Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

‘Better. Again.’

She yelled, over him, past him and out across the worn grass of the park, at the trees, the walkers and joggers, the talkers and the kids who should have been at school. ‘I’ll denounce my family.’

Many in the park had heard her. Some merely turned their heads but went on their way, others stopped to gawp. ‘I hear you, but do I believe you?’ he said softly.

‘You have my word.’

He allowed the irony to run over her: ‘I have the word of the daughter of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli?’

‘Everything.’

Now he was an uncle to her. As a zio would, he tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and walked with her through the rain, their shoes squelching on the grass and the mud. ‘You travelled to Nola, Signorina, you were late, for whatever reason, and did not reach the basilica in time for the funeral mass, but you travelled on to the municipal cemetery. There, you were humiliated, and subject to the emotional experience of parting from a friend. You flew back to London. You didn’t sleep. The accusations are alive in you and guilt haunts you. You pick up the telephone. None of this, yet, is difficult. You make a statement to the prosecutor’s office that is laced with dramatic intent. You put down the telephone and imagine champagne corks pulled, an executive jet on stand-by and that you will be brought back to Naples to be met on the tarmac with a red carpet, the cardinal in attendance and the mayor. No, it hasn’t happened. They sent Mario Castrolami, as you requested, and the flight home will be in economy where there is little leg room, the food is foul and English barbarians are talking about the culture fix they’ll get in our home over seventy-two hours. You will then, Signorina, be surrounded by strangers – and don’t expect them to regard you as a resurrected Mother Teresa. They will try to leech from you every scrap, morsel, titbit of information so that they can shut away your family for even longer – the family who has trusted you with their lives, and whom you will have betrayed. Many months after you’ve taken that flight back to Italy you’ll have to appear in court. At one end of the room there will be the judges, in the well of the court the ranks of the lawyers, and at the other end a cage. Behind its steel bars you will see your family. Will you turn to me then and say, “Dottore, I have doubts now on the course of action to which I was committed last September. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t wish to go ahead with this. It was a mistake. I want to be reunited with my family. I want the love and warmth of my gangster father, my ruthless, vicious mother, my murderous eldest brother and my psychopathic middle brother. I want to return to them.” Will you turn your back on the court? Many do, Signorina. They climb high, survey the view and scramble down. Their nerve doesn’t hold. Will your nerve hold?’

She lowered her head and looked at the toecaps of her shoes. She allowed him to lead her along. ‘It’ll hold.’

‘They all say that, but many fail to deliver.’

She stopped. She felt his fingers drop from her arm. She faced him and tilted her head. She could see the cage, their faces, the hatred that beamed at her, and the contempt. ‘My word should be sufficient guarantee.’

‘You will never be forgotten, never forgiven. You will never again walk the streets of your city as a free woman. Can you turn your back on Naples?’

It was her home.

Those Greek traders who had first anchored their boats in the shadow of the great mountain, mid-eighth century BC, had called it Nea Polis, the New City. The Romans came later from the north and corrupted the name to Napoli. Now it is a city adored and detested, admired and despised. It is one of UNESCO’s proudest World Heritage Sites, and is regarded by Interpol as having the greatest concentration in the world of Most Wanted organised-crime players. Horace, the Roman poet, coined the phrase ‘Carpe diem’, ‘Seize the Moment’, and it is still the maxim of Neapolitans.

Many cultures have left their mark on Naples. After the collapse of Rome’s civilisation and its hold on the city, the occupying army was that of the Ostrogoths, then the Byzantines from Constantinople, the Normans and the Spanish. There were Bourbon satraps and Napoleonic revolutionaries. Admiral Nelson’s fleet covered the port with cannon, the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo sought to control it, after which the Americans gave it military government. In the last century, Communists, democrats and Fascists have attempted to bring Naples to heel, but failed.

At the university, the academics seek to excuse the inner city’s million people for its ungovernability. They quote the actual and the potential. The actual is the Camorra, the generic name for the criminal families that are the principal employer and major pulsebeat in Naples. The potential is the lowering image of the mountain, Vesuvio, with its volcanic capability and history of destruction. The criminality survived the most savage reprisals of the Mussolini era and now cannot be beaten: the threat of the volcano mocks any who look far to the future: it may erupt at any time and warning will be minimal. Those same academics point proudly to the magnificent churches and palaces, and strangers flock there from across the world.

John Ruskin, the English art critic and reformer, came to the city in the late nineteenth century and saw the Naples that has attracted the first overseas tourist industry. He wrote, ‘The common English traveller, if he can gather a black bunch of grapes with his own fingers, and have a bottle of Falernian brought him by a girl with black eyes, asks no more of this world or the next, and declares Naples a paradise…’ But he would not be seduced and continued, ‘… [Naples] is certainly the most disgusting place in Europe… [combining] the vice of Paris with the misery of Dublin and the vulgarity of New York… [Naples] is the most loathsome nest of caterpillars… a hell with all the devils imbecile in it’. Outsiders may come, criticise and leave, but those who are bred and live in Naples are held by loyalty, as if in chains, to the city.

The gulf makes a perfect natural harbour. The sea ranges from azure to aquamarine. The churches are noted for their splendour, and the castles that defend the shore are reassuring in their strength. It has the best of everything – architecture, painting, sculpture, music, food, vitality, and the refusal to be cowed – with the biggest open-air narcotics supermarket ever created, the wealthiest criminal conspiracies ever known, and a degree of violence that makes both the brave and the cynical cringe.

In the heart of the old city, where the streets were laid by Roman road builders, then wide enough only for a handcart to pass and now for only a scooter, is the district of Forcella. The Borelli clan ruled Forcella.

‘Can you do that, erase that place from your mind?’

‘I hope…’

‘What’s hope? Useless, inadequate. Either you can or you can’t.’

She flared. ‘I am Immacolata Borelli. You offer me no respect.’

Castrolami shrugged, as if she had scored no points. He said, ‘I see so many of them. This isn’t Sicily. The vow of silence doesn’t exist in Forcella, Sanita, Secondigliano or Scampia. In the far south, the gangs are linked by blood. It’s impossible to consider that a family would turn in on itself. But you’re not Calabrian – I’ll get to the point, Signorina – or Sicilian. The clans of Naples have greed, brutality and no honour. Do you understand? We have more men and women offering to collaborate than in any other part of Italy. They’re practically queuing outside the palace. Sometimes the prosecutor has to check his diary to make sure he has a slot for a new one. Many are rejected because they have little to offer that we don’t already know, a few because we don’t believe they can sustain the pressure of their treachery. I offer no informer respect, and I’m used to rejecting them. Don’t think, Signorina, that you have earned my admiration or have my gratitude.’