Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

The photographer lit another cheroot, puffed at it, shrugged. ‘He shouted his mouth off. He said he’d go to the palace, inform – the police have that from the woman. Maybe he’d already made a statement to the prosecutor. Maybe he’d only said he would. In some districts you can do that and survive, but not in Forcella or Sanita. He’d threatened it, and that was enough.’

‘So that’s what they do to an informer?’

‘Yes. And nobody reported any noise or the body in the street, because they were frightened, and because nobody values an informer. He has the status of a leper.’

The scene-of-crime technician had folded away his tripod. The ambulance crew had carried the body on a stretcher to the vehicle. The woman and the child were escorted by a priest to their door, and the owner of the drogheria lifted his steel shutter, uncoiled a hosepipe and sluiced the pavement. The crowd dispersed. The reporter and the photographer drove off, to write copy, check pictures and hear the police statement in the Questura. Within minutes, there was no trace – on the pavement or in the street – of where an informer had been killed.

He glanced at his watch. She had promised detailed information on the functioning of the clan, her mother’s role in the running of the organisation, the dealings of Vincenzo, and the work Giovanni was put to in Forcella. What she had told him was merely headlines, but to an investigator it was mouthwatering, not that he showed enthusiasm. He took no notes, and didn’t wear a wire. He thought it important to be indifferent at this stage of his linkage with Immacolata Borelli.

In his mind were the bullet points of what he needed, and two were outstanding. He asked where Vincenzo had been that day. Did she know anything about his diary? Where could he be found after midday? She was vague. It was difficult for her, she said, to know her brother’s schedule. She gave him the address of the apartment they shared, his mobile number, the name and location of the cafe-bar he most often patronised, the warehouse where he stored the coats and shoes he imported and exported.

‘I emphasise and repeat, Signorina, that intense pressure will be applied to you when your family learn what you’ve done. In the first period, before a legal process, we will protect you, but we can’t protect all those who may be dear to you. Could they find, hold and hurt, maybe murder, a lover?’

‘No.’

Put a second time, the question was redundant, but it was his practice to examine the face rather than merely listen to words.

‘In Naples, there’s no lover, no boy?’

‘No.’

‘In London, are you in a relationship with someone you met here? An Italian boy? A boy from the college you attend?’

‘Is that important?’

‘It is, Signorina, because you’ll be sequestered, perhaps for months, in a safe-house and under protection. A boyfriend won’t be able to visit you. You can’t get on a plane and come back to London because you want him, because-’

‘It won’t happen.’

‘So there is a boy here?’ His eyes bored into her, looking for truth, demanding it, and he towered over her. He was aware then that the first thin sunlight had broken through the cloud and played on her cheeks. ‘I have to know.’

‘Yes, but not significant.’

‘What does that mean – significato? Is there or isn’t there a boy?’

‘We go to bars, we go to films, we go-’

‘You go to bed. But you say it’s not “significant” – yes?’

‘He’s just a boy. We met in a park. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘You won’t pine for him?’

She threw back her head and raindrops cascaded from her hair, the sun catching them to make jewels. ‘I’ll forget him – maybe I have already.’

He looked into her eyes for evidence of a lie and couldn’t find it. Her eyes were clear, bright and unwavering. Mario Castrolami knew little of love. His wife and children were in Milan, lodgers at her mother’s home. There was little of love that he could remember – it might have been his uniform that had attracted her when he was young, slim and straight-backed, but now he no longer wore it, his shoulders were rounded, his stomach pushed at his belt, he was edging towards his forty-seventh birthday, and he slept with a loaded handgun in the drawer of his bedside table. There was a woman with whom he shared a restaurant table and the couch in her studio, but only once a month, never more than twice. She painted aspects of the great Vesuvio, exhibited some and sold a few, and he was fond of her – but it wasn’t love. Most of the time he forgot his wife and children, and if his friend, the artist, moved on, she, too, would be forgotten. He did not challenge her again. He believed he had found honesty in her features.

Not that honesty would help her. Deceit was a survivor’s weapon. Away from her, Castrolami used his mobile phone.

A new day, and Eddie felt better. Last night was gone.

Better and freer.

He had had breakfast with the others in the house, toast and cereal, and Eddie had said his piece about losing track of Mac, and there had been, almost, a collective howl. She was part of them all. Down the pub, and the laughter. Back home, her cooking lasagne or cannelloni, or making a sauce. Coming out of the bathroom with maybe just a shirt on, or the see-through robe, and fluttering her eyelashes at them. It just wasn’t possible. Eddie had thought that each of the others would have looked back to the last time they’d seen her, mentally stripped her mood and looked for indicators that she was bugging out on him – and them. He had said he was going to teach and that at the end of his working day he was going to find her. Didn’t know the number, but had dropped her off that first time at the end of a street – a bloody long one – and he’d find her if he had to bang on every door and ring every bell.

He taught with enthusiasm, was maybe at his best. He had ditched Dame Agatha, and had gathered up an armful of weathered, much-used digests of Shakespeare, condensed anthologies. Eddie himself, quietly and with sincerity, had read Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

And a Lithuanian car mechanic had read aloud:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring barque,

Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.

The classroom had rung with applause and he had blushed. A Nigerian who wanted to nurse but needed the language before she could enrol was next:

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

A Somali man who washed dishes in a hotel but wanted to be a street trader stuttered through

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

An Albanian needed more English if he was to get customers for a delivery service up in Stoke Newington. He was last to be chosen and looked about to opt out but Eddie wouldn’t let him, so he tried:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Then the class stamped and slapped their palms on the desk tops. He thought a Hungarian girl, plump, with Beatle spectacles on her nose, was savvy enough to take stock first, and she said to the Algerian next to her, in halting English, that the sonnet was not performed for them but for their teacher, it was his love they had recited, and what she had said went on down the line, behind her, in front of her, and the room echoed with giggles.

They did more extracts and his medley of students, gathered from across the globe, played Ferdinand, Miranda and Prospero, Lysander and Hermia, Juliet and her Nurse, Lorenzo and Jessica. He ended with Sonnet 18, and had the Hungarian girl read it: