Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate…

He let her read alone and her delivery grew in confidence, but he brought in the whole class to echo the final couplet and make a chorus:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

It had been a unique class. He doubted it would be repeated.

He would find her, his Mac. He had promised to.

Eddie walked to the staff room and the coffee machine. He felt that purpose had returned.

The bustle of the prosecutor’s office was stilled. He was at his desk, which was littered with a carpet of opened files and more lay on the wood tiles beside it. The deputy prosecutor had a cigarette in his mouth, the lighter lit but left to burn ten centimetres from the tip. The liaison officer winced, air hissing between his near-closed teeth. The personal assistant to the prosecutor bit sharply at a pencil and looked up from her screen. The archivist was halfway across the office from the door to the desk and carried a load of cardboard file-holders that reached from her stomach up to her chin. They were the inner cabal. The call had come, faint and with a poor signal, from Castrolami. The prosecutor looked around, into each face, and they nodded, accepted his judgement: Operation Partenope, named after the mythical daughter of a goddess, who had drowned in the Gulf and was regarded as a symbol of deceit, treachery, was launched.

Now he spoke softly: ‘Let’s get to work. I want on the telephone the extradition team of the Metropolitan Police, if they’re not too arrogant to speak to me. I want the operations director of the Squadra Mobile, and the duty officer, ROS, here for fourteen thirty hours, with arrest squads on stand-by. There must be no breach in security and no names of targets given. We have a small window and must jump through it. And-’

His desk phone pealed. His assistant passed him the receiver, and mouthed that the caller was, again, Castrolami. The prosecutor began to scribble names and addresses, the light of triumph in his eye.

She dictated. Castrolami repeated into the mobile phone what she told him: all of the addresses used as safe-houses by Gabriella Borelli; the location of the rooms where Giovanni Borelli slept; the apartment, off the via Forcella, that was the home of Carmine and Anna Borelli, and where Silvio Borelli stayed; the rooms off the piazza Mercato, a street behind the via Polveriera and an alley to the north of the vicolo Lepri that Salvatore, Il Pistole, used. She gave the last streets with dry relish and had long believed that the clan’s principal hitman fancied having his hands in her knickers, her stomach against his, and wanted to put a ring on her finger, thus ensuring his advancement in the clan: family would bring him that. She felt no emotion as she spoke. All the time she had clear images in her mind. They were not the faces of those she denounced. Or the features of Castrolami, jowled and clumsily shaven, with raw, bloodshot eyes, his sparse hair whipped up by the wind.

She saw the cavernous space in the basilica, empty because she had been late. The face of an innocent carved in stone, Angelabella, with the single flower, as she had hurried past with one foot bleeding. She heard everything that had been said to her, and named the streets where the safe-houses were. She had done it.

He cut the call, put the phone back into his pocket. He said quietly, almost conversationally, ‘I hope, Signorina, you aren’t fucking with me. This is big. We must win or be laughed at. If we lose because you’re fucking with me then I’ll put you into the sea, off the rocks, and hold you down.’

She looked at him. ‘I’ll go the course, whatever they throw at me.’

She stood then, feet a little apart, shoulders back. Her coat was now open and had dried on her, her blouse stretched across her breasts. She slipped her hand into the damp crook of his arm and they walked together.

It was a good morning by the river. The rain and cloud had cleared and Lukas was hunched on the step with his friend.

Squatting on a canvas stool, Philippe drew with crayons on heavy white paper pinned to a wooden board. With midday coming, it was close to the high seventies and in the afternoon the temperature might hit eighty. But where he had taken his pitch there was shadow from the doorway. Down and across the street, there was a foot bridge over the river, marked by a larger-than-life-size statue of Thomas Jefferson. Lukas didn’t know much about Jefferson’s life and times, but it was a good place for the artist. Tourists from the United States came and took photographs of the statue, then seemed to want to remember the place with something more authentic, so they purchased his crayon drawings of the statue, the bridge, the river, and the Louvre, which was on the far side of the Seine. Usually, when he was at home, Lukas would come to that doorway and settle beside his friend. If his friend was concentrating, he would sit quietly and do some thinking of his own.

If they talked it was about little things. The price of bread, the state of the football championship, whether the weather was lifting or closing in. He would never pry into Philippe’s life, and in return he was not asked, when he came back after a week or three, or a month, where he had been or why. There was always, in late September, a strong odour rising off the river because its level was low, and when he looked upstream he could see the little island covered with Notre Dame. He came to this place, unwound his emotions, let them slacken, and was distanced from where he’d been – Afghanistan, Iraq, an Uzbek or Tajik city, the jungle of the high mountains in Colombia – and Philippe wouldn’t press him. Why was the man his friend? In one limited area there was total and compelling frankness between them. Philippe said his work was shit, and Lukas never disagreed. He valued honesty – men and women died when assault-squad commanders or hostage negotiators and co-ordinators fought little patches of territory and declined to be truthful. The work was shit, but it sold and fed his friend, and meant there was a place for at least another month where Lukas could find company.

He was anonymous here, which suited him. He didn’t carry a mobile in Paris, but the way he lived his life meant he was seldom far from the telephone on the small table inside the apartment’s front door, and a light flashed if a call had come in and a message had been left. He always hesitated a couple of seconds, no more, before he picked it up when the light flashed red.

They’d gone round it for a long time and had now reached consensus. Philippe, busy on Jefferson’s face, the second work since the discussion had begun, was certain who would win the weekend’s football games, and Lukas agreed. In his own trade, he knew that disagreement killed.

Three times a day, Lukas was out of his apartment, but seldom for more than two hours. It was always a stampede to catch up when the call came and the light flashed red.

Philippe shared his flask – it was good coffee, as always.

He disliked to ask a favour, to place himself in debt or obligation to any man. He hadn’t asked one but Castrolami had endured an uncomfortable, awkward day, but now he had purpose. They were out of the city and on to the motorway. It was not yet dusk, but the sun was sinking and it would be evening when they left Heathrow, night when they reached Fiumicino. The man from the embassy drove.

In the hours since they had left the park, they had shopped – underclothes for her in a chain store. He had passed her euros from his wallet, which she had placed in her purse, then used British currency – he thought her the daughter of her father because she hadn’t given him change for what she had purchased. He had hustled her. They had been brought fifteen minutes in the car away from the park and he thought they were nearer to the heart of the city but distanced from where she lived and where her brother might be. Then she found a nightdress, a washbag and the items to go with it. For himself there was a sandwich in a cardboard and cellophane wrapping. He had not discussed with her the possibility of her returning to the apartment and packing a bag: it had been stated as fact that there was no question of her going near her street. They had stopped outside a railway station near the shopping area, and she had walked with him to a fast-photo booth and done portraits. Then they had killed time.