Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

She felt a chill and shivered. She recognised that call tone. It had no romance, no style, was not stolen from an opera aria or something popular. It was piercing, like a car’s alarm. Brief, then silence. She turned her back on the clothes and went to the chair where her coat and bag were.

Salvatore had that number, the young man who… and Umberto, the lawyer long used by the family. It was for times of emergency.

A text message waited. ‘Three run, Four run – Bravo five boxes – Twelve walk – block 5 alpha.’ She studied the text, memorised and deleted it.

She said to the owner that she would call for the dresses she had chosen and would then settle the account. The owner was at pains to indicate that settlement was a small matter and should not concern the signora. Gabriella Borelli left the shop the way she had come, through the staff area, past the toilets and the storeroom, then went out into the street through a reinforced door. She waited. She listened. She looked from a corner for a loose cordon, for men who lounged and smoked or sat in parked cars. The text messages she sent and received on her mobile were always coded: ‘Three’ was Giovanni, ‘Four’ was Silvio and ‘run’ was arrested. She was ‘Bravo’ and ‘boxes’ were safe-houses that had been hit. ‘Twelve’ was Salvatore and ‘walk’ meant still at liberty, while ‘block 5 alpha’ told her where he would be and at what time.

She was a woman in a dowdy coat because the chill came in from the sea with the evening, and slipped among shadows. Dreams had been curtailed and an escape cut short. Fuck Giovanni and fuck Silvio. If five of her safe-houses had been hit, searched, then the security of the clan, on which she prided herself, was split open. How was it possible? Almost – not quite – fear held her.

The pictures came on the screen. There were digital images of Vincenzo Borelli in the custody suite at a London police station, full face and profile. They were replaced by a photograph of Giovanni Borelli being brought out of a door, wearing only boxer shorts. An officer behind him carried a bundle of clothing. The youngest, Silvio, walked meekly, appearing confused, between two towering men. The locations followed the individuals, a sequence of smashed-down doors, succeeded by an interior of a living room or bedroom.

The deputy prosecutor, unable to mask his disappointment, said, ‘We have the three cubs, but not the vixen. We were given five safe-house addresses, have hit each of them but she wasn’t there. Possessions? Yes. Recent clothes down to dirty ones? Yes. Jewellery not put away? Yes. She was due back at one of them. I suppose we have to query the tactic of overt hits.’

The liaison officer smarted. ‘We agreed on simultaneous strikes and-’

‘And we do not have Salvatore, Il Pistole.’

‘We were given five locations for the vixen, and couldn’t have delayed the lift.’ The liaison officer was prepared to rebut any criticism of the operation, which he had overseen.

The deputy prosecutor, maybe from frustration or tiredness, or from the simple matter of dashed expectations, snarled, ‘You had a free hand. They were your decisions. Where is she? Under your leadership we were the Gadarene swine in a headlong dash. Perhaps – and I say this with all charity – a calmer approach and surveillance stake-outs might well-’

‘We had to act in concert.’

The prosecutor thwacked a fist on his desk. ‘If we’re divided, we lose. I believe we’ll have the mother within hours. The plane is now, I estimate, thirty minutes away. We’ll push the girl harder.’

The prosecutor reckoned it was not his optimism that won a truce in the recriminations, but his mention of Immacolata Borelli. They had all been in the room when the tape was played and her tinny voice, with traffic noise surging across it, had told them a plain truth: ‘It is my intention to collaborate. By saying that on the telephone to you, I put my life at risk.’ The voice, the memory of it, might have shamed the protagonists. The deputy prosecutor shrugged, and the liaison officer went for water. They were all thinking of her, the prosecutor decided, and the enormity of what she had done. He was offered a biscuit, but waved away the plate. He said, ‘I don’t know how, but we’ll have the vixen.’

Two and a quarter hours of street tramping, and failure. Fortune did not shine on Eddie Deacon. He had started so brightly, full of hope and anticipation, when he had reached the street corner to which he had brought her from the pub. There, she had slipped her hand off his arm, grinned, waved and wandered down the street under the streetlamps. She hadn’t looked back. He had stood on one corner and she had disappeared round another. He had never been back. Always his Mac had turned up on time, punctual as a digital clock. He knew only that she had turned off to her left. He had stood there and had seen a pretty much main route with bus stops, and smaller streets going off to right and left. There were shops with flats above. There were smart little residential roads where professionals from the City or the Law Courts had come with their Polish builders, and there were bollards at the end to stop rat-runners and twockers. There were streets where there seemed to be more bell buttons on a pad by the front entrance than windows. She might have gone to a high-grade road, or to a couple of rooms above a launderette or a travel agent.

What to do? He could hardly stop anyone he saw going about their business: ‘Excuse me, have you seen an Italian girl in this street/road? We have this big thing, but she never gave me an address or a phone number, and she stood me up for a meal in the Afghan up Kingsland Road. Do you know where I can find her?’ He had walked – had been into Pakistani-run shops that sold everything and takeaways that did chicken or curries, and at first he had shyly shown the photograph he kept in his wallet, but for the last two hours he had just walked, peering into every young woman’s face, and found that he was doubling back on himself.

He went past a doorway, Edwardian, set in London brick, between a Turkish bank and a charity shop. Both had been open when he’d gone by the first time but now they were closed and showed only security lights. A pair of police stood outside, a regular officer and a Community Support girl. He remembered now that the door was covered with tacked hardboard.

His feet hurt, but not as much as his mind. He kept seeing her. Every time a girl materialised, round a corner, off a bus, out of a shop, into the throw of a streetlight, Eddie Deacon stared her out. Worst was when he had run after a girl – had seen the swing of the hips, the straight back, the chuck of hair over a shoulder – had caught her, gone in front of her, damn near blocking her on the pavement and she’d been reaching into her handbag – could have been a nail file, a personal alarm or even a pepper spray – when he had seen the spectacles. He had apologised, grovelling, had just about scraped the knees of his jeans on the pavement. She had walked on after one glance that measured him up as a sad thing or maybe a lowlife pervert. He stopped. Everybody watched policemen. Everybody pretended policemen standing on the first step of a flight were interesting, and doubly interesting when the door was opened, two men came out with filled plastic bags and put them into the back of an unmarked van, then went back inside. So interesting… and it rested his feet, which hurt bad. He looked down at them, and noticed the glow beside his legs.

The kid smoked. Eddie Deacon thought he was about ten, but the face was too near the pavement for him to make out the features. He sat on the kerb and his feet were in the gutter. He couldn’t have been seen by the police across the street.