Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

He sat astride the pillion, slapped his man on the shoulder – he called him ‘Fangio’ – and they powered away. He did not look down from the track at the beauty of the bay and the reflections on the sea from ships’ lamps and portholes or up at the illuminated ramparts of the castle. He let his mind scratch at the problem. Who had betrayed the clan? Who had earned death – not the fast death of the P38, but slow, stretched death? Who?

The aircraft landed, hit hard. She reached out, instinct, as the wheels bounced and the aircraft seemed to fly again, then the impact was repeated. Her hand took his. The fingers did not close on hers, and there was no comfort from them. Then she realised Castrolami thought nothing of her and had no concern whether she was terrified on landing or not.

They taxied, turned, idled and then, with a last lurch, the aircraft braked and was still. A ripple of applause shimmered behind them: it had not been a smooth flight, with turbulence over southern France, then powerful cross-winds as they had descended on Fiumicino, and the landing had been rough. Immacolata Borelli did not join in. She had only once, while they were in the air, left her seat. Then she had gone to the toilets in front of Business and had changed into the few new clothes she had been permitted to buy. She had washed her face and hands and had looked at herself in the mirror. She had tried to smile – and could not.

She had returned to her seat. Castrolami had not spoken to her. She thought he reckoned it enough that he had her on the plane, out of British jurisdiction and on her way to Italy, home. He hadn’t asked if she was comfortable, if she was hungry, if she wanted a drink or a magazine. He had scribbled on a pad, might have been his report or his expenses, and she thought his socks smelled worse in the cabin than they had in the car.

She heard, behind her, a stampede. She had expected that she would have to wait. Castrolami squeezed his bulk past her, no apology, stood in the aisle and successfully blocked any passenger wanting to short-cut through Business to the forward door. Then he flicked his fingers – as if he had called a dog. She didn’t move. Heard the flick of the fingers again, louder, more insistent and closer to her ear. Sat, didn’t shift. The hand came down – the one she had clutched when the plane hit – caught her coat and yanked her up. Her waist snagged on the belt, still fastened. His other hand came across her thighs, almost groping her, and opened the catch. She thought he wouldn’t have noticed where his hand had been. She stood.

She saw that two stewardesses and a purser eyed her, almost stripped her. It was obvious that she was a fugitive returning. No sympathy, no clemency. She had been offered a rug for her knees and had declined it, also earphones for the stereo. The trolley had come with newspapers – Corriere, Messaggero and Repubblica and she’d said she didn’t want one. A few remarks only, and she wondered if they were sufficient for the cabin crew to know she was Neapolitan. If she was from Naples and in custody, she was a camorrista. She understood then that few shoulders would offer her a place to weep.

He had reached into his pocket and produced a pair of dark glasses. He handed them to her. The lights were poor in the cabin and outside it was late evening. She shook her head.

Castrolami said, ‘Maybe there’s a photographer. How do I know, when I have no control over it, what the security’s like? I’m off my patch. Maybe this place leaks. Maybe your name is out. You want to make it easier for them? Put them on and turn up your coat collar. I don’t want you dead, Signorina…’

She put on the glasses and pulled up the collar so that it half covered her cheeks. She thought, was not certain because his voice was only a murmur, that he added, ‘Not before we’ve had you in court and testifying.’

He took her arm, led her out through the door and on to the pier, then down a flight of side steps into the night. Two cars waited, and men had sub-machine guns. The rear door of the lead car was open for her. Fingers lay on trigger guards. She was from a clan family and couldn’t play at ignorance, and she understood the reaction towards a traitor and knew their fate. She attempted to bring to mind Marianna Rossetti’s face, the last time she had seen it, without the ravages of leukaemia.

Immacolata Borelli had completed the first stage of her journey home. She dropped her head, sank on to the back seat and the crackle of radios was around her as she was driven away.

Music played at one cafe and the last stages of a soccer game were on a television at the other. Lukas was about halfway between the soccer and the music, and had yesterday’s Herald Tribune in front of him with a month-old copy of Match.

Most evenings, when he was in Paris, he walked down the rue de Bellechasse and on to the rue St Dominique. There, he would pause outside the building with the double gate wide enough for a carriage and pair to go through, and he would take a moment under the plaque to consider the life and work of J. B. Dumas, Chimiste-Secretaire Perpetuel de l’Academie des Sciences, and note a date carved in the stone that put recognition of this man at 209 years ago. It was important for Lukas to stop for those few seconds, break his evening walk to the Bar le Bellechasse, the Drop Cafe or the Cafe des Deux Musees, because then he placed matters in his life into a correct perspective, one that he could manage to be alongside. There would be no plaque erected in Kabul, or Baghdad, up in the forests of the Midwest or in the triple-canopy jungle high in the Cordillera Central east of Cali for a co-ordinator who made the judgement – weighed lives and deaths – between the arguments of the negotiators and the storm-squad commanders. Nobody would read a plaque naming Lukas Sometimes a Saviour and sometimes a Killer, Federal Bureau of Investigation and lately of Ground Force Security (London). Lukas did not rate himself important enough to warrant a plaque.

He thought them good people who served in the cafes and bars he patronised. They were ordinary people, who would not know of the situations that confronted him when he worked. It was better not to bring back to Paris with him, in his rucksack, the situations and knife-edges on which he operated. If business was slack they talked to him about the concerns and excitements of ‘ordinary’ people, and did not push for entry into his life – his unexplained absences – or pry, and they brought him beer and he gave them tips in midsummer and before Christmas. He paid always for what was brought to him unless the patron came with the drink. They could all set agendas and choose the subjects – had free range – except one area. He would steer the talk away from sons: he didn’t welcome chatter about the triumphs and failures of sons. It was an area of pain suppressed, not shared, and he managed the deflection with subtle skill. In the bars and cafes, wiling away the evening hours, he never drank so that his mind clouded: the telephone in the apartment could ring at any time and activate the voicemail.

There was agitation at the far end of the bar. His name was called by a white-aproned waiter and he was told that the game had gone to penalty kicks and he should come for the death throes, but he smiled, shook his head, stayed in his chair and nursed his beer. Tomorrow, he thought, he would go to the museums – first the Musee d’Orsay and then that of the Legion – if the telephone had not rung and no message had been left.

The kid hissed, ‘No lights, only the torch. And no torch till the curtains are done.’

Eddie Deacon could honestly have said that never in his life had he done anything that warranted the intervention of the police. Maybe he was a bit drunk sometimes on a Friday or Saturday night, rolling along the street and using a lamp-post as a crutch, but he hadn’t done anything that required an officer to get stuck into him. It didn’t make him special, just ordinary. If a policeman’s torch had lit him now, it would have been handcuffs, the back of a wagon and a cell door slamming.