Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

He was led, as if he were the child, out of the room and the lock was refastened. They went on tiptoe across the debris on the living-room floor to a window facing out on to the street. He was gestured to look down. There were two police officers on the front step, rubbing their hands and talking quietly. He realised then the quality of the kid’s anarchy.

They went as silently as they had come. Down the drainpipe, across the yard and over the wall, through a garden and a side gate, supposedly fastened, then out on to a lit street. All tarted up, this one. Signs in the window proclaimed neighbourhood security co-operation, and alarm boxes winked lights.

The kid turned to him. ‘Don’t give me any shit about what they call love. It’s all because she’s a great shag, yes?’

He wondered if, one day, the kid might learn what was shit and what was something else, but was not confident of it – and he thought the boy didn’t want to hear about the pain of separation, the hurt of his Mac going out of his life, about fighting heart and soul to win back the one person, in his world, he could not be without. He had the scrap of paper in his pocket and knew where he would take it. The kid, at nine or ten, was riddled with cynicism, and love hadn’t reached him. Why disabuse…?

‘A great shag,’ Eddie Deacon said.

They did high fives, whacked their hands together, and he watched the kid walk off. Just a kid, but with a bounce and a roll in his stride. There was the flash of a match, and a wisp of smoke curled away from his face.

Couldn’t help himself. Eddie Deacon called, ‘She’s fantastic, the light for me. Thank you for helping me. She’s more important to me than anything.’

If the kid heard he gave no sign of it but kept going towards the corner. Daft to have confided that to an urchin, a thief, but it was heartfelt.

She stood by the window, full length, with a sliding door that led to the balcony. The nightdress, bought in London, was shorter than she had thought, thinner, and hung tight on her. She had no slippers, sandals or flip-flops so Immacolata was barefoot on the marble flooring. She assumed that any of the penthouse apartments in such a block, in such a location, would have a veneer of marble in the living room. The sun was up, just above the distant mountain range.

She didn’t know Rome, had been there once with her mother, years before, to stand on an Easter Sunday in the piazza San Pietro and see the tiny far-away figure of the Holy Father. So she had not recognised the route taken by the two cars as they had sped towards the centre, then veered away, crossed the river again and climbed a hill. The headlights had speared up and caught pine branches. No sirens and no blue lights. Nothing to indicate that the passenger in the lead car was a collaboratore di justizia, was protected, a pentita who would give evidence against her family in return for clemency, an infame, who would be despised in the streets where she had been reared. She came unheralded and unannounced. She had been hustled out of the car, and the guns were there, but under draped coats. She had been bundled into the lift, then almost pushed the few steps from the lift door into the penthouse.

She had been ignored at first by Castrolami, who was on his mobile – she’d heard him swear – and eyed by the two men who were to mind her.

Cold cuts of meat, a salad, fruit and cheese, laid out on plates, were taken from the refrigerator.

She was told nothing, shown to a bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, and had heard the door locked. It was done quietly and she reckoned it was not intended that she should hear it. A poor night’s sleep, almost nightmares when she did drift off, able now to comprehend what she had done. At half past six, according to her watch, she had heard the key turn in the lock. She’d gone into the living room. The two men were up, smartly dressed, shirtsleeves and ties, shoulder-holster harnesses across their chests with weapons.

In case she had forgotten overnight, she was told – after the hope was expressed that she had enjoyed a satisfactory rest – that their names were Giacomo Orecchia and Alessandro Rossi. She’d nodded, then gone to the window.

She had intended to provoke them.

Immacolata wore only the flimsy cotton nightdress, white but with flowers at the collar, and stood in front of the window as the sun came up over the rooftops, towers and spires. She eased her feet apart, let her heels be half a metre separated. She could feel, through the pane, that the sun already had the power to warm and would have lit the outline of her body. It was not normal for Immacolata Borelli to glory in her body, to use it as a tool or as a weapon. She imagined the way the light silhouetted it. Then she turned.

It would have been their skill that they moved in silence; neither watched her. The younger was out through the door, in the kitchen area, and sat at a table, looking at a newspaper – he was Rossi. The older one, Orecchia, was in a bedroom, again with the door open, smoothing a duvet and straightening a coverlet. It had been for nothing, her gesture. She had flaunted her body, to tease or confuse, and it hadn’t been noticed.

From the kitchen, Rossi: ‘Would you like coffee, Signorina? And we have panini or bread, fruit, and cheese. Some of it or all?’

Whatever. Did she care? Hardly. ‘I don’t know…’

Orecchia said, ‘Do you want some coffee before you dress or while you’re still almost naked?’

She met his eyes. She realised then that he had taken a gamble with her: that he could ridicule her, showing he recognised the game she was playing and would not tolerate it so had laughed at her. She flushed and twisted away from them so that neither would see, through the flimsy material, the curve of her bosom, the cherrystone nipples or the hair above her thighs. Orecchia reached behind the bedroom door and his hand appeared with a heavy towelling robe. He threw it at her. It landed on the marble beside her so she had to bend to lift it up, with an arm across her chest as she did so. She slipped into the robe, belittled and angry.

Rossi called, ‘I make good coffee, Signorina, and I bought the bread this morning while you slept. My suggestion: breakfast now, dress afterwards. Then we have visitors and work.’

She believed they were treating her as they would a spoiled child, and seemed to have set guidelines. They had not leered at her or been shocked by her. They had, with laid-back politeness, almost taken her legs off at the knees. She stumbled across the marble, bare feet slipping, losing her poise, to her bedroom door. She showered – found a small bar of soap there and a sachet of shampoo, and she had her own washbag. She barely allowed the water to run hot, then was out and drying herself viciously. She dressed – new underwear, the same outer clothing she had travelled in, and left her hair damp. She could smell the coffee and the warmed panini.

Beyond the window there were similar blocks to the one she was in, surrounded by high steel fences with sharp spikes; the walls had broken glass embedded in concrete on the brickwork. She saw a maid beating a carpet on a balcony, and a man, who wore only shorts on another, was smoking and scratching his chest. A woman watered her plants with a hose. She did not belong in their world. Perhaps she belonged to no world. Her nakedness had been her attempt to take control of the void into which she had thrown herself.

She was as much a prisoner in that apartment as she would have been in a cell in the Poggioreale gaol. They might have read her.

‘Signorina, the coffee is ready.’

‘Bread and fruit are on the table, Signorina.’

She went into the kitchen and sat with them. Rossi was the heavier and she imagined he worked out in a gym. His arm muscles bulged in the short sleeves of his shirt, he was clean-shaven and a little gel had gone on his hair. She recognised the pistol in the holster as a Beretta. He poured her coffee.