Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Her meeting broke. She shook their hands formally to bind the agreements.

She went out of the pizzeria’s front door on to the street.

She did not, of course, carry a diary. Everything was in her head. Meeting locations and times, rendezvous points, market prices. The next meeting – in another back room, in a bar on the via Arenaccia – was to determine the volume of hardcore stone for the foundations of a new apartment block on Cristoforo Colombo, then the amount of concrete required for the six-storey construction, the prices for the materials and the fee for the men in the municipio who would give permission to build. It was a normal routine for Gabriella Borelli.

The sun was warm on her face. She felt as if a winter frost thawed. By the conclusion of the meeting the Albanians had shown her the necessary respect. She wondered if those who had guided them to the rendezvous had shown them a half-page of yesterday’s Cronaca and translated a report on the death of a man in a street, the meal made of his testicles. She walked briskly, Salvatore, Il Pistole, behind her, and felt she had regained control.

They broke. The recorder was switched off and a new tape inserted. The prosecutor’s assistant went to the toilet.

She looked up into the prosecutor’s face and hoped for a smile and praise. Immacolata Borelli had been prompted to talk about her brother, Vincenzo, who was to appear before magistrates that morning and would then be transferred to a maximum-security facility. She was confused. ‘You haven’t mentioned my mother.’

‘That is correct,’ the prosecutor answered gravely.

‘You took her?’ she pressed.

‘We did not.’ A small frown cut into his forehead.

‘Because you couldn’t find her.’

‘She wasn’t where we looked for her.’ The prosecutor’s tongue licked his lower lip.

‘I told you where to go.’

‘You did.’

‘She was the principal target.’

‘She was one target. We regret she isn’t yet in custody. She will be, very soon.’ He smiled wanly. The assistant came back to her chair and the recorder was switched on again. ‘It shouldn’t concern you whether or not your mother’s in custody.’

The gesture was fast, instinctive. Immacolata hit the table with the heel of her hand. The impact bounced the tape-recorder and spilled the prosecutor’s coffee. There was a flicker of movement in a doorway off the hall as if a watcher had been alerted. She said, ‘I won’t talk to you until my mother has been taken. I trusted in your competence. You have failed.’

‘Do you imagine I travel lightly from Naples to Rome to hear the tantrum of a woman who overestimates her own importance? I can cut you loose and-’

‘You won’t take my mother.’

She stood and the chair fell behind her, clattered. She didn’t look at them, didn’t see the slow turn of the spools in the tape-recorder. She went to her room and slammed the door. It was her mother’s face, lit by camera flashes, that she wanted to see, her mother’s face, in shadow as a cell door closed on a corridor’s lights, and her mother’s face, when early sunlight caught the cell windows and the bars made stripes on her skin. Her strongest emotion that morning was not love but hate. It went so deep. It covered a mother’s apparent indifference to a girl-child, the failure of the parent to rate the achievements of a daughter. Immacolata had been denied attention, denied praise, ignored. She lay on the bed. There had been hate for her mother, but now there was fear at the reach of her arm.

‘Is that what he said?’

‘It’s what I was told he said.’ Salvatore was at Gabriella Borelli’s shoulder. His voice had been a murmur and his lips had barely moved. While he had guarded the inner door of the pizzeria, the scugnizzi had brought messages to him. Lower in the chain than the foot-soldiers were the kids who watched entrances to the quarters of the city and reported, listened to conversations in bars and reported, sat in the gutter opposite police stations and carabinieri barracks and reported.

‘Say it to me again.’ She spoke from the side of her mouth, a whisper, as the traffic roared by, horns blasted, men and women walked along the pavement, and her words were lost to all but Salvatore.

‘He was in the bar at the top end of Casanova, Luigi Pirelli’s bar. He was in a group and the TV was on. The arrests… Alfredo’s youngest heard him. He said, ‘The Borelli clan is history. They’re finished, old, shit and soft. They have no authority now. Count the days, they’ll be gone.’

‘That man, he is not to say that again.’

She walked on. Salvatore dropped back. He was soon fifteen or twenty paces behind her. He had much to think about. He was the enforcer of the clan and answered only to Gabriella Borelli. He had taken on, also, responsibility for her security and the offshoots of the group. Three years ago, before he had been arrested, Pasquale Borelli would have had the last say on security. Eight months ago, before his flight to London, Vincenzo had been given that responsibility in his father’s absence. He did not know where such leakage of information had come from: the faces of men bounced in his mind, called forward, then discarded. He kept her back in his sight, and the pistol, the Beretta P38, was in his belt. He wore a loose-fitting jacket to conceal it.

She was tough, and her walk showed it. The weakness of the last evening had been short-lived. Salvatore thought Gabriella Borelli magnificent as he tracked her, watching her back.

He asked, respectfully, if Lottie would join him in the staffroom alcove. Eddie Deacon hardly knew her, had offered her no friendship, but now he needed her. She was – and the young guys who taught at the language school tittered over it – shyly lesbian. Obvious, but never confessed. Lottie had not outed herself. She was reluctant to come with him, suspicious, but then he did what he reckoned was his best imitation of ‘Labrador eyes’ and she would have seen it mattered to him. There was no snigger on his lips.

Eddie said, ‘Sorry and all that, but I need help. I’ve lost a girl. It’s really hacked me off. Don’t know where she is, other than gone home, and she’s Italian, from Naples. Says on Google that a million people live there, that the city is a hundred and twenty square kilometres. I have to find her, but I don’t know where to start.’

Lottie looked at him in the marginal privacy of the alcove, perhaps remembered slights that were not imagined, remarks behind hands and little darts of cruelty. ‘What if little Miss Perfect doesn’t want to be found – at least, not by you?… All right, all right. What have you got that might help?’

Eddie had the torn scrap of paper in a see-through plastic bag, as if it was priceless. He seemed reluctant to give it up, share it, but did so.

‘You didn’t answer me. What if she rates you a pain, and wants shot of you?’

‘I’ll have her say it to my face,’ Eddie said. He shrugged, then did the smile he was famed for – it implied that no woman could possibly want shot of him. Lottie grinned, then looked at the handwriting. He had gone to her because she had spent time in Naples, at the university, and spoke the language fluently. He tried to joke: ‘I really don’t understand why any female of the species could want shot of me, let alone rate me a pain. Just not on the agenda.’

She studied the paper as if it were a crossword puzzle, then gazed at him. ‘I’m wondering, Eddie, if you’re behaving like an adult or reverting to teenage male, all acne and infatuation – or is that not my business?’

‘Just a little old cry for help… please. If it wasn’t for her, it’s you I’d be chucking red roses at.’

She rolled her eyes, almost blushed. ‘What’s her name?’