Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Flashes in her mind of the moments of fear. A girl left to mind a slow-cooking meat – baby lamb – in the oven, told when to take it out, forgetting, and coming back into the kitchen to see the smoke then cringing from her mother’s beating, a hard one. Her mother made fear, and the hate was secondary. There was no love in her life, not from her family. Love was sealed away from her in the cemetery at Nola. She knew only hatred and fear. More laughter came through her door, but Immacolata did not share it.

He put the phone down, ended one of the calls that seemed to consist of almost endless silences. The display panel told him the connection had been for four minutes and nine seconds, but it had seemed to Arthur Deacon a fair imitation of eternity. He walked slowly from the hall table towards the kitchen. He couldn’t go in as Betty was washing the floor but he came to the doorway and coughed, as if that was the best way to gain his wife’s attention.

She squeezed out the mop, quizzed him with a glance. ‘Well?’

‘It was Edmund.’

‘I know – what did he want?’

She used a mop on the kitchen floor three mornings a week, then went to work at a family firm of builders, and would tut if he stepped on the clean tiles and messed up. He was watching her, thinking how to relay what he had been told.

‘Have you lost your tongue? What did he want? Money? At his age he ought to be able to-’

‘Listen. Just for once. Listen. Thank you.’ He saw astonishment on her face. His boldness, almost, surprised him. She liked to say that her mother had told her on the eve of their wedding, ‘Always remember, Elizabeth, a husband is for life but not for lunch.’ She was at work over lunch time and he made himself sandwiches. She liked also to remind him that she was now the principal breadwinner and he was a pensioner who had taken the early bullet. ‘Yes, best if you simply listen. Edmund has resigned from his job.’

‘What for?’

‘He packed it in as of today. He’s going tomorrow, or this evening if he can arrange it, to Naples.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Listen, and you might – after a fashion. That girl he spoke of, the one he promised to bring to meet us, she’s gone. Gone home. No warning, no explanation, but gone. Sadly, he intends to follow her.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said there were other fish in the sea. Apparently not. I said he’d run the risk of hurting himself. He said he was hurting enough as it was and wouldn’t notice any more pain. He’d never said anything like that to me before, bared himself in that way.’

‘Extraordinary.’

‘I don’t want to be rude, Betty, but I’m wondering whether either of us would have gone chasing halfway across Europe if the other had done a bunk. I doubt that’s unfair. I said I’d look after his Visa bills – and couldn’t think of anything else. Oh, yes, I wished him luck. It didn’t seem sensible to be parental, old and cautionary. That’s it.’

His wife said, ‘No, I wouldn’t have followed you. She must be very special, that girl.’

At that time in the morning, the tourists had not yet come to the museums. Lukas had. The bars, coffees and beers were for later in the day, while squatting close to his friend who drew the river, the Louvre and Notre Dame was for the middle. Early, he came with a plastic bottle of fizzy water to sit on a bench and watch the first arrivals. Most would not know a Millet from a Manet or a Monet, but Lukas had no sense of superiority, and could not have made the distinction himself. He came to see people and search their faces, the better to understand them.

The science he practised affected humble people, average people, ordinary people. It was they who looked at the great statues, the bronzes, outside the former railway station that was now a museum and gazed at the massive charcoal grey bulk of the rampant elephant with flared ears and the rhinoceros that looked ready to charge, both larger than life. It was those people – businessmen, teachers, backpackers, engineers, charity workers, and those of whom it was said ‘Wrong place at the wrong time’ – whom he worked to liberate, to keep alive.

When the buses came he would settle back and stare into the faces, but not be noticed himself, and he would play mind games. How would they respond, hooded, bound, beaten, videotaped with guns at their heads and knives at their throats as they parrot-spoke denunciations of state policy? His interpretation of how they would react, in circumstances of the greatest stress would govern the guidance he gave and the decisions he took.

He had no favourites. He was no more on the side of the pretty slim blonde girl with the denim mini-skirt who came off the bus with the Hamburg plates than he was on the side of the guy who walked behind her with a stick. All were equal. So, he was not summoned to the great offices of authority in the power centres of the world. He did not walk echoing corridors, was not brought into carpeted offices and offered sherry or Scotch, because their occupants did not know his name. He worked in dark corners, that were – except once – beyond the reach of long-lens cameras.

It was rumoured, though five years later it remained unconfirmed, that a photographer from a German news agency had snapped him on a street in Baghdad when he was with a Special Forces crowd. The photographer had been embedded with a marine unit or would otherwise have been hotel-bound. Rumour ran that the sunlight had nicked the glass of the Leica camera so he had seen its owner and strode up to him. He had half strangled the snapper when he pulled off the strap and broke the camera open by stamping on it, destroying maybe fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. He had taken out the memory stick and had chucked it into the middle of a wide sewer, then had gotten on with his work. The photographer had been told by a gofer alongside Lukas, from the Green Zone, that if he talked about the incident his safety could not be guaranteed. It was a rumour. In the work he did, his anonymity was precious, perhaps even more so than that of an elite bomb-disposal operative. If his face had been known to the enemy, with his reputation, he would have been a prime target, and his usefulness in the field minimised. And, which he had not admitted to another soul he had a rooted aversion to the limelight, almost shyness, disguised under brusque indifference.

He had no medals, but the people – ordinary, average, humble – coming off the bus of a Hamburg tour company, pretty and ugly, young and old, did not have medals. Most of those freed from the hell-holes, the bunkers where they squatted in excreta and urine, listening for footsteps and wondering if a weapon was loaded or a knife sharpened, would never know of Lukas’s existence. It was better that way. No handshakes at the end, if it had gone well, no hugging and kissing, no names and promises of cards on the anniversary. The only way.

So, his imagined friends queued in front of him to enter the museum, and one of his real friends sketched in crayon by the river, and several more cleaned cafe tables and swept floors – and all would be wondering if he would stroll by, spend some time, or whether he was gone, wherever and for whatever.

That morning he left his bench, went to the kiosk and bought a pistaccio ice-cream. It was his favourite. He thought about it when he was in places that didn’t do that flavour or any other. Some said he was a screwball and unhinged, others that folk should be goddam grateful the lunatic stayed on call and was never far from his phone.

When he had finished the ice-cream and wiped his mouth, he would head into the museum for the Legion of Honour, and the impeccable garden in the central courtyard with the fine red roses. It was where he went when he had tired of the mind games, and it was where heroes were. He did not see himself as heroic, and if a medal had been offered he would have refused it.