Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Many, meeting him for the first time, defined him as ‘that screwball’. A major in the Rangers had. It was Baqubah and they’d helicoptered in from Camp Liberty at the Balad air base between Baghdad and Samarra. There was a single-storey house, breeze blocks and tin roof, on the extreme edge of the place near fields, and the asset handled by Task Force 145 said it was where the hostage was – a Greek-born engineer and expert in electricity supply, and how many guys held him. Difficult to get close, and the usual thing would have been to do three or four days’ reconnaissance, learn the movements and do it from a distance. Lukas was at the command point, four or five klicks back, and was barely tolerated by the major who rated him – FBI background and all – as an unwelcome shoe-in. A forward covert observer would have been on a telescope, reported a jerk coming to the building cautiously and that he carried a canister of milk and a metre-wide roll of clear plastic sheeting. Only Lukas – in the command centre – had reacted. He had demanded – not asked or suggested but demanded – that the storm squad assault the building immediately. It had been agreed. Would have been Lukas’s damn near manic certainty that had won the day: an attack without sufficient preparation, without a model of the interior, and in the bright heat light of the middle of the day.

Twelve minutes after Lukas had made his demand the first men in the Ranger platoon hit the doors front and back, then the windows, and chucked in stun grenades and gas canisters, like it was Christmas and they were giving them away. They dragged out the Greek, and brought him back from the dead. The Greek said he would have been dead in five minutes, was shouting it because of what the grenades had done to his hearing and choking because of the gas. Then the major asked the man designated a ‘screwball’ how he’d known the attack had to go in without the necessary preparation. Lukas had said: ‘Because they took the plastic sheeting in.’ Would he explain? Lukas had said: ‘They always spread plastic sheeting out on the floor before they saw a guy’s head off with a serrated blade to keep the blood off it.’ There had been a camera, with a charged battery, mounted on a tripod. The major had been awarded another ribbon and his storm squad had commendations, and none of them had ever seen Lukas again. Maybe by now the major had made brigadier or even general, and maybe the Greek had a good position in power supply at the ministry in Athens… and Lukas wandered into the courtyard of the museum for heroes.

It was how he liked it, staying unknown but being on call.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator

He had been lucky. He told himself that luck had dictated that a lorry should spill its load on the M11 just north of Harlow, the northbound carriageway, and that a tailback of four miles should delay a family on a budget break to Rome while the rail service had sailed past unaffected. Eddie Deacon would have slept on a bench at the airport, Stansted, but instead found himself aboard a ‘cheap and cheerful’ flight going to Ciampino.

A rush to get himself on board, a chase down corridors and piers, and he had been the last on to the aircraft. He was not even in a seat before the doors were closed and it was taxiing. He told himself then that he was blessed.

He had not bought a book, and they didn’t do freebie newspapers with that airline. The child on his left ate chocolate messily and concentrated on a GameBoy, and the woman on his right was rigid with nerves – he reckoned he might have her hand in his lap, for comfort, when it came to landing. Eddie didn’t buy anything from the trolley and sat still, upright, stared ahead and made no contact, eye or physical, with the woman or the child. He thought he might just as well have pulled a pin and rolled a pineapple grenade into his parents’ living room: his father had been monosyllabic and breathing hard, but had coughed up the offer to look after his plastic bill, which was decent, but afterwards they would – together – have been in shock. He had switched off his mobile before catching the train to Stansted. He reckoned they would have tried half a dozen times to phone him, to try to dissuade him, to tell him he should go to the language school and request his job back. His parents, and all their friends, would never march out of regular paid employment without having another position to move to on the following Monday morning. So, the concept of what he had done left him vaguely light-headed. His mind danced.

What was bizarre about the choreography was that he had not stopped – he hadn’t since he had sat alone in the Afghan restaurant and waited – to consider that Immacolata might have decided that he was a boring no-hoper, a saddo and a loser, and that a summer fling was over as autumn came on. Never thought of it. He had a BA (Hons) in Modern Languages, only a 2:2 – they called it a Desmond at that university in the Thames Valley – and at the end of four years’ study was supposed to possess some capability at analysis. He had left with a good knowledge of German, fair French and some Spanish, with a smattering of Italian, which might take him over the front page of a newspaper.

He knew Berlin, having walked the pavements and worked in all-night cafes during summer vacations, and could get himself around Paris without glancing every five minutes at a map, and he wouldn’t have been lost in Barcelona. He didn’t know Rome or Naples, but he had once spent two days in Milan, having climbed on the wrong train in Geneva when he should have been going to Montpellier in France, coming from Munich. It mattered not. It was not in the temperament of Eddie Deacon to worry at a problem, as if he needed to untie a tight knot in a length of string. He either ran from problems or tilted at them. If she had indeed walked out on him she could say so to his face: clear, one-syllable words. Not possible, not his Mac. Second point, chewed on briefly in the aircraft cabin: police at the flat, a brother taken away, the flat searched, everything about her hidden from him like her address. Was she ‘dodgy’, or ‘bent’? Weighed it. Didn’t care. She was his Mac.

There was no doubt. He had to go to Naples. He had to find her. He’d pull a face, she’d grimace and shrug a bit, ask him what the hell he was doing there – in a street, whatever it looked like, whatever via Forcella looked like. He’d say he wanted a fresh roll for his breakfast, maybe some croissants. She would look surprised, astonished, then grin. He’d laugh. Both laughing, hugging and holding tight. It was what he thought. Nothing about a broken door, police on the step, a wild kid who was expert on breaking and entering, maybe no more than ten years old. Nothing about sitting for several hours in a restaurant, hurting, and hurting worse in his bedroom where her dressing-gown hung and her magazines lay about. Nothing about talking to, pleading with a blow-up photograph on a wall. They would do it, meeting again, just casual, as if nothing had happened and no wounds had been cut into him. He never saw her solemn, sullen, serious, because Mac was always the photograph on the wall.

Who knew what love was? They didn’t talk about love in the little house they shared in Dalston. Love was not an agenda area with the guy from HM Revenue and Customs, the club waiter, the rail-ticket seller or the perpetual student. Love was in movies, books, magazines. Screwing and shagging were real – rare but attainable with a good alcohol flow – but love was off-limits. The definition of love, as known to Eddie Deacon, was an ache in his guts, a yearning and the bloody awful misery of not seeing that face coming round the corner and the little wave, then feeling her touch… And the bloody child had put chocolate on the sleeve of his jacket, and the bloody woman’s hand was on his knee and her fingers were tightening. They were long over the Alps.