Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

The light was failing, and the sun had dipped below the wing. The child was gobbling chocolate to get the box finished and the woman was going into white-knuckle time because the engine pitch had changed, and Eddie sensed that the descent had started. At that time, he should have been educating a roomful of immigrants – all his chums from the Baltics, the Balkans and North Africa – on the intricacies of Murder in Mesopotamia or Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express, didn’t really matter which. Like pressing a button on the staff-room computer keyboard, he deleted them, erased them.

It was early in the evening and a city’s lights were on. The aircraft yawed and the undercarriage rumbled as it was lowered. Of course he had come. He was Eddie Deacon, and he wanted nothing more than to see her, hear her, feel her – and there was no logic in it and no more analysis of what he knew.

The wheels hit, a good landing, feathered, and he didn’t know of anything he should fear.

He came out of the car fast, slammed the door, waved off the driver. For Mario Castrolami this was foreign territory. What he had seen of Collina Fleming was enough to curl his lip. He tasted the first trace of bile in his throat. He had heard it was a hill for millionaires, the big ones, and the apartments were broad built, their balconies had expensive plants on them and the plots were surrounded by barricades. Dogs barked behind electronically controlled gates and porters patrolled the front doors. He thought the hill was about privilege and wealth. Castrolami, investigator in the carabinieri ROS, detested privilege and lacked wealth. Could have done… Could have blocked enquiries, made files disappear, given advance warning by public phone, with a handkerchief over the mouthpiece, of a raid planned for the following dawn. All of that would have filled an offshore account. He lived in Vomero, the comfortable area of Naples, but on the north side of the Castel Sant’Elmo, and he needed to be a gymnast and to stand on tiptoe on a chair to peer through a skylight for a minuscule glimpse of the sea and the east promontory of Capri. He thought the hill oozed money.

A woman passed him as he went to the gate. It was late September and Castrolami’s tie was loose and there was sweat in his armpits. She wore a fur coat, and carried a dog under one arm. Where Castrolami lived, on the wrong side of Vomero, there were stray cats that would have killed that toy dog and eaten it. She looked up, saw him, dismissed him as irrelevant and went by – probably thought him a plumber or an insurance salesman. There was no porter on this block and he rang the bell, gave his name and the gate was unlocked. He carried a thin cardboard file and a small overnight bag. He loathed Rome, and hoped the bag would be needed for a night or two, no more.

He was admitted.

He asked how she was. Rossi, the young one, gestured – something of amusement and something of frustration.

The older one was Orecchia. ‘She stays in her room. It was about her mother. We find it often enough. There’s the excitement and drama, the centre-of-stage hour, then the moment of reality and the fear. She’s frightened of her mother. You understand, we’re not interrogators. At this stage we’re here to protect her and maintain the security of the safe-house. She wants to stay in her room, hide at the back of her cave so we don’t drag her out. She won’t eat, she won’t talk, she won’t…’

Castrolami smiled. He did a grim, dark smile well.

He went to the door. It was less than twenty-four hours since he had brought Immacolata Borelli to this address, and less than twelve since he had been told she had refused to speak to the prosecutor, and only half a dozen since the file had landed on his cluttered desk. They used him, at the Palace of Justice, as a bulldozer. That evening, he should have been with his friend, who painted views of the mountain, at an exhibition of modern art in a church on the riviera di Chiaia and afterwards… They took for granted, at the Palace of Justice, that the bulldozer did twenty-four/seven.

He didn’t knock.

The light was off, but the blinds were not drawn and the street-lamps far below threw up enough for him to see her. She lay on her back, her legs together, staring at the ceiling. She didn’t turn to face him but said quietly, ‘I don’t want anything to eat or drink.’ He put the light on, hit all the switches, and she jerked her head sideways. He went to the table and put the file on it. Then he walked towards her. He took her right arm at the wrist, heaved her off the bed and she nearly fell. He said nothing and dragged her to the table, her feet slithering on the floor. He kicked back a chair, made room for her, pressed her down on the seat.

He flicked open the file cover, and spilled out the photographs.

She saw her mother. Immacolata held the photograph under the table light. She looked at the wife of Pasquale Borelli, the leader of the clan and controller of most business activities in Forcella and Sanita, the woman who did deals that had relevance in the north of Italy, in the South of France, in Spain and Germany, who had ambitions for the opening of opportunities in Great Britain, who aspired to be a player on the east coast of the United States and had links with organisations operating in the west of the former Soviet Union. She looked at the photograph of her mother.

A little gasp.

Her gaze slipped to Castrolami. If he felt sympathy for the fate of her mother he disguised it. His expression was blank. He showed neither clemency nor triumph.

She matched his mood.

Her mother, whom she had feared, was on the ground – on concrete built up a few centimetres from the street – was helpless.

For a moment she wondered, and then she asked, ‘Is she dead?’

He shook his head.

In the black-and-white photograph, enlarged to twenty centimetres by twenty-five, her mother was prostrate. A man was poised above her head, his pistol drawn and aimed at her. A woman crawled on her back and had wrenched up one arm so that the hand almost touched the neck, and held a pistol against the neck so that the barrel dented it. Her mother wore the dead look on her face. She was supine, had no fight, did not cringe. It was as if she was comatose from shock. She had fallen awkwardly under the weight of the woman, then must have wriggled backwards to get further clear of the man with the aimed pistol. The effect of that movement had been to ruck up her skirt. It had ridden up her thighs. Immacolata gazed at the photograph. It was the indignity… Her mother’s thighs were white on the grey concrete, but not as white as the knickers she wore. Immacolata had a glimpse of them, frozen by the camera. She thought of the respect her mother demanded – from her children, the clan, foot-soldiers and associates, from businessmen to foreign gang principals. She thought of when a stick had been taken to her, aged twelve, when she had refused to leave her bedroom to sweep the floor in the living room and hall, and when her face had been slapped, a stinging blow, as her mother had announced to her brothers that she was to be la madrina and Immacolata had not suppressed a giggle – of nerves at her mother’s self-elevation to such a height. She thought of the verbal criticism, offered in a cafe, when she had failed to bring back all the protection-payment envelopes from the via Casanova. It was her mother, humiliated, who lay prone in the road, and at the periphery of the camera’s view a small crowd had gathered and formed a wary half-moon. She believed, from the greyness and distortion of the picture, that her mother’s arrest had been captured on a mobile phone. She realised she had been brought this particular photograph – not one of her mother being led through paparazzi and cameramen, flashes and arc lights, able to use the haughtiness of a Pupetta Maresca, a Rosetta Cutolo or a Patrizia Ferriero – to see her mother laid out in a posture of vulgarity.