Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

‘Did I do that?’ Immacolata asked, almost in awe.

Castrolami: ‘Alone, nobody achieves anything. Together, much. You were part of “doing” that. A big enough part, when your involvement is known, to guarantee that the sentence of death is passed on you.’

‘What do you want of me now?’

‘I want you, Signorina – excuse me – to stop trying to play games with me. You should now consider your situation as set in stone. You see the photograph of your mother. I don’t think she’ll be pleased to know that her picture is now a source of amusement throughout Naples. When she knows, and she soon will – it’s inevitable – that her daughter has collaborated and is in part responsible for her being photographed with bare thighs and most of her arse on display, I believe she’ll feel resentful towards you. But there’s no turning back. And she’s behind bars, in a cell. She’s beginning the process of rotting.’

‘Do you know, Dottore, what it’s like to die of leukaemia?’

‘No. I would imagine, though, that it’s worse than being in a cell and rotting.’

‘I think so.’

‘I rarely offer advice, Signorina, but now I’ll break a habit. Don’t waste my time again, and don’t forget your friend’s suffering.’

‘Where do we start?’ she asked, pushing away the photograph.

‘We should talk again of Vincenzo.’

A corridor led from the staircase to the basement cell block and the interview rooms where prisoners met their lawyers. One of the detectives who had arrested Vincenzo Borelli accompanied the custody officers who escorted him from the cell along the corridor. Even for this short walk from a departure point to a destination deep inside a protected police station – and Paddington Green was a fortress, designed to hold resourceful terror captives – he was handcuffed to an officer. Since his arrest, he had seen no lawyer, no detective, only the uniformed men entrusted with guarding and caring for him. He knew nothing.

He was Neapolitan, a man – it was right that strangers should see he cared. He asked softly, with concern, ‘My sister, Immacolata, where is she? Is she held?’

The detective behind him sniggered. He would have thought, Vincenzo recognised, that he dealt with crap, with an Italian. ‘Not held, friend, not here and not likely to be. Actually, friend, she’s shafted you – she’s singing like a whole damn choir… Sorry, did I say that? I don’t think I did.’

Vincenzo thought it was arrogance. The detective needed to appear a mastermind, senior, and to have detailed knowledge of an extradition case. Vincenzo looked blankly ahead as he was led down the corridor, and mimed being simple, fitting a stereotype, not understanding.

In an interview room, he met a lawyer. The lawyer offered him cigarettes, said he came from Catania in Sicily, was based in the British capital and dealt exclusively with cases – criminal and civil – in which Italian citizens needed representation. He said, too, that he had been appointed to act on Vincenzo’s behalf by Umberto. He gave the name of a street and quoted a telephone number as verification that he knew where the clan’s lawyer lived and the number of his personal mobile. Vincenzo told him to call it and deliver a message urgently.

The message was in English: The diva performs with rare beauty and is hired for many performances. He told the lawyer that the message was to be spoken once, fast. That was all he wished to say. He wanted the man gone.

Vincenzo, in his cell, believed that within half an hour the message would be on Umberto’s desk. Umberto would have recorded it for safe transcription, memorised it, then destroyed the tape and the typescript. The door shut on him, a key turned in a lock. He leaned against a wall, much scribbled on and graffiti-strewn, then beat the painted brickwork with his fist till the bruising came.

His own sister…

He left the ticket window and ran. He was last on the train, and he thought that, too, was luck. Eddie Deacon had managed to rip open the heavy door while the uniforms shouted, waved their arms and blew hard on whistles, but he jumped aboard, closed the door after him, they did a sweet smile for the man who reached the window and glowered.

The train rolled out of Rome.

He had come into the city on an airport bus, and had suffered a sea-change. Realised it now. He didn’t have a seat, but stood and rocked with the motion of the carriage. The engine gathered acceleration. The sea-change was in him. Luck was sprinting with him, and he was thankful for it. Darkness flanked the train as it cleared the Roman suburbs, and then he made out the tight clusters of lights high up, and imagined the track had been routed between hills and their old villages. He felt exhilaration, as if he challenged himself. Not bad, was it, getting himself halfway across western Europe on the same day that he’d jacked a job, cleared a bank account? He had plastic his family would guarantee, and was hightailing through the hills south of the Eternal City. Excitement, adventure: they wouldn’t have contemplated it – ‘they’ being the HM Revenue and Customs clerk, the waiter, the ticket man and the student. One would be dragging himself back to the house after a day of staring at a screen with a head fit to bust, the next would be making polite noises to pompous farts in the club and bringing them drinks, the ticket man would be on late shift and counting the minutes till he finished, and the last would be buried in some damn book about manorial field divisions in the Tudor period. They would find his note, hasty, scrawled, and would each feel – Eddie reckoned – a spasm of jealousy – but not half of the jealousy they’d feel when he brought her back. It was excitement, adventure, and he felt himself lifted, almost euphoric.

It was a brilliant line, so fast, so modern, so smooth. It was as if he had entered true civilisation. Didn’t have a line like this, or a carriage, on the route to Chippenham. He knew of nothing now that could block him. He was on a pedestal, had placed himself there.

He would find her.

‘Incredible! It’s Mac! Wow! Fancy bumping into you here. Just happened to be passing.’

‘Did you now? Funny old world, yeah?’ And hearing her voice, the accent and the lilt, and knowing she damn near laughed – not at him, with him.

‘Like you say, Mac, “funny old world”. Shall we go and get a beer?’

‘Can’t think of anything better.’

Didn’t know where he’d find her, couldn’t picture it – or where she’d lead him to find a beer. Didn’t care. Excitement was the narcotic in Eddie Deacon. On this train, on the new track, it would take ninety minutes to travel from Rome to Naples. Everything went for him, and luck smiled. Why should it not?

He read the note that the child had brought him. He needed a magnifying-glass to decipher the tiny characters. It was Carmine Borelli who had first taken the young lawyer, Umberto, inside the clan’s affairs. He had spotted the overweight and indulgent rookie with no resources of his own, and no family to keep him in a fitting standard of living, and had backed his intuition. It had been forty years the previous June since he had made the approach, and the youthful Umberto had virtually kissed his hand in gratitude. It astonished him that Umberto’s ponderous, stubby fingers were capable of writing in such a delicate minuscule style. He would have thought the lawyer too clumsy to fashion it. The magnifying-glass made the message clear.

Clear, but almost unbelievable.

Your daughter-in-law arrested, your grandsons also arrested. Your granddaughter collaborates with the Palace of Justice and has been flown to Rome.

He couldn’t complain that four words were used when one sufficed. So few words and so great this effect. He was breathing hard, with wheezes and bubbling gasps. He understood. It was a situation as critical for the clan he had founded as that which had confronted the brothers in Sicily during the Fascist regime and the rule of the brutal ‘prefect of iron’, Cesare Mori, when the Cosa Nostra had been closest to defeat, and no different in Naples during the time of Mussolini. But Mussolini had fallen, and the Allies had landed first in Sicily, then on the mainland at Salerno, and a new era of opportunity had arrived. Carmine Borelli had seized that opportunity, had begun to form the apparatus of the clan that bore his name. It had survived, with respect, on the streets and in the files of the Palace of Justice for sixty-six years. He had been married to Anna only two years when American troops had entered the bombed streets of Naples. Everything he had built – according to the note a street child had brought him from the lawyer – was now at risk.