Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

A convulsion of coughing shook his body. He spat phlegm into his handkerchief and the irritation passed. He sat still in his chair with the scrap of paper in his palm and the magnifying glass. He did not call his wife, but she had admitted the child and would have known that the much-folded piece of paper was of importance so had allowed him to digest it first, then would come to share. He had known, of course – as she did – that the boys were held, not merely Silvio, that Gabriella had been taken in the street and her photograph circulated in the day’s newspapers. The bite of the vipera was your granddaughter collaborates. If he smoked more than a full carton in a day there were pains in his chest – but no worse than those now in his mind. He could think of so many clans in which a member of the inner family had taken the pentito programme of the Palace of Justice, and he had always – in the fifteen years since the programme had been launched – felt a sense of superiority over those who had not been able to hold the loyalty of sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters. It was his own nipote who sat now with the men who were his lifetime enemy.

Much for him to reflect on.

He remembered the contempt he had larded on those clans cut deep by the testimony of their own: the sneer, the retort, the shrug, and the secret feeling that it was but for God’s grace that… It could have been his brother, now long dead, or his brother’s son, shot and left to bleed to death on the via Carbonara, or his grandson, the least liked among his nipoti, Giovanni. It was none of them. Immacolata was accused.

He let his mind rove. His wife, Anna, had brought the newborn granddaughter to the visitors’ hall at the Poggioreale gaol. In that place of dirt, noise and despair, where he had been held for four months before the charges of extortion were dropped, the infant had slept, as if unaffected by where she was, had made a little island of calm in the clamour. Her christening had been delayed until his release. He had been present in the church at the top of the street in Forcella, and the priest had been his friend. The child’s father had been one of the many latitanti in the city, in flight from the prosecutor, and Carmine had replaced Pasquale in the place of honour at Immacolata’s first communion and had hosted the celebration lunch. The child became a teenager, then a young woman, and he would sit her beside him and give her the benefit of his experience, and she would listen. He would have said that her affection for him was great – greater than she harboured for her mother and father – and that her respect for him was total.

Anna came into the room. She had poor eyesight, poorer than his, and her chair was always by the window. She reached out a hand and he passed her the scrap of paper and the magnifying-glass. She glanced at the note, then shook her head sharply. It was for him to tell her what was written, and to repeat it would be another wound, cut ever deeper. He used the zapper to turn on the big TV and raise its volume. There had been police in the house so recently and not a chance of observing them: he would say nothing of importance without turning on the television and increasing the volume. She leaned close to him and he to her, his lips little more than ten centimetres from her ear. He could see each of the cancer marks on her skin, the wrinkles at her throat and the hairs on her upper lip. He told her everything, and always had.

He said, ‘The boy came from Umberto. Umberto writes, “Your granddaughter collaborates with the Palace of Justice and has been flown to Rome.” Umberto denounces Immacolata. She is, Umberto says, an infame. Immacolata seeks to destroy us.’

She gave no answer. Carmine could see only the chill slab of his wife’s face, devoid of expression. The child, Immacolata, had spent as many of her waking hours in this apartment as she had in her mother’s. It was personal, the hurt. Anna gave no answer, he believed, because she still pondered on what her response should be. She would not speak unless there were words of substance to say. He felt the damp on his face. A tear trickled down his skin to the thin stubble on his cheek.

His shin was kicked.

A sharp blow with a heavy lace-up shoe, which stabbed pain into the bone.

He thought she might as well have condemned their granddaughter. It had taken five or six seconds for him to relay the message, and twenty-six years of love, commitment and caring were obliterated.

He looked into his wife’s face. Many times in those sixty-six years of marriage she had worn an expression that frightened him, and so it was. He saw in that face a terrible, but controlled, hatred. Where Immacolata was involved, he could be soft – but his wife could not.

They had broken. Castrolami came into the kitchen to make tea and left Immacolata Borelli to sip a glass of juice.

It was different. He had fastened the photograph to the wall. From where he had sat her at the table, the microphone close to her, she faced it. He was to the side of her. It was natural for her to look up, to be certain that a point made was assimilated, and then she saw her mother – on the ground, in humiliation, the skirt pushed up, white skin, whiter underwear, dignity and control stripped. It was different because the Borelli girl now talked, and during the time he had been there he had used three spare tapes from the stack he had brought. They had moved beyond Vincenzo, enough on the first two tapes to ensure an extradition case to go with the evidence already laid before the British courts on charges of murder, and the third detailed the control of Gabriella Borelli over the clan, not mere supposition. Supposition would have been that Pasquale Borelli slipped out messages from the gaol of Novara through a route in the gaol’s catering; detail was that the route, whereby the husband let the wife have his advice, involved the man who brought the flour, yeast, salt, olive oil and cheap dried milk to the prison bakery, and was a facilitator for the communications of two maximum-security Sicilians. Supposition was that the contract for a new sewage works at a town inland from Naples had corrupt political involvement; detail named the men who had granted the contract in the local town hall, what they had been paid for their cooperation, how the payment was made and how that contract would be shared between different clans – who had trucking, who had labour, who had cement. Castrolami needed to break the meeting for tea.

Orecchia took milk from the refrigerator and poured it. ‘You’re pleased with her.’

‘More so than before.’

Orecchia’s smile was cold. ‘You were hard on her.’

Castrolami said, ‘Because I feel nothing for her. She is not a true pentita. There is no sense of penitence. The death of a friend, linked to her, and an attack on her at a cemetery, her being too late to attend the funeral Mass combine to create a sense of guilt. She seeks to redress the guilt, but that’s not penitence. Revenge, anger, dislike for her family, who may not have valued her as she thought she deserved… Many things. But it’s not a road-to-Damascus conversion.’

‘She’s not Paul,’ Orecchia murmured, ‘but few of them are.’

‘And no shining light, only little grievances topped by the friend’s death. No sense of outrage at the criminality of the Camorra, what has happened to the city, Naples distinguished by callousness. Shit, that’s boring.’

‘Excuse me, have you no sense of sincerity? You see her as shallow?’

‘You know better than I, friend, what she’ll face. When the pressure crushes her, we’ll see sincerity or not…’

Orecchia handed him the cup, no saucer, and a sweet biscuit. ‘Me, when I go home – not often – I stand in the shower for a full fifteen minutes and the family screams there’ll be no hot water for the rest of that day. They say I’m mad, that I sup with devils. I say I eat with a long spoon. You know what’s worse? The collaborators believe they do me, Rossi, you, society, a great favour by coming to us. I despise them.’