Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Castrolami smiled grimly. ‘Maybe you’d find spiritual fulfilment as a street sweeper. Thanks for the tea.’

Orecchia said, ‘I’m not joking. I trust this one, all of them, as far as I can kick them. They entangle people, squeeze and suck the goodness from them.’

‘I hear you.’ Castrolami couldn’t have argued with a word he’d said, but he wondered how a man survived in his work if he saw only bleakness. Did he laugh at home? Did he follow a football team with the fanaticism of the Mastiffs in Naples? Did he pay tarts? Castrolami wondered if Orecchia was ever saddened when a collaborator was cut loose from the protection programme and left to fend for himself – did he ever respect them? That evening he would talk to Signorina Immacolata about her mother’s hard-drugs-importation programmes and…

The voice droned again at him: ‘To be touched by them is to be contaminated.’

More luck. He was told that a single room was available, the last, and that it was the first day after the end of the high-season rate – big luck double time for Eddie Deacon, innocent and ignorant.

The accommodation desk at the city’s railway station had found him the room. A pretty girl had circled the hotel on a map and confirmed it would not be expensive. He had slung the bag over his shoulder and started to walk, making his way – only two wrong turnings – from the wide square, the piazza Garibaldi. He had tasted the heat, the noise, the smells and the chaos of traffic and scooters, and had known the first pangs of nerves. He had stood outside the hotel door and the neon above him blinked without pattern. Kids stood on the streets, smoked and didn’t talk but eyed him. More nerves. They spoke some English inside, and the man who gave him the key had a squint, a khaki mole on his cheek and a stutter. Eddie spoke kindly to him. He thought, then, that he needed a friend – any bloody friend from any bloody place. Maybe the excitement, the adventure, the exhilaration, like the neon, blinked.

He went up to the room. His step was heavier and the bounce had gone. They were saving on power for the stairs: the bulbs were low-wattage and made the shadows longer, the greyness of the walls and ceiling deeper, the lack of light accentuating the scratches in the paint. He was no longer within the civilisation boundaries of the train carriage that had brought him south. He heard a couple row in German about the cost of the meal that evening and the budget being blown. Another couple on the next floor up grunted, squealed and worked the bedsprings, and there was a tray outside the door on which was a barely nibbled pizza: the sex sounded good but the pizza had dried out. He had been told by the girl at the accommodation desk at Napoli Centrale that this pensione was the best he could afford. He went on up the staircase, the carpet thinner, more faded and worn with each flight.

The key was on a chain that hooked on to a small wooden ball. He slipped the little card that had come with it – his name, room number, the hotel address – into his trouser pocket, opened the door and groped for the switch.

The room was smaller than a prison cell, with a wardrobe, an upright chair, a table hardly deep enough for an A4 sheet of paper and a single bed. Beside the wardrobe there was a square section of transparent plastic for a shower, basin and toilet. Only a damn small cat, a kitten, could have been swung in it. Had he expected a Marriott room, or one from a Holiday Inn, maybe an InterContinental? Old story: in this world, Eddie, you get what you pay for. Eddie Deacon, in Germany or France, had never felt himself a stranger, had not been the lonely foreigner.

He pushed open a window and the sounds of the night buffeted against him – cars, screaming, music turned up high. He knew he was in a street behind the piazza Garibaldi because it showed up on the map he had been given. He had asked the girl if it was near to the via Forcella and she had shrugged as if to indicate that only an idiot needed that information, and then she had agreed it was. Another visitor to Naples, with a rucksack on his back, had elbowed Eddie away from the desk. He felt an increase in those nerve pangs.

So, he slapped his face with the palm of each hand, then unfolded the map. He didn’t feel good, he didn’t feel right, but he didn’t feel as if he was about to bloody lie down and cave.

He mapped out a route.

A man had said – in public – that the family was shit, finished, a spent power. Might have been right. Salvatore walked into the bar.

He wore no face mask. The room was brightly lit and his face, features, identity were clear. The clan of which he was the enforcer was worth – if all property investments, treasury bonds and shares in a half-dozen of the leading money markets were added up – in excess of half a billion euros. As an enforcer, he could have been directed to a penthouse apartment on the Cote d’Azur or a villa in a smart, protected suburb of Frankfurt, and his target would have been a banker or investment manager who had misappropriated tens of thousands of euros, or a hundred thousand, or a million. Also, his work was to maintain the respect and dignity the clan family needed. He handed down the justice of the Borellis to those who were high and mighty, to the potential informer who refused to pay a hundred euros a week – and to the braggart in the bar. He looked around him.

He was seen, noticed. He didn’t want anonymity. If many saw and knew him, the word went faster. His eyes fastened on the man.

It had always surprised Salvatore that when he confronted a victim, they seldom ran or fought. They were, almost all, helpless and trapped in terror. This one was no different. He would have said it, that the family were shit, would have repeated it, would have gone home and lain beside his whore-wife in their bed, and the bravado would have oozed away. He would have known that within hours, a few days but less than a week, the enforcer of the clan would come for him. He had nowhere to hide. A victim, a man of forty, would have been familiar with only the few streets that surrounded the districts of Sanita and Forcella, and the labyrinth inside the area of two or three square kilometres. He was, and would have realised it, a dead man walking from the time his mouth had opened and his tongue had flapped, who lived out the final stages of his life in a small flat with his wife and children, in a bar where others were cautious of his company, who was in la cella dei condannati a morte. Others now backed away from him. His jaw was slack, the spittle was white against dark lips and sweat gleamed on his high forehead. He would have felt his legs sag under the weight of his body.

He did not have to show the pistol, the Beretta, at his waist. Salvatore flicked his fingers. He gestured with his head to the door. At that moment some men – bankers or street scum – wet their trousers in the crotch or fouled their seat. Some closed their eyes and began to pray. Some wept, some pleaded. Some spoke of their children, their wives. Some went as if they sleepwalked.

This one did.

Salvatore also knew that the man he had called out would have friends in the bar with whom he had played in the street as a child, sat in schoolrooms, talked and watched football in that bar for an adult lifetime, and none would help him now. Perhaps in a week… not yet. Power not yet gone: a photograph in a newspaper of the thighs and the covered arse of Gabriella Borelli, more photographs of her children in custody, but no certainty, yet, that power was in new hands. None of those friends, once valued, would block the door, defend him.

It was the way of Naples. The authority of the clans, even one seriously wounded – weakened – ruled.

And none in that crowded bar would say they had seen Salvatore’s face. Within two minutes the bar would have emptied, well before the first sirens and lights arrived. Only the staff would be there. All would claim to have been facing the far wall, or busy at the coffee machines, or in the rear store for more milk. That, too, was the way of Naples, unchanged and unchanging.