Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Negotiations with a tribal leader had been ongoing for excess of three days. Much reliance placed on the talks; my view, too much reliance. Asset intelligence reported the hostage held in a six-storey block of twenty-four apartments plus basement. Exact location of hostage and hostage-takers in the building was not known but we had electronics in the stairwell. A male – not seen before at the building – approached and carried a plastic bag containing one large potato. I advised readying the storm squad for immediate intervention. Spanish diplomatic personnel in the command centre took a contrary position. The electronics in the stairwell indicated the unknown male to have gone to the second floor, right side of staircase. I urged an instant assault…

No mention of the attempt to punch him, the screamed accusation that he cared nothing for the life of a Spanish-born expert in antiquities on attachment to the National Museum. No mention of a diplomat having to be restrained while frothing with rage. No mention in the report of an expert’s experience. A big potato, weighing more than two kilos, had been the trigger for him. The diplomats believed negotiation would free their national, that a premature assault endangered the captive’s life. To be told that a man carrying a potato into the building was reason enough to abandon the talks that had been so difficult to initiate had caused an explosion of fury.

The assault was successful. Four Iraqis were killed by troops from the Polish special forces team and the hostage was freed. He would have been dead within the hour. Signed, F. Lukas.

NB A large potato was used as a pistol’s silencer in the assassination of a British national, the barrel tip being indented into the potato and the killing bullet passing through its bulk.

A British co-ordinator – one whom Lukas admired – had told him about big potatoes. It didn’t offend him to be accused of lunacy because he understood too well the stresses they all felt. The Brit had given him a cassette and Lukas had gone off to watch, alone, the video of a killing. The potato as the end of an automatic-pistol barrel, a Makharov, had dulled the noise on the soundtrack of the firing. He had seen the body collapse – not fall forward but go down like one of those big old cooling towers that were dynamited. The co-ordinator, tough, hard, had seemed badly cut by that loss. They were all in the same club, limited membership, and all felt badly when they lost out. He had failed to save the life of a European tourist who was a damn fool stupid guy to think he could walk those mountains without having looked through websites and Foreign office advisories – but it still hurt. It just seemed cheap to Lukas to show the world what hurt.

From his living room, he often looked out into the hall, but no red light winked and no bell rang.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator

There were kids at the top of the street. They wore a uniform of faded T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms or denims and scuffed trainers, had close-cropped hair that made them look as though they were recovering from a louse infestation. They had darting eyes that crossed over the pedestrians who came off the via Duomo, turned and headed on down the street. When the T-shirt of one was lifted in a sudden arm movement, Eddie Deacon saw the handle of a knife and the upper part of its sheath. The kids did not kick footballs. Behind them, astride a scooter, smoking, was an older boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and he kept the engine idling. Against the wall two more boys, maybe seventeen or eighteen, had mobile phones clamped to their faces.

Eddie Deacon was not an idiot – some said he was bone idle, that he lacked ‘drive’, that he was short on ambition – and nobody had ever called him ‘stupid’, but he had common sense, ‘nous’. He had realised that everyone who went down that street was visually checked over. There was a rhythm to it. A man or a car appeared and the kids seemed to rush in front of him, maybe to slow him. The scooter’s engine speed quickened and the mobile was spoken into. Once he had seen the scooter pull out and go down the street, and a signal must have been sent because, within seconds, another scooter had taken over sentry duty. He had walked past two other streets leading into the district and there had been kids, a scooter and mobile phones at the top of each. He could recognise it, could not deny it. Eddie had slept poorly because of the nerves. He was as intimidated by the street, hesitating and hovering at its mouth, as he had been in the darkness the night before. He felt his intelligence dulled. But it was what he had come for, to go down that street and find Immacolata Borelli.

Nobody had accused him of cowardice, or ever mocked him for fast-fix religion.

It might have been the nerves. On the via Duomo, before he reached the junction with via Forcella, he had found himself outside the cathedral. He had gone inside and lingered there. He had read that the huge high interior was built four hundred years ago after earthquake devastation had brought down the thirteenth-century building, and that under the most recent foundations were a Greek temple and a Roman-era rainwater canal. He’d read, too, of San Gennaro, who protected the city from disaster and whose blood, kept here in a vial, liquefied each first Sunday in May and each 19 September. The saint had died in 305 – he did a simple sum fast – 1704 years ago, beheaded after torture as punishment for his beliefs, and his blood was a dried cake for three hundred and sixty-three or -four days of the year, but went liquid on those two days. If Eddie Deacon had told the guys in the house off the Kingsland Road this story, and that he didn’t doubt it, he would have been laughed all the way to the pub, to do the first round and the second. Flowers were being arranged near the altar and he imagined there would be a wedding later. A scattering of chairs was taken by crouched figures. He was happy to have been there, yet he never went into the church on Hoxton Street or the one on the other side of Dalston at Middleton Road. Being there, hearing a choir of treble angel voices rehearse, settled him a little.

So, best bloody foot forward.

The light didn’t come down the street. The alleyways leading off to the sides, spars off a mast, were narrower and dim, and above them washing hung. There were shops: for hardware, groceries, bread, cheap clothing. The facade rendering had peeled away and the paintwork was chipped and flaking. Often, in the first few paces, he reached back and touched his hip pocket, where the slim wallet was. He wore faded jeans, trainers and a short-sleeved shirt; he had left his passport, his plastic and most of his cash in the little safe in the pensione room. It seemed necessary for him – under the gaze of the kids, the boy astride the scooter and the older boys with the mobiles – to feel for his wallet.

He said softly to himself, ‘For fuck’s sake, Eddie, get with it. Where are you? In western Europe, the cradle of civilisation. Why are you in western Europe? To find Mac. What are you? A bloody wimp. When are you going to grow up? Now… now.’

A woman carried two thin plastic bags that were heavy with vegetables. Eddie asked her – in stuttered Italian – if she knew where Immacolata Borelli lived. The woman looked through him, as if he didn’t exist, and he repeated the name, but she walked past him.

He didn’t know where the street ended, where the vicolo Vicaria began, but he did not think via Forcella was long, maybe two hundred yards. Everyone should know her… A man stopped in the centre of the street, a dog squatted and defecated, a cat crouched at his feet and chewed gristle from a bone, and a scooter swept by them. The man had paused to light his pipe. Eddie asked if he knew, please, where Immacolata Borelli lived. The man gaped at him. Eddie said the name again. The match burned until it touched the skin of the man’s fingers, then the man pushed past. He stepped in the dog’s mess, four square in it, and seemed not to care.