Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

He listened. It was the message he had expected – he might have been surprised had it not surfaced the previous evening.

A Naples newspaper, Cronaca, had telephoned the Palace of Justice and asked for guidance on a rumour in the Forcella and Sanita districts that Immacolata Borelli, twenty-five-year-old daughter of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli, was collaborating. Was the rumour confirmed or denied? He was told that time had been bought, that the prosecutor was unavailable, in meetings, and that the press office could neither confirm nor deny – but only a few hours could be bought. He thanked the caller and pocketed the mobile.

They had had the gentle hours. He imagined the word racing through the district of her birth and childhood – as it had with an Alfieri, a Contini, a Misso and a Giuliani. But for it to be a girl, pretty, educated, intelligent, would captivate the city. He did not hide news. Good or bad it should be spelled out.

He said, ‘It’s rumoured in Naples that Immacolata Borelli is an infame. Word is out and on the streets. They would spit at your picture, if they had you in via Forcella, they would stamp on you until your breath had gone. If you ever believed there was a time for turning back it’s gone. Now I shall ask you a very serious question.’

‘What?’

‘Is there anything in your life that I should know about which you have not told me? Signorina Immacolata, is there anything that can be exploited, a weakness?’

‘No.’

‘Should I believe you?’

‘You insult me.’

She looked at her best when she was angry. But, and it troubled Castrolami, the sunlight was reflected on to the white marble floor and her eyes, making them black pockets. He liked to look deep into the eyes when he was deciding whether a suspect was truthful or lied. He could not see hers. He thought her strong, and that she would need to be strong.

He said, ‘In an hour, maybe, we will go to the piazza, where the stalls are, and you can shop. I think you’ll find that a chic corner of Rome is more expensive than Forcella or any part of Naples, and probably the produce is inferior. That we give permission is a gesture of trust.’

She didn’t thank him. He thought her an enigma: tough and vulnerable, resolute and frightened, hard and pliant. He didn’t yet know her, didn’t know whether he ever would – whether a gesture of trust was misplaced.

She had shuffled towards him. Salvatore watched the approach of Anna Borelli, grandmother to the family and icon in the clan. He had heard she had been the strength behind her man, that the clan would not have prospered without her and that she was the worst woman in Naples to make an enemy of. He knew her to have been born in 1922, the year Mussolini had launched, from Naples, the march on Rome that elevated him to power. He knew her to have been married in 1941 when her husband had come out of hiding from military conscription and posting to Montenegro. He knew her to have stepped back from the running of the clan in the middle 1980s when its strength was assured and Pasquale was given authority, knew that she had paramount importance in the clan’s territory. She came close to him.

She was frail, with bent shoulders, and walked with a stick to mitigate her rheumatism. She had cropped white hair, but her clothes were always ebony black. If she ever smiled he hadn’t seen it. If she ever laughed he hadn’t heard her. She paused outside a hardware shop and he saw her examining brooms, weighing the advantages of one against another: she was worth, by whatever calculation, millions of euros, but fingered brooms to decide whether one that cost three euros was as good value as one that cost five. He came close to her, and the owner of the shop, who had been solicitous and grovelling as if to royalty, stepped back to give him room and privacy.

He said, ‘Grandmother, it is a time of maximum danger to the clan. Nonna, the wolves circle because they believe us weak. Nonna, without Pasquale, Gabriella and Vincenzo, and with the bitch Immacolata whoring with the palace, we need leadership or we’ll disintegrate. Everything you and Carmine achieved will be lost. Unless you lead now, your lives will have been wasted. I beg you, take control. Fight. Umberto can find me, but in extreme emergency call this…’ He slipped a piece of paper into her clawed hand. He relied on her memory, in her eighty-eighth year, to absorb the number. He was satisfied she would have done so within an hour. With total sincerity Salvatore said: ‘We depend on you, Nonna, and on Carmine. If we’re led we’ll follow. If we don’t fight, we’re dead, and the whore has killed us.’

He walked away from her. At an entry fifty metres down the via Forcella from the hardware shop, he paused in the shadow. The priest passed her, the bastard priest from the church of San Giorgio Maggiore – should have been shot – and she didn’t acknowledge him. Salvatore thought she bartered with the shop owner for a discount on the broom, and – for certain – she would be given it. There were many who would delight in dancing on his corpse and many who would queue for the privilege of dropping him. He reached his man, Fangio, put on the helmet with the smoked-glass visor and was gone.

It was perplexing to him. Frustrated, annoyed, failing and unable to get sense from anyone, Eddie Deacon beaded on the priest. Perplexingly, the priest walked in the centre of the street and scooters swerved to pass him, going either way, and the street was lined with shoppers and gossipers, old and young, and no one spoke to him. He was young, no more than thirty, with a rounded, chubby face but there was no cheer in it: pallor and tiredness characterised him. He had come out of a courtyard through tall iron gates. The school had the name ‘Annalisa Durante’. Eddie sidled towards the priest.

A quick side-step, like a soccer player’s swerve, and the priest had passed. Eddie called after him. No response, but the priest’s step quickened. He fastened on the back of the man – had to: he had been the length of the street and must have asked a dozen people where the Borelli home was, and had not received one coherent answer. The kids followed him still, but not with intensity. He didn’t think they regarded him as threatening, more as a curiosity, but they were behind him and he’d noted that each time he asked, the boy on the scooter quizzed the person he’d spoken to.

The sun came higher. He sweated. Strips of light and warmth knifed on to the street from the alleys. More people were out. If he met eyes, they were averted. If he smiled, it was not returned.

He didn’t know what else to do, but followed the priest. The spark had gone out for him, as if hope was extinguished. So alone. The priest went up the steps of the church and into it. Eddie had that sense of being the stranger and unwanted. In the stone slabs beside the main door, at about the level of a man’s head, there were chip marks, two scars where the stone had been gouged. He followed the priest inside. Cool and quiet enveloped him.

They walked. Rossi led and he wore a lightweight poplin jacket so that his shoulder harness was covered. She followed, with Castrolami alongside her, Orecchia behind. They went down a side-road from the block, where the parked cars had been in place all summer, the bonnets and windscreens coated with the fine dust that came from the north African deserts, carried on the winds. The hill where they had brought her was empty of residents, still holidaying in the south or at the Sardinian resorts. That would have been why they had shipped her in here. There were so few people in the apartments and on the roads.

The dogs had not been taken to the southern beaches, but abandoned to the care of maids and porters. They threw themselves at the balcony railings. Immacolata had forgotten, almost, the ferocity of the sun – but there were many things to be forgotten. She walked with a good step and Rossi had to sense her pace and stretch his stride to keep ahead of her. They went past the entrance to a tennis club and she glimpsed the pool, azure blue, and the loungers; the Borelli family had not been able, in Naples, to belong to a club where tennis was played and there was a pool, so Immacolata didn’t play tennis and couldn’t swim. Different worlds, and this one closed to her by the dictate of the clan’s security, but there were clubs like this in Posilippo and Pozzuoli north up the coast. There was a clinic, and more apartments set back, with different dogs and different porters, then the road ducked down and ran beneath a roof of pine branches.