Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Castrolami said, conversationally, ‘We put you in a tower block on the north side or on the east side of Rome and on every floor women are looking to see who is new. It’s an intelligence-gathering system, unavoidable – you know that. It’s the same in a tower in Naples. We put you in a small town near Firenze, Pisa or on the Adriatic, you open your mouth and they hear you, Naples, and they hear us, outsiders, and they think that Mafia scum is being hidden among them, and there are demonstrations, perhaps violence, because they despise you and believe you contaminate their society. It’s good here because we’re among the people who don’t know the Mafia but hate the VAT officials and the Revenue investigators, and who seek to live in privacy. If, however, they believed that a collaborating criminal had been brought here, there would be outrage and the accusation that we’ve reduced the worth of their property. We don’t flaunt you.’

‘And when they come back from holiday?’

‘We’ll think again, look at the budget and-’

‘Move on?’

There was an old bridge over the river ahead. They had left the shade of the trees and gone under a six-lane road. She could see over the parapet wall that the Tiber’s level was down. It looked played out, not like a famous river. He didn’t answer her. She thought they would keep her in the fine apartment while they stripped the meat of what she knew, then ship her on when only the bones remained.

Castrolami said, ‘The bridge is the Ponte Milvio, one of the most important in the city. It was built by Gaius Claudius Nero more than two thousand years ago. Constantine won a great battle at the bridge in 312 AD. It’s been repaired many times, then a new phenomenon. Three years ago, young people in love were attracted to it, put padlocks on the lamppost and threw the keys into the river. So many padlocks – the bigger and heavier they were, the greater the love – were fastened there that the lamppost collapsed. For a few months there was a virtual lamppost, on the web, but now the mayor has put steel columns on the bridge and it’s possible to fix padlocks again. Do you find that interesting?’

She shook her head decisively.

Quietly, his response: ‘No, you wouldn’t because you assured me that you do not, at present, have a lover. You told me so. We should cross the road.’

Rossi had already done so.

It was a fast thought only, a brittle image – of him in a park, and in a small, grubby house, then laughter, the smoothness of skin and… She followed Rossi, and Castrolami was holding her arm. She didn’t think she was a prisoner but that he guided her between cars and vans. In her mind she had a list.

She had shopped twice every week for food to cook for Vincenzo and his friends, and once a fortnight she had gone to the street market to buy enough to make a meal for him and his friends. It was a market far superior to those in London, laid out in splendour, stalls stacked high, every variety and every choice, but of a lower standard to that of the piazza Mercato and what was – had been – her home. She turned, tapped her hip pocket to show it was empty, pulled out the lining of a side pocket, grimaced, laughed… Orecchia passed her a ten-euro note, and Castrolami was taking his time, pecking in his wallet, so she leaned forward and took a twenty from it. Rossi gave her a ten. Immacolata chose veal and was about to point out the size of the fillets she wanted when she felt the pressure of Castrolami’s fingers on her arm. She indicated, and he spoke. She had learned. She selected potatoes, spinach and green beans, and Castrolami took the notes from her and paid. She bought tomatoes and peppers, button mushrooms and onions, and at another stall there was cream and cheese. On the way out at the far end of the covered market there were wines and spirits, and Castrolami bought one bottle, from Friuli, and she queried it with a gesture, then pointed to him, Rossi, Orecchia and herself. One bottle? He tapped his own chest, and the other men’s, then shook his head. She could drink; they would not.

They didn’t take the bags from her. She carried three and Castrolami two. It was hotter, might have reached the eighties, and no breeze came off the river. In London, if she had shopped with him, he would have carried the bags. In Naples, a foot-soldier would have carried her shopping, just as he would have parked the car and waited a respectful pace behind her as she chose. Perhaps it was the glance she gave Castrolami that prompted him. He said, ‘If they carry your shopping it would impede their shooting. If they had to shoot it would be in your defence. A shopping bag doesn’t help in aiming and firing.’

She thought, again, he had insulted her. She walked faster, away from him, and slowed only when she was a pace behind Rossi. The padlocks on the bridge were in her mind: if she’d been there with him , which of them would have taken the key, made the statement of love, and thrown it out into the slack water?

Castrolami was with Orecchia. They were fifteen paces behind the young woman and kept that distance, and Castrolami listened to the older man, who lived and ate with the criminals who collaborated, and slept near them – and held a grip, maybe a loose one, on sanity.

‘You ask me how she’ll be. You want to know if she’ll fall early or late, or stay on her feet and be strong enough for the court.’

To Castrolami it was a pain to be endured. Some investigators and detectives were easy in the company of criminals, could go to weddings and birthday parties and survive allegations of corruption. Not Castrolami. He detested being with them.

‘I was with one from your city and you’ll have known him. He walked out of the door one morning and the next we heard he was in the Secondigliano area of Naples, or perhaps Scampia, whichever. He had taken a train from the north. A week afterwards we heard he’d arrived home and was on the street, dead. One bullet, middle of the forehead. We’d been with him for four months. Time and resources wasted.’

Castrolami remembered him. Police, not carabinieri, had handled his defection. He walked slowly, felt burdened.

‘There was another. We had him in Genoa for a whole year, with his wife, his mother, his aunt, her mother and three children. We brought him to Caltanisetta to give evidence against twenty prime Sicilian fuck-pigs. We dressed him in his good suit, a clean shirt and a tie and drove him to the courthouse. He smiled and said he now wished to renegotiate his terms – like his evidence was a piece of goddam property. More money, a better allowance, or no evidence. We had twenty men in the cage and were waiting on his testimony. We agreed the new terms, won the conviction. Then the agreement was torn up. I don’t know now whether he’s alive or dead.’

Castrolami knew there was a segment of opinion, influential, which believed too many had been allowed to become a collaboratore di giustizia, that too much was given them. It was an easy way to win convictions. With the crimes of the Camorra or the Mafia, there was little opportunity for gathering forensic evidence, less chance of finding eye witnesses prepared to face down intimidation and go public in court. The collaborator, the infame, was an attractive solution.

‘I’ve seen little of her, but we were given some notes before her arrival. I read of the leukaemia death, her supposed friend. Perhaps it was merely that the guilt needed a trigger or perhaps the emotion was real. Now you talk to her about her mother, her brothers, but you haven’t played a big card. It’s there.’

Castrolami faced him. They were now on the rough, narrow road that went up beneath the pines.

‘I’m not trying to teach you your job but I’d milk the disease. To be verbally abused, physically assaulted in a cemetery at a burial, is no small matter. Use it, twist it, work it. My advice, Dottore, there isn’t a living human being whom she loves. Make good with the dead.’