Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

He blushed. Eyes pierced him. The coarseness of the question neither unnerved him nor seemed peculiar – almost, in this place, natural. They were both, he estimated, in their eighties. He sensed that they moved with difficulty, were in pain, and near the door there had been a stand of walking-sticks. The room he was in was furnished, Eddie thought expensively, but with hideous taste – chrome, plastic, fluffy, pinkish. The PhD man in the house in Dalston would have called it kitsch, and his mother’s lip would have curled in disdain. He noticed there were no photographs. Not a picture of Immacolata, or of a man who would have been her brother, or of her parents. Everyone his mother knew, all her friends, had homes littered with photographs of grandchildren, shelves and surfaces groaning under them.

The question, its vulgarity, almost amused Eddie, but the eyes of the old woman pierced him with a brightness that suggested she harboured a degree of humour. He would not have dared to lie to her. ‘Yes.’

The old woman shrugged. ‘There are many girls. Why come to find Immacolata?’

‘I think… because I love her. You know… what I mean. Yes, I love her.’

She said something to the old man, Eddie didn’t know what. She reached up from her chair, caught the collar of his shirt, tugged his face down and spoke into his ear, then moved her head to let him speak into hers, but her eyes stayed on Eddie.

The old woman asked if Immacolata loved him. He thought she used the word ‘love’ as if it was strange to her, but he reckoned that was because she was struggling with the language. He wondered how she had learned English, what call this peasant woman had had to speak it. He repeated and amplified. ‘I hope she was in love with me – at least, very fond of me. We were very happy together.’

She tugged again at her husband’s shirt collar.

Her small spider fingers scratched at the material of his shirt, pulled and jerked his head down. She was, like him, in her eighty-eighth year, but her memory was as sharp as the day he had come back to her from the Poggioreale and she had told him – without a balance sheet to read from – the finances of the brothel. She murmured the numbers given her by Salvatore. He would have had to write them down. Her mouth to his ear, her ear to his mouth as he repeated the numbers. She told Carmine that it was equal to a gift from the Virgin – and ignored his shock at what he considered inappropriate, almost blasphemy – that leverage against the bitch had walked through the front door, presented itself, gift-wrapped. He understood. Anna would go to the kitchen, make coffee and take cake from the tin. He, Carmine, would go into the hallway and telephone. He repeated the number again.

What they knew of the English language, American, was from the days when the troops had been in Naples. Good days, the best, he a king and she a queen. The fingers loosed his collar. He smiled at the young man, hoped it a smile of friendship, and there was a girlish charm about his wife’s smile, which he thought as insincere – and sweet – as the smile she had used for her customers more than sixty years before. The same smile and no truth in it. She said she would make coffee and bring cake, and she said that Carmine would go and telephone, that there was a man who knew where Immacolata was and, please, would the young man wait a little. There was an image of long ago, never forgotten. A shared cell in the south-west block of the Poggioreale. A spider, huge, whose territory was the angles between the brickwork, the bars and the grimy glass of the window. It had a web that extended nearly a metre across and half a metre high and the prisoners bet each evening, in cigarettes, how many new flies would be trapped in the daylight hours and eaten at night. The spider was esteemed and admired, its body the size of a matchbook. It trapped the ignorant and the innocent. She went to prepare coffee and bring cake, and Carmine went into the hall, leaving the young man alone. There was excitement on the young man’s face.

Always, to fight against the testimony of an infame – the bitch whore who was his granddaughter – there must be leverage. Only that, applied with extreme violence, could destroy the most feared threat to the clans: the informer, turncoat and traitor.

His was the cleanest and best-polished window of any in the long line looking out on to the central walkway on the third floor of the Sail. He was Davide. He spent many hours each week with a bucket and a rag washing his windows, outside and in. He used warm water and soap, then a disintegrating cloth to dry them. He sprayed them with polish, then used a dry cloth to take off the last of the filth that had accumulated on the glass. Those who lived in the box apartments, crumbling from neglect, on either side of him regarded the occupant of 374 with tolerance and amusement. Many in the Sail – a gigantic architectural monstrosity – existed with mental aberration. It was a dumping ground for the socially challenged and the medical misfits. On the eastern extremity of Naples, the district of Scampia had achieved notoriety as a supermarket of drugs, a killing ground in clan warfare, and as a place where the city authorities could dump the detritus of the city’s population. Davide was among the rubbish placed there, and he seemed to eke a minuscule living from delivering messages and packages for one of the Comando Piazza, who flourished around the Sail, and small handyman tasks.

Davide’s home was on one of the lower floors of a building that had become a cult symbol of ugliness. The lower floors, where No. 374 is found, represent the hull and level decking of a yacht, with ten storeys of floors. Above the deck there is a towering sail-shaped construction, vertical at the mast on the far end from Davide’s location, but terraced down for another ten levels. It has always been known as the Sail. Of the seventy thousand listed in the most recent census as living in Scampia and its tower blocks, some eleven thousand are in this architect’s eccentricity. Some call the different levels and ends of the Sail by colours, and others know each block there as a lotta. Davide was a resident of Lotta H, which was Green, and which had the franchise to market heroin, already refined. Through his well-cleaned windows, Davide observed much of the trade and the sight of him in his handkerchief-sized living room, the television blaring and only a side light on, was familiar to the lookout, the seller and the Comando Piazza who ran them, and to the magazzinieri who held the stockpiles of the narcotic, and even to the level of aquirenti who purchased in bulk, and bought from the capo of the clan that had authority in the Sail. All, from the top of the tree to the bottom, knew of the demented old fool who spent hours on the windows, bringing them to a brilliant shine, and left his apartment not more than once a week. He was almost always there and when he was not outside and window-cleaning, he was hunched in a chair with the curtains open.

To others, he was Delta465/Foxtrot, and valued – too valuable to be burned by the routine of drugs trafficking.

*

Salvatore came. He had left the van, with dark bloodstains on the tyres from where a stomach had burst when it was driven over, and was at the door. He was met by Carmine Borelli. He was briefed. He thought the old man panted as if some rare delight hooked him, anticipation… Sometimes Salvatore found that his own breath spurted in the moment that he lifted a pistol and aimed it. He thought it would have been, perhaps, before he was born that the old man had last made operational decisions. He was revelling in the chance to live again. The talk was short, as it should have been. He broke away, chuckled to himself: the young man who had screwed Immacolata in London, who loved her, would find that the bitch’s sweat, the bitch’s caresses and the bitch’s groans came expensive. Carmine Borelli had said the young man, screwer of Immacolata, was an idiot and would not make any difficulty. The radio that morning had quoted an unnamed official in the Palace of Justice as stating, no equivocation, that the Borelli clan was history, a broken reed. He saw nothing in the street that gave cause for anxiety.