Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

She turned once, saw his face, must have had a smile on hers and the music from the radio lifted her. Her mother was gone, her three brothers were gone, via Forcella was gone. Castrolami was at the door, leaning on the jamb and watching her, not sharing any form of pleasure. He had destroyed the mood. She saw no thanks, no gratitude. He looked at her as if she was a child, wayward and not to be humoured.

‘Yes?’

‘We go back to work. Now.’

‘I need only a few minutes and then I’m-’

‘We start now,’ Castrolami said. He reached across the work surface to the radio and killed the sound.

‘What is so important that it can’t wait five minutes?’ Her hands were on her hips, her feet apart, her chin jutted. She barked: ‘Well, what?’

He scratched his leg, then let his teeth run across his lower lip, looked at the ceiling, then said coldly, and without apology, ‘It’s time to talk about leukaemia and about the death of a longstanding friend.’

Everything gone, broken. ‘Yes, of course.’

She threw the kitchen gloves into the bowl where they sank among the spinach leaves and the potato peel. She yanked the tie loose on the apron, hitched the strap over her head and let it fall to the floor. She turned her back on the sink and the work surfaces and strode towards the door, but he made no effort to back away.

Almost, she had believed she would be among colleagues. Now she realised she was alone.

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘We’ll eat first.’

The fish-seller, Tomasso, spoke with the day manager of the pensione, Giuseppe. They had not met before, but in the sparring for mutual contact – for guarantees – it was learned that a cousin of Tomasso had been at middle school with Giuseppe’s niece. Everyone who lived at street level in the city knew that there were times when a man took a grave risk, times when he relied on trust.

He showed the piece of paper. It was a big decision for him to say what he had seen, but old enmities, long-festering slights and past wrongs encouraged him. The fish-seller was rewarded. The day manager had an address on a card filled in by a young Englishman, a point of contact. He had done his bit, played his part, and was assured of virtual anonymity. Tomasso believed he had done right, which was important to him.

Giuseppe did not pay the pizzo. The night manager did. Sometimes it was Giovanni Borelli who came for the small envelope, and sometimes it was the younger son, the little bastard, and once it had been Gabriella Borelli, who had been rude, boorish. First it had been the daughter. Immacolata Borelli had arrived with a pocket calculator and demanded to see the books. She had sat with the owner for an hour in the office at the back. Two men – thugs – had been with her and had loafed in the reception lobby. They had known, the night manager, the day manager and the owner, of a shift in authority in that district and that the Borelli clan was now supreme. There had been photographs in the Cronaca of bodies lying in the streets. The books had been shown to the daughter, and the owner had not considered refusing to pay and informing the police. Immacolata, with her calculator, had decided how much should be paid each month. The day manager was from Genoa, and worked in Naples because his wife demanded to be near her widowed mother. Giuseppe hated the corruption of the city.

He found a number in England from the address given, rang it and steeled himself for what he had to say.

There was the sound of a trapdoor slamming above him, then a bolt’s scrape. The impact pushed air across his hands, but not through the hood covering his head. He was on concrete. Now that the trapdoor was shut, and the air from above was gone, Eddie sensed dampness around him. For a while he lay still. He tried to learn. There were sounds, at first clear, and he thought feet moved immediately beside the trapdoor, then heard low voices, but the footfall and the words were soon muffled, then gone. He was uncertain as to whether he had heard an engine start – the van’s or a smaller, noisier one, like a scooter’s. Silence fell.

The quiet frightened him. It was more intimidating, he thought, to have a curtain without noise draped around him than it had been at the moment of his capture – violence, speed, pain, scrambled, tumbling images and thoughts. The intimidation of the silence was intensified by the hood, the gag, the cuffs, but the rope at his ankles had been untied. He could, after a fashion, relate to his kidnap: nothing like it had happened to him before, obvious, but it did in movies and books. Books didn’t do the darkness and films didn’t do the silence. He could move on his backside, could wriggle forwards, backwards and sideways.

He started to explore.

The concrete floor was not wet but moist. He had been dragged out of the van and had slipped. His head had careered into the bottom of the side hatch and the impact had dazed him, but the hold on him had not slackened. He had heard a door unlocked ahead and had been propelled through it, then down some steps. On the steps he had stumbled again and fallen forwards unable to use his arms to protect his face. The hands gripping him had let him go, and Eddie’s shoulders had taken his weight against the wall, but his nose had bled. He had been held upright in a room, a basement or, more likely, a cellar, and the trapdoor had been lifted and his ankles freed. Hands had held him under the armpits and he had felt his feet dance in a void, like a hanged man’s. He had been lowered into the space and then, as his feet had made contact with concrete, he had been shoved violently sideways so that he collapsed and was prone. Then the trapdoor had been shut. Now he moved, with the grace of damaged reptile, across the floor.

To learn about his surroundings, Eddie had to manoeuvre himself backwards so that his fingers could touch and feel. He made calculations. He reckoned he was in a bunker dug into the earth below a cellar, and that its dimensions were six feet by eight. The sides were of breeze blocks and the mortar holding them was crudely applied. In a corner there were two sacks, heavy-duty plastic and well filled.

Something now was worse than the darkness and the silence. He imagined the hood over his head had once been a pillowcase on a child’s bed. Maybe since then it had been used as a rag to clean floors, windows or lavatory seats. The smells in it were deep in his nostrils. Bad enough not to be able to breathe through his mouth, worse when the passage into his nose was clogged with the hood’s stench. Eddie found he could tilt his back against a wall and wriggle his body downwards while his head and the hood had contact against the roughness of the mortar. The movements eased the hem of the hood upwards. He scratched his shoulders against the barbed edges of the mortar and might have drawn more blood, but the hem was lifted from the nape of his neck, then to the back of his skull and on to the crown. It was important to him that he did this. Since the street, and the slamming of the door behind him, the eye-contact with the fish-seller and the raising of his hands, Eddie had done nothing for himself, had been like a bloody vegetable. He shook his head violently. Rotated it, waggled it. The hood came off. A different air and a different smell were on his face and in his nose.

He thought it a victory. There was no light in the bunker. All he could see now, with the hood off, was a thin outline where the trapdoor sides met the ceiling it was set in, and one pinpoint where there must have been a flaw in one of the trapdoor’s planks. He stood. He couldn’t straighten to his full height – and reckoned the bunker was five feet high. It was a victory that he had shed the hood, and the guys in the house in Dalston would have rated it. A Revenue clerk, a clubland waiter, a ticket seller and a work-shy PhD student would have seen the value of success.