Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Shortlived, the sense of that victory.

Eddie wanted to pee. He had crawled backwards around the bunker’s walls and found the filled sacks, but no bucket. With his wrists held in the small of his back, he couldn’t drop his zip. He hadn’t wet his trousers since he was five, on a school outing. Also gone, with the sense of victory, was the belief that the guys in Dalston would have the faintest comprehension of being in darkness and feeling the urge to wet their trousers. He slumped.

He could hear nothing – no vehicles, no music, no voices and no sirens. It was as if he had gone off the face of the earth. Fight, be passive or think. Time for Eddie Deacon to face the alternatives and make a choice. Time to wonder why it had happened.

He sat against the sacks, with only the bloody darkness and the bloody silence for company. The bladder pressure grew, and he knew that the fear would return.

It was a gesture of his new-found defiance. Carmine Borelli left his stick propped in the corner inside the doorway. He had swallowed three Nurofen tablets – the strong ones – washing them down with cold water. He knew that Anna would watch him from a high window and he would be tongue-whipped if he failed.

Between the clans that were labelled ‘Camorra’, there was no overall authority, no consensus of leadership. On the island of Sicily, Cosa Nostra groups acknowledged the disciplines imposed by a cupola, a cabinet of principals; there was a predictability and a certainty about the future. Not so in Naples. A clan was dead when power was lost… Now the Borelli clan teetered on the brink of oblivion.

The drugs compensated for his leaving behind his stick. The pain from his rheumatism was controlled. In old age, Carmine watched much daytime television and flipped between the satellite channels – so many dealt with the big animals of the African plains, elephant and lion and buffalo. When their teeth failed and they could no longer forage, or when their muscles and strength failed, or when their eyesight was gone and their keen hearing, the great beasts were pushed aside by the young. Many afternoons he had sat in his chair and watched as an old elephant, lion or buffalo was killed or pushed aside and left to starve. As brutal as Naples. He had shaved closely, and wore a suit with a laundered shirt and a tie. His thick hair was slicked back with gel, and Anna had wiped the dust off his shoes.

He felt himself born again.

He walked down the street where a man had been taken from a bar and shot in the leg, then driven over. Salvatore was a half-pace behind him, while a dozen of the young men who wanted to be enforcers and had tried to find favour with his son, Pasquale, and daughter-in-law, Gabriella, fanned out around him. Carmine wore his suit jacket open, the jacket flapping from his walk, the butt of the pistol in his waistband there to be seen. Salvatore had a fist buried in a deep pocket that bulged, and some of the young men carried wooden staves or pickaxe handles. If he was not on the street and not exercising authority, his clan area would be lost. It would not be gone over a year or six months, but in a day. His right hip hurt in a throbbing ache. To compensate he put more weight on his left knee and experienced stabs of pain there. He kept walking, his smile broad.

Some of the older men gathered in doorways. They had been on the payroll in the early days of power when the city was devastated by bombing, the sewers were fractured, epidemics rife and money was to be made. Now they called the name he had once been given. Then, now, he was ‘Il Camionista’, the Lorry Driver, because he had had the first fleet of trucks on the road, the permit, the petrol and the goods they transported from the Americans. He had skewered his way into so much in those incredible, prosperous days. He had been told, and had believed it, that a third of all cargo landed by the Americans ended up on the stalls of the street traders in Naples, a good proportion of it in the via Forcella: food, clothing, oil. Best of all was the copper wire used for the Allies’ telephone communications – it fetched massive prices: his people cut down the wire before the first connection was made. He acquired good business from funerals. He could arrange, for a price, to summon that ‘successful cousin from Rome whose intellect and wealth enhanced a sad day’, and therefore lifted the prestige of the bereaved family. Nothing had been beyond Carmine Borelli, but it was sixty-five years ago that he had been known as Il Camionista. The younger men looked at him questioningly.

They would have thought: Pasquale Borelli already in gaol, Gabriella Borelli also in gaol, Vincenzo, Giovanni and Silvio in gaol, and the whore of a granddaughter singing to the Palace of Justice. Where was the power? Would the Misso clan take it, or the Contini clan, or would a new boy come out of the shadows? Was the old guard already dead, or moving only in the last spasms? At the cafe, from which a customer had been taken and killed, the owner brought out a small tray of bogus silver with coffee and a brandy aperitif. Carmine drank the coffee first, then the alcohol, and stifled successfully the choke that rose in his throat. Further down the street, a haberdasher who was three days late in payment of his pizzo thrust the envelope into Carmine’s hand, murmured apologies and said he had put in extra. He had been on the street for five or six minutes, and little time was left.

Had the man actually said that Carmine Borelli was an old drunk and useless, fit only to pleasure himself in a chair? Had he? Who had heard him? He had been kept for an hour, to wait and sweat, in a lock-up behind the butcher’s, would have squatted among the bones and offal waiting for disposal. Some had said they had heard him say Carmine Borelli was fit only to take his penis in his own hand. It was enough that a rumour of what the man had said was abroad. Carmine Borelli had not risen to the position of clan leader by clemency and charity. It would be done on the street.

In his time, leading the clan, he had killed, it was estimated, thirty-six men with his own hand, and had ordered the proxy killing of at least another sixty.

It was high risk.

It was about authority and respect. It would be done on the street, in public view, in daylight, so that none could say Carmine Borelli slunk in the shadows. The man was brought out. Carmine recognised him. The man knelt on the pavement. Two of the foot-soldiers produced plastic bags – for garden fertiliser – and held them close to the man’s head. He gibbered. Carmine had known the man’s father, his uncles and his mother’s family. Many said he was an idiot and certifiable. But he shot him. He had not killed for twenty years.

He shot him low in the forehead at a point equidistant between the eyes. Blood spouted but was trapped by the plastic bags. Had Carmine wanted to run, he could not have. The damaged joints in his knees and hips prevented it. Salvatore took the pistol from him and was gone.

He turned his back on the man, who should have been in an asylum and was crumpled on the pavement, and made his way back to the via Forcella. He hoped he had sent a message or he, too, would be on the pavement. He would not give up the clan, would not see it cannibalised. His hand shook from the impact of the pistol when it had fired. He was out of the street by the time he heard the sirens. They would take the corpse to the Ospedale degli Incurabili, then to the mortuary. The police and the carabinieri would come. If he, Carmine Borelli, was named by a witness as the killer, his authority was sand dribbling between his fingers. If the investigators and detectives met the familiar wall of silence, there remained a small chance he could resuscitate the clan… meaningless, if the whore didn’t break with her interrogators.