Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

He stopped at several more shops, small craftsmen’s businesses and showed himself. He thought it the best of fortune that a fool had come from England and had talked the rubbish of love for the whore. By the time he reached his main door, beside the fish-seller’s stall, he would not be able to hide the limp. The whore was the key; the fool was critical. He would go first to the home of a dear and long-standing friend and there he would strip and shower. The fine suit and the shirt would be bagged, and the change of clothes brought for him there by Anna would be neatly laid out. His friend would burn the clothes that carried the residue of the pistol’s firing, his body would be clean of such traces, and then he would go home – after visiting a cafe where many would swear he had spent two hours… if his authority held up. As he walked, Carmine Borelli shook his head. It was so hard to believe that Immacolata was the whore.

She wanted to dance. Orecchia refused and Rossi declined more politely but as firmly. She did not ask Castrolami.

She had had the music up, high volume. Castrolami had pushed his chair back from the table, gone to the radio, turned the volume down and talked of unwelcome complaints from the floor below. They had said she cooked well, that it was a fine meal, and she had thought the praise insincere. She did not dance in Naples, had not danced in London. She was not trained to dance. If she could dance with Orecchia or Rossi, she thought she might dominate whichever man held her.

They had eaten what she had put in front of them, but not had second helpings. It was not disguised: she believed they would have preferred to hit the freezer and do defrosts in the microwave.

She stood up, went round the table, worked her hips and let her hands drop first on Orecchia’s shoulders, then on Rossi’s. Neither reacted. When she was opposite Castrolami, he looked at her. She stared at him and undid an upper button on her blouse. He looked away.

She fell back on temper.

She didn’t wait for them to clear the table of glasses and the cheese plate, she scooped up what she could carry, and made as great a noise as possible by dropping them into the bowl in the sink, on top of the pans she had used for the meat and the pasta, the knives, forks and spoons. She expected them to come running. Their voices were low in the dining room. Immacolata went back for the wine bottle and her glass, then stalked again to the kitchen. There was enough in the bottle to fill her glass: the men had only drunk water. She ran a tap noisily, put the soap in. Everything could, of course, have gone in the dishwasher, but then there would have been no noise, no possibility of reaction. She had noise, not the reaction. She sang, made more noise.

Immacolata washed and stacked.

Songs from Naples – where else could they be from? She only knew songs from that city. It was her life. She heard him wheeze and turned.

‘Tell me how it was for her in the last twenty-four hours of her life…’

‘I want to know about the last hours of Marianna Rossetti’s life.’

He stood in the kitchen doorway. He was not, then, proud of himself. Seldom, if ever, was. It was a job. He couldn’t bring himself to show sympathy or humanity. Had he done so, the emotions would have been fraudulent. The course he took was necessary for the job. He gave nothing of himself to Immacolata Borelli.

She reacted. Was a little drunk. It had not been a strong wine, but she’d put down most of a bottle. She stared hard at him and her lips moved, but no words came.

Castrolami said, ‘I want to know about the last hours of Marianna Rossetti’s life. If you’ve forgotten what you were told I can remind you. Would that be a good idea? Should your memory have failed you, I have a note of what was said to you in the cemetery in Nola. I ask again. Tell me how Marianna Rossetti died, what the leukaemia had done to her, about the contamination. Does your memory need prompting?’

The reaction was not aggression but as if a deep wound had opened, the rawness exposed. There was, he thought, an inner struggle.

‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes,’ Castrolami said. He squeezed it out of her, as if from a tube that needed folding over and pressurising. He heard how the father had spat beside her feet, how her offer of the flowers had been rejected, and she was called a whore. He heard how the mother of her closest friend had used her fingers to rip her blouse and underwear, had kicked her, and she had fallen, crushing the flowers.

‘Don’t gild it. I’m not interested in you, how you felt, what they did to you. I’m interested, Signorina, in the last hours of your friend.’ He said it harshly, and had no regret.

‘Her last days were marked by exhaustion, very tired, very lethargic, no energy…’

He thought she spoke like a machine, and no emotion showed.

‘Then bruises appeared all over her body, but she had not hit herself or been hit. The bruises were there. She was very pale. It was high summer in Nola – hot sunshine – and she was so white, anaemic. She was taken to the doctor. He knew immediately. As soon as he had peered behind her eyes, used that little torch, he made the call to the hospital.’

‘You miss nothing, and you spare yourself nothing. Continue.’

He tested her, her toughness and resolve. He had to strain to hear her, but he didn’t lean forward: he stayed propped against the door jamb. ‘The doctor thought it too urgent for Marianna and her mother to wait for an ambulance. Her mother drove her, and they called her father from work.’

He was told of the fast collapse of the patient, the pain in the skull, the uncontrolled internal bleeding, the neurosurgeon arriving too late, the failed resuscitation.

‘How did she contract the disease that took her life, that left her in her last hours without dignity and peace? How?’

‘Being in the fields, bathing in streams, having gone close to where toxic waste was dumped.’

‘Who dumped the poison?’

He was told that the father of Marianna Rossetti had said that the clan at Nola had, for more than twenty years, paid for the toxic waste to be left in the fields, the orchards and the riverbeds around the town.

‘The question I asked was “Who dumped the poison?” You have not yet answered it.’

He was told that the transportation of the waste from the north was sub-contracted to the Borelli clan in Naples who had an empire of lorries and trucks. Her father had arranged the transportation. Her brother and her mother had banked the money paid for it.

‘The food on your plate, Signorina, was the blood money for the poisoning of your friend. That isn’t a question. It’s a statement.’

She nodded. All the time she had spoken, and he had listened, she had washed plates, knives, forks and glasses. He hadn’t noticed. It was as if they were tied together, bound by what he said and what she said, and all else was shut out.

‘The clothes on your back.’

Again, she nodded, then tipped out the water from the bowl, but did not face him.

‘The classes where you have learned book-keeping, the basics of accountancy, so that you can more successfully launder the cash from poisoning others.’

She peeled off the rubber gloves, threw them into the bowl, then nodded – accepted what he had said.

‘You should know, Signorina, that the Camorra has a profit of three billion euro each year from this trade. That is a vast amount of food, clothes and classes. Cancer rates are up in some categories – liver, colo-rectal, leukaemia, lymphoma – to levels three times that of the rest of Italy. It is the Triangle of Death, Signorina Immacolata. Do you accept responsibility?’

She was staring out of the window. From the little movements of her shoulders, Castrolami thought she might weep. ‘I do.’