Gerald Seymour: The Collaborator

In the doorway, she could have recited every word that had been said to her as she had lain on the ground. Every last word. And she could remember how the aggression had cut into her, wounding her. Never in her life had anyone spoken to her with such venom, or made such an accusation, while seeming not to care for the consequences of denouncing the daughter of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli, sister of Vincenzo and Giovanni. It should have meant a death sentence. To humiliate and abuse the daughter of a clan leader was the act of a man bored with living. If her father, in his cell in the north, or her mother, who flitted between safe-houses, had been told what her friend’s parent had hissed at her, that man would have been condemned. If she had interrupted the card game to say where she had been and what had happened, within twenty-four hours blood would have run on a pavement, a body would have lain at a grotesque angle and the authority of the clan would have been preserved. She had not even told Silvio, who had looked curiously at her torn blouse but hadn’t asked.

Her brother won the hand. He always won. The game was for small stakes, two-pound coins. The heap on the table in front of Vincenzo was four or five times greater than the piles in front of the other players. London served two purposes for him. He was out of sight of the magistrates and investigators in Italy, but he was also in a position to do good deals, exploit opportunities and build the foundations of networks. He dealt in leather jackets and shoes manufactured in the small sweat-shop factories on the slopes of Vesuvio, then shipped out of the Naples docks – in secrecy after the labels of the most famed European fashion-houses had been sewn or stamped in place – to Felixstowe on Britain’s east coast, or to the Atlantic harbours of the United States. A leather coat, with a designer label, could be manufactured for twenty euros and sold in Boston, New York or Chicago for three hundred. Many opportunities existed for Vincenzo Borelli’s advancement. The downside was that a prolonged absence from the seat of power – Forcella and Sanita in the old district of Naples – diminished his status and authority. His parents had decreed that in London he should watch over his sister while she qualified in accountancy. A clan needed trustworthy finance people. He treated her as a child, showing no interest as she stood in the doorway. The music billowed around her.

The cruellest images were those of the hospital ward. When Silvio had driven her away from the cemetery, down the via Saviano, they had come to the inner area of Nola and had gone past two of the hospital’s entrances. It was dominated by a ruined castle on a hilltop. It was a modern building. Of any hospital closer to her own area, she could have said which clan had controlled the construction of it, which had supplied the concrete, and which had owned the politician whose name was on the contracts, but this one was too far from her home. She imagined the interior of the Ospedale Santa Maria della Pieta, death coming fast behind a cotton screen, a young woman’s mother screaming as her daughter slipped away, the father beating clenched fists against the wall behind the bed, the equipment’s alarm pealing because the medics couldn’t save a life, the mutterings of a stand-in priest, the weeping of patients in the adjacent beds, and the squeak of wheels as the body was taken away, the medical staff shrugging…

Now Vincenzo looked up, gave a brief smile in greeting. He held up an empty beer bottle, then pointed to the kitchen door. Immacolata dropped her holdall, went to the kitchen, took four Peronis from the fridge, opened them, carried them back into the living room and found space between the empty bottles, filled ashtrays and cigarette cartons to put them down. She was not acknowledged. She closed the door behind her.

In her room, she lay on her bed. She did not weep. She stared at the ceiling, the lightbulb and the cobweb draped off the shade and didn’t think of the boy who had made her laugh. There was music playing in the living room and traffic outside in the street, voices raised in the apartment above and a baby screaming below. They meant nothing to her and she shut them out, but she couldn’t escape from the raised bundle, the spoken savagery and cruelty of death.

The young man found his maresciallo in a bar to the right side of the piazza in front of the town’s cathedral. He was from the Udine region in the far north-east, where there were rolling hills and valleys, civilisation and cleanliness. He would have hated Nola, his first posting after training for induction into the carabinieri, had it not been for the gruff kindness of his commanding officer. He still wore the suit that had been suitable for the funeral service and the burial, but his dark glasses were high now on his hair.

He waited until he was waved to a chair, then sat and handed the maresciallo the plastic folder he had prepared. A waiter approached. He ordered Coca-Cola. The folder, with the name on it of Marianna Rossetti and that day’s date, was opened. His report covered five closely typed pages. He knew that, two days before, the maresciallo had met with the girl’s father and was aware of the circumstances and cause of the girl’s death. He himself had been ordered to the basilica and the cemetery to watch, listen – it had been explained to him that the family’s emotions ran high. Also, he knew that a researcher at the hospital had published material in the foreign-language edition of the Lancet Oncology under a title that referred to il triangolo della morte, and that in the secure archive section of the barracks there was a small mountain of files dealing with the area’s contamination. The maresciallo had read the first two pages, and he sat in silence. The waiter brought his Coca-Cola, with an espresso and a large measure of Stock brandy. He had known the maresciallo always spent time here in the evening and that he could be certain of finding him. He tried to read the other man’s face, but saw nothing. He had hoped for praise.

The question was as blunt as it was unexpected: ‘Have you drunk alcohol tonight?’

And he had believed that praise was due. The father and mother of the deceased had made no attempt to lower their voices so he had heard them crystal clear. Within minutes what they had said was written in his notebook as virtual verbatim. He had the accusation, the condemnation and the name. An older man, jaundiced and cynical, from long service with the Arma – what the carabinieri called themselves – might have hung back, lounged against a distant headstone, smoked a quiet cheroot and reflected on what a shit place Nola was. The young man had made certain he was close enough to hear every word and to see the violence shown towards the woman. He accepted that he would not be praised.

‘No. I haven’t had a drink for three-’

He was interrupted. The report was in the folder, which was pushed back across the table. The maresciallo had a mobile and was scrolling, then making a connection. The young man was shown his superior’s back as a call was made. He couldn’t hear what was said. The chair scraped as the maresciallo turned to him.

‘If you haven’t had a drink, you can drive to Naples. There’s a barracks at piazza Dante. You’re expected.’

‘Excuse me.’

‘What?’

‘My report – is it useful?’

The maresciallo swirled the coffee, drank it, then some brandy, and coughed. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps, if you want praise, you should ask the officer I’m sending you to. My old mother does jigsaw puzzles to pass her time, and tells me that discovering where one piece fits will solve the rest. There may be a thousand pieces on the tray in front of her, but slotting one piece into its home makes the rest easy. I can’t say whether or not what you have told me is that one piece. Twenty-five years ago I was at the training college in Campobasso with Mario Castrolami, who’s waiting for you at the piazza Dante. He will decide whether or not you’ve helped to solve the puzzle or made it more difficult.’