Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

An investigator from a private commercial security firm was flying tonight to Rome on behalf of the family, and would wish to see, at the start of the working day, Mario Castrolami.

‘Tell him and whoever volunteered me to get lost. No possibility of me involving myself.’

The parents of the boy, Castrolami was told, had reported that their son had gone to Naples to find his girlfriend.

‘I feel like my knees are weak, that I could throw up, because I know what you’ll tell me. Let me have it. What’s her name?’

He heard it.

‘Mother of Jesu…’ Castrolami told the assistant where he would be in the morning, at the start of the working day, and rang off. He murmured, to himself, ‘What have I done to deserve that?’

He went back into the living room. He could mask reactions. It might have been his wife who had called with news of a new dress purchased in faraway Milan, or the administration department at the piazza Dante barracks with confirmation of his annual leave dates near to the Christmas holiday. He smiled thinly, switched the tape-recorder back on and prompted Immacolata Borelli on her father’s involvement with City Hall. She started again, as if a tap had been turned on.

Why had he not believed she would lie to him? Why had she lied? He felt no sympathy for the boy, for her, and he let her talk without interruption about City Hall, then give the names of national politicians, the location of meetings, the dates. In the morning he would learn and then he would confront her. He took it badly that she had lied to him about a boy.

He was kicked in the face. That was first, then kicks to the chest and the small of his back. Eddie tried to curl himself into the foetal position for protection, and succeeded well enough for more kicks to find his upper arms and wrists where the handcuffs were, but not to reach the organs that would hurt more. His head was lifted, then punches were thrown at him. He realised the crime.

Feet had approached, the trapdoor had been lifted. Light had cascaded into the bunker but had not reached right into the corner recess next to the filled sacks. He had seen the man clearly, the same face as had been on the street, that of the man who had taken him. The man would have realised the hood was off and that he was stared at. Eddie hadn’t really absorbed the face on the street, but now he’d had a good clean sight of him. It was when he was punched that he wet himself – all those bloody hours of lying on his side or sitting, clamping his muscles overtime and calling for will-power, wasted effort. When the punch went in he could hold back no longer. Could have cried then. He felt the heat of the urine and its stream on his leg, then the clamminess of his trousers. It was degradation, learned hard.

More blood in his mouth, swallowing it, unable to cough properly because of the sagging tape, and choking.

He felt a new emotion. Eddie Deacon, ‘steady Eddie’, easygoing and friend to almost everybody, little riled him and not much exhilarated him: he hated. He had, now, a true sense of loathing. Novel. He took in all the features of the face. Didn’t think in terms of a police station line-up, or of having a crowbar in his hand, but reckoned he needed to get that face into his mind, acid-etch it there. He’d coughed and taken that blood down, and the heat was gone from the urine on his thighs. He could have just felt miserable and sorry for himself.

The hood was put on. He was back inside the small world, hemmed in by the material and the cuffs, the sodden trousers and his ankles were again roped and he was kicked some more. The kick went into the stomach. The force made him piss more. He didn’t cry out.

No moan, no cry, no scream.

He wondered if the memory of faces, and the hope of a judicial process had kept those people alive in the camps – they’d done that at school, German extermination camps, and in Berlin he’d seen the plaque that marked where the railway station was from which the Jews were shipped, and he’d been on Prinz Albrechtstrasse where they had excavated the holding cells used by the Gestapo. He wouldn’t forget that face.

Or the voice.

‘I speak it, a little, English. You fuck the whore, Immacolata. You come here to find Immacolata. Immacolata is with police. Immacolata is infame. Immacolata betrays her family. If she likes again to fuck with you, she will leave the police. To encourage her to leave the police, we send perhaps an ear, orecchio, perhaps a finger, dito, perhaps a hand, mano, perhaps we must send the pene – and she will recognise it as from you. Did you not know who was Immacolata, who was her family? Did you not know what she did? She will leave the police or we send the ear, the finger, the hand, the pene, then all of you but not breathing. I think I speak English very good. She will save you or she will kill you. It is her choice. Not another person will save you.’

He heard the man grunt as he levered his way up and out through the trapdoor, then it was closed. He heard the footsteps retreat. Bloody hell. What to think about? Sort of put pissing his pants in the background. He sensed all of them – his ear tingled, his finger scratched his palm and his penis was still wet, but shrunken.

He hated the man. He hoped the hate would give him strength.

Lukas walked out of the terminus where the airport bus had dumped him. The warm night air hit him after the cool of the vehicle, and he felt then the little lift in his step, the stretch of his stride, and reckoned the mission launched – always did feel good then. Afterwards was bad, when he had the name and face of a target, a threat level to assess. Then the hard times came. As yet, walking briskly, he was not burdened by the responsibility of a human life in his hand, but when he thought like that, Lukas either stubbed a toe on the kerb, spat, or kicked his ankle bone. He crossed a couple of dark streets, wove like a native through the traffic, was in the immigrant quarter – north African, west African, east African – predictable alongside a railway hub. He passed a telephone bar, where calls could be made to Mogadishu, Lagos or Algiers, and a cafe where guys sipped soft drinks and had at their feet the mountains of unsold handbags they’d try with again the next day. A trolley bus went up the street, rolled and rattled. There was a narrow door into the pensione. He was told by the guy behind the desk that a single room was booked for him, the bill open-dated and prepaid. He didn’t bother with the lift and climbed two flights of stairs.

The room was fine: a television he didn’t switch on, a mini-bar he didn’t open, an air-conditioner going like a tank’s engine and the noise of the street coming through a double-glazed window. It was the way Lukas liked it, the sort of place where he was comfortable. Why was he there? It confirmed he was still capable, not washed up, not yesterday’s creature, that he wouldn’t hesitate to accept an invitation to travel. It was why he was there, and it went unshared.

He hooked power into his laptop, wired into his mobile, and information cascaded through to him. He started out on the first steps of learning about Edmund ‘Eddie’ Deacon, and about a girl, and with each page passing on the screen, so the deadweight, the responsibility, settled heavier. Nothing ever changed. She looked a pretty girl, and he looked an ordinary boy – nothing was different from every other time – but the scorpion sting was at the end. Last page up was the sitrep profile on Immacolata Borelli – who she was, what she did, where she was. A Camorra-clan girl, a money-washer, now a traitor to her own, was what the kid had gone looking to find.

In his career, Lukas thought, there had been worse situations, but not many. He didn’t know when he’d next get any rest, so he killed the laptop, stripped, and pretty soon was asleep.