Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

He told himself that they would cut off his ears, fingers and penis. Maybe it had been his failure to react fast enough on the pavement, in the moment after the fish-seller had given the glance, but it was all an unwalked road for him.

Fighting was about films, about stories. Heroes did fighting with scumbags. He didn’t know heroes or lowlife. He had to learn how to fight. First lesson: shed the handcuffs.

Eddie found one place on the flooring where the concrete had a rough edge. Might have been where one load had gone down as liquid against the previous load that had almost set hard. The ridge was about half a centimetre high and sharp. The handcuffs were not the bar variety that the police were issued with when they came into Kingsland Road, but the old sort with a short chain linking the manacles. Eddie knelt. He planted his elbows, crouched, then had the chain against the ridge, made it taut and started to scratch, working the chain over the ridge. It hurt like fuck in his elbows but he kept on at it, and when he had rubbed smooth one short section of the ridge he edged further along to a new position. Dust came up and was in his nostrils.

Better to be beaten – face the knife – and have given it a thrash.

‘It’s about windows – the best opportunity for escape by the potential hostage – right at the start. Chaos, confusion, maximum tension for the hostage-taker. You can count it on the seconds of one hand, the sight of a window. That’s when the hostage is most likely to get clear, but an attempt to escape is when the hostage is most likely to be killed. It’s a hell of a risk and-’

Castrolami interrupted: ‘You go in there?’

Lukas saw the facade, behind high, heavy railings, of the building, the flag drifting limp, and the barricades to keep the truck bombs away from the embassy walls. There had been a time when he would have been welcomed, open arms, at any US embassy. He wondered how it was for them, living in a fortress, bringing the Baghdad Green Zone to the via Vittorio Veneto. ‘I’d go in there if I’d lost my documents, assuming I was travelling on American papers. Get it straight, I don’t belong to governments.’

They kept walking. It was hot, the sun high. Lukas thought the city not yet back from holiday and the temperature too great for the comfort of tourists. He was not told why they walked in the heat, or why Castrolami checked his watch, as if that would make the hands go faster. Castrolami said, ‘Sorry I interrupted. Don’t think I’m not interested.’

Lukas asked, blunt, ‘Are you fooling with me?’

‘No.’

They left the flag, no wind to make it proud, behind them. Lukas said, ‘After that first open window, there’s less likelihood of another. We used to advise, at those seminars the state put on and the private security companies host for big bucks, that once taken a hostage shouldn’t try to escape. Then along came Iraq. Remember the Brit? Doesn’t matter how, but he managed a runner, barefoot and in darkness. He was actually within three hundred paces of an American checkpoint when they caught him. Maybe he was already condemned but the escape confirmed it. His throat was cut. Would we now advise people to hang about and see what the sun brings up? We’re a bit humbler with advice. What we do say: to escape and fail is a death sentence. These people here, do they have qualms about killing? Is it a big deal for them?’

‘Like changing their underpants or brushing their teeth,’ Castrolami said. ‘In Naples, life doesn’t count. They would go for an espresso afterwards and talk football.’

The dust in his eyes didn’t matter because he couldn’t use them. What came up his nose was an irritant and several times he sneezed uncontrollably, then froze to listen. He heard nothing – no engines, no music, no voices. He kept on scraping the chain against the ridge of concrete. He didn’t – wouldn’t – feel the chain to see whether the effort he made was winning a degree, however small, of success. He didn’t run a thumb or a finger, the sensitive part, against it to learn whether he had made a fraction of an indentation in the link – too scared of finding there was no difference. Then it would be hopelessness, he would slump, join the line that had shuffled towards the gas chamber, that hadn’t needed whipping or the prod of bayonets to keep it moving. How long had he been scraping? An hour? Might take a day, or three days. Might take a week.

The bucket smelled worse. That was a new worry. Better to have the worry about the bucket than about the knife homing in on his ears, or his fingers, or of them pulling aside his trousers. He went on scraping the chain against the concrete, and the smell was lodged in his nose. He worked on the chain manically. A new worry: what if the scraping dulled his ears? What if the footsteps came to the trapdoor and he didn’t bloody hear them? What if they knew he was busy with escape in his mind? New worries, old worries – hardly fucking mattered which danced in him.

‘We tend to suggest that the hostage looks hard for opportunities to escape, but we can’t say where they might be. Every case is different and-’

Castrolami grunted, ‘Do you go there?’

The Union flag flew, had no more life in it than the American one. The British place was sixties modern with a water feature at the front. There was a police jeep outside and a uniformed guy lounged with his legs draped out through the open door, a submachine-gun across his thighs. In the square just beyond, a fine statue of a Bersaglieri soldier, double life size, stood high on a plinth. Lukas said, ‘Today I travel on a French passport – sort of a return for favours rendered. I work all right with UK Special Forces, and with spooks, but the diplomats tend to see me as street dirt. So, I’d go there for a glass of water if I was thirsty… I saw those troops in Iraq. I liked the feathers in the hat. You like useless information? Tough shit if you don’t. The feathers are from the capercaillie bird, and the gate behind is the Porta Pia through which they came to complete the unification of your God-forsaken country and give the Holy Father the boot.’

He was punched, a hard, short-arm blow with a clenched fist, and Lukas rode it and rated it a compliment. They went through the gate – he thought there were bits of ancient Roman brickwork in the walls. ‘We’re nearly there,’ Castrolami said.

‘Where I was… We can lay down guidelines. We know how we think guys should behave but we cannot be arrogant enough to dictate… and this boy has never been to a seminar, nor on a chief executive’s course, or probably ever read a newspaper, a magazine, anything with hostage-survival guidelines. He’ll know nothing – which might be a bonus or might be fatal. I can’t say.’

Castrolami said, straight face, without expression, ‘What a pity he cannot hear your encouraging words.’

*

Still, he had the discipline. Still, Eddie worked, and didn’t move his thumb or forefinger over the chain’s link. But with two hours gone he found the first evidence of progress. The chain seemed to lock more easily on to the ridge.

Then feet.

It would be such an opportunity – in a day, three days or a week, if the chain was broken and his legs untied: wait till the bastard came down the hole, belt him on the back of the head with the sharp edge of a manacle, knee him in the crotch and leave him stunned, be up and out, dropping the trapdoor, bolting it and running… Running where? Running anywhere. The scene played endlessly, as if it was on a loop in his mind, as he worked on the link, an image of action and response that pleased him. The image removed the fear, gave him the sense that he was not a fatted bloody calf tethered in a shed awaiting the stun-gun. But this was not the time. The opportunity did not exist. He blew hard on the floor, hoped he’d dispersed the dust he’d created, and edged himself back against a side wall. He groped to find the hood, arranged it on his head and let the rim cover his eyes. He waited, and didn’t know what would happen – didn’t know if the footsteps heralded the knife – and squeezed his thighs together so that his penis was protected, pinned back his ears and clenched his fists to hide his fingers.