Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

The bolt was drawn back. The torchbeam flared into the bunker and caught the hood. Pimples of light pierced the material. Could he, at that moment in time, rip off the hood, stand, grab a leg or a foot, drag the weight down, do damage with the handcuffs on? Eddie hesitated. Could he take the decision, allow the man to come down into the pit, rip off the hood, stand up? He heard the impact of the plastic bag. The light went off. The trapdoor closed and the bolt was pushed through.

There was food in the bag – more bread and cheese, one apple and water in a bottle. His bucket was not emptied. He ate a piece of the bread and a nugget of cheese, rinsed some of the dryness out of his mouth, then went back to scraping the chain on the rough ridge of the concrete. The heat in the bunker built on him and sweat drenched him.

Castrolami said that the parkland was the Villa Borghese gardens, that it dated back four hundred years, that it covered eighty hectares. Lukas said he didn’t care to know the history of the park and its significance: his feet hurt from walking and his throat was parched. Castrolami looked at his watch, might have been the tenth or twelfth time, and must have reckoned then that a schedule was on course. He supposed that the walk to the park was of similar importance to his own visit to the carabinieri barracks. He showed no impatience. Lukas knew people – at the Bagram base outside Kabul and at Anaconda camp inside the Balad air base – who would have demanded dedicated space, computers wired in, maps on walls, secure communications, iced water, iced coffee, iced tea, and maybe their name on a card at the front of the desk. Lukas could be patient because he sensed Castrolami – a hulk, heavy and clumsy – to be a man of substance, a guy with whom business could be done. He thought it would be rude – and tactical shit – to chivvy for detail. He didn’t require action to enhance his role. He saw two boys, rucksacks off their backs, half stripped and washing in a pool into which water fell from three levels. To him, the sculpture of rampant horses that supported the fountain was art. Set among huge mature pines, which gave wide shade, the massive statue of a man in fancy-dress uniform sat astride a warhorse, and Castrolami murmured that it was King Umberto I. There were mock Roman pillars, designed as ruins, and in an amphitheatre the workmen were setting up scaffolding for a concert’s sound systems. He saw men with dogs, women with buggies, and tourists who digested their lunch with a stroll, not a siesta. He saw everything, and let his eyes follow where Castrolami’s gaze went.

He saw her.

Had to be her.

There was a wide avenue lined with the high pines, sparse grass in the shadows. She led. A young man, good stride and arm movement, relaxed, was a metre behind her but close to her shoulder. Her T-shirt was damp-streaked and the shorts were baggy, too large – Lukas reckoned she’d begged or borrowed them from the young man. She ran well, but it was harder for her than him, and he thought she was not as conditioned as he was. Twenty metres behind them an older man rode a bicycle, the awkward sort with high handlebars that were hired out in parks, wherever. She didn’t look up, to left or right. He saw her face clearly, full and in profile. Gazed at the thrust of her chin and chest. He rated her as the type of girl who would collapse on her knees in serious exhaustion before she allowed the young man to go past her. Dust spurted from under their sneakers. He sensed the privilege he was given. He could make judgements from the sight of her, a few seconds of watching her. ‘Tough, hard and committed. Not a quitter,’ he said.

Castrolami was grim-faced. ‘We would have turned her out on to the street if we had thought she was.’

Lukas shook his head, ‘Why… why? Tell me, why does a decent nonentity boy get his arms and legs around that one – why?’

‘She is the daughter of her father. All her life she has what she wants. When she is finished with it, no longer wants it, it is discarded. There is something new she wants, and she takes it. It is the culture of the criminal clan.’

Lukas watched her draw away from him, and her escort. The bicycle squealed, needing oil. He almost enjoyed the wiggle of her butt, noted the drive in her arms and that she kept her head up and still.

‘A pity for the boy, our Eddie, that she once wanted him.’ Lukas saw her pass the kids washing in the fountain. She didn’t deign to glance at them, and he lost her.

She had made her own world and stayed inside it. She didn’t need panted conversation with Alessandro Rossi, wouldn’t stop, slump and have Giacomo Orecchia give her water. Sweat soaked her.

It was a city of betrayal, hers. Had been throughout the centuries of its history, and she thought herself a mere footnote. Betrayal was the ultimate weapon of the clans. It meant nothing, went against no culture. She took a text, an episode of the city’s history, better to remember betrayal.

She stretched her stride and couldn’t hear panting in Alessandro Rossi, but she could in Giacomo Orecchia and his wheeze went with the shriller wail of his bicycle wheels. She had learned the text as a child at school. In the year of 1486, a day in August, when Naples was further forward in architectural standards, sophistication and wealth than anywhere else in Europe, King Ferrante I of Aragon, the ruler, invited the aristocracy, who, he believed, were plotting his overthrow, to the Castel Nuovo on the shore to witness the marriage of his granddaughter to the heir of the Coppola family. They came. After the marriage service they attended a banquet in the great hall. Near the end of the feast, the king’s lord chamberlain read out the names on the arrest warrants: all of the nobility’s names were heard. The Royal Guard came in and took them into custody. That day they were tried and – before sunset – they met the king’s executioner in the yard below the castle’s ramparts. They would have betrayed the king, so the king betrayed them. It was a good story, and one from the history of her city.

She ran well.

Immacolata could not have held that pace, and kept the length of her stride, without the escort behind her. She thought herself liberated. Nothing nagged in her mind. London was behind her, and the boy, and there was a new intoxication – the betrayal. She didn’t concern herself with Eddie Deacon. She hadn’t asked him to travel, hadn’t summoned him. She thought her hair flew behind her, and still there was the wail of the bicycle wheels, and she thought that, for the first time, Rossi struggled. Those betrayed were fools to have trusted; those who betrayed were tacticians and without guilt.

She ran until they called the halt.

‘In your experience, how does it play?’ Castrolami asked him.

‘They will have moved him first to a holding location, then will shift him to something more permanent. That completed, they make the contact. They have something they consider of value and wish to trade. There has to be dialogue. I’m grateful for the opportunity to see her.’

‘You want to walk some more?’

‘To my room, to pack, then to the train station. They have to make the contact.’

The prosecutor took a call. He knew the lawyer well. For all of the prosecutor’s years in the city – in the offices of the Castel Capuana, now deserted and derelict, and in the new tower to which the Palace of Justice had moved – this man had handled the legal affairs of the Borelli family. He had contempt for him. He believed him bereft of integrity. He thought him a symbol of the corruption alive in the city. He had first met the lawyer when he had tried to prepare a case against Carmine Borelli, himself a young official, his target a man of substance, and had failed. He had met him again after the arrest of Pasquale Borelli, had negotiated a way through the court-imposed minefields and now had that clan leader locked away in Novara. He would doubtless meet the lawyer frequently now, with the arrest of Gabriella Borelli, Giovanni Borelli and Silvio Borelli, and after the extradition of Vincenzo Borelli. He heard honeyed words.