Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

He closed the door and slung the rucksack straps over his shoulders. He saw the car veer away, then lost it in traffic, but he didn’t think Castrolami had swung in his seat and waved. The sort of man Lukas was – and his judgement of Castrolami – did not take time out for relationships with professionals. A sharp punch, a quick handshake was a good par on that course. He had asked to be dropped near to the piazza Garibaldi, had not been asked why, or where he had booked a room. He recalled what he had been told, peeled off his watch and pocketed it.

The streetlights were low, the headlights blinding, and it seemed that around him the city was vibrant, alive. It flourished. Lukas couldn’t walk along a street in Baghdad or Basra, Kabul or Kandahar, Bogota or Cali. He saw backpackers in front of him, guys and girls who were half his age, would have come off a train and now trekked from the main-line station to whatever fleapit they could afford. His clothes were, of course, clean – laundered but not pressed – and he was shaven but not closely, and his short cropped hair was not brushed or combed. He lit a cigarette, dragged on it, and tobacco smoke mingled with what he breathed out. He felt good here. He pondered: Castrolami and himself, were they on opposite sides of a chequered board? A girl who was needed as a state witness was one queen, and a boy who had done ‘wrong place at wrong time’ was the other, and if the game was played to conventional rules only one could be left standing. He would have to act, if they were to claim a victory, on maverick rules. But, he had been told, it was not a city that threw up victories. He went by the cafes, the bars, the little restaurants and pizza houses, past the stalls where clothing was slung, and past tall west Africans who had laid on the paving handbags with fancy labels.

Not good for a man in Lukas’s trade to stand up and cheer if the hostage walked free, or to crumple and sag if the hostage came out zipped into a body-bag. Could do his best, nothing more. After success came another day, and after failure there was one more day to be met. He thought, though, and this hurt, that the priorities were not with the boy, and it would be a difficult road to walk… He saw the sign, lit, hardly welcoming… One more backpacker in town, older and more wizened, but unexceptional. He smiled wanly at the small group of men who stood by the step up into the pensione, and worked his way past them. None seemed to notice him.

He was greeted at the desk. He thought himself a welcome diversion from the Australian kids who had come into the lobby complaining that the toilet was blocked and wouldn’t flush. He murmured a name – the one that had been used on the reservation, which was on a passport he now offered, Canadian – then asked the guy whether he was Giuseppe. He wasn’t: Giuseppe was the day manager, worked from seven in the morning until seven in the evening. Lukas lied, said a friend had been here, had spoken well of the pensione and of Giuseppe. He was given his key.

Slowly, tired, he started up the stairs. He did not know yet which had been the floor where Eddie Deacon had taken a room. He was tired, a little hungry, and the room allocated to Lukas would, inevitably, be shit, and his situation would, inevitably, be about a thousand times better than Eddie Deacon’s. He unlocked a door, went in, kicked it shut.

He said quietly, ‘You get my best effort, kid, can’t say more – and can’t say it will be enough.’

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator

As did his wife, Carmine Borelli possessed the cunning of the elderly and the wiliness of a veteran.

He didn’t understand the technicalities of the most modern surveillance systems employed in the piazza Dante barracks or inside the Questura, but he had grasped the need for total vigilance… His jacket collar was turned up, a loose cotton scarf covered much of his lower face and he wore a cap with a peak to hide his nose and eyes from elevated cameras. He had walked more than two kilometres, done back-doubles and alleyways, before he was satisfied. Then he had been picked up in a small repair garage in which he had a commanding financial stake. An old friend had driven him.

The car in which he had travelled to the north of the city was not a Mercedes, a BMW 7 series or an Audi, not a vehicle of status. It was a humble mass-produced Fiat, churned out by the Turin factories, anonymous. He would have confessed, climbing stiffly from the passenger seat and stepping into the sunshine, to a flutter of apprehension. It was hostile territory, and he was inside it. Mobile phones would have logged each metre the Fiat had brought him deeper into the complex of towers. He saw the scooter accelerate towards him, then brake and swerve.

He was happier to have Salvatore at his back.

When Carmine Borelli had taken charge of the Forcella district of the old city, where the streets followed the old layout of foundations put down by Roman builders, the district of Scampia had been scrub, fields and smallholdings. There was now a population of some seventy thousand. It was outside the area of his experience, and a new breed of clan leader was found here. They did not frighten him, but were a cause of anxiety. He had created wealth that was exceptional by the stricken standards of the Forcella people, and Pasquale had built on it, hugely increasing it. Vincenzo – if he was ever freed – would take it further.

Salvatore had removed the helmet and tucked it under his arm. Carmine Borelli took a cue from the hitman and doffed his cap. He unwound his cotton scarf and smoothed the collar of his jacket. It was, almost, an act of submission. It was a sign that they accepted they walked now under the protection of a more powerful man’s authority.

The families, supreme in Scampia, had wealth on different strata from that of the Borellis. They were, here, among the richest in the entire Italian state.

Those families also employed violence on a scale that could almost turn Carmine Borelli’s stomach. They fought, pursued vendettas, tortured, amputated, burned alive. He came with a request. The difficulty of asking the more powerful for favours was that a high price could be exacted. Desperate times meant desperate measures were employed.

They were checked in at a pavement-level entrance. Men spoke on mobile phones, men searched him with aggressive, disrespectful hands, men took the firearm from Salvatore’s belt, men eyed them as if they were lesser creatures. Carmine Borelli could accept the reduced status, but thought it harder for Salvatore to bow the knee. He imagined, in Salvatore, that pride burgeoned. It had to. It could not be otherwise. They were led up a flight of stairs – filth had accumulated in the well – past scattered syringes. He would not have tolerated the heroin addicts’ needles left as litter in Forcella, but the drug trade and its trafficking had come after his time of ascendancy. He was brought to an iron-barred gate across the first-level walkway.

It was unlocked by more men.

They went through, heard it clang shut, then the rattle of a heavy chain. Carmine knew little of ironwork but would have been an imbecile not to have realised that the fire brigade would need sophisticated oxyacetylene cutting gear to get through it, and it would be slow work. They walked some more, then went through another gate, similar, and climbed another staircase.

Little in life could frighten Carmine Borelli – but later he would admit to Anna, if the Virgin smiled on him and he was clear of this fuck-place, that he was uncertain, unhappy, with his experience on the lower floors of the great Sail tower in Scampia. When they were on the third level, there was another pause at another barred gate, and he breathed hard, sucking air into his lungs – and cursed a lifetime’s cigarettes. His hip ached sharply. It was good that Salvatore, disarmed, was with him. He thought, by now, they must be close. More men waited here, more mobiles were used, and he heard little jabbers of code talk. He thought the numbers were a show of strength, of power. He must acknowledge it.