Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

It had.

A photograph and a demand changed the game. It increased the pressure on Castrolami and his people to keep the girl in line, and on Lukas to get the boy out. It increased the pressure on the girl he had seen running, and on the people who held the boy. Heavy pressure now – all different.

He did not have a map in his pocket. He was in an old city, on streets where shoes, sandals and boots had strolled, walked and trekked for two millennia. He did not know, could not have said, whether he was close or far distant from where Eddie Deacon was held, but Lukas seemed to flare his nostrils. He gazed at faces, at windows and at shadows. He was a fighter. It was his preparation once a tipping point had been reached.

He went to work, walked faster.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator

Three men brought food. Two filled the doorway, and the third came in. There was light behind them, above their heads and shoulders, and it flooded inside. He was still sitting, hadn’t moved, cramped and stiff, but he pushed himself up. The man who came in was the guy who had snatched him off the street; the eyes were clear, cold and blue-grey. The fingers were long, delicate, almost a musician’s. The lips were thin, without the life that blood brought, perhaps cruel. Eddie barely looked at the face, only the eyes and lips, then the fingers.

In the fingers there was a lightweight plastic plate, with slices of sausage and a portion of cheese. There was a plastic water bottle on its side. The plate was laid on the floor, but beyond Eddie’s reach. A trainer toe edged it across the floor. The movement shook it and a piece of bread fell off on to the worn, grimy linoleum. It could not have been washed in months, maybe years – there was a tackiness to it that could have come from dried urine or spilled food. Eddie looked into the eyes: had it been an accident or done purposely? Nothing showed.

It was no matter to the guy that the bread had gone on the floor. The lips didn’t move and no expression crossed his face. Eddie took the opportunity. He’d heard once that it was called ‘peripheral vision’, and he tried to keep his head static but to use his eyes to rake across the space. About eight feet square. About seven feet high. A window at the top of one wall, but covered with heavy-duty hardboard – he could see the pattern of the nails fastening it. There was a metal bucket. There was a ring attached to the wall to which the chain was fastened. There was graffiti on the walls, which had once been whitewashed, but he couldn’t read what had been written. The door had steel sheeting on the inside. All those things he absorbed and stored, and his head didn’t move. Why did he absorb, store?

It was his refrain. No self-pity, but acceptance of reality. No one was coming for him. His life was in his own hands, that sort of crap… Heavy, heavy stuff. He saw ants on the floor, little beggars scurrying. The piece of bread off the plate was in their line of march.

A voice: ‘You are OK?’

Eddie gagged. Why did the bastard care? He didn’t know how he should reply to the hesitant question in accented English.

‘Well, there’s a fucking chain on my-’

He was kicked. The trainer swung over the plate and the toecap caught him a little above his right knee, hard. When the foot swung back, the heel clipped the plastic plate, and all the bread was on the floor, with the cheese and the sausage. The water bottle rolled away. He wasn’t kicked again but the door was shut, locked and bolted, then nothing.

He would initiate a short debate. Better to say, in answer to the question ‘You are OK?’, that he was fine, grateful for the kindness and room service? Better to say that he was not OK because he had a ‘fucking chain’ on his ankle? Better to be passive, or better to earn a kicking? No decision taken. No consensus of opinion. Better to crawl to the bastard, or better to fight? Didn’t know. How could he? They hadn’t done survival training at the sixth-form college in Wiltshire, or at the university. At the language school there were no extra-curricular classes in it. The kick had hit the bone above the knee, and the bruising hurt, but he felt better for bawling out the bastard.

He wondered how far the ants had reached. Wondered if they had found his food on the floor. He squatted down, gave the chain a pull but merely jarred his wrists, then reached out, blind, to collect the bread, the sausage and the cheese. He had thought, when he had been able to see the food, that there might have been blue mould on the bread crust. Better when there was no light, and when he couldn’t see the ant column.

Eddie ate his food. He didn’t taste mould but had grit from the linoleum in his mouth, and didn’t know if he had swallowed a platoon of ants. He ate part of the food left for him, then went to work.

He stood up. Stretching, leaving his weight on the manacled foot, he could touch the wall where the window was set. It would be his first target. He tried to get his fingernails into the space between the wall at the edge of the hardboard, but could not. He tried until the nail of his right forefinger cracked far down. The pain was sharp and he winced, then sagged back – maybe half a minute, no more. Stood again, stretched again – and again could get no leverage on the window. He realised more. His head was against the hardboard, his ear to it, but he couldn’t hear anything: no music, no television, no kids, no laughter or shouting. What he did not hear told Eddie that there was soundproofing beyond the hardboard, which meant additional layers, and he couldn’t shift the first layer, and he couldn’t reach the door, and he couldn’t shift the ring that held the chain – and he couldn’t stop the pain in his finger from the broken nail. He’d once read something an academic had said on courage: ‘The important thing when you’re going to do something brave is to have someone on hand to witness it.’ And he’d read something an American had said on heroes: ‘We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the kerb and clap as they go by.’ Might have been both, might have been one – didn’t know which – but he laughed. Good to laugh, bloody good. Not a big laugh, a belly laugh, a gut-shaker, but a pleasant enough chuckle.

New experiences walked with Eddie Deacon. On his hands and knees, on linoleum and in the crack where the edge met the base of the wall, he searched, wondering whether he was close to the ants’ camp from which they came out to forage on his bread, cheese and sausage. While he searched he didn’t think of the knife, which blade they would use. His hands pushed and probed. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he searched.

*

The game-show on television was new – one of the Milan-based independent channels – and the girls in the show went topless. It was the third week that Davide had watched it. He would have said, if asked for a true response, that he believed the girls on display were hopelessly anorexic… He didn’t have that level of conversation in the Sail.

Ostensibly, in his chair in front of the television, it appeared to any man on the walkway peering through the cleaned, polished window, that Davide – the idiot, harmless – gazed longingly at the slack breasts that bounced on gaunt, lined ribcages. But the agent had the mirror wedged between his thigh and the side of the chair. He had seen much movement that day, more than was usual, and personalities.

He was an agent, a watcher, and had been sent on a crash course to gain the skills, was knowledgeable on the workings of electricity. Nobody, of course, who lived in the great Sail paid the state company for electricity. Nobody ever had to face final demands delivered by postal officials. Nobody was ever cut off for non-payment. Davide, as he was known, was not required to run cables from the main supply into the apartments on level three, but he was useful when a fusebox blew and when new plugs were needed. Then he was sent for. That was good. The poor, the derelicts and the addicts did not have the electrical appliances that blew out fuses. Men high in the chain of command did. That was good for his handlers.