Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Lukas looked around him. It was a place of decay. He did not like to imagine but he felt the presence of the baying drunken crowd, a lynch mob, and saw a gallows of rough wood and used, well-stretched ropes. The sun blistered his forehead and he had to squint. There seemed no takers for the toys and the plastic furniture.

His gaze had gone beyond the church in front of him and past the broken statues. He saw the mountain, huge, grand and hazed. Cloud sat on it, a white cushion.

Castrolami said, ‘In the rest of Italy there is no love for this city. It does not concern the citizens because they have each other’s love. You know Narcissus? Of course you do. He could be the patron saint of Naples. The society is fashioned by the mountain. The mountain dominates. Tomorrow it may blow, or next week, or next year. The mountain creates fatalism. If it blows it will be fast and there will be no escape – perhaps half a million people will die, most sitting in their cars and hooting in a traffic jam as the ash comes down. There is resignation and acceptance of death. They used to be in this square to watch the death dance at the hangings. Today they gather, crowded close and pressing forward, to see the spasms of a man bleeding on the pavement after being shot. I hate this city, my home, and I hate its absence of morality, its acceptance of corruption, its compromising of honesty. They are total in the city. I have to tell you, Lukas, that Immacolata Borelli swears she will testify. She will not back down.’

‘Then find him – find him quick, before the bits are sent to you,’ Lukas said.

They turned their backs on the piazza and the mountain.

He had already bought the shirt, inexpensive and manufactured in China, wrapped in cellophane, when he met his handler. It was one of Davide’s routines that he bought a cheap shirt when he took the bus down the hill to the old town. Then he had something to bring back to the Sail and talk about if anyone wanted to know why he went so far.

That day he didn’t know the name of his handler. There were men and women, and some he thought were senior, and others little more than clerks. Neither did he know from what building in the city they worked. He had, that day, requested an extraordinary meeting and broken the schedule.

A man in a hood, handcuffed, had been hustled along a walkway. There was a view, fleeting, of the capo of the clan that had control of the Sail and half of the rest of Scampia, who, with his family, was a billionaire in euros and had been a fugitive for twelve years. There had now been four sightings of a man who was a stranger on that floor, not seen before, escorted. An old man, unable to disguise arthritis or rheumatism, had been brought past the agent’s apartment window. He told it all. He was not expected to interpret or analyse. He said that the activity was of greater intensity than he could remember and he thought the presence of the outsiders, and the hooded man, of sufficient interest to be reported.

He passed to the handler two small cassettes. He was given two replacement spools.

He received no encouragement, no praise. Neither was he criticised for requesting the extra rendezvous.

He left the handler at the table, also routine. He knew that when he had gone, the handler would leave. Using his pass, which showed him as disabled, he took a bus to the railway station, then another back up the long hill. It would drop him – with the rest of the flotsam and the addicts who came each day to buy – in Scampia near his block.

He had seen the shape of the hips, known it was a young man, – but his handler had shown no humanity, was unconcerned. Perhaps he had cared more for the cake on his plate.

Umberto, the lawyer, used his open hands to demonstrate helplessness. ‘I don’t seek to be an intermediary. What am I to do? A note is left at my office, and an answer demanded. I do my best, and attempt to save the life of an unfortunate.’

The prosecutor had the note in front of him. They were in the same room as they had met in before and, again, no dignity was offered to the clan’s advocate. He considered his answer. He had learned much that morning. Castrolami had come to him and brought news that Immacolata Borelli was back with her minders, that Operation Partenope proceeded and her support was guaranteed. Excellent news. Less excellent – in fact, dismal: a further communication via the lumaca, the lawyer he regarded as a slug crawling in slime, and an ultimatum that had hardened. Time was running fast, fine sand between fingers.

With Castrolami there had been a short, slight man, who looked unfed and carried no spare weight, whose clothes were clean but unironed, and who had pepper-speckled hair that was cut short – as if by using scissors harshly the need for brushing was removed. He wore a short-sleeved checked sports shirt – not the collar and tie that the prosecutor and Castrolami habitually put on. The man had on jeans, not suit trousers, trainers, not polished leather shoes. His accent was a little American, had something of French, intimations of English, the language he used. The expression on his face was of humility. The prosecutor would likely have dismissed him as an indulgence that wasted precious time but for two factors: Mario Castrolami had brought him and would not have done so lightly, and the man had eyes that pierced, in which a light burned and demanded attention. He used only one name: Lukas.

The prosecutor, formulating his answer, recalled what he had been told by the soft voice with many accents. The man, Lukas, had said they were now in the ‘stand-off’ time, that they needed to get to the next stage, the ‘negotiation phase’, and there followed only ‘termination’. Right now – with a tenuous line of communication open – they should be stalling, playing the game towards deadline extension. He should not be negative, should not refuse, but should delay while always reassuring that a solution of mutual benefit could be found… And when nothing is negotiable? The man, Lukas, had said with simplicity and candour: ‘You swallow the truth and lie.’ It stuck, like a mullet’s bone, in the prosecutor’s throat. He had been told how he should begin the dialogue and wanted, almost, to throw up.

He smiled sickly. ‘What you must remember all the time, Umberto, is that I want to help.’

Nothing was negotiable. Immacolata Borelli would testify. She would denounce her mother and brothers. Her evidence would send her blood relatives to harsh gaols for the greater part of their lives. There was no slack, no elasticity in the rope he now played out. He had, in his desk drawer, a photograph of the boy. A decent photograph, one that had been used for a passport. It was a photograph of an ordinary boy, and nothing was negotiable. The boy’s freedom could not be bought. It would be duplicity that saved the boy, not honesty – which did not sit easily with the prosecutor. He had talked of it that morning with his wife, who had remarked, predictably, ‘His parents, how awful for them…’ The parents, of course, were another burden for shouldering. Often, when faced with the gravest problems, he would talk to his wife and listen to her, then decide on the course to be followed. He would go to his office in the palace tower and listen to none of his closest aides. His wife had said, ‘But you cannot buy, dear one, the life of the boy.’ He valued what she told him, and could be strengthened by her opinion. What would change when he was gone, retired? What would be different on the streets of Naples when Castrolami was gone, and all the men and women who worked in that trusted loop round him? Would anything have altered? Was a great victory possible before the day that he, his wife and child turned their back on the place? He smiled again, looked across the table at the lawyer and felt the purity of hatred. ‘I need you to know, Umberto, that I want to help resolve this matter in any way I can. My help is on the table.’