Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Around the table were the head of the carabinieri criminal-intelligence section for the province of Campania, the officer who headed intelligence-gathering for the Naples police, the senior intelligence co-ordinator of the Guardia di Finanza, and a dapper, slight man who seemed to offer no name and was set apart from the rest.

Castrolami said, ‘I repeat, for the final time, that only a few hours are now available to save the life of this British boy, Eddie Deacon. I repeat that all surveillance of principals has failed to find – as best I know – a pattern of movements or intercepts that can locate him. I hope you will all examine your memories with due diligence. Whatever else you have in on-running investigations, I request your help. So, I repeat, has anyone even the smallest information on where the Borelli clan is holding this boy? Please.’

His eyes travelled round the table: to his colleague, to the police officer he had known for a dozen years of late-night drinking, bitching, complaining and laughing, to the fiscal policeman who was new in the city. They had all shaken their heads or used their hands to gesture ignorance. Last, his glance rested on the official from the secret service, who was doodling on a sheet of paper. He looked up and Castrolami lip-read his quiet answer: ‘Nothing.’ But it was not said aloud.

He stood. He had no more to offer.

They came off the autostrada, through the toll booth, and on to the slip-road. Below, far to the west, were the city and the sea, its beauty and its magnificence.

In the glove box, Orecchia had found a lightweight raincoat, flimsy, but sufficient for what he needed. If it hadn’t been there he would have used a newspaper. He covered the machine pistol with it, then switched off the flashing light behind the radiator grille.

Now Rossi caught her eye, accepted the contact. There was a query in his expression and she nodded decisively. She was prepared for the last stage of the journey, into Naples.

And memories swept her. Immacolata knew the features and signs of the road. She knew the filling station, owned by the Mauriello clan, and the garden centre that seemed to have hectares of rattan furniture on display and was owned by the Nuvoletta clan. There was the restaurant beside the dual-carriageway where her father had taken her and she had met the Lo Russo family – she had been seventeen and had taken an instant dislike to the boy whose company she was supposed to enjoy. It would have been a good alliance, and her father had laughed all the way back into the city at the scale of the failure. There was the truckyard where the long-distance lorries were kept, maintained and repaired; it was owned by the Licciardi clan, and the fleet could be hired by her father or her brother for the empty run north, under the terms of a sub-contract, and the return laden with chemical waste for the Moccia or the Alfieri clan. It was excellent commercial co-operation. They came past the great angled towers of the Scampia district, and on through Secondigliano and into the territory of the Contini clan. She saw cafes where men had been killed, and bars where men had been killed, and pavements where men had been killed, and she had come home.

Immacolata was adult. She was intelligent. She knew what happened in her home city, and the history of its streets. She knew where the envelopes of five-hundred-euro notes, tight in elastic bands, had been slipped into the smart, expensive leather briefcases of politicians, national and local; she knew where civil servants who prepared recommendations on contract choice of cement manufacturers were entertained by Romanian or Belarussian girls; she knew where the men who led the clans housed their mistresses – and where there had been a concrete-lined hole in a yard that had been the home for eight months of a clan leader’s eldest son, his heir. The police had needed reinforcements before they could remove the twenty-six-year-old and had fired gas at a screaming crowd. They had lost two patrol cars, torched, before order was restored for long enough to make the retreat. She knew where. It was her city.

She could see the Sail building, and knew that her father – in an earlier prison term – had been in an adjacent cell and had shared exercise with the clan leader’s cousin. Now it had drifted away from her view, with the other towers, and she saw the signs to Capodicino airport.

The car went fast. She saw now that Orecchia spoke – outside her hearing – into a button microphone that hung loose from an attachment. She had not noticed him put an earpiece in place.

They were near to the bottom of the last long hill, on the via Carbonara, going past the high walls of the Castel Capuano. Rossi had stiffened in his seat and had undone his seatbelt, as if he felt the need for greater freedom. His hand was on the stock of the machine pistol, and a car – unmarked – was in front of them, with another behind. It was not the direct route. She sensed they were playing with her, testing her, or steeling her.

Immacolata saw, very clearly, the lower end of the via Forcella. There was the bar where her grandfather went for coffee and brandy, to play cards or dominoes with old friends. There was the vegetable stall where her grandmother bought broccoli and spinach, tomatoes and spring onions. There was the narrow entrance to the shallow arcade where Silvio played the machines, and the hairdresser Giovanni used was beyond it. Momentarily, she had a view of the facade of the block where her grandfather and grandmother lived, then the three cars – in unison – had swung left.

She could see, fleetingly, the shops, businesses, outlets from which, as a teenager, she had collected the pizzo, and those to which, older, with the benefit of her newly learned book-keeping, she had gone to revalue their contributions. She could recall her ice-cool responses when she was told that such sums were not possible. They always were. They crossed the big square in front of the railway station, and it was from there – only a few times – that she had taken the train, anonymous and unidentified, to the town of Nola to visit her friend. On down a crowded, logjammed street. Then the siren started. They had gone the wrong way in the traffic chaos and the sun had been blocked by the height of the Poggioreale walls, where Giovanni and Silvio were held. She saw the church, modern and magnificent, and the triple towers of the Palace of Justice.

They went down a subway entrance and a barrier was raised.

She had never been there before, descending into the greyness of the tunnel under the palace. She had been through the main public entrance, off the pedestrian area, through which the families of the accused were admitted, but not this route. In Naples there were the Castel Capuano, the Castel Nuovo, the Castel dell’Ovo and the Castel San Elmo, all great historic monuments, but the palace was another castle, as formidable, the home of what had been for every one of her aware years the ‘enemy’, the nemico. One thing to meet the enemy in a park in north-east London, and to travel with the enemy from London to Rome, then to be in a safe-house on a hill with exquisite views of the capital. It was another to be taken, under the protection of guns, into the enemy’s castle.

She was in an underground car park, dimly lit, and there was the stench of petrol fumes.

Immacolata did not look into Rossi’s face as he stood beside the opened door of the Alfa. She climbed out, making light of the awkwardness in slipping her legs from the low seat, and stretched. She followed Orecchia towards a lift shaft where more men waited. She was ringed with guns. Theatre? Or real and present danger? The men had hard faces and she didn’t think they play-acted.

In the lift, she was hemmed in, and Rossi’s machine-pistol magazine dug into her arm.