The Collaborator Read online

  Maybe, he wondered, Agatha Christie was taking the blame for his own inadequacy. He was droning. He had as much interest in who was the murderer as they did. His students wanted to be able to do the business with a gang-master, a bureaucrat at the Job Centre, the warden of a hostel, while the brightest needed to be able to communicate in a good-quality three-star hotel. What they also needed, and somebody was paying for, was a teacher with enthusiasm who could concentrate on a text. It was as though he was on auto-pilot. He could hear his voice, monotonous and flat.

  The straw he clung to was that his Mac would be back at his place. She had an outer door key and a Yale to his room. It was only a straw, a pretty thin one, but it was possible that she’d be there. They all liked her at the house – couldn’t believe she was real. A guy who pushed paper for H M Revenue and Customs, another who waited at tables in a club on Pall Mall, the one who sold train tickets for Great Western, and the PhD student from Goldsmiths couldn’t believe she was real because once a week she made pasta with a sauce to die for.

  They would all have known when he and Mac were on the bed in his room, must have heard, through those walls and down those narrow stairs, enough noise… Then she’d cook. She always brought plastic bags of food, and would never accept money – it was the only time she splashed out and showed she was flush. When they were out, as they should have been in the Afghan place, they shared. It had been laid down between them at the start…

  He ached for her…

  He didn’t care about Miss Marple, or Poirot, didn’t give a damn who’d done it. He wouldn’t wait for a bus: he’d run all the way back to the little house and pound up the stairs and burst through the door and hope, hope, she was there… his straw. He hadn’t made the bed that morning, hadn’t straightened the coverlet. Seemed to see it still in chaos. He said, ‘I apologise to you all. I’m not myself today. I hope it’s not the flu. Thank you for your attention, and I’ll see you all next week.’

  As he gathered together his dog-eared lecture notes, they chimed, ‘Thank you, Mr Deacon. A very good evening to you.’

  He fled. Hit the pavement, at full stride, and tears blistered his cheeks.

  She liked Salvo – always used the diminutive, not Salvatore, and never called him by his street name, ‘Il Pistole’ – more than any of her own children, and had since the day he had been introduced into the heart of the clan three years earlier.

  When she reached the bar, she went inside and past the counter, the tables, and into the inner room. He was already there, and immediately stood up. Giovanni was at the table but did not get to his feet. She could accept her eldest, Vincenzo, because he possessed the dynamism of his father, and could feel affection for the youngest, Silvio, because he was helpless, devoid of authority and ambition. She had never considered her daughter of equal importance to the boys. She disliked Giovanni for his painful and prolonged birth, and for his conceit and exploitation of the family name. If he had not been of her blood and had behaved with such arrogance in her presence he would now, like as not, be dead. Dead at the hand of Salvo, Il Pistole. It gave Gabriella Borelli some slight pleasure to know that her middle son, Giovanni, not only loathed Salvo but also feared him.

  And Giovanni had cause to fear Salvo.

  When she had come into the outer area of the bar, the staff would have begun to prepare coffee for her, a variety that was gentler on her throat than the small, bitter measures the men swore by.

  She thought Salvo was similar to a ferocious dog that ran wild and free at night inside the fence of a scrap-metal yard and showed obedience to none but his acknowledged master. Her husband had recruited Salvo and advanced him, had been that master, but on his arrest the young man’s loyalty had turned to her. She believed his devotion to be as honest as that of any slobbering Rottweiler or German Shepherd.

  At a light knock on the door, Salvo was up again. He opened it, took the cup and saucer and closed it. He put the coffee in front of her. Indeed, Giovanni had cause to fear Salvo. The young man, recruited and advanced by her husband and now only twenty-four, was a killer. He could kill with a pistol but, if circumstances warranted, he could kill more artistically. He was best known for the pistol. In the Forcella and Sanità districts, the kids had photographs of the Beretta P38 on their mobile-phone screens, and images of the weapon’s owner. As the ultimate enforcer of the Borelli clan Salvo had accumulated enemies. Vendetta blood feuds were no longer practised in Naples, but there were enough stones in the cemeteries around that quarter of the city for many to long for the day when he was a corpse in a crimson pool, or at least looking at a maximum-security cell’s bars.

  She sipped her coffee, and her thinly applied lipstick left a pale smear on the cup’s rim.

  But hers was a city of betrayals. Gabriella Borelli did not trust readily, so she had brought the son she disliked to the meeting. There should always be a witness. She would never place her faith entirely in one man. She could smell the sweat of sex on her son, seeping through his shirt and off his chest; he didn’t even have the respect for her that would have made him shower afterwards. He flaunted the smell, and she wondered which teenage whore had opened her legs for him. Since Pasquale had been flown north to Novara, she had not taken a man into her bed – had not, but wished she had when she smelt the sweat.

  They talked. She controlled a huge financial empire now. It involved property in the city, in other parts of Italy, the holiday resorts of the Balearics and the Canaries, the South of France and on the coast east and west of Spanish Málaga. It covered import and export of goods through the Naples docks and a dozen ports near and far from Italy. Gabriella Borelli, Giovanni and Salvatore could have talked of legal and illegal trading and mentioned millions of euros. They did not. They talked instead of the merits of a power supply. Which was better? Should a two-stroke petrol engine be preferred to one driven by mains electricity but needing a cable plugged into a wall socket? It was all a matter of the time available, the location and whether the power was within easy reach. They considered the problem of a cold petrol engine, and how many pulls there would be on the starter cord – and what if it flooded? Much of the Borelli clan’s business utilised laundered cash and that could be done in the back rooms of a major bank – local, American, German or British – but other matters needed close attention in the rear room of a back-street bar in the depths of Forcella. It was the place to decide between electrical power or a two-stroke engine. Salvatore would not have been consulted on commerce or investments. It was the matter of enforcement that necessitated his presence.

  Gabriella Borelli liked Salvo, but was wary of him. In the world of Forcella, and the clans that ran so much of the city and its population, enforcement was critical. Respect must always be secured; lack of respect must be answered. To ignore disrespect showed weakness. To show weakness, even in a trivial matter, was fatal for a clan leader. A moment of perceived weakness was enough to alert circling rivals. A position of power must be reinforced with decisive action. That was Salvatore’s role. Most often the P38 was used for quick, clean intervention, but reputation required innovation. That evening the discussion was on power supplied by petrol or by electric cable.

  The decision taken, with Giovanni as a witness, herself sanctioning it, Gabriella Borelli left the bar.

  Because she had chosen her way of life, she never complained about it, not even in her thoughts. Her husband would be in gaol for the rest of his life, and her eldest son was a fugitive; her middle son was a vain bastard, and her youngest son was a useless idiot. Her daughter was intelligent but had neither her mother’s commitment to the clan nor the determination to succeed. Gabriella was more than twice Salvo’s age, and he had no future beyond a quick death from a gunshot, or arrest and a long sentence that was slow death. On the street, alone, hugging shadows, both hands gripping the strap of her shoulder-bag, she thought of the arms of the man who killed at her demand, their thin, hairless beauty, his light, narrow fingers, his waist, flat under the T-s
hirt, and the jeans that bulged when he stood to greet her, to collect her coffee or to escort her from the bar. It was unthinkable. She flushed and… returned to the image of her daughter. A scooter swept past her, its fumes flagged into her face, and the picture was lost.

  Eddie had studied the Victorian poets, the Lakes people, and Byron, at the small, unfashionable university in the Thames Valley. If he’d managed the entry to a better university or worked harder where he’d ended up, he would have been qualified to teach those poets, as eventual head of department at a sixth-form college. He hadn’t, so he taught basic English to foreigners, and his high literature was from Agatha Christie.

  There was no poetry in his pain. Nothing noble, romantic, or edifying about it. The pain hurt bloody bad, and left an emptiness he couldn’t fill. The hole in his life gaped.

  She hadn’t been there. He had gone through the front door, brushed aside the taxman in the hallway, met the man from the ticket desk halfway up the stairs and reached his own door, then fumbled so badly that he couldn’t insert the key. He had started to kick it when the PhD fellow did the honours with the lock. He had snapped the light on, heeled the door shut hard enough for it to slam and had seen the bed, empty – unmade.

  What to do?

  Too much pain. Yearning for his Mac, not daring to believe she had just walked out on him.

  Music was playing downstairs, soul stuff, as if the others had caught his mood and sought to offer solace. He had said it to himself so many times, but he had never felt so bad before. Girls? Yes. Before? Yes. Village girls, university girls and language-school girls? Yes. Kissing? Yes. Groping? Sometimes. Shagging? Not often. Really caring? Not even with the hygiene inspector. It had never really mattered whether he was hooked into a girl or not. He was cold, he was lonely – he was so bloody unhappy. Hadn’t eaten and hadn’t slept much the night before. He asked the question aloud: ‘So, what to do?’

  He could see her magazines on the floor, her dressing-gown hanging limp from the hook on the door. The scent of her was still in the room. He could have leaned over, buried his face in the sheets and she would have been there, the sweet smell of her. He did not. He stared at the wall, found her picture. Sat taller and straighter. He told himself, ‘Don’t know what happened, don’t know why it happened – whatever. Going to find out. Going to go to work in the morning, hack the day, and track it down, the problem of Mac, in the evening. Promise? Yes, bloody promise.’

  He’d thought he wouldn’t go downstairs and face them. Wrong. He went down and put his head round the door of the communal living room. Eyes looked at him, then evaded him, as if he had the plague. They wouldn’t have known how to react to his unhappiness. The TV was on, bloody football… Yes, they all loved her, as if she was Wendy and they were Peter Pan’s kids – and she cooked wonderful pasta…

  Eddie Deacon forced a smile. His voice quavered but he got through it: ‘It’s been a grim day, double-whammy awful. I don’t know where she is, don’t know anything. Tomorrow I’ll find out. Right now I’m going out for a drink or three.’

  They all went. They had their arms round his shoulders, in the rain, not a coat among them, and headed for the Talbot, the public bar, as if everything was all right. He’d know tomorrow evening if he’d kept the promise he’d made to himself.

  She didn’t sleep. She was in her room with the light off so there wouldn’t be a strip showing under the door when the gang came back and she wouldn’t be called to get up and make coffee or pour beer.

  Immacolata knew most of the stories of betrayal in the folklore of her city, although her mother, father and brothers would not: she had gone to a school that had taught her more than how to write a police statement in an interview room. She had been educated. She also knew what happened to the men, yesterday, today or tomorrow, who betrayed their own… She didn’t know what they did to the women. Her mind raced, flicked through a score of images, and glimpsed the nightmare sight of what might happen to a woman before it was superseded. She was in the crowd, at the back, and the polizia were unwinding the roll of crime-scene tape. She was on tiptoe and had just seen the blood and the white underwear, the tanned thighs, maybe black hair, and the blanket was cast to cover… Her mind had gone on.

  She told herself that only one person would have understood what she had done in the public phone box on the Kingsland Road. That person was dead. Marianna Rossetti would have understood. But her friend was immured behind the concrete hatch with the marble facing, which might now have been sealed with grouting. She lay still and breathed quietly. She had heard her father speak of Castrolami, the investigator from the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale, and she imagined a man of dignity, stature and bearing. She thought of how he would welcome her, show gratitude for the sacrifice she intended to make and talk to her of the nobility of what she did… He seemed handsome and… But she didn’t sleep.

  She was in that street again – in the via Foria, or the via Cesare Rosaroli, or the via Carbonara – and the pain bit into her toes as she struggled for greater height to see better the woman on the pavement, who had been accused of betrayal, and know what had been done to her. Always, shoulders and heads impeded her view.

  The hours went slowly. They came in. They drank, talked, played cards, watched TV, then Vincenzo was alone. She thought he paused outside her door and listened. If she had moved in her bed he would have come in and talked to her – maybe he had some problem with money, foreign-exchange regulations, the opening of a new account or a transfer – so she lay still. After half a minute she heard him clear his throat and go to his room.

  Her mind was made up, the seed sown in the cemetery at Nola.

  He had stomach cramps. He walked down the long pier inside Arrivals at Charles de Gaulle airport. The pain snatched at nerves in Lukas’s gut, made his mouth twitch and brought a frown to his forehead. The cramps had not been brought on by the landing of the aircraft that had brought him from Madrid to Paris, a catastrophic bump, leap and skid in a fierce cross-wind that carried driving rain. Nor were they the product of the food served on the long Atlantic crossing, or the result of the confined leg room – he’d gone steerage because business class was fully booked. He had not smoked since he had gone through the departure gate at El Dorado. He walked slowly and soaked up the ache in his guts. Within a few strides he had killed the pain, the twitch and the frown. Nothing about him was noticeable to a stranger. He would go through Immigration and Customs briskly. He didn’t need a visa for France, living now on a UK passport, and had only the rucksack slung loose from his shoulder. He had been authorised, some months back, at permanent-secretary level, to carry two passports; in Washington this had been endorsed by an under-secretary. The passport with the Colombian entry and exit stamps was at the bottom, under his laptop. The one he would show at Immigration bore only East European and north African stamps – nothing from the Middle East, or Latin and Central America – so his movements would not go down in the computers that tracked international travellers. It was important in the work he did that he left no paper trail.

  He would take a bus into the city centre.

  He’d have a chance at a bus stop, in the driving rain and wind, to light a cigarette. That seemed important to Lukas, about as important as gaining a return of three unhurt, two wounded, one fatality. He didn’t triumph, nor expect hero-grams, only a long debrief with his employer when he would sift in his mind what was relevant and what could be discarded. Not something to boast about, playing God, making decisions that might cost the lives of men and women. He thought more about the cigarette he would light in the bus queue than about a return of five survivors from six… It had been about the one guy, the Agency man, but Lukas declined to recognise a stark fact. When the bus came, he would ride into the city, then get himself down into the late train on the Métro and walk from the subway at Solférino to his apartment.

  If he had permitted it, a limousine would have been waiting for him at the kerb outside Arrivals. The America
ns would have sent one as a mark of gratitude. The company would have ordered one. He had, perhaps, a Low Church love of frugality. None of the good men, the ones to whom Lukas gave respect, sought greasepaint, flashbulbs and welcoming bands. It was just possible that he was the most competent of the ‘good men’. If he was the élite figure among them it was not because of his crusading spirit but the attention he gave to detail, the depth of his experience and his rejection of conceit when he won through. It was said that many who knew Lukas waited to spy out his emotions and motivation, and still waited. No car, no congratulations. Might have been because he knew how fine the lines were between success and failure…

  He had one regret that evening. It was a few minutes short of midnight and he was returning to Paris too late to meet up with his friends. By the time he had negotiated the bus ride, the Métro and done the walk, his friends would have gone home.

  Lukas was back where he lived – would be there until the next time the phone shrilled in his ear. It was his life. As someone had once said to him: ‘Lukas, you dance on other people’s misery. If it wasn’t such a crap world you wouldn’t have work.’ He hadn’t disagreed.

  3

  He blinked to see better. He was under a tree. During the night the wind had taken off enough of the foliage for the rain to drip on to his shoulders and head. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to clear out the water and the bleariness of a bad night. Mario Castrolami was looking for her.

  The Ministero degli Interni, the vast, creaking bureaucracy on the Viminale in Rome, had an officer seconded to the Italian embassy. He was a policeman, not a member of the carabinieri, so Castrolami regarded him as a lesser creature – good enough to meet him last night at Heathrow and drive him to a Holiday Inn, not good enough to be given advance warning on the identity of a potential collaborator with justice and the implications that might splinter from it. An ROS investigator from Naples, a front-line salient in the war against organised crime, would have little trust in the combination of policeman and Viminale. So, after his failure to sleep, Castrolami had left the heavy sealed envelope containing the arrest-warrant papers for Vincenzo Borelli at the hotel’s reception desk, with the officer’s name on it… Laborious, complicated, but necessary, and if the woman did the business the officer would be told to collect the envelope and act on it. Trust, the lack of it, always governed Castrolami’s actions.