The room was fine: a television he didn’t switch on, a mini-bar he didn’t open, an air-conditioner going like a tank’s engine and the noise of the street coming through a double-glazed window. It was the way Lukas liked it, the sort of place where he was comfortable. Why was he there? It confirmed he was still capable, not washed up, not yesterday’s creature, that he wouldn’t hesitate to accept an invitation to travel. It was why he was there, and it went unshared.
He hooked power into his laptop, wired into his mobile, and information cascaded through to him. He started out on the first steps of learning about Edmund ‘Eddie’ Deacon, and about a girl, and with each page passing on the screen, so the deadweight, the responsibility, settled heavier. Nothing ever changed. She looked a pretty girl, and he looked an ordinary boy – nothing was different from every other time – but the scorpion sting was at the end. Last page up was the sitrep profile on Immacolata Borelli – who she was, what she did, where she was. A Camorra-clan girl, a money-washer, now a traitor to her own, was what the kid had gone looking to find.
In his career, Lukas thought, there had been worse situations, but not many. He didn’t know when he’d next get any rest, so he killed the laptop, stripped, and pretty soon was asleep.
Gerald Seymour
The Collaborator
9
The hatred was like the wire scouring pad that his mother had by the kitchen sink, and it cleaned Eddie’s mind.
He needed it clean. He didn’t think he could lie propped up against the sacks, hooded, handcuffed and bound, with wet trousers, his guts aching with hunger, his throat dry with thirst, the scars on his face itching incessantly and those inside his mouth shooting pain, and do nothing else. Hate had taken over his mind, and given him clarity of thought.
He had ditched the disbelief. He knew the reality, had had it confirmed. He thought he needed, more than anything, to regain a sense of control – with nothing to see, no leg movement, nothing to eat, no arm movement, he needed a sense of some input into his destiny, whatever it was. He had to find control. He had kicked off the process. Thoughts came, and jumped, raced, flitted. He must remember everything he had seen when the hood had been off, the trapdoor lifted and light had flooded in: the dimensions of the bunker, the colour of the plastic sacks and what was printed on them, face of the bastard he hated, the clothes he had worn, the markings on the trainers that had done the kicking, the Nike symbol – he had all that. He should keep a sense of time… How? He screwed his right fingers on to his left wrist and realised that his watch wasn’t there – had to be somewhere on the floor, dislodged when he was beaten. They would bring him meals. Meals would be a routine. Told himself: no sentimentality and no self-pity.
Wait, heh… Wait, wait.
No self-pity? He’d picked up a girl in a park, hadn’t even used a hoary old chat-up line. Apologies and stumbles and embarrassments and then, ‘I don’t understand this – “turn over”. What is “turn over”?’ He’d been picked up – might have been a thousand different girls but hadn’t: had been her, Immacolata. Wouldn’t tolerate self-pity, wouldn’t entertain it… Would try not to tolerate and entertain self-pity.
No sentimentality? Didn’t know who he could be sentimental about – not his mum and dad… Good enough people, on railway lines of predictability, not particularly loving and not particularly disapproving, much like everyone else’s mum and dad. But worse things came into his mind and squeezed away the small matters, self-pity, control and sentimentality.
The man had spoken with a sing-song reciting voice, the sort of language he might have learned in a sixth-year classroom. He would have had a textbook open that showed a man’s body, with arrows pointing to an ear, a finger and a hand – not to a penis. She will leave the police… we send perhaps an ear… perhaps a finger… perhaps a hand… the pene… then all of you but not breathing… He saw a knife and his gut squirmed in fear as the shock waves surged and the pains came hard.
Not easy – fuck, no – to plead the need for control.
Hardest to understand: they wanted nothing of him. He had no secret to hide or squeal, no ideology to cling to or renounce. He was not an agent in occupied Europe or a heretic in Tudor England: he was just a piece of garbage.
Would Immacolata, his Mac, leave the police – she would be in protective custody – and walk away to save him, his ear, finger and…? Couldn’t say. He had slept with her, loved her, sucked her juices, whispered with her, laughed with her – he didn’t know.
Eddie thought he heard – indistinct – the moan of engine noise. Cars, lorries, vans? Couldn’t be sure. Might mean a new day had started. If he was right, noting that a new day was born was an act of control – pretty bloody small, pretty much all he was bloody capable of. He teetered then on the edge of self-pity – and righted himself. Another day.
Then teetered again, rocked, was near to capsizing. How big was Eddie Deacon in the emotions of Immacolata Borelli? Hard to say, admit, spit out that he didn’t know. He knew where the birthmark was, deep brown at the top of her right buttock, and where the minute polyp was in her left armpit, but he didn’t know her mind. Eddie had heard of prisoners in cells, or in interrogation rooms, who took a point on a wall or a ceiling and focused on it, or found a spider crawling and tracked it, but the hood didn’t allow that.
Perhaps it hurt most, and made the worst fear, that he didn’t know how Immacolata Borelli would react when she held his life in the palm of her hand and weighed its value.
‘You lied to me. I take much from the shit people I work with – but lying disgusts me.’
She hung her head.
Castrolami seemed to tower over her. It was a theatrical, contrived attack. A knock at her door, a request that she come now into the living room. She wasn’t dressed. Castrolami, Orecchia and Rossi were. No coffee had been made for her, no juice laid out, no rolls heated, but she had seen their plates on the draining-board in the kitchen. She thought they had ambushed her.
‘You lied. We took you on trust. We diverted resources. All the time you lied.’
She hung her head because she didn’t understand. She had talked of her father, her mother, her eldest brother. She had listed the names of men who laundered and bought for the clan, who handled transhipments. That day she had prepared herself to talk about Giovanni, the brother she loathed, and Silvio, who had depended and doted on her. She couldn’t think, then, of anything she had said that was untrue. There was, Immacolata believed, genuine anger in Castrolami’s accusation. His jaw wobbled and little froths of spittle were at the sides of his mouth.
‘We were about to offer you the contract. You would have read the document, seen what we offered and what we required in return, and it would have been signed by the palace and by you. Now we find you’ve lied to us. I don’t make deals with liars. I prosecute them, I send them to Poggioreale, but I don’t sweet-talk with liars.’
She saw that he was holding a roll of papers, maybe ten sheets, and she noted a photograph among them. For emphasis, Castrolami hit his palm with it. Rossi was at the kitchen door, sober-faced and impassive. Orecchia was sitting in the hall and neither made eye-contact with her. She was the daughter of her father. She wouldn’t bend the knee.