She said, ‘I’m grateful, Mr Johnstone, more grateful than I can say, and my husband… Yes, please do, please keep in touch with us, any time of day or night… Can I ask you one question, Mr Johnstone, only one?… Thank you… Why, Mr Johnstone, are you doing this for us?… Perhaps I do and perhaps I don’t, but thank you.’
He heard the phone put down. He heard her choke, like a sob, and couldn’t remember when he had last heard or seen his Betty in tears – wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t heard the choke. He took off his shoes, put them on the correct shelf, went inside and put his arm round her shoulders. She was still standing by the hall table, facing the silent phone.
She said, ‘That was Mr Johnstone. He says his name’s Duck, but I’m not indulging him. He’s building what he calls a “profile” of Eddie.’
‘Don’t know that I could.’
‘He says Eddie’s been kidnapped and the likelihood is that he’s in the hands of an organised-crime group. This one, called the Camorra, is in Naples. The likelihood is that the girl Eddie spoke of, Immacolata Borelli, is from a criminal family, a very successful one.’
‘God, poor Eddie – an innocent abroad.’
‘It gets blacker. The girl has turned herself in as a state witness against her family. Eddie, our Eddie, barged in there – supremely innocent but also supremely ignorant, I don’t know which is worse – and Mr Johnstone says they will try to use his captivity to persuade the girl to withdraw her evidence. He wanted to know how Eddie would withstand extreme pressure and stress – he didn’t say torture, but I think that’s what he meant – and the information will help in building the profile. I said he was just ordinary, a bit lazy and a bit stubborn.’
‘Usually aware, kind, not very ambitious.’
‘Without malice. I said that. It was almost like I was doing his obituary for the Western Daily Press. I said he was a nice boy, decent, and steady, but hadn’t too much imagination. His own mother, selling him short.’
She did a brief sniffle, blinked, and the weakness of tears was gone. Arthur Deacon held her tight. Her eyes were still on the phone.
‘A man’s flown to Rome. I wasn’t told his name. He’s called a co-ordinator, and he works on a freelance basis for Mr Johnstone’s company. He has FBI experience and has been in Iraq for the American military. He’s an expert on hostage rescue, whether by negotiation or use of force. It’s all because of Dean. Dean spoke well of Eddie. I’m in areas I don’t understand but I think it’s a sort of family – Dean Weymouth, the people who work for this company at whatever level of importance, and the man who’s going to Naples. It’s like a brotherhood of mutual support because of the awful places they operate in. The expert – he’s as good at his work as anyone in the world, Mr Johnstone says.’
‘We have to be strong, and pray Eddie is.’
‘What Mr Johnstone also says, we must hope, we must believe, and we must understand the desperate nature of the situation Eddie’s in. And Mr Johnstone says we mustn’t feel angry with him. That’s the natural emotion, extreme anger, for having caused our misery. Eddie may not be the brightest star but he’s done nothing wrong, has nothing to be ashamed of. This expert, the co-ordinator, is used to going where governments get entangled in bureaucracy and pomposity and guarding territory, Mr Johnstone says, and side-stepping them all. But he doesn’t flannel.’
‘You live nearly a lifetime, then into your cosy world come people you didn’t know existed. I’m not trying to be profound, but now we share space with them.’
‘He says Eddie’s position is “difficult”. He’s going to ring us twice a day, and he promised that all the questions he’ll ask are relevant for the profile. I asked him why. He said that people climb mountains because they’re there, cross deserts because they’re there, get involved in problems because they’re there. He didn’t mention anything about money… I’m frightened for Eddie.’
Arthur held her, couldn’t do it tighter.
‘Which is more important? That the girl gives her evidence or our Eddie’s life? I’m not asking you for an answer.’
They had walked without speaking, had had a coffee and walked some more, not spoken, and drunk a second coffee. Lukas knew that the exhibition in the canteen had left a sour taste in Castrolami’s mouth, but it was easier done that way than having to explain himself.
Near the end of the second coffee, at a bar that over looked the big square, piazza Venezia, where the coffee cost more than a meal, Castrolami put his gripe: ‘Mr Lukas, it was dishonest.’
‘If you want it to be.’
‘Implication – you win them all.’
‘I win a lot.’
‘Not all.’
‘I could have had you put on an Alitalia big bird and you’d be mid-Atlantic now, and I could take you to a trailer camp in Arkansas or Alabama, and I could wheel out the family of a marine or a ranger or a military truck driver not past his nineteenth birthday who was lifted and killed because I didn’t save him. I could do that, if it would help you.’
‘You don’t win them all.’
‘I lose people, yes. I try to win. I don’t ask for a shoehorn. I’m there if I can help, and I try to win.’
‘What keeps you in the game?’
Lukas said, ‘It’s what I know – about all I know.’
A hand reached out, slapped Lukas’s face – quite hard but not malevolent, and not playful. Lukas supposed he had said the right words, the right thing at the right time, but that, too, was a skill of his. One day, if time allowed, he would work at sincerity – what was real and what was not.
Castrolami said, ‘We should go and see her. Then maybe you can judge better what happens to the boy.’
*
He had eaten, used the bucket and ditched the hood. The focus in his mind was the hatred, and the need for control, and Eddie held it. With the darkness around him there was the silence.
Self-pity, which would not have been control, cursed that he had stepped on to a flight when he’d thought he was ‘lucky’, cursed that he had made it on to a train going south, cursed that he had found a priest in a great church who, distracted and seeming not to care, had told him where to find his Mac’s family – and cursed that he had lingered over cake while the man was sent for. Any cursing was self-pity. He would not have turned his back on Immacolata – would not and could not. Mixed it up in his mind – the face that was the source of hatred, and the face of Immacolata, and she was laughing, sharing her happiness with him. He mixed the two, but the hatred was of greater importance… He mustn’t lose control.
He couldn’t stand in the bunker, couldn’t pace, couldn’t lose the smell of the bucket, couldn’t allow his head to drop.
Gerald Seymour
The Collaborator
10
A new decision faced Eddie. A week before, it would have been whether to do Shakespeare or Agatha Christie with his class, drink British bitter or Czech lager, eat pasta or Oriental, sleep the night with Immacolata or send her home, put the whites in the washing-machine or the woollens. Big decisions, but all in the past.
How to get a pair of locked handcuffs off his wrists, in near total darkness, was the problem that needed a decision.
He doubted there would be an anaesthetic – maybe, at best, alcohol or iodine to keep the cut clean. It might be a medical student, a man who cut up chicken for his family’s evening meal – a butcher – or any bastard off the street. He had been told that his ears, his fingers, his hand and his penis would be chips in the negotiation stakes, which seemed a good enough reason to work on the locked handcuffs. Do nothing? Not a bloody option.
How to do it? He didn’t know.
He had searched the floor space for wire, then gone over each wall, hoping to find a nail hammered in. He had crouched under the ceiling and smoothed the surface with his hands, but there had been no nails, hooks or wire. They had done the Holocaust at school. There were pictures, downloaded from the net, of day-in-the-life scenes at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belsen and Treblinka. It had seemed a long way from a sixth-form college in northwest Wiltshire, until an old man had been brought in on a wet Tuesday afternoon in February 1998. He had been in the camps as a child and had survived, and was – a half-century later – a witness. He had the tattooed number to prove it and had rolled up his sleeve to show it. The class had seen the photographs of the crowds shuffling in lines, with suitcases and bundles, holding their children’s hands, towards the gas chambers. The Jew had talked about death, its certainty. A boy, Robinson – cocky little sod – had asked the Jew: ‘Why did they all just accept it? Why didn’t they fight it? They were dead anyway, so why didn’t they give it a thrash?’ The class teacher had told Robinson that the question was offensive, but the Jew had waved him down and said, ‘A few did, a very few, not enough. The state of Israel today still has a sense of shame at what is seen as the inability to fight, the lying-down, the docility. Israel will defend itself now with the utmost robustness, but then we had come from ghettos, we were exhausted, starved, degraded of dignity. We did not have the strength, physical and mental, to combat the inevitable. It was a good question.’ They’d talked about it afterwards, in the canteen, the school corridors, and had all said – Robinson at the helm – that they wouldn’t have gone like sheep. Easy to say at a school in north-west Wiltshire. Eddie Deacon had not come from a walled-in ghetto, was tired from lack of sleep but not exhausted, was hungry but not starved, and his dignity was fired by hate. How best to regain the freedom of his hands?