three before him. Short but broad-shouldered and thick at the waist, he had cropped hair, controlled stubble, good jeans, a good-quality shirt and good shoes. What he wore was good because he sold fine fish fresh from the market that morning. There were, however, matters relevant to the state of mind Tomasso enjoyed that were not generally known to those who dictated the economics of his fish stall. His father’s cousin had a boat that fished from the harbour at Mergellina, but two years before Tomasso had been told by the Borelli clan that he must only buy fish landed from the boats they owned. He had not complained and had acquiesced because his chance of obtaining another pitch was minimal. Now, also, he must pay to the clan a hiked pizzo for the right to put the stall in that place. Also, now, he must supply fish at cut-price to the trattoria two streets away, at less than cost, because the trattoria was owned by the clan. The pesce spade, huge, with the malevolent eye, frozen, would have been taken by Giovanni on a normal day, and not paid for: that had happened more often in the last months.
But the shit-face hadn’t come, was in the cells at Poggioreale, and the cow who headed the clan was also in the cells, and Vincenzo who had sent the message by courier telling him where he could and could not buy. They were, in his opinion, fucked, but he knew what had been done last evening to a man who had shouted it. Tomasso kept quiet, sold where it was possible, but impotent anger burned in him. Where he stood, close to his till and scales, he was, perhaps, two metres from the door of the house where the old goat lived with his woman. He had seen the young man go into the building, had seen also that kids had come with him, and a scooter boy, and he had thought the young man a stranger. The kids had still been in place, on the far side of the road, till two minutes ago. Everyone knew Salvatore. Everyone who worked in the via Forcella or in the Sanita district knew the face of Il Pistole, who had come and talked inside with the old goat, had waved the kids away and gone. He felt the tension ratchet, and he was aware that the street, quietly and without fuss, was emptying.
The grocery was down the rue de Bellechasse, and Lukas – as was usual for him – bought only the bread, milk and eggs that he would eat in twenty-four hours, nothing that would go sour or stale in the fridge if the apartment was indefinitely abandoned. The red light had not been blinking when he had returned.
He had checked his post before he started on the cleaning, as he did every day. Nothing that needed attention. There was little enough for him to collect from the box by the main door: a few utility bills, offers of health insurance and holiday brochures, never anything personal. When he was away, in a war zone or counter- insurgency theatre, he always noted how men and women, far from home, yearned for mail from their families, emails or phone calls. Didn’t matter whether he yearned or not, he wasn’t getting any. No envelopes came with spidery writing, copperplate, a big fist or one that was near indecipherable. It was as if, wanting or not, he had no home and no folk who cared a shite. So, he built a wall, surrounded himself and… Lukas cleaned.
He did the cleaning, too, about every day, because he had the feeling always that he would go out through the front door, lock it behind him and might survive or might not. Might go down in a Black Hawk over a Shiite city in Iraq, and might get blown off a road by an IED outside Kandahar, and might fall off some dirt track in the mountains of central Colombia. He was like many of the gypsies who serviced the dirty little wars: he didn’t want to think of anyone making an entrance to collect his effects and puckering a forehead as they wondered where to start, thinking that the man was an untidy jerk and had left a mess. He might only have ten minutes between the telephone ringing or coming back in and having the red light alert him, dragging the bag out from under the bed, locking the door and starting the sprint for Solferino Metro. He kept the place neat and just about in a state that no one could be sure that anyone had recently lived there. All his washing went most days to the launderette, even if it was just briefs, singlet, socks and a shirt.
When he had finished the cleaning – it took all of a quarter of an hour – he checked the laptop. There were copies of the fulsome praise from DC that had come into Ground Force Security, and gratitude for his report. The company didn’t give him saccharine accolades for what he had achieved in the last trip, knew that the sweet stuff was unwelcome. Lukas could have reeled off the story of disasters in the hostage-rescue trade. He didn’t do celebrity and didn’t want back-slapping. Truth was, the fear of failure gripped his gut more when he was in the field than the demands of success. Failure was a body-bag. There had been enough for them never to be forgotten.
He wound up the cord of the vacuum cleaner that did the living-room rugs and the bedrooms’ carpet. Ruby Ridge was in Lukas’s battle honours, and nobody was keen to shout that one up to the clouds. Lukas, if he had engaged in a discourse about his work – which he never did – would have said that Ruby Ridge, up in the forests of Idaho where it was wild enough for mountain lion, had been the first pinpoint lesson of where a screw-up had happened. An innocent woman shot dead by official marksmen, and a child, and in return fire a US marshal killed, then the circus of a full-blown FBI-controlled siege of ten days’ duration, with a cast of maybe five hundred agents, and millions paid by government in subsequent compensation. Lukas had not been senior, had been then a marksman with the Bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, and had seen a cock-up played out close enough to smell the shit that emanated. A good lesson for a rookie. He had been far back from the front line overlooking the cabin, and his Remington Model 700 had never been out of its bag, let alone loaded, but he had seen, played out before him, how bad it could get. He knew he walked a fine line between Ruby Ridge and the broken careers, and the hero- gram stuff on his laptop.
He watched the telephone and thought it might be an opportunity to go visit his friend who did the artwork down by the river, shit work and without talent, but by a good friend. The artist would never have heard of Ruby Ridge – or seen the face of a hostage when it was frozen in death, attached to or severed from the neck, or incoherent and trembling in the moment after liberation. Lukas played the strings, did God, and he went round a last time with a duster.
When he closed the door he stood in the lobby for a moment and listened. The bell did not ring. He went off down the flights of stairs.
Gerald Seymour
The Collaborator
8
Eddie came out of the main door on the ground floor. He had been told he would be met and taken to Immacolata. He saw a great deal in the moment he was on the outer step but he assimilated the importance of nothing.
The door swung shut behind him. He caught a glimpse of it and the grandfather’s old hand, pocked with cancer scars, that had heaved it: too fast, no chance to thank. A van was parked on the street as if about to unload, but nothing was taken from the tail doors and nothing was carried to them. A pavement opposite had bustled and was now still. The kids were not crowded in the street but further up the slope of via Forcella and further down, as if they formed a cordon and made a perimeter. A man came forward and did not play-act friendship, a frown puckering his forehead. A hand from the interior slid open a side door of the van. The guy on the fish stall caught Eddie’s eye, the swordfish in ice beside him, and held his gaze.
Eddie had his hand in his pocket, was reaching for a handkerchief – must have been dust, up his nose and in his throat. He was about to sneeze. A man closed on him, came from the van, and behind was a dark interior, and sacking, a rope trailing out of the opening. The man on the fish stall held Eddie’s eyes. So much, then, for Eddie Deacon to assimilate. Time slowing. The man coming slower. People in the cafe opposite pirouetting their chairs to face away from the street, but the pace of the movement slackening. Trying to understand… The fish-seller had that look, unmistakable, no argument with it. Like a warning shout, but nothing passed his lips. The quiet, like fog, settled on him but the sights were clearer.
He could not comprehend why the fish-seller should give the warning. He could only react to it.
The hands of the man reached towards him. Not open, not in greeting, clenched. The veins stood out in his muscled arms, like highways through the hairs. Eddie ripped his hand from his pocket and moved into that defensive stance, as a boxer does, trying to go forward on to the balls of his feet. He had never, since he was a child in a tantrum, hit anyone. He had never punched, kicked, gouged or bitten another adult. He had only once intervened in a fight and played a hero and- So fast. His hand was only halfway up to protect his chin and throat when the fist of the man came at him. He felt himself buffeted. Pain riddled his nostrils and there were tears in his eyes. A grip tightened on his shirt and he was dragged forward. He was pulled past the fish-seller and saw nothing but a face without expression. Should he have tried to run? No chance: blocked by the van and the fish stall on its heavy trestle legs. Could see only the backs of the heads in the cafe opposite.
