Scampia. He had read a week ago, before the idiocy had started, in Il Mattino, that a sociologist had said: ‘If you live in Scampia you have no hope of anything ever being better. You cannot have optimism. You have nothing and no possibility of legal work or anything that is psychologically rewarding. It is a prison. The boy growing up here as a teenager might as well be locked in the cells of a goal.’ He had read that because it was on the same page as the story about himself, named, with a photograph. He had thought it a shit article about a shit place. He lived in safe- houses scattered through Forcella and Sanita, he was optimistic, his picture was on the screen of kids’ phones, and he was rewarded. One day, one day, he would drive a Ferrari on the seafront at Nice and stay in a hotel, where a movie star would have stayed, and it would not be Gabriella Borelli in his bed – one day.
He saw the Sail again.
Fangio took him towards the great weather-stained mountain of concrete. He supported Carmine Borelli’s decision to bring the boy here for safe-keeping, but he thought the old man had given too much in return: too much of a percentage of a shipment coming to the Naples docks in three weeks, too much of a share in a contract for the rebuilding of a sewage system on the north side of Sanita. He thought them peasants, contadini, here, but he had masked his anger when the weapon was taken from him and he was blindfolded.
They were on the via Baku. Salvatore did not know where Baku was, in what country, or why a street in Scampia was named after it.
They were waved down. He said who he and Fangio were, where he went and by whose authority, and he gave the registration of the van, its maker and colour, and then he was allowed to go through.
There had been that knot of men, another at the outer end of via Baku and more at the junction of the viale della Resistenza, otherwise near emptiness… He knew that, from every angle, he was watched.
He laughed.
The scooter swerved – Fangio had twisted. He laughed because he had remembered the scratched line in the manacles. He laughed at the effort, wasted.
He thought escape from here, from the Sail in Scampia, was impossible – as impossible as from the maximum-security wing at Novara, or the one for Sicilians at Rebibia. Impossible. He had not resolved which knife he would use, which blade.
He was jolted. The braking of the van, no warning, threw Eddie forward and his shoulder cannoned against the bulkhead. The back door was opened. No ceremony. A blanket was draped over him. He was moved fast. No voices.
Eddie thought it had been four or five paces from the van and into a building. He couldn’t see, but he could smell – all the human smells but, above all, decay. They had hustled him inside but it seemed they were happy to slow and go at their own pace now, wherever they were. He was taken up a staircase. He didn’t know whether it was enclosed or open, but there was no wind on his hands, and no sun’s warmth, and the rest of his body was covered with the blanket.
He was not hit.
Small mercy. He was thankful.
Another flight of stairs – he’d tried to count. To count was to be positive. Reckoned, as best he could, that he was on a third floor, then went along some sort of corridor – it was wide because men were alongside him, to his left and his right, and they had his arms at the elbows. Not a word spoken. Would have said he went a clear hundred paces along the walkway.
Heard a knock, heard a door open in an instant response. Was jostled through the gap, narrow because one man led, he followed and another man had to wait to come behind. Now he heard a television set blaring, but not near. Bolts were drawn back, and another door opened. He was pushed and pulled inside a room, and knew the space was small and that there was no open window because he was hit by clammy warmth, suffocating.
A chain was put on Eddie’s ankle – he felt its weight, tight against the bone. The blanket was pulled off, and the plastic strip that had gouged his wrists was cut.
The door closed, was bolted.
The sound of the television was gone, and silence crushed him. He did not start to learn his new prison, its dimensions. He slumped – stood against a wall, bent his knees and let his weight take him to his haunches, then toppled over. The chain tightened and he lay on his side. He had not bothered to remove the hood.
He wondered if he was beaten.
Lukas walked. It was good for him to feel the air of the city, to breathe it and learn from it. It might be the last chance he had to indulge himself, and he was mean with his time, did not willingly waste it. He soaked up what was around him.
He called it a ‘tipping point’, and had identified it from what Castrolami had told him. A mobile call, the Italian’s phone clamped to his ear, the frown deepening, the gasps on the cigarette faster and deeper, the phone shut down. They had been close to the barracks at piazza Dante. He had been told of the meeting at which an official at the Palace of Justice had met the corrupt lawyer, one of those who always ran with bad guys, a photograph and a demand. He had asked them if he could walk, feel the small streets.
They crowded close to him. Hanging washing made an arch over him. Cooking scents fed him. Lukas went to a chapel, paid to go past the door, stood in awe and stared at Sammartino’s Veiled Christ, so lifelike, marble made into flesh and cloth, and was in the majesty of the place for three minutes, no more, had learned and had pondered on the tipping point.
Not original. A lecturer at Quantico had spoken of a tipping point, had offered an analogy of the final gram going on to the scales and toppling the equilibrium. A legal assistant, drawing up the separation agreement in Charlotte, had talked of the tipping point as the moment when a failing relationship became irretrievable. A sociologist doing demography out of the Green Zone, in safe, comfortable Baghdad, had done the study on Sunni and Shia mixed neighbourhoods, but when one side began to leave – Shia or Sunni – the tipping point was reached when goddam ethnic cleansing was on its way, the flight started, and what had been mixed was now either Shia or Sunni. A tipping point was reached when what had meandered took on a new momentum.
It had.
A photograph and a demand changed the game. It increased the pressure on Castrolami and his people to keep the girl in line, and on Lukas to get the boy out. It increased the pressure on the girl he had seen running, and on the people who held the boy. Heavy pressure now – all different.
He did not have a map in his pocket. He was in an old city, on streets where shoes, sandals and boots had strolled, walked and trekked for two millennia. He did not know, could not have said, whether he was close or far distant from where Eddie Deacon was held, but Lukas seemed to flare his nostrils. He gazed at faces, at windows and at shadows. He was a fighter. It was his preparation once a tipping point had been reached.
He went to work, walked faster.
Gerald Seymour
The Collaborator
12
Three men brought food. Two filled the doorway, and the third came in. There was light behind them, above their heads and shoulders, and it flooded inside. He was still sitting, hadn’t moved, cramped and stiff, but he pushed himself up. The man who came in was the guy who had snatched him off the street; the eyes were clear, cold and blue-grey. The fingers were long, delicate, almost a musician’s. The lips were thin, without the life that blood brought, perhaps cruel. Eddie barely looked at the face, only the eyes and lips, then the fingers.
In the fingers there was a lightweight plastic plate, with slices of sausage and a portion of cheese. There was a plastic water bottle on its side. The plate was laid on the floor, but beyond Eddie’s reach. A trainer toe edged it across the floor. The movement shook it and a piece of bread fell off on to the worn, grimy linoleum. It could not have been washed in months, maybe years – there was a tackiness to it that could have come from dried urine or spilled food. Eddie looked into the eyes: had it been an accident or done purposely? Nothing showed.
It was no matter to the guy that the bread had gone on the floor. The lips didn’t move and no expression crossed his face. Eddie took the opportunity. He’d heard once that it was called ‘peripheral vision’, and he tried to keep his head static but to use his eyes to rake across the space. About eight feet square. About seven feet high. A
