Red Fox

CHAPTER TEN

The shadows had gone now, called away by the sun that had groped beyond the orange orchard over to his right. The lines had lengthened, reached their extremity and disappeared, leaving in their wake the haze of the first darkness. With their going there was a cold settling fast among the trees and bushes that Giancarlo had taken for his watching place. The building in front of him was no more than a blackened outline, indistinct in shape, difficult to focus on. Around him the noises of the night were mustering, swelling in their competition. The barking of a far distant farm dog, the droning of the bees frantic for a last feed from the wild honeysuckle, the engine drive of the skeleton mosquitoes, the croak of an owl unseen in a high tree. The boy did not move, as if any motion of his body might alert those who he knew stayed unaware and unsuspicious in the barn that was less than a hundred metres from him. This was not the moment to rush forward. Better to let the darkness cling more tightly to the land, throw its blanket more finally across the fields and olive patches and the rock outcrops that were submerging in the dusk.

The ideas of Giancarlo convoluted and hesitant when conceived in the rocking pace of the rapido were now near to fulfilment.

Wild and ill-thought at their birth, they now seemed to him to own a pattern and a value. Worth a smile, little fox, worth a grin.

Unchallenged, he had walked out of the small station with its wide platforms on the Reggio esplanade, gulped at a waft of sea-blown air, and mingled with the stream of descending passengers.

If there were watching polizia at the barrier, Giancarlo had not seen them, and there had been no shouted command to halt. He had walked from the station, among the people laden with suitcases and string bags. The snakes of humanity had slithered in their differing directions, splintering again and again till he was alone. In a tabacchi he purchased a map of Calabria. The names were clear and well remembered. Sinopli… Delianuova…

Acquaro… Cosoleto. He found them where the red ribbons of the roads began to twist into the uplands of the Aspromonte, beyond the green-shaded coastal strip, far into the deeper sand and brown of the rising ground.

In early afternoon with the time of siesta weighty on the empty streets, Giancarlo found his car. Among the white-washed houses, with the light battering back at his unprotected eyes, parked haphazardly as if the owner were late for an important meeting, not just restless for his lunch. The life of the Mezzo Giorno ruled, the land of the half day. Washing hung down, bleached and stiffened, from the balcony of a house under which was abandoned a red Fiat 127. Right outside the front door, keys in the ignition. Shutters fastened to protect the cool in the interior, not a child crying, not a grandmother complaining, not a radio tuned to music. He slipped into the driving seat, eased off the handbrake and coasted slowly down the incline, waiting till he was clear of the corner before firing the engine.

He headed north for the long viaduct, where the Mafiosi had made their fortunes in extortion from those who needed to move in materials and equipment and found it cheaper to concede the dues than to fight. He drove slowly because that was the style of the Calabrian after lunch and his need to avoid drawing attention was as acute as ever. His face was sufficient of a problem, white with the pallor of prison and confinement in the covo; not the complexion of the south, not the burned and dark wood tan of those who owned this country. He drifted past the turn-off signs to Gallico and Carnitello, and climbed high with the road above the sea channel that separated the Sicilian island from the mainland. For a moment he slowed and stared hard away to his left, his gaze held on the sprawl of Messina away across the azure of the water.

Messina, blurred and indistinct, lay white in the sun among the spreading green and rust of parks and waste ground. Messina, where they had built the gaol for the girls. This was where they had taken La Vianale, where Curcio's Nadia had waited for her trial, where if he did not succeed his Franca would decay and crumble. He could not see the prison, not across eight kilometres of reflecting sea, but it was there, a spur and a goad.

The car increased speed. Past the road on the left to Scilla, and on the right to Gambarie. Through the booming length of rock cut tunnels, and on into the interior. Sinopli and Delianuova were signed to the right and he pulled the little Fiat off the dual carriageway and started the winding negotiation of the hill road.

Through Santa Eufemia d'Aspromonte, a barren and meagre community where his coming scattered only the chickens feeding in the road gravel, and his going raised barely an eyebrow of attention from the elderly who sat in black skirts and suits in front of their homes. Through Sinopli where he hooted for the right to pass a bus that struggled in an exhaust cloud on the main street, and where the shops were still padlocked, and it was too hot, too sickly clammy for the ragazzi to have brought out their plastic footballs.

Bitter country now. Laden with rock and precipice, covered with the toughened scrub and trees that grew from little earth. In low gear, rising and descending, Giancarlo drove on, till he was over the old and narrow stone bridge across the Vasi, and into Acquaro. Perhaps some saw him go through the village but he was unaware of them, studying by turns the map laid out on the front passenger seat, and the perils of the curving route. A half-kilometre further, he stopped. There was a lay-by, and a heap of gravel where the workmen would come in the winter when there was ice to make the road safe for motorists. Further back was a turn-in among the trees where perhaps the hunting parties parked their cars on Sundays or the young men took the virgins when they could no longer suffer the claustrophobia of the family in the front room and the watch of the Madonna above the fireplace. Giancarlo grinned to himself. Wrong day for hunters, too early in the evening for virgins. This was a place for him to park hidden from the road. He drove as far between the trees as the track permitted.

From habit, in the quiet of his seat, Giancarlo checked over the P38, stroked its silk barrel length, and wiped on his shirt waist the faint stains on the handle. Eight bullets only, eight to do so much with. He climbed lightly from the car, eased the pistol back into his belt and was lost in the close foliage.

He skirted the road, leaving it what he judged to be a hundred metres on his left, seeking the thickness of the wood, easing on to the toes of his canvas shoes, thankful for the cover. It took him only a few minutes before he found the vantage point for the once-white house from which paint and plaster alike peeled, served by a rutted track. A hovel to Giancarlo, a place for sheep and cows. Medieval, had it not been for the car parked outside the only door. This was the home of a contadino, a peasant; and his wife moved beside the building with a bucket, and his half-clothed children played with a spar of wood. The boy settled himself comfortably on the mould of generations of fallen leaves and watched and waited for the brother of the wife of Claudio.

Not long. Not long enough to try him.

A big man, balding above a flat weatherbeaten forehead.

Cheeks that were not shaved, trousers that were held at the waist with string, a shirt that was torn at the armpit. Contadino, Giancarlo spat the word. But of the proletariat, surely? He smiled mirthlessly. A servant of the bosses…? The boy agreed, satisfied in the ideology equation. The man carried a plastic bag and walked down the track from his house to the road, paused there and his eyes traversed a sweep that covered the boy's hide. The man had passed close to where Giancarlo lay before his sounds subsided. Like a stoat, Giancarlo was after him, ears cocked and attuned to the distant noises in front, eyes fastened on the dried twigs and oak leaves that he must not break nor displace.

The tree line covered the rim of a slight hill, beyond it was a roughened field indented from the cattle's wet spring grazing. On the far side of the open ground Giancarlo saw the stone-built barn with its rain-reddened tin roof and two doors facing him.

The man he had followed was met by one who had come from the right-hand door and who carried a single-barrelled shotgun, the weapon of the country people. They talked a brief discourse, before the bag was handed over and a gust of laughter carried to the boy. As the man retraced his steps, Giancarlo melted among the trees and undergrowth, unseen, unheard.

When it was safe he came slowly forward to the dry stone wall that skirted the field, and picked his watching place. A boundless pride swept through him. He wanted to stand up and shout defiance and exultation. Giancarlo Battestini, remember the name, because he had found the Englishman of the multinationals, and would exploit him, as the foreign companies exploited the proletariat.

Later Giancarlo would begin his advance, edge closer to the building. Later. Now was the time for him to rest, and to relax if that were possible. And to d r e a m… and the images of the thighs, warm and muscled in moisture, and of the curling growth and the breasts where his head had lain blasted and echoed through his mind. Alone on the ground, the myriad earth creatures converging on him, he shuddered and knew he would not sleep.

Archie Carpenter had been shown round the flat. He'd made the right noises and stood hesitantly at the bedroom door casting a quick eye over the wide pink coverlet, studied the wall pictures, paced the corridors with his hands joined behind his back in the pose of Royal males factory-visiting, and expressed his opinion as to what a fine place it was. She was a queer one, this Violet Harrison, making it all seem so natural as she marched him over the marble floors, pointing to this and that, offering the limited history of the furniture. She'd poured him a drink. Gin with hardly enough tonic to notice, and splashed some ice cubes in.

And he'd seen her hand shaking, rocking like a sick man's and he'd known it was all a damn great sham. All the poise, all the silly chat, just a counterfeit. That's when the sympathy had started to roll, watching the trembling fist and the way the finger talons clutched at the bottle.

Loose and slim in the full flow of her dress, she sat on a sofa, the shape and form projecting without angular emphasis. The sort of woman you could take to your chest, Archie, sort of nuzzle against, and it would be all soft and wouldn't hurt anywhere. He wasn't looking at her eyes when he started to speak, just at the cleavage, where the freckles ran down. His suit was tight and hot and too thick for Roman summer. Bloody strange dress she'd put on for a time like this.

'You have to know, Mrs Harrison, that the company are doing all they can to get Geoffrey back to you. As quickly as humanly possible he'll be home again.'

'That's very kind,' she said, and her words were not easy to follow; it wasn't the first drink she'd had that day. You don't have to stand up like a preacher, Archie, and tell people how to behave and conduct themselves, not when their whole world's falling in.

'Everything possible,' Carpenter hurtled on. 'The Board will rubber-stamp the Managing Director's decision to pay. He wants you to know that the company will pay whatever is required to get your husband back. There's nothing on that count for you to worry about.'

'Thank you,' she said. Raised her eyebrows at him as if trying to show how impressed she was that the Board should make such a commitment.

Bloody marvellous, he thought. What a pair, and not a trace of sweat on her where the neckline cut down and him dripping wet like a horse at the Derby finish. 'There's not a great deal that we can do at the moment, but your husband's colleagues at ICH in Rome are geared to take calls, and make the financial arrangements. It'll probably all be outside the country, which makes it smoother.' He paused, drank it all in, watched the shift of the material as she crossed her legs. 'But you have to soldier on for a bit, Mrs Harrison, for quite a few days. It takes time, this sort of thing, we cannot settle it in a matter of hours.'

' I understand that, Mr Carpenter.'

'You're taking it very well.'

' I'm just trying to go on as I usually would, as if Geoffrey were away on a business trip, something like that.' She leaned forward slightly in her chair.

What to say now, what ground to stumble over? Carpenter swallowed. 'Was there anything you wanted, anything I could help with?'

' I doubt it, Mr Carpenter.'

'It may take a few days, but we're working on two fronts. We can pay, that's no problem. At the same time the police are co-operating and have a major and discreet recovery effort under-way, they have their best men on the case and…'

' I don't really need to know that, do I?' she asked quietly.

Carpenter bridled. ' I thought you'd want to hear what was happening.' Cool it, Archie, she's under stress. A brave front and damn-all underneath.

'So what you're offering me is that after a week or two I'll know whether Geoffrey is going to walk through the door, or whether I'm never going to see him again.'

' I think we should look on the bright side of things, Mrs Harrison.' Out of training, Archie. Bloody years since he'd been a beat copper in uniform and knocking on doors with a solemn face to tell the wife that her old man's come off his motor-bike and if she doesn't hurry she'll see him in the hospital chapel.

She seemed to sag, and the tears came, and then the deeper sobs, and the protest in the choked voice. 'You don't know anything. Nothing at a l l… Mister bloody Carpenter. You treat me like a bloody child… Let's all have a drink, let's believe it isn't for real.. . What do you know about this place, sweet fuck-all of nothing… You don't know where my husband is, you don't know how to get him back. All you talk about is "everything possible", and "major effort", "best men on the case". It's just bloody bromide, Mister bloody Carpenter…'

'That's not fair, Mrs Harrison, and don't swear at me..

'And don't you come marching in here oozing your platitudes, telling me everything is going to be marvellous…'

'Too bloody right I won't. There's people that don't know when someone's trying to help them.' Carpenter's voice rose, his neck flushed. He pushed himself up from the seat, gulping at the remains of his drink. 'When someone comes and tries to give a hand there's no call for foul language.' He couldn't get smoothly out of his chair, couldn't make a quick and decent exit with dignity. By the time he was on his feet she was between him and the door and the tears were wet on her face, gleaming in the sheen of her make-up.

' I think I'd better go,' he said, mumbling his words, conscious of his failure to complete his task.

She stood very close to him, barring his way, a frail little thing for all the bravura of her language and looked straight into his face. Her head was turned up towards him, with a small, neat mouth, and her arms hung inert down to her hips.

' I think I'd better go… don't you? I don't think I can help any more.'

' If you think you ought to.' Brown hazel eyes, deep-set and misted, and around them the morass of freckles that he followed the patterns of, followed where they led.

'Geoffrey's bloody useless, you know.' Her hand came up, wiping hastily across her face, smudged the cosmetic grease, and the smile was there again. Curtained herself from him, just as she had done when she showed him round the flat, taken a public stance. There was a little laugh, bright in his ear. 'I'm not shocking you, am I, Mr Carpenter? Quite bloody useless, to me anyway. I don't mean to shock you, but people ought to understand each other. Don't you think so?'

One hand was sliding under his jacket, fingers rifling at the damp texture of his shirt, the other played at the uppermost buttons of her dress.

'Don't let's mess about, Mr Carpenter. You know the geo-graphy of this flat, you know where my room is. Oughtn't you be taking me there now T Her nails dug into the small of his back, a small bone button slipped from its hole, the spirals of excitement climbed at his spine. 'Come on, Mr Carpenter. You can't do anything for Geoffrey, I can't do anything for Geoffrey, so let's not pretend. Let's pass the time.' There was pressure on his back ribs, drawing him closer, the mouth and the pink painted lips mesmerizing him. He could smell her breath, could smell that she smoked, but she must have used toothpaste just before he came, peppermint toothpaste.

'I can't stay,' Carpenter said, a hoarseness at his throat. Out of his depth, wallowing in deep water, and not a life-raft in bloody miles. ' I can't stay, I have to go.'

The hands abandoned his back and the buttons and she stepped aside to leave him space to pass into the hall.

'No hesitations, Mr Carpenter?' she murmured behind him.

He was fiddling with the door locks, anxious to be on his way and therefore hurrying and in the process slowing himself; the man who is impatient and cannot unfasten a brassiere strap. 'No second thoughts?'

Teased, bowed by a shame that he could not recognize as coming from either inadequacy or morality, Archie Carpenter, nine-to-fiver, opt-out from the grown-up world, finally opened the door.

'You're a boring bastard, Mr Carpenter,' she called after him.

'A proper little bore. If you're the best they can send to get my husband out, then God help the poor darling.'

The door slammed. He didn't wait for the lift, but took the stairs two at a time.

In pre-war Rome the fascist administration sometimes ordered the lights of the principal government offices to be left burning long after the bureaucracy had gone to their trams and buses; a grateful population would believe that the State was working late and be impressed. The spirit of such deception had long since passed and the prevailing dictates of austerity decreed that unnecessary lights should be extinguished. Giuseppe Carboni was one of only a very few who worked late into that night in the shadowed sepulchre of the Questura. By telephone he had indefinitely postponed his dinner at home as he put off and avoided the anathema of communication with the force that he saw as his principal rival, the para-military carabinieri. The polizia and carabinieri existed, at best, as uneasy bedfellows between the communal sheets of law and order. Competition was fierce and jealous; the success of either was trumpeted by its senior officers, and a weak executive power was satisfied that neither should become overpowerful. A recipe for inefficiency, and a safeguard against the all-encompassing police state power that Italy had laboured under for twenty-one years.

Carboni's problem, and it had taken him many hours to resolve it in his mind, was whether or not he should place in the lap of the opposition his information on the speculator Mazzotti. The man was in the far south, apparently at the village of Cosoleto and beyond the striking and administrative range of the polizia at the Calabrian capital of Reggio. Cosoleto would come under the jurisdiction of the carabinieri at the small town of Palmi, his maps showed him that. His option was to allow the man Mazzotti to return from Calabria to the Roman district, where he would again be liable to police investigation. But if the gorilla Claudio were linked to the kidnapping of the Englishman Harrison, then the report of his killing in Rome would serve only to alert those involved. For another few hours, perhaps, the name of the dead man could be suppressed, but not beyond the dawn of the next day. It was immaterial at whose hand the strong man had met his death; sufficient for Carboni that it would be enough to set into play the fall-back plans of the kidnap group. It was not possible for him to delay in his action, but if he acted now, made a request for help that were successful, then what credit would be laid at the door of Giuseppe Carboni? Trivial plaudits, and victim and criminals in the hands of the black-uniformed carabinieri.

Enough to make a man weep.

He broke the pledge of the morning and poured himself a Scotch from his cabinet, the bottle reserved for times of celebration and black depression, then placed the call to Palmi. Just this once he would do the right deed, he promised himself, just this once break the habit of a professional lifetime.

When the call came the static was heavy on the line, and Carboni's voice boomed through the quiet offices and out through the opened doors into the emptied corridors of the second floor of the Questura. Many times he was obliged to repeat himself to the carabinieri capitano, as he was urged to great explanation.

He stressed the importance of the Harrison affair, the concern in the matter of high administrative circles in Rome. Twice the capitano had demurred; the action suggested was too delicate for his personal intervention, the Mazzotti family were of local importance, should there not be authorization from the examining magistrate. Carboni had shouted louder, bellowed bull-like into the telephone. The matter could not wait for authorization, the situation was too fluid to be left till the morning appearance of the magistrate in his office. Perhaps the very vehemence impressed the carabinieri officer, perhaps the dream of glory that might be his. He acquiesced. The home of Antonio Mazzotti would be placed under surveillance from three o'clock in the morning. He would be arrested at eight.

'And be careful. I want no suspicions, I want no warnings given to this bastard,' Carboni yelled. 'A little mistake and my head is hanging. You understand? Hanging on my belly. You have the man Mazzotti in the cells at Palmi and I'll be with the magistrate by nine, and have him brought to Rome. You will reap full praise for your initiative and flexibility and co-operation; it won't be forgotten.'

The capitano expressed his gratitude to the Dottore.

'Nothing, my son, nothing. Good luck.'

Carboni put the telephone down. There was a black sheen on the handpiece and with his shirt cuff he smeared the moisture from his forehead. Rome in high summer, an impossible place to work. He locked his desk, switched off his desk light and headed for the corridor. For a man so gross in stomach and thighs there was something of a spring in his step. The scent sharp in the nose of the professional policeman. The old one, the one above pride and expediency. Time to go home to his supper and his bed.

Uncomfortable, irritated by the sharpness of the hay strands, impeded by the wrist manacle, Geoffrey Harrison had been denied the relief of sleep. They left no light for him, and the darkness had come once the slanting sun shafts no longer bored through the old nail holes of the roof. A long darkness, aggravated by the absence of food. A punishment, he thought, a punishment for kicking the bucket over them. As if the beating wasn't enough.

His belly ached and groaned out loud in its deprivation.

He lay full length on his back, the chain allowing his right arm to drop loosely on the hay beside his body. Still and inert, occasionally dozing, eking out minutes and hours and not knowing nor caring of their passage.

The voices of his guards were occasional and faint through the thickness of the dividing wall of the bam. Indistinct at best and punctuated by laughter and then loud silence. Little he heard of them, and since one had walked heavily outside the building and urinated with force there had been nothing. His concentration was sharpened by the whisper of the scurrying feet of rats and mice who had made their nests in the gaps between the hay bales under him. Little bastards, eating and crapping and copulating and spewing out their litters, performing their functions of limited life a few feet below his backside. He wondered what they made of the smell and presence close to their heartland, whether they'd summon the courage or curiosity to investigate the intruder.

Each movement of the rodents he heard; the vibrations of the small feet, frantic as they went about their business. Perhaps there would be bats tonight; there might have been last night but the sleep had been too great, too thick for him to have noticed.

All the phobias, all the hates and fears of bats rushed past him so that he could examine and analyse the folklore – the scratchers, the tanglers, the disease-carriers…

And there was a new sound.

Harrison stiffened where he lay. Rigid now on his back.

Fingers clenched. Eyes peering upward into the unbroken darkness.

A footfall beyond the side wall away from where his guards rested.

Frightened to move, frightened to breathe, Harrison listened.

A soft-soled shoe eased on to the dirt and mess beyond the wall. A step taken slowly as if the ground were being tested before the weight of a man was committed.

A tree brushing with a laden branch against the coarse granite stone, sweeping across it with the gentle motion of the night wind

– that Harrison could identify, that was not what he had heard.

An outside man, a stranger was coming silently and in stealth to the barn, without warning, without announcement. A person had come before the sun had set and had called from some way off and there had been greetings and conversation. This was not as then.

Another footstep.

Clearer this time, as if nerve and caution were failing, as if impetuosity and impatience were rising. Harrison willed him forward. Anyone who came with the hush of feet on the tinder grass and the scraping stones, anyone who came with such secrecy had no love nor friendship for the men who waited in the far room of the barn.

Cruel and mocking came the long void of silence unbroken to Harrison's alert ears.

Each noise of the night available to him he rejected because the sounds he searched for were lost. The last footstep had been clear, and perhaps the man had taken fright and would stay still and listen before he came on. The perspiration invaded Harrison's body, floating to the crevices of his body. Who was it who had come? Who would travel to this place?

A shatter of noise, a warning shout, a blasting pistol shot, ripped an echo through the space under Harrison's low ceiling.

In the half light from the storm lamp set low, Giancarlo saw the man nearest him pitch forward, the cry in his throat destroyed.

For a moment he caught the reflection of the eyes of a second man, a rabbit's in headlights, and then a stool careered in the air towards him and his ducking weave was enough to take the force of the blow on his shoulder, and to distort his gathering aim. Like a huge shadow the man dived against the wall, but his movements were sluggish and terrorized and without hope. Giancarlo had time before the man reached the shortened shotgun. He held the P38 close with his two fists, cursed as the barrel wavered and the ache sagged in his upper arm. The man stole a last glance at him, without hope of salvation and reached the last inches for the shotgun. Giancarlo fired, two shots for certainty into the target that sank to the earth floor.

Harrison heard the answering whimper, a moan of supplication, perhaps a prayer, before a choked sob sliced it to silence.

He was frozen still, unmoving, uncomprehending.

The leaning door, old and protesting on its hinges, was opened beneath him; the chain was tight between his arm and the roof denying him escape. What in God's name happens now? This was not the noise the police would have made. Not the way it would have been if they were here. There would have been voices all round and shouts and commands and organization. Only the door below him, deep in the darkness, being prised open.

His name was called.

"Arrison, 'Arrison.'

Difficult for him to register it at first. Slow and tentative, almost a request.

'Where are you, 'Arrison?'

A young voice, nervous. A young Italian. They could never get their tongues round his name, not in the office, not at business meetings, not in the shops when he was out with Violet.

The fear swelled inside him, the child that lies in the blackness and hears a stranger come. To answer or not, to identify or to remain silent. Pulsing through him, the dangers of the unknown.

'Where are you, 'Arrison? Speak, tell me where you are,

'Arrison.'

His reply was involuntary, blurted out, made not because he had worked out the answers but because there was a plea for response and he had no longer the strength to resist.

'Up here. I am up here.'

' I am coming, 'Arrison.' Heavy in the stumbled English was the tinge of pride. The door scraped across the floor, the caution of the footsteps was abandoned. 'There are more of them,

'Arrison? There were two. Are there more?'

'Just two, there were only two.'

He heard the sound of the ladder thudding into position against the hay wall, and the noise was fierce as the feet came against the rungs.

'Come down quickly, we should not stay here.'

'They have me by a chain, I cannot move.' Would the stranger understand, would his English be competent? ' I am a prisoner here.' Harrison slid into the staccato language of the foreigner, believing that was how his own tongue was best understood.

Two hands clawed at his feet and he could make out the slight silhouette of a man rising towards him. He cringed backwards.

'Don't fear me. Don't be afraid, 'Arrison.' A soft little voice, barely out of school, with the grammar fresh from the reading primers. The fingers, cruising and exploratory, reached along the length of his body. Across Harrison's thigh, scratching at his waist, onwards and upwards to the pit of his arm and then away out past his elbow to the wrist and the steel grip of the handcuff.

A cigarette lighter flicked on, wavering and scarcely effective.

But from the kernel of light Geoffrey Harrison could distinguish the face and features of the boy beneath the short-thrown shadows. Unshaven, pallid, eyes that were alive and burned bright. A shape to marry to the garlic smell of bread and salad sandwiches.

'Take it.'

An order and the lighter was directed towards Harrison's free hand.

'Turn your face away.'

Harrison saw the shadowed pistol drawn, squat and revolting, a macabre toy. He bucked his head away as the gun was raised and held steady. Squinted his eyes shut, forced them closed.

Tearing at his ears was the noise of the gun, wrenching at his wrist the drag of the chain. The pain burned in the muscle socket of his shoulder, but when his arm swung back to his side it was free.

' It is done,' the boy said, and there was the trace of a smile, sparse and cold in the flame of the lighter. He pulled at Harrison's hand, led him towards the ladder. It was a cumbersome descent because Harrison nursed his shoulder, and the boy's hands were occupied with the gun and the flick lighter. The pressed earth of the floor was under Harrison's feet and the grip on his arm constant as he was led towards the opaque moon haze of the doorway. They stopped there and the fingers slipped to his wrist and there was a sharp heave at the bullet-broken handcuff ring. A light clatter on the ground.

'The men, those who were watching me…?'

' I killed them.' The face invisible, the information inconsequential.

'Both of them?'

' I killed the two of them.'

Out in the night air, Harrison shuddered as if the damp loose on his forehead were frozen. The waft of fresh wind caught at his hair and flipped it from his eyes. He stumbled on a rock.

'Who are y o u r

' It is not of concern to you.'

The grip on his wrist was tight and decisive. Harrison remembered the fleeting sight of the pistol. He allowed himself to be dragged away across the uneven, thistled grass of the field.

The eyewitnesses to the attack melted and died from the pavement with the wailing approach of the ambulance sirens. Few would stay to offer their account and their names and addresses to the investigating police. Out in the middle of the road, slewed at right angles to the two traffic flows, was the ambushed Alfa of Francesco Vellosi. Mauro, the driver, lay, death pale across his steering-wheel, his head close to the holed and frosted windscreen.

Alone in the back, half down on the floor was Vellosi, both hands clamped on his pistol and unable to stifle the trembling that invaded his body. The door of reinforced armour plate had saved him. Above his scalp the back passenger windows, for all their strengthening, were a kaleidoscope of reflected colours amid the fractured glass splinters. So fast, so vivid, so terrifying, had been the moment of assault. After eight years in the Squadro Anti-Terrorismo, eight years of standing and looking at cars such as his, at bodies such as Mauro's, yet no real knowledge had accrued of how the moment would find him. Everything he could previously have imagined of the experience was inadequate. Not even in the war, in the sand dunes of Sidi Barrani under the artillery of the English, had there been anything as overwhelming as the trapped rat feeling in the closed car with the sprays of automatic fire beating over his head.

The escort car had locked its bonnet under the rear bumper of Vellosi's vehicle. Here they had all survived and now they were scattered with their machine-pistols. One in cover behind the opened front passenger door. One away in a shop doorway. The third man in Vellosi's guard stood erect in the middle of the street, lit by the high lights, his gun cradled and ready and pointing to the tarmac lest the prone figures should rise and defy the blood trails and the gaping intestinal wounds and offer again a challenge.

Only when the street was busy with police did Vellosi unlock his door and emerge. He seemed old, almost senile, his steps laboured and heavy.

'How many of them do we have?' he called across the street to the man who had been his shadow and guard these three years, whose wife cooked for him, to whose children he was a godfather.

'There were three, capo. All dead. They stayed beyond their time. When they should have run they stayed to make certain of you.'

He walked into the lit centre of the street and his men hurried to close around him, wanting him gone, but reading his mood and unwilling to confront it. He stared down into the faces of the boys, the ragazzi, grotesque in their angles with the killing weapons close to their fists, only the agony left in their eyes, the hate fled and gone. His eyes closed and his cheek muscles hardened as if he summoned strength from a distant force.

'The one there – ' he pointed to a shape of denim jeans and a blood-flawed shirt. 'I have met that boy. I have eaten at his father's house. The boy came in before we sat down at dinner.

His father is a banker, the Director of the Contrazzioni Finan-ziarie of one of the banks in the Via del Corso. I know that boy.'

He turned reluctantly from the scene, dawdling, and his voice was raised and carried over the street and the pavement and to the few who had gathered and watched him. 'The bitch Tantardini, spitting her poison over these children. The wicked, con-taminating bitch.'

Hemmed in on the back seat of his escort car, Francesco Vellosi left for his desk at the Viminale.