Red Fox

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Giancarlo asleep seemed little more than a child, hurt by exhaustion and dragged nerves, coiled gently. His real age was betrayed by the premature haggardness of his face, the witness to his participation in the affairs of men. His left forearm acted as a shield to the climbing sun, and his right hand was buried in the grass, fingers among the leaves and stalks and across the handle of the P38.

He was dreaming.

The fantasy was of success, the images were of achievement.

Tossed and tumbling through his febrile mind were the pictures of the moment of triumph he would win. An indulgent masturbation of excitement. Sharp pictures, and vivid. Men in blue Fiat saloons hurrying with escorts of outriders to the public buildings of the capital, men who pushed their way past avalanches of cameras and microphones with anger at their mouths. Rooms that were heavy in smoke and argument where the talk was of Giancarlo Battestini and Franca Tantardini and the NAP. Crisis in the air. Crisis that was the embryo of chaos. Crisis that was spawned and conceived from the sperm of the little fox.

Papers would be set in front of the men and pens made ready by the acolytes at their shoulders. Official stamps, weighty and em-bossed with eagles, would clamp down on the scrawl of the signatures. The order would be made, Franca would be freed, plucked clear from the enemy by the hand of her boy and her lover. The order would be made, in Giancarlo's dreaming and restless mind there was no doubt. Because he had done so much

… he had come so far.

He had done so much, and they could not deny him the pleasure of his prize. There was one 'more element among the images of the boy sleeping in the field. There was a prison gate, dominating the skyline and shadowing the street beneath, and doors that would swing slowly open, dragged apart against their will by the hands of Giancarlo. There was a column of police cars, sirens and lights bright on a July morning, bringing his Franca free; she sat like a queen among them, contempt in her eyes for the truncheons and Beretta pistols and machine-guns.

Franca coming to freedom.

It would be the greatest victory ever achieved by the NAP.

Loving himself, loving his dream, Giancarlo groped downwards with his right hand, urging his thoughts to the diminishing memory of his Franca, conjuring again her body and the sunswept skin.

And the spell was broken. The mirror cracked. The dream was gone with the speed of a disturbed tiger at a waterhole; a blur of light, a memory and a ripple. Lost and wrecked, vanished and destroyed. Trembling in his anger, Giancarlo sat up.

'Giancarlo, Giancarlo,' Geoffrey Harrison had called. ' I want to pee, and I can't the way I'm tied.'

Harrison saw the fury in the boy's face, the neck veins in relief.

The intensity of the little swine frightened him, the loathing that was communicated across the few metres of stone and burned field flowers.

He wormed back from confrontation. ' I have to pee, Giancarlo.

It's not much to ask.'

The boy stood up, uncertain for a moment on his feet, then collected himself. He scanned all the surroundings as if they were unfamiliar to him and in need of further checks to establish his security. He examined the long depth to the horizon, breaking the fields and low stone walls and distant farm buildings into sectors to vet them more thoroughly. Harrison could see that the boy was rested, that sleep had alerted and revived him. He used a bush of gorse with yellow-petalled flowers to screen himself from the road as he looked around. There was something slow and workmanlike and hugely sinister about his calm. Better to have tied a knot in it or soaked his trousers, Harrison thought, than to have woken him.

Giancarlo walked towards him, feet light on the springy grass, avoiding the stones set deep in the earth, the hand with the gun extended, aimed at Harrison's chest.

'Don't worry, don't point it, I'm not playing heroes, Giancarlo.'

The boy moved behind Harrison, and he heard the scuff of his feet.

'There's a good lad, Giancarlo, you know how it is. I'm fit to bloody burst, you know…'

The blow was fierce, agonizing and without warning. The full force of the canvas toe-cap of Giancarlo's right shoe digging into the flesh that formed the protective wall for the kidneys.

The pain was instant, blending with the next stab as the following kick came in fast and sharp. Three in all and Harrison slid on to his side.

'You little pig. Vicious… bullying… little pig.. The words were gasped out, strained and hoarse, and the breath was hard to find. More pain, more hurt, because the wounds of the men in the barn were aroused again and mingled with the new bruising. Harrison looked up into the boy's eyes and they bounced his gaze back with something animal, something primitive. Where do they make them, these bloody creatures? Where's the production line? Where's the factory? Deadened and unresponsive and cruel. Where's the bloody stone they're bred under?

Slowly and with deliberation the boy bent down behind Harrison, the barrel of the pistol indenting the skin where it was smooth and hairless behind the ear. With his free hand Giancarlo untied the flex. It was the work of a few moments and then Harrison felt the freedom come again to his wrists and ankles, the shock surge of the blood running free. He didn't wait to be told but rose unsteadily to his feet. He walked a half-dozen paces with a drunken gait, and flicked at his zip-fastener. The spurting, draining relief. That's what it had come down to; ten minutes of negotiation, a kicking, a gun at the back of his head – all that because he wanted to pee, to spend a penny, as Violet would have said. Being pulled down into the cesspool, being animalized. He looked down into the clear, reflecting pool in front of his feet and in a moment of hesitation between surges saw the traces of his own concerned and wrung-out face.

Geoffrey, we want to go home. We're not fighters, old lad, we're not like those who can just sit in a limbo and be pushed and tugged by the wind. We're just a poor little bloody businessman who doesn't give a stuff about exploitation and revolution and the rights of the proletariat; a poor little bloody businessman who wants to wrestle with output and production and raw materials, the things that pay for summer holidays and the clothes on Violet's back, and a few quid to go on top of a widowed mother's pension. It's not our war, Geoffrey, not our bloody fight. Harrison shook himself, swayed on his feet, pulled up the zip and turned his hips so that he could see behind him.

His movements were careful, designed to cause no alarm. The boy was watching him, impassive and with as much emotion as a whitewashed wall. The two of them, devoid of relationship, without mutual sympathy, stared at each other. He'd kill you as he'd stamp on a dragonfly, Geoffrey, and it wouldn't move him, wouldn't halt his sleep afterwards. That's why he doesn't communicate, because the bastard doesn't need to.

'What are we going to do now?' Harrison asked in a small voice.

The boy stood out of arm's reach but close. Another gesture from the arm that held the pistol and they walked the few metres towards the car.

'Where are we going?' Harrison said.

Giancarlo laughed, opening his mouth so that Harrison saw the fillings of his teeth and felt the stench of his breath. This is the way the Jews went to the cattle trucks in the railway sidings, without a struggle, making obeisance to their guards, thought Harrison. Understand, Geoffrey, how they forsook resistance?

You're gutless, lad. And you know it, that's what hurts.

He opened the door of the car, climbed in and watched Giancarlo walk round the front of the engine. The keys were exchanged, the P38 took up position by his ribcage, the brake was eased off, the gears engaged.

Harrison headed the car back towards the road.

Its headlights shining vainly in the morning brilliance, a white Alfetta swept down the sloping crescent of the driveway outside the Viminale. An identical car with the smoked, half-inch-thick windows and reinforced bodywork had latched itself close behind, the worrying terrier that must not leave its quarry. Alone among the members of the Italian government, the Minister of the Interior had discarded the midnight blue fleet of Fiat 132s after the kidnapping of the President of his party. For him and his bodyguards bulletproof transport was decreed. The Minister had said in public that he detested the hermetically sealed capsule in which he was ferried in high summer from one quarter of the city to another, but after the chorus of inter-service recrimination that followed the attack on the vulnerable Moro car and the massacre of his five-man escort, the Minister's preferences mattered little.

With siren blaring and driving the motorists on Quattro Fontane languidly aside, the Alfetta plied through the mounting traffic. The driver was hunched in his concentration, left hand steady on the wheel, the right resting loosely on the gear stick.

Beside the driver, the Minister's senior guard cradled a short-barrelled machine-gun on his lap, one magazine attached, two more on the floor between his feet.

For the Minister and his guest, the British Ambassador, conversation was difficult, each clinging to the thong straps above the darkened side windows. The Ambassador was travelling at the Minister's invitation, his presence hurriedly requested. Would he care to be briefed on the situation concerning the businessman Harrison while the Minister was in transit between his offices and those of the Prime Minister? Somewhere lost behind them in the dash and verve of the Roman streets was the Embassy Rolls that would collect the Ambassador from Palazzo Chigi.

Public men both of them, and so they were jacketed. The Italian sported a red silk tie above his blue shirt. The Ambassador favoured the broad colour bands of his wartime cavalry unit. The two men were stifled near to suffocation with the heat in the closed car, and the Minister showed his irritation that he should be the cause of his guest's discomfort. His apologies were waved aside, and there was the little clucking of the tongue that meant the problem was inconsequential.

Unlike many of his colleagues, the Minister spoke English, fluently and with little of the Mediterranean accent. An educated and lucid man, a professor of Law, an author of books, he explained the night's events to the Ambassador.

'And so, sir, we have at our doors another nightmare. We have another journey into the abyss of despair that after the murder of our friend, Aldo Moro, we hoped never to see again. For all of us then, in the Council of Ministers and in the Directorate of the Democrazia Cristiana, the decision to turn our backs on our friend provoked a bitter and horrible moment. We all prayed hard for guidance, then. All of us, sir. We walked across to church from the deliberations at the Piazza Gesii, and as one we went on our knees and prayed for God's guidance. If He gave it to us He manifested Himself in His own and peculiar way. His message bearer was Berlinguer, it was the Secretary-General of our Communist party who informed us that the infant understanding between his party and ours could not survive vacillation.

The PCI dictated that there could be no concession to the Brigate Rosse. The demand that we release thirteen of their nominees from gaol was rejected. The chance to save one of the great men of our country was lost. Who can apportion victory and defeat between ourselves and the Brigatisti?'

The Minister mopped a smear of sweat from his neck with a handkerchief scented with cologne sufficiently to offend the Ambassador's nostrils. The monologue, the exposition of the day's business, continued.

'Now we must make more decisions, and first we must decide whether we follow the same rules as before or whether we offer a different response. The hostage on this occasion is not an Italian, nor is he a public figure who could by some be held accountable for the society in which we live. The hostage now is a guest, and totally without responsibility for the conditions that unhappily prevail in our country… I won't elaborate. I turn to the nature of the ransom demanded. One prisoner, one only.

Thirteen we could not countenance, but one we might swallow, though the bone would stick. But swallow it we could if we had to.'

The Ambassador rocked pensively in his seat. They had cut down the curved hill from the Quirinale and surged with noise and power across the Piazza Venezia scattering the locust swarms of jeaned and T-shirted tourists. Not for him to reply at this stage, not till his specific opinion was required.

The Minister sighed, as if he had hoped for the load to be shared, and realized with regret that he must soldier on.

'We would be very loath to lose your Mr Harrison, and very loath to lose the Tantardini woman. We believe we should do everything within our power to save Mr Harrison. The dilemma is whether "everything in our power" constitutes interference in the judicial process against Tantardini.'

The Ambassador peered down at the hands in his lap. 'With respect, Minister, that is a decision the Italian government must take.'

'You would pass it all to us?"

The Ambassador recited, 'Anything else would be the grossest interference in the internal affairs of a long-standing and respected friend.'

The Minister smiled, grimly, without enjoyment. 'We have very little time, Ambassador. So my questions to you will be concise.

There should be ho misunderstandings.'

' I agree.'

The Minister savoured his question before speaking. The critical one, the reason that he had invited the Ambassador to travel with him. 'Is it likely that Her Majesty's Government will make an appeal to us to barter the woman Tantardini with the intention of saving Harrison's life?'

'Most unlikely.' The Ambassador was sure and decisive.

'We would not wish to take a course of action and afterwards receive a request from Whitehall for a different approach.'

' I repeat, Minister, it is most unlikely that we would ask for the freeing of Tantardini.'

The Minister looked with his jaded blue eyes at the Ambassador, a dab of surprise at his mouth. 'You are a hard p e o p l e… you value principle highly. It does not have much merit in our society.'

'My government does not believe in bowing to the coercion of terrorism.'

'I put another hypothesis to you. If we refuse to negotiate with the Nappisti for the freedom of Tantardini and if as a consequence Harrison dies, would we be much criticized in Britain for the hard line, la linea dura, as we would say?'

'Most unlikely.' The Ambassador held the Minister's questioning glance, unswerving and without deviation, the reply clear as a pistol shot.

'We are not a strong country, Ambassador, we prefer to circumvent obstacles that fall across our path. We do not have the mentality of your cavalry, we do not raise our sabres and charge our enemy. We seek to avoid him… '

The car came fast to a halt and the driver and bodyguard leaned back to unfasten the locks on the rear doors. Out on the cobbled courtyard of the Palazzo Chigi the Ambassador breathed in the clean, freshened air and dried his hands on his trouser crease.

The Minister had not finished, busily he led the Ambassador into the centre of the yard where the sun was bright and where there was none who could overhear their words.

The Minister held the Ambassador's elbow tightly. 'Without a request from your government, there is no reason for our cabinet even to consider the options over Tantardini. You know what I am saying to you?'

'Of course.'

'You value the point of principle?'

'We value that consideration,' the Ambassador said quietly and with no relish.

The Minister pressed. 'Principle… even when the only beneficiary could be the Republic of I t a l y… '

'Still it would be important to us.' The Ambassador pulled at his tie, wanting relief from its grip. 'A man came to see me earlier this morning, he is a representative of Harrison's firm, and I told him what I have told you. He called me Pilate, he said I was washing my hands of his man. Perhaps he is right. I can only give my opinion, but I think it will be ratified by London.'

The Minister, still sombre, still clinging to the Ambassador's arm as if unwilling to break away for his cabinet colleagues waiting upstairs, said, 'If we refuse to release Tantardini, I do not think we will see Harrison again.'

The Ambassador accepted his opinion, nodded gravely.

' I will relay your view to Whitehall.'

The two men stood together, the Ambassador disproportion-ately taller. High frescoes in centuries-old paint leered down at them, mocking their transitory plans for history. Both perspired, both were too preoccupied to wash away the moisture beads.

'We understand each other, my friend. I will tell my colleagues that the British ask for no deal, no barter, no negotiation… and whatever happens we win the victory of principle… '

The Ambassador interrupted his short choked laugh. ' I am sure that Defence would send the Special Air Service, the close-quarter attack squad, as they did for Moro. They could be here this afternoon, if it were helpful.'

The Minister seemed to snort, give his judgement on an irrelevance, and walked away towards the wide staircase of the Palazzo.

Those who came late that morning to their desks in the Viminale on the second floor found that already the corridors and offices were nests of harsh and total activity. Vellosi paced among rooms, querying the necessity of bureaucrats and policemen alike to occupy their premises and their precious telephones, and where he found no satisfaction he commandeered and installed in their place his own subordinates. By ten he had secured an additional five rooms, all within shouting distance of his own. Technicians from the basements were kept busy hoisting the mess of cables and wires, attaching the transmitters and receivers that would secure him instant access to the control centre of the Questura and the office of Carboni. Some of the dispossessed hung about in the corridors, sleek in their suits and clean shirts, and smiled sweetly at the pace and moment of the working men around them and vowed they would have Vellosi's head served up on a charger were he not to deliver Geoffrey Harrison, free and unharmed, by the next morning. It was not the way that things were done in the Viminale. Noise, rising voices, the ringing of telephone bells, the pleas of radio static all mingled and coalesced in the corridor. Vellosi bounced between the sources of the confusion. He had told an examining magistrate that he was a hindrance and an obstruction, a carabinieri general that if he didn't push reinforcements into the Cosoleto area he would face speedy retirement, the persistent editor of the largest Socialist newspaper in the city that his head should be down the lavatory pan and would he clear the line, and sent out for more cigarettes, more coffee, more sandwiches.

At a hectic pace, bewildering to all those who were not central to the knot of the enquiry, the operation and investigation was launched. Those who participated and those who were idle and smirking behind their hands could agree on the one common point. The mood on the second floor of the Viminale was unique.

Very few, though, were privy to the telephone conversation between Vellosi and the Minister, who spoke from an anteroom outside the cabinet deliberations at the Palazzo Chigi; only the inner court, the hard men on whom Vellosi leaned for succour and advice.

He had slammed the telephone down, barely a grunt of thanks to the Minister and confided to those in the room near him.

'They're standing firm, our masters. The men of deviation and compromise are holding a line. The bitch stays with us. Tantardini stays in her cell and rots there.'

The four who heard him understood the importance of the political decision, and they smiled to each other in a grim satisfaction and dropped their shoulders and raised their eyebrows and returned to their notepads and their internal telephone directories.

The information began to flow as the team hustled, begged and screamed into the telephones; shapes and patterns emerging from the kaleidoscope of mystery and dead alleys with which the day had started. Photographs of the known Nappisti at liberty had been spread out on a table for the portiere of the pensione where Claudio's body had been found. He had not wished to be involved, this elderly man whose job required a short tongue and shorter memory. He had turned over many pictures, showing little interest, muttering repeatedly of the failure of his recollection. One flicker of curiosity nullified his reluctance and a detective had seen the betrayal of recognition that the portiere had tried to hide. It was the work of a police photographer, and the typed message on the back of the picture gave the name of Giancarlo Battestini.

What name had he used? What identity card had he shown?

What had he been wearing? What time had he arrived? What time had he left? The questions battered at the old man in his fading uniform till he had broken the reticence born of the sense of survival and told the story the police wanted to hear. The information breathed a new activity into the squad of men around Vellosi, whipped up their flagging morale and drove them on.

' It's beside the station,' Vellosi stormed down his telephone to a maggiore of the Pubblica Sicurezza. 'Right beside the station, this pensione, so get the photograph of Battestini down to the ticket counters, get it among the platform workers. Check him through all the trains to Reggio yesterday morning. Find the ticket inspectors on those trains, find their names, where they are now, and get that picture under their noses.'

There was so much commitment, so much cajoling and abuse that for a full minute Giuseppe Carboni stood ignored in the doorway of Vellosi's office. He bided his time; he would have his moment. And it would be choice, he thought, choice enough for it to have been worth his while to abandon his desk at the Questura and come unannounced to the Viminale. Vellosi was on his way for another prowl along the corridor to chase and jockey his men when he careered into the solid flesh wall of the policeman.

'Carboni, my apologies.' Vellosi laughed. 'We have been very busy here, we have been going hard… '

'Excellent, Vellosi, excellent.' A measured reply, tolerant and calm.

'… you will forgive my hurry, but we have discovered an important connection..

'Excellent.'

'The boy of the NAP, Battestini… the one we missed when we took Tantardini, this is the kernel of this matter, it was he who killed the gorilla in the hotel. We have established that, and this Claudio was from those who took your H a r r i s o n… we have not been idle.'

'Excellent.'

Vellosi saw the smile on Carboni's face, as though the man had picked up a book and found it already familiar. His revelation won no recognition of achievement.

'And are you prospering too, Carboni?' Subdued already, Vellosi braced himself. 'Tell me.'

Carboni led the head of the anti-terrorist squad back to his desk. With his heavy rounded fingers he produced from a neat briefcase two facsimile documents. He laid them on the desk, carelessly pushing aside the piles of handwritten notes that had accumulated there through the morning. With his forefinger, Carboni stabbed at the upper sheet.

"This is the statement taken from Battestini by the polizia more than eighteen months ago… after his arrest for some student fracas. It carried his handwriting at the bottom.'

' I have seen it,' Vellosi said curtly.

Carboni pulled clear the under sheet. "This is the statement from the Nappisti found at Seminara along with Harrison's card.

Observe the writing, Vellosi, observe it closely.'

Vellosi's nose was a few inches from the papers as he held them to the light.

'It has been checked. At Criminalpol they ran it through the machines for me. The scientists have no doubt that they match.'

Carboni savoured the moment. It was perhaps the finest of his professional life. He stood among the gods, the princes of the elite force, the cream of the anti-subversion fighters, and he told them something they had not seen for themselves. 'Giancarlo Battestini, nineteen years old, born in Pescara, university drop-out, probationer of the NAP, he is the one who has taken Geoffrey Harrison. Harrison is in Battestini's hands, and I venture to suggest that is the limit and extent of the conspiracy.'

Vellosi dropped back to his chair. A hush spread across the room and on into the corridor and further offices. Men in shirtsleeves holding cigarettes and plastic coffee beakers crowded to the doorway. 'Is it possible for one man – a mere boy – to have achieved all this?'

'Vellosi, it has happened.' The pleasure shone on Carboni's face. ' I won't detain you, but you should know we are sifting the reports of stolen vehicles from the area of the city of Reggio – there are not many, not at the times that fit. Two cinquencentos, but they would be too small for the purpose. There was a BMW but that is a conspicuous car. Close to the main station at Reggio, a few minutes' walk away, there is reported missing within ninety minutes of the arrival of the rapido from Roma a one-two-seven. It is red, and the registration is going out now.

There is the same problem as always with the road blocks because we do not know where to set them, but if it is on the radio and the lunchtime television, then perhaps…'

'Shut up, Carboni.' Vellosi spoke quietly. He reached up with both arms, put them round Carboni's neck and pulled the ill-shaven face towards him. Their cheeks met, the kiss of friends and equals. 'You're a genius, Carboni, nothing but a genius.'

Carboni blushed, swung on his heel and left with a little wave of his fingers for farewell. He had stirred Vellosi's ant hole, changed its direction, shifted the whole basis of the enquiry.

'Well, don't stand about,' Vellosi snapped at his audience.

'We've let an amateur show us what's happening, point to what's been staring at us for hours. We have more in a day than we had in a month with Moro. Use it.'

But for Moro he had had time. For Harrison he had less than twenty-four hours till the expiry of the ultimatum.

Vellosi scuffed among his papers till he found the photograph of Battestini. He searched the mouth and the jaw line and the set of the eyes for information, scrabbling to catch up, scratching to make do with diminishing hours, the tools of a policeman's trade.

"The little bastard could be anywhere.' And Vellosi swore and reached for his coffee that was cold.

He must go back to the basics, back to deep and quiet thought in the midst of the noise surrounding him, back to analysis of the minimal factual evidence available.

Start again, start from the beginning. Return to the face of Battestini, drag from those features the response that should be made.

Giancarlo Battestini, imprisoned in Rome after studying in the capital's university, and a member of an NAP cell in that city.

Could the boy have links with the far countryside? Likely or unlikely? Vellosi flexed his fingers. The answer was obvious. The boy would know nothing of Calabria. A city boy, a town boy, a foreigner in the Mezzo Giorno.

He turned and called to a colleague, who stubbed his cigarette, drained his coffee and came to him.

'Battestini would not believe he could survive in the countryside, it is beyond his experience. Correct?'

'Correct.'

'He would try to return to the city?*

'Possible.'

'In the files he is linked only with Rome: would he try to get back here?'

'Perhaps.'

'He is divorced from Pescara. He has nothing there. And if he comes back towards Rome he must come by car because he cannot take a prisoner by train.'

'Probable.'

The momentum carried Vellosi on. 'If he comes by road he must decide for himself whether he will attempt speed on the autostrada, or whether he will go for the safer and slower old roads.'

' I think he would choose the autostrada.'

Vellosi slapped his fist into the palm of his other hand. 'And he must stop… '

'For petrol.'

'He has to stop.'

'Certain.'

'Either at a station on the autostrada or he must come off and use a toll gate and a station off the main route.'

' If he is coming to Rome, if he is coming by car, if he is on the autostrada, then that is correct.'

Vellosi thrust his chair behind him, rose to his full height and shouted, 'Work on the petrol stations and the autostrada tolls.

Each side of Naples. Call Carboni, tell him that too.'

His colleague was no longer beside him.

Vellosi slumped back into his seat. There was no one to praise him, no one to smile and slap his back and offer congratulations.

To himself he muttered, over and over again, 'The boy will come back to the city, the boy will return to Rome.'