Red Fox

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Giuseppe Carboni was dozing'at his desk, head pillowed lop-sided on his folded arms.

'Dottore…' The shout of excitement and pounding feet boomed in the outer corridor.

Carboni flicked his head up, the attention of the owl, his eyes large in expectation. The subordinate surged through the open door, and there was a gleam and an excitement on his face.

'We have the car, D o t t o r e… ' Stuttered out, because the thrill was great.

Chairs were heaved back, files discarded, telephones dropped, men hurrying in the wake of the messenger gathered at Carboni's desk.

"Where?' Carboni snapped, the sleep shed fast.

'On the hill below Bracciano, between the town and the lake.'

'Excellent,' Carboni sighed, as if the burden of Atlas were shifted.

'Better than excellent, Dottore. A farmer found the car… his son, a small boy, took him to the place, and he thinks the boy watched Battestini and Harrison in the wood in the d a y… '

'Excellent, excellent…' Carboni gulped at the foetid air of the room which had taken on a new freshness, a new quality. He felt a weakness in his hands, a trembling at his fingers. 'Where is Vellosi?'

'At the communications centre. He said he would not return to the Viminale tonight.'

'Get him.'

The room had been darkened, and now Carboni moved to the door and rammed down the wall switch. The response was blinding light in the room, all bulbs on the chandelier illuminated, sweeping away the shadows and depressions.

T h e liaison officers of carabinieri and SISDE, get them here too

… within ten minutes.'

Back at his desk, moving with uncommon speed, he pulled from a drawer a large-scale map of the Lazio region. His aide's pencil raked to the green plot of woodland dividing the built-up grey shades of the town of Bracciano from the blue tint of the Lago di Bracciano. Carboni without ceremony relieved him of the pencil and scratched the crosses on the yellow road ribbons for the perimeter that he would throw around the boy and his prisoner. Seal the road to Trevignano, the road to Anguillara, the road to La Storta, the road to Castel Giuliano, to Cerveteri, to Sasso, to Manziano. Seal them tight, block all movement.

'Has the farmer alerted them at a l l… is there that risk?'

'He was asked that, Dottore. He says not. He went with his son to the car, identified it, and then returned home. He left the child there and then he walked to the home of a neighbour who has a telephone. He was careful to walk because he feared the noise of a car would startle the people in the wood, though his farm is at least a kilometre away. From the house of his neighbour he telephoned the carabinieri in Bracciano…'

'The carabinieri… they will not blunder…' Carboni exploded, as if success was so fragile, could be snatched from him.

'Be calm, Dottore. The carabinieri have not moved.' The aide was anxious to pacify.

'You have them, Carboni?'

The direct shout, Vellosi striding into the office, hands clapping together in anticipation. More followed. A carabinieri colonel in pressed biscuit-brown uniform, the man from the secret service in grey suit with sweat stains at the armpit, another in shirtsleeves who was the representative of the examining magistrate.

'Is it confirmed, the s i g h t i n g…? '

'What has already been d o n e…?'

'Where do you have them…? '

The voices droned around his desk, a gabble of contradiction and request.

'Shut up!' Carboni shouted. His voice carried over them and silenced the press around his desk. He had only to say it once, and had never been known to raise his voice before to equals and superiors. He sketched in his knowledge and in a hushed and hasty tone outlined the locations he required for the block forces, the positioning of the inner cordon, and his demand that there should be no advance into the trees without his personal sanction.

T h e men best, trained to comb the woods are mine…'

Vellosi said decisively.

'A boast, but not backed by fact. The carabinieri are the men for an assault.' A defiant response from the carabinieri officer.

'My men have the skills for close quarters.'

'We can get five times as many into the area in half the time..

Carboni looked around him, disbelieving, as if he had not seen it all before, heard it many times in his years of police work. His head shook in anger.

' It is, of course, for you to decide, Giuseppe." Vellosi smiled, confident. 'But my men -'

'Do not have the qualities of the carabinieri,' the colonel chipped in his retort.

'Gentlemen, you shame us all, we discredit ourselves.' There was that in Carboni's voice that withered them, and the men in the room looked away, did not meet his gaze. 'I want the help of all of you. I am not administering prizes but seeking to save the life of Geoffrey Harrison.'

And then the work began. The division of labour. The planning and tactics of approach. There should be no helicopers, no sirens, a minimum of open radio traffic. There should be concentrations before the men moved off on foot across the fields for the inner line. Advance from three directions; one force congregating at Trevignano and approaching from the north-east, a second taking the southern lakeside road from Anguillara, a third from the town of Bracciano to the west to sweep down the hillside.

'It is as if you thought an army were bivouacked in the trees,'

Vellosi said quietly as the meeting broke.

' It is a war I know little of,' Carboni replied as he hitched his coat from the chair on to his wide shoulders. They walked together to the door, abandoning the room to confusion and shouted orders and ringing telephones. Activity again and welcome after the long night hours of idleness. Carboni hesitated and leaned back through the doorway. 'The Englishman who was here in the day. I will take him with me, call him at his hotel.'

He hurried to catch Vellosi. He should have felt that at last the tide had turned, the wind had slackened, yet the doubt still gnawed at him. How to approach by stealth, through trees, through undergrowth, and the danger if they did not achieve surprise. The thing could be plucked from him yet, even at the last, even at the closest time.

'We can still lose everything,' Carboni said to Vellosi.

'Not everything, we will have the boy.'

'And that is important?'

'It is the trophy for my wall.'

They destroy us, these bastards. They make the calluses in our minds, they coarsen our sensitivities, until a good man, a man of the quality of Francesco Vellosi believes only in vengeance and is blinded to the value of the life of an innocent.

'When you were in church, Francesco, last n i g h t…'

' I prayed that I myself, with my own hand, might have the chance to shoot the boy.'

Carboni held his arm. They emerged together into the warm night air. The convoy stood ready, car doors open, engines pulsing.

The damp of the earth, rising through the leaf mattress, crawled and nagged at the bones of Giancarlo, till he writhed in irritation and the refuge of sleep fell from him. The hunger bit and the chill was deep at his body. He groped across the ground for his pistol and his hand brushed against the metal of the barrel. P38, I love you, my P38, present to the little fox from Franca. Sometimes when he awoke in a strange place, and suddenly, he needed moments to assimilate the atmosphere around him. Not at this awakening. His mind was sharp in an instant.

He glanced at the luminous face of his watch. Close to three.

Six hours to the time that Franca ordered for the retribution on Geoffrey Harrison. Six hours more and then the sun would be high, and the scorch patterns of the heat would have flung back the cold of darkness, and the wood would be dying and thirsting for moisture. There would have been two or three of them with Aldo Moro on this night. Two or three of them to share the desperate isolation of the executioner as he made ready his equipment. Two or three of them to pump home the bullets, so that the blame was spread… Blame, Giancarlo? Blame is for the middle classes, blame is for the guilty. There is no blame for the work of the revolution, for the struggle of the proletariat.

Two or three of them to take him to the beach by the airport fence of Fiumicino. And they had had their escape route.

What escape route for Giancarlo?

No planning, no preparation, no safe house, no car switch, no accomplice.

Did Franca think of that?

It is not important to the movement. Attack is the factor of importance, not retreat.

They will hunt you, Giancarlo, hunt you for your life. The minds of their ablest men, hunting you to eternity, hunting you till you cannot run further. The enemy has the machines that are invulnerable and perpetual, that invoke a memory that cannot weary.

It was an order. Orders can never be bent to accommodate circumstance. In the movement there has been great sacrifice.

And there is advantage in the killing of 'Arrison…?

Not for your mind to evaluate. A soldier does not question his order. He acts, he obeys.

The insects played at his face, nipping and needling at his cheeks, finding the cavities of his nostrils, the softness of his ear lobes. He swatted them away.

Why should the bastard 'Arrison sleep? When he was about to die, how could he? A man with no belief beyond his own selfish survival, how could he find sleep?

For the first time in many hours Giancarlo summoned the image of his room in the fiat at seaside Pescara. Bright on the walls of Alitalia posters, the hanging figure of the wooden Christ, the thin-framed portrait from a colour magazine of Paul VI, the desk for his schoolbooks where he had worked in the afternoons after classes, the wardrobe for his clothes where the white shirts for Sundays hung ironed. Insidious and compelling, a world that was lit and conventional and normal. Giancarlo, one-time stereotype, who sat beside his mother at meals, and wanted in the evenings to be allowed to help his father at the shop. A long time ago, an age ago, when Giancarlo was on the production line, held in the same precision mould as the other boys of the street.

'Arrison had been like that.

The ways had parted, different signposts, different destinations. God… and it was a lonely way… terrifying and hostile. Your choice, Giancarlo.

He slapped his face again to rid himself of the insects and the dream collapsed. Gone were the savours of home, replaced by a boy whose photograph was stuck with adhesive tape to the dash-boards of a thousand police cars, whose features would appear in a million newspapers, whose name grew fear, whose hand held a gun. He would never see Franca again. He knew that and the thought ripped and wrenched at him. Never in his life again.

Never again would he touch her hair, and hold her fingers. Just a memory, a recollection to be set beside the room in Pescara.

Giancarlo lay again on the ground and closed his eyes.

Up the Cassia northwards from the city headed the convoys.

The riot wagons of the Primo Celere, the Fiat lorries of the carabfnieri, the blue and white and prettily painted cars of the polizia, the unmarked vehicles of the special squads. There were many who came in nightclothes to the balconies of the high-rise flats and watched the stream of the participants and felt the thrill of the circus cavalcade. More than a thousand men on the move.

All armed, all tensed, all drugged in the belief that at last they could assuage their frustration and beat and kick the irritant that plagued them. At the village of La Storta, where the road narrowed and was choked, the drivers hooted and blasphemed at the traffic police, and demanded clearance of the chaos, because all were anxious to be in Bracciano when dawn came.

Past La Storta, on the narrower Via Claudia with its sharp bends between the tree lines, Giuseppe Carboni's car was locked into a column of lorries. It was a quieter, more sedate progress because now the sirens were forbidden, the rotating lights were doused, the horns unused. Archie Carpenter shared the front seat with the driver. Vellosi and Carboni were behind among the bullet-proof waistcoats and the submachine-guns, taken as if by a careful virgin from the boot before the departure from the Questura.

Water dripped from Carpenter's hair on to the collar of his shirt and down the back of his jacket, the remnant of his shower after the telephone had broken the total, drink-induced sleep that he had stumbled to. Now that he was awake, the pain between his temples was huge.

A boring bastard, she'd called him. A proper little bore. Violet Harrison on Archie Carpenter.

Well, what was he supposed to do? Get her on to the mattress in the interests of ICH, take her on the living-room c a r p e t…?

Not what it was about, Archie. Not cut and dried like that.

Just needed someone to talk to.

Someone to talk to? Wearing a dress like that, hanging out like it was going out of fashion?

Wrong, Archie. A girl broken up and falling down, who needed someone to share it with. And you were out of your depth, Archie, lost your lifebelt and splashing like an idiot. You ran away, you ran out on her, and had a joke with Charlesworth, had your giggle. You ran because they don't teach you about people under high stress in safe old Motspur Park. All cosy and neat there in the mortgaged semis, where nobody shouts because the neighbours will hear, nobody has a bit on the side because the neighbours will know, where nobody does anything but sit on their arses and wait for the day when they're pushing up daisies and it's too late and they've gone, silent fools and un remembered.

She needed help, Archie. You galloped out of that flat as fast as your bloody legs would take you.

A proper little bore, and no one had ever called him that before, not to his face.

'Did you hear about Harrison's wife, Mr Carboni?' Spoken offhand, as if he wasn't concerned, wasn't involved.

'What about her?'

'She was killed in a car crash, late last night.'

'Where was she?' Puzzlement rang through Carboni's preoccupation with the procedures of the coming hours.

'Out on what's called the Raccordo.'

'It is many kilometres from where she lives.'

'She was driving home, she was alone.' Carpenter spewing it out.

'No one with her, no friends with her…? '

'So, if we get the man out, that is what we have to confront him with.' A light, chilled laugh from Vellosi. 'Incredible, Carboni, when a man's cup is overfilled '

' It is criminal that at this time a woman should be alone.' A distaste hung in Carboni's words.

' I suppose no one thought about it,' said Carpenter dully.

At the junction to the lake road they saw the stationary rows of lorries and vans parked on the grass verge. They passed queues of walking men in uniform, the headlights glinted on the metal of firearms, and there were glimpses of cordons forming in the fields.

The car winged on down the steep hillside before turning hard to the right along a weeded driveway with a military barrier and a concentration of elderly brick buildings awaiting them. Carpenter tried to loose the load of self-pity and stared about him as the car stopped.

The doors snapped open, Carboni was out quickly, and mopped himself and turned to Carpenter. 'It used to be a flying-boat station, long before the war, with its lake frontage. It is a place now just for dumping the conscripts. They maintain a museum, but nothing flies. But we are close to the wood here and we have communications.' He took Carpenter's arm. 'Stay near to me, now is the time for you to wish me well.'

They were swept through the ill lit door of the administration block, Carpenter elbowing to keep contact with the bustling Carboni, and on into a briefing room. Hands out to greet Carboni, hugging and rubbed cheeks, a clutch of bodies around him, and Carpenter relegated to a chair at the back while the policeman found sufficient yet reluctant silence to make a short address on his plan. Another surge of the men in suits and uniforms and battledress, and Carboni, the emperor of the moment, was speeding for the doorway. They won't stop for you, Archie.

They won't hang about for that bloody Englishman. Carpenter shoved and pushed, winced as a Beretta holster dug at his stomach and won his way to Carboni's side. In the wedge at the door Carboni smiled at him, looking up, perspiring.

' I have made a great decision. The anti-terrorist unit demanded the right to lead, so did the carabinieri. Both thought they were best fitted. I have satisfied everybody. The carabinieri will come from the north, Vellosi's men from the south. I am an Italian Solomon. I have sliced Battestini in two.'

Carpenter stared coldly at him.

'Allow me one levity, I have nothing else to laugh at. At any moment Battestini may kill your man, he may already have done so. We are going forward in the dark, we are going to stumble in the dark through the wood.'

'You're not waiting for daylight?'

To wait is to take too great a risk. If you pray, Carpenter, now is the moment.'

They were out of the building.

Muffled, subdued orders. Men in the grey half light hitching over their heads the heavy, protective clothing that would halt all rounds other than high velocity. The cocking and arming of weapons. Ripples of laughter. Tramping feet away into the last remnants of the night. Should have a bloody stirrup cup, Archie, and a red coat, and a man to shout Tally Ho'.

The group with Carboni at its heart set off towards the road, and walking beside him was a short, firm-bodied man who wore torn trousers and boots and a thick sweater and carried an old shotgun broken and crooked, farmer's style, across his inner elbow.

From the hard bare mattress of her cell bed, Franca Tantardini heard the soft-soled footsteps in the outside corridor. A bolt was drawn back, a key inserted and turned, and the man who had been her interrogator let himself in.

He smiled at the woman as she lay with her head propped on her clasped hands, with the golden hair spilling on the one pillow.

' I have some news for you, Franca. Something that you would wish to know.'

Her eyes lit at first, then dulled, as if her interest betrayed her before the discipline triumphed.

' I should not be telling you, Franca, but I thought that you would wish to hear of our success.'

Involuntarily she half rose on the bed, her hands forsaking her neck, propping her up now.

'We know where he is. Your little fox, Franca. We know where he hides, in what wood, close to which village. They are surrounding the place now. At first light they will move in on your little fox.'

The light from the single bulb behind its casing of close-mesh wire bit down at the age lines of her face. The muscles at her mouth flickered.

'He'll kill the pig first.'

The interrogator laughed softly. 'If he has the courage, when the guns are around him.'

'He'll kill him.'

'Because Franca told him to. Because Franca from the safety of her cell ordered it. His pants will be wetted, his hand shaking, guns round him, aimed on him, and he is dead if he does what his Franca has told him.'

'He will do as he was ordered.'

'You are certain you can make a soldier from a bed-wetter, that was what you called him, Franca.'

'Get out.' She spat her hatred.

The interrogator smiled again. 'Let the dream be of the failure, Franca. Good night, and when you are alone think of the boy, and think of how you have destroyed him… '

She reached down beside her bed for the canvas shoes, snatched at one and hurled it at the man in the open doorway. Wide and high, and bouncing back from the wall. He chuckled to her and grinned.

She heard the key in place, the bolt thrust across.

The noise of Giancarlo twisting from his side to his back was the agent that roused Geoffrey Harrison from sleep. As soon as he woke the bite of the wire at his wrists and ankles was sharp. The first, instinctive stretch of his limbs tautened the flex, dug the knots into the underflesh of his wrists and ankles. A man who awakens in hell, who has purchased a great vengeance. Nothing but the bloody pain, first sensation, first thought, first recollection.

God, the morning that I die.

The mental process that became a physical happening, and his body cowed to a foetal position of fear. No protection, nothing to hide behind, nothing to squirm to. The morning that I die. He felt the tremble and the shudder take him, and the awareness was overwhelming. God, the morning that I die.

The first precious beginnings of the day were seeping into the wood. Not the sunlight, but its outriders in the grey pastel that permitted him to detect the lines of the nearest tree-trunks. This morning, with the birds singing, at nine o'clock. Another shape, suffused and vague and hard to alert himself to, as Giancarlo rose and stood above him and looked down. Giancarlo, called by Harrison's movements and inspecting the fatted goose of the feast.

'What time is it, Giancarlo?' He could hear the watch ticking on his wrist, could not see it

'A little past four… '

The little bastard had learned the role of gaoler, thought Harrison, had taken on the courtesy of the death cell attendant.

The hushed tone, and 'Don't you worry, lad, it doesn't hurt and it's quick'. The warm eyes of sympathy. Well, that never helped a poor lad who was going to swing at nine. What do you know about that, Geoffrey? I read it. That was other people, Geoffrey, and half the fucking population saying 'And a damn good thing too'. That's for a criminal. 'No sympathy' and 'Deserves all he's getting'. That's for men who've shot policemen and raped kids.

That's not for bloody Geoffrey Harrison.

'Did you sleep?'

'Only a little.' Giancarlo spoke simply. ' It was very cold on the ground.'

' I slept very well. I didn't dream.'

Giancarlo peered down at him, the definition of his face growing with the slow coming light.

T h a t is good.'

'Are you going to get some food?' He could have kicked himself when he'd said it, could have spat on himself.

' I am not going for any f o o d… not n o w… later, later I will eat.'

Cheaper to feed one. More economic to sustain the single person family. Silly man, Geoffrey. Should have your calculator there, the one beside the desk in the office, the one you use for all the arithmetic of ICH, then you'd know the boy would be only shopping for one, and how many lire he would save that way. Only for one, because there will only be one mouth. Not on the bloody bread list, Geoffrey, because you'll be past food, past caring about the ache in your guts.

Geoffrey Harrison's voice rose in crescendo, down the paths of the wood, high with the branches, fluttered the thrushes and blackbirds.

'Don't hurt me, Giancarlo. Please, please, don't hurt me..

He was answered far back, from the shadows among the trees, distant and beyond sight, by the rampage of a dog's bark.

And in the wake of the bark was the drumming of running feet and the crash of branches swept aside.

An avalanche, circling and nearing.

Giancarlo had crouched, bent double, at the sound of the dog.

At the noise of the approach of men he surged towards Harrison, pulled him to the limit of the wire and flung himself into the gap between his prisoner and the earth roof where the roots had taken the ground high out of the pit. He panted for breath, wriggled to get lower, held the gun at the lower hairs of Harrison's head.

' If you shout now you are dead.'

The gun squirming against his neck, Harrison played his part, the one he was familiar with. 'Run, you little fool. Run now.'

He could sense the boy's shock of terror imparted through their clothes, body to body, flesh warmth, through the quivering and pulsing of the blood veins. He didn't know why he called, only that this is what he would have done. This was his way.

Avoid contact, avoid impact, stall the moment, the lifestyle of Geoffrey Harrison.

'If you go now you have a chance.'

He felt the boy drive deeper into the pit, and then the voice, small and reeded.

' I need you, 'Arrison.'

'Now, you have to go now.' Father and mother, didn't the little bugger understand? Time for running, time for ducking, time for weaving.

' If I go now, they will kill me.'

What was he supposed to do? Feel sorry for the little pig?

Wipe his bottom for him, clean his pants out?

'We stay together, 'Arrison. That is what Franca would have done.'

The man and the boy, ears up, lying in the shallow hole and listening.

Around them, unseen, among the trees an army advanced, clumsy and intimidating in its approach, breaking aside the wood that impeded its progress. Closing on them, sealing them, the net tightening. Fractured and splintered branches in front and behind them, stamped leaves and curses of discomfort to right and left. And the baying of dogs.

Harrison turned his body from his side, a ponderous movement, then twisted his neck further until he could see the face of the boy. 'It is too late, Giancarlo.' He spoke with a kind of wonderment, astonished because the table was turned and the fear exchanged. 'You had to go when I said.'

'Shut up,' the boy spat back at him, but there was a shiver in his voice. And then more slowly as if the control were won with great effort, 'That is not our way.'

Carboni with his pistol drawn, Vellosi trailing in one hand a submachine-gun, Carpenter keeping with them, all were running in their own fashion down the narrow path, spurred on by the shouts of the advance, and the roars, fierce and aggressive, full and deep-throated, of the police attack dogs. They sprinted on the shadowed surface, buried in the surrealism of the dawn mist that ebbed between the tree towers.

Carpenter saw the shape of the polizia vice brigadiere materialize from the foliage at the pathside, rising to block Carboni and Vellosi. The stampede stopped, men crouched about them and struggled to control the heaving of their lungs that they might be quieter. The trees were infested, the undergrowth alive. Static from the portable radios, whispered voices, distorted replies. A council of war. Grown and elderly men on their knees, huddled to hear, the weapons in their hands.

'Carpenter, come close,' Carboni called, his voice blanket-shrouded. 'The dogs heard voices and barked. They are about a hundred metres from us. We are all around them but I do not wish to move further till there is light. We wait here for the sun.'

'Battestini, will he pack it in, will he give himself up?'

The big sad eyes rolled at Carpenter, the shoulders heaved their gesture. 'We have to try. If the spell of Tantardini is still on h i m

… '

Left unsaid because Carpenter mouthed his obscenity and understood.

'But he can kill him now, while we are here.'

'We wait for the sun.' Carboni turned away, resumed the hush of conference.

This was where it all ended. In a damp wood with mud on your shoes and dirt on the knees of your trousers. Right, Archie.

Where the family picnickers might have been, or boys with tents, or a kid with his condom and his girl. Only the method and the style to be decided. To be determined only whether it was champagne or a mahogany box. You're within rock-throwing distance of him, Archie. You could stand up and shout and he'd hear you. A few seconds running, you're that close. God, the bastard can't shoot him now. Not now, not after all this. Not after Violet.

The dawn came steadily, imperceptibly, winnowing behind the trees and across the leaves, cloaking the men who peered forward and fingered the mechanisms of their firearms. Drawn-out, lethargic, mocking their impatience, the light filtered into the wood.