Red Fox

CHAPTER EIGHT

What in Christ's name am I doing here?

The first thoughts of Archie Carpenter. He was naked under a sheet, illuminated by the light that pierced the plastic blind slats.

He flailed his arms at the hanging cloud of cigarette smoke, spat out the reek of brandy from the glasses that littered the dressing-table and window-sill.

Archie Carpenter sat up in bed, putting his memory together, slotting the evidence into place. Half the bloody night he'd spent with the men from ICH. All the way from the airport in the limousine he'd listened and they'd talked, he'd asked and they'd briefed. Convincing the big man from Chemical House of their competence, that's how he saw it. They'd taken care of his bags at the hotel with a finger snap and tramped into his room, rung down for a bottle of cognac and kept up the barrage till past three. He'd slept less than four hours and he had to show for it a headache and the clear knowledge that the intervention of Archie Carpenter had no chance of affecting Geoffrey Harrison's problems. He climbed out of bed and felt the weakness in his legs and the mind-bending pain behind his temples. Half midnight, at the latest, they wound things up in Motspur Park. Had to, didn't they? With babysitters at a pound an hour there wasn't much time after the ice-cream and fruit salad to sit on your arse and chat about the rate of income tax. And the brandy didn't flow, not out there in the suburbs, not at seven pounds a bottle.

A quick splash after coffee and the Mums and Dads were on their way. Not that the Carpenters had kids… that's another trial, Archie. Not for now, old sunshine.

He'd need a shower to flush it out of him.

Beside his bed, under a filled ashtray, was his diary. He thumbed through for the number the Managing Director had given him. A chap called Charlesworth, from the Embassy and said to be helpful. He dialled, listened to the telephone ringing out, took a time to answer. What you'd expect at this time in the morning.

'Pronto, Charlesworth.'

'My name's Carpenter. Archie Carpenter of ICH. I'm the company's Security Director…' Since when had he had a title like that? But it sounded right, just sort of slipped out like a palmed visiting card. 'They've asked me to come out here and see what's going on. With this fellow Harrison, I mean.'

' It's nice of you to ring, but I'm a bit out of touch since yesterday evening.'

"They said in London you'd put yourself out in this business.

I was asked to pass on the thanks of the company.'

'That's very kind of you, it was nothing.'

'They thought it was. I have to go out to this EUR place wherever that is, and I have to visit Harrison's missus, so I'd like to meet you before that. First thing.'

Carpenter was aware of a hesitation on the line. A natural request, but it had sparked prevarication.

' I don't think there's very much that I can tell you.'

' I'd like to hear views other than from the company people.

They're Italians, every last one of them. I'd like your views.'

'There really isn't much that I can tell you.'

'Not in the line of duty?' Carpenter clipped in, cold, awake, the brandy disgorged.

' I double between political and security. Security doesn't warrant a great deal of time, and the desk is pretty loaded with the political stuff at the moment. My plate's more than full.'

'So is Harrison's.' A flare of anger from Carpenter. What was the bloody fool at? 'He's British isn't he? Entitled to a bit of help from the Embassy.'

'He is,' came the cautious reply. 'But there's debate in the shop about how much help.'

'You've lost me.'

'I'm sorry, then.'

Carpenter closed his eyes, grimaced. Begin again, Archie boy.

Start all over again.

'Mr Charlesworth, let's not waste each other's time. I'm not a moron, and I've kidnapping coming out of my ears after last night with the locals. I know it's not straightforward. I understand the threat that exists, that Harrison's on the edge. I know it's not just a matter of sitting in the front parlour and waiting for the shareholders to cough up so Harrison can come back and kiss his sweet wife hello. I know the risks for Harrison. They told me about Ambrosio, shot because a mask slipped and he saw his captors. I heard how they chopped Michelangelo Ambrosio. They told me about de Capua. Now on to the other side of things. I did eight years in Special Branch before I moved to ICH. My rank at Scotland Yard was Chief Inspector. This isn't the time for a "need to know" show.'

A laugh on the line. "Thanks for the speech, Mr Carpenter.'

'What's the problem, then?'

' I wouldn't want what I say repeated.'

' I've signed the bloody Official Secrets Act, Mr Charlesworth, just like you have.'

' It's a tedious matter of keeping our hands clean. Theoretically it's a criminal offence to pay ransom money, and it would be damaging to us if we could be linked with such a felony. In the Ambassador's view this is a private matter between ICH and a gang of Italian criminals. He doesn't want us to be seen to be condoning the extortion of money, and he feels that any public involvement could give the impression that we're bending the knee to criminal action. If Harrison worked for Whitehall we wouldn't be paying, it's as simple as that.'

'And a chat in your office… '

'That's involvement in the Ambassador's eyes.'

'That's bloody ridiculous,' Carpenter barked into the telephone.

' I agree, particularly in a country where ransom payment is the normal way of extrication. If you're that well briefed you'll have heard of a man called Pommarici in Milano. He's a prosecutor and has tried to freeze kidnap victims' assets, to prevent payment. He l o s t

… the families said he was endangering the lives of their loved ones. It all went back to the jungle. So what it adds up to is that the Embassy has no role to play. Off the record we can help, but not if it's visible. Do you read me?'

Carpenter slopped back on to his bed. ' I read you, Mr Charlesworth.'

'Give me a ring this afternoon. We'll have an early bite in town.'

' I'd like that,' Carpenter said and rang off. Poor bloody Harrison, but how inconsiderate of him. To get himself kidnapped and embarrass HMG. Not a very good show, my old love.

The wooden shutters, bent and paint-peeled but still capable of restricting light, stayed late across the upper window of the narrow terraced home of Vanni, the driver. The noises made by children and cars in the cobbled street behind the main road through Cosoleto merely lulled the man as he lay in the drowsy pleasure of his bed.

It had been close to midnight when he had returned to his home, and there was the radiance in his worn face to tell his wife that the journey had been profitable. She had not asked what the work had been, what the danger, what the stake, but had busied herself first in the kitchen, then against the muscles of his stomach in the great bed that had been her mother's. And when he had slept she had slid from the sheets and looked with a glowing excitement at the hard roll of banknotes before replacing them in the hip pocket of the trousers thrown with abandon on a chair. A good man he was to her, and a kind man.

While she worked in the kitchen beneath, Vanni was content to idle the early morning hours. Not time yet for him to dress, throw on a freshly ironed shirt, put a sheen on his shoes and drive his car into Palmi for a coffee and a talk with Mario who would make a similar journey if ever he woke – she was an animal, Mario's woman, consumed in the brute passion of the Sicilians.

A coffee with Mario if he had satisfied his woman, if he had the sap to leave his bed.

And when Claudio had returned on the morning rapido, then perhaps they all would be summoned to the villa of the capo to take a glass of Campari and talk of the olive trees, the goat herds, and the death of an old man of the village. They would not speak of anything that was immediate and close to them, but they would smile at their mutual knowledge, and each in his own way reflect a peculiar glory.

At least another hour Vanni could keep to his bed.

At Criminalpol, where the Rome police forensic effort is mounted, the first particles of evidence were being gathered in the scientific analysis section. Brought from the central telephone exchange were recordings of all calls received by ICH in EUR and of those directed to the private number of the Harrisons. One of the most far-reaching advances in the hunt for the kidnappers had been the development of a voice bank programmed for the computer to match similarities. The same man, the electronics decided, who had called ICH with the ransom demand had also made the abortive call to Mrs Harrison. Nothing particular in that. The stir of interest among the technicians came when they fed to the brain scores of recordings made from previous interceptions, and sought a similarity with their latest material. On the read-out screens the file on the Marchetti case was flashed. Eight and a half months earlier. A four-year-old boy. Taken from a foreign national nanny in the Aventino district of Rome. No arrests. No clues left on site. A ransom payment of 250 million paid. Marked notes. No sign of ransom money. The Marchetti communication and the calls on the Harrison case had been made by the same man. Vocal interpretation located an accent from the extreme south.

The night work of machines. The recordings were sent by line to the Questura to await the arrival of Giuseppe Carboni.

The Agente di Custodie hurried from the prison officers' mess to the main gate of the Asinara gaol. He had not eaten the breakfast provided for the men coming off night shift after they had supervised the first feeding of the prisoners. The weight of the message that he must telephone to the contact number bore down on him, spiriting up the fear waves of nausea.

His recruitment as a pigeon for the leading members of the NAP held on Asinara when they wished to communicate with the outside world had been a long-drawn-out affair. As a badger will sniff and dig for choice roots, so members of the group at liberty had discovered the turmoil that the Agente and his family lived with as they devoted themselves to the care of their ailing spina bifida baby. Reports had come back of crippling doctors' bills in the town of Sassari on the Sardinian mainland to the south of the prison bland. There had been word of the inability of the father to pay for visits to Roma or Milano for consultation with specialists.

The Agente had been ripe for plucking. There was money for his wife, used notes in envelopes. He was no longer in debt and muttered instead and without conviction to the medical men of the help of a distant relative. Not that the child could improve, only that the conscience of the parents might be easier. The numbers that he must telephone changed frequently, and the cryptic messages that he must pass on became a deluge.

On Asinara is the maximum security cage of the Italian forces of justice, escape deemed impossible. It is the resting-place of the most dedicated of the male urban guerrilla community, the re-ceptacle for those found guilty of armed insurrection against the State. Originally a prison colony, then a gaol for the liberal few who opposed Mussolini's fascism, the gaol drifted into disrepair before the refurbishment that was necessary for the incarceration of the new enemy. The renovation had been from the drawing-board of the magistrate Riccardo Palma; he had done his work well, and died for it. But through the Agente the words of the Chief of Staff of the NAP could pass beyond the locked cell doors, along the watched corridors with their high closed-circuit cameras, through the puny exercise yards, piercing the lattice of the electrically controlled double gates and their dynamite-proof bars. The message had been given to the Agente as he lined the prisoners in a queue for their food, slipped into his hand, drowned in the sweat sea of his palm.

Beyond the gates and heading for his home, the free house of the prison service where only anxiety and pain awaited him, he had read the message on the scrap of sharply torn paper.

Per La Tantardini. Rappresaglia. Numero quattro.

For Tantardini. Reprisal. Number Four.

The Agente, held in the clutch of compromise, walked in a tortured daze that vanished as the pale broken face of his wife greeted his arrival at the front door. His child was dying, his wife was failing, and who cared, who helped? He kissed her per-functorily, went to their room to change out of uniform, and then looked in silence through the half-open door at the child asleep in her cot. In his own clothes and without explanation he strode down into the hamlet to telephone to the number he had been given at Porto Torres across the narrow channel on Sardinia. Within one day, perhaps two, he would witness on the little black and white television screen in the corner of the living-room the results of his courier work.

The swollen pressure of his bladder finally awoke Geoffrey Harrison. He stretched himself, jerking at the handcuff, wrenching at his wrist, aware immediately of the inhibitions of his slept-in clothes. Still the suit that he had dressed in for the drive to the office, still with the tie at his neck, and only the top button undone as a concession to the circumstances. The sun had not yet played on the roof of the barn and he was cold, shivering. His socks smelt, pervading the limited space between the rafters and the bales; the nylon ones that he always wore in the summer and that he changed when he came home in the early evening.

Didn't speak the language, did he? Had never taken a Berlitz.

He could only order a meal and greet his office colleagues at the start of the day. So what to shout to the men in the other half of the barn? He wanted to urinate, wanted to squat and relieve himself, and didn't know how to say it. Basic human function, basic human language. He couldn't mess his trousers. That was revulsion, and so from necessity came the shout. Couldn't have an accident.

'Hey. Down there. Come here.' In English as if because of his urgency they would understand him. They'll come, Geoffrey, they'll want to know why the prisoner shouts. 'Come here.'

He heard the sudden movement, and the voices of two men that were closer. A creaking from the swing of the barn door that was hidden from him by the bales, and the ladder-top slid into position and shook from a man's weight. A gun first, black and ugly, held in a firm grip, and following it the contortion of a hood with eye slits. Eerie and awful in the half light before it gave way to the recognizable shape of shoulders and a man's trunk. The gesture of the gun was unmistakable. He obeyed the order of the waved barrel and stumbled back as far as the chain would allow. He pointed down to his zip, then across with his free hand to his buttocks. A grotesque mime. And the hooded head shook and was gone, lost below the lip of the hay.

There were noisy chuckles from below and then a farm bucket arched up, from an unseen hand. Old and rusted and once of galvanized steel. A folded wad of newspaper pages followed. He was left to a slight privacy as he pulled the bucket towards him, turned his back on the ladder and fingered at his belt. Humiliated and hurt, one arm aloft and fastened, he contorted his body over the bucket. He speeded his functions, willing his bladder and bowels to be emptied, before the slitted eyes returned to laugh at his dropped pants and his bared thighs and genitals. How half the world does it, Geoffrey, so get used to it. Don't think I can bloody well take it, not every day, not like this. God, what a bloody stink. The sandwich… all stink and wind. Remember the sandwich, back sometime yesterday, that the men in the van gave you, the curse in the guts. He groped down for the paper; damp with the morning dew, must have been outside through the night, and it tore soggily in his hands. He wanted to cry, wanted to weep and be pitied. Harrison cleaned himself as best he could, tears smarting, pulled at his underwear and trousers, zipped himself and fastened the belt.

' I've finished. You can come and take it.'

Movement and repetition. The ladder moved as before and the gun and the hood reappeared. He pointed to the bucket.

' I've used it. You can take it away.'

Just a belly laugh from the covered face and a jumping in merriment of the shoulders, and the hood sinking and going, and the muffled call of fun and entertainment. A bloody great joke, Geoffrey. Do you see it, do you see why he's splitting himself?

You asked for the bucket, they've given it to you, given it for keeps. They've given you a little present. It's going to sit there, a couple of yards away. Stinking and rotten and foul. Own pee, own shit, own waste. You've given them a bloody good laugh.

'Come here. Come back.' All the command that he could summon. The tone of an order, unmistakable, and enough to arrest the disappearance of the hood. The laugh was cut.

'Come here.'

The head came upwards, revealed again the shoulders.

Geoffrey Harrison leaned back on his left foot, then swung himself forward as far as the chain permitted. He drove his right instep against the bucket, saw it rise and explode, career against the shoulder of the man, spill its load across his mask and faded cotton shirt. Stained, dripping, and spread.

'You can have it back,' Harrison giggled. 'You can have it again now.'

What in God's name did you do that for?

Don't know. Just sort of happened.

They'll bloody murder you, Geoffrey Harrison, they'll half tear you apart for that.

It's what they're for, those bastards, to be crapped and peed on.

Right, dead right. When you've a bloody army at your back.

You're an idiot, Geoffrey Harrison.

I don't know why I did it.

You won't do it again.

They came together for him. The other man leading, the one with the smears on his shirt and hood a rung on the ladder behind. No words, no consultation, no verbal reproach. Nothing but the beat of their fists and the drumming of their boots against his face and chest, and the softness of his lower belly and his thighs and shins. They worked on him as if he were a suspended punchbag, hanging from the beam. They spent their strength against him till they panted and gasped from their effort, and he was limp and defenceless and no longer capable of even minimal self-protection. Vicious, angered creatures, because the act of defiance was unfamiliar and the bully had risen in them, sweet and safe. Harrison crumpled down on to the hay floor, feeling the pain that echoed in his body, yearning for release, wishing for death. The worst was at his ribcage, covered now in slow funnels of agony. When did you ever do anything like that in your life before, Geoffrey? Never before, never stood up, not to be counted. And no bastard here this morning with his calculator. No one there to see him, to cheer and applaud. Just some mice under his feet, and the stink of his body, and the knowledge that there was a man close by who loathed him and would cut off his life with as little ceremony as picking the muck from his nostrils.

He worked a smile over the pain of his jaw and gazed at the emptied bucket. He'd tell Violet about it, tell her it blow by blow.

Not what they did to him afterwards, but up till then, and his foot still ached.

He struggled upright, knees shaking, stomach in torment.

'You're animals,' he shouted. 'Slobbering, miserable swine.

Fit to shovel shit, you know that.' The scream wobbled under the low cut of the rafters. 'Get down in your shit and wash your-selves, you pigs. Rub your faces in it, because that's what makes pigs happy. Pig shit, pig thick.'

And then he listened, braced for a new onslaught, and heard the murmur of their voices. They took no notice of him, ignored him. He knew that he could shout till he lifted the roof and that they had no fear of it. He was separated from every civilization that he knew of.

Without hunger, without thirst, numbed by the annihilation of the big Calabresi, Giancarlo sat on a bench in the Termini, waiting the hours away. Close to exhaustion, near to drifting to fitful sleep, hands masking his face, elbows digging at his legs, he thought of Franca.

There had been girls in Pescara, the daughters of the friends of Father and Mother. Flowing skirts, starched blouses and knee boots, and the clucking approval of Mother as she brought the cream cakes out. The ones that giggled and knew nothing, existed with emptied minds. Crucifixes of gold at their necks and anger in their mouths if he reached for buttons or zips or eye-fasteners.

There had been girls at the University. Brighter and more adult stars who regarded him as an adolescent. There he was someone who could make up the numbers for the cinema or the beach, but who was shunned when it was dark, when the clinching began.

The spots, the acne, and the titter behind the hand. It should have been different with the Autonomia, but the girls would not grovel for a novice, for a recruit, and Giancarlo had to prove himself and win the acclamation. Far out in the front of the crowd, running forward with the fire eating into the rag at the hilt of the milk bottle, arcing the Molotov into the air. The battle for approval, and his ankle had turned. Would they even remember him now, the girls of the Autonomia? Giancarlo Battestini had no experience other than in the arms, between the thighs, wrapped warm by Franca. It was the crucible of his knowledge. A long time he thought of her.

Franca with the breasts golden and devoid of the rim of sun-tan, Franca with the cherry-pip nipples, with the flattened belly holed by a single crater, Franca with the wild forest that had tangled and caught his fingers. The one who had chosen him.

Darling, darling, sweet Franca. In his ears was the sound of her breathing, the beat of her movement on the bed, her cry as she had spent herself.

I am coming, Franca. I am coming to take you from them, he whispered to himself.

I am coming, Franca. Believe it, know it. Thinking of Franca as the station began to live again, to move and function, participate in a new day. Thinking of Franca as he walked to the ticket counter and paid the single fare on the rapido to Reggio.

Thinking of Franca as he climbed up to a first-class carriage.

Away from the herd of Neapolitans and Sicilians with their bundles and salads and children and hallucinating noises of discussion and counter-discussion. No other passengers in the compartment. Thinking of Franca as the train pulled away from the low platform, and crawled between the sidings and junctions and high flats draped in the day's first washing. The boy slumped back, slid his heels on to the seat in front and felt the pressure power of the P38 against his back.

Out across the flatlands to the south of the city, carving through the grass fields and the close-packed vineyards, skirting the small towns of Cisterna di Latina and Sezze away on the hills, and Terracina at the coast, the train quickened its pace. Blurring the telegraph poles, homing and seeking out the dust-dry mountains and the bright skies of the Aspromonte.

'Believe in me, Franca. Believe in me because I am coming.'

The boy spoke aloud above the crash of wheels on the welded track. 'Tomorrow they will know of me. Tomorrow they will know my name. Tomorrow you will be proud of your little fox.'