Killing Ground

Chapter Ten

'Do I really need to know this?'

The grievance, the story of the 'pressurization' of a young girl from south Devon, was climbing the ladder. From Detective Sergeant Harry Compton to his detective superintendent. From the detective superintendent to the commander of S06. From the commander to the assistant commissioner (Specialist Operations). At each step of the ladder the grievance was elaborated.

'I rather think, Fred, that you do – and I'd like to hear the views of colleagues.'

Around the polished table, bright in spring light thrown through the plate-glass windows, in a room on the sixth floor of the New Scotland Yard building, were the commanders who headed what they believed to be the elite specialized teams of the Metropolitan Police. Comfortable in their chairs, at the end of their monthly meeting, were the men who ran Anti-Terrorist Branch, International and Organized Crime, the Flying Squad, Special Branch, Royal and Diplomatic Protection and S06.

The assistant commissioner moved behind them, refilling the coffee cups from a jug.

'Right, shoot then.'

'Am I peeing in a gale? None of you knew that the DEA, our American friends, were recruiting in this country?'

Gestures and shrugs and shaken heads from Anti-Terrorist branch and Special Branch and from Royal and Diplomatic Protection, hardly likely to have been blown past their desks. The I; lying Squad man said that he rarely dealt with Americans, when he did it was FBI and, snigger, then when he was short of a good meal on expenses.

International and Organized Crime denied flatly that he had joint operations with DEA currently in place.

'Get to the point, please.'

'Of course, Fred. I am not a happy man, I regard this situation as intolerable.

American agencies are based in this country on the very clear understanding that they operate through us, and that means they do not have the right to run independent operations. What we know, no thanks to them, is that a DEA operative flew here from Rome in pursuit of a letter sent from Palermo to a Miss Charlotte Parsons, teacher and first job, aged twenty-three, just a naive youngster. The letter the DEA tracked was an invitation to Miss Parsons that she should go to work for a Palermo family as a child-minder and nanny. The DEA wanted that girl in that household, they worked her over, they put quite intolerable pressure on her. A member of my team has established, at stiletto point, from I)evon and Cornwall, that the locals behaved like cowboy bullies at the DEA's request, took the girl on a tour of druggie housing ••states, to a morgue to gawp at an overdose victim, to a hospital to visit a narcotic-addicted baby. That is disgusting abuse of influence.'

'I've not heard anything that I want to know.'

'It is our belief that Miss Parsons is now exposed to real hazard. Whether you want to know it or not, sir, you'll hear it. Sorry, but this gets up my nose. Not any old family, no, but a quality, tasty, mafia family. Miss Parsons has been kicked by the DEA's boot into l he Ruggerio family. She has gone to work for the younger brother of Mario Ruggerio.'

The commander paused for effect. Not that Royal and Diplomatic Protection, paring his nails, knew who the hell Mario Ruggerio was, nor Anti-Terrorist Branch, who was swirling the coffee dregs in his cup, nor Special Branch. Flying Squad was gazing at the ceiling, frowning, trying to gather in a memory of that name. He gestured to International and Organized Crime.

'Yes, I know the name. It's in most of that interminable stuff the Italians chuck at us.

Mario Ruggerio is coming through, fast- track, to fill the vacuum created when the Italians finally put a bit of their act together and lifted Riina and Bagarella. Same mould as Liggio or Badalamenti or Riina, a peasant who's made the big time.'

'And a killer?'

The commander of the International and Organized Crime unit grimaced. 'That's integral to his job description. Riina had a hundred and fifty killings down to him, forty done himself, mostly manual strangulation. Goes without saying.'

'Kills without hesitation, kills what threatens?'

'Reasonable assumption.'

The assistant commissioner rapped his silver pencil on the table, hard. 'Where are we going?'

'When challenged their Country Chief gave us a right put-down. I'll tell you where we're going. The DEA, the Americans, have inserted this innocent young woman, untrained and with zero experience of undercover, into a prime and vicious mafia family. Stands to reason, the Americans see her as an access source. Christ, down there the Italians cannot even protect their own judges and magistrates who're ring-fenced with hardware – what sort of protection are they going to be able to give this young woman? Nil.'

The hps of the assistant commissioner pursed. 'Do I not hear a little of injured pride?

Wasn't there a word of a little spat in Lyon last year, the Europol conference, rather a public put-down of one of your people? I would hope, most sincerely, that we are not edging into vendetta country.'

'I resent that.'

The assistant commissioner smiled, icily. 'And we are, I believe, supposed to be on the same side, wouldn't you agree?'

'There are potential consequences. Because of the possible consequences, I felt it my duty to raise this matter. A naive and pressurized young woman has been inserted into an area of hazard. Take the bad side. She's blown out. Our little Miss Parsons, of south Devon, schoolteacher, ends in a ditch with her throat cut and her body showing all the marks of sadistic torture. Italian media, with their cameras, crawling all over her body, our papers and TV picking it up. Going to try to wash our hands of responsibility, are we? Going to say, are we, that she was put in this position of real danger from right under our bloody noses, and we did nothing? A lamb to the slaughter, and we did nothing? Would you, gentlemen, sit on your backsides if it were your daughter?

'Course you bloody wouldn't, you'd raise the bloody roof.'

'What do you want?'

The commander of S06 said, 'Try me on what I don't want – I don't want bloody Americans running riot in this country on recruitment trawls, short of consideration of consequences.'

'I said, what do you want?'

'I want Charlotte Parsons extricated. You postured that we were on the same side.

The same side is co-operation. They didn't co-operate. I want the Americans sent a message. I want Charlotte Parsons brought home.'

'Shit in the fan,' from Special Branch.

'Would kind of knock down bridges,' from Royal and Diplomatic I 'rotection.

'Poor friends, the Americans, if peeved. They'd not enjoy interference,^' from Flying Squad.

'I rely on their help, be reluctant to see them offended,' from Anti-Terrorist Branch.

'I'm taking S06's position, we'd be hung on lampposts if it went sour, if she came back in a box,' from International and Organized Crime.

'1 want her brought home before harm comes to her.'

Silence fell. The assistant commissioner stared out of the window. Where the buck should stop was in front of him, in front of the neatly piled papers on which his silver pencil beat a slight tattoo, the commander of S06 watched him. The commander was going no higher, but the assistant commissioner was five years the younger and would have his eyes on the top job and the knighthood. Squirming, wasn't he? Working over the tangent lines of consequences. Wriggling, wasn't he? The commander of S06 felt himself in good shape because the responsibility for consequences was now shared with his superior and with his colleagues. But the bastard, true to form, fudged.

'Before we confront the DEA, I want more information on Mario Ruggerio.'

'Like what he has for breakfast, what colour are his socks?'

'Steady, my friend – detail on Mario Ruggerio. There's a slot in my diary same time next week, just the two of us. I'm sure it'll keep for a week. Don't want to run before we can walk. And, so that I can better evaluate, I want to know more about this girl.'

'Hello – wasn't any trouble finding it.'

She had lied again, but then the lying was a habit. Good at lying, Charley had told Angela that it was important for her to go again to Palermo. So reasonable a lie, so fluent. 'It's the same as if you've been a driver in an accident, Angela, then you have to get back behind the wheel as quickly as possible. It's really kind of you to offer, but I need to be alone, just as I was alone then. I don't want anyone with me. I want to walk the streets, get it out of my system. Tell you what, Angela, I'm not taking that lovely bag that Peppino bought, I'm going to buy one of those stomach things that tourists have. I don't know what time I'll be back… I have to do this for myself, I have to put it behind me.'

The gardener had let her out of the gates, the bloody 'lechie', and she had almost run down the street from the villa in impatience to get clear of the place. Peppino was long gone, driven away while she was still asleep. She had already taken the children to school and kindergarten. The baby was sleeping. When she'd talked to Angela, lied, she'd thought that Angela was close to spitting out the great confidences. Little Charley, she could be a vicious little bitch, she hadn't wanted to hang around and hear the confidences, nor the weeping. Stick to the pills, Angela, keep popping them. She had run to get the bloody miserable place behind her…

'You are well, recovered?'

'Do I look awful?'

'The bruise has gone, the scratches are good.' He was so damn solemn. 'You do not look awful.'

'Aren't you going to invite me in?'

She grinned, she felt mischief. He was so damn solemn, and so damn shy. He stepped aside with courtesy.

'It is a big mess, I am sorry.'

'No problem.'

She was early. Because she had lied well and run fast down to the sea shore in Mondello she had caught the bus before the one she had planned to take into Palermo.

She wore her tight jeans that hugged her waist and contoured her stomach and thighs, and the T-shirt with the wide cut at the neck that left her shoulders bare. She stepped through the door. She had taken time, unusual for her, with her lipstick and with her eyes, and she wondered now, as Benny let her into his apartment, if Angela would have registered that she had been careful with her cosmetics, might have known she lied.

Perhaps it was a mistake to have been careful with the lipstick and with her eyes, and maybe Axel bloody Moen would have slagged her off for it. The apartment was a single big room of an old building. A small cooker in a dark corner beside a washbasin that was filled with dirty plates and mugs, a wardrobe and a chest, a single bed not made and with the pyjamas lying dumped on it, a table covered with papers and a hard chair and an easy chair that was covered with clothes. There were posters on the walls.

'I was going to clean it, but you are early.' Said as an apology, without criticism.

'It's lovely. It's what I don't have…'

It was what she yearned for, her own place and her own space. A place, space, where she was not a lodger in her mother's home, not a paid guest in Angela Ruggerio's villa.

She was a lying little bitch and a bullying little bitch. She had invited herself into his life. She went to the basin and ran the water till it was hot. She didn't ask him if he wanted his plates and his mugs cleaned, she did it. She ignored him and he hovered behind her. The poster on the wall above the basin was of a pool of blood on a street and the single slogan, 'Basta!'. When she had finished at the washbasin she went to the bed and stripped back the sheets. and saw the indentation where his body had been, and she made the bed neatly and folded hospital corners as her mother had taught her. She put his pyjamas under the pillows. It was a narrow bed, a priest's bed, and she wondered if it whispered when his body moved on it, a chaste bed. The poster, fastened with Sellotape to the wall above the bed, was of white doves rising. She didn't look at him, it was her game with him, and at the chair she started to fold the clothes and to take a suit back to the wardrobe. In the bottom of the wardrobe she found dirty shirts and socks and underpants; she assumed he went back to his mother every week with a bag of washing. She turned. Beside the door was a poster on the wall showing, black and white, the long snaking column of a funeral and mourners. Her hands were on her hips.

Charley grinned. It was her cheek.

'Another Sicilian boy who needs a woman to look after him. Christ, how did you survive in London?'

She had embarrassed him. 'Where I lived, there were men and there were women. I used to bring back the left-over chips at the time we closed the McDonald's – they would have been thrown away. I fed the women, the women did my washing and they cleaned my room.'

'Grieves me to hear there's a male chauvinist piggery alive and well in London.'

He did not understand. He stood awkwardly. What she liked about him, he seemed so bloody vulnerable.

'So, that was me saying thanks, saying you were brilliant. Thanks for being brilliant when everyone else looked the other way. Now, I've been really conscientious, I've read the guidebook. I want to see the duomo, the Quattro Canti on the Marqueda, the old market in the Vucciria. I want to get to the Palazzo Reale for the Cappella Palatina.

I reckon we can do the Palazzo Sclafani as well before lunch. Big lunch, a good bottle, then if we've the stamina-'

'I am sorry…'

'What for?'

'You did not give me a telephone number for you. I could not telephone you.' He hung his head. 'I do not have the time to walk in Palermo.'

Charley blinked. Trying to be casual, trying not to show that she had looked forward to the day, the escape, ever since she'd rung him. 'So you got your room cleaned up and you don't have to do the guide bit, lucky old you. I suppose that makes us quits.'

He fidgeted. 'I have the day off from the school. It was my intention to escort you around Palermo. I have the school, and I have another life. For the work of my second life I have to deliver, urgently, some things.'

'I'll come.'

'I think, Charley, you would find it very boring.'

As if he sought to dismiss her. Shit. She could turn round and she could walk out of the door. As if he told her that she intruded.

'Try me. What's the second life? I've nowhere else to go. I mean, the duomo has been there best part of a thousand years, expect it'll keep another week. Where have you got to go?'

'I have to go to San Giuseppe Jato, and then to Corleone…'

'Heard of Corleone. Interesting, yes? Never heard of the other one. Is that countryside?'

'It is into the country.' He seemed to hesitate, as if undecided. She gazed back into his quiet almond-coloured eyes. Come on, Benny, don't play the bloody tosser. She could not tell him about the claustrophobia she had fled from for a day. 'I am a teacher, but I have also other work. I have to see people in San Giuseppe Jato and in Corleone, and I think you would not find it interesting.'

'Then I'll sit in the car.'

'My other work is for the Anti-Mafia Co-ordination Group of Palermo – how can that be of interest to you? Can we not fix another day?'

Her chin jutted. Axel bloody Moen would have told her to run, not to bother to close the door, run and keep running. The watch was on her wrist. His fingers, twisting, were fine and gentle, a pianist's. She should never relax. His face was of narrow angles, but without threat. She understood the posters on the walls of the room. She challenged him.

'I think that might be of more interest than the duomo. I think I might learn more about Sicily than from the Quattro Canti and the Cappella Palatina, yes?'

As a response he went to the door and unhooked his anorak. He looked around him, as if his room had been invaded, as if he had been boxed and bullied, as if he were too polite to complain, from the basin with the cleaned plates and mugs, to the chair from which the clothes had been taken, to the bed that had been made. He led her outside and onto the wide landing above the old staircase. He turned two keys in the heavy mortice locks.

'Safer than Fort Knox.'

So polite. 'I'm sorry, I don't understand.'

'Just something you say, forget it, something silly. Benny, why do you work against the mafia?'

He started to walk to the staircase. He said, matter-of-fact, 'Because the mafia killed my father. When he was driving me home from the school, they shot him.'

Pasquale had run along three blocks from where the bus had stopped, and run into the building, and not waited for the elevator, and run up three flights of stairs, and leaned panting against the wall while he waited for the apartment door to be opened. He was seven minutes late. He had not overslept, he was late because his car had not started, battery gone, and the man on the floor below who had the jump leads was not at home, and… He was let inside. Jesu, and they were waiting for him, and they wore their vests and they carried their guns. The magistrate, Tardelli, sat in a chair in the hall with his coat on and his briefcase between his feet, and he looked up at Pasquale and there seemed to be sympathy on his face. The one who drove the chase car scowled and looked at his watch pointedly. The one who rode passenger in the chase car stared at the ceiling as if he did not wish to have a dog in this fight. The one who sat in the back of the chase car stared at him hard and without pity.

The maresciallo said, 'We would have gone without you, but it is against regulations to go when we do not have the full complement. Dr Tardelli has been obliged to wait for you.'

Panting hard. 'Car didn't start – battery gone – my apologies, dottore – one minute, please, one minute…'

He felt sick. He felt like dirt. He stumbled away to the spare bedroom, still decorated and furnished for two of the children taken by their mother back to the north. Beside the wardrobe, empty, was the reinforced-steel gun box, full. Fumbling for the key that opened the gun box, and knowing the angered presence of the maresciallo behind him.

Jesu, the wrong key. Finding the correct key. Taking out the Heckler amp; Koch, dropping a magazine that clattered on the wood floor. Blessings to Mary the Virgin that he had refilled the magazine the previous evening because it was routine that magazines must be emptied at the end of each shift or the mechanism might jam, grovelling thanks to Mary the Virgin that he had refilled the magazine. Snatching the Beretta 9mm with the shoulder holster from his numbered hook, and more magazines for the Beretta, and a box of bullet shells for the Beretta because he had not filled those magazines.

Crouching down and searching in the heap for the bulk of his vest. He stood. He had to peel off his coat, sling the harness of the holster for the Beretta. He had to heave the vest over his head, heavy onto his shoulders. He had to throw on his coat again. The box of bullet shells for the Beretta into the coat pocket, and the emptied magazines. He slapped one magazine into the machine- pistol, and the eyes of the maresciallo were fixed on him, and, thank Jesu, he remembered to check that the safety was on. He breathed hard.

For a moment he stood. Blessings to Mary the Virgin. He came back into the hall and they all stared at him, and there was no movement to the front door, still business to be completed inside, and the expression of the magistrate was sympathy, and the shrug which said the matter was beyond his intervention.

The maresciallo beckoned with his finger, an instruction to follow. Pasquale went after him into the kitchen. The maresciallo pointed with his finger. The flowers his wife had bought, the bright flowers he had taken to the magistrate's apartment, were dumped in the trash can under the sink. Alive, still with colour, thrown away.

'You are, Pasquale, pretend to be, a close-protection guard. You are not the servant of Dr Tardelli, nor are you his friend. Whether you have sympathy for him or a dislike of him, you do your job, and you take your money, and you go home. What you do not do is snivel sentiment. I will not have on my team any man who, remotely, becomes emotionally involved. I come back from three days away and I find that little presents, little gifts of flowers, have been given. Your job is to protect Dr Tardelli, not to make a friendship. He is a target, a principal target, and the best way to protect him is to remain aloof from him as a personality. We do not travel each day with a friend, but with a paccetto. To you he should be just a parcel that is taken from here and delivered safely to a destination. You should not try to wrap ribbons around a parcel. You are on assessment, on probation, and I remember everything. If you are ready, may we, please, leave?'

Pasquale stumbled out into the hall. He had told his wife how much the magistrate, poor lonely man, had appreciated her flowers. There was the clatter of the guns being armed, the static and distorted chatter of the radios. They took the paccetto down to the street, to the cars.

'Do you want to wait in the car, or do you want to come in?'

'I think I'd like to walk around the town – I mean, it's sort of famous, isn't it?'

Benny said, sombre, 'You should not walk alone around the town. Afterwards, if you want, I can show you the town. For now you should come inside with me or you should wait in the car.'

Charley said, sullen, 'If I should not walk around the town without an escort, then I will come with you.'

She snapped her body out of the tiny AutoBianchi car. She stretched and felt the sunlight. Of course she had heard of Corleone – she had seen the first film at college with Marlon Brando starring, and she had seen Godfather III on video with Al Pacino starring. They were parked near the carabineri barracks. Pretty bloody ordinary it looked to her, Corleone. They had come into the town on a wide open road from San Giuseppe Jato, where Benny had left her in the car while he collected a photocopier from a small house. He hadn't talked much as he had driven through the countryside between San Giuseppe Jato and Corleone. Axel Moen would have kicked her backside because she had bullied her way into Benedetto's day. It had been spare and empty talk on the road after they had left the confined tight streets of San Giuseppe Jato. They had talked of the horses that grazed the grasslands in the expanses between rock outcrops, and of the wild flowers of yellow and burgundy, and of the handkerchief-sized plots of vines growing where a vestige of cultivation could be scratched in soil above the stone, and there had been hawks climbing above the outcrops of rock which she recognized as the kestrels and buzzards of home. Benny didn't know what the horses were used for, didn't know what the flowers were called, didn't know what was the sort of grapes grown here, didn't know about the hawks. She had been talking, nothing talk, about the hawks on the cliffs at home, when he had told her abruptly, almost with rudeness, to be quiet, and he had slowed, and then she had noticed the military road block, and they had been waved through, boring… If Sicily was a battleground, if it were the place of Axel bloody Moen's war, then she had only a single military road block to tell her of it. They had driven into Corleone on a broad street and past a street market that seemed to sell everything from clothes and furniture to vegetables and meat. No troops and no police, nothing that was familiar from television of war on the streets of Belfast. The sun was on her back and she walked after Benny as he carried the photocopier.

So she had annoyed him by pressing her presence. So he could bloody well put up with her. Doggedly, she followed.

They went by a school and there was a clamour of kids' voices from inside. There was an emblem on the wall of the school, not large and not ostentatious, of doves flying. She read, 'AI MARTIRI DELLA VIOLENZA' – hardly a monument to war, not much of a mark for a battleground. He went through the open door of a house. Quite sharply, he gestured for her to sit on a hard chair in the hallway, and he left her there as he went through to an inner room. She heard the excitement of women's voices, and two women came into her view and were hugging Benny and thanking him and he carried the photocopier into the room where she could not see him. Their voices clattered in her ears. She thought she was excluded – bugger that. She stood, she walked to the door. They were bent over the old photocopier and Benny was on his knees and plugging it to a socket. Their voices died. She was excluded because she was a stranger.

There were the same posters on the walls that she had seen in his Palermo room. Benny flushed. He told the women that the Signorina Parsons was English, that he had met her when she was attacked in the street, that he had promised to show her the antiquities of Palermo, but the photocopier had to be delivered.

'So she is a tourist in Corleone?'

'So she comes to see the wickedness of Corleone, and perhaps to send a postcard?'

Charley rode the sneers. She turned away, defiant, and took her seat again. She heard their laughter from the room. Perhaps they teased Benny, for bringing a tourist. He was distant when he came out of the inner room and each of the women made a show of kissing him on the cheek, and she thought their politeness to her was a charade. Did he screw them? Did he screw anyone on that narrow little priest's bed? Did Axel Moen fuck anyone on any bed? She smiled, lied her simplicity with a smile.

Out in the street, innocent and simple, 'What do they do?'

'They have a newsletter to issue, but the photocopier is broken. They produce a newsletter for the Anti-Mafia Co-ordination Group of Corleone.'

'Is it a big circulation?'

He matched her innocence and simplicity, but there was no lie. 'Very small, very few people, which is why we have such humble resources, a room and two women and a photocopier. In Corleone is the culture of the mafia, but you would not know that. It is the heart beat of the mafia – from Corleone to Palermo, from Palermo across the island, from the island to the mainland, from the mainland to Europe and over the ocean to America. It is why we speak of the octopus, with many tentacles, but the heart beat of the beast is here. The sindaco speaks against the mafia, the priest denounces the mafia from the church, but that is politics and religion, and they change nothing.'

'When will something change?'

He smiled, innocent and simple. 'I will know that something has changed when we need two, three photocopiers.'

'Tell me about Corleone. Show it to me.'

He looked at her. His eyes that squinted against the sun were grave, as if he feared that she mocked him. 'Forgive me – so that you can buy postcards and boast to your friends at home that you were in Corleone?'

'Please, walk me through the town?'

'Why?'

Axel bloody Moen would have kicked her arse, would have said that she lurched on the edge of disclosure, would have snarled that she was at the cliff face of complacency.

'It's just, what I've seen, a street and a market and a school and blocks of apartments and a barracks. I can't imagine what you are fighting against.'

'I think you would be bored.'

'I want to understand.'

They walked to the piazza. Old men watched them from under the bars' awnings and youths sat astride their motorcycles and eyed I hem from under the shade of palm trees.

The sun beat on Charley's. arms and on her shoulders.

'It is the town of Navarra and then of Liggio and then of Riina. and then of Provenzano. Now it is the town of Ruggerio. To you, I he stranger, it will appear like any other town. It is unique in Sicily because here no businessman pays the pizzo.

Literally that is the small bird's beak that pecks for a little food, but on the island the pizzo is the extortion of money for "protection". In the 1940s, after the liberation from Fascism, a good statistic for you to carry home to your friends, there were more murders here per head of Copulation than in any town or city in the world.'

Charley said quietly, 'You don't have to talk me short, Benny, like I'm only a tourist.'

At the start of the old town, where the streets darkened and narrowed and climbed to the left and fell to the right, Benny bought her a coffee and a warm roll with ham and goat's cheese. His voice was a murmur. 'I will tell you one story, and perhaps from the one •lory you will understand. It is not the story of Navarra, who was the doctor here, and the parents of a twelve-year-old boy who brought the hysterical child to him and told the doctor that the child had seen the killing of a man, and Navarra injected the child with a "sedative" that killed him, and then apologized for his mistake. It is not the story of Navarra. It is not the story of Liggio, who was a cattle thief before he developed the heroin trade of the mafia. And not the story of Riina, who ordered the killing of the bravest of the judges and drank champagne in celebration. Not the story of Provenzano, who is called the trattore here, the tractor, because of the brutality of his killings. It is not the story of Ruggerio. Come.'

She gulped the last of the roll. She wiped the crumbs from the front of her T-shirt.

She followed him out onto the street.

'You will hear, anywhere in Sicily, the stories of Navarra and Liggio and Riina and Provenzano, maybe you can hear the story of Ruggerio. You will not be told the story of Placido Rizzotto, but that is the story that will help you to understand.'

They walked down a narrow street, on cobbled stones. The balconies with wrought-iron railings pushed out from the walls above them, seeming to make a tunnel.

Watched by an old man, watched by children who stopped their football game, watched by a woman who paused to rest from the weight of her shopping bags. No sun on the narrow street.

'First he had been in the army, then he was with the partisans. Then he came back to Corleone, where his father was at a low level with the mafia. Placido Rizzotto returned here with opened eyes from the mainland. He became a trade-union organizer. The mafia detested the trade unions because they mobilized the contadini, worked against the mafia's domination of the poor. To the Church he was a communist. To the police he was a political agitator. Perhaps the mafia and the Church and the police were distracted, but Rizzotto was elected as mayor of Corleone. Do I bore you, Charley?'

They stopped. They were near to the church, a huge edifice, at the front, and a bell tolled, and black-dressed women hurried for the door but swivelled their heads as they went that they might better watch them. Ahead of them was a bank. A fat-bellied guard leaned against the door of the bank, and his finger rested loosely in his sagging belt that took the weight of his holster, and he watched them.

'Ten o'clock at night, a summer night. A friend calls for Placido Rizzotto at his father's home, invites him to come for a walk. All the men in the town are walking in the Via Bentivegna and the Piazza Garibaldi. He was betrayed by his friend. He strolled along the street, and one moment his friend was with him and the next moment his friend was gone… All of the men walking that evening on the Via Bentivegna and the Piazza Garibaldi saw Liggio approach Rizzotto, saw the gun put into Rizzotto's back.

All of the men, all of those who had voted for him and who had cheered his speeches, watched him led away as if he were a dog led to a ditch to be killed. Are you bored, Charley?'

The ravine was in front of them. Water tumbled from above them and fell, and the flow was broken by dark stones that had been smoothed over the centuries. Above the ravine was a fortress of decayed yellow stone built on the flat top of a straight-sided rock mass, dominating. They were alone now with the ravine and the fortress, and the watchers were behind them.

'The people went home. They emptied the streets and they locked their doors and they went to their beds. They had surrendered. And Rizzotto did not even threaten the mafia, or the Church, or the police, to all of them he was merely a nuisance. It was in 1948. Two years later his body was recovered by the fire brigade from here. His father could identify him from the clothes, and from his hair that had not been eaten by the rats. A man who had seen Rizzotto taken away said, "He was our hero and we let him go. All we had to do, every one of us, was to pick up a single stone from the street, and we could have overwhelmed the man with the gun. We did not pick up a stone, we went home." It was in 1948 and the culture of fear is the same today. Does my story bore you, Charley, or do you better understand?'

Her father had been three years old when Placido Rizzotto had been pitched, dead, into the ravine below. Her mother had been one year old. She had walked along the same street as the man with the pistol in his back, walked on the same pavements as the watchers had stood on, walked past the same doors through which they had hurried and which they then locked, walked past the same windows in which the lights had been extinguished. Charley Parsons, twenty-three years old, stared down into the ravine below the mountain rock on which the ruin of the fortress stood, and she thought the smell of a rotted corpse was in her nose, and she believed that at last she knew the scent of evil. Christ, yes, she understood.

'Where does Ruggerio come from?'

'From near here.'

'Can I see where he comes from?'

'For what reason?'

She lied, so easily. 'What you said, Ruggerio is the present. Right, I'm just a bloody tourist imposing on your day. It's what tourists do, go and visit a birth place. If you don't want to…'

'It's not difficult.'

Each afternoon, after the quarry had closed, after the drivers of the big dumper lorries had gone and the stone-crushers had been silenced, they blasted for the next day's supply of broken rock.

The quarry was cut into the mountain across the river from San Giuseppe Jato and San Cipirello. It was where the expert tested ail the explosive devices he designed.

In open ground, clear of the rock face where the dynamite charges were set, the expert and Tano had carefully parked the two cars. The car the expert had driven was an old Fiat Mirafiori. The car that Tano had driven, level with it but separated by ten metres of space, was a Mercedes, low on its wheels from the weight of the armour plate lodged in the doors. The distance between the cars had been measured with a tape, because the expert had said that in matters involving explosives detail was important.

The two explosions were finely synchronized. At the moment that the dynamite in the quarry face was detonated, the final digit of a six-figure number was pressed by Tano on his mobile telephone and the connection was made to the telephone pager set into the bomb on the back seat of the Mirafiori.

In San Giuseppe Jato and in San Cipirello, the people would have heard the explosion, what they always heard at that hour, and a reverberating echo would have masked the second explosion.

The great dust cloud from the quarry face had barely settled when the expert and Tano went forward. The Mirafiori had disintegrated, beyond recognition. The Mercedes was what interested them. The two parts of the Mercedes, and it had been sliced precisely in half, burned fiercely.

They laughed, the expert and Tano, they were bent at the waist and shouting their laughter at the quarry face from which the last of the fractured rock fell.

By the morning, before the quarry opened for work, the parts of the Fiat Mirafiori and the halves of the Mercedes would be buried under waste stone away to the side of the quarry.

'Do you have a camera?'

She started, she had been alone with her thoughts. 'A camera? Why is it important?'

Snapping, and she thought now he was frightened. 'Charley, I asked, do you have a camera?'

'No.'

It had been brilliant country. Bigger hills than those on Dartmoor that she knew, greener than Dartmoor, but the same wilderness.

They had stopped once, when she had told him to stop. She had stood beside the car, leaned against the warmth of the body of the car, and gazed across a field of wild flowers to the shepherd with his flock and his dog. Something of the Bible of a child, pastoral and safe, and she had heard the symphony of the chime of bells from the sheep, and the shepherd had sung. She thought it would have been an old song, handed down from his family, a song of love. The shepherd never saw them as he sang. Benny had stood beside her, close to her. Her sort of place… And the town was above them, and now the nervousness played in his face.

'I don't have a camera. Why?'

'Where we go, you should not use a camera – doesn't matter.'

On a winding road Benny drove towards Prizzi. He parked in a lay-by. The town stretched away from them and above them, a mosaic of yellow and ochre tiled roofs so dense that the streets were hidden.

Benny looked around him, locked the AutoBianchi. He took her arm, fingers on her elbow. He hurried her.

They were on a climbing street. The window of a macellaio took her eye, the thin, strange cuts of meat, unfamiliar to her, and her arm was pulled.

There would not have been room for cars to pass in the road. I wo terraced lines of three-storey homes, wooden doors set under low arches, balconies fronting shuttered windows, plaster and paint in yellow and orange and primrose. He walked fast and she skipped to keep up with him.

'You don't stop, you don't stare.' His lips barely moved as he spoke and his voice hissed as if fear caught him. 'The sixth house beyond the black-painted drainpipe. You have it? Don't turn your head. That is the house, the balconies one above the other, of the parents of Mario Ruggerio. It is where they live, with the brother of Mario Ruggerio, who is simple. You see it?'

He walked and he looked straight ahead. Charley saw a cat, low on its stomach, run from them.

Nothing moved in the street but the cat. The sunlight fell on the house that had been identified for her. The door to the house was open and she heard, fleeting, a radio playing. She smelt, fleeting, the cooking of vegetables. Was that it? Was that the bloody lot? No

Mercedes, no gold taps, no 9-inch cigars, no Rottweilers, no Harrods curtains, bloody hell… She defied him. Charley stopped in front of the open door and she twisted her head to look inside, and her arm was jerked half out of the socket at the shoulder. Only the sound of the radio and the smell of the cooking. When she was three doors past the house, he loosed her hand.

'Was that quite necessary?'

'Where do you think you are? Do you think you are at Stratfordupon-Avon? Do you think the Japanese come here in buses? Are you stupid?'

'You don't have to be rude.'

'I am rude because you are stupid.'

He was breathing hard. His lips twitched in nervousness. He walked fast. They came to the end of the road, where more roads, identical and mean and close, veered away into shadow. Christ, where were the people? Where were the kids?

'I am sorry, Benny, I am sorry if I am stupid. Spell it out, start with the camera.'

His feet, a stamped stride, clattered on the cobbles. 'You see nothing here, but you are watched. There would be, of course, a police camera on the street, but that is not important. Because you do not see anybody it does not mean you are not watched.

Behind doors, behind blinds, behind shutters, behind curtains are people who watch. It is the home of the family of Mario Ruggerio, and Mario Ruggerio is responsible for the deaths of many people. Such a man does not leave his family vulnerable to the vendetta of revenge. Because you do not see something it does not mean that it does not exist. If you had a camera, and took a picture of the house, it is likely that we would be followed, and the number of my car would be taken. I do not want, because you are stupid, to have those people match the number of my car with my name. To a man like Mario Ruggerio the family is the most important feature of his life, only with his family does he relax. We should not stay here.'

'Where is the wife of Ruggerio?'

'Two streets from here. Why do you ask, why are there so many questions?'

'Just me, I suppose. Always talked too much.' 'It would not be sensible for strangers to walk from the street of Ruggerio's parents direct to the street of Ruggerio's wife.'

'I was only asking…'

He was walking back towards the car. Charley followed.

'In the story you told me, Placido Rizzotto was killed because he was a nuisance. Was your father a nuisance?'

'Not a threat, only a nuisance, which is enough.'

'With the work you do, Benny, are you a nuisance?'

'How can I know? You know when you see the gun.'

'Benny, damn you, stand still. Benny, what is your dream?'

He stood, and for a moment his eyes were closed. Charley took his hand. She waited on him. He said, soft, 'I see him standing, and his head is hung in shame, and the handcuffs are on his wrists, and he stands alone without the backing of his thugs and his guns and his acid barrels and his drugs. He is an old man and he is alone. Around him are the children from Sicily and Italy, from. ill of Europe and from America. The children make a ring around him with their joined hands and they dance in a circle around him, and they laugh at him and they reject him and they jeer at him. My dream is when the children dance around him and have no fear of him.'

He took his hand from hers.

I'eppino had the dollars. They had the bank.

He had not met Russians before, and he thought them quite disgusting.

Peppino had the dollars on deposit in Vienna. They had the bank in St Petersburg.

His first meeting with Russians was in a hotel room near the railway station in Zagreb.

The two Russians wore big gold rings on their fingers, as a whore would, and bracelets of gold at their wrists. Their suits, both of them, were from Armani, which had brought the only dry smile to Peppino's face. The one smile, because he did not think they were people to laugh at, and the cut of the Armani suits did not disguise the muscle power of their shoulders and arms and stomachs and thighs. He assumed they carried firearms, and assumed also that a single blow from the gold-ringed list of either of them would disfigure him for the rest of his life.

The deal that his brother envisaged was for $50 million to go from deposit in Vienna to their bank in St Petersburg, and on then into investment in the oil-production industry of Kazakhstan. They controlled, they boasted in guttural English, the Minister for Petroleum Extraction and Marketing in Alma Ata. His brother said that the Russians were not to be ignored, that alliances must be forged, that every effort must be made to find routes of cooperation. The co-operation would come through the investment in Kazakhstan, and in return Peppino was instructed to offer facilities to the Russians for the cleaning of their money. For himself, Peppino had only a view of money. His brother had the view of strategy. The strategy of his brother was for cast-iron agreements between La Cosa Nostra and these Russian thugs. His brother said that within five years these crude and vulgar people would have control of the biggest opium-growing area in the world and the biggest arms factories in the world, and their power could not be ignored.

They frightened Peppino.

And he was nervous also because they seemed to have no care for their personal security. It was Zagreb, and the Croatian capital was a place for scams and for racketeers, but the city offered easy access to the FBI and to the DEA. He had doubted their hotel room had been swept. He had come into the room and he had immediately turned the TV satellite rubbish up loud and he had sat himself beside the TV's loudspeaker, and they had to strain to hear him against the blast of game-show sound.

Himself, he was against dealing with these people, but he would never contradict his brother.

He glanced at his watch, gestured with his hands. He apologized. He must leave for his flight out. Nothing written down, and nothing signed. He must take them on trust.

He gave them a fax number in Luxembourg, and told them slowly, as if he was with imbeciles, what coded messages would be recognized. He offered them his hand, and his hand was crushed by each of them.

He stood.

One Russian said, 'When you see Mario Ruggerio you should pass to him our good wishes that are sent in respect.'

The second Russian said, 'Mario Ruggerio is a man we learn from, we acknowledge his experience of life.'

Rubbing his hand, Peppino charged away down the hotel corridor. They had spoken in deference of his brother, as if they held his brother to be a great man. What did it say, their respect, of his brother? He hurried across the foyer of the hotel and out into the street for the doorman to call him a taxi. He had thought them coarse, crude, brutal, and they were the men who offered him their admiration of his brother. He lay back in the taxi. He believed he was the messenger boy of his elder brother, coarse and crude and brutal, who owned him.

The telephone was ringing. Charley had been back an hour. The telephone was shrill.

Charley was with the children in the bathroom, soaping them and trying to laugh with them. God, where was Angela to answer the phone? Charley was splashing water and making a game with the children and their shrieks did not drown the bell of the telephone. Angela had the second telephone beside her bed – the bloody pills. Charley wiped her hands on the towel. She hurried into the hall, past the closed door of Angela's bedroom.

'Pronto.'

'It's David Parsons. Could I speak to my daughter, Charlotte, please?'

'It's me. Hello, Dad.'

'Are you all right, Charley?'

'How did you get the number?'

'Directory enquiries – are you all right?'

'Didn't you get my card?'

'Just one card. We were worried.'

'No cause for worry, I am very well and having a wonderful lime.'

'Your mother wanted me to call, you know what your mother is for worrying. Charley, there was a policeman came, from London, he wanted to know about the American.

We-'

Charley snapped, 'Don't talk about it.'

She had heard the click on the telephone, and the sound of Angela's breathing.

'… wanted to know-'

'You are not to call me here again. It is very inconvenient for me to take a telephone call. I am fine, and very happy. I'll try to send more postcards. I'm a big girl, Dad, if you'd forgotten, so don't call me again. Love to Mum, and to you, Dad.'

She heard the breathing.

'Charley, we only wanted you to know-'

She put the phone down. Her fingers rested on the watch on her wrist, and she felt herself to be a cruel and vicious bitch. She could picture it in her mind, her father holding the telephone and hearing the purring of the dial tone, and then going into the little living room and away from the telephone on the table below the photograph of her at graduation, and then her father would have to tell her mother that their daughter had brushed him off, as a vicious and cruel little bitch would have, put him down… She was Axel bloody Moen's creature. She thought that, one day, she might tell her father of the dream, might tell her father of Benny's dream of dancing children and of an old man in handcuffs who suffered the humiliation of the children's contempt, one day…

Angela stood, sleep-devastated, pill-damaged, at the bedroom door.

'Sorry if it woke you, Angela,' Charley said, and the cheerfulness was a lie. 'It was my dad, I've been a bit naughty with the postcards, he was just checking I was all right.'

She went back into the bathroom and took the big towels from the hook. If it were their father in the handcuffs, and their uncle, would small Mario and Francesca be dancing with the dream children? She started to rub them dry.

'It took me time to recognize him – it was the guy who picked her off the street when she was mugged.'

'So she wanted to thank him – why the blow-out?'

'She was with him all day.'

'So she's lonely, and maybe it's her free day – maybe.'

'I could kick her arse, hard, with my boot. 'Vanni, she only goes to San Giuseppe Jato, and that's a poison place. Then she goes to Corleone, and that's a bad place. Where in Corleone? She only goes to the Anti-Mafia Co-ordination Group, meets up with those low- life deadbeats.'

'They are brave people, Axel, committed people.'

'Who achieve nothing, might as well jerk off. You know where she went after that, and you could see it on the guy's face, like he was shitting himself, she went to Prizzi.'

'So it's a pretty town, it's interesting.'

'It's a crap place, Prizzi – there's no scenery that's good, no architecture, no history.

She wasn't looking for anything good. For Christ's sake, 'Vanni, she only goes marching off down the little shit street where the big guy's parents are. Can you believe it, she walked down the street where Rosario and Agata Ruggerio live? I mean, is that clever?'

'She's got balls.'

'She's got a hole in the head where her brain fell out.'

'And you don't trust her?'

'To box clever? Not on this show, no, I do not.'

'But, Axel, you have to trust her. That's your problem isn't it, I hat's the shit on your shoe? She's all you've got. The criticism is irrelevant. And you had an interesting day?'

'A great day, what I really wanted, hiking round San Giuseppe Jato and Corleone and Prizzi.'

'But you were there, the chaperone.'

'It's my job to be there. She was endangering herself – she could have compromised me. That is not goddam funny.'

Back in Corleone, back where he had come with his grandfather. and his step-grandmother when he was a teenager. Back where his grandfather had found the

'opportunity' and taken the bribes and handed out the gas coupons. He had been dragged by them past the street where his grandfather had pointed out the wartime AMGOT office. He had tracked Charley past the street to which he had been taken as a teenager to meet his step-grandmother's family, and he had sweated that he might be remembered. Ridiculous to believe that he might be remembered, the features of his face recalled, but the sweat had run on his spine.

'Who is the man?'

' IHe dropped her off in the town. First goddam sense she'd shown, lie didn't march him up to the villa. She was going nowhere but home. I went back to his place, asked around.'

'Then you came running to me, like you're booked for a coronary.'

'He's Benedetto Rizzo, late twenties, built like a streak of piss – he's nothing. You know, she stood in the middle of goddam Prizzi after they'd walked the Ruggerio street, and she held his hand and she looked into his face, like she was hot for him.'

'Perhaps you're short of a woman, Axel.'

'I don't need shit from you.'

But Axel Moen had always been short of a woman. There had been women at the university, just casual… There had been a good woman when he was on the police in Madison, working in real estate in Stoughton, and he'd brought her flowers and wrapped chocolates, and she'd been of old Norwegian stock, and she'd made Arne Moen laugh when Axel took her up to the Door Peninsula, and it had finished the night he told her he was accepted by DEA, and going to Quantico, because she said she wouldn't follow him… There had been a good woman, Margaret, from a publishing house on East 53rd, when he had his head buried in New York with the earphones for the wire taps, and it had taken time but he'd persuaded her to come to the weekend cabins up-state, and they'd done the long hikes and they'd loved, and it was over when he told her he was posted down to La Paz, Bolivia… There had been a good woman in La Paz, out of order to mess with a Confidential Informant, a sweet soul and a dedicated mind and with guts, and it was ended when he found her crucified on the back of the door at the airstrip for the estancia… There had been a good woman, Margaret again, when he had returned to New York with the bullet-hole souvenir in his stomach flesh, and she liked to run her finger down the scar when they went back to the weekend cabins, but there hadn't been the love as before, and it had been trashed for all time when he'd said he was posted to Rome… There was a good woman in Italy, Heather, out of the Defense Attache's office in the main building, and she was wiser than the rest and kept him at arm's length, just convenience for both of them, and they went to the parties together, kept the matchmakers at a distance by showing up at the barbecues and the functions, were seen together when they mutually needed a partner, no loving and nothing to finish… And there was a good woman, Charlotte Eunice Parsons…

'So she makes a mistake, walks down a street, isn't sensible. Maybe she knows that, maybe she won't do it again. She's lonely, she holds a man's hand to whom she has reason to be grateful. You know what I believe?'

'What?'

'Vanni laughed quietly, and whispered, 'I think you are jealous of the "streak of piss", I think you are jealous of him.'

'You are pathetic.'

Axel walked out on the best friend he had in Sicily, out of the cinema.

A cinema, dark and showing an unpublicized French-language film, empty, was a useful place to meet.

He took a side entrance out. It was a basic precaution, the sort of care that came naturally to him.

He was not aware that, at the front of the cinema, a man watched the builder's van that was parked half on the street and half on the pavement.

TO: Alfred Rogers, DLO, British Embassy, Via XX Settembre, Rome.

FROM: D/S Harry Compton, S06.

Action stations this end, going to a war footing. Big politics being played…

To impress top brass we urgently require updater on MARIO RUGGERIO, inclusive of bullshit you so expert in. My last still applies. The Pepsi/peanut-butter brigade are not, repeat NOT, Need To Know. Hope this does not interfere with your leisure schedule. Think of Queen and Country as you sacrifice your obese body.

Bestest, Harry.