Killing Ground

Chapter Two

Tracy was fighting Vanessa. Darren was sticking a pencil point into Vaughan's forearm. Lee was drawing with a felt-tip pen over Joshua's writing pad. Dawn was tugging at Nicky's hair. A crash as Ron's chair tipped over backwards, a scream from Ron as Ian dived back to his own chair and table…

And class 2B was regarded by the headmistress as the bestdisciplined and happiest class in the school, and class 2B had been singled out by the Inspectors three weeks before as a model.

Tracy kicked Vanessa. Darren gouged the pencil point hard enough for it to draw Vaughan's blood. Lee had destroyed Joshua's careful work. Dawn had a fistful of Nicky's hair. Ian sat innocent as Ron bawled…

She could have belted each one of them, and lost her job. She could have smacked Tracy's hand, whacked Darren, twisted Lee's ear, thumped Ian, and that would have been the fast route to an Education Authority Sub-Committee (Disciplinary) Hearing.

She imagined in the other classrooms, the other prefabricated blocks that sieved the draughts and leaked the rain, the teachers of classes IA and IB and 2A and 3A and 3B, and the headmistress on her rounds, and their surprise that class 2B was audibly and publicly in chaos. It was her second term at the school, her nineteenth week, and the first time that she had lost control of the thirty-eight children. She clapped her hands, and maybe there was rare anger in her voice, and maybe there was total contempt on her face, but the clapping and the anger and the contempt won her a short respite. It had been a rotten, desperate night for Charley Parsons. No sleep, no rest. The kids knew her mind was far away. Kids always knew and exploited weakness. Five more minutes on her watch before the bell would go, before a quite bloody day was finished.

She had come in from outside the evening before and heard the front door close quietly after him. She had stood in the hall and heard the big engine of the four-wheel-drive pull away. She had gone back into the kitchen. Her mother, accusing: did she know that her tea was ruined? Her father, furtive: would she have time for the work to be done that night on class preparation?

Her mother: what was that about? Her father: who was he? 'I can't tell you, so don't question me.'

Her father: hadn't her own parents the right to know? Her mother: shouldn't her own parents be given an explanation when a total stranger barges into the house? 'He said that if I talked about him, what he said to me, then I might be responsible for hurting people.'

Her mother: didn't she know how offensive she sounded? Her father: had they scrimped and saved and sent her to college merely to learn rudeness? 'He's a sort of policeman, a sort of detective. He works for something called the Drug Enforcement Adminstration.'

Drugs? The shock spreading across her mother's face. What had she to do with drugs? The incredulity at her father's mouth, and she had seen the shake of his hands. 'I have nothing to do with drugs. I just can't talk about it. I have no connection with drugs.

I can't tell you.'

She had run out of the kitchen and across the hall and into her bedroom. She had flung herself down onto the duvet cover. She had held the bear that had been hers for twenty years. She had heard the worry in her mother's voice and the bluster in her father's voice. She hadn't had her ruined tea, nor had she done her preparatory work for the next day's class with 2B. Later, she had heard her mother's footfall outside her door and a light knocking and she had not replied, and much later she had heard them going to bed beyond the thin partition wall. A tossing and restless and hideous night, with two images churning her mind. The twin images that denied her sleep were of the warmth and kindness of Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio, and of the cold certainty of Axel Moen. They confronted her, the love shown her by Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio, the matter-of-fact hostility of Axel Moen. She should not have given him the time of day, should have shown him the door. She thought she had betrayed the warmth and kindness, the love, of Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio…

Her night had been unhappiness and confusion. Her day had been exhaustion and distraction.

It seemed God-given, a moment of mercy, when the bell echoed through the low-set prefabricated walls of the classroom. Perhaps the kids of 2B, the kickers and gougers and scribblers and bullies, felt the crisis and were afraid. They waited for her. Every day, at I he end of classes, she swapped jokes and cheerful banter with the ix-year-olds, not that day. She swept up the books and notes on her desk. She was first out through the door. It was her decision to go home, to apologize to her mother and father and to make believe that the tall American with the blond pony-tail of hair had never walked with her in the garden behind the bungalow, never propositioned her, never talked of necessary 'access'. Her decision… She stopped beside a rubbish bin outside the classroom, reached deliberately into her bag, took out the letter of invitation and ripped it to small pieces. She dropped the torn scraps of paper, and the envelope into the bag. There was a mass of children around her as she walked towards the lean-to shed where her scooter was left for I he day.

'Charlotte! Are you all right, Charlotte?'

The shrill voice bleated at her back. She turned. The headmistress faced her.

All right? Yes, of course I'm all right, Miss Samway.'

I just wondered… Charlotte, there are two men to see you. They're at the gate.'

She looked over the running and shouting and charging horde of children going from the playground to the gate that led to the street. She looked between the heads and shoulders of the young mothers with cigarettes at their lips, gum in their mouths, babies on their arms, bulging stomachs in tight jeans, who yapped about the night's TV. So much anger, fuelled by the tiredness. She saw two men leaning against an old Sierra car, not the last model but the model before that, and the door which took the weight of their buttocks was a recent addition and not yet sprayed to match the rest of the bodywork, that was scraped and rust-flecked. They were not like anyone she knew.

They wore old denims and T-shirts and one had a leather jacket over his shoulders and one wore a dirtied anorak. The hair of both men was cut short, and the one who was more slightly built had a silver ring piercing his right nostril, and the heavier one waved to her, and she could see the tattoo between the wrist and knuckle of his hand.

'I don't know if they're friends of yours, Charlotte, but I don't want people like that hanging round my school.'

She went to them. She stood her full height. The headmistress behind her would be watching, and others on the staff, and the mothers would be watching. Little Miss Parsons, stuck-up Miss Parsons, entertaining two low-life types who waited on the street for her. Something to talk about in the common room, and as they pushed the prams and led the kids back to the bloody little homes where the telly would blast all through the evening, and reading would involve the figures on scratch cards, and…

God, she was just so bloody tired.

'Yes? You wanted to see me. I am Charlotte Parsons.'

The one with the ring in his right nostril seemed to flick his fist open and in the palm of his hand was a police warrant card, and he said his name was Brent and muttered about 'Task Force', and the one with the tattoo showed his card and said his name was Ken and the quiet words were 'Drug Squad'.

A frail voice. 'What do you want?'

Brent said, 'It's what you want, Miss Parsons. We were told you were looking for the grand tour.'

Ken said, 'We were told you needed a run round our patch, so you'd understand better the end of the importation road, that your particular interest was skag and rock.'

Brent said, 'But, Ken, we shouldn't go too fast for Miss Parsons, 'cos a nice girl like her wouldn't know that skag is heroin, now would she?'

Ken said, 'Too right, Brent, and she wouldn't know that rock is crack cocaine. If you'd like to get in the back, Miss Parsons… Oh, don't go worrying, we squared it with the caretaker that he'll look after your scooter.'

'Who sent you?'

Brent said, 'Our inspector sent us.'

Ken said, 'The American gentleman…'

She shook. The trembling was in her arms, her fingers. The heaviness was in her legs, her feet. 'And if I say that it's bugger-all to do with me?'

Brent said, 'We were told that you might bluster a bit at first. ..'

Ken said, '… but after the bluster you'd be good as gold. Miss I'arsons, I've been on Drug Squad a bit over four years. Brent's been on Task Force, drug-importation team, for six years. All we get near is the creatures at the bottom of the pyramid. What we were told, sort of vague, you've the chance to hurt them right at the sharp end, nothing specific, but hurt the top of the pyramid. Now, if the bluster time's over, could you get in, please?'

She did as she was told. She was good as gold, as Axel Moen had said she would be.

She took the big step, and ducked down into the back of the old Sierra. Bloody man…

The car was a fraud, dapped out exterior but a high-performance tuned engine. Brent drove, and Ken was twisted round in the front seat so that he could la Ik to her. She thought she was tired, but as the car hammered on the lanes and then the fast road, she came to know the crow's-feet lines and the sack bulges at Ken's eyes. Something of a joke at first, about the tattoo only being a transfer that he could wash off each night, about a limit to the cause of duty, but old Brent had gone the whole hog and had his nostril pierced for the goddam job. They were not in the style of any policemen that she had met before. She l bought a part of the smell came from the discarded polystyrene last-food plates that were dumped on the floor in the back, under her feet, and the rest of the smell came from the clothes they wore. They smoked hard, and didn't ask whether she minded them smoking. Ken said they weren't interested in cannabis, nor in solvents, nor in amphetamines, nor in the benzodiazepines like Temazepam and the barbiturates like sodium amytal. They worked the world of heroin that was skag, horse, smack, stuff, junk, and the world of crack cocaine that was rock, wash. She listened…

They came into the city of Plymouth, where Charley went for best shopping, for a dress for a friend's wedding, for Christmas presents and birthday gifts for her mother and father, and they talked her through the street cost of skag and rock. She listened…

They turned out of the city centre and went north, climbing the long drag into the big housing estate. The name of the estate was familiar, from the local television, but she had never been there. Nothing urgent in the information they gave her, no passion, but the figures were beyond her comprehension. A worldwide trade in narcotics with a profit margin of 100 billion American dollars. Seizures and disruption of trafficking into UK the last year of?1.45 billion, and what was seized and disrupted, on a good day, was one in five shipments and, on a bad day, was one in ten.

Ken said, 'But they're the super-glory figures, we don't operate at that level. We work down here in the gutter, where the skag and the rock ends up. Down here a kilo of heroin, skag, goes for thirty grand, street price. Crack cocaine, rock, means?7,500 sterling, cheaper because of saturation. Out there in the big world they're talking thousands of kilos, tonnes – we're little people, we're talking kilos and grammes.' She listened…

Brent said, 'You being a teacher, Miss Parsons, you'd be good at arithmetic. Ten grammes doesn't give a big long high, ten minutes' worth for an habitual, but it costs, my sums, seventy-five quid, and it's addictive, so you get to need a lot of grammes, and that means you need a lot of cash, and you steal, fight, burgle, maybe kill, for the cash.'

She saw tower blocks of homes, and terraces of homes, and she saw the children, like the ones that she taught, running in dog packs. She thought she saw a poverty and a despair… She saw an old man hurrying, limping, heavy on a stick, and his face was frightened and she wondered whether he had?75 sterling in his wallet. She saw an old woman scuttling with a shopping bag towards the dark entrance of a tower block, and she wondered whether the old woman had?75 sterling in her purse, or in the tin under her bed, or folded into her pension book and hidden, and she wondered how many old men and old women needed to be robbed to make a crack cocaine high that lasted ten minutes. She felt sick.

The light was going. Where the street lights were broken, where the shadows clung, she saw ghost figures gathered. Brent cruised the car. Ken said, 'See over there, Miss Parsons? See the tall kid? Most days he's there, he'll do about a hundred grammes a week in rocks.' Brent said, 'He can do you skag as well, maybe some ecstasy. He's not special. He's one in a hundred, going on more. It's got hold of the place. Lift him, there's another ninety-nine.' She saw the boy. He wore good Reeboks and Nike leisure wear and the cap on his head was the wrong way round. The contact she saw was short and sweet. Hands moved, money given over by the customer, goods given over to the customer. Brent said, 'We're not even holding the line. The price is going down. It goes down when we're awash with it. The job of our young friend is to keep moving the rocks, getting new customers, creating demand. He's good in his market place.' She listened…

Brent said, 'I hope you're getting the picture, Miss Parsons. But I wouldn't want you to get the impression that this is C2 or C3 trade only. We could run you down to Plymstock or Roborough, up to Southway and round Goosewell. We can show you it anywhere.'

'I want to go home, please.'

Ken said, 'No can do, sorry. The American gentleman said you should have the grand tour.'

The unmarked police car slipped out of the estate. Charley looked i last time for the old people hurrying with their wallets and purses and their fear, for the kid with his Reebok shoes and Nike leisure suit, for the customers.

'Hi, Dwight, how was the vacation by the sea? How'd it go?'

I'd rate him as cold shit.'

His coat was flipped onto the hook of the stand, alongside the i oat of the Country Chief.

You'd better come in, you'd better talk.'

He look a plastic cup and filled it with water from the dispenser. He walked across the deserted outer office and through the open door and into the Country Chief's office. It was a lowering, dark evening outside, and there was rain in the heavy cloud that settled over the square. He was waved to a seat.

Dwight Smythe shrugged. 'I reckon, Ray, I can cope with most sort of men. I failed with that bastard. Is he some sort of zealot? I thought Quantico was supposed to weed that sort. Right, he's rude, I can live with that. Right, he's aggressive, I can handle it.

Where we part company, he elbows into a small and unsuspecting life, a young woman's life, and puts together a web to trap her, and does it cold. Me, I'm surplus to requirements, the chauffeur that's no longer needed.'

'Did you read his file?'

'No.'

'Do you know about him?'

'Not before I picked him up yesterday.'

'Happy to make a judgement?'

'My assessment of him, yes, I feel comfortable with it.'

'My opinion, Dwight, you're a lucky guy.'

'How come, Ray, I'm a lucky guy?'

'A lucky guy, Dwight, because you have personnel and accounts and running this station to keep busy with.' The eyes needled on Dwight Smythe. 'You have fuck-all of nothing to worry about.'

'That is not fair.'

'And true as hell. You, Dwight, are promotion material. You keep the leave charts regular, you keep wiping your ass, you keep the budget and expenses in blue, you keep your butt clean, you keep us all in surplus paper-clips, and you don't have to worry because that is promotion material. It's the road, Dwight, to the big office back home and the pile carpet, but it's not that joker's road.'

'That is not fair, Ray, because without administration-'

'I have heard it before, I have practised it. You are talking with the converted. When did you last carry a sidearm?'

'The way to fight organized crime is through the intellectual deployment of resources, not-'

'I've made that speech, Dwight. You think if I'd preached on body confrontation, nose-to-nose, I'd have climbed the goddam ladder? Grow up.'

'I didn't expect to hear you, Ray, give out that sort of crap.'

'Your consolation, what should make you feel good, the likes of Axel Moen don't get to climb the goddam ladder. The ladder's for you and for me. It's you and me that like to collect the plaques for the wall, the photographs of the Director's handshake, the commendations and the bullshit.'

'Sorry, I spoke.' Dwight Smythe pushed himself up, drank the last of the water. He looked around him. The plaques recorded successful operations, the photographs witnessed the warmth of the Director meeting with a coming man, the commendations were polished print engraved on bronze. 'And I don't recognize bullshit, Ray.'

'You taking Melanie out tonight, something to eat?'

'Yes, why?'

'My advice, meant kind, call her, tell her to hold an hour so you can get your face into the computer, take a look at Axel Moen's file.'

'For what?'

'Did he tell you his target?'

'He did not.'

'Read his file so you get to know what sort of man gets put up. against a way big target.'

'Maybe in the morning…'

'Tonight, Dwight, read it.'

It was an instruction. They prided themselves, the Country Chief and the four special agents and the clerical staff working on the fifth floor of the embassy, that they were a close team, that harsh words were rare, instructions came rarer. He walked out of the office. He went to his desk. He called Melanie and he told her he wwas held up and put her back an hour and asked her to call the curry house on the Edgware Road to hold the reservation for an hour. He checked with the file that was kept locked in the drawer of his desk for the entry code and the password key. He went into the NADDIS computer for the file on the man he called cold shit.

'We've just got the one at the moment. There was another one last month but it died.

The other one died about three days before this one came in here,' the nurse said. She was a big woman but with a gentle Irish voice. She spoke flatly as if she did not care to feel emotional involvement. 'I couldn't tell you how long this one's going to hold on.

Myself, I hope it's not too long. You see, she's damaged. She was damaged in the womb, pretty close to conception, she was damaged all the time through the pregnancy, she's damaged now. It's what happens when the mother is an addict. Her mother's nineteen years old, she's into mainlining with heroin, lovely girl, was and still is. The little one is seventeen days old and it's as if she's on heroin, same as Mum, same as if she was using Mum's syringe, Mum's tourniquet. This one's too far gone to be weaned off it, the damage is in the little one's system. That's why I say that I hope it's not too long…'

Charley stood by the door. She looked into the room, Children's Unit (Intensive Care). The baby seemed to shiver inside the glass case and the tubes hooked to its nose and mouth waved slowly with the movements. The nurse spoke as if they were alone, as if the mother, the 'lovely girl', was not there. The mother sat beside the glass box. She wore a dressing gown, hospital issue. She stared blankly at the quivering baby. When Charley turned away, the nurse smiled at her, and said that it was decent of her to have bothered to come. That was an empty remark because the nurse did not know why Charley had come, did not know of the arrangement made by Brent and a hospital administrator. Charley hurried out. She thought she hated Axel Moen.

Brent and Ken were in the corridor. They led, she followed.

Out into the night air. Across a car park. There was a light over a door.

Brent knocked at the door. Ken rang the bell. They entered the hospital mortuary.

'This one's heroin but it could just as well have been cocaine. On average we get three a year. His father's a retired major in Tavistock, not that it matters who his father was, is,' the pathology technician said. He was a young man with an angled nose on which were balanced heavy spectacles. He spoke as if the corpse, the retired major's son, was an item of no particular interest. 'When they get started on it, heroin, that is, they find the total relaxation from stress, from anxiety, must seem the way out of the problem, but… they step up the dosage, the withdrawal symptoms each time are harsher, more frequent. The dependency grows. This one,

'I heard, he broke into his parents' house and cleaned out his mother's jewellery case, all the heirloom stuff was worth one big fix. He would have been subject to tremors, muscle spasms, sweats. He would have loaded up in panic, but got the dose wrong. He would have been unconscious, then gone into coma. He ended up in here after a breathing failure. Of course, this is just a small city, we don't get that many.'

Charley looked down at the corpse. She had never seen a dead body before. It was as if the skin had been waxed pale, and the body hair on the chest and in the arm pits and round the penis of I he body seemed, to her, like a weed that had been poisoned. There was colour in the bruised right arm, but the needle holes were dulled. She thought the body was of a young man of about her age. ind there seemed to be a peace about his expression. She didn't know, and she didn't ask, whether the people in the mortuary could have given his face the mask of peace, or whether the act of dying made the peace.

In the corridor outside the area where cadavers were stored in refrigerated bays, Ken was smoking a cigarette that was tucked into the palm of his hand, and Brent was unwrapping a boiled sweet.

They drove her back to the school.

They rang the doorbell for the caretaker, who opened up for them.

Charley gunned the engine of her scooter. She sat astride the saddle. She arched her back, pinched her shoulder blades.

Are you always as subtle as that? Squeezing my emotions. Winding me up, like a damn puppet.'

Brent said, 'Sorry, love, but it's what we were asked to do.'

Ken said, 'I don't know, of course, what it was for, sunshine, but it was what the American gentleman wanted.'

She pulled the helmet down over her hair. Charley had seen reality, what she read in newspapers and what she watched on television, and she had not cared to know that it was reality in her

• own bloody back yard. She rode away into the night, and she cursed him and the tears ran on her face and were caught by the wind. On the road, in the lane, a car followed her and lit her back and never closed on her. In her mind was a jumble of images, unproven,

• of the island of Sicily and the city of Palermo. The lights of the car stayed in her mirror. Palermo…

No wind, no rain, no cloud. The island baked in spring sunshine. By early morning, the first warmth of the year suffocated the city. Over that city, which was pressed into a narrow seaboard between the Mediterranean and the mountains, had settled a chemical mist of yellow-hazed pollution from the vehicles jockeying on the Via della Liberta and the Via Marqueda and the Via Francesco Crispi and the Via Vittorio Emanuele and the Via Tukory. Invisible under that mist were the symbols of Low-intensity Warfare, the electronic signals, the micro-wave boosters, the pulses sent by telephone and radio transmissions, the pictures carried by covert surveillance cameras, the voices distorted by audio-intercept bugs. Among the clutter of a modern society's legitimate communications, small fish in the big sea, were the messages, coded and masked, of a contemporary battlefield. Signals, pulses, tones, images, voices of men at war meandered under the foul-tasting mist that clung above the roofs of Palermo.

When she came out of the common room, with the taste of instant coffee in her mouth, to bring in the children from mid-morning break, she saw him sitting in the parked car outside the gate. She thought of the housing estate and the despair and the poverty.

He did not trust the safety of any form of telephone communication.

Mario Ruggerio sat alone in the small room of the apartment on the first floor. The sounds, raucous, of the Capo district came to him through the opened window, through the closed shutters that filtered segments of sunlight into the room. The sunlight lay in shards across the table at which he worked and were reflected from a mirror and onto a side wall, so that the brightness and the shadow latticed the picture of the Agony of Christ. The crying of the hawkers, the shouting of people in anger and in mirth, the roar of the engines of Vespas and Lambrettas competed with the quiet of Radio Uno.

Neither the noise from the alleyway below nor the voice and music close to him disturbed his concentration. Both the outside noise and the radio's voice and music were a necessary part of his security. In the Capo district of hardship and crime and wariness, a surveillance car and a surveillance team would be noticed and a quiet would fall over the alleyway. And if there was the arrest of a super-latitanti, a big man on the run, or if there was a swoop and round-up of suspects, then it would be carried on the radio and he would know. The outside noise and the radio's voice and music did not disturb him as he wrote the brief and cryptic messages with a fine-point pen on the sheets of paper used for rolling cigarettes.

Education at school for Mario Ruggerio had lasted from the age of five years to nine years. No schoolmaster, nor schoolmistress, no academic, no lecturer, no professor had taught him the science of electronic communications, but he had no trust in the security of the telephone. There were those he had known who had believed they could talk through the landline system, and they sat now in the stifling heat of the cells at Ucciardione in the city of Palermo. There were others who had believed in the safety of the new analogue technology of the mobile telephone, and they rotted now behind the walls of Caltanisetta on the island or at Asinara Prison on Sardinia. He had been urged the last year to believe in the total security of the most recent system, the digital network, promised that it could not be intercepted, and those men who had believed and promised now saw the sun and the sky for an hour a day ill rough the net mesh above the exercise yard at Ucciardione or C'altanisetta or Asinara.

He laid the messages written on the cigarette papers across the table. He read them.

He lit a small cigar. He coughed and spat phlegm into his handkerchief. He read the messages again and then gathered them into his ashtray. He was satisfied he had memorized thee messages. He burned the papers on which they were written. The messages, now held in his memory, dealt with the matters concerning the movement of $8 million from a holding company in the Bahamas to a casino development in Slovenia, the switching of I I million from a Vienna-based account to a bank in Bratislava, the buying of a block of twenty-two apartments at a Corsican beach resort, the question of the life and death of a man in Catania, the problem of the persistent investigation by a magistrate in the Palazzo di Giustizia. Five messages, now burned, now memorized, would be passed, word of mouth, to five men in five bars over five coffees that morning.

His way was caution and suspicion. With caution and suspicion he maintained what was most precious, his freedom.

Later, when the sun was higher against the closed shutters, when he had smoked a second cigar, when he had listened to the radio news bulletin and heard the report that the Questura in Agrigento had made no progress in their search for a missing man and his grandson and his driver, he would slip in his anonymity onto the streets of the city and into five bars where his people waited for him. His people were the 'cut-out' intermediaries who carried the messages, verbally, to construction magnates and politicians and the principals of the Masons or Rotary and bankers, and to the policemen that he owned, and to the churchmen that he had bought. All of those who received messages from Mario Ruggerio acted upon them immediately because he fuelled their greed and fanned their fear…

Mario Ruggerio wondered, a fast thought because there was much in his mind, how were the children and the baby that he loved, and the thought brought a gentle smile to his face. The smile was still on his face as he walked down the alleyway in his grey wool jacket with his check cap worn forward.

When she came into the playground to halt the football game and round up the children with their lunchboxes, she saw him waiting and smoking in his car. She thought of the old man hurrying to his home on the estate.

From the balcony she watched him go. She held the baby. Piccolo Mario jumped excitedly on the balcony tiles and leaned across the pots of geraniums to see his father at the car below, and Francesca held her hand and cried quietly.

He turned from the car and he waved up at the bungalow, and Angela's answering gesture was a limp flap of her hand. She did not wait to see him into the car, nor to see him drive away through the main gates that would have been opened by the uniformed portiere. She left piccolo Mario on the balcony, she carried the baby and led Francesca back into the living area of the apartment, and past the statue that she thought disgusting, and over the stain she could not remove in the carpet from Iran. She loathed Palermo. To

Angela Ruggerio, the city was a prison. In Rome, if they still lived in Rome, she could have gone back to the university, but it was not acceptable in Palermo that a married woman should go alone to a university. In Rome she could have gone to a health gymnasium, but in Palermo it was not permitted that a married woman could go to a gymnasium without a friend for a chaperone and she did not have that friend. In Rome it would have been possible for her lo have taken part-time work in a gallery or in a museum, but it was not possible in Palermo that a married woman of her class should go to work… She could not, in Palermo, paint the walls of the apartment, wield a roller brush, because, in Palermo, that would imply her husband could not afford to employ an artisan to the work.

She loathed the city most when he left to go abroad. Then the money for household expenses was left in the drawer beside her bed, because, in Palermo, it was not usual for a married woman to have her own bank account, own credit cards, own resources. In Rome, during the good days in Rome, he would have talked with her the night before a business flight to London or Frankfurt or New York, but not now, because, in Palermo, it was not necessary for, a married woman to know the detail of her husband's work.

She slumped down into the depth of the wide sofa. She flicked the pages of a magazine and read nothing… The boy shouted. Picolo Mario yelled from the balcony that he had seen his uncle, really, and she must come. She pushed herself up from the sofa, She held the baby tight against her. She went onto the balcony. She looked down, across the car park, past the security gates, onto the pavement. She saw nobody, but piccolo Mario shouted that he had seen his uncle, yelled that his uncle had walked past the gates and looked for them and had waved, and she saw nobody that she knew. How many times did he come, the little old man with the bowed shoulders and the jowl at his throat and the grey jacket and the checked cap, and walk past the apartment in the Giardino Inglese and look up towards the flowers on their balcony, how often? She knew, of course, all that was said of ipiccolo Mario's uncle on the television, all that was written of Peppino's brother in the Giorale di Sicilia… She took the boy from the balcony. It was not right that the boy should talk of his uncle.

In four days they would be at the villa, they would be by the sea, where, if it were possible, she would be more lonely than in the city. She prayed, almost with fervour, that Charlotte would come.

When she rang the bell for the end of mid-afternoon break she saw him sitting with a magazine in his car. She thought of the old woman, in fear, going back to her one bedroom with the hidden tin of savings that made her vulnerable.

There were only two pictures on the walls of the room in the barracks at Monreale.

There was the picture of his daughter and there was the photograph of Generale Carlos Alberto dalla Chiesa. The smiling ten-year-old girl and the militaristic portrait served to heighten Giovanni Crespo's sense of total isolation.

He dialled the number, he threw the switch that activated the scrambler.

Isolato, isolated, was a cruel word for the captain of carabineri. His daughter was growing up in Bologna. He was isolated from her, saw her twice a year at best, three days at a time, and spoke briefly on the telephone each Sunday evening. That was isolation. But it was the general who had taught him the true meaning of the word isolato. The general, hero of the counter-terrorist campaign against the Brigate Rosse, prefect of Palermo, had been ridiculed, sneered at, whispered of, isolated and shot to death thirty-eight days after Giovanni Crespo had joined his staff as liaison officer.

They were all isolated, all the condemned men, before the gunfire or the bomb. To stay alive, living and breathing and fucking and drinking, he thought it most necessary to recognize isolation.

His call was to an unlisted number in Rome, a quiet side-street office on the Via Sardegna, to the desk of the DEA's Country Chief.

"Vanni here. Go secure, Bill.'

He was asked to wait out. He heard the clicked interruption on the line. The voice was fainter, with metallic distortion. He was told he could speak.

'Just wanted to know how my friend was, whether my friend had optimism…'

He was told the young woman was 'OK, nothing special'. He was told she was

'predictable' and that she had taken time 'to think on it'.

'You know, Bill, we don't even have a name for this. It is ridiculous, but we don't even have a name. So, we don't have a file, that's good, and we don't have computer space, that's better, but we should have a code name, do you not think?'

Giovanni Crespo, aged forty-two, captain of carabineri, member of the specialist Reparto Operativo Speciale team tasked with securing the arrest of Mario Ruggerio, would never speak a confidence even on a line scrambled with state-of-the-art electronics. On the island he trusted no man. In his life he trusted only one man. He had taken the letter posted by Angela Ruggerio, sister-in-law of Mario Ruggerio, to Rome and to the one man he trusted. The detail of the matter was not shared with his own people, for lack of trust of his own people. He had taken the detail of the matter, the link, to Ins friend.

He was asked what he thought.

I 'Helen. Helen of Troy. Bill, when all else failed, in Italian we would say uccello da richiamo, I think your word is "decoy", yes? The decoy behind the walls. The way through the gate. Codename Helen, for when we talk, Bill. But, Bill, it is to be kept close.'

II It was authorized in Washington. Herb had authorized it. Yes, he knew Herb. He was told it should be kept closer than a choirboy's 'sphincter, and the Country Chief's laugh rang in his ear, pealing as if from inside a box of metal.

'Is that dirty talk, Bill? Hey, but, Bill, we keep this close. You call in. when you have something, something on Codename Helen. It's bad here at the moment, so quiet. There is nothing to touch, nothing to feel, nothing to see. When it is quiet, then I have the anxiety. You tell him, he gives the Codename Helen a good kicking because I need her here, just tell him.'

The one man that he trusted, that Giovanni Crespo would give his life to, was Axel Moen.

'Bill, he is moving, climbing. Did you see that a bad bastard from Agrigento went missing? Old style, old school, so conflict was inevitable It is the lupara bianca, the disappearance. Between him and the top place, where he will try to be, is only the Catania man, that's what we hear. If he gets to the top place, our friend, then there is a time of maximum danger, perhaps for many people, when he would seek to prove himself. Bill, I have a big anxiety. The only way for our friend to prove himself is to kill

…'

When she pushed her scooter out of the lean-to shed and buttoned her anorak and slipped on her helmet, she saw him look up and wipe the windscreen, and she saw him start to manoeuvre the car. She thought of the young mother, the addict, in Intensive Care.

They were the ragazzi, the kids, the boys. Though the magistrate called them, always, the ragazzi, three of them were aged over forty, and one was two years off a fiftieth birthday. The fifth, Pasquale, was the only one of the ragazzi still clinging to youth. The party, orange juice and a cake, was in the kitchen. The kitchen was for cooking and doubled as the communications room and rest area for them.

In the depths of the apartment, away from the closed door of the kitchen, a telephone rang.

It was as good a party as was possible on orange juice and chocolate cake. No alcohol. No alcohol was allowed on duty, nor for five hours before starting duty.

Chocolate cake was permitted, and orange juice. The baby, Pasquale's first, had been born in the small hours of the morning and he had come straight from the hospital to start his duty. And they larked and fooled like kids and boys and there was spilled juice on the floor and broken cake on the table, and the birth of a baby and the pride of a father were celebrated. He had bought the cake himself, and the juice. If he had been a part of them, truly a member of the team, then they would have collected among themselves and bought the cake and the juice. He was too young, too recent, to have been wholly accepted, and his work was under continuous probationer assessment. It could have been that they resented his youth, there were some on the qualification course who said that the reflexes of a younger man were sharper than those of older men… He tried to be a part of the team.

The telephone no longer rang.

And those who had three children and four children and two children, and the maresciallo who was the oldest and had teenagers, competed with the horror stories of parenthood to bludgeon Pasquale. The black execution humour of his fellows played, mocking, around Pasquale's ears, the tales of the sleepless nights and the changing of shit-filled diapers and vomited food and a swallowed I/D card and the little hands that climbed a chair to produce the condom packet from the bathroom cupboard that was displayed to grandparents, and…

The laughter died. They heard, all of them, the footfall beyond the kitchen door.

All faced the door, like ragazzi, like kids and boys caught in a moment of guilt. He seemed with his eyes to apologize, as if he deeply regretted the intrusion into his own kitchen, into their communications room and rest room. They had started the party, opened the orange juice, cut the cake, because he had told them he was not returning that evening to the Palazzo di Giustizia, now lie shrugged in his self-effacing way and brushed the greying hair back off his forehead and muttered that he must return to his bunker office. He held his briefcase in his hand and his raincoat was draped on his shoulders.

There was the snap of the maresciallo's radio, to alert the military In the street.

Crumbs were brushed off a Beretta M-12S 9mm pistol, juice was shaken from the barrel of a Heckler amp; Koch MP-5 machine gun. The vests of kevlar plates, proof against small-arms fire and light shrapnel, were heaved up from the floor beside the oven by Pasquale, one for each man.

There was the clatter of the weapons being armed.

Left in the kitchen, debris on the table, half-drunk glasses of juice, half-eaten slices of chocolate cake.

They went out of the apartment and towards the door. The woman who lived across the hallway scowled, and the bodyguards gave her the eye and the finger because she had twice written to in newspapers to complain of the danger in which she was placed by lliving in proximity to Dr Rocco Tardelli. They went fast down two flights of stairs, in front of him, beside him, behind him. He was a small figure, hemmed in between them, skipping to keep pace. They iwere not his servants, nor his messengers, nor his cooks, they would never be his true friends. They had not volunteered to protect his life, but been given the assignment.

Out on the street the soldiers shrieked their whistles for the traffic to halt at the far junctions. Two of them were out of the main lobby and into the cars and hacking the engines. Guns drawn, the maresciallo in front of him, Pasquale behind him, the magistrate was bustled to the open door of his armoured Alfa. As if he were pitched inside, as if he were a parcel to be despatched… The sirens blasted. The tyres screamed.

The Alfa and the chase car hit the first junction and swerved right, scattered the cars and scooters ahead. They were not the servants or the cooks of Dr Rocco Tardelli, nor were they his true friends, but each of them in his differing way felt a fierce loyalty to the small man low on the back seat of the Alfa who struggled, through his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, to read a file as the car bucked, braked, accelerated and weaved. The other teams, those assigned to other investigating magistrates, regarded them with pity. They were the escort of the magistrate who worked stubbornly and persistently towards the capture and conviction of Mario Emanuele Ruggerio. They were the ragazzi of a 'walking corpse'.

A tremor of a voice from the back of the Alfa. 'I understand you are to be congratulated, Pasquale. Is the baby well, is your wife well?'

His mind churning the procedures of 'cover and evacuate' and 'defensive of life only' shooting patterns and 'fight or flight' mode, Pasquale muttered, 'Very well, thank you, Dr Tardelli.'

'You will be leaving me?'

'No, Dr Tardelli.'

'Because you now have a baby?'

'Please, Dr Tardelli, you distract me…'

When she pushed the scooter up the drive and parked it in front of the garage doors and took off her helmet and shrugged her hair free, she saw him slowing in his car. She thought of the baby of seventeen days, hooked to tubes, shivering in a glass box.

'Did you read the man's file?'

'I did.'

'Did you like what you read?'

'Not particularly, if you need to know.'

The Country Chief, Ray, stood at the partition wall that blocked off Dwight Smythe's work area from the open-plan office. He had been a guest observer the whole of the day at a symposium organized by the British Home Office to talk through international co-operation on organized crime – and the day had been crap, the papers read before lunch by a Russian and a Spaniard and the paper read after the buffet by a Brit from the National Criminal Intelligence Service had been shit. The papers had been a recitation of seizure statistics and arrest statistics and asset-confiscation statistics, and he'd reckoned them garbage. The papers were garbage because they did not go to the core problem of taking out t lie men who mattered, the men who made it happen.

Complacency was a crime in the Country Chief's Bible, and that day there had been more complacency on show than food on the buffet table. He envied Axel Moen, didn't reckon Axel Moen suffered too many symposiums.

'You want to go work in La Paz, Bolivia?'

'No.'

' He did. You want to get yourself into firelights where they need body bags afterwards?'

'No.'

' He did. You want to lift a bad man in Miami, testify to a Grand hiry, find out then that there's a video of you going into court and that the Cali people, the cartel guys, have the video and have your lace?'

'No.'

'You want to wear a Smith amp; Wesson, you want to look over your shoulder, you want to go to Palermo?'

'No, no, no.'

He could be affable, the Country Chief, Ray. He could tell a good lory at the Christmas party. He could charm the asses off the inspection teams. He could make a sour-minded man smile. He was affable when he cared to be. His voice had a crunch, trodden-down hosted gravel.

'You don't want it, Dwight, so keep your bad-mouthing to yourself.'

'What I'm saying-'

'Don't.'

'You goddam hear me, Ray. What I'm saying, we are professionals and we are trained and we are paid. The young woman that he's got his hooks into – hear me, because I didn't just take time on the computer for Moen's file, I went into current assessments of La Cosa Nostra, down in Sicily, that's a killing ground – the young woman is an innocent.'

The Country Chief, a moment, softened. 'Maybe, Dwight, you sell us all short, maybe we're all thinking like you. And maybe we should all clap our hands and sing our hymns and get on our knees and thank our God that He didn't give us the problem. Have you got the budget figures for last month? Trouble is, it's a good plan. Might not, but might just get to work. Bring the budget through, please.'

When she looked from the window, she saw him lying back, eyes closed, in his car. She thought of the grief of a retired major and how he would writhe in self-guilt. She thought of the body on the trolley.

Anyone who knew her or worked with her would have described Mavis Finch as a difficult person. Her family was up north, she had no friends in London, there was no one who would have shouted her corner. Those who lived in the same block of two- and one-bedroom maisonettes in a south-west suburb of the capital would have spoken, if asked, of Mavis Finch's complaint flow about the noise of their televisions, about their pets, about their litter, about late visitors. Those who worked with her in the bank in the Fulham Road would have spoken, if asked, of Mavis Finch's carping criticism of balance sheets produced late, of account errors, of extended lunch hours, of days taken for minor illness. She was unloved and unliked by both neighbours and work colleagues. To the more charitable she was someone to be pitied, to the less charitable she was a vindictive bitch. But the life of this lonely thirty-seven-year-old woman, without a man or a child or a friend or a hobby, was governed by a rule book. The rule book laid down the volume of her neighbours' televisions, what pets could be kept, when their litter should be put out, up to what time visitors were permitted to come banging on doors…

It was because of the needle eye of Mavis Finch for the pages of her rule book that Detective Sergeant Harry Compton, S06, took an early dinner in the hotel fronting onto Portman Square. Her rule book for conduct in the bank on the Fulham Road extended beyond matters of lateness, delays, mistakes, sickness. Regarded by her managers as best kept distant from customers, it had been, the previous June, a combination of holidays and pregnancies and sickness that had forced them to detail Mavis Finch to counter work. It was because she had been at the counter, mid-morning, nine months before, that DS Compton, Fraud Squad, toyed with a cod mornay in the dining room of a five-star hotel. Probably, Mavis I inch, that long-ago morning, would have been alone among the counter clerks in having read in full the texts of the Drugs Trafficking Act (1984), the Criminal Justice Acts (1988 and 1993) and the Drugs Trafficking Offences Act (1994). The Acts, taken in lotality, made it obligatory for a bank to disclose

'suspicious and large transactions'. Of course, that mid-morning, Mavis Finch reported the deposit of?28,000 in?50 notes because had she not reported it, she would, herself, have been guilty of criminal conduct. She had taken the name, Giles Blake, the address, she had noted what she described in the spidery handwriting of her report as an

'impatience' by the customer… Compton watched the target, sipped mineral water, listened.

And so typical, Compton thought, that the buggers at NCIS should have taken from June to March to evaluate the bank's disclosure before passing the detail to Fraud Squad. Bloody typical. To Harry Compton, the National Criminal Intelligence Service should more often get its hands out from under its butt.

He had, because time was precious and allocated fiercely to priorities, around five hours of desk time and an evening to decide whether to hold open a file on Giles Blake or whether to scrawl across the existing seven sheets that 'no further action' was warranted.

The desk time had produced nothing tangible, no evidence of illegality, but Compton had a nose, nostrils, that sensed an incomplete picture. A nice house in Surrey for Mr Blake, a nice wife and children for Mr Blake, bank accounts and stocks and money in building societies for Mr Blake. Too much that was 'nice', and not enough to substantiate it. Compton had gone as a young detective from the Harrow station to Anti-Terrorist Branch, and found the surveillance of Irish 'sleepers' in smoky and beer-stinking pubs to be a decent definition of boredom. He had sought and found stimulation, he had transferred to Fraud Squad. He liked to say, if he met up, increasingly rarely, with guys from Harrow or Anti-Terrorist, that S06 was the steepest learning curve in the Metropolitan Police. He was studying, nights, business management and accountancy, and when he'd those qualifications he'd be going for law. But the old nose still counted.

What had twitched the nose of Harry Compton, stung the nostrils, was the guest that Giles Blake had brought to dinner.

The tables were adjacent. They liked to boast, from top to bottom of S06, that their surveillance procedures were the best, better than Anti-Terrorist, better than Flying Squad. The ethos was 'proximity'. They had to blend, they had to risk burning out. It was not sufficient merely to observe, long range, they needed 'proximity' to listen.

He'd heard once on a course, a hot afternoon, central heating turned too high, head beginning to drop, a lecture line that had hit him. 'The accountants are more dangerous than the killers – the killers are small-time scumbags, the accountants threaten a whole society…' He had used up the five hours of his allocated desk time, he had started to burrow into his evening's surveillance time, tracked Giles Blake from his London office to Portman Square, to the hotel, to the reception desk, to the bar, to the restaurant. The guest had come to the restaurant, shaken hands, hugged, sat down.

'A good flight?'

'It's every day, every week, not in your papers here, a strike of the airline workers, just two hours – so we were late away. Nothing changes in Palermo.'

His nose twitched, his nostrils smarted.

The light came on over the porch. Axel flicked the wiper switch and the windscreen was smeared clear. She came out of the door. The windscreen blurred with the rain. She hurried through the small gate and she was hunched small with her arms tight around her body as if that would keep her dry. At the car she rapped her fingers on the passenger window. He did not hurry himself. He tossed the Time magazine copy behind him and onto the back seat and then he pulled out the ashtray and stubbed the cigarette. The rain ran on her hair and her face and she hit the passenger window with her fist. He leaned across and unlocked the door, pushed it open.

She ducked into the car and was wiping the rain off her head and from her face. She turned to him, angry. There was a brightness in her eyes, but her face was wrecked because her mouth was screwed, good anger. It was useful for Axel Moen to see how she handled good anger.

'Thanks, thank you very much.'

'What do you thank me for?'

'Thanks for making me stand out there, get bloody wet, while you read your magazine, smoke your cigarette-'

'Care for one?' He held the packet in front of her, Lucky Strike, out of the carton from duty-free at Fiumicino.

'It's a dirty habit. Thanks for keeping me in the rain while you read and smoke, before you open the door-'

'So you got wet, how's that cause to thank me?'

'Are you stupid?'

'Sometimes, sometimes not.'

'It was sarcasm. In thanking you for getting me wet, I was being sarcastic.'

'I find it best, Charley, always, so there's not misunderstandings, to say what I mean.'

He grinned. Axel grinned because her face had flushed red. He saw the colour spreading across her face by the light above him. It was good anger and getting better.

She had twisted to confront him. He thought she might have put on lipstick at the start of the day hut it had wiped off and not been replaced, and there were no cosmetics round her eyes and they were bloodshot as if it were two nights she hadn't slept well.

Her temper was scratched, a nail in wood that the saw blade hits. It was important for him to read her temper. forced calm. 'All right, what I mean… We don't have it now, we used to have a terrier bitch. When the bitch was in season, on heat, then a big Labrador dog used to come and sit at the side gate. He used to sit there by the hour, big, bloody stupid eyes.

You know what, that dog sitting there, all night, and sort of crying, he got to be just a bore.'

'I'm hearing you, Charley.'

Enjoying herself. 'The town where I went to college, it was an army town, a garrison camp. Soldiers used to sit in their cars, on their bikes, at the gate and watch us, the girls. We called them 'lechies', understand, lechers. They didn't have old raincoats, they kept their Y-fronts on, they didn't flash us. They were pretty harmless, but they got to be boring.'

'Did they?'

'You here in your car, last night, all night… today at school. .. here now… it's getting to be a bore. It is causing embarrassment. Danny Bent, he says you could have injured his stock. Fanny Carthew says you damn near ran her dog over. Zach Jones wants to know if we've called the police. Daphne Farson wants to know if you're a pervert.'

'Maybe you should go tell them to fuck themselves.'

'That is-'

She laughed. He thought she was trying to be shocked and failing, because she was laughing. It was useful for him to see her laugh. When she laughed she was pretty, quite pretty, not especially pretty. She wiped the laugh.

'Where I was taken last night, emotional blackmail, it was pathetic.'

'Myself, I'd say it was patronizing.'

'Treating me like a juvenile.'

'Patronizing, but I doubt it did you harm.'

'What do you want of me?'

'Same as I told you first time round. There is an opportunity for you to give me access to the home of Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio. I need that access.'

She stared hard at him. There were shadows on her face that caught the small lines at her eyes and at her mouth. He thought now that he stressed her. It was important to him to see her stressed. He waited on her. It was not for him to lead her.

She hesitated, then blurted, 'If I refuse, won't go to Palermo… ?'

Axel gazed at the windscreen, at the running water, at the blur of the beach and the jetty and dark outline of the headland. ''I lose that opportunity for access. I have one opportunity through you. OK, we thought it out, you get the invitation, you write back and say that you're sorry and can't make it, but that you've a friend. We supply the friend. The friend is the Customs and Excise investigation team, a policewoman, whatever. They're too careful over there, wouldn't buy it. You're the one with access, Charley, only you. If you refuse, I don't get the access. Don't think I want someone like you down there, but I haven't another option.'

She turned away from him, twisted her back to him. She jerked the passenger door open. She pushed herself out of the car. She told him that she would think on it one more night, and where she would meet him the next day after school. She asked him if he liked walking. She bent suddenly, peered at him through the door, and il did not seem to matter to her that the rain beat on her head and her shoulders and her spine.

'What would happen to me, if…?'

'It went sour on you? If they were just unhappy about you, they'd fire you, send you home. Charley, I try and say what I mean so I here aren't misunderstandings. It's a shit place and they're shit people. If they'd serious cause to suspect you, then they'd kill you and go home afterwards and eat their dinner. It wouldn't bother them, Charley, to kill you.'

He watched her run towards the light above the porch of the bungalow.