Killing Ground

Chapter Three

Egregio Dottore e gentile Signora.

She sat in the classroom. She took a mouthful of a sandwich from her lunchbox. She sipped at the can of Pepsi. She had brought in with her, in the rucksack that strapped onto the back of her scooter, the sheet of notepaper headed with the address of Gull View Cottage. In the mid-morning break she had gone to the rubbish containers on the far side of the playground and lifted the lids of two of them and tried, hopelessly, to identify which plastic bag had been in the bin outside her classroom. She had not found the plastic bag. It was a fine day, the cloud was broken, and the crocuses in the pots around the prefabricated classroom were already showing with the daffodils, and she thought that the spring season was a time of hope and optimism, and she wondered how the spring season was in Palermo… She tried to remember each phrase, sentence, of the letter written to her by Angela Ruggerio and then intercepted and copied and tracked.

(Sorry, dottore, and sorry, signora, but that is going to be the limit of my Italian – I remember quite a lot of it, but if you'll excuse me the rest will be in English!!)

Thank you very much for your kind invitation. And my warmest congratulations on the birth of Mauro, and of course I was very pleased to hear that Mario and Francesca were well.

It was so clear to her, the Roman summer of 1992. School finished, exams taken. The miserable response of her father, who had expected too much of her grades. Not good enough for university but sufficient to win her a place at a teachers' training college. It had been her mother who had seen the advertisement in the Lady magazine. Her mother had seen the advertisement in the magazine at the hairdresser, copied it and brought it home. An Italian family living in Rome sought a 'nanny/mother's help' for the summer months. She and her mother had written the application and enclosed a photograph, and her father had warned that Italians pinched bottoms and were dirty, not to be trusted and thieves, and she and her mother had ignored him, as they usually did. The four months of the Roman summer of 1992 had been, quite simply, the happiest months of her life.

I was very surprised to get your letter, and you will understand that I have had to think about it very hard. Because of the situation today in England I found when I graduated as a teacher (!) that it was really hard to find work.

I think I was very lucky, Dad certainly says so, to get this job that I now have.

The Roman summer of 1992 had been magic months for Charley. From the time that she had walked down the aircraft's steps, pushed her trolley through Customs and Immigration, seen Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio, with Mario holding his father's hand and Angela carrying the baby Francesca, and seen their welcome smiles, she had felt a true liberation for the first time in her life. They had greeted her as if she were a part of them, right from the time that Peppino, as he insisted he should be called, had driven them away from the airport in his sleek BMW, and she had sat in the back withthe small boy beside her and the baby girl on her lap, had treated her as a friend already by the time the car had swept into the basement car park of the apartment on the Collina Fleming. She had thought then that her father was ossified in his attitudes and boring, and she thought that her mother was complacent in her outlook and boring, and to be away from them, first time in her life, was true freedom. Most mornings of that June and July Peppino, with the beautiful suit and smile and lotion scent, was gone early to his office in the bank, something to do with the Vatican. And most mornings of those first weeks Charley had taken Mario down to the piazza for the private bus to the kindergarten of St George's School, high on the Via Cassia. And most mornings of that June and July Angela, with beautiful blouses and skirts and coats, was out in the shops of the Via Corso or at her volunteer job in the Keats Museum at the Piazza Espagna.

Most mornings, while the domestica made the beds and cleaned the bathrooms and put the washing in the machines and did the ironing and tidied the kitchen, Charley had sat on the wide balcony and played with the baby, Francesca, and marvelled at the view above the pot flowers, watered each day by the old portiere, stretching from the dome of the basilica of St Peter's across the heart of the city and away to the distant shadows of the mountains. It had been heaven. And more of heaven in the afternoons, the Italian classes in a room off the cool of a courtyard behind the Parliament building, and then the roaming walks through the centro storico. When she walked the narrow cobbled streets of the centro storico she had never taken a map with her, so that each church and old piazza, each gallery and hidden garden, each tucked-away temple and frieze from antiquity, had seemed a discovery that was personal to her. It had been her freedom.

I have considered very carefully your offer that I should come to Palermo to help look after Mario and Francesca and baby Mauro. I am happy in my present job, I have ambitions to move to a bigger school when I have gained more direct experience. If I resign my position, then I believe it would be quite difficult, at this time, to find another school that would have me in the autumn.

That summer of 1992, for the months of August and September, Charley had gone with Angela Ruggerio and the children to a rented beach villa a kilometre along the coast from Civitavecchia.

If he were not away on the bank's business, Peppino came to the villa at weekends.

Seven weeks of sun, oil and sand and ice-creams and lazy evening meals and a growing love of Angela and her children. The good clothes from the Via Corso boutiques were left behind. The time for T-shirts and jeans and bikinis, and the fourth day on the beach Charley had taken courage and unhooked the bikini top and felt a desperate blushing shyness at the whiteness and lain on her stomach on the towel while Angela had lain on her back beside her, and never worn the top again and known her own parents would have called her a slut. She had talked of poetry with Angela and known her own mother had never read Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth. She had talked of social sciences, Angela's degree course at the University of Rome that had specialized in local administration, and known that her own father had believed the world began and ended with the study of marine engineering. It was the time of her liberation. And it had ended

… It had ended in tears in her small room at the apartment when she had packed her bag, ended in tears as she had hugged them all and kissed them all at the departure gate, ended in tears as she had walked alone to the aircraft. Magic was not real, was illusory.

She had come home from a Roman summer of liberation and freedom to the drab college that trained her to teach.

Basta, enough of me waffling on. I think you are providing me with another fantastic opportunity to travel – which I certainly cannot afford to do on what I am now paid!! – I don't know anything about Palermo except that it is a city very rich in history. I cannot imagine it, cannot see it in my mind, and yet already I am excited.

She did not he often, but it was a lie when she wrote of her ignorance of the city and its images. She was taken, her recall, to (he images on the television screen of the apartment on Collina Fleming. The killing of Judge Giovanni Falcone had been twelve days before her arrival in Rome, that summer of 1992, but the killing of Judge Paolo Borsellino had been forty-five days after her arrival.. She sat in the classroom, with her lunchbox and her emptied can of Pepsi, and she remembered the images of the television…

It was only afterwards, after she had seen the images, that she had understood the quiet in the capital that weekend afternoon as she had browsed her way from the Colosseum to the Partheneum, and the quiet on the bus that had dropped her by the Ponte Flaminio, and the quiet on the street as she had walked under the pine trees towards the apartment on Collina Fleming. She had called her greeting in the hall, and not been answered, and she had gone into the little sitting area where they had the portable television. Even the child, Mario, and the baby, Francesca, had been hushed. Peppino, grim-faced, had sat in front of the television and stared at the screen, and the chin of Angela, beside him, quivered. So it was a lie for Charley to write that she had no image of Palermo. The image in bright colour was of the front of a block of flats, demolished, and of a car that had held 50 kilos of explosives, disintegrated, and of the faces of Judge Borsellino and five bodyguards, destroyed. That was the image of Palermo, and there were more images for her to recall because the television broadcast, interrupting normal schedules, had then shown the scene of the killing, fifty-seven days earlier, of Judge Falcone and Judge Falcone's wife and Judge Falcone's three bodyguards. The images were of the demolished facade of an apartment block in Palermo and of a cratered highway with broken cars scattered among rubble at Capaci. Peppino and Angela had sat with their silence and Charley had watched, seen and slipped away to her bedroom as if she had feared she had intruded into a world that held no place for her, but it had all been far away from Rome and was not referred to again, far away in Palermo.

I am happy to take the plunge. I will sort out the matter of a new job when I get back because this is much too good an opportunity for me to miss – I accept your invitation.

I look forward to hearing your suggestions for my arrival date. Distinti saluti,

Charley (Charlotte Parsons)

Outside the window the bell clamoured the end of the lunch hour. She was twenty-three years old. She heard the screaming, excited babble of the children charging back from the playground. Other than when she had gone to Rome four years earlier, she had never been outside her country. Her hand trembled. She had agreed to take an opportunity for access. She read the letter back. She would spy on the family that had shown her love and kindness and affection.

'Come on, children. Settle down now. Leave her alone, Dean. Stop it. Writing books out, please. Yes, writing books, Tracy. Darren, don't do that. Has everyone got their writing book?'

She folded the letter. She had been told that if she gave serious cause for suspicion, she would be killed and that then her killers would go home to eat their dinner.

To refuse protection in Palermo was to lose the love of life.

Under the yellow haze of car fumes that lay below the surrounding mountains and that was held in place by the light sea breeze, the city was a mosaic of guarded camps.

Palermo was a place of armed men, of carefully sited strongpoints, as it had been throughout history. Soldiers with their NATO rifles, huddled inside bulletproof shelters, held the street corners of the blocks where magistrates and politicians lived.

Police bodyguards in armour- reinforced cars, deafened by sirens, escorted those magistrates and politicians from one defended position to another, from home to work, from work to home. Thug-minders watched over the personal security of the men who figured high on the lists of Interpol's and Europol's most-wanted suspects and had Kalashnikov assault rifles secreted in their cars but close to hand. It was a city of tension and fear, a city where the industry of protection flourished. The industry offering protection, fortresses and safety was spread thick across the city. It covered the servants of the state and the principals of the alternate society, and right on up and right on down through every stratum of Palermo's society. If the magistrate or the politician was denied protection, was isolated, he was as a floor rag left out on a line to rot in the sun, he was dead. If the boss of a family running a district of Palermo ignored the necessary precautions of survival, then other pigs would come to snout out the food in his trough. The hotelier running the four-star albergo must pay for protection or face his guests' cars vandalized, his food contaminated, his business ruined.

He sought protection. The bar owner risked fire if he did not buy protection. A construction magnate risked the denial of contracts and bankruptcy if he did not buy protection. The street vendor must buy it or reckon to have his legs broken, and the street whore on the Via Principe di Villafranca, and the bag thief on the Via del Liberta, and the taxi driver on the rank at the Politeama, and the heroin peddler at the Stazione Centrale. The seeking of protection was a habit of existence, unremarked and unexceptional…

To decline protection in Palermo was to refuse to live.

His hands were less painful that day. He could hold the coffee cup with his fingers and not spill the treacle-thick liquid. He thought that his hands were less painful because of the warmth of the spring sunshine on them as he had walked on the Via Marqueda to the bar.

In the bar, where the television played a satellite channel's transmissions of continuous music-promotion videos, Mario Ruggerio met with a man and talked the strategy of killing.

If he had talked with a man who was close to him, close-tied by blood or friendship, he would have said that the matter of killing was abhorrent to him. But there was no man who was sufficiently close to him, not even his youngest brother, in whom he would confide his most prized and inner thoughts. His aloneness, his suspicion of intimacy and sharing, were key attributes that he recognized in his capacity for personal survival. His dislike of the strategy, matter, of killing had little to do with any sense of squeamishness, even less with any hesitation over the morality of taking the life of another of God's creatures. It was to do with security, his freedom.

In the conversation, punctuated by long silences, over the single cup of coffee, down to the dregs of the ground beans and the two sugar spoonfuls, the name of the magistrate was never used.

It was difficult to kill without witnesses. It was hard to kill without leaving traces for the forensic scientists of the carabineri and the squadra mobile and the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia to analyse for evidence. It was complicated to dispose of a cadaver, even if an oildrum of acid were used or the 'heavy overcoat' of liquid concrete on a construction site, or if the body was food for the fishes. All of those who had planned and carried out the killing of Falcone and Borsellino were now in custody, rotting, or convicted in absentia, and, like wayward children, they had scattered evidence around them. The old way of killing, his father's way, was the lupara, which was the short-barrelled shotgun with the spread of pellets but that left blood spatters on walls, streets, carpets, rugs and pavements. The Magnum handgun with exploding bullets was the favourite of the wild young picciotti, the head-case kids, but that too left evidence, shell cases, fractured bullet fragments, blood running to the street drains and smeared through interiors. He preferred the way of strangulation, but that was so hard now on his hands that had the rheumatic pain in them.

They talked, without using the name of the magistrate, right under the television.

The killing of a man served two purposes for Mario Ruggerio. The killing of a man would send a message to his family and his colleagues, and the killing of a man removed an obstacle that confronted the smooth running of his affairs. The killing of the magistrate, discussed in staccato words under the beat of an electric guitar and the hammer of a drummer, would send a message and would remove an obstacle. It was his belief that La Cosa Nostra should strike only when it was threatened and the magistrate, in the opinion of Mario Ruggerio, now endangered him. The shotgun could not be used, nor the Magnum, nor the Kalashnikov fired from the waist on automatic, because it was not possible to be that close to the magistrate. He did not know the workings of bombs in cars or rubbish bins, nor the methods of a command wire or of an electronic firing pulse, but the man he talked with knew of those workings and methods.

He would have preferred a world of quiet, a world where the interest of the state waned. He wished for a world of coexistence. He could reel off, without consultation of notes, the names of judges and prosecutors and magistrates in the Palazzo di Giustizia who also yearned for such a world of coexistence, but in that conversation, in the bar, he did not speak the name of the single magistrate whom he thought now to represent a threat against his precious freedom.

It was agreed that a bomb was the necessary method of attack.

And further agreed that the movements of the magistrate would be more closely observed to find a pattern in his travel. And finally agreed that the matter of killing was a priority.

He slipped away from the bar, an old man in a grey jacket and a check cap on the pavement of the Via Marqueda who attracted no attention, who flexed the muscles of his hand in the Palermo sunshine.

The prisoner had been brought from his shared cell on the third floor of the block. The doctor was the 'cut-out'. The doctor had asked for the prisoner to be brought to the medical wing for routine examination. The doctor and his own staff had been used three times before by the magistrate. The magistrate would not have reckoned on the chances of the survival of the prisoner if it were known in the corridors and landings of Ucciardione Prison that the man, on remand and charged with murder, had requested a meeting. The request for the meeting, a prisoner wishing to talk with Dr Rocco Tardelli, had come in a letter, barely literate, hardly legible, delivered to the Palazzo di Giustizia.

He thought the letter, perhaps, had been written by the prisoner's mother. Men died, some quietly through strangulation, some noisily through poisoning, some messily through bludgeon blows, in Ucciardione Prison when they sought to collaborate. It was of critical importance, at this moment, that it should not be known among the prison staff that a man had asked to see the magistrate who was known to have dedicated his life to the capture of Mario Ruggerio. When the prison staff who escorted the prisoner to the surgery had been dismissed and the prisoner signed for, he had been taken by two of the magistrate's own security detail, his head covered by a blanket that he should not be recognized by watchers peering from the cell windows high above, across the yard and to the room made available for the magistrate.

Tardelli thought him pathetic.

The cigarette that the prisoner smoked was nearly finished and already the man looked longingly at the packet on the table. Tardelli did not smoke but he always carried a nearly full packet in his pocket when he came to Ucciardione. He pushed the packet towards the prisoner and smiled his invitation that the man should help himself again. A new cigarette was lit from an old cigarette and the hands of the prisoner shook.

Tardelli thought him wretched.

They sat in a bare room, on either side of a bare table, they were enclosed by bare walls. There was no window and the light came from a single fluorescent strip on the ceiling, around which wafted the spurted smoke from the prisoner's cigarette. Since the message had come from his office at the Palazzo di Giustizia, the report of a letter without signature to request the interview, the message that had interrupted the celebration of orange juice and chocolate cake, Tardelli had spent the major part of two days studying the file of the prisoner. It was his way always to be meticulously prepared before he faced a prisoner.

The prisoner spoke the name of Mario Ruggerio.

He detested personal publicity, he left it to the more ambitious and the more scheming to give media interviews, but it was inevitable that Rocco Tardelli should be known as the magistrate who hunted Mario Ruggerio. Half a dozen times a year he was told that a prisoner had requested, in conditions of secrecy, to meet with him. Half a dozen times a year a prisoner grovelled for the freedom of the pentito programme, for the opportunity to trade information for liberty. Once a year, if he was lucky, Tardelli would hear information that carried forward his investigation, drew him closer to the man he hunted. They came and they squirmed and they crossed the Rubicon. They condemned themselves to death if they were identified, if they were located, when they broke the God- given law of Sicily, the law of omerta, which was the code of silence.

The pentito Contorno had broken the law of omerta and thirty of his relations by blood and by marriage had been butchered in a proxy attempt to halt the information flow he dribbled. There was a saying of the peasants on the island: 'A man who is really a man never reveals anything even when he is being stabbed.' The pentito Buscetta had turned away from the code of silence and thirty-seven of his relations had been murdered. Another saying of the peasants on the island: 'A man who is deaf and blind and silent lives a hundred years in peace.' The pentito Mannoia was now a terrified man, existing on Valium tablets, in crisis. He had heard a woman refer to her pentito brother as 'a relative of my father'. It was an earthquake in their lives when they gave up the silence. Each year one of the prisoners who sat at the bare table in the bare room, hemmed in by the bare walls of the bunker, was useful to the magistrate. Five a year were rubbish wretches.

It was a sparring game for Tardelli and the prisoner.

'Why do you wish to take advantage of the Award Legislation under the conditions of the Special Protection Programme?'

The eyes of the prisoner were on the choked ashtray. He stammered, 'I have decided to collaborate because La Cosa Nostra is only a gang of cowards and assassins.'

He could be cruel. Rocco Tardelli, mild-mannered and roundshouldered, could be vicious.

'I believe it more probable that you seek to "collaborate" because you face the sentence of ergastolo. You face the rest of your life in prison, here, in Ucciardione.'

'I have rejected La Cosa Nostra.'

'Perhaps you have only rejected the sentence of life in Ucciardione.'

'I have information…'

'What is the information?'

'I have information on the location where Mario Ruggerio lives.'

'Where does he live?'

The prisoner snorted, the furtive eyes lanced upwards towards the magistrate. 'When I have the guarantee of the Special Protection.. .'

'Then you go back to your cell, and you consider. You do not seek to bargain with me.

Back and consider.'

'I can tell you where is Mario Ruggerio.'

'When you have told me, then we think on the Protection Programme. Then I evaluate and make my recommendation to the Committee. You talk, or you go back to your cell. It is not for you to make conditions.'

It was important for the magistrate, Rocco Tardelli, to set the rules from the first interview. A thousand men had been received into the Protection Programme. The budget was exhausted, safe houses were filled, carabineri and military barracks bulged with the pentiti and their families. Most were useless. Most bartered long sentences of imprisonment for stale information. To a dedicated investigator, as was Rocco Tardelli, it was distasteful to exchange freedom for tired news.

'But I have come to you…'

'And told me nothing. Consider your position.'

Tardelli stood. The interview was concluded. Most of those he met, the true leaders of La Cosa Nostra, were men he treated with due respect. It puzzled him, frequently, that such gifted men should require criminality to buttress their yearning for dignity.

Because they had lost their dignity, it was hard for him to offer a pentito due respect.

The prisoner, the blanket again over his head, was escorted back to the medical area.

The doctor would call for prison staff to return him to the shared cell on the third floor of the block. The magistrate gathered up his briefcase from the floor, his cigarette packet from the table, his coat from the hook on the door. With his guards, he hurried down the corridor.

The sunshine hit their faces.

'You see, my young friend, Pasquale, maker of babies, I have to make him suffer. He has made the first move, but he will have thought he can control me. I have to show him that he does not. He will have thought he can offer me information, step by step, a little at a time, as he demands further privileges. That is not acceptable. I have to be able to judge that he will tell me everything that he knows. I have to be patient…'

They paused at the car, the armoured Alfa. The lights were flashed at the gate sentries. The engines roared. The gates swung open. The sidearms and the machine-pistols were cocked.

'Is he a jewel, Pasquale, or is he false gold?'

'Please don't talk to me, not when we are moving, please.'

He tucked down into the darkened interior of the car. The young man, Pasquale, was in front of him, the maresciallo drove.

He leaned forward, he caught the back of the young man's seat. It was a compulsion for him, to share and to talk. There was no one for him to talk with but the ragazzi. He despised himself, but to talk at times was the craving of an addict.

'You know, if I was afraid, if I could not tolerate the fear any longer, I could send a signal. There are routes by which a signal could be sent. Certain people, in the Palace of Poison or in the Questura, even in the barracks of the carabineri, would send a signal, pass a message. I have only to say, in confidence, that a prisoner asked for me. In confidence, I would give that prisoner's name. In confidence, binding such a person to secrecy, I could say that I have rejected the offer of information from that prisoner. It would be a signal that I was now afraid. The message would be passed on, it would be heard. It would be understood that I was no longer a threat. If, in confidence, I sent that signal, then I could again go to a restaurant, go to the cinema, go to the opera at the Politeama, go to the hairdresser…'

The young man, Pasquale, sat rigid in front of him.

The magistrate said sadly, 'I have to believe that I can live with the fear.'

'I hear we cocked your posh grub. You won't find me crying, Harry. Wife was out, so mine last night was sausage, oven chips and beans.'

'Didn't do too bad, sir.' Harry chuckled. 'Managed five courses, two gins for aperitif, bottle of white and red, brandy to wash it down

…'

'Did we screw you?'

The detective superintendent, it was his show, led the detective sergeant out of the senior partner's office and across the hall and out through the front door, down the steps and across to the pavement where the Transit van was parked. Harry stood back to allow his superior to hand over the cardboard packing case first to the constable at the rear doors. They paused, each of them, wrung their hands, pretty damn heavy the boxes were.

'I was beginning to get the taste for it. Quite a good restaurant, actually, for a hotel.'

'Till we horned in. Come on, next load.'

They went back into the building on Regent Street, looking straight ahead and ignoring the white-faced junior partners and the secretaries who had little handkerchiefs clasped in their hands as if to safeguard them from the Domesday collapse of their world. It was inevitable, what had happened the previous evening, because of the shortage of manpower in S06 and the constant juggling of priorities. Listening to Giles Blake's assessment of the immediate future of the gilts market, toying with the cod to make it last because they were slow on their food at the next table and hearing the announcement break into the canned nothing music. 'Would Mr Harry Compton please come to reception to take a telephone call? Mr Harry Compton to reception, please.'

Getting a judge out of his club and back to chambers, phoning the wife and pleading excuses, going through the evidence dossier with the judge and asking for a Schedule 1

Production Order under the Police Criminal Evidence Act (1984). Getting the judge's signature on the order, asking him to put nib to paper a second time for the search warrant, and seeing his reluctance because it was a solicitor that they were going to jump when the office opened in the morning. Maybe that had been worth it, the study of distaste on the good old judge's face, because it was a solicitor, same clan and same tribe. Harry Compton had done the donkey's load of the investigation into the bent bastard whose hands were into clients' savings, the greedy bastard who was excavating trustee funds, the solicitor who had broken trust, but it was the detective superintendent's show and he'd made the call that had hauled the junior man off his expenses dinner. The panic reason was that the senior partner, information received, was going abroad and hadn't given his colleagues a coming-home date. Under a Schedule 1 Production Order and a search warrant the papers and archives were being packed away in cardboard boxes, down to the last sheet and the last file, loaded up and would be d riven for close analysis to the S06 office behind Holborn police station.

Harry Compton was dog-tired, out on his feet. He had finished with the judge at midnight, had the briefing with the team at thirty minutes after midnight, been home and slept three hours, been up and driven to the senior partner's home in Essex for a dawn knock and the clicking of handcuffs. He trudged up the stairs again for the next load of papers.

'Where did we get to?' The detective superintendent stopped on I he landing and breathed hard.

'Last night? Sort of nowhere and somewhere. Chummy meets a guy, they have dinner, they talk financials through the evening. It was pretty unexceptional stuff.

Anyway, the NCIS material on chummy was kind of vague, not much more than a single report of a medium cash deposit in a bank,?28,000, along with sharp-moving accounts with plenty of action in drops and withdrawals and not a lot to point to where the money comes from and where it's going, but not showing up as obvious illegal. That was the "nowhere".'

They were back in the senior partner's office. A small mountain of cardboard boxes remained to be shifted. And there was more to move in the secretary's office, and more from the junior partners' rooms, and then there was the whole of the bloody archive in the basement.

'Get a hernia from this. You're a cussed sod, Harry, always keep the best to last. What was the "somewhere"?'

The detective sergeant grinned, welcomed the compliment. 'Smooth as new paintwork. The guest, wearing his money on his back, Italian, very tasty… and he'd flown in from Palermo.'

Each of them heaved up a box and headed for the door.

'You wouldn't be telling me, would you, Harry, that every businessman from Palermo is bloody mafia?'

Harry Compton winked. "Course they are – if it was a grannie aged eighty from Palermo, a kid aged five from Palermo, I'd have 'em locked up for "organized crime".

It has a sort of ring, doesn't it, Palermo?'

'We can run the name through.'

'Don't have the name, had a phone call before I'd even got stuck into the sweets trolley.

I'll get the name.'

'But you'll work this bloody lot first, too right.'

There were forty-seven boxes of papers from the offices, and there would be twenty-nine plastic bin sacks from the archives, and they'd need going through before he could get back to a hotel in Portman Square for a guest's name. It would all be a matter of priorities.

She passed him the letter, but the American made no move to take it. He turned to face her.

'Who else has read this letter?'

She bridled. 'Nobody has.'

'You are telling me, certain, nobody else has touched this letter.'

'Of course they haven't.'

She watched. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, shook it, then took the letter from her. The handkerchief protected the letter from the touch of his fingertips.

To Charley, holding the letter in a handkerchief seemed ridiculous. 'Why?'

He said bleakly, 'So that it doesn't look as if it's been shown round, so that my prints aren't on it.'

'Would it be looked at that closely?'

'We do it my way, let's understand that from now.'

He was impassive. He talked as if to an annoying child. He swung round, away from her, to read the letter held in the handkerchief. Bugger him. Charley had thought it clever to give him a meeting point on the cliffs. The dusk had been falling when she had ridden her scooter to the car park, empty but for his hire-car, that served the coastal footpath. He had been where she had told him to be. There was a nest of cigarette ends by his feet, enough for him to have been there for hours, from long before she had told him to be there. It was a good place for the big seabirds, and the gulls and shags and guillemots were chorusing and floating in the wind and settling on the rocks below where the sea's charge broke. It was a favourite place, when home just suffocated her, to come to. It was where she came and sat and brooded when the clinging attentions of her mother and father swamped her. It was a place of peace and wildness. She had thought it clever to come to the cliffs, to sit on the bench of coarse wood planks. Here she would be in control… He passed the letter back to her, then pocketed the handkerchief, then flicked a cigarette from the Lucky Strike packet.

'Aren't you going to ask me why I decided-?'

'Not important to me.'

'Whether it's excitement or duty, whether it's adventure or obligation-?'

'Doesn't matter to me.'

She bit at her lip. She ran her tongue the length of her lip. She had sought control.

The blood was running in her. 'Well, sure as hell, it's not your courtesies. You are the rudest man-'

'If that's what you want to think, you should fax it to them in the morning.'

She crumpled, and the control that she had sought slipped further. 'But… but I don't have the fax number.'

He said, as if he were tired, as if it were tedious, 'The fax number was on their letter.'

'But I tore it up, didn't I? I wasn't going, was I? I destroyed the letter, and then I changed my mind.'

He should have asked why she had changed her mind. He didn't. He was reaching inside his windcheater and he took out the folded sheet of paper and opened it. From the photocopy of the letter sent to her he wrote the number and the international code on a note pad, tore off the sheet from the pad and handed it to her. There was a growl in his voice. She thought him so bloody cold. 'Write it in your own hand on the back of the letter.'

She did what she was told. He took the paper from his notebook back and tore it into small pieces. He threw the pieces into the air and they flaked away below them, carried on the wind gusts, down towards the big birds as they settled for the night.

Away beyond Bolt Head, off Start Point, she saw the first flash of the lighthouse, the raking beam.

'Is it necessary to be like that, so careful?'

'Yes.'

'That's what I have to learn?'

'It's best that you learn, fast, to be careful.'

She shivered, the cold caught her. His windcheater had none of the quilted thickness of hers, but the cold did not catch him and he did not shiver. She felt dominated and small. Said with acid deliberateness. 'Yes, Mr Moen. Right, Mr Moen. Three bloody bags full, Mr Moen. I'll send the fax in the morning.'

'Tell me about yourself.'

'Excuse me, shouldn't you be doing the talking. Who, what, you are. Where I'm going.

Why.'

He shook his head. 'Who, what, I am doesn't concern you.'

She snorted in fake derision. 'Brilliant.'

'It's about being careful.'

She felt the cold, the wind on her back, night wind hacking at the strength of her anorak. 'Where I'm going and why.'

'In good time. About yourself.'

She took a big breath. He watched her and his face was shadowed, but she did not think that if a flashlight had been shone on his features, or the full beam of the lighthouse on Start Point, she would have seen any damned encouragement. As if she was being manipulated, as if she was one of the marionettes that were stored in the cupboard behind her desk in 2B's classroom…

She blurted, 'I'm Charlotte Eunice Parsons, everyone calls me "Charley". I'm pretty ordinary-'

'Don't talk yourself short, and don't look for compliments.'

'Fat chance. I'm an only child. My parents are David and Flora Parsons. Dad was an engineering manager at the naval dockyard at Plymouth, it was his whole life – well, and me – until two years ago, when he was made redundant, the "peace dividend". We lived then in Yelverton, which is up on the edge of the moor, north of Plymouth. He didn't think he could afford to stay there, so they upped and moved. He packed in the bowls club and the tennis club, cinemas and shops, he's paranoid about being hard-up, broke. He bought the bungalow, he took his place in a gossipy and inquisitive little society, mean-minded. God knows why, my mother went along with it. Where they are now, they're boring and sad and empty. Do you think I'm being foul?'

'Doesn't matter what I think.'

She gazed out at the sea, at the darkening mass of the water, at the white foam spurts on the rocks, at the distant light rotating from Start Point. She thought she spoke a truth, and that truth was important to Axel Moen.

'I can't afford to live away from home, all I've got went into that silly little bike. If I had a promotion, a better job, when I've more experience, then I could quit and go and live in my own place. Not yet. Their lives are boring, sad, empty, so they're looking for a star, and I fit the role. It's always been like that, but it's worse now. There's days I could scream – don't think I'm proud of being a right hitch – and there's nights I'm ashamed of myself. The trouble with being a star, you learn as a kid how to milk it, you get to play the little madam. Not before, but there are times now that I disgust myself.

They wanted me to be quality at tennis, but I was ordinary and Dad couldn't see that.

They wanted me top of the form atschool, and when I wasn't, it was the teacher's fault, not because I was just another average kid. They wanted me to go to university, and when I didn't get the grades, Dad said the examiners had made a mistake. What saved me, what sort of opened the window to me, was going to Rome and being with Giuseppe and Angela, they were really lovely, they were wonderful. But you want me to spy on them?'

'I want access, yes.'

She peered ahead. He wouldn't have seen it. She gazed down the depth of the rock face to where a crag hung out as a limp finger. A falcon worried with its killing beak at the feathers under its wing. It was personal to her, the peregrine. Sometimes, when she came to this place, she saw it, sometimes she heard the crying call of the female. If it came, she would see it because she could recognize the fast movements of the bird in flight and its rigid profile when it perched on the finger of rock. The bird was her own, nothing to do with him. It flew. She lost the sight of the bird.

'I came back from Rome and went to training college. I suppose I was a spoiled little cow from home and a patronizing little cow from Rome. I didn't seem to find it necessary to make friends. All right, let's have it straight. I thought most of the other students were pretty trivial, and they thought I was pretty stuck-up, you know what that means? I didn't have a boyfriend, not one of the students, but there were a few sweaty sessions with one of the lecturers, one of those who always apologizes and cries afterwards and moans about his wife, but he used to give me good marks. Are you married?'

'No.'

'Ever been married, Mr Moen?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'Just stay with the story, Charley.'

'Please yourself. I've only once ever done anything worthwhile in my life, what I thought was worth doing. You see, when you know how to milk, it's the big temptation to stay on the gravy train – God, that's rotten mixed metaphors. When you can get what you want without trying, you get complacent, you stop trying. Big deal, but I went last summer to Brightlingsea, it's a small dock on the east coast, other side of London.

There was a protest there against the export of calves to Europe. They were shipping the calves across for fattening up and then slaughter. It's the veal trade. It's revolting. I was there for a month, bawling and hollering and trying to stop the lorries. Yes, I thought that was worth while. Are you from a city or from the country?'

'North-west Wisconsin.'

'Is that country?'

'Big country.'

'So you wouldn't care about the animals, you'd say that farmers have to live, people have to eat, animals don't feel fear and pain.'

'It's not important what I think.'

'Christ. What else do you want to know? What colour knickers I wear, when my period is? You're a bloody bundle of fun, Mr Moen.'

'I think I've heard enough.'

She stood. Her hair was jostled on her face. The wind had risen and now that she no longer talked in his ear she had to shout against the roar of waves battering on rocks.

'Could we murder something, like a drink?'

He murmured, 'I don't drink, not alcohol.'

'My bloody luck, a bloody temperance nut. Hey, I'll drink, you watch. And while I drink you can tell me whether what I am going to do is worthwhile – or don't you have an opinion on that?'

Charley strode towards the car park. It was her big exit. She pounded up the path from the bench and the cliff face. She was going fast and ahead of him. Her foot, in the black darkness, tripped on a stone. She was falling… 'Shit.' She was stumbling and trying to hold her balance… 'Bugger.' He caught her, held her up, and she shook his hand off her arm and stormed on.

'Yes, Dr Ruggerio… Of course, Dr Ruggerio, of course I'll tell C harlotte that you rang, I'll tell her exactly what you said… It is difficult, Dr Ruggerio, she has a very good position at the moment, hut… Yes, Dr Ruggerio, we're very gratified to know that you and your wife regard Charlotte so highly… Yes, she's a lovely young woman… We are, as you say, very proud of her… I know she's thinking very hard about your offer.

She's out at the moment, something connected with school work.. . Send a fax or telephone to Palermo, yes, I'll see she does that tomorrow… You're very kind, Dr Ruggerio… Yes, yes, I'm sure she'd be very happy with you again… My wife, yes, I'll pass on your best wishes… So good to speak to you. Thank you. Goodnight.'

He put down the telephone. David Parsons glanced once, briefly, at the graduation photograph of his Charlotte that hung in the place of honour in the hall. He went into the sitting room. Flora Parsons looked up from her needlework, the cover for a cushion.

'God, you're a coward.'

'That's not called for.'

'Eating out of his hand and he's soft-soaping you. Crawling to him.'

'He sent you his best wishes…'

'The letter comes, then the American's here. Half the village wants to know who he is. Where's Charley now? I haven't an idea. Where is she? I'm frightened for her.'

'As soon as she's back, I'll speak to her.'

'You won't, you're a coward.'

It was her bravado, and when she'd finished she had only a few coins left in her purse.

Back to the bar, refusing his offer to buy the second round. A pint of Exmoor draft for herself, and a double malt whisky for herself, and another cup of decaffeinated coffee for Axel Moen with milk in a plastic carton and sugar in a paper sachet.

While she'd drunk the first pint and the first double malt whisky, while he'd sipped the first coffee, she'd told him about the timbered, low-ceilinged pub. She had given him the history – supposed to be a smugglers' den, and a hundred years earlier it was supposed to have been used as a lodging for a hanging judge in the Monmouth rebellion round-up, supposed to be…

He'd looked barely tolerant, uninterested. He lit another cigarette. 'OK, listen, please.

What you saw when you had your drive round, pushers' territory, small-time-'

She interrupted. 'I wouldn't describe an addicted baby in spasm as "small-time", nor would I call an overdosed corpse "small-time". I'd-'

'Be quiet, and listen. What you saw was the symptom of a strategic problem. Too many law-enforcement people spend their time, the resources given them, chasing thieves and muggers and pushers because it looks good and they get to seem busy. But they're attacking the wrong end of the problem. Let me explain. Take a big company, let's talk of a mega-multinational. We'll take Exxon or General Motors or the Ford Motor Company, they're the major three American corporations. The total of their turnover, last set of figures I saw, $330 billion – get that figure in your mind – but the man you see is the salesman from the General Motors or Ford showroom, or if it's Exxon he's the guy who takes your money at the filling station. For the salesman or the guy on the cash till you should read "thieves and muggers and pushers".

Narco-trafficking, the last set of figures, runs directly alongside those of General Motors and the Ford Motor Company and Exxon, so we are talking serious money – you with me? – but organized crime is not only about narcotics, you can add in the profits from money washing, from arms trading, from illegal-immigrant rackets, loan sharking and kidnapping and hijacking, from extortion. What the whole thing comes to, worldwide, is figures too big to comprehend, but we try. The figure is $3 million billion. It leaves the top corporations for dead… Hang on in there.'

She bolted at the beer. He sat opposite her. The cigarettes went from his mouth to the ashtray, were stubbed, were lit, were smoked. He talked quietly and she clung to his words, as if he'd opened a door to her that showed a sea without a horizon.

'Hanging, but it's from my fingernails.'

She won a quick smile that did not last.

'The salesmen of General Motors and the Ford Motor Company don't count, nor the guy on the cash till at an Exxon filling station, they're about as important as the thieves and muggers and pushers. Where it matters is head office. Get in the elevator at head office, head on up past the accountants and lawyers and the marketing people and the public affairs people, keep going up in the elevator, up past the vice-presidents for sales and finance and internationals and image, research and development, keep on till it stops or hits the sky. You are, Charley, in the presence of the chief executive officer. He matters. What he decides affects folk. He is god. His level is strategic.'

She felt minuscule, a pygmy. The whisky glass was empty, just the dregs of the Exmoor draft left.

'There are mafias in Italy, in the United States, in Japan and Hong Kong, in Colombia and Brazil, in Russia. Each of those mafias has a chief executive officer, one man, because there's no space for a gang session in a mafia or in a corporation, who acts pretty much like the chief executive officer of General Motors, the Ford Motor Company or Exxon. He lays down guidelines, he plans for the future, he takes an overview, and if there are major problems, then he gets to roll up his sleeves and go hands-on into detail. I'll hit some differences. The mafia chief executive officer lives out of a hole in the ground, on the run, hasn't a thirty-storey tower for staff, hasn't a floor of IBM computer gear. Your corporation guy, take away his support and his computer, he'd fall on his face… not his mafia opposite. The mafia chief executive officer lives with a wolf-pack. To survive he has to be feared. If he is thought to show weakness, he will be torn to pieces. He stays cunning and he stays ruthless. I'm getting there, Charley, nearly there…'

'Fingers are getting a bit tired, nails are starting to crack.' She hoped to make him laugh, another bloody failure. She did not believe he had talked this through before, she did not think it was rehearsed. It was not, Charley's opinion, a familiar and patterned story. It made her warm, with the whisky, to believe she was not carried along a rutted story track.

'There's a commonplace. The mafias in Italy and the United States, Japan and Hong Kong, Colombia and Brazil, in Russia, have a sincere respect for the mafia of Sicily, La Cosa Nostra. La Cosa Nostra, out of Palermo, out of desperate little towns hanging in poverty off the sides of mountains, is the role model of international crime. It's where it started, where it's bred, where it lives well. They call it, in Italy, la piovra, that's an octopus. The tentacles spread out all over Europe, into your country, all over the world, into my country. Hack one off and another grows. You have to get to the heart of the thing, kill the heart, and the heart is in those little towns and in Palermo.'

She trembled. Her hands were splayed out on the table. She whispered, 'What do you want of me?'

'You offer the possibility of access to the chief executive officer of La Cosa Nostra.

It's why I came to find you.'