Killing Ground

Chapter Four

She sat alone on the cliff, her place.

The headmistress had said, 'There were four hundred applicants for your job, eighty applications from inside the county. If we'd realized that there was the faintest possibility you would just walk out on us, then you wouldn't have even won an interview, let alone a short-listing. Don't you feel a responsibility to the children? Don't you feel something for your colleagues here who made you so welcome? When you return from this little episode in idiocy, don't think that this job will be waiting for you, and I doubt that any other job in teaching will be opening its arms to you after the report I intend to attach to your record. You've failed me, and your colleagues, and your children…'

In the common room, mid-morning break, she had announced her departure, and she had seen the expressions on their faces, orchestrated by the reaction of the headmistress, change from astonishment to hostility. The sneer of the divorced head-of-year teacher who always looked at her with the ambition of getting his hands into her knickers. The angered resentment of the young man who taught 3A and ran the library and took scouts on weekends and whose eyes mooned after her in the common room every day.

The rank envy of the teacher of 1A who had three children of her own and her husband had run and her life was dictated by minders and baby-sitters. Charley had shrugged, she had muttered that her mind was made up. She hadn't said, couldn't see the point in saying, that she thought them all pathetic and limited, small-minded and trapped.

From the bench above the cliff she saw the peregrine preen the pure white of its chest feathers, worrying at them.

Axel had said, 'You don't only have rights in this world as some gift of God. If you are given rights, you have to take the downside on board. You have to acknowledge obligation and duty. If the citizen has rights, then the citizen also has obligation and duty. You are the citizen, Charley. Bad luck. You cannot always hand over your obligations and duties to other people. Cannot walk away, cannot cross over the road. I don't have to give you syrup thanks for what you're doing, I don't tell you that we're all grateful to you. I'm not thanking you when all that's asked of you is to perform your duties and obligations as a citizen. I hope you didn't want a pretty speech.'

They had sat in his hire-car up the lane from the lights of the community, and Danny Bent had come by and stopped to peer in through the misted window and had spat onto the ground when he had turned away. Too right, she had wanted a pretty speech. She had wanted to feel proud, flushed and pleasured, and his quiet and cold voice gave her nothing. She had sent the fax. Three days later, the last evening when she had returned from a day at school, the envelope from the travel agent in London had been on the table in the hallway of Gull View Cottage, beside the telephone, under her photograph, and enclosed had been the ticket to Palermo, via Rome. He had said, cool and devoid of emotion, what she should write in a fax to be sent in the morning, why she was stopping two days in Rome, when she would reach Palermo. He had told her, brusque, where accommodation would be reserved for her in Rome, at what time he would meet her.

When she had pushed herself out of the hire-car and kick-started the scooter, Fanny Carthew had been watching her. When she had reached home, pushed the scooter up the drive, Zack Jones had spied on her with his binocular lenses. She was turning her back on them, and she knew so little of the man for whom she danced.

Where the sea crashed upon the rocks at the base of the cliffs, a shag bird strutted and held out its wings, drying them in the formation of a blackened cross. It was her place.

Her father had said, 'When that Italian telephoned, maybe I should have been a bit firmer with him. Perhaps I should have told him direct, "She's not coming, there's no question of her travelling to Palermo." Those sort of people, because they've money, they believe they can buy anything. There's a job down the drain, God knows where you're going to find another one. And what are we supposed to think, your mother and I? But I don't suppose we matter to you. You are treating us like filth, and after all the love we've given you. What are your mother and I supposed to think? You let that American into our house, you skulk out in the garden. You come back from drinking with him, but, of course, your mother and I are not told, and you stink of alcohol. Mr Bent and Miss Carthew, they both saw you last night, with that American, but we're not told. All we're told is that "if we talk about it we might be responsible for hurting people". What sort of an answer is that to two loving, caring parents?'

She had felt then a depth of sadness, and the mood must have been mirrored on her face, because her father had broken his whining attack and her mother had come from the kitchen and put her arm around her daughter. It had been the only time since the American had first come that she could have wept, cried out her heart. Charley had said, head against her mother's chest, looking into the bewilderment of her father's eyes, that she was sorry. She had said that she was sorry, but that she could not tell them more.

She had gone away to her room to lay out on her bed the clothes she would pack to take to Palermo. She had not told them that the hostility of the common room had given her raw satisfaction, nor had she told them of the sparse moments of delight when she gained the fast, cracked smile from Axel Moen, nor had she told them of the brutal excitement she felt at the chance to walk away from a life that was trapped on tracks of certainty. She had not told them, 'I want out, I want to bloody live.' She had gone into her room and laid out on the bed, beside the sausage-bag, her best jeans, two denim skirts, her favourite T-shirts, her underwear from Marks and Spencer's, two pairs of trainers and her best evening shoes and a pair of sandals, the severe cotton nightdress that she had been given the last Christmas by her mother, her make-up bag and her washing-bag, two dresses for the evenings, her bear that had been in her bed for twenty years and which still carried the yellow ribbon for the safe return of the Beirut hostages, and the leather-framed photograph of her mother and father from their twenty-fifth anniversary, and the airline ticket. She had checked what she had laid out. She had packed the bag.

When she could no longer see the peregrine on its perch, and no longer see the shag on the rock washed with the sea, when the darkness had closed over her place, she rode home and back to her small room and her packed bag, and the bungalow was like a place for the dead.

It was raining. The wind drove the rain to run in rivers on the windows. Charley settled in her seat. She didn't screw her face against the glass, she didn't look back, she didn't try to see whether her mother and her father still stood on the Totnes platform and waved. Maybe she was a proper little bitch, and maybe that was why Axel Moen thought he could work with her. A mile out of Totnes station, as the big train gathered speed, the world she had known, and felt she was condemned to, was slipping, blurred, away. Behind her was the suffocation of home, the smallness of her place on the cliff, the drear routine of the school. She had thought she lived. The train powered towards Reading. She felt the adrenalin thrill. At Reading she would take the shuttle bus to Heathrow airport. She believed, at last, that she was challenged.

From where he sat at his desk, Dwight Smythe could see the man through the glass of the partition wall and through the open door. Axel Moen was clearing the desk that had been given him since he had come to London. He could see him take each sheet of paper from the drawers, fast-read it, then take the sheet to the office shredder and mince it. Each last sheet, read and shredded, so that when he boarded the plane he would carry nothing. There were handwritten sheets and typed sheets and note jottings, and each one was destroyed. Dwight's telephone rang. Ray wanting him. Ray had finally got round, taken him four days, to going through the budget figures.

He walked out of his office and across the open area. Axel Moen was sat on his desk and turning a file's pages and seemed not to notice him and he had to manoeuvre round him, awkward, and Axel Moen never shifted to make his way easier. There was a small bag on the floor beside the desk, and there was an Alitalia airline ticket laid down beside the file that Axel Moen was reading, hard concentration.

Ray hated figures. He was like a bad housewife when it came to accounting. He went through the budget figures as if they might bite him, and scrawled signatures on each sheet, and didn't seem to know what he was signing. Ray pushed the budget sheets back.

'That's a good job, thanks. Thanks for taking the weight. Is he about cleared up?'

'Given him his ticket, given him petty cash.'

'What time they going?'

Dwight Smythe peered out of the Country Chief's office and across the open area towards Axel Moen, still bent over the last file.

'Oh, they don't travel together, hell, no. He doesn't hold the hand of that poor kid. She goes British Airways, I was instructed to book him with Alitalia. She doesn't get any comfort treatment. You'd have thought…'

'You hooked into his file?'

'I did what I was told.'

'There was an area blocked off to you.'

A bitter, droll response. 'There was an area of the file to which I was not admitted. Not suitable for an administrative jerk.'

'I hooked in, but my key code doesn't get blocked.'

'That is privilege to aim at, that gives my life a goal.'

'You have, Dwight, don't mind me saying it, a rare ability to get stuck in my throat so's I want to spit. He was in La Paz, Bolivia.'

'I got that far – have you anything else for me, Ray?'

The Country Chief's finger, a moment, jabbed at Dwight Smythe's chest. A lowered voice. 'He was in La Paz, Bolivia, that was '89 to '92. Only the best get to go down to Colombia and Peru and Bolivia. Three-year postings for wild guys.'

The lip curled. 'You talking about cowboys?'

'Don't push. They move into coca-leaf-production country, where the campesinos grow the goddam stuff. There's remote estancias up there, with the small airstrips that the cartels use to ship the coca out for refinement in Cali or Medellxn. Back in La Paz life is behind razor wire and walls and with a handgun beside the pillow and checking under the car each morning. Up-country it's serious shit. Our people have CIs out there, our people try to hit the airstrips when the CIs report there's going to be a shipment. We have to fly with the Bolivian military. A Bolivian helicopter pilot might get to earn $800 a month, he's wide open to corruption, but you have to tell him where you're flying, you have to trust him. You can't reckon to fly with your own people every day.

You have to trust. You wouldn't know about that, Dwight, living that sort of stress, waiting for betrayal, and pray to God you never learn. They were up near the Brazil border, hot news from a Confidential Informant, two Huey loads of Bolivian special forces, Axel Moen and another agent. They came in over the strip and there were three light aircraft being loaded – it's what his report in the file says. Understand, when you come in on a Huey you don't go round a couple of sweet circles for recce, you go in and you hit. It was bad, compromised, it was a fuck-up, ambush time. He, your friend Axel Moen, took a high velocity in the stomach, one of the birds was busted, three Bolivians KIA and six more WIA and that was out of twenty-two of the poor bastards.'

'I never found war stories that interesting.'

'Hang around. The high-velocity in the stomach was flesh at the side. They hadn't much choice but to get themselves off the open strip and to the cover of the buildings. It was quite a fire fight. When they got to the buildings they met up with the Confidential Informant. Couldn't do much talking with her. She was dead. She'd been gang-banged.

She'd had her throat cut. She'd been nailed up, through the hands, to the inside of the door of the building. Are you hearing me? It's a hard world out there, it's better out there when you don't make emotional relationships with a Confidential Informant, it's better when you're a cold bastard.'

'Thanks for checking the budget figures, Ray.'

Across the open area Axel Moen fed the last sheet of paper into the shredder, and then a photograph. Dwight Smythe had only the most fleeting glimpse of it. It seemed to show a slight and inoffensive man of middle age, perhaps at a function or a wedding or a reception because there were others in suits around the small man, whose head was ringed in red chinagraph. The target? Shit, and the guy looked nothing and wouldn't have stood out in the photograph if it hadn't been for the red ring around his head. As Dwight Smythe came across the work area, Axel Moen checked that the band holding his hair was secure, then picked up and pocketed his airline ticket, and heaved up his small bag.

Axel Moen waved, desultory, at Ray, and was heading for the door.

Dwight Smythe thought that once the intruder had left he'd spray an air freshener round the office area. He didn't know the world of Confidential Informants and fire fights and high-velocity flesh wounds, and hoped to God he never would. And he thought the girl from the small bungalow was an innocent.

He growled, 'I'll see you some time. Have a good flight. I'll see you, maybe-'

'Yes, if I want some expenses signed.'

Gone through the door, gone and not closed it behind him.

When the aircraft had lifted, yawed and climbed, as she sat small in her seat and buckled tight, Charley had felt that she crumpled. She had thought then that she was the most minuscule of the marionette puppets locked in the cupboard behind the teacher's desk, not her desk, in class 2B.

As the aircraft cruised, on automatic flat flight, and she sat numbed in her seat beside the honeymoon couple in their best new British Home Stores outfits, Charley felt numbed. The couple did not seem to notice her, and after she had seen the rampant love bite on the girl's lower throat and the girl was younger than Charley, she did not even consider trying to talk to them. What would they have understood of her acceptance of an invitation that would provide access? Damn-all of nothing… She sat far down in her seat, refused the tray of food, turned the pages of the in-flight magazine and retained not a word of the printed text, not a frame of the glossy photographs.

The aircraft lurched in flight, bounced on landing, swayed in flight and bounced again, and Charley thought briefly of the seabirds on the rocks below the cliff at her place, coming to land without faltering on the water-washed rocks. It was behind her.

The honeymoon couple, had they bothered to look, but they didn't because they were huddled together in a fear of flying, would have seen at that moment that a stubborn and bloody-minded grimace had caught at her mouth. It was what she had wanted, the chance, what she had chosen, the opportunity. When the aircraft was still, when the music came on, when she had unfastened the waist strap, she strode down the aisle, a small bounce in her step. She was needed, and it had been a long time in her life since she had known the glow of importance, too damn long…

Charley walked briskly through the aircraft's door.

'You on secure, 'Vanni?'

'Wait out… You there, Bill? OK, I'm on secure.'

Bill Hammond, Country Chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration, working out of an office in the Via Sardegna, to the right off the big drag of the Via Veneto, held the telephone tight in a sweaty grip. He was an old hand, heavy experience in the back-pack of his career. The walls behind him and beside him had no further space to carry the commendations and the handshake photographs and the team pictures, of which the operations for Polar Cap and Green Ice were the most recent of the blitzkrieg swoops. His desk, on which his shirt-sleeved elbows rested, was thick with paperwork, requests from Washington, cross-references with colleagues in London and Frankfurt and Zurich, reports from the Italian end… and there was the closed file bearing his handwritten legend, CODENAME HELEN. His fists sweated, always did and always would, when an operation went live.

'How's it going down there?'

'Don't give me Yankee bullshit.' A sharp, metallic-toned response.

'You got sun down there? May rain up here, always liable to rain when Easter's coming on.'

'Don't pee on me.'

'Tried to call you last night. Were you out screwing? Your age, and you should watch your heart-'

'What's happening, shit on you, Bill?'

He took a deep breath, he had the wide smile on his face. 'She's coming. She'd have touched down about now.'

'Jesu…' A hiss distorted by the scrambler system on the telephone. 'How did he get her? How did he persuade…?'

'That's my boy, you know my boy. How? I didn't get to ask him.'

'Is she stupid, what is she?'

He was laughing. 'Go back to your pit, 'Vanni, dream of big hips and big boobs, whatever you spend your time doing, you carabineri bastards. My boy'll call you. Look after yourself, 'Vanni, stay safe. I don't know whether she's stupid, or what…' He replaced the telephone. He flicked the switch to disconnect the scrambler.

The Country Chief had worked with Axel Moen for two years and he reckoned, better than any man in the Administration, that he knew him. He did not know the detail of how Axel Moen had manipulated the young woman, Charlotte Parsons, but he had never doubted that face to face, body to body, eyeball to eyeball, Axel Moen would bring back to Italy the young woman and her baggage of access.

He would have qualified on his knowledge of the career of Axel Moen.

He would have said that he knew the backgrounder – upbringing, home base, education, work before joining the Administration, the postings of the agent before Rome – but that he was short on the motivation that drove the man.

The Country Chief had the backgrounder on Axel Moen from the headquarters' confidential file… from his meeting two years back with the Country Chief who had run him in Bolivia… from sessions when he was in Washington for the strategy seminars, late at night over whisky, with the people who had run him in New York and Miami. He could tell the backgrounder.

His man, Axel Moen, was thirty-eight years old. From immigrant Norwegian stock, farm people. Reared by his grandfather and his step-grandmother on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. Complications in the rearing because his father was away with the oil industry and pneumonia had taken his mother. Lonely childhood because his grandfather was divorced before the Second World War and had brought back from Europe a second wife, Sicilian, but the community on the Door Peninsula hadn't held with divorce and hadn't taken in a stranger. Isolated. Went through the University of Wisconsin, finished in Madison with grades not quite decent. Joined the city police, reached detective, applied to join the Administration. Thought to have an 'attitude problem' on the induction course at Quantico, given the benefit of the doubt because the DEA was pushing up its numbers and not looking for course failures. Sent to New York, with fluent knowledge of Sicilian dialect, to sit in the darkened rooms with the earphones on and listen to the Pizza Connection wire taps. Sent to Bolivia, good under stress circumstances, good with the locals, poor on a team operation, superficially wounded. Sent back to New York, reported as a 'pain' in an office environment. Sent down to Miami, worked well in deep cover, identified by the cartels, shipped out and sharp. Sent to Rome… Bill Hammond had been with Axel Moen for two years, run him, knew the backgrounder. Bill Hammond, who did not lie often, would have confessed that he knew sweet fuck-all of the motivation of Axel Moen.

He himself had been a DEA man since the start. Bill Hammond was coming now, and the dates on the year's work planner behind him were the ever-present reminders, towards the day he dreaded most. He was headed for retirement, for the presentation of the carriage clock or the crystal sherry decanter, for the speeches, for the last photo opportunity of the handshake with the Director. Everybody loved a cop, nobody noticed a retired cop. He was headed for minding the grandkids. Over fourteen years of service he had gathered in the detail of the file biographies of, maybe, a couple of hundred agents – men and women he could evaluate and pass a judgement on. But he did not know the source of the drive force governing Axel Moen. OK, right, sure as hell, as his career wound towards that date on the year planner, he wanted to preside over a spectacular arrest operation and he wanted to have the Director on the telephone, personal, and he had given his authorization to the plan that was CODENAME HELEN and he had basked in an anticipation of glory, but…

But…

But the kid was now off the plane at Fiumicino. But the young woman was now through Immigration. But the kid was in a taxi and headed for central Rome.

But…

The kid, the young woman, was now the property of Axel Moen. And it was Bill Hammond who had authorized it, and Bill Hammond had put his goddam name on the recommendation document that had gone to Washington and onto Herb Rowell's desk.

And it was Bill Hammond who had given the big talk and enthused enough for Herb to kick it through the committee that rubber-stamped hard-point operations. And it was Bill Hammond who had pushed Herb to make the requisition order to the Engineering Research Facility. It was the responsibility of Bill Hammond that the kid, a young woman, was travelling in a taxi towards central Rome. Maybe it would be the glory, maybe it would lie on his conscience…

He was old, too old. He was tired, too tired… As the bag was dropped down on the floor, his eyes snapped open.

'Good flight, Axel?'

The shrug. 'Same as any other.'

'She's arrived, Miss Parsons?'

The glint of the eyes, tightening, narrowing. 'That, Bill, is a sloppy mistake.'

He was in the wrong. He blustered, 'For God's sake, Axel, where are we? We are swept, cleaned, hoovered. We can talk-'

'You make a beginner's mistake. You talk a name here, perhaps you get to talk it elsewhere. A beginner's mistake can get to be a habit.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I don't want to hear it again, that name.'

'I apologized… 'Vanni, he called her the uccello da richiamo, the decoy. We talked about the Trojan Horse. The horse had access. For 'Vanni, she's Codename Helen. Can you live with that?'

Axel, standing loosely, lit a cigarette. 'It'll do.'

'Where is she?'

'About checking in, I should think. You got my package?'

From the ring of keys on the chain at his belt, he unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk. He took out the padded bag. The bag had come with the cargo on a military flight to 6th Fleet from Engineering Research Facility at Quantico, then had been brought to Rome by a Navy courier from Naples.

'Thanks. I'll be getting on.'

Axel Moen held the package and seemed to stare at it for a moment, then dropped it into his small bag. He was turning away.

'Hey, Heather rang for you. Seems Defense Attache's a party on tonight. I said you wouldn't be able to go, I told Heather that.'

'Why'd you do that?'

The emphasis steeled his voice. 'Because, Axel, I assumed that Miss Codename Helen, described by you as "ordinary" and "predictable", might be stressed up, might need some care before she goes down there. Aren't you taking her to dinner?'

The shaken head. 'No.'

'Shouldn't you be taking her to dinner?'

Axel said, 'It's good for her to be alone. I can't hold her hand, in Palermo I can't nanny her. She's got to learn to be alone.'

It was as the memory had been, the memory she had guarded as a treasure, in privacy, for the last four years.

In the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, in front of the imperial tomb encased in glass, Charley could have shouted her delight. In the Piazza Popolo, surrounded by the rushing river of cars and vans and motorcycles, Charley could have screamed the news that she had returned.

A heady and excited delight caught at her, as a narcotic would have. It was to her, the solitary young woman walking the old streets and scuffing her toes on the uneven cobbles and skipping over the dog dirt and the refuse, an evening of triumph. Around her were the evening crowds of the beautiful people, beside her were the open shops of clothes and designed furniture, above her were the peeling ochre buildings. Like the renewal of a love affair. Like seeing, after long absence, a man standing and waiting for her, and running headlong to him, sprinting to jump towards him and his arms. It was one evening, it was so precious. She found again, as she had found them in the summer of 1992, the little courtyards off the Via della Dataria and the churches with the high doors off the Corso, the steps above Piazza Espagna where the Arab boys sold rubbish jewellery, the fountain of Bernini in Piazza Navona. She stood by the edifice to Vittorio Emanuele and looked the length of the wide street to the far-away, floodlit Colosseum.

It was Charley's heaven… For three hours she ran and walked and ambled through the streets of the centro storico, and knew happiness again. When she was tired, bruised feet aching, Charley had to kick herself because the impulse was to find the bus stop on the Corso, or the rank of yellow taxis, and head north for the apartment on Collina Fleming. She had thought, many times, that she saw a younger woman walking with Angela Ruggerio and carrying the shopping bags, a younger woman walking with Giuseppe Ruggerio and smiling up at him as he joked, a younger woman walking with small Mario Ruggerio and holding his hand and laughing with his love…

She took her dinner in a ristorante, a table to herself, and was served by grave-faced waiters a meal of pasta and lamb with spinach, and she drank all of the gassy water and most of a litre of wine, and she left a tip that was near to reckless and felt her self-esteem.

She strolled from the ristorante the few yards back to the hotel in which she had been booked, near to the river, off the Via della Scrofa, near to the Parliament. Outside the narrow door of the hotel, across the alleyway, a radio blared from an open workshop and a man in greasy vest and torn jeans repaired motorcycles. She looked at him, she caught his eye, she winked at him, as if it were her city. In Italian, her best, she asked the portiere at the reception for coffee in the morning and a copy of La Stampa, and with an impassive expression he had answered her in English that she would indeed have coffee and a newspaper, and she'd giggled like a child.

Her room was tiny and stifling hot. She switched on the TV, habit, scattered her clothes on the bed and the carpet, habit, went for a shower, habit. She let the lukewarm water sprinkle on her upturned face and wash away the dirt of the streets. She towelled herself hard. She would sleep naked in the sheets. She was alone, she was free, she controlled her destiny, and she bloody well was going to sleep naked and she looked, her opinion, bloody good naked. She was standing before the mirror, bloody good and. ..

In the mirror, behind what she thought was her bloody good nakedness, was the inverted television picture. A body in a street, a bustle of photographers pressing on the body and held back by the languid arm of a policeman. The trousers of the body were down at the ankles, the underpants were down at the knees, the groin was as naked as her body and bloodstained, the bare chest of the body was slashed by torture cuts, the mouth of the body bulged with the penis and the testicles cut from the groin. She held the towel now tight against her skin, as if to hide her nakedness from the eye of the mirror and the eye of the television. The commentary on the television said that the body was of a Tunisian man, a pusher of hard drugs, who had tried to trade in the streets behind the stazione centrale of Palermo.

Charley lay in bed. The alcohol had drained from her. She heard each shout, each siren, each roar of a motorcycle without an exhaust. Away in the south was the crevice home of what Axel called la piovra, the source of the spreading and writhing tentacles of the octopus. Palermo.

Could an individual change anything? Answer yes or answer no…

Could a single person alter a situation? Answer yes or answer no. ..

Don't know, don't bloody know.

She put the light out. She lay huddled in her bed and she held herself as if to protect her nakedness.

The night lay on the city of Palermo. The journalist from Berlin yawned. Below the apartment windows, muffled because the glass was reinforced and the shutters were closed and the drape curtains drawn, only occasional cars passed. The journalist yawned because he could see that the interview granted him, so late, would not fit easily into the article commissioned by his editor.

The senator said, 'You foreigners, you see La Cosa Nostra in Sicily as a "Spectre", you see it as a character in the fiction of Ian Fleming. It makes me laugh, your ignorance. The reality is a centaur, half a knight in bright armour and half a beast. La Cosa Nostra exists because the people want it to exist. It is in the people's life and souls and bloodstream. Consider. A boy of nineteen years has left school, and if he is admitted to the local family, he gets three million a month, security, structure, culture, and he gets a pistol. But the state cannot give him the security of work, can give him only the culture of TV game shows. The state offers legality, which he cannot eat. From La Cosa Nostra he gains, most important, his self-respect. If you are a foreigner, if you follow the image of "Spectre", you will believe that if the principals of La Cosa Nostra are arrested, then the organization is destroyed. You delude yourself, and you do not comprehend the uniqueness of the Sicilian people. As strangers here you will imagine that La Cosa Nostra rules by fear, but intimidation is a minor part of the organization's strength. Don't think of us as an oppressed society, in chains, pleading for liberation.

The author, Pitre, wrote, "Mafia unites the idea of beauty with superiority and valour in the best sense of the word, and something more – audacity but never arrogance," and there are more who believe him than deny him. To most people, most Sicilians, the Government of Rome is the true enemy. You asked me, does the arrest of Riina or Santapaola or Bagarella wound the power of La Cosa Nostra? My answer, there are many who are younger, as charismatic, to take their place. Do I disappoint you? This is not the war with a military solution that you want.'

The journalist blinked his eyes, tried to concentrate on what he was told and to write his longhand note.

The Capo district, the old quarter of the narrow streets and decaying buildings that had long ago been the glory of the Moorish city, was quiet. The bars were closed, the motorcycles were parked and chained, the windows were opened to admit the slight breath of the warm air. In his room Mario Ruggerio slept, dreamless, and a few inches from his limp and outstretched hand, on the floor beside his bed, was a loaded 9mm pistol. He slept in exhaustion after a day of figures and calculations and deals. A dead sleep that was not troubled by any threat, that he knew of, from any quarter, of imminent arrest. Lonely, without his wife, without the few that he loved, with his pistol on the floor and his calculator on the table,

Mario Ruggerio snored through the dark hours.

The time of the change of the guards' shift… Pasquale hurried, flashing his I/D at the soldiers on the street and the sergeant who watched the main entrance of the block.

Pasquale hurried because he was three minutes late for the start of his shift, and it was laid down that he should have been at the apartment a minimum of ten minutes before the shift of eight hours began. He was late for his shift because it had been the first night that his wife and the baby had been home, and he had lain beside her for three hours, awake and unable to sleep, ready to switch off the bleeped alarm the moment it sounded. The baby had been quiet in the cot at the end of the bed. His wife had lain still in the bed, buried in tiredness. He had not woken either his wife or his baby when he had slipped from under the single cotton sheet, dressed, gone on his toes from the bedroom.

The door was opened. He saw the disciplined annoyance on the face of the maresciallo. Pasquale muttered about his baby, coming home, asleep now, and when he shrugged his apology he expected a softening of the maresciallo's anger, because the older man had children, adored children, would understand. There was a cold, whispered criticism, and he squirmed the response that it would not happen again.

They knew where the polished floorboards of the hallway creaked. They avoided the loose boards. They went silently past the door behind which the magistrate slept.

Sometimes they heard him cry out, and sometimes they heard him tossing, restless.

In the seven weeks he had known the magistrate, Pasquale thought the saddest thing he had learned of the life of the man he protected was the going of Rocco Tardelli's wife and the taking of Rocco Tardelli's children. The maresciallo had told him. The day after the killing of Borsellino, the month after the murder of Falcone, Patrizia Tardelli shouting, 'Sicily is not worth a single drop of an honourable man's blood. Sicily is a place of vipers…' She had gone with her three children, as the maresciallo had told Pasquale, and the magistrate had not argued with her but had helped to carry their bags from the outer door to the car, and the ragazzi had hurried him away from the danger of the exposed pavement and not allowed him even to see the car disappear around the corner of the block. The maresciallo had said that afterwards, after they had gone, the magistrate had not wept but had gone to work. Pasquale thought it the saddest story he knew.

In the kitchen, among the mess of the heavy vests and the machine pistols, Pasquale filled the kettle in the sink where the magistrate's supper dishes had not yet been cleaned, and made the first coffee of the day. He poured the coffee for the maresciallo and himself. Later he would wash the dishes in the sink. They, the ragazzi, were not supposed to be the servants of the magistrate, or his messengers, or his cooks, nor would they ever be his true friends, but it would have seemed to each of them on the detail to be merciless to sit and watch as the magistrate washed his own dishes, prepared his food alone.

Pasquale asked what was the schedule of the day.

The maresciallo shrugged as if it were of no relevance.

'To Ucciardione…?'

Again the shrug, as if it were of no importance whether they went again to the prison.

The forehead of Pasquale wrinkled in puzzlement. It was what had confused him the night before, when he had sat in front of the late evening television after his wife had gone to their bed and the baby to the new cot. He did not understand.

'The man who tries to be a pentito, he was very hard with him. All right, so we are not supposed to hear, to listen, but it is impossible not to hear what is said. "I can tell you where is Mario Ruggerio." Nothing happens. It is left. Why? Ruggerio is the biggest catch, Ruggerio is the target of Tardelli, Ruggerio is of international status. Am I very simple?'

'Simple and naive and with much to learn.' There was a weariness in the expression of the maresciallo. He held the coffee cup in two hands, as if one hand on the cup might have shaken and spilled the coffee. 'There is a saying on the island, "A man warned is a man saved." Dr Tardelli was warned long ago, and he has ignored the warning. But, important, he has not only been warned by La Cosa Nostra, he has been warned also by those who should be his colleagues. He has the quality of honesty, and it is that honesty that humiliates his colleagues. There is no serious effort to attack the enemy, the colleagues stand and watch from safety, and they wait to see Tardelli fall on his arse.

How many in the Palace of

Justice make certain, Jesu, so certain, that an investigation into La Cosa Nostra never hits their desks? Too many. He is accused of the personality cult, of judicial communism, of denigrating the reputation of Sicily. He is accused by those who have ambition and vanity and envy, but who do not have honesty. Which judge can he trust, which prosecutor, which magistrate, which carabiniere, which police officer? Pasquale, can he trust you?'

'That is insane.'

'Insane? Really? A judge in Calabria is arrested, mafia collusion. The head of the squadra mobile is arrested, mafia association. What is your price, Pasquale, if your wife is threatened or your baby? If a prime minister can be bought, what is the price of a young policeman with a wife and baby? Everywhere is the contamination of the bastards. The former head of International Affairs of the American Justice Department is charged with working for the Colombians. In Germany it is reported that new levels of corruption in public life have been reached. Maybe he trusts us because we ride with him, because we would die with him. He does not trust his colleagues.'

'Tell me.'

'Each time he offers protection to a pentito he has to be certain of the genuineness of the man. He may be dealing with a "placed" man, he may be sitting opposite a liar. If he diverts resources, the weight of an investigation, in the direction of a "placed" man or a liar, then he will be weakened. If he is weakened, then he is isolated. If he is isolated, then he is dead. It is necessary for him to go one short step at a time because he walks through a mine field. Heh, what would you prefer, boy? Would you prefer to be directing traffic in Milan?'

The coffee Pasquale drank was cold. He stood. He took off his jacket, and rolled up his sleeves, and ran hot water into the sink, and started to wash the magistrate's dishes.

Past two in the morning… The night duty manager reflected his annoyance at being called by the porter from his office and his catnap. He studied the computer screen.

'Difficult to help you, Sergeant. That's nearly a week ago. We've had 827 guests through since that night. All right, the date you want

… 391 guests in residence. Bear with me. Are you sure this cannot wait till the morning?'

But Harry Compton, after another evening beavering at the solicitor's files and archives, had chosen to visit the hotel in Portman Square on his way home. It was what was called, a bullshit expression, a 'window of opportunity'. In the morning he would be back at the solicitor's papers, so, definitely, it could not wait.

'Well, of the 391 residents, twenty-one declared Italian passports. Wait again, I'll check the details…'

The fingers flitted over the computer's keys.

'You said, "resident in Palermo". No, can't help. Of the Italian passport holders that night, none declared residency in Palermo. You're being economical. Could you tell me why Fraud Squad is here at this wretched hour?'

He felt the blow, like a punch. He swore under his breath.

'Are you sure?'

'That's what I said, friend – none lists residence in Palermo, Sicily.'

'What about the dinner bill? Table twelve in the restaurant, did one of them sign?'

'No can help. That's a restaurant matter. The restaurant's closed, has been cleared for ninety minutes. Have to come back in the morning.'

'Get it open.'

'I beg your pardon.'

Harry Compton, detective sergeant in S06, reckoned he loathed the languid little creep across the reception counter. 'I said, get it open.'

They went into the dim-lit restaurant. A sous waiter was found, smoking, in the kitchen. The keys were produced. A drawer was opened. The receipts and order bills were taken from the drawer. There had been eighty-three diners on the evening that concerned him. He took the bundle of receipts and order bills to a table and asked to be brought a beer…

It was near the bottom of the pile, sod's law, the sheet of paper for table twelve, the printout sheet with the illegible signature and the digits of the room number of the resident. He gulped the beer.

He strode with the sheet of paper back to the reception desk and trilled the bell hard for the night duty manager.

'Room 338, I want that gentleman's card.'

'Are you entitled to that information?'

'I am – and I am also entitled to report to Public Health that a dirty little creature was smoking in your kitchen.'

The bill was printed out for him, with the check-in card carrying the personal details of the guest who had occupied room 338. It was an afterthought. Should have been routine, but he was so goddam tired. The night duty manager was disappearing back to his office.

'Oh, and I require a list of the telephone numbers called from that room. Yes, now, please.'

'Did you go back, where you were before?'

'I did.'

'Never worth it, going back. It seems unimportant, what was once special.'

'I walked from the block along past the tennis club and into Piazza Fleming. It was the way that I used to take small Mario to the school bus.'

'Going back is time wasted, sentimental.'

'If you have any other criticisms to make, could we do them in a job lot and get them over with, Mr Moen? It gets to be tedious, your criticism.'

If Charley annoyed him then, he did not show it. If she amused him, he did not show it. They were by the footbridge, high on the promenade above the water, across from the fortress of Sant'Angelo. She had been at the rendezvous on time and then she had waited. It had been ten minutes after she had come to the bridge that she had seen him, coming easily through a traffic flow, stopping, then skipping forward, confident. He'd told her that he had watched her through those ten minutes and he'd satisfied himself that she was not followed. He hadn't made a big deal of the fact that, his opinion, she might have been followed, just said it and unsettled her. She gazed down into the slow movement of the green-brown water below.

'Are you going to ask me what I did last night?'

'No.'

So Charley did not tell Axel Moen about walking the streets of the centro storico and dousing herself in nostalgia. Nor did she tell him of sitting, anarchic and alone, in a ristorante and eating till her stomach bulged and drinking the best portion of a litre of house wine. She did not tell him that she had showered, walked naked from the bathroom and seen on the television the picture of a man's body in Palermo whose balls were in his mouth, and didn't tell that the night had been a long nightmare.

'What did you do last night?'

The dry voice, as if reciting from a catalogue. 'Went to a party.'

'Could you have taken me?'

'I had someone to go with.'

He stood beside her. He held a padded paper bag in his hand. The labels had been pulled from it. She saw the great tree logs and the big branches, debris of the winter floods, now marooned against the piers of the bridge. She looked up at the fortress of Sant'Angelo. She had been round it, alone, in the summer of 1992, tramped the narrow corridors and climbed the worn steps and marvelled at the symmetry of its architects, so many centuries ago, in creating the perfect circular shape. It had been then a place of friendship.

'I'm here, you're here, so what happens now?'

'You're on board?'

'Of course I'm bloody on board.'

'You don't want to step off?'

She stood her full height. He wasn't looking at her. He was gazing . iway, distant, towards the dome, misted and grey, of St Peter's. She took his arm, a fistful of the arm of his windcheater, and she jerked him round to face her.

'For Christ's sake – I came, didn't I?'

He seemed to hesitate, as if he were troubled. Then Axel launched. Terrorism, Charley, is spectacular. Terrorism makes headlines. You know about the bombs in the City of London, you know about ()klahoma City and the World Trade Center, and about hijackings. You know about the charisma of a Che Guevara or a Carlos or an Adams or a Meinhof because the ideology and profile of those people are plastered all over your television. They don't count. For al the resources we throw against them they are minor-league. But you, Charley, you don't know the name of an internationally relevant criminal. It's like HIV and cancer. HIV, the terrorist, gets the attention and the resources, while cancer, the crime boss, busies itself with the serious damage, but quietly. With an ideology only of greed, organized crime is the cancer that chews at our society, and it should be taken out at source with a knife. In the ideology of greed there is no mercy if an obstacle – you, Charley – gets in the way…'

A small and weak grin. 'Is this your effort to scare me?'

'When you're alone, when you're frightened, then you should know what you've gotten into. Down in Sicily, fair to assume, there's a hundred different programmes, slants, angles of an operation running. You are one in a hundred. That's your importance. You offer a one-in-a-hundred chance of, maybe, getting up alongside the target.

You are Codename Helen, that is the name-'

She snorted and the colour ran back into her face. She laughed at him. 'Helen? Helen of Troy? Trojan Horse and all that? That is really original – did a genius think up that one?'

'It's what you are, Codename Helen.' He flushed.

'What's inside the walls? Who's hiding in Troy?'

'Don't play jokes, Charley, don't. There is a family in the town of Prizzi, that's inland from Palermo. It's a mean little place stuck on the rock. OK, Prizzi is the home of a contadino's family. The contadino is Rosario and he is now aged eighty-four. His wife is Agata, now aged eighty-three. Rosario and Agata have produced six children. The children are Mario, the eldest, sixty-two… Salvatore, sixty, in prison… Carmelo, fifty-nine, simple, lives with his parents… Cristoforo, would be fifty-seven, dead…

Maria, fifty-one, married and an alcoholic… the youngest, Giuseppe, forty-two, the big gap because old Rosario was called away between 1945 and 1954 to spend time in Ucciardione Prison. The name of that family from Prizzi is Ruggerio…'

He flicked a cigarette from the Lucky Strike packet. She locked her eyes on the cupola of St Peter's, as if she thought the mistshrouded image might strengthen her.

'The family is mafiosi, down to the base of its spine, right to the bottom of the root of the weed. But nothing is as it seems. The family has played a long game, which is the style of La Cosa Nostra, to play long and patient. Giuseppe, bright child, was sent by his eldest brother away from Prizzi, out of Sicily, to university in Rome. On to a school of business management in Geneva. To an Italian bank in Buenos Aires. There were connections, favours were called in, work in Rome for one of those discreet little banks handling Vatican funds. Did he seem to you, Giuseppe, to be the son of a contadino?

Did he tell you about a peasant family? Did he?'

Charley had no answer. Her teeth ground at her bottom lip.

'I said that the family could play a long game. Only a very few in Palermo, and none in Rome, would know that Giuseppe is the brother of Mario Ruggerio. I don't know how many hundreds of millions of dollars Mario Ruggerio is worth. I know what he needs. Mario Ruggerio needs a banker, a broker, an investment manager, in whom he can place absolute trust. It's all a matter of trust down there. Trust is held in the family.

The family has the man to wash, rinse, spin and dry their money. The family is everything. The family meets, the family gathers, and the family does not feel the danger of betrayal. Then, and it's rare, the family makes a mistake. The mistake is a letter written by Angela to a former nanny/ child-minder – I have a friend down there, and you don't need his name, and you don't need his agency, and because it's the way in Sicily he does not share with colleagues what he learns – and he learned of the link between Giuseppe and Mario Ruggerio, and he started to run a sporadic surveillance on pretty little Giuseppe, and the jackpot bonus came up when he intercepted the letter, a mistake. I don't know how often that family meets, no idea. I know that the family will come together, that Mario Ruggerio will need, a deep need because he is Sicilian, to be in the bosom of his family. They all have it, the evil, heartless bastards, a syrup streak of sentimentality for the family. You're there, Charley, you're a part of the family, you're the little mouse that nobody notices, you're at the far end of the room, watching the kids and keeping them quiet, you're access…'

She stared at the cupola of St Peter's. She thought it a place of sanctity and safety, and she could remember standing in the great square on a Sunday morning and feeling humbled by the love of 1 he pilgrims for the Holy Father, minuscule on the balcony.

'A man from Agrigento has disappeared. He led one of the three principal families of La Cosa Nostra. It is assumed he is dead. There is a man from Catania, the power in the east of the island. There is Mario Ruggerio. They do not share power in Sicily, they fight for power with the delicacy of rats in a bucket. Mario Ruggerio is one stage away from the overall command of La Cosa Nostra. One step away from taking the title of capo di tutti capi. One killing away from becoming the most influential figure in international organized crime. The target of Codename Helen is Mario Ruggerio.'

She felt weak, pitiful. 'Is it possible, listen to me, Christ, hear me, is it possible for one person, me, to change anything?'

He said, 'If I didn't think so, I would not have come for you.'

He took her hand. Without asking, and without explanation, he unhooked the fastening of her wrist-watch. The watch was gold. It was the most expensive thing that she owned. It had been given to her by her father, three weeks before he had known of his redundancy, for her twenty-first birthday. He dropped the gold watch, as if it were a bauble and worthless, into his trouser pocket. He still held her hand, a strong grip that was without affection. The envelope was laid on top of the stonework above the flowing river. He took from it a bigger watch, a man's watch, the sort of watch that young men wore, a scuba diver's watch. He told her to think of a story as to why she wore such a watch. He slipped it over the narrowness of her fist, onto the narrowness of her wrist. The strap was of cold expanding metal. He showed her, exactly and methodically, which buttons activated the watch's mechanism, and which button activated the panic tone… Christ… He told her the life of the cadmium battery in the watch. He told her the signals she should send. He told her the range of the signal of the panic tone. He told her that the UHF frequency would be monitored twenty-four hours a day in Palermo. He told her when she should make a test transmission. He let her hand drop.

'When he comes, if he comes, to meet with his family, Mario Ruggerio, you activate the tone. The only other time that you use it is if you believe that your physical safety is endangered. Do you understand?'

'Where will you be?'

'Close enough to respond.' She saw the strength in his face, the bold build of his chin, the assurance of his mouth. She reflected that she was placing her life in that strength.

'You promise?'

'I promise. You have a good journey.'

She flared, enough of playing the small and pathetic girl. 'Wait a minute, Mr Axel bloody Moen, how often do we meet?'

Casual. 'Every so often.'

'That's not good enough. Where do we meet?'

'I'll find you.'

He walked away. She watched him go over the bridge, towards the fortress of Sant'Angelo. She felt the tight cold metal of the strap on her wrist.