Killing Ground

Chapter Five

He had said, back in Devon, that she should travel from Rome to Palermo by train. He had explained, chill and staccato, that the most vulnerable time for an agent was in the sea-change hours of going from overt to covert. If she boarded a plane, he had said, a journey like Rome to Palermo, she would step over the gulf in an hour. Better, he'd said, to spread the transition time. Better to use a dozen hours and have the chance to reflect on the sea change and the gulf that was to be crossed.

Charley had taken the train from the terminii in the early evening, pushed her way with a rare aggression through the crowds on the concourse. She had booked the sleeper, a single berth, and not cared what it cost because the Ruggerios would pay for it. She had heaved her bag along the corridor and dumped it inside the little compartment of the snake-length train that was alongside those that would leave later for Vienna and Paris. She had chewed on a ham-and-tomato roll, revolting, and sipped from a bottle of mineral water, warm, and watched from the train as the dusk gathered on isolated farmhouses and avenues of high pines and a long, ruined viaduct from the dawn of history.

She had reflected, as Axel Moen had said she should.

She had considered the distance at which he kept himself. She knew nothing of what lay beneath the exterior of his face, beneath his clothes, nothing of his mind. She had not met before, ever, a person of such sealed privacy. She thought, and it perked her up, that he kept a distance as if he were a little afraid of her. So she wanted to believe that she was important to him, that she was the final piece that made the puzzle complete. It was good to feel that. And, alone in the train, the rumble of the wheels below her, rushing south, the darkness of the night beyond the window, she felt a sense of pride.

She had been chosen, she had been challenged, she was wanted. She had lain on the made bed and the glow of excitement had coursed in her. She was needed. She was important… She had slept, as if an arrogance and an ignorance had caught her.

She had slept through the shunting of the train onto the ferry at Villa S. Giovanni on the Calabrian coast and the docking of the ferry at Messina, slept a dead and dreamless sleep.

The knocking on the door woke Charley. She had slept in her T-shirt and her knickers. She was decent, but she wrapped the blanket around her as she unlocked the door and took the tray of coffee from the attendant. She closed the door and locked it again. She set the tray down and went to the window and released the blind. Charley saw Sicily.

The journalist from Berlin was awake early. He boasted a tidy mind. He believed it important, at the first sober oppportunity, to transfer the essentials of the interview from notebook to laptop memory. He had ordered an early call, before the pace of the city moved, because he had first to dissect the notes he had taken over dinner and two bottles of Marsala wine, and the notes would be a mess and scrawled in confusion. He had dined with the mayor of a small town on the west coast down from Palermo. He had anticipated a ringing cry for action against La Cosa Nostra from a man whose father had been killed because he had denounced an evil. Sitting on his bed in his pyjamas, the ache in his head, he had read back his notes.

'Quote Pirandello (paraphrase) – draw the distinction between the seeing and the being, the fiction and the reality – the fiction is police activity, ministers and policemen and magistrates on TV, prisoners paraded in front of cameras, the cry that the mafia is crumbling, FICTION. The mafia is not weakened, stronger than ever, REALITY. No serious commitment by the state against the mafia – think what it is like to be Sicilian, abandoned by central government, not supported, to be alone. No big victory is possible – white sheets on balconies after the killing of Falcone as an expression of public disgust, but the disgust is slipping, collective anger is gone. The thread of the mafia is woven through every institution, every part of life – always the stranger must realize that he does not know who he talks to – being a mafioso can mean a man belongs to the upper strata of society, does not mean that he is a crude killer. Nobody, NOBODY, knows the depth of mafia infiltration into public life. For the stranger, NEVER BE UNGUARDED…'

The Country Chief drove Axel Moen to Fiumicino for the first flight of the day going south to Palermo, and parked, and went with his man to check-in.

They walked together towards the centre of the concourse; there were a few minutes before the flight would be called. Should have talked in the car, but they hadn't, and it had been time lost, but the traffic had been heavy and the Country Chief had reckoned he needed all of his start-of-the-day concentration to keep himself from shunting with the bastards around him who were weaving and overtaking and braking. The Country Chief shouldn't have left the loose ends to the concourse.

'You OK?'

'I feel fine.'

'The archaeology…?'

'It'll do and it'll get better.'

'You get a shooter from 'Vanni?'

'Yes, 'Vanni says he'll fix me a shooter.'

Too old and too tired, and the Country Chief thought he played the part of the fussing mother well. 'It's shared with 'Vanni, only him.'

'Maybe it has to be shared with a magistrate. That guy, Rocco Tardelli, maybe we share with him. He's a good man.'

'He's a friend, useful, but don't… You know it hurts me, but you put ten Italian law-enforcement people in a room, and you share. If you share, you should trust. Do you know everything about them? Do you know which of them's wife's uncle's cousin is going after a construction contract to build a school and needs a favour from the local boss? So you trust none of them. That bugs me, the lack of trust, it makes for corrosive suspicion, but you cannot take the chance.'

'I know that, Bill.'

'Because it's her life.'

In front of him was the face of Axel Moen, a wall of granite, shielding whatever feelings the damned man had.

'I figured that.'

'You know what I want?'

'Keep it quick, Bill.'

'I want that bastard, I want Mario Ruggerio nailed, and I want it to be by our efforts.

Not a big co-operative, but by our efforts. If it's us that nails him, then I believe, what Headquarters says, we can swing the extradition business. I want him shipped Stateside, I want him put into Supermax. I want him to breathe the sweet air of Colorado. I want him in one of those concrete tombs. I want him to know that for sending over all that filth into our country there's a downside. I want…'

'I'll stay close, Bill.'

'Look after that kid, damn you, with your life.'

Axel shrugged and walked towards Departure.

She was not trained, she was not coached. But she did not think herself stupid.

Charley was dressed. She leaned against the grimed glass of the window and the train lurched slowly along. She was gazing inland. She thought that she did not have to be trained to recognize, in that country, how a corpse could remain hidden and how a fugitive could stay free. On and on, displayed from her window, were the steep and harsh-cut rainwater gullies that were overgrown with coarse grass and scrub and that ran from the track up to the hills. She had bought from the English-language bookshop on Via Babuino, the previous day, after he had left her, a guidebook to Sicily. The book had a chapter on the island's history. In the gullies there could have been the corpse of a Moorish invader, of a Bourbon soldier, of a Fascist official, of a Roman policeman, and it would never be found, it would be food for foxes and rats. Among the scrub were dark-set, small caves, and there were the roofless ruins of peasant homes and the crumbled shelters where once a farmer had put his goats or his sheep, and the ruins and the shelters could have been hiding places for fugitives, from centuries back to the present moment. Above the gullies and the caves and the ruins, beyond the hills, were the climbing mountains that reached to the clouds. A great emptiness that was broken only rarely by the white scars of winding switchback roads. A ruthless and hard place.

A body, her body, dumped into a gully, and she would never be found. A fugitive, Mario Ruggerio, hiding in the caves and ruins, and he would never be found.

She murmured, private to herself, as she fingered the heavy watch on her wrist,

'Learning, Charley, learning bloody fast.'

She came away from the window. She brushed her teeth. She tidied her sausage-bag.

She reflected, as Axel Moen had told her to.

They had circled Catania, then come in to land through the early mist. He could see the foothills to the west, but not the summit of Etna, which the cloud held.

He had told her that going back was time wasted, was sentimental.

Palermo, yes, many times, but it was twenty-one years since Axel Moen had been at the Fontanarossa Airport of Catania. They were old now and they were living far up the Door Peninsula, up between Ephraim and Sister Bay, and eking out their last days and weeks and months. It was twenty-one years since his grandfather and his step-grandmother had brought him to the airport at Catania. Only the name to remember it by because there were new buildings and a new tower and new acreage of concrete. On Arne Moen's retirement he had brought his wife, Vincenzina, and his grandson to Catania and Sicily. Didn't matter if he cared not to think on it… Most of the emotion juices Axel was ready for, could control. Going through the airport at Catania, the juices worked on him and hurt him. Arne Moen had come to Sicily in 1943, a captain in George Patton's invasion army, and he'd been the idiot who'd drunk too much brandy for his system one night and had fallen in the gutter while swaying back to the commandeered villa at Romagnolo and broken his goddam arm. The army had leapfrogged onto the Italian mainland and left Arne Moen behind to nurse his plaster-cased arm. Taken into AMGOT, given a job with the bureaucracy of the Allied Military Government, and found himself in a minor heaven as a minor god controlling gasoline supplies and transportation between Corleone and the road junction at Piana degli Albanesi. It had provided what his grandfather called an 'opportunity'. The story of the 'opportunity' had been told in self-pity and with moist eyes at the Catania airport at the end of the week's tour, as if it were necessary for a seventeen-year-old to know a truth.

The emotions wounded Axel because the 'opportunity' was corruption. He did not care to remember because the 'opportunity' was in the black-market siphoning of gasoline and the taking of bribes in return for permission to run lorries down to Palermo. The money from the corruption and the black market and the bribes had gone back to the Door Peninsula and it had paid, dirty money, for his grandson's education at the university in Madison, and had paid for the house and the fields and orchards between Ephraim and Sister Bay. One day, maybe not too long, because Arne Moen was now in his eighty-fifth year, and Vincenzina Moen was in her seventy-eighth year, he would have to decide what to do with a legacy of dirty money… After the tour of the battlefields, precious little fighting done, and the visit to the house in Corleone from which the minor god had run his racket, after the cloying visit to Vincenzina's peasant family, after the journey had come to its end, the story of the 'opportunity' had been told.

For Axel it was a sharp memory. He had sat between his grandfather and his step-grandmother in the departure lounge at Catania. His grandfather had snivelled the story of criminality, and his step-grandmother had stared straight ahead as though she heard nothing and saw nothing and knew nothing. He thought, striding that early morning through the airport, that the telling of the story of corruption had withered his innocence. He had sworn to himself, with the authority of his seventeen years, that he would never again allow innocence to cut him… Where he'd sat, between his grandfather and his step-grandmother, twenty-one years before was now a left-luggage area. What he had learned when his innocence had ended was to trust no man because even a man he loved had a price. Shit…

Axel Moen went to the Avis counter for his hire-car.

Charley jumped down onto the low platform.

She reached back to drag out her sausage-bag.

She was carried forward in the restless rush of passengers surging from the train. Her gaze raked the barrier, and she saw them. She recognized Angela Ruggerio, a little thicker in the hips and a little heavier at the throat and still beautiful, and holding the new baby and holding the hand of Francesca who had been the baby in the happiness summer of 1992, and bending to speak in small Mario's ear and pushing him forward.

The boy ran against the flow and came to her, and Charley dropped her bag and held out her arms and let him jump at her and hug her. She held the son of the man who washed and rinsed and spun and dried the money, the nephew of the man who was an evil, heartless bastard. She had arrived, she had gained access. Small Mario fought out of her arms and took the straps of the sausage-bag in his hands and scraped it after her along the platform. Charley gave the Judas kiss to Angela Ruggerio and her hands were squeezed. It was a desperate love that she saw in Angela Ruggerio, as if she were a true friend, as if she represented deliverance from misery. She tugged the cheek of Francesca in play and the little girl laughed and thrust her arms round Charley's neck.

'You are very good for time, Charley. I do not think you are a minute late.'

She glanced down at her watch, the heavy watch of a diver, instinct. The minute hand of the watch pointed directly to the button for the panic tone.

'No, it is wonderful, we were exactly on time.'

Axel took the autostrada route across the heart of the island. He was calm. He cruised in the small Fiat hire-car along the dualcarriageway A19 through the central mountains, past the small vineyards that had been hacked from the handkerchiefs of ground available for cultivation among the rocks, past the herds of thin goats and leggy sheep that were watched by men with leatheredfaces and by restless dogs. He stopped at the old hill city of Enna, long enough to see the crooked lines in yellow and orange and ochre of successive mountain ranges to the north, not long enough for the culture of the buildings, sufficient time for a cup of sharp and hot coffee. On down towards the coast, and he allowed the lorries and cars to race past him, as if he had no ambition to compete with speed. When he reached the coast, could see the blue haze of the sea, he swung west for Terminii Imerese, and he drove towards Palermo. Between the road and the shore were orange groves and lemon orchards, holiday complexes that were shuttered and barred because the season had not yet started

… A prosecutor had talked of 'a power system, an articulation of power, a metaphor of power and a pathology of power…'

The sun burned the road, the light heat up from the tarmac into his face. Away out on the water were small boats, drifting distant from each other, in which lonely lfishermen stood and cast small nets, and he saw old men walking on the grey pebble beaches with long shore-fishing rods on their shoulders… A judge had talked of 'a global, unitary, rigidly regimented and vertical structure governed from the top down by a cupola with absolute powers over policy, money, life and death…' He felt a calmness because he was not deluded by the peace of the mountains and the peace of the seascape. He drove through Bagheria and Villabate and took the ringroad to the south of the city, as if ignoring the close-set tower blocks of Palermo, and I hen he climbed the switchback road that was signed to Monreale. I le was close to his destination.

At the apartment in the Giardino Inglese the morning was spent packing Angela's clothes and the children's bags.

She was told about Mondello and a villa by the sea, the holiday home for the summer. The description of the holiday villa, given by Angela Ruggerio, was curt, and Charley saw already a wan tiredness and distraction about the face and movements of her employer. It was hard for Charley to gauge her mood, but the woman was a changed person: the confidence and humour of four years before were gone, as if the spirit of her were crushed. It was, Charley thought, as if a wall had been erected. She spent most of that morning in the rooms used by small Mario and Francesca, taking the necessary clothes from drawers and the favoured toys from cupboards, but when she had wandered into the principal bedroom and not knocked she had seen Angela at the drawer of a bedside table, taking two pill bottles out, and she had seen a little moment of almost panic because the bottles were noticed, and then Angela had dropped them into a bag. Charley had smiled in embarrassment and said something inane about the number of shirts that small Mario would need, and the little moment had passed.

Charley and small Mario were given the work of taking the bulging bags and cases down in the elevator to the underground parking area. When she came back up and walked into the grandness of the apartment Angela was standing in the centre of the living area gazing down at a blemish in the beauty of the embroidered carpet and frowning. Then, aware of Charley in the doorway, she replaced the frown with a fixed and tense smile.

The last bags were carried out. The door was locked. In the car park, the bags and cases were pushed into the big trunk of a Mercedes saloon.

Charley sat in the back and held tight to the baby, and Francesca cuddled against her as if, so soon, a friendship had been made. They were out of the city, the tower blocks were behind them, they were under the steep might of the Pellegrino mountain, they were passing the first whores of the day, waiting in their mini-skirts and plunging blouses at the entrances to the picnic sites, when it struck Charley. He had not been mentioned. Dr Giuseppe Ruggerio had not been spoken of. It was not for her to ask questions. She should not probe, she had been told, and she should not push and she should not display curiosity.

They drove along the slack crescent road that skirted the beach at Mondello. They went through the narrow streets of the old town. They stopped at big iron gates with black-painted steel plates to deny a voyeur's inspection of what lay behind them.

Angela slapped the horn of the Mercedes. The gates were opened by an old man, who ducked his head in respect, and she drove up a hidden drive, past flowers and shrubs, and braked hard in front of the villa.

She had arrived. Codename Helen was in place. She had taken the opportunity of access. She was the horse, she was treachery.

Angela, remote and unsmiling, carrying the baby, went ahead and fished the keys from her bag as she walked to the patio of the villa. Small Mario and Francesca ran after their mother. Charley opened the trunk of the Mercedes and started to heave out the family's bags and cases. From by the gate, leaning on a broom, standing among the fallen winter's leaves, the old man, the gardener, watched her… She felt small and alone and cast off.

'There is no change.' The magistrate shrugged as if uninterested. 'You tell me what you know, when you have told me then I evaluate, when I have evaluated what you tell me then I decide on a recommendation, when I have decided on a recommendation then the committee will determine if you should be given the privileges of the Special Protection Programme…'

Pasquale leaned against the door. The Beretta 9mm pistol was against his hip, and the machine-gun was draped on a strap and cut into the small of his back.

'I need the guarantee.'

The prisoner was hunched over the table and his furtive eyes roamed around the bare walls, and his fingers shook as they guided his cigarette to his mouth. Outside the door, muffled from passage along the concrete-faced corridor, deadened by the distance from the car park, were the shouts and jeers of the men kicking a football, the men who guarded the magistrate and a judge who worked that day at Ucciardione. From the door Pasquale craned to hear the response. The magistrate made the gesture, opened his hands. 'If you do not tell me what you know, then you will serve a sentence of life imprisonment for murder. It is not for me to offer guarantees.'

The prisoner had requested the second interview. Word had again been passed. The prisoner had again been brought by the secret and circuitous route to the bare-walled room. The wretch trembled. Pasquale knew the oath that he would have sworn. In a locked room filled with already sworn Men of Honour, the darkness of night outside to conceal their gathering: 'Are you ready to enter La Cosa Nostra? Do you realize there will be no going back? You enter La Cosa Nostra with your own blood and you can leave it only by shedding more of your own blood.' Pasquale thought the wretch trembled because he would then have been asked in which hand he would hold a gun, and the trigger finger of that hand would have been pricked with a thorn sufficient to draw blood, and the blood would have been smeared on a paper image of the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, and the paper would have been lit and it would have been dropped, burning, into the palm of the wretch's hand and he would have recited the oath and then condemned himself if he betrayed it – 'May my flesh burn like this holy image if I am unfaithful to La Cosa Nostra.' The wretch would have sworn it, with blood and with fire, and now he squirmed.

'For Ruggerio, I get the guarantee for Mario Ruggerio…?'

The magistrate's fingers drummed on the table. Pasquale watched him. The shoulders were rounded, the chin was slack, there seemed no evidence of the core strength of the man, but the maresciallo had spoken, musing, of his courage and quoted, as if it were relevant to this man too, the saying of the dead Falcone: 'The brave man dies only once, the coward dies a thousand times each day.' Pasquale listened. If they were close to Mario Ruggerio, if they threatened the freedom of Mario Ruggerio, they were all endangered – not only Rocco Tardelli's life was hazarded, but also the lives of the ragazzi who stood in front of Tardelli and beside him and behind him.

'If, through your efforts, Mario Ruggerio were to be arrested, then I would recommend that you be given the privileges of the Special Protection Programme.'

The silence hung between the bare walls, eddied with the cigarette smoke towards the single fluorescent strip. Because Pasquale knew the oath that the wretch had sworn, the depths of the oath made with fire and blood, he shuddered. The maresciallo, sitting behind the wretch, leaned forward to hear better. The magistrate scratched at the head of a pimple on the side of his nose as if it were not a matter of importance to him.

There were tears in the prisoner's eyes.

'He is in the Capo district of Palermo…'

'Now, today?'

'I heard it a little time ago, Mario Ruggerio is in the Capo district.'

'How long is a "little time ago"?'

'A few months ago, in the Capo district.'

The hardening of the accent of the magistrate, leaning forward across the table and allowing the smoke to brush his face. 'How many months ago?'

'A year ago.'

Pasquale sagged. There was a sardonic and bruised smile on the face of the maresciallo. Rocco Tardelli did not imitate them, did not sag and did not smile. He held the prisoner's eyes.

'Where, "a year ago", in the Capo district, was Mario Ruggerio?'

'He used a bar…'

'Where was the bar in the Capo district that was used by Mario Ruggerio?'

'He used a bar in the street between the Via Sant'Agostino and the Piazza Beati Paoli.

Several times he used the bar, but once he ate almond cake in the bar and his stomach was disturbed. He said, I was told, it was a shit bar that served shit almond cake.'

'That is what you were told?'

'Yes…'

The prisoner's head was bowed. An oath was broken, an oath made on blood and fire was fractured. The tears ran brisk on the wretch's cheeks.

The magistrate said, serene, 'May I recapitulate what you have said? It is important that we understand the information you pass me. In return for eighteen million lire a month, and for your freedom, and for the ending of the legal process against you that is a charge of murder, in return for that you offer me the information that a friend told you that Mario Ruggerio had mild food poisoning in a bar in the Capo district.'

The blurted response. 'He would only have used a bar in the Capo district if he lived there.'

'If he lived there a year ago.' So patient. 'That is everything?'

The prisoner's head rose. He looked directly into the face of the magistrate. He wiped the tear rivers from his cheeks. 'It is enough to kill me.'

Later, after the prisoner had been taken, with his face hidden by a blanket, back across the yard to the medical centre, after they had called a halt to the football game in the car park and loaded into the Alfa and the chase car, after they had emerged from the safety of the perimeter fence of Ucciardione Prison, after they had hit the traffic and blasted a way clear with the siren, Rocco Tardelli leaned forward and spoke quietly into the ear of the maresciallo. Pasquale drove, fast, using brakes and gears and accelerator, and listened.

'It was of importance or not of importance? I have my own opinion, but I wish for yours. Or is it not fair for me to ask you? I believe him. I believe Mario Ruggerio would indeed inhabit a rat hole like the Capo district. He has no use for luxury, for gold taps, for silken sheets and suits from Armani. He is a contadino, and the peasant cannot change. He would be happy there, he would feel reassured there, in safety. But it was a year ago. A summer has gone, an autumn, and a winter, and now I have to deliberate as to whether to use my authority to divert pressed resources to the investigation of information that is stale. We have to pick at crumbs and pluck at straws as if we starved and as if we drowned… It is not fair for me to ask you, I must walk my own road.'

They stood back and they watched.

The swing was good and the pivot was good and the contact was good and the flight was good. The ball flew. Before the ball had landed Giuseppe Ruggerio bent to pick up the plastic tee peg, then he went forward and reached down for the divot, cleanly removed like a dropped hairpiece. Now he glanced up to see the final bouncing of his ball on the sand ground of the fairway, then turned to replace his divot.

They murmured as they watched.

'He's useful, can't take that from him.'

'Useful but, God, he doesn't hide that he knows it…'

'Where did you meet up, Giles? Where did your paths cross?'

Giles Blake heaved up his bag. The Italian, his guest, was already striding off down the grassed avenue between the dull winter heather and the broken-down bracken. 'I've known Peppino for ever… You know, there's too many generalizations about the old Italian. Get a good one and you've the best you could meet anywhere. He's a dream to know. He's decisive, knows what he wants. Better than that, no cash-flow problem, loaded with investment funds. I had an introduction in Basle, sort of took it from there. ..'

They walked. Their voices were lowered and they held a pace up the fairway that kept them beyond the hearing of the Italian ahead.

'What's he looking for?'

'That about sums it up. I mean, Giles, lunch was bloody good, I'm not averse to a golf round and a decent lunch, but what's the bottom line?'

'He's pretty good company, I'll grant you, but why are we here, Giles?'

Giles Blake could give the sincere smile, do it as well as anyone, and he could laugh quietly. 'You're a hell of a suspicious bunch. OK, he has funds. He needs to place monies. He's like any other banker I've ever known. He moves money, and he looks for opportunities that will benefit his clients and stockholders. I think some rather seriously wealthy people use him, people who are looking for discretion… Hold on, wait a minute, I'm not talking about "funny" money, I'm talking about "quiet" money. For Heaven's sake, it's not "hot" money. Be quite honest, I've always found him good as gold.'

'Where do we fit in?' the banker asked.

'What can he offer that interests me?' the investment manager asked.

'What should I pitch for?' the property developer asked.

'How long have I known you chaps? Barrie, fourteen years. Kevin, since '85. Don, we've done business for nine years. I wouldn't think any of you have had much to complain about. Am I going to see you, you know my track record, short-changed? Am I hell. Cards on the table. Meeting with Giuseppe Ruggerio was the best thing that happened to me. Believe me, I'm really happy to have made this introduction.'

In front of them, the Italian had stopped by his ball. The ball would have been at least fifty yards ahead of any of theirs. The banker was no golfer, had no clubs, had come for the walk…

Barrie, the banker, asked, 'What does he want?'

Kevin, the investment manager, asked, 'There's no dirty, nasty bit?'

Don, the property developer, asked, 'Where do we go?'

They were, all three of them, trusted and tried friends of Giles Blake. They were friends over the business desk and across the social scene. They met for the rugby at Twickenham, for the cricket at Lord's, for the opera at Glyndebourne, and they shot together. They put business each other's way, they made money. They were the new elite, tolerant of success, intolerant of obstructions.

'Barrie, what I'm saying is this – what he's looking for is an opportunity to move funds into a good UK house where his cash is going to be rather better managed than where it is now. Kevin, we're talking quite substantial funds – do you really think I'd be involved if it were "dirty and nasty"? Not damn likely. Don, what I know, you've got a hell of a large white elephant sitting in Manchester, short of the top seven storeys, and the backers have pulled the rug on you. We're talking about him having twenty-five available for starters. I would have hoped twenty-five million sterling on a three-way split with commission… I'm sure there would be a little mark of gratitude, would go down as well as that Chardonnay at lunch… Of course I vouch for him. Look, you know what Italians are like. Italians are paranoid about the old tax man in their own backyard.

They like their money overseas and they like it held quietly. It's the "no names, no pack-drill" bit. Can't you live with that?'

'There would be commission?'

'Kevin, certainly there would be commission – it's the way they do business. It's no skin off my nose if you're not interested, chaps.. .'

Giles Blake walked away to his own ball. He would push the matter no further. He had done what he was paid to do. He provided discreet introductions for Giuseppe Ruggerio, the overseas player, who constantly searched for new pipelines through which to feed money. He sought out and befriended contacts who would make double-damn certain, in return for commission, that the paperwork on 'due diligence' would be ignored. He assumed, and he would not have dared to press the point, that he was one of many used as fronts for the washing of money and its ultimate layering into legitimate finance.

He played his stroke. He watched Giuseppe Ruggerio club his own ball towards the distant green. He called quietly to the Italian to come to him.

They stood at the side of the fairway. The banker and the investment manager and the property developer were in deep talk.

Giles Blake said quietly, 'They're jumping because they're greedy. Three-way split.

They need it, why they're nibbling.'

'And quiet people?'

'As the grave, when they've banked their commissions.'

'Because if they are not quiet…'

The voice died. They walked on up the course towards the green, Giles Blake and Giuseppe Ruggerio ahead of their guests. It was a fine course, used on several occasions a year for championships. Until Blake met the Italian there had been no way, not till hell froze over, that he could have afforded the membership fees. Nor could he have afforded the house a dozen miles away, nor the horses, nor the children's schools.

He was owned by the Italian…

The threat had been made before the voice died. He thought that Giuseppe Ruggerio understood only too well that the threat did not have to be articulated. He knew of the banker who had unsuccessfully handled the funds of La Cosa Nostra and who had been strangled and then hanged from a rope under a London bridge. He knew of an investment broker in New York who had failed to predict the last great fall in the international markets and who had been found dead on the paving below his balcony.

He knew of the import/export man in Toronto who had been found knifed to death off Yongue Street, the hookers' area, with dollar bills stuffed in his mouth. He knew of those who had died after failing La Cosa Nostra because Giuseppe Ruggerio had told him of them.

'A very pleasant day, Giles. I am having a very pleasant day. Before we were joined by your guests we were talking of the opportunity of the antique furniture markets…'

Each day the file on Giles Blake had worked lower in the detective sergeant's pending tray. There was a method. Each day the bottom file in the pending tray was retrieved from oblivion, shown the light and placed on the top. Harry Compton, when the Giles Blake file reached the top again, should have given it attention, but the bloody solicitor's paperwork was defeating them. If the paperwork of the bloody solicitor, the bastard, did not give up its secrets, then the shit was going to be spinning across the ceiling and they'd be looking, bloody certain, at 'harassment', at 'wrongful arrest', at

'punitive compensation'. Over a quick sandwich and tea from a polystyrene cup, he leafed fast through the top file, swore because he had done nothing in the best part of a week, then scribbled a note.

TO: Alfred Rogers, Drugs Liaison Officer, British Embassy, Via XX

Settembre, Rome, Italy. FROM: S06, D/S H. Compton.

Alf, Sorry to interrupt the rest module in which you have, no doubt, settled easily, and hope this does not disturb your necessary siesta. Meanwhile, some of us are paid to work, not scratch their blackheads, you jammy bugger!! If your Italian colleagues have learned how to operate the computer (if!!), get them to check Bruno Fiori, Apartment 5, Via della Liberazione 197, Milan. Confession, don't know what I am looking for – was it ever different? He stayed last week at the Excelsior Hotel, Portman Square, London W1 See attached copy of hotel reg. form for passport details, etc. In haste. All in chains here and hacking at the coal face. I imagine it's tough, too, in Rome.

In envy, Harry.

He brushed crumbs from his shirt, wiped the tea from his chin, handed the scrawl and the photocopy to Miss Frobisher, requested transmission to Rome, then stumbled back to the rooms in which the solicitor's documents and archives were piled.

The last time they had met had been a year before, and they had argued.

There was no love between Mario Ruggerio and the man from Catania.

It had taken a week of bickering by emissaries from the two for the meeting to be arranged. It had been decided, after a week of sour discussion, that the meeting should take place in a no man's land in the Madonie mountains. Off a dry, rutted farm track between Petralia and Gangi, in a remote farm building, they met to talk of the future.

They were two scorpions, as if in a ring, watching each other.

No love, no trust existed between these two. Each had sent men the day before to sit on the high ground above the farm building, and to look down over the ripening fields and over the flocks of grazing sheep and the herds of browsing goats, to check the security arrangements. Neither Mario Ruggerio nor the man from Catania feared intervention by the carabineri or by the squadra mobile, but they feared the trap and the trick that might be sprung by the other. The man from Catania had come first, driven in a Mercedes and with a following car of minders. Mario Ruggerio had deemed it right that the other should come first and then wait… He had made his statement, he had come with two BMW cars filled with his own men but had driven himself in an old Autobianchi, a poor man's car, a peasant's wheels.

Outside the building the two groups of armed men stood apart. All would have known that if it came to war between the two families, then they must make, and fast, the decision as to whether to stand and fight in loyalty or to attempt to switch sides. If it were war, it would be to the death. It was said – and the minders who stood apart from each other would have heard it – that a thousand men in the defeated factions had died when Riina had killed his way to supreme power. There was no tolerance for a loser…

Some carried machine-pistols, some were armed with automatic assault rifles, some slipped their hands nervously inside bulging jackets as if for reassurance. There was no place inside the organization for shared control.

They talked, the two scorpions manoeuvring in the ring for advantage, across a bare board table. Ruggerio spoke of his view of the future, and the view was of increased international dealing in the world of legitimate finance. The man from Catania gave his opinion, and his opinion was that the organization should draw in the reach of its tentacles and make a concentration of effort on the island. They talked in fast bursts of dialect-accented words, and they smoked through the long silences.

In the silences were soft smiles. In the silences they smiled compliments and felicitations to each other, and both sought to decide whether it would be necessary, in order to achieve supremacy, to fight. In the matter of body language, of assessing strength, Mario Ruggerio was an artist. It was his quality, through his cold and clear-blue and darting eyes, to recognize weakness. In the ring, it was not the time for the scorpion to strike. He thought that the chin of the man from Catania displayed weakness.

Outside the farm building, Mario Ruggerio watched the three cars head away for the long drive back to Catania. His own men watched him for a sign. Franco saw it, and Tano and Carmine. They saw Mario Ruggerio watch the dust clouds billow on the track from the wheels of the cars, and they saw him spit into the mud, and they knew that a man had refused to take second place and that a man was condemned.

The tourists came by bus up the hairpin road from the city to the cathedral of Monreale.

They brought to the duomo voices that bayed excitement in the languages of French and German and Japanese and English. They came with their blinkered eyes and closed minds to the cathedral and monastery for Benedictine monks built nine centuries before by the Norman king William the Good, and they clucked their pleasure as they stood at his sarcophagus, and gazed up at the gold of his mosaics and walked through his cloisters, and marvelled at the site he had chosen with such acuity above Palermo.

When they returned to their buses to drive away from Monreale, the French tourists and the Germans and the Japanese and the English and the Americans knew only of the past, had learned nothing of the present. No guide had told them of the ownership by La Cosa Nostra of the water they had sipped, of the ristorante they had eaten in, of the souvenir trade in religious relics they had boosted. No guide had told them of the priests who had offered hiding places to men of La Cosa Nostra on the run, or of the priests who had perjured themselves in court in offering alibi evidence, or of the priests who had permitted the super-latitanti to use their mobile telephones, or of the priests who said that La Cosa Nostra killed far fewer of God's children than the modern abortionists. No guide had told them of the new carabineri barracks in the town that were the base of the Reparto Operativo Speciale, or shown them the plaque on the wall of the barracks of the polizia municipale in memory of d'Aleo killed by mafiosi and of the plaque in the principal piazza in memory of Vice-Questore Basile killed by mafiosi. The tourists surfeited on history and did not know and did not care to know of present times.

He had the top floor of a widow's house.

She was a tall and elegant woman and wore the traditional black of mourning, but she told Axel Moen that it was six years since her husband, the surveyor, had died. She led him around the apartment – a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom – and in each room her fingers seemed to brush the surfaces for imaginary dust. He used his actual name with her, and he showed her the doctored passport that had come from the resources section back in Washington along with the wrist-watch, and he told her that he was a lecturer at the university in Madison and that his subject- matter was archaeology. She was polite, but she had no interest in digging through the past. The widow, his view, was a fine woman with education and dignity, but she had no complaint when he paid her three months' rental in advance with dollar bills. He thought they might, the dollar bills, go to Switzerland or they might go to a tin under her bed, but sure as hell they would not go onto a tax return form. She treated the payment as if it were a necessary moment of vulgarity and continued the tour of the apartment. She showed him how the shower worked, told him when the water pressure would be high, she took him to a small balcony that looked out over the town and the valley beyond and then to the mountains, and it would be his responsibility to water the potted plants. She gave him the keys of the outer door to the street and of the inner door to the apartment. Perhaps because he wore jeans and an old check shirt, perhaps because he wore his hair long in a pony-tail, she remarked coolly that she expected a

'guest' in her home to be quiet in the evenings, that she should not be disturbed, as she was a light sleeper. She was Signora Nasello. She closed the apartment door behind her.

She left him.

He had sat alone in the chair by the open doors to the balcony, alone with his thoughts, before 'Vanni Crespo came.

They hugged. Their lips brushed the other's cheeks.

They were as kids, as blood brothers.

'It's good?'

'Looks fine.'

'Not easy to find, a place in Monreale…'

'You did well.'

He was short of friends. Friendship did not come welcome to Axel Moen. Friendship was giving…

'You are the spirit of generosity, Mr Moen.'

Not many others, in Italian law enforcement or in the DEA's place on Via Sardegna, cared to goad Axel Moen. Not many others cared to tease or taunt him.

He had learned from his childhood to exist without friends. After the death of his mother, when his father had gone abroad, at the age of eight he had gone to live for five catastrophic months with his mother's parents. They were from the south end of the state, close to Stoughton. They were big in the Lutheran church and ran a hardware store and had forgotten how to win the love of an abandoned child. Five months of screaming confrontation, and beatings, and Axel had been sent on the bus, like preserved cod going to market, like a bale of dried tobacco leaf going to the factory, away up north to his father's father and the 'foreign Jezebel'. There had been no friends at the small farm between Ephraim and Sister Bay. In the tight-bound Norwegian community, his grandfather and his grandfather's second wife were shunned. He was a child living as an outcast. He had learned to live without a friend on the bus taking him to and from the school in Sturgeon Bay, and without a friend to make the long journey with down to Green Bay to see the Packers play. Vincenzina, from far-away Sicily, dark and Catholic, treated as a medieval witch and a danger and a threat, existed alone and taught the young Axel how to ignore isolation. He had learned, alone, to sail a boat and fish and walk with the dog as his company. And Vincenzina had never mastered fully the English language and they had talked an Italian of the Sicilian dialect at home in the farmhouse. They had been, forced to be, their own people. Axel had little trust in friendship.

'Vanni took a Beretta pistol from his waist, and two filled magazines of 9mm bullets from his trouser pocket. He passed them to Axel.

'It's good. I'm an archaeologist. I'm digging for antiquities. I teach at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I'm over for the summer semester. You'd better believe it.'

Axel grinned, and 'Vanni was laughing with him.

Axel had known Giovanni Crespo for a full two years. The first trip with Bill Hammond down to Palermo, called 'front-line acclimatization', they had been assigned the tall and angular-faced carabiniere captain as a guide. Bill had said, and believed it, that any Italian policeman should be treated as a security risk. Two days of whispering between the two Americans until the last night, when the big trip was winding down, and they had gone to ' Vanni's flat and 'Vanni and Bill had drunk themselves half-insensible on Jack Daniel's and Axel had sipped coffee. 'Vanni had been the first Italian Axel had met who said the sociologists and the apologists talked shit about La Cosa Nostra, that the bastards were simple criminals. He had known 'Vanni was worth the trust because it had been 'Vanni who had held the pistol at Riina's head. Salvatore Riina, capo di tutti capi, blocked off in a south Palermo street, and shitting himself and wetting himself, and lying in the gutter with ' Vanni's pistol at his temple as the handcuffs went on his wrists and the blanket went over his head. If a man held a pistol at Salvatore Riina's head, at the squat killer's temple, then Axel had a man who did not compromise. 'Vanni drank, 'Vanni screwed a prosecutor from Trapani and usually in the back of a car, 'Vanni talked too much and didn't know how to protect his back. They were different species, and their friendship was total.

'She's here?'

'She's here, and she's Codename Helen.'

'That was mine, I thought of that one.'

Between the knuckles of his fingers Axel caught a pinch of 'Vanni's cheek. 'She said,

"That is really original – did a genius think up that one?" That's what she said.'

Axel told 'Vanni the detail of the watch with the UHF panic tone, and he told him about the range of the pulse signal.

'Vanni had the maps, large scale, of Mondello on the coast, and of the high points of Monte Gallo and Monte Castellacio and Monte Cuccio, and of Monreale. They marked, bold ink crosses, the high points on which the microwave boosters would be placed.

'What have you told her?'

'When she should use the signal – only at the time of a contact with Mario Ruggerio or at a time of risk to her personal safety.'

'She accepts that?'

'I think so.'

'Think? Jesu, Axel, does she understand what she does, where she goes, with whom?'

'I told her.'

'Vanni said, soft, 'Is she capable of doing what is asked of her?'

'What I told her, "Don't think I want someone like you down there, but I don't have the option." And I told her that if she gave cause for serious suspicion, then she would be killed, and I told her that after they'd killed her they'd go eat their dinner.'

There was astonishment on 'Vanni's face, 'And she is just "ordinary", your word?'

'She is ordinary and predictable.'

'Don't you have a feeling for what you have pushed her towards – do you not have any goddam feeling?'

Axel said quietly, 'It's her strength that she is ordinary. And what was lucky for me, she was bored. She saw her life stretched out, the tapestry of her life was insignificance and under-achievement and waste. She yearns to be recognized, she wants excitement…'

'Don't you go fucking her, she might go to sleep.'

They were in each other's arms. Together, crying in laughter. Holding each other and laughing in hysteria.

'Vanni said, and the laughter dribbled at his mouth, 'You are a cold bastard, Axel Moen, and you are a cruel bastard. How close did you say you would be?'

'I said that I would be close enough to respond.'

'But that's shit, you know you cannot be, not all of the time.'

'It's best for her to believe that, all the time, I am close enough to respond.'

As if the laughter had served as a bonding, as if now there was no time for more laughter, they talked together into the night. They worked the detail of the exact locations of the microwave boosters, and where the receivers should be, and what were the codes that Codename Helen might use. They talked of the response team that must be made available, and with whom the information could be shared. Later,

'Vanni would slip out of the apartment and then return with boxed fresh-cooked pizzas. They talked in urgency, into the night, as if a life was suspended from their fingers.

She stood back. Piccolo Mario was frantically working open the bolts and locks of the door. Angela was in front of the mirror, and she touched her hair and then flicked with her nails to remove something unseen from the shoulders of her blouse. Francesca ran from her bedroom. Charley stood at the back of the hall.

He was a little greyer at the temples. He was, perhaps, a few pounds heavier in weight. He was as she remembered him. He carried bags and flowers and gift-wrapped parcels. The wide smile on his face as he pecked a kiss at Angela's cheek and swung small Mario high in the air and crouched to cuddle Francesca.

He came forward, across the hall, and he beamed pleasure at the sight of her. She held out her hand, shyly, and he took it and then lifted it and kissed it, and she blushed.

'So wonderful that you could come, Charley. You are very welcome in our small home.'

She stammered, 'It's lovely to be here… thank you.'

The man who washed money, whose brother was one killing away from becoming the most influential figure in international organized crime, let her hand drop. She was there, she had been told, because the family had made a 'mistake'. Angela and small Mario and Francesca, as if according to a ritual on his return, and she remembered the ritual, were opening their presents, discarding to the floor the ribbons and the bright paper.

'And you have been in Rome, Charley?'

'Yes.'

'Why did you go to Rome?'

She blurted, 'For nostalgia… because I had been so happy there… because it was the best time of my life. It was an opportunity.' She felt confident because she thought she had lied well.

A brooch of diamonds for Angela, an electronic game for small Mario, a soft toy for Francesca…

'I missed the direct flight, had to change in Milan – delay, of course – fog, of course.

You should not have stayed up for me, not until so late.'

Charley instinctively glanced down at her watch. The watch was heavy on her wrist.

She glanced at the watch and the button on her watch. She slipped away. She should not intrude. She went to her room. In her bed Charley pressed the watch against her breast and felt the hardness of it, and she wondered where he was, where Axel Moen waited.