Killing Ground

Chapter Six

He had been up early.

He had seen Signora Nasello, through a ground-floor door, in her kitchen and wearing a bright dressing-gown, as if in the privacy of her home she did not need to clothe herself in widow's black. In a bar he had taken a coffee and a pastry, and he had gone to the meeting place.

He had not shaved. He was dressed in old jeans and an old shirt, and his hair was gathered back into an elastic band.

Axel waited at the meeting place and gripped a plastic bag close against his thigh, and the Beretta pistol was under his shirt and held by the waist of his trousers. He was off the main street that led down to the piazza and the cathedral. He was high in the town and close to the rock face of the dominating mountain. He stood beside the stall of a man who sold vegetables, and while he waited the housewives came and bartered for beans and artichokes and lemons and oranges and potatoes and shrugged and made to walk away and turned back to give the man their money and to take the bags in return.

The van came from behind him. It was poor procedure on Axel's part that he did not see the approach of the van. He was jolted by 'Vanni Crespo's sharp whistle. It was a builder's van, the sort that would be used by an artisan working alone, small and dirty and rust-flaked. The door was opened for him, and he slid inside and his feet had to find space between a plastic bucket and paint pots, and he needed to duck to avoid the stepladder that jutted from the back of the van out between the front seats. He held the bag on his lap.

'You like it?'

'Taxed, I assume?' Axel grinned.

'Taxed, even insured. Did you sleep well?'

'I slept all right.'

'Did you dream?'

'No.'

'You didn't dream of her, of Codename Helen, not of her?'

Axel shook his shoulders. 'You play CIs, you use them, and when you have finished with them, then you pack them off back where they came from, end of story.'

'And you did not dream of Ruggerio?'

'No.' Axel, quite hard, punched his fist into the side of the Italian's chest. 'Hey, big boy, ugly boy, this woman from Trapani, does she have to go with you in the back of this heap?'

'She has, I thank the Virgin, her own car.'

They lapsed to quiet. They had come to a four-lane road below the town. He felt the keen thrill of pleasure, like he was dosed on ephedrine, like it was when the adrenalin coursed. The adult life of Axel Moen was divided, sharply, between the good times and the bad times. There were no grey shade compromises.

The university at Madison was bad times, no friends and no tolerance of student life, and finding what he rated as juvenile kids, and working alone to get the grades that were necessary. The city Police Department was good times, interesting from the start and better when he'd made detective status and gone to the surveillance team. A Drug Enforcement Administration investigation in Madison that used him as liaison and included him on a covert stake-out, that was good times. Taking the jump, quitting Madison and going to the DEA, joining the recruits at Quantico and being told he had an attitude problem and struggling to stay with the flow, that was bad times.

No warning, 'Vanni swung the wheel. They were checked at the gate by the smart-uniformed carabiniere trooper. They were passed inside, went under the raised barrier. They were a pair of workmen going on a small contract into the main carabiniere barracks on the island. He turned to 'Vanni, nodded his approval. Of course, the comings and goings at the main barracks on the island could be watched… They parked away from the main fleet of shining squad cars, near the memorial to the guys shot down in the line of duty. And still they could be watched, and 'Vanni gave Axel a bucket to carry and took the stepladder for himself, and they headed for a side door. He liked 'Vanni because he thought the guy trusted no bastard.

The first assignment with the DEA had been bad times. New York City, and the file had said that he was fluent in the Sicilian dialect, and the Pizza Connection case was going to trial, and there were the hours of wire taps to be listened to and noted, and he had sat week after week, month after month, in a small, darkened room with the earphones on his head and the tapes turning and the light blazing at his notepad…

When 'Vanni had fingered in the entry code and they were inside a corridor, they dumped the bucket and the stepladder.

La Paz, Bolivia, that had been good times, working with a small team, running his own CIs, riding in the local Huey birds, getting used to wearing the flak vest and to carrying the weight of an M16. The big shoot-out, the end of the day, hadn't changed La Paz, Bolivia, from rating as good times. Nor being shipped out on a walking-wounded ticket.

They went down a corridor and past the open section of an operations area with consoles and radios. Past a rest room where men sat in chairs and wore casual clothes and the firearms and the vests and the balaclavas were heaped on a table with the coffee cups and the used plates, and 'Vanni told Axel they were the Response Squad of the Reparto Operativo Speciale. 'Vanni said, if the panic tone went for real, that they'd be the guys who'd go running. He'd called in a favour, been allocated the team, dragged in a big debt, refused to explain.

Back to New York, three more years, and that had been bad times. They'd said in DEA and FBI and the prosecutors' offices that the American mainland end of La Cosa Nostra was finished. Tommaso

Buscetta, turncoat, pentito, had blown them away to the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. All over. The Bureau said, on the record, assholes that they were, that the

'mafia myth of invincibility' was torpedoed. A prosecutor said, for quoting, 'The Sicilian mafia's drug connection has been dismantled.' The resources were being drained from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Three years of scrapping with FBI over investigation priorities and pushing reports from desk to desk, three years of hearing that the Sicilians were a back number by comparison with the Colombians, and wondering then why the streets of Chicago and Philadelphia and Atlanta and Los Angeles and New York and Washington, a short walk from Headquarters, were stacked high with goddam heroin. Bad times, until the posting to Rome…

Up a flight of stairs, down another corridor, through a door that could be opened only with an entry code, into ' Vanni's office. Axel looked around him.

'If this is home, Christ…'

He thought it was a monk's cell. A bare room, with bare walls except for the photograph of a general in best uniform and a smiling portrait of a little girl, with a bare, plastic-topped table and a hard chair, with a bare bed and blankets folded neatly on top of the single pillow.

Axel took from the plastic bag the second of the receivers he had brought to Sicily.

The box was a little longer and a little thicker but the same depth as a hardback book.

He extended the aerial. He showed 'Vanni the on/off switch. He wrote on a sheet of paper the UHF frequency that was programmed into the wrist-watch worn by Codename Helen.

'Vanni said, 'I am only back-up to take the signal. She is your responsibility.'

'I understand that/

'You can take the signal in Mondello, if you sit there, which is not sensible. You can take the signal in Monreale, which is better, but you are a long way from her. On the road, in Palermo, you are beyond contact.'

'I understand that too.'

'In the operations area the frequency will be monitored, through the twenty-four hours, but I cannot tell them the detail of the importance of the signal, I can only lecture them on the priority. At the bottom line, it is your responsibility, Axel.'

Axel said, 'I told her to make a test transmission this afternoon.'

'This afternoon. That is idiot. It's not in place.'

'So shift yourself.'

'You think I have nothing else?'

The quiet smile played on Axel's face. 'You held the pistol to Salvatore Riina's head

– what I think, you'd give your right ball to hold that pistol at Mario Ruggerio's head.'

'Vanni reached for the telephone. He dialled, he spoke, he swore, he explained, he gave his rank, he ordered, he laid down the telephone and looked straight into Axel's eyes.

Distant and quiet, 'Vanni said, 'It will be, for her, like a bell calling from the darkness

…'

She half woke when Francesca crawled under the sheet of her bed. A moment before she knew where she was. Charley woke fully when piccolo Mario dragged her bear from her arms. She looked at her watch, she laughed and she tugged back the bear from the boy. God, the time… She heard a radio playing and the squeals of the children, excited, drove the sleep from her. She went, dazed, to the bathroom. Washed, teeth brushed, she wandered to the kitchen.

The note was on the table.

Charley, you were like an angel in peace. Giuseppe has gone to his office. I am shopping for lunch. Mauro is sleeping, feed him when he wakes. We meet later, Angela.

The whole of her life was a lie. She thought the lie worked well because she had been given, with the children, the run of the villa for the morning. She was accepted, she had gained access… She walked out onto the terrace. There was a freshness in the morning air and she hugged her arms across her chest and the tiles were cold under her bare feet.

She could see, through the gaps between the shrubs and the trees of the garden, over the high wall that ringed the villa. Beyond the wall were rooftops of other villas and beyond them was the bay. Where was he? Did he watch her? Was he close by? She saw only the glass shards set in the wall and the roofs and the distant blue expanse of the sea.

The children followed her into the kitchen. She pulled open the fridge for coffee and juice and a day-old croissant.

Charley thought the villa, its construction, was magnificent, but it was for the summer. Large rooms with high ceilings and floors of tile or marble. Big windows that could open out onto the patios. There was not the furniture to go with the magnificence, nor yet the weather. Angela had explained, seemed to apologize for, the functional furniture that was so mean compared to the fittings of the apartment in Palermo. Angela had said, head dropped, 'I had the place aired, of course, the week before we came, but it is built for the sunshine, not the rain and damp of the winter. You have to excuse us for the wetness. I can barely live with the furniture. You see, Charley, we pay a man a hundred thousand a month and he is supposed to watch the security of the villa. Twice this last winter we were thieved from, we were broken into. You would not leave anything of value here through the winter, the thieving is so bad…' She washed the cup and the glass and the plate and the knife. She wandered.

She was alone. She walked barefoot on a paved path. She bent to take the scent of the first of the spring's roses. So quiet around her. The cotton of her nightdress was pressed against her by a light wind. She crouched and took in her fingers the fragile petals of a crimson geranium. She went by a small fountain that spluttered water and she held out her hand and let the cascade run cold on her palm. The watch weighed on her wrist. She tried to believe, as if it were her anthem, that it were possible for one person, Charlotte Eunice Parsons, to change something… had to believe it. If she did not believe that she could change something, then she should have stayed at home, ridden her scooter to school each morning and ridden it back to the bungalow each evening. Should have bloody stayed, if she could not change something. She came round a screen where honeysuckle sprawled over a trellis frame.

He watched her.

Christ, the bloody 'lechie' eyed her.

The man who opened the gate, who swept the leaves, who watered the pots of flowers, gazed at Charlie. She felt the thin cloth of her nightdress against her nakedness. She had thought she was alone… An old face, lined by the sun and weathered by the sea's salt, and he stared at her and leaned his weight on his broom. She heard the cry of the baby. The old man with the old face and the old hands watched her. She ran on the coarse stones of the path back towards the villa and the crying baby, and it was seven hours until she would make her test transmission.

Where was he? Did he watch her? Was he close by?

They worked with a drill that was powered by a portable petroldriven generator to pierce the rock so that the stanchions could be buried securely and be proof against the winds on the higher point of Monte Gallo. When the stanchions were secured, the antennae of the microwave radio link were bolted to them, along with the booster that would enable the pulse of a panic tone to be carried across five kilometres to the higher point of Monte Castellacio.

Only when the sun over the city has climbed high, to its zenith, does the fierce light and warmth reach the cobbled alleys and broken pavings of the Capo district. Most of the day the district is a place of shadows and suspicion. It was the old Moorish slave quarter, and it is where the history of the men of the modern La Cosa Nostra is rooted.

In the grey and run-down heart of the Capo district is the Piazza Beati Paoli where, it is said, was the beginning… There is a church in the piazza, there is a small, hemmed-in open space, enclosed by high buildings with damp-scarred and crumbling walls and the night's bedding is draped from balconies. It is said by the historians who rejoice in the nobility of the anarchic Sicilian character that the piazza was the safe house of the Beati Paoli, the secret association formed more than 800 years ago. The men of the secret society claimed the right to protect the poor against the foreign rulers of the island.

Their motto was 'Voice of the People, Voice of God'. Their meeting place was in the caves and tunnels under the present piazza. By day they practised normality, worshipped in public. By night they roamed the black alleys, cloaked in heavy coats under which they carried rosaries and knives, and punished and murdered by ritual.

From the men of the secret society of the Beati Paoli was born a word: the word was

'mafia'. Some say the word comes from the old Italian maffia, which describes a man of madness, audacity, power and arrogance. Some say the word was the old French maufer, which denotes the God of Evil. Some say the word was the old Arabic mihfal, which is an assembly of many people. The children of each succeeding generation have been taught the mythology of the secret society, and its fight against the persecution of the unfortunate, and its punishment of the oppressor, and its justification for murder.

What began eight centuries ago had spread now from the grey piazza, flowed and eddied into the city, across the island, over the sea, but it began in the Capo district of Palermo.

'The Capo district, I see. You wish, Dr Tardelli, to cordon off the Capo district… Wait, Dr Tardelli, you have already spoken. Throw a surveillance cordon around the Capo district because – forgive me if I recapitulate – because you have been told by a source that must remain anonymous, that may not be shared with us, because you have information that a year ago an almond cake upset the bowels of Mario Ruggerio. An interesting proposition, Dr Tardelli.'

The grim smile played at the face of the oldest of the Palermo prosecutors. He shrugged, his fingers were outstretched in the gesture of ridicule, his throat burrowed down into his shoulders.

'I request the resources of a surveillance team.'

'Now, I, of course, Dr Tardelli, am not able to devote my life to the investigation of one man.' The voice of the magistrate quavered in sarcasm. A tall man, ascetic, his fingers clinging to an unlit cigarette, he rolled his eyes around the table, before bringing them to bear on Rocco Tardelli. 'My desk is piled with many investigations, all of which require my attention. I, too, need resources. But on the basis of information that is as old as was, no doubt, the almond cake – no, Dr Tardelli, I do not seek to make a joke of this – you wish for a special surveillance of the Capo district. There are, my recollection, at least fourteen entrances into that area. Should we have surveillance cameras for each of them? To do a job at all correctly you must have eight men at any one time on surveillance duty. Mathematics, I regret, is not my strength, but with the duty shifts that would take away twenty-four men from other duties. Then, I make a further addition, and I ask whether the eight men on surveillance duty must have the support of back-up. A further addition, those who watch however many cameras we install. A year ago, on the word of your informant, an almond cake made a problem for Mario Ruggerio, and we are asked to divert an army…'

'I ask for what can be spared.'

'Please, Dr Tardelli, your indulgence… I work in a more simple field, I attempt investigations into the extortion of payments from the public utility companies. To you, Dr Tardelli, I have no doubt that would seem to be valueless work, it is as if I hunt for many cats and not just one tiger. The tiger, of course, may by now be toothless and maimed and harmless, but that is another matter. I assure you, the cats have claws and teeth and kill.' The prosecutor was younger than Rocco Tardelli, was in his first year in Palermo, had travelled from Naples, and would have seen his appointment as a step on a career ladder. He would not be long on the island of Sicily. 'You put in place the valuable resource of a trained surveillance unit, a resource that each week, for my investigations, I beg for, but do you even know what he looks like, the elusive Mario Ruggerio? How – am I being stupid – how can a surveillance team operate, how can video cameras be monitored, if the only photograph of Mario Ruggerio is twenty years old? I do not wish to be difficult…'

'The photograph found when his brother was arrested, taken at his sister's wedding in 1976, has now been computer-enhanced. We have aged Mario Ruggerio.'

'You must not misunderstand me, Dr Tardelli. I, I can assure you, am not among them, but there are some, a few, who would be less than generous to you. Some, and I am not among them, would see an unfavourable motivation in your request for these valued resources. They would look, some would look, towards a desire on your part for promoted status. Not me, no…' Older than Tardelli, less grey in the visage because he did not live behind shuttered windows and drawn curtains, heavier in the stomach because he ate in the restaurants of the city, the magistrate had long ago sent a signal that had been transmitted, mouth to mouth, and received. He carried out his work, with punctilious care, but always those arrested, charged, convicted, imprisoned, were from a losing faction. '… Myself, I believe Ruggerio to be irrelevant, but his capture would play well on television, it would make the headlines in newspapers. The man who claimed credit for that capture would be feted, by the ignorant, as a national hero.

Would the finger beckon, would Rome summon him? Would he sit at the right hand of the Minister? Would he go to Washington to lecture the FBI and DEA, and to Cologne to meet the BKA, to Scotland Yard to take wine? Would he leave us all behind him to go about our daily work in danger, here in Palermo? Some might say that-'

'When you arrest a man of the stature of Mario Ruggerio then you dislocate the organization – it is proven.'

They were his colleagues and they mocked him. They might as well have laughed in his face, they might as well have spat upon him. It was what he lived with.

He looked around the table. He raked his eyes over them. He was accused, behind his back, in conversations in quiet corridors, of 'careerism' and of chasing 'handcuffs for headlines'. In his mind was that description of the dead Falcone, 'a lonely fighter whose army had proved to consist of traitors'. Some of them, he thought, were crushed by the coward's desire to return to normality. But… but he should have been more tolerant of cowards. Not every man could make such a sacrifice, pig-headed in righteous duty, as he had done. Not every man could see his wife walk out and take the children, and then go from the silence of a lifeless apartment, in the armoured car, to the bunker office.

There had been no contribution at the weekly meeting from the representatives of the squadra mobile and the Reparto Operativo Speciale and the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia, as if those men stood aside while the prosecutors and magistrates carped and cut at each other.

Tardelli began to gather together the papers in front of him. There was a hangdog sadness in his face, and his shoulders were bowed as if under the weight of disappointment. He spoke with the diffidence that was his own. 'Thank you for hearing me, gentlemen. Thank you for your courtesy and consideration. Thank you for pointing out to me the folly of my ambition and the idiocy of my request…'

He stood. He placed his papers in his briefcase. It had been the same for Falcone and for Borsellino, and for Cesare Terranova and 'Ninni' Cassara, and for Giancomo Montalto and for Chinnici and for Scopellitfi, all ridiculed, all isolated, all dead. He had been to the funerals of all of them.

'I will call, in one hour, a news conference. I will tell the world that I have a lead, a slight lead, for the hiding place of the super- latitanti, Mario Ruggerio. I will say that my colleagues in the Palazzo di Giustizia, and I will name them, do not consider this a matter important enough for the allocation of resources. I will say-'

The bluster beat around him.

'That would be disloyal…'

'Unfair…'

'We merely pointed to the difficulties…'

'Of course there are resources…'

When he was out in the corridor, when the door behind him was closed on the hatred, when his ragazzi gathered around him with their guns, as they did even on the upper floor, and questioned him with their glances, the magistrate showed no triumph.

Falcone had written, 'One usually dies because one is alone, because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support,' and Falcone, with his wife and his ragazzi, was dead.

Walking briskly, he said to the maresciallo, 'I have been given nine men of the squadra mobile for the surveillance of the Capo district, three shifts of three, and no additional cameras. I have to hope. I have nine men for ten days. If they find nothing, then I am isolated. We should, my friend, be very careful.'

They sweated in the cold wind that hit them. They were at 890 metres above sea level.

The wind buffeted them and rocked the stanchion arms. They struggled to hold the antennae as the bolts were tightened. The clear line of sight was established from Monte Castellacio, across the Palermo-Torretta road, to the greater height of Monte Cuccio.

In a new block, overlooking the moles against which the big ferries from Livorno and Naples and Genoa docked, Peppino had his office. It was lavishly furnished, modern and expensive-Italian. He sat in the wide room with the picture window that faced out over the harbour. The office was a home from home for him, necessary that it should be of the greatest comfort because Peppino spent fifteen hours out of the twenty-four hours of the day there, six days a week, hugging the telephone between his ear and his shoulder, feeding the fax machine, flicking between the channels on the screen that gave him the market indices in New York and Frankfurt and London and Tokyo. He did not take a siesta in the afternoon, as did every other businessman in the city's Rotary or in the Lodge he attended on the third Thursday in the month. He avoided the luxury of a siesta because, single-handed, he managed and moved and placed, each year, in excess of four billion American dollars on behalf of his elder brother.

It was the way of the organization and, in particular, the way of his elder brother that matters of finance should be kept inside the family. It was why he had been brought back to Palermo from Rome. He lived a life consumed by the need to 'clean' money. He was the trusted laundryman for Mario Ruggerio. He was a master at his work, the consolidation and placement, the immersion, the layering, the heavy soaping, the repatriation and integration, the spin-dry. What Angela did in the utility room off the kitchen, Peppino did in his office in the new block on Via Francesco Crispi. Angela washed and cleaned a dozen shirts a week, a dozen sets of socks, half a dozen sets of underwear. Peppino washed and cleaned in excess of four billion American dollars a year. The office was his home. He could cook and eat in his office. He could shower and change in his office. He could take his secretary, when the businessmen of the Rotary and the Lodge were at siesta, to the stark black couch by the picture window.

If the office were his home, if the scale of his work increasingly kept him from the apartment in the Giardino Inglese and the villa at Mondello, Jesu, it was necessary for him to take his secretary to the couch. What his brother said, Mario said, a wife should never be embarrassed… Would Angela have cared? If the condoms had spilled out of his pocket, fallen at her feet, would Angela have noticed? Not since she had come to Palermo. Angela would not be embarrassed by any indiscretion of his secretary because the young woman's father was sick with a carcinoma and the treatment was expensive, and Peppino paid for the principal consultant in the field of that necessary treatment.

The rows with Angela came more often now. They lived in physical proximity and in psychological separation. She could have everything that she wanted except divorce, divorce was unthinkable… So good in Rome, so different. They maintained an appearance. His brother had said that appearance was important.

His feet, shoes discarded, rested on the glass top of his desk, his leather chair was tilted far back. He talked through the final details of a leisure complex in Orlando with the bank in New York and the construction company's operations manager in Miami.

Two phones going, and the talk 'in clear' because the money coming down from New York was cleaned…

And just as he washed money for his brother, so Mario Ruggerio had immersed and soaped and spun-dry the younger Peppino. Sent by his brother away from Prizzi, dismissed from his mother, sent abroad, dismissed from his past, sent into the world of legitimate finance, dismissed from his family. The businessmen that he knew in Rotary and the Lodge, the trustees of the Politeama who sought his advice on financial planning, the charitable orphanage in Bagheriaia and the priests at the duomo in Palermo who sought his help did not know of the connection of his birth, were unaware of the identity of his elder brother. Perhaps, maybe, a few policemen knew. There was a magistrate who knew. One interrogation, one summons to come to the offices of the Servizio Centrale Operativo in the EUR suburb, one journey out of Rome. The magistrate who knew had been a pitiful little man, obsequious in his questions, up from Palermo. He had attacked. Was he to be blamed for the accident of his birth? Should he carry his blood as a cross? Because of his brother, he had left home, left the island what more could he do to break the association? Was he obliged, because of blood and birth, to wear the hair-shirt of a penitent? Was he to be persecuted? He had thought the magistrate, Rocco Tardelli, an insignificant man who had cringed at the attack. He had not been interrogated again in Rome, and not since he had come back with Angela and the children to Palermo. It had been important, in that one session with the magistrate at the offices of SCO, to dominate arid kill the investigation of his affairs. He knew the way they worked, submerged with paper, starved of resources, scratching for information that would take them forward. He imagined that the transcript of the interview, no information gained and nothing moved forward, was now consigned to a file shut away in a basement, was buried beneath a mountain of other sterile interrogations, was forgotten. If it were not forgotten, then he would have been investigated again following his return to Palermo. He felt safe, but that was no reason to drop, ever, his guard. He kept his guard high, as his brother demanded.

The deal was concluded. The papers would go to the lawyers for fine analysis, then the bank in New York would move the money, then the operations manager would move on site. Peppino said when he would next be in New York… dinner… yes, dinner, and he thanked them.

Peppino looked up at the clock on the wall, cursed. Angela was never punctual, and they were to be at the opera. As a trustee it was necessary for him to be at a first night of the Politeama's spring programme.

He called to the outer room, to his secretary. She should telephone Angela. She should remind Angela at what time she should drive into the city, what time she should be in the Piazza Castelnuovo. A wry smile, cool, on his face. No excuse for Angela not to come, because he gave her everything, the brooch of diamonds that she would wear that evening, and he had given her the little English mouse to watch the children.

Charley carried the baby, easily, as if it were her own. She came off the patio as Angela was putting down the telephone.

Charley said, 'Please, Angela, I would like to go for a walk later.'

'Where?'

Down to the Saracen tower beside the harbour. 'Just into the town.'

'Why?'

To press the panic pulse button for a test transmission. 'Because I haven't been in the town. It would be nice to walk by the sea.'

'When?'

Told to send the transmission in an hour and ten minutes. 'I thought it would be nice in an hour or so.'

'Can't you go now?'

The time was fixed by Axel Moen. 'It's too hot now. I think it would be nicer in an hour.'

'Some other time. I have to go with Peppino to the opera. I have to leave in less than two hours. Another time.'

They would be waiting for the signal to be sent in an hour and ten minutes, waiting with their earphones, twisting the receiver's dials to the UHF frequency. 'I'll be here when you go out.'

'Charley, the children, and Mauro, they have to be fed, they have to be bathed, they have to be put to bed.'

'I can do all that, don't you worry. I'll take piccolo Mario and Francesca and baby Mauro with me. They'll like to walk when it's not so hot. You don't have to worry about them, it's what I've come for, to help you.'

Charley tried to smile away the unhappiness of Angela Ruggerio. She did not know the cause of the sadness. She was not the woman Charley had known in Rome, the woman who laughed and talked and lay on the beach without the top to her bikini. She did not recognize the new woman.

'Perhaps…'

'You should have a rest. Lie down. Don't think about the children, that's for me, that's why I'm here.' Here to send panic-pulse transmissions, here to spy, here to break open a family's life and to smash the parts…

They were beyond the height to which the shepherds brought the Hocks and herds.

From Monte Cuccio they could see, direct line of sight, to Monte Castellacio and on to Monte Gallo, and when they turned away from the swaying antennae and looked down the scree slope, and on past the track's limit where the jeep had been left, there was the ridge line of yellow-grey rock that lay above Monreale. One more set of antennae, on that ridge, and they would have made the boosted microwave link from Mondello to the aerial on the roof of the carabineri barracks.

'Vanni Crespo asked, gulping air, panting, 'It's good?'

The technician pouted. 'If a signal is transmitted, on the frequency you have given me, from Mondello, then it will be received in Monreale.'

He scrambled down the scree slope, slipping and falling, and when he was on his feet, 'Vanni ran for the jeep.

Anxiety furrowed the wide forehead of Mario Ruggerio. His fingers tapped restlessly at the keys of the Casio calculator.

The figures, the lire totals, were worse than they had been a year ago.

Losses, that column, stood at forty billion a month, the calculation for income was down 17 per cent on the previous year and these were the balance-sheet figures that were held in his mind. His estimate of outgoings was up by 21 per cent. Each time he played the figures onto the calculator's screen the answer came the same, and unwelcome.

He sat at his table in the drab room on the first floor of the house in the Capo district.

The figures were estimates, given him by an accountant from Palermo.

He wrote occasional words, with figures beside the words that he ringed. He had written 'decline in public works expenditure': the new Government in Rome no longer poured money into the Sicilian infrastructure for roads and dams and the administration offices for the island. He had written 'legal fees', and the estimate was that four thousand Men of Honour, from the members of the cupola to the sotto capi and the consiglieri and the capodecini and right down to the level of the picciotti, were in custody and must receive the best legal representation – if they did not receive the best, and if their families were not supported then there was the chance of men taking the foul option of joining the bastard pentiti. He had written 'asset seizure', and the figure for the previous twelve months stood, in his careful hand, at 3,600 billion for the state's sequestration of property and bonds and accounts, and the calculator, purring through fast additions and multiplications and divisions and subtractions, told him that 'asset seizure' was already up in the first months of the year by 28 per cent. He had written

'narcotics', and there the figure was down because the habits of addicts had changed to the more recent creation of chemically based tablets, and the organization did not have control of the supply of such products as the LSD and amphetamine range. He had written 'co-operation', the payment each year to politicians and policemen and magistrates and the revenue investigators, and the figure alongside the word was five hundred billion. He thought the words and the figures were the result of three years of drift. The drift had begun with the capture of Salvatore Riina, and had continued while others had scratched eyes and killed in their attempts to succeed him as capo di tutti capi. When he had control, full control of the organization, then the drift would be halted.

He lit his cigar, and coughed, and he held the flame of his lighter against the sheet of paper on which he had written the words and the figures. He coughed again, deeper in his throat, and tried to lift the phlegm.

Axel saw her.

He sat on the warm concrete of the pier and he looked across the curve of the bay towards the dun tower that was, he guessed, four hundred metres from him.

He saw her, and in his mind she was Codename Helen. She had no other identification. He stripped her, as he gazed across the bay at her, of personality and of humanity. She was the Confidential Informant that he used.

Axel sat with his legs casually dangling over the edge of the pier and the water lapped below his feet. Around him were small fishing boats and men working at the repair of their nets and at the tuning of boats' engines. He ignored their solemn faces, walnut-coloured from salt spray and the sun's strength. He watched her.

The small boy ran ahead of her the moment they were across the road and she released his hand. A small girl clutched the side of the pram that Codename Helen pushed. There was a bright awning on the pram to shelter a baby from the brilliance of the late afternoon light. It was so normal. It was what Axel might have seen beside any bay on the island, on any esplanade above the gold of any beach. A hired help, a nanny and a child-minder, pushed a pram and escorted two small children. He had good eyesight, no need of spectacles, and he could see her face as a whitened blur. He had reckoned that binoculars could draw attention to himself; without binoculars he could not see the detail of her face, did not know whether she was calm or whether she was stressed.

On Axel's lap, shielded by his body from the fishermen who moved behind him on the pier from boat to boat, covered by his windcheater, was the equipment designated as CSS 900. The crystal-controlled two-channel receiver, the best and most sensitive that Headquarters could supply, had been stripped of its microphone capability and would receive only a tone pulse. In the canal of his right ear, buried from sight, was an induction earpiece, no cable necessary. The equipment, and the earpiece, were activated only when a tone pulse was transmitted. Protruding from under the windcheater, protected from view by his body, was the fully extended aerial of the receiver. He waited.

He thought that he saw her head drop and for a moment the whiteness of her face was gone, and he thought that she checked her watch and he wondered whether she had synchronized with the radio during the day, as he had done, as she should have. His eyes roved over the shoreline, sweeping inland from the tower that had been built by the Moors centuries before as a defensive position and across the piazza where the kids were gathered with their motorbikes and their Coke cans and up over the roofs towards the final line of villas set against the raw grey stone of the cliff. Later he would go, on another day, to see the villa. She was at an icecream counter, and he saw her hand a cone to the small boy and another to the little girl. She did not take an ice-cream for herself.

It was Axel Moen's life. His life was made of waiting for covert transmissions from Confidential Informants. There was, to him, sitting with his feet above the vivid colours of the water that was polluted by oil and above the floating plastic bags and fish carcases, nothing that was particular or special about the CI given the title of Codename Helen. His life and his work… Shit. He had no feelings for her that he could summon, was not concerned as to whether she was calm or whether she was stressed. Couldn't help himself, but his head jerked.

The pulse tone rang in his ear. So clear, three short blasts, so sharp. It cavorted through his head. There was little static, and the pulse tone was repeated. It beat within the confines of his skull bone. It came again, a final time, three short blasts.

The static was gone, the silence returned.

He thought she looked around her. He thought she looked for a sign. He saw her turning slowly and looking at the road and at the pavement and up into the town and out across the sea. It was good that she should be alone and good that she should know she was alone. He pushed down the aerial, lost it under the cover of his windcheater.

Axel stood. When he was standing he could see her better. She was going away, alone, with the children and with the pram. She stopped to cross the road, and when there was a gap in the traffic she hurried. He did not see her on the far side of the road because a lorry blocked his view of her.

He walked away.

'Vanni handed the second headset back to the technician. He leaned against the technician's chair as if a weakness sagged through his body. The grit and dust of the scree slope on Monte Cuccio was on his hands and on his face, and on the knees and seat of his jeans and on the chest and back of his shirt. He breathed deeply…

The signal had come so clearly, and he had said that it would be for her like a bell ringing from the darkness, like the light of a candle in the black of night. It might, just, offer success… He wondered where she was, their Codename Helen, whether she shivered in fear, whether she felt the chill of isolation… He wrote on a piece of paper the number of his mobile telephone and he told the technician, smacking his fist into the palm of his hand for emphasis, that he must be called every time that the frequency was used, night or day. The number was clipped to the banked equipment in front of the technician.

'You have that? Any hour – whether it is the triple pulse, short and repeated three times, whether it is the long pulse, repeated four times – at any hour, if that signal comes

…'

The technician, laconic, shrugged. 'Why not?'

His fists gripped the technician's shoulders, his fingers gouged at the technician's flesh. 'Don't piss on me. The early duty and the late duty and the night duty, whatever cornuto sits here, he calls me. If I am not obeyed, I will crack the bones in your spine.'

'You will be called.'

He loosed his hands. He shook. He had heard a bell ringing in the darkness. He felt the weakness because he believed, for the first time, that the plan might work. Not since they had turned

Baldassare di Maggio, not since di Maggio had told them where to look for Salvatore Riina, not for three years had a source been in place so close to the heart of the organization. They would kill her. If they found her, they would kill her.

One piece of paper… One telephone number scribbled on one piece of paper… The party spilled noisily through the offices. Of all the boxes taken out of the solicitor's premises, and all the plastic bags, one piece of paper had done the business, one telephone number on the back of a commercial property conveyancing draft had launched the party. The solicitor would have been checking a subordinate's work on the draft, and a telephone call would have come through, and he would have been given a number, and he would have jotted it on the back of the nearest sheet of paper. Trouble was, for the solicitor, the number was that of a small and discreet Zurich bank. Further trouble was, for the solicitor, that Swiss banks weren't what they had been. Cold feet in Cuckoo- clock-land, and the small and discreet Zurich bank had not been prepared to fight the recent Swiss legislation contained in Article 305 11 of the penal code which made its directors liable to prosecution if they shielded illegal funds. With the solicitor's name and account number on the top page of the evidence file, and the reckoning of what was stashed there of his clients' cash, the party had started.

Six packs of beer from the off-licence, and three bottles of wine, and a bottle of Scotch which was the detective superintendent's fast track to getting pissed up, and music from a transistor. They didn't come often, the good ones.

Harry was called.

Harry Compton was called out of the party area and into the administration office.

Miss Frobisher, and the place fell apart when she took her five weeks of leave, didn't drink and didn't approve, but she'd stayed put to answer the telephones. She would have read the secure transmission, and she scowled as she handed it to Harry.

TO: Det. Sgt. H. Compton, S06, London.

FROM: Alf Rogers, DLO, Rome.

Harry, Regards. Assuming they could find it, some nasty soul has been pulling your insignificant pecker. No trace in Milan on available records of BRUNO FIORI. The address provided in Via della Liberazione does not exist. That section of the street was pulled down six years ago for the construction of a municipal swimming pool. Details on hotel reg. were totally fictitious. Back to your gin/tonics. We, here, are involved in important work and don't need to be diverted from the necessary with duff info.

Luv, Alf.

Harry took the single sheet of paper to his desk, locked it away, went back to the party. The detective superintendent was into his joke repertoire and had an audience, and Harry didn't think he'd take it kindly if his punchline was interrupted. It would wait till the morning, till they crawled in with their headaches. He had a nose, that was his bloody trouble, and the nose was smelling something rotten, but it would be better talked about in the morning.