Killing Ground

Chapter Seven

'How long?'

'II don't know.'

'If you don't know how long it would take, then, Harry, leave it to the locals.'

Maybe it would have been better the night before, perhaps it would have been better to have crashed the boss when he was in his joke session. Water under the bridge, because Harry Compton had let that moment go.

'I don't want to do that.'

'Did I hear right? "Want"? Don't "want" me, young man.'

The morning after, and the S06 office was a dead ground. Miss Frobisher, of course, had been in early, before seven, and she'd removed all the plastic cups and emptied the ashtrays and wiped the bottle stains off the desks, but the place still stank, and their heads ached. He thought the detective superintendent's head hurt worse than most because the boss-man's mood was foul.

'What I'm trying to say-'

'Rein in, young man. What you are "trying to say" is that you want two days down in the country. Well, we'd all like that, wouldn't we?'

'It should be followed up.'

'The locals can follow it up.'

Harry stood in the detective superintendent's office. The boss was hunched over his desk and he had a second coffee mug in front of him and the heartburn pills that squeezed off a little tinfoil platter. He held in his hand the message received the last evening from Alf Rogers, and the hotel registration sheet, and the printout from the night manager of telephone calls made from the room occupied by Bruno Fiorii, alias for Christ only knew. He was on a short fuse that was getting shorter. His wife, Fliss, had bitched at the time he'd come in. Hadn't he remembered that they were supposed to be going out shopping for the new settee set? Wasn't there a telephone he could have used? He'd an accountancy exam, first part, coming up, and wouldn't he have been better at his books, after late-night shopping, than lurching in smelling foul from drink? Why'd he forgotten to put the cat out? The cat had been shut in the kitchen and crapped on the floor. God.

'The locals down there are useless, they're parking-ticket merchants.'

'You've got nothing, nothing, that warrants me kissing you goodbye for two days.'

'It's worth doing.'

'How many files on your desk?'

'That's the bloody point, isn't it?'

'What's tickling up your arse, Harry?'

'It's trivia, that's what's on my desk. It's nothing stuff. It's corrupt little men, high-street dwarfs, fiddling pensions, fiddling savings.'

'Those pensioners, those savers, they just happen, young man, to pay fucking taxes.

Those taxes are your wages. Don't you get on a high-and-mighty horse and forget where your bread comes from.'

For a moment Harry closed his eyes. He squeezed the lids tight shut. He took a big breath.

'Can I walk in again? Can we start again?'

The coffee dribbled from the sides of the detective superintendent's mouth. 'Please yourself, and keep it short.'

'What I'm saying is this. We have a trace that is just routine on this tosser Giles Blake, bank disclosure on a cash deposit. We run the check on his accounts. Nothing special, no alarms, except that it's not clear where the wealth comes from. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we'd say that's as far as it runs, file it and drop it. But, you authorize an evening's surveillance, and Mr bloody Blake takes an Italian to dinner, and they talk about nothing that is illegal. File it and drop it. But the Italian says he's come from Palermo. But the Italian has given the hotel a false name, a false address. We don't know who he is. But his telephone records indicate that from his room he called a travel agent for his flight back to Milan and the non-existent address, a limousine company for a ride to the airport using the fictional name. But there was one more call from his room. He rang a Devon number. He rang a number listed as belonging to David Parsons. That's where I want to go, to see Mr David Parsons.'

'Why can't the locals-?'

'Christ, don't you understand?'

'Steady, young man.'

'Don't you understand? I repeat myself, what we do is trivia. Trivia are good for the statistics. We lift enough second-rate people on second-rate scams, and you get to make commander, and I get to make inspector, and we get pissed together, and we are achieving damn-all. But, don't worry, it's easy and it gets fast results, and aren't we bloody clever?'

He was on the edge. Over the edge was insubordination, was a bollocking, was a mark on his file. Maybe it was last night's drink, perhaps it was the tiredness, could have been the row with Fliss. It didn't seem to matter to Harry Compton that he was on the edge.

'Then, onto your plate falls something that might just be interesting. Can't quantify it, can't put bloody time and motion to it, can't put a balance sheet on it. Might spend a week or two weeks or a month, and might get nothing. No, it's not for the locals, it's our shout and I want to go to Devon.'

The boss-man hesitated. It was always that way with the boss, because the man was a bully. If the boss's shin were kicked, if he had pain, then he usually crumpled, what Harry had learned. 'I don't know

…'

'If you're trying to send a message, then the message is being heard. Looks to me that you're saying that Fraud Squad can chase greedy little bastards with their fingers in the pensions accounts and the savings accounts, but we're not smart enough for the international scene. I hear you. The big time is too complex for S06, like we're not fit enough to run on dry sand where it gets to hurt. I hear you.'

'For two days, when you've got your in-tray down to half empty, not before,' the detective superintendent said, sour. 'And get the fuck out of here.'

Four days gone, and the excitement had drained. Four days gone in a numbed routine of getting up, getting the kids dressed, getting the kids their breakfast, getting small Mario to school, getting Francesca to kindergarten, getting baby Mauro changed. Charley was four days into the routine and was bored. She sat at the iron-legged table on the patio and she wrote her first postcards.

It was four days since she had gone down to the town and stood by the Saracen tower and pressed the button on her wrist-watch, and looked around and tried so desperately to see him and failed. That had been the last moment of excitement. For God's sake, she hadn't come to Sicily to walk the kids to school and kindergarten, to deal with a baby's stinking backside, to skivvy for Angela Ruggerio. She'd come, spit it out, sunshine, she'd come to gain the access that would lead to the capture of Mario Ruggerio. Who?

What for? Why? A postcard for her mother and father, and another for her uncle, and another for the 2B class. All the week Peppino had been in Palermo, not come to Mondello, and Angela said that her husband had too much work in the city to be able to come back to them in the evenings. Now, that was just plain ridiculous because it was twenty minutes' drive in that big bloody fast car from central Palermo to Mondello.

On the postcards Charley didn't say that she was bored out of her mind. 'Having a wonderful time – weather brilliant – soon be warm enough to swim, Love, Charley.' The same for her parents and for her uncle and for the 2B class.

She had come because she had decided she was trapped at home, netted at work. But nothing bloody well happened here either, except that she fussed round the kids and changed the baby and swept the bloody floors. God. Come on, speak the bloody truth: Charley Parsons had come to Sicily because Axel Moen had told her to. She wrote the addresses on the cards, a fast and clumsy hand. Damn Axel Moen. What did he mean to her? Meant nothing, and she threw the pen down onto the table top. God, and just once he could have said something decent, could have given her something that was praise, something that was bloody compassion.

She had come with the excitement holding her. Like when she had gone to the home of the lecturer at college, the first time, and known his wife was away, and worn the sheer blouse and no bra, and drunk his wine, and stripped for him in front of the open fire, and climbed on him as they did in the films. That had been excitement, till the dull fart had cried. Like when she had walked to the caravan at the edge of the camp site at Brightlingsea where the long-term activists lived who each day tried to break the police cordons and halt the trucks carrying the animals to the continental abattoirs, gone to the caravan where Packy slept, with the cap in her hip pocket, walked to his caravan because the other girls said he'd a prick bigger than a horse's… That had been excitement, till the stupid bugger had spurted before he'd even got over her. Hey, sunshine, excitement's for books. The villa was a mortuary, it was the death of excitement.

It was the third day that piccolo Mario and Francesca had been to school and kindergarten, and Charley thought they were like a pit-prop to their mother. She seemed to weaken when they were gone from her sight. Charley, too damn right, she'd tried. Tried to make conversation, tried to earn some laughter back – a lost bloody cause. Some mornings Angela went into Palermo, some mornings she stayed in her room. Some afternoons Angela walked with the children, some afternoons she went, remote, to a sunbed at the bottom of the garden. Charley tried, Charley failed, to get through to her. Charley giggled, Charley remembered the face of the mistress at school who taught sixth-form history and who'd come to hammer the Civil War into them the morning after the miserable cow's husband had moved out to set up home with a nineteen- year-old boy, same school. God, that was bloody cruel, but it was the face of Angela Ruggerio, struggling to keep the appearance, and tortured… Charley would try, and fail, and try again. As though she were haunted, as though…

The gardener watched her. Whenever Charley was outside the gardener was always close, with the hose for the plants, with the broom for the paths, with the fork for the weeds, always near to her, where he could see her. One day, bloody certain, one day she'd put a towel on the grass and lie on it, and give the 'lechie' something to look at.

One day…

'Charley. Do you know what is the time, Charley?'

She turned. She looked towards the open patio doors.

'It's all right, Angela, I've not forgotten the time, about ten minutes, then I'm off for them.'

Angela Ruggerio stood in the doorway. It made Charley miserable to see her, to see her drawn face, to see her attempt to smile, to see the woman pretend. There was no love, Charley reckoned, and there had been love in Rome. But not her problem.

'I was just doing some postcards, friends and family…'

Angela repeated the word, rolled it. 'Family? You have a family, Charley?'

'Not really, but there's my parents and there's my mother's brother, lives up in the north of England. We hardly see him… I'm afraid we're not like Italians in England, family doesn't matter that much. But-''

The bitterness snapped in Angela's voice, as when a mask slips. 'Find a Sicilian, and you find a family.'

She must never pry, Axel had said, never push. 'I suppose so.'

'When you were with us in Rome, you did not know that Peppino was Sicilian?'

'No.'

'With a Sicilian there is always a family, the family is everything…'

She was gone. Angela went as quietly as she had come.

Charley finished the addresses on the postcards. She had come into the villa to find Angela, to ask when the post office closed and whether she would have time to buy stamps. She moved, barefoot, across the marble of the living area and the tiles of the hallway at the back. She moved without sound. Angela lay full-length on the bed.

Charley saw her through the open door. Angela lay on her stomach on the bed and her body convulsed in weeping. She knew of the family. The family was Rosario and Agata in Prizzi, and Mario who was hunted, and Salvatore who was in prison, and Carmelo who was simple, and Cristoforo who was dead, and Maria who drank, and Giuseppe who washed the money. She knew of the family because Axel had told her.

Charley watched the woman weep and sob. She felt humbled.

She left the villa, the prison, and walked with the baby in the pram into the town to collect small Mario and Francesca.

'You'd like a coffee?'

'Yes, I'd like that, espresso, thanks.'

'Three coffees, espresso, please.'

The policeman bobbed his head in acknowledgement. He was an old tired man, in a uniform that bulged over his stomach. He looked to be the sort of fixture in the upper corridor of the Palazzo di Giustizia that they had in the same upper corridors at Headquarters. He wore a pistol in a holster that slapped his thigh, but his job was of little more importance than bringing coffee for guests.

The magistrate gestured that 'Vanni should go first through the outer door. Axel followed. There were minders on the outer door and minders on the inner door. Both the doors were steel-plated. There had been razor-wire coils on the walls around the compound in La Paz. They had lived in Bolivia, and worked, with a pistol at the waist, with constant apprehension. They had been careful in their movements, avoided nighttime car journeys. The screen around the magistrate, Dr Rocco Tardelli, even on the top floor of the Palazzo di Giustizia, jolted Axel and he tried to imagine how it would be to live a half-life under guard. It was over the top, above anything he had seen on the previous trips down to Palermo. The inner door, steel plated, was closed behind them, his view of the harsh and suspicious-faced guards was lost. He blinked in the low light of the room. Behind the drawn blinds there would have been shatterproof and bulletproof glass

… A shit of a way to live.

The man was small and bowed and while he tried to play at the necessary courtesies his eyes flickered in a constant and moving wariness. Axel knew the phrase the

'walking dead'. He could laugh about the 'walking dead' in Rome, make gas-chamber humour of it, but not here, not where the reality confronted him. His Country Chief rated Dr Rocco Tardelli, took him to lunch when he was in Rome. Headquarters rated Dr Rocco Tardelli, flew him to the

Andrews USAF Base once a year on a military transport and had him talk to the Strategy teams, poor bastard. The Country Chief said, and Headquarters said, that Dr Rocco Tardelli was a jewel – but not precious enough to share with… The poor bastard seemed, to Axel, a caged creature.

A knock at the door. The coffee tray was set down on the desk, and the machine-pistol of the young guard swung on its strap and clattered against the desk top.

Shit, the goddam thing was armed, and the magistrate seemed to wince.

'Careful, Pasquale, please.'

They were alone.

The soft voice. 'So the DEA has come to Palermo. May I be so impertinent as to ask what mission brings you here?'

Axel said, 'We have an operation going, the target is Ruggerio.'

'Then you are one of so many. What is the scope of the operation?'

Axel said, 'We hope to mark him. If we mark him, then we send for the cavalry.'

Said dry, with a gentle smile, 'Of course you would expect that we have plans for the arrest of Ruggerio. What is the range of the operation from which the DEA believes it will taste success when we eat failure?'

'This is what you'd call a courtesy call. We have a small range of facilities organized by our friend. 'Vanni is looking after our interest.' Axel shifted awkwardly in his chair.

'I'd rather not be specific.'

The smile widened, warmth flowed and there was a brightness in the magistrate's eyes. 'Do not be embarrassed – I am the same as you. I trust very few people. You would not expect me to tell you of the locations of the physical surveillance and the bugs and the cameras, where we watch for Ruggerio. You would not expect me to tell you what information I have from the pentiti. But it is a sad game to play when there is no trust.'

'It's not personal.'

'Why should it be? So, we are engaged in competition. You wish to achieve what we cannot. You wish to show the Italian people that the power of the United States of America is so great that they can succeed where we fail.' The smile was long gone, his eyes fixed on Axel. 'If you succeed where we fail, then I assume you would seek the extradition of Ruggerio, and fly him back in chains to your courts as you did with Badalamenti.'

'We have charges to lay against Ruggerio. It would be a message because we'd lock him up till he was dead.'

'There are many here who would appreciate such a situation, and the poison whispers would pass in these corridors that Tardelli, the seeker after glory, was humiliated. You have put an agent into Palermo?'

What he'd heard, more prosecutions were blocked by the jealousies, the ambitions, the envy, of colleagues than by the efforts of La Cosa Nostra. The man yearned for a rope to be thrown him. Axel looked away. 'I'd rather not.'

'My assumption, Signor Moen, you have put an agent of small importance into Palermo. I do not wish to insult you, but if it were an agent of big importance, then Bill himself would have come, but only you have travelled… Do you know of Tom Tripodi?'

Axel scratched in his memory. 'Yes, didn't meet him, gone before I joined, I heard of him. Why?'

'He was here in the summer of 1979, not too long ago for lessons to be remembered.

He was the star agent from Washington, and he worked with Vice-Questore Boris Giuliano. He posed as a buyer of narcotics, he found himself an introduction to Badalamenti, who was then capo di tutti capi. For those who made the plans in Washington it would have seemed so simple. An agent in place to achieve what the Italians could not. So sad that there was disappointment, that Badalamenti did not bite.

It ended with Tripodi running for his life, taken to the docks by Boris Giuliano, with escort cars, with a helicopter overhead. We paid a heavy price, maybe because of Tripodi and maybe not, on the twenty-first of July of that year. Some days, a few days, after Tripodi ran from Palermo, Vice-Questore Giuliano went to his usual bar for his usual coffee early in the morning, and he did not have the chance to reach for his gun.

But, of course, Signor Moen, the danger to your agent, and to those who work with you, and to yourself, will have been carefully evaluated in Washington…'

There was steel in the magistrate's eyes, there had been the rasp of sarcasm in his voice.

Axel said brusquely, 'We have made an evaluation.'

'I am very frank with you, Signor Moen, I do not have an agent in place. I do not have an agent close to Mario Ruggerio, nor do I try to put an agent in proximity to that man.

I would not wish it to lie on my conscience, the danger to an agent. Unless your agent is scum, a creature of the gutter, whose life is held to be of small importance…'

Axel stood. 'Thank you for your time. Bill wanted to be remembered to you. It was only a courtesy.'

The magistrate was already at the papers on his desk as they closed the door on the inner office. God, and he wanted to be out of the goddam place, like it was a place where he could suffocate on foul air.

The guards watched them go, and drew casually on their cigarettes and stopped the card game. Axel led, pounding down the corridor, past the policeman who had been instructed to bring them coffee. Didn't wait for the elevator, but skipped down the wide stairs.

Out into the fresh air, the goddam building behind him. He turned his back on the great grey-white building, Fascist architecture and a crap symbol of the state's power.

He strode between the high pillars that were built to impress, through the parked and armour-reinforced cars that offered status.

'What I cannot comprehend-'

'What you cannot comprehend, Axel, is how small brother Giuseppe is not primary to Tardelli's investigations. I tell you, he works alone. He does not trust a staff. He works from early in the morning till too late in the night. He pushes paper until he is exhausted because he does not trust… A long time ago he talked with little brother Giuseppe, in Rome, and was satisfied with what he was told. Think, how many metres of paper have crossed his desk since then? His mind is governed by priorities, and what he dismissed four, five years ago is low with priority. Of course he should target the family, every root of the family, but his mind is cluttered, his mind is tired, he has lost track of the distant root of the family. Do you complain that I don't help him? We are not the wonderful DEA, Axel, where colleagues are trusted, where work is shared. We are just pathetic Italians, yes? We are just food for your prejudices, yes?'

He did not look back to see the troops on the flat roof with their machine-guns, he did not glance sideways to see the troops patrolling the outer fence, he went by the troops at the gate, ignoring them as they pushed the anti-bomb mirror on the pole under a car.

'Vanni had to run to keep with him, and Axel pitched himself into the traffic flow, and the protest blasts of the horns beat in his ears. On the far side of the street, Axel swung round and he gripped 'Vanni's shirt front.

'Why did he do that, why did he piss on me?'

'Vanni was laughing. 'He goes to all the funerals. Maybe he is too busy to go to your funeral or the Codename Helen's funeral. Maybe he was telling you to be careful because he does not have a hole in his diary.'

He thought of her, standing beside the Saracen tower, looking for him, alone, not finding him.

Carrying the small bag, with a raincoat sagging from between the straps, Mario Ruggerio walked out of the Capo district.

He came from behind the Palazzo di Giustizia. There was no expression on his face as he went past the building site backing onto the building where new offices were under construction for the sprouting kingdom of the magistrates and prosecutors. An old man with a small bag and a check cap on his head and a grey tweed jacket on his peasant's shoulders drew no interest from the soldiers of the bersagliere regiment on the roof, on the gates, beside the fence, on the pavement corners. In front of the Palazzo a policeman strutted importantly into the traffic flow and blew an imperious whistle-blast, stopped the cars and vans and allowed the old man and others to cross safely over the Via Goethe.

He walked a full 750 metres along the Via Constantino Lascaris and the Via Giudita, and he did not turn his head to see the approach of sirens behind him. He walked until the breath was short in his lungs, until the tiredness was in his legs. The figures from the Casio calculator played in his mind, absorbed him. His concentration on the figures was broken only when he rested and faced a shop window, when he turned to watch the pavement behind him and the pavement across the street, when he checked to see if a car dawdled slowly after him. Near to the junction of the Via Giudita and the Via Giuglielmo il Buono, tucked away behind an apartment block, was the garage.

At the entrance to the garage, by the high gates that were topped with wire, he turned again and checked again.

The cousin of the owner of the garage had shared a cell in Ucciardione, four years before, with Salvatore Ruggerio. The cousin had received the protection of Salvatore Ruggerio. Four years later, in return for that protection, a debt was called in.

The garage was a good place to meet. He went between the cars parked out in the forecourt and into the building that was alive with the music from a radio and the hiss of the welding burner and the clatter of spanners and the clamour of the panel-beating mallets. He carried his bag into a back office and the owner of the garage looked up, saw him and immediately cleared the papers from his desk and dusted the chair, as if an emperor had come. He was asked if he wished for coffee or for juice, and he shook his head. He sat on the cleaned chair, and waited.

It was a good place for a meeting with Peppino. It was where Peppino had, for the last year, brought his car for servicing. He lit a cigar. He assumed that Peppino, though he denied it, was under sporadic surveillance.

When Peppino came, they embraced.

'You are well?'

'Fine.'

'A good journey?'

'London was for me, for us, very good.'

They talked the business. Peppino told his brother, close detail, down to each contractor's percentage, of the deal for the leisure complex at Orlando in Florida.

Peppino spoke of the money that would be moved from Vienna to the account of Giles Blake in London and then invested with a merchant banker and a broker and a building contractor who needed the funds to complete seven storeys of a Manchester office block. He said what arrangements were made for the visit of the Colombian from Medellfn who managed onward shipments into Europe. And there were the Russians he would meet the week after in Zagreb.

And Mario thought his brother spoke well. Only rarely did he interrupt. What was the commission for the clients of Giles Blake?

Where would the meeting be with the Colombian? What percentage, down to a quarter of a point, would the Russians pay? He loved the younger man, so different from himself, and every phase of the differential had been planned by him, as though he had made and fashioned each stage of Peppino's life. He could smell the talc on Peppino's body, and the lotion on his face. The suit was the best, the shirt was the best, the tie was the best, and the shoes of his brother. The irony was not lost on Mario Ruggerio.

Wealth and success clung to Peppino. Their parents lived in the old terraced house in Prizzi with Carmelo. Salvatore rotted in a cell in the prison at Asinara. Cristoforo was dead. Maria was cut off from them because the alcohol made her dangerous. His own wife, Michela, and his own children, Salvo and Domenica, were in Prizzi, where she looked after her mother. Only Peppino lived the good life.

Nothing was written, everything was in their heads. He told Peppino of what the accountant had said, recited the figures of declining income and increasing outgoings.

'You should not listen to him. If you were a small man, if you were concerned only with investments and product on the island, then this would be perhaps important. Your portfolio is international. You are better without him.'

'There are some who say that I do not interest myself enough in the opportunities given by Sicily.'

'I think in Catania they say that, where there is a small man – as the man in Agrigento was a small man…'

It was, for Giuseppe Ruggerio, the confirmation of a death sentence. 'It is possible for a small man, as from Catania, to obstruct progress. If a tree falls in the wind and blocks a road, it is necessary to bring the saw, and to cut the tree, and to burn it.'

'Burn it with fire.'

They laughed, the chuckle of Peppino merging with the growled snigger of Mario Ruggerio. They laughed as the sentence of death was confirmed.

And the smile stayed on the old and lined face. 'And how is my little angel?'

'Piccolo Mario is the same as his uncle, a rascal.'

'Francesca and the baby?'

'Wonderful.'

'I hope very much soon to see them. I have their photograph. I carry their photograph. I do not carry a photograph of my wife, nor of Salvo and Domenica, but I have with me the picture of Francesca and the birichino. The day you went to London, I was near to the Giardino Inglese, I saw the rascal. I have few enough pleasures. And Angela, how is your wife, how is the Roman lady?'

'She survives.'

He noted the coolness of the response. He shook his head. 'Not good, Peppino.

Sometimes there is a problem if the wife of someone like yourself is not happy, sometimes there is an unnecessary problem.'

Peppino said, 'In Rome we had a girl to help Angela with the children, an English girl. Angela became fond of her. I have brought her back, to the villa in Mondello, to make Angela happier.'

The eyebrows of the old man lifted sharply, questioning. 'That is sensible?'

'She is just a girl from the country. A simple girl, but she is company for Angela.'

'You are sure of her?'

'I think so.'

'You should be certain. If she has the freedom of your home, there should not be doubt.'

When Mario Ruggerio left, he walked from the garage to the corner of Via Giuglielmo il Buono and Via Normanini. He had the time to go into the tabaccaio and buy three packets of his cigars, and then the time, while he waited on the corner, to think of the small man from Catania, a tree that blocked the road and should be cut and burned, and more time to think of the family that he loved and the rascal boy who was named in respect of him. The Citroen BX came to the corner. The driver leaned across to push open the passenger door. He was driven away. A dentist had moved from Palermo to Turin and the apartment on Via Crociferi that was now vacated would be the safe house, for a week, used by Mario Ruggerio. At least he would sleep there, be free of the shit noise of the Capo district.

He could not sleep. He stood at the window. Behind him was the bed and the sound of his wife's rhythmic snoring – he had not told her. In front of him were the lights of Catania, and out at sea were the lights of the approaching car ferry from Reggio. He could not talk about such matters with his wife. Never in thirty-two years of marriage had he talked of such matters, so she did not know of his fear, and she slept and snored.

Alone, unshared, was the fear. Because of the fear, the loaded pistol was on the table beside his bed and the assault rifle was on the rug under the bed. Because of the fear, his son had come from his own home and now slept in the adjoining room. The fear had held him since he had come away from the meeting in the Madonie mountains with Mario Ruggerio. Other than his son, he did not know now in whom he could place his faith. It would come to war, war to the death, between his family and the family of Mario Ruggerio, and each man of his family, in his home and his bed, would now be making the decision as to which side he would fight on. He knew the way of Mario Ruggerio. It was the way that Mario Ruggerio had climbed. From among his own family of men there would be one who was targeted by the bastards of Mario Ruggerio, targeted and twisted and turned and bent to compliance. One of his own family of men would lead him to death, and he did not know which one. The fear, in the night, ate at him.

'I don't want Pietro Aglieri, I don't want Provenzano or Salvatore Minore, I don't want Mariano Troia. You see them, you light a cigarette for them, and you offer them gum, but you don't show out.'

A weak and nervous ripple of laughter played in his office. Rocco Tardelli believed that each man on a surveillance team should be in at the briefing. He reeled off the names of the super-latitanti and grinned humbly. They would have thought him an idiot. They stood in front of his desk, seven and not nine of them because one was on holiday and one claimed illness. He turned over the photograph on his desk, showed it them.

'I want him. I want Mario Ruggerio. Aglieri, Provenzano, Minore, Troia are men of yesterday, gone, spent. Ruggerio is the man of tomorrow. There are insufficient of you.

We have no more cameras than before. We do not know where to put audio devices.

The photograph is twenty years old, but it has been through the computer. I do not know now if Ruggerio has a moustache, I do not know whether he routinely wears spectacles, I do not know whether he has dyed his hair. You are going into the Capo district, which is the most criminally aware sector of Palermo, I believe, more so than Brancaccio or Ciaculli. The prospect of your maintaining a cover for ten days is minimal, and you know that better than me. The information I have is that Ruggerio took an almond cake in the bar in the street between the Via Sant'Agostino and the Piazza Beati Paoli which caused him to shit, but that was a year ago.'

The men of the squadra mobile surveillance team laughed at the magistrate, which was the intention of Rocco Tardelli. The surveillance teams, whether from the ROS or the DIA or the Guardia di Finanze or the squadra mobile, were in his opinion the cream.

They looked so awful, quite beyond salvation – they were like street thieves and like beggars and like pimps for whores and like narcotics pushers. They looked like the filth of the city. But his maresciallo knew them all, and had sworn on the loyalty of each of them. He wanted them to laugh at him. He needed them to reckon that what was asked of them was idiot's work. Others would have lectured them, others would have minimized the problems. Rocco Tardelli challenged them.

'And, of course, you should know that you are not alone in hunting Ruggerio. Every agency has a plan for his capture. You know, even a foreigner has come to me, as a matter of courtesy, to inform me that he is on the ground and hunting il bruto. You are considered to have the least chance, you are at the bottom of the priority heap, you are assigned to an obsessional and neurotic and vain investigator. You are given to me.'

They gazed at him. The time of laughter was over.

He said quietly, 'If he is there – if – I know you will find him. Thank you.'

Peppino had come home the night before, late.

When she made breakfast for Francesca and small Mario, while she heated the milk for baby Mauro's bottle, Charley had heard the sounds of the love-making from the main bedroom of the villa. Tried to concentrate on what measure of cereal for the children, and what temperature the milk should be heated to, and she had heard the groaned whisper of the bed. It was eight months since she had had sex, been screwed by the creep in the caravan who'd come over her stomach before he was even inside her…

She turned the radio up loud. On the radio was the news of a train strike and a rail strike and an airline strike, and a man had been shot in Misilmeri, and there was a demonstration of pensioners in Rome, and an excavator digging a drain's trench in Sciacca had uncovered the buried bones of four men, and the treasurer of the Milan city administration had been arrested for taking the bustarella, and. .. Christ, it was better listening to the sex. All through the breakfast of the children, all the time that she chewed on an apple and peeled an orange for herself, all through feeding the baby, Charley heard the whisper of the bed.

When she was ready to take the children to school and kindergarten, when she had laid the baby Mauro in the pram, and taken the housekeeping purse from the drawer and Angela's shopping list from the table, there was the sound of the shower running. She didn't call out. It had sounded like good sex, like the sex the bloody girls at college had bragged of, like the sex Charley hadn't known with the bloody lecturer and the bloody man in his caravan, like the sex she never heard from her mother's bedroom. She went down into Mondello and she saw Francesca into the kindergarten class and she kissed small Mario at the school gate and saw him run inside.

She walked in the street behind the piazza, where the bars were open behind scrubbed and sluiced pavements, where the trattorias and pizzerias were being prepared for the day with swept floors and laundered tablecloths. She bought salad things from a stall, and cheese and milk and olive oil from the alimentari, and some fresh sliced ham.

She ticked each item on Angela's list.

Every morning, when she took the children to school and kindergarten, and shopped, she looked for him, and never saw him.

That morning she did not linger in the town. Her shopping was completed. She pushed the pram with the sleeping baby back up the hill, past where the workmen were repairing the sewerage pipes, past the leaping and barking guard dogs, back to the villa.

She whistled sharply at the gate, like she was in charge – she had learned that the bloody Techie', the miserable toad, the gardener, came running when she whistled and opened the locked gate for her. She didn't thank him, ignored him and walked past him. She left the baby, sleeping in the pram, on the patio that was shaded from the rising sun. In the kitchen she put the salad things and the cheese and milk and ham into the refrigerator and the olive oil into the cupboard. She wanted her book.

She almost crashed into him.

The door to her bedroom was open. Peppino stood in the corridor beside the open door.

He said that he had come to look for her. He wore a loose towelled dressing-gown.

The hair was thick on his legs and on his chest, and he had not shaved. He said that he had not realized she had already gone with the children and with the shopping list.

Well, she hadn't wanted to disturb him, had she? Wouldn't want to muscle in on a good fuck, would she? He said that he wanted her to buy flowers, fresh cut flowers. Very good, sex and flowers to buy off Angela's misery, no problem in tramping down to the town again and buying I lowers. He was sleek-headed from the shower, and the talc dust was a frost on his chest hair. She thought it amused him, using her. is a messenger, a fetcher and carrier. She wondered if Angela, back in the bedroom, smiled or cried, whether a fuck changed her life, whether flowers would lift her spirits.

She took the purse from the kitchen drawer. Back down the path between the flowerbeds, back past the gardener, back through the gates, and she slammed them behind her and the lock clicked into place. Back past the fury of the guard dogs, and past the workmen who leered at her and stripped her from the sewerage trench. Back to the piazza…

Right, Giuseppe Ruggerio, right. Expensive flowers. At the stall she took from the housekeeping purse a note for 50,000 lire. Not enough. She took a note for 100,000.

She gave the 100,000-lire note to the man. What would the signorina like? She shrugged, she would like what she could have for ?40 sterling, and he should choose.

She took the wrapped bunch, chrysanthemums and carnations, and crooked them on her elbow. She was walking away.

'Go down to the sea front.'

The voice was behind her.

'Don't look round, don't acknowledge.'

The voice, quiet, belted her.

Charley obeyed. She didn't turn to see Axel. She fixed her eyes ahead of her, took a line between the Saracen tower and the fishermen's pier. She assumed he followed her. The American accent had been sharp, curt. She walked through the piazza. She waited for the traffic and crossed the road. She stood beside an old man who sat on a stool on the pavement, and in front of him was a box of fresh fish with ice around them, and he held up an ancient black umbrella to shadow his fish.

'Keep walking, slowly, and never turn.'

Charley walked. The sea was blue-green, the boats in the sea rolled at their moorings.

She thought he was very close, near enough to touch her. The voice behind her was a murmur.

'How does it go?'

'Nothing goes.'

'What does that mean?'

'Nothing happens.'

Said cold, 'If it happens, anything happens, it'll be quick, sudden. Is there any sign of suspicion?'

'No.' She looked ahead, out over the sea and the boats, and she tried to show him her defiance. 'I'm a part of the family, it's just a damned miserable family, it's-'

'Don't whine… and don't ever relax. Don't go complacent.'

'Aren't you going to tell me?'

'Tell you what?'

'The test. Did your gadget work?'

'It was OK.'

She flared, she spat from the side of her mouth, but the discipline held and she did not turn to face him. 'Just OK? Brilliant. I've been wetting myself. If you didn't know, it's my link. My road to the outside. It's like a morgue in there. I feel so much better to know that your gadget works "OK". Not magnificent, not incredible, not wonderful.'

'It was OK. Remember, because it's important, don't be casual. Keep walking.'

'When'll I see you again?'

'Don't know.'

'You bastard, do you know what it's like, living the lie?'

'Keep walking.'

She was able to smell him, and she heard the light tread of his footfall behind her. She walked on with the flowers. The tears welled in her eyes. Why, when she cried out for praise, did he have to be so damned cruel to her?

She could no longer smell him, no longer hear him. She wondered whether he cared enough to stand and watch her go. She smeared the tears out of her eyes. She carried the flowers back to the villa. Bloody hell. In less than an hour and a half she would be going again into the town to collect the children. Peppino was dressed. Peppino thanked her and smiled gratitude. He told her that she was very welcome in their home, and that they so much appreciated her kindness to the children, and she had not had a day off, and she should go tomorrow on the bus to Palermo, and he winked and took a wad of notes from his pocket and peeled off some for her and told her of a shop on the Via della Liberta where the girls went for their clothes, young girls' clothes. He was sweetness to her, and he took the flowers into the bedroom to Angela. Charley went for her book.

Her book, on the table beside the bed, alongside the photograph of her parents, had been moved.

She felt the cold running over her.

Only slightly moved, but she could picture where it had been, a little over the edge of the table.

She could tell nothing from the clothes hanging in her wardrobe. She could not recall exactly where her sausage-bag had been on top of the wardrobe.

She thought that her bras had been on top of her pants in the middle drawer of the chest, and now they were underneath.

Charley stood in her room and she breathed hard.

'Is that all you said?'

'I said the test transmission had been OK, I told her that she was not to relax. Because nothing has happened she should not be complacent.'

'That's all?'

'There wasn't anything else to say.'

The archaeologist was hunched down on the stone slab and his back was against the square-fashioned rock that was the base of the cloister column. He sketched rapidly, and to reinforce the detail of his work he used a tape to measure height and width and diameter. It was natural, when an expert came to the duomo and studied the history of the construction of the cathedral, that a busy-minded and prying bystander should come to talk with him, question him, disturb him. So natural that none of the tourists or the priests or the guides took note of the archaeologist and the bystander. There was a bag by the feet of the archaeologist, and from the bag a chrome aerial was extended to its full length, but the aerial was wedged between the spine of the archaeologist and the base rock of the column and was hidden from the echoing flow in the cloisters of the tourists and the priests and the guides.

'Vanni said, 'You make it hard for her, very hard.'

Axel did not look up from his sketch pad. 'She has to find her own strength.'

'You gave her no comfort.'

'That's crap.'

'Did I tell you the story about dalla Chiesa?'

'General dalla Chiesa is dead.'

'Vanni grinned. 'I don't wish to be impertinent to my friend, to the eminent archeologo, and I think you are most sensible to pursue the cover, give it authenticity. I think it is right you are not "complacent" – but an archeologo takes lessons from the past, and General dalla Chiesa is of the past and offers lessons.'

'It is difficult to study detail when one is subject to the boring interruption of a stranger, don't you think?'

'Vanni said, conversational, 'There was a story that the general told of when he was a young carabiniere officer in Sicily, some years before he achieved the fame of destroying the Brigate Rosse. He had a telephone call from a captain under his command who was responsible for the town of Palma di Montechiaro, which is near to Agrigento. The captain told dalla Chiesa that he was under threat in the town from the local capo. He went to the town, he met the captain. He took the captain's arm, held his arm, and walked with him up the street of Palma di Montechiaro and back again. They walked slowly, so that everyone in the town could see that he held the captain's arm.

They stopped outside the home of the capo. They stood in silence outside that house until it was quite clear, no misunderstanding, that the captain was not alone. Do you still listen to me, my friend the archeologo?'

Axel did not look up from his sketch pad and his calculations. 'I listen to you.'

'Years later, General dalla Chiesa came to Palermo to take the post at the Prefettura.

He found himself mocked, sneered at, obstructed and alone. Each initiative he tried to make against La Cosa Nostra was blocked by the corruption of the Government. In desperation he telephoned for a meeting with the American consul in the city. I drove him there, to see Ralph Jones. I sat in on the meeting. The general begged of Jones that the Government of the United States should intervene with Rome, "do something at the highest level". At the finish of the meeting, the general told Jones the story of Palma di Montechiaro, and he said, "All I ask is for somebody to take my arm and to walk with me." I drove him back to the Prefettura. At the end of the day he dismissed me. His wife came to take him home. He was killed, with his wife, that night in Via Carini. He was killed because he was alone, because nobody had taken his arm and walked with him.'

'What do you want of me?'

'Vanni's voice was close and hoarse. 'Should you not take her arm, Codename Helen's arm, and walk with her when she is alone, and give her comfort?'

'I can't give her the strength. She must find it for herself.'

The bystander walked away from the archaeologist, left him to his research.

'No.'

'I'm sorry, Mr Parsons, but I have to be quite clear about this. My question was, did you have a telephone call a week ago from Bruno Fiori?'

'Same answer, no.'

They sat across the fireplace from Harry Compton. He thought they were scared half out of their minds.

'And you don't know an Italian who uses the name of Bruno Fiori?'

'No.'

'Would you care to look at this, Mr Parsons?'

He was deep in his chair in the small front living room, and reaching into his briefcase, and he passed to the man the printout list of the telephone calls. The woman sat close to her husband and her eyes were down and staring at the card he had given them. His card had that effect on people, 'Metropolitan Police Fraud Department, Harry Compton, Detective Sergeant, Financial Investigator' frightened the shit out of them.

The man glanced at the list of calls made from the hotel room, two London numbers and his own number.

The man glowered back defiantly, like he was trying to show that he wasn't scared half out of his mind. 'Yes, that's my number.'

The woman said, eyes never leaving the card, 'It was Dr Ruggerio who called.'

The man's glance flashed at his wife, then, 'We were telephoned by Dr Giuseppe Ruggerio. And may I ask what business that is of yours?'

'Better that I ask the questions. Why did this Giuseppe Ruggerio telephone you?'

'I'm not going to be interrogated, without explanation, in my own home.'

'Please, Mr Parsons, just get on with it.'

He wrote a fast shorthand note. He heard the name of Charlotte, an only daughter.

He could see from his chair out through the open door of the living room and into the hall. He could see the photograph of the young woman in her graduation gown and her mortarboard at a cheeky angle. He heard the story of a summer job in 1992. And a letter had come, and the invitation for a return to minding children. The information came in a slow and prompted drip. Charlotte had given up her job and was now in Sicily. The wife had gone to the kitchen and come back with an address, and Harry wrote it on his pad and underlined the words 'Giardino Inglese'.

The father said, 'Dr Ruggerio telephoned but Charlotte was… she was out. I spoke to him, he just said how much they wanted her. I was against it, her going. She's thrown up a good job. God knows what she's going to do when she gets back. Jobs aren't on trees.'

The mother said, 'They're a lovely family. He's such a gentleman, Dr Ruggerio, very successful, banking or something. David thinks that life is all work, and what's work done for him? Chucked out without thanks, redundant. I said that she would only be young once. They treat her like one of the family. If she hadn't gone, she'd have been old before her time, like us.'

He closed his notebook, slipped it into his pocket. He stood. He was asked again why he had an interest in Dr Giuseppe Ruggerio, and he smiled coolly and thanked them for their hospitality, not even a bloody cup of tea. He went out into the hall. He looked at the photograph of the young woman and made a remark that she was a grand-looking girl. He took his coat from the hook. The man opened the door for him. He could hear the sea beating on shingle away in the evening darkness. A woman was across the lane, clinging to a dog's leash and staring at him as he stood under the porch light. He saw a man hunched in a lit window across the lane and peering at him through small binoculars. Behind a board advertising bed-and-breakfast (Vacancies), a curtain fell back to its place. God, what a dreary and suspicious little backwater. He started down the path to the gate.

The hiss of the woman. 'Aren't you going to tell him?'

The man's whisper. 'It's not his business.'

'You should tell him.'

'No.'

'You should tell him about the American…'

Harry Compton stopped, turned. 'What should I know? What A merican?'

TO: Alfred Rogers, DLO, British Embassy, Via XX Settembre, Rome.

FROM: D/S Harry Compton, S06.

Please get your leg off the beautiful women and ditch the bottle you will inevitably be busting open. Do me SOONEST a P check on Dr GIUSEPPE RUGGERIO, Apt 9, Giardino Inglese 43, Palermo, Sicily.

Ruggerio believed to be in finance, banking? Interests me because he uses alias of BRUNO FIORI. Don't break a blood vessel at the chance of actually doing something useful. Come up with the goods and I'll stand you a half-pint at the Ferret and Ferkin on your next extended (!) leave.

Bestest, Harry.

He had the scent, the smell was in his nostrils. He gave the sheet of paper to Miss Frobisher for transmission to the DLO, jammy sod, in Rome. Bloody good job, that one, soft old number. His detective superintendent was out of the building. It would have to keep, what he had to share, but there was a good bounce in his step. The day that the invitation to travel down to Palermo had reached Charlotte Parsons there had pitched up on her doorstep an American from the embassy, from the Drug Enforcement Administration. 'He said that if I talked about him, what he said to me, then I might be responsible for hurting people.' He'd bloody well find out, too right, what Americans were doing running round foreign territory to scoop up compliant and untrained agents.

Charlotte Parsons's father had said that his daughter was 'pressured' to travel. The boss would like it. Harry's boss had been skewered and minced and chewed by the FBI the last summer at the Europol fraud conference in Lyon. He'd come back bruised from France, worked over for suggesting that international crime was a figment of American imagination. He'd said, loud, at a seminar that international crime was a fantasy-land, and been told for all to listen that he was talking rubbish and that the Brits were just part-time players. Harry had heard it from the inspector who'd travelled as the detective superintendent's bag-carrier. If the Americans had taken an English girl, 'pressured' her, dragged her in, then his boss would not mind hearing of it, too right.