Killing Ground

Chapter Eight

In two years, not more than three years, he would have sufficient money to buy the pizzeria.

Each time that he was paid, in American bills, he sent them by post to his son. He had enough money already to buy a pizzeria in Palermo, nearly enough money to buy a pizzeria in Milan or Turin, hut to buy a pizzeria in Hanover, near to the railway station, was more costly. His son and his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren lived in Hanover. They were, and he thought it was quite shameful to his own dignity, a part of the immigrant underclass in Germany. JHis son worked at night in the kitchen of a trattoria in Hanover, his daughter-in-law went to the trattoria in the mornings to clean it and to lay the tables. When there was sufficient money his son would use it to buy a pizzeria, and he would go to Hanover with his wife and with his son and he would live the last of his days there. The pizzeria in Hanover was the limit of his dream, and he and his wife and his son and his daughter-in-law would take it in turn to sit behind the cash desk. In return for the money, a thousand American dollars a month, he supplied information. The money came to him each month whether the information he supplied was important or whether it was insignificant. The money was a certainty, just as it was a certainty that he could not cease to provide the information.

Trapped, corrupted, he stood one morning each month in the park in front of the Palazzo Reale and he watched the mothers with their children and their babies and waited for the contact to be made. He did not know the name of the man who came to him, nor did he know to whom the information was delivered. One morning every month he reported on what he had seen and heard, nothing written down, and then he walked from the park and along the Via Papireto and he would stop at the post office and buy the stamps for Germany. He would send the money. At the Palazzo di Giustizia he would show his identity card, walk past the soldiers, climb the wide steps, go to the rest room and open his locker and change into his uniform, and then he would go to the armoury and draw his firearm and the holster, and then he would take the elevator to the upper corridor where he saw and he heard, and he would bring the small cups of espresso coffee to the magistrates and prosecutors. One morning each month his dream of buying the pizzeria in Hanover came closer.

A man stood beside him, and asked with courtesy whether he had a match for a cigarette, and they talked, as men talked who stood in a park and watched the mothers with their children and their babies.

The policeman said, '… He spoke in Italian, but the accent was American. "Yes, I'd like that, espresso, thanks." He was not Italo-American because he had a fair skin and gold hair. I recognized the one who brought him, that was Giovanni Crespo, who is of the ROS in the Monreale barracks. He was not an American journalist because Tardelli never sees journalists, and when I brought the coffee I was not permitted by Tardelli's guards to take the tray inside myself. The tray was carried inside by Tardelli's man. I remember last year, in the winter, when an American came and I was not permitted to take the coffee inside, and then I heard the guards say that the American was the Country Chief of the DEA from Rome. The American was with Tardelli for fifteen or twenty minutes. What I can tell you of Giovanni Crespo, he is with the squad of the ROS that searches for the super-latitanti. The American wore casual clothes, not the clothes that are worn for a meeting with a person of the position of Tardelli, jeans and an open shirt, it surprised me, and he did not carry a briefcase but a small bag. I cannot be certain, I think there was a firearm in his waist but under his shirt. I estimate that he weighed near to 80 kilos, a height of perhaps 1.80 or 1.85 metres. He wore his hair long, like a hippy, and his hair was taken at the back with an elastic band, fair hair. I wondered how it was possible that such a man could be brought to meet Tardelli… I know also that Tardelli has met with a team from the squadra mobile, they were dressed very roughly, so it is a surveillance team. Again I was not permitted to take in the coffee. The story on the corridor, but it is only gossip, is that Tardelli had the big argument with the prosecutors and magistrates, I don't know. ..'

An envelope was passed. The policeman talked of the information scraps he had gained in a month of the work of other magistrates and other prosecutors.

He went on his way to the post, and dreamed of the pizzeria near to the railway station in Hanover, then to the Palazzo di Giustizia.

Her mother would have said that she should not have taken the money, and her father would have said that it would have seemed ungrateful to refuse the money. The purse in her handbag bulged with the roll of notes. Her mother would have said that it was simple human nature, like it or not, for people to look in the drawers of a guest, and her father would have said that she had probably forgotten where she had laid down her book and whether her pants had been on top of or below her bras.

Charley had the money, and she wore the handbag draped from her shoulder across her chest. She didn't know.

She could not know, and all through the night she tossed and twisted it in her mind, whether the movement of her book and her clothes was the mark of suspicion against her, or was in innocence, or was her bloody imagination. The taxi driver in Mondello had quoted her 20,000, sod that. She had come on the bus along the road that was shadowed by the height of Monte Pellegrino, on the road that skirted the La Favorita park where the whores were already gathered, on the road that cut through the high-rise blocks. Where the Via della Liberta merged into the Piazza Crispi, Charley had pushed her way to the bus door.

Better to think it was her bloody imagination. But, he had said, the damned faceless man creeping behind her, 'Don't ever relax. Don't go complacent.' She felt a freedom, as if the garden gate of the villa, when it had slammed shut behind her, had been a gaol's gate. She walked along the Via della Liberta. They were beautiful shops, they were better than any of the shops in Plymouth or Exeter. The temperature was near to the seventies, and the women around her had fur coats hoisted loose on their shoulders, and the men wore their best loden coats. It was so bloody hot, and she was in a blouse and jeans with a light cardigan tied to the strap of her handbag, bloody peacocks around her.

The women had their jewellery on, rings and bracelets and necklaces, as if they were out for an anniversary dinner and not merely promenading, and Charley only wore the thin little chain of poor gold that her uncle had sent down to her for her eighteenth birthday… And bugger Axel Moen, who was a cold bastard… She had bounce in her stride, she had control. There was no street like the Via della Liberta in Plymouth or Exeter. Three lanes of traffic running in each direction and a wide centre area with benches under the shade of trees. To Charley Parsons it was a little piece of joy. She heard the shouting. She looked across the traffic lanes and the centre area, and she saw a street leading away in which there were no vehicles parked, and a soldier was gesturing with his rifle, and playing dumb-innocent was a squat little man with a pick-up truck loaded with builder's gear. She watched the yelling soldier and the obstinate little man trade insults. She murmured, 'Go on, old boy, give the pompous bastard stick,' just as they had given stick to the bloody policemen in their battle gear at the harbour in Brightlingsea. She had been free then, on the picket line and trying to block the lorries carrying the animals to Europe. She could have clapped because the squat little man had won the day, and the soldier stood, threatening, over him with the rifle, had gained the right to park his pick-up and to unload his sacks of concrete mix.

She grinned, she moved on. Her mother would have said that she had insufficient respect for authority, her father would have said she was a damned little anarchist…

She held tight to her bag because Angela had told her she should.

Not the Via Siracusa, the next street off the Via della Liberta from the Via Siracusa.

She couldn't think when, if ever, she had had as much cash, as thick a roll of notes, in her purse. She saw the sign of the boutique, where Peppino had said it would be. She was flushed, a little thrilled. God, that amount of money to spend on herself. What would the cold bastard have said? She stopped outside the boutique, in front of the window of clothed model figures. She looked around her. As with a child's guilt, she looked for Axel Moen. Did not see him. Nor did Charley see the young man who sat astride a motorcycle, up the street from her.

The prices on the model figures were just incredible, out of this bloody world, but she had the money in her purse. Best foot forward, ma'am. She pushed open the door of the shop. Go hack it, Charley. She did not see the young man astride the motorcycle, the engine idling, slide down the smoked black visor of his crash helmet.

Soft music played. The lighting was clever. She was of importance. God, eat your heart out, British Home Stores in Exeter, Marks and bloody Spencer in Plymouth. She tried four blouses, her mind played the calculations of translating from lire to sterling.

Christ, Charley… Big breath, deep breath. She chose a blouse of royal-blue, and the touch of it on her fingers was so soft. She tried three skirts, short minis, and they'd be better when she'd done time on the beach and burned the whiteness off her knees and thighs. She chose a skirt in bottle-green. She paid, stripped the notes off the roll. She took the bag they gave her. Bugger where the money had come from. Bugger that Giuseppe Ruggerio washed money. She had enough in her purse to go on to find a throat scarf and maybe a good pair of dark glasses. She came out of the shop, and she did not see the haughty smiles of the sales staff, as if they thought her an ingenua. She stood on the pavement, savouring the moment. Her mother would have said that it was criminal to spend that much on clothes, her father would have said they were the clothes of a spoiled child. She did not see the young man, head hidden in the crash helmet, nudge his motorcycle forward.

It was a few yards from the open space of the pavement of the Via della Liberta…

Meandering past a shoe shop…

Heard nothing and seen nothing, and the blow belted her.

As if her chest was torn apart, as if the strap of her handbag cut into her back and her breast.

She clung to the strap. Trying to scream, and spinning, and there was the roar of the motorcycle against her, and the black shape of the crash helmet was above her.

Falling, and the boot came into her face. The boot came from below a scarlet-painted fuel tank, and on the tank was an eagle's head. The boot savaged her.

She held the handbag strap and she was dragged on the pavement. Kicked again, and letting loose of the strap and covering her face.

On the pavement and the foul filth of the motorcycle exhaust blasting at her, choking. The gloved hand came down, crude, bulged fingers, and caught at the necklace that was the present of her uncle, and ripped at it, and it broke, and was coiled in the gutter beside her.

Charley lay on the pavement, and under her body was the shopping bag. She sobbed into the dirt of the pavement.

The motorcycle was gone.

A man walked past her, and looked away. She sobbed and she swore. Two women, queens in their finery, quickened their step and hurried by her. She wept and she cursed.

Kids were going by her, fast little trainer shoes scurrying. After them were high heels and shoes of worked leather. In pain, she wept. In anger, she cursed. The pain was in her chest and her face and her elbows and her knees. The anger was for all of them, the fucking bastards, who hurried by. She pushed herself to her knees, Christ, and it hurt because her knees were red-raw from being dragged, and she could see right down to the Via della Liberta, and across she could see a soldier on the far corner with his rifle held in alertness and he didn't come to help her. As if she carried a yellow flag, bloody leprosy, bloody HIV, was quarantined, they went by her, the fucking bastards. She was on her feet, she staggered, she lurched towards a man, and she saw the horror on his face, and he pushed her away. She fell. She was on the pavement.

'Are you all right?'

"Course I'm not bloody-' She looked up at him.

He was bent down and close to her. 'You are a tourist, yes? English, German?'

'English.'

He was young, maybe a couple of years older than herself. Concern was on his face, and sincerity, sympathy.

'Nobody helped me, nobody tried to stop him.'

'People are afraid here, afraid to be involved.'

'Bloody bastard cowards.'

'Afraid to interfere. It is different to England, I apologize.'

Such kindness. He was tall. He had a fine, angled face, strong bones in the cheeks. He pushed the falling hair back from his forehead.

'I haven't broken anything. I just feel so angry. I want to get him, kick him. There was a soldier across the road, a bloody great gun, didn't move.'

So soothing. 'He could not help you. It might have been a diversion. In Palermo anything is possible. You are a foreigner, you would not understand. Can I help you?

Take my hand. The soldier would have been disciplined. If he had left his place and come to you, it could have been a diversion, it could have been an attack on the home that he guards. It is Palermo.'

He took her hand. He had long and delicate fingers. She felt them close on her hand.

He lifted her up. The anger had gone. She wanted to be held and she wanted to cry. He picked up her bag from the shop.

'It happens every day in Palermo. They target tourists.'

'I'm not a tourist, I've come here for a job. It was my first day in Palermo. The job's in Mondello. I'm sorry that I swore. I am Charley Parsons.'

He grinned, embarrassed. 'But that is a man's name.'

A smile cracked her face. 'Charlotte, but I am Charley to everyone.'

'I am Benedetto Rizzo, but I am called Benny. You are sure there is no bad injury?'

'I am not going to hospital. Damn, shit, fuck. Sorry, and thank you.'

'I was in London for a year, people were very kind to me. I worked in the McDonald's near Paddington railway station. I apologize that this is your first experience of Palermo.'

Charley said, 'Trouble is, I feel like a fool. I was warned to be careful – I was bloody miles away. I just feel… humiliated. I was warned, and I forgot. Excuse me, you said that in Palermo people are afraid to be involved, afraid to interfere, but you were not afraid.'

'It is our city, our problem. You should not dissociate yourself from responsibility from a problem. If nobody does anything, then the problem will never be solved, it's what I believe.'

She looked into his face. 'Small people can change something, is that what you think?'

'Of course.'

He crouched. His hand, the long fingers, were in the gutter and the filth, and he lifted up the broken chain of poor gold. He seemed to Charley to recognize its value to her.

He lifted it with care and he placed it in her hand.

'I'm sorry, I am a teacher, I…'

'I was a teacher in England.'

'Then you will know – I have to be back. I have my class, at the elementary school behind the Piazza Castelnuovo.' He grinned. 'Maybe if I am not back, there will be a riot of the children, maybe the police will have to come with gas.'

Her face was puffing from the bruises, her elbows were scraped, the knees under the tears in her jeans were oozing blood.

Charley grimaced. 'I can't go to a bar, not looking like this. I am really grateful for what you did for me, for your kindness. When I am repaired, can I buy you a drink?

Please let me.'

He wrote for her his address and a telephone number, gave it to her.

'But you are all right, Charley?'

'I'm fine, Benny. It's just my bloody dignity that's damaged.'

Aching throughout her body, Charley limped with her shopping bag towards the bus stop. Only when she stood at the bus stop did she realize that the bloody bastard hadn't gone for her watch, that the watch was on her wrist.

Axel watched the bus come.

He saw her, in pain, drag herself up onto the bus.

As the bus drove away, the bus for Mondello, her face was in the window for a moment in his vision. She was white-faced except for the vivid bruising where the boot had caught her, and she seemed to him to be in shock.

He was on the pavement, a few feet from the bus, close enough to see the markings on her face.

Axel had seen it all. He had seen her, Codename Helen, come out of the boutique, carrying her bag, alive with pleasure, and he had seen the motorcycle accelerating down the side street towards her, and then weave through a gap in the parked cars and come onto the pavement. He had seen each detail of the attack, the snatch of the bag, her being dragged behind the motorcycle, the motorcycle stopping on the pavement and the boot going into her face, and the gloved fist going for her throat, and the motorcycle accelerating away down the pavement before it cut between the cars and out onto the side street.

He had not tried to intervene.

He would have intervened if it had been life-threatening. If he had intervened, if it had been life-threatening, if he had used his firearm, if the police had been called, then his cover was broken.

He had recognized the situation from the moment the motorcycle had moved on her.

It was a bag snatch, it was the life of Palermo. It was not worth the breaking of his cover. From his viewpoint across the side street he had satisfied himself that the situation was, by the terms on which he operated, harmless. The young Palermitan had come to her and helped her, and he had seen her weep and then curse and then soften as she was dosed in his sympathy, and at the end he had seen the small and rueful grimace on her face. She had not needed him.

And Axel did not need the smart talk of Dwight Smythe who pushed paper in the London embassy, nor of Bill Hammond in a safe billet on the Via Sardegna up the road from the Rome embassy, nor of 'Vanni, nor of a magistrate who had probed and warned of responsibilities. Didn't need them whining their consciences at him…

He had been to Mondello each morning. Each morning he had seen her come from the villa with the children. He had tracked her, unseen, each morning. Surveillance tactics were the skill area of Axel Moen, always behind, always on the far side of the street or the piazza or the alleyway. Each morning he followed her, Codename Helen, stayed back from her. He did not need any hand-wringing bastards to tell him of his responsibility. There had been a girl crucified on the back of a door, and he had used the pliers and a claw hammer from the tool kit of the Huey's pilot to get the nails from the palms of her hands. He did not need to be told about his responsibilities.

He walked away. He wore a cap so that the long fall of his hair was tucked up inside it. He had sun-glasses on. The windcheater was not one she had seen him use.

She could have panicked, could have pressed the pulse-tone button that was the alarm on her wrist-watch. She'd done well. She had shown good sense. He thought the best of her and it did not cross his mind that she had simply forgotten that she wore the wrist watch with the panic alarm. He went to a shop and bought some sketch pencils with soft lead and buried them in the bag with his sketch pads and his tape measure and the CSS 900 receiver. He was heading for his car. By the late morning he would be back and protecting his cover at the cloister aisle of the duomo in Monreale. He used people, and he goddam well knew it, used them and squeezed them and dropped them.

There was a parking ticket on his car, pinned under the wiper on the windscreen. He glanced at it. He tore the ticket into small pieces and dropped them into a street drain. It would be several weeks before the office where the duplicate tickets were lodged stirred themselves to trace the registration back to the hire company at Catania's airport, and by then Axel Moen would be back in the Via Sardegna office. It could not last more than a month, his reckoning, she could not survive the lie for more than a month. The Confidential Informant designated Codename Helen would, in several weeks, have been used and squeezed and dropped.

It had been a shit shift, but the next shift would be worse. The shift from six in the morning until two in the afternoon was difficult, but at least the street stalls were up in the Capo district, and it was possible for Giancarlo to walk between the stalls and to finger a lemon or a pear or turn over an apple and to look at faces, and to drift on. The shift from two in the afternoon until ten in the evening was worse shit because the stalls had done their trade for the day and were packing and emptying the alleyways, and it was harder in the afternoons and the evenings to hold cover. He had not yet been assigned to the shift from ten in the evening until six in the morning, and that would be the worst shit duty, and Jesu alone would know how to hold cover in the bastard place when the alleyways were darkened, when people hurried, when the bambini roamed over the cobbles on their scooters. Maybe, Jesu would tell him, when he had the shift through the night…

A man brushed against his shoulder.

'Anything?'

A sardonic smile. Giancarlo coughed on his cigarette. He spoke from the side of his mouth. 'That has to be a joke. Perhaps, a better joke. Yesterday I took home three lemons, a pear, a quarter-kilo of cheese and an artichoke. Today I take home one lemon, three apples and a cauliflower.' He held up the plastic bag. 'My wife said last night that I intruded on her lifestyle. You would think you would be thanked for doing the shopping.'

'But you don't bring home il brutoT

'The photograph is twenty years old. He could walk past me.'

'We need the buona fortuna.'

'I think, more than luck, I need to have a taste for lemons.'

A sharp smile between them. They were chosen, this team from the squadra mobile, for the quality of their patience. The patience bred an attitude to their work. They could go each day to a street, to an apartment that was used for observation, they could sit in a car and in a closed van, do the shift for a week or for a month and watch the same view and look for the same face. They did not fret and they were not bored, and that was the training bred into them.

Giancarlo left the Capo district. The sun was now on his face, and the smells of the dog shit and the rotting food bags and the old drains were out of his nose. There had to be patience. The guys of the DIA had watched a shop for eight weeks before Bagarella was spotted, and the ROS team of the carabineri had watched a street for eleven weeks before Riina was seen. He went for his bus.

He was an anonymous figure riding the bus home. He bought the clothes for work, in such a place as the Capo district, from a charity shop. He was forty-seven years old, had served eighteen years in the squadra mobile, had volunteered four years back for work with the team specializing in the sorveglianza. They had moved home then. In the apartment block where they had lived before it had been known on the landings that he was a police officer. They had moved on when he had taken the surveillance work. It was the cross that his wife carried, in the new apartment, that he seemed to their neighbours to be another of the city's disoccupati. Better that he should appear as one of the city's unemployed or as a casual tradesman… He promised his wife that there would be one more year and then they would move again. It was hard for his wife, difficult for her. She had to tolerate his shabby old handed-down clothes. She had to exist alongside the pistol in the holster and the radio carried in a harness against his skin that were permanent to him when he was on assignment. She had to tolerate the fruit, the vegetables and always the lemons that he bought to hold his cover and dumped on her.

Even on the bus, he watched faces. But the photograph that Giancarlo tried to match to the faces was twenty years old. Faces riding with him, faces on the pavement, faces in cars.

Another day's work finished. There were some operations when Giancarlo, and the guys in the team with him, would feel the chance of a success strike was good, and there were others…

Small Mario ran back into the house and shouted for his mother to come.

Francesca stood rooted to the patio, clutching her toy.

The gardener eyed her as he methodically closed the gates behind her.

She struggled up the drive and then up the path between the flowerbeds, and then onto the patio. Charley grimaced when Angela came through the open doors. She saw the collapse of Angela's mouth and chin, as if in shock. Angela had come to her, hurrying, and took Charley in her arms. Charley wept. The tears streamed. Charley hung in Angela's arms, as if she were held by a friend. The tears were wet on the shoulder of Angela's silk blouse, staining it, and she tried to make an apology, and Angela would not have it, and held her. It was a moment of bonding. The tears flowed down Charley's cheeks. Small Mario had taken the cue from his mother and clutched at her waist, as if that were his own gesture of comfort love, and Francesca held herself tight against Charley's legs and cried with her. They went together inside the villa.

Charley felt as though, now, she was protected by Angela and small Mario and Francesca. She was taken through the hall, and as they passed the full-length mirror they saw the pavement dirt in the confusion of her hair and the bruising on her face and the grazing on her elbows and the ripped material at the knees of her jeans. She was sat on a chair in the kitchen. When Angela loosed her, to put on the kettle to get hot water, to find the medical box and the cotton wool, the children still held her. Charley tried to blink away the tears. She wore the wrist-watch. She spied against their love.

'You were robbed?'

Trying to be brave. 'Afraid so.'

'You are hurt, badly hurt?'

'Don't think so. I didn't go to the hospital, didn't seem necessary.'

'The physician will come – robbed of your bag?'

Angela gathered the medical box, the plasters, the ointments, the cotton-wool pad on the table, and she waited for the kettle to boil.

'When I came out of the shop, which Peppino had recommended – I still have what I bought, they're lovely – I just didn't see him come. He must have been watching me. As I started to walk, he came from behind me.'

'It's a foul place.'

'I had the strap of the bag across me, when he pulled the bag I was dragged…'

'It's a place of the jungle, home for animals. What have you lost?'

'Nothing that's life-threatening. A diary, that's a nuisance. A credit card, boring.

Make-up, thank God, I'd spent most of what Peppino gave me. He got nothing.'

The water from the kettle was poured into a bowl. Angela, so gentle, began to clean the wounds.

'He stopped the bike. He kicked my face. That was when I let the bag go. He didn't have to, he had my bag. He leaned down and he snatched at the necklace. It broke.'

She took the necklace, broken, from her pocket. She put it on the table. It seemed to her so cheap, so trivial, and the necklace of

Angela was heavy gold and dancing in front of her eyes as Angela bent across her to dab the soaked hot cotton wool on her face.

'For what happened, I feel ashamed. Did anyone help you?'

'Most didn't, one did. He was very kind, a teacher.'

'I am so sorry, Charley. I will call Peppino. It is a foul place, Charley, because the society is bred on violence, a city that makes fear. I feel so great a responsibility.'

'Please, please don't,' Charley said.

The whisper of desperation. 'You won't go back to England, because of this, you won't-?'

'No.'

Angela kissed Charley. The children held her. She would not go home because she was a spy. She thought the watch on her wrist was a talisman of treachery. She was under the control of the cold bastard Axel Moen, who had not been close by, who had not protected her. It was not the filth of the gutter in her hair that dirtied her but the watch on her wrist. The kiss was love, and the children held her in love.

The baby was crying when Pasquale came home, and Pasquale was dead on his feet. A bad night broken by the alarm at four, little sleep before the alarm because the baby then had been crying. And he couldn't tell whether the tiredness on his wife's face was because of the baby's crying or because of her anxiety for his work. Her mother was in the kitchen, trying to quieten the baby, and failing. He didn't want to talk in front of her mother, so he went to the bedroom, and he lay on the bed staring at the ceiling light. He didn't want to tell his wife, in front of her mother, that he had received snapped criticism from the maresciallo. 'If you are tired, you are useless, if you are a zombie, you endanger us all. Don't think you are the only one that has fathered a baby that cries in the night.' He should pull himself together, remember that he was a part of a team.

The maresciallo had said that he had the promise from Tardelli, the magistrate was working at home that afternoon. They could manage, once, without Pasquale. If Pasquale were again found yawning, blinking tiredness, then he would be off the team, the maresciallo had said. He had gone home, feeling shame, and he lay on the bed and could not sleep.

His wife came into the bedroom and she carried a glass of juice for him.

'Is there no overtime? You are early.'

'I was sent home.'

'What had you done?'

'I was told I was too tired. I was told I was not effective. I was told I endangered the team.'

He could not tell whether it was the exhaustion or anxiety that made the lines at her mouth and the bulging bags under her eyes. He did not know whether the end of her prettiness was marked by the birth of the baby or by his joining the team that protected a 'walking corpse'.

'They will get rid of you?'

'I don't know.'

'If they got rid of you…?'

'Then I could patrol outside the Questura, I could stop the traffic for schoolchildren, I could be on the pavement and watch the sirens go by.'

'What do you want?'

'I want to be with him and stand beside him.'

The magistrate had been in the living room of the apartment when the maresciallo had spat the criticism at Pasquale. The living room was his office. The desk where he worked at his computer screen was on the far side of the room from the reinforced plate glass of the windows. The room was always in gloom because the shutters were across the window and the curtains were drawn. When he had left, been sent home, he had passed the door to the living room and seen the magistrate hunched over his computer with the mess of files on the desk and opened on a chair and on the carpet around the desk. He had felt humility towards the magistrate because all the team knew that the phone call had been made at dawn to the magistrate's wife in Udine, and the telephone had not been picked up by Patrizia Tardelli, nor by the children, but by a man. All the team had heard the poor bastard stammer to a man whose name he did not know, in his wife's house, at dawn. A bad time of the day to learn, for sure, that a marriage had foundered, that his wife was fucked by a stranger.

'And me? Do you want to stand beside me? And do you want to stand beside our baby?'

'That is stupid talk.'

'So I am stupid. Each day that you go out, when I am left, I have to consider whether, again, I will see you.'

'He asks of you each day, and he asks of the baby. Each day he remembers you.'

'Each day, Pasquale, I am so frightened.'

'He asks after you, as if he blamed himself for your situation.' Pasquale pushed himself up on the bed. He spoke in bitterness. 'What would you have us do? Would you have us walk away from him, abandon him?'

'Is he so stubborn?'

'He has the fear, we all have the fear. He jokes of the fear, he has learned to live with it.

As I try to, as you have to. Stubborn? Will he surrender to the fear? He is stubborn, and he will not give in to the fear.'

'Is the danger very great?'

He looked away from her. His shoulders dropped back to the bed. He gazed up at the ceiling light. She sat beside him and she held his hand. He thought that she struggled to reconcile their fear with her own fear.

'You have the right to know. We are not supposed to talk of it, not even in the home, but you have the right. He could compromise, he could exist, he could move paper across his desk, he could ride through the city in safety, and we could go in safety with him. The maresciallo says that a man such as Tardelli faces real danger only when he has become a threat to those people.'

'Please.'

'I should not tell you. There is a prisoner in the Ucciardione who seeks the privilege of the pentito programme, and he has given information about Ruggerio, the target of Tardelli. The information is not good but if it is acted upon, it could threaten Ruggerio.'

'I listen.'

'An American came from Rome, an agent of the DEA, to see Tardelli. If he sees Tardelli, then it is connected with Ruggerio, so the threat increases.'

'Tell me.'

'There is a third factor, the maresciallo says. It is a time of great danger to Tardelli.

Ruggerio seeks to be the capo di tutti capi, he looks for absolute control. There is a rival in Agrigento, disappeared. There is a family in Catania, but they will be destroyed.

When, the maresciallo says, the control of Ruggerio is absolute, then he will demonstrate his new power with a strike against the heart of the state. It could be the life of Tardelli because that is the man who most threatens him… You wanted to know.'

'I asked…'

'Are you better for knowing?'

She loosed Pasquale's hand. She left him in the dim-lit room. He slept with his mind dulled to dreams. Later he would wake. Later he would find her sleeping beside him, and the baby asleep in the cot at the foot of the bed. Later he would shower and dress and strap onto his chest the pistol holster. Later he would go into the kitchen to make himself coffee to clear away the sleep taste from his mouth and he would find the small bunch of flowers on the table and he would read the note his wife had written. 'Please give them to him, and thank him for asking after me each day and after our baby. God keep you.' Later Pasquale would go to work.

The boy was sat in a chair.

His arms were tied tight behind his back and the rope chafed against his skin. The boy's ankles were strapped to the legs of the chair. The gag filled his mouth.

He did not understand… He was of the Brancaccio district. He came from the high blocks of crumbling apartments. He had never been employed, nor had his father ever been in work. He thieved to keep his family, stole the bags of the tourists.

He did not understand… He paid the pizzo each month to the Men of Honour in Brancaccio. He never failed to give them the percentage from what he took out of tourists' handbags.

He did not understand… He had been told that one day, perhaps, he would be invited to join the ranks of the picciotti, that a final decision would be made when he had completed tasks set for him by the Men of Honour in Brancaccio.

He did not understand… A task had been set for him. He had taken the handbag. He had brought the handbag to the address given him. A pistol had been pressed against his neck, he had been strapped to the chair. The handbag was now in front of him on a bare wooden table.

He did not understand… The money from the handbag was in a neat pile. Two men were looking carefully at the diary from the handbag. Their hands, which held the diary, passed it between them, were protected by transparent plastic gloves. They examined the diary with minute care.

The boy was condemned. They had not hooded him and they had not blindfolded him. He had seen their faces. He could not know whether they would strangle him or knife him or shoot him, whether they would put him in acid or in concrete or whether they would dump him, under cover of darkness, in an alley. They did not seem to notice that the piss ran hot on his thigh and he shivered without control. He did not understand

…

As a child, he had been told by his father, Rosario, an old saying of Sicily: 'The man who plays alone always wins.'

Any detail relevant to his personal security was passed to Mario Ruggerio. He alone would decide the importance of information. The message came by word of mouth to the apartment off the Via Crociferi. In conditions of secrecy the magistrate, Tardelli, had met Capitano Giovanni Crespo of the carabiniere ROS, and the capitano had brought with him an unnamed American. Alone in the apartment, in the kitchen, he heated up his favourite meal of trip-pa that he would take with a sauce of boiled tomato.

A woman had come to the apartment the day before he had moved in, and cleaned it, and filled the refrigerator with sufficient small and simple-to- prepare meals that would last him for a week. He would be gone after a week, and then the apartment would again be scrubbed clean. He could search in the far recesses of a huge memory. The recesses of his memory were compartmentalized, so the name of Giovanni Crespo, of the carabiniere ROS, was not obscured by the bank of information held on financial movements and cash investments and future strategy and opponents and affiliates. He could sweep aside his thoughts on the plans of an explosives expert, and on the matter of a handbag thief, and of a meeting with a Colombian who was skilled in the movement of refined cocaine to Europe, and of discussions with the new men from Russia.

He remembered the name of Giovanni Crespo, and there had been a photograph, which was blurred, of a white and tensed face, published in the Giornale di Sicilia, beside the blanket-covered head of Riina as the big man was driven away after his arrest from the carabineri barracks. The memory was dismissed. He considered what he had been told of an American, poorly dressed, unnamed, perhaps armed, admitted to the inner office of Tardelli. In his mind he turned over the information, analysed it, pondered it. If the Americans mounted an operation in Palermo, if an agent came to visit Tardelli, then he believed that only he could be the principal target.

The water in the saucepan boiled around the trippa. The sauce made from boiled tomatoes bubbled in a second saucepan. He took a bottle of Peroni beer from the refrigerator. He was ready to eat. There were times that he yearned for the cooking of Michela, and to be surrounded by his family, and to sit the little boy, his nephew, who was a rascal and who was named after him, on his knee… So much to think of.. . He took the trippa from the saucepan and spooned the sauce of tomato over it. He poured his beer. He seemed to imagine that his wife, Michela, put the plate on the table in front of him. It was a compartment in his life. All his life was in sealed compartments, and that was his strength. He allowed three men, Carmine and Franco and Tano, to be close to him. It was what he had learned in his climb to power. There should always be three, because two men could agree, in secrecy, on conspiracy, never three. The three men competed with each other, in insecurity, for his favour. Carmine would look to the matter of the carabiniere officer, Giovanni Crespo, and the association with the American. Franco had already been given responsibility for the security of the meeting with the Colombian. Tano liaised with the expert in explosives. He divided them, and he ruled them. He must be strong.

There was an old saying in Sicily that his father, Rosario, had told him: 'A man who makes himself a sheep will be eaten by the wolf.'

The physician, elderly and elegant and expensively considerate, had examined Charley with soft and cool fingers, probed at her grazes and bruises, and told her with a distant smile on his lined face that her injuries, though painful, were superficial. He had congratulated her on the good fortune that her experience had not led to serious hurt. Charley thought of what it would have been like in England, waiting in Casualty or at the general practitioner's clinic. Bloody hideous it would have been. But she had been calmed by the physician. She lay on her bed.

He knocked. Peppino was smiling sympathy at her from the door.

'You are better now?'

'I feel a bit of a fraud.'

'Angela tells me that you were very brave.'

'Just wish I'd been able to scratch his eyes out or kick him in the bloody balls. Sorry, I mean leave him something to remember me by.'

Peppino chuckled with her. 'It would have been nice. I am so sorry that I could not come at once. Have you reported this matter to the police?'

'I just couldn't face it.'

'Of course. It happens all day and every day in Palermo. The beauty of our city, its heritage, is despoiled by such crime, and the police can do little. If you report to the police, then you invade the world of their bureaucracy. Believe me, they are not fast.'

'But, for the insurance, shouldn't I have a chit from the police?'

He sat on the end of the bed, friendly, kind but not familiar. 'What exactly did you lose?'

'There was my purse. I'd spent most of what you gave me… You'd like to see?'

She swung off the bed. She took the blouse and the mini-skirt from the bag. She held them in turn in front of her. She thought it was what she should do, what would be expected of her, what was expected of a spy. He nodded his approval.

'When there is a special occasion, please, you will decorate it. What was in your bag?'

'Not much. My purse and thirty or forty thousand, my lipstick and the powder compact and the eye stuff, some keys. There was my Visa card, but I can get that cancelled, and there was my diary with phone numbers and addresses.'

'You see, Charley, these scum are only interested in cash, probably for drugs, and they are very impertinent. Many times, after they have taken the money they will dump the bag in a rubbish collector very close to the Questura. It is possible, I cannot say probable, that your bag will be found. And I would not wish you to be concerned about your card. Allow me to take care of it. Angela said there was a necklace.'

'He tried to snatch it, broke it. Just of sentimental importance, a present from my uncle.'

She pointed to the thin chain that had lustre. The chain was on the table beside the book that she thought had been moved. And across the room was the chest containing her underwear that she thought had been taken out of the middle drawer and replaced.

Maybe it was her imagination. Maybe it was a vicious lie of Axel bloody Moen.

Maybe. She was the spy in their home.

A frown, questioning, was on his forehead. 'You see, Charley, how greatly Angela depends on you. It is not easy for her here. It is a different culture from her life in Rome.

It is impossible for her, in Sicilian society, to recreate the freedom of Rome. To her, your companionship is so important. Why I say that, very frankly, we hope you will not wish immediately to return to England.'

'I didn't consider it – and God help the next low-life who tries anything.'

He asked her to describe the handbag. He told her that he knew a man in the Questura and he would go directly to see the man and himself report the theft of the bag. For a moment his hand rested on the cleaned wound on her knee.

'All of us, Charley, we admire your courage.'

The detective superintendent winked across the table at Harry Compton, like it was going to amuse him. He cradled the telephone between his cheek and his shoulder to free his hands to light a cigarette.

'… I quite appreciate you're a busy guy, Ray. When you've a moment… I know how busy you DEA people keep yourselves. Won't take more than a moment, just something that's come up, needs clarification. I'll fit in with you. Down here at S06 we're not that stretched, not like you are. Keep for a couple of days? I should think so. .. Oh, yes, the Bramshill conference would be excellent. I'll see you there. Very good of you, Ray, to get me on board your schedule. I appreciate that. See you then, Ray…'