Red Fox

CHAPTER THREE

The immediate sense of survival was uppermost now in the mind of Giancarlo.

It was the instinct of the stoat or the weasel that has lost its mate and must abandon its den, move on, but has no notion of where to go, only that it must creep stealthily away from the scene of its enemies' vengeance. He wanted to run, to outstrip the pedestrians who cluttered and barred the pavements, but his training won out. He did not hurry. He strolled, because he must blend, must forsake the identity bestowed on him by the P38.

The noise and confusion and shouting of the beginning of a new day swamped him. The hooting of impatient motorists. The crashing intrusion of the alimentari shutters rising in their doorways and windows to display the cheese and hams and tins and bottles. The arguments that spilled from the bars. Confident, secure sounds, belonging and with a right to be there, swarming around Giancarlo. The boy tried to shut inside himself his concentration and avoid the cancer of these people that swept and surged past him. He belonged to no part of them.

Since the NAP had drifted into existence in the early nineteen-seventies, coalesced from a meeting of minds and aspirations to an organization, it had derived its principal security from the cell system. Nothing new, nothing revolutionary in that; laid down by Mao and Ho and Guevara. Standard in the theoretical treatises. Separated in their cells the members had no need for the identity of other names, for the location of other safe houses.

It was essential procedure, and when one was taken, then the wound to the movement could be swiftly cauterized. Franca was their cell leader. She alone knew the hidden places where am-munitions and materials were stored, the telephone numbers of the policy committee, and the lists of addresses. She had not shared with Enrico, much less with the boy, the probationer, because neither required such information.

He could not go back to his previous fiat where he had lived with a girl and two boys as that had been closed and abandoned.

He could not tour the cars and streets of Pietralata behind the Tiburtina station and ask for them by name; he wouldn't know where to begin, and who to ask. It made him shudder as he walked, the depths of the isolation in which the movement had so successfully cloaked him.

Where among the streaming, scrambling crowds that passed on either side of him did he find the nod and handshake of recognition? It was frightening to the boy because without Franca he was truly alone. Storm clouds rising, sails full, rudder flapping, and the rocks high and sharp and waiting.

Giancarlo Battestini, nineteen years old.

Short and without weight, a physical nonentity. A body that looked perpetually starved, a face that seemed for ever hungry, a boy that a woman would want to take in and fatten because she would fear that unless she hurried he might wither and fade.

Dark hair above the growth of his cheeks that was curled and untidy. A sallow, wan complexion as if the sun had not sought him out, had avoided the lustreless skin. Acne spots at his chin and the sides of his mouth that were red and angry against the surrounding flesh and to which his fingers moved with embarrassed frequency. The pale and puckered line across the bridge of his nose that deviated on across the upper cheekbone under his right eye was his major distinguishing mark. He had the polizia of the Primo Celere to thank for the scar, the baton charge across the Ponte Garibaldi when the boy had slipped in headlong flight and turned his ankle. He had been a student then, enrolled two terms at the University of Rome, choosing the study of psychology for no better reason than that the course was a long one and his father could pay for four years of education.

And what else was there to do?

The University with its bulging inefficiency had seemed to Giancarlo a paradise of liberation. Lectures too clogged to attend unless you took a seat or standing place a full hour before the professor came. Tutorials that were late or cancelled. Exams that were postponed. A hostel within walking distance in the Viale Regina Elena where the talk was long and bold and brave.

Heady battles they had fought around the University that winter. The Autonomia in the van, they had driven the polizia back from the front facade of arches and across the street to their trucks. They had expelled by force Luciano Lama, the big union man of the PCI, who had come to talk to them on moderation and conformity and responsibility; thrown him out, the turn-coat communist in his suit and polished shoes. Six hundred formed the core of the Autonomia, the separatists, and Giancarlo had first hung round their fringe, then attended their meetings and finally sidled towards the leaders and stammered his pledge of support. Warm acceptance had followed. A paradise indeed to the boy from the seaside at Pescara where his father owned a shop and carried a stock of fine cotton dresses and blouses and skirts in summer, and wool and leather and suede in winter.

Hit and run. Strike and retreat. The tactical battles of the Autonomia, were in the name of repression in Argentina, the deaths in Stamheim of comrades Baader and Raspe and Enselin, the changing of the curriculum. No long searches for cause and justification. Hurt the polizia and the carabinieri, the forces of the new fascism. Goad them into retaliatory dashes from the wide streets that were safe to the narrow maze of centro storico where the Molotovs and the P38s could score and wound. Formidable the polizia looked, with their white bullet-proof tunics lolling to their knees and their stovepipe face masks behind which they felt a false invulnerability. But they could not run in their new and expensive equipment, could only fire the gas and beat the clubs on the plastic shields. They were loath to follow the kids, the Pied Pipers, when the range of the pistols and the petrol diminished.

A scarf tight across his face for protection both from press photographs and the gas, Giancarlo had never before experienced such orgasmic, pained excitement as when he had sprinted forward on the bridge and launched the bottle with its litre of petrol and smouldering rag at the Primo Celere huddled behind their armoured jeep. A shriek of noise had erupted as the bottle splintered. The flames scattered. There was a roar of approval from behind as the boy stood his ground in defiance while the gas shells flourished about him. Then the retaliation. Twenty of them running, and Giancarlo had turned for his escape. The desperate, terrifying moment when the ground was rising, space under his feet, control lost, and in his ears the drumming of the boots that were in pursuit. His hands covering his head were pulled away as they put the baton in, and there was blood cool across his face and sweet in his mouth, and blows to the leg, kicks to the belly. Voices from the south, from the peasant south, from the servants of the Democrazia Cristiana, from the workers who had been bought and were too stupid to know it.

Two months in the Regina Coeli gaol awaiting his court appearance.

Seven months imprisonment for throwing the Molotov to be served in the Queen of Heaven.

A whore of a place, that gaol. Intolerable heat and stench through that first summer when he had bunked in a cell with two others. Devoid of draught and privacy, assimilated into a world of homosexuality, thieving, deprivation. Food inedible, boredom impossible, company illiterate. Hatred and loathing bit deep in the boy when he was the guest of the Queen of Heaven. Hatred and loathing of those who had put him there, of the polizia who had clubbed him and spat in his face in the truck and laughed in their dialect at the little, humbled intellettuale.

Giancarlo sought his counterstrike and found the potential for revenge in the top-floor cells of the 'B' Wing where the men of the Nuclei Armati Proletaria were incarcerated, some on remand, some sentenced. They could read in the boy's eyes and in the twist of his lower lip that here was a progeny that could be useful and exploited. He learned in those Heated, sweating cells the theory and the practice, the expertise and the strategy of urban guerrilla conflict. A new recruit, a new volunteer. The men gave him diagrams to memorize of the mechanism of weapons, lectured him in the study of concealment and ambush, droned at him of the politics of their struggle, hectored him with the case histories of corruption and malpractice in government and capitalist business. These men would not see the fruits of their work but took comfort that they had found one so malleable, so supple to their will. They were pleased with what they saw. Word of his friendship spread along the landings of his own wing. The homosexuals did not sidle close and flash their hands at his genitals, the thieves left undisturbed the bag under his bunk where he kept his few personal possessions, the Agenti did not bully.

In the months in gaol he passed from the student of casual and fashionable protest to the political militant.

His parents never visited him in the Queen of Heaven. He had not seen them since they had stood at the back of the court, half masked from his sight by the guard's shoulders. Anger on his father's face, tears making the mascara run on his mother's cheeks. His father wore a Sunday suit, his mother dressed in a black coat as if that would impress the magistrate. The chains on his wrists had been long and loose, and they gave him the opportunity to raise his right arm, clenched fist, the salute of the left, the gesture of the fighter. Screw them. Give them something to think on when they took the autostrada back across the mountains to Pescara. And his picture would be in the Adriatic paper and would be seen by the ladies who came to buy from the shop and they would whisper and titter behind their hands. In all his time in the gaol he received only one letter, written in the spider hand of his brother Fabrizio, a graduate lawyer and five years his elder. There was a room for him at home, Mama still kept his bedroom as it had been before he had gone to Rome. Papa would find work for him. Therecould be a new start, he would be forgiven. Methodically Giancarlo had torn the single sheet of notepaper into many pieces that flaked to the cell floor.

When the time came for Giancarlo's release he was clear on the instructions that had been given him from the men in 'B'

Wing. He had walked out through the steel gates and on to the Lungotevere and not looked back at the crumbling plaster of the high ochre-stained walls. The car was waiting as he had been told it would be and a girl had moved across the back seat to make room for him. First names they called themselves by, and they took him for a coffee and poured a measure of Scotch whisky into the foaming milk of the cappuccino and brought him cigarettes that were imported and expensive.

Half a year now of being hunted, half a year of running and caution and care, and he had wondered what was the life expectancy of freedom, thought of how long his wings would stay undipped by cell bars and locked doors.

Once he had been in the same flat as the one they called the Chief, had seen his profile through an opened door, bushy-bearded, short, vital in the eyes and mouth – the Chief who stayed now on the island prison of Asinara and who they said had been betrayed.

Once he had strayed into the bedroom of a covo carrying the cigarettes he had been sent to buy, looking for the man who had dispatched him, and recognized the sleeping form of the one they said was expert with explosives. He too, they said, had been betrayed to a life sentence on the island.

Once he had been taken to stand for a moment on the steps of a church where Antonio La Muscio and Mia Vianale had sat and eaten plums on a summer evening, and he now in his grave with half a carabinieri magazine to put him there, and the fruit unfinished, and La Vianale rotting in the gaol at Messina.

Hard and dangerous times, only recently made safer by the skill and calm of Franca.

But as the net grew closer, shrinking around the group, Franca had disowned the safety of inactivity.

'Two hundred and fifty political prisoners of the left in the gaols, and they believe we are close to the moment of our destruction, that is what they say on the RAI, that is what they say at the DC congress. So we must fight, demonstrate beyond their concealment that we are not crushed, not neutered.'

Franca did not talk in the slogans of the kids of his first covo.

She had no use for the parrot words of "enemies of the proletariat', the 'forces of repression', 'capitalist exploitation'. It confused the boy because they had become a part of his life, a habit of his tongue, cemented to his vocabulary. Franca vented her anger without words, displayed her dedication with the squeezed, arctic index finger of her right hand. Three bedridden victims in the Policlinico, another in a private room of the nursing home on the Trionfale, they were her vengeance – men who might never walk again with freedom, would not run with their children, and one among them who would not sleep with and satisfy his wife.

Inevitable that it must end. The risks were too great, the pace too heady, the struggle unequal.

Giancarlo crossed a road, not looking for the cars, nor for the green-lit 'Avanti' sign, not hearing the shriek of the brakes, ignorant of the bellowed insult. Perhaps he would have brought her flowers that evening. Perhaps he would have gone to the piazza and bought from the gypsy woman some violets, or a sprig of pansies. Nothing gaudy, nothing that would win a sneer from her. Simple flowers from the fields to make her smile and her face soften, to erase the harshness of her mouth that he had first seen as she walked from the shooting of the personnel officer.

But flowers would not help her now, not from the boy who had declined to step forward, who had walked away.

There was a hunger already in his stomach and little chance to appease it. His wallet still lay in the flat on the small table beside his unused bed. There was some loose change in his hip pocket and the mini-assegni notes that were worth not more than a hundred and a hundred and fifty lire apiece. In all he had enough for a bowl of pasta or a sandwich, and a coffee or a beer, and after that – nothing. He must keep two hundred lire for an afternoon paper when they came on the news stands – Paese Sera or Momento Sera. Meanwhile his wallet was in the flat. His wallet that he touched and handled through the day, held with his finger-tips, the contour whorls that were only his own and that the police fingerprint dust would find and feed to the files. They had taken his fingerprints months back in the police station after his arrest.

They will have your name by the afternoon, Giancarlo, and your photograph. All they want about you they will have.

Time to begin to think again, to throw off the weight of depression and self-examination. Stupid bastard, take a hold.

Behave like a man of the NAP. Save yourself and survive.

Where to start?

The University.

In the vacation, in the summer? When there is no one there?

Where else? Where else do you go to, Giancarlo? Home to Mama, to tell her it was all a mistake, that you met bad people…?

Perhaps there would be someone at the University.

The University offered him the best chance of a bed with no questions asked among the students of the Autonomia whom he had known many months before. He had not been there since his release and he would have to exercise the utmost care as he approached the faculties. The campus was heavy with informers and policemen who carried books and mingled. But if he could find the right boys, then they would hide him, and they would respect him because he had graduated from the sit-ins and the lock-ins and the Molotovs to the real war of the fully fledged, of the men.

They would look after him at the University.

A long walk it would be, across the wide Ponte Flaminio, through the Parioli, along the tree-lined ribbon of the Viale Regina Margherita. With the decision taken and his mind clearing he quickened his step. It was a risk to go that far and his name and description and his clothing would soon be radioed to the polizia who cruised and watched over the city, but there were no alternatives.

Because he worked directly to the Minister of the Interior, Francesco Vellosi's office was on the second floor of the lowering grey stonework of the Viminale. His subordinates were found either a kilometre away at the Questura, or far to the west in the Criminalpol building at EUR. But the capo of the Squadra Anti-Terrorismo was required to be close to the seat of power, just down the corridor from it, which served to emphasize the recognition of the threat to the country posed by the rash of urban guerrilla groups. A fine room he occupied, reached through high double doors of polished wood, with an ornate ceiling from which hung electric bulbs set in a shivering chandelier of light, oil paintings on the walls, a wide desk with an inlaid leather top, easy chairs for the visitors, a coffee table for magazines and ashtrays, and a signed photograph of the President between the tail twin windows. Francesco Vellosi, thirty years in the police, detested the room, and would have given much to have exchanged the brilliance of the surroundings for a shirtsleeves working area. The room got the sun in the afternoons but on this July morning the brightness had not yet reached it.

The radio telephone in his armour-plated car had warned Vellosi when mid-way between his bachelor flat and place of work that his men had met with a major and significant success that morning, and waiting for him when he bustled into the office had been the initial incident report and photostats of the files held on Franca Tantardini and Enrico Panicucci.

Vellosi gutted the paperwork with enthusiasm. A bad winter and spring they had had, built on the depressive foundation of the loss the previous year of Aldo Moro. There had been arrests, some significant, some worthless, but the plague of bombings and shootings had kept up its headlong pace, prompting the disquiet of the Deputies in the Chamber of the Democrazia Cristiana, the ridicule of the newspapers, and the perpetual demand of his Minister for solutions. Always they came to Vellosi, hurrying in pursuit of the news of a fresh outrage. He was long tired of trying to find the politician or the senior civil servant who would take responsibility for what he called the necessary methods, the hard and ruthless crackdown that he believed essential; he was still looking for his man.

Here at last was good news, and he would issue his own order that the photographers should have a good look at the Tantardini woman. The national habit of self-denigration went too deep, and it was good when the opportunity presented itself to boast a little and swagger with success.

A tall, heavily built boar of a man, the roughness of his figure softened by the cut of his jacket, the elegance of his silk tie, Vellosi shouted acknowledgement across the room of the light tap at his door. The men who entered the presence were from a different caste. Two in tattered suede boots. Two in canvas training shoes. Faded jeans. A variety of T-shirt colours. An absence of razors. Hard men whose faces seemed relaxed while the eyes were ever alert and alive and bright. Vellosi's lions, the men who fought the war far below the surface of the city's life.

The sewer rats, because that was where they had to exist if they were to find the rodent pests.

The four eased a careful way across the thick carpet, and when he gestured to them, sat with care on the deep, comfortable chairs.

They were the officers of the squad that had taken the woman, destroyed the animal Panicucci, and they had come to receive their plaudits, tell at first hand of the exploit, and bring a little solace to the days of Vellosi in the Viminale.

He wriggled with pleasure in his seat as the work of the morning was recounted. Nothing omitted, nothing spared, so that he could savour and live in his mind the moment when Panicucci and the woman had emerged from the Post. As it should be, and he'd wheel them in to shake the hand of the Minister and blunt the back-stab knives that were always honing for him. He limited himself to the briefest of interruptions, preferring to let the steady flow of the story bathe him in the triumph of his squad.

The telephone broke into the recital.

Vellosi's face showed his annoyance at the interference – the annoyance of a man who hopes to make it and is on the couch with his girl when the doorbell sounds. He waved his hand to halt the flow; he would return to it as soon as the business of the call was dispatched. It was the Questura.

Had Vellosi's men been certain when they took the woman that there was not another boy with her? Had they missed one?

The covo had been found, the address taken from the telephone slip just paid by the Tantardini woman. The polizia had visited the flat and found there the clothes of another boy, far too small to be those of Panicucci. There was a woman on the ground floor of the block, sick, and from the moment she was dressed in the morning she would sit and watch from her window the passing street; when the ragazzi drove their car from the garage there were always three, and there were three that morning. Fingerprinting had begun, there was another set and fresh, not to be confused with Tantardini's and Panicucci's. The polizia had been careful to check with the woman at the window the time of the departure of the car from the block and compare it with the timing of the incident at the Post. It was their opinion that there had been no time for a substantial deviation to drop off a second male.

A cold sponge was squeezed over Vellosi.

'Have you a description of this second man?'

T h e woman says he is not a man, just a boy really. There are many identity cards in the flat, one of the photographs may be genuine, but we are working on a photo-fit now. Your own people are there now, no doubt they will brief you. We think the boy is eighteen, perhaps nineteen. We thought you would like to know.'

'You are very kind,' Vellosi said quietly, then hammered the telephone down.

He ran his eyes over the men in front of him, brought them sitting upright and awkward on the edge of their seats.

'We missed one.' Spoken with coldness, the pleasure eroded from the session.

"There was no one else at the Post. The car had no driver waiting in it, and only the two came out. They were well clear of the doorway when we moved.' The defensive, bridling argument came from a man who an hour earlier had faced the barrel of a Beretta, who had out-thought, out-manoeuvred his opponent and fired for his own survival.

'Three came from the flat. The car went straight to the Post.'

The inquisition was resented. 'He was not there when we came.

And after the shooting some of our people watched the crowd, as is standard. Nobody ran from the scene.'

Vellosi shrugged, resigned. Like eels, these people. Always one of them wriggled away, slipped through the finest meshes.

Always one of a group escaped, so that you could never cut off the head and know that the body was beyond another spawning.

'He is very young, this one that we have lost.'

Three of the men stayed silent, peeved that the moment of accolade had' turned to recrimination. The fourth spoke up, un-daunted by his superior's grimness. 'If it is a boy, then it will have been her runner, there to fetch and carry for her, and to serve in the whore's bed. Always she has one like that. Panicucci she did not use, only the young ones she liked. It is well known in the NAP.'

'If you are right, it is not a great loss.'

'It is an irritation, nothing more. The fat cat we have, the gorilla we have killed; that the flea is out is only a nuisance.'

It was not yet ten o'clock and there were smiles as Vellosi produced the bottle from the lower drawer of his desk, and then reached again for the small cut-glass tumblers. It was too early for champagne but Scotch was right. The brat had broken the pattern of perfection, like a summer picnic when it rains and the tablecloth must be scooped up, but the best of the day had gone before.

Only a nuisance, only an irritation, the missing of the boy.

He knew they had been travelling many hours because the van floor on which he lay was warmed by the outside sun even through the layer of sacking. The air around Geoffrey Harrison was thick, tasting of petrol fumes, pricking against his skin as if all the cool and freshness of the morning's start had been expelled, thrust out. It was painfully hot, and under the weight of the hood over his head he had sometimes begun to pant for air, with accompanying hallucinations that his lungs might not cope, that he might suffocate in the dark around him. Occasionally he heard two slight voices in conversation but the words, even had he been able to understand them, were muffled by the engine noise.

Two different tones, that was all he could distinguish. And they talked infrequently, the two men riding in the seats in front.

There were long periods of quiet between them and then a brief flurry of chatter as if something they passed took their fancy, attracted their eyes.

The motion of the van was constant, its progress uneventful, releasing him to his thoughts. It was as if he were a package of freight being transported to a far destination by two men who had neither interest nor concern in him and thought only of their delivery time.

In the Daily News and the Daily American and the Italian papers that he struggled with in the office Harrison had read many times of the techniques practised by the flourishing Italian kidnap gangs. In the bar of the Olgiata Golf Club, little America, little Mid-West, where there were Tom Collins and Bourbon mixes, he had joined the drift of conversation when the foreigners had talked of the Italian disease. Different setting, different values; easy then to relate all sickness to the bloody inefficiency of Italians, and what else could you expect when you were half way to the Middle East. Well down the road to Damascus here, right? Wasn't it a scandal, the transatlantic executives would say, that a fellow could get picked off the street and have to cough up a million dollars, however many noughts that was in lire, to get himself back to his wife and kids? And wasn't it about time that something was done about it? Couldn't happen at home, of course – not in London, not in Los Angeles… not in Birming-ham, not in Boston. And there'd always be one there, elbow at the bar and face pulled with authority, to drop his voice beneath the reach of the Italian members, and lean forward and whisper,

'Wouldn't happen if old Musso was running the place. And it's what they need again. A damn great shock up the ass, and someone like Musso to give it to them. Not exactly Musso, because he was an idiot, but someone with a damn great stick.' Simple answers, more drinks, and none of them had an idea. He wondered whether they'd remember him: young Harrison, quite a junior fellow, didn't make it up this way that often, always hanging on the edge of a chat, and a wife with bright lipstick.

Just a drinking member.

Perhaps you're lucky, Geoffrey, perhaps you're lucky you didn't struggle. You put up a bit of a show, but not much. Just enough for vague self-respect. Remember the picture in the paper of the man from Milan, the man who'd fought back and mixed it.

Stone dead in a box, with the wife in black and the kids holding her hands walking behind. At least you're bloody alive. Because they don't muck about, these people; they're not governed by Queensberry or any other set of rules. Hard, vicious bastards.

Remember the black-and-white images on the television in the living-room; the body of little Christina, eighteen years old, being dragged out of the rubbish tip and the ransom had been paid. Remember the race-course king; he made the front pages, trussed like a chicken and a hood on him, just like you are now except that he had a hunk of cement to weight him down in the lake near Como. Remember the boy in the village in Calabria with his ear sliced away to encourage his father to dig deeper into the family savings…

Horrible bastards.

Not like anything those stupid sods in the bar would know about when they came off their nine holes. All a bit of a joke over a pre-lunch gin, a bit of a chuckle. Something local that didn't affect foreigners. They should have seen them for themselves, those bloody faces under the stockings, the way the guns came, and the hammer. That would have splashed the tonic round a bit, would have stifled all the rectitude, the platitudes. They'd never bloody laugh again, those sods in the bar, not if they saw that crowd coming at them. Remember the Telegiornale, Geoffrey, what happens to the Italian families. Drawn curtains, shuttered windows, people hurrying by on the pavement below, not wishing to look in as if that would somehow involve them with a family that flew the yellow flag of quarantine. The face of a child or a mother in the doorway who looked for support and sympathy and found none; the humble car of the priest pulling up on the pavement and scattering the waiting photographers. Geoffrey knew the pictures, knew the way the story was chronicled on the first day and never mentioned again afterwards until the moment of conclusion. Stale in twenty-four hours.

Pray God there isn't some pompous fool in there.

What do you mean?

Well, some stupid ass with a good lunch inside him and letters after his name who wants to talk about the principle of paying.

What do you mean?

Well, if some ape says it's not right to pay, that you have to stand up to these people, that if you give way now what do you do next time.

They wouldn't say that, would they, not really say that?

They're not where you are, Geoffrey. They're in a boardroom, not in handcuffs. They may have cut themselves shaving, but they haven't had a bloody great fist slammed in. Some of them are bloody geriatric. All they know about the sodding country is what they see on a balance sheet.

They wouldn't be so stupid, they couldn't. Don't they know people get chopped if there's no payola, don't they know that?

Calm it, kid. Not bloody helping, is it? They'll know it, and if they don't there'll be someone there to tell them.

You're sure?

I'm sure, I'm certain.

How can you know?

I'm certain because I have to believe that, otherwise we go stark bloody mad, straight insane.

With the sun playing on its roof without remorse or hindrance, baking the closed interior, the van headed at a steady and unremarkable one hundred and ten kilometres per hour southwards along the Autostrada del Sol.