Red Fox

CHAPTER FIVE

It had taken many minutes of the new motion of the van before Geoffrey Harrison was sufficiently aroused to realize that they were no longer travelling on the smooth worn surface of the autostrada.

The tang of the chloroform was just a memory now, one receding aspect of the morning nightmare. The smell of the moisture across his limbs and torso had become acceptable with familiarity. The breathing through the hood became more possible as time went on, the harsh smell of the carbon monoxide from the engine could be ignored. It was a long time since he had tried to struggle with his bonds and he had abandoned the ambition to loosen the tapes. With the greater calmness came a greater comfort. No tears, no fight, no desperation. No reason for him to compete any more, just a need to lie back and let it all float across him, to obliterate the more vicious fantasies that hovered near his imagination. There was nothing he could do to change his situation, and so he lay there feeling the jar and jolt and shift of the van wheels, and gaining from the bruising impacts the knowledge that they had moved to a slower, indirect road.

He thought of Violet, poor old Violet. She'd know by now, she'd have heard and the police would be swarming round the flat and she'd be shouting at them and crying, and unless someone came who spoke English she wouldn't have a clue what they were talking about. Poor old Violet, who'd wrung it out of him that they wouldn't stay past next summer – two and a half years she'd have existed then, and she'd said that was her limit, that was enough. She should have adjusted, shouldn't she? Should have compromised, made something of it.

Of course it was different to England, but people go abroad and people cope. She should have been able to find some friends to coffee-morning with, go walk-about the ruins with. Didn't seem to make the effort, though, did she? And didn't seem interested, not in anything, not in his job, not in his business colleagues, not in the few foreigners who lived within walking distance of the flat. She'd never accepted living in a flat and not having neighbours she could lean over a fence and gossip with, never accepted that people who spoke a different language were still human beings and intelligent and kindly and funny, and that if they weren't British it didn't mean they wiped their backsides with their hands.

Bloody ridiculous it was, old Violet locked up in her castle on the hill and not letting the drawbridge down. Tried hard enough, hadn't he? Yes, Geoffrey. Well, what the hell else could be done?

Couldn't throw her out of the front door with a street map and shout down the terraces that she mustn't be back before six. He remembered when her parents had come to visit from Stoke-on-Trent. Never been out of England before. Didn't know whether they should put their teeth in the water at night. Didn't hold with all the wine at meals. Didn't master the coils of spaghetti falling off their forks when he took them all out to dinner. Set them back, the pair of them, that visit, they'd argued about it endlessly after the old people had gone; he telling her she should make more effort and not live like a bloody mole and what an advantage and opportunity she had; she telling him she hated it, wanted out and to England. He telling her to get interested in the city, get off her bottom and visit the Vatican and the Foro Italico; she telling him she was buggered if she'd be ordered to tramp round museums.

Poor old Violet. Must have been out of her mind with boredom.

And she didn't even hit the bottle, because he looked each night when he came home, checked the gin level and the Martini Bianco level and the Tio Pepe level. She didn't even drink the time away.

Only thing she seemed to like was getting down to the beach and that was bloody ridiculous too. There was a nice quiet pool just down the road for her to use, and some very decent families using it. But she preferred the beach and a hell of a drive down to Ostia and all the filth and the oil to sit on, pressed in close by those Italians burning themselves nigger brown. A total bloody mystery. Getting the sand in her hair, not speaking to anyone.

Poor old Violet, poor bored old Violet. Hadn't thought about her for a long time, had he? Not like this, not examining her day.

Well, he didn't have time, did he? Someone had to put the clothes on her back, the food in her fridge. A damn good job he had in Rome. Better prospects, better pay than he could have hoped for in London. He wished she'd see that. Working damned hard he was, and he could do without the abuse when he flopped home in the evenings.

They were slow rambling thoughts, indulgent and close, lulling him from the crisis, until there was another change in the engine pitch and he felt the movement of the gears, the slowing of the engine, the application of brakes. The van bumped crazily on rough ground. A dead stop. Voices that were clearer with the motor cut. The complacency vanished, the trembling began again, because this was frightening to the man who was bound and gagged and hooded and who had no horizons of sight. A way of existence that had become settled, achieved tranquillity, was ruptured.

The van had left the autostrada half way between Cassino and Capua, bypassed the small town of Vairano Scalo, avoiding the single wide street and central piazza. They had turned east on a winding open hill road that would eventually reach the village of Pietramelara, the home of just over a thousand people with shuttered minds and uninquisitive tongues who would not question the presence of a strange vehicle with distant number plates that might rest for half an hour among the trees and off the road short of their community.

Harrison felt himself bracing his muscles as if trying to push his way further back into the interior of the van, crawl on his buttocks away from the rear door. He heard the slamming at the front and the gouging scratch of feet on the ground that walked along the length of the side walls and then the noise of a lock being turned and a handle being tugged. When the door opened there was a slight smudge of light filtering through the weave of the hood and the floor of the van bucked under a new weight. He felt the shape, alien and revolting to him, brush against his knees and thighs, and then there were hands at the hood, scrabbling close to his chin, at the back of his neck, as the cloth was drawn back across his face. He wanted to scream, wanted to vomit, to expel the fear. Taut, tensed, terrorized. The smell of garlic was close to his nose, and the odour of a farm.

The light, brilliant, blinding, flooded over him, hurting so that he screwed up his face and tried to twist away. But he was not just turning from the intrusive sun, but also from the man who was bent double under the low roof and now loomed above him.

Boots close to his head, hard, roughened, unpolished, cracked with wear. Trousers that were old and patched and shapeless, grease-stained. A shirt of red check material, sleeves turned high on muscled forearms. And dominating, compelling his eyes, was the hood, black cloth with eye slits and the crudely cut hole that simulated the position of the mouth. Nowhere for Harrison to writhe to. Nowhere for him to find refuge. The hands, coarse and blistered, thrust to the tapes across his mouth. One savage pull ripped them clear and left the skin as a vast, single abrasion.

He coughed hard, spluttered with his face smarting, eyes heavy with tears at the sharpness of the pain.

No word from the man above who screwed up and tossed away the jumble of adhesive tape. There was another silhouetted against the light of the doorway, and Harrison saw him pass forward a roll of bread that bulged with lettuce and tomato and ham. Big and fat and filling it would have been if he were hungry.

The bread was placed against his mouth. He bit and swallowed.

Bit again, swallowed again. Around him an awareness of the surroundings grew. The tastes were of the far countryside, distant and removed from the city that was his home. The air was closed to urban sounds, open only to the calls of the birds that were free and roaming at their will. Harrison ate half the roll, could stomach no more and shook his head, and the man threw it casually behind him, successful in his aim avoiding his friend. They let him swig from a bottle of water; aqua minerale, lively with gas and bubbles from the movement of the van. One drink and then the bottle was withdrawn. He lay numbly still, unresisting, as his face was again taped. Instinctively he pleaded with his eyes because they were the only vehicle of argument left to him, but the hood was returned to its place. Back in his realm of darkness, his stomach ground on the food it had taken down, his bowels were loose and confused by the content of what he had eaten. He heard the back door close, the lock being fastened, the men walking back to the front of the van. The engine started.

No threat, no kindness. No cruelty, no comfort.

Men without any minuscule, foetal sensitivity. Vicious bastards, without emotion, without charity. To take a blindfold off a man who was terrorized, holding his muscles to keep his pants clean; to rip the gag from his mouth and offer him nothing, nothing in communication, nothing as one human being to another. The one who had fed him had worn on the third finger of his left hand, the hand that held the bread, the wide gold band of a wedding-ring.

He had a wife whom he would hold close to him and sweat and grunt his passion against, and children who would call to him and laugh. The bastard, the fucking bastard, who could extinguish compassion, drown it, say not a word, give not a sign to a fellow creature who was in pain and suffering and alone.

So help me God, if ever I have the chance I'll kill that bastard.

Beat his head with a stone, smash and pound and break it. While he pleads, while he cries, while the blood spatters. So help me God, I want to kill him, I want to hear him scream.

You've never hit anyone in your life, Geoffrey, you wouldn't know how.

The van moved off.

They drove slowly into the village of Pietramelara. The driver found what he was looking for without difficulty. A bar with the circular sign of a telephone dial that heralded the presence of a coin-box machine. He left his passenger in the seat, nodded respectfully to the village priest hurrying home for his lunch, accepted the smile of greeting. Conversation in the bar was not interrupted. The driver pulled from his pocket a clutch of gettoni, the tokens necessary for the call. He took from the breast pocket of his shirt a packet of cigarettes, and deciphered the number written on the inside of the cardboard lining. Six gettoni he required for Rome. He remembered the zero six prefix, then carefully repeated the seven figure number from the packet.

When the answer came he spoke quickly, gave only his first name and that of the village and his estimation that the journey would be completed in eight hours.

Had there been difficulties?

There had been none.

The call was terminated by the other party. The driver did not know to whom he was speaking. He walked back to the van anxious to be on his way. He faced a long drive, far into the very toes of the Italian boot, into the mountain country of Calabria.

And tonight he would sleep in his own cottage, sleep against the cool stomach of his woman.

The driver's contact would permit the organization in the group that had kidnapped Geoffrey Harrison to make their first contact with the Englishman's home. They now knew that their merchandise was far beyond the reach of rescue by the polizia, that the cordons and road blocks were way outstripped.

Claudio stood with his hands in his pockets among the little groups of waving Romans. A varied sadness painted all those who watched the train, the anaconda, snake away from the long platform of the Termini, bending at the first far curve, engine already lost. Mario and Vanni gone, settled into their seats in the grey carriage that carried the sign of Reggio Calabria, nine hundred kilometres to the south. Their going left Claudio without a companion, condemned to wait away the night, contain his resentment that he was not with his friends. Time to be killed and frittered as a man does when he is in a strange city that has no heart, no belonging for him.

Once he waved, simply and without demonstration, lifting his arm and waggling his fingers at the train as it diminished and blended with the softness of the heat haze that distorted and tricked.

As Mario and Vanni walked along the platform he had been tempted to follow and join them, but fear of the men of the organization was enough to cast the apple from big Claudio's mouth. Some before had discarded the instructions of the organization, trifled with their orders. All had been awarded a fine funeral, two or more priests to celebrate the Mass, many boys to sing in the choir, enough flowers to cover all the stones in the cemetery, enough tears to make a dead man believe he was mourned. Claudio had stayed behind and waved; he would catch tomorrow's train.

He swung his eyes away from the converging, empty tracks and headed for the bar and the first of a new session of Perroni beers that would help him watch the hour and minute hands of his watch.

Later he would find a room near the station.

Sometimes hurrying, sometimes slowly when the lethargy bred from failure was on him, Giancarlo searched among the familiar places, the rooms and corridors where he expected to find his friends. He had gone to the Faculty of Letters where the walls were bright in a technicolour of protest paint and wandered the high plaster-coated corridors, past the stripped notice-boards, past the locked lecture theatres, into the quiet of the library. To some who were relaxed and lounging in chairs he had spoken.

Not with confidence but sidling towards them. He had mentioned a name and seen a head shaken; moved on, another name, shoulders shrugged in response. On from the Faculty of Letters to the Faculty of Social Sciences and further echoing and deserted corridors that rang with his thin-soled shoes and in which reverberated the laughter of those who belonged and knew their place.

Hopeless for him to ask the question directly.

Where are the people of the Autonomia? Where can I find any member of the Autonomia? It was not information that would be given to a stranger, not in a casual conversation. He plodded on, wet and constricted in his clothes, dampened and caught in his unhappiness. On from the Faculty of Social Sciences, heading for the Faculty of Physics. Two hours Giancarlo paced the University complex. There was no one he knew among the students who sat and talked in the sunshine, or walked with their bundles of books, or crouched over the printed words of their study texts. No one who could send him with a smile and a gabble of directions to where he might discover the people of the Autonomia.

Still careful, still watchful, he hesitated by the great opened doors of the Faculty of Physics, pausing in the shadow short of the sun-bright steps that led down into the central yard of the University, traversed with his eyes, as a fox will when it sniffs the early air before leaving its den. Giancarlo quivered, stiffened, focused on the grey gunmetal Alfasud parked back and out of the light, far into the shade of the trees. The car was distinctive because of its radio aerial, high and set above the right rear wheel, and because of the three men sprawled in the seats. Bearded two of them, clean-shaven the third, but all of them too old to be students. He watched the car for many minutes, hidden by shadow as it was, observing the men fidget and shift in response to the comfort of their seats, assimilating their mood, their state of preparedness. There was nothing exceptional about the police being there, he told himself, the place crawled with the pigs and their informers, and there was no urgency about these men as they watched the young people move across their vision. Dumb bastards, because even if they had his name and his picture they telegraphed their presence by their age, by their location.

Had they his name yet?

Not so quickly, surely, not within a few hours. Confidence and depression, ebullience and fear, competed in the boy's mind as he scurried for a side entrance and cover among the parked buses at the Tiburtina termini. Rampant in his imagination was the sight of the three men low in the seats of their car. The one with his newspaper, the one with his arm trailing through the open window with the dangled cigarette, the one with the barely opened eyes. They had made him ran, hastened the end of his fruitless, wasted search, and that was how it would always be, till the gutter time, till the shooting time, till he no longer needed to scan the cars and the faces for the polizia.

Pig bastards. There would be a moment when he stood his ground. A moment when they would know of him. When, Giancarlo? The moment when he would take Franca Tantardini from them. By yourself, Giancarlo? There was a pain at the boy's eyes, and agony behind the lids, because this was a public place among the buses and the people who waited and they must not see him weep.

He climbed on to a bus. Chose it not for its route but because it was one that did not have a conductor to collect money and hand out tickets, and relied instead on a machine and the honesty of passengers.

Heart pumping, blood coursing fast, the little boy who had lost his protection and was running.

The girl in faded jeans and a flowing, wrist-buttoned blouse came quickly to the top of the high steps at the entrance to the Faculty of Social Sciences. She paused there, raking the open ground in front of her, then jogged down the steps and across the car park towards the grey Alfasud. It was not remarkable that she could identify the unmarked police car, any student could have done that. As she approached the car she saw the interest of the occupants quicken, the cigarette stubbed, the newspaper dropped, the backs straightened. At the driver's open window she hesitated as the men's eyes soaked into her, for this was a public place for an informant to work.

'You are looking for a boy?'

The cool smile from the front passenger in response, the lighting of another cigarette.

'Dark curly hair – jeans and a shirt – not tall, thin.'

The man in the back seat flipped casually at a notepad in which were scribbled words.

'A boy like that came into the library, it was just a few minutes ago. He was nervous, you could see that, in his voice, in his h a n d s… '

The notebook was passed to the front, examined with a secrecy as if the knowledge written there were to be denied to the girl.

'… he asked a friend if two boys were in the University. The boys are both of the Autonomia, both were arrested after the last fight, more than three months ago.'

She was answered. The front passenger drew his Beretta pistol from the glove drawer and armed it, the man in the back groped to the floor for a short-barrelled machine-gun. The driver snapped a question: 'Where did he go?'

' I don't know. There is the students' lounge, he went in that direction…'

The girl had to step back as the car doors whipped open.

Hand-guns pocketed, the machine-gun closed to view under a light jacket, the three policemen ran for the Faculty entrance.

They searched methodically for an hour in the public places of the University, while more men of the anti-terrorist squad arrived to augment their efforts. There were curses of frustration at the failure of the hunt, but satisfaction could be drawn from the knowledge that the identification if it were genuine showed that the kid was short of a covo. It would not be long before the boy was taken, not if he were scouting the University for friends more than twelve weeks in the cells.

That night the University and its hostels would be watched.

Men would be detailed to stand in their silence in the shadows and doorways. Pray God, the bastard returns.

By telephone the message from Pietramelara was relayed to the capo. That the initial moments of the kidnapping of the Englishman had met with success he knew from the radio beside his desk. The communique bearing the fruits of his enterprise had been broadcast with commendable speed by the RAI networks.

How they help us, he thought, how they facilitate our business.

And now the cargo was moving beyond the scope of the road checks. Soon he would authorize the initial approaches to the family and the company, and set in motion the financial procedures in the matter laid down by his specialist accountant. A fat, choice haul, and the lifting sharp and surgical.

It was not for a man of the prominence of the capo to consider and burden himself with the machinery of the extortion of ransom; a team he paid did that; he paid them well so that tracks should be smothered and hidden. He let himself out of his office, locked his door from a wide ring of keys and crossed the pave ment to his car. For the long journey to the south and the hill village where his wife and children lived, he used the Dino Ferrari that would eat into the kilometres to the Golfo di Policastro, where he would break the journey back to his family.

Beside the sea, in the sprouting coastal resorts, his business was fuelled by the new and flourishing source of revenue. He cut a good figure as he climbed athletically into the low-slung sports car. To the superficial watcher there was nothing in his bearing or his dress to link him with profitable crime, painstakingly organized, ruthlessly executed. He would be at the resort area by early evening, in time to take a functionary of the regional planning office to dinner, and when, the man was drunk and grateful for the attention the capo would leave him and motor on to his villa in the Aspromonte.

He drove aggressively from the kerbside, attracting notice. To those who saw him go there was a feeling that this was a man on whom the sun shone.

Violet Harrison had no clear intention of going to the beach at Ostia that afternoon. Nothing definite in her mind, no commitment to escape from the funereal movements of her maid, but there had to be an alternative to sitting and smoking and drinking coffee and straining for the telephone's first ecstatic ring. She had taken the three newest bikinis from the drawer of the chest in her bedroom, one in yellow, one in black, the third in pink with white dots, and laid them with a neatness that was not usually hers out on the bedspread, and looked at their flimsy defiance.

"Bit on the small side, isn't it?' Geoffrey had laughed. 'Bit of a risk running round in that in these parts.' That was last week and he'd slapped her bottom, kissed her on the cheek and never mentioned it again. But written all over his bloody face, What's an Old Girl like you wanting a Teenager's fripperies for? He'd settled in his chair with a drink in his hand and a folder of accounts on his lap. 'Bit on the small s i d e… ' and he'd held her most recent purchase, pink with white dots, between his fingers, dangling. She'd found it in the boutique window down past the market, wanted it, urged herself to buy it. She'd ignored the superciliousness of the stare of the shop girl, tall and manicured and straight-backed; haughty bitch who said with her eyes what her husband had spoken five hours later.

Violet Harrison had only worn the pink and white bikini once.

Just the one time, the day before, while she lay on the beach at Ostia and listened to the virulent run of conversation around her.

Couldn't understand a word they said, to her it was a medley of silly chatter and giggling and exuberance. But it made a state of independence for her, a secret hideout. Among the people and litter from the ice-cream wrappers and the beer bottles and Pepsi cartons, it was her place, unknown to the cool and monied world of the inhabitants of Collina Fleming. Marvellous she felt there, bloody marvellous, and the sun burned into her skin, and the sand flicked across her face and went unnoticed. The nearest thing to happiness and guiltless pleasure. And then the silly kid had started talking to her. All part of the game, wasn't it? All part of the scenario of escape and freedom. A silly little kid trying to pick up an English matron, old enough to be

… his aunt anyway. Trying to pick her off as if she were an au-pair on an afternoon out. And he'd said he'd be there that afternoon.

It's not my bloody fault, Geoffrey.

What am I supposed to do? Dress in black tights and put Polaroid specs on so that people can't see that I haven't cried for four hours? Put flowers round the living-room and wear soft shoes so I'll make no noise when I pace up and down, and keep the bloody place looking like a laying-out parlour?

What do you want me to do? Sit here all day, sit here and weep, and ask Mummy to come out and hold my hand and make mugs of tea? I don't mean that, Geoffrey, not like that. I don't mean you any harm. I can't just sit here, you understand that, I can't just eke it all out. I'm not strong enough, that's what I mean…

I'm not a public person's wife.

But I'm not going to go, anyway. I mean it, I'm not going to the beach. I'm going to stay here and wait for the telephone, that's what I have to do, isn't it? I have to suffer with you because you're out there, somewhere. Are you frightened, Geoffrey?

… A man came to see me, some idiot from the Embassy, and he said they wouldn't hurt you. Well, he didn't quite say that, but they won't actually hurt you if everything goes well, if nothing is wrong. That's what he said.

She grabbed the bikini from the bedcover, the little cotton triangles, the linking cords, the fastening straps. Crushed them in her fist and hurled the pieces towards the corner that housed the neat formation of Geoffrey's shoes.

She started to run from the bedroom, drawn always faster by the piercing, siren call of the telephone. Crashing through doors, slipping on the smooth floor surface. The caller was patient, allowed the bell to ring out its summons, let the persistence of the noise swamp the flat, cutting the walls, floating to the crannies.

Again the air-conditioning was not working.

Michael Charlesworth sat in his office, jacket draped over his chair, tie loosened, top three shirt buttons undone. No surprise, the air-conditioning, had to be phlegmatic about it. What chance of finding a maintenance man who wouldn't carve half the wall off pulling at the pipes, and who wasn't like the rest of the city, prostrate with the heat or on holiday?

Sweat coated the paper in front of him, running the ink where he'd written with his ballpoint, and beside his elbow the telephone was still wet from his palm print. A great quiet in a building usually leaking with noise; the Ambassador and his guests at lunch, attaches and First and Second Secretaries disappeared to the shaded restaurants near the Porta Pia and the Via Nomentana. The typists had covered their machines, the clerks locked their filing cabinets. Charlesworth scribbled on fiercely.

He had started with a list of his immediates. A call to Carboni at the Questura, to ensure the message was discreetly fed to the afternoon newspapers that Harrison's office was standing ready to receive contact. He had barely put the phone down when Violet Harrison rang; she had seemed detached, distant. Enough for him to wonder if a doctor had called with sedatives. She had spoken of a message and a man who talked only in Italian and she had shouted and he had shouted, each obliterating the words of the other. There was a great calmness about her, as if a narcotic were at work, and a politeness as she had told Charlesworth that she was going out for a few hours.

'I can't just sit here,' she'd said, matter of fact, untroubled by crisis. ' I can't just hang about. I think you understand.'

He had tried to reach the Ambassador, sent a spiritless message through to the Personal Secretary, and received the reply he anticipated.

' If nothing has changed the Old Man would be happy to see you about five. He wouldn't want to be disturbed before that At least, not unless it's a case of life and death, you know.'

A nice girl, the Personal Secretary, long and leggy and combed and sweet, projecting out of cotton print dresses, but fierce and loyal in her protectiveness. And what was a case of life and death?

A guy on his back, crapping himself and bound so that he lay in his filth, and savage bastards round him who'd kill if it was to their advantage. Life and death? Not in the Old Man's terms, not enough reason to spoil a good lunch. And there wasn't anything new, not if he were honest about it. Just that a woman was having a plucky try and likely to succeed at a nice and public nervous breakdown, not a special woman who knew an MP back home with clout, or who'd figure on the Embassy scones-and-tea invitation list. But Michael Charlesworth hadn't provided the granite pillar for Violet Harrison to support herself against nor the shoulder, nor the handkerchief. A dreadful woman, awful manners, disastrous sense of occasion, but worthy of some small charity – yes, Michael Charlesworth? His teeth played on his lower lip as he heaved in his chair and grabbed again for the telephone.

' It's ten minutes since I asked for that London call, sweetheart. Ten minutes, and that's too long.' He called her Miss Foreman normally.

' I can't help it Mr Charlesworth. The operator on International won't answer. You know how it is.' The syrup voice of a lady who knitted and took holidays in Welsh hotels off-season, and thought of Italians as dirty, and wished she was twenty years younger, not too old to be loved.

'Can't you just dial it for me, darling…?'

'You know that's not allowed, Mr Charlesworth."

'You can dial it for me.' Wearying of the game.

'You'll have to sign for it. One of the girls will have to come up to Second when she's free and get your signature…'

'Just get me the call.' Charlesworth's temper fraying, ragged.

'As soon as we've looked out a priority form and a girl's available I'll send her up.'

'Get me that bloody call, get it now. Dial it A man's bloody life may depend… '

'You don't have to swear, there's no need for offensiveness.'

'Just get me the call, darling. I'll sign the Priority later, but it's important that I speak to London and that cretins like you don't waste any more of my time.'

The earpiece exploded in the sounds of switchboard mechanics.

Plugs extracted, plugs inserted. Numbers dialled and whirring on their arcs. The ringing tone. He'd never spoken to Miss Gladys Foreman MBE like that. Doubted if anyone ever had, not in three decades anyway. Like urinating right across the lounge carpet at a stand-up buffet at the Residence.

Two rings and the plastic, automated voice of a faraway girl.

' International Chemical Holdings. Can I help you, please?'

' It's the British Embassy in Rome. Michael Charlesworth speaking. I need to talk with the Managing Director.'

Delays, re-routings, a false start and the call retrieved. Charles-worih sat at his desk, soaking the sunlight, telling a secretary that he was damned if he was going to prdcis his message and that he wanted her master, and she should pull her bloody finger and get off the line. Yes, he could wait a moment, he could wait all day, why not? Different whether the other blighter could, whether Geoffrey Harrison could.

'Adams speaking. What can I do for you, Mr Charlesworth?'

Sir David Adams, captain of industry, clipped voice, a brusqueness that demanded information and warned against wasted time.

' It's good of you to speak to me. I have to tell you that your representative in Rome, Mr Geoffrey Harrison, was kidnapped this morning on his way to your office.' Charlesworth paused, cleared his throat, a guttural clatter, then launched into the few available facts, recounted his conversations with the Questura.

Not a great deal to say, and the inadequacy hurt.

' I've read in the newspapers of these happenings, but I confess I was under the impression this was an Italian problem, a domestic one.' A sharp voice distorted to a high pitch by the static of the communication.

'Your man is the first of the foreign business community.'

'And it could be expensive?'

'Very expensive, Sir David.' Lurched to the heart of the issue, hadn't he? Charlesworth contained himself from laughing. Get the priorities right, lad. Get the balance sheets organized and the rest follows.

'To get him back, what sort of figure might we be talking about?'

'The asking price might be anything up to four or five million dollars.' That'll set him swinging in his black leather chair, that'll start him gawping out over the City skyline. 'There might be a possibility of negotiation, but it won't be easy for a company like yours to plead poverty.'

'And if we don't pay?'

'Then you are in for a long widow's pension. Mrs Harrison is a young woman.'

'Well, that's a Board decision. And in the meantime, what action should we take?'

'The only thing you have to do is to get that decision taken, and fast. It could go very hard for Mr Harrison if the group that hold him thought you were prevaricating. As you probably realize, in this country there is a tradition of paying up, they would not respond well to the breaking of that custom.'

Don't ever say I didn't root for you, Geoffrey Harrison. Don't ever say I didn't go in there with two feet kicking. A silence on the line, the big man chewing on it, deliberating. A slow smile winning across Michael Charlesworth's face.

When Sir David Adams spoke again, the chisel had blunted in his voice. 'It's a great deal of money, Mr Charlesworth. My Board would have be very certain that it's totally necessary to pay the sort of sum you mention. They won't like it. And there's a question of principle too; there's a tradition in this country that we don't crumble to blackmail.'

'Then you would have to make the decision that on a point of principle you were prepared to sacrifice the life of Mr Harrison.

Of course, it might not come to that, but the possibility, perhaps the probability, exists.'

'You are very frank, Mr Charlesworth.' There was the trace of disapproval in the scraped gravel tones. 'If we suppose, and only suppose, that we were to pay a very considerable sum, then who would control the arrangements?'

' It would be best done by your office in Rome. The Embassy couldn't get involved.'

Charlesworth heard the low laugh in response. Ten minutes they'd been talking, ten minutes in querying the profit and loss columns, and whether a ransom should be paid. Principle or expediency. A martyr for the greater good of the majority or a shame-laden deal for the return of one man. Perhaps, Charles worth thought, he'd minimized the issues at stake. Perhaps a line had to be drawn. No deals, no bargains, no compromise, there would be many willing to shout that clarion call. If you gave in once, if you slipped one time into the shadows with a suitcase of used banknotes and a string of Zurich bank account numbers, then how many other poor bastards were going to follow the road of Geoffrey Harrison? Not his business, though, not his concern, because as he'd said most clearly, the Embassy wouldn't be involved, would stand detached within its glass walls and watch and murmur occasional interest. That was why Sir David Adams, Managing Director of International Chemical Holdings in the City of London, could laugh lightly at him, without humour, without rancour, at the moment of dismissal.

'You've been very kind, Mr Charlesworth. I'll get one of my people on the plane this evening. I'd like him to be in touch with you.'

The call was terminated.

Michael Charlesworth flopped back into the small comforts offered by the plastic padding of his chair. A time for reflection.

He must call Miss Foreman, he must apologize, and there would be some flowers for her basement bunker tomorrow in the morning. And then the bell again, the bloody telephone.

The Questura had been informed from the offices of ICH in Viale Pasteur that a demand of two million dollars for the return of Geoffrey Harrison had been received. There should be no contact with the police, further details of arrangement for payment would follow through intermediaries. Dottore Carboni was not in his office at present but he had requested that the information be passed to Signor Charlesworth. There were mutual thanks and politeness.

Two million dollars. More than a million in sterling at whatever the fluctuating rate. Four million Swiss francs. Cascades of figures. And less than he'd thought it would be, as if those who had taken Harrison had settled for a bargain basement price and would not haggle and barter, but expect settlement without delay.

Michael Charlesworth changed his mind. He would apologize in person to Gladys Foreman. He fastened his shirt buttons, straightened his tie, slipped on his jacket and walked slowly out of his office. He wondered what the man looked like, Geoffrey Harrison, how his voice sounded, whether he'd be good company for dinner, if he told a good joke. He felt himself inextricably involved with a man he did not know, could not picture and might never meet unless a company on the other side of the continent jettisoned an issue of principle and made available more money than he could decently imagine.