Killing Ground (10 page)

If he were not away on the bank's business, Peppino came to the villa at weekends.

Seven weeks of sun, oil and sand and ice-creams and lazy evening meals and a growing love of Angela and her children. The good clothes from the Via Corso boutiques were left behind. The time for T-shirts and jeans and bikinis, and the fourth day on the beach Charley had taken courage and unhooked the bikini top and felt a desperate blushing shyness at the whiteness and lain on her stomach on the towel while Angela had lain on her back beside her, and never worn the top again and known her own parents would have called her a slut. She had talked of poetry with Angela and known her own mother had never read Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth. She had talked of social sciences, Angela's degree course at the University of Rome that had specialized in local administration, and known that her own father had believed the world began and ended with the study of marine engineering. It was the time of her liberation. And it had ended

... It had ended in tears in her small room at the apartment when she had packed her bag, ended in tears as she had hugged them all and kissed them all at the departure gate, ended in tears as she had walked alone to the aircraft. Magic was not real, was illusory.

She had come home from a Roman summer of liberation and freedom to the drab college that trained her to teach.

Basta, enough of me waffling on. I think you are providing me with another fantastic opportunity to travel - which I certainly cannot afford to do on what I am now paid!! - I don't know anything about Palermo except that it is a city very rich in history. I cannot imagine it, cannot see it in my mind, and yet already I am excited.

She did not he often, but it was a lie when she wrote of her ignorance of the city and its images. She was taken, her recall, to (he images on the television screen of the apartment on Collina Fleming. The killing of Judge Giovanni Falcone had been twelve days before her arrival in Rome, that summer of 1992, but the killing of Judge Paolo Borsellino had been forty-five days after her arrival . . She sat in the classroom, with her lunchbox and her emptied can of Pepsi, and she remembered the images of the television . . .

It was only afterwards, after she had seen the images, that she had understood the quiet in the capital that weekend afternoon as she had browsed her way from the Colosseum to the Partheneum, and the quiet on the bus that had dropped her by the Ponte Flaminio, and the quiet on the street as she had walked under the pine trees towards the apartment on Collina Fleming. She had called her greeting in the hall, and not been answered, and she had gone into the little sitting area where they had the portable television. Even the child, Mario, and the baby, Francesca, had been hushed. Peppino, grim-faced, had sat in front of the television and stared at the screen, and the chin of Angela, beside him, quivered. So it was a lie for Charley to write that she had no image of Palermo. The image in bright colour was of the front of a block of flats, demolished, and of a car that had held 50 kilos of explosives, disintegrated, and of the faces of Judge Borsellino and five bodyguards, destroyed. That was the image of Palermo, and there were more images for her to recall because the television broadcast, interrupting normal schedules, had then shown the scene of the killing, fifty-seven days earlier, of Judge Falcone and Judge Falcone's wife and Judge Falcone's three bodyguards. The images were of the demolished facade of an apartment block in Palermo and of a cratered highway with broken cars scattered among rubble at Capaci. Peppino and Angela had sat with their silence and Charley had watched, seen and slipped away to her bedroom as if she had feared she had intruded into a world that held no place for her, but it had all been far away from Rome and was not referred to again, far away in Palermo.

I am happy to take the plunge. I will sort out the matter of a new job when I get back because this is much too good an opportunity for me to miss - I accept your invitation.

I look forward to hearing your suggestions for my arrival date. Distinti saluti,

Charley (Charlotte Parsons)

Outside the window the bell clamoured the end of the lunch hour. She was twenty-three years old. She heard the screaming, excited babble of the children charging back from the playground. Other than when she had gone to Rome four years earlier, she had never been outside her country. Her hand trembled. She had agreed to take an opportunity for access. She read the letter back. She would spy on the family that had shown her love and kindness and affection.

'Come on, children. Settle down now. Leave her alone, Dean. Stop it. Writing books out, please. Yes, writing books, Tracy. Darren, don't do that. Has everyone got their writing book?'

She folded the letter. She had been told that if she gave serious cause for suspicion, she would be killed and that then her killers would go home to eat their dinner.

To refuse protection in Palermo was to lose the love of life.

Under the yellow haze of car fumes that lay below the surrounding mountains and that was held in place by the light sea breeze, the city was a mosaic of guarded camps.

Palermo was a place of armed men, of carefully sited strongpoints, as it had been throughout history. Soldiers with their NATO rifles, huddled inside bulletproof shelters, held the street corners of the blocks where magistrates and politicians lived.

Police bodyguards in armour- reinforced cars, deafened by sirens, escorted those magistrates and politicians from one defended position to another, from home to work, from work to home. Thug-minders watched over the personal security of the men who figured high on the lists of Interpol's and Europol's most-wanted suspects and had Kalashnikov assault rifles secreted in their cars but close to hand. It was a city of tension and fear, a city where the industry of protection flourished. The industry offering protection, fortresses and safety was spread thick across the city. It covered the servants of the state and the principals of the alternate society, and right on up and right on down through every stratum of Palermo's society. If the magistrate or the politician was denied protection, was isolated, he was as a floor rag left out on a line to rot in the sun, he was dead. If the boss of a family running a district of Palermo ignored the necessary precautions of survival, then other pigs would come to snout out the food in his trough. The hotelier running the four-star albergo must pay for protection or face his guests' cars vandalized, his food contaminated, his business ruined.

He sought protection. The bar owner risked fire if he did not buy protection. A construction magnate risked the denial of contracts and bankruptcy if he did not buy protection. The street vendor must buy it or reckon to have his legs broken, and the street whore on the Via Principe di Villafranca, and the bag thief on the Via del Liberta, and the taxi driver on the rank at the Politeama, and the heroin peddler at the Stazione Centrale. The seeking of protection was a habit of existence, unremarked and unexceptional . . .

To decline protection in Palermo was to refuse to live.

His hands were less painful that day. He could hold the coffee cup with his fingers and not spill the treacle-thick liquid. He thought that his hands were less painful because of the warmth of the spring sunshine on them as he had walked on the Via Marqueda to the bar.

In the bar, where the television played a satellite channel's transmissions of continuous music-promotion videos, Mario Ruggerio met with a man and talked the strategy of killing.

If he had talked with a man who was close to him, close-tied by blood or friendship, he would have said that the matter of killing was abhorrent to him. But there was no man who was sufficiently close to him, not even his youngest brother, in whom he would confide his most prized and inner thoughts. His aloneness, his suspicion of intimacy and sharing, were key attributes that he recognized in his capacity for personal survival. His dislike of the strategy, matter, of killing had little to do with any sense of squeamishness, even less with any hesitation over the morality of taking the life of another of God's creatures. It was to do with security, his freedom.

In the conversation, punctuated by long silences, over the single cup of coffee, down to the dregs of the ground beans and the two sugar spoonfuls, the name of the magistrate was never used.

It was difficult to kill without witnesses. It was hard to kill without leaving traces for the forensic scientists of the carabineri and the squadra mobile and the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia to analyse for evidence. It was complicated to dispose of a cadaver, even if an oildrum of acid were used or the 'heavy overcoat' of liquid concrete on a construction site, or if the body was food for the fishes. All of those who had planned and carried out the killing of Falcone and Borsellino were now in custody, rotting, or convicted in absentia, and, like wayward children, they had scattered evidence around them. The old way of killing, his father's way, was the lupara, which was the short-barrelled shotgun with the spread of pellets but that left blood spatters on walls, streets, carpets, rugs and pavements. The Magnum handgun with exploding bullets was the favourite of the wild young picciotti, the head-case kids, but that too left evidence, shell cases, fractured bullet fragments, blood running to the street drains and smeared through interiors. He preferred the way of strangulation, but that was so hard now on his hands that had the rheumatic pain in them.

They talked, without using the name of the magistrate, right under the television.

The killing of a man served two purposes for Mario Ruggerio. The killing of a man would send a message to his family and his colleagues, and the killing of a man removed an obstacle that confronted the smooth running of his affairs. The killing of the magistrate, discussed in staccato words under the beat of an electric guitar and the hammer of a drummer, would send a message and would remove an obstacle. It was his belief that La Cosa Nostra should strike only when it was threatened and the magistrate, in the opinion of Mario Ruggerio, now endangered him. The shotgun could not be used, nor the Magnum, nor the Kalashnikov fired from the waist on automatic, because it was not possible to be that close to the magistrate. He did not know the workings of bombs in cars or rubbish bins, nor the methods of a command wire or of an electronic firing pulse, but the man he talked with knew of those workings and methods.

He would have preferred a world of quiet, a world where the interest of the state waned. He wished for a world of coexistence. He could reel off, without consultation of notes, the names of judges and prosecutors and magistrates in the Palazzo di Giustizia who also yearned for such a world of coexistence, but in that conversation, in the bar, he did not speak the name of the single magistrate whom he thought now to represent a threat against his precious freedom.

It was agreed that a bomb was the necessary method of attack.

And further agreed that the movements of the magistrate would be more closely observed to find a pattern in his travel. And finally agreed that the matter of killing was a priority.

He slipped away from the bar, an old man in a grey jacket and a check cap on the pavement of the Via Marqueda who attracted no attention, who flexed the muscles of his hand in the Palermo sunshine.

The prisoner had been brought from his shared cell on the third floor of the block. The doctor was the 'cut-out'. The doctor had asked for the prisoner to be brought to the medical wing for routine examination. The doctor and his own staff had been used three times before by the magistrate. The magistrate would not have reckoned on the chances of the survival of the prisoner if it were known in the corridors and landings of Ucciardione Prison that the man, on remand and charged with murder, had requested a meeting. The request for the meeting, a prisoner wishing to talk with Dr Rocco Tardelli, had come in a letter, barely literate, hardly legible, delivered to the Palazzo di Giustizia.

He thought the letter, perhaps, had been written by the prisoner's mother. Men died, some quietly through strangulation, some noisily through poisoning, some messily through bludgeon blows, in Ucciardione Prison when they sought to collaborate. It was of critical importance, at this moment, that it should not be known among the prison staff that a man had asked to see the magistrate who was known to have dedicated his life to the capture of Mario Ruggerio. When the prison staff who escorted the prisoner to the surgery had been dismissed and the prisoner signed for, he had been taken by two of the magistrate's own security detail, his head covered by a blanket that he should not be recognized by watchers peering from the cell windows high above, across the yard and to the room made available for the magistrate.

Tardelli thought him pathetic.

The cigarette that the prisoner smoked was nearly finished and already the man looked longingly at the packet on the table. Tardelli did not smoke but he always carried a nearly full packet in his pocket when he came to Ucciardione. He pushed the packet towards the prisoner and smiled his invitation that the man should help himself again. A new cigarette was lit from an old cigarette and the hands of the prisoner shook.

Tardelli thought him wretched.

They sat in a bare room, on either side of a bare table, they were enclosed by bare walls. There was no window and the light came from a single fluorescent strip on the ceiling, around which wafted the spurted smoke from the prisoner's cigarette. Since the message had come from his office at the Palazzo di Giustizia, the report of a letter without signature to request the interview, the message that had interrupted the celebration of orange juice and chocolate cake, Tardelli had spent the major part of two days studying the file of the prisoner. It was his way always to be meticulously prepared before he faced a prisoner.

The prisoner spoke the name of Mario Ruggerio.

He detested personal publicity, he left it to the more ambitious and the more scheming to give media interviews, but it was inevitable that Rocco Tardelli should be known as the magistrate who hunted Mario Ruggerio. Half a dozen times a year he was told that a prisoner had requested, in conditions of secrecy, to meet with him. Half a dozen times a year a prisoner grovelled for the freedom of the pentito programme, for the opportunity to trade information for liberty. Once a year, if he was lucky, Tardelli would hear information that carried forward his investigation, drew him closer to the man he hunted. They came and they squirmed and they crossed the Rubicon. They condemned themselves to death if they were identified, if they were located, when they broke the God- given law of Sicily, the law of omerta, which was the code of silence.