Killing Ground (18 page)

The prisoner had requested the second interview. Word had again been passed. The prisoner had again been brought by the secret and circuitous route to the bare-walled room. The wretch trembled. Pasquale knew the oath that he would have sworn. In a locked room filled with already sworn Men of Honour, the darkness of night outside to conceal their gathering: 'Are you ready to enter La Cosa Nostra? Do you realize there will be no going back? You enter La Cosa Nostra with your own blood and you can leave it only by shedding more of your own blood.' Pasquale thought the wretch trembled because he would then have been asked in which hand he would hold a gun, and the trigger finger of that hand would have been pricked with a thorn sufficient to draw blood, and the blood would have been smeared on a paper image of the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, and the paper would have been lit and it would have been dropped, burning, into the palm of the wretch's hand and he would have recited the oath and then condemned himself if he betrayed it - 'May my flesh burn like this holy image if I am unfaithful to La Cosa Nostra.' The wretch would have sworn it, with blood and with fire, and now he squirmed.

'For Ruggerio, I get the guarantee for Mario Ruggerio . . . ?'

The magistrate's fingers drummed on the table. Pasquale watched him. The shoulders were rounded, the chin was slack, there seemed no evidence of the core strength of the man, but the maresciallo had spoken, musing, of his courage and quoted, as if it were relevant to this man too, the saying of the dead Falcone: 'The brave man dies only once, the coward dies a thousand times each day.' Pasquale listened. If they were close to Mario Ruggerio, if they threatened the freedom of Mario Ruggerio, they were all endangered - not only Rocco Tardelli's life was hazarded, but also the lives of the ragazzi who stood in front of Tardelli and beside him and behind him.

'If, through your efforts, Mario Ruggerio were to be arrested, then I would recommend that you be given the privileges of the Special Protection Programme.'

The silence hung between the bare walls, eddied with the cigarette smoke towards the single fluorescent strip. Because Pasquale knew the oath that the wretch had sworn, the depths of the oath made with fire and blood, he shuddered. The maresciallo, sitting behind the wretch, leaned forward to hear better. The magistrate scratched at the head of a pimple on the side of his nose as if it were not a matter of importance to him.

There were tears in the prisoner's eyes.

'He is in the Capo district of Palermo . . .'

'Now, today?'

'I heard it a little time ago, Mario Ruggerio is in the Capo district.'

'How long is a "little time ago"?'

'A few months ago, in the Capo district.'

The hardening of the accent of the magistrate, leaning forward across the table and allowing the smoke to brush his face. 'How many months ago?'

'A year ago.'

Pasquale sagged. There was a sardonic and bruised smile on the face of the maresciallo. Rocco Tardelli did not imitate them, did not sag and did not smile. He held the prisoner's eyes.

'Where, "a year ago", in the Capo district, was Mario Ruggerio?'

'He used a bar . . .'

'Where was the bar in the Capo district that was used by Mario Ruggerio?'

'He used a bar in the street between the Via Sant'Agostino and the Piazza Beati Paoli.

Several times he used the bar, but once he ate almond cake in the bar and his stomach was disturbed. He said, I was told, it was a shit bar that served shit almond cake.'

'That is what you were told?'

'Yes . . .'

The prisoner's head was bowed. An oath was broken, an oath made on blood and fire was fractured. The tears ran brisk on the wretch's cheeks.

The magistrate said, serene, 'May I recapitulate what you have said? It is important that we understand the information you pass me. In return for eighteen million lire a month, and for your freedom, and for the ending of the legal process against you that is a charge of murder, in return for that you offer me the information that a friend told you that Mario Ruggerio had mild food poisoning in a bar in the Capo district.'

The blurted response. 'He would only have used a bar in the Capo district if he lived there.'

'If he lived there a year ago.' So patient. 'That is everything?'

The prisoner's head rose. He looked directly into the face of the magistrate. He wiped the tear rivers from his cheeks. 'It is enough to kill me.'

Later, after the prisoner had been taken, with his face hidden by a blanket, back across the yard to the medical centre, after they had called a halt to the football game in the car park and loaded into the Alfa and the chase car, after they had emerged from the safety of the perimeter fence of Ucciardione Prison, after they had hit the traffic and blasted a way clear with the siren, Rocco Tardelli leaned forward and spoke quietly into the ear of the maresciallo. Pasquale drove, fast, using brakes and gears and accelerator, and listened.

'It was of importance or not of importance? I have my own opinion, but I wish for yours. Or is it not fair for me to ask you? I believe him. I believe Mario Ruggerio would indeed inhabit a rat hole like the Capo district. He has no use for luxury, for gold taps, for silken sheets and suits from Armani. He is a contadino, and the peasant cannot change. He would be happy there, he would feel reassured there, in safety. But it was a year ago. A summer has gone, an autumn, and a winter, and now I have to deliberate as to whether to use my authority to divert pressed resources to the investigation of information that is stale. We have to pick at crumbs and pluck at straws as if we starved and as if we drowned ... It is not fair for me to ask you, I must walk my own road.'

They stood back and they watched.

The swing was good and the pivot was good and the contact was good and the flight was good. The ball flew. Before the ball had landed Giuseppe Ruggerio bent to pick up the plastic tee peg, then he went forward and reached down for the divot, cleanly removed like a dropped hairpiece. Now he glanced up to see the final bouncing of his ball on the sand ground of the fairway, then turned to replace his divot.

They murmured as they watched.

'He's useful, can't take that from him.'

'Useful but, God, he doesn't hide that he knows it . . .'

'Where did you meet up, Giles? Where did your paths cross?'

Giles Blake heaved up his bag. The Italian, his guest, was already striding off down the grassed avenue between the dull winter heather and the broken-down bracken. 'I've known Peppino for ever . . . You know, there's too many generalizations about the old Italian. Get a good one and you've the best you could meet anywhere. He's a dream to know. He's decisive, knows what he wants. Better than that, no cash-flow problem, loaded with investment funds. I had an introduction in Basle, sort of took it from there .

. .'

They walked. Their voices were lowered and they held a pace up the fairway that kept them beyond the hearing of the Italian ahead.

'What's he looking for?'

'That about sums it up. I mean, Giles, lunch was bloody good, I'm not averse to a golf round and a decent lunch, but what's the bottom line?'

'He's pretty good company, I'll grant you, but why are we here, Giles?'

Giles Blake could give the sincere smile, do it as well as anyone, and he could laugh quietly. 'You're a hell of a suspicious bunch. OK, he has funds. He needs to place monies. He's like any other banker I've ever known. He moves money, and he looks for opportunities that will benefit his clients and stockholders. I think some rather seriously wealthy people use him, people who are looking for discretion . . . Hold on, wait a minute, I'm not talking about "funny" money, I'm talking about "quiet" money. For Heaven's sake, it's not "hot" money. Be quite honest, I've always found him good as gold.'

'Where do we fit in?' the banker asked.

'What can he offer that interests me?' the investment manager asked.

'What should I pitch for?' the property developer asked.

'How long have I known you chaps? Barrie, fourteen years. Kevin, since '85. Don, we've done business for nine years. I wouldn't think any of you have had much to complain about. Am I going to see you, you know my track record, short-changed? Am I hell. Cards on the table. Meeting with Giuseppe Ruggerio was the best thing that happened to me. Believe me, I'm really happy to have made this introduction.'

In front of them, the Italian had stopped by his ball. The ball would have been at least fifty yards ahead of any of theirs. The banker was no golfer, had no clubs, had come for the walk . . .

Barrie, the banker, asked, 'What does he want?'

Kevin, the investment manager, asked, 'There's no dirty, nasty bit?'

Don, the property developer, asked, 'Where do we go?'

They were, all three of them, trusted and tried friends of Giles Blake. They were friends over the business desk and across the social scene. They met for the rugby at Twickenham, for the cricket at Lord's, for the opera at Glyndebourne, and they shot together. They put business each other's way, they made money. They were the new elite, tolerant of success, intolerant of obstructions.

'Barrie, what I'm saying is this - what he's looking for is an opportunity to move funds into a good UK house where his cash is going to be rather better managed than where it is now. Kevin, we're talking quite substantial funds - do you really think I'd be involved if it were "dirty and nasty"? Not damn likely. Don, what I know, you've got a hell of a large white elephant sitting in Manchester, short of the top seven storeys, and the backers have pulled the rug on you. We're talking about him having twenty-five available for starters. I would have hoped twenty-five million sterling on a three-way split with commission . . . I'm sure there would be a little mark of gratitude, would go down as well as that Chardonnay at lunch ... Of course I vouch for him. Look, you know what Italians are like. Italians are paranoid about the old tax man in their own backyard.

They like their money overseas and they like it held quietly. It's the "no names, no pack-drill" bit. Can't you live with that?'

'There would be commission?'

'Kevin, certainly there would be commission - it's the way they do business. It's no skin off my nose if you're not interested, chaps . . .'

Giles Blake walked away to his own ball. He would push the matter no further. He had done what he was paid to do. He provided discreet introductions for Giuseppe Ruggerio, the overseas player, who constantly searched for new pipelines through which to feed money. He sought out and befriended contacts who would make double-damn certain, in return for commission, that the paperwork on 'due diligence'

would be ignored. He assumed, and he would not have dared to press the point, that he was one of many used as fronts for the washing of money and its ultimate layering into legitimate finance.

He played his stroke. He watched Giuseppe Ruggerio club his own ball towards the distant green. He called quietly to the Italian to come to him.

They stood at the side of the fairway. The banker and the investment manager and the property developer were in deep talk.

Giles Blake said quietly, 'They're jumping because they're greedy. Three-way split.

They need it, why they're nibbling.'

'And quiet people?'

'As the grave, when they've banked their commissions.'

'Because if they are not quiet . . .'

The voice died. They walked on up the course towards the green, Giles Blake and Giuseppe Ruggerio ahead of their guests. It was a fine course, used on several occasions a year for championships. Until Blake met the Italian there had been no way, not till hell froze over, that he could have afforded the membership fees. Nor could he have afforded the house a dozen miles away, nor the horses, nor the children's schools.

He was owned by the Italian . . .

The threat had been made before the voice died. He thought that Giuseppe Ruggerio understood only too well that the threat did not have to be articulated. He knew of the banker who had unsuccessfully handled the funds of La Cosa Nostra and who had been strangled and then hanged from a rope under a London bridge. He knew of an investment broker in New York who had failed to predict the last great fall in the international markets and who had been found dead on the paving below his balcony.

He knew of the import/export man in Toronto who had been found knifed to death off Yongue Street, the hookers' area, with dollar bills stuffed in his mouth. He knew of those who had died after failing La Cosa Nostra because Giuseppe Ruggerio had told him of them.

'A very pleasant day, Giles. I am having a very pleasant day. Before we were joined by your guests we were talking of the opportunity of the antique furniture markets . . .'

Each day the file on Giles Blake had worked lower in the detective sergeant's pending tray. There was a method. Each day the bottom file in the pending tray was retrieved from oblivion, shown the light and placed on the top. Harry Compton, when the Giles Blake file reached the top again, should have given it attention, but the bloody solicitor's paperwork was defeating them. If the paperwork of the bloody solicitor, the bastard, did not give up its secrets, then the shit was going to be spinning across the ceiling and they'd be looking, bloody certain, at 'harassment', at 'wrongful arrest', at

'punitive compensation'. Over a quick sandwich and tea from a polystyrene cup, he leafed fast through the top file, swore because he had done nothing in the best part of a week, then scribbled a note.

TO: Alfred Rogers, Drugs Liaison Officer, British Embassy, Via XX

Settembre, Rome, Italy. FROM: S06, D/S H. Compton.

Alf, Sorry to interrupt the rest module in which you have, no doubt, settled easily, and hope this does not disturb your necessary siesta. Meanwhile, some of us are paid to work, not scratch their blackheads, you jammy bugger!! If your Italian colleagues have learned how to operate the computer (if!!), get them to check Bruno Fiori, Apartment 5, Via della Liberazione 197, Milan. Confession, don't know what I am looking for -