Killing Ground (20 page)

She stood back. Piccolo Mario was frantically working open the bolts and locks of the door. Angela was in front of the mirror, and she touched her hair and then flicked with her nails to remove something unseen from the shoulders of her blouse. Francesca ran from her bedroom. Charley stood at the back of the hall.

He was a little greyer at the temples. He was, perhaps, a few pounds heavier in weight. He was as she remembered him. He carried bags and flowers and gift-wrapped parcels. The wide smile on his face as he pecked a kiss at Angela's cheek and swung small Mario high in the air and crouched to cuddle Francesca.

He came forward, across the hall, and he beamed pleasure at the sight of her. She held out her hand, shyly, and he took it and then lifted it and kissed it, and she blushed.

'So wonderful that you could come, Charley. You are very welcome in our small home.'

She stammered, 'It's lovely to be here . . . thank you.'

The man who washed money, whose brother was one killing away from becoming the most influential figure in international organized crime, let her hand drop. She was there, she had been told, because the family had made a 'mistake'. Angela and small Mario and Francesca, as if according to a ritual on his return, and she remembered the ritual, were opening their presents, discarding to the floor the ribbons and the bright paper.

'And you have been in Rome, Charley?'

'Yes.'

'Why did you go to Rome?'

She blurted, 'For nostalgia . . . because I had been so happy there . . . because it was the best time of my life. It was an opportunity.' She felt confident because she thought she had lied well.

A brooch of diamonds for Angela, an electronic game for small Mario, a soft toy for Francesca . . .

'I missed the direct flight, had to change in Milan - delay, of course - fog, of course.

You should not have stayed up for me, not until so late.'

Charley instinctively glanced down at her watch. The watch was heavy on her wrist.

She glanced at the watch and the button on her watch. She slipped away. She should not intrude. She went to her room. In her bed Charley pressed the watch against her breast and felt the hardness of it, and she wondered where he was, where Axel Moen waited.

He had been up early.

He had seen Signora Nasello, through a ground-floor door, in her kitchen and wearing a bright dressing-gown, as if in the privacy of her home she did not need to clothe herself in widow's black. In a bar he had taken a coffee and a pastry, and he had gone to the meeting place.

He had not shaved. He was dressed in old jeans and an old shirt, and his hair was gathered back into an elastic band.

Axel waited at the meeting place and gripped a plastic bag close against his thigh, and the Beretta pistol was under his shirt and held by the waist of his trousers. He was off the main street that led down to the piazza and the cathedral. He was high in the town and close to the rock face of the dominating mountain. He stood beside the stall of a man who sold vegetables, and while he waited the housewives came and bartered for beans and artichokes and lemons and oranges and potatoes and shrugged and made to walk away and turned back to give the man their money and to take the bags in return.

The van came from behind him. It was poor procedure on Axel's part that he did not see the approach of the van. He was jolted by 'Vanni Crespo's sharp whistle. It was a builder's van, the sort that would be used by an artisan working alone, small and dirty and rust-flaked. The door was opened for him, and he slid inside and his feet had to find space between a plastic bucket and paint pots, and he needed to duck to avoid the stepladder that jutted from the back of the van out between the front seats. He held the bag on his lap.

'You like it?'

'Taxed, I assume?' Axel grinned.

'Taxed, even insured. Did you sleep well?'

'I slept all right.'

'Did you dream?'

'No.'

'You didn't dream of her, of Codename Helen, not of her?'

Axel shook his shoulders. 'You play CIs, you use them, and when you have finished with them, then you pack them off back where they came from, end of story.'

'And you did not dream of Ruggerio?'

'No.' Axel, quite hard, punched his fist into the side of the Italian's chest. 'Hey, big boy, ugly boy, this woman from Trapani, does she have to go with you in the back of this heap?'

'She has, I thank the Virgin, her own car.'

They lapsed to quiet. They had come to a four-lane road below the town. He felt the keen thrill of pleasure, like he was dosed on ephedrine, like it was when the adrenalin coursed. The adult life of Axel Moen was divided, sharply, between the good times and the bad times. There were no grey shade compromises.

The university at Madison was bad times, no friends and no tolerance of student life, and finding what he rated as juvenile kids, and working alone to get the grades that were necessary. The city Police Department was good times, interesting from the start and better when he'd made detective status and gone to the surveillance team. A Drug Enforcement Administration investigation in Madison that used him as liaison and included him on a covert stake-out, that was good times. Taking the jump, quitting Madison and going to the DEA, joining the recruits at Quantico and being told he had an attitude problem and struggling to stay with the flow, that was bad times.

No warning, 'Vanni swung the wheel. They were checked at the gate by the smart-uniformed carabiniere trooper. They were passed inside, went under the raised barrier. They were a pair of workmen going on a small contract into the main carabiniere barracks on the island. He turned to 'Vanni, nodded his approval. Of course, the comings and goings at the main barracks on the island could be watched . . . They parked away from the main fleet of shining squad cars, near the memorial to the guys shot down in the line of duty. And still they could be watched, and 'Vanni gave Axel a bucket to carry and took the stepladder for himself, and they headed for a side door. He liked 'Vanni because he thought the guy trusted no bastard.

The first assignment with the DEA had been bad times. New York City, and the file had said that he was fluent in the Sicilian dialect, and the Pizza Connection case was going to trial, and there were the hours of wire taps to be listened to and noted, and he had sat week after week, month after month, in a small, darkened room with the earphones on his head and the tapes turning and the light blazing at his notepad . . .

When 'Vanni had fingered in the entry code and they were inside a corridor, they dumped the bucket and the stepladder.

La Paz, Bolivia, that had been good times, working with a small team, running his own CIs, riding in the local Huey birds, getting used to wearing the flak vest and to carrying the weight of an M16. The big shoot-out, the end of the day, hadn't changed La Paz, Bolivia, from rating as good times. Nor being shipped out on a walking-wounded ticket.

They went down a corridor and past the open section of an operations area with consoles and radios. Past a rest room where men sat in chairs and wore casual clothes and the firearms and the vests and the balaclavas were heaped on a table with the coffee cups and the used plates, and 'Vanni told Axel they were the Response Squad of the Reparto Operativo Speciale. 'Vanni said, if the panic tone went for real, that they'd be the guys who'd go running. He'd called in a favour, been allocated the team, dragged in a big debt, refused to explain.

Back to New York, three more years, and that had been bad times. They'd said in DEA and FBI and the prosecutors' offices that the American mainland end of La Cosa Nostra was finished. Tommaso

Buscetta, turncoat, pentito, had blown them away to the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. All over. The Bureau said, on the record, assholes that they were, that the

'mafia myth of invincibility' was torpedoed. A prosecutor said, for quoting, 'The Sicilian mafia's drug connection has been dismantled.' The resources were being drained from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Three years of scrapping with FBI over investigation priorities and pushing reports from desk to desk, three years of hearing that the Sicilians were a back number by comparison with the Colombians, and wondering then why the streets of Chicago and Philadelphia and Atlanta and Los Angeles and New York and Washington, a short walk from Headquarters, were stacked high with goddam heroin. Bad times, until the posting to Rome . . .

Up a flight of stairs, down another corridor, through a door that could be opened only with an entry code, into ' Vanni's office. Axel looked around him.

'If this is home, Christ . . .'

He thought it was a monk's cell. A bare room, with bare walls except for the photograph of a general in best uniform and a smiling portrait of a little girl, with a bare, plastic-topped table and a hard chair, with a bare bed and blankets folded neatly on top of the single pillow.

Axel took from the plastic bag the second of the receivers he had brought to Sicily.

The box was a little longer and a little thicker but the same depth as a hardback book.

He extended the aerial. He showed 'Vanni the on/off switch. He wrote on a sheet of paper the UHF frequency that was programmed into the wrist-watch worn by Codename Helen.

'Vanni said, 'I am only back-up to take the signal. She is your responsibility.'

'I understand that/

'You can take the signal in Mondello, if you sit there, which is not sensible. You can take the signal in Monreale, which is better, but you are a long way from her. On the road, in Palermo, you are beyond contact.'

'I understand that too.'

'In the operations area the frequency will be monitored, through the twenty-four hours, but I cannot tell them the detail of the importance of the signal, I can only lecture them on the priority. At the bottom line, it is your responsibility, Axel.'

Axel said, 'I told her to make a test transmission this afternoon.'

'This afternoon. That is idiot. It's not in place.'

'So shift yourself.'

'You think I have nothing else?'

The quiet smile played on Axel's face. 'You held the pistol to Salvatore Riina's head

- what I think, you'd give your right ball to hold that pistol at Mario Ruggerio's head.'

'Vanni reached for the telephone. He dialled, he spoke, he swore, he explained, he gave his rank, he ordered, he laid down the telephone and looked straight into Axel's eyes.

Distant and quiet, 'Vanni said, 'It will be, for her, like a bell calling from the darkness

. . .'

She half woke when Francesca crawled under the sheet of her bed. A moment before she knew where she was. Charley woke fully when piccolo Mario dragged her bear from her arms. She looked at her watch, she laughed and she tugged back the bear from the boy. God, the time . . . She heard a radio playing and the squeals of the children, excited, drove the sleep from her. She went, dazed, to the bathroom. Washed, teeth brushed, she wandered to the kitchen.

The note was on the table.

Charley, you were like an angel in peace. Giuseppe has gone to his office. I am shopping for lunch. Mauro is sleeping, feed him when he wakes. We meet later, Angela.

The whole of her life was a lie. She thought the lie worked well because she had been given, with the children, the run of the villa for the morning. She was accepted, she had gained access . . . She walked out onto the terrace. There was a freshness in the morning air and she hugged her arms across her chest and the tiles were cold under her bare feet.

She could see, through the gaps between the shrubs and the trees of the garden, over the high wall that ringed the villa. Beyond the wall were rooftops of other villas and beyond them was the bay. Where was he? Did he watch her? Was he close by? She saw only the glass shards set in the wall and the roofs and the distant blue expanse of the sea.

The children followed her into the kitchen. She pulled open the fridge for coffee and juice and a day-old croissant.

Charley thought the villa, its construction, was magnificent, but it was for the summer. Large rooms with high ceilings and floors of tile or marble. Big windows that could open out onto the patios. There was not the furniture to go with the magnificence, nor yet the weather. Angela had explained, seemed to apologize for, the functional furniture that was so mean compared to the fittings of the apartment in Palermo. Angela had said, head dropped, 'I had the place aired, of course, the week before we came, but it is built for the sunshine, not the rain and damp of the winter. You have to excuse us for the wetness. I can barely live with the furniture. You see, Charley, we pay a man a hundred thousand a month and he is supposed to watch the security of the villa. Twice this last winter we were thieved from, we were broken into. You would not leave anything of value here through the winter, the thieving is so bad . . .' She washed the cup and the glass and the plate and the knife. She wandered.

She was alone. She walked barefoot on a paved path. She bent to take the scent of the first of the spring's roses. So quiet around her. The cotton of her nightdress was pressed against her by a light wind. She crouched and took in her fingers the fragile petals of a crimson geranium. She went by a small fountain that spluttered water and she held out her hand and let the cascade run cold on her palm. The watch weighed on her wrist. She tried to believe, as if it were her anthem, that it were possible for one person, Charlotte Eunice Parsons, to change something . . . had to believe it. If she did not believe that she could change something, then she should have stayed at home, ridden her scooter to school each morning and ridden it back to the bungalow each evening. Should have bloody stayed, if she could not change something. She came round a screen where honeysuckle sprawled over a trellis frame.

He watched her.

Christ, the bloody 'lechie' eyed her.

The man who opened the gate, who swept the leaves, who watered the pots of flowers, gazed at Charlie. She felt the thin cloth

of her nightdress against her nakedness. She had thought she was alone . . . An old face, lined by the sun and weathered by the sea's salt, and he stared at her and leaned his weight on his broom. She heard the cry of the baby. The old man with the old face and the old hands watched her. She ran on the coarse stones of the path back towards the villa and the crying baby, and it was seven hours until she would make her test transmission.