Killing Ground (21 page)

Where was he? Did he watch her? Was he close by?

They worked with a drill that was powered by a portable petrol- driven generator to pierce the rock so that the stanchions could be buried securely and be proof against the winds on the higher point of Monte Gallo. When the stanchions were secured, the antennae of the microwave radio link were bolted to them, along with the booster that would enable the pulse of a panic tone to be carried across five kilometres to the higher point of Monte Castellacio.

Only when the sun over the city has climbed high, to its zenith, does the fierce light and warmth reach the cobbled alleys and broken pavings of the Capo district. Most of the day the district is a place of shadows and suspicion. It was the old Moorish slave quarter, and it is where the history of the men of the modern La Cosa Nostra is rooted.

In the grey and run-down heart of the Capo district is the Piazza Beati Paoli where, it is said, was the beginning . . . There is a church in the piazza, there is a small, hemmed-in open space, enclosed by high buildings with damp-scarred and crumbling walls and the night's bedding is draped from balconies. It is said by the historians who rejoice in the nobility of the anarchic Sicilian character that the piazza was the safe house of the Beati Paoli, the secret association formed more than 800 years ago. The men of the secret society claimed the right to protect the poor against the foreign rulers of the island.

Their motto was 'Voice of the People, Voice of God'. Their meeting place was in the caves and tunnels under the present piazza. By day they practised normality, worshipped in public. By night they roamed the black alleys, cloaked in heavy coats under which they carried rosaries and knives, and punished and murdered by ritual.

From the men of the secret society of the Beati Paoli was born a word: the word was

'mafia'. Some say the word comes from the old Italian maffia, which describes a man of madness, audacity, power and arrogance. Some say the word was the old French maufer, which denotes the God of Evil. Some say the word was the old Arabic mihfal, which is an assembly of many people. The children of each succeeding generation have been taught the mythology of the secret society, and its fight against the persecution of the unfortunate, and its punishment of the oppressor, and its justification for murder.

What began eight centuries ago had spread now from the grey piazza, flowed and eddied into the city, across the island, over the sea, but it began in the Capo district of Palermo.

'The Capo district, I see. You wish, Dr Tardelli, to cordon off the Capo district... Wait, Dr Tardelli, you have already spoken. Throw a surveillance cordon around the Capo district because - forgive me if I recapitulate - because you have been told by a source that must remain anonymous, that may not be shared with us, because you have information that a year ago an almond cake upset the bowels of Mario Ruggerio. An interesting proposition, Dr Tardelli.'

The grim smile played at the face of the oldest of the Palermo prosecutors. He shrugged, his fingers were outstretched in the gesture of ridicule, his throat burrowed down into his shoulders.

'I request the resources of a surveillance team.'

'Now, I, of course, Dr Tardelli, am not able to devote my life to the investigation of one man.' The voice of the magistrate quavered in sarcasm. A tall man, ascetic, his fingers clinging to an unlit cigarette, he rolled his eyes around the table, before bringing them to bear on Rocco Tardelli. 'My desk is piled with many investigations, all of which require my attention. I, too, need resources. But on the basis of information that is as old as was, no doubt, the almond cake - no, Dr Tardelli, I do not seek to make a joke of this - you wish for a special surveillance of the Capo district. There are, my recollection, at least fourteen entrances into that area. Should we have surveillance cameras for each of them? To do a job at all correctly you must have eight men at any one time on surveillance duty. Mathematics, I regret, is not my strength, but with the duty shifts that would take away twenty-four men from other duties. Then, I make a further addition, and I ask whether the eight men on surveillance duty must have the support of back-up. A further addition, those who watch however many cameras we install. A year ago, on the word of your informant, an almond cake made a problem for Mario Ruggerio, and we are asked to divert an army . . .'

'I ask for what can be spared.'

'Please, Dr Tardelli, your indulgence ... I work in a more simple field, I attempt investigations into the extortion of payments from the public utility companies. To you, Dr Tardelli, I have no doubt that would seem to be valueless work, it is as if I hunt for many cats and not just one tiger. The tiger, of course, may by now be toothless and maimed and harmless, but that is another matter. I assure you, the cats have claws and teeth and kill.' The prosecutor was younger than Rocco Tardelli, was in his first year in Palermo, had travelled from Naples, and would have seen his appointment as a step on a career ladder. He would not be long on the island of Sicily. 'You put in place the valuable resource of a trained surveillance unit, a resource that each week, for my investigations, I beg for, but do you even know what he looks like, the elusive Mario Ruggerio? How - am I being stupid - how can a surveillance team operate, how can video cameras be monitored, if the only photograph of Mario Ruggerio is twenty years old? I do not wish to be difficult . . .'

'The photograph found when his brother was arrested, taken at his sister's wedding in 1976, has now been computer-enhanced. We have aged Mario Ruggerio.'

'You must not misunderstand me, Dr Tardelli. I, I can assure you, am not among them, but there are some, a few, who would be less than generous to you. Some, and I am not among them, would see an unfavourable motivation in your request for these valued resources. They would look, some would look, towards a desire on your part for promoted status. Not me, no . . .' Older than Tardelli, less grey in the visage because he did not live behind shuttered windows and drawn curtains, heavier in the stomach because he ate in the restaurants of the city, the magistrate had long ago sent a signal that had been transmitted, mouth to mouth, and received. He carried out his work, with punctilious care, but always those arrested, charged, convicted, imprisoned, were from a losing faction. '. . . Myself, I believe Ruggerio to be irrelevant, but his capture would play well on television, it would make the headlines in newspapers. The man who claimed credit for that capture would be feted, by the ignorant, as a national hero.

Would the finger beckon, would Rome summon him? Would he sit at the right hand of the Minister? Would he go to Washington to lecture the FBI and DEA, and to Cologne to meet the BKA, to Scotland Yard to take wine? Would he leave us all behind him to go about our daily work in danger, here in Palermo? Some might say that—'

'When you arrest a man of the stature of Mario Ruggerio then you dislocate the organization - it is proven.'

They were his colleagues and they mocked him. They might as well have laughed in his face, they might as well have spat upon him. It was what he lived with.

He looked around the table. He raked his eyes over them. He was accused, behind his back, in conversations in quiet corridors, of 'careerism' and of chasing 'handcuffs for headlines'. In his mind was that description of the dead Falcone, 'a lonely fighter whose army had proved to consist of traitors'. Some of them, he thought, were crushed by the coward's desire to return to normality. But. .. but he should have been more tolerant of cowards. Not every man could make such a sacrifice, pig-headed in righteous duty, as he had done. Not every man could see his wife walk out and take the children, and then go from the silence of a lifeless apartment, in the armoured car, to the bunker office.

There had been no contribution at the weekly meeting from the representatives of the squadra mobile and the Reparto Operativo Speciale and the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia, as if those men stood aside while the prosecutors and magistrates carped and cut at each other.

Tardelli began to gather together the papers in front of him. There was a hangdog sadness in his face, and his shoulders were bowed as if under the weight of disappointment. He spoke with the diffidence that was his own. 'Thank you for hearing me, gentlemen. Thank you for your courtesy and consideration. Thank you for pointing out to me the folly of my ambition and the idiocy of my request . . .'

He stood. He placed his papers in his briefcase. It had been the same for Falcone and for Borsellino, and for Cesare Terranova and 'Ninni' Cassara, and for Giancomo Montalto and for Chinnici and for Scopellitfi, all ridiculed, all isolated, all dead. He had been to the funerals of all of them.

'I will call, in one hour, a news conference. I will tell the world that I have a lead, a slight lead, for the hiding place of the super- latitanti, Mario Ruggerio. I will say that my colleagues in the Palazzo di Giustizia, and I will name them, do not consider this a matter important enough for the allocation of resources. I will say—'

The bluster beat around him.

'That would be disloyal . . .'

'Unfair . . .'

'We merely pointed to the difficulties . . .'

'Of course there are resources . . .'

When he was out in the corridor, when the door behind him was closed on the hatred, when his ragazzi gathered around him with their guns, as they did even on the upper floor, and questioned him with their glances, the magistrate showed no triumph.

Falcone had written, 'One usually dies because one is alone, because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support,' and Falcone, with his wife and his ragazzi, was dead.

Walking briskly, he said to the maresciallo, 'I have been given nine men of the squadra mobile for the surveillance of the Capo district, three shifts of three, and no additional cameras. I have to hope. I have nine men for ten days. If they find nothing, then I am isolated. We should, my friend, be very careful.'

They sweated in the cold wind that hit them. They were at 890 metres above sea level.

The wind buffeted them and rocked the stanchion arms. They struggled to hold the antennae as the bolts were tightened. The clear line of sight was established from Monte Castellacio, across the Palermo-Torretta road, to the greater height of Monte Cuccio.

In a new block, overlooking the moles against which the big ferries from Livorno and Naples and Genoa docked, Peppino had his office. It was lavishly furnished, modern and expensive-Italian. He sat in the wide room with the picture window that faced out over the harbour. The office was a home from home for him, necessary that it should be of the greatest comfort because Peppino spent fifteen hours out of the twenty-four hours of the day there, six days a week, hugging the telephone between his ear and his shoulder, feeding the fax machine, flicking between the channels on the screen that gave him the market indices in New York and Frankfurt and London and Tokyo. He did not take a siesta in the afternoon, as did every other businessman in the city's Rotary or in the Lodge he attended on the third Thursday in the month. He avoided the luxury of a siesta because, single-handed, he managed and moved and placed, each year, in excess of four billion American dollars on behalf of his elder brother.

It was the way of the organization and, in particular, the way of his elder brother that matters of finance should be kept inside the family. It was why he had been brought back to Palermo from Rome. He lived a life consumed by the need to 'clean' money. He was the trusted laundryman for Mario Ruggerio. He was a master at his work, the consolidation and placement, the immersion, the layering, the heavy soaping, the repatriation and integration, the spin-dry. What Angela did in the utility room off the kitchen, Peppino did in his office in the new block on Via Francesco Crispi. Angela washed and cleaned a dozen shirts a week, a dozen sets of socks, half a dozen sets of underwear. Peppino washed and cleaned in excess of four billion American dollars a year. The office was his home. He could cook and eat in his office. He could shower and change in his office. He could take his secretary, when the businessmen of the Rotary and the Lodge were at siesta, to the stark black couch by the picture window.

If the office were his home, if the scale of his work increasingly kept him from the apartment in the Giardino Inglese and the villa at Mondello, Jesu, it was necessary for him to take his secretary to the couch. What his brother said, Mario said, a wife should never be embarrassed . . . Would Angela have cared? If the condoms had spilled out of his pocket, fallen at her feet, would Angela have noticed? Not since she had come to Palermo. Angela would not be embarrassed by any indiscretion of his secretary because the young woman's father was sick with a carcinoma and the treatment was expensive, and Peppino paid for the principal consultant in the field of that necessary treatment.

The rows with Angela came more often now. They lived in physical proximity and in psychological separation. She could have everything that she wanted except divorce, divorce was unthinkable ... So good in Rome, so different. They maintained an appearance. His brother had said that appearance was important.

His feet, shoes discarded, rested on the glass top of his desk, his leather chair was tilted far back. He talked through the final details of a leisure complex in Orlando with the bank in New York and the construction company's operations manager in Miami.

Two phones going, and the talk 'in clear' because the money coming down from New York was cleaned . . .

And just as he washed money for his brother, so Mario Ruggerio had immersed and soaped and spun-dry the younger Peppino. Sent by his brother away from Prizzi, dismissed from his mother, sent abroad, dismissed from his past, sent into the world of legitimate finance, dismissed from his family. The businessmen that he knew in Rotary and the Lodge, the trustees of the Politeama who sought his advice on financial planning, the charitable orphanage in Bagheriaia and the priests at the duomo in Palermo who sought his help did not know of the connection of his birth, were unaware of the identity of his elder brother. Perhaps, maybe, a few policemen knew. There was a magistrate who knew. One interrogation, one summons to come to the offices of the Servizio Centrale Operativo in the EUR suburb, one journey out of Rome. The magistrate who knew had been a pitiful little man, obsequious in his questions, up from Palermo. He had attacked. Was he to be blamed for the accident of his birth? Should he carry his blood as a cross? Because of his brother, he had left home, left the island -