Killing Ground (26 page)

She could tell nothing from the clothes hanging in her wardrobe. She could not recall exactly where her sausage-bag had been on top of the wardrobe.

She thought that her bras had been on top of her pants in the middle drawer of the chest, and now they were underneath.

Charley stood in her room and she breathed hard.

'Is that all you said?'

'I said the test transmission had been OK, I told her that she was not to relax. Because nothing has happened she should not be complacent.'

'That's all?'

'There wasn't anything else to say.'

The archaeologist was hunched down on the stone slab and his back was against the square-fashioned rock that was the base of the cloister column. He sketched rapidly, and to reinforce the detail of his work he used a tape to measure height and width and diameter. It was natural, when an expert came to the duomo and studied the history of the construction of the cathedral, that a busy-minded and prying bystander should come to talk with him, question him, disturb him. So natural that none of the tourists or the priests or the guides took note of the archaeologist and the bystander. There was a bag by the feet of the archaeologist, and from the bag a chrome aerial was extended to its full length, but the aerial was wedged between the spine of the archaeologist and the base rock of the column and was hidden from the echoing flow in the cloisters of the tourists and the priests and the guides.

'Vanni said, 'You make it hard for her, very hard.'

Axel did not look up from his sketch pad. 'She has to find her own strength.'

'You gave her no comfort.'

'That's crap.'

'Did I tell you the story about dalla Chiesa?'

'General dalla Chiesa is dead.'

'Vanni grinned. 'I don't wish to be impertinent to my friend, to the eminent archeologo, and I think you are most sensible to pursue the cover, give it authenticity. I think it is right you are not "complacent" - but an archeologo takes lessons from the past, and General dalla Chiesa is of the past and offers lessons.'

'It is difficult to study detail when one is subject to the boring interruption of a stranger, don't you think?'

'Vanni said, conversational, 'There was a story that the general told of when he was a young carabiniere officer in Sicily, some years before he achieved the fame of destroying the Brigate Rosse. He had a telephone call from a captain under his command who was responsible for the town of Palma di Montechiaro, which is near to Agrigento. The captain told dalla Chiesa that he was under threat in the town from the local capo. He went to the town, he met the captain. He took the captain's arm, held his arm, and walked with him up the street of Palma di Montechiaro and back again. They walked slowly, so that everyone in the town could see that he held the captain's arm.

They stopped outside the home of the capo. They stood in silence outside that house until it was quite clear, no misunderstanding, that the captain was not alone. Do you still listen to me, my friend the archeologo?'

Axel did not look up from his sketch pad and his calculations. 'I listen to you.'

'Years later, General dalla Chiesa came to Palermo to take the post at the Prefettura.

He found himself mocked, sneered at, obstructed and alone. Each initiative he tried to make against La Cosa Nostra was blocked by the corruption of the Government. In desperation he telephoned for a meeting with the American consul in the city. I drove him there, to see Ralph Jones. I sat in on the meeting. The general begged of Jones that the Government of the United States should intervene with Rome, "do something at the highest level". At the finish of the meeting, the general told Jones the story of Palma di Montechiaro, and he said, "All I ask is for somebody to take my arm and to walk with me." I drove him back to the Prefettura. At the end of the day he dismissed me. His wife came to take him home. He was killed, with his wife, that night in Via Carini. He was killed because he was alone, because nobody had taken his arm and walked with him.'

'What do you want of me?'

'Vanni's voice was close and hoarse. 'Should you not take her arm, Codename Helen's arm, and walk with her when she is alone, and give her comfort?'

'I can't give her the strength. She must find it for herself.'

The bystander walked away from the archaeologist, left him to his research.

'No.'

'I'm sorry, Mr Parsons, but I have to be quite clear about this. My question was, did you have a telephone call a week ago from Bruno Fiori?'

'Same answer, no.'

They sat across the fireplace from Harry Compton. He thought they were scared half out of their minds.

'And you don't know an Italian who uses the name of Bruno Fiori?'

'No.'

'Would you care to look at this, Mr Parsons?'

He was deep in his chair in the small front living room, and reaching into his briefcase, and he passed to the man the printout list of the telephone calls. The woman sat close to her husband and her eyes were down and staring at the card he had given them. His card had that effect on people, 'Metropolitan Police Fraud Department, Harry Compton, Detective Sergeant, Financial Investigator' frightened the shit out of them.

The man glanced at the list of calls made from the hotel room, two London numbers and his own number.

The man glowered back defiantly, like he was trying to show that he wasn't scared half out of his mind. 'Yes, that's my number.'

The woman said, eyes never leaving the card, 'It was Dr Ruggerio who called.'

The man's glance flashed at his wife, then, 'We were telephoned by Dr Giuseppe Ruggerio. And may I ask what business that is of yours?'

'Better that I ask the questions. Why did this Giuseppe Ruggerio telephone you?'

'I'm not going to be interrogated, without explanation, in my own home.'

'Please, Mr Parsons, just get on with it.'

He wrote a fast shorthand note. He heard the name of Charlotte, an only daughter.

He could see from his chair out through the open door of the living room and into the hall. He could see the photograph of the young woman in her graduation gown and her mortarboard at a cheeky angle. He heard the story of a summer job in 1992. And a letter had come, and the invitation for a return to minding children. The information came in a slow and prompted drip. Charlotte had given up her job and was now in Sicily. The wife had gone to the kitchen and come back with an address, and Harry wrote it on his pad and underlined the words 'Giardino Inglese'.

The father said, 'Dr Ruggerio telephoned but Charlotte was . . . she was out. I spoke to him, he just said how much they wanted her. I was against it, her going. She's thrown up a good job. God knows what she's going to do when she gets back. Jobs aren't on trees.'

The mother said, 'They're a lovely family. He's such a gentleman, Dr Ruggerio, very successful, banking or something. David thinks that life is all work, and what's work done for him? Chucked out without thanks, redundant. I said that she would only be young once. They treat her like one of the family. If she hadn't gone, she'd have been old before her time, like us.'

He closed his notebook, slipped it into his pocket. He stood. He was asked again why he had an interest in Dr Giuseppe Ruggerio, and he smiled coolly and thanked them for their hospitality, not even a bloody cup of tea. He went out into the hall. He looked at the photograph of the young woman and made a remark that she was a grand-looking girl. He took his coat from the hook. The man opened the door for him. He could hear the sea beating on shingle away in the evening darkness. A woman was across the lane, clinging to a dog's leash and staring at him as he stood under the porch light. He saw a man hunched in a lit window across the lane and peering at him through small binoculars. Behind a board advertising bed-and-breakfast (Vacancies), a curtain fell back to its place. God, what a dreary and suspicious little backwater. He started down the path to the gate.

The hiss of the woman. 'Aren't you going to tell him?'

The man's whisper. 'It's not his business.'

'You should tell him.'

'No.'

'You should tell him about the American . . .'

Harry Compton stopped, turned. 'What should I know? What A merican?'

TO: Alfred Rogers, DLO, British Embassy, Via XX Settembre, Rome.

FROM: D/S Harry Compton, S06.

Please get your leg off the beautiful women and ditch the bottle you will inevitably be busting open. Do me SOONEST a P check on Dr GIUSEPPE RUGGERIO, Apt 9, Giardino Inglese 43, Palermo, Sicily.

Ruggerio believed to be in finance, banking? Interests me because he uses alias of BRUNO FIORI. Don't break a blood vessel at the chance of actually doing something useful. Come up with the goods and I'll stand you a half-pint at the Ferret and Ferkin on your next extended (!) leave.

Bestest, Harry.

He had the scent, the smell was in his nostrils. He gave the sheet of paper to Miss Frobisher for transmission to the DLO, jammy sod, in Rome. Bloody good job, that one, soft old number. His detective superintendent was out of the building. It would have to keep, what he had to share, but there was a good bounce in his step. The day that the invitation to travel down to Palermo had reached Charlotte Parsons there had pitched up on her doorstep an American from the embassy, from the Drug Enforcement Administration. 'He said that if I talked about him, what he said to me, then I might be responsible for hurting people.' He'd bloody well find out, too right, what Americans were doing running round foreign territory to scoop up compliant and untrained agents.

Charlotte Parsons's father had said that his daughter was 'pressured' to travel. The boss would like it. Harry's boss had been skewered and minced and chewed by the FBI the last summer at the Europol fraud conference in Lyon. He'd come back bruised from France, worked over for suggesting that international crime was a figment of American imagination. He'd said, loud, at a seminar that international crime was a fantasy-land, and been told for all to listen that he was talking rubbish and that the Brits were just part-time players. Harry had heard it from the inspector who'd travelled as the detective superintendent's bag-carrier. If the Americans had taken an English girl, 'pressured' her, dragged her in, then his boss would not mind hearing of it, too right.

In two years, not more than three years, he would have sufficient money to buy the pizzeria.

Each time that he was paid, in American bills, he sent them by post to his son. He had enough money already to buy a pizzeria in Palermo, nearly enough money to buy a pizzeria in Milan or Turin, hut to buy a pizzeria in Hanover, near to the railway station, was more costly. His son and his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren lived in Hanover. They were, and he thought it was quite shameful to his own dignity, a part of the immigrant underclass in Germany. JHis son worked at night in the kitchen of a trattoria in Hanover, his daughter-in-law went to the trattoria in the mornings to clean it and to lay the tables. When there was sufficient money his son would use it to buy a pizzeria, and he would go to Hanover with his wife and with his son and he would live the last of his days there. The pizzeria in Hanover was the limit of his dream, and he and his wife and his son and his daughter-in-law would take it in turn to sit behind the cash desk. In return for the money, a thousand American dollars a month, he supplied information. The money came to him each month whether the information he supplied was important or whether it was insignificant. The money was a certainty, just as it was a certainty that he could not cease to provide the information.

Trapped, corrupted, he stood one morning each month in the park in front of the Palazzo Reale and he watched the mothers with their children and their babies and waited for the contact to be made. He did not know the name of the man who came to him, nor did he know to whom the information was delivered. One morning every month he reported on what he had seen and heard, nothing written down, and then he walked from the park and along the Via Papireto and he would stop at the post office and buy the stamps for Germany. He would send the money. At the Palazzo di Giustizia he would show his identity card, walk past the soldiers, climb the wide steps, go to the rest room and open his locker and change into his uniform, and then he would go to the armoury and draw his firearm and the holster, and then he would take the elevator to the upper corridor where he saw and he heard, and he would bring the small cups of espresso coffee to the magistrates and prosecutors. One morning each month his dream of buying the pizzeria in Hanover came closer.

A man stood beside him, and asked with courtesy whether he had a match for a cigarette, and they talked, as men talked who stood in a park and watched the mothers with their children and their babies.

The policeman said, '. . . He spoke in Italian, but the accent was American. "Yes, I'd like that, espresso, thanks." He was not Italo-American because he had a fair skin and gold hair. I recognized the one who brought him, that was Giovanni Crespo, who is of the ROS in the Monreale barracks. He was not an American journalist because Tardelli never sees journalists, and when I brought the coffee I was not permitted by Tardelli's guards to take the tray inside myself. The tray was carried inside by Tardelli's man. I remember last year, in the winter, when an American came and I was not permitted to take the coffee inside, and then I heard the guards say that the American was the Country Chief of the DEA from Rome. The American was with Tardelli for fifteen or twenty minutes. What I can tell you of Giovanni Crespo, he is with the squad of the ROS that searches for the super-latitanti. The American wore casual clothes, not the clothes that are worn for a meeting with a person of the position of Tardelli, jeans and an open shirt, it surprised me, and he did not carry a briefcase but a small bag. I cannot be certain, I think there was a firearm in his waist but under his shirt. I estimate that he weighed near to 80 kilos, a height of perhaps 1.80 or 1.85 metres. He wore his hair long, like a hippy, and his hair was taken at the back with an elastic band, fair hair. I wondered how it was possible that such a man could be brought to meet Tardelli . . . I know also that Tardelli has met with a team from the squadra mobile, they were dressed very roughly, so it is a surveillance team. Again I was not permitted to take in the coffee. The story on the corridor, but it is only gossip, is that Tardelli had the big argument with the prosecutors and magistrates, I don't know . . .'