Killing Ground (28 page)

He walked away. He wore a cap so that the long fall of his hair was tucked up inside it. He had sun-glasses on. The windcheater was not one she had seen him use.

She could have panicked, could have pressed the pulse-tone button that was the alarm on her wrist-watch. She'd done well. She had shown good sense. He thought the best of her and it did not cross his mind that she had simply forgotten that she wore the wrist watch with the panic alarm. He went to a shop and bought some sketch pencils with soft lead and buried them in the bag with his sketch pads and his tape measure and the CSS 900 receiver. He was heading for his car. By the late morning he would be back and protecting his cover at the cloister aisle of the duomo in Monreale. He used people, and he goddam well knew it, used them and squeezed them and dropped them.

There was a parking ticket on his car, pinned under the wiper on the windscreen. He glanced at it. He tore the ticket into small pieces and dropped them into a street drain. It would be several weeks before the office where the duplicate tickets were lodged stirred themselves to trace the registration back to the hire company at Catania's airport, and by then Axel Moen would be back in the Via Sardegna office. It could not last more than a month, his reckoning, she could not survive the lie for more than a month. The Confidential Informant designated Codename Helen would, in several weeks, have been used and squeezed and dropped.

It had been a shit shift, but the next shift would be worse. The shift from six in the morning until two in the afternoon was difficult, but at least the street stalls were up in the Capo district, and it was possible for Giancarlo to walk between the stalls and to finger a lemon or a pear or turn over an apple and to look at faces, and to drift on. The shift from two in the afternoon until ten in the evening was worse shit because the stalls had done their trade for the day and were packing and emptying the alleyways, and it was harder in the afternoons and the evenings to hold cover. He had not yet been assigned to the shift from ten in the evening until six in the morning, and that would be the worst shit duty, and Jesu alone would know how to hold cover in the bastard place when the alleyways were darkened, when people hurried, when the bambini roamed over the cobbles on their scooters. Maybe, Jesu would tell him, when he had the shift through the night . . .

A man brushed against his shoulder.

'Anything?'

A sardonic smile. Giancarlo coughed on his cigarette. He spoke from the side of his mouth. 'That has to be a joke. Perhaps, a better joke. Yesterday I took home three lemons, a pear, a quarter-kilo of cheese and an artichoke. Today I take home one lemon, three apples and a cauliflower.' He held up the plastic bag. 'My wife said last night that I intruded on her lifestyle. You would think you would be thanked for doing the shopping.'

'But you don't bring home il brutoT

'The photograph is twenty years old. He could walk past me.'

'We need the buona fortuna.'

'I think, more than luck, I need to have a taste for lemons.'

A sharp smile between them. They were chosen, this team from the squadra mobile, for the quality of their patience. The patience bred an attitude to their work. They could go each day to a street, to an apartment that was used for observation, they could sit in a car and in a closed van, do the shift for a week or for a month and watch the same view and look for the same face. They did not fret and they were not bored, and that was the training bred into them.

Giancarlo left the Capo district. The sun was now on his face, and the smells of the dog shit and the rotting food bags and the old drains were out of his nose. There had to be patience. The guys of the DIA had watched a shop for eight weeks before Bagarella was spotted, and the ROS team of the carabineri had watched a street for eleven weeks before Riina was seen. He went for his bus.

He was an anonymous figure riding the bus home. He bought the clothes for work, in such a place as the Capo district, from a charity shop. He was forty-seven years old, had served eighteen years in the squadra mobile, had volunteered four years back for work with the team specializing in the sorveglianza. They had moved home then. In the apartment block where they had lived before it had been known on the landings that he was a police officer. They had moved on when he had taken the surveillance work. It was the cross that his wife carried, in the new apartment, that he seemed to their neighbours to be another of the city's disoccupati. Better that he should appear as one of the city's unemployed or as a casual tradesman . . . He promised his wife that there would be one more year and then they would move again. It was hard for his wife, difficult for her. She had to tolerate his shabby old handed-down clothes. She had to exist alongside the pistol in the holster and the radio carried in a harness against his skin that were permanent to him when he was on assignment. She had to tolerate the fruit, the vegetables and always the lemons that he bought to hold his cover and dumped on her.

Even on the bus, he watched faces. But the photograph that Giancarlo tried to match to the faces was twenty years old. Faces riding with him, faces on the pavement, faces in cars.

Another day's work finished. There were some operations when Giancarlo, and the guys in the team with him, would feel the chance of a success strike was good, and there were others . . .

Small Mario ran back into the house and shouted for his mother to come.

Francesca stood rooted to the patio, clutching her toy.

The gardener eyed her as he methodically closed the gates behind her.

She struggled up the drive and then up the path between the flowerbeds, and then onto the patio. Charley grimaced when Angela came through the open doors. She saw the collapse of Angela's mouth and chin, as if in shock. Angela had come to her, hurrying, and took Charley in her arms. Charley wept. The tears streamed. Charley hung in Angela's arms, as if she were held by a friend. The tears were wet on the shoulder of Angela's silk blouse, staining it, and she tried to make an apology, and Angela would not have it, and held her. It was a moment of bonding. The tears flowed down Charley's cheeks. Small Mario had taken the cue from his mother and clutched at her waist, as if that were his own gesture of comfort love, and Francesca held herself tight against Charley's legs and cried with her. They went together inside the villa.

Charley felt as though, now, she was protected by Angela and small Mario and Francesca. She was taken through the hall, and as they passed the full-length mirror they saw the pavement dirt in the confusion of her hair and the bruising on her face and the grazing on her elbows and the ripped material at the knees of her jeans. She was sat on a chair in the kitchen. When Angela loosed her, to put on the kettle to get hot water, to find the medical box and the cotton wool, the children still held her. Charley tried to blink away the tears. She wore the wrist-watch. She spied against their love.

'You were robbed?'

Trying to be brave. 'Afraid so.'

'You are hurt, badly hurt?'

'Don't think so. I didn't go to the hospital, didn't seem necessary.'

'The physician will come - robbed of your bag?'

Angela gathered the medical box, the plasters, the ointments, the cotton-wool pad on the table, and she waited for the kettle to boil.

'When I came out of the shop, which Peppino had recommended - I still have what I bought, they're lovely - I just didn't see him come. He must have been watching me. As I started to walk, he came from behind me.'

'It's a foul place.'

'I had the strap of the bag across me, when he pulled the bag I was dragged . . .'

'It's a place of the jungle, home for animals. What have you lost?'

'Nothing that's life-threatening. A diary, that's a nuisance. A credit card, boring.

Make-up, thank God, I'd spent most of what Peppino gave me. He got nothing.'

The water from the kettle was poured into a bowl. Angela, so gentle, began to clean the wounds.

'He stopped the bike. He kicked my face. That was when I let the bag go. He didn't have to, he had my bag. He leaned down and he snatched at the necklace. It broke.'

She took the necklace, broken, from her pocket. She put it on the table. It seemed to her so cheap, so trivial, and the necklace of

Angela was heavy gold and dancing in front of her eyes as Angela bent across her to dab the soaked hot cotton wool on her face.

'For what happened, I feel ashamed. Did anyone help you?'

'Most didn't, one did. He was very kind, a teacher.'

'I am so sorry, Charley. I will call Peppino. It is a foul place, Charley, because the society is bred on violence, a city that makes fear. I feel so great a responsibility.'

'Please, please don't,' Charley said.

The whisper of desperation. 'You won't go back to England, because of this, you won't—?'

'No.'

Angela kissed Charley. The children held her. She would not go home because she was a spy. She thought the watch on her wrist was a talisman of treachery. She was under the control of the cold bastard Axel Moen, who had not been close by, who had not protected her. It was not the filth of the gutter in her hair that dirtied her but the watch on her wrist. The kiss was love, and the children held her in love.

The baby was crying when Pasquale came home, and Pasquale was dead on his feet. A bad night broken by the alarm at four, little sleep before the alarm because the baby then had been crying. And he couldn't tell whether the tiredness on his wife's face was because of the baby's crying or because of her anxiety for his work. Her mother was in the kitchen, trying to quieten the baby, and failing. He didn't want to talk in front of her mother, so he went to the bedroom, and he lay on the bed staring at the ceiling light. He didn't want to tell his wife, in front of her mother, that he had received snapped criticism from the maresciallo. 'If you are tired, you are useless, if you are a zombie, you endanger us all. Don't think you are the only one that has fathered a baby that cries in the night.' He should pull himself together, remember that he was a part of a team.

The maresciallo had said that he had the promise from Tardelli, the magistrate was working at home that afternoon. They could manage, once, without Pasquale. If Pasquale were again found yawning, blinking tiredness, then he would be off the team, the maresciallo had said. He had gone home, feeling shame, and he lay on the bed and could not sleep.

His wife came into the bedroom and she carried a glass of juice for him.

'Is there no overtime? You are early.'

'I was sent home.'

'What had you done?'

'I was told I was too tired. I was told I was not effective. I was told I endangered the team.'

He could not tell whether it was the exhaustion or anxiety that made the lines at her mouth and the bulging bags under her eyes. He did not know whether the end of her prettiness was marked by the birth of the baby or by his joining the team that protected a 'walking corpse'.

'They will get rid of you?'

'I don't know.'

'If they got rid of you . . . ?'

'Then I could patrol outside the Questura, I could stop the traffic for schoolchildren, I could be on the pavement and watch the sirens go by.'

'What do you want?'

'I want to be with him and stand beside him.'

The magistrate had been in the living room of the apartment when the maresciallo had spat the criticism at Pasquale. The living room was his office. The desk where he worked at his computer screen was on the far side of the room from the reinforced plate glass of the windows. The room was always in gloom because the shutters were across the window and the curtains were drawn. When he had left, been sent home, he had passed the door to the living room and seen the magistrate hunched over his computer with the mess of files on the desk and opened on a chair and on the carpet around the desk. He had felt humility towards the magistrate because all the team knew that the phone call had been made at dawn to the magistrate's wife in Udine, and the telephone had not been picked up by Patrizia Tardelli, nor by the children, but by a man. All the team had heard the poor bastard stammer to a man whose name he did not know, in his wife's house, at dawn. A bad time of the day to learn, for sure, that a marriage had foundered, that his wife was fucked by a stranger.

'And me? Do you want to stand beside me? And do you want to stand beside our baby?'

'That is stupid talk.'

'So I am stupid. Each day that you go out, when I am left, I have to consider whether, again, I will see you.'

'He asks of you each day, and he asks of the baby. Each day he remembers you.'

'Each day, Pasquale, I am so frightened.'

'He asks after you, as if he blamed himself for your situation.' Pasquale pushed himself up on the bed. He spoke in bitterness. 'What would you have us do? Would you have us walk away from him, abandon him?'

'Is he so stubborn?'

'He has the fear, we all have the fear. He jokes of the fear, he has learned to live with it.

As I try to, as you have to. Stubborn? Will he surrender to the fear? He is stubborn, and he will not give in to the fear.'

'Is the danger very great?'

He looked away from her. His shoulders dropped back to the bed. He gazed up at the ceiling light. She sat beside him and she held his hand. He thought that she struggled to reconcile their fear with her own fear.

'You have the right to know. We are not supposed to talk of it, not even in the home, but you have the right. He could compromise, he could exist, he could move paper across his desk, he could ride through the city in safety, and we could go in safety with him. The maresciallo says that a man such as Tardelli faces real danger only when he has become a threat to those people.'

'Please.'

'I should not tell you. There is a prisoner in the Ucciardione who seeks the privilege of the pentito programme, and he has given information about Ruggerio, the target of Tardelli. The information is not good but if it is acted upon, it could threaten Ruggerio.'