Killing Ground (34 page)

'I am sorry . . .'

'What for?'

'You did not give me a telephone number for you. I could not telephone you.' He hung his head. 'I do not have the time to walk in Palermo.'

Charley blinked. Trying to be casual, trying not to show that she had looked forward to the day, the escape, ever since she'd rung him. 'So you got your room cleaned up and you don't have to do the guide bit, lucky old you. I suppose that makes us quits.'

He fidgeted. 'I have the day off from the school. It was my intention to escort you around Palermo. I have the school, and I have another life. For the work of my second life I have to deliver, urgently, some things.'

'I'll come.'

'I think, Charley, you would find it very boring.'

As if he sought to dismiss her. Shit. She could turn round and she could walk out of the door. As if he told her that she intruded.

'Try me. What's the second life? I've nowhere else to go. I mean, the duomo has been there best part of a thousand years, expect it'll keep another week. Where have you got to go?'

'I have to go to San Giuseppe Jato, and then to Corleone . . .'

'Heard of Corleone. Interesting, yes? Never heard of the other one. Is that countryside?'

'It is into the country.' He seemed to hesitate, as if undecided. She gazed back into his quiet almond-coloured eyes. Come on, Benny, don't play the bloody tosser. She could not tell him about the claustrophobia she had fled from for a day. 'I am a teacher, but I have also other work. I have to see people in San Giuseppe Jato and in Corleone, and I think you would not find it interesting.'

'Then I'll sit in the car.'

'My other work is for the Anti-Mafia Co-ordination Group of Palermo - how can that be of interest to you? Can we not fix another

day?'

Her chin jutted. Axel bloody Moen would have told her to run, not to bother to close the door, run and keep running. The watch was on her wrist. His fingers, twisting, were fine and gentle, a pianist's. She should never relax. His face was of narrow angles, but without threat. She understood the posters on the walls of the room. She challenged him.

'I think that might be of more interest than the duomo. I think I might learn more about Sicily than from the Quattro Canti and the Cappella Palatina, yes?'

As a response he went to the door and unhooked his anorak. He looked around him, as if his room had been invaded, as if he had been boxed and bullied, as if he were too polite to complain, from the basin with the cleaned plates and mugs, to the chair from which the clothes had been taken, to the bed that had been made. He led her outside and onto the wide landing above the old staircase. He turned two keys in the heavy mortice locks.

'Safer than Fort Knox.'

So polite. 'I'm sorry, I don't understand.'

'Just something you say, forget it, something silly. Benny, why do you work against the mafia?'

He started to walk to the staircase. He said, matter-of-fact, 'Because the mafia killed my father. When he was driving me home from the school, they shot him.'

Pasquale had run along three blocks from where the bus had stopped, and run into the building, and not waited for the elevator, and run up three flights of stairs, and leaned panting against the wall while he waited for the apartment door to be opened. He was seven minutes late. He had not overslept, he was late because his car had not started, battery gone, and the man on the floor below who had the jump leads was not at home, and ... He was let inside. Jesu, and they were waiting for him, and they wore their vests and they carried their guns. The magistrate, Tardelli, sat in a chair in the hall with his coat on and his briefcase between his feet, and he looked up at Pasquale and there seemed to be sympathy on his face. The one who drove the chase car scowled and looked at his watch pointedly. The one who rode passenger in the chase car stared at the ceiling as if he did not wish to have a dog in this fight. The one who sat in the back of the chase car stared at him hard and without pity.

The maresciallo said, 'We would have gone without you, but it is against regulations to go when we do not have the full complement. Dr Tardelli has been obliged to wait for you.'

Panting hard. 'Car didn't start - battery gone - my apologies, dottore - one minute, please, one minute . . .'

He felt sick. He felt like dirt. He stumbled away to the spare bedroom, still decorated and furnished for two of the children taken by their mother back to the north. Beside the wardrobe, empty, was the reinforced-steel gun box, full. Fumbling for the key that opened the gun box, and knowing the angered presence of the maresciallo behind him.

Jesu, the wrong key. Finding the correct key. Taking out the Heckler & Koch, dropping a magazine that clattered on the wood floor. Blessings to Mary the Virgin that he had refilled the magazine the previous evening because it was routine that magazines must be emptied at the end of each shift or the mechanism might jam, grovelling thanks to Mary the Virgin that he had refilled the magazine. Snatching the Beretta 9mm with the shoulder holster from his numbered hook, and more magazines for the Beretta, and a box of bullet shells for the Beretta because he had not filled those magazines.

Crouching down and searching in the heap for the bulk of his vest. He stood. He had to peel off his coat, sling the harness of the holster for the Beretta. He had to heave the vest over his head, heavy onto his shoulders. He had to throw on his coat again. The box of bullet shells for the Beretta into the coat pocket, and the emptied magazines. He slapped one magazine into the machine- pistol, and the eyes of the maresciallo were fixed on him, and, thank Jesu, he remembered to check that the safety was on. He breathed hard.

For a moment he stood. Blessings to Mary the Virgin. He came back into the hall and they all stared at him, and there was no movement to the front door, still business to be completed inside, and the expression of the magistrate was sympathy, and the shrug which said the matter was beyond his intervention.

The maresciallo beckoned with his finger, an instruction to follow. Pasquale went after him into the kitchen. The maresciallo pointed with his finger. The flowers his wife had bought, the bright flowers he had taken to the magistrate's apartment, were dumped in the trash can under the sink. Alive, still with colour, thrown away.

'You are, Pasquale, pretend to be, a close-protection guard. You are not the servant of Dr Tardelli, nor are you his friend. Whether you have sympathy for him or a dislike of him, you do your job, and you take your money, and you go home. What you do not do is snivel sentiment. I will not have on my team any man who, remotely, becomes emotionally involved. I come back from three days away and I find that little presents, little gifts of flowers, have been given. Your job is to protect Dr Tardelli, not to make a friendship. He is a target, a principal target, and the best way to protect him is to remain aloof from him as a personality. We do not travel each day with a friend, but with a paccetto. To you he should be just a parcel that is taken from here and delivered safely to a destination. You should not try to wrap ribbons around a parcel. You are on assessment, on probation, and I remember everything. If you are ready, may we, please, leave?'

Pasquale stumbled out into the hall. He had told his wife how much the magistrate, poor lonely man, had appreciated her flowers. There was the clatter of the guns being armed, the static and distorted chatter of the radios. They took the paccetto down to the street, to the cars.

'Do you want to wait in the car, or do you want to come in?'

'I think I'd like to walk around the town - I mean, it's sort of famous, isn't it?'

Benny said, sombre, 'You should not walk alone around the town. Afterwards, if you want, I can show you the town. For now you should come inside with me or you should wait in the car.'

Charley said, sullen, 'If I should not walk around the town without an escort, then I will come with you.'

She snapped her body out of the tiny AutoBianchi car. She stretched and felt the sunlight. Of course she had heard of Corleone - she had seen the first film at college with Marlon Brando starring, and she had seen Godfather III on video with Al Pacino starring. They were parked near the carabineri barracks. Pretty bloody ordinary it looked to her, Corleone. They had come into the town on a wide open road from San Giuseppe Jato, where Benny had left her in the car while he collected a photocopier from a small house. He hadn't talked much as he had driven through the countryside between San Giuseppe Jato and Corleone. Axel Moen would have kicked her backside because she had bullied her way into Benedetto's day. It had been spare and empty talk on the road after they had left the confined tight streets of San Giuseppe Jato. They had talked of the horses that grazed the grasslands in the expanses between rock outcrops, and of the wild flowers of yellow and burgundy, and of the handkerchief-sized plots of vines growing where a vestige of cultivation could be scratched in soil above the stone, and there had been hawks climbing above the outcrops of rock which she recognized as the kestrels and buzzards of home. Benny didn't know what the horses were used for, didn't know what the flowers were called, didn't know what was the sort of grapes grown here, didn't know about the hawks. She had been talking, nothing talk, about the hawks on the cliffs at home, when he had told her abruptly, almost with rudeness, to be quiet, and he had slowed, and then she had noticed the military road block, and they had been waved through, boring ... If Sicily was a battleground, if it were the place of Axel bloody Moen's war, then she had only a single military road block to tell her of it. They had driven into Corleone on a broad street and past a street market that seemed to sell everything from clothes and furniture to vegetables and meat. No troops and no police, nothing that was familiar from television of war on the streets of Belfast. The sun was on her back and she walked after Benny as he carried the photocopier.

So she had annoyed him by pressing her presence. So he could bloody well put up with her. Doggedly, she followed.

They went by a school and there was a clamour of kids' voices from inside. There was an emblem on the wall of the school, not large and not ostentatious, of doves flying. She read, 'AI MARTIRI DELLA VIOLENZA' - hardly a monument to war, not much of a mark for a battleground. He went through the open door of a house. Quite sharply, he gestured for her to sit on a hard chair in the hallway, and he left her there as he went through to an inner room. She heard the excitement of women's voices, and two women came into her view and were hugging Benny and thanking him and he carried the photocopier into the room where she could not see him. Their voices clattered in her ears. She thought she was excluded - bugger that. She stood, she walked to the door. They were bent over the old photocopier and Benny was on his knees and plugging it to a socket. Their voices died. She was excluded because she was a stranger.

There were the same posters on the walls that she had seen in his Palermo room. Benny flushed. He told the women that the Signorina Parsons was English, that he had met her when she was attacked in the street, that he had promised to show her the antiquities of Palermo, but the photocopier had to be delivered.

'So she is a tourist in Corleone?'

'So she comes to see the wickedness of Corleone, and perhaps to send a postcard?'

Charley rode the sneers. She turned away, defiant, and took her seat again. She heard their laughter from the room. Perhaps they teased Benny, for bringing a tourist. He was distant when he came out of the inner room and each of the women made a show of kissing him on the cheek, and she thought their politeness to her was a charade. Did he screw them? Did he screw anyone on that narrow little priest's bed? Did Axel Moen fuck anyone on any bed? She smiled, lied her simplicity with a smile.

Out in the street, innocent and simple, 'What do they do?'

'They have a newsletter to issue, but the photocopier is broken. They produce a newsletter for the Anti-Mafia Co-ordination Group of Corleone.'

'Is it a big circulation?'

He matched her innocence and simplicity, but there was no lie. 'Very small, very few people, which is why we have such humble resources, a room and two women and a photocopier. In Corleone is the culture of the mafia, but you would not know that. It is the heart beat of the mafia - from Corleone to Palermo, from Palermo across the island, from the island to the mainland, from the mainland to Europe and over the ocean to America. It is why we speak of the octopus, with many tentacles, but the heart beat of the beast is here. The sindaco speaks against the mafia, the priest denounces the mafia from the church, but that is politics and religion, and they change nothing.'

'When will something change?'

He smiled, innocent and simple. 'I will know that something has changed when we need two, three photocopiers.'

'Tell me about Corleone. Show it to me.'

He looked at her. His eyes that squinted against the sun were grave, as if he feared that she mocked him. 'Forgive me - so that you can buy postcards and boast to your friends at home that you were in Corleone?'

'Please, walk me through the town?'

'Why?'

Axel bloody Moen would have kicked her arse, would have said that she lurched on the edge of disclosure, would have snarled that she was at the cliff face of complacency.

'It's just, what I've seen, a street and a market and a school and blocks of apartments and a barracks. I can't imagine what you are fighting against.'

'I think you would be bored.'

'I want to understand.'

They walked to the piazza. Old men watched them from under the bars' awnings and youths sat astride their motorcycles and eyed I hem from under the shade of palm trees.

The sun beat on Charley's .arms and on her shoulders.

'It is the town of Navarra and then of Liggio and then of Riina .and then of Provenzano. Now it is the town of Ruggerio. To you, I he stranger, it will appear like any other town. It is unique in Sicily because here no businessman pays the pizzo.