Killing Ground (35 page)

Literally that is the small bird's beak that pecks for a little food, but on the island the pizzo is the extortion of money for "protection". In the 1940s, after the liberation from Fascism, a good statistic for you to carry home to your friends, there were more murders here per head of Copulation than in any town or city in the world.'

Charley said quietly, 'You don't have to talk me short, Benny, like I'm only a tourist.'

At the start of the old town, where the streets darkened and narrowed and climbed to the left and fell to the right, Benny bought her a coffee and a warm roll with ham and goat's cheese. His voice was a murmur. 'I will tell you one story, and perhaps from the one •lory you will understand. It is not the story of Navarra, who was the doctor here, and the parents of a twelve-year-old boy who brought the hysterical child to him and told the doctor that the child had seen the killing of a man, and Navarra injected the child with a "sedative" that killed him, and then apologized for his mistake. It is not the story of Navarra. It is not the story of Liggio, who was a cattle thief before he developed the heroin trade of the mafia. And not the story of Riina, who ordered the killing of the bravest of the judges and drank champagne in celebration. Not the story of Provenzano, who is called the trattore here, the tractor, because of the brutality of his killings. It is not the story of Ruggerio. Come.'

She gulped the last of the roll. She wiped the crumbs from the front of her T-shirt.

She followed him out onto the street.

'You will hear, anywhere in Sicily, the stories of Navarra and Liggio and Riina and Provenzano, maybe you can hear the story of Ruggerio. You will not be told the story of Placido Rizzotto, but that is the story that will help you to understand.'

They walked down a narrow street, on cobbled stones. The balconies with wrought-iron railings pushed out from the walls above them, seeming to make a tunnel.

Watched by an old man, watched by children who stopped their football game, watched by a woman who paused to rest from the weight of her shopping bags. No sun on the narrow street.

'First he had been in the army, then he was with the partisans. Then he came back to Corleone, where his father was at a low level with the mafia. Placido Rizzotto returned here with opened eyes from the mainland. He became a trade-union organizer. The mafia detested the trade unions because they mobilized the contadini, worked against the mafia's domination of the poor. To the Church he was a communist. To the police he was a political agitator. Perhaps the mafia and the Church and the police were distracted, but Rizzotto was elected as mayor of Corleone. Do I bore you, Charley?'

They stopped. They were near to the church, a huge edifice, at the front, and a bell tolled, and black-dressed women hurried for the door but swivelled their heads as they went that they might better watch them. Ahead of them was a bank. A fat-bellied guard leaned against the door of the bank, and his finger rested loosely in his sagging belt that took the weight of his holster, and he watched them.

'Ten o'clock at night, a summer night. A friend calls for Placido Rizzotto at his father's home, invites him to come for a walk. All the men in the town are walking in the Via Bentivegna and the Piazza Garibaldi. He was betrayed by his friend. He strolled along the street, and one moment his friend was with him and the next moment his friend was gone . . . All of the men walking that evening on the Via Bentivegna and the Piazza Garibaldi saw Liggio approach Rizzotto, saw the gun put into Rizzotto's back.

All of the men, all of those who had voted for him and who had cheered his speeches, watched him led away as if he were a dog led to a ditch to be killed. Are you bored, Charley?'

The ravine was in front of them. Water tumbled from above them and fell, and the flow was broken by dark stones that had been smoothed over the centuries. Above the ravine was a fortress of decayed yellow stone built on the flat top of a straight-sided rock mass, dominating. They were alone now with the ravine and the fortress, and the watchers were behind them.

'The people went home. They emptied the streets and they locked their doors and they went to their beds. They had surrendered. And Rizzotto did not even threaten the mafia, or the Church, or the police, to all of them he was merely a nuisance. It was in 1948. Two years later his body was recovered by the fire brigade from here. His father could identify him from the clothes, and from his hair that had not been eaten by the rats. A man who had seen Rizzotto taken away said, "He was our hero and we let him go. All we had to do, every one of us, was to pick up a single stone from the street, and we could have overwhelmed the man with the gun. We did not pick up a stone, we went home." It was in 1948 and the culture of fear is the same today. Does my story bore you, Charley, or do you better understand?'

Her father had been three years old when Placido Rizzotto had been pitched, dead, into the ravine below. Her mother had been one year old. She had walked along the same street as the man with the pistol in his back, walked on the same pavements as the watchers had stood on, walked past the same doors through which they had hurried and which they then locked, walked past the same windows in which the lights had been extinguished. Charley Parsons, twenty-three years old, stared down into the ravine below the mountain rock on which the ruin of the fortress stood, and she thought the smell of a rotted corpse was in her nose, and she believed that at last she knew the scent of evil. Christ, yes, she understood.

'Where does Ruggerio come from?'

'From near here.'

'Can I see where he comes from?'

'For what reason?'

She lied, so easily. 'What you said, Ruggerio is the present. Right, I'm just a bloody tourist imposing on your day. It's what tourists do, go and visit a birth place. If you don't want to . . .'

'It's not difficult.'

Each afternoon, after the quarry had closed, after the drivers of the big dumper lorries had gone and the stone-crushers had been silenced, they blasted for the next day's supply of broken rock.

The quarry was cut into the mountain across the river from San Giuseppe Jato and San Cipirello. It was where the expert tested ail the explosive devices he designed.

In open ground, clear of the rock face where the dynamite charges were set, the expert and Tano had carefully parked the two cars. The car the expert had driven was an old Fiat Mirafiori. The car that Tano had driven, level with it but separated by ten metres of space, was a Mercedes, low on its wheels from the weight of the armour plate lodged in the doors. The distance between the cars had been measured with a tape, because the expert had said that in matters involving explosives detail was important.

The two explosions were finely synchronized. At the moment that the dynamite in the quarry face was detonated, the final digit of a six-figure number was pressed by Tano on his mobile telephone and the connection was made to the telephone pager set into the bomb on the back seat of the Mirafiori.

In San Giuseppe Jato and in San Cipirello, the people would have heard the explosion, what they always heard at that hour, and a reverberating echo would have masked the second explosion.

The great dust cloud from the quarry face had barely settled when the expert and Tano went forward. The Mirafiori had disintegrated, beyond recognition. The Mercedes was what interested them. The two parts of the Mercedes, and it had been sliced precisely in half, burned fiercely.

They laughed, the expert and Tano, they were bent at the waist and shouting their laughter at the quarry face from which the last of the fractured rock fell.

By the morning, before the quarry opened for work, the parts of the Fiat Mirafiori and the halves of the Mercedes would be buried under waste stone away to the side of the quarry.

'Do you have a camera?'

She started, she had been alone with her thoughts. 'A camera? Why is it important?'

Snapping, and she thought now he was frightened. 'Charley, I asked, do you have a camera?'

'No.'

It had been brilliant country. Bigger hills than those on Dartmoor that she knew, greener than Dartmoor, but the same wilderness.

They had stopped once, when she had told him to stop. She had stood beside the car, leaned against the warmth of the body of the car, and gazed across a field of wild flowers to the shepherd with his flock and his dog. Something of the Bible of a child, pastoral and safe, and she had heard the symphony of the chime of bells from the sheep, and the shepherd had sung. She thought it would have been an old song, handed down from his family, a song of love. The shepherd never saw them as he sang. Benny had stood beside her, close to her. Her sort of place . . . And the town was above them, and now the nervousness played in his face.

'I don't have a camera. Why?'

'Where we go, you should not use a camera - doesn't matter.'

On a winding road Benny drove towards Prizzi. He parked in a lay-by. The town stretched away from them and above them, a mosaic of yellow and ochre tiled roofs so dense that the streets were hidden.

Benny looked around him, locked the AutoBianchi. He took her arm, fingers on her elbow. He hurried her.

They were on a climbing street. The window of a macellaio took her eye, the thin, strange cuts of meat, unfamiliar to her, and her arm was pulled.

There would not have been room for cars to pass in the road. I wo terraced lines of three-storey homes, wooden doors set under low arches, balconies fronting shuttered windows, plaster and paint in yellow and orange and primrose. He walked fast and she skipped to keep up with him.

'You don't stop, you don't stare.' His lips barely moved as he spoke and his voice hissed as if fear caught him. 'The sixth house beyond the black-painted drainpipe. You have it? Don't turn your head. That is the house, the balconies one above the other, of the parents of Mario Ruggerio. It is where they live, with the brother of Mario Ruggerio, who is simple. You see it?'

He walked and he looked straight ahead. Charley saw a cat, low on its stomach, run from them.

Nothing moved in the street but the cat. The sunlight fell on the house that had been identified for her. The door to the house was open and she heard, fleeting, a radio playing. She smelt, fleeting, the cooking of vegetables. Was that it? Was that the bloody lot? No

Mercedes, no gold taps, no 9-inch cigars, no Rottweilers, no Harrods curtains, bloody hell . . . She defied him. Charley stopped in front of the open door and she twisted her head to look inside, and her arm was jerked half out of the socket at the shoulder. Only the sound of the radio and the smell of the cooking. When she was three doors past the house, he loosed her hand.

'Was that quite necessary?'

'Where do you think you are? Do you think you are at Stratford- upon-Avon? Do you think the Japanese come here in buses? Are you stupid?'

'You don't have to be rude.'

'I am rude because you are stupid.'

He was breathing hard. His lips twitched in nervousness. He walked fast. They came to the end of the road, where more roads, identical and mean and close, veered away into shadow. Christ, where were the people? Where were the kids?

'I am sorry, Benny, I am sorry if I am stupid. Spell it out, start with the camera.'

His feet, a stamped stride, clattered on the cobbles. 'You see nothing here, but you are watched. There would be, of course, a police camera on the street, but that is not important. Because you do not see anybody it does not mean you are not watched.

Behind doors, behind blinds, behind shutters, behind curtains are people who watch. It is the home of the family of Mario Ruggerio, and Mario Ruggerio is responsible for the deaths of many people. Such a man does not leave his family vulnerable to the vendetta of revenge. Because you do not see something it does not mean that it does not exist. If you had a camera, and took a picture of the house, it is likely that we would be followed, and the number of my car would be taken. I do not want, because you are stupid, to have those people match the number of my car with my name. To a man like Mario Ruggerio the family is the most important feature of his life, only with his family does he relax. We should not stay here.'

'Where is the wife of Ruggerio?'

'Two streets from here. Why do you ask, why are there so many questions?'

'Just me, I suppose. Always talked too much.' 'It would not be sensible for strangers to walk from the street of Ruggerio's parents direct to the street of Ruggerio's wife.'

'I was only asking . . .'

He was walking back towards the car. Charley followed.

'In the story you told me, Placido Rizzotto was killed because he was a nuisance. Was your father a nuisance?'

'Not a threat, only a nuisance, which is enough.'

'With the work you do, Benny, are you a nuisance?'

'How can I know? You know when you see the gun.'

'Benny, damn you, stand still. Benny, what is your dream?'

He stood, and for a moment his eyes were closed. Charley took his hand. She waited on him. He said, soft, 'I see him standing, and his head is hung in shame, and the handcuffs are on his wrists, and he stands alone without the backing of his thugs and his guns and his acid barrels and his drugs. He is an old man and he is alone. Around him are the children from Sicily and Italy, from .ill of Europe and from America. The children make a ring around him with their joined hands and they dance in a circle around him, and they laugh at him and they reject him and they jeer at him. My dream is when the children dance around him and have no fear of him.'

He took his hand from hers.

I'eppino had the dollars. They had the bank.

He had not met Russians before, and he thought them quite disgusting.

Peppino had the dollars on deposit in Vienna. They had the bank in St Petersburg.

His first meeting with Russians was in a hotel room near the railway station in Zagreb.

The two Russians wore big gold rings on their fingers, as a whore would, and bracelets of gold at their wrists. Their suits, both of them, were from Armani, which had brought the only dry smile to Peppino's face. The one smile, because he did not think they were people to laugh at, and the cut of the Armani suits did not disguise the muscle power of their shoulders and arms and stomachs and thighs. He assumed they carried firearms, and assumed also that a single blow from the gold-ringed list of either of them would disfigure him for the rest of his life.