Killing Ground (37 page)

'Don't smart-talk me.'

'I rather need to know what I should do. We can put a full surveillance on Blake for a start, go for a full search warrant for Mr Blake. We can shake him up.'

'I'm not permitted to scratch my bloody nose on this one without authorization, not before we've heard from Rome, then I have to have you back down in Devon and a fat lot—'

'What I'm asking, do I do something or do I go back to sifting minimal scams on the good old pensioners' savings?'

Harry Compton thought the biro in the hands of his boss man might just break, big fingers twisting it in frustration. 'You're a clever little chap, Harry.

Put yourself where I am, ringfenced by the God Almighties, make a suggestion that's half sensible.'

'Fair assumption that Fiori, Ruggerio, will go back to his good friend. I'd stake it out, and I'd sweep his paperwork - and I'd belt Alf Rogers hard, so's it hurt, and keep belting him till he delivers.'

'So get on with it, and don't embarrass me. You embarrass me and you'll be back helping old ladies across the road.'

He went back to his office. He phoned the car pool and the Stores section and told them what he wanted. He scrawled the message, and he was whistling because he felt good, and handed it to Miss Frobisher for transmission.

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

FROM: Harry Compton, S06.

Relevant word in my last was 'urgently'. Stop squeezing your blackheads and do some WORK. Soonest, we must have updated biog. on MARIO

RUGGERIO with assessment of links to brother GIUSEPPE. I grovel because I need ACTION. I would have thought you have a small window of opportunity for research between getting out of your pit, paying off your women, and the opening of the many bars you maintain in profit. PLEASE

. . .

Bestest, Harry.

PS. Don't know where this one's going, but it's tasty.

'Would you like to come, Angela?' No, Angela did not want to come because she had a headache and needed to stay in her room.

'Can I leave Mauro?' Yes, Angela would look after Mauro in her room because the baby was asleep.

And Charley was to be certain that small Mario and Francesca did not get cold - God, and it was 70 degrees out there, and Charley had swum off the beach at Bigbury and at Thurlestone and Outer Hope when it was bloody freezing, when her legs and body and arms were goosed. She thought it would do small Mario good, be a useful lesson to the little blighter, to be in the water and struggling because he could not swim. Small Mario was already getting to be, Charley's opinion, revolting and Sicilian, already standing in front of the mirror to check his hair, already posturing at her as if she were merely the hired help. She'd seen it that week, the difference in the child. She might just make certain that he went right under and took the sea water into his nose. It wasn't the child's fault, just the culture of the place . . . 'I'll make sure they don't get cold.'

So many times each day Charley had to pinch herself, gouge the nails of her fingers into herself, because then she could keep the reality with the fantasy, marry the mundane of life in the villa with the lie that was tight on her wrist. She had the towels and the swimsuits for the children in a beach bag, and in the beach bag were her own underclothes, because she had already changed into her bikini, and her sun-lotion tube.

She had the bright, coloured water-rings for the kids, and Francesca had found a toy sailing boat from last summer and small Mario had his football.

Angela's call - they would be all right? 'They'll be all right, Angela. Hope your headache gets better . . .'

The gardener opened the gate for them. She didn't think he knew much about swimming. The gardener stank. She didn't think he knew much about washing. She'd get round to it one day, her bikini on the sunbed, and she'd loose the top, she'd give the old 'lechie' a sight to keep the bastard awake at night. They went down the hill, and Francesca held her hand and skipped along and small Mario bounced the football like a basketball player. She wondered where he was, where Axel Moen was. Always with her, the dulled routine of minding the children and the exciting sensation of the lie.

Twice she looked behind her, tried to be casual, but she didn't see him, didn't see his face or the hanging pony-tail of his hair. It would have been good to be on the beach with him, clear of the kids, on a towel on the sand with him, and in the water with him .

.. They went through the piazza, and the teenagers were gathered there, boys and girls, with their scooters and motorcycles, and they went past the shops that were opening again for the afternoon, scraping up the shutters, expanding the awnings. She told small Mario, sharply, that he must not bounce the ball as they crossed the road near the newspaper kiosk and close to the Saracen tower.

It might have been wonderful, she thought, going through Mondello to the beach, if it hadn't been for the bloody watch she wore on her wrist. And with the watch, as if to hammer her, like a replaying tape, was her voice snapping at her father, and her voice taunting the young man, Benny. It might have been perfect, going in the warm sunshine towards the gold of the beach and the blue of the sea, except that she lived the lie. The fingernails dug at the palm of her hand to kill the lie.

Across the road, they walked alongside the beach, hugging the shade of the spread pines. The tide was out and the sand was golden, clean. The junk litter would come later, with the crowds, the next month and the month after, when all Palermo descended on Mondello. The beach was brilliant to her, like the beaches of Thurlestone and Bigbury before the tourists came. Charley led the way down onto the sand and she kicked off her sneakers and hopped at the sudden heat on the soles of her feet, and the children laughed with her. Small Mario booted his football ahead and they ran after it, whooping and noisy, all the way to the tideline that changed the sand from pale gold to the lustre of ochre. Charley was first to the football, never could kick a ball, and it skewed off to the right and careered towards a couple on a towel, and the couple were kissing, the boy under the girl. Lucky cow. She went to the ball, and the couple didn't notice her, cared not to look at her, and she picked the ball up and took it away, as if she were a prim and proper little miss. There were four boys with a transistor radio some yards behind her, and they whistled once, and Charley turned and gave them a single finger, and they jeered once. There was another couple, away towards the new town and the pier, reading magazines.

She put the bag down on the tideline.

The sea ran out into the crescent bay in front of her. Far ahead were the small boats, far beyond the small boats was a car ferry coming towards the docks at Palermo that were hidden by the scree slopes of Monte Pellegrino. From the bag she took a sheet of plastic and laid it flat on the sand, and then she laid two towels on the plastic. The sun beat on her, the strength of the sun on the sand and the water dazzled her. She wrapped her towel, the big towel, around Francesca and undressed the little girl and helped her, full of giggles, into the swimsuit, and to do the same for small Mario she had to pull faces and make a game and beat the shyness of the child. She folded their clothes and put them carefully in the bag. Francesca was puffing her breath into the plastic water-ring and small Mario dribbled the football around the towels. Charley pulled off her blouse and unbuttoned her skirt, and she did not look round to see if the boys with the transistor ogled her. The sun's force caught at the whiteness of her skin. It would have been perfect if it had not been for the lie. Francesca was pulling her hand, wanted to go to the water. Small Mario was tugging her hand, wanted to play football with her.

'A minute, darling, wait a minute. Mario, you can only learn to swim in the water, you can't learn on the beach with a football. OK, please yourself. Play football, don't learn to swim.'

The lie hit her. The lie was the destruction of the world of the little boy who wanted to play football, and the lie would be agony to the little girl who wanted to learn to swim. She took the watch from her wrist, slipped it in the bag. The watch was supposed to be waterproof. The watch was the lie.

'You play football, Mario. You don't want to learn to swim, then that's fine.'

There was the white ring on her wrist. It was as if she'd shed the lie. She walked with Francesca towards the sea. It was wonderful. She arched her back. The sun's warmth was on her shoulders and her stomach and her thighs. It was perfect.

He had been the day before, and the day before that, to see his consigliere. It was a good assumption that he would go again that day. Tano waited. It was a good assumption that the man from Catania would come again that afternoon, as the crisis isolated him, to try to confirm the support of his consigliere. The home of the consigliere was a large house, in half a hectare of ground that was enclosed by a wall topped with broken glass set in concrete and in a private cul-de-sac. Tano watched. Where he waited and watched he could not see the consigliere's home - he was on the public road, away from the turning into the cul-de-sac - but he could see with an uninterrupted view the parked car that had been taken the night before from a street in Acireale to the north, near the church of San

Pietro e Paolo. If the man from Catania came in his Mercedes, then he must drive past the parked car. Tano held the mobile telephone.

Tano was a careful man. He had been able to travel back across the Atlantic twelve years before because he was careful. When the net closed on his friends, colleagues, family, when the FBI sprang the trap in New Jersey, his name had not figured in the files collected around the Pizza Connection investigation. When the squadra mobile had mounted for the bastard Falcone the big arrest operation of the year after his return to the island, four hundred men, again his name was not included. It was natural, when it came to his offering his loyalty to one man, that he should have chosen Mario Ruggerio. Mario Ruggerio was the most careful man he had worked with. With the care came Tano's loyalty.

He believed himself to be the favourite of Mario Ruggerio, and he had begun to feel in the last months, that he might, one day, succeed Mario Ruggerio - not this year, not next year, not for many years, but one day ... He thought he was the favourite because Mario Ruggerio had entrusted to him the preparation of the bomb, the planning for the bomb and the detonation of the bomb. When this bomb was exploded he would prepare and plan and detonate the second bomb, and his position as the favourite would be confirmed, not Carmine who had the brains of a wood plank, not Franco who he thought was stupid. His future was linked inexorably with the future of Mario Ruggerio. They climbed together, him a step lower on the ladder, but it was together.

He could not bear to imagine failure, slipping on the step on the ladder. Could not bear to consider the iced fury of Mario Ruggerio. But he could imagine, consider, the praise of Mario Ruggerio, the quiet, half-spoken praise that brought the thrilled flush through him. Tano would do anything, alcuna cosa, to win the praise of Mario Ruggerio, and think nothing of what he had done. Tano had lost no sleep, not a minute of rest in his bed, after he had slit the throat from ear to ear, drawn the sharpened knife through the windpipe, of a street thief.

He saw the Mercedes.

His fist tightened its hold on his mobile telephone, his finger hovered over the button of the final digit of the number built into the telephone pager. The telephone pager was integral to the bomb of dynamite packed inside a wall of ballbearings.

He had held the scrawny legs of the man from Agrigento while Mario Ruggerio had grunted and perspired through the process of strangulation. They climbed the ladder together, and higher. He pressed the button of the final digit . . . The flash of light. The hammer-crash of the explosion. The Mercedes picked up and tossed across the road, the impact collapsing the wall that the body of the Mercedes hit. The blue-grey of smoke, the flicker of the fire . . . They were at the top of the ladder.

He saw, in his mind, the pleased smile of Mario Ruggerio, and he seemed to feel the hand of Mario Ruggerio cudgel his shoulder in praise. He was the favourite . . .

The fire ripped through the body of the Mercedes.

Tano walked away.

The journalist from Berlin settled in his seat as the aircraft banked over the sea and then straightened on its course. Looking left from his window seat he could see the urban sprawl of Catania, and looking right he could see the coastline and the mountains of the toe and foot and ankle of the mainland. He reached down and took his laptop from the bag beneath his feet. He was an unhappy flier and felt more comfortable when he worked during a flight, his attention distracted from the syndromes of vertigo and claustrophobia, and it was easy to work with the laptop in the Business Class compartment that his contract guaranteed him. He was not a vain man, but it was part and parcel of his trade that the cover of the laptop should be festooned with the adhesive stickers of airlines he had flown with and cities from which he had reported.

The laptop boasted of visits to Beirut and Dhahran and Hanoi and Belfast and Grozny and Sarajevo and Kabul. He started, two fingers, to type, and he was going well and his mind was diverted from t he warm air turbulence until the passenger beside him spoke.

'I see you are a journalist, a journalist from Germany, and you have been in Sicily to write about the malvagita of our society - did you find that wickedness? It is a strange time for you to be leaving, it is peculiar that you should choose this day to leave.

Myself, I am a physician, I work with children, I do not see any foreign journalists, they do not come to my surgery. I presume you have been meeting with our illustrious politicians and with our social workers and with magistrates. Are you confused? I met once with a British engineer working on a sewerage project here. The engineer said that he believed the evil in our society to be a product of imagination, a subject of discussion in the same way that the British are obsessed with discussion of the future of the weather. He told me also that in his part of Britain there was a great inland sea in which there was said to live a huge monster, a creature from pre-history, which was elusive whenever scientific examination was made of the inland sea. But the engineer said that many people desired to believe in the existence of the monster even if there was no proof that it lived. I remember, it was the monster of Loch Ness. The engineer said it did not exist in reality, and he said, his opinion, that La Cosa Nostra was similar, something that is in our imagination. If you are leaving Sicily today, then you must surely follow the belief of the British engineer. I said to him, but of course he did not have the time, that he should come with me to the rotten apartment towers of Brancaccio in Palermo, where I work. He should see the children without hope who live under the heel of La Cosa Nostra, who eat when La Cosa Nostra says they should eat, whose parents work when La Cosa Nostra says they should work. And I said that he should go to Rome and Milan and taste the corruption in government and commerce that is brought by La Cosa Nostra. And he should go, I told him, to Frankfurt and London and New York and walk among the addicts of Grade A drugs and think further about La Cosa Nostra. But he said that I made a fantasy, that I saw a monster like the one in the inland sea. You leave now? It was on the car radio just before I reached the airport, a killing in Catania, a bomb. I am surprised that you are leaving at a time when there is proof of wickedness. I am sorry that I interrupt you from your important thoughts. Excuse me, forgive me . . .'