Killing Ground (49 page)

The body was on the floor. In the back of the body was a short-bladed, double-edged knife. The owner of the bar, facing a wall, his wrists handcuffed in the small of his back, had seen nothing. Perhaps the customers had seen something? The matriarch had seen nothing. The customers were all strangers to her and she knew none of them.

A car brought the wife of Giancarlo to the bar, and a young priest had run from the church on Via Terrasanta. The photographers from the newspapers and the cameramen from the RAI crowded the pavement.

The maresciallo elbowed a way through for the magistrate and Pasquale bullocked him into the bar, into the crush that circled the body. There were some who had come from family gatherings and wore their suits, some had come from the tennis courts, some from their seats in the football stadium, some from their sleep. Beside their shoes and sneakers and sandals was the body and the blood. The magistrate saw the face, bleak, of 'Vanni Crespo, and pushed towards him.

'It was shit luck,' 'Vanni Crespo said. 'We were so close . . .'

The tail had watched the car of 'Vanni Crespo, the carabiniere Alfetta, from the barracks at Monreale to the bar on Via Sam- martino. The tail was locked on 'Vanni Crespo.

' He brought me lemons, 'Vanni. I had fish for my meal on Friday. They are not supposed to do my shopping, my boys, but they prefer to do it than to take me to the market, so they break the rule, they bought fresh mullet for me. He had brought me lemons and made .1 joke of it. I had one of his lemons with my mullet. He was the I 'est of men.'

'It was shit luck,' 'Vanni growled. 'He was on the bus with his wife. He saw Ruggerio.

He got off the bus. He ran through the traffic. That's the decision. You wait and you lose the target. You run and you alert the target. You've ten seconds, five seconds, to make the decision and you live by it and you die by it.'

The lemon was most sharp in the taste.'

'He would have shown out when he ran. Ruggerio would have had a back marker. He had to go to the bar for communication. The back marker would have followed him.

You need the luck and all you get is the shit.'

'There are six more of his lemons in my kitchen . . . Do you believe in luck, 'Vanni?'

He saw the tears well at the eyes of the magistrate. He took out his handkerchief. He did not care who saw him. In the crowd in the bar, he wiped the running tears from the magistrate's face. 'I believe in nothing.'

'Do you believe your agent of small importance will be lucky?'

He remembered her, as he had seen her, the last look back from the side of the road before he had dropped down into the car. The last look, across the pavement, and between the trees, and across the sand, and she had stood against the brightness of the sea, and the sun had caught the white of her body skin as her towel had slipped. In the bar, with the corpse, with the soft whimpering of the widow, with the crowd, with the smell of cigarettes and cold coffee, he remembered her.

'I am sorry, dottore, I cannot share with you because it is not in my gift.'

He drove a way through the crowd in the bar, pushed through the crowd on the pavement and the street. A good man had had ten seconds, five seconds, to make a decision and the result of the decision was a mistake, and the result of a mistake was to lie dead on the dirty floor of a bar that was lit by flashlights. He went to his car, walked leaden in the dusk light.

The tail followed the Alfetta driven by 'Vanni Crespo. The tail was delayed by the military cordon around the square of streets after the Alfetta had been waved through, but it was of no consequence. The tail was linked by radio to a second car and to motorcyclists who waited outside the cordon. As if a chain held the tail to the Alfetta . .

.

When he had heard the explosion of the car horns, and then heard the insults shouted, Mario Ruggerio had paused in front of a shop window. He had appeared to study the contents of the shop window. An old practice, one that his father would have known, was to use a shop window as a mirror. He had seen a man come at desperate speed through the traffic lanes, then reach the pavement and stop. The man, stopped, had stared up the street towards him. If the man had had a radio he would already have used it, if the man had had a mobile telephone he would not have run through the traffic lanes, if the man had carried a firearm he would not have stopped. In the reflections of the window he had seen the picciotto, a good boy, behind the man. He had known he was recognized and he had known the man panicked. He had realized it was a chance recognition and not a part of a comprehensive surveillance. He had made a small gesture, a single movement of his index finger, a cutting motion. He had walked away.

He had turned the corner . . .

It was two hours later. Mario Ruggerio sat in the darkened room on the first floor in the Capo district. His feet ached, his lungs heaved, the ashtray was filled with the stubbed ends of his cigarillos. The two picciotti who had been ahead of him on the Via Sammartino had made a brutal pace for him, up to the Piazza Lolli, one pocketing the cap he had been wearing, across the Via Vito la Mancia, one taking his jacket and folding it on his arm so that the material could not be seen, past the Mercato delle Pulci, hurrying him along as if he were an old uncle out with two impatient nephews. He had slipped away from them behind the duomo. Even when he gasped for breath, when exhaustion bled him and he swayed on his feet, he would not have considered allowing picciotti to take him to his safe house. The sweat ran on his face and on his back and on his stomach. He smoked. He held the photograph of the child he loved.

Charley sat on the patio.

The sun had gone down and only a feeble layer of light fell on the seascape ahead of her. The family had gone down to the town. She had lost the loneliness that had hurt her in Palermo. She felt, sitting in the comfortable chair on the patio, a supreme confidence.

The villa was her place. The family would be walking on the esplanade, under the trees, patrolling like the caged bears she had seen in zoos, where they would be seen ... It was the time of waiting. She was in control, she felt her power. The power was the watch on her wrist. She sat with her legs apart, and the cool of the evening air made feather strokes on her thighs. She was at the centre of the world of Axel Moen and the people who directed Axel Moen. She had power over Giuseppe Ruggerio and over the brother.

She watched the last of the sunlight flee the smooth surface of the sea. Because of her control and her power it would be her story that would be told, the story of Codename Helen.

In the grey light, on the patio, an arrogance tripped in Charley's mind.

The tail was locked on 'Vanni Crespo. Three bars in Monreale. The tail watched him drink alone in a bar near the duomo, in a second bar near the empty market stands, in a third bar high in the old town. The tail watched and followed where 'Vanni Crespo led.

Through the window of the pizzeria he saw 'Vanni. 'Vanni was going slowly, confused.

He was lit by a street lamp, and his face was flushed, and his hair hung on his forehead in careless strands, and he lurched to a stop beside the window and was struggling to find the cigarette packet in his pocket. Axel turned away. There was nowhere in the pizzeria for him to hide. He turned away and hoped that his face was not seen, but he heard the whip of the door opening and then the slam of it shutting and he heard the shuffle of the feet and then the scrape of the chair opposite him.

'Vanni sat in front of Axel, and he swayed on the chair before his elbows thudded down on the table.

'I find the American hero . . .'

'You pissed up or something?'

'I find the American hero who comes to Sicily to achieve what we cannot.'

'You're drunk.'

'We Italians are pathetic, we cannot wipe our own arses, but the American hero comes to do it for us.'

'Go fuck yourself.'

'You know what happened today because we had shit luck, what happened . . . ?'

'We don't break procedure,' Axel hissed across the table.

Two young men, carrying their crash helmets, were at the counter of the
pizzeria
and asking for the list of sauces.

The hand in which Axel held his fork was gripped in ' Vanni's fists. 'We had surveillance people in the Capo, that's a shit place, to target the bastard. The surveillance was called off, nothing seen. One of the team, on a bus, sees the bastard.

Off duty, no communications. We are pathetic Italians, we do not have the money to give out, sweets and chocolates, mobile telephones. Not carrying his personal radio, off duty, no sidearm. He tries to use the telephone in a bar. The bastard would have had a guy behind him, back marker. The message was incomplete, that's the shit luck. No profile and no description, no clothes, before he was stabbed to death. The bastard's gone. It's cold.'

At the bar the boys with the crash helmets studied the list of pizza sauces.

'Get the hell out of here.'

'He was in our hand. We snatched. We lost him. Isn't that shit luck?'

'Go and sleep with your woman.'

'I drink, I don't weep. The man was dead on the floor with the crap and the cigarettes and the spit and his blood. Tardelli came down, he wept, he doesn't drink. He asked me—'

'Get some water down you, some aspirin, get to your bed.'

'He's isolated, he's got the stink of failure. He has nothing, nothing to hope for. He begged . . .'

The boys with the crash helmets had seen nothing on the list of sauces that they wanted. They pushed their way out of the door, into the street.

'What did he beg?'

'Offer him something to hold to. I said it was not my gift to give. His mind is blocked, too much work, too tired, he cannot see the obvious, not followed the line of the family, as we have. He wanted me to share with him the detail of your agent.'

'Bullshit.'

'Your agent of small importance. He wanted the crumbs off your table. "All I want is someone to hold my arm and walk with me." But that's the usual sort of shit talk in Palermo when a man is isolated, that's not the talk to impress an American hero.'

'I don't share.'

'With Italians? Of course not. I tell you, Axel, what I saw. I saw a body on the floor, I saw the blood, I saw the fucking crowd of people. I saw her, I saw Codename Helen, I saw her body and her blood. I drink, I don't weep. Enjoy your meal.'

The fists released Axel's hand that held the fork. The table rocked as 'Vanni levered himself to his feet. Axel watched him go . . . He did not see her on the floor of the bar, but she was clear in his mind, and she was hanging from the nails on the back of the door of the hut at the estancia airstrip ... He pushed the plate away from him. He lit a cigarette and he dropped the match on the plate, into the pizza sauce.

The tail learned the name of the woman who owned the house, and late into the night the tail watched the light burn in the upper room.

'What are my options, Ray? What do I chew on?'

The voice boomed back, metallic, from the speaker. Dwight Smythe leaned over the Country Chief's desk and twisted the volume dial. The Country Chief was scribbling headlines.

'Could you wait out, Herb? Could you let me have a minute?'

'Have two - I fancy it's better we get this right, now.'

It had been a bad bloody Monday for Ray. He had been called, two hours' notice, to New Scotland Yard for late morning coffee with biscuits and a hard-going session. He had sat with Dwight, he had been faced by the commander (S06) and the assistant commissioner (SO) and the detective superintendent who was a cat with cream, and there'd been a young guy there who'd not spoken. He'd had a heavy time and they'd done their work on Mario Ruggerio (worse than the worst) and they'd a profile on Charlotte Parsons (Codename Helen). He'd broken, he'd said he needed to talk to Headquarters, and back at the embassy he'd sat on his hands waiting for Herb to show up in his office from the beltway drag into Washington. It had to be Herb he spoke to because it was Herb who had authorized the operation.

'Got it together ... I'm not happy, Herb. I feel I'm pushing in over Bill's space.'

'Forget Bill, he'll do as he's damn well told. I get the feeling this isn't a time for standing on ceremony. Hell, I've fourteen situations going in Colombia, I've eight in Peru. I've situations running in

Bangkok, Moscow, Jamaica. I'm not getting an ulcer for one situation in Sicily. I want the options.'

Again Ray paused. What they hated, the big men in Washington who'd made it to the floor with the pile carpets and the drinks cabinets and access to God, was getting bounced for a decision early on a Monday morning. It was a time when his own career could go down the drain, and his hopes of ever getting his feet on that carpet and his hands on the cabinet keys, but he reckoned there wasn't room for evasion. He plunged.

'At high-grade level, the British have Angst. They say, and I quote, "It is intolerable that a young woman should have been pressurized by the DEA, entrapped, and then persuaded to travel to Sicily as the central part of an American-sponsored anti-mafia operation," end quote. That's, my opinion, not the core of their hand-wringing. What's right up their nose, quote, "All DEA activities inside the UK are governed by procedures of liaison and we were not informed, prior to your inveigling Miss Parsons, of your intention to recruit her," end quote. And most important, they have the shits on this one. They see her dead, they see the paparazzi crawling over her, they see an almighty inquest on what an untrained innocent was doing there in a role central to an investigation, they see the blame hammering on their door . . .'

'I asked, what are the options?'

'Two, Herb. You can tell them to go jump, tell them they are small guys running small shows and suggest they stick to softball in the park.'

'We do good business with the Brits. My second option?'

'You can withdraw your sanction, Herb, close it down, you can pull her out. You can wind it up.'

'Ray, we've known each other a long time, too goddam long. I am not interested in the sensitivities of Bill Hammond. The plan isn't Bill's anyway. The plan belongs to that guy Axel Moen, and I do not care whether I massage his ego or whether I kick him.