Killing Ground (51 page)

'. . . Do you know, Charley, that while you were in the city on Sunday, when Peppino and I and the children were at Mass, that men came into our home, my home, and they swept it with electronic devices to see that we were not listened to, to see that the police had not placed listening devices in our home, my home? Every second Sunday they come. Why? Have you heard Peppino talk here about confidential business? Never. It is not for industrial sabotage, it is for police microphones. Peppino must be certain that conversations concerning the famiglia are not listened to. Put it together, Charley, the wealth and the family, the affluence and the family. Where does the wealth come from?

From the family . . .'

In front of Charley was the strong wooden gate set in the high fence. Beside Charley was the path from which the gardener had picked up the crushed tip of a cigarillo. She held Peppino's shirts and the damp ran on her arms. She played her part, the innocent home-help, played the lie.

'. . . He is a grotesque sham. My Peppino is a creature created by his family. He fulfils a need for the family. What would he be if the need did not exist? A criminal? An extortionist? A killer? Do I upset you, Charley? There are enough of those in the family, they have no need for more. They need the sham that is rispettabilita, you understand me, Charley? They have the wealth, the family, but they need the sham of respectability. I am a part of the sham, I am from the pedigree of the Vatican, I give respectability. He is as criminal, my husband and my children's father, as his family.

Why I am so alone, Charley, so isolated here, so devastated here, why I need you, Charley. He is controlled by his brother, has the criminal guilt of his brother Her voice died, as if in sudden submission. For a moment she looked behind Charley, then at the pegs and washing on the line. Charley thought, like she's trapped, like she has no escape. Charley turned. The gardener pushed the wheelbarrow, on the path round the villa, towards them. She passed Angela the last of Peppino's shirts.

Back in the kitchen the baby was crying. The confessional was finished. Angela, in her kitchen, made the baby's feed, brittle and sharp movements.

Harry Compton and Dwight Smythe met at Heathrow. Each had made his own way west out of the capital, each would have said that there was no requirement to share transport. They met at check-in. If there was mutual respect, they hid it. The detective sergeant of S06 and the office administrator from the DEA were brusque in their greetings, showed a minimum of courtesy. Harry Compton would have said that he, alone, was perfectly capable of extracting Miss Charlotte Parsons. Dwight Smythe would have said that he, alone, was perfectly capable of aborting Axel Moen. They went through Departure, showed no sign of being colleagues who travelled together, they went their separate ways in Duty-Free and the Briton bought Scotch and the American bought Jack Daniel's. They sat on the bench and read newspapers. Each was an intrusion into the world of the other. They were called for take-off.

Cautiously, Pasquale knocked at the door. The call came. He carried the mug of hot coffee into the room, and he went to the magistrate's desk and put the coffee mug down beside the computer's screen.

'Thank you, that is very kind. Very considerate of you. How goes it, Pasquale?'

He grimaced. 'This morning the maresciallo wrote his assessment of me.'

'He read it back to you?'

'That is the regulation, I am entitled to know.' He had come to work at five and then the bedroom door of the magistrate had been open, and the door of the living room had been closed and the light had shone under that door. He saw the wan tiredness on the face of the magistrate.

'It is good coffee. Thank you. What did he write of you? If you do not wish to . . .'

Pasquale said, 'That I was unsuitable, that I was inefficient, that my enthusiasm did not compensate for my mistakes, that I tried to make a friend of you, that I crashed a car, that I was late for duty, that I had forgotten to load a magazine—'

'You are very young, you have a baby, you have a wife, you have a life in front of you. Is it for the best?'

He said simply, 'It's what I want to do. But the maresciallo says I endanger you and my colleagues by my incompetence.'

'Do you wish my intervention?'

'I would be ashamed if, through your intervention, I held my job.'

'So each of us, Pasquale, each of us has a bad day.'

Such sadness on the magistrate's face, and no attempt to hide it. He bled for the man.

He could not ask the magistrate to intervene for him, could not call that card. More than anything in his police career he wished to succeed in this work. To turn his back on the magistrate, Rocco Tardelli, to return to the uniform, would be humiliation. He hesitated. He was a humble policeman, without rank and without seniority, and he wanted to say something that was of comfort to this older and troubled man. He did not know what he could say. He hesitated, then started for the door.

'Pasquale, please - sometimes it needs a younger mind, sometimes it needs the freshness. I have no lead, I have nothing, I have to begin again. Please. Where does Ruggerio go? What must Ruggerio have?'

He blurted, 'A dentist?'

'How many dentists in Palermo? How many more dentists in Catania and Agrigento and Messina and Trapani? Has he dentures? Does he need a dentist? I cannot have every dentist on the island watched for the one day a year when he is visited by Mario Ruggerio.'

'An optician?'

'I do not know that he wears spectacles and, again, if he does, how many opticians on the island are available to Mario Ruggerio? Help me, with a young mind.'

Pasquale furrowed his forehead, considered. 'You have investigated the family?'

'I ask for a young mind, not the obvious. The family is the beginning, the middle, the end. We have a camera at his father's house. I should not tell you. And I should not tell you, we have a camera and we have audio close to the house of his wife. His brother, a brute, in prison on Asinara - you do me great damage if you repeat what I say - we have audio in his cell. His other brother is handicapped and we forget him. His sister, we forget her, alcoholism. Please, my boy, give us credit for the obvious.'

The apology was on his lips. He stared, amazed. A shock-wave seemed to Pasquale to flow across the magistrate's face. Tardelli jerked out of his chair, slipped, was on the carpet. Pasquale was rooted. He crawled on his hands and knees to the bedroom wardrobe that was so strange in a living and working area. He dragged it open. Files cascaded on him. Closed files and opened files, files held with tape and files bound with string. Pasquale watched. He groped among the files, scanned the titles of the files, pulled more files from the wardrobe. He whistled an aria as the heap of files grew.

Papers scattered and he swept them clear, and they were buried by more files. He found one. He ripped the tape from it. No longer whistling, he now cooed like a dove. The papers fluttered from his hands. He shouted, a noise of exaltation. He held two sheets of paper.

'There was a brother, Pasquale, I interviewed him myself. Four years ago, in Rome, I interviewed him. A banker. So plausible, the link with the criminality of the family cut.

I accepted it. No surveillance, no telephone intercept. I buried the memory. The memory was lost under blankets of information, new strata of information, further leaves of information. My mind lost him. I am ashamed ... It is the place to look, isn't it, Pasquale, where you have forgotten to look, where there is no connection?'

He stood. His face, to Pasquale, was ripped by a sort of manic happiness.

He hugged Pasquale.

At the desk he snatched for the telephone. He dialled. He waited and the aria climbed to a peak.

"Gianni? Tardelli, the "walking corpse" of Palermo. 'Gianni, four years ago, in EUR, I met with Giuseppe Ruggerio. Yes, no connection. What of him now? . . . 'Gianni, call me.'

There were two and a quarter hours between the arrival of the London flight and the departure of the Palermo flight. There was no ceremony. They sat in Bill Hammond's car, Dwight Smythe in the front with the Country Chief and Harry Compton in the back. Bill Hammond had brought coffee from a kiosk.

'It's a sad damned day . . .'

'What we're saying in London, Mr Hammond, it should never have gone this far,'

Harry Compton said, sparring. 'We are also saying that if there had been correct consultation at the start, then there would never have been this difficulty. I don't think anyone's enjoying it.'

'As you eloquently put it, Bill, it is a "sad damned day" because the plan was irresponsible from the kick-off,' Dwight Smythe said, sullen. 'We are left with dog shit on our shoes.'

It was a new world for Harry Compton. He had never before been overseas for S06.

All pretty structured back in London. A good pattern of seniority to lean against back in London. He sat in the car and held the coffee, had a single sip and thought it gritty.

Perhaps, he had thought, when the two of them were together on the flight, beside each other, they could defrost the chill of the inter-organization spat, and they hadn't. They'd worn their badges, different armies, in cold hostility. Perhaps, he had thought, they'd be given the good treatment when they landed at Rome, and given a good meal and a good briefing and a dose of civilization, and he was uncomfortable in a car out on the edge of a bloody parking area.

'Did I hear you right? Dog shit?'

'That's what I said,' Dwight Smythe intoned.

'And you, what did you call it? A "difficulty"?'

'That's our opinion,' Harry Compton said.

'I wasn't happy, I had cold feet. Hear me through - the plan was brilliant. It's the sort of plan that comes along off the rainbow, and it just stands a chance. It stands a chance because Axel Moen is one hell of a fine operator. He's not you, Smythe, not you, Compton, not a blow-in, not a smart-ass who comes in on the big bird and thinks he knows the fucking game. Axel Moen is top of the tree. What does he get for being top of the tree? He gets a posting to a shit place like Lagos, and a bastard like me dresses Lagos up as a good slot.'

Harry Compton said, 'I don't think obscenities help. Our priority is to get Charlotte Parsons.'

'Where'd they dig you up from? A creche? A nursery? Training school? You don't ever name names. She's a code, she's Codename Helen. You don't throw names in Sicily. You work in Sicily, you have to be big, not a fucking ant. It's a sad damned day when people like you - and you, Smythe - get involved.'

'Has your agent been told that we are bringing Codename Helen home?'

A bitter smile crossed the Country Chief's face. 'You are a funny man, Compton, you make me laugh. You think I'm doing the crap work for you. I messaged him to meet you. You tell him his plan was shit and made a "difficulty". Tell him yourself.'

He thought he was followed, but he was unsure of it. He thought he was followed as he left the duomo in Monreale. As Axel walked away from the cloister he saw, on the other side of the street, a man of middle age and wire-thin build take off his cap and slip it into the hip pocket of his trousers, and a hundred metres further on, at the edge of the piazza, the man wore another cap of a different colour and a different material. A hundred metres further on, by the stalls that sold fish and meat, vegetables and fruit and flowers, the man had gazed into a shop window, studying women's clothes, and Axel had passed by him, and he had not seen him again. He could not be certain that he was followed. Maybe the man, forty- something, with the wire-thin build, had bought a new cap and was dissatisfied with it and put his old cap back on, and maybe he looked at women's underwear because that gave him a jerk-off thrill or because his wife's birthday was coming up, or maybe he followed the procedures of foot surveillance.

Axel breathed hard. In La Paz he had been followed, once, and he had hit the numbers of his mobile and called out the cavalry and two streets later he had walked on a wide pavement that was suddenly crawling with his own guys and with the Bolivian task-force people, and the tail had flaked away. He had no cavalry in Monreale. His training was in surveillance, not in counter-measure tactics. He breathed hard, deep. He assumed, if he was indeed followed, that they would use the technique of the 'floating box'. There would be men ahead of him, men behind him, men on the same side of the street and men on the opposite side of the street. But it was early in the afternoon, and the siesta hours had not started, and the pavements were full. If he ran, suddenly, tried to break out of the box, then he told them, put it up in neon lights, that he knew he was followed. His mind ratcheted, going fast, considering how he should act . . . His problem, on the busy streets, he could not identify the operators or the command operator of the floating box. He walked faster and slower, he lingered in front of shops and in front of stalls, he passed a tabaccaio, then turned sharply to retrace his steps and went inside and bought a throw-away lighter, and he could not confirm that he was the centrepiece of a floating box, nor confirm that his strained imagination merely goaded him. He walked on. He did not know. He made a long loop, and he came back to the garden terrace at the back of the duomo. He sat on a bench. From the terrace, among the flowers climbing on walls and under the wide shade of the trees, he could look down onto Palermo and the sea, where she had been. Axel did not know if he was watched . .

.

'It is the thirteenth.'

'No, the ninth.'

'I do not wish to dispute with you, Mama, but it is the thirteenth.'

'You told me, it was fifteen years ago, that it was the ninth, it is what a mother remembers.'

'Mama, I promise you, it is the thirteenth.'

His father said, growl of the peasant's dialetto, 'Last year you said it was the eleventh, the year before it was the fourteenth, the year before that it was—'

'Papa, I assure you, you are mistaken.'

'No, Mario, it is you that are mistaken. Each year you make a different number and argue with your mother.'