Killing Ground (53 page)

Dwight Smythe grinned. 'Maybe we get to share a room tonight, maybe we leave the light on . . .'

The American tried again on the mobile telephone. It was the fourth time since they had landed that he had tapped the numbers for Axel Moen's telephone, the fourth time the call had not been answered.

'So what's to do?'

Dwight Smythe flashed his teeth. 'Ride into town, get that big room with the bright light, and wait. You got anything else to suggest?'

They took a taxi into Palermo.

The journalist from Berlin waved his bank note for 20,000 lire at the steward. He thought the bar of La Stampa Estera to be the most dismal drinking hole that he knew, a heavy and darkened room and company to match. But they should know, the journalists who worked the Rome beat, the reality of the strength of La Cosa Nostra. He bought his second round of drinks, and none of those he entertained complained and demanded the right to buy. They drank what he bought, and he believed they mocked him. He was not proud of himself for coming to such a place and seeking the input of fellow trade hacks, but his story was littered, so far, with cavities and loose ends. He needed their assessments. Was the corruption in central government so widespread? Was there indeed a third tier of bankers and politicians, generals and secret servicemen, who protected the principals of the organization? Was a victory in Sicily possible? What was the lifestyle of the capo di tutti capi and how did he evade arrest? They mocked him, and they drank the Scotch he bought and the beers.

A magazine writer from Rotterdam said, 'Never go down there, a played-out story.

Go to Sicily, and all you end with is confusion. What my people are interested in is the Tower at Pisa, after the last earthquake, whether it's going to fall on a bus-load of our tourists.'

A freelance writer from Lisbon said, 'I can't get a word in the paper about Sicily.

Haven't been down there for nine months. It's expensive. Anyway, the food in Palermo is revolting. Nothing changes. It is the most tedious story in Europe. Now the Brazilian who is playing for Juventus, the striker, that is a page lead . . .'

An agency lady from Paris said, 'The mafia? The mafia make my people go to sleep.

If I want anything in the paper, and I have to want it because I am paid by the line, then I write about fashion and I write about the new gearbox in the Ferrari.'

A super-stringer on retainer to a London daily said, 'Nobody is interested, nobody cares, Sicily might be another planet. It is where they make an art form of deception, an industry of misinformation. Do you think they will use your story? I doubt it, I think you chase fool's gold.'

An Italian woman under contract to nine evening newspapers in Japan said, 'There is no interest because the mafia story is not about real people. The judges, the policemen, the criminals, they are the characters of a cartoon strip. People we can understand, people we can believe in, they do not exist in Sicily . . .'

The telephone rang. They listened. When the telephone was on secure, and the voice strength was diminished, then the magistrate always shouted. It was past midnight, it was quiet in the kitchen. In deference to the magistrate's request they did not play the radio in the kitchen late at night. If they played the radio late at night then the cow from the next apartment, with the common wall, would come in the morning and rail against the magistrate that she could not sleep. It was as if the ragazzi believed their man had sufficient problems without adding the cow's complaints. They listened.

'. . . I do not believe it, 'Gianni . . . How is that possible? Why was I not told? . . . We all have a work load, 'Gianni, we are all buried under a work load . . . Yes, I have it, I have written it. Of course, I am grateful ... I told you, I look for any light, I do not know where I will find the light . . .'

There was a time of silence and then they heard the shuffle of his feet.

He came to the kitchen door. He wore his slippers and a robe over his pyjamas. There was a grey tiredness in his face, and his hair hung clumsily on his forehead. The maresciallo snapped his fingers at Pasquale.

Pasquale asked, 'Dottore, would you like juice, or coffee, or tea?'

The shaken head. Pasquale wondered if the magistrate had taken a pill. He had gone to his bedroom a good hour before. He could have taken a pill, he could have been deep in sleep. There were four of them round the table with their newspapers and their cards and the filled ashtray.

'Nothing, thank you. Maresciallo, please, I ask a favour of you. It is only a request because what I ask is outside the remit of your duties. What I ask is forbidden, you would be within your rights to tell me that what I ask is not possible.'

Pasquale watched the face of the maresciallo, and the face was impassive and gave no answer. They were not permitted to shop for the magistrate, and they did. They were not permitted to cook for him, or to clean the apartment.

'It is always the family, correct? I follow the family of Ruggerio and always it leads me into darkness. There has been a member of his family that I have missed - my own fault, I cannot justify my error: his youngest brother. The error is with me because, four years ago, I interviewed this brother in Rome. The youngest brother is Giuseppe Ruggerio, a businessman, he attacked me with what I believed to be justification. Was it his fault that his eldest brother was a mafioso? What more could he do than leave Sicily, make his own life away from the island? Was I not guilty of persecution? I believed him, erased him from my memory. I can make excuses. I can justify why I let the trail slip from me. But, the reality, I am humiliated. Now, I am told - I grovel because it was my error - the youngest brother is in Palermo. I have his address. I want confirmation that he is here. I ask you, maresciallo, to go and confirm for me that Giuseppe Ruggerio now lives in Palermo. It is always the family. Please . . .'

It was forbidden that the ragazzi should shop, cook, clean for the man they protected.

A more serious offence, to take active part in an investigation. Grim-faced, the maresciallo reached out and took a scrap of paper from the magistrate. Pasquale saw an address written in pencil on the scrap of paper. They faced the same danger as the man.

Because they rode with him and walked with him they were as exposed to risk as he was. Pasquale understood why the maresciallo took the scrap of paper and lifted his coat from the draining board, and checked his pistol and went out of the kitchen. They walked with death, together.

The great wooden horse figure was being towed by men in modern dress into a farmyard, and the men carried firearms and were swarthy-faced, hard-weathered-faced, and from the pockets of their trousers and their jackets and their anoraks spilled American dollar bills, and there were dollar bills in the mud and ignored, and they started to search the interior of the wooden horse figure, clambered into the hatch door in the horse figure's belly, and she was far to the back of the interior, and the torches of the men found her, and she screamed, and he heard the sirens . . .

The first sirens of the day had woken Harry Compton.

He'd slept rotten. Not the fault of the bed in the hotel room that he'd tossed half the night. He'd tossed, he'd put the light back on in the small hours and he'd tried to win some sleep by reading the file he had accumulated on Charlotte Parsons, Codename Helen, and he'd dreamed.

He thought he might have slept a little over three hours. He had thrust himself out of the bed and walked over the scattered bedclothes, and gone to the window and pushed back the shutters. He had seen the two cars powering along the street with the lights on the roofs and the sirens blasting. He'd seen the guns, he'd seen the guards, he had seen the slumped figure in the back of the lead car.

They'd met for breakfast.

At home, Fliss left him alone for breakfast. If she sat with him they argued. He took his breakfast alone in the kitchen at home, a snatched apple and a piece of toasted bread smeared with honey, and coffee. The American didn't seem to want to talk, which suited Harry Compton. The American had eggs and sausage and bacon cooked to extinction. They'd talk after breakfast, that seemed to be the deal. It was the American's problem that they hadn't been met, for the American to sort out, and for the American to argue that the mission of Codename Helen was dead in the water, aborted . . . There were mostly tourists in the breakfast room. There were couples from Britain and Germany and they wore bright clothes that were ridiculous for their age and their eyes were on their food and their guidebooks. Breakfast would be inclusive, so they were eating big, like the American, and they were gutting the guidebooks so that they would seem intelligent each time they were dumped off the bus and marched to the next antiquity. He was contemptuous of tourists because his mortgage was £67,000, monthly repayments hovering at £350 a month, and if the baby came then they would need a bigger place, bigger mortgage, bigger monthly drain. Most summers he went with Fliss for two weeks to her aunt's cottage in the Lakes, and most summers after a week there he was yearning to get back to S06 work. Harry Compton had told his wife that he'd be gone forty-eight hours, that he wouldn't be getting to see anything ... He chewed on the bread roll, not fresh that morning, and the coffee was cold . . .

The man came from behind him.

The hand of the man brushed across the table and bounced the small basket that contained the bread rolls.

He had his back to the entrance of the breakfast room, hadn't seen the man come.

The hand was tanned and it had fair hairs growing on it. The hand scooped up Dwight Smythe's room key from beside the basket of bread rolls.

He was half out of his chair, the protest was in his throat, and he saw the American's face, impassive except that the big lips moved nervously.

'Leave it, Harry,' the American growled, water on shingle. Dwight Smythe, no fuss, laid down his fork and rested his hand loose on Harry Compton's arm.

He subsided back onto his chair. The man walked on, slipped the key to Dwight Smythe's room into his trouser pocket. The man was dressed casually, a check shirt and jeans, and he carried a plastic bag that was weighted, and the top of a sketch pad protruded from the top of the bag. The man wore a long pony-tail of fair hair, held close to his neck by a red plastic band. He was, to Harry Compton, like a drop-out, like a druggie. The man went to the end of the breakfast room and he was looking around him as if for a friend, as if to find someone he was due to meet. The man turned, the man had failed to find his friend, and he came back past them. Harry Compton saw the man's face. He saw drawn lines, as if the man were scarred with anxiety. He saw the man's waist and the bulge below where the shirt was tucked into the trouser belt. The man was gone past him.

'I think we'll have fresh coffee,' Dwight Smythe said, and his tongue brushed on his lips. 'This coffee's cold shit.'

Dwight Smythe called the girl, and it was ten minutes before the coffee came, and while they waited for the coffee the American ate two rolls of bread with jam on them, and he didn't talk . . . He was a detective sergeant, headhunted for an elite unit, he was supposed to have the qualities of a policeman and an accountant and a lawyer, and he reckoned that he knew nothing . . . They drank most of the second pot of coffee, and Dwight Smythe wiped the crumbs off his face ... He wasn't firearms-trained, he had never carried a weapon more lethal than his truncheon, he knew nothing . . .

They went out of the breakfast room and crossed the hotel lobby. The British tourists were loading noisily into their bus, and the Germans were crowding round their courier.

They walked up the wide staircase, and then down the corridor. There was only a chambermaid in the corridor with her trolley of clean sheets, clean towels, soaps and shampoos. Harry Compton realized that he had glanced her over, as if a chambermaid could be a threat. The 'Non Disturbare' sign was on Dwight Smythe's door. He thought there would be a fight, but the fight was the American's problem. The chambermaid was in a room down the corridor. The American knocked lightly on his own door. The accent, American, was a murmur - the door was not fastened.

The man sat on Dwight Smythe's unmade bed. On the crumpled pillow was an ashtray. The man smoked his second cigarette, looked up as they came in, his hand had been over the bulge in his waist and now dropped away. The strain was stamped on the man's face. It was the American's problem, the American's job to do the dirty talk.

'Hi, Axel, good to see you.'

'Sorry for last night.'

'Not a problem. Axel, this is Harry Compton, out of London, a detective in the—'

Axel jerked across the bed and his body upset the ashtray and spilled the cigarette debris over the pillow, and he reached for the TV control and flicked buttons until he found loud rock, and he raised the volume.

Dwight Smythe said, soft, 'We were sent together, there's been high-grade crap between London and Washington.'

The cigarette went to the mouth, the hand snaked forward. The murmur stayed with the voice as if, Harry Compton thought, the shit had been kicked out of him. 'I'm Axel Moen, happy to meet you, Harry. Sorry I didn't make the airport.'

'Didn't matter, we had a good ride in,' Harry Compton said awkwardly. Not his problem, it was for the American to dish the shit.

'Axel, I'm not carrying good news/ Dwight Smythe blurted. 'I'm sorry, I'm only the goddam messenger.'

'What's the message?'

'Let me say this. When we met in London, when we travelled, we may not have hit it.

I might have sparked you. Maybe I thought you arrogant, maybe you thought me fourth-grade. That's past, gone.' 'Spit it.'

Dwight Smythe scratched at the short curled hair of his scalp, like he was buying time. 'It's not easy, not for me and not for Harry . . . Up on high, Washington and London - Axel, they've killed it.'

Harry Compton waited for the fight back, waited for the anger to jut the chin, waited for the tirade about big men being short of balls.