Red Fox (20 page)

It may not be required.'

The jolt shuddered through Archie Carpenter, straight-backed in his chair, peering forward.

'We try to use modern methods here. We try not to justify the image that you have of us. We do not sleep through the afternoon, we are not lazy and stupid. We have a certain skill, Carpenter.

We have the tapes of the telephone calls to Mrs Harrison and to ICH. The computer gobbles them. Then we feed other calls into the machine, from other events. And we have made a match. We have two cases where the contact was from the same man. You understand police work?'

' I did eight years with Special Branch in London, with the Metropolitan Police. What you'd see as the political wing.'

Carpenter spoke with a certain pride.

'I know what is Special Branch.'

Carpenter flashed his molars, creased his cheeks.

Carboni acknowledged, then launched himself again. 'So I have a match and that tells me that I am not dealing with a first time out group. I am working against an organization that has been in the field. It tells me a little, it tells me something. Just now I am talking to a man from the office of a business fellow that I have been asked to investigate. You know the situation. Many times when you have my position people come with a whisper for the ear. Look at this man, they say, look at him and think about him. Is everything correct about him? And if he is a Calabrese, if he is from the south and has much cash, then you look closely.

I rang the office of a property speculator in Rome this morning, but he is not available, he is away on business. I must speak to his junior.'

Carboni paused, master of theatre, paused and waited while Carpenter willed him on. Seemed to fill his lungs as if the ten minutes of near continuous talk had vacuumed them.

'Carpenter, we need fortune in this business. You know that, we need luck. This morning we have been blessed. You saw me in the office when I hugged that little prig - I detest the man, arrogant and sneering - and I hugged him because to my ear the voice of the man that says his master is in Calabria is the same as that of the man who called the office of Harrison.'

Carpenter bobbed his head in praise. 'Congratulations, sincerely, Mr Carboni, my congratulations. You have a wrap-up.'

' It is not definite, of course. I await the confirmation of the machines.' A coyness across the desk.

'But you have no doubts.'

' In my own mind there are none.'

' I say again, congratulations.'

'But we must move with care and discretion, Carpenter. You understand that we go into surveillance and tapping. Caution is required if we want your Harrison returned . . .'

Sharply, an intrusion on the men's concentration, the telephone rang. Carboni reached for it and even where Carpenter sat he could hear the strident talk. Carboni scribbled on his notepad as the Englishman's excitement dissipated and waned. He had not wanted the spell of success broken and now had to endure interruption of the sweet flow. Carboni had written on and covered two sheets of paper before, without courtesies, he put the telephone down.

'Don't look worried, Carpenter. Complications, yes. But those that thicken the mixture. A man has been found dead in a small hotel close to the railway station. He had been clubbed to death.

We have the teleprint of his history. He was held briefly on a kidnapping charge, but the principal witness declined to testify at his trial, the prosecution was lost. He comes from the village of Cosoleto, in the far south, in Calabria. The man that I tried to telephone this morning, he is from that village too. There is a web forming, Carpenter. A web is sticky and difficult to extract from, even for those who have made it.'

' I think you'd prefer that nobody's hopes were raised yet. Not in London, not with the family.'

Carboni shrugged, sending a quiver through his body and eased his fingers through the rare strands of his forehead hair. ' I have given you much in confidence.'

' I'm grateful to you because you've wasted much of your time.

If I could see you tomorrow I'd be more than pleased.' Archie rose out of his chair, would love to have stayed because the atmosphere of investigation was infectious, and for too long he had been away from it.

'Come tomorrow at the same time,' said Carboni and laughed, deep and satisfied. The man who has enjoyed a lively whore, spent his money and regretted nothing. 'Come tomorrow and I will have something to tell you.'

'We should put some champagne on ice.' Carpenter trying to match the mood.

'From this morning I don't drink.' Carboni laughed again and gripped Carpenter's hand with the damp warmth of friendship.

For two and a half years Francesco Vellosi had accepted the escort of a loaded Alfetta, three men of his own squad always in place behind him as he made the four daily journeys to and from the Viminale and his flat. Sun and frost, summer and winter, they dogged his movements. He had people coming for drinks that evening at home, he told Mauro, with his clipped, even voice.

But he would be returning to his desk later. Would Mauro fix the movements and co-ordination of the escort? A flicker of the eyes went with the request.

For Vellosi there was now time for a brief rest before his guests arrived. He would not permit them to stay late, not with the papers piling on his desk. When he was inside his front door and passed to the responsibility of the guard who lived with him, the motor escort withdrew. Because he would later return to his office, there were curses from the men who accompanied him, and who would again suffer a broken evening.

The shadows had gone now, called away by the sun that had groped beyond the orange orchard over to his right. The lines had lengthened, reached their extremity and disappeared, leaving in their wake the haze of the first darkness. With their going there was a cold settling fast among the trees and bushes that Giancarlo had taken for his watching place. The building in front of him was no more than a blackened outline, indistinct in shape, difficult to focus on. Around him the noises of the night were mustering, swelling in their competition. The barking of a far distant farm dog, the droning of the bees frantic for a last feed from the wild honeysuckle, the engine drive of the skeleton mosquitoes, the croak of an owl unseen in a high tree. The boy did not move, as if any motion of his body might alert those who he knew stayed unaware and unsuspicious in the barn that was less than a hundred metres from him. This was not the moment to rush forward. Better to let the darkness cling more tightly to the land, throw its blanket more finally across the fields and olive patches and the rock outcrops that were submerging in the dusk.

The ideas of Giancarlo convoluted and hesitant when conceived in the rocking pace of the rapido were now near to fulfilment.

Wild and ill-thought at their birth, they now seemed to him to own a pattern and a value. Worth a smile, little fox, worth a grin.

Unchallenged, he had walked out of the small station with its wide platforms on the Reggio esplanade, gulped at a waft of sea-blown air, and mingled with the stream of descending passengers.

If there were watching polizia at the barrier, Giancarlo had not seen them, and there had been no shouted command to halt. He had walked from the station, among the people laden with suitcases and string bags. The snakes of humanity had slithered in their differing directions, splintering again and again till he was alone. In a tabacchi he purchased a map of Calabria. The names were clear and well remembered. Sinopli . . . Delianuova . . .

Acquaro . . . Cosoleto. He found them where the red ribbons of the roads began to twist into the uplands of the Aspromonte, beyond the green-shaded coastal strip, far into the deeper sand and brown of the rising ground.

In early afternoon with the time of siesta weighty on the empty streets, Giancarlo found his car. Among the white-washed houses, with the light battering back at his unprotected eyes, parked haphazardly as if the owner were late for an important meeting, not just restless for his lunch. The life of the Mezzo Giorno ruled, the land of the half day. Washing hung down, bleached and stiffened, from the balcony of a house under which was abandoned a red Fiat 127. Right outside the front door, keys in the ignition. Shutters fastened to protect the cool in the interior, not a child crying, not a grandmother complaining, not a radio tuned to music. He slipped into the driving seat, eased off the handbrake and coasted slowly down the incline, waiting till he was clear of the corner before firing the engine.

He headed north for the long viaduct, where the Mafiosi had made their fortunes in extortion from those who needed to move in materials and equipment and found it cheaper to concede the dues than to fight. He drove slowly because that was the style of the Calabrian after lunch and his need to avoid drawing attention was as acute as ever. His face was sufficient of a problem, white with the pallor of prison and confinement in the covo; not the complexion of the south, not the burned and dark wood tan of those who owned this country. He drifted past the turn-off signs to Gallico and Carnitello, and climbed high with the road above the sea channel that separated the Sicilian island from the mainland. For a moment he slowed and stared hard away to his left, his gaze held on the sprawl of Messina away across the azure of the water.

Messina, blurred and indistinct, lay white in the sun among the spreading green and rust of parks and waste ground. Messina, where they had built the gaol for the girls. This was where they had taken La Vianale, where Curcio's Nadia had waited for her trial, where if he did not succeed his Franca would decay and crumble. He could not see the prison, not across eight kilometres of reflecting sea, but it was there, a spur and a goad.

The car increased speed. Past the road on the left to Scilla, and on the right to Gambarie. Through the booming length of rock-

cut tunnels, and on into the interior. Sinopli and Delianuova were signed to the right and he pulled the little Fiat off the dual carriageway and started the winding negotiation of the hill road.

Through Santa Eufemia d'Aspromonte, a barren and meagre community where his coming scattered only the chickens feeding in the road gravel, and his going raised barely an eyebrow of attention from the elderly who sat in black skirts and suits in front of their homes. Through Sinopli where he hooted for the right to pass a bus that struggled in an exhaust cloud on the main street, and where the shops were still padlocked, and it was too hot, too sickly clammy for the ragazzi to have brought out their plastic footballs.

Bitter country now. Laden with rock and precipice, covered with the toughened scrub and trees that grew from little earth. In low gear, rising and descending, Giancarlo drove on, till he was over the old and narrow stone bridge across the Vasi, and into Acquaro. Perhaps some saw him go through the village but he was unaware of them, studying by turns the map laid out on the front passenger seat, and the perils of the curving route. A half-kilometre further, he stopped. There was a lay-by, and a heap of gravel where the workmen would come in the winter when there was ice to make the road safe for motorists. Further back was a turn-in among the trees where perhaps the hunting parties parked their cars on Sundays or the young men took the virgins when they could no longer suffer the claustrophobia of the family in the front room and the watch of the Madonna above the fireplace. Giancarlo grinned to himself. Wrong day for hunters, too early in the evening for virgins. This was a place for him to park hidden from the road. He drove as far between the trees as the track permitted.

From habit, in the quiet of his seat, Giancarlo checked over the P38, stroked its silk barrel length, and wiped on his shirt waist the faint stains on the handle. Eight bullets only, eight to do so much with. He climbed lightly from the car, eased the pistol back into his belt and was lost in the close foliage.

He skirted the road, leaving it what he judged to be a hundred metres on his left, seeking the thickness of the wood, easing on to the toes of his canvas shoes, thankful for the cover. It took him only a few minutes before he found the vantage point for the once-white house from which paint and plaster alike peeled, served by a rutted track. A hovel to Giancarlo, a place for sheep and cows. Medieval, had it not been for the car parked outside the only door. This was the home of a contadino, a peasant; and his wife moved beside the building with a bucket, and his half-clothed children played with a spar of wood. The boy settled himself comfortably on the mould of generations of fallen leaves and watched and waited for the brother of the wife of Claudio.

Not long. Not long enough to try him.

A big man, balding above a flat weatherbeaten forehead.

Cheeks that were not shaved, trousers that were held at the waist with string, a shirt that was torn at the armpit. Contadino, Giancarlo spat the word. But of the proletariat, surely ? He smiled mirthlessly. A servant of the bosses... ? The boy agreed, satisfied in the ideology equation. The man carried a plastic bag and walked down the track from his house to the road, paused there and his eyes traversed a sweep that covered the boy's hide. The man had passed close to where Giancarlo lay before his sounds subsided. Like a stoat, Giancarlo was after him, ears cocked and attuned to the distant noises in front, eyes fastened on the dried twigs and oak leaves that he must not break nor displace.

The tree line covered the rim of a slight hill, beyond it was a roughened field indented from the cattle's wet spring grazing. On the far side of the open ground Giancarlo saw the stone-built barn with its rain-reddened tin roof and two doors facing him.

The man he had followed was met by one who had come from the right-hand door and who carried a single-barrelled shotgun, the weapon of the country people. They talked a brief discourse, before the bag was handed over and a gust of laughter carried to the boy. As the man retraced his steps, Giancarlo melted among the trees and undergrowth, unseen, unheard.

When it was safe he came slowly forward to the dry stone wall that skirted the field, and picked his watching place. A boundless pride swept through him. He wanted to stand up and shout defiance and exultation. Giancarlo Battestini, remember the name, because he had found the Englishman of the multinationals, and would exploit him, as the foreign companies exploited the proletariat.