Red Fox (38 page)

Fat women in Hampstead, poodles and jewels, apartments with lifts, and deceased husbands. For you, you bitches, for you I'm lying here, listening to him coming.

There were the escape moments, Geoffrey. In the car, plenty of them, each time you stopped . . . God, do we go through all that again ? It's a big grown-up world, Geoffrey. Nanny isn't here any more. No one to save you but yourself. Why isn't little Giancarlo messing his knickers, why isn't he frightened that his time is coming? Because he believes in something, idiot. It's a faith, it has a meaning to him.

And Geoffrey Harrison has no creed.

Who does Geoffrey Harrison fight for? What principle?

Where is his army of companions who will weep if one of their number falls?

Another bloody casualty, Geoffrey, and there will be a public sadness in Head Office, and a few will scratch their heads and try and remember the chap who went abroad because it paid more.

But don't expect there's going to be any wet on the blotting-paper, any stains on the ledgers, any flags pulled down.

Remember the bar at the Olgiata Golf Club. Red faces and long gins. Men who were always right, always knew. Certainty of opinion. Remember the bar of the Gold Club when Aldo Moro was cringing for the world to see and urging in letters to his friends for government weakness to preserve his life from the Red Brigades.

Despicable behaviour. The man's no dignity.

What you'd expect from these people.

Only have to go back to the war, in North Africa, show 'em a bayonet and you've more prisoners on your hands than you can feed.

What a wonderful wallowing security, membership of the Golf Club. They'll make hay of you, Geoffrey. The man who came back for nine holes after he'd been on his knees with the tears on his cheeks and the sobbing in his throat, and pleaded and held the legs of a boy half his age.

Got to fight 'em, show 'em there's going to be no nonsense.

That's the way to beat the scum.

Giancarlo was very close, and his voice pierced the darkness.

They want you dead, 'Arrison.'

Harrison wriggled and dragged at the wires, tried to turn to face the boy. Managed a few inches.

'What do you mean?'

They do nothing to save you.'

'What did they say?'

"They tried only to use up time so that they could trace the call.'

'What did Franca say?' The questions from Harrison blurted at the centre of the shadow above him.

'Franca told me to kill you. She said they would not release her.

She told me to kill you . . . '

A whisper from Harrison. The breached corn sack, from which the essence is lost. 'Franca said that?'

It's a bloody dream, Geoffrey. There's no reality here. It's fantasy.

' I'm not your enemy, Giancarlo. I've done nothing to hurt you.'

And where was the bastard's face, moulded in the blackness?

How could you creep before a boy with no face, how did you win him with your fear and your misery? 'I've never tried to harm you ..

'Franca said I was to kill you.*

'For Christ's sake, Giancarlo. I'm no enemy of the Italian proletariat, I'm not in the way of your revolution.'

'You are a symbol of oppression and exploitation.'

' It's like you're reading out of the telephone book, they don't mean anything, those words. You can't take a life for a slogan.'

The same dripping voice, the same cruelty in the unseen eyes.

There can be no revolution without blood. Not just your blood,

'Arrison. We die in the streets for what we believe is a just struggle. We face the living death in the concentration camps of the regime. Twenty years she will exist in Messina . . . '

'Don't talk to me about other people.' The dream clearing, the nightmare fading. 'It helps you not at all if you kill me. You must see that, Giancarlo, please say you can see t h a t . . . '

'You are pathetic, 'Arrison. You are of the middle class, you are of the multinational, you have a flat on a h i l l . . . should you not defend that way? Should you not defend that exploitation?

I despise you.'

The silence fell fast because the killing words of the boy struck far. Harrison abandoned his efforts, lay still and heard the sounds of Giancarlo dropping to sit on the ground a dozen feet from the bunker. Man and boy they drifted to their own thoughts.

Crawl to him, Geoffrey. It's not the Golf Club's life, forget the humiliation, screw the dignity lapse. That he couldn't grovel, what a thing for a man to die over.

Shrill little words and a voice he did not recognize as his own.

'What do I have to do, Giancarlo? What do I have to do for you not to kill me?'

The Judas moment, Geoffrey. The betrayal of his society. The boy had read him, that he belonged nowhere, was a part of nothing. 'Answer me, please.'

Endlessly the boy waited. The wave rolled back from the beach, then gathered itself in white-crested accumulation, burst again, shattering with force on the sand. The reply of Giancarlo.

'You cannot do anything.'

'Afterwards I will say what you have told me to say.'

'Franca has ordered it, you cannot do anything.'

' I will go to the newspapers and the radio and the television, I will say what you want me to . . . '

The boy seemed bored, as if wishing the conversation terminated. Could the man not understand what he was told? 'You chose a way for your life, I have chosen mine. I will fight against what is rotten, you will prop it. I do not recognize the white flag, that is not the way of our combat.'

Harrison was crying, convulsing, the great tears welling in his eyes, dribbling on his cheeks, wetting his mouth. 'You take a pleasure in i t . . . ? '

There was a sternness in the boy. 'We are at war, and you should behave like a soldier. Because you do not I despise you.

It will be at nine o'clock in the morning. You have till then to become a soldier.'

'You horrid, repulsive little bastard . . . they'll give you no mercy . . . you'll die in the fucking gutter.'

'We ask for no mercy, 'Arrison. We offer none.'

Quiet again in the forest. Giancarlo spread himself on the leaves. He pushed with his hands to make the surface more even, wriggled on to his side so that his back was turned on Geoffrey Harrison and beneath a ceiling of moonlight flecked by the high branches, settled himself. For a few minutes he would hear the foreign sounds of his prisoner's choking sobs. Then he found sleep and they were lost to him.

The sun of the day and the food of the evening ensured the farmer's sleep, and the comatose rest was escape from the worries that burdened his life. The price of fodder, the price of fertilizer, the price of diesel oil for the tractor could be shut out only when his mind was at peace. His child stayed silent, close to the rise and fall of his father's chest and waited with a concentrated patience, fighting off his own tiredness. Beyond the doorway the child heard the sounds of his mother's movements, and they encouraged his stillness as he lay fearful that any stirring on the damaged springs of the sofa would alert and remind her that he was not yet in his small narrow bed.

Mingled with the music were the mind pictures that the child drew for himself. Pictures that were alien and hostile.

'Come on in, Archie.*

Thank you, Michael.* Didn't slip off the tongue that easily, not the Christian name bit, not after the hard words. Charlesworth stood in the doorway with a loose shirt on him, no tie, and slacks and sandals. Carpenter fidgeted at the door in his suit.

'Come on into the den.'

Carpenter was led through the hall. Delicate furniture, a case of hardback books, oil paintings on the wall, a vase of tall irises.

Do all right, these p e o p l e . . . Stop the bitching, Archie, drop the chip off your shoulder. You can't blame people for not living in Motspur Park, not if they've the choice.

'Darling, this is Archie Carpenter, from Harrison's head office.

My wife Caroline.'

Carpenter shook hands with the tall, tanned girl presented to him. The sort they bred down in Cheltenham, along with fox-hunters and barley fields. She wore a straight dress held at the shoulders by vague straps. The wife back in the semi would have had a fit, blushed like an August rose, no bra and entertaining.

' I'm sorry I'm late, Mrs Charlesworth. I've been at the Questura.'

'You poor thing, you'd like a wash.'

Well, he wouldn't have asked for it himself, but he'd worn a jacket all day and the same socks, and he Stank like a hung duck.

'I'll take him, darling.'

An older man was rising heavily from a sofa. Washing could wait, introductions first. Charlesworth resumed the formalities.

This is Colonel Henderson, our military attach.'

'Pleased to meet you, Colonel.'

They call me "Buster", Archie. I've heard about you. I hear you've a straight tongue in your head, and a damned good thing too.'

Carpenter was led to the peace of an outer bathroom. Time for him as he stood in front of the pan to examine the sentry row of deodorant sprays on the window-sill, enough to keep the Embassy smelling sweet for a month. And books too. Who was going to read classical Greek history and contemporary American politics while having a quick squat? Extraordinary people. The reek of public school and private means. He washed his hands, let the day's grime dribble away, pushed a flannel round the back of his neck. Long live the creature comforts. Soap and water and a waiting gin.

They sat around in the lounge, the four of them, separated by rugs and marble flooring and sprouting coffee tables. Carpenter didn't resist the demand that he shed his jacket, loosen his tie.

'Well, tell us, Archie, what's the scene at the Questura?'

Charlesworth setting the ball rolling.

' I think they've screwed i t . . . '

'For that poor Mr Harrison . . . ?'

Carpenter ignored Caroline Charlesworth. What did they want, a coffee-morning chat with the neighbours, or something from the bloody horse's mouth?

Tantardini got her hands on the telephone too early in the game for the trace people. Told her boy to chop Harrison, then pulled the connection. The call was still at switchboard but the boy had the message. He rang off, and that's about it.'

Charlesworth was leaning forward in his seat, glass held between his hands. The honest, earnest young man, he seemed to Carpenter. 'She gave a specific instruction for the boy to kill Harrison?'

'That's the way Carboni put it. "I have failed your man", those were his words. Biggest bloody understatement of the day.'

'He's a good man, Giuseppe Carboni.' Charlesworth spoke with enough compassion for Carpenter momentarily to squirm.

' It's not easy, not in a country like this. Right, Buster?'

The Colonel swirled his whisky round the glass. 'We had full powers in many places, what you'd call nowadays totalitarian powers, in Palestine and Malaya and Kenya and Cyprus. Here the legacy of pre-war fascism is that the security forces are kept weak. But for all we had, it didn't do us a great deal of good.'

'But that was far from the great Mother Britain,' Carpenter interjected impatiently. This is different, it's on their own doorstep that they're being whipped. Carboni excepted, they're ambling about like bloody zombies . . . '

"They're trying, Archie,' Charlesworth intervened gently.

' I wouldn't care to make a judgement on their efficiency if I'd been here just a few hours.' The Colonel cut at the air, the swinging of the old cavalry sabre.

Carpenter put his hands above his head, grinned for a moment, dissolved the temper. 'I'm outnumbered, out-flanked, whatever

. . . So what I want to know is this: when they say they'll chop him, when Battestini says it, do we take that at face, is it gospel ?'

Caroline Charlesworth started from her chair. The plea to be excused from the blunt assessments. T h e dinner won't be more than a few minutes.'

'You answer that, Buster,' Charlesworth said. 'It's the pertinent question of the evening.'

The hard, clean eyes of the veteran fixed on Carpenter. T h e answer is affirmative. When they say they'll kill, they're as good as their word.'

'Black tie job?'

' I repeat, Mr Carpenter, they're as good as their word.'

Caroline Charlesworth appeared from the kitchen doorway.

The food was ready. She led, the men followed. In the dining-room Carpenter saw the wine on the table, the port and brandy on the sideboard. There was solace to be found here, escape from a hideous and crippling mess.

Late into the evening, the child's mother came at last for him.

With a sweep of her hand she hushed his protest, and swept him up so that he sat on her hip as she took him from the side of his father. It was done quickly and expertly and the farmer seemed as unaware of the child's going as he had been of his presence.

She nuzzled her nose against her son's neck, saw the fight that he made to keep his eyes open and chided herself that she had left him for so long. She carried him to his room.

'Mama.'

'Yes, my sweet.' She lowered him into the bed.

'Mama, if Papa wakes soon, will he come to see me?'

'You will be asleep, in the morning you will see him.' She pulled the coarse sheet to his chin.

' I have to tell him what I saw . . . '

'What was it, a wild pig, the big dog f o x . . . ?' She watched the yawn break on the child's face.

'Mama, I saw . . . '

Her kiss stifled his words, and she tip-toed from the room.

It was the work of the Agente to check finally the cell doors after the prisoners held in maximum security had finished communal recreation and were consigned for the night to their individual cells. His practice was to take a quick glance through the spyhole and then slide the greased bolt. Others would come after him when the lights were dimmed to make the last muster call of the night.

The Agente had found the paper, folded once, on the mat at the front door of his house. A small piece, ragged at an edge where it had been torn from a notepad. There was a pencil-written number on the outside flap that was immediately relevant to the Agente. Three digits, the number of the cell of the Chief of Staff of the Nappisti.