Killing Ground (11 page)

The pentito Contorno had broken the law of omerta and thirty of his relations by blood and by marriage had been butchered in a proxy attempt to halt the information flow he dribbled. There was a saying of the peasants on the island: 'A man who is really a man never reveals anything even when he is being stabbed.' The pentito Buscetta had turned away from the code of silence and thirty-seven of his relations had been murdered. Another saying of the peasants on the island: 'A man who is deaf and blind and silent lives a hundred years in peace.' The pentito Mannoia was now a terrified man, existing on Valium tablets, in crisis. He had heard a woman refer to her pentito brother as 'a relative of my father'. It was an earthquake in their lives when they gave up the silence. Each year one of the prisoners who sat at the bare table in the bare room, hemmed in by the bare walls of the bunker, was useful to the magistrate. Five a year were rubbish wretches.

It was a sparring game for Tardelli and the prisoner.

'Why do you wish to take advantage of the Award Legislation under the conditions of the Special Protection Programme?'

The eyes of the prisoner were on the choked ashtray. He stammered, 'I have decided to collaborate because La Cosa Nostra is only a gang of cowards and assassins.'

He could be cruel. Rocco Tardelli, mild-mannered and round- shouldered, could be vicious.

'I believe it more probable that you seek to "collaborate" because you face the sentence of ergastolo. You face the rest of your life in prison, here, in Ucciardione.'

'I have rejected La Cosa Nostra.'

'Perhaps you have only rejected the sentence of life in Ucciardione.'

'I have information . . .'

'What is the information?'

'I have information on the location where Mario Ruggerio lives.'

'Where does he live?'

The prisoner snorted, the furtive eyes lanced upwards towards the magistrate. 'When I have the guarantee of the Special Protection . . .'

'Then you go back to your cell, and you consider. You do not seek to bargain with me.

Back and consider.'

'I can tell you where is Mario Ruggerio.'

'When you have told me, then we think on the Protection Programme. Then I evaluate and make my recommendation to the Committee. You talk, or you go back to your cell. It is not for you to make conditions.'

It was important for the magistrate, Rocco Tardelli, to set the rules from the first interview. A thousand men had been received into the Protection Programme. The budget was exhausted, safe houses were filled, carabineri and military barracks bulged with the pentiti and their families. Most were useless. Most bartered long sentences of imprisonment for stale information. To a dedicated investigator, as was Rocco Tardelli, it was distasteful to exchange freedom for tired news.

'But I have come to you . . .'

'And told me nothing. Consider your position.'

Tardelli stood. The interview was concluded. Most of those he met, the true leaders of La Cosa Nostra, were men he treated with due respect. It puzzled him, frequently, that such gifted men should require criminality to buttress their yearning for dignity.

Because they had lost their dignity, it was hard for him to offer a pentito due respect.

The prisoner, the blanket again over his head, was escorted back to the medical area.

The doctor would call for prison staff to return him to the shared cell on the third floor of the block. The magistrate gathered up his briefcase from the floor, his cigarette packet from the table, his coat from the hook on the door. With his guards, he hurried down the corridor.

The sunshine hit their faces.

'You see, my young friend, Pasquale, maker of babies, I have to make him suffer. He has made the first move, but he will have thought he can control me. I have to show him that he does not. He will have thought he can offer me information, step by step, a little at a time, as he demands further privileges. That is not acceptable. I have to be able to judge that he will tell me everything that he knows. I have to be patient . . .'

They paused at the car, the armoured Alfa. The lights were flashed at the gate sentries. The engines roared. The gates swung open. The sidearms and the machine-pistols were cocked.

'Is he a jewel, Pasquale, or is he false gold?'

'Please don't talk to me, not when we are moving, please.'

He tucked down into the darkened interior of the car. The young man, Pasquale, was in front of him, the maresciallo drove.

He leaned forward, he caught the back of the young man's seat. It was a compulsion for him, to share and to talk. There was no one for him to talk with but the ragazzi. He despised himself, but to talk at times was the craving of an addict.

'You know, if I was afraid, if I could not tolerate the fear any longer, I could send a signal. There are routes by which a signal could be sent. Certain people, in the Palace of Poison or in the Questura, even in the barracks of the carabineri, would send a signal, pass a message. I have only to say, in confidence, that a prisoner asked for me. In confidence, I would give that prisoner's name. In confidence, binding such a person to secrecy, I could say that I have rejected the offer of information from that prisoner. It would be a signal that I was now afraid. The message would be passed on, it would be heard. It would be understood that I was no longer a threat. If, in confidence, I sent that signal, then I could again go to a restaurant, go to the cinema, go to the opera at the Politeama, go to the hairdresser . . .'

The young man, Pasquale, sat rigid in front of him.

The magistrate said sadly, 'I have to believe that I can live with the fear.'

'I hear we cocked your posh grub. You won't find me crying, Harry. Wife was out, so mine last night was sausage, oven chips and beans.'

'Didn't do too bad, sir.' Harry chuckled. 'Managed five courses, two gins for aperitif, bottle of white and red, brandy to wash it down . . .'

'Did we screw you?'

The detective superintendent, it was his show, led the detective sergeant out of the senior partner's office and across the hall and out through the front door, down the steps and across to the pavement where the Transit van was parked. Harry stood back to allow his superior to hand over the cardboard packing case first to the constable at the rear doors. They paused, each of them, wrung their hands, pretty damn heavy the boxes were.

'I was beginning to get the taste for it. Quite a good restaurant, actually, for a hotel.'

'Till we horned in. Come on, next load.'

They went back into the building on Regent Street, looking straight ahead and ignoring the white-faced junior partners and the secretaries who had little handkerchiefs clasped in their hands as if to safeguard them from the Domesday collapse of their world. It was inevitable, what had happened the previous evening, because of the shortage of manpower in S06 and the constant juggling of priorities. Listening to Giles Blake's assessment of the immediate future of the gilts market, toying with the cod to make it last because they were slow on their food at the next table and hearing the announcement break into the canned nothing music. 'Would Mr Harry Compton please come to reception to take a telephone call? Mr Harry Compton to reception, please.'

Getting a judge out of his club and back to chambers, phoning the wife and pleading excuses, going through the evidence dossier with the judge and asking for a Schedule 1

Production Order under the Police Criminal Evidence Act (1984). Getting the judge's signature on the order, asking him to put nib to paper a second time for the search warrant, and seeing his reluctance because it was a solicitor that they were going to jump when the office opened in the morning. Maybe that had been worth it, the study of distaste on the good old judge's face, because it was a solicitor, same clan and same tribe. Harry Compton had done the donkey's load of the investigation into the bent bastard whose hands were into clients' savings, the greedy bastard who was excavating trustee funds, the solicitor who had broken trust, but it was the detective superintendent's show and he'd made the call that had hauled the junior man off his expenses dinner. The panic reason was that the senior partner, information received, was going abroad and hadn't given his colleagues a coming-home date. Under a Schedule 1 Production Order and a search warrant the papers and archives were being packed away in cardboard boxes, down to the last sheet and the last file, loaded up and would be d riven for close analysis to the S06 office behind Holborn police station.

Harry Compton was dog-tired, out on his feet. He had finished with the judge at midnight, had the briefing with the team at thirty minutes after midnight, been home and slept three hours, been up and driven to the senior partner's home in Essex for a dawn knock and the clicking of handcuffs. He trudged up the stairs again for the next load of papers.

'Where did we get to?' The detective superintendent stopped on I he landing and breathed hard.

'Last night? Sort of nowhere and somewhere. Chummy meets a guy, they have dinner, they talk financials through the evening. It was pretty unexceptional stuff.

Anyway, the NCIS material on chummy was kind of vague, not much more than a single report of a medium cash deposit in a bank, £28,000, along with sharp-moving accounts with plenty of action in drops and withdrawals and not a lot to point to where the money comes from and where it's going, but not showing up as obvious illegal. That was the "nowhere".'

They were back in the senior partner's office. A small mountain of cardboard boxes remained to be shifted. And there was more to move in the secretary's office, and more from the junior partners' rooms, and then there was the whole of the bloody archive in the basement.

'Get a hernia from this. You're a cussed sod, Harry, always keep the best to last. What was the "somewhere"?'

The detective sergeant grinned, welcomed the compliment. 'Smooth as new paintwork. The guest, wearing his money on his back, Italian, very tasty . . . and he'd flown in from Palermo.'

Each of them heaved up a box and headed for the door.

'You wouldn't be telling me, would you, Harry, that every businessman from Palermo is bloody mafia?'

Harry Compton winked. "Course they are - if it was a grannie aged eighty from Palermo, a kid aged five from Palermo, I'd have 'em locked up for "organized crime".

It has a sort of ring, doesn't it, Palermo?'

'We can run the name through.'

'Don't have the name, had a phone call before I'd even got stuck into the sweets trolley.

I'll get the name.'

'But you'll work this bloody lot first, too right.'

There were forty-seven boxes of papers from the offices, and there would be twenty-nine plastic bin sacks from the archives, and they'd need going through before he could get back to a hotel in Portman Square for a guest's name. It would all be a matter of priorities.

She passed him the letter, but the American made no move to take it. He turned to face her.

'Who else has read this letter?'

She bridled. 'Nobody has.'

'You are telling me, certain, nobody else has touched this letter.'

'Of course they haven't.'

She watched. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, shook it, then took the letter from her. The handkerchief protected the letter from the touch of his fingertips.

To Charley, holding the letter in a handkerchief seemed ridiculous. 'Why?'

He said bleakly, 'So that it doesn't look as if it's been shown round, so that my prints aren't on it.'

'Would it be looked at that closely?'

'We do it my way, let's understand that from now.'

He was impassive. He talked as if to an annoying child. He swung round, away from her, to read the letter held in the handkerchief. Bugger him. Charley had thought it clever to give him a meeting point on the cliffs. The dusk had been falling when she had ridden her scooter to the car park, empty but for his hire-car, that served the coastal footpath. He had been where she had told him to be. There was a nest of cigarette ends by his feet, enough for him to have been there for hours, from long before she had told him to be there. It was a good place for the big seabirds, and the gulls and shags and guillemots were chorusing and floating in the wind and settling on the rocks below where the sea's charge broke. It was a favourite place, when home just suffocated her, to come to. It was where she came and sat and brooded when the clinging attentions of her mother and father swamped her. It was a place of peace and wildness. She had thought it clever to come to the cliffs, to sit on the bench of coarse wood planks. Here she would be in control . . . He passed the letter back to her, then pocketed the handkerchief, then flicked a cigarette from the Lucky Strike packet.

'Aren't you going to ask me why I decided—?'

'Not important to me.'

'Whether it's excitement or duty, whether it's adventure or obligation—?'

'Doesn't matter to me.'

She bit at her lip. She ran her tongue the length of her lip. She had sought control.

The blood was running in her. 'Well, sure as hell, it's not your courtesies. You are the rudest man—'

'If that's what you want to think, you should fax it to them in the morning.'

She crumpled, and the control that she had sought slipped further. 'But . . . but I don't have the fax number.'

He said, as if he were tired, as if it were tedious, 'The fax number was on their letter.'

'But I tore it up, didn't I? I wasn't going, was I? I destroyed the letter, and then I changed my mind.'

He should have asked why she had changed her mind. He didn't. He was reaching inside his windcheater and he took out the folded sheet of paper and opened it. From the photocopy of the letter sent to her he wrote the number and the international code on a note pad, tore off the sheet from the pad and handed it to her. There was a growl in his voice. She thought him so bloody cold. 'Write it in your own hand on the back of the letter.'

She did what she was told. He took the paper from his notebook back and tore it into small pieces. He threw the pieces into the air and they flaked away below them, carried on the wind gusts, down towards the big birds as they settled for the night.