Killing Ground (30 page)

Time for coffee.

He was in the queue and talking banalities with a man from Drugs Squad.

'Morning, Ray.'

The guy from S06 was beside him.

'You were looking for a word. How you doing?'

'Coffee's usually pretty revolting. Let's walk and talk.'

The Country Chief, good ears, caught the snap in the voice of the detective superintendent.

'You go without, please yourself. I'm taking coffee.'

So he stayed in the queue, made his point, had his cup filled, balanced it on the saucer and walked to the door. The detective superintendent was ahead of him. They went across the wide hallway and out onto the driveway where the chauffeurs waited with their bullshit cars. He liked to say that DEA had a 'blue-collar' mentality, and chauffeur-driven black cars didn't fit the work ethic he believed in. They walked on the lawns and skirted the daffodil clumps and the crocus carpets.

'Nice time of year. So what can I do for you?'

The detective superintendent was smiling, but malevolent. 'Just something that crossed my desk. You have an agent called Axel Moen on your staff—'

'Wrong.'

'I beg your pardon?' The smile had shifted, the face had hardened.

'Put in one-syllables,' the Country Chief spoke slowly as if to an idiot child, emphasizing while his mind ratcheted, 'I do not have anyone of that name on my staff.

Does that settle your problem?'

'An agent with DEA accreditation named Axel Moen.'

'We have around twenty-five hundred special agents, can't know all of them.'

He never lied. He could divert, interrupt, head off, but he would not lie. He knew, from his deputy who had been to Lyon, that quite the most memorable twenty minutes of the Europol conference had been when Garcia, FBI out of Moscow, had put down the Brit from S06. The man's throat was tightening, and the veins were up on his forehead.

'Did you know that a special agent, Axel Moen, travelled down to Devon a bit more than two weeks ago?' 'Maybe I did.'

'Where's he out of?'

'Is that your business?'

'Don't fuck me around.'

'If it's your business, he's out of Rome.'

'Working with your facilities?'

'Maybe.'

'With your knowledge?'

'Maybe. I'd kind of like to catch the next lecture.' The Country Chief threw the dregs from his cup down onto the grass. The lawns around them, between the islands of daffodils and the carpets of crocuses, had just been given their first cut. The dew damp flecked his shoes. 'What's your concern?'

'He went to the home of a young girl, a schoolteacher.'

'Did he?'

'She had received an invitation to go and work for a Sicilian family/

'Had she?'

'Her parents say that your man, Axel Moen, pressured her into accepting that invitation.'

'Do they?'

'The man who has offered her employment has just travelled to the UK under false documentation.'

'Has he?'

'You want it, you'll get it. We reckon you are running some sort of anti-mafia job. We reckon you have trawled round for someone to do the sharp end for you, and you've got your sticky fingers on some poor girl.'

'Do you?'

'You have taken it upon yourselves, you arrogant bloody people, to pressurize and then send a small-town girl to Palermo for some bloody operation you've dreamed up.

Who've you cleared it with?'

'Among your crowd, I don't have to.'

'You are running some naive youngster, filled with crap no doubt, down in Palermo.

So help me, I'll see you—'

'Should have listened to what your fat cat said. Your world partners will run out of patience. Maybe they already have.'

He remembered what Dwight Smythe had said. The words rang in his mind. 'He elbows into a small and unsuspecting life, a young woman's life, and puts together a web to trap her, and does it cold.' He remembered what he himself had said: 'And maybe we should all clap our hands and sing our hymns and get on our knees and thank God that He didn't give us the problem.' He looked into the flushed anger of the Englishman's face.

'Have you thought through the consequences? Do you take responsibility for the consequences?'

'It's something you shouldn't get your noses into.'

'That's shit, that's not an answer.'

'It's the answer you're getting, so back off.'

The Country Chief walked away. He went back into the hall and gave his cup and saucer to a waitress.

He didn't have the heart for the session from the Italian attache on preventative measures being taken by the Banco d'ltalia concerning disclosure, nor for lunch, nor for the afternoon session when they would be 'entertained' by the police colonel from St Petersburg. He felt bad, and he wanted to get the hell out. He felt bad because he had said himself that it was a good plan, a plan that might just work. He had justified, himself, the use of a pressured innocent. He took his coat from the cloakroom. The poor goddam kid . . .

She had stayed in the villa the day before, fussed over by Angela, lain in the sun while the gardener worked around her, but she had argued that morning with Angela. Yes, she was quite fit enough to take small Mario to school and Francesca to kindergarten. Yes, she was quite able to do the day's shopping. Yes, she would be able to walk the children to school and kindergarten, and do the shopping, before the threatened rain came.

Shouldn't make a bloody drama out of a bloody crisis.

She walked the children, with the baby in the pram, down from the villa and into Mondello. All her childhood, the star who was the centre of attention, she had learned to milk a crisis. Perhaps it had been her going to Rome for the summer of 1992, perhaps it had been leaving home and living lonely at college, but the thought of draining sympathy from others now disgusted her. She could reflect, viciously, that her father had whined drama out of t he redundancy crisis, made a growth industry from it. Her mother complained drama out of the cash-flow crisis. God, it was why she had gone away. She thought, cruelly, that her parents fed off drama, drank off crisis.

Shut up, Charley, close it down. What was drama to Axel Moen, what was his definition of crisis? And where was he? Wrap it, Charley, forget it . . .

She dropped small Mario at the school gate, bent down so that the child could kiss her. He ran, as he did each morning, through the playground to his friends and was engulfed by them. He was a happy and sweet little boy. If the plan worked, Axel's plan, then the drama would hit the child, the crisis would come with the arrest of the child's father and the child's uncle. She wondered who would play with the child at school the morning after the arrest of his father and his uncle, and the thought hurt deep. So considerate of those children, lying little bitch that she was, Charley acknowledged the growing strength each day of the sun, and she adjusted the parasol over the pram to keep baby Mauro in shade and she had Francesca walk in the shadow of her body. The forecast on Radio Uno had claimed there would be rain later, then promised clear weather for the rest of the week. In a couple of days it would be warm enough to lie on the beach, and go into the sea, and get some of the bloody sun onto the white of her legs and onto her arms and shoulders, and onto the bruises and scabs. Put it on the list, Charley, sun lotion. The children would like it, going to the beach. She left Francesca at the kindergarten.

Through the shopping list. Tomatoes, cucumber, salami, non-fat milk, potatoes and oranges, apples . . . She ticked each item on her list. There was a farmacia on the road below the piazza, near to the Saracen tower.

She wondered if the habit of coming each morning with the children and the baby to the piazza and the shops and the school and the kindergarten meant she was now recognized. The old man who sat on his chair under the black umbrella that protected the ice blocks around his fish, he nodded gravely to her, and she flashed him her smile.

Angela only bought fish on Friday mornings, and then from a shop. Charley promised herself, if Angela were out for lunch one day, if Charley had the responsibility to make a hot meal for the children, then she'd buy fish from the old man with the black umbrella. She was on her way to the farmacia for the sun lotion when she saw the photograph.

On the newspaper stall, on the front page of the Giornale di Sicilia, in colour, was the photograph.

The photograph leapt at Charley, caught at her throat. She stood numbed in front of the newspaper stall.

In colour, in the photograph . . .

An old woman with thick legs held in bulging stockings wore the widow's clothes of black. She sat on a small household chair and her arms were held out and her head was raised as if she screamed anguish. Behind her was a priest, behind the priest was a crowd of watching men and women and children, behind the crowd were the tall and wide symmetrical lines of the close-set windows and narrow balconies. In front of her was the motorcycle that tilted on its stand. In front of the motorcycle with the red fuel tank and the eagle's head was the body. In the foreground of the photograph, in colour, was the head of the body. Blood was spread on the ground from the mouth and throat of the head of the body.

She rocked on her feet. The eyes of the woman behind the counter of the newspaper stall glinted at her.

It was a young head. She had not seen the bloodied head before. The head had been hidden from her by the helmet with the dark visor. A young and thin-faced head that was topped with a wild mat of close-curled hair was clear in the photograph. Charley knew the motorcycle. When the boot had lashed her, when she had loosed the strap to her handbag, when the glove had groped for her necklace, her face had looked up at the motorcycle.

Her words, Charley had said to Giuseppe Ruggerio, 'Just wish I'd been able to scratch his eyes out or kick him in the bloody balls.'

Her words, said to show that she was the big brave kid, 'I mean leave him something to remember me by.'

She turned away. She thought that if she stayed to look at the photograph, in colour, she would vomit on the street in front of the newspaper stall. It was the motorcycle she remembered, definite. Charley walked past the old man who sold the fish from under his black umbrella. She pushed the pram to the pier where the fishermen worked on their nets and at their boats. She stared out over the water. Such peace. As if it were a place for poets, a place for lovers. Scattered cloud shadows of turquoise on rippled water. Christ, she understood. The power of life and the power of death was around her.

Axel had told her of the power. No poets around her, no lovers. Men were around her who would kill a boy, cut his throat, leave him with his motorcycle outside the block where his mother lived, and go to eat their dinner.

She murmured, 'Don't worry, Axel Moen, I am learning. I am learning that there is no love, no kindness. Satisfied, you cold bastard? I am learning to be a lying bitch. I am learning to survive. That boy had, Axel Moen, quite a decent young face and probably where he came from there was no bloody chance of work or opportunity, what I've had.

So he's dead, and I am learning. I am learning that any bloody sentiment is just a luxury for tossers. My promise, I have forgotten the kindness of Angela Ruggerio and the love of small Mario and Francesca, I will stitch them up, do my best. It's what you wanted, right? You wanted me to learn to be a lying bitch. Satisfied?'

She pushed the pram to the farmada and she bought the sun lotion for the beach. She pushed the pram to a bar where there was a telephone and she rang Benedetto Rizzo and told him when she next had a free day, and she didn't speak of love and kindness.

Charley doubted that, until the day she died, she would forget the photograph in colour.

While the first drops of rain fell, she pushed the pram back up the hill to the villa.

As snails and slugs come out after rain has fallen and leave tacky and shining tracks on concrete paths that merge and cross and meander, so too moved the surveillance teams.

The man from Catania was first followed by a taxi driver as he went in search of a declaration of loyalty from his brothers. When the man from Catania journeyed on across his territory to gain the same declaration from his wife's brothers, he was watched by three picciotti on motorcycles. The driver of a bread-delivery van shadowed the man from Catania as he drove the big Mercedes, weighed down by the reinforced windows and by the armour plating inserted in the doors in his cousin's repair yard, reported on a meeting with his consigliere. A student from the medical school of the university watched the home of a capodecino in the Ognina district of the city to which the man from Catania came. All of them, the taxi driver and the picciotti and the driver of the bread-delivery van and the student, were paid by the man from Catania. All of them betrayed him and reported his movements to Tano, who belonged to Mario Ruggerio.

Slugs and snails, after rain has fallen, move from their cover, leave the slime of their tracks, ignore the hazard of poison pellets, crawl forward to kill the plants that have no defence.

Slugs, on their bellies, on the move ... A woman who cleaned the living quarters in the carabineri barracks at Monreale had met with Carmine before her slow and laboured walk to work. Her husband's first cousin's son, from Gangi in the Madonie mountains, was held awaiting trial in Ucciardione Prison . . . Her security clearance to clean the living quarters of the barracks had not picked up the family connection, but the vetting had not been strict as her work did not give her access to sensitive areas of the building.

On her knees she scrubbed a floor. Two pairs of feet were in front of her, waiting for her to move her bucket of soaped water. When she looked up she saw the uniformed carabiniere officer and his colleague who was dressed in the clothes of a building artisan. With reluctance, she pulled the bucket to the side of the corridor. They passed her by, as if they did not notice her. She knew the names of all of those officers whose rooms she was not given access to, and the door of the room of Giovanni Crespo was locked to her. When she reached the end of the corridor, where the doors opened out on to the car park behind the barracks, she could see the small builder's van, washed in the driving rain, with the ladder tied to the roof frame and with the stepladder jutting up between the seats. The cleaning woman had a poor memory. In pencil, on a scrap of paper, she wrote the registration number of the van. Without the help of a good lawyer, her husband's cousin's son would spend the next eight years of his young life in Ucciardione Prison.