Killing Ground (39 page)

Pasquale carried the unused glasses through the armour-plated door of the magistrate's office, and the driver of the chase car followed him with the two bottles of champagne. He had not told his wife about the flowers, their rejection, but he would tell her of the bottles that were not opened and the glasses that were not dirtied. He felt an idiot because there was moist dew at his eyes. Perhaps the driver of the chase car saw the damp gleam in his eyes.

'What do we do with the champagne?' Pasquale asked briskly.

'Keep it for the funeral,' the driver of the chase car said, impassive.

'What funeral?'

'His, yours, ours.' There was a growled laugh from the driver of I lie chase car. The other men of the team were around the table in the corridor. They mocked Pasquale, as if he were an idiot for their sport.

'What sort of shit is that?'

Coolly, the driver of the chase car said, 'Don't you know anything? Don't you listen to the radio? Don't you have ears? Worry less about flowers and listen more. Once, in Palermo, there was a jeweller who sold fine stones and necklaces and watches from Switzerland, and he had a great fear of thieves, so he protected the window of his shop with armour-plated glass. One night a car drove slowly past the shop front, and half a magazine from a Kalashnikov assault rifle was fired at the window. High-velocity rounds. And the window was broken, but the car did not stop, nothing was taken. A few days later, from the same Kalashnikov, the same make of bullets, a mafioso who rode in his car that was fitted with armour-plated glass was shot dead. The attack on the jeweller's shop was merely to test whether the bullets of a Kalashnikov could pierce reinforced glass.'

Pasquale stood holding the tray, and the glasses chimed as his hands trembled. He was the object of their sport.

'If you listened to the radio . . . The capo in Catania was killed this afternoon by a bomb in a car that had been parked in a street and was detonated as he drove past. He was a rival for the supreme position sought by Ruggerio, but he was already isolated.

That is what Tardelli says. Why a bomb? Why a huge explosion? Why something so public? Because that is not the way of La Cosa Nostra. Why was he not shot, or strangled, or disappeared with the lupara bianca into acid or into the bay or into concrete? Why a jeweller's shop?'

Pasquale shook. He thought of his wife and of his baby and of the man behind the armour-plated door who was alone with his work. They were watching him from the table, amused.

'Maybe, Pasquale, because you have his ear, because you bring him flowers, you should tell him to go back to his wife in Udine. Maybe you should request him to use his authority to have every parked car on every road in Palermo towed away. Maybe you should arrange, very quickly, for the arrest of Ruggerio. Maybe you should resign.'

'You talk shit.'

They were all laughing as Pasquale stumbled away down the corridor carrying the tray of clean glasses.

'What did you expect?'

'That she wouldn't be so goddam naive.'

The argument started back at the barracks. They hadn't fought in front of the ROS

men, had held back their frustration at the failure until they were clear of the squad and alone. And the attitude of the men had been so predictable to 'Vanni Crespo. Into the cars on the beach front at Mondello, balaclavas pulled off, weapons made safe, another day and another fuck-up, and their talk in the car had been of football and the size of the breasts of the new PA to the colonello, and then about the next issue of boots to be given them. Another day and another fuck-up and nothing changed.

'She's an amateur.'

'Of course she's an amateur. Picked up on the cheap, fast little run in and out that doesn't cost the great DEA much. I know she's an amateur and cheap because the great DEA left it to you to run her, and you, Axel Moen, are insignificant.'

'Not so goddam precious yourself. You were so naive. The signal was a mess -

Immediate Alert, Stand Down, Stand-by, Immediate Alert. Didn't you think?'

'I thought that she was an amateur. I thought she was in panic. She is not the wonderful Axel Moen, hero of the great DEA. She is a girl, she is untrained. It was reasonable to assume she'd be in panic. For the sake of Christ, Axel, think where you've put her, and what you've told her, and the job you've given her. That would make panic.'

They were in a corridor. The argument had been whisper-hissed as the business of the corridor went on around them. 'Vanni took the American's shoulders in his fists, and caught the material of the windcheater, and shook his shoulders.

'You make a good argument, 'Vanni, but it's flawed - she wouldn't begin to know how to panic.'

But Axel Moen had let his head fall against 'Vanni's chest, and they hugged. They held each other and let the anger slip.

Axel broke the hold. 'I'll see you around, some place.'

'Take some food. Yes, stay close.'

'Vanni called for an escort to take Axel Moen to the gate. He watched him go away down the corridor, carrying the bag with the two-channel receiver and the notes and drawings of the cloister columns of the duomo, watched him until he was gone through the door at the far end of the corridor. He could get away with it once, culling out the squad and not filing a report, in triplicate, on white and yellow and blue flimsies, only the once. He went, heavy-footed, to his room. Ridiculous, he was a senior officer, he had been in the force for twenty years and two months, and a single failed call-out was like a wound to him. He had been one of the chosen few who had hunted, first, and closed down, second, the terrorists of the Brigate Rosse, the scum kids of the middle-class affluents who claimed to kill for the proletariat. He had been especially chosen as the liaison officer to Carlos Alberto dalla Chiesa. He had been nine years in the wilderness of Genoa, murders, drugs, kidnapping. He had been five years now with the Reparto Operativo Speciale. And he had held his pistol against the neck of Riina.

How many stake-outs, how many charges in a screaming car with the firearms oil in his nose, how many surveillance operations? He thought himself a cretin because this time, among so many, the failure had wounded him. In his room he lay on his bed. It was the habit that he kept to, twenty minutes each afternoon of catnapping. He lay on his bed with a cigarette lit and with the whisky glass on his stomach. When he had smoked the cigarette and drunk the whisky, he would set the alarm for twenty minutes ahead and sleep. Later, in the early evening, he would make the telephone call to his daughter in Genoa and talk about her school that he had never visited and her friends that he did not know. In the late evening, with the mobile phone in his pocket and the pistol in his waist, he would drive to Trapani and bounce the arse off the woman in the back of her car. But the call would mean little, and the sex would mean less, because he was wounded.

He spiralled the smoke up towards the bland shade of his light, he gulped the whisky.

They came more often, now, the doubts. They came to him most afternoons when he lay on his bed with his cigarette and his whisky, with the alarm set for twenty minutes of sleep. No doubts of ultimate victory when he had tracked the Brigate Rosse cells, no doubts when he had stood with controlled emotion in the congregation at the funeral of dalla Chiesa, none when he had investigated murders and trafficking and kidnapping in Genoa, and none when he had pressed the pistol down against the flesh of Riina. The doubts now were with him most afternoons. Unshared, unspoken, he doubted in ultimate victory, as if he beat against a wall and the wall did not break from the force of his blows. The arm was cut, the arm grew again. The heart was knifed, the heart healed.

If that was his life, fighting and not winning, then what was the point of his life?

'Vanni stubbed out his cigarette and drained his glass. He swung onto his stomach and pressed his face down into his pillow. He could not cut the sight of her. She was on the beach. She was light against the darkness of the sea. She was white-skinned as the towel slipped. She was naive and innocent, she was alone. She was being used as a weapon in a war without the prospect of ultimate victory. Mother of Christ. She was the wound that hurt him.

He was still awake when the alarm bleeped through the bare room.

It was raining hard.

There should have been back-up, there should have been support.

No support and no back-up, and so Harry Compton was dependent on a short truncheon and a pair of image-intensifier binoculars and a suction microphone linked to a tape-recorder. It had been the best that Stores could supply him with, which was pitiful. About the only thing going for Harry Compton was the rain, tipping down, which meant it was unlikely that the man's wife was going to come walking round the garden with the dogs. Small mercy, because there were enough things steepling against him. With the image-intensifier binoculars he had been able to identify the heat-sensitive exterior floodlights, and the location of the bloody things meant that he had to crawl through the depths of the bloody shrubs, wet earth sliming on his stomach and thorny pyracantha clinging to the material of his overalls. He was up against the wall of the house, but couldn't bloody move, because if he moved he would be into the arc of the heat-sensitive kit. He was wet. His hands ran rainwater. With wet hands, and he couldn't use gloves because they would deny him the sure touch of his fingers, the suction microphone had become smeared and wouldn't bloody stick on the window glass. He'd had to hold the microphone in position against the glass, and stand up to do it, like a damn prune in a cereal bowl. Music on in the room, bloody pop music, and he could not filter the music from the voices of Giles Blake and Giuseppe Ruggerio. Now, that was just incredible, these two men talking after-dinner business and with kids'

music turned up strong.

Blake's own house. Of course, they hadn't talked confidential in the hotel restaurant, but if they had music to drown them now, sure as hell they talked serious business, and he could not hear a bloody word. He was wet, he was cold, he was bloody miserable, and some time soon the bloody dogs would want putting out. He was an hour's drive from home, and at home there would be a darkened bedroom and the wife's back, cold.

There was the jewel moment. Harry Compton, wet and miserable, could have bloody well jumped and cheered. The CD, Oasis, had played out.

'. . . working hard at getting their different acts together. I think they'll be all right.'

'You know of Roberto Calvi?'

'Yes, of course.'

'They want the business?'

'Of course, and they want the commission.'

'If they want the business, the commission, then they should know of Roberto Calvi.

They should be told that Roberto Calvi deceived people, that he was strangled slowly.'

'Do we have to have more of the same? Kids'll think I'm on monkey glands.'

'Remind them to be careful. Please, something else . . .'

And something else was Elton bloody John. Harry Compton would hear nothing else for forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. Within an hour, damn certain, rain or no rain, the bloody dogs would be put out into the garden. He dropped on his hands and knees from the window of the house, the nice bloody pad that went with soaping and rinsing and drying mafia money, across the flagstone path. Onto his stomach, and the crawl into the landscaper's shrub bed, and caught immediately by the thorny pyracantha. His wife had planted one of the bloody things beside her little greenhouse, and he might just, next Sunday, dig the damn thing out or plaster it with weedkiller. What he'd seen of Giles Blake, and of Mrs Giles Blake when she'd been clearing up the kitchen, luxury bloody fittings, they wouldn't do the garden because they paid for maintenance, and that was good because there was no way he could avoid smearing a trail across the earth and the mulch of the shrub bed. He went fast. He reckoned he had enough for a disclosure warrant from a judge, for a telephone- intercept order from the Home Office, maybe enough for a dawn knock and handcuffs. The name of Roberto Calvi was the diamond.

Rotten investments for bad people, bad people's money down the drain, strangled and left hanging from Blackfriars Bridge where the world and the world's dog could see what happened to a joker who lost bad people's money.

As he went over the wall, dropped down into the lane, Harry Compton heard the voice of the woman calling out the dogs. He loathed the sort of people who lived in that sort of house behind that sort of wall. He himself had earned a maximum of £27,380

(inclusive of overtime) the last year. The sort of people he loathed, through scams and greed and criminality, would have clawed in a minimum of £273,800 (part-time working) the last year. He had the big thrill, like best sex, when he did the dawn call on the bastards, when he had the handcuffs open. And it would be good, best, to have the Sicilian bastard in the interview room. He reached his car.

He peeled off his overalls, kicked out of his boots. One nagging thought - what was the role of the young woman, 'pressurized' by the DEA, gone as a child-minder to Sicily? Where did she fit? He cut it. The young woman was altitude politics. He fed in the world of mud-smeared overalls, filth-scraped boots.

He drove home.

It doesn't matter what it says.' The detective superintendent swung his chair so that he faced the window.

Harry Compton held the audio-cassette in his hand, then made the gesture and dropped it on the desk, onto his unread report. 'I had a hell of a drenching. I crawled through the garden.'

'What do you want, a medal? We are not playing at Scouts.'

Harry Compton had come to work bubbling in a froth of personal satisfaction. Had left the kit, smeared in dried mud, outside the locked door of Stores section. Up to his desk in the open-plan area, first one in apart from Miss Frobisher, and she too must have realized that a jackpot had been won because he had the success gleam in his eye, and she had put the kettle on and made him a mug of her own particular coffee, which was not the muck out of the vending machine in the corridor. He had listened to the tape, twice. Gone through the last Oasis track, the clean conversation, the start of the first Elton John track. He had typed his report, transcribed the tape, underlined in red the references to Roberto Calvi and then sat on his hands while the office filled and waited for his detective superintendent to get to work.