Killing Ground (48 page)

For the love of Charley, for the nakedness of Charley over him, the word 'murderer'

was in blood, his father's blood, on the door of the parents of Mario Ruggerio. The word was sprayed crudely.

The madness was done.

Benny dropped the can.

He stood in the narrow street, and he heard the sharp whistle behind him. A man watched him, and in the shadow under the peak of his cap the man held his fingers to his lips and whistled. The dog had come and taken the can in its mouth and the spray ran from its mouth as if its jaws bled, as his father had bled. He looked a last time at the work of his madness. He started to walk away. He should have run, but she would not have run. He should have charged, but she would not have, as if her nakedness that covered him gave him her protection. He heard the man whistle again, and he turned, twisted to look behind him, and the man pointed to him . . . She was not there, with him, guarding him . . .

When he started to run there were men already across the narrow road ahead of him.

When he stopped, when the fear locked his legs, when he turned, there were men already across the narrow road behind him. She had driven him to the point of madness.

The men closed on him, coming from ahead of him and from behind him . . . She was not there ... He ran back down the road and past the blood-red paint. Turned, ran again, turned, and stumbled.

Benny fell.

He lay on the ground and waited for the men to reach him.

Mario Ruggerio had been early to Mass, mingling with the worshippers at a church on the Via Marqueda, swimming with the crowds. Most Sundays he used a different church, but the one on the Via Marqueda was the favourite among many, a great and gloomy vault of a building. He had laid a 10,000-lire note in the collection tray, nothing ostentatious, because the church was patronized by the unemployed and the destitute and the jobbing workers of the Capo district and of Via Bari and Via Trabia and Via Rossini, and he matched their best but shabby clothes. He would not have casually missed the celebration of Mass early on a Sunday morning, the Mass was important to him. There were few regrets in the life of Mario Ruggerio, but it was a continuing frustration to him that he could not sit and stand and kneel beside his wife, Michela, at the Mass, nor be with his children, Salvatore and Domenica. He assumed they were followed, watched. Whether he was in the church on the Via Marqueda, another humble and elderly man searching for a path closer to his God, or in any of the other churches that he used, he always thought hard at that time of his family.

It was now the middle of the day. The restaurants on the Via Volturno and the Via Cavour waited for the families to come, the bars on the Via Roma and the Corso Tukory were filled with talking men. The traffic clogged the streets, the pavements bustled with movement. Before the afternoon, before the time for sleeping came, it was good for Mario Ruggerio to be on the move.

In a bar Tano told him of the movement patterns of the magistrate, Rocco Tardelli.

Twelve men, he was told, now logged the routes used by the magistrate for his journeys from the apartment to the Palazzo di Giustizia, from the apartment to Ucciardione Prison, from the Palazzo to Ucciardione Prison, and the reverse routes. He listened, he asked few questions. Tano told him that there were only three streets that the two-car convoy could use when it left the apartment and when it returned to the apartment.

Tano gave the information. He coughed on his cigarillo, he swilled the dregs of the coffee, he gave the instruction that the bomb should be prepared, he said where it should be placed.

He moved on busily.

In the Piazza Castelnuovo, among the crowds gathered to watch the end of the fifteen-kilometre race, under the blare of the loudspeakers, he met with a businessman.

The businessman had never been convicted of criminal association, was not subject to investigation. The businessman told him that an investment broker from Paris had driven his car the previous Thursday to the sand dunes of the Pas de Calais and there hooked a length of rubber tubing to the exhaust and run the tube into the car and had been found dead the previous Friday. The investment broker had recommended the placing of $1 million in the construction of the tunnel beneath La Manica, and the tunnel between the English coast and the French coast had lost Mario Ruggerio that $1

million of investment. He listened without comment.

As he moved he was shadowed by three young men who stood back and apart from him.

In the Piazza Virgilio, sitting on a bench in the sunshine, an old man who talked with an old friend, he met with the cousin of a man from Prizzi. He had known the man from Prizzi all of his life. He had known the cousin as a youth, but the cousin now lived in Hamburg and had made the long journey specifically for twenty minutes of conversation on a bench in the warmth of the sun. With the cousin of the man from Prizzi he discussed, in close detail, the investment opportunities in the proposed construction of a business park in Leipzig, and the tax breaks that were possible, and afterwards he talked of the similar opportunities in the housing market at Dresden. He pledged, for investment in Leipzig and investment in Dresden, a minimum of $5

million. He noted the deference of the cousin of the man from Prizzi, as if it were known that he was now the power of La Cosa Nostra.

On his way again, walking fast, his escort ahead of him and behind him. He was to take a late lunch at an apartment on the Via Terrasanta with the physician who advised him on the remedy for the rheumatism in his hip, but before his lunch he had to meet with the consigliere from Messina for an explanation of that family's future options and their investment co-operation and the percentages of profit... and he was due also to meet with Carmine on the matter of a carabiniere officer and an American . . . and with a chemist from Amsterdam who promised facilities for the manufacture of the new range of benzodiazapines and barbiturates . . . and with Franco to confirm the detail of the pellegrinaggio to the grave of his brother, Cristoforo, the annual pilgrimage with his parents. It was his Sunday, the same every Sunday when the streets and parks and piazzas were crowded, it was his terra-terra routine, down-to-earth and basic, the rhythm of his life on the day the city rested.

He waited for the traffic lights on the junction to change. The cars swept by him, and down the column of cars was a bus. He lit another cigarillo.

When he was not tasked for duty, Giancarlo always came on a Sunday with his wife into Palermo. He met with the leader of his team, and the leader's wife, for the regal pomp and majesty of the celebration of Mass at the duomo, and then the four ate an early lunch in a ristorante on the Via Vittorio Emanuele, and the men tried not to talk of work and the women elbowed them viciously when they failed in their intention, and there was laughter, and after the early lunch they went home to sleep through the afternoon.

When he came into the centre of Palermo on a Sunday, Giancarlo always took his wife on the bus - too many cars, too few parking places.

The bus was full. He and his wife stood, and they gripped tight the back of a seat. The bus pitched them when the driver braked, threw them when the driver accelerated. In the morning the leader of the team had told him, while they walked between the duomo and the ristorante, they started a new assignment on the Piazza Kalsa. Just that morsel of information . . . Maybe he would be in a car, maybe in a closed van, maybe, God willing, in a building with the video camera and the binoculars and a good chair -

maybe there would be no market where they were staked out, and no lemons. The bus stopped sharply. He lurched into his wife. The driver had tried to beat the traffic lights, but had not squeezed through.

Giancarlo, standing in the aisle of the bus, looking over the shoulder of the driver, saw the family cross the road, and the children held balloons that bounced on lengths of string. When their own kids had been that age, little hooligans, he grinned, they had loved to carry balloons . . .

Giancarlo saw the man.

The kids with the balloons were in front of the man. A couple with a pram were behind the man. A woman in a fur coat and carrying a posy of flowers was beside the man.

Giancarlo saw an old man. The man had turned to face the bus, as if to satisfy himself that it had indeed stopped. Giancarlo saw an old man, a pudgy and weathered face below a flat cap, a jowled chin and throat above a rough cloth jacket.

Giancarlo saw an old man crossing a road at his leisure. The face of the old man leaped in Giancarlo's mind. There was a face in front of the bus. There was a face in a photograph that had been computer-enhanced, aged from twenty years before. The face was gone behind the shoulder of the driver. Giancarlo squirmed to see past the shoulder.

He saw the face of the man a last time, and the man was smiling down at one of the children holding a balloon. Giancarlo matched the face, smiling, with the face, smiling at a wedding reception, of the photograph.

His wife abandoned. Other passengers pushed aside. The driver shouted at. The I/D

card shoved into the driver's face. The doors slowly hissing open. The man reaching the far pavement . . .

Giancarlo jumped from the bus. He cannoned into a couple, in love, hand in hand. He did not look back at his wife, at the shock on her face. The lights changed. The bus pulled forward. Giancarlo ran behind the bus. The horns of the following cars blasted anger at him, brakes squealed. The man was walking away on the far pavement.

Giancarlo had no telephone. The leader of the squadra mobile surveillance team carried a mobile telephone at all times, but mobile telephones were expensive, a rationed item.

His personal radio was on the charger at the Questura, he was off duty, and his pistol was locked behind the armoury door in the Questura. There was a telephone pager on his belt, which only carried incoming messages. He ran forward, reached the far pavement. Because of the anger of the horns, and the brakes' screams, because of the abuse shouted at him through open windows, Giancarlo was for a critical moment of time a centre of attention.

In that moment of time, the man stood and faced a shop window.

Giancarlo, among his own, was venerated for experience and professionalism. For the teaching of surveillance tactics to new recruits to the teams he was often used. If a young recruit had run across a street, through traffic, become the target of horns and insults, become a centre of attention, then Giancarlo would patiently have explained the error of the young recruit. He would have talked to the young recruit about the requirement to merge and blend. He did not know whether he had shown out, whether he was busted, and he did not see the picciotto, a swarthy and heavy-set youth, who protected the back of Mario Ruggerio. In the flush of excitement, experience and professionalism gone, he had displayed the rashness of a young recruit. He stood stock-still. He watched the back of the old man move on, a slow walk, up the Via Sammartino and then turn into the Via Turrisi Colonna. He did not know whether he had shown out.

There was a bar.

Giancarlo ran into the bar. There was a payphone on the counter. A woman talked on the payphone.

Maybe she talked with her sister in Agrigento, maybe with her mother in Misilmeri, maybe with her daughter in Partinico . . . Giancarlo snatched the telephone. He terminated her call. She howled her protest at him and he flapped his I/D in her face. He was scrabbling in his pocket for a token for the telephone. He was bawling at her for silence, and he fed the gettone and dialled his control. He did not see the swarthy and heavy-set youth sidle across the bar towards him. Again, for a critical moment of time, Giancarlo made himself the centre of attention. The bar's customers, the men, the women, the staff, the matriarch at the cash till, sided with the wronged woman. The screaming was in his ears. With his body he tried to block their hands from reaching the telephone.

His control answered.

His name, his location, the name of his target.

The pain caught him. The pain was in Giancarlo's back and then seeping to his stomach. He said again his name and his location and the name of his target. The questions from his control beat at him, but his concentration and ability to respond to the questions were destroyed by the pain. Which way was the target going? What was the target wearing? Was the target alone? Was the target in a vehicle or on foot? He said again his name and his location and the name of his target, and his voice was weaker and the pain was more acute. He dropped the phone, and the phone swung loose on its reinforced cable. He turned. He looked into the eyes of a swarthy and heavy-set youth.

Giancarlo swayed. The pain forced his eyes shut. He reached for the source of the pain in his back. He found the hardness of the knife's handle, and the wetness. When his knees gave, when he could no longer see the swarthy and heavy-set youth, when the telephone swung beyond his reach, when the screaming burst from grotesquely blurred mouths around him, Giancarlo realized, puzzled, that he could no longer remember the questions that control had asked of him.

The pain was a spasm through his body.

A square had been made.

The bar was at the centre of the square. The north of the square was the Via Giacomo Cusmano, the south was the Via Principe di Villafranca, the west was the Via Dante, and the east was the gardens of the Villa Trabia.

A hundred men with guns, with flak vests, quartered the square. They were from the DIA, and there were two sections of the ROS, and there was the stand-by team of the Guardia di Finanze, and there were men from the squadra mobile. The cordon around the square was given to the military, Jeeps at street corners, soldiers with NATO rifles.

They did not know what the man, Giancarlo's target, looked like, they did not know how he was dressed, they did not know in which direction he had gone, they did not know whether he walked or whether he went by car.

The bar was emptied but for the owner and the matriarch who guarded her cash till.