Killing Ground (59 page)

Pasquale saw the flash.

In the moment after the flash there was the flying debris.

Pasquale saw the flying debris break against the magistrate's car and toss it.

The magistrate's car was lifted. It was thrown clear across the road and over the parked cars and vans and motorcycles, over the pavement. The magistrate's car hammered into a wall.

There was the thunder roar and the spurting dust cloud, and then the crash of the debris landing and the fall of glass in shards. The chase car was stopped in the centre of the road and then the dust cloud claimed it.

He had no telephone. His mind was a flywheel. He must telephone.

He had passed a man with a telephone.

He turned. There was no man with a peasant's face, with the clothes of the office.

He understood. The pistol was in the holster strapped across his chest. He had walked past the man who had detonated the bomb. He had seen the man, he had had the power to stop the man, and the man was gone. He shook. The whimper was in his throat. The silence was around him. He wanted to howl to the world his acknowledgement of failure. His body trembled.

Pasquale walked forward.

He went by the chase car and he heard the screaming of the driver into the car's radio.

He stepped over the debris of the disintegrated car. He walked past the magistrate's car that rested, shattered, upside down, and he did not look to see the magistrate, nor did he look for the body of the maresciallo, nor did he look for the face of the replacement.

He went by the fire and the smoke. He was not a part of it, he did not belong to the team.

He thought he knew why he had been dismissed from the team. The tears streamed on the face of Pasquale. He walked towards his home. He walked briskly, did not bother to wipe the tears from his cheeks, did not bother to stop for apologies when he cannoned into an old dumpy man who stopped to light a cigarillo. He hurried to his wife and to his baby because he knew why he had been dismissed from the team.

Some saw the white heat of the flash, and some heard the thunder roar of the detonation, and some saw the smoke climb above the rooftops of the city, and some heard of the killing when the lunchtime programmes of the RAI were interrupted.

The city learned of the bomb.

There would be, in the city, a manifestation of shock and a wailing of despair, and there would be, also, a charge of raw excitement. The excitement would, as through the history of the city, overwhelm the sensations of shock and despair.

The city knew the story. A man had been ridiculed and isolated and destroyed. The story was written through the history of Palermo.

At the newspaper stand, where the Via delle Croci met the Piazza Crispi, Mario Ruggerio had stood with Franco. He had watched. He had seen the blue lights and he had heard the sirens. He had seen the flash of light and he had heard the thunder roar.

He had watched until the grey-yellow dust cloud had masked the street. He had made no comment. He had gone on his way. On the Via Constantino Nigra, a young man who wept had buffeted against him and hurried on. They came in a cavalcade of noise past him, the fire engines and the ambulances and the cars of the carabineri and the squadra mobile and the vigili urbani and the polizia municipale, and if he noticed them he gave no clue of it to Franco. Franco told him of the arrangements made for that evening, for celebration . . . Near to the Villa Trabia, he looked for a bench that was empty and he sat upon it. He sent Franco to get him a coffee from the stall.

His power was absolute. His authority was confirmed. He was the new capo di tutti capi. Across the continents of the world, that night, a thousand million people would see on their television screens the evidence of his power and of his authority . . .

Tano came. He told Tano that he was pleased. He smiled at Tano, and he gripped Tano's hand, and he saw the pleasure ripple over Tano's face.

Carmine came and whispered congratulations in his ear. Carmine told him that the American was now hidden at the barracks in Monreale. He felt the flush of invincibility. He gave his instructions.

Franco and Tano and Carmine were around the short and pasty-faced old man who sat in the heat of the sun. He gave them his opinion. There would be a week of denunciation and of demonstrations in the street, there would be a month of demands for more powerful legislation against the organization, and normality would return.

They competed to agree with him.

He said he was tired. He said that he wished to rest before the celebrations of the evening. He should be refreshed for the evening when he would receive the congratulations of his family, when he gathered his family, his strength, around him.

He believed himself invulnerable.

'Get him out tonight.'

'Put him on the plane this evening.'

'Vanni said, 'We have to clear his apartment, get his things. We can have him ready for the late flight.'

Axel slept. He lay on the bed in the barracks room, and above him was the portrait of the general, and beside him was the photograph of the teenage girl. He was sprawled on the bed. They moved around him, and they drank 'Vanni Crespo's whisky.

'Like, sure as hell, to go with him, but I can't,' Dwight said.

'She's not your responsibility, she's mine. It's me that has to stay,' Harry Compton said.

'You just joined the game late. It's our show. I stay.'

'No way I move out, not while she's here.'

'Then he goes alone on the flight.'

'He doesn't go with me.'

'Vanni Crespo refilled the glasses.

Axel slept as if he had found peace. His breathing was monotonous, regular. He slept still, like he did not dream, like the weight was shed. There was youth again on his face . . .

Dwight Smythe said, soft, 'You'd be kind of frightened to wake him.'

Harry Compton said, 'When I saw the tail on him, and saw him try to wriggle off the tail, then I bled for him.'

'But he's a dinosaur, his time's gone. These things should be done with computers.'

'Shouldn't be done with people, not real people like that girl.'

'It got out of hand.'

'It was your crowd—'

'Vanni snapped. 'It is not the time to argue. In the Via delle Croci they are searching for pieces. They look for pieces of bodies. It is necessary to have pieces of bodies to put into coffins. But then they are only Italian bodies. No other foreigner that I have known has tried harder to help us. No other foreigner has realized more the need for co-operation. But you come and you argue and you criticize. You interfere. Now you are frightened because now you understand the responsibility you have prized from Axel Moen.'

Axel slept.

'She doesn't come.'

'If she doesn't come, then I don't.'

The argument hissed through the villa.

'It is for the family. You have to come.'

'She comes or I don't.'

Charley sat in the living room and she watched the television. It was live from the Via delle Croci, shaking images. The argument

was on the patio and in the kitchen and in the bedroom. Angela would walk away, from the patio or from the kitchen or from the bedroom, and cross the living room, and then Peppino would follow her, and the argument would resume when they believed they were beyond her hearing. She listened to the argument, merged with the frantic commentary of the television.

'She cannot come - you know she cannot come.'

'Then the children don't come.'

'The children have to come, it is the family.'

'I don't and the children don't.'

There was no weeping from Angela. Angela had been sitting in front of the television with Peppino when Charley had come back from the town with the shopping.

Charley had first, before she had understood, tried to tell Angela what she had bought, but Angela had waved at the screen . . . She remembered the afternoon they had sat, in shock, in front of the screen in the apartment in Rome, the death of the magistrate Borsellino . . . Then Peppino had come into the living room and made a remark about what clothes the children should wear that evening, and the argument was born. Angela was cold, in control, brittle-voiced. When she walked away from him, back to the patio, to the kitchen, to their bedroom, Peppino followed. Charley thought that Angela had chosen the ground for war with care.

'You will go yourself. Alone, you will go to your family.'

'You have to be there, the children have to be there.'

'And what would he say? If I am not there, and my children are not there, what would he say?'

'It is a gathering of the whole family.'

'Are you afraid of him? Are you afraid of what he would say?'

She sat in front of the television. Piccolo Mario knelt on the floor and, a miracle of God, the battery-powered car still worked. Francesca, on her lap, made a family of her dolls. The images of the television were sometimes soft-focus, sometimes zooming to close-up scenes, sometimes in wild and uncontrolled panning. There was nothing new for the television cameras. The scene was the same. There was the broken car, upside down, there was the following car stopped in the centre of the street, there was the wreckage of cars parked at the side of the street, and there was the milling mass of uniformed men . . . She thought Angela must hate her husband, sincere hatred, to taunt him so to his face.

'It is not her place to be with my family.'

'Then I don't go, and the children don't go, and you have to find the courage to tell him that you cannot discipline your wife . .. and what will he tell you? Knock her about a bit, Peppino. Give her your hand, Peppino, across her face. Are you frightened of her, Peppino? She comes, I come, my children come, and then that creature can touch our son.'

'Why?'

'It is a normal family party, Peppino, yes? Just an ordinary family party?' Her voice was rising. The sarcasm was rampant, as if she knew that she was heard. 'Of course, in respect of Rocco Tardelli, many normal and ordinary family parties tonight would be postponed. It is natural that a bambinaia should accompany the children to a normal and ordinary family party . . . and it would give me someone to talk with so that I do not vomit at the table.'

He came to the door.

Charley watched the television.

Peppino said, 'Charley, Angela would like you to accompany us this evening to a family gathering. Please, you will come?'

'You sure?'

'Quite sure.'

'I'd be delighted.' She did not, at that moment, know why Angela Ruggerio had chosen to make her part of a battleground in war. Her fingers brushed against the watch on her wrist. She wondered if he had gone yet, if he had quit. She wondered who would listen to her call.

'Thank you.'

They had shaken him.

He had been far away. He had been with his grandfather. He had been with his grandfather to pick cherries, and there was the warmth of summer on him, and he had taken the cherries to his grandmother. He had sat on the broad, scrubbed kitchen table, and his grandmother had put the cherries, two fistfuls for each, into a row of big bottles, with a half-cup of sugar that he measured out for each, and a fifth of vodka for each.

The Norse people of the Door Peninsula called it Cherry Bounce, and when Christmas came he would be allowed a small drink. They had shaken him to wake him. He was a child, he would be allowed only enough of the brew to cover the bottom of the glass. In the kitchen, on the range, was the 'boil'. The smell of the 'boil' was in his nose. The 'boil'

was white fish with potatoes, with carrots and onions, sometimes with cabbage.

He woke, but his eyes stayed closed, and there was the murmur of the voices around him, and it was ' Vanni's voice that led.

'To understand his commitment you have to know what drives him. He doesn't drink, God help him, so it wasn't alcohol talk, what he told me once . . . He was dumped as a kid, when his mother died, when her parents found him impossible and his father was travelling for work. He was dumped on his father's parents. It would have been a trauma, and they had to become the rock that he could hang to, they were God and they were safety to him. They took him to Sicily when he was seventeen years old. They brought him here. His grandfather had been in the Allied Military Government. His grandfather had gone home in 1945 and brought a Sicilian peasant girl with him for his new wife. I use a word that's often spoken in Sicily, isolato. His step-grandmother was isolated in that close little Norwegian community. It would have been a fiercely lonely childhood. They came back here to see relations, to see his grandfather's office, where he'd been a paramount king round the Corleone and Prizzi area. He told me, they were at the airport, they were getting the flight out, his grandfather made the confession. He was a teenager, he wasn't a priest in the box, he was a kid. The confession was corruption. His grandfather had been bought, he was paid for petrol coupons, for food coupons, for lorry permits. What was at home, back in Wisconsin, the farm, the land, the home, the orchards, was from corrupt money. All that he believed in, clung to, was corrupt. He went looking for another rock. The new rock was DEA, but it could have been FBI or Secret Service or Customs. He went looking for a rock that he wouldn't be washed off. For most men, for me, it is a rotten job and a fun job. I work the hours and I drink and I screw. For him it is a rock. If he were to lose that rock, to slip from it, then I do not think he could survive. He told me, and I understood the obsession. I understand more. When he was told to quit, walk out on his agent in place, abandon his agent, you'd have thought he would kick and that he would fight. He did not, he accepted the verdict of the rock. There is nothing else in his world. You say there is a posting to Lagos waiting for him - a seriously awful place - but you will hear no complaint from him, he will go, that is the way he stays with the rock. Everything I know of him, it is very sad.'

'More like it's obscene,' Dwight Smythe said.

'You don't mind me saying so, but obsessionalists, crusaders, they're juveniles, they don't have a place any more,' Harry Compton said.