Killing Ground

by Gerald Seymour

  'When he comes, if he comes, to meet with his family, Mario Ruggerio, you activate the tone. The only other time that you use it is if you believe that your physical safety is endangered. Do you understand?'

  'Where will you be?'

  'Close enough to respond.' She saw the strength in his face, the bold build of his chin, the assurance of his mouth. She reflected that she was placing her life in that strength.

  'You promise?'

  'I promise. You have a good journey.'

  She flared, enough of playing the small and pathetic girl. 'Wait a minute, Mr Axel bloody Moen, how often do we meet?'

  Casual. 'Every so often.'

  'That's not good enough. Where do we meet?'

  'I'll find you.'

  He walked away. She watched him go over the bridge, towards the fortress of Sant'Angelo. She felt the tight cold metal of the strap on her wrist.

  Chapter Five

  He had said, back in Devon, that she should travel from Rome to Palermo by train. He had explained, chill and staccato, that the most vulnerable time for an agent was in the sea-change hours of going from overt to covert. If she boarded a plane, he had said, a journey like Rome to Palermo, she would step over the gulf in an hour. Better, he'd said, to spread the transition time. Better to use a dozen hours and have the chance to reflect on the sea change and the gulf that was to be crossed.

  Charley had taken the train from the terminii in the early evening, pushed her way with a rare aggression through the crowds on the concourse. She had booked the sleeper, a single berth, and not cared what it cost because the Ruggerios would pay for it. She had heaved her bag along the corridor and dumped it inside the little compartment of the snake-length train that was alongside those that would leave later for Vienna and Paris. She had chewed on a ham-and-tomato roll, revolting, and sipped from a bottle of mineral water, warm, and watched from the train as the dusk gathered on isolated farmhouses and avenues of high pines and a long, ruined viaduct from the dawn of history.

  She had reflected, as Axel Moen had said she should.

  She had considered the distance at which he kept himself. She knew nothing of what lay beneath the exterior of his face, beneath his clothes, nothing of his mind. She had not met before, ever, a person of such sealed privacy. She thought, and it perked her up, that he kept a distance as if he were a little afraid of her. So she wanted to believe that she was important to him, that she was the final piece that made the puzzle complete. It was good to feel that. And, alone in the train, the rumble of the wheels below her, rushing south, the darkness of the night beyond the window, she felt a sense of pride.

  She had been chosen, she had been challenged, she was wanted. She had lain on the made bed and the glow of excitement had coursed in her. She was needed. She was important . . . She had slept, as if an arrogance and an ignorance had caught her.

  She had slept through the shunting of the train onto the ferry at Villa S. Giovanni on the Calabrian coast and the docking of the ferry at Messina, slept a dead and dreamless sleep.

  The knocking on the door woke Charley. She had slept in her T-shirt and her knickers. She was decent, but she wrapped the blanket around her as she unlocked the door and took the tray of coffee from the attendant. She closed the door and locked it again. She set the tray down and went to the window and released the blind. Charley saw Sicily.

  The journalist from Berlin was awake early. He boasted a tidy mind. He believed it important, at the first sober oppportunity, to transfer the essentials of the interview from notebook to laptop memory. He had ordered an early call, before the pace of the city moved, because he had first to dissect the notes he had taken over dinner and two bottles of Marsala wine, and the notes would be a mess and scrawled in confusion. He had dined with the mayor of a small town on the west coast down from Palermo. He had anticipated a ringing cry for action against La Cosa Nostra from a man whose father had been killed because he had denounced an evil. Sitting on his bed in his pyjamas, the ache in his head, he had read back his notes.

  'Quote Pirandello (paraphrase) - draw the distinction between the seeing and the being, the fiction and the reality - the fiction is police activity, ministers and policemen and magistrates on TV, prisoners paraded in front of cameras, the cry that the mafia is crumbling, FICTION. The mafia is not weakened, stronger than ever, REALITY. No serious commitment by the state against the mafia - think what it is like to be Sicilian, abandoned by central government, not supported, to be alone. No big victory is possible - white sheets on balconies after the killing of Falcone as an expression of public disgust, but the disgust is slipping, collective anger is gone. The thread of the mafia is woven through every institution, every part of life - always the stranger must realize that he does not know who he talks to - being a mafioso can mean a man belongs to the upper strata of society, does not mean that he is a crude killer. Nobody, NOBODY, knows the depth of mafia infiltration into public life. For the stranger, NEVER BE UNGUARDED . . .'

  The Country Chief drove Axel Moen to Fiumicino for the first flight of the day going south to Palermo, and parked, and went with his man to check-in.

  They walked together towards the centre of the concourse; there were a few minutes before the flight would be called. Should have talked in the car, but they hadn't, and it had been time lost, but the traffic had been heavy and the Country Chief had reckoned he needed all of his start-of-the-day concentration to keep himself from shunting with the bastards around him who were weaving and overtaking and braking. The Country Chief shouldn't have left the loose ends to the concourse.

  'You OK?'

  'I feel fine.'

  'The archaeology . . . ?'

  'It'll do and it'll get better.'

  'You get a shooter from 'Vanni?'

  'Yes, 'Vanni says he'll fix me a shooter.'

  Too old and too tired, and the Country Chief thought he played the part of the fussing mother well. 'It's shared with 'Vanni, only him.'

  'Maybe it has to be shared with a magistrate. That guy, Rocco Tardelli, maybe we share with him. He's a good man.'

  'He's a friend, useful, but don't . . . You know it hurts me, but you put ten Italian law-enforcement people in a room, and you share. If you share, you should trust. Do you know everything about them? Do you know which of them's wife's uncle's cousin is going after a construction contract to build a school and needs a favour from the local boss? So you trust none of them. That bugs me, the lack of trust, it makes for corrosive suspicion, but you cannot take the chance.'

  'I know that, Bill.'

  'Because it's her life.'

  In front of him was the face of Axel Moen, a wall of granite, shielding whatever feelings the damned man had.

  'I figured that.'

  'You know what I want?'

  'Keep it quick, Bill.'

  'I want that bastard, I want Mario Ruggerio nailed, and I want it to be by our efforts.

  Not a big co-operative, but by our efforts. If it's us that nails him, then I believe, what Headquarters says, we can swing the extradition business. I want him shipped Stateside, I want him put into Supermax. I want him to breathe the sweet air of Colorado. I want him in one of those concrete tombs. I want him to know that for sending over all that filth into our country there's a downside. I want . . .'

  'I'll stay close, Bill.'

  'Look after that kid, damn you, with your life.'

  Axel shrugged and walked towards Departure.

  She was not trained, she was not coached. But she did not think herself stupid.

  Charley was dressed. She leaned against the grimed glass of the window and the train lurched slowly along. She was gazing inland. She thought that she did not have to be trained to recognize, in that country, how a corpse could remain hidden and how a fugitive could stay free. On and on, displayed from her window, were the steep and harsh-cut rainwater gullies that were overgrown with coarse grass and scrub and that ran from the track up to the hills. She had bought from the English-language
bookshop on Via Babuino, the previous day, after he had left her, a guidebook to Sicily. The book had a chapter on the island's history. In the gullies there could have been the corpse of a Moorish invader, of a Bourbon soldier, of a Fascist official, of a Roman policeman, and it would never be found, it would be food for foxes and rats. Among the scrub were dark-set, small caves, and there were the roofless ruins of peasant homes and the crumbled shelters where once a farmer had put his goats or his sheep, and the ruins and the shelters could have been hiding places for fugitives, from centuries back to the present moment. Above the gullies and the caves and the ruins, beyond the hills, were the climbing mountains that reached to the clouds. A great emptiness that was broken only rarely by the white scars of winding switchback roads. A ruthless and hard place.

  A body, her body, dumped into a gully, and she would never be found. A fugitive, Mario Ruggerio, hiding in the caves and ruins, and he would never be found.

  She murmured, private to herself, as she fingered the heavy watch on her wrist,

  'Learning, Charley, learning bloody fast.'

  She came away from the window. She brushed her teeth. She tidied her sausage-bag.

  She reflected, as Axel Moen had told her to.

  They had circled Catania, then come in to land through the early mist. He could see the foothills to the west, but not the summit of Etna, which the cloud held.

  He had told her that going back was time wasted, was sentimental.

  Palermo, yes, many times, but it was twenty-one years since Axel Moen had been at the Fontanarossa Airport of Catania. They were old now and they were living far up the Door Peninsula, up between Ephraim and Sister Bay, and eking out their last days and weeks and months. It was twenty-one years since his grandfather and his step-grandmother had brought him to the airport at Catania. Only the name to remember it by because there were new buildings and a new tower and new acreage of concrete. On Arne Moen's retirement he had brought his wife, Vincenzina, and his grandson to Catania and Sicily. Didn't matter if he cared not to think on it. . . Most of the emotion juices Axel was ready for, could control. Going through the airport at Catania, the juices worked on him and hurt him. Arne Moen had come to Sicily in 1943, a captain in George Patton's invasion army, and he'd been the idiot who'd drunk too much brandy for his system one night and had fallen in the gutter while swaying back to the commandeered villa at Romagnolo and broken his goddam arm. The army had leapfrogged onto the Italian mainland and left Arne Moen behind to nurse his plaster-cased arm. Taken into AMGOT, given a job with the bureaucracy of the Allied Military Government, and found himself in a minor heaven as a minor god controlling gasoline supplies and transportation between Corleone and the road junction at Piana degli Albanesi. It had provided what his grandfather called an 'opportunity'. The story of the 'opportunity' had been told in self-pity and with moist eyes at the Catania airport at the end of the week's tour, as if it were necessary for a seventeen-year-old to know a truth.

  The emotions wounded Axel because the 'opportunity' was corruption. He did not care to remember because the 'opportunity' was in the black-market siphoning of gasoline and the taking of bribes in return for permission to run lorries down to Palermo. The money from the corruption and the black market and the bribes had gone back to the Door Peninsula and it had paid, dirty money, for his grandson's education at the university in Madison, and had paid for the house and the fields and orchards between Ephraim and Sister Bay. One day, maybe not too long, because Arne Moen was now in his eighty-fifth year, and Vincenzina Moen was in her seventy-eighth year, he would have to decide what to do with a legacy of dirty money . . . After the tour of the battlefields, precious little fighting done, and the visit to the house in Corleone from which the minor god had run his racket, after the cloying visit to Vincenzina's peasant family, after the journey had come to its end, the story of the 'opportunity' had been told.

  For Axel it was a sharp memory. He had sat between his grandfather and his step-grandmother in the departure lounge at Catania. His grandfather had snivelled the story of criminality, and his step-grandmother had stared straight ahead as though she heard nothing and saw nothing and knew nothing. He thought, striding that early morning through the airport, that the telling of the story of corruption had withered his innocence. He had sworn to himself, with the authority of his seventeen years, that he would never again allow innocence to cut him . . . Where he'd sat, between his grandfather and his step-grandmother, twenty-one years before was now a left-luggage area. What he had learned when his innocence had ended was to trust no man because even a man he loved had a price. Shit . . .

  Axel Moen went to the Avis counter for his hire-car.

  Charley jumped down onto the low platform.

  She reached back to drag out her sausage-bag.

  She was carried forward in the restless rush of passengers surging from the train. Her gaze raked the barrier, and she saw them. She recognized Angela Ruggerio, a little thicker in the hips and a little heavier at the throat and still beautiful, and holding the new baby and holding the hand of Francesca who had been the baby in the happiness summer of 1992, and bending to speak in small Mario's ear and pushing him forward.

  The boy ran against the flow and came to her, and Charley dropped her bag and held out her arms and let him jump at her and hug her. She held the son of the man who washed and rinsed and spun and dried the money, the nephew of the man who was an evil, heartless bastard. She had arrived, she had gained access. Small Mario fought out of her arms and took the straps of the sausage-bag in his hands and scraped it after her along the platform. Charley gave the Judas kiss to Angela Ruggerio and her hands were squeezed. It was a desperate love that she saw in Angela Ruggerio, as if she were a true friend, as if she represented deliverance from misery. She tugged the cheek of Francesca in play and the little girl laughed and thrust her arms round Charley's neck.

  'You are very good for time, Charley. I do not think you are a minute late.'

  She glanced down at her watch, the heavy watch of a diver, instinct. The minute hand of the watch pointed directly to the button for the panic tone.

  'No, it is wonderful, we were exactly on time.'

  Axel took the autostrada route across the heart of the island. He was calm. He cruised in the small Fiat hire-car along the dual- carriageway A19 through the central mountains, past the small vineyards that had been hacked from the handkerchiefs of ground available for cultivation among the rocks, past the herds of thin goats and leggy sheep that were watched by men with leatheredfaces and by restless dogs. He stopped at the old hill city of Enna, long enough to see the crooked lines in yellow and orange and ochre of successive mountain ranges to the north, not long enough for the culture of the buildings, sufficient time for a cup of sharp and hot coffee. On down towards the coast, and he allowed the lorries and cars to race past him, as if he had no ambition to compete with speed. When he reached the coast, could see the blue haze of the sea, he swung west for Terminii Imerese, and he drove towards Palermo. Between the road and the shore were orange groves and lemon orchards, holiday complexes that were shuttered and barred because the season had not yet started ... A prosecutor had talked of 'a power system, an articulation of power, a metaphor of power and a pathology of power . . .'

  The sun burned the road, the light heat up from the tarmac into his face. Away out on the water were small boats, drifting distant from each other, in which lonely lfishermen stood and cast small nets, and he saw old men walking on the grey pebble beaches with long shore-fishing rods on their shoulders ... A judge had talked of 'a global, unitary, rigidly regimented and vertical structure governed from the top down by a cupola with absolute powers over policy, money, life and death . . .' He felt a calmness because he was not deluded by the peace of the mountains and the peace of the seascape. He drove through Bagheria and Villabate and took the ringroad to the south of the city, as if ignoring the close-set tower blocks of Palermo, and I hen he climbed the switchback road that was sig
ned to Monreale. I le was close to his destination.

  At the apartment in the Giardino Inglese the morning was spent packing Angela's clothes and the children's bags.

  She was told about Mondello and a villa by the sea, the holiday home for the summer. The description of the holiday villa, given by Angela Ruggerio, was curt, and Charley saw already a wan tiredness and distraction about the face and movements of her employer. It was hard for Charley to gauge her mood, but the woman was a changed person: the confidence and humour of four years before were gone, as if the spirit of her were crushed. It was, Charley thought, as if a wall had been erected. She spent most of that morning in the rooms used by small Mario and Francesca, taking the necessary clothes from drawers and the favoured toys from cupboards, but when she had wandered into the principal bedroom and not knocked she had seen Angela at the drawer of a bedside table, taking two pill bottles out, and she had seen a little moment of almost panic because the bottles were noticed, and then Angela had dropped them into a bag. Charley had smiled in embarrassment and said something inane about the number of shirts that small Mario would need, and the little moment had passed.