Killing Ground

by Gerald Seymour

  No warning, 'Vanni swung the wheel. They were checked at the gate by the smart-uniformed carabiniere trooper. They were passed inside, went under the raised barrier. They were a pair of workmen going on a small contract into the main carabiniere barracks on the island. He turned to 'Vanni, nodded his approval. Of course, the comings and goings at the main barracks on the island could be watched . . . They parked away from the main fleet of shining squad cars, near the memorial to the guys shot down in the line of duty. And still they could be watched, and 'Vanni gave Axel a bucket to carry and took the stepladder for himself, and they headed for a side door. He liked 'Vanni because he thought the guy trusted no bastard.

  The first assignment with the DEA had been bad times. New York City, and the file had said that he was fluent in the Sicilian dialect, and the Pizza Connection case was going to trial, and there were the hours of wire taps to be listened to and noted, and he had sat week after week, month after month, in a small, darkened room with the earphones on his head and the tapes turning and the light blazing at his notepad . . .

  When 'Vanni had fingered in the entry code and they were inside a corridor, they dumped the bucket and the stepladder.

  La Paz, Bolivia, that had been good times, working with a small team, running his own CIs, riding in the local Huey birds, getting used to wearing the flak vest and to carrying the weight of an M16. The big shoot-out, the end of the day, hadn't changed La Paz, Bolivia, from rating as good times. Nor being shipped out on a walking-wounded ticket.

  They went down a corridor and past the open section of an operations area with consoles and radios. Past a rest room where men sat in chairs and wore casual clothes and the firearms and the vests and the balaclavas were heaped on a table with the coffee cups and the used plates, and 'Vanni told Axel they were the Response Squad of the Reparto Operativo Speciale. 'Vanni said, if the panic tone went for real, that they'd be the guys who'd go running. He'd called in a favour, been allocated the team, dragged in a big debt, refused to explain.

  Back to New York, three more years, and that had been bad times. They'd said in DEA and FBI and the prosecutors' offices that the American mainland end of La Cosa Nostra was finished. Tommaso

  Buscetta, turncoat, pentito, had blown them away to the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. All over. The Bureau said, on the record, assholes that they were, that the

  'mafia myth of invincibility' was torpedoed. A prosecutor said, for quoting, 'The Sicilian mafia's drug connection has been dismantled.' The resources were being drained from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Three years of scrapping with FBI over investigation priorities and pushing reports from desk to desk, three years of hearing that the Sicilians were a back number by comparison with the Colombians, and wondering then why the streets of Chicago and Philadelphia and Atlanta and Los Angeles and New York and Washington, a short walk from Headquarters, were stacked high with goddam heroin. Bad times, until the posting to Rome . . .

  Up a flight of stairs, down another corridor, through a door that could be opened only with an entry code, into ' Vanni's office. Axel looked around him.

  'If this is home, Christ . . .'

  He thought it was a monk's cell. A bare room, with bare walls except for the photograph of a general in best uniform and a smiling portrait of a little girl, with a bare, plastic-topped table and a hard chair, with a bare bed and blankets folded neatly on top of the single pillow.

  Axel took from the plastic bag the second of the receivers he had brought to Sicily.

  The box was a little longer and a little thicker but the same depth as a hardback book.

  He extended the aerial. He showed 'Vanni the on/off switch. He wrote on a sheet of paper the UHF frequency that was programmed into the wrist-watch worn by Codename Helen.

  'Vanni said, 'I am only back-up to take the signal. She is your responsibility.'

  'I understand that/

  'You can take the signal in Mondello, if you sit there, which is not sensible. You can take the signal in Monreale, which is better, but you are a long way from her. On the road, in Palermo, you are beyond contact.'

  'I understand that too.'

  'In the operations area the frequency will be monitored, through the twenty-four hours, but I cannot tell them the detail of the importance of the signal, I can only lecture them on the priority. At the bottom line, it is your responsibility, Axel.'

  Axel said, 'I told her to make a test transmission this afternoon.'

  'This afternoon. That is idiot. It's not in place.'

  'So shift yourself.'

  'You think I have nothing else?'

  The quiet smile played on Axel's face. 'You held the pistol to Salvatore Riina's head

  - what I think, you'd give your right ball to hold that pistol at Mario Ruggerio's head.'

  'Vanni reached for the telephone. He dialled, he spoke, he swore, he explained, he gave his rank, he ordered, he laid down the telephone and looked straight into Axel's eyes.

  Distant and quiet, 'Vanni said, 'It will be, for her, like a bell calling from the darkness

  . . .'

  She half woke when Francesca crawled under the sheet of her bed. A moment before she knew where she was. Charley woke fully when piccolo Mario dragged her bear from her arms. She looked at her watch, she laughed and she tugged back the bear from the boy. God, the time . . . She heard a radio playing and the squeals of the children, excited, drove the sleep from her. She went, dazed, to the bathroom. Washed, teeth brushed, she wandered to the kitchen.

  The note was on the table.

  Charley, you were like an angel in peace. Giuseppe has gone to his office. I am shopping for lunch. Mauro is sleeping, feed him when he wakes. We meet later, Angela.

  The whole of her life was a lie. She thought the lie worked well because she had been given, with the children, the run of the villa for the morning. She was accepted, she had gained access . . . She walked out onto the terrace. There was a freshness in the morning air and she hugged her arms across her chest and the tiles were cold under her bare feet.

  She could see, through the gaps between the shrubs and the trees of the garden, over the high wall that ringed the villa. Beyond the wall were rooftops of other villas and beyond them was the bay. Where was he? Did he watch her? Was he close by? She saw only the glass shards set in the wall and the roofs and the distant blue expanse of the sea.

  The children followed her into the kitchen. She pulled open the fridge for coffee and juice and a day-old croissant.

  Charley thought the villa, its construction, was magnificent, but it was for the summer. Large rooms with high ceilings and floors of tile or marble. Big windows that could open out onto the patios. There was not the furniture to go with the magnificence, nor yet the weather. Angela had explained, seemed to apologize for, the functional furniture that was so mean compared to the fittings of the apartment in Palermo. Angela had said, head dropped, 'I had the place aired, of course, the week before we came, but it is built for the sunshine, not the rain and damp of the winter. You have to excuse us for the wetness. I can barely live with the furniture. You see, Charley, we pay a man a hundred thousand a month and he is supposed to watch the security of the villa. Twice this last winter we were thieved from, we were broken into. You would not leave anything of value here through the winter, the thieving is so bad . . .' She washed the cup and the glass and the plate and the knife. She wandered.

  She was alone. She walked barefoot on a paved path. She bent to take the scent of the first of the spring's roses. So quiet around her. The cotton of her nightdress was pressed against her by a light wind. She crouched and took in her fingers the fragile petals of a crimson geranium. She went by a small fountain that spluttered water and she held out her hand and let the cascade run cold on her palm. The watch weighed on her wrist. She tried to believe, as if it were her anthem, that it were possible for one person, Charlotte Eunice Parsons, to change something . . . had to believe it. If she did not believe that
she could change something, then she should have stayed at home, ridden her scooter to school each morning and ridden it back to the bungalow each evening. Should have bloody stayed, if she could not change something. She came round a screen where honeysuckle sprawled over a trellis frame.

  He watched her.

  Christ, the bloody 'lechie' eyed her.

  The man who opened the gate, who swept the leaves, who watered the pots of flowers, gazed at Charlie. She felt the thin cloth

  of her nightdress against her nakedness. She had thought she was alone . . . An old face, lined by the sun and weathered by the sea's salt, and he stared at her and leaned his weight on his broom. She heard the cry of the baby. The old man with the old face and the old hands watched her. She ran on the coarse stones of the path back towards the villa and the crying baby, and it was seven hours until she would make her test transmission.

  Where was he? Did he watch her? Was he close by?

  They worked with a drill that was powered by a portable petrol- driven generator to pierce the rock so that the stanchions could be buried securely and be proof against the winds on the higher point of Monte Gallo. When the stanchions were secured, the antennae of the microwave radio link were bolted to them, along with the booster that would enable the pulse of a panic tone to be carried across five kilometres to the higher point of Monte Castellacio.

  Only when the sun over the city has climbed high, to its zenith, does the fierce light and warmth reach the cobbled alleys and broken pavings of the Capo district. Most of the day the district is a place of shadows and suspicion. It was the old Moorish slave quarter, and it is where the history of the men of the modern La Cosa Nostra is rooted.

  In the grey and run-down heart of the Capo district is the Piazza Beati Paoli where, it is said, was the beginning . . . There is a church in the piazza, there is a small, hemmed-in open space, enclosed by high buildings with damp-scarred and crumbling walls and the night's bedding is draped from balconies. It is said by the historians who rejoice in the nobility of the anarchic Sicilian character that the piazza was the safe house of the Beati Paoli, the secret association formed more than 800 years ago. The men of the secret society claimed the right to protect the poor against the foreign rulers of the island.

  Their motto was 'Voice of the People, Voice of God'. Their meeting place was in the caves and tunnels under the present piazza. By day they practised normality, worshipped in public. By night they roamed the black alleys, cloaked in heavy coats under which they carried rosaries and knives, and punished and murdered by ritual.

  From the men of the secret society of the Beati Paoli was born a word: the word was

  'mafia'. Some say the word comes from the old Italian maffia, which describes a man of madness, audacity, power and arrogance. Some say the word was the old French maufer, which denotes the God of Evil. Some say the word was the old Arabic mihfal, which is an assembly of many people. The children of each succeeding generation have been taught the mythology of the secret society, and its fight against the persecution of the unfortunate, and its punishment of the oppressor, and its justification for murder.

  What began eight centuries ago had spread now from the grey piazza, flowed and eddied into the city, across the island, over the sea, but it began in the Capo district of Palermo.

  'The Capo district, I see. You wish, Dr Tardelli, to cordon off the Capo district... Wait, Dr Tardelli, you have already spoken. Throw a surveillance cordon around the Capo district because - forgive me if I recapitulate - because you have been told by a source that must remain anonymous, that may not be shared with us, because you have information that a year ago an almond cake upset the bowels of Mario Ruggerio. An interesting proposition, Dr Tardelli.'

  The grim smile played at the face of the oldest of the Palermo prosecutors. He shrugged, his fingers were outstretched in the gesture of ridicule, his throat burrowed down into his shoulders.

  'I request the resources of a surveillance team.'

  'Now, I, of course, Dr Tardelli, am not able to devote my life to the investigation of one man.' The voice of the magistrate quavered in sarcasm. A tall man, ascetic, his fingers clinging to an unlit cigarette, he rolled his eyes around the table, before bringing them to bear on Rocco Tardelli. 'My desk is piled with many investigations, all of which require my attention. I, too, need resources. But on the basis of information that is as old as was, no doubt, the almond cake - no, Dr Tardelli, I do not seek to make a joke of this - you wish for a special surveillance of the Capo district. There are, my recollection, at least fourteen entrances into that area. Should we have surveillance cameras for each of them? To do a job at all correctly you must have eight men at any one time on surveillance duty. Mathematics, I regret, is not my strength, but with the duty shifts that would take away twenty-four men from other duties. Then, I make a further addition, and I ask whether the eight men on surveillance duty must have the support of back-up. A further addition, those who watch however many cameras we install. A year ago, on the word of your informant, an almond cake made a problem for Mario Ruggerio, and we are asked to divert an army . . .'

  'I ask for what can be spared.'

  'Please, Dr Tardelli, your indulgence ... I work in a more simple field, I attempt investigations into the extortion of payments from the public utility companies. To you, Dr Tardelli, I have no doubt that would seem to be valueless work, it is as if I hunt for many cats and not just one tiger. The tiger, of course, may by now be toothless and maimed and harmless, but that is another matter. I assure you, the cats have claws and teeth and kill.' The prosecutor was younger than Rocco Tardelli, was in his first year in Palermo, had travelled from Naples, and would have seen his appointment as a step on a career ladder. He would not be long on the island of Sicily. 'You put in place the valuable resource of a trained surveillance unit, a resource that each week, for my investigations, I beg for, but do you even know what he looks like, the elusive Mario Ruggerio? How - am I being stupid - how can a surveillance team operate, how can video cameras be monitored, if the only photograph of Mario Ruggerio is twenty years old? I do not wish to be difficult . . .'

  'The photograph found when his brother was arrested, taken at his sister's wedding in 1976, has now been computer-enhanced. We have aged Mario Ruggerio.'

  'You must not misunderstand me, Dr Tardelli. I, I can assure you, am not among them, but there are some, a few, who would be less than generous to you. Some, and I am not among them, would see an unfavourable motivation in your request for these valued resources. They would look, some would look, towards a desire on your part for promoted status. Not me, no . . .' Older than Tardelli, less grey in the visage because he did not live behind shuttered windows and drawn curtains, heavier in the stomach because he ate in the restaurants of the city, the magistrate had long ago sent a signal that had been transmitted, mouth to mouth, and received. He carried out his work, with punctilious care, but always those arrested, charged, convicted, imprisoned, were from a losing faction. '. . . Myself, I believe Ruggerio to be irrelevant, but his capture would play well on television, it would make the headlines in newspapers. The man who claimed credit for that capture would be feted, by the ignorant, as a national hero.

  Would the finger beckon, would Rome summon him? Would he sit at the right hand of the Minister? Would he go to Washington to lecture the FBI and DEA, and to Cologne to meet the BKA, to Scotland Yard to take wine? Would he leave us all behind him to go about our daily work in danger, here in Palermo? Some might say that—'

  'When you arrest a man of the stature of Mario Ruggerio then you dislocate the organization - it is proven.'

  They were his colleagues and they mocked him. They might as well have laughed in his face, they might as well have spat upon him. It was what he lived with.

  He looked around the table. He raked his eyes over them. He was accused, behind his back, in conversations in quiet corridors, of 'careerism' and of chasing 'handcuffs for headlines'. In his mind was that description of
the dead Falcone, 'a lonely fighter whose army had proved to consist of traitors'. Some of them, he thought, were crushed by the coward's desire to return to normality. But. .. but he should have been more tolerant of cowards. Not every man could make such a sacrifice, pig-headed in righteous duty, as he had done. Not every man could see his wife walk out and take the children, and then go from the silence of a lifeless apartment, in the armoured car, to the bunker office.

  There had been no contribution at the weekly meeting from the representatives of the squadra mobile and the Reparto Operativo Speciale and the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia, as if those men stood aside while the prosecutors and magistrates carped and cut at each other.

  Tardelli began to gather together the papers in front of him. There was a hangdog sadness in his face, and his shoulders were bowed as if under the weight of disappointment. He spoke with the diffidence that was his own. 'Thank you for hearing me, gentlemen. Thank you for your courtesy and consideration. Thank you for pointing out to me the folly of my ambition and the idiocy of my request . . .'

  He stood. He placed his papers in his briefcase. It had been the same for Falcone and for Borsellino, and for Cesare Terranova and 'Ninni' Cassara, and for Giancomo Montalto and for Chinnici and for Scopellitfi, all ridiculed, all isolated, all dead. He had been to the funerals of all of them.

  'I will call, in one hour, a news conference. I will tell the world that I have a lead, a slight lead, for the hiding place of the super- latitanti, Mario Ruggerio. I will say that my colleagues in the Palazzo di Giustizia, and I will name them, do not consider this a matter important enough for the allocation of resources. I will say—'