Killing Ground

by Gerald Seymour

  Pasquale stumbled out into the hall. He had told his wife how much the magistrate, poor lonely man, had appreciated her flowers. There was the clatter of the guns being armed, the static and distorted chatter of the radios. They took the paccetto down to the street, to the cars.

  'Do you want to wait in the car, or do you want to come in?'

  'I think I'd like to walk around the town - I mean, it's sort of famous, isn't it?'

  Benny said, sombre, 'You should not walk alone around the town. Afterwards, if you want, I can show you the town. For now you should come inside with me or you should wait in the car.'

  Charley said, sullen, 'If I should not walk around the town without an escort, then I will come with you.'

  She snapped her body out of the tiny AutoBianchi car. She stretched and felt the sunlight. Of course she had heard of Corleone - she had seen the first film at college with Marlon Brando starring, and she had seen Godfather III on video with Al Pacino starring. They were parked near the carabineri barracks. Pretty bloody ordinary it looked to her, Corleone. They had come into the town on a wide open road from San Giuseppe Jato, where Benny had left her in the car while he collected a photocopier from a small house. He hadn't talked much as he had driven through the countryside between San Giuseppe Jato and Corleone. Axel Moen would have kicked her backside because she had bullied her way into Benedetto's day. It had been spare and empty talk on the road after they had left the confined tight streets of San Giuseppe Jato. They had talked of the horses that grazed the grasslands in the expanses between rock outcrops, and of the wild flowers of yellow and burgundy, and of the handkerchief-sized plots of vines growing where a vestige of cultivation could be scratched in soil above the stone, and there had been hawks climbing above the outcrops of rock which she recognized as the kestrels and buzzards of home. Benny didn't know what the horses were used for, didn't know what the flowers were called, didn't know what was the sort of grapes grown here, didn't know about the hawks. She had been talking, nothing talk, about the hawks on the cliffs at home, when he had told her abruptly, almost with rudeness, to be quiet, and he had slowed, and then she had noticed the military road block, and they had been waved through, boring ... If Sicily was a battleground, if it were the place of Axel bloody Moen's war, then she had only a single military road block to tell her of it. They had driven into Corleone on a broad street and past a street market that seemed to sell everything from clothes and furniture to vegetables and meat. No troops and no police, nothing that was familiar from television of war on the streets of Belfast. The sun was on her back and she walked after Benny as he carried the photocopier.

  So she had annoyed him by pressing her presence. So he could bloody well put up with her. Doggedly, she followed.

  They went by a school and there was a clamour of kids' voices from inside. There was an emblem on the wall of the school, not large and not ostentatious, of doves flying. She read, 'AI MARTIRI DELLA VIOLENZA' - hardly a monument to war, not much of a mark for a battleground. He went through the open door of a house. Quite sharply, he gestured for her to sit on a hard chair in the hallway, and he left her there as he went through to an inner room. She heard the excitement of women's voices, and two women came into her view and were hugging Benny and thanking him and he carried the photocopier into the room where she could not see him. Their voices clattered in her ears. She thought she was excluded - bugger that. She stood, she walked to the door. They were bent over the old photocopier and Benny was on his knees and plugging it to a socket. Their voices died. She was excluded because she was a stranger.

  There were the same posters on the walls that she had seen in his Palermo room. Benny flushed. He told the women that the Signorina Parsons was English, that he had met her when she was attacked in the street, that he had promised to show her the antiquities of Palermo, but the photocopier had to be delivered.

  'So she is a tourist in Corleone?'

  'So she comes to see the wickedness of Corleone, and perhaps to send a postcard?'

  Charley rode the sneers. She turned away, defiant, and took her seat again. She heard their laughter from the room. Perhaps they teased Benny, for bringing a tourist. He was distant when he came out of the inner room and each of the women made a show of kissing him on the cheek, and she thought their politeness to her was a charade. Did he screw them? Did he screw anyone on that narrow little priest's bed? Did Axel Moen fuck anyone on any bed? She smiled, lied her simplicity with a smile.

  Out in the street, innocent and simple, 'What do they do?'

  'They have a newsletter to issue, but the photocopier is broken. They produce a newsletter for the Anti-Mafia Co-ordination Group of Corleone.'

  'Is it a big circulation?'

  He matched her innocence and simplicity, but there was no lie. 'Very small, very few people, which is why we have such humble resources, a room and two women and a photocopier. In Corleone is the culture of the mafia, but you would not know that. It is the heart beat of the mafia - from Corleone to Palermo, from Palermo across the island, from the island to the mainland, from the mainland to Europe and over the ocean to America. It is why we speak of the octopus, with many tentacles, but the heart beat of the beast is here. The sindaco speaks against the mafia, the priest denounces the mafia from the church, but that is politics and religion, and they change nothing.'

  'When will something change?'

  He smiled, innocent and simple. 'I will know that something has changed when we need two, three photocopiers.'

  'Tell me about Corleone. Show it to me.'

  He looked at her. His eyes that squinted against the sun were grave, as if he feared that she mocked him. 'Forgive me - so that you can buy postcards and boast to your friends at home that you were in Corleone?'

  'Please, walk me through the town?'

  'Why?'

  Axel bloody Moen would have kicked her arse, would have said that she lurched on the edge of disclosure, would have snarled that she was at the cliff face of complacency.

  'It's just, what I've seen, a street and a market and a school and blocks of apartments and a barracks. I can't imagine what you are fighting against.'

  'I think you would be bored.'

  'I want to understand.'

  They walked to the piazza. Old men watched them from under the bars' awnings and youths sat astride their motorcycles and eyed I hem from under the shade of palm trees.

  The sun beat on Charley's .arms and on her shoulders.

  'It is the town of Navarra and then of Liggio and then of Riina .and then of Provenzano. Now it is the town of Ruggerio. To you, I he stranger, it will appear like any other town. It is unique in Sicily because here no businessman pays the pizzo.

  Literally that is the small bird's beak that pecks for a little food, but on the island the pizzo is the extortion of money for "protection". In the 1940s, after the liberation from Fascism, a good statistic for you to carry home to your friends, there were more murders here per head of Copulation than in any town or city in the world.'

  Charley said quietly, 'You don't have to talk me short, Benny, like I'm only a tourist.'

  At the start of the old town, where the streets darkened and narrowed and climbed to the left and fell to the right, Benny bought her a coffee and a warm roll with ham and goat's cheese. His voice was a murmur. 'I will tell you one story, and perhaps from the one •lory you will understand. It is not the story of Navarra, who was the doctor here, and the parents of a twelve-year-old boy who brought the hysterical child to him and told the doctor that the child had seen the killing of a man, and Navarra injected the child with a "sedative" that killed him, and then apologized for his mistake. It is not the story of Navarra. It is not the story of Liggio, who was a cattle thief before he developed the heroin trade of the mafia. And not the story of Riina, who ordered the killing of the bravest of the judges and drank champagne in celebration. Not the story of Provenzano, who is called the trattore here, the tractor, because of the brutality of his killing
s. It is not the story of Ruggerio. Come.'

  She gulped the last of the roll. She wiped the crumbs from the front of her T-shirt.

  She followed him out onto the street.

  'You will hear, anywhere in Sicily, the stories of Navarra and Liggio and Riina and Provenzano, maybe you can hear the story of Ruggerio. You will not be told the story of Placido Rizzotto, but that is the story that will help you to understand.'

  They walked down a narrow street, on cobbled stones. The balconies with wrought-iron railings pushed out from the walls above them, seeming to make a tunnel.

  Watched by an old man, watched by children who stopped their football game, watched by a woman who paused to rest from the weight of her shopping bags. No sun on the narrow street.

  'First he had been in the army, then he was with the partisans. Then he came back to Corleone, where his father was at a low level with the mafia. Placido Rizzotto returned here with opened eyes from the mainland. He became a trade-union organizer. The mafia detested the trade unions because they mobilized the contadini, worked against the mafia's domination of the poor. To the Church he was a communist. To the police he was a political agitator. Perhaps the mafia and the Church and the police were distracted, but Rizzotto was elected as mayor of Corleone. Do I bore you, Charley?'

  They stopped. They were near to the church, a huge edifice, at the front, and a bell tolled, and black-dressed women hurried for the door but swivelled their heads as they went that they might better watch them. Ahead of them was a bank. A fat-bellied guard leaned against the door of the bank, and his finger rested loosely in his sagging belt that took the weight of his holster, and he watched them.

  'Ten o'clock at night, a summer night. A friend calls for Placido Rizzotto at his father's home, invites him to come for a walk. All the men in the town are walking in the Via Bentivegna and the Piazza Garibaldi. He was betrayed by his friend. He strolled along the street, and one moment his friend was with him and the next moment his friend was gone . . . All of the men walking that evening on the Via Bentivegna and the Piazza Garibaldi saw Liggio approach Rizzotto, saw the gun put into Rizzotto's back.

  All of the men, all of those who had voted for him and who had cheered his speeches, watched him led away as if he were a dog led to a ditch to be killed. Are you bored, Charley?'

  The ravine was in front of them. Water tumbled from above them and fell, and the flow was broken by dark stones that had been smoothed over the centuries. Above the ravine was a fortress of decayed yellow stone built on the flat top of a straight-sided rock mass, dominating. They were alone now with the ravine and the fortress, and the watchers were behind them.

  'The people went home. They emptied the streets and they locked their doors and they went to their beds. They had surrendered. And Rizzotto did not even threaten the mafia, or the Church, or the police, to all of them he was merely a nuisance. It was in 1948. Two years later his body was recovered by the fire brigade from here. His father could identify him from the clothes, and from his hair that had not been eaten by the rats. A man who had seen Rizzotto taken away said, "He was our hero and we let him go. All we had to do, every one of us, was to pick up a single stone from the street, and we could have overwhelmed the man with the gun. We did not pick up a stone, we went home." It was in 1948 and the culture of fear is the same today. Does my story bore you, Charley, or do you better understand?'

  Her father had been three years old when Placido Rizzotto had been pitched, dead, into the ravine below. Her mother had been one year old. She had walked along the same street as the man with the pistol in his back, walked on the same pavements as the watchers had stood on, walked past the same doors through which they had hurried and which they then locked, walked past the same windows in which the lights had been extinguished. Charley Parsons, twenty-three years old, stared down into the ravine below the mountain rock on which the ruin of the fortress stood, and she thought the smell of a rotted corpse was in her nose, and she believed that at last she knew the scent of evil. Christ, yes, she understood.

  'Where does Ruggerio come from?'

  'From near here.'

  'Can I see where he comes from?'

  'For what reason?'

  She lied, so easily. 'What you said, Ruggerio is the present. Right, I'm just a bloody tourist imposing on your day. It's what tourists do, go and visit a birth place. If you don't want to . . .'

  'It's not difficult.'

  Each afternoon, after the quarry had closed, after the drivers of the big dumper lorries had gone and the stone-crushers had been silenced, they blasted for the next day's supply of broken rock.

  The quarry was cut into the mountain across the river from San Giuseppe Jato and San Cipirello. It was where the expert tested ail the explosive devices he designed.

  In open ground, clear of the rock face where the dynamite charges were set, the expert and Tano had carefully parked the two cars. The car the expert had driven was an old Fiat Mirafiori. The car that Tano had driven, level with it but separated by ten metres of space, was a Mercedes, low on its wheels from the weight of the armour plate lodged in the doors. The distance between the cars had been measured with a tape, because the expert had said that in matters involving explosives detail was important.

  The two explosions were finely synchronized. At the moment that the dynamite in the quarry face was detonated, the final digit of a six-figure number was pressed by Tano on his mobile telephone and the connection was made to the telephone pager set into the bomb on the back seat of the Mirafiori.

  In San Giuseppe Jato and in San Cipirello, the people would have heard the explosion, what they always heard at that hour, and a reverberating echo would have masked the second explosion.

  The great dust cloud from the quarry face had barely settled when the expert and Tano went forward. The Mirafiori had disintegrated, beyond recognition. The Mercedes was what interested them. The two parts of the Mercedes, and it had been sliced precisely in half, burned fiercely.

  They laughed, the expert and Tano, they were bent at the waist and shouting their laughter at the quarry face from which the last of the fractured rock fell.

  By the morning, before the quarry opened for work, the parts of the Fiat Mirafiori and the halves of the Mercedes would be buried under waste stone away to the side of the quarry.

  'Do you have a camera?'

  She started, she had been alone with her thoughts. 'A camera? Why is it important?'

  Snapping, and she thought now he was frightened. 'Charley, I asked, do you have a camera?'

  'No.'

  It had been brilliant country. Bigger hills than those on Dartmoor that she knew, greener than Dartmoor, but the same wilderness.

  They had stopped once, when she had told him to stop. She had stood beside the car, leaned against the warmth of the body of the car, and gazed across a field of wild flowers to the shepherd with his flock and his dog. Something of the Bible of a child, pastoral and safe, and she had heard the symphony of the chime of bells from the sheep, and the shepherd had sung. She thought it would have been an old song, handed down from his family, a song of love. The shepherd never saw them as he sang. Benny had stood beside her, close to her. Her sort of place . . . And the town was above them, and now the nervousness played in his face.

  'I don't have a camera. Why?'

  'Where we go, you should not use a camera - doesn't matter.'

  On a winding road Benny drove towards Prizzi. He parked in a lay-by. The town stretched away from them and above them, a mosaic of yellow and ochre tiled roofs so dense that the streets were hidden.

  Benny looked around him, locked the AutoBianchi. He took her arm, fingers on her elbow. He hurried her.

  They were on a climbing street. The window of a macellaio took her eye, the thin, strange cuts of meat, unfamiliar to her, and her arm was pulled.

  There would not have been room for cars to pass in the road. I wo terraced lines of three-storey homes, wooden doors set under low arches, bal
conies fronting shuttered windows, plaster and paint in yellow and orange and primrose. He walked fast and she skipped to keep up with him.

  'You don't stop, you don't stare.' His lips barely moved as he spoke and his voice hissed as if fear caught him. 'The sixth house beyond the black-painted drainpipe. You have it? Don't turn your head. That is the house, the balconies one above the other, of the parents of Mario Ruggerio. It is where they live, with the brother of Mario Ruggerio, who is simple. You see it?'

  He walked and he looked straight ahead. Charley saw a cat, low on its stomach, run from them.

  Nothing moved in the street but the cat. The sunlight fell on the house that had been identified for her. The door to the house was open and she heard, fleeting, a radio playing. She smelt, fleeting, the cooking of vegetables. Was that it? Was that the bloody lot? No

  Mercedes, no gold taps, no 9-inch cigars, no Rottweilers, no Harrods curtains, bloody hell . . . She defied him. Charley stopped in front of the open door and she twisted her head to look inside, and her arm was jerked half out of the socket at the shoulder. Only the sound of the radio and the smell of the cooking. When she was three doors past the house, he loosed her hand.

  'Was that quite necessary?'