If that was his life, fighting and not winning, then what was the point of his life?
'Vanni stubbed out his cigarette and drained his glass. He swung onto his stomach and pressed his face down into his pillow. He could not cut the sight of her. She was on the beach. She was light against the darkness of the sea. She was white-skinned as the towel slipped. She was naive and innocent, she was alone. She was being used as a weapon in a war without the prospect of ultimate victory. Mother of Christ. She was the wound that hurt him.
He was still awake when the alarm bleeped through the bare room.
It was raining hard.
There should have been back-up, there should have been support.
No support and no back-up, and so Harry Compton was dependent on a short truncheon and a pair of image-intensifier binoculars and a suction microphone linked to a tape-recorder. It had been the best that Stores could supply him with, which was pitiful. About the only thing going for Harry Compton was the rain, tipping down, which meant it was unlikely that the man's wife was going to come walking round the garden with the dogs. Small mercy, because there were enough things steepling against him. With the image-intensifier binoculars he had been able to identify the heat-sensitive exterior floodlights, and the location of the bloody things meant that he had to crawl through the depths of the bloody shrubs, wet earth sliming on his stomach and thorny pyracantha clinging to the material of his overalls. He was up against the wall of the house, but couldn't bloody move, because if he moved he would be into the arc of the heat-sensitive kit. He was wet. His hands ran rainwater. With wet hands, and he couldn't use gloves because they would deny him the sure touch of his fingers, the suction microphone had become smeared and wouldn't bloody stick on the window glass. He'd had to hold the microphone in position against the glass, and stand up to do it, like a damn prune in a cereal bowl. Music on in the room, bloody pop music, and he could not filter the music from the voices of Giles Blake and Giuseppe Ruggerio. Now, that was just incredible, these two men talking after-dinner business and with kids'
music turned up strong.
Blake's own house. Of course, they hadn't talked confidential in the hotel restaurant, but if they had music to drown them now, sure as hell they talked serious business, and he could not hear a bloody word. He was wet, he was cold, he was bloody miserable, and some time soon the bloody dogs would want putting out. He was an hour's drive from home, and at home there would be a darkened bedroom and the wife's back, cold.
There was the jewel moment. Harry Compton, wet and miserable, could have bloody well jumped and cheered. The CD, Oasis, had played out.
'. . . working hard at getting their different acts together. I think they'll be all right.'
'You know of Roberto Calvi?'
'Yes, of course.'
'They want the business?'
'Of course, and they want the commission.'
'If they want the business, the commission, then they should know of Roberto Calvi.
They should be told that Roberto Calvi deceived people, that he was strangled slowly.'
'Do we have to have more of the same? Kids'll think I'm on monkey glands.'
'Remind them to be careful. Please, something else . . .'
And something else was Elton bloody John. Harry Compton would hear nothing else for forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. Within an hour, damn certain, rain or no rain, the bloody dogs would be put out into the garden. He dropped on his hands and knees from the window of the house, the nice bloody pad that went with soaping and rinsing and drying mafia money, across the flagstone path. Onto his stomach, and the crawl into the landscaper's shrub bed, and caught immediately by the thorny pyracantha. His wife had planted one of the bloody things beside her little greenhouse, and he might just, next Sunday, dig the damn thing out or plaster it with weedkiller. What he'd seen of Giles Blake, and of Mrs Giles Blake when she'd been clearing up the kitchen, luxury bloody fittings, they wouldn't do the garden because they paid for maintenance, and that was good because there was no way he could avoid smearing a trail across the earth and the mulch of the shrub bed. He went fast. He reckoned he had enough for a disclosure warrant from a judge, for a telephone- intercept order from the Home Office, maybe enough for a dawn knock and handcuffs. The name of Roberto Calvi was the diamond.
Rotten investments for bad people, bad people's money down the drain, strangled and left hanging from Blackfriars Bridge where the world and the world's dog could see what happened to a joker who lost bad people's money.
As he went over the wall, dropped down into the lane, Harry Compton heard the voice of the woman calling out the dogs. He loathed the sort of people who lived in that sort of house behind that sort of wall. He himself had earned a maximum of £27,380
(inclusive of overtime) the last year. The sort of people he loathed, through scams and greed and criminality, would have clawed in a minimum of £273,800 (part-time working) the last year. He had the big thrill, like best sex, when he did the dawn call on the bastards, when he had the handcuffs open. And it would be good, best, to have the Sicilian bastard in the interview room. He reached his car.
He peeled off his overalls, kicked out of his boots. One nagging thought - what was the role of the young woman, 'pressurized' by the DEA, gone as a child-minder to Sicily? Where did she fit? He cut it. The young woman was altitude politics. He fed in the world of mud-smeared overalls, filth-scraped boots.
He drove home.
Chapter Twelve
It doesn't matter what it says.' The detective superintendent swung his chair so that he faced the window.
Harry Compton held the audio-cassette in his hand, then made the gesture and dropped it on the desk, onto his unread report. 'I had a hell of a drenching. I crawled through the garden.'
'What do you want, a medal? We are not playing at Scouts.'
Harry Compton had come to work bubbling in a froth of personal satisfaction. Had left the kit, smeared in dried mud, outside the locked door of Stores section. Up to his desk in the open-plan area, first one in apart from Miss Frobisher, and she too must have realized that a jackpot had been won because he had the success gleam in his eye, and she had put the kettle on and made him a mug of her own particular coffee, which was not the muck out of the vending machine in the corridor. He had listened to the tape, twice. Gone through the last Oasis track, the clean conversation, the start of the first Elton John track. He had typed his report, transcribed the tape, underlined in red the references to Roberto Calvi and then sat on his hands while the office filled and waited for his detective superintendent to get to work.
'What I am trying to say, Roberto Calvi is not a name that trips off the tongues of every pair of business people sitting down for a little chat on how to make a good buck.'
'You don't cop on quick, do you?'
The detective superintendent was searching his drawer and coming up with his cigarette packet. About two days in every five, it was said, the detective superintendent tried to pack in his smoking, and the intention usually lasted about an hour or up to Ihe first of the morning's crises. But two days out of five he could be foul-tempered and sarcastic with it.
'I used to think, Harry, you were quite bright, a clever little sod. Right now I reckon you're dumb. Hear me, and I'll do it slowly. This is politics. We stumbled into something, we pushed it a bit, took it to the bosses, and they've claimed it as their own.
That is politics. The politics are between us, way above me, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, way above their London man. It's good politics for us to have a stick to belt the DEA with because that's the route to trading. We make a noise, a high-level noise, we promise to make their life difficult. And to shut us up we get something in return - could be equipment, could be priority on an investigation in their back yard, could be computer access or something from their phone-tap capability, anything - that is politics. Politics are on the high ground, you and I are in the gutter. Don't make bloody faces, Harry, don't blood
y sulk. While you were doing the gardening down in Surrey last night, and hunting medals, the commander had the AC (SO) beating his ears for half an hour. Up above the clouds they see this as good politics and your suggestion would screw those politics, ditch the chance of trading lor something in return. We play
"civilized". Your suggestion, lift this Ruggerio man, would blow apart the DEA's insertion of that young woman - what's her bloody name?'
'Miss Charlotte Eunice Parsons. Sorry you'd forgotten.'
'Can't help being clever, can you? That young woman's insertion into a mafia family is now politics.'
Harry Compton flared. 'She was pressured.'
'She's between a rock and a hard place. She's for bartering for political advantage.
She's about as irrelevant as an individual as bloody Giles Blake and bloody Ruggerio.'
The cigarette smoke hung between them. The noise of the traffic below wafted through the window. He was flattened. Harry Compton reached forward and picked off the desk his report and his audio-cassette.
'I'm sorry, Harry.' The detective superintendent had his head down. 'I was the one who flew it high, got the kite into the wind, and fucked up. You've done well, and no thanks to me. If I authorized, here, now, what you want, quite reasonably, I'd be dead in the water. Don't think I feel good.'
'I doubt you do.'
'Give that bugger in Rome, idle sod, another belt, then get yourself down to Devon like I told you.'
'Thank you.'
'I want to bury those arrogant bastards, poaching from our patch, so get me a profile on Miss Charlotte Eunice Parsons . .. and don't make waves that splash me.'
'Charley? Where are you, Charley?'
She lay on the sunbed. The warmth played on her body. She lay on her back and she splayed out her legs so that the sun's heat was on her thighs. Her eyes were closed, but she could hear the scrape of the brush used by the 'lechie' on a path further down the garden. Each time that the motion of the brush was silenced she assumed that he gazed at her. She had looked in the dictionary that morning, after coming back from the school and the kindergarten, to find the word. The word was libertino. That was too good a word, in translation, for a lecher, foul old bastard with his peering eyes . . .
The watch was on her wrist. The watch would not leave her wrist, not when she was in the bath or the shower, not when she was in the sea. The white ring on her wrist, under the watch, would not be touched by the sun. But the rest of her body, too damn right, that would get the sun . . .
She had rung Benny that morning from a pay-phone in a bar facing onto the piazza, after she had dropped the children at school and kindergarten, and heard his voice that was distant and unsure, and gushed her thanks for the day in the countryside, and resurrected the invitation for him to guide her around the duomo and the Quattro Canti and the Cappella Palatina and the Palazzo Sclafani. She'd bullied him and told him when she could next be in
Palermo. She wanted the sun to have been on her, on all of her body except for her wrist, when she went into Palermo to see Benny. God, he wasn't much, didn't have much other than a dream, was all that was on offer.
She hadn't thought, not when she had sat on the cliff with Axel Moen, not when she had stood beside the river with Axel Moen in Rome, not on the train, not in Mondello, not in the villa, that the waiting would be so bloody hard. And it was worse now, the waiting, because she had seen the helicopter and the men with the guns, seen the response of Axel Moen to the pressing of the panic button. So bloody hard to wait. She opened her eyes, blinked at the brightness. The gardener was some fifteen paces from her and used the brush with a desultory and bored motion, and he looked away when she caught his glance. She rolled over onto her stomach. She twisted her hands over her back and unfastened the straps of the bikini top. She had never thought the waiting would be so bloody hard. Maybe it would all be waiting, maybe it would never happen, maybe it was just the illusion of Axel Moen. God, it was eating at her, the waiting.
'Here, Angela. I'm here.'
She pushed herself up and the bikini top fell away. Her elbows took her weight. She could not see the gardener, but away behind I he bushes there was the scrape of his brush. Angela came from the patio. She saw Angela's face, distracted, and there was a tautness. Angela had seen her.
The lips pursed, the frown dug deeper. 'I don't think, Charley, that is suitable.'
Bloody hell, but Charley grinned. 'You used to.'
Snapped. 'That was Civitaveccia, that was not Palermo. Please make yourself decent.'
Did she want to talk about it? Was now the time to press it? Would there be tears?
The lie came first. Each day she thought that Angela was more distanced from her. It was not in the interest of the lie to flush out the feelings of Angela Ruggerio, poor bitch.
Charley acted the lie, the chastened girl, and slipped her arms through the straps of the bikini and wriggled to fasten the clasp. Angela held a small piece of paper in her fingers, and her purse, and the fingers moved restless and wretched. It was all going to come, one day. Whether the lie was served or not, the confidences would gush and the tears would follow. Charley sat up.
She said cheerfully, 'Expect you're right.'
'I have a list for the shops.'
'Right, I'll do it when I get the children.'
'For now, Charley.'
It was hell's hot out there. It was all right in the heat lying nine-tenths stripped, but it was bloody hot to be traipsing back down the hill, and in two hours she would be going to get the children. But she lived the lie.
'No problem.'
Charley stood. Gently she took the list for the shopping from Angela's fidgeting fingers. A long list, a list for a meal for guests, not for a meal around the table in the kitchen where they ate when Peppino was away. She scanned it - oils, sauces, vegetables for a salad and vegetables for cooking and meat, mineral water, wine, cheese and fruit.
As if Angela pleaded with her. 'You don't tell Peppino that I forgot, you don't tell him
. . .'
'Of course not.' She tried to smile comfort.
'Am I pathetic to you?'
'Don't be daft.' She didn't want the tears, didn't want the confidences. 'So how many are coming?'
'It is tomorrow the birthday of Peppino's father. It is the eighty-fourth birthday tomorrow of Peppino's father. Peppino's father and his mother. Did I tell you that Peppino's father and mother lived near to Palermo?' Her voice was brittle, slashing.
'They are peasants, they are ignorant, they are not educated, but Peppino would want them fed well, and I forgot.'
'Peppino, he won't be here—'
'Back this evening, hurrying back from wherever.' A sneer flickered the muscles at her mouth. 'Back because it is the birthday of his father, which I forgot.'
Charley interrupted briskly, 'So the children, yes? You and Peppino, yes? His parents?
Me?'
'Of course, you live with us, of course you are there.'
Charley smiled. 'That's for four, six, and me, which makes seven. I'll go and get changed.'
She took the list and the purse. She headed for the patio.
'For eight - it is possible that someone else comes/ Angela said, from behind Charley.
'But I do not think I would be told.'
Charley stopped. She didn't turn. She thought that if she turned, Angela Ruggerio might see the brightness in her eyes. Charley said, 'Eight, fine, I'll buy for eight. I'll just chuck on a skirt and a T-shirt.'
Every time before he had ridden in the lead car, and sometimes he was given the keys to drive the lead car. But the maresciallo had promised that he was watched, as a probationer, and from their keen watching they would have seen his tiredness. Pasquale had been told to drive the chase car. He could not blame the tiredness on the baby, or on the soft and rhythmic snoring of his wife beside him, the tiredness was from the nightmare that had stayed with him through the night.
The route chosen by the maresciallo for the
journey between the Palazzo di Giustizia and Ucciardione Prison took them around the sharp bends of the Piazza San Francesca di Paoli, onto Via Mariano Stabile, from Mariano Stabile a sharp left for Via Roma and then Piazza Sturzo, then straight on before the final right turn into Via della Croci, which would run them the last stretch to the gates of Ucciardione. The route of every journey in the city was decided first by the maresciallo, who poured over the street maps each morning, who badgered Tardelli for his day's programme and the timing of the programme. The routes chosen by the maresciallo were not communicated to a central switchboard for fear of betrayal or interception. Now, one thing for Pasquale to drive the lead car, .mother thing for him to take the chase car and have his speed and cornering and acceleration and braking determined by the car in front. He was stressed.
He did not have the traffic opening ahead of him in response to the blue lamp and the siren wail, he had rear brake lights and the winking indicator to guide him, and his horizon was the back of Tardelli's head, and the sun was in his eyes.
Because they had teased and mocked him, he had slept falteringly with the nightmare.
livery street they went down, every piazza they crossed, was parked up. Cars and vans and motorcycles were at the side of every street and piazza, half on the tarmacadam and half on the pavings. 'Why a bomb? Why a huge explosion? Why a jeweller's shop?' All through the night, twisting and tossing in his bed beside his sleeping wife, near his sleeping baby, the nightmare had been of parked cars and parked vans and parked motorcycles. They could wait for a day or a week or a month, and they would know the inevitability that the lead car and the chase car must travel between the Palazzo di Giustizia and Ucciardione Prison, they could wait and watch a particular route and know the options for the journey were limited, and they could hold the detonator switch. And after the nightmare, after he had showered and shaved, after he had sat at the table in the kitchen while his wife fed their baby, he had seen on the television the picture of an armour-reinforced Mercedes, burned out and on its side, a death cage.
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