RED FOX

by Gerald Seymour

  ' I once did a stint at G2 Ops. Shut up in a bloody office, out in Aden. We had a couple of Brigades in the Radfan, tribesman-bashing. Damn good shots they were, gave our chaps a hell of a run for their money. I couldn't get clear of my desk, and m'brother-in-law was up there with a battalion. Used to rub it in with his signals, wicked devil. Used to get me damned cross, just talking and not doing. I know how you feel, Carpenter.' The weathered hand reached again for the bottleneck.

  Neither man looked up as Michael Charlesworth came back into the room. He paused, and watched Henderson refilling the glasses, slopping brandy on the polished wood surface.

  'You'll be needing that, Buster, I've just heard something a w f u l . . . '

  His voice attracted, mothlike, the eyes of his guests.

  ' . . . it's Harrison's wife. Violet Harrison, she's just hit a lorry on the Raccordo. She's dead. Ran slap into a lorry. Killed out-right, head-on collision.'

  The bottle base crashed down on to the table and trembled there together with the hand that held it. Carpenter's fist shot out for his glass and dashed a saucer sideways, spewing ash on the white crocheted mats.

  'Not bloody fair.' The Colonel spoke into the hand that masked his face.

  ' I made them repeat it twice, I couldn't believe it.' Charlesworth was still standing.

  Carpenter swayed to his feet. 'Could you get me a taxi, Michael? I'll wait for it downstairs.' He didn't look back, headed for the front door. No farewells, no thanks for hospitality.

  Going, getting out, and running.

  He didn't call the lift, kept to the stairs, hand on the support rail, the fresh air freezing the alcohol.

  God, Archie, you've screwed it now. Throwing the shit at everyone else but not yourself. Laying down the law on how everyone else should behave. Ran out on the poor bitch, Archie, hid behind the prim chintz curtain and clucked your tongue and disapproved. Bloody little pharisee with as much charity as a weasel up a rabbit burrow. Preaching all day about getting Geoffrey Harrison back to his family, but he hadn't shut the door and seen there was a family for the bastard to come home to.

  What had Carboni said? 'I've failed your man.' Join the club, Giuseppe, meet the other founder member.

  He fell into the back of the taxi. Gave the name of his hotel and blew his nose noisily.

  The dog fox crept close to the two sleeping men. With a front paw it scratched the P38 a little further from Giancarlo and its nose worked with interest at the barrel and the handle before fascination was lost.

  Four times the fox went over the ground between Giancarlo and the pit as if unwilling to believe there was no food remnant to be rifled. Disappointed, the animal moved on its way, along the path that led to the fields and hedgerows where mice and rabbits and chickens and cats could be found. Abruptly the fox stopped. Ears straight, nostrils dilating. The noise that it heard was faint and distant, would not be felt by the men who slept, but for a creature of stealth and secrecy it was adequate warning.

  A dark shadow, flitting comfortably on the path, the fox retraced its steps.

  The farmer had laid the shotgun on the ground and knelt at the front of the car. The torch was in the boy's hands, and the farmer cupped his hands around it to minimize the flare of the light as he studied and memorized the number plate. Not that it was necessary after he had seen the prefix letters before the five numbers.

  RC, and the television had said that the car had been stolen from Reggio Calabria. Cunningly hidden too, a good place, well shielded by the bank and the bushes and the trees. He rose to his feet, trying to control his breathing, feeling his heart battering at his chest. He switched off the torch in the boy's hand and retrieved his gun. Better with that in his hands as the wood threw out its death hush. The farmer reached for his son's hand, gripping it tightly, as if to provide protection from a great and imminent evil.

  T w o men were in the wood?'

  He sensed the nodded response.

  'Where was the path to their place?'

  The boy pointed across the car's bonnet into the black void of the trees. By touch the farmer collected with his fingers three short fallen branches, and made an arrow of them that followed his son's arm. He put his hand on the boy's shoulder and they hurried together from the place, back across the fields, back to the safety of their home.

  C H A P T E R N I N E T E E N

  Giuseppe Carboni was dozing'at his desk, head pillowed lop-sided on his folded arms.

  'Dottore . . .' The shout of excitement and pounding feet boomed in the outer corridor.

  Carboni flicked his head up, the attention of the owl, his eyes large in expectation. The subordinate surged through the open door, and there was a gleam and an excitement on his face.

  'We have the car, D o t t o r e . . . ' Stuttered out, because the thrill was great.

  Chairs were heaved back, files discarded, telephones dropped, men hurrying in the wake of the messenger gathered at Carboni's desk.

  "Where?' Carboni snapped, the sleep shed fast.

  'On the hill below Bracciano, between the town and the lake.'

  'Excellent,' Carboni sighed, as if the burden of Atlas were shifted.

  'Better than excellent, Dottore. A farmer found the car . . .

  his son, a small boy, took him to the place, and he thinks the boy watched Battestini and Harrison in the wood in the d a y . . . '

  'Excellent, excellent...' Carboni gulped at the foetid air of the room which had taken on a new freshness, a new quality. He felt a weakness in his hands, a trembling at his fingers. 'Where is Vellosi?'

  'At the communications centre. He said he would not return to the Viminale tonight.'

  'Get him.'

  The room had been darkened, and now Carboni moved to the door and rammed down the wall switch. The response was blinding light in the room, all bulbs on the chandelier illuminated, sweeping away the shadows and depressions.

  T h e liaison officers of carabinieri and SISDE, get them here too . . . within ten minutes.'

  Back at his desk, moving with uncommon speed, he pulled from a drawer a large-scale map of the Lazio region. His aide's pencil raked to the green plot of woodland dividing the built-up grey shades of the town of Bracciano from the blue tint of the Lago di Bracciano. Carboni without ceremony relieved him of the pencil and scratched the crosses on the yellow road ribbons for the perimeter that he would throw around the boy and his prisoner. Seal the road to Trevignano, the road to Anguillara, the road to La Storta, the road to Castel Giuliano, to Cerveteri, to Sasso, to Manziano. Seal them tight, block all movement.

  'Has the farmer alerted them at a l l . . . is there that risk?'

  'He was asked that, Dottore. He says not. He went with his son to the car, identified it, and then returned home. He left the child there and then he walked to the home of a neighbour who has a telephone. He was careful to walk because he feared the noise of a car would startle the people in the wood, though his farm is at least a kilometre away. From the house of his neighbour he telephoned the carabinieri in Bracciano .. .'

  'The carabinieri . . . they will not blunder . . .' Carboni exploded, as if success was so fragile, could be snatched from him.

  'Be calm, Dottore. The carabinieri have not moved.' The aide was anxious to pacify.

  'You have them, Carboni?'

  The direct shout, Vellosi striding into the office, hands clapping together in anticipation. More followed. A carabinieri colonel in pressed biscuit-brown uniform, the man from the secret service in grey suit with sweat stains at the armpit, another in shirtsleeves who was the representative of the examining magistrate.

  'Is it confirmed, the s i g h t i n g . . . ? '

  'What has already been d o n e . . .?'

  'Where do you have them . . . ? '

  The voices droned around his desk, a gabble of contradiction and request.

  'Shut up!' Carboni shouted. His voice carried over them and silenced the press around his desk. He had only to say it once, and had never been k
nown to raise his voice before to equals and superiors. He sketched in his knowledge and in a hushed and hasty tone outlined the locations he required for the block forces, the positioning of the inner cordon, and his demand that there should be no advance into the trees without his personal sanction.

  T h e men best, trained to comb the woods are mine . . .'

  Vellosi said decisively.

  'A boast, but not backed by fact. The carabinieri are the men for an assault.' A defiant response from the carabinieri officer.

  'My men have the skills for close quarters.'

  'We can get five times as many into the area in half the time..

  Carboni looked around him, disbelieving, as if he had not seen it all before, heard it many times in his years of police work. His head shook in anger.

  ' It is, of course, for you to decide, Giuseppe." Vellosi smiled, confident. 'But my men -'

  'Do not have the qualities of the carabinieri,' the colonel chipped in his retort.

  'Gentlemen, you shame us all, we discredit ourselves.' There was that in Carboni's voice that withered them, and the men in the room looked away, did not meet his gaze. 'I want the help of all of you. I am not administering prizes but seeking to save the life of Geoffrey Harrison.'

  And then the work began. The division of labour. The planning and tactics of approach. There should be no helicopers, no sirens, a minimum of open radio traffic. There should be concentrations before the men moved off on foot across the fields for the inner line. Advance from three directions; one force congregating at Trevignano and approaching from the north-east, a second taking the southern lakeside road from Anguillara, a third from the town of Bracciano to the west to sweep down the hillside.

  'It is as if you thought an army were bivouacked in the trees,'

  Vellosi said quietly as the meeting broke.

  ' It is a war I know little of,' Carboni replied as he hitched his coat from the chair on to his wide shoulders. They walked together to the door, abandoning the room to confusion and shouted orders and ringing telephones. Activity again and welcome after the long night hours of idleness. Carboni hesitated and leaned back through the doorway. 'The Englishman who was here in the day. I will take him with me, call him at his hotel.'

  He hurried to catch Vellosi. He should have felt that at last the tide had turned, the wind had slackened, yet the doubt still gnawed at him. How to approach by stealth, through trees, through undergrowth, and the danger if they did not achieve surprise. The thing could be plucked from him yet, even at the last, even at the closest time.

  'We can still lose everything,' Carboni said to Vellosi.

  'Not everything, we will have the boy.'

  'And that is important?'

  'It is the trophy for my wall.'

  They destroy us, these bastards. They make the calluses in our minds, they coarsen our sensitivities, until a good man, a man of the quality of Francesco Vellosi believes only in vengeance and is blinded to the value of the life of an innocent.

  'When you were in church, Francesco, last n i g h t . . .'

  ' I prayed that I myself, with my own hand, might have the chance to shoot the boy.'

  Carboni held his arm. They emerged together into the warm night air. The convoy stood ready, car doors open, engines pulsing.

  The damp of the earth, rising through the leaf mattress, crawled and nagged at the bones of Giancarlo, till he writhed in irritation and the refuge of sleep fell from him. The hunger bit and the chill was deep at his body. He groped across the ground for his pistol and his hand brushed against the metal of the barrel. P38, I love you, my P38, present to the little fox from Franca. Sometimes when he awoke in a strange place, and suddenly, he needed moments to assimilate the atmosphere around him. Not at this awakening. His mind was sharp in an instant.

  He glanced at the luminous face of his watch. Close to three.

  Six hours to the time that Franca ordered for the retribution on Geoffrey Harrison. Six hours more and then the sun would be high, and the scorch patterns of the heat would have flung back the cold of darkness, and the wood would be dying and thirsting for moisture. There would have been two or three of them with Aldo Moro on this night. Two or three of them to share the desperate isolation of the executioner as he made ready his equipment. Two or three of them to pump home the bullets, so that the blame was spread . . . Blame, Giancarlo? Blame is for the middle classes, blame is for the guilty. There is no blame for the work of the revolution, for the struggle of the proletariat.

  Two or three of them to take him to the beach by the airport fence of Fiumicino. And they had had their escape route.

  What escape route for Giancarlo?

  No planning, no preparation, no safe house, no car switch, no accomplice.

  Did Franca think of that?

  It is not important to the movement. Attack is the factor of importance, not retreat.

  They will hunt you, Giancarlo, hunt you for your life. The minds of their ablest men, hunting you to eternity, hunting you till you cannot run further. The enemy has the machines that are invulnerable and perpetual, that invoke a memory that cannot weary.

  It was an order. Orders can never be bent to accommodate circumstance. In the movement there has been great sacrifice.

  And there is advantage in the killing of 'Arrison . . . ?

  Not for your mind to evaluate. A soldier does not question his order. He acts, he obeys.

  The insects played at his face, nipping and needling at his cheeks, finding the cavities of his nostrils, the softness of his ear lobes. He swatted them away.

  Why should the bastard 'Arrison sleep? When he was about to die, how could he? A man with no belief beyond his own selfish survival, how could he find sleep?

  For the first time in many hours Giancarlo summoned the image of his room in the fiat at seaside Pescara. Bright on the walls of Alitalia posters, the hanging figure of the wooden Christ, the thin-framed portrait from a colour magazine of Paul VI, the desk for his schoolbooks where he had worked in the afternoons after classes, the wardrobe for his clothes where the white shirts for Sundays hung ironed. Insidious and compelling, a world that was lit and conventional and normal. Giancarlo, one-time stereotype, who sat beside his mother at meals, and wanted in the evenings to be allowed to help his father at the shop. A long time ago, an age ago, when Giancarlo was on the production line, held in the same precision mould as the other boys of the street.

  'Arrison had been like that.

  The ways had parted, different signposts, different destinations. God . . . and it was a lonely way . . . terrifying and hostile. Your choice, Giancarlo.

  He slapped his face again to rid himself of the insects and the dream collapsed. Gone were the savours of home, replaced by a boy whose photograph was stuck with adhesive tape to the dash-boards of a thousand police cars, whose features would appear in a million newspapers, whose name grew fear, whose hand held a gun. He would never see Franca again. He knew that and the thought ripped and wrenched at him. Never in his life again.

  Never again would he touch her hair, and hold her fingers. Just a memory, a recollection to be set beside the room in Pescara.

  Giancarlo lay again on the ground and closed his eyes.

  Up the Cassia northwards from the city headed the convoys.

  The riot wagons of the Primo Celere, the Fiat lorries of the carabfnieri, the blue and white and prettily painted cars of the polizia, the unmarked vehicles of the special squads. There were many who came in nightclothes to the balconies of the high-rise flats and watched the stream of the participants and felt the thrill of the circus cavalcade. More than a thousand men on the move.

  All armed, all tensed, all drugged in the belief that at last they could assuage their frustration and beat and kick the irritant that plagued them. At the village of La Storta, where the road narrowed and was choked, the drivers hooted and blasphemed at the traffic police, and demanded clearance of the chaos, because all were anxious to be in Bracciano when da
wn came.

  Past La Storta, on the narrower Via Claudia with its sharp bends between the tree lines, Giuseppe Carboni's car was locked into a column of lorries. It was a quieter, more sedate progress because now the sirens were forbidden, the rotating lights were doused, the horns unused. Archie Carpenter shared the front seat with the driver. Vellosi and Carboni were behind among the bullet-proof waistcoats and the submachine-guns, taken as if by a careful virgin from the boot before the departure from the Questura.

  Water dripped from Carpenter's hair on to the collar of his shirt and down the back of his jacket, the remnant of his shower after the telephone had broken the total, drink-induced sleep that he had stumbled to. Now that he was awake, the pain between his temples was huge.

  A boring bastard, she'd called him. A proper little bore. Violet Harrison on Archie Carpenter.

  Well, what was he supposed to do? Get her on to the mattress in the interests of ICH, take her on the living-room c a r p e t . . . ?

  Not what it was about, Archie. Not cut and dried like that.

  Just needed someone to talk to.

  Someone to talk to ? Wearing a dress like that, hanging out like it was going out of fashion?

  Wrong, Archie. A girl broken up and falling down, who needed someone to share it with. And you were out of your depth, Archie, lost your lifebelt and splashing like an idiot. You ran away, you ran out on her, and had a joke with Charlesworth, had your giggle. You ran because they don't teach you about people under high stress in safe old Motspur Park. All cosy and neat there in the mortgaged semis, where nobody shouts because the neighbours will hear, nobody has a bit on the side because the neighbours will know, where nobody does anything but sit on their arses and wait for the day when they're pushing up daisies and it's too late and they've gone, silent fools and un remembered.

  She needed help, Archie. You galloped out of that flat as fast as your bloody legs would take you.

  A proper little bore, and no one had ever called him that before, not to his face.

  'Did you hear about Harrison's wife, Mr Carboni?' Spoken offhand, as if he wasn't concerned, wasn't involved.