I'll see she does that tomorrow… You're very kind, Dr Ruggerio… Yes, yes, I'm sure she'd be very happy with you again… My wife, yes, I'll pass on your best wishes… So good to speak to you. Thank you. Goodnight.'
He put down the telephone. David Parsons glanced once, briefly, at the graduation photograph of his Charlotte that hung in the place of honour in the hall. He went into the sitting room. Flora Parsons looked up from her needlework, the cover for a cushion.
'God, you're a coward.'
'That's not called for.'
'Eating out of his hand and he's soft-soaping you. Crawling to him.'
'He sent you his best wishes…'
'The letter comes, then the American's here. Half the village wants to know who he is. Where's Charley now? I haven't an idea. Where is she? I'm frightened for her.'
'As soon as she's back, I'll speak to her.'
'You won't, you're a coward.'
It was her bravado, and when she'd finished she had only a few coins left in her purse.
Back to the bar, refusing his offer to buy the second round. A pint of Exmoor draft for herself, and a double malt whisky for herself, and another cup of decaffeinated coffee for Axel Moen with milk in a plastic carton and sugar in a paper sachet.
While she'd drunk the first pint and the first double malt whisky, while he'd sipped the first coffee, she'd told him about the timbered, low-ceilinged pub. She had given him the history – supposed to be a smugglers' den, and a hundred years earlier it was supposed to have been used as a lodging for a hanging judge in the Monmouth rebellion round-up, supposed to be…
He'd looked barely tolerant, uninterested. He lit another cigarette. 'OK, listen, please.
What you saw when you had your drive round, pushers' territory, small-time-'
She interrupted. 'I wouldn't describe an addicted baby in spasm as 'small-time', nor would I call an overdosed corpse 'small-time'. I'd-'
'Be quiet, and listen. What you saw was the symptom of a strategic problem. Too many law-enforcement people spend their time, the resources given them, chasing thieves and muggers and pushers because it looks good and they get to seem busy. But they're attacking the wrong end of the problem. Let me explain. Take a big company, let's talk of a mega-multinational. We'll take Exxon or General Motors or the Ford Motor Company, they're the major three American corporations. The total of their turnover, last set of figures I saw, $330 billion – get that figure in your mind – but the man you see is the salesman from the General Motors or Ford showroom, or if it's Exxon he's the guy who takes your money at the filling station. For the salesman or the guy on the cash till you should read 'thieves and muggers and pushers'.
Narco-trafficking, the last set of figures, runs directly alongside those of General Motors and the Ford Motor Company and Exxon, so we are talking serious money – you with me? – but organized crime is not only about narcotics, you can add in the profits from money washing, from arms trading, from illegal-immigrant rackets, loan sharking and kidnapping and hijacking, from extortion. What the whole thing comes to, worldwide, is figures too big to comprehend, but we try. The figure is $3 million billion. It leaves the top corporations for dead… Hang on in there.'
She bolted at the beer. He sat opposite her. The cigarettes went from his mouth to the ashtray, were stubbed, were lit, were smoked. He talked quietly and she clung to his words, as if he'd opened a door to her that showed a sea without a horizon.
'Hanging, but it's from my fingernails.'
She won a quick smile that did not last.
'The salesmen of General Motors and the Ford Motor Company don't count, nor the guy on the cash till at an Exxon filling station, they're about as important as the thieves and muggers and pushers. Where it matters is head office. Get in the elevator at head office, head on up past the accountants and lawyers and the marketing people and the public affairs people, keep going up in the elevator, up past the vice-presidents for sales and finance and internationals and image, research and development, keep on till it stops or hits the sky. You are, Charley, in the presence of the chief executive officer. He matters. What he decides affects folk. He is god. His level is strategic.'
She felt minuscule, a pygmy. The whisky glass was empty, just the dregs of the Exmoor draft left.
'There are mafias in Italy, in the United States, in Japan and Hong Kong, in Colombia and Brazil, in Russia. Each of those mafias has a chief executive officer, one man, because there's no space for a gang session in a mafia or in a corporation, who acts pretty much like the chief executive officer of General Motors, the Ford Motor Company or Exxon. He lays down guidelines, he plans for the future, he takes an overview, and if there are major problems, then he gets to roll up his sleeves and go hands-on into detail. I'll hit some differences. The mafia chief executive officer lives out of a hole in the ground, on the run, hasn't a thirty-storey tower for staff, hasn't a floor of IBM computer gear. Your corporation guy, take away his support and his computer, he'd fall on his face… not his mafia opposite. The mafia chief executive officer lives with a wolf-pack. To survive he has to be feared. If he is thought to show weakness, he will be torn to pieces. He stays cunning and he stays ruthless. I'm getting there, Charley, nearly there…'
'Fingers are getting a bit tired, nails are starting to crack.' She hoped to make him laugh, another bloody failure. She did not believe he had talked this through before, she did not think it was rehearsed. It was not, Charley's opinion, a familiar and patterned story. It made her warm, with the whisky, to believe she was not carried along a rutted story track.
'There's a commonplace. The mafias in Italy and the United States, Japan and Hong Kong, Colombia and Brazil, in Russia, have a sincere respect for the mafia of Sicily, La Cosa Nostra. La Cosa Nostra, out of Palermo, out of desperate little towns hanging in poverty off the sides of mountains, is the role model of international crime. It's where it started, where it's bred, where it lives well. They call it, in Italy, la piovra, that's an octopus. The tentacles spread out all over Europe, into your country, all over the world, into my country. Hack one off and another grows. You have to get to the heart of the thing, kill the heart, and the heart is in those little towns and in Palermo.'
She trembled. Her hands were splayed out on the table. She whispered, 'What do you want of me?'
'You offer the possibility of access to the chief executive officer of La Cosa Nostra.
It's why I came to find you.'
Chapter Four
She sat alone on the cliff, her place.
The headmistress had said, 'There were four hundred applicants for your job, eighty applications from inside the county. If we'd realized that there was the faintest possibility you would just walk out on us, then you wouldn't have even won an interview, let alone a short-listing. Don't you feel a responsibility to the children? Don't you feel something for your colleagues here who made you so welcome? When you return from this little episode in idiocy, don't think that this job will be waiting for you, and I doubt that any other job in teaching will be opening its arms to you after the report I intend to attach to your record. You've failed me, and your colleagues, and your children…'
In the common room, mid-morning break, she had announced her departure, and she had seen the expressions on their faces, orchestrated by the reaction of the headmistress, change from astonishment to hostility. The sneer of the divorced head-of-year teacher who always looked at her with the ambition of getting his hands into her knickers. The angered resentment of the young man who taught 3A and ran the library and took scouts on weekends and whose eyes mooned after her in the common room every day.
The rank envy of the teacher of 1A who had three children of her own and her husband had run and her life was dictated by minders and baby-sitters. Charley had shrugged, she had muttered that her mind was made up. She hadn't said, couldn't see the point in saying, that she thought them all pathetic and limited, small-minded and trapped.
From the bench above the cliff she saw the peregrine preen the pure white of its chest feathers, worrying at them.
