She had been chosen, she had been challenged, she was wanted. She had lain on the made bed and the glow of excitement had coursed in her. She was needed. She was important… She had slept, as if an arrogance and an ignorance had caught her.
She had slept through the shunting of the train onto the ferry at Villa S. Giovanni on the Calabrian coast and the docking of the ferry at Messina, slept a dead and dreamless sleep.
The knocking on the door woke Charley. She had slept in her T-shirt and her knickers. She was decent, but she wrapped the blanket around her as she unlocked the door and took the tray of coffee from the attendant. She closed the door and locked it again. She set the tray down and went to the window and released the blind. Charley saw Sicily.
The journalist from Berlin was awake early. He boasted a tidy mind. He believed it important, at the first sober oppportunity, to transfer the essentials of the interview from notebook to laptop memory. He had ordered an early call, before the pace of the city moved, because he had first to dissect the notes he had taken over dinner and two bottles of Marsala wine, and the notes would be a mess and scrawled in confusion. He had dined with the mayor of a small town on the west coast down from Palermo. He had anticipated a ringing cry for action against La Cosa Nostra from a man whose father had been killed because he had denounced an evil. Sitting on his bed in his pyjamas, the ache in his head, he had read back his notes.
'Quote Pirandello (paraphrase) – draw the distinction between the seeing and the being, the fiction and the reality – the fiction is police activity, ministers and policemen and magistrates on TV, prisoners paraded in front of cameras, the cry that the mafia is crumbling, FICTION. The mafia is not weakened, stronger than ever, REALITY. No serious commitment by the state against the mafia – think what it is like to be Sicilian, abandoned by central government, not supported, to be alone. No big victory is possible – white sheets on balconies after the killing of Falcone as an expression of public disgust, but the disgust is slipping, collective anger is gone. The thread of the mafia is woven through every institution, every part of life – always the stranger must realize that he does not know who he talks to – being a mafioso can mean a man belongs to the upper strata of society, does not mean that he is a crude killer. Nobody, NOBODY, knows the depth of mafia infiltration into public life. For the stranger, NEVER BE UNGUARDED…'
The Country Chief drove Axel Moen to Fiumicino for the first flight of the day going south to Palermo, and parked, and went with his man to check-in.
They walked together towards the centre of the concourse; there were a few minutes before the flight would be called. Should have talked in the car, but they hadn't, and it had been time lost, but the traffic had been heavy and the Country Chief had reckoned he needed all of his start-of-the-day concentration to keep himself from shunting with the bastards around him who were weaving and overtaking and braking. The Country Chief shouldn't have left the loose ends to the concourse.
'You OK?'
'I feel fine.'
'The archaeology…?'
'It'll do and it'll get better.'
'You get a shooter from 'Vanni?'
'Yes, 'Vanni says he'll fix me a shooter.'
Too old and too tired, and the Country Chief thought he played the part of the fussing mother well. 'It's shared with 'Vanni, only him.'
'Maybe it has to be shared with a magistrate. That guy, Rocco Tardelli, maybe we share with him. He's a good man.'
'He's a friend, useful, but don't… You know it hurts me, but you put ten Italian law-enforcement people in a room, and you share. If you share, you should trust. Do you know everything about them? Do you know which of them's wife's uncle's cousin is going after a construction contract to build a school and needs a favour from the local boss? So you trust none of them. That bugs me, the lack of trust, it makes for corrosive suspicion, but you cannot take the chance.'
'I know that, Bill.'
'Because it's her life.'
In front of him was the face of Axel Moen, a wall of granite, shielding whatever feelings the damned man had.
'I figured that.'
'You know what I want?'
'Keep it quick, Bill.'
'I want that bastard, I want Mario Ruggerio nailed, and I want it to be by our efforts.
Not a big co-operative, but by our efforts. If it's us that nails him, then I believe, what Headquarters says, we can swing the extradition business. I want him shipped Stateside, I want him put into Supermax. I want him to breathe the sweet air of Colorado. I want him in one of those concrete tombs. I want him to know that for sending over all that filth into our country there's a downside. I want…'
'I'll stay close, Bill.'
'Look after that kid, damn you, with your life.'
Axel shrugged and walked towards Departure.
She was not trained, she was not coached. But she did not think herself stupid.
Charley was dressed. She leaned against the grimed glass of the window and the train lurched slowly along. She was gazing inland. She thought that she did not have to be trained to recognize, in that country, how a corpse could remain hidden and how a fugitive could stay free. On and on, displayed from her window, were the steep and harsh-cut rainwater gullies that were overgrown with coarse grass and scrub and that ran from the track up to the hills. She had bought from the English-language bookshop on Via Babuino, the previous day, after he had left her, a guidebook to Sicily. The book had a chapter on the island's history. In the gullies there could have been the corpse of a Moorish invader, of a Bourbon soldier, of a Fascist official, of a Roman policeman, and it would never be found, it would be food for foxes and rats. Among the scrub were dark-set, small caves, and there were the roofless ruins of peasant homes and the crumbled shelters where once a farmer had put his goats or his sheep, and the ruins and the shelters could have been hiding places for fugitives, from centuries back to the present moment. Above the gullies and the caves and the ruins, beyond the hills, were the climbing mountains that reached to the clouds. A great emptiness that was broken only rarely by the white scars of winding switchback roads. A ruthless and hard place.
A body, her body, dumped into a gully, and she would never be found. A fugitive, Mario Ruggerio, hiding in the caves and ruins, and he would never be found.
She murmured, private to herself, as she fingered the heavy watch on her wrist,
'Learning, Charley, learning bloody fast.'
She came away from the window. She brushed her teeth. She tidied her sausage-bag.
She reflected, as Axel Moen had told her to.
They had circled Catania, then come in to land through the early mist. He could see the foothills to the west, but not the summit of Etna, which the cloud held.
He had told her that going back was time wasted, was sentimental.
Palermo, yes, many times, but it was twenty-one years since Axel Moen had been at the Fontanarossa Airport of Catania. They were old now and they were living far up the Door Peninsula, up between Ephraim and Sister Bay, and eking out their last days and weeks and months. It was twenty-one years since his grandfather and his step-grandmother had brought him to the airport at Catania. Only the name to remember it by because there were new buildings and a new tower and new acreage of concrete. On Arne Moen's retirement he had brought his wife, Vincenzina, and his grandson to Catania and Sicily. Didn't matter if he cared not to think on it… Most of the emotion juices Axel was ready for, could control. Going through the airport at Catania, the juices worked on him and hurt him. Arne Moen had come to Sicily in 1943, a captain in George Patton's invasion army, and he'd been the idiot who'd drunk too much brandy for his system one night and had fallen in the gutter while swaying back to the commandeered villa at Romagnolo and broken his goddam arm. The army had leapfrogged onto the Italian mainland and left Arne Moen behind to nurse his plaster-cased arm. Taken into AMGOT, given a job with the bureaucracy of the Allied Military Government, and found himself in a minor heaven as a minor god controlling gasoline supplies and transportation between Corleone and the road junction at Piana degli Albanesi. It had provided what his grandfather
