'What can he offer that interests me?' the investment manager asked.
'What should I pitch for?' the property developer asked.
'How long have I known you chaps? Barrie, fourteen years. Kevin, since '85. Don, we've done business for nine years. I wouldn't think any of you have had much to complain about. Am I going to see you, you know my track record, short-changed? Am I hell. Cards on the table. Meeting with Giuseppe Ruggerio was the best thing that happened to me. Believe me, I'm really happy to have made this introduction.'
In front of them, the Italian had stopped by his ball. The ball would have been at least fifty yards ahead of any of theirs. The banker was no golfer, had no clubs, had come for the walk…
Barrie, the banker, asked, 'What does he want?'
Kevin, the investment manager, asked, 'There's no dirty, nasty bit?'
Don, the property developer, asked, 'Where do we go?'
They were, all three of them, trusted and tried friends of Giles Blake. They were friends over the business desk and across the social scene. They met for the rugby at Twickenham, for the cricket at Lord's, for the opera at Glyndebourne, and they shot together. They put business each other's way, they made money. They were the new elite, tolerant of success, intolerant of obstructions.
'Barrie, what I'm saying is this – what he's looking for is an opportunity to move funds into a good UK house where his cash is going to be rather better managed than where it is now. Kevin, we're talking quite substantial funds – do you really think I'd be involved if it were 'dirty and nasty'? Not damn likely. Don, what I know, you've got a hell of a large white elephant sitting in Manchester, short of the top seven storeys, and the backers have pulled the rug on you. We're talking about him having twenty-five available for starters. I would have hoped twenty-five million sterling on a three-way split with commission… I'm sure there would be a little mark of gratitude, would go down as well as that Chardonnay at lunch… Of course I vouch for him. Look, you know what Italians are like. Italians are paranoid about the old tax man in their own backyard.
They like their money overseas and they like it held quietly. It's the 'no names, no pack-drill' bit. Can't you live with that?'
'There would be commission?'
'Kevin, certainly there would be commission – it's the way they do business. It's no skin off my nose if you're not interested, chaps.. .'
Giles Blake walked away to his own ball. He would push the matter no further. He had done what he was paid to do. He provided discreet introductions for Giuseppe Ruggerio, the overseas player, who constantly searched for new pipelines through which to feed money. He sought out and befriended contacts who would make double- damn certain, in return for commission, that the paperwork on 'due diligence' would be ignored. He assumed, and he would not have dared to press the point, that he was one of many used as fronts for the washing of money and its ultimate layering into legitimate finance.
He played his stroke. He watched Giuseppe Ruggerio club his own ball towards the distant green. He called quietly to the Italian to come to him.
They stood at the side of the fairway. The banker and the investment manager and the property developer were in deep talk.
Giles Blake said quietly, 'They're jumping because they're greedy. Three-way split.
They need it, why they're nibbling.'
'And quiet people?'
'As the grave, when they've banked their commissions.'
'Because if they are not quiet…'
The voice died. They walked on up the course towards the green, Giles Blake and Giuseppe Ruggerio ahead of their guests. It was a fine course, used on several occasions a year for championships. Until Blake met the Italian there had been no way, not till hell froze over, that he could have afforded the membership fees. Nor could he have afforded the house a dozen miles away, nor the horses, nor the children's schools.
He was owned by the Italian…
The threat had been made before the voice died. He thought that Giuseppe Ruggerio understood only too well that the threat did not have to be articulated. He knew of the banker who had unsuccessfully handled the funds of La Cosa Nostra and who had been strangled and then hanged from a rope under a London bridge. He knew of an investment broker in New York who had failed to predict the last great fall in the international markets and who had been found dead on the paving below his balcony.
He knew of the import/export man in Toronto who had been found knifed to death off Yongue Street, the hookers' area, with dollar bills stuffed in his mouth. He knew of those who had died after failing La Cosa Nostra because Giuseppe Ruggerio had told him of them.
'A very pleasant day, Giles. I am having a very pleasant day. Before we were joined by your guests we were talking of the opportunity of the antique furniture markets…'
Each day the file on Giles Blake had worked lower in the detective sergeant's pending tray. There was a method. Each day the bottom file in the pending tray was retrieved from oblivion, shown the light and placed on the top. Harry Compton, when the Giles Blake file reached the top again, should have given it attention, but the bloody solicitor's paperwork was defeating them. If the paperwork of the bloody solicitor, the bastard, did not give up its secrets, then the shit was going to be spinning across the ceiling and they'd be looking, bloody certain, at 'harassment', at 'wrongful arrest', at
'punitive compensation'. Over a quick sandwich and tea from a polystyrene cup, he leafed fast through the top file, swore because he had done nothing in the best part of a week, then scribbled a note.
TO: Alfred Rogers, Drugs Liaison Officer, British Embassy, Via XX
Settembre, Rome, Italy. FROM: S06, D/S H. Compton.
Alf, Sorry to interrupt the rest module in which you have, no doubt, settled easily, and hope this does not disturb your necessary siesta. Meanwhile, some of us are paid to work, not scratch their blackheads, you jammy bugger!! If your Italian colleagues have learned how to operate the computer (if!!), get them to check Bruno Fiori, Apartment 5, Via della Liberazione 197, Milan. Confession, don't know what I am looking for – was it ever different? He stayed last week at the Excelsior Hotel, Portman Square, London W1 See attached copy of hotel reg. form for passport details, etc. In haste. All in chains here and hacking at the coal face. I imagine it's tough, too, in Rome.
In envy, Harry.
He brushed crumbs from his shirt, wiped the tea from his chin, handed the scrawl and the photocopy to Miss Frobisher, requested transmission to Rome, then stumbled back to the rooms in which the solicitor's documents and archives were piled.
The last time they had met had been a year before, and they had argued.
There was no love between Mario Ruggerio and the man from Catania.
It had taken a week of bickering by emissaries from the two for the meeting to be arranged. It had been decided, after a week of sour discussion, that the meeting should take place in a no man's land in the Madonie mountains. Off a dry, rutted farm track between Petralia and Gangi, in a remote farm building, they met to talk of the future.
They were two scorpions, as if in a ring, watching each other.
No love, no trust existed between these two. Each had sent men the day before to sit on the high ground above the farm building, and to look down over the ripening fields and over the flocks of grazing sheep and the herds of browsing goats, to check the security arrangements. Neither Mario Ruggerio nor the man from Catania feared intervention by the carabineri or by the squadra mobile, but they feared the trap and the trick that might be sprung by the other. The man from Catania had come first, driven in a Mercedes and with a following car of minders. Mario Ruggerio had deemed it right that the other should come first and then wait… He had made his statement, he had come with two BMW cars filled with his own men but had driven himself in an old Autobianchi, a poor man's car, a peasant's wheels.
Outside the building the two groups of armed men stood apart. All would have known that if it came to war between the two families, then they must make, and fast, the decision as to whether to stand and fight in loyalty or to attempt to switch sides. If it were war, it would be to the death. It was said – and the minders who stood apart from each other would have heard it – that a thousand men in the defeated factions had died when Riina had killed his way to supreme power. There was no tolerance for a loser…
