the road and at the pavement and up into the town and out across the sea. It was good that she should be alone and good that she should know she was alone. He pushed down the aerial, lost it under the cover of his windcheater.
Axel stood. When he was standing he could see her better. She was going away, alone, with the children and with the pram. She stopped to cross the road, and when there was a gap in the traffic she hurried. He did not see her on the far side of the road because a lorry blocked his view of her.
He walked away.
'Vanni handed the second headset back to the technician. He leaned against the technician's chair as if a weakness sagged through his body. The grit and dust of the scree slope on Monte Cuccio was on his hands and on his face, and on the knees and seat of his jeans and on the chest and back of his shirt. He breathed deeply…
The signal had come so clearly, and he had said that it would be for her like a bell ringing from the darkness, like the light of a candle in the black of night. It might, just, offer success… He wondered where she was, their Codename Helen, whether she shivered in fear, whether she felt the chill of isolation… He wrote on a piece of paper the number of his mobile telephone and he told the technician, smacking his fist into the palm of his hand for emphasis, that he must be called every time that the frequency was used, night or day. The number was clipped to the banked equipment in front of the technician.
'You have that? Any hour – whether it is the triple pulse, short and repeated three times, whether it is the long pulse, repeated four times – at any hour, if that signal comes
…'
The technician, laconic, shrugged. 'Why not?'
His fists gripped the technician's shoulders, his fingers gouged at the technician's flesh. 'Don't piss on me. The early duty and the late duty and the night duty, whatever cornuto sits here, he calls me. If I am not obeyed, I will crack the bones in your spine.'
'You will be called.'
He loosed his hands. He shook. He had heard a bell ringing in the darkness. He felt the weakness because he believed, for the first time, that the plan might work. Not since they had turned
Baldassare di Maggio, not since di Maggio had told them where to look for Salvatore Riina, not for three years had a source been in place so close to the heart of the organization. They would kill her. If they found her, they would kill her.
One piece of paper… One telephone number scribbled on one piece of paper… The party spilled noisily through the offices. Of all the boxes taken out of the solicitor's premises, and all the plastic bags, one piece of paper had done the business, one telephone number on the back of a commercial property conveyancing draft had launched the party. The solicitor would have been checking a subordinate's work on the draft, and a telephone call would have come through, and he would have been given a number, and he would have jotted it on the back of the nearest sheet of paper. Trouble was, for the solicitor, the number was that of a small and discreet Zurich bank. Further trouble was, for the solicitor, that Swiss banks weren't what they had been. Cold feet in Cuckoo- clock-land, and the small and discreet Zurich bank had not been prepared to fight the recent Swiss legislation contained in Article 305 11 of the penal code which made its directors liable to prosecution if they shielded illegal funds. With the solicitor's name and account number on the top page of the evidence file, and the reckoning of what was stashed there of his clients' cash, the party had started.
Six packs of beer from the off-licence, and three bottles of wine, and a bottle of Scotch which was the detective superintendent's fast track to getting pissed up, and music from a transistor. They didn't come often, the good ones.
Harry was called.
Harry Compton was called out of the party area and into the administration office.
Miss Frobisher, and the place fell apart when she took her five weeks of leave, didn't drink and didn't approve, but she'd stayed put to answer the telephones. She would have read the secure transmission, and she scowled as she handed it to Harry.
TO: Det. Sgt. H. Compton, S06, London.
FROM: Alf Rogers, DLO, Rome.
Harry, Regards. Assuming they could find it, some nasty soul has been pulling your insignificant pecker. No trace in Milan on available records of BRUNO FIORI. The address provided in Via della Liberazione does not exist. That section of the street was pulled down six years ago for the construction of a municipal swimming pool. Details on hotel reg. were totally fictitious. Back to your gin/tonics. We, here, are involved in important work and don't need to be diverted from the necessary with duff info.
Luv, Alf.
Harry took the single sheet of paper to his desk, locked it away, went back to the party. The detective superintendent was into his joke repertoire and had an audience, and Harry didn't think he'd take it kindly if his punchline was interrupted. It would wait till the morning, till they crawled in with their headaches. He had a nose, that was his bloody trouble, and the nose was smelling something rotten, but it would be better talked about in the morning.
Chapter Seven
'How long?'
'II don't know.'
'If you don't know how long it would take, then, Harry, leave it to the locals.'
Maybe it would have been better the night before, perhaps it would have been better to have crashed the boss when he was in his joke session. Water under the bridge, because Harry Compton had let that moment go.
'I don't want to do that.'
'Did I hear right? 'Want'? Don't 'want' me, young man.'
The morning after, and the S06 office was a dead ground. Miss Frobisher, of course, had been in early, before seven, and she'd removed all the plastic cups and emptied the ashtrays and wiped the bottle stains off the desks, but the place still stank, and their heads ached. He thought the detective superintendent's head hurt worse than most because the boss-man's mood was foul.
'What I'm trying to say-'
'Rein in, young man. What you are 'trying to say' is that you want two days down in the country. Well, we'd all like that, wouldn't we?'
'It should be followed up.'
'The locals can follow it up.'
Harry stood in the detective superintendent's office. The boss was hunched over his desk and he had a second coffee mug in front of him and the heartburn pills that squeezed off a little tinfoil platter. He held in his hand the message received the last evening from Alf Rogers, and the hotel registration sheet, and the printout from the night manager of telephone calls made from the room occupied by Bruno Fiorii, alias for Christ only knew. He was on a short fuse that was getting shorter. His wife, Fliss, had bitched at the time he'd come in. Hadn't he remembered that they were supposed to be going out shopping for the new settee set? Wasn't there a telephone he could have used? He'd an accountancy exam, first part, coming up, and wouldn't he have been better at his books, after late-night shopping, than lurching in smelling foul from drink? Why'd he forgotten to put the cat out? The cat had been shut in the kitchen and crapped on the floor. God.
'The locals down there are useless, they're parking-ticket merchants.'
'You've got nothing, nothing, that warrants me kissing you goodbye for two days.'
'It's worth doing.'
'How many files on your desk?'
'That's the bloody point, isn't it?'
'What's tickling up your arse, Harry?'
'It's trivia, that's what's on my desk. It's nothing stuff. It's corrupt little men, high-street dwarfs, fiddling
