'With a Sicilian there is always a family, the family is everything…'
She was gone. Angela went as quietly as she had come.
Charley finished the addresses on the postcards. She had come into the villa to find Angela, to ask when the post office closed and whether she would have time to buy stamps. She moved, barefoot, across the marble of the living area and the tiles of the hallway at the back. She moved without sound. Angela lay full-length on the bed.
Charley saw her through the open door. Angela lay on her stomach on the bed and her body convulsed in weeping. She knew of the family. The family was Rosario and Agata in Prizzi, and Mario who was hunted, and Salvatore who was in prison, and Carmelo who was simple, and Cristoforo who was dead, and Maria who drank, and Giuseppe who washed the money. She knew of the family because Axel had told her.
Charley watched the woman weep and sob. She felt humbled.
She left the villa, the prison, and walked with the baby in the pram into the town to collect small Mario and Francesca.
'You'd like a coffee?'
'Yes, I'd like that, espresso, thanks.'
'Three coffees, espresso, please.'
The policeman bobbed his head in acknowledgement. He was an old tired man, in a uniform that bulged over his stomach. He looked to be the sort of fixture in the upper corridor of the Palazzo di Giustizia that they had in the same upper corridors at Headquarters. He wore a pistol in a holster that slapped his thigh, but his job was of little more importance than bringing coffee for guests.
The magistrate gestured that 'Vanni should go first through the outer door. Axel followed. There were minders on the outer door and minders on the inner door. Both the doors were steel-plated. There had been razor-wire coils on the walls around the compound in La Paz. They had lived in Bolivia, and worked, with a pistol at the waist, with constant apprehension. They had been careful in their movements, avoided nighttime car journeys. The screen around the magistrate, Dr Rocco Tardelli, even on the top floor of the Palazzo di Giustizia, jolted Axel and he tried to imagine how it would be to live a half-life under guard. It was over the top, above anything he had seen on the previous trips down to Palermo. The inner door, steel plated, was closed behind them, his view of the harsh and suspicious-faced guards was lost. He blinked in the low light of the room. Behind the drawn blinds there would have been shatterproof and bulletproof glass
… A shit of a way to live.
The man was small and bowed and while he tried to play at the necessary courtesies his eyes flickered in a constant and moving wariness. Axel knew the phrase the
'walking dead'. He could laugh about the 'walking dead' in Rome, make gas-chamber humour of it, but not here, not where the reality confronted him. His Country Chief rated Dr Rocco Tardelli, took him to lunch when he was in Rome. Headquarters rated Dr Rocco Tardelli, flew him to the
Andrews USAF Base once a year on a military transport and had him talk to the Strategy teams, poor bastard. The Country Chief said, and Headquarters said, that Dr Rocco Tardelli was a jewel – but not precious enough to share with… The poor bastard seemed, to Axel, a caged creature.
A knock at the door. The coffee tray was set down on the desk, and the machine-pistol of the young guard swung on its strap and clattered against the desk top.
Shit, the goddam thing was armed, and the magistrate seemed to wince.
'Careful, Pasquale, please.'
They were alone.
The soft voice. 'So the DEA has come to Palermo. May I be so impertinent as to ask what mission brings you here?'
Axel said, 'We have an operation going, the target is Ruggerio.'
'Then you are one of so many. What is the scope of the operation?'
Axel said, 'We hope to mark him. If we mark him, then we send for the cavalry.'
Said dry, with a gentle smile, 'Of course you would expect that we have plans for the arrest of Ruggerio. What is the range of the operation from which the DEA believes it will taste success when we eat failure?'
'This is what you'd call a courtesy call. We have a small range of facilities organized by our friend. 'Vanni is looking after our interest.' Axel shifted awkwardly in his chair.
'I'd rather not be specific.'
The smile widened, warmth flowed and there was a brightness in the magistrate's eyes. 'Do not be embarrassed – I am the same as you. I trust very few people. You would not expect me to tell you of the locations of the physical surveillance and the bugs and the cameras, where we watch for Ruggerio. You would not expect me to tell you what information I have from the pentiti. But it is a sad game to play when there is no trust.'
'It's not personal.'
'Why should it be? So, we are engaged in competition. You wish to achieve what we cannot. You wish to show the Italian people that the power of the United States of America is so great that they can succeed where we fail.' The smile was long gone, his eyes fixed on Axel. 'If you succeed where we fail, then I assume you would seek the extradition of Ruggerio, and fly him back in chains to your courts as you did with Badalamenti.'
'We have charges to lay against Ruggerio. It would be a message because we'd lock him up till he was dead.'
'There are many here who would appreciate such a situation, and the poison whispers would pass in these corridors that Tardelli, the seeker after glory, was humiliated. You have put an agent into Palermo?'
What he'd heard, more prosecutions were blocked by the jealousies, the ambitions, the envy, of colleagues than by the efforts of La Cosa Nostra. The man yearned for a rope to be thrown him. Axel looked away. 'I'd rather not.'
'My assumption, Signor Moen, you have put an agent of small importance into Palermo. I do not wish to insult you, but if it were an agent of big importance, then Bill himself would have come, but only you have travelled… Do you know of Tom Tripodi?'
Axel scratched in his memory. 'Yes, didn't meet him, gone before I joined, I heard of him. Why?'
'He was here in the summer of 1979, not too long ago for lessons to be remembered.
He was the star agent from Washington, and he worked with Vice-Questore Boris Giuliano. He posed as a buyer of narcotics, he found himself an introduction to Badalamenti, who was then capo di tutti capi. For those who made the plans in Washington it would have seemed so simple. An agent in place to achieve what the Italians could not. So sad that there was disappointment, that Badalamenti did not bite.
It ended with Tripodi running for his life, taken to the docks by Boris Giuliano, with escort cars, with a helicopter overhead. We paid a heavy price, maybe because of Tripodi and maybe not, on the twenty-first of July of that year. Some days, a few days, after Tripodi ran from Palermo, Vice-Questore Giuliano went to his usual bar for his usual coffee early in the morning, and he did not have the chance to reach for his gun.
But, of course, Signor Moen, the danger to your agent, and to those who work with you, and to yourself, will have been carefully evaluated in Washington…'
There was steel in the magistrate's eyes, there had been the rasp of sarcasm in his voice.
Axel said brusquely, 'We have made an evaluation.'
'I am very frank with you, Signor Moen, I do not have an agent in place. I do not have an agent close to Mario Ruggerio, nor do I try to put an agent in proximity to that man.
I would not wish it to lie on my conscience, the danger to an agent. Unless your agent is scum, a creature of the gutter, whose life is held to be of small importance…'
Axel stood. 'Thank you for your time. Bill wanted to be remembered to you. It was only a courtesy.'
The magistrate was already at the papers on his desk as they closed the door on the inner office. God, and he wanted to be out of the goddam place, like it was a place where he could suffocate on foul air.
The guards watched them go, and drew casually on their cigarettes and stopped the card game. Axel led, pounding down the corridor, past the policeman who had been instructed to bring them coffee. Didn't wait for the elevator, but skipped down the wide stairs.
Out into the fresh air, the goddam building behind him. He turned his back on the great grey-white building, Fascist architecture and a crap symbol of the state's power.
He strode between the high pillars that were built to impress, through the parked and armour-reinforced cars
