pizzeria in Hanover was the limit of his dream, and he and his wife and his son and his daughter-in-law would take it in turn to sit behind the cash desk. In return for the money, a thousand American dollars a month, he supplied information. The money came to him each month whether the information he supplied was important or whether it was insignificant. The money was a certainty, just as it was a certainty that he could not cease to provide the information.
Trapped, corrupted, he stood one morning each month in the park in front of the Palazzo Reale and he watched the mothers with their children and their babies and waited for the contact to be made. He did not know the name of the man who came to him, nor did he know to whom the information was delivered. One morning every month he reported on what he had seen and heard, nothing written down, and then he walked from the park and along the Via Papireto and he would stop at the post office and buy the stamps for Germany. He would send the money. At the Palazzo di Giustizia he would show his identity card, walk past the soldiers, climb the wide steps, go to the rest room and open his locker and change into his uniform, and then he would go to the armoury and draw his firearm and the holster, and then he would take the elevator to the upper corridor where he saw and he heard, and he would bring the small cups of espresso coffee to the magistrates and prosecutors. One morning each month his dream of buying the pizzeria in Hanover came closer.
A man stood beside him, and asked with courtesy whether he had a match for a cigarette, and they talked, as men talked who stood in a park and watched the mothers with their children and their babies.
The policeman said, '… He spoke in Italian, but the accent was American. 'Yes, I'd like that, espresso, thanks.' He was not Italo-American because he had a fair skin and gold hair. I recognized the one who brought him, that was Giovanni Crespo, who is of the ROS in the Monreale barracks. He was not an American journalist because Tardelli never sees journalists, and when I brought the coffee I was not permitted by Tardelli's guards to take the tray inside myself. The tray was carried inside by Tardelli's man. I remember last year, in the winter, when an American came and I was not permitted to take the coffee inside, and then I heard the guards say that the American was the Country Chief of the DEA from Rome. The American was with Tardelli for fifteen or twenty minutes. What I can tell you of Giovanni Crespo, he is with the squad of the ROS that searches for the super- latitanti. The American wore casual clothes, not the clothes that are worn for a meeting with a person of the position of Tardelli, jeans and an open shirt, it surprised me, and he did not carry a briefcase but a small bag. I cannot be certain, I think there was a firearm in his waist but under his shirt. I estimate that he weighed near to 80 kilos, a height of perhaps 1.80 or 1.85 metres. He wore his hair long, like a hippy, and his hair was taken at the back with an elastic band, fair hair. I wondered how it was possible that such a man could be brought to meet Tardelli… I know also that Tardelli has met with a team from the squadra mobile, they were dressed very roughly, so it is a surveillance team. Again I was not permitted to take in the coffee. The story on the corridor, but it is only gossip, is that Tardelli had the big argument with the prosecutors and magistrates, I don't know. ..'
An envelope was passed. The policeman talked of the information scraps he had gained in a month of the work of other magistrates and other prosecutors.
He went on his way to the post, and dreamed of the pizzeria near to the railway station in Hanover, then to the Palazzo di Giustizia.
Her mother would have said that she should not have taken the money, and her father would have said that it would have seemed ungrateful to refuse the money. The purse in her handbag bulged with the roll of notes. Her mother would have said that it was simple human nature, like it or not, for people to look in the drawers of a guest, and her father would have said that she had probably forgotten where she had laid down her book and whether her pants had been on top of or below her bras.
Charley had the money, and she wore the handbag draped from her shoulder across her chest. She didn't know.
She could not know, and all through the night she tossed and twisted it in her mind, whether the movement of her book and her clothes was the mark of suspicion against her, or was in innocence, or was her bloody imagination. The taxi driver in Mondello had quoted her 20,000, sod that. She had come on the bus along the road that was shadowed by the height of Monte Pellegrino, on the road that skirted the La Favorita park where the whores were already gathered, on the road that cut through the high-rise blocks. Where the Via della Liberta merged into the Piazza Crispi, Charley had pushed her way to the bus door.
Better to think it was her bloody imagination. But, he had said, the damned faceless man creeping behind her, 'Don't ever relax. Don't go complacent.' She felt a freedom, as if the garden gate of the villa, when it had slammed shut behind her, had been a gaol's gate. She walked along the Via della Liberta. They were beautiful shops, they were better than any of the shops in Plymouth or Exeter. The temperature was near to the seventies, and the women around her had fur coats hoisted loose on their shoulders, and the men wore their best loden coats. It was so bloody hot, and she was in a blouse and jeans with a light cardigan tied to the strap of her handbag, bloody peacocks around her.
The women had their jewellery on, rings and bracelets and necklaces, as if they were out for an anniversary dinner and not merely promenading, and Charley only wore the thin little chain of poor gold that her uncle had sent down to her for her eighteenth birthday… And bugger Axel Moen, who was a cold bastard… She had bounce in her stride, she had control. There was no street like the Via della Liberta in Plymouth or Exeter. Three lanes of traffic running in each direction and a wide centre area with benches under the shade of trees. To Charley Parsons it was a little piece of joy. She heard the shouting. She looked across the traffic lanes and the centre area, and she saw a street leading away in which there were no vehicles parked, and a soldier was gesturing with his rifle, and playing dumb-innocent was a squat little man with a pick-up truck loaded with builder's gear. She watched the yelling soldier and the obstinate little man trade insults. She murmured, 'Go on, old boy, give the pompous bastard stick,' just as they had given stick to the bloody policemen in their battle gear at the harbour in Brightlingsea. She had been free then, on the picket line and trying to block the lorries carrying the animals to Europe. She could have clapped because the squat little man had won the day, and the soldier stood, threatening, over him with the rifle, had gained the right to park his pick-up and to unload his sacks of concrete mix.
She grinned, she moved on. Her mother would have said that she had insufficient respect for authority, her father would have said she was a damned little anarchist…
She held tight to her bag because Angela had told her she should.
Not the Via Siracusa, the next street off the Via della Liberta from the Via Siracusa.
She couldn't think when, if ever, she had had as much cash, as thick a roll of notes, in her purse. She saw the sign of the boutique, where Peppino had said it would be. She was flushed, a little thrilled. God, that amount of money to spend on herself. What would the cold bastard have said? She stopped outside the boutique, in front of the window of clothed model figures. She looked around her. As with a child's guilt, she looked for Axel Moen. Did not see him. Nor did Charley see the young man who sat astride a motorcycle, up the street from her.
The prices on the model figures were just incredible, out of this bloody world, but she had the money in her purse. Best foot forward, ma'am. She pushed open the door of the shop. Go hack it, Charley. She did not see the young man astride the motorcycle, the engine idling, slide down the smoked black visor of his crash helmet.
Soft music played. The lighting was clever. She was of importance. God, eat your heart out, British Home Stores in Exeter, Marks and bloody Spencer in Plymouth. She tried four blouses, her mind played the calculations of translating from lire to sterling.
Christ, Charley… Big breath, deep breath. She chose a blouse of royal-blue, and the touch of it on her fingers was so soft. She tried three skirts, short minis, and they'd be better when she'd done time on the beach and burned the whiteness off her knees and thighs. She chose a skirt in bottle-green. She paid, stripped the notes off the roll. She took the bag they gave her. Bugger where the money had come from. Bugger that Giuseppe Ruggerio washed money. She had enough in her purse to go on to find a throat scarf and maybe a good pair of dark glasses. She came out of the shop, and she did not see the haughty smiles of the sales staff, as if they thought her an ingenua. She stood on the pavement, savouring the moment. Her mother would have said that it was criminal to spend that much on clothes, her father would have said they were the clothes of a spoiled child. She did not see the young man, head hidden in the crash helmet, nudge his motorcycle forward.
It was a few yards from the open space of the pavement of the Via della Liberta…
Meandering past a shoe shop…
Heard nothing and seen nothing, and the blow belted her.
As if her chest was torn apart, as if the strap of her handbag cut into her back and her breast.
She clung to the strap. Trying to scream, and spinning, and there was the roar of the motorcycle against her,
