'It won't take too many minutes,' Axel said. He was good, as well, at playing the bully. The man backed away from him and shuffled towards the opened door at the end of the hall. There was a television on and a local news bulletin dealing with the day of a small place and a small town and small people. The man had no fight to stand his ground and ask the questions and demand the answers. The man went in through the door, into the kitchen area. Axel had broken into the sanctum of a family, fractured a mealtime, and he felt no guilt. The man muttered to his wife, at the stove, moving pans, that it was an American who had come to see Charley, and the wife had boldness and challenge in her gaze. Axel ignored the man and the man's wife. He stood at the entrance to the kitchen. The young woman was sitting at the table. She had a half slice of bread, margarine smeared on it, in her hand and halfway to her mouth. She quizzed him, a strong, firm glance. She wore a full- length denim skirt and a shapeless sweater with the sleeves stretched down over her wrists and no cosmetics and her hair was held up with a band so that it came from the back of her head as a pig's tail. She neither cowered like her father nor challenged like her mother, she met Axel's eye. In front of her, beside the plate with the bread slices and the mug of tea, was a torn- open envelope and beside it were the two sheets of a handwritten letter.
'Miss Charlotte Parsons?'
'Yes.'
'I'd be grateful if I could speak to you, a private matter.'
'These are my parents.'
'It would be easier in private, if you wouldn't mind…'
'Who are you?'
'I am Axel Moen, from the American embassy.'
'I've no business with your embassy, private or not.'
'It would be better, private.'
She could have backed off then, but she did not. He pulled his shoulders back, consciously, to fill the kitchen doorway. He held her with his eyes. They talked on the courses about body language and eye-to-eye contact. The body language was domination and the eye contact was authority. She could have said that it was in front of her parents or not at all… She pushed her chair back, scraped it over the vinyl floor of mock terracotta tiles. She stood her full height, then as an afterthought she stuffed the half slice of bread and margarine into her mouth, then she swigged at her mug of tea, then she wiped the sleeve of her sweater across her lips. She was moving from the table.
Axel said, 'You received a letter, Miss Parsons, please bring it with you.'
She rocked, quick, fast. Her eyes blinked. She swayed, but she did as he asked her because he had the domination and authority. She picked up the letter and the torn-open envelope and she walked past her mother and father, her own person. She went past him as if he did not exist, and her face was set. She led into the living room and snapped on the light in the standard lamp and cleared the morning paper off the sofa, waved for him to sit. She took the chair beside the fire. She held the letter and the envelope tight in her hands. He tried to judge her, to measure whether it was bravado, whether it was an inner toughness.
'Well?'
'You are Charlotte Eunice Parsons, teacher?'
'Yes.'
'You are twenty-three years old?'
'How's that of interest to the American embassy?'
'I'm asking the questions, Miss Parsons. Please answer them.' 'I am twenty-three years old. Do you need to know that I have a mole on my backside, and an appendix scar?'
'In the summer of 1992 you worked for eleven weeks as a home help and child-minder in Rome for the family of Giuseppe Ruggerio?'
'I don't see the importance-'
'Yes or no?'
'Yes.'
'This afternoon you have received a letter from that family inviting you to return?'
'Who the hell are you?'
Out of the hip pocket of his trousers, he took the squashed wallet. He flipped it open, exposed the identification badge in gold-veneer metal of the Drug Enforcement Administration, thumb half covering the title of Special Agent, fingers masking the rampant eagle.
'My name is Axel Moen, DEA. I work out of Rome.'
'You've come from Rome?'
'Don't interrupt me, Miss Parsons. I'm sorry, where can I smoke?'
'Sort your answer out. What on earth are you doing here, prying and poking. Come on.'
But a small grin was on her face. She marched him back out into the hall, and grabbed a heavy coat off a hook, and then through a darkened dining room. She unlocked the doors, and let him into the garden. The kitchen lights washed half of the patio, but she led him beyond the light and onto the paving slabs outside a garden shed. She turned to face him, looked up at him, and the flash of the match caught her face.
'Prying and poking, so what the hell's your answer?'
'I work out of Rome – you should listen to what I say. I work in liaison with the Italian agencies. I work against the Sicilian-based organization La Cosa Nostra. You were employed by Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio to look after their son at the time their daughter was born. They have written you to say that two months ago they were
'blessed' with the birth of a second son, Mauro – just listen – and they have asked you to return to them to do the same work as four years ago. They live now in Palermo.'
He threw down the cigarette, half smoked. His foot was moving to stamp on it, but she crouched and picked it up and handed it back to him. He stubbed out the cigarette on the ribbed sole of his shoe, then placed the dead end in the matchbox.
'They live now in Palermo. How do I know? Giuseppe Ruggerio is sporadically under surveillance. There are not the resources, such is the scale of criminality in Sicily, for the surveillance to be full time. From time to time he is targeted. Tailed, wire-tapped, mail watch, electronic stuff, it's routine. It's a trawl. The letter showed up.
Angela Ruggerio posted it. The letter was intercepted, copied, resealed and went back into the postal service. In Rome I was shown the copy. The letter was tracked from Palermo to Milan, international sorting, Milan to London, London down here. We took that trouble to ensure the timing of my journey, so that I should get here after you received the letter, before you responded. This is my idea, Miss Parsons, I have initiated this. I want you to go to Palermo and take up that offer.'
She laughed in his face. He didn't think the laugh was affectation.
'Ridiculous…'
'Go back to Palermo and work for Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio.'
'I've a job, I'm in full-time work. Before, that was just a fill-in between school and college. It's just, well, it's idiotic. It's a joke.'
'1 want you to accept the invitation and travel to Palermo.'
Axel lit a second cigarette. The wind was on his face and cutting into the thin material of his windcheater. She was small now, huddled inside the shape of her coat and her arms were clamped across her chest as if to hold in the warmth.
'What do they call you, people who know you?'
' I get called Charley.'
'Don't think, Charley, that I would have bothered to haul myself over here if this were not an important investigation, don't think I take kindly to wasted time. We get opportunities, maybe they come convenient, maybe they don't. Maybe we can handle the opportunities ourselves, maybe we need to pull in help from outside. We want you in the home of Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio.'
The bitterness hissed in her voice, and the contempt. 'As a spy?'
'The opportunity we have, through you, is one of access.'
'They treated me as one of their family.'
'Giuseppe Ruggerio is a careful, clever bastard. You should take up that offer and work for Giuseppe and Angela Ruggerio/
