'Go to hell. Bugger off and bloody get out of here.'
He flicked the cigarette into the middle of the dark grass. He started to turn away.
'Please yourself, I don't beg. You care to live here, you care to spend the rest of your life living here, you care to cross over to the other side of the street when there's something you could do, please yourself. I thought that maybe you had some balls. Pity is that I was wrong.'
'You are, Mr Axel bloody Moen, a total shit.'
'Big words, but you're short of big action. You want to rot here, then that's your problem. Don't talk about this conversation. If you talk about it, you might be responsible for hurting people.'
A small voice. She wouldn't be able to see his face, see the flicker of satisfaction.
She asked, 'Why do you need access to Giuseppe's and Angela's home?'
No sarcasm, and no laugh, and no bullshit, Axel said, 'You get on board and you get told, so think on it. And think also on whether, for the rest of your life, you want to remember crossing over the road to avoid responsibility. Good night, Miss Parsons.
When you've had a chance to think on it, I'll make the contact again. Don't worry, I can see myself out.'
He walked away, back through the darkened dining room, and past the open door to the kitchen, and through the hall. He looked a last time at the photograph of Charley Parsons on the wall above the table with the telephone. He liked the cockiness and cheekiness in her graduation photograph. He let himself out through the front door.
Sometimes he used a driver, most times Mario Ruggerio drove himself. Whether he drove himself, or whether he rode with the driver, he used a mass-produced, factory-production-line saloon car. There was nothing flamboyant, nothing ostentatious, in the life of Mario Ruggerio, nothing to draw attention to him. That evening, if a car of the carabineri or the squadra mobile or the polizia stradale or the polizia municipale or the Guardia di Finanze or the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia had passed the Citroen BX that carried him as passenger, nothing would have seemed remarkable to the police officers of those agencies. He had been released from Ucciardione Prison, down by the city's docks, on 15 June 1960, and he had not been arrested since. He was now aged sixty-two. He was governed by twin obsessions and they were the seeking of power and the avoidance of capture. Without freedom there was no power. To maintain that precious freedom he travelled the city in a series of commonplace vehicles. To any of the police officers of those agencies, the sight of him at the traffic lights or at a pedestrian crossing would have been of an old man, tired by long life, being driven by a son or a nephew… but he was, and he knew it so well, to all of the police officers of all of those agencies, the most wanted man in the city, the most hunted man on the island, I he most tracked man in the country, the most sought-after man on the continent of Europe. He believed himself to have achieved the primary position on what the Ministry of the Interior called the Special Programme of the Thirty Most Dangerous Criminals at l arge. The police officers of those agencies would have seen, at I he traffic lights or a pedestrian crossing, an old man who sat low In the passenger seat, a height of 5 feet 3 inches and a weight ol a couple of pounds less than 13 stones, unstyled and shorti-ropped and grey-flecked hair, a low peasant's forehead, roving and cautious eyes, jowls at his throat and nicotine-stained teeth, broad but bowed shoulders. They would not have known… Nor would they have seen the powerful, thickset fingers, with the nails cut back to the quick, because the hands were held down between his knees. They might have seen his eyes, and if the police officers of the agencies had met those eyes, then Mario Ruggerio's head would have ducked in respect to their uniforms and their position, but they would not have seen his hands, clasping and unclasping, stretching and clenching. He moved his fingers and thumbs, worked the joints, because his hands were still bruised and aching from the effort of strangulation, and the rheu- matism in his hands was always worse at the end of the wet months iof the Sicilian winter.
There was a calmness in his expression as the driver brought him from their rendezvous point on the south side of Via Generale di Maria, along the Via Malaspina and across the Piazza Virgilio, but the expression of calmness was false. With the obsessions for power and freedom came neurosis. The neurosis was based on the fear of loss of power and loss of freedom, and the fear that was always with him was of betrayal. It was hard for Mario Ruggerio to trust any man, even the driver who had been with him seven years. The fear of loss of power and freedom governed the precautions that he took every day and every night of his life. He had the keys to sixteen apartments in the city, loaned to him indefinitely by 'affiliates' who owed loyalty to him and him alone. The driver who had been with him for seven years was never given the address of an apartment block from which to pick him up, merely a street junction, and never given an address at which to drop him. When they came, that evening, past the decayed facade of the Villa Filippina and onto Via Balsamo, he coughed hard as if to signal for his driver to pull in to the kerb.
He climbed awkwardly, heavily, out of the Citroen, and the driver passed him a small bag in which a kid might have kept sports clothes or stored school books, and then his cap of grey-check pattern. He stood among the debris on the pavement, among the filth and the paper wrappings, put on his cap, and he watched the car drive away.
Always he satisfied himself that the car was gone before he moved from the drop point.
The old eyes, bright and alert and clear blue, raked the road and searched the faces of drivers and checked the pedestrians. He knew the signs of surveillance… When he was satisfied, only when he was sure, he walked off down the Via Balsamo and across the wide Via Volturno, where the street market was packing up for the evening, and he disappeared into the labyrinthine alleys of the Capo district of Palermo.
The most wanted man on the continent, in the country, on the island, in the city, walked alone and carried his own bag in the near darkness, and around him radios played and women screamed and men shouted and children cried. He was worth – his own estimate and tapped out each week on his Casio calculator – something in excess of $245,000,000, and his calculator could tell him in the time that it took tired eyes to blink that the value of his worth was in excess of 637,000,000,000 Italian lire. The wealth of Mario Ruggerio, walking in the slum district of Capo, was held in government bonds, foreign currencies, blue-chip gilts on the European and New York stock markets, investment in multinational companies and in real estate.
He pushed open a battered door.
He climbed an ill-lit stairway. He found the key. He let himself into the room.
Only when he had drawn the thick curtains of the room did he switch on the light.
The pain in his hands, bruised from strangulation, pitched at his mouth and he winced.
He unpacked t he small bag, his nightclothes, his shaving bag, his clean shirt and underwear and socks, and the framed photograph of the two children that he loved and the baby.
Carrying the suitcase, Giuseppe Ruggerio, known always to his family as Peppino, was first through the outer door and behind him was piccolo Mario, heaving the children's bag, and then Francesca with her soft toys, and further behind him was Angela, who tried to soothe baby Mauro's crying… the end of a four-day break in the San Domenico Palace hotel of Taormina, five-star. Back home in Palermo, and the baby was hungry.
But the hunger of the baby was not high in the thoughts of Giuseppe Ruggerio. He had almost run, in spite of the weight of the suitcase, the last few steps from the elevator to the outer door of the apartment, and he had pulled hard on piccolo Mario's collar to propel the child backwards as he had opened the door.
Inside, snapping on the lights, dumping the suitcase, his eyes roved over floors and walls – he saw the faint smear where the marble in the hallway had been wiped. On into the living area, more lights crashing on, checking the sofa and chairs where they would have sat, and on into the dining area and over the polished block floor and gazing at the smooth sheen of the mahogany table where they would have eaten. Pictures where they should have been, the statue where it should have been. Turning fast, into the kitchen, the fluorescent ceiling light hesitating and then shining, and the kitchen was as it had been left. Everything was as it should have been. A fast gasp of relief. He refused nothing that his brother asked of him, nothing… It had said on the radio that morning, on Radio Uno, in the hotel in Taormina, that the wife of a man from Agrigento had reported to the carabineri that her husband was missing from home and her grandson and her husband's driver. The man from Agrigento, with his grandson and his driver, would have come to a meeting point in Palermo, and a picciotto of his brother would have met them there, then travelled in their car to the apartment in the complex of the Giardino Inglese, they would not have been able by cellular phone or digital phone or personal radio to communicate the ultimate destination. His brother was always careful.
'Peppino.'
There was the shrill whine of her voice behind him. He turned. Angela stood in the living room. Angela held the baby, Mauro, and the face of the baby was red from crying. Angela, his wife of nine years, pointed down at the thick woven carpet from Iran.
