'On the Piazza Ucciardione, dottore? When would you like to go?'
'Please, I would like to go now.'
'Then we go, now – no problem.'
'He took his life. The man I played a game with, made fear for, to help his memory, he hanged himself in his cell.'
He was gone, shuffling through the hallway for his coat. The maresciallo mapped out a route to the Piazza Ucciardione, a route past the close-packed parked cars and vans and motorcycles with panniers. They lifted their vests off the floor, they took the machine-guns from the table and the draining board beside the sink and the work surface beside the cooker. The radio carried the message, staccato, to the troops in the street below the apartment. They took him out. They hurried him down the staircase, with the two drivers stampeding ahead so that the engines of the cars would have been started before he hit the pavement. They ran across the pavement, into the last light of the afternoon, and the gale scorched grit into their faces. Pasquale was front passenger in the chase car, and the maresciallo was behind him. Sirens on. Lights on. At the end of the street, as the soldier held up the traffic, they swerved onto the main road and past the lines of parked cars and vans and motorcycles. They went faster than usual, as if it were necessary now always for them to go faster than the time taken by a man to react and press the last digit on a mobile telephone linked to a pager.
'Pasquale. What are you, Pasquale?'
The voice of the maresciallo whispered in his ear. His eyes were on the traffic ahead, and on the line of parked cars, vans, motorcycles they hurtled past. He held the machine-gun hard against his chest.
'What are you, Pasquale?'
'I don't understand.'
'You want me to tell you what you are, Pasquale? You are. 1 stupid and pathetic cretin. You do not have a magazine loaded.'
His hands were rigid on the stock and trigger guard of the machine-gun. He looked down. He had not loaded a magazine, thirty-two rounds, into it. He bent and laid the machine-gun on the floor between his feet. He took his pistol from the shoulder harness.
The cars swerved, screamed, cornered.
The journalist from Berlin was settled comfortably in his chair. The embassy was a little piece of home for him. There was a strong beer from the Rhineland on the table beside him. To be back in Rome again was to have returned to Europe, to have left that Arab world of half-truths, coded statements and conceit. He had telephoned his editor for more cheques to be sent him and they would arrive in the morning at the American Express. He had won a few more days… As a veteran of so many wars, he was reluctant to make the last leg home and have it said in the office, by younger, ankle-snapping colleagues, that he had failed. In truth, so far his journey in search of the mafia was a failure, but he believed that a few more days in Rome, distanced from this war that he could not sense or smell, would supply him with the copy for his article.
There was a counsellor at the embassy who liaised for the Bundeskriminalamt with the Italian agencies. He wrote a sharp shorthand note of what he was told. .. We had the opinion, five, six years ago that the collapse of the Christian Democrat machine, and those of the communists and socialists, would remove from the mafia the protection they had enjoyed for forty years. We thought then that for Italy a new era of clean politics was coming. We were wrong. There was the businessman's Government that followed. Far from attacking the mafia this Government took a most dangerous line. Anti-mafia magistrates in Palermo were denounced as self-seekers and opportunists, the pentiti programme was condemned for making bad law. There was a small window of opportunity to strike against the mafia after the killing of Falcone and Borsellino, when the public, in outrage, demonstrated against criminality, but the opportunity was not grasped. I believe it now lost. What I hear, it is increasingly difficult to persuade prosecutors and magistrates to travel to Sicily, there is on-going and debilitating rivalry between the many agencies, there is incompetence and inefficiency. The Italians forever plead with us to make greater efforts against a common enemy, but – hear me – look at the construction of the businessman's Government. There was a neo-Fascist appointed to the Interior Ministry, there are men with proven criminal associations introduced to the peripheries of power. Would we wish for such people to have co-operation given them? Should they be granted access to BKA files? Only because the Sicilian mafia pushes drugs and dirty money into Germany do we have an interest in the matter of organized crime in Italy. The British, the Americans, the French, we are all the same. We are obliged to be interested as long as the Italians demonstrate their unwillingness to tackle their own problem. But Sicily is a sewer of morality, and our interest achieves nothing. Do I disappoint you?'
There were two women in the church, in black, kneeling, several rows of seats ahead of him.
He had taken a place near the back of the church on Piazza Ucciardione, and at the far end of the seats from the aisle.
He knelt. He could hear the traffic outside and he could hear the beat of the wind against the upper windows of the church. In his mind, in silence, his knees cold on the floor tiles, he prayed for the soul of the man who had hanged himself…
It was what he had chosen. It was the fifteenth year since he had chosen to come with his wife and children to Palermo, brought by ambition and the belief of career advancement. It was the fourth year since he had chosen to stay in Palermo, in the comfort of his obsession, after his wife had left with the children. Huddled on his knees, he prayed for the spirit of a wretch. To come to church, to pray, he must have an armed guard at the door to the priest's room, he must have a maresciallo sitting with a machine-gun three rows behind him, he must have a young guard with a sullen and chastised face standing at the door of the church with a pistol in his hand, he must have two armed guards on the outer steps of the church. There was no more ambition. The ambition was dried out, a cloth left on the line in the sun. The ambition had been overwhelmed by the assassination of his character, by the drip of the poison, by the scheming stabs at his back in the Palazzo di Giustizia. He was left only with the obsession of duty… for what? The obsession hanged a man by the throat until his windpipe was crushed… for what? The obsession brought the risk of death, high probability, to five wonderful men who were his ragazzi
… for what? The obsession brought him closer, each day, to the flower- covered coffin that would be filled with what they could find of his body… for what?
The priest watched him. The priest was often in the prison across the piazza. The priest knew him. The priest did not come to him and offer comfort.
If he sent the message, if he cut the obsession from his mind, then on offer would be a bank account abroad and a position of respect in Udine and the return to his family and the last years of his life lived in safety. To send the message would be so easy.
Within a few hours a message would reach the small man, the elderly man, whose photograph had been aged twenty years by a computer
…
He pushed himself up from his knees. He faced the altar and he made the sign of the cross. He turned. The magistrate, Rocco Tardelli, saw the face of the youngest of the ragazzi. To reject the obsession would be to betray Pasquale, who had come with his wife's flowers and who had crashed the chase car and who had forgotten a magazine for his machine-gun, to betray all of them who rode with him, gave their lives to him. Each day the weight, the burden, he thought, was heavier. Back to his office where the obsession ruled him, back to the files and the computer screen, back to the aged photograph.
He laughed out loud.
His laughter cracked the quiet of the church, and the women who prayed turned and glowered at the source of the noise, and the priest by the altar scowled hostility at him.
He laughed because he remembered the long-haired American who had introduced into Palermo 'an agent of small importance'. There was a manic peal to his laughter. If 'an agent of small importance' should lead to Ruggerio, succeed where his obsession failed
… He bowed his head.
'It is a difficult life, maresciallo, for us all. I apologize for my unseemly behaviour.'
They closed around him as he walked out of the church and hurried him the few paces to his armour-plated car.
'… It's Bill Hammond… Yes, Rome… Not too bad. Hey, Lou, when did you get to Personnel? That's a good number, yes?…
Lou, this is not official, I'm looking for guidance. No names, OK?
