wife, at the shock on her face. The lights changed. The bus pulled forward. Giancarlo ran behind the bus. The horns of the following cars blasted anger at him, brakes squealed. The man was walking away on the far pavement.
Giancarlo had no telephone. The leader of the squadra mobile surveillance team carried a mobile telephone at all times, but mobile telephones were expensive, a rationed item.
His personal radio was on the charger at the Questura, he was off duty, and his pistol was locked behind the armoury door in the Questura. There was a telephone pager on his belt, which only carried incoming messages. He ran forward, reached the far pavement. Because of the anger of the horns, and the brakes' screams, because of the abuse shouted at him through open windows, Giancarlo was for a critical moment of time a centre of attention.
In that moment of time, the man stood and faced a shop window.
Giancarlo, among his own, was venerated for experience and professionalism. For the teaching of surveillance tactics to new recruits to the teams he was often used. If a young recruit had run across a street, through traffic, become the target of horns and insults, become a centre of attention, then Giancarlo would patiently have explained the error of the young recruit. He would have talked to the young recruit about the requirement to merge and blend. He did not know whether he had shown out, whether he was busted, and he did not see the picciotto, a swarthy and heavy-set youth, who protected the back of Mario Ruggerio. In the flush of excitement, experience and professionalism gone, he had displayed the rashness of a young recruit. He stood stock-still. He watched the back of the old man move on, a slow walk, up the Via Sammartino and then turn into the Via Turrisi Colonna. He did not know whether he had shown out.
There was a bar.
Giancarlo ran into the bar. There was a payphone on the counter. A woman talked on the payphone.
Maybe she talked with her sister in Agrigento, maybe with her mother in Misilmeri, maybe with her daughter in Partinico… Giancarlo snatched the telephone. He terminated her call. She howled her protest at him and he flapped his I/D in her face. He was scrabbling in his pocket for a token for the telephone. He was bawling at her for silence, and he fed the gettone and dialled his control. He did not see the swarthy and heavy-set youth sidle across the bar towards him. Again, for a critical moment of time, Giancarlo made himself the centre of attention. The bar's customers, the men, the women, the staff, the matriarch at the cash till, sided with the wronged woman. The screaming was in his ears. With his body he tried to block their hands from reaching the telephone.
His control answered.
His name, his location, the name of his target.
The pain caught him. The pain was in Giancarlo's back and then seeping to his stomach. He said again his name and his location and the name of his target. The questions from his control beat at him, but his concentration and ability to respond to the questions were destroyed by the pain. Which way was the target going? What was the target wearing? Was the target alone? Was the target in a vehicle or on foot? He said again his name and his location and the name of his target, and his voice was weaker and the pain was more acute. He dropped the phone, and the phone swung loose on its reinforced cable. He turned. He looked into the eyes of a swarthy and heavy-set youth.
Giancarlo swayed. The pain forced his eyes shut. He reached for the source of the pain in his back. He found the hardness of the knife's handle, and the wetness. When his knees gave, when he could no longer see the swarthy and heavy-set youth, when the telephone swung beyond his reach, when the screaming burst from grotesquely blurred mouths around him, Giancarlo realized, puzzled, that he could no longer remember the questions that control had asked of him.
The pain was a spasm through his body.
A square had been made.
The bar was at the centre of the square. The north of the square was the Via Giacomo Cusmano, the south was the Via Principe di Villafranca, the west was the Via Dante, and the east was the gardens of the Villa Trabia.
A hundred men with guns, with flak vests, quartered the square. They were from the DIA, and there were two sections of the ROS, and there was the stand-by team of the Guardia di Finanze, and there were men from the squadra mobile. The cordon around the square was given to the military, Jeeps at street corners, soldiers with NATO rifles.
They did not know what the man, Giancarlo's target, looked like, they did not know how he was dressed, they did not know in which direction he had gone, they did not know whether he walked or whether he went by car.
The bar was emptied but for the owner and the matriarch who guarded her cash till.
The body was on the floor. In the back of the body was a short-bladed, double-edged knife. The owner of the bar, facing a wall, his wrists handcuffed in the small of his back, had seen nothing. Perhaps the customers had seen something? The matriarch had seen nothing. The customers were all strangers to her and she knew none of them.
A car brought the wife of Giancarlo to the bar, and a young priest had run from the church on Via Terrasanta. The photographers from the newspapers and the cameramen from the RAI crowded the pavement.
The maresciallo elbowed a way through for the magistrate and Pasquale bullocked him into the bar, into the crush that circled the body. There were some who had come from family gatherings and wore their suits, some had come from the tennis courts, some from their seats in the football stadium, some from their sleep. Beside their shoes and sneakers and sandals was the body and the blood. The magistrate saw the face, bleak, of 'Vanni Crespo, and pushed towards him.
'It was shit luck,' 'Vanni Crespo said. 'We were so close…'
The tail had watched the car of 'Vanni Crespo, the carabiniere Alfetta, from the barracks at Monreale to the bar on Via Sam- martino. The tail was locked on 'Vanni Crespo.
' He brought me lemons, 'Vanni. I had fish for my meal on Friday. They are not supposed to do my shopping, my boys, but they prefer to do it than to take me to the market, so they break the rule, they bought fresh mullet for me. He had brought me lemons and made. 1 joke of it. I had one of his lemons with my mullet. He was the I 'est of men.'
'It was shit luck,' 'Vanni growled. 'He was on the bus with his wife. He saw Ruggerio.
He got off the bus. He ran through the traffic. That's the decision. You wait and you lose the target. You run and you alert the target. You've ten seconds, five seconds, to make the decision and you live by it and you die by it.'
The lemon was most sharp in the taste.'
'He would have shown out when he ran. Ruggerio would have had a back marker. He had to go to the bar for communication. The back marker would have followed him.
You need the luck and all you get is the shit.'
'There are six more of his lemons in my kitchen… Do you believe in luck, 'Vanni?'
He saw the tears well at the eyes of the magistrate. He took out his handkerchief. He did not care who saw him. In the crowd in the bar, he wiped the running tears from the magistrate's face. 'I believe in nothing.'
'Do you believe your agent of small importance will be lucky?'
He remembered her, as he had seen her, the last look back from the side of the road before he had dropped down into the car. The last look, across the pavement, and between the trees, and across the sand, and she had stood against the brightness of the sea, and the sun had caught the white of her body skin as her towel had slipped. In the bar, with the corpse, with the soft whimpering of the widow, with the crowd, with the smell of cigarettes and cold coffee, he remembered her.
'I am sorry, dottore, I cannot share with you because it is not in my gift.'
He drove a way through the crowd in the bar, pushed through the crowd on the pavement and the street. A good man had had ten seconds, five seconds, to make a decision and the result of the decision was a mistake, and the result of a mistake was to lie dead on the dirty floor of a bar that was lit by flashlights. He went to his car, walked leaden in the dusk light.
The tail followed the Alfetta driven by 'Vanni Crespo. The tail was delayed by the military cordon around the square of streets after the Alfetta had been waved through, but it was of no consequence. The tail was linked by radio to a second car and to motorcyclists who waited outside the cordon. As if a chain held the tail to the Alfetta .. .
When he had heard the explosion of the car horns, and then heard the insults shouted, Mario Ruggerio had
