'Where are you, 'Arrison?'
A young voice, nervous. A young Italian. They could never get their tongues round his name, not in the office, not at business meetings, not in the shops when he was out with Violet.
The fear swelled inside him, the child that lies in the blackness and hears a stranger come. To answer or not, to identify or to remain silent. Pulsing through him, the dangers of the unknown.
'Where are you, 'Arrison? Speak, tell me where you are,
'Arrison.'
His reply was involuntary, blurted out, made not because he had worked out the answers but because there was a plea for response and he had no longer the strength to resist.
'Up here. I am up here.'
' I am coming, 'Arrison.' Heavy in the stumbled English was the tinge of pride. The door scraped across the floor, the caution of the footsteps was abandoned. 'There are more of them,
'Arrison? There were two. Are there more?'
'Just two, there were only two.'
He heard the sound of the ladder thudding into position against the hay wall, and the noise was fierce as the feet came against the rungs.
'Come down quickly, we should not stay here.'
'They have me by a chain, I cannot move.' Would the stranger understand, would his English be competent? ' I am a prisoner here.' Harrison slid into the staccato language of the foreigner, believing that was how his own tongue was best understood.
Two hands clawed at his feet and he could make out the slight silhouette of a man rising towards him. He cringed backwards.
'Don't fear me. Don't be afraid, 'Arrison.' A soft little voice, barely out of school, with the grammar fresh from the reading primers. The fingers, cruising and exploratory, reached along the length of his body. Across Harrison's thigh, scratching at his waist, onwards and upwards to the pit of his arm and then away out past his elbow to the wrist and the steel grip of the handcuff.
A cigarette lighter flicked on, wavering and scarcely effective.
But from the kernel of light Geoffrey Harrison could distinguish the face and features of the boy beneath the short-thrown shadows. Unshaven, pallid, eyes that were alive and burned bright. A shape to marry to the garlic smell of bread and salad sandwiches.
'Take it.'
An order and the lighter was directed towards Harrison's free hand.
'Turn your face away.'
Harrison saw the shadowed pistol drawn, squat and revolting, a macabre toy. He bucked his head away as the gun was raised and held steady. Squinted his eyes shut, forced them closed.
Tearing at his ears was the noise of the gun, wrenching at his wrist the drag of the chain. The pain burned in the muscle socket of his shoulder, but when his arm swung back to his side it was free.
' It is done,' the boy said, and there was the trace of a smile, sparse and cold in the flame of the lighter. He pulled at Harrison's hand, led him towards the ladder. It was a cumbersome descent because Harrison nursed his shoulder, and the boy's hands were occupied with the gun and the flick lighter. The pressed earth of the floor was under Harrison's feet and the grip on his arm constant as he was led towards the opaque moon haze of the doorway. They stopped there and the fingers slipped to his wrist and there was a sharp heave at the bullet-broken handcuff ring. A light clatter on the ground.
'The men, those who were watching me…?'
' I killed them.' The face invisible, the information inconsequential.
'Both of them?'
' I killed the two of them.'
Out in the night air, Harrison shuddered as if the damp loose on his forehead were frozen. The waft of fresh wind caught at his hair and flipped it from his eyes. He stumbled on a rock.
'Who are y o u r
' It is not of concern to you.'
The grip on his wrist was tight and decisive. Harrison remembered the fleeting sight of the pistol. He allowed himself to be dragged away across the uneven, thistled grass of the field.
The eyewitnesses to the attack melted and died from the pavement with the wailing approach of the ambulance sirens. Few would stay to offer their account and their names and addresses to the investigating police. Out in the middle of the road, slewed at right angles to the two traffic flows, was the ambushed Alfa of Francesco Vellosi. Mauro, the driver, lay, death pale across his steering-wheel, his head close to the holed and frosted windscreen.
Alone in the back, half down on the floor was Vellosi, both hands clamped on his pistol and unable to stifle the trembling that invaded his body. The door of reinforced armour plate had saved him. Above his scalp the back passenger windows, for all their strengthening, were a kaleidoscope of reflected colours amid the fractured glass splinters. So fast, so vivid, so terrifying, had been the moment of assault. After eight years in the Squadro Anti- Terrorismo, eight years of standing and looking at cars such as his, at bodies such as Mauro's, yet no real knowledge had accrued of how the moment would find him. Everything he could previously have imagined of the experience was inadequate. Not even in the war, in the sand dunes of Sidi Barrani under the artillery of the English, had there been anything as overwhelming as the trapped rat feeling in the closed car with the sprays of automatic fire beating over his head.
The escort car had locked its bonnet under the rear bumper of Vellosi's vehicle. Here they had all survived and now they were scattered with their machine-pistols. One in cover behind the opened front passenger door. One away in a shop doorway. The third man in Vellosi's guard stood erect in the middle of the street, lit by the high lights, his gun cradled and ready and pointing to the tarmac lest the prone figures should rise and defy the blood trails and the gaping intestinal wounds and offer again a challenge.
Only when the street was busy with police did Vellosi unlock his door and emerge. He seemed old, almost senile, his steps laboured and heavy.
'How many of them do we have?' he called across the street to the man who had been his shadow and guard these three years, whose wife cooked for him, to whose children he was a godfather.
'There were three, capo. All dead. They stayed beyond their time. When they should have run they stayed to make certain of you.'
He walked into the lit centre of the street and his men hurried to close around him, wanting him gone, but reading his mood and unwilling to confront it. He stared down into the faces of the boys, the ragazzi, grotesque in their angles with the killing weapons close to their fists, only the agony left in their eyes, the hate fled and gone. His eyes closed and his cheek muscles hardened as if he summoned strength from a distant force.
'The one there – ' he pointed to a shape of denim jeans and a blood-flawed shirt. 'I have met that boy. I have eaten at his father's house. The boy came in before we sat down at dinner.
His father is a banker, the Director of the Contrazzioni Finan-ziarie of one of the banks in the Via del Corso. I know that boy.'
He turned reluctantly from the scene, dawdling, and his voice was raised and carried over the street and the pavement and to the few who had gathered and watched him. 'The bitch Tantardini, spitting her poison over these children. The wicked, con-taminating bitch.'
Hemmed in on the back seat of his escort car, Francesco Vellosi left for his desk at the Viminale.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
With the headlight beams flashing back from the roadside pine trees, hurling aside the startled shadows, the little two-door Fiat ground its way into the inky night leaving behind the cluster of the Cosoleto lights. Giancarlo forced the motor hard, regardless of the howling tyres, the crack of the fast-changed gears and the drift of Harrison's shoulders against his own. His purpose now was to be rid of the vacuum of the darkened roads and
