seems Battestini was full of his threats. There's a fair depression about the way it's going,' Charlesworth had said.
Holding himself, the diver conserving his oxygen, Carpenter had heard him out. Then the explosion.
'So what are you all doing about it?'
'What we were doing about it earlier, Archie. It has not changed.'
'Sweet damn-all.'
'You can put it that way,* Charlesworth placated. T h a t way if you want to.'
'What other bloody way is there?'
'Abuse doesn't help, Archie. You've spoken to the Ambassador yourself, he's explained our situation. I've heard since that London have called him. They back him.'
'He's written off my man.'
'Histrionics don't help either. I'm sorry, you're sorry, we're all s o r r y… But you'll come and have that meal tonight.'
'If you want me to.'
'Come on up and help us through a bottle. Did you get in touch with the wife?'
' I rang again, took a bloody effort to, but I tried. There's no answer.'
' It's a filthy business, Archie, but don't think you're alone with the hair shirt. It's shared about a bit, you know.'
Charlesworth rang off.
Archie Carpenter straightened his bed, brushed his hair, raised his tie knot and drew on his jacket. He took the lift downstairs and walked out through the front foyer of the hotel, stepping irritably over the piled suitcases of an arriving tour. He summoned a taxi and asked for the Questura. Early summer evening, the traffic rushing for home and guaranteeing him an exciting and lively journey among the pedestrians and across the traffic lanes. Carpenter barely noticed. A telephone call from the enquiry desk had promptly led to his being ushered up the stairs to the offices of Giuseppe Carboni, now transformed into a tactical crisis centre.
Shirtsleeves, tobacco smoke, coffee beakers, a three-quarters emptied Scotch bottle, faces lined with weariness, the howl of electric fans, the chatter of teletype machines, and, radiating energy, Carboni in the midst, rotund and active.
Carpenter hesitated by the door, was spied out, waved forward.
'Come in, Carpenter. Come and see our humble efforts,'
Carboni shouted at him.
This was the old world, the known scents. An emergency room under pressure. This was something for Carpenter to feel and absorb. He felt an interloper, yet at home, among the men he could find sympathy for. The clock was turned back as he came diffidently past the desks where the paper mountained, past the photographs stuck with tape to the walls that showed shocked and staring faces, past the telephones that demanded response.
' I don't want to be in the way… '
'But you cannot sit in the hotel room any longer? 5
'Something like that, Mister Carboni.'
'And you come here because everyone you speak to gives you bad news or no news, and from me you hope for a difference?'
Something lovable about him, Carpenter thought. Over-weight, ugly as sin, dirty fingernails, a shirt that should have seen the wash, and a bloody good man.
'It was getting at me, just sitting a b o u t… you know how it is?'
'I will educate you, Carpenter.' Carboni was sliding on his coat, then turning away to bellow what seemed to Carpenter a score of differing instructions to varied recipients, and simul-taneously. 'I will show you our enemy. You will witness what we fight against. I know you policemen from England, detailed and organized men, who have believed that you are the best in the world… '
'I'm not a policeman any more.*
'You retain the mentality. It has stayed with you.' Carboni laughed without a smile, a nervous tic. 'The rest of the world are idiots, second-class people. I understand. Well, come with me, my friend. We go across the city to the Rebibbia gaol. That is where we hold the Tantardini woman and I must play the taxi-driver and bring her here, because that is what little Giancarlo wants and we must please him… '
Carpenter sensed the swollen anger in the man, wondered where it could find an outlet. The laugh came again, raising and suspending the flesh rolls of the jaw.
'… I must please him, because if he does not talk to Tantardini, then your Harrison is dead. I am here to save him, I will do my humble best to save him.'
' I hadn't really doubted that, sir.' Carpenter let the respect run in his voice, because this was a professional man, this was a caring man.
'So, come and see her. Know your enemy. That is what you say in England? The better you know him, the better you fight him.' Carboni caught Carpenter's arm and propelled him back towards the door. 'You will see that we risk much at this stage.
But don't tell me that it was never like that in London. Don't tell me that always you were supreme.'
'We had the black times.'
'We have experience, we know the black times. Tonight it is that but darker.'
His arm still clamped by Carboni's fist, Carpenter surged down the corridor.
Across the bonnet of the little red Fiat, the child drew with a pliant finger the letters of his name in the dirt covering the paintwork. It had perplexed him at first to find a car edged from the field into the shelter of the trees, and he had skirted it twice before gaining the courage to approach it. He had gazed inside, admired the shiny newness of the seat leather and let his hand flit to the bright chrome door handle and felt it slide down under pressure. But he did not dare to climb into the car and sit in the driver's seat and hold the steering-wheel as he would dearly like to have done. His compensation was the writing of his name in big and bold and shaking letters.
That task completed, his interest moved on and he walked away as the sun slipped, delaying his journey home to the farm only for the time it took to pluck some hedgerow flowers for his mother. He had little sense of the hour but the chill that was rising from the grass, carried by the freshening wind was enough to dictate his going. He ambled between the chewing cows, holding tightly to the stems of the flowers, admiring their colours.
That his mother and father might be cruelly anxious for him was beyond the comprehension of his young mind.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Together Archie Carpenter and Giuseppe Carboni stood in the courtyard of the gaol, far on the inside from the high swinging gates, ringed by walls and watch-towers and men who patrolled catwalks with the guns ready in their hands. The Rebibbia prison, Carboni said, was the maximum security holding centre for the capital city. A fearsome and odious place it seemed to Carpenter, where even in the open, where the wind could blow, there was the smell of kitchens and lavatories, and a community in confinement.
'She will be here one more day,' Carboni intoned. T h e n we transfer her to Messina to await the courts. God willing, it will be months before they drag her into the light again.'
This is not your work, these are not the people you are normally with?' A gentle query from Carpenter.
' I am a criminal policeman, I do not have a political background. That is the can of worms for a policeman. But everyone is very willing that I should be the man who takes the weight of this action. There are others better fitted than I, but they did not raise their hands.' There was a tight, resigned sadness on Carboni's face. 'But that is how we live here, that is our society. We do not fall down and wag our tails and demand to be given the hardest task because there lies the way to honour and promotion, when the risk of failure is greatest. We are survivors, Carpenter. You will learn that.'
He broke off, his attention directed to the side door of a small building that fronted a towering five-storey cell
