something from the bloody horse's mouth?
Tantardini got her hands on the telephone too early in the game for the trace people. Told her boy to chop Harrison, then pulled the connection. The call was still at switchboard but the boy had the message. He rang off, and that's about it.'
Charlesworth was leaning forward in his seat, glass held between his hands. The honest, earnest young man, he seemed to Carpenter. 'She gave a specific instruction for the boy to kill Harrison?'
'That's the way Carboni put it. 'I have failed your man', those were his words. Biggest bloody understatement of the day.'
'He's a good man, Giuseppe Carboni.' Charlesworth spoke with enough compassion for Carpenter momentarily to squirm.
' It's not easy, not in a country like this. Right, Buster?'
The Colonel swirled his whisky round the glass. 'We had full powers in many places, what you'd call nowadays totalitarian powers, in Palestine and Malaya and Kenya and Cyprus. Here the legacy of pre-war fascism is that the security forces are kept weak. But for all we had, it didn't do us a great deal of good.'
'But that was far from the great Mother Britain,' Carpenter interjected impatiently. This is different, it's on their own doorstep that they're being whipped. Carboni excepted, they're ambling about like bloody zombies… '
'They're trying, Archie,' Charlesworth intervened gently.
' I wouldn't care to make a judgement on their efficiency if I'd been here just a few hours.' The Colonel cut at the air, the swinging of the old cavalry sabre.
Carpenter put his hands above his head, grinned for a moment, dissolved the temper. 'I'm outnumbered, out- flanked, whatever
… So what I want to know is this: when they say they'll chop him, when Battestini says it, do we take that at face, is it gospel?'
Caroline Charlesworth started from her chair. The plea to be excused from the blunt assessments. T h e dinner won't be more than a few minutes.'
'You answer that, Buster,' Charlesworth said. 'It's the pertinent question of the evening.'
The hard, clean eyes of the veteran fixed on Carpenter. T h e answer is affirmative. When they say they'll kill, they're as good as their word.'
'Black tie job?'
' I repeat, Mr Carpenter, they're as good as their word.'
Caroline Charlesworth appeared from the kitchen doorway.
The food was ready. She led, the men followed. In the dining-room Carpenter saw the wine on the table, the port and brandy on the sideboard. There was solace to be found here, escape from a hideous and crippling mess.
Late into the evening, the child's mother came at last for him.
With a sweep of her hand she hushed his protest, and swept him up so that he sat on her hip as she took him from the side of his father. It was done quickly and expertly and the farmer seemed as unaware of the child's going as he had been of his presence.
She nuzzled her nose against her son's neck, saw the fight that he made to keep his eyes open and chided herself that she had left him for so long. She carried him to his room.
'Mama.'
'Yes, my sweet.' She lowered him into the bed.
'Mama, if Papa wakes soon, will he come to see me?'
'You will be asleep, in the morning you will see him.' She pulled the coarse sheet to his chin.
' I have to tell him what I saw… '
'What was it, a wild pig, the big dog f o x…?' She watched the yawn break on the child's face.
'Mama, I saw… '
Her kiss stifled his words, and she tip-toed from the room.
It was the work of the Agente to check finally the cell doors after the prisoners held in maximum security had finished communal recreation and were consigned for the night to their individual cells. His practice was to take a quick glance through the spyhole and then slide the greased bolt. Others would come after him when the lights were dimmed to make the last muster call of the night.
The Agente had found the paper, folded once, on the mat at the front door of his house. A small piece, ragged at an edge where it had been torn from a notepad. There was a pencil-written number on the outside flap that was immediately relevant to the Agente. Three digits, the number of the cell of the Chief of Staff of the Nappisti.
When he reached that door, the Agente pushed it a few inches, tossed the paper inside, crashed the bolt home, and was on his way. Any colleague who might have seen him would not have been aware of the passing of the message.
The capo abandoned his weekly letter to his mother in the hill city of Siena, saw the paper and slipped from his chair to gather it.
Uamministrazione dice non per Tantardini.
No freedom for Tantardini. It was as he had said. What he had anticipated, because the Englishman was of insufficient importance. Inevitable, but better that way, better if the ultimatum were to expire, the gun were to be fired. The strategy of tension they called it in the Roman newspapers, the creation of intolerable fear. The death of the enemy created fear, something not achieved by negotiation and the making of deals. Better if the Englishman were killed.
But who was the boy, Battestini? Why had he not heard of a youth who could implement so much? The radio in his cell had told him the police held the opinion that the boy worked alone
… remarkable, outstanding… and the commentator called him the lover of Franca Tantardini and expounded that this was the reason for the boy's action. Who in the movement had not been the lover of Franca Tantardini? How many of the Nappisti in this same cell block had not taken comfort from hours spent strangled by the arms and legs of Tantardini, taken pleasure from the flesh and fingers of the woman? His table lamp lit a mirthless smile.
Perhaps it was the boy's first time, and he believed he had made a conquest. If it was the first time the boy would climb a mountain for that woman, perhaps he'd die for Tantardini. Certainly he would kill for her. When the ultimatum was met he would issue a communique in his own name from inside the walls of Asinara.
Courage, my child. We love you, we are with you. But why had he not been told of this boy?
Like sharks homing for offal, the mosquitoes slipped through the opened window of the farmhouse parlour and turned their incisive attention to the arms and neck of the resting man.
Instinctively he slapped the side of his face in irritation, and in his growing consciousness there was the drone of their wings, the rising surge of their attacks. He started up, blinked in the flickering light of the television and heard the sounds of the kitchen through the closed door, water running, the quiet clatter of dishes and tins. He scratched savagely at the bitten skin where the bite mark had grown enough for him to gouge a sharp trickle of blood, he rubbed the back of his hand into his eyes, then headed for the kitchen. Time for him to be going to his bed, time for him to encourage her to follow.
His wife put her finger across her mouth, the call for quiet, and pointed to the half-open door that led to their son's room. A tall, broad-shouldered woman, red-faced, dark hair pulled back in an elastic band, thick bare arms and a faded apron. She had been his woman since he was seventeen and had shyly courted her with the encouragement of her parents, who knew of the farm he would inherit.
'The little one is sleeping?'
She worked at the final flurry of the day's sink work. 'It's taken him long enough, but he's nearly there.'
'Did he tell you where he'd been?'
She slopped warm water from a kettle into the bright plastic sink bowl. 'In the woods, where else?'
'What kept him there?' He was tired, yearning for his bed, and there was much hay to be moved by trailer in the morning. Per-functory conversation, made only because she was not ready to follow him to their cumbersome, heavy oak wedding bed.
'He saw something, he said.'
