'We can still lose everything,' Carboni said to Vellosi.
'Not everything, we will have the boy.'
'And that is important?'
'It is the trophy for my wall.'
They destroy us, these bastards. They make the calluses in our minds, they coarsen our sensitivities, until a good man, a man of the quality of Francesco Vellosi believes only in vengeance and is blinded to the value of the life of an innocent.
'When you were in church, Francesco, last n i g h t…'
' I prayed that I myself, with my own hand, might have the chance to shoot the boy.'
Carboni held his arm. They emerged together into the warm night air. The convoy stood ready, car doors open, engines pulsing.
The damp of the earth, rising through the leaf mattress, crawled and nagged at the bones of Giancarlo, till he writhed in irritation and the refuge of sleep fell from him. The hunger bit and the chill was deep at his body. He groped across the ground for his pistol and his hand brushed against the metal of the barrel. P38, I love you, my P38, present to the little fox from Franca. Sometimes when he awoke in a strange place, and suddenly, he needed moments to assimilate the atmosphere around him. Not at this awakening. His mind was sharp in an instant.
He glanced at the luminous face of his watch. Close to three.
Six hours to the time that Franca ordered for the retribution on Geoffrey Harrison. Six hours more and then the sun would be high, and the scorch patterns of the heat would have flung back the cold of darkness, and the wood would be dying and thirsting for moisture. There would have been two or three of them with Aldo Moro on this night. Two or three of them to share the desperate isolation of the executioner as he made ready his equipment. Two or three of them to pump home the bullets, so that the blame was spread… Blame, Giancarlo? Blame is for the middle classes, blame is for the guilty. There is no blame for the work of the revolution, for the struggle of the proletariat.
Two or three of them to take him to the beach by the airport fence of Fiumicino. And they had had their escape route.
What escape route for Giancarlo?
No planning, no preparation, no safe house, no car switch, no accomplice.
Did Franca think of that?
It is not important to the movement. Attack is the factor of importance, not retreat.
They will hunt you, Giancarlo, hunt you for your life. The minds of their ablest men, hunting you to eternity, hunting you till you cannot run further. The enemy has the machines that are invulnerable and perpetual, that invoke a memory that cannot weary.
It was an order. Orders can never be bent to accommodate circumstance. In the movement there has been great sacrifice.
And there is advantage in the killing of 'Arrison…?
Not for your mind to evaluate. A soldier does not question his order. He acts, he obeys.
The insects played at his face, nipping and needling at his cheeks, finding the cavities of his nostrils, the softness of his ear lobes. He swatted them away.
Why should the bastard 'Arrison sleep? When he was about to die, how could he? A man with no belief beyond his own selfish survival, how could he find sleep?
For the first time in many hours Giancarlo summoned the image of his room in the fiat at seaside Pescara. Bright on the walls of Alitalia posters, the hanging figure of the wooden Christ, the thin-framed portrait from a colour magazine of Paul VI, the desk for his schoolbooks where he had worked in the afternoons after classes, the wardrobe for his clothes where the white shirts for Sundays hung ironed. Insidious and compelling, a world that was lit and conventional and normal. Giancarlo, one-time stereotype, who sat beside his mother at meals, and wanted in the evenings to be allowed to help his father at the shop. A long time ago, an age ago, when Giancarlo was on the production line, held in the same precision mould as the other boys of the street.
'Arrison had been like that.
The ways had parted, different signposts, different destinations. God… and it was a lonely way… terrifying and hostile. Your choice, Giancarlo.
He slapped his face again to rid himself of the insects and the dream collapsed. Gone were the savours of home, replaced by a boy whose photograph was stuck with adhesive tape to the dash-boards of a thousand police cars, whose features would appear in a million newspapers, whose name grew fear, whose hand held a gun. He would never see Franca again. He knew that and the thought ripped and wrenched at him. Never in his life again.
Never again would he touch her hair, and hold her fingers. Just a memory, a recollection to be set beside the room in Pescara.
Giancarlo lay again on the ground and closed his eyes.
Up the Cassia northwards from the city headed the convoys.
The riot wagons of the Primo Celere, the Fiat lorries of the carabfnieri, the blue and white and prettily painted cars of the polizia, the unmarked vehicles of the special squads. There were many who came in nightclothes to the balconies of the high-rise flats and watched the stream of the participants and felt the thrill of the circus cavalcade. More than a thousand men on the move.
All armed, all tensed, all drugged in the belief that at last they could assuage their frustration and beat and kick the irritant that plagued them. At the village of La Storta, where the road narrowed and was choked, the drivers hooted and blasphemed at the traffic police, and demanded clearance of the chaos, because all were anxious to be in Bracciano when dawn came.
Past La Storta, on the narrower Via Claudia with its sharp bends between the tree lines, Giuseppe Carboni's car was locked into a column of lorries. It was a quieter, more sedate progress because now the sirens were forbidden, the rotating lights were doused, the horns unused. Archie Carpenter shared the front seat with the driver. Vellosi and Carboni were behind among the bullet-proof waistcoats and the submachine-guns, taken as if by a careful virgin from the boot before the departure from the Questura.
Water dripped from Carpenter's hair on to the collar of his shirt and down the back of his jacket, the remnant of his shower after the telephone had broken the total, drink-induced sleep that he had stumbled to. Now that he was awake, the pain between his temples was huge.
A boring bastard, she'd called him. A proper little bore. Violet Harrison on Archie Carpenter.
Well, what was he supposed to do? Get her on to the mattress in the interests of ICH, take her on the living- room c a r p e t…?
Not what it was about, Archie. Not cut and dried like that.
Just needed someone to talk to.
Someone to talk to? Wearing a dress like that, hanging out like it was going out of fashion?
Wrong, Archie. A girl broken up and falling down, who needed someone to share it with. And you were out of your depth, Archie, lost your lifebelt and splashing like an idiot. You ran away, you ran out on her, and had a joke with Charlesworth, had your giggle. You ran because they don't teach you about people under high stress in safe old Motspur Park. All cosy and neat there in the mortgaged semis, where nobody shouts because the neighbours will hear, nobody has a bit on the side because the neighbours will know, where nobody does anything but sit on their arses and wait for the day when they're pushing up daisies and it's too late and they've gone, silent fools and un remembered.
She needed help, Archie. You galloped out of that flat as fast as your bloody legs would take you.
A proper little bore, and no one had ever called him that before, not to his face.
'Did you hear about Harrison's wife, Mr Carboni?' Spoken offhand, as if he wasn't concerned, wasn't involved.
'What about her?'
'She was killed in a car crash, late last night.'
'Where was she?' Puzzlement rang through Carboni's preoccupation with the procedures of the coming hours.
'Out on what's called the Raccordo.'
'It is many kilometres from where she lives.'
