'Yes.'
'La Questura. Dottore Giuseppe C a r b o n i… momento.'
Delay. First a crossed line. Apology, rampant clicking and interruption before Charlesworth heard the Questura switchboard announce with pride to Carboni that the task was accomplished, the connection successful. They were not friends, the policeman and Michael Charlesworth, but known to each other, acquainted. Carboni would know that Charlesworth was happier in English, that language courses were not always victorious. With a faint American accent Carboni spoke.
•Charlesworth, that is you?'
'Yes.' Caution. No man is happy talking to the police, least of all to foreign police at fourteen minutes past eight in the morning.
'I have bad news for you, my friend. Bad news to give you for which I am sorry. You have a businessman in the city, a resident, a man called Harrison. He is the financial controller of ICH in EUR, International Chemical Holdings. They are at Viale Pasteur in EUR, many of the multinationals favour that a r e a… '
What's the silly blighter done, thought Charlesworth resigned.
Socked a copper? Drunk himself stupid? No, couldn't be that, not if Carboni was calling, not if it was at that level.'… I regret very much, Charlesworth to have to tell you that Geoffrey Harrison was kidnapped this morning. Armed men, forced from his car near his home.'
'Christ,' muttered Charlesworth, low but audible.
' I understand your feelings. He is the first of the foreign residents, the first of the foreign commercials to be affected by this plague.'
' I know.*
'We are doing everything we can. There are road blocks…'
The distant voice tailed and died, as if Carboni knew the futility of boasting to this man. He came again. 'But you know, Charlesworth, these people are very organized, very sophisticated. It is unlikely, and you will understand me, it is unlikely that what we can do will be sufficient.'
'I know,' said Charlesworth. An honest man he was talking to, and what to say that wouldn't be churlish. ' I am confident you will exercise all your agencies in this matter, completely confident.'
'You can help me, Charlesworth. I have called you early, it is not half an hour since the attack, and we have not yet been to the family. We have not spoken to his wife. Perhaps she does not speak Italian, perhaps she speaks only English, we thought it better if someone from the Embassy should be with her first, to give her the news.'
The dose prescribed for diplomats seeking nightmares was purveying ill-tidings to their own nationals far from home. A stinking, lousy job and indefinite involvement. 'That was very considerate of you.'
'It is better also that you have a doctor go to her this morning.
In many cases we find that necessary in the first hours. It is a shock… you will understand.'
'Yes.'
' I do not want to lecture you at this stage, because soon you will be busy, and I am busy myself in this matter, but you should make a contact with Harrison's employer. It is a London-based company, I believe. If they have taken the employee of a multinational they will be asking for more than poor Harrison's bank balance can provide. They will believe they are ransoming the company. It could be expensive, Charlesworth.'
'You would like me to alert the company to this situation?'
Charlesworth scribbled hard on his memo pad.
'They must make their attitude clear, and quickly. When the contact is made they must know what attitude they will take.'
'What a way to start the bloody day. Well, they'll ask, me this, and it may colour their judgement: you would presume that this is the work of a professional, an experienced gang?'
There was a faint laugh, quavering over the telephone line before Carboni replied. 'How can I say, Charlesworth? You read our newspapers, you watch the Telegiornale in the evening. You know what we are up against. You know how many times the gangs are successful, how many times we beat them. We do not hide the figures, you know that too. If you look at the results you will see that a few of the gangs are amateur – you English, always you want to reduce everything to sport – and we catch those ones.
Does that give us a winning score? I would like to say so, but I cannot. It is very hard to beat the professionals. And you should tell to Harrison's firm when you speak with them that the greater the police efforts to release him, the greater the risk to his life.
They should not forget that*
Charlesworth sucked at his pencil top. 'You would expect the company to pay what they are asked to?'
'We should talk of that later. Perhaps it is premature at this moment.' A gentle correction, made with kindness, but a correction nevertheless. Not manners to talk of the will and the beneficiaries while the corpse is still warm. 'But I do not think that we would expect the family or the company of a foreigner to adopt a differing procedure to that taken by our own families when they are faced with identical problems.'
The invitation to pay. It wouldn't be made clearer than that.
The invitation not to be stubborn and principled. Pragmatism winning through, and a bloody awful scene for a policeman to have to get his nose into.
'There may be some difficulty. We don't do it like that in England.'
'But you are not in England, Charlesworth.' The taint of impatience from Carboni. 'And in England you have not always been successful. I remember two cases, two ransom demands unmet, two victims found, two deaths. It is not a straightforward area of decision, and not one which we can debate. Later perhaps, but now I think there are other things that you wish to do.'
' I appreciate greatly what you have done, Dottore.'
' It is nothing.' Carboni rang off.
Five minutes later Charlesworth was in the ground-floor hall of the Embassy waiting for the arrival of the Ambassador, still shrill in his ears the piercing protests of the woman he had telephoned.
Who was going to pay?
Didn't they know they hadn't any money?
Nothing in the bank, just a few savings.
Who was going to take responsibility?
Not a conversation that Charlesworth had relished and his calming noises had been shouted out till he'd said he had to go because he must see the Ambassador. No more blustering after that; just a deep sobbing, a pain echoing down the wire to him, as if some dam of control and inhibition had been broken.
Where was he, the poor sod? What were they doing to him?
Must be a terrible loneliness. Mind-bending, horrific. And damn all for comfort. Didn't even know that idiots like Michael Charlesworth and Giuseppe Carboni were Sapping their wings and running in circles. Better he didn't know it; it might make him turn over and give up. And what chance the Ambassador being in before nine? What bloody chance?
They'd tied him expertly as they would have done a lively bullock going to slaughter. Not a casual job, not just a length of rope round his legs.
Geoffrey Harrison had lain perhaps twenty minutes on the coarse sacking on the van floor before he had tried to move his ankles and wrists. The effects of the chloroform were dissipating, the shock of capture and the numbness of disorientation sliding.
The nobbled bones on the inside of his ankles wrapped in cord caught hard against each other, digging at the flesh. The metal handcuffs on his wrists, set too tight for him, pressed on the veins and arteries. Tape, adhesive and broad, was across his mouth, forcing him to breath through his nose, reducing any sounds he could make to a jumbled, incomprehensible moan. One man had trussed him swiftly before the chloroform had gone to be replaced by the desperate passiveness of terror in an alien surrounding. And they'd hooded him, reducing his horizons to the limited things he could touch and smell. The hood was cool and damp as if it had spent the night in the grass, been subject to the light dew and retrieved before the coming of the drying warmth of the early sun. Because of the handcuffs behind his back he lay on his right side where the undulations of the road surface caused his shoulder to impact through the sacking against the ribbed metal floor.
They seemed to move at a constant speed as if far from the reach of traffic lights and road junctions, and many times Harrison heard the whine of overtaking engines, and occasionally the van shuddered as if under strain
