Killing Ground

by Gerald Seymour

  Education at school for Mario Ruggerio had lasted from the age of five years to nine years. No schoolmaster, nor schoolmistress, no academic, no lecturer, no professor had taught him the science of electronic communications, but he had no trust in the security of the telephone. There were those he had known who had believed they could talk through the landline system, and they sat now in the stifling heat of the cells at Ucciardione in the city of Palermo. There were others who had believed in the safety of the new analogue technology of the mobile telephone, and they rotted now behind the walls of Caltanisetta on the island or at Asinara Prison on Sardinia. He had been urged the last year to believe in the total security of the most recent system, the digital network, promised that it could not be intercepted, and those men who had believed and promised now saw the sun and the sky for an hour a day ill rough the net mesh above the exercise yard at Ucciardione or C'altanisetta or Asinara.

  He laid the messages written on the cigarette papers across the table. He read them.

  He lit a small cigar. He coughed and spat phlegm into his handkerchief. He read the messages again and then gathered them into his ashtray. He was satisfied he had memorized thee messages. He burned the papers on which they were written. The messages, now held in his memory, dealt with the matters concerning the movement of $8 million from a holding company in the Bahamas to a casino development in Slovenia, the switching of I I million from a Vienna-based account to a bank in Bratislava, the buying of a block of twenty-two apartments at a Corsican beach resort, the question of the life and death of a man in Catania, the problem of the persistent investigation by a magistrate in the Palazzo di Giustizia. Five messages, now burned, now memorized, would be passed, word of mouth, to five men in five bars over five coffees that morning.

  His way was caution and suspicion. With caution and suspicion he maintained what was most precious, his freedom.

  Later, when the sun was higher against the closed shutters, when he had smoked a second cigar, when he had listened to the radio news bulletin and heard the report that the Questura in Agrigento had made no progress in their search for a missing man and his grandson and his driver, he would slip in his anonymity onto the streets of the city and into five bars where his people waited for him. His people were the 'cut-out'

  intermediaries who carried the messages, verbally, to construction magnates and politicians and the principals of the Masons or Rotary and bankers, and to the policemen that he owned, and to the churchmen that he had bought. All of those who received messages from Mario Ruggerio acted upon them immediately because he fuelled their greed and fanned their fear . . .

  Mario Ruggerio wondered, a fast thought because there was much in his mind, how were the children and the baby that he loved, and the thought brought a gentle smile to his face. The smile was still on his face as he walked down the alleyway in his grey wool jacket with his check cap worn forward.

  When she came into the playground to halt the football game and round up the children with their lunchboxes, she saw him waiting and smoking in his car. She thought of the old man hurrying to his home on the estate.

  From the balcony she watched him go. She held the baby. Piccolo Mario jumped excitedly on the balcony tiles and leaned across the pots of geraniums to see his father at the car below, and Francesca held her hand and cried quietly.

  He turned from the car and he waved up at the bungalow, and Angela's answering gesture was a limp flap of her hand. She did not wait to see him into the car, nor to see him drive away through the main gates that would have been opened by the uniformed portiere. She left piccolo Mario on the balcony, she carried the baby and led Francesca back into the living area of the apartment, and past the statue that she thought disgusting, and over the stain she could not remove in the carpet from Iran. She loathed Palermo. To

  Angela Ruggerio, the city was a prison. In Rome, if they still lived in Rome, she could have gone back to the university, but it was not acceptable in Palermo that a married woman should go alone to a university. In Rome she could have gone to a health gymnasium, but in Palermo it was not permitted that a married woman could go to a gymnasium without a friend for a chaperone and she did not have that friend. In Rome it would have been possible for her lo have taken part-time work in a gallery or in a museum, but it was not possible in Palermo that a married woman of her class should go to work . . . She could not, in Palermo, paint the walls of the apartment, wield a roller brush, because, in Palermo, that would imply her husband could not afford to employ an artisan to the work.

  She loathed the city most when he left to go abroad. Then the money for household expenses was left in the drawer beside her bed, because, in Palermo, it was not usual for a married woman to have her own bank account, own credit cards, own resources. In Rome, during the good days in Rome, he would have talked with her the night before a business flight to London or Frankfurt or New York, but not now, because, in Palermo, it was not necessary for ,a married woman to know the detail of her husband's work.

  She slumped down into the depth of the wide sofa. She flicked the pages of a magazine and read nothing . . . The boy shouted.Picolo Mario yelled from the balcony that he had seen his uncle, really, and she must come. She pushed herself up from the sofa, She held the baby tight against her. She went onto the balcony. She looked down, across the car park, past the security gates, onto the pavement. She saw nobody, but piccolo Mario shouted that he had seen his uncle, yelled that his uncle had walked past the gates and looked for them and had waved, and she saw nobody that she knew. How many times did he come, the little old man with the bowed shoulders and the jowl at his throat and the grey jacket and the checked cap, and walk past the apartment in the Giardino Inglese and look up towards the flowers on their balcony, how often? She knew, of course, all that was said of ipiccolo Mario's uncle on the television, all that was written of Peppino's brother in the Giorale di Sicilia . . . She took the boy from the balcony. It was not right that the boy should talk of his uncle.

  In four days they would be at the villa, they would be by the sea, where, if it were possible, she would be more lonely than in the city. She prayed, almost with fervour, that Charlotte would come.

  When she rang the bell for the end of mid-afternoon break she saw him sitting with a magazine in his car. She thought of the old woman, in fear, going back to her one bedroom with the hidden tin of savings that made her vulnerable.

  There were only two pictures on the walls of the room in the barracks at Monreale.

  There was the picture of his daughter and there was the photograph of Generale Carlos Alberto dalla Chiesa. The smiling ten-year-old girl and the militaristic portrait served to heighten Giovanni Crespo's sense of total isolation.

  He dialled the number, he threw the switch that activated the scrambler.

  Isolato, isolated, was a cruel word for the captain of carabineri. His daughter was growing up in Bologna. He was isolated from her, saw her twice a year at best, three days at a time, and spoke briefly on the telephone each Sunday evening. That was isolation. But it was the general who had taught him the true meaning of the word isolato. The general, hero of the counter-terrorist campaign against the Brigate Rosse, prefect of Palermo, had been ridiculed, sneered at, whispered of, isolated and shot to death thirty-eight days after Giovanni Crespo had joined his staff as liaison officer.

  They were all isolated, all the condemned men, before the gunfire or the bomb. To stay alive, living and breathing and fucking and drinking, he thought it most necessary to recognize isolation.

  His call was to an unlisted number in Rome, a quiet side-street office on the Via Sardegna, to the desk of the DEA's Country Chief.

  "Vanni here. Go secure, Bill.'

  He was asked to wait out. He heard the clicked interruption on the line. The voice was fainter, with metallic distortion. He was told he could speak.

  'Just wanted to know how my friend was, whether my friend had optimism . . .'

  He was told the young woman was '
OK, nothing special'. He was told she was

  'predictable' and that she had taken time 'to think on it'.

  'You know, Bill, we don't even have a name for this. It is ridiculous, but we don't even have a name. So, we don't have a file, that's good, and we don't have computer space, that's better, but we should have a code name, do you not think?'

  Giovanni Crespo, aged forty-two, captain of carabineri, member of the specialist Reparto Operativo Speciale team tasked with securing the arrest of Mario Ruggerio, would never speak a confidence even on a line scrambled with state-of-the-art electronics. On the island he trusted no man. In his life he trusted only one man. He had taken the letter posted by Angela Ruggerio, sister-in-law of Mario Ruggerio, to Rome and to the one man he trusted. The detail of the matter was not shared with his own people, for lack of trust of his own people. He had taken the detail of the matter, the link, to Ins friend.

  He was asked what he thought.

  I 'Helen. Helen of Troy. Bill, when all else failed, in Italian we would say uccello da richiamo, I think your word is "decoy", yes? The decoy behind the walls. The way through the gate. Codename Helen, for when we talk, Bill. But, Bill, it is to be kept close.'

  II It was authorized in Washington. Herb had authorized it. Yes, he knew Herb. He was told it should be kept closer than a choirboy's 'sphincter, and the Country Chief's laugh rang in his ear, pealing as if from inside a box of metal.

  'Is that dirty talk, Bill? Hey, but, Bill, we keep this close. You call in. when you have something, something on Codename Helen. It's bad here at the moment, so quiet. There is nothing to touch, nothing to feel, nothing to see. When it is quiet, then I have the anxiety. You tell him, he gives the Codename Helen a good kicking because I need her here, just tell him.'

  The one man that he trusted, that Giovanni Crespo would give his life to, was Axel Moen.

  'Bill, he is moving, climbing. Did you see that a bad bastard from Agrigento went missing? Old style, old school, so conflict was inevitable It is the lupara bianca, the disappearance. Between him and the top place, where he will try to be, is only the Catania man, that's what we hear. If he gets to the top place, our friend, then there is a time of maximum danger, perhaps for many people, when he would seek to prove himself. Bill, I have a big anxiety. The only way for our friend to prove himself is to kill

  . . .'

  When she pushed her scooter out of the lean-to shed and buttoned her anorak and slipped on her helmet, she saw him look up and wipe the windscreen, and she saw him start to manoeuvre the car. She thought of the young mother, the addict, in Intensive Care.

  They were the ragazzi, the kids, the boys. Though the magistrate called them, always, the ragazzi, three of them were aged over forty, and one was two years off a fiftieth birthday. The fifth, Pasquale, was the only one of the ragazzi still clinging to youth. The party, orange juice and a cake, was in the kitchen. The kitchen was for cooking and doubled as the communications room and rest area for them.

  In the depths of the apartment, away from the closed door of the kitchen, a telephone rang.

  It was as good a party as was possible on orange juice and chocolate cake. No alcohol. No alcohol was allowed on duty, nor for five hours before starting duty.

  Chocolate cake was permitted, and orange juice. The baby, Pasquale's first, had been born in the small hours of the morning and he had come straight from the hospital to start his duty. And they larked and fooled like kids and boys and there was spilled juice on the floor and broken cake on the table, and the birth of a baby and the pride of a father were celebrated. He had bought the cake himself, and the juice. If he had been a part of them, truly a member of the team, then they would have collected among themselves and bought the cake and the juice. He was too young, too recent, to have been wholly accepted, and his work was under continuous probationer assessment. It could have been that they resented his youth, there were some on the qualification course who said that the reflexes of a younger man were sharper than those of older men . . . He tried to be a part of the team.

  The telephone no longer rang.

  And those who had three children and four children and two children, and the maresciallo who was the oldest and had teenagers, competed with the horror stories of parenthood to bludgeon Pasquale. The black execution humour of his fellows played, mocking, around Pasquale's ears, the tales of the sleepless nights and the changing of shit-filled diapers and vomited food and a swallowed I/D card and the little hands that climbed a chair to produce the condom packet from the bathroom cupboard that was displayed to grandparents, and . . .

  The laughter died. They heard, all of them, the footfall beyond the kitchen door.

  All faced the door, like ragazzi, like kids and boys caught in a moment of guilt. He seemed with his eyes to apologize, as if he deeply regretted the intrusion into his own kitchen, into their communications room and rest room. They had started the party, opened the orange juice, cut the cake, because he had told them he was not returning that evening to the Palazzo di Giustizia, now lie shrugged in his self-effacing way and brushed the greying hair back off his forehead and muttered that he must return to his bunker office. He held his briefcase in his hand and his raincoat was draped on his shoulders.

  There was the snap of the maresciallo's radio, to alert the military In the street.

  Crumbs were brushed off a Beretta M-12S 9mm pistol, juice was shaken from the barrel of a Heckler & Koch MP-5 machine gun. The vests of kevlar plates, proof against small-arms fire and light shrapnel, were heaved up from the floor beside the oven by Pasquale, one for each man.

  There was the clatter of the weapons being armed.

  Left in the kitchen, debris on the table, half-drunk glasses of juice, half-eaten slices of chocolate cake.

  They went out of the apartment and towards the door. The woman who lived across the hallway scowled, and the bodyguards gave her the eye and the finger because she had twice written to in newspapers to complain of the danger in which she was placed by lliving in proximity to Dr Rocco Tardelli. They went fast down two flights of stairs, in front of him, beside him, behind him. He was a small figure, hemmed in between them, skipping to keep pace. They iwere not his servants, nor his messengers, nor his cooks, they would never be his true friends. They had not volunteered to protect his life, but been given the assignment.

  Out on the street the soldiers shrieked their whistles for the traffic to halt at the far junctions. Two of them were out of the main lobby and into the cars and hacking the engines. Guns drawn, the maresciallo in front of him, Pasquale behind him, the magistrate was bustled to the open door of his armoured Alfa. As if he were pitched inside, as if he were a parcel to be despatched ... The sirens blasted. The tyres screamed.

  The Alfa and the chase car hit the first junction and swerved right, scattered the cars and scooters ahead. They were not the servants or the cooks of Dr Rocco Tardelli, nor were they his true friends, but each of them in his differing way felt a fierce loyalty to the small man low on the back seat of the Alfa who struggled, through his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, to read a file as the car bucked, braked, accelerated and weaved. The other teams, those assigned to other investigating magistrates, regarded them with pity. They were the escort of the magistrate who worked stubbornly and persistently towards the capture and conviction of Mario Emanuele Ruggerio. They were the ragazzi of a 'walking corpse'.

  A tremor of a voice from the back of the Alfa. 'I understand you are to be congratulated, Pasquale. Is the baby well, is your wife well?'

  His mind churning the procedures of 'cover and evacuate' and 'defensive of life only'

  shooting patterns and 'fight or flight' mode, Pasquale muttered, 'Very well, thank you, Dr Tardelli.'

  'You will be leaving me?'

  'No, Dr Tardelli.'

  'Because you now have a baby?'

  'Please, Dr Tardelli, you distract me . . .'

  When she pushed the scooter up the drive and parked it in front of the garage doors an
d took off her helmet and shrugged her hair free, she saw him slowing in his car. She thought of the baby of seventeen days, hooked to tubes, shivering in a glass box.

  'Did you read the man's file?'

  'I did.'

  'Did you like what you read?'

  'Not particularly, if you need to know.'

  The Country Chief, Ray, stood at the partition wall that blocked off Dwight Smythe's work area from the open-plan office. He had been a guest observer the whole of the day at a symposium organized by the British Home Office to talk through international co-operation on organized crime - and the day had been crap, the papers read before lunch by a Russian and a Spaniard and the paper read after the buffet by a Brit from the National Criminal Intelligence Service had been shit. The papers had been a recitation of seizure statistics and arrest statistics and asset-confiscation statistics, and he'd reckoned them garbage. The papers were garbage because they did not go to the core problem of taking out t lie men who mattered, the men who made it happen.

  Complacency was a crime in the Country Chief's Bible, and that day there had been more complacency on show than food on the buffet table. He envied Axel Moen, didn't reckon Axel Moen suffered too many symposiums.

  'You want to go work in La Paz, Bolivia?'

  'No.'

  ' He did. You want to get yourself into firelights where they need body bags afterwards?'

  'No.'

  ' He did. You want to lift a bad man in Miami, testify to a Grand hiry, find out then that there's a video of you going into court and that the Cali people, the cartel guys, have the video and have your lace?'