Killing Ground

by Gerald Seymour

  Axel Moen waved, desultory, at Ray, and was heading for the door.

  Dwight Smythe thought that once the intruder had left he'd spray an air freshener round the office area. He didn't know the world of Confidential Informants and fire fights and high-velocity flesh wounds, and hoped to God he never would. And he thought the girl from the small bungalow was an innocent.

  He growled, 'I'll see you some time. Have a good flight. I'll see you, maybe—'

  'Yes, if I want some expenses signed.'

  Gone through the door, gone and not closed it behind him.

  When the aircraft had lifted, yawed and climbed, as she sat small in her seat and buckled tight, Charley had felt that she crumpled. She had thought then that she was the most minuscule of the marionette puppets locked in the cupboard behind the teacher's desk, not her desk, in class 2B.

  As the aircraft cruised, on automatic flat flight, and she sat numbed in her seat beside the honeymoon couple in their best new British Home Stores outfits, Charley felt numbed. The couple did not seem to notice her, and after she had seen the rampant love bite on the girl's lower throat and the girl was younger than Charley, she did not even consider trying to talk to them. What would they have understood of her acceptance of an invitation that would provide access? Damn-all of nothing . . . She sat far down in her seat, refused the tray of food, turned the pages of the in-flight magazine and retained not a word of the printed text, not a frame of the glossy photographs.

  The aircraft lurched in flight, bounced on landing, swayed in flight and bounced again, and Charley thought briefly of the seabirds on the rocks below the cliff at her place, coming to land without faltering on the water-washed rocks. It was behind her.

  The honeymoon couple, had they bothered to look, but they didn't because they were huddled together in a fear of flying, would have seen at that moment that a stubborn and bloody-minded grimace had caught at her mouth. It was what she had wanted, the chance, what she had chosen, the opportunity. When the aircraft was still, when the music came on, when she had unfastened the waist strap, she strode down the aisle, a small bounce in her step. She was needed, and it had been a long time in her life since she had known the glow of importance, too damn long . . .

  Charley walked briskly through the aircraft's door.

  'You on secure, 'Vanni?'

  'Wait out . . . You there, Bill? OK, I'm on secure.'

  Bill Hammond, Country Chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration, working out of an office in the Via Sardegna, to the right off the big drag of the Via Veneto, held the telephone tight in a sweaty grip. He was an old hand, heavy experience in the back-pack of his career. The walls behind him and beside him had no further space to carry the commendations and the handshake photographs and the team pictures, of which the operations for Polar Cap and Green Ice were the most recent of the blitzkrieg swoops. His desk, on which his shirt-sleeved elbows rested, was thick with paperwork, requests from Washington, cross-references with colleagues in London and Frankfurt and Zurich, reports from the Italian end . . . and there was the closed file bearing his handwritten legend, CODENAME HELEN. His fists sweated, always did and always would, when an operation went live.

  'How's it going down there?'

  'Don't give me Yankee bullshit.' A sharp, metallic-toned response.

  'You got sun down there? May rain up here, always liable to rain when Easter's coming on.'

  'Don't pee on me.'

  'Tried to call you last night. Were you out screwing? Your age, and you should watch your heart—'

  'What's happening, shit on you, Bill?'

  He took a deep breath, he had the wide smile on his face. 'She's coming. She'd have touched down about now.'

  'Jesu . . .' A hiss distorted by the scrambler system on the telephone. 'How did he get her? How did he persuade . . .?'

  'That's my boy, you know my boy. How? I didn't get to ask him.'

  'Is she stupid, what is she?'

  He was laughing. 'Go back to your pit, 'Vanni, dream of big hips and big boobs, whatever you spend your time doing, you carabineri bastards. My boy'll call you. Look after yourself, 'Vanni, stay safe. I don't know whether she's stupid, or what . . .' He replaced the telephone. He flicked the switch to disconnect the scrambler.

  The Country Chief had worked with Axel Moen for two years and he reckoned, better than any man in the Administration, that he knew him. He did not know the detail of how Axel Moen had manipulated the young woman, Charlotte Parsons, but he had never doubted that face to face, body to body, eyeball to eyeball, Axel Moen would bring back to Italy the young woman and her baggage of access.

  He would have qualified on his knowledge of the career of Axel Moen.

  He would have said that he knew the backgrounder - upbringing, home base, education, work before joining the Administration, the postings of the agent before Rome - but that he was short on the motivation that drove the man.

  The Country Chief had the backgrounder on Axel Moen from the headquarters'

  confidential file . . . from his meeting two years back with the Country Chief who had run him in Bolivia ... from sessions when he was in Washington for the strategy seminars, late at night over whisky, with the people who had run him in New York and Miami. He could tell the backgrounder.

  His man, Axel Moen, was thirty-eight years old. From immigrant Norwegian stock, farm people. Reared by his grandfather and his step-grandmother on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. Complications in the rearing because his father was away with the oil industry and pneumonia had taken his mother. Lonely childhood because his grandfather was divorced before the Second World War and had brought back from Europe a second wife, Sicilian, but the community on the Door Peninsula hadn't held with divorce and hadn't taken in a stranger. Isolated. Went through the University of Wisconsin, finished in Madison with grades not quite decent. Joined the city police, reached detective, applied to join the Administration. Thought to have an 'attitude problem' on the induction course at Quantico, given the benefit of the doubt because the DEA was pushing up its numbers and not looking for course failures. Sent to New York, with fluent knowledge of Sicilian dialect, to sit in the darkened rooms with the earphones on and listen to the Pizza Connection wire taps. Sent to Bolivia, good under stress circumstances, good with the locals, poor on a team operation, superficially wounded. Sent back to New York, reported as a 'pain' in an office environment. Sent down to Miami, worked well in deep cover, identified by the cartels, shipped out and sharp. Sent to Rome . . . Bill Hammond had been with Axel Moen for two years, run him, knew the backgrounder. Bill Hammond, who did not lie often, would have confessed that he knew sweet fuck-all of the motivation of Axel Moen.

  He himself had been a DEA man since the start. Bill Hammond was coming now, and the dates on the year's work planner behind him were the ever-present reminders, towards the day he dreaded most. He was headed for retirement, for the presentation of the carriage clock or the crystal sherry decanter, for the speeches, for the last photo opportunity of the handshake with the Director. Everybody loved a cop, nobody noticed a retired cop. He was headed for minding the grandkids. Over fourteen years of service he had gathered in the detail of the file biographies of, maybe, a couple of hundred agents - men and women he could evaluate and pass a judgement on. But he did not know the source of the drive force governing Axel Moen. OK, right, sure as hell, as his career wound towards that date on the year planner, he wanted to preside over a spectacular arrest operation and he wanted to have the Director on the telephone, personal, and he had given his authorization to the plan that was CODENAME HELEN

  and he had basked in an anticipation of glory, but . . .

  But . . .

  But the kid was now off the plane at Fiumicino. But the young woman was now through Immigration. But the kid was in a taxi and headed for central Rome.

  But . . .

  The kid, the young woman, was now the property of Axel Moen. And it was Bill Hammond who had authorized it, and Bill Hammond h
ad put his goddam name on the recommendation document that had gone to Washington and onto Herb Rowell's desk.

  And it was Bill Hammond who had given the big talk and enthused enough for Herb to kick it through the committee that rubber-stamped hard-point operations. And it was Bill Hammond who had pushed Herb to make the requisition order to the Engineering Research Facility. It was the responsibility of Bill Hammond that the kid, a young woman, was travelling in a taxi towards central Rome. Maybe it would be the glory, maybe it would lie on his conscience . . .

  He was old, too old. He was tired, too tired ... As the bag was dropped down on the floor, his eyes snapped open.

  'Good flight, Axel?'

  The shrug. 'Same as any other.'

  'She's arrived, Miss Parsons?'

  The glint of the eyes, tightening, narrowing. 'That, Bill, is a sloppy mistake.'

  He was in the wrong. He blustered, 'For God's sake, Axel, where are we? We are swept, cleaned, hoovered. We can talk—'

  'You make a beginner's mistake. You talk a name here, perhaps you get to talk it elsewhere. A beginner's mistake can get to be a habit.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'I don't want to hear it again, that name.'

  'I apologized . . . 'Vanni, he called her the uccello da richiamo, the decoy. We talked about the Trojan Horse. The horse had access. For 'Vanni, she's Codename Helen. Can you live with that?'

  Axel, standing loosely, lit a cigarette. 'It'll do.'

  'Where is she?'

  'About checking in, I should think. You got my package?'

  From the ring of keys on the chain at his belt, he unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk. He took out the padded bag. The bag had come with the cargo on a military flight to 6th Fleet from Engineering Research Facility at Quantico, then had been brought to Rome by a Navy courier from Naples.

  'Thanks. I'll be getting on.'

  Axel Moen held the package and seemed to stare at it for a moment, then dropped it into his small bag. He was turning away.

  'Hey, Heather rang for you. Seems Defense Attache's a party on tonight. I said you wouldn't be able to go, I told Heather that.'

  'Why'd you do that?'

  The emphasis steeled his voice. 'Because, Axel, I assumed that Miss Codename Helen, described by you as "ordinary" and "predictable", might be stressed up, might need some care before she goes down there. Aren't you taking her to dinner?'

  The shaken head. 'No.'

  'Shouldn't you be taking her to dinner?'

  Axel said, 'It's good for her to be alone. I can't hold her hand, in Palermo I can't nanny her. She's got to learn to be alone.'

  It was as the memory had been, the memory she had guarded as a treasure, in privacy, for the last four years.

  In the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, in front of the imperial tomb encased in glass, Charley could have shouted her delight. In the Piazza Popolo, surrounded by the rushing river of cars and vans and motorcycles, Charley could have screamed the news that she had returned.

  A heady and excited delight caught at her, as a narcotic would have. It was to her, the solitary young woman walking the old streets and scuffing her toes on the uneven cobbles and skipping over the dog dirt and the refuse, an evening of triumph. Around her were the evening crowds of the beautiful people, beside her were the open shops of clothes and designed furniture, above her were the peeling ochre buildings. Like the renewal of a love affair. Like seeing, after long absence, a man standing and waiting for her, and running headlong to him, sprinting to jump towards him and his arms. It was one evening, it was so precious. She found again, as she had found them in the summer of 1992, the little courtyards off the Via della Dataria and the churches with the high doors off the Corso, the steps above Piazza Espagna where the Arab boys sold rubbish jewellery, the fountain of Bernini in Piazza Navona. She stood by the edifice to Vittorio Emanuele and looked the length of the wide street to the far-away, floodlit Colosseum.

  It was Charley's heaven . . . For three hours she ran and walked and ambled through the streets of the centro storico, and knew happiness again. When she was tired, bruised feet aching, Charley had to kick herself because the impulse was to find the bus stop on the Corso, or the rank of yellow taxis, and head north for the apartment on Collina Fleming. She had thought, many times, that she saw a younger woman walking with Angela Ruggerio and carrying the shopping bags, a younger woman walking with Giuseppe Ruggerio and smiling up at him as he joked, a younger woman walking with small Mario Ruggerio and holding his hand and laughing with his love . . .

  She took her dinner in a ristorante, a table to herself, and was served by grave-faced waiters a meal of pasta and lamb with spinach, and she drank all of the gassy water and most of a litre of wine, and she left a tip that was near to reckless and felt her self-esteem.

  She strolled from the ristorante the few yards back to the hotel in which she had been booked, near to the river, off the Via della Scrofa, near to the Parliament. Outside the narrow door of the hotel, across the alleyway, a radio blared from an open workshop and a man in greasy vest and torn jeans repaired motorcycles. She looked at him, she caught his eye, she winked at him, as if it were her city. In Italian, her best, she asked the portiere at the reception for coffee in the morning and a copy of La Stampa, and with an impassive expression he had answered her in English that she would indeed have coffee and a newspaper, and she'd giggled like a child.

  Her room was tiny and stifling hot. She switched on the TV, habit, scattered her clothes on the bed and the carpet, habit, went for a shower, habit. She let the lukewarm water sprinkle on her upturned face and wash away the dirt of the streets. She towelled herself hard. She would sleep naked in the sheets. She was alone, she was free, she controlled her destiny, and she bloody well was going to sleep naked and she looked, her opinion, bloody good naked. She was standing before the mirror, bloody good and .

  . .

  In the mirror, behind what she thought was her bloody good nakedness, was the inverted television picture. A body in a street, a bustle of photographers pressing on the body and held back by the languid arm of a policeman. The trousers of the body were down at the ankles, the underpants were down at the knees, the groin was as naked as her body and bloodstained, the bare chest of the body was slashed by torture cuts, the mouth of the body bulged with the penis and the testicles cut from the groin. She held the towel now tight against her skin, as if to hide her nakedness from the eye of the mirror and the eye of the television. The commentary on the television said that the body was of a Tunisian man, a pusher of hard drugs, who had tried to trade in the streets behind the stazione centrale of Palermo.

  Charley lay in bed. The alcohol had drained from her. She heard each shout, each siren, each roar of a motorcycle without an exhaust. Away in the south was the crevice home of what Axel called la piovra, the source of the spreading and writhing tentacles of the octopus. Palermo.

  Could an individual change anything? Answer yes or answer no . . .

  Could a single person alter a situation? Answer yes or answer no . . .

  Don't know, don't bloody know.

  She put the light out. She lay huddled in her bed and she held herself as if to protect her nakedness.

  The night lay on the city of Palermo. The journalist from Berlin yawned. Below the apartment windows, muffled because the glass was reinforced and the shutters were closed and the drape curtains drawn, only occasional cars passed. The journalist yawned because he could see that the interview granted him, so late, would not fit easily into the article commissioned by his editor.

  The senator said, 'You foreigners, you see La Cosa Nostra in Sicily as a "Spectre", you see it as a character in the fiction of Ian Fleming. It makes me laugh, your ignorance. The reality is a centaur, half a knight in bright armour and half a beast. La Cosa Nostra exists because the people want it to exist. It is in the people's life and souls and bloodstream. Consider. A boy of nineteen years has left school, and if he is admitted to the local family, he gets three
million a month, security, structure, culture, and he gets a pistol. But the state cannot give him the security of work, can give him only the culture of TV game shows. The state offers legality, which he cannot eat. From La Cosa Nostra he gains, most important, his self-respect. If you are a foreigner, if you follow the image of "Spectre", you will believe that if the principals of La Cosa Nostra are arrested, then the organization is destroyed. You delude yourself, and you do not comprehend the uniqueness of the Sicilian people. As strangers here you will imagine that La Cosa Nostra rules by fear, but intimidation is a minor part of the organization's strength. Don't think of us as an oppressed society, in chains, pleading for liberation.

  The author, Pitre, wrote, "Mafia unites the idea of beauty with superiority and valour in the best sense of the word, and something more - audacity but never arrogance," and there are more who believe him than deny him. To most people, most Sicilians, the Government of Rome is the true enemy. You asked me, does the arrest of Riina or Santapaola or Bagarella wound the power of La Cosa Nostra? My answer, there are many who are younger, as charismatic, to take their place. Do I disappoint you? This is not the war with a military solution that you want.'

  The journalist blinked his eyes, tried to concentrate on what he was told and to write his longhand note.

  The Capo district, the old quarter of the narrow streets and decaying buildings that had long ago been the glory of the Moorish city, was quiet. The bars were closed, the motorcycles were parked and chained, the windows were opened to admit the slight breath of the warm air. In his room Mario Ruggerio slept, dreamless, and a few inches from his limp and outstretched hand, on the floor beside his bed, was a loaded 9mm pistol. He slept in exhaustion after a day of figures and calculations and deals. A dead sleep that was not troubled by any threat, that he knew of, from any quarter, of imminent arrest. Lonely, without his wife, without the few that he loved, with his pistol on the floor and his calculator on the table,