Killing Ground

by Gerald Seymour

'Where do you think you are? Do you think you are at Stratford- upon-Avon? Do you think the Japanese come here in buses? Are you stupid?'

  'You don't have to be rude.'

  'I am rude because you are stupid.'

  He was breathing hard. His lips twitched in nervousness. He walked fast. They came to the end of the road, where more roads, identical and mean and close, veered away into shadow. Christ, where were the people? Where were the kids?

  'I am sorry, Benny, I am sorry if I am stupid. Spell it out, start with the camera.'

  His feet, a stamped stride, clattered on the cobbles. 'You see nothing here, but you are watched. There would be, of course, a police camera on the street, but that is not important. Because you do not see anybody it does not mean you are not watched.

  Behind doors, behind blinds, behind shutters, behind curtains are people who watch. It is the home of the family of Mario Ruggerio, and Mario Ruggerio is responsible for the deaths of many people. Such a man does not leave his family vulnerable to the vendetta of revenge. Because you do not see something it does not mean that it does not exist. If you had a camera, and took a picture of the house, it is likely that we would be followed, and the number of my car would be taken. I do not want, because you are stupid, to have those people match the number of my car with my name. To a man like Mario Ruggerio the family is the most important feature of his life, only with his family does he relax. We should not stay here.'

  'Where is the wife of Ruggerio?'

  'Two streets from here. Why do you ask, why are there so many questions?'

  'Just me, I suppose. Always talked too much.' 'It would not be sensible for strangers to walk from the street of Ruggerio's parents direct to the street of Ruggerio's wife.'

  'I was only asking . . .'

  He was walking back towards the car. Charley followed.

  'In the story you told me, Placido Rizzotto was killed because he was a nuisance. Was your father a nuisance?'

  'Not a threat, only a nuisance, which is enough.'

  'With the work you do, Benny, are you a nuisance?'

  'How can I know? You know when you see the gun.'

  'Benny, damn you, stand still. Benny, what is your dream?'

  He stood, and for a moment his eyes were closed. Charley took his hand. She waited on him. He said, soft, 'I see him standing, and his head is hung in shame, and the handcuffs are on his wrists, and he stands alone without the backing of his thugs and his guns and his acid barrels and his drugs. He is an old man and he is alone. Around him are the children from Sicily and Italy, from .ill of Europe and from America. The children make a ring around him with their joined hands and they dance in a circle around him, and they laugh at him and they reject him and they jeer at him. My dream is when the children dance around him and have no fear of him.'

  He took his hand from hers.

  I'eppino had the dollars. They had the bank.

  He had not met Russians before, and he thought them quite disgusting.

  Peppino had the dollars on deposit in Vienna. They had the bank in St Petersburg.

  His first meeting with Russians was in a hotel room near the railway station in Zagreb.

  The two Russians wore big gold rings on their fingers, as a whore would, and bracelets of gold at their wrists. Their suits, both of them, were from Armani, which had brought the only dry smile to Peppino's face. The one smile, because he did not think they were people to laugh at, and the cut of the Armani suits did not disguise the muscle power of their shoulders and arms and stomachs and thighs. He assumed they carried firearms, and assumed also that a single blow from the gold-ringed list of either of them would disfigure him for the rest of his life.

  The deal that his brother envisaged was for $50 million to go from deposit in Vienna to their bank in St Petersburg, and on then into investment in the oil-production industry of Kazakhstan. They controlled, they boasted in guttural English, the Minister for Petroleum Extraction and Marketing in Alma Ata. His brother said that the Russians were not to be ignored, that alliances must be forged, that every effort must be made to find routes of cooperation. The co-operation would come through the investment in Kazakhstan, and in return Peppino was instructed to offer facilities to the Russians for the cleaning of their money. For himself, Peppino had only a view of money. His brother had the view of strategy. The strategy of his brother was for cast-iron agreements between La Cosa Nostra and these Russian thugs. His brother said that within five years these crude and vulgar people would have control of the biggest opium-growing area in the world and the biggest arms factories in the world, and their power could not be ignored.

  They frightened Peppino.

  And he was nervous also because they seemed to have no care for their personal security. It was Zagreb, and the Croatian capital was a place for scams and for racketeers, but the city offered easy access to the FBI and to the DEA. He had doubted their hotel room had been swept. He had come into the room and he had immediately turned the TV satellite rubbish up loud and he had sat himself beside the TV's loudspeaker, and they had to strain to hear him against the blast of game-show sound.

  Himself, he was against dealing with these people, but he would never contradict his brother.

  He glanced at his watch, gestured with his hands. He apologized. He must leave for his flight out. Nothing written down, and nothing signed. He must take them on trust.

  He gave them a fax number in Luxembourg, and told them slowly, as if he was with imbeciles, what coded messages would be recognized. He offered them his hand, and his hand was crushed by each of them.

  He stood.

  One Russian said, 'When you see Mario Ruggerio you should pass to him our good wishes that are sent in respect.'

  The second Russian said, 'Mario Ruggerio is a man we learn from, we acknowledge his experience of life.'

  Rubbing his hand, Peppino charged away down the hotel corridor. They had spoken in deference of his brother, as if they held his brother to be a great man. What did it say, their respect, of his brother? He hurried across the foyer of the hotel and out into the street for the doorman to call him a taxi. He had thought them coarse, crude, brutal, and they were the men who offered him their admiration of his brother. He lay back in the taxi. He believed he was the messenger boy of his elder brother, coarse and crude and brutal, who owned him.

  The telephone was ringing. Charley had been back an hour. The telephone was shrill.

  Charley was with the children in the bathroom, soaping them and trying to laugh with them. God, where was Angela to answer the phone? Charley was splashing water and making a game with the children and their shrieks did not drown the bell of the telephone. Angela had the second telephone beside her bed - the bloody pills. Charley wiped her hands on the towel. She hurried into the hall, past the closed door of Angela's bedroom.

  'Pronto.'

  'It's David Parsons. Could I speak to my daughter, Charlotte, please?'

  'It's me. Hello, Dad.'

  'Are you all right, Charley?'

  'How did you get the number?'

  'Directory enquiries - are you all right?'

  'Didn't you get my card?'

  'Just one card. We were worried.'

  'No cause for worry, I am very well and having a wonderful lime.'

  'Your mother wanted me to call, you know what your mother is for worrying. Charley, there was a policeman came, from London, he wanted to know about the American.

  We—'

  Charley snapped, 'Don't talk about it.'

  She had heard the click on the telephone, and the sound of Angela's breathing.

  '. . . wanted to know—'

  'You are not to call me here again. It is very inconvenient for me to take a telephone call. I am fine, and very happy. I'll try to send more postcards. I'm a big girl, Dad, if you'd forgotten, so don't call me again. Love to Mum, and to you, Dad.'

  She heard the breathing.

  'Charley, we only wanted you to know—'

  She p
ut the phone down. Her fingers rested on the watch on her wrist, and she felt herself to be a cruel and vicious bitch. She could picture it in her mind, her father holding the telephone and hearing the purring of the dial tone, and then going into the little living room and away from the telephone on the table below the photograph of her at graduation, and then her father would have to tell her mother that their daughter had brushed him off, as a vicious and cruel little bitch would have, put him down . . . She was Axel bloody Moen's creature. She thought that, one day, she might tell her father of the dream, might tell her father of Benny's dream of dancing children and of an old man in handcuffs who suffered the humiliation of the children's contempt, one day . . .

  Angela stood, sleep-devastated, pill-damaged, at the bedroom door.

  'Sorry if it woke you, Angela,' Charley said, and the cheerfulness was a lie. 'It was my dad, I've been a bit naughty with the postcards, he was just checking I was all right.'

  She went back into the bathroom and took the big towels from the hook. If it were their father in the handcuffs, and their uncle, would small Mario and Francesca be dancing with the dream children? She started to rub them dry.

  'It took me time to recognize him - it was the guy who picked her off the street when she was mugged.'

  'So she wanted to thank him - why the blow-out?'

  'She was with him all day.'

  'So she's lonely, and maybe it's her free day - maybe.'

  'I could kick her arse, hard, with my boot. 'Vanni, she only goes to San Giuseppe Jato, and that's a poison place. Then she goes to Corleone, and that's a bad place. Where in Corleone? She only goes to the Anti-Mafia Co-ordination Group, meets up with those low- life deadbeats.'

  'They are brave people, Axel, committed people.'

  'Who achieve nothing, might as well jerk off. You know where she went after that, and you could see it on the guy's face, like he was shitting himself, she went to Prizzi.'

  'So it's a pretty town, it's interesting.'

  'It's a crap place, Prizzi - there's no scenery that's good, no architecture, no history.

  She wasn't looking for anything good. For Christ's sake, 'Vanni, she only goes marching off down the little shit street where the big guy's parents are. Can you believe it, she walked down the street where Rosario and Agata Ruggerio live? I mean, is that clever?'

  'She's got balls.'

  'She's got a hole in the head where her brain fell out.'

  'And you don't trust her?'

  'To box clever? Not on this show, no, I do not.'

  'But, Axel, you have to trust her. That's your problem isn't it, I hat's the shit on your shoe? She's all you've got. The criticism is irrelevant. And you had an interesting day?'

  'A great day, what I really wanted, hiking round San Giuseppe Jato and Corleone and Prizzi.'

  'But you were there, the chaperone.'

  'It's my job to be there. She was endangering herself - she could have compromised me. That is not goddam funny.'

  Back in Corleone, back where he had come with his grandfather .and his step-grandmother when he was a teenager. Back where his grandfather had found the

  'opportunity' and taken the bribes and handed out the gas coupons. He had been dragged by them past the street where his grandfather had pointed out the wartime AMGOT office. He had tracked Charley past the street to which he had been taken as a teenager to meet his step-grandmother's family, and he had sweated that he might be remembered. Ridiculous to believe that he might be remembered, the features of his face recalled, but the sweat had run on his spine.

  'Who is the man?'

  ' IHe dropped her off in the town. First goddam sense she'd shown, lie didn't march him up to the villa. She was going nowhere but home. I went back to his place, asked around.'

  'Then you came running to me, like you're booked for a coronary.'

  'He's Benedetto Rizzo, late twenties, built like a streak of piss - he's nothing. You know, she stood in the middle of goddam Prizzi after they'd walked the Ruggerio street, and she held his hand and she looked into his face, like she was hot for him.'

  'Perhaps you're short of a woman, Axel.'

  'I don't need shit from you.'

  But Axel Moen had always been short of a woman. There had been women at the university, just casual . . . There had been a good woman when he was on the police in Madison, working in real estate in Stoughton, and he'd brought her flowers and wrapped chocolates, and she'd been of old Norwegian stock, and she'd made Arne Moen laugh when Axel took her up to the Door Peninsula, and it had finished the night he told her he was accepted by DEA, and going to Quantico, because she said she wouldn't follow him . . . There had been a good woman, Margaret, from a publishing house on East 53rd, when he had his head buried in New York with the earphones for the wire taps, and it had taken time but he'd persuaded her to come to the weekend cabins up-state, and they'd done the long hikes and they'd loved, and it was over when he told her he was posted down to La Paz, Bolivia . . . There had been a good woman in La Paz, out of order to mess with a Confidential Informant, a sweet soul and a dedicated mind and with guts, and it was ended when he found her crucified on the back of the door at the airstrip for the estancia . . . There had been a good woman, Margaret again, when he had returned to New York with the bullet-hole souvenir in his stomach flesh, and she liked to run her finger down the scar when they went back to the weekend cabins, but there hadn't been the love as before, and it had been trashed for all time when he'd said he was posted to Rome . . . There was a good woman in Italy, Heather, out of the Defense Attache's office in the main building, and she was wiser than the rest and kept him at arm's length, just convenience for both of them, and they went to the parties together, kept the matchmakers at a distance by showing up at the barbecues and the functions, were seen together when they mutually needed a partner, no loving and nothing to finish . . . And there was a good woman, Charlotte Eunice Parsons . . .

  'So she makes a mistake, walks down a street, isn't sensible. Maybe she knows that, maybe she won't do it again. She's lonely, she holds a man's hand to whom she has reason to be grateful. You know what I believe?'

  'What?'

  'Vanni laughed quietly, and whispered, 'I think you are jealous of the "streak of piss", I think you are jealous of him.'

  'You are pathetic.'

  Axel walked out on the best friend he had in Sicily, out of the cinema.

  A cinema, dark and showing an unpublicized French-language film, empty, was a useful place to meet.

  He took a side entrance out. It was a basic precaution, the sort of care that came naturally to him.

  He was not aware that, at the front of the cinema, a man watched the builder's van that was parked half on the street and half on the pavement.

  TO: Alfred Rogers, DLO, British Embassy, Via XX Settembre, Rome.

  FROM: D/S Harry Compton, S06.

  Action stations this end, going to a war footing. Big politics being played ...

  To impress top brass we urgently require updater on MARIO RUGGERIO, inclusive of bullshit you so expert in. My last still applies. The Pepsi/peanut-butter brigade are not, repeat NOT, Need To Know. Hope this does not interfere with your leisure schedule. Think of Queen and Country as you sacrifice your obese body.

  Bestest, Harry.

  Chapter Eleven

  M iss Frobisher handed the brief message to the detective sergeant.

  TO: D/S Harry Compton, S06.

  FROM: Immigration Desk (EU entrants), Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport.

  BRUNO FIORI (Your ref: 179/HC/18.4.96) arrived ex Zagreb 18.35 Monday. Regret not delayed as requested.

  Barnes, Dawn, Supervising Officer.

  He read it five times, then telephoned the Supervising Officer - Barnes, Dawn. She had one of those chill efficient voices. Yes, Italian passport-holder 'Bruno Fiori' had come off last night's Zagreb flight. Yes, he had been passed through the European Union passengers' desk. Yes, there had been a request from S06, logged, that Italia
n passport-holder 'Bruno Fiori' should be delayed - had the detective sergeant any idea of how many EU passport holders journeyed through Heathrow at that time of an evening? Yes, he had been positively identified, but the logged request for delay had only triggered with the immigration officer, a new probationer, after the passport had been returned. Yes, that officer had shut down his desk and gone through to Customs, Green Channel and Red Channel, but had failed to find Italian passport-holder 'Bruno Fiori' . . . 'There's no requirement for that sort of talk, Mr Compton. We do our best. If you don't like our best, then I suggest you refer the matter to the Home Office and request additional funding for Immigration (Heathrow). And a good day to you too.' So that was a brilliant bloody start to Tuesday morning. Giuseppe Ruggerio back in UK, and the hope had been that, if he returned, he would be held first on a passport technicality, and then done over by Customs as a 'random' check and held long enough for the tail to be scrambled. The brilliant bloody start to a Tuesday morning was a quality foul-up. He hammered down the corridor to his detective superintendent.

  He explained. 'Shit.'

  He showed the communication.

  'Bloody hell.'

  'So what do I do?' Harry Compton could play dumb-insolent as well as the next. He stood in front of the boss-man, with his hands folded across his groin, and the look of innocence on his face. He knew the track that the investigation had taken, that it had gone up the ladder to the commander, from the commander to the assistant commissioner (Special Operations). He knew the spat with the Americans had reached the stratosphere level.

  'It's out of my hands.'

  'What's best then - that I bin it?'

  'Don't smart-talk me.'

  'I rather need to know what I should do. We can put a full surveillance on Blake for a start, go for a full search warrant for Mr Blake. We can shake him up.'

  'I'm not permitted to scratch my bloody nose on this one without authorization, not before we've heard from Rome, then I have to have you back down in Devon and a fat lot—'

  'What I'm asking, do I do something or do I go back to sifting minimal scams on the good old pensioners' savings?'