Killing Ground

by Gerald Seymour

  The sun was in his eyes, the tiredness was in his mind. It was the skill of a driver of a chase car that he should always anticipate the speed and cornering and acceleration and braking of the lead car. Pasquale did not see, in front of the lead car, the woman push her baby buggy out from the pavement and into the road. The junction of Via Carini and Via Archimede, parked cars and vans and motorcycles. The brake lights of the lead car blazed. At Pasquale's horizon, the head of Tardelli jerked forward. The man beside him swore, let loose his machine-gun, flung his hands forward to brace himself.

  Pasquale stamped the brakes. Pasquale swerved as the tail of the lead car seemed to leap back at him. The sun was brilliant in his eyes.

  The woman with the baby buggy was back on the pavement, arms up and shouting.

  The lead car was surging away. Pasquale had locked the wheels, was skidding. The siren screamed above him. He hit the lamppost. He was in shock and dazed. The woman was thrusting the baby buggy towards him, stationary against the lamppost, yelling in hysteria. The crowd was looming around him, hostile and aggressive. He threw the reverse. He clattered into something, didn't bother to look behind him. He pulled forward and nudged the crowd aside, and a man spat at his windscreen. He accelerated. Ahead was the open road. He could not see the light on the roof of the lead car, he could not hear the siren of the lead car.

  Pasquale, in his tiredness, with the sun in his eyes, could have wept.

  The man beside him spoke with a patronizing calmness into the radio.

  'No, no, no, no ambush, no emergency, no panic. Yes, that's the problem, the idiot can't drive. The engine sounds like shit, a lamppost, we'll get there. If I have to rope the idiot up and make him pull it, we'll get there. Over, out.'

  He tried to go faster, but the bumper bar was loosened and scraping the road. When they reached the gates of Ucciardione, as the gates were opened by the police, Pasquale could see two of the crew of the lead car, and they were clapping him home, cheering their applause, laughing at him.

  'I have to know more.'

  Desperation. 'I don't know more.'

  'Then we do not do business.'

  Pleading. 'I told you what I knew, everything.'

  'It is a disappointment to me, which means there will be a disappointment for you.'

  Snivelling. 'Everything I knew I told you, and you promised . . .'

  The magistrate scratched the scalp under his thick grey hair, and then he swung his spectacles from his face and took the arms of the spectacles, where they would fit over his ears, into his mouth. He chewed the plastic. It was his tactic. The tactic was to permit the silence to cling in the interview room. The prisoner was a criminal killer, but Tardelli, in truth, felt some slight sympathy for the wretch. The wretch had crossed over, had tried to co-operate, hut with inadequate information. The next day was the tenth day, and without information of substance he would not be justified in requesting an extension of the surveillance operation. The wretch tried to barter other names, other crimes, but they were not of interest to the magistrate.

  'You have to tell me more about Mario Ruggerio and the Capo district.'

  ' I was told he used the bar. I was told he had the stomach pain. That is all.'

  'Not enough. Where did he stay?'

  'I don't know.'

  'The bar is sold, new owner. The old owner, conveniently, has died. I have no one to ask but you. How often did he go?'

  'I don't know.'

  'What did he wear?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Who was he with?'

  'I don't know.'

  The magistrate laid his spectacles carefully back on the table. The door opened quietly and closed quietly. He shut the file that he had studied and lifted his briefcase from the floor and placed the file in it. The youngest of his ragazzi, Pasquale, stood by the door. There were many approaches, differing tactics, that he employed when questioning Men of Honour. He could be stern or gentle, contemptuous or respectful.

  He could make them believe they were integral to an investigation or that they were irrelevant rubbish. He clicked the catch on his briefcase.

  He said, uninterested, 'You see, my friend, when you are taken back to your cell you will have completed the programme of subterfuge visits to this room. Your mother, a good and devout woman, I am certain, requested that I see you, and I obliged her. Not again because I am a busy man. Let me explain to you the consequences of your lack of detailed knowledge about Mario Ruggerio and your failure to gain protection status.

  There will be someone, I assure you, on the landing of your cell who will know that three times you have been taken to the medical unit. There will also, I assure you, be someone in a different block who, from a high window, will have seen me arrive here three times. Someone will have seen your movements, and someone will have seen my movements. You have to hope those people do not meet, do not talk, do not compare what each has seen. But there is much talk in a place such as this, many meetings. I see that you will have a visit from your wife this afternoon, later. I suggest you talk to your wife, to the mother of your children, and tell her of our meetings, because I believe she might have the possibility of persuading you to remember more. Try hard to remember.'

  The prisoner was taken out.

  The magistrate said, 'The problem, Pasquale, is that I must deal each day with such a man. It is possible to be desensitized, to be dragged down, to lie with them in filth. You think I am vicious, Pasquale? He won't get the protection status, but after a few days, for him to consider the depths of his memory, of his knowledge, I will transfer him to somewhere on the mainland where he is safer. When you lie in filth you become dirtied.'

  He came home from the early shift. He dumped the two plastic bags on the kitchen table. His wife ironed a skirt.

  Through the kitchen's open window came the noise of the tower block, music and shouting and the crying of children and the smell of drains. One more year . . . Perhaps a small apartment by the sea on the east of the island, near Messina or Taormina or Riposto, where La Cosa Nostra was less formidable, perhaps a bungalow with two bedrooms and a pension from the state.

  She hated what he did, and she did not look up from the ironing-board.

  Giancarlo poured himself a glass of juice. He drank the lemon juice that she had made. He took the bags from the table and carried them to the cupboard. There were four cardboard boxes on the floor of the cupboard, one for potatoes, one for fruit, one for green vegetables and one for lemons. Another kilo of potatoes, another kilo of apples and a kilo of oranges, another cauliflower and a half- kilo of spinach, and three more lemons. He looked down at the boxes, all close to being filled.

  She hung the skirt on a wire hanger. She took a blouse from the washing basket.

  He closed the door of the cupboard.

  'It is finished. From tomorrow you do your own shopping.'

  Giancarlo took his pistol from the shoulder holster under his lightweight jacket, and cleared it and took out the magazine. She went on with the ironing. He went to their bedroom to rest. After tomorrow there would be no more lemons for the cardboard box in the kitchen cupboard, and no more potatoes or green vegetables or fruit. He had been too long in the job of surveillance to feel a sense of failure.

  Franco drove. It was an old Fiat 127, a model that was no longer in production. The bodywork was rusted, but the engine, beneath a layer of oil and grime left for casual police inspection, was finely tuned and capable of powering the car to a speed of 170

  kilometres per hour. It was the right car to bring a humble and elderly priest from a country village to a home in mourning. Nothing was left to chance, everything had been prepared with care, the movement of the humble and elderly priest was the responsibility of Franco. Franco, with a day's stubble on his face and wearing a poorly fitting coat and a tie that was not quite straight against the collar of a shirt that was a centimetre too tight, drove slowly because Mario Ruggerio did not like to be thrown around in a fast car. The radio set
in the dash between the knees of Franco and the priest did not play the music and talk of the RAI stations but was tuned to the extremity of the VHF band to receive warnings of military road blocks from the two cars that travelled ahead and warnings, from the car behind, of any possible suspicion of a police tail.

  The sun was down now over the mountains to the west. The lights of Catania merged with the dusk.

  The responsibility of moving Mario Ruggerio to the home, in mourning, of the man from Catania brought rare pride to Franco. There would be police, not in uniform, on the pavement outside the apartment block. There would be hastily rigged cameras, positioned by men dressed in the overalls of the telephone company or the electricity company, covering the front and the rear of the apartment block. The number of the Fiat 127 and its paint colouring would be noted, of course, but by the morning the car would have been resprayed and the registration plates would have been changed. A humble and elderly priest, from the country, would not be harassed by the police, not questioned or body-searched, in the aftermath of death. The pride of Franco came from his belief that the responsibility given him provided an indication, clear as mountain water, that he was now the favourite of Mario Ruggerio - not Carmine, who was an arrogant idiot, not Tano, who was a toad and blown out with self-importance. He believed that more responsibility would be given him until he stood at the right shoulder of Mario Ruggerio, undisputed as the consigliere to Mario Ruggerio. The radio stayed silent. No military road blocks on the approach to the apartment block and no tail. The bastards would be relying on the surveillance teams on the street and the remote cameras. He drove along the street, and when he started to change down through his gears he nudged Mario Ruggerio, respectfully, and pointed to the ashtray.

  The humble and elderly priest stubbed out a cigarillo, coughed hard, spat into a handkerchief. He pulled up smoothly in front of the main entrance to the apartment block, where the street lights were brightest. When he was out of the car, when he would be seen by the surveillance men and by the cameras, Franco seemed to examine a scrap of paper, as if directions had been written on it, as if he were a stranger to the city, as if he merely brought a humble and elderly priest from a village in the country.

  Two young men stood in the shadow near to the door, and there would have been two more across the street, and two more down the street, and they would have cameras.

  The priest walked with the help of a hospital stick, one that had a reinforcing clamp for the upper arm, and Franco walked with him as if ready to take his other arm should the priest stumble. The priest murmured a greeting, perhaps a blessing, to the policemen as he passed them, and they ignored him. The priest walked hesitantly over the marble floor of the hallway to the block as if such luxury were not a part of his life in the village. They took the elevator. The face of Mario Ruggerio was impassive. Franco could not read his thoughts. The man was magnificent. The man had such authority.

  Small, old, and such presence. The empire of the man extended across the width of the island, the length of Europe, the ocean, and Franco was his favourite. It was typical of the magnificence of the man that he came to the front door of the apartment and rang the bell for admittance to the home of a slaughtered rival.

  The door was opened.

  Franco carried a pistol strapped to his shin. He felt a winnowing of fear.

  The apartment was crowded with the supporters of the dead rival and the family. A moment's gesture, Mario Ruggerio's hand on franco's arm, a grip that was steel-hard, the order that he should stay back, and he was passed the hospital stick. Mario Ruggerio, murderer, now capo di tutti capi because a rival had been removed, went forward and the supporters and rivals backed off and made an aisle for him. Franco saw that none dared catch his eye, none had the courage or the stupidity to denounce him.

  Franco followed, into the living room, and he waited by the door as Mario Ruggerio approached the widow, black-clothed, sitting, eyes reddened. The widow rose to greet him. He took the widow's hands and held them in his own. He spoke the words of sincere sympathy. He brought respect. He declined the offer of alcohol from the son of the dead man, a juice would be most welcome. He gave dignity. Gravely, Mario Ruggerio, watched by Franco, thanked the son of the dead man for the juice. His presence was accepted because he brought respect, gave dignity, to a dead man. Franco understood. The power of Mario Ruggerio, dressed as a humble and elderly priest, over La Cosa Nostra was absolute.

  For more than an hour Mario Ruggerio talked with the widow and the widow's son and the widow's family. When he left, he hobbled on his hospital stick past the policemen on surveillance duty, past the cameras.

  With two cars in front and one behind, Franco, who was swollen with pride, drove him back to Palermo through the night's darkness.

  She looked the prisoner straight in the eye, and when he dropped his head, she reached forward and lifted his chin so that he must look at her.

  She was the daughter of the capo of the Kalsa district of the city. Her brothers followed in the footsteps of her father.

  Across the table, in a low voice so that she would not be heard by the guards and by the other prisoners and their families, she spat at him her message.

  'I will tell my children, not your children, my children, that they no longer have a father. I will tell them that they should forget their father. To me, to my children, you are dead. You listened to your mother, always to your mother, so now your mother can wipe your arse for you, but not me and not my children. If I am offered protection, then I will refuse it. What you intend will bring shame on you and on me and on your children. It now disgusts me that I lay with you and made children for you. You swore the same oath as my father, the same oath as my brothers, and you betray the oath. I tell you your future, from the time that I leave here, from the time that I meet with my father and my brothers. Wherever they put you, look to see if anyone is behind you when you stand on steep steps. When you approach any group, consider which man carries the knife. When you lie at night and hear a footstep, consider whether the rope is brought for your throat. When you eat, consider whether the poison is in your food. That is your future. Not my future, not the future of my children, who have no father. To me, to them, you do not exist, never existed.'

  She let his chin fall. The tears flowed on his cheeks. With poise, without looking back, she walked to the door.

  'What I am saying, Bill - you secure at your end?'

  'Secure. Go.'

  'I'm saying there is regular shit stirring at this end.'

  'Am I dumb, Ray? What's your end to do with it?'

  'This show, Codename Helen, the baggage your guy came for.'

  'That's our problem.'

  'My problem too. I got mugged by one of the local people here. Quote, "Taken it upon yourselves, you arrogant bloody people, to pressurize and then send a small-town girl to Palermo for some bloody operation you've dreamed up. Who've you cleared it with?", end quote. Bill, that's why it's my problem.'

  'Where's that going to lead?'

  'Why I'm sweating on it, don't know. I've been in this city, Bill, three years. In three years you get to know the way people work. Here they work devious. The old lion is losing his sight, got flea scrapes, yellow teeth, but he still thinks he hunts with the best of the pride. I'm accused of getting hold of his tail and twisting it. He's angry, and he's quiet, which means he's thinking devious.'

  'You're away ahead of me, Ray.'

  'I thought you should know, they may try to fuck us about.'

  'Aren't we all going in the same direction?'

  'Wouldn't that be nice? What I'm getting to, it would raise a powerful shit-smell if anything happened, unpleasant, to Codename I lelen, to your bit of baggage, like I might be run out of town, like it would go all the way to the top floor. I'll stay close.

  Goodnight, Bill. I just have a bad feeling.'

  He put down the telephone. He switched off the scrambler, then dialled again. He told his wife that he was about through for th
e evening, and he gave her the name and address of the restaurant in the Fulham Road where he'd meet her. He was clearing his desk when he realized that Dwight Smythe was still at his desk outside, and it was always necessary, when the secure scrambler was used, to speak that bit louder.

  'Did you hear that, Dwight?'

  'Sorry, but it would have been difficult not to.'

  'What are you thinking?'

  'Same as I told you first time, same as you ignored. The plan was crazy. When a crazy plan gets disseminated, goes to the top, when the big guys have to guarantee a crazy plan, they run for cover. You're out on your own, Ray, but I expect you thought of that.'

  She lay on her bed and she turned the pages of her book.

  'If that's everything, Angela, I'll get on with the children's baths,' Charley had said. 'I think you've done wonders.'

  'Thank you for your help,' Angela had said.

  And Charley had gone into the living room, where Peppino, home an hour before and jacket off and whisky in his hand and tie loosened, sat and where the children played with the presents that had been brought them. There was a battery-powered car that piccolo Mario raced across the tiled floor, and a doll that Francesca had stripped and then dressed again. For Angela there was a silk headscarf, and for Charley there was a box of lace handkerchiefs. She had left Angela in the kitchen with the pasta ready to go into a saucepan and the sauce already mixed, the meat thin-sliced and in the refrigerator, the vegetables washed, the fruit in a bowl and the cheese on the wood block. The wine was chilled and the mineral water. Beyond Peppino and the children, in the dining alcove, the table had been laid by Charley for eight people.

  'Come on, Mario and Francesca, bath time, come on,' Charley had said.

  'So soon, so early?' Peppino had asked.

  Charley had glanced down at the watch on her wrist. 'Think I'd better be getting on because then I'll need a shower and time to change. I thought I'd wear what you—'