Killing Ground

by Gerald Seymour

  . He stroked her hand, a small and unimportant gesture to him, as if he patted the paw of a prized pedigree dog, and he smiled in his confidence . . . Angela detested her husband.

  If it were not for the brother, the stumbling, fat little snail of a man, then her husband would be nothing more than another criminal on the streets of the island she loathed. It made her sick, physically sick, when the rough hands of the brother touched the smooth skin of her piccolo Mario, when he slipped through a back door early in the morning or late in the night and touched her son and played on the floor with her son . . .

  Angela smiled at her husband, and he could not see her eyes.

  The tail was on 'Vanni Crespo.

  Before, the tail had been successful only sporadically, but Carmine had directed more men, more picciotti, to the tail.

  The tail could now report each day on the pattern of the life of 'Vanni Crespo. They knew the clothes he would wear, casual or formal or the builder's overalls. They knew the cars he would use, the Alfetta, the Fiat 127, the builder's van. By trial, by error, Carmine had dictated what resources were necessary to cover the movements of 'Vanni Crespo. Each end of the main road leading from the carabineri barracks at Monreale was watched that Sunday morning by a car and by two youths on motorcycles.

  The previous evening, it had been reported to Carmine, 'Vanni Crespo had driven the builder's van to meet with a woman in a lay-by on the road between Trapani and Erice, and the previous afternoon he had used the Fiat 127 and called on the home of a colleague living in Altofonte, and the previous morning he had been in the Alfetta to the barracks at Bagheria.

  Carmine had learned the patience of Mario Ruggerio. Each time he met with the men who drove the cars and the picciotti with the motorcycles, he repeated the description -

  weight near to 80 kilos, height near to 185 centimetres, fair skin, gold hair - of the American man taken to see the magistrate, Tardelli.

  Two cars, three motorcycles, changing position as they went, followed the Fiat 127

  from the barracks at Monreale down the fast road, Route 186, towards Palermo.

  'I said to him, "It is a sad game to play when there is no trust." I said that to him.'

  'He told you that it was not personal.'

  'I suggested to him that he had put "an agent of small importance" close to Mario Ruggerio.'

  'Which he did not care to confirm.'

  'I remarked to him that I would not wish it to lie on my conscience, the danger to that agent, unless the life of the agent was held to be of no importance.'

  'He did not debate semantics with you,' 'Vanni said. 'May I tell you, dottore, what he asked me when we came out of your place in the Palazzo? He asked why you pissed on him. I said you were anxious that you might not have a free hole in your diary for his funeral and for his agent's funeral. They're earnest people, the Americans, he found it difficult to register the humour of what I said.'

  "Vanni, please, I need help.'

  They were alone in the sun-less room of the apartment. Out in the kitchen a radio played, and there were the distant voices of his ragazzi. He had apologized sincerely for interfering with the Sunday plans of the carabiniere officer, but that was the day in the week when he conducted his business within the confinement of the office in his apartment. He did not go to Mass on Sundays, did not take the bread and the wine of Communion, did not think it right to go to a church with his guards and their guns. He would go to church only for funerals and for occasional moments of stressed reflection when he could judge that a church would be emptied, but not on Sunday mornings. His wife would be in church for the Mass in Udine with his children, and he could tell himself that he did not care what man now stood and sat and knelt beside his wife.

  'How may I help, dottore?'

  'I grasp at straws. Mario Ruggerio has taken, with blood, the supreme position.'

  'I read the digests from Intelligence.'

  'Each new man, when he takes the supreme position, must demonstrate to the families that he has strength.'

  'I know the history.'

  'To demonstrate that strength he must attack the state, show that he has no fear of the state. It is now, 'Vanni, a time of extreme danger.' The carabiniere officer, without asking permission, had lit a cigarette, and the smoke from the cigarette watered his eyes. 'It is possible that I am the target, possible, that will demonstrate the strength, but there are many others.' The carabiniere officer was shifting in his seat, awkward, dragging at his cigarette. 'I take you into areas of confidence, 'Vanni, as I hope you will take me into your confidence. This morning I go to the Chief Prosecutor, by whom I will be criticized and taunted, with great politeness, concerning my efforts to capture Mario Ruggerio. I had a wretch who wished for the status of pentito. On the limited information he provided I was given meagre resources for a surveillance of the Capo district, a failure. I urged the wretch to give me more information, played on the psychology of his fear, and he hanged himself, a failure. I have spoken in the last hours with the DIA and with the squadra mobile and they have nothing for me, more failure.

  All around me is the murmur of sneering laughter.'

  'What do you want of me?'

  'You run an agent of small importance, you collaborate with the American, you thought last week that the agent was close. We had champagne, iced, and we waited ...

  It was a blow to my stomach. Please, give me hope, more than a floating straw, 'Vanni, share with me the detail of your agent.'

  'You embarrass me, dottore, but the gift is not mine to give.'

  The carabiniere officer jackknifed to his feet. The magistrate saw the turmoil that he had made, and the officer bit at his lip. It was the true moment, and he recognized it clearly, of his isolation.

  'Of course. Thank you, on a Sunday, for your time.'

  Within fifteen minutes of the departure of the carabiniere officer, 'Vanni Crespo, his friend who would not share with him, Rocco Tardelli was on the move. The ragazzi were quiet around him, moodily silent in the cars. They read the signs of the isolation of a man. The signs were across the inside pages of the newspaper. The newspaper wrote that a prisoner in Ucciardione Prison had three times met with Magistrate Tardelli, and wrote that the prisoner had been told by his wife that she rejected his collaboration, and wrote that the prisoner in Ucciardione Prison had hanged himself, wrote that there should be restrictions on the activities of ambitious magistrates.

  They crossed the city . . .

  The Chief Prosecutor had glanced sharply at his watch, as if to indicate that he had guests to welcome shortly. He had given no indication that Rocco Tardelli should join his guests for lunch.

  'You are an impediment, Rocco. You make a bad image. You disturb the equilibrium.

  You make a problem for me. You fight a crusade, you bully your colleagues, you demand resources. Your crusade, your bullying, your resources, where do they take us?

  They take us to a prisoner, harassed and threatened, driven to take his own life. Where do we go now? From which direction comes the next tragic disaster? I recommend, as a true friend, Rocco, that you should consider your position most carefully. You should consider your position and your future.'

  He could go so easily. He could pass his files to a colleague, he could turn his back on the sniggered laughter and the poisoned barbs, he could be off the island by the evening car ferry or by the early afternoon flight. He could win the smiles and relief and thanks of his ragazzi. He could go so easily.

  'What do you say, Rocco? What would be the best for all of us?' The smile beamed in his face as if to reassure him. 'Is it not time that new horizons beckoned you?'

  He felt old and tired and frightened. The bell rang. The guests had come with flowers and with presents. Old, tired, frightened, and dressed in the clothes he wore for Sundays because he did not go to Mass and did not entertain. His Sunday clothes were crumpled trousers and a shirt that should have been washed and shoes that should have been polished. After he had be
en hustled through the door, down the flight of stairs, across the pavement and into his armour-protected car, after they had driven past the parked cars and vans and motorcycles, after they had come back to his home, he would eat alone in his room. That would be his Sunday, and the next Sunday, isolated . . . He had needed to know the detail, hold the comfort of it, of the agent in place . . .

  He murmured, as he went to the door, 'I don't quit.'

  Benny held the spray can.

  The door was closed. The shutters were across the windows. The radio played inside.

  He aimed. He squirted the spray can. His hand shook. The paint of the spray can was a brilliant red. The red was the colour of blood. The blood from the wounds of his father, the blood that had seeped and spilled on him. The word was forming on the door beside the black drainpipe. A dog barked at him. What she had said beat in his mind as the red paint formed the word ... 'Is it good to be so ineffective that one is unnoticed?'

  She made the strength for him as if she stood beside him, goaded him. 'Is it good to be only an irritation and ignored?' Goaded him because he was ineffective and an irritation and he helped with a newsletter and went to meetings and gummed envelopes. It was for his father. The word, dripping with the scarlet of blood, was on the door of the home of Rosario and Agata Ruggerio. It was madness. ASSASSINO.

  For the love of Charley, for the nakedness of Charley over him, the word 'murderer'

  was in blood, his father's blood, on the door of the parents of Mario Ruggerio. The word was sprayed crudely.

  The madness was done.

  Benny dropped the can.

  He stood in the narrow street, and he heard the sharp whistle behind him. A man watched him, and in the shadow under the peak of his cap the man held his fingers to his lips and whistled. The dog had come and taken the can in its mouth and the spray ran from its mouth as if its jaws bled, as his father had bled. He looked a last time at the work of his madness. He started to walk away. He should have run, but she would not have run. He should have charged, but she would not have, as if her nakedness that covered him gave him her protection. He heard the man whistle again, and he turned, twisted to look behind him, and the man pointed to him . . . She was not there, with him, guarding him . . .

  When he started to run there were men already across the narrow road ahead of him.

  When he stopped, when the fear locked his legs, when he turned, there were men already across the narrow road behind him. She had driven him to the point of madness.

  The men closed on him, coming from ahead of him and from behind him . . . She was not there ... He ran back down the road and past the blood-red paint. Turned, ran again, turned, and stumbled.

  Benny fell.

  He lay on the ground and waited for the men to reach him.

  Mario Ruggerio had been early to Mass, mingling with the worshippers at a church on the Via Marqueda, swimming with the crowds. Most Sundays he used a different church, but the one on the Via Marqueda was the favourite among many, a great and gloomy vault of a building. He had laid a 10,000-lire note in the collection tray, nothing ostentatious, because the church was patronized by the unemployed and the destitute and the jobbing workers of the Capo district and of Via Bari and Via Trabia and Via Rossini, and he matched their best but shabby clothes. He would not have casually missed the celebration of Mass early on a Sunday morning, the Mass was important to him. There were few regrets in the life of Mario Ruggerio, but it was a continuing frustration to him that he could not sit and stand and kneel beside his wife, Michela, at the Mass, nor be with his children, Salvatore and Domenica. He assumed they were followed, watched. Whether he was in the church on the Via Marqueda, another humble and elderly man searching for a path closer to his God, or in any of the other churches that he used, he always thought hard at that time of his family.

  It was now the middle of the day. The restaurants on the Via Volturno and the Via Cavour waited for the families to come, the bars on the Via Roma and the Corso Tukory were filled with talking men. The traffic clogged the streets, the pavements bustled with movement. Before the afternoon, before the time for sleeping came, it was good for Mario Ruggerio to be on the move.

  In a bar Tano told him of the movement patterns of the magistrate, Rocco Tardelli.

  Twelve men, he was told, now logged the routes used by the magistrate for his journeys from the apartment to the Palazzo di Giustizia, from the apartment to Ucciardione Prison, from the Palazzo to Ucciardione Prison, and the reverse routes. He listened, he asked few questions. Tano told him that there were only three streets that the two-car convoy could use when it left the apartment and when it returned to the apartment.

  Tano gave the information. He coughed on his cigarillo, he swilled the dregs of the coffee, he gave the instruction that the bomb should be prepared, he said where it should be placed.

  He moved on busily.

  In the Piazza Castelnuovo, among the crowds gathered to watch the end of the fifteen-kilometre race, under the blare of the loudspeakers, he met with a businessman.

  The businessman had never been convicted of criminal association, was not subject to investigation. The businessman told him that an investment broker from Paris had driven his car the previous Thursday to the sand dunes of the Pas de Calais and there hooked a length of rubber tubing to the exhaust and run the tube into the car and had been found dead the previous Friday. The investment broker had recommended the placing of $1 million in the construction of the tunnel beneath La Manica, and the tunnel between the English coast and the French coast had lost Mario Ruggerio that $1

  million of investment. He listened without comment.

  As he moved he was shadowed by three young men who stood back and apart from him.

  In the Piazza Virgilio, sitting on a bench in the sunshine, an old man who talked with an old friend, he met with the cousin of a man from Prizzi. He had known the man from Prizzi all of his life. He had known the cousin as a youth, but the cousin now lived in Hamburg and had made the long journey specifically for twenty minutes of conversation on a bench in the warmth of the sun. With the cousin of the man from Prizzi he discussed, in close detail, the investment opportunities in the proposed construction of a business park in Leipzig, and the tax breaks that were possible, and afterwards he talked of the similar opportunities in the housing market at Dresden. He pledged, for investment in Leipzig and investment in Dresden, a minimum of $5

  million. He noted the deference of the cousin of the man from Prizzi, as if it were known that he was now the power of La Cosa Nostra.

  On his way again, walking fast, his escort ahead of him and behind him. He was to take a late lunch at an apartment on the Via Terrasanta with the physician who advised him on the remedy for the rheumatism in his hip, but before his lunch he had to meet with the consigliere from Messina for an explanation of that family's future options and their investment co-operation and the percentages of profit... and he was due also to meet with Carmine on the matter of a carabiniere officer and an American . . . and with a chemist from Amsterdam who promised facilities for the manufacture of the new range of benzodiazapines and barbiturates . . . and with Franco to confirm the detail of the pellegrinaggio to the grave of his brother, Cristoforo, the annual pilgrimage with his parents. It was his Sunday, the same every Sunday when the streets and parks and piazzas were crowded, it was his terra-terra routine, down-to-earth and basic, the rhythm of his life on the day the city rested.

  He waited for the traffic lights on the junction to change. The cars swept by him, and down the column of cars was a bus. He lit another cigarillo.

  When he was not tasked for duty, Giancarlo always came on a Sunday with his wife into Palermo. He met with the leader of his team, and the leader's wife, for the regal pomp and majesty of the celebration of Mass at the duomo, and then the four ate an early lunch in a ristorante on the Via Vittorio Emanuele, and the men tried not to talk of work and the women elbowed them viciously when they failed in their intention,
and there was laughter, and after the early lunch they went home to sleep through the afternoon.

  When he came into the centre of Palermo on a Sunday, Giancarlo always took his wife on the bus - too many cars, too few parking places.

  The bus was full. He and his wife stood, and they gripped tight the back of a seat. The bus pitched them when the driver braked, threw them when the driver accelerated. In the morning the leader of the team had told him, while they walked between the duomo and the ristorante, they started a new assignment on the Piazza Kalsa. Just that morsel of information . . . Maybe he would be in a car, maybe in a closed van, maybe, God willing, in a building with the video camera and the binoculars and a good chair -

  maybe there would be no market where they were staked out, and no lemons. The bus stopped sharply. He lurched into his wife. The driver had tried to beat the traffic lights, but had not squeezed through.

  Giancarlo, standing in the aisle of the bus, looking over the shoulder of the driver, saw the family cross the road, and the children held balloons that bounced on lengths of string. When their own kids had been that age, little hooligans, he grinned, they had loved to carry balloons . . .