These were hard and dangerous times for the movement. The odour of risk was in the air, constant after the kidnapping and execution of Aldo Moro, the mobilization of the forces of the State, the harrying of the groups. The gesture on the grand scale by the Brigatisti had been the taking of Moro and the People's Court to try him and pass sentence. But there were many who disputed that this was the way to fight, who counselled caution, argued against the massive strike and favoured instead the process of wearing erosion. More men were rallied against them now; there was more awareness, more sophistication. It was a time for the groups to burrow deeper, and when they surfaced on the street it was in the knowledge that the risks were greater, the possibility of failure increased.
Swerving across the traffic lanes, Enrico brought the car to rest spanning the gutter, half on the pavement, half in the road.
Franca wore a watch on her wrist, but still asked with a flow of irritation in her voice:
'How long till it opens?"
Enrico, accustomed to her, did not reply.
'Two minutes, perhaps three, if they begin on time,' Giancarlo said.
'Well, we can't sit here all morning. Let's get there.'
She slipped the door open, swung her feet out and stretched on the pavement, leaving the boy to fiddle at getting her seat forward so that he could follow her. As she started to walk away Enrico went hurrying after her because his place was at her side and she should not walk without him. To Giancarlo, her stride was light and perfect, shivering in the taut and faded jeans. And she should walk well, thought the boy, because she does not carry the cold clear shape of the P38 against her flesh buried beneath a shirt and trouser belt. Not that Giancarlo would have been without his gun. It was more than a tube of chewing gum, more than a packet of Marlboro. It was something he could no longer live without, something that had become an extension of his personality. It owned a divinity to Giancarlo, the P38 with its simple mechanism, its gas routes and magazines, its hair-trigger, its power.
'No need for us all to be in there,' Franca said when Giancarlo was at her side, Enrico on the other flank, and they were close to the Post doorway. 'Get yourself across the road to the papers.
And get plenty if we're to be stuck in the flat for the rest of the day.'
He didn't wish to leave her side, but it was an instruction, a dismissal.
Giancarlo turned away. He faced the wide and scurrying lanes of early morning traffic, looked for the opening that would enable him to reach the raised centre bank of the Corso Francia.
There was a newspaper stall on the far side nearly opposite the Post. There was no hurry for him because however early you came to the Post there was always a man there before you; the pathetic fools who were paid to take the bills and the money for gas and telephone and electricity because it was beneath the dignity of the borghese to stand and wait in a line. He saw the opening, a slowing in the traffic and launched himself through the welter of bonnets and bumpers and spirited horns and spinning wheels. A hesitation in the centre. Another delay before the passage was clear and he was off again, skipping, young-footed, across the remaining roadway to the stand with its gaudy decoration of magazine covers and paperbacks. He had not looked back at Franca and did not see the slowly cruising car of the Squadra Mobile far out in the traffic flow of the road behind him.
Giancarlo was unaware of the moment of surging danger, the startled gape of recognition on the face of the vice brigadiere as he riveted on the features of the woman, half in profile at the entrance to the Post and waiting for the lifting of the steel shutter.
Giancarlo did not know as he took his place ih the queue to be served that the policeman had savagely urged his driver to maintain speed, create no warning, as he rifled through the folder of photographs kept permanently in the glove box of the car.
The boy was still shuffling forward as the first radio message was beamed to the Questura in central Rome.
Giancarlo stood, hands in pockets, mind on a woman as the radio transmissions hit the air. While cars were scrambling, accelerating, guns being armed and cocked, Giancarlo searched his memories, finding again the breasts and thighs of Franca.
He did not protest as the woman in the cream coat pushed past him without ceremony, passing up the opportunity to sneer and laugh so that she should be discomfited. He knew the newspapers he should buy. L'Unita of the PCI, the communists; La Stampa of Turin, the paper of Fiat and Agnelli; Repubblica of the Socialists; Popolo of the right, il Messaggero of the left. Necessary always, Franca said, to have il Messaggero so that they could browse through the 'Cronaca di Roma' section and read of the successes of their colleagues in different and separated cells, learn where the Molotovs had landed in the night, what enemy had been hit, what friend taken. Five papers, a thousand lire.
Giancarlo scratched in the hip pocket of his trousers for the dribble of coins and the crumpled notes he would need, counting out the money, standing his ground against the pushing of the man behind him. He would ask Franca to replace it, it was she who kept the cell's money, in the small wall safe in her room with the combination lock and the documents for identity changes, and the files on targets of future attacks. She should replace the money - a thousand lire, three bottles of beer if he went to the bar in the evening. It was all right for him to go out after dark, it was only Franca who should not. But he would not be drinking beer that evening, he would be sitting on the rug at the feet of the woman and close to her, rubbing his shoulder against her knee, resting his elbow on her thigh, waiting for the indications of her tiredness, her willingness for bed. He had been to the bar the night before, after their meal, and come back to find her drooped in the chair and Enrico sprawled and sleeping opposite her on the sofa with his feet on the cushions. She had said nothing, just taken his hand and turned off the lights and led him like a lamb to her room, and still she had not spoken as her hands slipped down the length of his shirt to his waist The agony of waiting for her would be unendurable.
Giancarlo paid his money, stepped back from the counter with the folded newspapers and scanned the front page of il Messaggero. Carillo of Spain and Berlinguer of Italy were meeting in Rome, a Eurocommunist summit middle-class, middle-aged, a betrayal of the true proletariat. A former Minister of Shipping was accused of having his hand in the till, what you'd expect from the bastard Democrazia Cristiana. The steering committee of the Socialists was sitting down with the DC, games being played, circles of words. A banker arrested for tax evasion.
All the sickness, all the foetid corruption was here, all the cancer of the world they struggled to usurp. And then he found the head-lines that would bring the smile and the cold mirth to Franca; the successes and the triumphs. One of their own, Antonio de Laurentis of Napoli, missing inside the maximum security gaol on Favignana island, described as 'most dangerous', a leader of the NAP, inside the prison and they'd lost him. An executive of Fiat shot in the legs in Turin, the thirty-seventh that year to have the people's sentence inflicted and the year not eight months old.
He tucked the papers under his arm and looked out across the road to the Post. Franca would be furious, icy, if he kept her waiting. It was heavily parked now around their 128. Two yellow Alfettas there and a grey Alfasud, close to their own car. He wondered whether they'd be able to get out. God, she'd be angry if they were boxed. Over the top of the traffic, solid and un-passable to him, Giancarlo saw Enrico emerge from the doorway, cautious and wary. Two paces behind him, Franca, cool, commanding. His woman. Christ, she walked well, with the loping stride, never an eye left nor right.
And the blur of movement. Shatteringly fast. Too quick for the boy to retain. Franca and Enrico were five, six metres from the entrance to the Post. The doors of the three intruding cars bulged and split open. Men running, shouting. The moment of clarity for Giancarlo, he saw the guns in their hands. The two at the front sprinted forward, then dived for the crouch with the automatics held straight arm to the front. Enrico twisted his arm back for the hang
ing flap of the shirt tail and the concealed Beretta.
Across the traffic and tarmac void Giancarlo heard the shriek of the doomed Enrico. The cry for the woman to run. The scream of the stag that will stand against the dogs to give time for the hind to hasten to the thickets. But her eyes were faster than his, her mind quicker and better able to assess the realities of the moment. As his gun came up to face the aggressors she made the quicksilver decision of survival. The boy saw her head duck and disappear behind the roofs of the passing cars, and then there was the vision of her, prone on the stomach, hands on her head.
Enrico would not see her, would believe in his last sand-running moments that his sacrifice had achieved its purpose.
Even as he fired, he was cut down by the swarm of bullets aimed at him in a thunderclap of gunfire, and lay writhing on the pavement as if trying to shake away a great agony, rolling and rolling from his back to his belly. The men ran forward, still suspicious that their enemy might bite, might hurt. There was a trail of blood from Enrico's mouth, another two from his chest that meandered together and then separated, and more crimson paths etching from his shattered legs. But his life lingered and a hand scrabbled at the dirt for the gun that had been dropped, that had fallen beyond reach. The men who towered above him wore jeans and casual slacks and sweatshirts, and some were unshaven or bearded or carried their hair long on their shoulders. Nothing to tell them from Enrico and Giancarlo. These were the men of the Squadra Anti-Terrorismo, undercover, dedicated, as hard and ruthless as those they opposed. A single shot destroyed the frenzy of Enrico's groping hands.
An execution bullet. Just as it had been said it was when the carabinieri dropped La Muscio on the church steps near the Colosseo. Bastards, bastard pigs.
A man beside Giancarlo crossed himself in haste, a private gesture in the glare of a public moment. Down the road a woman bent in sickness. A priest in long cassock abandoned his car in the road and ran forward. Two of the men covered the figure of Franca, their guns roaming close to her head.
A terrible pain coursed through the boy as his hands stayed clamped on the folded newspapers and would not waver towards the gun buried in the flesh of his buttock. He watched, part of the gathering crowd, terrified of risking the intervention that Enrico had affected. He willed himself to run forward and shoot because that was the job the movement had chosen for him, protector and bodyguard of Franca Tantardini. But if he did his blood would run in the deep gutter, company for Enrico's. There was no thrust in his legs, no jolt in his arms; he was a part of those who stayed and waited for the show to end.
They pulled the woman, unresisting and limp, to her feet and dragged her to a car. Two had their hands on her upper arms, another walked in front with his fist caught in the long blonde strands of her hair. There was a kick that missed at her shins. He could see that her eyes were open but bewildered, unrecognizing as she went to the opened car door.
Would she have seen the boy she had opened herself to a short night before?
Would she have seen him?
He wanted to wave, give a sign, shout out that he had not abandoned her. How to show that, Giancarlo? Enrico dead, and Giancarlo alive and breathing, because he had stepped back, had dissociated. How to show it, Giancarlo? The car revved its engine and its horn was raucous as it pulled out into the open road, another Alfetta close in escort behind. The cars swung across the central reservation, lurching and shaken, and completed their turn in front of where Giancarlo stood. The crowd around him pressed forward to see better the face of the woman, and the boy was among them. And then they were gone and one of the men held a machine-gun at the car window. A fanfare of sirens, an explosion of engine power. For a few moments only he was able to follow the passage of the cars in the growing traffic before they were lost to him, and the sight of Enrico was taken from him by a moving bus.
Deep in a gathering shame at the scope of his failure, Giancarlo began slowly to walk away along the pavement. Twice he bumped into men who hurried towards him, fearful that they had missed the excitement and that there was nothing remaining for them to see. Giancarlo was careful not to run, just walked away, not thinking where he should go, where he should hide.
Too logical, such thoughts for his fractured mind to cope with.
He saw only the stunned deep golden eyes of Franca, who was handcuffed and for whom a boy had not stepped forward.
She had called him her little fox and scratched with her nails at his body, had kissed him far down on the flatness of his stomach, had governed and tutored him, and he drifted from the place, feet leaden, unseeing with the moisture in his eyelids.
The British Embassy in Rome occupies a prime site set back from high railings and lawns and a stone-skirted artificial lake at 80a Via XX Settembre. The building itself, unlikely and original, supported by pillars of grey cement and with narrow arrow-slit windows, was conceived by a noted English architect after the previous occupant of the grounds had been destroyed by the gelignite of Jewish terrorists . . . or guerrillas . . . or freedom fighters, a stop-over in their search for a homeland. The architect had fashioned his designs at a time when the representatives of the Queen in this city were numerous and influential. Expense and expediency had whittled down the staff list. Many diplomats now doubled on two separate jobs.
The First Secretary, who handled matters of political importance in Italian affairs had also taken under his umbrella the area of liaison with the Questura and the Viminale. Politics and security, the aesthetic and the earthy, strange bed partners. That Michael Charlesworth's two previous foreign postings had been in Vientiane and Reykjavik was a source of astonishment neither to himself nor his colleagues. He was expected to master the local intricacies of a situation inside three years, and this accomplished, he could correctly anticipate that he would be sent to a country about which he had only the most superficial knowledge. After Iceland and the tangled arguments of the Cod War, with the island's fishing interests ranged against the need of his country-men to eat northern water fish from old newspapers, Roman politics and police had a certain charm. He. was not dissatisfied.
Charlesworth had demanded and won a rise in rent allowance from his Ambassador and had been able to set up home with his wife in a high-roofed flat within earshot, but not sight, of the Piazza del Popolo in the centro storico. The garaging of a car there was next to impossible and while his wife's veteran 500 was parked beneath the condescending eyes of the Vigili Urbani in the piazza, he himself cycled to work on the machine he had first used twenty years earlier as a Cambridge undergraduate. The sight of the dark-stripe-suited Englishman pedalling hard along the Corso d'ltalia and the Via Piave with collapsible umbrella and attache case clamped to the carrier over the rear wheel was a pleasing sight to Italian motorists, who from respect for his efforts afforded him unusual circumspection. Once the slopes of the Borghese Gardens had been surmounted, the bicycle provided Charlesworth with fast and intrepid transport, and often he was the first of the senior diplomatic staff to reach his desk.
A salute from the gatekeeper, the parking and padlocking of the machine, the shaking free of trouser turn-ups from the clips, a wave to security in the ground-floor hall, a gallop up two flights of stairs, and he was striding along the back second-floor corridor. Fully three doors away he heard the telephone ringing from his office. Fast with the key into the lock, swinging the door open to confront the noise, abandoning the briefcase and umbrella to the floor, he lunged for the receiver.
'Pronto.' Panting a little, not the way he liked to be.
'Signor Charlesworth F
'Yes.'
'La Questura. Dottore Giuseppe C a r b o n i . . . momento.'
Delay. First a crossed line. Apology, rampant clicking and interruption before Charlesworth heard the Questura switchboard announce with pride to Carboni that the task was accomplished, the connection successful. They were not friends, the policeman and Michael Charlesworth, but known to each other, acquainted. Carboni would know that Charleswo
rth was happier in English, that language courses were not always victorious. With a faint American accent Carboni spoke.
•Charlesworth, that is you ?'
'Yes.' Caution. No man is happy talking to the police, least of all to foreign police at fourteen minutes past eight in the morning.
'I have bad news for you, my friend. Bad news to give you for which I am sorry. You have a businessman in the city, a resident, a man called Harrison. He is the financial controller of ICH in EUR, International Chemical Holdings. They are at Viale Pasteur in EUR, many of the multinationals favour that a r e a . . . '
What's the silly blighter done, thought Charlesworth resigned.
Socked a copper? Drunk himself stupid? No, couldn't be that, not if Carboni was calling, not if it was at that level.'... I regret very much, Charlesworth to have to tell you that Geoffrey Harrison was kidnapped this morning. Armed men, forced from his car near his home.'
'Christ,' muttered Charlesworth, low but audible.
' I understand your feelings. He is the first of the foreign residents, the first of the foreign commercials to be affected by this plague.'
' I know.*
'We are doing everything we can. There are road blocks .. .'
The distant voice tailed and died, as if Carboni knew the futility of boasting to this man. He came again. 'But you know, Charlesworth, these people are very organized, very sophisticated. It is unlikely, and you will understand me, it is unlikely that what we can do will be sufficient.'
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