RED FOX

by Gerald Seymour

  'I know,' said Charlesworth. An honest man he was talking to, and what to say that wouldn't be churlish. ' I am confident you will exercise all your agencies in this matter, completely confident.'

  'You can help me, Charlesworth. I have called you early, it is not half an hour since the attack, and we have not yet been to the family. We have not spoken to his wife. Perhaps she does not speak Italian, perhaps she speaks only English, we thought it better if someone from the Embassy should be with her first, to give her the news.'

  The dose prescribed for diplomats seeking nightmares was purveying ill-tidings to their own nationals far from home. A stinking, lousy job and indefinite involvement. "That was very considerate of you.'

  'It is better also that you have a doctor go to her this morning.

  In many cases we find that necessary in the first hours. It is a shock . . . you will understand.'

  'Yes.'

  ' I do not want to lecture you at this stage, because soon you will be busy, and I am busy myself in this matter, but you should make a contact with Harrison's employer. It is a London-based company, I believe. If they have taken the employee of a multinational they will be asking for more than poor Harrison's bank balance can provide. They will believe they are ransoming the company. It could be expensive, Charlesworth.'

  'You would like me to alert the company to this situation?'

  Charlesworth scribbled hard on his memo pad.

  'They must make their attitude clear, and quickly. When the contact is made they must know what attitude they will take.'

  'What a way to start the bloody day. Well, they'll ask, me this, and it may colour their judgement: you would presume that this is the work of a professional, an experienced gang?'

  There was a faint laugh, quavering over the telephone line before Carboni replied. 'How can I say, Charlesworth? You read our newspapers, you watch the Telegiornale in the evening. You know what we are up against. You know how many times the gangs are successful, how many times we beat them. We do not hide the figures, you know that too. If you look at the results you will see that a few of the gangs are amateur - you English, always you want to reduce everything to sport - and we catch those ones.

  Does that give us a winning score? I would like to say so, but I cannot. It is very hard to beat the professionals. And you should tell to Harrison's firm when you speak with them that the greater the police efforts to release him, the greater the risk to his life.

  They should not forget that*

  Charlesworth sucked at his pencil top. 'You would expect the company to pay what they are asked to?'

  'We should talk of that later. Perhaps it is premature at this moment.' A gentle correction, made with kindness, but a correction nevertheless. Not manners to talk of the will and the beneficiaries while the corpse is still warm. 'But I do not think that we would expect the family or the company of a foreigner to adopt a differing procedure to that taken by our own families when they are faced with identical problems.'

  The invitation to pay. It wouldn't be made clearer than that.

  The invitation not to be stubborn and principled. Pragmatism winning through, and a bloody awful scene for a policeman to have to get his nose into.

  'There may be some difficulty. We don't do it like that in England.'

  'But you are not in England, Charlesworth.' The taint of impatience from Carboni. 'And in England you have not always been successful. I remember two cases, two ransom demands unmet, two victims found, two deaths. It is not a straightforward area of decision, and not one which we can debate. Later perhaps, but now I think there are other things that you wish to do.'

  ' I appreciate greatly what you have done, Dottore.'

  ' It is nothing.' Carboni rang off.

  Five minutes later Charlesworth was in the ground-floor hall of the Embassy waiting for the arrival of the Ambassador, still shrill in his ears the piercing protests of the woman he had telephoned.

  Who was going to pay?

  Didn't they know they hadn't any money?

  Nothing in the bank, just a few savings.

  Who was going to take responsibility?

  Not a conversation that Charlesworth had relished and his calming noises had been shouted out till he'd said he had to go because he must see the Ambassador. No more blustering after that; just a deep sobbing, a pain echoing down the wire to him, as if some dam of control and inhibition had been broken.

  Where was he, the poor sod? What were they doing to him?

  Must be a terrible loneliness. Mind-bending, horrific. And damn-

  all for comfort. Didn't even know that idiots like Michael Charlesworth and Giuseppe Carboni were Sapping their wings and running in circles. Better he didn't know it; it might make him turn over and give up. And what chance the Ambassador being in before nine? What bloody chance?

  They'd tied him expertly as they would have done a lively bullock going to slaughter. Not a casual job, not just a length of rope round his legs.

  Geoffrey Harrison had lain perhaps twenty minutes on the coarse sacking on the van floor before he had tried to move his ankles and wrists. The effects of the chloroform were dissipating, the shock of capture and the numbness of disorientation sliding.

  The nobbled bones on the inside of his ankles wrapped in cord caught hard against each other, digging at the flesh. The metal handcuffs on his wrists, set too tight for him, pressed on the veins and arteries. Tape, adhesive and broad, was across his mouth, forcing him to breath through his nose, reducing any sounds he could make to a jumbled, incomprehensible moan. One man had trussed him swiftly before the chloroform had gone to be replaced by the desperate passiveness of terror in an alien surrounding. And they'd hooded him, reducing his horizons to the limited things he could touch and smell. The hood was cool and damp as if it had spent the night in the grass, been subject to the light dew and retrieved before the coming of the drying warmth of the early sun. Because of the handcuffs behind his back he lay on his right side where the undulations of the road surface caused his shoulder to impact through the sacking against the ribbed metal floor.

  They seemed to move at a constant speed as if far from the reach of traffic lights and road junctions, and many times Harrison heard the whine of overtaking engines, and occasionally the van shuddered as if under strain and pulled out to the left. Just once they stopped, for a short time, and he heard voices, a rapid exchange, before the van was moving again, riding through its gears, getting under way and back to the undisturbed progress. He thought about and conjured a route along the Raccordo Annulare with its festoons of white and pink oleander between the central crash barrier, and imagined the halt must have been at the toll gate for entry to an autostrada. Could be north on the Florence road, or west for L'Aquila and the Adriatic coast, or south for Naples. Could be any bloody direction, any road the animals wanted to use. He'd thought he'd been clever and superior in his intellect to make the calculations, and then came the wave of antipathy, carried on the wing. What did it matter which direction they took? It was a futile and petty exercise, because the control of his destiny was removed, turning him into a bloody vegetable. Anger surfaced for the first time, and spent itself straining against the ankle cords, striving to bite with his teeth against the tape across his mouth. It created a force and a power that struggled even as the tears rose and welled.

  In one convulsion, one final effort to win even the minimum of freedom for any of his limbs, he arched his back, forced his muscles.

  Couldn't shift. Couldn't move. Couldn't change anything.

  Pack it in, Geoffrey, you're being bloody pathetic.

  Once more?

  Forget it. They don't come with machine-guns and chloroform and then find, surprise, surprise, that they don't know how to tie knots.

  As he sagged back his head thumped on the floor above the reach and slight protection of the sacking and he lay still with the ache and the throb in his temples and the smell of the hood in his nose. Lay still because he could do
nothing else.

  C H A P T E R T H R E E

  The immediate sense of survival was uppermost now in the mind of Giancarlo.

  It was the instinct of the stoat or the weasel that has lost its mate and must abandon its den, move on, but has no notion of where to go, only that it must creep stealthily away from the scene of its enemies' vengeance. He wanted to run, to outstrip the pedestrians who cluttered and barred the pavements, but his training won out. He did not hurry. He strolled, because he must blend, must forsake the identity bestowed on him by the P38.

  The noise and confusion and shouting of the beginning of a new day swamped him. The hooting of impatient motorists. The crashing intrusion of the alimentari shutters rising in their doorways and windows to display the cheese and hams and tins and bottles. The arguments that spilled from the bars. Confident, secure sounds, belonging and with a right to be there, swarming around Giancarlo. The boy tried to shut inside himself his concentration and avoid the cancer of these people that swept and surged past him. He belonged to no part of them.

  Since the NAP had drifted into existence in the early nineteen-seventies, coalesced from a meeting of minds and aspirations to an organization, it had derived its principal security from the cell system. Nothing new, nothing revolutionary in that; laid down by Mao and Ho and Guevara. Standard in the theoretical treatises. Separated in their cells the members had no need for the identity of other names, for the location of other safe houses.

  It was essential procedure, and when one was taken, then the wound to the movement could be swiftly cauterized. Franca was their cell leader. She alone knew the hidden places where am-munitions and materials were stored, the telephone numbers of the policy committee, and the lists of addresses. She had not shared with Enrico, much less with the boy, the probationer, because neither required such information.

  He could not go back to his previous fiat where he had lived with a girl and two boys as that had been closed and abandoned.

  He could not tour the cars and streets of Pietralata behind the Tiburtina station and ask for them by name; he wouldn't know where to begin, and who to ask. It made him shudder as he walked, the depths of the isolation in which the movement had so successfully cloaked him.

  Where among the streaming, scrambling crowds that passed on either side of him did he find the nod and handshake of recognition? It was frightening to the boy because without Franca he was truly alone. Storm clouds rising, sails full, rudder flapping, and the rocks high and sharp and waiting.

  Giancarlo Battestini, nineteen years old.

  Short and without weight, a physical nonentity. A body that looked perpetually starved, a face that seemed for ever hungry, a boy that a woman would want to take in and fatten because she would fear that unless she hurried he might wither and fade.

  Dark hair above the growth of his cheeks that was curled and untidy. A sallow, wan complexion as if the sun had not sought him out, had avoided the lustreless skin. Acne spots at his chin and the sides of his mouth that were red and angry against the surrounding flesh and to which his fingers moved with embarrassed frequency. The pale and puckered line across the bridge of his nose that deviated on across the upper cheekbone under his right eye was his major distinguishing mark. He had the polizia of the Primo Celere to thank for the scar, the baton charge across the Ponte Garibaldi when the boy had slipped in headlong flight and turned his ankle. He had been a student then, enrolled two terms at the University of Rome, choosing the study of psychology for no better reason than that the course was a long one and his father could pay for four years of education.

  And what else was there to do?

  The University with its bulging inefficiency had seemed to Giancarlo a paradise of liberation. Lectures too clogged to attend unless you took a seat or standing place a full hour before the professor came. Tutorials that were late or cancelled. Exams that were postponed. A hostel within walking distance in the Viale Regina Elena where the talk was long and bold and brave.

  Heady battles they had fought around the University that winter. The Autonomia in the van, they had driven the polizia back from the front facade of arches and across the street to their trucks. They had expelled by force Luciano Lama, the big union man of the PCI, who had come to talk to them on moderation and conformity and responsibility; thrown him out, the turn-coat communist in his suit and polished shoes. Six hundred formed the core of the Autonomia, the separatists, and Giancarlo had first hung round their fringe, then attended their meetings and finally sidled towards the leaders and stammered his pledge of support. Warm acceptance had followed. A paradise indeed to the boy from the seaside at Pescara where his father owned a shop and carried a stock of fine cotton dresses and blouses and skirts in summer, and wool and leather and suede in winter.

  Hit and run. Strike and retreat. The tactical battles of the Autonomia, were in the name of repression in Argentina, the deaths in Stamheim of comrades Baader and Raspe and Enselin, the changing of the curriculum. No long searches for cause and justification. Hurt the polizia and the carabinieri, the forces of the new fascism. Goad them into retaliatory dashes from the wide streets that were safe to the narrow maze of centro storico where the Molotovs and the P38s could score and wound. Formidable the polizia looked, with their white bullet-proof tunics lolling to their knees and their stovepipe face masks behind which they felt a false invulnerability. But they could not run in their new and expensive equipment, could only fire the gas and beat the clubs on the plastic shields. They were loath to follow the kids, the Pied Pipers, when the range of the pistols and the petrol diminished.

  A scarf tight across his face for protection both from press photographs and the gas, Giancarlo had never before experienced such orgasmic, pained excitement as when he had sprinted forward on the bridge and launched the bottle with its litre of petrol and smouldering rag at the Primo Celere huddled behind their armoured jeep. A shriek of noise had erupted as the bottle splintered. The flames scattered. There was a roar of approval from behind as the boy stood his ground in defiance while the gas shells flourished about him. Then the retaliation. Twenty of them running, and Giancarlo had turned for his escape. The desperate, terrifying moment when the ground was rising, space under his feet, control lost, and in his ears the drumming of the boots that were in pursuit. His hands covering his head were pulled away as they put the baton in, and there was blood cool across his face and sweet in his mouth, and blows to the leg, kicks to the belly. Voices from the south, from the peasant south, from the servants of the Democrazia Cristiana, from the workers who had been bought and were too stupid to know it.

  Two months in the Regina Coeli gaol awaiting his court appearance.

  Seven months imprisonment for throwing the Molotov to be served in the Queen of Heaven.

  A whore of a place, that gaol. Intolerable heat and stench through that first summer when he had bunked in a cell with two others. Devoid of draught and privacy, assimilated into a world of homosexuality, thieving, deprivation. Food inedible, boredom impossible, company illiterate. Hatred and loathing bit deep in the boy when he was the guest of the Queen of Heaven. Hatred and loathing of those who had put him there, of the polizia who had clubbed him and spat in his face in the truck and laughed in their dialect at the little, humbled intellettuale.

  Giancarlo sought his counterstrike and found the potential for revenge in the top-floor cells of the 'B' Wing where the men of the Nuclei Armati Proletaria were incarcerated, some on remand, some sentenced. They could read in the boy's eyes and in the twist of his lower lip that here was a progeny that could be useful and exploited. He learned in those Heated, sweating cells the theory and the practice, the expertise and the strategy of urban guerrilla conflict. A new recruit, a new volunteer. The men gave him diagrams to memorize of the mechanism of weapons, lectured him in the study of concealment and ambush, droned at him of the politics of their struggle, hectored him with the case histories of corruption and malpractice in government and capitalist business. The
se men would not see the fruits of their work but took comfort that they had found one so malleable, so supple to their will. They were pleased with what they saw. Word of his friendship spread along the landings of his own wing. The homosexuals did not sidle close and flash their hands at his genitals, the thieves left undisturbed the bag under his bunk where he kept his few personal possessions, the Agenti did not bully.

  In the months in gaol he passed from the student of casual and fashionable protest to the political militant.

  His parents never visited him in the Queen of Heaven. He had not seen them since they had stood at the back of the court, half masked from his sight by the guard's shoulders. Anger on his father's face, tears making the mascara run on his mother's cheeks. His father wore a Sunday suit, his mother dressed in a black coat as if that would impress the magistrate. The chains on his wrists had been long and loose, and they gave him the opportunity to raise his right arm, clenched fist, the salute of the left, the gesture of the fighter. Screw them. Give them something to think on when they took the autostrada back across the mountains to Pescara. And his picture would be in the Adriatic paper and would be seen by the ladies who came to buy from the shop and they would whisper and titter behind their hands. In all his time in the gaol he received only one letter, written in the spider hand of his brother Fabrizio, a graduate lawyer and five years his elder. There was a room for him at home, Mama still kept his bedroom as it had been before he had gone to Rome. Papa would find work for him. Therecould be a new start, he would be forgiven. Methodically Giancarlo had torn the single sheet of notepaper into many pieces that flaked to the cell floor.

  When the time came for Giancarlo's release he was clear on the instructions that had been given him from the men in 'B'

  Wing. He had walked out through the steel gates and on to the Lungotevere and not looked back at the crumbling plaster of the high ochre-stained walls. The car was waiting as he had been told it would be and a girl had moved across the back seat to make room for him. First names they called themselves by, and they took him for a coffee and poured a measure of Scotch whisky into the foaming milk of the cappuccino and brought him cigarettes that were imported and expensive.