RED FOX

by Gerald Seymour

  On the warm softness of the hay he was soon asleep, curled on his side with his knees pressed up against his chest. His mind closed to all around him, permitting neither dream nor nightmare, he found a peace, stirring hardly at all, his breathing calm and regular.

  The clashes spread far through the centro storico of the capital city. Under cover of darkness the gangs of young people, small and co-ordinated, smashed a trail of broken shop windows and burned-out cars. The night air echoed with the crack of Molotovs on the cobbles, the howl of police sirens and the reports of carabinieri rifles that threw gas shells into the narrow streets. A night full of the noise of street battle and the cries of 'Death to the fascists', 'Death to the assassins of Panicucci' and 'Freedom for Tantardini'.

  Twenty-nine arrests, five polizia injured, eleven shops damaged and eighteen cars. And the name of Franca Tantardini had been heard and would be seen when morning came to the city written large on the walls in dripping paint.

  His guests gone, the dinner table of the executive suite in ICH

  House cleared, Sir David Adams retreated to his office. In mid-week he frequently worked late, his justification for prohibiting business interference during weekends at his country retreat.

  The principal officers of the company had learned to expect his staccato tones on the telephone at any hour before he cleared his desk and walked across to his Barbican flat for the trifle of sleep that he needed.

  His target this evening was his Personnel Director, who took the call on a bedside extension line. The conversation was typically to the point.

  'The man we sent to Rome, he got away all right?*

  'Yes, Sir David. I checked with Alitalia, he was diverted to Milan, but he managed an onward to Rome.'

  'Have you called Harrison's wife?'

  'Couldn't get through. I tried before I left the office, but this fellow Carpenter will do that.'

  'He'll be in touch with her?'

  'First thing in the morning.'

  'How's Harrison going to stand up to all this ? The man from the Embassy who called me was pretty blunt in his scenario.'

  ' I've been through Harrison's file, Sir David. Doesn't tell us much. He's a damn good record with the company well, that's obvious for him to have had the posting. He's a figures man . . . '

  ' I know all that. What's he going to be like under this sort of pressure, how's he going to take it?'

  ' He's fine under business pressure . . . '

  The Personnel Director heard a sigh of annoyance whistle at his ear.

  ' Is he an outdoor type, does he have any outdoor hobbies listed on his file?'

  'Not really, Sir David. He listed "reading" . . . '

  There was a snort on the line. 'You know what that means.

  That he comes home, switches on television, drinks three gins and gets to his bed and his sleep. A man who offers reading as a hobby is a recreational eunuch in my book.'

  'What are you implying?'

  'That the poor blighter is totally unfitted for the hoop he's going to be put through. I'll see you in the morning.' Sir David Adams rang off.

  In a restaurant in the northern outskirts of Rome, secure and far from the running street fight, Giuseppe Carboni shuffled his ample wife around the cleared dance floor. The tables and chairs had been pushed back against the walls to make space for the entertainment. A gypsy fiddler, a young man with a bright accordion and his father with a guitar, provided the music for the assortment of guests. It was a gathering of friends, an annual occasion and one valued by Carboni. The kidnapping of Geoffrey Harrison provided no reason for him to stay away from the evening of fancy dress enjoyment.

  He had come dressed as a ghost, his wife and her sewing-machine concocting from an old white sheet and a pillowslip with eye slits the costume that had caused loud acclamation on his entry. She was robed in the costume of a Sardinian peasant girl. They had eaten well and drunk deep of the Friuli wine and the night would serve as a brief escape from the dreary piling of reports on his desk at the Questura. And there was advantage for Carboni in such company. An Under-Secretary of the Ministry of the Interior in a mouse's habit with tail hanging from his rump, was dancing close to his shoulder. Across the floor a deputy of the Democrazia Cristiana, and one spoken of as ambitious and well-connected, clutched at the hips of a girl both blonde and beautiful and attired solely in a toga created from the Stars and Stripes. Good company for Carboni to be keeping; and what good would be achieved sitting in his flat with an ear cocked for the telephone? It was too early in the Harrison matter for intervention. Always it was easier to work when the money had been paid, when there were not tearful wives and stone-faced legal men complaining in high places that the life of their dear one and their client was being endangered by police investigation.

  He bobbed his head at the Under-Secretary, smirked beneath his pillowcase at the deputy, and propelled his wife forward.

  There were few enough of these evenings when he was safe from disturbance and aggravation. He bowed to the man in property who wore the fading theatrical uniform of a Napoleonic dragoon and who was said to be a holiday companion at the villa of the President of the Council of Ministers. Diamonds catching brightly in the guttering candlelight, the crisp cackle of laughter, the sweet ring of the violin chords. Movement and life and pleasure, and the white-coated waiters weaved among the guests dispensing brandy tumblers and glasses of sambucca and amaro.

  The man in property was beside him, more smiles and a hand released from his wife's waist so that Carboni could greet the interloper.

  'Please forgive me, Signora Carboni, please excuse me. May I take your husband for a moment. . .?'

  'He dances badly,' she tinkled.

  The man in property kissed her hand, laughed with her. 'It is the cross of marrying a policeman, always there is someone to take him aside and whisper in his ear. My extreme apologies for the interruption.'

  'You have the gratitude of my feet.'

  The ghost and the dragoon huddled together in a corner, far from earshot, achieving among the sounds of talk and music a certain privacy.

  'Dottore Carboni, first my apologies.'

  'For nothing.'

  'You are busy at this time with the new plague, the blight over us all. You are involved in enquiries into the kidnappings.'

  'It is the principal aspect of our work, though less intense here than in the north.'

  'And always the problem is to find the major figures, am I right? They are the hard ones.'

  "They protect themselves'well, they cover their activities with care.'

  'Perhaps it is nothing, perhaps it is not my business ' I t was how they all began when they wished to pour poison in a policeman's ear . .. 'but something has been brought to my attention.

  It has come from the legal section of my firm, we have some bright young men there and it was something that aroused their interest, and that involved a competitor.' That was predictable too, thought Carboni, but the man must be heard out if it were not to reach the head of government that a policeman had not reacted to the advice of a friend.

  'A year ago I was in competition for a site for chalets on the Golfo di Policastro, near to Sapri, and the man against me was called Mazzotti, Antonio Mazzotti. Around two hundred millions were needed to settle the matter, and Mazzotti outbid me. He took the site, I took my money elsewhere. But then Mazzotti could not fulfil his commitments, it was said he could not raise the capital, that he was over-extended, and I am assured he sold at a loss. It is a difficult game, property, Dottore, many burn their fingers. We thought nothing more of him, another amateur.

  Then two weeks ago I was in competition for a place to the south of Sapri, at the Marina de Maratea. There was another location where it was possible to build some chalets . . . but my money was insufficient. Then yesterday my boys in the legal section told me that the purchaser was Mazzotti. Well, it is possible in business to make a fast recovery but he paid in bank draft the greater proportion of the sum
. From an outside bank, outside Italy. The money has run back sharply to the hands of this Mazzotti. I set my people to find out more and they tell me this afternoon that he is from the village of Cosoleto in Calabria. He is from the bandit land. I ask myself, is there anything wrong with a man from the hills having brains and working hard and advancing himself. Nothing, I tell myself. Nothing. But it was in foreign draft that he paid, Dottore. That, you will agree, is not usual.'

  ' It is not usual,' Carboni agreed. He hoped the man had finished, wished only to get back to the music. 'And I would have thought it a matter for the Guardia di Finanze if there have been irregularities of transfer.'

  'You do not follow me. I do not care where the fellow salts his money, I am interested in where he acquires it, and how its source springs up so quickly.'

  'You are very kind to have taken so much trouble.'

  ' I have told no one else of my detective work.' A light laugh.

  'In the morning I will make some enquiries, but you understand I have a great preoccupation with the kidnapping of the Englishman.'

  ' I would not wish my name to be mentioned in this matter.'

  'You have my word,' said Carboni, and was gone to the side of his wife. Something or nothing, and time in the morning to run a check on Antonio Mazzotti. Time in the morning to discover whether there were grounds for suspicion or whether a dis-gruntled businessman was using the influence of the network of privilege to hinder an opponent who had twice outwitted him.

  Giuseppe Carboni scooped the pillowslip over his head and downed a cooled glass of Stock brandy, wiped his face, dropped again his disguise and resumed with his wife a circuit of the dance floor.

  When they reached the second-floor room, puffing because they came by the turning staircase as there was no lift in a pensione such as this, Giancarlo stood back, witnessing the drunken effort of Claudio to fit the room key to the door lock. They had taken a room in a small and private place between the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele and the Piazza Dante, with a barren front hall and a chipped reception desk that carried signs demanding prepayment of money and the decree that rooms could not be rented by the hour. The portiere asked no questions, explained that the room must be vacated by noon, pocketed the eight thousand lire handed him by Claudio and presumed them to be from the growing homosexual clan.

  On the landing, waiting behind the fumbling Claudio, Giancarlo looked down at his sodden jeans, dark and stained below the knees, and his canvas shoes that oozed the wine he had poured away under the table in the pizzeria. He had eaten hugely, drunk next to nothing, was now sobered and alert and ready for the confrontation that he had chosen. The Calabrian needed a full minute, interspersed with oaths, to unfasten the door and reveal the room. It was bare and functional. A wooden table with chair. A wooden single-door wardrobe. A thin-framed print of old Rome. Two single beds separated by a low table on which rested a closed Bible and a small lamp. Claudio pitched forward, as if it were immaterial to him that the door was still open, and began pulling with a ferocious clumsiness at his clothes, dragging them from his back and arms and legs before sinking heavily in his underpants on to the grey bedspread. Giancarlo extracted the key from the outside lock, closed the door behind him and then locked it again before pocketing the key.

  Cold and detached, no longer running, no longer in flight, Giancarlo looked down with contempt at the sprawled figure on the bed, ranged his eyes over the hair-encased legs, the stomach of rolled fat and on up to the opened mouth that sucked hard for air. He stood for a long time to be certain in his mind that the building was at peace and the other residents asleep. An animal, he seemed to Giancarlo, an illiterate animal. The pig had called his Franca a whore, the pig would suffer. With a deliberation he had not owned before, as if sudden age and manhood had fallen to him, he reached under his shirt tail and pulled the P38 from his belt. On the balls of his feet and keeping his silence he moved across the linoleum and stopped two metres from the bed. Close enough to Claudio, and beyond the reach of his arms.

  'Claudio, can you hear me ?' A strained whisper.

  In response only the convulsed breathing.

  'Claudio, I want to talk to you.'

  A belly-deep grunted protest of irritation.

  'Claudio, you must wake up. I have questions for you, pig.'

  A little louder now. Insufficient to turn the face of Claudio, enough to annoy and to cause him to wriggle his shoulders in anger as if trying to rid himself of the presence of a flea.

  'Claudio, wake yourself.'

  The eyes opened and were wide and staring and confused because close to them was the outstretched hand that held the pistol, and the message in the boy's gaze was clear even through the mist of station beer and pizzeria wine.

  'Claudio, you should know that you are very close to death.

  I am near to killing you, there as you lie on your back. You save yourself only if you tell me what I want to know. You understand, Claudio?'

  The voice droned at the dulled mind of the prostrate man, dripping its message, spoken by a parent who has an ultimatum on behaviour to deliver to a child. The bedsprings whined as the bulk of the man began to shift and stir, moving backwards towards the head rest, creating distance from the pistol. Giancarlo watched him trying for focus and comprehension, substituting the vague dream for the reality of the P38 and the slight figure that held it. The boy pressed on, dominating, sensing the moment was right.

  'There is nowhere to go, no one to save you. I will kill you, Claudio, if you do not tell me what I ask you. Kill you so that the blood runs from you.'

  The boy felt detached from his words, separated from the sounds that his ears could hear. No word from the pig.

  'It is the P38, Claudio. The weapon of the fighters of the NAP.

  It is loaded and I have only to draw back the trigger. Only to do that and you are dead, and rotting and fly-infested. Am I clear, Claudio?'

  The boy could not recognize himself, could not recognize the strength of his grip upon the gun.

  ' It is the P38. Many have died by this gun. There would be no hesitation, not in sending a Calabrian pig to his earth hole.'

  'What do you want?'

  ' I want an answer.'

  'Don't play with me, boy.'

  'If I want to play with you, Claudio, then I will do so. If I want to tease you, then I will. If I want to hurt you, then you cannot protect yourself. You have nothing but the information that I want from you. Give it me and you live. It is that or the P38.'

  The boy watched the man strain in the night stillness for a vibration of life from the building, ears cocked for something that might give him hope of rescue, and saw the dumb collapse at the realization that the pensione slept cloaked in night. The big body crumbled back flat on to the bed as if defeated and the coiled springs tolled under the mattress.

  'What do you want?'

  He is ready, thought Giancarlo, as ready as he will ever be.

  ' I want to know where the man is hidden that was taken this morning.' The message came in a flurry, as a transitory shower of snow falls on the high places of the Apennines, quick and brisk and blanketing. 'If you want to live, Claudio, you must tell me where to find him.'

  Easier now for Claudio. Easier because there was something that he could bite at. Half a smile on his face, because the drink was still with him and he lacked the control to hide the first, frail amusement.

  'How would I know that?"

  'You will know it. Because if you do not you will die.*

  ' I am not told such things."

  'Then you are dead, Claudio. Dead because you are stupid, dead because you did not know.'

  From the toes of his feet, moving with the swaying speed of the snake, Giancarlo rocked forward, never losing the balance that was perfect and symmetrical. His right arm lunged, blurred in its aggression till the foresight of the gun was against the man's ear.

  Momentarily it rested there, then raked back across the fear-driven, quivering face and the sh
arp needle of the sight gouged a ribbon welt through the jungle of bristle and hair. Claudio snatched at the gun, and grasped only at the air and was late and defeated while the blood welled and spilled from the road hewn across his cheek.

  'Do not die from stupidity and idiocy, Claudio. Do not die because you failed to understand that I am no longer the child who was protected in the Queen of Heaven. Tell me where they took the man. Tell me.' The demand for an answer, harsh and compelling, winning through the exhaustion and the drink, abetted by the blood trickle beneath the man's hand.

  "They do not tell me such things.'

  'Inadequate, Claudio . . . to save yourself.'

  ' I don't know. In God's name I don't know.'

  Giancarlo saw the struggle for survival, the two extremes of the pendulum. If he spoke now the immediate risk to the pig's life would be removed, to be replaced in the fullness of time by the threat of the retribution that the organization would bring down on his dulled head should betrayal be his temporary salvation.

  The boy sensed the conflict, the alternating fortunes of the two armies waging war in the man's mind.

  'Then in your ignorance you die.'

  Noisily because it was not a refined mechanism, Giancarlo drew back with his thumb the hammer of the pistol. It reverberated around the room, a sound that was sinister, irretrievable.

  Claudio was half up on the bed, pushed from his elbows, his hand flown from the wound. Eyes, saucer-large and peering into the dimness, perspiration in bright rivers on his forehead. Dismal and pathetic and beaten, his attention committed to the rigid, unmoving barrel aimed at the centre of his ribcage.

  'They will have taken him to the Mezzo Giorno,' Claudio whispered his response, the man who is behind the velvet curtain of the confessional and who has much to tell the Father and is afraid lest any other should hear his words.