RED FOX

by Gerald Seymour

  The Minister, still sombre, still clinging to the Ambassador's arm as if unwilling to break away for his cabinet colleagues waiting upstairs, said, 'If we refuse to release Tantardini, I do not think we will see Harrison again.'

  The Ambassador accepted his opinion, nodded gravely.

  ' I will relay your view to Whitehall.'

  The two men stood together, the Ambassador disproportion-ately taller. High frescoes in centuries-old paint leered down at them, mocking their transitory plans for history. Both perspired, both were too preoccupied to wash away the moisture beads.

  'We understand each other, my friend. I will tell my colleagues that the British ask for no deal, no barter, no negotiation... and whatever happens we win the victory of principle . . . '

  The Ambassador interrupted his short choked laugh. ' I am sure that Defence would send the Special Air Service, the close-quarter attack squad, as they did for Moro. They could be here this afternoon, if it were helpful.'

  The Minister seemed to snort, give his judgement on an irrelevance, and walked away towards the wide staircase of the Palazzo.

  Those who came late that morning to their desks in the Viminale on the second floor found that already the corridors and offices were nests of harsh and total activity. Vellosi paced among rooms, querying the necessity of bureaucrats and policemen alike to occupy their premises and their precious telephones, and where he found no satisfaction he commandeered and installed in their place his own subordinates. By ten he had secured an additional five rooms, all within shouting distance of his own. Technicians from the basements were kept busy hoisting the mess of cables and wires, attaching the transmitters and receivers that would secure him instant access to the control centre of the Questura and the office of Carboni. Some of the dispossessed hung about in the corridors, sleek in their suits and clean shirts, and smiled sweetly at the pace and moment of the working men around them and vowed they would have Vellosi's head served up on a charger were he not to deliver Geoffrey Harrison, free and unharmed, by the next morning. It was not the way that things were done in the Viminale. Noise, rising voices, the ringing of telephone bells, the pleas of radio static all mingled and coalesced in the corridor. Vellosi bounced between the sources of the confusion. He had told an examining magistrate that he was a hindrance and an obstruction, a carabinieri general that if he didn't push reinforcements into the Cosoleto area he would face speedy retirement, the persistent editor of the largest Socialist newspaper in the city that his head should be down the lavatory pan and would he clear the line, and sent out for more cigarettes, more coffee, more sandwiches.

  At a hectic pace, bewildering to all those who were not central to the knot of the enquiry, the operation and investigation was launched. Those who participated and those who were idle and smirking behind their hands could agree on the one common point. The mood on the second floor of the Viminale was unique.

  Very few, though, were privy to the telephone conversation between Vellosi and the Minister, who spoke from an anteroom outside the cabinet deliberations at the Palazzo Chigi; only the inner court, the hard men on whom Vellosi leaned for succour and advice.

  He had slammed the telephone down, barely a grunt of thanks to the Minister and confided to those in the room near him.

  'They're standing firm, our masters. The men of deviation and compromise are holding a line. The bitch stays with us. Tantardini stays in her cell and rots there.'

  The four who heard him understood the importance of the political decision, and they smiled to each other in a grim satisfaction and dropped their shoulders and raised their eyebrows and returned to their notepads and their internal telephone directories.

  The information began to flow as the team hustled, begged and screamed into the telephones; shapes and patterns emerging from the kaleidoscope of mystery and dead alleys with which the day had started. Photographs of the known Nappisti at liberty had been spread out on a table for the portiere of the pensione where Claudio's body had been found. He had not wished to be involved, this elderly man whose job required a short tongue and shorter memory. He had turned over many pictures, showing little interest, muttering repeatedly of the failure of his recollection. One flicker of curiosity nullified his reluctance and a detective had seen the betrayal of recognition that the portiere had tried to hide. It was the work of a police photographer, and the typed message on the back of the picture gave the name of Giancarlo Battestini.

  What name had he used? What identity card had he shown?

  What had he been wearing? What time had he arrived? What time had he left? The questions battered at the old man in his fading uniform till he had broken the reticence born of the sense of survival and told the story the police wanted to hear. The information breathed a new activity into the squad of men around Vellosi, whipped up their flagging morale and drove them on.

  ' It's beside the station,' Vellosi stormed down his telephone to a maggiore of the Pubblica Sicurezza. 'Right beside the station, this pensione, so get the photograph of Battestini down to the ticket counters, get it among the platform workers. Check him through all the trains to Reggio yesterday morning. Find the ticket inspectors on those trains, find their names, where they are now, and get that picture under their noses.'

  There was so much commitment, so much cajoling and abuse that for a full minute Giuseppe Carboni stood ignored in the doorway of Vellosi's office. He bided his time; he would have his moment. And it would be choice, he thought, choice enough for it to have been worth his while to abandon his desk at the Questura and come unannounced to the Viminale. Vellosi was on his way for another prowl along the corridor to chase and jockey his men when he careered into the solid flesh wall of the policeman.

  'Carboni, my apologies.' Vellosi laughed. 'We have been very busy here, we have been going hard . . . '

  'Excellent, Vellosi, excellent.' A measured reply, tolerant and calm.

  ' . . . you will forgive my hurry, but we have discovered an important connection..

  'Excellent.'

  'The boy of the NAP, Battestini... the one we missed when we took Tantardini, this is the kernel of this matter, it was he who killed the gorilla in the hotel. We have established that, and this Claudio was from those who took your H a r r i s o n . . . we have not been idle.'

  'Excellent.'

  Vellosi saw the smile on Carboni's face, as though the man had picked up a book and found it already familiar. His revelation won no recognition of achievement.

  'And are you prospering too, Carboni?' Subdued already, Vellosi braced himself. 'Tell me.'

  Carboni led the head of the anti-terrorist squad back to his desk. With his heavy rounded fingers he produced from a neat briefcase two facsimile documents. He laid them on the desk, carelessly pushing aside the piles of handwritten notes that had accumulated there through the morning. With his forefinger, Carboni stabbed at the upper sheet.

  "This is the statement taken from Battestini by the polizia more than eighteen months ago . . . after his arrest for some student fracas. It carried his handwriting at the bottom.'

  ' I have seen it,' Vellosi said curtly.

  Carboni pulled clear the under sheet. "This is the statement from the Nappisti found at Seminara along with Harrison's card.

  Observe the writing, Vellosi, observe it closely.'

  Vellosi's nose was a few inches from the papers as he held them to the light.

  'It has been checked. At Criminalpol they ran it through the machines for me. The scientists have no doubt that they match.'

  Carboni savoured the moment. It was perhaps the finest of his professional life. He stood among the gods, the princes of the elite force, the cream of the anti-subversion fighters, and he told them something they had not seen for themselves. 'Giancarlo Battestini, nineteen years old, born in Pescara, university drop-out, probationer of the NAP, he is the one who has taken Geoffrey Harrison. Harrison is in Battestini's hands, and I venture to suggest that is the limit and extent of the conspira
cy.'

  Vellosi dropped back to his chair. A hush spread across the room and on into the corridor and further offices. Men in shirtsleeves holding cigarettes and plastic coffee beakers crowded to the doorway. 'Is it possible for one man - a mere boy - to have achieved all this?'

  'Vellosi, it has happened.' The pleasure shone on Carboni's face. ' I won't detain you, but you should know we are sifting the reports of stolen vehicles from the area of the city of Reggio -

  there are not many, not at the times that fit. Two cinquencentos, but they would be too small for the purpose. There was a BMW

  but that is a conspicuous car. Close to the main station at Reggio, a few minutes' walk away, there is reported missing within ninety minutes of the arrival of the rapido from Roma a one-two-seven. It is red, and the registration is going out now.

  There is the same problem as always with the road blocks because we do not know where to set them, but if it is on the radio and the lunchtime television, then perhaps...'

  'Shut up, Carboni.' Vellosi spoke quietly. He reached up with both arms, put them round Carboni's neck and pulled the ill-shaven face towards him. Their cheeks met, the kiss of friends and equals. 'You're a genius, Carboni, nothing but a genius.'

  Carboni blushed, swung on his heel and left with a little wave of his fingers for farewell. He had stirred Vellosi's ant hole, changed its direction, shifted the whole basis of the enquiry.

  'Well, don't stand about,' Vellosi snapped at his audience.

  'We've let an amateur show us what's happening, point to what's been staring at us for hours. We have more in a day than we had in a month with Moro. Use it.'

  But for Moro he had had time. For Harrison he had less than twenty-four hours till the expiry of the ultimatum.

  Vellosi scuffed among his papers till he found the photograph of Battestini. He searched the mouth and the jaw line and the set of the eyes for information, scrabbling to catch up, scratching to make do with diminishing hours, the tools of a policeman's trade.

  "The little bastard could be anywhere.' And Vellosi swore and reached for his coffee that was cold.

  He must go back to the basics, back to deep and quiet thought in the midst of the noise surrounding him, back to analysis of the minimal factual evidence available.

  Start again, start from the beginning. Return to the face of Battestini, drag from those features the response that should be made.

  Giancarlo Battestini, imprisoned in Rome after studying in the capital's university, and a member of an NAP cell in that city.

  Could the boy have links with the far countryside? Likely or unlikely ? Vellosi flexed his fingers. The answer was obvious. The boy would know nothing of Calabria. A city boy, a town boy, a foreigner in the Mezzo Giorno.

  He turned and called to a colleague, who stubbed his cigarette, drained his coffee and came to him.

  'Battestini would not believe he could survive in the countryside, it is beyond his experience. Correct?'

  'Correct.'

  'He would try to return to the city?*

  'Possible.'

  'In the files he is linked only with Rome: would he try to get back here?'

  'Perhaps.'

  'He is divorced from Pescara. He has nothing there. And if he comes back towards Rome he must come by car because he cannot take a prisoner by train.'

  'Probable.'

  The momentum carried Vellosi on. 'If he comes by road he must decide for himself whether he will attempt speed on the autostrada, or whether he will go for the safer and slower old roads.'

  ' I think he would choose the autostrada.'

  Vellosi slapped his fist into the palm of his other hand. 'And he must stop . . . '

  'For petrol.'

  'He has to stop.'

  'Certain.'

  'Either at a station on the autostrada or he must come off and use a toll gate and a station off the main route.'

  ' If he is coming to Rome, if he is coming by car, if he is on the autostrada, then that is correct.'

  Vellosi thrust his chair behind him, rose to his full height and shouted, 'Work on the petrol stations and the autostrada tolls.

  Each side of Naples. Call Carboni, tell him that too.'

  His colleague was no longer beside him.

  Vellosi slumped back into his seat. There was no one to praise him, no one to smile and slap his back and offer congratulations.

  To himself he muttered, over and over again, 'The boy will come back to the city, the boy will return to Rome.'

  CHAPTER F O U R T E E N

  While the disparate arms and commands of security forces strove to drag themselves into a state of intervention, the small red Fiat slipped unremarked through the toll gate marking the terminal of the autostrada at Roma Sud and away towards the Raccordo Annulare, the ring road skirting the capital. With the passing of the mass-produced common car through the toll check, the chances of its detection, always remote, were reduced to the minimal.

  The two men had exchanged only desultory conversation, preferring to brood to themselves in the confined space. Geoffrey Harrison, the pain gone from his back, drove in a careless and detached way as if concern and anxiety were no longer with him.

  His mind numbed, his brain deadened, he performed the automatic tasks of keeping the car in the centre lane of traffic, the speed constant. At two places, the petrol station and the toll gate, he told himself there had been the possibility of a break-out from the car. But the will to seek his freedom was reduced. He had sat meekly in the driving seat, neither looking at nor avoiding the man who secured the fuel tank cap and wiped wetly over the windscreen. He had held his silence as the young man at the toll had handed the change through the open window.

  Manipulated and broken, too destroyed to weep, too cudgelled to fight, Harrison guided the car around the east side of the city.

  For Violet Harrison the mood of the morning alternated between remorse and defiance.

  She had lain in bed, curling slowly over, switching the images of a prisoner husband with those of a dark-chested boy with a flat stomach and sinewed hair-covered legs. Both caused her pain.

  If she could again find the boy at the beach and forge her liaison, then it would not be the first time, nor the second, nor the third. It was the usual way she found relief when the strain became too much for her. It had nothing to do with loving Geoffrey, whatever that meant, nothing to do with being his wife, sharing his life. All that was irrelevant. But there had to be a valve somewhere when the steam built up, and this was her release: writhing under a stranger, without obligation, without attachment.

  There had been an Irish barman from Evesham in Worcester-shire, sought out on the day after Geoffrey, the young industrial trainee, had told her there was a discrepancy in the books and that the branch Chief Accountant believed him responsible. He had been cleared of suspicion, but only after Violet had spent an afternoon in an autumn field with a man whose name she had never known.

  There had been a West Indian bus driver from Dalston in East London after a Friday night when Geoffrey had come home to report that he had drunk too much that lunchtime and told the head of his department to stuff his job where it would hurt and smell. Geoffrey had apologized on the Monday morning, been accepted back with handshakes and smiles and had never known of Violet's two hours on a Sunday morning in a railway hotel close to King's Cross ridden hard by a muscled lad who called her 'darlin' and bit her shoulders.

  Other crises had come, some greater, some lesser. Same pal-liative, same escape; and Geoffrey had remained unaware of them, of that she was sure and grateful. She remembered once watching on television the wife of the British governor of an island colony, just widowed after her husband had been terribly murdered while taking a late evening stroll in the gardens of the Residence. The woman had worn white and sat on a sofa with her daughters and talked to the cameras with composure and dignity. Had it been Violet, she thought, she would have been in the chauffeur's bed. She knew it, hated it, and told herself
she did not have the strength to resist. And if Geoffrey did not know, if Geoffrey were not wounded, then what did it matter? Who else's business was it?

  There had been no boy in Rome. God knows there were times when she would have wished for one, hoped for the release from an arched back and a driving thrust. But there had been none.

  Until she had been to the beach she had not given herself even the opportunity. Isolated and cocooned in a flat where the telephone never rang, the doorbell never sounded, she had been protected from the predators.

  She dressed with studied care as if anxious not to crease the bikini and the covering dress, as if forgetful that she would be sitting in her car for the hour-long drive to Ostia or Fregene or Santa Marinella. A peahen jealous of her scant plumage. The bikini was new, and the dress a month old had not been worn.

  Adornment for the fall. Her hair she combed loosely, sitting at her dressing-table mirror and aware of the excitement and the tremble that came with the narcotic, with the contemplation of the unmentionable. It was the only gesture of independence that Violet Harrison was capable of, to climb into her little car, drive away down the road and spend and punish herself of her own volition, in her own time, in her own panting scenario. Would Geoffrey have cared if he had known . . . ? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

  But it didn't matter because Geoffrey did not know, Geoffrey was away, bound like a chicken with the stubble on his face and a gun at his head. Geoffrey would be thinking of her, hers would be the face in his mind, as clear and sharp as it was in the mirror before her. Geoffrey would be leaning on her, conjuring in his mind only the good times. That was when the remorse always won through from the defiance. That was when it hurt, when the urge was strongest, when she was weakest, least able to struggle.

  Smudges of tears were summoned below the neatly careened blonde hair.