RED FOX

by Gerald Seymour

  They are dragging us down, Vellosi.'

  'That is the ground where we meet them, where we fight them, and where we win.'

  ' If in such times victory is available . . . I am less certain.'

  'Concern yourself with the present, Carboni. Find me the boy Battestini.' Vellosi squeezed his arm and walked on out through the door.

  In the front parking area of a small trattoria Violet Harrison parked her car. Not tidily, not quietly, but with a splash of movement and rising dust and the protest of an over-extended engine.

  The parking area was for patrons, but she would take a cup of coffee and perhaps half a carafe of white wine, and that would satisfy the white-shirted waiters of her right to a table. The verandah of the trattoria was at the back, and she walked through the small construction of timber and corrugated iron roofing and past the kitchen where the fires were being stoked for the lamb and the veal. She would sit beneath a screen of interlaced bam-boo, and from there she could watch, across some scrub grass and shallow shifting hills of sand, the boys who walked on the beach.

  She seemed relaxed, at peace, but the Polaroids on her face hid reddened eyes. She showed a calm pose to the world, obliterated her inner self, sat at the table and waited. Occasionally she swung her head and gazed away down the beach, a searchlight roving, hunting all the time, haunting and punishing.

  CHAPTER S I X T E E N

  Early afternoon in the great slumbering capital.

  A wicked heat, clamping on the bodies of the few Romans who moved listlessly on the steaming, paper-strewn streets. Little protection for walkers, even from the high buildings of nine-teenth-century finery on the Corso. The pavements, abandoned by their own citizens, were given over to the perspiring, grumbling tourists. The map-clutchers, guide-book-scanners, ice-cream-suckers, groped from ruin to ruin expressing their admiration for what they saw in shrill Japanese, blaring American, dominant German.

  Like a stranger in his own community, Giuseppe Carboni threaded an impatient way between the loiterers. He crossed the small square in front of the colonnaded church and hurried up the six shallow steps to the central entrance of the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. The visitors were thick, shoulder to shoulder, huddled close to their guides, serious and solemn-faced as they mopped up the culture and the dampness of their armpits. Here Carboni had been told he would find Francesco Vellosi. The church of Saint Peter in Chains is where the bonds of the saint are reverently kept, shining and coated in dark paint inside a gold and glass-faced cabinet. The central nave was occupied by the groups, soaking up the required information: the age of the construction, the dates of renovation, the history of the tomb of Julius II, the smooth sculpture of the bearded and muscled Moses that was the work of Michelangelo. But in the aisles, in the narrower naves, where the tourists gave ground to the wor-shippers, Carboni would find his man. Where the shadows were thicker, where the tall candles burned in flickering insecurity, where the women in black came in from the streets to pray.

  In the right-hand nave he saw Vellosi, three rows from the front, kneeling hunched on a red hassock. The hard man of the anti-terrorist squad was now bent in prayer because his driver was slain and would be buried in the morning. It was no surprise that Vellosi chose this church. On the same steps that Carboni had climbed the carabinieri had shot to death Antonio La Muscio and captured the girls La Vianale and Salerno. The place acted as a symbol to those who fought the underground of subversion and anarchy, it was their place of triumph and riposte.

  Carboni did not intrude. He crossed to the small side altar and waited with hands joined across his stomach. The voices of the guides seemed distant, the brush of scores of feet was near eliminated. A place of tranquil value. A place to shed, for precious moments, the fearsome and desperate load that the two men carried. Watching and waiting, curling his toes, ignoring the passage of time that could not be recouped, Carboni curbed himself. He could be thankful that, if nothing else, he had escaped from his desk, his aides, his telephone and the endless computer print-outs.

  Abruptly, Vellosi jack-knifed himself from his knees and back on to his chair. Carboni darted forward and eased himself down beside him. When their eyes met Carboni could see that the man was rested, that the purgative of prayer had refreshed him.

  'You forgive me, capo, for coming here to find you?'

  'Nothing, Carboni. I came to say some words for my M a u r o . .

  'A good place to come to.' Carboni spoke softly, with approval.

  'Here we killed the rat, exterminated La Muscio . . . It is a good place to come to speak with my friend.'

  ' It is right to remember the success. Catastrophe is burdening, deadening.'

  There was a wry smile at Vellosi's lips. 'Catastrophe we are familiar with, success is the star we seek.'

  'And too often the cloud obscures the star . . . it is seldom visible.'

  The two men spoke in church whispers, Vellosi content to idle till Carboni was ready to unveil the purpose of his visit.

  A deep sigh from Carboni. The man who will jump into a winter sea from a breakwater, and must strip off his robe and discard his towel.

  'We talked long enough at the meeting,' Carboni plunged.

  'Long enough to have settled every matter that was outstanding, but at the end we had decided nothing, nothing beyond the fact that Giuseppe Carboni should take responsibility . . . '

  'You had expected something different?'

  'Perhaps yes, perhaps no.' Carboni stared in front of him as he spoke, over the shoulder of the wizened sparrow woman with her bones angular under the black blouse who mouthed quiet words to the altar. 'A gathering like that is a farce, a babble of men seeking with one voice to disclaim ultimate responsibility, prepared only to pile it on my shoulders.'

  'They are broad enough,' chuckled Vellosi. 'You should work at the Viminale, you would quickly learn then what is normal, what is acceptable.'

  'Do we let the woman Tantardini speak to the boy?' Carboni sharper now, play-acting completed.

  Vellosi too responded, the smile draining, a savagery in his voice. ' I hate that bitch. Believe me, dear friend, I hate her. I wish to dear Jesus that we had slaughtered her in the street'

  'Understandable and unhelpful.'

  Vellosi snatched back at him. 'What do you need most?'

  'Now I have nothing. I know only that Battestini was early this morning in the area of Rome. I know that he has travelled on. I have a car number, but that could have been changed. I have no hope of intervention before tomorrow morning.' The ebbing of the bravura.

  'So you must have a trace, you must have a location. If the bitch is there and talks to him, then you give your engineers the possibility . . . '

  'She has to speak to him?"

  'You have to make her.' There Was a snarl in Vellosi's voice, as if the discussion had reached obscenity. 'If I were to ask her she would spit in my face.'

  Carboni looked around him in response to the protest coughs of those who objected to the interference of raised voices in their worship. He stood up, Vellosi following, and together they walked down the aisle between the colonnade and the chairs. 'What would you tell her?'

  'That you have to decide for yourself.'

  ' I came for help, Vellosi.'

  ' I cannot aid you. You must read her when you see her. When you meet her you will know why I cannot help you.' The inhibitions of the church quiet were lost on Vellosi. 'She is poison, and you must think of the consequences for yourself if you involve her.'

  Carboni stared back at Vellosi as they stopped at the great opened doors. A small and pudgy figure dwarfed by his colleague of the open and strong face. He weighed his words for a moment.

  'You are nervous of her. Even from her cell in the Rebibbia she frightens you.'

  No denials, no stuttered protests. Vellosi said simply, 'Be careful, Carboni, remember what I say. Be careful of the bitch.'

  Through the afternoon little had passed between Geoffrey Harrison and Gianca
rlo Battestini. Harrison's arms had not been tied again since the food and he lay on his side on the earth of the bunker, his only movements to swat the flies from his face and brush the ants and insects from his body and legs. He might have slept, had certainly dozed in the twilight area. All the while Giancarlo watched him with a casual and intermittent observation and with the gun resting on the leaves close to his hand.

  The summer sun was high, burning even now through the ceiling of foliage, sufficient to shrivel any wind that might have infiltrated earlier. Sticky, hot and defeated, Harrison slipped into a vegetable sloth, his mind devoid of ideas and expectations. No longer did the presence of the check shirt in the undergrowth a few yards beyond and behind Giancarlo offer any hope of salvation. Just another witness to his helplessness, another voyeur.

  The body functions drove Harrison to speak again.

  ' It's the call of nature, Giancarlo.' Ridiculous that he was embarrassed. Couldn't use the language of the dressing-room, of the men's club. Couldn't say . . . I want to have a crap, Giancarlo . . . I want to have a shit, Giancarlo. Didn't want to say it any other way and feared to foul his trousers. ' It's been a long time.'

  Giancarlo looked at him curiously as if experiencing some new buttress of his power. The great man of the multinational must ask Giancarlo's permission again, because otherwise he would smell and lose his dignity, and no more be a person of stature and importance. The cat with the mouse. The boy and the butterfly with the broken wing. Giancarlo teased in mock disbelief. 'Perhaps you are trying to trick me, 'Arrison.'

  'Really, Giancarlo, I have to go. I'm not tricking you.'

  The boy warmed to the hint of desperation. 'Perhaps you would try to escape from me.'

  ' I promise there is no trick . .. but quickly.'

  'What do you say then, 'Arrison? What were you taught to say when you wanted something?'

  'Please, Giancarlo . . . '

  The boy grinned, a sneer playing over his lips. 'And you want to go in the trees where you cannot be seen. You think many are watching you?'

  'Please, Giancarlo.'

  The boy was satisfied. Another victory, another demonstration of strength. Enough, and the pleasure was satiated. He left the P38 on the ground and slowly, taking his time, manoeuvred himself behind Harrison. It was the work of a few seconds to detach the flex that fastened the ankles to the tree roots. 'Four or five metres only, 'Arrison, no more.'

  'Aren't you going to loosen my legs?'

  Giancarlo was further amused. 'Crawl, 'Arrison, and watch where your hands move, that they do not go close to my knots.'

  Once more Harrison gazed away past Giancarlo and towards the hiding-place of the child. Still visible were the flecks of the shirt between leaves and branches. Anger was rising out of the frustration. The little bastard. Like a bloody puppy that's too young to have been trained, that stays and mocks and will not come. On his hands and knees, Harrison crawled, the performing pet, towards a cluster of birch trunks.

  'Not too fair, 'Arrison.' The mocking call of derision.

  His knees scuffed a trail through the leaves and surface earth before he was partially hidden by the trees. He lowered his trousers, squatted using his hands to support himself and felt the constriction and pain gush away. God, the bloody relief of it.

  Bloody freedom. And the bloody smell too.

  'Please, Giancarlo, do you have any paper?'

  There was a ripple of laughter from past the trees. 'I have no bidet for you, I have no aerosol for you to spray under your armpits. But paper I have for you.'

  Subdued, Harrison thanked him and then repeated himself when the bag that had carried the rolls landed close to his feet, thrown with accuracy. He cleaned himself, retrieved his trousers, scuffed some dirt over the soiled paper and dragged himself back to his captor and his prison. He crawled to the flattened earth in the cavity and lay down, resuming his familiar position, pliant and non-resistant, and curled his arms behind his back.

  'Close your eyes.' A command, and with his legs trussed, what chance? Nothing, just pain, nothing. He clenched his eyes shut, and heard only the slight sounds of Giancarlo's feet, and then the hands were cruelly at his wrists and the flex was wound tight and brutally across his flesh, and there was the pressure of a knee on the small of his back.

  The weight slid from him and with its going there was again the mocking voice. 'You can open your eyes.'

  Above the horizon of the crater rim, Harrison saw Giancarlo standing, observing, hands on hips. Something mindless, something vacuous about the smile and the mouth and the dulled glare of the eyes.

  'You're enjoying yourself, Giancarlo. It's sick to be that way.

  It means that you are i l l . . . '

  'Now we have a grand speech.' Derision from the boy, the void unbridged by the contact.

  To treat anyone like this, it means you're deranged. You're a bloody lunatic. You know what that means . . . you're mad, Giancarlo, you've flipped your bloody Kd.' Why say it? Why bother? What bloody difference does it make?

  'I understand what you say.' But the boy was not roused.

  'You've become an animal, Giancarlo. A vicious, infected, little - '

  Giancarlo with studied care turned his back. ' I do not listen to speeches. I am not obliged to hear you.'

  'Why don't you do it now?' The whisper, without fervour, without passion. The words of a second in the boxer's ring when he has seen enough blood, when he is ready to throw in the towel.

  'Because it is not time. Because I am not ready.'

  ' I say it again, Giancarlo, you enjoy it. You must have felt like a kid giving yourself a wrist job when you killed the men back in the barn, jerking yourself. What are you going to do when you kill me, take your bloody trousers d o w n . . . ?'

  Giancarlo narrowed his eyes, and on his slight forehead the frown deepened in its ruts. His voice came as a rush of breeze among the trees. 'You know nothing of us. Nothing. You cannot know why a man goes sotto-terra, why a man discards all the trappings so sought after by your stinking breed, why a man fights to destroy a system that is rotten. You were smug and safe and fat, and you were blind. You know nothing of the struggle of the proletariat.'

  Half into the dirt, Harrison shouted back, 'Bloody cliches.

  Parrot talk you learned in the drains.'

  'You do not make it easier for yourself.'

  Attempting an order and a sternness, Harrison called, 'Get it over with.'

  ' I have said to them that it will be at nine o'clock if I have not my Franca. I will wait till nine. That was my word. Keeping you till then does not threaten me.'

  Giancarlo walked away a few paces, discarded the conversation, withdrew to his inner recesses, gone from Harrison's reach.

  And he's right, Geoffrey, you know nothing of them, nothing at all of the new and embryo species. Nothing of the hate squashed into that mind. And there's no help, no succour, the cavalry don't come this time. Just a bloody carcase already, that's all, Geoffrey. Harrison looked into the green grey mist of the trellis of sapling branches and leaves, and felt the falling of a greater loneliness. He could not see the child. Perhaps it was his eyes, perhaps he looked in the wrong place, but he could not find the checked shirt though he peered till his eyes ached and hurt him.

  A second carafe now stood emptied on the table.

  The Bo-Peep act and the boy not to be found. The waiters had served the lunches, waved their patrons away and stripped the cloths from the chipboard tables. Violet Harrison seemed not to notice and with their studied politeness they waited on her pleasure as she toyed and sipped at the last glass of wine. On the big circus wheel she alternated between hope and despair as the young men of the beach sauntered by. Straight-backed, tanned from wind and sun and the flailing blows of the fine grains, cocky assured eyes, combed-down hair. Any would have served her purpose. She saw the boy a long way off on the beach, walking between two companions.

  Recognized him instantly.

  'Could I have my b
ill, please.' She rummaged in her bag for the notes, gestured to the waiter that she required no change, and was on her feet and smiling sweetly.

  She walked out from the eating verandah, taking what she hoped was a casual saunter and following a line that would intercept the boy's path. She did not look to her right, the direction from which he was coming, but held her head high and straight and focused on the blue sea's depths and its breaking flecks of spume. She strode on, waiting for the greeting, consumed with a growing, creeping nervousness.

  T h e English lady, good afternoon.'

  She spun round, gouging at the warm sand beneath her sandals. Not that she could claim surprise, but when his voice came, almost behind her, it cut and burned at her consciousness.

  'Oh, it's you.' How else did you do it? How to flick up a clever answer when all you were confronting was the stud required for half an hour's brisk anonymous work?

  ' I did not expect to see you here again.'

  ' It's a public beach.' Don't frighten him off. Too trite, Violet.

  God, you'd kick and curse yourself. 'I come here quite a lot.'

  She saw the boy's little gesture with his hands, the clipping of his forefinger against his thumb, the message to the other two that the principal wished to be left to his opportunities. Close together but untouching, no bridging contact of fingers, no brushing of thighs, they moved together towards the sea.

  'You would like to swim, Signora?'

  How he'd speak to a friend of his bloody mother, thought Violet. 'Not yet. I thought I'd just lie on the beach for a bit.'

  'Give me your towel.'

  She dived into her bag and produced it for him. He spread it out on the sand, gestured with his hand for her to sit and followed her down. There was little room for both of them if they were to share it. His swimming costume was brief and bulging grotesquely. You understand, Geoffrey. Their hips touched. You won't cast a rock, Geoffrey.

  'My name is Marco.'

  And Geoffrey wouldn't know. That was the rule. No blows below the belt for Geoffrey. No knowledge and therefore no hurt.