RED FOX

by Gerald Seymour

  ' I am Violet.'

  'That is the name of a flower in English, yes? A very beautiful flower, I think.'

  I know you are alone, Geoffrey. I too am alone. You cannot move, you cannot help yourself. I too, Geoffrey.

  ' I said it the last time we met, and I was right. You are a very cheeky boy, Marco.'

  He smiled across the inches of towel at her. The toothpaste advertisement, the smile of a child taken to a shop, who knows it is his birthday, knows if he is patient he will receive his present.

  'What time is it, Giancarlo ?'

  'Past five.'

  The boy returned to his own chasm of silence.

  He had much to think of, much to concern himself with. Less than three hours to the schedule that he had set himself, had in-sisted on. Less than three hours till he spoke once more with his Franca. Problems and options bombarded his limited intellect.

  If they met his demand, if they agreed to the exchange, where should he fly to? Algiers, Libya, Iraq, the People's Republic of South Yemen. Would any of those places take them? And how to choose, a boy who had never been out of Italy. How would he guarantee their safety if an airport rendezvous were permitted?

  What was the capability of the anti-terrorist pigs? Would they seek a shooting gallery, regardless of the prisoner? It was too much for him to assimilate. Too great the difficulties, too encompassing. A great team the Brigatisti had for the Moro operation, and they now sat in Asinara, locked in their cells, the failed men.

  As he weighed each trick in the card pack, so too grew the realization of the sheer mountainface he must scale. Start with the haven, start there, because with nowhere to go they were lost. A country to welcome them and harbour them, start there. An Arab country? What else? But even their own people were now shunned and ignored; he had seen the pictures of the lorries blocking the runways in Algiers and Benghazi and Tripoli. If they would do that when an Arab brother was seeking r e f u g e . . .

  Late for the answers to the questions. The time was ripe for answers before Claudio walked to his room in the pensione, before the rapido sped towards Reggio, before the Calabresi whimpered in their terror.

  Perhaps it was all irrelevant.

  Did he know in his heart there would be no exchange? And if there were to be no exchange, what then would the leadership want of him? He wrestled in the growing purgatory of the dilemma. Where lay the victory in this skirmish? The body of his

  'Arrison in a ditch, the head blasted with the shell of the P38, that or his prisoner released to walk away on a road with a communique in his pocket to be printed the next morning in Paese Sera and il Messaggero ? Where lay the victory for the proletariat's revolution? How had the Brigatisti advanced when they took the life of Aldo Moro on the slime-covered beach at Focene?

  He was old enough only for questions, too young for their responses. If he could not conjure the answers then he would not see his Franca again. Not for twenty years and that was for ever.

  Three days since his hands had travelled her skin, since her golden head had passed across the softness of his belly. To be denied that for a lifetime. The boy felt a gust of pain. There was nothing that was simple, facile, and that was why there was a steel in the comrades who fought, in Franca Tantardini and the men in the island gaol. And what was the sinew of Giancarlo Battestini, in his twentieth year, lover of Tantardini, son of a borghese, member of the NAP? A dozen hours, slow and tardy hours, and he would have the answer.

  His hands clutched together, white to the knuckles, Giancarlo waited for the time when he should leave Harrison and make his way again to the lakeside of Bracciano.

  In his hotel room Archie Carpenter listened to Michael Charlesworth's clipped and exact resume.

  A voice far away on a bad connection. The situation if anything had deteriorated. Reuters and UPI carried on their wires that a boy, Giancarlo Battestini, categorized as little more than a probationer of the NAP, had telephoned the Questura to emphasize the terms of his ultimatum.

  ' I don't know how it is that the Italians allow this sort of information out, but nothing stays secure here. It seems Battestini was full of his threats. There's a fair depression about the way it's going,' Charlesworth had said.

  Holding himself, the diver conserving his oxygen, Carpenter had heard him out. Then the explosion.

  'So what are you all doing about it?'

  'What we were doing about it earlier, Archie. It has not changed.'

  'Sweet damn-all.'

  'You can put it that way,* Charlesworth placated. T h a t way if you want to.'

  'What other bloody way is there?'

  'Abuse doesn't help, Archie. You've spoken to the Ambassador yourself, he's explained our situation. I've heard since that London have called him. They back him.'

  'He's written off my man.'

  'Histrionics don't help either. I'm sorry, you're sorry, we're all s o r r y . . . But you'll come and have that meal tonight.'

  'If you want me to.'

  'Come on up and help us through a bottle. Did you get in touch with the wife?'

  ' I rang again, took a bloody effort to, but I tried. There's no answer.'

  ' It's a filthy business, Archie, but don't think you're alone with the hair shirt. It's shared about a bit, you know.'

  Charlesworth rang off.

  Archie Carpenter straightened his bed, brushed his hair, raised his tie knot and drew on his jacket. He took the lift downstairs and walked out through the front foyer of the hotel, stepping irritably over the piled suitcases of an arriving tour. He summoned a taxi and asked for the Questura. Early summer evening, the traffic rushing for home and guaranteeing him an exciting and lively journey among the pedestrians and across the traffic lanes. Carpenter barely noticed. A telephone call from the enquiry desk had promptly led to his being ushered up the stairs to the offices of Giuseppe Carboni, now transformed into a tactical crisis centre.

  Shirtsleeves, tobacco smoke, coffee beakers, a three-quarters emptied Scotch bottle, faces lined with weariness, the howl of electric fans, the chatter of teletype machines, and, radiating energy, Carboni in the midst, rotund and active.

  Carpenter hesitated by the door, was spied out, waved forward.

  'Come in, Carpenter. Come and see our humble efforts,'

  Carboni shouted at him.

  This was the old world, the known scents. An emergency room under pressure. This was something for Carpenter to feel and absorb. He felt an interloper, yet at home, among the men he could find sympathy for. The clock was turned back as he came diffidently past the desks where the paper mountained, past the photographs stuck with tape to the walls that showed shocked and staring faces, past the telephones that demanded response.

  ' I don't want to be in the way . . . '

  'But you cannot sit in the hotel room any longer?5

  'Something like that, Mister Carboni."

  'And you come here because everyone you speak to gives you bad news or no news, and from me you hope for a difference?'

  Something lovable about him, Carpenter thought. Over-weight, ugly as sin, dirty fingernails, a shirt that should have seen the wash, and a bloody good man.

  'It was getting at me, just sitting a b o u t . . . you know how it is?'

  'I will educate you, Carpenter.' Carboni was sliding on his coat, then turning away to bellow what seemed to Carpenter a score of differing instructions to varied recipients, and simul-taneously. 'I will show you our enemy. You will witness what we fight against. I know you policemen from England, detailed and organized men, who have believed that you are the best in the world . . . '

  'I'm not a policeman any more.*

  'You retain the mentality. It has stayed with you.' Carboni laughed without a smile, a nervous tic. 'The rest of the world are idiots, second-class people. I understand. Well, come with me, my friend. We go across the city to the Rebibbia gaol. That is where we hold the Tantardini woman and I must play the taxi-driver and bring her here, because that is what little Gian
carlo wants and we must please him . . . '

  Carpenter sensed the swollen anger in the man, wondered where it could find an outlet. The laugh came again, raising and suspending the flesh rolls of the jaw.

  '. . . I must please him, because if he does not talk to Tantardini, then your Harrison is dead. I am here to save him, I will do my humble best to save him.'

  ' I hadn't really doubted that, sir.' Carpenter let the respect run in his voice, because this was a professional man, this was a caring man.

  'So, come and see her. Know your enemy. That is what you say in England? The better you know him, the better you fight him.' Carboni caught Carpenter's arm and propelled him back towards the door. 'You will see that we risk much at this stage.

  But don't tell me that it was never like that in London. Don't tell me that always you were supreme.'

  'We had the black times.'

  'We have experience, we know the black times. Tonight it is that but darker.'

  His arm still clamped by Carboni's fist, Carpenter surged down the corridor.

  Across the bonnet of the little red Fiat, the child drew with a pliant finger the letters of his name in the dirt covering the paintwork. It had perplexed him at first to find a car edged from the field into the shelter of the trees, and he had skirted it twice before gaining the courage to approach it. He had gazed inside, admired the shiny newness of the seat leather and let his hand flit to the bright chrome door handle and felt it slide down under pressure. But he did not dare to climb into the car and sit in the driver's seat and hold the steering-wheel as he would dearly like to have done. His compensation was the writing of his name in big and bold and shaking letters.

  That task completed, his interest moved on and he walked away as the sun slipped, delaying his journey home to the farm only for the time it took to pluck some hedgerow flowers for his mother. He had little sense of the hour but the chill that was rising from the grass, carried by the freshening wind was enough to dictate his going. He ambled between the chewing cows, holding tightly to the stems of the flowers, admiring their colours.

  That his mother and father might be cruelly anxious for him was beyond the comprehension of his young mind.

  CHAPTER S E V E N T E E N

  Together Archie Carpenter and Giuseppe Carboni stood in the courtyard of the gaol, far on the inside from the high swinging gates, ringed by walls and watch-towers and men who patrolled catwalks with the guns ready in their hands. The Rebibbia prison, Carboni said, was the maximum security holding centre for the capital city. A fearsome and odious place it seemed to Carpenter, where even in the open, where the wind could blow, there was the smell of kitchens and lavatories, and a community in confinement.

  'She will be here one more day,' Carboni intoned. T h e n we transfer her to Messina to await the courts. God willing, it will be months before they drag her into the light again.'

  This is not your work, these are not the people you are normally with?' A gentle query from Carpenter.

  ' I am a criminal policeman, I do not have a political background. That is the can of worms for a policeman. But everyone is very willing that I should be the man who takes the weight of this action. There are others better fitted than I, but they did not raise their hands.' There was a tight, resigned sadness on Carboni's face. 'But that is how we live here, that is our society. We do not fall down and wag our tails and demand to be given the hardest task because there lies the way to honour and promotion, when the risk of failure is greatest. We are survivors, Carpenter. You will learn that.'

  He broke off, his attention directed to the side door of a small building that fronted a towering five-storey cell block. Carabinieri with light machine-guns led the way, officers with medal ribbons followed and then the prisoner. It was the sound of the chains, intrusive and strange to Carpenter, that alerted him to the presence of Franca Tantardini, diminutive when surrounded by so many taller men. A flower choked by weeds. Carpenter shrugged. Stop the bloody politicizing, Archie. She's not a bad-looker either. Good pair of hips on her.

  There was no fear on the woman's face. A battleship under steam, proud and devastating and intimidating. The face that launched Giancarlo, chucked him far out to sea.

  'An impressive bit of woman, Mister Carboni.'

  ' If you find a psychopath impressive, Carpenter, then this one would meet your definition.'

  You've overstepped the line, Archie. Taking the guided tour for granted, as of right. You're the workhouse boy here, out on a charity ride and taking favours. And remember what they brought you here to see. The bloody enemy, Archie, the enemy of the State. They watched as Franca Tantardini was led into the windowless grey van with her gaolers, and around them there was running and movement and the revving of engines from the escort cars; four of them, back windows lowered, machine-guns pro-truding.

  The rear of the van was held open and Carboni moved rapidly inside, Carpenter following and chastened.

  'We are sensitive at this m o m e n t . . . about these people.'

  T a k e my apology, it was the remark of an idiot.'

  Thank you.' A half smile, fast and then obliterated, replaced by the set, hard features of a man about his work. Carboni offered a hand to help Carpenter climb inside. There were two lines of benches in the interior, running against the sides, and the woman rested in a corner far from the door. Illumination came from a single bulb protected by steel mesh. Carboni felt in his waist and produced his short-barrelled pistol and handed it without comment to an escort who would sit at a distance from the prisoner.

  'You are armed, Carpenter?'

  'No.' A blush, as if he had displayed an inadequacy.

  The van drew away, slowly at first, then speeding forward and the echo of the sirens in front and behind bathed the shallow interior.

  'Come and join me.'

  Carboni, a hand against the ceiling to preserve his balance, had struggled across the heaving floor and subsided on to the bench beside the woman. Carpenter took a place opposite her.

  Tantardini eyed them indifferently.

  'Franca.' The policeman spoke as if it hurt to use her first name, as if afterwards he would soap-rinse his mouth. ' I am Carboni of the Questura. I am in charge of the investigation into the kidnapping of an English businessman, Geoffrey Harrison ..

  'Am I to be accused of that too ?' She laughed clearly. 'Is every crime in Rome to be set against the terrible, the fearsome Tantardini ?'

  'Listen to me, Franca. Listen and do not interrupt. . The talk was fast and in Italian, leaving Carpenter uncomprehending, his attention held only by the calm, bright face of the woman.

  ' . . . Hear me out. He was taken, this Englishman, by a Calabresi group. Now he has been removed from them, and he is in the hands of your boy, your Giancarlo.'

  Again the laugh, and the rich, diamond smile. 'Battestini could not deliver a letter . . . '

  'He has killed three men, he has moved Harrison half across the country.' Carboni pierced her with his small pig eyes. The heat in the van was intolerable, and he mopped at his face with a stained handkerchief. 'Battestini holds the Englishman in Rome and demands your freedom against his prisoner's life.'

  There was a trickle of wonderment and surprise. 'Battestini has done all this?'

  'On his own, that is what we believe.'

  Almost a chuckle. 'So why do you come to me?*

  'You are going now to my office. In little more than an hour, in eighty minutes, Battestini will telephone that office. He has demanded to talk to you. We have agreed . . . '

  Carpenter, the eyewitness, watched the tightening of the woman's body, saw the muscles ripple against the cloth of her jeans.

  ' . . . He is very young, this boy. Too young. I tell you something very honestly, Franca: if any harm should come to Harrison, then Giancarlo will die where we find him.'

  'Why tell this to me?'

  'You bedded him, Franca.' The words ripped in distaste from Carboni's mouth. 'You poured the paraffin on his calf-l
ove. He does this for you.'

  The van had lost its speed, telling the occupants that the built-up sprawl of north-east Rome had been reached, and the sirens bellowed for passage with a greater ferocity. Carpenter watched the woman as she lapsed into silence, as if pondering what she had been told. The blanket of warm air wrapped all of them, and there was a drop of sweat eking from her hairline across the fine chiselled nose.

  'What do you offer me?'

  ' I offer you the chance to save the boy's life. He is not of your sort, Franca. He is not a man of the Nappisti, he is a boy. You will go to gaol for many years, not less than twenty. Help us now and it would be taken into account at your trial, there would be clemency.'

  As if from instinct her mouth curled scornfully, before the softness of the woman's lips reappeared. 'You ask me to secure the release of the Englishman?'

  T h a t is what we ask of you.'

  'And I will talk with Giancarlo?'

  'You will talk with him.'

  Carboni looked hard into her, waiting for the response, conscious that he had committed much of his future to the conversation of a few minutes. Whitened skin, pale as the flesh of an underground creature, hair that was not greased and ordered, tired to exhaustion.

  'He is very young,' the woman murmured. 'Just a boy, just a pair of clumsy little hands . . . '

  Thank you, Franca. Your action will be rewarded.'

  What had been settled Carpenter could not know. Carboni had leaned back against the discomfort of the rolling metal wall, and Tantardini sat very still except that her fingers played on the links of the chains that fastened her wrists. And she wasn't wearing a bra either. Bloody marvellous sight, and the blouse must have shrunk in the last wash. Wrap it, Archie. Carboni seemed happy enough, something would have been sorted.

  The van travelled at steady speed towards the inner city.

  Only when the last of them had retreated noisily through the low yellow gorse clump beneath the pines did Violet Harrison open again her eyes. It was too dark under the trees for her to see his fleeing back, but there were the sounds for a long time of his blundering feet and his calls for his friends. The pain in her body was intense, bitter and vivid, and there was a chill seeping against her skin. But the cold was nothing, set against the agony of the wounds provided by the boy Marco and his friends. The worst was at the gentle summit of her thighs, on the line where the tan and the whiteness split, where the bruises would be forming.