RED FOX

by Gerald Seymour

  The face of Geoffrey Harrison, its lines and contours, was frozen to his wife's mind in the final broken seconds of her life.

  The sound of herself speaking his name was bolted to her tongue.

  There was much traffic returning at that time from the coast.

  Many sitting behind their wheels would curse the unseen source of the queues that built on either side of the accident, and then shudder and avert their faces as they witnessed in their lights the reason for their delay.

  In front of Carboni's desk, Franca Tantardini sat on a hard, un-prepossessing chair. She was upright, taking little notice of the men who bustled around her, gazing only at the window with its dark abyss and undrawn curtains. The fingers of her hands were entwined on her lap, the chains removed. More like a waiting bride than a prisoner. She had not replied when she had first come into the room and Carboni had taken her to a corner and spoken in his best bedside hush beyond the ears of his subordinates.

  Archie Carpenter's eyes never left her. Not the sort of creature that he had handled when he was with Special Branch in London.

  His career spanned the years before the Irish watch, before the bombers came in earnest. Not much colour in those days for Carpenter who was concerned with the machinations of the far-out shop stewards, the Marxist militants and that old source of inspiration, the Soviet Trade Delegation from Highgate. His had been the old Branch, the archaeological specimen that withered and died in its ice age before learning the new techniques of the war against urban terrorism. The guerrilla fighter was a new phenomenon for Archie Carpenter, something only experienced through newspapers and television screens. But there seemed to be nothing special about the woman, nothing to put her on the pedestal. Well, what do you expect, Archie? A Che Guevara T-shirt, the hammer and sickle tattooed on her forehead?

  The telephone on Carboni's desk rang.

  Difficult really to know what to expect. Criminals the world over, all the same. Whether it's political, whether it's material.

  Big fat bouncy kids when they've the air of freedom to breathe.

  Miserable little bastards when the door closes behind them, when they've twenty years of sitting on a blanket.

  Carboni grabbed at the receiver, snatching it from the cradle.

  Thought she'd have more fight in her, from the way they cracked her up. Belt it, Archie, for Christ's sake.

  'Carboni.'

  T h e call that you have been waiting for, Dottore.'

  'Connect it.'

  The light bulb had been removed from the telephone kiosk. In the half dark Giancarlo watched the second hand of his watch moving slowly on its path. He knew the available time, was aware of the ultimate danger. With one hand he held the telephone pressed hard against his right ear, the noise of the ristorante stifled.

  'Pronto, Carboni.' A voice fused in metallic interference.

  'Battestini.' He had used his own name, chipped at the pretence.

  'Good evening, Giancarlo.'

  'I have little time . . . '

  'You have as much time as you want, Giancarlo.'

  The sweat rivers ran on the boy's face. 'Will you meet the demands of the Nuclei Armati Proletaria . .. ?'

  The voice cut back at him, smothering his words. 'The demands of Giancarlo Battestini, not of the Nappisti.'

  'We stand together as a movement, we . . .' He broke off, absorbed in the motion of his watch ticking on its way, edging towards fiasco.

  'You are there, Giancarlo ?'

  The boy hesitated. Forty seconds gone, forty seconds of the two minutes that was required for a trace.

  ' I have demanded the freedom of F r a n c a . . . that is what must happen if 'Arrison is to live .. .'

  It is a very complicated matter, Giancarlo. There are many things to be considered.' There was an awful, deadening calmness in the responses. A sponge that he hit at but could not corner and pinion.

  Oose to a minute gone.

  There is one question only, Carboni. Yes or no?'

  The first hint of anxiety broke in the distorted voice, the noise of breathing mingled with the atmospherics. 'We have Franca here for you to talk to, Giancarlo.'

  'Yes or no, that was my question.'

  More than a minute gone, the hand on its second arc.

  'Franca will talk to you.'

  All eyes in the room on the face of Franca Tantardini.

  Carboni held the telephone mouthpiece against his shirt, looked deep and far into the woman, saw only the blank, proud, composed eyes, and knew that this was the ultimate moment of risk. Nothing to be read from her mouth and from her hands that did not fidget, showed no impatience. Total silence, and an atmosphere lead-laden that even Carpenter without the Italian language could sense and be fearful of.

  ' I trust you, Franca.' Barely audible the words as Carboni's hand with the telephone stretched out towards the responding arm of La Tantardini.

  There was a carelessness now in her smile. Almost human.

  Long slender fingers exchanged for the fatty, stumpy grip of Carboni's fist. When she spoke it was with a clear and educated voice, no roughened edges, no slang of the gutter. The daughter of a well-set family of Bergamo.

  ' It is Franca, my little f o x . . . do not interrupt me. Hear me to the finish . . . and little fox, do as I instruct you, exactly as I instruct you. They have asked me to tell you to surrender. They have asked me to tell you that you should release the Englishman . . . '

  Carboni permitted his eyes, in secrecy, to float to his watch.

  One minute and twenty seconds since the call was initiated. He saw the image of activity in the Questura basement. The isolation of the communication, the evaluation of the digital dialling process, the routing of the connection back towards its source.

  He strained forward to hear better her words.

  'You have asked for my release, little fox. Listen to me. There will be no freedom. So I say this to you, Giancarlo. This is the l a s t - '

  It was the action of a moment. Franca Tantardini on her feet.

  Right arm high above her head, the fist in clenched salute. A face riven with hatred. Muscles of the neck bulged like sewer pipes.

  ' - kill him, Giancarlo. Kill the pig. Forza la proletaria. Forza la rivoluzione. Giancarlo, la lotta continua .. .'

  Even as they were rising to their feet, the men about her, struggling to reach her, she had moved whiplash fast towards the receiver on Carboni's desk. As she wrenched at the telephone, tearing its flex from the wall fitting, they pounded her to the ground. The little men of the room kicked and punched at the unresisting body of the woman while Carboni and Carpenter, separated by the mel6e and on their different sides of the office, sat stock still and assessed the scope of the catastrophe.

  'Take her back to the Rebibbia, and I want no marks on her

  . . . none that can be seen.' A terrible ice cold in his voice, as if the shock wave of betrayal had broken Giuseppe Carboni.

  Another telephone ringing. He picked it up, placed it to his ear and dropped his weight on to an elbow. As he listened he watched Franca Tantardini half carried, half dragged, take her leave of him. Carboni nodded as information was given him, offered no gratitude for the service.

  'They say, from the basement, that I had told them they would have a minimum of two minutes to find the trace. They say that I gave them one minute and forty seconds. They say that was not sufficient. I have failed your man, Carpenter. I have failed your man.'

  Carpenter spat back at him. They gave you nothing?'

  ' Just that it was from the north of the c i t y . . . '

  Carpenter stood up and walked towards the door. He wanted to say something vicious, wanted to let the frustration go, and couldn't find it in himself. You couldn't kick a dog, not one that was already limping, that had the mange at its collar. There was nothing he could say. Grown men, weren't they? Not kids who could bully. All adults, all trying, all confronted by the same cancer that was eating deep and ravenously.

&nbs
p; ' I'm going round to Charlesworth's place. The Embassy fellow.

  You can reach me there . . . till late.'

  'I will be here.'

  Of course he would be. Where else for him ? No Embassy duty-free Scotch for Giuseppe Carboni, no shutting out of the problem with seventy per cent proof. Carpenter let himself out, didn't look back at Carboni, and walked down the corridor to the staircase.

  Through the connecting door and into the inner sanctum marched Francesco Vellosi. There was uninhibited hatred on his face, brutal and devastating, informing Carboni that he had heard the words of Tantardini.

  ' I told you to be careful, Carboni, I told you.!

  'You told me . . . '

  A strand of sympathy shone. 'Anything?'

  'With the time available, nothing of substance, nothing that matters.'

  Their arms around each other's waists, in mutual consolation, the two men walked from the room to the wire-caged lift for the fifth floor.

  They would saturate an area of slightly more than three thousand five hundred square kilometres, from Viterbo in the north to La Storta in the south, while the western limit would be the coastal town of Civitavecchia and the eastern line would be the Roma-Firenze autostrada. Formality, the task provided by the basement technicians. Too great an area for a manhunt, too great an area to lift the men's bowed shoulders.

  As they emerged from the lift Vellosi said softly, T h e y will crucify you, they will say she should never have spoken to the boy.'

  ' It was the best chance to make him talk for longer.'

  ' Who will say that ? You will be torn apart, Carboni, the entertainment of the wild dogs.'

  Arms still round each other, faces close, Carboni looking up and Vellosi down, eyes meeting. 'But you will be with me, Vellosi.'

  Only a smile, only a tightening of the fist in the material of Carboni's shirt, as they came to the operations centre.

  The child's head, wearing a winning smile, drifted around the kitchen door.

  ' M a m a . . . ' the plaintive call. 'Can I sit with Papa?"

  'You were a bad boy today.'

  ' I'm sorry, Mama .,

  She had no stomach for the fight, was pleased the child had come from his room, exorcizing her shame that she had lost her temper and tried to strike him. God knows they both worshipped their lone son.

  'Papa is tired.' She heard the distant steady snore from her man's throat, the warm food cosseted in him, the burned energy of the day seeking replacement. 'You can sit with him, but don't you bother him, don't you wake him . . .'

  The child waited for no more hesitation from his mother. He raced in his light bare feet, his loose pyjamas flowing, through the kitchen and into the living-room.

  His mother listened.

  'Papa, are you asleep? Papa, can I tell you what I saw in the wood? Please, Papa .. .*

  She slapped the towel across her hands, summoned herself across the room in a cloak of annoyance and hissed through the doorway at the sofa where the child snuggled against his sleeping father.

  'What did I say to you? That you were not to wake him.

  Another word from you and you go to your bed. Leave Papa alone. You talk to Papa in the morning.'

  'Yes, Mama, can I watch the programme?'

  A concert flickered on the aged screen, the harmony of the notes suffering from the distortion of the set. She nodded her head. That was permitted, and it was good for the boy to sit with his father.

  'But don't you wake P a p a . . . and don't you argue when I call you for bed.'

  C H A P T E R E I G H T E E N

  The sounds of the returning Giancarlo carried from far away to Geoffrey Harrison. The arrival was blundering and clumsy as if silence and stealth were no longer of importance. The noise spread through the quiet of the wood, where there was nothing to compete with the snapping of branches, the crushing of fallen leaves. He would not be able to see the boy's face when he came, would not be able to recognize the mood and the danger. A blessing or an additional wound? Better to know when the boy was still far from him, better his news while the creature was still distant.

  They say some men die well, and others die badly. Harrison remembered when he was a kid and he'd read in a magazine stories of executions by law in a gaol. They said some had screamed and some walked with a high head, and some were carried, and some went unaided and thanked the men around them for their courtesy. What bloody difference did it make?

  Who looks at a skinned pig hanging from a butcher's hook and says, 'That pig would have died well, you can see it on his face, brave bugger, well done'; who looks at the carcase and thinks of its going?

  You'll crawl, Geoffrey, grovel on your knees, because that's the way you are. The bender and the compromiser. Have to be, don't you? Because that's the way you do business, and you're good at business, Geoffrey. That's why International Chemical Holdings sent you here, sent you to lie on your side with the hair growing on your face and the smell from your socks and pants, and the hunger in your belly, and the pain at your wrists, and a kid coming to kill you. Crawl, Geoffrey, play the lizard on his stomach, scuffing through the deadwood. That's the way of commerce. Know when you can fight and when you can lose, and if it's defeat, then turn the cheek and summon the sweet words and save something for the shareholders. Bloody shareholders.

  Fat women in Hampstead, poodles and jewels, apartments with lifts, and deceased husbands. For you, you bitches, for you I'm lying here, listening to him coming.

  There were the escape moments, Geoffrey. In the car, plenty of them, each time you stopped . . . God, do we go through all that again ? It's a big grown-up world, Geoffrey. Nanny isn't here any more. No one to save you but yourself. Why isn't little Giancarlo messing his knickers, why isn't he frightened that his time is coming? Because he believes in something, idiot. It's a faith, it has a meaning to him.

  And Geoffrey Harrison has no creed.

  Who does Geoffrey Harrison fight for? What principle?

  Where is his army of companions who will weep if one of their number falls?

  Another bloody casualty, Geoffrey, and there will be a public sadness in Head Office, and a few will scratch their heads and try and remember the chap who went abroad because it paid more.

  But don't expect there's going to be any wet on the blotting-paper, any stains on the ledgers, any flags pulled down.

  Remember the bar at the Olgiata Golf Club. Red faces and long gins. Men who were always right, always knew. Certainty of opinion. Remember the bar of the Gold Club when Aldo Moro was cringing for the world to see and urging in letters to his friends for government weakness to preserve his life from the Red Brigades.

  Despicable behaviour. The man's no dignity.

  What you'd expect from these people.

  Only have to go back to the war, in North Africa, show 'em a bayonet and you've more prisoners on your hands than you can feed.

  What a wonderful wallowing security, membership of the Golf Club. They'll make hay of you, Geoffrey. The man who came back for nine holes after he'd been on his knees with the tears on his cheeks and the sobbing in his throat, and pleaded and held the legs of a boy half his age.

  Got to fight 'em, show 'em there's going to be no nonsense.

  That's the way to beat the scum.

  Giancarlo was very close, and his voice pierced the darkness.

  They want you dead, 'Arrison.'

  Harrison wriggled and dragged at the wires, tried to turn to face the boy. Managed a few inches.

  'What do you mean?'

  They do nothing to save you.'

  'What did they say?'

  "They tried only to use up time so that they could trace the call.'

  'What did Franca say?' The questions from Harrison blurted at the centre of the shadow above him.

  'Franca told me to kill you. She said they would not release her.

  She told me to kill you . . . '

  A whisper from Harrison. The breached corn sack, from which the es
sence is lost. 'Franca said that?'

  It's a bloody dream, Geoffrey. There's no reality here. It's fantasy.

  ' I'm not your enemy, Giancarlo. I've done nothing to hurt you.'

  And where was the bastard's face, moulded in the blackness?

  How could you creep before a boy with no face, how did you win him with your fear and your misery? 'I've never tried to harm you ..

  'Franca said I was to kill you.*

  'For Christ's sake, Giancarlo. I'm no enemy of the Italian proletariat, I'm not in the way of your revolution.'

  'You are a symbol of oppression and exploitation.'

  ' It's like you're reading out of the telephone book, they don't mean anything, those words. You can't take a life for a slogan.'

  The same dripping voice, the same cruelty in the unseen eyes.

  There can be no revolution without blood. Not just your blood,

  'Arrison. We die in the streets for what we believe is a just struggle. We face the living death in the concentration camps of the regime. Twenty years she will exist in Messina . . . '

  'Don't talk to me about other people.' The dream clearing, the nightmare fading. 'It helps you not at all if you kill me. You must see that, Giancarlo, please say you can see t h a t . . . '

  'You are pathetic, 'Arrison. You are of the middle class, you are of the multinational, you have a flat on a h i l l . . . should you not defend that way? Should you not defend that exploitation?

  I despise you.'

  The silence fell fast because the killing words of the boy struck far. Harrison abandoned his efforts, lay still and heard the sounds of Giancarlo dropping to sit on the ground a dozen feet from the bunker. Man and boy they drifted to their own thoughts.

  Crawl to him, Geoffrey. It's not the Golf Club's life, forget the humiliation, screw the dignity lapse. That he couldn't grovel, what a thing for a man to die over.

  Shrill little words and a voice he did not recognize as his own.

  'What do I have to do, Giancarlo? What do I have to do for you not to kill me?'