'I heard, he broke into his parents' house and cleaned out his mother's jewellery case, all the heirloom stuff was worth one big fix. He would have been subject to tremors, muscle spasms, sweats. He would have loaded up in panic, but got the dose wrong. He would have been unconscious, then gone into coma. He ended up in here after a breathing failure. Of course, this is just a small city, we don't get that many.'
Charley looked down at the corpse. She had never seen a dead body before. It was as if the skin had been waxed pale, and the body hair on the chest and in the arm pits and round the penis of I he body seemed, to her, like a weed that had been poisoned. There was colour in the bruised right arm, but the needle holes were dulled. She thought the body was of a young man of about her age. ind there seemed to be a peace about his expression. She didn't know, and she didn't ask, whether the people in the mortuary could have given his face the mask of peace, or whether the act of dying made the peace.
In the corridor outside the area where cadavers were stored in refrigerated bays, Ken was smoking a cigarette that was tucked into the palm of his hand, and Brent was unwrapping a boiled sweet.
They drove her back to the school.
They rang the doorbell for the caretaker, who opened up for them.
Charley gunned the engine of her scooter. She sat astride the saddle. She arched her back, pinched her shoulder blades.
Are you always as subtle as that? Squeezing my emotions. Winding me up, like a damn puppet.'
Brent said, 'Sorry, love, but it's what we were asked to do.'
Ken said, 'I don't know, of course, what it was for, sunshine, but it was what the American gentleman wanted.'
She pulled the helmet down over her hair. Charley had seen reality, what she read in newspapers and what she watched on television, and she had not cared to know that it was reality in her
• own bloody back yard. She rode away into the night, and she cursed him and the tears ran on her face and were caught by the wind. On the road, in the lane, a car followed her and lit her back and never closed on her. In her mind was a jumble of images, unproven,
• of the island of Sicily and the city of Palermo. The lights of the car stayed in her mirror. Palermo…
No wind, no rain, no cloud. The island baked in spring sunshine. By early morning, the first warmth of the year suffocated the city. Over that city, which was pressed into a narrow seaboard between the Mediterranean and the mountains, had settled a chemical mist of yellow-hazed pollution from the vehicles jockeying on the Via della Liberta and the Via Marqueda and the Via Francesco Crispi and the Via Vittorio Emanuele and the Via Tukory. Invisible under that mist were the symbols of Low-intensity Warfare, the electronic signals, the micro-wave boosters, the pulses sent by telephone and radio transmissions, the pictures carried by covert surveillance cameras, the voices distorted by audio-intercept bugs. Among the clutter of a modern society's legitimate communications, small fish in the big sea, were the messages, coded and masked, of a contemporary battlefield. Signals, pulses, tones, images, voices of men at war meandered under the foul-tasting mist that clung above the roofs of Palermo.
When she came out of the common room, with the taste of instant coffee in her mouth, to bring in the children from mid-morning break, she saw him sitting in the parked car outside the gate. She thought of the housing estate and the despair and the poverty.
He did not trust the safety of any form of telephone communication.
Mario Ruggerio sat alone in the small room of the apartment on the first floor. The sounds, raucous, of the Capo district came to him through the opened window, through the closed shutters that filtered segments of sunlight into the room. The sunlight lay in shards across the table at which he worked and were reflected from a mirror and onto a side wall, so that the brightness and the shadow latticed the picture of the Agony of Christ. The crying of the hawkers, the shouting of people in anger and in mirth, the roar of the engines of Vespas and Lambrettas competed with the quiet of Radio Uno.
Neither the noise from the alleyway below nor the voice and music close to him disturbed his concentration. Both the outside noise and the radio's voice and music were a necessary part of his security. In the Capo district of hardship and crime and wariness, a surveillance car and a surveillance team would be noticed and a quiet would fall over the alleyway. And if there was the arrest of a super-latitanti, a big man on the run, or if there was a swoop and round-up of suspects, then it would be carried on the radio and he would know. The outside noise and the radio's voice and music did not disturb him as he wrote the brief and cryptic messages with a fine-point pen on the sheets of paper used for rolling cigarettes.
Education at school for Mario Ruggerio had lasted from the age of five years to nine years. No schoolmaster, nor schoolmistress, no academic, no lecturer, no professor had taught him the science of electronic communications, but he had no trust in the security of the telephone. There were those he had known who had believed they could talk through the landline system, and they sat now in the stifling heat of the cells at Ucciardione in the city of Palermo. There were others who had believed in the safety of the new analogue technology of the mobile telephone, and they rotted now behind the walls of Caltanisetta on the island or at Asinara Prison on Sardinia. He had been urged the last year to believe in the total security of the most recent system, the digital network, promised that it could not be intercepted, and those men who had believed and promised now saw the sun and the sky for an hour a day ill rough the net mesh above the exercise yard at Ucciardione or C'altanisetta or Asinara.
He laid the messages written on the cigarette papers across the table. He read them.
He lit a small cigar. He coughed and spat phlegm into his handkerchief. He read the messages again and then gathered them into his ashtray. He was satisfied he had memorized thee messages. He burned the papers on which they were written. The messages, now held in his memory, dealt with the matters concerning the movement of $8 million from a holding company in the Bahamas to a casino development in Slovenia, the switching of I I million from a Vienna-based account to a bank in Bratislava, the buying of a block of twenty-two apartments at a Corsican beach resort, the question of the life and death of a man in Catania, the problem of the persistent investigation by a magistrate in the Palazzo di Giustizia. Five messages, now burned, now memorized, would be passed, word of mouth, to five men in five bars over five coffees that morning.
His way was caution and suspicion. With caution and suspicion he maintained what was most precious, his freedom.
Later, when the sun was higher against the closed shutters, when he had smoked a second cigar, when he had listened to the radio news bulletin and heard the report that the Questura in Agrigento had made no progress in their search for a missing man and his grandson and his driver, he would slip in his anonymity onto the streets of the city and into five bars where his people waited for him. His people were the 'cut-out' intermediaries who carried the messages, verbally, to construction magnates and politicians and the principals of the Masons or Rotary and bankers, and to the policemen that he owned, and to the churchmen that he had bought. All of those who received messages from Mario Ruggerio acted upon them immediately because he fuelled their greed and fanned their fear…