Most mornings, while the domestica made the beds and cleaned the bathrooms and put the washing in the machines and did the ironing and tidied the kitchen, Charley had sat on the wide balcony and played with the baby, Francesca, and marvelled at the view above the pot flowers, watered each day by the old portiere, stretching from the dome of the basilica of St Peter's across the heart of the city and away to the distant shadows of the mountains. It had been heaven. And more of heaven in the afternoons, the Italian classes in a room off the cool of a courtyard behind the Parliament building, and then the roaming walks through the centro storico. When she walked the narrow cobbled streets of the centro storico she had never taken a map with her, so that each church and old piazza, each gallery and hidden garden, each tucked-away temple and frieze from antiquity, had seemed a discovery that was personal to her. It had been her freedom.
I have considered very carefully your offer that I should come to Palermo to help look after Mario and Francesca and baby Mauro. I am happy in my present job, I have ambitions to move to a bigger school when I have gained more direct experience. If I resign my position, then I believe it would be quite difficult, at this time, to find another school that would have me in the autumn.
That summer of 1992, for the months of August and September, Charley had gone with Angela Ruggerio and the children to a rented beach villa a kilometre along the coast from Civitavecchia.
If he were not away on the bank's business, Peppino came to the villa at weekends.
Seven weeks of sun, oil and sand and ice-creams and lazy evening meals and a growing love of Angela and her children. The good clothes from the Via Corso boutiques were left behind. The time for T-shirts and jeans and bikinis, and the fourth day on the beach Charley had taken courage and unhooked the bikini top and felt a desperate blushing shyness at the whiteness and lain on her stomach on the towel while Angela had lain on her back beside her, and never worn the top again and known her own parents would have called her a slut. She had talked of poetry with Angela and known her own mother had never read Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth. She had talked of social sciences, Angela's degree course at the University of Rome that had specialized in local administration, and known that her own father had believed the world began and ended with the study of marine engineering. It was the time of her liberation. And it had ended
… It had ended in tears in her small room at the apartment when she had packed her bag, ended in tears as she had hugged them all and kissed them all at the departure gate, ended in tears as she had walked alone to the aircraft. Magic was not real, was illusory.
She had come home from a Roman summer of liberation and freedom to the drab college that trained her to teach.
Basta, enough of me waffling on. I think you are providing me with another fantastic opportunity to travel – which I certainly cannot afford to do on what I am now paid!! – I don't know anything about Palermo except that it is a city very rich in history. I cannot imagine it, cannot see it in my mind, and yet already I am excited.
She did not he often, but it was a lie when she wrote of her ignorance of the city and its images. She was taken, her recall, to (he images on the television screen of the apartment on Collina Fleming. The killing of Judge Giovanni Falcone had been twelve days before her arrival in Rome, that summer of 1992, but the killing of Judge Paolo Borsellino had been forty-five days after her arrival.. She sat in the classroom, with her lunchbox and her emptied can of Pepsi, and she remembered the images of the television…
It was only afterwards, after she had seen the images, that she had understood the quiet in the capital that weekend afternoon as she had browsed her way from the Colosseum to the Partheneum, and the quiet on the bus that had dropped her by the Ponte Flaminio, and the quiet on the street as she had walked under the pine trees towards the apartment on Collina Fleming. She had called her greeting in the hall, and not been answered, and she had gone into the little sitting area where they had the portable television. Even the child, Mario, and the baby, Francesca, had been hushed. Peppino, grim-faced, had sat in front of the television and stared at the screen, and the chin of Angela, beside him, quivered. So it was a lie for Charley to write that she had no image of Palermo. The image in bright colour was of the front of a block of flats, demolished, and of a car that had held 50 kilos of explosives, disintegrated, and of the faces of Judge Borsellino and five bodyguards, destroyed. That was the image of Palermo, and there were more images for her to recall because the television broadcast, interrupting normal schedules, had then shown the scene of the killing, fifty-seven days earlier, of Judge Falcone and Judge Falcone's wife and Judge Falcone's three bodyguards. The images were of the demolished facade of an apartment block in Palermo and of a cratered highway with broken cars scattered among rubble at Capaci. Peppino and Angela had sat with their silence and Charley had watched, seen and slipped away to her bedroom as if she had feared she had intruded into a world that held no place for her, but it had all been far away from Rome and was not referred to again, far away in Palermo.
I am happy to take the plunge. I will sort out the matter of a new job when I get back because this is much too good an opportunity for me to miss – I accept your invitation.
I look forward to hearing your suggestions for my arrival date. Distinti saluti,
Charley (Charlotte Parsons)
Outside the window the bell clamoured the end of the lunch hour. She was twenty-three years old. She heard the screaming, excited babble of the children charging back from the playground. Other than when she had gone to Rome four years earlier, she had never been outside her country. Her hand trembled. She had agreed to take an opportunity for access. She read the letter back. She would spy on the family that had shown her love and kindness and affection.
'Come on, children. Settle down now. Leave her alone, Dean. Stop it. Writing books out, please. Yes, writing books, Tracy. Darren, don't do that. Has everyone got their writing book?'
She folded the letter. She had been told that if she gave serious cause for suspicion, she would be killed and that then her killers would go home to eat their dinner.
To refuse protection in Palermo was to lose the love of life.
Under the yellow haze of car fumes that lay below the surrounding mountains and that was held in place by the light sea breeze, the city was a mosaic of guarded camps.
Palermo was a place of armed men, of carefully sited strongpoints, as it had been throughout history. Soldiers with their NATO rifles, huddled inside bulletproof shelters, held the street corners of the blocks where magistrates and politicians lived.
Police bodyguards in armour- reinforced cars, deafened by sirens, escorted those magistrates and politicians from one defended position to another, from home to work, from work to home. Thug-minders watched over the personal security of the men who figured high on the lists of Interpol's and Europol's most-wanted suspects and had Kalashnikov assault rifles secreted in their cars but close to hand. It was a city of tension and fear, a city where the industry of protection flourished. The industry offering protection, fortresses and safety was spread thick across the city. It covered the servants of the state and the principals of the alternate society, and right on up and right on down through every stratum of Palermo's society. If the magistrate or the politician was denied protection, was isolated, he was as a floor rag left out on a line to rot in the sun, he was dead. If the boss of a family running a district of Palermo ignored the necessary precautions of survival, then other pigs would come to snout out the food in his trough. The hotelier running the four-star albergo must pay for protection or face his guests' cars vandalized, his food contaminated, his business ruined.