'What did you do last night?'
The dry voice, as if reciting from a catalogue. 'Went to a party.'
'Could you have taken me?'
'I had someone to go with.'
He stood beside her. He held a padded paper bag in his hand. The labels had been pulled from it. She saw the great tree logs and the big branches, debris of the winter floods, now marooned against the piers of the bridge. She looked up at the fortress of Sant'Angelo. She had been round it, alone, in the summer of 1992, tramped the narrow corridors and climbed the worn steps and marvelled at the symmetry of its architects, so many centuries ago, in creating the perfect circular shape. It had been then a place of friendship.
'I'm here, you're here, so what happens now?'
'You're on board?'
'Of course I'm bloody on board.'
'You don't want to step off?'
She stood her full height. He wasn't looking at her. He was gazing . iway, distant, towards the dome, misted and grey, of St Peter's. She took his arm, a fistful of the arm of his windcheater, and she jerked him round to face her.
'For Christ's sake – I came, didn't I?'
He seemed to hesitate, as if he were troubled. Then Axel launched. Terrorism, Charley, is spectacular. Terrorism makes headlines. You know about the bombs in the City of London, you know about ()klahoma City and the World Trade Center, and about hijackings. You know about the charisma of a Che Guevara or a Carlos or an Adams or a Meinhof because the ideology and profile of those people are plastered all over your television. They don't count. For al the resources we throw against them they are minor-league. But you, Charley, you don't know the name of an internationally relevant criminal. It's like HIV and cancer. HIV, the terrorist, gets the attention and the resources, while cancer, the crime boss, busies itself with the serious damage, but quietly. With an ideology only of greed, organized crime is the cancer that chews at our society, and it should be taken out at source with a knife. In the ideology of greed there is no mercy if an obstacle – you, Charley – gets in the way…'
A small and weak grin. 'Is this your effort to scare me?'
'When you're alone, when you're frightened, then you should know what you've gotten into. Down in Sicily, fair to assume, there's a hundred different programmes, slants, angles of an operation running. You are one in a hundred. That's your importance. You offer a one-in-a-hundred chance of, maybe, getting up alongside the target.
You are Codename Helen, that is the name-'
She snorted and the colour ran back into her face. She laughed at him. 'Helen? Helen of Troy? Trojan Horse and all that? That is really original – did a genius think up that one?'
'It's what you are, Codename Helen.' He flushed.
'What's inside the walls? Who's hiding in Troy?'
'Don't play jokes, Charley, don't. There is a family in the town of Prizzi, that's inland from Palermo. It's a mean little place stuck on the rock. OK, Prizzi is the home of a contadino's family. The contadino is Rosario and he is now aged eighty-four. His wife is Agata, now aged eighty-three. Rosario and Agata have produced six children. The children are Mario, the eldest, sixty-two… Salvatore, sixty, in prison… Carmelo, fifty-nine, simple, lives with his parents… Cristoforo, would be fifty-seven, dead…
Maria, fifty-one, married and an alcoholic… the youngest, Giuseppe, forty-two, the big gap because old Rosario was called away between 1945 and 1954 to spend time in Ucciardione Prison. The name of that family from Prizzi is Ruggerio…'
He flicked a cigarette from the Lucky Strike packet. She locked her eyes on the cupola of St Peter's, as if she thought the mistshrouded image might strengthen her.
'The family is mafiosi, down to the base of its spine, right to the bottom of the root of the weed. But nothing is as it seems. The family has played a long game, which is the style of La Cosa Nostra, to play long and patient. Giuseppe, bright child, was sent by his eldest brother away from Prizzi, out of Sicily, to university in Rome. On to a school of business management in Geneva. To an Italian bank in Buenos Aires. There were connections, favours were called in, work in Rome for one of those discreet little banks handling Vatican funds. Did he seem to you, Giuseppe, to be the son of a contadino?
Did he tell you about a peasant family? Did he?'
Charley had no answer. Her teeth ground at her bottom lip.
'I said that the family could play a long game. Only a very few in Palermo, and none in Rome, would know that Giuseppe is the brother of Mario Ruggerio. I don't know how many hundreds of millions of dollars Mario Ruggerio is worth. I know what he needs. Mario Ruggerio needs a banker, a broker, an investment manager, in whom he can place absolute trust. It's all a matter of trust down there. Trust is held in the family.
The family has the man to wash, rinse, spin and dry their money. The family is everything. The family meets, the family gathers, and the family does not feel the danger of betrayal. Then, and it's rare, the family makes a mistake. The mistake is a letter written by Angela to a former nanny/ child-minder – I have a friend down there, and you don't need his name, and you don't need his agency, and because it's the way in Sicily he does not share with colleagues what he learns – and he learned of the link between Giuseppe and Mario Ruggerio, and he started to run a sporadic surveillance on pretty little Giuseppe, and the jackpot bonus came up when he intercepted the letter, a mistake. I don't know how often that family meets, no idea. I know that the family will come together, that Mario Ruggerio will need, a deep need because he is Sicilian, to be in the bosom of his family. They all have it, the evil, heartless bastards, a syrup streak of sentimentality for the family. You're there, Charley, you're a part of the family, you're the little mouse that nobody notices, you're at the far end of the room, watching the kids and keeping them quiet, you're access…'
She stared at the cupola of St Peter's. She thought it a place of sanctity and safety, and she could remember standing in the great square on a Sunday morning and feeling humbled by the love of 1 he pilgrims for the Holy Father, minuscule on the balcony.
'A man from Agrigento has disappeared. He led one of the three principal families of La Cosa Nostra. It is assumed he is dead. There is a man from Catania, the power in the east of the island. There is Mario Ruggerio. They do not share power in Sicily, they fight for power with the delicacy of rats in a bucket. Mario Ruggerio is one stage away from the overall command of La Cosa Nostra. One step away from taking the title of capo di tutti capi. One killing away from becoming the most influential figure in international organized crime. The target of Codename Helen is Mario Ruggerio.'
She felt weak, pitiful. 'Is it possible, listen to me, Christ, hear me, is it possible for one person, me, to change anything?'
He said, 'If I didn't think so, I would not have come for you.'
He took her hand. Without asking, and without explanation, he unhooked the fastening of her wrist-watch. The watch was gold. It was the most expensive thing that she owned. It had been given to her by her father, three weeks before he had known of his redundancy, for her twenty-first birthday. He dropped the gold watch, as if it were a bauble and worthless, into his trouser pocket. He still held her hand, a strong grip that was without affection. The envelope was laid on top of the stonework above the flowing river. He took from it a bigger watch, a man's watch, the sort of watch that young men wore, a scuba diver's watch. He told her to think of a story as to why she wore such a watch. He slipped it over the narrowness of her fist, onto the narrowness of her wrist. The strap was of cold expanding metal. He showed her, exactly and methodically, which buttons activated the watch's mechanism, and which button activated the panic tone… Christ… He told her the life of the cadmium battery in the watch. He told her the signals she should send. He told her the range of the signal of the panic tone. He told her that the UHF frequency would be monitored twenty-four hours a day in Palermo. He told her when she should make a test transmission. He let her hand drop.