… A prosecutor had talked of 'a power system, an articulation of power, a metaphor of power and a pathology of power…'
The sun burned the road, the light heat up from the tarmac into his face. Away out on the water were small boats, drifting distant from each other, in which lonely lfishermen stood and cast small nets, and he saw old men walking on the grey pebble beaches with long shore-fishing rods on their shoulders… A judge had talked of 'a global, unitary, rigidly regimented and vertical structure governed from the top down by a cupola with absolute powers over policy, money, life and death…' He felt a calmness because he was not deluded by the peace of the mountains and the peace of the seascape. He drove through Bagheria and Villabate and took the ringroad to the south of the city, as if ignoring the close-set tower blocks of Palermo, and I hen he climbed the switchback road that was signed to Monreale. I le was close to his destination.
At the apartment in the Giardino Inglese the morning was spent packing Angela's clothes and the children's bags.
She was told about Mondello and a villa by the sea, the holiday home for the summer. The description of the holiday villa, given by Angela Ruggerio, was curt, and Charley saw already a wan tiredness and distraction about the face and movements of her employer. It was hard for Charley to gauge her mood, but the woman was a changed person: the confidence and humour of four years before were gone, as if the spirit of her were crushed. It was, Charley thought, as if a wall had been erected. She spent most of that morning in the rooms used by small Mario and Francesca, taking the necessary clothes from drawers and the favoured toys from cupboards, but when she had wandered into the principal bedroom and not knocked she had seen Angela at the drawer of a bedside table, taking two pill bottles out, and she had seen a little moment of almost panic because the bottles were noticed, and then Angela had dropped them into a bag. Charley had smiled in embarrassment and said something inane about the number of shirts that small Mario would need, and the little moment had passed.
Charley and small Mario were given the work of taking the bulging bags and cases down in the elevator to the underground parking area. When she came back up and walked into the grandness of the apartment Angela was standing in the centre of the living area gazing down at a blemish in the beauty of the embroidered carpet and frowning. Then, aware of Charley in the doorway, she replaced the frown with a fixed and tense smile.
The last bags were carried out. The door was locked. In the car park, the bags and cases were pushed into the big trunk of a Mercedes saloon.
Charley sat in the back and held tight to the baby, and Francesca cuddled against her as if, so soon, a friendship had been made. They were out of the city, the tower blocks were behind them, they were under the steep might of the Pellegrino mountain, they were passing the first whores of the day, waiting in their mini-skirts and plunging blouses at the entrances to the picnic sites, when it struck Charley. He had not been mentioned. Dr Giuseppe Ruggerio had not been spoken of. It was not for her to ask questions. She should not probe, she had been told, and she should not push and she should not display curiosity.
They drove along the slack crescent road that skirted the beach at Mondello. They went through the narrow streets of the old town. They stopped at big iron gates with black-painted steel plates to deny a voyeur's inspection of what lay behind them.
Angela slapped the horn of the Mercedes. The gates were opened by an old man, who ducked his head in respect, and she drove up a hidden drive, past flowers and shrubs, and braked hard in front of the villa.
She had arrived. Codename Helen was in place. She had taken the opportunity of access. She was the horse, she was treachery.
Angela, remote and unsmiling, carrying the baby, went ahead and fished the keys from her bag as she walked to the patio of the villa. Small Mario and Francesca ran after their mother. Charley opened the trunk of the Mercedes and started to heave out the family's bags and cases. From by the gate, leaning on a broom, standing among the fallen winter's leaves, the old man, the gardener, watched her… She felt small and alone and cast off.
'There is no change.' The magistrate shrugged as if uninterested. 'You tell me what you know, when you have told me then I evaluate, when I have evaluated what you tell me then I decide on a recommendation, when I have decided on a recommendation then the committee will determine if you should be given the privileges of the Special Protection Programme…'
Pasquale leaned against the door. The Beretta 9mm pistol was against his hip, and the machine-gun was draped on a strap and cut into the small of his back.
'I need the guarantee.'
The prisoner was hunched over the table and his furtive eyes roamed around the bare walls, and his fingers shook as they guided his cigarette to his mouth. Outside the door, muffled from passage along the concrete-faced corridor, deadened by the distance from the car park, were the shouts and jeers of the men kicking a football, the men who guarded the magistrate and a judge who worked that day at Ucciardione. From the door Pasquale craned to hear the response. The magistrate made the gesture, opened his hands. 'If you do not tell me what you know, then you will serve a sentence of life imprisonment for murder. It is not for me to offer guarantees.'
The prisoner had requested the second interview. Word had again been passed. The prisoner had again been brought by the secret and circuitous route to the bare-walled room. The wretch trembled. Pasquale knew the oath that he would have sworn. In a locked room filled with already sworn Men of Honour, the darkness of night outside to conceal their gathering: 'Are you ready to enter La Cosa Nostra? Do you realize there will be no going back? You enter La Cosa Nostra with your own blood and you can leave it only by shedding more of your own blood.' Pasquale thought the wretch trembled because he would then have been asked in which hand he would hold a gun, and the trigger finger of that hand would have been pricked with a thorn sufficient to draw blood, and the blood would have been smeared on a paper image of the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, and the paper would have been lit and it would have been dropped, burning, into the palm of the wretch's hand and he would have recited the oath and then condemned himself if he betrayed it – 'May my flesh burn like this holy image if I am unfaithful to La Cosa Nostra.' The wretch would have sworn it, with blood and with fire, and now he squirmed.
'For Ruggerio, I get the guarantee for Mario Ruggerio…?'
The magistrate's fingers drummed on the table. Pasquale watched him. The shoulders were rounded, the chin was slack, there seemed no evidence of the core strength of the man, but the maresciallo had spoken, musing, of his courage and quoted, as if it were relevant to this man too, the saying of the dead Falcone: 'The brave man dies only once, the coward dies a thousand times each day.' Pasquale listened. If they were close to Mario Ruggerio, if they threatened the freedom of Mario Ruggerio, they were all endangered – not only Rocco Tardelli's life was hazarded, but also the lives of the ragazzi who stood in front of Tardelli and beside him and behind him.
'If, through your efforts, Mario Ruggerio were to be arrested, then I would recommend that you be given the privileges of the Special Protection Programme.'
The silence hung between the bare walls, eddied with the cigarette smoke towards the single fluorescent strip. Because Pasquale knew the oath that the wretch had sworn, the depths of the oath made with fire and blood, he shuddered. The maresciallo, sitting behind the wretch, leaned forward to hear better. The magistrate scratched at the head of a pimple on the side of his nose as if it were not a matter of importance to him.
There were tears in the prisoner's eyes.