The first assignment with the DEA had been bad times. New York City, and the file had said that he was fluent in the Sicilian dialect, and the Pizza Connection case was going to trial, and there were the hours of wire taps to be listened to and noted, and he had sat week after week, month after month, in a small, darkened room with the earphones on his head and the tapes turning and the light blazing at his notepad…
When 'Vanni had fingered in the entry code and they were inside a corridor, they dumped the bucket and the stepladder.
La Paz, Bolivia, that had been good times, working with a small team, running his own CIs, riding in the local Huey birds, getting used to wearing the flak vest and to carrying the weight of an M16. The big shoot-out, the end of the day, hadn't changed La Paz, Bolivia, from rating as good times. Nor being shipped out on a walking-wounded ticket.
They went down a corridor and past the open section of an operations area with consoles and radios. Past a rest room where men sat in chairs and wore casual clothes and the firearms and the vests and the balaclavas were heaped on a table with the coffee cups and the used plates, and 'Vanni told Axel they were the Response Squad of the Reparto Operativo Speciale. 'Vanni said, if the panic tone went for real, that they'd be the guys who'd go running. He'd called in a favour, been allocated the team, dragged in a big debt, refused to explain.
Back to New York, three more years, and that had been bad times. They'd said in DEA and FBI and the prosecutors' offices that the American mainland end of La Cosa Nostra was finished. Tommaso
Buscetta, turncoat, pentito, had blown them away to the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. All over. The Bureau said, on the record, assholes that they were, that the
'mafia myth of invincibility' was torpedoed. A prosecutor said, for quoting, 'The Sicilian mafia's drug connection has been dismantled.' The resources were being drained from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Three years of scrapping with FBI over investigation priorities and pushing reports from desk to desk, three years of hearing that the Sicilians were a back number by comparison with the Colombians, and wondering then why the streets of Chicago and Philadelphia and Atlanta and Los Angeles and New York and Washington, a short walk from Headquarters, were stacked high with goddam heroin. Bad times, until the posting to Rome…
Up a flight of stairs, down another corridor, through a door that could be opened only with an entry code, into ' Vanni's office. Axel looked around him.
'If this is home, Christ…'
He thought it was a monk's cell. A bare room, with bare walls except for the photograph of a general in best uniform and a smiling portrait of a little girl, with a bare, plastic-topped table and a hard chair, with a bare bed and blankets folded neatly on top of the single pillow.
Axel took from the plastic bag the second of the receivers he had brought to Sicily.
The box was a little longer and a little thicker but the same depth as a hardback book.
He extended the aerial. He showed 'Vanni the on/off switch. He wrote on a sheet of paper the UHF frequency that was programmed into the wrist-watch worn by Codename Helen.
'Vanni said, 'I am only back-up to take the signal. She is your responsibility.'
'I understand that/
'You can take the signal in Mondello, if you sit there, which is not sensible. You can take the signal in Monreale, which is better, but you are a long way from her. On the road, in Palermo, you are beyond contact.'
'I understand that too.'
'In the operations area the frequency will be monitored, through the twenty-four hours, but I cannot tell them the detail of the importance of the signal, I can only lecture them on the priority. At the bottom line, it is your responsibility, Axel.'
Axel said, 'I told her to make a test transmission this afternoon.'
'This afternoon. That is idiot. It's not in place.'
'So shift yourself.'
'You think I have nothing else?'
The quiet smile played on Axel's face. 'You held the pistol to Salvatore Riina's head
– what I think, you'd give your right ball to hold that pistol at Mario Ruggerio's head.'
'Vanni reached for the telephone. He dialled, he spoke, he swore, he explained, he gave his rank, he ordered, he laid down the telephone and looked straight into Axel's eyes.
Distant and quiet, 'Vanni said, 'It will be, for her, like a bell calling from the darkness
…'
She half woke when Francesca crawled under the sheet of her bed. A moment before she knew where she was. Charley woke fully when piccolo Mario dragged her bear from her arms. She looked at her watch, she laughed and she tugged back the bear from the boy. God, the time… She heard a radio playing and the squeals of the children, excited, drove the sleep from her. She went, dazed, to the bathroom. Washed, teeth brushed, she wandered to the kitchen.
The note was on the table.
Charley, you were like an angel in peace. Giuseppe has gone to his office. I am shopping for lunch. Mauro is sleeping, feed him when he wakes. We meet later, Angela.
The whole of her life was a lie. She thought the lie worked well because she had been given, with the children, the run of the villa for the morning. She was accepted, she had gained access… She walked out onto the terrace. There was a freshness in the morning air and she hugged her arms across her chest and the tiles were cold under her bare feet.
She could see, through the gaps between the shrubs and the trees of the garden, over the high wall that ringed the villa. Beyond the wall were rooftops of other villas and beyond them was the bay. Where was he? Did he watch her? Was he close by? She saw only the glass shards set in the wall and the roofs and the distant blue expanse of the sea.
The children followed her into the kitchen. She pulled open the fridge for coffee and juice and a day-old croissant.
Charley thought the villa, its construction, was magnificent, but it was for the summer. Large rooms with high ceilings and floors of tile or marble. Big windows that could open out onto the patios. There was not the furniture to go with the magnificence, nor yet the weather. Angela had explained, seemed to apologize for, the functional furniture that was so mean compared to the fittings of the apartment in Palermo. Angela had said, head dropped, 'I had the place aired, of course, the week before we came, but it is built for the sunshine, not the rain and damp of the winter. You have to excuse us for the wetness. I can barely live with the furniture. You see, Charley, we pay a man a hundred thousand a month and he is supposed to watch the security of the villa. Twice this last winter we were thieved from, we were broken into. You would not leave anything of value here through the winter, the thieving is so bad…' She washed the cup and the glass and the plate and the knife. She wandered.
She was alone. She walked barefoot on a paved path. She bent to take the scent of the first of the spring's roses. So quiet around her. The cotton of her nightdress was pressed against her by a light wind. She crouched and took in her fingers the fragile petals of a crimson geranium. She went by a small fountain that spluttered water and she held out her hand and let the cascade run cold on her palm. The watch weighed on her wrist. She tried to believe, as if it were her anthem, that it were possible for one person, Charlotte Eunice Parsons, to change something… had to believe it. If she did not believe that she could change something, then she should have stayed at home, ridden her scooter to school each morning and ridden it back to the bungalow each evening. Should have bloody stayed, if she could not change something. She came round a screen where honeysuckle sprawled over a trellis frame.