'No.'
Angela kissed Charley. The children held her. She would not go home because she was a spy. She thought the watch on her wrist was a talisman of treachery. She was under the control of the cold bastard Axel Moen, who had not been close by, who had not protected her. It was not the filth of the gutter in her hair that dirtied her but the watch on her wrist. The kiss was love, and the children held her in love.
The baby was crying when Pasquale came home, and Pasquale was dead on his feet. A bad night broken by the alarm at four, little sleep before the alarm because the baby then had been crying. And he couldn't tell whether the tiredness on his wife's face was because of the baby's crying or because of her anxiety for his work. Her mother was in the kitchen, trying to quieten the baby, and failing. He didn't want to talk in front of her mother, so he went to the bedroom, and he lay on the bed staring at the ceiling light. He didn't want to tell his wife, in front of her mother, that he had received snapped criticism from the maresciallo. 'If you are tired, you are useless, if you are a zombie, you endanger us all. Don't think you are the only one that has fathered a baby that cries in the night.' He should pull himself together, remember that he was a part of a team.
The maresciallo had said that he had the promise from Tardelli, the magistrate was working at home that afternoon. They could manage, once, without Pasquale. If Pasquale were again found yawning, blinking tiredness, then he would be off the team, the maresciallo had said. He had gone home, feeling shame, and he lay on the bed and could not sleep.
His wife came into the bedroom and she carried a glass of juice for him.
'Is there no overtime? You are early.'
'I was sent home.'
'What had you done?'
'I was told I was too tired. I was told I was not effective. I was told I endangered the team.'
He could not tell whether it was the exhaustion or anxiety that made the lines at her mouth and the bulging bags under her eyes. He did not know whether the end of her prettiness was marked by the birth of the baby or by his joining the team that protected a 'walking corpse'.
'They will get rid of you?'
'I don't know.'
'If they got rid of you…?'
'Then I could patrol outside the Questura, I could stop the traffic for schoolchildren, I could be on the pavement and watch the sirens go by.'
'What do you want?'
'I want to be with him and stand beside him.'
The magistrate had been in the living room of the apartment when the maresciallo had spat the criticism at Pasquale. The living room was his office. The desk where he worked at his computer screen was on the far side of the room from the reinforced plate glass of the windows. The room was always in gloom because the shutters were across the window and the curtains were drawn. When he had left, been sent home, he had passed the door to the living room and seen the magistrate hunched over his computer with the mess of files on the desk and opened on a chair and on the carpet around the desk. He had felt humility towards the magistrate because all the team knew that the phone call had been made at dawn to the magistrate's wife in Udine, and the telephone had not been picked up by Patrizia Tardelli, nor by the children, but by a man. All the team had heard the poor bastard stammer to a man whose name he did not know, in his wife's house, at dawn. A bad time of the day to learn, for sure, that a marriage had foundered, that his wife was fucked by a stranger.
'And me? Do you want to stand beside me? And do you want to stand beside our baby?'
'That is stupid talk.'
'So I am stupid. Each day that you go out, when I am left, I have to consider whether, again, I will see you.'
'He asks of you each day, and he asks of the baby. Each day he remembers you.'
'Each day, Pasquale, I am so frightened.'
'He asks after you, as if he blamed himself for your situation.' Pasquale pushed himself up on the bed. He spoke in bitterness. 'What would you have us do? Would you have us walk away from him, abandon him?'
'Is he so stubborn?'
'He has the fear, we all have the fear. He jokes of the fear, he has learned to live with it.
As I try to, as you have to. Stubborn? Will he surrender to the fear? He is stubborn, and he will not give in to the fear.'
'Is the danger very great?'
He looked away from her. His shoulders dropped back to the bed. He gazed up at the ceiling light. She sat beside him and she held his hand. He thought that she struggled to reconcile their fear with her own fear.
'You have the right to know. We are not supposed to talk of it, not even in the home, but you have the right. He could compromise, he could exist, he could move paper across his desk, he could ride through the city in safety, and we could go in safety with him. The maresciallo says that a man such as Tardelli faces real danger only when he has become a threat to those people.'
'Please.'
'I should not tell you. There is a prisoner in the Ucciardione who seeks the privilege of the pentito programme, and he has given information about Ruggerio, the target of Tardelli. The information is not good but if it is acted upon, it could threaten Ruggerio.'
'I listen.'
'An American came from Rome, an agent of the DEA, to see Tardelli. If he sees Tardelli, then it is connected with Ruggerio, so the threat increases.'
'Tell me.'
'There is a third factor, the maresciallo says. It is a time of great danger to Tardelli.
Ruggerio seeks to be the capo di tutti capi, he looks for absolute control. There is a rival in Agrigento, disappeared. There is a family in Catania, but they will be destroyed.
When, the maresciallo says, the control of Ruggerio is absolute, then he will demonstrate his new power with a strike against the heart of the state. It could be the life of Tardelli because that is the man who most threatens him… You wanted to know.'
'I asked…'
'Are you better for knowing?'
She loosed Pasquale's hand. She left him in the dim-lit room. He slept with his mind dulled to dreams. Later he would wake. Later he would find her sleeping beside him, and the baby asleep in the cot at the foot of the bed. Later he would shower and dress and strap onto his chest the pistol holster. Later he would go into the kitchen to make himself coffee to clear away the sleep taste from his mouth and he would find the small bunch of flowers on the table and he would read the note his wife had written. 'Please give them to him, and thank him for asking after me each day and after our baby. God keep you.' Later Pasquale would go to work.
The boy was sat in a chair.
His arms were tied tight behind his back and the rope chafed against his skin. The boy's ankles were strapped to the legs of the chair. The gag filled his mouth.
He did not understand… He was of the Brancaccio district. He came from the high blocks of crumbling apartments. He had never been employed, nor had his father ever been in work. He thieved to keep his family, stole the bags of the tourists.
He did not understand… He paid the pizzo each month to the Men of Honour in Brancaccio. He never failed to give them the percentage from what he took out of tourists' handbags.
He did not understand… He had been told that one day, perhaps, he would be invited to join the ranks of the picciotti, that a final decision would be made when he had completed tasks set for him by the Men of Honour in Brancaccio.
He did not understand… A task had been set for him. He had taken the handbag. He had brought the handbag to the address given him. A pistol had been pressed against his neck, he had been strapped to the chair. The handbag was now in front of him on a bare wooden table.
He did not understand… The money from the handbag was in a neat pile. Two men were looking carefully at the diary from the handbag. Their hands, which held the diary, passed it between them, were protected by transparent plastic gloves. They examined the diary with minute care.