Her father had been three years old when Placido Rizzotto had been pitched, dead, into the ravine below. Her mother had been one year old. She had walked along the same street as the man with the pistol in his back, walked on the same pavements as the watchers had stood on, walked past the same doors through which they had hurried and which they then locked, walked past the same windows in which the lights had been extinguished. Charley Parsons, twenty-three years old, stared down into the ravine below the mountain rock on which the ruin of the fortress stood, and she thought the smell of a rotted corpse was in her nose, and she believed that at last she knew the scent of evil. Christ, yes, she understood.
'Where does Ruggerio come from?'
'From near here.'
'Can I see where he comes from?'
'For what reason?'
She lied, so easily. 'What you said, Ruggerio is the present. Right, I'm just a bloody tourist imposing on your day. It's what tourists do, go and visit a birth place. If you don't want to…'
'It's not difficult.'
Each afternoon, after the quarry had closed, after the drivers of the big dumper lorries had gone and the stone-crushers had been silenced, they blasted for the next day's supply of broken rock.
The quarry was cut into the mountain across the river from San Giuseppe Jato and San Cipirello. It was where the expert tested ail the explosive devices he designed.
In open ground, clear of the rock face where the dynamite charges were set, the expert and Tano had carefully parked the two cars. The car the expert had driven was an old Fiat Mirafiori. The car that Tano had driven, level with it but separated by ten metres of space, was a Mercedes, low on its wheels from the weight of the armour plate lodged in the doors. The distance between the cars had been measured with a tape, because the expert had said that in matters involving explosives detail was important.
The two explosions were finely synchronized. At the moment that the dynamite in the quarry face was detonated, the final digit of a six-figure number was pressed by Tano on his mobile telephone and the connection was made to the telephone pager set into the bomb on the back seat of the Mirafiori.
In San Giuseppe Jato and in San Cipirello, the people would have heard the explosion, what they always heard at that hour, and a reverberating echo would have masked the second explosion.
The great dust cloud from the quarry face had barely settled when the expert and Tano went forward. The Mirafiori had disintegrated, beyond recognition. The Mercedes was what interested them. The two parts of the Mercedes, and it had been sliced precisely in half, burned fiercely.
They laughed, the expert and Tano, they were bent at the waist and shouting their laughter at the quarry face from which the last of the fractured rock fell.
By the morning, before the quarry opened for work, the parts of the Fiat Mirafiori and the halves of the Mercedes would be buried under waste stone away to the side of the quarry.
'Do you have a camera?'
She started, she had been alone with her thoughts. 'A camera? Why is it important?'
Snapping, and she thought now he was frightened. 'Charley, I asked, do you have a camera?'
'No.'
It had been brilliant country. Bigger hills than those on Dartmoor that she knew, greener than Dartmoor, but the same wilderness.
They had stopped once, when she had told him to stop. She had stood beside the car, leaned against the warmth of the body of the car, and gazed across a field of wild flowers to the shepherd with his flock and his dog. Something of the Bible of a child, pastoral and safe, and she had heard the symphony of the chime of bells from the sheep, and the shepherd had sung. She thought it would have been an old song, handed down from his family, a song of love. The shepherd never saw them as he sang. Benny had stood beside her, close to her. Her sort of place… And the town was above them, and now the nervousness played in his face.
'I don't have a camera. Why?'
'Where we go, you should not use a camera – doesn't matter.'
On a winding road Benny drove towards Prizzi. He parked in a lay-by. The town stretched away from them and above them, a mosaic of yellow and ochre tiled roofs so dense that the streets were hidden.
Benny looked around him, locked the AutoBianchi. He took her arm, fingers on her elbow. He hurried her.
They were on a climbing street. The window of a macellaio took her eye, the thin, strange cuts of meat, unfamiliar to her, and her arm was pulled.
There would not have been room for cars to pass in the road. I wo terraced lines of three-storey homes, wooden doors set under low arches, balconies fronting shuttered windows, plaster and paint in yellow and orange and primrose. He walked fast and she skipped to keep up with him.
'You don't stop, you don't stare.' His lips barely moved as he spoke and his voice hissed as if fear caught him. 'The sixth house beyond the black-painted drainpipe. You have it? Don't turn your head. That is the house, the balconies one above the other, of the parents of Mario Ruggerio. It is where they live, with the brother of Mario Ruggerio, who is simple. You see it?'
He walked and he looked straight ahead. Charley saw a cat, low on its stomach, run from them.
Nothing moved in the street but the cat. The sunlight fell on the house that had been identified for her. The door to the house was open and she heard, fleeting, a radio playing. She smelt, fleeting, the cooking of vegetables. Was that it? Was that the bloody lot? No
Mercedes, no gold taps, no 9-inch cigars, no Rottweilers, no Harrods curtains, bloody hell… She defied him. Charley stopped in front of the open door and she twisted her head to look inside, and her arm was jerked half out of the socket at the shoulder. Only the sound of the radio and the smell of the cooking. When she was three doors past the house, he loosed her hand.
'Was that quite necessary?'
'Where do you think you are? Do you think you are at Stratfordupon-Avon? Do you think the Japanese come here in buses? Are you stupid?'
'You don't have to be rude.'
'I am rude because you are stupid.'
He was breathing hard. His lips twitched in nervousness. He walked fast. They came to the end of the road, where more roads, identical and mean and close, veered away into shadow. Christ, where were the people? Where were the kids?
'I am sorry, Benny, I am sorry if I am stupid. Spell it out, start with the camera.'
His feet, a stamped stride, clattered on the cobbles. 'You see nothing here, but you are watched. There would be, of course, a police camera on the street, but that is not important. Because you do not see anybody it does not mean you are not watched.
Behind doors, behind blinds, behind shutters, behind curtains are people who watch. It is the home of the family of Mario Ruggerio, and Mario Ruggerio is responsible for the deaths of many people. Such a man does not leave his family vulnerable to the vendetta of revenge. Because you do not see something it does not mean that it does not exist. If you had a camera, and took a picture of the house, it is likely that we would be followed, and the number of my car would be taken. I do not want, because you are stupid, to have those people match the number of my car with my name. To a man like Mario Ruggerio the family is the most important feature of his life, only with his family does he relax. We should not stay here.'