'Where is the wife of Ruggerio?'
'Two streets from here. Why do you ask, why are there so many questions?'
'Just me, I suppose. Always talked too much.' 'It would not be sensible for strangers to walk from the street of Ruggerio's parents direct to the street of Ruggerio's wife.'
'I was only asking…'
He was walking back towards the car. Charley followed.
'In the story you told me, Placido Rizzotto was killed because he was a nuisance. Was your father a nuisance?'
'Not a threat, only a nuisance, which is enough.'
'With the work you do, Benny, are you a nuisance?'
'How can I know? You know when you see the gun.'
'Benny, damn you, stand still. Benny, what is your dream?'
He stood, and for a moment his eyes were closed. Charley took his hand. She waited on him. He said, soft, 'I see him standing, and his head is hung in shame, and the handcuffs are on his wrists, and he stands alone without the backing of his thugs and his guns and his acid barrels and his drugs. He is an old man and he is alone. Around him are the children from Sicily and Italy, from. ill of Europe and from America. The children make a ring around him with their joined hands and they dance in a circle around him, and they laugh at him and they reject him and they jeer at him. My dream is when the children dance around him and have no fear of him.'
He took his hand from hers.
I'eppino had the dollars. They had the bank.
He had not met Russians before, and he thought them quite disgusting.
Peppino had the dollars on deposit in Vienna. They had the bank in St Petersburg.
His first meeting with Russians was in a hotel room near the railway station in Zagreb.
The two Russians wore big gold rings on their fingers, as a whore would, and bracelets of gold at their wrists. Their suits, both of them, were from Armani, which had brought the only dry smile to Peppino's face. The one smile, because he did not think they were people to laugh at, and the cut of the Armani suits did not disguise the muscle power of their shoulders and arms and stomachs and thighs. He assumed they carried firearms, and assumed also that a single blow from the gold-ringed list of either of them would disfigure him for the rest of his life.
The deal that his brother envisaged was for $50 million to go from deposit in Vienna to their bank in St Petersburg, and on then into investment in the oil-production industry of Kazakhstan. They controlled, they boasted in guttural English, the Minister for Petroleum Extraction and Marketing in Alma Ata. His brother said that the Russians were not to be ignored, that alliances must be forged, that every effort must be made to find routes of cooperation. The co-operation would come through the investment in Kazakhstan, and in return Peppino was instructed to offer facilities to the Russians for the cleaning of their money. For himself, Peppino had only a view of money. His brother had the view of strategy. The strategy of his brother was for cast-iron agreements between La Cosa Nostra and these Russian thugs. His brother said that within five years these crude and vulgar people would have control of the biggest opium-growing area in the world and the biggest arms factories in the world, and their power could not be ignored.
They frightened Peppino.
And he was nervous also because they seemed to have no care for their personal security. It was Zagreb, and the Croatian capital was a place for scams and for racketeers, but the city offered easy access to the FBI and to the DEA. He had doubted their hotel room had been swept. He had come into the room and he had immediately turned the TV satellite rubbish up loud and he had sat himself beside the TV's loudspeaker, and they had to strain to hear him against the blast of game-show sound.
Himself, he was against dealing with these people, but he would never contradict his brother.
He glanced at his watch, gestured with his hands. He apologized. He must leave for his flight out. Nothing written down, and nothing signed. He must take them on trust.
He gave them a fax number in Luxembourg, and told them slowly, as if he was with imbeciles, what coded messages would be recognized. He offered them his hand, and his hand was crushed by each of them.
He stood.
One Russian said, 'When you see Mario Ruggerio you should pass to him our good wishes that are sent in respect.'
The second Russian said, 'Mario Ruggerio is a man we learn from, we acknowledge his experience of life.'
Rubbing his hand, Peppino charged away down the hotel corridor. They had spoken in deference of his brother, as if they held his brother to be a great man. What did it say, their respect, of his brother? He hurried across the foyer of the hotel and out into the street for the doorman to call him a taxi. He had thought them coarse, crude, brutal, and they were the men who offered him their admiration of his brother. He lay back in the taxi. He believed he was the messenger boy of his elder brother, coarse and crude and brutal, who owned him.
The telephone was ringing. Charley had been back an hour. The telephone was shrill.
Charley was with the children in the bathroom, soaping them and trying to laugh with them. God, where was Angela to answer the phone? Charley was splashing water and making a game with the children and their shrieks did not drown the bell of the telephone. Angela had the second telephone beside her bed – the bloody pills. Charley wiped her hands on the towel. She hurried into the hall, past the closed door of Angela's bedroom.
'Pronto.'
'It's David Parsons. Could I speak to my daughter, Charlotte, please?'
'It's me. Hello, Dad.'
'Are you all right, Charley?'
'How did you get the number?'
'Directory enquiries – are you all right?'
'Didn't you get my card?'
'Just one card. We were worried.'
'No cause for worry, I am very well and having a wonderful lime.'
'Your mother wanted me to call, you know what your mother is for worrying. Charley, there was a policeman came, from London, he wanted to know about the American.
We-'
Charley snapped, 'Don't talk about it.'
She had heard the click on the telephone, and the sound of Angela's breathing.
'… wanted to know-'
'You are not to call me here again. It is very inconvenient for me to take a telephone call. I am fine, and very happy. I'll try to send more postcards. I'm a big girl, Dad, if you'd forgotten, so don't call me again. Love to Mum, and to you, Dad.'
She heard the breathing.
'Charley, we only wanted you to know-'
She put the phone down. Her fingers rested on the watch on her wrist, and she felt herself to be a cruel and vicious bitch. She could picture it in her mind, her father holding the telephone and hearing the purring of the dial tone, and then going into the little living room and away from the telephone on the table below the photograph of her at graduation, and then her father would have to tell her mother that their daughter had brushed him off, as a vicious and cruel little bitch would have, put him down… She was Axel bloody Moen's creature. She thought that, one day, she might tell her father of the dream, might tell her father of Benny's dream of dancing children and of an old man in handcuffs who suffered the humiliation of the children's contempt, one day…
Angela stood, sleep-devastated, pill-damaged, at the bedroom door.
'Sorry if it woke you, Angela,' Charley said, and the cheerfulness was a lie. 'It was my dad, I've been a bit naughty with the postcards, he was just checking I was all right.'
She went back into the bathroom and took the big towels from the hook. If it were their father in the handcuffs, and their uncle, would small Mario and Francesca be dancing with the dream children? She started to rub them dry.