'The conclusion?'
Giancarlo stood with the others of the team, all of them except for those who had done the last night shift. It was not routine for the squadra mobile surveillance unit to meet with an investigating magistrate who tasked them at the beginning of an operation and at the end of an operation, but it was the requirement of this small and sad man. The small and sad man sat on his desk, his legs a little too short for his feet to reach the floor, and his arms were hunched across his chest. Giancarlo thought, a ridiculous thought and inappropriate, that the magistrate had in his eyes the dull tiredness of death, that the dimmed room had the gloom of a cella dei condannati a morte. They had nothing to say and nothing to report, but he had insisted on seeing them.
There was no conclusion. No sighting of Ruggerio, no trace of Ruggerio. But it had been three teams of only three men, and a labyrinth such as the Capo would swallow a hundred men. It had been a gesture, but the gesture was a token.
'Thank you for your endeavour.' The endeavour was to walk and to stand and to look at faces and to try to match the faces of old men to a photograph. The photograph was twenty years old. Some computer-enhancements of photographs were good, some were useless. They might have seen him, might have stood beside him.'Thank you for your commitment.'
'For nothing…' The leader of the unit gazed, embarrassed, at the floor.
And Giancarlo held the present behind his buttocks. That moment he wondered how often there was laughter in this room. Like a mortuary, this room, like a place of black weeds and hushed voices. A place for a man who was condemned… Did the poor bastard, small and sad, condemned, it was said, ever get to laugh? The men on the door outside, condemned with him, it was said, they didn't seem fun creatures who would make the poor bastard laugh. Giancarlo was the oldest on the team, the most experienced, the one who gave no respect to any man, and he had been chosen to offer the gift to the small and sad man, to make him laugh.
'As an appreciation of working for you, dottore…'
Giancarlo handed the parcel, wrapped in shiny paper and bound with gift tape, to the magistrate. They watched as his nervous fingers unbound the tape and unwrapped the paper.
Lemons cascaded on the desk, lemons bounced, lemons fell to the floor, lemons rolled on the carpet.
He understood. A quick smile slipped to his mouth. He knew their work, knew the difficulty of going into the Capo district day after day and finding a process that enabled them to blend with the crowds in the alleyways. He slipped off the desk and came to Giancarlo and pecked a kiss on each of the man's cheeks, and Giancarlo thought it was the kiss of a condemned man.
When it was the time for exercise, when the bells clamoured and the keys scraped in the doors' locks, the prisoner stayed on the bunk bed.
The men with whom he shared the cell went on their way for exercise in the yard below. A carceriere saw him sitting hunched on the lower bunk and asked the prisoner why he was not going to exercise and was told that he had a headcold.
When the landing of the block was quiet, as it would be for thirty minutes, the prisoner stood. It surprised him that his hands did not shake as he unbuckled his belt.
Holding his belt, he scrambled up onto the upper bunk. He could see now, through the squat window, through the bars, the panorama of Palermo. The window of the cell was open. A hard wind came on his face. Through the bars he could see the mountains above Palermo. In the mountains was the home of his mother, in the city was the home of his wife and his children. As he hooked the buckle of his belt around a bar at the window he heard only the howl of the wind.
His wife had told him that he was dead. The magistrate had told him he would die by the push, or by the knife thrust, or by poison.
He pulled the belt hard and tested that it was held strong by the bar.
Suicidio was a crime against the oath he had taken many years before. When a man took his own life he lost his dignity and his respect, and that was a crime against the oath.
The prisoner wound the end of the belt around his throat and knotted it. There was not an adequate drop from the top bunk bed, nor was the belt long enough, for him to break his neck when he slid his weight clear. He would strangle himself to death.
He had nothing more to tell the magistrate, nothing more to tell of Mario Ruggerio.
He mouthed a prayer, and he tried to find in his mind the faces of his children.
He was suspended, kicking, choking, writhing, and below the cell window men walked the monotonous circles of exercise.
'So this is home?'
'This is Cinisi, and it is my home.'
'Quite a nice-looking little place, a lot of character,' Charley said brightly.
She looked up the main street, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. At the end of the street was a granite mountain face, and above the rim of the mountain there was a clear azure sky in which cloud puffs raced in the wind. Against the grey rock face, dominating the street below, was the church that had been built with sharp and angular lines.
'My father, before they killed him, called Cinisi a mafiopoli,' Benny said.
He held the door of his car open for her. She thought it a nicelooking place, and the character was in the smart terraces of houses that flanked the main street. The windows of most of the houses were masked with shutters, but there were potted plants on the balconies and the paint was fresh on the houses' walls, white and ochre, and the main street was swept clean in front of the houses. Set in the paving between the houses and the street were flowering cherry trees, and under the trees was a scattering of pink blossom.
'I can't see anything, Benny, can't feel it. Maybe I could not see much in Corleone, maybe I could feel something in Prizzi, but not here. There doesn't seem to be anything to touch.'
'Look to the mountain,' Benny said.
Charley wore her best skirt, which she had bought with Peppino's money, and her best blouse. She stood with the sun and the wind on her thighs and shins. The force of the wind tunnelled down the main street. She stood boldly with her feet a little apart, as if to brace herself. There was scrub on the lower slope of the mountain, where the fall was less severe, but higher on the rock wall nothing grew. The mountain was a harsh presence above the main street.
'It's a mountain, it's rock, it's useless.'
He touched her arm, a small gesture as if to direct her attention, and there was a softness in his voice. 'You are wrong, Charley. Of course you are wrong, because you do not live here, you do not know. They own the mountain, they own the rock, they own the quarries. Did you not come on the plane to Palermo?'
'Came by train,' Charley said. Axel Moen had told her that the vulnerable time for an agent was the sea change between overt and covert, the journey from safety to danger, told her it was good to take time on the journey to reflect on the sea change. Charley lied. 'I thought it was wonderful to come by train, sort of romantic, on a train through the night and crossing a continent.'
'Because they own the mountain and the rock and the quarries, they wanted the airport for Palermo built here. The runways are two kilometres from here. There is too much wind and the mountain is too close, but that was not important because they owned the mountain, the rock, the quarry. Cinisi was a place of farms and vines and olive trees, but they turned the contadini off their land, and the stone made the base for the runways, the stone could be a base for the concrete, and they came to own the airport. They own everything that you see, Charley, every person.'
They were outside a smart house. There were recently fitted hardwood surrounds to the windows and a heavy hardwood door with a polished brass knocker.