She was introduced.
She played the part of the innocent.
She was offered juice and a slice of rich cake.
She was the nanny to a rich family from Palermo, and she was ignorant.
She talked, innocent and ignorant, with Benny's mother. The mother had darting sparrow's movements and bright cobra's eyes. Charley thought the woman must have quite extraordinary courage. She had trained, since her loss, as an accountant. She could live anywhere on the island, work anywhere in Sicily or on the mainland, but she had chosen to stay. She wore a bright scarlet skirt and a grass-green blouse, as if it would have been a defeat to take to widow's black. The courage of the woman, Charley thought, would come from facing each day the people of the town who had stood aside when her man was butchered, and from facing each day the people who had filled the church and lined the Corso for her man's burial. Charley ate her cake and drank her juice, sucked in the strength of the woman. The courage of the woman was in walking, each day, up the Corso, past the home of the people who had ordered her man's killing, and seeing their families in the bars, and standing with them in the shops, and knowing that they slept well at night.
If she were not to quit, go home, walk away, she needed that courage.
She waited for the woman to clear away the glasses and the plates. She waited for the woman to take the pillowcase to the washing-machine in the kitchen.
Charley reached for Benny's hand. The hand was limp. She controlled him. She led him to the staircase of cleaned and polished wood. She heard the churning motion of the washing-machine. The door to the bathroom was open. The door to the principal bedroom, the woman's room, was open. She led Benny through the door that had been shut, into his room. It was cool in the room because the shutters were closed and the sunlight came in zebra lines, filtered, onto the single bed, onto the skin rug on the floor, onto the picture above the bed. The picture was from a newspaper. A car was isolated in an empty street. The body of a man was beside the car. A woman stood near to the car and held a small child against her. Giving space to the body and the woman and the child was a crowd of onlookers. Charley fed from the photograph, as she had eaten the cake and drunk the juice. She must draw strength from the woman and the child.
She took the jacket from his shoulders and he made no move to help her.
She knelt and slipped the shoes from his feet, and the socks.
She took the tie from his throat and the shirt from his chest and loosed the trousers at his waist. She stripped the man bare, and she saw the tremble of his knees and the smooth flatness of his stomach, and she saw the heave of his chest below the hair mat.
She thought he pleaded to her. She heard, from below, the rattle of the plates being rinsed and the clatter of the glasses.
He lay on the bed. She squatted over him. She kissed the mouth and the throat and the chest and the stomach of Benny, drank the juice of his sweat. She made lines with the nails of her fingers on his skin and tangled his hairs. Only when the moaning was in his throat, as the wind moaned in the cables outside the shuttered window, did he reach for her. He tore at the buttons of the blouse and at the clasp of her bra and at the waist of her skirt. She had control of him. She put the rubber over him, as she had known she would.
Charley rode the man.
Not the lecturer from college on the carpet, not the guy from the picket line in the caravan, not the schoolteacher who had lifted her, bruised, bleeding, scarred, from the pavement.
Charley held his head, and her fingers, frantic, searched for the pony-tail of blond hair that was held tight with an elastic band. Charley pounded her fingers into the pale face with the day of stubble beard on it. Charley pulled the arms around her, muscled and powerful. He drove at her, hard in her, as if he were trying to buck her from him.
She murmured the name of the man… 'Axel… Fuck me, Axel. ..'
He came, he was sagging, he was spent.
She crawled off him. He tried to kiss her, to hug her, to hold her, but she pushed him back and down onto the bed. She took the rubber off him. She walked, cruel and vicious bitch, from the bedroom to the bathroom and she flushed the rubber down the lavatory.
She sat on the seat. She wondered where he was and whether he had watched her. Her fingers rested on the nakedness of her arm, on the coldness of the watch on her wrist.
She came back into the room. He lay on the bed and his arm was across his face so that he should not see her.
Charley started to dress.
'Who killed your father?'
'My father is mine. He is not your business.'
She was dressing fast, snatching at the crumpled heap of clothes. 'Is it good to be so ineffective that one is unnoticed? Who killed him?'
'When a man from Catania is to be killed they bring in an assassin from Trapani, when a man from Agrigento is to be killed they find a man in Palermo.' He hissed the explanation. 'It is an exchange of favours, a barter of services. When a man from Cinisi is to be killed-'
'They bring a killer from Prizzi? Is it good to be only an irritation and ignored?'
'What is it to you?' His arm was off his face. He pushed himself up on the bed. She thought he had a fear of her.
'I'll take the bus back,' Charley said. 'I'll go on the bus because your mother won't have had time to dry your washing and iron it. You're safe from Mario Ruggerio, Benny, because he won't even have noticed you.'
Carmine brought the minister to the apartment.
The apartment was at Cefalu and the business of the minister was at Milazzo, which was nearly 150 kilometres to the east.
Carmine had been given, by Mario Ruggerio, responsibility for bringing the politician from the oil refinery at Milazzo to the holiday apartment at Cefalu. It was a serious and important responsibility. The minister was now in charge of the budget for Industry, but Mario Ruggerio had told Carmine that the minister was a rising star and eyed Finance. A half-year before the minister had sent a signal; in a speech in Florence he had spoken of the glory of a united
Italy and the duty of all Italians to support their fellow citizens of Sicily. Mario Ruggerio had read the code of the signaclass="underline" government funds should continue, as before, to cascade onto the island, and the supply of government money, trillions of lire, were the lifeblood of La Cosa Nostra. A month before, the minister had sent a second signal; on a late-night television programme broadcast by a private channel, he had warned of the excesses of the judiciary in Palermo in their use of pentiti as trial witnesses. Two signals, two coded messages that the minister was ready to do business with Mario Ruggerio. A contact through an intermediary at a Masonic meeting in Rome, and now Carmine had the responsibility of bringing the minister in secrecy from Milazzo to Cefalu. Not simple, not for an arrogant shit like Tano, not for a fool who had air in his brain like Franco, to bring a minister from Milazzo to Cefalu. The responsibility was entrusted to Carmine because he had the intelligence to arrange the security necessary for the meeting. The minister had toured the oil refinery with his guides and his guards, had worn the hard hat, had walked alongside the kilometres of pipelines, had stood in the control areas with the technical directors and his guards, and had pleaded a headache from the fumes of the refinery. The minister had taken refuge in his hotel room. The guards of the minister of Industry, not a prime target, were relaxed. They had been called, at Carmine's direction, to the end of the hotel corridor for refreshment. In the few moments when the distraction of the guards was total, the minister had been brought from his room, through the door on which the 'Non Disturbare' sign hung, and out onto the fire escape.