Carmine drove the car from Milazzo to Cefalu. He had given the minister a flat cap to wear, and the minister had a scarf half across his mouth. The beauty of Carmine's plan, the guards in the hotel would never admit to loss of control of their subject, they would never confess that the minister had been given an opportunity to leave his hotel room unseen.
He took the car into the parking area under the apartment block. He parked beside the Citroen BX, the only other car there. The tourists, they would be Germans, had not yet come to Cefalu to scorch themselves on the beach and to wander in the Piazza del Duomo.
The minister, at the base of the concrete steps, hesitated, but Carmine smiled reassurance. The stupid bastard was already hooked, the stupid bastard had nowhere to go but up the concrete steps. He led. They climbed. The minister panted. Three raps at the door of the second-floor apartment.
The door was opened. The damp of the winter had been at the wood of the door, warped it, and it whined as it was opened.
The small body of Mario Ruggerio was framed in the door, and his head ducked as if in respect to the minister's rank, and the smile on his face was of gratitude that a man of such importance had made the journey to visit him. He wore baggy trousers that were hoisted with a peasant's braces to the fullness of his stomach, and the old grey jacket that was his favourite, and he took the minister's hands and held them in welcome. And the old worn face of the peasant brushed a kiss to each side of the minister's cheeks. He gestured with his hand, humbly, that the minister should come into the apartment.
Carmine was not a party to the meeting. He closed the door.
Carmine waited.
He assumed that by the next morning a bank draft for, perhaps, a million American dollars would have been transferred to an account in Vienna or in Panama or to the Caymans or to Gibraltar. Mario Ruggerio said, always said, that there was a price for every man, and perhaps the price for a minister of the state was a million American dollars. And Mario Ruggerio would know because he had already found out the price for judges and for policemen and for a cardinal and for… It was the power of Mario Ruggerio, Carmine was under the protection of that power, that he could own those at the very heart of the state. There was so much that could be bought with a million American dollars – the blocking of investigations, the opening of contract opportunities, recommendations and introductions abroad. He stood outside I he door and basked in the glory of the power of Mario Ruggerio. One day, at some time, when Mario Ruggerio tired of the glory of power, stepped aside, then it would be Carmine who replaced him…
An hour later Carmine led the minister back down the concrete steps. Three hours later, when refreshments were again offered to the guards, the minister climbed the fire escape of the hotel in Milazzo. Four hours later, the minister appeared at his door and called to his guards that the headache from the oil refinery fumes was gone.
The telephone rang.
It shrilled through the darkened apartment. In the kitchen the ragazzi of the magistrate had their own telephone and their radio. They pretended an indifference each time the telephone rang, talked louder among themselves, took a greater interest in their card game. They pretended they did not listen, after the telephone call, for the quiet scrape of Tardelli's feet coming from his room to the kitchen. Pasquale felt the new mood of the protection team. The joke, sad, sick, had been against him, but he recognized now that the joke affected all of them. He had been the sole target of the joke – 'Why a jeweller's shop?' – but it claimed them all. Less talk, raucous, of the last two days of overtime and screwing women and holidays. More talk, sombre, of the last two days of greater speed in the cars, less predictable routes, more weapons training.
Each time the telephone rang they waited for the scrape of Tardelli's feet coming from his room to the kitchen, stiffened, pretended, listened. Pasquale suffered each night the dream of a parked car or a parked van or a parked motorcycle exploding in fire as they passed, and he knew the bomb would be reinforced with ballbearings and detonated via the link between a mobile phone and a telephone pager. He knew it, they all knew it, because the maresciallo had told them what he had heard from Forensics. He knew, they all knew, and the maresciallo did not need to tell them, that there was no protection against the bomb in the parked car or van or on the pannier of a motorcycle. They waited, they listened, as they did each time the telephone rang in the apartment.
He came, scraping his feet, to the kitchen door. There was a greyness to the colour of his cheeks, his fingers moved, fidgeting in a clasp across his stomach. With his eyes he apologized.
'I have to go out.'
The maresciallo said breezily, 'Of course, dottore – the Palazzo, the Palace of Poison?'
'There is a church beside the prison…'
'On the Piazza Ucciardione, dottore? When would you like to go?'
'Please, I would like to go now.'
'Then we go, now – no problem.'
'He took his life. The man I played a game with, made fear for, to help his memory, he hanged himself in his cell.'
He was gone, shuffling through the hallway for his coat. The maresciallo mapped out a route to the Piazza Ucciardione, a route past the close-packed parked cars and vans and motorcycles with panniers. They lifted their vests off the floor, they took the machine-guns from the table and the draining board beside the sink and the work surface beside the cooker. The radio carried the message, staccato, to the troops in the street below the apartment. They took him out. They hurried him down the staircase, with the two drivers stampeding ahead so that the engines of the cars would have been started before he hit the pavement. They ran across the pavement, into the last light of the afternoon, and the gale scorched grit into their faces. Pasquale was front passenger in the chase car, and the maresciallo was behind him. Sirens on. Lights on. At the end of the street, as the soldier held up the traffic, they swerved onto the main road and past the lines of parked cars and vans and motorcycles. They went faster than usual, as if it were necessary now always for them to go faster than the time taken by a man to react and press the last digit on a mobile telephone linked to a pager.
'Pasquale. What are you, Pasquale?'
The voice of the maresciallo whispered in his ear. His eyes were on the traffic ahead, and on the line of parked cars, vans, motorcycles they hurtled past. He held the machine-gun hard against his chest.
'What are you, Pasquale?'
'I don't understand.'
'You want me to tell you what you are, Pasquale? You are. 1 stupid and pathetic cretin. You do not have a magazine loaded.'
His hands were rigid on the stock and trigger guard of the machine-gun. He looked down. He had not loaded a magazine, thirty-two rounds, into it. He bent and laid the machine-gun on the floor between his feet. He took his pistol from the shoulder harness.
The cars swerved, screamed, cornered.
The journalist from Berlin was settled comfortably in his chair. The embassy was a little piece of home for him. There was a strong beer from the Rhineland on the table beside him. To be back in Rome again was to have returned to Europe, to have left that Arab world of half-truths, coded statements and conceit. He had telephoned his editor for more cheques to be sent him and they would arrive in the morning at the American Express. He had won a few more days… As a veteran of so many wars, he was reluctant to make the last leg home and have it said in the office, by younger, ankle-snapping colleagues, that he had failed. In truth, so far his journey in search of the mafia was a failure, but he believed that a few more days in Rome, distanced from this war that he could not sense or smell, would supply him with the copy for his article.