Carboni savoured the moment. It was perhaps the finest of his professional life. He stood among the gods, the princes of the elite force, the cream of the anti-subversion fighters, and he told them something they had not seen for themselves. 'Giancarlo Battestini, nineteen years old, born in Pescara, university drop-out, probationer of the NAP, he is the one who has taken Geoffrey Harrison. Harrison is in Battestini's hands, and I venture to suggest that is the limit and extent of the conspiracy.'
Vellosi dropped back to his chair. A hush spread across the room and on into the corridor and further offices. Men in shirtsleeves holding cigarettes and plastic coffee beakers crowded to the doorway. 'Is it possible for one man – a mere boy – to have achieved all this?'
'Vellosi, it has happened.' The pleasure shone on Carboni's face. ' I won't detain you, but you should know we are sifting the reports of stolen vehicles from the area of the city of Reggio – there are not many, not at the times that fit. Two cinquencentos, but they would be too small for the purpose. There was a BMW but that is a conspicuous car. Close to the main station at Reggio, a few minutes' walk away, there is reported missing within ninety minutes of the arrival of the rapido from Roma a one-two-seven. It is red, and the registration is going out now.
There is the same problem as always with the road blocks because we do not know where to set them, but if it is on the radio and the lunchtime television, then perhaps…'
'Shut up, Carboni.' Vellosi spoke quietly. He reached up with both arms, put them round Carboni's neck and pulled the ill-shaven face towards him. Their cheeks met, the kiss of friends and equals. 'You're a genius, Carboni, nothing but a genius.'
Carboni blushed, swung on his heel and left with a little wave of his fingers for farewell. He had stirred Vellosi's ant hole, changed its direction, shifted the whole basis of the enquiry.
'Well, don't stand about,' Vellosi snapped at his audience.
'We've let an amateur show us what's happening, point to what's been staring at us for hours. We have more in a day than we had in a month with Moro. Use it.'
But for Moro he had had time. For Harrison he had less than twenty-four hours till the expiry of the ultimatum.
Vellosi scuffed among his papers till he found the photograph of Battestini. He searched the mouth and the jaw line and the set of the eyes for information, scrabbling to catch up, scratching to make do with diminishing hours, the tools of a policeman's trade.
"The little bastard could be anywhere.' And Vellosi swore and reached for his coffee that was cold.
He must go back to the basics, back to deep and quiet thought in the midst of the noise surrounding him, back to analysis of the minimal factual evidence available.
Start again, start from the beginning. Return to the face of Battestini, drag from those features the response that should be made.
Giancarlo Battestini, imprisoned in Rome after studying in the capital's university, and a member of an NAP cell in that city.
Could the boy have links with the far countryside? Likely or unlikely? Vellosi flexed his fingers. The answer was obvious. The boy would know nothing of Calabria. A city boy, a town boy, a foreigner in the Mezzo Giorno.
He turned and called to a colleague, who stubbed his cigarette, drained his coffee and came to him.
'Battestini would not believe he could survive in the countryside, it is beyond his experience. Correct?'
'Correct.'
'He would try to return to the city?*
'Possible.'
'In the files he is linked only with Rome: would he try to get back here?'
'Perhaps.'
'He is divorced from Pescara. He has nothing there. And if he comes back towards Rome he must come by car because he cannot take a prisoner by train.'
'Probable.'
The momentum carried Vellosi on. 'If he comes by road he must decide for himself whether he will attempt speed on the autostrada, or whether he will go for the safer and slower old roads.'
' I think he would choose the autostrada.'
Vellosi slapped his fist into the palm of his other hand. 'And he must stop… '
'For petrol.'
'He has to stop.'
'Certain.'
'Either at a station on the autostrada or he must come off and use a toll gate and a station off the main route.'
' If he is coming to Rome, if he is coming by car, if he is on the autostrada, then that is correct.'
Vellosi thrust his chair behind him, rose to his full height and shouted, 'Work on the petrol stations and the autostrada tolls.
Each side of Naples. Call Carboni, tell him that too.'
His colleague was no longer beside him.
Vellosi slumped back into his seat. There was no one to praise him, no one to smile and slap his back and offer congratulations.
To himself he muttered, over and over again, 'The boy will come back to the city, the boy will return to Rome.'
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
While the disparate arms and commands of security forces strove to drag themselves into a state of intervention, the small red Fiat slipped unremarked through the toll gate marking the terminal of the autostrada at Roma Sud and away towards the Raccordo Annulare, the ring road skirting the capital. With the passing of the mass-produced common car through the toll check, the chances of its detection, always remote, were reduced to the minimal.
The two men had exchanged only desultory conversation, preferring to brood to themselves in the confined space. Geoffrey Harrison, the pain gone from his back, drove in a careless and detached way as if concern and anxiety were no longer with him.
His mind numbed, his brain deadened, he performed the automatic tasks of keeping the car in the centre lane of traffic, the speed constant. At two places, the petrol station and the toll gate, he told himself there had been the possibility of a break-out from the car. But the will to seek his freedom was reduced. He had sat meekly in the driving seat, neither looking at nor avoiding the man who secured the fuel tank cap and wiped wetly over the windscreen. He had held his silence as the young man at the toll had handed the change through the open window.
Manipulated and broken, too destroyed to weep, too cudgelled to fight, Harrison guided the car around the east side of the city.
For Violet Harrison the mood of the morning alternated between remorse and defiance.
She had lain in bed, curling slowly over, switching the images of a prisoner husband with those of a dark-chested boy with a flat stomach and sinewed hair-covered legs. Both caused her pain.
If she could again find the boy at the beach and forge her liaison, then it would not be the first time, nor the second, nor the third. It was the usual way she found relief when the strain became too much for her. It had nothing to do with loving Geoffrey, whatever that meant, nothing to do with being his wife, sharing his life. All that was irrelevant. But there had to be a valve somewhere when the steam built up, and this was her release: writhing under a stranger, without obligation, without attachment.
There had been an Irish barman from Evesham in Worcester-shire, sought out on the day after Geoffrey, the young industrial trainee, had told her there was a discrepancy in the books and that the branch Chief Accountant believed him responsible. He had been cleared of suspicion, but only after Violet had spent an afternoon in an autumn field with a man whose name she had never known.
There had been a West Indian bus driver from Dalston in East London after a Friday night when Geoffrey had come home to report that he had drunk too much that lunchtime and told the head of his department to stuff his job where it would hurt and smell. Geoffrey had apologized on the Monday morning, been accepted back with handshakes and smiles and had never known of Violet's two hours on a Sunday morning in a railway hotel close to King's Cross ridden hard by a muscled lad who called her 'darlin' and bit her shoulders.