'If it pleases you.'
'Do not doubt us. When we say we will kill the man 'Arrison, do not doubt us.'
' I believe you will kill him, Giancarlo. It would not be clever, but I believe that you are capable…'
With his forefinger Giancarlo pulled down the hook beside the telephone box, felt the moment of sliding pressure before the sound that told him the call was terminated. Franca had told him they needed two minutes for a trace. He had not exposed himself to their reach. Time in hand. He walked out of the ristorante and into the lively afternoon sun, knees weak, breath summoned fast, his mind a confusion of spattered images. They should have grovelled and they had not. They should have bent and they had held the mast erect. Perhaps in the sinking pit of his stomach there was an alien and unholy presentiment of the imminence of failure.
But the mood was soon discarded. The chin jutted and the eyes glowed and he hurried back on the dust-covered road, retracing his way towards the wood.
It was more than an hour now since the child had come, and the crease lines of interest still wrapped his face.
Harrison no longer moved, no longer attempted to wheedle the small boy closer. Tried, you poor bastard, tried all you knew.
The ants were at him. Virile swine, monsters with a swingeing bite, hitting and retreating and returning, calling for their friends because the mountain of food was defenceless and amusing. And the kid hadn't spoken one bloody word.
Go away, you little blighter, get lost, get back to your mama and your tea. You're no bloody use to me. A pretty face the child had, and the frown lines were worn as if by a martyred infant in the colours of a church window. Violet would notice a face like this child's, and she'd enthuse on it and want to tousle his hair and coo to him. Why didn't the child respond? God knows, and he's not caring. He'll be in church, this brat, on Sunday morning, with his hair combed and his face washed with a red cassock down to shined sandals and white socks, probably be singing his bloody heart out in the choir stall, and he won't even remember the strange shape of the man in the woods with the wild gaze and the body twist of fear. He'll be in church… if Giancarlo isn't back soon.
The child started up, the rabbit alerted, slid fast to his feet, easily and with the suppleness of youth.
For Harrison there was nothing beyond the lethargic motion of the wood.
The child began to move away and Harrison watched fascinated for there was a silence under the boots that glided over the dry minefield of leaves and sticks. His place, thought Harrison, here among the animals and birds and the familiar; he probably didn't know what the inside of a schoolroom looked like, because this was his playground. He watched the child go, his slight body merging with the pale grey lines of the tree-trunks. When he was at the murky edge of vision, Harrison saw him drop to his knees and ease the fronds of a sapling across his face and shoulders. The child had covered less than twenty yards but when he was settled Harrison had to strain and search with his eyes to find his hiding-place.
Into view, trying to move with caution but failing to find quiet places for his feet, came Giancarlo, source of the disturbance.
He closed quickly, gun in hand, and the brown paper bag held between the crook of his arm and his body. He was alert, hunting between the trees with his eyes, but finding nothing to caution nor alarm him. He dropped to his knee and slipped the pistol into the waist of his trousers. The cleaned face and the bright Tshirt gave him a youth and innocence that Harrison had not seen before.
'Food, and I haven't had mine either. We are both equally starved.' There was a little laugh and Giancarlo leaned forward and put his arms behind Harrison's head and unknotted the handkerchief, pulled it clear and dropped it beside him. 'Better, yes?'
Harrison spat from the side of his mouth, cleared the spittle.
Still bent low, Giancarlo bounced on his toes down into the earth crater and worked quickly and expertly at the wrist flex.
'Still better, yes? Even better?'
Harrison looked deep into his face and struggled to comprehend the volatile changes of atmosphere. After hours of silence in the car, after the kicking of the early morning, the new direction of the wind was too complex for him to comprehend.
'What did you get for us to eat?' he asked lamely, rubbing his wrists and restoring the glow of circulation. And what the hell did it matter? What importance did it hold?
'Not much. Some bread, with cheese and salad. It will fill us.*
'Very good.'
'And I spoke to the man who is trying to find you. A fool at the Questura, I called him by telephone. I told him what would happen if Franca were not freed by tomorrow morning.' Giancarlo took a bulging bread roll from the bag, ignored the cheese spillage, and passed it to Harrison. He spoke proudly. 'He tried to keep me talking to give them time for a trace but that's an old trick, you won't hear sirens tonight, 'Arrison. I told him also that I would talk direct to Franca this evening and that they should bring her to his office.'
A chatty, banal conversation. That of two men who have been buried for too long and for whom the quiet has proved oppressive.
'What did you say would happen if Franca were not freed?'
Harrison's words were mumbled through the sea of bread and salad.
' I told them you would be executed.'
That's what you told them?'
' I said that I would kill you.'
'And what did they say?' Harrison ate on, the words of both of them too unreal to be of value.
'Carboni is the name of the man who is hunting for you. He was the only one that I spoke to. He said nothing.'
'Did he say if Franca would be freed?'
'He did not answer that.' Giancarlo smiled. There was a certain warmth, a certain charm in the scrubbed, shaved features.
'He did not answer any of my questions. You know, he knew my name, he knew who it was that he was speaking to. He was pleased with that, the man Carboni. I mean it, I mean it very deeply, 'Arrison, I would be sorry to kill you. It would not be what I want.'
It was too much for Geoffrey Harrison to assimilate. Once in the yard behind his father's house they had watched the chickens prowling beside the fence and decided which one would make their meal and which should survive, and he had tried to communicate to the chosen fowl that there was nothing personal in the choice, no malice.
'It doesn't help you if you shoot me.' Harrison trying to be calm, trying to soften and mollify through dialogue.
'Only that each time you make a threat you must carry it out if you are to be believed. You understand that, 'Arrison. If I say that I will kill you unless I am given something, then I must do it if I am denied. It is credibility. You understand that, 'Arrison?'
'Why do you tell me this?'
'Because you have the right to know.'
Harrison turned his head, a slow, casual movement, traversed across the tree-front and caught like a flash that was there and then gone the blue and white of the check shirt of the idiot child who had sat where Giancarlo now squatted.
'Will they give you back your Franca, Giancarlo?'
'No…' he said simply, and his hand dived again in the bag and he passed another roll across to Harrison. An afterthought:
'Well, I do not think so. But I must try, right, 'Arrison? You would agree that I should try?'
With the arrival of Francesco Vellosi from the Viminale, the summit meeting in Carboni's office could begin. Just preceding the head of the anti-terrorist unit had been the Minister of the Interior and before him the examining magistrate who had successfully jockeyed among his profession for the nominal role of heading the investigation.
Tired men, all of them. Harassed and without small talk. At the outset there was argument over priorities around the bowed figure of the Minister, who knew the penalty for failure to arrest terrorist outrage was resignation and could not find in the bearing of the men about him the stimulus for a new initiative.