Like he's going round a cancer ward, and nobody's carrying the good news, nobody's lost his pains, nobody thinks he's coming through. Poor bastard, thought Carpenter.
Carboni expended a long, powered sigh, and slumped to the chair behind his desk. With the sense of theatre, of tragedy, he slapped a hand on to the cream telephone receiver in front of him.
'Call Vellosi. Get him to come here. Not the same room as this.. . but ask him to be close.' He rubbed at the weariness in his eyes. 'Bring her up now, bring Tantardini.'
The child fled from the raw, opened hand of his mother.
Neat and nimble on his feet, he dodged the swinging blow, scattered the posy of hedge flowers on to the stone slabs of the kitchen floor, and scampered for the corridor that led to his bedroom.
'All afternoon I've been calling you from the h o u s e…'
' I was only in the wood, Mama.' He called shrilly in his fright from the sanctuary of his room.
' I even went and bothered your father in the field… he called too… he wasted his time when he was busy… '
She did not follow him, he had achieved safety.
'Mama, in the wood, I saw…'
His mother's voice boomed back, surging to him, as in falsetto she mimicked his small voice. 'I saw a fox… I saw a r a b b i t…
I followed the flight of a hawk. You'll have no supper tonight.
Into your night clothes… sick with worry you had me.'
He waited, trying to gauge the scale of her anger, the enormity of his fault, then wheedled in justification. 'Mama, in the wood I saw. .. '
She snapped her interruption back at him.
'Silence your chatter, silence it and get yourself to bed. And you'll not sit with your father after his supper. Not another sound from you, or I'll be in and after you.'
'But Mama… '
' I'll be in and after you.'
'Good night, Mama, may the Virgin watch over you and Papa tonight.'
The voice was small, the fluency broken by the first tears on the child's smooth-downed cheeks. His mother bit her lower lip.
It was not right to shout at a small child, and he had so few to play with, and where else was there for him to go but to the woods or to the fields with his father? It would be better when he started school in the autumn. But she had been frightened by his absence, and she consoled herself that her punishment of her only little one was for his own good. She returned to the preparation of her man's supper.
Throughout the city and its suburbs the security net was poised.
More than five hundred cars and trucks and riot vans were on the streets. They wore the colours of the Primo Celere, and the Squadra Volante and the Squadra Mobile; others were decorated in the royal blue of the carabinieri. There were the unmarked cars of the undercover men, and of SISDE, the secret service. The agencies of government were poised to spring should the engineers of the Questura basement provide the map reference from which Giancarlo Battestini telephoned. Engines ticking idly, watches and clocks repeatedly examined, machine-guns on the back seats of cars, on the metalled floors of vans. A great army, but one which rested till the arrival of the orders and instructions without which it was a helpless, useless force.
On the fifth floor of the Questura, in the control centre, the technicians had exhausted the lights available on their wall map for marking the position of their interception vehicles. A clock creeping up to twenty hours had silenced conversation and movement, leaving only the mindless hum of an air-conditioning system.
Grim-faced, wearing his years, Francesco Vellosi strode from the central doors of the Viminale to his car that waited at the apex of the half-moon drive. The men who were to escort him to the Questura fidgeted in the seats of the car that would follow.
As he settled in the back seat he was aware of the clatter of the arming of weapons. From an upper room the Minister watched him go, then resumed his tiger pacing of the carpet. He would hear by telephone of the night's developments.
Nothing impeded Giancarlo, a fierce moonlight guided his way.
There was a stream of cars on the road, but of course there would be cars, for this was a resort of the Roman summer, and no driver would see anything extraordinary in a youth with the long hair of a student, the T-shirt and jeans uniform of the unemployed. On the road he did not flinch from the blinding beams of the headlights. On down the hill he walked till he could see the still reflection of the lights of the trattorie and bars playing on the distance of smooth water. On down the hill, with only occasional stolen glimpses at the slow-moving hands of his watch. The fools with their wives and girls, they would know of Giancarlo Battestini. Those who rushed past him impatiently in their cars would know of him tomorrow. Tomorrow they would know his name and roll it on their tongues and savour it, and try to ask how, and try to ask why.
The pavements beside the lake were filled with those who drifted in aimless procession. They did not glance at the boy. Safe in their own lives, safe in their own business, they ignored him.
At the ristorante the kiosk with the telephone was empty. He darted his eyes again to his watch. Patience, Giancarlo, a few more minutes only. He collected the gettoni from the knot in his handkerchief where they had been segregated. Noise and money-purchased happiness crept from the interior. Where he stood, hemmed in by the glass walls of the cubicle he could see the mouths that burst with pasta, the hands grasping at the wine bottles, the bellies that rocked over the table-tops. Tomorrow they would not shriek in their gusts of laughter. Tomorrow they would talk of Giancarlo Battestini till it consumed them, till it burned them, the very repetition of the name. His name.
The child's father came to the stone-walled, tin-roofed farmhouse when there was no longer light for him to work his fields. A tired, sleep-ridden man, looking for his food and his chair and his television and his rest.
His wife chided him for the late hour, played the scolder, till she kissed him light and pecking, on a hair-roughened cheek; to her he was a good man, full of work, heavy in responsibility, a loyal man to his family, who depended on the long-drawn-out power of his muscles to make a living from the coarse hillside fields. His food would soon be ready and she would bring it on a tray to their living parlour where the old television set, provider of black and white pictures, sat proudly on a coarse wood table.
Perhaps later the boy could sit with him because her anger had evaporated with the passing of her fear at his absence, but only if he had not already drifted to sleep.
He had not replied when she had told her man of the time their child had returned and the punishment imposed, just shrugged and turned to the sink to wash away the day's grime. She held sway over the domestic routine and it was not for him to challenge her authority. Hearing him safely settled, she hurried to her stove, lifted the big grey metal saucepan down and drained the steaming water from the pasta, while through the opened doorway blazoned the music of the opening of the evening's news programme. She did not go to watch beside her husband; all day the radio channels had been obsessed with an event from the city.
City people, city troubles. Not relevant to a woman with stone floors to be scrubbed daily, a never-filled purse, and a distant, difficult child to rear. She set the pasta on a plate, doused it in the brilliant red of the tomato sauce, flecked it with the grated cheese, and carried it to her man, flopped in his chair. She could draw satisfaction from the happy and contented smile on her husband's face, and the way that he shook off his weariness, sat himself upright, and the speed with which his fork drove down into the eel lengths of the brilliant butter-coated spaghetti.