Courage, my child. We love you, we are with you. But why had he not been told of this boy?
Like sharks homing for offal, the mosquitoes slipped through the opened window of the farmhouse parlour and turned their incisive attention to the arms and neck of the resting man.
Instinctively he slapped the side of his face in irritation, and in his growing consciousness there was the drone of their wings, the rising surge of their attacks. He started up, blinked in the flickering light of the television and heard the sounds of the kitchen through the closed door, water running, the quiet clatter of dishes and tins. He scratched savagely at the bitten skin where the bite mark had grown enough for him to gouge a sharp trickle of blood, he rubbed the back of his hand into his eyes, then headed for the kitchen. Time for him to be going to his bed, time for him to encourage her to follow.
His wife put her finger across her mouth, the call for quiet, and pointed to the half-open door that led to their son's room. A tall, broad-shouldered woman, red-faced, dark hair pulled back in an elastic band, thick bare arms and a faded apron. She had been his woman since he was seventeen and had shyly courted her with the encouragement of her parents, who knew of the farm he would inherit.
'The little one is sleeping?'
She worked at the final flurry of the day's sink work. 'It's taken him long enough, but he's nearly there.'
'Did he tell you where he'd been?'
She slopped warm water from a kettle into the bright plastic sink bowl. 'In the woods, where else?'
'What kept him there?' He was tired, yearning for his bed, and there was much hay to be moved by trailer in the morning. Per-functory conversation, made only because she was not ready to follow him to their cumbersome, heavy oak wedding bed.
'He saw something, he said.'
'What did he see?'
' I don't know – something. He wanted to tell you about it. I said it would keep till morning. Perhaps it was a pig T
'Not this far down the hillside,' he said softly.
She sluiced the pan in which she had made the sauce for the pasta.
'You have much more to do?' he asked.
' I have to wash some socks through, then it is finished.' She smiled at him, kind and dark-eyed.
' I'll say good night to the boy.'
The frown crossed her face. 'Don't wake him, not now. He's dead to the world, don't wake him now.'
' I'll see his bedclothes aren't on the floor.'
When he had gone, she could muse as she doused the socks in water that her man loved his child as the most precious thing in his life. God be thanked, she thought, that if we were to have but one child it should have been a boy. Someone for him to work for, someone for him to dream would one day take over the running of the farm. She worked quickly, the soap lathering in a sea of bubbles among the wool, some whole and some darned.
Shirts she would do in the morning, after the chickens had been fed.
'Mama.'
She turned abruptly in response to the strained voice of her man. He stood at the kitchen door, his face dazed and in shock, his hand resting loosely on the shoulder of his son.
'You've woken him.' The petulance rose in her voice.
'You never asked him what he had seen?' The farmer spoke hoarsely.
'A fox, a rabbit, perhaps a heron, what difference does it make, what difference at his age?' She bridled, before her senses responded to the mood her man set. 'What did he see?'
'He found a red car hidden in the bushes beside the small field and the wood. He has a toy, a toy car that your mother gave him last Easter, the one he plays in his bed with. He said to me that the toy was the same as the car that he had found. His toy is a red Fiat Uno Vente Sette. They showed a car on the television, the car for the foreigner who was kidnapped. Fiat Uno Vente Sette, and red… '
'A red 127, there would be half a million… ' Her hands were drawn from the water, wiped nervously at her apron. There should be no involvement, not with something hostile.
'He found a man who was tied.'
T h e boy dreams. It is a world of his own.!
'He saw a youth come, with a gun.'
She stammered, 'It's not our business.'
'Dress him.'
Her eyes wide, her lips moving in fear, she attacked in defence of her child. 'You cannot take him there, not in the darkness, not if you believe that he has seen these things.'
'Get his clothes and dress him.' It was an instruction, a command. She did not resist and scurried to the child's room for his day clothes.
From the hallway the farmer took a thick sweater and the small-bore shotgun that he used for pigeon and rabbit when he went with his neighbours to shoot on a Sunday morning. From a nail high in the back door to the yard he unhooked a rubber-coated torch.
Together they dressed their son.
'You remember, Mama, what Father Alberti said at the Mass after Moro. He said these people were the anti-Christ. Even Paolo Sesto they rejected, even the appeal by him that Moro should be spared. They are the enemies of the Church, these people, they are the enemies of all of us. You remember what Father Alberti said? On the television it was said they would kill the foreigner tomorrow morning. We have to go, Mama, we have to know what the boy has seen.'
They slipped the child's shirt and coat and trousers over his pyjamas, drew on his boots over his bare feet. The mother's hands fumbled and were slower than her man's.
'Be careful, Papa, be careful with him.'
The father and his son walked out of the door and into the night. She followed the passage of the torch before the bend in the lane obscured its light, and then she sat at the kitchen table, very still, very quiet.
The wine had gone and the port after it and Caroline Charlesworth had fled the scene for her bed. The three men sat around the table and the ash and cigarette ends made their molehills in the coffee saucers. They'd been over all the ground, all the old and trampled paths. The issues of principle and pragmatism were digested and spat back. The debate on negotiation had been fought with anger and spite. And then the brandy had taken its toll and soaked and destroyed the attack of Carpenter and the defence of Charlesworth and the attache. They were resting now and the talk was sporadic. Geoffrey Harrison was no longer the principal subject, replaced by the rate of income tax, Church aid to the Patriotic Front of Rhodesia, decadence on the streets of London. The familiar fodder for Britons abroad.
Michael Charlesworth stood up from the table, murmured something about checking with the Embassy, and moved unhappily away from the safety of the chairs.
'He's a damn good man.' Carpenter had problems with the words.
'Damn good,' growled Buster Henderson. 'You're right, you know, a damned good man.'
' I've given him some stick since I've been here.'
'Wouldn't give a hoot. Knows you've a job to be getting on with. A damn good man.'
' I've never felt so bloody useless, not in anything before.'
' I once did a stint at G2 Ops. Shut up in a bloody office, out in Aden. We had a couple of Brigades in the Radfan, tribesman-bashing. Damn good shots they were, gave our chaps a hell of a run for their money. I couldn't get clear of my desk, and m'brother-in-law was up there with a battalion. Used to rub it in with his signals, wicked devil. Used to get me damned cross, just talking and not doing. I know how you feel, Carpenter.' The weathered hand reached again for the bottleneck.
Neither man looked up as Michael Charlesworth came back into the room. He paused, and watched Henderson refilling the glasses, slopping brandy on the polished wood surface.
'You'll be needing that, Buster, I've just heard something a w f u l… '
His voice attracted, mothlike, the eyes of his guests.
'… it's Harrison's wife. Violet Harrison, she's just hit a lorry on the Raccordo. She's dead. Ran slap into a lorry. Killed out-right, head-on collision.'
The bottle base crashed down on to the table and trembled there together with the hand that held it. Carpenter's fist shot out for his glass and dashed a saucer sideways, spewing ash on the white crocheted mats.
'Not bloody fair.' The Colonel spoke into the hand that masked his face.
' I made them repeat it twice, I couldn't believe it.' Charlesworth was still standing.
Carpenter swayed to his feet. 'Could you get me a taxi, Michael? I'll wait for it downstairs.' He didn't look back, headed for the front door. No farewells, no thanks for hospitality.
Going, getting out, and running.
He didn't call the lift, kept to the stairs, hand on the support rail, the fresh air freezing the alcohol.
God, Archie, you've screwed it now. Throwing the shit at everyone else but not yourself. Laying down the law on how everyone else should behave. Ran out on the poor bitch, Archie, hid behind the prim chintz curtain and clucked your tongue and disapproved. Bloody little pharisee with as much charity as a weasel up a rabbit burrow. Preaching all day about getting Geoffrey Harrison back to his family, but he hadn't shut the door and seen there was a family for the bastard to come home to.
What had Carboni said? 'I've failed your man.' Join the club, Giuseppe, meet the other founder member.
He fell into the back of the taxi. Gave the name of his hotel and blew his nose noisily.
The dog fox crept close to the two sleeping men. With a front paw it scratched the P38 a little further from Giancarlo and its nose worked with interest at the barrel and the handle before fascination was lost.
Four times the fox went over the ground between Giancarlo and the pit as if unwilling to believe there was no food remnant to be rifled. Disappointed, the animal moved on its way, along the path that led to the fields and hedgerows where mice and rabbits and chickens and cats could be found. Abruptly the fox stopped. Ears straight, nostrils dilating. The noise that it heard was faint and distant, would not be felt by the men who slept, but for a creature of stealth and secrecy it was adequate warning.
A dark shadow, flitting comfortably on the path, the fox retraced its steps.
The farmer had laid the shotgun on the ground and knelt at the front of the car. The torch was in the boy's hands, and the farmer cupped his hands around it to minimize the flare of the light as he studied and memorized the number plate. Not that it was necessary after he had seen the prefix letters before the five numbers.
RC, and the television had said that the car had been stolen from Reggio Calabria. Cunningly hidden too, a good place, well shielded by the bank and the bushes and the trees. He rose to his feet, trying to control his breathing, feeling his heart battering at his chest. He switched off the torch in the boy's hand and retrieved his gun. Better with that in his hands as the wood threw out its death hush. The farmer reached for his son's hand, gripping it tightly, as if to provide protection from a great and imminent evil.
T w o men were in the wood?'
He sensed the nodded response.
'Where was the path to their place?'
The boy pointed across the car's bonnet into the black void of the trees. By touch the farmer collected with his fingers three short fallen branches, and made an arrow of them that followed his son's arm. He put his hand on the boy's shoulder and they hurried together from the place, back across the fields, back to the safety of their home.