'And what would he say? If I am not there, and my children are not there, what would he say?'
'It is a gathering of the whole family.'
'Are you afraid of him? Are you afraid of what he would say?'
She sat in front of the television. Piccolo Mario knelt on the floor and, a miracle of God, the battery-powered car still worked. Francesca, on her lap, made a family of her dolls. The images of the television were sometimes soft-focus, sometimes zooming to close-up scenes, sometimes in wild and uncontrolled panning. There was nothing new for the television cameras. The scene was the same. There was the broken car, upside down, there was the following car stopped in the centre of the street, there was the wreckage of cars parked at the side of the street, and there was the milling mass of uniformed men. .. She thought Angela must hate her husband, sincere hatred, to taunt him so to his face.
'It is not her place to be with my family.'
'Then I don't go, and the children don't go, and you have to find the courage to tell him that you cannot discipline your wife… and what will he tell you? Knock her about a bit, Peppino. Give her your hand, Peppino, across her face. Are you frightened of her, Peppino? She comes, I come, my children come, and then that creature can touch our son.'
'Why?'
'It is a normal family party, Peppino, yes? Just an ordinary family party?' Her voice was rising. The sarcasm was rampant, as if she knew that she was heard. 'Of course, in respect of Rocco Tardelli, many normal and ordinary family parties tonight would be postponed. It is natural that a bambinaia should accompany the children to a normal and ordinary family party… and it would give me someone to talk with so that I do not vomit at the table.'
He came to the door.
Charley watched the television.
Peppino said, 'Charley, Angela would like you to accompany us this evening to a family gathering. Please, you will come?'
'You sure?'
'Quite sure.'
'I'd be delighted.' She did not, at that moment, know why Angela Ruggerio had chosen to make her part of a battleground in war. Her fingers brushed against the watch on her wrist. She wondered if he had gone yet, if he had quit. She wondered who would listen to her call.
'Thank you.'
Chapter Eighteen
They had shaken him.
He had been far away. He had been with his grandfather. He had been with his grandfather to pick cherries, and there was the warmth of summer on him, and he had taken the cherries to his grandmother. He had sat on the broad, scrubbed kitchen table, and his grandmother had put the cherries, two fistfuls for each, into a row of big bottles, with a half-cup of sugar that he measured out for each, and a fifth of vodka for each.
The Norse people of the Door Peninsula called it Cherry Bounce, and when Christmas came he would be allowed a small drink. They had shaken him to wake him. He was a child, he would be allowed only enough of the brew to cover the bottom of the glass. In the kitchen, on the range, was the 'boil'. The smell of the 'boil' was in his nose. The 'boil' was white fish with potatoes, with carrots and onions, sometimes with cabbage.
He woke, but his eyes stayed closed, and there was the murmur of the voices around him, and it was ' Vanni's voice that led.
'To understand his commitment you have to know what drives him. He doesn't drink, God help him, so it wasn't alcohol talk, what he told me once… He was dumped as a kid, when his mother died, when her parents found him impossible and his father was travelling for work. He was dumped on his father's parents. It would have been a trauma, and they had to become the rock that he could hang to, they were God and they were safety to him. They took him to Sicily when he was seventeen years old. They brought him here. His grandfather had been in the Allied Military Government. His grandfather had gone home in 1945 and brought a Sicilian peasant girl with him for his new wife. I use a word that's often spoken in Sicily, isolato. His step-grandmother was isolated in that close little Norwegian community. It would have been a fiercely lonely childhood. They came back here to see relations, to see his grandfather's office, where he'd been a paramount king round the Corleone and Prizzi area. He told me, they were at the airport, they were getting the flight out, his grandfather made the confession. He was a teenager, he wasn't a priest in the box, he was a kid. The confession was corruption. His grandfather had been bought, he was paid for petrol coupons, for food coupons, for lorry permits. What was at home, back in Wisconsin, the farm, the land, the home, the orchards, was from corrupt money. All that he believed in, clung to, was corrupt. He went looking for another rock. The new rock was DEA, but it could have been FBI or Secret Service or Customs. He went looking for a rock that he wouldn't be washed off. For most men, for me, it is a rotten job and a fun job. I work the hours and I drink and I screw. For him it is a rock. If he were to lose that rock, to slip from it, then I do not think he could survive. He told me, and I understood the obsession. I understand more. When he was told to quit, walk out on his agent in place, abandon his agent, you'd have thought he would kick and that he would fight. He did not, he accepted the verdict of the rock. There is nothing else in his world. You say there is a posting to Lagos waiting for him – a seriously awful place – but you will hear no complaint from him, he will go, that is the way he stays with the rock. Everything I know of him, it is very sad.'
'More like it's obscene,' Dwight Smythe said.
'You don't mind me saying so, but obsessionalists, crusaders, they're juveniles, they don't have a place any more,' Harry Compton said.
'If that's what you want to believe…'
His shoulder was shaken. Axel Moen opened his eyes. The lying bastards, Dwight Smythe and Harry Compton were all warmth and concern. Yes, he'd slept well. He thought that the warmth and the concern were shit.
He went to the basin and sluiced cold water on his face and on his hands and his arms.
He thought 'Vanni Crespo tried to be gentle and sincere. 'Vanni told him that, while he had slept, the magistrate had been killed. A bomb had killed him. The magistrate with whom he had not shared Codename Helen was dead. He took a cup of water and swilled it in his mouth and spat it out. He looked around him a last time, his eyes soaked in the bare room, and he knew that he would never see his friend's room again.
Time to quit.
They went down the corridor and out of the living quarters of the barracks.
They stopped at the communications room, waited in the corridor. He saw 'Vanni Crespo lean over the technician, and smack his hand with emphasis on the work table, and in front of the technician was the second of the CSS 900 two-channel receivers.
He thought of her. He thought of his love for her. The Englishman carried his own receiver, and he would have no love for her.
They went out into the falling sunshine of the late afternoon to the cars.
She broke the rule. The rule had been set by Axel Moen. Axel Moen had quit.
'Angela, why-?'
'Why what?'
'Why did you make an issue-?'
'An issue of what?'
'Angela, why did you insist-?'
The rule set by Axel Moen was that she should never question, never pester, never persist. They stood beside the washing-line and Charley held the washed clothes that would hang on the line overnight, and the pegs, and passed them to Angela.
'Insist on what?'
'Angela, why did you demand that I come with you tonight?'
'I have small children.' 'Yes/
'I have a nanny/
'Yes.'
'I have a family occasion to attend, and my husband would like our children to be with us. If the children are with us, then so, too, should be their nanny.'
'Yes.'
The strain was off the face of Angela Ruggerio. Her smile was sweetness. To Charley, there was a strength in the face of Angela Ruggerio. But the smile of sweetness was not open. The smile was enigmatic, the smile was a fraud.