She held the carrycot tightly, and the hand of Francesca was on her elbow and gripped it.
She remembered the road.
It was the road along which Benny had driven her. They skirted the lit homes of Piana degli Albanesi where, Benny had told her, a Greek itinerant population had settled five hundred years before. So much going on in her mind but she remembered that bloody useless, bloody irrelevant, morsel of information. The headlights of Peppino's car, and the lights of the cars behind him, wafted on the road bends across tended, rich fields and found the same opaque flowers and the same horses. He meant nothing to her, he had been used, he had been available. She thought that now he would be sitting alone in his small room and writing tracts for his pamphlets, or he would be at a meeting and spewing words. He meant nothing to her because he was ineffective. She sat in the back of the car with the children and she thought that Benny Rizzo was a loser. It was she, Codename Helen, who held the power. They climbed. A few times, not often, the rock outcrops were close enough to the road for her to see the harshness of them. It was what she had come for, it was where she wished to be, it was her story.
Once, a car passed them, swerved by them at speed, and she saw the backs of the heads of men in the car… She took it on trust that she was followed, that there were men close by, men who would listen.
And Angela knew. Angela who was silent and who sat upright and so still and who gazed unmoving into the cones of glare thrown forward by the headlights, she knew.. . Charley saw the sign for
Corleone and the car slowed and the lights caught at a flock of goats that meandered in the road. And Axel Moen had told her that if she aroused serious suspicion then she would be killed – and the men who killed her, afterwards, would eat their meal and think nothing of it. She felt the strength flow in her.
At the airport of Punta Raisi…
In a door that should have been locked, a key turned.
Along a corridor that should have been lit, a light was switched off.
Outside the door of Departures, in shadow, an officer of the Guardia di Finanze passed his I/D card to a man, and was promised that his co-operation would not be forgotten.
In the cockpit of an aircraft, fuelled and waiting for passengers to board, a technician reported a malfunction in the avionics and called for a delay of the flight until the fault was repaired.
Axel Moen sat alone, apart from the other passengers, and waited.
One car was up ahead, and one car was close behind the target, and the third car held back.
Harry Compton thought they did it well. It was his training and he didn't find a fault.
Three times now the car up ahead of the target and the car tailing the target had exchanged positions. He was in the car that held back. It was plenty of miles since he had last seen, clearly, the target car, been close enough to read the registration, and it was plenty of minutes since he had last seen the tail lights of the target car. 'Vanni Crespo was in the front passenger seat and he had a cable earpiece hooked in, and Harry Compton was in the back with the American.
So calm in the car, unreal.
It was like an exercise, like routine. It was the quiet in the car that unnerved him.
They said, back home, he thought it was on his assessment file, that he was good at stress handling. Christ, true shit, he had never known hard stress. Easier if the radio had been blasting, if there had been static howl and frantic shouts, but 'Vanni Crespo had the earpiece hooked in and he would whisper to the driver and sometimes they'd slow and sometimes they'd accelerate, but he was not a part of it and it was unreal. The American shivered beside him. The American had the stress bad. It was the American who pulled Harry Compton back from reckoning that it was all unreal.
There had been nothing, no signal, coming into his head, hitting the curves of his skull. Each kilometre or so, regular as a church clock, 'Vanni Crespo turned and looked back at him and queried with his eyes, and each kilometre he shook his head. Nothing, no signal, and each kilometre or so the American cursed, because he had the stress bad.
Must have been another kilometre gone, because 'Vanni Crespo turned and he shook his head again and the American cursed. He laid his hand on the American's and felt the shiver.
'You reckon it's a bum?' the American murmured.
'She's there, she's followed. Can't say that-'
'She's not called you up?'
'She's not.'
'Why wouldn't she?'
'Don't know, maybe it's not possible. How the hell do I know?'
'I reckon it's a bum.'
'If that's what you want to think…'
'What I want is a piss.'
'Not in my pocket.'
There was always one of them, Harry Compton thought, sure as hell there was always one man in a surveillance job or on a tail job who had the stress bad and who needed to jabber. They had only been in position three minutes, all sweating and all tensed up and all on the adrenalin edge, when the gates to the villa drive had been opened and the big car had pulled out. He'd seen her then, in the light thrown by a street lamp, sat in the back of the big car and looking straight ahead, and he'd seen her chin jutted out like it was set in a way of defiance. His eyes had lingered on her for three, four seconds. He'd thought she'd looked, no lie, just bloody magnificent. There had been a woman in the front, just seen the flash of her, classily dressed. There had been the man driving. It was his talent to be sharp on recognition and the profile of the head had registered, the sighting such a damn long time ago in the hotel restaurant on Portman Square. .. He had seen the woman and the man who drove, but it was the jutting chin of the girl that captured him. They'd made it by three minutes, and the stress had built from that time.
'God, I'd give a heap of my pension for a piss.'
Most cruel was the silence in his ear. The inductor piece was a poor fit. All the time he was aware of the pressure of its presence. Harry Compton waited for it to bleep, was dominated by it, and there was only silence. He could not help but think of her, what
'Vanni Crespo had said about her. So boring, her life, so tedious. Her life in the villa, behind the big gates he had seen opened, was a routine of dressing kids, feeding kids, walking kids to school, reading to kids, cleaning kids' rooms, washing kids, putting kids to bed, and waiting… He might just, if he ever was posted to an undercover course, stand up, tell the instructor that he talked bullshit, and talk about the miracle of an untrained operative who had survived boredom and tedium.
'Where's this?' There was the hiss in Dwight Smythe's voice.
They were into a queue of cars. There was a road block up ahead and beyond the road block were the lights of a town that fell the length of a hillside.
'Vanni Crespo turned. His face was screwed in concentration, as if the radios were going from the two cars ahead. 'It is Corleone.'
'What does that mean, 'Vanni?' Harry Compton asked. 'What does it tell you?'
'It is their snake pit, it is where they come from. It is where they kill, it is where they are comfortable. It is a time-'
Dwight Smythe shuddered. 'I'd give more than all my pension for a piss.'
'Would you please be quiet? You distract me. Understand, it is a time and a place of maximum danger to her when she goes with them into their snake pit…'
They drove through the lit town.
It was where she had walked with Benny Rizzo.
They drove beside the piazza and then up the narrowing main street. The shops were closed, and the bars were empty, and the market had been dismantled for the night. She remembered what Benny Rizzo had told her. Corleone was the place of Navarra and Liggio and Riina, and now it was the place of Mario Ruggerio. They drove where she had walked, and where a trade unionist had walked, but then a gun had been in the trade unionist's back, but then the men of the town had hurried to their homes and locked their doors and shuttered their windows. They drove past the same doors and the same shuttered windows, and past the church, and over the bridge beneath which the torrent of the river fell into a gorge, and it was where the body of the trade unionist had been dumped so deep that the crows would not find it.. . 'He was our hero and we let him go.