He sought protection. The bar owner risked fire if he did not buy protection. A construction magnate risked the denial of contracts and bankruptcy if he did not buy protection. The street vendor must buy it or reckon to have his legs broken, and the street whore on the Via Principe di Villafranca, and the bag thief on the Via del Liberta, and the taxi driver on the rank at the Politeama, and the heroin peddler at the Stazione Centrale. The seeking of protection was a habit of existence, unremarked and unexceptional…
To decline protection in Palermo was to refuse to live.
His hands were less painful that day. He could hold the coffee cup with his fingers and not spill the treacle-thick liquid. He thought that his hands were less painful because of the warmth of the spring sunshine on them as he had walked on the Via Marqueda to the bar.
In the bar, where the television played a satellite channel's transmissions of continuous music-promotion videos, Mario Ruggerio met with a man and talked the strategy of killing.
If he had talked with a man who was close to him, close-tied by blood or friendship, he would have said that the matter of killing was abhorrent to him. But there was no man who was sufficiently close to him, not even his youngest brother, in whom he would confide his most prized and inner thoughts. His aloneness, his suspicion of intimacy and sharing, were key attributes that he recognized in his capacity for personal survival. His dislike of the strategy, matter, of killing had little to do with any sense of squeamishness, even less with any hesitation over the morality of taking the life of another of God's creatures. It was to do with security, his freedom.
In the conversation, punctuated by long silences, over the single cup of coffee, down to the dregs of the ground beans and the two sugar spoonfuls, the name of the magistrate was never used.
It was difficult to kill without witnesses. It was hard to kill without leaving traces for the forensic scientists of the carabineri and the squadra mobile and the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia to analyse for evidence. It was complicated to dispose of a cadaver, even if an oildrum of acid were used or the 'heavy overcoat' of liquid concrete on a construction site, or if the body was food for the fishes. All of those who had planned and carried out the killing of Falcone and Borsellino were now in custody, rotting, or convicted in absentia, and, like wayward children, they had scattered evidence around them. The old way of killing, his father's way, was the lupara, which was the short-barrelled shotgun with the spread of pellets but that left blood spatters on walls, streets, carpets, rugs and pavements. The Magnum handgun with exploding bullets was the favourite of the wild young picciotti, the head-case kids, but that too left evidence, shell cases, fractured bullet fragments, blood running to the street drains and smeared through interiors. He preferred the way of strangulation, but that was so hard now on his hands that had the rheumatic pain in them.
They talked, without using the name of the magistrate, right under the television.
The killing of a man served two purposes for Mario Ruggerio. The killing of a man would send a message to his family and his colleagues, and the killing of a man removed an obstacle that confronted the smooth running of his affairs. The killing of the magistrate, discussed in staccato words under the beat of an electric guitar and the hammer of a drummer, would send a message and would remove an obstacle. It was his belief that La Cosa Nostra should strike only when it was threatened and the magistrate, in the opinion of Mario Ruggerio, now endangered him. The shotgun could not be used, nor the Magnum, nor the Kalashnikov fired from the waist on automatic, because it was not possible to be that close to the magistrate. He did not know the workings of bombs in cars or rubbish bins, nor the methods of a command wire or of an electronic firing pulse, but the man he talked with knew of those workings and methods.
He would have preferred a world of quiet, a world where the interest of the state waned. He wished for a world of coexistence. He could reel off, without consultation of notes, the names of judges and prosecutors and magistrates in the Palazzo di Giustizia who also yearned for such a world of coexistence, but in that conversation, in the bar, he did not speak the name of the single magistrate whom he thought now to represent a threat against his precious freedom.
It was agreed that a bomb was the necessary method of attack.
And further agreed that the movements of the magistrate would be more closely observed to find a pattern in his travel. And finally agreed that the matter of killing was a priority.
He slipped away from the bar, an old man in a grey jacket and a check cap on the pavement of the Via Marqueda who attracted no attention, who flexed the muscles of his hand in the Palermo sunshine.
The prisoner had been brought from his shared cell on the third floor of the block. The doctor was the 'cut-out'. The doctor had asked for the prisoner to be brought to the medical wing for routine examination. The doctor and his own staff had been used three times before by the magistrate. The magistrate would not have reckoned on the chances of the survival of the prisoner if it were known in the corridors and landings of Ucciardione Prison that the man, on remand and charged with murder, had requested a meeting. The request for the meeting, a prisoner wishing to talk with Dr Rocco Tardelli, had come in a letter, barely literate, hardly legible, delivered to the Palazzo di Giustizia.
He thought the letter, perhaps, had been written by the prisoner's mother. Men died, some quietly through strangulation, some noisily through poisoning, some messily through bludgeon blows, in Ucciardione Prison when they sought to collaborate. It was of critical importance, at this moment, that it should not be known among the prison staff that a man had asked to see the magistrate who was known to have dedicated his life to the capture of Mario Ruggerio. When the prison staff who escorted the prisoner to the surgery had been dismissed and the prisoner signed for, he had been taken by two of the magistrate's own security detail, his head covered by a blanket that he should not be recognized by watchers peering from the cell windows high above, across the yard and to the room made available for the magistrate.
Tardelli thought him pathetic.
The cigarette that the prisoner smoked was nearly finished and already the man looked longingly at the packet on the table. Tardelli did not smoke but he always carried a nearly full packet in his pocket when he came to Ucciardione. He pushed the packet towards the prisoner and smiled his invitation that the man should help himself again. A new cigarette was lit from an old cigarette and the hands of the prisoner shook.
Tardelli thought him wretched.
They sat in a bare room, on either side of a bare table, they were enclosed by bare walls. There was no window and the light came from a single fluorescent strip on the ceiling, around which wafted the spurted smoke from the prisoner's cigarette. Since the message had come from his office at the Palazzo di Giustizia, the report of a letter without signature to request the interview, the message that had interrupted the celebration of orange juice and chocolate cake, Tardelli had spent the major part of two days studying the file of the prisoner. It was his way always to be meticulously prepared before he faced a prisoner.
The prisoner spoke the name of Mario Ruggerio.
He detested personal publicity, he left it to the more ambitious and the more scheming to give media interviews, but it was inevitable that Rocco Tardelli should be known as the magistrate who hunted Mario Ruggerio. Half a dozen times a year he was told that a prisoner had requested, in conditions of secrecy, to meet with him. Half a dozen times a year a prisoner grovelled for the freedom of the pentito programme, for the opportunity to trade information for liberty. Once a year, if he was lucky, Tardelli would hear information that carried forward his investigation, drew him closer to the man he hunted. They came and they squirmed and they crossed the Rubicon. They condemned themselves to death if they were identified, if they were located, when they broke the God- given law of Sicily, the law of omerta, which was the code of silence.