When he came into the centre of Palermo on a Sunday, Giancarlo always took his wife on the bus – too many cars, too few parking places.
The bus was full. He and his wife stood, and they gripped tight the back of a seat. The bus pitched them when the driver braked, threw them when the driver accelerated. In the morning the leader of the team had told him, while they walked between the duomo and the ristorante, they started a new assignment on the Piazza Kalsa. Just that morsel of information… Maybe he would be in a car, maybe in a closed van, maybe, God willing, in a building with the video camera and the binoculars and a good chair – maybe there would be no market where they were staked out, and no lemons. The bus stopped sharply. He lurched into his wife. The driver had tried to beat the traffic lights, but had not squeezed through.
Giancarlo, standing in the aisle of the bus, looking over the shoulder of the driver, saw the family cross the road, and the children held balloons that bounced on lengths of string. When their own kids had been that age, little hooligans, he grinned, they had loved to carry balloons…
Giancarlo saw the man.
The kids with the balloons were in front of the man. A couple with a pram were behind the man. A woman in a fur coat and carrying a posy of flowers was beside the man.
Giancarlo saw an old man. The man had turned to face the bus, as if to satisfy himself that it had indeed stopped. Giancarlo saw an old man, a pudgy and weathered face below a flat cap, a jowled chin and throat above a rough cloth jacket.
Giancarlo saw an old man crossing a road at his leisure. The face of the old man leaped in Giancarlo's mind. There was a face in front of the bus. There was a face in a photograph that had been computer-enhanced, aged from twenty years before. The face was gone behind the shoulder of the driver. Giancarlo squirmed to see past the shoulder.
He saw the face of the man a last time, and the man was smiling down at one of the children holding a balloon. Giancarlo matched the face, smiling, with the face, smiling at a wedding reception, of the photograph.
His wife abandoned. Other passengers pushed aside. The driver shouted at. The I/D card shoved into the driver's face. The doors slowly hissing open. The man reaching the far pavement…
Giancarlo jumped from the bus. He cannoned into a couple, in love, hand in hand. He did not look back at his wife, at the shock on her face. The lights changed. The bus pulled forward. Giancarlo ran behind the bus. The horns of the following cars blasted anger at him, brakes squealed. The man was walking away on the far pavement.
Giancarlo had no telephone. The leader of the squadra mobile surveillance team carried a mobile telephone at all times, but mobile telephones were expensive, a rationed item.
His personal radio was on the charger at the Questura, he was off duty, and his pistol was locked behind the armoury door in the Questura. There was a telephone pager on his belt, which only carried incoming messages. He ran forward, reached the far pavement. Because of the anger of the horns, and the brakes' screams, because of the abuse shouted at him through open windows, Giancarlo was for a critical moment of time a centre of attention.
In that moment of time, the man stood and faced a shop window.
Giancarlo, among his own, was venerated for experience and professionalism. For the teaching of surveillance tactics to new recruits to the teams he was often used. If a young recruit had run across a street, through traffic, become the target of horns and insults, become a centre of attention, then Giancarlo would patiently have explained the error of the young recruit. He would have talked to the young recruit about the requirement to merge and blend. He did not know whether he had shown out, whether he was busted, and he did not see the picciotto, a swarthy and heavy-set youth, who protected the back of Mario Ruggerio. In the flush of excitement, experience and professionalism gone, he had displayed the rashness of a young recruit. He stood stock-still. He watched the back of the old man move on, a slow walk, up the Via Sammartino and then turn into the Via Turrisi Colonna. He did not know whether he had shown out.
There was a bar.
Giancarlo ran into the bar. There was a payphone on the counter. A woman talked on the payphone.
Maybe she talked with her sister in Agrigento, maybe with her mother in Misilmeri, maybe with her daughter in Partinico… Giancarlo snatched the telephone. He terminated her call. She howled her protest at him and he flapped his I/D in her face. He was scrabbling in his pocket for a token for the telephone. He was bawling at her for silence, and he fed the gettone and dialled his control. He did not see the swarthy and heavy-set youth sidle across the bar towards him. Again, for a critical moment of time, Giancarlo made himself the centre of attention. The bar's customers, the men, the women, the staff, the matriarch at the cash till, sided with the wronged woman. The screaming was in his ears. With his body he tried to block their hands from reaching the telephone.
His control answered.
His name, his location, the name of his target.
The pain caught him. The pain was in Giancarlo's back and then seeping to his stomach. He said again his name and his location and the name of his target. The questions from his control beat at him, but his concentration and ability to respond to the questions were destroyed by the pain. Which way was the target going? What was the target wearing? Was the target alone? Was the target in a vehicle or on foot? He said again his name and his location and the name of his target, and his voice was weaker and the pain was more acute. He dropped the phone, and the phone swung loose on its reinforced cable. He turned. He looked into the eyes of a swarthy and heavy-set youth.
Giancarlo swayed. The pain forced his eyes shut. He reached for the source of the pain in his back. He found the hardness of the knife's handle, and the wetness. When his knees gave, when he could no longer see the swarthy and heavy-set youth, when the telephone swung beyond his reach, when the screaming burst from grotesquely blurred mouths around him, Giancarlo realized, puzzled, that he could no longer remember the questions that control had asked of him.
The pain was a spasm through his body.
A square had been made.
The bar was at the centre of the square. The north of the square was the Via Giacomo Cusmano, the south was the Via Principe di Villafranca, the west was the Via Dante, and the east was the gardens of the Villa Trabia.
A hundred men with guns, with flak vests, quartered the square. They were from the DIA, and there were two sections of the ROS, and there was the stand-by team of the Guardia di Finanze, and there were men from the squadra mobile. The cordon around the square was given to the military, Jeeps at street corners, soldiers with NATO rifles.
They did not know what the man, Giancarlo's target, looked like, they did not know how he was dressed, they did not know in which direction he had gone, they did not know whether he walked or whether he went by car.
The bar was emptied but for the owner and the matriarch who guarded her cash till.
The body was on the floor. In the back of the body was a short-bladed, double-edged knife. The owner of the bar, facing a wall, his wrists handcuffed in the small of his back, had seen nothing. Perhaps the customers had seen something? The matriarch had seen nothing. The customers were all strangers to her and she knew none of them.
A car brought the wife of Giancarlo to the bar, and a young priest had run from the church on Via Terrasanta. The photographers from the newspapers and the cameramen from the RAI crowded the pavement.
The maresciallo elbowed a way through for the magistrate and Pasquale bullocked him into the bar, into the crush that circled the body. There were some who had come from family gatherings and wore their suits, some had come from the tennis courts, some from their seats in the football stadium, some from their sleep. Beside their shoes and sneakers and sandals was the body and the blood. The magistrate saw the face, bleak, of 'Vanni Crespo, and pushed towards him.