Carmine hurried, in the few seconds' length of the coded call he had heard the urgency of the tail. He waddled, his short and thick legs striding quickly, towards where his car was parked.
In the garden outside the sweat had run on him. Inside the cathedral it seemed to freeze on his back. Dwight had followed the Englishman through the low arched door, and maybe six times in the last five minutes he had glanced down at his watch. They stood at the back and the Englishman leafed through the pages of a guidebook he'd bought, as if to hold the cover it was necessary to do the tourist thing.
He could see Axel Moen. He had been there before them. Dwight Smythe could see the back of Axel Moen and there was light on his hair that fell below his shoulder line.
There was a tremor in the Englishman's voice, like he was frightened, like they both were…
'Do you know, this pile was started by an Englishman. He was archbishop here. He was Gualtiero Offamiglio, which is Walter of the Mill. Do you know, he started putting this lot together exactly 810 years ago? Think on it. I mean, what sort of journey was it from England to here, 810 years ago? Forget the building, just getting here was incredible-'
'Can you leave it?'
'I was only saying that it was-'
'I was saying, cut the shit.'
He was supposed to push paper and balance a budget and keep the leave charts tidy.
He wasn't supposed to stand with the sweat freezing on his back and on his gut to watch an agent meet with an informer. Dwight Smythe liked church, but he liked church that was simple. He went with his wife each Sunday to a Baptist place up in London's Highgate, where the middle classes of the Anglo- African community came, where they sang loud to lift a low roof. The cathedral wasn't his place. The Baptist church that he knew was a place of safety and light – and, hell, here it was danger, it was grey darkness. He watched Axel Moen's back. Up ahead of Axel Moen, where the light pierced from high windows and made a many-coloured tapestry of cones, was a group of tourists. Further ahead of Axel Moen, young unseen voices, was a choir practising.
The Englishman whispered, 'I think that's her.' He made a small gesture. Dwight Smythe followed the line of the pointed finger. There was a young woman walking slowly down the central aisle. At times the light shafted down on her and lit the fairness of her hair in green and blue and red and white, but mostly her hair was in grey gloom.
She went down the aisle slowly and looked around her. He thought she played a part, did it well, a foreigner in the aisle of the cathedral and looking around her with awe, like there wasn't danger in the place. She wore a white blouse that was cut away on her shoulders. Her shoulders were red from the sun, as if they had already been burned and not yet been tanned. She wore old faded jeans. She was going down the aisle towards where Axel Moen sat. He would not have seen her yet.
'You know that's her?'
'There was a picture in her home. I saw the picture.' There was a hoarseness in the Englishman's voice. 'How's she going to be when she gets told?'
'Get her out tonight?'
'Too right, straight on the freedom bird.'
'Is she stupid?'
'Not what I hear.'
'If she's not stupid, she might just kiss you when she hears it's finished.'
They watched. She went down the aisle. She went past the line of wooden seats on which Axel Moen sat. She was good. She did not give a sign of recognizing him, but she would have seen the pony-tail of hair on his shoulders. She faced the altar and genuflected and crossed herself, and then she slipped into the row of chairs in front of Axel Moen. Maybe he said something to her, but she gave no sign of it. She sat for a full minute on her chair, as if in contemplation. He wondered what was the future of Axel Moen. Could be the slot they'd made in Lagos, and it could be there was no future – could be that he was headed for that place in Wisconsin and hooking trebles into small fish… She stood. She went forward and she tagged with the tourist group. She was goddam good.
The maresciallo was bent over the street map, the map was spread over the table. Under the map were the used plates from their lunch, and their cups and their guns. The chase-car driver lay on the floor beside the cooker and slept, and the passenger of the chase car sat on a hard chair and his head was on his chest and his eyes were closed.
Pasquale studied the manual of the Beretta, tried to learn each working part, and the words and the diagrams seemed to bounce back from the tiredness of his mind.
His eyes never left the map. There was a cruel coldness in the abrupt voice of the maresciallo. 'I regret, Pasquale, as a result of your assessment, you are not considered suitable for this work.'
The boy was staring at him, gaping mouth, in shock. 'Why?… Why?'
'For the most obvious of reasons, inefficiency.'
The boy was peering at him, blinking his eyes fast. 'When? When do I leave?'
'There is a replacement tomorrow. You go when the replacement is available.'
The boy was trying to hold back tears. 'Did Dr Tardelli not speak for me?'
'It was Dr Tardelli who said you were not fitted for the work.'
He might have punched the boy Pasquale, might have kicked the boy. The maresciallo wrote from the map the name of each street they would use on the journey to Mondello.
Carmine was in the traffic on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, jammed. The city was closing down for the siesta. The tail called him again on his mobile and gave him the code digits and the code letter. Carmine was in the traffic, locked.
Axel went forward. A full five minutes he had left her with the group around the guide.
He had waited until the guide was criticizing a woman for wanting to take flash photographs. In the moment of distraction he went forward and he took her arm, where it was narrow at the elbow below the sleeve of her blouse and he squeezed her arm, and she didn't turn. He stood behind Charley.
The tourists were German. The guide spoke in German.
'There is still, as you see, enough of the original Norman carving to impress – it is the shame of the building that too much of the craftsmen's work of the twelfth century was destroyed by the barbarians of the Gothic period…'
Axel murmured into her hair. 'We speak Italian, these people won't understand Italian.' 'OK.'
They moved with the group. '… Both the portals that you see and the doors are from the fifteenth century. In the desecration of the interior it is remarkable they survived.
The building is a hybrid, each generation and each imperial conqueror came with his own desire for immortality, and achieved only historic vandalism.' The tourists tittered.
'I don't mess with you, kid. I don't play with you. I always gave it you straight.'
'What do you need to say?'
'It's not easy, what I've to say… I respect you…'
'Say it, what you want to say.'
There was an advance-course instructor at Quantico. He didn't get the rookies, he worked with the guys who operated in danger. The instructor was said to be, on the use of agents, super-Grade A, shit-hot. Axel Moen had done the week's course before he'd shipped down to La Paz. The instructor said that when you handled agents, then you lost your moral virginity. The instructor said that an agent was an item without human value, the agent was just a means to an end, the agent was a coded cipher, the agent was never a person… An agent had died, crucified on the back of a door… An agent stood in the dark shadow of the cathedral of Palermo… Christ, the goddam instructor at Quantico would never have run an agent himself, never felt the dependency and the trust, and never known the dirtiness.
Axel said it quick. 'It's over, finished, it's killed. The big cats say it's wound up. It's the time, their order, to abort.'