RED FOX Page 6

  Pray God there isn't some pompous fool in there.

  What do you mean?

  Well, some stupid ass with a good lunch inside him and letters after his name who wants to talk about the principle of paying.

  What do you mean?

  Well, if some ape says it's not right to pay, that you have to stand up to these people, that if you give way now what do you do next time.

  They wouldn't say that, would they, not really say that?

  They're not where you are, Geoffrey. They're in a boardroom, not in handcuffs. They may have cut themselves shaving, but they haven't had a bloody great fist slammed in. Some of them are bloody geriatric. All they know about the sodding country is what they see on a balance sheet.

  They wouldn't be so stupid, they couldn't. Don't they know people get chopped if there's no payola, don't they know that?

  Calm it, kid. Not bloody helping, is it? They'll know it, and if they don't there'll be someone there to tell them.

  You're sure?

  I'm sure, I'm certain.

  How can you know?

  I'm certain because I have to believe that, otherwise we go stark bloody mad, straight insane.

  With the sun playing on its roof without remorse or hindrance, baking the closed interior, the van headed at a steady and unremarkable one hundred and ten kilometres per hour southwards along the Autostrada del Sol.

  CHAPTER F O U R

  His Excellency the Ambassador of Her Britannic Majesty, who had known the tap of her sword on his right shoulder and had kissed her hand and valued his audience, was a man who admired discipline of action, and protocol of approach. He had not disguised his distaste at what he regarded as the breathy intervention of young Charlesworth when he was only one foot out of his official burnished transport. He had been short with his First Secretary, had permitted only the briefest of resumes and failed to raise his eyebrows in either shock or astonishment. And as he had marched away, smiling at the doorman, with Charlesworth snapping like a lap dog at his heels, he had suggested that something on paper by lunchtime would satisfy his requirements for information.

  As he strode down the drive to the security lodge, Charlesworth cursed himself for his flustered account, for his failure to interest his superior, regretting that he had allowed himself to be put down as a bubbling child is by an overburdened parent. He recalled that the Ambassador was hosting a luncheon-party that day; the newly appointed Foreign Minister would be at his right hand, the guest of honour. Present would be the senior members of the diplomatic corps, a smattering of ranking civil servants, the best bone china and the silverware out from the cupboard.

  The Ambassador had his priorities, Charlesworth growled to himself. The soup shouldn't be too salted, the plates must be warm, the wine chilled, the conversation clever. He had too much on his mind to worry about the fears of a hysterical woman, and a man trussed and perhaps half dead who was experiencing the greatest degree of terror he had known in his life. He'd be far too busy for such sordidness, and a piece of paper with some aptly chosen words presented before the sherry flowed would be sufficient.

  Charlesworth dived out into the road beyond the regimented railings of the Embassy, scanning the traffic that burst through the arches of the ancient reddened brick city wall. Getting a taxi would need the luck of old Jupiter. But luck was with him, the yellow Fiat snaking to the pavement, and he waved frantically and hurried towards its stopping point. He saw the face in the back, equal shades of mauve and pink. 'Buster' Henderson; Military Cross in Korea God knows how many years ago and for doing something nobody sane would have dreamed of; military attache; half-colonel; always took a cab in, and one home in the afternoon. Charlesworth didn't know how he could afford it, not that and the gin as well.

  'In a hurry, young man?' Charlesworth detested the way the older staff regarded him as a juvenile. 'Flap on, is there? Eyeties declared war on u s . . . ?' A boom of laughter. Must have been the life and soul of some gory cavalry mess east of the Rhine.

  'One of our people has been kidnapped this morning.'

  'One of the Embassy chaps?' Henderson was waiting for the change from his 10,000-lire note.

  'No, it's not the end of the world, not one of ours. It's a businessman, a fellow who works out here. I've to get up to his wife.'

  'Poor bastard,' said Henderson quietly. His wallet was open, the notes being carefully put away in order of value, damn-all of a tip. 'Poor devil, rather him . . . '

  'Could be rather a shambles for us. It's the first time a foreigner has been lifted. Well, only the Getty boy, and that was different, I suppose.'

  Henderson held the door open for Charlesworth. 'You'll be handling our end, eh? Well, if you get a bit overwhelmed, give us a shout. Damn-all I have to worry about at the moment, diary's empty as a larder these next three days. Don't hang about if you want a hand, if you want to talk it over.'

  'Thank you . . . thank you very much. It's most kind . . .

  Buster.'

  Charlesworth had never called him that before, never really had a conversation with the army officer on any more substantive subject than whether it would rain on QBP day, whether they'd have to retire to the marquee for the annual Queen's Birthday Party celebrations. Silly little thing, the offer of help, but he was grateful, grateful because he was stepping on stones that he did not know.

  'Poor devil, rather him . . Charlesworth heard half-colonel

  'Buster' Henderson mutter again as he closed the taxi-door on himself.

  He walked in what shade he could find, seeking out the places where the sun was denied sight of the pavements by the towering blocks of flats flanking the Regina Margherita. Unable now to control the speed of his legs as they pumped a way along the uneven flagstones, hurrying when he knew he should be calm, because the coolness he had first sought to impose on himself was disappearing, slipping from his grasp. Giancarlo was feeling the stress and lead weight of the fugitive.

  Not that the shade offered him solace. The stinking, brutalizing heat of the morning penetrated the air, broke open his white skin and thrust out the carousing sweat rivers that saturated his few clothes, soaking and irritating him. No wind down at street level.

  Just the furnace and the car exhausts, nothing to bluster across his face and limbs. He tramped on for the sanctuary of the University, where a face might be familiar, where the environs would be known, where there would be an end to the perpetual swinging of his head for a first glimpse of the coasting police cars.

  It was a new experience for Giancarlo. Never before had he known the feeling of being hunted, of being loose and adrift from the companionship of the group, of being cast outside the protective womb of the NAP.

  When Giancarlo had walked at the side of Franca Tantardini, the NAP had seemed to him a great and powerful organization.

  Limitless authority and potential gushed when he had been close to her, and the words of victory and success and triumph had cascaded from her tongue. Now the sheen of safety was stripped from him and Enrico was dead, washing his face in his owh blood, and Franca taken. He fled towards the reassurance of the nursery, the safety of the creche, to the University.

  Tired legs, sore feet, a heaving chest, the classic symptoms of flight. He turned left towards the Piazza Giorgio Fabrizio, then right into the Viale del Policlinico. He stumbled from tiredness as he passed the huge, drawn-out complex of the hospital. The signs of PRONTO SOCCORSO that guided the racing, siren-loud ambulances to where they should bring their emergencies were on his right. Where they brought Franca's victims. Where they deposited the men with the gunshot wounds for the first immediate life-saving operation to counter the work of the P38. The boy saw the men who waited in their short white coats and the nurses in their belted dresses who lounged under the trees alert for the screaming of the ambulance approach that would send them scurrying in preparation to Casualty Reception.

  Going past the Policlinico, Giancarlo knew with the sureness of the first lightning flash in a
storm why they would hate him, track him, spend a lifetime edging towards his back. No forgiveness, no charity, not while men lay in pain on the metal bed-frames of the Policlinico, and shouted in the night for their wives. A great army they would bring against him, and a mind with a limitless and unbroken memory.

  A boy who was as nothing. Devoid of possessions, importance, status. Armed with a P38 and a magazine of eight shells.

  Devoid of plan and programme and blueprint.

  Armed with a detestation of cruel force against the system that rallied now to crush him.

  Bereft of friendship and accomplices and the strength of a leader to guide.

  Armed with the love of a girl who had taken him into herself.

  Armed with the love of Franca Tantardini. For she must have loved him, she must have wanted him, Giancarlo Battestini, or he would not have known her bed and her warmth and her murmurs and her fingers. If it took a week or a month or a year, he would take her from them. Repossess her freedom, the freedom of the bird to escape the cage. Because she had loved him.

  Dwarfing the boy were the great white stone walls and archway of the University. Designed for immortality, designed to stand for a thousand years as proof to a grateful worker class of the power wielded by the black shirt and the leather boot. Giancarlo took in the daubed slogans of the paint spray aerosols, bright colours of graffiti that disfigured the impression of omnipotence, but only as high as a student's arm could rise. Above the reach of the protestor was the clean-cut stone of the rejected regime.

  The slogans of the Autonomia were here at shoulder height. The painted outline of the closed fist with the first and second fingers extended - the P trent' otto. Here were daubed the cries of hate against the Ministers of government, the parties of democracy, the polizia, the carabinieri, the borghese. He had arrived at the place where succour might be found.

  Stretching away in front of him was the wide avenue between the Science and Medical Faculties and the Administration buildings. Many doors were closed, many windows shuttered, because the academic year and examinations had terminated six weeks earlier. But there would be some students here, those who had taken a cause and rejected the cloying parental hand over the family holiday, they would have stayed. Giancarlo broke into a run. He lifted the weariness from his legs, lengthened his stride, till he was sprinting down the gentle hill.

  The taxi, its driver displaying caution rare in his vocation, nudged up the hill at a crawl and rounded the three police cars straddled in front of the Mercedes. Charlesworth saw the driver's side window breached and shattered, frozen glass glittering in the gravel surface of the road.

  The polizia, in blue and mauve trousers with the thin maroon cord astride their thighs and open blue shirts and caps pushed back on their foreheads, were working round the smitten vehicle.

  They dabbed on fingerprint dust and a tin was beside them in which plaster glistened wetly and which would be used if the impression of a tyre grip needed recording. It was too Warm for the polizia to move with energy and their inertia was augmented by the very familiarity of the scene. There was nothing new, the scene of crime procedures for a kidnap. As the taxi circumvented the blockage, Charlesworth saw two men in civilian suits, and they were the only ones that mattered. Only two. Not the young boys in their crumpled uniforms recruited from the Mezzo Giorno who knew less of crime than a Neapolitan pickpocket or a Milanese burglar and wore the uniform because it was the only escape from the region of unemployment. Just two, the trained ones who took the privilege of wearing their own clothes, enough to make him heave and throw up. Dear old Carboni, with his courtesy and his compromise, who had promised nothing, he knew the limitations of his force. And why should they bust a gut - because the man who'd been lifted had a blue passport with a lion rampant and English scroll inside the front flap? Carboni had marked Charlesworth's card, said there should be a payout, that they should get the misery over, forget the games. So what's in it for a policeman, standing on his big flat feet, when more money will be paid than he'll see in a lifetime, and it won't be missed, won't be noticed, and his own chief says that's the way to do business ?

  He paid the driver, stepped out of the taxi and looked around him.

  A wide street on a sloping hill. Flats which owned areas of neat lawn in front and flower-bushes that had been tended and cropped and watered that morning by the porters. Blocks of five floors with deep terraces and canvas awnings and jungles of foliage. The ladies' cars parked bumper to bumper; the little runabout city motors. Dust floated softly down on to Charlesworth's jacket and the maid in the starched apron stared him out as she shook her mop. Not much poverty here, not much malaise from the economic crisis, not up here on the hill. And there was the reaction to the affluence for him to see, provided by those who crept up the slope under cover of night: paint-sprayed swastikas, the daubed MORTE AL FASCISTI that could never be scrubbed from the marble veneer surfaces.

  Didn't do badly for their people, the old multinationals. If International Chemical Holdings had put their man in here, then they were solvent, they had no liquidity problems. And the bastards would have known that, or Geoffrey Harrison would be sitting at his desk right now, clobbering his secretary for the lateness of the post, straightening his tie for his next appointment.

  Money here, and plenty of it, and these people knew where to sniff the air for it, where to strike, where the dividend was assured.

  Charlesworth walked into the hallway of the block, paused at the porter's nook where a man with a saddened and troubled face sat, mentioned the name and was told which floor. A slow lift creaked and swayed upwards. Two policemen lolled against the wall beside the door of the flat. They straightened when they saw the diplomat, not dramatically but enough to swing the holstered pistols that hung from waistbelts. Charlesworth said nothing, merely nodded, and pressed the bell.

  Soft, slippered feet shuffled to the door. An age passed while four sets of locks were unfastened. The door opened an inch and a half, as far as a chain would allow. Like a bloody fortress, he thought. But they all lived like that on the hill and damn-all good it did them when the vultures began to circle. It was dark inside and he could see nothing through the gap.

  'Who is it?' A small voice, invisible and inanimate.

  'It's Charlesworth, Michael Charlesworth. From the Embassy.'

  A pause, and then the door was closed. He heard the button on the end of the chain being withdrawn from its socket. The door opened again, not extravagantly, but sufficient to admit him.

  'I'm Violet Harrison. Thank you for coming.'

  He turned almost startled, two steps inside the hall, as if he had not expected the voice to materialize from behind - a quick movement that betrayed his unease. She came out of the shadows and her hand took his elbow and manoeuvred him towards the living-room where the blinds were drawn and the low table lights lit. He followed meekly behind the tented swirl of her trailing cotton dressing-gown with the big flowers embroidered across the shapes of her back and her buttocks and legs. He stole a glance at the silhouette against a light and dug his nails into the palm of a hand. You'd have thought she'd have dressed by now, on a morning like this, with a bloody deluge of visitors about to come tripping in. You'd have thought the woman would put some clothes on.

  He saw her the first time when she reached her chair and angled her face at him. She might not have dressed but she'd made her face, had worked at it long enough to give the tears scope to smudge and spoil her efforts. She would have been crying from the time he telephoned. The eyelids were puffy and bulging, red above the dark broad painted eye shadow. A small tight-turned nose that had taken the sun and the freckles offset her cheeks that were smooth and bronzed. Attractive but not remarkable. Well shaped but not beautiful. His eyes flickered over her, unwilling but compelled, and she gazed back at him, no hint of embarrassment. Charlesworth looked away, the blush rising in him. Been caught like a schoolboy hadn't he? Been seen peering in the Soho bookshop windows during school
holidays. Been noticed ogling a woman who wore a sheer nightdress and a light cotton wrap.

  'I'm very sorry for what has happened, Mrs Harrison,' he said.

  'Would you like some coffee . . . there's only instant.'

  'You're very kind, but no. Thank you.'

  'There's tea, I can make a cup.' A small, far voice.

  'No, thanks. Thank you again, but I won't. Would you like me to put the kettle on for you? Can I make you some tea?'

  ' I don't want any tea. Would you like a cigarette?' Still staring at his eyes, raking and examining them.

  ' It's very nice of you, but I don't. I don't smoke.' He felt he should apologize because he didn't want Nescafe, didn't want teabags, didn't want a cigarette.

  She sat down in an armchair, flanked by the tables that carried last night's glasses and last night's coffee cups, with a flurry of shin and knee glimpsing out. He followed into a chair across the central rug, felt himself going down, slipping away, falling into far-settling cushions, the sort that you drown in and then for ever feel ill at ease with because you're too low and can't dominate the conversation, and your nose is half way to the carpet. She was still looking into him boring and penetrating.

  'Mrs Harrison, first I should tell you who I am. I have responsibility for political affairs at the Embassy, but I also double on matters affecting the police, relations between the British community in Rome and the Italian police. Those, that is, that aren't covered by the Consular Department . . .' Come on, Charlesworth, you're not doing your own testimonial; not applying for a job e i t h e r . ' . . . So I was called this morning by a fellow called Carboni, he's one of the bigger men at the Questura. There wasn't very much known then, it was just a few minutes after your husband had been seized. Doctor Carboni gave me a solemn assurance that everything possible was being done to secure your husband's early release.'

  'And that's bugger all,' she said slowly and with deliberation.