Red Fox (10 page)

Only thing she seemed to like was getting down to the beach and that was bloody ridiculous too. There was a nice quiet pool just down the road for her to use, and some very decent families using it. But she preferred the beach and a hell of a drive down to Ostia and all the filth and the oil to sit on, pressed in close by those Italians burning themselves nigger brown. A total bloody mystery. Getting the sand in her hair, not speaking to anyone.

Poor old Violet, poor bored old Violet. Hadn't thought about her for a long time, had he? Not like this, not examining her day.

Well, he didn't have time, did he ? Someone had to put the clothes on her back, the food in her fridge. A damn good job he had in Rome. Better prospects, better pay than he could have hoped for in London. He wished she'd see that. Working damned hard he was, and he could do without the abuse when he flopped home in the evenings.

They were slow rambling thoughts, indulgent and close, lulling him from the crisis, until there was another change in the engine pitch and he felt the movement of the gears, the slowing of the engine, the application of brakes. The van bumped crazily on rough ground. A dead stop. Voices that were clearer with the motor cut. The complacency vanished, the trembling began again, because this was frightening to the man who was bound and gagged and hooded and who had no horizons of sight. A way of existence that had become settled, achieved tranquillity, was ruptured.

The van had left the autostrada half way between Cassino and Capua, bypassed the small town of Vairano Scalo, avoiding the single wide street and central piazza. They had turned east on a winding open hill road that would eventually reach the village of Pietramelara, the home of just over a thousand people with shuttered minds and uninquisitive tongues who would not question the presence of a strange vehicle with distant number plates that might rest for half an hour among the trees and off the road short of their community.

Harrison felt himself bracing his muscles as if trying to push his way further back into the interior of the van, crawl on his buttocks away from the rear door. He heard the slamming at the front and the gouging scratch of feet on the ground that walked along the length of the side walls and then the noise of a lock being turned and a handle being tugged. When the door opened there was a slight smudge of light filtering through the weave of the hood and the floor of the van bucked under a new weight. He felt the shape, alien and revolting to him, brush against his knees and thighs, and then there were hands at the hood, scrabbling close to his chin, at the back of his neck, as the cloth was drawn back across his face. He wanted to scream, wanted to vomit, to expel the fear. Taut, tensed, terrorized. The smell of garlic was close to his nose, and the odour of a farm.

The light, brilliant, blinding, flooded over him, hurting so that he screwed up his face and tried to twist away. But he was not just turning from the intrusive sun, but also from the man who was bent double under the low roof and now loomed above him.

Boots close to his head, hard, roughened, unpolished, cracked with wear. Trousers that were old and patched and shapeless, grease-stained. A shirt of red check material, sleeves turned high on muscled forearms. And dominating, compelling his eyes, was the hood, black cloth with eye slits and the crudely cut hole that simulated the position of the mouth. Nowhere for Harrison to writhe to. Nowhere for him to find refuge. The hands, coarse and blistered, thrust to the tapes across his mouth. One savage pull ripped them clear and left the skin as a vast, single abrasion.

He coughed hard, spluttered with his face smarting, eyes heavy with tears at the sharpness of the pain.

No word from the man above who screwed up and tossed away the jumble of adhesive tape. There was another silhouetted against the light of the doorway, and Harrison saw him pass forward a roll of bread that bulged with lettuce and tomato and ham. Big and fat and filling it would have been if he were hungry.

The bread was placed against his mouth. He bit and swallowed.

Bit again, swallowed again. Around him an awareness of the surroundings grew. The tastes were of the far countryside, distant and removed from the city that was his home. The air was closed to urban sounds, open only to the calls of the birds that were free and roaming at their will. Harrison ate half the roll, could stomach no more and shook his head, and the man threw it casually behind him, successful in his aim avoiding his friend. They let him swig from a bottle of water; aqua minerale, lively with gas and bubbles from the movement of the van. One drink and then the bottle was withdrawn. He lay numbly still, unresisting, as his face was again taped. Instinctively he pleaded with his eyes because they were the only vehicle of argument left to him, but the hood was returned to its place. Back in his realm of darkness, his stomach ground on the food it had taken down, his bowels were loose and confused by the content of what he had eaten. He heard the back door close, the lock being fastened, the men walking back to the front of the van. The engine started.

No threat, no kindness. No cruelty, no comfort.

Men without any minuscule, foetal sensitivity. Vicious bastards, without emotion, without charity. To take a blindfold off a man who was terrorized, holding his muscles to keep his pants clean; to rip the gag from his mouth and offer him nothing, nothing in communication, nothing as one human being to another. The one who had fed him had worn on the third finger of his left hand, the hand that held the bread, the wide gold band of a wedding-ring.

He had a wife whom he would hold close to him and sweat and grunt his passion against, and children who would call to him and laugh. The bastard, the fucking bastard, who could extinguish compassion, drown it, say not a word, give not a sign to a fellow creature who was in pain and suffering and alone.

So help me God, if ever I have the chance I'll kill that bastard.

Beat his head with a stone, smash and pound and break it. While he pleads, while he cries, while the blood spatters. So help me God, I want to kill him, I want to hear him scream.

You've never hit anyone in your life, Geoffrey, you wouldn't know how.

The van moved off.

They drove slowly into the village of Pietramelara. The driver found what he was looking for without difficulty. A bar with the circular sign of a telephone dial that heralded the presence of a coin-box machine. He left his passenger in the seat, nodded respectfully to the village priest hurrying home for his lunch, accepted the smile of greeting. Conversation in the bar was not interrupted. The driver pulled from his pocket a clutch of gettoni, the tokens necessary for the call. He took from the breast pocket of his shirt a packet of cigarettes, and deciphered the number written on the inside of the cardboard lining. Six gettoni he required for Rome. He remembered the zero six prefix, then carefully repeated the seven figure number from the packet.

When the answer came he spoke quickly, gave only his first name and that of the village and his estimation that the journey would be completed in eight hours.

Had there been difficulties?

There had been none.

The call was terminated by the other party. The driver did not know to whom he was speaking. He walked back to the van anxious to be on his way. He faced a long drive, far into the very toes of the Italian boot, into the mountain country of Calabria.

And tonight he would sleep in his own cottage, sleep against the cool stomach of his woman.

The driver's contact would permit the organization in the group that had kidnapped Geoffrey Harrison to make their first contact with the Englishman's home. They now knew that their merchandise was far beyond the reach of rescue by the polizia, that the cordons and road blocks were way outstripped.

Claudio stood with his hands in his pockets among the little groups of waving Romans. A varied sadness painted all those who watched the train, the anaconda, snake away from the long platform of the Termini, bending at the first far curve, engine already lost. Mario and Vanni gone, settled into their seats in the grey carriage that carried the sign of Reggio Calabria, nine hundred kilometres to the south. Their going left Claudio without a companion, condemned to wait away the night, contain his resentment that he was not with his friends. Time to be killed and frittered as a man does when he is in a strange city that has no heart, no belonging for him.

Once he waved, simply and without demonstration, lifting his arm and waggling his fingers at the train as it diminished and blended with the softness of the heat haze that distorted and tricked.

As Mario and Vanni walked along the platform he had been tempted to follow and join them, but fear of the men of the organization was enough to cast the apple from big Claudio's mouth. Some before had discarded the instructions of the organization, trifled with their orders. All had been awarded a fine funeral, two or more priests to celebrate the Mass, many boys to sing in the choir, enough flowers to cover all the stones in the cemetery, enough tears to make a dead man believe he was mourned. Claudio had stayed behind and waved; he would catch tomorrow's train.

He swung his eyes away from the converging, empty tracks and headed for the bar and the first of a new session of Perroni beers that would help him watch the hour and minute hands of his watch.

Later he would find a room near the station.

Sometimes hurrying, sometimes slowly when the lethargy bred from failure was on him, Giancarlo searched among the familiar places, the rooms and corridors where he expected to find his friends. He had gone to the Faculty of Letters where the walls were bright in a technicolour of protest paint and wandered the high plaster-coated corridors, past the stripped notice-boards, past the locked lecture theatres, into the quiet of the library. To some who were relaxed and lounging in chairs he had spoken.

Not with confidence but sidling towards them. He had mentioned a name and seen a head shaken; moved on, another name, shoulders shrugged in response. On from the Faculty of Letters to the Faculty of Social Sciences and further echoing and deserted corridors that rang with his thin-soled shoes and in which reverberated the laughter of those who belonged and knew their place.

Hopeless for him to ask the question directly.

Where are the people of the Autonomia? Where can I find any member of the Autonomia? It was not information that would be given to a stranger, not in a casual conversation. He plodded on, wet and constricted in his clothes, dampened and caught in his unhappiness. On from the Faculty of Social Sciences, heading for the Faculty of Physics. Two hours Giancarlo paced the University complex. There was no one he knew among the students who sat and talked in the sunshine, or walked with their bundles of books, or crouched over the printed words of their study texts. No one who could send him with a smile and a gabble of directions to where he might discover the people of the Autonomia.

Still careful, still watchful, he hesitated by the great opened doors of the Faculty of Physics, pausing in the shadow short of the sun-bright steps that led down into the central yard of the University, traversed with his eyes, as a fox will when it sniffs the early air before leaving its den. Giancarlo quivered, stiffened, focused on the grey gunmetal Alfasud parked back and out of the light, far into the shade of the trees. The car was distinctive because of its radio aerial, high and set above the right rear wheel, and because of the three men sprawled in the seats. Bearded two of them, clean-shaven the third, but all of them too old to be students. He watched the car for many minutes, hidden by shadow as it was, observing the men fidget and shift in response to the comfort of their seats, assimilating their mood, their state of preparedness. There was nothing exceptional about the police being there, he told himself, the place crawled with the pigs and their informers, and there was no urgency about these men as they watched the young people move across their vision. Dumb bastards, because even if they had his name and his picture they telegraphed their presence by their age, by their location.

Had they his name yet ?

Not so quickly, surely, not within a few hours. Confidence and depression, ebullience and fear, competed in the boy's mind as he scurried for a side entrance and cover among the parked buses at the Tiburtina termini. Rampant in his imagination was the sight of the three men low in the seats of their car. The one with his newspaper, the one with his arm trailing through the open window with the dangled cigarette, the one with the barely opened eyes. They had made him ran, hastened the end of his fruitless, wasted search, and that was how it would always be, till the gutter time, till the shooting time, till he no longer needed to scan the cars and the faces for the polizia.

Pig bastards. There would be a moment when he stood his ground. A moment when they would know of him. When, Giancarlo? The moment when he would take Franca Tantardini from them. By yourself, Giancarlo ? There was a pain at the boy's eyes, and agony behind the lids, because this was a public place among the buses and the people who waited and they must not see him weep.

He climbed on to a bus. Chose it not for its route but because it was one that did not have a conductor to collect money and hand out tickets, and relied instead on a machine and the honesty of passengers.

Heart pumping, blood coursing fast, the little boy who had lost his protection and was running.

The girl in faded jeans and a flowing, wrist-buttoned blouse came quickly to the top of the high steps at the entrance to the Faculty of Social Sciences. She paused there, raking the open ground in front of her, then jogged down the steps and across the car park towards the grey Alfasud. It was not remarkable that she could identify the unmarked police car, any student could have done that. As she approached the car she saw the interest of the occupants quicken, the cigarette stubbed, the newspaper dropped, the backs straightened. At the driver's open window she hesitated as the men's eyes soaked into her, for this was a public place for an informant to work.