Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

Some of those they asked said it came from inside the Jewish cemetary, some said it was in the tree-line above, some said they had heard nothing and had slammed doors in the troops' faces. The local police knew of no explosion, it had not been reported to the local fire brigade, no local ambulance had been called.

Eventually their Jeep found a ruined house at the half-way point up, steeply canted street. They saw two Mercedes limousines parked, and found an old man and a young woman, who was in a wheelchair, and a group of men. One of those men – shaven-headed, black-dressed, a gold chain heavy on his throat – explained courteously to the mareschallo that the street had been the front line in the war, that munitions were habitually stored in the roofs of such building, but were then, sadly, forgotten. It was possible that the roof beams had shifted and in doing so had detonated a mortar bomb. The old man and the young disabled woman had not spoken. The mareschallo was thanked for his attention to the matter, but was told with polite firmness that his presence was not required. The jeep drove away.

Joey had heard it. The windows to his room were double-glazed, but the force of the explosion from up the hill across the Miljacka river was insufficient to rattle the glass panes. The sound was muffled, more of a stuttering clap than a crisp detonation. He drifted back to sleep. Maggie had forbidden him to go to the Holiday Inn, sit in the van and watch. It was as if, he thought, for a day he had stepped back over the line, retrieved the die, worn the uniform, forgotten Mister, who was his Target One… He thought of Jasmina, she was the dream in his mind as he drifted, and the faint words carved in the stecak stone five centuries before: 'I stood, praying to God, meaning no evil, yet I was struck to death by lightning.' His fingers had flickered over the lichened grooves of the writing. The words on the stone were as a talisman to him.

Whatever a man or a woman did, however well they lived their lives, the lightning could strike, burn them.

There was a light rap on his door. His name was called.

'Coming, Maggie.' He opened the door.

'You're still a sight, Joey, but it's an improvement.'

'I feel better… What sort of day have you had?'

'I've heard the Welsh hero's life story. I think he wants to get his hand up my skirt. He's rather sweet

… His wife chucked him out. His kids are pining for him. Both sets of parents are on Megan's side of the fence. Yes, sweet and sad, but I think his hands are getting itchy Most of what I'm hearing is that young man talking with the dogs, or down on the floor playing with them and cuddling them. There was some sort of rendezvous tonight that took Ismet Mujii and his gorillas out, but there wasn't an explanation then, going to be a meeting the day after tomorrow I don't know where. Sounds like the big meeting, where the territory's cut. An Italian's coming.

All the talk's in a code.'

'Diry talk? " 'She raised her eyebrows – 'talking dirty' in the Church vernacular was conversation with criminal involvement, talking social' was about going to the supermarket or the corner shop for fags, or about telling the wife that the new hairpiece suited her. 'Code talk is criminal talk, right?'

' I think an Italian's coming, and there are others. I think it's the meeting that matters.'

She'd kept the meat to the last, had teased him. If the meeting, was the day alter tomorrow, somewhere, then she was inside the time limit set by her own people She thought that she was out on a parapet, over a precipice, as much as he was; if she fell it would be his, Joey Cann's, bloody fault.

'Thanks.'

'Sleep well, Joey – oh,'she dropped it as if it was an afterthought, 'do you know much about the Italians?'

He grinned ruefully. 'No, not a hell of a lot.'

She thought she was safe, thought it because a belief in her survival made life easier, but it was now two years since she had rejected the vita blindata and dismissed her police bodyguards. She had rejected the protective screen and had said to her husband, 'When the Mafia is intent on revenge it will always find a way.' She always made a joke with her husband. Who would want to pay for sex with a woman of forty-nine who was fat, had heavy, dropping breasts, and gross ankles? But last night the word prostituta had been daubed in paint on the white exterior wall of their house.

She was Giovanna. She was in her second term as the sindaca of the mountain village of San Giuseppe Jato on the western side of the island of Sicily. It was the women's vote that had elected her, again, to the mayor's office. When her deputy, Luciano, had found a bomb lodged under the front wheel hub of his car he had resigned, and she had not been able to find a man to replace him. Her ticket for re-election had been: the Rejection of the Cosa Nostra Path of Violence and Death. She did not give herself sufficient importance, if she were murdered, to be listed as an 'illustrious corpse', but she believed, had to, that she irritated the Family who controlled the village. She irritated them enough for a polio squartato to have been left on her doorstep four months before. She had found the disembowelled chicken, picked it up, and walked with it down the main street. Women had shouted to her from their windows, 'Brava, Giovanna', and she had placed the bleeding bird carefully on the step of the fine house near the church that was the principal residence of the Family. That gesture, more than anything else she might have done, ensured that women came to her, talked to her of the secrets of the Family.

She was told that evening, in a whispered telephone call, that the Family's most trusted nephew, Marco, was entrusted with a mission of importance by his uncle, had gone with a packed case to the airport at Messina, was travelling to a meeting of significance.

Giovanna thought Marco a handsome boy and im-porlant to the family's future, a boy of intelligence but trapped by the poison in the f amily's bloodstream, a boy with a life wasted a boy who might, one day, kill her.

Mislter had gone a dozen paces past the end of the line ol black station wagons, all with smoked-glass windows, past the knot of gossiping drivers, when he jerked to a stop. He was facing the swing doors of the hotel. The noise of a hundred voices, nasal and loud, billowing and American, buffeted him. His eyes narrowed. He peered through the doors. He turned in one swinging movement and faced Atkins. He reached in his belt, took the pistol from it and palmed it to Atkins.

'Leave it in the vehicle,' he said, 'and yours, and get the vehicle down the warehouse – now.'

He waited until Atkins had driven away.

'Right, Eagle, let's see what the party's for.'

They went through the door, shrugged out of their coats and laid them on the conveyor belt feeding the X-ray machine. They went through the metal detector, and were bleeped, because of the coins in Mister's pocket and the metal-lined case for the Eagle's spectacles. By the machine and the arch stood men with cropped haircuts and long, shapeless coats, with flesh-coloured wires coiled between their shirt collars and their ears. They were passed through. Every seat in the atrium bar was taken. Every table was littered with ashtrays, beer glasses, coffee cups and Pepsi cans. At the far end of the bar a woman addressed the little forest of microphones. Cameramen climbed on the soft-cushioned seats to see better. There was bedlam.

At the desk they collected their keys, and Mister was given a note from his pigeon-hole.

Eagle asked the receptionist, 'Who are all these people? What's going on?'

She told the Eagle that the American Secretary of State was due at the hotel in two hours, on a leg from Paris and Vienna, last stop before returning to Washington. This was only the advance party.