Gerald Seymour - Red Fox

'It's shit, Tantardini, because you have no army. You go to war with sick children. What have you to throw against me?

Giancarlo Bat testini, is that the hero who will strike -'

The pain fled her face. She shrieked with laughter, pealed it round the faces of the watching men. 'Giancarlo? Is that what you think we are made of? Little Giancarlo?'

'We have his name, we have his fingerprints, his photograph.

Where will he go, Tantardini?'

'What do you want with him, little Giancarlo? His capture won't win you a war.'

Angered for the first time, resenting the dismissal of a situation he had worked towards with care and precision, the interrogator slammed his fist to the table. 'We want the bpy. Tantardini, Panicucci, Battestini, we want the package.'

She jeered back at him. 'He is nothing, not to us, not to you.

A little bed-wetter, looking for a mother. A thrower of Molotovs.

Good for demonstrations.'

'Good enough for your bed,' he chanced.

'Even you might be good enough for my bed. Even you, little pig, if there was darkness, if you washed your mouth.'

'He was with you at the shooting of Cesare Fulni, at the factory.'

'Sitting in the car, watching, messing his pants, masturbating most likely.' She laughed again, as if in enjoyment.

Vellosi smiled, deep and safe in his privacy. She was a worthy enemy. Unique, styled, irreplaceable as an opponent.

'Where will he go?' The interrogator was flustered and unsettled.

' If you want Giancarlo go and stand outside his mother's door, wait till it is cold, wait till he is hungry.'

The interrogator shook his shoulders, closed his eyes, seemed to mutter an obscenity. His fingers were clamped together, knuckles showing white. 'Twenty-five years, Franca. For a man or a woman it is a lifetime. You know you can help us, and we can help you.'

'You begin to bore me.'

Vellosi saw the hate summoned to the man's narrowed lips.

' I will come one day each year and stand over the exercise yard and I will watch you, and then you will tell me whether I bore you.'

' I will look for you. And on the day that you have broken the rendezvous then I will laugh. You will hear me, pig, however deep you are buried, however far is your grave. You will hear me.

You do not frighten me because already you are running.'

'You stupid little whore.'

She waved her hand carelessly at him. ' I am tired. You do not interest me and I would like to go now. I would like to go bac k to my room.'

She stood up, proud and erect, and seemed to Vellosi to mesmerize her questioner because he came round the table and opened the door for her. She was gone without a backward glance, leaving the room abandoned and without a presence.

The interrogator looked sheepishly at his chief. 'The boy., sweet little Giancarlo, she would have eaten him, bitten him down, to the bone.'

'A very serious lady,' replied Francesco Vellosi with as composed a face as he could muster. 'She will have given her little bed-wetter and Molotov-thrower a night he will not quickly forget.'

For four undemanding years Archie Carpenter had been on the sprawling staff list of International Chemical Holdings. Four years in which his life revolved around negotiated office hours, a stipulated lunch break, five weeks' annual holiday, and days off for working public holidays. A 'soft old number, Archie', his one-time friends in the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police called it when the old ties proved too strong and he hunted them out in the pub behind the Yard for a grouse and a gossip. He had settled for a predictable backwater in an unremarkable current. So, it had been a traumatic evening. First, he had been summoned to the Managing Director's suite of offices. He'd stood with a puzzlement on his face through a briefing on the kidnapping of Geoffrey Harrison and its company implications.

The Personnel Director had handed him an open-dated return ticket to Rome on the way out. In a fluster he'd been ushered to the front entrance where a company car waited to speed him to Heathrow. Last on to the plane.

But he wasn't in Rome. Hadn't arrived at his destination.

Archie Carpenter was in front of the departure board at Linate, Milan's international airport. Strike in Rome, he'd been told.

Cockpit crew, and he was lucky to have reached this far. There might be a flight later and he must wait as everybody else was waiting. He'd asked repeatedly whether he would have a ticket for the first flight to leave for Fiumicino. He was smiled at and had learned in twenty minutes that the shaken shoulder of a man in uniform meant everything or nothing, the interpretation was free. All done up for the party, and nowhere to go. He paced, cursing, through the ant-scurrying crowds of fellow travellers, always returning to the crush around the board. Four years ago he wouldn't have been flapping, would have made his assessment and either sat back and let the tide take him or jumped off his backside and done something about it, like a self-drive hire car, or a taxi down to the Central Station and an express to the capital. But the improvisation was on the way out, the mechanics of initiative were rusty, and so he tramped the concourse and breathed his abuse.

A Detective Chief Inspector in Special Branch had been Archie Carpenter's lofty ranking in the Metropolitan Police when he had moved over into 'industry', as his wife liked to spell it out to the neighbours. All the big firms in the City had been frantic for security-trained personnel to advise them on protection from the rash of Provisional IRA bombings in London. Frightened half to death they'd been at the prospect of letter bombs in the mail-bags, of explosive devices in the corridors and the underground car park, looking for chaps with a confident jargon who seemed to know what they were at. ICH, a multinational colossus, offices and factories half way round the world, had one small plant outside Ballymena, County Antrim in Northern Ireland. The Board of Directors had determined that this put the vast con-glomerate at risk and was sufficient reason to lure Archie Carpenter from sixteen hours a day five days a week of plodding with the Branch. They had popped him into a nice, clean, air-conditioned office with a secretary to write his letters, a pension when he was senile and nine thousand a year for his bank account.

It had seemed like one long holiday. No more surveillance on winter evenings, no more meetings of the political loonies to drift into, no more Irish pubs to swill Guinness in, no more tetchy Arabs to stand alongside with a Smith and Wesson rammed in his belt. It had taken him a month to seal Chemical House, to put a system into operation that reduced the always faint threat to a minimum, and after that it had been more than comfortable, with little to worry him beyond the occasional pilfering from the typists' lockers, and the one great drama of the loss of a set of board-room minutes. He didn't complain, didn't want it to change.

He wasn't a small man. Had a good set of shoulders on him, and a stomach to go with it from four years of canteen lunches.

But they availed him nothing when the herd of would-be passengers "responded to the loudspeaker announcement and surged for the nominated check-in counter. Slight little girls bouncing him aside, chaps with concave chests pushing him half off his feet. Never seen anything like it.

'Wait a minute. Excuse me, won't you. You don't have to push like that, you know.' Helped him not at all.

Archie Carpenter's anger rose, the tired flush driving up his cheeks, and he thrust with the best of them and was almost ashamed at his progress. The gaps opened for his sharp, driving kneecaps and the heave of his elbows, and there were pained stares. Bit heavy, perhaps, but I didn't start it, darling, did I? So don't curl your bloody lip and flick your fingers. A little victory it had been, and one worth winning if there wasn't anything else about to compete for.