Gerald Seymour: Red Fox

Beyond the Rieti turn-off they went right and drove on a rough track skirting a recently completed four-floor block of flats and towards the garages that lay to the rear, partly shielded from the upper windows by a line of vigorous conifers. There was a van waiting there, old and with its paintwork scratched from frequent scarrings and the rust showing at the mudguards and road dirt coating the small window set in the rear doors. Two men lounged, elbows on the bonnet, waiting for the arrival of the Alfetta. Vanni did not hear what was said as Mario and Claudio carried the crumpled, drugged form of their prisoner from the back seat to the opened rear doors of the van. It would be of little interest, the passing of a moment between men hitherto unknown to each other who would not meet again. When the doors were closed an envelope passed between fingers, and Claudio slapped the men on their backs and kissed their cheeks, and his face was wreathed in happiness, and Mario handed the grip bag to new owners.

Mario led the way back to the car, then paused by the open door to watch the men fasten the back of their van with a padlock and drive away. There was a certain wistfulness on his features as if he regretted that his own part in the matter was now completed. When Claudio joined him, he looked away from the retreating vehicle, and slid back into his seat. Then the vultures were at the envelope, ripping at it, tearing it apart till the bundles in the pretty coloured plastic bands were falling on their knees.

One hundred notes for each. Some hardly used in transactions, others elderly and spoiled from passage of time and frequency of handling. Silence reigned while each counted his bounty, flicking the tops of the notes to a rhythm of counting.

Vanni loaded his money into the folds of his wallet, pulled a small key from his pocket, climbed from the car and walked to one of the garage doors. He unlocked it, then returned to the car and motioned for Mario and Claudio to leave. He drove the car into the garage, satisfied himself that the doors prevented a casual glance from the building seeing his work, and spent five slow minutes wiping clean the plastic and wood surfaces of the interior with his handkerchief, and then, when he was satisfied, the outer doors. When he was finished he came out into the warmth and slammed the garage doors shut. The garage had been rented by telephone, a letter with a bogus address containing cash had provided the deposit and confirmation. He threw the key far on to the flat roof, where it clattered momentarily. The rent had six weeks to run, time enough for the Alfetta to rest there, and by the time an irate landlord prised open the doors all other traces of the group would have been covered.

Together the three men walked out past the flats and to the main road and then along the pavement to the green-painted bus stop sign. It was the safest way into the city and ultimately to the railway station.

On that morning, in a flat across two Roman hills, the first of the occupants to wake was the boy Giancarlo.

Lithe on his bare feet, he padded across the carpet of the living-room, sleep still heavy and confusing to his eyes, blurring the shapes and images of the furnishings. He avoided the low tables and velvet-seated chairs, stumbling on a light flex as he pulled a shirt over his young, undeveloped shoulders. He had shaken Franca gently and with the care and wonderment and awe of a boy who wakes for the first time in a woman's bed and is frightened that the tumult and emotion of the night will be relegated by dawn to a fantasy and dream. He had scratched his fingers across her collar-bone and pulled quietly at the lobe of her ear, and whispered her name, and that it was time. He had looked down on her face, gazed intoxicated on the shoulder skin and the contour of the drawn-up sheet, and left her.

A small flat they lived in. The one living-room. The bathroom that was a box which crammed in a toilet, a bidet and a shower unit. The kitchen with a sink buried under abandoned plates and a cooker that had not seen a damp cloth round the burners for more than a week. The bedroom where Enrico still slept noisily and where there was the unused bed that till last night had been Giancarlo's. And there was Franca's room with the single narrow divan, her clothes draped as haphazard carpeting across the woodblock floor. A small hallway and a door with three locks and a spyhole, and a metal bar with chain that enabled the door to be opened an inch for additional checking of a visitor. It was a good flat for their needs.

The requirements of Franca Tantardini, Enrico Panicucci and Giancarlo Battestini were not great, not complex. It was determined that they should live among the borghese, in a middle-class area, where there was wealth, prosperity, where lives were shuttered, self-reliant affairs and closed to the inquisitive. Vigna Clara hill suited them well, left them secure and unnoticed in the heart of enemy territory. They were anonymous in a land of Ferraris and Mercedes and Jaguars, among the servants and the spoiled children and the long holidays through the summer, and the formidable foreign bank accounts. There was a basement garage and a lift that could carry them out of sight to their own door in the attic of the building, affording them the possibility of cloaking their movements, coming and going without observation. Not that they went out much; they did not roam the streets because that was dangerous and put them at risk. Better that they should spend their hours cooped between the walls, profiting from seclusion, reducing the threat of casual recognition by the polizia. Expensive, of course, to live there. Four hundred and seventy-five thousand a month they paid, but there was money in the movement. Enough money was available to meet the basic precautions of survival, and they settled in cash on the first day of the month and did not ask for the contract to be registered and witnessed and the sum to figure on their landlord's tax return. There was no difficulty finding premises that were private and discreet.

Giancarlo was a boy with two terms of psychology study at the University of Rome behind him, and nine more months in the Regina Coeli gaol locked in a damp cell low down by the Tiber river. Still a boy, little more than a child, but bedded now, bedded by a woman in every way his senior. She was eight years older than he was, so that he had seen in the first creeping light of the bedroom the needle lines at her neck and mouth and the faint trembling of the weight at her buttocks as she had turned in her sleep, resting on his arm, uncovered and uncaring till he had pulled the sheet about her. Eight years of seniority in the movement, and that he knew of too, because her picture was in the mind of every car load of the Squadra Mobile, and her name was on the lips of the capo of the Squadra Anti-Terrorismo when he called his conferences at the Viminale. Eight years of importance to the movement; that too Giancarlo knew of, because the assignment of Enrico and himself was to guard and protect her, to maintain her freedom.

The bright, expansive heat drove through the slatted shutters, bathing the furniture in zebra shades of colour, illuminating the filled ashtrays and the empty supermarket wine bottles and the uncleared plates with the pasta sauce still clinging to them, and the spreadeagled newspapers. The light flickered on the glass of the pictures with which the room was hung, expensive and modern and rectangular in their motifs, not of their choosing but provided with the premises, and which hurt their sensitivities as they whiled away the cramped hours waiting for instructions and orders of reconnaissance and planning and ultimately of attack. All of it, all of the surroundings grated on the boy, disturbed him, nurturing his distrust for the flat in which they lived.