Gerald Seymour - Red Fox

He worked a smile over the pain of his jaw and gazed at the emptied bucket. He'd tell Violet about it, tell her it blow by blow.

Not what they did to him afterwards, but up till then, and his foot still ached.

He struggled upright, knees shaking, stomach in torment.

'You're animals,' he shouted. 'Slobbering, miserable swine.

Fit to shovel shit, you know that.' The scream wobbled under the low cut of the rafters. 'Get down in your shit and wash your-selves, you pigs. Rub your faces in it, because that's what makes pigs happy. Pig shit, pig thick.'

And then he listened, braced for a new onslaught, and heard the murmur of their voices. They took no notice of him, ignored him. He knew that he could shout till he lifted the roof and that they had no fear of it. He was separated from every civilization that he knew of.

Without hunger, without thirst, numbed by the annihilation of the big Calabresi, Giancarlo sat on a bench in the Termini, waiting the hours away. Close to exhaustion, near to drifting to fitful sleep, hands masking his face, elbows digging at his legs, he thought of Franca.

There had been girls in Pescara, the daughters of the friends of Father and Mother. Flowing skirts, starched blouses and knee boots, and the clucking approval of Mother as she brought the cream cakes out. The ones that giggled and knew nothing, existed with emptied minds. Crucifixes of gold at their necks and anger in their mouths if he reached for buttons or zips or eye-fasteners.

There had been girls at the University. Brighter and more adult stars who regarded him as an adolescent. There he was someone who could make up the numbers for the cinema or the beach, but who was shunned when it was dark, when the clinching began.

The spots, the acne, and the titter behind the hand. It should have been different with the Autonomia, but the girls would not grovel for a novice, for a recruit, and Giancarlo had to prove himself and win the acclamation. Far out in the front of the crowd, running forward with the fire eating into the rag at the hilt of the milk bottle, arcing the Molotov into the air. The battle for approval, and his ankle had turned. Would they even remember him now, the girls of the Autonomia? Giancarlo Battestini had no experience other than in the arms, between the thighs, wrapped warm by Franca. It was the crucible of his knowledge. A long time he thought of her.

Franca with the breasts golden and devoid of the rim of sun-tan, Franca with the cherry-pip nipples, with the flattened belly holed by a single crater, Franca with the wild forest that had tangled and caught his fingers. The one who had chosen him.

Darling, darling, sweet Franca. In his ears was the sound of her breathing, the beat of her movement on the bed, her cry as she had spent herself.

I am coming, Franca. I am coming to take you from them, he whispered to himself.

I am coming, Franca. Believe it, know it. Thinking of Franca as the station began to live again, to move and function, participate in a new day. Thinking of Franca as he walked to the ticket counter and paid the single fare on the rapido to Reggio.

Thinking of Franca as he climbed up to a first-class carriage.

Away from the herd of Neapolitans and Sicilians with their bundles and salads and children and hallucinating noises of discussion and counter-discussion. No other passengers in the compartment. Thinking of Franca as the train pulled away from the low platform, and crawled between the sidings and junctions and high flats draped in the day's first washing. The boy slumped back, slid his heels on to the seat in front and felt the pressure power of the P38 against his back.

Out across the flatlands to the south of the city, carving through the grass fields and the close-packed vineyards, skirting the small towns of Cisterna di Latina and Sezze away on the hills, and Terracina at the coast, the train quickened its pace. Blurring the telegraph poles, homing and seeking out the dust-dry mountains and the bright skies of the Aspromonte.

'Believe in me, Franca. Believe in me because I am coming.'

The boy spoke aloud above the crash of wheels on the welded track. 'Tomorrow they will know of me. Tomorrow they will know my name. Tomorrow you will be proud of your little fox.'

At the Questura there were barely disguised smiles from the uniformed men who watched Dottore Giuseppe Carboni disgorged from his car. The evidence of the night before was plain and clear-cut. Bulldog bagged eyes, blotched cheeks, a razor-nicked chin, a tie not hoisted. He swept uneasily through the door, searching straight ahead of him as if wary of impediments and took the lift instead of risking the flight of stairs. Carboni had greetings for none of those who saluted and welcomed him along the second-floor passage. Ignoring them all, he was thankful to make the haven of his desk without public humiliation.

They would think he had been drinking all night, would not I t t know as they whispered and clucked in disapproval that he had left the party before two, and back at his flat had collapsed in a chair with a tumbler of whisky that he might better search his memory for patterns and procedures in his latest kidnap burden.

Never time for thought, for analysis, once he was at work with the telephone ringing and the stream of visitors, humble and distinguished. And a tumbler had become two, and merged into half a bottle as he had picked into the recesses of the problem before him. He had stayed up till his wife, magnificent in her flowing nightdress, had dragged him to her bed, and little enough chance of sleep then.

He sat heavily in his chair and buzzed the connecting speaker for his aide. A moment and the man was there, sleek and oiled and ready with an armful of files, battered brown folders encasing a hillock of typed paperwork. What did the Dottore intend the priority of the day to be?

Carboni winced, the stab of pain ringing in his head. 'The Harrison case. There is nothing else.'

'We have the tapings of the calls to Mrs Harrison and to 1CH. The one to Harrison's wife was futile. She couldn't understand what she was being told and rang off.' There was a sneer at the mouth of Carboni's assistant. 'The first tangible steps towards extortion were made in a message to his company.

Also from Criminalpol there is voice analysis. They believe there is similarity here with the communication at the Marchetti kidnapping, the child.'

'Just the one message to the company?'

'A single message, the establishment of lines of approach.'

'Leave me with the tapes,' said Carboni, eyes closed, head spinning, wishing deliverance from intelligent and confident young men.

When he was alone he played the cassette many times. Hands over his face, shutting out the noise through the open windows of the traffic below, concentrating his effort on the brief and staccato message. A callow, rasping voice he heard, and the policeman did not need the help of the memorandum that was attached to the package to know that this voice came from the toe of the country, from Calabria, from the land of the Mafiosi chieftains. Where else? A humble, inarticulate voice, reading a message that had been written for him, which was normal. Then there was the tape of the first call to the Marchetti family to be heard. A match; it didn't take a computer to tell him that.

Time now for work on the telephone. He mopped at his neck with his handkerchief. Half an hour in his office and his shirt was soaked. Calls to his subordinates drew blank. No further eyewitnesses had been produced since he had left for home the previous evening. There was nothing to feed into the machines beyond the very basics of description supplied by the single woman on Collina Fleming: bulk and height and generality of clothing. No faces, no fingerprints, no escape car yet traced. No information had emerged from the tenuous links with the Under-world maintained by the discreeter elements of the anti-kidnap squad. No word and none expected, because to inform in these matters was the sure and fast way to a wooden box. Not for the first time since he had reached his lofty eminence Giuseppe Carboni pondered the value of his work. The servant of a society which stepped back from commitment and involvement. The servant, neither trusted nor appreciated, and struggling for standards that those who lodged even in the higher places re-nounced. Lockheed, Friuli, Esso Italiana, Belice, even the Quirinale, even the Presidency. Scandals; nasty and deceitful, and the guilty were from the chief echelons of the great Mama Italia. So, who wanted law, who wanted order? The ache was back at his head, the throb of a hungover man, wetted with dis-illusion. He could take his pension. He could go on his way, and the President would hang a medal round his neck, and his parting would be unseen, unimportant.