Gerald Seymour: Red Fox

Enrico would not see her, would believe in his last sand-running moments that his sacrifice had achieved its purpose.

Even as he fired, he was cut down by the swarm of bullets aimed at him in a thunderclap of gunfire, and lay writhing on the pavement as if trying to shake away a great agony, rolling and rolling from his back to his belly. The men ran forward, still suspicious that their enemy might bite, might hurt. There was a trail of blood from Enrico's mouth, another two from his chest that meandered together and then separated, and more crimson paths etching from his shattered legs. But his life lingered and a hand scrabbled at the dirt for the gun that had been dropped, that had fallen beyond reach. The men who towered above him wore jeans and casual slacks and sweatshirts, and some were unshaven or bearded or carried their hair long on their shoulders. Nothing to tell them from Enrico and Giancarlo. These were the men of the Squadra Anti-Terrorismo, undercover, dedicated, as hard and ruthless as those they opposed. A single shot destroyed the frenzy of Enrico's groping hands.

An execution bullet. Just as it had been said it was when the carabinieri dropped La Muscio on the church steps near the Colosseo. Bastards, bastard pigs.

A man beside Giancarlo crossed himself in haste, a private gesture in the glare of a public moment. Down the road a woman bent in sickness. A priest in long cassock abandoned his car in the road and ran forward. Two of the men covered the figure of Franca, their guns roaming close to her head.

A terrible pain coursed through the boy as his hands stayed clamped on the folded newspapers and would not waver towards the gun buried in the flesh of his buttock. He watched, part of the gathering crowd, terrified of risking the intervention that Enrico had affected. He willed himself to run forward and shoot because that was the job the movement had chosen for him, protector and bodyguard of Franca Tantardini. But if he did his blood would run in the deep gutter, company for Enrico's. There was no thrust in his legs, no jolt in his arms; he was a part of those who stayed and waited for the show to end.

They pulled the woman, unresisting and limp, to her feet and dragged her to a car. Two had their hands on her upper arms, another walked in front with his fist caught in the long blonde strands of her hair. There was a kick that missed at her shins. He could see that her eyes were open but bewildered, unrecognizing as she went to the opened car door.

Would she have seen the boy she had opened herself to a short night before?

Would she have seen him?

He wanted to wave, give a sign, shout out that he had not abandoned her. How to show that, Giancarlo? Enrico dead, and Giancarlo alive and breathing, because he had stepped back, had dissociated. How to show it, Giancarlo? The car revved its engine and its horn was raucous as it pulled out into the open road, another Alfetta close in escort behind. The cars swung across the central reservation, lurching and shaken, and completed their turn in front of where Giancarlo stood. The crowd around him pressed forward to see better the face of the woman, and the boy was among them. And then they were gone and one of the men held a machine-gun at the car window. A fanfare of sirens, an explosion of engine power. For a few moments only he was able to follow the passage of the cars in the growing traffic before they were lost to him, and the sight of Enrico was taken from him by a moving bus.

Deep in a gathering shame at the scope of his failure, Giancarlo began slowly to walk away along the pavement. Twice he bumped into men who hurried towards him, fearful that they had missed the excitement and that there was nothing remaining for them to see. Giancarlo was careful not to run, just walked away, not thinking where he should go, where he should hide.

Too logical, such thoughts for his fractured mind to cope with.

He saw only the stunned deep golden eyes of Franca, who was handcuffed and for whom a boy had not stepped forward.

She had called him her little fox and scratched with her nails at his body, had kissed him far down on the flatness of his stomach, had governed and tutored him, and he drifted from the place, feet leaden, unseeing with the moisture in his eyelids.

The British Embassy in Rome occupies a prime site set back from high railings and lawns and a stone-skirted artificial lake at 80a Via XX Settembre. The building itself, unlikely and original, supported by pillars of grey cement and with narrow arrow-slit windows, was conceived by a noted English architect after the previous occupant of the grounds had been destroyed by the gelignite of Jewish terrorists. .. or guerrillas… or freedom fighters, a stop-over in their search for a homeland. The architect had fashioned his designs at a time when the representatives of the Queen in this city were numerous and influential. Expense and expediency had whittled down the staff list. Many diplomats now doubled on two separate jobs.

The First Secretary, who handled matters of political importance in Italian affairs had also taken under his umbrella the area of liaison with the Questura and the Viminale. Politics and security, the aesthetic and the earthy, strange bed partners. That Michael Charlesworth's two previous foreign postings had been in Vientiane and Reykjavik was a source of astonishment neither to himself nor his colleagues. He was expected to master the local intricacies of a situation inside three years, and this accomplished, he could correctly anticipate that he would be sent to a country about which he had only the most superficial knowledge. After Iceland and the tangled arguments of the Cod War, with the island's fishing interests ranged against the need of his country-men to eat northern water fish from old newspapers, Roman politics and police had a certain charm. He. was not dissatisfied.

Charlesworth had demanded and won a rise in rent allowance from his Ambassador and had been able to set up home with his wife in a high-roofed flat within earshot, but not sight, of the Piazza del Popolo in the centro storico. The garaging of a car there was next to impossible and while his wife's veteran 500 was parked beneath the condescending eyes of the Vigili Urbani in the piazza, he himself cycled to work on the machine he had first used twenty years earlier as a Cambridge undergraduate. The sight of the dark-stripe-suited Englishman pedalling hard along the Corso d'ltalia and the Via Piave with collapsible umbrella and attache case clamped to the carrier over the rear wheel was a pleasing sight to Italian motorists, who from respect for his efforts afforded him unusual circumspection. Once the slopes of the Borghese Gardens had been surmounted, the bicycle provided Charlesworth with fast and intrepid transport, and often he was the first of the senior diplomatic staff to reach his desk.

A salute from the gatekeeper, the parking and padlocking of the machine, the shaking free of trouser turn-ups from the clips, a wave to security in the ground-floor hall, a gallop up two flights of stairs, and he was striding along the back second-floor corridor. Fully three doors away he heard the telephone ringing from his office. Fast with the key into the lock, swinging the door open to confront the noise, abandoning the briefcase and umbrella to the floor, he lunged for the receiver.

'Pronto.' Panting a little, not the way he liked to be.

'Signor Charlesworth F

'Yes.'

'La Questura. Dottore Giuseppe C a r b o n i… momento.'

Delay. First a crossed line. Apology, rampant clicking and interruption before Charlesworth heard the Questura switchboard announce with pride to Carboni that the task was accomplished, the connection successful. They were not friends, the policeman and Michael Charlesworth, but known to each other, acquainted. Carboni would know that Charlesworth was happier in English, that language courses were not always victorious. With a faint American accent Carboni spoke.