Red Crystal (12 page)

He darted a look at Nick. ‘Ryder, what about your lot? The students seem to have been reasonably quiet, thank God.’

‘Well – maybe. But Paris has certainly given them ideas.’

The DCS looked displeased. ‘Oh?’

‘In Italy the disturbances are spreading like wildfire—’

‘But Italy …’ The DCS made it sound as if it were a faraway country reachable only by mule. ‘What goes for Italy and France doesn’t necessarily go for here. I mean, our students aren’t as bolshie or as well organized, are they?
Also
,’ the DCS added emphatically, ‘the defeat of the French students is bound to make them think twice, isn’t it?’

‘On the contrary. I think it might
encourage
them.’

There was a heavy silence. The DCS frowned. Eventually he murmured, ‘Well … We’ll see, we’ll see.’

Nick thought: I’m wasting my time.

‘What about the students expelled from France?’ asked Straughan. ‘What news of them?’

The French had expelled twenty-four British students at the height of the troubles. Nick looked at his notes. ‘Most of them have resurfaced in their usual haunts,’ he reported. ‘Two have made fairly inflammatory speeches, but that’s nothing new for them. Oh, and three are still astray. Two went to Belgium and haven’t chosen to return to the UK yet. The whereabouts of the third, a girl name of Wilson, aren’t known. She was on the expulsion list but gave them the slip.’

‘Any other loose ends?’

‘Only a student leader who spoke at one of the big Paris rallies back in May. The DST report that her name was Schroeder and that she was British. But we can’t find any trace of her, either in Passports or Naturalization. Nor can French immigration – no one entered the country under that name. Bit of a mystery.’

Straughan grunted. Things like that were always happening. He looked at his agenda. ‘Okay. So, what have we got coming up in the next few months?’

Nick went through the list of events being planned by Trotskyists and allied extremists, from a large anti-Vietnam rally in Trafalgar Square to recruitment drives in the universities. He brought up a final point. ‘There’s still a lot of aggravation over the sentences in the Linden House Hotel affair. There was another minor demonstration in Oxford only yesterday.’

The DCS said, ‘Yes, well, that was bound to happen, wasn’t it? Thought they were special, didn’t they? Well, now they realize that they go to prison like everyone else. But the aggravation will die away in time,’ he said with an air of absolute confidence. ‘They’re just letting off steam.’

He sat back in his chair. ‘So, nothing to suggest that our Trots are up to anything in particular?’

Nick resisted the impulse to ask if the DCS wanted them to make a declaration in writing. Reluctantly he shook his head.

‘Good,’ said the DCS, ‘let’s get on to rent-a-crowd. I’ll bet that’s where the next bout of aggravation is going to come from.’

Nick sighed inwardly. It was back to the professional industrial agitators, Straughan’s favourite bogeymen.

Later, when they filed out of the meeting, Nick muttered to Conway, ‘Should have saved my breath.’

As Nick threw the papers on his desk he reflected that the DCS’s ideas were like the Ten Commandments: etched in granite.

The files on the expelled students lay on the desk. He glanced through them. Most of the information was painfully thin. Photocopies of passport applications and photographs. In ten cases a bit more: known membership of political parties or groups; an address. In two instances, arrests at demonstrations.

Not a lot.

He picked up the files on the three students who had failed to return to England and took another look. He wanted to be sure he had memorized the names. Cook, Appleyard, Wilson. He peered at the photographs one by one. They were typical passport pictures, that is, pretty awful. The one of the girl was particularly bad. Her face was a white blur with black dots for eyes, like a couple of currants in a rice pudding. She looked terribly young. The picture must have been taken when she was still at school. It was almost impossible to tell what she really looked like.

Roll on the day when the British had photographs on their identity cards or driving licences, then there’d be more to go on.

He had another fleeting memory of the Wilson girl’s body at the house in Kentish Town, and reflected that if he’d been a better copper he would have paid some attention to her face.

As it was he had no decent picture. That was because someone had boobed. Though the girl had been held after the Linden House Hotel affair, no mug shots had found their way on to the file. When a charge against someone was dropped there was a strict rule that the negatives and prints were destroyed. That was,
officially
. But in practice Special Branch usually managed to ‘acquire’ a few copies on the quiet. However on this occasion someone somewhere had been excessively stupid – or stuck rigidly to the rules – and none had got on to the files.

He put the file into the tray to return to Records.

Cook. Appleyard. Wilson. At least he had the names. The ports had been posted. They’d turn up sooner or later.

It was late September, during the last hot gasp of summer.

The warmth of the day lingered in the stillness of the night. Gabriele could feel the heat rising from the dry dusty earth, drifting up through the pines towards the transparent blue-black sky. Beneath her, the hillside fell away in a series of slopes and ridges down to a wide valley. In the far distance another spur of hills, ink-black against the sky, reached away towards the higher ranges of the Apennines to the north.

It was very beautiful.

She raised the binoculars to her eyes and focused on the hills opposite. She watched for a long time, occasionally lowering the glasses to rest her eyes.

Then at last it came. A slight flicker of light.

She never heard the
woomph!
of the explosion itself; the distance was too great. Nor, unfortunately, was she near enough to see the brand new Mercedes enveloped in a ball of fire.

The tiny flutter of light died away, then rose up again, flickering gently. Suddenly a bright bolt of white flame leapt into the air, much higher than the first, and a distinct
crack!
floated across the valley.

Soft footsteps sounded behind her, and Giorgio laughed, ‘An oil tank, eh? Or bottled gas.’

The new flame was voracious and spread steadily, forming an oblong block of fire that illuminated the surrounding hills. Soon the whole house was burning.

Gabriele watched impassively. It was no more than the owner of the house deserved. The man, an army general, was a fascist and a murderer. The fascist secret society of which he was a leading member extended into every branch of the Italian establishment, including the police and judiciary.

The general had ordered the bombing of a Bologna bank. Ten innocent men, women and children had died. With suspicious rapidity the authorities had arrested a group of harmless anarchists, and announced that the case was closed. The fascists looked after their own. The general would never be brought to justice.

The firing of his car and house was scant punishment. To Gabriele’s mind he should have been executed.

She turned and led the way back through the woods. Suddenly there was a loud screech above their heads. Instantly Gabriele swung the Kalashnikov up into her hand, and sighted up the barrel.

‘It’s only an owl,’ Giorgio murmured.

She slid the catch on to automatic and listened. The screech came again. She adjusted her aim and squeezed the trigger. The rifle rattled deafeningly at a hundred rounds a minute.

She stopped firing and listened. It was very quiet. ‘I must have got it,’ she said with pleasure.

They continued through the woods. Gabriele cradled the Kalashnikov under her arm. At over eleven pounds loaded weight the rifle was heavy for a woman – so she had been warned – which was one reason why she’d been determined to master it. It also had the disadvantage of being almost three feet long, which made it difficult to carry around unobtrusively. But she didn’t care. The Russian-made rifle was the king of weapons; she liked the weight and security of it in her hands.

She’d learnt to use other weapons too: the small ultra-light Skorpion automatic machine pistol, a short-range weapon, easily concealed and therefore ideal for urban missions, and the Makarov pistol, a handgun that each of the group used as a personal weapon.

But she liked the Kalashnikov the best. This one belonged to a leader of the Lotta; it was on loan for the evening. One day very soon she would have one of her own.

They came to the rough road where they had left the car. Leaning against the bonnet, Gabriele paused and lit a cigarette.

Giorgio hovered impatiently by the driver’s door. ‘We should go. Someone might have heard.’

She shook her head in the darkness. ‘No, they couldn’t have heard. We were too far away. We will wait here a while. It’s safer.’

Giorgio acquiesced, as she knew he would, and settled down to wait. She had long since discovered the key to Giorgio’s character. It was quite simple. He had a terror of being bored. And he got bored very easily. Indeed, left to his own devices, he was incapable of escaping it. He needed someone to take the initiative, to create the situations that stimulated him. As long as the promise of excitement was dangled in front of him, he would follow. And the person he followed was Gabriele. She enjoyed her power over him, just as she enjoyed the power of the rifle.

After half an hour they got into the car and drove towards Bologna and the Milan
autostrada
. Gabriele kept the Kalashnikov across her lap the whole way, but they saw only one police car, and it showed no interest in them.

They arrived in Milan at dawn. Giorgio was about to turn the car into the street where they lived when Gabriele gestured him to continue past and park some way beyond. Gabriele walked slowly back, turned into the street, and sauntered up to the apartment building. Making a show of searching for her keys, she took a good look round.

Nothing.

She went up to the apartment and checked it. When she was satisfied that everything was quiet, she went back to the car and unloaded the weapons into a large suitcase.

‘You worry too much,’ Giorgio said.

‘It’s impossible to worry too much.’

Once in the apartment Gabriele made some coffee and sat at the window, watching the street. It was unlikely that the police would suspect her or Giorgio directly – they’d been too careful for that – but suspicion could easily fall on them through the others. The others were often less than cautious. The man who had actually made the incendiary was known to the police. So were at least two of those who had planted the device. Yet they made little effort to be careful: like good Italians, they still visited their families and friends regularly. Also everyone in the group knew everyone else, if not by name, then by face. Security was appalling. No one thought of operating in small cells. They liked the camaraderie of large and frequent meetings.

Gabriele didn’t want to be caught for someone else’s carelessness. In Italy they put you in jail and threw away the key. You were lucky if your case came to trial within three years.

The more active the group became, the more nervous Gabriele felt. She had an intense dislike of being at the mercy of other people’s decisions.

Eventually she left the window and joined Giorgio in bed, sleeping uneasily with the Kalashnikov beside her on the floor. She awoke at three in the afternoon and, still restless, went for a walk. She shopped for food and, for the first time in weeks, bought an English newspaper. She also went to the poste restante section of the main post office in Piazza Affari and, using her Dutch name of Anneke van Duren, asked for mail. Unusually, there was a letter. She recognized Max’s handwriting.

Taking the envelope to a quiet corner of the post office, she opened it.

She reread the first part of the letter twice, to make sure she had understood.

Stephie’s appeal had been refused.

The full three and a half years would have to be served.

Gabriele’s first thought was: Thank God it wasn’t me.

Three and a half years. She tried to imagine it. Holloway: dark, depressing. The other women: lesbian, ill-educated, cruel, scornful. The cell: cream-painted, tiny,
claustrophobic
. Three years.
God
– for
ever
.

She suppressed a shiver; she couldn’t have taken it. Even though she might have become a famous martyr in the process.

She allowed herself a moment of satisfaction: avoiding that charge had been the smartest thing she’d ever done.

She read on. Max’s scrawl was almost illegible. He must have been almost hysterical when he wrote it. The situation was desperate, he said. He had tried everything – he’d organized petitions and protest marches, written to MPs. It had done no good. He begged her to think of other tactics he might try. Did anyone over there have any ideas? He felt that everyone who’d been on the demo had a responsibility to Stephie, to help her, to get her free. Gabriele
must
help! The situation, he repeated, was desperate.

Gabriele thought: It’s not my problem.

She owed Stephie nothing. They’d all run risks that day. The difference was that Stephie had been stupid enough to lob that brick.
And
get caught.

Gabriele tucked the letter into her bag and put it out of her mind.

On the way back to the apartment she stopped for a coffee and read through the British newspaper. The news reflected the usual preoccupations of a capitalist society: the bank rate, growing inflation, the number of strikes. The strikes, she noted, were not reported as a sign of workers’ desperation, but as a bad omen for world trade and the profits of the fat capitalists.

And yet the stories interested her – very much, in fact. She discerned a strong current of pessimism. The newspaper seemed to think that everything was going to get much worse – strikes, inflation, trade. Reading between the lines, they seemed to be worried about a possible recession and widespread social unrest.