Killing Ground by Gerald Seymour Page B

letter, perhaps, had been written by the prisoner's mother. Men died, some quietly through strangulation, some noisily through poisoning, some messily through bludgeon blows, in Ucciardione Prison when they sought to collaborate. It was of critical importance, at this moment, that it should not be known among the prison staff that a man had asked to see the magistrate who was known to have dedicated his life to the capture of Mario Ruggerio. When the prison staff who escorted the prisoner to the surgery had been dismissed and the prisoner signed for, he had been taken by two of the magistrate's own security detail, his head covered by a blanket that he should not be recognized by watchers peering from the cell windows high above, across the yard and to the room made available for the magistrate.
    Tardelli thought him pathetic.
    The cigarette that the prisoner smoked was nearly finished and already the man looked longingly at the packet on the table. Tardelli did not smoke but he always carried a nearly full packet in his pocket when he came to Ucciardione. He pushed the packet towards the prisoner and smiled his invitation that the man should help himself again. A new cigarette was lit from an old cigarette and the hands of the prisoner shook.
    Tardelli thought him wretched.
    They sat in a bare room, on either side of a bare table, they were enclosed by bare walls. There was no window and the light came from a single fluorescent strip on the ceiling, around which wafted the spurted smoke from the prisoner's cigarette. Since the message had come from his office at the Palazzo di Giustizia, the report of a letter without signature to request the interview, the message that had interrupted the celebration of orange juice and chocolate cake, Tardelli had spent the major part of two days studying the file of the prisoner. It was his way always to be meticulously prepared before he faced a prisoner.
    The prisoner spoke the name of Mario Ruggerio.
    He detested personal publicity, he left it to the more ambitious and the more scheming to give media interviews, but it was inevitable that Rocco Tardelli should be known as the magistrate who hunted Mario Ruggerio. Half a dozen times a year he was told that a prisoner had requested, in conditions of secrecy, to meet with him. Half a dozen times a year a prisoner grovelled for the freedom of the pentito programme, for the opportunity to trade information for liberty. Once a year, if he was lucky, Tardelli would hear information that carried forward his investigation, drew him closer to the man he hunted. They came and they squirmed and they crossed the Rubicon. They condemned themselves to death if they were identified, if they were located, when they broke the God- given law of Sicily, the law of omerta, which was the code of silence.
    The pentito Contorno had broken the law of omerta and thirty of his relations by blood and by marriage had been butchered in a proxy attempt to halt the information flow he dribbled. There was a saying of the peasants on the island: 'A man who is really a man never reveals anything even when he is being stabbed.' The pentito Buscetta had turned away from the code of silence and thirty-seven of his relations had been murdered. Another saying of the peasants on the island: 'A man who is deaf and blind and silent lives a hundred years in peace.' The pentito Mannoia was now a terrified man, existing on Valium tablets, in crisis. He had heard a woman refer to her pentito brother as 'a relative of my father'. It was an earthquake in their lives when they gave up the silence. Each year one of the prisoners who sat at the bare table in the bare room, hemmed in by the bare walls of the bunker, was useful to the magistrate. Five a year were rubbish wretches.
    It was a sparring game for Tardelli and the prisoner.
    'Why do you wish to take advantage of the Award Legislation under the conditions of the Special Protection Programme?'
    The eyes of the prisoner were on the