Medusa - 9 (21 page)

‘He’s good, isn’t he?’

‘Very,’ the other man responded.

It was impossible to tell whether this was intended as a compliment.

‘What about Ferrero’s family?’ Belardinelli asked Alberto.

‘His father is now dead. His mother is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s and is in a nursing home. There are two sisters, but of course they believe that their brother died in that plane crash thirty years ago.’

‘And where is the corpse at present?’

‘In the morgue of a military hospital here in Rome.’

Alberto gestured deferentially.

‘I didn’t feel it appropriate to take any further action until we had spoken,
dottore
.’

Belardinelli strode over to the desk, switched off the tape recorder and gestured to his two aides to get moving.

‘Have it cremated,’ he told Alberto. ‘At once. Under a false name. Dispose of the ashes yourself.’

At the door, he turned again.

‘This man from the Viminale.’

‘Zen?’

‘Yes. If you get a chance, bury him too. Do you understand?’

Alberto nodded complaisantly. ‘Of course,
dottore
. Of course.’

XIII

Well, thought Claudia, this is different. Difference was of course why one came here in the first place, but still.

‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘I’d be delighted.’

The man smiled in a gracious, deferential way, but there was a look in his eye … A good ten years younger than me, she thought as he walked off towards the stairs. Just like Leonardo. Ten years meant a lot more back then, of course. But still.

Claudia turned back and tried to apply herself to her game. Venetian, he’d said, when she queried the name. ‘
Venessiani
gran signori
.’ He certainly seemed to have all the qualities of a gentleman, but the interesting kind who knows exactly when to stop behaving like one. ‘
Veronesi tuti mati
,’ the dialect rhyme concluded. People from Verona had the reputation of being a bit crazy, and Claudia felt in the mood to do something crazy.

But that was another reason why one went abroad. Campione wasn’t strictly speaking abroad, of course, but its ambiguous status made it still more fascinating. The place was an exception to every rule, a case apart. And afterwards one took the ferry back to Lugano, just around the peninsula and across the lake, and alighted at the stop a few steps from the Grand Hotel Lugubre Magnifique, as she always thought of it, so reassuringly Swiss, sedate and safe.

She and Gaetano had come here at least once a year back in the early days, and always, as now, in the off-season. She would never forget the sense of excitement and occasion, and above all the way Gaetano changed when they were there, becoming even more ardent and edgy, as though he were one of the serious gamblers the casino had attracted then, men who thought nothing of hazarding a million lire – a lifetime’s wages for many people in those days – on a night’s play.

In reality, though, Gaetano had spent little time at the tables.

‘Why do you bother coming if you’re not going to play?’ she’d asked once.

‘I’m visiting my bankers,’ he’d replied with an oblique smile.

He’d been at Campione before and during the war, when, according to him, it had been a notorious base for espionage, money laundering and shady unaccredited diplomats on various inadmissible missions.

But as long as she and her husband made a few token appearances together in the
sala dei giocatori
, it had been perfectly in order for her to return there without him, and her presence was accepted without the slightest comment by the staff and the other players. In a way it was like going to church. There were certain forms that had to be observed, but the only thing that really mattered was that they all worshipped the same god. In this case, money.

But the money had never been important to Claudia. Any more than God, for that matter. It was the freedom she loved, the sexy air of sweat and risk and tension. She had always set herself very strict limits on how much to lose, and then stuck by them rigidly, just as she had in her extramarital affairs. There were rules not to be broken, although she had broken the fundamental one with Leonardo: never to get involved with someone whom you and your husband knew socially. But Leonardo too had been a case apart.

A rattle of coins recalled her attention to the game she had been playing mechanically all along. One hundred francs, the maximum jackpot! A good omen, she thought, slipping anoth¬ er coin into the slot. Still, the nerve of that Zen, plonking himself down at her machine while she’d slipped out for a moment to attend to an urgent personal need. And then apologizing so charmingly and inviting her to have coffee with him later that afternoon.

It was humiliating, being reduced to playing the slot machines, but it would have been even more humiliating to come alone in the evening to play in the quiet, spacious rooms upstairs reserved for the
giochi francesi
, where the serious gamblers foregathered from ten or eleven o’clock on. Besides, the old villa which had housed the casino in those days had been demolished in favour of this fadedly glitzy monstrosity, shortly to be replaced in its turn by the state-of-the-art Las Vegas fantasy structure they were building just a step up the steep hillside behind. Everything changed. The important thing was to try not to care too much.

Twenty francs down now. She lined up the symbols, punched hold on a couple of columns, and then turned the wheels loose. What
had
Gaetano been doing all those times they’d come here so many years ago? Even then, as a scatterbrained newly-wed, she noticed that he had always brought a couple of empty suitcases that were no longer empty when they returned across the border at Chiasso. That was before they’d built the motorway, of course, and she remembered all too well the sometimes interminable delays at the border.

Gaetano had been tense then, his body stiff with stress in the back seat beside her, his mood withdrawn and almost angry. But the staff car, its passengers and uniformed driver had always been waved through customs control without questions, still less a search. Often Nestore was at the wheel. She’d always liked Nestore, in an innocently flirty sort of way. He’d always liked Campione, too. ‘If I ever get rich, this is where I want to live!’ he’d joked.

Looking back, it seemed odd that Nestore or one of the other young officers in her husband’s ‘stable’ had always been invited along to act as chauffeur. In fact, going there at all had been a bit odd, come to think of it. Gaetano had never taken her to any of the places she really wanted to visit, such as Paris, Vienna or London. Only and always to Campione, a dull little lakeside town dedicated to gambling. And this despite the fact that Gaetano didn’t gamble. But she hadn’t remarked on this at the time. Young wives don’t. Just so long as he’s happy. Just so long as he doesn’t blame me for his unhappiness. Just so long as he’s not interested in someone else.

It occurred to her now that one could very easily have imagined a scenario in which her husband
had
been interested in someone else, and had parked his wife at the casino in Campione, with an underling to keep an eye on her, in order to give him an opportunity to meet his mistress, perhaps in the very room to which she would be returning tonight, and which they had always shared on those earlier visits. But it wasn’t convincing. Gaetano had been twenty years older than her, and after they had married, he had very soon ceased to be seriously interested in sex.

On the other hand he had been extremely interested in the contents of the battered leather suitcases he brought back from those yearly trips with his beautiful young wife, one of which had spilled open when he stumbled and let it fall on the staircase of their villa – very much as he himself was to fall later – disclosing an astonishing quantity of one-hundred-thousand-lire notes bundled thickly together with rubber bands. When she’d asked where the money came from, he’d told her in a crisp, harsh tone he’d never used before that this was a professional matter, and then made her swear never to mention the incident to anyone. As if she would! She had been disloyal to Gaetano, but not in that way.

But she didn’t want to think about the past. It was just that there wasn’t much else to think about these days. So this Zen loomed rather larger than he otherwise might have done. That and a sense that he wanted something. Claudia had toyed briefly with the idea that he simply wanted her, but she had enough common sense to know that the days when strange men would approach her on that basis were almost certainly over, even here in the casino at Campione.

So on what basis? If not for that, then what? She’d never been wanted for anything much else, except for money, in her son’s case, and a good word in Gaetano’s ear from some of the junior officers. She’d originally suspected that that might be why Leonardo was coming on to her, and had been quite sharp with him on one occasion, a detail she had conveniently forgotten during her reverie at their trysting house the other day. That had set the whole thing back at least a month, when they’d had so little time to begin with. So little time.

Enough. Signor Zen. Yes, there was something of the favour seeker about him, some hint that she had something he needed and that he was prepared to pay assiduous attentions to her in order to get it. But what on earth could it be? It had of course crossed her mind that the man was an adventurer, one of those charming, unscrupulous con men who hung around casinos looking for a suitable target. And despite the fact that she had been playing the slots when he approached her – and he had deliberately approached her, she now felt sure – her manner, clothing and, alas, her age would have marked her down as just such. He certainly wanted something, that much was clear, but what was it?

The only remotely similar thing she could remember had been Danilo in the weeks immediately following Gaetano’s death, when he had started being so creepily solicitous. At first she had thought that was just his faggish way of demonstrat¬ ing sympathy for the bereaved wife, but after a while his constant questions, always delivered as though he was a grief counsellor helping her to come to terms with the reality of what had happened, had begun to seem just a little too pointed and insistent.

What exactly had she been doing when Gaetano fell? Which room had she been in? Hadn’t she heard anything? When did she realize what had happened? What had she done then? And so on. And on and on and on, until one day she had finally turned on him and said, quite coolly, ‘You think I killed him, don’t you?’

And he had. It had been written on his face as he tried desperately to backtrack, to work up enough honest indignation to treat her question with the contempt it should have deserved. Only he couldn’t quite do it. Claudia had dismissed him, and when they started to see each other again, a year or so later, the matter was never discussed. Thereafter she had kept Danilo at arm’s length until she decided that she had either been mistaken or that he had changed his mind. Either way, it was over. Or so she’d thought, until the veiled insinuations he’d made while breaking the news about the discovery of Leonardo’s body.

Speaking of which, she had better call Naldino soon and find out what was happening with the judicial application. Claudia had no illusions about her son. He was well-meaning but indecisive, just like his father, and needed constant prodding in order to achieve anything. Come to think of it, a spell in the army wouldn’t have done him any harm. Some people could only achieve their full potential when they were ordered around. An unfashionable truth, like so many others.

At four o’clock, punctual to the minute, her admirer came to escort her out of the main door of the casino, down the curving slope to the main piazza of the little village and into the Bar Rouge et Noir on the corner. This was where the croupiers and bouncers came later in the evening to loosen up before their shift began, the nearest thing that Campione had to a neighbourhood bar. Claudia was initially surprised that Zen had chosen it rather than one of the more fashionable tourist establishments a little further along the leafy promenade overlooking the lake, but perhaps he liked something a little rougher and edgier. So had Leonardo, once he’d got over his initial inhibitions and grown masterful. And so, to be honest, did she.

She ordered a cappuccino, Zen a beer.

‘Do you come here often?’ he asked.

It was such a classically lame pick-up line that Claudia almost laughed. Under the circumstances, however, she decided to treat it literally.

‘For decades.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes! I used to visit Campione regularly with my late husband.’

Just to let him know that she was unattached.

‘You had good fortune at the tables, then?’

‘I always broke even.’

‘And your husband?’

Claudia was starting to feel relaxed in this man’s company. She decided to paint a romantic, glamorous and slightly mysterious picture of her marriage, even though the reality had been rather different. Intrigue him.

‘Oh, he was much more successful than me. He used to bring back suitcases full of money.’

‘Did he have a system? I’ve always wanted to hear of a really good one.’

‘No, no. He wasn’t a gambler. He came here to see his bankers.’

‘There are no banks in Campione.’

‘Well, that’s what he told me.’

Zen nodded. ‘So perhaps he was a gambler after all, but at games they don’t play in the casino.’

Claudia was confused by this response, but Zen immediately changed the subject and proceeded to ask her a series of ‘questions expecting the answer Yes’. This was a phrase she remembered from school, and a technique she remembered from a rather more recent era. Get them used to saying yes and they’ll find it harder to say no when the time comes. But what did this Zen want her to say yes to? Dinner here or back in Lugano? Followed by a nocturnal visit to the rooms upstairs at the casino dedicated to roulette, chemin de fer, vingt-et-un and other
giochi francesi
? Followed by what?
Giochi francesi
?