Ratking (16 page)
Authors: Michael Dibdin
Once again he called weakly, but as before there was no reply. He lay back, stretched out on the cold wet tracks, waiting for the express to Russia to come and chop off his head.
The telephone call could hardly have been vaguer.
‘
One of your men is by the farm up above Santa Sofia there,
above the river, up there on the way to the church
.’
The voice was male, adult, uneducated, with a strong Calabrian accent. It was one forty-three in the morning and the duty sergeant wasn’t quite sure whether he was dealing with a wrong number, a hoax, or an emergency. But the next words made sense all right.
‘
You’d better go get him before he dies
.’
The Carabinieri station was at Bagno di Romagna, a small town high up in the Apennines on the borders of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. The locals were a staid lot; the sergeant, who was Sicilian, privately thought them dull. They were not given to silly pranks at any time, let alone a quarter to two on Sunday morning. So what the hell was going on?
He phoned his provincial headquarters at Cesena, who called regional headquarters at Bologna, who checked with their opposite numbers in Florence before confirming that no member of the force had been reported missing on either side of the Apennines. Better get out there and have a look just the same, Cesena told him with a hint of malice. Even down there in the coastal flatlands it was a wild night. They could imagine what conditions must be like up in the mountains, having done their stint in the sticks at one time or another.
Out
where
, though? Apart from the undisputed fact that the farm in question was ‘up’, the sergeant knew only that it was near a village called Santa Sofia, above a river and on the way to a church. He pored over his 1: 100 000 maps and finally selected four possibilities. If none of them proved correct they would have to wait until dawn and call out a helicopter, by which time it would probably be too late. The wind howled about the building, driving rain against the shutters.
They had been at it for over two and a half hours before the searchlight finally picked out the slumped body in the yard of an abandoned farm at over a thousand metres on the slopes of Mount Guffone. The young private at the wheel let out a gasp of surprise.
‘You see?’ the sergeant exclaimed triumphantly.
His relief at not having been made a fool of was matched by his curiosity to find out who the devil he was, this man lying chest down on the wet flagstones, face turned to one side as though asleep. There were some quite nasty-looking cuts on his head, and the sergeant was a bit apprehensive about turning him over. He would never forget that time when a corporal had been machine-gunned in an ambush on a country road near Palermo. He’d been found lying face down too, and the only sign of what had happened was a slight discoloration on the back of his jacket, as though some of the red dye from the trimming had leached on to the body of the black fabric. But when they turned him over there was a sound like a fart and all his insides had sicked out, bits that weren’t meant to be seen and which God accordingly hadn’t bothered to finish off like the rest. Amazingly, nothing had seemed to take any notice! The sky was still blue, the sun still shone, somewhere near by a lark gibbered away. Only he had watched, fascinated, as the pool of blood collecting around the spilt innards suddenly burst its confines and set off down the road, finding its way slowly and with difficulty, its bright fresh surface soon matted with dust and drowning insects.
‘What we going to do?’ asked the young private, a little concerned at the way his superior was acting.
‘Do? Well, we’ve got to find out who he is, haven’t we?’
In the end it was all right. There were no serious injuries at all, in fact. The man even mumbled something, and his eyelids flickered for a moment without opening.
‘No wonder no one knew about him!’ the sergeant exclaimed as he studied the identity card he had found in the man’s wallet. ‘He’s not one of ours at all. Stupid bastard didn’t know the difference.’
Or more likely didn’t care, he thought. The glorious traditions of the Service meant nothing to scum like that.
The man lying at their feet mumbled something again.
‘Did you hear what he said?’ the sergeant asked.
The private made a face.
‘I’m not sure. It sounded like he said “Daddy”.’
Yellowed light, stale warmth, a pervasive scent of chemicals: the contrast with his earlier dips into consciousness was total.
Zen was sitting on a stool under a bright light in a small white-curtained cubicle, thinking about Trotsky and the iceman. With his open-necked shirt, his air of dejected exhaustion and the newspaper spread open on his knee, he might almost have been a kidnap victim waiting to have his existence confirmed by means of a Polaroid photograph. But in fact he was waiting for a different kind of photograph, a different kind of confirmation.
Trotsky and the iceman had been his attempt to solve the problem of why he was still alive despite having been shot in the head. Leon Trotsky protested with his dying breath that he had been shot, not stabbed, even though Stalin’s killer had been caught with the ice-pick still in his hand. Zen’s mistake was less excusable, since all he’d suffered were a few hard kicks.
Then the wind and the darkness and the sense of utter abandonment had unlocked a memory which had already put in a passing appearance earlier that night. It was a memory he hadn’t known he had, and even now he knew very little about it beyond the fact that it involved him and his father and a railway tunnel. He didn’t know where or when it had happened. There they were, the two of them, walking into the tunnel. It must have been on a main line, because there were two sets of tracks, and the mouth of the tunnel had seemed to him – he might have been five, six? – bigger than anything he had ever seen, bigger than anything he had known could exist.
They had gone a very long way into the tunnel. He hadn’t wanted to, but since his father was holding his hand it was all right. When he looked round he found that the tunnel mouth had changed polarity and become a little patch of brightness, quite faint and very far away. The silence echoed with large drips falling from the invisible curved mass above. The air smelt dank and trapped despite the wind that poured past them, forcing them deeper into the solid darkness ahead.
Meanwhile his father, his voice reverberating in a way that hinted at the extent of the invisible spaces about them, told him about the tunnel, when it was opened and how long it was and how deep below the surface. He pointed out the sloping white stripes on the walls, whose incline indicated the nearest of the niches providing protection for plate-layers who otherwise might end up under the wheels of one of the expresses which thundered over these rails, bound for famous foreign cities.
Then, without warning or explanation, the warm grip on his hand disappeared and the soothing voice fell silent.
It was only for a moment, no doubt, as adults measure time. It must have been a joke, a little trick of the kind fathers like to play on their children, toying idly with their power, whimsical tyrants. He knew that it had been a joke, because when it was over his father laughed so much that the laughter was still echoing around them as they started back towards the light. It had sounded almost as though the tunnel itself were enjoying some deeper, darker joke whose significance not even his father had fully understood.
An unshaven young man in a white coat slouched into the cubicle and handed Zen three dark rectangular sheets of plastic.
‘No fractures.’
Zen held the X-rays up to the light. They looked as dubious as the photographs which are claimed to prove the existence of a spirit world: swirls and patches of white suspended in a grey mix.
‘You’re sure?’
It certainly hurt badly enough. But perhaps pain was no guide. Oddly enough the worst was his shoulder, where the man had seized it to pull him out of the car.
‘It’s only bruised,’ the orderly insisted. ‘But next time take it easy, eh? I might be in the other car.’
Zen had told them he’d been involved in a traffic accident, which had got a good laugh all round when it emerged that he was from Venice. For want of practice, Venetian drivers are proverbially supposed to be the worst in Italy.
He left the hospital and began to walk slowly along the boulevard leading back to the centre of Perugia. The morning was quiet and warm. The storm had blown itself out, leaving the sky pearly. There was a mild southerly breeze. A few people were about, returning from church or walking home with a newspaper or a neatly wrapped pastry. He was glad that he had dismissed Palottino, although the Neapolitan had made it clear that he strongly disapproved of this mania for walking. He had driven up to collect his superior from the Carabinieri post where he and his rescuers had returned as soon as Zen had recovered enough to assure the sergeant that he didn’t need to call an ambulance. As soon as they reached Bagno di Romagna Zen had phoned Geraci, who he’d left holding the fort, and inquired about Ivy Cook. His greatest worry was that somehow his presence had compromised her, that he might have another corpse on his hands, another death on his conscience. But Geraci was able to reassure him: Ivy had arrived home three hours earlier, badly shocked but unharmed. The money had been taken but there had been no communication from the kidnappers.
While Zen waited for his driver to arrive, his hosts tried politely to find out who he was and what he’d been doing, but he remained deliberately vague. Even with Palottino he had been discreet, not mentioning what the kidnapper had said to him. And when the Neapolitan asked, ‘You don’t think they knew?’ Zen had pretended not to understand.
‘Knew what?’
‘That you were from the police.’
‘How could they?’
Palottino had no answer to that, any more than Zen himself, though the question had tormented him for the whole drive back to Perugia. How could they have known? But they had, that was certain. ‘Fuckarse cocksucker of a cop,’ the man had said. So they knew that their orders had been deliberately disobeyed. This gang had already killed one man for less. The thought of what they might even now be doing to Ruggiero Miletti took the sparkle and warmth out of the morning and made Zen realize how exhausted he was.
As he passed through a small piazza there was a shout and a boy appeared at a window holding a bulging plastic shopping bag which he let drop to a friend in the street who stood, arms raised to catch it. But it was immediately obvious that the bag was too heavy and was falling much too fast. At the last moment the boy below ran back. The bag struck the paving, bounced, and now the boy caught it and peeled away the bag to reveal a football which he struck in a high, curling shot which ricocheted off the wall slightly to the left of a priest who had emerged from the large church which closed off one end of the piazza. Through the open door Zen could just make out the huge ornate crucifix above the high altar.
‘How could they?’ he murmured to himself again.
SIX
Twenty-four hours later he was sitting out on the Corso. It was brilliantly sunny and the atmosphere was charged with vitality and optimism. One bar had even gone so far as to put a few tables outside, and on impulse Zen settled down to enjoy the sunlight and watch the show on the Corso. This broad, flat street was the city’s living room, the one place where you didn’t need a reason for being. Being there was reason enough, strolling back and forth, greeting your friends and acquaintances, window-shopping, showing off your new clothes or your new lover, occasionally dropping into one of the bars for a coffee or an ice-cream.
For about fifteen minutes he did nothing but sit there contentedly, sipping his coffee and watching the restless, flickering scene around him through half-open eyes: the tall, bearded man with a cigar and a fatuous grin who walked up and down at an unvarying even pace like a clockwork soldier, never looking at anybody; the plump ageing layabout in a Gestapo officer’s leather coat and dark glasses holding court outside the door of the café, trading secrets and scandal with his men friends, assessing the passers-by as though they were for sale, calling after women and making hourglass gestures with his hairy, gold-ringed hands; a frail old man bent like an S, with a crazy harmless expression and a transistor radio pressed to his ear, walking with the exaggerated urgency of those who have nowhere to go; slim Africans with leatherwork belts and bangles laid out on a piece of cloth; a gypsy child sitting on the cold stone playing the same four notes over and over again on a cheap concertina; two foreigners with guitars and a small crowd around them; a beggar with his shirt pulled down over one shoulder to reveal the stump of an amputated arm; a pudgy, shapeless woman with an open suitcase full of cigarette lighters and bootleg cassettes; the two Nordic girls at the next table, basking half-naked in the weak March sun as though this might be the last time it appeared this year.
At length Zen lazily drew out of his pocket the three items of mail he had collected from the Questura. One was a letter stamped with the initials of the police trade union and addressed to Commissioner Italo Pompeo Baldoni. He replaced this in his pocket and picked up a heavy cream-coloured envelope with his own name printed on it, and a postcard showing the Forum at sunset in gaudy and unrealistic colour with a message reading ‘Are you still alive? Give me a ring – if you have time. Ellen.’
Putting this aside, he tore open the cream-coloured envelope. It contained four sheets of paper closely covered in unfamiliar handwriting, and it was a measure of how relaxed he was that it took him the best part of a minute to realize that he was holding a photocopy of the letter written by Ruggiero Miletti to his family three days previously.
My children,
If I address you collectively, it is because I no longer know who to address individually. I no longer know who my friends are within the family. I no longer even know if I have any friends. Can you imagine how bitter it is for me to have to write that sentence?
I remember one day, long ago, when I was out hunting with my father. He showed me a farmhouse, a solid four-square Umbrian tenant farm, surrounded by a grove of trees to break the wind. Look, he said, that is what a family is. Have many children, he told me, for children are an old man’s only defence against the blows of fate. I obeyed him. In those days children did obey their fathers. But what has it availed me? For you, my children, my only defence, my protection against the cruel winds of fate, what do you do? Instead of sheltering me, you turn to squabbling among yourselves, haggling over the cost of your own father’s freedom as though I were an ox brought to market. It is not you but my kidnappers who care for me now, who feed me and clothe me and shelter me while you sit safe and secure at home trying to find new ways to avoid paying for my release!
No doubt this tone surprises you. It is incautious, ill-advised, is it not? I should not permit myself such liberties! After all, my life is in your hands. If you treat me like an ox to be bargained for, I should be the more careful not to annoy you. Swallow your pride and your anger, old man! Flatter, plead, ingratiate and abase yourself before your all-powerful children! Yes, that is what I should do, if I wished to match you in devious cunning. But I don’t. You have refused to pay what has been asked for my return, but if you knew what I have become, a fearless old man with nothing left to lose, you would pay twice as much to have me kept away! Whatever happens now, my children, we can never be again as we were. Do you imagine that I could forgive and forget, knowing what I know now, or that any of you could meet my eye, knowing what you do? No! Though the ox escape the axe, it has smelt the blood and heard the bellows from the killing-floor, and it will never be fooled again. I know you now! And that knowledge is lodged in my heart like a splinter.
Nothing remains to me of the pleasures and possessions of my old life, which you now enjoy at my expense. I have been forced to give them up. But in recompense I have received a gift worth more than all the rest put together. It is called freedom. You laugh? Not for long, I assure you! For I shall prove to you how free I am. Not free to indulge myself, to be sure. Not free to come and go, to buy and sell, to control my destiny. You have taken those freedoms from me. Losing them was bitter, and my only reward is that now I can afford the one thing which with all my wealth and power I’ve never been able to permit myself until this moment. I can afford to tell the truth.
I have paid dearly for it, God knows! More than a hundred and forty days and nights of anguish to soul and body alike! My leg, which never mended properly after the accident, has not liked being cooped and cramped and bound, and like a mistreated animal it has turned against its master, making itself all pain. Yes, I have paid dearly. So let me show you what I mean by freedom. Let me tell you what I know, what I have learnt. Let me tell each of you the truth, one by one.
I shall start with you, Daniele, my youngest, the spoilt darling of the family. What a beautiful child you were! How everyone doted on you! Whatever happened to that little boy, all cuddles and kisses and cheeky sayings that set everyone in a roar? Back in the sixties, when the kids seemed to think of nothing but politics and sex, I used to pray God almighty that my Daniele would never turn out like that. It never occurred to me that he might turn out even worse, a vain, spineless, ignorant lout with no interest in anything but clothes and television and pop music, who would be rotting in gaol at this very minute if his family hadn’t come to his rescue. But when his own father needs to be rescued little Daniele is too busy to lift a finger, like the rest of you.
Cinzia I pass over in silence. Women cannot betray me, for I have never made the mistake of trusting them. The worst she could do was to bring that Tuscan adventurer into the family, since when none of us has had a moment’s peace. I can’t claim to have had my eyes opened to your true character, Gianluigi, for they were wide open from the first. Ask my daughter what I said to her on the subject! However, she preferred to disobey me. You think you’re so clever, Gianluigi, and that’s your problem, for your cleverness gleams like a wolf’s fangs. I at least was never fooled. Take this business of the Japanese offer, for example. Certainly the scheme you’ve worked out is very cunning. I really admire the way the structure of the holding company leaves you in effective control of SIMP through an apparently insignificant position in the marketing subsidiary. I suppose you thought that old Papa Miletti would be too stupid to spot that, wrapped up in a lot of technical detail about non-voting share blocks and nominal investment consortia? Of course the kidnapping has given you an extra edge. All you had to do was to hold up the negotiations until I got desperate and then bully me into authorizing the Japanese deal on the pretext of raising money to pay for my release! In fact the kidnapping was very well timed from your point of view, wasn’t it? It wouldn’t even surprise me to learn that you set it up! Beware of in-laws, my father used to say, and when he’s Tuscan into the bargain I think we can expect just about anything.
But none of this really bothered me, it was all piss in the wind as long as my eldest boy was true. Silvio I had already written off, of course. I realized long ago that the only thing he has in common with other men is the prick between his legs. God knows why – I made him the same way I made the rest of you – but there it is. There’s nothing manly to be expected from Silvio, unless that English witch knows something the rest of us don’t. Let him spit in her mouth and breed toads. He’ll never breed anything else, that’s for sure.
But Pietro made up for all that and for everything else, or so I thought. The rest of you, choke on this last gobbet of my scorn! If he had been loyal I should never even have mentioned these playroom plots and tantrums of yours. But what I didn’t realize, and what has proved the gravest shock to me, is that Pietro is the worst of you all. What a superb role he has invented for himself, the English gentleman who stands disdainfully aside from the vulgar squabbles of this Latin rabble to whom he has the misfortune to be related! I’ve got to hand it to you, son, you’re the only one who really managed to deceive me, the only one who could break your father’s heart. And you have, you have. The others I could afford to lose, but you were too precious. I loved you, I needed you, and blinded by my love and need I never looked at you closely enough. But now I have, and I see what I should have seen a long time ago, the selfish, arrogant, unscrupulous fixer who has been quietly feathering his nest in London for the past ten years at our expense after turning his back on us as though we weren’t good enough for him, who couldn’t even be bothered to come home during this ordeal but just flew over on a weekend return when the mood took him, when he had nothing better to do, like the tourist he is!
Gianluigi likes to think he’s clever, but you really are, Pietro. You’ve inherited my brains and Loredana’s morals, God rest her. You don’t instigate plots, because you know that plots get found out. Instead you manipulate the plots of the others to your own ends, playing one off against the others, letting them waste their energies in fruitless rivalries while you look on from a safe distance, waiting patiently for the moment to make your move, the day when I drop dead and you can come home and claim your own.
Well, there we are, I’ve had my say. How do you like yourselves, my children? When you lie down tonight in your soft warm beds, think over what I have said. Get up and look at yourselves in the mirror. Look hard and long, and then think of your father lying here tormented with cold and pain and fear and despair.
What follows has been dictated by my kidnappers. For some reason they seem to believe that you will obey them this time. First, then, the full ransom of ten milliard lire is to be paid immediately, in well-worn consecutively numbered notes …
There, at the foot of a page, the photocopy broke off. Zen inspected the envelope. It was of distinctive hand-laid paper with a griffin watermark and had been posted in Perugia the previous Thursday.
‘A personal and private family letter,’ Pietro Miletti had said. ‘A rather distressing document, not intended to be read by outsiders. Certain passages made very disturbing reading.’ Yes, it was easy to see why the family who, as Antonio Crepi had put it, couldn’t agree which sauce to have with their pasta, had found no difficulty in agreeing to burn Ruggiero’s letter on the spot. But this made it so obvious who had sent this copy that he was astonished that it had been sent at all. When Pietro Miletti thought Zen must have seen the letter, he’d burst out, ‘But that’s impossible!’ Then an idea occurred to him, and he added, ‘Unless …’ Now Zen knew what he had been thinking. If the letter had been burnt in the presence of all the members of the family immediately after being read, then the copy could only have been sent to him before they received it, by the person who went to pick it up from the rubbish skip.
But that could wait. This was urgent news and he must inform Bartocci at once. Besides, he had not yet had a chance to speak to the investigating magistrate about the pay-off. He tucked a two-thousand lire note under one of the saucers on the tray and went inside the café to phone.
Luciano Bartocci wasted no time on small talk.
‘
Jesus Christ almighty, Zen, what the hell do you think
you’ve
been up to?
’
He was too taken aback to reply.
‘
The family are absolutely incensed, and quite naturally so.
How could you do such a thing? I thought you were an
experi
enced professional or
I’d
never have let you go in the first place!
Don’t
you realize the position this puts me in?
’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘
I’m talking about what happened at the pay-off, when you
were beaten up. The woman who drove you told us all about it.
It’s
no use trying to cover up now
.’
‘I’m not trying to…’
Another voice broke in.
‘
Maurizio?
Maurizio
, is that you?
’
‘
It’s in use!
’
‘
What? Who is this?
’
‘
This line is in use, please put your phone down
.’
There was a grunt and a click.
‘
Hello? Hello?
’
‘I’m still here,’
‘
The man who assaulted you called you a dirty cop, or
words to that effect. So evidently they knew who you were. You
must have given yourself away somehow.
It’s
absolutely
unforgivable
.’