Ratking (21 page)

For a moment Zen wondered whether he should tell Bartocci about the photocopy of Ruggiero’s letter. Since the death of the writer the insults and threats he had dealt out to each member of his family took on a new significance. But in the end he decided against it. That letter was a card up his sleeve, the last one he had.

‘What
has
happened to you?’ he asked instead.

‘I’ll have to look for a new posting.’

‘You’re being transferred?’

‘Nothing as simple as that. The judiciary only resort to disciplinary action in the most blatant cases, where the alternative would make us look even worse. All I’ve done is offend one or two of the wrong people, it’s not the end of the world. No, nothing has changed. I’m quite free to stay in Perugia for the rest of my life, as an investigating magistrate. But if I want to move up the ladder I’ll have to go elsewhere.’

‘I still don’t understand why the Milettis didn’t try and stop you handling the investigation in the first place if they feel so strongly about you.’

‘They did try! But they went about it the wrong way. It was Pietro’s fault. He’s been away too long, lost his touch, forgotten how things are done. When I was assigned to investigate Ruggiero’s kidnapping, Pietro made a statement to the press drawing attention to my lack of experience and my political views and demanding that I be replaced immediately. After that I couldn’t be touched, of course. This time they went about it correctly, which is to say incorrectly. A few discreet phone calls and suddenly I find myself shunted into a siding while the investigation into Ruggiero’s murder passes me by.’

As Bartocci took his coat, the crucifix which Zen had laid on top of the filing cabinet the previous evening fell to the floor.

‘Where you’re concerned the Milettis got it wrong again,’ the magistrate remarked to Zen as they stood at the door. ‘The Ministry would have been only too happy to hand you over stuffed and pickled if they’d been asked in the proper way. But once Pietro started sounding off to the press they had to stand by you to avoid charges of bowing to pressure.’

‘I expect it’ll come to the same thing in the end,’ Zen told him as they shook hands.

The crucifix had been broken by its fall. Zen wandered over to the window, trying to push it back together again.

One effect of the years of terrorism had been to abolish night in the vicinity of prisons, and the scene outside was bleakly bright. Every detail was picked out by the floodlights mounted high up on the walls behind protective grilles. Remote-control video cameras scanned back and forth, while up on the roof a nervous-looking teenager in grey overalls went his rounds, hugging a machine-gun for comfort.

That was another slight anomaly about Ruggiero Miletti’s death, Zen reflected. Like Valesio, he had been shot through the mouth, but this time the only sign of damage was a single discreet exit wound in the back of the neck. The bullets fired into the victim’s cranium were still lodged there. When the projectile that had escaped turned up in the mud all was explained: it was a 4.5mm, low-power ammunition for a small pistol. This choice of weapons seemed rather bizarre. The negotiating cell of the gang had brutally dismantled Ubaldo Valesio’s skull with a submachine-gun while the hard men who had executed Ruggiero had done so with a small handgun, a bedside toy for nervous householders.

As Zen stood there fiddling with the crucifix, the end of the upright suddenly came away cleanly in his hand and he saw that it was hollow and that the lower part of the shaft contained a heavy rectangular pack about two centimetres long connected to a wire running back into the shaft and disappearing through a small hole into the figure of Christ. This figure was painted in the same syrupy pastel shades as the rest of the crucifix, but when Zen tapped it the head resounded not with the dull thud of plaster but with a light metallic ring.

He’s been away too long, Bartocci had said of Pietro Miletti. He’s lost his touch, forgotten how things are done. He wasn’t the only one. Zen clearly remembered the occasion when he’d felt that some detail in his office had altered. He’d thought that it was just the calendar which had been turned to the correct month, but something else had been changed too. The original crucifix had been much smaller, too small in fact to contain whatever it was he was now cradling in his hand. And to think he hadn’t noticed! At this rate he couldn’t even count on keeping his Housekeeping job much longer. People would be auctioning off whole police stations under his nose.

The broken fragments of the crucifix looked like some bizarre act of desecration. He laid them out on the desk, got a plastic bag out of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and swept all the bits and pieces into it. Then he put on his overcoat and pushed the package deep into the pocket.

It was almost eight o’clock, and the streets were dead apart from a little through traffic. While he was still undecided as to what to do a bus appeared round the corner and slowed to a halt near by. The doors opened and the driver stared at him expectantly, and Zen got in. The bus wound its way through the ring of nineteenth-century villas on the upper slopes and the post-war apartments below them, down to the modern blocks and towers on the flat land around the station, where it pulled up. The engine died and everyone got out.

Zen went over to the row of luggage lockers, laid the plastic package in one, dropped in three hundred lire coins, locked the door and pocketed the key. On the wall opposite there was an illuminated display listing the tourist attractions of the city. The word ‘cinemas’ caught his eye, and one of the names seemed familiar. He gave it to the driver of the taxi he found outside, who whisked him back up the hill again, back through time to a medieval alley smelling of woodsmoke and urine. A more unlikely situation for a cinema was hard to imagine, but the driver pointed to a set of steps burrowing up between two houses and explained that it was as near as he could get in a car.

The small piazza into which Zen eventually emerged had an eerie, underwater look, due to a uniform coating of lurid green light from a neon sign mounted on a building otherwise no different from the others. ‘CINEMA MINERVA’, it read. Zen made no attempt to find out what was showing. He paid, walked down a dark corridor and pushed through a curtain into a deep pool of sound and flickering light. The auditorium was almost empty. He walked without hesitation to the very front row, sat down and lay back, gazing up at the screen. Enormous blurred masses swarmed into view and out again. An ear the size of a flying saucer appeared for a moment and then was whisked away and replaced by a no less monstrous nose and half an eye. Giant voices boomed at each other. He snuggled down in his seat with a blissful smile, battered by images, swamped by noise, letting the film wash over him.

It was the perfect mental massage, and when it was over he rose feeling slightly numb, but tingling and refreshed. In the foyer he paused to look at the posters, and learned that he had just seen a comedy called
Pull The
Other One!
featuring a fat balding middle-aged clerk, the slim glamorous starlet madly in love with him, the clerk’s wily roguish ne’er-do-well cousin and the cousin’s battleaxe of a wife. As he stood there he felt a hand on his shoulder.

He would never have recognized Cinzia Miletti if she hadn’t approached him, for she was virtually in disguise: a silk scarf entirely covering her hair, dark glasses and a long tweed coat buttoned right up to the chin. She lowered the glasses for an instant so that he could see her eyes, then reused them again.

‘Did you enjoy it? We did, didn’t we, Stefania?’

They were the classic female twosome, mouse and minx. Stefania played her role to perfection, managing to give the impression of existing only provisionally, to a limited extent, and being quite prepared at the drop of a hat either to become completely real or to vanish without trace, whichever was more convenient.

Zen was so astounded at finding Cinzia there on that particular evening that he could think of nothing whatever to say.

‘I think he’s just fantastic, don’t you?’ she went on unperturbed. ‘I’ve seen all his films except
Do Me A
Favour!
which funnily enough I’ve never managed to catch although it’s on TV all the time. He’s working in America this year, you know.’

By now the foyer was completely empty. On every side images of love and violence erupted from glass-fronted posters advertising coming attractions. In her booth the cashier sat knitting behind a tank in which a solitary goldfish swam in desultory circles.

Cinzia looked at her companion.

‘I must go,’ breathed Stefania, and was gone.

‘Would you walk me home?’ Cinzia asked Zen. ‘I’m staying here in town, it’s only five minutes’ walk, not worth calling a taxi, but I don’t like to go alone. There are so many Arabs about now. Of course I’m not racist, but let’s face it, they’ve got a different culture, just like the South.’

Still he couldn’t reply, his head too full of questions to which he didn’t particularly want to know the answers. But he managed to nod agreement.

‘Of course you think I’m shameless,’ Cinzia remarked as they set off, the windless muffled night hardly disturbed by their footsteps. ‘Do you believe in a life after death? I don’t know what to think. But if there isn’t one then nothing makes any difference, does it, and if there is I’m sure it’ll all be far too spiritual for anyone to get in a huff over the way the rest of us carry on.’

The part of the city through which they were walking reminded Zen of Venice, but a Venice brutally fractured, as though each canal were a geological fault and the houses to either side had taken a plunge or been wrenched up all askew and left to tumble back on themselves, throwing out buttresses and retaining walls for support as best they could.

‘I mean, do you really think the dead sit around counting who goes to the funeral and how many wreaths there are and how much they cost?’ his companion carried on. ‘I just hate cemeteries, anyway. They remind me of death.’

Her tone was even more strident than usual. Zen wondered if she wasn’t slightly high on drink or drugs.

‘Going home to stick it up her, eh? Filthy old bumfucker! Squeeze it tight and you might just manage to get a hard-on, you miserable little rat!’

The voice was just overhead, but when they looked up there was no one there.

‘Good evening, Evelina,’ Cinzia replied calmly.

‘Don’t you good evening me, you shameless cunt! You blow-job artist! I bet you beg for it on bended knees! I bet you let him shove it where he wants! Whore! Masturbator!’

They turned a corner and the malignant ravings became blurred and indistinct.

‘Poor Evelina used to be one of the most fashionable women in Perugia,’ Cinzia explained. ‘Nobody seems to know what happened, but one day during a concert she suddenly stood up, took off her knickers and showed everyone her bottom. After that she was put away until they closed the asylums, since when she’s lived in that place. It’s one of her family’s properties, they own half the city. Sometimes you hear her singing, in the summertime. But mostly she just sits up there like a spider, sticking her head out of the window to insult the passers-by. It’s nothing personal, she says the same to everyone.’

For some time now Zen had been wondering where they were going. When Cinzia said she was staying ‘in town’, he’d assumed that she meant the Miletti villa. But although the structure of the city still defeated him in detail, he had got his bearings well enough to know that this could not be their destination. Eventually Cinzia turned up a set of steps rising steeply from the street and unlocked a door at the top.

‘You’ll come in for a moment, won’t you?’

Without waiting for an answer she disappeared, leaving the door open.

Zen slowly mounted the steps, and then paused on the threshold. Ruggiero Miletti was dead and the family blamed him. What better revenge than to disgrace him by rigging a scandal involving the dead man’s daughter, a married woman? But he told himself not to be crazy. How could they have known he was going to that cinema when he hadn’t known himself until he saw the name at the station?

A narrow stairway of glossy marble led straight into a sitting room arranged around a huge open fireplace. There was no sign of Cinzia. The room had roughly plastered walls and a low ceiling supported on enormous joists trimmed out of whole trees. Everything was spick and span, more like a hotel than a home. Zen was instinctively drawn towards the one area of disorder, a desk piled with leaflets, envelopes, magazines, newspapers, letters and bills. He picked up one of the envelopes and held it up to the light: the watermark showed the heraldic hybrid with which he was becoming familiar, with the wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. Next to it lay a note from Cinzia to her husband about collecting their daughter from school.

‘This is really Gianluigi’s place,’ Cinzia explained as she breezed in. She had changed into a striped shirt and a pair of faded jeans that were slightly too large for her. ‘I only use it when he’s away, there’s no telling who I might find here otherwise. What do you want to drink?’

‘Anything at all.’

Her bare feet padded across the polished terracotta tiles to the bottles lined along a shelf in the corner. Zen sat down on the large sofa which occupied most of one wall, thinking about that last card which he’d fondly thought he had up his sleeve. Thank God he hadn’t tried to play it! The trap had been beautifully set, and he’d only avoided it because thanks to Bartocci’s machinations he’d already fallen into another one.

Cinzia brought them both large measures of whisky and sat down astride the wicker chair in front of the writing desk, facing him over the ridged wooden back.

‘I don’t normally drink with strangers,’ she remarked. ‘It’s quite a thrill. We do all our drinking in private, you see, in the family. Like everything else, for that matter!’

Cinzia was beginning to remind Zen more than a little of his wife. Luisella had also been the child of a successful businessman, owner of one of the most important chemist’s shops in Treviso, and she too had had brothers who had dominated her childhood, driving her to defend herself in unorthodox ways. Life was a game like tennis, set up by men for men to win with powerful serves she would never be able to return. She countered by deliberately breaking the rules, exhausting her opponents and winning by default.