Ratking (26 page)

Ellen laughed, a short, mirthless noise.

‘Oh Christ, Aurelio, I don’t believe it!’

‘You don’t believe what?’

Her expression became opaque.

‘Nothing. Go on.’

Apparently he’d got it wrong yet again.

‘The next day I went to question the bus drivers. As I suspected, Carella had been there before me. One of the men I spoke to said that a colleague of his had identified the terrorist suspect from a photograph Carella had shown him. I got the colleague’s address and went to have a word with him. As I was walking up to his house two young bearded men in jeans and sweaters got out of a car and ran towards me. For a moment I thought they were terrorists, but I was wrong, they were Political Branch operatives. They drove me back to the ministry, where I was questioned by an officer I’d never seen before, a colonel. It was a small, stuffy room, and yet I distinctly felt a chill in the air, like a draught, and I knew that it must be coming from that other world my uncle had told me about, and that the threshold to it was somewhere very close at hand. The colonel wanted to know what I had been doing and who I had talked to. It wasn’t an easy hand to play. On the one hand I needed to stress the bus driver’s evidence in order to bolster my case, which was that Carella had somehow stumbled on a clue to Moro’s whereabouts. On the other hand I was afraid that if I made the driver sound too important he might end up under the wheel of a bus instead of behind one. In the end I was told to go home and to stay there. The next day I received a telegram informing me that my request to be transferred to clerical duties at the Ministry of the Interior had been granted. I hadn’t submitted any such request, of course.’

There was a long silence, broken only by the perpetual nudging of the wind, which seemed to be getting stronger all the time.

‘Shall we go?’ Ellen asked.

She started the engine without waiting for an answer and began to drive along the track winding down the mountain.

‘The Red Brigade were holding Moro in Portuense, weren’t they?’ she commented suddenly.

‘In a ground-floor flat in Via Montalcini. About four blocks from where Dario Carella was run over.’

It wasn’t until they reached the walls of Assisi that she spoke again.

‘It’s no good, I don’t understand. I’ll never understand. Why should they let him be killed? It doesn’t make any sense! After all, he was one of them.’

‘Perhaps he was no longer really one of them. Perhaps they didn’t know that until he was kidnapped. Perhaps once he’d gone they realized that they were better off without him. The ratking is self-regulating, it responds automatically and effectively to every situation.’

She took her eyes off the road for an instant to glance at him.

‘What have rats got to do with it?’

‘Oh, nothing. I was just trying to explain how Miletti came to be killed.’

‘Miletti?’

‘I mean Moro.’

‘How much have you had to drink?’

‘Enough to need a coffee.’

They stopped in a village strung out in ribbon development along the flat straight road from Assisi to Perugia. The air was still and it was pleasantly warm. The café was a brash new building full of old men playing cards.

‘I’m going back this afternoon,’ Ellen said as they stood at the bar, watched by every eye in the place.

Her visit had not been a success. The basic material of their relationship, the DNA itself, seemed to have gone wrong. As long as that condition lasted, the time they spent together, instead of adding to their store of shared experiences, depleted the existing one, leaving them more apart than when they were separated.

‘I’ll be back soon myself,’ he told her, ‘and then we’ll forget all this and have a really good time again.’

When they reached Perugia she dropped him opposite the Questura. As he stooped to kiss her Zen noticed that her cheeks were wet.

‘Why are you crying?’

She shook her head.

‘I’m afraid.’

‘Afraid of what?’

‘Of everything.’

‘There’s no need to be afraid. It’ll be all right.’

But he stood there watching until the little car had disappeared, as though Ellen were setting off on a long and dangerous journey from which she might never return.

One day towards the end of the war five ships had appeared in the lagoon off Venice. For a few weeks they lay moored together, like a new island between the city and the Lido, and then one day they were gone. Later Zen worked out that they must have been American warships of an obsolete type, waiting to be sold or scrapped, but at the time their slightly menacing presence seemed a pure challenge, and when his friend Tommaso dared him to try and get aboard one he naturally agreed.

Close up they were as big as churches: great solid slabs of crudely painted grey with black numbers too large to read. Only the end vessel was manned by a token guard, and it was merely terrifying to slip into one of the narrow channels between them, where the water slapped back and forth, tie their skiff to the anchor cable and then shin up it to the deck. The rest of that day they spent in an alien world of pipes and gauges and controls and levers and incomprehensible signs, like the first explorers of a ruined city.

With most of the staff going home at two o’clock, the end of the working day for employees of the state, the Questura had a faintly similar air of abandonment which Zen always found attractive. The rooms and corridors were empty except for a few elderly women cleaning up the male mess of scattered newspapers, stained coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays and the odd half-eaten sandwich. They had not yet reached Zen’s office, but someone else had been there, for there was a telegram on his desk.

Although he had been expecting it, it was still a shock. He put it away in his pocket unopened, and mechanically leafed through the report on the forensic tests he had unofficially requested on the Fiat Argenta saloon which Gilberto Nieddu had stolen from outside the cemetery during Ruggiero Miletti’s funeral and left abandoned near the scene of the murder. He had pinned all his hopes on this report providing him with some positive evidence to lay before the investigating magistrate, Rosella Foria, and when it had arrived that morning he’d been bitterly disappointed.

True, the three Pirellis and the odd Michelin on the car corresponded ‘in their general type and configuration’ to the marks found at the murder site, as he had confirmed when he checked the car at the SIMP garage. But in the absence of ‘specific individuating features’ a positive identification was not possible, while the soil samples found were merely ‘consistent with types found throughout the area’. As for the interior, it was clear that the mechanic had done his work well. The only items found were inconclusive traces of paint and dust, some cigarette ash, a few yellow nylon threads and a fifty-lire coin which had fallen and lodged beside the seat support, whose metal base had protected it from the nozzle of Massimo’s vacuum cleaner. In short, nothing that would persuade Rosella Foria that there was any case for pursuing this line of inquiry, when to do so would mean admitting that the Miletti family was under suspicion. To justify that you would need a lot more than the vague phrases of the report and the confused statements of a single witness. You would practically need a photograph of one of them pulling the trigger, and it had better be a bloody good photograph, and even then the smart thing to do would be to tear it up, burn the fragments and forget you’d ever seen it.

The door opened and a grizzled face bound in a green scarf appeared. At the same moment the phone began to ring.

‘
May I speak to Commissioner
Aurelio
Zen, please
.’

A woman’s voice, cool and distant.

‘Speaking.’

‘
This is
Rosella
Foria, investigating magistrate. I should like
to see you in my office, please
.’

The cleaning woman was already hard at work, banging her mop into the corners of the room.

‘Now?’

‘
If that is convenient
.’

Her tone suggested that he’d better come even if it wasn’t.

‘It stinks!’ the cleaning woman remarked as he hung up.

‘What?’

‘He can’t control his pee.’

Her accent was so broad that Zen could barely understand.

‘I rub and scrub from morning to night but it’s no good, everything stinks.’

She waved at the crucifix Lucaroni had provided.

‘He hangs up there doing sweet fuck all and they expect us to feel sorry for Him! I just wish we could change places, that’s all! Half an hour of my life and He’d wish He was back on his nice cosy cross, believe you me.’

For once Zen accepted Palottino’s offer of a lift up to the centre of town. On the way he amused himself by constructing a
prima facie
case against Cinzia Miletti. The gun used to kill Ruggiero was the same calibre as the pistol registered in her name, and the old salad-gatherer said that the driver of the Fiat had blonde hair. Cinzia claimed to have gone to Perugia to meet Ivy Cook, but Zen had discovered that she’d lied about the copy of Ruggiero’s letter, and that lie too had been intended to throw suspicion on Ivy. Cinzia could have arranged the appointment in town, gone to avenge herself on the man who had abused her innocence, then driven into Perugia and made a point of accosting Zen in order to strengthen her alibi. She’d had the motive, the means and the opportunity, and if her second name hadn’t been Miletti they would have run a ballistic check on that little pistol of hers, questioned her in detail about the time during which she claimed to have been waiting for Ivy and staged an identification parade to find out if the witness who had seen the blue Fiat and its blonde driver could pick her out. As it was, that was out of the question. Luciano Bartocci might have risked it, which was precisely why he had been replaced. Rosella Foria wouldn’t make the same mistake. If only one of those nylon threads they’d found on the floor of the SIMP Fiat had been a blonde hair instead, Zen thought. But hair is either fair or yellow, Lucaroni had told him. It sounded like a line from a pop song, and he murmured it over and over to himself as the car burbled over the cobbles of Piazza Matteotti.

Rosella Foria turned out to be a rather primly dressed, fragile-looking woman in her early thirties. Although her manner was suitably authoritative, her face seemed to seek approval. Her office, although almost identical to Bartocci’s, was impeccably neat and tidy.

‘There are two matters which I wish to discuss with you, Commissioner,’ she began. ‘The first concerns a car belonging to the Miletti family which I understand has been impounded by the police.’

Zen had been expecting something of the kind.

‘Two days ago I was informed that a blue Fiat Argenta saloon had been found abandoned near the scene of the murder,’ he replied. ‘Since such a car had been sighted by a witness near the scene and at the time of the murder I followed normal procedure and sent the vehicle for forensic analysis with a view to eliminating it from suspicion.’

‘Yet you failed to notify the Public Prosecutor’s office of this development. Why?’

Despite her uncompromising tone, she was still smiling. Zen was used to dealing with men, whose signals, ritualized over centuries of aggressive display, were clear and simple to follow. But Rosella Foria was unencumbered by such traditions.

‘Because the correspondence with the car mentioned by the witness was only superficial, and I saw no reason to anticipate a positive identification.’

The magistrate drew her well-plucked brows together.

‘I don’t understand how you could fail to see the significance of your action for the investigation, given that the car belonged to the Miletti family.’

‘I didn’t know that it did.’

Rosella Foria’s frown deepened.

‘Do you mean to say that you failed to take the elementary step of tracing the registered owner of the vehicle?’

‘On the contrary, that was the first thing I did. The car proved to be registered to a Fiat dealer. From what you have just told me I assume that it was one of those leased by the Miletti firm and used by the family.’

‘It didn’t occur to you to contact the dealer in question?’

‘I certainly should have done so if the tests had produced any positive results. But in fact they were inconclusive.’

She looked at him long and hard, but he noticed her shoulders relax and knew that it would be all right. She might or might not believe him. The main thing was that he had given her a story she could pass on to Di Leonardo and the Milettis. She was off the hook.

‘All the same, it’s most unfortunate that this has happened. Needless to say, the family are extremely displeased.’

Zen did not need to ask how they had learned of it. Like every top family, they would have a contact in the force.

‘The car was apparently stolen from outside the cemetery while they were attending their father’s funeral,’ the magistrate added, watching him carefully.

Zen’s grey eyes remained impenetrably glazed.

‘Probably some youngsters took it for a joyride and then dumped it.’

‘Possibly. In any event, we may consider the incident closed. But in the present situation misunderstandings of this kind are to be avoided at all costs. I should like your assurance that you will take no further initiatives without consulting me.’

‘Are you suggesting I have exceeded my powers?’

He knew very well that she wasn’t, of course, just as he knew what she
was
doing: telling him to forget the legal niceties and please not lift so much as a finger without her consent, because the situation was so delicate, the moment so critical, the stakes so high.

‘I don’t feel it’s the letter of the law that we ought to be concerned with here,’ she went on in a conciliatory tone, fingering the single-strand pearl necklace which looped above the neck of her Benetton cardigan. ‘It’s more a question of not hurting people’s feelings by hasty or ill-considered gestures, of not wounding a family which has just lost one of its members in deeply distressing circumstances. Above all it’s a question of not doing this when it is demonstrably gratuitous and irrelevant to the purpose of apprehending those responsible for this crime.’

‘But it’s not demonstrably anything of the kind,’ Zen protested. Although he lacked the hard evidence he’d hoped for, it was surely time to open this woman’s eyes a little, to remind her of the possibilities that were being swept under the carpet. ‘On the contrary, in my experience it’s unheard of for criminals to phone a number they know is being monitored in order to give the location of the body of a man they have just killed. If they wanted to murder Miletti, why didn’t they do it up in the mountains or wherever they were holding him? Why risk moving him to a spot close to Perugia only to shoot him dead?’

The investigating magistrate carefully rearranged the stack of papers on the desk in front of her so that the edges were perfectly aligned.

‘If I chose, I could answer these objections with a much stronger one. You seem to forget that Dottor Miletti was murdered almost twenty-four hours
before
the call informing us that he had been released. During that period of time only the kidnappers knew where he was. So how could anyone else possibly have committed the crime? However, this is all beside the point. I said I had two things to tell you. The first concerned the Milettis’ car. The second is that the Carabinieri in Florence have detained a number of men who are believed to be members of the gang which kidnapped and murdered Ruggiero Miletti. I’m going there tomorrow morning to conduct the formal interrogation, but I’m informed that they’ve already made a full confession.’

This was different, this was real. Zen felt like a child on the beach whose sandy battlements have melted beneath the first big wave. Appropriately, Rosella Foria’s concluding words sounded almost maternal.

‘Don’t take it too hard, Commissioner. It’s a pity that your efforts here have not been rewarded with success, but once you’re back in Rome you will no doubt soon find other outlets for your energies.’

As soon as he got outside Zen took out the telegram which had been waiting for him at the Questura. As he had thought, it was from the Ministry, informing him that his temporary transfer to the Questura of Perugia would terminate at midnight on Friday and his normal duties at the Ministry resume with effect from 0800 Monday.

For at least a minute he stood motionless on the kerb, oblivious to the animated scene around him. Then he crumpled up the telegram and walked back to the Alfetta, where he made Palottino’s day by telling him to drive to Florence as quickly as possible.

At Carabinieri headquarters in Florence Zen was received with just that air of polite suspicion that he had expected. When he announced that he had important information about the Miletti case he was taken upstairs and handed over to Captain Rivolta, a young officer with an aristocratic appearance and a languid manner who denied any personal involvement in what Zen referred to as ‘this magnificent coup’.

‘It was a tip-off, I suppose,’ Zen suggested.

Captain Rivolta gave a minimal nod.

‘From a Sardinian gang, I believe. The usual rivalry.’

‘So they were based here in Florence?’

Rivolta repeated his fastidious gesture of assent.

‘Two brothers. They ran a furniture showroom and recycled the ransom along with takings from the business. They handled the negotiations themselves. It was they who had the Miletti’s representative killed. Apparently he caught sight of one of them during the negotiations.’

Zen nodded sagely. It was going quite well, he thought. The young captain was relaxing nicely.

‘Anyway, I understand you have some information to pass on,’ Rivolta murmured.

‘No, that’s just what I told them downstairs.’

Captain Rivolta appeared to wake up fully for the first time.

‘I’ve come to see the prisoners,’ Zen explained.

‘Well, that’s a bit difficult, I’m afraid. As you are no doubt aware, requests for interrogation rights must be presented through the appropriate channels.’

‘That’s all right, I don’t want to interrogate them. I want to beat them up.’

The young officer’s superior smile froze in place, as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.