Medusa - 9

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘This matter involves national security issues of the very highest sensitivity,’ Alberto replied evenly. ‘Under the terms of my remit, I am only empowered to reveal the full facts directly to the Minister.’

  ‘I am a representative of the Minister,’ Belardinelli rapped back.

  ‘So is the driver who brought you here.’

  ‘How dare you?’ the other man shouted, now openly furious.

  Alberto spread out his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

  ‘It’s a question of security clearance, dottore. The first thing I did when this meeting was arranged was to check yours. I regret that it is not of a sufficiently high classification to permit me to divulge the full facts involved. I am however quite prepared to address any questions you may have, as long as the answer would not conflict with the limitations I have already mentioned.’

  ‘This is sheer insolence, Guerrazzi! You SISMI people are required to report to the Ministry.’

  ‘I am only required to report to my immediate superiors, to the Minister of Defence in person, and of course to the Prime Minister and to the President of the Republic should they so desire. Not to principal private secretaries with a B3 security clearance.’

  Belardinelli hammered his right fist into his left palm.

  ‘Right! So this meeting is a complete farce and a total waste of time.’

  He turned to the other two.

  ‘We’re leaving.’

  Alberto got to his feet.

  ‘Wait a moment, dottore! I’m sure we can work out a compromise solution that will satisfy your needs while ensuring that security remains intact. To get us started, may I ask why this affair is of such interest to the Ministry in the first place? It’s really just a dirty little secret dating back thirty years, of no contemporary relevance whatsoever except in so far as its revelation would cause severe embarrassment to the armed forces, resulting in destructive criticism and loss of morale. Steps are being taken to ensure that this does not happen, and I have no doubt that the whole thing will be forgotten in a week or two. Frankly, you would do much better to leave the matter to the professionals and avoid any involvement.’

  Belardinelli eyed him across the room.

  ‘I appreciate how difficult it must be for you to understand the wider issues involved, colonnello, locked as you are into your little secret society of codebooks, classified files and security clearances, but even you may be aware that a cabinet reshuffle is imminent. If it goes wrong, one or more of the coalition parties might withdraw, bringing down the government. Our rivals at the Ministry of the Interior have already launched their own investigation…’

  Alberto nodded. ‘An officer named Aurelio Zen.’

  ‘Bravo. I’m glad to hear that you are at least efficient. Nevertheless, there is clearly a secret to be discovered here. You have refused to reveal its precise nature, but you admit that it exists. If this Zen manages to unravel it, and this cock-and- bull story about a training accident involving nerve gas which we have been disseminating is revealed to be a lie, then the people at Interior will have scored a major coup. They will naturally make the most of it, and the outcome might well determine the fate of the present government. Is that clear enough, or would you like me to draw you a cartoon version?’

  Alberto decided to let him have that one. He nodded submissively and sat down again.

  ‘I completely understand and share your concern, dottore, but may I remind you that what you rightly term the cock-and- bull story about nerve gas did not originate from SISMI, but from certain elements within the army who were desperate to explain the fact that the victim found in that alpine tunnel had been reported killed following an explosion on board a military flight over the Adriatic.’

  ‘So they knew who he was?’ Belardinelli shot back.

  ‘They knew who he was.’

  ‘Despite the fact that the carabinieri had listed the body as unidentified.’

  ‘I was able to help them.’

  ‘And how did you know?’

  Alberto sighed regretfully.

  ‘The answer to that question would involve one of the breaches of security that I alluded to earlier. Let us just say that through various channels and resources available to my department, I was provisionally able to identify the body as being that of one Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero.’

  ‘But instead of communicating this information to the carabinieri in Bolzano, you invoked the national security emergency clause and ordered them to seize the body and effects from the hospital and transfer them to Rome.’

  Alberto shrugged.

  ‘It was perhaps a little precipitate, but it seemed the best course of action at that juncture.’

  Belardinelli shook his head incredulously.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘So the body is that of an army lieutenant named Ferrero. Which regiment?’

  ‘The Alpini.’

  ‘And how did he die?’

  This was the moment that Alberto had been building up to. He stood up and glanced around the room, as though worried about being overheard.

  ‘It was indeed the result of a misadventure, although not at the time nor in the manner of the version retailed to you by sources in the armed forces. The actual facts are very different. You must realize, first of all, that military mores were very different at the epoch of which we are speaking than is the case now. For example…’

  ‘We haven’t time for a lecture on military history, colonnello. Kindly restrict yourself to the facts.’

  ‘Very good. It appears that Lieutenant Ferrero and a number of his fellow junior officers were participating in a form of initiation ritual that was quite usual at the time. Those concerned spent a weekend or even longer on furlough in the military battlegrounds where so many members of their regiment had given their lives during the Great War. As you have reminded me that time is short, I shall not describe in detail the various ordeals which they were required to undergo in order to become “blood brothers” of our glorious dead. Suffice it to say that they were extremely arduous and painful. Unfortunately Lieutenant Ferrero must have suffered from some undiagnosed physical condition which rendered the initiation rites fatal.’

  ‘Why did those with him not simply report what had happened and have the body recovered then and there?’

  ‘The others naturally reported the tragedy to the colonel in charge of the detachment of the regiment in Verona on their return. Rightly or wrongly, he decided against disclosing the truth about Ferrero’s death, since that would have meant revealing the nature of the activities involved. Given the unstable political situation at the time, he feared that this would be seized upon by left-wing propagandists in an attempt to further discredit the armed forces. His initial idea was to recover the body and say that Ferrero had died during a training accident, but a few days later a military flight from Verona to Trieste happened to go down with all hands over the Adriatic. The colonel arranged for Lieutenant Ferrero’s name to be included on the list of those missing.’

  Belardinelli caught the eye of the older aide, who was now checking the walls for cracks.

  ‘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 trystin
g 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.