The convoy of cars drove round to the rear of the Palace of Justice, past the armed guards in their bullet-proof vests, and down a ramp leading into the bowels of the building. Corinna thanked the members of her escort — whose lives, of course, were as much at risk as hers — and took the lift to the third floor, where the offices of the Procura della Repubblica were located, and then walked along a corridor ending at yet another checkpoint. Here she not only had to present her identification to the guard on duty — despite the fact that they both knew each other by sight — but also to pronounce the codeword, changed daily, which permitted access to the offices of the so-called ‘pool’ of AntiMafia magistrates. The security precautions protecting this high-risk group were undeniably impressive, but Corinna knew better than to assume that they would be effective in the event that an order was given to eliminate her. The Mafia was traditionally compared to an octopus concealed in a rocky crevice, its tentacles reaching everywhere. Corinna thought that a pack of invasive rats provided a more accurate analogy: if you blocked up one entrance, they would find or make another.
Despite the élite status of the AntiMafia pool, or perhaps because of the widespread resentment which this exclusive club attracted from colleagues in other branches of the police and judiciary who had not been invited to join, Corinna Nunziatella had as yet been unable to obtain an office more suited to her requirements than the dingy, dark cubicle at the northeast corner of the building which she had originally been assigned. The pointless and oppressive height of its ceiling merely served to emphasize the meagre proportions of the floor space dictated by the newly installed wall panels: 3.5 square metres, to be exact.
Since she could not expand laterally, Corinna had followed the Manhattan model, stacking files in precarious piles propped up one against the other like exhausted drunks. Retrieving any given file was a work of considerable dexterity, requiring the skills of those conjurors who can remove a tablecloth while leaving the dinner setting intact. Relief was promised shortly in the form of a computer network linking all members of the Catania DIA pool both to each other and to their colleagues in the other provincial capitals, but despite a month of installation work, it was still not up and running. In the meantime, the massive terminal squatted idly on her desk, taking up yet more precious space.
‘E se tutto ciò non bastasse …’ she murmured under her breath.
Yes, indeed. As if all this were not enough, Corinna Nunziatella was beginning to suspect that she was falling in love.
She was not left long to brood on these incidental problems, for within a few minutes the phone rang, summoning her to the director’s office for a ‘progress report’. Corinna hastily grabbed an impressive-looking dossier of papers, some of which were actually related to her current cases, checked that her appearance was at once professional and uninviting, and proceeded up to the fifth floor.
The arrival of Sergio Tondo, the recently appointed director of the AntiMafia pool, had proved a source of much mirth to his subordinates, since in appearance he resembled the classic, slightly racist stereotype of the typical mafioso: short, broad, sallow and intense, with a moustache of which he was excessively proud, black voided eyes, and an air of undefined but potentially threatening distinction. The punchline of the joke was that, far from being Sicilian, or even a southerner, Tondo — originally, no doubt, Tondeau — was in fact a native of the Valle d’Aosta, the French-speaking mountain region in the extreme north-west corner of the country, well over a thousand kilometres from Catania as the crow flew, had there been any crows ambitious enough to attempt such a trip.
As though to confirm the initial impression he had created, Sergio Tondo seemed to go out of his way to act as well as look like a caricature Sicilian, to the extent of having made explicit sexual advances to all the female magistrates on his team. Corinna Nunziatella had already been obliged to remove one or other of his hands from her hip, her knee, her shoulder and just below her left breast, and to do so in such a way as to make it seem that she hadn’t really been aware that it had been there in the first place.
It was a delicate operation, calling for exquisite timing, adroitness and tact. Corinna would have been the first to admit that she was ambitious, and it was hard to overemphasize the importance of her promotion to the AntiMafia pool at the age of only thirty-four. To be eased out now would not just mean a return to her previous, uninspiring postings; it would mean being marked for the rest of her life as someone who had been given a rare chance to succeed at the highest level, but who had failed. No one would ever know why, still less bother to find out. And if she started retailing stories about sexual harassment, everyone would just assume that she was trying to lay the blame elsewhere in a feeble attempt to excuse her own incompetence.
Her tactics at present were to try to make herself look drably forbidding. Not so much impregnable, which might put the director on his macho mettle, as unworthy of the effort involved. The image she strove for was that of a walled mountain village at which the invading hordes in the valley below cast a brief glance, then shook their heads, shouldered their weapons and moved on to easier pickings elsewhere. The trick was to make Tondo feel that he had rejected her, thus leaving his pride and self-esteem intact — and, above all, to do so before he pushed matters to a point she could already sense somewhere close ahead, where she would ram her knee into his bulging crotch and rake her clawed nails across his piggy little eyes.
The moment she opened the door to the director’s absurdly spacious office, Corinna Nunziatella knew that something had happened, and that it was not good news. Having dreaded being overwhelmed by unwanted attentions, she found herself treated to an almost brutal absence of elementary politeness, never mind charm, which she found threatening in a quite different way. So far from rushing over to ‘drink in your perfume’, as he had once said, Sergio Tondo did not even bother to get to his feet. His greeting was perfunctory and barely audible. In short, his manner was everything she had wished it would be — cool, distant, and totally professional — and it scared the hell out of her. Because if the director was finally treating her as a colleague rather than a woman, it could only mean that something was very badly wrong indeed.
Corinna Nunziatella sat down in one of the two armchairs facing the desk, the antique leather creaking beneath her. Apart from a crucifix, a portrait of the president, a map of the province of Catania and a couple of shelves of law books apparently selected on the basis of format and size rather than content, the director’s office was strikingly, indeed significantly, empty. No piles of files here, no unsorted notes, no computer terminal. All this austerity made the three telephones on the desk — red, blue and yellow, respectively — loom even larger. One would be for internal calls within the building, another an ‘open’ external line.
And the third? Corinna Nunziatella found herself irresistibly reminded of the so-called terzo livello of the Mafia, whose existence had often been postulated but never proved; the fabled Third Level, far above mundane criminal activities and inter-clan rivalries, on which the most powerful and influential bosses met with their political patrons and protectors in Rome to discuss kickbacks, mutual interests, and the delivery of votes come election time.
‘So?’ the director remarked, as though Corinna had requested a meeting with him.
‘I understood you to say that you wanted a progress report,’ she replied stiffly.
Sergio Tondo smiled superficially and made a throw-away gesture with his left hand.
‘That was just a manner of speaking. I really want to have a chat, hear what you’re working on at present, that sort of thing. As you know, I try to foster a team spirit here, and I feel very strongly that face-to-face meetings like this, informal and off the record, without the inevitable stresses of peer pressure, can genuinely promote a sense of individual empowerment in each and every member of the department, resulting in an enhanced professional dynamic and group cohesion.’
Corinna kept her mouth shut.
‘How’s the Maresi case going?’ the director continued at length.
‘It isn’t going anywhere. It’s been deadlocked for months, and looks likely to stay that way.’
‘And the Cucuzza business?’
‘That looked promising, until the Supreme Court released my principal witness, who promptly disappeared and is now probably in hiding abroad or dead.’
The court was merely upholding the law,’ Sergio Tondo remarked in a tone of light reprimand. ‘The procedural irregularities which had evidently occurred — through no fault of yours, dottoressa, I dare say — unfortunately made it impossible for them to act in any other way.’
Corinna Nunziatella nodded sagely.
‘I’m sure the citizens of Italy will sleep more soundly in their beds at night, knowing that the legal rights of convicted mafiosi are being protected with such rigour.’
The director gave a sympathetic sigh.
‘I know how frustrating these setbacks can be, but try not to feel too bitter. It’s quite pointless, and might ultimately have a negative effect on your performance as a valued member of our team.’
Again Corinna chose not to respond.
‘Those two files are currently inactive, then,’ Tondo went on. ‘So what have you been working on?’
‘The Tonino Limina case has been occupying almost all my time in the past weeks.’
‘With what results?’
Corinna took a deep breath and counted silently to five.
‘As I explained at the general briefing last week, direttore, I have been working on two main fronts. Firstly, I have tried to trace the provenance and movements of the wagon in which the body was found. As you know, the waybill attached to the so-called “death chamber” indicated that it formed part of a stopping goods train, schedule number 46703, which left Palermo on 23 July. However, despite lengthy interviews with the various crews who worked this train, I have as yet been unable to determine conclusively whether the said wagon originated in Palermo or was attached to the train at some later point. It is also unclear how and when it came to be abandoned on the siding where it was later discovered. The train crew explicitly deny that they detached any wagons during their layover at the station of Passo Martino. On the other hand, they admit that they remained in the cab of the locomotive during this time. It is therefore possible that some third party detached the wagon without them noticing. What we do know is that the signalman who brought the train to a halt was not a railway employee, and that the repair work which he used to justify the manoeuvre was not in fact taking place.’
The director nodded in a slightly bored, dismissive way.
‘And your second line of enquiry?’
To try to contact the Limina family with a view to making a positive identification of the victim.’
The director smiled yet again, more intensely, but he did not speak.
‘Needless to say, this has also proved extremely problematic,’ Corinna went on. ‘The Limina family are not given to communicating with the authorities at the best of times, still less with a magistrate participating in the AntiMafia pool. Nevertheless, I have been able to establish a tentative initial contact, using an associate of the family with whom I have had dealings in the past.’
‘Who’s that?’ Sergio Tondo demanded, suddenly alert.
‘He is referred to in my files under the code name “Spada”.’
The director frowned at her.
‘“Swordfish”? And what is Signor Spada’s real name?’
Corinna Nunziatella’s face hardened.
‘I have no idea. Nor do I wish to know. This is an extremely sensitive and covert contact, and in my view one which the Limina family deliberately keeps active in order to facilitate communications with us and with other clans when this suits their purposes. If Spada’s real name became known, the contact might well be seriously compromised or even terminated.’
Corinna Nunziatella had spoken in a deliberately measured tone, weighing her words. The director considered her statement for a moment.
‘And what did your Swordfish have to say?’ he asked with a markedly ironic inflection.
‘It’s been inconclusive so far. He’s intimated that the family will have a statement to make, but that they want to make sure that all members of the “family” have been informed before they make any public pronouncement. With luck, I hope to have some definite news in a week or so.’
‘Oh, before that, I think!’
Sergio Tondo stood up and walked over to the window. He paused there for just long enough to make Corinna wonder if the interview was over, then turned on her abruptly.
‘The Liminas have already been in contact. With me. Through other channels.’
Corinna felt her spine tense up.
‘What do you mean, “other channels”?’ she demanded. ‘What kind of…?’
‘The family lawyer,’ Tondo replied evenly. ‘Dottor Nunzio Lo Forte, a highly respectable figure specializing in civil and commercial law. He phoned me yesterday to arrange a meeting, at which he presented this document.’
He walked back to the desk and handed Corinna a typed sheet of paper. It was a sworn declaration by Anna Limina, mother of Tonino, to the effect that her son was at present on holiday in Costa Rica, and that she knew him to be alive and well. In evidence, she appended a set of his dental records for forensic comparison with the body found on the train.
‘I sent the records over to the morgue immediately,’ the director went on. ‘The pathologist assures me that the dental details do not match those of the victim in any way. This has quite clearly been a case of mistaken identity.’
‘But what about the waybill with “Limina” written on it?’ Corinna protested.
The director raised an admonitory forefinger.
‘It wasn’t written, but scrawled, and further examination by a noted graphologist at the University of Catania suggests that the word was in fact limoni, as the railway official Maria Riesi originally thought. In other words, the perishable contents of the wagon in question were simply lemons, which were no doubt off-loaded further down the line. In short, whoever the unfortunate victim of this tragedy may have been, he was not Tonino Limina, and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that there is any Mafia connection at all. That being so, the matter is of no further interest to this department. The file can therefore be closed and the whole business turned over to the normal authorities for routine investigation, leaving you free to pursue your own work on such matters as the Maresi and Cucuzza cases, which by your own account appear to have been languishing of late.’
He sat down again behind his desk and made a note in his diary. Corinna Nunziatella got up and walked over to the door.
‘Did I tell you how lovely you’re looking this morning?’ Sergio Tondo said suddenly. ‘That outfit really suits you, and haven’t you done something to your hair?’
The words emerged in a rapid murmur, at once acknowledging and dismissing the existence of the director’s former persona, much as one might a twin who had died in infancy. Sad business, of course, but no longer really … relevant.
There was a draught about, faint but perceptible, its hollow chill undermining everything. But where was it coming from?
A real draught — indeed, fresh air of any kind or origin — would have been only too welcome in the dim recess of the Palace of Justice which Carla Arduini had reluctantly been assigned, its one high window dimmed with grime and welded shut by decades of poor maintenance. Not that conditions would have been any better with it open. On the contrary, the heat outside at this hour threatened to turn the lava paving blocks back to their molten form, while the humidity borne in off the sea swamped the whole city in a miasma of lassitude and passivity.
But the draught that was bothering Carla Arduini was not real but virtual: a flaw in cyberspace, a seepage of inform
ation from the system. Despite this, she sensed it almost physically, rather like the onset of some malaise — an accumulation of minor symptoms, none of them particularly significant in themselves, which together indicated a problem as yet unidentified, but puzzling and potentially serious.
Most people, including the majority of her professional colleagues, wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong. Although not yet quite ready to be turned over to her clients, the network she was responsible for installing was up and running. The terminals were all responding and the numbers were being crunched with suitable efficiency. The problem was not with the system itself but with access to it. For some days now, Carla had had the feeling that someone had opened a ‘back door’ which would permit the user to monitor or manipulate the data files at will.
As a commercial hireling, Carla did not have the security clearance necessary to view DIA files herself, although she could have got into them easily enough if she had wanted. But she didn’t need to. The evidence she was after was buried far below such superficial applications, hidden away in the genes of the system itself, and she had already found one line of code that didn’t fit.
In a sense, it was no concern of hers. There was no perceptible effect on the efficiency of the network. Carla could simply complete her installation and sign off on the assignment, but she felt personally intrigued and challenged. Whoever had tampered with the system had done an almost completely seamless job, but he had left a few crumbs here and there, and she was determined to identify the intruder.
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