Ratking az-1

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen jerked his chair back, making it squeak loudly on the floor, and the two heads reflected in the rectangle of glass immediately bent over their respective piles of papers, covered with almost illegible notations in Ubaldo Valesio’s minuscule handwriting. Zen shifted his gaze to the right, towards the small crucifix and the calendar showing cadets on parade at the training school at Nettuno. The calendar was still turned to February, although it was now March and his mother’s birthday was in less than a week. He absolutely must not forget to get her a present.

  On the desk in front of him lay the Nazione newspaper. The headline read ‘BUTCHERED, THE MILETTIS’ MOUTHPIECE: A MESSAGE TO THE “SUPERCOP” FROM ROME?’ Below it appeared a photograph of a scene which had become as familiar a part of Italian life as a bowl of pasta. Lying in a stiff and unnatural foetal crouch with a rather fatuous lopsided grin on his face, Ubaldo Valesio made an extremely unconvincing corpse. But conviction was amply supplied by the pictures of the other side of the lawyer’s head which Bartocci had shown him earlier, the pulpy mass of the brain hollowed out like a watermelon seeded with bits of shattered bone.

  But he had not died in vain! Thanks to this development Zen had been able to enforce payment of the blank cheque which the Questore had so boldly dashed off the day before. He had requested and obtained the services of two inspectors and a detective-sergeant, together with an extra office and various communications and vehicle privileges which he had no reason to suppose he would need but had thrown in for good measure. But as the news had made clear, the Carabinieri had taken a stranglehold on the murder inquiry, and all that remained for the ‘supercop from Rome’ was to check Valesio’s movements on the previous day and sift through the material which had been removed from his home and office. Lucaroni, one of the two inspectors, was handling the first chore, while the other, Geraci, was at work next door on the second. He was being assisted, if that was the word, by Chiodini, whose services Zen had specifically requested. The sight of the big brute straining to decipher Ubaldo Valesio’s finicky jottings was some small compensation for the way he had treated Zen the day before.

  Zen had arrived at Bartocci’s office promptly at nine o’clock. The law courts were housed in a rambling Renaissance palace forming one side of the inevitable Piazza Matteotti. The portal was surmounted by a lunette containing a statue of Justice flanked by two creatures apparently consisting of a vulture’s head and wings attached to the body of a hyena, a motif repeated extensively elsewhere in the building. Zen had plenty of time to admire the architectural features of the palace, since Luciano Bartocci did not put in an appearance until shortly after ten.

  By day the young magistrate conformed rather more to the sartorial norm for members of his profession: a tweed jacket, lambswool pullover, check shirt, woollen tie and corduroy trousers. He, too, looked haggard, having been up until almost five o’clock that morning dealing with the victim’s widow. Patrizia Valesio, it seemed, had at first reacted with eerie calm to the news of her husband’s death.

  ‘She was still up when we got there,’ Bartocci explained, ‘still waiting for her husband to come home. I’d taken my sister along to help out. I think Patrizia must have realized what had happened the moment she opened the door, but she invited us in as though nothing was the matter. We might have been paying a normal social call, except that it was the middle of the night. I told her that her husband had been involved in an accident. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she replied. “They’ve killed him.” I just nodded.’

  They were outside the law courts, waiting for Palottino to bring the Alfetta over. Bartocci had explained that he wanted Zen to accompany him to Valesio’s home and office, where he planned to remove any documents which might have a bearing on the lawyer’s murder or his contacts with the kidnappers. The street was brilliantly sunny and busy, with people going into and out of the market building, whose entrance was through an arcade beneath the law courts.

  ‘She stayed perfectly calm until I mentioned something about the car,’ Bartocci went on. ‘Then she went crazy. “No, it’s not possible!” she shrieked. “It was brand new, I gave it him for Christmas! Don’t tell me it was damaged too!” Marisa and I just stood looking at each other. It sounded like the ultimate consumerist nightmare, a woman who accepts her husband’s murder without blinking an eyelid and then breaks down because the car’s been scratched. Then she started to get hysterical and incoherent, snatching up things from the shelves and throwing them across the room. Marisa tried to calm her while I rang for a doctor. It took him forty minutes to get there. I’ll never forget that time as long as I live.’

  A woman who looked like a barrel wearing a fur coat was waiting for the bus. Her son, perfectly dressed as a miniature man, stood staring unbelievingly up at the balloon whose string he had just lost hold of, now floating away high above the arriving Alfetta.

  ‘The calmness was all a facade, of course,’ Bartocci continued once they were settled in the car. ‘Patrizia had been so terrified by what her husband was doing that she had convinced herself that nothing could happen to him. But she’d forgotten to extend this magic immunity to the BMW, which is why she went into hysterics as soon as I mentioned it.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘With relatives, under sedation.’

  The Valesios’ house was one of a number of modern apartments forming an exclusive development on the lower slopes of the city, all pink brick and double glazing and concrete balconies dripping with creeper. In the absence of Patrizia Valesio the family interests were represented by her mother, a formidable woman who followed Bartocci and Zen from room to room, personally checking every single item that was removed while bemoaning the fact that the authorities were permitted to make free with the private papers of a man above suspicion, a pillar of the community and a repository of every known human virtue. Ubaldo Valesio himself made a ghostly fourth presence, smiling at them from photographs, haunting a wardrobe full of clothes, proclaiming his taste in books and records, even trying to lay claim to a non-existent future by way of a scribbled note on his desk jotter reading ‘Evasio Thursday re plumbing’.

  It was not until they were driving back to the city centre that Bartocci produced the photographs.

  ‘Just in case you still think it was a mistake,’ he commented as Zen studied the images of horror.

  ‘No, I meant that Valesio may have accidentally caught sight of one of the gang,’ Zen explained. ‘These would have been the top men, don’t forget. No one else would be entrusted with the negotiations. They might well have been worried that he would be able to identify them.’

  Bartocci seemed to be about to say something, but in the end he just turned away and looked out of the window, leaving Zen to wonder once again why he had been invited along on this routine errand.

  The studio which Ubaldo Valesio had shared with two other lawyers was in the centre of the city, just behind the cathedral, in a street so narrow there was barely room for Palottino to park. It consisted of one wing of the first floor of the building, two huge rooms divided into separate work areas by antique screens and potted shrubs. Valesio’s partners were both present. They were very correct, very polite, and very unhelpful. Yes, they had known that Ubaldo was acting for the Milettis. No, they had never discussed it. They watched discreetly but attentively as the two representatives of the State looked through diaries, memo books, files and folders. Then they drew up an inventory of what had been taken, obtained a receipt, said goodbye, and went back to work.

  ‘When may I expect your report on this material?’ Bartocci asked Zen when they got back to the law courts.

  ‘Tomorrow, I hope. But if anything important comes up I’ll phone you.’

  He turned back and started to get into the car, but Bartocci called him back.

  ‘Listen, there are a few things I’d like to discuss with you. Off the record, as it were.’

  Zen gazed at him, his face perfectly expressionless.

  ‘In fact I
thought we might have lunch. That little restaurant down the street there is where I usually eat, the one with the neon sign and the awning.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘If that’s convenient.’

  Bartocci’s tone was polite, almost deferential. It scared Zen stiff.

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ he replied with a ghost of a smile.

  As Palottino drove him back to the Questura he saw that the restaurant Bartocci had indicated was called the Griffin and displayed a sign with a beast similar to those he had seen at the law courts.

  Back in his office, Zen thought about griffins and Luciano Bartocci and Ubaldo Valesio. Griffins, he discovered from the dictionary kept in the desk drawer to help the less literate officials write their reports, were mythical creatures having the head and wings of an eagle and the legs and tail of a lion. He was still not quite sure why they had been carved above the entrance to the law courts. Were they symbols of Justice? Certainly Luciano Bartocci seemed to be something of a hybrid. Zen had never been invited to lunch by a member of the judiciary before, and he found the prospect as unattractive as the invitation to Crepi’s the previous evening. Once again he felt that he was being drawn into an area where the stakes were high and the rules not clearly defined. ‘A few things I’d like to discuss with you, off the record.’ What was Bartocci up to?

  Almost with relief, his thoughts turned back to Ubaldo Valesio. Although they had never met, Zen felt he knew the dead man well: a successful and ambitious lawyer in a city which despite its recent growth was still a small town at heart, a place where rumours spread as silently and effectively as a virus. His partners had been telling the truth, Zen felt sure, and the two men next door were almost certainly wasting their time. People like Valesio, who knew everything about someone and something about everyone, not only stopped talking to others about their affairs, they very soon stopped talking even to themselves. Above all they would never commit anything to paper unless it was absolutely necessary. Ubaldo Valesio would have kept the details of his dealings with Ruggiero Miletti’s kidnappers in the only place he considered safe, his own head. With a shiver, Zen remembered the photographs Bartocci had shown him.

  A clangour of bells suddenly rang out from churches near and far, calling the faithful to Mass and reminding the rest that their lunch was just an hour away. Zen fetched his coat and hat and walked through to the next room. Geraci looked up at him with an expression of intense anxiety. His face was heavy and fleshy, and the two deep furrows running from the corners of the nose to the edge of the mouth gave him a hangdog look. His chin had a weak and skimpy look, as though the material had run out before the job was quite finished, while his eyebrows were absurdly thick and bushy, with a life of their own.

  ‘Anything?’ Zen enquired.

  Geraci shrugged. Chiodini pretended to be so intent on his labours that he did not even notice Zen’s presence.

  Outside, the sun illuminated every surface with uncompromising clarity. The air seemed full of disquieting hints of summer, but the illusion lasted no longer than it took to turn the corner into a narrow alley sunk deep in shadow, where the wind whetted the cold edge of the air like a knife. Bare walls faced with crumbling plaster rose up on both sides, pierced by the high, inaccessible windows of the prison, covered with heavy steel mesh. After going about a hundred metres Zen was beginning to feel he had made a mistake in turning off the broad avenue that led directly up to the centre, but he persisted, and was rewarded when the street widened out into a little square where the wind disappeared and a cherry tree was in sumptuous blossom in a garden high above. But at the next corner the wind was back, keener than ever. He turned left down a long flight of steps to get away from it.

  In the grocery at the corner a sad, pale pig of a girl, a greasy sliver of cooked ham dangling from her mouth, jerked her thumb at a set of steps opposite in response to his request for directions to the centre. It was a staircase for mountain climbers, the steps seeming to get progressively higher as he climbed. The wall it ran up looked like the face of history itself. It was founded on massive blocks of rock whose dimensions were those of ancient days, presumably Etruscan. Above this layer came another, Roman work, where the blocks, though still large, had lost the epic scale. Then came a long stretch of small cubes of pinkish stone forming the wall of a medieval house, and finally an upper storey tacked on in brick and concrete.

  He stopped to catch his breath, leaning against one of the giant blocks which had weathered to form intricate niches and cavities. In several of them tiny plants had somehow contrived to put down roots in a trace of dust, in another someone had wedged an empty Diet Coke can. On the other side a breathtaking view stretched away, line after line of hills rippling off into the hazy distance. He stepped carefully over a dead pigeon on the next step and clambered grimly to the top. The street in which he came out continued upwards without respite through an ancient gateway, and still up, darkly resonant and clangorous, past basement workshops where carpenters and furniture repairers and picture framers were at work. The air, fresh and cold and delicately flavoured with wood smoke, was a luxury in itself, an air for angels to breathe.

  On the wall of a nearby building was a hoarding displaying two posters. The one on the right featured a garish picture of a woman in a bathing costume being pursued by a number of eager fish with teeth like daggers. ‘For the first time in Italy,’ the caption exclaimed, ‘women and sharks in the same pool!!!’ The name of a circus appeared beneath, with the dates of its next visit to Perugia. The other poster showed a famous footballer leering suggestively at a glass of milk, but what attracted Zen’s attention was the top left-hand corner, where the mass of posters accumulated over several months was starting to curl back under its own weight, revealing a section of older strata far beneath. In the corner, in large red letters, he read ‘LETTI’. The protruding curl was almost a centimetre thick, layered like plywood, and when Zen tugged at it the whole block peeled off and fell to the ground at his feet. Now he could see almost all the earlier poster, which was headed ‘SIMP AND THE MlLETTI FAMILY.’ There were five short paragraphs of closely set writing: The arrogance and intransigence of the Miletti family, amply demonstrated on innumerable occasions in the past, are once again in evidence. Not content with shutting down the Ponte San Giovanni subsidiary, or laying off more than 800 workers in Perugia – to say nothing of their continuing exploitation of female piece-work labour and well-known anti-union policies – they are now reported to be planning to sell off a controlling interest in the Societa Industriale Miletti di Perugia to a Japanese electronics conglomerate. Having crippled a once-prosperous enterprise by a combination of managerial incompetence and ill-advised speculation in the activities of such gentlemen as Calvi, Sindona and their like, the Milettis now intend to recoup their losses by auctioning off SIMP to the highest bidder. The company named in the take-over bid already owns factories which are running well below their maximum potential production level due to the world economic recession and consequent shortage of demand. Their intention is to use SIMP as a means of eluding the EEC quotas by importing Japanese-produced goods to which nothing will be added in Umbria but a grille bearing one of the brand-names which generations of local workers have helped to make famous. The Umbrian Communists totally condemn this example of cynical stock-market manipulation. SIMP is not to be sold off like a set of saucepans. The future of our jobs and those of our children must be decided here in Perugia after a process of consultation between representatives of the workforce, the owners, and the provincial and regional authorities. Italian Communist Party

  Umbrian Section

  Zen turned away from the billboard and started to climb the ancient street paved with flagstones as smooth as the bed of a stream. An old woman lurched towards him, a bulging plastic bag in each hand, bellowing something incomprehensible at a man who stood looking up at the scaffolding hung with sacking that covered a house being renovated. A gang of boys on scooters swooped down the street, s
labs of pizza in one hand, klaxons groaning like angry frogs, yelling insults at each other. They missed the old woman by inches, and a load of rubble gushing down a plastic chute into a hopper made a noise that sounded like a round of applause for their skill or her nonchalance.

  ‘Anything else?’

  The waiter perched like a sparrow beside their table, looking distractedly about him. Bartocci shook his head and glanced at Zen.

  ‘Shall we go?’

  At the cash desk the manager greeted Bartocci warmly. No bill was presented. like the rest of the almost exclusively male clientele of the noisy little restaurant, the magistrate was clearly a regular who paid by the week or month.

  ‘How about a little stroll before having coffee?’ Bartocci suggested once they were outside. ‘I must warn you, though, that it’s uphill, like everything in Perugia!’

  It was a measure of Zen’s state of mind that he found himself wondering whether the words had more than one meaning. Lunch with Bartocci had indeed proved very much like dinner with the Milettis, except that the food was even better: macaroni in a sauce made with cream and spicy sausage meat, chunks of liver wrapped in a delicate net of membrane and charred over embers, thin dark green stalks of wild asparagus, strawberries soaked in lemon juice. But just as at Crepi’s the evening before, the conversation had been dominated by what was not discussed. Bartocci had shown himself to be particularly interested in Zen’s career and his views on various items of news: a scandal about kickbacks for building permits involving members of a Socialist city council, reports that a Christian Democrat ex-mayor had been a leading member of the Palermo Mafia, allegations that the wife of a Liberal senator in Turin was involved in the illegal export of currency. Zen knew what was happening, of course, and Bartocci knew that he knew. It was all part of the process. How would this police official from Rome react to being sounded out Off the record’ by a Communist investigating magistrate?