Ratking az-1

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen tried to steer a middle course, neither clamming up nor trumpeting opinions, biding his time and hoping that Bartocci would get to the point. But unless he did so soon Zen was going to get very nervous indeed. He had even tried to precipitate matters by asking Bartocci about the Deputy Public Prosecutor’s criticisms of the police. But Bartocci’s response had been offhand: ‘Let’s enjoy our lunch, we’ll talk later.’

  The magistrate led the way up a broad flight of steps which at first appeared to lead to someone’s front door. At the last moment they swerved to the left and continued into a tunnel burrowing underneath a conglomerate of interlocking houses, walls, gardens and yards deposited there over the centuries by generations of people neither more nor less dead than Ubaldo Valesio. It was dark and the wind whined emptily past them. On the wall a soccer fan had spray-gunned ‘Roma are magic’, while a dustbin opposite was inscribed ‘Juventus Headquarters’.

  After about fifty metres the subterranean arcade widened out slightly into a concrete yard where six Fiat 500s were packed in, so tightly that there was barely room to pass on foot. Bartocci led him on without a word, turning left and right without hesitation, always climbing, until they reached a small piazza in front of a church where the walls fell back to reveal a view similar to the one Zen had seen that morning from his bedroom window, centred by that strange mountain, full and rounded as a mound of risen dough.

  Bartocci glanced around the square, which was empty except for a few parked cars.

  ‘What were you saying about Di Leonardo?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Well, he implied last night that the police were at fault for not having exploited Valesio’s contacts with the kidnappers. I wondered if you agreed.’

  ‘No, I don’t see things in quite the same way. In fact I should have preferred to pursue a much more active line in this case from the very start. I tried to have the family’s assets frozen, to prevent any possibility of a ransom payment. I also sought to have Ubaldo’s phone monitored. But there was considerable opposition to these initiatives, notably from Di Leonardo himself.’

  ‘But you don’t need higher authority to authorize those things,’ Zen pointed out.

  ‘I don’t need higher authority to sign a warrant for the arrest of President Pertini, either. But it would be the last I ever signed. If I’d frozen the Miletti account and had the phone-tap put on, the net result would have been to destroy any chances I have of influencing the outcome of this case. Besides, people like the Milettis can always raise cash somewhere, and as for the phones, the gang must assume that they’re all tapped anyway. We wouldn’t have learned anything much without trying to follow Valesio, which would have been a very risky venture indeed. Di Leonardo tried to suggest that Ubaldo had been killed because of my negligence. I was his real target, not you. But just imagine how he would have responded had there been the slightest evidence that Valesio’s death was the result of my interference! No, that’s not the way to handle these things.’

  Zen moved over to the parapet at the edge of the piazza, where stone benches were placed at intervals between trees giving shade on hot summer days. The wall dropped vertically away to the gardens of the houses far below. Beyond them rose a lengthy strip of high medieval city wall, then a valley cut steeply into hills dotted with modern villas, leading the eye away to the still more distant hills and the valley beyond, green and grey and brown beneath the azure sky, where the strange mountain rose. In the far distance, at the limit of vision, shimmered the snow-covered peaks of the Apennines.

  Zen got out his packet of Nazionali. It contained only one cigarette, the last of the supply he had brought with him. As he lit up a flicker of movement down below caught his eye. A girl in jeans and a red sweater was standing at an open window in one of the houses, looking out at the garden with its rows of vegetables running up to a chicken coop at the foot of the high retaining wall. She was clearly unaware of being observed herself.

  ‘Valesio’s death has changed everything, of course,’ Bartocci continued. ‘Your arrival at the same moment is extremely convenient. The whole investigation will have to begin again from scratch. We must be prepared to re-examine all our assumptions, even the most fundamental, without allowing ourselves to be influenced by the thought that some people might find our conclusions difficult to swallow.’

  Zen exhaled a long breath of the fragrant, earthy tobacco. The girl moved and the window was empty again.

  ‘That’s why I asked to speak to you today,’ the magistrate went on in the same confidential tone. ‘It’s very refreshing for me to deal with an outsider, someone free of any preconceptions. You have no axe to grind here, no interests to protect. One can consider every possibility.’

  The girl reappeared at the window. Her legs were now bare.

  ‘About a month ago I received this,’ Bartocci said, handing Zen a sheet of paper. AREN’T THE MILETTIS CLEVER? THEY CAN TURN THEIR HAND TO ANYTHING – EVEN KIDNAPPING!!?? THEY’VE HAD PLENTY OF PRACTICE IN EXTORTION, ASK THEIR WORKERS! BUT IF YOU ARE NOT IN THEIR PAY TOO THEN KNOW THIS. OLD MILETTI GOT HIMSELF KIDNAPPED AT JUST THE RIGHT MOMENT. WITH HIM OUT OF THE WAY THE FAMILY CAN’T SIGN ANY TAKEOVER PAPERS WHICH MIGHT LET THE JAPS INTO THE GAME. AND WHAT IF THE RANSOM ENDED UP IN THE FAMILY’S POCKETS INTO THE BARGAIN? MAYBE THEN THEY COULD KEEP SCREWING US FOR ANOTHER FEW YEARS! THINK ABOUT IT. ONE WHO KNOWS

  Zen gave the letter back to Bartocci, who replaced it carefully in his pocket.

  ‘Of course, I get a lot of this sort of thing, and normally I would simply discount it as a hoax from someone with a grudge against the family. But in this case it seems to me that the writer knows what he’s talking about.’

  The girl had moved again, so that only her bare legs and feet were visible. Then she disappeared completely.

  ‘What’s this about a takeover?’ Zen asked. ‘I saw something about it on an old poster today, too.’

  ‘SIMP has been in financial difficulties for some time now. The root cause is that Ruggiero has insisted all along on maintaining total personal control of every aspect of the business. But the company has diversified into areas he knows nothing about, the market has changed out of all recognition in the last ten or fifteen years, above all he is no longer the man he was. The result has been a gradual running-down of the whole operation. They’ve been forced to shut one of their factories and lay off about a quarter of the workforce at the other. But the real crunch came with the collapse of Calvi’s financial empire. It seems that the Milettis had sunk quite a lot of money in it. Since then the company has been living from one loan to another, under increasing pressure to improve their performance and efficiency. Finally, just before Ruggiero was kidnapped, a Japanese company made an offer to put up the money SIMP needs in return for a licence to sell its products under the Miletti name. The old man wouldn’t hear of it, of course.’

  ‘That’s not what the PCI poster suggested.’

  ‘No, the Party quite correctly takes the line that unless prevented the family will do whatever makes sense from a financial point of view. Ruggiero’s opposition is merely the sentimental stubbornness of an old man, and as such cannot be depended on to protect the interests of the workers.’

  Again a flicker of movement below caught Zen’s eye.

  The girl passed by the window, naked except for a yellow towel wrapped round her hair.

  ‘I know this theory sounds fantastic,’ Bartocci continued. ‘But look at what else happens in this country. Look at Gelli, look at Calvi. Was that any more fantastic? When Michele Sindona got into difficulties with the law in New York he staged a fake kidnapping for himself so that he could go to Palermo and pressure people he thought might be helpful. What’s to stop the Milettis doing the same thing? It’s a scheme worthy of Calvi himself. Take Ruggiero out of circulation to prevent any takeover deals going through, and then use their own money, recycled through a faked payoff, to prop up the company’s finances.’

  Zen tried to keep his eye off the window below a
nd his mind on what Bartocci was saying.

  ‘But that would mean that they also murdered Valesio.’

  Bartocci nodded.

  ‘It’s precisely Valesio’s death which has made me take the theory seriously. You said that he may accidentally have caught sight of one of the members of the gang. But why should the kidnappers care if Valesio caught a glimpse of some Calabrian he’d never seen before and would never recognize again? But suppose that the person Valesio saw was not a stranger. Suppose it was someone he knew very well, someone anybody in Perugia would know well. Imagine his rage as he realizes the shameful game they have been playing on him and on everyone! And imagine the Milettis’ horror as they face the certainty of a revelation which would smash the family’s power for ever and send many of them to prison for years to come. What are they to do? Either kill Valesio or admit that all these months while we’ve been working tirelessly for Ruggiero Miletti’s release he has in fact been comfortably holed up in some property of the family a few miles from here, perhaps even in his own house. Do you remember how long it took the family to get around to informing the police of his disappearance? They claimed it was because the idea of kidnapping never occurred to them, but it might equally be because they needed time to fake the accident and the evidence of the struggle, time to burn the car.’

  Again a movement at the window below caught Zen’s eye. But this time the figure was that of a man, who reached for the shutters and banged them shut.

  ‘So you really believe that there’s a conspiracy?’ Zen asked Bartocci. He still wasn’t sure whether the magistrate was completely serious.

  ‘There’s always a conspiracy. Everything that happens in society at a certain level is part of a conspiracy.’

  Zen noted the evasive reply.

  ‘If everything is, nothing is. If we’re all conspirators then there’s no conspiracy.’

  ‘On the contrary, the condition of this conspiracy is that we’re all part of it,’ Bartocci retorted. ‘It’s a ratking.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A ratking. Do you know what that is?’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘The king rat, I suppose. The dominant animal in the pack.’

  ‘That’s what everyone thinks. But it’s not. A ratking is something that happens when too many rats live in too small a space under too much pressure. Their tails become entwined and the more they strain and stretch to free themselves the tighter grows the knot binding them, until at last it becomes a solid mass of embedded tissue. And the creature thus formed, as many as thirty rats tied together by the tail, is called a ratking. You wouldn’t expect such a living contradiction to survive, would you? That’s the most amazing thing of all. Most of the ratkings they find, in the plaster of old houses or beneath the floorboards of a barn, are healthy and flourishing. Evidently the creatures have evolved some way of coming to terms with their situation. That’s not to say they like it, of course! In fact the reason they’re discovered is because of their diabolical squealing. Not much fun, being chained to each other for life. How much sweeter it would be to run free! Nevertheless, they do survive, somehow. The wonders of nature, eh?’

  He paused for a moment, to let Zen’s exasperation mature.

  ‘Now a lot of people believe that somewhere in the wainscotting of this country the king of all the rats is hiding,’ he finally went on. ‘The toughest brute of all, the most vicious and ruthless, the dominant animal in the pack, as you put it. Some thought it was Calvi, some thought it Was Gelli. Others believe that it is someone else again, someone above and beyond either of them, a big name in the government perhaps, or on the contrary someone you’ve never even heard of. But the one thing they all agree is that he exists, this super-rat. It’s a message of hope and of despair. Hope, because perhaps one fine day we’ll finally trap him, run him down, finish him off and rid the house of rats for ever. Despair, because we know he’s too shrewd and powerful and cunning ever to be trapped. But in fact that’s all just a fairy story! What we’re dealing with is not a creature but a condition, the condition of being crucified to your fellows, squealing madly, biting, spitting, lashing out, yet somehow surviving, somehow even vilely flourishing! That’s what makes the conspiracy so formidable. There’s no need for agendas or strategies, for lists of members or passwords or secret codes. The ratking is self-regulating. It responds automatically and effectively to any threat. Each rat defends the interests of the others. The strength of each is the strength of all.’

  ‘I don’t quite see what all this has to do with the present case,’ Zen said.

  Bartocci glanced at his watch.

  ‘I’m sorry, I got rather carried away. But the fact remains that whether or not there is a conspiracy in progress in the Miletti case, I believe that the investigation has reached a point where I can no longer continue to ignore such a theory. However, it would be fatal for me to announce my intentions. If I were to conduct this investigation like any other the political repercussions would ensure that the truth never came to light.’

  ‘Which is where I come in.’

  The magistrate looked at him, the strange stalled smile straining away at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘If you are prepared to help.’

  Zen turned round, taking a deep breath. One of the first-floor windows of the houses giving on to the piazza was a painted dummy, but at the one next to it a portly, silver-haired man in a red dressing-gown stood staring down at them with undisguised curiosity.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Zen asked tonelessly.

  ‘Just a few things that would be difficult for me to do without causing comment. First of all I’d like you to check what firearms are registered to members of the Miletti family. Don’t forget to include the Santuccis. I also want you to make discreet inquiries as to the whereabouts of members of the family yesterday.’

  ‘I can tell you where they were yesterday evening. They were having dinner with me at Antonio Crepi’s.’

  Bartocci gave him a look that modulated rapidly from astonishment through alarm and respect to suspicion. Then he laughed rather aggressively.

  ‘Well, well! You do get around, don’t you?’

  ‘Apparently Crepi wanted me to meet the Milettis. To “see what we’re up against” as he put it.’

  At the other end of the piazza a young couple were hungrily necking, bent over a parked car. The fat man at the window was still looking on, his thumbs tucked under the belt of his dressing-gown.

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘Yes, quite a lot. In fact to some extent it seemed to tally with what you’ve been saying. Not that he suggested that the family had any complicity in the kidnapping…’

  ‘Of course not! Anyway, he wouldn’t know.’

  ‘But he feels they’re not doing enough to bring Ruggiero home. He asked me to make that plain to the press in an attempt to pressure the Milettis to pay up.’

  The young magistrate smiled sourly.

  ‘Typical. Anyway, one thing is certain. No additional pressure will be necessary now. Valesio’s death will do more than any press conference to resolve this issue one way or the other. Within the next few days I expect the family to say that they’ve received a demand for the full amount of the ransom to be paid at once and that they are going to comply. That’s why we need to move fast. Once that money is handed over and Ruggiero is back we’ll never be able to prove anything. But we must be discreet, above all! This entire matter is politically sensitive in the very highest degree, and if any word of it leaks out I shall be forced to…’

  He broke off suddenly, looking past Zen. The young man had produced a camera and was taking photographs of his girlfriend posed in various positions against the landscape.

  ‘Anyway, I must go. No time for coffee, I’m afraid.’

  As Bartocci hurried away the man with the camera came striding purposefully towards Zen, his girlfriend following more slowly behind.

  ‘Pardon me! Would you be as good enough t
o mind making of us two both a photograph?’

  Foreign, thought Zen with relief. The young magistrate’s sudden haste had been unnecessary. One thing at least was certain: the bastards would never employ foreigners.

  FOUR

  That afternoon Aurelio Zen went boating.

  After the shock of Valesio’s murder and his almost sleepless night, lunch with Luciano Bartocci had really been the last straw. One thing he could have done without was an ambitious young investigating magistrate with a strong political bias, a prefabricated conspiracy theory and an itch to get his name in the news. At Zen’s expense, needless to say, should anything go wrong.

  Once upon a time magistrates had been dull, stolid figures, worthy but uninspiring, above all remote and anonymous. But the combination of television and terrorism had changed all that. A new breed of men had emerged from the vague grey ranks of the judiciary to stamp themselves on the nation’s consciousness: the glamorous investigating magistrates and Public Prosecutors who were to be seen on the news every evening leading the fight against political violence and organized crime. Now all their colleagues craved stardom too, and almost overnight the once faceless bureaucrats had blossomed out in trendy clothes and bushy beards, and an anonymous letter was enough to get them as excited as any schoolboy.

  Since Bartocci had been at pains to emphasize that his comments were ‘off the record’, Zen could of course simply ignore them. But that would be rash. There were an infinite number of ways in which the investigating magistrate could compromise or embarrass a police officer, whereas having the judiciary on your side was an invaluable asset. No, he had to try and keep Bartocci happy. On the other hand, the inquiries he had been asked to make, although apparently innocuous, were also fraught with risk. A great family such as the Milettis is like a sleeping bear: it may look massively apathetic and unimpressionable but each hair of its pelt is wired straight into the creature’s brain, and if you twitch it the wrong way the thing will flex its tendons and turn on you, unzipping its claws. What was he to do? How was he to react? What was a safe course to take?