Ratking az-1

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Does it matter?’

  There was no telling, that was the problem. The responsibility for the consequences will be on your heads, Pietro Miletti had said. All along Zen had been haunted by the idea that he might make some blunder which would hang over him for the rest of his life, yet here he was behaving like a dope addict. He felt an overwhelming desire for a cigarette, but Ivy was a non-smoker and he had agreed not to smoke in the car.

  The road to Rimini bypassed the town and in a few moments they were out in the wilds again, labouring up a steep, tortuous medieval track on which modern civilization had done no more than slap a layer of asphalt and a road number. The ascent was arduous and prolonged, twisting and turning upwards for more than twelve kilometres to the pass, almost a thousand metres high. The starkness of the landscape revealed by the headlights penetrated the car like a draught. Zen sat there unhappily taking it all in. He didn’t much care for nature in the raw: it was messy and wasteful and there was too much of it. This was a fertile source of incomprehension between him and Ellen. The wilder and more extensive the view, the better she liked it. ‘Look at that!’ she would exclaim, indicating some appalling mass of barren rock. ‘Isn’t it magnificent?’ Zen had long given up trying to understand. It all came of her being American, he supposed. Americans had more nature than anything else except money, and they got pretty excited about that too.

  To take his mind off the scene outside he looked at his companion instead. Part of the oddness of her appearance, he realized, came from the fact that she didn’t look like a woman so much as a rather inept female impersonator. Not that there was anything butch about her. On the contrary, it was precisely the excessive femininity, laid on with a trowel as it were, that created the effect of someone pretending to be a woman, someone in fact rather desperately hoping to be taken for one. But this desperation was perhaps understandable. Certainly her role in the Miletti household appeared to be anything but feminine. She was evidently their dogsbody, used for tasks which no one else was prepared to take on. Typically, it had been Ivy, he’d learned, who had been sent to collect the letter from Ruggiero which the gang had left in the rubbish skip.

  ‘Are you married, Commissioner?’ she asked suddenly.

  It was the first remark she had volunteered all evening.

  ‘Separated. And you?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Zen had no idea what he was supposed to think. Eventually Ivy herself seemed to sense the need for an explanation.

  ‘My association with Silvio rather precludes marriage.’

  They rounded yet another bend, the headlights sweeping over a bald expanse of stricken scanty grass. It had started to rain more heavily, unless they were now actually up inside the clouds.

  ‘If you really want a cigarette very badly I think on the whole I should prefer you to have one,’ Ivy told him.

  He gave an embarrassed laugh.

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Well, you keep fiddling with the ashtray and pushing the cigarette lighter in and out. Just open the window a crack.’

  ‘What about the rest of the Milettis?’ Zen asked as he lit up. The wind burbled at his ear like frantic drumming.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘How do you get on with them?’

  She took a moment to think.

  ‘They find me useful, on occasion.’

  ‘I still remember how Cinzia Miletti treated you that evening at Crepi’s.’

  ‘Poor Cinzia!’ murmured Ivy. ‘She’s terribly unhappy.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit of a strain, though, living in the same house with them?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t. They would never stand for it. Ruggiero would have a fit!’

  She laughed gaily, as though Ruggiero Miletti’s attitude was frightfully amusing.

  ‘No, I have a little flat of my own, although I have been spending more time than usual at the villa since the kidnapping. But I’ll be very glad when it’s all over and things return to normal.’

  ‘But you and Ruggiero don’t get on?’

  That gave her pause.

  ‘Well, he doesn’t have a very high opinion of either foreigners or women,’ she said at last. ‘That places me at something of a disadvantage.’

  Zen didn’t reply at once. He was at the honeymoon stage with his cigarette, listening to the nicotine marching through his blood.

  ‘And yet you’re looking forward to his getting back? I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s a question of the lesser of two evils. At least we all know where we are when he’s around. For the last few months everything has rather fallen apart. Ruggiero kept all the reins in his own hands, you see. So in a sense I’ll be glad when he is back, despite his attitude to me.’

  He decided to risk a shot in the dark.

  ‘Is it your relationship with Silvio that Ruggiero objects to?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ she snapped.

  Clearly this was a sensitive topic. Then she laughed, as if to cover her outburst.

  ‘Anyway, you’re quite right. Silvio is a very complex and tormented personality, someone who has great difficulty in coming to terms with the demands of life. I help to ease that burden for him. Ruggiero doesn’t accept that, perhaps because it would mean accepting responsibility for the way his son’s turned out.’

  ‘In what way is he responsible?’

  The cigarette had suddenly turned bad on him.

  ‘Oh, in all sorts of ways. He was responsible for Loredana’s death, for one thing. Silvio has never really recovered from that.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Ruggiero was driving her back from Rome late one night, and somehow the car left the road and ended up against a tree. Loredana was killed instantly. Ruggiero’s legs and collar-bone were broken and he was trapped in the wreckage for almost seven hours, pinned beside her corpse. He was discovered the next morning by a boy on his way to school. People say he has never been the same since. Loredana moderated the violence of his personality, or at least sheltered the children from it. After her death they certainly took the full brunt, Silvio in particular. He was only thirteen and he’d been particularly close to his mother. Her death was a great blow to him, and I imagine Ruggiero handled it in exactly the wrong way, telling him to snap out of it, stop snivelling, that sort of thing. He’s a man who has crushed all softness in himself, so why should his son be indulged, be allowed to cry and display his grief, be stroked and cuddled and consoled when he never was? Of course, Cinzia suffered terribly too. The others rather less, I think. Pietro was old enough to cope better, Daniele too young to understand.’

  Zen wound down the window and let his half-smoked cigarette be sucked out into the airstream. The conversation no longer kept the landscape at bay but intensified it, showing its desolation to be a reality not merely natural but also human.

  Eventually the car slowed to a halt. The rain was now pelting down, covering the windows with a coat of water as thick and opaque as glycerine. The headlights created a luminous swathe ahead of the car, but nothing was visible except a variety of shapes which obstinately refused to become more than that. Ivy turned the engine off. Nothing moved outside, and the only sound was the steady metallic drumming on the roof of the car.

  ‘Why did you ask if I was married?’ Zen asked.

  She glanced at him briefly.

  ‘I don’t know. To break the silence, I suppose. Why does one ask anything?’

  He leaned closer to the window, but saw even less as his breath fogged the glass.

  ‘Well, in my case it’s usually to get information out of people,’ he said. ‘Then after a while it becomes a habit, like those teachers who speak to everyone as though they’re five years old.’

  ‘I suppose I was trying to make you seem more human. I’m frightened of the police, you see, like most people. Almost as frightened as I am of this gang.’

  The minutes slipped away, their passage recorded with unnecessary precision by the d
igital clock on the instrument panel.

  ‘They don’t ever attack people, do they?’

  It sounded as though the reality of what they were doing had come home to her for the first time.

  ‘Who, the police?’ he joked.

  Her expression showed that she no longer had any time for jokes.

  ‘No, it’s completely unheard of,’ he assured her. ‘Allthey want from us is the money that’s in the boot. We won’t even see them, probably.’

  The rain ceased abruptly, as if it had been turned off.

  ‘I think I’ll just stretch my legs a bit,’ Zen announced.

  The whole night was in motion, its gusts glancing blows from currents active on the fringes of the turbulence centred somewhere in the clouds swirling about overhead. The visibility had improved slightly. What he had taken to be a gate turned out to be a wall, the hump on the ground near by a heap of gravel and the massive bulk on the other side of the road a barn whose gable end still bore the faded icon of a helmeted Mussolini and the slogan ‘It is important to win, but still more important to fight.’

  At first the sound might have been thunder, or an animal. Next a light appeared, and a moment later a shape swept out of the night, big as a centaur, its blinding eye striking him along with something solid. Then it was gone, leaving a weighted envelope lying on the wet black asphalt at his feet.

  Back in the car he showed Ivy the black-and-white Polaroid photograph it contained.

  ‘That’s Ruggiero,’ she confirmed.

  The picture showed a stocky man with a shock of white hair and the typical Umbrian moon-face, wearing a chequered shirt open at the neck and holding up a newspaper. He looked resentful and slightly embarrassed, like an elderly relative who had grudgingly agreed to pose in order to keep the peace at a Christmas party. The photo might have been modelled on those sent by the Red Brigades during the Moro kidnapping, but where those middle-class intellectuals had used the centre-left Repubblica to mark the date, Ruggiero Miletti was holding the Nazione, just the kind of paper which a bunch of good Catholic boys like the kidnappers would choose.

  Ivy took the envelope from him, widened the opening and extracted a small coil of blue plastic strip about a centimetre wide. A message had been punched out in capital letters with a labelling machine. ‘PUT PHOTO AND MESSAGE BACK IN ENVELOPE LEAVE HERE FOLLOW BIKE.’ Zen slipped the photo and tape back into the envelope, opened the door and let them drop out.

  ‘Right, well, let’s get on with it.’

  For the next three hours the motorbike led them a nightmare chase over more than a hundred kilometres of mountain roads that were often little more than channels covered by scree and loose gravel, furrowed by rainwater and ridged by surfacing strata of rock. All they ever saw of their guide was a faint distant tail-light, and then only rarely, at irregular moments after long periods of doubt when it seemed that they had lost the scent, made the wrong decision at some unmarked junction up in the stormy darkness.

  The driving demanded constant attention. Only a narrow range of speeds was viable. Below that the car risked bogging down in the mud or grounding on an obstacle, above it the tyres might lose adhesion on the continual twists and turns or cliff-like descents, or one of the vicious potholes or rock outcrops rupture the suspension or pierce the sump. They hardly exchanged a word. Ivy had her hands full with the driving, and although Zen soon gave up trying to follow their route on the maps he had brought with him, which proved to bear only a partial and rather disturbing resemblance to the landscape, like a mild hallucination, he kept up a show of poring over them to try and assuage his guilt at being a mere passenger, unable to share her burden. And still the faint red light up ahead came and went by fits and starts, leading them on across gale-swept open moorland, through massively still pine forests, up exposed dirt tracks and over passes whose names had vanished with the inhabitants of the farms where until a few decades earlier generation after generation of human beings had eked out lives of almost unimaginable deprivation.

  It was after midnight when a set of headlights appeared behind them, flooding the interior of the car with light. Ivy squinted, trying to shut out the glare that made her task still more difficult.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked edgily.

  ‘They must be gating us in.’

  Then everything happened at once. The motorbike slowed so that for the first time they could see the outlines of the rider, a derelict farmhouse appeared in its headlight beam and the car behind them started flashing its lights. Figures appeared in the road ahead, waving them into the yard of the farmhouse. Their faces were black and completely featureless except for two oval eye-slits, the head hooded, the body shrouded in shiny waterproof capes. There were piercing whistles, then a thump as they opened the boot, where the money was packed in cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic rubbish bags. With a series of dull thuds and strangely intimate bumps the unloading began, punctuated by more of the raucous, inhuman whistles which finally blew away the remaining shreds of doubt in Zen’s mind about the reality of the kidnapping. That eerie keening, like the cry of a great predator, was used by shepherds to communicate across the vast wind-swept spaces in which they lived and worked. No outsider, no amateur, could ever fake that sound.

  The rain, which had been coming and going, began to pour down again, spattering in big gobs all over the glass around them. In the still warmth of the car, bathed in the calm green glow of the instrument panel, it was impossible to imagine what conditions were like out there. Inside and outside seemed so absolutely separate that once again Zen, drifting off into pleasantly dopey inattention, had the sensation of being a mere spectator of screen images, some television documentary about hardy men who did dangerous work for big money.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Ivy whispered fearfully.

  The activity at the back of the car had ceased and it had fallen silent.

  ‘They’re probably checking the money.’

  He could make out nothing in the darkness around the car. The headlights revealed only the worn flagstones of the farmyard, the archway into the byre on the ground floor of the house, the crumbling steps that had once given access to the living quarters above. The door was staved in and torn half off its hinges in what looked like an act of senseless violence. At one of the gaping window frames a bit of ragged cloth twitched and flapped spasmodically in the wind.

  ‘Perhaps they’ve gone,’ Ivy whispered.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Can’t we go?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Even before he finished speaking a caped and hooded figure appeared at Ivy’s shoulder, the door was wrenched open and a powerful torch shone into their faces.

  ‘Out! Out! Out!’

  The next instant the door behind him opened too, transforming the interior of the car into a wind tunnel. A huge hand grabbed Zen’s shoulder and dragged him outside, shoving him up against the side of the car. Light hit his face as hard as the stinging raindrops. Then it abruptly disappeared, and all he could see were entrancing coloured patterns chasing each other about the glowing darkness like tropical fish.

  The pain was so unexpected, so absolute, that he had no name for it and fell over without a sound, like a baby, too shocked to make any fuss.

  ‘Fuckarse cocksucker of a cop!’

  He could just make out the outline of the figure in front of him, sweeping its heavy cape to one side, then something smashed into the side of his head. They’ve shot me, he thought. They’ve shot me like they did Valesio. They’re proving they exist, punishing us for not believing in them, like gods.

  With a strange detachment he noted the final sequence of events: the roar of a car engine near by, the boot drawn back, the hiss of a tyre skidding past, the oddly painless blast which ended it.

  Like Trotsky and the iceman, he thought. Of course! The solution was so obvious, so satisfying, that there was no need to try and understand it.

  That explained the cold, too. Obviously if it wer
en’t cold the ice would melt. In fact some of it already had. The hard, smooth surface pressed to his face was covered in water. As for the purposeful darkness tugging at his clothing, this must be the wind in the tunnel. The only question, in fact, was where his father had gone, why he had left him alone. No doubt there was an answer to that, too, but he couldn’t think what it was.

  Once again he called weakly, but as before there was no reply. He lay back, stretched out on the cold wet tracks, waiting for the express to Russia to come and chop off his head.

  The telephone call could hardly have been vaguer.

  ‘ One of your men is by the farm up above Santa Sofia there, above the river, up there on the way to the church.’

  The voice was male, adult, uneducated, with a strong Calabrian accent. It was one forty-three in the morning and the duty sergeant wasn’t quite sure whether he was dealing with a wrong number, a hoax, or an emergency. But the next words made sense all right.

  ‘ You’d better go get him before he dies.’

  The Carabinieri station was at Bagno di Romagna, a small town high up in the Apennines on the borders of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. The locals were a staid lot; the sergeant, who was Sicilian, privately thought them dull. They were not given to silly pranks at any time, let alone a quarter to two on Sunday morning. So what the hell was going on?

  He phoned his provincial headquarters at Cesena, who called regional headquarters at Bologna, who checked with their opposite numbers in Florence before confirming that no member of the force had been reported missing on either side of the Apennines. Better get out there and have a look just the same, Cesena told him with a hint of malice. Even down there in the coastal flatlands it was a wild night. They could imagine what conditions must be like up in the mountains, having done their stint in the sticks at one time or another.

  Out where, though? Apart from the undisputed fact that the farm in question was ‘up’, the sergeant knew only that it was near a village called Santa Sofia, above a river and on the way to a church. He pored over his 1: 100 000 maps and finally selected four possibilities. If none of them proved correct they would have to wait until dawn and call out a helicopter, by which time it would probably be too late. The wind howled about the building, driving rain against the shutters.