Ratking az-1

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘I wanted to contact you this morning, but…’

  ‘ I was out. I’d arranged to meet someone.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I met Cinzia Miletti in town. She’d been waiting for you.’

  ‘ Well, I’d been waiting for her, too! We’d arranged to meet at her house.’

  ‘She told me that you phoned her and asked for a meeting in town.’

  ‘ I really can’t imagine why she should have said that, Com missioner. It’s exactly the opposite of what happened. She phoned me and asked me to come straight over. She didn’t say why, but obviously in my position…’

  It occurred to Zen that while they were talking any incoming call announcing Ruggiero’s release would be blocked.

  ‘Never mind about that,’ he said briskly. ‘There’s something I want to discuss with you. It’s about a letter I’ve received.’

  ‘ A letter? What son of letter? ’

  ‘I’d rather not discuss it on the phone. Do you think you could drop into my office? It won’t take long.’

  ‘ Well, it’s a bit difficult. It’s a question of the family, you see. I’m not sure they’d approve, just at present.’

  They’d approve still less if they knew what it was about, thought Zen.

  ‘ Perhaps later on, once this is all over.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll contact you later then.’

  He hung up, his hand hovering hopefully above the receiver. But the phone remained sullenly silent.

  His suspicions were confirmed. The uncharacteristic fuss and fluster in Ivy’s manner was surely a proof that she knew only too well which letter he was talking about and was in mortal dread of the family finding out.

  He took out the letter and scanned the final lines again. That mistake was curious: ‘… well-worn consecutively numbered notes…’ For a moment it had made him inclined to doubt the authenticity of the whole thing. But it was only a detail, and it didn’t alter the fact that no one but Ivy could have done it. She must have taken the letter straight to a photocopy shop after collecting it from the skip and then posted the copy to Zen before returning to the house, calculating that if the copy came to light each of the Milettis would equally be under suspicion. But that calculation had gone up in smoke with the original letter, and since then she must have bitterly regretted her rashness. Why had she taken such a risk? Was it because she knew the Miletti family only too well, and was determined that this time at least everything should not be conveniently hushed up? Had sending Zen the letter been her humble way of serving the great principle upon which Luciano Bartocci had now apparently turned his back, of not letting the bastards get away with it? At all events, she had committed no crime, so there was no reason for him to pursue the matter any further.

  He sat there until his eyelids began to droop, then phoned the switchboard and told them that he would be at his hotel. There was no point in continuing his lonely vigil.

  But why couldn’t he rid himself of the eerie sensation that it had already happened, that everyone knew except him, that he was being deliberately kept in the dark?

  SEVEN

  He was in bed, in the room in Venice where he had spent his childhood, and he was still that child. A figure moved slowly through the uncertain light towards him, as faceless and monumental as Death in an old engraving. But he wasn’t frightened, because he knew that it was all just a joke, a little comedy of the kind fathers like to play with their sons.

  He’d always known his father would come back. Not that he’d ever admitted it before, even to himself. But nothing and no one could ever really convince him that a world where fathers just disappeared one day and never returned could be anything other than a pitiful sham, a transparent hoax. He had never been taken in, not really, not inside, but he’d known moments of doubt, so his delight and relief were unbounded now he found that his instincts had been right all along! For here his father was, sitting down beside him, hugging and kissing him, taking his hand again and laughing at the silly terrors his little game had aroused in his son.

  The phone beside his bed started to ring. It was the duty officer on the intercept desk at the law courts.

  ‘ We’ve just picked up a message on the Miletti family line, dottore. It was from the kidnappers. They’ve released Signore Miletti .’

  Thank God, Zen thought with obscure fervour. Thank God.

  ‘Have you informed Dottor Bartocci?’

  ‘ Yes. The pick-up arrangements are to be put into effect immediately.’

  ‘Where has Signor Miletti been released?’

  ‘ If you’ve got a pen I’ll read the directions as they gave them to the family.’

  Zen scribbled the instructions on the back of an envelope. They were to take the road to Foligno, turn right towards Cannara just beyond Santa Maria degli Angeli and drive until they saw a telegraph pole with a yellow mark. Here they were to turn left, then take the second right and go about a kilometre to a building site where Ruggiero Miletti was waiting, unable to move because of his bad leg. It had been this problem which had led to the complex arrangements for picking up Ruggiero on his release. Normally kidnap victims are simply turned loose in the middle of nowhere and left to find their own way to the nearest house or main road. But since Miletti was immobilized it had been agreed that he would be fetched by a group consisting of Pietro Miletti escorted by Zen and Palottino in the Alfetta, with an ambulance in attendance in case Ruggiero required immediate attention. After the events of Saturday night and Bartocci’s angry phone call the previous day, Zen half expected to be rebuffed when he rang the Milettis. But Pietro, although cool, made no attempt to change the arrangements. Now the family’s fears had been proved groundless, the bungled pay-off could be dismissed as just another example of clumsy incompetence on the part of the police, the latest in a long list of blunders.

  Twenty minutes later the convoy set out. It was brilliantly sunny, as though summer had leapt forward a few months. People were moving more slowly and nonchalantly, without the pretext of a destination or purpose. They glanced curiously at the line of official vehicles which drove along the boulevard running along the lower ridges of the city, through a gateway and down in a series of long, lazy curves, dropping over two hundred metres to the valley floor. Shortly after passing the enormous domed basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli Palottino swerved across a patch of loose gravel into a minor road. The land was dead flat, divided into large ploughed fields almost devoid of trees. Modern brick and concrete duplexes squatted here and there along the road, each with a few rows of vines trained along wires suspended from concrete posts behind them. This would all have been uninhabited malarial marshland until the postwar boom made it worth draining. The road ran straight ahead, the telegraph poles passing at regular intervals to the right.

  The yellow splash of paint showed up hundreds of metres away in the bright sunshine. A farm track led off to the left opposite, flanked by deep drainage ditches. Speeds dropped now and the vehicles closed up. The fields appeared to have been abandoned, the broken stalks of the crop left to rot in a vast expanse of furrowed mud which the recent rains had reduced to a sticky mess. Could there really be a building site in the middle of this swamp rapidly reverting to nature after a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with civilization, Zen wondered? There had always been a possibility that the telephone call had been a hoax and this seemed to be getting more likely all the time.

  The bleak landscape made Zen think back to his dream, to his own father’s fate. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Mussolini thought the war would be over in a matter of weeks, and so that he could claim a share of the spoils for Italy he offered to send troops to the Russian front. The Germans had no illusions about the military effectiveness of their principal ally, and at first they agreed to accept only a few divisions of the Alpini, the specialist mountain troops who could hold their own with any in Europe. But that was not enough to give Mussolini the bargaining leverage he wanted. He insisted on sending more, and
so two hundred and thirty thousand Italians were packed into trains and sent off to Russia, Zen’s father among them. But the war was not over in a matter of weeks, and the Italian conscripts had neither the training nor the equipment to fight a winter campaign in Russia. They suffered ninety thousand casualties. Sixty-six thousand more made the weary trek home again. As for the remaining seventy-five thousand, nothing more was ever heard of them. They simply disappeared without trace. The Soviet authorities had no reason to take any interest in the fate of a handful of foreign invaders when over twenty million of their own people had been killed while, as for the Italians, it had suddenly become clear that they had in fact been anti-Fascists to a man all along and could hardly be expected to sympathize with the relatives of those few fanatics who had been rash enough to fight for the despised Duce. In any case, the whole country was in ruins and there were more urgent matters to attend to.

  ‘There it is!’ Palottino burst out.

  From a distance it resembled some piece of modern sculpture: disjointed planes, random angles, a lot of holes. It was only as they drew nearer that he began to make out that it was the concrete skeleton of an unfinished three-storey duplex, its half-built walls, pillars and floors rising out of a sea of mud. On each side a wide staircase led up in six zigzag sections, breaking off abruptly on an open landing about twenty metres above the ground.

  They parked a short distance away. Zen got out, jumped over the ditch running alongside the track and began to work his way along the edge of the field towards the back of the concrete structure, his shoes rapidly clogging up with mud. The building site was surrounded by a token fence consisting of two slack strands of barbed wire. Pietro Miletti was slowly making his way after him.

  On the south side of the structure the concrete was cleaner than to the north, where it was discoloured with moss. Here the stains were reddish-brown, from the twisted-off ends of the rusty reinforcing wire. It felt warm and sheltered. Plants had already seeded in crevices around the foundations, preparing to take over the instant man’s will failed. A yellow butterfly loped by with its strange broken flight, like an early film.

  Zen looked round at the floor of unfinished concrete littered with cement bags, lengths of wire, nails and lumps of wood, a lone glove. The upper storeys had not yet been floored and through the concrete joists and beams above the sky was visible. There was no sign that anyone had been there for months.

  ‘Papa!’

  Pietro Miletti appeared, his elegant shoes and trousers bespattered with mud.

  Zen scraped some of the mud off his shoes on the bottom step of the staircase.

  ‘I’m afraid it was a hoax.’

  ‘But why should they do that? What have they got to gain?’

  Pietro sounded indignant, as though the kidnappers had broken the rules of a game and ought to be penalized.

  ‘Perhaps it wasn’t really the gang who phoned you.’

  ‘It was them, all right. Do you think I don’t know his damned voice by now? Besides, who else would it be?’

  ‘How should I know?’ Zen snapped back, his tension finding an issue. ‘Someone who hates your guts. There must be plenty of them around.’

  He turned away towards the outside of the building, veering to the right to complete his circuit of the structure. In the distance someone sounded a horn several times. The view ahead was obscured by a section of partially completed walling at the east end, but when he reached the corner Zen found that the only unpredictable feature of the landscape was a river which cut across the track about a hundred metres further on. Once, no doubt, there would have been a bridge, since swept away by floods or war. Or perhaps it had never existed. It was hard to say whether the track continued on the other side or not.

  It was only when he turned to the more immediate problem of finding a way through the waste of mud that Zen noticed the figure lying slumped against the wall. He just had time to turn, plant one hand on Pietro Miletti’s chest and push him back, indignantly protesting.

  The floor was made up of dark red hexagonal tiles touching at their points, separated by triangles of a deep chestnut colour. Another way of looking at it was that the basic form was a large lozenge consisting of a red hexagonal core surrounded by six brown triangular tips, or again, diagonal strips of red hexagons kept in place by pairs of triangular brown wedges. The strips ran in both directions, creating a number of crosses. It should have been possible, theoretically, to work out how many there were. But it would have taken more than just time and ingenuity. You would have needed something else, some understanding of the principles involved, access to formulae and equations, a head for figures. Something he hadn’t got, at any rate. As it was, an irrelevant image kept popping up in the corner of his eye, dragging his attention away: the image of an old man lying slumped in the mud against a wall of concrete blocks, turned away, as though death were an act as shameful as intercourse or defecation, which he had sought to conceal as far as possible, even in the bleakly exposed place where it had come to him.

  Zen forced his attention back to the floor. But now a new pattern emerged as the red and brown shapes blocked together to form overlapping triangles all pointing across the room at the double doors opposite. These doors were now firmly closed, but they had opened several times since Zen’s arrival, admitting a succession of visitors who had forced their way through the mass of bodies and expectant faces in the corridor outside, sweltering under television lights and waving microphones in front of anyone who appeared.

  It was six o’clock in the evening, four hours since the Deputy Public Prosecutor had summoned Zen to his office in the law courts. When he arrived he had been told to wait, and he had been waiting ever since. He was being put in his place, softened up for what was to come. And what was that? ‘When they found a policeman at the pay-off they must have panicked,’ Major Volpi had remarked to Di Leonardo when they arrived together at the scene in a Carabinieri helicopter. Yes, the death of Ruggiero Miletti was Zen’s fault. He was completely innocent, but it was his fault. Even the tiles concurred, for now the arrows had all flipped over and were pointing at him, pointing out the guilty party, the incompetent official, the unworthy son. The pain that tugged at the muscles of his stomach and chest was so intimately hurtful that he knew it was nothing but useless unspent emotion. What he needed was to break down and howl like a child, and it was the effort not to do so that was tearing at him. It was all his fault, his fault, his fault. He had never known the man, but it was his fault. He was condemned by an image which had haunted him for over thirty years: a poor defenceless body lying curled up in a vast flat dismal landscape, a father abandoned to his lonely fate. He must be guilty. There could be no excuse for such a death.

  It was almost a relief when the door opposite suddenly opened and Ettore Di Leonardo appeared, immaculate as ever in a dark suit and sober tie.

  ‘This way!’

  The Public Prosecutor called him like a dog as he strode towards the door behind which a continuous threatening murmur could be heard. Zen obediently rose and followed, wondering as a dog perhaps does at his stupidity in not understanding why they were going that way, where their enemies lay in wait.

  The gentlemen of the press had had a fairly lean time of it so far. Di Leonardo’s personal secretary had issued a statement shortly after midday, a masterpiece of prolixity that took about five minutes to say that Ruggiero Miletti had been found dead and that another statement would be issued in due course. Since then anyone who had been unwise enough to venture along the corridor had been pounced upon and picked clean. Magistrates, lawyers, various clerks, a court reporter, a telephone repair man, and even a number of ordinary human beings untouched by the grace of public office had been accosted, to no avail. So when the Deputy Public Prosecutor himself suddenly appeared in person the assembled newshounds reacted like a gaggle of novices witnessing an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

  Appropriately enough Di Leonardo’s first gesture, a hand raised to still the cl
amour, looked not unlike a blessing. When complete silence had fallen he then produced a sheet of paper from his pocket, folded it back on itself to remove the crease, smoothed it out a number of times and then read a statement to the effect that inquiries were proceeding, steps being taken, fruitful avenues opening up and concrete results expected within a short space of time. Having done so he folded the sheet of paper again, replaced it in his pocket and made to leave.

  The reporters protested vociferously and blocked his path. Di Leonardo looked flabbergasted, as though never before in his experience had the media failed to be satisfied by the reading of a prepared statement. But questions continued to be hurled at him from every side, and eventually, as an extraordinary mark of favour, he consented to answer one or two of them.

  The first came from a man in the front row, a crumpled, resilient-looking individual with the look of someone who has been dropped on his head from a great height at some stage in his life.

  ‘Is it true that the magistrate investigating the Miletti case is to be replaced?’

  Di Leonardo glared back in frigid indignation.

  ‘Certainly not! Dottor Bartocci is and will remain in charge of the investigation into the kidnapping of Ruggiero Miletti.’

  ‘And into his murder?’ called a younger reporter on the fringes of the group.

  ‘That is another and quite separate development, whose importance and urgency I need hardly stress. In addition to the kidnapping case, Dottor Bartocci is already handling the murder of Avvocato Valesio. My wish, the wish of all of us, is simply that we may as quickly as possible get to the bottom of the shocking and cold-blooded crime which has stunned and appalled the entire country, and arrest and punish those responsible. In order to avoid placing an impossible burden on the shoulders of my young colleague, it has been decided that the investigation of the events whose tragic outcome was discovered this morning will be directed by Dottor Rosella Foria.’