Ratking az-1

by Michael Dibdin

  The small piazza into which Zen eventually emerged had an eerie, underwater look, due to a uniform coating of lurid green light from a neon sign mounted on a building otherwise no different from the others. ‘CINEMA MINERVA’, it read. Zen made no attempt to find out what was showing. He paid, walked down a dark corridor and pushed through a curtain into a deep pool of sound and flickering light. The auditorium was almost empty. He walked without hesitation to the very front row, sat down and lay back, gazing up at the screen. Enormous blurred masses swarmed into view and out again. An ear the size of a flying saucer appeared for a moment and then was whisked away and replaced by a no less monstrous nose and half an eye. Giant voices boomed at each other. He snuggled down in his seat with a blissful smile, battered by images, swamped by noise, letting the film wash over him.

  It was the perfect mental massage, and when it was over he rose feeling slightly numb, but tingling and refreshed. In the foyer he paused to look at the posters, and learned that he had just seen a comedy called Pull The Other One! featuring a fat balding middle-aged clerk, the slim glamorous starlet madly in love with him, the clerk’s wily roguish ne’er-do-well cousin and the cousin’s battleaxe of a wife. As he stood there he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  He would never have recognized Cinzia Miletti if she hadn’t approached him, for she was virtually in disguise: a silk scarf entirely covering her hair, dark glasses and a long tweed coat buttoned right up to the chin. She lowered the glasses for an instant so that he could see her eyes, then reused them again.

  ‘Did you enjoy it? We did, didn’t we, Stefania?’

  They were the classic female twosome, mouse and minx. Stefania played her role to perfection, managing to give the impression of existing only provisionally, to a limited extent, and being quite prepared at the drop of a hat either to become completely real or to vanish without trace, whichever was more convenient.

  Zen was so astounded at finding Cinzia there on that particular evening that he could think of nothing whatever to say.

  ‘I think he’s just fantastic, don’t you?’ she went on unperturbed. ‘I’ve seen all his films except Do Me A Favour! which funnily enough I’ve never managed to catch although it’s on TV all the time. He’s working in America this year, you know.’

  By now the foyer was completely empty. On every side images of love and violence erupted from glass-fronted posters advertising coming attractions. In her booth the cashier sat knitting behind a tank in which a solitary goldfish swam in desultory circles.

  Cinzia looked at her companion.

  ‘I must go,’ breathed Stefania, and was gone.

  ‘Would you walk me home?’ Cinzia asked Zen. ‘I’m staying here in town, it’s only five minutes’ walk, not worth calling a taxi, but I don’t like to go alone. There are so many Arabs about now. Of course I’m not racist, but let’s face it, they’ve got a different culture, just like the South.’

  Still he couldn’t reply, his head too full of questions to which he didn’t particularly want to know the answers. But he managed to nod agreement.

  ‘Of course you think I’m shameless,’ Cinzia remarked as they set off, the windless muffled night hardly disturbed by their footsteps. ‘Do you believe in a life after death? I don’t know what to think. But if there isn’t one then nothing makes any difference, does it, and if there is I’m sure it’ll all be far too spiritual for anyone to get in a huff over the way the rest of us carry on.’

  The part of the city through which they were walking reminded Zen of Venice, but a Venice brutally fractured, as though each canal were a geological fault and the houses to either side had taken a plunge or been wrenched up all askew and left to tumble back on themselves, throwing out buttresses and retaining walls for support as best they could.

  ‘I mean, do you really think the dead sit around counting who goes to the funeral and how many wreaths there are and how much they cost?’ his companion carried on. ‘I just hate cemeteries, anyway. They remind me of death.’

  Her tone was even more strident than usual. Zen wondered if she wasn’t slightly high on drink or drugs.

  ‘Going home to stick it up her, eh? Filthy old bumfucker! Squeeze it tight and you might just manage to get a hard-on, you miserable little rat!’

  The voice was just overhead, but when they looked up there was no one there.

  ‘Good evening, Evelina,’ Cinzia replied calmly.

  ‘Don’t you good evening me, you shameless cunt! You blow-job artist! I bet you beg for it on bended knees! I bet you let him shove it where he wants! Whore! Masturbator!’

  They turned a corner and the malignant ravings became blurred and indistinct.

  ‘Poor Evelina used to be one of the most fashionable women in Perugia,’ Cinzia explained. ‘Nobody seems to know what happened, but one day during a concert she suddenly stood up, took off her knickers and showed everyone her bottom. After that she was put away until they closed the asylums, since when she’s lived in that place. It’s one of her family’s properties, they own half the city. Sometimes you hear her singing, in the summertime. But mostly she just sits up there like a spider, sticking her head out of the window to insult the passers-by. It’s nothing personal, she says the same to everyone.’

  For some time now Zen had been wondering where they were going. When Cinzia said she was staying ‘in town’, he’d assumed that she meant the Miletti villa. But although the structure of the city still defeated him in detail, he had got his bearings well enough to know that this could not be their destination. Eventually Cinzia turned up a set of steps rising steeply from the street and unlocked a door at the top.

  ‘You’ll come in for a moment, won’t you?’

  Without waiting for an answer she disappeared, leaving the door open.

  Zen slowly mounted the steps, and then paused on the threshold. Ruggiero Miletti was dead and the family blamed him. What better revenge than to disgrace him by rigging a scandal involving the dead man’s daughter, a married woman? But he told himself not to be crazy. How could they have known he was going to that cinema when he hadn’t known himself until he saw the name at the station?

  A narrow stairway of glossy marble led straight into a sitting room arranged around a huge open fireplace. There was no sign of Cinzia. The room had roughly plastered walls and a low ceiling supported on enormous joists trimmed out of whole trees. Everything was spick and span, more like a hotel than a home. Zen was instinctively drawn towards the one area of disorder, a desk piled with leaflets, envelopes, magazines, newspapers, letters and bills. He picked up one of the envelopes and held it up to the light: the watermark showed the heraldic hybrid with which he was becoming familiar, with the wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. Next to it lay a note from Cinzia to her husband about collecting their daughter from school.

  ‘This is really Gianluigi’s place,’ Cinzia explained as she breezed in. She had changed into a striped shirt and a pair of faded jeans that were slightly too large for her. ‘I only use it when he’s away, there’s no telling who I might find here otherwise. What do you want to drink?’

  ‘Anything at all.’

  Her bare feet padded across the polished terracotta tiles to the bottles lined along a shelf in the corner. Zen sat down on the large sofa which occupied most of one wall, thinking about that last card which he’d fondly thought he had up his sleeve. Thank God he hadn’t tried to play it! The trap had been beautifully set, and he’d only avoided it because thanks to Bartocci’s machinations he’d already fallen into another one.

  Cinzia brought them both large measures of whisky and sat down astride the wicker chair in front of the writing desk, facing him over the ridged wooden back.

  ‘I don’t normally drink with strangers,’ she remarked. ‘It’s quite a thrill. We do all our drinking in private, you see, in the family. Like everything else, for that matter!’

  Cinzia was beginning to remind Zen more than a little of his wife. Luisella had also been the child of a succes
sful businessman, owner of one of the most important chemist’s shops in Treviso, and she too had had brothers who had dominated her childhood, driving her to defend herself in unorthodox ways. Life was a game like tennis, set up by men for men to win with powerful serves she would never be able to return. She countered by deliberately breaking the rules, exhausting her opponents and winning by default.

  ‘That’s a clue by the way,’ she continued. ‘You’re never going to get anywhere if you don’t understand the people involved.’

  ‘I thought the people involved were Calabrian shepherds.’

  ‘Oh, well, I don’t know anything about them. You should have asked Stefania. Her brother’s best friend is Calabrian, a medical student. But his family is extremely rich and I don’t expect he knows any shepherds.’

  She got up abruptly.

  ‘Shall we have some music? Let’s see, I can never remember how to work this thing.’

  She pressed a button and one of the hit songs of the season emerged at full volume, the tough, shallow lyrics gloatingly declaimed by a star of the mid-sixties who had traded in her artless looks and girlish lispings for a streetwise manner and a voice laden with designer cynicism.

  ‘I’d rather just talk,’ Zen shouted.

  With a flick of her finger she restored the silence.

  ‘I thought you were bored. Well, what shall we talk about? How about sex? Let’s see how you rate in that area. What do you think we go in for, here in Perugia? Wife-swapping? Open marriage? Group gropes? Singles bars?’

  ‘None of those, I should have thought,’ Zen replied with a slight smile.

  ‘And quite right too. Bravo, you’re improving. There’s some of that around, of course, but it’s not traditional So what do you think is the speciality of the house? I’m talking about something typically Perugian, home-made from the very finest local ingredients only.’

  She finished her drink in one gulp.

  ‘No idea? I don’t think you’re a very good detective, I’ve given you loads of clues. It’s incest, of course.’

  She banged her empty glass down on the desk, as though she had expected to find the surface several centimetres lower than it actually was.

  ‘Don’t look so surprised, it makes perfect sense. From our point of view marriage has one big drawback, you see. It lets an outsider into the family. Much safer to stick to one’s close relations. There’s no trusting cousins and the like, of course. No, we’re talking mother and son, father and daughter. See what I mean? If you don’t know these things how can you hope to get anything right? For example, you disapprove of my going to the cinema this evening, but what do you think I should be doing? Cleaving to the bosom of my grieving family? What do you think they’re doing? Daniele will be locked in his bedroom watching the latest batch of video nasties. Silvio? He’ll be stripping for action with Helmut or whatever his name is this week. And Pietro will have gone to bed with a nice English murder story. Not much in the way of company, you see.’

  ‘And your husband?’

  Zen was still irrationally worried that Gianluigi might walk in at any moment, hunting rifle in hand. Or would he use the other gun, the little 4.5mm pistol registered in Cinzia’s name? Where was that kept?

  ‘He’s still in Milan,’ Cinzia replied carelessly. ‘He couldn’t get a flight back because of all the journalists wanting to get down here, or so he claims. Anyway, he has nothing to do with it, he’s not family. Of course, he didn’t realize that when he married me. But you don’t break into the Miletti family as simply as that! So he’s been reduced to other expedients.’

  ‘And why did you marry him?’

  Cinzia looked around vaguely, as if trying to remember.

  ‘Well, he’s very handsome. I know men don’t think so, but he is. That might almost have been enough.’

  ‘But it wasn’t.’

  ‘No. I married him to spite my father.’

  Zen gave her a look of appraisal.

  ‘You’re not being very typically Perugian yourself, are you, telling me all this?’

  Cinzia’s eyes suddenly flashed and she smiled, displaying an excessive number of rather dirty teeth.

  ‘It’s strange, isn’t it? I knew his death would be a release, but I thought it would be terrible, that I would suffer. I thought he would always make me suffer, whatever happened. But it’s not like that at all. All this time, all these years, I’ve been lugging this weight around with me, for so long now that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be free of it. I’d even begun to mistake it for part of my own body, an incurable growth that I’ve got to learn to live with. But it’s not, it’s not! That disease, that horror, that swelling, it was all his! I’m whole and healthy and light, I find. Sorry for his death? I feel like dancing on his coffin!’

  But there were tears in her eyes. For a moment it looked as though she was going to break down.

  ‘There used to be this old-fashioned clothes shop on the Corso,’ she went on more quietly. ‘It’s gone now, they’ve turned it into a boutique. It was full of wooden drawers and cupboards and enormous heavy mirrors on stands and boxes of buttons and threads and trimming. All the clothes were wrapped in tissue paper. I can still remember the sound it made, a lovely special sound, as light and thin as the clothes were thick and heavy. Everything smelt of mothballs and lavender and cedar. That shop was like a dream world to me, full of secrets and wonders. My mother took me there occasionally, and we used to pass the window every Sunday after mass. They always had beautiful things in the window. There was. one I craved in particular, a pink nightdress with a lace hem and a frilly neck and a family of rabbits embroidered on the chest. I always stopped to look at it, although I knew it was much too expensive. But when my eighth birthday came I found it among my presents, with a little card from my father.’

  He saw that she was weeping, not for her father but for herself, for the child she had been.

  ‘Well, I expect you can guess the rest! That evening he came to my room, to see how I looked in my new nightdress. He told me to sit on his knee. That was normal, I didn’t think twice about it. But what happened next wasn’t normal. I knew it must be wrong, because afterwards he made me promise not to tell anyone about it, not even Mamma. What had happened was our secret, he said. That was the agreement we’d made. He’d kept his part by buying me the nightdress, now it was up to me to keep mine. I didn’t remember making any agreement, but what could I do? Fathers know best, don’t they? So although I didn’t like him touching me the way he had, I decided not to tell anybody. I didn’t realize that by keeping quiet I was walking into a trap.’

  She sniffed loudly and picked up her cigarettes.

  ‘After that he came to visit me almost every evening. After he had gone I found that my nightie was covered in a horrible sticky mess with a strange sour smell. I went to the bathroom and scrubbed myself until I was raw. But I still didn’t tell anyone. In the end he stopped bothering to make any pretence of cuddles, it became fucking pure and simple. And his filth was no longer just on my skin, it was inside me.’

  Zen tried to think of something to say, but it was useless. Faced with this ordinary everyday atrocity, he felt ashamed to be a man, ashamed to be human.

  ‘Finally I threatened to tell Mamma. I was older now and more daring. It was then that he finally sprang his trap. If you do that, he told me, we shall go to prison, both of us. Because it’s really all your fault. You encouraged me, you led me on. You must have enjoyed it, otherwise you would have told someone before now! You’re as bad as me, my girl, or even worse.’

  She lit her cigarette and smiled at Zen, inviting him to appreciate her father’s cleverness.

  ‘The worst thing about his lies was that they were partly true. Because although I hated it worse than anything, I did enjoy it too, once I got used to it. Of course it felt nice, what do you expect? And don’t you think it was flattering, in a way, to be preferred to my mother? What a position to be in! On the one hand I could send us both to
prison, shame my mother, beggar my brothers, scandalize the city and blacken the Miletti name for evermore. On the other hand, I could do, I did, exactly the opposite, keeping my father satisfied and happy and my mother ignorant, helping to shore up their marriage, holding the family together and preserving my unsuspecting brothers, who thought they were so superior to me, from disgrace. Half the time I felt like a vicious little whore and the other half like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel. But mostly I just felt my power! My father used the carrot as well as the stick, of course, and that meant I got everything I wanted, clothes, jewellery, perfume. And when his friends and business associates came round, I would put on my finery and try out my power on them too. And it worked! Antonio Crepi, for example, used to give me looks that would have melted a candle. I was twelve at the time.’

  ‘Did your mother never suspect what was going on?’

  After a long time Cinzia looked up.

  ‘That’s a terrible question,’ she said. ‘At the time I was sure she didn’t know. How could she have known, ‘I thought, and not done anything about it? Now I’m not so sure. She would have had every reason to look the other way. Besides…’

  She stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes I think she deliberately ignored what was happening, in order to punish me. Perhaps it was her way of taking revenge. Perhaps she too thought that it was my fault, that I enjoyed it, that I was as bad as he was, or even worse.’

  She straightened up, her voice bright and brisk again.

  ‘Anyway, none of that matters now. There was a car crash, she died, he was in hospital for a long time and when he came out everything had changed. He may have seen her death as a judgement. I don’t know, we never talked about it of course. But he never came near me again, and I was left high and dry with all that power lying idle inside me. It didn’t lie idle long, needless to say.’