Ratking az-1

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Then what have you done with my cigarette lighter?’

  ‘Cigarette lighter?’ the mechanic stammered. ‘What sort of cigarette lighter?’

  Zen’s smile vanished.

  ‘Why, how many have you found?’

  ‘None! I haven’t found anything.’

  ‘Then why did you ask what sort, eh? Think you can keep anything you find, eh? Supplement your lousy wages with a little private enterprise, is that it?’

  The man flung his sponge down angrily.

  ‘I’ve found nothing! I’ve just cleaned them all ready for this afternoon. There was no cigarette lighter in any of them.’

  ‘They’re going to use the company cars for the funeral?’ Zen queried in a tone of deep disgust. ‘Talk about cheap!’

  ‘It’s what Signor Ruggiero would have wanted.’

  ‘Don’t try and change the subject! You claim not to have found any lighter, is that it?’

  ‘I don’t claim anything! I didn’t find any lighter and that’s all there is to it. Have a look for yourself if you want, I’ve got nothing to hide!’

  ‘Oh, I’m going to! Don’t you worry about that, I’m going to.’

  The mechanic watched him out of the corner of his eye as he went from car to car, making an elaborate pretence of examining the interiors.

  The mud surrounding the building site where Ruggiero Miletti had been murdered had proved a rich source of impressions. A preliminary investigation, completed while Zen was still present, had yielded five different footprints and two distinct sets of tyre marks. One of the two sets consistently overlaid the other, and it was distinctive, in that one of the tyres did not match the other three. Zen had imagined that this would be a rarity, but in fact four of the cars in the garage had one odd tyre. Only one configuration, however, matched that found at the murder scene.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Zen?’

  It was Gianluigi Santucci. The Tuscan turned on the mechanic.

  ‘What has he been asking you, Massimo? If you’ve told him as much as the time, you’re out!’

  ‘Nothing!’ protested the mechanic energetically. ‘I’ve said nothing!’

  ‘That’s true,’ Zen confirmed. ‘He’s been most unhelpful.’

  ‘I haven’t found any lighter, I don’t know anything about any lighter,’ Massimo went on. ‘I told him so, but he wanted to look for himself. But he didn’t touch anything, Signor Gianluigi. I kept my eye on him the whole time.’

  Gianluigi Santucci glared at Zen.

  ‘Cigarette lighter my bollocks! What are you up to? Come on!’

  ‘I’ve lost my lighter and I thought I might have left it in the car the other day. I didn’t want to disturb the family at a moment like this so I came to check in person. But I don’t understand what you’re getting so excited about. I mean, is this garage a secret research area or something?’

  Too late, Gianluigi realized his error. In an attempt to compensate he forced a smile.

  ‘You haven’t understood, have you?’ he sneered. ‘You think you’re still in the game, but you couldn’t be more wrong. You’re a foreigner here. No one wants you, no one likes you, no one needs you. If you haven’t got your marching orders yet it just means no one can be bothered to tell you what’s happening any more! Now kindly fuck off out of here and don’t come back.’

  When Zen reached the gate the security guard was back in his place, but he was so intent on the spluttering exclamations of his walkie-talkie, cradling it to his face and murmuring to it like a mother trying to calm a baby, that Zen’s departure went as unremarked as his arrival.

  He walked on down the hill until the lane joined the main road. At the corner stood a green plastic rubbish skip, presumably the one where Ruggiero’s letter had been left. Opposite there was a bakery, an office furniture showroom, a driving school and a tobacconist displaying the familiar public telephone symbol of a blue receiver in a yellow circle. Zen went in, got two thousand lire’s worth of tokens and dialled a number in Rome.

  ‘Gilberto?’

  ‘ Who’s this? ’

  ‘Aurelio.’

  ‘ Aurelio! How’s it going? ’

  ‘Can you do me a favour?’

  ‘ Such as? ’

  ‘It means coming up here.’

  ‘ Where’s here? ’

  ‘Perugia. I’ve got problems.’

  ‘ What kind of problems? ’

  ‘Can you come up this afternoon?’

  ‘ This afternoon! Jesus.’

  Even at this depth the sunlight had finally started to filter down through the mist. There was a grove of olive trees opposite the shop, on the other side of the main road. Above the rush and scurry of the traffic they stood in monumental stillness, each leaf precisely outlined against the deep blue sky.

  ‘ What do you want done? ’

  ‘Can we talk on this line?’

  ‘ Listen, I’m in industrial espionage, you know. How long do you think I’d stay in business if I didn’t keep my lines clean? You worry about your own end.’

  Zen told his friend briefly about the murder and the large blue car that matched both the witness’s description and the tyre marks found at the scene. Then he told him what he wanted him to do and Gilberto said he would, although it might mean losing a contract to proof a leading Rome estate agent against electronic surveillance. They arranged to meet at half past four at a village a kilometre or so beyond the cemetery.

  That left lots of time to kill, so Zen rode a bus back up to the centre and wandered along the Corso. The steps of the cathedral were being used as a grandstand by some of the local young people and a few early tourists. A German youth whose exaggerated features looked as though they had been moulded from foam rubber explained loudly to his companion how he needed the sun, the sun for him was a physical necessity. The two Nordic girls he had seen two days before were now basking like seals outside another cafe. One of them had even contrived to get sunburned. Her friend was delicately pulling little wafers of flaking skin off her chest, watched hungrily by a group of young men in leather jackets, narrow ties and mirror sunglasses.

  All at once Zen saw a vigorous bulky figure in a dark grey overcoat with a black armband walking towards him across the piazza. It was Antonio Crepi. He prepared a greeting, but the Perugian passed by without a word or gesture, leaving Zen with his hand still uncertainly raised in salutation.

  It was the first time that someone had cut him dead, and it was a shock. He had always thought of it as a superficial and outmoded gesture found only in old novels. But what had just happened had nothing to do with etiquette: Antonio Crepi had made it clear that for him, and by extension for the whole of the Perugia that mattered, Zen had ceased to exist. That’s why ghosts wail, he thought, condemned to haunt a world which has no further need of them. He walked away quickly, trying to shake off the unnerving effect of the encounter.

  The air was carved into blocks by the buildings, soft and warm where the sun reached, chill and unyielding in the shadows. The continual passage from one to the other was initially as refreshing as a succession of hot and cold showers, and ultimately as enervating. Zen stopped in a small grocery and ordered a roll filled with anchovies sprinkled with vinegar and a little crushed chilli, which he ate with a glass of white wine. There was a newspaper open at the local pages on top of the freezer, and as he munched the roll Zen read an article describing the life and times of the late head of the Miletti family in such exorbitantly fulsome terms that Zen wondered in his dour Venetian way whether such a paragon would find Paradise quite good enough for him. He also wondered whether Ruggiero’s daughter had seen the article, and if so what she thought of it. Cinzia had told him what kind of drinkers the Perugians were, and what kind of lovers. What he needed to know now was what kind of murderers they were.

  By four o’clock the last of the mist had disappeared, even down in the valley below the cemetery. The warm air was scented with the heady reek of diesel oil from t
he bus which had brought him there and was now parked in the terminus circle near by. The driver was sitting on the step, smoking and reading a newspaper. Zen stood in the fading sunlight watching the courtship of two pigeons on the tiled roof of a shed below. The gurgling male, alternately bowing down and rearing up, chased the female from one row of tiles to the next. Eventually he appeared to lose interest, disheartened by her lack of appreciation, and turned away. Instantly the female stopped too, so that both birds came to a halt like toys whose batteries have run down. It seemed the end. Relationships were just too difficult, the sexes would never see eye to eye, it was all too much bother. Something essential had broken down and next year there wouldn’t be any pigeons. Then, just as suddenly as he had stopped, the male was off again, perking up his feathers and hopping after his mate with a meaningful glint in his beady eyes. Zen had watched this cycle a dozen times or more when he felt a touch on his shoulder and turned to find Gilberto grinning up at him.

  Gilberto Nieddu was so small that it wasn’t clear how he had ever managed to get into the police force. There were the inevitable rumours of bribery and favouritism, but since Gilberto’s father was only a small-time lock-smith from Nuoro this seemed unlikely. Zen preferred to think that some alert recruiting officer somewhere, realizing the appalling threat a disgruntled Gilberto would pose outside the law, had bent the rules to let him in. For four years they had worked together in Rome. The Sardinian had resigned a week after Zen’s transfer, and he was the only one of his former colleagues whom Zen still saw regularly.

  ‘Any problems?’ Zen asked him.

  ‘Only getting back here after I dumped it. You had to choose a place in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Close to the scene. Local colour.’

  Gilberto was as compact as a squash ball, sallow, ugly and muscular, yet amazingly deft in his movements. For a bet, he had once broken into the flat where a certain Vice-Questore was entertaining a lady friend and removed the couple’s clothes so stealthily that the Vice-Questore thought something supernatural must have occurred and came over all religious for a while. No, Gilberto wouldn’t have had any problems stealing an unguarded car from outside a cemetery.

  ‘Is this all really worth it?’ the Sardinian asked Zen, who merely shrugged.

  ‘How much do I owe you?’

  Gilberto Nieddu spat thoughtfully at the pigeons on the roof below.

  ‘Take me out to lunch when you get back. At the Pergola.’

  ‘The Pergola! Wouldn’t it work out cheaper just to pay your normal rates?’

  ‘Now, don’t try and wriggle out of it or I’ll send Vittorio round to see you. He’s my new enforcer. A great success. You may think you have problems now, but Vittorio can make them seem like fond memories.’

  Zen handed him a key with a number stamped on the shaft.

  ‘This opens a luggage locker at the station. There’s something inside, wrapped up in a plastic bag. I’d like to know what it is.’

  The Sardinian looked at him long and hard, shaking his head slowly.

  ‘You know something, Aurelio? You aren’t really cut out to be a cop.’

  ‘Imagine living in a country where the cops are all people who’re cut out for the job.’

  ‘I’ll phone you tomorrow morning.’

  Zen shook his head.

  ‘ I ’ll phone you.’

  The Sardinian spat once more.

  ‘Christ, you have got problems.’

  The bus driver started his engine again. Zen just had time to cross to the phone booth, dial the police emergency number and give the message he had prepared before boarding the bus as the doors were closing. A few moments later they passed Gilberto walking back up the hill to the place where he had left his own car, just below the massive wall of the columbarium in the cemetery where Ruggiero Miletti had been interred two hours previously.

  The switchboard on the ground floor of the Questura was manned by a chubby youth who was holding a large roll, turning it from one side to the other and studying it closely like a wrestler looking for a hold. As Zen came through the door he suddenly saw an opening and lunged forward, so that for the next thirty seconds or so he was unable to reply to his visitor’s question.

  ‘He wouldn’t give his name,’ he said finally. ‘Probably a hoax.’

  ‘What exactly did he say?’

  ‘Just said he wanted to report a blue Fiat abandoned on the road to Cannara, near the scene of the murder.’

  He kept glancing warily at his roll out of the corner of his eye, as though it might attack him. Zen leant forward on the top of the switchboard.

  ‘Listen, this could be very important. I want that car brought in, turned over to the laboratory and given the works.’

  ‘They’ll need confirmation in writing.’

  ‘They’ll get it.’

  The telephonist nodded. He was too eager to get back to his roll to ask how Zen had found out about the anonymous phone call.

  Upstairs on the third floor Zen stepped into the inspectors’ room, but there was no one there. He was about to leave when he froze in an awkward position midway across the room. Then he heard it again, a slight but unmistakable sound from next door. Someone was in his office.

  He moved as quietly as he could towards the connecting door, grasped the handle and with a single movement flung the door open.

  ‘About time too! I was beginning to think I’d have to spend the night here.’

  He leant back against the door, his body slowly un-tensing.

  ‘Ellen.’

  ‘Ah, so you remember my name!’

  ‘It’s wonderful to see you.’

  ‘Really? I certainly wouldn’t have guessed it from the way you’ve been behaving. Why haven’t you telephoned me?’

  ‘I did!’ he lied automatically. ‘You were never there!’

  ‘I was!’

  ‘Not when I phoned.’

  ‘I’ve been home almost every evening. When did you phone?’

  ‘Well, anyway, let’s not quarrel. The important thing is that you’re here. How long can you stay?’

  ‘I’ll have to see. It depends.’

  He tried to kiss her, but she evaded him in a half-angry, half-flirtatious way, so they were in the middle of a clumsy clinch when Lucaroni walked in.

  ‘Oh fuck!’ he said, on his way out again.

  Zen turned on him.

  ‘Didn’t anyone ever teach you to knock? You’re not home on the farm now, you know!’

  ‘Sorry, chief. Really sorry. I didn’t think anybody was here. I was going to put it up for you.’

  ‘Put what up?’

  Lucaroni unwrapped the package he was carrying to reveal a brand-new crucifix, the wounds daubed with bright red paint.

  ‘Just what you wanted, right?’ the inspector prompted eagerly. ‘Just like the other one.’

  Zen glanced at Ellen, who was staring at him in horrified disbelief.

  ‘I’ll explain later,’ he said wearily. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything later.’

  A small white plastic bag containing various packets of waxed paper marked ‘For Foodstuffs’ lay propped against the gear-lever of the little Fiat. The draught coming in through the ventilation ducts made it tremble continuously. They should never have come, thought Zen. What a crazy idea, picnicking up a mountain at this time of year. A crazy foreign idea.

  It had all started the night before, when Ellen asked, ‘Is that Assisi over there?’ They were standing looking out of his hotel window. In the distance a mess of lights were spread out across the face of the night like a shovelful of glowing cinders, flickering and scintillating in the currents of air rising from the villages in the plain between. Let’s go there tomorrow, she’d suggested, and then talked about her previous visits, enthusing about the place so much that he grew quite determined to dislike it. But it wasn’t until Ellen came to pick him up that he discovered that she had already bought everything for a picnic lunch. One o’clock in Piazza de
i Partigiani after a stressful morning at work was very different from eleven o’clock the night before after making love, but Ellen was bubbling with such enthusiasm that he hadn’t the heart to voice his reservations. But he still thought it was crazy, and he’d been right. Here they were, parked a thousand metres up the dough-shaped mountain, huddled in Ellen’s Fiat 500 because despite the sun the wind outside was wicked. Even the view was all but invisible through a windscreen coated with Roman grime. Foreign craziness!

  Ellen started to unwrap the food: a mound of ricotta, slices of cooked ham, olives in oil, half a loaf of bread. On a warm sunny day in the open air it might have been idyllic. Eaten off sheets of wrapping paper balanced precariously on their shivering knees the cheese looked a disgusting white excrescence, the ham pale and sickly and the olives slimy. Even the wine, a heavy red, was a failure. Cold and shaken from the journey, thick with sediment and drunk from a plastic beaker, it tasted like medicine. But like medicine it did him good, and the food tasted better than it looked, and after a while the silence grew less tense and they began to chat about the contrast between bloody-minded, earnest Perugia, just visible on its windswept ridge as a distant smudge of grey, and Assisi, symbol of everything nice and pretty and kind, whose pink stone made even its fortifications look as innocent as an illustration in a book of fairy tales. But as Zen pointed out, at least in Perugia you were spared the relentless commercialization of the pilgrim city, the three-dimensional postcards of a glamorous St Francis preaching to an audience of stuffed animals, the bottles of ‘Monk’s Delight’ liqueur, the ceramic prayer texts suitable for mounting over the toilet, the little figurines of lovable monks with round bellies and mischievous smiles.

  ‘Yes, but despite all that there really is something special about the place, isn’t there?’ Ellen insisted.

  It was the sort of comment, at once vague and gushing, that always irritated him. Sometimes he wondered whether that was why she kept making them.

  ‘To me it’s just another pretty Umbrian hill town,’ he retorted. ‘It’s a shame it’s been ruined.’

  He was going too far, pushing too hard, saying things he didn’t really believe. It was quite deliberate. Something had gone wrong between them, and he intended to find out what it was. Normally he handed over responsibility for the routine maintenance of their relationship to Ellen, but she was letting him down, so he was going to try the only technique he knew: drop some explosive overboard and see what floated to the surface.