Ratking az-1

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Rubbish!’ she’d retorted when he claimed to be grief-stricken.

  ‘But my father’s dead!’ he’d cried with a dramatic gesture. ‘I’ve got a right to be upset. It’s only natural!’

  ‘But you’re not upset. On the contrary, you’re quite relieved.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  But he had known that she was right. That was what was so amazing about Ivy, her ability to reach into his mind and show him things he had never dared admit to himself were there. It was terrible, sometimes, how right she could be.

  The policeman, a rather attractive young fellow with an enormous moustache, was checking the driver’s documents. Silvio thought he’d seen him somewhere before. And wasn’t there something familiar about the spot where they had been stopped too? The sun was high and it was unpleasantly hot in the taxi. He felt grotesquely overdressed in his heavy underwear, thick suit and overcoat, perspiring all over. But the moisture remained trapped between flesh and fabric, unable to do its business properly. Silvio consulted his watch. The patrolman was now walking in a maddeningly leisurely fashion around the taxi, inspecting it closely, taking his time. If this went on much longer he was going to be really late.

  After that rude awakening he’d tried in vain to get back to sleep, but in the end he’d given up all hope and gone downstairs, only to find that Daniele had scoffed all his special organic goat’s yoghurt rich in the live bacilli which Silvio’s homoeopathist was adamant he needed to maintain the precarious equilibrium of his health. The goaty taste was what attracted Silvio, though. Everything to do with goats came into that special category where pleasure and disgust struggled for supremacy like two naked wrestlers. Sweat was another, and farts and bad breath. Gianluigi’s breath was quite overpowering sometimes, because of his indigestion problems no doubt, or those teeth of his which never saw a brush, packed with rich, undisturbed deposits of plaque, so that he wondered sometimes how Cinzia could stand it. But perhaps she too loved to loathe, longed to stretch herself languorously out and yield to the very thing that made her shudder with disgust.

  After that his day had gone from bad to worse, the last straw being this lunchtime call from that creep Spinelli at the bank, insisting on meeting a representative of the family at Antonio Crepi’s villa that very afternoon to discuss some urgent problem that was too sensitive to discuss on the phone. Silvio had been hoping to treat himself to an afternoon listening to Billie Holliday records and leafing through that auction catalogue of rare Haitian issues which Pietro had sent him from London, hoping to keep him sweet for the future now he represented twenty-five per cent of the company! Yes, there were certainly consolations to Ruggiero’s death, just as Ivy had insisted. She should have been here to drive him, but by the time the call came she’d already left to keep an appointment. So he’d had to take a taxi, which of course had been late arriving and then got stuck in the traffic. And now this! It really was too bad.

  An official in plain clothes had got out of the police car.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Silvio heard him ask the young patrolman.

  ‘Not too good. Fucking thing’s in excellent shape.’

  Suddenly Silvio realized why this spot had seemed familiar. It was at this very bend that his father’s car had been forced off the road by the kidnappers.

  ‘You planning to be much longer?’ the taxi driver demanded.

  ‘We’re just noting the defects we’ve found on your vehicle,’ the official told him.

  ‘Defects? What defects?’

  The patrolman consulted his notebook.

  ‘Insufficient tread depth on nearside front tyre. Rear window partially obscured by sticker. Number-plate light defective.’

  The driver laughed sarcastically.

  ‘The cigarette lighter doesn’t work, either.’

  ‘Really?’ queried the official. ‘ Two faults in the electrical system, then. May I see your snow chains?’

  ‘Snow chains?’ the driver replied incredulously. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘All vehicles using this road between the beginning of October and the end of April are required to carry snow chains on board. Didn’t you see the sign back there on the hill?’

  ‘Can’t you feel that sun? It’s over twenty degrees!’

  ‘That’s the law.’

  ‘Then the law’s crazy!’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that if I were you. You could end up facing a charge for contempt.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ the driver murmured.

  Silvio wound down his window.

  ‘Excuse me!’ he called testily. ‘I’m already late for an appointment and…’

  The official looked round.

  ‘Why, Signor Miletti! Please forgive me, I had no idea it was you.’

  Silvio squinted up into the sunlight.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Zen. I thought you were back in Rome.’

  ‘Not yet, dottore. Not yet.’

  ‘They’ve put you on traffic duty, have they?’

  As someone often accused of lacking a sense of humour, Silvio liked to draw attention to his jokes by laughing at them himself. Zen duly smiled, although this might have been at the sound of Silvio’s squeaky laughter rather than the joke itself.

  ‘Anyway, will you please fine the driver or whatever you intend doing, and let us proceed. As I say, I’m already late for an appointment.’

  ‘Out of the question, I’m afraid. On a cursory examination alone this vehicle has been found to have five defects. As such it is clearly unfit to ply for hire as a public conveyance. However, I’d be delighted to offer you a lift.’

  ‘I have no wish to travel with you, Zen.’

  ‘Suit yourself. But it’s a long walk.’

  ‘Snow chains!’ murmured the taxi driver disgustedly.

  Silvio sat there stewing in the stuffy heat in the back of the car, thinking over what had just been said. A thrilling sense of peril had taken hold of him, and it was this that finally moved him to open the door and give himself up to whatever was about to happen.

  ‘A long walk to where?’ he murmured dreamily as the taxi screeched round in a tight turn and headed back to the city.

  Zen opened the rear door of the Alfetta.

  ‘To where you’re going.’

  ‘But you don’t know where I’m going.’

  ‘Oh, but I do, dottore, I do.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  It had been intended as a challenge, but Zen treated it as a real question.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he replied complacently as they drove off down the hill.

  Crepi’s villa was visible in the distance, perched up on its ridge, but the countryside flashed by at such an insane rate that in no time at all they had passed the driveway.

  ‘You’ve missed the turning!’ Silvio told the driver. ‘I’m going to Antonio Crepi’s! He’s expecting me.’

  ‘Wrong on both counts,’ Zen replied without turning round.

  ‘You’ll lose your jobs for this,’ Silvio stammered, almost incoherent with excitement. ‘This is kidnapping! You’ll get twenty years, both of you!’

  They had reached the flatlands near the Tiber, whose course was visible to the right, marked by a line of trees whose lower branches were festooned with scraps of plastic bags and other durable refuse.

  ‘This one,’ Zen told the driver, pointing to an abandoned track burrowing into a mass of wild brambles and scrub. The entrance was marked by a pair of imposing brick gateposts in a bad state of disrepair. A cloud of red dust rose up all around the car, almost blotting out the view.

  They drew up and Zen got out. He removed his overcoat and threw it on the front seat. From the dashboard he removed a clipboard and a large yellow envelope. Then he opened the rear door of the car.

  ‘Get out, dottore.’

  Silvio got out.

  As the dust settled he could see the massive piles of bricks all around the clearing where they were parked. They still preserved the vague outlines of
the barracks, ovens and chimneys they had once been, but fallen out of rank and order like an army of deserters. It reminded him of the old factory below the house which had been his private playground for many years, despite his mother’s dire warnings about venturing into it. He had been a solitary child, and those deserted alleys, yards and warehouses provided the perfect environment for his fantasies to flourish. They were fantasies of war, for the most part, or rather of suffering. His victims were Swedish wooden matchsticks, which he arranged behind bits of wall or in trenches scooped from the dirt and then bombarded mercilessly with bricks, from a distance at first but gradually closing in until you could see the sharp edges of the missile gouging into the ground. But the best bit was afterwards, picking through the bent and broken splinters, picturing the appalling injuries, the grotesque mutilations, the agony, the screams, the pathetic pleas to be finished off. He played all the parts himself, his voice mimicking shells and explosions, sirens and screams. In that secret playworld he was blissfully transparent, secure in the knowledge that the gates of the abandoned factory were locked and guarded, the walls too high to climb and topped with shards of broken glass.

  Then one day he looked up and found a pair of eyes on him.

  The man was lean and hard and dirty, his clothes greasy and torn. Silvio had never seen a Communist before, but he knew instinctively that this was one. His father had told him how the Communists were going to take over the factories and kill the owners and their families. Silvio fled, and for weeks he stayed away. Then, gradually at first, he found that the danger was no longer a reason for avoiding the factory but rather an irresistible temptation to return. He had no further interest in his innocent games. They were lost to him for ever, he knew, part of something he now thought of for the first time as his childhood. If he was to go back it would be in exploration of a new dimension he felt opening up within himself. It was not a comfortable sensation. He felt wrenched apart internally, split and fractured like one of his matchstick heroes. But there was no denying that urge. He already knew he would be its willing slave for the rest of his life.

  The second time he saw the man it was Silvio who had the advantage of surprise. He had rounded a length of wall, moving stealthily, and there in a corner he saw the figure, turned away, head bent, intent on some furtive task. He knew he should run for his life, but instead he found himself moving towards the man, who remained quite still, apparently unaware of his presence. Then, when Silvio was almost close enough to touch him, he suddenly whirled around and sent a high spray of urine flying through the air, splashing Silvio’s clothes and face, his lips, his mouth.

  Afterwards he drenched himself with the garden hose and told his parents that the rough boys near the station had thrown him in the fountain. His clothes came back unspotted from the laundry, but the obscene warmth and acrid taste of the bright yellow liquid had marked his flesh as indelibly as a tattoo. He never returned to the factory, which shortly afterwards was spruced up into offices and parking space for the management of what would soon become SIMP. But those barren desolate landscapes were now a part of him, like that stain which no water could wash off. Whenever he touched himself in bed at night he was there again, at risk from merciless mocking strangers, drenched in their stink and slime, both cringing and exultant.

  ‘You see, dottore?’ Zen remarked ironically. ‘I told you I knew where you were going.’

  It was suffocatingly hot. The great mounds of bricks were high enough to prevent the slightest breeze from entering but not to give any shade from the sun. Silvio could feel little rivulets of sweat running down the creases and furrows in his body, trickling through the hairy parts and soaking into his underclothes.

  ‘Naturally I didn’t just happen to be waiting at that bend in the road by pure coincidence,’ Zen went on.

  ‘It’s a plot!’ Silvio muttered.

  ‘Yes, it’s a plot. But you’re only the means, not the end. All I need from you is your signature on these papers.’

  Zen handed him the clipboard. The sun made a dazzling blank of the page, and Silvio had to turn so that the clipboard was in his shadow before he was able to make out anything except the crest printed at the top. Even then it took him a long time to see what it was about, because of the florid formulas and the stilted tone of the text. When understanding suddenly came he almost cried out with a pain as different from the gaudy agonies of his fantasies as a gallon of make-up blood is from a drop of the real thing.

  He had never forgotten his mother’s strict orders not to venture into the site where he had first experienced those horrid thrills, and when she was taken from him a few years later he knew that he was being punished for his disobedience. Not that this stopped him indulging; on the contrary, guilt made his forbidden pleasures taste still sourer and stronger. But the gentle hurt of her absence was something else. Nothing could assuage that, until Ivy came. And now…

  ‘You must be out of your mind!’

  Unfortunately, as so often happened when he got angry, his voice let him down, and the words emerged as an imperious squeak.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me, dottore,’ Zen assured him. ‘I’m only following orders.’

  ‘Whose orders?’

  ‘Can’t you work it out for yourself?’

  Silvio struggled to summon up the small residue of cunning which he had inherited from his father. This man had known that he would be passing that spot on the road. Therefore he must have known that he was going to Crepi’s, although he claimed that Crepi himself hadn’t known. In other words, the summons from Spinelli had been nothing but a ruse designed to draw him into an ambush. So the banker must be part of the plot. But he was only a minor figure, like this man Zen. Who controlled them both? The obvious answer was Gianluigi Santucci, the banker’s patron. But Gianluigi wouldn’t waste his energy on petty vendettas of this type. No, it could only be…

  ‘Cinzia,’ he murmured.

  Silvio threw the clipboard to the ground at Zen’s feet.

  ‘You can go fuck yourself.’

  ‘We don’t expect you to do it for nothing, of course,’ Zen said mildly, dusting down the papers.

  ‘You’re trying to bribe me?’

  Although eminently unworldly in his way, Silvio was enough of a Miletti to resent the idea that anyone would presume to patronize him financially.

  ‘No, it’s a question of a few souvenirs, that’s all. Souvenirs of Berlin.’

  Zen took two photographs from the large yellow envelope and held them up.

  Instantly Silvio’s real pain and righteous anger were overwhelmed by stronger sensations. To think that all the time this beast had known, had seen!

  ‘No, I won’t do it!’

  He knew very well that this petulant refusal wasn’t worth the paper it was wiped with, as dear Gerhard would put it. But Zen seemed to have been taken in.

  ‘In that case I’m afraid that prints of these photographs will begin to circulate among friends and enemies of the Miletti family in Perugia and elsewhere. Just imagine the scene, dottore! There they are, early in the morning, still dewy-eyed over that first cup of coffee, when bang! Hello! What’s this? Good God! It looks like Silvio Miletti waiting for someone to come and take a dump on him! What do you think their reaction is going to be, dottore? Oh, well, it takes all sorts, different strokes for different folks, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it?’

  Silvio was literally speechless. The idea of those images being seen by people who inhabited a quite separate zone of his life, whom he met at receptions and conferences, at dinners and concerts, who greeted him on the Corso every day! Yes, he would have to sign, no question about that. The revelation of his secret pleasures to the whole of Perugia would be a humiliation so monumental, so absolute, so perfect, that he knew he would never survive the excitement it would generate.

  But at the thought of what he was about to do, these thrills faded and the real pain returned.

  ‘But it’s all lies! Filthy obscene li
es and nothing else!’

  To his amazement, Zen winked conspiratorially.

  ‘Of course it is! That’s why it doesn’t matter. In fact the kidnappers are already under arrest in Florence. They’ve confessed to the whole thing. Believe me, dottore, if I thought for a single moment that these allegations would be taken seriously, I’d never have agreed to be a party to this! But it’s just a question of stirring up a bit of scandal, a bit of dirt. Quite harmless really.’

  The man’s whinging hypocrisy made Silvio feel sick, but what he said made sense. If the gang had confessed then the papers he was being asked to sign were totally worthless except precisely to someone like Cinzia, someone who would stoop to any trick to sully the honour of the woman he loved and whose love sustained him. But they would deal with Cinzia later. Meanwhile he must get this over with and warn Ivy immediately. It was awful to think how she might suffer if she was suddenly confronted with his apparent treachery.

  ‘Just put your name on the dotted line at the bottom, dottore,’ Zen prompted. ‘Where it says that you made the statement freely and voluntarily.’

  Silvio took out his pen and signed. When the yellow envelope was safe in his hands he turned to Zen.

  ‘I may be dirty in super?cial ways,’ he remarked, ‘but you’re dirty through and through! You’re a filthy putrid rancid cesspit, a walking shit-heap.’

  The final proof of the official’s total degeneracy was that he didn’t even try to defend himself, merely getting into the waiting car, his despicable job done. Silvio followed, but more slowly. Despite the varied splendours and miseries of his existence, the pleasure of moral superiority was one that very rarely came his way. As a connoisseur of exotic sensations he was determined to savour it to the utmost.

  ELEVEN

  She almost changed her mind at the last moment. It was the place itself that did it, the smell of cheap power, making her realize just how far she had come since those early days, the days of secretarial work and English lessons. The world Ivy lived in now was drenched in power too, of course, but quite different from the low-grade kind that pervaded places where you came to post a parcel or cash a cheque or renew your residence permit. How she’d always hated the bitter, envious midgets who patrol these internal boundaries of the state, malicious goblins wringing the most out of their single dingy magic spell. Her Italian friends claimed to feel the same way, but Ivy had never been convinced. The opium of these people was not religion but power, or rather power was their religion. Everyone believed, everyone was hooked. And everyone was rewarded with at least a tiny scrap of the stuff, enough to make them feel needed. What people hated in the system was being subjected to others’ power, but they would all resist any change which threatened to modify or limit their own. The situation was thus both stable and rewarding, especially for those who were rich in power and could bypass it with a few phone calls, a hint dropped here, a threat there. At length Ivy had come to appreciate its advantages, and to realize that she could make just as good use of them as the natives, if not rather better in fact. In the end she’d come to admire the Italians as the great realists who saw life as it really was, free of the crippling hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxon world in which she had been brought up.