Ratking az-1

by Michael Dibdin

  She’d learned her lesson well. Gone were the days when she had to hang around under that sign with its contemptuous scrawl ‘Foreigners’, waiting for the Political Branch officials who would swan in and out as it suited them, or not turn up at all, or send you away for not having enough sheets of the special franked paper which could only be bought at a tobacconist’s shop which meant another half-hour’s delay and then starting from scratch again having lost your place in the queue. Now-adays she went over their heads and dealt directly with the people with real power. The snag, of course, is that they won’t speak to you unless you have real power too, or know someone who does. Only since her association with Silvio Miletti had she been able to make full use of the lessons she had learned, to put her newly acquired skills to the test. Yes, she had come a long way.

  ‘You looking for something?’

  Hovering there at the foot of the stairs, hesitating, reflecting, she’d attracted the attention of the guard, who was fixing her with a supercilious stare.

  ‘I have an appointment with Commissioner Zen,’ she replied coldly.

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘It’s all right, I know the room number.’

  She tried to move forward to the stairs, but the man barred her with one arm and yelled to a colleague, ‘We got a Zen?’

  The man consulted a list taped to the wall.

  ‘Three five one!’ he yelled back.

  ‘Three five one,’ the guard repeated slowly. ‘Third floor. Think you can make it on your own?’

  ‘Just about, I should think, thank you very much.’

  Her attempt at irony did not make the slightest impression on the man’s fatuous complacency. You couldn’t beat them at their own game, of course; the mistake had been agreeing to come in the first place. Normally she would not have done so. In the circles in which she now moved one did not call on policemen unless they were on the payroll, in which case the meeting would be on neutral ground, in a cafe or on the street. But when Zen had phoned, just before lunch, Ivy had agreed with hardly a moment’s thought. He was going back to Rome that evening, he said, and he’d like to clear up that matter they had discussed on the phone at the beginning of the week, did she remember? She remembered all right! Not the subject of the phone call, which had been rather vague in any case, something about a letter he had received. But she wasn’t likely to forget the way he’d quizzed her about her appointment with Cinzia that morning. At all events, today he’d suggested that she stop by his office in the afternoon, and to her surprise she had agreed. The problem, she was forced to admit, was that her reflexes had not yet adjusted to her new position. Silvio would have got it right instinctively, but you had to have been born powerful for that. In her heart of hearts Ivy still feared and respected the police as her parents had taught her to do. She might have come a long way, she recognized, but there was still a long way to go.

  Her sensible rubber heels made hardly a sound as she walked along the third-floor corridor. With some surprise she noticed that her palms were slightly damp. The place was having its effect. That shiny travertine cladding they used everywhere, cold and slippery, seemed to exude unease. Get a grip on yourself, she thought, as she knocked at the door.

  The occupant of the office was a rough, common-looking individual of the brawn and no brain variety. She thought she must have made a mistake, but he called her in.

  ‘The chief’ll be back directly. He says you’re to wait.’

  Ivy glanced at her watch. She was by no means certain that it had been a good idea to come and this provided the perfect excuse for leaving.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got another appointment.’

  But the man had taken up a position with his back to the door.

  ‘Take it easy, relax!’ he told her in an insultingly familiar tone. ‘You want to read the paper?’

  He picked a pink sports paper from the dustbin and held it out to her. There was a long smear of some viscous matter down the front page.

  The man’s body was bulging with muscle. His nose had been broken and his ears were grotesquely swollen. He had an air of ingrained damage about him, as though his life had been spent running into things and coming off second-best. The effect was both comical and threatening.

  Ivy consulted her watch again.

  ‘I shall wait for fifteen minutes.’

  Why hadn’t she insisted on leaving immediately? It had something to do with the man’s physical presence. There was no denying it, he intimidated her. He was staring at her with an expression which to her alarm she found that she recognized. She had discovered its meaning back in the days when she was working at the hospital, where she’d been secretary to one of the directors, an unmarried man in his mid-forties. He was distinguished, witty and charming, and seemed intrigued by his ‘English’ secretary, amused by her, concerned about her welfare. He gave her flowers and chocolates occasionally, helped her find a flat at a rent she could afford, and once even took her out to eat at a restaurant outside Perugia. He had never made the ghost of a pass at her.

  One weekend there was a conference in Bologna which he was due to attend, and at the last moment he proposed that Ivy accompany him. When she hesitated he showed her the receipt for the hotel booking he had already made, for two single rooms. She could assist him in various small ways in return for a little paid holiday, he explained. He made it sound as though she would be doing him a favour. He appealed to her as an attractive, vivacious woman, a fellow-conspirator against life’s drabness, the ideal companion for such a jaunt as this. Nothing quite like it had ever happened to her before. The experience seemed to sum up everything she loved about this country where people knew what life was worth and understood how to get the best out of it.

  They put up at a luxury hotel and dined out that evening at one of the city’s famous restaurants. Ivy’s pleasure was dimmed only by a slight anxiety as to what would happen when they got back to the hotel, or rather as to how she would deal with it. Ivy was not attracted to her employer physically, but she had long ago been forced to face the fact that the men she found attractive did not feel the same way about her. They were younger than her, for one thing, handsome, reckless types who didn’t give a damn about anything. Unfortunately they didn’t give a damn about her, even as a one-night stand, so she had learned to compromise. And when someone had been as attentive and thoughtful as her employer, taking such pains to ensure that the weekend was a success, not to mention the various practical possibilities for the future this opened up, well, why not, she thought.

  Only it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen that night, when he simply kissed her hand and wished her a good night’s sleep, nor the next, when they went out with a group of his colleagues to a restaurant in the country outside Bologna. The men all talked loudly and continuously and so fast that Ivy wasn’t always able to follow the conversation. There were even moments when she doubted whether they meant her to. After the meal a bottle of whisky was brought to the table. As it circulated through the fog of endless cigarettes, Ivy watched meaning coming and going like a landscape glimpsed through cloud from a plane. She felt lost, discarded. Her employer had moved into the world which men inhabit with other men and where women are not at home. From time to time he glanced at her, made some comment or smiled, but he was no longer there, not really. She was alone in spirit, and later quite literally, for in the confusion of leaving the restaurant she ended up in a car with four men she hadn’t even been introduced to, and had to spend the whole forty minutes of the drive back to Bologna fielding crassly insensitive questions about her private life, her family, why she was living in Italy and whether she liked spaghetti. Back at her hotel her employer was nowhere to be found. She made her way alone to her room, cursing herself for a stupid sentimental bitch.

  The next morning a waiter awakened her with a bouquet of roses and a handwritten card covered in fulsome apologies and inviting her to take coffee on the terrace. There the apologies were repeated in pers
on. He had drunk too much and become confused, the group he was with had wanted to go on to a nightclub despite his objections, and so on and so forth. Later he drove her back to Perugia. Nothing seemed to have changed.

  But something had. She noticed it immediately in the eyes of the other men at the hospital and in the way they treated her. But she had no idea what it meant until about a week later, when she overheard two administrative assistants chatting on the stairs.

  ‘… for the weekend with that English bit.’

  ‘But he’s a pansy!’

  ‘That’s what everyone thought! Looks like we’ve been underestimating him.’

  ‘Or maybe he gets it coming and going, eh? Crafty old bugger!’

  It was so cruel, so nasty! Above all, it was so unfair! ‘But we didn’t do anything!’ she felt like screaming. ‘He is a pansy! He didn’t lay a finger on me!’ But of course no one would have believed her. ‘Where I come from,’ an Italian girl had once told her, ‘if a man and a woman are alone together in a room for fifteen minutes, it’s assumed that they’ve made love.’ Her employer had managed to salvage his reputation with the other men at the hospital – and how much depends on that reputation! – at no cost to himself. How very clever. Even in the intensity of her hatred and hurt at the way she had been used, Ivy remained coolly appreciative of how cleverly it had been done. Having realized at an early age that stupidity makes a poor sauce to plain looks, she had always sought to give cleverness its due.

  But now, incredibly, this brutal policeman was looking at her in the same way as those men at the hospital, the way a man looks at a woman he knows to be sexually available. But that didn’t make sense! The situation was utterly different in every respect. What was going on?

  Ivy felt immensely reassured when Zen finally arrived. He didn’t look at her in that vulgar impertinent way. His expression was detached, calculating and morose, as if to say that he would do his job to the best of his ability even though he had no illusions as to its value.

  ‘All right, Chiodini, that’ll do,’ he said, summarily dismissing the man who had been keeping the door like some mastiff. As he settled in his chair Ivy noticed that his shoes and trousers were coated with a fine red dust.

  ‘Is this going to take long?’ she asked a little tetchily. ‘You said two o’clock and I’m in rather a hurry.’

  Zen took a sheet of paper from his pocket and passed it to her without a word. It was covered in the same fine red dust as his clothing. Was this the letter which he’d referred to? But she could see from the printed heading Polizia dello Stato that it was official. The typed text began with one of those formulas which the judicial system employs to eliminate the ambiguities of normal human utterance. I, the undersigned, depose as follows. On the morning of Monday 22 March at 0920 approximately I observed Cook, Ivy Elaine, outside the garage below our family residence at Via del Capanno 5, Perugia. She was carrying a small green plastic bag. She got into one of the Fiat saloons and drove away. Since Cook is entitled to the use of these cars I thought no more of it at the time. Later the same morning, at 1145 approximately, I saw Cook walking upstairs to the room she occupied in our house during this period. She was carrying the same plastic bag as before. I wished her to type some letters for me and called to attract her attention. When she did not respond I followed her upstairs. Her room was empty and I could hear the sound of the shower from the bathroom next door. The plastic bag she had been carrying lay on the table. To my surprise, I found that it contained a blonde wig which I had bought the previous year to attend a Carnival party, and a small automatic pistol which I recognized as belonging to my sister Cinzia.

  Ivy surveyed the effect this text was having on her body: the thudding of her heart, the swelling pressure of her blood, the dryness of her mouth, the moisture erupting all over her skin, the weight on her chest against which she had to struggle to draw breath, the numbness and trembling, the urge to break out in short sharp howls like a hyena. When Cook returned to the room I asked her about the wig and the pistol. She appeared confused, and then said that she had just been playing a joke on Cinzia. I was appalled that she could contemplate such a thing at a moment when we were all anxiously awaiting news of my father’s release. I demanded further details, but Cook’s replies were incoherent and when I pressed her she became hysterical. I assumed at first that this episode was due to the tremendous strain under which we were all living at the time. But when my father was subsequently found dead, and it emerged that he had been shot during the period that Cook had been absent from the house and with a pistol similar to the one I had observed in her possession, I began to suspect the horrifying truth.

  As it got worse, it got better. This is a pack of lies, she thought. Appalled by the idea that I had been responsible for introducing a viper into the bosom of the family, I threw caution to the winds and decided to confront Cook. To my astonishment she claimed that I had imagined the sequence of events described above. She admitted going out at the time in question, but asserted that my sister had telephoned and asked Cook to meet her at the Santucci house, outside Perugia. On arriving there, she said, she had found Cinzia absent, and after waiting for some time had returned to the city. As for the wig and the pistol, she denied all knowledge of them. When I questioned my sister about this I discovered that the truth was that Cook had phoned Cinzia and asked for a meeting in Perugia, at which she had failed to appear. Clearly her motive in decoying my sister away from home had been to obtain entrance to the Santucci property, where she was admitted by the housekeeper and left unobserved for some time, in order to take the pistol which I had subsequently observed in her possession. Upon searching the house I discovered that my wig had been replaced in the chest of drawers where it is kept. Of the pistol I could find no trace. Faced with Cook’s angry denials and the assurance of the authorities that the murder had been committed by the kidnappers, I decided to keep my doubts to myself. But I now feel that this decision was mistaken, and have decided to come forward. The above statement has been made freely and of my own volition and my legal rights were fully respected throughout. (signed) Silvio Agostino Miletti

  Perhaps in an attempt to counter its reputation for gross inefficiency in everything that matters, the State is a stickler for precision when it comes to trivia. The legal system which takes so long to bring people to trial that they are often released after being found guilty, having already been imprisoned for longer than the period of their sentence, insists that statements to the authorities record not only the date on which they were made but also the time. Thus it was that Ivy learned that Silvio’s statement to the police had supposedly been made at twelve forty-two that day. Which was very interesting, because she remembered quite clearly that Silvio had spent the half-hour before lunch whining about the selfish and thoughtless behaviour of his brother Daniele and in particular his habit of eating the Bulgarian yoghurt which he, Silvio, went to considerable time and trouble to obtain from a stockist in Rome. That meant that the statement was not just a pack of lies but a transparent forgery. But this didn’t reassure Ivy, quite the contrary. Because that big loopy signature at the bottom was genuine all right, so that Silvio had to be a party to whatever monstrous conspiracy was afoot.

  She looked up at Zen, conscious that nothing of all this showed in her face.

  ‘I don’t know what to say. I feel like asking if this is some kind of joke. But it quite obviously isn’t.’

  The grey eyes regarded her cryptically.

  ‘So what is it?’ she demanded with a nervous laugh.

  ‘It’s a statement made to me by Silvio Miletti.’

  ‘It’s a pack of lies!’ she cried. ‘It’s rubbish, sheer invention, as you must know very well! And not even very clever invention! Do you really think that if I’d committed a murder I would bring the gun back to the house in a plastic bag and leave it lying in my room in full view while I went to have a shower?’

  ‘The witness describes you as hysterical. Hysterical peo
ple do irrational things.’

  ‘I was not hysterical!’ She sounded it now, though. ‘I wasn’t even there! After I got back from Cinzia’s I went home to my flat, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘I don’t know, late morning. I remember I had to do some shopping, to get something for lunch. Yes, that’s right, and then I ran into a friend on the Corso. We had an aperitif together. There, that proves it. He’ll verify my story!’

  ‘What about earlier, before the appointment with Cinzia? Where were you then?’

  She was about to reply, but checked herself.