‘If you’re going to question me then I’m entitled to the presence of a lawyer.’
Zen acknowledged the point with a fractional inflexion of his lips, not so much a smile as the memory of a smile.
‘But this isn’t an interrogation,’ he said.
His words were such an unexpected relief that Ivy felt quite faint. The riot in her body had been put down, but at too great a cost.
‘I really must go,’ she murmured.
Zen stared at her in silence. His expression was even more alarming than Chiodini’s, although quite different. He was looking at her as though she was dead.
‘I’m afraid that’s not possible.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Signora, an eminent citizen has come forward and made a statement implicating you in the murder of his father. Now I don’t know exactly what conception you have of the duties of the police, but I can assure you that I wouldn’t be performing mine if I simply ignored this allegation on the grounds that the person accused claims that it’s all a pack of lies.’
‘Are you saying I’m under arrest?’
‘Not exactly. You’re being held on suspicion of having committed a crime punishable by life imprisonment. This will be communicated to the Public Prosecutor’s office, who will in turn inform the investigating magistrate. She will want to question you, I imagine. But that won’t be for a day or two. She’s in Florence at the moment. The kidnappers are under arrest there.’
So far Ivy had been proud of her control, but now a little manic giggle escaped her. Dear Christ, how much more could she take?
‘Obviously she’s got her hands full with that at the moment,’ Zen continued. ‘The Public Prosecutor is supposed to be informed within forty-eight hours, and the magistrate is bound to interrogate you within a further forty-eight. In practice that tends to get run together to suit everyone’s convenience, but at the worst it shouldn’t be later than Tuesday.’
‘Tuesday.’
The word seemed meaningless.
‘And until then?’ she asked.
‘Until then you’ll be held here. Chiodini!’
The bruiser came back in.
‘Take Signora Cook down to the cells.’
The word was like an electric shock, and Ivy sprang to her feet.
‘Just a moment! I’m entitled to make a phone call first. It’s my legal right!’
Zen ignored her.
‘Now listen to me, Chiodini,’ he said. ‘I won’t be here to supervise this, so I’m depending on you. Until Rosella Foria gets back from Florence Signora Cook is out of bounds, in quarantine. Understand? She speaks to no one and no one speaks to her. And I mean no one!’
‘Right, chief. Come on, you!’
Chiodini made a grab at Ivy’s arm, but she evaded him and stalked out, deliberately repressing all thought. There’ll be time for that when I’m alone, she told herself.
As it was, she had to fight even for the small privilege of solitude. The cells were in the basement of the Questura, which clearly predated the rest of the building by several centuries. The doors had an air of total impenetrability which Ivy found oddly reassuring. Her privacy was very important to her, and she saw the doors not as shutting her in but as keeping others out. What had always terrified her most about prisons was the overcrowding, four or five people shut up together in a cell intended to be barely tolerable for two. Italians seemed to be able to stand such enforced intimacy, but Ivy knew that it would drive her mad. She simply couldn’t function adequately without a space she could call her own, and she was acutely aware that in the hours ahead she was going to need to function not just adequately but quite extraordinarily well.
So it was a nasty shock when the cell door swung open to reveal a strange-looking woman with a smell on her and a wild look in her black eyes.
‘I’m not going in there,’ Ivy said firmly.
‘Oh, you’re not, eh?’ Chiodini replied.
He stared at her in some confusion, unsure how to proceed. If it had been a man he would have hit him. But with women things were different; you could only hit them if they were married to you.
‘There are lots of other cells,’ she pointed out.
‘They’re being painted.’
‘For God’s sake, man, she’s a gypsy! How would you like it?’
Chiodini could see her point. His mother had told him about gypsies. With a bad grace he locked the cell up again and installed Ivy in the one next door.
She slumped down on the bed. To think that on her way to the Questura, just an hour ago, she’d been worrying about whether or not to splash out on that slinky but hideously expensive Lurex trouser-suit she’d had her eye on for some time. The contrast between that reality and this cell, this mean pallet bed, that door as massive as the slab over a tomb, was so disturbing that she felt black waves of panic lapping up at her. But she refused to give in. To do so would be sheer self-indulgence. She had managed before, after all. When she discovered the reason why she had been invited for that weekend in Bologna she had calmly set about reviewing the options open to her. They fell into two categories, revenge and reward. There was no question that revenge was a very attractive option, but in the end Ivy had rejected it in favour of reward. Damaging your enemies is satisfying, but doing yourself a favour is more important in the long run. Only in exceptional circumstances is it possible to combine the two.
Like everyone else, Ivy had envied those who had a secure job, guaranteed by the State, which could not be taken away no matter how lazy or incompetent you were and whose admittedly meagre salary could be supplemented by tax-free moonlighting in the afternoon. Her position at the hospital was, as they said, ‘precarious’. To keep it she had to please, which meant everything from picking up one man’s suit from the cleaners and buying fresh pasta for another to queuing for over an hour in the pouring rain to get theatre tickets for one of the patients, quite apart from being expected to do the work of an entire typing pool single-handed. But she didn’t dare complain. ‘Don’t give yourself airs!’ the old fascist who served as porter remarked when she’d made the mistake of letting herself be provoked by his rudeness. ‘The day the director decides he doesn’t like the colour of your knickers you’ll be out on the street.’ He had no need to add, ‘On the other hand I’m here for ever, whether he likes it or not.’ That was implicit in everything he did, or more usually failed to do.
Ivy didn’t necessarily want to work at the hospital for ever, but she did want to be the one who would decide if she would or not, and that meant getting a secure position. The director had the granting of such posts, but he knew what they were worth and wasn’t going to hand them out to some foreigner when the telephone was ringing off the hook with locals offering him this that and the other if he would see to it that Tizio or Cosetta was fixed up. So Ivy bided her time and kept her eyes and ears open, waiting for events to take her where she wanted to go.
Then one day her employer came storming into the poky annexe where she worked and grilled her for over half an hour about some documents which he said had disappeared. From a man who habitually paraded his velvet gloves this display of iron fist was disconcerting, the more so in that Ivy knew nothing of the existence of the documents, never mind their disappearance. But now she did, and she knew that he half-suspected her of having taken them. All of which added up to the opportunity she had been waiting for, because despite this, the porter’s prophecy was not fulfilled. Her job hung on a whim, but it was not indulged. The conclusion was obvious, and brought with it the reflection that her employer was not as clever as she had previously thought.
That afternoon she returned to the hospital after lunch, supposedly to catch up on her work. The other porter who, just to balance things out, was a Stalinist, responded to her request for the key to the supply cupboard as she had known he would, by tossing her a huge bunch opening every door on the top floor of the building. Identifying and labelling the keys was a task which the porters consid
ered too onerous to undertake, and since their jobs were not precarious no one could make them do so. So if anyone wanted the spare key to a particular room they were given the bunch for the entire floor in question and had to find the key themselves.
It took Ivy twelve minutes to do so, but that was the hardest part of the whole business. Men did not hide things very well, she knew. Their minds ran in predictable ways. Once inside the director’s office she quickly found the spare key to the filing cabinet, taped to the back of it, and a few seconds later the missing documents were in her hand. They had been where she had known they must be, lying on the floor of the metal drawer. They had been carelessly replaced between two files and had then worked their way down as the drawer was opened and closed. It was obvious, it happened all the time, and yet her employer had not thought of it. Part of the reason was that predictability of the male mind she had already noted, but it was also due to a structural defect of the system under which they all lived. The great weakness of paranoia is that it cannot take account of chance. Because the documents were sensitive and might be damaging to him if they fell into the wrong hands, the director had assumed that their disappearance must have been due to a deliberate act on someone’s part. To think otherwise would have been to run the risk of being exposed as gullible and unrealistic, the very things that a man in his position could least afford to be.
Back home in her little flat Ivy examined the documents at her leisure. They looked innocuous enough, mere lists of figures and dates and initials, but the next morning before work she dropped into her bank, opened a safety deposit box and placed the documents in it. She did well, for when she got home she found that her flat had been ransacked.
That evening she phoned her employer, rambling on incoherently about how she couldn’t go on living in an atmosphere of insecurity and lack of trust, of groundless accusations and the perpetual fear of losing her job. If she had a secure position perhaps she would feel differently, but as it was, well, she didn’t know what she might do. Really, she felt capable of almost anything.
A month later her post was made permanent.
She’d done it once, and if she could do it once then couldn’t she do it again? But it wasn’t as simple as that. The situation was quite different this time. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when she remembered Zen’s panicky orders about keeping her ‘in quarantine’. As though anyone was going to lift a finger to save her! Didn’t he understand that she had no support whatever apart from Silvio? Her relationship had always been exclusively with him. That was the way he had wanted it. Evidently there was something about her that attracted homosexuals, perhaps the same thing that repelled the young men she would have preferred to attract. But you had to make the best of things, and Silvio Miletti was a pretty good catch, all things considered.
Ironically enough, it had been Ivy’s boss at the hospital who had introduced her to Silvio. That was before the two men fell out over their mutual infatuation with a young German called Gerhard Mayer. Never one to do things by halves, Silvio had deprived his rival not only of Mayer’s services but of Ivy’s as well. For three years now they had been a couple in all respects but one. Ivy’s only stipulation had been to insist on keeping her job at the hospital, although the work was actually done by a succession of temporary secretaries paid through a Miletti subsidiary. It was partly a form of insurance to hold on to the salaried position and the promise of a pension that went with it, but it was mostly spite. The director had not been very happy about the arrangement, to say the least, but what with the Miletti’s leaning on him from one side and the fear that the missing documents might one day surface gnawing at him from the other, he had ended by agreeing.
Silvio and Ivy had proved to be a very effective couple, complementing each other perfectly. She had the vision, the will, the patience; he had the power, the contacts, and the influence. So far their exploits had been relatively modest. The anonymous letter she’d sent to the investigating magistrate Bartocci, alleging that the kidnapping was a put-up job, was a typical example. Ivy’s method was to seize the opportunity when it arose, and meanwhile to stir things up so that opportunities were more likely to arise. The letter to Bartocci had in fact succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, for it had indirectly created the circumstances leading to Ruggiero Miletti’s death, which had in turn removed the one remaining impediment to the brilliant future which beckoned to her and Silvio.
Or rather had seemed to beckon, until just a few hours ago. For now the unthinkable had occurred, the one eventuality which Ivy had left out of her calculations. Cautiously at first, but with increasing confidence as she recognized Silvio’s dependence on her, she had sacrificed all her minor allegiances to this one relationship, which offered far more than all the others put together. It was often a considerable effort to remember that despite his fecklessness and petulance, his timidity and sloth, Silvio was a man of considerable power. And that power was now at her disposal, to use as though it were her own. It was a dizzying sensation, like finding yourself at the controls of a jet after a lifetime of flying gliders. Only now did she appreciate the more sinister implications of this image. Gliders rode the buoyant winds, versatile and questing, finding alternative currents if one failed, but when jets went wrong disaster was swift and inevitable. But it had never seemed possible that anything could go wrong. Silvio needed her as he needed food and drink, not to mention more esoteric satisfactions. He could no more deny her than he could deny himself.
At least, so she’d always supposed. But apparently she’d been mistaken, and with catastrophic results. The police could relax. No one would be pulling strings on her behalf, for she had deliberately cut them all except for those which bound her to Silvio. And he – even now she could hardly bring herself to believe it! – had not merely abandoned her but turned viciously against her, perjuring himself in the vilest way so that she could be thrown into a common lock-up like some gypsy beggar. No, Zen had nothing to worry about on that score!
Then an even more terrifying thought occurred to her. The discrepancy in the time of the statement proved that Zen and Silvio were hand in glove. He must know that the Milettis were not going to intervene to save her. Was he perhaps worried that their intervention might take a quite different form? A cup of coffee, for example, laced with something that would have her flopping about the cell like a landed fish, gasping out the classic words, ‘They’ve poisoned me!’
That deposit box at the bank now contained much more than her employer’s precious documents, as Silvio well knew. There were photocopies of letters, account books and papers of all kinds, and above all the tapes, boxes of them. The answering machine had been a stroke of genius. For some reason they were always regarded as slightly comical annoyances. No one liked having to deal with them, so callers were always relieved when you answered in person, too relieved to remember that the machine was still there, still connected and possibly recording every word they said. For some reason that never seemed to occur to anyone. But it was a meagre consolation just the same, not nearly enough to keep the rising tide of panic away. She might take a couple of the bastards with her, or at least scratch up their pretty rich faces a bit, but that would not save her. Nothing could save her now.
When the door of the cell opened she hoped it might be a familiar face, even a visitor to see her, but it was only the hard man who had brought her down there.
‘Come on!’ he said, beckoning impatiently.
Ivy felt as reluctant to leave her cell as a condemned prisoner being led away to execution.
‘Where are we going?’
The man just stared at her in his insolent way, like those bastards at the hospital when they thought they had her where they wanted her.
‘So you’re called Chiodini, are you?’ Ivy asked him.
‘What about it?’ the man demanded, suddenly on his guard.
‘Nothing.’
But if I ever get out of here, she thought, I’m going to call a certain num
ber I know and pay whatever it takes to have one of those arrogant eyes of yours sliced in two like a bull’s testicle, my friend.
Chiodini led her away along a narrow passage constantly switching direction, like a sewer following the turnings of the street above. The walls here were a world away from the shiny, polished facades of the Questura – rough, grainy slabs of stone beaded with moisture like a sweaty brow, infilled with chunks of saturated brick and rubble. Here and there diminishing islands of plasterwork still clung on, but most of it had gone to make a gritty porridge that scratched and slithered underfoot. It felt like part of the complex system of tunnels and passages underlying the ancient city, into which it was said that children occasionally strayed and were never seen again.
At length they turned a corner to find a man who seemed to have been waiting for them. He was short and fleshy, with a melancholy face and heavy eyebrows, dressed in a heavy-duty suit of the kind farmers wear on Sundays. To Ivy, he was the image of an executioner.
‘What are you doing here, Geraci?’ Ivy’s escort demanded. ‘They said you were off ill.’
‘I’m all right. I’ll take over now, you run along.’
‘But the chief said…’
‘Never you mind about that! I’ll look after her.’
Chiodini looked at Ivy, then at the other man.
‘Go on, beat it!’ Geraci insisted.
When Chiodini had gone, he led Ivy along the passage to a metal door. So lost was she in evil dreams that she expected to see a whitewashed stall inside, with a dangling noose, the wooden shutters of the trap and the lever that springs them back to reveal the pit beneath. But in fact the room was large and high-ceilinged, bare of any features whatever except for a crucifix on one wall and a small barred window high up on the other. Through the window Ivy could just make out a section of exterior wall, bright with sunlight. The fact of their being outside, in the real world where life was going on in its reassuring humdrum way, imbued those stones with infinite fascination for Ivy. She wished she could see them more clearly, admire the tiny plants sprouting in the crevices, watch the insects coming and going, study the shifting subtleties of colour and shade. She longed to lavish a passionate attention on that poor patch of wall, to astonish it with her unwearying love.
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