Medusa az-9

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen had parked the Fiat illegally right outside the building, thereby obstructing one lane of what now revealed itself to be a major traffic artery. The first thing he saw when he got in was a white parking ticket fluttering under the windscreen wipers. He got out again, tore it in two and dropped it in the road, thereby adding littering to his local crime record. You had to hand it to the Veronesi, he thought as he pulled away, what they lacked in charm they made up for in efficiency, particularly when schei — dosh — was involved.

  It took him almost an hour to get out of the city, partly because he was a timid and inexperienced driver and partly because he had no idea where he was going, but mostly because he was trapped in a counter-Adige of nose-to-tail commuters who knew precisely where they were going and had no patience for this bumbling amateur who was fouling up the system. He only escaped in the end because he happened to see a direction sign with the word ‘Valpolicella’ and immediately veered right across two lanes of traffic in a manner that elicited a number of colourful comments which he was fortunately unable to understand since they were in a form of dialect specific not to the Veneto in general but to the city of Verona in particular.

  After that, it was pretty straightforward. He stopped at a petrol station and asked directions, then rang Boito’s number from the payphone. The call was answered immediately, and by the man himself. This time Zen wasted no time on a cover story. He told Boito exactly who he was and what he wanted, and got an immediate and positive response.

  San Giorgio di Valpolicella was reached by a turning off the main road which wound up into the hills looming mistily above the plain below before twisting to a halt in the entrails of a village that was clearly very much older than anything Zen had seen on the drive there. Boito had said that he would meet him at a bar in the centre of the village, next to the church.

  ‘You can’t miss it. It’s the only one.’

  He was right. Zen parked in the piazza and walked over to their rendezvous, a typical rural watering hole lacking either charm or pretension.

  A man in his sixties, with a shock of white hair cropped short and the thickset, four-square, slightly Germanic look of the local population, rose to his feet and greeted him. Zen made token apologies for disturbing Boito so early, which were graciously brushed aside. They both ordered coffees and then the retired inspector told his story.

  He remembered the Comai case well, he said, because it was one of those where he was reasonably sure that a crime had been committed, but had not been able to prove it.

  ‘They stick with you, those ones! She got away with it, you think, and I wasn’t intelligent or powerful or lucky enough to make her pay. So you end up feeling guilty yourself, almost as if you were the criminal. The whole business leaves a nasty taste in your mouth. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’

  ‘I certainly do.’

  ‘Gaetano Comai, the victim, was in his seventies at the time. His wife Claudia was about twenty years younger. Their son Naldo was in school and it was the housekeeper’s day off. Gaetano had retired from the army by then, after a long and distinguished career. He suffered from circulatory problems and could only walk with the aid of a metal frame. At their house in Verona there was a lift, but at the villa here in the Valpolicella they installed a chair lift so that he could get up and down the stairs. Are you familiar with those contraptions? It’s basically a platform fitted with a chair and powered by an electric motor, which runs up and down the staircase in a steel track mounted beneath the banisters.’

  ‘I’ve heard of them.’

  ‘The first we knew was when Signora Comai called the police station in Negrar with an incoherent message about an emergency, please come at once. No specifics. That was a bit odd in itself, don’t you think? Your husband is lying critically injured after allegedly falling downstairs, but instead of calling an ambulance you call the police.’

  ‘Did you ask her about that?’

  ‘She claimed to have been in shock. Anyway, the patrolmen arrive and immediately radio for an ambulance, but when it gets there Signor Comai is certified dead. Meanwhile the policemen have taken a statement from his wife about how the accident occurred.’

  ‘Her husband had been upstairs, having an afternoon nap,’ Zen recited. ‘She was downstairs reading in the main salone. She heard the tapping of his walking frame as he came along the gallery, then the whine of the chair lift in operation, a sharp cry and a series of heavy thuds. She ran to investigate and found his crumpled body at the foot of the stairs and the lift still only a few steps from the top.’

  Armando Boito stared at Zen suspiciously.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I’ve read the file on the case, ispettore. Believe me, I’ve done my homework. What I want from you is the items that did not appear in the official report.’

  Boito nodded.

  ‘We’re getting there. Forgive me, I have to take everything in order, otherwise I become confused. Signora Comai then demonstrated to the patrolman, as she did later to me, that the lift would only move as long as the control button on the arm was depressed. It must therefore have stopped when her husband, for whatever reason, lost his balance and fell forward to his death. The patrolman, who should instantly have been promoted for this thought, walked up the stairs and tried it out for himself. As the grieving widow had said, the lift moved as soon as he pushed the button. Only it moved up.’

  He and Zen exchanged a long look.

  ‘Those chair lifts are very simple devices,’ Boito went on. ‘They either go all the way up or all the way down, reversing direction at the end of their track. So Signor Comai must have been ascending and not descending the stairs when he fell, in which case his wife’s version of events was obviously false.’

  ‘What did she say to that?’ asked Zen.

  ‘She hummed and hawed for a while, then used the shock argument and suddenly remembered that she had used the lift herself to go upstairs to fetch medicines from the bathroom. She felt too weak to walk, she told me. And too frightened of the staircase. According to her, she had felt it to be a “malign force”.’

  Zen glanced at his watch.

  ‘But you thought otherwise?’

  ‘I certainly did. There was no sign of any medicines in the vicinity of the corpse, and the pathologist found no indication that any had been administered. What he did find, in addition to the expected fractures and contusions, was a deep bleeding fracture to the back of the skull.’

  Boito shrugged.

  ‘As you know, all sorts of odd things can happen when people fall to their deaths. Signor Comai might have struck his head against the edge of one of the steps, or for that matter against the banister post at the bottom, a very ornate affair with plenty of sharp edges. The problem from my point of view was that there were no traces of blood, tissue, hair or anything else on any of these places. When I remarked on this, the widow claimed that she had wiped the surfaces clean because it was too distressing for her to have to look at her husband’s bloodstains. I then asked what she had used. A rag, she replied. What had she done with it? “I threw it in the fire. It made me feel unclean.”’

  ‘A fire? But this happened in August.’

  ‘Precisely. An oppressive, sultry day with temperatures in the thirties and thunder in the air. Nevertheless, a fire was indeed smouldering in the salone. I inspected the fire-irons, which were of wrought iron and very heavy. They were all filthy except for the poker, which seemed to have been wiped clean. When I asked about the fire, Signora Comai blushed and replied that she had suddenly felt a chill. Perhaps it was the change of life. She was approaching that period of her life. Sometimes she felt hot, sometimes she felt cold. These were very indelicate questions. There was no law against lighting a fire in your own house, was there?’

  Zen liked Armando Boito, and under normal circumstances would have been more than happy to spend the whole day arguing the toss about this long-closed case, but as it was he had become a miser
with minutes.

  ‘So you had a promising prima facie case totally dependent on circumstantial evidence,’ he suggested.

  ‘Just so. And what I would have liked to do, of course, was to take Signora Comai back to the Questura in Verona and submit her to a twenty-four-hour-a-day relay interrogation until she broke. But that was out of the question. The Comais did not quite belong to the cream of Verona society, of the rich and thick variety, but they weren’t nobodies either. There were plenty of influential friends and acquaintances only too ready to make a public scandal out of the fact that an over-zealous police officer was not only trying to prevent Gaetano’s widow from coming to terms with her tragic loss, but was virtually accusing her of having murdered him. I would never have been able to find an investigating magistrate to sign an arrest warrant. On the contrary, in the course of the one attempt I made it was made very clear to me that any further initiatives of the kind would result in me being transferred to a much less desirable posting than Verona.’

  He opened his arms to embrace the bar, the village and the surrounding countryside.

  ‘This is my home, dottore! I had no wish to make a martyr of myself and get shipped off to some flea-ridden cesspit in Calabria or Sicily. To what good, anyway? The case would still have come to nothing. One has to be a realist about these things.’

  Zen indicated his complete understanding.

  ‘But you still think she did it?’ he asked.

  Boito looked at him almost with anger.

  ‘Do you need to ask?’

  ‘Then how?’

  Boito sighed deeply.

  ‘My guess would be that she waited until her husband went upstairs for his afternoon nap, which he habitually did at about the time his death occurred. On some pretext she walked up alongside the chair lift in which he was seated. Near the top she somehow persuaded him to stand up, or perhaps just heaved him bodily out of the chair and down the long flight of stairs. She was much younger than him, remember, and very sturdily built. Then she ran downstairs and got the poker from the salone. He may already have been dead, but she wanted to make sure. She smashed in the back of the head, then lit the fire she had previously laid and wiped off the poker with a rag that she then burned. I had the cinders forensically examined and traces of cloth fibre were found, but of course that fitted in with her story.’

  Zen nodded.

  ‘All right, let’s assume you’re right. She killed him. Why?’

  Boito made a broad, resigned gesture.

  ‘That was the other problem I had in trying to pursue the investigation. If only there had been some clear motive, or indeed any motive at all, I might have been able to find a judge to take it on, despite the pressure from the family’s friends. But on the face of it Signora Comai had nothing obvious to gain from her husband’s death. She inherited, of course, but she was perfectly well provided for anyway. The Comais seemed to get along reasonably well together, like most middle- aged couples. By this point, both of them had passed the age when romantic passion could have played a part, and there were no indications that she was a psychotic. So if I’m right, and she did kill him, what could possibly have driven her to take such an incredible risk? Unfortunately I never found the answer to that question.’

  Boito smiled complacently.

  ‘But maybe you’ll have better luck, dottore. What is the exact nature of your interest in this case, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘I’m investigating the death of Signora Comai.’

  Boito’s reaction was one of shock. It occurred to Zen that he might well be one of those retired people who understandably feel that they have wasted enough of their lives on news about events that were either of no interest to them or beyond their control, and have decided to break the addiction and live clean for the years remaining to them.

  ‘Like her husband, she died in a fall,’ he said, rising to his feet and putting a banknote on the table to pay for their coffees. ‘The official line is that it was an accident.’

  They walked out into the joyless morning.

  ‘What became of the villa?’ asked Zen as he searched for the elusive new car key. ‘I looked for it on the way here but I couldn’t find it.’

  ‘It’s gone. Signora Comai sold it after her husband’s death, citing painful memories and all the rest of it. It was torn down to make room for one of those new apartment blocks down on the main road. Not that it was any great loss, architecturally. The best aspect was always the grounds. Funnily enough, she kept a part of them.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the villa itself was just a nineteenth-century fantasy on Gothic and Renaissance themes, but there was an extensive walled garden reaching back to a lane behind the property. It had been well designed, and had reached full maturity back in the fifties. And in one corner, at the very end, there was a playhouse that had been built by Claudia’s parents as a birthday present for her. I went down there to take a look when I was questioning her, but it was obviously of no interest to our investigation. Too small for a grown man to even stand up in. Anyway, she sold everything except for a strip at the very end, where the playhouse is, and then had a new wall built to screen it off from the new apartments. Everyone thought she was crazy. A sentimental whim, I suppose.’

  Zen frowned.

  ‘So where is it?’

  ‘The villa was where the new block is, just opposite the AGIP filling station on the right as you drive back to Verona. But there’s nothing to see.’

  Zen spent some moments in thought, then breathed in deeply.

  ‘Good air up here,’ he remarked.

  Boito nodded.

  ‘In more ways than one, I would argue. San Giorgio has always been a paese rosso, one of the few in this priest-ridden zone. Because of the quarries, you see. This is where they mined that fine, flawless stone used for all the finishing work on the doors and windows in the area, and the quarrymen were soon organized by the PCI. So the intellectual air is also better, at least to my way of thinking.’

  He smiled self-deprecatingly.

  ‘But of course I was born here. You must judge for yourself. The church is well worth a visit. Parts of it date from 712, but the village itself is much older, at least Neolithic and probably much earlier. I’d be only too happy to show you around, if you have time.’

  But time was exactly what Aurelio Zen did not have.

  In the small town of Sant’ Ambrogio at the foot of the hill, he parked the Fiat in the huge piazza just north of the medieval centre, and then proceeded on foot. In due course he found a grocery and a newsagent’s where you could send or receive faxes. From the former he obtained a ham and cheese roll, from the latter the number of their fax machine. Then he walked back to the phone box in the piazza and called his contact at the Questura in Cremona.

  ‘Yes, yes, we have the information you requested, dottore. The property you described does indeed exist, although it’s now completely abandoned. Shall I give you the details now? Fax them to your hotel? Absolutely, dottore. At once. There’s just one thing, if I may be so bold…’

  ‘Well?’ demanded Zen, chewing on the roll.

  ‘When I called the land registry office, the woman there had the file we needed ready to hand. She said that this was the second time in the past few days that there had been an enquiry about the former Passarini property.’

  ‘Who was the other caller?’

  ‘Someone at the Ministry of Defence, she said. So I naturally wondered if there was perhaps something going on there that we should know about. We could easily send a few men out there to search the place.’

  Zen almost choked on his roll.

  ‘No, no, no! That won’t be necessary. There’s no interest in the property itself. It must be a ruin by now anyway. It’s just a question of the deeds.’

  ‘Ah, right. But what exactly is this concerning?’

  ‘An on-going criminal investigation based in Rome which for obvious reasons I can’t discuss. The
Ministry of Defence also has an interest in the case. And to make things still more difficult, there is a civil lawsuit in progress, the evidence in which is germane to our own enquiries. One of the items regarded the ownership of this property back in the sixties. So it’s purely a matter of background information relating to an affair which is of no interest whatsoever to the Provincia di Cremona. Otherwise of course I’d have alerted you.’

  To his relief, the inspector in Cremona sounded convinced.

  ‘ Perfetto, dottore. Forgive me for bringing it up, but I thought I’d better ask. We naturally like to keep track of anything important that might be happening on our territory.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Excellent. Well then, I’ll fax the information to you right away.’

  Zen left the phone booth and stood outside, smoking a cigarette and staring at the rectangular piazza lined with savagely pollarded trees. It was enormous for the size of the town, a parade ground big enough to drill a regiment. There must have been a sheep market here once upon a time, with flocks brought down from the hills above. That would explain it.

  He went back into the booth and phoned Gemma. There was no answer, so he left a brief message on the answering machine, almost certainly too brief for the listeners to trace the number he was calling from. As he walked back to the newsagent’s, he remembered that Gemma had told him that she was planning to spend a couple of days visiting her son.

  That gave him another idea. Having picked up the fax from the Questura in Cremona, he bought a sheet of paper — nothing came free in the Veneto — and faxed a message to his friend Giorgio De Angelis at Criminalpol, asking him to send a team of their technical people up to the apartment in Via del Fosso and remove any electronic surveillance equipment they found there. He didn’t bother mentioning the spare key held by a neighbour on the floor below. The Ministry’s specialists could open any door known to man while you were blowing your nose.