End games az-11

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Zup?’ Jake said, gasping like a landed fish.

  Martin let him sweat his heart rate down a few beats without an answer. He was no longer powerless and humiliated, and in no hurry to spread the excellent word.

  ‘That exec jet you have on hold?’ he said finally. ‘What’s the lead time on that baby?’

  ‘Couple of hours? More, maybe. It’s like in Fresno.’

  ‘Get it warmed up, Jake.’

  There was a pleased laugh the other end.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘The Aeroscan rep is swinging by momentarily to report in depth, but from what he just said on the phone it looks like we just struck gold. Literally.’

  ‘Awesome!’

  ‘How soon can you be here?’

  ‘The leasing outfit said ten, eleven hours? What time do you have there?’

  ‘Nine twenty-three.’

  ‘In the morning?’

  ‘In the evening.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Just get here as soon as you can. Call me from the plane when you’re an hour out and I’ll come meet you. It’ll be good whatever because we can’t move until after dark. Meanwhile I’ll chase up our Iraqi expendables and get busy renting the machinery we’ll need.’

  A sudden thought struck him.

  ‘Hey, Jake? You have got a passport, haven’t you?’

  ‘A password?’

  ‘No, a passport. You know, a little blue booklet issued by the Feds with your name and picture inside? You’ll need one when you arrive.’

  ‘Bullshit. You just show them your driver’s licence. I’ve been all over. Canada, Mexico — ’

  ‘That’s just the attic and the basement, Jake. This is a different house. Believe me, you need a passport to get in.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll buy one online and have it overnighted.’

  ‘The process doesn’t work like that. It takes weeks.’

  ‘Fuck, that’s so totally twentieth century.’

  ‘Yeah, but listen. Remember a couple years back you visited with Paul on that Caribbean island he owns a chunk of?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you had a passport then which will still be valid. And another thing. The candlestick you mentioned? I’m guessing that you’ll want to export it. Could you give me a little more detail about the payload so I can start figuring out the logistics? Weight, dimensions, packaging requirements…’

  ‘Not off the top of my head. It’s like the Jewish national logo, only the real thing is solid gold. Let me get showered off and I’ll shoot you an email attachment. Hey, this is great news, Martin! Maybe you deserve a bonus.’

  ‘Maybe I do.’

  Martin Nguyen sat back, a smile growing on his thin lips. It was not a pleasant smile, although Martin was in fact pleased. He Googled around a bit, then got on to eBay and typed ‘temple menorah’ in the Search box.

  Nicola Mantega cracked shortly after four o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t so much what the interrogators had done to him physically as their crushingly contemptuous, mean-spirited attitude. By then the original gorillas had been relieved by a fresh pair, who would in due course be relieved by another, and so on, on and on, world without end. But what really hurt was the chief of police calling him silly.

  Mantega had always prided himself on being furbissimo, a maestro of cunning schemes and shady short-cuts to riches. To be called silly was far worse than the slaps in the face and kicks to the ankle administered by Zen’s underlings when their verbal skills failed them. He, Nicola Mantega, silly? He’d show these bastards who was silly, and in the process extricate himself from this nightmare. Summoning up what remained of his dignity, he informed his tormentors that he was prepared to talk, but only to their superior. They appeared dubious, maybe even disappointed, but various phone calls were made and forty minutes later Aurelio Zen appeared in the basement interrogation room. He looked even more exhausted and dispirited than Mantega, which gave the latter hope.

  ‘I want to make a deal,’ he announced in a decisive tone which suggested that the terms would be his, and slapped his right palm down hard on the battered desk which, with the stool on which he was perched, constituted the only furnishings in the small, stuffy room. Zen lit a cigarette, rubbed his eyes, coughed several times, then set the cigarette down on the back of Mantega’s hand. When the latter’s cries subsided and he had been forcibly reseated on the stool, Zen looked at him blearily.

  ‘So sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were an ashtray.’

  Mantega was still reeling from the pain, and the thought of what might yet lie in store for him.

  ‘Why did you hurt me?’ he demanded, his voice on the brink of breaking down.

  ‘Why did your friends murder the American and mutilate that poor boy?’

  ‘What are you talking about? They’re not my — ’

  Zen sprang to his feet, grabbed Mantega’s hair and tried to jerk his head back, but the fibres he was holding came away in his hand to reveal a gleaming bald pate.

  ‘And you want to make a deal with me?’ laughed Zen, tossing the toupee on the desk. ‘Well, the product had better be good, because the salesman certainly doesn’t impress much.’

  ‘It’s good, it’s good,’ mumbled Mantega. ‘And it’ll lead you to the people you really want.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  Mantega took a deep breath.

  ‘You know that helicopter that’s been circling round the valley? Everyone thinks it’s searching out locations for that film they’re supposed to be making here. But I happen to know what it’s really doing.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Searching for buried treasure.’

  ‘I’m not interested in treasure hunts.’

  ‘Of course not, signore. Neither am I, and in any case it’s very unlikely to succeed. Which is why I’ve convinced Giorgio — ’

  ‘Ah, so you do know him,’ Zen murmured.

  ‘Only by that name, which may well be false. I don’t know his family name or where he’s from and I’ve never seen his face.’

  ‘What did you tell Giorgio?’

  ‘I suggested to him…’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Two nights ago.’

  ‘On the phone?’

  ‘In person.’

  ‘That’s a certain lie. You’ve never been out of sight of my surveillance team, and they reported no such meeting.’

  Mantega smiled archly. He had finally scored a point.

  ‘Giorgio came to my house in the early hours of the morning. He knew that there was a police cordon there, but he managed to get through it without being seen. He grew up in the mountains hunting boar and wolves and told me that he can move more silently than a leaf falling from a tree.’

  ‘You just said that you’d never seen his face.’

  ‘He wore a mask.’

  ‘Well, it was certainly kind of him to run such risks to drop in on an old friend,’ Zen remarked sarcastically. ‘What did he have to say?’

  ‘He didn’t want to talk. He came to kill me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He said he’d decided that I was of no further use to him, and a possible risk.’

  Zen laughed and lit another cigarette.

  ‘Any chance of a coffee?’ he asked one of the other officers.

  The man hesitated.

  ‘That place by the bus station,’ the other prompted.

  ‘Signor Mantega?’ Zen enquired.

  ‘ Un cappuccino scuro. Lots of sugar.’

  When the officer had left on his errand, Zen turned his eyes back to the prisoner, who was eyeing the glowing tip of his cigarette nervously.

  ‘So Giorgio wanted to kill you. Good for him. Nevertheless, it’s clear that he also failed in this admirable endeavour. How did you talk your way out of it?’

  Invigorated by the mere thought of coffee, Mantega overlooked these gross insults.

  ‘By offering him the chance to make a lot
of money. Giorgio used to distribute drugs in this area, acting as an agent for one of the Reggio clans. Then he started using the product himself and the reggiani found themselves a new distributor. He had a costly habit to maintain, and whatever money he made on small local jobs went on crystal meth. That’s why he needed the Newman kidnapping to replenish his funds.’

  ‘But he didn’t even try to bring that product to market,’ Zen objected.

  Mantega nodded dejectedly.

  ‘I know. I can’t understand it. Anyway, I knew he must be almost out of money, so I offered him the chance to co-operate on a hoax to prise a fortune out of these Americans who are searching for the tomb of Alaric. According to my sources, they are using a form of technology that can penetrate the surface of the earth to a certain depth and then analyse the results in order to reveal the presence of any structures or objects that may be buried there. So all we have to do, I told Giorgio — who was standing there with a knife in his hand, ready to cut my throat — is mock up something that will look to the radar like it might be a subterranean tomb. But when the Americans start digging, they’ll find that the supposed tomb has already been opened and contains nothing but boulders and rubble from the Busento in its winter spate. Che palle! Someone got there before them. Which is when I get in touch. Yes, I say, the treasure of Alaric was indeed discovered just a few years ago, but those responsible are having great difficulty selling it, being just a little local firm. What would you like and how much are you prepared to pay?’

  The officer who had left returned bearing a tray with their coffees. Both Zen and Mantega emptied their plastic cups in one go.

  ‘And you expect them to believe you?’ Zen asked.

  Mantega laughed for the first time. He sensed that he was gaining the upper hand in the exchange, besides which the caffeine, on a painfully empty stomach, kicked in like a rugby full back.

  ‘At the time, I was more worried about Giorgio believing me! Which he did, so at least I’d saved my life. But since you ask, dottore, I think that our story might very well be believed as long as it’s properly presented, which task will be in my capable hands. Treasure hunters don’t want to think that they’ve wasted years of their lives and millions of their money chasing the end of the rainbow, so they come preselected for a certain amount of credulity. Besides, what have we got to lose? If they don’t bite, we can walk away.’

  ‘And if they do bite?’

  Mantega gestured largely.

  ‘We’ll offer them some decent fakes. It’s been done before, you know.’

  Zen let his head sink into his hands. He looked utterly defeated.

  ‘All right, so that’s how you’re proposing to fool them,’ he said. ‘How are you proposing to fool me?’

  This was the moment that Mantega had been waiting for.

  ‘You called me silly,’ he said, a little edge in his voice, ‘but I’m not silly enough to try and fool a man like you. I may or may not succeed in fooling the treasure hunters, but that’s just a sideshow, a means to an end, which is to fool Giorgio and hand him over to you.’

  By now feeling fully empowered, Mantega allowed himself to crumple up and fold forward, his body language mirroring that of his opponent, always a good move in tough negotiations.

  ‘Giorgio wanted to kill me!’ he cried in an emphatic but muffled voice. ‘He broke into my house in the middle of the night, woke me from sleep and threatened to cut my throat! Thank God my beloved wife and sons weren’t there. But that man is a maniac, dottore. If he did it once, he may do it again. I won’t sleep soundly until he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for killing Pietro Calopezzati, and you are the only person who can achieve that. So what I’m proposing, Dottor Zen, is that you release me to act as the mediator between Giorgio and the Americans in the hoax that I’ve outlined. At some point in the ensuing negotiations, I will arrange a meeting at which Giorgio will be present and communicate the details of the time and place to you in advance, giving you plenty of time to prepare your men to move in and arrest him. What do you say?’

  Shortly before noon the next day, Achille Pancrazi set off for Reggio di Calabria, seat of the regional government and of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale. He covered the two hundred kilometres in a little under an hour and a half, parked in a side-street near the museum and then killed the remaining time in a bar over a coffee and a shot of the local spirit flavoured with bergamot, the pungent, inedible citrus native to that part of Calabria. Professor Pancrazi did not normally drink before lunch, but today he felt a need to fortify himself.

  At a quarter to two precisely he arrived at the museum and proceeded to the office of the assistant director he had spoken to earlier by phone.

  ‘I apologise for being late,’ he said once the ritual greetings and embraces had been concluded. ‘Roadworks on the autostrada. I was stuck in a tailback for almost an hour.’

  The director smiled wearily.

  ‘After a while, you begin to wonder why the damn thing wasn’t built properly in the first place.’

  Pancrazi returned an equally weary glance, but no reply. Both men knew perfectly well why the A3, like most high-investment construction projects in the south funded by the Italian government, hadn’t been built properly in the first place.

  ‘Anyway, I do hope it’s not too late,’ Pancrazi added apologetically. ‘You people must be wanting your lunch, but I can manage perfectly well on my own. As I said on the phone — ’

  ‘No, no! For you, professor, no problem at all. Please come with me.’

  The director led him out into the main galleries, then down several flights of stairs and through various doors to the basement, which housed the museum’s reserve collection and workshops. They traversed long lanes flanked by rows of tall metal shelving on which the artefacts were stored, eventually reaching a more brightly lit area where four men in blue overalls were chatting.

  ‘Ready for lunch, boys?’ the director said. ‘Me too. Let me introduce Professor Achille Pancrazi from Cosenza University.’

  There were polite murmurs and handshakes all round.

  ‘What was it you wanted to inspect again, professor?’ the director remarked. ‘Those pinakes whose authenticity and origin are still in dispute, I believe.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Pancrazi. He shrugged with a certain embarrassment. ‘I’ve been asked to give a paper about that type of artefact in Stockholm next weekend and I realised yesterday that the topic of your recent find is almost certain to come up, so I’d better have another look to be sure I know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Of course, of course. Marco will show you where they’re currently being stored. And then I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave you to find your own way out. Shame you couldn’t make it down here in time for lunch.’

  One of the workmen led Pancrazi along the racks to a section where the thin terracotta votive tablets dedicated to the cult of Persephone in the Greek city of Locri were stored.

  ‘Listen,’ Pancrazi whispered conspiratorially. ‘This may take some time, and of course smoking is not allowed in here. Is there somewhere I might go and have a puff if the need arises?’

  ‘ Ma certo, professore!’

  The man led him over to a door in the outer wall. Above it was a lighted sign reading ‘Fire Exit’.

  ‘Just push the bar and you’re standing in the loading dock area,’ the workman said. ‘Mind you hold the door open, though. Otherwise you’ll have to go all the way round to the front to get back in.’

  ‘But doesn’t the alarm sound when the door’s opened?’ Pancrazi asked.

  The caretaker gave him a knowing smile, as between two addicts.

  ‘Supposed to, but we disable it during the day. As long as you don’t let the door close behind you while you’re out there, there’ll be no problem.’

  He returned to join his fellows, and the whole group started to move off in the direction of lunch. Achille Pancrazi tracked their voices across the o
pen space of the basement until they dwindled away up the staircase. After that, it took him about fifteen minutes to search the storage area and locate the items he was seeking, and another five to pack the ones he selected to serve as a suitable ransom for his son Emanuele in layers of newspaper and a further layer of bubble-wrap. He slipped them into the large briefcase he had brought with him and left the premises through the door that the workman had pointed out to him.

  By the time his modified 737 finally touched down at wherever the fuck it was, Jake felt pretty well bummed. It wasn’t about the facilities. The Boeing Business Jet was a beauty, and having it all to himself was way cool. There was a regular king-size bed, a humungous TV with wrap-around sound, a flight attendant who wasn’t Jake’s type but was there when you needed her, plus satellite internet connection so he could keep up to speed with his online gaming. He’d even got to ride up front with the pilots for a while. But eleven hours was way too long to spend cooped up in a pressurised tube five miles above the ocean. Towards the end, Jake had found a leaflet that one of the cleaners must have left in a drawer of the desk in his living quarters. It was entitled Rectal Carcinoma and God’s Plan for You, and by then he was so bored that he’d read the whole freaking thing from start to finish. Linear reading! In treeware format! It was just too weird.

  Then there’d been Madrona. As soon as she heard where he was going, she was like, ‘Iddly? I’ve always wanted to go to Iddly! It’s so romantic! Can I come, Jake, can I, can I?’ Luckily he’d been able to call her on the passport angle. Like three-quarters of her fellow citizens, Madrona didn’t have one, but it was still tough to convince her that that meant she couldn’t come along. Actually, Jake kind of agreed with her. The US was the only global superpower left in the game. If that didn’t mean Americans could go anywhere they damn well chose, showing up with a wad of dollars and everyone pleased to see them, what was the point? As his plane taxied to a halt on a stand away from the terminal, he wondered how much it would cost to just buy Italy and then lease it back to the Italians as a franchised vacation facility. That would solve a lot of problems.

  No sooner had the metal staircase docked with the plane than up rolled some classy European saloon from which Martin Nguyen emerged, looking even more desiccated and reptilian than usual.