End games az-11

by Michael Dibdin

  In the end, Mantega did not leave the building until shortly after seven. This meant he would have to drive fast, which was good news. The vehicles and drivers at Zen’s disposal could easily keep up with anything that wasn’t airborne, and if Mantega had to keep his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road he was that much less likely to notice that his supposedly lonely pilgrimage up into the mountains actually had more in common with the convoy enveloping the Popemobile when the Supreme Pontiff, in his infallible way, decides to pay a visit to the shrine where the cult of a miracle-working saint is celebrated. The lead man astride the MotoGuzzi played a classic hand of hiding in plain view, aggressively harrying the Alfa on the many tight bends and spectacular viaducts of the superstrada leading up from the river valley to the heights above, tailgating the luxury saloon with his headlamp blazing and making little darting movements that were blatantly obvious in both of Mantega’s rear-view mirrors before roaring out to overtake and vanish in the manner of motorcyclists the world over, only to slacken speed as his machine demonstrated that it had more zip than stamina on the long, steep gradients, and eventually be passed himself in turn, at which point the whole game started again.

  The sweeper on the team was in the modified Ape van. His job was to ensure that the Popemobile didn’t have an alternative escort provided by Giorgio, and to take care of them in a suitably convincing manner if it did. The filling in the sandwich was provided by a vehicle that even Zen found interesting, despite not giving a toss about cars for the simple reason that the city in which he had grown up was one of the very few civilised niches on earth where they didn’t exist, any more than horses had before them. Back then, if you wanted to go riding, you had to row over to the Lido. Even now, if you wanted to go motoring you had to go to Mestre. And no one in his right mind would ever go to Mestre.

  But this item of Digos equipment had caught Zen’s attention. As they proceeded up into the mountains, he elicited from the driver and his colleague, who were seated in the front, that the chassis was the military version of the Ferrari Laforza all-terrain vehicle and the engine — ironically enough, given their quarry — a specially tuned Alfa Romeo V6. There were six seats inside, as well as ample space for any extra gear, but the exterior bodywork was as near as makes no difference an exact replica of the cheap Fiat vans used by provincial tradesmen and wholesalers all over the country, to which no one ever paid the slightest attention. At the moment it was painted bright blue with yellow lettering which proclaimed that it belonged to Scatamacchia Formaggi e Salumi.

  There was only one logical route for Nicola Mantega to get to his destination in time, so when they were past the summit a few kilometres from the Camigliatello exit, the MotoGuzzi put on a surprising turn of speed on the downward gradient, overtaking with some panache and surging ahead so far that it was able to take the turn-off while the Alfa was out of sight around the long bend behind. The driver swerved left and then right under the slender stone viaduct that carried the abandoned railway line across the ravine, turned off his lights, donned night-vision glasses and waited in the straggling outskirts of Camigliatello for Nicola Mantega to catch up, reporting in the meanwhile via the mouthpiece attached to his helmet.

  Things almost went wrong when Mantega turned the opposite way, up into the village, to buy a packet of cigarettes and knock back a coffee. But Natale Arnone had been tracking the relative distance and direction of the transmitter attached to the Alfa, and the Laforza was able to park unobtrusively opposite a mini-market and wait for Mantega to proceed, at which point the convoy reformed. Because of this delay, it was now sixteen minutes to eight, of which it took il notaio another fourteen to cover the remaining stretch of twisty country road in the rapidly failing light. By the time he reached the dam, the motorcyclist had cut the power and noise of the MotoGuzzi’s engine to the absolute minimum, then turned it off and free-wheeled down a path leading to the lake which Zen had identified from the map earlier. He then ran back along the shoreline to the dam, climbed up near to the roadside and reported in when Mantega’s car came to a halt in a lay-by on the other side of the road. Once again, there was nothing to do but wait.

  Two cars passed in the ensuing period of time, during which the darkness became absolute. The registration numbers of both were noted and checked against records at the Questura, but they appeared to belong to harmless local residents. No one will ever know what Mantega thought as their headlights appeared in the distance, swept across the vehicle where he sat listening to the radio and smoking cigarette after cigarette, but time in Calabria has its own rhythms which cannot be hurried. In the end he was rewarded when a black Jeep pulled up alongside the Alfa Romeo. According to the Digos agents watching the scene, the driver was a woman in her thirties or early forties, later identified as Silvia Fardella. After a brief parley, Nicola Mantega got into the Jeep, which turned right on to a steep minor road leading up into the mountains and disappeared.

  This was the crunch, and it could hardly have been worse from an operational point of view. Zen had to make an instant decision which might prove disastrous. He finally ordered the motorcyclist to remount and track the Jeep as best he could. It was a risk, but Mantega might well have other preoccupations at this point and ballsy bikers were two a penny up here in the Sila high pastures. He then called off the other Digos officer on the ground and the Ape van behind and told the driver of the Laforza to proceed slowly and with due caution. Eight minutes passed before lightning freeze-framed the thickly wooded landscape and a thundercrack shook heaven and earth, followed immediately by rain that broke on the windscreen like surf, overwhelming the wipers. Aurelio Zen finally relaxed. Now, he knew, everything would go well.

  Next the man on the MotoGuzzi called in to say that the Jeep had turned off the paved road and taken a dirt track leading up still more steeply into the forest. Giorgio was presumably waiting at some spot high in the wilderness above, just as Maria had predicted, and there was nothing for it but to go after him, hoping that the deafening violence of the torrential rain would force any watchers to take shelter and also cover the sound of the Laforza’s engine. The headlights could be dispensed with, thanks to the high-tech Digos toys — or so Zen assumed until on one particularly tight reverse curve of the precipitous, contorted and now seriously flooded track they unaccountably started moving sideways rather than forwards.

  ‘Shit!’ yelled the driver. ‘Landslip’s washed out half the road.’

  The vehicle slid gently downhill for some distance before coming to rest.

  ‘Can you get it back on the track?’ asked Zen.

  ‘Maybe,’ the Digos agent replied. ‘But I’d have to use full revs and they’d be bound to hear. I say we continue on foot and hope it’s not too much further.’

  Zen was aware that this was an attempt to democratise the decision-making process, but he couldn’t fault the man’s thinking.

  ‘ Andiamo! ’ he said decisively.

  The rain had diminished slightly for the moment, but there was little comfort once outside the vehicle. One of the Digos men produced a hooded torch whose pinched beam was the only point of reference in the darkness, and the other three followed him up what was now to all intents and purposes a river-bed. It rapidly became clear to Zen that he was falling behind, and eventually he came to a halt. The others had disappeared, leaving him in the dark. He was also ludicrously dressed for the occasion, in his office clothes and smooth-soled leather shoes that were already drenched and spouting water with every step. He found his key-ring and switched on the brilliant stiletto of light attached to it. The trees to either side looked monstrous, the trunks twenty metres or more in circumference, the last remnants of the primeval forest which had covered the area for hundreds of thousands of years. There were still wild cats here, he had heard, and wolves.

  Not unlike the man who had been baptised Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati, Zen started up the cruelly steep and rutted track and all things considered was making good speed when a flash o
f inconceivable intensity imprinted the entire surrounding landscape on his retina and the sky squealed and drummed its feet like a gutted animal. An instant later the downpour began again in the form of pebbles of hail pockmarking the molten mud ahead. Zen began running, slipped on a sheet of exposed rock and tumbled over what seemed a cliff, landing on a steep slope where he rolled over and over again before coming to rest against the trunk of one of those giant trees. The hail continued to fall deafeningly on the foliage all around, but where Zen lay the ground was covered with a deep bed of pine needles that remained dry. He heard distant gunfire — one shot, then two almost together — and got to his feet, but immediately tripped over a varicose cluster of roots. His key-ring went flying, and the miniature torch with it. There was nothing to be seen except the glittering array of stars above, each one hard, determinate and precise, but his nostrils were full of ancient odours, dense and strange, familiar and benign.

  Jake dreamt he was flying. At first it was awesome, the scenery scrolling away like on Google Earth, mountains and fields and rivers and roads and towns. Some flyover state. He longed to nuke something, but he couldn’t figure out which game it was, who the bad guys were or even the basic scenario. The only thing he knew for sure was that on an earlier level his character had spawned in the shining city upon a hill. That meant his game status was Exceptional and he had unlimited powers, which was way cool except he hadn’t a clue what to do with them.

  Maybe it was these doubts that triggered off what happened next, one of those dream things where everything goes bad just because it does, no reason given. There was this coffin on the floor he was trying to push out of the open doorway of the plane, only it was super heavy and wouldn’t budge until suddenly the rollers kicked in and they both went flying, flipping over slowly down to the sea beneath and then into it, still tumbling. He ended up in a kind of desert with huge cracks in the ground and these giant spiders, except they were more like cockroaches, a gazillion of them coming at him, more and more all the time. It was a classic run ’n’ gun, first-person shooter death match with randomised portals, only the software was way over-specified for his game controller, a dumb brick on a string with two buttons and a D-pad dating back to the eight-bit Nintendo games of the 1980s. He was getting killed here! This wasn’t a game, it was a fucking cartoon. Loony Tunes Two. That’s all, folks.

  ‘Hate to wake you, but we’ve only got about an hour to run. Care for an eye-opener?’

  Jake rolled over in bed and tried to focus on the babe who was shaking his shoulder. She totally wasn’t Madrona, but he got there in the end.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Coffee, tea or me?’

  Huh? thought Jake, but then he caught the look on her face and realised she’d been doing that thing that was big with the kids these days and gave him a headache, where you say one thing but mean something way different, ironing or something.

  ‘I’ll take a Diet Rockstar and some RapSnacks YoungBloodz Southern Crunk BBQ.’

  ‘You want ice with that?’

  He got out of bed and glanced out of the window. Mountains, fields, rivers, roads, towns, like on Google Earth. Some flyover state. He turned on ESPN and watched a bunch of ads. Black guys dunking big balls, white guys hurling oval balls, brown guys hitting white balls, all in sexy slow-mo. Ball games, celebrating designer sportswear and racial diversity. Cool. He sucked down his energy drink and tooled around the net a little till he found this site with a world map showing the area of darkness — kind of like a huge cock — over the places where it was night. Right now Madrona was in the light zone, but the edge of darkness was creeping towards her all the time. The image updated automatically every minute, so you could just sit there and watch the shadow line jerk forward a notch as the sun sank slowly in the west. You learn something every day, thought Jake. Like he’d never realised that the sun went round the earth, although it was kind of obvious once you thought about it.

  Then Madrona rang.

  ‘Yo.’

  ‘Where are you, hon?’

  ‘Beats me. I get in in like an hour?’

  ‘Bummer. I got a bikini wax at four or I’d come meet you.’

  ‘Eeeh.’

  ‘Are you okay, hon?’

  ‘I had this weird dream? Kind of creeped me out.’

  ‘Really? You know Crystl?’

  ‘I totally know her.’

  ‘She’s just awesome with dreams. She talked me through a whole bunch of mine and showed how they like foretell the future and stuff.’

  ‘Plus the movie thing tanked.’

  ‘You’re saying Apocalypse! isn’t going to happen?’

  ‘Not any time soon.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘That’s gaming.’

  He barked a laugh.

  ‘Chill, babe. It’s not the end of the world. Life is good!’

  There is a unique flavour of melancholy to remote railway stations during the long intervals between the arrival and departure of trains. And when the station is a modernistic monstrosity constructed a few decades ago on the scale befitting a provincial capital such as Cosenza, that flavour can become almost intolerably intense.

  The platform stretched away like a desolate beach at the edge of the world. Opposite, a grandiose diagram of sidings was occupied by a few rusted wagons, surplus to requirements and awaiting the scrap man. The clock ticked off precise divisions of a time without meaning anywhere else in the world. Within the cavernous vestibule behind, three uniformed employees yelled insults at each other across the resonant space with the insolence of those secure in the knowledge that under the statale ‘you pretend to work and we’ll pretend to pay you’ system, their jobs were not only guaranteed for life but left them enough free time to make some serious money in the black economy on the side.

  Like mine, thought Zen. Italy was indeed the bel paese, inexplicably blessed, just as some people seemed to be. Everything went wrong all the time, but somehow it didn’t matter, while in other countries even if everything went perfectly, life was still a misery.

  ‘ Il treno regionale 22485 proveniente da Paola viaggia con un ritardo di circa trenta minuti.’

  No, he wouldn’t lose his job. The delay to the connecting train from Cosenza to the coastal main line almost certainly meant that he would lose the seat he had reserved on the Intercity express to Rome, and therefore any hope of getting home to Lucca that night, but his job was safe. True, the powers that be had ruled that ‘the tragic and disastrous outcome’ of last night’s events had been due to Zen’s ‘precipitate actions in a complex situation demanding the greatest sensitivity and local knowledge’. Suggestions had even been made that it might be in everyone’s best interest, including his own, if he were to be offered early retirement.

  On the other hand, he hadn’t been termed ‘grossly incompetent’, which was just about the only way of winkling a government employee out of his comfy shell. If those railwaymen merely treated their customers with arrogant contempt, flaunted framed portraits of Che Guavara in their offices and fiddled the petty cash from time to time, no one could touch them. If they failed to align the points correctly or signalled one train into the path of another, that would be another matter. Zen hadn’t done that. Two men were dead, but this had been deemed not to be ‘as a direct result’ of his ‘regrettable initiative’. In short, he’d been a bit naughty but all would be forgiven. The Mummy State had merely scolded her son, not disowned him.

  The night before, he had eventually crawled back to the track, where he was intercepted by the Digos agent on the MotoGuzzi, who had been called in by his colleagues. Zen had ridden behind him up to the crime scene. This was a level area which served as a trysting place for the young people of the locality, judging by the beer bottles, syringes and used condoms picked out by the headlights of the black Jeep. Nicola Mantega was groaning, trying to say something and occasionally vomiting blood. Near him, Giorgio lay still. His sister, handcuffed to the grille of the Jeep, was screaming
hysterically.

  Accounts of what had happened varied. Natale Arnone claimed that Giorgio had fired first, he had returned fire, and the others had then shot both Giorgio and then, in error, Mantega. The Digos men agreed that Giorgio had fired shots in their general direction, ‘classic supersonic incoming whine and then the plonk of the discharge catching up, but nowhere near us’, that Arnone had fired back, hitting Mantega, and when Giorgio ignored their orders to drop his gun they had killed him. The clearing was too small and overhung by the huge pines to bring in a medivac helicopter. An hour later, an army ambulance managed to negotiate the treacherous dirt track leading to the spot, by which time Nicola Mantega was dead.

  ‘ Il treno regionale 22485 proveniente da Paola viaggia con un ritardo di circa venti minuti.’

  Aurelio Zen gazed up at the ring of mountains that hemmed Cosenza in on every side. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the autostrada and high-speed rail link to the national network had been constructed, but the character of cities and of their inhabitants are formed over centuries, not decades. Cosenza still viewed itself, and was viewed by others, as a backwater notable mainly for the fact that Alaric had been buried here. And he had done well, thought Zen. Whatever its shortcomings, Cosenza was an excellent place to be buried in, which is effectively what had happened to him that morning when Gaetano Monaco appeared at the Questura, bursting with confidence, energy and wisdom and eager to assume his duties and responsibilities as police chief of the province, the first of which was to show Zen the door.