Medusa - 9

by Michael Dibdin

  Then he heard a low whistle. He turned and saw a figure standing at the edge of the trees on the other side of the tracks. After a moment’s hesitation he started towards him.

  ‘Alberto,’ he said neutrally when he drew close enough.

  The other man had been inspecting him closely as he walked towards him. Now he nodded once, as if to confirm the resulting identification.

  ‘Nestore.’

  He gestured towards the path from which he had emerged, a narrow ribbon of bare earth winding off into the forest.

  ‘Shall we?’

  Alberto seemed to have changed only in the sense that leftover fondue changes from a bubbly sauce to a compact, grey, gelatinous mass. He had lost some hair and put on a bit of weight, but both his physique and his peremptory manner were essentially unaltered.

  ‘You’d already heard, I take it.’

  ‘Heard?’

  ‘About Leonardo.’

  ‘No, actually.’

  Alberto gave him one of his trademark coded looks, which might be decrypted roughly as ‘Obviously I don’t believe you, but equally obviously you don’t intend or expect me to. Honour is therefore satisfied, and we’re back where we started, only one level up.’

  ‘I don’t bother any more,’ Nestore said.

  ‘Bother?’

  ‘With the news.’

  Alberto laughed indulgently.

  ‘No, of course not! Neither do I. If those media clowns have heard of it, it isn’t news. But I thought you might …’

  The winding path, proceeding gently in ascent, had brought them to a viewpoint with a slatted wooden bench overlooking the lake. The gnarled roots of the huge beeches showed above ground between outcrops of rock covered in lichen and some patchy grass. Alberto extracted a pair of small binoculars from his pocket and looked down through them to the terminus of the railway far below. Nestore subsided on to the bench.

  ‘So you haven’t?’ Alberto remarked, replacing the binoculars in his pocket.

  Another unaltered trait: picking up some apparently discarded conversational thread as though it were one among dozens of chess games he was playing simultaneously and with equal mastery. For a vertiginous moment, Nestore felt twenty again, not in the conventional jokey sense in which he’d said it to his mistress, but with a kind of terror. We always misremember youth, he thought. The fact is that it was scary and demanding. He was happy being the age he now was, with the various perks and comforts that age had brought. He wasn’t up to youth any more, and he certainly wasn’t prepared to be dicked around by Alberto.

  ‘Haven’t what?’ he demanded in a tone that reflected this feeling.

  ‘Any inside channels. Contacts from the old days, perhaps.’

  ‘Like who?’

  Alberto’s casual, almost irritated shrug struck the first false note in their encounter.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know!’

  Asmall lizard sped across the rocky ledge between them.

  ‘Gabriele, for instance.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you?’

  ‘Passarini was a wimp, even back then. I don’t associate with wimps.’

  Alberto nodded, as though evaluating some important and complex piece of data.

  ‘So you’re no longer in touch with Gabriele.’

  Nestore got to his feet.

  ‘I’m no longer in touch with anyone from those days, Alberto. And the only reason I’m talking to you is because you dragged me up here with an urgent summons that made it all sound vitally important, a matter of life and death. I don’t get it. All right, Leonardo’s body has been found. So what?’

  Alberto slipped immediately into another of the roles that Nestore knew so well, but had forgotten; in this instance, that of the great professor indulging a promising student by deliberately misinterpreting his ploddingly literal question for a more suggestively meaningful one.

  ‘Before the Viminale moved, I would absolutely have agreed with you,’ he replied, nodding slowly. ‘The investigation was initially being handled by the Brothers-in-Law, and the combination of their own ineptitude and a little judicious guidance orchestrated by yours truly promised to bring the whole unfortunate business to a speedy and discreet conclusion.’

  This is how women must feel, thought Nestore, listening to some bore droning on, trying to impress them. Except that they at least know what he wants. But what did Alberto want?

  ‘What day is it?’

  He was pleased to note the momentary flash of startled confusion before the reply came.

  ‘Why, Sunday.’

  ‘Correct. It also happens to be my birthday, and I’m celebrating by having lunch out with my friends, none of whom would know you from the Romanian guest worker who washes the dishes at the very exclusive restaurant where I am due in just under an hour. I am no longer Nestore Soldani. My name is Nestor Machado Solorzano and I am a Venezuelan citizen living a blameless life in a quietly luxurious tax haven in southern Switzerland. I am grateful for the help that you provided in the past over those oil contracts and arms deals, but you got your cut at the time. In short, Alberto, unless you can demonstrate in the next thirty seconds that what happened all those years ago is of the slightest consequence to me now, then with all due respect I invite you to stick your Italian intrigues up your arse and leave me in peace.’

  He had been expecting fury and fireworks, but to his astonishment – disappointment even – Alberto just crumpled.

  ‘Of course, of course!’ he murmured. ‘I’m sorry. Let’s start back to the station. The train will be along soon and you’ll be back in Campione in good time for your lunch. I had no idea that it was your birthday and I apologize for intruding. Only I had to be sure, do you see?’

  When there was no answer, he repeated the apparently rhetorical question in an even more emphatically anguished tone.

  ‘Do you see?’

  I was completely wrong about him, thought Nestore. The old boy’s gone to pieces. It’s all front, bluster and bluff, and the generalized paranoia of the old.

  ‘See what?’ he demanded roughly.

  ‘That I had to be sure.’

  ‘Sure of what?’

  Alberto paused for a moment, holding his companion by the arm. He gave a brief laugh to signal an upcoming joke.

  ‘That I’d “secured my flanks”. Remember that pedant Oddone in his lecture on Cannae? “Aemilius Paullus had imprudently neglected to secure his flanks.” At which Andrea promptly pipes up, “And his rear was wide open too.” Ah, happy days!’

  Nestore pointedly consulted his watch, and Alberto hastened to lead the way along the path again.

  ‘Anyway, that’s rather my position just now, you see.’

  ‘“Securing your flanks”. Meaning me and Gabriele?’

  There was no reply.

  ‘What’s become of Gabriele, anyway?’

  Not that he gave a toss. This was just a social chat now, a question of finding some topic in common to keep the embarrassment of silence at bay.

  ‘He runs a bookshop in Milan,’ Alberto murmured.

  Nestore nodded.

  ‘I can imagine him doing that.’

  ‘Only he doesn’t seem to be there at the moment. Or at his house either. In fact he seems to have disappeared. It’s all a bit worrying. Are you sure you have no idea where he might be?’

  ‘We haven’t been in touch for over twenty years.’

  ‘Ah, right. Well, we’re looking into it. We’ll find him sooner or later. It’s just that time is of the essence.’

  ‘“We”?’

  Alberto’s demeanour changed in some indefinable way.

  ‘I moved over to intelligence work about the same time that you went off to South America.’

  ‘The servizi?’

  Alberto acknowledged the point with a self-satisfied bow.

  ‘SISMI, the Servizio Informazioni e Sicurezza Militare. Bette
r promotion prospects, not to mention the possibility of assisting you in your business ventures, but above all a real opportunity to serve my country. There’s little chance of Italy being involved in open warfare in the immediate future, but there’s no end to the covert wars. The post offers me superior challenges and superior resources. That’s how I’ve been able to maintain up-to-date records on you and Gabriele, just in case the need should ever arise.’

  ‘The need for what?’

  ‘To meet and talk frankly about the situation. Above all, to ensure that our secret remains ours, and will not become a public scandal which could compromise public trust in our armed forces in the most disastrous way, as well as reopening the terrible scars left on our body politic by the events of the seventies.’

  Pompous prick, thought Nestore.

  ‘Well, I’m glad I’ve been able to reassure you,’ he said affably.

  ‘Indeed. Now it’s just a question of tracking down Gabriele and having the same conversation with him. I’m sure the outcome will be the same too. I hear the train coming. Many thanks for your cooperation, Nestore, and profound apologies for the disturbance. But I did have to be sure. You understand that, don’t you? I did have to be sure.’

  Nestore shrugged wearily.

  ‘No problem, Alberto. Only next time, not on my birthday, all right?’

  Alberto regarded him with a look which Nestore found impossible to decipher.

  ‘There won’t be a next time.’

  He turned and walked away into the surrounding forest of beeches. Nestore headed off across the tracks to the station building.

  So what the hell had all that been about, apart from the loss to him of the fifty-franc fare and a quiet Sunday morning at home? All this secret service stuff! Alberto must have gone gaga in his sealed world of spooks, where the only people you could discuss your work with were as crazy as you. And all he’d wanted had been the reassurance that Nestore wouldn’t blab about Leonardo’s death. As though he would! They could have met at one of the cafés in the main square of Campione, for God’s sake. It would have taken a fraction of the time, and the end result would have been exactly the same.

  The journey back down the mountainside, at a steady fourteen kilometres an hour, seemed to take an eternity. When they finally arrived, Nestore got out and glanced around the car park. The Italian car had gone and there was no sign of the broken-nosed bouncer. Probably some mummy’s boy from Como who’d come up to Switzerland for the day to give himself a thrill.

  He unlocked the Mini Cooper and climbed in. It felt cramped somehow. Reaching down under the seat, he pulled the lever up and pushed back. The seat slotted into its most extended position. Nestore sighed and started up the engine. He always had that problem when Andreina had been using one of their cars. She moved the driving seat forwards so she could reach the pedals, then forgot to return it to its original position. It was one of many sloppy traits of hers that he no longer found charming. But Andreina never drove the Mini, and anyway if the seat had been moved, surely he would have noticed it on the way there? He shrugged and gunned the car out of town and back along the lake, delighting in its superb acceleration and surefootedness. One of these days he must take it up into the mountains and give it a real thrash.

  The bells of Santa Maria del Ghirli started ringing noon as he re-entered Italian territory. Perfect. Just time to go home, change into something more fashionable and then head out to the restaurant. He would stick with venison for the main course, but what to start with? The ravioli with meat and truffles were hard to beat at this time of year, but then so was everything else on the menu. Maybe the best thing would be to get Bernard to serve a selection of first courses so that people could sample them all. He drew up in front of the steel gates of the villa, took the telecomando from the glove compartment and depressed the green button at the top.

  IV

  The torch acted as the genius loci, its scope and sway strictly limited but within that ambit omnipotent, calling a myriad objects and vistas into being before dismissing them back into latency with a flick of its narrow beam.

  The world was made of rock, and always hemming in, but lately it had become more disorganized. The bounds had burst somewhere, allowing massive lumps and clusters to fall, or in some cases erupt upwards, almost blocking their path. But at the last moment the torch would always find a way. Some slit or aperture would appear, and they would crawl or squeeze through, mindful of the jagged edges all around, and patch together from disjunctive glimpses an impression of yet more rectangular tunnel strewn with debris.

  ‘Now we must be careful,’ announced Anton in his stalkily precise Italian. ‘This is the pitch head.’

  The beam of the squat orange torch dashed about, speedily brushing in their notional surroundings like a manic cartoon sequence, and then, unaccountably, its power ceased. The darkness in front of them, just a few metres distant, seemed no different or more intense than that which had surrounded them ever since they entered the tunnels, but the playful minor divinity of the place, out of his depth here, could get no grip on it.

  ‘Rudi wanted to go down and take a look, so we fixed an eight-millimetre self-drilling expansion bolt over here as a primary belay.’

  He pointed the torch at the wall of the tunnel, picking out a glinting metal ring.

  ‘Then we ran a secondary to the natural anchor point on that boulder over there.’

  The torch briefly illumined the chunk of raw rock.

  ‘We didn’t really count on much in the way of horizontal work when we planned the expedition,’ the young Austrian went on. ‘Nevertheless, we brought about fifty metres of static nylon rope, a harness and a minimum of other gear, just in case. What we didn’t have was any rope-protector, since we were thinking that if there were possible descents then they will be free hangs, with no rub points. But as soon as Rudi went over the edge he spotted a sharp protrusion. There was no way to belay around it so he carried on. It was safe enough for a single descent and ascent, but anything more than that would have been risky.’

  His voice boomed around the confined space, evacuated only by the gulf that had opened up at their feet.

  ‘Rudi rappelled down as far as he could, until he came to the knot marking the end of the rope. And he was shouting something we couldn’t make out, and we were shouting too, you know, because we were excited, and also feeling a little foolish because we had got lost. Then there were a few flashes when he took the pictures, and after that he prusiked back up the pitch and we hauled him over the edge and he told us that there was a body down there.’

  Anton gestured in an embarrassed way. ‘Been there, done that’ was the motto of him and his pals at the University of Innsbruck Speleology Club. That meant the Stellerweg and Kaninchenhöhle, of course, but also the Trave and the Piedra de San Martin, two of the longest and deepest systems in Northern Spain, not to mention various expeditions to Slovenia, Mexico, Norway and even Jamaica. And then to spend a weekend break exploring a network of military tunnels dating from the First World War and get lost in a man-made shaft in what had used to be part of their own country? The indignity, the disgrace, and … well, yes, a certain amount of fear had come into it, even before they’d found the body.

  ‘Let me take a look,’ said Zen.

  ‘All right, but on your hands and knees, please. Then on your stomach when I do. Your clothing will get dirty, but it’s perfectly dry here and it will brush off after. But we don’t want another accident.’

  It seemed to Zen that ghostly quotation marks seemed to hover around the last word, but he made no comment. They both proceeded in the prescribed manner until they reached the brink of the chasm. Anton leant out and shone his torch down, but there was little to see except occasional hints of the sheer scale of the pit beneath. Somewhere very far below – Zen found it impossible to estimate the depth even roughly – a wild chaos of rocks was dimly visible.

  ‘Is this a natural formation?�
� asked Zen.

  ‘No, no. The Dolomites are formed out of the rock that gives them their name. It’s a crystalline form of limestone and virtually impervious to erosion, even by acidic water. So there’s no caving here, although further north, where the limestone is softer, the situation is quite different. This was man-made. We’re now in one of the Austrian tunnels. The Italians counter- mined it in 1917. Over thirty thousand kilos of explosives. This is the result.’

  He moved the torch beam closer to the edge.

  ‘You can see the overhang down there, about two metres below,’ Anton went on in his slightly pedantic manner. ‘It is this which prevented us seeing the body from here, of course. But when Rudi reached the end of the rope, he illuminated his torch so that he could see how far there is to go and where he will land, and …’

  ‘And then he saw the corpse.’

  ‘Yes. Of course we were anxious to inform the authorities, but we were also lost in this maze of tunnels, so Rudi took some photographs to confirm and then we started back, this time keeping a sketch map for reference. After two hours and many false starts we found another way out, not the one by which we had entered. From there I called to the carabinieri on my mobile phone and then we waited some time for them to arrive. Quite a long time, actually.’

  He crawled back a metre or so before standing up.

  ‘So, I think that is all there is to show you. Shall we go back?’

  ‘We won’t get lost?’