Medusa - 9

by Michael Dibdin

  A straggle of low buildings appeared at a sharp bend in the road ahead, seemingly propped up against the precipitous slope of the mountainside. Most were abandoned, but a few showed lights, and in the centre of the village there was a bar and shop with petrol pumps outside. Bruno turned off and parked outside.

  ‘Need to pee, capo,’ he explained.

  The air inside the bar was as suffocatingly thick and hot as it had been at the establishment up at the pass, but when the half-dozen clients inside noticed Bruno’s uniform, the temperature immediately seemed to drop by several degrees.

  Zen went up to the counter and asked for two coffees and a glass of an interesting-looking homemade liqueur in a litre bottle on the bar. He had to repeat the order several times before the woman who was serving finally nodded and shuffled off without the slightest acknowledgement. While he waited, Zen skimmed through a story in the German-language newspaper lying on the counter, something about a rich Venezuelan who’d been killed when his car exploded outside the gates of his villa in Campione d’Italia. Good, he thought. The sooner this dead-end case he had mistakenly got involved with ceased to be national news, the better.

  Bruno reappeared, ostentatiously zipping up his flies and checking the positioning of their contents. Their coffees and Zen’s liqueur arrived without a word being spoken. In fact no word had been spoken by anyone in the bar since they had entered.

  ‘Quiet, isn’t it?’ remarked Bruno.

  Zen lit a cigarette but made no reply.

  ‘On the face of it,’ the patrolman went on loudly, leaning back against the bar and gazing round the room. ‘But appearances can be deceptive. In fact, everyone in this village suffers from a rare and ultimately fatal condition whose inexorable progress can only be delayed by drinking the blood of a live human being.’

  He nodded solemnly.

  ‘That’s the price you pay for centuries of incest. Poor things. There are few of them left now, because of course once in a while, when pickings from the passing trade are slim, they get desperate and draw lots among themselves. But their normal practice is to lure travellers in here with the promise of a hot drink or some petrol for the car. This dump used to be a mining community and there’s still a warren of shafts going back into the mountains. They stack the husks in there and resell the cars to the Mafia. Once in a while some tourist goes missing somewhere on the road to Cortina. No one can prove anything.’

  He pointed to the floor.

  ‘That’s the trapdoor, right there where you’re standing, dot¬ tore. Lucky you didn’t come in alone. Next thing you knew, you’d be lying down in the cellar with a broken leg and these creatures pouring down the stairs, giggling and squealing and knocking each other aside in their eagerness to open up an artery so that they could feast.’

  Bruno swivelled round and stabbed a finger at one of the other drinkers, a man of diminutive stature.

  ‘You dwarf!’ he roared. ‘How many litres have you downed over the years, eh? Sucking the rich red curd down like mother’s milk! And that swine next to you, nuzzling his snout into the still-living entrails in hopes of finding a last drop of the good stuff clinging to some gizzard!’

  Zen laid some money on the counter, took Bruno by the elbow and steered him outside. It was starting to snow, even at this lower level.

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Zen asked the patrolman once they were back in the car. ‘You know the problems we have in this territory! What are you trying to do, start another terrorist movement up here?’

  ‘Sorry about that, capo. I just lost it for a moment. But it’s all right, they don’t speak Italian.’

  ‘They understand it.’

  ‘Of course, but they’d never admit that. It would be letting the side down. Hence my little game. Must be maddening for them.’

  Zen sighed massively and lit a cigarette, cranking the window down slightly. Tufts of snow landed on his face like flies.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked in a subdued voice.

  ‘Bologna. I used to be bored there when I was growing up, but now I can’t wait to go back. It’s like being separated from your wife. And you, capo, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘Venice.’

  They drove on in silence for a while.

  ‘I hate the mountains,’ said Bruno.

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘And I hate the people who live here. Not because they’re foreigners. It’s their country and as far as I’m concerned they’re welcome to it. But all the bright, enterprising, intelligent people left long ago, because they hated the mountains too. I mean, who’d want to live up here? So the only people left are the scum. The village idiots, the child and wife abusers, the no-brain losers and retards of every variety.’

  Another silence.

  ‘How long have you got to go?’ asked Zen.

  ‘Three months and thirteen days.’

  Zen nodded.

  ‘From a professional point of view, I think it might be advisable to make a special exception in your case.’

  Bruno peered back at him in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘I’ll try. Provided you get me back to the valley, safe and sound, and by nine at the latest.’

  ‘You want the station, right?’

  ‘No, I’ve changed my mind. Drop me at the hospital. I’ll take a cab from there.’

  V

  Night slipped past the open window at a steady one hundred and forty kilometres per hour. Chips and shards of light, some isolated, others roughly clustered, were borne past on its current at an apparent speed relative to their distance from the train. Parallax, thought Zen, although his immediate memory was of twirled sparklers, wire with a fizzy firework coating that created illusionary circles and whorls of solid light in the darkness. That and fireflies. Whatever had happened to fireflies?

  By now they were quite far down the valley, past Rovereto. The snow had finally petered out at about the same point as the everyday use of the German language, but early that evening in Bolzano it had at once been clear that Bruno’s warning about getting down from the mountains in time had not been just a pretext for cutting short a long day. When they finally reached the city, after one distinctly scary moment involving an uncontrolled skid and an oncoming truck, the streets were already lightly covered, while huge but seemingly weightless flakes were falling so densely as to make driving almost as difficult as in fog. In the end, Bruno had insisted on remaining at the hospital while Zen did his business there and then driving him to the station, on the basis that taxis would be impossible to find and that it was too far to walk.

  ‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’ he’d added, seemingly casually. ‘And you shouldn’t hang around either, dottore. They’ll get the snowploughs out on the main streets, but it all takes time and you have that train down south to catch …’

  ‘What’s your surname, Bruno?’ Zen had remarked equally casually.

  ‘Nanni, capo.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  In the event he was back at the car in just over forty minutes, and they reached the station with almost an hour to spare. The train on which Zen had a reserved sleeper was waiting on one of the central platforms, but the locomotive had not yet been coupled up and the carriages were all dark and locked. He went to the station buffet and ate a toasted cheese and ham sandwich with some excellent beer, followed by a glass of local kirsch that was so good that he bought a small bottle as a souvenir for Gemma. Then he walked along the station building to the door marked Servizio.

  In the dense warmth within, half a dozen men in railway uniform were smoking, chatting and playing cards. By a combination of implied threat, backed up by his police identification, and overt bribery, backed up by his wallet, he persuaded one of the sleeping-car attendants to walk with him across the tracks. The snow had not yet started to settle here, but it was now falling more thickly than ever.

  �
�Do you think we’ll get away on time?’ Zen asked the attendant as he unlocked one of the blue sleeping cars.

  ‘No question, dottore. The whole crew’s from Rome. It would take the worst blizzard these krauts have ever seen to keep us banged up here overnight. Sorry about the cold inside. The heating’ll come on as soon as the engine hooks up.’

  Once in his chilly compartment, Zen lay down fully clothed on the bunk bed, bone-weary and dispirited, and immediately fell asleep.

  He surfaced briefly when something nudged the train heavily and the lights came to glaring life, then dozed again for a while, lulled by the complex and comforting sounds and motion. But for the last half-hour or so he had been on his feet at the open window, wide awake and seemingly for good. The slightly rumpled bed beckoned, the night-light glowed cosily, but sleep wouldn’t come.

  He opened the bottle of kirsch he had bought for Gemma at the station, took a satisfying slug and lit a cigarette. After the day he’d had, not to mention only four hours’ sleep the previous night, he should have been exhausted. Indeed, he was exhausted. It just so happened that he was also wide awake.

  This normally only happened to him when he was in the grip of a case, deeply involved and yet unable for the moment to understand what needed to be done, or how to go about it. He hadn’t previously imagined that this was the situation here. On the contrary, everything had seemed to suggest that this case had been shunted off in his direction, among a sheaf of others, as a sop to his professional pride, a transparent excuse to look busy. It seemed, however, that various supposedly subordinate departments of his mind – down in the basement, where the real work got done – were not convinced. Perhaps it had been Anton Redel’s oddly insinuating remarks, or perhaps the reception he had been given by the carabinieri in Bolzano, or the information he had gathered earlier that evening at the local hospital.

  In any event, it was all nonsense. He was in charge, for God’s sake, his rational, waking self, and he had decided to go home, file his report and make an end of it. It was as home that he now thought of Lucca. He knew that few of its inhabitants would ever return the compliment, but that was their business. As far as he was concerned, he had settled in, and with the only woman he had ever met who accepted him without question just as he was. That was no little thing, and all the rest seemed to naturally follow. One of the few differences between them, which Gemma had also accepted without com¬ ment or suggestions for a cure, was that after some days there he began to feel restless.

  It was in this spirit that Zen had accepted the assignment dangled before him by his superior Brugnoli in Rome. It would give him a chance to get out and about a bit, he had thought, to exercise his professional skills, spend some time away, and then return home refreshed and ready to enjoy the quiet pleasures of life in a small town so far off the beaten track that he would have to kill a good few hours of the early morning in Florence before the first connection left on the single-track branch line that ran through Pistoia and Lucca to Viareggio. Gemma had offered to come and pick him up when he had called her from Bolzano, but he had of course refused. It was humiliating enough not to own a car, and have still less desire to acquire one, without forcing your lover out of bed in the middle of the night to drive a hundred and fifty kilometres to save you from the consequences of your own inadequacy.

  He took another drink from the bottle and lit another cigarette. Standing to the left-hand side of the window, he was protected from the surging air. The light of a skittish moon, constantly dodging behind rafts of cloud, provided the only sense of place, and when it came, it was dramatic: towering cliffs of raw jagged rock, densely wooded slopes, the swathe of destruction on either bank, and then of course the Adige itself, surging and boiling in the shallow stretches, sinisterly calm and muscular where the channel deepened.

  Battlements clustered like birds’ nests appeared on a crag across the river, some medieval lordling’s lair perched above the highways he’d taken toll on, a previous version of the military works which Zen had viewed earlier in the day. The thought of the labour that had gone into those ingenious constructions, erected by sheer human sweat in the harshest of environments, not to mention the constant risk of being shot or blown up, was astonishing and humiliating. Depressing too, because in the end it had all been for nothing, both for the robber baron and for the young men who had died in the barren peaks Zen had visited earlier. The former had been replaced by more organized and democratic forms of extortion, while the Italian army had lost both its honour and the war at the disfatta storica of Caporetto, the battle which had wiped out all the earlier gains. Despite their heroic sacrifices and sufferings, the Alpini had been forced to withdraw.

  True, at the end of the war the nation had got the whole territory back, as well as the Austrian cisalpine provinces of the Südtirol, the valleys south of the Brennero, as a gracious crumb let fall from the grand table of the Versailles peace conference. The fact remained that young men had died in their hundreds of thousands, most of them farm labourers from the centre and south of the country who had not the slightest idea of who they were fighting, let alone why.

  The train seemed to have speeded up. They were going too fast, he thought, and in the same instant involuntarily recalled a passage from a French novel he’d read, probably while he was at university. He had perhaps remembered it because it was about railways, and his father had been a railwayman. In any event, he had now forgotten everything about the book except the demonic ending featuring a troop train hurtling through a featureless landscape towards the front in some forgotten war. The conscripts, numbed with exhaustion and booze, chanted and sang, unaware of the fact that the driver had fallen from the footplate of the locomotive, that the uncontrolled machine itself was driving them towards their inevitable destruction.

  La storia. Le storie. History. Stories. The two senses of the word were coming together in his mind. Despite being of a generation that had never had to go to war, Zen – like every Italian, directly or indirectly – had had his appointments both with history and the infinite stories, true and false, which had been woven around it. In his case, they had usually come in the form of official cases that he had been charged with investigating, or helping to investigate, or more cynically hindering. How many had there been? How many stories had he worked on? Unless of course, as some said, they were all the same story, whose author and outcome would never be known.

  Certainly this latest addition to the list did not seem very promising, even discounting the difficulties due to the fact that he had practically been operating in a foreign country. When Mussolini’s Fascists came to power after the First World War, exploiting the internal contradictions of the former regime’s hollow victory, they had exercised their absolute power to the utmost in the newly-named Alto Adige, forbidding the use of German, encouraging internal immigration from Sicily and the South, and generally grinding down the Austrian population in a blatant attempt to persuade them to head home across the Brennero Pass and not come back.

  It was small wonder that resentment against the Italians still smouldered in the area. Since the granting of regional autonomy, this largely manifested itself on the personal level to which Bruno had taken exception in the mountain bar, but back in the seventies Zen had been at the sharp end of separatist terrorism during his ‘hardship years’ in the police, the obligatory posting to either Sicily, Sardinia or the Alto Adige, the nation’s three most troubled and dangerous areas. Now, though, the terrorists had all retired and written their memoirs, while the locals were doing very nicely thank you off their status as nominally Italian but in practice self-regulating in all the issues that really mattered. They might still flaunt their cultural and linguistic diversity, but when push came to shove they were happier dealing with a remote and largely indifferent government in Rome than coming under the thumb of their own people to the north and having to do everything by the book.

  Certainly Werner Haberl, the junior doctor whom Zen had inter
viewed at the hospital in Bolzano, showed no traces of resentment at all. On the contrary, he had handled the occasion with an urbane, amused, slightly patronizing ease, treating Zen as if dealing with a promising exchange student from some developing country such as Ethiopia. The body found in the old Minenkriegstollenlage? A memorable case, even before the carabinieri had staged their midnight raid and whisked everything away without a word of explanation. It wasn’t every day that you got a partially mummified unidentified body of indeterminate age on the slab. The last one had been that Ice Age corpse they’d found up in the Alps, about a hundred metres on the Austrian side of the border as it turned out in the end. But Ötzi too had been there for a while, while the political aspects got sorted out.

  Yes, he’d been present at the autopsy. They all had. Staff, students, even people from outside the department. It was a unique case, after all; none of your run-of-the-mill car crashes, drug overdoses, suicides and cardiac arrests. They’d all hovered around while the professor did the business, describing his procedures and findings minutely for the benefit of the assembled company, as well as the voice recorder from which he would subsequently transcribe his notes before writing up the official report. That had of course been taken, along with everything else, in the course of the carabinieri’s intervention last week. At four in the morning. Ten of them in two jeeps, with a military ambulance to take the cadaver and all the effects. Protests had been made, but all in vain.

  Sensing an opening, Zen had immediately moved in.