Medusa - 9

by Michael Dibdin

  He swung left on to the slightly wider road that curved along the bank of the river into which all this land drained, and which in turn drained into a minor tributary of the Po. Two cars passed him, one in each direction, but each travelling at such a speed that Gabriele could have figured to the occupants as no more than a hazardous blur to be avoided if possible. The remaining locals all drove like maniacs, as though taking revenge for the years when their forebears had had to trudge endless distances each day of their lives, under a blazing sun or pouring rain, to or from their work in the fields.

  The road eventually curved around to join the main strada statale at the triple-arched medieval bridge leading up into the small town perched on its ledge safely above the flood level of the plains all around. Gabriele dismounted, hid the bicycle away in a grove of poplars near the junction and then continued on foot.

  Within the walls, all was as quiet as a tomb. He turned left, off the main road, and then right into a street of low, two- storey brick terraces. The town had a name, but on a deeper level it was generic; one of a thousand or more almost indistinguishable communities dotted across the Po valley and delta, low and modest in appearance, built of plastered brick, and originally serving as a market and shopping centre for the surrounding area. Since the flight to the cities of the sixties and seventies, such places had a sad air of living in enforced retirement. This suited Gabriele’s plans perfectly. Three-quarters of the population had left, and those who remained stayed within doors of an evening and went to bed early. There was no one about on the street, and his rubber-soled sports shoes made no sound as he walked towards the central piazza. Apart from the lack of people about, everything was as he remembered it from forty years earlier. More parked cars, of course, and the odd bit of repainting or remodelling here and there, but basically the same old stale loaf of a town.

  The shop was still there too, although with a new sign and plate-glass window, and presided over not by Ubaldo and Eugenia, but by a menopausal woman whom Gabriele finally recognized with a shock as their daughter Pinuccia, about whom he used to have wet dreams. He had put on his dark glasses before entering the shop and he now put on his thickest Milanese accent and asked if they sold batteries, in a tone suggesting that hicks like them probably wouldn’t know what batteries were, never mind have any.

  While Pinuccia was searching through a mass of cardboard boxes stacked on a shelf in a dim recess of the shop, Gabriele’s eye was caught by a large black skeleton printed on transparent plastic which was hanging from a hook behind the counter. A witch with a pointed hat and broomstick dangled on the other side of the cash register. Of course, Halloween was approaching. When he had last been interested in such things, the importation of exotic items such as this had not yet been thought of. The church would have banned it, for that matter, or at least fulminated against it. All Saints’ Day was a religious festival, and the superstitious legends and old wives’ tales surrounding the preceding evening something to be ridiculed or ignored.

  Pinuccia returned with a selection of batteries, of which Gabriele purchased six. He paid and left, removing his dark glasses so that he could see his way. The almost full moon peeked over the roofs of the houses on the main road. He had timed his journey perfectly.

  The light of the town’s one public telephone box gleamed dully from the far side of the pompous rinascimentale piazza. It would probably be broken, or of the almost obsolete variety that only took tokens. Maintaining public phones cost the company a lot of money, and even the beggars had mobiles these days. So did janitors, on the other hand.

  The interior of the box was a bit of a mess – cigarette butts on the floor, a heavily used copy of Il Giornale replacing the missing phone book, a tang of urine in the air – but the machine accepted his phone card and connected him to Fulvio’s mobile. Gabriele was well aware that making this call also involved an element of risk, but he had assessed it at length over several days and had decided that it was acceptable.

  ‘Pronto!’

  As always, Fulvio answered the phone as if making a declaration of war.

  ‘It’s Passarini.’

  ‘Dottore! How have you been? Where have you been?’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m just calling to find out whether anyone has been trying get in touch with me. Do you understand?’

  Although unprepossessing in manner, the janitor was remarkably quick on the uptake.

  ‘Certo, certo!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Actually there has been someone. Was, I should say. I haven’t seen him for a few days.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He came to my cubicle in the front hall and asked if I was responsible for the building. I said that I was, and he asked if that included the …’

  He was however, Gabriele remembered, long-winded.

  ‘Yes, yes. And the upshot?’

  ‘He asked about the bookshop, your shop. I said I didn’t know, I understood that there had been a death in the family and that you’d decided to take some time off. He asked how long, I said I had no idea. He said he had a very important business matter to discuss with you – huge amount of money at stake, something that couldn’t wait, all the rest of it. But he wouldn’t leave a name or number. I simply told him I had no idea where you were, which is true apart from anything else, and I was sorry but I couldn’t help. Basically just stone-walled him out of there, but he didn’t want to go, I can tell you that.’

  Gabriele was silent for so long that the janitor thought they’d been cut off and started going ‘Pronto? Pronto?’

  ‘I’m still here, Fulvio. Anything else?’

  ‘Just the usual post and casual callers. That professor from the university dropped by while I was taking out the garbage. He wanted to know if the plates he’d ordered had arrived. From some atlas.’

  Jansson’s Atlas Novus, thought Gabriele. A few loose sheets from one of the Latin editions, possibly 1647. He had acquired them very reasonably in Leipzig, but now he had a buyer in the United States interested, so the professor would have to wait and see what the market price turned out to be.

  ‘That man who came asking after me. What did he look like?’

  ‘Thick-set, average height, brown eyes set close together, bald, prominent ears. Oh, and a broken nose. Really splayed out, like a boxer or rugby player. What more can I say? He had a sense of power about him, as if he was someone, or thought he was. That’s about it.’

  ‘Very good, Fulvio. Thanks for your help.’

  ‘But when will you be back, dottore?’

  ‘I can’t really say. It may be some time. Anyway, just keep on as you have been doing and I’ll make it up to you as soon as I return.’

  He hung up, retrieved his phone card and then, as a final thought, rolled up the copy of Il Giornale and stuck it in his coat pocket. It might be mildly interesting to find out what had been going on in the world since he had left it.

  He was about to start back to his bicycle when an idea struck him. He returned to the shop and asked Pinuccia if she had any fireworks. It was only when she looked at him in a way suggesting a certain confused recognition that he realized that he had forgotten to put his stage shades back on.

  ‘Fireworks?’ she said.

  ‘Certo,’ he replied in his pushy Milanese accent. ‘For Halloween. Firecrackers. Bangers. Light blue touch-paper and retire immediately. Boom. Big thrill for the kiddies. You understand?’

  For a moment he was worried that she’d understood only too well, but in the end the dullness in her eyes subdued that momentary spark of intelligent interest and they concluded the transaction without further incident. Still, the spark had been there, if only for a second, he thought as he walked back down the street leading to the bridge.

  Had Pinuccia ever had fantasies about him? He had been one of the local landowner’s sons, after all. This was an aspect of the situation which had never occurred to him at the time. He had been far too busy becom
ing himself to give a moment’s thought to who he actually was, but others might not have been so dim. And his once-beloved’s failure to recognize him, although a blessing given the circumstances, nevertheless felt like a loss. She was no longer she and he was no longer he. Alone in the familiar environs of the cascina, he had grown accustomed to thinking of himself as a boy again, but that boy was as dead as poor Leonardo.

  The ride back was calm and uneventful, a magic adventure in the moonlight-soaked landscape. The only problem was the mist, which had curdled in patches now in that unpredictable way it had, so that one moved from almost total transparency to opacity in a second, and for no apparent reason at all. And then out again, from a clump so thick he had to dismount and walk, watching his way carefully, only to stumble suddenly into a clarity so perfect it made mock of his caution. Passing one of the places where an irrigation canal ran over the drainage ditches on a slender stone aqueduct, he recalled his childish fascination with this physical oxymoron: water flowing over water.

  Back at his base, he checked the fine cotton thread he had strung across the door set in the main gateway, its green-painted slatted planks faded now to a gentle blue. The tell-tale was unbroken. He bent under it and stepped through into the echoing aia, looking around the space which was so familiar to him that it was almost invisible behind its panoply of memories. He kept expecting a door or window to open and a voice to shout, ‘Gabriele! Welcome home!’ But those voices were all dead. How much work had been done here, how many lives lived out! Like a battlefield, he thought; an endless, indecisive engagement in a meaningless war fought with outdated equipment for reasons that no one could now remember.

  Back in his eyrie, as he had named it when he first moved there at the age of fifteen, he carefully lowered and secured the light-proof blinds he had cut from an oilskin tablecloth, before replacing the batteries of the camping lantern and turning it on. Despite the windbreaks of elms and poplars around the house, in this level landscape any light might show for miles, and would immediately attract interest.

  He filled the saucepan with water from the bucket in the corner, set it on the butane stove and settled down to read the paper he had brought back. Most of the articles didn’t interest him – the usual exaggerated fuss about some impending cabinet reshuffle in Rome – but his eye was caught by one of the headlines on the Cronaca page, about a killing in some town called Campione d’Italia. There was a photograph of the victim, who was identified as Nestor Machado Solorzano, a citizen of Venezuela. To Gabriele’s eye, he very much resembled a slightly older Nestore Soldani.

  He skimmed rapidly through the article, then re-read it several times with close attention. According to his wife Andreina, speaking through an interpreter, the victim had been phoned at home on his birthday and had driven out to an impromptu appointment with a person or persons unknown in Capolago, just across the Swiss border. On his return, the BMW Mini Cooper which he was driving had blown up at the entrance to their villa in Campione. The explosion had utterly destroyed the car and gates, and shattered the windows of the surrounding houses. Virtually no trace of the victim’s body had been recovered.

  Gabriele quickly worked out the dates. The murder had occurred the day after he had left Milan, having read about the discovery of Leonardo’s body.

  The pasta water boiled over. He removed the saucepan from the stove with trembling hands. To think that only an hour or so earlier he had been jeering at himself for having panicked unnecessarily, and raising philosophical questions about the nature of the proof that would be required to justify his having fled into hiding here. Here was his proof! So far as he was aware, only three men knew for sure what had happened to Leonardo Ferrero, and one of them was now dead, killed by a bomb in his car two days after the discovery of the body.

  That left only him and Alberto. He was loath to contact Alberto – indeed, he half-suspected him of being behind the series of mute, implicitly menacing postcards that arrived every year around the anniversary of Leonardo’s death – but now he felt he had no choice. Whoever had killed Nestore would have his name next on their list. This was no longer a game of hide-and-seek but of life-and-death. He couldn’t hide out at here at the cascina for ever, but neither did he wish to live in perpetual terror back in Milan, or to emigrate and eke out a miserable existence in some foreign country where they would still be able to reach him sooner or later.

  In short, he had no choice but to force the issue, and Alberto was the only person he could turn to. It would have to be drafted carefully, of course, giving nothing away about his present location, still less his fears. He must sound confident and assertive, even a little dangerous. He would outline his quite reasonable apprehensions on hearing the news of Nestore’s death, make it absolutely clear that the secret of Operation Medusa would remain forever sacrosanct, and demand further details of who had murdered Soldani and what was being done to bring them to justice and protect the two remaining members of the Verona cell.

  He would enclose his mobile phone number with a date and time for Alberto to call, allowing him a week to formulate an appropriate and satisfactory response. The letter would be posted from one of the larger local towns that he could reach easily by train from the unmanned station at which he had arrived, Crema perhaps. When the time came for Alberto to call, he would make a return trip in the other direction, to Mantua, taking the call on the train. They would never be able to trace his whereabouts, and at the very least he would know exactly where he stood. One thing he had learned from his time in the army was that while imaginary fears exhausted and paralysed him, real and present danger left him cool and collected. It was time to confront the enemy, whoever they might be, to force them to come forward and reveal themselves. Whatever the outcome, it could not be worse than living in a state of perpetual uncertainty and inchoate terror.

  VII

  As soon as Zen entered the bar just off Via Nazionale, the broad paved ditch between the Viminale and Quirinale hills, he felt an intruder. The political centre of the country might lie further down the hillside, at Palazzo de Montecitorio and Palazzo Madama in the centro storico, but this was where those entrusted with the dirty work of implementing any decisions made by the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate gathered. Like its counterpart in the business world, which was also heavily represented, this society was rigidly hierarchical, and the resulting distinctions extended far beyond the workplace. You would no more think of frequenting your superior’s bar or restaurant than you would of moving into his office. It would be inappropriate and embarrassing for all concerned.

  Zen could not determine the exact status of the clientele in this establishment, discreetly hidden away on a side street near the opera house, but it was definitely a cut above his own; senior rather than middle management. The woman enthroned at the cashier’s dais looked as though she had put in a few decades being chased around the desk by most of the men in the bar before taking early retirement in her current position. While paying for his coffee, Zen slid his Ministry identification card on to the counter between them. The woman glanced at it and at him, then reached down into some cubby-hole inviolate from the common gaze, and handed over a blank white envelope.

  Without wasting thanks or a smile on her, Zen proceeded to the bar, where despite the tip he had laid down with his receipt he had to wait until several other men, who had arrived after him and had not troubled themselves to prepay the cashier, were served with due ceremony and attention. This was a club you couldn’t buy your way into. You had to belong.

  The coffee, when it finally arrived, was one of the best Zen had ever had in Rome, where standards were notoriously variable. He turned away from the bar, savouring the velvety essence, and tore open the envelope. Inside was a piece of paper bearing the handwritten message: ‘Gardens of the Villa Aldobrandini, 15.00. Destroy this immediately.’ Zen shredded the note and distributed the fragments between two of the metal canisters serving as ashtrays and rubbish bins, but it was
with a heavy heart that he walked out into the cold streets. There were messages that were in themselves messages, and in this case the news did not sound good.

  The sun had come out by the time he reached the hanging gardens of the Villa Aldobrandini near the foot of Via Nazionale, and, hanging low in the sky at this time of year, its light was blinding. He climbed up the marble steps past the exposed brickwork of some Imperial Roman structure which, stripped of its marble finishing, looked much like the remains of a late-nineteenth-century factory.

  The gardens themselves, some ten metres above street level, consisted of a maze of gravel paths curving between islands of lawn edged with stone verges and punctuated by headless antique statues and the bare trunks of ancient chestnuts, cypresses, palms and pines. There were sufficient evergreens to provide a verdant background, but in general the trees were oppressively overgrown for the setting, and much of the shrubbery had a faded, moth-eaten air about it.

  In addition to the usual contingent of insomniac deadbeats and feral cats, the gardens were populated by a few local peo¬ ple walking their dogs and an alfresco ladies’ hairdressing salon. Here and there amongst the trees, about a dozen middle- aged women who knew exactly how much they were worth, down to the last lira, sat perched on folding plastic chairs being made reasonably presentable for a reasonable fee by much younger women who had brought all they needed for the job in bags and boxes. No licence, no rent or rates to pay; a no-frills service at a no-frills price.

  Although the gardens were quite small, their intricate layout made them seem deceptively large, and it was some time before Zen made out the figure of his superior standing by the wall at the far end, looking out at the view over Piazza Venezia and the Capitoline to the Gianicolo and the line of hills on the north bank of the Tiber. Brugnoli looked smaller than Zen had remembered him from their one previous meeting. He was wearing a navy-blue cashmere coat worn open over a suit which managed to suggest by various almost imperceptible details of cut and fabric that it was not a mere garment but rather an ironic statement about such garments, but so expertly and expensively executed that most people would never notice the difference, still less that the joke – whose punch-line was of course the price tag – was on them. In short, this was not a business suit, but a ‘business suit’.