Blood rain az-7

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘No, I’d like a different one, please,’ she said decisively. ‘Over there, by the fireplace.’

  The waiter gestured politely and seated them. Their escort took a table on the mezzanine balcony overlooking the lower room. Corinna leaned back in her chair and looked over towards the two men sitting in the corner. Seemingly satisfied, she sighed deeply and settled back in her chair.

  ‘Do you know them?’ asked Carla, who had been watching this pantomime attentively.

  Corinna shook her head.

  ‘Not really. But they came by this morning to pick up a file I’d been ordered to close and return. Their names are Roberto Lessi and Alfredo Ferraro. They’re agents of the Carabinieri’s Raggruppamento Operazioni Speciali.’

  ‘The Special Operations Group?’ queried Carla. ‘What sort of operations?’

  Corinna made a gesture which read, ‘Who knows, and anyway I doubt it.’

  ‘Anyway, at least they’re on our side,’ Carla exclaimed with evident relief.

  Corinna looked at her with a distant smile.

  ‘That reminds me,’ she said. ‘I gave your father a packet to pass on to you.’

  Carla frowned.

  ‘My father?’

  ‘He’s just the cut-out. I didn’t want to be seen handing it over directly. For both our sakes, yours particularly’

  ‘Why, what is it?’

  ‘Nothing that need concern you, my dear,’ Corinna replied. ‘It’s just a few papers that I need taken care of for a little while. They’re all packed up in an envelope which your father will give you on Saturday, if not before. He thinks it’s a birthday present. Just hide it away somewhere in your apartment. In due course, I’ll either tell you to destroy it or ask for it back. Is that all right?’

  Carla nodded.

  ‘But I’m not to look inside?’

  ‘No, don’t do that.’

  ‘Like Pandora’s box.’

  Corinna smiled.

  ‘Yes,’ she exclaimed. ‘Very much like Pandora’s box.’

  ‘All the good gifts of the gods turned to evil and flew out to plague the world,’ Carla continued pertly. ‘All except Hope.’

  Corinna sighed as the waiter neared their table.

  ‘There are various versions of the legend,’ she replied. ‘According to some, not even Hope remained. It was the last to leave, though.’

  She smiled across the table.

  ‘Shall we order?’

  Zen was terrified of flying. This had always been a fact about him, like his height and other physical characteristics. He was terrified of flying, but what was terrifying him now was that he wasn’t terrified of flying, and this was all the more terrifying because everyone else on board clearly was.

  Moments earlier, the pilot had instructed passengers to fasten their seatbelts in anticipation of ‘some possible turbulence ahead’. Seconds later, the Airbus A320 had thrown a spectacular grand mal epileptic fit, jerking, shuddering and leaping in an apparently uncontrollable series of spasms so violent that they sent one of the flight attendants flying into the row of seats just in front of Zen, while another sank to her knees and started crossing herself and chanting the Hail Mary in a loud voice. As for the other passengers, they screamed and closed their eyes tight, clutched one another and threw up.

  Meanwhile Zen sat there calmly, scared out of his wits at the realization that he was the only person on the plane who wasn’t scared. Which was truly scary. For your eyesight to deteriorate, your hearing to fail, your hair to thin and your memory to malfunction, that was normal, to be expected. But if your fears deserted you, what was left? Take those away, and all that remained was a hollow shell.

  What made things worse was the suspicion, amounting almost to a certainty, that his whole trip was the result of having fallen for a practical joke, one of those infantile pranks that Gilberto Nieddu loved to play on unsuspecting friends and colleagues. The Sardinian was still furious that Zen had dropped him socially after that disgraceful incident involving the stolen video-game cassette. Now he had decided to get even in a characteristically cruel, cynical and effective way.

  For if it was a practical joke, then it was one that Zen could hardly have avoided falling for, particularly after that conversation with Maria Grazia. The Airbus took another groin-tingling lurch, accompanied by a loud metallic clang which elicited a renewed chorus of shrieks and prayers. ‘Maria! Maria!’ the stewardess shouted imploringly. Maria, thought Zen. Maria Grazia. How did she fit into the conspiracy? Had Gilberto paid her off to act a part? This didn’t seem likely. Zen had known the family housekeeper for almost twenty years, and he was sure she wouldn’t have been able to lie effectively to save her life.

  No, there was only one possible solution. Gilberto must have convinced her too! That made sense all right. If it suited his purposes, that devious little Sardinian could talk anyone into anything, never mind someone as ingenuous and guileless as Maria Grazia. Yes, that was it. The housekeeper was simply an unwitting accomplice in Nieddu’s schemes, cunningly roped in to remove any lingering doubts from Zen’s mind and reduce him to an unthinking, panic-stricken automaton calling taxis, racing to the airport, oozing sweat and gasping for breath, and then paying a small fortune for one of the few remaining seats on the next flight to Rome.

  Very well, he thought, but we’ll see who has the last laugh. You may have won this round, my friend, but the match isn’t over yet. Nieddu was a past master at this sort of thing, but Zen had a few tricks up his sleeve as well. He knew quite a bit about the Sardinian’s business practices, for a start, many of which were extremely questionable even by Italian entrepreneurial standards.

  But that would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, he reflected, as the aeroplane veered into a steep descent while the crew struggled to restart the starboard engine. The cabin was loud with despairing shrieks and pleas, and the intimate odour of human excrement filled the air. Zen glanced indignantly at his neighbour, a surly businessman whose attention until now had been entirely absorbed by his laptop computer, and then edged away as far as possible in the other direction. The middle-aged woman seated on that side, her face so intensively curated that it looked like a burnished metal mask, gripped Zen’s arm tightly, leaned her head on his shoulder and began muttering fervent invocations to Santa Rita of Cascia.

  The senior steward now rose shakily to his feet and started to lead the passengers in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. If he was to pay Gilberto back, thought Zen, it must be in a more personal way. And then he suddenly got it, the perfect revenge for Nieddu’s tasteless jest. It was so good, in fact, that he couldn’t resist bursting into laughter, at which point the woman beside him snatched away her arm and glared at him in horror. At the same moment the Airbus bottomed out of its vertical descent as the starboard engine kicked in, causing the steward to collapse to the floor like an unstrung puppet. A few moments later, all was perfectly still and quiet again.

  Rosa Nieddu was not the typical Italian wife who didn’t much mind what her husband got up to as long as it didn’t involve any mutual acquaintances and was kept reasonably discreet. No indeed, fare finta di niente was definitely not Rosa’s style. On the contrary, she had proved herself to be intensely suspicious of what Gilberto was actually doing while he was supposedly away on business, and quite probably with good reason.

  Thus far, the claims of both friendship and male solidarity had led Zen to lend Gilberto whatever assistance he could when things got tricky with Rosa. Certainly he had never before thought of deliberately making trouble for him. So it was with some satisfaction that he realized just how easy this would be. Rosa’s intrinsic jealousy was like the Sardinian underbrush in high summer: one spark was all that would be needed to create a truly spectacular conflagration.

  And that initial spark wouldn’t be hard to provide. A few letters first, to prepare the ground. He would draft them and then get Carla to copy them out in a laborious, feminine hand, all curls and loops and little circles ov
er the letter ‘i’. She could make the phone calls, too, when the time came. What fun they’d have working out the script! Is that Signora Nieddu? My name is…’ What would she be called? Something slightly old-fashioned and socially tainted, suggestive of a buxom but simple-minded country lass.

  He suddenly remembered the object of the prayers which his neighbour had offered up. That would do nicely. ‘My name is Rita, signora. I’ve written to you several times. I hate to disturb you any more, and the only reason I’m calling now is that I’m desperate. As you know, your husband had his way with me during his visit to Bari, and, well, you see, I’ve just found out that I’m…’ How would that sort of woman put it? ‘With child’? ‘Going to be a mother’? ‘Three months gone’? Carla would know, not that it mattered. Rosa would already be back in the kitchen, honing the carving knife to a fine edge. Let Gilberto try to talk his way out of that one!

  An amplified voice announced that they would shortly be landing at Fiumicino Airport. Zen consulted Ms watch. It was only an hour since they’d left Catania. They couldn’t possibly be anywhere near Rome yet. That was where his mother lived. She’s dying, Aurelio. Ridiculous. Rome was hundreds of kilometres away. It took hours and hours to get there.

  The plane bumped down on the runway, eliciting an enthusiastic round of applause from the passengers, and nosed up to the disembarkation ramp. Everyone stood up and collected their belongings, chatting with almost hysterical volubility to complete strangers about the frightful ordeal they had shared.

  ‘Never again!’ one man kept saying over and over again in a strident tone. ‘That’s the last time I step on an aeroplane! Never ever again, no matter what happens!’

  It wasn’t until the businessman with the bowel problem nudged him meaningfully that Zen realized that everyone was leaving the plane. He got to his feet, lifted his coat down from the locker, and trudged along the aisle to the exit. The captain of the aircraft, in full uniform, was standing slightly to one side, outside the open door to the cockpit.

  ‘Sorry about the discomfort,’ he told Zen heartily. ‘Worst case of clear air turbulence I’ve ever encountered. Doesn’t show up on the radar, you see. Totally unpredictable. Nothing you can do.’

  Zen nodded.

  ‘No, there’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘My mother…’

  ‘Is she still alive?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You’re not sure?’

  ‘No, I mean, I suppose that you could say that she’s alive.’

  ‘She’s from Randazzo, you said.’

  ‘No, I said that she lives there. Used to live there.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now she doesn’t.’

  ‘So she moved?’

  ‘She’s been moved.’

  Carla gave an edgy smile.

  ‘You keep making odd distinctions that I don’t quite get, Corinna.’

  The other woman smiled too.

  ‘It’s a Sicilian speciality. But I’m not trying to hold anything back. I just need to decide how much to tell you, Carla. How much I want to tell you, that is, and how much you really want to know.’

  ‘I want to know everything!’

  ‘Oh, everything! Sorry, I’m not handling this right. I’m in love, you see.’

  ‘In love?’

  ‘Yes. So I’m behaving a bit oddly. I apologize in advance. The real problem is that I’m not really interested in small talk and brief encounters. That sort of thing can be fun for a while, but you can say the same about television. As I get older, I find I want something more difficult. Something that will challenge the limits of my competence.’

  ‘How old are you, Corinna?’

  ‘Thirty-four.’

  ‘I’m only twenty-three. My mother is dead, and as for my father… He miraculously reappeared, after all those years. It makes a difference, and yet it doesn’t. That’s always assuming that he is my father.’

  ‘But you had DNA tests done, you said.’

  ‘I sometimes think he faked them.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Why do people do anything? Half the time they don’t know themselves. Even if they do, their reasons needn’t make sense to anyone else.’

  ‘You’re an anti-rationalist, then?’

  ‘I’m a realist. At least, I like to think so.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you about my mother, Carla. Let’s test your sense of realism, my dear. I’ll try not to bore you, but to be frank you don’t have much choice but to listen anyway.’

  ‘I could always leave.’

  ‘I’m afraid not. As far as my escort are concerned, we’re a package. An item, as they say. As long as I’m here, you have to stay. We arrived together, and we leave together.’

  ‘I see. I didn’t quite realize what I was letting myself in for by accepting this invitation.’

  ‘No, I’m sure you didn’t. But in an odd way bondage can be quite liberating, don’t you think?’

  ‘Liberating?’

  ‘So many decisions you don’t have to make. At any rate, here’s my mother’s story. Joking aside, I’m not really going to exploit the fact that you’re a captive audience. If you’re bored, just tell me.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘My mother is from Manchester. A city in England. The second half of the word, “chester”, is cognate with the Latin castrum, a fortified camp. The first syllable is the English word for uomo. My mother once claimed, in one of her rare flashes of humour, that all her troubles stemmed from this fact.’

  ‘Your mother is English?’

  ‘She was born in England, of English parents. Well, actually one was Welsh, but I can’t keep track of all these distinctions which seem to be so important there. Anyway, there she was, growing up in Manchester…’

  ‘Have you ever been there?’

  ‘I have, as it happens.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Impossible to tell you. We don’t have cities like that here. I liked it. I liked the people.’

  ‘You speak English?’

  ‘We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Carla. All in due course.’

  ‘I’m sorry. So, your mother grew up in… whatever it’s called.’

  ‘Yes. Her name is Bettina. Betty. When she was sixteen she left school and found work as a waitress somewhere in the centre of town. That’s where she met my father.’

  ‘He’s English too?’

  ‘No, he’s from here. He had a job as a deckhand on a freighter out of Catania. It sailed the length of the Mediterranean, crossed the Bay of Biscay, then the Irish Sea, and finally ended up in a canal leading to Manchester. By that time my father had had enough of sleepless nights and puking over the side. He jumped ship, and after a couple of weeks at a sailors’ hostel he found a job washing dishes in a restaurant.’

  ‘The one where your mother was employed as a waitress.’

  ‘Brava! And then what?’

  ‘They fell in love?’

  ‘Bravissima. Or rather, she did. She was one of three daughters from a working-class family in one of the less attractive areas of the city. She’d never met anyone like Agostino, never even dreamt of doing so, never imagined that there were such people in the world. Confident, precocious and pleasantly pushy, with a permanent tan, coal-black hair, pearly teeth and a charmingly defective command of English which didn’t stop him telling her what to do all the time…’

  ‘And him?’

  ‘He’s never told me his side of the story. But I’ve seen photographs of my mother taken at the time, a few snapshots which her parents had kept and which I saw when I went over there. I think for him she must have seemed as exotic as he was for her. Slightly taller than him, with a mass of red hair, lightly freckled skin as white as milk. Strong, capable legs, a bosom which had already attracted much comment, and a sweet, unformed face, kindly and tentative. She must have looked like the sacrificial victim of every male’s dreams.’

  ‘Do you really t
hink men dream of that?’

  ‘Without question. Here in Sicily, at least. Sex isn’t really about pleasure for them. That’s just an extra. What it’s really about is power. Or, better, that is the pleasure — to captivate, to dominate, to penetrate, to master. Which is what he did with my mother. And it worked. She was crazy about him, she’s told me so. She was crazy. But he wasn’t.’

  ‘So he abandoned her?’

  ‘On the contrary. All things considered, that would have been a kindness, and men like my father are never kind unless it suits their purposes. No, he married her. She was pregnant by then, so he did the decent thing.’

  ‘I don’t see anything so terrible about that.’

  ‘Neither did she. Then he told her that they were going home.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘To Randazzo, where he was born.’

  ‘And she agreed?’

  ‘Of course. She had never been out of England before, except for a day trip to the Isle of Man when she was nine. She was thrilled. Italy! The south! Adventure, romance! She longed to see her husband in his native environment, and to experience all the colourful festivals, traditions and characters he had told her so much about. The language would be a problem at first, of course, but Agostino had already taught her a few phrases and she would learn the rest soon enough. Besides, she was going to be a mother, and it was only right that the child should be born in its father’s own country. And if it didn’t work out, they could always come back.

  ‘They travelled by train. It took two days and two nights, sleeping upright in a series of packed carriages. As soon as they crossed the border at Ventimiglia, my mother noticed the change in her husband. In England, he had always been the stereotype Latin lover — sexy, confident, attentive, macho. But now they were in Italy, northern Italy, where he was marked out as a Sicilian peasant on the make, a wide-boy, probably a mafioso. He seemed to get smaller, my mother said. He became quieter and more wary, “like a snail withdrawing into its shell”.

  ‘When they passed Rome, his mood changed again. Now he was back in his territory. There would be no more snide glances and half-caught innuendoes about southerners. Down here, he could expect a little respect. Anyone from Naples and points south knew that you didn’t mess around with Sicilians. The second night passed, and finally they had reached the Straits of Messina. There it was, the fabled isle of which she had heard so much. From the ferry, to be honest, it didn’t look much more interesting than the Isle of Man. They disembarked on the other side and continued to Catania, where they changed to the little train that runs up around Etna.