Blood rain az-7

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Signorina Arduini?’

  It was a uniformed waiter, professionally deferential.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There is a phone call for you. This way, please.’

  She followed the man across the lobby to a table with a telephone. The waiter dialled zero and passed the receiver to Carla.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Carla?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s me. Leave the hotel and turn left into Via San Leonarbello. At number sixty-three you’ll find a green Nissan. It’s unlocked. Follow the written instructions on the driver’s seat.’

  The line went dead.

  Via San Leonarbello turned out to be an alley of single-storey fishermen’s houses, most of which seemed to have been converted into holiday homes. Sure enough, a green Nissan saloon was parked outside number sixty-three. Carla glanced along the street, then opened the passenger door and got in. A piece of paper with writing lay on the driver’s seat.

  KEYS IN GLOVE COMPARTMENT.

  DRIVE TO END OF STREET, TURN LEFT.

  STOP OPPOSITE SPAR GROCERY.

  KEEP ENGINE RUNNING.

  Carla sighed sourly. If she’d had any idea what was involved, she would never have agreed to accompany Corinna on this stupid weekend outing to Taormina. All this games-playing was beginning to get on her nerves. But it was too late to back out now. She put her suitcase in the back of the car, moved over to the driver’s seat and drove off.

  The grocery store, one of the ubiquitous Spar chain, was easy enough to find, but there was no space to park anywhere on the narrow street. Carla drew up opposite the store, blasted the horn and consulted her watch. All right, Corinna, she thought. You’ve got sixty seconds exactly, then I dump the car and get the next bus back to Catania. She had laundry to do and several long-overdue letters to write, and there was the new Nanni Moretti film which she’d been meaning to see for some time. She’d loved Caro Diario, and even if this one wasn’t as good, the prospect of a few hours in an air-conditioned cinema was a powerful inducement.

  The passenger door opened and Corinna Nunziatella got in, barely recognizable in a man’s suit, shirt and tie. Her face was obscured as before by her aviator sunglasses, while her cropped hair was almost invisible beneath a large straw hat.

  ‘Go!’ she said urgently

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Just go! I’ll give you directions later.’

  Carla put the Nissan in gear and drove to the end of the street.

  ‘Left here,’ Corinna Nunziatella told her. ‘Now right. Do a U-turn in the middle of the block, then right again at the lights. Run the red, there are no traffic police round here. Do you like my outfit?’

  Carla smiled distractedly.

  ‘It’s, er… interesting.’

  ‘This car belongs to a friend. They have four altogether, so she won’t miss it. The hardest part was getting out of the house without my escort spotting me. Hence the disguise.’

  ‘Won’t it raise a few eyebrows at the hotel?’

  Corinna laughed.

  ‘Not in Taormina! They’ve seen everything there. It’s always been a sort of extra-territorial enclave here in Sicily, a place where none of the usual rules apply. As long as your money holds out, no one cares what you do. Left here across the railway tracks, then sharp right and follow the signs to the motorway.’

  She glanced playfully at Carla.

  ‘Anyway, I happen to think I look rather fetching, so there. And you? No problems?’

  Carla swayed her head slowly from side to side, indicating that this was not precisely the case.

  ‘I was followed. But I’m pretty sure it was just some creep who lives with his mother and wanted to look at my legs. He was much too obvious to be a professional. Anyway, this old man who was out watching birds along the coast got rid of him for me.’

  To Carla’s surprise, Corinna insisted on her recounting the entire story, detail by detail. The older woman’s face grew grimmer and grimmer.

  ‘A classic sacrifice,’ she remarked when Carla had finished. ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but this is not good news. It confirms that they’re on to you as well.’

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘That “creep” you say was following you, the conspicuous way he was dressed and acting was quite deliberate. With someone like me they would have been more subtle, but they knew you weren’t used to the rules of the game, so they went completely over the top. You were meant to spot him and become suspicious. That was the whole point. Then, at just the right psychological moment, along comes this chivalrous, inoffensive slightly tedious old-world gentleman who promptly rids you of your ostentatious tail. You’re naturally so grateful and relieved that you’re not going to suspect him.’

  ‘But he wasn’t following me, Corinna!’

  ‘Didn’t you just tell me that he walked the whole way to Aci Trezza with you, and that you then asked him for directions to I Ciclopi?’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘Did you see him after that?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘He didn’t by any chance follow you to this car?’

  ‘Of course not! At least, I don’t think so. I didn’t see him.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Carla did not answer. They drove along a dead-straight road between rows of tall palm trees, their trunks trimmed, rising on either side like exotically verdant telephone poles. Then a junction loomed ahead, marked by a large green arrow marked A18.

  ‘Turn right here on to the motorway,’ said Corinna. ‘Follow the signs to Messina.’

  ‘Messina? But I thought we were

  ‘I suggest that you concentrate on the driving and leave the thinking to me, cara,’ Corinna remarked crisply.

  Carla said nothing. After a few moments silence, Corinna sighed.

  ‘I’m sorry for snapping at you. I’ve been trying to work out what to do. If I went by the book, I’d cancel the whole outing right now.’

  She glanced girlishly at Carla.

  ‘But I can’t. To give up the prospect of this gorgeous weekend with you, all because of some paranoid fears which I’ve almost certainly imagined…’

  ‘You mean this man who was supposed to have been following me?’

  Corinna Nunziatella shook her head.

  ‘It’s not just that. That business yesterday for example. It’s obvious they were sending a message to me through you. Just to take one aspect of the thing, the Hotel Zagarella is a notorious symbol of Mafia power, built by Ignazio and Nino Salvo, cousins from one of the top families who later cornered the tax-collection monopoly for the whole island, thanks to their friends in the regional government. They became obscenely rich as a result, but the Zagarella was almost entirely financed by public money from the government’s Cassa per il Mezzogiorno fund, supposedly created to stimulate economic development in the south. And the hotel’s symbolic status was confirmed once and for all in 1979, when Giulio Andreotti, then prime minister, gave a speech at a rally there, surrounded by just about every high-ranking political mafioso in Palermo.’

  They were on the motorway now, gliding north with the other traffic heading towards the Straits of Messina and the ferry crossing to the continent of Europe. Corinna Nunziatella lit a cigarette snatched from a rumpled pack on the dashboard.

  ‘So when I’m told that you’ve been invited to lunch at the Zagarella by three men who claimed to represent the regional government, and who made it quite clear that they were aware of our relationship,’ she continued, blasting out smoke, ‘I don’t have to be a genius to understand the intended message.’

  ‘Which is?’

  “‘Be careful. We’ve got our eye on you. You’re alone, you can’t trust anyone, our people are everywhere. Take heed of this warning. Next time there may not be one.’“

  ‘And you think they really mean it?’

  ‘Of course they mean it! They killed Mino Pecorelli and Giuseppe Impastato and Pio Delia Torre. They killed Giorgio Ambrosio a
nd Michele Sindona and Boris Giuliano and Emanuele Basile and General Dalla Chiesa and his wife. They killed Cesare Terranora and Rococo Chinnici and Ciaccio Montalto. They killed Falcone and Borsellino. And they killed my mother and hundreds more like her, maybe thousands…’

  She opened the window and tossed out the half-smoked cigarette with a gesture of disgust.

  ‘Well, they’re not going to get me!’

  Perturbed by the intensity of Corinna’s voice, Carla took her eyes off the traffic for a moment to glance at her companion.

  ‘How do you mean, they killed your mother? The other evening you told me that she was still alive.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. You asked, and I replied, “I suppose you could say that she’s alive.” She’s alive, but shut up in an institution. A private one, mind you, and relatively pleasant, but an asylum nevertheless. She finally cracked when my father was killed in a particularly unpleasant way by a rival clan. Since then she will only speak English. She babbles about taking the train down to London and making a new start.’

  She broke off, shaking her head, and patted Carla’s left knee lightly.

  ‘I’m sorry to bore you with all this ghastly personal stuff, cara, but you can’t understand me without it. For better or for worse, it’s made me what I am. I realized very early on that nothing could be done without power. The only power open to me, as a Sicilian woman, was the power of the state institutions, so I decided to study law and join the judiciary. The Italian state isn’t as powerful as the Mafia, as we know to our cost, but the balance has already shifted a long way. We’re ahead at half-time, but the match is far from over. The important thing now is to make sure that they don’t try to change the rules. But I’ll carry on even if they do. It’s a personal commitment. The only way to defeat the patriarchal structure of mafiosita is to attack it through the medium of an equally patriarchal authority whose interests happen to be in conflict with those which destroyed my mother.’

  She laughed suddenly, and turned to Carla.

  ‘And now I’ll shut up about the whole business for the rest of the weekend!’ she announced gaily. ‘The only things you’ll be able to get me to talk about are clothes and jewellery and shoes and food and office gossip and celebrity scandals. I shall have breakfast in bed and lunch by the pool and dinner in a fabulous fish restaurant I know down by the sea. In short, I plan to behave like the frivolous, trivial, shallow slut that I’ve always secretly wanted to be. What about you?’

  Carla gave her a dazzling smile.

  ‘That sounds perfect. I’ll just try to keep up with you.’

  ‘There’s the Giardini turn-off,’ said Corinna, pointing to the signed exit. ‘We take the next one. It’s marked Taormina. Take it slowly. It gets quite steep and narrow once you’re off the autostrada. I hope you like the hotel.’

  ‘Have you stayed there before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘No, not alone. This exit coming up.’

  Carla signalled her turn.

  ‘So do you do this sort of thing quite often?’ she asked.

  ‘Not nearly as often as I’d like. It’s a survival strategy. Sicily is a pressure cooker. It’s not that life here is really that dangerous. Arguably less so, in fact, for most people, than in Rome or Milan. It’s a process of attrition. You’re “on” the whole time, particularly if you’re a woman. Everything you do or don’t do is noted down and reported back. There’s literally no such thing as privacy. We don’t even have a word for it.’

  Carla turned off on to a looping, heavily graded road which zigzagged laboriously uphill towards a perched town which was presumably Taormina. A motorcycle had turned off the motorway right behind her, and was now making aggressive but ineffectual attempts to overtake despite the steep gradient. The two men on it wore full-body leather suits with white and red stripes and seemed to be having an animated conversation over an intercom system built into their space-suit-type helmets.

  ‘And then there’s the insular mentality,’ Corinna was saying. ‘A sort of passive-aggressive provincialism. Rome is only an hour away by plane, but it might as well be on another planet. Even in Reggio di Calabria you breathe more easily. Seen from Palermo or Catania, the Straits of Messina look wider than the Atlantic. Nothing that happens over there is of any more than marginal significance, depending on the extent to which it might tip the balance of power here.’

  At the bend ahead, the road widened to a point which would allow Carla room to let the leather-suited bikers pass. She slowed down and signalled her intention to pull over. The bright red Moto Guzzi at once revved up and started to overtake. As it drew alongside, the passenger on the pillion raised a cloth-wrapped bundle which he was holding on his knees. There was a loud banging noise, as though the engine was about to stall, and pieces of glass started flying around inside the car. Corinna turned to Carla, who was struggling to keep the car on the road despite the rash of pockmarks erupting across her chest and shoulders. The man on the motorcycle produced a rectangular package which he lobbed through the shattered side-window of the Nissan, as though returning some mislaid possession to its rightful owner, just as the car veered off to the left, running over the verge and continuing on its way through the olive grove on the vertiginous hillside, riding normally at first, despite the gradient, but eventually turning sideways and rolling over.

  The explosion almost immediately afterwards destroyed a centenario olive tree which had been planted in July 1860 to commemorate Garibaldi’s decisive defeat of the Bourbon forces at the battle of Milazzo and the unification of Sicily with the nascent kingdom of Italy which soon ensued. But there was no one left in Taormina who recalled this fact and the tree had almost stopped cropping, so the incident was of no real importance.

  PART TWO

  Aurelio Zen had once been told by a fellow officer in the Criminalpol department about a joke that the latter had played on an assiduously literal-minded Umbrian colleague. The gag involved getting the victim to try to identify a notional train supposedly listed in the official timetables which, if you tracked its progress from one section of the network to the next, turned out to go round and round in perpetual circles. In reality, of course, no such train existed, so Zen had had to improvise.

  This involved consulting the glass-framed timetables at his station of arrival, then taking the next departure listed, regardless of its destination. If there was none until the following day, he spent the night at a hotel near the station and started again first thing in the morning. There were only three other rules: he was forbidden to return directly to the city from which he had just arrived, to use any other form of transportation, or to cross the frontier.

  To keep him amused on his travels, he stopped at a newsagent’s stall and bought a selection of the cheap thrillers published by Mondadori in its yellow-jacketed series featuring two narrow columns of type on every page, coarse paper which browned as you read it, and garishly stylized cover art. He picked out half a dozen at random, not bothering to read the blurbs. It was enough that the name of the author sounded English or American, thus offering the prospect of a tightly organized guided tour through a theme park of reassuringly foreign unpleasantness, and concluding with a final chapter in which the truth was laid bare and the guilty party identified and duly punished.

  By contrast, the trains themselves varied greatly, all the way from aerodynamic missiles barely skimming their dedicated high-speed rails, to ugly, smoke-spewing, diesel-powered brutes making their way sedately along ill-maintained branch lines. But these apparent differences were as unimportant as those in the cast of the thrillers Zen was reading. Some characters were glamorous and beautiful, others dull and earnest, but it was understood — even the fictional personages themselves seemed to understand, and to accept — that they only existed for the purpose of moving the plot along. To keep moving: that was the key. If he ever came to a stop, or even lingered more than a single night in the same place, then they’d be able to fin
d him as surely as they had his mother and daughter. To have any hope of survival, he had to remain a moving target.

  Places came and went. This was not their normal role, which was to stay put and display their innumerable layers of history, culture and tradition. Visitors were supposed to approach with due reverence, a full wallet, and at least a feigned knowledge of the wonders in store. They certainly weren’t supposed to flit in and out in such a free and easy fashion. It was something new for cities such as these to be treated as mere stops on an extemporized itinerary, but Zen sensed that once they got over the shock they quite liked being flirted with in this casual way.

  And what pretty names they had! Perugia, Arezzo, Siena, Empoli, Pisa, Parma… Which was just as well, since all Zen usually saw of them was the name, blazoned white on an enamelled blue platform sign, that and the generic surrounding suburbs tracing history in reverse like geological layers in a core sample: sixties apartment buildings, spartan Fascist blocks, turn-of-the-century industrial barracks, and the pomposities of post-unification triumphalism.

  If there was a little time to kill before the next train left, he might permit himself to wander out into the streets surrounding the station in search of a sandwich or a coffee. At which point the city — particularly if it was one of the more celebrated names — often seemed to give a little quiver of shock. ‘You mean you aren’t going to visit the museums, the cathedral and the remains of the mediaeval ramparts?’ it demanded of him as he breezed through the sleazy, strident fringes of the station zone, his only concern to leave again as soon as possible. ‘Perhaps next time,’ he silently replied. ‘But not now. I have to go. I have to keep going.’