Blood Rain - 7

by Michael Dibdin

  A woman who looked about a hundred years old was roasting red and yellow peppers on a charcoal brazier, muttering some imprecation or curse to herself the while. Behind their wooden stalls drawn up in ranks in the square, under their faded acrylic parasols, traders with faces contorted into ritual masks either muttered a sales pitch in the form of a continual litany, as if reciting the Rosary, or barked their wares in harsh, rhetorical outbursts like the Messenger in some ancient play announcing a catastrophe unspeakable in normal language. This speech duly delivered, they surrendered the stage to one of their neighbours and reverted to being the unremarkable middle-aged men they were, gazing sadly at the goods whose praises they had just been singing, until the time came to don the tragic mask again and announce in a series of blood-curdling shrieks that plump young artichokes were to be had for seven hundred and fifty lire a kilo.

  And not only artichokes. Just about every form of produce and merchandise known to man was on sale somewhere in the piazza, and those that were not on display — such as women, or AK-47S in their original packing cases — were available more discreetly in the surrounding streets. Zen and Carla walked through the meat section of the market, a shameless display which said, in effect, ‘These are dead animals. We raise them, we kill them, then we eat them. If they’re furry or have nice skin, we also wear them, but that’s at the other end of the piazza.’

  And it was this end that they had now entered, away from the specialist sellers of olives and peppers, fennel and cauliflowers, tomatoes and lettuce. Here it was all clothing, household goods and general kitsch and bric-à-brac, and a significant number of the traders were illegal extracommunitari immigrants from Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. An understood and accepted form of racism was in force: the locals wouldn’t accept food from black hands, but they were perfectly happy to buy socks and tin-openers and screwdrivers from them, as long as the price was right.

  ‘What were you saying about the body in the train?’ asked Aurelio Zen as he and his companion passed the fringes of the market and emerged into the startlingly empty street beyond.

  Carla glanced around before replying.

  ‘The buzz in the women’s toilet is that it wasn’t the Limina boy at all.’

  They walked in silence until they came to Via Umberto, their traditional parting place.

  ‘Which judge is handling the case?’ asked Zen.

  ‘A woman called Nunziatella. First name Corinna.’

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘We’ve met a few times, and she seems to like me, but obviously I try to keep out of her way. A humble technician like me is not supposed to interfere with the work of the judges any more than is strictly necessary.’

  Zen smiled, then kissed the woman briefly on both cheeks.

  ‘Buon lavoro, Carla.’

  ‘You too, Dad.’

  Zen walked down Via Umberto to the corner, then turned into Via Etnea, the town’s main street. As he crossed, he glanced as always at the snow-capped mass of Etna to the right, looming up over the city like a nightmare acne pimple. After that, it was a short and pleasant walk along a hushed back-street to the little piazza where the Questura was situated.

  With a nod to the armed guard in his bullet-proof booth at the door, Zen entered the building and went upstairs to his office: a cool, spacious room on the second floor of the elegant eighteenth-century palazzo, formerly a bank, which now housed the Catania police headquarters. Floor-length windows gave on to a balcony commanding a view of the street below. The walls were adorned with photographs of Carla Arduini and Signora Zen, as well as a framed poster entitled Venezia forma urbis, a large collage of aerial photographs forming a precise and evocative map of Zen’s native city.

  He had never bothered to personalize his temporary quarters like this before, and if he had now, it was because he had reluctantly accepted that these were not temporary. On the contrary, Zen had every reason to suppose that he would be stuck in Catania for the rest of his career.

  The proposition which had been made to him in Rome by the famous film director known as Giulio, prior to Zen’s visit to Piedmont, had turned out to be as false as it was flattering. Zen had been privately advised that an élite corps was being put together to smash the Mafia once and for all, and that following Zen’s ‘anti-terrorist triumph’ in Naples he had been chosen to join this select group, despite the notorious inconveniences and risks, occasionally fatal, of a posting to Sicily. The deal had been that in return for Zen’s assistance in the Aldo Vincenzo affair, Giulio’s contacts at the Interior Ministry would arrange for him to be sent not to one of the island’s hot spots but to an attractive backwater on the fringes of the real action. Syracuse had been mentioned as one possibility: a city ‘possessing all the charm and beauty of Sicily without being tiresomely Sicilian’, as Giulio had so invitingly put it.

  Almost every aspect of this cover story had turned out to be untrue. For a start, the new ‘élite corps’ did not exist, or rather it existed already in the form of the Direzione Investigated Anti-Mafia, set up in 1995 by Judge Giovanni Falcone with the collaboration of the then Minister of Justice, Claudio Martelli. Aurelio Zen had not been invited to join this group, and not surprisingly, since it consisted of young, keen, energetic volunteers from the country’s three separate police forces. Nevertheless, he was being posted to Sicily, he had learned shortly after his return to Rome following the false close he had achieved in the Vincenzo affair. In what role, however, remained for the moment ambiguous.

  ‘Essentially, you’re to act as a facilitator,’ Zen’s immediate superior had told him before his departure from Rome. ‘Needless to say, the DIA are doing admirable work, on the whole. Nevertheless, there is a growing feeling abroad that, like every élite division, they sometimes exhibit a regrettable and perhaps potentially perilous tendency towards a … How shall I put it? A degree of professional myopia. There have been instances, some quite recently, when they have regretfully been perceived to be acting without due consultation, and in apparent ignorance of the wider issues involved.’

  The official paused, awaiting Zen’s response. At length, realizing that it would not be forthcoming, he continued.

  ‘With the aforesaid factors in mind, a decision has been made at ministerial level to deploy a pool of mature and experienced officials such as yourself to liaise directly with members of the Polizia Statale seconded to the DIA. Your role will be firstly to report to us here at the Viminale on the nature and scope of DIA initiatives, both current and planned, secondly to monitor the response of all local personnel to ensuing governmental directives, and thirdly to communicate these in turn to Rome, all with a view to expediting an efficient and unproblematic implementation of official policy Do you understand?’

  Zen understood only too well: he was being asked to act as a spy. The position of Head of Post in each DIA office was allocated in turn to a representative of one of the police forces involved, each responsible to a different ministry in Rome: Defence, Finance, or Interior. The novelty of the DIA was that it had been set up from the first as a cooperative venture involving all three forces, and had been specifically designed to function independently of any ministerial interference.

  At the time, in the wake of the bloodbath initiated by the Corleone clan, and the killings of General Dalla Chiesa and the judges Falcone and Borsellino, it would have been politically unthinkable for any interested party to try to limit or control that independence. But times had changed. The Mafia had apparently been broken, with all but a few of its top capi jailed or in hiding, and there had been no large-scale outbreaks of violence for several years. Clearly someone in Rome, possibly several people, felt that the moment was now propitious to rein in this too-efficient and semi-autonomous organization. Even the public seemed to be starting to feel that enough was enough. Where would it all end? Were we to bring back the Inquisition?

  It was in this new climate of covert consensus that Aurelio Z
en had been sent south, and not to Syracuse but to Catania, the island’s second-largest city and a stronghold of various Mafia clans who had long resented the power, fame and influence of their rivals — and sometimes uneasy allies — in Palermo. The office of the DIA responsible for the provincia di Catania was presently commanded by a colonel of the paramilitary Carabinieri, whose ultimate loyalties — in the event of any inter-ministerial disputes — lay with his superiors at the Ministry of Defence. The new political appointees at the rival Interior Ministry wanted their own man on the spot, and Aurelio Zen — unambitious and deeply compromised — had been their choice.

  Superficially, Zen had to admit, it was not a bad job. Every week, each DIA office submitted a strictly confidential report on its current activities to headquarters in Rome. Thanks to a highly placed contact there, copies of these were passed to the Interior Ministry on the Viminale hill — as well, no doubt, as to the other two interested ministries. On the following Monday, a transcript of that portion of the report pertaining to the province of Catania turned up on Zen’s desk. His official title was Liaison Officer, and he supposedly functioned as a sort of surrogate uncle dispatched by the new, ‘caring’ ministry in Rome. His real job was to amplify and amend the extract from the DIA’s bare-bones document in the course of casual conversation with the seven officers of the Polizia Statale on the local DIA roster.

  He took them out for a coffee, a beer, even a meal, ostensibly to discuss their personal problems and keep them informed about pension plans, medical benefits, alternative career openings and the like. Then, at a certain point, he would let drop one of the facts garnered from his perusal of the previous week’s DIA report, in a manner which suggested that he respected his younger colleagues for doing such important and dangerous work and would be interested in knowing further details. These were generally forthcoming. Like anyone else, Zen’s contacts loved to chat, bitch and gossip about their work, except that in their case this was impossible, stuck as they were deep in enemy territory. But here was a senior officer in their own force, a man of wisdom and discretion hand-picked by the authorities in Rome to look after their personal and professional well-being. If they couldn’t trust him, whom could they trust?

  Today, Zen was lunching with Baccio Sinico, an inspector in his early thirties who had been in Sicily for almost three years, first in Trapani and then Catania, and now wanted to be transferred back to his native Bologna. This put Zen in an even more awkward position than usual. Sinico’s request was perfectly in order, and would already have been approved if it had not been for Zen’s intervention. Of all his contacts inside the DIA, Sinico had turned out to be by far the most informative and uninhibited, and Zen didn’t want to lose him. At the same time, he completely understood and sympathized with the man’s wish to return home.

  It wasn’t so much a question of the physical danger, he had realized, although this was real enough. But in the course of their conversations Zen had sensed that Sinico was afflicted by another complaint, at once vaguer and more disturbing. Although Sicily was part of Italy and therefore of Europe, it didn’t feel like it. In everything one did, saw and heard, there was a sense of being cut off from the mainstream, from il continente, as Sicilians termed the mainland. The result was a peculiarly insular arrogance, a natural reaction to centuries of being either ignored or exploited by whoever happened to be in power in the places that mattered.

  Baccio Sinico was suffering from a reaction to this mentality, as perhaps was Zen himself, on those not infrequent mornings when he woke at three or four in his darkened apartment for no apparent reason and found it impossible to seduce sleep again. This will end badly, he thought, standing at the open window, the smoke from his cigarette wafting gently away on the sea breeze which came by night to mitigate the rigours of the southern sun. All was balmy, all was calm, but an ancient instinct buried deep within his cortex refused to be fooled. This will end badly, it told him, with all the authority of a source at once disinterested and well-informed. This will end badly.

  Her journey to work seemed, as always, a crude parody of her entire existence: a cartoon-strip version, at once focusing and parodying the life she now lived.

  At five to eight the sirens were already audible in the distance, throated along on the morning breeze off the Ionian Sea, growing in strength all the time, nearing, homing in on their target. Precisely as the hour struck from a nearby church, they peaked and then wound down in front of the apartment building where she lived. ‘One, two, three, four, five …’ she counted under her breath. When she reached ten, the phone rang.

  Tu proverai sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui,’ a voice announced.

  ‘E com’e duro calle lo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale,’ Corinna Nunziatella replied, and hung up.

  As always, she asked herself which ironic genius had selected Dante’s famous lines on the bitterness of exile as that week’s coded phrase announcing her bodyguards’ arrival: ‘You’ll find out just how salty other people’s bread tastes, and how hard a road it is to climb up and down other people’s stairs.’

  Prior to her present appointment, Corinna had spent a year working in Florence and realized that the poet had meant this quite literally: Tuscan bread was made without salt and was, to her taste, insipid. Poor Dante, on the other hand, in exile north of the Apennines, had evidently been appalled by the daily discovery that the most basic human foodstuff was different there. Although without a trace of self-pity, Corinna could not help reflecting on the still greater bitterness of her own situation: a Sicilian born and bred, yet now an exile in her native land, unable to go up and down her own stairs without an armed guard.

  A knock at the door announced the latter’s arrival. Corinna checked by looking through the spyglass inset in the armoured panel, then opened the door with a sigh. Her personal escort that morning was Beppe, a gangling, semi-handsome son of a bitch who, as always, tried to get familiar as they walked downstairs together, she in her dark tailored suit and sensible shoes, he in camouflaged battledress accessorized with a machine-gun suspended on a leather belt strung over his shoulder.

  ‘Beautiful day!’ was his opening line.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not as beautiful as you, Signorina Nunziatella.’

  ‘That’ll do, Beppe.’

  ‘I’m sorry, dottoressa, but what do you expect? Here I am five hundred kilometres from home, stuck in a squalid barracks with a bunch of other jerks doing their military service, and risking my life every day to protect the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen! Have you ever heard of what they call “the Stockholm syndrome”, where the victims fall for their kidnappers? This is a similar thing. Because if you think about it, I’ve been kidnapped by the system, which you represent, dottoressa, so it’s not surprising that I’ve fallen for you like a ton of …’

  But by now they had reached the front door, and Beppe had to attend to his duties. He activated the radio strapped into a pouch on his belt and exchanged cryptic and static-garbled phrases with his companions. Then he counted slowly to five, swung open the door and ushered Corinna urgently outside. The two other guards had taken up point positions to either side of the three Fiat saloons which had drawn up in front of the building — where no other vehicle was allowed to park, even momentarily — and were anxiously scanning the street in every direction, their automatic weapons at the ready. Corinna ran the short distance to the second of the cars, whose rear door stood open, ready to receive her. Beppe, who had followed her, slammed the door shut and slapped the roof with his palm. Instantly the convoy containing Judge Nunziatella and her heavily armed escort moved off at speed, sirens screaming and blue lights flashing to alert the citizenry to the fact that yet another government functionary under sentence of death was passing by, panoplied in all the impotent might of the Italian state.

  The Palace of Justice in Piazza Verga was an impressive work dating from the Fascist era, occupying an entire
city block. Just outside the main entrance stood an enormous statue of a crowned female representing the justice supposedly dispensed within. One of her outstretched palms supported a jubilant male nude, while on the other a similar figure hid his head in shame or fear. Both these figures were more or less life-size, while Justice herself was at least ten metres tall, her vaguely Roman vestments overflowing on to the stone plinth below.

  Classical allusions continued in the form of twenty-four rectangular pillars supporting a decorative portico, which in the present political climate gave the impression that the building itself had been imprisoned, and was gazing out at the city through the bars of its cage. But the most disturbing effect was that, apart from an hour or so around midday, the pillars to either side of the statue cast strong vertical shadows across it, turning the image of Justice into an obscure, faceless icon of some pagan deity, utterly indifferent to the joy or the misery of the paltry human figures it held in the palms of its hands.

  The perimeter was impressively guarded, with canvas-covered trucks full of soldiers in battledress and an armoured car sporting a 4.5 cm cannon mounted in a swivelling turret. The army had been deployed on the streets of Catania and other Sicilian cities when it became apparent that the burden of protecting prefects, judges, magistrates and other functionaries was putting such a strain on the police forces that there weren’t enough officers left to carry out the investigations and arrests ordered by those members of the judiciary who had survived the assassinations planned by Totò Riina and carried out by his Corleone clan.

  Now, though, the political pendulum seemed to be on the point of swinging back again. Voices had been heard in parliament claiming that such a massive show of force was undermining the democratic culture of Italy and shaming the country in the eyes of its partners in the European Union. One deputy had gone so far as to compare it to the brutal repression instituted by Cesare Mori, Mussolini’s Iron Prefect’, who virtually eradicated the Mafia in the 1920s, only for the invading Allies to release the jailed capi and their followers just in time for them to get rich on the easy money and unregulated growth of post-war Italy. No one in the government had expressed such views as yet, but Corinna Nunziatella was by no means alone in feeling that it was only a matter of time before Beppe and his fellow recruits were reunited with their girlfriends and families, and the situation in Sicily returned to what had always passed for ‘normal’.