Blood Rain - 7

by Michael Dibdin

  Unlike most of her colleagues at the Turin-based Uptime Systems, Carla Arduini was not obsessed with computers, but she had an instinctive feel for them, the way some people do for animals. She had discovered this while at university in Milan, when a last-minute change of schedule by her mathematics professor — who tried to keep the time he had to spend away from his villa on Lake Como down to the absolute minimum — led her to take a course in systems analysis to fill in a blank couple of hours on Wednesday afternoons.

  The experience was a revelation to her. Mathematics, she had already begun to realize, was like one of those languages which are simple, straightforward and logical in the early stages, but which rapidly spiral out of control in a frenzy of idioms, oddities, idiosyncrasies and exceptions to the rule which even native speakers cannot always get right, never mind explain. From advanced calculus to proving Fermat’s theorem or calculating the value of pi was a large step, to be sure, but it would never go away, would always be a step not taken.

  The prospect of such indeterminacy on the horizon, however distant, was one which Carla found intensely threatening. Her childhood had been a shuffled series of abrupt moves, often taken furtively and under cover of darkness; of ‘relatives’ and ‘friends’ who came and went and never reappeared; of her mother’s sudden reticence and evasions; and above all her father’s absence. Later, as an adolescent, when she finally understood the reasons for all this, it turned out to be too late. Neat labels such as poverty, neglect, fecklessness and sheer bad luck would not adhere to those childhood memories, which remained unmanageable and apart, a perpetual source of anxiety which could awaken her even now, sweaty and trembling, in the middle of the night.

  She had been drawn towards mathematics in part because of a natural gift for the subject, but largely because it seemed to offer a secure refuge, a way of containing and exorcising such imponderables. Two and two can never make five or three, still less nothing at all. They can’t change their minds, or sink into depression, or disappear for days on end, or get drunk and abusive and then suddenly burst into tears across the dinner table. All they can ever do is make four.

  Most of her classmates found this and similar tricks a bit dull, but not Carla, because she knew that they could be relied upon to work over and over and over again, and never let her down. It was not until she got to university that this simple faith began to desert her. It was a question of scale. Two and two make four, four and four make eight, eight and eight make sixteen … Even this childishly simple series was, like all series, infinite. Stronger, more stable spirits than hers, she knew, delighted in the possibilities for intellectual acrobatics this provided. All Carla felt was the return of a familiar sense of panic.

  It was while struggling with this loss of mathematical faith that she was fortuitously introduced to the world of applied computing. It was love at first sight. Although seemingly complex, computers were actually reassuringly simple-minded. Whether searching a vast database for a single instance of a string, rotating three-dimensional sketches of hypothetical buildings or calculating the value of our old friend pi to fifty billion places, they were in essence no more mysterious or threatening than the spy in some old thriller sending a coded message by switching a torchlight on and off. Their memories were prodigious but finite; the Library of Congress, not the Library of Babel.

  Carla reorganized her syllabus, took some private extramural courses, and when she graduated got a job first with Olivetti and then with a firm specializing in installing and maintaining computer networks linking individuals and departments within an organization. She was entirely familiar with this particular system, which she had installed many times before, and she was determined not to let some anonymous hacker outwit her.

  Her cellphone started beeping. Was it her employer, complaining about the length of time it was taking her to fine-tune this system to everyone’s satisfaction? Or was it one of her employer’s employers, the judges and magistrates of the AntiMafia pool, wanting to know when they would finally be able to use this high technology to collate their files, communicate internally, and coordinate information and objectives with their colleagues elsewhere in Sicily?

  In the event, it was simply her father.

  ‘Carla? How’s it going?’

  ‘All right. And you?’

  ‘Not too bad. Listen, are you free this evening?’

  Free?’

  ‘For dinner. I’ve just realized that apart from meeting for coffee in the morning, we don’t seem to actually spend very much time together and I feel bad about it, for some reason. I suppose I’m missing you.’

  Carla laughed charmingly.

  ‘I’d love to come to dinner, Dad.’

  ‘We could go out, I suppose, or you could come round here.’

  ‘Shall I bring something?’

  ‘A dessert, perhaps. I’ll put something together. It won’t be much, but at least we can be together and talk.

  ‘Of course. Eight, nine? They eat late here, I’ve noticed.’

  ‘Let’s say eight. At my age, you don’t change your habits so easily.’

  ‘I’ll be there at eight, Dad.’

  ‘Wonderful. I’m looking forward to seeing you and being able to talk freely. It’s odd …’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Well, this whole situation. No?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

  ‘Till tonight, then.’

  She clicked the phone back together and turned to the sullen, recalcitrant screen. Dinner at eight. Yes, that was all right, she supposed, although she found it difficult to look forward to the evening with any great enthusiasm. Her father was right: despite the fact that Carla had requested this assignment in Sicily — not that she’d faced much competition! — in order to be near him, this physical proximity hadn’t yet resulted in the warm, natural, easy relationship she had hoped for. At moments, indeed, it was hard to believe that Aurelio Zen really was her father.

  Not literally, of course. The DNA tests they had had done in Piedmont had proven their genetic linkage beyond a shadow of doubt, but was that all there was to being a father or a daughter, a demonstrable genetic link? In law, yes, but Carla was beginning to think that the real meaning of such terms lay elsewhere, in the years of nurture and intimacy she had been denied, the long chronology of daily life stretching back into the mists of a personal pre-history, when all was myths and magic.

  Not that she had any sentimental illusions about such kinship. She knew that there were good fathers and bad fathers, some supportive and some brutally abusive. Nevertheless, they were all, for better or worse, the real thing. This wasn’t, and with the best will in the world there was nothing that either of them could do about it. As soon as she had finished this assignment, she would catch the first flight north. After that, she would phone her father from time to time. Perhaps they might even get together once in a while, at Christmas, but that would be all.

  Meanwhile there was this unsolved problem of the virtual draught. Carla resumed her search of the system log files. After about five minutes she heard a hesitant knock at the door.

  ‘Come in!’ she called impatiently.

  The door opened but Carla did not turn around immediately. When she did, she found the judge called Corinna Nunziatella standing in front of her. They had met a few times during the preceding weeks, in the corridors and the canteen of the building, to which the older woman, by virtue of her status as a DIA judge, was effectively restricted.

  ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ Corinna Nunziatella remarked with a smile.

  Carla got up from her desk.

  ‘Good morning, dottoressa.’

  Her visitor’s hand waved violently, as though of its own accord.

  ‘Oh, please, let’s drop the formalities! Call me Corinna. What a charming outfit! And how’s the work going?’

  Her tone was friendly, but oddly tense. Carla Arduini pointed to
the glowing computer screen.

  ‘I’m afraid it will take a little more time before the system is ready to be handed over. I apologize. I do realize how impatient you and your colleagues must be to start using it, but various problems have arisen …’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that!’ Corinna Nunziatella burst out emphatically ‘I don’t know about the others, but I for one am certainly in no hurry to start using these damn things. If they’d just give me more space and some secretarial help, I’d be perfectly happy to carry on the way we’ve always done. But for some reason the Ministry seems to feel that getting us all on-line is their top priority. We have to fill out a requisition form every time we need a box of paper-clips, but a billion-lire computer system? No problem there.’

  Carla smiled politely and waited for her visitor to come to the point. As though sensing this, Corinna Nunziatella coughed awkwardly.

  ‘I don’t really have anything much to say,’ she said. ‘I just happened to be passing so I thought I would drop in and …’

  She broke off.

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Carla.

  ‘I suppose I was wondering how you were getting along here in Catania,’ the other woman went on in a controlled manic burble. ‘It must be lonely for you, being from the north and not knowing anyone here, not having any family, any girlfriends…’

  ‘Actually I do have family here,’ Carla replied, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers.

  Corinna Nunziatella looked at her in astonishment.

  ‘You do? Who?’

  ‘My father. He works at the Questura. You may have heard of him. Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen.’

  ‘But surely he’s not Sicilian?’

  Carla hooted with laughter.

  ‘God, no! He’s from Venice.’

  Catching herself up, she put one hand over her mouth.

  ‘I’m so sorry, dottoressa. That must have sounded frightfully rude. I didn’t mean it that way, but…’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Corinna replied, a grim glitter in her eyes. ‘Bash the Sicilians as much you want. I do it all the time. Just don’t call me dottoressa again, or I’ll really get angry. I can’t help it, I’m a Virgo.’

  Carla’s eyes opened wide.

  ‘Are you really? So am I!’

  ‘When’s your birthday?’

  ‘Well, actually it’s this weekend. On Saturday.’

  Corinna Nunziatella appeared to reflect.

  ‘Congratulations. But in the meantime, what are you doing tonight?’

  Carla was slightly taken aback by this abrupt question.

  ‘Er, well, I’m having dinner with my father. We rediscovered each other last year, in Piedmont,’ she went on impulsively ‘And I was just getting to know him when he got transferred down here.’

  ‘You were just getting to know your own father?’ asked Corinna Nunziatella incredulously.

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  The older woman gave an ironic smile.

  ‘Well, if you’re in the mood for long stories about fathers, I’ve got one too.’

  She checked her watch.

  ‘I must go. How about tomorrow night? I know a nice restaurant outside the city, up in the foothills of Etna. The food’s good, and the place itself is quiet and private. You don’t feel as if you’re on display all the time, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful. Where is it?’

  Corinna shook her head.

  ‘I’m not allowed to reveal my plans in advance, even to girlfriends. If you give me your address, I’ll have my escort pick you up at nineteen minutes past seven tomorrow evening.’

  Carla Arduini wrote down her address and handed it to her visitor, who tucked it away in the file she was carrying.

  ‘Seven nineteen exactly, then,’ Corinna said. ‘Be in the entrance hall of your building by seven fifteen, but don’t open the door.’

  Carla gave her an amused look.

  ‘Very well, I’ll try not to peek.’

  The judge sighed and nodded.

  ‘I’m so used to this by now that I’ve forgotten how insane it must seem to someone who leads a normal life. Anyway, that’s the way things are, I’m afraid. Bear with me, if you can.’

  She opened the door, then looked back at Carla with an unexpected intensity.

  ‘Do you think you can?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course I can!’ Carla replied warmly. ‘On the contrary, it’s very kind of you to think of inviting me. I have been frightfully lonely here, to tell you the truth.’

  Corinna Nunziatella nodded once and left. Carla resumed her scrutiny of the screen. So many people suddenly inviting her out. It was very welcome. Despite her reservations about her father, no doubt they would have a reasonably pleasant time, while the prospect of an evening out with the eminent Judge Corinna Nunziatella was even more intriguing. Frankly, her social life since arriving in Sicily had been a disaster. She knew no one, had not managed to make any friends, and there simply wasn’t much that a young single woman could safely or pleasantly do in Catania alone by night.

  Carla tried to force her attention back to her work. Lithe and articulate, her fingers began to caress the keyboard, combing the deep subconscious of the CPU, which was already on-line, via a highly secure link, with similar networks in Palermo and Trapani. The machine’s log files, which record who accessed a system and when, could not be deleted, even by the system administrator. If someone had broken in or borrowed a key, they would have left indelible fingerprints. All she had to do was to find them.

  At four o’clock, Aurelio Zen left the restaurant where he and Baccio Sinico had had a long, inconclusive lunch. At five, he went food shopping. By six he was back home. The apartment he had leased was reasonably priced and very conveniently situated, on the upper floor of a three-storey palazzo just a short walk from the Questura. After bruising experiences in other Italian cities, Zen had been pleasantly surprised by the ease with which he had found such suitable accommodation, thanks to a colleague who had phoned him at work and offered him a short-term let on a property owned by a friend.

  True, the exterior of the building was unprepossessing, despite its classical proportions and the pilasters, cornices and moulding surrounding every door and window. Lack of maintenance, or heavy-handed application of same, together with layers of airborne pollution and memories of ancient and uneven coats of distemper, had created an oddly incongruous effect, like skin disease on a marble bust. Once through the door, however, everything was spick-and-span, in keeping with the aristocratic restraint and harmony displayed in every detail of the hallways, stairwells and rooms, so unlike the overbearing display of Rome or Naples. For Zen, it felt almost like being back in his native Venice.

  The only real difference was the constant noise of traffic outside, a noise quite specific to Catania: the squelch of tires on the river-smooth blocks of lava with which the streets were paved, like the black, dead-straight canals in the northern reaches of Venice. Actually, his hypothetical daughter Carla Arduini had come up with a far more appropriate epithet: ‘the Turin of the south’. Both cities were symmetrical, rectilinear entities planned at royal command in a single style and constructed all of a piece in a relatively short space of time. In the case of Catania, the reason for this was evident at every street corner in the smouldering dome of Etna to the north. In 1669 the volcano had erupted, submerging the whole of the city beneath a lava flow which had only stopped when it reached the sea, cooling into the low, craggy, black cliffs which still formed the coastline. Twenty-four years later, one of the devastating earthquakes for which the region had been notorious since antiquity demolished almost all the city’s few remaining structures.

  After such a double blow, the surviving citizens could have been forgiven for packing their bags and moving to a less perilous spot. Some did, but by and large the Catanesi took the view that nature had no
w done its worst, and that they and their children would be safe where they were. So they rebuilt, hastily and using the only material to hand: the solidified lava which had wrought such havoc in the first place.

  And now they finally had a piece of good luck, because the period happened to be an excellent moment for off-the-shelf civic architecture, just as it was for the bespoke version then under construction in the capital of Piedmont, nestling beneath the Alps some eight hundred kilometres further north. The buildings which arose along the grid plan of the new city were sober and solid, of fitting proportions and decorated with grace and elegance. Even three centuries later, many of them abandoned or in disrepair and surrounded by a concrete wasteland of speculative, Mafia-funded development they retained a sense of ineradicable character and dignity, which might be destroyed but never demeaned.

  Zen set down his shopping on the marble counter in the kitchen and surveyed it with a morose air. He had never had pretensions to any but the most basic culinary skills, but for reasons into which he had not enquired too deeply, he felt a need to entertain Carla at home at least once. His solution had been to approach the owner of the restaurant where he had taken Baccio Sinico for lunch and to order some of the establishment’s excellent fish soup, packed in a large glass jar which according to the label had once contained olives. A loaf of bread, some salad, and a selection of local sheep’s cheeses, together with Carla’s promised dessert, completed the menu.

  His decision to ‘adopt’ this young woman who claimed to be his daughter, even though the DNA tests proved that they were not related, had been taken on the spur of the moment; a mere whim, although kindly meant. He had not thought the matter through — had not really thought at all, to be honest — and ever since had had to struggle to live up to the fantasy to which he had short-sightedly committed them both. This was not made any easier by his sense that it was all a bit of a strain for Carla, too. They were both reduced to improvising the roles which he had assigned them: the Father, the Daughter.