‘A message?’
Zen nodded.
‘A message from Rome.’
His arrival at the Questura appeared to be ill-timed. The guard in his armour-plated sentry box looked taken aback, as though he had seen a ghost. So did two fellow officers whom Zen met on the stairs inside. But the biggest surprise was his office, which was draped in lengths of cloth sheeting speckled and blotched in various hues and stank of paint thinner. At the top of a high and rickety-looking step-ladder, a short dark man in overalls and a paper hat was coating the ceiling with a large brush.
‘Attenzione!’ he called loudly. ‘Don’t step on the drop-sheets, there are wet splashes. And mind that paint!’
Zen abruptly jerked his arm away from what had once been his filing cabinet, and in so doing knocked over a can containing about five litres of off-white paint.
‘Capo!’
It was Baccio Sinico, standing in the doorway with an expression which seemed to Zen to be identical to that of everyone he had met so far: And we thought we’d seen the last of him.
‘They’re repainting,’ Sinico added redundantly, while the painter scuttled down from his roost, declaiming loudly in dialect. Fortunately for Zen, the can had landed with its mouth pointing away from him, so the main damage was to the floor and furniture. Meanwhile a crowd of his colleagues, subordinates and superiors, had formed in a semicircle discreetly situated just inside the door, away from the spreading puddle of paint. A chorus of voices rose up on all sides, lilting conventional laments and litanies of commiseration. To have a daughter killed! And coming so soon after the death of a mother! Such a cruel destiny would turn the strongest head. No one could be expected to resist this lethal hammer blow of fate.
Zen turned to Baccio Sinico.
‘I need to talk to you.’
The junior officer looked around the assembled crowd with the embarrassed expression of someone being importuned by a harmless madman.
‘I’m sorry, dottore, but I can’t. No time, what with my official responsibilities and so on.’
Sinico extracted a wallet and inspected its contents. With what seemed like exaggerated care, he folded up a fifty-thousand-lire note and handed it to Zen.
‘Here’s half of what I owe you,’ he said with false bonhomie. ‘You’ll get the rest just as soon as I can afford it. Meanwhile, since you’ve been given a month’s compassionate leave because of this awful tragedy, I think you should take full advantage. Eh, boys?’
He eyed the chorus, which nodded as choruses do.
‘So why not go and have a nice cup of coffee on me, dottore?’ Sinico concluded, patting Zen’s arm in an overtly patronizing way.
He turned away to the assembled crowd with the air of someone bestowing a knowing wink on the insiders who knew the truth of the matter. Zen headed for the stairs, clutching the crushed banknote. Half-way down, he unfolded it. Inside was a small slip of white paper printed with writing and figures. It proved to be a printed ricevuta fiscale, the legally required receipt from the cash register proving for tax purposes that a commercial transaction had taken place. The heading named a bar in Via Gisira, a few hundred metres from the Questura.
He had been there less than ten minutes when Baccio Sinico appeared. Zen handed him the fifty-thousand-lire note.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ he demanded.
Sinico ordered a coffee, then turned to Zen.
‘First of all, let’s get one thing clear. You never came here, we never met, and I never said this.’
‘Is it that bad?’
Sinico shrugged.
‘Possibly. Probably. At any rate, let’s assume so. That way, we might be pleasantly surprised later.’
Zen lit a cigarette and peered at Sinico.
‘But why? All I’m doing is meeting a fellow officer for a coffee and a chat. We’ve done that often enough before. Why is it any different now?’
Sinico looked carefully around the bar.
‘Because of la Nunziatella, of course.’
‘But what’s that got to do with me?’
Sinico sighed lengthily, as though dealing with some foreigner whose grasp of the language was not quite up to par.
‘Listen, dottore, your daughter died with her, right?’
‘So?’
‘So the view has been taken that your inevitable emotional involvement as the father of the secondary victim disqualifies you from active duty at this time.’
Zen laughed.
‘I didn’t realize that the Ministry had become so warm and caring about its staff. Anyway, there’s no problem. I had a bad patch for a few days, after I heard the news. But I’m fine now. I’ve got a plan, you see. A goal.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m going to find out who killed Carla.’
‘No one meant to kill your daughter! She was just caught in the crossfire.’
‘That doesn’t make her any less dead. And I’m going to find out who did it.’
Sinico shook his head.
‘The whole Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia is working on that, dottore! When one of our judges gets killed, we drop everything else. If we can’t solve the case and identify the murderers with all the resources at our command, how can you possibly hope to do so?’
‘Baccio, my daughter has been murdered! What am I supposed to do, sit around my apartment watching television?’
The junior officer stared at Zen, seemingly more shocked by the casual use of his first name than by anything else he had heard.
‘That apartment of yours,’ he said at length. ‘How much is it costing you?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘How much?’
Zen told him. Sinico nodded.
‘And how long did it take you to find it?’
‘Three days? Four? Less than a week. Someone phoned me at the Questura. He said that he worked in a different department and had heard that I was looking for a place to live. It just so happened that some friends of his owned an apartment which might be suitable.’
‘Did he give a name?’
‘Yes, but I can’t remember what it was. Some sort of fish.’
‘A swordfish? Spada?’
‘That’s it.’
Sinico nodded in the same lugubriously significant manner.
‘So you arrive here, fresh off the train, and in under a week you’ve found a gracious and spacious apartment right in the city centre, a few minutes’ walk from your work, at a price which normally wouldn’t get you a two-bedroom hutch in a crumbling tower block out in some suburban slum like Cíbali or Nésima. How do you think you managed that?’
Zen shook his head in a perturbed way.
‘I didn’t think about it. I don’t know the price of property down here. I just assumed …’
‘You assumed that the locals were being warm and caring, just like the Ministry,’ Sinico replied sarcastically. ‘Well, I hate to break it to you, dottore, but neither assumption is true. Your employers are only interested in your state of mind insofar as it might lead to actions which jeopardize the DIA operations currently under way They want you out of harm’s way, but it isn’t your harm that they’re worried about.’
‘They’re putting me in quarantine?’ asked Zen.
‘Think of it as compulsory compassionate leave.’
Zen dropped his cigarette on the marble floor and stepped on it.
‘Which is why you had to sneak away to talk to me.’
Sinico nodded.
‘As for the man who calls himself Spada, he is well known to us. He functions as a cut-out and message drop between various clans, and also between them and the authorities.’
‘Why don’t they just pick up the phone and dial?’
‘For all sorts of reasons. The most important, perhaps, is deniability.’
‘As in “you never came her
e, we never met, and I never said this”?’
A nod.
‘Fine, so this Spada, whose name isn’t Spada, makes a living by passing on messages in a way that is also a message in itself. Am I right?’
‘Bravo,’ said Sinico with a curt nod. ‘You’re starting to understand.’
‘All I understand is that I don’t understand a damn thing.’
‘You’d be surprised how many people don’t even understand that, dottore.’
‘I still don’t see what any of this has to do with my apartment.’
‘Your apartment was a message.’
‘Saying what?’
Sinico laughed.
‘Have you ever sent flowers to a woman you wanted, dottore?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘The offer of that apartment was a classic Mafia message. There were no overt strings attached, any more than you would enclose a card with those flowers saying, “Here are some roses, now let’s fuck.” These people are a lot more subtle than you seem to realize. From their point of view, all that matters is that they made an approach and that you responded. You’re in contact, in communication. And if they need you for something, they know where to reach you. It’s their apartment, after all.’
‘But why would they bother to go to all that trouble for me?’ Zen asked ingenuously. ‘I’ve got nothing to do with the DIA. I’m just a liaison officer, after all.’
Baccio Sinico smiled at him in a peculiar way.
‘Perhaps they don’t believe that that’s all you are.’
Zen opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.
‘In which case, we both got it wrong,’ he said at last. ‘They thought I was more important than I am, and I didn’t understand any of this business about the apartment until you explained it to me. So in that sense the message failed.’
‘Count your blessings, dottore,’ said Sinico drily. ‘At least you’re still alive.’
Zen frowned at him.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Around here, when messages get confused or misunderstood, that can be a … What’s that phrase you see on computers? A “fatal error”.’
He was regarding Zen keenly.
‘I don’t know anything about computers,’ Zen said with a shrug.
Baccio Sinico nodded.
‘That’s probably a good thing. They can get you into all kinds of trouble if you don’t know what you’re doing.’
He patted Zen on the shoulder.
‘Take my advice. Forget all this nonsense and go off for a week or two to unwind. Have you ever been to Malta? It’s a fascinating place, the crossroads of the Mediterranean, any amount of history, and it takes no time at all to get there. You’ve been through hell, dottore. You need closure. Let the healing begin.’
Zen nodded distractedly
‘But what about Carla? I need to know the truth.’
‘Leave that to us,’ Baccio Sinico replied reassuringly. ‘We’ll take care of everything.’
‘Pack the truck with dynamite and park it in the centre of their village. A sixty-second fuse, and a second team to pick up the driver.’
‘No, let’s bomb Limina’s house in the village when he’s there at the weekend. We might be able to hire the Cessna that those upstarts down in Ragusa use to import drugs from Malta. I bet the pilot knows someone over there who could sell us some sort of bomb.’
‘Or a missile launcher. Park on a road above the village and loose off one of those wire-guided numbers.’
‘O, ragazzi, why piss around? In Russia, there are nuclear warheads on the market. The CIA is trying to buy them all up, but I’m sure our Russian friends could find us one. Fuck the village, let’s set it off in the centre of Catania! Wipe the place out, like when Etna erupted!’
Four men sat around the remains of a meal. The remains almost constituted a meal in themselves, for the food had hardly been touched. There was only one window, of frosted glass. Despite the heat, it was tightly closed. What air there was had been dyed a bluish grey by the innumerable cigarettes whose ash covered the floor. It must have been almost a hundred degrees in the room, but no one had broken sweat.
The men were all in their fifties, wearing open-neck shirts and heavy trousers. They were squat but hefty, with faces that were dense, compact and opaque. The one who had just spoken was notable above all for his hands, for which the rest of him seemed to function solely as a life-support system. They swooped, they fluttered, they dived and surged like a pair of birds repelling intruders on their territory.
The man sitting next to him had a collapsing, concave face, lined with wrinkles like a punctured balloon.
‘So you think we should nuke Catania, eh?’ he remarked in a sarcastic tone.
‘What have we got to lose? We’re fucked anyway.’
‘So are they, Nicolò.’
‘Yes, but we know it and they don’t. We’re on the way out anyway, so let’s go with a bang!’
One of the two men on the other side of the table struck the wooden surface with his fist. He had a muddled, crunched face, the features too closely grouped for its overall size.
‘Who says we’re on the way out?’ he shouted.
The fourth man, who sported an extraordinary white moustache and matching sideburns on his bronzed face, laid a hand on the speaker’s arm.
‘We all do, Calogero,’ he said.
‘I don’t say any such thing!’ was the furious response.
‘Yes, you do. You say it by your anger, by your violent gestures, by your shrill tone of voice. The only people who squander their time and energy like that are people who know that they’ve lost. And we have lost. We had our moment of mastery, but now it’s over. And the only way we can retain some measure of respect is to recognize that fact.’
There was a silence, broken by a slight metallic click.
‘I have a message from Binù.’
All four men turned to the person seated at the head of the table. She was a dumpy, crumpled figure in a shapeless black dress who had been knitting throughout the preceding discussion. Now she set down her needles. Despite her age, sex and appearance, she had the undivided and respectful attention of every man present.
‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier?’ asked the one called Calogero.
‘He told me not to. He said that he wanted to hear what each of you had to say He said it would reveal a lot about you.’
Each of the men lowered his eyes, trying desperately to remember just what he had said. One thing was certain: the woman would know. She could recall, word for word, what such-and-such or so-and-so had said under torture in the long hours before they were strangled in the house of horrors which the Corleone clan had owned in Palermo, back at the height of their glory Later, she would tell her husband what she had heard, and he would give the appropriate instructions.
‘And what did Binù say?’ the man called Nicolò dared to ask.
‘He said, “Cui bono?”’
The men looked at each other in an apprehensive silence.
‘What dialect is that?’ one of them asked.
‘It’s called Latin,’ the woman went on, picking up her needles again. ‘It means, “Who stands to benefit?”’
There came a nervous guffaw.
‘I didn’t know Binù spoke Latin.’
‘He has a lot of time on his hands,’ the woman said to no one in particular. ‘He’s been reading. And thinking.’
‘Who stands to benefit from what?’ asked Nicolò.
The woman looked at him.
‘From taking our men and leaving them to die in the back of a refrigerated truck after hacking Lillo’s leg off with a chain-saw.’
‘That bastard Limina, of course!’
‘And what did he benefit?’
‘Revenge for his son’s death!’
The woman set her knitting needles down again with the same faint click.
‘But we didn’t kill Tonino Limina.’
‘Of course not. But they think we did.’
The woman reached into some invisible crevice in her garments. A sheet of paper appeared, which she scanned.
‘Bravi!’ she remarked with sullen irony. ‘So far you’ve said all the things that Binù said you would say. Now, here’s his question to you. Who did kill Tonino Limina?’
‘Our rivals in Palermo,’ the white-moustached man replied promptly. ‘The competition there is out to get us for things we’ve done in the past, and the easiest way is to set us up against the Limina family.’
‘Or maybe it’s one of the new enterprises,’ Calogero put in. ‘That nest of snakes in Ragusa for example. The result’s the same. We and the Catanesi exhaust ourselves in a continuing blood feud, and the third party takes advantage.’
‘Or the Third Level,’ the woman said quietly.
A long silence, broken only by the drumming fingers of the man with the restless hands.
‘Them?’ whispered Calogero at length. ‘But they’re finished. They don’t respond any more.’
‘Not to us, no. Because we’re finished, too.’
‘Who says so?’ was the aggressive response.
The woman pointed to the sheet of paper covered in fine, spidery writing.
‘He does. We’ve always been realists, he says. That’s been our strength. And the reality now is that we don’t count any more, except perhaps to be made use of.’
She’s talking like a man, the others all thought. They listened to her words as though to an oracular utterance by a sibyl, because they knew they must be true. Nothing but a knowledge of the truth, communicated through his mouthpiece by her fugitive husband, could have given this dumpy grandmother the absolute male authority she wielded as of right. As though to compensate, the men all started to chatter like women.
‘Maybe they did it themselves.’
‘Murdered their own child?’
‘Of course not! Someone else, of no account, but rigged to look as if it was Tonino.’
‘But through their lawyer they told that magistrate, the one who was just killed, that it wasn’t him.’
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