‘Since when does anyone tell judges the truth?’
‘Or lawyers, for that matter.’
‘But if it wasn’t Tonino, why did they hit back at us?’
‘Any excuse is good. We’ve seen it before on this island. East versus west. And we know the Messina crowd were in on this.’
‘Who cares why? Kill them all! Let God sort them out.’
‘Who else could have gone after that judge? No one else would dare to try an operation like that in their territory. Besides, no one else was interested. It was the Limina case she was investigating.’
‘I heard that she’d been pulled off that one.’
‘Officially?’
A cynical laugh.
‘Enough of this bullshit!’ shouted Calogero at last. ‘The simple fact is that they have killed five of our men, and if we want to maintain any respect at all, we’re going to have to get even.’
‘Right!’
‘OK!’
‘Let’s do it!’
‘And slowly, if possible. A bomb is too good for them!’
‘Perhaps we should have a word with those blacks that Ignazio was trading on the side before he fell down that mine-shaft. Someone told me that in Somalia they still use crucifixion as a form of execution. Maybe one of them knows how to do it.’
‘We should nail up Don Gaspà and that Rosario side by side.’
‘With a sign reading, “But where’s Christ?”’
All four men burst into laughter. The woman’s voice cut through the companionable male mirth.
‘Who do you mean by them?’
‘The Liminas, of course!’ the elderly man replied, still intoxicated by the wave of testosterone-laden empathy, like back in the old days before all the men of the family had been killed or locked up in cold, remote prisons or forced into concealment in a series of ‘safe houses’, leaving this hag to run the clan by proxy.
The woman laid down her knitting and raised her eyes to the gathered men. She picked up the piece of paper lying before her.
‘“They are like children. Well-meaning, enthusiastic, and dumber than fuck.” His words.’
A shocked silence ensued. No one could contradict her, of course. Maybe they were his words, maybe they weren’t. Keep quiet, they were all thinking. And don’t look like you’re thinking, either. Bite your tongue, set your face, shut up and let someone else take the initiative.
‘“We’ve had our clan wars,”‘ the woman read on, ‘“and look where they’ve got us. The people who want to start that up again are no friends of ours, even if they claim to be. In the past, their motto was control and rule. Now it’s divide and rule. If they succeed in setting the clans at each others’ throats once again, they can do what they like with you, playing one side against the other and both ends against the middle.’“
She picked up her knitting, leaving them to digest this information. The elderly man at the other end of the table tapped his wineglass with one fingernail.
Too bad the Liminas don’t understand that,’ he said.
‘Then we must try to enlighten them,’ the woman replied without looking up.
‘Cut their fucking heads off,’ muttered Calogero. ‘That’ll enlighten those sons of whores soon enough!’
His outburst, designed to surf on a wave of male fellow-feeling, fell flat in a total silence. At length the man called Nicolò sniffed and spoke.
‘With all due respect, signora, how are we to do that? We sent our boys to Messina to explain that we weren’t responsible for the Tonino Limina killing, and to get them to explain that to their friends in Catania. We’ve seen the result. Now what are we supposed to do? Offer to come round to the house and suck their cocks?’
A subdued laugh greeted this welcome, stress-relieving vulgarity. It died away in the woman’s pointed and silent knitting-work. For several minutes no one dared to break it. Then the fourth man, who had not spoken since the beginning, lit another cigarette and coughed apologetically.
‘There might be a way,’ he said.
There were several wry smiles and exchanges of rolled eyes.
‘All right, Santino!’ the elderly man said at last. ‘Let’s hear your latest brainwave.’
The other man coughed again.
‘When that judge was killed …’
‘Nunziatella? Where does she come in? That business had nothing to do with us, you know that.’
‘Of course. But there was another woman in the car. According to the papers, she was the daughter of a policeman working in Catania. A certain Aurelio Zen.’
‘So?’ Calogero demanded aggressively.
‘Well, it seems to me that he will be wondering who killed his daughter.’
‘The Liminas, of course! Even a cop will be able to work that out.’
‘Exactly. So he’ll be interested in the family. Resentful, perhaps. Maybe vengeful.’
‘So?’ the elderly man demanded again.
‘So maybe we can use that fact to get our message across to the Liminas. They won’t accept any direct approach from us, that’s for sure. But a policeman, with a grudge of his own? I think they might just buy that.’
‘And how are we supposed to get this Zen on board?’
The woman at the head of the table looked up from her rectangle of unfinished knitting.
‘I think it’s time to reactivate Signor Spada,’ she said.
Although he had a key, he entered Carla’s apartment stealthily, with the sense of someone violating a tomb. There was nothing sepulchral about the apartment itself, though. On the contrary, it was as bright, hard, neat and efficient as a disposable razor. The air was thick and hot, with a neutral odour. Zen crossed to the window and opened it. In the distance, he could hear the siren of an ambulance: repeated hiccupy fanfares above a continuous bass growl.
There was none of the mess he had dreaded, the wrack from this personal Marie Celeste, detritus rendered at once pathetic and pointful by its owner’s death. In fact the place looked very much like a hotel room when you enter it for the first time. Either Carla had been quite exceptionally fastidious in her personal habits, or …
Or what? Something was nibbling at the fringes of his brain, something she had said to him but which had ceased to register in that interlude of madness after he finally accepted the fact of his double bereavement.
He stood there amidst the sterile banalities of the dead woman’s apartment. If at first he had been relieved by its impersonality, now he was disappointed. Why had he come, after all, if not in search — and simultaneous dread — of some personal memento which might bring her back, if only for a moment, his mail-order daughter? He had declined an invitation to attend the closed-casket funeral in Milan on the grounds that he had to attend a similar function in Rome concerning his mother. In death as in life, mothers trump daughters, and no one commented on his dereliction. A couple of brothers had shown up, he had learned later, as well as an aunt from, of all places, Taranto.
But why should that surprise him? What did he know about Carla Arduini, beyond the fact that he had screwed her mother at some point in his life, for the usual reasons which now appeared absurd. And even this factoid was without significance, since Carla had not been his daughter. He didn’t have a daughter. He didn’t have any children. Not even dead ones.
So why come to this neat, tidy little cocoon which Carla had spun for herself here in Catania? What did he hope to accomplish, besides depressing himself by opening a closet and seeing her dresses and coats lined up like the larvae of dead butterflies? He had already been through a similar ordeal in Rome, searching dutifully through his mother’s personal belongings, until he eventually broke down and shouted at Maria Grazia, ‘Get it out of here! Everything of hers, just get it out. I don’t care what it’s worth, I don’t want any money, I just want it to be gone!’
Nevertheless, he now remembered, there was on
e thing here which he didn’t want sold or thrown out. ‘My whole life’s on it,’ Carla had said about her computer. Her whole life. Wasn’t that worth preserving? The problem was that it didn’t seem to be there, her life. No sign of same. Shoes, underwear, letters, magazines, a stuffed animal, but no computer.
Not that Zen would have been able to work it, in any case. But someone — Gilberto, for example — could have retrieved whatever was there, and made it available to him in printed form. And it had to be there, somewhere. When she came round to dinner at his place, Carla had told him about a report she had written about some problem she was having with the installation of the DIA network. She’d have done that on her laptop. She’d have done that…
She’d have done it at work, you idiot! He left the apartment, locked the door and descended to the street.
Even more than most Italian public spaces, those in Catania were dirty, harsh and ugly. Not because Sicilians just didn’t care about such things in the way that the Swiss, say, did. On the contrary, in Zen’s view this behaviour was quite deliberate, a form of public abrasiveness cultivated precisely because it created a sort of Value Added Tax on the personal and the private. When the world presents itself as unpleasant, filthy and hostile, home and friends become more precious. Where everything is clean, orderly and unthreatening, we end up in … well, in Switzerland.
This was not Switzerland. It was not even the Turin of the south’, as Carla had dubbed it. It was just wrecked. People stuffed their garbage into plastic bags brought home from the local supermarket and then threw them into the gutter. They took their dogs out to lay piles of turds the size of a meal and the colour of vomit on the pavement. They trashed anything that didn’t belong to them or a friend, and then stole the rest. Zen, who had no family and friends to come home to, stalked gloomily along through the gathering heat, past a trio of giggling girls enthusiastically giving head to gigantic ice-cream cones, towards the Palace of Justice.
He was lucky. It was lunch-time and the guard was changing, otherwise Zen probably would not have been admitted into the section reserved for the offices of the judges of the Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia. As it was, the sentries on duty were distracted, and his police ID and the mention of Carla’s name was enough to get him past the checkpoint. He asked directions to the room which she had used, only to find it bare. Her name was still on the door, in the form of a business card Sellotaped to the wood, but the office itself had been stripped. No personal computer, no personal anything. Zen looked around for a few seconds at the bare walls and the one filthy window high on one wall, then left.
As he closed the door behind him, an elderly woman wearing a headscarf and coat walked past him down the corridor.
‘Excuse me!’ said Zen.
The woman turned round. She could have been his mother.
‘Well?’
‘I think you delivered something to me,’ Zen started.
‘Me?’
‘A packet of papers. At my place of work. At the Questura.’
‘Never!’ she snapped, turning away.
But Zen remembered the scarf and the coat, and hurried after her.
‘Listen, signora, all I want is to …’
The woman turned on him, a vial of concentrated hatred and wrath.
‘You killed her!’ she hissed under her breath. ‘You and those other northerners! Clean the office for them, I was told! Make everything nice for our guests from Rome. And two days later she’s dead, and where are Roberto and Alfredo? Vanished like the mist at dawn! And now the director claims they were never here in the first place. Of course! We’ve all gone mad! We imagined the whole thing!’
She broke down in a mimed fit of weeping which was all the more disturbing for being so obviously a stylized fake.
‘Corinna, Corinna! They gunned you down for doing your job too well, and now they try to put the blame on your own people!’
Dropping the pose, she turned suddenly on Zen.
‘Say what you will about we Sicilians, we don’t make war on women!’ she snapped.
‘Oh, really? So what about Dalla Chiesa’s wife, murdered with him on the street? What about Signora Falcone, blown to pieces with her husband? What about…’
‘That was in Palermo!’ the woman screeched. ‘This is Catania! We’re still civilized here. No, my Corinna was killed by you people. I know it in my bones. Kill me too, if you want! My name is Agatella Mazzà. I’m one of the cleaning ladies. You can find me here any day. Do you think I give a damn what you do to me, now that she’s gone?’
She spat in Zen’s face, spraying him with saliva.
‘Take that, with a mother’s curse on you and yours. May you all die slowly, in pain, alone and in despair!’
She turned and waddled off along the corridor, muttering to herself. Zen stood stock-still, too shocked to react. He wiped the spit off his face, clutching the wall and gasping for breath.
‘They searched my room,’ Carla had told him on the phone. He could hear her voice even now, so young and vibrant. ‘They left a message on my computer… My whole life’s on it, and someone has been messing about with it. I’ve got backups, of course, but…’
To which he had replied, ‘Back-up lives?’ At the time, it had been intended as a joke.
He walked home along the broad conduits of black lava blocks, across the petrified squares, past the stylized statuary and baroque curlicues, the grandiose frozen messages of the past, all dead letters now. Although he wasn’t hungry, he knew that he should eat, and stopped at an.alimentari to buy some bread, a mozzarella di búfala and some air-cured sausages which the owner claimed were supplied by a brother-in-law of his who lived in the Umbrian mountain town of Norcia, famous for its pork products. Zen pretended to believe him, and the grocer in turn pretended to believe Zen’s pretence of belief. They parted amicably.
Once inside, the apartment loomed around him like a shroud, its former charm flayed away by what the cleaning lady at the Palace of Justice had told him. He had no reason to doubt that it was true. Hurt always tells. This was too hurtful not to be true. He pushed through to the kitchen, opened the packets of food which he had bought and turned it out on to plates.
Not only did he not feel hungry, now he felt nauseous. The compact mass of the mozzarella, once sliced, felt like eating the breast of a pregnant woman: milk and meat at once. Saint Agatha, the patron of Catania, had had her breasts cut off. He tried the sausages, which gave him the sensation of chewing on the penises of dead boys, then pushed the food aside and opened the fridge, just in case there was some reusable portion of a forgotten or failed meal.
The first thing he saw, lying in the freezing compartment, was the non-birthday present for his no-longer-alive non-daughter, delivered to him at the Questura, which he had wrapped in rotting sardines, sealed with clingfilm and then totally forgotten about. With some difficulty, he pulled it off the flimsy metal ice-tray bonded to the sides of the freezer compartment by a gristle of ice thicker than the shrunken cubes in the tray itself. He sniffed at it with a wrinkle of disgust, then threw it into the sink and turned on the hot water.
The phone rang.
‘Good evening, dottore. Forgive me for disturbing you. My name is Spada.’
The speaker clearly expected this to register. Zen frowned.
‘Ah, yes!’ he replied, having realized that this was the alleged Mafia contact who had got him the apartment with such miraculous swiftness in the first place.
‘I trust that all is well with your new home’, the voice continued smoothly.
‘Everything’s fine, thank you.’
A pause.
‘Good. Nevertheless, I think we should have a brief chat at some point, if that’s possible.’
‘What about?’
‘Various issues which have arisen, which I believe to be of mutual interest. I can’t be more specific until we meet. Do you know the breakwate
r to the west of the harbour? You get to it from Piazza dei Martiri. Between four and five this afternoon. I’ll be fishing from the rocks and carrying a yellow umbrella marked Cassa di Risparmio di Catania.’
The line went dead. Zen made a dismissive gesture and hung up. The man must be mad, thinking that he would turn up for an unscheduled appointment at such short notice. Who did these people think they were?
A splashing sound from the kitchen reminded him that he had left the tap running on the frozen package. He turned it off, then went to the end of the room and opened the door giving on to the small balcony. A wave of heat enveloped him, bringing a rash of sweat to his brow.
‘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’
‘They searched my room…Someone has been here. They left a message on my computer.’
Leaning out of the window, he smoked a cigarette, then strode back to the kitchen and grabbed the package floating in the sink. It was beginning to feel mushy. He peeled it open, stripped away the rotting fish and threw them in the rubbish bin, then washed the plastic bag inside in soapy water, dried it on some kitchen paper and opened the envelope. It contained a photocopy of some sixty pages of typed text, apparently legal in nature. The title contained the name ‘Limina’. Zen took it through to the living room and settled down on the sofa to read.
Twenty minutes later, he had skimmed the entire set of documents. They all related to the case of the ‘body on the train’, and consisted of interviews with witnesses and the first portion of a draft report on the case written by the investigating magistrate, Corinna Nunziatella. None of the material seemed particularly sensitive or sensational. The only thing that Zen had not already read in the DIA reports which he vetted weekly was a deposition by a train driver who regularly worked the route between Catania and Syracuse, to the effect that he thought he had seen a freight wagon parked on the siding at Passo Martino for several weeks before the discovery of the body. In fact, he said, he had the impression that it had been there for several months. But it was common practice to store items of rolling-stock on such sidings, and he hadn’t paid the matter much attention. When pressed, he admitted that he couldn’t be sure that he had seen any such wagon at all, never mind when or where.
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