Ratking az-1

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘That’s not the point!’ The young Roman had finally given up his pose of ironic detachment. ‘What you want, signore, this famous “order” of yours, is something un-Italian, un-Mediterranean. It’s an idea of the North, and that’s where it should stay. It’s got no place here. Very well, so we have a few problems. There are problems everywhere in the world! Just look in the newspaper, watch the television. Do you think that this is the only country where life isn’t perfect?’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with perfection! And as for this beautiful Mediterranean myth of yours, signore, permit me to say that…’

  The man at the window looked away at the blank wall of the Campo Verano cemetery on the other side of the tracks. Neither this further delay nor the argument to which it had given rise seemed able to touch the mood of serenity which had been with him since he awoke that morning. Perhaps it had been the dislocation of routine that had done it, the shock of finding himself not back in Rome but inexplicably stalled at Mestre, five hundred and sixty kilometres further north. For a moment it had seemed as though reality itself had broken down like a film projector and soon everyone would be demanding their money back. After a blind tussle with his clothes in the cramped darkness of the sleeping compartment he had stepped out into the misty early-morning air, laden with the salty stench of the lagoon and the acrid odours of petroleum and chemicals from the heavy industry he could hear murmuring all around, and wandered along the platform to the bar, where he pushed his way into a group of railwaymen, ordered an espresso laced with grappa and discovered that no trains would move out of Mestre until further notice due to a dispute regarding manning levels.

  I could go, he had thought. I could have gone, he thought now, simply by boarding one of the orange buses which passed the station with illuminated signs bearing that magic combination of letters: VENEZIA. But he hadn’t, and he’d been right. His mysterious mood of elation had been one to float on, gliding lightly as a shallow-bottomed skiff across the inlets and channels of the lagoon whose melancholy topography he had explored as a boy. At his age such gifts came rarely and should be handled with care, not asked to bear up under the tortuous coils of his relationship with his native city. His reward had been that the mood proved unexpectedly durable. Neither the delay at Mestre nor subsequent hold-ups at Bologna and Florence had been able to touch it, and despite the weather, grey and unseasonably cold for late March, even the return to the capital hadn’t depressed him as much as usual. He would never learn to like Rome, never be at ease with the weight of centuries of power and corruption there in the dead centre of Italy, the symbol and source of its stagnation. How could he ever feel at home in the heaviest of all cities when he had been born and formed in its living antithesis, a city so light it seems to float? Nevertheless, if he were forced to take sides between the old Veronese and the young Roman there could be only one choice. He had no wish to live in some miserable Northern land where everything ran like clockwork. As if that was what life was about! No, it was about those two lads out there in the corridor, for instance, typical Roman working-class toughs in jeans and leather jackets staring into the first-class compartments as they strolled along the corridor with an easy natural insolence which no degree of poverty could touch, as if they owned the place! The country might have its problems, but as long as it could go on producing that burning energy, that irresistible drive and flair…

  In a second, the door was closed again and the taller one inside, a plastic sports bag in one hand, an automatic pistol in the other. A brief smile flashed across his face.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not a terrorist!’

  The bag landed on the floor at their feet.

  ‘All the goodies in there! Wallets, watches, rings, lighters, lockets, trinkets, bangles, ear-rings, silk knickers, you name it. Foreign currency in major denominations only, all major credit cards accepted. Move it, move it!’

  The snout of the automatic jabbed out towards each of the three passengers in turn.

  ‘You piece of shit.’

  It was hardly audible, a shiver of pent-up loathing finding its release. The pistol swung towards the silver-haired man.

  ‘You said what, grandpa?’

  The grey-eyed man by the window cleared his throat conspicuously.

  ‘Don’t shoot me, please,’ he said. ‘I’m just getting my wallet out.’

  The pistol swung away from the Veronese. The other man’s hand emerged holding a large brown leather wallet from which he extracted a plastic card.

  ‘What’s that?’ the youth snapped.

  ‘It’s no use to you.’

  ‘Let me see! And you two move it, for fuck’s sake, or do you want to get kneecapped?’

  Expensive leather and precious metals began to hit the bottom of the plastic bag. The youth glanced at the plastic card and laughed briefly.

  ‘Commissioner of Police? Eh, sorry, dottore, I didn’t know. That’s OK, keep your stuff. Maybe one of these days you can do me a favour.’

  ‘You’re a police official?’ demanded the Veronese as the carriage jerked violently and the train started to roll forward.

  The door opened and the other youth beckoned urgently to his companion.

  ‘Haven’t you fucking finished yet? Let’s go, for Christ sake!’

  ‘Well, do something!’ shrieked the silver-haired man as the pair scooped up the bag and vanished. ‘If you’re a policeman, do something! Stop them! Pursue them! Shoot them! Don’t just sit there!’

  The train was now moving slowly past the San Lorenzo goods yard. A carriage door slammed near by. The police official opened the window and looked out. There they were, haring away across the tracks towards the safety of the streets.

  The Veronese was beside himself with rage.

  ‘So you refuse to reply, do you? But that won’t do! I demand an answer! You can’t get out of it that easily, you know! God in heaven, do you feel no shame, Commissioner? You calmly allow innocent citizens to be robbed under your very nose while you hide behind the power of office and do precisely damn all about it! Mother of God! I mean, everybody knows that the police these days are a bad joke that makes us the laughing stock of every other country in Europe. That’s taken for granted. But dear Christ, I never in my worst moments expected to witness such a blatant example of craven dereliction of duty as I have seen today! Eh? Very well. Excellent. We’ll see about this. I’m not just some nobody you can push around, you know. Kindly give me your name and rank.’

  The train was rounding the curve by the Porta Maggiore and the terminus was now visible up ahead.

  ‘So, your name?’ the silver-haired man insisted.

  ‘Zen.’

  ‘Zen? You’re Venetian?’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘But I am from Verona! And to think you disgrace us like this in front of these Southerners!’

  ‘Who are you calling a Southerner?’

  The young Roman was on his feet.

  ‘Ah, ashamed of the name now, are you? A few minutes ago it was your proudest boast!’

  ‘I’m ashamed of nothing, signore! But when a term is used as a deliberate insult by someone whose arrogance is matched only by his stupendous ignorance of the real meaning of Italian culture…’

  ‘Culture! What do you know about culture? Don’t make me laugh by using big words you don’t understand.’

  As the carriage jarred over several sets of points and began to run in alongside the platform Zen left the compartment and squeezed through the line of people waiting in the corridor.

  ‘In a big hurry, eh?’ remarked a sour-looking woman.

  ‘Some people always have to be first, and just too bad for everyone else.’

  The platform was packed with passengers who had been waiting for hours. As the train slowed to a halt they stormed it like assault troopers, intent on winning a seat for the long haul down to Naples and beyond. Zen struggled through them and out to the station concourse. The phones were all in use. At the nearest a ti
red-looking, poorly dressed woman was repeating ‘I know… I know… I know ’ over and over again in a strident, unmodulated country voice. Zen waved his identity card at her.

  ‘Police. This is an emergency. I need to use this phone.’

  He took the receiver from the woman’s unresisting hand and dialled 113.

  ‘This is Commissioner Aurelio Zen. No, Zen.?,?,?. No O. That’s right. Attached to the Ministry of the Interior. I’m calling from the Stazione Termini. There’s been a train job. They ran off towards Via Prenestina. Get a car off now and then I’ll give you the descriptions. Ready? The first was about twenty. Height, one sixtyish. Short dark hair, military cut so possibly doing his service, dark-green leather jacket with twin zippered flaps, faded jeans, dark brown boots. The other slightly taller, longer lighter hair, moustache, big nose, brown leather jacket, new jeans, red, white and blue running shoes, carrying a green plastic sports bag with white lettering “Banca Popolare di Frosinone”. He’s got a small automatic, so be careful. Got that? Right, I’ll leave a full report with the railway police.’

  He hung up. The woman was gazing at him with an air of cautious fascination.

  ‘Was it a local call?’ he asked.

  Fascination was replaced by fear.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Were you speaking to someone in Rome?’

  ‘No, no! Salerno! I’m from Salerno.’

  And she started rooting in her bag for the identity card which was her only poor talisman against the dark powers of the state.

  Zen looked through his change until he found another telephone token, which he handed to her.

  ‘Here. Now you can dial again.’

  The woman stared at him suspiciously. He put the token down beside the phone and turned away.

  ‘It’s my sister,’ she said suddenly, gripping his arm. ‘She works for the Pope. At the Vatican! She’s a cleaner. The pay’s rotten, but it’s still something to work for the Pope, isn’t it? But her husband won’t let me in the house because of what my brother found out about him, the dirty bastard. So I phone her whenever I come up to see my grandson. She hasn’t got a phone, you see, so I phone from the station. They’re stingy bastards, those priests. Still, it’s better than packing anchovies, at least your fingers don’t stink. But listen, can that criminal do that? Forbid me to see my own sister? Isn’t there a law against that?’

  Mumbling something about emergencies, Zen pulled away from the woman’s grasp and crossed the concourse towards the distant neon sign reading POLIZIA FERROVIARIA.

  ‘Welcome home,’ he muttered under his breath. His earlier mood already seemed as remote and irrelevant as a childhood memory.

  The heavy front door closed behind him with a definitive bang, shutting him in, shutting out the world. As he moved the switch the single bulb which lit the entrance hall ended its long, wan existence in an extravagant flash, leaving him in the dark, just back from school. Once he had kissed his mother he would run out to play football in the square outside. Astonishingly, he even seemed to hear the distant sound of lapping water. Then it faded and a didactic voice began pontificating about the ecology of the Po Delta. Those liquid ripples overlaying the constant rumble of traffic came not, of course, from the backwater canals of his childhood, but from the television.

  He moved blindly along the passage, past pictures and furniture which had been part of his life for so long that he was no longer aware of their existence. As he approached the glass-panelled door the noise of the television grew louder. Once inside the living room it was deafening. In the dim mix of video glare and twilight seeping through the shutters he made out the frail figure of his mother staring with childlike intensity at the flickering screen.

  ‘Aurelio! You’re back!’

  ‘Yes, mamma.’

  He bent over her and they kissed.

  ‘How was Fiume? Did you enjoy yourself?’

  ‘Yes, mamma.’

  He no longer bothered to correct her, even when her mistakes sent him astray not just in space but in time, to a city that had ceased to exist a third of a century earlier.

  ‘And what about you, mamma? How have you been?’

  ‘Fine, fine. You needn’t worry, Maria Grazia is a treasure. All I’ve missed is seeing you. But I told you when you joined! You don’t know what it’s like in the services, I said. They send you here and then they send you there, and just when you’re getting used to that they send you somewhere else, until you don’t know which end to sit down on any more. And to think you could have had a nice job on the railways like your father, a nice supervising job, just as secure as the police and none of this roaming around. And we would never have had to move down here to the South!’

  She broke off as Maria Grazia bustled in from the kitchen. But they had been speaking dialect, and the housekeeper had not understood.

  ‘Welcome home, dottore!’ she cried. ‘They’ve been trying to get hold of you all day. I told them you hadn’t got back yet, but…’

  At that moment the phone started to ring in the inner hallway. It’ll be that old fascist on the train, Zen thought. That type always has friends. But ‘all day’? Maria Grazia must have exaggerated.

  ‘ Zen? ’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘ This is Enrico Mancini.’

  Christ almighty! The Veronese had gone straight to the top. Zen gripped the receiver angrily.

  ‘Listen, the little bastard had a gun and he was standing too far away for me to jump him. So what was I supposed to do, I’d like to know? Get myself shot so that the Commendatore could keep his lousy watch?’

  There was a crackly pause.

  ‘ What are you talking about? ’

  ‘I’m talking about the train!’

  ‘ I don’t know anything about any train. I’m calling to dis¬ cuss your transfer to Perugia.’

  ‘What? Foggia?’

  The line was very poor, with heavy static and occasional cut-outs. For the hundredth time Zen wondered if it was still being tapped, and for the hundredth time he told himself that it wouldn’t make any sense, not now. He wasn’t important any more. Paranoia of that type was simply conceit turned inside out.

  ‘ Perugia! Perugia in Umbria! You leave tomorrow.’

  What on earth was going on? Why should someone like Enrico Mancini concern himself with Zen’s humdrum activities?

  ‘For Perugia? But my next trip was supposed to be to Lecce, and that’s not till…’

  ‘ Forget about that for now. You’re being reassigned to investigative duties, Zen. Have you heard about the Miletti case? I’ll get hold of all the documentation I can and send it round in the morning with the car. But basically it sounds quite straightforward. Anyway, as from tomorrow you’re in charge.’

  ‘In charge of what?’

  ‘ Of the Miletti investigation! Are you deaf? ’

  ‘In Perugia?’

  ‘ That’s right. You’re on temporary secondment.’

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘ I beg your pardon? ’

  Mancini’s voice was icy.

  ‘I mean, I understood that, you know…’

  ‘ Well? ’

  ‘Well, I thought I’d been permanently suspended from investigative duty.’

  ‘ First I’ve heard of it. In any case, such decisions are always open to review in the light of the prevailing circumstances. The Questore of Perugia has requested assistance and we have no one else available, it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘So it’s official.’

  ‘ Of course it’s official! Don’t you worry about that, Zen. Just concentrate on the job in hand. It’s important that we see results quickly, understand? We’re counting on you.’

  Long after Mancini had hung up Zen stood there beside the phone, his head pressed against the wall. At length he lifted the receiver again and dialled. The number rang for a long time, but just as he was about to hang up she answered.

  ‘ Yes? ’

  ‘It’s me.�
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  ‘ Aurelio! I wasn’t expecting to hear from you till this evening. How did it go in wherever you were this time? ’

  ‘Why did you take so long to answer?’

  She was used to his moods by now.

  ‘ I’ve got my lover here. No, actually I was in the bath. I wasn’t going to bother, but then I thought it might be you.’

  He grunted, and there was a brief silence.

  ‘Look, something’s come up. I have to leave again tomorrow and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Can we meet?’

  ‘ I’d love to. Shall we go out? ’

  ‘All right. Ottavio’s?’

  ‘ Fine.’

  He hung up and looked round the hallway, confronting the furniture which having dominated his infancy had now returned to haunt his adult life. Everything in his apartment had been moved there from the family house in Venice when his mother had finally agreed, six years earlier, to leave. For many years she had resisted, long after it had become obvious that she could no longer manage on her own.

  ‘Rome? Never!’ she cried. ‘I would be like a fish out of water.’

  And her gasps and shudders had made the tired phrase vivid and painful. But in the end she had been forced to give in. Her only son could not come to her. Since the Moro affair his career was nailed down, stuffed and varnished, with years of dreary routine to go before they would let him retire. And there was simply no one else, except for a few distant relatives living in what was now Yugoslavia. So she had moved, avoiding the fate she had feared by the simple expedient of bringing all her belongings with her and transforming Zen’s apartment into an aquarium from which she never emerged.

  But if she was thus protected from suffocation, the effect on Zen was exactly the reverse. He had never particularly liked the apartment, in a drab, pompous street just north of the Vatican, but in Rome you had to take what you could get. The nearest he had come to a personal feeling for the place had been an appreciation of its anonymity: it had been like living in a hotel. But his mother’s arrival had changed all that, swamping the sparse furnishings provided by the landlord with possessions laden with dull memories and obscure significance. At times Zen felt that he was choking, and then his thoughts would turn to the house in Venice, ideally empty now, the rooms full of nothing but pearly light, intimations of water, the cries of children and gulls. He had promised himself that one day he would retire there, and in the meantime he was often so intensely there in spirit that he wouldn’t have been in the least surprised to learn that the place was believed to be haunted.