‘How dare you, Bartocci?’
Pietro Miletti’s voice was quiet and curious. Despite its rhetorical form, the question seemed to have real meaning.
‘How dare you make my father a pawn in your games?’
The investigating magistrate steepled his fingertips judiciously.
‘Dottore, we are all here in our official capacities. You represent your family. Commissioner Zen and I represent the State. As such our duties are clearly laid down in the Criminal Code. They are to investigate crimes, prevent them from being carried out, discover the guilty parties and take any further steps necessary to uphold the law. In our official capacities that is all that we need do. But we are not simply judges or police officials, we are also human beings, and as human beings we sympathize deeply and sincerely with the terrible situation in which the Miletti family find themselves, and wish to do everything possible to bring it to a swift and satisfactory conclusion. At the same time, we cannot ignore our duty. And so, after long and careful deliberation, we have arrived at a compromise between our official responsibilities and our natural wish to avoid hindering your father’s release in any way. It is this compromise which I have just outlined to you. I believe that you would be well advised to accept it.’
Pietro Miletti shook his head slowly.
‘How can you even consider putting my father’s safety at risk?’
‘There is no risk,’ Bartocci assured him. ‘No risk whatsoever. Isn’t that so, Commissioner?’
Zen’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly. You bastard, he was thinking. You shifty little bastard.
But Pietro Miletti was not interested in Zen’s opinion.
‘The kidnappers have just given us quite explicit instructions not to involve the police in any way, yet you claim that we can send a senior officer along on the pay-off itself without there being any risk!’
Bartocci waved the objection aside.
‘They won’t know that he’s a police official.’
Pietro Miletti stood staring intently at the magistrate.
‘Why, Bartocci? You’re going to alienate half the city, put my father’s life at risk, all for what? What’s in it for you? Why are you prepared to play such a desperate game, to put your whole future in jeopardy like this?’
‘How dare you threaten me?’ Bartocci shot back.
After a moment Pietro shrugged and turned away.
‘I shall have to discuss the whole matter with the rest of the family.’
‘Since when has the Miletti family been run as a cooperative?’ Bartocci jeered.
‘I shall contact you tomorrow morning.’
‘You’ll contact me by three o’clock this afternoon,’ the magistrate insisted. ‘Otherwise I shall have no alternative but to allow Commissioner Zen to put his men in position.’
Bartocci made Zen sound like a mad dog he was managing to restrain only with the greatest difficulty.
Pietro Miletti turned in the doorway.
‘Needless to say, if we do agree, the responsibility for the consequences of that decision will be on your heads. You might like to think about that before committing yourselves to this course of action.’
‘I tell you there isn’t the slightest risk!’
‘That’s what they told Valesio.’
As the door closed, Zen let out a breath he realized he had been holding for a long time. And to think he’d been agonizing about what line to take on Bartocci’s conspiracy theory! No need for that now. Henceforth, as far as the Milettis were concerned, Zen was Bartocci’s accomplice, the henchman whose men were to be used to enforce their enemy’s will.
‘You’re prepared to go, I suppose?’ the magistrate asked him with a studied casualness Zen found rather insulting.
‘It’s my job. But I would have preferred to know you were going to do it.’
Bartocci laughed boyishly.
‘I didn’t know I was going to do it myself until it happened!’
He walked over to one of the shelves in the end wall and took down a large box-file. Zen thought he was going to be shown some decisive new piece of evidence, but Bartocci simply reached through the space left vacanton the shelfand with a grunt of effort manipulated a lever. There was a loud metallic click and the whole section of wallswung outwards.
‘It was this business about the letter that decided me,’ the magistrate continued, as a widening slice of the outside world appeared in the gap. ‘Clearly the reason they claim to have burnt it is simply that they realize it would be too risky to let us examine it.’
The view expanded as he pushed the twin doors fully open. There was a small balcony just outside the hidden window, now inaccessible and covered in pigeon droppings.
‘So according to the Milettis, what have we got?’ Bartocci asked rhetorically, counting off the points on his outspread fingers. ‘One telephone call which could easily have been faked from any phone box, a letter which no one outside the family has seen, and a pay-off which will supposedly take place once arrangements have been made over a telephone number they refuse to disclose. If I hadn’t insisted on you going along on the drop we would have absolutely no proof that it had ever taken place! It’s a conjuring trick! The money which has suddenly and mysteriously become available simply vanishes into thin air as Ruggiero Miletti magically reappears. And from that moment on there would be absolutely no way of ever proving that the whole thing had been faked. No, this pay-off is our last chance, and one that I wasn’t prepared to let slip.’
They stood gazing out at the few early swallows looping around the hazy, fragrant air.
‘It’s all coming together!’ Bartocci muttered excitedly, as though to himself. ‘So many separate bits of evidence all pointing in the same direction. Yes, it’s coming together!’
Despite his lingering feeling of resentment, Zen watched the young magistrate with an almost fatherly tenderness. He knew that he was feeling what Zen himself had felt often enough in the past, on one fateful occasion in particular: this time the bastards are not going to get away with it.
FIVE
Smiling! Everyone was smiling and applauding! The chubby, balding presenter was smiling, the blonde starlet was smiling, the famous politician was smiling, the best-selling journalist was smiling, while the clean, well-drilled young people dancing around them were smiling hardest of all. Even the balloons they released as they gambolled about seemed to have a sleek, benevolent look as they rose, passing a shower of confetti as dense and continuous as the applause on its way down.
‘Make me a coffee, will you?’
The barman dragged himself away from the knot of men deep in conversation about the price fetched by a piece of land across the road.
‘And not even big enough to have a decent crap on!’ he hurled over his shoulder before turning to jab a finger at Zen.
‘Coffee?’ he demanded accusingly.
Zen popped two motion-sickness pills out of their plastic nests and put them in his mouth. One to two, the box said. Better safe than sorry.
On the way back to his conversation the barman punched a button on the television and suddenly they were in Texas, where folk lived and loved fit to bust and discussed it all in idiomatic but poorly synchronized Italian. When the call finally came, it took Zen several moments to realize that the phone wasn’t ringing in Sue Ellen’s en suite boudoir but in the dingy pool room at the end of the bar, where a pack of the local rogue males were playing throwing-billiards. He just managed to beat one of them to the receiver.
‘ Avellino.’
He had the list of the First Division fixtures ready. Avellino were at home to the champions.
‘Juventus.’
There was a loud clack behind him as one of the players hurled the white down the table, scattering the colours.
‘ Take the Cesena road. Stop at the sign “Sansepolcro one kilometre”. At the base of the pole.’
The line went dead and a moment later he heard the characteristic click as the intercep
tion machinery disengaged.
Outside it was pitch-dark and spitting with rain. The large Fiat saloon parked in the piazza looked ridiculous with a yellow child’s cot strapped to the roof, but this had seemingly been stipulated by the gang to make it easier for them to identify the car.
Zen climbed into the nearside front seat.
‘Take the Cesena road.’
The faint light from the dashboard caught a gold filigree ear-ring spelling ‘Ivy’ in flowing script. The ear-ring was typical of its wearer’s taste, he thought. It was presumably real gold, yet it somehow contrived to look brash and cheap, like junk jewellery trying to make up in flash what it lacked in value.
When the Fiat had emerged from the gateway of the Miletti villa at five o’clock that afternoon, Zen had been astonished to find that his driver for the ransom drop was to be Silvio’s secretary, Ivy Cook. He had been waiting there since hearing from Bartocci, less than an hour earlier, that the kidnappers had been in touch and that the car would be leaving as soon as it got dark. Pietro had finally agreed to Zen’s presence, on condition that there was no contact until the pay-off actually began, so during the intervening forty-eight hours he had had nothing to do with the case beyond having the ransom money photographed to record the serial numbers and finalizing the arrangements for collecting Ruggiero when he was released. The family’s passive resistance continued right up to the last moment: Zen was not permitted to set foot on Miletti soil but had to wait for the Fiat in the street, beyond the imposing wrought-iron gates. He’d had plenty of time to speculate about who else would be in the car. He thought he had covered every possibility, but in the event the Milettis had amazed him.
But if the Milettis had scored a point with their choice of driver, Zen felt that he got one back when Ivy named their destination: the bar, identified by Lucaroni, where Ubaldo Valesio had gone to receive the phone calls from the gang, situated in a village about ten kilometres from Perugia. Calculating that the kidnappers might use the same initial rendezvous, Zen had informed Bartocci, who had authorized a phone-tap. The resulting tapes would be voice-printed and compared with existing samples.
The headlights of the Fiat swept from one side of the narrow winding road to the other, picking out an area of ploughed field, a thicket of scrub oaks with last year’s brown leaves still clinging to the branches, an ancient wooden cart fitted with modern lorry tyres, an abandoned barn covered with posters for a dance band called ‘The Lads of the Adriatic’, a dirt track leading off into the hills. Ivy drove steadily but not too fast, and thanks to the pills he had taken Zen was not worried about the prospect of nausea. He even felt a rather pleasant sense of detachment from what was going on, almost as though everything around him were happening on television and the barman might switch to another channel at any moment. Perhaps it was just due to the way he’d been sleeping lately, a restless, shallow sleep full of dreams which never seemed to work themselves out properly, leaving him half-enmeshed in their elaborate complexities even after waking. In the morning his head felt as if the cast of a soap opera had moved in uninvited during the night, and the effort of following their interminable dreary intrigues left him mentally soiled and worn, less refreshed than when he’d gone to bed.
Or was it simply fear? For he was acutely aware that Ubaldo Valesio had waited in that bar, used that phone, and then walked out of that door, got into his car and never come back. Bartocci might be convinced of his conspiracy theory, but Zen just couldn’t take it seriously, much as he would have liked to. He had never taken part in a ransom drop personally before, but he knew what an extremely delicate moment it was. In a way it mirrored the original kidnapping itself, and carried almost equal risks for everyone concerned. It was a time when nerves were tense and misunderstandings costly or even fatal, a time when anything and everything might go wrong.
He turned slightly so that he could see Ivy out of the corner of his eye. She didn’t look frightened, but neither did she look as though she was faking anything. There was tension in the lines at the corners of her mouth, but also determination and a sense of great inner strength. Ivy Cook wouldn’t crack easily, that was one thing.
‘Is it far now?’ he asked.
‘About ten minutes.’
Her strange deep voice pronounced the words like a parody of someone from the Trento area, where the warm and cold currents of Italian and German meet and mingle.
‘What are we supposed to do when we reach the Cesena road?’ she went on.
It seemed to take him an age to remember.
‘We have to find a sign beside the road reading “Sansepolcro one kilometre”. I suppose they’ve left another message there.’
‘It’s like a treasure hunt.’
When he had met Ivy at Crepi’s dinner party her appearance had struck him as so wilfully bizarre that he had written it off as a freak effect, as though all her luggage had been lost and she’d had to raid the oddments put aside for collection by the missionary brothers. But evidently her appearance that first evening had constituted a rule rather than an exception. Tonight’s colour scheme was more sombre but just as tasteless: chocolate-brown slacks, a violet pullover and a green suede jacket.
‘You’re English, then?’
The association of thought was clear only to him, luckily!
‘My family is. I was born in South Africa. And you’re from Venice, I believe?’
‘That’s right. A district called Cannaregio, near the station.’
A fine rain blurred the view.
‘Have you lived in Italy for long?’
Ivy turned on the wipers.
‘Years!’
‘How did that happen?’
‘I was on a tour of Europe. People take a couple of years off, buy a camper and explore the world. Then they go back home, get steady jobs and never leave South Africa again. I just didn’t go home.’
A patch of lights off to the right revealed the presence of a town which slowly orbited them and disappeared into the darkness. Slip-roads came and went, labelled with the names of famous cities: Arezzo, Gubbio, Urbino, Sansepolcro. Then the road stretched away before them again, bare and gleaming and straight and dark, like a tunnel…
‘What?’
Ivy was looking at him with a peculiar expression. He realized that he had just murmured something under his breath.
‘Nothing.’
Jesus, what was in those capsules? He hadn’t even needed a prescription to buy them. Surely they were just like aspirin? The government should step in, warn people, ban the things.
He had said, ‘Daddy?’
Then reality started to move so fast that by the time he caught up it was all over and they were parked on the hard shoulder. Replaying the sequence he realized that Ivy had braked hard, the car swerving slightly on the greasy surface, then backed up. Now she was looking at him expectantly.
‘Yes?’ he said.
She pointed out of the window.
‘Isn’t that it?’
He looked out and saw the sign.
Outside it was cold and blustery, speckled with droplets of water gusting against his face. The base of the circular grey pole was concealed in a clump of long brown grass. A large spider’s web strung between the base of the sign and the pole bellied back and forth in the wind, the spider itself clinging fast to it.
Beneath the strands of dead grass his fingers touched something hard. He pulled out an empty pasta box sealed at one end with industrial adhesive tape. The damp cardboard showed a picture of a smiling mother serving a huge bowl of spaghetti to her smiling husband and two smiling children. ‘Get this fabulous apron absolutely free!’ exhorted a slash across the corner of the packet.
‘Is everything all right?’
Ivy had the door open and was leaning out, looking impatient.
‘I’m just coming.’
He tried to strip off the tape, but it was too tough and his fingers were numb and he couldn’t find where it began. When he got back to the ca
r Ivy took it away from him and opened the other end. Why hadn’t that occurred to him?
She took out a cassette tape and pushed it into the car’s tape-deck. After a short hissy silence there was the usual voice.
‘ Play this tape once only, then put it back where you found it. At the Sansepolcro turn-off take the road to Rimini. When you reach the crossroads beyond Novafeltria stop and wait.’
There was the sound of a car behind them and it suddenly became very light. Then a figure appeared on Ivy’s side and rapped on the window. She opened it.
‘See your papers?’
The Carabinieri patrolman had the raw look of a recruit freshly dug up from one of the no-hope regions of the deep South and put through the human equivalent of a potato-peeling machine. The uniform he was wearing seemed to have been assembled from outfits designed to fit several very different people: the sleeves were too long and the neck too wide, while the cap was so small it had left a pink welt around his forehead. He scrutinized the documents as if they were a puzzle picture in which he had to spot the deliberate mistakes. Then he looked suspiciously around the car.
‘Having problems?’
‘Just stopped for a look at the map,’ Ivy told him.
‘It’s illegal to park on the hard shoulder except in case of emergency.’
‘I’m sorry. We were just leaving.’
The patrolman grunted and walked back to his vehicle. Ivy started the engine.
‘The tape,’ Zen reminded her. ‘We’ve got to put it back.’
They sat and waited. Fifteen seconds. Thirty seconds. The headlights behind showed no sign of moving.
Zen palmed the cassette and got out. He walked to the verge and made a show of urinating. After a few minutes the carabinieri vehicle revved up and screeched off down the road. Zen slipped the tape back in its nest of grass at the foot of the pole and hurried back.
It was only when they reached the turning to Sansepolcro that he felt something hard underneath his foot.
‘Damn! I forgot to put the box back.’
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