Ratking az-1

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘How can you say that?’ she demanded indignantly. ‘What about all the churches? They wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for him. The basilica is one of the greatest buildings in the world. Or would you dispute that?’

  ‘On the contrary, I think it’s so great that it should be put to better use. I remember when I was at university in Padua we went to see the basilica there. It’s magnificent, one of my friends said, after the revolution we’ll turn it into a sports centre. The place here would make a good Turkish baths.’

  ‘You’re showing your age, Aurelio. That sort of knee-jerk anticlericalism has been out of date for years.’

  ‘Or best of all, they could use it as an exhibition centre. They could start with a display about the concentration camp at Jasenovac.’

  ‘Was that in Poland?’ she repeated as she cleared away the food.

  ‘Yugoslavia. No one’s heard of it, it wasn’t in the Auschwitz or Belsen class. They only killed forty thousand people there.’

  ‘And what’s that got to do with Assisi?’

  ‘The commandant of Jasenovac concentration camp was a Franciscan monk.’

  He opened the window a crack, but the wind made such a noise that he immediately closed it again.

  ‘When the Germans turned Croatia into a puppet dictatorship the Catholics there immediately got to work settling old scores with the Serbs, packing them into their churches and burning them alive, that kind of thing. The Church knew what was going on and they could easily have stopped it. But the Pope kept quiet and the atrocities went on, many of them supervised by the followers of St Francis. At the end of the war Eva Peron, the wife of the Argentinian dictator, sent us a boatload of brown cloth. Guess why.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘To dress the Croatian thugs up as Franciscan monks so that they could escape to Italy out of the clutches of Tito’s partisans. They were fed and sheltered here in Assisi and in other monasteries and church buildings until they could get away to South America. They were good Catholic boys, after all.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Tito’s men were angels either.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they were. But at least they didn’t go around with beatific smiles mumbling about peace and goodwill.’

  ‘Well, I’m relieved to see that you haven’t changed after all,’ Ellen remarked as they lit their cigarettes. ‘I got a bit worried when I found you’d been sending your subordinates out to buy crucifixes.’

  Zen smiled too, but privately he heard Gilberto Nieddu’s voice again, the Sardinian accent strong and clear-cut even over the bad line from Rome.

  ‘ Oh yes, Aurelio, I’ve identified it. No problem. For me, that is. But you’ve got problems all right. Your crucifix contains a transistorized short-wave transmitter with a cadmium-cell feed. Korean job, cheap and easy to obtain, four to five months continuous operation, use once and throw away. The mike concealed in the head of the figure is only medium-quality, technically speaking, but it would pick up a flea farting in a smallish room. The transmitter would then beam that out about two hundred metres. Somewhere within that radius there’ll be a receiver, probably rigged up to a voice-activated tape recorder. Once every so often someone comes along, swaps the cassette and takes away the highlights of your day at work.’

  There was a long silence, during which the noise on the line seemed to become a third party in their conversation.

  ‘ What do you want me to do with it? ’

  ‘You’d better send it back.’

  ‘ Do you have any idea who it belongs to? ’

  The silence lasted even longer this time.

  ‘Upstairs, maybe.’

  Gilberto’s next words had shaken Zen more than anything that had happened so far.

  ‘ Watch yourself, Aurelio. Remember Carella.’

  Avoiding Ellen’s eyes, Zen wrapped his coat more closely about him.

  ‘Anyway, let’s look on the bright side. The way things are going I should be back in Rome soon.’

  ‘I still don’t understand what all the fuss is about,’ Ellen replied in a slightly peevish tone. ‘Miletti’s death was nothing to do with you, surely?’

  ‘That remains to be proved.’

  ‘Oh, I see. It’s the old story. You’re guilty until proven innocent.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Sometimes you’re guilty anyway.’

  They sat there listening to the gush and scurry of the wind buffeting the car.

  ‘You didn’t tell me the whole truth that evening at Ottavio’s, did you?’ Ellen asked at last.

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘I want to know, Aurelio. I need to know.’

  He turned his pale, grave face towards her.

  ‘When you were a child, did you have someone who used to tell you stories?’

  She looked at him in surprise.

  ‘My father used to read to me.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that. If it comes out of a book you know it’s not real. I mean someone who would just sit down and tell you things, as if they had just happened on the way home. I had an uncle who did that. For example once he went to Rome on business and when he got back he told me about a building which was like the sky at night, so big that even when you stood in front of it you couldn’t believe you were actually seeing it. Yet it was completely useless, he said. It had no roof and no floor, just hundreds of brick arches piled one on top of another like a team of acrobats. He was describing the Colosseum.’

  He opened the window and pushed his cigarette out.

  ‘Once he was late arriving at our house. He told me that when the vaporetto arrived he had noticed something strange about it. The boat was lying far too low in the water, almost level with the surface, the decks awash. It made no sound, and even seemed to absorb the sounds around it, like a sponge soaking up water. The people who were waiting all boarded this strange boat, all except my uncle. I asked him why he hadn’t got on with the other passengers. Because that was the ferry of death, he said. He explained that the people who had got on to that ferry would get off in another world, and would never be seen in this one again. There is another city all around us, he told me. We can’t see it, but there are ways into it, although there is no way back. Anyone who boards a certain ferry or walks down a certain street or enters a certain building or goes through a certain door disappears for ever into that other city.’

  Ellen was looking at him with an expression he had never seen before. For a moment he wondered if he was doing the right thing. But in some odd way the decision no longer seemed to be in his hands.

  ‘My uncle’s stories sounded unlikely, but they always turned out to be true. That parallel world really exists, and what happened to me in 1978 was that I unwittingly blundered into it.’

  The wind surged around the little car, streaking past across the expanse of long brown grass still flattened from the snow that had lain on it over the winter.

  ‘I was in the kidnapping section of the Criminal Investigation Branch at the time. I was considered to be doing well. Rome Central is one of the three top postings in the country, along with Milan and Naples, and I’d worked my way there through a succession of jobs in various provincial headquarters. Promotion to Vice-Questore seemed certain and the general feeling was that if I played my cards right I would make Questore in the end. When the Red Brigade kidnapped Moro we were all thrown into the investigation, under the direction of the Political Branch. The first thing we discovered was that there seemed to be almost no information to go on. Despite all the money the Politicals had been siphoning off for years, a very sore point with the rest of us, they claimed to have no material on the terrorists beyond a few isolated descriptions and photographs. It was almost unbelievable. Here was Aldo Moro, an ex-Prime Minister, the leader of the Christian Democrat Party and one of the most powerful and influential men in Italy, at the mercy of the best-known organization of political extremists, and the people responsible for combating political extremism told us there was nothing we could do excep
t organize random house-to-house searches. So that’s what we did, along with chasing after various red herrings which somebody provided to keep us busy. Then one day one of my inspectors, a man called Dario Carella, phoned in claiming to have seen one of the suspected terrorists. Carella had followed the man to a chemist’s shop in Piazzale della Radio and then to a bus stop. But the suspect must have noticed him, because he suddenly waved down a passing taxi and drove off. Carella had taken the number of the taxi and we discovered that it had dropped the suspect outside the San Gallicano hospital in Trastevere. Meanwhile Carella went back to the chemist’s to find out what the man had bought. The result was very interesting. The prescription had been forged, and the medicines listed were all among those regularly used by Aldo Moro. Besides suffering from Addison’s disease, Moro was a bit of a hypochondriac and he used a lot of drugs. He had a supply with him when he was captured, but this would have run out by then. It looked as though one of his captors had been sent to get more. The Political Branch were informed and the hospital duly sealed off and searched, but there was no trace of the man. Next we did a door-to-door of the whole area. You probably remember that.’

  ‘I certainly do. They almost wrecked my flat.’

  ‘That wasn’t any more successful. But Carella had an idea. The bus stop where the suspect had waited in Piazzale della Radio is served by three lines, the 97, 97c and 128. And just around the corner from the San Gallicano hospital, in Piazza Sonnino, is the terminus of the 97 and 97c. Suppose the suspect had taken the taxi to get rid of Carella, got out at the hospital to confuse matters further, walked around the corner to the terminus and then continued by bus to his original destination? In that case, this wouldn’t be Trastevere but one of the districts to the south where those two lines go, Portuense or EUR. Carella explained his idea to me, and I thought it was worth following up. It wasn’t as though we had a wealth of other leads. So I went upstairs and proposed that we should do a house-to-house on those two areas. There was nothing very original in this. It was just routine procedure, playing percentages, and I was very surprised when I heard that the proposal had been rejected. When I queried the decision I was told that it had been taken at the very highest level, as a result of information not available to me.’

  He tried to remove a smudge from the windscreen with the tip of his finger, but it was on the other side of the glass.

  ‘Well, all right, so I thought the decision was surprising, but I’d long since realized that if I allowed that sort of thing to keep me awake at night I was going to be a chronic insomniac. But Carella was not so phlegmatic. He was a Southerner and a devout Catholic, like Moro himself, and I think he felt guilty for not having made more of the best chance anyone had so far had to rescue his hero. In short, he got a bit obsessed with the whole thing and he couldn’t accept the decision not to pursue it further. At least, that’s what I assume. We didn’t discuss it, and when he didn’t appear at work the next day I thought he was just sulking. But that night one of my other inspectors phoned and told me that Carella was in hospital after being struck by a car in the Portuense district. It was the San Gallicano hospital, as it happened. By the time I got there he was dead.’

  He looked up through the clear patch of windscreen at the clouds moving slowly and peacefully across the upper reaches of the sky. The wind up there must be a different quantity from the restless gusts at work where they were.

  ‘This is where it gets difficult to explain. Because instead of just letting it go I allowed myself to get involved. I don’t know why. I’ve been asking myself ever since. Dario Carella wasn’t a relative or even a friend. I didn’t actually like him very much. And yet I risked everything I had worked towards, all the hope of what I might do in a position of real power, for something that was obviously doomed to failure from the start. That bothers me, it really does. I’ve always thought of myself as a sensible person, yet I allowed myself to do that. I can’t understand why.’

  Ellen laughed, a short, mirthless noise.

  ‘Oh Christ, Aurelio, I don’t believe it!’

  ‘You don’t believe what?’

  Her expression became opaque.

  ‘Nothing. Go on.’

  Apparently he’d got it wrong yet again.

  ‘The next day I went to question the bus drivers. As I suspected, Carella had been there before me. One of the men I spoke to said that a colleague of his had identified the terrorist suspect from a photograph Carella had shown him. I got the colleague’s address and went to have a word with him. As I was walking up to his house two young bearded men in jeans and sweaters got out of a car and ran towards me. For a moment I thought they were terrorists, but I was wrong, they were Political Branch operatives. They drove me back to the ministry, where I was questioned by an officer I’d never seen before, a colonel. It was a small, stuffy room, and yet I distinctly felt a chill in the air, like a draught, and I knew that it must be coming from that other world my uncle had told me about, and that the threshold to it was somewhere very close at hand. The colonel wanted to know what I had been doing and who I had talked to. It wasn’t an easy hand to play. On the one hand I needed to stress the bus driver’s evidence in order to bolster my case, which was that Carella had somehow stumbled on a clue to Moro’s whereabouts. On the other hand I was afraid that if I made the driver sound too important he might end up under the wheel of a bus instead of behind one. In the end I was told to go home and to stay there. The next day I received a telegram informing me that my request to be transferred to clerical duties at the Ministry of the Interior had been granted. I hadn’t submitted any such request, of course.’

  There was a long silence, broken only by the perpetual nudging of the wind, which seemed to be getting stronger all the time.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Ellen asked.

  She started the engine without waiting for an answer and began to drive along the track winding down the mountain.

  ‘The Red Brigade were holding Moro in Portuense, weren’t they?’ she commented suddenly.

  ‘In a ground-floor flat in Via Montalcini. About four blocks from where Dario Carella was run over.’

  It wasn’t until they reached the walls of Assisi that she spoke again.

  ‘It’s no good, I don’t understand. I’ll never understand. Why should they let him be killed? It doesn’t make any sense! After all, he was one of them.’

  ‘Perhaps he was no longer really one of them. Perhaps they didn’t know that until he was kidnapped. Perhaps once he’d gone they realized that they were better off without him. The ratking is self-regulating, it responds automatically and effectively to every situation.’

  She took her eyes off the road for an instant to glance at him.

  ‘What have rats got to do with it?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I was just trying to explain how Miletti came to be killed.’

  ‘Miletti?’

  ‘I mean Moro.’

  ‘How much have you had to drink?’

  ‘Enough to need a coffee.’

  They stopped in a village strung out in ribbon development along the flat straight road from Assisi to Perugia. The air was still and it was pleasantly warm. The cafe was a brash new building full of old men playing cards.

  ‘I’m going back this afternoon,’ Ellen said as they stood at the bar, watched by every eye in the place.

  Her visit had not been a success. The basic material of their relationship, the DNA itself, seemed to have gone wrong. As long as that condition lasted, the time they spent together, instead of adding to their store of shared experiences, depleted the existing one, leaving them more apart than when they were separated.

  ‘I’ll be back soon myself,’ he told her, ‘and then we’ll forget all this and have a really good time again.’

  When they reached Perugia she dropped him opposite the Questura. As he stooped to kiss her Zen noticed that her cheeks were wet.

  ‘Why are you crying?’

  She shook her head.

 
‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘Of everything.’

  ‘There’s no need to be afraid. It’ll be all right.’

  But he stood there watching until the little car had disappeared, as though Ellen were setting off on a long and dangerous journey from which she might never return.

  NINE

  One day towards the end of the war five ships had appeared in the lagoon off Venice. For a few weeks they lay moored together, like a new island between the city and the Lido, and then one day they were gone. Later Zen worked out that they must have been American warships of an obsolete type, waiting to be sold or scrapped, but at the time their slightly menacing presence seemed a pure challenge, and when his friend Tommaso dared him to try and get aboard one he naturally agreed.

  Close up they were as big as churches: great solid slabs of crudely painted grey with black numbers too large to read. Only the end vessel was manned by a token guard, and it was merely terrifying to slip into one of the narrow channels between them, where the water slapped back and forth, tie their skiff to the anchor cable and then shin up it to the deck. The rest of that day they spent in an alien world of pipes and gauges and controls and levers and incomprehensible signs, like the first explorers of a ruined city.

  With most of the staff going home at two o’clock, the end of the working day for employees of the state, the Questura had a faintly similar air of abandonment which Zen always found attractive. The rooms and corridors were empty except for a few elderly women cleaning up the male mess of scattered newspapers, stained coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays and the odd half-eaten sandwich. They had not yet reached Zen’s office, but someone else had been there, for there was a telegram on his desk.