End Games - 11

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Nor did he return to his hotel that night. In short, he was almost certainly kidnapped on his way to that meeting at your villa, Signor Mantega. An arrangement which only he and you knew about.’

  ‘He must have been followed. If the kidnappers are professionals, they would have had him under surveillance for days.’

  ‘Perhaps, but how did they know that he was a suitable prospect? How did they know who he was and what he might be worth? For that matter, how did they know he was here at all?’

  On the wall of Zen’s office hung an elegantly designed notice proclaiming the vision statement of the new Italian police, thick with catchphrases such as la nostra missione, i nostri valori, competenza professionale, integrità, creatività e innovazione. As so often in the past, Zen decided to go for the last two.

  ‘Acting on my orders, one of my officers interviewed your wife this morning while you were at work,’ he said. ‘She denied all knowledge of any guest having been invited for dinner on the evening in question.’

  Mantega was staring at Zen with an expression of baffled indignation.

  ‘I didn’t tell her,’ he said at last.

  Zen nodded, as though this little misunderstanding had now been cleared up.

  ‘Of course! You were planning to cook yourself. Some local delicacy, no doubt, to remind your guest of his origins. Stewed tripe in tomato sauce, perhaps.’

  ‘What is the meaning of these insinuations?’ Mantega demanded angrily. ‘Signor Newman is an American. I wouldn’t have dreamt of offering him one of our traditional Calabrian dishes. We are only too well aware that they are often unappreciated by foreigners.’

  He glared pointedly at Zen.

  ‘I didn’t mention the occasion to my wife because I did not intend her to be present. As I keep trying to get you to understand, this was not a social event. The business that Signor Newman and I had to discuss was extremely confidential. I planned to receive him outside on the terrazza. It has a wonderful view of the city below, and there we could talk freely. As for food, there was some leftover parmigiana di melanzane in the fridge that I could warm up.’

  Mantega was well into his stride by now.

  ‘I did in fact tell my wife when I returned from work that night, but she may well not have been listening to me. Such is often the case. I’ll remind her of what happened as soon as I get home. If it comes to her making a sworn testimony in the future, I’m sure that her story will tally with mine.’

  ‘I’m sure it will,’ said Zen drily. ‘And she will probably deny ever having spoken to my subordinate. All right, you may go.’

  Mantega frowned and stood up, shrugging awkwardly.

  ‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ he said in a defensive tone.

  ‘You’ve been a model witness,’ Zen returned. ‘In fact I shall hold you up as an example to the people I have still to question, some of whom may be less helpful. “Why can’t you be as co-operative as Signor Mantega?” I shall say. “There’s a man who’s not afraid to tell me everything he knows.”’

  Mantega seemed about to say something for a moment, but then Natale Arnone came in and escorted him out. Zen went over to the window and stood looking down until the notary emerged on to the street. When Mantega was about ten metres off, one of the officers that Zen had detached from the elite Digos anti-terrorist squad got out of a parked car and started to follow. His companion started the car and drove ahead to take the point position.

  Zen’s pro tem transfer to his current post as chief of police for the province of Cosenza had come about purely as a matter of chance, and had not promised – still less delivered, until a few days ago – the slightest challenge to his professional skills. A new bureaucratic entity had appeared on the map of Italy: the provincia di Crotone, carved out of the neighbouring provinces of Cosenza and Catanzaro. It naturally demanded a fully staffed bureaucratic apparatus to run it, and this had to be constructed from scratch. One of the vacant positions was that of police chief, and Pasquale Rossi, the incumbent in Cosenza, had eventually been selected as someone professionally familiar with much of the territory concerned and thus in a position to bring his extensive experience to bear. His post had in turn gone to the deputy chief at Catanzaro, one Gaetano Monaco, but unfortunately the latter was unable to take up his duties since he had shot himself in the foot while cleaning his service pistol.

  Once made, such appointments are very difficult to unmake, since the promotional ripple effect spreads far and wide and the suitability of each chosen candidate has to be vetted by all interested parties before approval. The Ministry in Rome had therefore opted for the expedient of a temporary replacement for the short period until the original appointee recovered from his self-inflicted injury, and their choice had fallen on Zen. He had been received politely enough by the questore and the other senior officers, but it had discreetly been made clear to him that he was a mere figurehead occupying the post in name only and need not concern himself too much with the day-to-day workings of the department. Which is exactly what he had been happy to do until the recent disappearance of an American lawyer which bore all the hallmarks of a professional kidnapping for ransom.

  There was a knock at the door and Natale Arnone entered. He was in his late twenties, stockily built and with a shaven head, no neck and a generally thuggish manner accentuated by his unshaven jowls and bandit beard. After two months in Calabria, Zen was beginning to feel facially nude.

  ‘This just arrived, sir,’ Arnone said, laying a sheet of paper on the desk. It was a fax from the American consulate in Naples, which Zen had contacted immediately after lunch, and read as follows:

  PETER NEWMAN Passport # 733945610 Date of birth: 11/28/44 Place of birth: Spezzano della Sila, Italy Remarks: Birth certified under name PIETRO OTTAVIO CALOPEZZATI. Name legally changed 5/30/69 at San Francisco. US citizenship acquired 4/19/68, sponsor Roberto Marcantonio Calopezzati, SBU//FOUO file reference 48294/AVP/0006

  Attached were several official photographs of Newman and a digitalised scan of his fingerprints, taken when he received US citizenship. Zen handed Arnone the documents without comment. The young officer read them through and whistled quietly.

  ‘Rather changes things, doesn’t it?’ Zen remarked.

  The young officer erupted in a loutish, splurging laugh, instantly repressed.

  ‘In more ways than one.’

  Arnone tapped the sheet of paper.

  ‘Until the land reform acts of the 1950s, the Calopezzati were the richest family in this province and far beyond. They owned half of Calabria.’

  The two men eyed one another in silence.

  ‘Drop whatever you’re doing and get me a certified copy of that birth certificate,’ said Zen.

  When Arnone had gone, he rang the consulate in Naples and asked them to explain the significance of the letters SBU/FOUO preceding the file records of Peter Newman’s naturalisation process.

  ‘Sensitive but unclassified, for official use only,’ came the reply.

  ‘So I don’t suppose there’s any point in my asking for further details.’

  ‘FOUO data will also be NOFORN. No foreign nationals. Distribution restricted to US citizens. Sorry we can’t help you.’

  ‘You already have,’ Zen replied.

  Jake and Martin met at SooChic, a Japanese-Peruvian fusion place with accents of the Deep South. The furnishings were 1950s Scandinavian, easy on the eye but hard on the ass. A waitperson showed up and dispensed some intense culinary talk therapy.

  ‘So?’ said Jake.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Martin.

  Martin Nguyen’s father had been one of the principal torturers for the Diem regime, and his son had inherited the plated face and sinkhole eyes that terrified the living shit out of you even before they cranked up the generator.

  ‘Basically, we’re solid,’ said Martin. ‘Newman is an independent contractor, totally ring-fenced off from Rapture Works. If he’s been kidnapped, that’s the family’s problem. The son is on
his way to Calabria now. Pete knew what he was getting himself into. He’s from there, for Christ’s sake.’

  Food came. Jake speared a chunk of sushi and dipped it in the fiery corn porridge purée.

  ‘Pete Newman?’

  Martin nodded.

  ‘Usual Ellis Island illiteracy, I guess. Pop was probably named Novemano or some damn thing.’

  He chomped moodily on his chitterling tamale.

  ‘I hate Italians.’

  ‘Foreigners suck,’ Jake remarked.

  Martin looked at him sharply. Although he’d lived in the States most of his life, he still felt pretty foreign a lot of the time. Since getting hired by Jake as project manager for the Rapture Works venture, he’d learned how to decode and even speak the idiolect of the city’s software community, where geeks married nerds and the incidence of autism was the highest in the country. Jake wasn’t exactly autistic – mild Asperger’s, maybe – although it had occurred to Martin that he might well fail the CAPTCHA test designed to distinguish between human and artificial intelligence, maybe in both categories. Too dumb to be human, too fucked up to be a machine. But the hard fact was that someone who walked and talked and looked and spoke like Jake was worth more money, right now, up front in cash, than anyone else in the restaurant would earn in his entire lifetime. Including Martin.

  ‘I mean, to do business with,’ he said. ‘It’s all “Sure, yeah, no problem, you got it” and then no delivery. And they don’t even apologise, just act like you’re a sucker for ever believing they meant what they said in the first place. You need me to go there, Jake. Aeroscan have concluded their installation and set-up and will be ready to roll at eleven this evening our time. The civil authorities have granted them unlimited clearance below a hundred metres.’

  Jake gave him one of those looks.

  ‘Three hundred feet,’ said Martin. ‘Newman said the mayor practically creamed in her pants. Apparently Cosenza is one no-hope town and this is the biggest boost they’ve ever had. I mean, it would be if it was for real.’

  He smiled hideously. Jake torqued his lips just a fraction, as if remembering a joke that had seemed funny at the time.

  ‘So they bought the movie angle?’

  Martin reassembled the shards of his face into an orderly pattern.

  ‘Totally. There’s another city down that way – Matera? An even smaller dump even further off the beaten track. Now it’s jammed with tourist buses, hotels packed to the brim, restaurants gouging to the max, souvenir shops selling out by noon. Know why? Because Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ there.’

  ‘Fuck,’ murmured Jake contemplatively.

  ‘So Pete Newman told the guys in Cosenza, if you think the Crucifixion was big, wait till you see the Apocalypse.’

  More food arrived and they ordered another round of Diet Coke with sliced lime. Then the aisle was full of noises. The girl sitting at a table opposite reached for her mobile and started talking her boyfriend through the best route to the restaurant. Martin eyed her appreciatively. His line was that if they were legal they were over the hill. This one looked border-line.

  ‘Babe,’ he commented.

  Jake dismissed her with a glance.

  ‘Ringtone sucks. So how come you need to go out there?’

  ‘Because if Aeroscan finds the treasure, we need to move fast. The movie cover is good for the search, but once we start digging it’s a whole different ball game. Anything we turn up is legally the property of the Italian state. Cultural heritage bullshit. Just breaking ground will be a felony, so we’re going to need a work crew who can be trusted not to talk later. I’ve got a plan for that, but now Pete’s out of the picture I need to be there to head up the team in person. I also need clearance from you on the hired help angle.’

  ‘What’s the deal?’

  ‘Contact of mine works for one of the big US contractors in Iraq. He’s found me some able-bodied guys who’ve never left the country in their lives and arranged, for a consideration, to have them given passports and sent to Jordan. From Amman they’ll fly into Italy on tourist visas and assemble at the site to carry out the excavation and transfer of the treasure to a storage facility rented by the film company. No Rapture Works footprint.’

  Jake toyed with his peeled guinea pig in teriyaki sauce on a bed of collard greens.

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘We’ll need to discuss details once I have a chance to perform an assessment at the mission location, but I can tell you right now that export/import is going to be a bitch. I mean, we’re talking like drugs here.’

  ‘I mean the Iraqi guys.’

  ‘They go home.’

  ‘And tell everyone about their excellent Italian adventure?’

  A decisive headshake.

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘You don’t need to know, Jake. Just trust me.’

  ‘Quit bullshitting.’

  Martin sighed.

  ‘Okay. When the six of them get back, my contact invites them to dinner at some place in downtown Baghdad. He hands over some counterfeit cash with a few real bills on top, then fakes a phone call and says he has to run, business shit going down. The Iraqis couldn’t care less. They’ve been paid and here’s all this great Arab food they’ve been missing so much. Few minutes later a car draws up outside, the driver sprints away and … Well, you can figure out the rest yourself.’

  He brushed away the service dude, who was trying to interest them in seaweed ice-cream made from llama’s milk.

  ‘You mean like permadeath?’ said Jake. ‘Man, that’s heavy. Couldn’t we just –’

  Martin shook his head as decisively as before.

  ‘No, Jake. If we go ahead on this one, we’re going to need total deniability and cut-outs at every stage. That’s the way it’s got to be.’

  ‘What about this contact of yours in Baghdad?’

  ‘He doesn’t know who I’m working for, never mind what we’re doing, and he doesn’t want to know.’

  ‘But he knows we’re setting it up to have those guys killed, right?’

  ‘Yeah, plus whoever else is in the restaurant and on the street outside. Sure he knows. But he says the thing about working in Iraq is after a few months you quit worrying about that stuff.’

  Jake put on a sick smile.

  ‘I guess we’re not in Kansas any more.’

  ‘You can be back in Kansas any time you want,’ Martin replied. ‘I can pull the plug on all this right now and no one will ever be any the wiser. We’ll tell the director the project’s tanked, wind up Rapture Works and pay off Aeroscan. All you have to do is say the word. But if we hit pay dirt, which just could happen as early as tonight, then we’ll be looking down the barrel at international arrest warrants and jail sentences in multiples of ten. So I need to do it my way.’

  He sat back with a crinkly grin, regarding the other man with dispassionate intensity. The server approached.

  ‘I also have a tomato and pimento sorbet! That comes with sweet potato and pumpkin fritters!’

  ‘Well?’ demanded Martin.

  Jake finally met his tormentor’s eyes and emitted a sound like a fledgling crow.

  ‘Eeeh! Back when they hid the treasure, the guys who did the work got killed after. So it kind of makes sense.’

  ‘You’re authorising me to go ahead?’

  Jake wriggled this way and that, but finally gave a lopsided shrug.

  ‘How about coffee?’ their server implored. ‘I have an organic bean from a collective of farms in the San Ignacio valley that shows excellent brightness and acidity plus a funky edge that doesn’t dominate the cup.’

  ‘I’m good,’ said Jake.

  The flight from Milan was over an hour late due to a strike by baggage handlers earlier in the day and Tom had been seated in the very last row, next to the galley and the toilets, so by the time he finally emerged, the small airport of Lamezia Terme was almost deserted, public transpo
rt services had long since ceased and the last cab had driven away. An electronic display on the wall showed that the external temperature was a very pleasant twenty-three degrees, and after his overnight journey Tom was perfectly prepared to stretch out on a bench or underneath some shrubbery and go straight to sleep, but in the event this wasn’t necessary. As he walked towards the baggage carousels, he was accosted by a paunchy, well-dressed, middle-aged man whose expression alternated rapidly between pleasure, sorrow, respect and encouragement.

  ‘Signor Newman? I am Nicola Mantega. You called me from the United States a few days ago, if you remember. You said that your father had spoken of me.’

  ‘Oh yes, right.’

  ‘And you also mentioned that you would be arriving on the last flight from Milan tonight. Very pleased to meet you. I only wish that it could have been in happier circumstances.’

  Having collected Tom’s luggage, they proceeded outside. Neither noticed the young man who had been scanning the titles of the books in the window of the locked newsagent’s stall and then followed them out, to be greeted effusively with a smacking kiss and a full embrace by the very attractive brunette standing beside a battered Fiat Panda. Tom’s escort led him to an Alfa Romeo saloon parked in a lane designated for emergency vehicles only. He gestured the American inside, then returned to the driver’s seat and started the engine.

  ‘Has there been any news?’ Tom Newman asked as the car sped away into the darkness beyond the airport perimeter lights. Mantega shook his head glumly.

  ‘I’m sorry, nothing. But that is not surprising in a case like this. It is normal, even reassuring.’

  The Alfa slowed slightly to take the sharp curve of the slip road and then they were on the autostrada, heading north to Cosenza.

  ‘Reassuring?’ Tom queried. ‘I don’t see why. Surely the kidnappers should have got in contact by now and made their ransom demand. The longer they delay, the more chance there is of the whole thing going wrong.’

  Mantega smiled in a superior way.

  ‘For them, the only things that can go wrong are the initial seizure and the ensuing payoff. The first apparently went without a hitch from their point of view. Now they are worried only about the second. They are going to take their time, extract every bit of information they can from their hostage …’