End Games - 11

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Well, we know that she never married, so the child was evidently illegitimate. Ottavia’s lawyer could easily have forged a document purporting to be a sworn declaration from the imaginary father to the effect that he wished his son to be named Calopezzati. That and a few bribes or threats to the clerk in Spezzano would have done it.’

  A vague, dreamy look came over Zen’s face. He was silent for a full thirty seconds, then slapped his palm on the desk so hard it made Arnone start.

  ‘Azzo Plecita!’ he cried. ‘Calopezzati! It’s an anagram of her own name. She wanted to produce a surrogate heir while keeping the whole thing in the family and excluding outsiders.’

  ‘We can be a bit like that down here,’ Arnone admitted.

  ‘So what did you find out about the baronial bastard farmers?’

  ‘That took longer, because I had to search the local paper trail as well. The net result is that the only surviving members with any relation to the Calopezzati are a stepdaughter last heard of thirty years ago and a half-cousin who may or may not have emigrated to Australia.’

  ‘What about the brother, Roberto?’

  ‘It appears that he had strong connections with the Fascist movement back in the 1930s and later went on to fight in the colonial wars, Greece, Albania and back here after the Allied invasion. After that his name disappears from the records. It may well be that he was killed but never identified.’

  Zen dismissed his subordinate and then sat quite silent and still, staring at the wall, until Giovanni Sforza walked in and suggested that they repair to a bar.

  ‘Why are you working overtime?’ Zen asked him as they walked downstairs.

  ‘It’s all thanks to that excellent imitation of our allies in Iraq that your men put on earlier this evening. My phone’s been ringing for the past three hours, everyone from the mayor down to the media wanting to know what the hell we think we’re doing. It was evidently a very effective operation, Aurelio, but given that I’ve been covering for you until now, might I ask what it actually achieved?’

  They crossed the street and entered the only decent drinking hole in the area, a clumsy, clunky attempt to clone steely Milanese chic in these inhospitable climes.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Zen replied. ‘It was a matter of tossing a large rock into the pond and seeing what rose to the surface. I certainly wasn’t expecting any of the townspeople to talk, but as it happened someone did say something. A boy of nine, who on the day when the murder took place was playing with some friends close to the path that the victim must have taken.’

  Zen ordered a beer, Sforza an expensive malt whisky. The barman poured him a scrupulously measly measure.

  ‘Così poco?’ thundered Sforza, in a tone that made Zen realise that there was another side to his friend, and one which quite possibly accounted for the fact that he had got where he was. The barman also took the hint and filled the glass close to the brim. The two men sat down at a marble-topped table in the arid interior, which at least had the advantage of not sporting any video game consoles, television screens or recorded music.

  ‘So what did this boy of yours have to say?’ asked Sforza, blatantly lighting a cigarette.

  ‘At first he repeated the standard line about seeing and hearing nothing, but he hadn’t quite mastered the knack of improvising innocuous details to support that during follow-up questioning. Corti and Caricato were in charge and it sounds as if they did a good job. They weren’t rough with the kid, just listened to his story and elicited clarifying information. So Francesco and his friends had been playing up in the waste ground above the town? Yes. And they’d got there by the track which led up to Altomonte Vecchia? Yes. But they hadn’t seen anyone else on the track? No. After some more innocuous questions about how long they spent playing and so on, and determining that they had returned home by the same path, Corti quite casually mentioned that in that case Francesco must have noticed the bright red luxury car that was parked just at the point where the path joined the road. The boy frowned. No, it was grey, he said.’

  Zen laughed.

  ‘Well, of course, they took him apart after that!’

  Giovanni Sforza shook his head.

  ‘Sorry, Aurelio, I’m not as bright as Corti. We already knew that Newman was there. Who cares what colour his car was?’

  ‘Because it’s the first tiny crack in the wall of silence. Obviously everyone in the town knew that the car had been there and that it was subsequently removed by the person or people who murdered Newman. Moreover, it indicates the modus operandi, which was a very odd one. It looks as if Newman arrived alone in the Lancia and then voluntarily walked up the long, arduous track to the spot where his body was found, barefoot and wearing the ritual garb of a corpse laid out for burial. And all this in plain view of the people in the town, even though an alternative and much more secluded route exists, the one taken by that French tourist. Doesn’t that suggest anything to you?’

  Sforza shrugged impatiently.

  ‘Only that the people concerned were crazy. Kidnappers are in it for the money. It’s just business to them. They may occasionally kill their hostage if negotiations break down or if the family tries to lure them into an ambush, but in this case they hadn’t even tried to get in touch. Why would they destroy a potentially very profitable piece of merchandise without even putting it on the market?’

  Zen nodded noncommittally and gathered up his things.

  ‘Those are valid questions, Giovanni, but we shouldn’t let them mesmerise us. I don’t believe that whoever did this was crazy in the vulgar sense. The key to resolving these apparent oddities is to stop regarding them as odd, because the perpetrator almost certainly doesn’t. It all makes complete sense to him, so it might be helpful to try to see the whole ghastly business in the same way that he sees it, as a deeply deliberate and meaningful performance. The question then becomes, what was the significance of this performance and for what audience was it intended?’

  ‘Well, I’ll leave all that to you, Aurelio. I haven’t run a case in years. Out of training.’

  He sipped his drink reflectively.

  ‘To change the subject, how are you adjusting to life in Calabria?’

  Zen waved vaguely.

  ‘It depresses me. Not so much the gory details like this atrocity. It’s more the sense of a generalised and ineradicable sadness about the place, despite its natural beauty. In fact, that just makes it worse. To tell you the truth, I’m surprised you can stick it here. I can’t wait for whatever his name is to get healthy enough to take over the seat I’m keeping warm for him.’

  ‘The word is that you may not have to wait very much longer,’ Sforza commented. ‘As for why I can stick it here, the reason is quite simply that I am ambitious. Not an attractive quality, perhaps, but I can’t help it. I’m only too well aware of the thing you’re talking about, that pervasive tristezza, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it interfere with my career plans.’

  He knocked back the rest of his whisky.

  ‘Whereas you, Aurelio, if you will permit me to say so, haven’t a gram of ambition in your body. Which is why I will be made questore in two or three years and you will be stuck on your current rung of the ladder until you retire. Shall we go and grab a bite to eat?’

  ‘I’m not hungry. And I have work to do.’

  Sforza looked shocked.

  ‘At this hour? And with drink taken?’

  Zen smiled weakly.

  ‘Your diagnosis of my character may well be correct, Giovanni. But if I’m not as well endowed with ambition as you are, I at least have a goal, which is to track down the people who kidnapped that poor bastard, persuaded him to walk to the place of execution they had selected and then blew his head off. Until I’ve done that, I won’t really have much interest even in a good meal, never mind the slop they serve here. Buon appetito, però.’

  The old woman tossed and turned on the lumpy, sagging mattress, but sleep wouldn’t take her. Maria lay waiting as
though for a lover, but sleep didn’t come. She was too old. Sleep just didn’t want her any more.

  The house was finally still once again, and the rest of the family asleep. The town too, save for the bleeping of a video game from the house across the alley, where Francesco Nicastro was playing the game he had been given for his ninth birthday. There was a lot of violence and bloodshed, but Francesco was enchanted by it. Apart from that, the town was superficially silent, but Maria could sense the whispers and rumours rustling through the streets and walls like rats, just as they had back at the beginning. Someone had been told then, and variously diluted and tainted versions had circulated through the community. The common denominator was that it was all the work of a certain person, and that no one was to interfere or intervene in any way. These stipulations had been observed. Various people had seen the dead man arrive, park his car and walk up the track leading to the old town. Some time later there had been a dull bang, its location impossible to place. Then night fell, and next day the parked car had gone. No one ever climbed up to the ruins above except on the feast of San Martino, and certainly no one had gone there now. In short, normal life had resumed as if the incident had never occurred, until this evening, when the police suddenly descended in force and invested the town, their horrible helicopters hovering overhead like vultures and their armoured vehicles sealing off all the exits.

  Everyone agreed that nothing like it had been seen since the war, although Maria had longer and darker memories, of Fascist bullies descending on a town where the people had assembled for a rally to demand decent living wages and then shooting them down in cold blood. This time, however, she had not personally witnessed anything. For months now she had been bedridden with a flare-up of her arthritis, and had kept to her room. Some young policeman dressed like a soldier had had the nerve to open the door without knocking – she might easily have been in the altogether! – with his machine gun levelled. He’d had the grace to apologise and withdraw as soon as he understood the situation, but the rest of the family hadn’t been so lucky. They’d all been herded into the living room, then taken out one by one and questioned by two extremely unpleasant men in suits not unlike that which had been worn by il morto. When each person’s interrogation was over, they were taken to the kitchen and held there in isolation until the entire family had been individually questioned. Only then were they allowed to reassemble and exchange accounts of their experiences, at which point Maria had joined them.

  Despite the pressure and threats – one of the thugs had demanded to see written authorisation for the illegal top floor of the house, which had been added to accommodate Maria when she couldn’t manage for herself any more – no one had said anything. What was interesting was what the police had said. The car which had been parked at the edge of town, what make was it? What colour? What was the licence number? When had it arrived? When had it been removed and by whom? These were much tougher questions to evade, particularly when the cops gradually revealed that they already knew the answers. How could a luxury hire-car like that have been left abandoned on the outskirts of a paese di merda like this without being noticed, probably broken into and possibly stolen? All six members and two generations of the family had stonewalled them, insisting that they hadn’t gone that way and had seen and heard nothing. But in all their minds, the same certainty had formed. No one outside the town except ‘him’ knew about the arrival and subsequent disappearance of the car. Now the police knew, so somebody must have talked.

  Finally the helicopters had whirled away and the uniforms and suits had withdrawn, their show of power at an end. But this was not yet over, Maria sensed. Her seventy-eight years on earth had earned her many unwanted gifts, above all the dark secret she had carried intact for most of her life and would take with her to the tomb. So many years in this pitiless landscape, the only one she had ever known and which she loved beyond reason, had also given her a sixth sense for trouble. Despite the apparently baffled withdrawal of the forces of the state, she felt it very strongly now, which was perhaps why she was the only person in the household unable to sleep. To her finely tuned senses it was as obvious and irrefutable as an imminent storm is to birds. What she didn’t know, any more than them, was when it would strike and from which direction. She herself would be safe, but Maria no longer cared about herself. She wanted her family to be safe, but the auguries were clear. She had tried to deny them, just as she always tried to deny the first twinge that signalled the onset of one of her arthritic attacks, and just as uselessly. Now she was in no further doubt. With immense difficulty, Maria got up out of bed and knelt, very slowly and carefully, before the image of her namesake on the wall, hoping as always that the pain this caused her might increase the efficacy of her prayers, said as always in the Latin liturgy of her youth. Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis.

  Tom Newman stretched his legs luxuriously, crossed them at the ankle and settled back to watch the show. It was, in his opinion, pretty spectacular. Beyond the clustered tables, chairs and folded parasols of the café’s enclave, the young beauties of the town were parading up and down the pavement in pairs, trios or larger groups, weaving their way past and through similar sets of young men. With a few rare exceptions, neither sex openly acknowledged the existence of its counterpart, but each was intensely aware of the other, as they were of everyone else on the street that night, including the young American sitting over a beer and a cigarette outside a café on the pedestrianised stretch of Corso Mazzini.

  And for the most part, these beauties were beauties. Tom had already thrown everything he had ever heard about southern Italian women into the recycling bin. Two generations of proper nutrition and good medical care had worked wonders. Like their peers back home, they were showing a lot of midriff, but significantly more – from barely above the pubis to just below the undercurve of the breasts in some cases – and, at least in the mild ambient glow of the street lighting, significantly better. Best of all, Tom wasn’t just an onlooker but an object of considerable interest. The squads of girls continually passing and repassing regarded him with lengthy, intense and startlingly candid stares. To an almost unnerving extent, they seemed to have an instinctive sense and acceptance of what they were here for and how long they had to make it happen, and weren’t about to waste any opportunity of getting down to business. Tom didn’t get looked at in the same way back in the States, that was for sure, like he was merchandise that was being checked out. The public street was as sweaty and dizzy with sex as any club.

  All in all he was disgustingly happy, he thought, signalling the barman to bring another beer. He had spent most of the afternoon selecting and acquiring a mobile phone, and had then used it to call Martin Nguyen and change the arrangements for their meeting that evening. On reflection, he had realised that he didn’t want to be stuck over dinner with some boring CEO type, so he had claimed a subsequent engagement related to his father’s kidnapping and fixed up a ten o’clock rendezvous at this bar. Tom’s Italian was still in recovery, but his efforts to speak it seemed to be both understood and appreciated. In short, if it hadn’t been for the reason why he was there, this would have been the dream vacation. But although he could feel as happy as he liked, he couldn’t show it, any more than he could approach one of the passing women – that one there, for instance, with stunning legs, a deep cleavage and the gaze of a lioness – and ask for her phone number. In a society as traditional as this, with the family at the centre of everything and the father its undisputed head, for someone in his position to go out trawling for dates would be the equivalent of pissing on the high altar.

  Worse, this might go on for weeks, even months. Both Nicola Mantega and the local police chief had made that clear. Not that he was in any hurry to leave, he thought, scoping out a cutie who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, with tits out to here under a T-shirt that read, in English, WILL FUCK FOR LOVE. All Tom wanted to do was to stay indefinitely and have a ball, but that was out of the question. ‘How could you?�
�� people would ask in shocked tones, and he didn’t know what to answer, even to himself. For at least a decade, he and his father had led separate lives in separate cities on separate coasts. Visits were rare, limited to a couple of hours at some restaurant or show when his father came to New York on business, and phone calls were infrequent, brief and impersonal. When mamma was still alive, Tom had felt obliged to go back to San Francisco for the holidays, but after her death his father had moved into a condominium and pointedly converted the spare bedroom into an office.

  That’s how it had been for years, and although the matter was never discussed, Tom had every reason to suppose that his father found the arrangement as satisfactory as he did. He had certainly never seen any reason why it shouldn’t go on in exactly the same way for the foreseeable future. But the kidnapping had changed everything. It wasn’t enough to go on as he had always done. He was going to have to learn to play the part of a loving and devoted son traumatised by the ghastly fate that had overtaken his father, just when every nerve in his being was telling him that there was something vital for him in this city, a chance not to be missed.

  Martin Nguyen arrived dead on time and cut straight to the chase.

  ‘How long are you planning on staying?’ he asked Tom.

  ‘As long as it takes. Maybe longer. I kind of like it here.’

  ‘What about your job?’

  ‘I quit before coming out. I was going to anyway.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Sous-chef in an upscale Manhattan restaurant. There was a change of ownership and the new manager really sucked. Plus my girlfriend had just dumped me, so when this business came up I took advantage to tell my boss where he could shove it.’

  He bit his lip. ‘When this business came up’ was cold. He was going to have to be more careful.

  ‘Glad to hear that there’s a silver lining to this dark cloud,’ Nguyen murmured silkily. ‘But how are you managing for money? Europe’s a total rip these days.’