He speedily got down to business, announcing that he had flown to Rome, ‘interrupting my annual period of creative repose’ on the Costa Smeralda, in order to break the dramatic news that he had withdrawn from the project to transfer the Book of Revelations to the screen – ‘a work I hoped and believed would crown a long career dedicated solely to my art’ – since he had lost all faith in the commitment and integrity of the American production company which had been financing it.
What followed was a presentation worthy of someone who had once played, very competently, various minor roles in post-war neo-realist films made on a shoestring budget by directors including Visconti and Fellini. Aldobrandini lamented the demise of that generation’s values in favour of the cynical manipulations of market-driven accountants and middle managers, ‘people without intelligence, without courage, without vision, without ideals, concerned only with maximising profits’. With a sad smile, he recounted his discovery that the backer of ‘the intended masterwork of my late period, a funeral oration for the entire culture which formed and nourished me’, was exploiting the project for reasons which had nothing to do with making the film.
Egged on by the eager but flustered hostess, who had obviously been primed with a list of helpful questions, Aldobrandini proceeded to disclose certain very specific details which had led him to suppose that the masterwork in question would never be made. His suspicions had been aroused, he said, by the withdrawal of the great British actor whom he had selected to play St John of Patmos. The reason given at the time had been that his agent had come to doubt the credibility of the project’s backers. Until that moment, Aldobrandini proclaimed, he had ‘never even thought of such a thing. I don’t live in that world. For me it is all about the creative challenge e basta! When it comes to high finance and commercial skulduggery, I am an innocent abroad.’ Nevertheless, this news led him to instigate certain enquiries, the results of which had appalled him.
‘I am reliably informed that for several weeks now a helicopter has been operating in and around the city of Cosenza, supposedly carrying out a detailed survey of the terrain under the pretext of selecting suitable locations for the shooting of my film. My film!’
He appealed to his interviewer with a charming gesture.
‘Signorina, you may or may not like my work … Well, that’s very kind of you, but my point is that even my severest critics have never suggested that I am not un autore. Every single one of my films is handcrafted in every aspect and at every stage of its creation, from setting up to final editing. It is absurd to imagine that Luciano Aldobrandini would delegate the selection of locations to an outside contract! And needless to say he never did so. Nevertheless, these flights are taking place under the auspices of my American production company. Have you ever had occasion to hire a helicopter, signorina? I have, and believe me they don’t come cheap. Since that money is clearly not being spent on preparations for my film, what is it being spent on? And where does that leave me and my dreams of making a final and lasting contribution to the glorious history of Italian cinema?’
Aldobrandini held up his palms in symbolic surrender.
‘I don’t know the answer to those questions, and until I do I can have no faith in those who suggested this project and promised to finance it. I am therefore, and with the greatest reluctance, severing all personal and professional connection with this whole sorry affair. It is a sad day for me, a sad day for art and a sad day for Italy.’
Martin Nguyen turned off the TV as the hostess thanked her guest and transitioned effortlessly to a commercial break.
‘Holy fuck!’ he said.
‘Yeah, he was certainly in a hissy fit,’ Tom replied casually. ‘No one gives me ’nuff respec’ now I’m over the hill stuff.’
‘The guy’s a genius,’ said Martin in a tone of hushed reverence.
Tom gestured sceptically.
‘Well, the jury’s still pretty well out on that one. I like his early films, Terra Bruciata for example. That was one of my mom’s favourites. She said it was just how people lived where she grew up.’
‘I’m not talking about his fucking movies!’ Martin yelled. ‘He just killed us, live on national network TV! Next it’ll be all over the –’
The phone in the room rang. Martin jerked his thumb.
‘Take it.’
Tom did so. He listened for a long time, inserting the occasional ‘Ho capito’, ‘Senz’altro’ and ‘D’accordo, signore’. Then he turned to Martin.
‘That was the mayor’s office. They want you to present yourself at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’
‘Present myself? What the fuck does that mean?’
‘Sorry, I’m thinking in Italian. Go to city hall and meet with them.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s about the permits your company was granted to operate those helicopter flights. Apparently they expire in forty-eight hours. Basically, they want to know if there’s any truth in Aldobrandini’s allegations. I don’t want to sound alarmist, Mr Nguyen, but I think you should take this very seriously. Italy may seem all free and easy and spontaneous on the surface, but when the going gets rough you find out that it’s basically a police state in many respects. This could just be one of those occasions.’
Martin Nguyen stared at the blank television screen.
‘Holy fuck,’ he repeated.
The convoy of vehicles came to rest at a remote spot on the banks of the Busento river a few kilometres south of Cosenza. The only access was by a dead-end dirt track leading steeply down from a minor road to the city from the village of Dipignano, which saw very little traffic now that there was a much faster route over the line of hills to the east connecting with the autostrada.
As a result, the guard who had been posted at the turn-off to deter intruders was only called upon to act once, when a farmer in a quad vehicle came along, trying to short-cut across the valley by fording the river and taking the equivalent track leading up on the western side. The guard simply shook his head and told the man that the road was ‘chiusa per lavoro’. What sort of work? Construction of a weir in the river-bed to improve flow levels and protect aquatic life. An environmental project. The farmer cackled cannily.
‘Glad to hear someone’s getting Rome’s money!’
Say what you liked about Giorgio – and opinions on this subject were many and various, although rarely expressed – he knew how to organise and execute a project like this on time, under budget, with minimal risk and at the shortest possible notice. The last of these attributes was perhaps the most valuable, given the nature of his business. Opportunity tended to knock rarely and with no notice whatever, so to take advantage you needed to be able to think on your feet. He had spent the previous day scouting out a suitable site. Enquiries at the few neighbouring farms in the area Giorgio had eventually chosen revealed that no helicopters had been seen or heard in this valley as yet. This was crucial to the success of Mantega’s scheme for instant riches, as was haste, since those searching for the location of the tomb might appear at any moment.
The first stage of the operation involved installing sandbags upstream to dam the flow of water – still minimal despite the recent rains, thanks to the absorption capacity of the baked hillsides all around – followed by the marking out of a circular area ten metres in diameter and the removal of the superficial rocks, gravel and vegetation. This was done by hand by the unskilled labourers, great care being taken not to mark the rocks with metal tools or to damage the various reeds and weeds that had taken root for the summer in muddy patches formed by the eddies of the stagnant stream but would be swept away once the winter floods arrived. A geotextile access path was then laid down to minimise any further disturbance to the surface and the big yellow mechanical digger unloaded from its transporter and brought up to excavate the site down to a level of about two metres.
While all this was going on, another phase of the job was taking place on the lower slopes of Monte Serratore to the south, w
here the stonemasons were dismantling a long-abandoned and roofless house of the type that abounded in the area and transferring the blocks of weathered basalt to the bed of a truck. These materials arrived at the construction site shortly after the team’s lunch break, following which the masons started to install them in the excavated pit in the form of a circular wall five courses deep and nine hundred and forty-three centimetres in diameter. The masons protested that this was an irrational number, but Giorgio refused to be swayed. He had no idea what kind of linear measurement would have been used by the people who had supposedly built this structure, but it certainly wouldn’t have been the standardised French import which even today wasn’t in general use in certain parts of the region. Likewise, he had chosen the circular pattern on the basis of some very old earthwork mounds up in the mountains, which the schoolteacher had told the class were the graves of the Bruttii, the original inhabitants of Calabria. This information had caused general hilarity, since the deletion of the final letter gave a word meaning ‘the uglies’. From that moment on, Giorgio’s personal motto became ‘Sugno brutto e mi ’nde vantu’: ugly and proud of it.
The resulting structure, however, wasn’t ugly at all. Indeed, as it gradually took shape, the stone blocks trimmed, laid and locked together with no visible mortar, Giorgio began to think for the first time that this scheme of Mantega’s might actually work. Not that it would be any great loss to him if it didn’t. His contact in Vibo Valentia owed him a couple of favours and had offered a very reasonable price for the equipment and wages. And if it did by any chance succeed, then there was no telling what kind of profits might be made on the operation. It was simply a question of what the purchaser wanted, how badly he wanted it and how much he could afford to pay. If Mantega was to be believed – and in cases offering the possibility of personal enrichment, he was – the answer to the last question was ‘almost anything’.
Dusk had gathered by the time the walling was completed and the mechanical digger started to dump the rock and gravel excavated earlier into the resulting enclosure. Its claw would inevitably scar some of the stones in a potentially suspicious way, but the constraints of time and security had forced Giorgio to make various assumptions. One of these was that once it became apparent that the supposed tomb had already been opened, the treasure seekers would not bother to dig it out to a depth greater than the five courses of blocks that had been laid, and that they would use mechanical means to do so. Any marks on the rocks removed would therefore be attributed to their own equipment. And if by any chance they took a more painstaking approach, Giorgio had already worked out various ways to hurry them up. The work they imagined they were doing would of course be illegal, so it shouldn’t take much to scare them off.
The final phases of the operation were undertaken after dark, lit by the headlights of the various trucks. The remaining stones from the demolished barn were tossed on top of the piled infill, suggesting elements of the vaulted roof which had been removed, then the surface rocks and vegetation were carefully replaced and the entire site cleared and swept by hand. Last of all, the dam of sandbags was removed, allowing the accumulated water to flow over the workings, obliterating the traces of human intervention. The construction convoy then snaked its way around the narrow country roads to the autostrada and headed south to their depot. As for Giorgio, he drove the black Jeep back up into the Sila mountains, heading home to his sister’s apartment. At the former station of San Nicola, on a windswept plateau fifteen hundred metres above sea level, he pulled off the main road. Cowbells clanked intermittently in the far distance, but there was no other sound. This part of the railway had been abandoned, but the public payphone attached to the station building still worked and there was never anyone there.
Giorgio fed in some money and had started to dial when he heard a noise close behind him. He let the receiver drop and whirled around, his pistol in one hand and his torch in the other. A pair of hallucinogenic eyes stared back at him, a feral black cat out hunting for prey amidst the long grass that had grown up between the rusted rails. After a moment it disregarded him and moved away across the row of sleepers, balks of sun-spliced timber cut from the forests that had once clad this entire region, now aged and weathered like beams of the True Cross.
‘Pronto,’ Mantega’s voice squeaked somewhere in the distance. ‘Pronto, pronto?’
Giorgio picked up the receiver.
‘Signor Rossi?’
‘He’s gone out.’
Giorgio hung up and climbed back into the Jeep, well pleased with the way the day had gone. The coded message was to inform Nicola Mantega that the trap was ready. Once it was found and opened – self-evidently for the second time, the contents already looted – then the notary would initiate dealings with the disappointed tomb robbers. They would almost certainly demand to inspect a sample of the supposed treasure before proceeding any further. To guarantee the authenticity of the fakes that would subsequently be offered for purchase, some genuine sample of antique Roman gold work would have to be produced for verification. That was Giorgio’s next task, and he had already decided on a way to accomplish it. This involved a kidnapping prospect he had had his eye on for some time, and would be put into effect the very next day.
Having been detained in Rome by work until early evening, Aurelio Zen decided to return to Calabria in the same way that he had arrived, rather than trekking all the way out to Fiumicino to catch a plane and then have to arrange for transport from the airport at the other end. He slept badly this time – possibly as the result of over-indulging at a restaurant near the Viminale, where he had eaten the first decent meal he had had for weeks and the only one in which tomatoes did not feature in any shape or form – and was then deposited at the junction for Cosenza shortly after four in the morning, almost an hour before the first connecting train.
By the time he got back to the city it was too late to go to bed and too early to go to work, so he killed time in the first bar he found open, drinking double espressos laced with a streak of milk, pondering his next move and generally feeling like hell. But the temperature was pleasantly mild and the air clean, with not a trace of the toxic pall that smothered the capital, dense enough to see as well as smell and taste. By the time he arrived at the Questura, he had formulated a suitable response to the demands of his superiors at the Ministry concerning his handling of the murder case which had gripped Italy and also, as they did not fail to remind him, had international implications.
Once in his office, he phoned the magistrate who had been appointed to oversee the investigation of the original presumed kidnapping and who was now so beside himself with delight at finding himself in charge of a gruesome, high-profile homicide that he had given Zen his mobile phone number. After the usual courtesies, Zen explained that he wished to file a request for an arrest warrant on one of the suspects, if the signor giudice could find a moment to receive him. The judge judiciously observed that there was no time like the present – or at least in an hour, when he would be at the Palace of Justice. Zen summoned Arnone.
‘We’re going to take Mantega,’ he told his subordinate. ‘It’s a little sooner than I would ideally have liked, but I was put under a lot of pressure at headquarters yesterday. They badly want something they can feed to the media to show that we’re on the job. It will also free up all the people who have been shadowing him. Given the way the situation appears to be evolving, I may well need them for other duties.’
‘Very good.’
‘Now listen, this is important. I want the arrest to be made as publicly as possible, for instance on the street or while he’s at lunch, and I want you to handle it. If you can arrange for reporters and photographers from the local television and press to arrive fortuitously at about the same time, so much the better.’
‘Benissimo, capo.’
‘Oh, by the way, did anything come of that business about Giorgio ordering in a construction team from Vibo Valentia?’
‘Following your i
nstructions, an officer was dispatched to the assembly point on the autostrada to observe events and take photos, but I haven’t debriefed her yet. I’ll make enquiries and get back to you.’
‘Let’s take care of Mantega first. I’m off to get the warrant. After that it’s up to you, but bear in mind what I said about it being a high-profile arrest. I want word of this to get around like a forest fire with a gale behind it. Understand?’
On his way out of the building, Zen caught sight of an old woman seated on the long, shiny and very hard bench placed in the entrance hall of the Questura for the use of supplicants seeking an official document or permit for one of the numerous activities for which such papers are mandatory. Zen was about to pass by, but then, recalling what Arnone had told him on the phone the day before, he stopped and went over to her.
‘Are you being looked after, signora?’
The woman eyed him with an air of determination amounting to defiance. She looked as shrivelled as a raisin and as hard as a nut, and clearly wasn’t going to be placated or put off her stride by anyone.
‘I want to speak to the chief of police,’ she said.
‘I am he.’
The woman looked at him again, as if for the first time.
‘Yes, I suppose you are,’ she conceded grudgingly.
‘And who are you, signora?’
‘Sono una creatura. A person. My name is Maria Stefania Arrighi.’
‘Ah, yes. You came here yesterday, didn’t you?’
She nodded.
‘They told me you were away.’
‘I was. But why do you want to speak to me? I’m extremely busy this morning. If it’s not an urgent matter …’
The woman shrugged.
‘It may be urgent. It’s certainly important. To me, at least.’
Zen weighed this up.
End Games - 11 Page 16