Back to Bologna

by Michael Dibdin

  He walked out and up the street, turned several corners at random, then crossed Via Rizzoli, stepped up under the massive nineteenth-century arcade, ignoring the nasal whine of a crouched beggar, and strode in through a door beneath a neon sign depicting two golden arches.

  ‘Give me a Big Tasty, a McRoyal Deluxe, a Crispy McBacon and five large fries,’ he told the girl at the counter.

  ‘Is that for here or to go?’

  ‘To go, to go!’

  16

  ‘So apparently the whole thing’s fixed! It’s supposed to be a free-for-all followed by an impartial blind tasting, but the jury’s been rigged. They’ll know which bowl Lo Chef’s stuff is in and then vote for it whatever it tastes like. So I’m afraid your Professor Ugo is bound to lose.’

  Listening to Flavia chatter away, Rodolfo wished that he could enjoy his sense of power more. Killers were supposed to, by all accounts. That was what made it all worthwhile.

  ‘He’s going to lose all right.’

  His doomed girlfriend had already devoured her entire pizza, including the crusts, and was now digging into a hefty slab of one of the semifreddo pies from the glass-fronted cooler near the door.

  ‘Besides, Lo Chef has been told the list of ingredients in advance,’ she went on, blithely unaware of her imminent fate. ‘He’s already chosen a recipe and practised it over and over again, just like my sister used to do with her piano test pieces at the conservatory. Mind you, there was always a sight unseen as well.’

  Rodolfo looked up from the slice of pizza he had been morosely nibbling at for longer than it had taken to prepare.

  ‘I didn’t know your sister was a pianist,’ he remarked in a stilted, stagey drawl. ‘Does she have a thing?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You know, a career. Sort of like a job, only more glam.’

  Flavia finally displayed the first signs of sensing that something was wrong, although she couldn’t of course have imagined in her wildest dreams that she was about to be shot through the heart.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied guardedly. ‘We’ve rather lost touch.’

  ‘One always worries so much about these creative people. A gal’s reach exceeding her grasp–or is it the other way around? Soaring dreams brought crashing down to earth, the inevitable brutal awakening to the harsh realities of life, and all that crap.’

  Flavia made a moue he would have kissed, had it not been time to pull the trigger and have done.

  ‘For my people, this is normal,’ she said.

  The waiter appeared with an unmarked litre bottle and two glasses, all frosty from the freezer. This was the home-made liqueur that was a speciality of La Carrozza, pure alcohol flavoured with a mixture of wild berries, lemon and spices, which was left on the table without appearing on the bill, a tradition of the house for regular customers. The upper two-thirds of the contents were a very light pinkish-purple, while the swamp of macerated berries occupied the lower section.

  ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ Flavia asked. ‘You never talk about your family.’

  Rodolfo poured them both a drink, knocking his back to brace his nerves.

  ‘Just a father. He phoned me today and we talked a lot, for the first time in ages. Maybe the first time ever.’

  Flavia smiled warmly.

  ‘That’s nice. What did you talk about?’

  ‘Failure. Professor Ugo expelled me from his course this morning. But I’ve decided that he unwittingly did me a favour. Failure’s the key to everything. That’s what these post-modern wankers don’t realise, or won’t accept. For them it’s all relative. There’s no such thing as failure, only alternative interpretations. It’s all a state of mind. I believed that bullshit for a while myself, but now my eyes have been opened. I’ve definitely failed. Shame about my academic career, shame about you, but that’s the way it is. I just have a couple of things to take care of–this was one, by the way–and then I’m off home.’

  Flavia sipped her drink.

  ‘Ah, home,’ she said, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Yes, but my home is a real place.’

  Flavia drained the liqueur, immediately poured herself another and then lit a cigarette. She sat smoking in silence, looking all about the room at the other clients, the hefty padrone who made the pizzas, the two waiters who looked like that American silent film duo.

  ‘I had to go to the university library today to return some overdue books,’ Rodolfo said mechanically. ‘I took the opportunity of consulting the index in the latest edition of the Times atlas. No Ruritania.’

  He paused, still not meeting her eyes, but there was no response.

  ‘So then I went to a computer terminal and did an online search. Apparently it’s the name of a fictional country invented by some minor English writer as the locale for a trashy swashbuckling romance. The one you were reading when we first met, in fact. What you called your “Italian textbook”. But the fact of the matter is that Ruritania doesn’t exist.’

  Flavia lowered her face to the filthy tablecloth as tears welled up in her eyes.

  ‘It does exist! It does, it does, it does!’

  Rodolfo smiled in a superior way and shrugged.

  ‘If you say so. Of course, some people might say you were mad, but I prefer to assume that you’ve just been lying to me all along. And I don’t care to be lied to.’

  He placed some banknotes on the table.

  ‘Well, I must be going. I’ve got a biggish day tomorrow. That’ll cover the meal and a coffee, should you want one. Addio.’

  17

  The next morning, Aurelio Zen decided to raid the Amadori family residence. At least, this was how he jokingly put it to himself, over a coffee and the crispy, deep-fried batter wafers named sfrappole, in a bar on Via D’Azeglio almost opposite his hotel.

  The breakfast buffet at the latter was an uninspiring concession to northern European businessmen visiting the city’s famous trade fairs, who expected to start the day with a selection of cheeses, cold meats and hard-boiled eggs, washed down with watery coffee or tea. By contrast, Il Gran Bar was almost aggressively monocultural. The espresso was first-rate, and came with a complimentary glass of sparkling mineral water. The pastries were handmade and fresh, the waiters impeccably attentive, the clientele well-dressed and quietly spoken, but what was most striking were the decorative plaques and flags mounted on the walls, each bearing the emblem of a divisional unit of the anti-terrorist DIGOS squad and other elite units of the Polizia di Stato. In the context of historically ‘red’ Bologna, the message was clear: this was an unashamedly right-wing establishment in the rich ‘black’ area south of Piazza Nettuno, located comfortingly close to the central police station and the Prefettura, the bastions of state rather than local power.

  Zen was of course an agent of that power, and had amused himself with the idea of using a little of it for the first time in months. After his visit to the football stadium with Bruno Nanni, he had spent a dreary and dispiriting evening alone–the first of many, no doubt–followed by a restless night during which he had skimmed through the written report on the Curti case with which Salvatore Brunetti had fairly blatantly tried to fob him off. This had been made clear by the Bologna officer’s remarks when they parted. ‘I really must try and find time to look into the possibility of allocating you a suitable office, Dottor Zen. For the moment there just doesn’t seem to be anything available. I do apologise, but your transfer here was very sudden. All leave has of course been cancelled and the entire staff is working three shifts around the clock, so the situation’s a bit difficult. I hope you understand.’

  Zen understood all right, and in normal circumstances would have been quite happy to stay well out of harm’s way and keep his head down until the initial flurry of fuss about Curti had calmed down. But the circumstances were no longer normal, as he had been reminded, vividly and disturbingly, the night before. While going through his personal belongings in search of the generous selecti
on of pills that he was supposed to take a varying number of times every twenty-four hours, he had discovered an envelope that the consultant had handed him on his visit to Rome, saying that the contents related to Zen’s treatment and that he might find them ‘of interest’.

  Feeling that they might prove all too interesting in his current state of mind, or rather mindlessness, Zen had promptly forgotten the envelope until it turned up in a side pocket of the briefcase where he had packed his supply of drugs. In hopes of dispelling the vague fears that continued to haunt him, he had opened it and started to read the enclosed document, a technical report concerning his operation. This had been a mistake. Within moments, he felt himself reduced once again to the status of a helpless object, a piece of worn-out and much abused machinery consigned to the mechanics for short-term running repairs.

  ‘…soft tissues were dissected away and the fascia was demonstrated on all sides of the necrotic tissue…a fine 11 blade was then used to incise the interface…and a site was selected distal to the area of involvement, the mesentery cleared adjacent to…which specimen was then presented to pathology…it was felt to be unwise to use mesh material for repair of the defect and…blood loss during the procedure was…the sponge count, needle count and instrument counts were correct and the patient tolerated the procedure quite well…’

  The remainder of the night had passed miserably, and it was largely to try and regain a sense of initiative and competence that he formed the plan of visiting the Amadori family home. True, he had assured Salvatore Brunetti that he would be taking no active part in the Curti case, merely serving as an intermediary with the Ministry in Rome, but the detectives at the Questura were apparently not investigating the Vincenzo Amadori hypothesis–either because they didn’t know about it, or had dismissed it as stadium tittle-tattle–so Zen felt justified in undertaking a modest preliminary investigation himself. Besides, one way or the other he had to escape from his pleasant but very small hotel room, its high ceiling freakishly out of proportion with the other dimensions owing to the intrapolated bathroom. This errand at least gave him a destination and the shadow of a pretext.

  After breakfast, he walked down the street and out into the vacant, paved expanses of the city’s main square, flanked by the uninspiring, red-brick mass of the cathedral towering above its unfinished marble facing, the modest but well-proportioned Palazzo del Podestà, the ornate Palazzo De’Banchi where luxury shops lurked beneath an imposing arcade, and the austere medieval façade of the Palazzo Communale, whose original delicate balance had been defaced by a monumental baroque excrescence erected in honour of one of the many popes who had sucked the city treasury dry over the centuries. There was nothing particularly wrong with any of this, but in his snobbish Venetian way Zen regarded it as not quite good enough. The enormous space seemed to make claims which the standard of the individual buildings couldn’t justify.

  The temperature was still below freezing, and he pushed briskly on into a warren of narrow streets that had obviously been the city’s central food market for centuries. These were crowded with traders and their customers, mostly short, stout, elderly women enveloped in utilitarian fur coats from which their head and legs protruded as stubby appendages, giving them the appearance of so many furry pods. Zen’s smugness instantly evaporated before the array of small shops to either side, displaying a dizzying selection of fruit, vegetables, cheeses and fresh meats infinitely more enticing than anything that either his native city or indeed Lucca had to offer. After weeks on a heavily restricted diet, the delights on offer had an almost sexually direct appeal, and made Zen impatient for lunch.

  Fortunately the barrow-boy delivering cartons of Sicilian blood oranges to the kerb was strong, nimble, and had his wits about him, so when the signore who had been striding purposefully along the street suddenly stopped dead right in his path at the exact point where he was planning to set the heavy cart down, he was able to slew it to one side just far enough to prevent a collision that might otherwise have resulted in an interesting opportunity to compare the juice of the oranges with the liquid after which they were named.

  Zen retreated rapidly with ritualistic apologies, but his mind was elsewhere. ‘coming bo tomorrow lunch?’ He switched on his phone. There was no reply from their home number, but at the tenth tone Gemma answered her mobile.

  ‘Can’t talk now, we’re just going into the hall.’

  Her voice was a faint graffito scratched across a concrete wall of noise.

  ‘I tried to call!’ Zen hurled back. ‘I tried several times, but there was no answer!’

  He waited to be challenged about yet another egregious lie, but there was only the background babel. In reality, after that first attempt in the café outside the football stadium, he had never tried to contact Gemma about the message she had left him. He hadn’t even remembered to neglect to do so.

  ‘It’s about to begin, I’ll call you later,’ he thought he might have heard someone say before hanging up.

  The Amadori house, whose address Zen had earlier extracted from the Questura’s records, was located in a quiet street west of the two medieval towers, one leaning at an alarming angle, that were among the city’s most famous landmarks. The pavements here were raised about half a metre above the roadway, and protected from the elements by a set of infinitely varied yet harmonious portici. The house itself was of modest outward appearance, blending with grace and tact into the gently curving line of the whole block while nevertheless contributing its individual variation on the underlying architectural theme. It must have been worth well over a million euros.

  Bruno Nanni had described the elder Amadori as a lawyer, and it was a very imprudent policeman who called uninvited on such a man without an excellent cover story, and preferably a judicial warrant. Zen had therefore planned his ‘raid’ carefully. There would of course be no mention of Lorenzo Curti, except as the subject of the memorial event at the football stadium the previous evening, following which Zen had been physically assaulted and verbally abused by a young man identified to him as Vincenzo Amadori. At this stage he had no wish to press charges or otherwise make an issue of the incident, but he considered it best that Vincenzo’s parents should be informed so that they might take any action they considered appropriate. At the very least, it would be interesting to see what sort of reaction, or lack of it, he got to these allegations.

  The front door was opened by a woman of about sixty, wary but unafraid, wearing a starched white blouse over a brassière resembling a major engineering project, a gingham pinafore and pink rubber gloves. Zen presented his police identification card and asked to see Dottor Amadori.

  ‘L’avvocato is not here,’ the woman replied.

  ‘Do you happen to know when he’ll be back?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure. He’s away on business. You’d need to ask at the office.’

  ‘And la signora?’

  ‘Also not at home.’

  Zen smiled, pleasantly enough, but with just a hint of professional steeliness.

  ‘To anyone? Or just to the police?’

  The housemaid looked slightly affronted.

  ‘What’s this about?’ she asked.

  ‘A personal matter. I need to speak to a member of the family. What about the son, Vincenzo?’

  Ashake of the head.

  ‘He doesn’t live here any more.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  The woman shrugged in a way suggesting that it was a mockery even to ask.

  ‘Signora Amadori will be back in an hour or so.’

  Zen nodded.

  ‘Might I wait for her, do you think? It’s a fairly routine matter, but we need to get it sorted out as soon as possible, and I’m a busy man. Since I’m already here…’

  He gestured significantly. The maid hesitated a second, then opened the door fully and beckoned him across the threshold.

  From the street, the house–like its guardian angel–had looked pleasingly plain an
d ordinary, with the subdued dignity of elderly people who no longer have anything they either can or need to prove. The interior, on the other hand, had been remodelled at some point in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, so that in entering one moved instantly but imperceptibly into a space not only mindful of its history and place in the greater scheme of things, but marginally more elegant and formal. The present owners had respected its simple, harmonious values, adding only a couple of inoffensive abstract oils in a now dated manner to the otherwise studiously neutral walls.

  ‘This way, signore,’ said the housemaid, peeling off her work gloves.

  She led him up a steep stairway of marble steps with rounded edges flanked by elaborate wroughtiron banisters. The first-floor landing offered three doors. Zen was shown into what was obviously the formal salotto, at the front of the house, used on rare occasions as an impressive but impersonal ‘receiving room’. It was large, with a ceiling even higher than the one in Zen’s hutch at the hotel, and furnished with the type of 1970s ‘contemporary’ furniture designed to be admired rather than enjoyed. It was also bitterly cold.

  ‘Would you care for a coffee?’ the woman asked.

  Zen reflected for a moment, and then gave her his warmest smile.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, signora. I’d love one, if it’s not too much trouble. Would it be all right if I came down and had it with you in the kitchen?’

  He laughed, as though in slight embarrassment.

  ‘This room’s a little chilly, and at my age…’

  ‘Eh, the heating’s always turned off in here, unless there are guests. Yes, of course, signore, come down. It’s nothing grand like this but you’ll be nice and snug there, and I’ll announce you as soon as Signora Amadori returns.’

  They walked together to the stairs, which as Zen had noted on the way up were of old marble, heavily worn and polished to a lustrous sheen. He insisted that his companion go first, and about half-way down staged a carefully controlled fall backwards, accompanied by an impressive and convincing cry of pain.