Cosi Fan Tutti

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Those little prigs have been breaking my balls about this for months!’ he exclaimed. ‘They’re just like these hypocritical politicians we have running around now, making out they’re some new breed of men, clean, honest and incorruptible, unlike the old shits like us who’ve been running the country since they were crapping in their nappies. It makes me sick! Gesualdo and Sabatino claim they’re not like other men, always checking out the room for something fresh and new. God forbid! Their love is the only one worthy of the name, the purest and most perfect emotion which the world has ever seen and which will endure eternally, etcetera, etcetera.’

  ‘How sweet!’ cried Iolanda, placing one hand on her breast.

  ‘You may think so, signorina,’ Zen retorted, ‘but me and the rest of the lads have had just about as much as we can stand. So we’ve made a little plan. The two girls this pair are so mad about are out of town for a few weeks, and we aim to put all their fine talk to the test.’

  Libera smiled thoughtfully.

  ‘It’s intriguing. Definitely more imaginative than our normal line of work.’

  ‘But will it pay as much?’ queried Iolanda. ‘A girl’s got to make a living, you know.’

  Zen took a sip of tea and eyed them both.

  ‘I can offer you five hundred thousand each down, and the same again if you succeed.’

  ‘For two weeks’ work?’ the blonde exclaimed indignantly. ‘We can make more than that in a few nights on the street!’

  ‘Not if I bust you for prostitution, tax evasion, and corrupting a minor,’ Zen retorted with a smile.

  ‘What minor?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I can easily find one. The city’s full of corrupt minors.’

  Iolanda pushed her hair back impatiently.

  ‘I don’t think it’s very nice of you to threaten us.’

  Zen laughed insincerely.

  ‘Only joking! If you don’t think you’re up to the challenge, I can always find someone else. But you two are definitely the most stunning-looking women I’ve seen so far. If anyone can bring this off, you can.’

  He produced the two snapshots which Valeria gave him earlier, showing each couple posed self-consciously against a view of a sunlit beach.

  ‘Meanwhile, here’s a look at the competition,’ he said.

  The two prostitutes scrutinized the photographs closely.

  ‘God, that hair!’ cried Iolanda.

  ‘And those clothes!’ added Libera.

  ‘Those ghastly ear-rings!’

  ‘That posture!’

  ‘They definitely need a girlfriend to take them in hand …’

  ‘To take them shopping, too.’

  ‘But the guys are really cute!’

  ‘What a waste!’

  Libera looked at Zen.

  ‘It’s a deal,’ she said.

  ‘So the money’s not a problem?’

  Iolanda sniffed haughtily.

  ‘It’s not a question of money.’

  ‘It’s an act of charity,’ explained Libera. ‘To see two virile young men throw themselves away on a couple of homely figlie ’e mammà like that …’

  ‘It’ll be a pleasure to show them what a real woman is like!’ said Iolanda.

  ‘But how exactly are we to go about this?’ asked Libera.

  With a cautious glance all around, Zen lowered his voice and began to outline the details of his plan. Not that anyone was listening. In fact the bar had emptied considerably by now. The travellers had left to catch their trains, the railwaymen had returned to work, and the cleaning crew were on their way out too, apparently in response to a pager which one of them had clipped to the breast pocket of his overalls. Only the elderly whore remained slumped over her table, gazing morosely into her glass of wine.

  The street cleaners climbed into their orange truck, which drove off along the main avenue for some distance before turning into a side-street riddled with deep potholes. The only illumination here, apart from the truck’s headlights, came from the open fires of the prostitutes spaced at intervals along the pavement. And one of them, at least, appeared to be doing some business. A large saloon was parked at the kerb near her pitch, the engine still running. From the driver’s window, a man beckoned to the thin, slight woman leaning against the wall at the corner. With an odd gesture, half-shrug and half-wave, she walked over to the car.

  About fifty yards farther back another car stood beside the kerb, its lights off and the engine silent. It might at first sight have appeared to be the scene of a similar encounter, but one which had progressed beyond the stage of negotiations. It would have taken a very keen observer to notice that the car had only one occupant, who was sitting bolt upright behind the wheel, looking straight ahead, with occasional glances in the rear-view mirror. As the garbage truck came into view he switched on the ignition and pumped the brake pedal three times. The headlights behind flicked momentarily to high beam.

  Meanwhile the skinny prostitute and her prospective client had concluded the preliminaries. She got into the back seat of the car, a luxury import of some kind, which immediately pulled away from the kerb. The street was deserted and the truck had plenty of room to pass, but it unaccountably failed to pull over, ramming the rear of the car with a jarring shock and a loud metallic crunch.

  The driver of the saloon got out, waving his arms and exclaiming angrily. A middle-aged man conventionally dressed in a suit and overcoat, he was clearly both shocked and hopping mad, as well he might be. Even a superficial inspection of the damage was enough to show that some extremely expensive bodywork was involved here. The crew of the truck also descended from their cab, three of them all together.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you were doing?’ the first man shouted angrily. ‘Are you trying to pretend you didn’t see me? If you assholes lose nothing but your jobs, you can count yourselves lucky!’

  And so on, for some considerable time. When he finally paused for breath, one of the crew leaned forward confidentially.

  ‘I understand how you feel, dottore. The fault was entirely ours, no question about it. On the other hand, it wouldn’t do your reputation any good if it were known that you were hanging around an area like this at this time of night, right? So why don’t we try and work out some mutually agreeable solution?’

  The car driver started to splutter some suitably crushing reply, but broke off as the logic of the other man imposed itself. Everyone in Naples knew that single men in smart cars only came down here at night for one reason. His wife wouldn’t be too happy, nor her influential family, to say nothing of his so-called ‘allies’ in the political arena. And as for the press, they’d have a field day, particularly if one of his former partners in pleasure should take it into her head to earn a hefty bonus by detailing some of the more esoteric requests with which, for a fat fee, she had reluctantly complied.

  The garbage-disposal man glanced significantly at the woman waiting in the car, then gestured towards the back of the truck.

  ‘Let’s get out of earshot, dottore,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve got a proposal which I think will satisfy you, but it wouldn’t do for us to be overheard.’

  In the back seat of the car, the prostitute sat tapping her crossed legs in a bored fashion. The things some men get off on! She thought she’d heard it all, and for that matter done most of it, but this one had ideas she’d never even imagined. Still, he was prepared to pay, and this car – she stroked the leather seats – proved that he had the necessary. She would make more tonight than the whole rest of the week. Maybe she could even treat herself to few days off, spend some time with the children.

  She turned as the orange truck started up with a roar and drove away, disappearing round the corner. A moment later another car passed by and turned into the same street, some small domestic compact not to be mentioned in the same breath as the padded, perfumed limousine in which she sat waiting for her client to reappear, having sorted out this annoying accident, and drive them to the place
he said he has nearby, with all the necessary equipment set up and ready to use.

  Only he didn’t reappear. And when she looked round again, the street appeared to be empty. Reluctantly, she climbed out of the car. There was no one in sight. For a moment she felt a sense of relief at the thought that she wasn’t going to have to go through with it after all. Then she remembered the money, its loss all the more bitter since she had already spent it in anticipation.

  But what about the car? No one, however rich, was going to go off leaving a machine like that behind, even with a badly damaged wing. Clearly her client must have gone off with the cleaning crew to phone for a tow-truck or something. Typical that he should just vanish like that without bothering to explain to her what was happening. She was only a whore, after all.

  It was only then that she noticed the set of keys dangling from the steering column. He must have been so angry and shocked by the accident that he’d forgotten about them, just taken off, leaving her alone with about sixty million lire’s worth of luxury import.

  She opened the door, slipped in behind the wheel and started the motor, which hummed obediently into life. The woman sat there, thinking rapidly. The owner had almost certainly never seen her before, and if she didn’t return to her pitch for a while he would never be able to trace her. As for the car, she could make that disappear equally effectively. They’d rip her off on its true value, of course, but even so she and the kids should be able to live on the proceeds for a year or so, maybe more. Fate had thrown this prize her way. She’d be an ungrateful fool not to accept it. It could only bring bad luck.

  With a slight scraping sound from the rear wheels, the car moved away, its lights dwindling rapidly in the distance. A moment later the street was completely deserted. Indeed, the only sign that anyone had been there at all was a rectangle of orange paper lying in the gutter, as though discarded at random. STRADE PULITE read the big black headline. Underneath there was a logo of some sort, and the bold slogan ‘A New Start for a New City’.

  Un uom nascosto

  If Aurelio Zen had reduced his working week to the minimal level necessary to sustain a professional existence, his weekends were totally sacrosanct. No more overtime for him, no more broken sleep or cancelled social arrangements.

  The mistake had been going home. He had been bent and battered by previous setbacks, but his experience in Venice had broken him. To cap it all, the local politician at the centre of the case Zen had been investigating had not only got off scot-free, but shortly afterwards the regionalist party he led had been lifted from their provincial marginality to the heart of the government as part of a disparate group of untried, untested and therefore untainted personalities and movements united under the brash, breezy slogan ‘Go for It, Italy!’

  Nor had the one positive outcome been such as to enhance Zen’s sense of professional responsibility. The American family for whom he had been moonlighting in Venice had initially baulked at paying out the reward they had promised, on the grounds that the murderers had not been brought to justice. But when Zen threatened to make public some of the information he had uncovered about their kinsman’s war record, they had rapidly backed off and agreed to a kill fee amounting to a substantial proportion of the original sum.

  Despite this, Zen had come to Naples in a mood of bitterness and defeat. At first he had dealt with this by pretending that he was not really there at all. He put in token appearances at the office, and spent the rest of his time in the hotel where he had made an advantageous arrangement for a single room Monday to Thursday nights inclusive. Each Friday he caught the train back to Rome, remaining there until Monday, when he caught an early-morning express back to Naples.

  Not that the situation back home was exactly ideal, either. Most of his friends and acquaintances were linked with his previous job in the Criminalpol squad, and seeing them inevitably served to remind him of the effective demotion he had been forced into taking. Nor were the prospects any brighter romantically. Thanks to an opportunistic dalliance in Venice – misconceived and ill-fated, like everything else that had happened to him there – Tania Biacis was now out of the picture, seemingly for good.

  So he was largely thrown back on the company of his mother, who viewed the whole country south of Rome as a bottomless pit of vice and degradation, with Naples as one of its deepest and most vicious abysses. That her son had been transferred there was cause for endless complaint and commiseration. When he revealed that he had requested the transfer himself, she concluded that he must have taken leave of his senses (a remark he let slip about his father not being dead provided further proof of this) and started treating him with a creepily solicitous reserve.

  Then, imperceptibly, things began to change. The first sign was when he started returning to Rome less often and for shorter periods. But it was Valeria Squillace’s offer of the house on Salita del Petraio which tipped the balance decisively. This property was eventually intended for the use of Orestina and Filomena when they completed their education and got married to young men the family approved of. Since there was no immediate prospect of this, and perhaps as a gentle hint to her daughters, Signora Squillace had kept her word and given Zen a short-term lease on the upper apartment, renewable quarterly, at a rate considerably less than he was paying at the hotel.

  Even once he had moved in, it was a while before he regarded the place as anything more than a dormitory. But gradually that too began to change. He started rearranging the furniture to suit his needs, removed a couple of pictures that were getting on his nerves, and even smuggled a few items out of the flat in Rome to make his new home more attractive or convenient. His visits there became ever rarer and more grudging, an onerous duty which he soon came to resent having to perform every month. If it hadn’t been for his mother, he eventually realized, he wouldn’t have gone at all.

  For, much to his amazement, he found himself liking Naples. Not as he had on his previous sojourn there, as an up-and-coming officer with every prospect of a brilliant career ahead of him, for whom Naples was one of a series of appointments to major provincial cities paving the road to Rome. Now he liked it for its own sake, not for what it could do for him but for what it was. He was enchanted by every aspect of the city which he had expected to drive him mad. He loved the noise, the crowds, the traffic, the chaos, the pushiness and resilience of the people, their innate sense of tolerance, negotiation and endurance. Above all he prized his anonymity in the midst of a city which neither knew nor cared where he was from, what he did, or even who he was.

  Since Zen had never got around to correcting his new landlady’s impression that his name was Alfonso Zembla, this was the name inscribed on the rental contract, and which eventually appeared on the bell-push outside the front door. Partly to avoid confusion, partly on a whim, he had decided to adopt it. He knew no one in Naples and no one knew him. Why not accept the pseudonym which fate had handed him? It would serve to mark the radical break between his old and new lives, and also between his professional persona and his private life, and to keep the latter private. At work he would remain Aurelio Zen, a dedicated slacker. In every other aspect of his life, he would become Alfonso Zembla, whose personality and attributes remained, for the moment, fascinatingly vague.

  When the phone rang that morning, Zen was sitting out on the terrace sipping coffee, enjoying the sun and planning his weekend. At ten the carpenter, a nephew of Don Castrese, was coming to give an estimate of cost and time – above all time – needed to extend the shelves in the living room. After that, he’d go to the local restaurant he usually patronized, and then, if he felt up to it, wander around the side-streets around Via Duomo in search of a bedside lamp to replace the bronze horror he had deposited at the back of a cupboard. After so much frenetic activity, a slow start to Sunday seemed in order, punctuated by a visit to the café at the top of the steps which did such wonderful pastries. Then a stroll in the gardens of the nearby Monastery of San Martino, followed by a leisurely lunch somewh
ere at one of the good places down by the water before proceeding to the rendezvous where Orestina and Filomena Squillace were to break the news of their imminent departure to their undesirable lovers.

  So it was with both incredulity and dismay that he answered the phone and heard Giovan Battista Caputo telling him that his presence was ‘urgently required’ at work. The deadline which he had given the Questura, and then completely forgotten, was about to expire, and according to his deputy the case was no further advanced than it had been then.

  ‘The bastard just sits there grinning at us! We’ve tried everything – sweet-talking him, knocking him about – but nothing works.’

  This, evidently, was as far as Caputo’s interrogational skills extended. The carrot and the stick having both failed to produce any result, he was at a loss.

  ‘But it’s Saturday!’ Zen protested. ‘You don’t mean to tell me the Questore’s working today?’

  ‘Not in person,’ Caputo replied. ‘But Piscopo is. She’s his deputy, and a regular martinet. She’s already phoned twice to find out what progress we’re making.’

  ‘Christ, what’s happening to this country? Work isn’t everything. I’ve got my own life to lead, you know.’

  ‘Eh, eh! Me too, chief, believe me. But this case has raised a lot of dust, and until we either wrap it up or figure out a way to pass it on to someone else …’

  He left an expressive silence. Zen sighed deeply.

  ‘Very well. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  He depressed the rest on his phone and called Pasquale, the taxi driver of the night before, who had given him a card on receipt of a 10,000-lire tip.

  ‘Any time you need a car, dottore, just call my mobile direct and as long as I’m free we can forget about all this nonsense,’ he said, gesturing contemptuously at the meter and the logo of the taxi company.

  Zen was not surprised to hear that Pasquale was free, having got the distinct impression that he went out of his way to remain in this state to service the no doubt lengthy list of ‘special clients’ on which Zen was now enrolled. He promised to be at the top of the Salita del Petraio in five minutes.