Cosi Fan Tutti

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘That’s going to cost us another Caravaggio.’

  Sabatino flashed his wallet, bulging with 50,000-lire banknotes bearing the likeness of this artist.

  ‘What else would I spend it on? Nothing’s too good for Filomena. She deserves the best there is.’

  From a side pocket of the wallet, he took a strip of photographs, much creased with wear.

  ‘God, she’s adorable!’ he sighed.

  Gesualdo raised an eyebrow. Reaching into his jacket, he produced a studio photograph framed in cardboard and enclosed in a plastic slip-case.

  ‘“She deserves the best there is,” he says, and then drops a whole two thou at a passport machine. This cost me a hundred thou, but it’s worth every lira.’

  He turned the photograph towards his friend.

  ‘Doesn’t she look lovely?’

  Sabatino smiled wryly.

  ‘If anyone had told me a year ago that we’d be sitting here mooning over a couple of girls’ snapshots, I’d have said he was crazy.’

  Gesualdo nodded.

  ‘I never expected this to happen to me. I never really believed it happened to anybody, except in the movies.’

  ‘And just think, if their car hadn’t broken down that time, we would never have met them.’

  ‘Or if we hadn’t taken that short cut because the traffic was so bad. You didn’t want me to make that illegal left turn, remember? And I said, “If we get arrested, it won’t be for a traffic violation!”’

  ‘Well, you didn’t want to stop and help them change the tyre. “It could be a trap,” you said. “They get tourists that way all the time.”’

  Gesualdo sighed.

  ‘Yet the moment I got out of the car and saw her standing there, I knew that was it. For life.’

  ‘Me too,’ agreed Sabatino.

  The exalted look abruptly drained from Gesualdo’s face.

  ‘Except that their mother will never consent to the idea of them marrying the likes of us.’

  ‘It must be awful for them, having to sneak out every time they want to see us.’

  ‘And it’s horrible for us having to lie to them the whole time, not being able to introduce them to our families and friends. It’s almost enough to make me want to chuck the whole thing in.’

  Sabatino looked at him in astonishment.

  ‘The girls, you mean?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Gesualdo replied indignantly. ‘This line of work, I mean. Pack it in and apply for a regular job.’

  Sabatino smiled at him.

  ‘You’d go out of your mind with boredom by the end of the first week. And then there’s the money.’

  Gesualdo nodded.

  ‘I suppose you’re right. Another few years and we can go straight.’

  ‘Filomena said she’d marry me now, even without her mother’s consent.’

  ‘Orestina told me the same. But you know we can’t. Not with the risks we run every day.’

  ‘And which they’d have to share. The opposition can get pretty vindictive when things don’t go their way. Remember when Don Fortunato’s brother fell from grace? They couldn’t get to him, so they killed his sister, his wife and his eldest kid.’

  ‘The only thing to do is stick it out and hope they wait for us.’

  He glanced at his watch.

  ‘Where are they, anyhow? They should be here by now.’

  As if on cue, there was a sound of voices from inside the restaurant building. The two men turned round hopefully, but the lone figure which emerged from the garden door of the villa was a man. With a purposeful but unhurried stride he crossed over to the table where Gesualdo and Sabatino were sitting.

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen.’

  His accent was harsh and alien. The two men looked up at him warily.

  ‘Signor Gesualdo?’ the man asked, looking at Sabatino.

  Gesualdo got to his feet.

  ‘That’s me,’ he said shortly.

  ‘Ah, excuse me! And you must be Signor Sabatino,’ the man exclaimed. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. Alfonso Zembla, a friend of the Squillace family. May I?’

  He sat down. After a momentary hesitation, Gesualdo followed suit. The newcomer held up his hands apologetically.

  ‘I’m sorry to force myself on you like this,’ he said in a tone of embarrassment. ‘I don’t mean to intrude, but … It’s difficult to know where to begin. You see, your girlfriends … I’m afraid I have bad news.’

  Gesualdo reached over the table and clutched the stranger’s arm.

  ‘Are they dead?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Injured?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pregnant?’ breathed Sabatino.

  ‘Not that, either. The fact is, they’ve just heard that they’ve won a scholarship to study English at a school in London. Two other students had to cancel at the last minute, and Orestina and Filomena were next on the list. But they have to leave tonight.’

  ‘Tonight?’ both men cried together.

  Aurelio Zen nodded sternly.

  ‘They have to register for the course tomorrow morning. That means catching the last flight out tonight.’

  Utterly lost for words, Sabatino looked helplessly at Gesualdo, then back at Zen.

  ‘You mean they’ve left already? Can’t we at least say goodbye? Where are they?’

  ‘They’re waiting outside in the taxi that’s to take them to the airport. They were afraid to break the news to you themselves – they were afraid you’d be angry – so they asked me to do it.’

  He consulted his watch.

  ‘There’s still a few minutes to spare. I’ll have them come in, shall I?’

  Without waiting for a response, he turned and signalled to the waiter, who had been hovering at the entrance to the restaurant. Zen got to his feet and withdrew discreetly. As he reached the doorway to the building, Orestina and Filomena appeared, soberly but expensively dressed in the military-style greatcoats which were currently in fashion.

  ‘Not a word about our bet, now!’ Zen murmured.

  The two women swept past without a word. Zen took a seat at the bar inside and ordered an aperitif which he sipped while watching the brightly lit scene outside on the terrace.

  Side by side, the women approached the table where their lovers were sitting. They seemed nervous and hesitant. The two men got to their feet and confronted them with expressions of confusion, dismay and self-pity. For a moment no one said anything, then each couple started speaking rapidly, the men questioning and complaining, the women explaining and justifying. The occasional phrase drifted in through the open door, wafted on the breeze laden with the scent of herbs and flowers.

  ‘… so sudden …’

  ‘… just heard today …’

  ‘… such a dangerous city …’

  ‘… not any more than here …’

  ‘… with no friends, no family …’

  ‘… perfectly capable of looking after …’

  ‘… attacked or robbed, perhaps even …’

  ‘… in a very safe area right in the …’

  ‘… won’t see you for …’

  ‘… only a few weeks ….’

  Finally they fell silent. The men gripped their lovers’ arms, the woman leaned forward to be held and kissed. The dissonant rumble of a horn sounded outside in the car park.

  ‘That must be for us!’ cried Orestina, pulling free of Gesualdo’s embrace. ‘It’s time to go.’

  She sounded shocked, as though the reality of departure had only just come home to her. Zen walked out on to the terrace.

  ‘Come on, girls! The taxi’s waiting!’

  The two young couples hugged each other protectively.

  ‘The flight closes in thirty minutes,’ Zen insisted. ‘Pasquale says he can’t guarantee getting you there in time unless you leave right away.’

  Gesualdo grasped Orestina tightly.

  ‘Promise you’ll call me every day.’

  ‘Of course!’
she replied.

  ‘Call me twice, if you can,’ Sabatino told Filomena.

  Watching from the doorway, Zen felt torn between a desire to laugh at the intensity of their emotion, and an inexplicable melancholy quite out of keeping with the realities of a situation which, after all, he himself had engineered.

  It was only when the women finally extricated themselves from their lovers’ arms and turned to go that he finally understood that what he was witnessing was not the callow amateur dramatics of four self-obsessed young people who have to part for a few weeks. Although none of them was aware of it, they were saying goodbye not just to each other, for a while, but to something infinitely more intimate and precious, and for ever.

  Un poco di sospetto

  Gesualdo and Sabatino sat quite still at their table, staring at the ground as though in shock. They were still there when Aurelio Zen returned, having escorted Orestina and Filomena out to the waiting taxi.

  ‘Where are they?’ muttered Sabatino, looking up with a start.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ Zen told him.

  ‘It’s all so sudden!’ Gesualdo exclaimed.

  He seemed to be talking to himself. Zen sat down between them.

  ‘Pull yourselves together, lads! It’s not the end of the world. In fact, it might even be helpful.’

  ‘Helpful?’ said Gesualdo aggressively, all his emotion bursting out. ‘And what’s your interest in all this, anyway?’

  Zen handed them each one of the cards he had had engraved in the name Alfonso Zembla.

  ‘If you drop by here this evening between nine and ten, I’ll tell you. And I’ll also tell you a really easy way in which you can get yourself into the good graces of your sweethearts’ mother.’

  The men took the cards, but it was clear that their thoughts were elsewhere. Silence fell. Over to the east, above the city, an airplane lumbered laboriously into the pale azure sky, its engines straining at the seemingly impossible task of lifting such a massive weight. Gesualdo and Sabatino followed it with their eyes, willing it to succeed. The plane climbed steadily up through the clear, still air, out over the calm waters of the bay, its lights winking brightly against the deeper blue of the gathering dusk, then turned slowly in a wide circle over the shadowy outline of the peninsula and islands, heading north.

  Gesualdo rose, followed by Sabatino. Without a word to Zen, they walked off across and into the restaurant. Zen clicked his fingers to summon the waiter.

  ‘Bring me the same again,’ he told him. ‘And a phone.’

  When the phone arrived, on a long white cable, he called Valeria.

  ‘They’re on their way,’ he said.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘The two lads seem to be taking it very hard, but that could work to our advantage. People who exaggerate their emotions are usually the first to change them.’

  Outside the restaurant, Gesualdo and Sabatino

  walked over to their parked cars.

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ said Sabatino, shaking his head slowly.

  ‘Maybe because it isn’t true,’ suggested Gesualdo.

  Sabatino stopped dead, staring at him.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  A shrug.

  ‘I don’t know. But I don’t quite buy this. The girls take off without any notice, supposedly to study English. How do we know where they’ve gone?’

  ‘We can call them,’ said Sabatino.

  Gesualdo shook his head.

  ‘They didn’t leave a number, did they? Or an address. Just the name of some school that may not even exist, for all we know.’

  ‘Filomena said she’d call me twice a day!’ protested Sabatino.

  ‘Yes, but from where? They could be anywhere in the country, or abroad for that matter. This could all be a ruse to get them out of our influence. I sense the fine hand of their mother in all this. And this Alfonso Zembla character gives me the creeps. Where did he spring from?’

  ‘“A friend of the family,” he said. I’ve never heard Filomena mention him before. And what’s he doing here in Naples? With that accent, he has to be from somewhere in the North.’

  He took out the card Zen gave him and inspected the address.

  ‘You think we should go?’ he asked his friend.

  ‘Of course. If this is some kind of set-up, Zembla has to be in on it. Maybe we can worm it out of him. He didn’t seem that bright to me.’

  Sabatino unlocked his car.

  ‘Maybe we’re getting a little carried away here,’ he said with a loosening-up gesture of his right hand. ‘That’s the trouble with being in this line of work. You end up thinking that everyone’s as devious as the people we hang out with.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  Sabatino got into his car.

  ‘I’m going round to Dario’s to play cards for a while, put my ear to the ground about this other business. You want to come?’

  Gesualdo shook his head.

  ‘I’ve got an appointment.’

  ‘Business or pleasure?’

  ‘Business. I’ll swing by and pick you up around nine.’

  ‘Take care.’

  ‘You too.’

  Gesualdo drove out of the car park along a steep, narrow, switchback street that ended at the main road a few hundred metres up the hillside. There he turned right, coasting down the cobbled corniche whose extensive views out over the bay have proved fatal to so many drivers. Dipping down to water level at Mergellina, he drove along the front past the gardens of the Villa Communale and back into the city.

  In the inverted ghetto of Posillipo, where the wealthy and powerful have paraded their wealth and power for well over two thousand years, Gesualdo had felt ill at ease, an interloper. The shocking news of the girls’ departure was fully in keeping with other subliminal messages he was picking up, a kind of white noise which the place generated along with the obedient hum of luxury cars, the murmur of conversation between people who never need to raise their voices to be heard, the silence of exclusion and the discreet hushing of a tame, respectful sea.

  Here, plunged into the deafening clamour and random trajectories of the streets, he was at home once more, back in the innards of the city he knew so well. He turned out of Piazza dei Martiri into a gateway in the wall of a nineteenth-century palazzo. Inside a concrete ramp led steeply down into a cavern, its dimensions too huge and complex to be grasped at once. The vaulted ceiling, barely visible in the gloom, must have been over fifty feet high. The space below extended back at least twice that distance, irregular in shape and divided by walls of bare stone left to support the streets and houses on the hill above.

  Gesualdo angled his car into a vacant slot in the middle of one of the rows of vehicles parked there, for a fee, by office workers and other commuters. Unlike them, however, he did not walk back the way he had driven in, towards the steps leading up to street level, but the other way, into the deepest recesses of the subterranean car park. The ground underfoot was dusty with particles of stone scuffed up from the soft volcanic tufa forming the walls, floor and ceiling of this gigantic excavation, one of a series of such cavities underlying the entire city.

  It was the Greeks who first realized that the stratum of solidified lava beneath their new city, Neapolis, was at once easy to extract and work, and strong enough to resist collapse. Both they and the Romans exploited this fact to install a complex system of subterranean aqueducts, reservoirs, road tunnels and storage spaces for grain, oil and other goods. The temperature at these depths was consistently cool, the humidity constant.

  But the boom period for the underground city dated from the Spanish conquest. In one of the earliest attempts to enforce zoning regulations within the city walls, the invaders prohibitively taxed the importation of building materials. The response of the inhabitants was to reopen the ancient tunnels and caverns, this time as secret quarries, and to use the tufa to extend or amplify their homes. The fact that they were thus undermining the very houses they were c
onstructing apparently struck no one as ironical.

  The branch of the cavern which Gesualdo was following narrowed progressively to form a giant ravine no more than ten feet across, but even higher than the main body of the cave. The lower walls had been widened, presumably to accommodate the vehicles whose tire tracks were imprinted in the fine dust covering the ground. The passage ended at a pair of rusty iron doors, from behind which a variety of industrial noises were audible: drilling, sanding, hammering. Occasional brief flashes of incredible brilliance enlivened the prevailing darkness.

  Gesualdo pressed a button mounted beside the doors. After a long pause, a muffled voice inside said something incomprehensible. Gesualdo leant forward, pressing his face to the metal.

  ‘Roberto sent me,’ he shouted.

  Another long pause ensued. Then there was the sound of a bolt being drawn back, and a man’s face appeared between the two doors. He was wearing welding goggles, through which he inspected the intruder cautiously.

  ‘It’s about a car,’ said Gesualdo.

  Troppo vero

  When the phone rang the first time, Zen assumed it must be work. On his return from the trip to consult Gilberto Nieddu in Rome, he had called by the port and dropped off the grey cassette with the duty officer, a young man named Pastorelli who had merely saluted Zen and returned to a volume of Mickey Mouse comics printed on what looked like crudely recycled toilet paper. After returning the video game to the plastic bag containing the suspect’s other belongings, Zen had departed as inconspicuously as he arrived.

  By dint of staying out of the house most of the next day, he had managed to avoid hearing anything further about the progress – or, more likely, the lack of it – of the case to which he was supposedly devoting his every waking hour. He realized that this ostrich approach to problem-solving was widely regarded as immature and escapist, but where, he demanded of the hypothetical sneerers, had all his clear thinking and tireless energy got him in the past? To Naples, was the answer, and when in Naples …

  Sooner or later, nevertheless, he had to go home to meet the new tenants of the lower flat and see them properly installed. It was while he was overseeing this operation that the phone started ringing upstairs. Obedient to his ‘what I don’t know can’t hurt me’ philosophy, he decided to let the machine take it. It was not until some time later, on one of his trips up to his own flat in search of decorative materials to fake the influence of a woman’s hand below – and also to remove various personal effects which might reveal more about him than he wished strangers to know – that he finally bothered to listen to the message.