He proceeded briskly along the deserted street, dodging the prows of the cars parked at all angles across the pavement. One of these was wedged so tightly against the wall of the adjacent building that he was forced to turn back and go around the other end. It was then that he noticed the two men fifty feet or so farther back. He paused for a moment, then continued on his way with a little more urgency in his stride. At the next corner he turned left and crossed the block half-way down, glancing casually behind him as though checking for traffic. The men were still there.
He remembered Pasquale’s warning, which he had so thoughtlessly dismissed, his mind on other problems. This pair looked very much like the ones who had followed the taxi from the house that morning, young and trim, wearing the casually tough uniform of their type. Reaching the corner, he turned right and started to run, making as little noise as possible. The streets were empty, the windows dark, and his pursuers had cut off his route back to the only door open to him.
At the next corner he looked round again. One of the men was in sight, but the other had disappeared, having probably circled back around the block to cut off his escape in that direction. The fact that they were no longer making any attempt to disguise their intentions made it chillingly clear what these must be.
But then, just when all seemed lost, fate lent a hand in the form of a garbage truck on its nightly rounds. The moment he saw it, Zen realized that the deep growl of its motor had been audible for some time. Several of the crew, dressed in blue overalls, were walking alongside their vehicle. What a stroke of luck! Even the most ruthless of killers would hardly dare attempt anything before so many witnesses. Zen walked confidently towards the oncoming truck, his arm raised in greeting.
Cose note, cose note!
If there had been anyone about in Via Bernini on the night in question, this was what they would have seen.
As the man in the overcoat and hat approached, his arm raised in greeting, the orange truck slowed down and its crew surrounded him. He turned and pointed back the way he had come, as though indicating the presence of something or someone, although there was no one in sight. At the same moment, the workman standing behind him took something from one of the many pockets of his overalls and swept it through the air as though swatting a fly.
Simultaneously, although without any obvious sense of cause and effect, the man in the overcoat tumbled forward, very much as though he had tripped on the raised edge of one of the black paving slabs – always a hazard, even in this relatively well-to-do area of the city. Luckily the other workman, now level with the rear of the still moving truck, managed to catch the falling man, thus preventing him from doing himself any serious injury.
The other workman now tossed aside his implement, which struck the paving stones with a sharp metallic ring, and bent to grasp the victim’s feet. Without a word, the two men lifted him clear of the ground, holding him suspended limply in mid-air by his shoulders and calves. By now the truck, in its inexorable progress, had passed them. With a preliminary swing they heaved the inert body up and over the tail-gate, where it disappeared from view.
While the first workman retrieved his discarded wrench, the second pressed a green button protruding from a box mounted on the rear of the truck. With a loud roaring noise, the massive ram began to descend. The top and sides were dirty and dull, but the curved blade had been polished by constant abrasion to an attractive silvery sheen. The ram moved steadily down into the body of the truck, the racket of its powerful machinery completely obliterating any sounds which might otherwise have been audible.
At this point there was an unexpected touch. Two young men appeared in the street ahead of the garbage truck, one waving a pistol, the other talking urgently into a mobile phone. The gunman fired twice, bringing down two of the blue-overalled crew, then sprinted forward and blasted another shot into the control console, disabling the ram. He then clambered aboard the orange truck, which was by now accelerating away.
His companion had meanwhile also drawn a pistol and forced the remaining members of the crew to lie on the ground. Far below, in the dense jumble of the old city, sirens started to wail and whine. The garbage truck spun around in a tight turn, almost spilling the first gunman from its roof, but he managed to cling on to a metal reinforcing ridge until the manoeuvre was complete, then inched his way forward along the roof as the truck bore down at speed on the crew members being held at gunpoint by his companion.
Three more shots sounded out, fired directly down through the roof of the cab. Like a stricken fish, the truck went wild, veering all over the street and smashing into a succession of parked cars which gradually broke its headlong progress, albeit at considerable expense to the owners, few of whom have been able to get insurance for their vehicles from those tight-arsed sons of bitches in Milan who seem to regard Naples as some sort of war zone. The resulting series of violent impacts finally dislodged the gunman whose shots were responsible for all this damage. He landed on the roof of a pale blue Lancia, which buckled beneath his weight like silk sheets as the garbage truck roared away into the night.
If there had been anyone about in Via Bernini on the night in question, this is what they would have seen. And in fact lots of people were about. The only thing stronger than omertà was curiosity, and the combination of shots, crashes, screams and sirens had been simply too much to resist. They craned out of windows and peered down from balconies and roofs. A few hardy souls even ventured tentatively forth from their doorways.
Catching sight of a man in uniform – a fireman visiting one of his mistresses, it emerged later – the gunman who had been covering the garbage crew pressed the pistol into his hands and told him to keep them covered until the police got there. The shrieks of the converging emergency vehicles were much closer now. The man ran across the street to his partner, who was sitting up on the roof of the Lancia like someone awakening after a heavy night.
‘Oh, Gesuà!’ he shouted. ‘The cops are almost here! Let’s go, for Christ’s sake.’
La porta dell’inferno
His first conscious thought was that this was definitely the worst hangover he had ever had, on a scale and of an intensity that he had not previously believed possible.
The smell, to take just one aspect of the prevailing vileness, was such as he had not experienced since the age of seven, when a combination of freak flood tides in the Venetian lagoon and a collapsed sewer had transformed the toilet in the Zen household into a seething cornucopia of filth, spewing forth the accumulated faecal products of the neighbourhood which cascaded down the staircase and into every corner of the living area. But even that memorable event was no more than a dress rehearsal in a provincial theatre compared with the world-class, state-of-the-art, no-expense-spared, cast-of-thousands-in-a-football-stadium production currently being visited upon his nostrils.
Nor were the other senses neglected. His ears, in particular, were taking a battering on an unprecedented scale, rather as if he were trapped inside the electronically enhanced bass drum during the Grand Triumphal March from the aforementioned spectacular. This hypothesis would also have accounted for the darkness, which was total except for brief, jagged, laser-like beams which traversed his surroundings without illuminating them, as in some high-tech light show designed to keep the crowd amused until the star tenor finally came on to do ‘Nessun dorma’. Was this another clue? Sleep, although devoutly to be wished, was certainly out of the question.
But none of this began to explain the agony in his skull, external as well as internal, or the smell of blood on his fingers when he worked them around, squirming in the glutinous mess pressing in on him from every side, to explore the sticky patch on the back of his head, still less the fact that everything was so violently jolting and swaying, or the acrid aftertaste of vomit which coated the membranes of his mouth.
The last thing he could remember was leaving Valeria’s apartment after drinking a glass and a half of her cousin’s cherry brandy made ‘with fr
uit from his country estate’. Christ almighty, what did he use for crop-spray? Cyanide? Or was the problem with illegal additives in the alcohol, as with the tainted wine scandals that were such a regular feature of Italian life?
Or was the problem with him? Was he blocking out some truth too horrible for remembrance, some news unfit to be imprinted? Only a glass and a half! A likely story. He must have drained the entire bottle, and then raided the remaining stocks in the cupboard like those American sailors who had gone to mix drinks, pouring the stuff down his throat as though there were no tomorrow, or rather to obliterate the possibility of one.
Nevertheless, it had arrived, his tomorrow. And just when he had consoled himself in the traditional way that things could not get any worse, in the traditional way they did. Back in the distant past, maybe a couple of seconds earlier, it had seemed absolutely impossible to improve on what had gone before, yet it now turned out that there wasn’t the slightest problem about this.
As with all good dramatic effects, things got better before they got worse. The appalling noise died away to almost nothing, the flashing slivers of light ceased, the terrifying shudders subsided to a mild and constant vibration. Only the stink and foul taste remained, and even they were by now coming to seem familiar and tolerable. And of course it was then, when his defences were down and he was starting to think that maybe things weren’t so bad after all, that all hell broke loose.
Broke in, rather – not that finicky distinctions of this kind were uppermost in his mind as the surface beneath him suddenly reared up with astonishing rapidity, tilting at an alarming and apparently impossible angle which nevertheless turned out to make perfectly good sense as he started to roll back, hands helplessly outstretched. His cramped confinement receded as the darkness opened up to receive him, one item among many falling in purposeful disorder. Even the terminal impact, when it finally came, was mercifully soft.
Dove son?
‘Pronto?’
‘Dottore, is that you?’
‘Is what me?’
‘You’re alive?’
‘I am?’
Pause.
‘Am I speaking to Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen of the Polizia dello Stato, serial number 4723 stroke vz stroke 798?’
‘Present and correct, sir!’
‘Identify your present whereabouts.’
‘Unknown.’
‘Describe same.’
‘A pit of some kind. Dark, silent. Abundance of foul-smelling and slimy materials all around.’
He took out his cigarette lighter, producing a feeble, flickering flame.
‘Proximity of one, possibly more, human corpses.’
‘Do not break this connection! Repeat, do not break this connection. How long will your mobile phone go on functioning?’
‘The battery indicator light is flashing. Five, possibly ten minutes operational time remaining.’
‘Jesus Christ! I don’t think we can trace you in time. Can you get out yourself?’
‘Negative.’
‘Is there anything you can do or tell me to indicate your position?’
‘Negative. But don’t worry, I still have Pasquale’s box.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It got a bit dented, but I suppose the miracles work anyway. Oh, and listen, if you have time to drop by Valeria’s and pick up some of that cherry brandy … The hair of the dog, you know.’
Non mi fate più fare triste figura!
It was almost four in the morning when they finally found him. By then the power pack of his mobile phone had long since failed, but one of the bullets fired by Gesualdo into the cab of the stolen garbage truck had pierced the oil line and the resulting trail of drops led the investigators step by step into the heart of the labyrinth to the deep pit where Aurelio Zen was lying on a mound of garbage next to a hideously mutilated cadaver, as peaceful as a child in bed with his bear. He looked up, blinking in the glare of torches and spotlights.
‘There he is!’ yelled a voice.
‘And isn’t that Attilio Abate?’
‘No, there’s Abate over there. That’s one of Vallifuoco’s henchmen, what’s his name …?’
‘Marotta. And there’s Don Ermanno himself!’
‘Get the chief over here! This is going to be huge.’
Rope ladders were lowered and men clambered down. Zen sat up, feeling distinctly under-dressed for the occsion. Almost everyone else seemed to be wearing uniform and carrying guns. Not only was he unarmed and in civilian clothes, but he seemed to have a large pool of dried vomit on his shirt and trousers.
Much to his surprise, the intruders seemed solicitous rather than critical. Two hefty types in battledress lifted him on to a stretcher which was then hoisted to the rim of the pit in a series of fits and starts reminiscent of the elevator at the Squillace apartment building. One of the few persons in plain clothes, apparently a doctor, examined him physically and then gave him a little quiz. This was quite fun, involving questions about his name, address, age, background, as well as a few general-knowledge teasers: what year it was, the name of the current prime minister, the capital of Emilia-Romagna, the numbers and playing positions of the Juventus team, Moana Pozzi’s vital statistics, the percentage of Trebbiano grapes permissible in Chianti Classico, and so on. He was able to answer all of these correctly – except of course for the second, which had been deliberately inserted as a trick question to trap malingerers.
Once Zen’s mental competence had been established, he was hurried into the presence of a compact, sturdily suited man wearing dark glasses and a lethal smile who appeared to be directing the proceedings.
‘This whole operation must be planned down to the last detail!’ he was telling his clustered subordinates. ‘Nothing must be left to chance. This is our great chance to smash these people once and for all. I want everything to go like clockwork. Understand?’
A chorus of dedicated assent greeted this rhetorical question.
‘Piero? You handle the TV people. We’re talking all three RAI channels, naturally, but also the leading independents and cable providers. Pack the room, lots of confusion, a sense of breaking news. I want jagged conflictual lighting, a mass of urgent but chaotic motion, then a segue into the strong, firm presentation from the podium restoring a sense of order and control. Mario, you handle the print media. Pack them in as extras for the TV coverage, get that quality of grainy actuality. Then line up the Corriere, Stampa and Repubblica for the off-air, in-depth, back-story pitch.’
‘What about the Mattino, dottore?’
Even through his shades, the suited man’s stare was perceptibly cutting.
‘Mario, I assumed it was clear that we were talking national here.’
‘Right, chief. Of course.’
‘Keep the locals in the picture, but at a distance. They’ll be only too glad to pick up the scraps from the table. These are not some small-time provincial gangsters we’re talking about here. This is a world-class event of national and even international proportions, and I want it treated with the proper respect, God damn it!’
‘You’ve got it, chief.’
‘All right, get to work.’
The suited man turned his blank regard towards Zen.
‘Now then, dottore, let’s discuss what we’re going to tell them. After that we’ll get you showered, shaved and suited up. Or maybe we should go for the haggard, back-from-the-brink look. What do you think? There’s a lot riding on this, for both of us. Let’s not screw it up.’
Forme giudiziarie
‘Are you saying that this operation began even before the communication from the group calling itself Strade Pulite was made public?’
The question came from a man in the first row, identified on his name tag as a reporter for the International Herald Tribune, but in fact an aide who had been planted among the audience to ‘facilitate efficient and expeditious coverage of this historically significant event’.
The Questore, whose eyes were no less dark a
nd obscure than the glasses he had worn earlier, nodded briefly.
‘My officers have been aware of the existence of these terrorists for several months. Indeed, it was for this very reason that I arranged for the transfer of a noted specialist from the Criminalpol squad in Rome …’
He turned to Aurelio Zen, who was standing slightly behind and to one side of him, facing the mêlée of reporters, cameras, microphones and lights.
‘To preserve the secrecy of our operation, Dottor Zen was nominally appointed to an administrative post in the Port of Naples. It was there that we had our first breakthrough, with the arrest of one of the men whose bodies were discovered today, Giosuè Marotta.’
‘But surely he was charged with stabbing a Greek sailor?’ a TV reporter asked with a puzzled frown.
‘Exactly! Marotta, a noted hothead, was injudicious enough to get involved in a scuffle with some foreign naval personnel while acting as courier in a low-level smuggling operation of no relevance to the present case. This gave us a convenient pretext to arrest him without revealing our hand and thereby losing the initiative. But his connection to the Strade Pulite terrorists was proved in tragic and dramatic fashion when one of their commandos attacked a police car in which he was being transferred to hospital and cold-bloodedly gunned down one of our most promising younger officers, Ispettore Armando Bertolini.’
Cosi Fan Tutti Page 22