Medusa az-9

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘The case is being treated as an accident?’ Anton asked at length.

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘So who was he? What happened? And when?’

  ‘That’s still unclear.’

  They walked on along the rock road marked by the ruts carved almost a century before by the metal wheels of carts and gun carriages.

  ‘Strange,’ remarked Anton. ‘Of course, this is also what we thought when we found the body. Someone who had tried to do what we were doing, only badly equipped and alone. But there was no sign of any rope at the top of the pitch. Or at the bottom, I think. Even if it had frayed and broken on that rub point, the upper length should still be there attached to the belay and the rest should be with the body. Unless he was one of those free-style alpine climbers, and tried to descend without aids. But he wasn’t dressed correctly for this, or even for walking at such an altitude, still less exploring those tunnels, which are cold, as you know. In fact, from what the photographs show, he didn’t seem to be wearing any shoes or boots.’

  ‘He was barefoot?’

  ‘Apparently, yes. Of course, people who come alone into the mountains for adventures are often a little bit strange, but I have never heard of this before. Besides, if he was going to do something extreme in this way, he would surely have informed a relative or the hotel keeper of his intentions and estimated time of return. If someone goes missing, there’s always a search and an enquiry, at least in my country. Even if they don’t find him, the police keep an open file in case a body turns up. We get a few up in the Alps once in a while, particularly now that the glaciers are receding so fast. Those bodies are often chewed up by the ice, but even then they are almost always identified, even if they have been there fifty or more years. In this case the corpse was not so badly decayed, because of the cool stable air in the tunnels. You would think it would not be so difficult to put a name to this person.’

  ‘You would, wouldn’t you?’

  At the point where the path up the face of the massif crossed the old military road, they turned right and started zigzagging down the way they had ascended over four hours earlier, Anton effortlessly, Zen taking frequent pauses to admire the view.

  ‘You mentioned some photographs,’ Zen said as they picked their way down the steep, rock-strewn track.

  ‘Yes, Rudi was carrying a camera on his belt, and he took a few shots of the scene just to prove that we hadn’t touched anything or interfered in any way. In the event we forgot all about them, but it didn’t matter. The officers who answered our call weren’t interested. They just took our names and addresses and a brief statement and then said we could go. And of course we were only too happy to do so, and still perhaps a little in shock from this experience. So it was only when we got back to Innsbruck that Rudi remembered the photos.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘I have a set with me. I’ll give them to you when we get back to the rifugio, if you like. But these are just amateur snapshots, taken in a moment of some stress and anxiety. The quality isn’t that good, and of course you’ll have access to the official photographic record taken when the body was removed.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Still, it would be interesting to see them, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not a problem. I brought them just for that.’

  The path narrowed to wind over the shoulder of a rocky bluff, followed by an even more precipitous descent, and silence once more became an acceptable option.

  It was pitch-dark by the time they reached the small hostel in the bleak, rock-strewn plain where the road crossed the pass towards Cortina and the valleys to the east. Once through the double set of doors, the smoke-laden fug was initially overwhelming after the icy air outside. Bruno was propped up in a booth at the far end, pointedly ignoring the fact that he was being pointedly ignored by everyone else in the bar. Catching sight of his superior, he hurriedly straightened his uniform, replaced his cap and stood up, but Zen waved to him to stay put. The young patrolman nodded, sat down again and picked up the crossword puzzle magazine he had been working on.

  The bar was crowded with a gang of German motorcyclists of both sexes, all sheathed in garish leather suits, as well as a smattering of elderly people who looked local, although where they could have come from was a mystery. Zen led Anton into the restaurant area at the side of the building. There were the same red and white checked curtains over the tiny windows, the same glossily varnished wooden chairs and tables, the same dim lighting from elaborate brass fixtures with frosted glass bowls, but this space was unoccupied and much quieter, apart from a muttered news bulletin from the inevitable television set mounted on a cabinet at the end of the room.

  A blank-looking girl of perhaps fifteen came over, a notebook in her hand. After a brief discussion, they settled on a selection of cheese and salumi, a bottle of red wine and two large bowls of soup. Out of sheer habit, Zen initially ordered minestrone, until Anton sensibly pointed out that to be worth eating this required fresh vegetables and high-quality olive oil and parmesan, none of which was likely to be available at this remote spot. Instead they both opted for lentil soup made with chunks of smoked bacon.

  ‘So, I hope you feel that your visit has been worthwhile,’ said Anton.

  It took Zen a moment to realize the oddity of the question. Anton had spoken German to the waitress, who had replied in the same language. Everyone else in the room was speaking either German or, like the TV newscaster, Ladino, the archaic dialect of Latin which had survived only in this isolated mountain range. There wasn’t a word of Italian to be heard or seen anywhere in the place. Zen felt very much as if it were he, and not Anton Redel, who had travelled to a foreign country.

  ‘Indeed,’ he replied. ‘You too, I trust.’

  The Austrian laughed.

  ‘Oh yes! It is always a pleasure to come down here to our former transalpine provinces. Everything is so cheap, too. But this is the first time I’ve had the additional pleasure of doing so at the expense of the Italian government.’

  When their food arrived, Anton’s choice proved to have been inspired. The lentils and bacon were a thick, unctuous, rib-sticking delight, more stew than soup. The cold cuts, too, were subtly different from their southern cousins, darker and smokier in flavour and texture. The wine was from the Adige valley where they had both started their journey that morning. It was a very young light red with a tart raspberry taste and a slight prickle of spritz. It was utterly delicious, and cut the rich, heavy food perfectly.

  When they had eaten, Anton lit a small cheroot.

  ‘So, the photographs.’

  He got up and went over to the stairs leading to the bedrooms. Zen’s driver appeared at the table.

  ‘Ready when you are, capo.’

  Zen relaxed into Italian as if into a warm lavender-scented bath. He dug out his battered pack of Nazionali and lit up.

  ‘Calm down, Bruno. I’m not quite finished yet.’

  ‘ Benissimo. Only it’s just starting to snow. We should be able to make it down the mountain if we start soon, otherwise…’

  He shrugged expressively.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as possible,’ Zen told him.

  ‘I’ll go and get the car warmed up.’

  Bruno walked off back to his table as Anton reappeared, holding an envelope which he placed on the table between them. It contained four colour prints which Zen looked through one by one without saying anything. Indeed, it was difficult to find anything to say. The pictures looked like reproductions of modern art, all blobs and scurries, masses and evasions of colour and form whose presumed significance could only be their apparent lack thereof.

  ‘Rudi didn’t have much time, and his camera is not so good,’ Anton explained through a cloud of cigar smoke. ‘But it is digital, so I’ve enclosed a diskette with the files.’

  ‘Files?’

  ‘In case you want to do an enhancement. They’re compressed, of course. You’ll need to unzip them.’

  Zen e
xtracted a black plastic rectangle from the envelope. He nodded sagely and puffed on his cigarette. Yet another foreign language. Compression and unzipping he could more or less understand, but what sort of magic was involved in an enhancement?

  ‘This one, for instance,’ the Austrian added, selecting one of the prints and turning it the right way up. Zen suddenly realized that it showed the outflung wreck of the corpse lying broken on the floor of the blast pit. It was dressed only in a shirt and slacks. The feet appeared to be bare. The face was turned away, but the right arm lay outstretched across the jagged rocks. Anton pointed to some markings just above the elbow.

  ‘It might be significant to know exactly what this is,’ he said. ‘But such details will naturally have emerged during the postmortem examination.’

  Was there a hint of irony in his tone? It was hard to tell with the Austrians. They liked to present themselves as slow, cosy, complacent country bumpkins, but their empire had produced some of the most incisive thinkers and artists in Europe. Zen called the waitress and settled the bill.

  ‘Well, thank you for your cooperation, Herr Redel. I hope you have good walking tomorrow.’

  ‘It looks like it will be cross-country skiing with this weather. But they rent langenlauf equipment here, so either way I shall enjoy myself.’

  The two men shook hands. Then Zen looked his guest straight in the eye.

  ‘What do you think really happened?’

  Anton Redel looked understandably confused by this question.

  ‘Well, of course I am not a policeman. But if this had occurred somewhere else, say in the elevator shaft of an abandoned city warehouse, I’d probably suspect that others were involved.’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘Some gangsters, perhaps. Drugs or some such thing. They kill the man and then hide his body in the shaft. Or they just throw him down. Maybe the corpse will never be found. Even if it is, it may be too late to identify him.’

  He gave Zen a charming, thick-lipped Austrian smile.

  ‘But of course this is ridiculous! There are many dangers up here in the mountains, but criminal organizations are not among them.’

  Outside the insulating double doors, the snow was now descending in earnest frothy flakes that were deceptively insubstantial as they floated into the lights of the hostel, but already lay several centimetres deep on its concrete forecourt. Bruno had drawn the marked police Alfa right up to the entrance. Zen got into the back seat and they set off.

  To Zen’s relief, Bruno was not one of those police drivers for whom the point of the exercise was to validate their virility. Indeed, for the first thirty minutes or so, when the snow was still heavy and the road treacherous, he was almost excessively cautious as they negotiated the frequent reverse curves and steep gradients in very poor visibility. After that, the snow gradually turned to sleet and eventually a slushy rain, the surface reverted to a reliable shiny black, and they were able to speed up.

  In the back, Zen relaxed, dozy after so much unaccustomed exercise and fresh air, but also taunted by the question which Anton Redel had no doubt intended merely as a courtesy. Did he feel that his visit had been worthwhile? The honest answer was ‘No’, but this was in keeping with every other aspect of this case which had been tossed into his lap, he suspected, more than anything else as a sop to give him the illusion of being gainfully employed.

  ‘You might want to take a look at these,’ was how the departmental head had put it when he handed Zen a bunch of files at the termination of his weekly briefing at the headquarters of the Interior Ministry on the Viminale hill in Rome. ‘They’re mostly quite routine, I think, but it would be valuable to have any input or suggestions you might have to offer.’

  Zen had accepted the files in the same spirit, and taken them back that evening to the apartment in Lucca that he shared with Gemma, the new woman in his life. There were eight in all, the very number confirming Zen’s suspicions that none of this was intended to be taken too seriously. Most of the cases indeed appeared to be fairly routine. The exception was the one that he had brought with him to the Alto Adige.

  This already had a certain curiosity value based on its provenance. Rather than being forwarded to police headquarters in Rome by one of the Ministry’s provincial questure, it had been obtained ‘through channels’ from the carabinieri, who were handling the case. When Zen made a few phone calls to query various aspects of the report, his interest immediately quickened. He had done this often enough in the past, and was familiar with the standard response: a mixture of obscurantism, grudging disclosures and resentful passing off of the intruder to subordinates, the officer who had been called having more pressing matters to attend to. This was standard procedure, and he had frequently employed it himself when the boot was on the other foot.

  This time, though, things went quite differently. Zen’s call was immediately transferred to the officer in charge, a Colonel Miccoli, who evinced an almost embarrassing readiness to address any and all questions that his esteemed colleague might have. Of course Zen wasn’t wasting his time! Full disclosure and cooperation between the two forces of order was of the essence to effective law enforcement in a modern democracy. ‘ Mi casa es su casa,’ quoted the colonel, adding that he had spent several months liaising with the Spanish anti-terrorist squad back in the nineties over some Basque suspects who had allegedly spent several years in hiding in Sardinia.

  He had some interesting and amusing anecdotes to tell about that episode, but almost nothing to say about the case concerning which Zen had called. Everything was in limbo at the moment and it would be injudicious to draw any premature conclusions. The body had been removed from the tunnel complex and flown by helicopter to the central hospital in Bolzano. Yes, a post-mortem examination had been performed, but the results appeared to be inconclusive. No, it had not been possible to positively identify the victim as yet. Misadventure seemed the most likely cause of death, but foul play had not entirely been ruled out. In short, it was a question of time, and at worst the affair might turn out to be one of those minor mysteries associated with a mountainous district whose rugged remoteness naturally attracted — how should he put it? — amateurs of extreme sports and thrill-seekers of all kinds. He would of course pass on any further details should they become available. It had been a pleasure to have the opportunity of discussing the case with Dottor Zen. Not at all, on the contrary, the pleasure had all been his.

  Zen had by now become accustomed to the widespread effects of what his friend Giorgio De Angelis termed ‘Italia Lite’: the new culture of empty slogans, insincere smiles and hollow promises overlaying the authentic adversarial asperity of public life. He was somewhat surprised to find that the rot had tainted a military body such as the carabinieri, with its long traditions and strong esprit de corps, but no more than that. It was none of his business anyway. He had duly ‘reviewed’ and returned the file. No one would thank him for exerting himself any further.

  Nevertheless, he was left with a nagging feeling, based on decades of experience of how these things were handled, that something wasn’t quite right. After a few days, it became strong enough to nudge him into contacting the Questura in Bolzano and asking them to obtain a copy of the post-mortem report direct from the hospital. Their reply had been more than enough to confirm his doubts. ‘ The official response of the hospital authorities is that such a request can only be considered if routed through the Ministry of Defence, which has been designated the competent State agency in this matter. According to our sources, however, the post-mortem report and the photographs taken in the course of the examination, together with the cadaver itself and all clothing and objects appertaining thereto, are no longer in the possession of the hospital, having been taken in charge by officers of the carabinieri on the morning of the 15th inst.’

  It was at this point that Zen had decided that there was a case to be made for him to travel north. Much as he liked Lucca, he was in a mood to leave for a few days, and was particu
larly looking forward to meeting Colonel Miccoli, given that their telephone conversation had taken place three days after the developments noted in the Questura’s fax. He had therefore booked a first-class sleeper on the night train which passed through Florence just before midnight and stopped at Bolzano about four hours later.

  On his arrival at the carabinieri headquarters later that morning, he had been told that Colonel Miccoli was ‘out of town’. Not only that, but his adjunct claimed never to have heard of Zen, and to have no personal knowledge of the case in question.

  Fortunately Zen had arranged a fallback position. One of the few substantive facts in the carabinieri report he had been given concerned the three young Austrians who had discovered the body. Their names, addresses and home telephone numbers had all been noted down as a matter of routine, and with a sense that he had nothing to lose Zen had taken the long shot of calling one of them. Initially this turned out to be abortive due to language difficulties, but on the third attempt Zen reached Anton Redel, who had been born and raised in the Alto Adige and spoke serviceable Italian. He had readily agreed to return to the scene of the tragedy and explain what had happened, in exchange for a reasonable sum to cover the expense of the journey down from Innsbruck, where he was now at university.

  A straggle of low buildings appeared at a sharp bend in the road ahead, seemingly propped up against the precipitous slope of the mountainside. Most were abandoned, but a few showed lights, and in the centre of the village there was a bar and shop with petrol pumps outside. Bruno turned off and parked outside.