Medusa az-9

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘What about identification?’

  ‘Again, inconclusive. The face was very badly damaged, but a search of dental records might have yielded some results, if we’d had a chance to make one.’

  ‘And his clothing?’

  Werner Haberl nodded.

  ‘That was perhaps the most interesting feature we discovered. It was not, for example, military uniform. That was important to establish, as the dry, cold conditions in those tunnels inhibit putrefaction, and our first thought was obviously that this might be one of our glorious dead. Or perhaps of yours.’

  ‘So the corpse had been there for some time?’

  ‘Judging by the condition of the flesh and organs, the pathologist conservatively estimated a period of at least twenty years and perhaps much longer. However, he could not have been a war victim. The clothes were of synthetic fabric and a more modern cut, certainly not dating from the period of the Great War, and consisted entirely of a pair of trousers, a shirt and underclothes and socks. No footwear, no jacket. Moreover, all the makers’ marks had been removed and there were no personal items in the victim’s pockets or at the scene where the body was discovered.’

  ‘In other words…’

  ‘In other words, we were apparently faced with the scenario of a young man — the pathologist’s provisional estimate is that he was aged between twenty and twenty-five when he died — entering those tunnels alone, wearing light summer clothing from which all identifying tags had been removed, without shoes or boots, and then falling to his death.’

  ‘Did you happen to notice any sort of marking on the man’s right arm?’

  ‘There was lots of superficial damage. The cadaver was in a very bad condition, as I’ve said.’

  ‘No, I mean something artificial. A tattoo, for example.’

  Haberl paused a moment.

  ‘I believe there was something of the sort, now that you mention it. We didn’t pay much attention to such superficial details at the preliminary stage, but of course they would be apparent on the video of the autopsy.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  Werner Haberl sighed wearily and rolled his eyes for an answer.

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ said Zen, laying one of his cards on the desk between them. ‘Here’s my number, in case you remember anything else about the events we have discussed, or if there are any further developments.’

  Werner Haberl looked at the card but did not touch it.

  ‘I have the feeling that if there are any further developments, they will take place in Rome. Where, I note from your card, you are based, dottore.’

  The honorary title emerged like sausage meat from a grinder.

  ‘You may well be right,’ Zen had replied, getting to his feet. ‘ Aber man kann nie wissen.’

  One never knows. A safe folk precept. Right now, for instance, he himself did not remotely know where he was. The stations dodged by so quickly, their lights all extinguished, that he couldn’t read their names. But they had left the high ravines of the Adige, that much was clear. As was the moon. The weather was improving, the landscape was gentler and more cultivated, the economy productive rather than extractive. Distances sprang out, roads were straight, lights abounded, and there was traffic on the roads they crossed. Life was returning. Zen could smell its heady presence, stuffed with promise and challenge, in the mild air surging in through the window.

  The train slowed slightly, clattered over a set of points and then dipped into a concrete underpass beneath another set of lines running at ninety degrees to its course. Leaving his compartment, Zen went out into the corridor. Yes, there were the lights of Verona, a city he had always irrationally loathed and never visited. Una citta bianca, a fiefdom of the priests and the army, of soulless entrepreneurs and all the loutish scum of the Venetian hinterland who had inherited the worst qualities of both their ancestors and their Austro-Hungarian invaders, without any of the redeeming features of either. And the feeling was mutual. The veronesi had always hated the lordly Venetians too.

  Now they were moving out into the vast desolation of the Po flatlands. Zen returned to his compartment for another dose of kirsch and a fresh cigarette. The railway line had narrowed to a single track, as though to emphasize the precarious hold of civilization on these reclaimed swamps, while the moonlight, filtered down through a layer of mist, evoked a dimensionless landscape punctuated by the squat, rectangular outlines of the cascine; agricultural barracks, now largely abandoned, where generations of crop-sharing farmhands had been born, grown up, married, laboured and died, all within one isolated and self-sufficient community lost in this featureless plain plagued by suffocating heat in summer and clammy cold in winter.

  ‘In case you want to do an enhancement,’ Anton had said about the black plastic thing that came with the photographs now packed away in Zen’s overnight bag on the rack above. What was that supposed to mean?

  The train rolled resonantly over a series of long metal spans laid out across the monstrous obesity of the lower Po. Its lights showed the skeletal remains of the former brick and stone structure, the central arches gutted by bombs. Another war, another battleground, another failure. Mussolini’s Chief of Staff, Marshal Badoglio, had allegedly deserted his unit at Caporetto and sought safety behind the lines. A quarter of a century later, after the Duce’s downfall, he had dithered and prevaricated about the handover to the Allies just long enough to allow the Germans to occupy all but the extreme south of the peninsula, thereby ensuring the destruction of much of the nation’s heritage and infrastructure, including the bridge they had just crossed.

  A station flitted by. The train was going more slowly now, and he could just make out the name. Mirandola. A couple of houses on a minor road. He would never know anything more about Mirandola, just as he would never know anything more about the case he had been assigned. This was perfectly normal. Stories were one thing, history another. The first abounded, the second was unknowable. Despite Italy’s economic prosperity and impeccable European credentials, not to mention the glitzy ‘open government’ stance of the current regime, its public history remained riddled with the secret network of events collectively dubbed the misteri d’Italia. The wormholes pervading the body politic remained, but the worms had never been identified, still less charged or convicted.

  That was the way it was. Reasons existed, but reason itself, discredited by the excesses committed in its name, had been abandoned. Even reality was little more than a designer tag for whatever tissue of lies was being worn that year. But this too was normal. None of the ways we experience the world corresponds even remotely to the scientific truths about it. Not only are our intuitions invariably wrong, it is impossible to imagine what they would be like if they were right.

  I should have joined the magistratura, he thought. Antonio Di Pietro, the inspirational investigating judge who had almost single-handedly brought about the fall of the former regime, the so-called First Republic, had formerly been a policeman. Then he had studied at night for a qualification to the judiciary, having realized that only that independent body could give him the power he needed to solve at least some of the more egregious ‘mysteries of Italy’. I’ve never been that ambitious, Zen conceded gloomily. I’ve just carried on in my little rut, always taking the path of least resistance, trying to do the best I can, and then wondering why my work never amounts to anything in the end.

  A clatter of points recalled him to the present. The line had now doubled again and the train was approaching a mass of orange lights, squishy in the light mist rising from the far shore of the swamplands. A cigarette and a final glug of kirsch later, they were trundling through Bologna station, past the rebuilt waiting room with the plaque commemorating yet another of those impenetrable mysteries: the bomb of 2 August 1980, which had killed eighty-four people and left over two hundred others scarred for life. Both the right and left wings of political opinion had blamed extremists of the opposing faction. There had been a flurry of invest
igations and a few charges had been brought, but nothing had come of it. It was as if that everyday atrocity had been an Act of God, like a hurricane or an earthquake. Shame, of course, shocking tragedy, but nothing to be done.

  Now feeling tired for the first time, Zen lay down on the bed. The window was still open, and as the train entered a valley in the Apennine foothills he caught a momentary whiff of sweet wood smoke. Then there was nothing but the hammering of the wheels reverberating off the walls of the tunnels, increasingly frequent and long. Here at last he dozed off, only to be awakened by the sleeping car attendant he had bribed earlier, who told him that they were passing through Prato. He had just time to collect his things and make himself look more or less presentable before the train arrived in Florence.

  He stepped wearily down on to the platform, still only halfawake, and wondering how on earth he was to fill the long hours before his connection to Lucca left. Then a lithe form emerged from the shadows and kissed him.

  ‘You’re looking very well. The mountain air must suit you.’

  He stared at Gemma.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said irritably. ‘I told you not to bother.’

  ‘Well, I did. The car’s outside. Give me your bag.’

  ‘I can manage perfectly well. You’re not my mother!’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Anyway, thank you for coming. Sorry I’m so tetchy. I’m completely exhausted. God, it’s good to be home.’

  ‘Make the most of it, because the Ministry’s been in touch. Someone named Brugnoli. He wants to see you in Rome tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to Rome.’

  ‘Well, I do. And you have to. I’ve booked us both seats on the nine o’clock.’

  ‘What have you got to do with it? You don’t work for Brugnoli. Or do you? Is that it? He planted you on me at the beach back in the summer to…’

  ‘Calm down. I just want to do some shopping.’

  ‘Fine, but I have to work. You can’t just expect me to drop everything, escort you round the shops and then take you to lunch.’

  ‘I prefer to shop alone, and I’m lunching with a friend.’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘Her name’s Fulvia. We were at school together. We’ll take the train down together in the morning and then back again in the evening, leaving the car at the station here in Florence.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘You’re just tired. And a bit drunk, I think. It’ll all make sense in the morning.’

  ‘No, it won’t.’

  ‘All right, then it won’t. Is getting worked up about it now going to change that?’

  ‘Why do you always have to be right?’

  ‘Why do you always have to be wrong?’

  ‘I’m not always wrong!’

  ‘No, but you think you are. You even want to be. Well, I want to be right. And I usually am. I took a chance on you, don’t forget. A very big chance. Was I wrong about that?’

  ‘No, you were right.’

  ‘I rest my case. Now you rest, and I’ll drive.’

  VI

  Once the sun had set into a distant bank of clouds to the southwest, Gabriele opened the trap-door in the floor, lowered the ladder and clambered down. After that it was easy: the precipitous sets of stairs leading to the second floor, then the much grander and gentler stone sweep to ground level and the stately entrance hall of the bocchirale running the entire length of the building, its wasted space and elaborately frescoed ceiling proclaiming the status of the landlord.

  He opened the front door to the vast courtyard, with its slightly raised and cambered threshing floor framed by shallow drainage channels, and walked diagonally across to the last of the seven arched openings of the cloister-like barchessale, where the farm machinery and equipment had once been stored. As a child, he had kept his bicycle here, and that was where he kept it now, well out of sight of any casual — or not so casual — visitors.

  Ten minutes later he was pedalling steadily along the dead flat, dead straight lane that passed the property, flanked by deep ditches on either side, the desolate flatness of the landscape making the lines of poplars, pollarded to break the wind, stand out like architecture. Timing was crucial to the success of this outing. There was still enough light for him to see, but little enough to make it unlikely that he would be seen. Apart from the invariable ground mist that was already starting to creep up, the nights had been consistently clear, and the moon would rise just in time to light his way back. When he was a boy, there had been no electricity at the cascina. During the many summers he had spent here, he had been keenly aware of the rising and setting times of the sun and moon, and of the latter’s phases. It was a form of respectful attention which he had now effortlessly regained.

  The trip was still a risk, of course, but a minimal and necessary one. He would be taking back roads to his destination. Given the massive depopulation of the whole area, these were almost unused, particularly after dark. With any luck, the shopkeeper would be the only person to see his face, and with his newly grown beard and dark glasses even his sister would have had difficulty in recognizing him. Besides, the batteries for the camping lantern that he had brought with him from Milan had almost run out, and without that substitute for the oil and acetylene lamps of his boyhood, he wouldn’t be able to function at all during the hours of darkness.

  To be honest, he would have had to get out, however briefly, in any case. The rectangular block of the cascina, totally sealed off from the outside world except for its two gateways, and surrounded by a wide drainage ditch like the moat of a medieval castle, had an overwhelming sense of being cut off from the outside world. This had initially seemed comforting, but by now Gabriele was starting to suffer from what he and his friends in the army had used to call ‘barracks fever’.

  And there was another factor. He was starting to feel a bit of a ninny. That’s how his father had sometimes referred to him in a tone of contemptuous affection — il babbione — and as so often in the past it was beginning to look as though he had been right. Ten days gone, and nothing whatever had happened. More to the point, it was getting difficult to see what could happen to justify his panicked flight to the family’s former rural property.

  He remembered having read somewhere that the difference between a theory and a belief rested not on proof but on the possibility of disproof. No matter how many observations appeared to corroborate the theory of relativity, for example, it could never conclusively be proved to be true. Its scientific respectability rested on the fact that it could instantly be proven false should contradictory evidence come to light. The same did not apply to the idea that God had created the world in six days and then faked the fossil record to suggest otherwise, which is why this amounted to nothing more than a belief. As did his fears about his own safety, he now realized. They weren’t rational, and therefore could not be dispelled. What would have to happen to prove that he had been wrong, that in fact there was no threat, nothing whatever to fear?

  Not that he wasn’t quite comfortable where he was. Indeed, that was part of the problem. The nights were still quite mild for the time of year, and the camping gear he had bought before leaving Milan — for cash, in case anyone was tracing his credit card records — was perfectly adequate to his needs. He lived as simply as he did at home, on pasta, parmesan, oil, salumi and dried soups, occasionally supplemented by a hare or pigeon he had trapped and prepared using his army training for living off the land. His only other purchase, before slipping on to a train bound for Cremona from the suburban station of Lambrate, had been this second-hand bicycle, on which he had invisibly arrived at his refuge, and which was always available for trips like this. The water from the well was better than what came out of the tap in Milan and he had brought plenty of books from the shop to keep him amused.

  Best of all, absolutely no one knew where he was! Not just his enemies, but his friends, acquaintances and associates, not to mention his sister Paola and her th
irty-something, live-at-home son. To think of all the time and affection he had lavished on the idle cipher that his nephew, so charming and intelligent when young, had turned out to be as an adult. But it had been his own fault. People always let you down. You were better off without them. Another of the things he had realized here — there had been plenty of time to think — was that he had always secretly dreamed of disappearing, of becoming invisible, wholly a subject to himself but in no way an object for others. That was what he had always wanted, and now, to all intents and purposes, he had it.

  The bike rolled easily along, with an endearing little squeak from the rear axle. It was an old-fashioned ladies’ model, the black-painted frame elegantly bowed like a harp. There were three gears, two brakes and no gadgets. Gabriele had fallen in love with it at first sight, a cotton print frock amidst the massed acrylic sports gear of the ATBs, and the price had been absurdly low.

  The light was fading fast now, but he would almost have known his way blindfold. All he needed was a glimmer to keep him from falling into one of the deep ditches that lined every road and track in this territory reclaimed centuries ago from the monstrous Po. He had covered them all as a boy, often walking and cycling for ten or twelve hours a day, and sometimes sleeping rough if he got lost or the bike broke down. No one had worried if he didn’t return by nightfall. In those days, the world had been hard but benign; now it was soft and malevolent.

  He swung left on to the slightly wider road that curved along the bank of the river into which all this land drained, and which in turn drained into a minor tributary of the Po. Two cars passed him, one in each direction, but each travelling at such a speed that Gabriele could have figured to the occupants as no more than a hazardous blur to be avoided if possible. The remaining locals all drove like maniacs, as though taking revenge for the years when their forebears had had to trudge endless distances each day of their lives, under a blazing sun or pouring rain, to or from their work in the fields.