Medusa az-9

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Did he have a system? I’ve always wanted to hear of a really good one.’

  ‘No, no. He wasn’t a gambler. He came here to see his bankers.’

  ‘There are no banks in Campione.’

  ‘Well, that’s what he told me.’

  Zen nodded. ‘So perhaps he was a gambler after all, but at games they don’t play in the casino.’

  Claudia was confused by this response, but Zen immediately changed the subject and proceeded to ask her a series of ‘questions expecting the answer Yes’. This was a phrase she remembered from school, and a technique she remembered from a rather more recent era. Get them used to saying yes and they’ll find it harder to say no when the time comes. But what did this Zen want her to say yes to? Dinner here or back in Lugano? Followed by a nocturnal visit to the rooms upstairs at the casino dedicated to roulette, chemin de fer, vingt-et-un and other giochi francesi? Followed by what? Giochi francesi?

  In the end, it all proved to be rather different from what she had imagined.

  ‘Perhaps I’d better lay my cards on the table,’ Zen told her, producing a plastic rectangle from his wallet. ‘Or rather my card.’

  Polizia di Stato, she read.

  So she had been conned, after all. And he would take her for everything she was worth, she knew that. He would destroy her. Despite her efforts to forget, some part of her had been expecting this moment for the past fifteen years. Now it had come, but she was no readier to cope with it.

  ‘How did you find me?’ she asked, stalling for time.

  Zen was obviously still trying the charm, because he smiled.

  ‘I went to see your son, signora. Naldo Ferrero. I visited him last night at that rustic restaurant in the Marche. He told me that you were staying in Lugano. I enquired at various hotels until I found the one at which you are registered. The desk clerk told me that you had gone to Campione for the day. One of the staff at the casino then identified you.’

  Despite the fact that the money and the number plates were Swiss, Campione was part of Italy, she reminded herself. This man could arrest her here, but on the other side of the lake he would have no such power. She furtively consulted her watch. The next ferry was due in less than ten minutes.

  ‘It’s about the circumstances surrounding the death,’ Zen continued. ‘And, of course, the identity of Naldo’s father.’

  The time to move had not yet come. Absolute stillness was demanded now.

  ‘I made my statement to the police at the time,’ she replied, as though he were an impertinent journalist and she a star caught in an indiscretion. ‘They questioned me on several occasions and I said everything I have to say then, while it was all fresh in my mind. The report must still be on file somewhere. I really don’t know what you expect me to add now.’

  It was a bold sally, but it apparently worked. This Zen suddenly looked discomfited, ill at ease. She glanced at her watch again, then out of the window at the darkening lake.

  ‘Naldo Ferrero told me that he was your natural son by Leonardo Ferrero, and that you had encouraged him to apply for legal custody of a body recently discovered in the Dolomites on the grounds that it is that of his father.’

  For a moment, Claudia herself felt thoroughly confused. Don’t try and work out his strategy, she told herself. Boldness had worked once. Maybe it would work again.

  ‘That’s absurd!’

  She sighed and made a gesture indicating how painful it was for her to admit this.

  ‘The fact is, Naldo is something of a fantasist. He always was as a child, but that’s natural enough. Now, though… My husband, Gaetano, was a hard man in many ways. The barracks and the home were all one to him. Orders were orders, and the slightest disobedience was punished. Naldino took after my side of the family rather than his, which of course made matters worse for both of them. As Gaetano became more intransigent and repressive, his son grew ever more rebellious. And this was an era when rebellion was in the air, remember. Anyway, after Gaetano died in that unfortunate accident, Naldino somehow convinced himself that he was not his son at all, that his real father had been someone quite different. He even changed his name, as though to try and prove it. It’s quite a common psychological phenomenon. I believe there’s even a word for it, although it escapes me at the moment.’

  Zen nodded sympathetically.

  ‘But how could he have known which name to change his to? Where could he have got the idea that his real father was someone who died before he had been born? Someone he had never met or even heard of?’

  This was a more difficult question, and one that she hadn’t had to face during her earlier questioning.

  ‘Oh, he’d heard of Leonardo,’ she found herself replying.

  ‘How?’

  ‘From friends.’

  ‘Friends of his?’

  ‘No, no. Friends of ours.’

  ‘Of you and Leonardo?’

  ‘Of me and my husband, of course.’

  Zen took out a packet of cigarettes and offered them to her. Claudia shook her head.

  ‘May I?’ he asked.

  She nodded distractedly. When was the ferry? There was something in the man’s polite manners, long silences and seemingly ingenuous questions that made her absolutely certain that he already knew all the answers and was merely toying with her to see what more he could get her to admit to before his final lethal pounce. Had he found The Book? She’d been a fool to keep it, but it had never occurred to her that anyone would take any interest in events which now seemed, even to her, like ancient history.

  ‘I’m sorry, signora, I don’t quite understand. Your son was born in 1974, correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘While your husband died in 1987?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So Naldo was thirteen at the time of his death.’

  Suddenly she saw her way clear.

  ‘Yes. A very delicate age, very difficult. Which is probably why he came to terms with the tragedy by denying that he had ever been his father in the first place.’

  Zen’s brow remained comically furrowed.

  ‘But, I repeat, why choose as his surrogate father someone who was also dead, and had been from shortly before his own birth?’

  Claudia made a large gesture.

  ‘Well, one would have to be some sort of Freudian doctor to explain that! All I know is that he decided at a certain point that his biological father, as they say these days, was a young man who formed part of what we jokingly called the ‘stable’, the group of junior officers that Gaetano had assembled around him in the regiment, and who all came quite frequently to our house.’

  ‘That group included Leonardo Ferrero?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Nestore Soldani?’

  She looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Yes, him too.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘I can’t remember all their names. It’s so long ago.’

  A tiny white speck in the gloaming announced the imminent arrival of the ferry.

  ‘But, I repeat, how could your son possibly have heard of Leonardo Ferrero, who died in an accident involving a military aircraft the year before he was born?’

  He glared at her across the table, all charm now stripped away.

  ‘Unless of course Naldo really is your love child by Leonardo Ferrero, as he claims you told him. That would also explain your late husband’s animosity to him, assuming, as I think we may under the circumstances, that he had either found out or guessed the truth.’

  Claudia scooped up her bag and got to her feet, saying something about needing to visit the washroom for a moment. She rounded the table, pushing against Zen’s back. A moment later she was through the door and running as fast as she could towards the ferry dock about thirty metres away. The boat was already alongside, the lines secure. She waved frantically, praying that the deckhand would see her and hold the gangplank long enough for her to board.

  He did. She clomped breathlessly down
the short flight of steps into the forward saloon and sank into one of the plastic upholstered seats. The boat’s engines revved up, then settled back into a steady purring rhythm for the ten-minute crossing to Paradiso, the southern district of Lugano where her hotel was located. She’d done it!

  But so had he, she realized as a figure appeared at the far end of the empty saloon. For a moment she was terrified that he was going to come at her as Gaetano had when she’d confronted him with the truth about her pregnancy, slapping and punching her face and breasts and screaming ‘ Puttana! ’

  Nothing like that. He just sat down opposite her, quite calmly, another passenger on his way back to Lugano. The deck¬ hand came round and clipped her return, sold Zen a single, and then went back to join his colleague in the wheelhouse, leaving them alone.

  ‘Did he have a tattoo?’

  Say nothing.

  ‘The body they found, the one that your son is trying to reclaim, had a tattoo. A woman’s face.’

  Say nothing.

  ‘So did Nestore Soldani, another of your husband’s “stable”. I spoke to his widow earlier this afternoon.’

  ‘His widow?’

  ‘Soldani, also known as Nestor Machado Solorzano, was murdered here a few days ago. Blown up in his car as he returned home to Campione after a meeting with a person or persons unknown.’

  Claudia stood up. They were a good hundred metres off the eastern coast of the lake now, surely back in Swiss waters. She could finally allow herself to get angry.

  ‘I don’t want to listen to any more of this nonsense! I’ve had enough of all your tricks and teasing, understand? He fell down the stairs! That’s what happened and you have no proof to the contrary. He was a cripple by then, for God’s sake! He fell down the stairs. That was the conclusion arrived at by the investigating magistrate at the time and it’s never once been queried, not once in all these years. How dare you poke your nose in here now, in a foreign country where I’m on holiday, trying to find a little peace and happiness after so much pain, and bring up the whole horrible business again? How dare you? You have no standing here. The Swiss wouldn’t let you clean the toilets in their country!’

  The ferry was approaching the dock. Claudia went up the staircase and out on deck. Zen followed, catching up with her as the ferry came alongside.

  ‘Signora…’ he began, but got no further.

  ‘Shut up! Leave me alone! You’re just a bully, like all policemen. Well, you don’t scare me, do you hear? I’ve lived my life, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Go to hell! Dio boia, Dio can, vaffanculo! You can’t do anything to me!’

  The deckhand was watching them with alarm, trying to work out what was going on. It occurred to Claudia that she and Zen might well appear to him to be the two lovers she had fantasized about earlier, having a classic end-of-the-affair row. She strode down the gangplank and off under the trees. Zen made no attempt to follow, but his voice floated after her from the deck of the ferry which was already pushing off for its final run down to the city centre.

  ‘I’m not going to do anything to you.’

  The words were reassuring, but there was a disquieting undercurrent to them. It took her a moment to work out what it was. ‘ Non ti faccio niente, io.’ He’d addressed her in the familiar form used only with family, close friends, inferiors and people you are condescending to. What a nerve! The emphatic personal pronoun at the end added another dimension to her unease. ‘I’m not going to do anything to you.’ So who was? Was he going to try and enlist the aid of the local police chief? The idea was ridiculous. The Swiss were fiercely independent and notoriously bureaucratic. This Zen would need every legal document under the sun, translated into three languages, before they’d even begin to consider arresting a foreign tourist happily spending her money and causing no disturbance whatsoever on their territory.

  The clerk at the desk handed her her key with that exquisitely diffident yet friendly courtesy which all the staff seemed to possess as a birthright. Claudia was of course a regular, and a generous tipper. She could afford it. The extent of her fortune, once Gaetano’s will was read, had quite bewildered her. Where had all this money come from? Not from his salary as an army officer, that was for sure. She’d asked Danilo, who had muttered about it being one of those things — and how many there were in this life! — that was better not enquired into too deeply.

  In her room, immaculately remade in her absence, she opened the windows and then the shutters on to the balcony overlooking the lake. Then she called room service. A plate of Scottish wild smoked salmon, a green salad and a bottle of champagne. A rich elderly widow’s sad supper. Well, so be it. She didn’t normally drink alone, despite Danilo’s snide comment, but tonight she felt like getting slightly tipsy. She deserved it, after what she’d just been through.

  The fumes of the lake rose to meet her as she went out on to the balcony, like the bad smell of a goldfish bowl in urgent need of cleaning. Across the lake, the lights of the casino at Campione were reflected in the torpid water. What had this Zen meant about her husband being a gambler at games they didn’t play in the casino? Gaetano had never understood gambling, but she had understood it immediately. It brought meaning to your life, if only for a while and at a potentially high price. But there was no price too high to be paid for meaning, nothing that could replace it, nothing that could compare. What was money besides that infinite gift? And, money aside, it didn’t matter whether you won or you lost. Something had happened, your life had been structured for a few hours, you wept or you exulted. It was like sex. Yes, that was the only thing that could compare.

  There was a discreet knock at the door and a waiter entered with a wheeled trolley bearing her meal. She tipped him lavishly and then, the moment he had left, tore into the salmon and open-throated the wine almost with desperation, like Leonardo making love shortly before he grew cold and dropped her, eager to get it over with before his appetite failed him.

  When hers was sated, she surveyed the wreckage of the dinner tray. It had all been so clean and perfectly arranged, and she’d turned it into this mess. Still, it was another meal, she thought with a slight burp. And more meals tomorrow and the day after, and more burps. But no more gambling. No more illusions of meaning, however fleeting. She stepped back out on to the balcony with her glass and the bottle of champagne. Far below, the fan-shaped pattern of the paving stones seemed to beat gently, like wings. She was a little drunk, she realized. And she’d never had a head for heights. Unless that was precisely what she had had, and to excess.

  From a room close by, the strains of a solo violin rose above the miasma of the lake, probably the soundtrack to a movie or TV programme that someone was watching. The encounter with that policeman seemed as distant as her childhood. She found herself muttering the German lullaby rhyme which her mother had used to send her to sleep. Her parents had met in the Alto Adige shortly before the war. Her mother spoke almost perfect Italian, but her native tongue was German. Claudia’s father, however, had forbidden the language to be spoken in the house. It had remained a secret between mother and daughter, and seemed all the more powerful and precious for that.

  How did the rhyme go? Her mother had later claimed it was a poem by a famous writer, but she had always had intellectual pretensions, and the verses were too natural and artless ever to have been written down. Despite the innumerable times her mother had recited it to her, she could only now remember scattered phrases, and realized that she had no precise idea what they meant. ‘ Nun der Tag mich mud gemacht… wie ein mudes Kind… Stirn, vergiss du alles Denken…’ Something about children feeling tired at the close of day, and it being time to stop doing and thinking, time to let go.

  If only she could! But she knew what Zen’s appearance portended. He thought he had been so clever, apparently talking about Leonardo and Naldino and Nestore, but she had seen right through him. The discovery of Leonardo’s body had clearly triggered a reinvestigation of all the circumstances surrounding
Gaetano’s death. A new man had come along, insusceptible to the pressures that had been brought to bear on Inspector Boito, and much better informed about the affair with Leonardo, and he had instantly realized the truth. It was all very well to say that he was powerless while she remained in Switzerland, but she couldn’t stay at the hotel for ever. And the moment she returned home, he would be watching and waiting, biding his time. They might even arrest her at the frontier. What would she get? Twenty-five years? A life sentence. She would die in prison.

  From the room below the music drifted up again, the same theme, but this time taken up by the whole orchestra. Below, the splayed paving stones of the courtyard glowed up at her. ‘ Und die Seele unbewacht will in freien Flugen schweben…’ She’d understood that die Seele meant l’anima, the soul, and then there was something about flying, but she’d never understood unbewacht. And when she’d asked her mother, she had started to weep and then said, ‘It means unwatched, unsupervised, without anyone to tell you what to do or say or feel or how to behave or anything else. It means to be at perfect liberty, free at last.’

  At the time, this outburst had just made the idea more problematic, not to mention threatening in some sense, as though a taboo had been broken. Nor had she really understood what die Seele meant, except as an ideal version of herself, with better hair and none of the acne and period pains and the fat which had been quite a big problem at the time, although it had turned out all right later on. And she certainly hadn’t understood unbewacht. Watched over was exactly what she had so desperately wanted to be, and particularly when she was asleep, except that her parents weren’t up to the job. Her mother’s tears had been the final proof of that.

  It occurred to her for the first time that in her marriage to Gaetano, and even perhaps her affair with Leonardo, she had merely been replaying the hand of cards that her parents had been dealt, as if to prove to them posthumously that it could after all have been a winner.

  She leant over the balcony, gazing down at the paving stones spread out like interlocking angels’ wings. Unbewacht. She understood the word now all right, and she understood Seele and she understood her mother. She also understood, and it was perhaps her supreme moment, that this understanding had come too late, not as an epiphany but an epitaph.