Medusa az-9

by Michael Dibdin

  XIV

  The door was opened by a bearded man who ignored Aurelio Zen’s identification card and waved him into a large room insulated from the harsh external environment of the Milan suburbs both by a hovering layer of stringed music and by shelves of books stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, leaving only a minimal escape hatch in the form of the door through which Zen had entered.

  ‘Quite a change from the last time the police called on me,’ said Luca Brandelli. ‘That was back in the terrorist years. For some reason they’d got it into their heads that I knew where Toni Negri and the Red Brigades leaders were hiding out, so they went through the place with a bulldozer. A good third of my research files disappeared for ever.’

  ‘They weren’t returned?’

  ‘The files were. Shame about the contents. Still, one can’t have everything.’

  Brandelli was a stocky, powerful man of medium height, with a full head of loose white curls and a beard to match. He shuffled about the apartment in faded jeans, a baggy sweater and moccasins, as if to proclaim in advance that wherever he was taking his stand, it wasn’t on his appearance. No, he’d given up the journalism, he told Zen while he prepared a pot of Chinese green tea in the minuscule kitchen.

  ‘I can get by on my pension, more or less, so I’ve decided to devote my remaining years to writing a book.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘A definitive account, explanation and analysis of all the misteri d’Italia.’

  ‘A slim volume, then,’ commented Zen.

  ‘Virtually invisible.’

  They returned to the living room, temporarily bonded by this shared moment of irony. Brandelli walked over and turned off the radio.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Schubert after Mozart won’t do. That’s when everything started to go wrong. For all his facile melodic gush, Schubert was a neurotic. Even Beethoven, although eminently sane, couldn’t escape self-consciousness. Whereas Mozart had no self at all, in his music I mean. Nor should we forget that Karl Marx was born in 1818, and in Trier, a stagnating little provincial town on the Moselle with a glorious past as a Roman colony, a staid present at least thirty years behind the times, and no future to speak of. Some people argue that he rebelled against that very childhood, or at least forgot it. I disagree. You may forget your childhood, but your childhood does not forget you. To all intents and purposes Marx grew up in the 1780s, a child of the Enlightenment, a pre-Romantic. It was only when he went to Paris in his mid-twenties that he formulated his doctrine of “merciless criticism of everything existing”.’

  The two men sat down, Zen on a spongy sofa, his host on a creaky wicker chair opposite.

  ‘Marx always looked back to earlier eras of production — and hence of course social organization and personal psychology — with a great sense of warmth and nostalgia, just as I look back to the struggles of the working class in Genoa and Turin in the 1950s. Whatever those people were doing, and whatever mistakes they may have made in retrospect, they weren’t doing it for themselves. They were as selfless in their work as was Mozart, just as Marx’s vision of a socialist future was based on the sense of community, however wrongly organized, that still lingered in the Trier of his youth, but had since been obliterated by Romantic egotism. In Paris, it was all “Me, me, me! My feelings, my needs!”. He recognized the danger, and tried to avert it by his overt hostility to the most fashionable contemporary revolutionary movements, and above all by his lifelong labour to formulate a broad, dialectic solution which would transcend the individual in order to remake him. It was a noble attempt, but in the end it failed. The neurotic ego won. Schubert banished Mozart, and we’re still living with the consequences two hundred years later.’

  Aurelio Zen sipped his tea and said nothing. The room was very warm, almost suffocating. He wished that he had removed his coat, but to do so now might seem pointed. Luca Brandelli cleared his throat stagily.

  ‘But I think that I’m in danger of making my diagnosis appear a symptom of the disease,’ he said. ‘Enough from me, let’s talk about me. In what specific manner may I be of service to the authorities on this occasion?’

  Zen took his time about answering and sipped his tea, considering the best way forward.

  ‘I may be able to contribute a chapter to the book you’re working on,’ he said at last. ‘Or perhaps an episode, an anecdote. At worst, a footnote.’

  ‘Concerning what?’

  ‘Something that happened thirty years ago.’

  ‘Well, as I said, my records of that period are incomplete, and my memory is not what it used to be.’

  Zen nodded sympathetically.

  ‘Does the name Ferrero mean anything to you?’ he asked.

  Now it was Brandelli’s turn to take refuge in the tea ceremony.

  ‘Leonardo Ferrero,’ added Zen.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Possibly meaning yes, or possibly meaning no?’

  They exchanged a glance.

  ‘Possibly meaning I’d like to know a bit more about the nature of your interest in this affair before committing myself to an answer. As a good citizen, one naturally wishes to cooperate with the authorities, even though I note that in this instance they haven’t presented themselves with the necessary documentation to command an answer. Nevertheless, I still have a somewhat tattered and faded sense of journalistic honour and responsibility. So before going any further, and in the absence of the aforesaid official documentation, I would like to know a little more about the circumstances before replying.’

  Talkative, but a bit of a bore, thought Zen. But the man was obviously intelligent, and the combination of his articulate, professorial delivery and cuddly teddy-bear physique made it easy to understand the popularity he had once enjoyed in left- wing circles.

  ‘Let me outline the basic facts. A body has been discovered. It is as yet officially unidentified, but an individual has come forward and asserted that the dead man is one Leonardo Ferrero. I have been assigned to make preliminary enquiries. In the course of these, your name emerged as someone who had known this Ferrero.’

  He had actually been on the phone to the editorial offices of L’Unita and to the Questura in Milan for the best part of an hour from his hotel room in Lugano before identifying the correct name and full address of the journalist that Marta had remembered as either Brandoni or Brandini. A call to the Ministry would have cut the time to a few minutes, but the risk of his whereabouts being traced and reported was too great.

  Luca Brandelli looked at Zen in some wonderment.

  ‘Leonardo Ferrero, eh? Now there’s a name I never expected to hear again.’

  ‘You knew him, then?’

  Brandelli made a qualifying gesture.

  ‘We met. Once. Long ago.’

  ‘Under what circumstances?’

  ‘One moment. Are you asking me to identify the body?’

  Zen paused a moment, then shrugged.

  ‘Why not? It can’t hurt.’

  He took an envelope from his coat pocket and passed over the photographs taken by the Austrian caver who had descended into the blast pit. Brandelli looked through them and frowned.

  ‘Where are these?’

  ‘Photographs of the body in situ at the place where it was found. They’re not terribly clear, I’m afraid, and the face is not visible. Not that there was much left of it, according to the hospital in Bolzano.’

  ‘Bolzano?’

  ‘Where the corpse was taken. It was discovered in an abandoned military tunnel in the Dolomites. You may have heard about it on the news, although the story seems to have died now. Or been killed.’

  Brandelli handed the photographs back.

  ‘This makes no sense whatever,’ he said with finality. ‘To the best of my knowledge, Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero died when a military plane carrying him to Trieste exploded over the Adriatic.’

  Zen nodded.

  ‘According to the official records, Ferrero indeed died in a plane accident.’r />
  ‘Well, I don’t necessarily believe that it was an accident, but that’s another matter.’

  ‘Nevertheless, an individual with a purely personal interest in the matter and no political axe to grind has asserted that the body recently discovered under the circumstances I mentioned is that of Lieutenant Ferrero. The Dolomites are a long way from the Adriatic, and the body was discovered about two hundred metres underground.’

  ‘So, he’s wrong. Or crazy. An attention seeker. What proof does he offer?’

  ‘He says that he’s a blood relative of Ferrero and that DNA tests would validate his claims.’

  ‘Then do them.’

  Zen replaced his cup on its saucer and leaned back into the sofa, which immediately tried to swallow him. He pulled himself out of its maw and perched on the edge.

  ‘Unfortunately that’s not possible. About a week ago, the carabinieri raided the hospital in Bolzano at four in the morning and removed the corpse and all records of the preliminary post-mortem examination to an unknown destination. The Ministry of Defence is saying that the victim was a soldier who died in the course of an exercise testing a new nerve gas and that for safety reasons the cadaver was abandoned and the site sealed with explosives. Only it wasn’t sealed. Some cavers found their way in there, and I returned with one of them and inspected the area for myself. In short, this business has all the air of being a cover-up for yet another of our little Italian mysteries. I was wondering whether you could shed any light on it.’

  Zen rearranged himself on the edge of the sofa in an attempt to find a more comfortable position. There was an ashtray on the glass-and-steel coffee table. He took out his cigarettes and made an interrogative gesture. His host’s right hand eloquently indicated that there had been no need to ask.

  ‘Well, it was all a long time ago…’

  ‘That’s what everyone keeps telling me.’

  Brandelli got to his feet.

  ‘I was about to add, so I’d better go and retrieve my dossier on the subject.’

  He was back in less than a minute, holding a very slim buffcoloured file.

  ‘The police raid I mentioned earlier did not come as a complete surprise,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘I had therefore taken the precaution of moving some of the most sensitive material to a bank safety-deposit box.’

  Zen finished his cigarette and stubbed it out while Brandelli quickly skimmed the contents of the file.

  ‘Right!’ the journalist said. ‘My mind is duly refreshed and I will give you a brief guided tour of the salient facts. Off the record, of course, bearing in mind the lack of a search warrant.’

  ‘That’s fine. I’m operating off the record myself.’

  ‘Interesting. I’ve known the police do that on numerous occasions, needless to say, but they’ve never tried to enlist my help before. In fact they invariably treated me as an enemy.’

  Zen nodded. ‘Times change,’ he said. ‘In this case, it’s quite possible that our interests may ultimately coincide.’

  Brandelli poured them both more tea.

  ‘You astonish me, dottore. And at my age it’s very unusual to be astonished. Anyway, here we go. The year was 1973. I then worked for L’Unita and had already developed something of a reputation for investigative journalism thanks to various pieces which had won me the highest award in the profession, namely a number of death threats. One day I received yet another anonymous phone message. This time the caller claimed to have information to pass on regarding an affair of the highest national importance and wanted to arrange a suitable place and time for us to meet. It had to be in Verona, at the weekend and in the evening. He was very insistent about that.’

  ‘And you assumed that this was the set-up for an actual assassination, as opposed to the usual string of vague menaces and veiled threats.’

  ‘Precisely. Verona was a notorious hotbed of neo-Fascism at the time, and indeed since, so my only surprise was that the hit-man or his employers hadn’t realized this. Nevertheless, I couldn’t risk turning the caller down out of hand and possibly losing a scoop, so I set up an assignation at a pizzeria in Piazza Bra. I did not of course go there myself, but I enlisted the help of some of the Veronese compagni to keep an eye on the venue and let me know what happened. They reported that a young man had duly shown up at the agreed time. He had looked extremely nervous and preoccupied, had waited for about half an hour, looking up whenever anyone entered. When he left, a team of them followed discreetly. His destination turned out to be a local army barracks.’

  Zen put down his tea cup and lit another cigarette.

  ‘At which point you were no doubt reminded of the method they use to catch man-killing tigers in India,’ he said. ‘They tether a goat to a stake, and then when the tiger comes to eat the goat, the hunters emerge from the undergrowth and shoot it.’

  Brandelli beamed.

  ‘Our minds obviously work along similar lines, Dottor Zen. My contact was the goat, I was the tiger, and since I had not taken the bait that evening the hunters had not shown themselves. But a few days later the man called again. I apologized for having missed our first appointment and we made another. It was a matter of the greatest urgency, he said, a vital and shocking disclosure that would horrify the public.’

  Brandelli shrugged.

  ‘There was still a risk, of course, but the man’s tone of voice convinced me that he was either a trained actor or telling the truth. Besides, risk is part and parcel of the trade that I had chosen. At any event, we met. And the first thing he said, once we had exchanged the agreed code words, was that he was an army officer acting under orders.’

  Zen looked up sharply.

  ‘And you believed him?’

  ‘I believed him. His manner was that of a dutiful subordinate carrying out a task without regard for his personal feelings or opinions. He displayed no discernible political animus or involvement whatsoever. On the contrary, he remained completely detached throughout. His role was simply that of the go-between, the messenger, executing the orders that he had been given.’

  Zen raised his eyebrows.

  ‘He then proceeded to reveal the existence within the armed forces of a parallel entity consisting of selected officers organized into four-man groups. Only one man in each group had access to the next level of command, and none of them to any other groups.’

  ‘The classic cell structure, in other words.’

  ‘Indeed. An invention of the Bolsheviks. My informant claimed that the superior officer who had sent him was a member of one of these cells, but had lately grown disillusioned and now felt that it was his duty to bring the true purpose of the conspiracy to the attention of the public before it could be put into effect. Since he was closely watched at all times, he was doing so through an intermediary.’

  ‘And the purpose was?’

  ‘Nothing less than the overthrow of the elected government and the imposition of a military dictatorship.’

  Zen laughed.

  ‘You must have thought you’d won the lottery!’

  ‘It’s easy to laugh now,’ Brandelli retorted testily. ‘For that matter, it seemed pretty far-fetched to me even at the time. But there was so much we didn’t know about back then. We didn’t know about the CIA-funded stay-behind Gladio terrorist operation, for example, to be activated in the event of the Communists coming to power. Nor about Licio Gelli’s P2 organization, specifically intended to provide support and personnel in the event of a right-wing coup. And in which, lest we forget, the onorevole Silvio Berlusconi was enrolled with the membership number 1168.’

  Zen gave a chastened nod.

  ‘You’re right. I apologize.’

  ‘We didn’t know about any of that at the time, but what we did know was that the governance of this country was teetering on the brink during that whole decade. It seemed then, and continues to seem now, perfectly credible that certain people should have put in place a plan for bypassing the democratic process and seizing power in the name o
f “normalization” and “stability”. According to my informant, such a plan existed. Its code-name was Operation Medusa.’

  At that moment Aurelio Zen did something that anyone familiar with him would have regarded as very uncharacteristic. Whatever his faults, Zen was not physically clumsy, yet now he kicked the low table in front of him hard enough to overturn the tea pot.

  Luca Brandelli went out to the kitchenette, returning with a sponge to wipe up the spillage and brushing aside Zen’s apologies.

  ‘So what follow-up action did you decide on?’ Zen asked when order had been restored.

  Brandelli sighed.

  ‘I was still not completely convinced that it wasn’t a set-up,’ he said at length. ‘Not to murder me, but to plant information which could later be shown to be false, thereby discrediting myself, the paper I wrote for, and by extension the entire progressive movement of that period. In short, anyone who tried thereafter to expose any conspiracy of the extreme right — and there were plenty of them, as we now know — would be laughed off stage and told to pull the other one. Nevertheless, I couldn’t be entirely sure. I therefore displayed a cautious interest and arranged another meeting a few weeks later, with the excuse that I had to go to Cuba to research a lengthy article on political organization under Castro. That happened to be true, but my real reason for not cancelling the trip was to give the other side, whoever they were, a cooling-off period to reconsider the situation. If they were genuine, I reasoned, then they would re-engage on my return. If it was a put-up job, they might well think that they had been rumbled and drop the whole thing.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘On my return from Cuba, I learned of the plane crash over the Adriatic. The papers published photographs of the two victims, the pilot and the only passenger. The latter was identified as Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero of the Alpine Regiment, attached to a unit stationed in Verona. I instantly recognized him as my informant in the Medusa affair.’