Medusa az-9

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Might he have gone to visit your mother in Australia?’

  Paola Passarini shook her head decisively.

  ‘I would have heard about it if he had. “Why didn’t you come too? It’s at least a year since I’ve seen you!” Etcetera, etcetera.’

  The phone rang but was answered before Paola Passarini could reach it. She hovered in the arch to the next section of the room, listening intently. The young man could be heard talking in a deliberately low voice.

  ‘And I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you,’ she said to Zen, coming back again.

  Zen nodded and stood up.

  ‘What about your husband?’ he asked.

  Paola Passarini looked startled.

  ‘My husband? What does he have to do with it?’

  ‘I thought that perhaps he might have some idea where your brother is.’

  ‘Well, by all means feel free to ask him.’

  Her look was by now so intense that he finally understood.

  ‘I’m sorry, I meant…’

  He gestured with his head towards the sound of the low voice mumbling away.

  ‘That’s my son, Siro,’ was the reply.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He writes code.’

  ‘Code?’

  ‘For computers. He submits all his work online, so there’s no need to go in to the office every day. And he helps me out with the housekeeping bills. This arrangement makes sense for both of us.’

  There was an aggressive quality to her declaration that merely served to undermine it. She’d married young, Zen guessed, quite possibly following a pregnancy intended, like her brother’s volunteering for the army, to make a point. But the marriage had been a failure and now she was holding on desperately to the one remaining man in her life, lest she be left all alone. He felt sorry for Paola Passarini, but there was also something unwholesome about her, like fruit picked green that rots before it ripens.

  ‘Thank you for your time, signora, and please excuse the disturbance.’

  A door slammed and the young man strode back into the living area.

  ‘I’m going out for a while with Costanzo, Mamma.’

  ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Don’t know. I may spend the night at his place.’

  ‘Well, be sure to phone and tell me. You know how I worry otherwise.’

  In the end, the two men left the apartment almost at the same time, with the result that they found themselves waiting for the lift together. The resulting awkward silence was broken by Siro.

  ‘I think I know where my uncle might be.’

  Zen, whose only thoughts had been about where he was going to spend the night, looked at him in astonishment, but Siro didn’t volunteer anything more.

  Outside, the fog was thicker than ever. To Zen, it came as a merciful pall blanking out the horrors of the neighbourhood. Having grown up in Venice, it was hard for him to adjust to most other urban landscapes, let alone this psychotic collage of concrete brutalities unmitigated by any sense of order, never mind beauty. The young man pointed up the street, where a neon light blossomed in the plump miasma.

  ‘That’s where I’m meeting my friend. Come along and I’ll tell you my idea.’

  They walked the twenty metres or so to a bleak cafe set back in the facia of the apartment block. It was empty, and the barman looked as though he had been about to close. A game show blared from the television suspended from a pivot above the bar. Zen ordered a coffee, Siro a Coke.

  ‘It was after the other guy left that it came to me,’ he said.

  ‘The carabinieri officer who came yesterday?’

  ‘If that’s what he was.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Mamma was in the bathroom when the doorbell rang, so I answered it. He introduced himself as being from the carabinieri. I asked to see his ID and he had a card to back him up. But in the window on the opposite side of his wallet was another card identifying him, under a different name, as a member of the military secret service. I read it upside down.’

  Zen looked into the young man’s eyes for a very long time.

  ‘You don’t miss much,’ he said at last.

  Siro shrugged.

  ‘Maybe that’s why I ended up writing computer programs. It’s all a matter of detail. I’m good at that, it seems.’

  He shot Zen an incisive glance.

  ‘You didn’t know that the secret police were hunting for my uncle?’

  ‘I certainly hadn’t been informed,’ Zen replied evenly. ‘And SISMI is not noted for collaborating with other agencies. But there are often parallel investigations in progress. The right hand frequently doesn’t know what the left is doing.’

  Siro seemed tempted for a moment to make a witty remark, perhaps of a political nature, but thought better of it.

  ‘What did he look like?’ asked Zen.

  Siro shrugged.

  ‘A thug, basically. Broken nose, shaven head, workout shoulders. Gave me the creeps, to be honest. He kept asking Mamma about some “place in the country”. She told him that Gabriele doesn’t own any property other than his apartment in Milan. But that started me thinking. It was only when you showed up that I realized I had known the answer to his question all along.’

  Zen finished his coffee and ordered them both another round.

  ‘It appears that your uncle may be a crucial witness in a very complex case that we are investigating,’ he said. ‘We naturally want to interview him as soon as possible, but to be frank we are also concerned about his safety.’

  ‘You think he may be in danger?’

  ‘I’m convinced of it.’

  ‘And the secret service? Are they part of the protection or part of the threat?’

  Zen stared at the floor without answering for a very long time.

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that,’ he said at last.

  Siro nodded.

  ‘It’s just that I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to Uncle Gabriele. I don’t see much of him these days, but he was always very kind to me when I was young. And my idea may be nonsense. But I don’t want to betray him if he doesn’t want to be found.’

  Zen grasped the young man’s arm urgently.

  ‘If the servizi are after him, he will be found whether he wants it or not. So that’s no longer an issue. The only question is who gets there first. Would you rather it was them or me?’

  Siro gulped down some more Coke.

  ‘In the past, Mamma’s family were landowners,’ he said. ‘It all started about a hundred and fifty years ago, when they got wealthy from a brickworks they owned here in Milan. They bought an agricultural estate in the country with the profits, and added to it over the years. And a century later, when Gabriele was a boy, that’s where the family used to spend the summer months. My grandfather finally sold the property in the late sixties. It had been operating at a loss for some time. The contadini were all moving here and finding jobs in construction or factories, and the ones that were left were demanding higher wages and better conditions. That era was over. So he sold up, but the buildings remained. They were of no use for modern mechanized farming, but would have been far too expensive to demolish.’

  ‘You see them all over the Po valley,’ Zen commented, ‘but I’ve never been inside one.’

  ‘I have. My uncle took me there on a day trip from Milan. I must have been eight or nine at the time. To be honest, I could¬ n’t understand why he’d bothered. Just this huge expanse of fields, flat as a pancake, and drainage ditches and irrigation canals and rows of trees, and then the cascina itself, which was already falling into ruin. All I understood at the time was that this was tremendously important to him, and because I wanted to please him I pretended to be interested as he showed me around the stables and the byre, the hayloft, the threshing floor and all the rest of it. The light, he kept saying, that pearly quality you only get here in the Valpadana. And then he showed me the little room he’d used when he was a child, up
in the old dovecote above the family house, with all his books and a view for miles. “That was the only time in my life when I’ve been truly happy,” he told me. And I believed him, even though to me it was just a broken-down stinking ruin.’

  Aman dressed in jeans and a leather jacket opened the door.

  ‘ Ciao, Siro!’ he called over. ‘Sorry about the delay, but this fog…’

  Siro gestured to Costanzo to wait.

  ‘You think he’s there now?’ Zen asked.

  ‘He might be. He would feel safe there, I know that.’

  ‘And where is it?’

  ‘Ah, that I can’t tell you. We arrived at some small local railway station, I’ve forgotten the name, then cycled along these flat country roads for what seemed like hours. Somewhere north of Cremona, I think. And now I must go.’

  The two young men left. The barman reached for the remote control to turn off the television.

  ‘Wait!’ Zen told him.

  The television game show had given way to the news while he and Siro had been talking. The presenter was now running through the minor items at the end of the bulletin, the sweepings from the day’s events. It was the video of the hotel that had attracted Zen’s attention. An expressionless voice-over explained that a female Italian tourist had fallen to her death from the balcony of her room in Lugano. The Swiss police were treating it as an accident. Her name had been given as Claudia Giovanna Comai, a former resident of Verona.

  ‘Call me a taxi,’ Zen told the barman abruptly.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘The station.’

  The barman shrugged.

  ‘Frankly, with the weather like this it would be quicker to walk.’

  Zen did exactly that. From Porta Garibaldi he took the metropolitana to the Central Station, where he caught the last train to Verona with twenty minutes to spare.

  XVI

  The worst part was having to take the underground. There was something aggressively demotic about this system of transportation that never failed to remind Alberto of everything that was wrong with the country. From the security point of view, however, it had the virtue of near-total anonymity.

  Lepanto, his local station was called, after the street where the station was situated. Below ground, next to the tracks, the walls were plastered with huge advertisements in French informing the hordes of blacks pouring in from North Africa how they could telegraph the money they made illegally in Italy back to their starving broods in the desert, so that they too could hire a scafista to smuggle them in to pillage the wealth of Europe.

  The platforms were packed with jostling, raucous, overexcited students from the high school on Viale delle Milizie. How many of them had the slightest clue what Lepanto signified? The seventh of October 1571. The decisive naval victory of Christianity over Islam, settling that matter for another four centuries. News as up-to-date as today’s headlines, but where were the Sebastiano Veniers and the Augustino Barbarigos of today? Cervantes had served among the Spanish forces during that encounter, and had sustained injuries that had permanently maimed his left hand, but he counted Lepanto ever afterwards as the most glorious day in his life, beside which the composition of Don Quixote was a mere bagatelle.

  The letter from Gabriele had arrived two days earlier. Alberto had at once forwarded the envelope, though not of course the contents, to the service’s Scientifica unit. Their forensic experts had found minute traces of corn, fertilizer, mould and birdshit. An agricultural location was evidently indicated, but that and the Crema postmark was all there was to go on. However a little discreet research in the provincial land registry office had revealed that the Passarini family once owned an agricultural estate in the Valpadana. Cazzola, who had already interviewed Gabriele’s sister Paola without result, had been dispatched there on Friday to do some preliminary investigation. His call had arrived that morning.

  ‘I’ve visited the property, capo. I took some photographs and I’ve got a full description, but in accordance with your orders I didn’t investigate further.’

  ‘Very good. How soon can you get back to Rome?’

  ‘In a few hours. By this afternoon at the latest.’

  ‘We need to meet in person so that I can fully debrief you. Location seven, time D.’

  ‘ D’accordo, capo.’

  The orange train finally disgorged itself from the tunnel, almost unrecognizable beneath the graffiti that obliterated even the windows, huge curvy garish crazed capital letters spelling God knew what, but certainly nothing sane or good. As if that wasn’t enough, at the Spagna stop the carriage was invaded by a mob of Veronese football hooligans who packed the space, drinking limoncello out of a communal bottle, smoking in open defiance of the law, and screaming ‘ Roma, Roma, vaffanculo! ’ in an obscene, pagan chant. Alberto was dearly tempted to take out one of his numerous false IDs and arrest the lot of them on the spot, but of course that was impossible under the rules of engagement.

  In the event, the soccer fans got off two stations later at Termini, presumably to catch a train back north. Unfortunate¬ ly the few ordinary solid Italians who had been aboard also left, to be replaced by a mob of blacks and gypsies and asylum seekers who had been begging, picking pockets and selling counterfeit junk outside the main railway station all day, and were now going home to their illegal squatter camps on the fringes of the city. With a slight chill, Alberto suddenly realized that he was the only Italian in the carriage.

  Nothing happened. If anything the atmosphere grew warmer and more relaxed as the stations ticked away. All the foreigners were chatting away to each other, laughing and telling stories in their barbaric tongues. Alberto was hesitant to admit it to himself, but what it felt like, to be perfectly honest, was something very similar to the society in which he had grown up back in the fifties. Here too there was that sense of community and of shared experience that had all but vanished from the peninsula during his lifetime. He could of course never feel at home with these people, but they seemed to feel at home with each other, each in his own clan with its own language and traditions. What did the Italy of today have to offer in return? That pack of drunken football yobs, or a bunch of flashy yuppies with one spoilt designer child in tow like a pedigree dog. We’ve lost something, he thought. We’re stronger in lots of small ways, but they’re stronger in one big way.

  Nevertheless he did not relax his guard. When he left the train at Cinecitta, one stop before the terminus, a group of four Moroccans or Senegalese followed him up the escalator. They were intensely black, all dressed in loose, brightly patterned cotton robes, their skin burnished like some precious metal. As he reached ground level, a gust of cold air blew in through the portal leading to the street. They’re going to freeze in that desert gear, he thought with a mixture of admiration and contempt, buttoning up his heavy overcoat and lighting a cigarette.

  Suddenly they were all around him, closed in like a pack of wild dogs, one of them demanding something in mangled Italian. Alberto had no idea what he was saying. He knew only that the tone was loud, insistent and menacing, and that he was all alone. He instinctively pulled his knife and stabbed out at the nearest of the four, but the man was no longer there. Alberto whirled around, carving the air to left and right, until an inexorable grip stilled his wrist, immobilizing the knife. Two brown eyes, infinitely wide and deep, looked into his.

  ‘What sort of animal are you?’ said one of the men.

  And then it was over and they were gone, striding away like gods, laughing and talking amongst themselves, not bothering to glance back and see if he was coming after them. They’d even left him the knife, because for them he didn’t count. He was just a sad old man who had panicked because some strangers had asked him for a light at the entrance to an underground station.

  ‘ Ma che razza di animale sei? ’ Well, he’d soon show them the answer to that. Not those illegal immigrants, who would never dream of bringing the incident to the attention of the authorities, thank God, but the only tw
o people who still mattered. They’d soon find out exactly what sort of animal he was! He checked his watch, but there was no need to worry. ‘Time D’ was still a good twenty minutes off, and it would take him no more than half that to reach the spot. He had timed the route carefully, as he always did, although he had never used ‘Location seven’ before. It was somewhere he had been saving for a long time as a ‘one-time-only’ venue, in much the same way that he had nurtured Cazzola along for many years as a potential one-time-only resource, should the need arise.

  He had spotted Cazzola shortly after taking up his post as a divisional commander at SISMI’s headquarters. He had already formed a clear impression of the kind of man he was looking for — young, insecure, ambitious, diligent, malleable but not too bright — and Cazzola fitted this identikit portrait to perfection. Alberto had taken him under his wing, flattered and encouraged him, and arranged for him to be promoted into a meaningless but fine-sounding role as his personal aide-de- camp. Within a year, he owned Cazzola. ‘You’re like a father to me,’ the young man had once blurted out.

  Once Alberto’s authority had been established beyond question, he had tested out his protege on a few minor but strictly illegal missions of no real importance in themselves. The object had been to ensure that Cazzola was prepared to perform any and all tasks under Alberto’s personal direction and authorization, reporting only to him, and to keep quiet about them at the time and afterwards. He had passed these tests with flying colours.

  So when the long-dreaded eventuality finally came to pass, Alberto had the instruments he needed to hand. Over the years, he had used the resources of the servizi to keep track of the other two former members of his cell. Nestore’s move to Venezuela, and the change of name and citizenship that followed, had thrown him off the scent until Soldani had solved the problem himself by enlisting Alberto’s help in setting up various illicit but lucrative deals involving petroleum and guns. With an antiquarian bookshop licensed with the city of Milan under his own name, Gabriele had posed no such problem. In both cases, Alberto’s approach had been oblique and tacit. Each year on the anniversary of Leonardo’s death, he had sent them both a blank postcard of the Cellini bronze depicting Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa, as a reminder both of the event that would link them for the rest of their lives and also of the fact that he knew where they lived.