Medusa az-9

by Michael Dibdin

  Back in the Fiat, he decided to take a quick look at the remains of Claudia and Gaetano Comai’s country property. It was only a few kilometres away, and the nearest link road to the autostrada lay in that direction anyway. Following Armando Boito’s instructions, he located the filling station easily enough, then turned left down a street along the side of the new apartment block. About three-quarters of the way down, what was obviously the original nineteenth-century wall of the estate replaced the modern cast-iron fence mounted on a concrete base installed by the developers. The old stone wall continued around the corner at the next cross-street, running along the rear of the property. At its mid-point, a green wooden door was inset in the wall. Stickers on the rear bumper of a battered white Toyota parked next to it exhorted people to say no to NATO genocide bombing in Serbia, save the whales, and think globally but act locally.

  There was an odd, disturbing sound in the air, presumably a dog shut up here to guard the property, far from the snuffly intimacy and comforting odours of the pack. Single dogs had become the norm these days, Zen reflected as he opened the back door of the car and unlatched his suitcase. Single children too. He’d been an only child himself, of course, but things had been different back then. In the neighbourhood of Venice where Zen had grown up, there had been a community of children who played and learned together, swearing and daring and egging each other on, tussling for rank and status, inventing elaborate games for which no expensive products were necessary, exploring their territory and staging raids and mock battles with their rivals to either side. But all that had gone. Now both dogs and children had to try and make sense of life all on their own. No wonder they whined so much.

  He approached the door in the wall, holding the small toolkit that he had removed from his suitcase. He had acquired this useful piece of equipment during his years as an inspector in Naples, when a petty thief had unwittingly blundered into the middle of a major operation Zen had been involved in. The burglar had gladly agreed to trade his freedom for a vow of silence and a set of his working instruments, plus a crash course in how to use them.

  They had served Zen well on many occasions, but one glance at the lock told him that they would be of no use here. This was an old-fashioned barrel lock wrought by hand out of iron, contemporary with the original villa. It might have caused a slight problem even for the Ministry’s technicians. Zen’s bag of tricks, designed to cope with modern industrial products, would be powerless against it.

  The wailing sounded out again, louder and more prolonged than before. Zen glanced at the white Toyota. It had the old- fashioned number plates starting with the two-letter code for the province where the vehicle was registered, in this case Pesaro. He grasped the handle of the garden door and pushed his shoulder against it. The door stuck for a moment on the stone ledge at the bottom, then swung open.

  The remaining strip of garden consisted of dense shrubbery against the wall to either side and between the thrusting lower trunks of deciduous trees much too large for this space. A clearly-trodden path led off through this miniature glade, and Zen followed it past outcroppings of bushes and ground cover to a wall of giant cypresses where the path curved back, eventually revealing a diminutive brick house in the corner of the garden.

  The wailing burst out with renewed vigour and volume, peaking in howls of grief with indecipherable words embedded in them. Zen stopped a few metres short of the little building. He knew now what he would find there, and had no wish to cause embarrassment by intruding. He could easily have slipped away unnoticed, but instead he continued to the low front door and opened it.

  He looked cautiously around the tiny room before entering, knowing from experience how easily grief could find relief in violence, but there was no one there. To his left, between the windows, hung a mirror covered in black cloth. To his right, a miniaturized dresser with a central cupboard and many smaller cabinets and drawers to either side. At the far end, a table and chairs, a stove and fireplace, and another door. It was from there that the sounds were coming.

  Zen stooped to clear the low beamed ceiling. The air was chill and smelt powerfully musty. He opened the door at the far end into an even smaller room. There was a chest of drawers on the same scale as the dresser in the main room. The top drawer was open. On a low wooden bed beneath the single window, Naldo Ferrero sat slumped forward and weeping uncontrollably. On his knees lay an open scrapbook of the kind in which Zen had once arranged the collection of railway tickets given to him by his father.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Zen said quietly.

  Naldo Ferrero leapt to his feet, wiping his tears away and throwing the scrapbook down on the bed.

  ‘How dare you come here?’ he shouted furiously. ‘You killed my mother! What did you say to her, you bastard? You bullied her, didn’t you? You threatened her with God knows what and she threw herself off that balcony in terror and despair!’

  ‘Control yourself, Signor Ferrero. Your mother died in Lugano. How could I have interrogated her there? The Italian police have no jurisdiction in Switzerland. Besides, her death was the result of a tragic accident. At any rate, such is the view of the Swiss authorities, who are famously efficient and neutral.’

  He was almost caught off guard when Naldo suddenly lashed out with his fist, but the space was too confined and the intended blow low and wide. Zen simply moved back a step, neither doing nor saying anything. As if appalled at his own temerity, Ferrero pushed past him and ran out of the house. Zen bent over the bed and picked up the scrapbook. It opened naturally about a quarter of the way through, for a reason that was immediately obvious. Ten photographs had been glued to the facing pages at this point.

  All had been taken in a large garden. The first six showed a young man, the next two a woman of about thirty. The man might almost have been as young as sixteen or seventeen, with the lean, wiry body of an athlete, close-cut black hair and a guarded gaze laden with some emotion that Zen couldn’t quite read in the grainy, low-quality, black-and-white prints. In two of the shots he was wearing casual clothes with the oddly comical air of a style that is out of date but not yet classic. In three others he was in a bathing suit, in one case swimming on his back down a small pool. The remaining one presented him stretched out on the bed that Zen could see by turning his head, stark naked and apparently asleep.

  The photographs of the woman had been rather more carefully composed, avoiding the amputational framing and dodgy focus evident in those of the man. The subject, however, was more problematic, despite the fact that Zen recognized her immediately. The younger Claudia had never been beautiful, so much was clear, but the look she gave the camera — as opaque in its way as the young man’s — revealed her to have been as troubling as she was troubled. Hers was one of those faces where a certain combination of daring, desperation and sexual greed transforms plain, pudgy features into something far more potent than standard ‘good looks’.

  Her body, amply revealed by the yellow bikini she wore, provided a powerful bass to this disturbing siren song. The fact that she was slightly overweight and teetering on the brink of an early middle age added a final note. Glancing back at the shots of Leonardo, Zen realized that the look in his eyes was one of fear. This might have seemed perfectly natural under the circumstances, but the quantity and depth of the young man’s emotion was somehow disproportionate to the simple fact that he was screwing his commanding officer’s wife. Leonardo had been afraid of him, yes, but in some odd way he had been even more afraid of her.

  By the time the last two photographs were taken, either Claudia or Leonardo must have worked out how to operate the timed shutter release function on the camera, since these showed both of them posed awkwardly in their swimsuits by the pool. These shots were the most powerfully suggestive of all. Zen vaguely remembered learning at school about certain atoms — or was it molecules? — that would ‘bond’ with others because they possessed a particle that the other lacked. The possibility for sniggery doppi sensi had been only too clear
at the time, but he had never realized the wider implications until now. These photographs made it plain that Gaetano Comai’s wife and Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero had been doomed from the moment they met.

  How they chose to deal with it was of course another matter, but that was in very little doubt from the moment that Zen turned back to the beginning of the scrapbook. This consisted of densely packed lines of handwriting in dark green ink, a journal of the affair evidently started shortly after it began. It would have taken at least an hour to read the whole thing, for it ran to almost seventy-five large pages, and Claudia proved to have had a prolix and evasive prose style, short on details but very long indeed on feelings, speculations, afterthoughts, commentary and rhetorical questions. Keenly aware that he could spare not hours but minutes, if that, Zen opted for a heuristic method, dipping and scanning, skipping and noting.

  His initial researches told him little except for the fact, reading between the lines of loopy handwriting, that Leonardo’s part had initially been passive. It was Claudia who had initiated the affair when the young lieutenant appeared at the villa one summer afternoon to return some books to his commanding officer. As it happened, Gaetano Comai was away on army business, but other business soon resulted. Before long, Lieutenant Ferrero started turning up regularly at the villa, always on days when it was known that Gaetano and the staff would be absent.

  He was about to put the book down again when he noticed that the thumbed softness at the edge of the used pages continued for a further distance before reverting to the hard cut edge of the original volume. Turning over two more blank sheets, he found the text resuming, but in what at first appeared a different hand. The pen was different too, a common blue ballpoint, and the writing tighter, harder and more slanted. There were three pages in all, and he read them very quickly.

  Naldo Ferrero was standing immediately outside the front door, as if waiting for him to emerge.

  ‘I’m sorry I lashed out at you,’ he said in a contrite tone.

  ‘Have you filed that judicial application to recover your father’s body?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ve been busy. But I’m still working on it.’

  Zen looked him in the eyes.

  ‘Signor Ferrero, when we met previously I promised to help you to the limits of my ability in return for your cooperation. I regret to say that I have been unsuccessful, but I will give you a word of advice which you would do well to take. Do not contact the judiciary about this. Do not make any further enquiries, either officially or unofficially. Go back to La Stalla, marry Marta if she’ll have you, and try and forget the whole thing. One man has already been murdered because of his connection with this affair. A second has gone to ground under a virtual sentence of death. If you pursue this matter, you may well become the third. There are very large interests at stake, and the people concerned are both powerful and ruthless. In any case, there’s nothing to be gained. I’m afraid it’s virtually certain that your father’s body no longer exists in any recognizable form. Put it all behind you and get on with your life.’

  Back behind the wheel, Zen took out all his repressed emotion on the hapless rental car, forcing it mercilessly around the tight curves and along the infrequent straights, blasting other traffic with the horn and smashing the gears down to pass. At last he reached the autostrada, heading first west and then south to Cremona. When he reached the service station at Ghedi, he parked at the rear of the premises, well out of sight of the main buildings, between two huge red trailer trucks marked Transport Miedzynarodowy with an address in Poland. In the service area he bought a small electric torch, and then ordered coffee and a grappa and took them all to one of the stand-up tables. His hands were trembling so much that it was all he could do to get the cup and the glass to his mouth.

  Some years earlier, on a return trip to his native Venice, Zen had inadvertently caused the death of a childhood friend by putting too much pressure on him at a vulnerable moment. Now it seemed to have happened again. There had been no way that he could have foreseen the consequences of his actions, but a sense of self-disgust remained. He only hoped that he might be granted an opportunity to make what amends he could.

  XVIII

  The first time the car passed by, Gabriele was heating up a packet of dried mushroom soup to which he’d added some fresh porcini from a long-remembered patch in a thicket near the river. In a minor miracle that seemed to collapse the intervening years, it had turned out still to be there. The second time, when the same car passed by in the opposite direction, he was eating the soup with some bread bought in the local town three days earlier. Dunked in the creamy brown broth, it was just about palatable.

  Despite the indifferent light, he was also reading — in a very nice, tight seventh-edition copy (Hachette, 1893) — Hippolyte Taine’s Voyage en Italie. A memory popped into his mind of a friend who had noticed one of the annual postcards of Perseus holding the Medusa’s head, without of course understanding its significance, and had commented that if we could travel back to Cellini’s Florence and vice versa, we would be appalled by the smells and he by the noise.

  Time travel, the only kind Gabriele was still interested in, was unfortunately not yet possible, but his days here in the country had retrofitted his sense of hearing, which had become as acute as a cat’s. At the cascina, the silence was intense, broken only by the murmur of an occasional aeroplane far above. The little strada comunale that passed the estate had finally been paved, but there was almost no one left with any interest in using it. So when the car drove past the first time, it was an unusual event. Gabriele tracked it, noting the specific characteristics of the engine sound. When it then returned, stopping about a hundred metres beyond the driveway, probably in that copse where the long-abandoned back entrance to a neighbouring property joined the road, he put his book and his bowl of soup aside and grabbed the pack of supplies he had prepared.

  His plans had been made for a long time, and were based on a chance encounter with an elderly Chinese man in the Parco Sempione in Milan. In the midst of the usual crew of junkies, whores of both sexes and indigent homeless people, this tiny, wizened person had been tranquilly performing something that looked like art of some kind: a living statue modulating slowly but very surely between various ritualistic poses.

  Gabriele had approached the man and asked what he was up to. When he replied that he was practising a form of self- defence called ‘t’ai chi’, Gabriele had almost laughed. He associated the oriental martial arts with savage kicks, bone-breaking hand blows and a lot of screaming.

  ‘Your silent ballet is very beautiful, but how could it help if someone tried to beat you up?’

  ‘It would be very difficult for anyone to attack me,’ the man said in a quiet, almost apologetic tone.

  This time Gabriele did laugh.

  ‘But what on earth could you do if one of the scum who hang around here went for you with his fists, or even a knife?’

  The Chinese man regarded him with a gaze so dignified that it seemed a reproach.

  ‘I would so arrange matters that I was not in the place where the blow struck.’

  This was now Gabriele’s strategy. He had no way of knowing whether the solemn promises in his letter to Alberto about never revealing the truth about Leonardo’s death, still less Operation Medusa, had had any effect, but his last call to Fulvio had elicited the disquieting information that the win¬ dow of the shop had been smashed, and that a policeman had been there making enquiries regarding his whereabouts and those of his sister. He had almost been tempted to phone Paola for further details, but her line would almost certainly be tapped.

  He had decided to wait another few days before making a further appeal to Alberto. In the meantime, if anyone had managed to track him down and came looking for him, it would be almost impossible for them to approach the farm complex without him seeing or hearing them, and once they had entered he would so arrange matters that he was not in the place where they struck.

 
; The main gates of the cascina were closed and locked, but he had deliberately left the door inset into them slightly ajar. When pushed, it always squeaked on its hinges. It did so now. Gabriele ran quickly downstairs and out of the rear door of the casa padronale into the overgrown garden where the family had sometimes taken tea in the then-fashionable English manner, past the factor’s house, the laundry, the old stables and the porcilaie for the pigs and hens, then around the corner to the row of two-up, two-down houses formerly occupied by the workers on the estate. In through a rear window that he had left open and up to the first floor bedroom window.

  ‘Gabriele!’

  He recognized the voice immediately, but he had also been counting the footsteps ringing out on the stones of the resonant courtyard. There was only one set, so Alberto had come alone. He might of course have back-up in reserve, but that was unlikely. In a matter of this delicacy, whom could he trust? Either way, it was time to find out. He opened the window, lit one of the fireworks he had bought earlier and tossed it out.

  The answer was a gunshot. The bullet came nowhere near Gabriele, but the response had been immediate and without the slightest hesitation. Alberto must already have had a pistol in his hand. In a way, this came as a relief. The terms of engagement had been established. Now he had to keep moving, rapidly, and always in the same direction. This aspect of the business he had gleaned from further explanations provided by the t’ai chi performer. The art of the thing was to hypnotize your opponent with a seemingly ineluctable pattern of movement, a process with its own rhythm and dynamics, and then, at the last moment, disappear from it.

  But to do that, he first had to appear. This would inevitably be dangerous, but Gabriele’s army experiences had proved that despite his seemingly infinite capacity for irrational anxieties of all kinds, he was virtually insusceptible when it came to real, solid, substantial threats. Indeed, he almost welcomed them. They took his mind off the other stuff. Nevertheless, his army experience had also amply demonstrated that his fearlessness far exceeded his competence. ‘If this had been real, you’d be dead,’ he’d been told more than once in the course of a training exercise. Now it was real. This still didn’t scare him — as the child his imaginary fears revealed him to be, he still believed himself to be immortal — but it made him wary. He wasn’t afraid to risk his life, but he would have hated to give these bastards the satisfaction of killing him.