Medusa az-9

by Michael Dibdin

  Downstairs to the communal kitchen at the front of the house. A glance outside showed a figure prowling aimlessly about the aia in the rising mist, seemingly at a loss how to proceed. Now for the tricky part. Gabriele had eased the catch and hinges of the front door with olive oil, as he had those of the window upstairs, but there were no guarantees. It was strange to recall that one of the specialist courses the four of them had taken together all those years ago had been in close-quarter house-to-house combat. Nestore and Leonardo had been by far the best.

  He opened the door gradually, then slipped through the gap and ran as fast as he could to his left, weaving and ducking as they’d been trained to do. Two shots in rapid succession, sounding like thunder in the well of the yard. One bullet struck the brickwork to his right. Gabriele raced up the steps of the porcilaie and through the trapdoor at the top, bolting it behind him. Then it was out through the ventilation aperture — barred in the traditional chequered wrought-iron fashion, but he and his brother Primo had cut down the screws, leaving only the heads in place, to create another secret exit — and on to a branch of the huge poplar just outside. By now he was ten years old again. Up the steeply curving limb to the point where it overhung the roof, from which it was an easy drop on to the terracotta tiles.

  Reaching the crest of the roof, he produced another banger from his bag and launched it down into the courtyard. The explosion was satisfyingly loud, but this time there was no return shot. He worked his way along the rooftop to the slightly higher eaves of the factor’s house, and then went flying as a loose tile slipped free under his weight.

  By stripping his fingers on the remaining tiles he managed to save himself from going over the edge, but the net result was a twisted ankle which all but put paid to his original strategy. Grunting from the pain, he worked his way along the roof to the small stone tower housing the bell whose peals, audible for kilometres over the flatlands all around, had once governed every stage of the working day of everyone on the estate.

  Footsteps sounded out in the courtyard. Alberto had evidently either failed to open the trapdoor, or given up trying to find his way in the maze of buildings, a palimpsest dating from between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries. In one of his few lighter moments, his father had once joked that even the rats must get lost sometimes.

  ‘Stop playing these stupid games, Gabriele! We need to talk! I mean you no harm, I swear it. You startled me with that firework. Come out in the open. We just need to discuss what’s happened and agree on a strategy. You must know that that’s inevitable sooner or later. Let’s get it over and done with now. Then you can go back to Milan and get on with your life.’

  Gabriele’s plan at this stage of the performance had been to drop down through the hatch at the base of the belfry, go downstairs through the factor’s house, then dash across the remaining open side of the courtyard to the safety of the barchessale. Once there he would show himself briefly at intervals, always moving to his left. Alberto would intuitively assume that he would then proceed to the one remaining side of the rectangular structure, and would head for that to cut him off. Meanwhile Gabriele would pick up his bicycle from the niche where he had stored it and slip away through the gateway at the south-eastern corner of the cascina, through which the farm wagons used to enter and leave without disturbing the gentry, for whom the main entrance was reserved. While Alberto was fruitlessly searching the hayloft and byre, he could be off and away without anyone inside being any the wiser. He had done it often enough in the past.

  In those days he had simply sauntered over to the open- sided sheds and spent some time chatting with old Giorgio, who was responsible for the upkeep and repair of the wagons and farm equipment stored there, before slipping out of the porta dei carri, but now he needed to sprint rather than saunter, and with his ankle in the state it was, that was out of the question. In short, his concept had been perfect but his performance, as so often before, had let him down. Real t’ai chi masters didn’t twist their ankles.

  And the stakes were high. Despite the weasel words that continued to echo around the courtyard below, Alberto’s three shots had left no doubt in Gabriele’s mind about his intentions, and at ground level, in his present condition, he would be an easy target. As for the rear of the property, it was now overgrown with brambles at the north-east corner. That left only the roofs.

  The gently sloping ridges and troughs of terracotta tiles had been familiar territory to him in his teens, but even then he had never ventured there after sunset, in misty late autumn, with a throbbing ankle and a killer ready to shoot him down the moment he presented a silhouette against the dying light. The tiles were slippery with moss and dead leaves, many were missing and all were loose. In one spot, the roof of the wagon shed had collapsed entirely, leaving a gaping hole. It took more time than he had ever imagined to crawl and hobble round to the hay loft on the southern side of the complex. If his memory served, there was an elm somewhere about there which jutted out over the roof. He wasn’t looking forward to shinning down it, but there was no alternative, and at least he would be in complete cover the whole time.

  By now the light had almost completely gone, and he was still searching in vain for the remembered overhanging bough when the roof gave way beneath him. It was a gradual process lasting perhaps ten seconds: a gentle crack, a slow subsidence like sinking into a pile of pillows, then a deafening series of detonations and a terrifyingly quick descent.

  ‘Gabriele!’

  Alberto’s booming tones recalled him to the realities of the situation. He was aching, but otherwise uninjured. The fall had been short, ending on a mound of festering hay. He was inside the raised and open loft, lying on top of the section of collapsed roof. The only exit was over the side giving on to the courtyard. Then he heard the scrape of a ladder being lift¬ ed off its metal hook and placed against the wall.

  So prone to lethargy and despair in his everyday life, Gabriele showed no symptom of either now. His first thought was to fling one of the fallen tiles at his enemy the moment his head cleared the edge of the floor. Then he had an even better idea.

  Alberto’s torch and gun appeared before he did, the former’s cold barrel of compressed light scouting out the space before coming to rest on the freshly-fallen tiles and timbers lying on the hay. Its owner climbed up the remaining rungs of the ladder and stepped out on to the brickwork paving.

  ‘Gabriele?’

  There was no sound at all. Alberto walked over to the debris and inspected it with his torch, then turned and shone the powerful beam all around the floor of the loft. Then he started to search the space more carefully, pistol at the ready, obviously suspecting that his quarry was hiding under or behind one of the many pieces of agricultural detritus that littered the barn.

  Perched on the main roof-beam above, Gabriele awaited his moment, gripped the knotted climbing rope as he had so many times in the past while playing the game that he and his brother had called ‘flying skittles’. As Alberto returned towards the centre of the floor after overturning two casks and a wooden wheelbarrow, Gabriele launched himself into space, hurtling down and then twisting at the last moment on the rope to ram his uninjured foot into Alberto’s back.

  It was then that everything went out of control. Gabriele’s intention had simply been to disarm and subdue his opponent, but Alberto rolled over and slipped into the botola, the aperture designed for pushing hay down to the cattle in the byre below. For a moment his fingers clung desperately to the slimy brickwork, but there was not sufficient purchase and Gabriele could not reach him in time. There was a dull thump from below, then a scream that went on and on.

  A moment later, Gabriele heard another voice in the courtyard. So Alberto had brought back-up after all. He picked up the pistol and torch, but privately he acknowledged defeat. He would go down fighting, but he had exhausted his stock of feints and dodges and had no illusions about the final outcome.

  XIX

  ‘Gabriele Passarini
!’

  There was a long silence, broken only by a monotonous series of muffled bellows, as of an animal in pain, emanating from the shed below the loft. But how could there be an animal there? The farm had been abandoned for decades.

  Zen did not speak further, nor did he move. He just maintained his position at the centre of the former threshing floor, amid the weeds poking up between the paving slabs, as silent and immobile as the harmless if slightly dull statue in a town piazza.

  At long length, a voice sounded out from inside the hay loft.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘You are Passarini?’

  Another pause, interspersed by the dull howls of a third voice.

  ‘Help me, Gabriele! My leg is broken!’

  A torch beam shot out like a flick-knife, transfixing Zen.

  ‘Drop your weapon on the ground and move away from it,’ the man above said.

  ‘I am not armed. We need to talk. I have no intention of harming you.’

  A brief, caustic laugh.

  ‘Just what Alberto said! You people from the servizi would lie to your mothers about your own name and the date of your birthday.’

  ‘Please, Gabriele!’ cried the other voice. ‘All right, you won. Now I’m a battlefield casualty. Despite everything, we used to be comrades in arms. By your honour as a soldier, call an ambulance, for the love of God!’

  Zen abandoned his imaginary plinth, switched on his torch and strode over to the shed from which these pleas were coming. He finally made out the ancient wooden door and pulled it open. Inside, the darkness was as absolute as in the military tunnels he had explored with Anton Redel. Once again, the torch acted as the presiding deity.

  An overwhelming stench of damp mingled with lingering bovine odours and the acoustics of a crypt in which continual whimpers and moans reverberated like a choir of the damned. The building was all of brick. The floor was a tight herringbone pattern, while the vaulted ceiling strengthened the ecclesiastical analogy. The design was at once sturdy, graceful and perfectly proportioned, only this was not a church but a cowshed. They did ugly things in those days too, Zen thought, but they didn’t make ugly things. They just didn’t know how.

  ‘Over here, Gabriele!’

  The swirling echoes cancelled out any directional help that the voice had intended to give, but the torch beam soon picked out the crumpled form lying supine on the flooring in the centre of the hall about five metres away.

  ‘Call an ambulance! Do you have a mobile? Use mine if not. You wouldn’t want my death on your conscience as well, would you? We’ll just forget what’s happened here. Enough is enough. No more deaths.’

  Zen walked towards and then around the man, keeping the torch fixed on his head and face.

  ‘Gabriele?’ the man asked wonderingly.

  ‘No, not Gabriele.’

  The man lay breathing rapidly and shallowly. His right leg was twisted forward some thirty degrees at the knee. There was blood on his face and hands and on the brick flooring.

  Zen transferred the torch to his left hand, knelt down and started to frisk the man’s pockets with his right. The position was awkward, the light source too close to the subject, and he didn’t see the knife until it was curving up towards his throat. But his attacker was hampered in his movements and Zen was able to roll away in time to avoid the blade. Neither man spoke. Zen stood up and kicked the hand holding the knife, which clattered away into one of the cow stalls. He retrieved it, retracted the blade and placed it in his pocket. Then he resumed his search. Having collected all the contents of the man’s jacket and coat pockets, he stood examining them by the light of the torch. As he was doing so, another source of light made its presence felt as Gabriele Passarini made his way towards them, moving in the oddly aggressive manner of people with a limp. He still had the torch in one hand and the pistol in the other.

  ‘What was I supposed to do?’ Passarini asked, as if talking to himself. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted to knock him over and take his gun away. He was trying to kill me! Only when I hit him, he fell down here from the loft.’

  Zen took no notice of him. He completed his inspection of the items he had taken from the man’s pockets, placed them in his own and only then looked at Passarini.

  ‘Thirty years ago, you were a witness to the murder of Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero in an abandoned military tunnel in the Dolomites. Tell me exactly what happened on that day.’

  ‘Don’t say anything!’ the man on the floor shouted. ‘He’s a snooper from the Interior Ministry. They’re trying to disgrace the army. Shoot him and then call an ambulance for me! I’ll sort it all out. I’ll tell them that he was responsible for the whole thing and that you saved my life.’

  ‘Colonel Alberto Guerrazzi was also present on that occasion,’ Zen continued. ‘So was Nestore Soldani, who was killed by a car bomb in Campione d’Italia a few days after the discovery of Ferrero’s corpse, and one day before you fled here. The three of you, with Leonardo Ferrero, formerly constituted one unit of a conspiratorial organization code-named Operation Medusa.’

  ‘Shoot him, Gabriele!’ Guerrazzi shouted in a voice streaked with anguish. ‘This man is a maverick who is being used by the Interior people to stir up trouble while remaining officially unaccountable. Whatever he has found out remains for the moment his private knowledge. It has not been communicated to Rome. I would know if it had. The risk is therefore containable, just as it was with Ferrero. Like him, this individual represents an Alpha-grade threat to national security. I now outrank you, and as the senior officer in this emergency situation I am ordering you to eliminate him immediately. You have the means at your disposal and I will take full responsibility. Failure to obey my order would be tantamount to treason.’

  Gabriele Passarini sighed.

  ‘Fuck off, Alberto,’ he said.

  There was a strangled sound from the floor.

  ‘Guerrazzi was the leader of the cell,’ Zen continued in an utterly bored tone, ‘the only one with access to higher levels of command within the organization. At a certain point, he informed the rest of you that he had been ordered to take you all up to an abandoned system of military tunnels in the Dolomites to undergo a series of ritual ordeals. The reason given, I imagine, was both to bond the cell together — you were all very new recruits to Medusa — and also to bind that organization in a mystical Blutbruderschaft union with the glorious dead of the regiment who fell there during the First World War.’

  ‘All honour to them!’ cried the injured man.

  ‘I entirely agree. All honour to them. All pity too, the poor bastards. At any rate, this is what you were told, and of course you all leapt at the chance to get out of the barracks for a lad¬ dish weekend in the mountains, just as you had at the invitation to be inducted into an elite club like Medusa in the first place. Guerrazzi here was the only one to know the real purpose of the expedition. Colonel Gaetano Comai, his commanding officer and Medusa contact, had informed him that Leonardo Ferrero had contacted a radical Communist investigative journalist named Luca Brandelli with a view to disclosing details about Operation Medusa. Comai no doubt showed him photographs taken covertly during their meeting at a pizzeria in Piazza Bra. Guerrazzi’s mission now was to find out how many other times Ferrero had talked to Brandelli and exactly how much he had revealed, and then eliminate him. I don’t know how he put it to you and Soldani, Signor Passarini, but it may well have been in terms very similar to those he used when he tried to persuade you to shoot me a moment ago.’

  ‘Alberto told us…’ Gabriele began.

  ‘Shut up!’ yelled Guerrazzi. ‘If you won’t do your duty, at least hold your tongue.’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘Would you by any chance have any paper here?’ Zen asked Passarini.

  ‘Paper?’

  ‘Typing paper, preferably, but anything will do. I know that you are a man of books, so I thought maybe…’

  ‘I’ve got some at the h
ouse.’

  ‘Would you be good enough to bring a few sheets over here?’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Five or six sheets would be perfect. Oh, and please don’t think of just running off and disappearing, tempting though that obviously is. If you do, I’ll have to call headquarters and have them issue an arrest warrant for the attempted murder of Colonel Alberto Guerrazzi.’

  ‘It was an accident!’

  ‘That would be for the courts to decide, but the case would take at least three years to come to trial, should you be lucky enough to survive that long. I’m sure that the colonel and his friends would take steps to ensure that your time in prison was as unpleasant as possible, if not indeed fatal.’

  Gabriele’s fear was evident even in the wavering torchlight. He nodded once and limped away.

  ‘I knew you’d be trouble as soon as I heard about you, Zen,’ said Guerrazzi. ‘Yes, I’ve guessed your identity, although I hope you noticed that I didn’t reveal it to our little bookworm. So we can put all this behind us. I know I can count on you to keep your silence. You’re a patriot, just as Brandelli was in his own way. He was our sworn enemy thirty years ago, of course, like all the PCI crowd, but times have changed. When I see the shallow consumerist trash running around these days I almost begin to feel nostalgic for enemies like that.’