Ratking (10 page)

Zen turned away from the billboard and started to climb the ancient street paved with flagstones as smooth as the bed of a stream. An old woman lurched towards him, a bulging plastic bag in each hand, bellowing something incomprehensible at a man who stood looking up at the scaffolding hung with sacking that covered a house being renovated. A gang of boys on scooters swooped down the street, slabs of pizza in one hand, klaxons groaning like angry frogs, yelling insults at each other. They missed the old woman by inches, and a load of rubble gushing down a plastic chute into a hopper made a noise that sounded like a round of applause for their skill or her nonchalance.

‘Anything else?’

The waiter perched like a sparrow beside their table, looking distractedly about him. Bartocci shook his head and glanced at Zen.

‘Shall we go?’

At the cash desk the manager greeted Bartocci warmly. No bill was presented. like the rest of the almost exclusively male clientele of the noisy little restaurant, the magistrate was clearly a regular who paid by the week or month.

‘How about a little stroll before having coffee?’ Bartocci suggested once they were outside. ‘I must warn you, though, that it’s uphill, like everything in Perugia!’

It was a measure of Zen’s state of mind that he found himself wondering whether the words had more than one meaning. Lunch with Bartocci had indeed proved very much like dinner with the Milettis, except that the food was even better: macaroni in a sauce made with cream and spicy sausage meat, chunks of liver wrapped in a delicate net of membrane and charred over embers, thin dark green stalks of wild asparagus, strawberries soaked in lemon juice. But just as at Crepi’s the evening before, the conversation had been dominated by what was
not
discussed. Bartocci had shown himself to be particularly interested in Zen’s career and his views on various items of news: a scandal about kickbacks for building permits involving members of a Socialist city council, reports that a Christian Democrat ex-mayor had been a leading member of the Palermo Mafia, allegations that the wife of a Liberal senator in Turin was involved in the illegal export of currency. Zen knew what was happening, of course, and Bartocci knew that he knew. It was all part of the process. How would this police official from Rome react to being sounded out Off the record’ by a Communist investigating magistrate?

Zen tried to steer a middle course, neither clamming up nor trumpeting opinions, biding his time and hoping that Bartocci would get to the point. But unless he did so soon Zen was going to get very nervous indeed. He had even tried to precipitate matters by asking Bartocci about the Deputy Public Prosecutor’s criticisms of the police. But Bartocci’s response had been offhand: ‘Let’s enjoy our lunch, we’ll talk later.’

The magistrate led the way up a broad flight of steps which at first appeared to lead to someone’s front door. At the last moment they swerved to the left and continued into a tunnel burrowing underneath a conglomerate of interlocking houses, walls, gardens and yards deposited there over the centuries by generations of people neither more nor less dead than Ubaldo Valesio. It was dark and the wind whined emptily past them. On the wall a soccer fan had spray-gunned ‘Roma are magic’, while a dustbin opposite was inscribed ‘Juventus Headquarters’.

After about fifty metres the subterranean arcade widened out slightly into a concrete yard where six Fiat 500s were packed in, so tightly that there was barely room to pass on foot. Bartocci led him on without a word, turning left and right without hesitation, always climbing, until they reached a small piazza in front of a church where the walls fell back to reveal a view similar to the one Zen had seen that morning from his bedroom window, centred by that strange mountain, full and rounded as a mound of risen dough.

Bartocci glanced around the square, which was empty except for a few parked cars.

‘What were you saying about Di Leonardo?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Well, he implied last night that the police were at fault for not having exploited Valesio’s contacts with the kidnappers. I wondered if you agreed.’

‘No, I don’t see things in quite the same way. In fact I should have preferred to pursue a much more active line in this case from the very start. I tried to have the family’s assets frozen, to prevent any possibility of a ransom payment. I also sought to have Ubaldo’s phone monitored. But there was considerable opposition to these initiatives, notably from Di Leonardo himself.’

‘But you don’t need higher authority to authorize those things,’ Zen pointed out.

‘I don’t need higher authority to sign a warrant for the arrest of President Pertini, either. But it would be the last I ever signed. If I’d frozen the Miletti account and had the phone-tap put on, the net result would have been to destroy any chances I have of influencing the outcome of this case. Besides, people like the Milettis can always raise cash somewhere, and as for the phones, the gang must assume that they’re all tapped anyway. We wouldn’t have learned anything much without trying to follow Valesio, which would have been a very risky venture indeed. Di Leonardo tried to suggest that Ubaldo had been killed because of my negligence. I was his real target, not you. But just imagine how he would have responded had there been the slightest evidence that Valesio’s death was the result of my interference! No, that’s not the way to handle these things.’

Zen moved over to the parapet at the edge of the piazza, where stone benches were placed at intervals between trees giving shade on hot summer days. The wall dropped vertically away to the gardens of the houses far below. Beyond them rose a lengthy strip of high medieval city wall, then a valley cut steeply into hills dotted with modern villas, leading the eye away to the still more distant hills and the valley beyond, green and grey and brown beneath the azure sky, where the strange mountain rose. In the far distance, at the limit of vision, shimmered the snow-covered peaks of the Apennines.

Zen got out his packet of Nazionali. It contained only one cigarette, the last of the supply he had brought with him. As he lit up a flicker of movement down below caught his eye. A girl in jeans and a red sweater was standing at an open window in one of the houses, looking out at the garden with its rows of vegetables running up to a chicken coop at the foot of the high retaining wall. She was clearly unaware of being observed herself.

‘Valesio’s death has changed everything, of course,’ Bartocci continued. ‘Your arrival at the same moment is extremely convenient. The whole investigation will have to begin again from scratch. We must be prepared to re-examine all our assumptions, even the most fundamental, without allowing ourselves to be influenced by the thought that some people might find our conclusions difficult to swallow.’

Zen exhaled a long breath of the fragrant, earthy tobacco. The girl moved and the window was empty again.

‘That’s why I asked to speak to you today,’ the magistrate went on in the same confidential tone. ‘It’s very refreshing for me to deal with an outsider, someone free of any preconceptions. You have no axe to grind here, no interests to protect. One can consider every possibility.’

The girl reappeared at the window. Her legs were now bare.

‘About a month ago I received this,’ Bartocci said, handing Zen a sheet of paper.

Zen gave the letter back to Bartocci, who replaced it carefully in his pocket.

‘Of course, I get a lot of this sort of thing, and normally I would simply discount it as a hoax from someone with a grudge against the family. But in this case it seems to me that the writer knows what he’s talking about.’

The girl had moved again, so that only her bare legs and feet were visible. Then she disappeared completely.

‘What’s this about a takeover?’ Zen asked. ‘I saw something about it on an old poster today, too.’

‘SIMP has been in financial difficulties for some time now. The root cause is that Ruggiero has insisted all along on maintaining total personal control of every aspect of the business. But the company has diversified into areas he knows nothing about, the market has changed out of all recognition in the last ten or fifteen years, above all he is no longer the man he was. The result has been a gradual running-down of the whole operation. They’ve been forced to shut one of their factories and lay off about a quarter of the workforce at the other. But the real crunch came with the collapse of Calvi’s financial empire. It seems that the Milettis had sunk quite a lot of money in it. Since then the company has been living from one loan to another, under increasing pressure to improve their performance and efficiency. Finally, just before Ruggiero was kidnapped, a Japanese company made an offer to put up the money SIMP needs in return for a licence to sell its products under the Miletti name. The old man wouldn’t hear of it, of course.’

‘That’s not what the PCI poster suggested.’

‘No, the Party quite correctly takes the line that unless prevented the family will do whatever makes sense from a financial point of view. Ruggiero’s opposition is merely the sentimental stubbornness of an old man, and as such cannot be depended on to protect the interests of the workers.’

Again a flicker of movement below caught Zen’s eye.

The girl passed by the window, naked except for a yellow towel wrapped round her hair.

‘I know this theory sounds fantastic,’ Bartocci continued. ‘But look at what else happens in this country. Look at Gelli, look at Calvi. Was that any more fantastic? When Michele Sindona got into difficulties with the law in New York he staged a fake kidnapping for himself so that he could go to Palermo and pressure people he thought might be helpful. What’s to stop the Milettis doing the same thing? It’s a scheme worthy of Calvi himself. Take Ruggiero out of circulation to prevent any takeover deals going through, and then use their own money, recycled through a faked payoff, to prop up the company’s finances.’

Zen tried to keep his eye off the window below and his mind on what Bartocci was saying.

‘But that would mean that they also murdered Valesio.’

Bartocci nodded.

‘It’s precisely Valesio’s death which has made me take the theory seriously. You said that he may accidentally have caught sight of one of the members of the gang. But why should the kidnappers care if Valesio caught a glimpse of some Calabrian he’d never seen before and would never recognize again? But suppose that the person Valesio saw was
not
a stranger. Suppose it was someone he knew very well, someone anybody in Perugia would know well. Imagine his rage as he realizes the shameful game they have been playing on him and on everyone! And imagine the Milettis’ horror as they face the certainty of a revelation which would smash the family’s power for ever and send many of them to prison for years to come. What are they to do? Either kill Valesio or admit that all these months while we’ve been working tirelessly for Ruggiero Miletti’s release he has in fact been comfortably holed up in some property of the family a few miles from here, perhaps even in his own house. Do you remember how long it took the family to get around to informing the police of his disappearance? They claimed it was because the idea of kidnapping never occurred to them, but it might equally be because they needed time to fake the accident and the evidence of the struggle, time to burn the car.’

Again a movement at the window below caught Zen’s eye. But this time the figure was that of a man, who reached for the shutters and banged them shut.

‘So you really believe that there’s a conspiracy?’ Zen asked Bartocci. He still wasn’t sure whether the magistrate was completely serious.

‘There’s always a conspiracy. Everything that happens in society at a certain level is part of a conspiracy.’