Ratking (22 page)

‘That’s a clue by the way,’ she continued. ‘You’re never going to get anywhere if you don’t understand the people involved.’

‘I thought the people involved were Calabrian shepherds.’

‘Oh, well, I don’t know anything about them. You should have asked Stefania. Her brother’s best friend is Calabrian, a medical student. But his family is extremely rich and I don’t expect he knows any shepherds.’

She got up abruptly.

‘Shall we have some music? Let’s see, I can never remember how to work this thing.’

She pressed a button and one of the hit songs of the season emerged at full volume, the tough, shallow lyrics gloatingly declaimed by a star of the mid-sixties who had traded in her artless looks and girlish lispings for a streetwise manner and a voice laden with designer cynicism.

‘I’d rather just talk,’ Zen shouted.

With a flick of her finger she restored the silence.

‘I thought you were bored. Well, what shall we talk about? How about sex? Let’s see how you rate in that area. What do you think we go in for, here in Perugia? Wife-swapping? Open marriage? Group gropes? Singles bars?’

‘None of those, I should have thought,’ Zen replied with a slight smile.

‘And quite right too. Bravo, you’re improving. There’s some of that around, of course, but it’s not
traditional
So what do you think is the speciality of the house? I’m talking about something typically Perugian, home-made from the very finest local ingredients only.’

She finished her drink in one gulp.

‘No idea? I don’t think you’re a very good detective, I’ve given you loads of clues. It’s incest, of course.’

She banged her empty glass down on the desk, as though she had expected to find the surface several centimetres lower than it actually was.

‘Don’t look so surprised, it makes perfect sense. From our point of view marriage has one big drawback, you see. It lets an outsider into the family. Much safer to stick to one’s close relations. There’s no trusting cousins and the like, of course. No, we’re talking mother and son, father and daughter. See what I mean? If you don’t know these things how can you hope to get anything right? For example, you disapprove of my going to the cinema this evening, but what do you think I should be doing? Cleaving to the bosom of my grieving family? What do you think they’re doing? Daniele will be locked in his bedroom watching the latest batch of video nasties. Silvio? He’ll be stripping for action with Helmut or whatever his name is this week. And Pietro will have gone to bed with a nice English murder story. Not much in the way of company, you see.’

‘And your husband?’

Zen was still irrationally worried that Gianluigi might walk in at any moment, hunting rifle in hand. Or would he use the other gun, the little 4.5mm pistol registered in Cinzia’s name? Where was that kept?

‘He’s still in Milan,’ Cinzia replied carelessly. ‘He couldn’t get a flight back because of all the journalists wanting to get down here, or so he claims. Anyway, he has nothing to do with it, he’s not family. Of course, he didn’t realize that when he married me. But you don’t break into the Miletti family as simply as that! So he’s been reduced to other expedients.’

‘And why did
you
marry
him
?’

Cinzia looked around vaguely, as if trying to remember.

‘Well, he’s very handsome. I know men don’t think so, but he is. That might almost have been enough.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

‘No. I married him to spite my father.’

Zen gave her a look of appraisal.

‘You’re not being very typically Perugian yourself, are you, telling me all this?’

Cinzia’s eyes suddenly flashed and she smiled, displaying an excessive number of rather dirty teeth.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it? I knew his death would be a release, but I thought it would be terrible, that I would suffer. I thought he would always make me suffer, whatever happened. But it’s not like that at all. All this time, all these years, I’ve been lugging this weight around with me, for so long now that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be free of it. I’d even begun to mistake it for part of my own body, an incurable growth that I’ve got to learn to live with. But it’s not, it’s not! That disease, that horror, that swelling, it was all
his
! I’m whole and healthy and light, I find. Sorry for his death? I feel like dancing on his coffin!’

But there were tears in her eyes. For a moment it looked as though she was going to break down.

‘There used to be this old-fashioned clothes shop on the Corso,’ she went on more quietly. ‘It’s gone now, they’ve turned it into a boutique. It was full of wooden drawers and cupboards and enormous heavy mirrors on stands and boxes of buttons and threads and trimming. All the clothes were wrapped in tissue paper. I can still remember the sound it made, a lovely special sound, as light and thin as the clothes were thick and heavy. Everything smelt of mothballs and lavender and cedar. That shop was like a dream world to me, full of secrets and wonders. My mother took me there occasionally, and we used to pass the window every Sunday after mass. They always had beautiful things in the window. There was. one I craved in particular, a pink nightdress with a lace hem and a frilly neck and a family of rabbits embroidered on the chest. I always stopped to look at it, although I knew it was much too expensive. But when my eighth birthday came I found it among my presents, with a little card from my father.’

He saw that she was weeping, not for her father but for herself, for the child she had been.

‘Well, I expect you can guess the rest! That evening he came to my room, to see how I looked in my new nightdress. He told me to sit on his knee. That was normal, I didn’t think twice about it. But what happened next wasn’t normal. I knew it must be wrong, because afterwards he made me promise not to tell anyone about it, not even Mamma. What had happened was our secret, he said. That was the agreement we’d made. He’d kept his part by buying me the nightdress, now it was up to me to keep mine. I didn’t remember making any agreement, but what could I do? Fathers know best, don’t they? So although I didn’t like him touching me the way he had, I decided not to tell anybody. I didn’t realize that by keeping quiet I was walking into a trap.’

She sniffed loudly and picked up her cigarettes.

‘After that he came to visit me almost every evening. After he had gone I found that my nightie was covered in a horrible sticky mess with a strange sour smell. I went to the bathroom and scrubbed myself until I was raw. But I still didn’t tell anyone. In the end he stopped bothering to make any pretence of cuddles, it became fucking pure and simple. And his filth was no longer just on my skin, it was inside me.’

Zen tried to think of something to say, but it was useless. Faced with this ordinary everyday atrocity, he felt ashamed to be a man, ashamed to be human.

‘Finally I threatened to tell Mamma. I was older now and more daring. It was then that he finally sprang his trap. If you do that, he told me, we shall go to prison, both of us. Because it’s really all your fault. You encouraged me, you led me on. You must have enjoyed it, otherwise you would have told someone before now! You’re as bad as me, my girl, or even worse.’

She lit her cigarette and smiled at Zen, inviting him to appreciate her father’s cleverness.

‘The worst thing about his lies was that they were partly true. Because although I hated it worse than anything, I
did
enjoy it too, once I got used to it.
Of course
it felt nice, what do you expect? And don’t you think it was flattering, in a way, to be preferred to my mother? What a position to be in! On the one hand I could send us both to prison, shame my mother, beggar my brothers, scandalize the city and blacken the Miletti name for evermore. On the other hand, I could do, I
did
, exactly the opposite, keeping my father satisfied and happy and my mother ignorant, helping to shore up their marriage, holding the family together and preserving my unsuspecting brothers, who thought they were so superior to me, from disgrace. Half the time I felt like a vicious little whore and the other half like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel. But mostly I just felt my power! My father used the carrot as well as the stick, of course, and that meant I got everything I wanted, clothes, jewellery, perfume. And when his friends and business associates came round, I would put on my finery and try out my power on them too. And it worked! Antonio Crepi, for example, used to give me looks that would have melted a candle. I was twelve at the time.’

‘Did your mother never suspect what was going on?’

After a long time Cinzia looked up.

‘That’s a terrible question,’ she said. ‘At the time I was sure she didn’t know. How could she have known, ‘I thought, and not done anything about it? Now I’m not so sure. She would have had every reason to look the other way. Besides …’

She stopped.

‘What?’

‘Sometimes I think she deliberately ignored what was happening, in order to punish me. Perhaps it was her way of taking revenge. Perhaps she too thought that it was my fault, that I enjoyed it, that I was as bad as he was, or even worse.’

She straightened up, her voice bright and brisk again.

‘Anyway, none of that matters now. There was a car crash, she died, he was in hospital for a long time and when he came out everything had changed. He may have seen her death as a judgement. I don’t know, we never talked about it of course. But he never came near me again, and I was left high and dry with all that power lying idle inside me. It didn’t lie idle long, needless to say.’

She gave him a wry smile.

‘So now you know everything there is to know about me! Not even my husband knows what I’ve just told you. A rare privilege, and one you didn’t deserve, to be perfectly honest. But I needed to tell someone, after all these years, and it had to be a stranger of course. You were just in the right place at the right time.’

Zen finished his whisky.

‘There’s still one thing I don’t know.’

‘What?’

‘Why you sent me that copy of your father’s letter.’

She barked out a little laugh.

‘I thought at first it must have been Ivy Cook,’ Zen went on. ‘But that doesn’t really make sense. Take the envelope, for example. Did she take it with her when she went to the rubbish skip or dash to a stationer’s and buy it? And not just any old envelope, but a special luxury brand with a griffin watermark. Like the ones on your desk.’

She gave him a bored look.

‘It’s not my desk, it’s Gianluigi’s. I expect he sent you the letter. You’ve no idea how resourceful he is. He just about owns poor Daniele ever since that business with the drugs, not to mention those photographs he has of Silvio …’

‘No, it wasn’t your husband,’ Zen interrupted. ‘It was you. You rewrote the letter after the original had been burned, had your version photocopied and then sent me the copy. The handwriting is the same as that note on the desk asking your husband to collect Loredana from school.’

‘Well, supposing I did? It’s not a criminal offence, is it, sending information to the police? You should be grateful! I may have changed a word here or there, but apart from that it’s all exact. I wrote it while the text was still fresh in my mind. It wasn’t the kind of letter that is easy to forget! When Pietro told us that you were going on the pay-off I felt that you should know what you were getting yourself into.’

Zen smiled sceptically.

‘I thought it might have something to do with the fact that when it emerged that I’d received the letter, Ivy Cook would become
persona non
grata
in the Miletti family.’

Cinzia giggled.

‘Well, why shouldn’t I get something out of it too? That bitch has been a thorn in our flesh for too long. Help yourself to another drink, I’ll be back in a moment.’

She lurched off across the room, reaching for the wall to steady herself, and disappeared upstairs. Some time later there was the sound of a lavatory flushing, but Cinzia did not reappear. Zen sat there, thinking over what she had told him. He felt heavy, saturated, crammed with more or less repulsive odds and ends he neither wanted nor needed to know. Someone had said that nowadays doctors had to double as priests, offering general consolation and advice to their patients. But there are things you would be ashamed to tell even your doctor, things so vile they can only be confessed to the lowest, most contemptible functionaries of all. There were days when Zen felt like the Bocca de Leone in the Doges’ Palace: a stiff stone grimace clogged with vapid denunciations and false confessions, scribbles riddled with hatred or guilt, the anonymous rubbish of an entire city.

There was still no sign of Cinzia. Zen got up, walked to the foot of the stairs and called out. There was no reply. He put his foot on the first step and paused, listening.

‘Signora?’

The high marble steps curved upwards, paralleling the flight leading up from the front door. Zen started to climb them. There were three doors in the passageway at the top. Feeling like a character in a fairy tale, he chose the one to the right and opened it carefully.

‘Signora?’

The room inside was startlingly bare, reminding him of his mother’s flat in Venice. Two empty cardboard boxes sat on the floor, one at each end of the room, ignoring each other. Between them a small window showed a blank stretch of wall on the other side of the alley.

The second door he tried was the bathroom. A quick search failed to reveal any suspiciously empty bottles of barbiturates, but of course she might have taken them with her. That left just one door, and he hesitated for a moment before opening it. But the scene which met his eyes was perfectly normal. A large high old-fashioned bed almost filled the room. Cinzia Miletti was lying across it on her back, bent slightly to one side, fully clothed, her eyes closed. Her breathing seemed steady.

Zen felt he should cover her up. Her body proved unexpectedly awkward and resistant. One arm kept getting entangled in the sheets, until he began to think that she was playing a trick on him. Paradoxically, it wasn’t till her eyes opened that he knew he was wrong. Their unfocused glance passed over him without the slightest flicker of movement or response. Then they closed and she turned over and began to snore lightly. His last image before switching off the light was of Cinzia’s head lying on the pillow in the centre of a mass of long blonde hair, her mouth placidly sucking her thumb.