Ratking (23 page)

Outside the night had turned clear and bitterly cold, and the stars were massed in all their intolerable profusion. The light cast by one of the infrequent street lamps glistened on a freshly pasted poster extolling the virtues of Commendatore Ruggiero Franco Miletti, whose funeral would be held the following afternoon.

By morning everything had changed: the sky was still clear, but the sun shone on a new landscape. The straggling hinter-parts of the town, the scree of recent building on the lower slopes, the patchy developments strung out beside road and railway in the valley, all this had vanished. Immediately beyond the two churches visible from Zen’s window the world abruptly ended, to begin again fifteen or twenty kilometres away, where the upper slopes of the yeasty mountain survived as a small island rising from a frozen ocean. A few other islets were visible on the other side of the valley, but apart from these patches of high ground and the stranded city itself, a glistening white mass of fog covered everything.

The Questura was barely fifty metres down the hill, but it was below the surface, and as Zen walked there from his hotel he felt the invisible moisture beading his newly shaved skin. When he looked up the light was pearly and the sky a blue so tender he could hardly take his eyes off it, with the result that on several occasions he collided with people coming the other way. But everybody was in a good mood that morning, and his apologies were returned with a smile. He remembered a Chinese fable Ellen had once told him about a man who falls off a cliff, saves himself by clutching at a plant, and then notices that two mice are gnawing away the branch on which his life depends. There is a fruit growing on the branch, which the man plucks and eats. The fruit tastes wonderful.

‘How did the mice come to be halfway down a cliff in the first place?’ he had asked her. ‘And why didn’t they eat the fruit themselves?’

He couldn’t see the point of the story at all, but Ellen refused to explain.

‘You must experience it,’ was all she would say. ‘One day it’ll suddenly hit you.’

He had been sceptical at the time, but she’d been quite right, for he had suddenly understood the story. ‘It’ll come to the same thing in the end,’ he’d told Luciano Bartocci. His days in Perugia were clearly numbered, and he would spend them like the young magistrate, on a siding running parallel to the main line but going nowhere and ending abruptly. The process had begun the day before, at the scene of the crime. It was Major Volpi who had been given responsibility for putting up roadblocks and carrying out house-to-house searches. The police had made one mistake too many in this case and would be given no further opportunities to demonstrate their incompetence. As for Zen, any day now he would receive a telegram from the Ministry summoning him back to Rome, and that would be that.

But in the meantime, how sweet the fruit tasted! And although the bureaucratic mice were invisibly at work, he still went through the motions of shifting hands and improving his grip on the branch. Thus his first action on returning to the Questura the day before had been to send his inspectors out to question the people living in the houses along the road to Cannara and talk to the local farmers, just in case anyone had seen anything. When he arrived at work that morning the result of their labours was waiting for him in a blue folder.

Five minutes after entering his office Zen reappeared in the inspectors’ room, where Geraci was watching Chiodini fill in a coupon for a competition promising the winner a lifetime supply of tomato concentrate.

‘What is this?’ he demanded.

Geraci looked warily at the folder Zen was holding up, his eyebrows working away like two caterpillars doing a mating dance.

‘It’s our report.’

‘I’ve never seen a report like this. What’s all this stuff down the side?’

‘Those are computer codes.’

‘Since when have we had a computer?’

‘We haven’t, it’s at the law courts. All packed up in boxes, down in the basement. But we’ll be getting terminals here, once it’s working. You see, this report isn’t meant to be read, it’s meant to be put into the computer.’

Zen regarded him stonily.

‘But there is no computer.’

‘Not yet, no. But they want to be ready, you see. It’s going to be wonderful! All the files from us, the Carabinieri, the Finance people, everything, is going to go straight into the computer. Anything you want to know, it’ll be there at your fingertips. Say you’ve got a report about a small red car, and you want to compare it with all the other small red cars that have been reported in the area. With the old method it would take you hours looking through files, but with the computer you just push a button and it tells you right away. And the same for all the large red cars, or the red foreign cars of any size, or the small sports cars of any colour …’

Zen passed one hand across his forehead. There were clearly various possibilities which the Chinese hadn’t thought of. For example, the mice stop gnawing, scamper down your arm, cock their legs and piss in your face.

‘Listen, you don’t mean to tell me that everyone around here gets their reports in this form. I simply don’t believe it.’

‘Of course they do! Isn’t it the same in Rome?’

Zen looked away. Of course it was the same in Rome. It would be the same everywhere, that was how the system worked. What Geraci still didn’t know was that Zen had no recent operational experience in Rome or anywhere else.

‘Mind you, some of the older officers get us to do a back-up report in the old way,’ Chiodini told him.

‘But it’s strictly unofficial,’ Geraci added hurriedly. ‘Can’t be logged or filed.’

Zen was leafing through the folder. He seemed not to have heard.

‘Did you speak to this witness?’

The inspector took the file and glanced at the entry pointed out by Zen’s broad flat finger.

‘No, that was Lucaroni.’

‘But it’s marked G.’

‘That’s right. G stands for Lucaroni.’

‘Really? I suppose you’re L?’

Geraci frowned.

‘L? No, L is already in use by the system. For example here in the same entry it says L23, right? That means an unidentified foreign car.’

‘Where is Lucaroni?’

Geraci seemed to hesitate for a moment.

‘Upstairs,’ said Chiodini.

That meant either the senior command structure or the Political Branch, whose rooms are situated on the top floor of every Questura. The fact that the same word is used for either reflects the general feeling that the distinction between them is fairly hazy.

‘Tell him I want to see him as soon as he gets back.’

He closed the door behind him. So they were getting a computer, were they? Soon the intolerable mysteries of Mediterranean life would be swept away by the electronic wonders of real time and random access for all. And just to make sure that everything was fair and above-board, the computer, like the facilities for tapping phones, would be located at the law courts, safely out of the hands of the police. ‘They’re doing to small-time corruption what the multinational corporations are doing to small-time business,’ a cynical Sardinian friend had once remarked apropos of the latest initiative to clean up the police. ‘It’s not going to stop the abuse of power, it’s just going to restrict it to the highest level. Anyone can afford to buy you or me, Aurelio, but only the big boys can manipulate judges.’

Zen glanced at the wall, where the calendar now looked oddly unbalanced. Yes, it might be time to phone Gilberto. He couldn’t leave the crucifix in the luggage locker for ever.

Lucaroni appeared about ten minutes later, all apologies for the delay.

‘I was just having a word with Personnel,’ he explained. ‘My sister’s getting married next week and I wanted to know whether there’d be any chance of a spot of leave.’

Zen passed him a page of the report.

‘Tell me about this woman who claims to have seen a large blue car near the scene of the crime.’

‘Well, there’s just what it says here,’ the inspector replied, scanning the page. ‘It was a large blue foreign saloon, she said, driven by someone with fair hair, going along the …’

‘Tell me about the woman.’

‘The driver? But we don’t …’

‘No, the woman you spoke to.’

Lucaroni made a conspicuous effort to remember.

‘Well, she was oldish. lives with her in-laws in one of those new houses along the road.’

‘How did she see the car?’

‘She was out gathering salad leaves for the evening meal. There’s very little traffic on that road and she knows most of the people, so when she saw this strange car she noticed it.’

‘She called it a “strange” car?’

‘Yes.’

‘So how did the idea that it was foreign come up?’

‘I asked her about the make and she said she didn’t know. I asked if it was foreign and she said that it was.’

Zen nodded. The old woman wouldn’t have known a Rolls-Royce from a Renault. ‘Foreign’ just meant that the car was a large luxury saloon of a kind she’d never seen before.

‘And there was only one person in it?’

‘So she said. A woman with blonde hair.’

Zen took the report back again.

‘It says “fair hair” here.’

‘Well, you can’t put blonde, can you?’ Lucaroni pointed out. ‘The computer won’t accept it. Hair is either fair or yellow.’

Zen nodded.

‘Oh, there’s one other thing.’

He pointed to the wall.

‘You remember the crucifix that used to be there? You don’t happen to know where it came from, do you?’

Lucaroni’s tongue emerged to dampen his lips. He shook his head.

‘I had a visitor in here the other day, you see. There was an accident and the thing ended up in pieces. Most unfortunate.’

‘In pieces?’ Lucaroni whispered.

Zen nodded.

‘Luckily my visitor was a Communist, so he’s not superstitious about these things. I’d be happy to pay for a new one, but I have no idea where to go. Do you think you could get me one? I’d really appreciate it.’

There was a long silence.

‘Well …’ Lucaroni began.

Zen tapped his chest with one finger.

‘But I want one that is the same. You understand? Exactly identical in every respect.’

Their glances met and held.

‘Identical,’ breathed the inspector.

‘Absolutely. I was very fond of that crucifix. It had a certain something about it, know what I mean?’

Lucaroni’s mouth was now completely out of control. His tongue shot out continually, dumping saliva on his lips, which barely had time to spread it around their shiny surfaces before the next load arrived. Zen hastened to dismiss him before he self-destructed.

A glance at the map revealed that there was a short cut down to the Miletti villa, so instead of summoning Palottino he decided to walk. What he was thinking of doing was risky enough as it was. The less official he could make it the better.

The short cut turned out to be a lane which started abruptly at the bottom of a flight of steps opposite the Questura and ran straight down the hillside like a ruled line. It must have been one of the old medieval roads into the city, now closed to traffic by the concrete retaining wall of the ring boulevard. To either side old farmhouses and new villas stood in uneasy proximity. Beyond them, a narrow fold in the hillside was being filled with rubbish to provide space for a car park. Down below, lost in the mist, he could just make out the holm-oaks and cypresses surrounding the Miletti property, a lugubrious baroque monstrosity built on a shoulder of land jutting out from the steep hillside.

Zen walked past it for another hundred and fifty metres to the separate entrance marked ‘Società Industriale Miletti di Perugia’. At this depth the mist was still unwarmed by the sun, clinging glaucously to every surface. This was the site of Franco’s original workshops, built just below the house. In those days captains of industry were not ashamed to live close to the source of their wealth. Since production had been moved out to Ponte San Giovanni the buildings had been gutted and transformed into the administrative headquarters of SIMP. He’d been expecting tight security at the entrance, but in the event the gates were open and unmanned, and a passing employee directed him along a concrete road leading to the garage where a man in blue overalls was washing one of the Fiat saloons. Behind him a dozen or so more of the cars were lined up, their paintwork gleaming.

Zen flashed his identification with contemptuous brevity and then allowed a little time for the mechanic’s fear to be fruitful and multiply. Everyone has some reason to be afraid of the police, and fear, like money, can be spent on something quite unrelated to what has created it. When Zen judged that he had enough for his purposes he pointed to the Fiats.

‘Are you responsible for these cars?’

The man nodded. Zen gave a satisfied smile, as though he had obtained a damning admission.

‘Then what have you done with my cigarette lighter?’

‘Cigarette lighter?’ the mechanic stammered. ‘What sort of cigarette lighter?’

Zen’s smile vanished.

‘Why, how many have you found?’

‘None! I haven’t found anything.’

‘Then why did you ask what sort, eh? Think you can keep anything you find, eh? Supplement your lousy wages with a little private enterprise, is that it?’

The man flung his sponge down angrily.

‘I’ve found nothing! I’ve just cleaned them all ready for this afternoon. There was no cigarette lighter in any of them.’

‘They’re going to use the company cars for the funeral?’ Zen queried in a tone of deep disgust. ‘Talk about cheap!’

‘It’s what Signor Ruggiero would have wanted.’

‘Don’t try and change the subject! You claim not to have found any lighter, is that it?’

‘I don’t claim anything! I didn’t find any lighter and that’s all there is to it. Have a look for yourself if you want, I’ve got nothing to hide!’

‘Oh, I’m going to! Don’t you worry about that, I’m going to.’

The mechanic watched him out of the corner of his eye as he went from car to car, making an elaborate pretence of examining the interiors.

The mud surrounding the building site where Ruggiero Miletti had been murdered had proved a rich source of impressions. A preliminary investigation, completed while Zen was still present, had yielded five different footprints and two distinct sets of tyre marks. One of the two sets consistently overlaid the other, and it was distinctive, in that one of the tyres did not match the other three. Zen had imagined that this would be a rarity, but in fact four of the cars in the garage had one odd tyre. Only one configuration, however, matched that found at the murder scene.