Ratking (3 page)

‘Here. Now you can dial again.’

The woman stared at him suspiciously. He put the token down beside the phone and turned away.

‘It’s my sister,’ she said suddenly, gripping his arm. ‘She works for the Pope. At the Vatican! She’s a cleaner. The pay’s rotten, but it’s still something to work for the Pope, isn’t it? But her husband won’t let me in the house because of what my brother found out about him, the dirty bastard. So I phone her whenever I come up to see my grandson. She hasn’t got a phone, you see, so I phone from the station. They’re stingy bastards, those priests. Still, it’s better than packing anchovies, at least your fingers don’t stink. But listen, can that criminal do that? Forbid me to see my own sister? Isn’t there a law against that?’

Mumbling something about emergencies, Zen pulled away from the woman’s grasp and crossed the concourse towards the distant neon sign reading POLIZIA FERROVIARIA.

‘Welcome home,’ he muttered under his breath. His earlier mood already seemed as remote and irrelevant as a childhood memory.

The heavy front door closed behind him with a definitive bang, shutting him in, shutting out the world. As he moved the switch the single bulb which lit the entrance hall ended its long, wan existence in an extravagant flash, leaving him in the dark, just back from school. Once he had kissed his mother he would run out to play football in the square outside. Astonishingly, he even seemed to hear the distant sound of lapping water. Then it faded and a didactic voice began pontificating about the ecology of the Po Delta. Those liquid ripples overlaying the constant rumble of traffic came not, of course, from the backwater canals of his childhood, but from the television.

He moved blindly along the passage, past pictures and furniture which had been part of his life for so long that he was no longer aware of their existence. As he approached the glass-panelled door the noise of the television grew louder. Once inside the living room it was deafening. In the dim mix of video glare and twilight seeping through the shutters he made out the frail figure of his mother staring with childlike intensity at the flickering screen.

‘Aurelio! You’re back!’

‘Yes, mamma.’

He bent over her and they kissed.

‘How was Fiume? Did you enjoy yourself?’

‘Yes, mamma.’

He no longer bothered to correct her, even when her mistakes sent him astray not just in space but in time, to a city that had ceased to exist a third of a century earlier.

‘And what about you, mamma? How have you been?’

‘Fine, fine. You needn’t worry, Maria Grazia is a treasure. All I’ve missed is seeing you. But I told you when you joined! You don’t know what it’s like in the services, I said. They send you here and then they send you there, and just when you’re getting used to that they send you somewhere else, until you don’t know which end to sit down on any more. And to think you could have had a nice job on the railways like your father, a nice supervising job, just as secure as the police and none of this roaming around. And we would never have had to move down here to the
South
!’

She broke off as Maria Grazia bustled in from the kitchen. But they had been speaking dialect, and the housekeeper had not understood.

‘Welcome home, dottore!’ she cried. ‘They’ve been trying to get hold of you all day. I told them you hadn’t got back yet, but …’

At that moment the phone started to ring in the inner hallway. It’ll be that old fascist on the train, Zen thought. That type always has friends. But ‘all day’? Maria Grazia must have exaggerated.

‘
Zen?
’

‘Speaking.’

‘
This is Enrico Mancini
.’

Christ almighty! The Veronese had gone straight to the top. Zen gripped the receiver angrily.

‘Listen, the little bastard had a gun and he was standing too far away for me to jump him. So what was I supposed to do, I’d like to know? Get myself shot so that the Commendatore could keep his lousy watch?’

There was a crackly pause.

‘
What are you talking about?
’

‘I’m talking about the train!’

‘
I don’t know anything about any train. I’m calling to dis¬
cuss your transfer to Perugia
.’

‘What? Foggia?’

The line was very poor, with heavy static and occasional cut-outs. For the hundredth time Zen wondered if it was still being tapped, and for the hundredth time he told himself that it wouldn’t make any sense, not now. He wasn’t important any more. Paranoia of that type was simply conceit turned inside out.

‘
Perugia! Perugia in Umbria! You leave tomorrow
.’

What on earth was going on? Why should someone like Enrico Mancini concern himself with Zen’s humdrum activities?

‘For Perugia? But my next trip was supposed to be to Lecce, and that’s not till…’

‘
Forget about that for now. You’re being reassigned to
investigative duties, Zen. Have you heard about the Miletti
case? I’ll get hold of all the documentation I can and send it
round in the morning with the car. But basically it sounds
quite straightforward. Anyway, as from tomorrow you’re in
charge
.’

‘In charge of what?’

‘
Of the Miletti investigation! Are you deaf?
’

‘In Perugia?’

‘
That’s right. You’re on temporary secondment
.’

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘
I beg your pardon?
’

Mancini’s voice was icy.

‘I mean, I understood that, you know …’

‘
Well?
’

‘Well, I thought I’d been permanently suspended from investigative duty.’

‘
First I’ve heard of it. In any case, such decisions are always
open to review in the light of the prevailing circumstances. The
Questore of Perugia has requested assistance and we have no
one else available, it’s as simple as that
.’

‘So it’s official.’

‘
Of course
it’s
official!
Don’t
you worry about that, Zen. Just
concentrate on the job in hand. It’s important that we see
results quickly, understand?
We’re
counting on you
.’

Long after Mancini had hung up Zen stood there beside the phone, his head pressed against the wall. At length he lifted the receiver again and dialled. The number rang for a long time, but just as he was about to hang up she answered.

‘
Yes?
’

‘It’s me.’

‘
Aurelio! I wasn’t expecting to hear from you till this
even
ing. How did it go in wherever you were this time?
’

‘Why did you take so long to answer?’

She was used to his moods by now.

‘
I’ve got my lover here. No, actually I was in the bath. I
wasn’t
going to bother, but then I thought it might be you
.’

He grunted, and there was a brief silence.

‘Look, something’s come up. I have to leave again tomorrow and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Can we meet?’

‘
I’d love to. Shall we go out?
’

‘All right. Ottavio’s?’

‘
Fine
.’

He hung up and looked round the hallway, confronting the furniture which having dominated his infancy had now returned to haunt his adult life. Everything in his apartment had been moved there from the family house in Venice when his mother had finally agreed, six years earlier, to leave. For many years she had resisted, long after it had become obvious that she could no longer manage on her own.

‘Rome? Never!’ she cried. ‘I would be like a fish out of water.’

And her gasps and shudders had made the tired phrase vivid and painful. But in the end she had been forced to give in. Her only son could not come to her. Since the Moro affair his career was nailed down, stuffed and varnished, with years of dreary routine to go before they would let him retire. And there was simply no one else, except for a few distant relatives living in what was now Yugoslavia. So she had moved, avoiding the fate she had feared by the simple expedient of bringing all her belongings with her and transforming Zen’s apartment into an aquarium from which she never emerged.

But if she was thus protected from suffocation, the effect on Zen was exactly the reverse. He had never particularly liked the apartment, in a drab, pompous street just north of the Vatican, but in Rome you had to take what you could get. The nearest he had come to a personal feeling for the place had been an appreciation of its anonymity: it had been like living in a hotel. But his mother’s arrival had changed all that, swamping the sparse furnishings provided by the landlord with possessions laden with dull memories and obscure significance. At times Zen felt that he was choking, and then his thoughts would turn to the house in Venice, ideally empty now, the rooms full of nothing but pearly light, intimations of water, the cries of children and gulls. He had promised himself that one day he would retire there, and in the meantime he was often so intensely there in spirit that he wouldn’t have been in the least surprised to learn that the place was believed to be haunted.

From the kitchen came a clatter of pans supplemented by Maria Grazia’s voice alternately berating the ancient stove, encouraging a blunt knife, singing snatches of the spring’s big hit and calling on the Madonna to witness the misery to which her life was reduced by the quality of the vegetables on offer at the local greengrocer’s. He would have to eat something here before sneaking out to meet Ellen. His mother’s birthday was in a week, he realized. He would almost certainly still be away. At all events, he would have to tell her about the change of plans, which meant hearing once again how he should have got a nice job on the railways like his father. Did she really not realize that she told him this every single time he returned? Or was she, on the contrary, having a good laugh at his expense? That was the trouble with old people, you could never be sure. That was the trouble with living with someone you loved more than anyone else in the world, but had nothing in common with now but blood and bones.

‘But I don’t understand. Surely you’re not a real policeman? I mean, you work for the Ministry, don’t you? As a bureaucrat. That’s what you told me, anyway.’

Ellen’s implication was clear: she would never have had anything to do with him if she had thought he was a ‘real’ policeman.

‘And it’s the truth. Ever since I’ve known you that’s what I’ve been doing. Going the rounds of provincial headquarters checking how many paperclips are being used, that sort of thing. Inspection duty, popularly known as Housekeeping, and just about as glamorous. The nearest I’ve got to real police work was smashing the great stolen toilet-roll racket at the Questura in Campobasso.’

She didn’t smile.

‘And before that?’

‘Well, before it was different.’

‘You were a real cop? A police officer?’

‘Yes.’

There was so much shock in her look that he could not tell what else it might contain.

‘Where was this?’ she asked eventually.

‘Oh, various places. Here, for example.’

‘You worked in the Questura, here in Rome?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Christ! Which department?’

She was looking hard at him.

‘Not the Political Branch, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

It was, of course. Ellen’s circle of expatriate acquaintances already regarded it as rather bizarre that she had got involved with an official from the Ministry of the Interior, just as Zen’s few friends were clearly at a loss to know what to make of his liaison with this American divorcee, a classic
straniera
with her bright little apartment in Trastevere filled with artistic bric-à-brac and books in four languages and her Fiat 500 illegally parked in the street outside. The only answer in either case had been that whatever it was, it worked for both of them. It had seemed to be the only answer necessary. But now, without the slightest warning, Ellen found herself facing the possibility that her official had once been an active member of La Politica: one of those who beat up demonstrating students and striking workers and pushed suspects out of windows, while protecting the neo-fascists responsible for the indiscriminate bombings of public squares and cafeterias and trains.

‘I asked you what you did do,’ she insisted, ‘not what you didn’t.’

Her manner had become that of the tough brutal cop she perhaps assumed him to have been, bullying a statement out of a suspect.

‘I was in the section concerned with kidnappings.’

At this, her features relaxed slightly. Kidnappings, eh? Well, that was all right, wasn’t it? A nice uncontroversial area of police work. Which just left the question of why he had abandoned it for the inglorious role of Ministry snooper, spending half his time making exhausting trips to dreary provincial capitals where his presence was openly resented by everyone concerned, and the other half sitting in his windowless office at the Viminale typing up unreadable and no doubt unread reports. But before Ellen had a chance to ask him about this, Ottavio appeared in person at their table and the subject changed to that of food.

Ottavio outlined in pained tones his opinion that people were not eating enough these days. All they ever thought about was their figures, a selfish, short-sighted view contributing directly to the impoverishment of restaurateurs and the downfall of civilization as we know it. What the Goths, the Huns and the Turks had failed to do was now being achieved by a conspiracy of dietitians who were bringing the country to its knees with all this talk of cholesterols, calories and the evils of salt. Where were we getting to?

Such were his general grievances. His more particular wrath was reserved for Zen, who had told the waiter that he did not want anything to follow the huge bowl of
spa¬
ghetti alla carbonara
he had forced himself to eat on top of the vegetable soup Maria Grazia had prepared at home.