Ratking (35 page)

Although she was very close to him now, she still did not touch him. He turned away, and for a moment she thought that she’d lost him, that he was about to rush to the door, scream for the guards, denounce her.

‘Perhaps I’ve done the wrong thing,’ she went on, almost whispering. ‘Perhaps I’ve made a terrible mistake. Even mummies aren’t perfect, they make mistakes sometimes. But babies have to forgive them, don’t they?’

After an interminable moment he looked back at her, and she knew she was safe. That dash to the door would never happen, for it would be like running off a cliff.

‘What are we going to do?’ he moaned.

‘We must plan and act, Silvio. That statement will be used against me.’

‘But since it’s all lies …’

‘It’s all lies, yes. But it’s not all untrue.’

Just as she had once paid tribute to her employer’s cleverness, she now gave Gianluigi Santucci his due. It was very cunning, the way he had woven details like the wig and the pistol and the fake appointment with Cinzia into a tissue of lies. Yes, there was enough truth there to give the investigators plenty of material to get their teeth into.

‘Besides, if they’ve arrested the kidnappers then sooner or later they’ll find out that it was my number they called on Monday morning to announce Ruggiero’s release.’

‘But that’s not true! They called us at the house on Tuesday! I remember that perfectly well. Pietro took the call.’

Ivy shook her head wearily.

‘No, that was a recording I made when they phoned me the day before. The gang was given my number before the ransom drop, because it wasn’t being tapped by the police. Don’t you remember?’

Silvio gestured impatiently.

‘Who cares what they say? It’s just their word against yours. I’ll get you the finest lawyers in the country …’

‘That’s not enough. The judicial investigation is secret, don’t forget. However good a lawyer you get, there’s nothing he can do initially. Besides, the Santuccis will be working against us, and there’s no telling what line Daniele and Pietro will take. No, it’s going to be a struggle, I’m afraid. We must prepare to fight on a much wider front, and that means we’re going to need friends, all the friends we can get. Russo, for example, and Fratini. Possibly Carletti. I’ll send you a list later. We must think flexibly. We might make it seem all a grotesque plot which Gianluigi is orchestrating in order to compromise the Miletti family. The new investigating magistrate will remember what happened to Bartocci. Hopefully she’ll think twice about venturing too far on flimsy evidence in the teeth of sustained opposition. And if she does, we’ll put it about that her zeal is not wholly inspired by a fervour for the truth, tie her in to Gianluigi’s interests in some way.’

She had been thinking aloud, her eyes gleaming with enthusiasm as she began to see her way clear. But Silvio just moved his big head from side to side as though trying to dodge a blow.

‘I can’t do all that!’ he wailed.

This brought her down to earth with a bump. She gripped his arms tightly, pouring her strength and determination into him.

‘Nonsense! Remember what happened with Gerhard, after they arrested Daniele. You managed then.’

‘But you were there too!’

‘And I’ll be here this time, to help you and tell you what to do. But you must do it, because I can’t. Don’t you see that? You must! No one but you can.’

But his look remained vague and distracted. She took his head in both her hands, forcing him to look her in the eyes.

‘You know what happened to your real mummy, don’t you?’

He bridled like a horse, but her grip was firm, holding him steady.

‘She died, Silvio. She died because you didn’t love her enough. Because you were too tiny, too weak. Do you want that to happen to me, too?’

He twisted away, a look of unspeakable horror on his face. After a moment he sighed massively and turned back towards her.

‘I’ll do whatever you want. Whatever has to be done.’

Satisfied, Ivy drew him down, tucking his nose into the hollow in her shoulder-blade where it loved to nestle.

As they embraced she gazed up at the crucifix on the wall. The figure on the cross was oddly distorted, suggesting not the consolations of the Christian faith but the realities of an atrocious torture. It looked as though the crucifix had been broken and then crudely glued together again, she thought idly.

‘There, there,’ she murmured. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

‘
By the way, do you know that
they’ve
arrested the
kid
nappers?
’

‘
Silvio, the kidnappers
didn’t
kill
Ruggiero
.’

‘
But
they’ve
confessed!
’

‘
They
didn’t
do it
.’

‘
How do you know?
’

‘
Because I did
.’

‘
That’s silly.
Don’t
say things like that.
It’s
horrible. It
frightens me
.’

‘
It frightens me too. But if we face it together it
won’t
be so
frightening. You know that nothing can frighten us as long as
we’re
together
.’

‘Right, that’ll do.’

Geraci pressed a button on the tape recorder and Chiodini clapped his enormous hands together.

‘We got the bastards, didn’t we? We really got them!’

Zen looked at them both.

‘You can never be sure, can you? But on balance, yes, I would say that this time we’ve got them.’

It was raining in Rome. People said Venice was wet, but it seemed to Zen that it rained even more in the city of his exile. It had something to do with the way the two places coped with this basic fact of life. Venice welcomed water in any form, perfectly at home with drizzle or downpour. The city was rich in cosy bars where the inhabitants could go to shelter and dry out over a glass or two, secretly glad of this assurance that their great ark would never run aground. But Rome was a fair-weather city, a playground for the young and the beautiful and the rich, and it dealt with bad weather as it dealt with ageing, ugliness and poverty, by turning its back. The inhabitants huddled miserably in their draughty cafés, gazing out at this dapper passer-by with his large green umbrella and his bouquet of flowers, taking the rain in his stride.

Two weeks had passed since Zen’s return from Perugia. His working days had been dominated by the readjustment to the humdrum world of Housekeeping and his personal life by the apparent impossibility of getting together with Ellen. Whenever he tried to arrange to see her it seemed to be the wrong day or the wrong time. In the end he’d begun to suspect that she was putting him off deliberately, but then this morning she had phoned out of the blue and invited him round to her flat for dinner.

‘
I’ll get us something to eat. It
won’t
be much, but
…’

He knew what she meant by throwaway phrases like that! She had probably been planning the meal for days.

Ellen’s attitude to food had initially been one of the sharpest indicators of her very different background. Brought up to assume that women cooked the regional dishes they had learned from their mothers, Zen had at first been both amazed and appalled by Ellen’s eclecticism. He would no more have expected Maria Grazia to make a Venetian dish, let alone a French or Austrian one, than she would have expected to be asked. But at Ellen’s you had to expect anything and everything. A typical meal might begin with a starter from the Middle East followed by a main course from Mexico and a German pudding. Presumably this was an example of the famous American melting-pot, only far from melting, the contents seemed to have retained all their rugged individuality and to jostle each other in a way Zen had found as disquieting as the discovery that the source of these riches was not family or cultural tradition but a shelf of cookery books which Ellen read like novels. Nevertheless, with time he had come to appreciate the experience. If the menu was bizarre, the food itself was very good, and it all made him feel pleasantly sophisticated and cosmopolitan. What new discoveries would he make tonight?

Ellen was given to dressing casually, but the outfit in which she came to the door seemed fairly extreme even by her standards: a sloppy, shapeless sweater and a pair of jeans with paint stains whose colour dated them back more than two years, when she’d redecorated the bathroom. The flowers he presented her with seemed to make her slightly ill at ease.

‘Oh, how lovely. I’ll put them in water.’

‘There’s no hurry, I expect they’re wet enough.’

She led him into the kitchen.

‘I really meant it about the food being simple, you know.’

She held up a colourful shiny packet.
Findus 100%
Beef
American-style Hamburgers
, he read incredulously. Was this one of her strange foreign jokes, the kind you had to be a child or an idiot to find funny?

‘I imagine you ate well in Perugia, didn’t you?’ she continued with restless energy. ‘Tell me all about it. What I don’t understand is how the Cook woman ever thought she could get away with it. Surely it was an insane risk to take.’

He sat down at the kitchen table.

‘It only seems like that because the kidnappers were arrested. Of course once I knew what had happened then I started to notice other things. For example, in the phone call to the Milettis which we recorded on the Tuesday, the gang’s spokesman gave the name of a football team, Verona, as a codeword. Pietro should have responded with the name of the team Verona were playing the following Sunday, but he didn’t understand and simply assumed it was a wrong number. Yet the kidnapper, instead of insisting or hanging up, says that’s fine and goes ahead as if the correct response had been given. Which it had, of course, in the original conversation with Ivy. Also the spokesman refers to “the Milettis’ father”, because he knows that the person he’s speaking to is not a member of the family. If he’d been phoning the Milettis direct he’d have said “your father”.’

Ellen ignited the gas under the grill.

‘Go on!’ she told him as she peeled away the rectangles of plastic which kept the hamburgers separate. She seemed more concerned that he might fall silent than interested in what he had to say.

‘Well, you know most of the rest. The kidnapper I spoke to in Florence told me that they’d phoned the same number as was used to arrange details of the kidnapping. The family had never revealed what this was, and I obviously couldn’t approach them directly. But I knew that the gang had used advertisements in a local newspaper as a way for people to get in touch with them. I went to the library and looked through the paper until I found an advertisement that was supposedly for a two-way radio. Phone 8818 after 7, it said. There are no four-digit telephone numbers in a big city like Perugia. But if you read the instructions literally you get a five-digit one, 78818. That was Ivy Cook’s number.’

There was a crinkling sound as Ellen tore off a sheet of aluminium foil to line the grill-pan.

‘What confused the issue slightly was that the kidnapper told me that the person who answered was a man with an accent like mine. For a moment I thought it might have been Daniele. But Ivy’s voice is deep enough to be mistaken for a man’s, and to a shepherd from Calabria her foreign accent sounded like someone from the North. She recorded the kidnappers’ call on the answering machine attached to her phone, edited the tape to cut out her own voice, then telephoned the Milettis the next morning and played it back to Pietro.’

Ellen laid the patties on the foil and slid the pan under the grill.

‘I’m surprised she and Silvio weren’t more cautious,’ she remarked. ‘Talking freely like that in a police station.’

‘They weren’t in a police station, just an anonymous room in an annexe of the prison. But what really put them at their ease was that it all seemed to have been rigged in their favour. I arranged for one of my inspectors to call Silvio and offer to get him in to see Ivy in return for various unspecified favours. It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time to people in Silvio’s position, so he found it completely natural. When he arrived, the inspector got rid of Ivy’s guard and made a big point of the fact that he was leaving the two of them alone together. They both assumed that the Miletti family power was working for them as usual. After that it never occurred to them to watch what they were saying. They felt they were on their home ground, as though they owned the place.’

The patties were sizzling away loudly. Ellen kept busy slicing up buns and laying them on top of the grill to warm.

‘Can I do anything?’ he asked.

‘No, you just take it easy.’

Normally she would have asked him to lay the table, but this evening he was being treated as an honoured guest, except that she’d hardly bothered to cook at all. Zen had once seen a film in which people were taken over by aliens from outer space. They looked the same and sounded the same, but somehow they weren’t the same. What had Ellen been taken over by? No sooner had he posed the question than the answer, the only possible answer, presented itself, and everything made sense. But the sense it made was too painful, and he pushed it aside.

‘All the same, so much scheming just to bring one guilty person to justice!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you always go to this much trouble?’

‘Not usually, no. But I was practically being accused of responsibility for Miletti’s death myself. Besides …’

‘What?’

Zen had been going to say that he had personal reasons for wishing fathers’ deaths to be avenged, but he realized that it might sound as if he was fishing for sympathy.

‘It’s not that I’m criticizing you, Aurelio,’ Ellen went on. ‘I’m just staggered, as always, at the way this country works.’

‘Oh, not that again!’

It was intended as a joke, but it misfired.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a tone that was half contrite and half defiant. ‘I won’t say another word.’

She served the hamburgers wrapped in sheets of kitchen paper and brought a litre bottle of Peroni from the fridge. The hamburgers were an unhappy hybrid of American and European elements. The meat, processed cheese and ketchup tried to be as cheerfully undemanding as a good hamburger should, but were shouted down by the Dijon mustard, the pungent onions and the chewy rolls.

Zen began dismantling his hamburger, eating the more appetizing bits with the fork and discarding the rest. Ellen wolfed hers down as though her life depended on it. After a few minutes she lit another cigarette without asking. He took the opportunity to push his plate away.

‘Don’t you like it?’

She sounded almost pleased.

‘It’s delicious. But I had to eat something with my mother. You know how it is.’

Ellen laughed quietly.

‘I surely do.’

The conversation stalled, as if they were two strangers who had exhausted the few topics they had in common.

‘Anyway, what have you been up to?’ he asked her.

She refilled her glass with beer.

‘Well …’

She broke off to puff at her cigarette. But he already knew what she was going to say. She had met someone else, these things happened, she’d been meaning to tell him for some time, she hoped they would remain friends. This was what he had glimpsed earlier, the answer to the question of what was making her act in this odd way, of what it was that had taken her over. The only possible answer was another man.

‘The thing is, I’m going home, Aurelio.’

But you
are
at home, he thought. Then he realized what she meant.

‘For a holiday?’

She shook her head.

‘You’re joking,’ he said.

She walked over to the glass jars where she kept rice and pulses, pulled out an envelope tucked under one and handed it to him. ‘Whether you travel for business or pleasure, MONDITURIST!’ it read. ‘Our business is to make travelling a pleasure!’ Inside there was an airline ticket to New York in her name.

‘I decided one night last week. For some reason I had woken up and then I couldn’t get back to sleep. I just lay there and thought about this and that. And it suddenly struck me how foreign I feel here, and what that was doing to me.’

She paused, biting one fingernail.

‘People who have been exiles too long seem to end up as either zombies or vampires. I don’t want that to happen to me.’

There was a roar from the street outside as a metal shutter was hauled down, then a gentler rumble as it was eased into position and the lock attached. The greengrocer opposite was closing up and going home to his family.

‘I think we should get married,’ Zen said, to his total astonishment.

Ellen gave a yelp of laughter.

‘Married?’

One of the other tenants had put on some rock music whose bass notes penetrated to where they sat as a series of dull thumps. Somewhere else, seemingly quite unrelated to them, a tinny melody line faintly wailed.

‘You don’t know how many times I’ve imagined that you might say this, Aurelio,’ Ellen sighed. ‘I always thought that it was the one thing needed to make everything right.’

‘It is. It will.’

But his voice lacked conviction, even to himself.

He looked around slowly, conscious that all this was about to join his huge gallery of memories. The latest addition to our collection. A significant acquisition. ‘They’re turning the whole city into a museum,’ Cinzia Miletti had complained. But it wasn’t only cities that suffered that fate.

‘I’d better go.’

She made no attempt to stop him.

‘I’m sorry, Aurelio. I really am.’

The rain had almost stopped. Zen stood waiting at the tram stop, his mind completely blank. The shock of what had just happened was so severe that he found it literally impossible to think about. The last thing he could clearly remember was eating the hamburger and telling Ellen about the Miletti case. He had not mentioned the most recent development, which had occurred just the day before.

The arrest of Ivy Cook had had the unusual effect of uniting both sides of the political spectrum. On the one hand there was talk of a carefully orchestrated attempt by the forces of the Left to undermine the Milettis, on the other of a typically cynical solution by the Right to the embarrassing problem of the family’s involvement in Ruggiero’s death. In short, whatever your political leanings, Ivy Cook appeared as a humble employee who was being made to carry the can for others, a foreigner without influence or power, the perfect scapegoat. Di Leonardo, the Deputy Public Prosecutor, contributed to the debate with some widely quoted off-the-record criticisms of ‘serious irregularities in the procedures adopted by the police’, Senator Gianpiero Rossi publicly expressed the opinion that the tape recording was inadmissible evidence since it had neither been authorized by the judiciary nor made on official equipment, while Pietro Miletti flew back from London to demand an end to ‘the continual harassment of the Miletti family and their dependants’. The net result was that Rosella Foria had finally granted an application for Ivy Cook’s release on bail pending a full investigation. The case still hung in the balance, but Ivy was free.

The tram arrived and Zen was rumbled and jolted across the Tiber, over the Aventine hill and past the Colosseum to Porta Maggiore. He then walked three blocks to the street where Gilberto Nieddu lived with a dark-haired beauty who treated him with bantering humour, as though Gilberto’s clumsy attempts to woo her aroused nothing but her amusement. In fact they had been married eight years and had four children, who sat open-mouthed and wide-eyed as Uncle Aurelio described the dramatic end of his relationship with ‘
l’americana
’.