Ratking (5 page)

Zen avoided a reply by taking a sip of coffee. He still hadn’t the faintest idea who he was talking to!

‘I’m sure this is very different from the way you do things in Rome,’ Antonio Crepi went on. ‘Maybe you even think it’s a bit strange, but I don’t care! The only thing that interests me is getting Ruggiero released. The
only
thing! Do you understand? It is wonderful that you’re here, your arrival gives us all new heart. Come to dinner! Valesio will be there too, the lawyer who’s been handling the negotiations. Talk informally, off the record. Say what you like, ask any question you like. Be as indiscreet as I am, if you can! No one will mind, and when you start work tomorrow morning you’ll know as much about the case as anyone in Perugia. What do you say?’

This time there was no way out.

‘I’ll be delighted.’

Crepi looked pleased.

‘Thank you, dottore. Thank you. I’m glad you understand. We Umbrians are just simple, forthright country folk. Rome is another world. If at first you find us a bit rough, a bit blunt, that’s just our way. After a while you’ll get used to it. We lack polish, it’s true, but the wood beneath is sound and solid. But you’re not from Rome, surely? Excuse me asking.’

‘I’m from the North.’

‘I thought so. Milan?’

‘Venice.’

‘Ah. A beautiful city. But Perugia is beautiful too! I’ll send someone to collect you at about eight. No, I insist. It’s easier than trying to give directions. You need to have been born here! Until this evening, then.’

As Zen walked back to his hotel he noticed several people staring at him curiously, but it was not until he caught sight of his reflection in a shop window that he realized that he was wearing one of those annoying little Mona Lisa smiles which makes everyone wonder why you’re so pleased with yourself. It was just as well that no one knew him well enough to ask, for he had no idea what he would have replied.

Whatever the reason might have been, by eight o’clock the smile had definitely faded.

Zen had spent the afternoon and early evening reading the background material he had been given on the Miletti case. Like most police drivers, Luigi Palottino clearly considered himself a Formula One contender
manqué
, and the relentless high speeds and a succession of near misses had brought on a mild attack of the car sickness from which Zen often suffered, so that he just hadn’t been able to face the pile of documents Enrico Mancini had sent round with the Alfetta. Not that he needed them, of course, to know who Ruggiero Miletti was. To any Italian of his generation the name was practically synonymous with the word gramophone. Ruggiero’s father, Franco, had started the business, first repairing and later constructing the new-fangled machines in a spare room at the back of the family’s furniture shop on Corso Vanucci, the main street of Perugia. That was in 1910. Ruggiero had been born the previous year. By the time he left school Miletti Phonographs had become a flourishing concern which had outgrown the original premises and moved to a site convenient to the railway line down in the valley.

Although by no means cheap, the Miletti instruments had enjoyed from the first the reputation of being well made, durable, and technically advanced, ‘combining the ancient traditions of Umbrian craftsmanship with an irresistible surge towards the Future’, as the advertisements put it. Franco had a flair for publicity, and before long such notables as D’Annunzio, Bartali the cycle ace and the composer Respighi had consented to be photographed with a Miletti machine. Franco’s greatest coup came when he persuaded the Duce himself to issue a typically bombastic endorsement: ‘I declare and pronounce that your phonographs are truly superior instruments and represent a triumph of Fascist civilization.’ Meanwhile the radio age had arrived, and the Miletti company were soon producing the massive sets which formed the centrepiece of every wealthy family’s sitting-room, around which friends and hangers-on would congregate on Sunday afternoons to listen to the programme called ‘The Four Musketeers’, which eventually became so popular that the football authorities had to delay matches until it was over.

The family’s good fortune continued. Although Ruggiero’s elder brother Marco was killed in Greece, the Milettis had a relatively easy war. Having sacrificed one son, it was easy for Franco to persuade influential friends that Ruggiero’s brains were too valuable a commodity to be put at risk, and hostilities ended with them and the Miletti workshops intact. Both were quickly put to work. The post-war economic boom, artificially fuelled by the Americans to prevent Italy falling to the Communists, provided ideal conditions for rapid growth, while Ruggiero soon proved that he combined his father’s technical genius with even greater ambition and vision. In the next decade the company steadily expanded and diversified, though often in the teeth of considerable opposition from Franco Miletti. When his father died in 1959, Ruggiero found himself at the head of one of the most successful business concerns in the country, producing hi-fi equipment, radios, televisions and tape recorders, exporting to every other country in Europe as well as to many in South America, and often cited as a glowing example of the nation’s economic resurgence. In 1967 the firm became the Società Industriale Miletti di Perugia, or SIMP for short, but this fashionably ugly acronym changed nothing. The Miletti family, which in practice meant Ruggiero himself, remained in absolute and sole control.

The kidnap itself was described in a few pages of material copied over the teleprinter from Perugia. The contents proved to be highly predictable, but at least Zen discovered who Antonio Crepi was: the retired director of a construction company with whom Ruggiero Miletti was in the habit of spending Sunday evening playing cards. One week Crepi would motor over to the Miletti villa, the next Ruggiero would drive down to his friend’s place, overlooking the Tiber valley. On the last Sunday in October, four and a half months earlier, it had been Ruggiero’s turn to visit Crepi. He had left home as usual at eight o’clock and arrived at Crepi’s twenty minutes later. The two had played cards and chatted until about a quarter past eleven, when Ruggiero left to drive home. He had never arrived.

The alarm had been given by Silvio, one of Ruggiero’s three sons. It was rare for Ruggiero not to be back by midnight, and since there was a hard frost Silvio began to worry that his father might have had an accident. He therefore phoned Crepi, who had already gone to bed, and learned that Ruggiero had set out on his return journey an hour earlier. But, as so often, no one thought of a kidnapping. Daniele, the youngest son, arrived home while his brother was speaking to Crepi, and instead of alerting the police the two decided to search the road themselves. When they arrived at Crepi’s villa without having found any trace of Ruggiero the police were finally informed. It was twelve thirty-seven.

Perugia is blessed with a crime rate among the lowest in Italy, and at that hour only a skeleton staff was on duty at the Questura. It took another quarter of an hour to call out the men on standby, and it was twenty past one before a complete set of roadblocks had been set up. Meanwhile the route Miletti had taken was thoroughly examined, revealing evidence of a struggle. Ruggiero’s hat, tie and shoe were found lying on the verge, and not far away lay a muslin wad soaked in ether. But it wasn’t until daybreak that the burnt-out shell of the car Ruggiero had been driving, one of a fleet of leased Fiat Argenta saloons used by both the family and the senior management of SIMP, was finally spotted by a helicopter in an abandoned quarry some eleven miles north of the city. The front bumper was dented and one of the headlamps cracked, indicating that the gang had front-tailed Ruggiero from the villa, then deliberately braked hard on a bend to cause a minor collision, immobilizing his car. They would have got out to examine the damage, all smiles and apologies. At the last moment their victim must have realized what was happening, for he had fought and kicked and struggled. But by then it was much too late. You could only defend yourself against kidnappers
before
they struck, by persuading them to strike somewhere else.

The remainder of the report on the Miletti kidnapping set out the investigators’ provisional conclusions. The gang had had about two hours altogether in which to seize Miletti, dispose of his car, and make good their escape. Assuming the first two stages took about thirty minutes, that left an hour and a half before the roadblocks went up. It was more than enough. If they had continued north they could have been on any one of a dozen remote roads high up in the Apennines within an hour. It was quite possible that they had gone to ground there, in some isolated farm or mountain hut. On the other hand they might well have left the area altogether, taking the link road west to the motorway and spending the rest of the night driving south. By dawn they could have reached the Aspromonte mountains behind Reggio di Calabria, a territory fifty times the size of San Marino and considerably more independent of the Italian State.

In short, it had been a typical professional kidnapping, well planned and well executed. The victim had been carefully chosen to combine the maximum potential return with the minimum possible risk. Like many others, Ruggiero Miletti had regarded kidnapping as something that happened to other people in less fortunate areas of the country, and had scorned to take any precautions. Like many others, he had been wrong. For months, his movements had been logged and analysed, until the kidnappers knew more about his way of life than he did. They had taken him at the weekend. By Monday morning the snatch squad would be back at the garages or factories where they worked. Their companions would laugh as they yawned their way through the day and make crude jokes about their wives being too much for them. They wouldn’t mind. They would be getting paid soon, their job over.

Meanwhile the central cell of the gang would be in touch with the family to get the negotiations moving. They wouldn’t be too impatient at first, although they would sound it, phoning up with bloodcurdling threats about what would happen to their victim if they weren’t paid by the day after tomorrow. But they had timed the operation for the autumn precisely to allow themselves the long winter months in which to break any resistance to their demands. By now though, in late March, they would be starting to grow restless, wanting to see some return on their considerable investment. Summer was just around the corner, and they wouldn’t want to risk missing their month at the seaside. Criminals have the same aspirations as everyone else. That’s why they become criminals.

More recent details were skimpy in the extreme. The gang had apparently contacted the family soon after the kidnapping and it was understood that a ransom had been agreed. The sum remained unknown but was thought likely to have been in the region of ten thousand million lire. Payment was assumed to have taken place towards the end of November, but the hostage had not been released, and a local lawyer named Ubaldo Valesio was now believed to be negotiating on behalf of the family. This last snippet was dated mid-December, and unless someone had filleted the file before it was put on the teleprinter it was the most recent piece of information the police in Perugia had. The message was clear: ‘… was understood that a ransom had been paid … remained unknown but was thought to have been in the region of … was assumed to have taken place towards the end … believed to be negotiating …’ Whoever had drafted the report wanted no one to be in the slightest doubt that the Miletti family had not been cooperating with the authorities.

There was nothing unusual in this, of course. The trouble with the authorities’ line on kidnapping was that it sounded just too good to be true. Free the victim, punish the criminals
and
get your money back! Besides, most people were happier doing business with the kidnappers, whose motives they understood and who like them had a lot to lose, than with the impersonal and perfidious agencies of the State. If Zen was unpleasantly surprised to discover how little the Milettis had been cooperating, it was because it put paid to the theory he’d evolved to explain his sudden recall to active duty.

The explanation Enrico Mancini had given him was obviously false. In the first place, provincial detachments never requested intervention of this kind. A local Questura might ask for an expert from Criminalpol to advise them on some technical problem, but that was a very different thing to handing over control to someone from Rome. Such a procedure was always imposed by the Ministry, and was regarded as a humiliating reprimand for inefficiency or incompetence. But an even more serious objection to Mancini’s story was simply that Mancini was telling it. Enrico Mancini was a very big fish indeed, whose natural habitat was the wider ocean of political life. At the moment he chose to swim in the local waters of the Interior Ministry, where indeed he had survived an abrupt change in the political temperature which had proved fatal to several of his species. But tomorrow he might well be sighted in one of the other branches of government, between which he moved as effortlessly as a porpoise moves from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic and back again. According to some observers, indeed, this rather too evident ease, together with Mancini’s brashly confident manner, might prove to be his downfall in the long run.

At all events, the likes of Mancini did not concern themselves with such normal everyday matters as staff movements. The implication was clear. Despite appearances, this particular staff movement was neither normal nor everyday. When you got a personal phone call from an assistant under-secretary to the Minister and were told you were leaving the next morning, someone had been pulling strings. The obvious candidates had been the Miletti family, but if the Milettis were not cooperating with the authorities they would hardly run to the Ministry complaining that those authorities weren’t doing enough. So what was going on?

Zen read and re-read the material, scribbling a few notes and a lot of convoluted designs in the margins. But it was no good. There were too many faceless names, or what was worse, names which had somehow acquired a totally misleading set of features and characteristics. Thus Pietro, Silvio, Cinzia and Daniele appeared as ‘The Miletti Children’, a quartet of child entertainers in matching outfits, and this despite Zen’s knowledge that the youngest, Daniele, was twenty-six years old, while Pietro was already in his late thirties, married and living somewhere abroad. As for Cinzia, she could hardly be a winsome little pre-pubescent charmer since she already had two children of her own, the eldest twelve years old.