Medusa

XIII

Well, thought Claudia, this is different. Difference was of course why one came here in the first place, but still.

‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘I’d be delighted.’

The man smiled in a gracious, deferential way, but there was a look in his eye… A good ten years younger than me, she thought as he walked off towards the stairs. Just like Leonardo. Ten years meant a lot more back then, of course. But still.

Claudia turned back and tried to apply herself to her game. Venetian, he’d said, when she queried the name. ‘ Venessiani gran signori.’ He certainly seemed to have all the qualities of a gentleman, but the interesting kind who knows exactly when to stop behaving like one. ‘ Veronesi tuti mati,’ the dialect rhyme concluded. People from Verona had the reputation of being a bit crazy, and Claudia felt in the mood to do something crazy.

But that was another reason why one went abroad. Campione wasn’t strictly speaking abroad, of course, but its ambiguous status made it still more fascinating. The place was an exception to every rule, a case apart. And afterwards one took the ferry back to Lugano, just around the peninsula and across the lake, and alighted at the stop a few steps from the Grand Hotel Lugubre Magnifique, as she always thought of it, so reassuringly Swiss, sedate and safe.

She and Gaetano had come here at least once a year back in the early days, and always, as now, in the off-season. She would never forget the sense of excitement and occasion, and above all the way Gaetano changed when they were there, becoming even more ardent and edgy, as though he were one of the serious gamblers the casino had attracted then, men who thought nothing of hazarding a million lire — a lifetime’s wages for many people in those days — on a night’s play.

In reality, though, Gaetano had spent little time at the tables.

‘Why do you bother coming if you’re not going to play?’ she’d asked once.

‘I’m visiting my bankers,’ he’d replied with an oblique smile.

He’d been at Campione before and during the war, when, according to him, it had been a notorious base for espionage, money laundering and shady unaccredited diplomats on various inadmissible missions.

But as long as she and her husband made a few token appearances together in the sala dei giocatori, it had been perfectly in order for her to return there without him, and her presence was accepted without the slightest comment by the staff and the other players. In a way it was like going to church. There were certain forms that had to be observed, but the only thing that really mattered was that they all worshipped the same god. In this case, money.

But the money had never been important to Claudia. Any more than God, for that matter. It was the freedom she loved, the sexy air of sweat and risk and tension. She had always set herself very strict limits on how much to lose, and then stuck by them rigidly, just as she had in her extramarital affairs. There were rules not to be broken, although she had broken the fundamental one with Leonardo: never to get involved with someone whom you and your husband knew socially. But Leonardo too had been a case apart.

A rattle of coins recalled her attention to the game she had been playing mechanically all along. One hundred francs, the maximum jackpot! A good omen, she thought, slipping anoth¬ er coin into the slot. Still, the nerve of that Zen, plonking himself down at her machine while she’d slipped out for a moment to attend to an urgent personal need. And then apologizing so charmingly and inviting her to have coffee with him later that afternoon.

It was humiliating, being reduced to playing the slot machines, but it would have been even more humiliating to come alone in the evening to play in the quiet, spacious rooms upstairs reserved for the giochi francesi, where the serious gamblers foregathered from ten or eleven o’clock on. Besides, the old villa which had housed the casino in those days had been demolished in favour of this fadedly glitzy monstrosity, shortly to be replaced in its turn by the state-of-the-art Las Vegas fantasy structure they were building just a step up the steep hillside behind. Everything changed. The important thing was to try not to care too much.

Twenty francs down now. She lined up the symbols, punched hold on a couple of columns, and then turned the wheels loose. What had Gaetano been doing all those times they’d come here so many years ago? Even then, as a scatterbrained newly-wed, she noticed that he had always brought a couple of empty suitcases that were no longer empty when they returned across the border at Chiasso. That was before they’d built the motorway, of course, and she remembered all too well the sometimes interminable delays at the border.

Gaetano had been tense then, his body stiff with stress in the back seat beside her, his mood withdrawn and almost angry. But the staff car, its passengers and uniformed driver had always been waved through customs control without questions, still less a search. Often Nestore was at the wheel. She’d always liked Nestore, in an innocently flirty sort of way. He’d always liked Campione, too. ‘If I ever get rich, this is where I want to live!’ he’d joked.

Looking back, it seemed odd that Nestore or one of the other young officers in her husband’s ‘stable’ had always been invited along to act as chauffeur. In fact, going there at all had been a bit odd, come to think of it. Gaetano had never taken her to any of the places she really wanted to visit, such as Paris, Vienna or London. Only and always to Campione, a dull little lakeside town dedicated to gambling. And this despite the fact that Gaetano didn’t gamble. But she hadn’t remarked on this at the time. Young wives don’t. Just so long as he’s happy. Just so long as he doesn’t blame me for his unhappiness. Just so long as he’s not interested in someone else.

It occurred to her now that one could very easily have imagined a scenario in which her husband had been interested in someone else, and had parked his wife at the casino in Campione, with an underling to keep an eye on her, in order to give him an opportunity to meet his mistress, perhaps in the very room to which she would be returning tonight, and which they had always shared on those earlier visits. But it wasn’t convincing. Gaetano had been twenty years older than her, and after they had married, he had very soon ceased to be seriously interested in sex.

On the other hand he had been extremely interested in the contents of the battered leather suitcases he brought back from those yearly trips with his beautiful young wife, one of which had spilled open when he stumbled and let it fall on the staircase of their villa — very much as he himself was to fall later — disclosing an astonishing quantity of one-hundred-thousand-lire notes bundled thickly together with rubber bands. When she’d asked where the money came from, he’d told her in a crisp, harsh tone he’d never used before that this was a professional matter, and then made her swear never to mention the incident to anyone. As if she would! She had been disloyal to Gaetano, but not in that way.

But she didn’t want to think about the past. It was just that there wasn’t much else to think about these days. So this Zen loomed rather larger than he otherwise might have done. That and a sense that he wanted something. Claudia had toyed briefly with the idea that he simply wanted her, but she had enough common sense to know that the days when strange men would approach her on that basis were almost certainly over, even here in the casino at Campione.

So on what basis? If not for that, then what? She’d never been wanted for anything much else, except for money, in her son’s case, and a good word in Gaetano’s ear from some of the junior officers. She’d originally suspected that that might be why Leonardo was coming on to her, and had been quite sharp with him on one occasion, a detail she had conveniently forgotten during her reverie at their trysting house the other day. That had set the whole thing back at least a month, when they’d had so little time to begin with. So little time.

Enough. Signor Zen. Yes, there was something of the favour seeker about him, some hint that she had something he needed and that he was prepared to pay assiduous attentions to her in order to get it. But what on earth could it be? It had of course crossed her mind that the man was an adventurer, one of those charming, unscrupulous con men who hung around casinos looking for a suitable target. And despite the fact that she had been playing the slots when he approached her — and he had deliberately approached her, she now felt sure — her manner, clothing and, alas, her age would have marked her down as just such. He certainly wanted something, that much was clear, but what was it?

The only remotely similar thing she could remember had been Danilo in the weeks immediately following Gaetano’s death, when he had started being so creepily solicitous. At first she had thought that was just his faggish way of demonstrat¬ ing sympathy for the bereaved wife, but after a while his constant questions, always delivered as though he was a grief counsellor helping her to come to terms with the reality of what had happened, had begun to seem just a little too pointed and insistent.

What exactly had she been doing when Gaetano fell? Which room had she been in? Hadn’t she heard anything? When did she realize what had happened? What had she done then? And so on. And on and on and on, until one day she had finally turned on him and said, quite coolly, ‘You think I killed him, don’t you?’

And he had. It had been written on his face as he tried desperately to backtrack, to work up enough honest indignation to treat her question with the contempt it should have deserved. Only he couldn’t quite do it. Claudia had dismissed him, and when they started to see each other again, a year or so later, the matter was never discussed. Thereafter she had kept Danilo at arm’s length until she decided that she had either been mistaken or that he had changed his mind. Either way, it was over. Or so she’d thought, until the veiled insinuations he’d made while breaking the news about the discovery of Leonardo’s body.

Speaking of which, she had better call Naldino soon and find out what was happening with the judicial application. Claudia had no illusions about her son. He was well-meaning but indecisive, just like his father, and needed constant prodding in order to achieve anything. Come to think of it, a spell in the army wouldn’t have done him any harm. Some people could only achieve their full potential when they were ordered around. An unfashionable truth, like so many others.

At four o’clock, punctual to the minute, her admirer came to escort her out of the main door of the casino, down the curving slope to the main piazza of the little village and into the Bar Rouge et Noir on the corner. This was where the croupiers and bouncers came later in the evening to loosen up before their shift began, the nearest thing that Campione had to a neighbourhood bar. Claudia was initially surprised that Zen had chosen it rather than one of the more fashionable tourist establishments a little further along the leafy promenade overlooking the lake, but perhaps he liked something a little rougher and edgier. So had Leonardo, once he’d got over his initial inhibitions and grown masterful. And so, to be honest, did she.

She ordered a cappuccino, Zen a beer.

‘Do you come here often?’ he asked.

It was such a classically lame pick-up line that Claudia almost laughed. Under the circumstances, however, she decided to treat it literally.

‘For decades.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes! I used to visit Campione regularly with my late husband.’

Just to let him know that she was unattached.

‘You had good fortune at the tables, then?’

‘I always broke even.’

‘And your husband?’

Claudia was starting to feel relaxed in this man’s company. She decided to paint a romantic, glamorous and slightly mysterious picture of her marriage, even though the reality had been rather different. Intrigue him.

‘Oh, he was much more successful than me. He used to bring back suitcases full of money.’

‘Did he have a system? I’ve always wanted to hear of a really good one.’

‘No, no. He wasn’t a gambler. He came here to see his bankers.’

‘There are no banks in Campione.’

‘Well, that’s what he told me.’

Zen nodded. ‘So perhaps he was a gambler after all, but at games they don’t play in the casino.’

Claudia was confused by this response, but Zen immediately changed the subject and proceeded to ask her a series of ‘questions expecting the answer Yes’. This was a phrase she remembered from school, and a technique she remembered from a rather more recent era. Get them used to saying yes and they’ll find it harder to say no when the time comes. But what did this Zen want her to say yes to? Dinner here or back in Lugano? Followed by a nocturnal visit to the rooms upstairs at the casino dedicated to roulette, chemin de fer, vingt-et-un and other giochi francesi? Followed by what? Giochi francesi?

In the end, it all proved to be rather different from what she had imagined.

‘Perhaps I’d better lay my cards on the table,’ Zen told her, producing a plastic rectangle from his wallet. ‘Or rather my card.’

Polizia di Stato, she read.

So she had been conned, after all. And he would take her for everything she was worth, she knew that. He would destroy her. Despite her efforts to forget, some part of her had been expecting this moment for the past fifteen years. Now it had come, but she was no readier to cope with it.

‘How did you find me?’ she asked, stalling for time.

Zen was obviously still trying the charm, because he smiled.

‘I went to see your son, signora. Naldo Ferrero. I visited him last night at that rustic restaurant in the Marche. He told me that you were staying in Lugano. I enquired at various hotels until I found the one at which you are registered. The desk clerk told me that you had gone to Campione for the day. One of the staff at the casino then identified you.’

Despite the fact that the money and the number plates were Swiss, Campione was part of Italy, she reminded herself. This man could arrest her here, but on the other side of the lake he would have no such power. She furtively consulted her watch. The next ferry was due in less than ten minutes.

‘It’s about the circumstances surrounding the death,’ Zen continued. ‘And, of course, the identity of Naldo’s father.’

The time to move had not yet come. Absolute stillness was demanded now.

‘I made my statement to the police at the time,’ she replied, as though he were an impertinent journalist and she a star caught in an indiscretion. ‘They questioned me on several occasions and I said everything I have to say then, while it was all fresh in my mind. The report must still be on file somewhere. I really don’t know what you expect me to add now.’

It was a bold sally, but it apparently worked. This Zen suddenly looked discomfited, ill at ease. She glanced at her watch again, then out of the window at the darkening lake.

‘Naldo Ferrero told me that he was your natural son by Leonardo Ferrero, and that you had encouraged him to apply for legal custody of a body recently discovered in the Dolomites on the grounds that it is that of his father.’

For a moment, Claudia herself felt thoroughly confused. Don’t try and work out his strategy, she told herself. Boldness had worked once. Maybe it would work again.

‘That’s absurd!’

She sighed and made a gesture indicating how painful it was for her to admit this.

‘The fact is, Naldo is something of a fantasist. He always was as a child, but that’s natural enough. Now, though… My husband, Gaetano, was a hard man in many ways. The barracks and the home were all one to him. Orders were orders, and the slightest disobedience was punished. Naldino took after my side of the family rather than his, which of course made matters worse for both of them. As Gaetano became more intransigent and repressive, his son grew ever more rebellious. And this was an era when rebellion was in the air, remember. Anyway, after Gaetano died in that unfortunate accident, Naldino somehow convinced himself that he was not his son at all, that his real father had been someone quite different. He even changed his name, as though to try and prove it. It’s quite a common psychological phenomenon. I believe there’s even a word for it, although it escapes me at the moment.’

Zen nodded sympathetically.

‘But how could he have known which name to change his to? Where could he have got the idea that his real father was someone who died before he had been born? Someone he had never met or even heard of?’

This was a more difficult question, and one that she hadn’t had to face during her earlier questioning.

‘Oh, he’d heard of Leonardo,’ she found herself replying.

‘How?’

‘From friends.’

‘Friends of his?’

‘No, no. Friends of ours.’

‘Of you and Leonardo?’

‘Of me and my husband, of course.’

Zen took out a packet of cigarettes and offered them to her. Claudia shook her head.

‘May I?’ he asked.

She nodded distractedly. When was the ferry? There was something in the man’s polite manners, long silences and seemingly ingenuous questions that made her absolutely certain that he already knew all the answers and was merely toying with her to see what more he could get her to admit to before his final lethal pounce. Had he found The Book? She’d been a fool to keep it, but it had never occurred to her that anyone would take any interest in events which now seemed, even to her, like ancient history.

‘I’m sorry, signora, I don’t quite understand. Your son was born in 1974, correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘While your husband died in 1987?’

She nodded.

‘So Naldo was thirteen at the time of his death.’

Suddenly she saw her way clear.

‘Yes. A very delicate age, very difficult. Which is probably why he came to terms with the tragedy by denying that he had ever been his father in the first place.’

Zen’s brow remained comically furrowed.

‘But, I repeat, why choose as his surrogate father someone who was also dead, and had been from shortly before his own birth?’

Claudia made a large gesture.

‘Well, one would have to be some sort of Freudian doctor to explain that! All I know is that he decided at a certain point that his biological father, as they say these days, was a young man who formed part of what we jokingly called the ‘stable’, the group of junior officers that Gaetano had assembled around him in the regiment, and who all came quite frequently to our house.’

‘That group included Leonardo Ferrero?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Nestore Soldani?’

She looked at him in surprise.

‘Yes, him too.’

‘Who else?’

‘I can’t remember all their names. It’s so long ago.’

A tiny white speck in the gloaming announced the imminent arrival of the ferry.

‘But, I repeat, how could your son possibly have heard of Leonardo Ferrero, who died in an accident involving a military aircraft the year before he was born?’

He glared at her across the table, all charm now stripped away.

‘Unless of course Naldo really is your love child by Leonardo Ferrero, as he claims you told him. That would also explain your late husband’s animosity to him, assuming, as I think we may under the circumstances, that he had either found out or guessed the truth.’

Claudia scooped up her bag and got to her feet, saying something about needing to visit the washroom for a moment. She rounded the table, pushing against Zen’s back. A moment later she was through the door and running as fast as she could towards the ferry dock about thirty metres away. The boat was already alongside, the lines secure. She waved frantically, praying that the deckhand would see her and hold the gangplank long enough for her to board.

He did. She clomped breathlessly down the short flight of steps into the forward saloon and sank into one of the plastic upholstered seats. The boat’s engines revved up, then settled back into a steady purring rhythm for the ten-minute crossing to Paradiso, the southern district of Lugano where her hotel was located. She’d done it!

But so had he, she realized as a figure appeared at the far end of the empty saloon. For a moment she was terrified that he was going to come at her as Gaetano had when she’d confronted him with the truth about her pregnancy, slapping and punching her face and breasts and screaming ‘ Puttana! ’

Nothing like that. He just sat down opposite her, quite calmly, another passenger on his way back to Lugano. The deck¬ hand came round and clipped her return, sold Zen a single, and then went back to join his colleague in the wheelhouse, leaving them alone.

‘Did he have a tattoo?’

Say nothing.

‘The body they found, the one that your son is trying to reclaim, had a tattoo. A woman’s face.’

Say nothing.

‘So did Nestore Soldani, another of your husband’s “stable”. I spoke to his widow earlier this afternoon.’

‘His widow?’

‘Soldani, also known as Nestor Machado Solorzano, was murdered here a few days ago. Blown up in his car as he returned home to Campione after a meeting with a person or persons unknown.’

Claudia stood up. They were a good hundred metres off the eastern coast of the lake now, surely back in Swiss waters. She could finally allow herself to get angry.

‘I don’t want to listen to any more of this nonsense! I’ve had enough of all your tricks and teasing, understand? He fell down the stairs! That’s what happened and you have no proof to the contrary. He was a cripple by then, for God’s sake! He fell down the stairs. That was the conclusion arrived at by the investigating magistrate at the time and it’s never once been queried, not once in all these years. How dare you poke your nose in here now, in a foreign country where I’m on holiday, trying to find a little peace and happiness after so much pain, and bring up the whole horrible business again? How dare you? You have no standing here. The Swiss wouldn’t let you clean the toilets in their country!’

The ferry was approaching the dock. Claudia went up the staircase and out on deck. Zen followed, catching up with her as the ferry came alongside.

‘Signora…’ he began, but got no further.

‘Shut up! Leave me alone! You’re just a bully, like all policemen. Well, you don’t scare me, do you hear? I’ve lived my life, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Go to hell! Dio boia, Dio can, vaffanculo! You can’t do anything to me!’

The deckhand was watching them with alarm, trying to work out what was going on. It occurred to Claudia that she and Zen might well appear to him to be the two lovers she had fantasized about earlier, having a classic end-of-the-affair row. She strode down the gangplank and off under the trees. Zen made no attempt to follow, but his voice floated after her from the deck of the ferry which was already pushing off for its final run down to the city centre.

‘I’m not going to do anything to you.’

The words were reassuring, but there was a disquieting undercurrent to them. It took her a moment to work out what it was. ‘ Non ti faccio niente, io.’ He’d addressed her in the familiar form used only with family, close friends, inferiors and people you are condescending to. What a nerve! The emphatic personal pronoun at the end added another dimension to her unease. ‘I’m not going to do anything to you.’ So who was? Was he going to try and enlist the aid of the local police chief? The idea was ridiculous. The Swiss were fiercely independent and notoriously bureaucratic. This Zen would need every legal document under the sun, translated into three languages, before they’d even begin to consider arresting a foreign tourist happily spending her money and causing no disturbance whatsoever on their territory.

The clerk at the desk handed her her key with that exquisitely diffident yet friendly courtesy which all the staff seemed to possess as a birthright. Claudia was of course a regular, and a generous tipper. She could afford it. The extent of her fortune, once Gaetano’s will was read, had quite bewildered her. Where had all this money come from? Not from his salary as an army officer, that was for sure. She’d asked Danilo, who had muttered about it being one of those things — and how many there were in this life! — that was better not enquired into too deeply.

In her room, immaculately remade in her absence, she opened the windows and then the shutters on to the balcony overlooking the lake. Then she called room service. A plate of Scottish wild smoked salmon, a green salad and a bottle of champagne. A rich elderly widow’s sad supper. Well, so be it. She didn’t normally drink alone, despite Danilo’s snide comment, but tonight she felt like getting slightly tipsy. She deserved it, after what she’d just been through.

The fumes of the lake rose to meet her as she went out on to the balcony, like the bad smell of a goldfish bowl in urgent need of cleaning. Across the lake, the lights of the casino at Campione were reflected in the torpid water. What had this Zen meant about her husband being a gambler at games they didn’t play in the casino? Gaetano had never understood gambling, but she had understood it immediately. It brought meaning to your life, if only for a while and at a potentially high price. But there was no price too high to be paid for meaning, nothing that could replace it, nothing that could compare. What was money besides that infinite gift? And, money aside, it didn’t matter whether you won or you lost. Something had happened, your life had been structured for a few hours, you wept or you exulted. It was like sex. Yes, that was the only thing that could compare.

There was a discreet knock at the door and a waiter entered with a wheeled trolley bearing her meal. She tipped him lavishly and then, the moment he had left, tore into the salmon and open-throated the wine almost with desperation, like Leonardo making love shortly before he grew cold and dropped her, eager to get it over with before his appetite failed him.

When hers was sated, she surveyed the wreckage of the dinner tray. It had all been so clean and perfectly arranged, and she’d turned it into this mess. Still, it was another meal, she thought with a slight burp. And more meals tomorrow and the day after, and more burps. But no more gambling. No more illusions of meaning, however fleeting. She stepped back out on to the balcony with her glass and the bottle of champagne. Far below, the fan-shaped pattern of the paving stones seemed to beat gently, like wings. She was a little drunk, she realized. And she’d never had a head for heights. Unless that was precisely what she had had, and to excess.

From a room close by, the strains of a solo violin rose above the miasma of the lake, probably the soundtrack to a movie or TV programme that someone was watching. The encounter with that policeman seemed as distant as her childhood. She found herself muttering the German lullaby rhyme which her mother had used to send her to sleep. Her parents had met in the Alto Adige shortly before the war. Her mother spoke almost perfect Italian, but her native tongue was German. Claudia’s father, however, had forbidden the language to be spoken in the house. It had remained a secret between mother and daughter, and seemed all the more powerful and precious for that.

How did the rhyme go? Her mother had later claimed it was a poem by a famous writer, but she had always had intellectual pretensions, and the verses were too natural and artless ever to have been written down. Despite the innumerable times her mother had recited it to her, she could only now remember scattered phrases, and realized that she had no precise idea what they meant. ‘ Nun der Tag mich mud gemacht… wie ein mudes Kind… Stirn, vergiss du alles Denken…’ Something about children feeling tired at the close of day, and it being time to stop doing and thinking, time to let go.

If only she could! But she knew what Zen’s appearance portended. He thought he had been so clever, apparently talking about Leonardo and Naldino and Nestore, but she had seen right through him. The discovery of Leonardo’s body had clearly triggered a reinvestigation of all the circumstances surrounding Gaetano’s death. A new man had come along, insusceptible to the pressures that had been brought to bear on Inspector Boito, and much better informed about the affair with Leonardo, and he had instantly realized the truth. It was all very well to say that he was powerless while she remained in Switzerland, but she couldn’t stay at the hotel for ever. And the moment she returned home, he would be watching and waiting, biding his time. They might even arrest her at the frontier. What would she get? Twenty-five years? A life sentence. She would die in prison.

From the room below the music drifted up again, the same theme, but this time taken up by the whole orchestra. Below, the splayed paving stones of the courtyard glowed up at her. ‘ Und die Seele unbewacht will in freien Flugen schweben…’ She’d understood that die Seele meant l’anima, the soul, and then there was something about flying, but she’d never understood unbewacht. And when she’d asked her mother, she had started to weep and then said, ‘It means unwatched, unsupervised, without anyone to tell you what to do or say or feel or how to behave or anything else. It means to be at perfect liberty, free at last.’

At the time, this outburst had just made the idea more problematic, not to mention threatening in some sense, as though a taboo had been broken. Nor had she really understood what die Seele meant, except as an ideal version of herself, with better hair and none of the acne and period pains and the fat which had been quite a big problem at the time, although it had turned out all right later on. And she certainly hadn’t understood unbewacht. Watched over was exactly what she had so desperately wanted to be, and particularly when she was asleep, except that her parents weren’t up to the job. Her mother’s tears had been the final proof of that.

It occurred to her for the first time that in her marriage to Gaetano, and even perhaps her affair with Leonardo, she had merely been replaying the hand of cards that her parents had been dealt, as if to prove to them posthumously that it could after all have been a winner.

She leant over the balcony, gazing down at the paving stones spread out like interlocking angels’ wings. Unbewacht. She understood the word now all right, and she understood Seele and she understood her mother. She also understood, and it was perhaps her supreme moment, that this understanding had come too late, not as an epiphany but an epitaph.