Medusa

XIX

‘Gabriele Passarini!’

There was a long silence, broken only by a monotonous series of muffled bellows, as of an animal in pain, emanating from the shed below the loft. But how could there be an animal there? The farm had been abandoned for decades.

Zen did not speak further, nor did he move. He just maintained his position at the centre of the former threshing floor, amid the weeds poking up between the paving slabs, as silent and immobile as the harmless if slightly dull statue in a town piazza.

At long length, a voice sounded out from inside the hay loft.

‘Who are you?’

‘You are Passarini?’

Another pause, interspersed by the dull howls of a third voice.

‘Help me, Gabriele! My leg is broken!’

A torch beam shot out like a flick-knife, transfixing Zen.

‘Drop your weapon on the ground and move away from it,’ the man above said.

‘I am not armed. We need to talk. I have no intention of harming you.’

A brief, caustic laugh.

‘Just what Alberto said! You people from the servizi would lie to your mothers about your own name and the date of your birthday.’

‘Please, Gabriele!’ cried the other voice. ‘All right, you won. Now I’m a battlefield casualty. Despite everything, we used to be comrades in arms. By your honour as a soldier, call an ambulance, for the love of God!’

Zen abandoned his imaginary plinth, switched on his torch and strode over to the shed from which these pleas were coming. He finally made out the ancient wooden door and pulled it open. Inside, the darkness was as absolute as in the military tunnels he had explored with Anton Redel. Once again, the torch acted as the presiding deity.

An overwhelming stench of damp mingled with lingering bovine odours and the acoustics of a crypt in which continual whimpers and moans reverberated like a choir of the damned. The building was all of brick. The floor was a tight herringbone pattern, while the vaulted ceiling strengthened the ecclesiastical analogy. The design was at once sturdy, graceful and perfectly proportioned, only this was not a church but a cowshed. They did ugly things in those days too, Zen thought, but they didn’t make ugly things. They just didn’t know how.

‘Over here, Gabriele!’

The swirling echoes cancelled out any directional help that the voice had intended to give, but the torch beam soon picked out the crumpled form lying supine on the flooring in the centre of the hall about five metres away.

‘Call an ambulance! Do you have a mobile? Use mine if not. You wouldn’t want my death on your conscience as well, would you? We’ll just forget what’s happened here. Enough is enough. No more deaths.’

Zen walked towards and then around the man, keeping the torch fixed on his head and face.

‘Gabriele?’ the man asked wonderingly.

‘No, not Gabriele.’

The man lay breathing rapidly and shallowly. His right leg was twisted forward some thirty degrees at the knee. There was blood on his face and hands and on the brick flooring.

Zen transferred the torch to his left hand, knelt down and started to frisk the man’s pockets with his right. The position was awkward, the light source too close to the subject, and he didn’t see the knife until it was curving up towards his throat. But his attacker was hampered in his movements and Zen was able to roll away in time to avoid the blade. Neither man spoke. Zen stood up and kicked the hand holding the knife, which clattered away into one of the cow stalls. He retrieved it, retracted the blade and placed it in his pocket. Then he resumed his search. Having collected all the contents of the man’s jacket and coat pockets, he stood examining them by the light of the torch. As he was doing so, another source of light made its presence felt as Gabriele Passarini made his way towards them, moving in the oddly aggressive manner of people with a limp. He still had the torch in one hand and the pistol in the other.

‘What was I supposed to do?’ Passarini asked, as if talking to himself. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted to knock him over and take his gun away. He was trying to kill me! Only when I hit him, he fell down here from the loft.’

Zen took no notice of him. He completed his inspection of the items he had taken from the man’s pockets, placed them in his own and only then looked at Passarini.

‘Thirty years ago, you were a witness to the murder of Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero in an abandoned military tunnel in the Dolomites. Tell me exactly what happened on that day.’

‘Don’t say anything!’ the man on the floor shouted. ‘He’s a snooper from the Interior Ministry. They’re trying to disgrace the army. Shoot him and then call an ambulance for me! I’ll sort it all out. I’ll tell them that he was responsible for the whole thing and that you saved my life.’

‘Colonel Alberto Guerrazzi was also present on that occasion,’ Zen continued. ‘So was Nestore Soldani, who was killed by a car bomb in Campione d’Italia a few days after the discovery of Ferrero’s corpse, and one day before you fled here. The three of you, with Leonardo Ferrero, formerly constituted one unit of a conspiratorial organization code-named Operation Medusa.’

‘Shoot him, Gabriele!’ Guerrazzi shouted in a voice streaked with anguish. ‘This man is a maverick who is being used by the Interior people to stir up trouble while remaining officially unaccountable. Whatever he has found out remains for the moment his private knowledge. It has not been communicated to Rome. I would know if it had. The risk is therefore containable, just as it was with Ferrero. Like him, this individual represents an Alpha-grade threat to national security. I now outrank you, and as the senior officer in this emergency situation I am ordering you to eliminate him immediately. You have the means at your disposal and I will take full responsibility. Failure to obey my order would be tantamount to treason.’

Gabriele Passarini sighed.

‘Fuck off, Alberto,’ he said.

There was a strangled sound from the floor.

‘Guerrazzi was the leader of the cell,’ Zen continued in an utterly bored tone, ‘the only one with access to higher levels of command within the organization. At a certain point, he informed the rest of you that he had been ordered to take you all up to an abandoned system of military tunnels in the Dolomites to undergo a series of ritual ordeals. The reason given, I imagine, was both to bond the cell together — you were all very new recruits to Medusa — and also to bind that organization in a mystical Blutbruderschaft union with the glorious dead of the regiment who fell there during the First World War.’

‘All honour to them!’ cried the injured man.

‘I entirely agree. All honour to them. All pity too, the poor bastards. At any rate, this is what you were told, and of course you all leapt at the chance to get out of the barracks for a lad¬ dish weekend in the mountains, just as you had at the invitation to be inducted into an elite club like Medusa in the first place. Guerrazzi here was the only one to know the real purpose of the expedition. Colonel Gaetano Comai, his commanding officer and Medusa contact, had informed him that Leonardo Ferrero had contacted a radical Communist investigative journalist named Luca Brandelli with a view to disclosing details about Operation Medusa. Comai no doubt showed him photographs taken covertly during their meeting at a pizzeria in Piazza Bra. Guerrazzi’s mission now was to find out how many other times Ferrero had talked to Brandelli and exactly how much he had revealed, and then eliminate him. I don’t know how he put it to you and Soldani, Signor Passarini, but it may well have been in terms very similar to those he used when he tried to persuade you to shoot me a moment ago.’

‘Alberto told us…’ Gabriele began.

‘Shut up!’ yelled Guerrazzi. ‘If you won’t do your duty, at least hold your tongue.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Would you by any chance have any paper here?’ Zen asked Passarini.

‘Paper?’

‘Typing paper, preferably, but anything will do. I know that you are a man of books, so I thought maybe…’

‘I’ve got some at the house.’

‘Would you be good enough to bring a few sheets over here?’

‘But why?’

‘Five or six sheets would be perfect. Oh, and please don’t think of just running off and disappearing, tempting though that obviously is. If you do, I’ll have to call headquarters and have them issue an arrest warrant for the attempted murder of Colonel Alberto Guerrazzi.’

‘It was an accident!’

‘That would be for the courts to decide, but the case would take at least three years to come to trial, should you be lucky enough to survive that long. I’m sure that the colonel and his friends would take steps to ensure that your time in prison was as unpleasant as possible, if not indeed fatal.’

Gabriele’s fear was evident even in the wavering torchlight. He nodded once and limped away.

‘I knew you’d be trouble as soon as I heard about you, Zen,’ said Guerrazzi. ‘Yes, I’ve guessed your identity, although I hope you noticed that I didn’t reveal it to our little bookworm. So we can put all this behind us. I know I can count on you to keep your silence. You’re a patriot, just as Brandelli was in his own way. He was our sworn enemy thirty years ago, of course, like all the PCI crowd, but times have changed. When I see the shallow consumerist trash running around these days I almost begin to feel nostalgic for enemies like that.’

‘I imagine that Ferrero was tortured before you threw him into that pit,’ Zen said.

Guerrazzi sighed wearily.

‘We naturally tried to extract whatever information we could about what he had divulged. Don’t think that we enjoyed it. We were acting under orders. It was our duty to obey, just as it is your duty to summon an ambulance and have me taken to hospital immediately.’

‘And then a few days later a military aircraft with Leonardo Ferrero supposedly aboard conveniently went missing over the Adriatic following a mid-air explosion.’

‘Many of your guesses so far have been very clever and cor¬ rect, Zen, but you are mistaken if you believe that I had any¬ thing to do with that.’

‘How many men were on board the plane?’

‘In theory, two.’

‘But in practice one. An innocent serviceman.’

‘It was a historic moment, Zen! The whole of Europe was teetering on the brink of armed revolution. The fate of the nation hung in the balance. In the end, the Maoists and Stalinists and anarchists were defeated, but it was a war, albeit secret and undeclared, and in any war there will be casualties. All the liberties and privileges that we take for granted today were won through struggle, sacrifice and suffering, yet how quick we are to forget! And even quicker to condemn.’

‘And to panic, as when Ferrero’s body unexpectedly turned up after all these years. What has become of it, incidentally?’

‘It was cremated last week under a false name and death certificate. I myself scattered the ashes in the Tiber.’ Guerrazzi managed a laugh. ‘One of the vigili noticed what I was doing and threatened me with a fine for polluting the environment. I took his name and number and told him that if he didn’t bugger off he would be in the next urn.’

The light increased perceptibly as Gabriele Passarini returned, holding a sheaf of paper. Zen carefully extracted a slim pile of sheets from the inside of the pack.

‘Thank you. Now then, we’re going to need to leave soon, and it’s vital that you leave no traces of your occupancy here. Go back to the house, pack up whatever you brought with you and try and make the place look as it did when you arrived. Then wait for me in the courtyard. Oh, and leave the pistol here.’

‘Don’t give it to him!’ Guerrazzi shouted, sounding genuinely panicked for the first time. ‘Give it to me! I’ll cover him while you call an ambulance!’

Ignoring him, Gabriele addressed Zen.

‘Why do you want the gun?’

‘It’s government property. Now it’s one thing for you to have critically injured Colonel Guerrazzi…’

‘It was an accident, I tell you!’

‘Exactly my point. But if you take the pistol, that’s theft. It’s the property of the state and must be returned to its assigned user.’

He pointed to the low wall of the nearest stall.

‘Just leave it there and go and pack. I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve discussed a few remaining issues with the colonel.’

Gabriele did as he had been told and walked off. The door at the end of the byre grated on its hinges as he went out.

‘Well, you’ve certainly got Passarini eating out of your hand,’ Guerrazzi commented sarcastically. ‘As a matter of interest, are you planning to shoot me?’

Zen did not reply. He took out a pen and held it out at arm’s length to Guerrazzi along with the sheaf of papers.

‘Sign each of these at the bottom, in order, printing your full name and title underneath.’

Guerrazzi regarded him spitefully.

‘Why?’

‘I want your autograph. A keepsake for my children’s children.’

‘You have no children, Zen. I checked your file.’

‘Sign anyway.’

‘Do you take me for an idiot? I’m not signing some blank sheets of paper that could be used to forge a statement or a confession. Never!’

Zen straightened up and consulted his watch. Then he took a step forward and very deliberately rearranged the position of Guerrazzi’s broken leg. He paid no attention to the resulting clamour. He did not even look at Guerrazzi, only at his watch. When a minute had passed, he repeated the procedure.

‘All right, all right!’ barked Guerrazzi when he could speak again. ‘My heart is weak. You’ll kill me.’

‘Then sign.’

And Alberto did. Zen supervised the process carefully, then retrieved the pages and the pen and placed them in his pocket.

‘Thank you, colonnello,’ he said. ‘We’re almost finished. It only remains for me to tell you why Leonardo Ferrero was killed.’

‘We’ve already discussed that.’

‘We’ve discussed the reasons that your commanding officer gave you. They were in fact false.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Zen, call an ambulance! This pain is unbearable.’

‘I fear that the truth will be even more painful. Indeed, it seems to me almost the cruellest aspect of this little miserable affair.’

‘Don’t lecture me about the truth! I was there. I know what happened.’

‘No, you don’t. And even the version you did believe must have provided little comfort as the years went by. You believed that you had been ordered to eliminate a traitor who was threatening to expose a clandestine organization essential to the future stability of the country. But as time passed it surely became clear that if that stability had ever been under any real threat in the first place, it would have been from people like you. There was never the slightest prospect of the armed left- wing uprising. You had not only underestimated the common sense and decency of the Italian people, but committed an atrocious act in their name and without their consent.’

‘It’s easy to be wise with hindsight.’

‘The three of you have had to live with that knowledge ever since, and each dealt with it in his own characteristic style. Nestore Soldani emigrated to Venezuela and made a fortune in various shady ways. Signor Passarini became a recluse and retreated into the world of antiquarian book dealing. You transferred to the secret service and used your power to terrify and if necessary eliminate anyone who threatened you. Soldani’s dead, and I shall spare Passarini, but your case is different. The other two were accomplices to Ferrero’s murder, but you were in charge. In charge of everything — the details, the duration, the durezza. You decided exactly how much Ferrero had to suffer before you threw him into that blast pit. It’s only right that you at least should know the truth.’

Alberto Guerrazzi managed a scornful laugh.

‘I have always known it, and I am neither proud nor ashamed of what I did.’

Zen ignored him.

‘In the course of the interrogation to which you subjected him, Leonardo Ferrero must have claimed that he had been ordered to contact the journalist Luca Brandelli by your commanding officer, Colonel Comai.’

‘He said a lot of things.’

‘People under torture do. They will say anything to stop the pain.’

‘Just as I signed those sheets of paper. What do you plan to do with them, incidentally?’

‘But in this case what Ferrero said was true. There’s no doubt about that, because he said exactly the same thing to the journalist when they met. He told Brandelli that his commanding officer had recently discovered the existence of Operation Medusa and was very concerned about the implications for democracy. He had therefore instructed Ferrero to arrange for selected details to be leaked to the press so that the whole matter would come to light.’

‘That’s absurd! Comai personally inducted me into Medusa. As cell leader, I recruited the other three. They reported to me and I reported to Comai. If he had doubts about the organization, why would he do all that?’

Zen nodded. ‘That’s an interesting point. Another is the cellular structure of Medusa. The idea of course is to protect the organization from external scrutiny in the event of a breakdown in security. Since each cell is discrete, its members cannot betray anything more than their own limited knowledge. By the same token, however, they cannot know anything more either. They cannot know, for example, whether the organization actually exists at all.’

He shone the torch beam at Guerrazzi’s face.

‘Your induction occurred during the three-month period preceding Lieutenant Ferrero’s death, right?’

‘How can you know?’

‘Because the beginning of that period is when Colonel Comai discovered that Ferrero had been having an affair with his wife Claudia. Or rather, that’s when she told him.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Ferrero had broken off the affair a few months earlier, and he chose the cruellest way, a wall of silence. The coward’s way, she calls it in her journal. It was very difficult and dangerous for Claudia to contact her young lover, and on the few occasions when she tried he simply refused to respond. In a word, he had tired of her, and was no doubt also worried about the effect on his career if her husband found out. Anyway, he dropped her.’

‘This is all…’

‘Shortly afterwards, Claudia discovered that she was pregnant. She broke both the good news and the bad to her husband. She was going to be a mother at last, and he a father. It was a new beginning for their marriage, and in order that love and trust might henceforth be abounding there was one past peccadillo that she wanted to confess to, just so as to clear the air. She backdated the end of the affair with Ferrero by about a year, so that her husband would have no suspicion that the child was not his, and indeed it seems that he never did.’

Guerrazzi looked completely dazed, and not just by pain or the light.

‘Signora Comai’s object in all this was to protect herself against possible future indiscretions by her ex-lover, and more importantly to get her own back. She knew exactly how ambitious Ferrero was, and in his military career he would soon be facing the same wall of silence to which he had treated her. It was a just punishment that would hurt him just as he had hurt her. Colonel Comai had other ideas, however. It was he, no doubt, who suggested that Leonardo Ferrero would be an excellent choice for one of the other three members of the newly formed Medusa cell.’

‘He mentioned his name.’

Zen murmured indulgently.

‘The idea was a stroke of genius on his part, I must admit. A stupid man would have made do with one assassin, or even have done it himself. But Comai couldn’t know how many other people knew about Ferrero’s liaison with his wife. If the young lieutenant turned up dead in an alley somewhere then tongues might have started to wag. Besides, an individual might have betrayed him, but a group like yours was bound together by a sense of shared responsibility and guilt. To reveal the truth would have been to betray your comrades in arms, not to mention a patriotic conspiracy of the highest secrecy and significance.’

‘This is all bluff, Zen! You have no proof.’

‘Proof exists, in the form of Claudia Comai’s journal. I read it earlier today, although apart from a few details it merely confirmed what I already knew or had guessed. And I could easily have brought it with me, had I been interested in collecting evidence. But this case is never going to come to court. Apart from anything else, the principals are all dead. Colonel Comai was almost certainly murdered by his wife, by the way. At the time of Ferrero’s death, Claudia assumed that he had been killed by accident in that plane crash. It was another fifteen years before her husband finally revealed the truth in the course of a marital row. A short time later he fell, or more likely was pushed, to his death. And his widow Claudia herself ended her life at a hotel in Lugano.’

He paused for a moment.

‘Which leaves only you, Guerrazzi.’

He went over to the wall where Passarini had left the pistol and carefully wiped the weapon clean of fingerprints on his scarf before setting it down on the floor about two metres beyond the furthest reach of the injured man.

‘You should be able to reach that in due course. It will be totally dark in here, of course, and moving will be painful. But under the circumstances you may well decide that the alternatives are even less desirable.’

Zen got out Guerrazzi’s SISMI identification and checked that the signature on the blank sheets of paper corresponded to that on the card. He then went through the rest of the other man’s belongings. The keys he retained and the knife he tossed into a corner. Lastly he removed the battery from the mobile phone and then threw them separately to different ends of the shed.

‘So you’re appointing yourself judge, jury and executioner,’ Guerrazzi commented with a certain bitter satisfaction.

‘Just the first two, colonnello, and then only after conducting a full investigation. Unlike you, who took on all three roles on nothing but the unsupported word of a vengeful husband.’

‘I was a soldier obeying the orders of my commanding officer!’

‘What you were was a fool, Guerrazzi. Take these tattoos with the face of the Gorgon, for example. Ferrero and Soldani both had them. I imagine that you and Passarini did too.’

‘It was part of the induction ceremony.’

‘To make life easy for the opposition, no doubt. No need for lengthy interrogations or the third degree. To identify you as a member, all they had to do was roll up your sleeve. And it wasn’t as if Colonel Comai didn’t know any better. He regularly used to smuggle in huge amounts of cash through Switzerland, using the casino at Campione as his clearing house. You can’t do that without powerful friends, and Comai was almost certainly paymaster to one of the real extreme right-wing conspiratorial organizations that were operating at the time. But he knew that the real thing wouldn’t be colourful enough to attract young idiots like you, so he dreamt up this fantasy secret society complete with tattoos and passwords and induction ceremonies and bonding rituals and all the rest of it. And you fell for the hoax, and on the strength of it you have committed two murders and were planning a third.’

‘It’s not true! It can’t be true!’

‘It is true, colonnello. Your entire career has been predicated on a lie. You are evidently a great admirer of military discipline and traditions. So am I, in my way, so I shall now leave you to reflect on the situation and then do as you see fit.’

Zen walked down the alley and out of the building, closing the heavy door behind him and wiping off the handle. After the damp, fetid atmosphere inside the stalla, the night air smelt wonderful.

Gabriele Passarini was waiting with his bags in the courtyard.

‘Right, let’s be off!’ said Zen briskly. ‘Got all your stuff?’

‘Everything except my bicycle.’

‘Is there anything about it to link it to you?’

‘No.’

Passarini hesitated.

‘In fact it’s a ladies’ model.’

‘Then forget it. We must leave immediately.’

‘But what about him?’

He gestured to the cowshed.

‘Oh, that’s all sorted out,’ Zen replied, picking up one of Passarini’s bags and leading the way to the gate. ‘Colonel Guerrazzi and I have come to an understanding and he’s given me full instructions. As soon as we’re clear of the area, I’ll call a number he provided and dispatch a military ambulance to come and pick him up. We couldn’t use the civilian service, of course. They’d want to know what he’d been doing here and how it happened and who we were and all the rest of it. This way, the whole incident will just be forgotten.’

They passed through the little door and Zen closed it behind them.

‘But what about me?’ Passarini whined. ‘He’ll come after me again, or send someone else.’

‘No, he won’t,’ Zen told him as he unlocked his car. ‘Part of our understanding is that he’s made a written statement on those sheets of paper you brought me. I’ll ensure that it’s forwarded to the appropriate quarters. Soon everyone will know about Operation Medusa, so your knowledge will be of no significance.’

‘But there’ll be an enquiry. I’ll have to testify in court.’

‘Your name is not mentioned in Colonel Guerrazzi’s statement. Anyway, no one’s interests would be served by holding a public enquiry. The whole thing will be brushed under the carpet as yesterday’s news. Apparently he’s planning to put out a disinformation story to account for his injuries and allow adequate time for recuperation. But the success of this plan depends absolutely on neither of us disclosing anything about what has happened. Now then, where did he leave his car?’

Passarini looked at Zen doubtfully.

‘Didn’t he tell you?’

‘We overlooked that detail.’

‘It’s in a thicket just a little way along the road. I heard him arrive.’

‘Right. There are apparently sensitive documents in the vehicle and he wants it disposed of safely. He’s given me full instructions. Can you drive with your ankle in that state?’

‘I’m not incapacitated. It’ll hurt a bit, but that kind of pain I can deal with.’

Zen started the engine and turned round.

‘Then you take this car and I’ll drive his. Stay behind me all the way to the place where he wants it dropped off, and then I’ll drive you back to Milan.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ said Passarini as they bumped down the drive leading from the cascina to the paved road. ‘I don’t understand who you are and I don’t understand what you’re doing.’

‘It’s not so much what I’m doing, it’s what I’m undoing. And you don’t need to understand. All you need do is to forget that this ever happened. If you do that, I guarantee that you will be left in peace.’

It was this last phrase that finally persuaded Gabriele. Left in peace! That was all he had ever wanted to be.