Medusa

III

The kick-turn perfectly executed, he emerged from the depths and gasped in air, then powered forward again, cleaving the wavelets set up by his previous passage. Three, four, five, six… The powerful arms thrashed the water that streamed down his hairy shoulders and back, ending in a dense twist like the tail of some small parasite seeking refuge down the crack in the man’s buttocks.

Eight, nine, ten… Sighting the wall ahead, he swivelled and kicked off again, torpedoing a good two metres underwater before breaking surface again. Forty-eight lengths already, and he was feeling fine. In fact he was feeling great. His arms and legs were still solid, enjoying their work, and even the edgy warming pain from the lactic acid build-up merely served as a stimulant. But above all his voglia was back, his will to win. The idea had been to break fifty laps for the first time, to celebrate his birthday, and now he knew that he could.

Seen from the road running up the hillside above, had there been an observer there, the house, the swimming pool and the surrounding terraces resembled a section of tessera unearthed from a once larger antique inlaid floor: an azure rectangle contrasting with the russet dash of the roof tiles, both keyed to the blocks and wedges of ochre paving and the surrounding array of silvery olive trees. As for the shadows cast by the potted shrubs lining the driveway leading up to the house, they might have been explained away as ancient stains; wine, perhaps, or blood.

Eight, nine, ten… Another perfect flip-over and once again he was caroming up through the depths and hitting his stride for the final length. It was as he rose to breathe after the initial battery of strokes that he heard the sound for the first time. At first he ignored it as an aural aberration, some tinnitus brought on by a combination of water in the ear canals and his extraordinary exertions. The second time he spouted, he knew the sound was real, but it was only after the third that he realized what it was. Well, they could wait, whoever they were.

His fingers touched the tiled wall. He rose triumphantly to his feet and surveyed the scene. A large white cloud was sliding over the tremulous sun. Beneath the veranda of the house, a heavy white plastic table with its yellow parasol supported a newspaper, a glossy news magazine, a bottle of mineral water, a glass with a slice of lemon and a mobile phone.

Nestore felt a crawling sensation on his right arm, and looked down to see a butterfly exploring the undergrowth of wet hairs just above the small black tattoo of a woman’s head. Its huge wings were a miraculous pattern of rusty orange and cobalt blue dots and dashes on an ochre ground while its head was festooned with delicate antennae like a radio aerial. With a careless swipe of his hand he crushed the creature, which fell like limp ashen paper into the chlorinated water of the pool.

The sound which had interrupted him continued without interruption, a series of high nagging whines. He strode over to the side of the pool, thrusting the water aside with his powerful thighs, placed his hands in the trough at the edge, then leapt up on to the tiles and strode briskly over to pick up the phone.

No sooner had he grasped it than it stopped ringing. He was about to close the cover again when he noticed the text message light blinking. It must have been Irene. Damn. If he’d told her once, he’d told her a hundred times never to contact him at the weekend. Presumably the temptation to send him birthday greetings had proved too strong. ‘We’ll celebrate my twentieth on Monday,’ he’d said when they parted. She’d frowned. ‘Your twentieth?’ ‘ Certo, amore. Whenever I’m with you I feel thirty years younger.’ Which was true. Dark, short and skinny, Irene was no one’s idea of a pin-up, but she had a dirty, driven quality that he found extremely sexy. Just the same, that wouldn’t stop him doubling the usual ration of precoital welts to her buttocks as punishment for this indiscretion. Gli ordini vanno rispettati. Rules were rules. Andreina’s astounding inability to learn Italian had got him off the hook on several occasions, but if she had happened to see this particular message, he’d have had the hell of a time trying to talk his way out of it.

But the message wasn’t from Irene. Water crawled coldly down the man’s back as he read it. 348 393 9028: MEDUSA. After the heated pool, the air was distinctly cool, even down here in the sheltered terraces above Lake Lugano. He keyed in the number, then turned to face the hillside behind the villa. The land rose precipitously, the contours marked by the looping line of Via Totone and its accompanying homes and gardens. There was no one in sight.

The distant phone answered. Nestore remembered those curt, peremptory tones all too well.

‘We need to talk. Drive to Capolago and take the little train up Monte Generoso. Get off at Bellavista. Tell no one. Come immediately and alone.’

He was suddenly furious.

‘Don’t give me orders, Alberto! I’m not in the army any more.’

‘You still are when it comes to this. We all are, all three of us.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘They’ve found Leonardo.’

The only upside to the whole business was that Andreina was predictably furious. ‘But what about lunch? I’ve got a table for fifteen booked at Da Candida! Everyone’s coming! You can’t just change your plans at the last moment like this!’

In his wife’s domestic theology, changing one’s plans at the last moment was a mortal sin on a par with not noticing when she’d had her hair done or forgetting their wedding anniversary. Nestore used his invariable formula for dealing with these outbursts.

‘It’s a matter of business, cara.’

The none-too-subtle implication being, ‘Where the hell do you think the money for all this comes from?’

Once dressed, he went to his study. It was a blatantly masculine room, the tone immediately given by the odour of leather and cigar smoke, the rosewood cabinet filled with shotguns and the two mounted ibex heads on the wall above the fireplace. He removed the one to the left and tapped an eight-digit code into the keypad of the metal door inside. From the recess behind he removed a Glock 32 pistol, checked it carefully, then placed it in his coat pocket.

‘I only have to go to Capolago,’ he told Andreina after pecking her on the cheek. ‘I should be back in plenty of time, but if for some reason I’m delayed just go on down without me and I’ll meet you and the others there. Tell Bernard I’m having the controfiletto di cervo and let him pick the wine.’

He climbed into his new BMW Mini Cooper S — 163 hp at 6000 rpm, 0-100 kph in 7.4 seconds, top speed 220 kph, alloy wheels with run-flat tyres, and the Getrag 6-speed manual box — and drove down the steep twisting street, past the old casino and the construction area for the new one, down into the original town square on the shore of the lake, when the place had been a fishing village. A pair of huge birds were circling on the thermals high above the glassy waters of the lake. Nestore had often observed them from the patio of the villa, but had never been able to identify them. They were obviously raptors of some kind, yet they never seemed to stoop to prey.

He drove round the tight bends by the old church, then out along the suburban street leading to the elegant Fascist-era boxed arch of black and white stone marking the confines of this tiny Italian enclave in the Ticino; ‘a tiny bubble of Italian air trapped in the thick Swiss ice’, as Nestore thought of it.

No formalities of any sort at the border, of course. You simply drove across an invisible line and were, equally invisibly, in Switzerland. Politically Italian, financially Swiss, but to all intents and purposes offshore, Campione was a useful anomaly which attracted many sophisticated and wealthy foreign residents such as himself. The principal amenity it had to offer, although not to Italian citizens, was its negligible rate of income tax, the assessment for which was at the discretion of the local authorities, but almost equally important to Nestore was the fact that Lugano was just a short drive or ferryboat ride away across an unsupervised frontier. That made various things so much easier, notably banking.

There were many fine establishments in Lugano, but he favoured the UBS, partly for the discretion and professionalism of their staff, and partly because it came raccomandata by no less a figure than Roberto Calvi, who before being found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London had paid a seven million dollar backhander to the Socialist party leader Bettino Craxi through that very bank. Nestore reckoned that what had been good enough for the late lamented Dr Calvi would be good enough for him.

Despite its international flavour, due not least to the casino whose profits provided all the municipal income, thereby abolishing all other rates and taxes, Campione was geographically a dead end, almost forty kilometres from the country of which it was nominally a part. The one way out reflected this, a narrow unimproved country road running between nineteenth- century villas set in huge walled gardens above the lake, then ducking underneath the huge swathe of the autostrada up to the San Bernardino and Gotthard tunnels, before trickling into the insignificant village at the head of the lake.

He left his Mini Cooper — a personal toy that Andreina didn’t appreciate, but which Irene certainly did — in the Swiss Federal Railways car park and went off to feed the machine at the entrance. The Swiss might be happy to let the residents of Campione pay virtually no taxes whatever, but God forbid you shouldn’t pay for your parking ticket.

A thickset man with a spectacularly broken nose was sitting on a bench at the end of the mainline station. A huge jaw, ratty eyes set too close together, jug ears, shaven head. Black suit, narrow rectangular shades. Not Swiss, Nestore thought idly, returning to place the ticket on the dashboard of the Mini. He prided himself on being able to spot people’s nationality at a glance, sometimes even their profession.

He walked across the metre-gauge rails embedded in the roadway to the bar opposite, with its typical lakeside array of lindens, palms and dwarf pines. Here he checked the timetable for the mountain railway and then ordered a large espresso and a glass of kirsch. He was going to need a bit of fortification before his appointment with Alberto. Amazing, he thought. Of all the stupid things he’d done, and there had been plenty, this was the last that he had ever imagined would come back to haunt him. On the very rare occasions when he thought about it at all, he’d always imagined it to be as dead and buried as Leonardo himself.

Anyway, apparently the corpse had turned up. So now what? ‘We need to talk.’ Meaning of course that Alberto need¬ ed to talk. And what would the talk amount to? That they were all in this together, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, all for one and one for all, etc, etc. That would be about the extent of it, and it was all perfectly obvious, but it was only too much like Alberto to seize this heaven-sent opportunity to bore him to death.

Not to mention insisting on this absurd secret rendezvous! As if anyone cared about Operation Medusa any more. Those days were long over, far longer indeed than the intervening three decades of calendar time. The innovative ideas of that period were now accepted and its various political causes were all lost. Obsessed as always with the conspiracies and counter-conspiracies which went with his fanatical half-baked patriotism, Alberto was probably the only person left in the country who didn’t realize this.

A blue and orange two-coach electric unit came to rest in the road opposite, pushing a small wagon filled with two large metal rubbish bins and plastic-wrapped cases of mineral water destined for the hotel at the summit of the mountain. Nestore tossed back the rest of his kirsch, crossed the road and took a seat at the very end of the rear carriage. From there he could keep an eye on anyone who boarded after him. They all seemed to be the expected crew of sightseers and hikers. The ugly pug had left his bench and was now taking something from the boot of a red Fiat Panda in the parking lot. It had Italian number-plates, quite unusual here. The minute hand of the station clock clicked to a vertical position and the train jolted into motion.

Nestore leaned back in his seat as the train rumbled across the mainline tracks, under the concrete cliff of the autostrada, gripped the rack rails and hauled itself through a thick growth of elder trees up the steep lower flank of the mountain, then through a sharply curving tunnel almost as narrow as the one to which they’d taken Leonardo and out on to the eastern slopes of the ridge in a ravine of dense beeches. There was no undergrowth here, just the tall erectile trees, most of them retaining their dead leaves, and the brown mulch of beech nut casings below. The air-brake system exhausted its excess pressure with a loud hiss. The thug down at the station could have been Alberto’s companion or driver, thought Nestore idly. Alberto himself would have taken an earlier train, and return by a later one. The old fart always had been a stickler for security procedures, not to say obsessed with conspiracies and plots of every kind.

Bellavista station was a passing loop set in a level clearing in the beeches before the railway started its final climb towards the summit. There was a small buffet and booking office, both closed at this time of year. A sign above the door stated that the altitude was 1223 metres, while another on a pole nearby indicated that the walking time to Scudellate and Maggio was two hours, and to Castel San Pietro two and a half. The air was distinctly colder and sharper than down by the lake.

Nestore waited by the station building, apparently shortsightedly peering at the timetable, until various hearty types in brightly coloured hiking gear had dispersed along their respective paths. Once they were out of sight and the train had continued on its way, he looked around him. There was no one in view, and the only sound was the soughing of the breeze through the beeches, which were mostly bare in this more exposed spot. The ballast between the tracks was thickly covered in their crisp umber leaves.

It was beginning to look as though he had been stood up. And there was nothing he could do except wait for the next train down to Capolago. Another and very nasty thought crossed his mind, namely that Alberto’s call had just been a ruse to draw him away from his home. The hood at the station had been there to check that he did indeed board the train, and as soon as it left he had driven to join Alberto in Campione and force an entrance to the villa. They could be going through his papers right now, noting down all the secrets of his business and financial dealings with a view to blackmailing him. Andreina might even be in peril! Dream on, he thought cynically.

Then he heard a low whistle. He turned and saw a figure standing at the edge of the trees on the other side of the tracks. After a moment’s hesitation he started towards him.

‘Alberto,’ he said neutrally when he drew close enough.

The other man had been inspecting him closely as he walked towards him. Now he nodded once, as if to confirm the resulting identification.

‘Nestore.’

He gestured towards the path from which he had emerged, a narrow ribbon of bare earth winding off into the forest.

‘Shall we?’

Alberto seemed to have changed only in the sense that leftover fondue changes from a bubbly sauce to a compact, grey, gelatinous mass. He had lost some hair and put on a bit of weight, but both his physique and his peremptory manner were essentially unaltered.

‘You’d already heard, I take it.’

‘Heard?’

‘About Leonardo.’

‘No, actually.’

Alberto gave him one of his trademark coded looks, which might be decrypted roughly as ‘Obviously I don’t believe you, but equally obviously you don’t intend or expect me to. Honour is therefore satisfied, and we’re back where we started, only one level up.’

‘I don’t bother any more,’ Nestore said.

‘Bother?’

‘With the news.’

Alberto laughed indulgently.

‘No, of course not! Neither do I. If those media clowns have heard of it, it isn’t news. But I thought you might…’

The winding path, proceeding gently in ascent, had brought them to a viewpoint with a slatted wooden bench overlooking the lake. The gnarled roots of the huge beeches showed above ground between outcrops of rock covered in lichen and some patchy grass. Alberto extracted a pair of small binoculars from his pocket and looked down through them to the terminus of the railway far below. Nestore subsided on to the bench.

‘So you haven’t?’ Alberto remarked, replacing the binoculars in his pocket.

Another unaltered trait: picking up some apparently discarded conversational thread as though it were one among dozens of chess games he was playing simultaneously and with equal mastery. For a vertiginous moment, Nestore felt twenty again, not in the conventional jokey sense in which he’d said it to his mistress, but with a kind of terror. We always misremember youth, he thought. The fact is that it was scary and demanding. He was happy being the age he now was, with the various perks and comforts that age had brought. He wasn’t up to youth any more, and he certainly wasn’t prepared to be dicked around by Alberto.

‘Haven’t what?’ he demanded in a tone that reflected this feeling.

‘Any inside channels. Contacts from the old days, perhaps.’

‘Like who?’

Alberto’s casual, almost irritated shrug struck the first false note in their encounter.

‘Oh, I don’t know!’

Asmall lizard sped across the rocky ledge between them.

‘Gabriele, for instance.’

‘Why should I?’

‘Why shouldn’t you?’

‘Passarini was a wimp, even back then. I don’t associate with wimps.’

Alberto nodded, as though evaluating some important and complex piece of data.

‘So you’re no longer in touch with Gabriele.’

Nestore got to his feet.

‘I’m no longer in touch with anyone from those days, Alberto. And the only reason I’m talking to you is because you dragged me up here with an urgent summons that made it all sound vitally important, a matter of life and death. I don’t get it. All right, Leonardo’s body has been found. So what?’

Alberto slipped immediately into another of the roles that Nestore knew so well, but had forgotten; in this instance, that of the great professor indulging a promising student by deliberately misinterpreting his ploddingly literal question for a more suggestively meaningful one.

‘Before the Viminale moved, I would absolutely have agreed with you,’ he replied, nodding slowly. ‘The investigation was initially being handled by the Brothers-in-Law, and the combination of their own ineptitude and a little judicious guidance orchestrated by yours truly promised to bring the whole unfortunate business to a speedy and discreet conclusion.’

This is how women must feel, thought Nestore, listening to some bore droning on, trying to impress them. Except that they at least know what he wants. But what did Alberto want?

‘What day is it?’

He was pleased to note the momentary flash of startled confusion before the reply came.

‘Why, Sunday.’

‘Correct. It also happens to be my birthday, and I’m celebrating by having lunch out with my friends, none of whom would know you from the Romanian guest worker who washes the dishes at the very exclusive restaurant where I am due in just under an hour. I am no longer Nestore Soldani. My name is Nestor Machado Solorzano and I am a Venezuelan citizen living a blameless life in a quietly luxurious tax haven in southern Switzerland. I am grateful for the help that you provided in the past over those oil contracts and arms deals, but you got your cut at the time. In short, Alberto, unless you can demonstrate in the next thirty seconds that what happened all those years ago is of the slightest consequence to me now, then with all due respect I invite you to stick your Italian intrigues up your arse and leave me in peace.’

He had been expecting fury and fireworks, but to his astonishment — disappointment even — Alberto just crumpled.

‘Of course, of course!’ he murmured. ‘I’m sorry. Let’s start back to the station. The train will be along soon and you’ll be back in Campione in good time for your lunch. I had no idea that it was your birthday and I apologize for intruding. Only I had to be sure, do you see?’

When there was no answer, he repeated the apparently rhetorical question in an even more emphatically anguished tone.

‘Do you see?’

I was completely wrong about him, thought Nestore. The old boy’s gone to pieces. It’s all front, bluster and bluff, and the generalized paranoia of the old.

‘See what?’ he demanded roughly.

‘That I had to be sure.’

‘Sure of what?’

Alberto paused for a moment, holding his companion by the arm. He gave a brief laugh to signal an upcoming joke.

‘That I’d “secured my flanks”. Remember that pedant Oddone in his lecture on Cannae? “Aemilius Paullus had imprudently neglected to secure his flanks.” At which Andrea promptly pipes up, “And his rear was wide open too.” Ah, happy days!’

Nestore pointedly consulted his watch, and Alberto hastened to lead the way along the path again.

‘Anyway, that’s rather my position just now, you see.’

‘“Securing your flanks”. Meaning me and Gabriele?’

There was no reply.

‘What’s become of Gabriele, anyway?’

Not that he gave a toss. This was just a social chat now, a question of finding some topic in common to keep the embarrassment of silence at bay.

‘He runs a bookshop in Milan,’ Alberto murmured.

Nestore nodded.

‘I can imagine him doing that.’

‘Only he doesn’t seem to be there at the moment. Or at his house either. In fact he seems to have disappeared. It’s all a bit worrying. Are you sure you have no idea where he might be?’

‘We haven’t been in touch for over twenty years.’

‘Ah, right. Well, we’re looking into it. We’ll find him sooner or later. It’s just that time is of the essence.’

‘“We”?’

Alberto’s demeanour changed in some indefinable way.

‘I moved over to intelligence work about the same time that you went off to South America.’

‘The servizi?’

Alberto acknowledged the point with a self-satisfied bow.

‘SISMI, the Servizio Informazioni e Sicurezza Militare. Better promotion prospects, not to mention the possibility of assisting you in your business ventures, but above all a real opportunity to serve my country. There’s little chance of Italy being involved in open warfare in the immediate future, but there’s no end to the covert wars. The post offers me superior challenges and superior resources. That’s how I’ve been able to maintain up-to-date records on you and Gabriele, just in case the need should ever arise.’

‘The need for what?’

‘To meet and talk frankly about the situation. Above all, to ensure that our secret remains ours, and will not become a public scandal which could compromise public trust in our armed forces in the most disastrous way, as well as reopening the terrible scars left on our body politic by the events of the seventies.’

Pompous prick, thought Nestore.

‘Well, I’m glad I’ve been able to reassure you,’ he said affably.

‘Indeed. Now it’s just a question of tracking down Gabriele and having the same conversation with him. I’m sure the outcome will be the same too. I hear the train coming. Many thanks for your cooperation, Nestore, and profound apologies for the disturbance. But I did have to be sure. You understand that, don’t you? I did have to be sure.’

Nestore shrugged wearily.

‘No problem, Alberto. Only next time, not on my birthday, all right?’

Alberto regarded him with a look which Nestore found impossible to decipher.

‘There won’t be a next time.’

He turned and walked away into the surrounding forest of beeches. Nestore headed off across the tracks to the station building.

So what the hell had all that been about, apart from the loss to him of the fifty-franc fare and a quiet Sunday morning at home? All this secret service stuff! Alberto must have gone gaga in his sealed world of spooks, where the only people you could discuss your work with were as crazy as you. And all he’d wanted had been the reassurance that Nestore wouldn’t blab about Leonardo’s death. As though he would! They could have met at one of the cafes in the main square of Campione, for God’s sake. It would have taken a fraction of the time, and the end result would have been exactly the same.

The journey back down the mountainside, at a steady fourteen kilometres an hour, seemed to take an eternity. When they finally arrived, Nestore got out and glanced around the car park. The Italian car had gone and there was no sign of the broken-nosed bouncer. Probably some mummy’s boy from Como who’d come up to Switzerland for the day to give himself a thrill.

He unlocked the Mini Cooper and climbed in. It felt cramped somehow. Reaching down under the seat, he pulled the lever up and pushed back. The seat slotted into its most extended position. Nestore sighed and started up the engine. He always had that problem when Andreina had been using one of their cars. She moved the driving seat forwards so she could reach the pedals, then forgot to return it to its original position. It was one of many sloppy traits of hers that he no longer found charming. But Andreina never drove the Mini, and anyway if the seat had been moved, surely he would have noticed it on the way there? He shrugged and gunned the car out of town and back along the lake, delighting in its superb acceleration and surefootedness. One of these days he must take it up into the mountains and give it a real thrash.

The bells of Santa Maria del Ghirli started ringing noon as he re-entered Italian territory. Perfect. Just time to go home, change into something more fashionable and then head out to the restaurant. He would stick with venison for the main course, but what to start with? The ravioli with meat and truffles were hard to beat at this time of year, but then so was everything else on the menu. Maybe the best thing would be to get Bernard to serve a selection of first courses so that people could sample them all. He drew up in front of the steel gates of the villa, took the telecomando from the glove compartment and depressed the green button at the top.