Ratking

ELEVEN

She almost changed her mind at the last moment. It was the place itself that did it, the smell of cheap power, making her realize just how far she had come since those early days, the days of secretarial work and English lessons. The world Ivy lived in now was drenched in power too, of course, but quite different from the low-grade kind that pervaded places where you came to post a parcel or cash a cheque or renew your residence permit. How she’d always hated the bitter, envious midgets who patrol these internal boundaries of the state, malicious goblins wringing the most out of their single dingy magic spell. Her Italian friends claimed to feel the same way, but Ivy had never been convinced. The opium of these people was not religion but power, or rather power was their religion. Everyone believed, everyone was hooked. And everyone was rewarded with at least a tiny scrap of the stuff, enough to make them feel needed. What people hated in the system was being subjected to others’ power, but they would all resist any change which threatened to modify or limit their own. The situation was thus both stable and rewarding, especially for those who were rich in power and could bypass it with a few phone calls, a hint dropped here, a threat there. At length Ivy had come to appreciate its advantages, and to realize that she could make just as good use of them as the natives, if not rather better in fact. In the end she’d come to admire the Italians as the great realists who saw life as it really was, free of the crippling hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxon world in which she had been brought up.

She’d learned her lesson well. Gone were the days when she had to hang around under that sign with its contemptuous scrawl ‘Foreigners’, waiting for the Political Branch officials who would swan in and out as it suited them, or not turn up at all, or send you away for not having enough sheets of the special franked paper which could only be bought at a tobacconist’s shop which meant another half-hour’s delay and then starting from scratch again having lost your place in the queue. Now-adays she went over their heads and dealt directly with the people with real power. The snag, of course, is that they won’t speak to you unless you have real power too, or know someone who does. Only since her association with Silvio Miletti had she been able to make full use of the lessons she had learned, to put her newly acquired skills to the test. Yes, she had come a long way.

‘You looking for something?’

Hovering there at the foot of the stairs, hesitating, reflecting, she’d attracted the attention of the guard, who was fixing her with a supercilious stare.

‘I have an appointment with Commissioner Zen,’ she replied coldly.

‘Never heard of him.’

‘It’s all right, I know the room number.’

She tried to move forward to the stairs, but the man barred her with one arm and yelled to a colleague, ‘We got a Zen?’

The man consulted a list taped to the wall.

‘Three five one!’ he yelled back.

‘Three five one,’ the guard repeated slowly. ‘Third floor. Think you can make it on your own?’

‘Just about, I should think, thank you very much.’

Her attempt at irony did not make the slightest impression on the man’s fatuous complacency. You couldn’t beat them at their own game, of course; the mistake had been agreeing to come in the first place. Normally she would not have done so. In the circles in which she now moved one did not call on policemen unless they were on the payroll, in which case the meeting would be on neutral ground, in a cafe or on the street. But when Zen had phoned, just before lunch, Ivy had agreed with hardly a moment’s thought. He was going back to Rome that evening, he said, and he’d like to clear up that matter they had discussed on the phone at the beginning of the week, did she remember? She remembered all right! Not the subject of the phone call, which had been rather vague in any case, something about a letter he had received. But she wasn’t likely to forget the way he’d quizzed her about her appointment with Cinzia that morning. At all events, today he’d suggested that she stop by his office in the afternoon, and to her surprise she had agreed. The problem, she was forced to admit, was that her reflexes had not yet adjusted to her new position. Silvio would have got it right instinctively, but you had to have been born powerful for that. In her heart of hearts Ivy still feared and respected the police as her parents had taught her to do. She might have come a long way, she recognized, but there was still a long way to go.

Her sensible rubber heels made hardly a sound as she walked along the third-floor corridor. With some surprise she noticed that her palms were slightly damp. The place was having its effect. That shiny travertine cladding they used everywhere, cold and slippery, seemed to exude unease. Get a grip on yourself, she thought, as she knocked at the door.

The occupant of the office was a rough, common-looking individual of the brawn and no brain variety. She thought she must have made a mistake, but he called her in.

‘The chief’ll be back directly. He says you’re to wait.’

Ivy glanced at her watch. She was by no means certain that it had been a good idea to come and this provided the perfect excuse for leaving.

‘I’m sorry, I’ve got another appointment.’

But the man had taken up a position with his back to the door.

‘Take it easy, relax!’ he told her in an insultingly familiar tone. ‘You want to read the paper?’

He picked a pink sports paper from the dustbin and held it out to her. There was a long smear of some viscous matter down the front page.

The man’s body was bulging with muscle. His nose had been broken and his ears were grotesquely swollen. He had an air of ingrained damage about him, as though his life had been spent running into things and coming off second-best. The effect was both comical and threatening.

Ivy consulted her watch again.

‘I shall wait for fifteen minutes.’

Why hadn’t she insisted on leaving immediately? It had something to do with the man’s physical presence. There was no denying it, he intimidated her. He was staring at her with an expression which to her alarm she found that she recognized. She had discovered its meaning back in the days when she was working at the hospital, where she’d been secretary to one of the directors, an unmarried man in his mid-forties. He was distinguished, witty and charming, and seemed intrigued by his ‘English’ secretary, amused by her, concerned about her welfare. He gave her flowers and chocolates occasionally, helped her find a flat at a rent she could afford, and once even took her out to eat at a restaurant outside Perugia. He had never made the ghost of a pass at her.

One weekend there was a conference in Bologna which he was due to attend, and at the last moment he proposed that Ivy accompany him. When she hesitated he showed her the receipt for the hotel booking he had already made, for two single rooms. She could assist him in various small ways in return for a little paid holiday, he explained. He made it sound as though she would be doing him a favour. He appealed to her as an attractive, vivacious woman, a fellow-conspirator against life’s drabness, the ideal companion for such a jaunt as this. Nothing quite like it had ever happened to her before. The experience seemed to sum up everything she loved about this country where people knew what life was worth and understood how to get the best out of it.

They put up at a luxury hotel and dined out that evening at one of the city’s famous restaurants. Ivy’s pleasure was dimmed only by a slight anxiety as to what would happen when they got back to the hotel, or rather as to how she would deal with it. Ivy was not attracted to her employer physically, but she had long ago been forced to face the fact that the men she found attractive did not feel the same way about her. They were younger than her, for one thing, handsome, reckless types who didn’t give a damn about anything. Unfortunately they didn’t give a damn about her, even as a one-night stand, so she had learned to compromise. And when someone had been as attentive and thoughtful as her employer, taking such pains to ensure that the weekend was a success, not to mention the various practical possibilities for the future this opened up, well, why not, she thought.

Only it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen that night, when he simply kissed her hand and wished her a good night’s sleep, nor the next, when they went out with a group of his colleagues to a restaurant in the country outside Bologna. The men all talked loudly and continuously and so fast that Ivy wasn’t always able to follow the conversation. There were even moments when she doubted whether they meant her to. After the meal a bottle of whisky was brought to the table. As it circulated through the fog of endless cigarettes, Ivy watched meaning coming and going like a landscape glimpsed through cloud from a plane. She felt lost, discarded. Her employer had moved into the world which men inhabit with other men and where women are not at home. From time to time he glanced at her, made some comment or smiled, but he was no longer there, not really. She was alone in spirit, and later quite literally, for in the confusion of leaving the restaurant she ended up in a car with four men she hadn’t even been introduced to, and had to spend the whole forty minutes of the drive back to Bologna fielding crassly insensitive questions about her private life, her family, why she was living in Italy and whether she liked spaghetti. Back at her hotel her employer was nowhere to be found. She made her way alone to her room, cursing herself for a stupid sentimental bitch.

The next morning a waiter awakened her with a bouquet of roses and a handwritten card covered in fulsome apologies and inviting her to take coffee on the terrace. There the apologies were repeated in person. He had drunk too much and become confused, the group he was with had wanted to go on to a nightclub despite his objections, and so on and so forth. Later he drove her back to Perugia. Nothing seemed to have changed.

But something had. She noticed it immediately in the eyes of the other men at the hospital and in the way they treated her. But she had no idea what it meant until about a week later, when she overheard two administrative assistants chatting on the stairs.

‘… for the weekend with that English bit.’

‘But he’s a pansy!’

‘That’s what everyone thought! Looks like we’ve been underestimating him.’

‘Or maybe he gets it coming and going, eh? Crafty old bugger!’

It was so cruel, so nasty! Above all, it was so unfair! ‘But we didn’t do anything!’ she felt like screaming. ‘He is a pansy! He didn’t lay a finger on me!’ But of course no one would have believed her. ‘Where I come from,’ an Italian girl had once told her, ‘if a man and a woman are alone together in a room for fifteen minutes, it’s assumed that they’ve made love.’ Her employer had managed to salvage his reputation with the other men at the hospital – and how much depends on that reputation! – at no cost to himself. How very clever. Even in the intensity of her hatred and hurt at the way she had been used, Ivy remained coolly appreciative of how cleverly it had been done. Having realized at an early age that stupidity makes a poor sauce to plain looks, she had always sought to give cleverness its due.

But now, incredibly, this brutal policeman was looking at her in the same way as those men at the hospital, the way a man looks at a woman he knows to be sexually available. But that didn’t make sense! The situation was utterly different in every respect. What was going on?

Ivy felt immensely reassured when Zen finally arrived. He didn’t look at her in that vulgar impertinent way. His expression was detached, calculating and morose, as if to say that he would do his job to the best of his ability even though he had no illusions as to its value.

‘All right, Chiodini, that’ll do,’ he said, summarily dismissing the man who had been keeping the door like some mastiff. As he settled in his chair Ivy noticed that his shoes and trousers were coated with a fine red dust.

‘Is this going to take long?’ she asked a little tetchily. ‘You said two o’clock and I’m in rather a hurry.’

Zen took a sheet of paper from his pocket and passed it to her without a word. It was covered in the same fine red dust as his clothing. Was this the letter which he’d referred to? But she could see from the printed heading Polizia dello Stato that it was official. The typed text began with one of those formulas which the judicial system employs to eliminate the ambiguities of normal human utterance. I, the undersigned, depose as follows. On the morning of Monday 22 March at 0920 approximately I observed Cook, Ivy Elaine, outside the garage below our family residence at Via del Capanno 5, Perugia. She was carrying a small green plastic bag. She got into one of the Fiat saloons and drove away. Since Cook is entitled to the use of these cars I thought no more of it at the time. Later the same morning, at 1145 approximately, I saw Cook walking upstairs to the room she occupied in our house during this period. She was carrying the same plastic bag as before. I wished her to type some letters for me and called to attract her attention. When she did not respond I followed her upstairs. Her room was empty and I could hear the sound of the shower from the bathroom next door. The plastic bag she had been carrying lay on the table. To my surprise, I found that it contained a blonde wig which I had bought the previous year to attend a Carnival party, and a small automatic pistol which I recognized as belonging to my sister Cinzia.

Ivy surveyed the effect this text was having on her body: the thudding of her heart, the swelling pressure of her blood, the dryness of her mouth, the moisture erupting all over her skin, the weight on her chest against which she had to struggle to draw breath, the numbness and trembling, the urge to break out in short sharp howls like a hyena. When Cook returned to the room I asked her about the wig and the pistol. She appeared confused, and then said that she had just been playing a joke on Cinzia. I was appalled that she could contemplate such a thing at a moment when we were all anxiously awaiting news of my father’s release. I demanded further details, but Cook’s replies were incoherent and when I pressed her she became hysterical. I assumed at first that this episode was due to the tremendous strain under which we were all living at the time. But when my father was subsequently found dead, and it emerged that he had been shot during the period that Cook had been absent from the house and with a pistol similar to the one I had observed in her possession, I began to suspect the horrifying truth.

As it got worse, it got better. This is a pack of lies, she thought. Appalled by the idea that I had been responsible for introducing a viper into the bosom of the family, I threw caution to the winds and decided to confront Cook. To my astonishment she claimed that I had imagined the sequence of events described above. She admitted going out at the time in question, but asserted that my sister had telephoned and asked Cook to meet her at the Santucci house, outside Perugia. On arriving there, she said, she had found Cinzia absent, and after waiting for some time had returned to the city. As for the wig and the pistol, she denied all knowledge of them. When I questioned my sister about this I discovered that the truth was that Cook had phoned Cinzia and asked for a meeting in Perugia, at which she had failed to appear. Clearly her motive in decoying my sister away from home had been to obtain entrance to the Santucci property, where she was admitted by the housekeeper and left unobserved for some time, in order to take the pistol which I had subsequently observed in her possession. Upon searching the house I discovered that my wig had been replaced in the chest of drawers where it is kept. Of the pistol I could find no trace. Faced with Cook’s angry denials and the assurance of the authorities that the murder had been committed by the kidnappers, I decided to keep my doubts to myself. But I now feel that this decision was mistaken, and have decided to come forward. The above statement has been made freely and of my own volition and my legal rights were fully respected throughout. (signed) Silvio Agostino Miletti

Perhaps in an attempt to counter its reputation for gross inefficiency in everything that matters, the State is a stickler for precision when it comes to trivia. The legal system which takes so long to bring people to trial that they are often released after being found guilty, having already been imprisoned for longer than the period of their sentence, insists that statements to the authorities record not only the date on which they were made but also the time. Thus it was that Ivy learned that Silvio’s statement to the police had supposedly been made at twelve forty-two that day. Which was very interesting, because she remembered quite clearly that Silvio had spent the half-hour before lunch whining about the selfish and thoughtless behaviour of his brother Daniele and in particular his habit of eating the Bulgarian yoghurt which he, Silvio, went to considerable time and trouble to obtain from a stockist in Rome. That meant that the statement was not just a pack of lies but a transparent forgery. But this didn’t reassure Ivy, quite the contrary. Because that big loopy signature at the bottom was genuine all right, so that Silvio had to be a party to whatever monstrous conspiracy was afoot.

She looked up at Zen, conscious that nothing of all this showed in her face.

‘I don’t know what to say. I feel like asking if this is some kind of joke. But it quite obviously isn’t.’

The grey eyes regarded her cryptically.

‘So what is it?’ she demanded with a nervous laugh.

‘It’s a statement made to me by Silvio Miletti.’

‘It’s a pack of lies!’ she cried. ‘It’s rubbish, sheer invention, as you must know very well! And not even very clever invention! Do you really think that if I’d committed a murder I would bring the gun back to the house in a plastic bag and leave it lying in my room in full view while I went to have a shower?’

‘The witness describes you as hysterical. Hysterical people do irrational things.’

‘I was not hysterical!’ She sounded it now, though. ‘I wasn’t even there! After I got back from Cinzia’s I went home to my flat, for heaven’s sake.’

‘What time was that?’

‘I don’t know, late morning. I remember I had to do some shopping, to get something for lunch. Yes, that’s right, and then I ran into a friend on the Corso. We had an aperitif together. There, that proves it. He’ll verify my story!’

‘What about earlier, before the appointment with Cinzia? Where were you then?’

She was about to reply, but checked herself.

‘If you’re going to question me then I’m entitled to the presence of a lawyer.’

Zen acknowledged the point with a fractional inflexion of his lips, not so much a smile as the memory of a smile.

‘But this isn’t an interrogation,’ he said.

His words were such an unexpected relief that Ivy felt quite faint. The riot in her body had been put down, but at too great a cost.

‘I really must go,’ she murmured.

Zen stared at her in silence. His expression was even more alarming than Chiodini’s, although quite different. He was looking at her as though she was dead.

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Signora, an eminent citizen has come forward and made a statement implicating you in the murder of his father. Now I don’t know exactly what conception you have of the duties of the police, but I can assure you that I wouldn’t be performing mine if I simply ignored this allegation on the grounds that the person accused claims that it’s all a pack of lies.’

‘Are you saying I’m under arrest?’

‘Not exactly. You’re being held on suspicion of having committed a crime punishable by life imprisonment. This will be communicated to the Public Prosecutor’s office, who will in turn inform the investigating magistrate. She will want to question you, I imagine. But that won’t be for a day or two. She’s in Florence at the moment. The kidnappers are under arrest there.’

So far Ivy had been proud of her control, but now a little manic giggle escaped her. Dear Christ, how much more could she take?

‘Obviously she’s got her hands full with that at the moment,’ Zen continued. ‘The Public Prosecutor is supposed to be informed within forty-eight hours, and the magistrate is bound to interrogate you within a further forty-eight. In practice that tends to get run together to suit everyone’s convenience, but at the worst it shouldn’t be later than Tuesday.’

‘Tuesday.’

The word seemed meaningless.

‘And until then?’ she asked.

‘Until then you’ll be held here. Chiodini!’

The bruiser came back in.

‘Take Signora Cook down to the cells.’

The word was like an electric shock, and Ivy sprang to her feet.

‘Just a moment! I’m entitled to make a phone call first. It’s my legal right!’

Zen ignored her.

‘Now listen to me, Chiodini,’ he said. ‘I won’t be here to supervise this, so I’m depending on you. Until Rosella Foria gets back from Florence Signora Cook is out of bounds, in quarantine. Understand? She speaks to no one and no one speaks to her. And I mean no one!’

‘Right, chief. Come on, you!’

Chiodini made a grab at Ivy’s arm, but she evaded him and stalked out, deliberately repressing all thought. There’ll be time for that when I’m alone, she told herself.

As it was, she had to fight even for the small privilege of solitude. The cells were in the basement of the Questura, which clearly predated the rest of the building by several centuries. The doors had an air of total impenetrability which Ivy found oddly reassuring. Her privacy was very important to her, and she saw the doors not as shutting her in but as keeping others out. What had always terrified her most about prisons was the overcrowding, four or five people shut up together in a cell intended to be barely tolerable for two. Italians seemed to be able to stand such enforced intimacy, but Ivy knew that it would drive her mad. She simply couldn’t function adequately without a space she could call her own, and she was acutely aware that in the hours ahead she was going to need to function not just adequately but quite extraordinarily well.

So it was a nasty shock when the cell door swung open to reveal a strange-looking woman with a smell on her and a wild look in her black eyes.

‘I’m not going in there,’ Ivy said firmly.

‘Oh, you’re not, eh?’ Chiodini replied.

He stared at her in some confusion, unsure how to proceed. If it had been a man he would have hit him. But with women things were different; you could only hit them if they were married to you.

‘There are lots of other cells,’ she pointed out.

‘They’re being painted.’

‘For God’s sake, man, she’s a gypsy! How would you like it?’

Chiodini could see her point. His mother had told him about gypsies. With a bad grace he locked the cell up again and installed Ivy in the one next door.

She slumped down on the bed. To think that on her way to the Questura, just an hour ago, she’d been worrying about whether or not to splash out on that slinky but hideously expensive Lurex trouser-suit she’d had her eye on for some time. The contrast between that reality and this cell, this mean pallet bed, that door as massive as the slab over a tomb, was so disturbing that she felt black waves of panic lapping up at her. But she refused to give in. To do so would be sheer self-indulgence. She had managed before, after all. When she discovered the reason why she had been invited for that weekend in Bologna she had calmly set about reviewing the options open to her. They fell into two categories, revenge and reward. There was no question that revenge was a very attractive option, but in the end Ivy had rejected it in favour of reward. Damaging your enemies is satisfying, but doing yourself a favour is more important in the long run. Only in exceptional circumstances is it possible to combine the two.

Like everyone else, Ivy had envied those who had a secure job, guaranteed by the State, which could not be taken away no matter how lazy or incompetent you were and whose admittedly meagre salary could be supplemented by tax-free moonlighting in the afternoon. Her position at the hospital was, as they said, ‘precarious’. To keep it she had to please, which meant everything from picking up one man’s suit from the cleaners and buying fresh pasta for another to queuing for over an hour in the pouring rain to get theatre tickets for one of the patients, quite apart from being expected to do the work of an entire typing pool single-handed. But she didn’t dare complain. ‘Don’t give yourself airs!’ the old fascist who served as porter remarked when she’d made the mistake of letting herself be provoked by his rudeness. ‘The day the director decides he doesn’t like the colour of your knickers you’ll be out on the street.’ He had no need to add, ‘On the other hand I’m here for ever, whether he likes it or not.’ That was implicit in everything he did, or more usually failed to do.

Ivy didn’t necessarily want to work at the hospital for ever, but she did want to be the one who would decide if she would or not, and that meant getting a secure position. The director had the granting of such posts, but he knew what they were worth and wasn’t going to hand them out to some foreigner when the telephone was ringing off the hook with locals offering him this that and the other if he would see to it that Tizio or Cosetta was fixed up. So Ivy bided her time and kept her eyes and ears open, waiting for events to take her where she wanted to go.

Then one day her employer came storming into the poky annexe where she worked and grilled her for over half an hour about some documents which he said had disappeared. From a man who habitually paraded his velvet gloves this display of iron fist was disconcerting, the more so in that Ivy knew nothing of the existence of the documents, never mind their disappearance. But now she did, and she knew that he half-suspected her of having taken them. All of which added up to the opportunity she had been waiting for, because despite this, the porter’s prophecy was not fulfilled. Her job hung on a whim, but it was not indulged. The conclusion was obvious, and brought with it the reflection that her employer was not as clever as she had previously thought.

That afternoon she returned to the hospital after lunch, supposedly to catch up on her work. The other porter who, just to balance things out, was a Stalinist, responded to her request for the key to the supply cupboard as she had known he would, by tossing her a huge bunch opening every door on the top floor of the building. Identifying and labelling the keys was a task which the porters considered too onerous to undertake, and since their jobs were not precarious no one could make them do so. So if anyone wanted the spare key to a particular room they were given the bunch for the entire floor in question and had to find the key themselves.

It took Ivy twelve minutes to do so, but that was the hardest part of the whole business. Men did not hide things very well, she knew. Their minds ran in predictable ways. Once inside the director’s office she quickly found the spare key to the filing cabinet, taped to the back of it, and a few seconds later the missing documents were in her hand. They had been where she had known they must be, lying on the floor of the metal drawer. They had been carelessly replaced between two files and had then worked their way down as the drawer was opened and closed. It was obvious, it happened all the time, and yet her employer had not thought of it. Part of the reason was that predictability of the male mind she had already noted, but it was also due to a structural defect of the system under which they all lived. The great weakness of paranoia is that it cannot take account of chance. Because the documents were sensitive and might be damaging to him if they fell into the wrong hands, the director had assumed that their disappearance must have been due to a deliberate act on someone’s part. To think otherwise would have been to run the risk of being exposed as gullible and unrealistic, the very things that a man in his position could least afford to be.

Back home in her little flat Ivy examined the documents at her leisure. They looked innocuous enough, mere lists of figures and dates and initials, but the next morning before work she dropped into her bank, opened a safety deposit box and placed the documents in it. She did well, for when she got home she found that her flat had been ransacked.

That evening she phoned her employer, rambling on incoherently about how she couldn’t go on living in an atmosphere of insecurity and lack of trust, of groundless accusations and the perpetual fear of losing her job. If she had a secure position perhaps she would feel differently, but as it was, well, she didn’t know what she might do. Really, she felt capable of almost anything.

A month later her post was made permanent.

She’d done it once, and if she could do it once then couldn’t she do it again? But it wasn’t as simple as that. The situation was quite different this time. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when she remembered Zen’s panicky orders about keeping her ‘in quarantine’. As though anyone was going to lift a finger to save her! Didn’t he understand that she had no support whatever apart from Silvio? Her relationship had always been exclusively with him. That was the way he had wanted it. Evidently there was something about her that attracted homosexuals, perhaps the same thing that repelled the young men she would have preferred to attract. But you had to make the best of things, and Silvio Miletti was a pretty good catch, all things considered.

Ironically enough, it had been Ivy’s boss at the hospital who had introduced her to Silvio. That was before the two men fell out over their mutual infatuation with a young German called Gerhard Mayer. Never one to do things by halves, Silvio had deprived his rival not only of Mayer’s services but of Ivy’s as well. For three years now they had been a couple in all respects but one. Ivy’s only stipulation had been to insist on keeping her job at the hospital, although the work was actually done by a succession of temporary secretaries paid through a Miletti subsidiary. It was partly a form of insurance to hold on to the salaried position and the promise of a pension that went with it, but it was mostly spite. The director had not been very happy about the arrangement, to say the least, but what with the Miletti’s leaning on him from one side and the fear that the missing documents might one day surface gnawing at him from the other, he had ended by agreeing.

Silvio and Ivy had proved to be a very effective couple, complementing each other perfectly. She had the vision, the will, the patience; he had the power, the contacts, and the influence. So far their exploits had been relatively modest. The anonymous letter she’d sent to the investigating magistrate Bartocci, alleging that the kidnapping was a put-up job, was a typical example. Ivy’s method was to seize the opportunity when it arose, and meanwhile to stir things up so that opportunities were more likely to arise. The letter to Bartocci had in fact succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, for it had indirectly created the circumstances leading to Ruggiero Miletti’s death, which had in turn removed the one remaining impediment to the brilliant future which beckoned to her and Silvio.

Or rather had seemed to beckon, until just a few hours ago. For now the unthinkable had occurred, the one eventuality which Ivy had left out of her calculations. Cautiously at first, but with increasing confidence as she recognized Silvio’s dependence on her, she had sacrificed all her minor allegiances to this one relationship, which offered far more than all the others put together. It was often a considerable effort to remember that despite his fecklessness and petulance, his timidity and sloth, Silvio was a man of considerable power. And that power was now at her disposal, to use as though it were her own. It was a dizzying sensation, like finding yourself at the controls of a jet after a lifetime of flying gliders. Only now did she appreciate the more sinister implications of this image. Gliders rode the buoyant winds, versatile and questing, finding alternative currents if one failed, but when jets went wrong disaster was swift and inevitable. But it had never seemed possible that anything could go wrong. Silvio needed her as he needed food and drink, not to mention more esoteric satisfactions. He could no more deny her than he could deny himself.

At least, so she’d always supposed. But apparently she’d been mistaken, and with catastrophic results. The police could relax. No one would be pulling strings on her behalf, for she had deliberately cut them all except for those which bound her to Silvio. And he – even now she could hardly bring herself to believe it! – had not merely abandoned her but turned viciously against her, perjuring himself in the vilest way so that she could be thrown into a common lock-up like some gypsy beggar. No, Zen had nothing to worry about on that score!

Then an even more terrifying thought occurred to her. The discrepancy in the time of the statement proved that Zen and Silvio were hand in glove. He must know that the Milettis were not going to intervene to save her. Was he perhaps worried that their intervention might take a quite different form? A cup of coffee, for example, laced with something that would have her flopping about the cell like a landed fish, gasping out the classic words, ‘They’ve poisoned me!’

That deposit box at the bank now contained much more than her employer’s precious documents, as Silvio well knew. There were photocopies of letters, account books and papers of all kinds, and above all the tapes, boxes of them. The answering machine had been a stroke of genius. For some reason they were always regarded as slightly comical annoyances. No one liked having to deal with them, so callers were always relieved when you answered in person, too relieved to remember that the machine was still there, still connected and possibly recording every word they said. For some reason that never seemed to occur to anyone. But it was a meagre consolation just the same, not nearly enough to keep the rising tide of panic away. She might take a couple of the bastards with her, or at least scratch up their pretty rich faces a bit, but that would not save her. Nothing could save her now.

When the door of the cell opened she hoped it might be a familiar face, even a visitor to see her, but it was only the hard man who had brought her down there.

‘Come on!’ he said, beckoning impatiently.

Ivy felt as reluctant to leave her cell as a condemned prisoner being led away to execution.

‘Where are we going?’

The man just stared at her in his insolent way, like those bastards at the hospital when they thought they had her where they wanted her.

‘So you’re called Chiodini, are you?’ Ivy asked him.

‘What about it?’ the man demanded, suddenly on his guard.

‘Nothing.’

But if I ever get out of here, she thought, I’m going to call a certain number I know and pay whatever it takes to have one of those arrogant eyes of yours sliced in two like a bull’s testicle, my friend.

Chiodini led her away along a narrow passage constantly switching direction, like a sewer following the turnings of the street above. The walls here were a world away from the shiny, polished facades of the Questura – rough, grainy slabs of stone beaded with moisture like a sweaty brow, infilled with chunks of saturated brick and rubble. Here and there diminishing islands of plasterwork still clung on, but most of it had gone to make a gritty porridge that scratched and slithered underfoot. It felt like part of the complex system of tunnels and passages underlying the ancient city, into which it was said that children occasionally strayed and were never seen again.

At length they turned a corner to find a man who seemed to have been waiting for them. He was short and fleshy, with a melancholy face and heavy eyebrows, dressed in a heavy-duty suit of the kind farmers wear on Sundays. To Ivy, he was the image of an executioner.

‘What are you doing here, Geraci?’ Ivy’s escort demanded. ‘They said you were off ill.’

‘I’m all right. I’ll take over now, you run along.’

‘But the chief said…’

‘Never you mind about that! I’ll look after her.’

Chiodini looked at Ivy, then at the other man.

‘Go on, beat it!’ Geraci insisted.

When Chiodini had gone, he led Ivy along the passage to a metal door. So lost was she in evil dreams that she expected to see a whitewashed stall inside, with a dangling noose, the wooden shutters of the trap and the lever that springs them back to reveal the pit beneath. But in fact the room was large and high-ceilinged, bare of any features whatever except for a crucifix on one wall and a small barred window high up on the other. Through the window Ivy could just make out a section of exterior wall, bright with sunlight. The fact of their being outside, in the real world where life was going on in its reassuring humdrum way, imbued those stones with infinite fascination for Ivy. She wished she could see them more clearly, admire the tiny plants sprouting in the crevices, watch the insects coming and going, study the shifting subtleties of colour and shade. She longed to lavish a passionate attention on that poor patch of wall, to astonish it with her unwearying love.

Then she heard a sound behind her. Someone had spoken her name. On the other side of the great naked space a figure stood gazing at her with imploring eyes. Silvio, it’s Silvio, she thought.

‘I’ll give you as long as I can, dottore,’ Geraci murmured.

Silvio nodded impatiently.

‘Yes, yes. Thank you.’

The man bowed slightly as he backed towards the door.

‘Thank you, dottore. Thank you.’

Despite his impatience, once they were alone Silvio seemed unable to speak.

‘What are you doing here?’ Ivy demanded coldly.

‘That man telephoned me and told me what had happened. I’ve been trying to get hold of you all afternoon! I had no idea they would move so quickly!’

At his words something Ivy thought had died for ever flickered into life again.

‘But how did he get you in?’ she asked guardedly. ‘They said I was to see no one.’

‘He’s one of them. Apparently he’s in some trouble, wants me to put in a word for him. But let me explain what happened, you have no idea…’

‘Excuse me, I know exactly what happened! I’ve seen the whole thing, read every one of the lies you put your name to.’

Silvio rubbed his hands together in anguish.

‘You don’t think I signed that thing willingly, do you? Ivy, you must understand!’

‘I don’t care how you signed it! It’s quite sufficient that you did. Do you know how I’ve spent the last few hours? Sitting all alone in a stinking cell, totally humiliated and despairing! And you have the gall to try and interest me in your state of mind when you signed the libellous rubbish that made that possible? You expect me to under stand? No, no, those days are over, Silvio. I don’t feel very understanding any more. I don’t have time to worry about your problems. I’ve got problems of my own.’

‘But you haven’t! It’s all meaningless!’

He blundered blindly towards her.

‘Ivy, you must understand! It’s all just a trivial vendetta by Cinzia. It doesn’t amount to anything. You’ll be out of here by this evening, I promise. I’ll retract the whole statement, deny everything. They’ll have to let you go.’

She turned towards him, a new light in her eyes.

‘Cinzia?’

‘That’s right. She got hold of some photographs taken in Berlin and gave them to that bastard Zen. They threatened to make them public unless I signed. What could I do? I was taken completely by surprise. I thought I’d have time to warn you, at least. But it doesn’t amount to anything, that’s the important thing. She just wanted to stir up a bit of scandal, to give you a bad time for a day or two. But we’ll soon sort her out, won’t we? We’ll make her sorry!’

Ivy was silent. The nightmare was beginning to fade, but something still remained, some real cry of distress which the dream had taken up and used for its own purposes. What had it been?

Meanwhile Silvio told her the whole story, starting with the call from the banker which had set him up to be waylaid by Zen. It was all Cinzia’s fault, he repeated. But Ivy knew better. She had long recognized Gianluigi Santucci as her most formidable opponent. Like her, he was an outsider; like her, he had a personal hold over one member of the family; like her, he was ambitious and unscrupulous. In different circumstances they might have been natural allies. As it was they were rivals. Ivy had always known that sooner or later she would have to deal with Gianluigi. Evidently he’d had the same idea, and had struck first. It should have occurred to her that he would have had Silvio followed to that club and his indiscretions photographed. After all, she would have done exactly the same thing in his position.

But there was still that other fact nagging at the back of her mind, that real nightmare. It was something Zen had told her almost casually and which she had immediately forgotten, not because it didn’t matter but because it mattered far too much, because coming on top of Silvio’s apparent stab in the back it was just too hideous to contemplate. But now that she wanted and needed to deal with it Ivy found that repression had done its job too efficiently. Try as she would, she simply couldn’t recall what it had been.

‘By the way, do you know that they’ve arrested the kidnappers?’ Silvio asked her eagerly.

They had often remarked on the fact that one of them would mention something that had been on the tip of the other’s tongue, as though they were able to read each other’s minds. Now it had happened again. And now Ivy understood why she had deliberately forgotten. This was the worst news in the world.

There was only one way. She dreaded it as one might dread a painful and risky operation, even knowing that there was no alternative. It would have to be very quick, before she could change her mind.

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

He tossed his head impatiently.

‘But they’ve confessed!’

‘They didn’t do it.’

‘How do you know?’

It was his scornful, cocksure tone of voice that tipped the balance in the end, that made it possible for her to tell him.

‘Because I did.’

It took him a moment to react.

‘That’s silly.’

He frowned.

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

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

She moved towards him.

‘And now we’ll never have to be apart again.’

His mouth opened a crack.

‘But… you…’

‘When they phoned to say he’d been released I suddenly realized what that would mean. We’ve been happy these past months, haven’t we? Happy as never before. And that happiness is precious, because people like us know so little of it. The others are rich in happiness, yet they want to take away what little we’ve got. You remember the letter he sent. You remember what he said about us. Why should people be allowed to say things like that? You know it’s unfair, you know it’s wrong. And it was all about to start again. We would have been separated again, kept apart from one another. You would have been trapped at home, having to listen to his cruel, obscene gibes. You couldn’t stand that. Why should you be expected to stand it?’

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

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

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

‘What are we going to do?’ he moaned.

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

‘But since it’s all lies…’

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

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

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

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

Ivy shook her head wearily.

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

Silvio gestured impatiently.

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

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

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

‘I can’t do all that!’ he wailed.

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

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

‘But you were there too!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘ But they’ve confessed! ’

‘ They didn’t do it.’

‘ How do you know? ’

‘ Because I did.’

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

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

‘Right, that’ll do.’

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

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

Zen looked at them both.

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