Ratking

THREE

As the car leaned further and further into the curve he tensed for the inevitable smash. Cheated again! There was no getting used to it.

‘If that’s Valesio with his apologies I’ll tell him what he can do with them!’ Crepi had muttered as he went to answer the phone. ‘Hello? Who? Oh. Yes? I don’t understand. What? No! Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus!’

He bent over, taking deep breaths.

‘What’s happened?’

Crepi was panting as though about to faint. Zen took the receiver from him.

‘Hello? Who’s there?’

The line went dead.

‘They’ve killed him,’ Crepi murmured as he lurched towards the door, ignoring Zen’s questions.

Zen dialled the Questura, but they didn’t know anything. He told them to find out and call him back.

He walked over to the hearth, picked up a log and threw it on the embers. Some dried moss and a section of ivy still clinging to the bark flared up. Gradually the wood itself took hold, first smoking furiously and then bursting into flame.

A ladybird appeared from a crack and began exploring the surface of the log, now well alight. Zen took a splinter from the hearth and lowered the end of it into the path of the little creature, which promptly veered away. Again and again he tried to tempt the ladybird to safety, until his hand began to ache from the heat. Just as he had finally succeeded, the phone rang again. The insect fell and flamed up on the glowing embers at the front of the grate.

‘ The Carabinieri are handling it and they’re not giving much away. The gist of it seems to be that someone’s been killed out near Valfabbrica.’

He walked downstairs calling for Palottino, who emerged from the kitchen where he’d been watching television. It wasn’t till they were getting into the car that Crepi appeared, looking for the first time like the old man he was.

‘I’m coming too.’

It had been his contact in the Carabinieri who had called, he said. Ruggiero Miletti had been found murdered in the boot of a car.

The night was still mild and luminous, but a big gusty southerly breeze had sprung up and was pushing the clouds along, and when they cleared the moon the landscape was revealed, distinct and yet mysterious, in a way that made daylight seem as crudely functional as neon strip-lighting. Then the clouds closed in again and it was night, the headlights punching holes in the darkness. Black metal bicycle torches gripped tight as they ran shrieking barefoot through the sand dunes. At the Lido, it must have been, with Tommaso and that lot, more than forty years ago. To think that single memory had lain undisturbed in some crevice of his brain all these years, lovingly, uselessly preserved.

‘There it is!’

Crepi’s voice was uncomfortably close to Zen’s ear. He just glimpsed the blue and white sign reading ‘Valfabbrica’.

The main street was dark and tightly shuttered. Outside the Carabinieri station three men in uniform were chatting beside a dark blue Giulietta. A burly individual with a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve responded to Zen’s request for directions by jerking his head at the open doorway behind him, but before Zen could get out Palottino leaned across him and started speaking in tongues. The sergeant said something in return and then got into the Giulietta.

‘He’s going to take us there,’ the Neapolitan explained.

‘Friend of yours?’

Palottino shook his head. The emergency was having a relaxing effect on his manners.

‘He’s from Naples, I recognized the accent. Says this is the first interesting thing that’s happened here.’

‘And what exactly has happened?’

Wonderful, thought Zen. I’m reduced to getting my information on the dialect grapevine.

‘Somebody found shot in a car.’

Crepi groaned as though knifed.

About a kilometre outside town they turned left on to a dirt road winding through a desolate landscape created by the seasonal floods of the nearby river. After a while the Giulietta slowed, lights appeared ahead and the road was blocked by vehicles parked at all angles across it.

The scene was illuminated like a film set by a powerful searchlight mounted on a Carabinieri jeep. As they got out Zen made out a group of men standing talking near a large grey car. Then everything disappeared as the searchlight went out.

‘Till tomorrow, then!’

‘Excuse me!’ Zen called.

‘Who is it?’

‘I’m from the police.’

The silence was broken only by the incomprehensible squawks and crackles of a short-wave radio.

‘You’re rather late.’

Someone laughed.

‘As usual!’

‘It’s gone.’

‘And we’re off.’

‘Is it true, then?’

It Was Crepi’s voice, just in front of Zen.

‘Is what true?’

‘He’s dead?’

‘Who are you?’

‘I am Antonio Crepi. Who are you?’

Someone drew in their breath sharply.

‘Forgive me, Commendatore, I had no idea! For God’s sake, Volpi, tell your men to put that light back on. Ettore Di Leonardo, Deputy Public Prosecutor. My apologies, I thought you said you were from the police.’

‘I’m from the police,’ Zen began. ‘Commissioner Aurelio…’

‘Answer me!’ Crepi repeated. ‘Is he dead?’

The searchlight crackled back into life and they all covered their eyes.

‘Unfortunately, Commendatore. Unfortunately.’

‘The first murder victim I’ve ever seen,’ said a younger man with a full black beard. ‘And it wasn’t a pretty sight, I can assure you.’

‘Show a little respect, for Christ’s sake!’ Crepi protested angrily. ‘He was my friend!’

The younger man shrugged.

‘Mine too.’

‘You, Bartocci?’ Crepi’s tone was bitterly sarcastic. ‘A friend of Ruggiero Miletti? What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Who said anything about Ruggiero Miletti?’ asked the older of the two civilians.

‘I was referring to the murdered man, Ubaldo Valesio,’ explained his bearded colleague.

Crepi looked at the third man, a major of the Carabinieri.

‘But I was told that it was Ruggiero who had been killed!’ he exclaimed.

‘There was initially some confusion as to the identity of the victim,’ the officer replied smoothly.

The older civilian had turned his attention to Zen. He was short and stout, with a face as smooth and featureless as a balloon, and he glared at everyone, as though he knew very well how foolish he looked and had decided to brazen it out.

‘You’re from the police? Di Leonardo, Deputy Public Prosecutor. I’m by no means happy with the way this investigation has been handled. In my view the police have shown a lack of thoroughness bordering on the irresponsible, with the tragic results that we have seen tonight.’

Zen shook his head vaguely.

‘Excuse me, I’ve only just arrived…’

‘Quite, quite. This is in no sense intended as a personal reflection on you, Commissioner. Nevertheless I find it quite incredible that no attempt has been made to exploit the dead man’s contacts with the gang, really quite incredible. If his movements had been monitored much might have been learned. As it is we now have a corpse on our hands without being any closer to tracing either the gang or Ruggiero Miletti’s whereabouts. It is most unsatisfactory, really most unsatisfactory indeed.’

Zen gestured helplessly.

‘As I say, I’ve only just arrived here, but I must point out that electronic surveillance of the kind you mention requires the cooperation of the subject. If no such attempt was made it’s presumably because the police were respecting the wishes of the Miletti family.’

The Public Prosecutor waggled his finger to indicate that this wouldn’t do.

‘The constitution states quite clearly that the forces of the law operate autonomously under the direction of the judiciary. The wishes of members of the public have nothing whatever to do with it.’

‘But the police can’t be expected to contradict the wishes of the most powerful family in Perugia without specific instructions from the judiciary,’ Zen protested.

Major Volpi intervened, holding out his hand as though he was directing traffic.

‘I cannot of course speak for my colleagues in the police,’ he remarked smugly, ‘but I can assure you that in this case as in any other my men will at all times do whatever is necessary to ensure a successful outcome, regardless of who may be involved.’

A fierce rivalry had always existed between the civil police, responsible to the Ministry of the Interior, and the paramilitary Carabinieri controlled by the Defence Ministry. Indeed, it was deliberately cultivated on the grounds that competition helped to keep both sides efficient and honest.

‘There you are, you seel’ Di Leonardo told Zen. ‘You can’t expect us judges to do all your thinking for you, Commissioner. We expect to see some initiative on your part too.’

With that he turned away to speak to Antonio Crepi. The Carabinieri officer went off to supervise a tow-truck which had just arrived from the direction of the main road. Bartocci, the young investigating magistrate, was standing beside the car in which Valesio’s body had been found, a grey BMW, almost new by the look of it. Zen walked over and looked down into the open boot. There was nothing to be seen except a small dark pool of blood held back by the edge of a plastic pouch containing an instruction booklet on the use of the jack.

‘His wife’s very close to my sister,’ Bartocci remarked. ‘She’s only thirty-one. They’ve got three children.’

Zen had enough sense to keep quiet.

‘The worst of it is that this wasn’t his line at all! Ubaldo was a labour lawyer. Union disputes, contracts, that sort of thing. A good negotiator, of course.’

Luciano Bartocci provided the strongest possible contrast to his senior colleague from the Public Prosecutor’s office. They had both been called out unexpectedly, but while Di Leonardo was turned out immaculately in a suit, pullover and tie complete with gold pin, the younger man was wearing a skiing jacket, open-necked shirt and jeans. He was about thirty-five years old, athletic and vigorous, with a frank and direct gaze. His beard almost hid his one weakness, a slight facial twitch, as if he were constantly restraining an impulse to smile.

‘Why should they do such a thing?’ he murmured.

‘Perhaps it was a mistake.’

Zen was hardly conscious of having spoken until Bartocci rounded on him.

‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen him! They put the gun in his mouth, it blew the back of his head clean off. There was no mistake about it.’

‘No, I meant…’

But before he could explain Bartocci was called away by Di Leonardo. All the vehicles were revving up their engines ready for departure. Without warning the searchlight went out again.

Zen hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings and at first he was afraid to move a step in case he walked into a ditch. But as his eyes adjusted he started to make his way towards the Alfetta, slowly at first, then with growing confidence. He was moving at almost his normal pace when he ran into someone.

‘Sorry!’

‘Sorry!’

He recognized Bartocci’s voice.

‘Is that the Police Commissioner from Rome?’ the young magistrate asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Listen, I’d like to see you tomorrow morning. Can you come to my office?’

The voice was moving away.

‘I’ll have to break the news to his wife,’ Bartocci continued, more and more distantly. ‘I don’t know how long that’ll take. Shall we say nine o’clock? If I’m late perhaps you could wait.’

‘Is there anything in particular you want?’

There was no reply. Zen walked cautiously forward, hands outstretched before him, but when the moon came out again he found that he was alone.

The Uncle of Italy, Sandro Pertini, looked down with his inimitable air of benevolent authority on Aurelio Zen, who stared blankly back. This apparent lack of respect was due to the fact that he was not looking at the President of the Republic but at the glass covering the photograph, which reflected the doorway open to the adjoining room where his two assistants were sifting through the mound of documents that had been removed from Ubaldo Valesio’s home and office that morning. Or rather, that is what they were supposed to be doing: the glazing of the presidential portrait revealed that in fact one of them was engaged in an intense whispered discussion with the other, punctuated by furtive glances in the direction of Zen’s office.

Zen’s face was even paler and more drawn than usual, and his eyes glittered from the combined effects of too little sleep and too much coffee. It had been after three o’clock before he’d finally got to bed. He awoke four hours later with the taste of blood in his mouth, the tip of his tongue aching fiercely where his teeth had nipped it. That was a bad sign, a sign of tension running deep, of nerves out of control. He got out of bed and opened the window for the first time. The noise of traffic from the broad boulevard directly below rushed in along with the icy pure air. In the middle distance two churches marked the route of a street running out of the city through a medieval suburb. The nearer was a broad structure of rough pink stone with a solid rectangular bell-tower, squatting amidst the cramped and jumbled houses with the massive poise of a peasant woman in the fields. The other, by contrast, was a complex conglomerate of buildings topped by a tall, slim spire. Far beyond them both, fifteen or twenty kilometres away, a mountain as round and smooth as a mound of dough rose from the plain. Zen had never seen it before, but he had the oddest sensation that he had known it all his life.

He had got up and searched through his luggage, still scattered untidily about the room, until he found the little transistor radio he took with him on his travels. The news had just begun, and he listened with one ear as he shaved. A minister had decided to respond with ‘dignified silence’ to calls for his resignation following claims that his name appeared on a list of those involved in a kickback scandal involving a chain of construction companies. The leader of one party had described as ‘absolutely unacceptable’ a statement made the day before by the secretary of another, whom he accused of ‘typical arrogance and condescension’. A senior police officer in Palermo had been shot dead as he left a restaurant. The Pope had announced a forthcoming tour of ten countries. Flights were likely to be disrupted later that month by a planned strike by air traffic controllers. An accident on the Milan-Venice motorway had left three people dead and eleven more injured and had strengthened the calls for the building of an extra carriageway. The murder of a lawyer in Umbria had been squeezed in just before the weather forecast; the Carabinieri were said to be investigating, but there was no mention of Ruggiero Miletti.

Zen jerked his chair back, making it squeak loudly on the floor, and the two heads reflected in the rectangle of glass immediately bent over their respective piles of papers, covered with almost illegible notations in Ubaldo Valesio’s minuscule handwriting. Zen shifted his gaze to the right, towards the small crucifix and the calendar showing cadets on parade at the training school at Nettuno. The calendar was still turned to February, although it was now March and his mother’s birthday was in less than a week. He absolutely must not forget to get her a present.

On the desk in front of him lay the Nazione newspaper. The headline read ‘BUTCHERED, THE MILETTIS’ MOUTHPIECE: A MESSAGE TO THE “SUPERCOP” FROM ROME?’ Below it appeared a photograph of a scene which had become as familiar a part of Italian life as a bowl of pasta. Lying in a stiff and unnatural foetal crouch with a rather fatuous lopsided grin on his face, Ubaldo Valesio made an extremely unconvincing corpse. But conviction was amply supplied by the pictures of the other side of the lawyer’s head which Bartocci had shown him earlier, the pulpy mass of the brain hollowed out like a watermelon seeded with bits of shattered bone.

But he had not died in vain! Thanks to this development Zen had been able to enforce payment of the blank cheque which the Questore had so boldly dashed off the day before. He had requested and obtained the services of two inspectors and a detective-sergeant, together with an extra office and various communications and vehicle privileges which he had no reason to suppose he would need but had thrown in for good measure. But as the news had made clear, the Carabinieri had taken a stranglehold on the murder inquiry, and all that remained for the ‘supercop from Rome’ was to check Valesio’s movements on the previous day and sift through the material which had been removed from his home and office. Lucaroni, one of the two inspectors, was handling the first chore, while the other, Geraci, was at work next door on the second. He was being assisted, if that was the word, by Chiodini, whose services Zen had specifically requested. The sight of the big brute straining to decipher Ubaldo Valesio’s finicky jottings was some small compensation for the way he had treated Zen the day before.

Zen had arrived at Bartocci’s office promptly at nine o’clock. The law courts were housed in a rambling Renaissance palace forming one side of the inevitable Piazza Matteotti. The portal was surmounted by a lunette containing a statue of Justice flanked by two creatures apparently consisting of a vulture’s head and wings attached to the body of a hyena, a motif repeated extensively elsewhere in the building. Zen had plenty of time to admire the architectural features of the palace, since Luciano Bartocci did not put in an appearance until shortly after ten.

By day the young magistrate conformed rather more to the sartorial norm for members of his profession: a tweed jacket, lambswool pullover, check shirt, woollen tie and corduroy trousers. He, too, looked haggard, having been up until almost five o’clock that morning dealing with the victim’s widow. Patrizia Valesio, it seemed, had at first reacted with eerie calm to the news of her husband’s death.

‘She was still up when we got there,’ Bartocci explained, ‘still waiting for her husband to come home. I’d taken my sister along to help out. I think Patrizia must have realized what had happened the moment she opened the door, but she invited us in as though nothing was the matter. We might have been paying a normal social call, except that it was the middle of the night. I told her that her husband had been involved in an accident. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she replied. “They’ve killed him.” I just nodded.’

They were outside the law courts, waiting for Palottino to bring the Alfetta over. Bartocci had explained that he wanted Zen to accompany him to Valesio’s home and office, where he planned to remove any documents which might have a bearing on the lawyer’s murder or his contacts with the kidnappers. The street was brilliantly sunny and busy, with people going into and out of the market building, whose entrance was through an arcade beneath the law courts.

‘She stayed perfectly calm until I mentioned something about the car,’ Bartocci went on. ‘Then she went crazy. “No, it’s not possible!” she shrieked. “It was brand new, I gave it him for Christmas! Don’t tell me it was damaged too!” Marisa and I just stood looking at each other. It sounded like the ultimate consumerist nightmare, a woman who accepts her husband’s murder without blinking an eyelid and then breaks down because the car’s been scratched. Then she started to get hysterical and incoherent, snatching up things from the shelves and throwing them across the room. Marisa tried to calm her while I rang for a doctor. It took him forty minutes to get there. I’ll never forget that time as long as I live.’

A woman who looked like a barrel wearing a fur coat was waiting for the bus. Her son, perfectly dressed as a miniature man, stood staring unbelievingly up at the balloon whose string he had just lost hold of, now floating away high above the arriving Alfetta.

‘The calmness was all a facade, of course,’ Bartocci continued once they were settled in the car. ‘Patrizia had been so terrified by what her husband was doing that she had convinced herself that nothing could happen to him. But she’d forgotten to extend this magic immunity to the BMW, which is why she went into hysterics as soon as I mentioned it.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘With relatives, under sedation.’

The Valesios’ house was one of a number of modern apartments forming an exclusive development on the lower slopes of the city, all pink brick and double glazing and concrete balconies dripping with creeper. In the absence of Patrizia Valesio the family interests were represented by her mother, a formidable woman who followed Bartocci and Zen from room to room, personally checking every single item that was removed while bemoaning the fact that the authorities were permitted to make free with the private papers of a man above suspicion, a pillar of the community and a repository of every known human virtue. Ubaldo Valesio himself made a ghostly fourth presence, smiling at them from photographs, haunting a wardrobe full of clothes, proclaiming his taste in books and records, even trying to lay claim to a non-existent future by way of a scribbled note on his desk jotter reading ‘Evasio Thursday re plumbing’.

It was not until they were driving back to the city centre that Bartocci produced the photographs.

‘Just in case you still think it was a mistake,’ he commented as Zen studied the images of horror.

‘No, I meant that Valesio may have accidentally caught sight of one of the gang,’ Zen explained. ‘These would have been the top men, don’t forget. No one else would be entrusted with the negotiations. They might well have been worried that he would be able to identify them.’

Bartocci seemed to be about to say something, but in the end he just turned away and looked out of the window, leaving Zen to wonder once again why he had been invited along on this routine errand.

The studio which Ubaldo Valesio had shared with two other lawyers was in the centre of the city, just behind the cathedral, in a street so narrow there was barely room for Palottino to park. It consisted of one wing of the first floor of the building, two huge rooms divided into separate work areas by antique screens and potted shrubs. Valesio’s partners were both present. They were very correct, very polite, and very unhelpful. Yes, they had known that Ubaldo was acting for the Milettis. No, they had never discussed it. They watched discreetly but attentively as the two representatives of the State looked through diaries, memo books, files and folders. Then they drew up an inventory of what had been taken, obtained a receipt, said goodbye, and went back to work.

‘When may I expect your report on this material?’ Bartocci asked Zen when they got back to the law courts.

‘Tomorrow, I hope. But if anything important comes up I’ll phone you.’

He turned back and started to get into the car, but Bartocci called him back.

‘Listen, there are a few things I’d like to discuss with you. Off the record, as it were.’

Zen gazed at him, his face perfectly expressionless.

‘In fact I thought we might have lunch. That little restaurant down the street there is where I usually eat, the one with the neon sign and the awning.’

‘Today?’

‘If that’s convenient.’

Bartocci’s tone was polite, almost deferential. It scared Zen stiff.

‘I’d be delighted,’ he replied with a ghost of a smile.

As Palottino drove him back to the Questura he saw that the restaurant Bartocci had indicated was called the Griffin and displayed a sign with a beast similar to those he had seen at the law courts.

Back in his office, Zen thought about griffins and Luciano Bartocci and Ubaldo Valesio. Griffins, he discovered from the dictionary kept in the desk drawer to help the less literate officials write their reports, were mythical creatures having the head and wings of an eagle and the legs and tail of a lion. He was still not quite sure why they had been carved above the entrance to the law courts. Were they symbols of Justice? Certainly Luciano Bartocci seemed to be something of a hybrid. Zen had never been invited to lunch by a member of the judiciary before, and he found the prospect as unattractive as the invitation to Crepi’s the previous evening. Once again he felt that he was being drawn into an area where the stakes were high and the rules not clearly defined. ‘A few things I’d like to discuss with you, off the record.’ What was Bartocci up to?

Almost with relief, his thoughts turned back to Ubaldo Valesio. Although they had never met, Zen felt he knew the dead man well: a successful and ambitious lawyer in a city which despite its recent growth was still a small town at heart, a place where rumours spread as silently and effectively as a virus. His partners had been telling the truth, Zen felt sure, and the two men next door were almost certainly wasting their time. People like Valesio, who knew everything about someone and something about everyone, not only stopped talking to others about their affairs, they very soon stopped talking even to themselves. Above all they would never commit anything to paper unless it was absolutely necessary. Ubaldo Valesio would have kept the details of his dealings with Ruggiero Miletti’s kidnappers in the only place he considered safe, his own head. With a shiver, Zen remembered the photographs Bartocci had shown him.

A clangour of bells suddenly rang out from churches near and far, calling the faithful to Mass and reminding the rest that their lunch was just an hour away. Zen fetched his coat and hat and walked through to the next room. Geraci looked up at him with an expression of intense anxiety. His face was heavy and fleshy, and the two deep furrows running from the corners of the nose to the edge of the mouth gave him a hangdog look. His chin had a weak and skimpy look, as though the material had run out before the job was quite finished, while his eyebrows were absurdly thick and bushy, with a life of their own.

‘Anything?’ Zen enquired.

Geraci shrugged. Chiodini pretended to be so intent on his labours that he did not even notice Zen’s presence.

Outside, the sun illuminated every surface with uncompromising clarity. The air seemed full of disquieting hints of summer, but the illusion lasted no longer than it took to turn the corner into a narrow alley sunk deep in shadow, where the wind whetted the cold edge of the air like a knife. Bare walls faced with crumbling plaster rose up on both sides, pierced by the high, inaccessible windows of the prison, covered with heavy steel mesh. After going about a hundred metres Zen was beginning to feel he had made a mistake in turning off the broad avenue that led directly up to the centre, but he persisted, and was rewarded when the street widened out into a little square where the wind disappeared and a cherry tree was in sumptuous blossom in a garden high above. But at the next corner the wind was back, keener than ever. He turned left down a long flight of steps to get away from it.

In the grocery at the corner a sad, pale pig of a girl, a greasy sliver of cooked ham dangling from her mouth, jerked her thumb at a set of steps opposite in response to his request for directions to the centre. It was a staircase for mountain climbers, the steps seeming to get progressively higher as he climbed. The wall it ran up looked like the face of history itself. It was founded on massive blocks of rock whose dimensions were those of ancient days, presumably Etruscan. Above this layer came another, Roman work, where the blocks, though still large, had lost the epic scale. Then came a long stretch of small cubes of pinkish stone forming the wall of a medieval house, and finally an upper storey tacked on in brick and concrete.

He stopped to catch his breath, leaning against one of the giant blocks which had weathered to form intricate niches and cavities. In several of them tiny plants had somehow contrived to put down roots in a trace of dust, in another someone had wedged an empty Diet Coke can. On the other side a breathtaking view stretched away, line after line of hills rippling off into the hazy distance. He stepped carefully over a dead pigeon on the next step and clambered grimly to the top. The street in which he came out continued upwards without respite through an ancient gateway, and still up, darkly resonant and clangorous, past basement workshops where carpenters and furniture repairers and picture framers were at work. The air, fresh and cold and delicately flavoured with wood smoke, was a luxury in itself, an air for angels to breathe.

On the wall of a nearby building was a hoarding displaying two posters. The one on the right featured a garish picture of a woman in a bathing costume being pursued by a number of eager fish with teeth like daggers. ‘For the first time in Italy,’ the caption exclaimed, ‘women and sharks in the same pool!!!’ The name of a circus appeared beneath, with the dates of its next visit to Perugia. The other poster showed a famous footballer leering suggestively at a glass of milk, but what attracted Zen’s attention was the top left-hand corner, where the mass of posters accumulated over several months was starting to curl back under its own weight, revealing a section of older strata far beneath. In the corner, in large red letters, he read ‘LETTI’. The protruding curl was almost a centimetre thick, layered like plywood, and when Zen tugged at it the whole block peeled off and fell to the ground at his feet. Now he could see almost all the earlier poster, which was headed ‘SIMP AND THE MlLETTI FAMILY.’ There were five short paragraphs of closely set writing: The arrogance and intransigence of the Miletti family, amply demonstrated on innumerable occasions in the past, are once again in evidence. Not content with shutting down the Ponte San Giovanni subsidiary, or laying off more than 800 workers in Perugia – to say nothing of their continuing exploitation of female piece-work labour and well-known anti-union policies – they are now reported to be planning to sell off a controlling interest in the Societa Industriale Miletti di Perugia to a Japanese electronics conglomerate. Having crippled a once-prosperous enterprise by a combination of managerial incompetence and ill-advised speculation in the activities of such gentlemen as Calvi, Sindona and their like, the Milettis now intend to recoup their losses by auctioning off SIMP to the highest bidder. The company named in the take-over bid already owns factories which are running well below their maximum potential production level due to the world economic recession and consequent shortage of demand. Their intention is to use SIMP as a means of eluding the EEC quotas by importing Japanese-produced goods to which nothing will be added in Umbria but a grille bearing one of the brand-names which generations of local workers have helped to make famous. The Umbrian Communists totally condemn this example of cynical stock-market manipulation. SIMP is not to be sold off like a set of saucepans. The future of our jobs and those of our children must be decided here in Perugia after a process of consultation between representatives of the workforce, the owners, and the provincial and regional authorities. Italian Communist Party

Umbrian Section

Zen turned away from the billboard and started to climb the ancient street paved with flagstones as smooth as the bed of a stream. An old woman lurched towards him, a bulging plastic bag in each hand, bellowing something incomprehensible at a man who stood looking up at the scaffolding hung with sacking that covered a house being renovated. A gang of boys on scooters swooped down the street, slabs of pizza in one hand, klaxons groaning like angry frogs, yelling insults at each other. They missed the old woman by inches, and a load of rubble gushing down a plastic chute into a hopper made a noise that sounded like a round of applause for their skill or her nonchalance.

‘Anything else?’

The waiter perched like a sparrow beside their table, looking distractedly about him. Bartocci shook his head and glanced at Zen.

‘Shall we go?’

At the cash desk the manager greeted Bartocci warmly. No bill was presented. like the rest of the almost exclusively male clientele of the noisy little restaurant, the magistrate was clearly a regular who paid by the week or month.

‘How about a little stroll before having coffee?’ Bartocci suggested once they were outside. ‘I must warn you, though, that it’s uphill, like everything in Perugia!’

It was a measure of Zen’s state of mind that he found himself wondering whether the words had more than one meaning. Lunch with Bartocci had indeed proved very much like dinner with the Milettis, except that the food was even better: macaroni in a sauce made with cream and spicy sausage meat, chunks of liver wrapped in a delicate net of membrane and charred over embers, thin dark green stalks of wild asparagus, strawberries soaked in lemon juice. But just as at Crepi’s the evening before, the conversation had been dominated by what was not discussed. Bartocci had shown himself to be particularly interested in Zen’s career and his views on various items of news: a scandal about kickbacks for building permits involving members of a Socialist city council, reports that a Christian Democrat ex-mayor had been a leading member of the Palermo Mafia, allegations that the wife of a Liberal senator in Turin was involved in the illegal export of currency. Zen knew what was happening, of course, and Bartocci knew that he knew. It was all part of the process. How would this police official from Rome react to being sounded out Off the record’ by a Communist investigating magistrate?

Zen tried to steer a middle course, neither clamming up nor trumpeting opinions, biding his time and hoping that Bartocci would get to the point. But unless he did so soon Zen was going to get very nervous indeed. He had even tried to precipitate matters by asking Bartocci about the Deputy Public Prosecutor’s criticisms of the police. But Bartocci’s response had been offhand: ‘Let’s enjoy our lunch, we’ll talk later.’

The magistrate led the way up a broad flight of steps which at first appeared to lead to someone’s front door. At the last moment they swerved to the left and continued into a tunnel burrowing underneath a conglomerate of interlocking houses, walls, gardens and yards deposited there over the centuries by generations of people neither more nor less dead than Ubaldo Valesio. It was dark and the wind whined emptily past them. On the wall a soccer fan had spray-gunned ‘Roma are magic’, while a dustbin opposite was inscribed ‘Juventus Headquarters’.

After about fifty metres the subterranean arcade widened out slightly into a concrete yard where six Fiat 500s were packed in, so tightly that there was barely room to pass on foot. Bartocci led him on without a word, turning left and right without hesitation, always climbing, until they reached a small piazza in front of a church where the walls fell back to reveal a view similar to the one Zen had seen that morning from his bedroom window, centred by that strange mountain, full and rounded as a mound of risen dough.

Bartocci glanced around the square, which was empty except for a few parked cars.

‘What were you saying about Di Leonardo?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Well, he implied last night that the police were at fault for not having exploited Valesio’s contacts with the kidnappers. I wondered if you agreed.’

‘No, I don’t see things in quite the same way. In fact I should have preferred to pursue a much more active line in this case from the very start. I tried to have the family’s assets frozen, to prevent any possibility of a ransom payment. I also sought to have Ubaldo’s phone monitored. But there was considerable opposition to these initiatives, notably from Di Leonardo himself.’

‘But you don’t need higher authority to authorize those things,’ Zen pointed out.

‘I don’t need higher authority to sign a warrant for the arrest of President Pertini, either. But it would be the last I ever signed. If I’d frozen the Miletti account and had the phone-tap put on, the net result would have been to destroy any chances I have of influencing the outcome of this case. Besides, people like the Milettis can always raise cash somewhere, and as for the phones, the gang must assume that they’re all tapped anyway. We wouldn’t have learned anything much without trying to follow Valesio, which would have been a very risky venture indeed. Di Leonardo tried to suggest that Ubaldo had been killed because of my negligence. I was his real target, not you. But just imagine how he would have responded had there been the slightest evidence that Valesio’s death was the result of my interference! No, that’s not the way to handle these things.’

Zen moved over to the parapet at the edge of the piazza, where stone benches were placed at intervals between trees giving shade on hot summer days. The wall dropped vertically away to the gardens of the houses far below. Beyond them rose a lengthy strip of high medieval city wall, then a valley cut steeply into hills dotted with modern villas, leading the eye away to the still more distant hills and the valley beyond, green and grey and brown beneath the azure sky, where the strange mountain rose. In the far distance, at the limit of vision, shimmered the snow-covered peaks of the Apennines.

Zen got out his packet of Nazionali. It contained only one cigarette, the last of the supply he had brought with him. As he lit up a flicker of movement down below caught his eye. A girl in jeans and a red sweater was standing at an open window in one of the houses, looking out at the garden with its rows of vegetables running up to a chicken coop at the foot of the high retaining wall. She was clearly unaware of being observed herself.

‘Valesio’s death has changed everything, of course,’ Bartocci continued. ‘Your arrival at the same moment is extremely convenient. The whole investigation will have to begin again from scratch. We must be prepared to re-examine all our assumptions, even the most fundamental, without allowing ourselves to be influenced by the thought that some people might find our conclusions difficult to swallow.’

Zen exhaled a long breath of the fragrant, earthy tobacco. The girl moved and the window was empty again.

‘That’s why I asked to speak to you today,’ the magistrate went on in the same confidential tone. ‘It’s very refreshing for me to deal with an outsider, someone free of any preconceptions. You have no axe to grind here, no interests to protect. One can consider every possibility.’

The girl reappeared at the window. Her legs were now bare.

‘About a month ago I received this,’ Bartocci said, handing Zen a sheet of paper. AREN’T THE MILETTIS CLEVER? THEY CAN TURN THEIR HAND TO ANYTHING – EVEN KIDNAPPING!!?? THEY’VE HAD PLENTY OF PRACTICE IN EXTORTION, ASK THEIR WORKERS! BUT IF YOU ARE NOT IN THEIR PAY TOO THEN KNOW THIS. OLD MILETTI GOT HIMSELF KIDNAPPED AT JUST THE RIGHT MOMENT. WITH HIM OUT OF THE WAY THE FAMILY CAN’T SIGN ANY TAKEOVER PAPERS WHICH MIGHT LET THE JAPS INTO THE GAME. AND WHAT IF THE RANSOM ENDED UP IN THE FAMILY’S POCKETS INTO THE BARGAIN? MAYBE THEN THEY COULD KEEP SCREWING US FOR ANOTHER FEW YEARS! THINK ABOUT IT. ONE WHO KNOWS

Zen gave the letter back to Bartocci, who replaced it carefully in his pocket.

‘Of course, I get a lot of this sort of thing, and normally I would simply discount it as a hoax from someone with a grudge against the family. But in this case it seems to me that the writer knows what he’s talking about.’

The girl had moved again, so that only her bare legs and feet were visible. Then she disappeared completely.

‘What’s this about a takeover?’ Zen asked. ‘I saw something about it on an old poster today, too.’

‘SIMP has been in financial difficulties for some time now. The root cause is that Ruggiero has insisted all along on maintaining total personal control of every aspect of the business. But the company has diversified into areas he knows nothing about, the market has changed out of all recognition in the last ten or fifteen years, above all he is no longer the man he was. The result has been a gradual running-down of the whole operation. They’ve been forced to shut one of their factories and lay off about a quarter of the workforce at the other. But the real crunch came with the collapse of Calvi’s financial empire. It seems that the Milettis had sunk quite a lot of money in it. Since then the company has been living from one loan to another, under increasing pressure to improve their performance and efficiency. Finally, just before Ruggiero was kidnapped, a Japanese company made an offer to put up the money SIMP needs in return for a licence to sell its products under the Miletti name. The old man wouldn’t hear of it, of course.’

‘That’s not what the PCI poster suggested.’

‘No, the Party quite correctly takes the line that unless prevented the family will do whatever makes sense from a financial point of view. Ruggiero’s opposition is merely the sentimental stubbornness of an old man, and as such cannot be depended on to protect the interests of the workers.’

Again a flicker of movement below caught Zen’s eye.

The girl passed by the window, naked except for a yellow towel wrapped round her hair.

‘I know this theory sounds fantastic,’ Bartocci continued. ‘But look at what else happens in this country. Look at Gelli, look at Calvi. Was that any more fantastic? When Michele Sindona got into difficulties with the law in New York he staged a fake kidnapping for himself so that he could go to Palermo and pressure people he thought might be helpful. What’s to stop the Milettis doing the same thing? It’s a scheme worthy of Calvi himself. Take Ruggiero out of circulation to prevent any takeover deals going through, and then use their own money, recycled through a faked payoff, to prop up the company’s finances.’

Zen tried to keep his eye off the window below and his mind on what Bartocci was saying.

‘But that would mean that they also murdered Valesio.’

Bartocci nodded.

‘It’s precisely Valesio’s death which has made me take the theory seriously. You said that he may accidentally have caught sight of one of the members of the gang. But why should the kidnappers care if Valesio caught a glimpse of some Calabrian he’d never seen before and would never recognize again? But suppose that the person Valesio saw was not a stranger. Suppose it was someone he knew very well, someone anybody in Perugia would know well. Imagine his rage as he realizes the shameful game they have been playing on him and on everyone! And imagine the Milettis’ horror as they face the certainty of a revelation which would smash the family’s power for ever and send many of them to prison for years to come. What are they to do? Either kill Valesio or admit that all these months while we’ve been working tirelessly for Ruggiero Miletti’s release he has in fact been comfortably holed up in some property of the family a few miles from here, perhaps even in his own house. Do you remember how long it took the family to get around to informing the police of his disappearance? They claimed it was because the idea of kidnapping never occurred to them, but it might equally be because they needed time to fake the accident and the evidence of the struggle, time to burn the car.’

Again a movement at the window below caught Zen’s eye. But this time the figure was that of a man, who reached for the shutters and banged them shut.

‘So you really believe that there’s a conspiracy?’ Zen asked Bartocci. He still wasn’t sure whether the magistrate was completely serious.

‘There’s always a conspiracy. Everything that happens in society at a certain level is part of a conspiracy.’

Zen noted the evasive reply.

‘If everything is, nothing is. If we’re all conspirators then there’s no conspiracy.’

‘On the contrary, the condition of this conspiracy is that we’re all part of it,’ Bartocci retorted. ‘It’s a ratking.’

‘A what?’

‘A ratking. Do you know what that is?’

Zen shrugged.

‘The king rat, I suppose. The dominant animal in the pack.’

‘That’s what everyone thinks. But it’s not. A ratking is something that happens when too many rats live in too small a space under too much pressure. Their tails become entwined and the more they strain and stretch to free themselves the tighter grows the knot binding them, until at last it becomes a solid mass of embedded tissue. And the creature thus formed, as many as thirty rats tied together by the tail, is called a ratking. You wouldn’t expect such a living contradiction to survive, would you? That’s the most amazing thing of all. Most of the ratkings they find, in the plaster of old houses or beneath the floorboards of a barn, are healthy and flourishing. Evidently the creatures have evolved some way of coming to terms with their situation. That’s not to say they like it, of course! In fact the reason they’re discovered is because of their diabolical squealing. Not much fun, being chained to each other for life. How much sweeter it would be to run free! Nevertheless, they do survive, somehow. The wonders of nature, eh?’

He paused for a moment, to let Zen’s exasperation mature.

‘Now a lot of people believe that somewhere in the wainscotting of this country the king of all the rats is hiding,’ he finally went on. ‘The toughest brute of all, the most vicious and ruthless, the dominant animal in the pack, as you put it. Some thought it was Calvi, some thought it Was Gelli. Others believe that it is someone else again, someone above and beyond either of them, a big name in the government perhaps, or on the contrary someone you’ve never even heard of. But the one thing they all agree is that he exists, this super-rat. It’s a message of hope and of despair. Hope, because perhaps one fine day we’ll finally trap him, run him down, finish him off and rid the house of rats for ever. Despair, because we know he’s too shrewd and powerful and cunning ever to be trapped. But in fact that’s all just a fairy story! What we’re dealing with is not a creature but a condition, the condition of being crucified to your fellows, squealing madly, biting, spitting, lashing out, yet somehow surviving, somehow even vilely flourishing! That’s what makes the conspiracy so formidable. There’s no need for agendas or strategies, for lists of members or passwords or secret codes. The ratking is self-regulating. It responds automatically and effectively to any threat. Each rat defends the interests of the others. The strength of each is the strength of all.’

‘I don’t quite see what all this has to do with the present case,’ Zen said.

Bartocci glanced at his watch.

‘I’m sorry, I got rather carried away. But the fact remains that whether or not there is a conspiracy in progress in the Miletti case, I believe that the investigation has reached a point where I can no longer continue to ignore such a theory. However, it would be fatal for me to announce my intentions. If I were to conduct this investigation like any other the political repercussions would ensure that the truth never came to light.’

‘Which is where I come in.’

The magistrate looked at him, the strange stalled smile straining away at the corner of his mouth.

‘If you are prepared to help.’

Zen turned round, taking a deep breath. One of the first-floor windows of the houses giving on to the piazza was a painted dummy, but at the one next to it a portly, silver-haired man in a red dressing-gown stood staring down at them with undisguised curiosity.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Zen asked tonelessly.

‘Just a few things that would be difficult for me to do without causing comment. First of all I’d like you to check what firearms are registered to members of the Miletti family. Don’t forget to include the Santuccis. I also want you to make discreet inquiries as to the whereabouts of members of the family yesterday.’

‘I can tell you where they were yesterday evening. They were having dinner with me at Antonio Crepi’s.’

Bartocci gave him a look that modulated rapidly from astonishment through alarm and respect to suspicion. Then he laughed rather aggressively.

‘Well, well! You do get around, don’t you?’

‘Apparently Crepi wanted me to meet the Milettis. To “see what we’re up against” as he put it.’

At the other end of the piazza a young couple were hungrily necking, bent over a parked car. The fat man at the window was still looking on, his thumbs tucked under the belt of his dressing-gown.

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘Yes, quite a lot. In fact to some extent it seemed to tally with what you’ve been saying. Not that he suggested that the family had any complicity in the kidnapping…’

‘Of course not! Anyway, he wouldn’t know.’

‘But he feels they’re not doing enough to bring Ruggiero home. He asked me to make that plain to the press in an attempt to pressure the Milettis to pay up.’

The young magistrate smiled sourly.

‘Typical. Anyway, one thing is certain. No additional pressure will be necessary now. Valesio’s death will do more than any press conference to resolve this issue one way or the other. Within the next few days I expect the family to say that they’ve received a demand for the full amount of the ransom to be paid at once and that they are going to comply. That’s why we need to move fast. Once that money is handed over and Ruggiero is back we’ll never be able to prove anything. But we must be discreet, above all! This entire matter is politically sensitive in the very highest degree, and if any word of it leaks out I shall be forced to…’

He broke off suddenly, looking past Zen. The young man had produced a camera and was taking photographs of his girlfriend posed in various positions against the landscape.

‘Anyway, I must go. No time for coffee, I’m afraid.’

As Bartocci hurried away the man with the camera came striding purposefully towards Zen, his girlfriend following more slowly behind.

‘Pardon me! Would you be as good enough to mind making of us two both a photograph?’

Foreign, thought Zen with relief. The young magistrate’s sudden haste had been unnecessary. One thing at least was certain: the bastards would never employ foreigners.