Blood Rain - 7 (4 page)

But by now they had reached the front door, and Beppe had to attend to his duties. He activated the radio strapped into a pouch on his belt and exchanged cryptic and static-garbled phrases with his companions. Then he counted slowly to five, swung open the door and ushered Corinna urgently outside. The two other guards had taken up point positions to either side of the three Fiat saloons which had drawn up in front of the building — where no other vehicle was allowed to park, even momentarily — and were anxiously scanning the street in every direction, their automatic weapons at the ready. Corinna ran the short distance to the second of the cars, whose rear door stood open, ready to receive her. Beppe, who had followed her, slammed the door shut and slapped the roof with his palm. Instantly the convoy containing Judge Nunziatella and her heavily armed escort moved off at speed, sirens screaming and blue lights flashing to alert the citizenry to the fact that yet another government functionary under sentence of death was passing by, panoplied in all the impotent might of the Italian state.

The Palace of Justice in Piazza Verga was an impressive work dating from the Fascist era, occupying an entire city block. Just outside the main entrance stood an enormous statue of a crowned female representing the justice supposedly dispensed within. One of her outstretched palms supported a jubilant male nude, while on the other a similar figure hid his head in shame or fear. Both these figures were more or less life-size, while Justice herself was at least ten metres tall, her vaguely Roman vestments overflowing on to the stone plinth below.

Classical allusions continued in the form of twenty-four rectangular pillars supporting a decorative portico, which in the present political climate gave the impression that the building itself had been imprisoned, and was gazing out at the city through the bars of its cage. But the most disturbing effect was that, apart from an hour or so around midday, the pillars to either side of the statue cast strong vertical shadows across it, turning the image of Justice into an obscure, faceless icon of some pagan deity, utterly indifferent to the joy or the misery of the paltry human figures it held in the palms of its hands.

The perimeter was impressively guarded, with canvas-covered trucks full of soldiers in battledress and an armoured car sporting a 4.5 cm cannon mounted in a swivelling turret. The army had been deployed on the streets of Catania and other Sicilian cities when it became apparent that the burden of protecting prefects, judges, magistrates and other functionaries was putting such a strain on the police forces that there weren’t enough officers left to carry out the investigations and arrests ordered by those members of the judiciary who had survived the assassinations planned by Totò Riina and carried out by his Corleone clan.

Now, though, the political pendulum seemed to be on the point of swinging back again. Voices had been heard in parliament claiming that such a massive show of force was undermining the democratic culture of Italy and shaming the country in the eyes of its partners in the European Union. One deputy had gone so far as to compare it to the brutal repression instituted by Cesare Mori, Mussolini’s Iron Prefect’, who virtually eradicated the Mafia in the 1920s, only for the invading Allies to release the jailed
capi
and their followers just in time for them to get rich on the easy money and unregulated growth of post-war Italy. No one in the government had expressed such views as yet, but Corinna Nunziatella was by no means alone in feeling that it was only a matter of time before Beppe and his fellow recruits were reunited with their girlfriends and families, and the situation in Sicily returned to what had always passed for ‘normal’.

The convoy of cars drove round to the rear of the Palace of Justice, past the armed guards in their bullet-proof vests, and down a ramp leading into the bowels of the building. Corinna thanked the members of her escort — whose lives, of course, were as much at risk as hers — and took the lift to the third floor, where the offices of the
Procura della Repubblica
were located, and then walked along a corridor ending at yet another checkpoint. Here she not only had to present her identification to the guard on duty — despite the fact that they both knew each other by sight — but also to pronounce the codeword, changed daily, which permitted access to the offices of the so-called ‘pool’ of AntiMafia magistrates. The security precautions protecting this high-risk group were undeniably impressive, but Corinna knew better than to assume that they would be effective in the event that an order was given to eliminate her. The Mafia was traditionally compared to an octopus concealed in a rocky crevice, its tentacles reaching everywhere. Corinna thought that a pack of invasive rats provided a more accurate analogy: if you blocked up one entrance, they would find or make another.

Despite the élite status of the AntiMafia pool, or perhaps because of the widespread resentment which this exclusive club attracted from colleagues in other branches of the police and judiciary who had not been invited to join, Corinna Nunziatella had as yet been unable to obtain an office more suited to her requirements than the dingy, dark cubicle at the northeast corner of the building which she had originally been assigned. The pointless and oppressive height of its ceiling merely served to emphasize the meagre proportions of the floor space dictated by the newly installed wall panels: 3.5 square metres, to be exact.

Since she could not expand laterally, Corinna had followed the Manhattan model, stacking files in precarious piles propped up one against the other like exhausted drunks. Retrieving any given file was a work of considerable dexterity, requiring the skills of those conjurors who can remove a tablecloth while leaving the dinner setting intact. Relief was promised shortly in the form of a computer network linking all members of the Catania DIA pool both to each other and to their colleagues in the other provincial capitals, but despite a month of installation work, it was still not up and running. In the meantime, the massive terminal squatted idly on her desk, taking up yet more precious space.

‘E
se tutto ciò non bastasse
…’ she murmured under her breath.

Yes, indeed. As if all this were not enough, Corinna Nunziatella was beginning to suspect that she was falling in love.

She was not left long to brood on these incidental problems, for within a few minutes the phone rang, summoning her to the director’s office for a ‘progress report’. Corinna hastily grabbed an impressive-looking dossier of papers, some of which were actually related to her current cases, checked that her appearance was at once professional and uninviting, and proceeded up to the fifth floor.

The arrival of Sergio Tondo, the recently appointed director of the AntiMafia pool, had proved a source of much mirth to his subordinates, since in appearance he resembled the classic, slightly racist stereotype of the typical
mafioso:
short, broad, sallow and intense, with a moustache of which he was excessively proud, black voided eyes, and an air of undefined but potentially threatening distinction. The punchline of the joke was that, far from being Sicilian, or even a southerner, Tondo — originally, no doubt, Tondeau — was in fact a native of the Valle d’Aosta, the French-speaking mountain region in the extreme north-west corner of the country, well over a thousand kilometres from Catania as the crow flew, had there been any crows ambitious enough to attempt such a trip.

As though to confirm the initial impression he had created, Sergio Tondo seemed to go out of his way to act as well as look like a caricature Sicilian, to the extent of having made explicit sexual advances to all the female magistrates on his team. Corinna Nunziatella had already been obliged to remove one or other of his hands from her hip, her knee, her shoulder and just below her left breast, and to do so in such a way as to make it seem that she hadn’t really been aware that it had been there in the first place.

It was a delicate operation, calling for exquisite timing, adroitness and tact. Corinna would have been the first to admit that she was ambitious, and it was hard to overemphasize the importance of her promotion to the AntiMafia pool at the age of only thirty-four. To be eased out now would not just mean a return to her previous, uninspiring postings; it would mean being marked for the rest of her life as someone who had been given a rare chance to succeed at the highest level, but who had failed. No one would ever know why, still less bother to find out. And if she started retailing stories about sexual harassment, everyone would just assume that she was trying to lay the blame elsewhere in a feeble attempt to excuse her own incompetence.

Her tactics at present were to try to make herself look drably forbidding. Not so much impregnable, which might put the director on his macho mettle, as unworthy of the effort involved. The image she strove for was that of a walled mountain village at which the invading hordes in the valley below cast a brief glance, then shook their heads, shouldered their weapons and moved on to easier pickings elsewhere. The trick was to make Tondo feel that he had rejected her, thus leaving his pride and self-esteem intact — and, above all, to do so before he pushed matters to a point she could already sense somewhere close ahead, where she would ram her knee into his bulging crotch and rake her clawed nails across his piggy little eyes.

The moment she opened the door to the director’s absurdly spacious office, Corinna Nunziatella knew that something had happened, and that it was not good news. Having dreaded being overwhelmed by unwanted attentions, she found herself treated to an almost brutal absence of elementary politeness, never mind charm, which she found threatening in a quite different way. So far from rushing over to ‘drink in your perfume’, as he had once said, Sergio Tondo did not even bother to get to his feet. His greeting was perfunctory and barely audible. In short, his manner was everything she had wished it would be — cool, distant, and totally professional — and it scared the hell out of her. Because if the director was finally treating her as a colleague rather than a woman, it could only mean that something was very badly wrong indeed.

Corinna Nunziatella sat down in one of the two armchairs facing the desk, the antique leather creaking beneath her. Apart from a crucifix, a portrait of the president, a map of the province of Catania and a couple of shelves of law books apparently selected on the basis of format and size rather than content, the director’s office was strikingly, indeed significantly, empty. No piles of files here, no unsorted notes, no computer terminal. All this austerity made the three telephones on the desk — red, blue and yellow, respectively — loom even larger. One would be for internal calls within the building, another an ‘open’ external line.

And the third? Corinna Nunziatella found herself irresistibly reminded of the so-called
terzo livello
of the Mafia, whose existence had often been postulated but never proved; the fabled Third Level, far above mundane criminal activities and inter-clan rivalries, on which the most powerful and influential bosses met with their political patrons and protectors in Rome to discuss kickbacks, mutual interests, and the delivery of votes come election time.

‘So?’ the director remarked, as though Corinna had requested a meeting with
him
.

‘I understood you to say that you wanted a progress report,’ she replied stiffly.

Sergio Tondo smiled superficially and made a throw-away gesture with his left hand.

‘That was just a manner of speaking. I really want to have a chat, hear what you’re working on at present, that sort of thing. As you know, I try to foster a team spirit here, and I feel very strongly that face-to-face meetings like this, informal and off the record, without the inevitable stresses of peer pressure, can genuinely promote a sense of individual empowerment in each and every member of the department, resulting in an enhanced professional dynamic and group cohesion.’

Corinna kept her mouth shut.

‘How’s the Maresi case going?’ the director continued at length.

‘It isn’t going anywhere. It’s been deadlocked for months, and looks likely to stay that way.’

‘And the Cucuzza business?’

‘That looked promising, until the Supreme Court released my principal witness, who promptly disappeared and is now probably in hiding abroad or dead.’

The court was merely upholding the law,’ Sergio Tondo remarked in a tone of light reprimand. ‘The procedural irregularities which had evidently occurred — through no fault of yours,
dottoressa
, I dare say — unfortunately made it impossible for them to act in any other way.’

Corinna Nunziatella nodded sagely.

‘I’m sure the citizens of Italy will sleep more soundly in their beds at night, knowing that the legal rights of convicted
mafiosi
are being protected with such rigour.’

The director gave a sympathetic sigh.

‘I know how frustrating these setbacks can be, but try not to feel too bitter. It’s quite pointless, and might ultimately have a negative effect on your performance as a valued member of our team.’

Again Corinna chose not to respond.

‘Those two files are currently inactive, then,’ Tondo went on. ‘So what
have
you been working on?’

‘The Tonino Limina case has been occupying almost all my time in the past weeks.’

‘With what results?’

Corinna took a deep breath and counted silently to five.

‘As I explained at the general briefing last week,
direttore
, I have been working on two main fronts. Firstly, I have tried to trace the provenance and movements of the wagon in which the body was found. As you know, the waybill attached to the so-called “death chamber” indicated that it formed part of a stopping goods train, schedule number 46703, which left Palermo on 23 July. However, despite lengthy interviews with the various crews who worked this train, I have as yet been unable to determine conclusively whether the said wagon originated in Palermo or was attached to the train at some later point. It is also unclear how and when it came to be abandoned on the siding where it was later discovered. The train crew explicitly deny that they detached any wagons during their layover at the station of Passo Martino. On the other hand, they admit that they remained in the cab of the locomotive during this time. It is therefore possible that some third party detached the wagon without them noticing. What we
do
know is that the signalman who brought the train to a halt was not a railway employee, and that the repair work which he used to justify the manoeuvre was not in fact taking place.’