Ratking (17 page)

‘They didn’t find out from me!’

‘
Then how did they find out? Eh?
’

Zen decided to give him the only answer he had been able to come up with.

‘Perhaps one of the family told them.’

‘
That’s nonsense! Why should they do that?
’

Zen put a hand out against the wall to steady himself.

‘How should I know? The last I heard you thought they were behind the whole thing!’

‘
Now, listen,
that’s
enough! I
don’t
want to hear any more
talk of that kind. This is a very serious situation
you’ve
got us
into.
There’s
no telling what the gang may do now
.’

Zen lowered the receiver and stared at it, as though its expression might help him understand the words it was uttering.

‘
Hello? Hello?
’

Bartocci’s voice emerged in a comically diminished squawk, like a character in a cartoon film. The white-jacketed waiter scurried into the café carrying a tray on which a pyramid of empty cups and glasses was balanced. ‘Four coffees two beers one mineral water!’ he called to the barman. With a sigh Zen raised the receiver again.

‘Look, dottore, they knew I was there before I got out of the car, before they’d even had a glimpse of me.’

‘
I’d like to believe you, Zen. But
it’s
just not credible. If the
gang knew you were coming why did they allow the pay-off to
continue? Why
didn’t
they just cancel the whole thing?
’

‘I don’t know. All I know is that my presence was no surprise to them, but they decided to go ahead with the drop anyway. And afterwards they went to the trouble of calling out the Carabinieri to make sure I didn’t die of exposure. So there’s no reason to suppose that they’re going to do anything stupid now.’

‘
You and the kidnappers seem to have a perfect
understand
¬
ing, Zen. They know what
you’re
doing, you know what
they’re
thinking. I just hope
you’re
right. For all our sakes
.’

The line went dead.

A young man with a bad case of acne approached and pointed at the phone.

‘You finished?’

Yes, he had finished. There was no point now in telling Bartocci about the letter he had received. The young magistrate had embraced orthodoxy with the fervour of a recent convert. He was no longer interested in sensational revelations by anonymous informants.

As Zen turned away he glanced at the calendar hanging beside the phone, and suddenly realized what day it was. After all these years it had finally happened! Come hell or high water, he’d always managed to get his mother a present and to send her some flowers and a card. But this time he had forgotten, and tomorrow was her birthday.

Then he remembered Palottino. Since arriving in Perugia the Neapolitan’s days had been spent slumped in the Alfetta in the car park beneath Zen’s office window, reading comics and listening to the radio. Yet poor Luigi was not happy. He longed for action, yearned to be trusted with high responsibilities, to undertake prodigious feats requiring a cool head, a stout heart and nerves of steel. Delivering a gift to Zen’s mother didn’t quite come into that category, but it was better than nothing. Besides, he could pick up some Nazionali from Zen’s tame tobacconist as well. So it only remained to find a suitable present.

Forty minutes later he was still empty-handed and beginning to panic. It was a feeling which often came over him in shops, a paralysis of the decision-making faculty. Nevertheless he had to get something, and quickly, before the shops closed for lunch. It was at this point that he found himself face to face with Cinzia Miletti.

‘Show me where they hit you!’ she cried. ‘Oh, is that all? Surely it should be worse. But you must tell me all about it, I can’t wait to hear. Come and have coffee, I’m just on my way home, you can help carry this. Gianluigi’s away and if that woman thinks I’m going to wait one second longer …’

Zen murmured something about needing to find his mother a present, and Cinzia immediately took charge.

‘Well now, let’s see, it should be something traditional, characteristic, typical of the region. Embroidery, for example, or does she collect ceramics? I know, chocolates! We’ll get her a nice presentation pack, that one over there, local pottery.’

Even once Cinzia had bullied one of the assistants into offering Zen a discount, the item she had selected came to about three times what he had reckoned to spend, but he paid up. A few minutes later the Deruta vase containing about half a kilo of assorted chocolates had been placed on the rear seat of the Volvo and he was sitting in the front watching Cinzia tear up the parking ticket which had been tucked under the windscreen wiper.

Cinzia Miletti drove as she talked, in a prolonged spasm characterized by unpredictable leaps and frenetic darts and swerves, serenely unimpressed by the existence of other traffic. The drive to her house just outside Perugia was littered with miraculously unachieved collisions. Cinzia naturally also talked as she drove. If anything she seemed even more voluble than usual, which Zen put down to embarrassment. With her father’s fate still undecided, he had caught her cruising the shops as though she hadn’t a care in the world. She was therefore at some pains to explain that the only reason she had come into Perugia at all was because of an appointment with Ivy Cook, of all people, who had telephoned her earlier that morning.

‘I must see you urgently, she tells me, shall I come out there or could you meet me in town? So out of the kindness of my heart I agreed to come in.’

The kindness of Cinzia Miletti’s heart was a quality Zen had considerable difficulty in imagining where Ivy Cook was concerned, but he found it easy enough to believe that in her husband’s absence Cinzia had been feeling bored and had welcomed any excuse for going into Perugia.

‘Did she say what it was about?’

‘She didn’t want to discuss it on the phone, that’s all I know. First of all I had the most awful trouble starting this thing. We should never have got rid of the little Fiat we used to have which started first time every time and if anything did go wrong you could fix it with an elastic band or a bit of string, Gianluigi used to say, although personally I’m hopeless with machinery. Anyway, when I got to the café where we were supposed to meet there’s no sign of her! Well, you can’t get near her flat, they’ve closed the street, they’re turning the whole city centre into a museum, next thing they’ll be charging admission and closing in the afternoon. I had to walk all the way round there in these shoes, they look good but believe me they’re not meant for walking, and in the end she’s not even home. Have you ever heard anything like it? I mean, it’s really just the most infuriating thing conceivable, maddening, really.’

They were driving through the suburbs in the valley far below the ancient hill settlement forming the historic core of the city. In the midst of concrete towers and slabs, the office blocks and apartment buildings of the new Perugia, stood an old stone farmhouse, squat and sturdy, with its attendant chicken coops and vegetable garden, the walls dyed green by years of sulphur sprayed on the vines running up to form a pergola. Was this the one Franco Miletti had pointed out to his son Ruggiero as an image of the family? If so, the protective trees had gone, and the brutal buildings which had replaced them would channel the wind more fiercely, not screen it.

They crossed the strip of wasteland underneath the motorway link that came tunnelling and bridging its way through the hilly landscape, and entered a zone of fenced-off lots containing warehouses and sales-rooms, light industrial units and the offices of small businesses. The whole area was no more than ten or fifteen years old, straggling along either side of what had once been a country road and ending messily with the shell of an unfinished building of some indeterminate nature. Shortly afterwards Cinzia turned off along an unpaved minor road. High boundary fences marked the position of villas hiding coyly behind rows of evergreens. Guard dogs hurled themselves against the wire and then chased the car the length of the property, barking frantically, while Cinzia told Zen how she had persuaded Gianluigi to buy a place in the country although he couldn’t see the point, but to her nature was not a luxury but something fundamental, a source of sanity and order, did he understand what she meant?

They drew up in front of a pair of steel gates topped with spikes. While Cinzia searched the glove compartment for the remote control unit, Zen noted the heavy-duty fencing with angled strands of barbed wire at the top and electronic sensors at the bottom, and the video camera mounted on a pole just inside the gates, all of it brand new. The local security equipment retailers had clearly done well out of Ruggiero Miletti’s kidnapping. Bartocci should have noticed details like that, thought Zen. People don’t go out and spend millions turning their homes into prison camps unless there is real fear in the air.

They were barely inside the front door when the elderly housekeeper appeared and told Cinzia that Signorina Cook had been looking for her.

‘What?’ shrieked Cinzia. ‘Here? But she must be mad!’

‘She said you were supposed to meet her here. She waited about ten minutes and then left.’

‘What nonsense! Would I have bothered to go all the way into town if we had arranged to meet here?’

The housekeeper held up her hands in a conciliatory gesture and started saying something about a mistake. But Cinzia was not to be mollified.

‘Oh no, she did it deliberately! Well, I’ll teach her to play tricks on me!’

She strode to the telephone and dialled. After a moment or two she passed the receiver to Zen with an exclamation of disgust.

‘Just listen to this!’

‘
… at the moment
,’ Ivy’s recorded voice said. ‘
If you wish
to leave a message please speak after the tone
.’

‘I’ll leave her a message all right, when I see her,’ Cinzia exclaimed, slamming the receiver down.

She turned to Zen, her anger apparently gone.

‘I’m going to change. Look around, make yourself at home. Margherita, make us some coffee.’

Zen stood there in the elegant and spacious sitting room, listening to the insistent voices of the glass and steel coffee table supporting a spray of glossy magazines, the pouchy leather furniture over which a huge lamp on a curved stainless-steel pole craned like a vulture, the silver plates and the crystal bowls, the discreetly modern canvases, the shelves lined with works of literature, the expensive antiques, the handwoven rugs on the gleaming parquet floor, the baby grand piano with a Mozart sonata lying open on the stand, the fireplace piled high with logs. The view from the picture window showed a carefully landscaped garden, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a field where a wiry old gardener in baggy peasant clothing and a felt hat was tending his master’s vines and olives. Even nature was made to chatter.

‘Ah, so you’ve found our little secret, with your policeman’s flair!’

The room had as many entrances and exits as a stage set. Cinzia had appeared almost at his elbow. She picked up a small statuette which he hadn’t been aware of before.

‘But we didn’t buy it from some grave-robber, you know. I mean, that’s totally wrong, taking the national heritage for your own selfish private use. But you see, Gianluigi’s cousin works in the museum and they’ve got so much stuff there they literally don’t know what to do with it all, it just sits and rots in boxes in the cellar, no one ever sees it. At least here it’s cared for, admired, which is what they would have wanted. Wonderful people, very sexual and full of life. I’m sure I have Etruscan blood in me.’

She was wearing a short skirt with a big broad belt, a soft woollen pullover with a deep V-neck and a double string of pearls. She had removed her shoes and stockings.

‘This wood is magic,’ she exclaimed. ‘In winter it’s warm and in summer it’s cool, can you explain that? I can’t, not that I want to. I hate explanations, they ruin everything. But you mustn’t peek at my feet like that, poor horrible ugly deformed things.’

She moved restlessly about the room, lifting and rearranging things without any evident purpose.

‘Kant,’ she remarked, taking a book down from the shelf. ‘Have you read Kant? I keep meaning to, but somehow I never get around to it.’

She curled up in the leather sofa that looked as comfortable as a bed and waved Zen into a matching armchair opposite.

‘So your husband’s away?’ he queried.

‘In Milan, lucky pig! Very urgent business which he’d been putting off. But there’s no point in him being here anyway, as far as I can see. I mean there’s nothing we can do, any of us. It’s just a question of waiting.’

Despite her alleged impatience to hear about his experiences during the pay-off, she made no attempt to refer to it again, launching instead into a blow-by-blow account of a film she had seen the previous evening, going on to explain that she loved films, really loved them, that the only place to see them properly was the cinema, that her favourite was a wonderful old place in the centre of town called the Minerva, and what a shame it was that no one went to the cinema any more.

The housekeeper brought in the coffee in an ornate silver tray which she deposited on one level of the Scandinavian wall-system. I’ve been in the family for generations, said the tray, so you can see that they’re not just a bunch of jumped-up farmers like so many around these days. Quite so, commented the wall-system, but despite their solid roots these are modern progressive people with a truly cosmopolitan outlook. Oh, shut up, Zen thought. Just shut up.

‘Is your husband’s trip to Milan connected with this Japanese deal I’ve been hearing about?’ he asked.

Cinzia’s air of boredom deepened significantly.