Ratking (27 page)

‘Beat them up,’ he repeated mechanically.

‘Well, just one of them actually. The one who called me a fuckarse and a cocksucker when they had me at their mercy during the pay-off, up there in the mountains. The one who kicked me in the balls and in the face and then left me there to die. If your men hadn’t come out and found me, God bless them, I
would
have died! Phone them, if you don’t believe me!’

The captain held up his hands placatingly. Zen gave an embarrassed smile.

‘Anyway, perhaps you understand now why I came straight here as soon as I heard that you’d laid hands on the bastards. Just fifteen minutes, that’s all I ask.’

‘Well, I’m really not sure that I can agree to authorize you to, ah …’

‘I won’t leave a mark on him.’

‘Possibly not, but …’

‘I’ve done this sort of thing before.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you have. Nevertheless, there is the question of …’

Zen shot out of his chair.

‘There’s the question of teaching these fucking bastards to respect authority, Captain, that’s what the question is! Next time it might be you out there, remember. Now the politicians have taken away the death penalty what have these animals got to lose? We’ve got to stick together, Captain, make our own arrangements. Just fifteen minutes, that’s all I ask.’

Rivolta stared up at Zen, seemingly mesmerized.

‘You’re sure there won’t be any marks?’ he murmured at last.

Zen smiled unpleasantly.

‘Like I always say, it’s the ones that don’t show that hurt the most.’

The corridor was straight, evenly lit and apparently endless, with steel doors set at equal intervals on either side. Zen had unconsciously adopted the same pace as his escort, so their footsteps rapped out a single rhythm on the concrete floor. At length the sergeant stopped, produced a set of keys and unlocked one of the doors. Zen’s nostrils flared at the smell which emerged, sheep and smoke and dirt and sweat all worked together, overpowering the antiseptic odour which he hadn’t been aware of until it went under to this blast from another world.

There were two men in the cell, one lying on the bunk bed, the other leaning against the wall. They stared at the intruders. The Carabinieri sergeant produced a pair of handcuffs and snapped them with practised ease on to the wrists of the man on the bed.

‘On your feet, shithead,’ he remarked without animosity.

He grasped the man’s left elbow between forefinger and thumb and pushed him towards the door. The man winced and said something in dialect to the other prisoner. Then the door slammed shut and they were walking again, three of them now rapping out the same rhythm along the corridor.

They passed through a set of doors like an airlock, separating the cells from the rest of the building. The prisoner didn’t move fast enough for the sergeant’s liking and again he made him wince, although the only contact between them was the two-fingered grip on the man’s elbow. Then they turned left through a pair of swing doors into a small gymnasium.

‘Jesus!’ the Calabrian muttered.

The sergeant guided him over to a set of wall bars.

‘You’ll fucking well speak when you’re spoken to and not unless,’ he remarked.

‘But we talk already!’

‘You don’t understand,’ the sergeant told him. ‘That was work. This is pleasure.’

He spun the prisoner round, undid one end of the handcuffs, looped it through the wall-bars and locked it back on the man’s wrist so that the handcuffs wrenched his arms up and back in the classic
strappado
position.

‘OΚ?’

Zen nodded appreciatively.

‘Very nice.’

The sergeant chopped the edge of his hand down on the elbow he had been gripping earlier. The prisoner groaned.

‘Hurt his arm,’ the sergeant commented conversationally. ‘He’s all yours, then. Fifteen minutes.’

The swing doors banged together behind him a few times and then all was quiet.

Zen lit a cigarette.

‘You remember me,’ he said, placing it between the prisoner’s lips.

The man stared at him through the smoke which drifted up into his unblinking eyes.

‘Was it you?’

The prisoner drew on the cigarette. His gaze was as absolute and incurious as a cat’s. His head shook.

‘They come looking for him but he is not there. They take the brother instead and later he is dead. From then he hates all police.’

For the Calabrian the Tuscan dialect called Italian was as foreign a language as Spanish, but Zen dimly perceived the general outlines of the story.

‘We know this only after,’ the prisoner went on. ‘We phone them to get you. We don’t want anyone killed.’

‘Except Ruggiero Miletti.’

The man mouthed the cigarette to one side.

‘We don’t kill Miletti!’

‘You’ve confessed to doing so.’

‘We don’t want to end like the brother. When the judge comes we deny everything.’

‘I don’t think she’s going to be very impressed by that.’

The prisoner looked sharply at Zen.

‘It’s a woman?’

This seemed to disturb him more than anything else.

‘What of it?’

‘They’re the worst.’

Zen sighed.

‘Look, you had the means, the opportunity and a reasonable motive. Everyone is going to assume you did it, no matter what you say.’

The prisoner let the cigarette drop from his mouth and trod it out with the care of one from a land where fire is not completely domesticated.

‘It’s the same. At Milan innocent till guilty, at Rome guilty till innocent, in Calabria guilty till guilty.’

Zen glanced at his watch.

‘I believe that you didn’t kill Ruggiero Miletti.’

‘Prison for kidnap, prison for murder. Same prison.’

He’s always known this would happen one day, Zen thought, and now that it has he feels oddly reassured. And I’m cast in the role of a smart lawyer trying to make Oedipus believe that I’ve found a loophole in fate and given a sympathetic jury I can get him off with a suspended sentence.

‘Look, I’ve read the letter Ruggiero sent to his family,’ he told the prisoner. ‘He made it clear that you treated him well. As far as the kidnapping goes you were small fry, manual workers. You’ll go to prison, certainly, but with good behaviour and a bit of luck you’ll get out one day. But if you’re sent down for killing a defenceless old man in cold blood then that’s the end. They won’t bother locking your cell, they’ll just weld up the door. And you’ll know that whatever happens, however society changes, whichever party comes to power, you’re going to die in prison and be buried in a pit of quicklime, because if any of your relatives still remember who you are they’ll be too ashamed to come and claim your body.’

The prisoner stared stoically at the floor. Zen consulted his watch again.

‘Tell me about the day you released Miletti.’

There was no reply.

‘If I’m to help you I need to know!’

Eventually the deep voice ground unwillingly into action.

‘We drive him there and leave him. That’s all.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Before light.’

‘On Monday? Four days ago?’

A grudging nod.

‘And when did you phone the family?’

‘Later.’

‘Later the same morning? On Monday?’

Another nod.

‘Which number did you phone?’

‘The same as before.’

‘When before?’

‘When we go to get the money.’

He seemed bored, as if none of this concerned him and he simply wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.

‘And who did you speak to?’

‘I don’t speak.’

Of course. The gang would have picked someone more articulate as their spokesman.

‘You don’t know anything about who answered? A man? A woman? Young? Old?’

‘A man, of course! Not of the family. Like you.’

‘Like me?’

‘From the North.’

Zen nodded, holding the man’s eyes. Time must be getting desperately short, but he didn’t dare break the concentration by glancing at his watch.

‘The man who hates the police because of what they did to his brother, how did he know who I was?’

‘He say he can smell them.’

Zen’s foot hooked the man’s ankles and pulled him off balance so that he fell forward with a short cry of pain.

‘That was very brave of you,’ Zen commented as the prisoner struggled back to his feet. ‘But we don’t have time for bravery. Who told you I was coming on the pay-off?’

The man stood motionless, eyes closed, breathing the pain away.

‘Some people say Southerners are stupid,’ Zen continued. ‘I hope you’re not going to prove them right. I can’t help you unless I know who your contact was.’

He moved closer to the prisoner, inside the portable habitat of mountain odours that surrounded him like a sheath.

‘Was it one of the family?’

No response.

‘Or someone in the Questura?’

The man’s eyelids flickered but did not open.

‘Someone called Lucaroni?’

Zen’s gaze swarmed over the prisoner’s face.

‘Chiodini?’

Behind him the doors banged open and boots rapped out across the parquet flooring.

‘Geraci?’

Suddenly the eyes were on him again, pure and polished and utterly empty of expression.

‘Everything go all right?’ asked the sergeant, appearing at Zen’s side. ‘Didn’t give you any trouble, did he?’

Zen turned slowly, rubbing his hands together.

‘It went just fine, thank you.’

The sergeant unlocked the handcuffs and the prisoner straightened his arms with a long groan. Zen buttoned up his overcoat.

‘I’ll be going then.’

‘Didn’t know you were here,’ the sergeant remarked.

The Alfetta was parked on the pavement outside, forcing pedestrians out into the street jammed with traffic. Palottino sat inside reading a comic featuring a naked woman with large breasts cowering in terror before an enormous spider brandishing a bloodstained chainsaw. It was drizzling lightly and the evening rush hour was at its peak, but thanks to a judicious use of the siren and a blatant disregard for the rules of the road the Neapolitan contrived to move the Alfetta through the traffic almost as though it did not exist. Meanwhile Zen sat gazing out at the narrow cobbled streets, teeming with quirky detail to an extent that seemed almost unreal, like the carefully contrived background to a film scene. But it was just the effect of the contrast with that other world, a world of carefully contrived monotony, designed for twenty thousand people but inhabited by more than twice that number, of whom several hundred killed themselves each year and another fifty or so were murdered, a world whose powerful disinfectant would seep into the blood and bones of the violent, gentle shepherds who had kidnapped Ruggiero Miletti, until it had driven them safely mad.

Zen lit a Nazionale and stretched luxuriously. What the Calabrian had told him made everything simple. All he had to do was get in touch with Rosella Foria before she left for Florence and pass on the information he had received and he could return to Rome exonerated and with a clear conscience. The key was that the kidnappers had telephoned on Monday, not on Tuesday, and that the number they had called was the one communicated to them by the family before the pay-off, as stipulated in Ruggiero’s letter. Whoever had answered this telephone call was at the very least an accessory to Ruggiero’s murder and could be arrested at once. The rest would follow.

As they hit the motorway, surging forward into the rain-filled darkness, Zen suddenly felt slightly lightheaded, and he told Palottino to stop at a service area so that they could get something to eat. Ten minutes later they were sitting at a formica-topped table in a restaurant overlooking the motorway. Zen was chaffing his driver about a toy panda he had bought for his brother’s little daughter, a great favourite of his. Palottino produced a number of photographs of the child, which they both admired. Encouraged by his superior’s good humour, the Neapolitan asked how things were going, and Zen felt so relaxed and obliging that he told him what had happened in Florence. Palottino laughed admiringly at the clever ruse Zen had used to gain access to the kidnappers, and at his description of the languid young captain who had fallen for it. But when it came to the prisoner’s revelations he unfortunately got the wrong end of the stick.

‘Called another number on another day!’ he jeered. ‘Oh, yes, very clever! What do they take us for, idiots?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Well, I mean no one’s going to believe that, are they? Not when there’s a recording, logged and dated, of them actually making the call on Tuesday. I mean, it’s a clear case of pull the other one, right?’

Zen stared at him. He seemed to be having difficulty focusing.

‘No. No, you don’t understand. They called
another
number, not the Miletti house. On Monday.’

Quickly reading the signals, Palottino did an abrupt U-turn.

‘Oh, I see! You mean you
know
they did. Oh, well, that’s different! Sorry, chief, I didn’t realize that. I thought it was just their word against the official record. And like we say in Naples, never believe a Calabrian unless he tells you he’s lying!’

Zen gazed down at the surface of the table gleaming dully under the flat neon light. He stood up abruptly.

‘I’ve got to go to the toilet. I’ll meet you in the car.’

As Zen washed his hands he gazed at his face in the mirror above the basin. How could he have failed to see what was obvious even to a knucklehead like Palottino? How could he have imagined for a second that the kidnappers’ unsupported assertions would be taken seriously by anyone? On the contrary, they would be indignantly dismissed as a feeble and disgusting attempt by a gang of ruthless killers to add insult to injury by smearing the family of the man they had just savagely murdered.

It was Thursday evening now. His mandate in Perugia ran until midnight on Friday. That gave him just over twenty-four hours. He phoned the Night Duty Officer at the Questura in Perugia and then, since he had some tokens left, dialled Ellen’s number in Rome. But as soon as it began to ring he pushed the rest down with his finger, breaking the connection.