Authors: Michael Dibdin
‘Go, Gilberto,’ he said. ‘Go to Sassari. Go to the house. Don’t phone, don’t write, don’t tell her you’re coming. Just go.’
Nieddu looked suddenly shifty.
‘Well, I don’t know about that. Maybe later, if she’s lucky. Once she starts to see reason. Let a little time pass, eh? Let her suffer a bit, realize what she’s lost. Then I might go.’
‘By then Rosa will have become accustomed to the situation, maybe even started to persuade herself that she enjoys it. And in a month the children will have started at a new school and will have a new circle of friends. Go now. Go tonight, if there’s a flight. And if there isn’t, hire a plane. You’ve got the money. Take a cab to the house and tell her that you’ve got a jet waiting at the airport to take the family home again.’
‘It wouldn’t be a jet. More likely a turboprop.’
‘It doesn’t matter what kind of aircraft it is, Gilberto!’
‘But what about the brother?’
Zen looked at him solemnly.
‘You really are a loser, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘I make five times what you do, Zen, and pay a quarter as much tax!’ Nieddu retorted violently.
‘So what? If you don’t get over to Sardinia right now and bring back your wife and the mother of your children, then as far as I’m concerned you’re a loser.’
He handed Nieddu a couple of thousand-lire coins.
This’ll get you home on the
metropolitana
. Call me when you have good news.’
When Aurelio Zen reached the address he still thought of as home, he had a very strange feeling: it was as if he were entering it for the first time. The spacious gloom of the entrance hall, the antique elevator in its wrought-iron cage, the neighbour’s caged bird which mimicked the squeaky hinges of the front door to Zen’s apartment; all these details, for years so worn with use as to have become transparent, now asserted themselves as fresh perceptions, potentially significant information about a territory never encountered before.
The lights still didn’t work. By touch and instinct, aided at moments by the flame from his cigarette lighter, he found his way to the kitchen and then the cupboard where they had always kept a stock of candles for use during the power cuts which had at one time been a frequent occurrence. He bundled six of them together, tied them up with a length of twine chosen from the many odd pieces that Maria Grazia stored in a drawer because ‘You never know when it might come in handy’, then lit the wicks and made his way back to the living room, where he placed the bunch of candles on the table. The flames spluttered
and wavered and then grew tall and steady, making the walls and ceiling glow in a way that reminded Zen irresistibly of the
camera
ardente
at the funeral home where he had gone to view his mother’s body.
‘They don’t put the body in the box,’ said a voice in his head, ‘they wrap the box around the body.’
No, that wasn’t right. He’d been misled by the previous
association
with his mother’s funeral. The word had been bottles, not body. ‘They don’t put the bottles in the box, they wrap the box around the bottles.’ In some hospital, during one of the few lucid memories he had of that whole period. A young doctor was preparing to give him an injection of liquid drawn from one of a set of glass phials packed into a cardboard box on the trolley beside him. Zen had remarked, in an attempt at humour, that it must be hard work fitting all those tiny bottles into such a tight space. And the doctor had explained, adding that his brother worked in packaging and never tired of telling him that wraparound was the wave of the future.
But why had that voice come back to him now? He had often noticed that if he found himself humming some tune, there was usually a connection between the words, or title, or general
context
and associations of the music, and something that had been preoccupying him without his conscious awareness of it. The same must be the case here, he thought, but what possible
connection
could there be? Bottles, boxes, packaging, wraparound … None of these had any evident relevance. Nor did threats to his life and the resulting injuries, not to mention doctors or
hospitals
. He was finished with all that.
He moved his luggage into the bedroom where he used to sleep. Maria Grazia had stripped the bed before leaving. He
didn’t
feel up to remaking it, so he fetched a pillow and some
blankets
from the linen cupboard in the hall, blew out the candles in the living room and groped his way back to the bedroom. The air was filled with the unctuous smoke of the candles, which made him realize that there had been a previous and not dissimilar odour in the apartment which he only now identified as the sweet-and-sour fetor of his mother’s dying flesh. The thought made him close and lock the bedroom door behind him. A few minutes later he was lying fully clothed on his bed, wrapped up
in his coat and the blankets. A few minutes after that he was asleep.
He awoke a moment later, or so it seemed. It was an instant and complete awakening with no memory of dreams, no
drowsiness
, and no evident cause. The room was silent and dark, apart from a faint glimmer coming up through the shutters from the street below. He lay on his back, staring up at the lamp hanging like a predatory bat from the ceiling. He had always loathed that lamp, he realized. Then he thought: Now that mamma’s dead, I can get rid of it.
A sound broke the silence. It was difficult to say what might have caused it, but the source seemed clear. He lay quite still,
listening
intently. Eventually there was another sound, equally generic and almost inaudible, but it too had been located just
outside
the room, behind the locked door leading to the rest of the apartment. But that was absurd. Clearly there was no one out there. How could there be?
The silence then remained unbroken for so long that he almost convinced himself that he had imagined the earlier noises. Then he heard a distinct metallic scraping that he recognized instantly. Someone was turning the handle to his bedroom door.
‘Who’s there?’ he shouted, sitting up in bed.
There was silence again, then a rapid series of ratchety clicks. Zen climbed out of bed as the door resounded under a
tremendous
blow.
‘Who’s that?’ he yelled again.
Another blow, then another. The door was of seasoned oak, at least a hundred years old. It wouldn’t give, unless the intruder had an axe, but sooner or later the catch must.
Zen groped in his coat pocket and found the device he had been given at the Ministry the previous afternoon. He clicked the button at the side to turn it on, then slid up the shield over the glowing red button and pressed it as another
earthquake-like
tremor hit the door.
What happened then was the last thing he had expected: the sound of a phone ringing in the room next door. It was only a moment later that he remembered that the phone had been cut off. There was a brief whisper of speech, followed by a number of unidentifiable sounds, then silence.
It was broken a few moments later by a distant siren that veered ever nearer and louder until it wound down from a
strident
shriek to a mild burble outside the building. Blue flashing lights added an intermittent brightness to the glimmer in the room, while a furious pounding and ringing sounded out in the stairwell and from the street. After a while it ceased, to be replaced by the sound of clattering boots on the stone steps and then in the room outside.
‘Polizia!’
Zen felt a wave of overwhelming relief that made him realize just how scared he had been. He had heard that voice countless times before, and knew it well. It was the voice of a raw young patrol officer, himself scared even more, and knowing that his only hope of saving his reputation and possibly his life was to sound overwhelmingly masterful.
Zen unlocked and opened the door, and was immediately pinned in the glaring beams from two flashlights aimed right at his face.
‘Good evening,’ he said, holding up his empty hands. ‘I am Dottor Zen.’
The two policemen in the room lowered their torches, creating a more even light.
‘What’s going on?’ barked one.
‘We received an all-points emergency call to assist you,’ said a slightly steadier voice.
‘Someone broke into my apartment.’
‘The door was open when we got here,’ replied the steadier voice immediately.
‘Probably a burglar,’ said the first patrolman.
‘There have been a number of attempts on my life recently,’ Zen replied in a studiously casual tone, as though this sort of thing was all in a day’s work for him.
‘The lights don’t work,’ said the steadier voice. ‘Maybe they cut the wiring.’
‘No, the fuse blew and I haven’t had time to mend it. Now could you just check that whoever it was isn’t still here, and
perhaps
try and find out how he got in?’
One of the two torches started searching the apartment. The other headed out to the stairway.
‘No one,’ reported the first voice, returning to the room.
He and Zen gazed at each other in the gloom hacked apart by his torch beam.
There was a rush of boots on the steps and his partner
reappeared
.
‘The skylight at the very top of the stairs is wide open,’ he announced. ‘He must have been an agile little monkey, though. That window’s a good three metres off the ground.’
‘Well, thank you for your prompt response,’ Zen said
conclusively
. ‘Evidently on this occasion the whole thing was a false alarm. If you’ll just inform headquarters about that, I won’t keep you from your regular duties any longer.’
He saw them to the front door of the apartment, then bent down and examined the door itself. There was no sign that any force had been used to open it. It was only when he straightened up again that he noticed Giuseppe, the janitor of the building. He was clad in pyjamas and a worn plaid dressing gown, and was lurking on the flight of stairs leading up to the landing.
‘Is everything all right,
dottò
?’ he asked.
Zen took out the key to his apartment.
‘You didn’t give this to anyone while I was away, did you?’
Giuseppe’s face assumed an expression of righteous
indignation
.
‘Absolutely not! It was locked up in the safe the whole time along with the duplicate sets.’
Zen nodded.
‘Very well. I just wondered.’
‘If you’d told me you were coming back, I’d have arranged for the electricity and gas to be on,’ Giuseppe added. ‘I’ll do it
tomorrow
, first thing.’
‘Don’t bother. I shan’t be living here any more.’
Giuseppe took a few moments to digest this statement. So did Zen himself.
‘You’re moving?’ Giuseppe queried.
‘I’m leaving. A new work assignment. I shan’t be based in Rome any longer. I’ll contact the owners and tell them to cancel the lease as soon as possible. They should be able to find a new tenant quite quickly. Unless you have someone in mind, of course.’
Giuseppe nodded in a dazed way. Clearly this, coming on top of the break-in and the appearance of the policemen, was just too much to deal with at this hour of the morning. He started to turn away, then paused.
‘Maybe that colleague of yours would like it.’
‘Which colleague?’
‘I don’t recall the name. It was a long time ago, right after that terrible bomb business. He came by to pick up some papers from work you’d left in the apartment. When he handed me back the key, he said what a nice place it was.’
‘You gave him the key?’
‘Of course. He showed me his identification card. It was just like yours,
dottò
. Well, different photo and name, of course, but the real thing. And he said he worked with you, so I let him in. I mean, I knew you were in hospital, so you couldn’t come
yourself
. That was all right, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course. Good night, Giuseppe.’
‘Good night,
dottò
.’
Zen went back inside, closing but not locking the door. What was the point?
‘Don’t look them in the eye, and never turn your back.’
This time the voice was in the air, not in his head. He could feel its vibrations, although he knew there was no one there. Then another voice, this one internal, added, ‘They don’t put the
bottles
in the box, they wrap the box around the bottles.’
He lit the knotted candles on the table and stood there in the gradually waxing light, staring at the chair in which his mother had always sat to watch banal television programmes which her addled mind had transmuted into richer, stranger material. Something was trying to tell him something, but what was it?
For the first time, it occurred to him to look at his watch. It was a little after three in the morning. After a momentary hesitation, he went back into his bedroom and found the shelf on which he kept his Pozzorario railway timetable, the front cover festooned with anachronistic advertisements for various hotels
con tutti i
conforti
a prezzi
modici
. Not for the first time, he wondered if
anyone
ever selected a hotel on the basis of these rather
desperate-sounding
appeals, and if so who. The timetable itself was a year out of date, but Zen knew that the schedules of the night trains
were virtually invariable. After a few minutes’ search, he found an express from Reggio di Calabria to Milan that stopped at the station of Roma Tiburtina just after four o’clock. He repacked his bags, then called for a taxi. The dispatcher said that Taranto 64 would be there in about ten minutes.
Zen spent the interval wandering about the apartment, apart from his mother’s room, which he did not enter, and wondering if there was anything he wanted to keep. Nothing, he concluded, with a surprising shiver of pleasure. He’d hire a company to haul everything away and dispose of it for whatever price they could get. He wasn’t even going to think about it. It could all go.