Authors: Michael Dibdin
‘As I said, all your belongings will be …’
‘This is not one of my belongings, strictly speaking. It’s something which …’
He broke off, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
‘Something which belonged to my mother, Giuseppina.’
Baccio Sinico nodded respectfully.
‘It makes no difference. Everything that’s there except the furniture will be delivered to you at…’
‘That’s the problem. You see, this is a piece of furniture. Well, actually it’s a picture which I brought from our house in Rome after she …’
‘Just tell us where it is, and we’ll bring it.’
Zen sighed heavily.
‘That’s what’s embarrassing, you see. I don’t remember. I just grabbed it at random, as something to remember her by, but I can’t recall where I put it or even what the subject of the picture is. All I know is that I’ll recognize it the moment I see it.’
He gripped Sinico’s arm.
‘Look, even the Mafia are not going to try again so soon after the failure of this attempt. Let’s go to my place right now, just the two of us. I’ll pick up the picture and then we’ll drive straight to the barracks.’
Baccio Sinico shook his head.
‘I’m sorry,
dottore
, I don’t have the authorization to …’
‘And then there are the papers,’ said Zen.
Sinico looked at him sharply.
‘Papers?’
‘Legal documents.’
Sinico was now staring at him with a mute intensity.
‘Relating to my mother’s will,’ Zen added. ‘I hid them away for safety. It would be impossible for anyone else to find them. You can imagine how important they are.’
‘The papers,’ Sinico repeated.
‘Yes. Those legal documents. If they fell into the wrong hands…’
Baccio Sinico nodded almost maniacally.
‘Of course, of course. The wrong hands.’
‘We wouldn’t want that.’
‘No, no! Certainly not.’
He sighed.
‘Very well. It’s highly irregular, but…’
They took off at high speed for the short drive to Zen’s home, emergency lights flashing and sirens wailing. If they had wanted to draw the Mafia’s attention to the fact that their target was returning home, thought Zen, they could hardly have done a better job. The car drew up in front of the building, providing a further visual clue by parking the way the police always park: so as to create the maximum inconvenience for everyone else. While one of the two ROS agents secured the front door, Zen and Sinico walked upstairs with the second, who then stood guard at the door to Zen’s apartment while the two men went inside.
Zen looked around quickly. The Toshiba laptop had of course gone. Maybe it really had been a bomb, as they claimed. He would never know. More to the point, the papers which Corinna Nunziatella had ‘posted’ to herself, using Carla as a cut-out, and which Zen had left on the sofa, had also disappeared.
‘Through here,’ he told Sinico, leading the way towards the bedroom. As Sinico crossed the threshold, Zen smashed the door into his face. The younger officer reeled back, clutching his forehead and staring wildly at Zen, who grabbed him by the arm and hair and hurled him forward into the bedroom, tripping him up as he passed so that he fell sprawling on the gleaming aggregate floor.
After a moment, Sinico got to his knees and then his feet, pulling a revolver from a holster at the back of trousers, but he was too shocked and too slow. Zen yanked him forwards by the arm holding the gun, chopped the weapon free with a blow to the wrist, then kneed Sinico in the chest as he went down for the second time. He picked up the revolver and checked it quickly, keeping an eye all the while on the figure splayed out on the floor, panting hard as though he were about to burst into tears.
‘I’m sorry, Baccio,’ Zen said quietly ‘I had no choice.’
Sinico looked up at him.
‘You’re mad!’ he croaked.
‘That’s conceivable, but I can’t afford to take the risk of finding out that I’m not. Don’t worry, I won’t bother you again, as long as you don’t bother me. Remember that “compassionate leave” you told me about? I’ve decided to take your advice.’
Sinico crawled up into a sitting position.
‘They’ll kill you,
dottore!
They’ve tried once already, and they won’t give up. You need us! You need our help, our protection!’
Zen put the revolver in his coat pocket and stared bleakly down at the younger man.
‘Who are
they
, Baccio? Whose friends are
they?’
Sinico shook his head despairingly.
‘This is all madness!’ he said. ‘Paranoia run wild!’
Zen inclined his head.
‘As I said, that’s conceivable. It’s also conceivable that you’re just trying to keep me talking until one of those ROS thugs comes to see why we’re taking so long.’
He walked over to the doorway.
I’m leaving now,’ he told Sinico. ‘If you try to stop me, I’ll shoot you.’
Once in the living room, he crossed rapidly to the front door and opened it. The ROS agent named Lessi looked at him in surprise.
‘We’ve found something!’ Zen said in an urgent undertone. ‘Baccio thinks it might be another bomb. He wants you to take a look.’
Lessi nodded and ran inside. Zen closed the door and locked it with the complicated double-sided key, formed like a gondola’s prow, turning it four times to insert the metal security bolts into the retaining block. Without a key, it could not be opened from the inside.
He ran quickly downstairs and slunk into the shadows at the rear of the entrance hall. About twenty seconds later, the front door flew open and the other ROS man ran in, a pistol in his hand, talking urgently on his cellphone.
‘He locked the door? Don’t worry, I’ll be right there!’
Zen listened to the man’s footsteps receding above, then walked to the door and out into the night.
A few minutes after eight o’clock sounded from the massive church of San Nicolò in Piazza Dante, Zen arrived at the address to which he had been directed, in a side-street off Via Gesuiti. He was under no illusion about the value of the assurances which the man known as Spada had given him as to his safety, but neither did he care very deeply one way or the other. If his mother had still been alive, it would have been different, as it would if he’d ever had children. As it was, he discovered that it didn’t really matter what happened, although this did not prevent him from carefully checking the revolver he had taken from Baccio Sinico while he waited inside the portico of San Nicolò for eight o’clock to arrive.
The building assigned for his appointment with ‘Signor Spada’ was a handsome two-storey baroque
palazzo
with widely spaced windows, ornate cornices and shallow balconies protected by metal railings. The main entrance seemed to be on Via Gesuiti itself, but the address to which Zen had been directed was a door about half-way along the left-hand side. Rather to Zen’s surprise, it was open. He knocked tactfully but without result, then stepped inside. The light from the lamp strung on a wire at first-floor level across the street revealed a set of stone steps leading down to another door about a metre lower down.
Leaving the street door open, Zen made his way down. The lower door was not locked. With a very faint creak, it opened into an unlit but acoustically larger space beyond. Zen stood still, sniffing the musty air and trying to decipher a faint sound which he thought at first might be the echoes of the creaking door, amplified by the resonant chamber beyond. The interior seemed at first completely dark, but as Zen’s eyes began to adjust he became aware of a tepid luminescence which seemed to emanate from…
From whatever they were, those rows and ranks of massive structures, identical in shape and height, which ran the length and breadth of the room. Except for their size, they might almost have been old-fashioned school desks, with sloping tops which caught what little light there was and reflected it. Only they didn’t reflect it, he soon realized, they radiated it. By now, his night vision was good enough for him to make out some other features of the place, such as two hulking human forms each about three metres tall standing against the wall at the far end of the room. A warehouse of glowing furniture managed by giants? Well, he had no problem with that. That was just fine! He could deal with it. Now what?
The answer was a scream. Well, no, not quite. A keening wail, more like. A lengthy, throaty squawk. It took Zen a long and very uncomfortable moment to match it tentatively in his auditory database with one of those scarily humanoid sounds that cats emit when involved in sexual or territorial disputes. In which case the eerie ululation he had heard earlier had presumably not been the echoes of the door squeaking, but the two mogs tuning up. He wondered idly how large the pets were around here. About the size of ocelots, to judge by the figures at the end of the room and the school desks which filled it.
Only they weren’t desks, he realized. His vision was slowly filling in all the time, like a computer downloading a complex graphic screen. He could now make out that the giants lounging against the end wall were in fact statues mounted on plinths. Between them, a broad staircase led up into gloom. On the side walls, the dark patches which he had taken to be windows revealed themselves to be a series of oil paintings. At which point the files of desks shamefacedly removed their carnival masks and were transformed into rows of display cabinets lit internally by a low-wattage bulb. He was in a museum.
A brief investigation confirmed this hypothesis. Beneath a thick layer of glass, each cabinet contained a selection of coins, jewellery, amulets and similar objects of antiquity, each identified by a label with a number and a description such as ‘Greek, late 2nd century BC(?)’. It was one of those provincial museums which are open to the public for a few inconvenient hours on various randomly chosen days every month, always assuming that Spada’s relative didn’t have something more important to do.
So now only the noises remained unexplained. They had diminished in volume, but were still there, troubling and exciting the silence like fingernails raked lightly across skin. His sight satisfied, Zen tuned in to his hearing. The sounds seemed to be coming from the end of the room, where the staircase led up, presumably to the next floor of the building. He walked cautiously down the aisle between the lit display cases and started up the steps at the far end.
They were handsome steps, broad and shallow and as solid as the rock from which they had been carved, flanked to either side by elaborate stone balustrades. It occurred to Zen that this must have been the original ground floor of the
palazzo
, before subsequent infill or volcanic activity had raised the street level. After a considerable fetch, the stairs reached a landing and doubled back the way they had come, giving access to a room of the same dimensions and much the same appearance as the one below, but with a much higher ceiling. This would have been the reception quarters of the original design, the
piano nobile
. All this was quite clear, because the lights were on.
A light, rather: a clear steady beam illuminating what looked at first sight like a sexual act involving two men. One was standing, his back to the stairs where Zen stood watching. From time to time his body jerked spasmodically, each spasm accompanied by a satisfied though effortful grunt. The other man, who was on his knees before the other, was meanwhile emitting a continuous series of weak mewling sounds which were, Zen now realized, the source of the noises he had heard earlier. It took him another moment or two to understand that the distended and discoloured features of the kneeling man were those of the man known as Spada, and that he was not engaged in fellatio but being strangled.
The light wavered to one side, revealing itself as the beam of a powerful torch concealed behind the wall to Zen’s right.
‘Come on, Alfredo!’ said a bored voice. ‘It’s done, for Christ’s sake. Let’s go.’
Zen pulled out Sinico’s revolver and loosed off a shot towards the ceiling.
‘Police!’ he yelled as the appalling reverberations died away. ‘Drop your weapons and lie down on the floor with your hands above your heads.’
The strangler released his victim and turned slowly to Zen with an imposing yet slightly incredulous look. A moment later a pistol appeared in his hand.
Zen would undoubtedly have died then and there if the late Signor Spada had not intervened, slumping forward into the back of the gunman’s knees and throwing him off balance. At such close range, even a marksman as out of practice as Zen could not miss. He fired once, hitting his opponent in the upper chest. The victim, as his status now was, absorbed the shot with an expression which mingled astonishment and resignation, as if he had always known that it would end like this but — stupidly, as he now realized — hadn’t expected it just yet. Then the light went out.
Dependent now upon his hearing alone, Zen found that sense perking up just as his sight had earlier. Most of the time, we were functionally deaf, he realized. What we thought of as silence was a constant substratum of noises mentally censored as being insignificant. He recalled a camping holiday up in the Dolomites, years ago, with a friend from university. There, by night, it had been utterly silent, and yet that silence had registered not as an absence but as a massive and disturbing presence. Now that his life was at stake and every sound significant, he found himself bombarded by a barrage of aural data, some potentially identifiable — traffic, televisions, voices in the street — but all previously classified as irrelevant and therefore inaudible. Within the room in front of him, there was that intimidating silence he had experienced in the Alps all those years ago.
Then, like some unidentified animal stumbling into that remembered campsite, came three distinct sounds: a click, a creak, and a loud metallic snap. They were related both by position and by distance, but above all by the concurrent appearance of a brilliant glow within the room. Unnerved, Zen fired blind. Immediately two other sounds joined the former intruders: a tinkle of glass and a raucous clanging with a whooping siren to back it up. He ran up the remaining steps, just in time to see a young man wearing a baseball cap sitting on the exterior ledge of one of the windows, which he had evidently opened along with its corresponding shutter. He was lit from behind by the streetlamp strung on a wire almost level with the window. His face was in shadow, but he turned briefly to Zen and seemed to pause for a moment, as if in recognition. Then he abruptly disappeared.