Authors: Michael Dibdin
Zen dragged himself away from Stephanie’s side and went to look. It was true. A dark-blue Carabinieri launch was closing rapidly with the ferry, its searchlight scorching the gentle wavelets between them. A few moments later, it was alongside. A rope ladder was thrown down, and a man swarmed up it from the launch.
Zen felt himself sobering up rapidly. He knew who had come aboard, and why he was there. Reluctantly he got Baccio Sinico’s revolver out of his pocket and hurled it into the sea. Then he returned to Stephanie. She said something which, like all the things she had said, he did not understand. He shook his head and clutched her hand tightly. She looked alarmed. He forced a smile.
Then he remembered the other piece of incriminating evidence. He searched in his pockets until he found the object he had stolen from the museum. It was a silver cross, with forked ends and intricate engraving on the surface. Zen pressed it into the palm of the hand he had been holding.
‘For you,’ he said.
Stephanie looked down at the cross, turning it this way and that so that it gleamed gently in the moonlight. Then her face suddenly crumpled, she turned away and burst into tears. Panicked, Zen looked around for the Italian-speaking man.
‘What did I do wrong?’ he demanded. ‘I didn’t mean to insult her! Christ, can’t I get anything right?’
The Glaswegian came over and spoke rapidly to Stephanie, then turned her back to face Zen. The girl was still weeping and making little sniffing noises as she spoke.
‘It’s not what you think,’ Andy told Zen.
The girl started to talk, seemingly not to the two men but to the silver cross cradled in the palm of her hand.
‘She says it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen,’ Andy translated. ‘She says she didn’t know that such beauty existed in the world. She says she feels ashamed because she doesn’t deserve to have it.’
At the end of the deck, adjoining the superstructure, a man appeared.
‘Tell her that no one deserves such beauty,’ Zen said quickly. ‘Tell her that it is indeed very precious, but no more than she is. Tell her to care for it, and for herself.’
He stood up as the ROS agent appeared in front of him.
‘Aurelio Zen,’ he said. ‘You evaded our plan of preventative detention and are therefore officially considered to be at risk. I am are here to accompany you back to Catania.’
Zen gestured defeatedly.
‘And if I say no?’
Roberto Lessi tossed his head contemptuously.
‘Let’s go. The boat’s waiting.’
And there indeed was the Carabinieri launch, lying about ten metres off to port, wallowing slightly in the softly bloated seas.
‘Excuse me,’ said Andy, in Italian. ‘He’s a friend of ours.’
Lessi gave him a hard glance.
‘So?’ he replied.
The Glaswegian smiled.
‘So, if you want to take him, you’re going to have to take all of us. And I’m not sure that we’d fit on that wee boat of yours. That’s always supposing that you were able to get us on board in the first place, which personally speaking I wouldn’t be inclined to place a bet on.’
The ROS agent turned furiously to Zen.
‘Tell this little prick to fuck off before I break his balls!’ he spat out.
‘What did he say?’ asked Andy ‘I can’t understand when they speak so quick.’
Zen racked his brains. What was the name of that other English team? Leaver, Leever … And what was the phrase that taxi driver in Rome, the vociferous Lazio supporter, had used?
‘He said that Arsenal are a clan of degenerate wankers and marginal know-nothings,’ Zen confided to Andy. ‘According to him, the only half-decent English team is Liverpool, and compared to Lazio they suck too.’
The Glaswegian spoke loudly and rapidly to his red-shirted companions, who dropped whatever they were doing and clustered tightly around the ROS man. The latter pulled out and displayed a police identity card embedded in his wallet.
‘I am a police!’
he declared in cracked English.
‘Is that right?’ Andy replied, plucking the wallet from the Carabiniere’s hand and tossing it overboard. ‘Awful hard job, they say’
The Carabiniere looked around at the towering Arsenal supporters with a furious but cornered expression.
‘You are all under arrest!’ he screamed. ‘Outrage to a public official! Surrender your papers immediately! You are all…’
At which point a whisky bottle slammed into his skull.
‘Liverpool, my arse,’ said Norman.
Stephanie giggled.
When thieves fall out read a sub-headline in the copy of the newspaper
La Sicilia
which Zen bought the next morning in Valletta. ‘A brutal strangulation concludes a successful break-in to the Civic Museum of Catania. The presumed killer makes a daring escape by leaping from a window and remains at large. A twelfth-century Norman crucifix “of inestimable value” is missing.’
Zen smiled sourly. So that’s how they had decided to pitch the story. But why was there no mention of Alfredo Ferraro, the ROS agent whom he had shot? And why hadn’t he been named as the ‘presumed killer’? He was sure that Roberto Lessi, the other ROS man, had identified him in that final moment before he leapt from the window, but there was no mention of this in the article. This was both good news and bad. Good, because it meant that they were not going to be coming after him openly, with arrest warrants and extradition orders. Bad, because it meant that he didn’t have the slightest idea what they
were
going to do.
The ferry had docked in Valletta at just after six o’clock that morning, following a night which from Zen’s point of view had been extremely eventful. Following the intervention of the English football supporters, the ROS agent had been placed in one of the lifeboats hanging from cradles along both sides of the main deck. At Zen’s suggestion, Norman had moved his beer supply to a nearby bench, and when the supposed Liverpool supporter finally regained consciousness, it had been made clear to him that the alternative to lying low and keeping quiet was another dose of whisky
‘And, frankly, I’m not at all sure that whisky should really be your drink of choice, Roberto,’ Norman had added, brandishing the bottle as if unaware that it was in his hand at the time. ‘To be perfectly honest, I don’t think you can handle it. I’m not sure you’ve got the bottle to deal with the hard stuff. Seems to go straight to your head. Personally speaking — and this is just my opinion, with which you may well disagree, as is your right — but
personally
, for what it’s worth, I think you should stick to beer.’ With which he split open another can of Nastro Azzurro and handed it to the still only partially conscious ROS agent with a significant grin.
Meanwhile the Carabinieri launch had come alongside, and two of its crew, armed with machine-guns, were searching the ferry for their missing colleague. Aurelio Zen was in a feigned clinch with Stephanie at the time, having explained the realities of the situation through the Italian-speaking Glaswegian. Stephanie clearly didn’t believe a single word of this rigmarole, assuming that this Italian was just trying to get into her pants. But she was prepared to play along, up to a point, and so when the Carabinieri officers passed through on their sweep of the boat, all they saw was a horde of drunken English football hooligans, two of whom were necking.
Had they persisted, the truth would no doubt have emerged in time, but by then dawn was breaking and Malta was in sight. A coastguard cutter closed in on the ferry and its escort, and over a very powerful loudspeaker demanded to know just what the Italian police thought they were doing, trespassing in Maltese waters. At this point the Carabinieri acknowledged defeat, withdrew to their launch and sped off northwards. Unfortunately Norman had also passed out, exhausted by the stresses and strains of the night’s adventures, and when Zen reluctantly disentangled himself from Stephanie’s embraces and went to inspect the lifeboat where the ROS agent had been stowed away, he found it empty.
Nor did Lessi put in an appearance when the passengers disembarked in the imposing harbour at Valletta, but this was hardly surprising. He could not arrest Zen on foreign soil, and since his identification papers were now at the bottom of the Mediterranean, he was not in a position to enlist the help of the Maltese authorities either, even if they had been disposed to be helpful.
On the quayside, Zen said goodbye to his seriously hung-over British friends and kissed Stephanie, who surprised him by putting her tongue in his mouth and then starting to weep again. He then changed some money and, after a discussion in very fractured Italian with a taxi driver, had himself driven to a small hotel at the top of the old town.
For a moment he thought he had hired a suicidal maniac, since the driver proceeded to turn out of the port area and start driving on the
left-hand
side of the road. But if he was mad, everyone else seemed to share his madness, and the short journey passed uneventfully. At the hotel, Zen took the one remaining room, a small single at the rear of the premises, overlooking what had once been a small internal courtyard and was now a deep, dank shaft filled with air-conditioning ducts, rubbish and cooking smells.
There had been no obvious sign that his taxi had been followed, but he knew that it wouldn’t take them long to find him. His Italian identity card had been enough to get him through passport control, but he had to fill out an entry card which would now be on file. He was officially registered as having entered the country, and it was far too small a country to hide in, particularly for someone with no friends and who didn’t speak the language.
His best hope, he reckoned, lay in that entry card. Persons leaving Malta legally would have to complete a similar exit card, which would also be filed. If a search for ‘Zen, Aurelio’ turned up no such card, it would naturally be assumed that he was still in the country. The resulting confusion might just be enough to buy him the time he needed. But first he had to find a way to leave the country illegally. With a heavy heart, he lifted the phone and dialled a number in Rome.
There was no answer, so he left a message.
‘Gilberto, it’s Aurelio. I’m in it up to here, and I don’t even know who with, but they don’t mess about. I can’t say any more on the phone, and I can’t give you my number, but I need help desperately, and after what happened in Naples you owe me, you son of a bitch. I’ll call again every thirty minutes until I get you. Don’t let me down, Gilberto, and none of your stupid jokes. This is deadly serious. And I mean that literally’
He took his shoes off and lay down on the bed, but with his head and shoulders propped against the wall. After a sleepless night on the ferry, exhaustion was starting to overcome the adrenalin which had kept him going thus far, but he could not afford to sleep until his arrangements were made. He turned on the television and watched a documentary about tree frogs until the thirty minutes had elapsed.
There was still no answer from Gilberto’s home phone. Since his recent legal problems, the Sardinian no longer had an office number, and Zen was wary of calling him on his cellphone, knowing how easily such calls can be intercepted. In the end he tried anyway, only to discover that Gilberto’s
telefonino
was either switched off or out of range. Back on TV, the tree frogs were mating.
It was another two hours before Gilberto finally responded, and he when he did he initially sounded distinctly flippant.
‘I thought you weren’t speaking to me, Aurelio.’
‘I’m speaking to you now.’
‘So what’s the story this time?’
‘I don’t trust stories any more. I’m too old.’
‘It’s no fun growing old. But as someone said, the only alternative is dying young.’
‘Can we stop pissing around, Gilberto? I’m in serious trouble.’
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘I can’t tell you over the phone. We must do this on a strict need-to-know basis.’
‘All right, what do I need to know?’
‘First, I’m in Malta.’
‘Never been there. Are those Knights still around? I seem to remember that you had trouble with them some years back.’
‘Will you please shut the fuck up and listen, Gilberto?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Second, I need to leave as soon as possible, ideally this evening.’
‘I’m not a travel agent.’
‘Yes, you are, because the third thing is that I need to travel clandestinely. No tickets, no passport control.’
Gilberto whistled.
‘That’s a tall order, Aurelio. What did you have in mind?’
‘Preferably a light plane owned and flown by someone with a shady reputation. Take-off and landing at private airstrips.’
‘I don’t know anyone like that.’
‘But you have friends, and they have friends. Somewhere in that pyramid-selling scam you call your social life, there may be someone who knows the contact I need. Your job is to locate him.’
‘How can you know that such a contact even exists?’
‘Because Malta is, among other things, a notorious staging-post for a whole range of illegal import-export operations between North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Arms, drugs, you name it. And those people don’t fly Alitalia.’
‘I don’t blame them.’
‘This is not a joking matter, Gilberto!’
‘All right, all right, calm down.’
A distant sigh.
‘I’ll see what I can do, but it’s going to take some time.’
‘Time is of the essence. How long?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll drop everything else and get to work right away. Call me on my
telefonino
at noon and then every hour on the hour after that.’
‘We can’t discuss this stuff over a cellular link.’
‘Oh, I heard a great story the other day! There’s this guy on a train, making life hell for everyone around with an endless series of calls on his cellphone, right?’
‘Gilberto!’
‘Then this woman across from him has a seizure of some kind, and all the other passengers say, “Please, we need to call an ambulance at the next station, lend us your phone.” Only he won’t, see? Absolutely refuses to let anyone else use his cellphone. And …’