Authors: Michael Dibdin
A woman wearing a dowdy coat and old-fashioned headscarf had left a package for him with the guard outside the Questura. According to the guard, she had claimed that it was a present for Carla Arduini, daughter of Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen. He was to pick it up and deliver it to the intended recipient on her birthday, the coming Saturday. The notional present was clad in the wrapping paper of a
pasticceria
in Via Etnea, but proved to contain what looked like another package, as though in some game of pass-the-parcel. The contents were bulky, consistent, quite heavy, slightly flexible, and had resisted various forms of extreme impact with no apparent effect.
It had crossed his mind, of course, that it might be a bomb. The same thought had crossed the mind of the officer on guard at the Questura, so he had taken it inside and run it through the X-ray machine used to monitor all incoming bags and packages. Nothing had shown up on the screen — no wiring, no batteries — but you could never tell these days. He’d read somewhere that they’d invented some sort of chemical trigger which didn’t show up on the machines.
If it
was
a bomb, though, the intended target would almost certainly be the person who opened the package, in this case Carla. Which raised another question. Whoever the mystery donor might be, she had known two things which, as far as Zen knew, no one in Catania was aware of. The first was that, despite her surname, Carla Arduini was supposedly Zen’s daughter. The second was that her birthday fell on Saturday.
He tossed back his coffee, lit a cigarette and wandered back into the living room. Rather to his surprise, the package was still where he had thrown it. He looked at it for some time, then grabbed it suddenly and ripped off the wrapping paper. Inside was a large manilla envelope, plain except for a message written in flowing script with a medium blue felt-tip pen.
This is the item I told you about
, Carla, DO NOT OPEN IT. Wrap it up in some dirty underclothes or something and hide it away. I’ll pick it up in a few days, once things settle down. I apologize for dragging you into this, but there is no one else I can turn to. P.S. Your real birthday present will be a lot more interesting!
Zen read this through several times, then put it down on the table and walked about the room, picked it up and read it again. Carla had been specifically instructed not to open the package. Therefore it was something which, if opened, might either threaten her in some way, or compromise the writer of the note, whoever that might be.
After the bomb idea, Zen’s next quick-fix solution was drugs. According to Baccio Sinico, Catania was now what Marseilles had once been, the major entry point into Europe for hard drugs coming from the eastern Mediterranean or North Africa. The package was about the right size, weight and feel to be a vacuum-packed slab of refined cocaine or heroin.
But such speculations were pointless. What was certain was that possession of the envelope, whatever its contents, constituted a potential hazard for the person concerned. Whoever had left it to be delivered to Carla obviously felt that in her case this risk was so small as to be negligible, but Zen could not feel so sanguine. Nor could he open the packet and determine for himself what it contained. In that event, the interested parties would naturally assume that it was Carla who had deliberately flouted the DO NOT OPEN warning, and would take the appropriate measures.
So in a sense the thing
was
a bomb, albeit one with a delayed-action fuse of indeterminate length. And the only way that Zen could protect Carla against possible danger was to prevent her ever taking delivery of the package, while ensuring that she would be able to produce it again, untouched and unharmed, at a future date. Which meant that he was going to have to hide it himself. Which meant, he decided after another cigarette and several minutes’ reflection, that he needed to visit the fish market.
He had been there before, often stopping by on his way to meet Carla, spellbound by the everyday miracle which had taken place on this spot for almost three thousand years: the decapitated swordfish and tuna being hacked into slabs with curved blades like machetes, the tubs full of squirming squid and octopus, the wooden trays of anchovies and sardines, their silvery skin glistening with unexpected glints of evanescent colours which had no name. And everywhere the stench of flesh and death, the clamour of voices in a timbre at once raucous and shrill, and the blood, above all; spattered on the stall-keepers’ aprons, streaked across their arms and knives, trickling away in the gutter.
It was now almost three o’clock, and the pulsing drama in the streets around the market had disappeared like the sea at low tide, leaving a wrack of stalls in the process of demolition, various unidentifiable scraps being raided by feral cats and the more daring seagulls, and remnants of unsold fish turning dull and matt in their communal coffins with the pathetic air of those who have died in vain. Zen approached one of the traders, a bulky, morose man surveying his remaining stock of sardines.
‘How much for those?’
The man glanced at him in astonishment, as though suspecting a practical joke, then brightened up considerably. A price was named, halved, halved again, and finally concluded. Money changed hands and Zen strode away with the best part of a kilo of extremely smelly fish.
Back at his apartment, he put his purchase in the sink, then wrapped the manilla envelope in several layers of plastic film, securing each with adhesive tape. When he was satisfied with this sheath, he opened the plastic bag provided by the fishmonger and slipped the package inside. The last stage was the most tricky, working the slithery mass of sardines around inside the bag until they concealed the inserted envelope. Once he had achieved this, Zen taped the bag tightly shut and wedged it into the freezing compartment of his refrigerator.
He completed his task, and sat down on the sofa with a sense of regret. What now? It was the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question which had haunted his days and nights for some time. The ‘now’ was both specific and general; at once the next hour which had somehow to be filled, and the rest of a life which seemed increasingly predictable and pointless, in a vaguely cosy way. His career had evidently hit a plateau where he would be stuck until he retired. The promotion to Questore which he had been promised on being told of this Sicily assignment had failed to materialize, and now Zen was pretty sure that it never would. He had made too many enemies for that.
To be honest, he couldn’t really complain. The fact was that he just didn’t care any more. Career, love, family, friendships — he’d tried his best in each field, but the results had not been encouraging. Once he’d been callow and enthusiastic, now he was tired and cynical. Once he’d been ignorant, now he was knowing. Whatever the middle term of these bleak declensions might be, it appeared to have passed him by.
So, what now? The answer was clear enough: another five or ten years plugging away at a job he no longer believed in and messing about with tentative relationships which were doomed from the start, while the world around him gradually changed into an unrecognizable although all too familiar place. Age makes us all exiles in our own country, he thought.
He looked up, startled, as an electronic beeping filled the room. It was his mobile phone, which he never took with him. He located it, on a cupboard in the kitchen, and pressed the green button.
‘Aurelio?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s Gilberto.’
Silence.
‘Gilberto Nieddu. Listen, the thing is …’
Zen clicked the phone shut. He had had no contact with his former Sardinian friend since the latter had betrayed him — unforgivably, in Zen’s view — by first stealing and then selling, at a vast profit, a video tape which was evidence in a case Zen had been investigating. One man had died as a result and another could have joined him, in which case Zen’s career prospects might easily have turned out to be even less inspiring than they were at present.
The phone rang again.
‘Don’t hang up on me, Aurelio!’ Gilberto’s voice said. ‘This is important, really important. It’s about…’
‘I don’t give a fuck what it’s about, Gilberto. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a treacherous scumbag and I never want to speak to you again, still less see you.’
He snapped the phone shut again, like a clam closing its shell, then stalked down the room and opened the doors on to the balcony overhanging the courtyard. At once he was subject to both an overwhelming tide of hot air, and a deafening outburst of hilarity which was the trademark of Signora Giordano, his herb-growing neighbour. She was a retired lady of some consequence and independent means, but socially nervous. Normally there was never a sound from her apartment, but on the few occasions when she entertained a harsh, convulsive laugh would burst forth at regular intervals, on average once every ten seconds. No sounds of conversation or of others’ merriment were audible, just this dreadful, forced cackle like a hack actor trying to signal a punchline to an unresponsive audience.
Behind him, the
telefonino
had started to beep again, a distant exclamation point amid the ambient noises of the neighbourhood and Signora Giordano’s outbursts. Zen lit a cigarette and waited for it to stop. But it didn’t stop. Why didn’t Gilberto get the message? What did he have to do, install one of those devices to block nuisance calls? He smoked quietly for a minute by the clock on the wall. The phone continued to ring. ‘It’s no use hiding,’ it seemed to say. ‘We know you’re there, and we’ve got plenty of time.’
After the second hand on the clock had described another complete circle, Zen threw his cigarette into the courtyard below, stalked over to the sofa and picked up the phone.
‘Well?’ he bellowed.
‘Excuse me …’
It was a frail, elderly woman’s voice, vaguely familiar to him.
‘Yes?’
‘This is Maria Grazia,’ the voice said after a pause.
Zen’s expression relaxed from aggression to a bored tolerance lightly mixed with perplexity. The housekeeper at his apartment in Rome had never phoned him before about anything.
‘Signor Nieddu asked me to call.’
‘Well, you can tell Signor Nieddu to …’
‘It’s about your mother, you see.’
Zen broke off, frowning.
‘My mother?’
‘Yes. You see …’
‘Hello? Maria Grazia?’
‘Yes. You see, the thing is …’
‘What’s going on? What’s all this about?’
A silence.
‘It’s about your mother.’
‘Thank you very much, Maria Grazia,’ Zen replied sarcastically, ‘I think I’ve just about grasped that. So let’s move on to the next point.
What
about my mother?’
Another silence, longer this time.
‘How soon can you get here?’
‘Get where?’
‘To Rome, of course!’
Zen stiffened. He was not used to being interrogated like this by the
donna di servizio
.
‘Look, Maria Grazia, please stop this nonsense and just tell me why you’re calling.’
Another silence, ending in a sniff and what sounded like weeping.
‘Excuse me. I would never have done it, only … Only it’s your mother, you see.’
‘What about my mother? Put her on the line if she wants to talk to me!’
This time the silence went on so long that they might almost have been cut off. When the answer to his question finally came, it was in a neutered tone of voice such as might issue from a public address system playing some pre-recorded emergency message.
‘She’s dying, Aurelio.’
Nineteen minutes past seven, Corinna Nunziatella had said. ‘Be in the entrance hall of your building by seven fifteen, but don’t open the door.’ Carla smiled to herself as she completed her preparations for the evening, checking her hair in the mirror and removing a stray strand from her blouse. How ridiculous all this secret-service stuff seemed! But also romantic, in a way, like being in a movie.
The entrance hall to the apartment building where she lived was a dreary space, replicated
ad infinitum
by the mirrored walls and dimly lit by five circular lamps of pebbled glass dangling on their cords from the meaninglessly high ceiling. Mafia chic, circa 1965, in short. Carla waited just inside the front door, eyeing the bank of mailboxes, in each of which the same round of junk advertising pamphlets lingered like a bad smell. When the door opened, she started forward, only to encounter the stout, overdressed form of Angelo La Rocca, a retired and chronically deaf lawyer who lived in solitary splendour in his illegal apartment on the roof, up a flight of stairs from the end of the elevator on the sixth floor, and exercised his rights over any unfortunate he happened to meet in the public areas in his unchallenged capacity as the building’s Official Bore.
‘Ah, Signorina Arduini!’ he cried, spying his prey. ‘How lovely you look this evening! A veritable symphony of shapes and shades, as fashionable as it is delectable. You are going out I perceive. And who’s the lucky young man? Forgive my impertinence, my dear. An old man’s privilege, just as you young women now enjoy the privilege of going out unescorted whenever you please, wherever you please, with whoever you please. I can still remember the time when a woman had to stay at home …’
‘Listening to old farts like you,’ muttered Carla.
The
avvocato
leaned forward, pleased to have provoked a response.
‘What, my dear?’
A horn sounded outside.
‘My taxi’s here,’ said Carla loudly, opening the door.
In fact, it wasn’t a taxi but a blue Fiat saloon. None the less, Carla had three reasons for thinking that this was the car which Corinna Nunziatella had sent for her. The first was that it was now exactly seven nineteen, and the second that the driver had parked right outside the building, blocking the traffic, and didn’t seem at all bothered by this. The third and decisive factor was that the tough-looking young man who had been sitting in the front passenger seat was already walking towards her, scanning the street to both sides, his right hand grasping something bulky concealed inside his jacket.