Michael Dibdin - Blood rain

‘That’s it.’

Sinico nodded in the same lugubriously significant manner.

‘So you arrive here, fresh off the train, and in under a week you’ve found a gracious and spacious apartment right in the city centre, a few minutes’ walk from your work, at a price which normally wouldn’t get you a two-bedroom hutch in a crumbling tower block out in some suburban slum like Cibali or Nesima. How do you think you managed that?’

Zen shook his head in a perturbed way.

‘I didn’t think about it. I don’t know the price of property down here. I just assumed…’

‘You assumed that the locals were being warm and caring, just like the Ministry,’ Sinico replied sarcastically. ‘Well, I hate to break it to you, dottore, but neither assumption is true. Your employers are only interested in your state of mind insofar as it might lead to actions which jeopardize the DIA operations currently under way They want you out of harm’s way, but it isn’t your harm that they’re worried about.’

‘They’re putting me in quarantine?’ asked Zen.

‘Think of it as compulsory compassionate leave.’

Zen dropped his cigarette on the marble floor and stepped on it.

‘Which is why you had to sneak away to talk to me.’

Sinico nodded.

‘As for the man who calls himself Spada, he is well known to us. He functions as a cut-out and message drop between various clans, and also between them and the authorities.’

‘Why don’t they just pick up the phone and dial?’

‘For all sorts of reasons. The most important, perhaps, is deniability.’

‘As in “you never came here, we never met, and I never said this”?’

A nod.

‘Fine, so this Spada, whose name isn’t Spada, makes a living by passing on messages in a way that is also a message in itself. Am I right?’

‘Bravo,’ said Sinico with a curt nod. ‘You’re starting to understand.’

‘All I understand is that I don’t understand a damn thing.’

‘You’d be surprised how many people don’t even understand that, dottore.’

‘I still don’t see what any of this has to do with my apartment.’

‘Your apartment was a message.’

‘Saying what?’

Sinico laughed.

‘Have you ever sent flowers to a woman you wanted, dottore?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘The offer of that apartment was a classic Mafia message. There were no overt strings attached, any more than you would enclose a card with those flowers saying, “Here are some roses, now let’s fuck.” These people are a lot more subtle than you seem to realize. From their point of view, all that matters is that they made an approach and that you responded. You’re in contact, in communication. And if they need you for something, they know where to reach you. It’s their apartment, after all.’

‘But why would they bother to go to all that trouble for me?’ Zen asked ingenuously. ‘I’ve got nothing to do with the DIA. I’m just a liaison officer, after all.’

Baccio Sinico smiled at him in a peculiar way.

‘Perhaps they don’t believe that that’s all you are.’

Zen opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.

‘In which case, we both got it wrong,’ he said at last. ‘They thought I was more important than I am, and I didn’t understand any of this business about the apartment until you explained it to me. So in that sense the message failed.’

‘Count your blessings, dottore,’ said Sinico drily. ‘At least you’re still alive.’

Zen frowned at him.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Around here, when messages get confused or misunderstood, that can be a… What’s that phrase you see on computers? A “fatal error”.’

He was regarding Zen keenly.

‘I don’t know anything about computers,’ Zen said with a shrug.

Baccio Sinico nodded.

‘That’s probably a good thing. They can get you into all kinds of trouble if you don’t know what you’re doing.’

He patted Zen on the shoulder.

‘Take my advice. Forget all this nonsense and go off for a week or two to unwind. Have you ever been to Malta? It’s a fascinating place, the crossroads of the Mediterranean, any amount of history, and it takes no time at all to get there. You’ve been through hell, dottore. You need closure. Let the healing begin.’

Zen nodded distractedly

‘But what about Carla? I need to know the truth.’

‘Leave that to us,’ Baccio Sinico replied reassuringly. ‘We’ll take care of everything.’

‘Pack the truck with dynamite and park it in the centre of their village. A sixty-second fuse, and a second team to pick up the driver.’

‘No, let’s bomb Limina’s house in the village when he’s there at the weekend. We might be able to hire the Cessna that those upstarts down in Ragusa use to import drugs from Malta. I bet the pilot knows someone over there who could sell us some sort of bomb.’

‘Or a missile launcher. Park on a road above the village and loose off one of those wire-guided numbers.’

‘O, ragazzi, why piss around? In Russia, there are nuclear warheads on the market. The CIA is trying to buy them all up, but I’m sure our Russian friends could find us one. Fuck the village, let’s set it off in the centre of Catania! Wipe the place out, like when Etna erupted!’

Four men sat around the remains of a meal. The remains almost constituted a meal in themselves, for the food had hardly been touched. There was only one window, of frosted glass. Despite the heat, it was tightly closed. What air there was had been dyed a bluish grey by the innumerable cigarettes whose ash covered the floor. It must have been almost a hundred degrees in the room, but no one had broken sweat.

The men were all in their fifties, wearing open-neck shirts and heavy trousers. They were squat but hefty, with faces that were dense, compact and opaque. The one who had just spoken was notable above all for his hands, for which the rest of him seemed to function solely as a life-support system. They swooped, they fluttered, they dived and surged like a pair of birds repelling intruders on their territory.

The man sitting next to him had a collapsing, concave face, lined with wrinkles like a punctured balloon.

‘So you think we should nuke Catania, eh?’ he remarked in a sarcastic tone.

‘What have we got to lose? We’re fucked anyway.’

‘So are they, Nicolo.’

‘Yes, but we know it and they don’t. We’re on the way out anyway, so let’s go with a bang!’

One of the two men on the other side of the table struck the wooden surface with his fist. He had a muddled, crunched face, the features too closely grouped for its overall size.

‘Who says we’re on the way out?’ he shouted.

The fourth man, who sported an extraordinary white moustache and matching sideburns on his bronzed face, laid a hand on the speaker’s arm.

‘We all do, Calogero,’ he said.

‘I don’t say any such thing!’ was the furious response.

‘Yes, you do. You say it by your anger, by your violent gestures, by your shrill tone of voice. The only people who squander their time and energy like that are people who know that they’ve lost. And we have lost. We had our moment of mastery, but now it’s over. And the only way we can retain some measure of respect is to recognize that fact.’

There was a silence, broken by a slight metallic click.

‘I have a message from Binu.’

All four men turned to the person seated at the head of the table. She was a dumpy, crumpled figure in a shapeless black dress who had been knitting throughout the preceding discussion. Now she set down her needles. Despite her age, sex and appearance, she had the undivided and respectful attention of every man present.