Michael Dibdin - Blood rain

There were several wry smiles and exchanges of rolled eyes.

‘All right, Santino!’ the elderly man said at last. ‘Let’s hear your latest brainwave.’

The other man coughed again.

‘When that judge was killed…’

‘Nunziatella? Where does she come in? That business had nothing to do with us, you know that.’

‘Of course. But there was another woman in the car. According to the papers, she was the daughter of a policeman working in Catania. A certain Aurelio Zen.’

‘So?’ Calogero demanded aggressively.

‘Well, it seems to me that he will be wondering who killed his daughter.’

‘The Liminas, of course! Even a cop will be able to work that out.’

‘Exactly. So he’ll be interested in the family. Resentful, perhaps. Maybe vengeful.’

‘So?’ the elderly man demanded again.

‘So maybe we can use that fact to get our message across to the Liminas. They won’t accept any direct approach from us, that’s for sure. But a policeman, with a grudge of his own? I think they might just buy that.’

‘And how are we supposed to get this Zen on board?’

The woman at the head of the table looked up from her rectangle of unfinished knitting.

‘I think it’s time to reactivate Signor Spada,’ she said.

Although he had a key, he entered Carla’s apartment stealthily, with the sense of someone violating a tomb. There was nothing sepulchral about the apartment itself, though. On the contrary, it was as bright, hard, neat and efficient as a disposable razor. The air was thick and hot, with a neutral odour. Zen crossed to the window and opened it. In the distance, he could hear the siren of an ambulance: repeated hiccupy fanfares above a continuous bass growl.

There was none of the mess he had dreaded, the wrack from this personal Marie Celeste, detritus rendered at once pathetic and pointful by its owner’s death. In fact the place looked very much like a hotel room when you enter it for the first time. Either Carla had been quite exceptionally fastidious in her personal habits, or…

Or what? Something was nibbling at the fringes of his brain, something she had said to him but which had ceased to register in that interlude of madness after he finally accepted the fact of his double bereavement.

He stood there amidst the sterile banalities of the dead woman’s apartment. If at first he had been relieved by its impersonality, now he was disappointed. Why had he come, after all, if not in search — and simultaneous dread — of some personal memento which might bring her back, if only for a moment, his mail-order daughter? He had declined an invitation to attend the closed-casket funeral in Milan on the grounds that he had to attend a similar function in Rome concerning his mother. In death as in life, mothers trump daughters, and no one commented on his dereliction. A couple of brothers had shown up, he had learned later, as well as an aunt from, of all places, Taranto.

But why should that surprise him? What did he know about Carla Arduini, beyond the fact that he had screwed her mother at some point in his life, for the usual reasons which now appeared absurd. And even this factoid was without significance, since Carla had not been his daughter. He didn’t have a daughter. He didn’t have any children. Not even dead ones.

So why come to this neat, tidy little cocoon which Carla had spun for herself here in Catania? What did he hope to accomplish, besides depressing himself by opening a closet and seeing her dresses and coats lined up like the larvae of dead butterflies? He had already been through a similar ordeal in Rome, searching dutifully through his mother’s personal belongings, until he eventually broke down and shouted at Maria Grazia, ‘Get it out of here! Everything of hers, just get it out. I don’t care what it’s worth, I don’t want any money, I just want it to be gone!’

Nevertheless, he now remembered, there was one thing here which he didn’t want sold or thrown out. ‘My whole life’s on it,’ Carla had said about her computer. Her whole life. Wasn’t that worth preserving? The problem was that it didn’t seem to be there, her life. No sign of same. Shoes, underwear, letters, magazines, a stuffed animal, but no computer.

Not that Zen would have been able to work it, in any case. But someone — Gilberto, for example — could have retrieved whatever was there, and made it available to him in printed form. And it had to be there, somewhere. When she came round to dinner at his place, Carla had told him about a report she had written about some problem she was having with the installation of the DIA network. She’d have done that on her laptop. She’d have done that…

She’d have done it at work, you idiot! He left the apartment, locked the door and descended to the street.

Even more than most Italian public spaces, those in Catania were dirty, harsh and ugly. Not because Sicilians just didn’t care about such things in the way that the Swiss, say, did. On the contrary, in Zen’s view this behaviour was quite deliberate, a form of public abrasiveness cultivated precisely because it created a sort of Value Added Tax on the personal and the private. When the world presents itself as unpleasant, filthy and hostile, home and friends become more precious. Where everything is clean, orderly and unthreatening, we end up in… well, in Switzerland.

This was not Switzerland. It was not even the Turin of the south’, as Carla had dubbed it. It was just wrecked. People stuffed their garbage into plastic bags brought home from the local supermarket and then threw them into the gutter. They took their dogs out to lay piles of turds the size of a meal and the colour of vomit on the pavement. They trashed anything that didn’t belong to them or a friend, and then stole the rest. Zen, who had no family and friends to come home to, stalked gloomily along through the gathering heat, past a trio of giggling girls enthusiastically giving head to gigantic ice-cream cones, towards the Palace of Justice.

He was lucky. It was lunch-time and the guard was changing, otherwise Zen probably would not have been admitted into the section reserved for the offices of the judges of the Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia. As it was, the sentries on duty were distracted, and his police ID and the mention of Carla’s name was enough to get him past the checkpoint. He asked directions to the room which she had used, only to find it bare. Her name was still on the door, in the form of a business card Sellotaped to the wood, but the office itself had been stripped. No personal computer, no personal anything. Zen looked around for a few seconds at the bare walls and the one filthy window high on one wall, then left.

As he closed the door behind him, an elderly woman wearing a headscarf and coat walked past him down the corridor.

‘Excuse me!’ said Zen.

The woman turned round. She could have been his mother.

‘Well?’

‘I think you delivered something to me,’ Zen started.

‘Me?’

‘A packet of papers. At my place of work. At the Questura.’

‘Never!’ she snapped, turning away.

But Zen remembered the scarf and the coat, and hurried after her.

‘Listen, signora, all I want is to…’

The woman turned on him, a vial of concentrated hatred and wrath.

‘You killed her!’ she hissed under her breath. ‘You and those other northerners! Clean the office for them, I was told! Make everything nice for our guests from Rome. And two days later she’s dead, and where are Roberto and Alfredo? Vanished like the mist at dawn! And now the director claims they were never here in the first place. Of course! We’ve all gone mad! We imagined the whole thing!’

She broke down in a mimed fit of weeping which was all the more disturbing for being so obviously a stylized fake.