Michael Dibdin - Blood rain

‘Corinna, Corinna! They gunned you down for doing your job too well, and now they try to put the blame on your own people!’

Dropping the pose, she turned suddenly on Zen.

‘Say what you will about we Sicilians, we don’t make war on women!’ she snapped.

‘Oh, really? So what about Dalla Chiesa’s wife, murdered with him on the street? What about Signora Falcone, blown to pieces with her husband? What about…’

‘That was in Palermo!’ the woman screeched. ‘This is Catania! We’re still civilized here. No, my Corinna was killed by you people. I know it in my bones. Kill me too, if you want! My name is Agatella Mazza. I’m one of the cleaning ladies. You can find me here any day. Do you think I give a damn what you do to me, now that she’s gone?’

She spat in Zen’s face, spraying him with saliva.

‘Take that, with a mother’s curse on you and yours. May you all die slowly, in pain, alone and in despair!’

She turned and waddled off along the corridor, muttering to herself. Zen stood stock-still, too shocked to react. He wiped the spit off his face, clutching the wall and gasping for breath.

‘They searched my room,’ Carla had told him on the phone. He could hear her voice even now, so young and vibrant. ‘They left a message on my computer… My whole life’s on it, and someone has been messing about with it. I’ve got backups, of course, but…’

To which he had replied, ‘Back-up lives?’ At the time, it had been intended as a joke.

He walked home along the broad conduits of black lava blocks, across the petrified squares, past the stylized statuary and baroque curlicues, the grandiose frozen messages of the past, all dead letters now. Although he wasn’t hungry, he knew that he should eat, and stopped at an. alimentari to buy some bread, a mozzarella di bufala and some air-cured sausages which the owner claimed were supplied by a brother-in-law of his who lived in the Umbrian mountain town of Norcia, famous for its pork products. Zen pretended to believe him, and the grocer in turn pretended to believe Zen’s pretence of belief. They parted amicably.

Once inside, the apartment loomed around him like a shroud, its former charm flayed away by what the cleaning lady at the Palace of Justice had told him. He had no reason to doubt that it was true. Hurt always tells. This was too hurtful not to be true. He pushed through to the kitchen, opened the packets of food which he had bought and turned it out on to plates.

Not only did he not feel hungry, now he felt nauseous. The compact mass of the mozzarella, once sliced, felt like eating the breast of a pregnant woman: milk and meat at once. Saint Agatha, the patron of Catania, had had her breasts cut off. He tried the sausages, which gave him the sensation of chewing on the penises of dead boys, then pushed the food aside and opened the fridge, just in case there was some reusable portion of a forgotten or failed meal.

The first thing he saw, lying in the freezing compartment, was the non-birthday present for his no-longer-alive non-daughter, delivered to him at the Questura, which he had wrapped in rotting sardines, sealed with clingfilm and then totally forgotten about. With some difficulty, he pulled it off the flimsy metal ice-tray bonded to the sides of the freezer compartment by a gristle of ice thicker than the shrunken cubes in the tray itself. He sniffed at it with a wrinkle of disgust, then threw it into the sink and turned on the hot water.

The phone rang.

‘Good evening, dottore. Forgive me for disturbing you. My name is Spada.’

The speaker clearly expected this to register. Zen frowned.

‘Ah, yes!’ he replied, having realized that this was the alleged Mafia contact who had got him the apartment with such miraculous swiftness in the first place.

‘I trust that all is well with your new home’, the voice continued smoothly.

‘Everything’s fine, thank you.’

A pause.

‘Good. Nevertheless, I think we should have a brief chat at some point, if that’s possible.’

‘What about?’

‘Various issues which have arisen, which I believe to be of mutual interest. I can’t be more specific until we meet. Do you know the breakwater to the west of the harbour? You get to it from Piazza dei Martiri. Between four and five this afternoon. I’ll be fishing from the rocks and carrying a yellow umbrella marked Cassa di Risparmio di Catania.’

The line went dead. Zen made a dismissive gesture and hung up. The man must be mad, thinking that he would turn up for an unscheduled appointment at such short notice. Who did these people think they were?

A splashing sound from the kitchen reminded him that he had left the tap running on the frozen package. He turned it off, then went to the end of the room and opened the door giving on to the small balcony. A wave of heat enveloped him, bringing a rash of sweat to his brow.

‘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’

‘They searched my room…Someone has been here. They left a message on my computer.’

Leaning out of the window, he smoked a cigarette, then strode back to the kitchen and grabbed the package floating in the sink. It was beginning to feel mushy. He peeled it open, stripped away the rotting fish and threw them in the rubbish bin, then washed the plastic bag inside in soapy water, dried it on some kitchen paper and opened the envelope. It contained a photocopy of some sixty pages of typed text, apparently legal in nature. The title contained the name ‘Limina’. Zen took it through to the living room and settled down on the sofa to read.

Twenty minutes later, he had skimmed the entire set of documents. They all related to the case of the ‘body on the train’, and consisted of interviews with witnesses and the first portion of a draft report on the case written by the investigating magistrate, Corinna Nunziatella. None of the material seemed particularly sensitive or sensational. The only thing that Zen had not already read in the DIA reports which he vetted weekly was a deposition by a train driver who regularly worked the route between Catania and Syracuse, to the effect that he thought he had seen a freight wagon parked on the siding at Passo Martino for several weeks before the discovery of the body. In fact, he said, he had the impression that it had been there for several months. But it was common practice to store items of rolling-stock on such sidings, and he hadn’t paid the matter much attention. When pressed, he admitted that he couldn’t be sure that he had seen any such wagon at all, never mind when or where.

The only other interesting aspect of the documents was a note on the last page of the unfinished draft report, which seemed to be tending towards the conclusion that the body on the train had indeed been that of Tonino Limina, but that there was no evidence that he had been kidnapped and killed by a rival Mafia clan. It had not been possible to establish Tonino’s movements prior to his disappearance with any certainty, but a search of passenger lists showed that he had flown to Milan on 6 July en route to Costa Rica for a holiday, but had not checked in for his onward flight. At this point the report broke off with the handwritten note: ‘Case blocked and transferred 3/10, documents impounded by Roberto Lessi and Alfredo Ferraro of the ROS.’

Zen knocked the pile of pages back into shape and left it on the sofa. As he got up to fetch his cigarettes, he noticed for the first time the grey plastic slab, sitting on his desk, in the corner of the room. It was about the size of one of those small briefcases which high-powered businessmen carry with them, to indicate that the heavy-duty paperwork is being done by their minions.