Michael Dibdin: Cabal

‘A what?’

‘Falco, the hot young designer. Haven’t you heard of him?’

Zen shrugged.

‘What I know about fashion you could fit on a postcard.’

‘And still have room for “Wish you were here” and the address,’ laughed Tania.

Zen joined in her laughter. Nevertheless, there’s one thing I do know, he thought — any jacket sporting the label of a ‘hot young designer’ is going to cost. Where did she get the money for such things? Or was it her money? Perhaps the garment was a present. Pushing aside the implications of this thought, he produced a small plastic bag from his pocket, removed the neatly wrapped package inside and handed it to her.

‘Oh, Aurelio!’

‘It’s only perfume.’

While she unwrapped the little flask, he added with a trace of maliciousness, ‘ I wouldn’t dare buy you clothes.’

She did not react.

‘I’d better not wear it tonight,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘It’ll come off on your clothes and she ’ll know you’ve been unfaithful.’

They smiled at each other. ‘She’ was Zen’s mother.

‘I could always take them off,’ he said.

‘Mmm, that’s an idea.’

They had been together for almost a year now, and Zen still hadn’t quite taken the measure of the situation. Certainly it was something very different from what he had imagined, back in his early days at the Ministry of the Interior, when Tania Biacis had been the safely inaccessible object of his fantasies, reminding him of the great Madonna in the apse of the cathedral on the island of Torcello, but transformed from a figure of sorrow to one of gleeful rebellion, a nun on the run.

His fancy had been more accurate than he could have known, for the breakup of her marriage to Mauro Bevilacqua, a moody bank clerk from the deep south, had transformed Tania Biacis into someone quite different from the chatty, conventional, rather superficial woman with whom Zen, very much against his better judgement, had fallen in love. Having married in haste and repented at leisure, Tania was now, at thirty-something, having the youthful fling she had missed the first time around. She had taken to smoking and even drinking, habits which Zen deplored in women. She never cooked him a meal, still less sewed on a button or ironed a shirt, as though consciously rejecting the ploys by which protomammas lure their prey. They went out to restaurants and bars, took in films and concerts, walked the streets and piazzas at all hours, and then went home to bed.

Things notoriously turned out differently from what one had expected, of course, but Zen was so used to them turning out worse, or at any rate less, that he found himself continually disconcerted by what had actually happened. Tania loved him, for a start. That was something he had certainly never expected. He had grown accustomed to thinking of himself as essentially unlovable, and he was finding it difficult — almost painful — to abandon the idea. He was comfortable with it, as with a well-worn pair of shoes. It would no longer do, though. Tania loved him, and that was all there was to it.

She loved him, but she didn’t want to live with him. This fact was equally as real as the first, yet to Zen they were incompatible. How could you love someone with that passionate intensity, yet still insist on keeping your distance? It didn’t make any sense, particularly for a woman. But there it was. He had invited Tania to move in with him and she had refused. ‘I’ve spent the last eight years of my life living with a man, Aurelio. I married young. I’ve never known anything else. Now I’m finally free, I don’t just want to lock myself up again, even with you.’ And that was that, a fact as unexpected and irreducible as her love, handed him to take or leave.

He’d taken it, of course. More than that, he’d schemed and grafted to grant her the independence she wanted, and then conceal from her that it was all a sham, subsidized by him. If Italian divorce rates were still relatively low, this was due less to the waning influence of the Church than to the harsh facts of the property market. Accommodation was just too expensive for most single people to afford. When Zen and his wife had broken up, they had been forced to go on living together for almost a year until one of Luisella’s cousins found room to take her in. Tania’s clerical job at the Ministry of the Interior had been a nice little perk for the Bevilacqua household, but it was quite inadequate to support Tania in the independent single state to which she aspired.

So Zen had stepped into the breach. The first place he’d come up with had been a room in a hotel near the station which had been retained by the police for use in a drug surveillance operation. In fact the subject of the investigation had been killed in a shoot-out with a rival gang several months earlier, but the officer in charge had neglected to report this and had been subletting the room to Brazilian transvestite prostitutes. As illegal immigrants, the viados were in no position to complain. Neither was Zen’s informant, a former colleague from the Questura, since the officer in question was one of his superiors, but Zen was under no such constraints. He sought the man out, and by a mixture of veiled threats and an appeal to masculine complicity had got him to agree to let Zen’s ‘friend’ have the use of the room for a few months.

It was only when they met at the hotel to exchange keys that Zen quite realized what he’d got himself into. Quite apart from the transvestites and the pushers, the room was filthy, noisy, and stank. It was unthinkable that he could ever suggest that Tania move in there, still less visit her, surrounded by the sounds and smells of commercial sex. Unfortunately they had already celebrated the good news, so he had had to find an alternative, and quickly.

The solution came through an expatriate acquaintance of Ellen, Zen’s former lover, who had been renting a flat right in the old centre of the city. The property had been let as an office, to get around the equa canone fair rent laws, and the landlord took advantage of this to impose a twenty per cent increase after the first year. The American quickly found an apartment he liked even better, but in order to cause his ex-landlord as much grief as possible, he suggested that Tania come and live in the original flat as his ‘guest’, thus forcing the owner to go through a lengthy and costly procedure to obtain a court order for his eviction. The rent still had to be paid, however, and since Zen had boasted of his cleverness in getting Tania a place for nothing — he told her that the American was away for some months and wanted someone to keep an eye on the flat — he had to foot the bill.

In the bedroom, Tania removed her clothes with an unselfconscious ease which always astonished Zen. Most women he’d known preferred to undress in private, or in the intimacy of an embrace. But Tania pulled off her jeans, tights and panties like a child going swimming, revealing her long leggy beauty, and then pulled back the covers of the bed and lay down half-covered while Zen was still taking off his jacket. Her straightforwardness made it easy for him, too. His doubts and anxieties dropped away with his clothes. As he slipped between the cool sheets and grasped Tania’s warm, silky-smooth flesh, he reflected that there was a lot to be said for the human body, despite everything.

‘What’s that?’ Tania asked some time later, raising her head above the covers.

Zen raised his head and listened. The silent dimness of the bedroom had been infiltrated by an electronic tone, muffled but just audible, coming in regular, incessant bursts.

‘Sounds like an alarm.’

Tania raised herself up on one elbow.

‘Mine’s one of the old ones, with a bell.’