Michael Dibdin - End games

They reached the Hotel Centrale at twenty to five. The air was mild and welcoming, but it was still dark. Tom Newman was waiting outside, and he and Martin proceeded to Aeroscan Surveying’s base in the outlying southern suburbs of the city. Neither of the Americans had been able to get breakfast at their respective hotels before leaving, so Phil Larson instantly went up a notch in Martin’s estimation by having brewed up a pot of coffee and bought some pastries from a bakery that opened early. Once Phil had got through giving them a long story about some break-in the previous night — ‘Nothing missing, it looks like, but you know how you feel kind of violated?’ — Martin opened his aluminium briefcase and passed a thick sheaf of printed matter across the desk.

‘That’s the report of the team I’ve consulted,’ he said. ‘You can read the small print later, but their principal conclusions are clear and I want them implemented subito.’

Larson looked at him curiously.

‘I didn’t know you spoke Italian, Mr Nguyen.’

‘I was born in a country then called Indochina, where the official language was French. Later I was moved to the States, where I had to learn English, then in high school I studied Spanish. Italian is pretty much the same except for the make-up and the hairstyle.’

He went over to the map which took up most of one wall.

‘These are the areas you’ve done?’ he queried, indicating the shaded zones.

Phil Larson nodded.

‘Okay, ignore the whole rest of this section and concentrate on the upper valleys of the rivers off this map to the south.’

Larson looked doubtful.

‘Hell, we don’t even have charts for that area. You said to look at the confluence of the rivers and down in the flood plain where we are now. That’s what we’ve been doing. Of course a lot of this terrain has been built on in the last fifty years or so, like this place where we are now. If the site we’re looking for is underneath any of that, we aren’t going to find it anyway.’

‘My consultants pointed that out. Plus that in a sprawling flood plain like this the river-bed will have shifted around over the centuries, and that the deforestation of the surrounding mountains a century ago has completely screwed the hydrological aspects of the situation, the amount of water run-off and hence the height of the rivers. So a lot of their data is highly indeterminate. But there are other factors involved. One is that the men who originally constructed this thing were all killed afterwards to keep the location secret.’

Phil Larson grinned nervously.

‘Not a company tradition, I hope?’

Martin ignored the comment.

‘But if the site had been within view of the city of Cosenza, then to preserve the secret all the citizens would have had to be killed too, and there is no record of such a massacre.’

‘We’re pretty well out of sight of the city here,’ Larson pointed out.

‘Yeah, but back then the main road from Rome down to Sicily ran right along this side of the valley. Anyone using it would have spotted what was going on and maybe come back later to check it out. So bearing all this in mind, your brief is to look in the upper valleys of the rivers that splay out southwards from here.’

Larson frowned.

‘But you said that we were looking for the foundations of a building. Why would anyone choose to build there? Here on the banks I can maybe see, but in the middle of a river? That’s just crazy!’

Martin glanced at Tom, but he didn’t appear to be paying any attention.

‘It’s a tomb,’ he explained to Phil. ‘The people who built it had this religious thing about the dead person resting undisturbed for ever, so beneath a river was perfect. No one except them knew where it was, so there was no way it was ever going to get dug up except by pure chance. Anyway, what do you care? You’ve been given your instructions.’

‘Well, like I said, I don’t have charts for that…’

‘You’ve also said you’re using visual navigation. Higher up, those rivers are hemmed in by the mountains, so their course can’t have changed much. Start where they join up and follow each of them up to the five-hundred metre level. Does the pilot understand English?’

‘Not so as you’d notice. I just point to the strips I want to cover every day.’

‘Go and give him his new orders. My assistant will translate.’

Outside on the concrete forecourt, the pilot was checking his machine over with the meticulous attention of a man who knows that his life depends on it. Phil Larson briefed him on the new search plan, pausing from time to time for Tom to turn it into Italian. He added that the boss was visiting, so to make a good impression they should look busy and get going as soon as possible, then returned to the office where Martin Nguyen was waiting.

Tom stayed where he was. He’d been fascinated by planes ever since he was a boy, when a friend of his father’s had taken him for a ride in a Cessna out over Marin County and done some freaky stuff that had scared him stiff and left an indelible memory. He half-hoped that this pilot might offer a repeat performance, but the Italian seemed preoccupied with other matters.

‘I don’t even have a chart of those valleys,’ he complained to Tom. ‘Not that it would help much. They’re always stringing new electricity lines across them that aren’t marked. And then there are the old pulleys they used to use to bring goods across to the far side from the road. They’re abandoned, so they’re not on the chart, but half of them are still there, sagging down just about exactly the altitude we’ll be flying at.’

Tom nodded sympathetically.

‘Anyway, the whole thing’s pointless,’ the pilot went on. ‘If these Americans want to find the right scenery for this film they’re making, they could do it much cheaper from the ground.’

Tom noted that the Italian’s resentment and contempt were markedly increased by the idea that his employers were throwing their money away so stupidly.

‘Apparently they’re looking for something that’s buried under the river,’ he said, in an instinctive attempt to defend his compatriots. ‘I guess they want to use it for a location in the movie.’

‘Under the river? What kind of thing?’

Tom shrugged.

‘Some tomb.’

The pilot continued to stare at him for so long that Tom began to think he must have offended him in some way. Then he smiled wearily.

‘ Ma certo,’ he replied in a tone of contempt. ‘ La famosa tomba d’Alarico.’

It was another perfect morning in Cosenza. Sunlight sidled in through the window, stripping away the acceptable surface of things to reveal the tawdry substance beneath. Seated at his desk, head in hands, Aurelio Zen sensed its intrusive presence as a glow between his fingers. He had been awake since shortly after four o’clock, following a phone call from the Questura under his standing instructions to be summoned at any hour of the day or night in the event of any significant development in the case. By then it was too late to do anything. What had happened had happened, and it was arguably all his fault. Police operations went wrong all the time, but this was different.

For years now, Zen had been living in a world where reality seemed to have been drained of all substance. Once upon a time, and he could still remember that time, authentic experience had been the default position, as unremarkable as gravity or the weather. Now, though, the authentic sounded a melancholy blue note as it receded, a Doppler effect induced by the speed of cultural change, as though sadly waving goodbye. There were, however, still exceptions to this general rule. Zen’s experience was that for every ten kilometres you travelled between Rome and Cosenza, you moved back another year into the past, finally arriving in the mid-1950s. Authenticity was not as yet under serious threat here, and in some way that he couldn’t have explained, that slewed the ethical equations too. What would have been good enough elsewhere simply wouldn’t do here, back in the lost realm of the real.