Michael Dibdin - End games

‘Hi, Jake.’

‘We’ve got issues, dude.’

‘No fucking kidding!’

‘The guy called you too?’

‘What guy?’

‘That big kahuna director we hired for the movie cover.’

‘Aldobrandini? We spoke after I arrived here.’

‘I mean real time. Like, you know, now.’

‘I’ve been totally slammed, Jake. It’s all swimming upstream here. What’s new?’

‘Aldo left a message. He somehow found out the whole thing is a scam. Said a lot of stuff about creative property rights and shit. Plus he’s threatening to get on TV and expose us, then sue our asses. What a shitty break! If Newman doesn’t get kidnapped, this never happens.’

Martin Nguyen took a moment to savour this, the longest discourse he had ever heard Jake pronounce. Then he turned his boss’s habitual brevity against him.

‘Newman’s dead.’

‘Huh?’

‘Murdered. They dressed him up as a corpse, made him walk to an old village someplace, then blew his head off.’

‘Fuck.’

After a long silence, Jake laughed.

‘Well, I guess the game’s hotting up.’

Like much of what Jake said, this didn’t make any sense to Martin, so he decided to ignore it.

‘I’ve refocused the search according to the parameters suggested by that team of consultants I told you about. The Aeroscan guy figures they can cover the area in three or four more days.’

‘Yeah, but if Brandini goes on TV and tells everyone there isn’t going to be any movie, we’re screwed.’

‘Chill, Jake. It’s just the flying permits at risk. I can stall the authorities that long.’

‘Okay, but if we get lucky, call me immediately. I’ve got a jet on standby.’

‘Well, that’s great, but it’s going to take you half a day to get here and the time difference screws up the scheduling. Plus I don’t know if you remember, but I just said that Pete Newman has been brutally murdered. That means that the cops here have a homicide investigation under way, and anyone associated with the victim — like me, for instance — is a potential witness, if not suspect. The police chief made that very clear to me today. So what with the threat of Aldobrandini going nuclear, I’m under a lot of pressure. Now Aeroscan might just come through tomorrow, in which case I’ll have to move fast without you around or maybe even in touch, because it’ll be the middle of the night over there. So it would help a lot if you told me what we’re actually looking for.’

There was a long pause.

‘It’s kind of hard to explain over the phone, plus I’ve got to go. Let me shoot you a couple of URLs. Think you have problems? Madrona went out and bought this designer dog. It’s like a total bitch.’

The line went dead. Martin felt rage coil up within him like a thwarted orgasm. For a moment he was tempted to hurl the phone at the wall, but in the end he tapped into his rage and used it to dissipate his earlier tiredness and sense of passive helplessness. He called room service and told them to remove his dirty dishes and bring a bottle of their best cognac, a soda siphon and a bucket of ice. Martin’s father had started his career as a waiter at one of the most exclusive clubs in the French colony of Cochinchine, so he had been in a position to pass on to his son a few tips about the good things in life.

After leaving his office exceptionally late, Nicola Mantega drove up the superstrada to Spezzano Grande, a ragged stack of concrete boxes perched on the precipitous slopes of the Sila massif. The radio was tuned to the same local news channel he had listened to while driving to work, and as the Alfa Romeo skimmed round the long curving viaduct leading up to the Spezzano turn-off, Mantega was surprised to hear the familiar voice of the new police chief, Aurelio Zen.

‘… where officers under my command discovered the remains of the American lawyer Peter Newman, who has subsequently been identified as a member of the Calopezzati family and hence of Calabrian origin. The victim’s head had been blown off by a charge of plastic explosive detonated by remote control. Forensic tests have revealed that the explosive substance was identical to that used last night to force an entry into a house in the new town of Altomonte, located near by. The capofamiglia, Antonio Nicastro, was then shot while attempting to defend his nine-year-old son Francesco, whose tongue was subsequently severed…’

The exit for Spezzano angled sharply right, then left up a steep gradient, and at the speed Mantega took it a lesser car than the Alfa 159 Q4 might well have spun out of control. He stopped at the side of the road until his breathing had calmed down to something approaching normal, then nosed through the narrow streets and parked in front of a pizzeria. Gina and the boys were visiting her brother in Leipzig, where he had found work stripping Communist-era plumbing out of desirable nineteenth-century apartment buildings for rich Wessis, so on top of everything else Nicola couldn’t get a home-cooked meal. The street was empty except for a kid who had been showing off his MotoGuzzi bike to his piece of arm-candy. She looked vaguely familiar, Mantega thought as he walked in and ordered. He’d definitely seen her before, maybe even that day, but where?

He sat down and gulped some beer. It wasn’t surprising that his mind was going after what he’d been put through. He’d spent a miserable afternoon pretending to listen to the needs and demands of some Oriental who had flown in from America to represent the film company that Peter Newman had worked for, but his thoughts had been elsewhere. He already knew that the interim police chief didn’t believe his story about the circumstances of Newman’s disappearance, but hadn’t had enough evidence to proceed against him when the case under investigation had merely been one of abduction. Now it was murder, and of the most atrocious kind. Crimes on that scale create their own judicial momentum, and Mantega knew that he would be one of its first victims. The only surprise was that they hadn’t come for him already.

To prepare for that onslaught, he needed to be briefed by Giorgio on what exactly had happened, and above all why, but any contact from that quarter now looked as unlikely as an intervention from the other quarter was inevitable. He had made his final pitch before lunch, borrowing Tom Newman’s mobile on the grounds that it was new and therefore untapped. The only reply was from an answering machine, on which he had left a frenzied message whose tone he now regretted. In retrospect, his spontaneous reaction to Tom’s news looked distinctly risky. Giorgio was not one to take kindly to threats and abuse. But what was he supposed to have done? The original deal they had struck was a straightforward business transaction, the victim returned a little poorer but otherwise unharmed and the perpetrators enriched by several million euros. A traditional Calabrian crime, with its roots in the immemorial banditry of the region. Nothing had ever been said about murder, still less a barbaric and apparently motiveless execution such as the one the police chief had described at his press conference.

He chomped his pizza down, then spent a little time flirting jokingly with the waitress, whose husband had been screwing the sister of the priest in Pedace ever since the difficult birth of their second child. The night outside was a still, solid block of oppressive heat. The storm that should have ripped it open, letting in the fresh air and a cooling downpour, had merely brooded over the area for a few hours and then shifted off to the east, leaving no resolution to the problems it had created. Mantega slipped gratefully into the air-conditioned zephyrs within the Alfa and drove up a tilted labyrinth of minor roads to his villa, where the electronic gates in the boundary fence automatically closed behind him. Tonight, there were no welcoming barks and plaintive whines to greet him. Attilio, his lively pit bull terrier, had come down with an acute intestinal ailment a few days earlier and was still in the care of the vet. Mantega unlocked the house, bolted the door behind him, reset the alarm system and then fetched a bottle of the local digestivo he favoured and watched an hour of mind-numbing television before going to bed.