Michael Dibdin - End games

‘I’m glad to see that you still have a lot of clout at the Ministry,’ Lucio said, ‘but next time around would you mind not using it to rough us up? Three of our best people got dragged in to work with me all night on these tests.’

‘That’s your answer. It wasn’t my clout but panic on the top floor. This gaudy little murder, which would normally get buried away on the Cronaca pages, is suddenly front-page news. And it’s not being handled as one of those condescending “Made in Calabria” stories but as a “What have we come to?” guilt piece. Anyway, do you have a positive result?’

‘I wouldn’t have phoned otherwise.’

‘So there’s a definite relationship?’

There was a pause at the other end.

‘Between what?’

‘For God’s sake, Lucio! You may have been up all night, but I haven’t had that much sleep either. Between the individual whose DNA sample I gave you yesterday and the other whose DNA profile you also have in your hands.’

‘Oh. In that sense, no.’

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I mean there is no correspondence at all.’

‘But you said the results were positive!’

‘Technically, they were. Sometimes matters are not so definitive, depending on the age of the sample, possible contamination and so on. But here there is no doubt whatsoever. The two subjects possess utterly different genetic profiles.’

‘There is no possibility that one of them could be the son of the other’s sister?’

‘Absolutely not. They are quite definitely unrelated by blood in any way.’

There was a long silence.

‘That was the result you were expecting, wasn’t it?’ Lucio put in at last.

It was a stiff test, but Zen rose to the occasion.

‘Of course, Lucio! You’ve confirmed my hypothesis. Many thanks.’

He put the phone down and continued on his way, his eyes blank.

Enough was enough, thought Emanuele Pancrazi, gazing at the rapturous light streaming in through the bedroom window. Emanuele had just turned seventeen, his soul was gaping open like a mussel to filter every last drop of life on offer and only a few days remained before he would have to return home to school and everyday reality. It was time to assert himself.

Thus far, Emanuele had indulged the agenda lovingly crafted and managed by his father. This governed every aspect of their month together, mostly in the form of day trips to churches and castles, long treks in the mountains and painstaking guided tours of the supposed sites of ancient Greek cities which in practice had vanished almost entirely. The day before had been devoted to the dull and seemingly endless badlands of the Marchesato di Crotone, unenlivened as usual by his father’s commentary on the historic system of sharecropping on the vast estates which had once covered the entire region, generating equally vast unearned profits for heartless absentee landlords such as the Calopezzati family.

In some dim way, prefiguring a wisdom that he didn’t really want just yet, Emanuele realised that his visits to Cosenza were as difficult for his father as they were for him, if not more so. His parents had been separated for ten years, and he had long ago stopped wetting the bed and weeping in corners. He was young and tough and sanely egoistic, but he knew that his mother still suffered from the break-up, not because she missed his dad, as he once had, so badly, but because she felt guilty for the pain that they had both caused him. He had to assume that his father felt the same sense of culpability, and that his gruelling programme of educational experiences was not in fact a deliberate bid to wreck his son’s visit but an attempt to provide a regime of constant activity, excluding any possibility of embarrassing hiatuses when the big dark questions that lurked in the background might assert themselves and demand to be addressed.

Nevertheless, the resulting experience was enough to make Emanuele feel as though he was back at school already. That had been just about acceptable when he was ten, or even fourteen, but time had now run out for this means of dealing with an event in the distant past which had changed his life for ever but wasn’t really of much interest to him any more. Too bad if his parents couldn’t get over it. Emanuele was on holiday in the deep south, almost a thousand kilometres from the apartment in Brescia where he lived with his mother. He wanted to relax, have fun and maybe even get a chance to chat up one of those juicy girls he had glimpsed from time to time through the car window as his father drove him home after another long day at the museum. Enough cultural uplift, enough history lessons. He programmed his mobile phone to ring, faked a brief conversation, then shuffled out to the living area of the spacious apartment facing Piazza del Duomo in the heart of the old city. His father was drinking coffee and consulting a map.

‘Ah, Emanuele! I’ve been thinking about what we should do today. The Sila Piccola seems the obvious answer, with a diversion to Carlopoli to see the ruins of the monastery founded in the twelfth century by the Benedictines and later taken over by the Cistercians. This complesso monastico was the religious, economic and cultural centre of the region, its abbot at one time having been the illustrious Giocchino da Fiore, but it was later suppressed and then destroyed in an earthquake shortly after — ’

‘Actually, dad, a friend of mine from school just called. He’s on holiday down here too, staying at a villa down on the beach. He says he’s getting a bit bored with the sun and sand bit so he wants to come into Cosenza and have a look around.’

‘Who is this boy?’

‘Oh, just a friend. Anyway, we’ve arranged to meet in half an hour. We’ll prowl around the streets a bit and then grab a bite to eat somewhere. So you can take the day off.’

‘But when will you be back?’ demanded his father in an almost panicky tone.

‘Depends. I’ll call you. Okay, I’d better go and put on some sharp clothes. You know how important personal appearance is down here. Don’t want these southerners to get the idea that the rest of us are all slobs!’

Twenty minutes later, Emanuele emerged from the front door of the building and sauntered away down the main street. This initially provoked a moment of indecision in the two men sitting in a van parked outside the eighteenth-century palazzo on Via Giuseppe Campagna. Their instructions were to go to the Pancrazi apartment on the third floor, abduct the son and leave certain brutal verbal instructions with his father Achille, Professor of Ancient History at the local university. Now they faced a quandary.

On the one hand, Giorgio had made it quite clear — in one never-to-be-forgotten instance by a personally administered beating that had ended with his being pulled off the offender just in time — that he wouldn’t tolerate his associates exercising any individual initiative in operational matters. On the other, taking the boy while he was alone would involve the two men and their boss in vastly less personal risk should anything go wrong. The normal course of action would have been to report in for further instructions, but the pair had been forbidden to make contact until the mission was complete. After a hasty discussion, they decided to go for it.

Their choice was validated almost immediately. If the kid had carried on the way he had set out, down the sinuous curves of Corso Telesio towards the bridge leading over the Busento river to the broad boulevards of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century city sprawled out below, it might have proved difficult to take him unchallenged. But Emanuele soon became intrigued by the network of alleys leading off to either side of the main street, and wandered away into the warren of mediaeval dwellings which formed an increasingly abandoned slum surrounding the gentrified core of the original centre. One of the two men Giorgio had selected for this job had grown up in just that part of town and knew his way around blindfold. He also knew that, despite his colleague’s doubts, their van would fit into the alley that the boy had taken, and that there was an exit at the other end that would have them out of town in minutes, up on the superstrada into the mountains.