Michael Dibdin - End games

‘I wonder how relevant all this is, signora. The motive for this murder is still unclear. Kidnappings go wrong for all kinds of reasons. For example, the victim may see or overhear something which would make his release perilous for the gang at any price. The question of whether or not he was the son of someone called Caterina Intrieri seems moot, to say the least.’

‘No,’ said Maria firmly. ‘He was killed because they thought he was a Calopezzati, but they were wrong.’

‘Who are “they”?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then how can you know what they may or may not have thought?’

‘I’m just telling you what everyone says.’

‘Everyone is of no use to me. What I need is someone, a specific individual prepared to come forward and identify those responsible for this crime and for the atrocities that happened in your own town shortly afterwards. I had hoped that you might be that someone, signora. Why else would you have come here yesterday, and again today, and spent hours on end waiting to see me?’

‘I wanted justice for Caterina. Her only child has been killed because it was tainted with the name of the family that made her life a misery, and the lives of everyone who lived around here then, if you could call it living.’

Zen glanced at his watch.

‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘It’s all I know,’ Maria replied stubbornly.

‘I don’t believe that for a moment, but I don’t intend to press you. However, I may need to get in touch at some point in the future. Doing so in the normal way might cause difficulties for your family. Do you understand my meaning?’

Maria got a pen and a used bus ticket out of her handbag, wrote down a telephone number in large, plump numerals and handed the ticket to Zen.

‘Call this number. If someone else answers, tell them that you work at the hospital and need to speak to me about the results of those tests I had. They’ll fetch me and then we can talk.’

Zen stood up to indicate that the interview was over.

‘You’re an interesting person, Maria,’ he said, using her name for the first time. ‘What you’ve said is extremely interesting. What you haven’t said might well be more interesting still. Do you know someone called Giorgio?’

Maria almost faltered then, dazzled by the feints setting up the knockout punch. But she too could hold herself together by sheer willpower.

‘It’s a very common name,’ she replied.

The chief of police seemed to acknowledge her fortitude with an ironic smile.

‘Excessively common, I’m inclined to think. The world would be a better place if there were fewer Giorgios in it. Or at least one fewer. I wish you a safe and speedy journey home.’

Since his son had made his own arrangements for the day, Professor Achille Pancrazi spent the afternoon working on a rather tricky review of a book by a former colleague at the University of Padua. He had initially been slightly taken aback by Emanuele’s announcement that he was going to spend the day with an unnamed school friend, largely because even after years of separation he still lived in fear of his ex-wife and knew that he would be held to account if anything went wrong. But of course nothing would, and frankly an interval of free time in these welcome but somewhat tiring visits was always welcome.

Needless to say, he hadn’t bothered to read Fraschetti’s latest effusion. He was familiar with both the subject and the author, so a perusal of the introduction and table of contents sufficed as far as content went. As for style, a brief skim of a few paragraphs taken at random was enough to show that his rival’s love affair with the jargon of the trade was by no means over. He was particularly amused by the constant references to ‘desire’, given that he knew for a fact that Fraschetti had never desired anyone of either sex in his life. But Pancrazi’s real problem was how to pitch his critical response, which would be published in the Cultura insert of a national newspaper and read by just about everyone in the scholarly world for whom the subject matter was relevant. In other words, it wasn’t so much a question of how he wanted to make his eminent — but well past his peak, despite his current fame — colleague look, but of how he wanted it to make him look. If he sounded too negative, then charges of professional envy could and would be brought, and not without a certain justification.

From way back in their far-off days together at Padua, Pancrazi had always considered Fraschetti his intellectual inferior. He didn’t gloat about this any more than he did about the fact that he was the taller of the two, but in the event it was he who’d had to move all the way down the boot to the University of bloody Cosenza to get his professorship while Fraschetti had landed the post in Turin that they’d both applied for, and then gone on to be a media don into the bargain. And why? Because the half-smart bastard had more connections than a telephone exchange, plus a superficial talent for memorable soundbites and an easy-to-grasp high concept, in this case the idea that the early Romans, far from having any sense of manifest destiny or even a coherent culture, had simply muddled along from year to year, the results being cleaned up much later by Livy and others into a neat corporate history for imperial PR purposes.

Achille Pancrazi had written and revised four drafts of his review and was just starting a fifth, in a marginally more nuanced tone, when his phone rang. The screen showed that the caller was his son. Despite the interruption, he answered with genuine pleasure.

‘ Ciao, Manuele! ’

Emanuele, on the other hand, sounded preoccupied.

‘There’s something I want to show you, dad. Can you come right now?’

‘Come where?’

‘To the chapel of Santa Caterina on the back road to Mendicino.’

‘Are you there now? I thought you and your friend were spending the day in town. Does he have a car?’

‘Don’t ask any more questions, dad, just come. Please!’

By now, Emanuele sounded desperate. Pancrazi considered that he knew the territory around Cosenza ‘tolerably well’, as he would have put it, but he was not familiar with that particular chapel, probably some devotional shrine of strictly local interest and no architectural merit. He had once joked to a colleague whose subject was the Early Modern period that he himself suffered from a professional version of Alzheimer’s symptoms. ‘I can remember the smallest details of everything that happened up to the fall of Constantinople, but the last five hundred years are just a blur.’ What on earth could Emanuele and his friend have found there in such a place to justify his driving out there ‘right now’? It was charming and flattering that they had even bothered to include him and his interests in their laddish day out together, but the whole thing still didn’t quite make sense.

The evening rush hour was in full swing and it took him almost forty minutes to reach the rendezvous. It was a small building, squat and mean, set off beside the road in the middle of nowhere, not a house in sight. There was no sign of another vehicle either, which meant that there had either been a mistake about the location of the rendezvous or the two young men had got tired of waiting. Achille decided to take a look inside anyway, if the door was unlocked. It was. The interior was no improvement on the thinly plastered rough stone outside, a cramped space with a few rows of pews set before a small altar. The few ex votos about were old and illegible and the air smelt musty. The place was obviously no longer used on any regular basis. He was about to turn back when the door slammed shut behind him.

‘Don’t turn round, professo,’ said a voice. ‘Sit down facing the altar. Keep your hands in view at all times.’