Michael Dibdin - End games

On the other hand, he hadn’t been termed ‘grossly incompetent’, which was just about the only way of winkling a government employee out of his comfy shell. If those railwaymen merely treated their customers with arrogant contempt, flaunted framed portraits of Che Guavara in their offices and fiddled the petty cash from time to time, no one could touch them. If they failed to align the points correctly or signalled one train into the path of another, that would be another matter. Zen hadn’t done that. Two men were dead, but this had been deemed not to be ‘as a direct result’ of his ‘regrettable initiative’. In short, he’d been a bit naughty but all would be forgiven. The Mummy State had merely scolded her son, not disowned him.

The night before, he had eventually crawled back to the track, where he was intercepted by the Digos agent on the MotoGuzzi, who had been called in by his colleagues. Zen had ridden behind him up to the crime scene. This was a level area which served as a trysting place for the young people of the locality, judging by the beer bottles, syringes and used condoms picked out by the headlights of the black Jeep. Nicola Mantega was groaning, trying to say something and occasionally vomiting blood. Near him, Giorgio lay still. His sister, handcuffed to the grille of the Jeep, was screaming hysterically.

Accounts of what had happened varied. Natale Arnone claimed that Giorgio had fired first, he had returned fire, and the others had then shot both Giorgio and then, in error, Mantega. The Digos men agreed that Giorgio had fired shots in their general direction, ‘classic supersonic incoming whine and then the plonk of the discharge catching up, but nowhere near us’, that Arnone had fired back, hitting Mantega, and when Giorgio ignored their orders to drop his gun they had killed him. The clearing was too small and overhung by the huge pines to bring in a medivac helicopter. An hour later, an army ambulance managed to negotiate the treacherous dirt track leading to the spot, by which time Nicola Mantega was dead.

‘ Il treno regionale 22485 proveniente da Paola viaggia con un ritardo di circa venti minuti.’

Aurelio Zen gazed up at the ring of mountains that hemmed Cosenza in on every side. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the autostrada and high-speed rail link to the national network had been constructed, but the character of cities and of their inhabitants are formed over centuries, not decades. Cosenza still viewed itself, and was viewed by others, as a backwater notable mainly for the fact that Alaric had been buried here. And he had done well, thought Zen. Whatever its shortcomings, Cosenza was an excellent place to be buried in, which is effectively what had happened to him that morning when Gaetano Monaco appeared at the Questura, bursting with confidence, energy and wisdom and eager to assume his duties and responsibilities as police chief of the province, the first of which was to show Zen the door.

‘I’m sure you did your best, but we’re not in the lagoons of Venice here!’ Monaco proclaimed. ‘No indeed! Calabria — or rather the Calabrias, as I prefer to think of this unique region, so diverse yet so cohesive, at once an infinite enigma and an endless delight — is a very special part of the world, veramente molto particulare. Molto, molto, molto! I sympathise with you, dear colleague. Your failure must pain you deeply, but I doubt whether any other outsider would have performed much better, if that is any consolation. The task you took on was simply beyond your powers. The fact is that only someone who had the good fortune to be born and to grow up here can ever hope to understand this extraordinary land and its even more extraordinary people, and know instinctively how to deal with them.’

Zen had been tempted to retort that he at least hadn’t shot himself in the foot, but in the end he’d just walked out, leaving Monaco in triumphant possession of the field. True, the raids on the two houses in San Giovanni in Fiore had gone off without a hitch, and netted a wealth of evidence as well as five of Giorgio’s suspected accomplices. True, Zen had stayed up all night interrogating the latter, and had bluffed one of them into admitting that Peter Newman had indeed been seized in a normal kidnapping-for-cash operation, but that when Mantega passed on the information that the victim’s real name was Calopezzati, Giorgio had worked himself up into a fit of rage and sworn that he must die. Pietro Ottavio was denied food and water for three days, then told that he must do penance for his family’s sins by making an arduous and humiliating pilgrimage on foot to their former stronghold in Altomonte to pray for forgiveness, following which he would be free to go.

In different circumstances, all this might have been regarded as a significant achievement. As it was, Zen had been subjected to a dressing-down by the prefetto, the magistrate investigating the case and an assortment of high officials at the Ministry in Rome, besides having to dodge a pack of newspaper and television reporters all day. Even Giovanni Sforza assiduously evaded him as though he were the carrier of some fatal virus. In the end, there had been nothing to do but leave.

‘ Il treno regionale 22485 proveniente da Paola viaggia con un ritardo di circa dieci minuti.’

A gust of wind stroked the platform with idle violence. Zen tried to visualise Lucca, and his life there with Gemma, but he couldn’t. Only this cradle-shaped tomb seemed real, all else an illusion.

‘ Buona sera, signore.’

An old lady and a boy of about fifteen stood looking at him.

‘ Signora Maria, buona sera.’

‘Allow me to present my grandson. We’re here to meet my sister. Go to the shop inside the station, Sabatino, and buy me a roll of mints. Here are five euros. You may spend the change on anything you like.’

The boy ran off.

‘Thank you,’ Maria said to Zen, once he was out of earshot.

Zen looked at her in astonishment.

‘For what?’

‘For killing that brute.’

‘But I — ’

‘It needed to be done. Now we can all rest easy.’

‘ Signora, I — ’

‘You’re a real man, the kind they don’t make any more. Your wife is a lucky woman. May God bless and keep you always.’

‘Look, I think you — ’

But Maria was no longer attending to him. Her face was averted and full of joyful expectation.

‘Ah, here comes the train!’ she said.