Michael Dibdin - End games

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‘Giorgio?’ he said when the number answered. ‘Nicola. He’s arrived.’

‘Too late. Tomorrow, the way we arranged.’

By now the altercation across the street had begun to wind down. The two bikers picked up their machine, revved up the engine and tested the brakes and lights. The van driver was intently scrutinising the front end of his vehicle, picking at the paintwork with his thumbnail. Meanwhile, in the back of the van the fourth member of the team lowered the directional microphone from the circle of plastic mesh forming the centre of one of the zeroes in the phone number emblazoned outside.

Nicola Mantega returned to his car and drove off just as a deafening blast from the MotoGuzzi’s twin exhaust consigned all van drivers to the lowest circle of hell. But the motorcycle had also been modified, and when it doubled back to follow the Alfa up to Mantega’s villa in the foothills above the city, its engine sounded no louder than a kitten’s purr.

Ever since he arrived in Cosenza, Aurelio Zen had been sleeping badly. This was not the fault of the weather, although a few weeks earlier the thermometer had been nudging forty, nor of his accommodation, an efficient, soulless apartment maintained by the police for the use of visiting officers in one of the concrete blocks that disfigured the area around the Questura. It consisted of a sitting room and kitchenette with a dining area, two bedrooms, one of which Zen used as a study, and the best-equipped bathroom he had ever seen. A maid came once a week to clean the floor and change the bedding, and he had arranged for her to wash and iron his clothing as well. Apart from that, he was left entirely alone. The apartment was quiet, air-conditioned and just a few minutes’ walk from his office.

Despite this, he had been sleeping badly, waking for no apparent reason and dreaming too much and far too vividly. Zen had never paid much attention to his dreams, but now they were thrusting themselves on his attention like a swarm of gypsy beggars, most of all in the intermediate state between sleep and waking when he was partly conscious but completely defenceless. As soon as he surfaced sufficiently to realise what was happening, he climbed out of bed, walked through to the state-of-the-art bathroom and took a cool shower before finishing off in a torrent of water as hot as he could bear. Standing naked in the well-equipped kitchen, he then filled the caffetiera and put it on the flame, lit his first cigarette of the day and phoned his wife in Lucca before she left home to open her pharmacy.

Zen had considered asking her to send him some sleeping pills, but he disliked admitting a weakness. Besides, he and Gemma had an unspoken agreement to keep their professional and personal lives separate as far as possible. In fact, he would have found it very difficult to say what they did talk about in these daily ten-to fifteen-minute conversations that seemed to flow along as effortlessly as a river and left him feeling calm, capable and ready to face the day. Having slurped down his muddy coffee, he then shaved, got dressed and left for work. Stepping out into the street was the final phase of his psychic detox ritual. Life in Calabria was by no means perfect, but the spectres and ghouls which tormented his nights could find no refuge in its merciless, crystalline light.

The next stop was a cafe and pastry shop called Dolci Idee. The display cases were laden with sugary iced cakes and buns of every description, but a sweet tooth was one item that didn’t figure on Zen’s sin list. He consumed a double espresso amaro, and then walked along one and a half blocks of the grid pattern on which the new city of Cosenza was constructed, past the church of Santa Teresa, a modern monstrosity with Romanesque pretensions, to the Questura. If the devotees of the saint had been making one sort of statement, those faithful to the cult of the state had made another, just as forceful and arguably more attractive, in the new provincial headquarters of the Polizia di Stato. This dated from the 1980s and was a wide, low building, windowless below the second storey and sheathed in ochre coloured metal sheets which were said to be bomb-proof.

The interior resembled the offices of a major business corporation rather than the grandiose follies of the Fascist era and the recycled baroque palazzi with which Zen was familiar. He tried to console himself with the thought that, as the proverb had it, everything had changed so that nothing would change, but something told him — was this the reason for those half-awake nightmares? — that something had indeed changed, and that there was no place for people like him in the new scheme of things. The basic design was open plan, with cubicles, a flat-screen computer monitor on every desk, bare walls, grey filing cabinets, corkboards stuck with memos, filtered lighting and furniture that might have been bought at Ikea. The building was nominally air-conditioned, but the system kept breaking down and none of the windows could be opened.

By virtue of his rank, Zen had an office all to himself, but with interior windows instead of walls as part of the force’s new transparent ethos. These could be, and in Zen’s case were, covered by slatted blinds which he always kept closed. On his desk that morning was a transcript of the recording made by the Digos team the night before of Nicola Mantega’s phone call to someone named Giorgio. The interest of this was not so much what Mantega had said, although that sounded conspiratorially cryptic, as the manner in which contact had been established. An eminent notaio who drove an Alfa Romeo 159 Q4 and had three mobile phones and two land lines — Zen knew, since he had ordered interceptions on all of them — did not pull up at a public phone box after midnight to make a call unless he had something to hide. Mantega clearly suspected that his private and business phones might be tapped, but not that he was being followed. All of which fitted in nicely with Zen’s view of him as a semi-competent provincial operator who knew far more than he had admitted about Newman’s disappearance.

There was a discreet knock at the door.

‘ Avanti! ’

Natale Arnone entered.

‘Here’s the material you requested, sir. And there’s some foreigner down at the desk demanding to speak to the officer in charge of the Newman case. Claims to be the victim’s son.’

‘In what language?’

‘Italian. He’s pretty fluent, but comes across as a bit rozzo. Strident and pushy. Do you want me to deal with him?’

‘I think an overwrought manner is forgivable under the circumstances. Send him up.’

Zen was looking through the paperwork which had accumulated overnight when Thomas Newman was shown in. After Arnone’s warning, Zen had expected someone resembling the classic American football player: a thick cylindrical skull welded to massive shoulders, no neck, hairy piano-leg limbs and a voice like the brass section of a 1930s big band at full discordant climax. He was confronted instead by a lithe, energetic young man whose body made no exaggerated claims and was in any case trumped by the face of a mischievous but charming cherub with a mass of glossy black curls cut negligently long. Zen invited his visitor to be seated and gestured Arnone to leave. Newman eyed the crammed ashtray on Zen’s desk.

‘May I smoke? I thought it was illegal now.’

‘It is.’

‘But you are a policeman.’

‘Exactly.’

They exchanged a glance, and Zen felt that subliminal clink of contact with another intelligence.

‘What a splendid city!’ exclaimed Newman. ‘I woke early, because of the time difference, and then went out and just walked around for hours. The light, the landscape, the buildings, the people — it all seemed magical, yet somehow familiar.’

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