Michael Dibdin: Ratking

There was a crackly pause.

‘ What are you talking about? ’

‘I’m talking about the train!’

‘ I don’t know anything about any train. I’m calling to dis¬ cuss your transfer to Perugia.’

‘What? Foggia?’

The line was very poor, with heavy static and occasional cut-outs. For the hundredth time Zen wondered if it was still being tapped, and for the hundredth time he told himself that it wouldn’t make any sense, not now. He wasn’t important any more. Paranoia of that type was simply conceit turned inside out.

‘ Perugia! Perugia in Umbria! You leave tomorrow.’

What on earth was going on? Why should someone like Enrico Mancini concern himself with Zen’s humdrum activities?

‘For Perugia? But my next trip was supposed to be to Lecce, and that’s not till…’

‘ Forget about that for now. You’re being reassigned to investigative duties, Zen. Have you heard about the Miletti case? I’ll get hold of all the documentation I can and send it round in the morning with the car. But basically it sounds quite straightforward. Anyway, as from tomorrow you’re in charge.’

‘In charge of what?’

‘ Of the Miletti investigation! Are you deaf? ’

‘In Perugia?’

‘ That’s right. You’re on temporary secondment.’

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘ I beg your pardon? ’

Mancini’s voice was icy.

‘I mean, I understood that, you know…’

‘ Well? ’

‘Well, I thought I’d been permanently suspended from investigative duty.’

‘ First I’ve heard of it. In any case, such decisions are always open to review in the light of the prevailing circumstances. The Questore of Perugia has requested assistance and we have no one else available, it’s as simple as that.’

‘So it’s official.’

‘ Of course it’s official! Don’t you worry about that, Zen. Just concentrate on the job in hand. It’s important that we see results quickly, understand? We’re counting on you.’

Long after Mancini had hung up Zen stood there beside the phone, his head pressed against the wall. At length he lifted the receiver again and dialled. The number rang for a long time, but just as he was about to hang up she answered.

‘ Yes? ’

‘It’s me.’

‘ Aurelio! I wasn’t expecting to hear from you till this evening. How did it go in wherever you were this time? ’

‘Why did you take so long to answer?’

She was used to his moods by now.

‘ I’ve got my lover here. No, actually I was in the bath. I wasn’t going to bother, but then I thought it might be you.’

He grunted, and there was a brief silence.

‘Look, something’s come up. I have to leave again tomorrow and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Can we meet?’

‘ I’d love to. Shall we go out? ’

‘All right. Ottavio’s?’

‘ Fine.’

He hung up and looked round the hallway, confronting the furniture which having dominated his infancy had now returned to haunt his adult life. Everything in his apartment had been moved there from the family house in Venice when his mother had finally agreed, six years earlier, to leave. For many years she had resisted, long after it had become obvious that she could no longer manage on her own.

‘Rome? Never!’ she cried. ‘I would be like a fish out of water.’

And her gasps and shudders had made the tired phrase vivid and painful. But in the end she had been forced to give in. Her only son could not come to her. Since the Moro affair his career was nailed down, stuffed and varnished, with years of dreary routine to go before they would let him retire. And there was simply no one else, except for a few distant relatives living in what was now Yugoslavia. So she had moved, avoiding the fate she had feared by the simple expedient of bringing all her belongings with her and transforming Zen’s apartment into an aquarium from which she never emerged.

But if she was thus protected from suffocation, the effect on Zen was exactly the reverse. He had never particularly liked the apartment, in a drab, pompous street just north of the Vatican, but in Rome you had to take what you could get. The nearest he had come to a personal feeling for the place had been an appreciation of its anonymity: it had been like living in a hotel. But his mother’s arrival had changed all that, swamping the sparse furnishings provided by the landlord with possessions laden with dull memories and obscure significance. At times Zen felt that he was choking, and then his thoughts would turn to the house in Venice, ideally empty now, the rooms full of nothing but pearly light, intimations of water, the cries of children and gulls. He had promised himself that one day he would retire there, and in the meantime he was often so intensely there in spirit that he wouldn’t have been in the least surprised to learn that the place was believed to be haunted.

From the kitchen came a clatter of pans supplemented by Maria Grazia’s voice alternately berating the ancient stove, encouraging a blunt knife, singing snatches of the spring’s big hit and calling on the Madonna to witness the misery to which her life was reduced by the quality of the vegetables on offer at the local greengrocer’s. He would have to eat something here before sneaking out to meet Ellen. His mother’s birthday was in a week, he realized. He would almost certainly still be away. At all events, he would have to tell her about the change of plans, which meant hearing once again how he should have got a nice job on the railways like his father. Did she really not realize that she told him this every single time he returned? Or was she, on the contrary, having a good laugh at his expense? That was the trouble with old people, you could never be sure. That was the trouble with living with someone you loved more than anyone else in the world, but had nothing in common with now but blood and bones.

‘But I don’t understand. Surely you’re not a real policeman? I mean, you work for the Ministry, don’t you? As a bureaucrat. That’s what you told me, anyway.’

Ellen’s implication was clear: she would never have had anything to do with him if she had thought he was a ‘real’ policeman.

‘And it’s the truth. Ever since I’ve known you that’s what I’ve been doing. Going the rounds of provincial headquarters checking how many paperclips are being used, that sort of thing. Inspection duty, popularly known as Housekeeping, and just about as glamorous. The nearest I’ve got to real police work was smashing the great stolen toilet-roll racket at the Questura in Campobasso.’

She didn’t smile.

‘And before that?’

‘Well, before it was different.’

‘You were a real cop? A police officer?’

‘Yes.’

There was so much shock in her look that he could not tell what else it might contain.

‘Where was this?’ she asked eventually.

‘Oh, various places. Here, for example.’

‘You worked in the Questura, here in Rome?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Christ! Which department?’

She was looking hard at him.

‘Not the Political Branch, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

It was, of course. Ellen’s circle of expatriate acquaintances already regarded it as rather bizarre that she had got involved with an official from the Ministry of the Interior, just as Zen’s few friends were clearly at a loss to know what to make of his liaison with this American divorcee, a classic straniera with her bright little apartment in Trastevere filled with artistic bric-a-brac and books in four languages and her Fiat 500 illegally parked in the street outside. The only answer in either case had been that whatever it was, it worked for both of them. It had seemed to be the only answer necessary. But now, without the slightest warning, Ellen found herself facing the possibility that her official had once been an active member of La Politica: one of those who beat up demonstrating students and striking workers and pushed suspects out of windows, while protecting the neo-fascists responsible for the indiscriminate bombings of public squares and cafeterias and trains.