Michael Dibdin - Ratking

‘You see, dottore?’ Zen remarked ironically. ‘I told you I knew where you were going.’

It was suffocatingly hot. The great mounds of bricks were high enough to prevent the slightest breeze from entering but not to give any shade from the sun. Silvio could feel little rivulets of sweat running down the creases and furrows in his body, trickling through the hairy parts and soaking into his underclothes.

‘Naturally I didn’t just happen to be waiting at that bend in the road by pure coincidence,’ Zen went on.

‘It’s a plot!’ Silvio muttered.

‘Yes, it’s a plot. But you’re only the means, not the end. All I need from you is your signature on these papers.’

Zen handed him the clipboard. The sun made a dazzling blank of the page, and Silvio had to turn so that the clipboard was in his shadow before he was able to make out anything except the crest printed at the top. Even then it took him a long time to see what it was about, because of the florid formulas and the stilted tone of the text. When understanding suddenly came he almost cried out with a pain as different from the gaudy agonies of his fantasies as a gallon of make-up blood is from a drop of the real thing.

He had never forgotten his mother’s strict orders not to venture into the site where he had first experienced those horrid thrills, and when she was taken from him a few years later he knew that he was being punished for his disobedience. Not that this stopped him indulging; on the contrary, guilt made his forbidden pleasures taste still sourer and stronger. But the gentle hurt of her absence was something else. Nothing could assuage that, until Ivy came. And now…

‘You must be out of your mind!’

Unfortunately, as so often happened when he got angry, his voice let him down, and the words emerged as an imperious squeak.

‘It’s nothing to do with me, dottore,’ Zen assured him. ‘I’m only following orders.’

‘Whose orders?’

‘Can’t you work it out for yourself?’

Silvio struggled to summon up the small residue of cunning which he had inherited from his father. This man had known that he would be passing that spot on the road. Therefore he must have known that he was going to Crepi’s, although he claimed that Crepi himself hadn’t known. In other words, the summons from Spinelli had been nothing but a ruse designed to draw him into an ambush. So the banker must be part of the plot. But he was only a minor figure, like this man Zen. Who controlled them both? The obvious answer was Gianluigi Santucci, the banker’s patron. But Gianluigi wouldn’t waste his energy on petty vendettas of this type. No, it could only be…

‘Cinzia,’ he murmured.

Silvio threw the clipboard to the ground at Zen’s feet.

‘You can go fuck yourself.’

‘We don’t expect you to do it for nothing, of course,’ Zen said mildly, dusting down the papers.

‘You’re trying to bribe me?’

Although eminently unworldly in his way, Silvio was enough of a Miletti to resent the idea that anyone would presume to patronize him financially.

‘No, it’s a question of a few souvenirs, that’s all. Souvenirs of Berlin.’

Zen took two photographs from the large yellow envelope and held them up.

Instantly Silvio’s real pain and righteous anger were overwhelmed by stronger sensations. To think that all the time this beast had known, had seen!

‘No, I won’t do it!’

He knew very well that this petulant refusal wasn’t worth the paper it was wiped with, as dear Gerhard would put it. But Zen seemed to have been taken in.

‘In that case I’m afraid that prints of these photographs will begin to circulate among friends and enemies of the Miletti family in Perugia and elsewhere. Just imagine the scene, dottore! There they are, early in the morning, still dewy-eyed over that first cup of coffee, when bang! Hello! What’s this? Good God! It looks like Silvio Miletti waiting for someone to come and take a dump on him! What do you think their reaction is going to be, dottore? Oh, well, it takes all sorts, different strokes for different folks, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it?’

Silvio was literally speechless. The idea of those images being seen by people who inhabited a quite separate zone of his life, whom he met at receptions and conferences, at dinners and concerts, who greeted him on the Corso every day! Yes, he would have to sign, no question about that. The revelation of his secret pleasures to the whole of Perugia would be a humiliation so monumental, so absolute, so perfect, that he knew he would never survive the excitement it would generate.

But at the thought of what he was about to do, these thrills faded and the real pain returned.

‘But it’s all lies! Filthy obscene lies and nothing else!’

To his amazement, Zen winked conspiratorially.

‘Of course it is! That’s why it doesn’t matter. In fact the kidnappers are already under arrest in Florence. They’ve confessed to the whole thing. Believe me, dottore, if I thought for a single moment that these allegations would be taken seriously, I’d never have agreed to be a party to this! But it’s just a question of stirring up a bit of scandal, a bit of dirt. Quite harmless really.’

The man’s whinging hypocrisy made Silvio feel sick, but what he said made sense. If the gang had confessed then the papers he was being asked to sign were totally worthless except precisely to someone like Cinzia, someone who would stoop to any trick to sully the honour of the woman he loved and whose love sustained him. But they would deal with Cinzia later. Meanwhile he must get this over with and warn Ivy immediately. It was awful to think how she might suffer if she was suddenly confronted with his apparent treachery.

‘Just put your name on the dotted line at the bottom, dottore,’ Zen prompted. ‘Where it says that you made the statement freely and voluntarily.’

Silvio took out his pen and signed. When the yellow envelope was safe in his hands he turned to Zen.

‘I may be dirty in super?cial ways,’ he remarked, ‘but you’re dirty through and through! You’re a filthy putrid rancid cesspit, a walking shit-heap.’

The final proof of the official’s total degeneracy was that he didn’t even try to defend himself, merely getting into the waiting car, his despicable job done. Silvio followed, but more slowly. Despite the varied splendours and miseries of his existence, the pleasure of moral superiority was one that very rarely came his way. As a connoisseur of exotic sensations he was determined to savour it to the utmost.

She almost changed her mind at the last moment. It was the place itself that did it, the smell of cheap power, making her realize just how far she had come since those early days, the days of secretarial work and English lessons. The world Ivy lived in now was drenched in power too, of course, but quite different from the low-grade kind that pervaded places where you came to post a parcel or cash a cheque or renew your residence permit. How she’d always hated the bitter, envious midgets who patrol these internal boundaries of the state, malicious goblins wringing the most out of their single dingy magic spell. Her Italian friends claimed to feel the same way, but Ivy had never been convinced. The opium of these people was not religion but power, or rather power was their religion. Everyone believed, everyone was hooked. And everyone was rewarded with at least a tiny scrap of the stuff, enough to make them feel needed. What people hated in the system was being subjected to others’ power, but they would all resist any change which threatened to modify or limit their own. The situation was thus both stable and rewarding, especially for those who were rich in power and could bypass it with a few phone calls, a hint dropped here, a threat there. At length Ivy had come to appreciate its advantages, and to realize that she could make just as good use of them as the natives, if not rather better in fact. In the end she’d come to admire the Italians as the great realists who saw life as it really was, free of the crippling hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxon world in which she had been brought up.