Michael Dibdin - Ratking

Ivy didn’t necessarily want to work at the hospital for ever, but she did want to be the one who would decide if she would or not, and that meant getting a secure position. The director had the granting of such posts, but he knew what they were worth and wasn’t going to hand them out to some foreigner when the telephone was ringing off the hook with locals offering him this that and the other if he would see to it that Tizio or Cosetta was fixed up. So Ivy bided her time and kept her eyes and ears open, waiting for events to take her where she wanted to go.

Then one day her employer came storming into the poky annexe where she worked and grilled her for over half an hour about some documents which he said had disappeared. From a man who habitually paraded his velvet gloves this display of iron fist was disconcerting, the more so in that Ivy knew nothing of the existence of the documents, never mind their disappearance. But now she did, and she knew that he half-suspected her of having taken them. All of which added up to the opportunity she had been waiting for, because despite this, the porter’s prophecy was not fulfilled. Her job hung on a whim, but it was not indulged. The conclusion was obvious, and brought with it the reflection that her employer was not as clever as she had previously thought.

That afternoon she returned to the hospital after lunch, supposedly to catch up on her work. The other porter who, just to balance things out, was a Stalinist, responded to her request for the key to the supply cupboard as she had known he would, by tossing her a huge bunch opening every door on the top floor of the building. Identifying and labelling the keys was a task which the porters considered too onerous to undertake, and since their jobs were not precarious no one could make them do so. So if anyone wanted the spare key to a particular room they were given the bunch for the entire floor in question and had to find the key themselves.

It took Ivy twelve minutes to do so, but that was the hardest part of the whole business. Men did not hide things very well, she knew. Their minds ran in predictable ways. Once inside the director’s office she quickly found the spare key to the filing cabinet, taped to the back of it, and a few seconds later the missing documents were in her hand. They had been where she had known they must be, lying on the floor of the metal drawer. They had been carelessly replaced between two files and had then worked their way down as the drawer was opened and closed. It was obvious, it happened all the time, and yet her employer had not thought of it. Part of the reason was that predictability of the male mind she had already noted, but it was also due to a structural defect of the system under which they all lived. The great weakness of paranoia is that it cannot take account of chance. Because the documents were sensitive and might be damaging to him if they fell into the wrong hands, the director had assumed that their disappearance must have been due to a deliberate act on someone’s part. To think otherwise would have been to run the risk of being exposed as gullible and unrealistic, the very things that a man in his position could least afford to be.

Back home in her little flat Ivy examined the documents at her leisure. They looked innocuous enough, mere lists of figures and dates and initials, but the next morning before work she dropped into her bank, opened a safety deposit box and placed the documents in it. She did well, for when she got home she found that her flat had been ransacked.

That evening she phoned her employer, rambling on incoherently about how she couldn’t go on living in an atmosphere of insecurity and lack of trust, of groundless accusations and the perpetual fear of losing her job. If she had a secure position perhaps she would feel differently, but as it was, well, she didn’t know what she might do. Really, she felt capable of almost anything.

A month later her post was made permanent.

She’d done it once, and if she could do it once then couldn’t she do it again? But it wasn’t as simple as that. The situation was quite different this time. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when she remembered Zen’s panicky orders about keeping her ‘in quarantine’. As though anyone was going to lift a finger to save her! Didn’t he understand that she had no support whatever apart from Silvio? Her relationship had always been exclusively with him. That was the way he had wanted it. Evidently there was something about her that attracted homosexuals, perhaps the same thing that repelled the young men she would have preferred to attract. But you had to make the best of things, and Silvio Miletti was a pretty good catch, all things considered.

Ironically enough, it had been Ivy’s boss at the hospital who had introduced her to Silvio. That was before the two men fell out over their mutual infatuation with a young German called Gerhard Mayer. Never one to do things by halves, Silvio had deprived his rival not only of Mayer’s services but of Ivy’s as well. For three years now they had been a couple in all respects but one. Ivy’s only stipulation had been to insist on keeping her job at the hospital, although the work was actually done by a succession of temporary secretaries paid through a Miletti subsidiary. It was partly a form of insurance to hold on to the salaried position and the promise of a pension that went with it, but it was mostly spite. The director had not been very happy about the arrangement, to say the least, but what with the Miletti’s leaning on him from one side and the fear that the missing documents might one day surface gnawing at him from the other, he had ended by agreeing.

Silvio and Ivy had proved to be a very effective couple, complementing each other perfectly. She had the vision, the will, the patience; he had the power, the contacts, and the influence. So far their exploits had been relatively modest. The anonymous letter she’d sent to the investigating magistrate Bartocci, alleging that the kidnapping was a put-up job, was a typical example. Ivy’s method was to seize the opportunity when it arose, and meanwhile to stir things up so that opportunities were more likely to arise. The letter to Bartocci had in fact succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, for it had indirectly created the circumstances leading to Ruggiero Miletti’s death, which had in turn removed the one remaining impediment to the brilliant future which beckoned to her and Silvio.

Or rather had seemed to beckon, until just a few hours ago. For now the unthinkable had occurred, the one eventuality which Ivy had left out of her calculations. Cautiously at first, but with increasing confidence as she recognized Silvio’s dependence on her, she had sacrificed all her minor allegiances to this one relationship, which offered far more than all the others put together. It was often a considerable effort to remember that despite his fecklessness and petulance, his timidity and sloth, Silvio was a man of considerable power. And that power was now at her disposal, to use as though it were her own. It was a dizzying sensation, like finding yourself at the controls of a jet after a lifetime of flying gliders. Only now did she appreciate the more sinister implications of this image. Gliders rode the buoyant winds, versatile and questing, finding alternative currents if one failed, but when jets went wrong disaster was swift and inevitable. But it had never seemed possible that anything could go wrong. Silvio needed her as he needed food and drink, not to mention more esoteric satisfactions. He could no more deny her than he could deny himself.

At least, so she’d always supposed. But apparently she’d been mistaken, and with catastrophic results. The police could relax. No one would be pulling strings on her behalf, for she had deliberately cut them all except for those which bound her to Silvio. And he – even now she could hardly bring herself to believe it! – had not merely abandoned her but turned viciously against her, perjuring himself in the vilest way so that she could be thrown into a common lock-up like some gypsy beggar. No, Zen had nothing to worry about on that score!