Michael Dibdin - Ratking

‘All the same, so much scheming just to bring one guilty person to justice!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you always go to this much trouble?’

‘Not usually, no. But I was practically being accused of responsibility for Miletti’s death myself. Besides…’

‘What?’

Zen had been going to say that he had personal reasons for wishing fathers’ deaths to be avenged, but he realized that it might sound as if he was fishing for sympathy.

‘It’s not that I’m criticizing you, Aurelio,’ Ellen went on. ‘I’m just staggered, as always, at the way this country works.’

‘Oh, not that again!’

It was intended as a joke, but it misfired.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a tone that was half contrite and half defiant. ‘I won’t say another word.’

She served the hamburgers wrapped in sheets of kitchen paper and brought a litre bottle of Peroni from the fridge. The hamburgers were an unhappy hybrid of American and European elements. The meat, processed cheese and ketchup tried to be as cheerfully undemanding as a good hamburger should, but were shouted down by the Dijon mustard, the pungent onions and the chewy rolls.

Zen began dismantling his hamburger, eating the more appetizing bits with the fork and discarding the rest. Ellen wolfed hers down as though her life depended on it. After a few minutes she lit another cigarette without asking. He took the opportunity to push his plate away.

‘Don’t you like it?’

She sounded almost pleased.

‘It’s delicious. But I had to eat something with my mother. You know how it is.’

Ellen laughed quietly.

‘I surely do.’

The conversation stalled, as if they were two strangers who had exhausted the few topics they had in common.

‘Anyway, what have you been up to?’ he asked her.

She refilled her glass with beer.

‘Well…’

She broke off to puff at her cigarette. But he already knew what she was going to say. She had met someone else, these things happened, she’d been meaning to tell him for some time, she hoped they would remain friends. This was what he had glimpsed earlier, the answer to the question of what was making her act in this odd way, of what it was that had taken her over. The only possible answer was another man.

‘The thing is, I’m going home, Aurelio.’

But you are at home, he thought. Then he realized what she meant.

‘For a holiday?’

She shook her head.

‘You’re joking,’ he said.

She walked over to the glass jars where she kept rice and pulses, pulled out an envelope tucked under one and handed it to him. ‘Whether you travel for business or pleasure, MONDITURIST!’ it read. ‘Our business is to make travelling a pleasure!’ Inside there was an airline ticket to New York in her name.

‘I decided one night last week. For some reason I had woken up and then I couldn’t get back to sleep. I just lay there and thought about this and that. And it suddenly struck me how foreign I feel here, and what that was doing to me.’

She paused, biting one fingernail.

‘People who have been exiles too long seem to end up as either zombies or vampires. I don’t want that to happen to me.’

There was a roar from the street outside as a metal shutter was hauled down, then a gentler rumble as it was eased into position and the lock attached. The greengrocer opposite was closing up and going home to his family.

‘I think we should get married,’ Zen said, to his total astonishment.

Ellen gave a yelp of laughter.

‘Married?’

One of the other tenants had put on some rock music whose bass notes penetrated to where they sat as a series of dull thumps. Somewhere else, seemingly quite unrelated to them, a tinny melody line faintly wailed.

‘You don’t know how many times I’ve imagined that you might say this, Aurelio,’ Ellen sighed. ‘I always thought that it was the one thing needed to make everything right.’

‘It is. It will.’

But his voice lacked conviction, even to himself.

He looked around slowly, conscious that all this was about to join his huge gallery of memories. The latest addition to our collection. A significant acquisition. ‘They’re turning the whole city into a museum,’ Cinzia Miletti had complained. But it wasn’t only cities that suffered that fate.

‘I’d better go.’

She made no attempt to stop him.

‘I’m sorry, Aurelio. I really am.’

The rain had almost stopped. Zen stood waiting at the tram stop, his mind completely blank. The shock of what had just happened was so severe that he found it literally impossible to think about. The last thing he could clearly remember was eating the hamburger and telling Ellen about the Miletti case. He had not mentioned the most recent development, which had occurred just the day before.

The arrest of Ivy Cook had had the unusual effect of uniting both sides of the political spectrum. On the one hand there was talk of a carefully orchestrated attempt by the forces of the Left to undermine the Milettis, on the other of a typically cynical solution by the Right to the embarrassing problem of the family’s involvement in Ruggiero’s death. In short, whatever your political leanings, Ivy Cook appeared as a humble employee who was being made to carry the can for others, a foreigner without influence or power, the perfect scapegoat. Di Leonardo, the Deputy Public Prosecutor, contributed to the debate with some widely quoted off-the-record criticisms of ‘serious irregularities in the procedures adopted by the police’, Senator Gianpiero Rossi publicly expressed the opinion that the tape recording was inadmissible evidence since it had neither been authorized by the judiciary nor made on official equipment, while Pietro Miletti flew back from London to demand an end to ‘the continual harassment of the Miletti family and their dependants’. The net result was that Rosella Foria had finally granted an application for Ivy Cook’s release on bail pending a full investigation. The case still hung in the balance, but Ivy was free.

The tram arrived and Zen was rumbled and jolted across the Tiber, over the Aventine hill and past the Colosseum to Porta Maggiore. He then walked three blocks to the street where Gilberto Nieddu lived with a dark-haired beauty who treated him with bantering humour, as though Gilberto’s clumsy attempts to woo her aroused nothing but her amusement. In fact they had been married eight years and had four children, who sat open-mouthed and wide-eyed as Uncle Aurelio described the dramatic end of his relationship with ‘ l’americana ’.

Rosella Nieddu diagnosed a lack of proper food and made Zen eat a bowl of ravioli, while Gilberto opened a bottle of the smooth and lethal rose made by a relative of his. Then the children were packed off to bed and the adults spent the evening playing cards.

‘Unlucky at love, lucky at cards,’ Gilberto joked to his friend, but as usual Rosella Nieddu easily beat both of them, even with one eye on the television. Then the phone rang, and while the Sardinian went to answer it Rosella changed channels for the late movie, catching the end of the late-night newscast. There were stories about the seizure of a shipment of heroin by the Customs in Naples, a conference on the economic problems of the Third World due to open in Rome the following afternoon and a trade fair promoting Italian agricultural machinery which had just opened in Genoa.

‘ And finally the main news again. In a dramatic develop ment in the Miletti murder case, Signora Ivy Cook, the foreign woman formerly being held in connection with this crime today failed to report to the police in Perugia as laid down in the conditions of her release. According to as yet unconfirmed reports she may already have left the country. Investigators are attempting to trace the person who chartered a light aircraft from Perugia to an airfield in Austria late this afternoon. And now for a round-up of the weekend sports action here’s…’