End Games - 11 (24 page)

‘I’m just telling you what everyone says.’

‘Everyone is of no use to me. What I need is someone, a specific individual prepared to come forward and identify those responsible for this crime and for the atrocities that happened in your own town shortly afterwards. I had hoped that you might be that someone,
signora
. Why else would you have come here yesterday, and again today, and spent hours on end waiting to see me?’

‘I wanted justice for Caterina. Her only child has been killed because it was tainted with the name of the family that made her life a misery, and the lives of everyone who lived around here then, if you could call it living.’

Zen glanced at his watch.

‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘It’s all I know,’ Maria replied stubbornly.

‘I don’t believe that for a moment, but I don’t intend to press you. However, I may need to get in touch at some point in the future. Doing so in the normal way might cause difficulties for your family. Do you understand my meaning?’

Maria got a pen and a used bus ticket out of her handbag, wrote down a telephone number in large, plump numerals and handed the ticket to Zen.

‘Call this number. If someone else answers, tell them that you work at the hospital and need to speak to me about the results of those tests I had. They’ll fetch me and then we can talk.’

Zen stood up to indicate that the interview was over.

‘You’re an interesting person, Maria,’ he said, using her name for the first time. ‘What you’ve said is extremely interesting. What you haven’t said might well be more interesting still. Do you know someone called Giorgio?’

Maria almost faltered then, dazzled by the feints setting up the knockout punch. But she too could hold herself together by sheer willpower.

‘It’s a very common name,’ she replied.

The chief of police seemed to acknowledge her fortitude with an ironic smile.

‘Excessively common, I’m inclined to think. The world would be a better place if there were fewer Giorgios in it. Or at least one fewer. I wish you a safe and speedy journey home.’

Since his son had made his own arrangements for the day, Professor Achille Pancrazi spent the afternoon working on a rather tricky review of a book by a former colleague at the University of Padua. He had initially been slightly taken aback by Emanuele’s announcement that he was going to spend the day with an unnamed school friend, largely because even after years of separation he still lived in fear of his ex-wife and knew that he would be held to account if anything went wrong. But of course nothing would, and frankly an interval of free time in these welcome but somewhat tiring visits was always welcome.

Needless to say, he hadn’t bothered to read Fraschetti’s latest effusion. He was familiar with both the subject and the author, so a perusal of the introduction and table of contents sufficed as far as content went. As for style, a brief skim of a few paragraphs taken at random was enough to show that his rival’s love affair with the jargon of the trade was by no means over. He was particularly amused by the constant references to ‘desire’, given that he knew for a fact that Fraschetti had never desired anyone of either sex in his life. But Pancrazi’s real problem was how to pitch his critical response, which would be published in the
Cultura
insert of a national newspaper and read by just about everyone in the scholarly world for whom the subject matter was relevant. In other words, it wasn’t so much a question of how he wanted to make his eminent – but well past his peak, despite his current fame – colleague look, but of how he wanted it to make
him
look. If he sounded too negative, then charges of professional envy could and would be brought, and not without a certain justification.

From way back in their far-off days together at Padua, Pancrazi had always considered Fraschetti his intellectual inferior. He didn’t gloat about this any more than he did about the fact that he was the taller of the two, but in the event it was he who’d had to move all the way down the boot to the University of bloody Cosenza to get his professorship while Fraschetti had landed the post in Turin that they’d both applied for, and then gone on to be a media don into the bargain. And why? Because the half-smart bastard had more connections than a telephone exchange, plus a superficial talent for memorable soundbites and an easy-to-grasp high concept, in this case the idea that the early Romans, far from having any sense of manifest destiny or even a coherent culture, had simply muddled along from year to year, the results being cleaned up much later by Livy and others into a neat corporate history for imperial PR purposes.

Achille Pancrazi had written and revised four drafts of his review and was just starting a fifth, in a marginally more nuanced tone, when his phone rang. The screen showed that the caller was his son. Despite the interruption, he answered with genuine pleasure.

‘
Ciao, Manuele!
’

Emanuele, on the other hand, sounded preoccupied.

‘There’s something I want to show you, dad. Can you come right now?’

‘Come where?’

‘To the chapel of Santa Caterina on the back road to Mendicino.’

‘Are you there now? I thought you and your friend were spending the day in town. Does he have a car?’

‘Don’t ask any more questions, dad, just come. Please!’

By now, Emanuele sounded desperate. Pancrazi considered that he knew the territory around Cosenza ‘tolerably well’, as he would have put it, but he was not familiar with that particular chapel, probably some devotional shrine of strictly local interest and no architectural merit. He had once joked to a colleague whose subject was the Early Modern period that he himself suffered from a professional version of Alzheimer’s symptoms. ‘I can remember the smallest details of everything that happened up to the fall of Constantinople, but the last five hundred years are just a blur.’ What on earth could Emanuele and his friend have found there in such a place to justify his driving out there ‘right now’? It was charming and flattering that they had even bothered to include him and his interests in their laddish day out together, but the whole thing still didn’t quite make sense.

The evening rush hour was in full swing and it took him almost forty minutes to reach the rendezvous. It was a small building, squat and mean, set off beside the road in the middle of nowhere, not a house in sight. There was no sign of another vehicle either, which meant that there had either been a mistake about the location of the rendezvous or the two young men had got tired of waiting. Achille decided to take a look inside anyway, if the door was unlocked. It was. The interior was no improvement on the thinly plastered rough stone outside, a cramped space with a few rows of pews set before a small altar. The few ex votos about were old and illegible and the air smelt musty. The place was obviously no longer used on any regular basis. He was about to turn back when the door slammed shut behind him.

‘Don’t turn round,
professò
,’ said a voice. ‘Sit down facing the altar. Keep your hands in view at all times.’

A harsh laugh.

‘Clasped in prayer, if you like.’

Achille Pancrazi knew immediately what had happened, but his first thought was for himself. God almighty, what would Reginella say when she heard? She had always despised and hated southerners, to the extent of initially refusing to allow her son to visit his father in Calabria. Achille and Emanuele had joined forces on that issue once he became old enough to take a stand on his rights and responsibilities, and they had prevailed, mocking her irrational fears, telling her that everything was different now, that it was time to wake up and stop behaving like a typical paranoid northern racist. They’d prevailed at the time, but now Reginella would exact a terrible revenge.

And why on earth was this happening to someone like him anyway? He knew that the gangs sometimes took relatively small fry, pharmacists or accountants, to keep their earnings up on a percentage basis, but it had never occurred to him that he might be on their list. All right, he was a university professor, but the pay was miserable even before the outrageous sums withheld under the divorce settlement that his ex-wife’s butch lesbian lawyer had imposed. Just look at my bank statements, he felt like saying. I may have an impressive-sounding title, but the truth is that I’m just scraping by.

‘It’s not about money,’ the man said, as though he had been reading Achille’s thoughts. ‘Just a little professional help. Things you can arrange quite easily and will cost you nothing but a little time. In return, I personally guarantee as a man of honour that you will get your son back, safe and unharmed.’

‘When?’

‘Once you have done what we ask.’

‘Yes, of course, only … You see, he’s due back at the weekend.’

‘Back where?’

‘To his mother. She’ll kill me if he’s still missing when she finds out what’s happened.’

The man laughed again.

‘Maybe we should have taken her as well!’

‘Could you do that?’ Achille found himself asking.

‘I’m not interested in your domestic problems. But it’s essential to our agreement that it remains private. If you or your wife or anyone else informs the authorities, then Emanuele will be returned to you one piece at a time, wrapped in plastic food bags. Do you understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘When we wish to contact you, we shall call your home number on your son’s mobile. If I suspect that either number is being monitored by the police, out come the skinning and butchering knives. The same if you fail to follow our instructions to the letter and on time. Are you still following me?’

The man’s patronising tone made Pancrazi really angry for the first time.

‘I’m not stupid, you know!’

‘I hope not. What we want is some old Roman treasure.’

‘Treasure?’ breathed Pancrazi faintly.

‘Gold cups, diamond jewellery, what do I know? But it has to be genuine, the real thing, good enough to pass examination by an expert.’

‘What period are we talking about here? Late republic? Early empire?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’ the man shouted.

‘Of course,’ murmured Pancrazi mildly. ‘Not your area of competence.’

There followed a silence so long that Pancrazi began to think that the man had left as silently as he arrived, until he spoke again.

‘Alaric.’

‘What about him?’

‘When did he live?’

‘Late fourth to early fifth century, roughly. The exact dates are a matter of some dispute, but a recent paper by Schöndorf suggests that –’

‘Okay, the stuff has to be older than that.’

‘And where am I supposed to get it?’

‘Not my problem,
professò
. But that’s what you teach, isn’t it? What you profess. The people who run the museums must give you a chance to handle the merchandise once in a while. Well, take that chance, use your wits and wait for me to call.’

‘Then what happens?’

‘We borrow the sample for a few days, then return it to you and you take it back to wherever you got it.’

‘What guarantee do I have that you’ll return it?’

The man laughed once more.

‘None whatever. But if you don’t deliver within the next forty-eight hours, your son will be returned to you in convenient bite-sized chunks. Simmer slowly in a good tomato sauce and you’ll have yourself a meal. You might want to invite your ex-wife. There’ll be plenty.’

Except for the looming presence of Natale Arnone, in full uniform and fingering the automatic pistol in the white holster attached to the diagonal strap across his ample chest, the scene of Zen’s first interview with Nicola Mantega was identical to that of the previous one with Maria. The atmosphere, however, could not have been more different. The two principals had both removed their ties and unbuttoned their shirts. The air was a broth of smoke, spent breath and body odours, seasoned with fear.

‘You’ve been a silly boy, Mantega,’ Zen said quietly. ‘It goes without saying that you’re a total waste of space from a moral and legal point of view, but I have to deal with that every day in my job and by now I’m hardened to it. What I can’t tolerate is sheer carelessness, perhaps because it calls into question my own reason for living. Evil is one thing, but a drunk driver who persistently takes blind corners on the wrong side of the road disturbs me.’

Mantega sat hunched in his chair like a resilient stuffed toy. He knew how this game was played. Zen gestured to Arnone.

‘Again.’

The young inspector crossed the room to the bank of electronic equipment and pressed a button. Mantega’s voice issued from the loudspeakers attached to the computer terminal on Zen’s desk, the recording of the call he had made on Tom Newman’s mobile to the house in San Giovanni in Fiore where Giorgio’s calls were received.

‘You crazy bastard! What do you think you’re doing? Newman’s son just told me that his father’s dead. Well, that’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned! I trusted you, Giorgio, and now I feel betrayed. It’s all very well for you, lying low with your friends out of harm’s way. I’m the one the cops are going to put through the mincer. If they do, and I still haven’t heard from you, I’ll tell them everything I know. Names, numbers, dates, times, places, the lot! And don’t think you can blackmail me with that video. That was about a kidnapping. This is manslaughter at the very least, and probably murder. I had nothing to do with that and I’m sure as hell not taking the blame. I don’t owe you anything and I shall take all necessary measures to protect my own position, so get in touch by tomorrow at the latest. If you don’t, all bets are off, and you’ll find out just what I’m –’

Aurelio Zen came to stand directly over Nicola Mantega.

‘So did he?’

Realising that silence and inertia would no longer do, that a move was required, Mantega glanced up at Zen with an expression of polite confusion.

‘Did who do what?’

‘Did Giorgio get in touch with you?’

‘No.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Zen commented. ‘Giorgio is certainly evil and possibly mad, but he isn’t stupid and doesn’t want to be associated with imbeciles. And who shall blame him?’