End Games - 11 (34 page)

With a twinkly smile, the
bergamasco
vanished into his office while Zen stomped back to his. As he crossed the open-plan area in the centre of the building, Natale Arnone emerged from one of the cubicles.

‘Ah, there you are, sir! It looks as though things are finally starting to move. Instead of going straight to his office this morning, Nicola Mantega drove to the square by the bus station and took a large cardboard box into Fratelli Girimonti. He was inside just a few minutes, then proceeded to a residential building facing Piazza del Duomo up in the old centre, where he delivered an envelope to the mailbox of an apartment owned by Achille Pancrazi, Professor of Ancient History at the university. Further enquiries revealed that Professor Pancrazi left yesterday on a flight for Milan, accompanied by his teenage son Emanuele, and has not yet returned.’

Zen lit a cigarette, as much for the symbolic warmth it represented as for the nicotine it contained. The Questura’s air-conditioning system had now been raised from the dead, so instead of his office being as sweatily airless as one of those containers in which illegal immigrants were found from time to time, it resembled the cold hold in a frozen-vegetable factory.

‘We’ll need to have a word with the professor at some point,’ Zen remarked, ‘but there’s no hurry. What did our Nicola do after that?’

‘He phoned the Americans and proposed lunch in a restaurant at San Lùcido, on the coast just outside Paola.’

‘He used the phone we gave him?’

‘Yes. He appears to be co-operating in that respect.’

‘“Appears” may well be the operative word, Arnone.’

‘He and the two Americans, Signor Manchu and young Tommaso, proceeded to the restaurant, where they remained for approximately ninety minutes. Unfortunately the nature of the situation was such that it proved impossible for our surveillance team to record the conversation without the risk of disclosing their own presence.’

‘But Mantega presumably called in to report on these developments, as per the terms of his conditional release.’

‘No, sir.’

A bomb exploded overhead, leaving their ears ringing and Zen’s office sunk in near-darkness as the electricity went out.

‘
Gesù Giuseppe e Maria cacciati a jettatura e ra casa mia
,’ muttered Natale Arnone, making not the sign of the cross but the two-fingered gesture to ward off evil.

‘What did Mantega do next?’ Zen asked casually.

‘He … he, er, proceeded …’

‘Can’t you just say “went”, Arnone? You’re not in court, you know.’

‘Sorry, sir. He went to a village called Grimaldi, about twenty kilometres south of here, where he visited a famous goldsmith, Michele Biafora. His work has been displayed in Naples, even in Rome.
Madonna, che pioggia!
It never used to rain like this.’

‘Why did he go there?’

‘We don’t know. Mantega hasn’t reported in, and once again our people couldn’t get close enough to observe the encounter. But we could easily pull Biafora in and question him directly.’

‘No, no. This is not an operation that can be performed incrementally. When the time comes, it will be all or nothing. Afterwards we can pick up the pieces, such as
il professore
and this goldsmith, at our leisure.’

They stood in silence for a moment, during which a dim, sickly, fuddled light made itself apparent in the room.

‘Ah, they’ve got the emergency generator working!’ Arnone cried with some pride.

‘Sort of,’ Zen replied. ‘Where’s Mantega now?’

‘Back at his office. Oh, one more thing. He also called young Newman, but not on his dedicated phone. He stopped at a service station on the
autostrada
and used a payphone. We picked up the intercept on Newman’s phone.’

Another series of spectacular rumbles stunned their ears, as if the remaining weakened masonry from the shattered dam were now tumbling down into the flooded valley below.

‘He asked what Tommaso was doing this evening,’ Arnone added.

‘Did he say why?’

‘No, and the American didn’t ask. He told Mantega that he would be spending the evening with his girlfriend. That’s the Digos agent you assigned to that task, Mirella Kodra.’

Zen noted the look on Arnone’s face.

‘Are you jealous?’ he enquired with a hint of malice.

‘No, no! Those Digos girls turn up their noses at ordinary cops like me. Besides, with a name like that she must be from one of the Albanian communities here. Those people are weird. It would never work out.’

He stifled a laugh.

‘Apparently that guy she teams up with when they need a young couple is openly gay. I heard he stuck his tongue in her mouth during one of their fake clinches. Mirella spat in his face and told him to go and ram a gerbil up his boyfriend’s arse!’

Arnone burst into further laughter, from the belly this time, then froze.

‘Sorry, sir. Don’t know what came over me.’

Zen had a pretty good idea, but did not comment on this aspect of the matter.

‘Very good, Arnone. Now then, I need to trace all persons by the name of Fardella or some dialect version thereof who were either born or have ever been resident in San Giovanni in Fiore. Check our own records, then get on to the town council. But discreetly. Make it sound like a routine bureaucratic enquiry of some urgency but no real significance. Report back as soon as possible.’

‘
Subito, signore!
’

Once Arnone had left, Zen called his wife.

‘It looks as though I’ll be home soon,’ he said.

‘Shall I put on the pasta?’ Gemma asked.

‘Not that soon, silly. But I’ve been reliably informed that my temporary posting here has just about reached the end of its shelf life.’

‘Good. I’ve been rather missing you. You’re an awful person to have around, Aurelio, but when you aren’t here life seems a bit boring.’

‘Accidie is a mortal sin, my child, a wilful failure to delight in God’s creation.’

‘On second thoughts, can’t you get transferred somewhere else? Maybe Iraq.’

‘I imagine that one of the few things the Iraqis don’t have to worry about at present is feeling bored.’

‘What kind of sauce do you want on the pasta?’

‘Anything you like, my love, as long as no tomatoes are involved.’

Mirella and Tom were walking up an inclined alley in the old town when the attack occurred. The evening had been a success so far, in Tom’s opinion, and he was looking forward to the rest of it. Mirella had suggested a restaurant he hadn’t known about, in the cellars of an ancient building in a mediaeval suburb called Arenella, outside the original city walls on the far side of the river. As soon as they entered the wide, low vaulted space, Tom realised that this was where he should have been eating all along.

How does one tell, he thought as they were shown to a table at the centre of the action, yet just far enough away from the glowing bed of hardwood embers covered by a wrought-iron grill where gigantic steaks were sizzling. In some indefinable way everything just felt and smelt right. There was an air of seriousness about both the diners and the waiters, although neither were in any obvious sense taking themselves seriously. Whatever that quality was, it was as much taken for granted on both sides as the silverware and glasses on the tables, or indeed the vaccination scar on Mirella’s arm. Her hair was loose and frizzy this evening, and she was wearing a sleeveless black satin top which displayed her bosom and those magnificent arms, on one of which, high up, appeared a tiny pale star that would never tan: shiny, almost translucent, infinitely touching and lovely.

No sooner were they seated than cuts of air-cured ham and other antipasti appeared on the table, together with freshly baked breadsticks and a carafe of water ‘from my own spring in the mountains’, the owner proclaimed with just the right air of arrogant nonchalance. He then announced that today he had managed to procure a supply of early mushrooms brought on by the recent unseasonable rain in the beech forests all around, and proposed a salad of
òvali
and
rositi
– ‘the finest for flavour’ – followed by pasta with more mushrooms and then a shared
fiorentina
steak, ‘since you are a couple, so young, so handsome and with such healthy appetites!’ His virtual commands having been approved, the owner bustled off to boss some other guests around while Tom and Mirella ate their way through shaved raw white and pink mushrooms sprinkled with oil and lemon juice, ribbons of home-made egg pasta overlaid with chunks of unctuous
porcini
, the best beef Tom had ever tasted, a fabulous salad, aged ewe’s-milk cheese and the slabs of Amedei dark chocolate – ‘seventy per cent pure cocoa’ the owner informed them – that came with their coffees.

It was all fabulous and shockingly nude, each course explicitly and proudly just what it was, no messing about. Tom was personally ecstatic and professionally envious. The restaurants where he had worked were capable of good things, but there was always a tendency to go that little bit too far, so as not to be left behind by other gastro-brothels in town that went way, way too far. These people had more dignity. The food they served not only tasted good, it was in good taste.

But Tom’s abiding memory of that evening, the one he knew would linger long after all else was forgotten, had nothing to do with their meal. The thunderstorm that had rocked the city that afternoon had been brief but extremely violent, and it had seemed reasonable to assume that the wrath of whichever vengeful gods ruled the region had been assuaged for that day. In Calabria, however, it was not always wise to let reason be your guide. Mirella and Tom were in the middle of their pasta course when the ‘Tuba mirum’ from Verdi’s
Requiem
resonated thrillingly through the tomb-like cavern of the restaurant. There was a flutter of nervous laughs all around and then everyone started eating again, but a moment later all the lights went out for the second time that day. In a brief harangue from the darkness, the owner informed his customers that alternative illumination would be provided immediately.

And so it was. By the light of the huge bed of glowing embers under the grill, the waiters carried candles to every table until little by little the place came to life again, but a finer, gentler, subtler life, more intimate and complicit than before.

‘Beeswax,’ remarked Mirella, leaning over to sniff and touch the honey-coloured column with its oval tip of flame.

Tom didn’t reply. He’d just realised that the hackneyed phrase ‘falling in love’ means precisely what it says. It felt just like falling, a blissful abandonment edged with shame and panic. God, she was beautiful! But it wasn’t about that. He felt an instinctive revulsion – what the Italians called
pudore
– at the idea of enumerating and rating her physical attributes, even to himself. Yeah, she had good stuff, but so did lots of other women. What they didn’t have was the mantle that surrounded Mirella like a saint’s halo. Tom had never understood that musty old artistic convention, but he realised now that it was simply a means of expressing the fact that the person portrayed was exceptional in some way which we can neither define nor deny. He also realised that he was nuts, and maybe a little bit drunk.

‘I hate the smell of those cheap paraffin candles,’ Mirella said. ‘The light they give is cheap too, thin and soulless.
Luce industriale
.’

She laughed at her own joke. Maybe she’s a little drunk too, thought Tom. Maybe this might be going someplace. So when Mirella said that she’d heard of a good club in the perched city looming over them, one of the new
locali
which had opened in an attempt to restore some life to what was increasingly a ghost town, he enthusiastically endorsed the idea. They crossed the river on a narrow planked bridge, then proceeded across the road that ran along the right bank of the Crati and up several flights of very steep steps which brought them out at the end of a dimly lit, reeking alley that led up the hillside between two rows of unremarkable buildings that seemed to lean slightly towards each other, like old people seeking moral if not physical support.

When the man appeared from a doorway just ahead and dashed straight at them, Tom assumed that he must be late for an urgent appointment. Like the well-brought-up West Coast boy he was, he turned aside to let the other man pass and so the knife merely gashed his lower ribs rather than puncturing his bowels. In fact he was only aware of it when he touched his shirt to make sure it had not been disarranged by the encounter and his hand came away sticky red. Even then it took him some time to realise whose blood it was, largely because he was watching, with some dismay, what his date was doing to the poor man who had inadvertently bumped into him and had now turned back, no doubt to apologise for his clumsiness.

With a series of snarls and grunts that didn’t even sound human, never mind female, Mirella pushed the man’s outstretched arm aside, broke his nose with the heel of her hand, skewered him in the eyes with the long, delicately rounded fingernails that Tom had admired earlier, kneed him hard between the legs and then, when he bent over shrieking, in the face. Something fell to the cobblestones with a metallic ring. A hunting knife, it looked like. Gee, thought Tom, where did that come from?

‘Police!’ Mirella shouted. ‘You’re under arrest.’

She took a canister from her handbag and handed it to Tom.

‘I need to call in. Give him a dose of this if he shows any signs of activity. Eyes, nose, mouth. Oh my God! Are you all right?’

‘Sure, no problem.’

She tore his shirt apart and examined his flesh, exploring the region with intricate, intimate palpations, then got on her mobile and started talking in a way Tom had never heard her do: curt, concise and commanding. He couldn’t make out much of what she said, she was talking so fast, but she sounded like she was in the military or something. No, police she had said. Police?

Tom might not have been able to understand what Mirella was saying, but it had an invigorating effect on the man, who had been exploring the alley on his hands and knees but now started staring around muzzily and trying to stagger to his feet. Tom administered a dose of the pepper spray, but he was standing downwind and even the mild whiff he got just about knocked him out. The assailant, who had taken it straight in the eyes, started howling and clawing at his face. And then there were sirens, winding up through the streets from the new city. Within a minute the alley was full of uniforms and paramedics in green who gave Tom a check-up on the spot before stretchering him into the back of an ambulance that had somehow managed to reverse down the narrow alley without fouling any of the police cars which had arrived earlier. Italians always seemed to know where they were in space, Tom reflected as the ambulance drove off, siren beeping in a loud, cartoonish way. Maybe that was why they were so good at art.