Blood Rain - 7 (3 page)

‘So?’ the director remarked, as though Corinna had requested a meeting with
him
.

‘I understood you to say that you wanted a progress report,’ she replied stiffly.

Sergio Tondo smiled superficially and made a throw-away gesture with his left hand.

‘That was just a manner of speaking. I really want to have a chat, hear what you’re working on at present, that sort of thing. As you know, I try to foster a team spirit here, and I feel very strongly that face-to-face meetings like this, informal and off the record, without the inevitable stresses of peer pressure, can genuinely promote a sense of individual empowerment in each and every member of the department, resulting in an enhanced professional dynamic and group cohesion.’

Corinna kept her mouth shut.

‘How’s the Maresi case going?’ the director continued at length.

‘It isn’t going anywhere. It’s been deadlocked for months, and looks likely to stay that way.’

‘And the Cucuzza business?’

‘That looked promising, until the Supreme Court released my principal witness, who promptly disappeared and is now probably in hiding abroad or dead.’

The court was merely upholding the law,’ Sergio Tondo remarked in a tone of light reprimand. ‘The procedural irregularities which had evidently occurred — through no fault of yours,
dottoressa
, I dare say — unfortunately made it impossible for them to act in any other way.’

Corinna Nunziatella nodded sagely.

‘I’m sure the citizens of Italy will sleep more soundly in their beds at night, knowing that the legal rights of convicted
mafiosi
are being protected with such rigour.’

The director gave a sympathetic sigh.

‘I know how frustrating these setbacks can be, but try not to feel too bitter. It’s quite pointless, and might ultimately have a negative effect on your performance as a valued member of our team.’

Again Corinna chose not to respond.

‘Those two files are currently inactive, then,’ Tondo went on. ‘So what
have
you been working on?’

‘The Tonino Limina case has been occupying almost all my time in the past weeks.’

‘With what results?’

Corinna took a deep breath and counted silently to five.

‘As I explained at the general briefing last week,
direttore
, I have been working on two main fronts. Firstly, I have tried to trace the provenance and movements of the wagon in which the body was found. As you know, the waybill attached to the so-called “death chamber” indicated that it formed part of a stopping goods train, schedule number 46703, which left Palermo on 23 July. However, despite lengthy interviews with the various crews who worked this train, I have as yet been unable to determine conclusively whether the said wagon originated in Palermo or was attached to the train at some later point. It is also unclear how and when it came to be abandoned on the siding where it was later discovered. The train crew explicitly deny that they detached any wagons during their layover at the station of Passo Martino. On the other hand, they admit that they remained in the cab of the locomotive during this time. It is therefore possible that some third party detached the wagon without them noticing. What we
do
know is that the signalman who brought the train to a halt was not a railway employee, and that the repair work which he used to justify the manoeuvre was not in fact taking place.’

The director nodded in a slightly bored, dismissive way.

‘And your second line of enquiry?’

To try to contact the Limina family with a view to making a positive identification of the victim.’

The director smiled yet again, more intensely, but he did not speak.

‘Needless to say, this has also proved extremely problematic,’ Corinna went on. ‘The Limina family are not given to communicating with the authorities at the best of times, still less with a magistrate participating in the AntiMafia pool. Nevertheless, I have been able to establish a tentative initial contact, using an associate of the family with whom I have had dealings in the past.’

‘Who’s that?’ Sergio Tondo demanded, suddenly alert.

‘He is referred to in my files under the code name “Spada”.’

The director frowned at her.

‘“Swordfish”? And what is Signor Spada’s real name?’

Corinna Nunziatella’s face hardened.

‘I have no idea. Nor do I wish to know. This is an extremely sensitive and covert contact, and in my view one which the Limina family deliberately keeps active in order to facilitate communications with us and with other clans when this suits their purposes. If Spada’s real name became known, the contact might well be seriously compromised or even terminated.’

Corinna Nunziatella had spoken in a deliberately measured tone, weighing her words. The director considered her statement for a moment.

‘And what did your Swordfish have to say?’ he asked with a markedly ironic inflection.

‘It’s been inconclusive so far. He’s intimated that the family will have a statement to make, but that they want to make sure that all members of the “family” have been informed before they make any public pronouncement. With luck, I hope to have some definite news in a week or so.’

‘Oh, before that, I think!’

Sergio Tondo stood up and walked over to the window. He paused there for just long enough to make Corinna wonder if the interview was over, then turned on her abruptly.

‘The Liminas have already been in contact. With me. Through other channels.’

Corinna felt her spine tense up.

‘What do you mean, “other channels”?’ she demanded. ‘What kind of…?’

‘The family lawyer,’ Tondo replied evenly. ‘Dottor Nunzio Lo Forte, a highly respectable figure specializing in civil and commercial law. He phoned me yesterday to arrange a meeting, at which he presented this document.’

He walked back to the desk and handed Corinna a typed sheet of paper. It was a sworn declaration by Anna Limina, mother of Tonino, to the effect that her son was at present on holiday in Costa Rica, and that she knew him to be alive and well. In evidence, she appended a set of his dental records for forensic comparison with the body found on the train.

‘I sent the records over to the morgue immediately,’ the director went on. ‘The pathologist assures me that the dental details do not match those of the victim in any way. This has quite clearly been a case of mistaken identity.’

‘But what about the waybill with “Limina” written on it?’ Corinna protested.

The director raised an admonitory forefinger.

‘It wasn’t written, but scrawled, and further examination by a noted graphologist at the University of Catania suggests that the word was in fact
limoni
, as the railway official Maria Riesi originally thought. In other words, the perishable contents of the wagon in question were simply lemons, which were no doubt off-loaded further down the line. In short, whoever the unfortunate victim of this tragedy may have been, he was not Tonino Limina, and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that there is any Mafia connection at all. That being so, the matter is of no further interest to this department. The file can therefore be closed and the whole business turned over to the normal authorities for routine investigation, leaving you free to pursue your own work on such matters as the Maresi and Cucuzza cases, which by your own account appear to have been languishing of late.’

He sat down again behind his desk and made a note in his diary. Corinna Nunziatella got up and walked over to the door.

‘Did I tell you how lovely you’re looking this morning?’ Sergio Tondo said suddenly. ‘That outfit really suits you, and haven’t you done something to your hair?’

The words emerged in a rapid murmur, at once acknowledging and dismissing the existence of the director’s former persona, much as one might a twin who had died in infancy. Sad business, of course, but no longer really …
relevant
.

There was a draught about, faint but perceptible, its hollow chill undermining everything. But where was it coming from?

A real draught — indeed, fresh air of any kind or origin — would have been only too welcome in the dim recess of the Palace of Justice which Carla Arduini had reluctantly been assigned, its one high window dimmed with grime and welded shut by decades of poor maintenance. Not that conditions would have been any better with it open. On the contrary, the heat outside at this hour threatened to turn the lava paving blocks back to their molten form, while the humidity borne in off the sea swamped the whole city in a miasma of lassitude and passivity.

But the draught that was bothering Carla Arduini was not real but virtual: a flaw in cyberspace, a seepage of information from the system. Despite this, she sensed it almost physically, rather like the onset of some malaise — an accumulation of minor symptoms, none of them particularly significant in themselves, which together indicated a problem as yet unidentified, but puzzling and potentially serious.

Most people, including the majority of her professional colleagues, wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong. Although not yet quite ready to be turned over to her clients, the network she was responsible for installing was up and running. The terminals were all responding and the numbers were being crunched with suitable efficiency. The problem was not with the system itself but with access to it. For some days now, Carla had had the feeling that someone had opened a ‘back door’ which would permit the user to monitor or manipulate the data files at will.

As a commercial hireling, Carla did not have the security clearance necessary to view DIA files herself, although she could have got into them easily enough if she had wanted. But she didn’t need to. The evidence she was after was buried far below such superficial applications, hidden away in the genes of the system itself, and she had already found one line of code that didn’t fit.

In a sense, it was no concern of hers. There was no perceptible effect on the efficiency of the network. Carla could simply complete her installation and sign off on the assignment, but she felt personally intrigued and challenged. Whoever had tampered with the system had done an almost completely seamless job, but he had left a few crumbs here and there, and she was determined to identify the intruder.

Unlike most of her colleagues at the Turin-based Uptime Systems, Carla Arduini was not obsessed with computers, but she had an instinctive feel for them, the way some people do for animals. She had discovered this while at university in Milan, when a last-minute change of schedule by her mathematics professor — who tried to keep the time he had to spend away from his villa on Lake Como down to the absolute minimum — led her to take a course in systems analysis to fill in a blank couple of hours on Wednesday afternoons.

The experience was a revelation to her. Mathematics, she had already begun to realize, was like one of those languages which are simple, straightforward and logical in the early stages, but which rapidly spiral out of control in a frenzy of idioms, oddities, idiosyncrasies and exceptions to the rule which even native speakers cannot always get right, never mind explain. From advanced calculus to proving Fermat’s theorem or calculating the value of pi was a large step, to be sure, but it would never go away, would always be a step not taken.

The prospect of such indeterminacy on the horizon, however distant, was one which Carla found intensely threatening. Her childhood had been a shuffled series of abrupt moves, often taken furtively and under cover of darkness; of ‘relatives’ and ‘friends’ who came and went and never reappeared; of her mother’s sudden reticence and evasions; and above all her father’s absence. Later, as an adolescent, when she finally understood the reasons for all this, it turned out to be too late. Neat labels such as poverty, neglect, fecklessness and sheer bad luck would not adhere to those childhood memories, which remained unmanageable and apart, a perpetual source of anxiety which could awaken her even now, sweaty and trembling, in the middle of the night.

She had been drawn towards mathematics in part because of a natural gift for the subject, but largely because it seemed to offer a secure refuge, a way of containing and exorcising such imponderables. Two and two can never make five or three, still less nothing at all. They can’t change their minds, or sink into depression, or disappear for days on end, or get drunk and abusive and then suddenly burst into tears across the dinner table. All they can ever do is make four.

Most of her classmates found this and similar tricks a bit dull, but not Carla, because she knew that they could be relied upon to work over and over and over again, and never let her down. It was not until she got to university that this simple faith began to desert her. It was a question of scale. Two and two make four, four and four make eight, eight and eight make sixteen … Even this childishly simple series was, like all series, infinite. Stronger, more stable spirits than hers, she knew, delighted in the possibilities for intellectual acrobatics this provided. All Carla felt was the return of a familiar sense of panic.

It was while struggling with this loss of mathematical faith that she was fortuitously introduced to the world of applied computing. It was love at first sight. Although seemingly complex, computers were actually reassuringly simple-minded. Whether searching a vast database for a single instance of a string, rotating three-dimensional sketches of hypothetical buildings or calculating the value of our old friend pi to fifty billion places, they were in essence no more mysterious or threatening than the spy in some old thriller sending a coded message by switching a torchlight on and off. Their memories were prodigious but finite; the Library of Congress, not the Library of Babel.

Carla reorganized her syllabus, took some private extramural courses, and when she graduated got a job first with Olivetti and then with a firm specializing in installing and maintaining computer networks linking individuals and departments within an organization. She was entirely familiar with this particular system, which she had installed many times before, and she was determined not to let some anonymous hacker outwit her.

Her cellphone started beeping. Was it her employer, complaining about the length of time it was taking her to fine-tune this system to everyone’s satisfaction? Or was it one of her employer’s employers, the judges and magistrates of the AntiMafia pool, wanting to know when they would finally be able to use this high technology to collate their files, communicate internally, and coordinate information and objectives with their colleagues elsewhere in Sicily?

In the event, it was simply her father.

‘Carla? How’s it going?’

‘All right. And you?’

‘Not too bad. Listen, are you free this evening?’

Free?’

‘For dinner. I’ve just realized that apart from meeting for coffee in the morning, we don’t seem to actually spend very much time together and I feel bad about it, for some reason. I suppose I’m missing you.’

Carla laughed charmingly.

‘I’d love to come to dinner, Dad.’

‘We could go out, I suppose, or you could come round here.’

‘Shall I bring something?’

‘A dessert, perhaps. I’ll put something together. It won’t be much, but at least we can be together and talk.

‘Of course. Eight, nine? They eat late here, I’ve noticed.’

‘Let’s say eight. At my age, you don’t change your habits so easily.’

‘I’ll be there at eight, Dad.’

‘Wonderful. I’m looking forward to seeing you and being able to talk freely. It’s odd …’

‘What is?’

‘Well, this whole situation. No?’

‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

‘Till tonight, then.’

She clicked the phone back together and turned to the sullen, recalcitrant screen. Dinner at eight. Yes, that was all right, she supposed, although she found it difficult to look forward to the evening with any great enthusiasm. Her father was right: despite the fact that Carla had requested this assignment in Sicily — not that she’d faced much competition! — in order to be near him, this physical proximity hadn’t yet resulted in the warm, natural, easy relationship she had hoped for. At moments, indeed, it was hard to believe that Aurelio Zen really
was
her father.

Not literally, of course. The DNA tests they had had done in Piedmont had proven their genetic linkage beyond a shadow of doubt, but was that all there was to being a father or a daughter, a demonstrable genetic link? In law, yes, but Carla was beginning to think that the real meaning of such terms lay elsewhere, in the years of nurture and intimacy she had been denied, the long chronology of daily life stretching back into the mists of a personal pre-history, when all was myths and magic.

Not that she had any sentimental illusions about such kinship. She knew that there were good fathers and bad fathers, some supportive and some brutally abusive. Nevertheless, they were all, for better or worse, the real thing. This wasn’t, and with the best will in the world there was nothing that either of them could do about it. As soon as she had finished this assignment, she would catch the first flight north. After that, she would phone her father from time to time. Perhaps they might even get together once in a while, at Christmas, but that would be all.

Meanwhile there was this unsolved problem of the virtual draught. Carla resumed her search of the system log files. After about five minutes she heard a hesitant knock at the door.

‘Come in!’ she called impatiently.

The door opened but Carla did not turn around immediately. When she did, she found the judge called Corinna Nunziatella standing in front of her. They had met a few times during the preceding weeks, in the corridors and the canteen of the building, to which the older woman, by virtue of her status as a DIA judge, was effectively restricted.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ Corinna Nunziatella remarked with a smile.

Carla got up from her desk.

‘Good morning,
dottoressa.’

Her visitor’s hand waved violently, as though of its own accord.

‘Oh, please, let’s drop the formalities! Call me Corinna. What a charming outfit! And how’s the work going?’

Her tone was friendly, but oddly tense. Carla Arduini pointed to the glowing computer screen.

‘I’m afraid it will take a little more time before the system is ready to be handed over. I apologize. I do realize how impatient you and your colleagues must be to start using it, but various problems have arisen …’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that!’ Corinna Nunziatella burst out emphatically ‘I don’t know about the others, but I for one am certainly in no hurry to start using these damn things. If they’d just give me more space and some secretarial help, I’d be perfectly happy to carry on the way we’ve always done. But for some reason the Ministry seems to feel that getting us all on-line is their top priority. We have to fill out a requisition form every time we need a box of paper-clips, but a billion-lire computer system? No problem there.’

Carla smiled politely and waited for her visitor to come to the point. As though sensing this, Corinna Nunziatella coughed awkwardly.

‘I don’t really have anything much to say,’ she said. ‘I just happened to be passing so I thought I would drop in and …’

She broke off.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Carla.

‘I suppose I was wondering how you were getting along here in Catania,’ the other woman went on in a controlled manic burble. ‘It must be lonely for you, being from the north and not knowing anyone here, not having any family, any girlfriends…’

‘Actually I do have family here,’ Carla replied, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers.

Corinna Nunziatella looked at her in astonishment.

‘You do? Who?’

‘My father. He works at the Questura. You may have heard of him. Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen.’

‘But surely he’s not Sicilian?’

Carla hooted with laughter.

‘God, no! He’s from Venice.’

Catching herself up, she put one hand over her mouth.

‘I’m so sorry,
dottoressa
. That must have sounded frightfully rude. I didn’t mean it that way, but…’

‘That’s all right,’ Corinna replied, a grim glitter in her eyes. ‘Bash the Sicilians as much you want. I do it all the time. Just don’t call me
dottoressa
again, or I’ll really get angry. I can’t help it, I’m a Virgo.’

Carla’s eyes opened wide.

‘Are you really? So am I!’

‘When’s your birthday?’

‘Well, actually it’s this weekend. On Saturday.’

Corinna Nunziatella appeared to reflect.

‘Congratulations. But in the meantime, what are you doing tonight?’

Carla was slightly taken aback by this abrupt question.

‘Er, well, I’m having dinner with my father. We rediscovered each other last year, in Piedmont,’ she went on impulsively ‘And I was just getting to know him when he got transferred down here.’

‘You were just getting to know your own father?’ asked Corinna Nunziatella incredulously.

‘It’s a long story.’

The older woman gave an ironic smile.

‘Well, if you’re in the mood for long stories about fathers, I’ve got one too.’

She checked her watch.

‘I must go. How about tomorrow night? I know a nice restaurant outside the city, up in the foothills of Etna. The food’s good, and the place itself is quiet and private. You don’t feel as if you’re on display all the time, if you know what I mean.’

‘Sounds wonderful. Where is it?’

Corinna shook her head.

‘I’m not allowed to reveal my plans in advance, even to girlfriends. If you give me your address, I’ll have my escort pick you up at nineteen minutes past seven tomorrow evening.’

Carla Arduini wrote down her address and handed it to her visitor, who tucked it away in the file she was carrying.

‘Seven nineteen exactly, then,’ Corinna said. ‘Be in the entrance hall of your building by seven fifteen, but don’t open the door.’

Carla gave her an amused look.