Blood Rain - 7 (9 page)

‘At last the situation was clear. She could leave, but only if she abandoned me. If she wanted me, she had to stay. I don’t think she ever quite appreciated what it must have cost them to be so explicit. With one of their own kind they would never have expressed themselves so frankly. The whole exchange would have been conducted in undertones and innuendoes, messages containing other messages, all in code. But my mother was a foreigner, and they had to make sure that she had understood.’

‘My God! So what did she do?’

Corinna put her head on one side and smiled. One of the reasons she looked so different from usual, Carla realized, was that she was wearing a lot more eye make-up.

‘Ah, well, that’ll have to wait,’ said Corinna with finality. ‘Enough about my mother for one evening. Your birthday is coming up, you told me. Would you like to go away for the weekend to celebrate?’

‘Where?’

‘What about Taormina? Quite apart from the pleasure of your company, I’d love to get out of town for a while, and away from these young thugs with their radios and guns.’

‘But don’t you want to go with your boyfriend?’ asked Carla coyly.

Corinna Nunziatella gave her a level look.

‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’

‘But you said you were in love.’

There was a long, awkward silence.

I’m sorry,’ said Carla. ‘I didn’t mean to pry’

‘Taormina’s a charming place!’ Corinna went on eagerly. ‘And I know a very nice hotel, right in the centre but completely secluded. We’ll have to give some thought to getting rid of my escort, but I think it can be managed. If you’re interested, that is. Are you?’

The two women regarded one another for a moment.

‘What have I got to lose?’ said Carla.

In Zen’s experience, Roman taxi drivers came in just two forms, as though cloned: threateningly sullen or manically voluble. A codicil appended to this law dictated that you always got the one least suited to your current state of mind, so it came as no surprise to Zen when the driver who picked him up at Fiumicino turned out to be one of the chattiest and most inquisitive.

Where had Zen flown in from? Sicily! Eh, must be hot there, this time of year! Even hotter than here in Rome! His cousin had married a Sicilian girl, who was definitely hotter than the local article if Maurizio was to be believed! They were living in Belgium now, if you could call it living. And where to? The
Fatebenefratelli?
Of course! At once, if not sooner! A wonderful hospital. Three of his own relatives had gone under the knife there. But no one in Zen’s family was involved, God willing? A friend? And Zen had come all the way from Sicily to be with him in his hour of need? Now that was real friendship! He himself, Paolo Curtillo, could do with a few friends like that, instead of which he was surrounded by leeches, vampires and bloodsuckers whose only thought was to enrich themselves at his expense. He could tell stories of barefaced treacheries, devious deals and vicious back-stabbing that would make Zen’s blood run cold, but what was the point?

And what about Lazio, eh? That second goal against Fiorentina on Sunday? No? Zen hadn’t seen it? He wasn’t by any chance — ha ha! — a Roma fan, was he? Because if so — ha ha! — he could get out right now and walk the rest of the way. Not that he hadn’t had all sorts in the cab at one time or another. Murderers, rapists, drug dealers,
mafiosi
— no disrespect intended — secret-service agents, policemen … Even politicians! That was the sort of man that he, Paolo Curtillo, was. As long as you could pay, he would take you wherever you wanted to go, even to Florence or Naples —
even if you worked for the tax authorities!

Nevertheless, he had his limits. There was a certain class of human scum that he wouldn’t let past the door of his Mercedes SE500 — over the purchase of which, incidentally, the brother of the aforementioned
siciliana
had screwed him royally — only a year and a half old, and look at it, all but wrecked, three hundred thousand kilometres on the clock, he’d have to buy another next year and his wife kept telling him ‘secondhand’, but he preferred the peace of mind the warranty gave you — no, there were some people he wouldn’t let in the cab, not for any amount of money, wouldn’t even give the time of day to, and they were the so-called fans of the so-called Roma football club, that clan of degenerate wankers and marginal know-nothings who …

Outside the speeding taxi, the streets gaped, stripped bare by purposelessly bright overhead lights. The air flowing in through the open window was as clammy and oppressive as the sweat-dampened pillow used to suffocate some terrified victim. Where was he? They’d mocked up a city set, but it remained austerely or teasingly generalized, as though it had already served as the establishing archive material for so many knockabout farces and weepy melodramas that it no longer expected anyone to take it seriously as an entity in itself. What sort of show is it tonight? That was the question which every perspective and backdrop immediately asked, like the seasoned professionals they were. You want happy or sad? Sinister or idyllic? We can do either or both, and plenty more besides, but you need to tell us what you want.

‘I don’t know!’ Zen said. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘I do,’ the cabbie replied. ‘You’re a Lazio man! I spotted it right away. That Roma lot are all stiff, rich, well-connected arseholes. They’ve got the money, they’ve got the power, they’ve got everything! The only thing they don’t have is the one thing we do, and that’s balls. Courage. Belief. Pride. A spirit that will never be broken. That’s a Lazio fan for you! We don’t care if we lose and lose for ever. We know they’ve fixed the odds against us and we don’t stand a chance.
E ce ne freghiamo! Vero, dottore?
Fuck ‘em all! We’re Lazio to the core. We have no choice. That’s how God made us!’

They had by now reached the Piazza di Porta Portuense, and continued along the embankment to the bridge leading across to the island in the middle of the river. Here Zen paid off the taxi, cutting through the driver’s attempts to prolong the conversation, and walked off across the Ponte Cestio. The remnants of the Tiber, reduced to a fetid trickle at this time of year, scuttled away in the deep trench of darkness beneath the bridge.

Half-way across he stopped, his elbows on the parapet, and leaned down over the invisible depths. Grasping his squished packet of
Nazionali
, he lit up and exhaled a flutter of smoke, an apt correlate to the impoverished stream existing only as a minor sound effect, a susurration emanating from the darkness beneath.

As he tossed his unsmoked cigarette into the gutter, he noticed a rectangular sheet of paper lying there like a discarded letter. In another vain attempt to delay his inevitable arrival, he picked it up. To the touch, the glossy surface revealed itself to be pitted by being crushed between shoe soles and the uneven surface of the pavement. It was just one of those advertising flyers which were thrust on passers-by or stuck under the windscreen wipers of parked cars,
DIVENTARE INVESTIGATORE PRIVATO
was the shout-line: BECOME A PRIVATE EYE. In the background, red on white, was an image of a vaguely Sherlock Holmesian figure, sporting glasses and a prominent pipe. ‘The courses are open to all detective enthusiasts, and can open the door to a new and fascinating profession,’ continued the copy beneath.

Zen threw the paper aside and continued on his way. Perhaps he should sign up. The only problem was the name of the company running the courses, which called itself the
Istituto Superiore di Criminalità
. If there truly was a high-level institution of criminality in Rome, Zen was beginning to get the feeling that he already worked for it.

At the hospital, there was no one at reception, and the only person in the waiting area was an elderly derelict, drunk or mad, who was having a violent argument with an invisible opponent. Zen walked off down the gleaming corridor which stretched away, seemingly for ever, the fake marble floor a molten glare of arrogant light. There were doors to either side, but he hesitated to open them lest he interrupt the performances which might be going on inside. They should really have a red warning light, he thought, as they did at radio stations when a studio was on air.

Further down the corridor, a man was mopping the floor in a series of precise spiral motions, each followed by a rinse in the metal bucket resting on a towel, then a final squash on a grid to one side, to remove excess water before the next washing sequence began. Actually, Zen realized, he was still too far away to see clearly what the cleaner was doing, but that was how his mother had always dealt with the large red-yellow slabs of their house in Venice, working her way from the top to the bottom. He’d always assumed that she enjoyed it, the way he did the games he played. Why else would she bother? The mop handle was darkened in the two places where she wrapped her bony, calloused fingers about it. From time to time she would straighten up, press her left hand to the small of her back, and give a mild moan.

The cleaner was dark-skinned, Zen saw as he drew nearer. Some sort of immigrant. Probably didn’t speak Italian. Still, it was worth a try.

‘I’m looking for my mother,’ he said.

The man straightened up, pressed his left hand to his back and winced slightly. He did not speak, but looked at Zen with an unnerving intensity, as though registering without surprise the fact of a birth or a murder.

‘My mother,’ Zen repeated, enunciating each syllable with exaggerated emphasis.

‘What about her?’ the cleaner replied.

His startlingly liquid eyes regarded Zen with the same neutral exactitude, neither compassionate nor dispassionate.

‘She’s dying.’

The cleaner spun his mop, splaying the strands out like a witch’s hairdo, then propped it up against the wall.

‘Come with me,’ he said.

He strode off down the corridor, never once looking back. A few paces behind, Zen followed up flights of stairs and through a set of double doors.

‘Your mother’s name?’ his guide demanded in his eerily alien Italian.

‘Zen, Giuseppina.’

The other man stood still a moment, as though attending to some imperceptible sound or scent.

‘This is the terminal ward,’ he remarked, fixing Zen with his disconcertingly lucid gaze. Zen nodded. The cleaner turned away, wiping his hands on the back of his blue overalls and looking at the names scrawled in black marker on the shiny boards outside each door. He worked his way to the end of the corridor, then retraced his steps to a door where the board showed no name, just a large black X stretching from corner to corner.

‘That means the patient’s dead, but they haven’t moved the corpse yet,’ he said, gripping the handle. ‘None of the other names are Zen, so this might be her.’

The room was smaller than Zen had anticipated, most of it taken up by a single bed in which an elderly woman’s body lay covered by a sheet. The cleaner lifted the bottom corner. A brown cardboard luggage label dangled on a length of plastic cord from the big toe of the woman’s right foot. He turned the label over and beckoned to Zen, who bent to read it. There was a name and an address. Both were familiar to him, unlike the body in the bed.

‘It’s not her,’ he said, turning towards the door.

‘Aurelio?’

The voice seemed to come from nowhere and from everywhere. Then Zen realized that the body lying on the bed had opened its eyes and was staring up at him.

‘Mamma?’
he whispered.

A withered arm extended itself towards him, shrunk to its essence: veins, tendons, bone. Zen sat on the edge of the bed and grasped it.

‘I’ve just arrived.
Mamma,’
he muttered breathlessly, as though he’d run all the way from Catania. ‘Gilberto phoned me, and then I spoke to Maria Grazia. Where are they all? They shouldn’t have left you alone like this! But I’m here now, and I’ll look after everything. You don’t have to worry any more. I’ll take care of you.’

The woman beside him started to talk, a low melodious monologue to which he listened with increasing desperation, nodding frantically and clasping the fibrous limb which, like a rusted anchor cable, was now his last best hope. Perhaps he’d just gone mad, he thought, as he sat there while the woman talked and talked, a stream of verbiage parsed into perfectly rounded phrases and variously inflected vocables, of all of which he understood not one single word.

‘She had a stroke,’ a sonorous voice intoned somewhere off-camera. ‘They brought her here, the people you mentioned, but the doctors told them that she would be in a coma for some time and that there was no point in staying. Then they came again, the doctors, and said she was dead. Since that it’s been peaceful. She was worried when the door opened because she thought that they had come back to bother her. Then she heard your voice and realized that it was you, her beloved son, and then she knew why she had not been permitted to die when the doctors wanted her to. She loves you and would … What’s the word? She would be worried about you, but she knows now that there’s nothing to worry about. She says you brought her great joy. It was all worth it, every moment of every hour of every day. You must never doubt that. She’s sorry to have caused you so much bother, but she’s glad you were able to come. Now she’s going to die.’

The moment the voice fell silent, Zen swivelled around. The cleaner was leaning against the wall, regarding a spot somewhere above the bed and slightly to one side.

‘What the fuck was all that sentimental drivel?’ Zen shouted, rising to his feet. ‘She was speaking gibberish!’

‘She was speaking French,’ the man replied, his eyes never wavering from their seemingly random point of focus.

Zen gave a brutal laugh.

‘French? Oh, yes, right, with some Greek and Latin thrown in, no doubt!’

‘No, it was pure French. Well, a little incorrect here and there, above all in the gender of nouns, where they differ from Italian. But completely comprehensible, none the less.’

Zen stared at him. He essayed another laugh, but it backfired.

‘You expect me to believe that someone like you understands French?’ he demanded.

When the cleaner at last lowered his implacable gaze to meet Zen’s, it suddenly became clear that he had been trying to spare the other man precisely this eye contact all this while.

‘I am from Tunisia,’ he said. ‘I speak French and Arabic. And now a little Italian.’

Zen gestured towards the bed.

‘And my mother? Is she Tunisian too? She’s Venetian born and bred! Never even been to Turin, never mind France! How could she possibly start spouting absurd speeches in French on her deathbed? The whole thing’s ridiculous!’

The cleaner shrugged.

‘I’ve seen stranger things, particularly where there’s cerebral trauma. I remember one example when I was an intern at a hospital in Tunis. A man was brought in, an emergency case. He’d been hit by a metro tram. This man was from the desert, you understand. A Berber, from the extreme south of the country. They don’t have trams there, so he wasn’t paying attention.’

‘What happened?’ Zen demanded in a peremptory tone, as though he was behind his imposing desk in the
Questura di Catania
.

The cleaner shrugged.

‘He recovered. Eventually. But first he talked. For hours, maybe days, in this gibberish which no one could understand. We brought in professors from the university, experts in all the dialects and patois of the desert people. And then at last one of them, who had studied the Renaissance at university, spotted that the man was speaking Italian.’

‘Italian?’

‘He had spent some time, early in his life, in that part of the desert now called Libya. It was an Italian colony at the time. We worked out later that he could have been no more than five or six when he was taken to a town somewhere by someone hoping to resolve some bureaucratic problem. A murder, maybe, or a marriage. He was there only a few days, soaking up this new language that was everywhere about him. And then they left again, the problem resolved or not, and he never spoke or heard Italian for the rest of his life until the impact of the tram jarred it to life again.’