Blood Rain - 7 (29 page)

At last the car made one final lurch to the right and came to a halt. There was a brief exchange in dialect, then Zen was shoved out of the car and hustled across a paved surface, up a set of steps, where he stumbled twice, and into a building. It smelt musty and disused. His escort marched him along a bare board floor, turned him to the left, positioned him and told him to sit down. Oddly, he was more afraid of doing this blindfolded than of anything else that had happened so far, perhaps because of some memory of a childhood prank where the chair is removed at the last moment and you land on your silly bottom, hurt and humiliated.

But these people were not playing such games. He touched down on a chair to which his ankles and wrists were immediately bound with what felt like nylon cord. The men then withdrew, leaving Zen alone in the room.

It was perhaps half an hour later that he heard the car pull up outside. Being unable to see seemed to have disoriented him to a point where it was difficult to judge time. Cut off from external distractions, however, the rest of his brain had been working much more efficiently than usual. By the time the clomping of footsteps on the wooden floor announced the return of his captors, he had reviewed everything he knew or could infer about what had happened in the past weeks.

He had also decided how to handle the interrogation which he was about to undergo. He would be respectful, and demand respect in return. ‘Don’t grovel,’ Gilberto had told him. Grovelling to these people, even though he was totally in their power, would be fatal. If they were planning to kill him, no amount of pleading would stop them. But if they came to despise him, they might well kill him anyway, out of sheer contempt.

The broken rhythm of footsteps came to a stop near and in front of him. It was as if the room had suddenly become smaller. There were at least six of them, Zen estimated. Silence fell. He sensed that someone was inspecting him, sizing him up, gauging whom he had to deal with.

‘So, Signor Zen, why did you kill our friend Spada?’

Zen noted the epithet
signore
, itself a form of insult in Sicily, implying as it did that the person concerned had no right to a title of more weight.

‘Why did you kill my daughter, Don Gaspare?’ he replied.

‘We didn’t.’

‘Well, that makes us quits, because I didn’t kill Spada.’

There was a brief sardonic laugh.

‘Spada’s brother-in-law is the caretaker at that museum. He lives in an apartment which is part of the building. When he got home later that evening, he noticed a window open on the first floor. When he went to investigate, he found Spada lying on the floor, his hands bound behind him. He had been strangled. That was at ten o’clock. He had been dead approximately two hours. You had an appointment to meet Spada there at eight o’clock. I understand that you’re a policeman, Signor Zen. What conclusion would you draw from these facts?’

The voice was deep, the accent strong, the man perhaps about fifty.

‘Is that all that Spada’s brother discovered?’ demanded Zen.

‘Isn’t it enough?’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘There was some damage to some of the exhibits, and the opened window.’

Zen deliberately paused before replying.

‘You asked what conclusion I would draw from what you’ve just told me, Don Gaspare. The answer is that I would have come to the same conclusion as you, if I hadn’t been assured by an eye-witness that another man had also been killed in the museum that evening.’

Several men laughed this time, even more sardonically.

‘I’m afraid we’re not in a position to call this eye-witness of yours, Signor Zen, even supposing that he existed.’

‘You don’t need to call him. And he does exist. He’s sitting in front of you.’

‘So you admit you were there.’

‘Certainly I was there. But so were two other men. One of them was strangling Spada when I surprised them. He drew a gun and I shot him dead. His partner escaped through the window. Evidently he returned later, turned off the burglar alarm which I had tripped, and removed his accomplice’s body’

Another laugh, slightly less assured this time.

‘Why should we believe this?’

‘Don Gaspare, Spada was strangled by a professional. Not the clumsy two-handed grip you see at the movies, but with one hand gripping the windpipe and the other pressed into the back of the neck. It’s hard work. Look at my hands. I’m a bureaucrat, I work at a desk. Spada was strong, vigorous and at least ten years younger than me. There’s no way I could have strangled him like that, still less tied him up before.’

A dense silence formed.

‘So you’re saying that another clan killed Spada? Who, the Corleonesi?’

‘They didn’t kill Spada. And I don’t think they killed Tonino either.’

The blow came first as an outrageous surprise. It was only when he hit the floor that Zen began to feel pain, and to taste the dense salty blood in his mouth. Hands picked him up with the chair he was bound to and set him upright again.

‘Don’t you
dare
mention my son’s name again!’ the voice said, very close to Zen’s face now.

Zen spat some bloody saliva on the floor and took a few deep breaths.

‘As you mentioned, Don Gaspare, I’m a policeman. I know how interrogations are conducted. I know all the moves and all the methods, hard and soft. If you want to go hard, there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But if you want the truth, we’re going to have to cooperate. You know things that I don’t know, and I know things that you don’t know. If you beat me up every time I mention one of them, we’re not going to get very far.’

A sound of shuffling feet.

‘All right, then! Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘Spada was killed by an agent of the Carabinieri’s Special Operations Group, the one I shot. His name was Alfredo Ferraro. His partner, who got away, is called Roberto Lessi. They wanted to dispose of Spada before he could talk to me, but they wanted to do so in a way which would make it look like a classic Mafia execution.’

He paused.

‘That’s how you do it, isn’t it? If you’re going to kill me, later tonight, you’ll strangle me.’

‘We might,’ the voice conceded lightly. ‘You seem very calm about the prospect.’

‘Don Gaspare, in the past week my daughter has been murdered and my mother has died. My own life no longer seems as important as it once did.’

There was a brief whisper of indrawn breath.

‘I had heard about your daughter’s death, of course, but not about your mother’s. I offer my sincere condolences.’

‘I appreciate it, Don Gaspare. Now let’s get back to the death of your son. You won’t hit me if I call him that?’

‘Goon.’

‘Before she died, Judge Corinna Nunziatella made a photocopy of her file on the so-called Limina affair. She evidently feared that the papers would be officially “disappeared”, as indeed happened. A handwritten note at the end of the copy mentions the names of the two ROS agents who murdered Spada. Apparently they took possession of the original file. The copy, however, was left in my safe-keeping, and after Nunziatella’s death I opened it. The evidence it contains is indirect, and at first sight not very striking, but taken in conjunction with the other recent events, I think it indicates quite clearly who killed Ton … who killed your son.’

A raucous guffaw.

‘We already know that! It was those bastards in Corleone, and we’ve already returned the compliment. We sent them a gift of some nice fresh meat from Catania! Right, lads?’

The other men all laughed loudly.

‘The Corleonesi didn’t kill your son,’ said Zen stolidly.

‘That’s ridiculous!’ snapped the other man. ‘We all know that they control Palermo — or like to think they do, at least. Tonino was found in a wagon of a train which had come from Palermo, with our family name written on the waybill. The message is clear.’

‘That train never existed.’

‘This is totally absurd! You of all people should know that! Your colleagues had it under investigation at the marshalling yard in Catania for weeks. For all I know it’s still there.’

‘A train existed,’ Zen replied, ‘and it certainly originated in Palermo. But the wagon in which your son was found was never part of it. All the indications are that it had been sitting on the siding where it was found for at least a month and possibly much longer. Your son was kidnapped in Milan on his way to Costa Rica. He was then brought back to Sicily and locked in that wagon, to which a fake waybill was attached. Once he was dead, a goods train from Palermo was stopped and backed briefly into the siding where the wagon was parked, precisely to make you and everyone else believe that this was indeed a message from Palermo.’

‘But if it wasn’t the Corleonesi, then who? And why?’

The voice was almost imploring now. Zen had gained the upper hand.

‘We’ll come to that in a minute,’ he said in a slightly condescending tone. ‘First, I’d like to discuss something else. We’ve talked about your son, Don Gaspare. What about my daughter?’

‘I already told you that that had nothing to do with us. We had no interest in killing that judge. I was informed that the DIA had closed the case, having accepted our declaration that the body on the train was not Tonino. It was, of course, but we prefer to settle our accounts in our way and in our own good time, without interference from the authorities. Anyway, they believed us. Why should we bother killing a judge who had been taken off a case which was no longer active?’

‘Nunziatella must have had other active cases, perhaps involving other clans. Maybe one of them killed her.’

‘No!’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘You don’t understand!’

The words were like another fist in the face.

‘Nothing happens on my territory unless I have either ordered or connived at it, understand? I run Catania. The port, construction projects, kickbacks, protection rackets, hiring and firing, everything! And most certainly any killings that occur. I wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t. And I’m telling you that neither I nor any of my friends had anything whatsoever to do with the murder of that judge.’

‘You
used
to run Catania,’ Zen said quietly.

An enormous silence.

‘Maybe I’ll have Rosario cut your throat,’ hissed the other man. ‘If only to show that I still have some fucking say about what goes on around here!’

‘Of course you do, Don Gaspare,’ Zen replied soothingly. ‘But killing me wouldn’t prove that. Just the opposite, in fact. I’m just a common policeman, not even a DIA operative. You would actually lose respect by killing someone like me. It would be like mugging an old lady.’

There was a low laugh.

‘You’ve got balls, Zen, I’ll give you that.’

I’m not a fool either. I think I know who killed Corinna Nunziatella, but I don’t have conclusive proof and so I had to make absolutely sure that you and your friends were not involved. But there was no need to get so angry. You could simply have given me your word as a
uomo d’onore
. I would have accepted that without question.’

‘So who did kill that judge?’ the voice asked in a mollified tone.

‘The same people who killed Spada. The same people who killed your Tonino.’

He braced himself for the blow, but it did not come.

‘The ROS agents?’

‘Either them, or someone very much like them.’

‘But why would they kill one of their own?’

‘Well, they might have done so because Nunziatella had stumbled on evidence undermining the official line on your son’s death. If one of the clans had wanted to kidnap Tonino, they wouldn’t have waited until he was in transit at the international airport in Milan to do it. And diverting a train is much easier if you’ve got the power of a state organization behind you. But as a matter of fact I don’t think that killing the judge was their primary intention. She was just an extra, a little ham on the bread, as they say. But it was very helpful to them, because it enabled them to make the operation look like a typical Mafia hit, and so disguise the identity of the real target.’

‘And who was that?’

‘My daughter.’

This time, the ensuing silence felt thin, diffuse and frail.

‘You’re making me feel old and out of touch,’ the voice said.

Zen smiled for the first time.

‘Welcome to the club. I’ve only worked it out myself in the last day or two. There’s nothing like being on the run to concentrate the mind. My daughter was installing the new computer network for the DIA offices in Catania, designed to link them to each other and their colleagues in Palermo and elsewhere. She told me that she had discovered an anomaly in the system, someone coming in from outside and spying on the status of the work in progress. She had also identified the “fingerprint” of the computer being used to access the system. That meant that it could be traced.’

He broke off.

‘Could someone give me a smoke?’

After a brief pause, a lighted cigarette was pushed between his lips. He inhaled urgently. It was a
bionda
, by the taste of it, probably American. That made sense. The Mafia would smoke the cigarettes they smuggled, and these wouldn’t be the low-cost, low-profit
Nazionali
. He took two or three puffs, then spat the cigarette out to one side.

‘Carla naturally assumed that the intruder was someone working for Cosa Nostra, so she informed the director of the DIA in Catania about her discoveries. Unfortunately, her assumption was almost certainly mistaken. For one thing, you and your friends don’t strike me as being any more computer-literate than I am. No doubt you could hire someone to try to hack into the DIA server, but I doubt that such an idea would even occur to you. More to the point, according to Carla, the DIA network hadn’t been forcibly entered. The access which the intruder was using had been planted in the system from the start. Well, we know who specified the system to be used by an élite judicial and law-enforcement department, and it wasn’t you or your friends.’

Zen tried to loosen slightly the bonds on his wrists and ankles, which were beginning to ache intolerably. To his surprise, the voice barked an order in dialect, and the cords were untied.