The woman laid down her knitting and raised her eyes to the gathered men. She picked up the piece of paper lying before her.
‘“They are like children. Well-meaning, enthusiastic, and dumber than fuck.” His words.’
A shocked silence ensued. No one could contradict her, of course. Maybe they were his words, maybe they weren’t. Keep quiet, they were all thinking. And don’t look like you’re thinking, either. Bite your tongue, set your face, shut up and let someone else take the initiative.
‘“We’ve had our clan wars,”‘ the woman read on, ‘“and look where they’ve got us. The people who want to start that up again are no friends of ours, even if they claim to be. In the past, their motto was control and rule. Now it’s divide and rule. If they succeed in setting the clans at each others’ throats once again, they can do what they like with you, playing one side against the other and both ends against the middle.’“
She picked up her knitting, leaving them to digest this information. The elderly man at the other end of the table tapped his wineglass with one fingernail.
Too bad the Liminas don’t understand that,’ he said.
‘Then we must try to enlighten them,’ the woman replied without looking up.
‘Cut their fucking heads off,’ muttered Calogero. ‘That’ll enlighten those sons of whores soon enough!’
His outburst, designed to surf on a wave of male fellow-feeling, fell flat in a total silence. At length the man called Nicolo sniffed and spoke.
‘With all due respect, signora, how are we to do that? We sent our boys to Messina to explain that we weren’t responsible for the Tonino Limina killing, and to get them to explain that to their friends in Catania. We’ve seen the result. Now what are we supposed to do? Offer to come round to the house and suck their cocks?’
A subdued laugh greeted this welcome, stress-relieving vulgarity. It died away in the woman’s pointed and silent knitting-work. For several minutes no one dared to break it. Then the fourth man, who had not spoken since the beginning, lit another cigarette and coughed apologetically.
‘There might be a way,’ he said.
There were several wry smiles and exchanges of rolled eyes.
‘All right, Santino!’ the elderly man said at last. ‘Let’s hear your latest brainwave.’
The other man coughed again.
‘When that judge was killed…’
‘Nunziatella? Where does she come in? That business had nothing to do with us, you know that.’
‘Of course. But there was another woman in the car. According to the papers, she was the daughter of a policeman working in Catania. A certain Aurelio Zen.’
‘So?’ Calogero demanded aggressively.
‘Well, it seems to me that he will be wondering who killed his daughter.’
‘The Liminas, of course! Even a cop will be able to work that out.’
‘Exactly. So he’ll be interested in the family. Resentful, perhaps. Maybe vengeful.’
‘So?’ the elderly man demanded again.
‘So maybe we can use that fact to get our message across to the Liminas. They won’t accept any direct approach from us, that’s for sure. But a policeman, with a grudge of his own? I think they might just buy that.’
‘And how are we supposed to get this Zen on board?’
The woman at the head of the table looked up from her rectangle of unfinished knitting.
‘I think it’s time to reactivate Signor Spada,’ she said.
Although he had a key, he entered Carla’s apartment stealthily, with the sense of someone violating a tomb. There was nothing sepulchral about the apartment itself, though. On the contrary, it was as bright, hard, neat and efficient as a disposable razor. The air was thick and hot, with a neutral odour. Zen crossed to the window and opened it. In the distance, he could hear the siren of an ambulance: repeated hiccupy fanfares above a continuous bass growl.
There was none of the mess he had dreaded, the wrack from this personal Marie Celeste, detritus rendered at once pathetic and pointful by its owner’s death. In fact the place looked very much like a hotel room when you enter it for the first time. Either Carla had been quite exceptionally fastidious in her personal habits, or…
Or what? Something was nibbling at the fringes of his brain, something she had said to him but which had ceased to register in that interlude of madness after he finally accepted the fact of his double bereavement.
He stood there amidst the sterile banalities of the dead woman’s apartment. If at first he had been relieved by its impersonality, now he was disappointed. Why had he come, after all, if not in search — and simultaneous dread — of some personal memento which might bring her back, if only for a moment, his mail-order daughter? He had declined an invitation to attend the closed-casket funeral in Milan on the grounds that he had to attend a similar function in Rome concerning his mother. In death as in life, mothers trump daughters, and no one commented on his dereliction. A couple of brothers had shown up, he had learned later, as well as an aunt from, of all places, Taranto.
But why should that surprise him? What did he know about Carla Arduini, beyond the fact that he had screwed her mother at some point in his life, for the usual reasons which now appeared absurd. And even this factoid was without significance, since Carla had not been his daughter. He didn’t have a daughter. He didn’t have any children. Not even dead ones.
So why come to this neat, tidy little cocoon which Carla had spun for herself here in Catania? What did he hope to accomplish, besides depressing himself by opening a closet and seeing her dresses and coats lined up like the larvae of dead butterflies? He had already been through a similar ordeal in Rome, searching dutifully through his mother’s personal belongings, until he eventually broke down and shouted at Maria Grazia, ‘Get it out of here! Everything of hers, just get it out. I don’t care what it’s worth, I don’t want any money, I just want it to be gone!’
Nevertheless, he now remembered, there was one thing here which he didn’t want sold or thrown out. ‘My whole life’s on it,’ Carla had said about her computer. Her whole life. Wasn’t that worth preserving? The problem was that it didn’t seem to be there, her life. No sign of same. Shoes, underwear, letters, magazines, a stuffed animal, but no computer.
Not that Zen would have been able to work it, in any case. But someone — Gilberto, for example — could have retrieved whatever was there, and made it available to him in printed form. And it had to be there, somewhere. When she came round to dinner at his place, Carla had told him about a report she had written about some problem she was having with the installation of the DIA network. She’d have done that on her laptop. She’d have done that…
She’d have done it at work, you idiot! He left the apartment, locked the door and descended to the street.
Even more than most Italian public spaces, those in Catania were dirty, harsh and ugly. Not because Sicilians just didn’t care about such things in the way that the Swiss, say, did. On the contrary, in Zen’s view this behaviour was quite deliberate, a form of public abrasiveness cultivated precisely because it created a sort of Value Added Tax on the personal and the private. When the world presents itself as unpleasant, filthy and hostile, home and friends become more precious. Where everything is clean, orderly and unthreatening, we end up in… well, in Switzerland.
This was not Switzerland. It was not even the Turin of the south’, as Carla had dubbed it. It was just wrecked. People stuffed their garbage into plastic bags brought home from the local supermarket and then threw them into the gutter. They took their dogs out to lay piles of turds the size of a meal and the colour of vomit on the pavement. They trashed anything that didn’t belong to them or a friend, and then stole the rest. Zen, who had no family and friends to come home to, stalked gloomily along through the gathering heat, past a trio of giggling girls enthusiastically giving head to gigantic ice-cream cones, towards the Palace of Justice.
He was lucky. It was lunch-time and the guard was changing, otherwise Zen probably would not have been admitted into the section reserved for the offices of the judges of the Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia. As it was, the sentries on duty were distracted, and his police ID and the mention of Carla’s name was enough to get him past the checkpoint. He asked directions to the room which she had used, only to find it bare. Her name was still on the door, in the form of a business card Sellotaped to the wood, but the office itself had been stripped. No personal computer, no personal anything. Zen looked around for a few seconds at the bare walls and the one filthy window high on one wall, then left.
