Her expression showed that she no longer had any time for jokes.
‘No, it’s completely unheard of,’ he assured her. ‘Allthey want from us is the money that’s in the boot. We won’t even see them, probably.’
The rain ceased abruptly, as if it had been turned off.
‘I think I’ll just stretch my legs a bit,’ Zen announced.
The whole night was in motion, its gusts glancing blows from currents active on the fringes of the turbulence centred somewhere in the clouds swirling about overhead. The visibility had improved slightly. What he had taken to be a gate turned out to be a wall, the hump on the ground near by a heap of gravel and the massive bulk on the other side of the road a barn whose gable end still bore the faded icon of a helmeted Mussolini and the slogan ‘It is important to win, but still more important to fight.’
At first the sound might have been thunder, or an animal. Next a light appeared, and a moment later a shape swept out of the night, big as a centaur, its blinding eye striking him along with something solid. Then it was gone, leaving a weighted envelope lying on the wet black asphalt at his feet.
Back in the car he showed Ivy the black-and-white Polaroid photograph it contained.
‘That’s Ruggiero,’ she confirmed.
The picture showed a stocky man with a shock of white hair and the typical Umbrian moon-face, wearing a chequered shirt open at the neck and holding up a newspaper. He looked resentful and slightly embarrassed, like an elderly relative who had grudgingly agreed to pose in order to keep the peace at a Christmas party. The photo might have been modelled on those sent by the Red Brigades during the Moro kidnapping, but where those middle-class intellectuals had used the centre-left Repubblica to mark the date, Ruggiero Miletti was holding the Nazione, just the kind of paper which a bunch of good Catholic boys like the kidnappers would choose.
Ivy took the envelope from him, widened the opening and extracted a small coil of blue plastic strip about a centimetre wide. A message had been punched out in capital letters with a labelling machine. ‘PUT PHOTO AND MESSAGE BACK IN ENVELOPE LEAVE HERE FOLLOW BIKE.’ Zen slipped the photo and tape back into the envelope, opened the door and let them drop out.
‘Right, well, let’s get on with it.’
For the next three hours the motorbike led them a nightmare chase over more than a hundred kilometres of mountain roads that were often little more than channels covered by scree and loose gravel, furrowed by rainwater and ridged by surfacing strata of rock. All they ever saw of their guide was a faint distant tail-light, and then only rarely, at irregular moments after long periods of doubt when it seemed that they had lost the scent, made the wrong decision at some unmarked junction up in the stormy darkness.
The driving demanded constant attention. Only a narrow range of speeds was viable. Below that the car risked bogging down in the mud or grounding on an obstacle, above it the tyres might lose adhesion on the continual twists and turns or cliff-like descents, or one of the vicious potholes or rock outcrops rupture the suspension or pierce the sump. They hardly exchanged a word. Ivy had her hands full with the driving, and although Zen soon gave up trying to follow their route on the maps he had brought with him, which proved to bear only a partial and rather disturbing resemblance to the landscape, like a mild hallucination, he kept up a show of poring over them to try and assuage his guilt at being a mere passenger, unable to share her burden. And still the faint red light up ahead came and went by fits and starts, leading them on across gale-swept open moorland, through massively still pine forests, up exposed dirt tracks and over passes whose names had vanished with the inhabitants of the farms where until a few decades earlier generation after generation of human beings had eked out lives of almost unimaginable deprivation.
It was after midnight when a set of headlights appeared behind them, flooding the interior of the car with light. Ivy squinted, trying to shut out the glare that made her task still more difficult.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked edgily.
‘They must be gating us in.’
Then everything happened at once. The motorbike slowed so that for the first time they could see the outlines of the rider, a derelict farmhouse appeared in its headlight beam and the car behind them started flashing its lights. Figures appeared in the road ahead, waving them into the yard of the farmhouse. Their faces were black and completely featureless except for two oval eye-slits, the head hooded, the body shrouded in shiny waterproof capes. There were piercing whistles, then a thump as they opened the boot, where the money was packed in cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic rubbish bags. With a series of dull thuds and strangely intimate bumps the unloading began, punctuated by more of the raucous, inhuman whistles which finally blew away the remaining shreds of doubt in Zen’s mind about the reality of the kidnapping. That eerie keening, like the cry of a great predator, was used by shepherds to communicate across the vast wind-swept spaces in which they lived and worked. No outsider, no amateur, could ever fake that sound.
The rain, which had been coming and going, began to pour down again, spattering in big gobs all over the glass around them. In the still warmth of the car, bathed in the calm green glow of the instrument panel, it was impossible to imagine what conditions were like out there. Inside and outside seemed so absolutely separate that once again Zen, drifting off into pleasantly dopey inattention, had the sensation of being a mere spectator of screen images, some television documentary about hardy men who did dangerous work for big money.
‘What’s happening?’ Ivy whispered fearfully.
The activity at the back of the car had ceased and it had fallen silent.
‘They’re probably checking the money.’
He could make out nothing in the darkness around the car. The headlights revealed only the worn flagstones of the farmyard, the archway into the byre on the ground floor of the house, the crumbling steps that had once given access to the living quarters above. The door was staved in and torn half off its hinges in what looked like an act of senseless violence. At one of the gaping window frames a bit of ragged cloth twitched and flapped spasmodically in the wind.
‘Perhaps they’ve gone,’ Ivy whispered.
He didn’t answer.
‘Can’t we go?’
‘Not yet.’
Even before he finished speaking a caped and hooded figure appeared at Ivy’s shoulder, the door was wrenched open and a powerful torch shone into their faces.
‘Out! Out! Out!’
The next instant the door behind him opened too, transforming the interior of the car into a wind tunnel. A huge hand grabbed Zen’s shoulder and dragged him outside, shoving him up against the side of the car. Light hit his face as hard as the stinging raindrops. Then it abruptly disappeared, and all he could see were entrancing coloured patterns chasing each other about the glowing darkness like tropical fish.
The pain was so unexpected, so absolute, that he had no name for it and fell over without a sound, like a baby, too shocked to make any fuss.
‘Fuckarse cocksucker of a cop!’
He could just make out the outline of the figure in front of him, sweeping its heavy cape to one side, then something smashed into the side of his head. They’ve shot me, he thought. They’ve shot me like they did Valesio. They’re proving they exist, punishing us for not believing in them, like gods.
With a strange detachment he noted the final sequence of events: the roar of a car engine near by, the boot drawn back, the hiss of a tyre skidding past, the oddly painless blast which ended it.
Like Trotsky and the iceman, he thought. Of course! The solution was so obvious, so satisfying, that there was no need to try and understand it.
That explained the cold, too. Obviously if it weren’t cold the ice would melt. In fact some of it already had. The hard, smooth surface pressed to his face was covered in water. As for the purposeful darkness tugging at his clothing, this must be the wind in the tunnel. The only question, in fact, was where his father had gone, why he had left him alone. No doubt there was an answer to that, too, but he couldn’t think what it was.
Once again he called weakly, but as before there was no reply. He lay back, stretched out on the cold wet tracks, waiting for the express to Russia to come and chop off his head.
The telephone call could hardly have been vaguer.
‘ One of your men is by the farm up above Santa Sofia there, above the river, up there on the way to the church.’
