‘Baldoni? He’s in Drugs.’
‘Three five one,’ Chiodini chimed in without raising his eyes from his newspaper.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Lucaroni told him. ‘This is three five one.’
Chiodini stuck one fat finger thoughtfully up his right nostril.
‘Used to be three five one,’ he pronounced at last.
Lucaroni consulted the directory.
‘He’s in four two five,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to…?’
‘That’s all right,’ Zen replied. ‘I’ll do it myself.’
Baldoni was a pudgy, balding man wearing a blue blazer with five silver buttons, a canary-yellow pullover and a red tie. He was picking his teeth with a match while someone on the phone talked his ear off. When he hung up Zen handed him the letter.
‘Fucking union,’ he frowned. ‘All they ever do is ask for money. The reason I joined was I thought they were going to get more money for me, not take it away.’
‘I’m on the Miletti kidnapping,’ Zen began.
Baldoni looked at him more warily.
‘Rather you than me.’
‘I understand that Daniele Miletti got himself into some trouble with your section some time ago.’
Baldoni laughed briefly.
‘Got himself into it and got himself out of it.’
He tried to sit casually on the edge of his desk, farted loudly and stood up again.
‘You know about the University for Foreigners?’ he demanded. His tone was suspicious and aggressive, as though the institution in question was missing and Zen was suspected of having stolen it.
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘Forget what you’ve heard. I know what you’ve heard. You’ve heard about this symbol of the brotherhood of man set in welcoming Perugia with its ancient traditions of hospitality, where every year bright-eyed, bushy-tailed youngsters come from the four corners of the world to study Italian culture and promote peace and international understanding.’
He looked intently at Zen.
‘You’re not from round here, are you?’
Zen shook his head.
‘In that case I can tell you that in my humble opinion this place is the meanest, tightest little arsehole in the entire fucking country. International understanding my bum! Christ, the people in this dump are so small-minded they treat the folk from the village down the hill as a bunch of aliens. So why do they put up with the real foreigners? For one very simple reason, my friend. It’s spelt m, o, n, e, y.’
‘And Daniele?’ Zen prompted.
‘Don’t worry, I’m getting there. Now you also have to realize that the foreigners aren’t like the ones you’ve heard about either. They used to come down from the North – German, Swiss, English, American. Girls, mostly. They came to read Dante, drink wine, sit in the sun and get laid. But those days are long gone. Now the Arabs have moved in, because you-know-who in Rome has done a deal for oil rights, including a fat kickback for you-know-who, naturally. Meanwhile you and I get paid worse than his housekeeper and the fucking union writes to ask me to send them money!
‘So, anyway, all these Arabs start rolling up to learn engineering and dentistry and Christ knows what. Unfortunately the professors object to giving lessons in Arabic, so suddenly we’ve got hundreds of thousands of students who need to learn Italian. And where do they go? To the University for Foreigners, of course, right here in lovely medieval Perugia. Only these foreigners are a bit different from what we’ve been used to. Masculine like they don’t make them any more, don’t give a fuck about Dante, don’t touch alcohol, find it cold here after their own country and are more interested in praying and politics than getting laid. Bright eyes and bushy tails are at a distinct premium among this bunch, and as for the brotherhood of man, their idea of that is that if someone disagrees with you, you kill him. Remember, Ali Agca, the man who shot the Pope? He was here. Remember the Palestinian commando that murdered half the Israeli athletes at the Munich games? They trained at a farmhouse in the hills just outside Perugia. The Jihad Islamica suicide squads, the pro-Khomeini mob, the anti-Khomeini mob, KGB spies, Bulgarian hit-men, you name it, it’s been here. The Political Branch have installed a hot line direct to the Ministry’s central computer in Rome and even so they can’t keep up. At one time there were two and half thousand Iranians alone in town. Their consul in Rome came up on an official visit last year and there was nearly a diplomatic incident when he got thrown out of the new university canteen he’d come to inspect. Turned out the last time the staff had seen him he was a student here and he’d made such an arsehole of himself they’d sworn they’d never let him back in!
‘All right, so that’s the new Perugia, crossroads of international terrorism. A big headache for the Politicos upstairs but what’s it got to do with yours truly, you’re no doubt wondering, or with Daniele Miletti for that matter? Well, terrorists need cash. The official ones get it from the government back home, the rest have to earn it. And there’s no quicker way to make money than drugs, particularly if you happen to come from a country where the stuff is sold like artichokes. So we start to take an interest, and among other things we’re passed the names of a couple of Iranians who make frequent trips back home by train. That’s one hell of a way to travel to Iran, unless of course you want to avoid the screening procedures at the airports. The next time through we have them picked up and lo and behold they’ve got a suitcase full of heroin. So we get to work on them and forty-eight hours later we have the whole ring, including one Gerhard Mayer, twenty-nine, from West Berlin, their linkman into the local drug community. Which is where everything starts to fuck up, because the moment we turn our attention to Herr Mayer he tells us that the money he used to pay the Iranians was put up by the son of a certain well-known local citizen.’
‘Daniele Miletti.’
‘You know the feeling? One minute I had a nice clean case bust wide open, stiff sentences all round and bonus promotion points for yours truly. The moment that fucking kraut mentioned Miletti I knew I could kiss that sweet dream goodbye. We went through the motions and pulled him in, of course, but by the time the magistrate spoke to him Mayer had changed his mind. He’d never met Daniele Miletti, never seen him, never heard of him. The kid was back home in time for lunch.’
‘And Mayer’s statement?’ Zen queried.
‘Extorted under duress. Duress my bum! Mayer couldn’t fucking wait to shop his rich young pal.’
‘What happened to Mayer?’
‘He hopped on the first plane back to Germany.’
Zen gazed at him, frowning.
‘They let him out? With a drug trafficking charge hanging over him?’
Baldoni nodded.
‘Like I say, where the Milettis are concerned, rather you than me, my friend. Rather you than me.’
By the evening Zen was beginning to feel like a hostage himself. He had spent the entire afternoon in his office, pacing from the desk to the window, from the window to door and back to the desk again. It was now over forty hours since the money had been handed over, but there had been no word of Ruggiero Miletti’s release. Despite the fact that he was powerless to influence events in any way, Zen felt bound to remain on watch, like the captain of a ship. But in the end he could stand it no longer and went out for a walk.
The evening was warm and calm, but the side streets through which he wandered at random were almost deserted. Very occasionally his path crossed that of a couple walking home or a group of a young friends going up to the centre, and then the brief appraising glances they gave him left Zen feeling obscurely ill at ease, underlining as they did his lack of purpose or direction. Thoughts flitted to and fro in his brain like swallows: phrases from Ruggiero Miletti’s letter, an insinuation of Antonio Crepi’s, something Ivy had said in the car, what Valesio’s widow had told him, Luciano Bartocci’s brisk new manner, Italo Baldoni’s story, Cinzia Miletti’s breasts…
He felt simultaneously starved and stuffed, deafened and denied. It was the nature of the place, he thought, perched up there on its remote peak, its back turned to the world, all the more obsessed with its petty intrigues and scandals because it knew them to be of no interest whatever to anyone else. Nothing he had been told from the very first moment he had arrived in Perugia amounted to any more than salacious gossip, casual slanders, ill- informed rumours of no real value which elsewhere would never have reached his ears. But folk here were eager to
