‘Two brothers. They ran a furniture showroom and recycled the ransom along with takings from the business. They handled the negotiations themselves. It was they who had the Miletti’s representative killed. Apparently he caught sight of one of them during the negotiations.’
Zen nodded sagely. It was going quite well, he thought. The young captain was relaxing nicely.
‘Anyway, I understand you have some information to pass on,’ Rivolta murmured.
‘No, that’s just what I told them downstairs.’
Captain Rivolta appeared to wake up fully for the first time.
‘I’ve come to see the prisoners,’ Zen explained.
‘Well, that’s a bit difficult, I’m afraid. As you are no doubt aware, requests for interrogation rights must be presented through the appropriate channels.’
‘That’s all right, I don’t want to interrogate them. I want to beat them up.’
The young officer’s superior smile froze in place, as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.
‘Beat them up,’ he repeated mechanically.
‘Well, just one of them actually. The one who called me a fuckarse and a cocksucker when they had me at their mercy during the pay-off, up there in the mountains. The one who kicked me in the balls and in the face and then left me there to die. If your men hadn’t come out and found me, God bless them, I would have died! Phone them, if you don’t believe me!’
The captain held up his hands placatingly. Zen gave an embarrassed smile.
‘Anyway, perhaps you understand now why I came straight here as soon as I heard that you’d laid hands on the bastards. Just fifteen minutes, that’s all I ask.’
‘Well, I’m really not sure that I can agree to authorize you to, ah…’
‘I won’t leave a mark on him.’
‘Possibly not, but…’
‘I’ve done this sort of thing before.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you have. Nevertheless, there is the question of…’
Zen shot out of his chair.
‘There’s the question of teaching these fucking bastards to respect authority, Captain, that’s what the question is! Next time it might be you out there, remember. Now the politicians have taken away the death penalty what have these animals got to lose? We’ve got to stick together, Captain, make our own arrangements. Just fifteen minutes, that’s all I ask.’
Rivolta stared up at Zen, seemingly mesmerized.
‘You’re sure there won’t be any marks?’ he murmured at last.
Zen smiled unpleasantly.
‘Like I always say, it’s the ones that don’t show that hurt the most.’
The corridor was straight, evenly lit and apparently endless, with steel doors set at equal intervals on either side. Zen had unconsciously adopted the same pace as his escort, so their footsteps rapped out a single rhythm on the concrete floor. At length the sergeant stopped, produced a set of keys and unlocked one of the doors. Zen’s nostrils flared at the smell which emerged, sheep and smoke and dirt and sweat all worked together, overpowering the antiseptic odour which he hadn’t been aware of until it went under to this blast from another world.
There were two men in the cell, one lying on the bunk bed, the other leaning against the wall. They stared at the intruders. The Carabinieri sergeant produced a pair of handcuffs and snapped them with practised ease on to the wrists of the man on the bed.
‘On your feet, shithead,’ he remarked without animosity.
He grasped the man’s left elbow between forefinger and thumb and pushed him towards the door. The man winced and said something in dialect to the other prisoner. Then the door slammed shut and they were walking again, three of them now rapping out the same rhythm along the corridor.
They passed through a set of doors like an airlock, separating the cells from the rest of the building. The prisoner didn’t move fast enough for the sergeant’s liking and again he made him wince, although the only contact between them was the two-fingered grip on the man’s elbow. Then they turned left through a pair of swing doors into a small gymnasium.
‘Jesus!’ the Calabrian muttered.
The sergeant guided him over to a set of wall bars.
‘You’ll fucking well speak when you’re spoken to and not unless,’ he remarked.
‘But we talk already!’
‘You don’t understand,’ the sergeant told him. ‘That was work. This is pleasure.’
He spun the prisoner round, undid one end of the handcuffs, looped it through the wall-bars and locked it back on the man’s wrist so that the handcuffs wrenched his arms up and back in the classic strappado position.
‘O??’
Zen nodded appreciatively.
‘Very nice.’
The sergeant chopped the edge of his hand down on the elbow he had been gripping earlier. The prisoner groaned.
‘Hurt his arm,’ the sergeant commented conversationally. ‘He’s all yours, then. Fifteen minutes.’
The swing doors banged together behind him a few times and then all was quiet.
Zen lit a cigarette.
‘You remember me,’ he said, placing it between the prisoner’s lips.
The man stared at him through the smoke which drifted up into his unblinking eyes.
‘Was it you?’
The prisoner drew on the cigarette. His gaze was as absolute and incurious as a cat’s. His head shook.
‘They come looking for him but he is not there. They take the brother instead and later he is dead. From then he hates all police.’
For the Calabrian the Tuscan dialect called Italian was as foreign a language as Spanish, but Zen dimly perceived the general outlines of the story.
‘We know this only after,’ the prisoner went on. ‘We phone them to get you. We don’t want anyone killed.’
‘Except Ruggiero Miletti.’
The man mouthed the cigarette to one side.
‘We don’t kill Miletti!’
‘You’ve confessed to doing so.’
‘We don’t want to end like the brother. When the judge comes we deny everything.’
‘I don’t think she’s going to be very impressed by that.’
The prisoner looked sharply at Zen.
‘It’s a woman?’
This seemed to disturb him more than anything else.
‘What of it?’
‘They’re the worst.’
Zen sighed.
‘Look, you had the means, the opportunity and a reasonable motive. Everyone is going to assume you did it, no matter what you say.’
The prisoner let the cigarette drop from his mouth and trod it out with the care of one from a land where fire is not completely domesticated.
‘It’s the same. At Milan innocent till guilty, at Rome guilty till innocent, in Calabria guilty till guilty.’
Zen glanced at his watch.
‘I believe that you didn’t kill Ruggiero Miletti.’
‘Prison for kidnap, prison for murder. Same prison.’
He’s always known this would happen one day, Zen thought, and now that it has he feels oddly reassured. And I’m cast in the role of a smart lawyer trying to make Oedipus believe that I’ve found a loophole in fate and given a sympathetic jury I can get him off with a suspended sentence.
