Silvio took out his pen and signed. When the yellow envelope was safe in his hands he turned to Zen.
‘I may be dirty in super?cial ways,’ he remarked, ‘but you’re dirty through and through! You’re a filthy putrid rancid cesspit, a walking shit-heap.’
The final proof of the official’s total degeneracy was that he didn’t even try to defend himself, merely getting into the waiting car, his despicable job done. Silvio followed, but more slowly. Despite the varied splendours and miseries of his existence, the pleasure of moral superiority was one that very rarely came his way. As a connoisseur of exotic sensations he was determined to savour it to the utmost.
ELEVEN
She almost changed her mind at the last moment. It was the place itself that did it, the smell of cheap power, making her realize just how far she had come since those early days, the days of secretarial work and English lessons. The world Ivy lived in now was drenched in power too, of course, but quite different from the low- grade kind that pervaded places where you came to post a parcel or cash a cheque or renew your residence permit. How she’d always hated the bitter, envious midgets who patrol these internal boundaries of the state, malicious goblins wringing the most out of their single dingy magic spell. Her Italian friends claimed to feel the same way, but Ivy had never been convinced. The opium of these people was not religion but power, or rather power was their religion. Everyone believed, everyone was hooked. And everyone was rewarded with at least a tiny scrap of the stuff, enough to make them feel needed. What people hated in the system was being subjected to others’ power, but they would all resist any change which threatened to modify or limit their own. The situation was thus both stable and rewarding, especially for those who were rich in power and could bypass it with a few phone calls, a hint dropped here, a threat there. At length Ivy had come to appreciate its advantages, and to realize that she could make just as good use of them as the natives, if not rather better in fact. In the end she’d come to admire the Italians as the great realists who saw life as it really was, free of the crippling hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxon world in which she had been brought up.
She’d learned her lesson well. Gone were the days when she had to hang around under that sign with its contemptuous scrawl ‘Foreigners’, waiting for the Political Branch officials who would swan in and out as it suited them, or not turn up at all, or send you away for not having enough sheets of the special franked paper which could only be bought at a tobacconist’s shop which meant another half-hour’s delay and then starting from scratch again having lost your place in the queue. Now-adays she went over their heads and dealt directly with the people with real power. The snag, of course, is that they won’t speak to you unless you have real power too, or know someone who does. Only since her association with Silvio Miletti had she been able to make full use of the lessons she had learned, to put her newly acquired skills to the test. Yes, she had come a long way.
‘You looking for something?’
Hovering there at the foot of the stairs, hesitating, reflecting, she’d attracted the attention of the guard, who was fixing her with a supercilious stare.
‘I have an appointment with Commissioner Zen,’ she replied coldly.
‘Never heard of him.’
‘It’s all right, I know the room number.’
She tried to move forward to the stairs, but the man barred her with one arm and yelled to a colleague, ‘We got a Zen?’
The man consulted a list taped to the wall.
‘Three five one!’ he yelled back.
‘Three five one,’ the guard repeated slowly. ‘Third floor. Think you can make it on your own?’
‘Just about, I should think, thank you very much.’
Her attempt at irony did not make the slightest impression on the man’s fatuous complacency. You couldn’t beat them at their own game, of course; the mistake had been agreeing to come in the first place. Normally she would not have done so. In the circles in which she now moved one did not call on policemen unless they were on the payroll, in which case the meeting would be on neutral ground, in a cafe or on the street. But when Zen had phoned, just before lunch, Ivy had agreed with hardly a moment’s thought. He was going back to Rome that evening, he said, and he’d like to clear up that matter they had discussed on the phone at the beginning of the week, did she remember? She remembered all right! Not the subject of the phone call, which had been rather vague in any case, something about a letter he had received. But she wasn’t likely to forget the way he’d quizzed her about her appointment with Cinzia that morning. At all events, today he’d suggested that she stop by his office in the afternoon, and to her surprise she had agreed. The problem, she was forced to admit, was that her reflexes had not yet adjusted to her new position. Silvio would have got it right instinctively, but you had to have been born powerful for that. In her heart of hearts Ivy still feared and respected the police as her parents had taught her to do. She might have come a long way, she recognized, but there was still a long way to go.
Her sensible rubber heels made hardly a sound as she walked along the third-floor corridor. With some surprise she noticed that her palms were slightly damp. The place was having its effect. That shiny travertine cladding they used everywhere, cold and slippery, seemed to exude unease. Get a grip on yourself, she thought, as she knocked at the door.
The occupant of the office was a rough, common-looking individual of the brawn and no brain variety. She thought she must have made a mistake, but he called her in.
‘The chief’ll be back directly. He says you’re to wait.’
Ivy glanced at her watch. She was by no means certain that it had been a good idea to come and this provided the perfect excuse for leaving.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve got another appointment.’
But the man had taken up a position with his back to the door.
‘Take it easy, relax!’ he told her in an insultingly familiar tone. ‘You want to read the paper?’
He picked a pink sports paper from the dustbin and held it out to her. There was a long smear of some viscous matter down the front page.
The man’s body was bulging with muscle. His nose had been broken and his ears were grotesquely swollen. He had an air of ingrained damage about him, as though his life had been spent running into things and coming off second-best. The effect was both comical and threatening.
Ivy consulted her watch again.
‘I shall wait for fifteen minutes.’
Why hadn’t she insisted on leaving immediately? It had something to do with the man’s physical presence. There was no denying it, he intimidated her. He was staring at her with an expression which to her alarm she found that she recognized. She had discovered its meaning back in the days when she was working at the hospital, where she’d been secretary to one of the directors, an unmarried man in his mid-forties. He was distinguished, witty and charming, and seemed intrigued by his ‘English’ secretary, amused by her, concerned about her welfare. He gave her flowers and chocolates occasionally, helped her find a flat at a rent she could afford, and once even took her out to eat at a restaurant outside Perugia. He had never made the ghost of a pass at her.
One weekend there was a conference in Bologna which he was due to attend, and at the last moment he proposed that Ivy accompany him. When she hesitated he showed her the receipt for the hotel booking he had already made, for two single rooms. She could assist him in various small ways in return for a little paid holiday, he explained. He made it sound as though she would be doing him a favour. He appealed to her as an attractive, vivacious woman, a fellow-conspirator against life’s drabness, the ideal companion for such a jaunt as this. Nothing quite like it had ever happened to her before. The experience seemed to sum up everything she loved about this country where people knew what life was worth and understood how to get the best out of it.
They put up at a luxury hotel and dined out that evening at one of the city’s famous restaurants. Ivy’s pleasure was dimmed only by a slight anxiety as to what would happen when they got back to the hotel, or rather as to how she would deal with it. Ivy was not attracted to her employer physically, but she had long ago been forced to face the fact that the men she found attractive did not feel the same way about her. They were younger than her, for one thing, handsome, reckless types who didn’t give a damn about anything. Unfortunately they didn’t give a damn about her, even as a one-night stand, so she had learned to compromise. And when someone had been
