already. She’s going through a bad patch now, coming to terms with not being as good-looking as she once thought she was.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, she’s hardly perfect. She seems to have inherited your legs, for a start, which, well, and her chin is pointy sharp and her nose — I think that must come from your side of the family, too.’
‘She’s absolutely beautiful. She always has been, always will be.’
Now he glanced at his vintage Breitling watch, a gift from Letizia six years ago to celebrate his fortieth birthday. The watch lost twelve to fifteen minutes a day, but he had never had the heart to tell her and continued to wear it, surreptitiously righting it every morning against the clock on his mobile phone. One minute to eight, lied the watch. That meant it was already at least one minute past. He slipped the book into his pocket, exited the gate on the side of Via Daniele Manin. He opened the back door of his BMW and tossed his briefcase in. Shutting it, he noticed a van, the same one he had glimpsed earlier, reversing down the road at speed. Idiot driver. He was going to have to get out of the way quickly if he didn’t want to get knocked down.
The van braked just in time, and its back doors burst open, to reveal a man with short straw-coloured hair, who half nodded at him, then leaped out and smiled as he landed nimbly on the road. Matteo stood absently fingering his car key, wondering if he was supposed to know the man standing next to him. Now the driver was coming around from the side, and for a split second, Matteo was worried that he had made a gesture of some sort to protest at the reckless driving. But of course, he hadn’t. He was proud of his ability to resist road rage. Even so, it almost seemed as if they were coming for…
Someone, it must have been the driver, pulled a thin plastic cord around his neck and jerked it tight, strangling his cry. The other man, or perhaps the driver again, grabbed his hands, and twisted them behind his back with speed and violence, then jerked upwards, causing extreme pain in his shoulders, and propelling him towards the van. He went straight into the side of one of the doors, hitting it with his mouth, and felt a crack, a shooting pain, and a sudden rush of salt and slime in his mouth. He felt the van tilt down slightly as someone jumped into it. The man who had nodded in that friendly way seconds before was now grabbing a fistful of Matteo’s thinning hair at the back of his neck and dragging him in. He could not breathe. The floor of the van felt strangely yielding, as if his face was metal and the floor was soft flesh. Now thousands of tiny ball bearings seemed to be rolling beneath his hands. He clutched at them desperately with his fists as if they were pearls of oxygen. A tingling sensation passed through his chest and he felt his body beginning to float upwards. Just before he lost consciousness, the cord was released from around his neck. He could hear gasping and coughing, and it took him a while before he realized he was making the sounds himself. He became aware of the man beside him and the movement of the vehicle. He was bringing his eyes into focus and getting ready to speak, when a bag was pulled over his head. Silently, the man bound his wrists with duct tape. He could hear the squeak of the sticky plastic being pulled from the roll as it was wrapped over and over his wrists and hands, stretchable at first, then tighter and tighter.
3
Milan-Sesto San Giovanni
The journey took somewhere between half an hour and an hour. Or maybe more. He had lost track of time but sensed the distance was not great. It was a short transfer from the vehicle to a damp room via a short few steps that he managed to negotiate without falling. He was thrown nose first against a crumbling wall. Still they left the bag over his head. He asked for it to be taken off, then scrunched up his face waiting for the blow that would inevitably follow. But no one answered and he realized he was alone. He could hear the muffled voices of the men speaking some Balkan or East European language. Probably Romanian, he thought. It sounded like it made sense. Romanian was full of Latin and Italian-sounding words; Albanian was unlike anything else.
Thought fragments and oddly irrelevant questions were forming a disorderly pile in the back of his mind, but they had to wait. He needed to concentrate on not dying from suffocation, on expelling the blood that kept welling up from inside his mouth and making him nauseous. To vomit would be to die. Finally, as an overwhelming question of dignity, he had to concentrate on his bowels. He began to get a rhythm going. Breathe slowly, gently, until someday someone would take this stifling hood off his head. Spit softly into the fabric to keep the blood and saliva from sliding down his throat and making him sick. Tighten the sphincter and clench the stomach muscles when the cold rush of liquid fear hit the base of his gut. The thing to remember was that they had the wrong person. As soon as they discovered their mistake, they would let him go. He had to be careful not to look at them and not to hear any names. He was able to move his fingers a little behind his back. He could use his right hand to feel the wedding ring on his left. Inside the ring were his wife’s name and the date of their marriage twenty-two years ago. He closed a finger and thumb over it and started easing it off.
He was not ready to die, even though that very morning he had given a thoughtful little speech on the question of ageing and death in front of his wife and his children, sleepy-eyed and outraged at being dragged out of their summer-morning beds. They already felt underprivileged to be in Milan at the end of August when everyone else was still on holiday. The trips to France in June, the holiday camps in July, and the two weeks on the Argentario counted for nothing, evidently.
‘Happy belated birthday,’ Letizia had said, giving him the book on trees. He had kissed her on the cheek. She moved her lips up to meet his, but he’d gone for the cheek, because, well, the children. But now he regretted it. He should have kissed her on the lips. He felt his wedding band slip over his knuckle. Then he had kissed Sofia on the head, run his fingers through his son’s hair, and said, ‘Get a haircut, Lorenzo. You look like a girl.’
Lorenzo was showing signs of wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps. Statistics, mathematics, probability puzzles. He and Lorenzo always had football, number tricks and puzzles to keep them in contact with each other. But his daughter Sofia had floated to a planet so far away that communications between them had become infrequent and asynchronous.
His right hand was cramping, and his wrist hurt from the effort, but he had managed to free the wedding ring from the fat of his finger. He crooked his fingertip to stop the ring from falling off immediately.
Someone entered the room. Something scraped, thin metal against cement, the hollow tube of a chair leg, followed by a fizz of static as synthetic fibres brushed plastic as the person sat down inches from him. Fingers touched his throat without violence. Then another hand, moved in under his chin, as Letizia sometimes did when she was adjusting his tie before he left in the morning. Behind his back, he straightened his finger and allowed the ring to slip into his right hand, where he nestled it protectively in the hollow made by his thumb and the edge of his palm.
The hands left his neck and the hood was lifted. Fresh cool air rushed across his face, down his mouth, up his nostrils, through his hair. It was like riding the waves in a speedboat. He looked up into the face of the man who had freed him from the constriction and darkness, unable to keep the gratitude out of his eyes. His thoughts began to clear as the oxygen returned to his brain and his eyes focused. He was in an abandoned place that smelled of urine and wet cement. He started talking.
‘We don’t have much money. I have a ski chalet in Aprica, just one bedroom, not worth all that much. My Generali stock options are worth 172,000 euros. I have 90,000 in the bank plus two online accounts that transfer to that account only, so I would have to be the one to do that. They have about 20,000 each in them. I lost money on the stock market. My parents rent their house and live on a state pension. Even if Letizia — that’s my wife, as you probably know — even if she sells the house to get me back, which she could hardly do without the authorities finding out and freezing my assets, you’re not going to get much more than a million, and… seeing as there are several of you…’ He thought of the Romanian words he had heard them speak. ‘Do you understand what I am saying?’
‘Shut up,’ said the man. ‘I’m not interested. If I want you to talk, I’ll tell you to talk.’ The voice was plaintive and resentful, as if his captor was the one having the wrong inflicted upon him. The speaker was a terrone, one of those brutal southern peasants whose unwelcome presence in Milan was one of the reasons the Northern League had become so popular. He wasn’t so good with the accents of the Mezzogiorno. He knew his captor was not Neapolitan. Neapolitans always sounded enthusiastic and friendly and on the verge of telling a joke. This was a more lugubrious southern accent, not Apulia. Sicily or Calabria — Calabria, probably. Where his own grandfather had
