Ratking by Michael Dibdin

Author:Michael Dibdin [Dibdin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Police Procedural, Detective and Mystery Stories, Police, Police - Italy - Fiction, Zen; Aurelio (Fictitious character) - Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Zen; Aurelio (Fictitious Character), General, Italy - Fiction, Italy, Fiction
ISBN: 9780679768548
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black LIzard
Published: 1997-04-28T23:00:00+00:00

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 let you into their neighbour’s secrets, particularly if they thought it might distract your attention from their own. ‘Mayer couldn’t fucking wait to shop his rich young pal.’ Yes, that was the style of the place. It was all a fuss about nothing, another example of the national genius for weaving intricate variations around the simplest event. Zen had always derived much amusement from Ellen’s simple-minded approach to current affairs. Despite her intelligence, she could be quite amazingly naive and literal in her judgements. She seemed to believe that the truth was great and would prevail, so why waste time spinning a lot of fancy theories? Whereas Zen knew that the truth prevailed, if at all, only after so much time had passed that it had become meaningless, like a senile prisoner who can safely be released, his significance forgotten, his friends dead, a babbling idiot.

But in the present case it was time to take a stand, to declare once and for all that on this occasion at least the truth was as obvious and evident as it appeared to be. The crimes which had been committed

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