Free Cosi Fan Tutti - 5 by Michael Dibdin Page A

putting the plastic cassette away in his coat pocket. ‘If you don’t do it yourself, it doesn’t get done.’
     
     
    Soldati d’onore
     
     
    At about the time Aurelio Zen left his office, allegedly to go to Rome, two other policemen entered a superficially similar room in a building at the foot of the Vomero, just off Via Francesco Crispi, about half a mile from Zen’s house as crows flew and footballs rolled. There was the same sense of excessive space, the same bleak decor, the same functional furniture, the same combination of chaotic clutter and impersonal neatness.
    There, however, the similarities ended. For here, each desk sported a smart new Olivetti computer, all networked to each other and to a host of other such workstations across the country. Phone calls were routed via the military communications system, with digital encoding to prevent interception. The windows were toughened against bullets and explosives, and incorporated a layer of metallic material designed to baffle electronic eavesdropping.
    For this was the local headquarters of the Divisione Investigativa Antimafia, an elite unit comprising handpicked members of the Carabinieri, the police and the Guardia di Finanza, which had been created specifically to combat organized crime. The former regime’s commitment to this particular struggle had always been a matter         of some doubt, to say the least, and one of its most prominent and illustrious figures was currently facing trial on charges of having been, as many had long suspected, ‘the Mafia’s man in Rome’.
    One of the first steps of the new government had therefore been to throw a conspicuous amount of money at the DIA, in an effort to demonstrate the difference between their predecessors’ ambiguous and dilatory approach and the determination of these bold new brooms to sweep the country clean. Whether this determination also held good on a political level was of course another question, and one which the two men chatting quietly in the third-floor office had often discussed.
    Not at work, though, in however quiet a voice. For rumour had it that when the building had been upgraded to incorporate the various technological marvels of which it now disposed, it had also been fitted with a series of extremely sensitive microphones which could pick up the merest whisper of sound in any corner of any corridor or room, toilets included. There had even been jokes concerning one of the officers on the team, whose bowel movements were of legendary volume, ‘making a big noise for himself in Rome’.
    No one had been able to confirm or deny the existence of this surveillance system, still less identify who, exactly, might have access to the results, but the prevailing wisdom held that it was advisable to avoid raising potentially sensitive issues while on the premises. The two men in question have no need to worry about this, however, for they are merely discussing their work, and in particular a new file which they have opened concerning one Ermanno Vallifuoco, who has just been reported missing by his family following his failure to return from a trip into town, supposedly to meet two business associates at a famous hotel on Via Partenope.
    One problem is that each of these ‘associates’ claims to have spent the evening in question elsewhere, one at a restaurant (ten witnesses) and the other at home (fourteen, of whom five not directly related to the family), and that each denies ever having arranged to meet Vallifuoco in the first place. But what has brought the matter to the attention of the DIA is the fact that this is the third such disappearance in as many weeks, and two of the presumed victims are successful local businessmen linked to the Camorra and the other a prominent figure in local government.
    Attilio Abate, the first man to vanish, failed to return after going out one night to walk his dog in streets surrounding his villa in Baia. The animal, a Great Dane, also