Ratking

(Spoilers)

Ratking by Michael Dibdin was the book chosen by the Wednesday Whodunit Mystery Book reading group to read in October and discuss on November 7, 2012.  I purchased a slightly used paperback copy of Ratking at the mystery bookstore Murder by the Book in Portland, OR, back in July.  It was first published in 1988 and is the first of the mysteries by Dibdin that feature the detective (policy commissioner in Italy) Aurelio Zen.  Most of the action takes place in the town of Perugia, Italy, where Michael Dibdin taught at the University for four years.  I had heard of Perugia recently and Ratking provides thorough descriptions of the place, especially its darker sides.  Ratking is a complicated mystery, with a slower but still suitable pace, some subtle humor and many interesting references.

Ratking introduces us to Aurelio Zen, the middle-aged policy commissioner who was demoted to “housekeeping” duty since he went against the political pressures.  The case in the book involves the kidnapping of the patriarch of a very powerful family in Perugia and the resulting complications.  The Italians in the book do not deal with criminal acts by pursuing justice when they feel it isn’t necessary.  All the complicated political arrangements can make pursuing justice more difficult and less straightforward than it should be.  I found myself asking many questions as I read such as why was Zen brought in on the case from his post in Rome?  Much is explained by the end but not everything.  I liked the character Zen, though.  His life is far from ideal with his mother living with him and a contentious relationship with his American girlfriend.  He knows he can’t just straight-up go after the bad guys due to all the politics.   Sometimes I wondered why he was willing to keep working on the case.  He didn’t take everything too seriously such as enjoying having the brute of an inspector, Chiodini in his services.  I think that despite their imperfections and whether they have entirely good intentions, detectives in mystery books want to solve their cases.

There are many interesting characters and complicated relationships.  Everyone seems to have something to hide including Zen who only much later in the book reveals some of his past failures.  The Milettis, the family of the kidnapping victim provide some interesting parts of the book.  Talk about dysfunctional and backstabbing.  It seemed as if any of them could be a suspect.  By the end I almost didn’t care what happened as long as Zen successfully figured it out.  Other characters include the magistrates in charge of cases that add some complication to the Italian justice system.  The young Bartocci is full of conspiracy theories and yet seems to change position when it suits him.  Some characters seemed a bit incomplete.  What were the motives of the kidnapping victim’s friend Antonio Crespi?  He was the one who used his pull to get Zen put on the case.  Then there’s the foreigner from South Africa, Ivy Cook.  She initially seems like the errand woman of the Milettis, Silvio mostly, but turns out to have some of her own motivations.

Italians seem to put a lot of importance into where you’re from, even within Italy.  They can tell by their accent such as that Zen isn’t from Rome where he lives but from the north, Venice to be exact.  His driver is from Naples while those in Perugia are Umbrian.  There are many references to the Calabrians who I’m guessing are the people from the countryside.  The shepherds even have special whistle singles that only they can understand.  In addition to Perugia, other places referenced include Rome, Venice, Florence, Siena, Venice, Assisi, Milan, and Naples.

The story takes place in Perugia, Italy, an old town in the Umbrian region.  I first heard about it when American Amanda Knox was convicted of murder there several years ago and recently had her conviction overturned.  So far I don’t have a good impression of Perugia and the book sure didn’t help with that.  Michael Dibdin taught at the University of Perugia, synonymous, in my understanding with the “University of Foreigners” mentioned in the book a couple of times.  Dibdin later lived in Seattle that also happens to be where Amanda Knox is from.  He died several years ago before the Knox case began.  I wonder what he would have thought of it.  Perugia seems to be this city on the side of a hill surrounded by a Medieval wall and a vast countryside of Calabrians.  Early on the book mentions the relationship between Rome and Perugia as “a relationship consisting of 2,000 years of bitterly resented domination” (p. 28) and that Perugia is “blessed with a crime rate among the lowest in Italy.” (p. 37)  But later a local police officer, Baldoni, describes how the University for Foreigners is full of Arabs coming there to learn Italian and that Perugia is the “crossroads of international terrorism.”  He says to Zen, “Remember the Palestinian commando that murdered half the Israeli athletes at the Munich games?  They trained at a farmhouse in the hills just outside Perugia.” (p. 144)  Maybe I’m prejudiced, but if I ever go to Italy, I’ll probably skip Perugia.

Perugia isn’t very far from the town of Assisi where the most well-known saint, Saint Francis, is from.  Before reading Ratking, I read My Life with the Saints by James Martin S.J.  Martin mentioned that Francis was captured by the Perugians during a war between Perugia and Assisi.  Assisi is also mentioned in Ratking such as when Cinzia says, “sometimes I think I’m more religious than all the priest and nuns in Assisi.” (p. 46)  Zen’s girlfriend, Ellen, visits him in Perugia for a few days.  They try to have a picnic outside of town despite the cloudy weather in spring.  Ellen asks if that’s Assisi over there and they chat about “the contrast between bloody-minded, earnest Perugia, just visible on its wind-swept ridge as a distant smudge of grey, and Assisi, symbol of everything nice and pretty and kind, whose pink stone made even its fortifications look as innocent as an illustration in a book of fairy tales.” (p. 192)

Another place mentioned in the book, that seems to have a lot of significance in Zen’s past is the Lido.  I initially didn’t know what was meant by Lido.  My wife and I have been getting interested in the music of Boz Scaggs and he has a song “Lido Shuffle”.  It turns out that they are different things.  Scaggs’s song is about a guy named Lido who’s on the run from the law but has a good heart deep down (or something like that).  Zen’s Lido is an island off the coast of Venice.  I hadn’t heard of that island but I had heard of the nearby island of Murano that’s famous for its glassmaking and glass art.  There’s a hotel in Tacoma, the Hotel Murano, and we saw a famous glass artist from Murano, Lino Tagliapietra, creating new works of art at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma on October 14.  Lido is also a British English word for an outdoor swimming pool.   It’s interesting how Zen’s past and even his childhood are seamlessly woven into the story.  When he first meets Ivy Cook, she is dressed in a “trouser suit made from some synthetic material which reminded Zen of beach fashions at the Lido in the fifties.” (p. 47)  While driving to the first murder scene, the landscape at night somehow reminds Zen of “Black metal bicycle torches gripped tight as they ran shrieking barefoot through the sand dunes.  At the Lido, it must have been, with Tommaso and the lot, more than forty years ago.  To think this single memory had lain undisturbed in some crevice of his brain all these years, lovingly, uselessly preserved.” (p.60)   Much later the air of abandonment in the Questura offices reminds Zen of five American warships that appeared in the lagoon off Venice towards the end of the war.  They lay moored together for a few weeks, “like a new island between the city and the Lido.” (p. 202)

Dibdin includes some subtle humor in his writing of the mystery/thriller that’s a bit like Jo Nesbo’s playful humor.  Before leaving for Perugia, Zen has dinner with Ellen at Ottavio’s in Rome where “Ottavio outlined in pained tones his opinion that people were not eating enough these days.  All they ever thought about was their figures, a selfish, short-sighted view contributing directly to the impoverishment of restaurateurs and the downfall of civilization as we know it.” (p. 22)  Zen’s three inspectors and his driver provide a bit of comic relief.  When he doesn’t give them enough to do, Geraci watches Chiodini “fill in a coupon for a competition promising the winner a lifetime supply of tomato juice.”  (p. 187)  There are also some subtle digs at the rich and powerful Milettis.  While visiting Cinzia Miletti, the housekeeper brings in the coffee on an ornate silver tray. “I’ve been in the family for generations, said the tray, so you can see that they’re not just a bunch of jumped-up farmers like so many around these days.” (p. 139)

The book provides some thorough descriptions of the clothes worn by the characters, especially the Milettis.  Daniele Miletti first appears wearing “a million lire’s worth of casually elegant clothing: Timberland shoes, tweed slacks, a lambswool sweater, and a Montclair skiing jacket.” (p. 50)  The oldest Miletti son, Pietro, lives in England and temporarily returns to be with his family.  From his tweed jacket to his patterned brogues, he looks the part of an English tourist perfectly: “not the usual designer mix from expensive shops in Milan or Rome, but the real thing, as plain and heavy as Zen imagined the English climate, character and cuisine to be.” (p. 97)  While Zen and Bartocci are talking, I think in an alley or on a rooftop, a silver-haired man in a red dressing gown stares down at them with undisguised curiosity.  The policy inspector Baldoni wears a blue blazer and a canary yellow pullover.  I looked up and found that a pullover is another name for a sweater.  Some clothing such as the magistrate Rosella Foria’s Benetton cardigan represent the time period of the book in the 1980’s.  The time period is also indicated by the police recording phone taps on reel-to-reel tapes.

Dibdin was born in England and attended schools in Scotland and Ireland and universities in England and Canada.  There are a few British English words such as “carriageway” for the part of the road used by vehicular traffic.  Ellen gets her recipes not from those passed down by her family but from “cookery” books.  I was disappointed when I saw the words “answering machine” instead of “answerphone”.  Dibdin must have picked this up from his time in Canada.

There were only a couple of new words in the book such as when Di Leonardo’s secretary issued a statement, “a masterpiece of prolixity . . .” (p. 156)  I found “prolix” to mean tediously long and wordy.  The most important new word was the title of the book, Ratking, that has both a literal and a figurative meaning.  The latter is defined by Bartocci as a large overriding conspiracy that everyone is a part of.  He often mentions that the Ratking is “self-regulating” since everyone is involved to some degree and no one has complete independence.  This concept greatly complicates Zen’s position.  He not only must solve the case, but use his political position and the positions of others to bring about the desired outcome.  It’s not just a simple matter of figuring out who is responsible because they can use their power to work things in their favor.  I think Zen goes through a process of figuring this out through the book and has it down by the end.

With its cultural setting, complicated intrigue, playful humor, and very interesting main character, Ratking is a very good mystery.  It’s not the typical good guys versus bad guys conflict but rather whose agenda is the most sinister.  Dibdin wrote many other Aurelio Zen books and I wouldn’t mind checking them out sometime.  Some of the novels have also been adapted into the TV series Zen staring Rufus Sewell in the title role.  I might check that out too.