Ratking by Michael Dibdin Read Free Book Online

send someone to collect you at about eight. No, I insist. It’s easier than trying to give directions. You need to have been born here! Until this evening, then.’
    As Zen walked back to his hotel he noticed several people staring at him curiously, but it was not until he caught sight of his reflection in a shop window that he realized that he was wearing one of those annoying little Mona Lisa smiles which makes everyone wonder why you’re so pleased with yourself. It was just as well that no one knew him well enough to ask, for he had no idea what he would have replied.

    Whatever the reason might have been, by eight o’clock the smile had definitely faded.
    Zen had spent the afternoon and early evening reading the background material he had been given on the Miletti case. Like most police drivers, Luigi Palottino clearly considered himself a Formula One contender manqué , and the relentless high speeds and a succession of near misses had brought on a mild attack of the car sickness from which Zen often suffered, so that he just hadn’t been able to face the pile of documents Enrico Mancini had sent round with the Alfetta. Not that he needed them, of course, to know who Ruggiero Miletti was. To any Italian of his generation the name was practically synonymous with the word gramophone. Ruggiero’s father, Franco, had started the business, first repairing and later constructing the new-fangled machines in a spare room at the back of the family’s furniture shop on Corso Vanucci, the main street of Perugia. That was in 1910. Ruggiero had been born the previous year. By the time he left school Miletti Phonographs had become a flourishing concern which had outgrown the original premises and moved to a site convenient to the railway line down in the valley.
    Although by no means cheap, the Miletti instruments had enjoyed from the first the reputation of being well made, durable, and technically advanced, ‘combining the ancient traditions of Umbrian craftsmanship with an irresistible surge towards the Future’, as the advertisements put it. Franco had a flair for publicity, and before long such notables as D’Annunzio, Bartali the cycle ace and the composer Respighi had consented to be photographed with a Miletti machine. Franco’s greatest coup came when he persuaded the Duce himself to issue a typically bombastic endorsement: ‘I declare and pronounce that your phonographs are truly superior instruments and represent a triumph of Fascist civilization.’ Meanwhile the radio age had arrived, and the Miletti company were soon producing the massive sets which formed the centrepiece of every wealthy family’s sitting-room, around which friends and hangers-on would congregate on Sunday afternoons to listen to the programme called ‘The Four Musketeers’, which eventually became so popular that the football authorities had to delay matches until it was over.
    The family’s good fortune continued. Although Ruggiero’s elder brother Marco was killed in Greece, the Milettis had a relatively easy war. Having sacrificed one son, it was easy for Franco to persuade influential friends that Ruggiero’s brains were too valuable a commodity to be put at risk, and hostilities ended with them and the Miletti workshops intact. Both were quickly put to work. The post-war economic boom, artificially fuelled by the Americans to prevent Italy falling to the Communists, provided ideal conditions for rapid growth, while Ruggiero soon proved that he combined his father’s technical genius with even greater ambition and vision. In the next decade the company steadily expanded and diversified, though often in the teeth of considerable opposition from Franco Miletti. When his father died in 1959, Ruggiero found himself at the head of one of the most successful business concerns in the country, producing hi-fi equipment, radios, televisions and tape recorders, exporting to every other country in Europe as well as to many in South America,