Blood rain

PART ONE

What it all seemed to come down to, in those early days when everything looked as clear as the sea at sunrise, was the question of exactly where, how and when the train had been ‘made up’. It was only much later that Aurelio Zen came to realize that the train had been made up in a quite different sense, that it had never really existed in the first place.

At the time, the issues had seemed as solid as the train itself: a set of fourteen freight wagons currently quarantined on a siding in the complex of tracks surrounding the engine sheds at Piazza delle Americhe, on the coast to the north of central Catania. The site where the body had been found was within the territory of the provincia di Catania, and hence under the jurisdiction of the authorities of that city. So far, so good. From a bureaucratic point of view, however, the crucial factor was where and when the crime — if indeed it was a crime — had occurred. As all those concerned were soon to learn, none of these points was susceptible of a quick or easy answer.

Even assuming that the records provided by the State Railway authorities had been complete and credible, and no one in his right mind would have been prepared to make such an assumption, only a few unequivocal facts emerged. The first was that the train had originally left Palermo at 2.47 p.m. on 23 July. At this point it consisted of seven wagons, three of them empties commencing a long journey back to their depot in Catania, the others loaded with an assortment of goods ranging from empty wine bottles to drums of fertilizer. It was not clear whether or not the ‘death chamber’, as it was later dubbed by the media, had been one of these.

Having trundled along the north coast as far as the junction of Castello, the train turned inland, following a river valley up into the remote and largely depopulated centre of the island. Here, always assuming that the scanty records of the Ferrovie dello Stato were to be trusted, it had disappeared from official view for the best part of a week.

When it re-emerged on 29 July, at the junction of Caltanissetta-Xirbi, the convoy consisted of twelve wagons, including some — or possibly all — of the seven which had originally started from the island’s capital. There had apparently been a lot of starting and stopping, of shunting and dropping, during the long, slow trip along the single-track line through the desolate interior of Sicily. No one was in any great hurry to get anywhere, and the staff in charge tended to make on-the-spot decisions about the composition and scheduling of such freight trains on a pragmatic basis, Without bothering their superiors about every last detail. If the odd empty wagon got uncoupled or hitched up at some point, to keep the load down to what the ancient diesel locomotive could handle on the steep inland gradients, that was not regarded as a matter that needed to be brought to the attention of the officials in Palermo. Nor would the latter have been pleased to be informed about such minutiae, it being notorious that they had better things to do than their jobs.

At all events, the resulting train — whatever its exact composition — had continued via Caltanissetta and Canicattii to the coast and then headed east, picking up three (or possibly four) more wagons and losing one (or possibly two) to form the set now reposing on a secluded siding in Catania, its intended destination all along.

According to the subsequent deposition of the driver and his assistant, however, it had been stopped by a flagman near the unmanned station of Passo Martino, just south of Catania, and diverted into a siding there for several hours. This, they claimed to have been told, was due to emergency repair work on a bridge to the north. At length the flagman gave them the all-clear, and the freight train completed its journey without further incident, arriving on 1 August towards eight o’clock in the evening.

It was two days later that the State Railway offices in Catania received the phone call. The speaker had a smooth, educated voice, but his accent was unfamiliar to the official on duty. Apparently he wanted to report a public nuisance in the form of a wagonload of rotting goods parked on a siding at Passo Martino. The smell, he claimed, was dreadful, and what with the heat and the usual stench from the swampland all around, it was driving everyone out of their minds. Something should be done, and soon.

The railway official duly passed the message on to his superintendent. Maria Riesi would normally have dismissed the matter as just another crank call from some disgruntled eccentric, but under the circumstances she was only too happy to have an excuse to leave her stifling office and drive — all windows open, and the new Carmen Consuela album blasting from the speakers — down the autostrada to Piano d’Arci, and then along the country road which zigzagged across the river and the railway tracks to the lane leading down to the isolated station. She didn’t believe for a moment that there would be anything there, but that didn’t matter. The call had been duly logged and noted, so by going out to investigate she was merely doing her job.

Much to her surprise, there was a wagon there, parked on a set of rusted rails almost invisible beneath a scented mass of wild thyme punctuated by some scrubby cacti. There were other, less pleasant smells in the air too, and a lot of flies about. The sun was a strident scream, the heat reflected from every ambient surface its sonorous echo. Maria Riesi walked along the crumbling platform towards the rust-red bulk of the boxcar.

As a matter of routine, the first thing she checked was the waybill clipped into its holder beside the doors. This document listed Palermo as the origin of the wagon, and its destination as Catania. The writing was a mere scrawl, but the contents appeared to be listed as ‘lemons’, and the bill had been over-stamped in red with the word PERISHABLE. Judging by the swarms of flies and the nauseating stench, whatever the wagon contained was not only perishable, but had in fact perished. This came as no surprise to Maria, who knew very well that perishable goods did not travel in this type of wagon. It only remained to find out their nature, and if possible their provenance, and then write an anodyne report handing the whole matter over to Central Headquarters in Palermo. Let them decide whose head should roll.

Even standing on tiptoe, Maria Riesi could not reach the handle to open the wagon. But although short, she was both resourceful and strong. The station had been abandoned for years, but one of the large-wheeled baggage carts used to unload goods and luggage was still parked in a weed-infested corner of the platform, its handle propped up against the wall of a shed. Maria marched over and, grunting from the effort, managed to get it moving and to haul it over to the stalled wagon. She clambered up on to the slatted wooden floor of the cart, her silk blouse stained with sweat, and, by dint of putting her whole weight on the lever which secured the sliding door, eventually forced it open.

Everyone subsequently agreed that she had done more than could have been expected under the circumstances, and that it was not her fault that she vomited all over herself and the baggage cart. The post-mortem was conducted that evening, in an army tent hastily erected at the end of the platform, well away from the assembled group of policemen, magistrates and reporters. The remains had been removed from the wagon earlier by hospital personnel clad in plastic body suiting equipped with breathing apparatus. If the results of the examination were not very informative, this was due more to the condition of the corpse than to the pathologist’s understandable desire to conclude the proceedings as soon as possible. The most he could say, based on a preliminary visual examination of the fly larvae present, was that the victim had been dead for at least a week.

Although the body had been discovered in the province of Catania, the ensuing investigation was technically speaking the responsibility of the police force having jurisdiction in the province where death had taken place. In the present case, this was an extremely moot point. In its peregrinations across Sicily, the train had passed through the provinces of Palermo, Caltanissetta, Palermo once again, Agrigento, Caltanissetta bis, Ragusa, Siracusa, and finally Catania. Six jurisdictions could thus assert a claim to investigate ‘the Limina atrocity’, to use another journalistic label soon attached to the affair. The wagon in which the corpse was found could not be traced with certainty to any of the many and only partially documented stops which the train had made, and even if it had, its original provenance as a ‘death chamber’ remained unknown.

None of this would have much mattered, of course, if it hadn’t been for the provisional identification of the victim. On the contrary, everyone would have been only too happy to hand such a messy, unpromising case to their provincial neighbours on either side. Some vagrant had jumped a freight train somewhere down the line. He may have had a specific goal in mind, or just wanted to move on. Yet a further possibility was that he was on the run from someone or something, and needed to resort to clandestine forms of transport.

Unfortunately for him, the loading door on the wagon he selected had closed at some point after his entry. Perhaps he had even shut it himself, for greater security, not realizing that it could not be opened from the inside. Or maybe some jolting application of the brakes had done it, or simply the force of gravity acting on one of the gradients the train had climbed during its journey through the mountains.

At all events, the door had closed, locking the intruder inside. At that time of year, daytime temperatures reached well over one hundred degrees, even on the coast. Inside the sealed metal freight wagon, standing for days at a time on isolated sidings in the full glare of the sun, a hypothetical thermometer might well have recorded temperatures as high as one hundred and thirty.

Trapped inside that slow oven, the victim had recourse to nothing but his bare hands. His feet were also bare, and both were even barer by the time the body was discovered — stripped to the bone, in fact. The flesh had been abraded and pulped and the nails ripped off in the man’s attempts to attract attention by hammering on the walls of the wagon and, when that failed, to pry open the door. No fingerprints, obviously. There wasn’t much left of the face, either, which he had smashed repeatedly against a metal reinforcing beam, a frenzied effort at self-destruction indicating the intensity of the ordeal which he had sought to bring to a swift end.

The victim’s pockets were completely empty, his clothing unmarked. In the absence of any other information it would have been almost impossible to identify him, except for that mysterious scribble in the Contents box on the wagon’s waybill, which was eventually deciphered as being not ‘limoni’- ‘lemons’ — but ‘Limina’. It was this which ultimately led to the authorities in Catania being allotted jurisdiction in the case, for the Limina family ran one of the principal Mafia clans in that city, and Tonino, the eldest son and presumptive heir, had been rumoured to be missing for over a week.

The woman was standing at the comer of the bar, below a cabinet displaying various gilt and silver-plate soccer cups, photographs of the shrine of Saint Agatha, and a mirror reading, in English: ‘Delicious Coca-Cola in the World the Most Refreshing Drink’. She was drinking a cappuccino and taking small, precise bites out of a pastry stuffed with sweetened ricotta cheese. In her early twenties, she was wearing a pale green linen dress and expensive sandals with heels. Her brown hair, streaked with blonde highlights, ran smoothly across her skull, secured by a white ribbon, then poured forth in a luxurious mane falling to her shoulders.

Nowhere else in Italy would this scene have rated a second of anyone’s attention, but here it was seemingly a matter of some general concern, if not indeed scandal. For although the bar was crowded with traders and customers from the market taking place in the piazza outside, this woman was the sole representative of her sex present.

Not that anyone drew attention to her anomalous presence by any pointed comments, hard looks or tardy service. On the contrary, she was treated to an almost suffocating degree of respect and courtesy, in stark contrast to the rough-and-ready treatment handed out to the regulars. While they jammed as equals in the jazzy rhythms of male talk, fighting for the opportunity to take a solo, she was deferred to in an outwardly respectful but in practice exclusionary way. A request that her tepid coffee be reheated was met with a cry of ‘Subito, signorina!’ When she produced a cigarette, an outstretched lighter materialized before she had a chance to find her own, like a parody of a seduction scene in some old film.

But although the atmosphere was almost oppressively deferential, it could not have been said to be cordial. The other customers all clustered at the opposite end of the bar, or backed away towards the window and the door, creating a virtual exclusion zone around this lone female. Their voices were uncharacteristically low, too, and their mouths often casually covered by a hand holding a cigarette or obsessively brushing a moustache. For some reason, this unexceptionable woman appeared to be regarded as the social equivalent of an unexploded bomb.

When the man arrived, the palpable but undefined tension relaxed somewhat. It was as if one of the problems which the woman’s presence represented had now been neutralized, although others perhaps remained. The newcomer was clearly not a local, even though his prominent, prow-like nose might have suggested some atavistic input from the Greek gene pool which still surfaced here from time to time, like the lava flows from the snow-covered volcano which dominated the city. But his accent, the pallor of his complexion, his stiff bearing and above all his height — a good head above everyone else in the room — clearly ruled him out as a Sicilian.

To look at, he and the woman might have been professional acquaintances or rivals meeting by chance over their morning coffee, but that hypothesis was abruptly dispelled by a gesture so quick and casual it could easily have passed unnoticed: the man reached over and turned down the label of the woman’s dress, which was sticking up at the nape of her neck.

‘A lei, Dottor Zen!’ the barman announced at a volume which might or might not have been intended to undercut the politeness of the phrase. With a triumphant yet nonchalant gesture, he set down a double espresso and a pastry stuffed with sultanas, pine nuts and almond paste. Zen took a sip of the scalding coffee, which jolted his head back briefly, then pulled over the copy of the newspaper which the woman had been reading, DEATH CHAMBER WAGON TRACED TO PALERMO, read the headline. Aurelio Zen tapped the paper three times with the index finger of his left hand.

‘So?’ he asked, catching his companion’s eyes.

The woman made a gesture with both hands, as though weighing a sack of some loose but heavy substance such as flour or salt.

‘Not here,’ she said.

And in fact the bar had suddenly become amazingly quiet, as though every single one of the adversarial conversations previously competing for territorial advantage had just happened to end at the same moment. Aurelio Zen turned to face the assembled customers, eyeing them in turn with an air which seemed to remind each of the company that he had urgent and pressing matters to discuss with his neighbours. Once the former hubbub was re-established, Zen turned back to start his breakfast.

‘You’re going native,’ he said through a bite of the pastry.

‘It’s just common sense,’ the woman replied, a little snappily. ‘They know all about us, but we haven’t the first idea about them.’

Zen finished his coffee and called for a glass of mineral water to wash down the sticky pastry.

‘If you start thinking like that, you’ll go mad.’

‘And if you don’t you’ll get killed.’

Zen snorted.

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Carla. Neither of us is going to get killed. We’re not important enough.’

‘Not to be a threat, no. But we’re important enough to be a message.’

She pointed to the newspaper.

‘Like him.’

‘How do you mean?’

The woman did not answer. Zen finished his pastry and wiped his lips on a paper napkin tugged from its metal dispenser.

‘Shall we?’ he said, dropping a couple of banknotes on the counter.

Outside in Piazza Carlo Alberto, the Fera o Luni market was in full swing. Zen and his adopted daughter, Carla Arduini, had made this their meeting point from the moment that she had arrived in Sicily a month earlier, on a contract from her Turin computer firm to install a computer system for the Catania branch of the Direzione Investigated AntiMafia. It was roughly half-way between the central police station, where Zen worked, and the Palazzo di Giustizia where Carla was battling with the complexities of setting up a network designed to be both totally secure and interactive with other DIA branches in Sicily and elsewhere.

Since arriving in the city, Zen had taken to leaving the window of his bedroom open so that he was awakened about five o’clock by the first birds and the barking of the local dogs, in time to watch the astonishing spectacle of sunrise over the Bay of Catania: an intense, distant glow, as though the sea itself had caught fire like a pan of oil. Then he showered, dressed, had a cup of homemade coffee and left the building, walking north beneath hanging gardens whose lemon trees, giant cacti and palms were teasingly visible above.

At about seven o’clock, he strode up to one of the conical-roofed booths in the Piazza Carlo Alberto which sold soft drinks, and ordered a spremuta d’arancia. In fact, he didn’t need to order. The owner, who had spotted Zen’s tall figure striding across the piazza, was already slicing blood-red oranges, dumping them in his ancient bronze press, and filling a glass with the pale orange-pink juice. Zen drank it down, then walked over to the cafe where he knew that Carla would be waiting for him. It was all very reassuring, like the rituals of the family he had never had.

When he and Carla emerged from the cafe, the sky above was delivering an impartial, implacable glare which merely hinted at the inferno to come later in the day, when every surface would add its note to the seamless cacophony of heat, radiating back the energy it had absorbed during hours of exposure to the midday sun.

A woman who looked about a hundred years old was roasting red and yellow peppers on a charcoal brazier, muttering some imprecation or curse to herself the while. Behind their wooden stalls drawn up in ranks in the square, under their faded acrylic parasols, traders with faces contorted into ritual masks either muttered a sales pitch in the form of a continual litany, as if reciting the Rosary, or barked their wares in harsh, rhetorical outbursts like the Messenger in some ancient play announcing a catastrophe unspeakable in normal language. This speech duly delivered, they surrendered the stage to one of their neighbours and reverted to being the unremarkable middle-aged men they were, gazing sadly at the goods whose praises they had just been singing, until the time came to don the tragic mask again and announce in a series of blood-curdling shrieks that plump young artichokes were to be had for seven hundred and fifty lire a kilo.

And not only artichokes. Just about every form of produce and merchandise known to man was on sale somewhere in the piazza, and those that were not on display — such as women, or AK-47S in their original packing cases — were available more discreetly in the surrounding streets. Zen and Carla walked through the meat section of the market, a shameless display which said, in effect, ‘These are dead animals. We raise them, we kill them, then we eat them. If they’re furry or have nice skin, we also wear them, but that’s at the other end of the piazza.’

And it was this end that they had now entered, away from the specialist sellers of olives and peppers, fennel and cauliflowers, tomatoes and lettuce. Here it was all clothing, household goods and general kitsch and bric-a-brac, and a significant number of the traders were illegal extracommunitari immigrants from Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. An understood and accepted form of racism was in force: the locals wouldn’t accept food from black hands, but they were perfectly happy to buy socks and tin-openers and screwdrivers from them, as long as the price was right.

‘What were you saying about the body in the train?’ asked Aurelio Zen as he and his companion passed the fringes of the market and emerged into the startlingly empty street beyond.

Carla glanced around before replying.

‘The buzz in the women’s toilet is that it wasn’t the Limina boy at all.’

They walked in silence until they came to Via Umberto, their traditional parting place.

‘Which judge is handling the case?’ asked Zen.

‘A woman called Nunziatella. First name Corinna.’

‘Do you know her?’

‘We’ve met a few times, and she seems to like me, but obviously I try to keep out of her way. A humble technician like me is not supposed to interfere with the work of the judges any more than is strictly necessary.’

Zen smiled, then kissed the woman briefly on both cheeks.

‘Buon lavoro, Carla.’

‘You too, Dad.’

Zen walked down Via Umberto to the corner, then turned into Via Etnea, the town’s main street. As he crossed, he glanced as always at the snow-capped mass of Etna to the right, looming up over the city like a nightmare acne pimple. After that, it was a short and pleasant walk along a hushed back-street to the little piazza where the Questura was situated.

With a nod to the armed guard in his bullet-proof booth at the door, Zen entered the building and went upstairs to his office: a cool, spacious room on the second floor of the elegant eighteenth-century palazzo, formerly a bank, which now housed the Catania police headquarters. Floor-length windows gave on to a balcony commanding a view of the street below. The walls were adorned with photographs of Carla Arduini and Signora Zen, as well as a framed poster entitled Venezia forma urbis, a large collage of aerial photographs forming a precise and evocative map of Zen’s native city.

He had never bothered to personalize his temporary quarters like this before, and if he had now, it was because he had reluctantly accepted that these were not temporary. On the contrary, Zen had every reason to suppose that he would be stuck in Catania for the rest of his career.

The proposition which had been made to him in Rome by the famous film director known as Giulio, prior to Zen’s visit to Piedmont, had turned out to be as false as it was flattering. Zen had been privately advised that an elite corps was being put together to smash the Mafia once and for all, and that following Zen’s ‘anti-terrorist triumph’ in Naples he had been chosen to join this select group, despite the notorious inconveniences and risks, occasionally fatal, of a posting to Sicily. The deal had been that in return for Zen’s assistance in the Aldo Vincenzo affair, Giulio’s contacts at the Interior Ministry would arrange for him to be sent not to one of the island’s hot spots but to an attractive backwater on the fringes of the real action. Syracuse had been mentioned as one possibility: a city ‘possessing all the charm and beauty of Sicily without being tiresomely Sicilian’, as Giulio had so invitingly put it.

Almost every aspect of this cover story had turned out to be untrue. For a start, the new ‘elite corps’ did not exist, or rather it existed already in the form of the Direzione Investigated Anti-Mafia, set up in 1995 by Judge Giovanni Falcone with the collaboration of the then Minister of Justice, Claudio Martelli. Aurelio Zen had not been invited to join this group, and not surprisingly, since it consisted of young, keen, energetic volunteers from the country’s three separate police forces. Nevertheless, he was being posted to Sicily, he had learned shortly after his return to Rome following the false close he had achieved in the Vincenzo affair. In what role, however, remained for the moment ambiguous.

‘Essentially, you’re to act as a facilitator,’ Zen’s immediate superior had told him before his departure from Rome. ‘Needless to say, the DIA are doing admirable work, on the whole. Nevertheless, there is a growing feeling abroad that, like every elite division, they sometimes exhibit a regrettable and perhaps potentially perilous tendency towards a… How shall I put it? A degree of professional myopia. There have been instances, some quite recently, when they have regretfully been perceived to be acting without due consultation, and in apparent ignorance of the wider issues involved.’

The official paused, awaiting Zen’s response. At length, realizing that it would not be forthcoming, he continued.

‘With the aforesaid factors in mind, a decision has been made at ministerial level to deploy a pool of mature and experienced officials such as yourself to liaise directly with members of the Polizia Statale seconded to the DIA. Your role will be firstly to report to us here at the Viminale on the nature and scope of DIA initiatives, both current and planned, secondly to monitor the response of all local personnel to ensuing governmental directives, and thirdly to communicate these in turn to Rome, all with a view to expediting an efficient and unproblematic implementation of official policy Do you understand?’

Zen understood only too well: he was being asked to act as a spy. The position of Head of Post in each DIA office was allocated in turn to a representative of one of the police forces involved, each responsible to a different ministry in Rome: Defence, Finance, or Interior. The novelty of the DIA was that it had been set up from the first as a cooperative venture involving all three forces, and had been specifically designed to function independently of any ministerial interference.

At the time, in the wake of the bloodbath initiated by the Corleone clan, and the killings of General Dalla Chiesa and the judges Falcone and Borsellino, it would have been politically unthinkable for any interested party to try to limit or control that independence. But times had changed. The Mafia had apparently been broken, with all but a few of its top capi jailed or in hiding, and there had been no large-scale outbreaks of violence for several years. Clearly someone in Rome, possibly several people, felt that the moment was now propitious to rein in this too-efficient and semi-autonomous organization. Even the public seemed to be starting to feel that enough was enough. Where would it all end? Were we to bring back the Inquisition?

It was in this new climate of covert consensus that Aurelio Zen had been sent south, and not to Syracuse but to Catania, the island’s second-largest city and a stronghold of various Mafia clans who had long resented the power, fame and influence of their rivals — and sometimes uneasy allies — in Palermo. The office of the DIA responsible for the provincia di Catania was presently commanded by a colonel of the paramilitary Carabinieri, whose ultimate loyalties — in the event of any inter-ministerial disputes — lay with his superiors at the Ministry of Defence. The new political appointees at the rival Interior Ministry wanted their own man on the spot, and Aurelio Zen — unambitious and deeply compromised — had been their choice.

Superficially, Zen had to admit, it was not a bad job. Every week, each DIA office submitted a strictly confidential report on its current activities to headquarters in Rome. Thanks to a highly placed contact there, copies of these were passed to the Interior Ministry on the Viminale hill — as well, no doubt, as to the other two interested ministries. On the following Monday, a transcript of that portion of the report pertaining to the province of Catania turned up on Zen’s desk. His official title was Liaison Officer, and he supposedly functioned as a sort of surrogate uncle dispatched by the new, ‘caring’ ministry in Rome. His real job was to amplify and amend the extract from the DIA’s bare-bones document in the course of casual conversation with the seven officers of the Polizia Statale on the local DIA roster.

He took them out for a coffee, a beer, even a meal, ostensibly to discuss their personal problems and keep them informed about pension plans, medical benefits, alternative career openings and the like. Then, at a certain point, he would let drop one of the facts garnered from his perusal of the previous week’s DIA report, in a manner which suggested that he respected his younger colleagues for doing such important and dangerous work and would be interested in knowing further details. These were generally forthcoming. Like anyone else, Zen’s contacts loved to chat, bitch and gossip about their work, except that in their case this was impossible, stuck as they were deep in enemy territory. But here was a senior officer in their own force, a man of wisdom and discretion hand-picked by the authorities in Rome to look after their personal and professional well-being. If they couldn’t trust him, whom could they trust?

Today, Zen was lunching with Baccio Sinico, an inspector in his early thirties who had been in Sicily for almost three years, first in Trapani and then Catania, and now wanted to be transferred back to his native Bologna. This put Zen in an even more awkward position than usual. Sinico’s request was perfectly in order, and would already have been approved if it had not been for Zen’s intervention. Of all his contacts inside the DIA, Sinico had turned out to be by far the most informative and uninhibited, and Zen didn’t want to lose him. At the same time, he completely understood and sympathized with the man’s wish to return home.

It wasn’t so much a question of the physical danger, he had realized, although this was real enough. But in the course of their conversations Zen had sensed that Sinico was afflicted by another complaint, at once vaguer and more disturbing. Although Sicily was part of Italy and therefore of Europe, it didn’t feel like it. In everything one did, saw and heard, there was a sense of being cut off from the mainstream, from il continente, as Sicilians termed the mainland. The result was a peculiarly insular arrogance, a natural reaction to centuries of being either ignored or exploited by whoever happened to be in power in the places that mattered.

Baccio Sinico was suffering from a reaction to this mentality, as perhaps was Zen himself, on those not infrequent mornings when he woke at three or four in his darkened apartment for no apparent reason and found it impossible to seduce sleep again. This will end badly, he thought, standing at the open window, the smoke from his cigarette wafting gently away on the sea breeze which came by night to mitigate the rigours of the southern sun. All was balmy, all was calm, but an ancient instinct buried deep within his cortex refused to be fooled. This will end badly, it told him, with all the authority of a source at once disinterested and well-informed. This will end badly.

Her journey to work seemed, as always, a crude parody of her entire existence: a cartoon-strip version, at once focusing and parodying the life she now lived.

At five to eight the sirens were already audible in the distance, throated along on the morning breeze off the Ionian Sea, growing in strength all the time, nearing, homing in on their target. Precisely as the hour struck from a nearby church, they peaked and then wound down in front of the apartment building where she lived. ‘One, two, three, four, five…’ she counted under her breath. When she reached ten, the phone rang.

Tu proverai si come sa di sale lo pane altrui,’ a voice announced.

‘E com’e duro calle lo scendere e’l salir per l’altrui scale,’ Corinna Nunziatella replied, and hung up.

As always, she asked herself which ironic genius had selected Dante’s famous lines on the bitterness of exile as that week’s coded phrase announcing her bodyguards’ arrival: ‘You’ll find out just how salty other people’s bread tastes, and how hard a road it is to climb up and down other people’s stairs.’

Prior to her present appointment, Corinna had spent a year working in Florence and realized that the poet had meant this quite literally: Tuscan bread was made without salt and was, to her taste, insipid. Poor Dante, on the other hand, in exile north of the Apennines, had evidently been appalled by the daily discovery that the most basic human foodstuff was different there. Although without a trace of self-pity, Corinna could not help reflecting on the still greater bitterness of her own situation: a Sicilian born and bred, yet now an exile in her native land, unable to go up and down her own stairs without an armed guard.

A knock at the door announced the latter’s arrival. Corinna checked by looking through the spyglass inset in the armoured panel, then opened the door with a sigh. Her personal escort that morning was Beppe, a gangling, semi-handsome son of a bitch who, as always, tried to get familiar as they walked downstairs together, she in her dark tailored suit and sensible shoes, he in camouflaged battledress accessorized with a machine-gun suspended on a leather belt strung over his shoulder.

‘Beautiful day!’ was his opening line.

‘Yes.’

‘But not as beautiful as you, Signorina Nunziatella.’

‘That’ll do, Beppe.’

‘I’m sorry, dottoressa, but what do you expect? Here I am five hundred kilometres from home, stuck in a squalid barracks with a bunch of other jerks doing their military service, and risking my life every day to protect the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen! Have you ever heard of what they call “the Stockholm syndrome”, where the victims fall for their kidnappers? This is a similar thing. Because if you think about it, I’ve been kidnapped by the system, which you represent, dottoressa, so it’s not surprising that I’ve fallen for you like a ton of…’

But by now they had reached the front door, and Beppe had to attend to his duties. He activated the radio strapped into a pouch on his belt and exchanged cryptic and static-garbled phrases with his companions. Then he counted slowly to five, swung open the door and ushered Corinna urgently outside. The two other guards had taken up point positions to either side of the three Fiat saloons which had drawn up in front of the building — where no other vehicle was allowed to park, even momentarily — and were anxiously scanning the street in every direction, their automatic weapons at the ready. Corinna ran the short distance to the second of the cars, whose rear door stood open, ready to receive her. Beppe, who had followed her, slammed the door shut and slapped the roof with his palm. Instantly the convoy containing Judge Nunziatella and her heavily armed escort moved off at speed, sirens screaming and blue lights flashing to alert the citizenry to the fact that yet another government functionary under sentence of death was passing by, panoplied in all the impotent might of the Italian state.

The Palace of Justice in Piazza Verga was an impressive work dating from the Fascist era, occupying an entire city block. Just outside the main entrance stood an enormous statue of a crowned female representing the justice supposedly dispensed within. One of her outstretched palms supported a jubilant male nude, while on the other a similar figure hid his head in shame or fear. Both these figures were more or less life-size, while Justice herself was at least ten metres tall, her vaguely Roman vestments overflowing on to the stone plinth below.

Classical allusions continued in the form of twenty-four rectangular pillars supporting a decorative portico, which in the present political climate gave the impression that the building itself had been imprisoned, and was gazing out at the city through the bars of its cage. But the most disturbing effect was that, apart from an hour or so around midday, the pillars to either side of the statue cast strong vertical shadows across it, turning the image of Justice into an obscure, faceless icon of some pagan deity, utterly indifferent to the joy or the misery of the paltry human figures it held in the palms of its hands.

The perimeter was impressively guarded, with canvas-covered trucks full of soldiers in battledress and an armoured car sporting a 4.5 cm cannon mounted in a swivelling turret. The army had been deployed on the streets of Catania and other Sicilian cities when it became apparent that the burden of protecting prefects, judges, magistrates and other functionaries was putting such a strain on the police forces that there weren’t enough officers left to carry out the investigations and arrests ordered by those members of the judiciary who had survived the assassinations planned by Toto Riina and carried out by his Corleone clan.

Now, though, the political pendulum seemed to be on the point of swinging back again. Voices had been heard in parliament claiming that such a massive show of force was undermining the democratic culture of Italy and shaming the country in the eyes of its partners in the European Union. One deputy had gone so far as to compare it to the brutal repression instituted by Cesare Mori, Mussolini’s Iron Prefect’, who virtually eradicated the Mafia in the 1920s, only for the invading Allies to release the jailed capi and their followers just in time for them to get rich on the easy money and unregulated growth of post-war Italy. No one in the government had expressed such views as yet, but Corinna Nunziatella was by no means alone in feeling that it was only a matter of time before Beppe and his fellow recruits were reunited with their girlfriends and families, and the situation in Sicily returned to what had always passed for ‘normal’.

The convoy of cars drove round to the rear of the Palace of Justice, past the armed guards in their bullet-proof vests, and down a ramp leading into the bowels of the building. Corinna thanked the members of her escort — whose lives, of course, were as much at risk as hers — and took the lift to the third floor, where the offices of the Procura della Repubblica were located, and then walked along a corridor ending at yet another checkpoint. Here she not only had to present her identification to the guard on duty — despite the fact that they both knew each other by sight — but also to pronounce the codeword, changed daily, which permitted access to the offices of the so-called ‘pool’ of AntiMafia magistrates. The security precautions protecting this high-risk group were undeniably impressive, but Corinna knew better than to assume that they would be effective in the event that an order was given to eliminate her. The Mafia was traditionally compared to an octopus concealed in a rocky crevice, its tentacles reaching everywhere. Corinna thought that a pack of invasive rats provided a more accurate analogy: if you blocked up one entrance, they would find or make another.

Despite the elite status of the AntiMafia pool, or perhaps because of the widespread resentment which this exclusive club attracted from colleagues in other branches of the police and judiciary who had not been invited to join, Corinna Nunziatella had as yet been unable to obtain an office more suited to her requirements than the dingy, dark cubicle at the northeast corner of the building which she had originally been assigned. The pointless and oppressive height of its ceiling merely served to emphasize the meagre proportions of the floor space dictated by the newly installed wall panels: 3.5 square metres, to be exact.

Since she could not expand laterally, Corinna had followed the Manhattan model, stacking files in precarious piles propped up one against the other like exhausted drunks. Retrieving any given file was a work of considerable dexterity, requiring the skills of those conjurors who can remove a tablecloth while leaving the dinner setting intact. Relief was promised shortly in the form of a computer network linking all members of the Catania DIA pool both to each other and to their colleagues in the other provincial capitals, but despite a month of installation work, it was still not up and running. In the meantime, the massive terminal squatted idly on her desk, taking up yet more precious space.

‘E se tutto cio non bastasse…’ she murmured under her breath.

Yes, indeed. As if all this were not enough, Corinna Nunziatella was beginning to suspect that she was falling in love.

She was not left long to brood on these incidental problems, for within a few minutes the phone rang, summoning her to the director’s office for a ‘progress report’. Corinna hastily grabbed an impressive-looking dossier of papers, some of which were actually related to her current cases, checked that her appearance was at once professional and uninviting, and proceeded up to the fifth floor.

The arrival of Sergio Tondo, the recently appointed director of the AntiMafia pool, had proved a source of much mirth to his subordinates, since in appearance he resembled the classic, slightly racist stereotype of the typical mafioso: short, broad, sallow and intense, with a moustache of which he was excessively proud, black voided eyes, and an air of undefined but potentially threatening distinction. The punchline of the joke was that, far from being Sicilian, or even a southerner, Tondo — originally, no doubt, Tondeau — was in fact a native of the Valle d’Aosta, the French-speaking mountain region in the extreme north-west corner of the country, well over a thousand kilometres from Catania as the crow flew, had there been any crows ambitious enough to attempt such a trip.

As though to confirm the initial impression he had created, Sergio Tondo seemed to go out of his way to act as well as look like a caricature Sicilian, to the extent of having made explicit sexual advances to all the female magistrates on his team. Corinna Nunziatella had already been obliged to remove one or other of his hands from her hip, her knee, her shoulder and just below her left breast, and to do so in such a way as to make it seem that she hadn’t really been aware that it had been there in the first place.

It was a delicate operation, calling for exquisite timing, adroitness and tact. Corinna would have been the first to admit that she was ambitious, and it was hard to overemphasize the importance of her promotion to the AntiMafia pool at the age of only thirty-four. To be eased out now would not just mean a return to her previous, uninspiring postings; it would mean being marked for the rest of her life as someone who had been given a rare chance to succeed at the highest level, but who had failed. No one would ever know why, still less bother to find out. And if she started retailing stories about sexual harassment, everyone would just assume that she was trying to lay the blame elsewhere in a feeble attempt to excuse her own incompetence.

Her tactics at present were to try to make herself look drably forbidding. Not so much impregnable, which might put the director on his macho mettle, as unworthy of the effort involved. The image she strove for was that of a walled mountain village at which the invading hordes in the valley below cast a brief glance, then shook their heads, shouldered their weapons and moved on to easier pickings elsewhere. The trick was to make Tondo feel that he had rejected her, thus leaving his pride and self-esteem intact — and, above all, to do so before he pushed matters to a point she could already sense somewhere close ahead, where she would ram her knee into his bulging crotch and rake her clawed nails across his piggy little eyes.

The moment she opened the door to the director’s absurdly spacious office, Corinna Nunziatella knew that something had happened, and that it was not good news. Having dreaded being overwhelmed by unwanted attentions, she found herself treated to an almost brutal absence of elementary politeness, never mind charm, which she found threatening in a quite different way. So far from rushing over to ‘drink in your perfume’, as he had once said, Sergio Tondo did not even bother to get to his feet. His greeting was perfunctory and barely audible. In short, his manner was everything she had wished it would be — cool, distant, and totally professional — and it scared the hell out of her. Because if the director was finally treating her as a colleague rather than a woman, it could only mean that something was very badly wrong indeed.

Corinna Nunziatella sat down in one of the two armchairs facing the desk, the antique leather creaking beneath her. Apart from a crucifix, a portrait of the president, a map of the province of Catania and a couple of shelves of law books apparently selected on the basis of format and size rather than content, the director’s office was strikingly, indeed significantly, empty. No piles of files here, no unsorted notes, no computer terminal. All this austerity made the three telephones on the desk — red, blue and yellow, respectively — loom even larger. One would be for internal calls within the building, another an ‘open’ external line.

And the third? Corinna Nunziatella found herself irresistibly reminded of the so-called terzo livello of the Mafia, whose existence had often been postulated but never proved; the fabled Third Level, far above mundane criminal activities and inter-clan rivalries, on which the most powerful and influential bosses met with their political patrons and protectors in Rome to discuss kickbacks, mutual interests, and the delivery of votes come election time.

‘So?’ the director remarked, as though Corinna had requested a meeting with him.

‘I understood you to say that you wanted a progress report,’ she replied stiffly.

Sergio Tondo smiled superficially and made a throw-away gesture with his left hand.

‘That was just a manner of speaking. I really want to have a chat, hear what you’re working on at present, that sort of thing. As you know, I try to foster a team spirit here, and I feel very strongly that face-to-face meetings like this, informal and off the record, without the inevitable stresses of peer pressure, can genuinely promote a sense of individual empowerment in each and every member of the department, resulting in an enhanced professional dynamic and group cohesion.’

Corinna kept her mouth shut.

‘How’s the Maresi case going?’ the director continued at length.

‘It isn’t going anywhere. It’s been deadlocked for months, and looks likely to stay that way.’

‘And the Cucuzza business?’

‘That looked promising, until the Supreme Court released my principal witness, who promptly disappeared and is now probably in hiding abroad or dead.’

The court was merely upholding the law,’ Sergio Tondo remarked in a tone of light reprimand. ‘The procedural irregularities which had evidently occurred — through no fault of yours, dottoressa, I dare say — unfortunately made it impossible for them to act in any other way.’

Corinna Nunziatella nodded sagely.

‘I’m sure the citizens of Italy will sleep more soundly in their beds at night, knowing that the legal rights of convicted mafiosi are being protected with such rigour.’

The director gave a sympathetic sigh.

‘I know how frustrating these setbacks can be, but try not to feel too bitter. It’s quite pointless, and might ultimately have a negative effect on your performance as a valued member of our team.’

Again Corinna chose not to respond.

‘Those two files are currently inactive, then,’ Tondo went on. ‘So what have you been working on?’

‘The Tonino Limina case has been occupying almost all my time in the past weeks.’

‘With what results?’

Corinna took a deep breath and counted silently to five.

‘As I explained at the general briefing last week, direttore, I have been working on two main fronts. Firstly, I have tried to trace the provenance and movements of the wagon in which the body was found. As you know, the waybill attached to the so-called “death chamber” indicated that it formed part of a stopping goods train, schedule number 46703, which left Palermo on 23 July. However, despite lengthy interviews with the various crews who worked this train, I have as yet been unable to determine conclusively whether the said wagon originated in Palermo or was attached to the train at some later point. It is also unclear how and when it came to be abandoned on the siding where it was later discovered. The train crew explicitly deny that they detached any wagons during their layover at the station of Passo Martino. On the other hand, they admit that they remained in the cab of the locomotive during this time. It is therefore possible that some third party detached the wagon without them noticing. What we do know is that the signalman who brought the train to a halt was not a railway employee, and that the repair work which he used to justify the manoeuvre was not in fact taking place.’

The director nodded in a slightly bored, dismissive way.

‘And your second line of enquiry?’

To try to contact the Limina family with a view to making a positive identification of the victim.’

The director smiled yet again, more intensely, but he did not speak.

‘Needless to say, this has also proved extremely problematic,’ Corinna went on. ‘The Limina family are not given to communicating with the authorities at the best of times, still less with a magistrate participating in the AntiMafia pool. Nevertheless, I have been able to establish a tentative initial contact, using an associate of the family with whom I have had dealings in the past.’

‘Who’s that?’ Sergio Tondo demanded, suddenly alert.

‘He is referred to in my files under the code name “Spada”.’

The director frowned at her.

‘“Swordfish”? And what is Signor Spada’s real name?’

Corinna Nunziatella’s face hardened.

‘I have no idea. Nor do I wish to know. This is an extremely sensitive and covert contact, and in my view one which the Limina family deliberately keeps active in order to facilitate communications with us and with other clans when this suits their purposes. If Spada’s real name became known, the contact might well be seriously compromised or even terminated.’

Corinna Nunziatella had spoken in a deliberately measured tone, weighing her words. The director considered her statement for a moment.

‘And what did your Swordfish have to say?’ he asked with a markedly ironic inflection.

‘It’s been inconclusive so far. He’s intimated that the family will have a statement to make, but that they want to make sure that all members of the “family” have been informed before they make any public pronouncement. With luck, I hope to have some definite news in a week or so.’

‘Oh, before that, I think!’

Sergio Tondo stood up and walked over to the window. He paused there for just long enough to make Corinna wonder if the interview was over, then turned on her abruptly.

‘The Liminas have already been in contact. With me. Through other channels.’

Corinna felt her spine tense up.

‘What do you mean, “other channels”?’ she demanded. ‘What kind of…?’

‘The family lawyer,’ Tondo replied evenly. ‘Dottor Nunzio Lo Forte, a highly respectable figure specializing in civil and commercial law. He phoned me yesterday to arrange a meeting, at which he presented this document.’

He walked back to the desk and handed Corinna a typed sheet of paper. It was a sworn declaration by Anna Limina, mother of Tonino, to the effect that her son was at present on holiday in Costa Rica, and that she knew him to be alive and well. In evidence, she appended a set of his dental records for forensic comparison with the body found on the train.

‘I sent the records over to the morgue immediately,’ the director went on. ‘The pathologist assures me that the dental details do not match those of the victim in any way. This has quite clearly been a case of mistaken identity.’

‘But what about the waybill with “Limina” written on it?’ Corinna protested.

The director raised an admonitory forefinger.

‘It wasn’t written, but scrawled, and further examination by a noted graphologist at the University of Catania suggests that the word was in fact limoni, as the railway official Maria Riesi originally thought. In other words, the perishable contents of the wagon in question were simply lemons, which were no doubt off-loaded further down the line. In short, whoever the unfortunate victim of this tragedy may have been, he was not Tonino Limina, and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that there is any Mafia connection at all. That being so, the matter is of no further interest to this department. The file can therefore be closed and the whole business turned over to the normal authorities for routine investigation, leaving you free to pursue your own work on such matters as the Maresi and Cucuzza cases, which by your own account appear to have been languishing of late.’

He sat down again behind his desk and made a note in his diary. Corinna Nunziatella got up and walked over to the door.

‘Did I tell you how lovely you’re looking this morning?’ Sergio Tondo said suddenly. ‘That outfit really suits you, and haven’t you done something to your hair?’

The words emerged in a rapid murmur, at once acknowledging and dismissing the existence of the director’s former persona, much as one might a twin who had died in infancy. Sad business, of course, but no longer really… relevant.

There was a draught about, faint but perceptible, its hollow chill undermining everything. But where was it coming from?

A real draught — indeed, fresh air of any kind or origin — would have been only too welcome in the dim recess of the Palace of Justice which Carla Arduini had reluctantly been assigned, its one high window dimmed with grime and welded shut by decades of poor maintenance. Not that conditions would have been any better with it open. On the contrary, the heat outside at this hour threatened to turn the lava paving blocks back to their molten form, while the humidity borne in off the sea swamped the whole city in a miasma of lassitude and passivity.

But the draught that was bothering Carla Arduini was not real but virtual: a flaw in cyberspace, a seepage of information from the system. Despite this, she sensed it almost physically, rather like the onset of some malaise — an accumulation of minor symptoms, none of them particularly significant in themselves, which together indicated a problem as yet unidentified, but puzzling and potentially serious.

Most people, including the majority of her professional colleagues, wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong. Although not yet quite ready to be turned over to her clients, the network she was responsible for installing was up and running. The terminals were all responding and the numbers were being crunched with suitable efficiency. The problem was not with the system itself but with access to it. For some days now, Carla had had the feeling that someone had opened a ‘back door’ which would permit the user to monitor or manipulate the data files at will.

As a commercial hireling, Carla did not have the security clearance necessary to view DIA files herself, although she could have got into them easily enough if she had wanted. But she didn’t need to. The evidence she was after was buried far below such superficial applications, hidden away in the genes of the system itself, and she had already found one line of code that didn’t fit.

In a sense, it was no concern of hers. There was no perceptible effect on the efficiency of the network. Carla could simply complete her installation and sign off on the assignment, but she felt personally intrigued and challenged. Whoever had tampered with the system had done an almost completely seamless job, but he had left a few crumbs here and there, and she was determined to identify the intruder.

Unlike most of her colleagues at the Turin-based Uptime Systems, Carla Arduini was not obsessed with computers, but she had an instinctive feel for them, the way some people do for animals. She had discovered this while at university in Milan, when a last-minute change of schedule by her mathematics professor — who tried to keep the time he had to spend away from his villa on Lake Como down to the absolute minimum — led her to take a course in systems analysis to fill in a blank couple of hours on Wednesday afternoons.

The experience was a revelation to her. Mathematics, she had already begun to realize, was like one of those languages which are simple, straightforward and logical in the early stages, but which rapidly spiral out of control in a frenzy of idioms, oddities, idiosyncrasies and exceptions to the rule which even native speakers cannot always get right, never mind explain. From advanced calculus to proving Fermat’s theorem or calculating the value of pi was a large step, to be sure, but it would never go away, would always be a step not taken.

The prospect of such indeterminacy on the horizon, however distant, was one which Carla found intensely threatening. Her childhood had been a shuffled series of abrupt moves, often taken furtively and under cover of darkness; of ‘relatives’ and ‘friends’ who came and went and never reappeared; of her mother’s sudden reticence and evasions; and above all her father’s absence. Later, as an adolescent, when she finally understood the reasons for all this, it turned out to be too late. Neat labels such as poverty, neglect, fecklessness and sheer bad luck would not adhere to those childhood memories, which remained unmanageable and apart, a perpetual source of anxiety which could awaken her even now, sweaty and trembling, in the middle of the night.

She had been drawn towards mathematics in part because of a natural gift for the subject, but largely because it seemed to offer a secure refuge, a way of containing and exorcising such imponderables. Two and two can never make five or three, still less nothing at all. They can’t change their minds, or sink into depression, or disappear for days on end, or get drunk and abusive and then suddenly burst into tears across the dinner table. All they can ever do is make four.

Most of her classmates found this and similar tricks a bit dull, but not Carla, because she knew that they could be relied upon to work over and over and over again, and never let her down. It was not until she got to university that this simple faith began to desert her. It was a question of scale. Two and two make four, four and four make eight, eight and eight make sixteen… Even this childishly simple series was, like all series, infinite. Stronger, more stable spirits than hers, she knew, delighted in the possibilities for intellectual acrobatics this provided. All Carla felt was the return of a familiar sense of panic.

It was while struggling with this loss of mathematical faith that she was fortuitously introduced to the world of applied computing. It was love at first sight. Although seemingly complex, computers were actually reassuringly simple-minded. Whether searching a vast database for a single instance of a string, rotating three-dimensional sketches of hypothetical buildings or calculating the value of our old friend pi to fifty billion places, they were in essence no more mysterious or threatening than the spy in some old thriller sending a coded message by switching a torchlight on and off. Their memories were prodigious but finite; the Library of Congress, not the Library of Babel.

Carla reorganized her syllabus, took some private extramural courses, and when she graduated got a job first with Olivetti and then with a firm specializing in installing and maintaining computer networks linking individuals and departments within an organization. She was entirely familiar with this particular system, which she had installed many times before, and she was determined not to let some anonymous hacker outwit her.

Her cellphone started beeping. Was it her employer, complaining about the length of time it was taking her to fine-tune this system to everyone’s satisfaction? Or was it one of her employer’s employers, the judges and magistrates of the AntiMafia pool, wanting to know when they would finally be able to use this high technology to collate their files, communicate internally, and coordinate information and objectives with their colleagues elsewhere in Sicily?

In the event, it was simply her father.

‘Carla? How’s it going?’

‘All right. And you?’

‘Not too bad. Listen, are you free this evening?’

Free?’

‘For dinner. I’ve just realized that apart from meeting for coffee in the morning, we don’t seem to actually spend very much time together and I feel bad about it, for some reason. I suppose I’m missing you.’

Carla laughed charmingly.

‘I’d love to come to dinner, Dad.’

‘We could go out, I suppose, or you could come round here.’

‘Shall I bring something?’

‘A dessert, perhaps. I’ll put something together. It won’t be much, but at least we can be together and talk.

‘Of course. Eight, nine? They eat late here, I’ve noticed.’

‘Let’s say eight. At my age, you don’t change your habits so easily.’

‘I’ll be there at eight, Dad.’

‘Wonderful. I’m looking forward to seeing you and being able to talk freely. It’s odd…’

‘What is?’

‘Well, this whole situation. No?’

‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

‘Till tonight, then.’

She clicked the phone back together and turned to the sullen, recalcitrant screen. Dinner at eight. Yes, that was all right, she supposed, although she found it difficult to look forward to the evening with any great enthusiasm. Her father was right: despite the fact that Carla had requested this assignment in Sicily — not that she’d faced much competition! — in order to be near him, this physical proximity hadn’t yet resulted in the warm, natural, easy relationship she had hoped for. At moments, indeed, it was hard to believe that Aurelio Zen really was her father.

Not literally, of course. The DNA tests they had had done in Piedmont had proven their genetic linkage beyond a shadow of doubt, but was that all there was to being a father or a daughter, a demonstrable genetic link? In law, yes, but Carla was beginning to think that the real meaning of such terms lay elsewhere, in the years of nurture and intimacy she had been denied, the long chronology of daily life stretching back into the mists of a personal pre-history, when all was myths and magic.

Not that she had any sentimental illusions about such kinship. She knew that there were good fathers and bad fathers, some supportive and some brutally abusive. Nevertheless, they were all, for better or worse, the real thing. This wasn’t, and with the best will in the world there was nothing that either of them could do about it. As soon as she had finished this assignment, she would catch the first flight north. After that, she would phone her father from time to time. Perhaps they might even get together once in a while, at Christmas, but that would be all.

Meanwhile there was this unsolved problem of the virtual draught. Carla resumed her search of the system log files. After about five minutes she heard a hesitant knock at the door.

‘Come in!’ she called impatiently.

The door opened but Carla did not turn around immediately. When she did, she found the judge called Corinna Nunziatella standing in front of her. They had met a few times during the preceding weeks, in the corridors and the canteen of the building, to which the older woman, by virtue of her status as a DIA judge, was effectively restricted.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ Corinna Nunziatella remarked with a smile.

Carla got up from her desk.

‘Good morning, dottoressa.’

Her visitor’s hand waved violently, as though of its own accord.

‘Oh, please, let’s drop the formalities! Call me Corinna. What a charming outfit! And how’s the work going?’

Her tone was friendly, but oddly tense. Carla Arduini pointed to the glowing computer screen.

‘I’m afraid it will take a little more time before the system is ready to be handed over. I apologize. I do realize how impatient you and your colleagues must be to start using it, but various problems have arisen…’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that!’ Corinna Nunziatella burst out emphatically ‘I don’t know about the others, but I for one am certainly in no hurry to start using these damn things. If they’d just give me more space and some secretarial help, I’d be perfectly happy to carry on the way we’ve always done. But for some reason the Ministry seems to feel that getting us all on-line is their top priority. We have to fill out a requisition form every time we need a box of paper-clips, but a billion-lire computer system? No problem there.’

Carla smiled politely and waited for her visitor to come to the point. As though sensing this, Corinna Nunziatella coughed awkwardly.

‘I don’t really have anything much to say,’ she said. ‘I just happened to be passing so I thought I would drop in and…’

She broke off.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Carla.

‘I suppose I was wondering how you were getting along here in Catania,’ the other woman went on in a controlled manic burble. ‘It must be lonely for you, being from the north and not knowing anyone here, not having any family, any girlfriends…’

‘Actually I do have family here,’ Carla replied, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers.

Corinna Nunziatella looked at her in astonishment.

‘You do? Who?’

‘My father. He works at the Questura. You may have heard of him. Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen.’

‘But surely he’s not Sicilian?’

Carla hooted with laughter.

‘God, no! He’s from Venice.’

Catching herself up, she put one hand over her mouth.

‘I’m so sorry, dottoressa. That must have sounded frightfully rude. I didn’t mean it that way, but…’

‘That’s all right,’ Corinna replied, a grim glitter in her eyes. ‘Bash the Sicilians as much you want. I do it all the time. Just don’t call me dottoressa again, or I’ll really get angry. I can’t help it, I’m a Virgo.’

Carla’s eyes opened wide.

‘Are you really? So am I!’

‘When’s your birthday?’

‘Well, actually it’s this weekend. On Saturday.’

Corinna Nunziatella appeared to reflect.

‘Congratulations. But in the meantime, what are you doing tonight?’

Carla was slightly taken aback by this abrupt question.

‘Er, well, I’m having dinner with my father. We rediscovered each other last year, in Piedmont,’ she went on impulsively ‘And I was just getting to know him when he got transferred down here.’

‘You were just getting to know your own father?’ asked Corinna Nunziatella incredulously.

‘It’s a long story.’

The older woman gave an ironic smile.

‘Well, if you’re in the mood for long stories about fathers, I’ve got one too.’

She checked her watch.

‘I must go. How about tomorrow night? I know a nice restaurant outside the city, up in the foothills of Etna. The food’s good, and the place itself is quiet and private. You don’t feel as if you’re on display all the time, if you know what I mean.’

‘Sounds wonderful. Where is it?’

Corinna shook her head.

‘I’m not allowed to reveal my plans in advance, even to girlfriends. If you give me your address, I’ll have my escort pick you up at nineteen minutes past seven tomorrow evening.’

Carla Arduini wrote down her address and handed it to her visitor, who tucked it away in the file she was carrying.

‘Seven nineteen exactly, then,’ Corinna said. ‘Be in the entrance hall of your building by seven fifteen, but don’t open the door.’

Carla gave her an amused look.

‘Very well, I’ll try not to peek.’

The judge sighed and nodded.

‘I’m so used to this by now that I’ve forgotten how insane it must seem to someone who leads a normal life. Anyway, that’s the way things are, I’m afraid. Bear with me, if you can.’

She opened the door, then looked back at Carla with an unexpected intensity.

‘Do you think you can?’ she asked.

‘Of course I can!’ Carla replied warmly. ‘On the contrary, it’s very kind of you to think of inviting me. I have been frightfully lonely here, to tell you the truth.’

Corinna Nunziatella nodded once and left. Carla resumed her scrutiny of the screen. So many people suddenly inviting her out. It was very welcome. Despite her reservations about her father, no doubt they would have a reasonably pleasant time, while the prospect of an evening out with the eminent Judge Corinna Nunziatella was even more intriguing. Frankly, her social life since arriving in Sicily had been a disaster. She knew no one, had not managed to make any friends, and there simply wasn’t much that a young single woman could safely or pleasantly do in Catania alone by night.

Carla tried to force her attention back to her work. Lithe and articulate, her fingers began to caress the keyboard, combing the deep subconscious of the CPU, which was already on-line, via a highly secure link, with similar networks in Palermo and Trapani. The machine’s log files, which record who accessed a system and when, could not be deleted, even by the system administrator. If someone had broken in or borrowed a key, they would have left indelible fingerprints. All she had to do was to find them.

At four o’clock, Aurelio Zen left the restaurant where he and Baccio Sinico had had a long, inconclusive lunch. At five, he went food shopping. By six he was back home. The apartment he had leased was reasonably priced and very conveniently situated, on the upper floor of a three-storey palazzo just a short walk from the Questura. After bruising experiences in other Italian cities, Zen had been pleasantly surprised by the ease with which he had found such suitable accommodation, thanks to a colleague who had phoned him at work and offered him a short-term let on a property owned by a friend.

True, the exterior of the building was unprepossessing, despite its classical proportions and the pilasters, cornices and moulding surrounding every door and window. Lack of maintenance, or heavy-handed application of same, together with layers of airborne pollution and memories of ancient and uneven coats of distemper, had created an oddly incongruous effect, like skin disease on a marble bust. Once through the door, however, everything was spick-and-span, in keeping with the aristocratic restraint and harmony displayed in every detail of the hallways, stairwells and rooms, so unlike the overbearing display of Rome or Naples. For Zen, it felt almost like being back in his native Venice.

The only real difference was the constant noise of traffic outside, a noise quite specific to Catania: the squelch of tires on the river-smooth blocks of lava with which the streets were paved, like the black, dead-straight canals in the northern reaches of Venice. Actually, his hypothetical daughter Carla Arduini had come up with a far more appropriate epithet: ‘the Turin of the south’. Both cities were symmetrical, rectilinear entities planned at royal command in a single style and constructed all of a piece in a relatively short space of time. In the case of Catania, the reason for this was evident at every street corner in the smouldering dome of Etna to the north. In 1669 the volcano had erupted, submerging the whole of the city beneath a lava flow which had only stopped when it reached the sea, cooling into the low, craggy, black cliffs which still formed the coastline. Twenty-four years later, one of the devastating earthquakes for which the region had been notorious since antiquity demolished almost all the city’s few remaining structures.

After such a double blow, the surviving citizens could have been forgiven for packing their bags and moving to a less perilous spot. Some did, but by and large the Catanesi took the view that nature had now done its worst, and that they and their children would be safe where they were. So they rebuilt, hastily and using the only material to hand: the solidified lava which had wrought such havoc in the first place.

And now they finally had a piece of good luck, because the period happened to be an excellent moment for off-the-shelf civic architecture, just as it was for the bespoke version then under construction in the capital of Piedmont, nestling beneath the Alps some eight hundred kilometres further north. The buildings which arose along the grid plan of the new city were sober and solid, of fitting proportions and decorated with grace and elegance. Even three centuries later, many of them abandoned or in disrepair and surrounded by a concrete wasteland of speculative, Mafia-funded development they retained a sense of ineradicable character and dignity, which might be destroyed but never demeaned.

Zen set down his shopping on the marble counter in the kitchen and surveyed it with a morose air. He had never had pretensions to any but the most basic culinary skills, but for reasons into which he had not enquired too deeply, he felt a need to entertain Carla at home at least once. His solution had been to approach the owner of the restaurant where he had taken Baccio Sinico for lunch and to order some of the establishment’s excellent fish soup, packed in a large glass jar which according to the label had once contained olives. A loaf of bread, some salad, and a selection of local sheep’s cheeses, together with Carla’s promised dessert, completed the menu.

His decision to ‘adopt’ this young woman who claimed to be his daughter, even though the DNA tests proved that they were not related, had been taken on the spur of the moment; a mere whim, although kindly meant. He had not thought the matter through — had not really thought at all, to be honest — and ever since had had to struggle to live up to the fantasy to which he had short-sightedly committed them both. This was not made any easier by his sense that it was all a bit of a strain for Carla, too. They were both reduced to improvising the roles which he had assigned them: the Father, the Daughter.

While he waited for Carla to arrive, he looked through the notes he had made of his lunch with Baccio Sinico, adding or deleting a phrase here and there. It had not been a convivial occasion. Not that the young Bolognese had been evasive; on the contrary, he had proved almost alarmingly forthcoming about the current state of morale — or rather the lack of it — within the Catania office of the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia.

‘I almost regret the old days,’ Baccio Sinico had remarked at one point. ‘At least they fought us openly then.’

‘They?’ queried Aurelio Zen.

Sinico gave him a sharp look, as though trying to decide whether Zen was being ironical or just plain stupid.

‘Gli amid degli amici,’ he replied in a voice so low that Zen almost had to lip-read the coded phrase — ‘the friends of the friends’, meaning the Mafia’s presumed patrons and protectors in the government.

‘But those “friends” are no longer in power,’ he reminded Sinico. ‘Some of them are even under arrest or on trial.’

‘Precisely! In the old days, you knew who was who and what was what. Everyone knew where he stood, and what was at stake for both sides. Now it’s all done by indirection and inertia. The implication is that the great days are over, the Mafia is as good as beaten, and that all remains to be done is a low-level mopping-up operation without any real importance, glamour or risk. In other words, we’re being treated like traffic cops by Rome and like arrogant prima donnas by all our colleagues outside the department.’

‘The pay’s good, though!’ Zen had replied in a jocular, one-of-the-boys tone of voice suitable to the avuncular but slightly dim persona he cultivated for these professional encounters.

‘It’s not bad,’ Sinico had conceded. ‘Which is yet another reason why we’re resented and obstructed by all the other branches of the service down here. But money’s not everything. And, without undue bravado, it’s not really that I’m frightened of the risks involved. No, it’s the sense of isolation that’s getting to me. My family and friends are all back in Bologna, and here I am holed up in a fortified barracks deep in enemy territory, trying to do a job which no one seems to think needs doing any more.’

‘Have you noticed a weakening of support from the local population?’

Sinico laughed sardonically.

‘What support? There was a wave of protests and demonstrations after Falcone and Borsellino were killed, but that soon faded. In my view it was mostly window-dressing anyway. It wasn’t so much that two selfless and dedicated servants of the Italian state had been blown to bloody pulp that got to people, it was the fact that it happened here, on their doorstep. It made them look bad, and Sicilians hate that.’

He paused to toy with the largely uneaten food on his plate.

‘But we never expected much cooperation from the locals. What’s harder to take is the fact that the people at the top have started to distance themselves from us and our work. The old alliances have broken down, but new ones are in formation.’

‘With whom?’ asked Zen.

Sinico made a gesture indicating that this was an unanswerable question.

‘We don’t know yet. But the Mafia has always allied itself with the party of the centre, and they’re all in the centre nowadays, even the former Fascists. Meanwhile our work is obstructed by insinuation and neglect. “With everyone in prison except Binu,” they say…’

‘Except who?’

‘Bernardo Provenzano, also known as Binu. Toto Riina’s right-hand man, and now effectively running the Corleone clan through his wife. Communicates only by written messages, doesn’t trust the phone. On the run for the last thirty years. He’s the last of the historic capi. The rest are all under arrest or serving life sentences, and have been dispersed to remote prisons. So the back of the Mafia has been broken, we’re told. “All thanks to people like you, of course, but the moment has perhaps come to take the longer view, the broader perspective, etcetera, etcetera”’

He sighed deeply and shook his head.

‘It’s depressing, particularly when you know what’s really going on.’

‘And what is going on?’ asked Zen.

Sinico looked up at him.

‘Dottore, the drug trade channelled through the port of Catania alone generates hundreds of millions of US dollars every year. There’s also a lucrative export market in firearms and military supplies, to say nothing of the usual construction scams, prostitution and protection rackets. Meanwhile, the youth unemployment rate is running at fifty per cent. There are seventy thousand people in this city with no visible means of support. Do you think the Mafia is going to have any trouble finding new recruits?’

‘But if the bosses are all in jail…’

‘Then new bosses will emerge. Someone said that only two things are certain, death and taxes. The Mafia combines both. It’s not going to go away. But whereas we knew who the old capi were, even if we couldn’t lay hands on them, we have virtually no idea at all who’s in charge now. Not only that, but the structure of power is shifting. The Corleonesi are more or less finished, having wiped out all their rivals. But other clans have emerged, two of the most powerful based in Belmonte Mezzagno and Caccamo.’

‘Where?’

‘Exactly Villages up in the mountains behind Palermo. No one’s ever heard of them except the DIA. Ragusa is also emerging as a major centre. In Catania and Messina, you have shifting alliances. The Limina family is on the way out, although they don’t seem to realize it yet. And as if all this weren’t enough, there are reliable rumours that alliances are being formed with the Calabrian n’drangheta, who are the real top dogs now, to say nothing of the start-up Albanian mobs in Puglia, some of which have opened branch offices right here in Sicily. In short, it’s an unbelievably complex and obscure situation, far more so than ever before. But no one wants to know. People here used to say, “What Mafia? There’s no such thing!” The only difference now is that they add “any longer”. Well, I’ve just about had enough, and I’m not the only one, believe me.’

Zen did believe him, but could hardly afford to say so. His remit was to report on the operations of the Catania DIA, not connive at its dissolution.

‘But surely you must have had some successes recently?’ he said encouragingly. ‘That case of the body on the train, for example.’

Baccio Sinico gave a massively expressive shrug.

‘It seems it wasn’t the Limina kid after all.’

‘It wasn’t?’

‘It seems not.’

Zen frowned at him.

‘How do you mean, “seems”? Either it was or it wasn’t.’

Sinico smiled his humourless smile once again.

‘With all due respect, dottore, it’s easy to see that you’ve only just arrived here. The dualistic, northern approach to life is completely alien to the Sicilian mind. So far from there being just two possibilities, there are, in any given case, an almost infinite number.’

‘Skip the philosophy, Sinico,’ Zen retorted gruffly. ‘I’ve never had a head for it.’

The young officer smiled, this time with genuine warmth.

‘I apologize, dottore. A hobby of mine. It’s what I studied at university, until I realized that the job market in that particular subject was rather restricted. And for that matter I make no claims to understanding the Sicilian mentality either. You have to be born here to do that. But to get back to the point, it seems that the judiciary has seen fit to accept the statement of the Limina family that their son is alive and well, on holiday in Costa Rica, despite their reluctance to say exactly where he is, still less produce him in person.’

‘So you don’t think their story is true?’

Baccio Sinico laughed again.

‘If you start asking yourself questions like that here in Sicily, you’ll drive yourself mad. I’m just telling you what’s happened. The case is closed and that’s that. As for the truth, who knows? Or cares?’

Aurelio Zen considered this in silence for a while.

‘What about the magistrate who was investigating the case?’ he asked at length.

‘Nunziatella? She’s been taken off it. The case has been officially downgraded to a routine accidental death enquiry. They’re no doubt writing up the press release as we speak. It’ll be all over the papers and the television tomorrow, if you’re interested.’

He sniffed and lit a cigarette.

‘Besides, the judge in question has her own problems, if the office gossip is to be believed.’

‘How do you mean?’

Sinico gave him a quick glance.

‘The word is that la Nunziatella doesn’t like men.’

Zen shrugged.

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that she does like women.’

Another shrug.

That’s not illegal.’

Baccio Sinico sighed again.

‘Despite some recent changes, this is a very conservative society, dottore. I’ve heard that there is a photograph in existence, showing Corinna Nunziatella and another woman in a restaurant.’

‘So?’

‘They’re kissing,’ Sinico went on. ‘On the mouth.’

Zen got out his battered pack of Nazionali cigarettes and lit up.

‘Who took the photograph?’ he asked.

‘No one knows.’

‘Well, where is it now?’

‘No one knows.’

There was a brief silence.

‘But in a sense it doesn’t even matter whether the photo actually exists or not,’ Sinico went on. ‘All that matters is that the word is out that it does. And if it were to be sent to the local paper and printed on the front page, all of which could easily be arranged by certain people, then it would become difficult, if not impossible, for Judge Nunziatella to continue to carry out her duties in a satisfactory manner. In which case, of course, she would have to be replaced.’

Walking over to the window at the rear of the apartment, overlooking the courtyard, Aurelio Zen unlatched the twin panes. It was like opening the door of an oven which is no longer turned on, but still stocked with heat from the long hours when it was blazing away. A spent wave of exhausted air invested the room, scented lightly with the basil and rosemary, thyme and oregano which a neighbour grew in pots on her balcony.

The doorbell sounded. It was Carla, looking relaxed in loose, wheat-coloured linen trousers and a peach ribbed cotton-knit top, her radiance and energy instantly enlivening the room. All Zen’s previous apprehensions about the success of the evening were swept away. Together they rummaged through the kitchen cupboards for cooking utensils, then poured the soup from its jar into a saucepan that proved to be too small, getting a stain on Carla’s trousers in the process. It didn’t matter. They laughed and sorted it out and put the soup on to warm, opened a bottle of wine and gossiped about the latest political and social scandals, and discussed what to do about Carla’s birthday, which fell on the following Saturday.

The conversational tempo slowed a bit once they had eaten, and at length Zen found himself resorting to a rather tired old standby.

‘So how’s work?’

‘The usual,’ said Carla. ‘I can never understand why so many people seem to find computers interesting. To me, they’re about as fascinating as a light switch — which is really all they are, when you get down to it. That’s why I like working with them. They’re soothing company.’

She paused, pushing the salt cellar to and fro across the table.

‘I found something interesting today, though.’

‘Yes?’

Another pause, followed by an embarrassed shrug.

‘I probably shouldn’t tell you. All this stuff is supposed to be highly confidential. You wouldn’t believe the paperwork they made me sign.’

‘Oh, come on, Carla! We both work for the same side, after all. And anyway, I’m family’

Carla conceded the point with a smile.

‘Well, someone’s been pinging the DIA system. I discovered a sequence of packet hits, all in the middle of the night, when none of the registered users was logged on.’

Zen smiled weakly.

‘Well, that does sound interesting.’

Carla laughed.

‘Actually, it is, sort of. In plain language, it means that someone outside the DIA has been looking at their work, checking their files and opening their mail. And what’s really interesting is that this doesn’t look like your average hacker. These people seem to be coming in with virtual sysadmin status, which means they can open, alter or even delete any file — even so-called “closed” files, inaccessible to other co-users. And they can do that not just here in Catania, but over the entire DIA network.’

‘So who are they?’

Carla shrugged.

‘That I can’t say, yet. But I’ve identified the string code of the machine they’re using, code name “nero”. That’s like a fingerprint. It doesn’t tell you who or where the user is, but there are ways of tracking it back. Which is what I plan to do next.’

She fumbled around in her bag and produced a folded piece of paper.

‘Look at this. This is just one of the entries I found on the DIA server’s var-log-messages file.’

Zen took the sheet of printout and read: Aug 12 23:19:06/falcone PAM_pwdb[8489]: (su) session opened for user root by nero (uid=o)

Carla pointed a finger at the page.

This means that at nineteen minutes and six seconds past eleven at night on Tuesday last, someone identified as “nero” accessed the DIA system and used the “su” command to switch to user root status. Don’t look at me like that, Dad! This is important, because the root user has permission to do anything he likes on or to the system. Anything at all.’

Zen nodded gravely.

‘And what action did you take?’

‘Well, of course I wrote a report and sent it to the DIA director. He’ll have to decide what to do next.’

While Carla unwrapped the dessert she had bought, Zen got to his feet and set about making coffee. He had accepted the fact that he would never understand the new technology that was sweeping the world, where everything was intangible and instantaneous, and occurred at once everywhere and nowhere. A street vendor in the fish market had told him with great bitterness that most of the local tuna were now snapped up by the Japanese, taken to that country to be processed, and then sold back to Italians in those cheap cans of fishy slurry that came in packs of six. This story might be true, or it might be one of those urban myths with a built-in ethnic slur such as the Sicilians themselves had endured for many centuries. The only certain thing was that it was now possible. The technology was there, and a primitive, hard-wired circuit in Zen’s brain told him that if something could be done, then somebody was going to do it.

‘And apart from your work?’ he asked over his shoulder as he assembled the coffee pot. ‘What do you get up to in the evening?’

‘Not much, to be honest,’ Carla replied from much nearer than he expected.

She lifted two plates down from a shelf and set about opening drawers in search of forks.

‘That one,’ Zen told her.

‘But I’ve been asked out to dinner tomorrow,’ she said, returning to the table.

‘Anyone interesting?’

‘One of the judges at the DIA. We’ll probably have soldiers lurking under the table and tasting the food to make sure it’s not poisoned.’

The coffee burbled up.

‘Good for you! Is he good-looking? Or married?’

There was a brief silence during which Zen poured out the coffee.

‘Actually, it’s a woman,’ Carla replied. ‘The one I told you about this morning, Corinna Nunziatella. She’s really been very nice to me. I think she’s lonely. She needs a girlfriend to talk things over with, but in her position…’

Zen nodded slowly, not looking at her.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, almost inaudibly, then went on in a tone of forced bonhomie, ‘Well, congratulations! It looks as though you’ve inherited the family skill for making friends in high places.’

‘You’ve always done that, then?’ asked Carla.

‘Sometimes. But it didn’t do me any good.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I made an even greater number of highly placed enemies.’

He gave her an odd smile, like a crumpled photocopy of the original.

‘Anyway, it sounds as if you might be in for an interesting evening,’ he said, swigging the pungent black coffee down in one go. ‘Let me know how it turns out.’

They came for Corinna Nunziatella just after she arrived for work the next day. There were two of them, in their twenties, both dressed in the all-purpose leisure uniforms of the trendy young: leather baseball caps, synthetic jackets, jeans and gigantic boot-style shoes. One was thin and ingratiating, the other squat and silent. Corinna instantly dubbed them Laurel and Hardy. She had never seen either of them before.

‘Sorry to disturb you, dottoressa,’ said Laurel with a charming smile. ‘We’ve been told to come and pick up the file on the Limina case.’

Corinna got up from her desk and turned to face them.

‘And who are you?’

Laurel removed his small oval-lensed sunglasses and produced a plastic card identifying him as Roberto Lessi, a corporal of the Carabinieri. The card was overstamped ROS in large red letters.

Corinna indicated Hardy, who was chewing gum and staring overtly at her in a way that she found extremely disturbing, all the more so in that there was nothing remotely sexual about his attentions.

‘My partner, Alfredo Ferraro,’ said Laurel, with an even more winning grin. ‘We work together.’

‘On what?’ Corinna demanded pointedly

‘Security.’

‘What kind of security?’

Laurel paused, as though unsure how to answer.

‘Internal,’ he said at length.

‘And you are responsible to whom?’ demanded Corinna.

‘To the director, Dottor Tondo,’ was the reply, delivered with a definite taunting edge, as though to say, ‘Trump that!’

Corinna picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Nunziatella,’ she replied when Sergio Tondo’s secretary answered. ‘I need to speak urgently to the director.’

After a silence broken only by the distant sound of a siren, Tondo came on the line.

‘I have two men in my office,’ Corinna told him. ‘They have identified themselves as Lessi, Roberto, and Ferraro, Alfredo. They claim to be working under your supervision on, quote, internal security, unquote, and want me to hand over the Limina papers to them. Can you verify that you are aware of this?’

‘My dear Corinna,’ the director replied in his most smarmy voice, ‘a woman as beautiful as you should never allow herself to lose her poise because the company is disagreeable. I apologize if these two young men have failed to make a favourable impression. But what they lack in charm, they make up for in efficiency.’

‘They are working for you, then.’

‘They’re working for all of us, my dear, as part of my constant attempts to make the lives of you and your colleagues safer and more productive. Speaking of which, I mustn’t detain you any longer. Just give your visitors the file relating to the matter which we discussed yesterday, and then you can get back to work.’

Sergio Tondo hung up. After a moment, so did Corinna. The gum-chewing man was still staring at her, his eyes moving at intervals to another part of her body as if taking exposures for a composite photograph. Corinna stepped over to the tower of box files in the corner. She grasped one with her right hand, steadied the pile above with her left, and in one decisive movement yanked the file free. The tower teetered for a moment, then settled back into place. Corinna returned to the two men, holding the file against her bosom.

‘I’ll need a receipt,’ she said.

Laurel frowned, as though Corinna had committed a minor lapse of good manners.

‘I’m afraid we don’t have anything like that,’ he said.

‘Then write one. “We, the undersigned, acknowledge receipt of file number such-and-such from Judge Corinna Nunziatella”, with the date and time. Spell out your names in block letters and then sign beneath.’

Laurel sighed.

‘I’ll need to consult the director.’

‘He’s just gone into a very important meeting,’ lied Corinna. ‘He won’t be very happy if this file isn’t on his desk when he comes out, and I’m not handing it over without a receipt. Here’s some paper and a pen.’

In the end the two men complied. Corinna took the receipt, read it through carefully, and only then handed over the file. Laurel and Hardy then left without a word, the latter breaking his sullen, intense scrutiny with apparent reluctance. Corinna Nunziatella listened to their footsteps receding on the marble floor outside. When they were no longer audible, she unlocked a drawer in her desk and removed another box file, identical to the one she had handed over except for the number marked on the spine.

She stood there for a moment, breathing rapidly and shallowly, her eyes unfocused. Then she opened the door, gave a quick glance in each direction, and strode off down the corridor to the main staircase. She went down two floors, then turned sharp left down to an unmarked door beneath the staircase. Inside, a stuffy, narrow passage led to another door, at which Corinna knocked. A moment later, the door was opened by a florid, elderly woman.

‘Well?’ she snapped.

A moment later, her face abruptly changed into a smile of welcome.

‘Oh, it’s you, my dear!’ she went on in Sicilian dialect. ‘Come in, come in. How nice to see you! I was just getting ready to give that empty room on the fourth floor a good going-over for these new people who’ve just got here. Lucia’s taking a few days’ sick leave to visit her son in Trapani, so I’ve got to do the whole thing myself. Not that they bothered to give us any notice, needless to say, just a phone call from His Royal Highness this morning telling me to…’

‘New people?’ asked Corinna, sitting down carefully on the cracked swivel chair which Agatella had scavenged from somewhere. It was perfectly comfortable and stable as long as you didn’t lean back too hard, in which case the whole thing tipped over while simultaneously spinning you around to land on your nose.

‘Arrived yesterday,’ the cleaning lady confided in hushed tones. ‘I was told in no uncertain terms to clean everything up by noon today, then clear out and never set foot in there again “under any circumstances whatsoever”.’

She rolled her eyes.

‘From Rome,’ she whispered. ‘I servizi.’

‘I servizi?’ repeated Corinna, repeating the common shorthand term for the alleged network of clandestine military agencies based in Rome, many of them tainted by scandals alleging their involvement in extreme right-wing terrorism. It may not have been coincidental that the word also meant ‘toilets’.

Agatella shrugged expressively.

‘Who knows? But that’s what Salvo thought.’

Salvo was Agatella’s son, employed at the Palace of Justice as a chauffeur.

‘He’s met them?’ asked Corinna.

‘He was sent to pick them up from the airport. Only not to the usual passenger terminal, but round the other side. You know that Fontanarossa used to be a military airfield? Well, it still is, and that’s where their plane came in, at the military buildings on the far side. Small jet, Salvo said, the sort millionaires have.’

Corinna gripped the file in her hands more tightly. She seemed about to say something, then aborted the remark in a lengthy exhalation, and started again.

‘Anyway, Agatella, the reason why I’m bothering you…’

‘It’s no bother, my dear! I’m always delighted to see you.’

‘The thing is, I was wondering if I could borrow your coat and scarf for about an hour.’

Agatella looked at her in astonishment.

‘My coat and scarf? Of course, but why, in heaven’s name?’

Corinna smiled sheepishly.

‘I’m meeting someone. A personal thing. But because of all this security nonsense, they won’t let me leave the building without an armed escort. And if I go with them, it won’t exactly be a relaxed encounter, to say the least, and of course word of the whole thing will be all over the department in five minutes. But if I could just put on your coat and scarf and slip out the side entrance, no one will be any the wiser.’

Agatella smiled radiantly.

‘Of course, my dear, of course! No one ever takes any notice of comings and goings at that door. Let me just fetch my things. Some nice young man, is it? It’s about time you settled down and started a family, my dear. None of us is getting any younger.’

Ten minutes later, a woman of uncertain age with a satin scarf on her head, carrying a bulging plastic bag with the logo of the Standa department chain, entered a newsagent’s shop on Via Etnea which advertised in the window that photocopies might be made there. Twenty or so minutes after that she reappeared, the plastic bag even more gravid than before, and started back the way she had come. But after going a short distance she stopped, then started to cross the street, as though at a loss. Traffic swirled and shrieked around her, while the other pedestrians went steadfastly about their business, ignoring this hapless female who had obviously lost her grip on the realities of life.

The woman walked down the street to a pasticceria, where she ordered a coffee. No one paid any attention there either. Even the barman who served her and took her money managed to convey the impression that the transaction hadn’t really taken place. The woman removed a large, thick manilla envelope from her plastic bag, sealed the flap and wrote something on the front.

‘How much to wrap this?’ she snapped.

The barman looked at her with a frown.

‘Like you do the cakes,’ the woman explained.

The barman cast a defeated glance at the other two male patrons in the bar, shook his head and started washing coffee cups.

‘Would two thousand do it?’ the woman demanded.

‘It might, if you had it,’ the barman replied in dialect.

A banknote appeared in the woman’s fingers as the envelope slid along the chrome counter to stop in front of the barman.

‘What is this?’ he asked irritatedly.

‘A practical joke I’m playing on a friend,’ the woman said. ‘I want it wrapped just like a cake, with a ribbon and all, and a little card. In return…’

She pushed the two-thousand-lire note into an empty glass on the other side of the bar. Seemingly embarrassed, the barman glanced again at the two men, then shrugged and did as the woman asked.

Five minutes later, she presented herself at the guard post at the main door of the police headquarters of Catania.

‘This is to be delivered to Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen,’ she told the officer on duty through the grille in the bullet-proof screen, placing an elegantly wrapped parcel on the shelf outside the access hatch, presently closed.

‘You know him?’ demanded the guard with a mocking air.

‘I’m a friend of his daughter, Carla Arduini. This is for her. A birthday present. All he has to do is give it to her on Saturday, understand?’

The officer shook his head, picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Excuse the disturbance, dottore,’ he said into the mouthpiece. ‘There’s someone here with what she says is a birthday present for your daughter. To be delivered on Saturday. Does this make any sense to you? Oh, it does? All right, sir. I understand. Very good.’

He hung up, and nodded vaguely at the woman.

‘Dottor Zen will pick it up on his way home.’

‘Mind he does, now!’ she replied. ‘And take good care of it meanwhile. It’s very precious, and you will be responsible if anything happens to it.’

The officer nodded repeatedly in a way that said, ‘Let’s humour the bitch and get her out of here.’ After a further sharp exhortation, the woman shuffled off across the little square in front of the police station. A lifetime of humiliation and submission seemed to have made it impossible for her to look up, so she did not notice the tall, gaunt figure gazing down at her from a balcony on the second floor of the Questura.

In all, almost an hour had elapsed before Corinna Nunziatella pushed open the obscure side entrance to the Palace of Justice, whose self-locking door she had propped open with one of Agatella’s wash rags. A few minutes after that, minus coat, scarf and plastic bag, she walked blithely through the checkpoint into the DIA section and along the corridor to her office. Opening the door, she found Laurel and Hardy in possession of her office, one lounging in her chair, the other inspecting the map of the province of Catania hanging on the wall.

‘Ah, there you are!’ cried Corinna with a touch of irritation. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. You know what? I gave you the wrong file! I’m so sorry. This is the one you want. No, no receipt necessary, thank you.’

If it hadn’t been for the skateboarder, no doubt, everything would have been very different. In retrospect, it would have been almost reassuring to be able to believe that this too was part of one of the conspiracies by which he seemed to be surrounded. But there was not the slightest evidence to suggest that such was the case, any more than the periodic eruptions of Etna could be credibly linked — despite the ingenious attempts of the priests and believers of various religions, Christian and pagan — to divine retribution on the inhabitants of the city for exceptionally or exotically sinful behaviour in the preceding months.

The fact of the matter was that there was this kid zipping down the pavement of Via Garibaldi at an amazing speed, avoiding the plodding pedestrians with even more amazing skill, a mere wiggle of the hips here and there sufficing to plot a curving trajectory through the obstacles thrown up in his path, until a woman ill-advisedly tried to take evasive action herself, forcing the skateboarder to make a sudden course correction at the last moment, which brought him into immediate and violent contact with a gentleman who had just crossed the street, carrying what appeared to be a cake carefully balanced on the palm of his right hand, and had now gained what he evidently thought of as the safety of the kerb, only to receive the careening skateboarder right in the gut, a full frontal encounter which left both lying winded on the ground.

The youngster was the first to recover, and as the one with the most to lose from this encounter, he wisely grabbed his board and rattled off swiftly down a side-street. As for the man, several passers-by went to his assistance, checked that he was not injured, then helped him up, dusted him down and retrieved the parcel he had been carrying, which had gone flying into the windscreen of one passing car and then promptly been run over by another. The man thanked them for these ministrations, and then joined in the obligatory round of head-shaking and sighs accompanying a chorus of rhetorical questions about what young people were coming to these days.

Once this ritual had been concluded, the participants went their separate ways, which in Zen’s case was home. No doubt due to delayed shock from his collision with the skateboarder, he did not at first notice that the supposed cake which Carla’s friend had delivered as a birthday present did not feel any different from the way it had when he left his office, despite having smashed into one car and been run over by another. It took another few moments for his jangled brain to come up with the obvious inference that whatever was inside the wrapping wasn’t in fact a cake. This was confirmed by a jagged tear at one corner of the shiny ivory wrapping paper, printed with the name of a nearby cafe and pastry shop, through which a section of orange paper could be seen.

Covering the torn corner with one hand, Zen continued along the street to the building where he lived, ran up the shallow stone steps three at a time and let himself into his apartment, where he threw the package down on a chair. Then he went through to the kitchen and mechanically made himself a cup of coffee while he tried to work out what he knew and what else might be inferred from that knowledge.

A woman wearing a dowdy coat and old-fashioned headscarf had left a package for him with the guard outside the Questura. According to the guard, she had claimed that it was a present for Carla Arduini, daughter of Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen. He was to pick it up and deliver it to the intended recipient on her birthday, the coming Saturday. The notional present was clad in the wrapping paper of a pasticceria in Via Etnea, but proved to contain what looked like another package, as though in some game of pass-the-parcel. The contents were bulky, consistent, quite heavy, slightly flexible, and had resisted various forms of extreme impact with no apparent effect.

It had crossed his mind, of course, that it might be a bomb. The same thought had crossed the mind of the officer on guard at the Questura, so he had taken it inside and run it through the X-ray machine used to monitor all incoming bags and packages. Nothing had shown up on the screen — no wiring, no batteries — but you could never tell these days. He’d read somewhere that they’d invented some sort of chemical trigger which didn’t show up on the machines.

If it was a bomb, though, the intended target would almost certainly be the person who opened the package, in this case Carla. Which raised another question. Whoever the mystery donor might be, she had known two things which, as far as Zen knew, no one in Catania was aware of. The first was that, despite her surname, Carla Arduini was supposedly Zen’s daughter. The second was that her birthday fell on Saturday.

He tossed back his coffee, lit a cigarette and wandered back into the living room. Rather to his surprise, the package was still where he had thrown it. He looked at it for some time, then grabbed it suddenly and ripped off the wrapping paper. Inside was a large manilla envelope, plain except for a message written in flowing script with a medium blue felt-tip pen.

This is the item I told you about, Carla, DO NOT OPEN IT. Wrap it up in some dirty underclothes or something and hide it away. I’ll pick it up in a few days, once things settle down. I apologize for dragging you into this, but there is no one else I can turn to. P.S. Your real birthday present will be a lot more interesting!

Zen read this through several times, then put it down on the table and walked about the room, picked it up and read it again. Carla had been specifically instructed not to open the package. Therefore it was something which, if opened, might either threaten her in some way, or compromise the writer of the note, whoever that might be.

After the bomb idea, Zen’s next quick-fix solution was drugs. According to Baccio Sinico, Catania was now what Marseilles had once been, the major entry point into Europe for hard drugs coming from the eastern Mediterranean or North Africa. The package was about the right size, weight and feel to be a vacuum-packed slab of refined cocaine or heroin.

But such speculations were pointless. What was certain was that possession of the envelope, whatever its contents, constituted a potential hazard for the person concerned. Whoever had left it to be delivered to Carla obviously felt that in her case this risk was so small as to be negligible, but Zen could not feel so sanguine. Nor could he open the packet and determine for himself what it contained. In that event, the interested parties would naturally assume that it was Carla who had deliberately flouted the DO NOT OPEN warning, and would take the appropriate measures.

So in a sense the thing was a bomb, albeit one with a delayed-action fuse of indeterminate length. And the only way that Zen could protect Carla against possible danger was to prevent her ever taking delivery of the package, while ensuring that she would be able to produce it again, untouched and unharmed, at a future date. Which meant that he was going to have to hide it himself. Which meant, he decided after another cigarette and several minutes’ reflection, that he needed to visit the fish market.

He had been there before, often stopping by on his way to meet Carla, spellbound by the everyday miracle which had taken place on this spot for almost three thousand years: the decapitated swordfish and tuna being hacked into slabs with curved blades like machetes, the tubs full of squirming squid and octopus, the wooden trays of anchovies and sardines, their silvery skin glistening with unexpected glints of evanescent colours which had no name. And everywhere the stench of flesh and death, the clamour of voices in a timbre at once raucous and shrill, and the blood, above all; spattered on the stall-keepers’ aprons, streaked across their arms and knives, trickling away in the gutter.

It was now almost three o’clock, and the pulsing drama in the streets around the market had disappeared like the sea at low tide, leaving a wrack of stalls in the process of demolition, various unidentifiable scraps being raided by feral cats and the more daring seagulls, and remnants of unsold fish turning dull and matt in their communal coffins with the pathetic air of those who have died in vain. Zen approached one of the traders, a bulky, morose man surveying his remaining stock of sardines.

‘How much for those?’

The man glanced at him in astonishment, as though suspecting a practical joke, then brightened up considerably. A price was named, halved, halved again, and finally concluded. Money changed hands and Zen strode away with the best part of a kilo of extremely smelly fish.

Back at his apartment, he put his purchase in the sink, then wrapped the manilla envelope in several layers of plastic film, securing each with adhesive tape. When he was satisfied with this sheath, he opened the plastic bag provided by the fishmonger and slipped the package inside. The last stage was the most tricky, working the slithery mass of sardines around inside the bag until they concealed the inserted envelope. Once he had achieved this, Zen taped the bag tightly shut and wedged it into the freezing compartment of his refrigerator.

He completed his task, and sat down on the sofa with a sense of regret. What now? It was the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question which had haunted his days and nights for some time. The ‘now’ was both specific and general; at once the next hour which had somehow to be filled, and the rest of a life which seemed increasingly predictable and pointless, in a vaguely cosy way. His career had evidently hit a plateau where he would be stuck until he retired. The promotion to Questore which he had been promised on being told of this Sicily assignment had failed to materialize, and now Zen was pretty sure that it never would. He had made too many enemies for that.

To be honest, he couldn’t really complain. The fact was that he just didn’t care any more. Career, love, family, friendships — he’d tried his best in each field, but the results had not been encouraging. Once he’d been callow and enthusiastic, now he was tired and cynical. Once he’d been ignorant, now he was knowing. Whatever the middle term of these bleak declensions might be, it appeared to have passed him by.

So, what now? The answer was clear enough: another five or ten years plugging away at a job he no longer believed in and messing about with tentative relationships which were doomed from the start, while the world around him gradually changed into an unrecognizable although all too familiar place. Age makes us all exiles in our own country, he thought.

He looked up, startled, as an electronic beeping filled the room. It was his mobile phone, which he never took with him. He located it, on a cupboard in the kitchen, and pressed the green button.

‘Aurelio?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s Gilberto.’

Silence.

‘Gilberto Nieddu. Listen, the thing is…’

Zen clicked the phone shut. He had had no contact with his former Sardinian friend since the latter had betrayed him — unforgivably, in Zen’s view — by first stealing and then selling, at a vast profit, a video tape which was evidence in a case Zen had been investigating. One man had died as a result and another could have joined him, in which case Zen’s career prospects might easily have turned out to be even less inspiring than they were at present.

The phone rang again.

‘Don’t hang up on me, Aurelio!’ Gilberto’s voice said. ‘This is important, really important. It’s about…’

‘I don’t give a fuck what it’s about, Gilberto. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a treacherous scumbag and I never want to speak to you again, still less see you.’

He snapped the phone shut again, like a clam closing its shell, then stalked down the room and opened the doors on to the balcony overhanging the courtyard. At once he was subject to both an overwhelming tide of hot air, and a deafening outburst of hilarity which was the trademark of Signora Giordano, his herb-growing neighbour. She was a retired lady of some consequence and independent means, but socially nervous. Normally there was never a sound from her apartment, but on the few occasions when she entertained a harsh, convulsive laugh would burst forth at regular intervals, on average once every ten seconds. No sounds of conversation or of others’ merriment were audible, just this dreadful, forced cackle like a hack actor trying to signal a punchline to an unresponsive audience.

Behind him, the telefonino had started to beep again, a distant exclamation point amid the ambient noises of the neighbourhood and Signora Giordano’s outbursts. Zen lit a cigarette and waited for it to stop. But it didn’t stop. Why didn’t Gilberto get the message? What did he have to do, install one of those devices to block nuisance calls? He smoked quietly for a minute by the clock on the wall. The phone continued to ring. ‘It’s no use hiding,’ it seemed to say. ‘We know you’re there, and we’ve got plenty of time.’

After the second hand on the clock had described another complete circle, Zen threw his cigarette into the courtyard below, stalked over to the sofa and picked up the phone.

‘Well?’ he bellowed.

‘Excuse me…’

It was a frail, elderly woman’s voice, vaguely familiar to him.

‘Yes?’

‘This is Maria Grazia,’ the voice said after a pause.

Zen’s expression relaxed from aggression to a bored tolerance lightly mixed with perplexity. The housekeeper at his apartment in Rome had never phoned him before about anything.

‘Signor Nieddu asked me to call.’

‘Well, you can tell Signor Nieddu to…’

‘It’s about your mother, you see.’

Zen broke off, frowning.

‘My mother?’

‘Yes. You see…’

‘Hello? Maria Grazia?’

‘Yes. You see, the thing is…’

‘What’s going on? What’s all this about?’

A silence.

‘It’s about your mother.’

‘Thank you very much, Maria Grazia,’ Zen replied sarcastically, ‘I think I’ve just about grasped that. So let’s move on to the next point. What about my mother?’

Another silence, longer this time.

‘How soon can you get here?’

‘Get where?’

‘To Rome, of course!’

Zen stiffened. He was not used to being interrogated like this by the donna di servizio.

‘Look, Maria Grazia, please stop this nonsense and just tell me why you’re calling.’

Another silence, ending in a sniff and what sounded like weeping.

‘Excuse me. I would never have done it, only… Only it’s your mother, you see.’

‘What about my mother? Put her on the line if she wants to talk to me!’

This time the silence went on so long that they might almost have been cut off. When the answer to his question finally came, it was in a neutered tone of voice such as might issue from a public address system playing some pre-recorded emergency message.

‘She’s dying, Aurelio.’

Nineteen minutes past seven, Corinna Nunziatella had said. ‘Be in the entrance hall of your building by seven fifteen, but don’t open the door.’ Carla smiled to herself as she completed her preparations for the evening, checking her hair in the mirror and removing a stray strand from her blouse. How ridiculous all this secret-service stuff seemed! But also romantic, in a way, like being in a movie.

The entrance hall to the apartment building where she lived was a dreary space, replicated ad infinitum by the mirrored walls and dimly lit by five circular lamps of pebbled glass dangling on their cords from the meaninglessly high ceiling. Mafia chic, circa 1965, in short. Carla waited just inside the front door, eyeing the bank of mailboxes, in each of which the same round of junk advertising pamphlets lingered like a bad smell. When the door opened, she started forward, only to encounter the stout, overdressed form of Angelo La Rocca, a retired and chronically deaf lawyer who lived in solitary splendour in his illegal apartment on the roof, up a flight of stairs from the end of the elevator on the sixth floor, and exercised his rights over any unfortunate he happened to meet in the public areas in his unchallenged capacity as the building’s Official Bore.

‘Ah, Signorina Arduini!’ he cried, spying his prey. ‘How lovely you look this evening! A veritable symphony of shapes and shades, as fashionable as it is delectable. You are going out I perceive. And who’s the lucky young man? Forgive my impertinence, my dear. An old man’s privilege, just as you young women now enjoy the privilege of going out unescorted whenever you please, wherever you please, with whoever you please. I can still remember the time when a woman had to stay at home…’

‘Listening to old farts like you,’ muttered Carla.

The avvocato leaned forward, pleased to have provoked a response.

‘What, my dear?’

A horn sounded outside.

‘My taxi’s here,’ said Carla loudly, opening the door.

In fact, it wasn’t a taxi but a blue Fiat saloon. None the less, Carla had three reasons for thinking that this was the car which Corinna Nunziatella had sent for her. The first was that it was now exactly seven nineteen, and the second that the driver had parked right outside the building, blocking the traffic, and didn’t seem at all bothered by this. The third and decisive factor was that the tough-looking young man who had been sitting in the front passenger seat was already walking towards her, scanning the street to both sides, his right hand grasping something bulky concealed inside his jacket.

‘Signorina Arduini?’ he barked.

Carla nodded.

‘Get in,’ the man replied, jerking his head at the car.

Once she was inside, everything happened very quickly. The driver shot forward, accelerating furiously, then braked and skidded over a low yellow ledge in the middle of the road. The Fiat swung round, screeching on the lava slabs, until it was facing in the opposite direction, then took off at high speed down the single lane supposedly reserved for buses. The man who had spoken to her now sat rigidly in the front seat, scanning the windows and mirrors as though monitoring a bank of radar screens.

It was almost as if she had been kidnapped, Carla reflected as they negotiated the stalled traffic in a large circular piazzale by dint of going the wrong way round the roundabout and appropriating part of the pavement. Neither man spoke, although the driver occasionally emitted low grunts. After about ten minutes, the man on the passenger side pulled a portable radio from his jacket and started a long sequence of brief exchanges. Places, times and distances were ticked off as though on a list. At length he switched off the radio and muttered something to the driver, who took the next exit and stopped under the bridge carrying the highway they had been on over a country road fringed with villas and two-storey apartment buildings. The columns supporting the bridge were covered in election posters displaying the local candidate of the right-wing National Alliance party, the recycled third-generation successor to Mussolini’s Fascists. The radio crackled again, and instructions were exchanged. Then another car materialized on the road ahead, drew level with theirs and then swung around to park behind them.

The man in the passenger seat was already outside, opening the back door of the Fiat and motioning Carla out. The back door of the other car was open and another man, this one in uniform and carrying a machine-gun, waved impatiently at her. ‘In here!’ he snapped. She was barely inside when he slammed the door, jumped into the front seat and yelled, ‘Go!’ The car screeched around the parked Fiat and roared away.

It was only then that Carla noticed the other woman, curled up in the other corner of the back seat in a loosely woven cotton gauze outfit with narrow trousers, daringly unbuttoned at the throat, the sleeves rolled up to reveal her tanned arms, and a wide gold cuff bracelet on her right wrist. Her eyes were invisible behind a pair of aviator-style sunglasses. To Carla, who had only ever seen Corinna Nunziatella in high-heeled pumps and tailored suits, this was a revelation.

‘So did you enjoy the ride?’ the judge asked ironically.

‘Well, it beats taking the bus. But I can’t quite see why they went to all that trouble to protect me. I mean, my life’s not in danger.’

Corinna Nunziatella pushed the sunglasses up on to her brow and glanced at Carla sharply.

‘Of course not. They were protecting me, not you. The assumption is that all my friends, acquaintances and surviving relatives are under surveillance. Your phone may well be tapped, and your mail intercepted. They may even have bugged the office where we made the arrangement to meet tonight. What they wouldn’t know is where and when, but all they’d need to do is follow you and you’d lead them right to me.’

She smiled and shook her head impatiently.

‘Anyway, that’s all over. Now we can just enjoy ourselves for the rest of the evening.’

It soon became clear that this was not entirely true. The drive, up into the foothills of Etna to the north of the city, was a highly choreographed affair, involving constant radio contact between the two vehicles already engaged, as well as a third which was apparently located somewhere up ahead. Sometimes they slowed almost to a crawl, at others raced forward at speeds which pinned Carla back into the seat. Turns were taken seemingly at random, always at the last moment and without signalling, to the accompaniment of much squealing of tyres, ripping of gears and wrenching of the steering wheel.

‘Well, at least they’re enjoying themselves!’ Carla confided to Corinna with a fugitive smile, nodding her head at the two men in the front.

To her surprise, there was no answering smile.

‘Eighteen judges from the DIA or its predecessors have been killed in the last decade,’ Corinna Nunziatella replied. ‘In almost every case, their escorts have died with them. When they killed Falcone and his wife, the six men in the lead car were blown to pieces as well. In Borsellino’s case, it was eight. No, all appearances to the contrary, I don’t think they’re enjoying it all that much. If I hadn’t wanted to take you out to dinner tonight, they could have been safe at home with their wives and children watching TV. As it is, if they make a single mistake, they could be on TV.’

Carla nodded soberly.

‘I see,’ she said.

Observing her guest’s chastened expression, Corinna smiled and clasped her arm.

‘As a matter of fact, this is the first time I’ve been out in the evening since I took up this position with the DIA,’ she said. ‘Which is quite a compliment to you, my dear.’

A few minutes later they reached the brow of the hill they had been circuitously climbing all this time, between fields surrounded by stone walls and the occasional outcrop of modern housing, and passed a white sign marked TRECASTAGNI. Almost at once they turned right into a secluded driveway between high brick walls and came to a standstill. Carla opened the door and started to get out.

‘Not yet!’ one of the uniformed officers barked at her.

‘They need to make sure it’s clean,’ Corinna explained.

The blue Fiat had pulled up behind them. The two plain-clothed men got out and walked up a flight of steps into the complex of buildings to their left.

‘The lead car will be parked in the street outside,’ Corinna said. ‘In case we have to make a quick get-away and need a block thrown. The two men in the back-up will take a table inside and check out the other clients. This is a very well-known restaurant, and of course “they” like the better things in life.’

‘You mean the Mafia?’ demanded Carla. Not noticing Corinna Nunziatella’s slight wince, she went on, ‘I always thought that they were a bunch of peasants. Mamma’s homemade pasta or nothing.’

Corinna smiled wearily.

‘It’s a little more complex than that,’ she replied in a slightly patronizing tone. ‘Some of them are like that, but even they like to try to impress each other, and especially guests from out of town, precisely because they too know the stereotype and know that it’s true. But there is also quite a different class of person involved these days, men who spend their time moving around between here and Bangkok, Bogota, Miami, you name it. For them it’s even more important to show off their sophistication and wealth. It’s like wearing the right kind of clothes and accessories. No international drug baron is going to take you seriously as a major player if you invite him home for a plate of pasta, no matter how germina it is.’

Corinna was talking rapidly and a little distractedly, all the while scanning the steps leading up to the main building where the two plain-clothed escorts had disappeared.

‘What’s taking them all this time?’ she demanded.

As if in response, the radio crackled into life and one of the two ‘minders’ reappeared on the steps and walked towards the car, beckoning urgently.

‘It’s clean?’ asked Carla.

‘Apparently.’

The two women got out of the car and were led up a series of steps and exterior galleries into the building, then down again into the layered spaces of the restaurant, each at a different height and angle: bare stone walls, a large open fireplace, antique wooden cabinets supporting bottles of wine and oil. From exposed wooden beams hung folkloristic agricultural implements and stiff-limbed marionettes representing the Christian knights Rinaldo and Orlando.

‘Sorry about the delay, dottoressa,’ their escort murmured. ‘We were just about to give the all-clear when Giuseppe spotted a suspicious-looking couple of lads sitting at a table in the corner. Those two over there, see? So we went over to check them out, and guess what? It turns out they’re on the same detail as us! Some VIP politician from Rome is visiting and got taken out to dinner here.’

Carla was only too aware that these words had been addressed solely to Corinna. She was the star, the ‘VIP’, the only victim who would count. If an assassination attempt did take place, Carla would figure as no more than ‘collateral damage’, just like the police escort.

Corinna stood staring at the two men seated in the corner, then turned to the waiter who was indicating their table.

‘No, I’d like a different one, please,’ she said decisively. ‘Over there, by the fireplace.’

The waiter gestured politely and seated them. Their escort took a table on the mezzanine balcony overlooking the lower room. Corinna leaned back in her chair and looked over towards the two men sitting in the corner. Seemingly satisfied, she sighed deeply and settled back in her chair.

‘Do you know them?’ asked Carla, who had been watching this pantomime attentively.

Corinna shook her head.

‘Not really. But they came by this morning to pick up a file I’d been ordered to close and return. Their names are Roberto Lessi and Alfredo Ferraro. They’re agents of the Carabinieri’s Raggruppamento Operazioni Speciali.’

‘The Special Operations Group?’ queried Carla. ‘What sort of operations?’

Corinna made a gesture which read, ‘Who knows, and anyway I doubt it.’

‘Anyway, at least they’re on our side,’ Carla exclaimed with evident relief.

Corinna looked at her with a distant smile.

‘That reminds me,’ she said. ‘I gave your father a packet to pass on to you.’

Carla frowned.

‘My father?’

‘He’s just the cut-out. I didn’t want to be seen handing it over directly. For both our sakes, yours particularly’

‘Why, what is it?’

‘Nothing that need concern you, my dear,’ Corinna replied. ‘It’s just a few papers that I need taken care of for a little while. They’re all packed up in an envelope which your father will give you on Saturday, if not before. He thinks it’s a birthday present. Just hide it away somewhere in your apartment. In due course, I’ll either tell you to destroy it or ask for it back. Is that all right?’

Carla nodded.

‘But I’m not to look inside?’

‘No, don’t do that.’

‘Like Pandora’s box.’

Corinna smiled.

‘Yes,’ she exclaimed. ‘Very much like Pandora’s box.’

‘All the good gifts of the gods turned to evil and flew out to plague the world,’ Carla continued pertly. ‘All except Hope.’

Corinna sighed as the waiter neared their table.

‘There are various versions of the legend,’ she replied. ‘According to some, not even Hope remained. It was the last to leave, though.’

She smiled across the table.

‘Shall we order?’

Zen was terrified of flying. This had always been a fact about him, like his height and other physical characteristics. He was terrified of flying, but what was terrifying him now was that he wasn’t terrified of flying, and this was all the more terrifying because everyone else on board clearly was.

Moments earlier, the pilot had instructed passengers to fasten their seatbelts in anticipation of ‘some possible turbulence ahead’. Seconds later, the Airbus A320 had thrown a spectacular grand mal epileptic fit, jerking, shuddering and leaping in an apparently uncontrollable series of spasms so violent that they sent one of the flight attendants flying into the row of seats just in front of Zen, while another sank to her knees and started crossing herself and chanting the Hail Mary in a loud voice. As for the other passengers, they screamed and closed their eyes tight, clutched one another and threw up.

Meanwhile Zen sat there calmly, scared out of his wits at the realization that he was the only person on the plane who wasn’t scared. Which was truly scary. For your eyesight to deteriorate, your hearing to fail, your hair to thin and your memory to malfunction, that was normal, to be expected. But if your fears deserted you, what was left? Take those away, and all that remained was a hollow shell.

What made things worse was the suspicion, amounting almost to a certainty, that his whole trip was the result of having fallen for a practical joke, one of those infantile pranks that Gilberto Nieddu loved to play on unsuspecting friends and colleagues. The Sardinian was still furious that Zen had dropped him socially after that disgraceful incident involving the stolen video-game cassette. Now he had decided to get even in a characteristically cruel, cynical and effective way.

For if it was a practical joke, then it was one that Zen could hardly have avoided falling for, particularly after that conversation with Maria Grazia. The Airbus took another groin-tingling lurch, accompanied by a loud metallic clang which elicited a renewed chorus of shrieks and prayers. ‘Maria! Maria!’ the stewardess shouted imploringly. Maria, thought Zen. Maria Grazia. How did she fit into the conspiracy? Had Gilberto paid her off to act a part? This didn’t seem likely. Zen had known the family housekeeper for almost twenty years, and he was sure she wouldn’t have been able to lie effectively to save her life.

No, there was only one possible solution. Gilberto must have convinced her too! That made sense all right. If it suited his purposes, that devious little Sardinian could talk anyone into anything, never mind someone as ingenuous and guileless as Maria Grazia. Yes, that was it. The housekeeper was simply an unwitting accomplice in Nieddu’s schemes, cunningly roped in to remove any lingering doubts from Zen’s mind and reduce him to an unthinking, panic-stricken automaton calling taxis, racing to the airport, oozing sweat and gasping for breath, and then paying a small fortune for one of the few remaining seats on the next flight to Rome.

Very well, he thought, but we’ll see who has the last laugh. You may have won this round, my friend, but the match isn’t over yet. Nieddu was a past master at this sort of thing, but Zen had a few tricks up his sleeve as well. He knew quite a bit about the Sardinian’s business practices, for a start, many of which were extremely questionable even by Italian entrepreneurial standards.

But that would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, he reflected, as the aeroplane veered into a steep descent while the crew struggled to restart the starboard engine. The cabin was loud with despairing shrieks and pleas, and the intimate odour of human excrement filled the air. Zen glanced indignantly at his neighbour, a surly businessman whose attention until now had been entirely absorbed by his laptop computer, and then edged away as far as possible in the other direction. The middle-aged woman seated on that side, her face so intensively curated that it looked like a burnished metal mask, gripped Zen’s arm tightly, leaned her head on his shoulder and began muttering fervent invocations to Santa Rita of Cascia.

The senior steward now rose shakily to his feet and started to lead the passengers in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. If he was to pay Gilberto back, thought Zen, it must be in a more personal way. And then he suddenly got it, the perfect revenge for Nieddu’s tasteless jest. It was so good, in fact, that he couldn’t resist bursting into laughter, at which point the woman beside him snatched away her arm and glared at him in horror. At the same moment the Airbus bottomed out of its vertical descent as the starboard engine kicked in, causing the steward to collapse to the floor like an unstrung puppet. A few moments later, all was perfectly still and quiet again.

Rosa Nieddu was not the typical Italian wife who didn’t much mind what her husband got up to as long as it didn’t involve any mutual acquaintances and was kept reasonably discreet. No indeed, fare finta di niente was definitely not Rosa’s style. On the contrary, she had proved herself to be intensely suspicious of what Gilberto was actually doing while he was supposedly away on business, and quite probably with good reason.

Thus far, the claims of both friendship and male solidarity had led Zen to lend Gilberto whatever assistance he could when things got tricky with Rosa. Certainly he had never before thought of deliberately making trouble for him. So it was with some satisfaction that he realized just how easy this would be. Rosa’s intrinsic jealousy was like the Sardinian underbrush in high summer: one spark was all that would be needed to create a truly spectacular conflagration.

And that initial spark wouldn’t be hard to provide. A few letters first, to prepare the ground. He would draft them and then get Carla to copy them out in a laborious, feminine hand, all curls and loops and little circles over the letter ‘i’. She could make the phone calls, too, when the time came. What fun they’d have working out the script! Is that Signora Nieddu? My name is…’ What would she be called? Something slightly old-fashioned and socially tainted, suggestive of a buxom but simple-minded country lass.

He suddenly remembered the object of the prayers which his neighbour had offered up. That would do nicely. ‘My name is Rita, signora. I’ve written to you several times. I hate to disturb you any more, and the only reason I’m calling now is that I’m desperate. As you know, your husband had his way with me during his visit to Bari, and, well, you see, I’ve just found out that I’m…’ How would that sort of woman put it? ‘With child’? ‘Going to be a mother’? ‘Three months gone’? Carla would know, not that it mattered. Rosa would already be back in the kitchen, honing the carving knife to a fine edge. Let Gilberto try to talk his way out of that one!

An amplified voice announced that they would shortly be landing at Fiumicino Airport. Zen consulted Ms watch. It was only an hour since they’d left Catania. They couldn’t possibly be anywhere near Rome yet. That was where his mother lived. She’s dying, Aurelio. Ridiculous. Rome was hundreds of kilometres away. It took hours and hours to get there.

The plane bumped down on the runway, eliciting an enthusiastic round of applause from the passengers, and nosed up to the disembarkation ramp. Everyone stood up and collected their belongings, chatting with almost hysterical volubility to complete strangers about the frightful ordeal they had shared.

‘Never again!’ one man kept saying over and over again in a strident tone. ‘That’s the last time I step on an aeroplane! Never ever again, no matter what happens!’

It wasn’t until the businessman with the bowel problem nudged him meaningfully that Zen realized that everyone was leaving the plane. He got to his feet, lifted his coat down from the locker, and trudged along the aisle to the exit. The captain of the aircraft, in full uniform, was standing slightly to one side, outside the open door to the cockpit.

‘Sorry about the discomfort,’ he told Zen heartily. ‘Worst case of clear air turbulence I’ve ever encountered. Doesn’t show up on the radar, you see. Totally unpredictable. Nothing you can do.’

Zen nodded.

‘No, there’s nothing you can do.’

‘My mother…’

‘Is she still alive?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You’re not sure?’

‘No, I mean, I suppose that you could say that she’s alive.’

‘She’s from Randazzo, you said.’

‘No, I said that she lives there. Used to live there.’

‘And now?’

‘Now she doesn’t.’

‘So she moved?’

‘She’s been moved.’

Carla gave an edgy smile.

‘You keep making odd distinctions that I don’t quite get, Corinna.’

The other woman smiled too.

‘It’s a Sicilian speciality. But I’m not trying to hold anything back. I just need to decide how much to tell you, Carla. How much I want to tell you, that is, and how much you really want to know.’

‘I want to know everything!’

‘Oh, everything! Sorry, I’m not handling this right. I’m in love, you see.’

‘In love?’

‘Yes. So I’m behaving a bit oddly. I apologize in advance. The real problem is that I’m not really interested in small talk and brief encounters. That sort of thing can be fun for a while, but you can say the same about television. As I get older, I find I want something more difficult. Something that will challenge the limits of my competence.’

‘How old are you, Corinna?’

‘Thirty-four.’

‘I’m only twenty-three. My mother is dead, and as for my father… He miraculously reappeared, after all those years. It makes a difference, and yet it doesn’t. That’s always assuming that he is my father.’

‘But you had DNA tests done, you said.’

‘I sometimes think he faked them.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Why do people do anything? Half the time they don’t know themselves. Even if they do, their reasons needn’t make sense to anyone else.’

‘You’re an anti-rationalist, then?’

‘I’m a realist. At least, I like to think so.’

‘Then I’ll tell you about my mother, Carla. Let’s test your sense of realism, my dear. I’ll try not to bore you, but to be frank you don’t have much choice but to listen anyway.’

‘I could always leave.’

‘I’m afraid not. As far as my escort are concerned, we’re a package. An item, as they say. As long as I’m here, you have to stay. We arrived together, and we leave together.’

‘I see. I didn’t quite realize what I was letting myself in for by accepting this invitation.’

‘No, I’m sure you didn’t. But in an odd way bondage can be quite liberating, don’t you think?’

‘Liberating?’

‘So many decisions you don’t have to make. At any rate, here’s my mother’s story. Joking aside, I’m not really going to exploit the fact that you’re a captive audience. If you’re bored, just tell me.’

‘Go on.’

‘My mother is from Manchester. A city in England. The second half of the word, “chester”, is cognate with the Latin castrum, a fortified camp. The first syllable is the English word for uomo. My mother once claimed, in one of her rare flashes of humour, that all her troubles stemmed from this fact.’

‘Your mother is English?’

‘She was born in England, of English parents. Well, actually one was Welsh, but I can’t keep track of all these distinctions which seem to be so important there. Anyway, there she was, growing up in Manchester…’

‘Have you ever been there?’

‘I have, as it happens.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Impossible to tell you. We don’t have cities like that here. I liked it. I liked the people.’

‘You speak English?’

‘We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Carla. All in due course.’

‘I’m sorry. So, your mother grew up in… whatever it’s called.’

‘Yes. Her name is Bettina. Betty. When she was sixteen she left school and found work as a waitress somewhere in the centre of town. That’s where she met my father.’

‘He’s English too?’

‘No, he’s from here. He had a job as a deckhand on a freighter out of Catania. It sailed the length of the Mediterranean, crossed the Bay of Biscay, then the Irish Sea, and finally ended up in a canal leading to Manchester. By that time my father had had enough of sleepless nights and puking over the side. He jumped ship, and after a couple of weeks at a sailors’ hostel he found a job washing dishes in a restaurant.’

‘The one where your mother was employed as a waitress.’

‘Brava! And then what?’

‘They fell in love?’

‘Bravissima. Or rather, she did. She was one of three daughters from a working-class family in one of the less attractive areas of the city. She’d never met anyone like Agostino, never even dreamt of doing so, never imagined that there were such people in the world. Confident, precocious and pleasantly pushy, with a permanent tan, coal-black hair, pearly teeth and a charmingly defective command of English which didn’t stop him telling her what to do all the time…’

‘And him?’

‘He’s never told me his side of the story. But I’ve seen photographs of my mother taken at the time, a few snapshots which her parents had kept and which I saw when I went over there. I think for him she must have seemed as exotic as he was for her. Slightly taller than him, with a mass of red hair, lightly freckled skin as white as milk. Strong, capable legs, a bosom which had already attracted much comment, and a sweet, unformed face, kindly and tentative. She must have looked like the sacrificial victim of every male’s dreams.’

‘Do you really think men dream of that?’

‘Without question. Here in Sicily, at least. Sex isn’t really about pleasure for them. That’s just an extra. What it’s really about is power. Or, better, that is the pleasure — to captivate, to dominate, to penetrate, to master. Which is what he did with my mother. And it worked. She was crazy about him, she’s told me so. She was crazy. But he wasn’t.’

‘So he abandoned her?’

‘On the contrary. All things considered, that would have been a kindness, and men like my father are never kind unless it suits their purposes. No, he married her. She was pregnant by then, so he did the decent thing.’

‘I don’t see anything so terrible about that.’

‘Neither did she. Then he told her that they were going home.’

‘Home?’

‘To Randazzo, where he was born.’

‘And she agreed?’

‘Of course. She had never been out of England before, except for a day trip to the Isle of Man when she was nine. She was thrilled. Italy! The south! Adventure, romance! She longed to see her husband in his native environment, and to experience all the colourful festivals, traditions and characters he had told her so much about. The language would be a problem at first, of course, but Agostino had already taught her a few phrases and she would learn the rest soon enough. Besides, she was going to be a mother, and it was only right that the child should be born in its father’s own country. And if it didn’t work out, they could always come back.

‘They travelled by train. It took two days and two nights, sleeping upright in a series of packed carriages. As soon as they crossed the border at Ventimiglia, my mother noticed the change in her husband. In England, he had always been the stereotype Latin lover — sexy, confident, attentive, macho. But now they were in Italy, northern Italy, where he was marked out as a Sicilian peasant on the make, a wide-boy, probably a mafioso. He seemed to get smaller, my mother said. He became quieter and more wary, “like a snail withdrawing into its shell”.

‘When they passed Rome, his mood changed again. Now he was back in his territory. There would be no more snide glances and half-caught innuendoes about southerners. Down here, he could expect a little respect. Anyone from Naples and points south knew that you didn’t mess around with Sicilians. The second night passed, and finally they had reached the Straits of Messina. There it was, the fabled isle of which she had heard so much. From the ferry, to be honest, it didn’t look much more interesting than the Isle of Man. They disembarked on the other side and continued to Catania, where they changed to the little train that runs up around Etna.

‘It was then, my mother said, that Agostino started to change seriously. Until then, it had been gradual, a series of variations on a person she had always known. But from the moment the train started, he metamorphosed — my word, of course, not hers — into a creature superficially resembling the man she had married, only a dream double, the same and yet not the same, at once alien and fully recognizable. That was the worst aspect of the whole thing, she said. We all imagine horrors happening to us. We know horrors happen. But we imagine them happening in unforeseen circumstances, at the hands of people we do not know and would never — even as they killed or tortured us — acknowledge as fully human. But this was Betty’s lover, her husband, and before her eyes he was turning into somebody she would have fled from if she had encountered him late at night at a bus stop back in Manchester, with the rain falling and no one about.

‘There were plenty of people about once they got to Randazzo. More than enough, in fact. The whole community had turned out to welcome Agostino home, and to pass judgement on his foreign bride. First and foremost amongst them, of course, was Agostino’s mother. She and my grandfather were going to be sharing the family’s small house with the newly-weds, so she was naturally curious to see just what her son had dragged home from his adventures abroad. She was not impressed.’

‘God, it sounds like a story by Verga!’

‘This was thirty years ago, an hour’s journey from where we are now. My mother was very quickly given to understand that her mother-in-law ran the household, handled the finances, and made all the decisions. Her appeals to Agostino made no impression. He couldn’t understand why she couldn’t understand that this was normal and natural. As the days passed, his metamorphosis ran its course. Any remaining hint of romantic interest completely vanished. They were husband and wife, that was all. He would fulfil his side of the bargain, according to the local standards, and he expected her to do likewise.

‘She learned that she was not to leave the house without a valid reason and only after obtaining permission from him or his mother, and never alone. Such a thing would bring shame on the family, and she would suffer the consequences. He, on the other hand, was free to disappear for hours or even days at a time, without being expected to offer the slightest explanation. Husband and wife would go out together only for family or communal events at which their absence might be remarked upon. If she uttered a word of complaint, she would be reminded that there was plenty of cleaning, cooking or sewing to do, and that idleness breeds vice. Anyway, she would soon be a mother. That would take care of her strange foreign restlessness.

‘And for a year or two, she told me, it did. She was totally enchanted with me, totally absorbed by my needs and my company. Everything else ceased to matter. She named me Corinna, after a song by Bob Dylan which she was fond of, and she devoted herself to my happiness. She wanted to take me back to England, to show off to her family, but Agostino kept prevaricating, saying that it was too expensive. In the end her father sent Betty a ticket. Despite his previous reservations, Agostino bought one for himself, and off they went.

‘I was duly admired and cooed over, but in every other way the visit was a disaster. Betty’s parents had never approved of Agostino, and he now stopped making any attempt to ingratiate himself with them. He even pretended that he couldn’t speak or understand English any more. Even worse, my mother’s eyes were opened by this first taste of liberty since leaving England. It was sweet while it lasted, but the return to Randazzo was all the more bitter. She had bought a stock of contraceptive pills in Manchester, and now started taking them. There would be no more children with Agostino, she had decided.

‘The problem was the one that already existed. As I grew up, she became more and more overwhelmed by the stifling dimensions of the world she lived in — not only for her sake, but for mine. The idea that her daughter would grow up to be one of these local cloistered breeding machines and maids-of-all-work horrified her. She couldn’t let it happen. She wouldn’t let it happen.

‘She made several attempts to escape, the first by bus. It left at five in the morning, bound for Catania. There she planned to take the train to Rome and cable her father for money to fly home. Early one morning she rose quietly, dressed herself and me and sneaked out of the house with only her handbag, some money she had set aside, and her passport. The bus was waiting in the square, the door open and the engine running, but when she tried to board, holding me in her arms, the driver told her there was no room. The bus was almost empty, she pointed out. It was now, he said, but he was picking up a large group in the next village, a comitiva going down to Catania for a political rally. She told him to sell her a reserved ticket for the next day, but he told her she would have to apply in person at the head office.

‘The next time, she tried the railway. This was more difficult, because it meant slipping away in the middle of the morning. Somehow she managed to get to the station without being stopped, but once again it seemed that there was a problem. The train had been delayed, possibly even cancelled, the station master told her. He would make a phone call and find out what was going on before she wasted her money on a ticket. Five minutes later, Agostino appeared. He led us back to the house, where I was taken from her. She wouldn’t tell me what he did to her then, but that evening she was called before her mother-in-law.

‘“These adventures are pointless and stupid,” she told my mother contemptuously. “You may as well get that into your head right away.” My mother spat defiance. She was a British citizen and they couldn’t keep her here against her will. Agostino’s mother smiled. Of course not, she said. My mother was free to leave whenever she wanted — the sooner the better, her tone implied. But alone. She could leave, but they would never give up the child.

‘My mother threatened to go to the police, and the visible contempt of her mother-in-law deepened still further. The law would back the family all the way, she said, but people like them didn’t need policemen and judges to defend what was theirs. Agostino and his friends were perfectly capable of doing that themselves. And they would rather see me dead than taken from them. My mother said she had no doubt that they meant exactly what they said.

‘At last the situation was clear. She could leave, but only if she abandoned me. If she wanted me, she had to stay. I don’t think she ever quite appreciated what it must have cost them to be so explicit. With one of their own kind they would never have expressed themselves so frankly. The whole exchange would have been conducted in undertones and innuendoes, messages containing other messages, all in code. But my mother was a foreigner, and they had to make sure that she had understood.’

‘My God! So what did she do?’

Corinna put her head on one side and smiled. One of the reasons she looked so different from usual, Carla realized, was that she was wearing a lot more eye make-up.

‘Ah, well, that’ll have to wait,’ said Corinna with finality. ‘Enough about my mother for one evening. Your birthday is coming up, you told me. Would you like to go away for the weekend to celebrate?’

‘Where?’

‘What about Taormina? Quite apart from the pleasure of your company, I’d love to get out of town for a while, and away from these young thugs with their radios and guns.’

‘But don’t you want to go with your boyfriend?’ asked Carla coyly.

Corinna Nunziatella gave her a level look.

‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’

‘But you said you were in love.’

There was a long, awkward silence.

I’m sorry,’ said Carla. ‘I didn’t mean to pry’

‘Taormina’s a charming place!’ Corinna went on eagerly. ‘And I know a very nice hotel, right in the centre but completely secluded. We’ll have to give some thought to getting rid of my escort, but I think it can be managed. If you’re interested, that is. Are you?’

The two women regarded one another for a moment.

‘What have I got to lose?’ said Carla.

In Zen’s experience, Roman taxi drivers came in just two forms, as though cloned: threateningly sullen or manically voluble. A codicil appended to this law dictated that you always got the one least suited to your current state of mind, so it came as no surprise to Zen when the driver who picked him up at Fiumicino turned out to be one of the chattiest and most inquisitive.

Where had Zen flown in from? Sicily! Eh, must be hot there, this time of year! Even hotter than here in Rome! His cousin had married a Sicilian girl, who was definitely hotter than the local article if Maurizio was to be believed! They were living in Belgium now, if you could call it living. And where to? The Fatebenefratelli? Of course! At once, if not sooner! A wonderful hospital. Three of his own relatives had gone under the knife there. But no one in Zen’s family was involved, God willing? A friend? And Zen had come all the way from Sicily to be with him in his hour of need? Now that was real friendship! He himself, Paolo Curtillo, could do with a few friends like that, instead of which he was surrounded by leeches, vampires and bloodsuckers whose only thought was to enrich themselves at his expense. He could tell stories of barefaced treacheries, devious deals and vicious back-stabbing that would make Zen’s blood run cold, but what was the point?

And what about Lazio, eh? That second goal against Fiorentina on Sunday? No? Zen hadn’t seen it? He wasn’t by any chance — ha ha! — a Roma fan, was he? Because if so — ha ha! — he could get out right now and walk the rest of the way. Not that he hadn’t had all sorts in the cab at one time or another. Murderers, rapists, drug dealers, mafiosi — no disrespect intended — secret-service agents, policemen… Even politicians! That was the sort of man that he, Paolo Curtillo, was. As long as you could pay, he would take you wherever you wanted to go, even to Florence or Naples — even if you worked for the tax authorities!

Nevertheless, he had his limits. There was a certain class of human scum that he wouldn’t let past the door of his Mercedes SE500 — over the purchase of which, incidentally, the brother of the aforementioned siciliana had screwed him royally — only a year and a half old, and look at it, all but wrecked, three hundred thousand kilometres on the clock, he’d have to buy another next year and his wife kept telling him ‘secondhand’, but he preferred the peace of mind the warranty gave you — no, there were some people he wouldn’t let in the cab, not for any amount of money, wouldn’t even give the time of day to, and they were the so-called fans of the so-called Roma football club, that clan of degenerate wankers and marginal know-nothings who…

Outside the speeding taxi, the streets gaped, stripped bare by purposelessly bright overhead lights. The air flowing in through the open window was as clammy and oppressive as the sweat-dampened pillow used to suffocate some terrified victim. Where was he? They’d mocked up a city set, but it remained austerely or teasingly generalized, as though it had already served as the establishing archive material for so many knockabout farces and weepy melodramas that it no longer expected anyone to take it seriously as an entity in itself. What sort of show is it tonight? That was the question which every perspective and backdrop immediately asked, like the seasoned professionals they were. You want happy or sad? Sinister or idyllic? We can do either or both, and plenty more besides, but you need to tell us what you want.

‘I don’t know!’ Zen said. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘I do,’ the cabbie replied. ‘You’re a Lazio man! I spotted it right away. That Roma lot are all stiff, rich, well-connected arseholes. They’ve got the money, they’ve got the power, they’ve got everything! The only thing they don’t have is the one thing we do, and that’s balls. Courage. Belief. Pride. A spirit that will never be broken. That’s a Lazio fan for you! We don’t care if we lose and lose for ever. We know they’ve fixed the odds against us and we don’t stand a chance. E ce ne freghiamo! Vero, dottore? Fuck ‘em all! We’re Lazio to the core. We have no choice. That’s how God made us!’

They had by now reached the Piazza di Porta Portuense, and continued along the embankment to the bridge leading across to the island in the middle of the river. Here Zen paid off the taxi, cutting through the driver’s attempts to prolong the conversation, and walked off across the Ponte Cestio. The remnants of the Tiber, reduced to a fetid trickle at this time of year, scuttled away in the deep trench of darkness beneath the bridge.

Half-way across he stopped, his elbows on the parapet, and leaned down over the invisible depths. Grasping his squished packet of Nazionali, he lit up and exhaled a flutter of smoke, an apt correlate to the impoverished stream existing only as a minor sound effect, a susurration emanating from the darkness beneath.

As he tossed his unsmoked cigarette into the gutter, he noticed a rectangular sheet of paper lying there like a discarded letter. In another vain attempt to delay his inevitable arrival, he picked it up. To the touch, the glossy surface revealed itself to be pitted by being crushed between shoe soles and the uneven surface of the pavement. It was just one of those advertising flyers which were thrust on passers-by or stuck under the windscreen wipers of parked cars, DIVENTARE INVESTIGATORE PRIVATO was the shout-line: BECOME A PRIVATE EYE. In the background, red on white, was an image of a vaguely Sherlock Holmesian figure, sporting glasses and a prominent pipe. ‘The courses are open to all detective enthusiasts, and can open the door to a new and fascinating profession,’ continued the copy beneath.

Zen threw the paper aside and continued on his way. Perhaps he should sign up. The only problem was the name of the company running the courses, which called itself the Istituto Superiore di Criminalita. If there truly was a high-level institution of criminality in Rome, Zen was beginning to get the feeling that he already worked for it.

At the hospital, there was no one at reception, and the only person in the waiting area was an elderly derelict, drunk or mad, who was having a violent argument with an invisible opponent. Zen walked off down the gleaming corridor which stretched away, seemingly for ever, the fake marble floor a molten glare of arrogant light. There were doors to either side, but he hesitated to open them lest he interrupt the performances which might be going on inside. They should really have a red warning light, he thought, as they did at radio stations when a studio was on air.

Further down the corridor, a man was mopping the floor in a series of precise spiral motions, each followed by a rinse in the metal bucket resting on a towel, then a final squash on a grid to one side, to remove excess water before the next washing sequence began. Actually, Zen realized, he was still too far away to see clearly what the cleaner was doing, but that was how his mother had always dealt with the large red-yellow slabs of their house in Venice, working her way from the top to the bottom. He’d always assumed that she enjoyed it, the way he did the games he played. Why else would she bother? The mop handle was darkened in the two places where she wrapped her bony, calloused fingers about it. From time to time she would straighten up, press her left hand to the small of her back, and give a mild moan.

The cleaner was dark-skinned, Zen saw as he drew nearer. Some sort of immigrant. Probably didn’t speak Italian. Still, it was worth a try.

‘I’m looking for my mother,’ he said.

The man straightened up, pressed his left hand to his back and winced slightly. He did not speak, but looked at Zen with an unnerving intensity, as though registering without surprise the fact of a birth or a murder.

‘My mother,’ Zen repeated, enunciating each syllable with exaggerated emphasis.

‘What about her?’ the cleaner replied.

His startlingly liquid eyes regarded Zen with the same neutral exactitude, neither compassionate nor dispassionate.

‘She’s dying.’

The cleaner spun his mop, splaying the strands out like a witch’s hairdo, then propped it up against the wall.

‘Come with me,’ he said.

He strode off down the corridor, never once looking back. A few paces behind, Zen followed up flights of stairs and through a set of double doors.

‘Your mother’s name?’ his guide demanded in his eerily alien Italian.

‘Zen, Giuseppina.’

The other man stood still a moment, as though attending to some imperceptible sound or scent.

‘This is the terminal ward,’ he remarked, fixing Zen with his disconcertingly lucid gaze. Zen nodded. The cleaner turned away, wiping his hands on the back of his blue overalls and looking at the names scrawled in black marker on the shiny boards outside each door. He worked his way to the end of the corridor, then retraced his steps to a door where the board showed no name, just a large black X stretching from corner to corner.

‘That means the patient’s dead, but they haven’t moved the corpse yet,’ he said, gripping the handle. ‘None of the other names are Zen, so this might be her.’

The room was smaller than Zen had anticipated, most of it taken up by a single bed in which an elderly woman’s body lay covered by a sheet. The cleaner lifted the bottom corner. A brown cardboard luggage label dangled on a length of plastic cord from the big toe of the woman’s right foot. He turned the label over and beckoned to Zen, who bent to read it. There was a name and an address. Both were familiar to him, unlike the body in the bed.

‘It’s not her,’ he said, turning towards the door.

‘Aurelio?’

The voice seemed to come from nowhere and from everywhere. Then Zen realized that the body lying on the bed had opened its eyes and was staring up at him.

‘Mamma?’ he whispered.

A withered arm extended itself towards him, shrunk to its essence: veins, tendons, bone. Zen sat on the edge of the bed and grasped it.

‘I’ve just arrived. Mamma,’ he muttered breathlessly, as though he’d run all the way from Catania. ‘Gilberto phoned me, and then I spoke to Maria Grazia. Where are they all? They shouldn’t have left you alone like this! But I’m here now, and I’ll look after everything. You don’t have to worry any more. I’ll take care of you.’

The woman beside him started to talk, a low melodious monologue to which he listened with increasing desperation, nodding frantically and clasping the fibrous limb which, like a rusted anchor cable, was now his last best hope. Perhaps he’d just gone mad, he thought, as he sat there while the woman talked and talked, a stream of verbiage parsed into perfectly rounded phrases and variously inflected vocables, of all of which he understood not one single word.

‘She had a stroke,’ a sonorous voice intoned somewhere off-camera. ‘They brought her here, the people you mentioned, but the doctors told them that she would be in a coma for some time and that there was no point in staying. Then they came again, the doctors, and said she was dead. Since that it’s been peaceful. She was worried when the door opened because she thought that they had come back to bother her. Then she heard your voice and realized that it was you, her beloved son, and then she knew why she had not been permitted to die when the doctors wanted her to. She loves you and would… What’s the word? She would be worried about you, but she knows now that there’s nothing to worry about. She says you brought her great joy. It was all worth it, every moment of every hour of every day. You must never doubt that. She’s sorry to have caused you so much bother, but she’s glad you were able to come. Now she’s going to die.’

The moment the voice fell silent, Zen swivelled around. The cleaner was leaning against the wall, regarding a spot somewhere above the bed and slightly to one side.

‘What the fuck was all that sentimental drivel?’ Zen shouted, rising to his feet. ‘She was speaking gibberish!’

‘She was speaking French,’ the man replied, his eyes never wavering from their seemingly random point of focus.

Zen gave a brutal laugh.

‘French? Oh, yes, right, with some Greek and Latin thrown in, no doubt!’

‘No, it was pure French. Well, a little incorrect here and there, above all in the gender of nouns, where they differ from Italian. But completely comprehensible, none the less.’

Zen stared at him. He essayed another laugh, but it backfired.

‘You expect me to believe that someone like you understands French?’ he demanded.

When the cleaner at last lowered his implacable gaze to meet Zen’s, it suddenly became clear that he had been trying to spare the other man precisely this eye contact all this while.

‘I am from Tunisia,’ he said. ‘I speak French and Arabic. And now a little Italian.’

Zen gestured towards the bed.

‘And my mother? Is she Tunisian too? She’s Venetian born and bred! Never even been to Turin, never mind France! How could she possibly start spouting absurd speeches in French on her deathbed? The whole thing’s ridiculous!’

The cleaner shrugged.

‘I’ve seen stranger things, particularly where there’s cerebral trauma. I remember one example when I was an intern at a hospital in Tunis. A man was brought in, an emergency case. He’d been hit by a metro tram. This man was from the desert, you understand. A Berber, from the extreme south of the country. They don’t have trams there, so he wasn’t paying attention.’

‘What happened?’ Zen demanded in a peremptory tone, as though he was behind his imposing desk in the Questura di Catania.

The cleaner shrugged.

‘He recovered. Eventually. But first he talked. For hours, maybe days, in this gibberish which no one could understand. We brought in professors from the university, experts in all the dialects and patois of the desert people. And then at last one of them, who had studied the Renaissance at university, spotted that the man was speaking Italian.’

‘Italian?’

‘He had spent some time, early in his life, in that part of the desert now called Libya. It was an Italian colony at the time. We worked out later that he could have been no more than five or six when he was taken to a town somewhere by someone hoping to resolve some bureaucratic problem. A murder, maybe, or a marriage. He was there only a few days, soaking up this new language that was everywhere about him. And then they left again, the problem resolved or not, and he never spoke or heard Italian for the rest of his life until the impact of the tram jarred it to life again.’

He glanced at Zen, then walked around him, took the woman’s arm and felt her wrist with two delicately probing fingers. Zen sat down heavily in a chair by the bed.

‘When she was in her teens, my mother worked for a French family who had rented a palazzo on the Grand Canal,’ he said dreamily. ‘I remember her telling me, years ago, when I was a child, about the stylish dresses and dazzling jewellery which the wife owned. My mother had never seen anything like that. She lived in the house with them for three months, one summer before the war, back in the thirties.’

There were tears in his eyes. He hastily brushed them away.

‘So you studied medicine?’ he asked the Tunisian.

‘Yes,’ the man said, laying Signora Zen’s arm back on the sheet. ‘Engineering, too, for a while. A perfect training for my present position, when you think about it. Routine hospital maintenance.’

He laughed darkly.

‘Well, I must get back to my mop. Your mother may have spoken in French, but all languages are the same now. Talk to her. This is your last chance. Tell her everything you will regret not saying for ever if you let this opportunity slip.’

He bent over the figure lying on the bed and rapidly muttered some words in a language Zen did not understand, then turned away. The door oozed shut behind him on its pneumatic spring.

Alone with this dying stranger, Zen at first could think of nothing to say. But as time passed an odd thing happened. He found himself warming to this old woman, whoever she might be, who had rattled on to him in French. It didn’t seem to matter any longer who she was. Perhaps she was his mother. What difference did it make now? She had been somebody’s mother. Even if she wasn’t his, did that make her less admirable, less worthy of pity and love? He found himself holding her wizened hand, kissing her rugged face. Then, suddenly, the words came, a stutter at first, but soon a torrent, a shameless gush obliterating every distinction between what was sayable and unsayable.

Later he felt cold. So did she. Light crept in through the shuttered window, reducing the obscure splendours of the night to ashes. Men in white coats appeared and ushered him aside. Curtains were drawn about the bed where an old woman lay. An outsider, an intruder, Zen was hustled out into the corridors, to the brutal glare of the lights, the squeal and tap of footsteps on the polished flooring, the hum of distant machinery. He made his way to the lift and pressed the button for the ground floor. The lift stopped before that and the cleaner got in, stowing his bucket, towel and mop in the corner.

They say she’s dead,’ Zen told him.

The man nodded.

‘She was dead when I left you.’

Zen looked at him incredulously.

‘But you told me to talk to her! You said it was my last chance, that I would regret it for ever if I let the opportunity slip. And now you tell me that she was dead all the time?’

The lift came to a rest. The cleaner collected his equipment and stepped out.

‘Yes, but you aren’t,’ he said as the doors closed.

Outside, the sky was falling. As yet it was just a light dust which appeared on Zen’s coat like mist. It seemed to be pink. He walked back along the bridge, pausing at the same spot as before to light a cigarette. A gentle aerosol, soft yet solid, had soaked the night, thickening it and covering every surface with a patina of reddish dust.

It was only when he saw it on his sleeve, his hands, that Zen realized that this was not just a trick of the light. The stuff was everywhere, saturating the air and coating every surface like a fine spray of wind-blown paint. He walked on across the bridge to the mainland, where a man was busily cleaning the windscreen of his car.

‘It happens every time,’ he remarked in a disgusted tone, glancing at Zen and shaking his head.

‘What?’

‘Yesterday I got the car washed and waxed, right?’ the man replied. ‘So of course today we get the pioggia di sangue.’

‘Blood rain?’ echoed Zen.

‘The sand from the Sahara! The wind picks it up and carries it along, thousands of metres high, and then at a certain point the pressure changes, the wind loses its force, and the sand rains down. And it’s always just after I get my car cleaned. It happens every time!’

With a throw-away ‘That’s life!’ gesture, the man climbed into the driver’s seat and started trying to goad the motor into action. Zen crunched off across the fine sand which squirmed and squeaked beneath his shoes.

Carla Arduini had calculated that it would take her two hours to drive to Palermo, but she hadn’t counted on a long stretch of repair work being done — or rather not being done — in the tunnels through which the A19 motorway descends into the valley of the Imera after crossing the island’s central mountain chain near Enna. Now, stuck in a tail-back which from this point on the road seemed indefinitely long, she began to worry about being on time for her appointment. She was fully aware that this was simply an acceptable cover for her real worry, which was why she had an appointment in the first place.

It was just after seven in the morning when her cellphone rang. Carla was just about to leave her apartment for her morning coffee with her father at the bar in Piazza Carlo Alberto. The phone call, at such an early hour, had to be bad news. She had two mobile phones, and this one was her work phone, supplied and paid for by her company. Therefore it was official and urgent, and Carla had a bad conscience, because the work she had been doing early that morning and the night before was certainly improper and quite possibly illegal.

In an effort to put her tentative theories about unlicensed intruders on the DIA network to the test, she had decided to try to do a little ‘pinging’ herself. Armed with the information she already had, as the licensed installer, it had taken her little time to penetrate the various firewalls surrounding the system. She had then called up the data files which had been opened by the nocturnal visitor she had provisionally named Count Dracula. She was still unsure whether the data vampire was from the Mafia, the media, or some other interested party, and it had occurred to her that some clue to this might be concealed in the material he had chosen to access.

If so, it had yet to emerge. In this case, the most recent interception, the text consisted of the transcript of an interview between a magistrate in Palermo and a pentito, one of the former members of Cosa Nostra who had agreed to collaborate with the authorities in return for them and their families being buried and rebirthed in the government’s witness protection programme, safe from the vengeance of those they had betrayed.

Sometimes, yes, but normally we just kill them. It’s quicker and cheaper. Saves a lot of effort. When you kill someone, you also send a message. Maybe even many messages.

Even contradictory messages?

Especially those. But it has to be done right. There’s an art to the thing. Because there’s no such thing as a messageless death, are you with me?

In other words, if a message doesn’t exist, someone will invent one.

Exactly. So you have to make sure that some message comes through loud and clear. Otherwise the communications can get fouled up. And when that happens…

Yes?

When the messages start going astray, there’s no rhyme or reason any more. No one knows what’s going on, so everyone’s extra edgy. Mistakes happen, and those mistakes breed others. Before you know where you are, you have another clan war on your hands.

So these executions have to be correctly performed. It’s a sort of ritual theatre, in other words, like the priest consecrating the host. What’s the matter?

Look, I’m trying to cooperate, all right? We’re different men with different objectives, but I respect you just as you respect me.

Of course.

So no more jokes about the holy mass, please.

I apologize. To go back to what we were discussing, can you give me an example of such a message?

There are so many. But I’ll mention a recent one.

Just to show that, even though for your own protection you’re in solitary confinement down at the Ucciardone prison, you’re still in touch.

Why would you take me seriously if you thought you were dealing with someone whose clock stopped when he got picked up? Anyway, the thing I’m thinking of is that body they found in a train near Catania.

The Limina case.

Only it wasn’t the Limina kid at all, is what I’ve heard.

Who, then?

Some sneak thief who was picked up operating on protected turf. He’d been warned before, but he had more balls than brains. They were going to waste him in an alley somewhere, but then someone had a brighter idea. The thief looked quite a bit like Tonino Limina. Same age, same height and build, same colour hair. The Limina clan have been making themselves a bit of a nuisance on this side of the island, so a warning seemed in order. They shut the thief up in a freight car on a train bound from Palermo to Catania, with a label with ‘Limina’ scrawled on it. One message delivered and one undesirable disposed of. A perfect solution.

But the Liminas explicitly denied that the murdered man was their son. Obviously they knew that Tonino was still alive. So the message was pointless.

No message is pointless. Maybe in this case it wasn’t the young Limina. Next time, who knows?

It was as she was reading these words that the phone rang. At once she felt a panicky guilt, as when her mother had burst into the room when she was reading a letter from her current boyfriend. Desperately she groped for the keyboard, killed the document on screen and got safely out of the DIA data files. Only then did she answer the phone.

‘Signorina Arduini?’

‘Speaking.’

‘We’d like to see you today to ascertain what progress is being made with regard to the computer installation for which you’re responsible. As you probably know, the handover date has already been put back twice. Through no fault of yours, I’m sure, but we’re naturally anxious to get the system up and running as soon as possible. I’ve therefore made a booking for lunch at the Hotel Zagarella in Santa Flavia, just east of the city. We’ll expect you at one o’clock.’

The caller hung up. Carla dug out her map, but failed to find any village named Santa Flavia. And how could it be ‘just east of the city’? East of Catania, there was nothing but water. She tried ringing her father, first at the Questura, then at home, and finally on his cellphone, without success. Finally, in timid desperation, she had called Corinna Nunziatella. Rather to Carla’s surprise, the judge seemed delighted to help, and informed her that the city east of which Santa Flavia was situated was Palermo.

‘Take the Casteldaccia exit off the motorway and follow the signs,’ the magistrate told her. ‘Who are these people, anyway?’

‘He didn’t say, but it seems to be about my work.’

‘Where are you meeting?’

‘A hotel called the Zagarella.’

The only reply was a low whistle.

‘Do you know it?’ Carla asked.

There was a long silence.

‘It’s a well-known venue,’ Corinna Nunziatella finally replied. ‘For all sorts of events. Listen, cara, make it clear to the people you’re meeting that you have an appointment with me back here in Catania this evening.’

‘But I don’t.’

Corinna’s response was unusually brusque.

‘Never mind that! Make sure they know that you’ve told me you’re meeting them at the Zagarella for lunch, and that I’m expecting you back by six o’clock this evening. I’ll call you then to make sure you’re safely back.’

Carla laughed.

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘I’ll explain tomorrow,’ Corinna replied. ‘Just do what I say. Make very sure that these people know what the situation is, all right? It could be important.’

‘Very well.’

‘And listen, don’t…’

Corinna’s voice broke off.

‘Don’t what?’

‘Oh, nothing. I’m just being silly. I’ll call you this evening at six.’

At length the constipated press of traffic in which Carla’s Fiat Uno was embedded passed through the succession of tunnels where so much expensive and urgent repair work was not being done, and she completed the drive down to the north coast of the island and then westwards to her destination. The Hotel Zagarella turned out to be a modern monstrosity on what must at one time have been a stunning peninsula, with extensive views along the neighbouring bay and out to sea. Next to the hotel was yet another construction site, one of those timeless projects which look like a nuclear power station being built by two old men with buckets, spades and a rope hoist.

Of the grand villas belonging to the Palermitan nobility which had once stood here, there was almost no sign. Those that did remain were imprisoned in a perspectiveless absurdity, a concrete Gulag constructed by the ‘state within the state’, where the memory of what might have been was perhaps the bitterest punishment in this society of latter-day zeks, where even the winners were losers.

When Carla pulled up outside the hotel, a flunkey rushed over and opened the door.

‘Signorina Arduini! You’re expected inside. I’ll see to the car.’

So whoever ‘they’ were, they knew the number of her telefonino and the make and registration of her car. But the most disturbing aspect of the situation was that they were evidently making no effort to hide the fact that they knew. Carla handed over the keys and walked up the plush red-carpeted steps. At the top, another functionary opened the door for her with a respectful bow. Once inside, a small rotund man in a suit and tie came bustling over to her.

‘Welcome to the Zagarella, Signorina Arduini! I trust your journey was not too arduous. Your friends are waiting for you in a private room at the rear of the premises. If you permit, I shall be happy to accompany you there myself. This way, please!’

She had visualized the ‘private room’ as an intimate space to one side of the hotel’s dining area, sectioned off perhaps by a slatted wooden partition. It turned out to be the size of a football field. Rows of metal tables and chairs stretched away in ranks towards a series of narrow windows reaching up to the ceiling. Despite the massive concrete columns supporting the latter, everything looked cheap, vulgar and temporary.

At the middle of the room stood a table heaped with food and centred by a vase roughly the size of an average sink, from which protruded a huge bouquet of flowers. Three men were seated around the table. All three stared blatantly at Carla as she made her way across the scuffed industrial flooring towards them.

Having reached the corner of the table, Carla stopped. After a significant pause, the middle of the three men jumped to his feet as though noticing her presence for the first time. He was dressed in the standard uniform of the professional classes: tweed jacket, blue shirt and red tie beneath a yellow pullover, brown trousers and highly polished shoes.

‘Good day, signorina,’ he said coolly. ‘So glad you could join us. May I introduce my assistant Carmelo. And this is Gaetano, an esteemed colleague visiting from Rome.’

He waved alternately at the two men. Carla nodded briefly to each, then turned back to the speaker.

‘And you are?’

The man frowned.

‘But surely that was…’

He tapped his forehead lightly with the heel of one hand.

‘But I forgot, of course you didn’t get our message!’

He turned to the other two.

‘Apparently she didn’t get our message,’ he said.

The two men sat impassively, with the air of people who had better things to do.

‘My name is Vito Alagna,’ the man announced, turning back to Carla with a ceremonial bow.

‘How did you know my cellphone number?’ asked Carla, wondering at her own temerity. These people had power the way some had muscles.

‘I left a message late yesterday with the porter at the Palace of Justice. When you didn’t return it, I called again and was told you were working at home, so I called you there this morning. Please, take a seat!’

He waved towards the enormous buffet table, on which stood a huge variety of cold foods. Carla took a chair at random, the nearest one. No one at the Palazzo di Giustizia except Corinna Nunziatella knew her cellphone numbers, private or professional. She had been very careful not to give them out, to avoid endless harassment.

‘Forgive the seeming mystification,’ Vito Alagna went on. ‘It’s really quite simple and straightforward. I work for the autonomous parliament here in Palermo which oversees the internal affairs of this little island of ours. We have naturally collaborated with our colleagues in Rome on the creation and development of the various specialized bodies set up to investigate so-called “criminal activities of the Mafia variety” within our political and administrative jurisdiction.’

He glanced at the other men, as though for corroboration. If so, none was forthcoming. As though embarrassed by his colleagues’ lack of response, Alagna gestured to the food.

‘But please! Help yourself!’

Carla looked at him, then at the other two, and lastly at the food itself. Although superficially attractive, even luxurious, there was something rather odd about the selection on offer. It included both smoked and poached salmon, a block of smooth meat pate in its wrapper of congealed butter and gelatin, a haunch of cold roast beef, and a selection of cheeses including Stilton, Brie and some sort of cream cheese smothered in nuts. A moment later, Carla had worked out why it seemed so odd: every single item was imported.

‘Aren’t you eating?’ she asked Vito, who smiled and shrugged.

‘We’re not hungry yet,’ he said.

Carla nodded.

‘Neither am I.’

The man at the end of the table, whom Vito had named Gaetano, suddenly spoke.

‘Perhaps later,’ he said. ‘We have all day.’

Carla recalled what Corinna had said.

‘Unfortunately I haven’t. I have to be back in Catania by six this evening. A friend of mine is expecting me for dinner.’

‘Who’s that?’

The question came from Gaetano.

‘Dottoressa Nunziatella,’ Carla replied succinctly. ‘She is a judge for the AntiMafia pool, where I work.’

‘You two must be very close.’

Gaetano again.

‘We’re friends, yes,’ Carla retorted.

Gaetano looked up at the ceiling, where a glass lamp like a melting zeppelin gathered dust at the end of its black cord.

‘And you’re having dinner with her again tonight? Two evenings in a row. Now that’s true friendship!’

The men all sniggered quietly.

‘How do you know about all this?’ Carla snapped.

The three men exchanged a glance, then resumed their purposefully purposeless gaze.

‘Eh, it’s a small place, Sicily!’ the one called Carmelo said at last.

Vito Alagna’s suave tones were almost a relief.

‘Be assured that we won’t detain you for long, signorina. We just need a brief update on the current situation with regard to the system you are working on. A sort of progress report, as it were.’

‘I’ve provided the director of the DIA in Catania with a series of progress reports,’ Carla replied.

Vito Alagna shrugged wearily.

‘Yes, I’m sure you have, but you know how it is! What with bad communications and the usual rivalry and backbiting, these reports are not always passed on as quickly as they should be, if at all. Now I’m sure that all you want to do is finish this assignment and get back to your home up in the north, right?’

Carla Arduini could not resist a decisive nod. Alagna laughed.

‘Excellent! In that case, our interests coincide. So let’s just run over the status of the project at this time, and touch briefly on any problems that may have arisen and your personal prognosis for a completion date.’

Which is exactly what she had done, Carla reflected in the car on the way back. She’d given the three men a succinct and professional overview of the situation to date, omitting all reference to ‘Count Dracula’, and provided them with her estimated best-case scenario for a handover to the AntiMafia authorities. Vito Alagna had listened quietly and intently, taking no notes but giving the impression of absorbing every detail Carla mentioned. The other two sat looking at their nails, saying nothing. It was around three o’clock when the one called Gaetano leaned heavily over on to his right buttock and emitted a loud fart.

‘Time we were going,’ he said to no one in particular.

‘Of course, of course!’ Vito Alagna exclaimed, rising to his feet. ‘Thank you so much for coming, signorina. It’s been extremely helpful. The valet will fetch your car. Thank you once again. Goodbye, goodbye!’

Her return journey was easier, since the westbound tunnels on the A19 were not affected by the notional repair work. The only problem was a motorcyclist stuck just in front of her, riding some sort of powerful red machine no doubt capable of over 200 kmph. Carla’s little Fiat didn’t have enough power to overtake him, and since he seemed content to cruise along at a steady 90 kmph the whole way, she had no choice but to stare at his stubborn, leather-clad form all the way to Catania.

Back in her flat, she tried calling her father, but there was still no reply. She had a shower and then went back into the bedroom of her modern apartment, searching for the thick white terry-towelling gown she used to dry off in. It was not on the hook where she kept it, and it took a moment to locate it on a similar hook on the other side of the closet. The jacket and slacks she had hung there, still in their plastic wrapping from the cleaners where she had picked them up two days earlier, were hanging on the other hook, the one where Carla always kept her towelling gown.

Her personal mobile started to ring. Carla sidled towards it, glancing at the open doorway and the various inner recesses of the apartment, as yet unchecked.

‘Signorina Arduini?’ a charmless male voice asked. ‘This is the Bar Nettuno. We have a message that was left by a friend of yours. She said to phone you and tell you to pick it up immediately.’

‘Can’t you give it to me now?’ asked Carla irritably. ‘Who is this supposed friend, anyway?’

‘She didn’t leave a name, signorina, just a written message sealed in an envelope. She told me to ring you at six o’clock precisely and tell you to come and pick it up.’

Carla glanced at the clock. It was just after six.

‘Very well, I’ll be there shortly,’ she said.

Naked except for the towel clutched around her belly, she opened every door in the small apartment and verified that no one was hiding there. Nothing seemed to be missing, either. Carla switched on her Toshiba laptop and

turned away to look for some clothes. When she returned to the table, the screen was glowing. In the centre was a box with a circle slashed red and the words FATAL ERROR MESSAGE! THIS COMPUTER HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN.

Looking out of the window at the apartment block across the street, Carla felt for the power switch and pressed it gently, stilling the computer, then closed the lid.

The Bar Nettuno was only a few steps away, an undistinguished enterprise installed on the ground floor of the apartment block visible from Carla’s window. Hurriedly dressed in jeans and a pullover, Carla strode in and identified herself to the barman, who nodded expressionlessly and passed her an envelope with her name on it. Inside she found a handwritten note: ‘I’ll call the pay phone in the corner, beside the video game, at six fifteen, then every five minutes until I get you. CN.’

Carla glanced at her watch. It was six twelve. Three minutes later, the phone started to ring. Corinna Nunziatella sounded embarrassed.

‘I apologize for all this nonsense, cara, but if we’re going to do this, we’d better do it properly.’

‘You think your phone is tapped?’

‘Under the circumstances, that’s the only sensible assumption to make. Yours too, for all I know. And cellphones are notoriously insecure. So this seemed the best way. How was your day in Palermo?’

Carla told her. There was silence the other end, then a long sigh.

‘This means we’re going to have to be even more careful about our arrangements for tomorrow.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ll explain when we meet. Have you got a pen and paper? Now listen carefully. Take the 10 a.m. AST bus to Aci Castello. Go down to the coast and walk north to Aci Trezza. It’s only a couple of kilometres along a very pretty path with a view of the rocks which the Cyclops named Polyphemus threw at Ulysses and his men after they blinded him. Do you know your Homer?’

‘Surely that happened somewhere in Greece?’

‘In Homer’s time, Sicily was somewhere in Greece. Are you paying attention? In Aci Trezza there’s a hotel called I Ciclopi. Go into the bar and wait for me. If I haven’t contacted you by midday, go home. Don’t mention my name, don’t ask questions, don’t try to call me, just go home. And another thing. After what you’ve just told me, it’s possible that you may be followed. If you notice anyone following you, try to lose him. If you can’t, again, just go home. Above all, on no account bring a tail to our rendezvous. Do you understand?’

‘Of course, but why should I be followed? No one’s interested in me.’

‘I’m interested in you, cara, and they’re interested in me. Your little lunch in “the triangle of death” proved that beyond a doubt.’

‘But that was…’

‘Please just accept what I’m telling you. As far as they’re concerned, we’re a couple. They will therefore be watching you.’

‘This is like some stupid movie!’ Carla exclaimed dramatically, sounding like a character in just such a movie.

‘All the more reason not to be stupid ourselves,’ Corinna Nunziatella replied calmly. ‘A domani, cara.’

Six men sat around the metal table set up in the shade of the ancient carob and palm trees in the centre of the small square. On the table, painted green and chipped and flecked with rust, lay a chessboard. The six men were seated on folding chairs of a similar colour and condition. Only two of the men were actually playing, but the other four watched as though their lives depended on the result. So, to a lesser degree, did a larger group, about ten in all, who stood in a rough circle at a respectful distance from the players and their immediate entourage. Beyond them, cars lay as though abandoned in the empty street, ranks of shuttered houses kept their counsel, while above all Etna smouldered like a badly doused fire.

‘The queen,’ said the man playing White, placing his cigar in the ashtray to the right of the chessboard.

All the onlookers perked up, but for a long time no one spoke.

‘She’s exposed,’ the other player agreed at length.

‘But that pawn is only a few moves from queening itself,’ the first mused. ‘If I move against the queen, the pawn will have a chance to get through to the back file. What to do?’

‘Try the Sicilian Defence!’ said a voice from the surrounding crowd. Ironic but anonymous guffaws broke out all around, as though to protect the speaker against the possible consequences of this insolence.

The man at the table picked up his cigar and leaned back slowly, looking up at the shards of blue sky visible through the thickly massed leaves overhead. There was a terrible silence. The speaker exhaled an expanding galaxy of smoke.

‘We really must respond to the recent communication from our friends in Corleone before too long,’ he said. ‘Not to do so might appear discourteous.’

‘But how?’ asked his opponent, shifting a rook forward five squares and then instantly withdrawing his hand, so quickly that the piece might have moved by itself.

The man playing White did not even look at the board.

‘I think an invitation to lunch,’ he said.

‘They’d never come!’ burst out the voice in the crowd which had spoken before.

‘Not to Catania, of course. But if the invitation came from Messina…’

He glanced down at the table and took the threatening rook with a knight.

‘Then we’d have to give them something in return,’ remarked Black.

‘Precisely. We give them the judge.’

‘Nunziatella? She’s already been removed from the picture.’

‘From our point of view, yes. But she’s still investigating the Maresi business, which spills over in all sorts of ways into the interests of our Messina friends.’

There was a long silence.

‘If we do that, then the authorities will crack down on us,’ said Black.

‘No, they won’t,’ White replied. ‘No one will know it was us. As you pointed out, we have no reason to be interested in Nunziatella. Why should we stir up trouble when everything has been sorted out so nicely?’

‘In that case, they’ll go after Messina. And our friends there won’t like that.’

‘Who cares what they like? By then it will be too late. They’ve been getting a bit above themselves recently, anyhow.’

He took a long satisfied draw on his cigar, then glanced back at the board and moved his queen diagonally from one side to the other.

‘Check.’

The man playing Black looked at him in astonishment.

‘How do you do it, Don Gaspare?’

‘You like it?’ the cigar-smoker enquired coyly.

‘It’s beautiful!’

A frown came over his face.

‘But what about the Corleonesi?’

‘What about them?’

‘Well, supposing they come to this lunch…’

‘They’ll come all right! Now that Toto is in prison and Binu’s in deep hiding, they need allies. I happen to know that they’ve been flirting with our friends in Messina for some time. An invitation like that? They’ll cream in their pants!’

Another round of laughter from the onlookers.

‘All right, so they come,’ said Black. ‘What then?’

‘Then they go home again,’ the other man said, staring his opponent in the eyes, his voice brutally harsh. ‘Since there’s no railway to Corleone, we can’t offer them a free ride in a freight car. But to avoid appearing discourteous, we must return the favour somehow. Saverio!’

‘Si, capo,’ said the rogue voice in the crowd.

The man at the table paused to draw on his cigar.

‘We’ll need a lorry,’ he said at last. ‘Something big. Maybe one of those articulated jobs. We can’t be sure how many of them will show up, and we wouldn’t want them to be too cramped.’

More laughter.

‘Do you think you could you arrange that?’ the cigar-smoker concluded.

‘A couple of hours, capo,’ Saverio replied. ‘Would you be interested in a refrigerated lorry, by any chance?’

The man at the table stared down at the chessboard for so long it seemed that he had not heard the question, his attention devoted wholly to the game. Then a slow smile spread across his face. He swivelled in his chair and looked directly at the man who had spoken.

‘Refrigerated,’ he repeated.

‘A lot of them are,’ Saverio explained. ‘For vegetables and meat and so on. It wouldn’t be hard to get one, down on the autostrada.’

‘Refrigerated!’ the chess player said again, his smile broader than ever. ‘Saverio, you’re a genius.’

Saverio made a humbly submissive shrug and did not speak further. The cigar-smoker turned back to the table.

‘They give it to us hot, we give it to them cold!’ he exclaimed triumphantly.

The man playing Black moved a pawn forward to block the White queen’s threat to his king.

‘They’ll know it was us,’ he remarked in a neutral tone.

‘Of course they will!’ the other man exclaimed. ‘So will their erstwhile hosts in Messina. They’ll also know that their explanations and excuses will never be believed. So with the Corleonesi going nuclear west of the mountains and the Calabrians moving in from the east, our friends in Messina will finally be forced to ally with us or face a classic pincer attack on two fronts.’

Silence fell. At length the other chess player broke it with a sharp intake of breath through his rotten teeth.

‘How do you do it, Gaspare?’ he repeated wonderingly

The other man sucked complacently at his cigar.

‘I think,’ he said. ‘I think, and then I think again. Then I review my conclusions with my friends here in my home town, and occasionally even have the pleasure of discovering that one of them has a streak of imagination to add a detail to my scheme, like young Saverio here.’

He bent forward and stared at the man across the table.

‘You used to be like that, Rosario. That’s why I always talked things over with you first. You were intelligent and creative. What happened, Rosario? Where did all that energy go?’

There was no reply. In the intense silence which had fallen on the group of men, a precise pattern of sound made itself heard. No one looked round, but each person seemed to become marginally denser and more still. The footsteps tapping rhythmically across the cobbles grew ever closer, passing beneath the statue of a nineteenth-century native of the town who had briefly achieved limited fame as a poet, then shifted to a rich crunching on the gravel strewn under the trees in the centre of the square.

The newcomer moved at a steady pace through the men gathered about the table with its chessboard. He was tall and imposing, in his eighties perhaps, his face collapsed on to the bones beneath, but with eyes of a startling blue clarity. He wore a brown blazer over a check shirt, with a dark red tie and grey flannel trousers. His feet were clad in beige socks and open leather sandals and he carried a briar walking-stick in one gnarled hand, with the aid of which he favoured his left leg. No one said a word to him, or gave the slightest impression of being aware of his presence. The man stopped in front of the green-painted table. He looked neither at the players, nor at the attendant entourage, but at the chessboard.

He stood there for over a minute, completely absorbed in his study. No one spoke, no one moved, but a sense of unease seemed to have come over the company. At length the newcomer straightened up and sniffed deeply.

‘Black to win in five moves,’ he announced in an Italian whose flexible spine had been replaced by a steel pin.

Only now did he look at the two players. The one called Don Gaspare glanced up at him in a curious way, simultaneously contemptuous and apprehensive.

‘Ah, yes, of course you know all about winning, Herr Genzler.’

The other man looked back at the board for an instant, then turned implacably back to Don Gaspare.

‘Black in five,’ he repeated. ‘Unless one of you makes a mistake.’

There was a subliminal gasp all around the table. No one talked to the capo like that. But Don Gaspare simply puffed contentedly on his cigar.

‘I don’t make mistakes,’ he replied calmly.

‘Perhaps. But I hear that Rosario is not as good as he used to be.’

The intruder bowed vestigially.

‘At your service, Don Gaspare.’

The chess player returned an even more sketchy bow.

‘And yours, General.’

The intruder turned his back and stalked off. The men around the table listened with communal intensity to the crunch and then the slapping of his sandals as he made his way across the square to what was to all appearances the town’s only commercial enterprise, a combination bar and grocery store, into which he disappeared.

Back in the public garden in the centre of the square, the silence continued for some time.

‘Black in five moves, eh?’ Don Gaspare remarked at length. ‘Can you see how, Rosario?’

The other player performed a pantomime shrug and grimace.

‘It’s easy enough to say something like that to make yourself look good!’ he exclaimed.

‘Can you see how?’ Don Gaspare repeated emphatically.

Rosario did not reply. The other man took out a cellphone and punched buttons.

‘Turi? Don Gaspa. Put the general on.’

A pause.

‘Herr Genzler? Black in five, you said. How, exactly?’

He took out a pen and started scribbling on the back of an envelope.

‘To Queen’s pawn seven? But that’s… Right. And then? Ah! I understand. Thank you. What are you drinking? Fine, tell Turi that it’s on me.’

He put the cellphone away. Gripping the chessboard, he turned it around so that he was behind the black ranks. After a moment, he sent a bishop sliding forward two squares. Rosario regarded him with anxiety, then taking the white pieces he replied by capturing a forward pawn. Don Gaspare immediately moved again, a crab-like advance by a hitherto unregarded knight. Rosario sat staring at the board until his opponent suddenly hammered his fist down on the table.

‘People come to me with their problems!’ he shouted furiously. ‘I don’t need more problems. What I need is solutions! Is that clear?’

He stood up, surveying the men assembled there.

‘Is that clear?

‘Si, capo,’ everyone muttered, like a congregation responding to the priest.

Don Gaspare stared around the circle, making eye contact with each man. Then he looked back at the chessboard. Without glancing at his opponent, he made three further moves and then flicked the middle finger of his right hand against the white king, which went flying on to the gravel under the trees.

‘Carla?’

‘Papa! Where have you been? I was worried about you.’

‘I’m in Rome.’

‘What’s this music?’

‘Music?’

‘Muzak. Elevator music’

‘I don’t hear anything.’

‘Well, I certainly do. So you’re in Rome? Why?’

‘I had to leave suddenly.’

‘Can you speak up, please? This music…’

‘I had to come to Rome. Unexpectedly. A personal matter.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, I see.’

‘I don’t know when I’ll be back, exactly. I’m taking a few days’ leave.’

Quite apart from the underlay of soft pop, the connection was poor, fading in and out, but always dim and drained.

‘What’s the weather like there?’ a voice like her father’s asked.

‘Much the same. And in Rome?’

‘Sandy.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind. Listen, it may be a while before I get back. Will you be all right?’

‘Of course. I just wish you were here, though. They searched my room.’

‘What? Who?’

‘I don’t know. But someone has been here. They left a message on my computer.’

‘Your what?’

‘My laptop. My whole life’s on it, and someone has been messing about with it. I’ve got back-ups, of course, but…’

‘Back-up lives?’

Carla laughed.

‘Sorry, I forgot you don’t speak the language.’

‘Look, Carla, if someone broke into your apartment, call the police. I’ll give you a number. A name, too. Baccio Sinico. He’s a good man and he’ll…’

‘I don’t have time now. We’re going away for the weekend and I’m just about to leave. I’ll do it on Monday. Will you be back by then?’

‘Going where?’

‘To Taormina. It’s supposed to be lovely, and the person I’m going with knows this wonderful hotel. It’s quite high up, too, so perhaps it’ll be cool. It’s difficult for me here, Dad. I haven’t really made any friends yet, and it’ll be nice to get out and meet some people.’

A pause.

‘Well, have fun.’

‘You too. When will you be back?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’ll let you know. Look after yourself.’

‘You too, Dad. After all, as you told me that time in Alba, you’re the only one I’ll ever have.’

Her voice broke slightly on the last phrase. She clicked the phone shut and turned back to the half-packed suitcase resting on the bed. Then she pulled a few more clothes off their hangers and folded them neatly into the suitcase between layers of tissue paper. She had heard that Taormina was an international resort for the rich and beautiful, and you never knew who you might run into in a place like that, maybe even Mr Right.

By now, Carla had a strong suspicion that Corinna Nunziatella wanted her to be more than just a ‘girlfriend’. The scenario Carla had in mind consisted of a few martinis too many at a bar, followed by a slow, delicious dinner at a restaurant, a walk back through the twilight to this fabulous hotel, and then the pitch. Well, fair enough. She had never made love with a woman, but there was a first time for everything and she was all grown up now. Anyway, she was planning to pay for her side of things, so she could always just say no. Or not, depending.

It was only when she closed the case and lifted it down off the bed that Carla realized she was going to have to carry the damn thing all the way. It was all very well for Corinna to tell her it was just a couple of kilometres along a very pretty path with classical associations. She had a car. Carla thought of calling the judge and explaining the problem, and then had a better idea.

Outside in the streets, even at twenty past nine, the heat was starting to gain the upper hand, although barely flexing the gigantic muscles which would throttle the city by noon. By the time she reached the corner of the block, Carla’s suitcase felt as though it was filled with bricks. It took another ten minutes to flag down a passing taxi.

‘Do you know a hotel called I Ciclopi at Aci Trezza?’ she asked.

He nodded.

‘Hop in.’

‘No, it’s not for me. But I need this case taken there and left at the desk. It’s to be collected by someone called Carla Arduini. Do you understand?’

The driver punctiliously estimated the distance to Aci Trezza and back on his map, worked out the fare on an electronic calculator and refused Carla’s offer of a tip. It took her a huge effort of will not to climb into the air-conditioned cab there and then, but Corinna had told her to walk, so walk she would. With regret, she handed her suitcase and the money to the driver, and watched the taxi drive away.

The usual elderly crowd had gathered at the bus stop: women whose nubile fruitfulness had shrivelled up like a sun-dried tomato, and men who looked diminished in a different way, plucked by age or ill-health from the vine of productive and meaningful labour. The only people in Carla’s age-group were a pair of punk-goths with spiked hair and extensive body-piercing, and an overweight figlio di mamma in a blazer, jeans and yellow pullover.

The 36 bus finally arrived, and Carla rode down to Piazza Giovanni XXIII, where she bought a ticket on the AST service north along the coast. Thirty minutes later, she got off in Aci Castello, a small bathing resort dominated by the Norman castle for which it was named. A lot of other people, mostly young, also got out here, all kitted out for a day at the seaside.

Carla followed them down to the sea, along the wooden walkway set out over the rocks and on to the rough path leading north. Here, outside the city, the bright sun seemed a benign presence, while the sea breeze was blissfully invigorating. People swam and sprawled on the lava rocks, while itinerant salesmen with flawless skin the colour of cooking chocolate hawked contraband gadgets and faked designer goods in a lazy, unthreatening way, as though they had no interest in making any money but were just passing the time.

Carla stopped to chat with one of them and haggled casually over a shoulder bag she quite liked but had no intention of buying and then carrying all the way along the coast. As she turned away from the vucompra she noticed the man standing beside the path twenty metres or so behind her, seemingly looking out to sea. He was wearing jeans, a canary-yellow pullover and a blue blazer with gilt buttons. The outfit was as conspicuous and inappropriate for a day at the beach as it had been at the bus stop outside her apartment an hour earlier.

Carla walked quickly on for some time, then sat down on one of the benches which were placed along the path, overlooking the Isole Ciclopi: the tall, jagged rocks which did indeed look as though some angry giant had just tossed them down from the smouldering bulk of Etna, like a child wanting to see how big a splash he could make. Glancing behind to her right, she noted that Blue Blazer had suddenly felt the need to rest too. There was no other bench nearby, so he was sitting on a ledge of the solidified lava flow, dusting the designated spot fastidiously before entrusting it with the seat of his Levi 501s.

Carla got up and continued on her way, pausing after a few minutes to look at the view behind her. Blue Blazer had also decided that it was time to get a move on, but now he too was brought to a halt, apparently by some problem involving his shoes. When Carla reached the next miniature headland, she left the path and walked to the tip of the rocks razoring out into the sea. Turning as though to take in the whole panorama, she discovered that her understudy was admiring the view of Etna on the other side of the path, while making a call on his mobile phone.

Carla squared her shoulders and walked quickly back to the path. She couldn’t afford to waste any more time or she’d arrive late. On the other hand, Corinna had been very specific about taking care that she was not followed, and clearly she was being followed. Confrontation, she decided, was the only way to resolve the situation. She hurried on along the path, which sloped up to a low rise formed by one of the jagged promontories thrust out into the sea. As soon as she was out of sight on the other side of this, she stopped. There was no one on the path ahead except for an elderly gentleman inspecting the seabirds through a pair of binoculars. A few moments later, Blue Blazer appeared at the top of the rise, panting slightly. He froze as Carla moved resolutely towards him.

‘Why are you following me?’ she demanded.

The man made a vague, sheepish gesture.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t try to deny it! You took the same bus I did, just down the street from my apartment building, then the AST service to Aci Castello, and ever since then you’ve been following me along this path, stopping whenever I stop and…’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ the man protested in a panicky tone. ‘I’m just out for a walk, that’s all, the same as you. This is a public path, lots of people come here. You’re not the only one allowed, you know.’

A shadow fell across the lava cinders between them.

‘May I be of any assistance, signorina?’

Carla turned. It was the elderly bird-watcher. He had a shock of carefully groomed silver hair, an elaborately waxed moustache, and was wearing a linen suit against which a pair of Braun binoculars dangled from their leather strap.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Carla replied warmly. ‘This man has been following me ever since I left home this morning.’

‘That’s not true!’ Blue Blazer protested. ‘She’s imagining things. It’s a complete coincidence. I haven’t done anything wrong!’

The older man walked over to him at a deliberate pace. His face had become very grim.

‘Not yet, perhaps,’ he said in a low, chilling voice. ‘You were biding your time, weren’t you? Waiting for a suitable opportunity to present itself, and to get up enough courage to make your move. We all know about people like you, my friend. We know how to deal with them, too.’

He added three short sentences in Sicilian. Carla could not understand the words, but there was no mistaking their lapidary brutality. Blue Blazer took several paces back and started to tremble. He mumbled something incoherent, then turned and walked off rapidly, almost running, in the direction from which he’d come.

‘Allow me to apologize unreservedly for that unpleasantness, signorina,’ the elderly man remarked in a courtly tone.

Carla smiled.

‘There’s no reason for you to apologize. On the contrary, thank you for your assistance.’

The man shook his head with an expression of disgust.

‘You are from the north, I think. Yes? To come here and have this horrible experience, this appalling breach of every law of Sicilian courtesy… I feel deeply ashamed, signorina, but the cruel fact is that nowadays there are scum everywhere. At one time, a man like that wouldn’t have dared show his face out of doors. By the same token, of course, a lovely young woman such as yourself wouldn’t have dreamt of going for a walk unaccompanied in an isolated spot such as this. But there we are! The old rules have broken down and the new ones have yet to take effect.’

Carla nodded briskly. Apparently she had evaded her amateurish shadower only to fall into the clutches of yet another elderly bore.

‘Well, thanks for getting rid of him. Now I must be off or I’ll be late for my appointment.’

‘Of course, of course! How far do you have to go?’

‘To Aci Trezza.’

‘Why, that’s where I live myself! It’s no more than ten minutes’ walk from here. Allow me to accompany you, signorina. No, no, I insist! I was on my way home anyway, and after that disagreeable incident I wouldn’t feel right letting you go alone. Have you been along here before? I come out every morning, to get some exercise and study the bird life. There’s a really quite amazing variety of species to be seen, some native, others migratory…’

Taking Carla’s arm, he led the way along the path, keeping up a continuous commentary on the fauna and flora of the littoral, about which he seemed oppressively well-informed. As soon as they reached the outskirts of Aci Trezza, Carla explained that she was meeting someone at I Ciclopi, and took leave of her courtly companion, although not before he had given her directions to the hotel as well as one of his cards, and insisted that the next time she was there she should contact him.

There was no sign of Corinna at the restaurant, but Carla’s suitcase had arrived. She reclaimed it and toyed with a cappuccino for twenty minutes, then walked outside. By now it was eleven forty-five, just fifteen minutes from the time when she had been instructed to give up and go home. It was deliciously warm yet airy in the shade of the huge awning. The only sounds were the slushy static of the wavelets on the rocks, the occasional clank of pots and pans in the kitchens, and the subliminal growl of a helicopter circling somewhere overhead.

‘Signorina Arduini?’

It was a uniformed waiter, professionally deferential.

‘Yes?’

‘There is a phone call for you. This way, please.’

She followed the man across the lobby to a table with a telephone. The waiter dialled zero and passed the receiver to Carla.

‘Hello?’

‘Carla?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s me. Leave the hotel and turn left into Via San Leonarbello. At number sixty-three you’ll find a green Nissan. It’s unlocked. Follow the written instructions on the driver’s seat.’

The line went dead.

Via San Leonarbello turned out to be an alley of single-storey fishermen’s houses, most of which seemed to have been converted into holiday homes. Sure enough, a green Nissan saloon was parked outside number sixty-three. Carla glanced along the street, then opened the passenger door and got in. A piece of paper with writing lay on the driver’s seat.

KEYS IN GLOVE COMPARTMENT.

DRIVE TO END OF STREET, TURN LEFT.

STOP OPPOSITE SPAR GROCERY.

KEEP ENGINE RUNNING.

Carla sighed sourly. If she’d had any idea what was involved, she would never have agreed to accompany Corinna on this stupid weekend outing to Taormina. All this games-playing was beginning to get on her nerves. But it was too late to back out now. She put her suitcase in the back of the car, moved over to the driver’s seat and drove off.

The grocery store, one of the ubiquitous Spar chain, was easy enough to find, but there was no space to park anywhere on the narrow street. Carla drew up opposite the store, blasted the horn and consulted her watch. All right, Corinna, she thought. You’ve got sixty seconds exactly, then I dump the car and get the next bus back to Catania. She had laundry to do and several long-overdue letters to write, and there was the new Nanni Moretti film which she’d been meaning to see for some time. She’d loved Caro Diario, and even if this one wasn’t as good, the prospect of a few hours in an air-conditioned cinema was a powerful inducement.

The passenger door opened and Corinna Nunziatella got in, barely recognizable in a man’s suit, shirt and tie. Her face was obscured as before by her aviator sunglasses, while her cropped hair was almost invisible beneath a large straw hat.

‘Go!’ she said urgently

‘Go where?’

‘Just go! I’ll give you directions later.’

Carla put the Nissan in gear and drove to the end of the street.

‘Left here,’ Corinna Nunziatella told her. ‘Now right. Do a U-turn in the middle of the block, then right again at the lights. Run the red, there are no traffic police round here. Do you like my outfit?’

Carla smiled distractedly.

‘It’s, er… interesting.’

‘This car belongs to a friend. They have four altogether, so she won’t miss it. The hardest part was getting out of the house without my escort spotting me. Hence the disguise.’

‘Won’t it raise a few eyebrows at the hotel?’

Corinna laughed.

‘Not in Taormina! They’ve seen everything there. It’s always been a sort of extra-territorial enclave here in Sicily, a place where none of the usual rules apply. As long as your money holds out, no one cares what you do. Left here across the railway tracks, then sharp right and follow the signs to the motorway.’

She glanced playfully at Carla.

‘Anyway, I happen to think I look rather fetching, so there. And you? No problems?’

Carla swayed her head slowly from side to side, indicating that this was not precisely the case.

‘I was followed. But I’m pretty sure it was just some creep who lives with his mother and wanted to look at my legs. He was much too obvious to be a professional. Anyway, this old man who was out watching birds along the coast got rid of him for me.’

To Carla’s surprise, Corinna insisted on her recounting the entire story, detail by detail. The older woman’s face grew grimmer and grimmer.

‘A classic sacrifice,’ she remarked when Carla had finished. ‘I don’t want to alarm you, but this is not good news. It confirms that they’re on to you as well.’

‘Who are?’

‘That “creep” you say was following you, the conspicuous way he was dressed and acting was quite deliberate. With someone like me they would have been more subtle, but they knew you weren’t used to the rules of the game, so they went completely over the top. You were meant to spot him and become suspicious. That was the whole point. Then, at just the right psychological moment, along comes this chivalrous, inoffensive slightly tedious old-world gentleman who promptly rids you of your ostentatious tail. You’re naturally so grateful and relieved that you’re not going to suspect him.’

‘But he wasn’t following me, Corinna!’

‘Didn’t you just tell me that he walked the whole way to Aci Trezza with you, and that you then asked him for directions to I Ciclopi?’

‘Yes, but…’

‘Did you see him after that?’

‘No!’

‘He didn’t by any chance follow you to this car?’

‘Of course not! At least, I don’t think so. I didn’t see him.’

‘Are you sure?’

Carla did not answer. They drove along a dead-straight road between rows of tall palm trees, their trunks trimmed, rising on either side like exotically verdant telephone poles. Then a junction loomed ahead, marked by a large green arrow marked A18.

‘Turn right here on to the motorway,’ said Corinna. ‘Follow the signs to Messina.’

‘Messina? But I thought we were

‘I suggest that you concentrate on the driving and leave the thinking to me, cara,’ Corinna remarked crisply.

Carla said nothing. After a few moments silence, Corinna sighed.

‘I’m sorry for snapping at you. I’ve been trying to work out what to do. If I went by the book, I’d cancel the whole outing right now.’

She glanced girlishly at Carla.

‘But I can’t. To give up the prospect of this gorgeous weekend with you, all because of some paranoid fears which I’ve almost certainly imagined…’

‘You mean this man who was supposed to have been following me?’

Corinna Nunziatella shook her head.

‘It’s not just that. That business yesterday for example. It’s obvious they were sending a message to me through you. Just to take one aspect of the thing, the Hotel Zagarella is a notorious symbol of Mafia power, built by Ignazio and Nino Salvo, cousins from one of the top families who later cornered the tax-collection monopoly for the whole island, thanks to their friends in the regional government. They became obscenely rich as a result, but the Zagarella was almost entirely financed by public money from the government’s Cassa per il Mezzogiorno fund, supposedly created to stimulate economic development in the south. And the hotel’s symbolic status was confirmed once and for all in 1979, when Giulio Andreotti, then prime minister, gave a speech at a rally there, surrounded by just about every high-ranking political mafioso in Palermo.’

They were on the motorway now, gliding north with the other traffic heading towards the Straits of Messina and the ferry crossing to the continent of Europe. Corinna Nunziatella lit a cigarette snatched from a rumpled pack on the dashboard.

‘So when I’m told that you’ve been invited to lunch at the Zagarella by three men who claimed to represent the regional government, and who made it quite clear that they were aware of our relationship,’ she continued, blasting out smoke, ‘I don’t have to be a genius to understand the intended message.’

‘Which is?’

“‘Be careful. We’ve got our eye on you. You’re alone, you can’t trust anyone, our people are everywhere. Take heed of this warning. Next time there may not be one.’“

‘And you think they really mean it?’

‘Of course they mean it! They killed Mino Pecorelli and Giuseppe Impastato and Pio Delia Torre. They killed Giorgio Ambrosio and Michele Sindona and Boris Giuliano and Emanuele Basile and General Dalla Chiesa and his wife. They killed Cesare Terranora and Rococo Chinnici and Ciaccio Montalto. They killed Falcone and Borsellino. And they killed my mother and hundreds more like her, maybe thousands…’

She opened the window and tossed out the half-smoked cigarette with a gesture of disgust.

‘Well, they’re not going to get me!’

Perturbed by the intensity of Corinna’s voice, Carla took her eyes off the traffic for a moment to glance at her companion.

‘How do you mean, they killed your mother? The other evening you told me that she was still alive.’

‘No, I didn’t. You asked, and I replied, “I suppose you could say that she’s alive.” She’s alive, but shut up in an institution. A private one, mind you, and relatively pleasant, but an asylum nevertheless. She finally cracked when my father was killed in a particularly unpleasant way by a rival clan. Since then she will only speak English. She babbles about taking the train down to London and making a new start.’

She broke off, shaking her head, and patted Carla’s left knee lightly.

‘I’m sorry to bore you with all this ghastly personal stuff, cara, but you can’t understand me without it. For better or for worse, it’s made me what I am. I realized very early on that nothing could be done without power. The only power open to me, as a Sicilian woman, was the power of the state institutions, so I decided to study law and join the judiciary. The Italian state isn’t as powerful as the Mafia, as we know to our cost, but the balance has already shifted a long way. We’re ahead at half-time, but the match is far from over. The important thing now is to make sure that they don’t try to change the rules. But I’ll carry on even if they do. It’s a personal commitment. The only way to defeat the patriarchal structure of mafiosita is to attack it through the medium of an equally patriarchal authority whose interests happen to be in conflict with those which destroyed my mother.’

She laughed suddenly, and turned to Carla.

‘And now I’ll shut up about the whole business for the rest of the weekend!’ she announced gaily. ‘The only things you’ll be able to get me to talk about are clothes and jewellery and shoes and food and office gossip and celebrity scandals. I shall have breakfast in bed and lunch by the pool and dinner in a fabulous fish restaurant I know down by the sea. In short, I plan to behave like the frivolous, trivial, shallow slut that I’ve always secretly wanted to be. What about you?’

Carla gave her a dazzling smile.

‘That sounds perfect. I’ll just try to keep up with you.’

‘There’s the Giardini turn-off,’ said Corinna, pointing to the signed exit. ‘We take the next one. It’s marked Taormina. Take it slowly. It gets quite steep and narrow once you’re off the autostrada. I hope you like the hotel.’

‘Have you stayed there before?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alone?’

‘No, not alone. This exit coming up.’

Carla signalled her turn.

‘So do you do this sort of thing quite often?’ she asked.

‘Not nearly as often as I’d like. It’s a survival strategy. Sicily is a pressure cooker. It’s not that life here is really that dangerous. Arguably less so, in fact, for most people, than in Rome or Milan. It’s a process of attrition. You’re “on” the whole time, particularly if you’re a woman. Everything you do or don’t do is noted down and reported back. There’s literally no such thing as privacy. We don’t even have a word for it.’

Carla turned off on to a looping, heavily graded road which zigzagged laboriously uphill towards a perched town which was presumably Taormina. A motorcycle had turned off the motorway right behind her, and was now making aggressive but ineffectual attempts to overtake despite the steep gradient. The two men on it wore full-body leather suits with white and red stripes and seemed to be having an animated conversation over an intercom system built into their space-suit-type helmets.

‘And then there’s the insular mentality,’ Corinna was saying. ‘A sort of passive-aggressive provincialism. Rome is only an hour away by plane, but it might as well be on another planet. Even in Reggio di Calabria you breathe more easily. Seen from Palermo or Catania, the Straits of Messina look wider than the Atlantic. Nothing that happens over there is of any more than marginal significance, depending on the extent to which it might tip the balance of power here.’

At the bend ahead, the road widened to a point which would allow Carla room to let the leather-suited bikers pass. She slowed down and signalled her intention to pull over. The bright red Moto Guzzi at once revved up and started to overtake. As it drew alongside, the passenger on the pillion raised a cloth-wrapped bundle which he was holding on his knees. There was a loud banging noise, as though the engine was about to stall, and pieces of glass started flying around inside the car. Corinna turned to Carla, who was struggling to keep the car on the road despite the rash of pockmarks erupting across her chest and shoulders. The man on the motorcycle produced a rectangular package which he lobbed through the shattered side-window of the Nissan, as though returning some mislaid possession to its rightful owner, just as the car veered off to the left, running over the verge and continuing on its way through the olive grove on the vertiginous hillside, riding normally at first, despite the gradient, but eventually turning sideways and rolling over.

The explosion almost immediately afterwards destroyed a centenario olive tree which had been planted in July 1860 to commemorate Garibaldi’s decisive defeat of the Bourbon forces at the battle of Milazzo and the unification of Sicily with the nascent kingdom of Italy which soon ensued. But there was no one left in Taormina who recalled this fact and the tree had almost stopped cropping, so the incident was of no real importance.