Blood rain

PART TWO

Aurelio Zen had once been told by a fellow officer in the Criminalpol department about a joke that the latter had played on an assiduously literal-minded Umbrian colleague. The gag involved getting the victim to try to identify a notional train supposedly listed in the official timetables which, if you tracked its progress from one section of the network to the next, turned out to go round and round in perpetual circles. In reality, of course, no such train existed, so Zen had had to improvise.

This involved consulting the glass-framed timetables at his station of arrival, then taking the next departure listed, regardless of its destination. If there was none until the following day, he spent the night at a hotel near the station and started again first thing in the morning. There were only three other rules: he was forbidden to return directly to the city from which he had just arrived, to use any other form of transportation, or to cross the frontier.

To keep him amused on his travels, he stopped at a newsagent’s stall and bought a selection of the cheap thrillers published by Mondadori in its yellow-jacketed series featuring two narrow columns of type on every page, coarse paper which browned as you read it, and garishly stylized cover art. He picked out half a dozen at random, not bothering to read the blurbs. It was enough that the name of the author sounded English or American, thus offering the prospect of a tightly organized guided tour through a theme park of reassuringly foreign unpleasantness, and concluding with a final chapter in which the truth was laid bare and the guilty party identified and duly punished.

By contrast, the trains themselves varied greatly, all the way from aerodynamic missiles barely skimming their dedicated high-speed rails, to ugly, smoke-spewing, diesel-powered brutes making their way sedately along ill-maintained branch lines. But these apparent differences were as unimportant as those in the cast of the thrillers Zen was reading. Some characters were glamorous and beautiful, others dull and earnest, but it was understood — even the fictional personages themselves seemed to understand, and to accept — that they only existed for the purpose of moving the plot along. To keep moving: that was the key. If he ever came to a stop, or even lingered more than a single night in the same place, then they’d be able to find him as surely as they had his mother and daughter. To have any hope of survival, he had to remain a moving target.

Places came and went. This was not their normal role, which was to stay put and display their innumerable layers of history, culture and tradition. Visitors were supposed to approach with due reverence, a full wallet, and at least a feigned knowledge of the wonders in store. They certainly weren’t supposed to flit in and out in such a free and easy fashion. It was something new for cities such as these to be treated as mere stops on an extemporized itinerary, but Zen sensed that once they got over the shock they quite liked being flirted with in this casual way.

And what pretty names they had! Perugia, Arezzo, Siena, Empoli, Pisa, Parma… Which was just as well, since all Zen usually saw of them was the name, blazoned white on an enamelled blue platform sign, that and the generic surrounding suburbs tracing history in reverse like geological layers in a core sample: sixties apartment buildings, spartan Fascist blocks, turn-of-the-century industrial barracks, and the pomposities of post-unification triumphalism.

If there was a little time to kill before the next train left, he might permit himself to wander out into the streets surrounding the station in search of a sandwich or a coffee. At which point the city — particularly if it was one of the more celebrated names — often seemed to give a little quiver of shock. ‘You mean you aren’t going to visit the museums, the cathedral and the remains of the mediaeval ramparts?’ it demanded of him as he breezed through the sleazy, strident fringes of the station zone, his only concern to leave again as soon as possible. ‘Perhaps next time,’ he silently replied. ‘But not now. I have to go. I have to keep going.’

He knew that he was in a fugue state, of course, but this knowledge made no difference. He was like an addict who is intelligently aware of his addiction and its possible consequences, but powerless to break it. Whenever he tried to do so, it effortlessly reasserted its control by flashing his own memories at him, slices from his central cortex which sent him scurrying for the next train, any other destination than this intolerable terminus. His desiccated mother gabbling at him in a foreign language. Her coffin, almost as tiny as a child’s, vanishing into the bowels of the crematorium. The ceremony at the cemetery, with him, Maria Grazia and the Nieddu family the only mourners. And then, if all else failed, him at home that evening, watching the television news and seeing the crumpled, charred wreck of the car in which yet another Anti-Mafia magistrate had gone to her death, gunned down on a road just outside Taormina. A certain Carla Arduini, a friend of the victim, had also been killed.

Piacenza, Pavia, Novara, Lugano, Bolzano, Trento, Padova, Treviso, Trieste… On the other side of the window, the landscape was laid out in varying hues and textures like the pelt of some precious, extinct animal. The thriller he was reading had turned out to be dead too. Something must have gone wrong at the printers, because the last thirty pages were missing. Well, not missing exactly. The pages were there, but they were from another book in the same series, but with a quite different cast and plot. The result was a double sense of frustration: not only would he never know the truth about what had happened in the original story, but he found himself trying to reconstruct the various intrigues and incidents which had led up to the interpolated ending.

At Cremona, and again at Mantova, he tried to buy another copy of the book, only to be told that it was out of print. The local trains seemed to have inherited the malarial symptoms once endemic to the inhabitants of the Po delta, running infrequently and at about the speed of the river itself in the various channels over which the track passed and repassed. By the time Zen finally regained the main line at Fidenza, it was eight in the evening and a spectacular thunderstorm was in progress. He stepped down from the railcar on to a surface which felt for a moment disturbingly familiar: crunchy, mobile, granular. But this was hail, not sand.

He was about to walk over and check the departure timetable when an alarm bell started ringing on the wall of the station building, announcing the arrival of a train from the north. Simultaneously, the diesel unit in which he had arrived gave a sullen roar and shuffled off into the gathering dusk. Too late, Zen remembered that he had left his unfinished thriller lying open on the seat opposite the one in which he had been sitting. He couldn’t even remember the title, never mind the author. Now he would never know how it ended.

In the barrage of hail, which was gradually turning to heavy rain, a bright light appeared away in the distance down the main line. Its announcement confirmed by this visual proof, the electric bell cut out, but it was another minute or two before the light perceptibly widened and intensified as the electric locomotive and its long line of carriages came into view through the torrential downpour. It was only then that Zen realized that he had also left his only pack of cigarettes on the railcar.

Luckily there was a bar a little further down the platform, with the square white-on-black T sign indicating that it sold tobacco. As the train squealed to a halt in front of him, Zen groped in his pocket and found a ten-thousand-lire note. That would buy him a couple of packs of Nazionali. It would mean missing this train, but first things first. There would soon be another, going somewhere else, and one destination was as good as another.

The carriage which had drawn up in front of Zen was not immediately recognizable as such. The classically chaste blue and white sleeping-car design had been almost obliterated by fat spray-paint graffiti — statements on steroids — which covered even the windows, shutting out any view of the outside world for the occupants. On the door appeared a signature, a date, and the slogan ‘Proud to be Crazy’. Zen realized that he hadn’t seen any graffiti in Sicily. Perhaps the islanders were behind the times in this, as in so much else. Or maybe the Mafia had hauled all the spray-paint egomaniacs behind the carriage sheds and shot them.

The door opened and a man in uniform emerged. He snatched the banknote that Zen was holding in his hand, picked up his luggage and bustled back aboard the train, safe from the gusts of driven rain blasting down the platform. Beside the door into which he had disappeared was a white destination sign slotted into metal grooves. It read: MILANO C. — BOLOGNA — FIRENZE C. DI MARTE — ROMA TIB. — NAPOLI–VILLA S. GIOV. — MESSINA — CATANIA. Further down the platform, the station master was striding self-importantly about, a lighted green wand raised above his head. The sleeping-car attendant reappeared in the doorway.

‘Quickly!’ he called. ‘It’s your last chance.’

Already the massive train had begun to move again, imperceptibly at first, but with a momentum which would carry it overnight down the spine of Italy and across the Straits of Messina to Sicily. Zen took a few steps to his right to get up to speed, then grasped the gleaming handle and, just in time, swung himself aboard.

The truck was parked on a bend on one of the roads into Corleone leading up from the valley of the Frattina river, a glaucous trickle at this time of year. It was a large vehicle with a freezer unit and a Catania number-plate. On both sides of the lorry, colourful painted designs advertised a meat-processing firm located in Catania whose products, according to the slogan below the image of a satisfied housewife, could be relied upon to be ‘Always Fresh, Always Wholesome’.

The driver climbed down from the cab and languorously stretched his muscles. He was about thirty, wirily built, with a military-style haircut and heavy black stubble on his chin and cheeks. The time was a few minutes after three in the morning, the dead heart of the night, here in the dead heart of the island, almost exactly half-way between the northern and southern coasts. Apart from the patterned punctures of the stars and the pervasive glow of the moon, presently screened by a thin wafer of cloud, there wasn’t a light to be seen, nor any sound to be heard.

Beside the narrow road, bolstered on the other side by a dry-stone retaining wall, stood a roofless, dilapidated two-storey structure which might have been a small farmhouse but was in fact an abandoned cantoniera: a dwelling and workshop for the man responsible in former years for the upkeep of this stretch of highway. The driver of the truck lit a cigarette and gazed up at the night sky, picking out the constellations whose supposed significance, indeed even their physical coherence, had turned out to be merely illusory.

After some time a faint flaw made itself felt in the crystalline silence. Far off in the distance, a light appeared and disappeared, turning this way and that. The driver tossed aside his cigarette, walked around to the back of the truck and opened the heavy metal doors. Reaching inside, he extracted a paper-wrapped package. Reacting to the change of temperature, the truck’s cooling system turned itself on, but its gentle hum was drowned out by the other noise, much closer now. The light, which had vanished, suddenly reappeared, a cold glare slicing through the darkness like a butcher’s knife. A moment later the motorbike screeched to a halt beside the truck, whose driver mounted the pillion, clasping the bulky package. The bike roared away up the road.

Less than a minute later, it was in the close alleys and twisting streets of Corleone. Here, the clamour of the engine rebounded deafeningly from the walls. The motorcycle worked its way through the entrails of the sleeping town, slowing just enough for the passenger to toss his package against the door of one of the houses, then racketing off along Statale 118, the main road leading west through the barren hills towards Prizzi. Some young hooligans out on a spree, those townsfolk who had been dredged from their slumbers concluded. They wouldn’t have tried it in the old days, but now Toto was gone there was no more respect.

It wasn’t for another three hours that this perception began to change. There was the ‘ham’, for a start. That’s how Annunziata described it to the priest, who was preparing to celebrate early mass.

‘Lying right there on the doorstep,’ she went on.

‘But where, figlia mia?’ the priest responded in an irritated tone. He’d had a sleepless night, administering extreme unction to a dying woman at the top of the town and trying to console her relatives. Another hysterical woman was the last thing he needed now.

‘On the doorstep,’ Annunziata repeated stubbornly.

‘Which doorstep?’

The woman’s silence was sufficient answer.

‘Di loro?’ asked the priest.

Being a priest, he was licensed to ask awkward questions, but in this case even he did so by implication. Was it their doorstep? Annunziata gave a minimal but decisive nod.

‘A ham?’ was the next question.

‘I don’t know. It had butcher’s wrapping on. And there was a dog there, the puppy that Leoluca tried to drown in the drain but it crawled back out? It was sniffing at it.’

Meanwhile, the ham had attracted the attention of other dogs. In fact they all seemed to be there, every loose hound in the town, snuffling around the wrapped package as though it were a bitch in heat. The consequent growling and nipping attracted the attention of various passers-by, one of whom alerted the occupants of the house.

By this time the truck was no longer parked on the curve opposite the abandoned cantoniera, thanks to a local lad whose private enterprise later earned him a slow strangulation and interment in the shaft of a disused sulphur mine. Ignazio had noticed the truck on his way back from another venture, which involved the sale of thirty-four illegal immigrants from North Africa to the representative of an agribusiness south of Naples which needed cheap indentured labour.

The deal had been struck after an inspection of the merchandise in Mazara del Vallo, a fishing port on the south-west corner of the island. This was deep in the territory of the Marsala clans, and strictly off-limits to entrepreneurs from anywhere else, especially Corleone, so Ignazio had arranged the appointment — at a disused fish-packing plant just south of the town — for the early hours of the morning, arriving under cover of darkness and leaving as soon as the duffle-bag of cash had changed hands.

Travel on a north-south axis in this part of Sicily was relatively easy, but going from west to east you might as well be on a mule as in a car. There were various possible routes, none of them good. Ignazio wanted to get out of enemy territory as quickly as possible, so he opted to take the autostrada to the Gallitello turn-off, then cut across country on back roads. It was almost six o’clock before he sighted his destination, distinct in the pre-dawn glimmer on its hilltop. A few minutes later he saw the truck.

Ignazio was by nature an opportunist, and although he had already done very nicely on the night’s work — even after the cut he’d have to give the importer and the handling people — he was not about to turn down an opportunity such as this. A meat truck from Catania abandoned at the roadside! He was back on his home turf now, and no one here had any exaggerated respect for the Limina family. Any windfalls from their territory were fair game. The driver would have known that, of course, which was no doubt why he’d vanished after his rig broke down on that excruciatingly steep ascent into Corleone. Odd route to choose, but he’d probably got lost.

Ignazio braked hard and turned off into an abandoned mule track leading down to the left. He bounced around a curve, parked out of sight of the road and then ran back to the truck. All he needed to do was break into the cab, then fix whatever had gone wrong. If he couldn’t, he’d use his cellphone to page his brother. Worst came to worst, they could cut Concetto in on the deal in return for the use of his tow truck.

None of these refinements proved necessary. The cab door was unlocked, the keys were in the ignition, the engine started first time. In retrospect, this should perhaps have given Ignazio pause, but he was an opportunist, and opportunity was clearly knocking.

The road was too narrow to turn the truck around, so Ignazio was forced to blast through the centre of town before heading up into the mountains to the east, looking for somewhere to stash the thing for a few hours, long enough for him to get back to his car, contact his brother and work out what to do next. And he quickly found it, in the form of a dried-up river-bed alongside the old road just north of Monte Cardella, the direct route to Prizzi since by-passed by the longer but less arduous strada statale. From there it was about six kilometres back to the spot where he’d left the car, but all downhill. Ignazio locked the truck, pocketed the keys and set off.

It took him about forty minutes to reach the place where he’d left his car, by-passing the town on another of the old mule tracks which criss-crossed the area. Five minutes after that he was back in Corleone, but by then the drama had moved on to a third act, and his role had been revealed to be merely supernumerary. By the time he and his brother returned to the parked truck, others were there to meet them.

The ensuing explanations took over three hours. Long before that, Ignazio started screaming, ‘Kill me! I’ve told you all I know, so just kill me!’ Which of course they did, but later. The refrigerated lorry had proved to contain the bodies of five ‘made men’ of the town, including the grandson of Bernardo Provenzano, the capo of the family, now in hiding in Palermo. The Corleonesi had accepted an invitation from a clan in Messina to attend a lunch to celebrate and inspire future contacts between the two clans involved. At some point, the five had been placed, alive, into the back of the truck, which was then driven off with the freezing unit turned on. Thanks to the sub-zero temperatures, none of the corpses showed any sign of post-mortem deliquescence, but they were almost unrecognizable just the same. Ironically enough, the only undamaged one was that of Binu’s grandson, the reason being that his left leg had been removed before he had entered the ‘death chamber’, and so he had been in no condition to try to escape. It was the thigh portion of this leg, suitably wrapped, which had been flung on to their doorstep. Examination of the severed stump suggested that the amputation had been performed with a chainsaw.

The bar in Piazza Carlo Alberto was as packed as ever, but the crowd was more evenly distributed now that the exclusion zone created by Carla Arduini’s presence was no longer in effect. There was perhaps a momentary flicker of the former tension when Aurelio Zen made his appearance, but it was instantly dissipated in a renewed rumble of discussion and comment.

Zen made his way to the counter and ordered a coffee. The barman appeared oddly frenetic and distracted. He said not a word, going about his business in a jerky, mute, compulsive frenzy, like an actor in a silent film.

‘Where’s the young lady who used to meet me here?’ Zen enquired as the coffee touched down on his saucer.

The barman ran through a range of facial expressions as if trying on a selection of hats, none of which really suited.

‘How should I know?’ he said at length, furiously wiping the gleaming counter with a rag. ‘She didn’t come today. I don’t know why. She just didn’t come. Maybe tomorrow…’

Zen knocked his coffee back.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She won’t be coming tomorrow, either. She won’t be coming ever again.’

He smiled mirthlessly.

‘Neither will I, for that matter.’

His eyes never leaving those of the barman, he produced his wallet and extracted a two-thousand-lire note which he tossed on the counter. With it came a spray of what looked like dust. Noticing it, Zen turned his wallet upside down. A stream of reddish grains poured out, forming an uneven pile on the stainless-steel counter.

‘What’s that?’ the barman demanded.

‘It’s called “blood rain”,’ Zen told him. ‘Think of it as a message.’

‘A message?’

Zen nodded.

‘A message from Rome.’

His arrival at the Questura appeared to be ill-timed. The guard in his armour-plated sentry box looked taken aback, as though he had seen a ghost. So did two fellow officers whom Zen met on the stairs inside. But the biggest surprise was his office, which was draped in lengths of cloth sheeting speckled and blotched in various hues and stank of paint thinner. At the top of a high and rickety-looking step-ladder, a short dark man in overalls and a paper hat was coating the ceiling with a large brush.

‘Attenzione!’ he called loudly. ‘Don’t step on the drop-sheets, there are wet splashes. And mind that paint!’

Zen abruptly jerked his arm away from what had once been his filing cabinet, and in so doing knocked over a can containing about five litres of off-white paint.

‘Capo!’

It was Baccio Sinico, standing in the doorway with an expression which seemed to Zen to be identical to that of everyone he had met so far: And we thought we’d seen the last of him.

‘They’re repainting,’ Sinico added redundantly, while the painter scuttled down from his roost, declaiming loudly in dialect. Fortunately for Zen, the can had landed with its mouth pointing away from him, so the main damage was to the floor and furniture. Meanwhile a crowd of his colleagues, subordinates and superiors, had formed in a semicircle discreetly situated just inside the door, away from the spreading puddle of paint. A chorus of voices rose up on all sides, lilting conventional laments and litanies of commiseration. To have a daughter killed! And coming so soon after the death of a mother! Such a cruel destiny would turn the strongest head. No one could be expected to resist this lethal hammer blow of fate.

Zen turned to Baccio Sinico.

‘I need to talk to you.’

The junior officer looked around the assembled crowd with the embarrassed expression of someone being importuned by a harmless madman.

‘I’m sorry, dottore, but I can’t. No time, what with my official responsibilities and so on.’

Sinico extracted a wallet and inspected its contents. With what seemed like exaggerated care, he folded up a fifty-thousand-lire note and handed it to Zen.

‘Here’s half of what I owe you,’ he said with false bonhomie. ‘You’ll get the rest just as soon as I can afford it. Meanwhile, since you’ve been given a month’s compassionate leave because of this awful tragedy, I think you should take full advantage. Eh, boys?’

He eyed the chorus, which nodded as choruses do.

‘So why not go and have a nice cup of coffee on me, dottore?’ Sinico concluded, patting Zen’s arm in an overtly patronizing way.

He turned away to the assembled crowd with the air of someone bestowing a knowing wink on the insiders who knew the truth of the matter. Zen headed for the stairs, clutching the crushed banknote. Half-way down, he unfolded it. Inside was a small slip of white paper printed with writing and figures. It proved to be a printed ricevuta fiscale, the legally required receipt from the cash register proving for tax purposes that a commercial transaction had taken place. The heading named a bar in Via Gisira, a few hundred metres from the Questura.

He had been there less than ten minutes when Baccio Sinico appeared. Zen handed him the fifty-thousand-lire note.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ he demanded.

Sinico ordered a coffee, then turned to Zen.

‘First of all, let’s get one thing clear. You never came here, we never met, and I never said this.’

‘Is it that bad?’

Sinico shrugged.

‘Possibly. Probably. At any rate, let’s assume so. That way, we might be pleasantly surprised later.’

Zen lit a cigarette and peered at Sinico.

‘But why? All I’m doing is meeting a fellow officer for a coffee and a chat. We’ve done that often enough before. Why is it any different now?’

Sinico looked carefully around the bar.

‘Because of la Nunziatella, of course.’

‘But what’s that got to do with me?’

Sinico sighed lengthily, as though dealing with some foreigner whose grasp of the language was not quite up to par.

‘Listen, dottore, your daughter died with her, right?’

‘So?’

‘So the view has been taken that your inevitable emotional involvement as the father of the secondary victim disqualifies you from active duty at this time.’

Zen laughed.

‘I didn’t realize that the Ministry had become so warm and caring about its staff. Anyway, there’s no problem. I had a bad patch for a few days, after I heard the news. But I’m fine now. I’ve got a plan, you see. A goal.’

‘Which is?’

‘I’m going to find out who killed Carla.’

‘No one meant to kill your daughter! She was just caught in the crossfire.’

‘That doesn’t make her any less dead. And I’m going to find out who did it.’

Sinico shook his head.

‘The whole Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia is working on that, dottore! When one of our judges gets killed, we drop everything else. If we can’t solve the case and identify the murderers with all the resources at our command, how can you possibly hope to do so?’

‘Baccio, my daughter has been murdered! What am I supposed to do, sit around my apartment watching television?’

The junior officer stared at Zen, seemingly more shocked by the casual use of his first name than by anything else he had heard.

‘That apartment of yours,’ he said at length. ‘How much is it costing you?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘How much?’

Zen told him. Sinico nodded.

‘And how long did it take you to find it?’

‘Three days? Four? Less than a week. Someone phoned me at the Questura. He said that he worked in a different department and had heard that I was looking for a place to live. It just so happened that some friends of his owned an apartment which might be suitable.’

‘Did he give a name?’

‘Yes, but I can’t remember what it was. Some sort of fish.’

‘A swordfish? Spada?’

‘That’s it.’

Sinico nodded in the same lugubriously significant manner.

‘So you arrive here, fresh off the train, and in under a week you’ve found a gracious and spacious apartment right in the city centre, a few minutes’ walk from your work, at a price which normally wouldn’t get you a two-bedroom hutch in a crumbling tower block out in some suburban slum like Cibali or Nesima. How do you think you managed that?’

Zen shook his head in a perturbed way.

‘I didn’t think about it. I don’t know the price of property down here. I just assumed…’

‘You assumed that the locals were being warm and caring, just like the Ministry,’ Sinico replied sarcastically. ‘Well, I hate to break it to you, dottore, but neither assumption is true. Your employers are only interested in your state of mind insofar as it might lead to actions which jeopardize the DIA operations currently under way They want you out of harm’s way, but it isn’t your harm that they’re worried about.’

‘They’re putting me in quarantine?’ asked Zen.

‘Think of it as compulsory compassionate leave.’

Zen dropped his cigarette on the marble floor and stepped on it.

‘Which is why you had to sneak away to talk to me.’

Sinico nodded.

‘As for the man who calls himself Spada, he is well known to us. He functions as a cut-out and message drop between various clans, and also between them and the authorities.’

‘Why don’t they just pick up the phone and dial?’

‘For all sorts of reasons. The most important, perhaps, is deniability.’

‘As in “you never came here, we never met, and I never said this”?’

A nod.

‘Fine, so this Spada, whose name isn’t Spada, makes a living by passing on messages in a way that is also a message in itself. Am I right?’

‘Bravo,’ said Sinico with a curt nod. ‘You’re starting to understand.’

‘All I understand is that I don’t understand a damn thing.’

‘You’d be surprised how many people don’t even understand that, dottore.’

‘I still don’t see what any of this has to do with my apartment.’

‘Your apartment was a message.’

‘Saying what?’

Sinico laughed.

‘Have you ever sent flowers to a woman you wanted, dottore?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘The offer of that apartment was a classic Mafia message. There were no overt strings attached, any more than you would enclose a card with those flowers saying, “Here are some roses, now let’s fuck.” These people are a lot more subtle than you seem to realize. From their point of view, all that matters is that they made an approach and that you responded. You’re in contact, in communication. And if they need you for something, they know where to reach you. It’s their apartment, after all.’

‘But why would they bother to go to all that trouble for me?’ Zen asked ingenuously. ‘I’ve got nothing to do with the DIA. I’m just a liaison officer, after all.’

Baccio Sinico smiled at him in a peculiar way.

‘Perhaps they don’t believe that that’s all you are.’

Zen opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.

‘In which case, we both got it wrong,’ he said at last. ‘They thought I was more important than I am, and I didn’t understand any of this business about the apartment until you explained it to me. So in that sense the message failed.’

‘Count your blessings, dottore,’ said Sinico drily. ‘At least you’re still alive.’

Zen frowned at him.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Around here, when messages get confused or misunderstood, that can be a… What’s that phrase you see on computers? A “fatal error”.’

He was regarding Zen keenly.

‘I don’t know anything about computers,’ Zen said with a shrug.

Baccio Sinico nodded.

‘That’s probably a good thing. They can get you into all kinds of trouble if you don’t know what you’re doing.’

He patted Zen on the shoulder.

‘Take my advice. Forget all this nonsense and go off for a week or two to unwind. Have you ever been to Malta? It’s a fascinating place, the crossroads of the Mediterranean, any amount of history, and it takes no time at all to get there. You’ve been through hell, dottore. You need closure. Let the healing begin.’

Zen nodded distractedly

‘But what about Carla? I need to know the truth.’

‘Leave that to us,’ Baccio Sinico replied reassuringly. ‘We’ll take care of everything.’

‘Pack the truck with dynamite and park it in the centre of their village. A sixty-second fuse, and a second team to pick up the driver.’

‘No, let’s bomb Limina’s house in the village when he’s there at the weekend. We might be able to hire the Cessna that those upstarts down in Ragusa use to import drugs from Malta. I bet the pilot knows someone over there who could sell us some sort of bomb.’

‘Or a missile launcher. Park on a road above the village and loose off one of those wire-guided numbers.’

‘O, ragazzi, why piss around? In Russia, there are nuclear warheads on the market. The CIA is trying to buy them all up, but I’m sure our Russian friends could find us one. Fuck the village, let’s set it off in the centre of Catania! Wipe the place out, like when Etna erupted!’

Four men sat around the remains of a meal. The remains almost constituted a meal in themselves, for the food had hardly been touched. There was only one window, of frosted glass. Despite the heat, it was tightly closed. What air there was had been dyed a bluish grey by the innumerable cigarettes whose ash covered the floor. It must have been almost a hundred degrees in the room, but no one had broken sweat.

The men were all in their fifties, wearing open-neck shirts and heavy trousers. They were squat but hefty, with faces that were dense, compact and opaque. The one who had just spoken was notable above all for his hands, for which the rest of him seemed to function solely as a life-support system. They swooped, they fluttered, they dived and surged like a pair of birds repelling intruders on their territory.

The man sitting next to him had a collapsing, concave face, lined with wrinkles like a punctured balloon.

‘So you think we should nuke Catania, eh?’ he remarked in a sarcastic tone.

‘What have we got to lose? We’re fucked anyway.’

‘So are they, Nicolo.’

‘Yes, but we know it and they don’t. We’re on the way out anyway, so let’s go with a bang!’

One of the two men on the other side of the table struck the wooden surface with his fist. He had a muddled, crunched face, the features too closely grouped for its overall size.

‘Who says we’re on the way out?’ he shouted.

The fourth man, who sported an extraordinary white moustache and matching sideburns on his bronzed face, laid a hand on the speaker’s arm.

‘We all do, Calogero,’ he said.

‘I don’t say any such thing!’ was the furious response.

‘Yes, you do. You say it by your anger, by your violent gestures, by your shrill tone of voice. The only people who squander their time and energy like that are people who know that they’ve lost. And we have lost. We had our moment of mastery, but now it’s over. And the only way we can retain some measure of respect is to recognize that fact.’

There was a silence, broken by a slight metallic click.

‘I have a message from Binu.’

All four men turned to the person seated at the head of the table. She was a dumpy, crumpled figure in a shapeless black dress who had been knitting throughout the preceding discussion. Now she set down her needles. Despite her age, sex and appearance, she had the undivided and respectful attention of every man present.

‘Why didn’t you tell us earlier?’ asked the one called Calogero.

‘He told me not to. He said that he wanted to hear what each of you had to say He said it would reveal a lot about you.’

Each of the men lowered his eyes, trying desperately to remember just what he had said. One thing was certain: the woman would know. She could recall, word for word, what such-and-such or so-and-so had said under torture in the long hours before they were strangled in the house of horrors which the Corleone clan had owned in Palermo, back at the height of their glory Later, she would tell her husband what she had heard, and he would give the appropriate instructions.

‘And what did Binu say?’ the man called Nicolo dared to ask.

‘He said, “Cui bono?”’

The men looked at each other in an apprehensive silence.

‘What dialect is that?’ one of them asked.

‘It’s called Latin,’ the woman went on, picking up her needles again. ‘It means, “Who stands to benefit?”’

There came a nervous guffaw.

‘I didn’t know Binu spoke Latin.’

‘He has a lot of time on his hands,’ the woman said to no one in particular. ‘He’s been reading. And thinking.’

‘Who stands to benefit from what?’ asked Nicolo.

The woman looked at him.

‘From taking our men and leaving them to die in the back of a refrigerated truck after hacking Lillo’s leg off with a chain-saw.’

‘That bastard Limina, of course!’

‘And what did he benefit?’

‘Revenge for his son’s death!’

The woman set her knitting needles down again with the same faint click.

‘But we didn’t kill Tonino Limina.’

‘Of course not. But they think we did.’

The woman reached into some invisible crevice in her garments. A sheet of paper appeared, which she scanned.

‘Bravi!’ she remarked with sullen irony. ‘So far you’ve said all the things that Binu said you would say. Now, here’s his question to you. Who did kill Tonino Limina?’

‘Our rivals in Palermo,’ the white-moustached man replied promptly. ‘The competition there is out to get us for things we’ve done in the past, and the easiest way is to set us up against the Limina family.’

‘Or maybe it’s one of the new enterprises,’ Calogero put in. ‘That nest of snakes in Ragusa for example. The result’s the same. We and the Catanesi exhaust ourselves in a continuing blood feud, and the third party takes advantage.’

‘Or the Third Level,’ the woman said quietly.

A long silence, broken only by the drumming fingers of the man with the restless hands.

‘Them?’ whispered Calogero at length. ‘But they’re finished. They don’t respond any more.’

‘Not to us, no. Because we’re finished, too.’

‘Who says so?’ was the aggressive response.

The woman pointed to the sheet of paper covered in fine, spidery writing.

‘He does. We’ve always been realists, he says. That’s been our strength. And the reality now is that we don’t count any more, except perhaps to be made use of.’

She’s talking like a man, the others all thought. They listened to her words as though to an oracular utterance by a sibyl, because they knew they must be true. Nothing but a knowledge of the truth, communicated through his mouthpiece by her fugitive husband, could have given this dumpy grandmother the absolute male authority she wielded as of right. As though to compensate, the men all started to chatter like women.

‘Maybe they did it themselves.’

‘Murdered their own child?’

‘Of course not! Someone else, of no account, but rigged to look as if it was Tonino.’

‘But through their lawyer they told that magistrate, the one who was just killed, that it wasn’t him.’

‘Since when does anyone tell judges the truth?’

‘Or lawyers, for that matter.’

‘But if it wasn’t Tonino, why did they hit back at us?’

‘Any excuse is good. We’ve seen it before on this island. East versus west. And we know the Messina crowd were in on this.’

‘Who cares why? Kill them all! Let God sort them out.’

‘Who else could have gone after that judge? No one else would dare to try an operation like that in their territory. Besides, no one else was interested. It was the Limina case she was investigating.’

‘I heard that she’d been pulled off that one.’

‘Officially?’

A cynical laugh.

‘Enough of this bullshit!’ shouted Calogero at last. ‘The simple fact is that they have killed five of our men, and if we want to maintain any respect at all, we’re going to have to get even.’

‘Right!’

‘OK!’

‘Let’s do it!’

‘And slowly, if possible. A bomb is too good for them!’

‘Perhaps we should have a word with those blacks that Ignazio was trading on the side before he fell down that mine-shaft. Someone told me that in Somalia they still use crucifixion as a form of execution. Maybe one of them knows how to do it.’

‘We should nail up Don Gaspa and that Rosario side by side.’

‘With a sign reading, “But where’s Christ?”’

All four men burst into laughter. The woman’s voice cut through the companionable male mirth.

‘Who do you mean by them?’

‘The Liminas, of course!’ the elderly man replied, still intoxicated by the wave of testosterone-laden empathy, like back in the old days before all the men of the family had been killed or locked up in cold, remote prisons or forced into concealment in a series of ‘safe houses’, leaving this hag to run the clan by proxy.

The woman laid down her knitting and raised her eyes to the gathered men. She picked up the piece of paper lying before her.

‘“They are like children. Well-meaning, enthusiastic, and dumber than fuck.” His words.’

A shocked silence ensued. No one could contradict her, of course. Maybe they were his words, maybe they weren’t. Keep quiet, they were all thinking. And don’t look like you’re thinking, either. Bite your tongue, set your face, shut up and let someone else take the initiative.

‘“We’ve had our clan wars,”‘ the woman read on, ‘“and look where they’ve got us. The people who want to start that up again are no friends of ours, even if they claim to be. In the past, their motto was control and rule. Now it’s divide and rule. If they succeed in setting the clans at each others’ throats once again, they can do what they like with you, playing one side against the other and both ends against the middle.’“

She picked up her knitting, leaving them to digest this information. The elderly man at the other end of the table tapped his wineglass with one fingernail.

Too bad the Liminas don’t understand that,’ he said.

‘Then we must try to enlighten them,’ the woman replied without looking up.

‘Cut their fucking heads off,’ muttered Calogero. ‘That’ll enlighten those sons of whores soon enough!’

His outburst, designed to surf on a wave of male fellow-feeling, fell flat in a total silence. At length the man called Nicolo sniffed and spoke.

‘With all due respect, signora, how are we to do that? We sent our boys to Messina to explain that we weren’t responsible for the Tonino Limina killing, and to get them to explain that to their friends in Catania. We’ve seen the result. Now what are we supposed to do? Offer to come round to the house and suck their cocks?’

A subdued laugh greeted this welcome, stress-relieving vulgarity. It died away in the woman’s pointed and silent knitting-work. For several minutes no one dared to break it. Then the fourth man, who had not spoken since the beginning, lit another cigarette and coughed apologetically.

‘There might be a way,’ he said.

There were several wry smiles and exchanges of rolled eyes.

‘All right, Santino!’ the elderly man said at last. ‘Let’s hear your latest brainwave.’

The other man coughed again.

‘When that judge was killed…’

‘Nunziatella? Where does she come in? That business had nothing to do with us, you know that.’

‘Of course. But there was another woman in the car. According to the papers, she was the daughter of a policeman working in Catania. A certain Aurelio Zen.’

‘So?’ Calogero demanded aggressively.

‘Well, it seems to me that he will be wondering who killed his daughter.’

‘The Liminas, of course! Even a cop will be able to work that out.’

‘Exactly. So he’ll be interested in the family. Resentful, perhaps. Maybe vengeful.’

‘So?’ the elderly man demanded again.

‘So maybe we can use that fact to get our message across to the Liminas. They won’t accept any direct approach from us, that’s for sure. But a policeman, with a grudge of his own? I think they might just buy that.’

‘And how are we supposed to get this Zen on board?’

The woman at the head of the table looked up from her rectangle of unfinished knitting.

‘I think it’s time to reactivate Signor Spada,’ she said.

Although he had a key, he entered Carla’s apartment stealthily, with the sense of someone violating a tomb. There was nothing sepulchral about the apartment itself, though. On the contrary, it was as bright, hard, neat and efficient as a disposable razor. The air was thick and hot, with a neutral odour. Zen crossed to the window and opened it. In the distance, he could hear the siren of an ambulance: repeated hiccupy fanfares above a continuous bass growl.

There was none of the mess he had dreaded, the wrack from this personal Marie Celeste, detritus rendered at once pathetic and pointful by its owner’s death. In fact the place looked very much like a hotel room when you enter it for the first time. Either Carla had been quite exceptionally fastidious in her personal habits, or…

Or what? Something was nibbling at the fringes of his brain, something she had said to him but which had ceased to register in that interlude of madness after he finally accepted the fact of his double bereavement.

He stood there amidst the sterile banalities of the dead woman’s apartment. If at first he had been relieved by its impersonality, now he was disappointed. Why had he come, after all, if not in search — and simultaneous dread — of some personal memento which might bring her back, if only for a moment, his mail-order daughter? He had declined an invitation to attend the closed-casket funeral in Milan on the grounds that he had to attend a similar function in Rome concerning his mother. In death as in life, mothers trump daughters, and no one commented on his dereliction. A couple of brothers had shown up, he had learned later, as well as an aunt from, of all places, Taranto.

But why should that surprise him? What did he know about Carla Arduini, beyond the fact that he had screwed her mother at some point in his life, for the usual reasons which now appeared absurd. And even this factoid was without significance, since Carla had not been his daughter. He didn’t have a daughter. He didn’t have any children. Not even dead ones.

So why come to this neat, tidy little cocoon which Carla had spun for herself here in Catania? What did he hope to accomplish, besides depressing himself by opening a closet and seeing her dresses and coats lined up like the larvae of dead butterflies? He had already been through a similar ordeal in Rome, searching dutifully through his mother’s personal belongings, until he eventually broke down and shouted at Maria Grazia, ‘Get it out of here! Everything of hers, just get it out. I don’t care what it’s worth, I don’t want any money, I just want it to be gone!’

Nevertheless, he now remembered, there was one thing here which he didn’t want sold or thrown out. ‘My whole life’s on it,’ Carla had said about her computer. Her whole life. Wasn’t that worth preserving? The problem was that it didn’t seem to be there, her life. No sign of same. Shoes, underwear, letters, magazines, a stuffed animal, but no computer.

Not that Zen would have been able to work it, in any case. But someone — Gilberto, for example — could have retrieved whatever was there, and made it available to him in printed form. And it had to be there, somewhere. When she came round to dinner at his place, Carla had told him about a report she had written about some problem she was having with the installation of the DIA network. She’d have done that on her laptop. She’d have done that…

She’d have done it at work, you idiot! He left the apartment, locked the door and descended to the street.

Even more than most Italian public spaces, those in Catania were dirty, harsh and ugly. Not because Sicilians just didn’t care about such things in the way that the Swiss, say, did. On the contrary, in Zen’s view this behaviour was quite deliberate, a form of public abrasiveness cultivated precisely because it created a sort of Value Added Tax on the personal and the private. When the world presents itself as unpleasant, filthy and hostile, home and friends become more precious. Where everything is clean, orderly and unthreatening, we end up in… well, in Switzerland.

This was not Switzerland. It was not even the Turin of the south’, as Carla had dubbed it. It was just wrecked. People stuffed their garbage into plastic bags brought home from the local supermarket and then threw them into the gutter. They took their dogs out to lay piles of turds the size of a meal and the colour of vomit on the pavement. They trashed anything that didn’t belong to them or a friend, and then stole the rest. Zen, who had no family and friends to come home to, stalked gloomily along through the gathering heat, past a trio of giggling girls enthusiastically giving head to gigantic ice-cream cones, towards the Palace of Justice.

He was lucky. It was lunch-time and the guard was changing, otherwise Zen probably would not have been admitted into the section reserved for the offices of the judges of the Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia. As it was, the sentries on duty were distracted, and his police ID and the mention of Carla’s name was enough to get him past the checkpoint. He asked directions to the room which she had used, only to find it bare. Her name was still on the door, in the form of a business card Sellotaped to the wood, but the office itself had been stripped. No personal computer, no personal anything. Zen looked around for a few seconds at the bare walls and the one filthy window high on one wall, then left.

As he closed the door behind him, an elderly woman wearing a headscarf and coat walked past him down the corridor.

‘Excuse me!’ said Zen.

The woman turned round. She could have been his mother.

‘Well?’

‘I think you delivered something to me,’ Zen started.

‘Me?’

‘A packet of papers. At my place of work. At the Questura.’

‘Never!’ she snapped, turning away.

But Zen remembered the scarf and the coat, and hurried after her.

‘Listen, signora, all I want is to…’

The woman turned on him, a vial of concentrated hatred and wrath.

‘You killed her!’ she hissed under her breath. ‘You and those other northerners! Clean the office for them, I was told! Make everything nice for our guests from Rome. And two days later she’s dead, and where are Roberto and Alfredo? Vanished like the mist at dawn! And now the director claims they were never here in the first place. Of course! We’ve all gone mad! We imagined the whole thing!’

She broke down in a mimed fit of weeping which was all the more disturbing for being so obviously a stylized fake.

‘Corinna, Corinna! They gunned you down for doing your job too well, and now they try to put the blame on your own people!’

Dropping the pose, she turned suddenly on Zen.

‘Say what you will about we Sicilians, we don’t make war on women!’ she snapped.

‘Oh, really? So what about Dalla Chiesa’s wife, murdered with him on the street? What about Signora Falcone, blown to pieces with her husband? What about…’

‘That was in Palermo!’ the woman screeched. ‘This is Catania! We’re still civilized here. No, my Corinna was killed by you people. I know it in my bones. Kill me too, if you want! My name is Agatella Mazza. I’m one of the cleaning ladies. You can find me here any day. Do you think I give a damn what you do to me, now that she’s gone?’

She spat in Zen’s face, spraying him with saliva.

‘Take that, with a mother’s curse on you and yours. May you all die slowly, in pain, alone and in despair!’

She turned and waddled off along the corridor, muttering to herself. Zen stood stock-still, too shocked to react. He wiped the spit off his face, clutching the wall and gasping for breath.

‘They searched my room,’ Carla had told him on the phone. He could hear her voice even now, so young and vibrant. ‘They left a message on my computer… My whole life’s on it, and someone has been messing about with it. I’ve got backups, of course, but…’

To which he had replied, ‘Back-up lives?’ At the time, it had been intended as a joke.

He walked home along the broad conduits of black lava blocks, across the petrified squares, past the stylized statuary and baroque curlicues, the grandiose frozen messages of the past, all dead letters now. Although he wasn’t hungry, he knew that he should eat, and stopped at an. alimentari to buy some bread, a mozzarella di bufala and some air-cured sausages which the owner claimed were supplied by a brother-in-law of his who lived in the Umbrian mountain town of Norcia, famous for its pork products. Zen pretended to believe him, and the grocer in turn pretended to believe Zen’s pretence of belief. They parted amicably.

Once inside, the apartment loomed around him like a shroud, its former charm flayed away by what the cleaning lady at the Palace of Justice had told him. He had no reason to doubt that it was true. Hurt always tells. This was too hurtful not to be true. He pushed through to the kitchen, opened the packets of food which he had bought and turned it out on to plates.

Not only did he not feel hungry, now he felt nauseous. The compact mass of the mozzarella, once sliced, felt like eating the breast of a pregnant woman: milk and meat at once. Saint Agatha, the patron of Catania, had had her breasts cut off. He tried the sausages, which gave him the sensation of chewing on the penises of dead boys, then pushed the food aside and opened the fridge, just in case there was some reusable portion of a forgotten or failed meal.

The first thing he saw, lying in the freezing compartment, was the non-birthday present for his no-longer-alive non-daughter, delivered to him at the Questura, which he had wrapped in rotting sardines, sealed with clingfilm and then totally forgotten about. With some difficulty, he pulled it off the flimsy metal ice-tray bonded to the sides of the freezer compartment by a gristle of ice thicker than the shrunken cubes in the tray itself. He sniffed at it with a wrinkle of disgust, then threw it into the sink and turned on the hot water.

The phone rang.

‘Good evening, dottore. Forgive me for disturbing you. My name is Spada.’

The speaker clearly expected this to register. Zen frowned.

‘Ah, yes!’ he replied, having realized that this was the alleged Mafia contact who had got him the apartment with such miraculous swiftness in the first place.

‘I trust that all is well with your new home’, the voice continued smoothly.

‘Everything’s fine, thank you.’

A pause.

‘Good. Nevertheless, I think we should have a brief chat at some point, if that’s possible.’

‘What about?’

‘Various issues which have arisen, which I believe to be of mutual interest. I can’t be more specific until we meet. Do you know the breakwater to the west of the harbour? You get to it from Piazza dei Martiri. Between four and five this afternoon. I’ll be fishing from the rocks and carrying a yellow umbrella marked Cassa di Risparmio di Catania.’

The line went dead. Zen made a dismissive gesture and hung up. The man must be mad, thinking that he would turn up for an unscheduled appointment at such short notice. Who did these people think they were?

A splashing sound from the kitchen reminded him that he had left the tap running on the frozen package. He turned it off, then went to the end of the room and opened the door giving on to the small balcony. A wave of heat enveloped him, bringing a rash of sweat to his brow.

‘You’re in contact, in communication. And if they need you for something, they know where to reach you. It’s their apartment, after all’

‘They searched my room…Someone has been here. They left a message on my computer.’

Leaning out of the window, he smoked a cigarette, then strode back to the kitchen and grabbed the package floating in the sink. It was beginning to feel mushy. He peeled it open, stripped away the rotting fish and threw them in the rubbish bin, then washed the plastic bag inside in soapy water, dried it on some kitchen paper and opened the envelope. It contained a photocopy of some sixty pages of typed text, apparently legal in nature. The title contained the name ‘Limina’. Zen took it through to the living room and settled down on the sofa to read.

Twenty minutes later, he had skimmed the entire set of documents. They all related to the case of the ‘body on the train’, and consisted of interviews with witnesses and the first portion of a draft report on the case written by the investigating magistrate, Corinna Nunziatella. None of the material seemed particularly sensitive or sensational. The only thing that Zen had not already read in the DIA reports which he vetted weekly was a deposition by a train driver who regularly worked the route between Catania and Syracuse, to the effect that he thought he had seen a freight wagon parked on the siding at Passo Martino for several weeks before the discovery of the body. In fact, he said, he had the impression that it had been there for several months. But it was common practice to store items of rolling-stock on such sidings, and he hadn’t paid the matter much attention. When pressed, he admitted that he couldn’t be sure that he had seen any such wagon at all, never mind when or where.

The only other interesting aspect of the documents was a note on the last page of the unfinished draft report, which seemed to be tending towards the conclusion that the body on the train had indeed been that of Tonino Limina, but that there was no evidence that he had been kidnapped and killed by a rival Mafia clan. It had not been possible to establish Tonino’s movements prior to his disappearance with any certainty, but a search of passenger lists showed that he had flown to Milan on 6 July en route to Costa Rica for a holiday, but had not checked in for his onward flight. At this point the report broke off with the handwritten note: ‘Case blocked and transferred 3/10, documents impounded by Roberto Lessi and Alfredo Ferraro of the ROS.’

Zen knocked the pile of pages back into shape and left it on the sofa. As he got up to fetch his cigarettes, he noticed for the first time the grey plastic slab, sitting on his desk, in the corner of the room. It was about the size of one of those small briefcases which high-powered businessmen carry with them, to indicate that the heavy-duty paperwork is being done by their minions.

Zen walked over and inspected the thing. The cover was stamped with black letters on a silver ground reading ‘Toshiba Satellite’. A paper label stuck alongside, at a slight angle, said, ‘Property of Uptime Systems Inc.’. Someone had added, in a rounded hand, ‘Carla Arduini’.

He stretched out one hand towards the computer, then drew it sharply back. An ambulance siren, identical to the one he had heard at Carla’s apartment earlier, was just audible in the distance. Zen located his mobile phone, dialled the DIA headquarters and asked to be put through to Baccio Sinico. The younger officer sounded suitably concerned, agreed that Zen was doing the right thing by taking no chances, and promised rapid response.

Twenty minutes later, in the bar across the street, Zen watched the convoy of police vehicles gathering in front of his apartment building. Figures in full-body suits, with huge helmets and metal pincers, descended and disappeared inside. Others carried a large trunk-like container supported on two metal poles. Sirens wailed and blue lights flashed. Another ten minutes went by before Zen’s cellphone beeped.

‘Where are you, dottore?’ asked Baccio Sinico.

‘Out and about,’ Zen replied.

‘You were right about the computer. An initial scan suggests that the works have been removed and replaced with half a kilo of explosive, detonated by opening the lid.’

‘Well, I’m glad that you lads didn’t go to all that trouble for nothing.’

‘But where are you? You need protection! We need to get you into a secure…’

I’m fine, Baccio. I have an appointment. I’ll call you later.’

Zen checked his watch. It was ten to four. He paid his bill and walked down towards the sea.

During his years of official disgrace following the Aldo Moro affair, Aurelio Zen had been posted to a city in Umbria to investigate another kidnapping case involving a local industrial tycoon. While he was there, one of his colleagues at the Questura had recounted a stock story which the Perugians told about their neighbours and traditional rivals from the town of Foligno, about thirty kilometres away in the valley below their mountain stronghold. The people of Foligno, it was alleged, thought like this: Europe was the centre of the world, the Mediterranean was the centre of Europe, Italy was the centre of the Mediterranean, and Foligno was the geographical centre of Italy. In the centre of Foligno was the Piazza del Duomo, and on this piazza there was a bar, in the centre of which there was a snooker table. The hole in the centre of this table, at the centre of all the other centres, was therefore the original omphalos, navel and origin of the universe.

Catania was exactly the opposite, Zen reflected as he picked his way across the main road bordering the port area. A landfall on the eastward brink of an island which had always been marginal to the interests of whichever foreigners currently controlled it, Catania had never been the centre of anything. On the contrary, it was the edge. And at the very edge of Catania stood the port, impressively walled, as though to contain the foreign contagions to which it was by its nature exposed. At one end stood the breakwater, flexed like an arm thrust out against the waves.

And today they were huge, mythical monsters breaking surface as if for the first time, visible evidence of powers and depths beyond human comprehension. A storm had passed over in the night, and although the south-easterly wind had now moderated, the seas it had raised came striding confidently ashore, only to have their determination and vigour smash into the random mass of stone blocks piled to seaward of the breakwater. Visibly perplexed and weakened, the waves shattered into futile spumes of spray and then re-formed as a contradictory scurry of surges and backwashes, their initial impetus dispersed or turned back against itself.

On one of the outlying rocks, a lone fisherman was trying his luck in the swirls of water below, protecting himself from the sun by means of a large yellow umbrella marked ‘You have a friend at the Cassio di Risparmio di Catania — the friendly bank!’ Zen clambered over the low wall of the breakwater and made his way gingerly from one boulder to another until he reached the one adjacent to the fisherman’s perch.

‘Catching anything?’ asked Zen.

The man turned around and inspected Zen briefly.

‘A few minnows. I threw them back in.’

‘What did you expect, a swordfish?’

The man smiled and gestured in a peculiarly feminine way which Zen had by now come to recognize as characteristically Sicilian. It was almost as if, since women had traditionally not been allowed out in public, the men had learned to fill the social space which they would have occupied.

‘Dottor Zen. What a pleasure.’

Zen held his eyes.

‘Are you surprised to see me?’

‘No, why? We had an arrangement.’

‘Death cancels all arrangements.’

‘Death?’ murmured Spada. ‘You mean your daughter? Forgive me for not mentioning this terrible tragedy. I thought, perhaps wrongly, that it might be painful…’

‘Not half as painful as a bomb in the face. My face.’

The man looked more and more bewildered.

‘A bomb?’

‘In the form of a laptop computer belonging to my daughter, gutted of its works, stuffed with plastic explosive and left in my apartment.’

Spada put down his fishing rod and stared at Zen. Judging by his expression, the bomb might have been meant for him.

‘I know nothing of this/ he said.

Zen raised his eyebrows.

‘I thought that the whole point of dealing with people like you was that you did know about these things.’

‘I repeat, I know nothing about this. But I will make enquiries.’

‘A lot of good your enquiries would have done me if I’d opened the lid of that computer.’

The man slashed his hand through the air.

‘What are you talking about? My friends have no interest in harming you, dottore. You’re no use to us dead.’

Zen lowered his head ironically.

‘I’m pleased to hear it. And in just what way can I be of use to you?’

Spada gestured in an awkward way.

‘It’s a question of a mutual interest, dottore. I’ve been given to understand that you want to find out who killed your daughter. Very naturally.’

‘And your interest?’

To facilitate your investigation.’

Zen smiled with an irony that was now undisguised.

‘But everyone knows that my daughter was killed by your “friends”. Why would you want to help me prove it?’

Spada picked up his rod, reeled in and then cast his line again.

‘Ah, but suppose we didn’t do it?’ he said, looking down at the water.

‘Then who did?’ demanded Zen.

‘Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?’

Zen waved his hand dramatically.

‘And you don’t know the answer to that either? I’m beginning to wonder whether I should bother taking you or your friends very seriously, Signor Spada.’

The fisherman slackened his grip on the rod in order to read the vibrations which it was transmitting.

‘If you want to find out the truth,’ he said, ‘then you’re going to need help. And for different reasons, which do not concern you, we need help from you. Perhaps we can make a deal.’

Zen gazed out across the sea with an air of complete boredom.

‘My friends didn’t kill Tonino Limina, either,’ said Spada.

The waves shattered and re-formed on the rocks beneath.

‘The Limina family have denied that their son is dead.’

‘He’s dead, all right.’

‘Then why did they deny it?’

‘Because Don Gaspare is a control freak, even though he doesn’t control anything worth a piss these days. But he doesn’t want to look bad. Plus he didn’t want the authorities taking an interest. He would have his revenge when the time came. Which it just has. Five of the Corleone clan frozen to death in a meat truck.’

‘I’ve heard nothing about this.’

‘It hasn’t been made public. The Corleonesi don’t want to look bad either. I’m just presenting my credentials. Go back to your friends at the DIA and check it out. It’s true.’

Zen looked up to the north where Etna was spewing out fat white clouds into a heartbreakingly pale blue sky.

‘What’s all this got to do with me?’ he demanded. ‘I’m a policeman. I should arrest you right now. Take you down to the basement and have the hard boys go to work on you!’

He turned away, shielding his face from the wind in an attempt to light a cigarette. On the breakwater, perhaps ten metres away, a young man wearing dark glasses was staring at him. Zen stared back. The man turned away, took out a cellphone and walked off down the mole.

‘We didn’t kill Limina,’ Spada repeated, playing his line.

Zen turned to him with an expression of bored cynicism.

‘All right, let’s pretend that you’re telling the truth. Your friends didn’t do it. So who did?’

Spada raised his rod and plied the reel furiously. About five metres from the edge of the breakwater, a fish broke surface. He hauled it in, twitching and struggling in vain, a small red mullet. Spada inspected it briefly, unhooked the line, and threw the fish back.

‘Maybe yours,’ he said.

Zen tossed the butt of his cigarette after the fish.

‘I don’t have any friends.’

‘Then you’re dead, dottore. Professionally speaking, of course. But here in Sicily, without friends…’

There was a silence.

‘And just who would these friends of mine be, supposing they existed?’ asked Zen.

A large shrug.

‘Who knows? What I’m hearing is that the operation was planned and carried out by people from the continent.’

‘From Rome?’

Spada did not answer for so long that his silence became an answer in itself. He leaned back and looked at Zen as though seeing him for the first time. Then Zen realized that the other man was looking not at him but past him.

‘I think we’ve been here long enough, dottore,’ Spada remarked.

He scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to Zen.

‘Come to this address after eight this evening. A relative of mine is the caretaker. We’ll be able to talk without any risk of disturbance.’

He quickly dismantled his rod and line, packing everything away into the wicker hamper he had brought with him. Zen turned away and clambered from rock to rock until he regained the concrete breakwater. Gulls swooped overhead, but there was no one in sight.

He was still three streets from his apartment block when they grabbed him. It only occurred to him later that this meant that he must have been followed all the way.

Along with five or six other passers-by, he had stopped to watch a peculiar courtship spectacle involving two dogs: a young dalmatian and a rather more mature spaniel. Their respective owners were a portly woman in a long coat and another, young enough to be her daughter, wearing a black pantsuit. Both dogs were leashed, and the spaniel was evidently in heat. The dalmatian was making frantic attempts to mount her, and the owners were making equally frantic attempts to drag the two lovers apart. Meanwhile a small crowd had gathered to offer advice and make the predictable jokes.

Zen sensed their presence a moment before one of them caught him by the arm.

‘Dottor Zen? I’m Roberto Lessi of the Raggruppamento Operazioni Speciali, currently seconded to the DIA. You’re to come with us, please.’

There were two of them, in their thirties, both wearing jeans and sports jackets. Zen found himself hyperventilating.

‘Come with you where?’ he asked.

A blue saloon pulled in alongside the rank of parked vehicles by the kerb. The two men took Zen by the elbows, one on each side, and steered him towards it.

‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.

‘It’s for your own protection,’ the other man said flatly.

The back door of the car opened and Baccio Sinico stepped out.

‘Baccio!’ Zen called to him. ‘What the hell’s happening?’

Sinico made a gesture like swatting a fly. The two Carabinieri agents released Zen.

‘You can’t go back to your apartment, dottore, not after we discovered that bomb there. These people, if at first they don’t succeed, they try and try again until they do. And they own the building, so access won’t be very difficult.’

‘But what’s the alternative?’

Sinico beamed a smile.

‘You’ve been put on the high-security risk roster, dottore! They’ve allocated you quarters in the Carabinieri barracks. You’ll be perfectly safe there, under armed guard night and day. And if for any reason you need to leave the barracks, you’ll have a full escort of armed officers with you at all times.’

‘I noticed what a good job they did with that judge,’ Zen retorted sourly.

Sinico looked indignant.

‘That wasn’t our fault! She deliberately broke security rules and took off on her own. There was nothing we could do. But don’t complain, dottore! This is an honour that many of your colleagues would die for.’

He gave a loose shrug.

‘So to speak.’

Zen nodded.

‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘All right, let’s go.’

‘What about my personal effects?’

‘Everything will be packed up and transferred to your allotted quarters at the barracks.’

Zen looked down at the pavement and shook his head slowly.

‘What a narrow escape!’ he exclaimed in a tone of voice which might have raised the eyebrows of someone who knew him better than Baccio Sinico. ‘I can’t thank you enough for taking all this trouble. Thank heavens I’ll be properly protected from now on! But listen, there’s just one thing I need to collect from my apartment.’

‘As I said, all your belongings will be…’

‘This is not one of my belongings, strictly speaking. It’s something which…’

He broke off, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.

‘Something which belonged to my mother, Giuseppina.’

Baccio Sinico nodded respectfully.

‘It makes no difference. Everything that’s there except the furniture will be delivered to you at…’

‘That’s the problem. You see, this is a piece of furniture. Well, actually it’s a picture which I brought from our house in Rome after she…’

‘Just tell us where it is, and we’ll bring it.’

Zen sighed heavily.

‘That’s what’s embarrassing, you see. I don’t remember. I just grabbed it at random, as something to remember her by, but I can’t recall where I put it or even what the subject of the picture is. All I know is that I’ll recognize it the moment I see it.’

He gripped Sinico’s arm.

‘Look, even the Mafia are not going to try again so soon after the failure of this attempt. Let’s go to my place right now, just the two of us. I’ll pick up the picture and then we’ll drive straight to the barracks.’

Baccio Sinico shook his head.

‘I’m sorry, dottore, I don’t have the authorization to…’

‘And then there are the papers,’ said Zen.

Sinico looked at him sharply.

‘Papers?’

‘Legal documents.’

Sinico was now staring at him with a mute intensity.

‘Relating to my mother’s will,’ Zen added. ‘I hid them away for safety. It would be impossible for anyone else to find them. You can imagine how important they are.’

‘The papers,’ Sinico repeated.

‘Yes. Those legal documents. If they fell into the wrong hands…’

Baccio Sinico nodded almost maniacally.

‘Of course, of course. The wrong hands.’

‘We wouldn’t want that.’

‘No, no! Certainly not.’

He sighed.

‘Very well. It’s highly irregular, but…’

They took off at high speed for the short drive to Zen’s home, emergency lights flashing and sirens wailing. If they had wanted to draw the Mafia’s attention to the fact that their target was returning home, thought Zen, they could hardly have done a better job. The car drew up in front of the building, providing a further visual clue by parking the way the police always park: so as to create the maximum inconvenience for everyone else. While one of the two ROS agents secured the front door, Zen and Sinico walked upstairs with the second, who then stood guard at the door to Zen’s apartment while the two men went inside.

Zen looked around quickly. The Toshiba laptop had of course gone. Maybe it really had been a bomb, as they claimed. He would never know. More to the point, the papers which Corinna Nunziatella had ‘posted’ to herself, using Carla as a cut-out, and which Zen had left on the sofa, had also disappeared.

‘Through here,’ he told Sinico, leading the way towards the bedroom. As Sinico crossed the threshold, Zen smashed the door into his face. The younger officer reeled back, clutching his forehead and staring wildly at Zen, who grabbed him by the arm and hair and hurled him forward into the bedroom, tripping him up as he passed so that he fell sprawling on the gleaming aggregate floor.

After a moment, Sinico got to his knees and then his feet, pulling a revolver from a holster at the back of trousers, but he was too shocked and too slow. Zen yanked him forwards by the arm holding the gun, chopped the weapon free with a blow to the wrist, then kneed Sinico in the chest as he went down for the second time. He picked up the revolver and checked it quickly, keeping an eye all the while on the figure splayed out on the floor, panting hard as though he were about to burst into tears.

‘I’m sorry, Baccio,’ Zen said quietly ‘I had no choice.’

Sinico looked up at him.

‘You’re mad!’ he croaked.

‘That’s conceivable, but I can’t afford to take the risk of finding out that I’m not. Don’t worry, I won’t bother you again, as long as you don’t bother me. Remember that “compassionate leave” you told me about? I’ve decided to take your advice.’

Sinico crawled up into a sitting position.

‘They’ll kill you, dottore! They’ve tried once already, and they won’t give up. You need us! You need our help, our protection!’

Zen put the revolver in his coat pocket and stared bleakly down at the younger man.

‘Who are they, Baccio? Whose friends are they?’

Sinico shook his head despairingly.

‘This is all madness!’ he said. ‘Paranoia run wild!’

Zen inclined his head.

‘As I said, that’s conceivable. It’s also conceivable that you’re just trying to keep me talking until one of those ROS thugs comes to see why we’re taking so long.’

He walked over to the doorway.

I’m leaving now,’ he told Sinico. ‘If you try to stop me, I’ll shoot you.’

Once in the living room, he crossed rapidly to the front door and opened it. The ROS agent named Lessi looked at him in surprise.

‘We’ve found something!’ Zen said in an urgent undertone. ‘Baccio thinks it might be another bomb. He wants you to take a look.’

Lessi nodded and ran inside. Zen closed the door and locked it with the complicated double-sided key, formed like a gondola’s prow, turning it four times to insert the metal security bolts into the retaining block. Without a key, it could not be opened from the inside.

He ran quickly downstairs and slunk into the shadows at the rear of the entrance hall. About twenty seconds later, the front door flew open and the other ROS man ran in, a pistol in his hand, talking urgently on his cellphone.

‘He locked the door? Don’t worry, I’ll be right there!’

Zen listened to the man’s footsteps receding above, then walked to the door and out into the night.

A few minutes after eight o’clock sounded from the massive church of San Nicolo in Piazza Dante, Zen arrived at the address to which he had been directed, in a side-street off Via Gesuiti. He was under no illusion about the value of the assurances which the man known as Spada had given him as to his safety, but neither did he care very deeply one way or the other. If his mother had still been alive, it would have been different, as it would if he’d ever had children. As it was, he discovered that it didn’t really matter what happened, although this did not prevent him from carefully checking the revolver he had taken from Baccio Sinico while he waited inside the portico of San Nicolo for eight o’clock to arrive.

The building assigned for his appointment with ‘Signor Spada’ was a handsome two-storey baroque palazzo with widely spaced windows, ornate cornices and shallow balconies protected by metal railings. The main entrance seemed to be on Via Gesuiti itself, but the address to which Zen had been directed was a door about half-way along the left-hand side. Rather to Zen’s surprise, it was open. He knocked tactfully but without result, then stepped inside. The light from the lamp strung on a wire at first-floor level across the street revealed a set of stone steps leading down to another door about a metre lower down.

Leaving the street door open, Zen made his way down. The lower door was not locked. With a very faint creak, it opened into an unlit but acoustically larger space beyond. Zen stood still, sniffing the musty air and trying to decipher a faint sound which he thought at first might be the echoes of the creaking door, amplified by the resonant chamber beyond. The interior seemed at first completely dark, but as Zen’s eyes began to adjust he became aware of a tepid luminescence which seemed to emanate from…

From whatever they were, those rows and ranks of massive structures, identical in shape and height, which ran the length and breadth of the room. Except for their size, they might almost have been old-fashioned school desks, with sloping tops which caught what little light there was and reflected it. Only they didn’t reflect it, he soon realized, they radiated it. By now, his night vision was good enough for him to make out some other features of the place, such as two hulking human forms each about three metres tall standing against the wall at the far end of the room. A warehouse of glowing furniture managed by giants? Well, he had no problem with that. That was just fine! He could deal with it. Now what?

The answer was a scream. Well, no, not quite. A keening wail, more like. A lengthy, throaty squawk. It took Zen a long and very uncomfortable moment to match it tentatively in his auditory database with one of those scarily humanoid sounds that cats emit when involved in sexual or territorial disputes. In which case the eerie ululation he had heard earlier had presumably not been the echoes of the door squeaking, but the two mogs tuning up. He wondered idly how large the pets were around here. About the size of ocelots, to judge by the figures at the end of the room and the school desks which filled it.

Only they weren’t desks, he realized. His vision was slowly filling in all the time, like a computer downloading a complex graphic screen. He could now make out that the giants lounging against the end wall were in fact statues mounted on plinths. Between them, a broad staircase led up into gloom. On the side walls, the dark patches which he had taken to be windows revealed themselves to be a series of oil paintings. At which point the files of desks shamefacedly removed their carnival masks and were transformed into rows of display cabinets lit internally by a low-wattage bulb. He was in a museum.

A brief investigation confirmed this hypothesis. Beneath a thick layer of glass, each cabinet contained a selection of coins, jewellery, amulets and similar objects of antiquity, each identified by a label with a number and a description such as ‘Greek, late 2nd century BC(?)’. It was one of those provincial museums which are open to the public for a few inconvenient hours on various randomly chosen days every month, always assuming that Spada’s relative didn’t have something more important to do.

So now only the noises remained unexplained. They had diminished in volume, but were still there, troubling and exciting the silence like fingernails raked lightly across skin. His sight satisfied, Zen tuned in to his hearing. The sounds seemed to be coming from the end of the room, where the staircase led up, presumably to the next floor of the building. He walked cautiously down the aisle between the lit display cases and started up the steps at the far end.

They were handsome steps, broad and shallow and as solid as the rock from which they had been carved, flanked to either side by elaborate stone balustrades. It occurred to Zen that this must have been the original ground floor of the palazzo, before subsequent infill or volcanic activity had raised the street level. After a considerable fetch, the stairs reached a landing and doubled back the way they had come, giving access to a room of the same dimensions and much the same appearance as the one below, but with a much higher ceiling. This would have been the reception quarters of the original design, the piano nobile. All this was quite clear, because the lights were on.

A light, rather: a clear steady beam illuminating what looked at first sight like a sexual act involving two men. One was standing, his back to the stairs where Zen stood watching. From time to time his body jerked spasmodically, each spasm accompanied by a satisfied though effortful grunt. The other man, who was on his knees before the other, was meanwhile emitting a continuous series of weak mewling sounds which were, Zen now realized, the source of the noises he had heard earlier. It took him another moment or two to understand that the distended and discoloured features of the kneeling man were those of the man known as Spada, and that he was not engaged in fellatio but being strangled.

The light wavered to one side, revealing itself as the beam of a powerful torch concealed behind the wall to Zen’s right.

‘Come on, Alfredo!’ said a bored voice. ‘It’s done, for Christ’s sake. Let’s go.’

Zen pulled out Sinico’s revolver and loosed off a shot towards the ceiling.

‘Police!’ he yelled as the appalling reverberations died away. ‘Drop your weapons and lie down on the floor with your hands above your heads.’

The strangler released his victim and turned slowly to Zen with an imposing yet slightly incredulous look. A moment later a pistol appeared in his hand.

Zen would undoubtedly have died then and there if the late Signor Spada had not intervened, slumping forward into the back of the gunman’s knees and throwing him off balance. At such close range, even a marksman as out of practice as Zen could not miss. He fired once, hitting his opponent in the upper chest. The victim, as his status now was, absorbed the shot with an expression which mingled astonishment and resignation, as if he had always known that it would end like this but — stupidly, as he now realized — hadn’t expected it just yet. Then the light went out.

Dependent now upon his hearing alone, Zen found that sense perking up just as his sight had earlier. Most of the time, we were functionally deaf, he realized. What we thought of as silence was a constant substratum of noises mentally censored as being insignificant. He recalled a camping holiday up in the Dolomites, years ago, with a friend from university. There, by night, it had been utterly silent, and yet that silence had registered not as an absence but as a massive and disturbing presence. Now that his life was at stake and every sound significant, he found himself bombarded by a barrage of aural data, some potentially identifiable — traffic, televisions, voices in the street — but all previously classified as irrelevant and therefore inaudible. Within the room in front of him, there was that intimidating silence he had experienced in the Alps all those years ago.

Then, like some unidentified animal stumbling into that remembered campsite, came three distinct sounds: a click, a creak, and a loud metallic snap. They were related both by position and by distance, but above all by the concurrent appearance of a brilliant glow within the room. Unnerved, Zen fired blind. Immediately two other sounds joined the former intruders: a tinkle of glass and a raucous clanging with a whooping siren to back it up. He ran up the remaining steps, just in time to see a young man wearing a baseball cap sitting on the exterior ledge of one of the windows, which he had evidently opened along with its corresponding shutter. He was lit from behind by the streetlamp strung on a wire almost level with the window. His face was in shadow, but he turned briefly to Zen and seemed to pause for a moment, as if in recognition. Then he abruptly disappeared.

A dull thud and the sound of running footsteps told the rest of the tale. The narrator could still prove to be lethally unreliable, however, so Zen endured another minute or so of the hellish racket of the security alarm before he ventured out into the upper room. The torch used to illuminate the execution lay on the floor near the two bodies. Switching it on, Zen quickly ascertained that he was alone, and that both Spada and his killer were dead. Zen recognized the latter as one of the two ROS agents who, together with Baccio Sinico, had tried to take him into ‘protective custody’ earlier that evening. A quick search of his jacket turned up a wallet, which identified him as Alfredo Ferraro.

By now, the shrieks of the alarm system were intolerable. Looking around, Zen realized that it had been set off by the second shot that he had fired, which had apparently struck one of the display cases. Dipping his hand in amongst the priceless relics there, he selected an object at random and headed quickly back downstairs.

It was almost midnight when the surly staff of the ferry finally deigned to allow passengers to board. The blue and white hulk had been moored to the dock for over three hours by that time, at this latest stop on its leisurely and much-delayed passage from Naples to Tunis. Needless to say, no one had bothered to explain the reason for this further delay, still less to apologize. The employees of the Tirrenia ferry company had an attitude as charmless, peremptory and inflexible as tax inspectors or prison guards — or policemen, for that matter.

But why should they care? Their jobs were state-funded sinecures, hard to obtain but virtually impossible to lose. If the passengers had had any power and money, they would have gone by air. So if you were here, pacing up and down the dock at almost one in the morning at the mercy of a bunch of incompetent slackers like them, then you evidently had neither money nor power. In which case, who cared?

The passengers’ only consolation was that if they had to wait out in the open for hours on end, this was the perfect night for it; pleasantly cool, with an almost imperceptible onshore breeze scented with a subtle briny tang, an appetizer for the voyage to come. The scene would have been almost idyllic, in fact, if it hadn’t been for the banks of floodlights mounted on tall masts, mercilessly baring the concrete and steel austerities all around. And then, of course, there were the foreigners.

These last represented a majority of the thirty or so people waiting to board the ferry, but the noise they were creating made them seem even more numerous and obnoxious. They were all in their twenties, the sexes roughly evenly represented. The males were all wearing red T-shirts with the word ARSENAL printed in large white letters, while their mates were in various stages of undress, revealing large quantities of sunburned thigh, shoulder and midriff.

One of the men, who seemed to be in charge, to the extent that anyone was, sat at the bottom of the gangway perched on four cases of Peroni beer cans. From time to time he reached down and produced a fresh can from a partially dismantled fifth case lying open in front of him. The others all had beers in their hands, except for a separate group who were sharing a bottle of whisky, and one girl who had apparently passed out. From time to time, one of the men would start what sounded like a war chant, and pretty soon they all joined in, even the women. One of the whisky drinkers yelled at someone in the main pack, and Zen was surprised to catch what sounded like the words ‘Norman’ and ‘beer’.

So, the Normans have returned, he thought, lurking in the shadows created by a stack of metal cargo containers and trying not to look up the collapsed girl’s dress, which had ridden up over her hips in a fascinating manner. He remembered being taught at school how the people of Normandy, themselves originally invaders from Norway, had conquered Sicily in the Middle Ages and ruled the island for over a hundred years. He remembered it because, as with the increasingly few things he remembered these days, it came with a story.

The story, Zen now realized, was almost certainly apocryphal, but this knowledge did not diminish its mythic charm and power. One fine day, his teacher had told the class, a group of Norman soldiers on their way home from the crusades stopped off at a port in Sicily, quite possibly Catania. Being hard-drinking northerners, they consumed the local wine without regard to its high alcohol content, and soon got very merry indeed.

At this point a fleet of Moorish corsair ships appeared in the harbour, striking terror into the hearts of the inhabitants, who had been collectively raped, plundered, shipped into slavery and put to the fire and the sword for as long as anyone could remember. It was like the plague. It came and went. Some people survived, others succumbed. There was nothing to be done.

Within minutes, the bells of the city’s churches started tolling out the bad news, and incidentally deafening the Normans, who grabbed a passing waiter and told him in no uncertain terms to turn off those fucking bells or else. The trembling native explained the reason for this tocsin, and advised his clients to flee immediately — ‘presumably after settling the bill’, the teacher interpolated with a sly wink at the class — since the Moors were about to rape and plunder, ship people into slavery, and generally put the city to the fire and the sword as usual.

The Normans looked at one another and smiled.

The teacher now broke off the story to give a brief lecture on physiognomical changes over the past centuries, their dietary causes, and why this meant you should eat your greens, just to show that this narrative digression had by no means extinguished his capacity for tedious pedantry. The Normans, he pointed out, would have been slightly less than the average height of Italians today, benefiting as the latter were from the ‘economic miracle’ of post-war reconstruction, but they would still have been a good head taller and proportionally broader than the Moorish marauders.

Imagine, he said, that you are one of the latter, out for a pleasant day’s looting and pillaging in an undefended town at the very toe of Italy. The inhabitants have all fled or are in hiding. The place is yours for the taking, you think. Then you round a corner to confront a horde of gigantic blond beings, completely drunk and utterly fearless, shrieking berserker battle cries and wielding their enormous swords and maces like children’s toys.

It wasn’t a question of courage, the teacher explained. The Arabs had never seen such creatures before. To them, they must have seemed like extraterrestrial aliens gifted with incomprehensible, superhuman powers. To try to fight against them would be mere folly. So they ran back to their boats, those who survived, and the local townspeople asked the Normans how much they would charge to stay around and provide this sort of service on future occasions. Not very much, was the answer. ‘But then,’ the teacher ended with a sly smile, ‘wine in Sicily is cheap.’

And now the Normans had returned, Zen reflected as the waiting passengers started to make their way up the gangplank, whose sullen Cerberus had finally consented, after a lengthy discussion on a two-way radio, to open to public access. The sleeping girl had been shaken into semi-consciousness and was helped along by a couple of the red-shirted men. Arsenal, thought Zen. He knew what the word meant, of course: the naval yard in his native city where the fleets of galleys which had built and maintained the Venetian empire had been constructed. But why were these drunken barbarians advertising it on their beefy chests? It was all a mystery. All he knew was that the Normans had returned, and that he was going to have to spend the next seven hours with them in the spartan public lounge of the ferry, since the cabins were apparently fully booked.

Apart from the latter-day Normans, the passengers consisted of a few dauntless young back-packers, and a selection of elderly Sicilian, Maltese and Tunisian persons, none of whom aroused any suspicion in Zen’s mind. Once on the ferry, he took up a position near the head of the gangplank, lest anyone else should board before they left. No one did. Ten minutes later, the mooring lines were cast off and they were steaming quietly off into the Ionian Sea, past the glowing lights of the refineries at Augusta and the twin headlands encircling the harbour of Syracuse, rumbling quietly south. Zen left his post and went down to the saloon. He was safe. He’d made it. They would never be able to find him here.

Down in the saloon, a major crisis had erupted, sparked by the Tirrenia line employee in charge, who was attempting to close the bar. This decision was being vigorously contested by the neo-Normans, one of whom, it turned out, spoke some Italian. But the barman was paying no attention to his protests and pleas. Closing time was closing time and that was that. The metal grille covering the bar came rattling down with the finality of a guillotine.

It was at this point that Zen intervened. He couldn’t care less about the foreigners, but he wanted a drink himself — thought he deserved one, in fact — and also wanted to throw his bureaucratic weight about a little in return for all the aggravation which he and everyone else had been treated to by the ferry company’s staff so far. Flashing his police identification card at the barman, he told him to reopen the bar immediately, lest his actions provoke a breach of the peace given the presence of a large number of evidently unhappy barbarians from the north, which might easily lead to actions of assault and affray likely to endanger the safety of the ferry, her crew and passengers.

The barman made the mistake of sneering at him.

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re in international waters now. Back in Italy, you’re the law. Out here, what I say goes. And I say the bar closes.’

‘Where is this vessel registered?’ asked Zen.

The barman didn’t know. Zen took him by the arm and led him over to a framed certificate on the bulkhead, which showed that the motor-vessel Omero, built in 1956, was registered at Naples, Italy, with a stamp from the relevant authorities to prove it.

‘So?’ the barman responded.

‘So wherever we may be geographically, from a legal point of view we’re on Italian soil, and Italian laws therefore apply.’

Zen gave him an avuncular smile and an encouraging pat on the shoulder.

‘Think of this ship as a little island,’ he said in accents borrowed wholesale from the history teacher who had retailed the story about the Norman occupation of Sicily all those years ago. ‘An island temporarily mobile and detached from its home, but still subject to all the rules and regulations which apply in that state, of which I am an official representative. I therefore order you to reopen the bar sine die, on the aforementioned grounds of provoking a possibly injurious if not fatal breach of the peace.’

The barman gave a defeated snarl.

‘You sons of bitches really enjoy this, don’t you?’ he said, sliding the grille back up with a loud racket.

‘Damn right we do,’ Zen replied.

The Italian-speaking Norman materialized at Zen’s side.

‘Is it open again?’ he asked.

Zen nodded.

‘It’s open. And it’ll stay open until I give permission to close it.’

The foreigner yelled something to his companions, who immediately surged forward to the bar.

‘How did you do it?’ the Italo-Norman asked Zen.

‘How do you do this?’

‘Do what?’

‘Speak Italian.’

‘My grandmother was one of yous. I’m from Glasgow myself. In Scotland,’ he added, noting Zen’s troubled frown. ‘Came over in the twenties, never went back. But she brought me mam up to speak the lingo a bit, and she passed it on to me.’

‘And why do all your shirts have that word on them?’ asked Zen.

‘Arsenal? It’s a football club. We won a competition at this place where we all work, in Croydon, just outside London. Know where London is? Best sales team in the company. Free week’s holiday in Malta. Came over to Italy on a day trip, had one too many, missed the hydrofoil back. One of the lads is an Arsenal supporter. I’m a Celtic man myself, but he bought the shirts for all of us, so we sort of have to wear them. Would look a bit thankless else. Can I get you a drink?’

‘That’s very kind of you. A grappa, please.’

Zen stood there amid the swirling alien mass while the other man fought his way to the bar. He already felt very foreign, and very reassured. They — whoever they might be — certainly couldn’t get him here. In the centre of the saloon, the girl who had earlier been asleep on the quay was now dancing alone to some inaudible music. Her breasts, Zen noted with some interest, were even better than her legs.

The Glaswegian returned with Zen’s grappa and one for himself.

‘Never tried this stuff before,’ he said. ‘Not bad, and cheap too.’

‘Are you Norman?’ asked Zen.

‘No, Norman’s the one sitting on the beer supply. I’m Andy.’

‘Why is that girl dancing all alone?’

‘Stephanie? Well, you know how it is on trips like this. Couples form and couples fall apart. Hers fell apart.’

He looked sharply at Zen.

‘Do you want to meet her?’

Zen shrugged.

‘Why not?’

After that, one thing led to another with astonishing rapidity. Eventually they all ended up on the afterdeck of the ferry, under a clear sky and an almost full moon, surrounded by the benign vastness of the sea. Zen was getting on very nicely with Stephanie, who seemed both easy to please and also quite intrigued by this distinguished-looking foreign gent who kept trying out his incomprehensible English on her while peeking down her cleavage in a sexy but respectful way. Wit flowed like wine, and the wine — well, grappa, beer and whisky, actually — flowed like the softly enveloping air of the Mediterranean night.

The other noise, when it first became apparent, seemed at first just a slight annoyance, a minor case of interference which might disturb but could not obliterate the experience they were all sharing. But it persisted, and at last someone went to the stern rail to see what was going on.

‘It’s a boat,’ he reported. ‘Got writing on the side. C, A, R, A, B, I, N…’

Zen dragged himself away from Stephanie’s side and went to look. It was true. A dark-blue Carabinieri launch was closing rapidly with the ferry, its searchlight scorching the gentle wavelets between them. A few moments later, it was alongside. A rope ladder was thrown down, and a man swarmed up it from the launch.

Zen felt himself sobering up rapidly. He knew who had come aboard, and why he was there. Reluctantly he got Baccio Sinico’s revolver out of his pocket and hurled it into the sea. Then he returned to Stephanie. She said something which, like all the things she had said, he did not understand. He shook his head and clutched her hand tightly. She looked alarmed. He forced a smile.

Then he remembered the other piece of incriminating evidence. He searched in his pockets until he found the object he had stolen from the museum. It was a silver cross, with forked ends and intricate engraving on the surface. Zen pressed it into the palm of the hand he had been holding.

‘For you,’ he said.

Stephanie looked down at the cross, turning it this way and that so that it gleamed gently in the moonlight. Then her face suddenly crumpled, she turned away and burst into tears. Panicked, Zen looked around for the Italian-speaking man.

‘What did I do wrong?’ he demanded. ‘I didn’t mean to insult her! Christ, can’t I get anything right?’

The Glaswegian came over and spoke rapidly to Stephanie, then turned her back to face Zen. The girl was still weeping and making little sniffing noises as she spoke.

‘It’s not what you think,’ Andy told Zen.

The girl started to talk, seemingly not to the two men but to the silver cross cradled in the palm of her hand.

‘She says it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen,’ Andy translated. ‘She says she didn’t know that such beauty existed in the world. She says she feels ashamed because she doesn’t deserve to have it.’

At the end of the deck, adjoining the superstructure, a man appeared.

‘Tell her that no one deserves such beauty,’ Zen said quickly. ‘Tell her that it is indeed very precious, but no more than she is. Tell her to care for it, and for herself.’

He stood up as the ROS agent appeared in front of him.

‘Aurelio Zen,’ he said. ‘You evaded our plan of preventative detention and are therefore officially considered to be at risk. I am are here to accompany you back to Catania.’

Zen gestured defeatedly.

‘And if I say no?’

Roberto Lessi tossed his head contemptuously.

‘Let’s go. The boat’s waiting.’

And there indeed was the Carabinieri launch, lying about ten metres off to port, wallowing slightly in the softly bloated seas.

‘Excuse me,’ said Andy, in Italian. ‘He’s a friend of ours.’

Lessi gave him a hard glance.

‘So?’ he replied.

The Glaswegian smiled.

‘So, if you want to take him, you’re going to have to take all of us. And I’m not sure that we’d fit on that wee boat of yours. That’s always supposing that you were able to get us on board in the first place, which personally speaking I wouldn’t be inclined to place a bet on.’

The ROS agent turned furiously to Zen.

‘Tell this little prick to fuck off before I break his balls!’ he spat out.

‘What did he say?’ asked Andy ‘I can’t understand when they speak so quick.’

Zen racked his brains. What was the name of that other English team? Leaver, Leever… And what was the phrase that taxi driver in Rome, the vociferous Lazio supporter, had used?

‘He said that Arsenal are a clan of degenerate wankers and marginal know-nothings,’ Zen confided to Andy. ‘According to him, the only half-decent English team is Liverpool, and compared to Lazio they suck too.’

The Glaswegian spoke loudly and rapidly to his red-shirted companions, who dropped whatever they were doing and clustered tightly around the ROS man. The latter pulled out and displayed a police identity card embedded in his wallet.

‘I am a police!’ he declared in cracked English.

‘Is that right?’ Andy replied, plucking the wallet from the Carabiniere’s hand and tossing it overboard. ‘Awful hard job, they say’

The Carabiniere looked around at the towering Arsenal supporters with a furious but cornered expression.

‘You are all under arrest!’ he screamed. ‘Outrage to a public official! Surrender your papers immediately! You are all…’

At which point a whisky bottle slammed into his skull.

‘Liverpool, my arse,’ said Norman.

Stephanie giggled.

When thieves fall out read a sub-headline in the copy of the newspaper La Sicilia which Zen bought the next morning in Valletta. ‘A brutal strangulation concludes a successful break-in to the Civic Museum of Catania. The presumed killer makes a daring escape by leaping from a window and remains at large. A twelfth-century Norman crucifix “of inestimable value” is missing.’

Zen smiled sourly. So that’s how they had decided to pitch the story. But why was there no mention of Alfredo Ferraro, the ROS agent whom he had shot? And why hadn’t he been named as the ‘presumed killer’? He was sure that Roberto Lessi, the other ROS man, had identified him in that final moment before he leapt from the window, but there was no mention of this in the article. This was both good news and bad. Good, because it meant that they were not going to be coming after him openly, with arrest warrants and extradition orders. Bad, because it meant that he didn’t have the slightest idea what they were going to do.

The ferry had docked in Valletta at just after six o’clock that morning, following a night which from Zen’s point of view had been extremely eventful. Following the intervention of the English football supporters, the ROS agent had been placed in one of the lifeboats hanging from cradles along both sides of the main deck. At Zen’s suggestion, Norman had moved his beer supply to a nearby bench, and when the supposed Liverpool supporter finally regained consciousness, it had been made clear to him that the alternative to lying low and keeping quiet was another dose of whisky

‘And, frankly, I’m not at all sure that whisky should really be your drink of choice, Roberto,’ Norman had added, brandishing the bottle as if unaware that it was in his hand at the time. ‘To be perfectly honest, I don’t think you can handle it. I’m not sure you’ve got the bottle to deal with the hard stuff. Seems to go straight to your head. Personally speaking — and this is just my opinion, with which you may well disagree, as is your right — but personally, for what it’s worth, I think you should stick to beer.’ With which he split open another can of Nastro Azzurro and handed it to the still only partially conscious ROS agent with a significant grin.

Meanwhile the Carabinieri launch had come alongside, and two of its crew, armed with machine-guns, were searching the ferry for their missing colleague. Aurelio Zen was in a feigned clinch with Stephanie at the time, having explained the realities of the situation through the Italian-speaking Glaswegian. Stephanie clearly didn’t believe a single word of this rigmarole, assuming that this Italian was just trying to get into her pants. But she was prepared to play along, up to a point, and so when the Carabinieri officers passed through on their sweep of the boat, all they saw was a horde of drunken English football hooligans, two of whom were necking.

Had they persisted, the truth would no doubt have emerged in time, but by then dawn was breaking and Malta was in sight. A coastguard cutter closed in on the ferry and its escort, and over a very powerful loudspeaker demanded to know just what the Italian police thought they were doing, trespassing in Maltese waters. At this point the Carabinieri acknowledged defeat, withdrew to their launch and sped off northwards. Unfortunately Norman had also passed out, exhausted by the stresses and strains of the night’s adventures, and when Zen reluctantly disentangled himself from Stephanie’s embraces and went to inspect the lifeboat where the ROS agent had been stowed away, he found it empty.

Nor did Lessi put in an appearance when the passengers disembarked in the imposing harbour at Valletta, but this was hardly surprising. He could not arrest Zen on foreign soil, and since his identification papers were now at the bottom of the Mediterranean, he was not in a position to enlist the help of the Maltese authorities either, even if they had been disposed to be helpful.

On the quayside, Zen said goodbye to his seriously hung-over British friends and kissed Stephanie, who surprised him by putting her tongue in his mouth and then starting to weep again. He then changed some money and, after a discussion in very fractured Italian with a taxi driver, had himself driven to a small hotel at the top of the old town.

For a moment he thought he had hired a suicidal maniac, since the driver proceeded to turn out of the port area and start driving on the left-hand side of the road. But if he was mad, everyone else seemed to share his madness, and the short journey passed uneventfully. At the hotel, Zen took the one remaining room, a small single at the rear of the premises, overlooking what had once been a small internal courtyard and was now a deep, dank shaft filled with air-conditioning ducts, rubbish and cooking smells.

There had been no obvious sign that his taxi had been followed, but he knew that it wouldn’t take them long to find him. His Italian identity card had been enough to get him through passport control, but he had to fill out an entry card which would now be on file. He was officially registered as having entered the country, and it was far too small a country to hide in, particularly for someone with no friends and who didn’t speak the language.

His best hope, he reckoned, lay in that entry card. Persons leaving Malta legally would have to complete a similar exit card, which would also be filed. If a search for ‘Zen, Aurelio’ turned up no such card, it would naturally be assumed that he was still in the country. The resulting confusion might just be enough to buy him the time he needed. But first he had to find a way to leave the country illegally. With a heavy heart, he lifted the phone and dialled a number in Rome.

There was no answer, so he left a message.

‘Gilberto, it’s Aurelio. I’m in it up to here, and I don’t even know who with, but they don’t mess about. I can’t say any more on the phone, and I can’t give you my number, but I need help desperately, and after what happened in Naples you owe me, you son of a bitch. I’ll call again every thirty minutes until I get you. Don’t let me down, Gilberto, and none of your stupid jokes. This is deadly serious. And I mean that literally’

He took his shoes off and lay down on the bed, but with his head and shoulders propped against the wall. After a sleepless night on the ferry, exhaustion was starting to overcome the adrenalin which had kept him going thus far, but he could not afford to sleep until his arrangements were made. He turned on the television and watched a documentary about tree frogs until the thirty minutes had elapsed.

There was still no answer from Gilberto’s home phone. Since his recent legal problems, the Sardinian no longer had an office number, and Zen was wary of calling him on his cellphone, knowing how easily such calls can be intercepted. In the end he tried anyway, only to discover that Gilberto’s telefonino was either switched off or out of range. Back on TV, the tree frogs were mating.

It was another two hours before Gilberto finally responded, and he when he did he initially sounded distinctly flippant.

‘I thought you weren’t speaking to me, Aurelio.’

‘I’m speaking to you now.’

‘So what’s the story this time?’

‘I don’t trust stories any more. I’m too old.’

‘It’s no fun growing old. But as someone said, the only alternative is dying young.’

‘Can we stop pissing around, Gilberto? I’m in serious trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘I can’t tell you over the phone. We must do this on a strict need-to-know basis.’

‘All right, what do I need to know?’

‘First, I’m in Malta.’

‘Never been there. Are those Knights still around? I seem to remember that you had trouble with them some years back.’

‘Will you please shut the fuck up and listen, Gilberto?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Second, I need to leave as soon as possible, ideally this evening.’

‘I’m not a travel agent.’

‘Yes, you are, because the third thing is that I need to travel clandestinely. No tickets, no passport control.’

Gilberto whistled.

‘That’s a tall order, Aurelio. What did you have in mind?’

‘Preferably a light plane owned and flown by someone with a shady reputation. Take-off and landing at private airstrips.’

‘I don’t know anyone like that.’

‘But you have friends, and they have friends. Somewhere in that pyramid-selling scam you call your social life, there may be someone who knows the contact I need. Your job is to locate him.’

‘How can you know that such a contact even exists?’

‘Because Malta is, among other things, a notorious staging-post for a whole range of illegal import-export operations between North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Arms, drugs, you name it. And those people don’t fly Alitalia.’

‘I don’t blame them.’

‘This is not a joking matter, Gilberto!’

‘All right, all right, calm down.’

A distant sigh.

‘I’ll see what I can do, but it’s going to take some time.’

‘Time is of the essence. How long?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll drop everything else and get to work right away. Call me on my telefonino at noon and then every hour on the hour after that.’

‘We can’t discuss this stuff over a cellular link.’

‘Oh, I heard a great story the other day! There’s this guy on a train, making life hell for everyone around with an endless series of calls on his cellphone, right?’

‘Gilberto!’

‘Then this woman across from him has a seizure of some kind, and all the other passengers say, “Please, we need to call an ambulance at the next station, lend us your phone.” Only he won’t, see? Absolutely refuses to let anyone else use his cellphone. And…’

‘And in the end it turns out that it was one of those fakes. Yes, I’ve heard that story, Gilberto. Now can we get back to the point?’

‘Of course. Here’s the deal. If I come up with something, I’ll tell you so. Then you phone me about thirty minutes later on that landline number we used before, when I was having those legal problems. Do you still have it?’

‘I never throw anything away, Gilberto.’

‘Except your friends.’

‘I’m sorry about that. I probably over-reacted. I apologize.’

‘Don’t grovel, Aurelio. It’s not your style.’

The line went dead. With a yawn of immense weariness, Zen set the alarm on the clock-radio, took off his clothing and slid in between the sheets. Seconds later he was asleep.

At a quarter to twelve, he was woken peremptorily by the alarm, which sounded as though it had been triggered by a fire or a burglary rather than the clock. He took a quick shower and then dialled the twenty-one-digit number of Gilberto’s cellphone.

‘Nothing yet, but I’ve turned up some possible leads,’ was the curt reply.

Zen grunted and hung up. He felt refreshed but starving, having had nothing to eat since a ham roll on the ferry the night before. He was strongly tempted to go out and forage, but the risks of running into Roberto Lessi or one of his associates — a back-up team could well have been flown in by now — were too great, so he called the front desk. The hotel didn’t serve lunch, but the manager offered to send someone out to get Zen a snack.

This duly arrived fifteen minutes later, in the form of two pasties made with filo pastry and a filling of soft cheese or meat sauce. They were stodgy, greasy and almost completely tasteless, but they were certainly filling, in a depressing way. Zen seemed to recall that the British had owned Malta for several hundred years. The local cuisine had apparently been one of their legacies to the island’s culture.

Satiated but unsatisfied, Zen turned the television back on and watched an American thriller dubbed into Maltese. This was an interesting experience, since the rhythm and cadence of the language sounded wholly Italian, while the noise it made was one which Zen associated with the Tunisian and Libyan street traders who sold jewellery and accessories out of suitcases on the streets of Rome. To make matters worse, an entire Italian word such as grazie or signore would suddenly flash by, casting its brief, deceitful light on the prevailing obscurity.

At one o’clock, Gilberto reported no further progress. At two, ‘I think I may be starting to narrow it down, but don’t get your hopes up.’ At three, ‘Why in the name of God did I let you sucker me into this, Aurelio? I should have just let you go on not speaking to me. I should have encouraged you! Friends like you I can do without.’

And then, at four o’clock: ‘Done it.’

The next thirty minutes seemed to last several hours. Zen had been asked to show his documents at the desk, and had therefore had no possibility of registering under an alias. And there weren’t that many hotels in Valletta. If Lessi had taken the number of Zen’s taxi, established that it had not left the city, then visited each in turn asking after his good friend Aurelio Zen, he could be knocking on his door at any moment. If he had called in back-up, they could cover the whole island by evening. And if they or their patrons in Rome had persuaded the Maltese authorities to cooperate, they might already have found him and be waiting for him to emerge, so as not to cause problems at the hotel, which could damage the island’s lavishly promoted tourist image.

When Zen finally called, he was told that Gilberto hadn’t arrived yet, although they were expecting him, because the traffic in Rome was a disaster, what with all the roadworks, renovation and construction designed to equip the city for the twenty-six million pilgrims expected for the forthcoming millennial Jubilee year. Try later, he was told.

Zen hung up, yelled an obscenity and smashed his fist into the wall, leaving a dent in the flimsy plaster-board. Then he told himself not to be stupid, lit a cigarette to calm himself down, and called again.

This time, Gilberto answered.

‘You’re on, Aurelio,’ he said. ‘It’s going to cost you, though.’

‘I wasn’t planning this trip, Gilberto. I have precisely fifty-eight thousand lire on me.’

‘I don’t mean now, you polenta brain. The bill will be presented in due course after your return. I just wanted you to know that it will be in the region of five million lire.’

‘Jesus!’

‘This sort of thing doesn’t come cheap. I’ve had to grease a lot of palms and to buy a lot of silence.’

‘And then, of course, there’s your cut.’

There was a long pause.

‘I don’t think I deserve that, Aurelio.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It’s just with all this stress and strain I’m under…’

‘You’re grovelling again. Let’s get back to the point, which is that I’ve booked your flight.’

‘How did you do it?’

‘You lectured me about need-to-know. The same applies here. Briefly, a friend of a friend of a friend knows someone who has been planning just such a trip as the one you mentioned, to visit some friends of his in Sicily’

‘What a lot of friendship! I’m moved.’

‘To quote an ex-friend of mine, “Can we stop pissing around?”’

‘Sorry. To quote a true and valued and shamefully misused friend of mine, “What do I need to know?”’

‘Have you got a pen? These people are likely to be extremely nervous. The person concerned had originally been planning to leave at the weekend. For a consideration, partly in cash and partly in kind, he agreed to contact his Sicilian friends and rearrange the trip for tonight. But if you get any part of this even slightly wrong, he simply won’t show up.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘In the centre of Valletta, there’s a road called Old Bakery Street. Towards the bottom of the hill, it crosses St Christopher Street. Just after the crossing, there’s a set of steep steps leading down to the left. About half-way down there is a bar called Piju. Be there at seven o’clock this evening. Go to the barman and ask, in Italian, for a Beck’s beer. He’ll tell you that they don’t have any. You say, “Just give me a beer.” He’ll ask if you want Maltese or imported, and you reply, “Maltese is fine with me.” Got that?’

‘What happens after that?’

‘I don’t need to know, so I wasn’t told. One more thing. If these people find out that you’re a policeman, you’re dead meat. Understand?’

‘Only too well.’

‘All right, that’s it. Good luck, Aurelio. If you make it, give me a call as soon as you arrive. I’ve been missing you, you old shit. I don’t want anything to happen to you now you’ve finally got over our little misunderstanding.’

‘I’ve missed you too, Gilberto. I’ll try not to do anything stupid and I’ll call as soon as I can. Meanwhile, thanks for everything.’

It was only when he saw the tiny single-engined aeroplane that Zen realized that flying back to Sicily was going to mean…well, flying. He had been so preoccupied with other problems in the hours leading up to this moment that this basic point had completely failed to register. The moment it did, he also realized that the state of comatose indifference induced by the news of his mother’s imminent death, which had protected him through the turbulent flight to Rome, was no longer operative. He was sane again, and the only sane way to look at flying was to be utterly terrified.

‘What happens if the propeller falls off?’ he asked in a tone of forced jocularity as they taxied to the end of the baked-earth runway.

‘It won’t.’

‘But suppose you have a heart attack or something?’

The pilot stroked his black moustache.

‘Well, we’ll be flying low, to keep off the radar screens, so you’ll have about fifteen seconds to put your worldly and spiritual affairs in order. Not enough, probably’

A moment later, the plane was lined up, the pilot pulled back the throttle, and all talk became impossible.

By then it was past eleven o’clock at night. Zen had spent most of the intervening hours locked up in a stuffy apartment whose windows were covered by exterior grooved metal shutters which he had been strictly ordered not to open.

Shortly after half-past six, he had gone down to the reception of his hotel, settled the bill and ascertained that the bar Piju was no more than a ten-minute walk away. He then seated himself in a corner of the lounge from where he had a clear view of the entrance and lobby. If the ROS men did come looking for him, there was just a chance that he would be able to slip out while they were upstairs hammering on the door of his room.

In the event, no one came in except couples, evidently tourists, but he was still nervous about showing himself on the street. There was nothing to be done, however, and after studying a map of Valletta displayed in the lobby and determining his route, he pushed open the glass door and turned sharp left down a narrow, steeply inclined alley. It had occurred to him that the telephone line of Gilberto’s Sardinian friends might be under surveillance, and possibly that of the hotel as well. Of course, ‘they’ could grab him at the bar if they wanted to, but it had also occurred to him that they might prefer not to act so publicly. He had therefore located the steps where the bar was situated on the map, and then planned an alternative way to get there. This was not difficult, since the city was built on a grid plan.

And a very handsome city it was too, he thought, as he made his way along St Mark Street and turned left on to a long straight paved thoroughfare swooping downhill and then up again like a carnival ride. The buildings to either side were of pleasant proportions, the architecture sober and restrained, the material a golden sandstone which glowed in the late-afternoon sunlight like warmed honey. The balconies were enclosed with wooden walls painted green or left bare, which made a charming contrast with the stonework. There could hardly have been a more complete contrast with the tortuous baroque excesses of Catania, executed in the black solidified lava which had so many times overwhelmed the city. Although he was hundreds of kilometres south of Sicily, almost half-way to Africa, Zen felt quite at home with this form of urban planning, where all was calm, functional and restful.

At the bottom of the street he turned left and then immediately right, and walked up the steps to the bar. It was a small, poky place, obviously designed to appeal to a circle of regulars and to repel anyone else. Zen strode up to the bar and ran through his ritual exchange with the owner, whose jolly, tubby physique was belied by a pair of startlingly direct black eyes. Once their dialogue was completed, the man served Zen the beer, picked up the phone and spoke a few phrases in the guttural false-Italian of the island.

It was another half hour before his contact showed up. At first, Zen paid him no attention. Various people, all men, had come in and gone out while he waited, and this skinny, pimply, gangly youth seemed an unlikely candidate for a mission of this presumed importance. It was only later that Zen realized that this had been precisely the point. They were not yet sure of Zen, so they had left him to stew while they checked the comings and goings in the neighbourhood. Then, once they felt reasonably sure that he had come alone, they’d sent this expendable kid to make the first approach, just in case they were wrong.

The owner of the bar had appeared to speak, or at least be able to pronounce, some Italian, but the youth gave no sign of having any use for language at all. He appeared at Zen’s side, standing close enough in the uncrowded bar to draw attention to himself, then jerked his head sharply back and to one side and walked out. Zen duly followed. Under the circumstances, he didn’t bother paying for his beer. They could take it out of the five million.

They walked down through a warren of steps and alleys to a dock on the waterfront, where they boarded a small ferry. During the crossing to the other shore of the harbour inlet, the youth closely inspected each of the other half dozen passengers, but made no eye contact with Zen and still did not speak. When they disembarked after the short crossing, he took up a pose of stoic resignation near the top of the gangplank and remained there until all the other passengers had dispersed. Then he gave Zen another of his violent head gestures, like someone slinging water out of a bucket, and crossed the street to a blue Renault saloon. He opened the passenger door for Zen, who noted that the car had been left unlocked. Either Malta was an incredibly crime-free country, or these people enjoyed a level of respect which made such routine security precautions unnecessary.

They drove at what seemed to Zen a remarkably sober and steady pace — considering that his chauffeur was not only about twenty-two, but presumably also a gang member — up a wide street leading from the harbour to a sprawling development of apartment blocks with a vaguely Arab air: clusters of white cubes of different heights and sizes all jammed together in apparent disorder like a residential souk. The youth drew up by one of the entrances to this labyrinth, gave Zen another of his patented cranial swipes, and led him inside.

Despite the folkloristic appearance of the complex, the interior was completely modern and remarkably luxurious. They rode in a lift up to the fifth floor, where the youth opened a door — once again, unlocked — and gesturally jerked Zen through to a room to the left. He switched on the light, pointed to the shutters over the window and made a savage slicing motion with his right hand, looking Zen in the eye for the first time.

Zen nodded.

‘I won’t open them,’ he said.

The youth looked at him in astonishment, as though his dog had just given voice to a political opinion. Then he walked out, closing the door behind him. A moment later, Zen heard the lock engage.

The room was minimally furnished with a sofa, a chair and a table, all in what appeared to Zen to be execrable taste. Hiere was no telephone, radio or television, and the walls were bare. It was as neutral and impersonal as some hutch at a cut-price hotel on the autostrada.

Zen had long ago decided not to concern himself too much about those aspects of life which he could not control, and he certainly could not hope to control or influence his fate in this situation. Gilberto had come up with a solution to his problems, Zen had accepted it, and now it was out of his hands. He was still very tired after his night on the ferry and all that had preceded and followed it, so he lay down on the sofa, covered in some garish acrylic material. He closed his eyes, thought about Stephanie and wondered where she was now, and so fell asleep.

He awoke, sensing that there was someone in the room. It was the gangly youth, standing over him where he lay on the sofa. Half asleep as he was, Zen knew what was going to happen next, and indeed the head-jerk was duly performed. Zen staggered groggily to his feet and followed the kid out of the apartment and down to the street. He glanced at his watch. It was half-past nine.

They got into the car and drove out of the city along narrow, gently winding roads. There was little other traffic, and what there was proceeded, like them, at a moderate pace, giving way to other drivers where necessary and never using the horn or flashing headlamps. The light was fading fast, but Zen could just make out a crooked grid of dry-stone walling all around, enclosing small fields with the occasional isolated house.

The drive lasted another hour, broken by regular stops when the youth got out and scanned the road behind them, and then made a cellphone call in his incomprehensible dialect. So he could talk, thought Zen, lying back in his seat and smoking cigarette after cigarette. He had always had a good innate sense of direction, and by reference to his internal compass, the glow in the west and the rising moon, he soon worked out that they were taking an extremely circuitous route to their destination.

In the end, though, they arrived, bouncing off the tarred road on to a dirt track which they followed for another kilometre or so, before pulling into a large field with a metal barn of recent construction at one end. In front of it stood the tiny single-engined plane, and beside it a short, stocky man with a moustache, wearing a pair of blue overalls and an old-fashioned flying cap with flaps over the ears.

Without waiting for another head-jerk, Zen got out of the car. The man in overalls walked over to him.

‘Signor Zen!’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you. I apologize for the delay, but we needed to wait for dark and also make sure that you were unaccompanied.’

Zen held out his hand, then retracted it, noticing no equivalent gesture from the other man.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

The man smiled roguishly.

‘I will be your pilot tonight, as they say on the commercial airlines. If you care to step up here, I’ll start the engine and we’ll be off.’

That had been almost an hour ago. Since then there had been nothing except the racket of the engine and the occasional lights of a ship passing so close beneath them that Zen felt sure they must rip off their wings against its masts. But the flight passed without incident, until the pilot spoke over the radio microphone he wore under his flying helmet and produced a spectacular display below: plumes of reddish light spaced equally to form two converging lines in the darkness.

The plane immediately started manoeuvring, turning this way and that until it was centred on the strip of dark between the beacons. It dipped dramatically, causing Zen’s stomach to rise and his panic to return, and then floated down as effortlessly as a feather past a group of cars and a panel van and touched down lightly on a smooth surface. Well before they reached the last flare, the plane had stopped, circled around and begun to taxi back towards the waiting vehicles.

‘But that’s not your real problem,’ the pilot said once the clamour of the engine had died down again.

‘What?’ demanded Zen, stunned by this non sequitur.

‘The propeller falling off, or me getting a heart attack,’ the pilot replied. ‘Your real problem was arriving safely. And I’m afraid we have.’

‘What do you mean?’

The pilot grinned.

‘I’ll be straight with you, Signor Zen, since you’ve been straight with me. Well, not quite straight. For instance, you didn’t tell us that you’re a policeman.’

Zen felt the adrenalin rush like walking into a wall.

‘I didn’t think it was relevant,’ he mumbled.

‘It isn’t. It doesn’t matter at all, because in a few hours from now you won’t be in a position to tell anyone anything. When I asked our Sicilian friends if it would be possible to move the delivery date because I had been asked to transport a certain Aurelio Zen, they got very excited indeed. It seems that some friends of theirs are anxious to meet you to discuss the recent death of a friend of theirs. Name of Spada. My friends here were of course only too happy to be able to do their friends a favour.’

The plane drew to a halt beside the cars and the van. Figures emerged from the darkness. The door was opened and Zen told roughly to descend. He stepped down on to a surface which felt like tarmac. On each side, the lines of flares stretched away into the darkness of the night, illuminating the scene in garish hues. The van had backed up to the rear door of the plane, which was open. A team of about five men were lifting out large, plastic-wrapped packages and stowing them away in the back of the van.

That was all that Zen had time to see before he was hustled over to one of the waiting cars. A man of about thirty with shiny ribbons of thick black hair and a notable nose got out of the driver’s seat and approached Zen and his handler.

‘Search him, Nello,’ he said to the latter.

Hands patted him down.

‘No gun,’ Nello reported.

‘Give me your mobile,’ the other man told Zen.

‘I don’t have one.’

The man stared at Zen in total disbelief.

‘Well, actually I do,’ Zen went on, realizing that he was cutting a poor figure. ‘But I left it at home. I never use it, to be honest. The last thing I want is people being able to get in touch with me day or night, wherever I may be. I’m suppose I’m old-fashioned.’

Nello laughed.

‘You’re not just old-fashioned, Papa. You’re extinct!’

He grabbed Zen by the arm, pushed him into the back of the car and got in beside him. The other man got behind the wheel and gunned the engine. They drove off along the runway, which looked suspiciously like an autostrada, then turned right on to a steep dirt track down which they bumped and bounced. When they reached the bottom, Zen saw that the landing strip behind them was indeed a portion of a two-lane highway, elevated on concrete stilts and breaking off abruptly just beyond the earthen ramp which they had just descended.

‘What’s going on?’ he demanded in an indignant tone.

Nello laughed.

‘You’re a VIP, Papal You get met at the airport.’

The car turned left on to a minor paved road and accelerated away.

They drove in silence for almost two hours. Zen saw signs to Santa Croce, Ragusa, Modica, Noto, Avola, Siracusa, Augusta, Lentini… The fact that his captors hadn’t bothered to blindfold him almost certainly meant that he was going to be killed. Quite apart from anything else, he now knew the approximate location of the section of uncompleted motorway which the local clan used as a landing strip for its drug shipments. Yes, they were going to have to kill him, no question about that.

‘How do you light up the runway?’ he asked.

Rather to his surprise, the answer came at once.

‘Sets of distress flares hooked up to an electrical cable,’ Nello replied with a certain technological eagerness. ‘We rig it all in advance, powered by a car battery, then when the pilot calls in on the radio we switch on the current.’

‘Shut up, Nello,’ said the driver.

‘What did I…?’

‘Just shut up!’

A large commercial aircraft flew overhead, its powerful landing lights seemingly vacuuming up the clouds scattered low in the sky. Then Zen saw the signs for Catania, and had a surge of hope. In the city, there would be traffic lights and, even at this time of night, traffic jams. He might be able to make a run for it, get away from these Mafia thugs and throw himself on the mercy of the authorities whose protection he had so arrogantly spurned. They wouldn’t be too happy about his disappearance, of course, and still less about what had happened to Alfredo Ferraro. He would have to be patient, penitent and remorseful, like an adulterous husband, but in the end they’d have to take him back. After all, he was one of them.

Unfortunately for this pleasing scenario, the signs to Catania rapidly died out, to be succeeded by ones to Misterbianco, Paterno, and a host of other places which Zen had never heard of. The car was labouring like a boat in a broken sea, the road rearing up and spinning round. Apart from that, there was nothing but fleeting glimpses of the small towns through which they drove at speed, the two men now apparently more tense than before.

At length they reached another town, more or less identical in appearance to all the others. The driver drove through the back-streets to the main piazza and drew up next to a gravel-covered park dotted with trees. At the end, next to them, stood one of those imposing but uninspiring civic statues which dot the minor towns of Italy, commemorating some local celebrity who had the misfortune to be born there. This one was of a man in vaguely nineteenth-century garb, his right hand clutching a book to his chest and his left outstretched in greeting or appeal. Zen read the name on the plinth by the light of one of the few streetlamps which adorned the piazza. It meant nothing to him.

Meanwhile the driver had taken out his telefonino and was now speaking rapidly in dialect. If he and Nello were indeed ‘only too glad to be able to do their friends a favour’ by handing over Zen, they were doing a good job of concealing the fact. So far from being happy, they looked as though they were scared to death.

About a minute later a car appeared at the other end of the piazza and swooped down towards them. Nello nudged Zen.

‘Out,’ he said.

Zen opened his door and stood up. The air smelt fresh and cool. The other car screeched to a halt alongside the first, its engine still running. The driver got out and shook hands with Zen’s captor and they spoke quietly for a while. Then the other man stretched out his arms and exposed his palms like a saint displaying his stigmata. His chin was slightly raised and pushed forward, his lips turned down. The gesture, typically Sicilian, meant, ‘I couldn’t care less.’

This sealed Zen’s fate. They couldn’t care less about him. They didn’t even glance in his direction. If they weren’t bothering to guard or even watch him, it was for the same reason that the ancient Romans did not build walls around their cities. It would have been redundant. They already controlled the whole place.

The two men concluded their discussion with a handshake and Nello turned to Zen.

‘You’re to go with him,’ he said, indicating the newcomer.

Zen nodded and started to walk over to the other car. Without a word, the driver opened the back door for him, as though this were a taxi which Zen had summoned. His nonchalant confidence confirmed Zen’s worst fears.

Then, just as Zen was about to get into the car, his head lowered like an animal entering an abattoir stall, the planet suddenly went into labour. All four men shuddered where they stood, as though suffering sympathetic but lesser convulsions. There was a deep groaning which seemed to come from nowhere, the cobblestones beneath them trembled and the trees shook their branches in the windless air. Finally, just as these symptoms began to subside, the statue of the local celebrity turned towards them, its left arm apparently waving goodbye. Slowly, but with utter inevitability, it tumbled forward off its plinth and crashed to the ground.

Panic-stricken, the four men started to run, each in a different direction. Where was not important: the essential was to get away. After a fifty-metre sprint, Zen found himself all alone in a darkened alley, facing a tall, elderly man wearing a dressing-gown and slippers, and carrying a walking-stick.

‘Is everything all right?’ the man said in heavily accented Italian. Not in dialect, in Italian.

‘Help me!’ said Zen. ‘Please help me.’

The man inspected him.

‘Are you hurt?’

‘Get me out of here.’

‘Out of where?’

‘Look, you’ve got to help! The Mafia is after me. They kidnapped me. I’m a police officer. I need to make a phone call, that’s all. The authorities will be here in no time with helicopters and armoured vehicles. They’ll have the whole place surrounded in less than an hour, but first I must make that call!’

The man looked at Zen.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

Zen produced his police identification card, which the other man inspected by the flame of a lighter.

‘Please!’ said Zen as his wallet was handed back. ‘I just need to make one phone call and then a place to hide until my colleagues arrive.’

‘I think what you need is a drink,’ the other man replied.

‘So that’s where they landed you! Of course, of course. The project for that motorway has been in the pipeline for twenty years or more, and will doubtless stay there for another twenty. In theory, it’s supposed to run along the south coast, connecting Catania with Gela. At present it only exists on paper, but various people who own or have bought bits of land along the route will have been able to persuade the regional government to get a compulsory purchase order, buy them out, and then build that particular stretch to justify the purchase in the budget.’

‘But most of that land must surely be worthless?’

Zen’s host picked up the packet of Nazionali which Zen had left on the table, having chain-smoked three immediately after arrival.

‘How much is this worth?’ he asked.

‘There’s about half a pack left… Two thousand lire?’

‘I’ll pay you four thousand.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘Why should you care? Let’s say I’m desperate for a cigarette. At any rate, if you agree, this pack is now worth twice what it was a moment ago. Now then, let’s suppose that you suddenly realize that you don’t have any more cigarettes, so you offer to buy one back from me. At four thousand for ten, it’s worth four hundred, but I want to make a profit on the deal, so I’ll charge six. That makes the remaining packet worth five thousand four hundred lire. We’ve almost tripled the value of these cigarettes in twenty seconds, without any money changing hands.’

They were sitting in a small room on the first floor of a house which might have been anywhere from a hundred to a thousand years old. Facing them was an empty fireplace. At one end of the room, by the stairs leading up from the street, was a cubby-hole kitchen. At the other, a window open to the balmy night air, and another set of steps leading to the next floor. The other furnishings consisted of an oil painting showing a young man in military uniform, cases of books in four languages, and a stereo system from which emerged the mellifluent sounds of a wind ensemble. Zen took another sip of the whisky which he had been offered and tried to drag himself back to reality.

‘Listen, I really must make that phone call.’

His host shook his head.

‘I used to have a telephone, but no one ever called me, and on the rare occasions when I wanted to place a call, the thing always seemed to be out of order.’

Zen slammed his fist against his forehead. Why hadn’t he brought his mobile with him? You’re not just old-fashioned, Papa. You’re extinct.

‘Anyway, the point is that what applies to our hypothetical deal on your cigarettes also applies to land,’ the elderly gentleman went on. ‘Even more so, because they aren’t making any more land. So what there is is worth just as much as people will pay for it. And I imagine that the stretch where they built the section of motorway where you landed was sold at a very high price indeed. The buyer will have had friends in the regional government who informed him about the route of the proposed motorway. He buys the requisite fields, then resells them at twice the price to another friend, who then sells them back to him at twice that. Depending on how long they keep it up, they can then show legal bills of sale to the government agents, proving that that particular patch of parched scrub is now worth twenty or forty or a hundred times what the patch of parched scrub next to it is worth. And of course our friends’ friends in the regional government will ensure that, instead of rerouting the motorway, that price is paid.’

The whole house quivered briefly, setting the ceiling lamp swaying gently to and fro, shifting the shadows about.

‘An aftershock,’ Zen’s host said calmly. ‘There may be more. But what we really worry about here is that this could be the prelude to an eruption. The last time, in 1992, the molten lava almost reached the village. And that was just a leak, a dribble. If Etna were to blow as it did in 1169, 1381 or 1669, or in 475 BC for that matter, everyone in this village would be dead within seconds.’

‘So why do you choose to live here?’ asked Zen. ‘You’re not Sicilian, I take it.’

‘No, I’m not Sicilian.’

There was a long silence.

‘I will answer your questions in due course, if you wish,’ Zen’s host said at last. ‘But first we need to resolve your own problems.’

‘There must be a phone box in the village,’ suggested Zen. ‘Could you go down and make a call to a number I will give you and explain the situation?’

The other man again shook his head.

‘The only public phone is in the bar, which will have closed by now. I could go to a neighbour’s house, but this would be so unusual that they would almost certainly listen in on the call. I am eighty years old, dottore. Very soon now I shall move house for the last time, so to speak, but I do not want to have to do so until then. If it becomes known that I gave you refuge and then called the authorities, life here would become impossible for me.’

‘Can you drive me somewhere else?’

‘I have no car.’

‘So what are we to do?’ demanded Zen in a tone of desperation.

‘First strategy, then tactics, as my commanding officer used to say. I need to know a little more about the situation. For example, you say this light aeroplane which flew you from Malta landed somewhere near a town called Santa Croce, is that right?’

Zen nodded.

‘That was the first sign I remember seeing.’

‘In that case, the reception committee was almost certainly composed of members of the Dominante clan, which controls the Ragusa area, or of one of the splinter groups which is trying to take it over, such as the D’Agosta family.’

Zen looked sharply at him.

‘You seem very well informed on these matters.’

‘Village gossip. What football league ratings are to other cultures, Mafia family ups and downs are to us. You also said that the pilot told you that they were doing a favour to some people here who want to talk to you. That would be Don Gaspare Limina. This is his home village, and although almost all his operations are conducted in Catania, this remains his power base and the refuge to which he retreats when things get too hot for him in the city.’

‘He’s here now?’ asked Zen.

‘He’s here now. Can you think of any reason why he should want to meet you?’

Zen lit another cigarette and sat silently for a time.

‘Even better, I can think of a reason why I want to meet him,’ he said finally.

‘Excellent. But it may be dangerous, you understand. I can set up such a meeting, but I am not in a position to guarantee your safety.’

‘I understand. I’ll take my chances.’

His host got up and poured them both another shot of whisky.

‘They may well be better than you fear,’ he said. ‘You asked me why I live here. Well, one reason is that the people of whom we’ve been speaking remind me to some extent of myself and my comrades, many years ago. Contrary to popular belief, they are not sadistic thugs with a taste for violence. They do only what they need to do. If they need you dead, then they will kill you. If not, you will be safe. I’ve been living here for over forty years, and no one has ever bothered me. I’m not worth bothering about, you see.’

He raised his glass.

‘Gesundheit.’

‘You’re German?’ asked Zen.

The other man just looked at him.

Zen gestured in a relaxed way. The whisky was starting to have its effect.

‘I did my “hardship years”, as we call them in the police, up in the Alto Adige — what you call the Sudtirol — and I learned a few words of the language.’

The other man smiled.

‘Yes, I’m German. From a city called Bremen. My name is Klaus Genzler.’

Zen bowed slightly.

‘I can’t thank you enough for your hospitality, Herr Genzler. If you hadn’t taken me in, I would have been dead by now, and all for nothing. I didn’t know where I was, you see. I had no idea who these people were. But now I do, and I look forward to meeting them.’

‘And why would that be?’

‘Because I think they killed my daughter, and I want to find out.’

‘Your daughter?’

‘Carla Arduini. She died along with a judge, Corinna Nunziatella. You may have read about it in the papers. They machine-gunned the car and then threw in a stick of plastic explosive, just outside Taormina.’

Klaus Genzler smiled reminiscently.

‘Ah, Taormina! I haven’t been there in over fifty years.’

He’s gaga, thought Zen.

‘Kesselring based his headquarters in Taormina, in the old Dominican convent. I had the good fortune to be summoned there several times. Wonderful buildings, stunning views. Did himself well, the Feldmarschall. But I don’t think the Omina clan killed your daughter.’

Or maybe he’s not.

‘You don’t?’

Genzler shook his head.

‘I remember when the news of that atrocity arrived. There was a sense of fear and confusion. People here are used to terrible things happening, but they expect Don Gaspare to know who did them and why, even if he didn’t order them himself. They’re like children. As long as Daddy seems to know what’s going on, and not be bothered by it, then the children won’t be troubled either, even though they don’t personally understand.’

He took another sip of whisky and unwrapped a short cigar.

‘But the day that news arrived, there was a sense of panic in the village. I knew at once what must have happened, and subsequent enquiries have proved me right. Not only did Don Gaspa not order that operation, but he has no idea who did.’

Genzler lit the cigar and stared at Zen.

‘Do you know what that means, in the circles in which he moves? It means that you’re finished. Taormina is part of the Liminas’ territory. If something happens on your territory which you didn’t order, and you can’t find out and punish whoever did it, then you might as well retire and open a grocery store, because no one will ever take you seriously again.’

Zen nodded quickly. A mass of thoughts were stirring in his brain like a school of porpoises creasing the surface of the sea and then vanishing. He wanted to let this process work itself out before trying to assess the consequences.

‘So you were here in the war?’ he asked Genzler.

‘I was indeed. This village was our main forward position in 1943, after the Allied invasion. Many of my friends fell here. Most were not buried.’

He took a long draw at his cigar.

‘We — the Germans — held this part of the island against the invading forces. Our Italian allies were responsible for the north side. We were up against the British, they against the Americans, who had a secret weapon called Lucky Luciano. You may have heard of him. An expatriate mafioso whom they released from prison, where he was serving a fifty-year sentence, to persuade the Italians not to resist the invasion. And it was successful. Luciano got Calogero Vizzini, the capo dei capi at the time, to guarantee Mafia support for the Allies in return for the release of all their friends from the Fascist prisons where they had been languishing since Mussolini cracked down on them. As a result, we were quickly outflanked, despite having put up a vigorous defence, and forced to withdraw to the mainland.’

He smiled bitterly at Zen.

‘The rest, as they say, is history.’

Zen finished his whisky.

‘That doesn’t explain why you’re living here.’

‘Doesn’t it? Well, that would perhaps take too long. At any rate, I was captured later, during the battle for Anzio, and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp. When I got back to Germany and learned exactly what we’d all been fighting so bravely to defend, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to live there again. I gathered up what little money I had, added a little more left me by my parents, who were killed in a bombing raid, sold what was left of our family home and moved here. In 1950, this house cost me thirty thousand lire, including legal fees. I have been living here on the remnants of my meagre fortune ever since.’

‘Doing what?’ asked Zen incredulously.

Klaus Genzler shrugged.

‘Trying to remember. Trying to forget. Trying to understand.’

He threw his cigar butt into the fireplace.

‘Now then, shall I contact our friends and tell them you’re here?’

Zen took a hundred-lire coin from his pocket and spun it up into the air. Grabbing at it clumsily, he managed only to send it flying across the floor into the vast shadows at the back of the room, where it ended up underneath an ancient leather sofa the size of a car. Both men laughed.

Zen shrugged wearily.

‘Do it,’ he said.

The German went to the end of the room and leaned out. Taking hold of the metal clothesline strung across the alley, he jerked it hard three times, so that it clanked in its socket at the other side. After a moment, the shutters on the house across the road opened and a man’s head appeared.

‘Buona sera, Pippo,’ said Genzler. ‘Yes, wasn’t it? No, no damage here. And you? The statue fell? Well, I’m sure the mayor can get a grant from his friends in the regional government to have it put back up again. He’s very good at that sort of thing. Listen, I happen to know of someone who wishes to talk to Don Gaspa, and I am informed that the Don is equally anxious to talk to him. The person’s name is Aurelio Zen. Do you think you could make enquiries and… He’ll be out here in the street, in about five minutes. Very good, we’ll expect them soon.’

He closed the shutters and turned to Zen.

‘They’re on their way. Have you a gun?’

Zen shook his head.

‘Good,’ said Genzler. ‘I’ll see you to the door.’

‘I can find my own way.’

‘No, I’ll accompany you.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Herr Genzler.’

‘It’s not a question of kindness. Like this, they will know that I know that you are in their hands. So if they kill you, they will have to kill me too. As I said, I can’t guarantee anything, but it may improve your chances of survival.’

Zen stared at him.

‘But you don’t even know me! Why would you risk your life like that?’

Genzler’s gaze was an abyss of pride and anguish.

‘Because I am a German officer,’ he said.

Zen pondered the implications of this statement until his thoughts were cut short by the sound of several cars outside. Then came the knock at the door.

This time he was blindfolded: a thick band of fabric over the eyes, taped to his forehead and cheeks. He tried to make himself believe that this was reassuring.

They drove for about twenty minutes along roads which reared up and down and roiled about without sense or reason. No one spoke. There were at least three of them with him in the car, the ones who had come to the door and taken him away. No one had said anything then, either, even when the German had extended his hand and said, ‘Buona notte, dottore.’ They didn’t seem interested. Zen was just a piece of merchandise which they had to deliver, like those plastic-wrapped packages transferred from the plane to the van on the strip of motorway where he had landed, many hours ago.

At last the car made one final lurch to the right and came to a halt. There was a brief exchange in dialect, then Zen was shoved out of the car and hustled across a paved surface, up a set of steps, where he stumbled twice, and into a building. It smelt musty and disused. His escort marched him along a bare board floor, turned him to the left, positioned him and told him to sit down. Oddly, he was more afraid of doing this blindfolded than of anything else that had happened so far, perhaps because of some memory of a childhood prank where the chair is removed at the last moment and you land on your silly bottom, hurt and humiliated.

But these people were not playing such games. He touched down on a chair to which his ankles and wrists were immediately bound with what felt like nylon cord. The men then withdrew, leaving Zen alone in the room.

It was perhaps half an hour later that he heard the car pull up outside. Being unable to see seemed to have disoriented him to a point where it was difficult to judge time. Cut off from external distractions, however, the rest of his brain had been working much more efficiently than usual. By the time the clomping of footsteps on the wooden floor announced the return of his captors, he had reviewed everything he knew or could infer about what had happened in the past weeks.

He had also decided how to handle the interrogation which he was about to undergo. He would be respectful, and demand respect in return. ‘Don’t grovel,’ Gilberto had told him. Grovelling to these people, even though he was totally in their power, would be fatal. If they were planning to kill him, no amount of pleading would stop them. But if they came to despise him, they might well kill him anyway, out of sheer contempt.

The broken rhythm of footsteps came to a stop near and in front of him. It was as if the room had suddenly become smaller. There were at least six of them, Zen estimated. Silence fell. He sensed that someone was inspecting him, sizing him up, gauging whom he had to deal with.

‘So, Signor Zen, why did you kill our friend Spada?’

Zen noted the epithet signore, itself a form of insult in Sicily, implying as it did that the person concerned had no right to a title of more weight.

‘Why did you kill my daughter, Don Gaspare?’ he replied.

‘We didn’t.’

‘Well, that makes us quits, because I didn’t kill Spada.’

There was a brief sardonic laugh.

‘Spada’s brother-in-law is the caretaker at that museum. He lives in an apartment which is part of the building. When he got home later that evening, he noticed a window open on the first floor. When he went to investigate, he found Spada lying on the floor, his hands bound behind him. He had been strangled. That was at ten o’clock. He had been dead approximately two hours. You had an appointment to meet Spada there at eight o’clock. I understand that you’re a policeman, Signor Zen. What conclusion would you draw from these facts?’

The voice was deep, the accent strong, the man perhaps about fifty.

‘Is that all that Spada’s brother discovered?’ demanded Zen.

‘Isn’t it enough?’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘There was some damage to some of the exhibits, and the opened window.’

Zen deliberately paused before replying.

‘You asked what conclusion I would draw from what you’ve just told me, Don Gaspare. The answer is that I would have come to the same conclusion as you, if I hadn’t been assured by an eye-witness that another man had also been killed in the museum that evening.’

Several men laughed this time, even more sardonically.

‘I’m afraid we’re not in a position to call this eye-witness of yours, Signor Zen, even supposing that he existed.’

‘You don’t need to call him. And he does exist. He’s sitting in front of you.’

‘So you admit you were there.’

‘Certainly I was there. But so were two other men. One of them was strangling Spada when I surprised them. He drew a gun and I shot him dead. His partner escaped through the window. Evidently he returned later, turned off the burglar alarm which I had tripped, and removed his accomplice’s body’

Another laugh, slightly less assured this time.

‘Why should we believe this?’

‘Don Gaspare, Spada was strangled by a professional. Not the clumsy two-handed grip you see at the movies, but with one hand gripping the windpipe and the other pressed into the back of the neck. It’s hard work. Look at my hands. I’m a bureaucrat, I work at a desk. Spada was strong, vigorous and at least ten years younger than me. There’s no way I could have strangled him like that, still less tied him up before.’

A dense silence formed.

‘So you’re saying that another clan killed Spada? Who, the Corleonesi?’

‘They didn’t kill Spada. And I don’t think they killed Tonino either.’

The blow came first as an outrageous surprise. It was only when he hit the floor that Zen began to feel pain, and to taste the dense salty blood in his mouth. Hands picked him up with the chair he was bound to and set him upright again.

‘Don’t you dare mention my son’s name again!’ the voice said, very close to Zen’s face now.

Zen spat some bloody saliva on the floor and took a few deep breaths.

‘As you mentioned, Don Gaspare, I’m a policeman. I know how interrogations are conducted. I know all the moves and all the methods, hard and soft. If you want to go hard, there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But if you want the truth, we’re going to have to cooperate. You know things that I don’t know, and I know things that you don’t know. If you beat me up every time I mention one of them, we’re not going to get very far.’

A sound of shuffling feet.

‘All right, then! Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘Spada was killed by an agent of the Carabinieri’s Special Operations Group, the one I shot. His name was Alfredo Ferraro. His partner, who got away, is called Roberto Lessi. They wanted to dispose of Spada before he could talk to me, but they wanted to do so in a way which would make it look like a classic Mafia execution.’

He paused.

‘That’s how you do it, isn’t it? If you’re going to kill me, later tonight, you’ll strangle me.’

‘We might,’ the voice conceded lightly. ‘You seem very calm about the prospect.’

‘Don Gaspare, in the past week my daughter has been murdered and my mother has died. My own life no longer seems as important as it once did.’

There was a brief whisper of indrawn breath.

‘I had heard about your daughter’s death, of course, but not about your mother’s. I offer my sincere condolences.’

‘I appreciate it, Don Gaspare. Now let’s get back to the death of your son. You won’t hit me if I call him that?’

‘Goon.’

‘Before she died, Judge Corinna Nunziatella made a photocopy of her file on the so-called Limina affair. She evidently feared that the papers would be officially “disappeared”, as indeed happened. A handwritten note at the end of the copy mentions the names of the two ROS agents who murdered Spada. Apparently they took possession of the original file. The copy, however, was left in my safe-keeping, and after Nunziatella’s death I opened it. The evidence it contains is indirect, and at first sight not very striking, but taken in conjunction with the other recent events, I think it indicates quite clearly who killed Ton… who killed your son.’

A raucous guffaw.

‘We already know that! It was those bastards in Corleone, and we’ve already returned the compliment. We sent them a gift of some nice fresh meat from Catania! Right, lads?’

The other men all laughed loudly.

‘The Corleonesi didn’t kill your son,’ said Zen stolidly.

‘That’s ridiculous!’ snapped the other man. ‘We all know that they control Palermo — or like to think they do, at least. Tonino was found in a wagon of a train which had come from Palermo, with our family name written on the waybill. The message is clear.’

‘That train never existed.’

‘This is totally absurd! You of all people should know that! Your colleagues had it under investigation at the marshalling yard in Catania for weeks. For all I know it’s still there.’

‘A train existed,’ Zen replied, ‘and it certainly originated in Palermo. But the wagon in which your son was found was never part of it. All the indications are that it had been sitting on the siding where it was found for at least a month and possibly much longer. Your son was kidnapped in Milan on his way to Costa Rica. He was then brought back to Sicily and locked in that wagon, to which a fake waybill was attached. Once he was dead, a goods train from Palermo was stopped and backed briefly into the siding where the wagon was parked, precisely to make you and everyone else believe that this was indeed a message from Palermo.’

‘But if it wasn’t the Corleonesi, then who? And why?’

The voice was almost imploring now. Zen had gained the upper hand.

‘We’ll come to that in a minute,’ he said in a slightly condescending tone. ‘First, I’d like to discuss something else. We’ve talked about your son, Don Gaspare. What about my daughter?’

‘I already told you that that had nothing to do with us. We had no interest in killing that judge. I was informed that the DIA had closed the case, having accepted our declaration that the body on the train was not Tonino. It was, of course, but we prefer to settle our accounts in our way and in our own good time, without interference from the authorities. Anyway, they believed us. Why should we bother killing a judge who had been taken off a case which was no longer active?’

‘Nunziatella must have had other active cases, perhaps involving other clans. Maybe one of them killed her.’

‘No!’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘You don’t understand!’

The words were like another fist in the face.

‘Nothing happens on my territory unless I have either ordered or connived at it, understand? I run Catania. The port, construction projects, kickbacks, protection rackets, hiring and firing, everything! And most certainly any killings that occur. I wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t. And I’m telling you that neither I nor any of my friends had anything whatsoever to do with the murder of that judge.’

‘You used to run Catania,’ Zen said quietly.

An enormous silence.

‘Maybe I’ll have Rosario cut your throat,’ hissed the other man. ‘If only to show that I still have some fucking say about what goes on around here!’

‘Of course you do, Don Gaspare,’ Zen replied soothingly. ‘But killing me wouldn’t prove that. Just the opposite, in fact. I’m just a common policeman, not even a DIA operative. You would actually lose respect by killing someone like me. It would be like mugging an old lady.’

There was a low laugh.

‘You’ve got balls, Zen, I’ll give you that.’

I’m not a fool either. I think I know who killed Corinna Nunziatella, but I don’t have conclusive proof and so I had to make absolutely sure that you and your friends were not involved. But there was no need to get so angry. You could simply have given me your word as a uomo d’onore. I would have accepted that without question.’

‘So who did kill that judge?’ the voice asked in a mollified tone.

‘The same people who killed Spada. The same people who killed your Tonino.’

He braced himself for the blow, but it did not come.

‘The ROS agents?’

‘Either them, or someone very much like them.’

‘But why would they kill one of their own?’

‘Well, they might have done so because Nunziatella had stumbled on evidence undermining the official line on your son’s death. If one of the clans had wanted to kidnap Tonino, they wouldn’t have waited until he was in transit at the international airport in Milan to do it. And diverting a train is much easier if you’ve got the power of a state organization behind you. But as a matter of fact I don’t think that killing the judge was their primary intention. She was just an extra, a little ham on the bread, as they say. But it was very helpful to them, because it enabled them to make the operation look like a typical Mafia hit, and so disguise the identity of the real target.’

‘And who was that?’

‘My daughter.’

This time, the ensuing silence felt thin, diffuse and frail.

‘You’re making me feel old and out of touch,’ the voice said.

Zen smiled for the first time.

‘Welcome to the club. I’ve only worked it out myself in the last day or two. There’s nothing like being on the run to concentrate the mind. My daughter was installing the new computer network for the DIA offices in Catania, designed to link them to each other and their colleagues in Palermo and elsewhere. She told me that she had discovered an anomaly in the system, someone coming in from outside and spying on the status of the work in progress. She had also identified the “fingerprint” of the computer being used to access the system. That meant that it could be traced.’

He broke off.

‘Could someone give me a smoke?’

After a brief pause, a lighted cigarette was pushed between his lips. He inhaled urgently. It was a bionda, by the taste of it, probably American. That made sense. The Mafia would smoke the cigarettes they smuggled, and these wouldn’t be the low-cost, low-profit Nazionali. He took two or three puffs, then spat the cigarette out to one side.

‘Carla naturally assumed that the intruder was someone working for Cosa Nostra, so she informed the director of the DIA in Catania about her discoveries. Unfortunately, her assumption was almost certainly mistaken. For one thing, you and your friends don’t strike me as being any more computer-literate than I am. No doubt you could hire someone to try to hack into the DIA server, but I doubt that such an idea would even occur to you. More to the point, according to Carla, the DIA network hadn’t been forcibly entered. The access which the intruder was using had been planted in the system from the start. Well, we know who specified the system to be used by an elite judicial and law-enforcement department, and it wasn’t you or your friends.’

Zen tried to loosen slightly the bonds on his wrists and ankles, which were beginning to ache intolerably. To his surprise, the voice barked an order in dialect, and the cords were untied.

‘Thank you, Don Gaspare,’ he said.

‘So they kill your daughter because she knows that they exist. But who are they, and what are their aims?’

Zen rubbed his wrists, trying to get the circulation going again.

‘The short answer, of course, is that we’ll never know. But on the basis of the events we do know about, I think we can make a pretty accurate guess. Are you familiar with that famous trick picture, Don Gaspare? You can see it either as a vase or as the profile of two faces in silhouette. I think that this affair has been a similar trick. Everybody assumes that the Corleonesi killed your son, that you or some other clan killed Judge Nunziatella, and that some equally shadowy party di stampo mafioso strangled Spada.’

‘Well, it certainly looks like that’s what happened, doesn’t it?’

Zen smiled again.

‘But what would it look like, if it looked like my version of events? What would it look like if someone had an interest in promoting violence between the clans here in Sicily, and in showing that they are still capable of killing heavily protected DIA judges? What would it look like if that someone had ordered your son to be kidnapped and then left to die in that wagon, in such a way as to make the killing appear to be a message from Palermo? What would it look like if they had discovered that my daughter had unearthed evidence which would identify this someone, and that Spada was about to give me further details when we met that evening? What would it look like if all this were the case, Don Gaspare?’

There was a pause, then a low cough.

‘It would look the same as it does in fact look,’ the voice replied.

‘My point precisely.’

‘But who is this “someone”?’

‘Who knows? There must be plenty of people in Rome who regret the good old days of the Red Brigades and the Mafia wars. Too much stability is the last thing a politician wants. Who needs a strong government when everything is going well? Politicians have a vested interest in problems, crises and general unease. And if those things don’t happen to exist at a given moment, then they have to invent them. And that’s what this whole bloody business has been from start to finish — an invention.’

‘You don’t need to lecture me about the terzo livello,’ the other man replied drily. ‘But believe me, it’s dead. All our contacts are either in prison, in exile, or politically disgraced and powerless.’

‘The old Third Level, perhaps,’ Zen replied. ‘But there may be levels that you don’t even know about. The fact is, Don Gaspare, and I say this with all due respect, I get the impression that neither you nor the Corleonesi are quite at the cutting edge of organized crime here in Sicily these days.’

Footsteps sounded out loudly, stomping towards him. The voice said loudly, ‘No!’ The steps ceased in a sigh of mute frustration.

‘Forgive me, Don Gaspare,’ Zen went on. ‘I’m simply repeating what I’ve heard. And I’m all the more inclined to believe it, because it would explain why these people in Rome chose your two clans as subjects for their destabilization project. You both still have a high profile, which will guarantee lots of publicity in the event of another Mafia war breaking out, but the truth of the matter is that you’re both finished as major players. The real action now is in smaller places like Caccamo and Belmonte Mezzagno, and above all in Ragusa, where I was “met at the airport” tonight. Those are the people that the politicians will be courting. You and your friends are yesterday’s men, just like me. We’re all expendable, counters in whatever game they’re playing.’

He paused significantly.

‘And if you kill me, you’ll be playing their game.’

There was a mutter of voices, a subdued argument, a sense of suppressed dissension. Then the voice returned, quite close to Zen, and slightly to his right.

‘We’re not going to kill you, Dottor Zen. You have treated me with respect, and I shall accord you the same treatment. You have never set eyes on me, and the place where we are is nowhere near my home. You therefore pose no threat to us, although those pushy little squirts in Ragusa could be in trouble if you reveal the location of the landing strip they use for their drug runs. But fuck them!’

A wave of laughter enveloped the room.

‘It has been a privilege meeting you,’ the voice went on, ‘but for both our sakes I hope that our paths do not cross again. You cannot be my friend, and I would hate to have you as my enemy. We shall be leaving now. Your wrists and ankles have been freed. In your own interests, I ask you not to remove your blindfold for at least five minutes after we leave. If you do, and any of us are still here, we shall have no compunction about killing you. Once we are clear of this area, one of my men will place a call to the authorities in Catania and report your whereabouts. Goodbye, Dottor Zen.’

‘Goodbye, Don Gaspare.’

The herd of footsteps trooped out, and then Zen heard the roar of car engines. Soon they faded, and a perfect silence formed.

It was not broken for another three hours, much longer than Zen had reckoned on. He spent the time sitting on the steps of the abandoned farmhouse in which he had been questioned. The moon was up, but the only other light to be seen was a curved stripe of glowing red in the night sky, as vivid and troubling as an open wound. He finally realized that it must be the molten lava flowing down one of the many flanks of Etna after the eruption which had been signalled by the earlier tremors.

Then, at long last, other lights appeared: mere points at first, two fixed, the other mobile, weaving from side to side and up and down and sometimes disappearing for minutes at a time. Eventually sound was added to the spectacle, a low thrumming and a slightly higher and more abrasive grating. All these phenomena increased in intensity, until a car and an accompanying motorcycle swept into the farmyard and came to a stop at the foot of the steps. The man seated astride the bright red motorbike started talking into a two-way radio, and Baccio Sinico leapt out of the car.

‘Thank God you’re safe!’ he exclaimed as Zen stood up. I’m sorry it took us so long to get here, but our colleagues in the Carabinieri were worried that it might be a trap and wanted to make certain preparations, all of which took some time. Then, to cap it all, their car got separated from us somehow on the drive up. They must have taken a wrong turning, I suppose. But, oh, dottore! Why did you run off like that? Look how it turned out! All we were trying to do was protect you. As it is, you’re lucky to be alive.’

‘We’re all lucky to be alive, Baccio,’ Zen remarked sententiously ‘The problem is that we often forget it.’

They walked down the steps and over to the waiting car. As they passed the man on the motorcycle, he removed his helmet and put away his radio.

‘We’re cleared to go,’ he told Baccio Sinico. ‘We’ll be taking a slightly different route, via Belpasso. I’ll stay about fifty metres ahead. Keep my tail-light in view at all times.’

Sinico turned to Zen.

‘This is our colleague from the Carabinieri, Roberto Lessi. I think you’ve met before.’

The ROS agent stared silently at Zen, who nodded slowly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ve met before.’

Lessi replaced his helmet and revved up his engine. Sinico was holding the back door of the car open, but Zen got into the one in front.

‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ he asked. ‘They tied me up for a long time and I’d like to be able to stretch my legs.’

‘Of course, dottore,’ said Sinico. Then, to the driver, ‘Let’s go, Renato! Follow the bike.’

Zen lit a cigarette with trembling fingers.

‘But how on earth did you manage to talk the Limina clan into letting you go?’ Sinico demanded, leaning forward from the back seat. ‘They have a reputation for cruelty second to none. Their speciality is slow drowning in a bath of water followed by disposal of the corpse in one of the side vents of Etna.’

Zen opened the window to clear the smoke from his cigarette.

‘Oh, I told them a pack of lies,’ he said dully.

‘What sort of lies?’

‘I turned the facts of the affair inside out and suggested that some secret government agency in Rome was behind the whole thing. A campaign of destabilization and so on.’

Sinico gave an incredulous laugh.

‘And they believed you?’

‘I don’t know if they believed me, but they let me go.’

Sinico leaned forward between the two front seats and spoke quietly into Zen’s ear.

‘But you don’t believe this conspiracy theory, do you?’

‘Of course not.’

They hurtled along the twisting road, following the tail-light of the Moto Guzzi.

‘By the way, do you have my revolver?’ asked Sinico.

‘I’m afraid I lost it. I’ll take full responsibility. Fill out a docket for a replacement and I’ll sign it.’

‘Only there’s a problem, you see. One of Roberto’s colleagues has been killed. I think you met him too. Alfredo Ferraro.’

‘I seem to remember the name.’

‘Well, he was shot. Late last night, in that rough area just north of Piazza San Placido, where the whores and the extra-communitari hang out.’

Zen took another drag at his cigarette and tossed it out of the window.

‘That’s where they found the body?’

‘Yes, at about midnight. And the problem is that it seems that he was almost certainly shot with my revolver. As you know, we have to perform test firings whose ballistic characteristics are kept on file. They found one of the bullets fired at the scene, and forensic tests show that the characteristics of my revolver are identical to those of the murder weapon.’

Zen nodded.

‘Unfortunately I can’t help you, because the gun was taken from me much earlier that evening, just an hour or so after I left you.’

‘Taken? How?’

‘A pickpocket. You know that Catania is notorious for petty crime. I was walking down a street near San Nicolo when a woman stopped me and asked me for a light. While I was holding it out to her, a man pushed into me from behind. The next thing I knew, they had both disappeared down an alley. Your gun and my wallet had disappeared with them.’

‘Yes, I see,’ said Sinico doubtfully.

‘This Alfredo Ferraro probably saw the couple trying something similar in the Via San Orsola area. He challenged them, and the man pulled out your gun and shot him.’

‘I suppose so. All the same, it’s awkward.’

‘Don’t worry, Baccio, I’ll sort it all out. We’re alive, that’s the main thing. The rest is just details.’

Ahead of them, the red light had turned brilliant white, shining straight back at them from the other side of a small valley where the road curved down across a seasonal torrente, now a bone-dry mass of lava boulders.

‘Get a move on, Renato!’ Sinico told the driver. ‘We’re getting left behind.’

‘This is a dangerous road,’ the man grumbled.

Nevertheless, he jammed his foot to the floor and the car shot forward on to the low concrete bridge across the riverbed. At the top of the hillside opposite, the man on the motorcycle flashed his headlight on and off. An answering flash of light appeared in the darkness above. A moment later, the bridge exploded.

The motorcycle rider replaced his helmet and turned his machine around. It had been an impressive blast, even though they’d had very little time. The quantity of explosives used was only a fraction of the amount which the Mafia had used to kill the judges Paolo Falcone and Giovanni Borsellino. But this too would be perceived as a message. After all, Zen was just a policeman.