Cabal

5

Ever since his transfer to the capital from Naples, Aurelio Zen had travelled to and from work by bus. His removal from active duty at the Questura at the time of the Aldo Moro kidnapping had had no effect on this, since the Ministry of the Interior — where he had been allocated a menial desk job — was only a few blocks from police headquarters. Even the opening of the new underground railway line had not induced him to change his habits, despite the fact that the terminus at Ottaviano was only a few blocks from his house, and the Termini stop a short walk from the Ministry. But experience showed that twenty minutes in the tunnels of the Metropolitana A left Zen’s day spavined before it had even begun. The bus journey was by no means an unrelieved joy, but at least it took place in a real city rather than that phantasmagoric subterranean realm of dismal leaky caverns which might equally well be in London, or New York — or indeed the next century.

Tania Biacis had changed Zen’s habits in this respect, as in so many others. They spent about three nights a week together, absences which Zen explained to his mother in terms of overtime or trips away from Rome. But whether Zen had slept at the flat or not, he and Tania travelled to work together by taxi every morning. It was yet another aspect of the new arrangement which was costing a small fortune, but it seemed worth it just to have that precious interval of time with Tania before they separated to go about their different jobs at the Ministry. He was perfectly willing to pay, Zen reflected as his taxi crossed Ponte Cavour on the way to Tania’s that Thursday morning. The problem was his ability.

The simple fact that was he could no longer go on supporting two households in this kind of style, and what was the point in doing it if not in style? Mistresses were not something you could get on the cheap, any more than champagne or caviar. They were a luxury, a self-indulgence for the rich. If you couldn’t afford them, you had to do without. Zen couldn’t do without Tania, but it was becoming clear that he couldn’t really afford her either — unless he found some way of making a large sum of money overnight. As the taxi turned right along the embankment of the Tiber, he found himself wondering idly how much the transcript of Ruspanti’s phone calls would fetch, assuming that his intuition about the hiding-place proved correct.

The idea was absurd, of course! He couldn’t contemplate making a personal profit from a piece of evidence which would presumably make it possible to bring the murderers of Ludovico Ruspanti and Grimaldi to justice. Of course, a cynic might argue that there was no chance of the murderers being brought to justice anyway, if the issues involved in the case were anywhere near as extensive as they appeared to be. Such a cynic — or a realist, as he would no doubt prefer to be called — might claim that in this particular case, as in so many others, justice was simply not an option, and to pretend otherwise was mere wishful thinking masquerading as idealism. In reality, there were only two possible outcomes. Zen could sell the transcript, thereby solving all his problems, or he could create a host of new problems for himself by setting in motion a major scandal with repercussions at every level of society. A rational man, the realist might well conclude, should be in no doubt which course to choose.

The taxi drew up in the narrow street, scarcely wider than an alley, where Tania lived. Almost at once the door opened and she appeared. It was a measure of what was happening to them that while Zen would once have been glad of a promptitude which allowed them a few extra minutes together, he now wondered whether she was anxious to prevent him seeing who was in the flat.

‘I phoned Tullio,’ she said, slipping in beside him with a seemingly guileless kiss. ‘He sounded very keen. He’ll see you this morning at his office in EUR.’

‘What time?’

‘About ten, he said.’

‘Did you tell him who I was?’

‘Of course not! As far as he knows, you’re just a high-ranking colleague of mine at the Ministry who needs a favour done. Not that Tullio would care. He’s made a pass or two at me himself, if it comes to that.’

Zen inspected her.

‘And did it?’

She sighed.

‘Give me a break, Aurelio!’

It was a windless grey morning, humid and close. The taxi was now wedged into the flank of the phalanx of traffic on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Zen patted her knee.

‘Sorry.’

She flashed him a smile.

‘Shall we eat out tonight?’

He nodded.

‘I’ll be out till about eight,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we could try that Chinese place behind Piazza Navona.’

Zen grunted unenthusiastically. Oriental cuisine, the latest Roman craze, left him cold. The food was excellent, but it seemed to him an exoticism as irrelevant to his life as Buddhism. The way he looked at it, you were either a Catholic or an atheist. There was no point in shopping around for odd doctrines, however original, nor eating odd food, however delicious.

The taxi dropped Tania first, at the corner of Via Venezia and Via Palermo, then drove round to the other side of the Ministry, where Zen paid it off. Lorenzo Moscati’s jibes had made it clear that their efforts to keep the affair secret had been a failure, but there was still a difference between accepting that people knew what was going on and flaunting it in their faces. The porter ticked Zen’s name off in the ON TIME column of his massive ledger.

‘Oh, dottore! They want to see you up in Personnel.’

Zen rode the lift up to the office on the fourth floor where Franco Ciliani, a tiny balding tyrant given to Etna-like eruptions of temper, presided over the thankless task of trying to complete the jigsaw of staff allocation when over half the pieces were missing at any one time.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded as Zen appeared.

‘Ciccillo said you wanted to see me.’

‘That’s not what I mean! As far as I’m concerned, you’re in Milan.’

Zen gestured a comically excessive apology.

‘Sorry, but I’m not, as you see.’

Ciliani gave a brutal shrug.

‘I don’t give a damn where you are in reality. That’s entirely your affair. I’m talking about what’s down on the roster, and that tells me you’re in Milan. So when I get a call yesterday asking why you haven’t turned up, I naturally wonder what the hell.’

‘Who did you speak to?’

Ciliani made a half-hearted attempt to locate something in the chaos of papers on his desk.

‘Shit. Sermonelli? Something like that.’

‘Simonelli?’

‘That’s it. Antonia Simonelli.’

‘Yesterday?’ queried Zen, ignoring the little matter of Simonelli’s gender.

‘That’s right. Real ball-breaker. You know what the Milanese are like.’

‘There must be some mistake. Simonelli’s here in Rome. We met yesterday.’

‘I said you’d be there by tomorrow at the latest.’

‘But I just told you…’

‘Told me?’ demanded Ciliani. ‘You told me nothing. We aren’t even having this conversation.’

‘What do you mean?’

Ciliani sighed deeply.

‘Look, you’re in Milan, right? I’m in Rome. So how can I be talking to you? It must be a hallucination. Probably the after-effects of that fever you had.’

Zen stared up at the fault-line of a huge crack running from one end of the ceiling to the other.

‘When did the original notification come through?’

Ciliani consulted his schedule.

‘Monday.’

‘I was off sick on Monday.’

He suddenly saw what must have happened. Simonelli had summoned Zen to Milan on Monday, then decided to come to Rome himself to investigate Grimaldi’s continuing silence. He had then got in touch with Zen direct, but presumably his secretary in Milan — the officious woman Ciliani had spoken to — had not been informed of this, and was still trying to complete the earlier arrangement.

‘Fine!’ said Ciliani. ‘I’ll give Milan a call and explain that your departure was unavoidably delayed due to medical complications, but you have since made a swift and complete recovery and will be with them tomorrow. Speaking of which, it’s tough about Carlo, eh?’

‘What?’

‘Romizi, Carlo Romizi.’

‘Oh, you mean his stroke? Yes, it’s…’

‘Haven’t you heard the news?’

‘What news?’

Ciliani stuck his finger in his ear and extracted a gob of wax which he scrutinized as though deciding whether to eat it.

‘He went last night.’

‘Went? Went where?’

Ciliani looked at him queerly.

‘Died.’

‘No!’

Such was the emotion in Zen’s voice that Ciliani lowered his voice and said apologetically, ‘Excuse me, dottore, I didn’t know you were close.’

We are now, thought Zen. Trembling with shock, he left Ciliani and joined the human tide which was beginning to flow in the opposite direction, as those dedicated members of staff who had reported for duty on time rewarded their efficiency by popping out for a coffee and a bite to eat at one of the numerous bars which spring up in the vicinity of any government building like brothels near a port. Zen scandalized the barman by ordering a caffe corretto, espresso laced with grappa, a perfectly acceptable early-morning drink in the Veneto but unheard of in Rome.

He stood sipping the heady mixture and gazing sightlessly at the season’s fixture list for the Lazio football club. From time to time he took a stealthy peek at the idea which had leapt like a ghoul from the grave when Ciliani gave him the news of Carlo Romizi’s death. It didn’t go away. On the contrary, every time he glanced at it — surreptitiously, like a child in bed at the menacing shadows on the ceiling — it looked more substantial, more certain.

The pay-phone in the bar was one of the old models that only accepted tokens. Zen bought two thousand lire’s worth from the cashier and ensconced himself in the narrow passage between the toilet and a broken ice-cream freezer. A selection of coverless, broken-spined telephone directories sprawled on top of the freezer. Zen looked up the number of the San Giovanni hospital. The first four times he dialled, it was engaged, and when he finally did get through the number rang for almost five minutes and was then answered by a receptionist who had taken charm lessons from a pit bull terrier. But she was no match for a man with twenty-five years’ experience as a professional bully, and Zen was speedily put through to the doctor he had spoken to the week before.

All went well until Zen mentioned Romizi’s name, when the doctor suddenly lost his tone of polite detachment.

‘Listen, I’ve had enough of this! Understand? Enough!’

‘But I…’

‘She’s put you up to this, hasn’t she?’

‘I’m simply…’

‘I refuse to be harried and persecuted in this fashion! If it continues, I shall take legal advice. The woman is mad!’

‘Please understand that…’

‘In a case of this kind prognosis is always speculative, for the very good reason that a complete analysis is only possible post-mortem. I naturally sympathize with the widow’s grief, but to imply that the negligence of I or my staff in any way contributed to her husband’s death is slanderous nonsense. There were no unusual developments in the case, the outcome was perfectly consistent with the previous case-history. If Signora Romizi proceeds with this campaign of harassment, she will find herself facing charges of criminal libel. Good day!’

There were two columns of Romizis in the phone book, so Zen got the number from the Ministry switchboard. Carlo’s sister Francesca answered. Having conveyed his condolences, Zen asked if it would be possible to speak to Signora Romizi.

‘Anna’s just gone to sleep.’

‘It must have been a terrible shock for her.’

‘We’ve both found it very hard. They’d warned us that Carlo might not recover, but you never really think it will happen. He had seemed better in the last few…’

Her voice broke.

‘I’m sorry to distress you further,’ Zen said. ‘It’s just that I heard from someone at work that Signora Romizi felt that the hospital hadn’t done everything they might to save Carlo.’

There was no reply.

‘I was wondering if I could do anything to help.’

‘It’s kind of you.’ Francesca’s voice was bleak. ‘The problem is that Anna is finding it hard to accept what has happened, so she’s taking it out on the people there. And of course there’s plenty to complain about. Carlo had a bed in a corridor, along with about thirty other patients, some of them gravely ill. There are vermin, cockroaches and ants everywhere. The kitchen staff walked out last week after some junkie’s relatives held them up at gun point, and the patients might have starved if the relatives hadn’t got together and provided sandwiches and rolls. That’s on top of taking all the sheets home to wash, of course. Meanwhile when the politicians get ill, they go to the Villa Stuart clinic and get looked after by German nuns!’

‘If it’s not too painful, could you tell me what actually happened?’

Francesca sighed.

‘We had been taking it in turns to sit up with Carlo round the clock, so that there would always be a familiar face there at his bedside if he regained consciousness. Last night it was Anna’s turn to stay up. She says she dozed off in her chair and some time in the middle of the night a noise woke her. She sat up to find a doctor standing by the bed, someone she had never seen before. He seemed to be adjusting the controls of the life-support apparatus. When Anna asked him what he was doing, he left without…’

Francesca Romizi’s quiet voice vanished as though the barman pointing his remote control unit at Zen had changed the channel of his life. From the huge television set mounted on a shelf at the entrance to the passage, the commentary and crowd noises of a football match which had taken place in Milan the previous evening boomed out to engulf the bar.

‘Can you speak up?’ Zen urged the receiver.

‘… grew light… cold and pale… nurse was… told her…’

High on the wall above the telephone was a black fuse-box. Standing on tiptoe, Zen reached for the mains cut-out. As abruptly as it had started, the clamour of the television ceased again, to be replaced by the groans of the staff and clientele.

‘Not again!’

‘This is the tenth time this month!’

‘I’m not paying my electricity bill! They can do what they like, send me to prison, anything! I’m not paying!’

‘The government should step in!’

‘Rubbish! The abuse of political patronage is the reason we don’t have a viable infrastructure in the first place.’

Zen covered one ear with his hand and pressed the other to the receiver.

‘I’m sorry, I missed that.’

‘I said, Anna thinks that the doctor who tampered with the electronic equipment was some intern, not properly trained. She’s threatening to sue the hospital for negligence.’

Zen struggled to keep his voice steady.

‘Have you any evidence?’

‘Well, they haven’t been able to identify the doctor concerned so far. But Anna could have dreamed the whole thing, or even invented it to relieve her guilt at the fact that she had been sleeping while Carlo died. Such strong emotions are unleashed at these moments that really anything is possible.’

Zen asked Francesca to convey his profoundest sympathy to Signora Romizi and offered to help in any way he could. As he replaced the receiver with one hand, he reached for the mains switch with the other, and the bar sprang to rowdy life again.

Back at the counter, Zen consumed a second coffee, this time without additives. Like Francesca Romizi, but for very different reasons, he was sceptical about the idea of negligence on the part of the hospital staff. Carlo’s death had no more been an accident than Giovanni Grimaldi’s. From the moment Zen used his name in an unsuccessful attempt to access the Ministry’s ‘closed’ file on the Cabal, Carlo Romizi had been doomed. No wonder the hospital had been unable to trace the mysterious doctor who had visited his bedside in the small hours of the night. There was no doctor, only a killer in a white coat.

The demonstrable absurdity of this response merely guaranteed its authenticity. The comatose Romizi, utterly dependent on a life-support system, could not conceivably have been responsible for the electronic prying carried out in his name at the Ministry the night before. His death had been intended to serve as a message to Aurelio Zen. The Cabal had of course seen through Zen’s feeble attempt at disguise, but they had gone ahead and killed Romizi anyway, knowing that he had nothing whatever to do with it. It was a masterstroke of cynical cruelty, calculated not only to strike terror into Zen’s heart but also to cripple him with remorse. For it was he who had condemned Carlo Romizi to death. If Zen had chosen another name, or used his own, the Umbrian would still be alive.

These reflections were much in Zen’s mind as he arrived at the ponderous block in Piazza dell’Indipendenza which housed the consulate of a minor South American republic, three pensioni patronized largely by American backpackers, a cut-price dental surgery, a beauty salon, and the headquarters of Paragon Security Consultants. Zen was still too shocked by the reality of what had happened to work out the long-term implications, but of one thing he was absolutely determined. The file which had cost Carlo Romizi his life was going to give up its secrets. If that part of the database was ‘closed’, then he would break in. Zen had no idea how to do this, but he felt sure that Gilberto Nieddu would know someone who did.

Gilberto at first seemed something less than enchanted to see his friend.

‘No!’ he cried as Zen walked in. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!’

‘I haven’t said anything yet.’

‘I don’t care! Jesus, last time I agree to look at a faulty water heater for you, and what happens? Not only do I end up having to tear-gas the Carabinieri and then risk my neck escaping across the rooftops, but when I get home my wife assaults me with the pasta rolling-pin, accusing me of having another woman on the side! Well that was the last time, Aurelio, the very last! From now on…’

Zen got out his cigarettes and offered them to Nieddu, who ignored the gesture.

‘I’m really sorry about that, Gilberto. You see, I’d told my mother I was in Florence so that I could spend a few nights with a friend. We should all get together some time. You’d like her. She’s called Tania and…’

‘Oh I see! You sin and I pay the price.’

‘I’ll explain to Rosella…’

‘If she thinks that I’ve buddy-buddied you into covering up for me, she’ll kill us both.’

‘All right then, I’ll get Tania to call her.’

‘She’d assume that she was my mistress, pretending to be yours. Can you imagine what Rosella would do if she thought I’d tried to con her like that? Sardinian girls learn how to castrate pigs when they’re five years old. And they don’t forget.’

Zen blew a cloud of smoke at the rows of box-files and tape containers stacked on the shelves.

‘She’ll get over it, Gilberto. It might even be a good thing in the end. There’s nothing like jealousy to liven up a marriage.’

‘Spare me the pearls of wisdom, Aurelio. I’m up to my eyes in work.’

He bent ostentatiously over a blueprint of an office building which was spread out across his desk.

‘I need to see some classified information held in a computer database,’ said Zen.

Nieddu unstoppered an orange highlight pen and marked a feature on the plan.

‘I was wondering how you’d go about that,’ Zen went on.

‘Who runs the computer?’ asked Nieddu without looking up.

‘The Ministry.’

The Sardinian shot him a quick glance.

‘But you have clearance to that.’

‘Not this part.’

Nieddu shook his head and pored over the blueprint again.

‘I know someone who can do it. It’ll cost you, though.’

‘That’s no problem. But it’s urgent. I have to go up to Milan on the early train tomorrow, and I need to set it up before leaving. What’s the address?’

‘I’ll run you out there before lunch.’

‘I don’t want to put you to any more trouble, Gilberto.’

Nieddu gave him a peculiar smile.

‘You’d never find the place,’ he said. ‘And anyway, you don’t just turn up. You have to be presented.’

The new metro was going to be wonderful when it was finished, but then Romans had been saying that about one grandiose and disruptive construction project or another ever since Nero set about rebuilding the city after the disastrous fire of July 64. The national pastime of dietrologia, ‘the facts behind the facts’, was also well established by that time, and many people held that the blaze had been started deliberately so as to facilitate the Emperor’s redevelopment scheme. Nero’s response to these scurrilous rumours of state terrorism had an equally familiar ring. The whole affair was blamed on an obscure and unpopular sect of religious fanatics influenced by foreign ideologies such as monotheism and millennialism. One of the victims of the resulting campaign of persecution was a Jewish fisherman named Simon Peter, who was crucified in the Imperial Circus and buried near by, in a tomb hollowed out of the flank of the Vatican hill.

This stirring historical perspective, far from inspiring Aurelio Zen to a sense of wonder and pride, merely intensified his oppressive conviction that nothing ever changed. Being stuck for twenty minutes at Garbatella station because of a signalling fault hadn’t exactly helped his mood. The work in progress to integrate the grubby old Ostia railway into the revamped Metropolitana B line to EUR had resulted in the partial paralysis of services on both. Nevertheless, it would be wonderful when it was finished — until it started to fall apart like the A line, which been open for less than a decade and already looked and smelt like a blocked sewer.

The short walk to the office where Tullio Bevilacqua worked helped restore Zen’s spirits, although he wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting this to anyone. For both political and aesthetic reasons, it was wholly unacceptable to admire the monumental EUR complex, conceived in the late thirties for a world fair designed to show off the achievements of Fascist Italy. The war put an end to the project for an Esposizione Universale di Roma, but the architectural investment survived and, as usual in Rome, was recycled for purposes quite different from that intended by its creator.

The resulting complex — the only example of twentieth-century urban planning attempted in the capital since the First World War — had a freakish, hallucinogenic appearance at once monumental and two-dimensional, like a film set designed by Giorgio de Chirico for a production by Dino de Laurentiis. The vast rectangular blocks of white masonry evenly distributed along either side of the broad straight thoroughfares locked together at right angles created a succession of perspectives which seemed designed to demonstrate and also subvert the laws of perspective. Despite the crushing scale and geometric regularity, the effect was curiously insubstantial, abstract and ethereal, diametrically opposed both to the poky confines of the old city centre and to the sprawling jumble of the unplanned borgate on the outskirts.

Tullio Bevilacqua looked like a caricature of his brother, the same features exaggerated into an extravagance larger than life. Tullio was not just overweight but grossly fat. His balding scalp was beaded with sweat, his nose glistened with grease, his moustache bristled and curled in anarchic abandon. Seeing him, Zen felt his first twinge of sympathy for fastidious, pedantic Mauro.

Zen introduced himself as Luigi Borsellino and outlined the cover story which he had prepared.

‘The case is still sub judice, but without going into details I can tell you that it concerns a drug-smuggling ring which has been bringing in heroin in consignments of tinned tuna from Thailand destined for the Vatican supermarket. Such goods are exempt from inspection by our customs officials, of course. The box containing the hot tuna is then moved across the unguarded frontier into Italy for distribution.’

Bevilacqua raised his eyebrows and whistled. Zen nodded.

‘The problem is that the resulting scandal would be so damaging for the Vatican that unless we go to them with a watertight case they might try and hush it up. What we’re doing at the moment is assembling a jigsaw of apparently unrelated pieces, one of which consists of some papers which we believe may be concealed in the Archives. But since we’re not liaising officially with the Vatican, we have no way of getting at them. That’s why your assistance would be invaluable — if you would be prepared to collaborate.’

He needn’t have worried. Tullio Bevilacqua was one of those men who are fascinated by police work. He clearly felt thrilled and privileged at the idea of becoming a part of this investigation, even on the basis of such a flimsy briefing. Zen had been prepared for awkward questions and hard bargaining, but Tullio had no more intention of quibbling about the details than a small boy who has been invited on to the footplate by the engine driver will stop to ask where the train is going.

‘We believe that the papers have been concealed in or near the document filed under this reference,’ Zen explained.

He passed Bevilacqua a card on which he had written the sequence of numbers and letters which Giovanni Grimaldi had noted in his diary.

‘Do we know what it looks like?’ asked the new recruit.

What a thrill that ‘we’ gave him!

‘It’s probably a number of typed pages, possibly with a printed heading of some sort to make it look official. In any case, it should stand out like a sore thumb in the middle of all those mediaeval manuscripts. Don’t worry about the contents. The information we need will be coded. Just get us the document and we’ll take care of the rest.’

Zen hoped that Grimaldi would have had the sense to remove any reference to Ruspanti on the cover of the transcript, and that the document itself would conform to the standard practice, identifying the telephone numbers involved rather than the speakers’ names. At any rate, Tullio Bevilacqua gave every impression of having been convinced by the story Zen had told him, and promised to do what he could to help. He gave Zen his home phone number and told him to ring between seven and eight that evening.

At the intersection just beyond offices of the assessorato alla cultura, four sets of converging facades combined to produce a perspective of vertiginous symmetry. Zen stood motionless at the kerb, gazing at the seemingly endless vistas on every side. In the even pearly light, the outlines of the buildings appeared to blur and merge into the expanse of the sky. It was impossible to say how much time passed before the metallic grey Lancia Thema screeched to a halt beside him.

‘Hop in,’ said Gilberto Nieddu.

The Sardinian had changed out of the jeans and poloneck he had been wearing earlier that morning into a sleek suit with matching tie and display handkerchief.

‘You look like a pimp at a wedding,’ Zen told him sourly as they swept off along the broad central boulevard running the length of EUR.

‘I’ve got an important lunch coming up,’ explained Nieddu. ‘It’s all very well for you, Aurelio. You can wear any old tat. In business, if you want to be rich and successful you have to look like you already are.’

Zen flushed indignantly. His suits came from an elderly tailor in Venice who had once supplied his father. They might not be in the latest style, but they were sober, durable, well-cut and of excellent cloth. To hear them denigrated was like hearing someone speak ill of a friend.

‘You sound like that jerk I saw on television yesterday,’ he retorted. ‘He claims that you are what you wear.’

‘Falco?’ exclaimed Nieddu. ‘He’s a genius.’

‘What!’

‘Well he’s done all right for himself, hasn’t he? Which reminds me, have you got the cash?’

‘Of course I’ve got it.’

The envelope containing the five fifty-thousand-lire notes was safely lodged in his jacket pocket. At this rate he was going to be broke by the New Year. They left the confines of EUR and drove along a road whose original vocation as a winding country lane was still perceptible despite the encroaching sprawl of concrete towers and jerry-built shacks which continually spilt across it. Nieddu punched the buttons of the radio without finding anything which satisfied him.

‘Want to hear a joke?’ he said. ‘This priest is playing bowls with the village drunk. Every time the drunk misses his shot, he yells, “Jesus wept!” “Don’t take Our Lord’s name in vain,” the priest tells him. Next shot, the drunk is wide again. “Jesus wept!” “If you blaspheme like that, God will strike you dead,” warns the priest. They play again, again the drunk misses. “Jesus wept!” Sure enough, a black thundercloud covers the sky, a bolt of lightning sizzles down and strikes dead… the priest. And from the heavens comes a tremendous cry, “ Jesus wept! ”’

Nieddu turned off on to a dirt track running through an enclave of shacks and shanties to the right of the tarred road. The Lancia bumped over dried mud ruts and a collapsed culvert. Three toddlers standing on a rusty pick-up perched on concrete blocks watched solemnly as they passed by. Just before the track turned left to rejoin the road, Nieddu stopped the car.

Like its neighbours, the house at the corner had apparently been cobbled together out of materials scavenged from other jobs. The walls were formed from breezeblocks, roof tiles, bricks of varying shape and shade, and sections of concrete and tile piping, all stuck together with plenty of rough thick cement. The property seemed to have grown organically, like a souk, further sections being added as and when required. Some of these were roofed with tiles, others with corrugated iron or asbestos sheeting, one with a sagging tarpaulin. There were few windows, and one of these, its wooden frame painted a lurid shade of puce, was nailed to the outside of the wall, presumably for decorative effect. The house was surrounded by a large expanse of bare earth, every growing thing having been consumed by the pigs and goats which roamed the property freely except for a small fenced-off area of kitchen garden. The entire lot was surrounded by a mesh fence against which two savage-looking mongrels were hurling themselves, their fangs bared at the intruders.

Nieddu locked the car, having first set and tested an alarm which briefly silenced the dogs. As he and Zen walked up to the gate they renewed their aggressive clamour, only to be stilled again, this time by a voice from inside the house. The front door opened and a shapeless, ageless creature appeared on the step. It was wearing a long robe of bright yellow silk, a crimson sash and a tiara set with green, blue and red stones.

Gilberto Nieddu raised his right hand in a gesture of salutation.

‘Peace be with you, signora!’

‘And with you.’

The voice was loud, coarse, hopelessly at odds with the archaic formulas of greeting.

‘We would fain speak with him that abideth here, yea, even with Mago,’ intoned Gilberto in a fruity tone, before adding prosaically, ‘I phoned earlier this morning.’

The figure screamed incomprehensible abuse at the dogs, who looked as though they might burst into tears at any moment, and slunk off to the rear of the property. Gilberto opened the gate and led the way across the yard to the door where the robed figure stood to one side, gesturing to them to enter.

The interior of the house was cool and dark and smelt strongly of animal odours. They walked along a passage which twisted and turned past a succession of open doorways. In one room a young man stripped to his underpants lay asleep on an unmade bed, in another an elderly man pored over a newspaper with a magnifying glass, in a third two teenagers wearing crinkly black acrylic shell suits with bold coloured panels sat watching a television set on top of which a cockerel perched, watching them in turn.

The next doorway was covered by a heavy velvet curtain.

‘Make ready your offering,’ hissed their guide.

Nieddu nudged Zen, who produced the envelope containing a quarter of a million lire. A plump hand appeared, its slug-like fingers bedecked with an assortment of jewelled rings, and the envelope vanished into the folds of the yellow robe.

‘Wait here while I intercede with Mago, that he may suffer you to enter in unto him.’

The creature drew back one edge of the curtain a little, releasing an overpowering whiff of fetor, and slipped inside. The curtain dropped into place again.

‘My grandfather used to move his bowels first thing every morning,’ Nieddu remarked conversationally. ‘Afterwards, he’d inspect the result carefully, then go outside and eat the appropriate herb or vegetable, raw, with the dirt still on it. He lived to be a hundred and four. He saw Garibaldi once.’

There were muffled voices from behind the curtain, which twitched aside to reveal the robed figure.

‘Mago is graciously pleased to grant your request for an audience.’

As the two men stepped inside, the curtain fell shut behind them, leaving them in a darkness which was total except for a glow emanating from the far side of the room. Nauseating odours of unwashed flesh, stale sweat and spilt urine made the air almost unbreathable. As Zen’s eyes gradually adjusted, he made out the reclining figure bathed in the toneless radiance.

‘Hi, Gilberto!’

‘Nicolo! How’s it going?’

Nieddu put his arm around Zen, forcing him forwards.

‘Let me introduce a friend of mine. This is Aurelio. Aurelio, meet Nicolo.’

Propped up in bed lay a teenage boy with delicate features, flawless pale skin and fine dark hair. His big expressive eyes rested briefly on Zen, and his slender hand stirred in welcome from the keyboard where it had been resting. A length of coiled wire connected the keyboard to a stack of electronic equipment on a table beside the bed. On an old chest of drawers at the foot of the bed stood a video screen.

‘Aurelio’s got rather an amusing little puzzle for you,’ said Nieddu.

‘Oh goody!’ the boy cried gleefully. ‘It’s been a bit boring lately. Is it like that one I did for you last month, Gilberto, the one where you wanted to find out how much money…?’

‘No, no,’ Nieddu interrupted, ‘it’s nothing to do with that at all. Aurelio wants to break into a database at the Ministry of the Interior.’

The boy’s face fell.

‘Government systems are easy peasy.’

Nieddu nudged Zen.

‘Tell Nicolo what you want to know, Aurelio.’

Zen was busy trying to block his nasal passages against the pervading stench.

‘I want a copy of a confidential file on an organization called the Cabal.’

The supine figure fluttered his fingers over the keyboard like a blind man reading braille.

‘Like that?’ asked Nicolo.

Zen followed his gaze to the glowing screen, which now read CABAL. He nodded.

‘It’s in a part of the database which you need special security clearance to get into,’ Zen explained. ‘The problem is that it’s quite urgent. Have you any idea how long it might take?’

Nicolo gave a contemptuous sniff.

‘I could get the system on-line while you wait, but if this is restricted-access data that isn’t going to help.’

He stared at the screen in silence for a while.

‘There are various ways we could do it,’ he mused. ‘There are probably a few guest passwords left lying around in the system. We might be able to use one of those.’

Zen shook his head.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, let’s say some VIP like Craxi comes to visit the place, they’ll set up a password customized just for him, for example…’

‘ Duce,’ suggested Nieddu.

Zen laughed. Bettino Craxi, the leader of the Socialist Party, was notoriously sensitive about comments likening his appearance and style to that of Benito Mussolini. Nicolo paid no attention to the joke.

‘Yes, that would do. After the visit, the guest password is supposed to be erased, but half the time people forget and it’s left sitting in the control system, waiting to be used. And it’s easier to guess a password than you might think. They have to be relatively straightforward, otherwise the designated users can’t remember them. Anyway, that’s one possibility. Another would be to run a key-stroke-capture programme, but if this level is classified then it may be accessed relatively infrequently, so that would take time.’

‘I need to know in the next day or two,’ Zen told him.

Nicolo nodded.

‘In that case, we’d better go in via Brussels. I cracked the EEC system last month. This mate of mine in Glasgow and I had a bet with the Chaos crowd in Hamburg to see which of us could get in there first and leave a rude message for the others to find. We won. From Brussels we can log on to the anti-terrorist data pool, and then access the Ministry from say London or Madrid. That way we circumvent the whole password procedure. If you’re on-line from a high-level international source like that, you come in with automatic authorization.’

Zen nodded as if all this made perfect sense.

‘Oh, and just one other thing,’ he said. ‘If you do manage to access this area of the computer, I’d like to see the file on an official named Zen. Aurelio Zen.’

Nieddu looked at him sharply but said nothing.

‘Zen,’ said Nicolo, spelling the name on the screen. ‘I’ll get to work on it right away. Give me a ring tomorrow. With any luck I should have something by then.’

Gilberto bent over the bed and handed something to the boy, who slipped it hastily under the covers with a guilty grin as the curtain drew aside again and the robed figure reappeared to usher the visitors out.

Back in the car, Zen burst into the hysterical laughter he had been suppressing. Nieddu grinned as he slalomed the Lancia through the twists and turns of the narrow country road.

‘I know, I know! But believe me, Nicolo’s the best hacker in Italy, and one of the best in Europe. He’s done things for me I didn’t believe were possible. And when he says he’ll get to work right away, he means exactly that. The boy lives and breathes computers. He’s capable of going for forty-eight hours without sleep when he’s on the job.’

‘But that… thing in the fancy dress!’

‘That’s his grandmother. Nicolo was born with a spinal deformity so severe he wasn’t expected to live. The family’s from a village near Isernia. Nicolo’s parents had their hands full working the land and looking after their other seven children, so they handed him over to Adelaide, who’d moved up here to Rome with her other daughter. One of the grandsons was given a computer for Christmas, but he couldn’t figure out how to work it properly, so they passed it on to Nicolo. The rest is history.’

‘But what’s all this Mago business?’ demanded Zen.

Nieddu laughed.

‘Adelaide thinks the whole thing is a con. Well, what’s she supposed to think? Here’s this crippled adolescent invalid, never leaves his bed, can’t control his bladder, kicks and screams when she tries to change the sheets, yet is supposedly capable of roaming the world at the speed of light, dodging in and out of buildings in Amsterdam, Paris or New York and bringing back accounts, sales figures, medical records or personnel files. I mean come on! I’m in the electronics business and even I find it barely credible. What’s a sixty-year-old peasant woman from the Molise to make of it all? Yet the punters keep rolling up to the door and pressing bundles of banknotes into her hand! It’s a scam, she thinks, but it’s a bloody good one. So she’s doing her bit to help it along by dressing up like a sorcerer’s assistant.’

Zen lit cigarettes for them both.

‘What did you give the boy at the end?’

‘Butterscotch. It’s some sort of speciality from Scotland. This friend of his in Glasgow — they’ve never met, needless to say — sent him a packet, and now Nicolo can’t get enough. I’ve bought a supply from a specialist shop in Via Veneto and I take him some every time I go.’

They had reached the Via Appia Nuova, and Gilberto turned left, heading back into the city. Zen felt totally disoriented at the sight of the shiny cars and modern shopping centres, as though he’d awakened from a dream more real than the reality which surrounded him.

‘So what is this Cabal?’ Nieddu said suddenly. ‘It was mentioned in that anonymous letter to the papers about the Ruspanti affair, wasn’t it? Are you still investigating that?’

‘No, this is private enterprise.’

Nieddu glanced at him.

‘So what is it?’

‘Oh, something to do with the Knights of Malta,’ Zen replied vaguely.

Nieddu shook his head.

‘Bad news, Aurelio. Bad news.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well for a start-off, the Knights of Malta work hand in glove with the American Central Intelligence Agency and with our own Secret Services.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I get around, Aurelio. I keep my ears open. Now I don’t know what you mean by private enterprise, but if you’re thinking of trying anything at all risky, I would think again. From what I’ve heard, some of the stuff the Order of Malta have been involved in, especially in South America, makes Gelli and the P 2 look small-time.’

They drove in silence for a while. Zen felt his spirits sink as the city tightened its stranglehold around them once more.

‘Like what?’ he asked.

‘Like funding the Nicaraguan Contras and mixing with Colombian drug barons,’ Nieddu replied promptly. ‘You remember the bomb which brought down that plane last year, killing a leading member of the Brazilian Indian Rights movement? Every item of luggage had been through a strict security check, except for a diplomatic pouch supposedly carrying documents to one of the Order’s consulates.’

Zen forced a laugh.

‘Come on, Gilberto! This is like claiming that Leonardo Sciascia was a right-wing stooge because his name is an anagram of CIA, CIA and SS! The Order of Malta is a respectable charity organization.’

Nieddu shrugged.

‘It’s your life, Aurelio. Just don’t blame me if you end up under that train to Milan instead of on it.’

Tania Biacis had said that she wouldn’t be home until eight o’clock, so Zen got there at six thirty. This time there were no problems with the electricity, but as he pushed the button of the entry-phone to make sure that the flat was in fact unoccupied, Zen couldn’t help recalling the night when Ludovico Ruspanti had died and all the lights went out. As the darkness pressed in on him, Zen had thought of his colleague Carlo Romizi. That association of ideas now seemed sinister and emblematic.

There was no answer from the entry-phone, and the unshuttered windows of the top-floor flat were dark. Zen let himself in and trudged upstairs. On each landing, the front doors of the other apartments emitted tantalizing glints of light and snatches of conversation. Zen ignored them like the covers of books he knew he would never read, his mind on other intrigues, other mysteries. A series of loud raps at the front door of Tania’s flat brought no response, so Zen got out the other key and unlocked the door.

Once inside, he turned on the hall light and checked his watch. He had plenty of time to search the flat and then retire to the local bar-cum-pizzeria, run by a friendly Neapolitan couple, before returning at about ten past eight for his dinner date with the unsuspecting Tania. First of all, though, he phoned his mother to make sure that Maria Grazia had packed his suitcase. His train left at seven the next morning, and he didn’t want to have to do it when he got home.

‘There’s a problem!’ his mother told him. ‘I told Maria Grazia to pack the dark-blue suit but she said she couldn’t find it! She wanted to pack the black one or the dark-grey, but I said no, the black is for funerals, God forbid, and the grey one for marriages and First Communions. Only the blue will do, but we can’t find it anywhere, I don’t know where it’s got to…’

‘I’m wearing it, mamma.’

‘… unless we find it you won’t be able to go. We can’t have you appearing at an official function looking less than your best…’

‘Mamma, I’m wearing the blue suit today!’

‘… so important to make a good impression if you want to get ahead, I always say. People judge you by your clothes, Aurelio, and if you’re inappropriately dressed it doesn’t matter what you do…’

‘Mamma!!!’

‘… watching on television while I was at Lucrezia’s yesterday, ever so nice, and talented too! He’s written this book called You Are What You Wear, which is precisely what I’ve been trying to say all along, not that anyone ever has me on TV or even listens to me for that…’

Zen depressed the rest of the telephone, cutting the connection. He counted slowly to ten, then dialled again.

‘Sorry, mamma, we must have got cut off somehow. Listen, apart from the blue suit, is my case packed?’

‘All except your suit, yes. We looked everywhere, Maria Grazia and I, but we just couldn’t find it. Perhaps it’s at the cleaners, I said, but she…’

‘I’ve got to go now, mamma. I’ll be back late. Don’t wait up for me.’

‘Oh listen, Aurelio, I almost forgot, someone phoned for you. They were going to ring again tomorrow but I told them you were going to Milan on the early train and they said they needed to speak to you urgently and so they gave me a number you’re to ring at seven thirty tonight.’

‘Who was it, mamma?’

‘I don’t remember if he gave a name, but he said it was about something you had for sale. It’s not any of the family belongings, I hope?’

Zen felt his heart beating quickly.

‘No, no. No, it’s just something to do with work. Give me the number.’

He noted down the seven digits and stared at them for some time before setting to work. Like a burglar, he made his way steadily through the flat, turning out drawers and searching cupboards, wardrobes and shelves. He became much better acquainted with Tania’s taste in clothes and jewellery, including a number of unfamiliar items bearing designer labels which even Zen had heard of. He had been allowed to see the Falco sweater, but the others had been concealed from him. None, he reckoned, could have cost much less than half a million lire.

As he passed by the extension phone in the hallway, he had an idea. He dialled the Ministry, quoted the Rome number which his mother had passed on, and asked them to find out the subscriber’s name and address. Then he went into the kitchen. Spreading an old newspaper over the floor, he lifted the plastic rubbish sack out of its bin and emptied out the contents. When the phone rang, he was on his hands and knees, separating long white worms of cold spaghetti from the whiffy mess in which they were breeding, poring over fish bones, separating scraps of orange peel from the gutted hulks of burst tomatoes. Wiping his hands quickly on a towel, he took the call in the hallway. It was the Ministry with the information he had requested.

‘The number is a public call-box, dottore, in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace. The address is…’

‘It’s all right, I know the address.’

‘Very good, dottore. Will that be all?’

Zen closed his eyes.

‘No. Contact the Questura and have a man sent round there to watch the phone. He’s to take a full description of anyone using it around seven thirty. If the person is a guest, he’s to identify him. If not, follow him.’

Back in the kitchen, he resumed his analysis of the mess on the floor. Deep in the ripest puree of all, which had been fermenting for days at the bottom of the sack, he found the first scrap of paper. Gradually he recovered the others, one by one, from a glutinous paste of coffee grounds moistened with the snot of bad egg white. In the end he traced all but two of the sixteen irregular patches into which the sheet had been torn, and carefully pieced it together again on the kitchen counter.

Dear Tania, It’s great news that you can make it on the 27th. Let me know which flight you’ll be on and I’ll meet you. I have to take my wife to the opera that evening, but we can have lunch and then spend the afternoon together. I’m really looking forward to it. All the best, Primo

Zen crunched the fragments into a clammy wodge which he tossed back on to the pile of smelly rubbish. Then he rolled up the sheets of newspaper and stuffed the bundles back into the plastic sack. The 27th was the following Saturday, when Tania claimed she was going back to Udine to spend the weekend with her cousin. When the rubbish was bagged, he opened the window to air out the kitchen. It was just after a quarter past seven, time to find out if his hunch about Giovanni Grimaldi’s hiding place for the transcript had been correct. Going back to the living room, he phoned the number Tullio had given him. A girlish voice answered before being silenced by a rather older boy. A brief struggle for the phone ended with a slap and crying.

‘Who is it?’ asked the victor.

‘Luigi Borsellino,’ said Zen. ‘Let me speak to your dad.’

Cutlery and crockery pinged and jangled distantly above the chatter of a family mealtime, and then a gleeful voice in Zen’s ear exclaimed ‘I’ve got it!’

‘It was there?’

‘Exactly where you said, interleaved between the pages of a fourteenth-century treatise on some obscure Syrian heresy.’

‘And you brought it out with you?’

‘No problem. The security at that place is a joke. Anyway, if they’d tried to stop me I’d have pointed out that fourteenth-century Syrians didn’t use typewriters.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘There’s about twenty pages. It starts with a list of what looks like telephone numbers.’

‘No, those will be the numbers of the bank accounts the gang uses to launder the money from the drug sales,’ Zen replied glibly. ‘Just read them out to me, will you? I’ll pick up the document itself later on this evening, but we need to take action to freeze those accounts as soon as possible.’

There were about twenty numbers altogether. Zen wrote them down in his notebook on the same page as the number his mother had passed on. To his surprise, one of the numbers Bevilacqua read out was the same, the pay-phone in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace. But the Torlonia Palace was of course one of the leading luxury hotels in Rome. It was perfectly natural that the intimates and associates of Prince Ruspanti should choose to stay there, just like other eminent visitors to the city such as Antonio Simonelli.

‘… before nine o’clock all right?’ Tullio Bevilacqua was saying.

Zen glanced at his watch. Christ! Seven thirty-one!

‘Yes, yes! I’ll see you then! Bye!’

‘But I haven’t given you the address!’ squawked Bevilacqua.

‘I’ll get it from…’

Zen broke off in confusion. ‘From Tania’, he had been going to say.

‘… from the Ministry computer.’

Bevilacqua gasped.

‘You mean… you’ve got a file on me?’

‘We’ve got a file on everyone.’

He hit the receiver rest repeatedly until he got a dialling tone, then punched the number which now figured twice on the notebook page open on his knee. It was answered immediately.

‘You’re late.’

It was the voice which had spoken to Zen the night before from the confessional in St Peter’s. The man’s arrogant tone triggered an instinctive response for which Zen was quite unprepared.

‘I’ve cornered the market in the commodity you’re interested in. I’ll be as late as I fucking well choose.’

‘Can you prove you have possession?’

The voice was the same as the night before, but the background was now thoroughly worldly: a babble of voices competing for attention against the synthetic battery of a pop band.

‘Well, I could read you a list of phone numbers, but that would be giving away information which I could sell elsewhere. Just as a taster, though, one of the numbers which Ruspanti phoned just before he died is the same as the one on which you are now speaking. But I expect you already knew that.’

There was a brief pause.

‘But now we know that you know. That makes all the difference.’

Zen said nothing.

‘Hello? Are you still there?’ the man queried peevishly.

‘I’m here. I’m waiting for you to say something worth listening to. I got an earful of your waffle last night.’

‘How much do you want?’

This was the crunch. If Zen had been bluffing, his bluff had been called. And what else could he have been doing? The idea of selling evidence to the highest bidder, never more than an idle speculation in the first place, was out of the question after what had happened to Carlo Romizi. It was unthinkable to imagine disposing of the transcript for his personal advantage, merely to restore his flagging finances and win back Tania from the rich young shit beside whom he looked drably impoverished, timidly conventional.

‘How much?’ prompted the voice impatiently.

‘Rather more than Grimaldi asked, and rather less than he got.’

The man laughed. He could relax, the deal was in the bag. Money would never be a problem for these people.

‘We offered Grimaldi thirty million, but he tried to hold out for more. I think we would be prepared to improve the price this time, to let us say fifty. But I would very strongly urge you to accept.’

Zen kept silent. What was the man talking about? The transcript wasn’t for sale, not at any price. It was sacred, stained with the innocent blood of his colleague, Carlo Romizi.

‘That figure of course applies only to the original,’ the voice stressed. ‘As you rightly surmised, the contents are already known to us.’

‘Grimaldi showed you a photocopy, I suppose, to whet your appetite for the real thing?’

‘We’ll contact you in the next day or two, dottore. I understand you’re going to Milan tomorrow?’

‘Yes, but…’

‘We shall know how to contact you. Buon viaggio.’

Zen replaced the phone slowly. Then he shrugged, as though shaking off a bad dream. Nothing would come of it. Tomorrow he would take the transcript to Milan and hand it over to Antonio Simonelli or his secretary. Then it would be out of his hands, and just as well too. He didn’t trust himself to do the right thing any longer.

The thought of Milan made him get out his notebook and look again at the list of phone numbers which Ruspanti had called from his hideaway in the Vatican. As he thought, in addition to those in Rome, there had been several calls prefixed 02, the code for Milan. Zen picked up the phone and dialled one of them, just out of curiosity. There was no answer. He tried another and got an answering machine.

‘This is 879 4632. There is no one able to answer the phone at present. If you wish to leave a message…’

The voice sounded rather like the man he had just been speaking to a moment ago in the Hotel Torlonia Palace. Which all went to show that one person can sound much like another, particularly on the telephone. There was one other Milan number on the list, and Zen was just about to dial it when the phone suddenly started to ring.

‘Yes?’

‘This is the Questore, dottore. The Ministry asked us to contact you about the phone you wanted watched. I’m afraid the situation was a bit confusing. Apparently there was some sort of publicity event being held at the hotel, a launch party for some book, so the place was thick with media people and the phones were in use all the time.’

‘I see. Thank you.’

He had expected something of the kind. The men he was dealing with were too clever to allow themselves to be trapped in that way. Zen picked up the phone again and dialled the last of the Milan numbers which Ludovico Ruspanti had called in the final week of his life.

‘Yes?’

The voice was that of a young woman. She spoke hesitantly, as though expecting a reprimand. Zen realized that he had no idea what to say.

‘It’s me,’ he murmured finally.

There was a brief pause.

‘Ludo?’

The woman sounded tentative, incredulous. Not half as incredulous as Zen, though.

‘Who else?’

There was a stifled gasp.

‘But they told me you’d had to go away. They told me I’d never see you again…’

Her voice trailed away. Perhaps she too had become aware of the altered acoustic on the line. Someone, somewhere, was listening in.

‘Listen, can I see you tomorrow?’ Zen went on quickly.

‘You’re coming here? To see me?’

‘Yes! I’ll ring when I arrive.’

‘But remember to let it ring and then call back, so that I have time to get rid of Carmela. You forgot this time, silly! Luckily her sister is visiting this week and they’re out every evening. Well, she couldn’t very well bring her here, could she?’

Zen caught sight of the clock on the sideboard opposite. It showed five to eight, long past time for him to be gone.

‘Till tomorrow, then!’

‘Oh, I can’t wait, I can’t wait!’ the woman cried girlishly. ‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

A superstitious revulsion rose like nausea in Zen’s throat.

‘I’ll ring you tomorrow,’ he said, and hung up.

He couldn’t believe what had just happened. Seemingly the number in Milan belonged to one of ‘Ludo’ Ruspanti’s mistresses, and — incredible as this seemed — she was apparently unaware that her lover was dead. His elation was briefly dimmed by the knowledge that someone had been eavesdropping on their conversation. Nevertheless, here was a golden opportunity which, if he could only find the right way to handle it, might lead him to the heart of the…

‘All right, Aurelio, who is she?’

Zen looked up to find Tania Biacis glowering at him from the doorway.

‘Come on!’ she shouted, advancing into the room. ‘Don’t try palming me off with clever lies. I’ve seen you taking in too many other people to fall for it myself. Just tell me the truth, then get to hell out of here!’

He had never seen her like this, furious, overbearing, utterly sure of herself. He got up, gesturing weakly.

‘You don’t think…’

‘I don’t think anything!’ she broke in brutally. ‘I just heard you speaking to her on the phone, fixing a rendezvous for tomorrow. “Oh, I can’t wait, I can’t wait!” Sounds like hot stuff, this lady of yours!’

‘So it was you listening in, on the extension in the hallway!’

‘I wasn’t listening in. I was trying to use my phone. I had no idea you were here. How the hell did you get in, anyway? You’ve had a key all along, I suppose. I might have known!’

‘The American gave me a spare key. I thought I’d hang on to it, just in case…’

‘So I get home and pick up the phone, only to hear this woman practically sticking her tongue into your ear. So you’re going away tomorrow, right? A sudden urgent mission of the highest importance to — where did you say she lives?’

‘And what about you, my dear?’ Zen retorted. ‘Who were you trying to phone so urgently the moment you got in? Was it that man who answered the phone when I called here on Tuesday?’

Tania held up her hands.

‘All right, I admit it. It wasn’t a wrong number. It was Aldo, my cousin Bettina’s husband. He was here on business.’

‘Business? You told me he worked for the post office.’

She flapped her hands in evident confusion.

‘Well, there was some… conference or something.’

The evident lie stung him to push things to the limit.

‘All right, then, let’s forget Aldo. But you still haven’t told me who you were trying to phone. Was it Primo, by any chance?’

The pink flush around her high cheek bones revealed that the name had had its effect.

‘It’s too bad he’s got to take his wife to the opera in the evening, isn’t it?’ Zen carried on. ‘Still, he’s going to pick you up from the airport and take you out to lunch, and after that, who knows?’

‘Is that why you broke in here? So that you could snoop around reading my mail? You… you… you cop!’

‘I can think of an even more insulting epithet to apply to you, if I chose to use it!’

‘Fuck off! Just fuck off out of my house!’

Zen measured her with a look.

‘What do you mean, your house?’

Tania tossed her head contemptuously.

‘Oh, you mean because you’ve been secretly paying someone to rent this place to me? Well I’d guessed that, as it happens. I’m not stupid. The only reason I hadn’t told you I knew was that I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Oh, it’s so fucking pathetic, the whole thing…’

To Zen’s utter consternation, she turned away and burst into tears. Not as a ploy; that he could have withstood. But she had moved beyond him, into uncharted areas of real grief. Yet how could it be real when she was false, and believed him to be? It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. So he fled, leaving her to her intolerable mysteries. The real world awaited him: his distraction, his toy.