End games

The ferocious character of the Barbarians was displayed, in the funeral of a hero, whose valour, and fortune, they celebrated with mournful applause. By the labour of a captive multitude, they forcibly diverted the course of the Busentinus, a small river that washes the walls of Cosentia. The royal sepulchre, adorned with the splendid spoils, and trophies, of Rome, was constructed in the vacant bed; the waters were then restored to their natural channel; and the secret spot, where the remains of Alaric had been deposited, was for ever concealed by the inhuman massacre of the prisoners, who had been employed to execute the work.

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

The dead man parked his car at the edge of the town, beside a crumbling wall marking the bounds of a rock-gashed wasteland of crippled oaks and dusty scrub whose ownership had been the subject of litigation for over three decades, and which had gradually turned into an unofficial rubbish tip for the local population. The arrival of the gleaming, silver-grey Lancia was noted by several pairs of eyes, and soon known to everyone in the town, but despite the fact that the luxury saloon was left unguarded and unlocked, no attempt was made to interfere with it, because the driver was a dead man.

The only ones to see him close to were three boys, aged between five and ten, who had been acting out a boar hunt in the dense shrubbery under the cliff face. The five-year-old, who was the prey, had just been captured and was about to be dispatched when a man appeared on the path just a few metres away. He was in his fifties or early sixties, of medium stature, with pale skin and a shock of hair that was profuse and solidly black. He wore a black suit of some cheap synthetic fabric, and a wide collar, almost clerical, but matt and black, encircled his neck. From it, beneath the throat, hung a large metal crucifix. The man’s chest and feet were bare. He trudged silently up the steep path towards the old town, looking down at the ground in front of him, and showed no sign of having seen the trio of onlookers.

As soon as he was out of sight the two younger boys were all for following him, scared but daring each other not to be. Sabatino, the eldest, put paid to that idea with a single jerk of the head. No one had confided in him about this event, but the community in which they all lived was a plangent sounding board when it came to news that might affect its members. Sabatino hadn’t heard the primary note that must have been struck somewhere, but he had unconsciously absorbed the secondary vibrations resonating in other parts of that complex instrument. ‘Danger!’ they had whispered. ‘Lie low, keep away, know nothing.’ Discarding his role as the renowned and fearless hunter of wild boar for that of the responsible senior child, he rounded up his friend Francesco and the other boy and led them down a side path back to the safety of the town.

The sole witness to what happened next was a figure surveying the scene through binoculars from a ridge about a kilometre away on the other side of the valley. The dead man followed the track until it rose above the last remaining trees and ceased to be a rough line of beaten earth and scruffy grass, to become a stony ramp hewn out of the cliff face and deeply rutted by the abrasive force of ancient iron-rimmed cart wheels. By now il morto was clearly suffering, but he struggled on, pausing frequently to gasp for breath before tackling another stretch of the scorched rock on which the soles of his feet left bloody imprints. Above his bare head, the sun hovered like a hawk in the cloudless sky.

The isolated hill he was climbing was almost circular and had been eroded down to the underlying volcanic core and then quarried for building materials, so that in appearance it was almost flat, as though sheared off with a saw. When the dead man finally reached level ground, he collapsed and remained still for some time. The scene around him was one of utter desolation. The vestiges of a fortified gateway, whose blocks of stone had been too large and stubborn to remove, survived at the brink of the precipice where the crude thoroughfare had entered the former town, but looking towards the centre the only structures remaining above ground level were the ruins of houses, a small church, and opposite it an imposing fragment of walling framing an ornate doorway approached by five marble steps. All around lay heaps of rubble with weeds and small bushes growing out of them. The rounded paving stones of the main street were still clearly visible, however, and the dead man followed them, moaning with pain, until the cobbles opened out into a small piazza.

He then proceeded to the church, bowing his head and crossing himself on the threshold. Ten minutes passed before he emerged. He stopped for a moment to stare up at the massive remnants of stone frontage which dominated the square, then crossed over to the set of steps leading up to the gaping doorway, knelt down and slowly crawled up the steps on his knees, one by one, until he reached the uppermost. A wild fig tree had established itself in the charred wasteland within the former dwelling, feeding on some hidden source of water far below. The dead man bent over it and kissed one of its leaves, then bowed down until his forehead touched the slightly elevated doorstep.

The man watching from the ridge opposite put down his binoculars, lifted what looked like a bulky mobile phone off the dashboard of the Jeep Grand Cherokee beside him, extended the long recessed antenna and then pressed a button on the fascia. The resulting sound echoed about the walls of the valley for some time, but might easily have been mistaken for distant thunder.

A forkful of food stilled between the plate and his mouth, Zen sat watching the man at the next table. His gaunt, angular head looked as though it had been sculpted with a chainsaw from a knot-ridden baulk of lumber, but Zen was waiting for it to explode. Both men had ordered the trattoria’s dish of the day, but Zen’s neighbour had then demanded pepe. This duly arrived, in the form of three fresh chilli peppers the size of rifle cartridges. He proceeded to chop them roughly and scatter the chunks over his pasta, seeds and all, before stirring the mass together and tucking in.

As so often since his transfer to Cosenza, Zen felt seriously foreign. He knew that if he had eaten even the smallest fragment of one of those peppers, he would have suffered not merely scorched taste-buds but also sweaty palpitations like those preceding a cardiac arrest, leaving him unable to eat, drink, talk or even think for at least fifteen minutes. His neighbour, on the other hand, chomped them down without the slightest change of expression. That grim countenance would never betray any emotion, but he appeared content with his lunch.

Zen toyed with his own food a bit longer, then pushed the plate away. Knobs of mutton knuckle protruded from the gloggy local pasta smothered in tomato sauce. Not for the first time, he asked himself how this bland yet cloying fruit had come to stand as the symbol of Italian cuisine worldwide, despite the fact that until a century or so ago very few Italians had even seen a tomato, never mind regarded them as a staple ingredient in every meal. As recently as his own childhood in Venice, they remained a rarity. His mother had never cooked them in her life. ‘ Roba del sud,’ she would have said dismissively, ‘southern stuff.’

Which, of course, was the answer to Zen’s question. The Spanish had introduced the tomato from their American empire to their dominions in southern Italy, where it grew like a weed. The historic waves of Italian emigrants from the south had virtually subsisted on this cheap and abundant foodstuff, whose appearance conveniently recalled the images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus which hung on their walls, and on the bottled sauce that could be made from it to last year round. They had adopted it as a symbol of their cultural heritage and identity and then sold it to the credulous foreigners among whom they lived as the very essence of Italian cuisine.

Zen signalled the waiter. Obsession was an occupational hazard in Calabria, but obsessing about tomatoes was absurd. He paid over the agreed fee and responded with a brief nod to the waiter’s thanks, nicely pitched as always in the grey area between grudging respect and overt truculence. The moment he emerged from the air-conditioned dining room into the sullen, stacked heat of the street, he felt his pores gaping open like the mouth of the goldfish he had kept as a child. He lit a cigarette and surveyed the visible slice of sky, an incandescent azure enlivened by puffy, faintly bruised clouds trailing translucent spumes of virga. The door behind him opened and Nicodemo, the owner of the restaurant, appeared and also lit up.

‘You didn’t like your meal?’ he asked with a solicitous expression.

Zen chose his words carefully.

‘It was very authentic.’

Nicodemo beamed. He had already told Zen, at some length, that he was un immigrante. Having spent almost thirty years as a construction worker in a Canadian city called Tronno, he had now retired to his native Calabria and opened a restaurant dedicated to preserving and reviving the genuine cuisine of his youth.

‘My mother used to make that dish on very special occasions, starting at dawn,’ he confided to Zen in reverential tones. ‘The sauce takes hours to prepare, but the flavour of sheep from the bone and the fat is incomparable.’

‘There is certainly very little to which it can be compared. I just don’t have much appetite today.’

‘You’re not unwell, dottore?’

‘No, no. Overwork, I expect.’

Nicodemo nodded sagely. He wouldn’t of course dream of prying further — one didn’t interrogate the local police chief — but a sympathetic word never went amiss.

‘Ah, this terrible business.’

A silence fell, which the restaurateur perhaps broke to avoid the appearance of any possible indiscretion on his part.

‘And to think that he came here once to eat!’

‘Did he like the food?’ Zen replied, with a trace of sarcasm that was entirely lost on the other man.

‘But of course! He too was rediscovering his heritage, just like me when I first returned.’

Zen hurled his cigarette into the gutter.

‘I’m sorry, I thought you were referring to the American lawyer.’

‘I am! As soon as I saw the picture on television I recognised him.’

‘Signor Newman ate here?’

He sounded no more than politely interested.

‘Only once. It had come on to rain suddenly. He sheltered in the doorway for a while, then came inside when it didn’t stop. He asked my advice about what to order and after he’d eaten we got chatting. First in Italian, then in dialect. The rough stuff, from up in the Sila mountains. He hadn’t spoken that for years, but it gradually came back to him. Like discovering that you can still ride a bicycle, he said.’

Nicodemo shook his head.

‘He seemed delighted to be home again, just like me. And now this happens! Calabria can be harsh to her sons.’

He grasped Zen’s arm lightly. Zen did not care to be touched by strangers, but had come to recognise this as an accepted rhetorical gesture in the south and managed to control his instinct to recoil.

‘I really shouldn’t ask this, dottore, but do you think he’ll be all right?’

Zen freed his arm by making another of the rhetorical gestures used to punctuate lengthy discourses between men in the street, an activity as normal, frequent and essential to civic life in Cosenza as it had been in the Athenian agora.

‘In such matters, nothing is certain. But the victim’s son is due to arrive shortly, so with any luck we should be able to begin serious negotiations soon.’

Nicodemo nodded obsequiously and seized Zen’s hand.

‘Thank you, thank you! Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked, but even though we only met briefly, I liked the man. Besides, he is a fellow immigrant.’

Zen turned away.

‘You’re coming tomorrow?’ the restaurateur called after him. ‘I’m serving spaghetti with clams.’

Zen paused, struck by the innocent recipe like a familiar face sighted in a crowd. This was a dish he had grown up with, the soft clitoral gristle of the clams in their gaping porcelain shells, the hard, clean pasta soaked in the subtle juice, a nudge of garlic, a dab of oil, a splash of wine…

‘I’m going to the coast to buy the clams fresh off the boats first thing tomorrow,’ Nicodemo added encouragingly.

‘Will they be cooked in tomato sauce?’ queried Zen.

‘ Ma certo! Just like my mamma used to make.’

Zen inclined his head respectfully.

‘May she rest in peace.’

At the corner of the block, he stopped in a cafe to erase the lingering taste of tomatoes stewed in mutton grease by drinking two coffees and crunching down half a tub of Tic Tacs. He was just starting his second espresso when everything became strange. The light dimmed as in an eclipse of the sun, a wind entered through the open doorway, the pages of a newspaper lying abandoned on a table turned over one by one, as though by the hand of an invisible reader. Outside in the street, someone cried out jaggedly above the seething sound that had insinuated itself into the laden silence. A fusillade of ice pellets erupted upwards from the pavement and then the sky broke, dropping waves of sound that shook the ground and made the water in Zen’s glass ripple lightly. Next the initial fusillade of hail turned to a hard rain and within moments the sewers were gorged. The water backed up, deluging the street where people caught in the storm held up briefcases or newspapers to protect their heads and gazed across at the lights of the cafe on the other bank of the impassable torrent, while those safe inside cackled and jeered, savouring their sanctuary.

And then it was all over. The rain ceased, the flood subsided and the sun came out. By the time Zen had paid and left, the streets were already steaming themselves dry. The accumulated odours from the clogged drains combined with the water vapour to create a pale miasmal veil through which he made his way back up the hill to the Questura.

Nine and a half thousand kilometres away to the north-west, Jake Daniels awoke. Early light seeped through the hardwood venetians. Jake paused to check central processing performance and run a defrag, then rolled off the mattress and stood up. The barely audible breathing from the far side of the bed maintained its steady rhythm. He navigated the shallows of the bedroom and stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him quietly. Madrona was great, but right now he needed his space.

He was fixing coffee and listening to the city’s fabled all-girl band, the Westward Ho’s, when his phone came to life. Inevitably, it was Martin. Martin was great too, except he didn’t do down-time.

‘Yo.’

‘We need to dialogue, Jake.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Pete Newman, that lawyer who’s been over in Europe providing logistical support on the movie angle? He’s missing.’

‘Missing what?’

‘No, he disappeared three days ago, presumed kidnapped. So we need to progress alternative strategies to minimise how this incident might impact our mission.’

‘Like when?’

‘Right away. There are significant granularity issues that need to be addressed and the solutions migrated to the rest of our people here and then cascaded down to the folks we’re teaming with at the location.’

‘Huh?’

‘Someone has to sweat the small stuff. I’m thinking I may need to go out there myself. You okay with lunch?’

‘Whatever.’

Jake poured himself a mug of coffee, cradled his BlackBerry in the other hand and headed on out to the deck. The sun was just starting to show above the hills behind. Out towards the lake, a thick layer of gunge had toned down the pricey vista of stacked conifers and sloppy water to the kind of generic blur you only notice if it isn’t there. Some dark agent in the guise of a crow hit the far end of the cedar planking in a clumsy clatter and then did the pimp roll over to a lump of wiener or marshmallow from last evening’s cookout. Jake lay back in a colonial rocker, breathed in the salty air and took stock. All in all, he was cool with this latest development. A totally necessary feature of any killer game was that whenever you thought you were home and free, really weird shit happened. And seeing who was the gamemaster on this particular adventure, the surprises were always going to be world-class. Which was okay. Jake had a few surprises in store himself.

Gaming had pretty well been his whole life ever since he discovered the early classics like Mario and Pac-Man at college. Crude and unsophisticated as those pioneering efforts had been in retrospect, they had spoken to him as nothing else before. The urge to add further levels and features to the games available, elegantly enough not to crash the Down’s syndrome software on which the platform was built, had led him to switch majors from engineering to computer programming. He turned out to be a natural code warrior and a couple of years after graduating landed a job at the Redmond campus. Jake hadn’t been one of the fabled Founding Fathers, but he was heavily vested and by the late 1990s his stock options, having split several times, amounted to a very sweet pile indeed. Then he got lucky, or maybe smart.

One day in the summer of 1998 he had been waiting to meet his stockbroker at a downtown restaurant that ran a sweepstake on what the Dow Jones industrial average would be at year’s end. The bids were displayed on a board at the rear of the bar, and as Jake stared at the numbers he felt one of those familiar gut wobblies, like when you know that there’s this monster fatal error lurking somewhere in the program you just wrote. So when his broker showed up he told her to dump his stock, thereby quite possibly contributing to the spectacular Nasdaq collapse a few weeks later. Then, instead of trying to reinvent himself as a vulture capitalist or pissing his capital away on some start-up dotcom company dedicated to revolutionising the way America buys toilet paper, he had put it all into real estate in time to clean up on the biggest property boom the city had ever seen. This had brought him an even bigger fortune, but best of all it had brought him Madrona, who had been working as a greeter for the firm that managed his portfolio of investments. Okay, he was forty-five and she was twenty-three, but so what? Ageing was an option and Jake had opted out.

It was only once they were married that he found out Madrona came from a fundamentalist Bible Belt family and believed that when the end times came, believers would be spirited up to heaven in the Rapture while Jesus and the Antichrist duked it out in the scorched wasteland below. Up until then, religion had been pretty much off the radar for Jake, but the more he heard about the coming Apocalypse — and Madrona had told him plenty, particularly back in the early days — the more interested he got. He hadn’t bought into the sales talk and begging letters of the sleazy pastor out at the glass-and-plywood church where Madrona worshipped, but their promotional material plus some trawling on the web made the general scenario clear, and also that millions of other Americans, including the president, believed in it.

The God game was for sure the greatest total immersive reality challenge of all time, but these fundies were just hunkering down and trying to defend their corner instead of going out there and taking the initiative. That was always a losing strategy, and most of them were indeed losers, gambling on their free pass to eternity working when the time came. Maybe that was all they could do, but Jake was both rich and bored. To be honest, even the top-end, interactive, massively multiple role-playing stuff didn’t really cut it for him any more. The stakes were too low and he was too good. Why piss around within the limits of the current technology when there was this persistent universe game that had been running for thousands of years, with killer graphics, no sharding or instancing and unlimited bandwidth? Not to mention an opponent who could come up with off-the-wall moves like targeting the lawyer Martin had sent out to work with the treasure hunters in Cosenza.

When he took his mug back to the kitchen for a refill, Madrona had emerged, wearing the retro baby-doll nightie Jake had given her for her birthday. It ended about an inch below her crotch and was pinkly transparent with appliqued rabbits. It didn’t matter what she wore, or what she didn’t.

‘Cuddle,’ she said.

It was an imperative. The only problem with babes young enough to be your daughter was they had so much goddamn energy. Back when Jake was her age, he couldn’t get laid to save his life. Now his problem was rationing the available supply to meet Madrona’s demands. Still, the cost-per-fuck ratio was good, although Jake had an uneasy sense that it might develop a negative tilt some time in the future.

He tweaked his goatee and displayed an arc of perfect teeth.

‘Are you Rapture-ready?’ he said.

‘Are you happy with the script?’

‘It comes from the highest possible source.’

‘Who is the screenwriter?’

‘I was referring to the basic material, or Bible if you prefer. “Divinely inspired”, some critics have been kind enough to say.’

‘A bit long and rambling, though. Hitchcock said that to film a novel you first have to cut it down to a short story.’

‘Which is where all novels started out and most should have stopped. And it was Truffaut, actually.’

Annalise Kirchner consulted her notes in a frigid fluster.

‘Are you employing a theological consultant, maestro?’

‘No pieces of silver have yet changed hands, but the subject naturally comes up when I meet one of my many friends in the Vatican.’

‘How about alternative scenarios for the end of historical time? Do you plan to consult any scientists?’

‘I simply can’t be bothered. Atheists are such bores. They talk about God all the time.’

‘Do you see this movie as making some sort of statement, and if so, what is it?’

Luciano Aldobrandini sighed. The young woman was quite decorative, if you liked that sort of thing, but clearly an idiot. It was time for him to take charge.

‘Fraulein Kirchner, I have made many movies. Too many, some have said. Most of them were good, a few perhaps even great. But never have I faced a challenge such as this.’

The interviewer nodded empathetically. Behind her, the Austrian TV crew continued to monitor their equipment with disinterested concentration.

‘Of course, the Holy Scriptures are hardly a new field for this medium,’ Aldobrandini went on discursively. ‘But most of the attempts that have been made, from De Mille to Mel, have taken as their subject the life and death of Christ, since that represents a human drama with which audiences can easily identify. Others have treated episodes from the Old Testament, which are also relatively straightforward to adapt for the screen since they portray aspects of the great human epic of the Jewish people.’

He puffed on his cigar.

‘But neither the teachings and sufferings of Jesus, nor the trials and tribulations of the Jews, constitute in and of themselves the essence of the Biblical message. Like all great religions, Christianity has both a human and a superhuman — one might even say inhuman — face. Its mysteries are revealed in the natural world around us, but their fons et origo is supernatural and by definition passeth all understanding.’

‘So how can such mysteries be transferred to the cinema screen?’ asked the interviewer.

Luciano Aldobrandini did not like being interrupted when he was in full flight. He held up his hand like a traffic policeman.

‘All in due course. As I was saying, previous cinematic treatments of the Bible have focused on its human aspects. The two great bookends of scripture, its alpha and omega, are of course Genesis and Revelations.’

He laughed reminiscently.

‘As one of Dino’s friends, I was involved in a minor way with John Huston’s attempt to tackle the first of these back in the 1960s, and in my sentimental moments regret that I cannot be kinder about the result. But the second has never even been attempted, no doubt because parsing such a narrative for the lens has always appeared impossible.’

A young man appeared in the background, just behind the floodlights, waving frantically. The interviewer signalled the cameraman to pause the tape.

‘Well?’ demanded Aldobrandini curtly.

‘Marcello’s on the phone. He says it’s urgent.’

‘Tell him to wait.’

The young man disappeared and the interview recommenced.

‘Saint John of Patmos has been variously described as an inspired visionary, a deranged drug addict and a delusional psychotic,’ Aldobrandini continued smoothly. ‘The work for which he is famous was only very narrowly accepted for inclusion in the biblical canon and has been the subject of controversy ever since. But the finer theological points do not concern me. What is incontrovertible is that in our post-9/11 world, the Book of Revelations touches many exposed cultural nerves. We all know that if terrorists gain access to nuclear or biological weapons, it will quite literally mean the end of the world. We also know that such a prospect would not give them a moment’s pause, and that we are therefore potentially facing imminent extinction. That knowledge provides the necessary human element which now makes Saint John’s eschatological ravings seem not merely relevant but even realistic.’

The young man reappeared.

‘Marcello again, maestro. He says it’s a matter of the highest priority and he must speak to you immediately.’

Luciano Aldobrandini slumped disgustedly.

‘For the love of God, Pippo, I told you I wasn’t to be disturbed! What do you think I pay you for? Oh well, I suppose we both know the answer to that. However, my agent works for me, not the other way round. Tell him I’ll call him when I’m good and ready — and not to dare interrupt me again.’

He turned to camera again, but the incident had clearly unsettled him and he appeared to have lost the thread of his presentation.

‘Nevertheless, it’s hard to see how the actual content of the Book of Revelations can successfully be brought to the screen,’ prompted the interviewer. ‘The text reads more like a violent fantasy video game. One might perhaps be able to imagine a Japanese anime version, but I understand that your work is to be filmed on location in Calabria.’

‘The raw material, yes. And some will remain raw. Other segments may be freeze-frame, slow motion or vastly speeded up. During the apocalyptic experience, as in Einsteinian physics, time and space become purely relative. The majority of the footage will be radically edited and post-processed using all the resources of modern computer graphics, and the results, I can assure you, will be something never before achieved, never even imagined or dreamt! Some envious individuals have been saying for years that I would never make another film, that I was burned out. Believe me, it’s their eyeballs that will be burned out when they see this film, the ultimate and crowning work of my life!’

He paused motionless for a few seconds to allow for editing, then clapped his hands loudly, rose and announced, ‘That’s all the time I can spare, I’m afraid.’

He hastened off towards a door in the far wall of the vast room, the interviewer at his heels.

‘Just one more thing!’ she called. ‘When does filming actually start?’

Aldobrandini ignored her. He locked the door behind him, then crossed the two antechambers leading to his private quarters at the far corner of the building. Once inside, he kicked off his shoes and collapsed supine on the sofa. Pippo appeared.

‘Beulah, peel me a grape,’ commanded his master. ‘No, pour me a potent whisky and soda.’

‘I’ve got Marcello on hold.’

Aldobrandini giggled.

‘Well, don’t squeeze him too tightly, caro, or he might spill all over you. God, I’m wrecked! Why do I even bother doing interviews?’

‘Because it’s in the contract that you have to, and because you’re an applause whore.’

‘Ah yes. And tomorrow?’

‘Spanish, French, Swedish and Russian press, plus Fox, CNN, the BBC, some Japanese cable station and three highly influential media bloggers.’

‘Dear Christ. All right, pass me Marcello. And that drink.’

Pippo handed over a portable phone and shimmied off towards the liquor cabinet.

‘Marcello, how delightful to hear from you. What news on the Rialto?’

‘Cut the crap, Luciano, this is serious. Jeremy’s off the movie.’

Pippo returned with a brimming beaker, half of which Aldobrandini downed at one go.

‘That’s absurd. I spoke to him only the other day.’

‘Yes, but what Jeremy didn’t know then was that his agent had heard some bad buzz about the project and had decided to dig a little himself. He didn’t like what he came up with and advised his client to pull, which he now has. It’ll go public tomorrow, so you’ll need to be prepared when you meet the media. Those Austrians hadn’t heard, I hope?’

‘They didn’t mention it, but I’ve kept them hanging around the palazzo all day because I was simply too overwhelmed to talk to anyone.’

‘Well, it’s bound to come up. I suggest you spin it as a creative disagreement thing. Both you and Jeremy are great artists and can only achieve your full potential if you are in complete accord. Unfortunately on this occasion your views differed, and so with the greatest regret you have mutually decided that further collaboration would not be fruitful. You wish Jeremy all the best in the future and look forward to working with him again. Negotiations are in progress with a number of other big Hollywood stars, but it would be inappropriate to mention names at this stage.’

Aldobrandini sat drinking and thinking. This was a blow, no denying it. The author of Revelations played a key part in the high concept he had in mind for the film. Saint John had not only declared his work to be an account of a mystical experience, but had grounded this by locating it on the island of Patmos. That island could easily be invoked with some shots of Calabrian caves and shoreline, but the figure of the prophet himself was central. The idea was to leave the audience uncertain whether his visions had been an objective visitation or a subjective hallucination, but it was the visual image of John himself that must convince them that any of this was worth their attention. For that, the slim, saturnine and massively talented British actor had seemed perfect. Aldobrandini could just see his lugubrious yet oddly fragile frame hung with a simple cloak, while the inspired face, the expression pitched on the cusp between the ecstatic and the demonic, gazed up at the heavens. The El Greco look.

‘So what did Jeremy’s agent find out?’ he asked Marcello.

‘Well, that’s the other thing we need to discuss. I have to say it’s slightly disturbing. No more than that at this stage, but we need to tread carefully.’

‘Cut the crap yourself, Marcello.’

‘He didn’t give me all the details, but basically it goes like this. He was in LA last week and of course mentioned our project. The response was, “It’s great that Luciano’s back in harness, but who’s this Rapture Works outfit? No one’s ever heard of them.”’

‘Neither have I.’

‘They’re the money behind the whole thing. Hollywood people always look at the bottom line. That’s where the deep pockets are if you need to sue.’

‘Why didn’t you know this already, Marcello?’

‘I did, but it didn’t seem relevant. Our production company has an excellent reputation for making quirky, low-budget films that do very nicely with a largish niche audience worldwide. They get great reviews and have never ever lost money on a project. And frankly, Luciano, your career wasn’t in the most sensational shape when this came up. It looked like a good deal all round.’

Aldobrandini sighed theatrically.

‘All this business shit gives me a headache. You know that. That’s what you get your cut to shield me from.’

‘All right, I’ll keep it brief. Jeremy’s agent’s people reported back that Rapture Works was incorporated just seven months ago and that its money seems to be channelled through a shell company in Bermuda. Now as I said, there may be nothing to worry about. You’ve had your upfront cut for vetting the shooting script and other advance work, and if it proves difficult to find a suitable replacement for Jeremy then you can do those scenes last. But after what I heard I reviewed the contract. Financially, everything’s now in limbo until the first day of principal photography. I would advise you to bring that forward and start work as soon as possible.’

‘What’s the hurry? If they’re going to default, they can do it any time.’

‘Because it’s just possible that this whole project is some sort of scam.’

‘What?’

‘Some clever tax dodge, or maybe money laundering. What I’ve heard is that the film may never get made. But there’s a quick way to find out, which is to get the cameras rolling. On that day they are contractually obligated to move a significant sum out of escrow and into our account. If they don’t, we’ll start looking for alternative financing. If they do, you can forget all this and get down to crafting the great work of art that I know you still have it in you to make, Luciano, whatever your detractors may say. But my professional advice is to fast-track the shoot and force these people to get real or get out.’

Luciano Aldobrandini turned off the phone and hollered for Pippo.

‘Another cocktail, darling.’

‘The doctor said — ’

‘I know what the doctor said. I also know that I need to get drunk right now. Where’s the Narcisso?’

‘Last I heard, she was having her bottom scraped.’

‘Don’t be smutty, Pippo. Call the boatyard, tell them to get her seaworthy, then whistle up some matelots. I feel an urge for southern climes.’

‘So you won’t tell me what you discussed.’

‘I don’t remember every detail! In any case, it was all business matters relating to the film project. Nothing that could have the slightest bearing on this tragic event.’

Zen strolled to the window, looked out for some time, then lit a cigarette. The official ban on smoking in government buildings added a particular piquancy to this gesture, virtually making it part of the interrogation.

‘What language did you speak?’ he asked, turning back to face Nicola Mantega.

‘Italian, of course.’

‘Not Calabrian dialect?’

The witness hesitated just a moment before answering.

‘Dialect? Signor Newman is an American lawyer. How could a man like that know the dialect?’

‘Answer the question.’

‘We spoke Italian.’

‘Newman spoke it fluently?’

Mantega shrugged.

‘For a foreigner.’

‘So how did he learn Italian?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘You didn’t discuss it?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Didn’t you think it unusual? And perhaps mention it? Some flattering comment…’

‘I really didn’t think about it. This wasn’t a personal relationship! As I keep telling you, it was strictly business. Maybe he took lessons before coming out here. What do I know?’

Zen stared at him in silence for a moment.

‘That’s precisely what I’m trying to determine.’

Nicola Mantega’s appearance was of a classic Calabrian type, with thick, lustrous black hair, a crumpled, oval face that barely contained all the troubles it had seen, a florid moustache and an expression of terminal depression.

‘Let’s just go back over that final phone call,’ Zen said. ‘You rang Signor Newman at ten thirty-two on the Tuesday morning…’

‘It was some time that morning, yes.’

‘It was at the time I stated. Newman hired a mobile phone and we have obtained a copy of the records. What we don’t have is a transcript of what was said, but you have stated that you told him that some new factors had arisen regarding final arrangements for the film project, and that you needed to meet again. You then suggested that he come to dinner at your house at seven that evening, but he never turned up.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Nor did he return to his hotel that night. In short, he was almost certainly kidnapped on his way to that meeting at your villa, Signor Mantega. An arrangement which only he and you knew about.’

‘He must have been followed. If the kidnappers are professionals, they would have had him under surveillance for days.’

‘Perhaps, but how did they know that he was a suitable prospect? How did they know who he was and what he might be worth? For that matter, how did they know he was here at all?’

On the wall of Zen’s office hung an elegantly designed notice proclaiming the vision statement of the new Italian police, thick with catchphrases such as la nostra missione, i nostri valori, competenza professionale, integrita, creativita e innovazione. As so often in the past, Zen decided to go for the last two.

‘Acting on my orders, one of my officers interviewed your wife this morning while you were at work,’ he said. ‘She denied all knowledge of any guest having been invited for dinner on the evening in question.’

Mantega was staring at Zen with an expression of baffled indignation.

‘I didn’t tell her,’ he said at last.

Zen nodded, as though this little misunderstanding had now been cleared up.

‘Of course! You were planning to cook yourself. Some local delicacy, no doubt, to remind your guest of his origins. Stewed tripe in tomato sauce, perhaps.’

‘What is the meaning of these insinuations?’ Mantega demanded angrily. ‘Signor Newman is an American. I wouldn’t have dreamt of offering him one of our traditional Calabrian dishes. We are only too well aware that they are often unappreciated by foreigners.’

He glared pointedly at Zen.

‘I didn’t mention the occasion to my wife because I did not intend her to be present. As I keep trying to get you to understand, this was not a social event. The business that Signor Newman and I had to discuss was extremely confidential. I planned to receive him outside on the terrazza. It has a wonderful view of the city below, and there we could talk freely. As for food, there was some leftover parmigiana di melanzane in the fridge that I could warm up.’

Mantega was well into his stride by now.

‘I did in fact tell my wife when I returned from work that night, but she may well not have been listening to me. Such is often the case. I’ll remind her of what happened as soon as I get home. If it comes to her making a sworn testimony in the future, I’m sure that her story will tally with mine.’

‘I’m sure it will,’ said Zen drily. ‘And she will probably deny ever having spoken to my subordinate. All right, you may go.’

Mantega frowned and stood up, shrugging awkwardly.

‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ he said in a defensive tone.

‘You’ve been a model witness,’ Zen returned. ‘In fact I shall hold you up as an example to the people I have still to question, some of whom may be less helpful. “Why can’t you be as co-operative as Signor Mantega?” I shall say. “There’s a man who’s not afraid to tell me everything he knows.”’

Mantega seemed about to say something for a moment, but then Natale Arnone came in and escorted him out. Zen went over to the window and stood looking down until the notary emerged on to the street. When Mantega was about ten metres off, one of the officers that Zen had detached from the elite Digos anti-terrorist squad got out of a parked car and started to follow. His companion started the car and drove ahead to take the point position.

Zen’s pro tem transfer to his current post as chief of police for the province of Cosenza had come about purely as a matter of chance, and had not promised — still less delivered, until a few days ago — the slightest challenge to his professional skills. A new bureaucratic entity had appeared on the map of Italy: the provincia di Crotone, carved out of the neighbouring provinces of Cosenza and Catanzaro. It naturally demanded a fully staffed bureaucratic apparatus to run it, and this had to be constructed from scratch. One of the vacant positions was that of police chief, and Pasquale Rossi, the incumbent in Cosenza, had eventually been selected as someone professionally familiar with much of the territory concerned and thus in a position to bring his extensive experience to bear. His post had in turn gone to the deputy chief at Catanzaro, one Gaetano Monaco, but unfortunately the latter was unable to take up his duties since he had shot himself in the foot while cleaning his service pistol.

Once made, such appointments are very difficult to unmake, since the promotional ripple effect spreads far and wide and the suitability of each chosen candidate has to be vetted by all interested parties before approval. The Ministry in Rome had therefore opted for the expedient of a temporary replacement for the short period until the original appointee recovered from his self-inflicted injury, and their choice had fallen on Zen. He had been received politely enough by the questore and the other senior officers, but it had discreetly been made clear to him that he was a mere figurehead occupying the post in name only and need not concern himself too much with the day-to-day workings of the department. Which is exactly what he had been happy to do until the recent disappearance of an American lawyer which bore all the hallmarks of a professional kidnapping for ransom.

There was a knock at the door and Natale Arnone entered. He was in his late twenties, stockily built and with a shaven head, no neck and a generally thuggish manner accentuated by his unshaven jowls and bandit beard. After two months in Calabria, Zen was beginning to feel facially nude.

‘This just arrived, sir,’ Arnone said, laying a sheet of paper on the desk. It was a fax from the American consulate in Naples, which Zen had contacted immediately after lunch, and read as follows:

PETER NEWMAN Passport # 733945610 Date of birth: 11/28/44 Place of birth: Spezzano della Sila, Italy Remarks: Birth certified under name PIETRO OTTAVIO CALOPEZZATI. Name legally changed 5/30/69 at San Francisco. US citizenship acquired 4/19/68, sponsor Roberto Marcantonio Calopezzati, SBU//FOUO file reference 48294/AVP/0006

Attached were several official photographs of Newman and a digitalised scan of his fingerprints, taken when he received US citizenship. Zen handed Arnone the documents without comment. The young officer read them through and whistled quietly.

‘Rather changes things, doesn’t it?’ Zen remarked.

The young officer erupted in a loutish, splurging laugh, instantly repressed.

‘In more ways than one.’

Arnone tapped the sheet of paper.

‘Until the land reform acts of the 1950s, the Calopezzati were the richest family in this province and far beyond. They owned half of Calabria.’

The two men eyed one another in silence.

‘Drop whatever you’re doing and get me a certified copy of that birth certificate,’ said Zen.

When Arnone had gone, he rang the consulate in Naples and asked them to explain the significance of the letters SBU/FOUO preceding the file records of Peter Newman’s naturalisation process.

‘Sensitive but unclassified, for official use only,’ came the reply.

‘So I don’t suppose there’s any point in my asking for further details.’

‘FOUO data will also be NOFORN. No foreign nationals. Distribution restricted to US citizens. Sorry we can’t help you.’

‘You already have,’ Zen replied.

Jake and Martin met at SooChic, a Japanese-Peruvian fusion place with accents of the Deep South. The furnishings were 1950s Scandinavian, easy on the eye but hard on the ass. A waitperson showed up and dispensed some intense culinary talk therapy.

‘So?’ said Jake.

‘Yeah,’ said Martin.

Martin Nguyen’s father had been one of the principal torturers for the Diem regime, and his son had inherited the plated face and sinkhole eyes that terrified the living shit out of you even before they cranked up the generator.

‘Basically, we’re solid,’ said Martin. ‘Newman is an independent contractor, totally ring-fenced off from Rapture Works. If he’s been kidnapped, that’s the family’s problem. The son is on his way to Calabria now. Pete knew what he was getting himself into. He’s from there, for Christ’s sake.’

Food came. Jake speared a chunk of sushi and dipped it in the fiery corn porridge puree.

‘Pete Newman?’

Martin nodded.

‘Usual Ellis Island illiteracy, I guess. Pop was probably named Novemano or some damn thing.’

He chomped moodily on his chitterling tamale.

‘I hate Italians.’

‘Foreigners suck,’ Jake remarked.

Martin looked at him sharply. Although he’d lived in the States most of his life, he still felt pretty foreign a lot of the time. Since getting hired by Jake as project manager for the Rapture Works venture, he’d learned how to decode and even speak the idiolect of the city’s software community, where geeks married nerds and the incidence of autism was the highest in the country. Jake wasn’t exactly autistic — mild Asperger’s, maybe — although it had occurred to Martin that he might well fail the CAPTCHA test designed to distinguish between human and artificial intelligence, maybe in both categories. Too dumb to be human, too fucked up to be a machine. But the hard fact was that someone who walked and talked and looked and spoke like Jake was worth more money, right now, up front in cash, than anyone else in the restaurant would earn in his entire lifetime. Including Martin.

‘I mean, to do business with,’ he said. ‘It’s all “Sure, yeah, no problem, you got it” and then no delivery. And they don’t even apologise, just act like you’re a sucker for ever believing they meant what they said in the first place. You need me to go there, Jake. Aeroscan have concluded their installation and set-up and will be ready to roll at eleven this evening our time. The civil authorities have granted them unlimited clearance below a hundred metres.’

Jake gave him one of those looks.

‘Three hundred feet,’ said Martin. ‘Newman said the mayor practically creamed in her pants. Apparently Cosenza is one no-hope town and this is the biggest boost they’ve ever had. I mean, it would be if it was for real.’

He smiled hideously. Jake torqued his lips just a fraction, as if remembering a joke that had seemed funny at the time.

‘So they bought the movie angle?’

Martin reassembled the shards of his face into an orderly pattern.

‘Totally. There’s another city down that way — Matera? An even smaller dump even further off the beaten track. Now it’s jammed with tourist buses, hotels packed to the brim, restaurants gouging to the max, souvenir shops selling out by noon. Know why? Because Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ there.’

‘Fuck,’ murmured Jake contemplatively.

‘So Pete Newman told the guys in Cosenza, if you think the Crucifixion was big, wait till you see the Apocalypse.’

More food arrived and they ordered another round of Diet Coke with sliced lime. Then the aisle was full of noises. The girl sitting at a table opposite reached for her mobile and started talking her boyfriend through the best route to the restaurant. Martin eyed her appreciatively. His line was that if they were legal they were over the hill. This one looked border-line.

‘Babe,’ he commented.

Jake dismissed her with a glance.

‘Ringtone sucks. So how come you need to go out there?’

‘Because if Aeroscan finds the treasure, we need to move fast. The movie cover is good for the search, but once we start digging it’s a whole different ball game. Anything we turn up is legally the property of the Italian state. Cultural heritage bullshit. Just breaking ground will be a felony, so we’re going to need a work crew who can be trusted not to talk later. I’ve got a plan for that, but now Pete’s out of the picture I need to be there to head up the team in person. I also need clearance from you on the hired help angle.’

‘What’s the deal?’

‘Contact of mine works for one of the big US contractors in Iraq. He’s found me some able-bodied guys who’ve never left the country in their lives and arranged, for a consideration, to have them given passports and sent to Jordan. From Amman they’ll fly into Italy on tourist visas and assemble at the site to carry out the excavation and transfer of the treasure to a storage facility rented by the film company. No Rapture Works footprint.’

Jake toyed with his peeled guinea pig in teriyaki sauce on a bed of collard greens.

‘And after that?’

‘We’ll need to discuss details once I have a chance to perform an assessment at the mission location, but I can tell you right now that export/import is going to be a bitch. I mean, we’re talking like drugs here.’

‘I mean the Iraqi guys.’

‘They go home.’

‘And tell everyone about their excellent Italian adventure?’

A decisive headshake.

‘They won’t.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘You don’t need to know, Jake. Just trust me.’

‘Quit bullshitting.’

Martin sighed.

‘Okay. When the six of them get back, my contact invites them to dinner at some place in downtown Baghdad. He hands over some counterfeit cash with a few real bills on top, then fakes a phone call and says he has to run, business shit going down. The Iraqis couldn’t care less. They’ve been paid and here’s all this great Arab food they’ve been missing so much. Few minutes later a car draws up outside, the driver sprints away and… Well, you can figure out the rest yourself.’

He brushed away the service dude, who was trying to interest them in seaweed ice-cream made from llama’s milk.

‘You mean like permadeath?’ said Jake. ‘Man, that’s heavy. Couldn’t we just — ’

Martin shook his head as decisively as before.

‘No, Jake. If we go ahead on this one, we’re going to need total deniability and cut-outs at every stage. That’s the way it’s got to be.’

‘What about this contact of yours in Baghdad?’

‘He doesn’t know who I’m working for, never mind what we’re doing, and he doesn’t want to know.’

‘But he knows we’re setting it up to have those guys killed, right?’

‘Yeah, plus whoever else is in the restaurant and on the street outside. Sure he knows. But he says the thing about working in Iraq is after a few months you quit worrying about that stuff.’

Jake put on a sick smile.

‘I guess we’re not in Kansas any more.’

‘You can be back in Kansas any time you want,’ Martin replied. ‘I can pull the plug on all this right now and no one will ever be any the wiser. We’ll tell the director the project’s tanked, wind up Rapture Works and pay off Aeroscan. All you have to do is say the word. But if we hit pay dirt, which just could happen as early as tonight, then we’ll be looking down the barrel at international arrest warrants and jail sentences in multiples of ten. So I need to do it my way.’

He sat back with a crinkly grin, regarding the other man with dispassionate intensity. The server approached.

‘I also have a tomato and pimento sorbet! That comes with sweet potato and pumpkin fritters!’

‘Well?’ demanded Martin.

Jake finally met his tormentor’s eyes and emitted a sound like a fledgling crow.

‘Eeeh! Back when they hid the treasure, the guys who did the work got killed after. So it kind of makes sense.’

‘You’re authorising me to go ahead?’

Jake wriggled this way and that, but finally gave a lopsided shrug.

‘How about coffee?’ their server implored. ‘I have an organic bean from a collective of farms in the San Ignacio valley that shows excellent brightness and acidity plus a funky edge that doesn’t dominate the cup.’

‘I’m good,’ said Jake.

The flight from Milan was over an hour late due to a strike by baggage handlers earlier in the day and Tom had been seated in the very last row, next to the galley and the toilets, so by the time he finally emerged, the small airport of Lamezia Terme was almost deserted, public transport services had long since ceased and the last cab had driven away. An electronic display on the wall showed that the external temperature was a very pleasant twenty-three degrees, and after his overnight journey Tom was perfectly prepared to stretch out on a bench or underneath some shrubbery and go straight to sleep, but in the event this wasn’t necessary. As he walked towards the baggage carousels, he was accosted by a paunchy, well-dressed, middle-aged man whose expression alternated rapidly between pleasure, sorrow, respect and encouragement.

‘Signor Newman? I am Nicola Mantega. You called me from the United States a few days ago, if you remember. You said that your father had spoken of me.’

‘Oh yes, right.’

‘And you also mentioned that you would be arriving on the last flight from Milan tonight. Very pleased to meet you. I only wish that it could have been in happier circumstances.’

Having collected Tom’s luggage, they proceeded outside. Neither noticed the young man who had been scanning the titles of the books in the window of the locked newsagent’s stall and then followed them out, to be greeted effusively with a smacking kiss and a full embrace by the very attractive brunette standing beside a battered Fiat Panda. Tom’s escort led him to an Alfa Romeo saloon parked in a lane designated for emergency vehicles only. He gestured the American inside, then returned to the driver’s seat and started the engine.

‘Has there been any news?’ Tom Newman asked as the car sped away into the darkness beyond the airport perimeter lights. Mantega shook his head glumly.

‘I’m sorry, nothing. But that is not surprising in a case like this. It is normal, even reassuring.’

The Alfa slowed slightly to take the sharp curve of the slip road and then they were on the autostrada, heading north to Cosenza.

‘Reassuring?’ Tom queried. ‘I don’t see why. Surely the kidnappers should have got in contact by now and made their ransom demand. The longer they delay, the more chance there is of the whole thing going wrong.’

Mantega smiled in a superior way.

‘For them, the only things that can go wrong are the initial seizure and the ensuing payoff. The first apparently went without a hitch from their point of view. Now they are worried only about the second. They are going to take their time, extract every bit of information they can from their hostage…’

The victim’s son looked at him in dismay.

‘Oh, not by brutality,’ Mantega continued in a discursive tone. ‘They don’t need that. Your father, like any kidnap victim, is utterly dependent on them for the basics of life. Food, water, sleep. They need only threaten to withhold some or all of those to get his complete co-operation. They will make their plans accordingly and then, and only then, will they risk contacting a third party, quite possibly me, to announce the conditions of his release.’

‘But they are holding him somewhere, and I was told that the police have launched a massive investigation,’ Tom Newman protested. ‘Surely every day they delay increases the chances of his being found.’

By now, Mantega’s smile was openly contemptuous.

‘Your Italian is quite good, signore, although not quite as good as your father’s, but I fear that you don’t understand very well what you are talking about. The kidnapping took place on the road leading to my villa, just outside Cosenza. Twenty minutes later, the vehicle conveying your father would have been on this road, but heading the other way, towards Reggio. An hour after that, at the very most, he and his captors would be high up in the mountains of Aspromonte.’

He jerked his thumb towards the rear window.

‘The government — be it the ancient Romans and Greeks, invading Normans, colonising Spanish or nationalistic Milanese — has tried again and again to make its laws hold sway in Aspromonte. On each occasion it has failed. That massif is a vast, shattered landscape, wild, barren, virtually impassable in many places, and riddled with caves and caverns. The people are primitive, ignorant, tough as nails, and speak the truth to no man save family members, and not to all of them. Naturally the police will make a show of strength, but to no effect other than saving their faces. I could hide all the people who just got off your flight from Milan up there for a year and no one would ever find them!’

Tom looked at him curiously.

‘You could, Signor Mantega?’

Mantega hesitated a moment, then laughed lightly.

‘As I mentioned, your Italian is not quite as good as your father’s. What I meant was that all those people could be hidden up on Aspromonte, not that I personally could do it. An easy mistake for a foreigner. Our verbal forms are very complex.’

The autostrada was almost deserted at that time of night, and despite the long uphill gradient the Alfa was now touching two hundred k.p.h. Nevertheless, the modest, ageing Fiat containing the young couple who had apparently met back at the airport was able to keep pace with it, thanks to some expensive technical modifications, but a few kilometres back, where even its lights would be largely invisible to the target ahead on the winding, tunnel-ridden highway. The saloon belonging to Nicola Mantega had also been modified recently, although without the owner’s knowledge or consent. The result was a mobile circle with inset cross on the flat screen visible within the opened glove compartment just in front of the woman’s knees, on the basis of which information she told her colleague at the wheel if he was breaching the agreed distance parameters.

‘My father never spoke Italian to me,’ Tom Newman declared.

‘Indeed? Then how did you learn our beautiful language?’

‘From my mother.’

‘Ah! So she at least is Italian.’

‘Was. She passed away four years ago.’

‘My condolences.’

‘Her family was from Puglia. Her parents were American citizens, but when she was five they decided to move back to Italy. My mother was brought up bilingually, and when she was eighteen she went to college in the States. That’s where she met my father. He told me that he’d taken a course in Italian because he was in love and she liked to speak the language when they were alone together.’

A long silence followed this remark.

‘Then there appears to be a discrepancy between what your father told you and what he told me, which was that he had been born here in Calabria.’

The young American stared at him sullenly, and then his eyes lit up.

‘Then the man that you met can’t have been my father! This must all have been a mistake. Some impostor must have taken his place and got kidnapped, and now he’s — ’

‘I quite understand your natural grief and distress,’ Mantega replied, ‘but you must not delude yourself with puerile fantasies. Of course it was your father. He showed me his passport at the outset just as I showed him my documents. The business we were discussing was extremely sensitive and confidential and it was essential that there should be absolute trust on both sides. There is no possibility that I could have been mistaken about his identity.’

Tom Newman was by now openly truculent.

‘Yeah well, I’ve also seen my father’s passport, Signor Mantega. If you had examined it more carefully, you would have noticed that the stated place of birth is the District of Columbia, USA.’

Mantega made the soft Italian gesture that turns away wrath.

‘As it happens, I did notice that, and when he later told me he was Calabrian I naturally mentioned it.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That it was a long story. A very Calabrian reply. He clearly did not intend to discuss the matter. But he must have told you something about his origins. What did he say?’

‘That he was an American,’ Tom replied shortly.

Mantega smiled.

‘A Red Indian?’

‘Of course not! And we don’t call them that any more.’

‘Then where did he say that his family was from? All Americans are from somewhere else. Your country is only a couple of hundred years old.’

‘That’s quite a long time.’

Nicola Mantega’s smile turned into a smug smirk.

‘Long for you, short for us.’

‘He told me that his family had been in the States for generations, and had intermarried so much that no one could figure out where anyone was from. Besides, he didn’t care. “We’re Americans and that’s the end of it,” he used to say. And I don’t care about any of this either. All I want is to get my father back. Those bastards at the film company he was working for have disclaimed all responsibility on the grounds that he was an outside employee and his contract with them says nothing about liability for ransom demands. So the money’s all going to have to come from my family.’

‘Is it a large family?’

‘No. I’m an only child and my father isn’t particularly rich. I just hope the kidnappers realise that and are prepared to be reasonable.’

Nicola Mantega did not pursue this topic. By now they had crossed the col between the valleys of the Savuto and Craticello rivers, and were descending the long sweeping stretch of highway towards the lights of Cosenza nestled in the narrow plain below.

‘You must be exhausted,’ Mantega said. ‘I’ve booked you into the Centrale. It’s part of the Best Western chain — all-American comforts like air-conditioning and room service, and as the name suggests, right in the centre.’

‘Was that where my father stayed?’

‘No, he hired a car and needed to drive around, so for him I suggested a location out in a suburb called Rende, with easy access to the autostrada.’

The Alfa braked sharply as it entered the ramp off the autostrada. Fifteen minutes later, having seen Tom Newman checked into his hotel and made an agreement to get in touch the next day, Mantega climbed back into his car and started to drive home. On the parallel street to the east, two young men on a MotoGuzzi kept pace. The man on the pillion talked incessantly into his mobile phone.

In Viale Trieste, the Alfa pulled up to a public phone booth. It was after midnight, and there was no one about except for a few derelicts. Mantega looked around, then fed a phone card into the machine. A couple of moments later, a white delivery van entered the square at the far end and came speeding round the corner. Mantega started to dial, then broke off at the squeal of tortured rubber and final crash and turned to look. It was quite clear what must have happened. A motorbike had turned into the square from a side-street just as the van hurtled past, and had been knocked to the ground. Luckily the two young men riding on it appeared to be uninjured. They picked themselves up, ran over to the van and started abusing the driver with a verbal violence that seemed likely to turn physical at any second. A stream of obscenity and blasphemy filled the air. Mantega grinned contemptuously and turned his attention back to the phone.

‘Giorgio?’ he said when the number answered. ‘Nicola. He’s arrived.’

‘Too late. Tomorrow, the way we arranged.’

By now the altercation across the street had begun to wind down. The two bikers picked up their machine, revved up the engine and tested the brakes and lights. The van driver was intently scrutinising the front end of his vehicle, picking at the paintwork with his thumbnail. Meanwhile, in the back of the van the fourth member of the team lowered the directional microphone from the circle of plastic mesh forming the centre of one of the zeroes in the phone number emblazoned outside.

Nicola Mantega returned to his car and drove off just as a deafening blast from the MotoGuzzi’s twin exhaust consigned all van drivers to the lowest circle of hell. But the motorcycle had also been modified, and when it doubled back to follow the Alfa up to Mantega’s villa in the foothills above the city, its engine sounded no louder than a kitten’s purr.

Ever since he arrived in Cosenza, Aurelio Zen had been sleeping badly. This was not the fault of the weather, although a few weeks earlier the thermometer had been nudging forty, nor of his accommodation, an efficient, soulless apartment maintained by the police for the use of visiting officers in one of the concrete blocks that disfigured the area around the Questura. It consisted of a sitting room and kitchenette with a dining area, two bedrooms, one of which Zen used as a study, and the best-equipped bathroom he had ever seen. A maid came once a week to clean the floor and change the bedding, and he had arranged for her to wash and iron his clothing as well. Apart from that, he was left entirely alone. The apartment was quiet, air-conditioned and just a few minutes’ walk from his office.

Despite this, he had been sleeping badly, waking for no apparent reason and dreaming too much and far too vividly. Zen had never paid much attention to his dreams, but now they were thrusting themselves on his attention like a swarm of gypsy beggars, most of all in the intermediate state between sleep and waking when he was partly conscious but completely defenceless. As soon as he surfaced sufficiently to realise what was happening, he climbed out of bed, walked through to the state-of-the-art bathroom and took a cool shower before finishing off in a torrent of water as hot as he could bear. Standing naked in the well-equipped kitchen, he then filled the caffetiera and put it on the flame, lit his first cigarette of the day and phoned his wife in Lucca before she left home to open her pharmacy.

Zen had considered asking her to send him some sleeping pills, but he disliked admitting a weakness. Besides, he and Gemma had an unspoken agreement to keep their professional and personal lives separate as far as possible. In fact, he would have found it very difficult to say what they did talk about in these daily ten-to fifteen-minute conversations that seemed to flow along as effortlessly as a river and left him feeling calm, capable and ready to face the day. Having slurped down his muddy coffee, he then shaved, got dressed and left for work. Stepping out into the street was the final phase of his psychic detox ritual. Life in Calabria was by no means perfect, but the spectres and ghouls which tormented his nights could find no refuge in its merciless, crystalline light.

The next stop was a cafe and pastry shop called Dolci Idee. The display cases were laden with sugary iced cakes and buns of every description, but a sweet tooth was one item that didn’t figure on Zen’s sin list. He consumed a double espresso amaro, and then walked along one and a half blocks of the grid pattern on which the new city of Cosenza was constructed, past the church of Santa Teresa, a modern monstrosity with Romanesque pretensions, to the Questura. If the devotees of the saint had been making one sort of statement, those faithful to the cult of the state had made another, just as forceful and arguably more attractive, in the new provincial headquarters of the Polizia di Stato. This dated from the 1980s and was a wide, low building, windowless below the second storey and sheathed in ochre coloured metal sheets which were said to be bomb-proof.

The interior resembled the offices of a major business corporation rather than the grandiose follies of the Fascist era and the recycled baroque palazzi with which Zen was familiar. He tried to console himself with the thought that, as the proverb had it, everything had changed so that nothing would change, but something told him — was this the reason for those half-awake nightmares? — that something had indeed changed, and that there was no place for people like him in the new scheme of things. The basic design was open plan, with cubicles, a flat-screen computer monitor on every desk, bare walls, grey filing cabinets, corkboards stuck with memos, filtered lighting and furniture that might have been bought at Ikea. The building was nominally air-conditioned, but the system kept breaking down and none of the windows could be opened.

By virtue of his rank, Zen had an office all to himself, but with interior windows instead of walls as part of the force’s new transparent ethos. These could be, and in Zen’s case were, covered by slatted blinds which he always kept closed. On his desk that morning was a transcript of the recording made by the Digos team the night before of Nicola Mantega’s phone call to someone named Giorgio. The interest of this was not so much what Mantega had said, although that sounded conspiratorially cryptic, as the manner in which contact had been established. An eminent notaio who drove an Alfa Romeo 159 Q4 and had three mobile phones and two land lines — Zen knew, since he had ordered interceptions on all of them — did not pull up at a public phone box after midnight to make a call unless he had something to hide. Mantega clearly suspected that his private and business phones might be tapped, but not that he was being followed. All of which fitted in nicely with Zen’s view of him as a semi-competent provincial operator who knew far more than he had admitted about Newman’s disappearance.

There was a discreet knock at the door.

‘ Avanti! ’

Natale Arnone entered.

‘Here’s the material you requested, sir. And there’s some foreigner down at the desk demanding to speak to the officer in charge of the Newman case. Claims to be the victim’s son.’

‘In what language?’

‘Italian. He’s pretty fluent, but comes across as a bit rozzo. Strident and pushy. Do you want me to deal with him?’

‘I think an overwrought manner is forgivable under the circumstances. Send him up.’

Zen was looking through the paperwork which had accumulated overnight when Thomas Newman was shown in. After Arnone’s warning, Zen had expected someone resembling the classic American football player: a thick cylindrical skull welded to massive shoulders, no neck, hairy piano-leg limbs and a voice like the brass section of a 1930s big band at full discordant climax. He was confronted instead by a lithe, energetic young man whose body made no exaggerated claims and was in any case trumped by the face of a mischievous but charming cherub with a mass of glossy black curls cut negligently long. Zen invited his visitor to be seated and gestured Arnone to leave. Newman eyed the crammed ashtray on Zen’s desk.

‘May I smoke? I thought it was illegal now.’

‘It is.’

‘But you are a policeman.’

‘Exactly.’

They exchanged a glance, and Zen felt that subliminal clink of contact with another intelligence.

‘What a splendid city!’ exclaimed Newman. ‘I woke early, because of the time difference, and then went out and just walked around for hours. The light, the landscape, the buildings, the people — it all seemed magical, yet somehow familiar.’

‘You are too kind,’ Zen replied smoothly. ‘As it happens, I agree that Cosenza is the most attractive city in Calabria — not that the competition is exactly fierce. But you are of course biased in these matters, since your father is a native.’

Zen had had very few dealings with Americans, but the volatility with which Tom Newman’s mood altered in a moment was completely familiar to him.

‘You’re the second person who’s tried to get me to believe that bullshit!’

‘Might the first have been Signor Nicola Mantega? I understand that he met you at the airport last night.’

‘How did you know?’

Zen looked at him curiously.

‘How do you know Signor Mantega?’

‘My father mentioned the name to me when he called during his first week here. After the disappearance, I got Mantega’s phone number from my father’s office and then called him. He’s been very helpful and supportive.’

‘I’m sure he has,’ Zen said drily. ‘Apart from his personal legal situation regarding this matter, he may well turn out to be the intermediary once negotiations for your father’s release get under way.’

‘But why wouldn’t the kidnappers deal directly with me? I can talk to them as well as Signor Mantega.’

‘In such interactions they will want someone they know and trust. Besides, they may prefer to express themselves in dialect. It’s a very different language from standard Italian and is incomprehensible even to me but preferred by many native Calabrians, particularly at moments of great intimacy or intensity. Which no doubt explains why your father had recourse to it during his stay here.’

Tom Newman flashed his deep hazel eyes at Zen in a way that was not at all cherubic.

‘What is this crap? My father is one hundred per cent American! Is that clear?’

Zen picked his words carefully.

‘It’s clear that that is what you believe, signore, but the fact remains that during his stay in Cosenza your father has been heard speaking a variety of dialect distinctive to that mountain range over there.’

He gestured to the window, where the verdant flanks of the Sila plateau could be seen sloping down to the valley where the city lay. From the wide expanse of the flood plain came the persistent drone of the helicopter that an American film company had hired to scout out suitable locations for their next project. It was a noisy pest, but both the mayor and the prefect had given the enterprise their blessing and there was nothing to be done.

‘I don’t believe you,’ Tom Newman said in a hard tone.

Zen shrugged.

‘He would hardly have been the first Calabrian to have emigrated to la Merica. In fact he wouldn’t even have been in the first hundred thousand. But as it happens you don’t need to believe me.’

He leafed through some papers and then passed across the naturalisation details of Peter Newman supplied by the consulate in Naples together with an Italian birth certificate in the name of Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati.

‘Are these official?’ Tom asked after reading them.

‘As official as can be. Your father assumed the name Peter Newman in 1969. Before that he was Pietro Calopezzati, born in the comune of Spezzano della Sila up in those mountains half an hour’s drive from here. Are you telling me that you are completely ignorant of these facts?’

‘Why would I lie to you?’ Tom Newman snapped. ‘I didn’t even know there was anything to lie about! Anyway, what’s all this got to do with the kidnapping? That’s what you’re supposed to be investigating. Who cares if my father concealed his origins for some reason?’

‘I care about everything that may be connected to the case, Signor Newman. One never knows what may turn out to be relevant. For instance, the Calopezzati were, until the political changes shortly after your father’s birth, among the richest landowners in Italy. At this point I have no information about the present state of the family finances, but the kidnappers certainly will. That may well affect the amount of the ransom they demand. I take it you have a mobile phone.’

Newman stubbed out his cigarette.

‘It doesn’t work in Europe.’

‘Then you’ll basically be deaf and dumb over here, and as is often the case with those who suffer from those disabilities, people will take you for an idiot.’

‘All right, I’ll get one.’

‘Pass the number on to me immediately. Once the kidnappers make their move, it’s essential that we are able to react quickly. The gang will almost certainly set a timetable for further negotiations, and if they don’t receive a prompt reply they may well break off contact. At that point things can rapidly get out of hand, with terrible results.’

Zen’s face clouded over.

‘Odd, your father deceiving you like that,’ he murmured. ‘I hope everything’s going to be all right.’

The watcher outside Nicola Mantega’s office on Corso Mazzini was getting bored. Thanks to his work with the Digos anti-terrorist squad, Benedetto was an old hand at stakeouts despite his relative youth, and knew that boredom was a surveillance operative’s worst enemy. It eroded your concentration, imperceptibly but continually, and when something finally happened, your reflexes would be stiff and your reaction time sluggish. If the wait was long enough and the event sufficiently discreet, you might even miss it altogether.

The night before, Mantega had been followed back to his villa by the motorcyclists, who reported that he had gone straight to bed. In the morning, a fresh team had tailed him back to the city in what was seemingly one of the ubiquitous Ape three-wheeled vans used by smallholders and rural tradesmen, but in this case powered by a very quiet 1.5-litre engine mounted in the covered rear cargo space. The target had spent the entire time since then in his office, in which an assortment of listening devices had been installed in the course of a nocturnal visit by members of the technical support group. Later in the day, the motorcycle duo had relieved the Ape team at the rear of the office building, while Benedetto kept his eyes on the front door from the specially equipped delivery van, which had been repainted green and given a fresh logo overnight.

The end result of all this effort had been precisely zero. Mantega had left home and arrived at the office at the normal hour, and his phone calls had been entirely routine, relating to his work facilitating contracts, payments and legal issues for various nominally legitimate business enterprises. A total yawn, in short, and Benedetto was in fact yawning when Mantega emerged from the utilitarian 1960s office building shortly after noon. This was a perfectly reasonable hour for a libera professionista to begin winding down towards lunch, but two features of the situation immediately struck Benedetto. The first was that Mantega had changed out of the jacket, pullover and tie he had worn to work into decidedly unsmart jeans, an open-necked sweatshirt and work boots. The second was that instead of walking towards his favourite restaurant or driving off in the Alfa in which he had arrived, he got into a taxi which had drawn up near by a few minutes earlier. Benedetto started the van and radioed the others to get their MotoGuzzi going. The taxi headed east across the Crati river and then south, where the bikers overtook both the van and the taxi with breathtaking arrogance. A few minutes later, the front tail came through on the radio link.

‘He paid off the cab in Casali and is now in a cafe opposite the station.’

‘Understood. I’ll take over.’

At one time, Casali had been a small and undistinguished village on the main road south from Cosenza, but that highway had long been superseded by the autostrada and the community itself subsumed into the suburbs of the city. Its centre was a modest piazza completely clogged with parked cars. Benedetto left the van a block further on and then doubled back, apparently talking non-stop on his mobile. In reality he was moving his lips silently while his colleague from the MotoGuzzi crew briefed him on the current situation. Mantega was still in the bar, drinking a cappuccino which he had already paid for, a slightly unusual thing to do in such a humble establishment. He had not apparently made contact with anybody.

After a brief glance inside, Benedetto took up position outside the bar, in the informal car park that the original piazzetta, a mere widening of the main road, had become. The bar was empty except for Mantega and three elderly men who looked as if they had been there since it opened. When Benedetto next looked — turning casually in the manner of a shiftless youth intent on his phone conversation — the target had emerged from the cafe and was now weaving his way rapidly through the ranks of parked cars, across the highway and into the station yard just as a diesel railcar emerged from the right and slowed to a halt. This was awkward. By the rule book, one of the others should have taken over at this point, but there was no time for that. Benedetto sprinted after him, narrowly avoiding an oncoming truck on the highway, and reached the platform just as the doors of the railcar were closing. He levered the rear one open and climbed aboard.

There were about a dozen other passengers. Benedetto slid on to a seat at the rear. Fortunately, Nicola Mantega had chosen to sit facing forward and gave no sign of having noticed Benedetto’s presence. When the guard came round, both men bought tickets. In Mantega’s case, this involved quite a lengthy discussion, but the roar of the engine as they climbed the steep gradient out of the valley made it impossible for Benedetto to hear what was said. He himself bought a single ticket all the way, then went to the lavatory and made a number of phone calls.

The back-up team at the Questura did their best, but it was an impossible task. There were twenty-six scheduled stops on the three and a half hour trip across the rugged interior of Calabria, twelve of which lay in the neighbouring province of Catanzaro and hence would require the co-operation of the authorities in that city, which was unlikely to be rapidly forthcoming at a time when most of their senior personnel would either be on the way home for lunch or at a restaurant. The metre-gauge railcar trundled along at no more than forty kilometres an hour, but on the winding, unimproved roads of that area even the MotoGuzzi would be hard pressed to maintain a better average speed. All Benedetto’s instincts told him that Nicola Mantega was headed for a covert meeting with the kidnappers, the vital link in the chain of evidence that would bring the dormant investigation to life, and eventually to court. But there would be further feints, dodges and cut-outs at the other end, and he himself, alone and on foot, could do nothing.

In the end, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. In addition to the scheduled stations, the train also passed a number of fermate facoltative, unmanned halts where it could be stopped by request to the guard. It was at one of these, located at the head of a remote valley which the line looped languidly around, that Nicola Mantega descended. There was an abandoned station, its windows and doorways bricked up, and a disused siding and goods shed. Behind this, a heavily overgrown dirt track rose up the bare hillside, presumably leading to the village that had given the station its name, but there was no sign of it or of any other human presence in the scrubby landscape. The railcar revved up its engine in a cloud of diesel fumes and then sidled off. Benedetto headed for the solitude of the lavatory and switched on his mobile and radio, but he couldn’t get a signal on the phone, the radio was out of range and anyway it was too late.

Nicola Mantega stood motionless until the railcar was out of sight, then started to walk slowly up the dirt track. After about a minute, a distant sound attracted his attention. A black Jeep was making its way down the hillside towards him, disdaining the levelled track. When it was about five metres away it swung around to face uphill and an electric window peeled down.

‘ Salve,’ said Giorgio.

The rotor blades were whirling slowly to a halt as the three men stepped down from the Bell 412. To the west, just above the line of mountains that cradled the city, the sun was also powering down for the night, but on the ground the temperature was still over a hundred. Flanked by the pilot and technician, Phil Larson headed towards the metal box that Aeroscan had hired as a temporary office facility. It stood on the cracked concrete paving that also served as a landing pad, right alongside a skeletal concrete structure that had obviously been abandoned for years. It looked as though someone had set out to build a factory or a supermarket and then changed his mind or run out of money half-way through.

None of the men talked. They were all stupid from the heat, filthy from the dust kicked up by the backdraught, jittery from the continual noise and vibration of the helicopter and looking forward to stripping off their work clothes and getting back to the hotel as soon as possible. So Phil wasn’t real happy when his phone started to ring. Even worse, the screen displayed Anonimo in place of the caller’s name. He had learnt that this meant an out-of-area call, almost certainly international and probably from head office. The damnedest thing about operating in Europe was the time difference. Just as you crawled out of the galley after a hard day at the oars, the eager beavers back in the States were arriving at the office all caffeined up and keen to show their mettle.

‘Phil Larson.’

‘Phil? It’s Martin Nguyen.’

‘Hi, Mr Nguyen.’

‘Phil? Phil? Are you there?’

‘Sure I’m here.’

‘I can’t hear you, Phil! Can you hear me?’

‘I can hear you fine, Mr Nguyen. Maybe there’s a problem with the connection.’

‘Phil? There must be a problem with the connection. I’ll call you right back.’

Oh no you won’t, thought Phil, speed-dialling another number.

‘Hi, Phil.’

‘Hi, Jason,’ replied Phil, pushing open the door. Jason looked up at him in surprise and made to clam his cell.

‘Leave it on!’ Phil told him. ‘I need to block an incoming while I unwind.’

After a quick rinse in what they called the sewer shower, Phil emerged wearing his street clothes. The others were all set to go. Phil told them that he’d be along later, retired to his office and scrolled down on the mobile till he hit ‘Rapture Works’.

‘Martin.’

‘This is Phil, Mr Nguyen.’

‘Finally! I’ve been trying to get you for almost half an hour. Where the fuck were you?’

Phil was not a serious student of human nature — too many variables — but Martin Nguyen had always struck him as being the nearest thing to the electrical circuitry that he loved and understood. Now he sounded like some goddamn chick. What was up?

‘I had to take another call, Mr Nguyen. Our aviation fuel distributor didn’t deliver on schedule and we’ve only got fifteen hours’ supply left. Anyway, I’ve sorted it all out. The gasoline’s going to arrive tomorrow, trucked in from…’

‘I don’t want to hear your goddamn life story, Larson. Report progress.’

‘Well, we’ve been working twelve-hour shifts and getting through around a hundred kilometres each day.’

‘But you haven’t found anything.’

‘You’d have heard if we had.’

‘So how long is this going to take?’

‘No way to tell, Mr Nguyen. We might find it first thing tomorrow, or it might be at the far end of our last beat.’

‘How can we speed up the search?’

‘We can’t. The ultrasound waves require a given amount of time to penetrate down into the ground and reflect back up to the receiver. The duration of each wave bounce represents a physical constant. If the forward motion of the monitoring vehicle exceeds the envelope created by that constant, the information returned is worthless.’

Martin Nguyen’s hiss echoed down the line.

‘Then we need to grow our resources. Hire another helicopter.’

‘Choppers are no use without the hardware.’

‘Have extra units shipped over.’

‘Well, you’d need to talk to head office about that, Mr Nguyen, but I think it might be a problem.’

‘You mean a challenge?’

‘No, I mean a problem. The scanner we’re using was originally developed for military purposes, in highflying planes or drones. The civilian variant, operable at low altitudes, is still in development, but Aeroscan was able to get hold of a beta release prototype for use on your project. It’s a beauty, works just great, but as far as I know there aren’t any more available right now.’

‘Okay. You say you’re working twelve hours a day. That’s only a fifty per cent effort. Get your company to fly out more people, hire another pilot — maybe another gas supplier while you’re at it — and keep going right around the clock.’

‘I hate to tell you this, Mr Nguyen, but it can’t be done. This is strictly visual navigation. We’re flying at less than a hundred feet in a complex environment on the outskirts of a major city surrounded by mountains on three sides. We’re working the flood plain now, but some of the side valleys on our survey chart are barely thirty feet across near the bottom. No aviation instruments could cope with that. The authorities have been pretty co-operative so far, but they’d never let us operate between civil dusk and dawn. Apart from anything else, we’re supposed to be selecting prime locations for a movie shoot. How can you do that in the dark?’

That hiss again.

‘So, worst-case scenario, when is the latest we’ll know whether there’s anything there?’

‘About a month, if all goes well.’

‘That’s way too long.’

‘I don’t know what to tell you, Mr Nguyen. I didn’t think this thing was time-dated.’

‘The situation has changed. The director of the movie we’re using as cover for the operation now wants to start shooting next week.’

‘So? He won’t bother us none.’

‘No, but you’ll bother him. He’ll wonder what this helicopter is doing all day, patrolling up and down when he’s trying to set up a scene. When he asks around, he’ll be told that it’s surveying locations for scenes in his movie. Bullshit, he’ll say, I never asked for anything like that.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Nguyen, this is way beyond my area of competence.’

‘All right, let’s see how competent you are, Larson. You don’t have a month any more. You have barely a week, so you’ll have to prioritise.’

‘On the basis of what criteria?’

‘How do you mean?’

Phil sighed.

‘Mr Nguyen, our project chart is posted right here on the wall of my office. I’m looking at it now. What I’m seeing is a large-scale map of the area divided into fifteen-metre-wide strips. Those that have been completed are shaded in — apart from today’s, because I haven’t had a chance yet. All the remaining strips look pretty well identical to me. I don’t even know what we’re looking for, except it’s a man-made structure buried somewhere down beneath the riverbed. You’re now asking me to favour some sections of the survey over others, so I’m asking you who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. They don’t seem to be wearing their hats.’

‘Don’t get flippant with me, Larson!’

‘Sorry, Mr Nguyen. The heat must be getting to me. Plus everything’s a whole lot tougher since Newman went AWOL. Just yesterday this Italian guy comes around wanting to know what we’re doing and where’s our authorisation from the city. At least I think that’s what he was saying, his English wasn’t too good. I gave him the agreed cover story but he wanted to see the paperwork. I don’t know where those permits are. Never even seen them. And I sure as hell can’t deal effectively with people like that in a foreign language. That was what Pete Newman was for. I do electronics.’

Another, briefer silence.

‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ Martin Nguyen announced.

The isolated stone barn had evidently lain derelict for years, but still smelt strongly of sheep and manure, interwoven with more recent layers of rot, damp and mould. The floor was of beaten earth and the windows filled in with roughly mortared blocks of terracotta brick. Once Giorgio had closed and bolted the massive door, the darkness was broken only by peeps of light from the roof, whose flat stone slabs had shifted over the years. He turned on his torch and suspended it from a loop at the end of a length of rusty wire attached to the main roof-beam, so that it dangled down like a domestic light fixture, then he moved away into the shadowy depths at the fringes of the building.

It was only now that Mantega realised there was another odour present. It was the smell of fear, and the fear was his own. A couple of days after Peter Newman’s kidnapping, an envelope had been deposited in the letter box of Mantega’s villa. It was unstamped and addressed only with his name. The note inside, printed by a typewriter in block capitals, gave detailed instructions to be followed in the event that meeting in person proved to be necessary. Mantega had followed these to the letter, and Giorgio had duly shown up at the designated station on the secondary line to Catanzaro.

So far so good, but since then nothing had gone according to plan. Mantega had expected a warm welcome from his associate, a rapid update on the latest developments regarding both of them, followed by a discussion of the most appropriate means to bring their joint enterprise to fruition. None of that. Giorgio had remained silent and glacially cold throughout the twenty-minute drive to the ruin where they now were, and had offered absolutely no explanation for having insisted on the meeting in the first place.

‘We’ll talk once we get there,’ was all he would say.

As he watched his host return, carrying two tumblers full of some colourless liquid, it occurred to Mantega that an important component of the primitive terror which had him in his grip was that Giorgio appeared physically different. He was still the same wiry weasel of a man, as thin and heavy as a sheet of beaten lead, but his movements had lost their fluidity, their naturalezza. He bristled with suppressed tension, and the hand that offered Mantega his glass of grappa might have been robotic.

‘ Salute.’

Neither man wanted to drink. Both did. Once this ceremony had been concluded, Mantega waited for Giorgio to get to the point. He felt sure that Peter Newman was being held near by, possibly even in the cellarage of the barn, and was anxious to discuss the ways and means for his release and their payment by the son. But Giorgio didn’t seem to want to discuss anything. He just stood there, his back to the light, eyes focused on nothing within view, listening intently to the silence between them. Eventually Mantega could stand it no longer.

‘I’ve been under a lot of pressure, you know!’

Giorgio moved his eyes, though not his head, and regarded him for a moment dispassionately.

‘From the police, as a matter of fact,’ Mantega continued with a hint of sarcastic emphasis. ‘This outsider that they’ve brought in as a temporary replacement for Rossi seems determined to make his mark at my expense. He gave me a very unpleasant grilling yesterday, and seems to regard me as a probable accessory both before and after the fact.’

Still Giorgio said nothing.

‘Rossi couldn’t be bought, but he’d grown lazy,’ Mantega went on. ‘The new man has a quite different approach. He’s given the case top priority, is heading the investigation in person and, since the victim is a prominent foreign citizen, he’s getting full cooperation from his superiors and the judiciary. I therefore have to assume that all my phones, both at home and at work, are being tapped. I may even be under surveillance.’

‘You are.’

Mantega’s relief at having finally made the other man say something was undermined by what he had in fact said.

‘How do you know?’

Giorgio put his glass in his pocket and lit a small cigar.

‘Don’t worry, it’s all part of the price of doing business,’ he replied.

‘That’s all very well for you to say! You’re not under suspicion. How could you be when there’s absolutely nothing to link you to the American? Anyway, as I told you last night, Newman’s son has arrived, so let’s get down to this business of yours. That call was from a public phone box, incidentally, with a tramp passed out in a doorway on one side of me and a violent outburst of road rage on the other. I don’t want to live like this, Giorgio, so let’s stop pissing around and get down to negotiating.’

Giorgio plucked the cigar from between his lips and exhaled a dense cloud of smoke. Then he smiled. When Giorgio smiled, you knew that the news was really, really bad.

‘Negotiating what?’

Too late, Mantega sensed that he was on a steep, slippery slope with nothing left to do but slither down as best he could.

‘For Christ’s sake, Giorgio! The money angle. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to see my share of the profits sooner rather than later.’

‘For doing what?’

He can’t be planning to stiff me, thought Mantega, but in his heart he knew that Giorgio could and that there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

‘We had an agreement, Giorgio!’

‘Have you a copy with you?’

‘You gave me your word! We embraced and kissed!’

‘And what did you do for me?’

Mantega flung his arms wide.

‘What did I do?’ he repeated dramatically. ‘The whole thing was my idea! You would never even have known about this rich American if it hadn’t been for me.’

‘You told me he was Calabrian. A Calopezzati.’

‘Who cares who he is? He’s rich and he’s here, totally out of his depth and all alone. I marked him down for you and arranged for him to visit me that evening so that you could take him. Without me, none of this would have been possible! You can’t deny that.’

Giorgio bent down to stub out his cigar, then placed the butt carefully in his pocket.

‘Let’s have another drink,’ he said.

‘I don’t want your damned drink, I want my money!’

But Giorgio had once again vanished into the dark recesses of the barn. A few moments later he returned, bottle in hand.

‘Give me your glass,’ he said.

‘I don’t want a drink!’

Giorgio stood quite still. He allowed the silence to reform and listened to it attentively for a while.

‘Neither do I.’

In one motion, he swivelled round and hurled the bottle of grappa against the wall. Sensing that he was in great danger, Mantega did not move or speak. Giorgio reached into his jacket pocket and handed out a bundle of fifty-euro notes.

‘What’s this?’ Mantega asked.

‘Your fee.’

‘My agreed fee was ten per cent of the ransom, Giorgio. We haven’t even started negotiating yet. How can you possibly know how much the family will end up paying?’

‘There won’t be any negotiations. You get a kill fee of a thousand. Take it.’

‘What do you mean, no negotiations? What’s happened? What’s going on?’

‘At the back of the barn you’ll find an old Vespa. Full tank, key in the ignition. Turn right when you reach the road, then left at the next junction. After that follow the signs for Cosenza. Dump the scooter in the outskirts and take a bus into town.’

There was a long silence.

‘And Newman?’ asked Mantega.

‘He died.’

The two men stared at each other.

‘What?’ Mantega shouted. ‘You let your hostage die and now you expect to buy me off with a lousy thousand euros? You must be crazy!’

Giorgio unhooked the torch from its support.

‘Let me show you how crazy I am.’

He shone the stark beam up and to one side, coming to rest on one of the transverse timbers supporting the roof. Attached to the side of the joist was a silver box terminating in a glittering glass eye.

‘Digital camcorder,’ said Giorgio. ‘I switched it on by remote control when I fetched the grappa and off again when I went back for the bottle. One of my cumpagni fixed it up for me, as well as the wire to hang up the torch that would draw you into its field of view.’

He shone the light straight into Mantega’s face, blinding him.

‘You have not only admitted your part in the kidnapping but claimed that the whole thing was your idea. Without you it wouldn’t have been possible, you said. I kept my back to the camera all along, but I made sure that you were facing it. If I get arrested because you’ve blabbed, under duress or not, that video will end up in the hands of this new chief of police you’re so scared of.’

He turned off the torch, leaving them both in the dark.

‘Drive carefully, Nicoletta.’

‘ I calabresi non sanno fare squadra. Tutto li! They can’t play as a team and so they’re condemned to remain ineffective whingers, always complaining that the state handouts they live on aren’t generous enough.’

As if to illustrate his thesis, Giovanni Sforza attracted the waiter’s attention with a loud ‘ Eh! ’ and then stabbed his finger at the bread basket and the wine carafe. Moments later, both had been replenished.

‘You see?’ demanded Sforza. ‘Bullying and beating is the only language they understand.’

‘You sound like one of those racists who want to declare an independent Padania,’ said Zen.

‘I’m not a racist, I’m a realist,’ Sforza returned mildly. ‘A racist believes that a designated ethnic group can never function and compete effectively because of its innate deficiencies. I don’t believe that. All I’m saying is that the Calabrians do not in fact function or compete effectively, despite having been given every opportunity to do so. Look at the Irish, by way of comparison. Their historical and economic circumstances were very similar for centuries, yet now their country is per capita one of the richest and most successful in Europe.’

Zen didn’t want to talk about Ireland. In fact he didn’t really want to talk at all, but Giovanni had invited him to lunch and it would have been churlish to refuse. Sforza was an overweight, melancholic individual from Bergamo who freely admitted that the only reason he had accepted his present posting as deputy questore in Cosenza was because it meant promotion. He and Zen saw eye to eye on almost everything that mattered, and tactfully agreed to differ on all the things that didn’t.

‘Anyway, I’ve ranted enough,’ said Sforza, reminding Zen of why he liked him. ‘How’s the Newman case going?’

‘No word yet from the kidnappers, but I’ve discovered one possibly significant fact. The victim’s original name was not in fact Newman.’

Sforza made a visible effort to appear interested.

‘Really? So what was it? Mickey Mouse? Arnold Schwarzenegger?’

‘Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati. He was born here in the province of Cosenza.’

Sforza shrugged.

‘In the two decades before the Great War, the south lost more men to emigration than the entire country lost fighting in that war.’

‘The significance is threefold,’ Zen replied. ‘First of all, he lied about his identity, even to his son. Lying is always significant, since by nature we’re truth tellers. Secondly, the documents relating to his American citizenship are held in a classified file marked “For Official Use Only”. And finally, the Calopezzati family used to be the greatest landowners in these parts. Perhaps you’ve heard of them.’

Sforza shook his head.

‘So what? The latifondo system is as obsolete as Russian serfdom. Far enough removed from us now, in fact, that we can even afford to indulge in a little nostalgia. If you ever drive over to the east coast, take a look around the Marchesato. You realise instantly that the only viable way to make any economic sense of that lunar landscape is intensive, centralised wheat farming on a massive scale with low labour costs.’

Zen laughed.

‘You’re sounding a little sentimental, Giovanni. Are you sure you’re not secretly voting for the Lega Nord?’

Sforza erased that suggestion with a decisive swipe of his hand, but his eyes smiled.

‘You know the old saying — once a Communist, always a Communist.’

‘So you still believe in that line in the Marxist creed: “to each according to his needs”?’

‘Devoutly.’

‘Well, my needs presently include tracking down any surviving members of the Calopezzati clan and getting as much information as possible about their whereabouts and activities during the war years. Can you help?’

‘Yes, but I need to smoke. Let’s pay these swine and adjourn to a cafe.’

They found a suitable place a few doors away, with tables on the street where they could smoke. The coffee was tolerable, but Giovanni Sforza was incredible. He swung into action as one to the manner born, calling a dozen of his contacts and gouging the information he needed out of each until a complete network had come into being and formulated a result, which he then communicated to Zen.

‘The man you need is Cataldo Antonacci. He curates the archives and local history section of the provincial museum. What he doesn’t know about events around here for the last thousand years is not worth knowing. He’s expecting you within the hour.’

‘Did you explain the nature of my interest?’

‘Naturally not. I merely said that the chief of police wished to consult him about a matter that he had not disclosed to me but which might quite possibly be legally privileged. He sounded very impressed.’

Twenty minutes later, Zen was in an elegant building on a quiet piazza high above the sterile grid of the modern city below, discussing the origins of the latifondo system in general and of the Calopezzati family in particular with Cataldo Antonacci. The historian’s expression of benign bemusement suggested that Zen’s visit possibly constituted a slight indelicacy, but one which he was too well bred to bring to his guest’s attention. Nor, needless to say, did he enquire why such an eminent official as the capo della polizia for the province of Cosenza was so interested in a dry subject that most people had learned about at school and promptly forgotten.

With exquisite tact and a welcome gift for concise synthesis, he related the origins of the huge southern estates in land grants made by the Spanish viceroys of Naples during the eighteenth century, and in their subsequent enlargement by shrewd purchases from adjoining landowners, often ancient noble families who had got into debt and needed cash fast. The key to success, the archivist explained, was to get possession of a property large enough to be virtually self-sufficient, to allow diversity of production involving economies of scale thus insulated from the vagaries of the market. The continuing integrity of the operation was then guaranteed by strict adherence to the primogeniture system, under which the eldest son inherited everything, the other males being maintained on an allowance but forbidden to marry.

‘To do that successfully over many generations requires good luck or good genes. The Calopezzati were gifted with both. They were of humble origins, small landowners from Cosenza, but they proved exceptionally astute and energetic in developing and managing their property, which eventually extended from the wheat plains around Crotone to the alpine forests and summer pastures of the Sila massif above us to the east. There was constant tension and occasional strife with the local peasantry, most usually over the encroachment and expropriation of smallholdings and common land bordering the Calopezzati domains, but in general the system worked fairly smoothly. By the mid-nineteenth century the family had been raised to baronial rank, was immensely wealthy and kept a splendid palace in Naples.’

‘So where did it all go wrong?’ Zen ventured to enquire.

‘The short answer is after the Great War. By then the Calopezzati were powerful political players, and the baron thus spent most of his time at the centre of things in Rome, leaving the management of the estate to less able relatives or salaried underlings. In addition, socialist ideas about the rationalisation of land ownership had finally started to take root in the south, leading to demonstrations which often ended in bloodshed.’

Cataldo Antonacci shrugged.

‘But in the end, it was their good luck that ran out. On the death of Baron Alfredo Calopezzati, the estate passed to his son Roberto, who was actively involved with the Fascist Mas X movement and later saw action in Ethiopia and the wider war that followed. He handed over administration of the estate to his sister Ottavia, who ruled over it with an iron hand from the old family stronghold at Altomonte, thirteen hundred metres up in the Sila mountains.’

‘What was she like?’

‘By all accounts, a stone-cold bitch. Her father Alfredo had been respected, if not exactly liked. Even her brother got some admiration for his courage and daring, although there were darker sides to his character. But to the best of my recollection I have never heard anyone say a positive thing about Ottavia. While the country fell apart and endured defeat and invasion, she remained shut up in that chilly fortress known locally as la bastiglia, surrounded by a retinue of loyal servants and armed guards. Then one winter night just before the end of the war, a fire broke out. It completely gutted the structure and killed the baroness, as Ottavia was called, although she had of course no claim to that title.’

‘And what happened to the estate after the war?’ asked Zen.

‘It was broken up by the agrarian reforms of the 1950s and what remained to the family was sold off.’

‘Did either Roberto or his sister have children?’

‘Not so far as one knows, but the details of the war years remain murky. It’s not even clear if Roberto survived, but Ottavia certainly died childless. She’d never married and was past childbearing age when the fire took her.’

‘So the family is now extinct?’

‘It may well be. That’s the price you pay for voluntarily observing primogeniture even after it was made illegal. But surely in your position it would be possible to…’

Zen nodded his assent. Yes, he would certainly make further enquiries.

‘As it happens, we’re standing in a former possession of that family,’ the archivist said as he saw his visitor to the door. ‘This building was originally one of their many properties. When they came south from Naples for the summer, they would break their journey in Cosenza for a few days and wine and dine the local notables before making the long trek up into the mountains to Altomonte. Until a century ago there was no road beyond Spezzano. The baron and his entire retinue had to get out of their carriages and continue on muleback.’

Zen had taken a taxi to the offices of the museum, but he opted to return to the modern centre on foot, down the narrow curve of Corso Telesio, where renovated apartments awaited yuppies with enough money and stamina to gentrify the largely abandoned mediaeval maze, and across the Busento river, a mere trickle between islands of gravel and tall reeds at this time of year. For a moment he wondered if he had wasted his time by going to see Antonacci. What he had learned had been interesting, particularly the bits that didn’t make sense, like Ottavia being past childbearing age when her son had been born. However, it remained doubtful how relevant any of it was to the task of getting Pietro Ottavio released as soon as possible by his kidnappers.

Jake and Madrona drove up into the mountains, pulled the bikes out of the back of the SUV and then cycled along an old railroad grade winding up above a dark, sinuous lake sheathed by forested slopes. Now they were sitting side by side on the timbers of a trestle overlooking the shimmering water below. The fresh, warm air was heady with the smell of pine sap and creosote.

‘Tell me about the Rapture again,’ he said.

Madrona smiled.

‘Oh Jake, you’re just like a baby, wanting to hear the same story over and over.’

She sighed wistfully.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about babies recently.’

‘We’ll have one, Madrona. Real soon. I just have to get this project finished first. As soon as that’s done I’ll switch to breeding mode, I promise.’

He grinned at her.

‘The Lord has sworn and will not repent.’

‘Huh?’

‘Some hypertext link. I want to say someplace in the Bible, but I can’t be bothered to Google it.’

‘I never read that creepy Jewish stuff. They had their chance to accept Jesus as their personal saviour and they blew it.’

‘But you told me that the end times can’t happen without the Jewish state.’

‘Oh sure. That’s why we’re in Iraq. Pastor Gary says that even though it turns out that Saddam didn’t have any like missiles and was never a threat to us, he was a big threat to Israel. That’s why the president had to send in the troops. The other stuff was just window dressing to keep the liberals quiet.’

Jake leant over and kissed her. God, he loved this woman. She wasn’t maybe what you’d call really beautiful, but she was a total babe. A sweet smile, frizzy blonde hair, plus the guileless blue eyes of a child combined with that hot bod and a voice like wind-chimes colliding in a gale, harmonious but with a raucous edge. Above all, though, he loved Madrona for her mind. She was sublimely stupid.

This was a central processing issue, nothing to do with data storage, which for Jake was peripheral. Why overload your system with a bunch of mostly dormant read-only files when the internet could come up with anything you didn’t know in like 0.18 seconds? Jake didn’t know practically everything, but he wasn’t stupid. You didn’t rise like a rocket through the massed ranks of Microsofties without being able to spot a glitch invisible to other eyes, or figure out a more elegant route from A to B than detouring via Z. But Madrona was not only even more ignorant than him about every aspect of human knowledge, except maybe female grooming, she was also dumber than fuck. Jake found this adorable. It was like having some big, placid, playful dog around the place, only one you could have great sex with too.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Before the end times can happen, the Jews have to rebuild the Temple. Then Jesus and the Antichrist duke it out while we all watch from heaven. It’s foretold in the Book of Revelations. God, I can’t wait to see the movie!’

Jake sighed.

‘Yeah, well, we’re having some problems.’

‘Really? Like what?’

‘Oh, the director wanted to cast some English guy but he pulled out. Plus we’re having some issues with the location shooting in Italy. I’m sending one of my people out there to try and fix things up.’

Madrona made her charming sideways moue.

‘I’ve always wanted to go to Italy.’

‘Chill, hon. I’ll take you there for our babymoon.’

‘But I don’t get it. If those guys are being assholes, why don’t you just make the movie here? Nevada or Utah or Arizona or someplace.’

Jake longed to tell her the truth, to bring her in on the whole delicious secret, but that would be too risky. The fact that Madrona had nothing to say didn’t stop her talking incessantly, particularly when she got together with girlfriends like that turbo-bitch Crystl. The media had been sniffing around Rapture Works and its unique project for months. So far Martin Nguyen had managed to ensure that they gave big returns for small feeds, but as the commencement of shooting approached the predators were getting hungrier by the minute. If Madrona mentioned the truth to even one of the gals in her worship group or therapy workshop, somewhere along the line someone would figure out that there were big bucks to be made by breaking the story. At the same time, Jake couldn’t lie to Madrona. It would be like stealing candy from a kid.

‘No, it’s got to be Italy. See, every game has a scenario, but only the players can make it all pan out by making the correct moves. By moving against Saddam, the guys in DC made a good blocking move. Right now I’m set to make an even better enabling move.’

‘Wow,’ said Madrona.

‘Totally,’ agreed Jake. ‘Here’s the thing. Okay, the Jews rebuild their temple. What about all the goodies they kept in there, the lost Ark and shit? You can’t fake those. Plus a lot of people think they’re not around any more.’

‘How come?’

‘It’s like history. Way back, the Romans burned the Temple down and stole all that stuff.’

‘That was the Jews’ punishment for rejecting Jesus. But wouldn’t they have melted them down and made it into jewellery? Hey, you know what! If you ever want to buy me something, I could really use some gold bracelets.’

Jake looked around at the jagged rocks and spiky conifers, then up at the vacant blue sky.

‘Madrona, is God perfect?’

She laughed.

‘Well, I could have used longer legs. But sure, of course he is.’

‘Then everything he does must be perfect, right? So he wouldn’t have designed a game which could never work out because one of the key items of loot is lost for ever.’

‘I guess.’

‘Okay. So if the Apocalypse is going to happen, all that treasure from the Temple must still be around somewhere. And I’m pretty sure I know where one chunk of it has been hidden all this time.’

Madrona looked totally awed.

‘Really, hon? What are we talking about here?’

Her husband smiled artlessly.

‘Like, a candlestick?’

At seven o’clock precisely, Claude Rousset awoke from plump, untroubled sleep, grasped the vacuum flask of coffee he had prepared before retiring the night before and stepped outside accompanied by Fifi, leaving his wife snoring contentedly in bed. The sun had not yet reached the side of the lake where their camper van was parked, but further out the water glinted prettily in a gentle breeze. The silence was absolute.

Fifi went off to urinate on selected features of the landscape while her master sipped his coffee and started planning the day’s activities. Monsieur and Madame Rousset owned a furniture shop in Dijon. Every August they closed up the business and took to the road. Having thoroughly explored every region of France, many of them more than once, they had lately started to venture further afield. Switzerland and Spain had been first, then the Ligurian coast, Tuscany and the Amalfi peninsula. This year, feeling they were by now seasoned travellers, Claude had proposed to his wife that they tackle Sicily and le Calabre sauvage.

Sabine Rousset’s response had at first been decidedly negative, but in the end her husband had prevailed. Fears of Mafia shoot-outs, larceny, theft, extreme poverty and casual violence were absurd and anachronistic, he had declared. Italy was a leading industrial nation and a founder member of the European Union, and that included the bits south of Naples. Sabine still had her doubts, but she had not held the marriage together for almost thirty years without learning to pick her battles.

When she finally emerged, the sun was up above the mountains, the temperature had climbed several degrees and her husband had made his plans. After leaving Crotone the previous day, they had visited San Severina and the Bosco del Gariglione, one of the few remaining patches of the primeval forest that had once covered these mountains — named selva, ‘wild’, by the Romans, later corrupted to Sila, as the extract from the Michelin guide read aloud at some length by Claude had explained.

Apart from the lake beside which they had spent the night, in a car park off a minor road, there appeared to be little more to detain them in the interior. After breakfast, they would therefore abandon these rugged heights and descend to Cosenza (visite 3 heures environ) and thence to the coast, where Claude had located a recommended camp site with good facilities close to shops and the beach. On the way he proposed a detour to the abandoned town of Altomonte, whose ruins were on a plateau now inaccessible to vehicles and required a stiff climb to reach, but which the guidebook described as suggestif, one of the highest terms of commendation in Monsieur Rousset’s touristic lexicon.

They arrived shortly after ten o’clock. There were two tracks leading up to the ruins, one of which left from the outskirts of the new town which had replaced its earlier namesake, but the guide made it clear that the other, accessible off a narrow and winding road with passing places, was the more suggestive. It was accordingly this route that Claude had chosen. The heat was still bearable and the small unpaved parking area was shaded by a grove of giant holm oaks. Having inspected the prospect with a beady eye, Madame Rousset professed herself perfectly content to remain in the camper while her husband explored this particular aspect of Calabrian savagery to his heart’s content, just so long as they got to Cosenza in time for lunch. Her husband indicated gesturally that while he would not of course contest this decision, the loss was hers. Fifi, on the other hand, was clearly dying to stretch her legs and to stake a urinary claim on yet more virgin territory.

At first the path wound gently upwards through a dense undergrowth of scrub and spindly trees, but after a while the character of the landscape abruptly changed. The vegetation died out for want of soil and the way ahead became a series of steep and abrupt ramps quarried out of the crevices and gullies in the sheer rock face. The reasons given by the guidebook for both the construction and the abandonment of the original town at once became clear. In the centuries when marauding armies had processed through the area every few years — Greeks, Romans, the Goths led by Alaric, and later the French, the Spanish and Garibaldi’s ragged army of liberation — this site had been a natural and virtually impregnable fortress, conveniently hidden from the invaders’ view and, if discovered by chance, requiring infinitely more time and effort to conquer than it was worth.

It was only more recently that the disadvantages of the now unthreatened location had come to outweigh the benefits. Frigid winters with no shelter from the wind, sweltering summers with no shade from the sun, and a subsistence economy dependent on the male population leaving for months at a time to work on the great estates of the region. Once that population decided to emigrate en masse to America, Argentina and Australia, the town began its slow decline. The final blow had been an earthquake in the 1950s which demolished most of the houses, rendered two of the four original access paths unusable and persuaded the remaining waverers to move to a new settlement in the valley below. The original Altomonte was now completely uninhabited, although the townsfolk still returned once a year, on the feast day of their patron saint, to celebrate mass in the small twelfth-century church of their ancestors.

Claude Rousset was a devotee of le footing and liked to consider himself supremely fit for a man of his age, but by the time he had hauled himself up the final stretch of sun-baked rock and taken refuge in the shade of the shattered guard tower which rose beside the remains of a fortified arch at the brink of the cliff face, he was beginning to envy his wife, who was no doubt nibbling one of her mid-morning snacks in the verdant cool far below. Even Fifi looked momentarily disconsolate, but after a lot of loud lapping at the bowl her master produced from his backpack and filled from the litre of Evian he had also brought along, she quickly recovered and set off in search of adventure.

Claude took longer to recover, but he had also brought the guidebook and a camcorder, so as to be able to include this curiosite in the two-hour video presentation with accompanying commentary with which the Roussets regaled their friends during the winter months. He therefore set off towards the only two remaining structures of any size, taking panoramic shots of the general situation as he went. Twenty minutes should do it, he thought. They’d be on their way again by eleven-thirty, and down in Cosenza shortly after noon. Just time to find a parking spot, enjoy an aperitif in some pleasant cafe and then proceed to the restaurant which the Michelin had recommended for the typicality of its cuisine.

Somewhere out of sight, Fifi had started yapping loudly. If his wife had come along, she would be having hysterics, but Claude saw the poodle as a dog rather than a substitute grandchild. Dogs do what dogs do, and in this case Fifi had probably startled a hare or some other small mammal that lived virtually undisturbed in this wilderness. Well, let her have her fun. The sun was now significantly higher and hotter. He made his way over to the church and poked his head inside the unlocked door. ‘Austere but of harmonious proportions’, the guidebook said, which was on the generous side. Claude shot forty-five seconds, which he would later edit down by half, then did a slow pan of the former piazza. Unfortunately Fifi was still barking her head off, thereby ruining the impressive ‘silence of desolation’ audio angle that he’d had in mind. The next thing he knew, the little bitch was right there in front of him, yelping away and making runs towards the centre of the square, returning when he didn’t follow.

Claude ignored her. The one remaining item on his clip list was the length of walling opposite. According to the guidebook, this had originally formed part of the facade of a fortified palace belonging to the Calopezzati, an illustrious family of the locality, which had burned down during the war. The remnants weren’t much to look at, but Michelin had mentioned them so they had to be recorded. He set to work, panning slowly in to focus on the ornamented portal in the middle, the most impressive vestige of the original. It was only once Claude lowered the camera angle and zoomed in on the steps that he noticed the misshapen lump sprawled across them, and realised that the dark stains on the marble slabs were not in fact shadows cast by the contorted fig tree posed in the gaping doorway.

Aurelio Zen’s journey to the crime scene was both more and less arduous. He was transferred by helicopter from the centre of Cosenza to the central square in Altomonte Vecchia in less than ten minutes, but he had been called in the middle of a horrible lunch and arrived both spiritually and literally nauseous.

Claude Rousset’s original emergency call had been made minutes after his discovery of the body. Unfortunately a communications problem of a different kind had then delayed everything for over an hour. Monsieur and Madame Rousset had a clear division of labour when it came to the smattering of foreign languages necessary to maximise the value of their touristic experiences — he did German and English, she did Italian and Spanish, and there was no one in the police emergency call centre who spoke French.

Since Madame Rousset’s phone was switched off, it was not until her husband had negotiated the even trickier and more tiring descent to the camper van that things started to happen. Twenty minutes after that a police patrol car arrived at the spot where the Roussets were parked. It took another twenty for the officers to climb to the top, assess the situation and call in by radio. Preliminary visual inspection appeared to suggest that they were dealing with a particularly brutal and premeditated homicide of a very unusual kind. The new chief of police had made it clear that he was to be summoned instantly in the event of anything out of the ordinary which might conceivably be related to the Newman disappearance, so he was duly hauled away from a plate of gristly meatballs in tomato sauce and deposited at the scene together with the forensic team. The latter were now kitted up and establishing secure perimeters. These were a bit vague, given that the body parts were spread over a wide area and the fact that Rousset and his damned dog had had a chance to wander about the place before they got there, so Zen felt that he wouldn’t be compromising the science work too much by donning a pair of plastic galoshes and moving in for a closer look.

Human remains were nothing new to Zen and he rarely felt disturbed by them. The exceptions were where the injuries to the dead body indicated any suffering that the victim had undergone before death. There were no such indications here, but the scene was spectacularly gruesome just the same. Having disgraced himself on the brief helicopter ride, Zen was pleased to see one of the forensic men make a dash for the shrubbery beyond the perimeter, tearing off his antiseptic mask as he went. The body lay face down on the steps, except that it had no face, no head. The entire skull, as well as a deep chunk of the shoulders and upper torso, had been torn away and now lay in scattered fragments all over the surrounding cobbles. The trunk and limbs had subsequently received additional attention from birds and rodents.

The leader of the forensic team, who had been carefully searching the man’s clothing, approached Zen.

‘Nothing in his pockets, and it doesn’t look like there are any identifying labels.’

‘Approximate time of death?’

‘At least forty-eight hours ago, but we’ll need to get tests done.’

Zen was staring up at a stemma carved in the lintel of the doorway.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, half to himself.

‘Coat of arms of the Calopezzati family,’ the forensic officer replied after a glance.

There was a silence.

‘Local landowners, back in the day,’ he added helpfully.

Zen nodded.

‘Let me have your preliminary report at the very earliest opportunity, however basic it may be.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘It must be damned hot in that biohazard gear.’

‘It is.’

Aurelio Zen returned to the Questura in an unusually grim and resolute mood. What had gone before had been mere skirmishes. This was war, and as in any war the first priority was to secure one’s base. He therefore headed first not to his own office but to that of the deputy questore. Giovanni Sforza had heard about the discovery of the body and Zen’s trip to the scene, but his only allusion to this consisted of a slightly raised eyebrow.

‘A bad one,’ Zen told him. ‘They blew his head off with something, a shotgun at very close range or maybe explosives. The killing occurred in situ, an abandoned village in the middle of nowhere.’

Giovanni nodded morosely, as though this merely confirmed his long-standing views about the awfulness of life in Calabria.

‘Is it the American?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know yet. It looks as though the victim was stripped and then dressed in a cheap suit like a corpse laid out for a traditional funeral. No form of identification. But the height and weight correspond with the data for Peter Newman.’

He paused, as though he had been about to add something and then changed his mind.

‘I should have a definitive answer by this evening.’

Sforza gave him a heavily ironic smile.

‘Just as well you’re here, Aurelio. Otherwise the Ministry would have sent down some hotshot from Rome to boss us all around.’

By now, Zen was immune to the charms of irony. He swung round on the deputy questore.

‘Well, since I am here, I plan to nail the bastards who did this! I’m sick to death of this romantic mystique of the south and the people’s self-proclaimed status as eternal victims ground beneath the tyrant’s boot throughout the ages. I’m particularly fed up with hearing how crime down here is ineradicable because it feeds off an unfathomable collective tradition of blood, honour and tragedy which we northerners can never presume to understand. To hell with that! It’s time they all woke up and started taking responsibility for their actions, and I plan to be their alarm clock.’

Sforza nodded.

‘A noble speech. Many of us have made it before, at least in our own minds.’

Zen waved his hands in a gesture of apology and lowered his voice.

‘I’m sorry, Giovanni, but it was really horrific. It looked very much like a ritual killing, almost a pagan sacrifice, and it’s somehow got under my skin. I have no idea how the investigation will play out, but I do know that it will be a constantly evolving situation and that timing will be of the essence. I may need to take extraordinary measures and make extraordinary demands on our available resources. So I’m asking you, in the name of the questore, to give me permission to do so in advance, sight unseen, using your name and rank as authorisation.’

Giovanni Sforza regarded him in silence.

‘It is of course an insane request,’ Zen added.

‘There’s nothing wrong with a little insanity,’ said Sforza, ‘as long as it’s employed in the service of reason. Do what you like. But I warn you — ’

He broke off.

‘What?’ asked Zen.

Sforza shook his head.

‘Never mind. Those were brave words about the public perception of the south and the need for Enlightenment values, but dare I say that they sounded ever so slightly callow? After all, just what are we doing with those values? Take the internet. Here’s the most powerful intellectual tool in the history of the human race and we use it to write narcissistic online journals and to “have our say” like a swarm of squabbling starlings. Enlightenment values? We’re playing hide-and-seek in the library of Alexandria.’

Zen’s dismay must have shown in his expression. Sforza laughed.

‘Oh, take it as a compliment, Aurelio! This case seems to have rejuvenated you. It’s just that I have a different paradigm for the problems of policing the south. It’s like arguing with a woman. You may win small victories, at a high cost, but afterwards everything goes on very much as it did before.’

He gestured self-deprecatingly.

‘Take no notice of me. I’m just an old cynic.’

‘You’re a year younger than me, Giovanni,’ Zen said acidly.

‘Time in the south cannot be measured by the clock,’ was the mock sententious reply.

Back in his office, Zen summoned Natale Arnone and briefed him on the situation.

‘Right, here’s my shopping list. The cadaver is on its way to the hospital for autopsy and further forensic tests. I want an immediate comparison of the dead man’s fingerprints with those of the American sent to us by the consulate, and after that a DNA profile. I’ll get on the phone and give the relevant orders, your job is to ensure that the people who promised me the earth don’t try and fob me off with a handful of dirt. Got that?’

‘Of course, sir.’

Arnone got up.

‘I’m not finished yet,’ Zen told him. ‘I also want you to track down Thomas Newman, the American’s son. He’s staying at the Hotel Centrale. If he’s not there now, leave a man in the lobby until he returns. Finally, I need to trace any surviving relatives of Ottavia Calopezzati as well as the man cited on that birth certificate as Pietro’s father, Azzo whatever it was.’

Arnone looked mystified by this last request, but held his tongue.

‘Is that all?’ he asked.

‘By no means all, but it should be enough to keep you busy until eight this evening. That’s your deadline for delivery of all the foregoing items. Buon coraggio.’

When Arnone had gone, Zen lit a cigarette, then picked up the phone and dialled the extension of the officer in charge of operations.

‘I am ordering a house-to-house search of the new town of Altomonte, beneath the hilltop where that corpse was discovered today. All road access and egress is to be sealed by personnel carriers with officers in battledress and armed with machine guns. Helicopters hovering low overhead to spot anyone who tries to escape on foot. Inside the net, every individual is to be questioned separately by plain-clothed officers concerning the arrival and killing of the victim, his identity and that of those responsible. The level of duress is to exploit the legal limits to the maximum and slightly exceed them should the situation appear to warrant it. As with the discovery of the body, the whole operation is to be subject to a total media blackout until further notice. Authorisation for these orders has been given by the questore’s office.’

The official coughed lightly.

‘Very good, sir.’

He sounded doubtful.

‘Is there a manning problem?’ Zen demanded. ‘Pull everyone off other jobs, cancel all — ’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Then what the hell is it?’

‘Well, sir, I don’t want to be critical or anything, only I know you’re new to the area and I have to say that operations like this haven’t proven very productive in the past. In fact, you might almost say that they’ve been counter-productive. People around here, the more you squeeze them, the harder they get.’

‘Admirable attempt to save your colleagues from hours of irksome overtime,’ Zen commented. ‘Admirable, but doomed. I don’t remotely expect any of the inhabitants of the place to talk. That isn’t the object of the exercise. Execute the orders you have been given.’

Martin Nguyen held that one of the ways you distinguished winners from losers was by how many times they had to change planes to get to their destination. He had therefore been appalled to discover that to reach the godforsaken hole in the ground down which Rapture Works was pouring its millions, he needed to transfer not just in Los Angeles but also in Rome. On the up side, the transatlantic flight lasted almost ten hours and the time difference was in Martin’s favour. He worked the twenty-dollar-a-minute credit-card phone in the armrest of his first-class seat to good effect, arranging to hire a European mobile — when was the rest of the world going to get over its hissy fit and switch to the US standard? — as well as a limo and driver, all to be delivered to him on arrival at Fiumicino airport.

The driver spoke extremely limited English, but he was there on time and proved to possess the skills, nerve and coolness of a Formula One professional. A little jaded after the long flight, Martin sat back in the rear of the Mercedes S-Class saloon and admired the Italian’s amazing ability to overtake and undertake, using the hard shoulder or a notional third lane which he conjured into being for precisely the duration of opportunity required, as well as the shamelessly thuggish tactics he employed on slower vehicles, which in effect meant everything else on the road, accelerating towards them at well over a hundred m.p. h., braking at the very last moment to fetch up less than a metre from the victim’s rear bumper and then repeatedly flashing his halogen high beams and sounding a series of aggressive and discordant horn blasts. The long section of single-lane working resulting from the reconstruction of the Salerno- Reggio autostrada proved almost excessively interesting, with plastic cones flying in all directions and at least one moment when Martin knew without a shadow of doubt that he was going to die.

In the end, they covered the five hundred kilometres from Rome to Cosenza in just under three hours, including a pit stop south of Naples. With the layover for the connection, flying would have taken four. Once the initial thrills of this crash course in extreme driving had worn off, Martin got busy with his rental phone. Okay, so this place was abroad. He knew what you did with broads. Someone fucks and someone gets fucked was the rule everywhere. Martin was sporting his Bluetooth, he was eager and armed. First up was the US consulate. They were as helpful as they had been during his earlier contacts with them, but apparently had nothing new to report on the Newman case.

‘The officer in charge is called Aurelio Zen,’ the consular official informed Martin. ‘Let me spell that. Well, yeah, “aw-reelly-oh” is how it might look to you, but “ow-raily-oh” is how they pronounce it here. Anyway, I suggest that you get in contact with him tomorrow, if only for form’s sake. It would just make everything go more smoothly. Do you have an interpreter? I can fix one up for you if you want.’

‘An American?’

The official hesitated.

‘I do know someone, but she’s vacationing right now. But I have a whole list of Italians who speak English better than most Americans. Hey, only kidding! They’re students, so they’d be glad to make some money.’

I’ll bet, thought Martin. Students could be bought cheap, but there was no knowing who else might offer them a cut above the agreed rate to pass on details of the conversations they had been party to. You could trust Italians to drive cars, but much of what Martin would need to discuss came under the heading of highly sensitive and strictly confidential information. If any word of what Rapture Works was really up to in Calabria leaked out, the whole project would be blown sky high in no time, and Martin’s job with it.

‘Thanks, I’ll think it over.’

‘The other thing is Newman’s son, Thomas. You’ll probably want to meet with him too. He’s at a hotel in the centre. Let me give you the number.’

Martin dialled it next. The desk clerk put him through to the room, where the phone rang and rang. Martin was about to hang up when a bleary voice answered.

‘ Pronto.’

Martin wondered what the hell the Lone Ranger had to do with it.

‘Give me Tom Newman,’ he stated crisply.

‘That’s me.’

‘Oh, hi, Tom. My name is Martin. I’m a business associate of your father. All of us at the company are just shocked at what’s happened, so I’ve been sent out from the States to see if we might be able to provide any help on the ground. I’ll be arriving in Cosenza momentarily. I don’t know how you’re fixed for this evening, but I’d sure appreciate it if we could touch base at some point.’

Martin manufactured an embarrassed chuckle.

‘I’m kind of like the new kid on the block here, so it would be real helpful to have someone who can bring me up to speed on the background and the current state of play. If you’re free, that is.’

‘Free as the wind,’ the voice replied tonelessly.

‘Well, how about dinner? I’m staying at a different hotel, but what say I swing by your place about six? Do you know somewhere that does good food?’

‘Sure, but they don’t really get going till eight.’

‘They don’t?’

‘Nowhere does.’

‘That late? Wow, this is seriously foreign. Still, when in Rome, I guess! Okay, how does a quarter of eight sound? Good speaking with you, Tom.’

Martin’s next call, to Phil Larson, was pitched in a rather different register.

‘Nguyen. I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Anything new?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Any fresh ideas about narrowing the search area?’

‘Not till someone firms up the variables in the equation for me, Mr Nguyen.’

‘I’ve got a team doing that right now. They’ll email me their conclusions by midnight tonight local time. When do you start work?’

‘We get to the site at five-thirty and airborne around six.’

‘Be there no later than five tomorrow. I need to brief you.’

The next call was the one that Martin had been dreading, but it had to be made. After ploughing through a security cordon of call-catchers, he finally got Luciano Aldobrandini on the line. At least the great director spoke excellent English.

‘Good of you to take my call, maestro,’ Martin gushed.

‘I’d told Pippo that I was at home to nobody, but money doesn’t speak, it shouts, as your famous cantautore put it. What can I do for you, Signor Nguyen?’

Martin gave out the warm guffaw of a door-to-door salesman working up to his pitch.

‘Well, maestro, I just flew into Rome so I thought I’d give you a call.’

‘You are in Rome now?’

Aldobrandini’s tone was not welcoming.

‘No, no, I’m on my way to Cosenza. As you know, our representative there has gone missing and I’ve been sent over to sort out the loose ends and get everything back on track. So I was kind of wondering if we might get together at some stage and hash out any outstanding issues.’

The film director’s voice changed, perhaps consciously, to one of unctuous menace.

‘No problem at all. A berth is in preparation.’

‘A birth?’

‘At Marina di Fuscaldo, for my yacht. It’s the only place down that way to put up in season but parking’s always a problem. I had to bounce out a couple of boaters who’d had the nerve to reserve months ago. One doesn’t like to pull rank — a trifle vulgar, I always think — but sometimes it’s the only way to get what one wants. The port is in a very nice position, with a splendid view of the precipitous coastline, and only twenty minutes or so from Cosenza. Why don’t you drop by for cocktails one day, if you’re not too busy? Among his many and varied talents, my assistant Pippo mixes the best martini this side of the Pillars of Hercules.’

The director’s love of his own voice was his downfall. A moment before, Martin had been bemused, but by the time silence finally fell he was back on task.

‘So when do you plan to start shooting, maestro?’

‘We dock tomorrow afternoon and I propose to get down to work as soon as possible after that. I’ve spent months planning this project and have achieved as much as I can at the theoretical level. My creative juices don’t really get flowing until the cameras start to turn, so I naturally want to move on to that stage as soon as possible.’

‘I see,’ replied Martin.

‘I doubt it, but that’s irrelevant. What I need from you is the money which you are contracted to pay to my agent on the first day of principal photography. I assume there will be no problem with that.’

‘No, no. No, of course not.’

‘Then I think we have nothing further to discuss at present. My cell phone has noted your number and I shall be in touch as soon as my ship comes in, so to speak.’

Martin Nguyen hung up and stared forwards through the windscreen. They had been sweeping up a long curve along the flank of a mountain range, but the magisterial progress of the Mercedes was now impeded by two articulated lorries engaged in a truckers’ duel on the steep gradient. Clearly frustrated and humiliated at being able to go no faster than seventy, Martin’s driver sent his vehicle darting to this side and that like a hummingbird, probing for an opening, then rammed his foot down and surged forward through a momentary gap between the two giant vehicles.

‘Yeah, go for it!’ Martin yelled. ‘Stick it to him! Ram it up his ass till he bleeds! Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him!’

Natale Arnone reappeared in Zen’s office two minutes before his deadline expired. He had phoned in earlier to report that the fingerprints of the corpse found at Altomonte matched those of Peter Newman and that the American’s son had left his hotel at about two o’clock that afternoon but had not yet returned. The rest of Arnone’s afternoon and early evening had been spent tracking down any surviving members of the Calopezzati family, as well as the individual named on Pietro Ottavio’s birth certificate as the father. The latter had turned out to be a dead end.

‘I checked with our central database in Rome as well as those for the civil authorities of every region in the country. The name Azzo Plecita does not appear in any of them. Only a fraction of the earlier paper archives have been digitalised, of course, but it did occur to me that la baronessa might just have made it all up.’

‘Why would she do that?’

Arnone looked pleased by Zen’s interest in his theory.

‘Well, we know that she never married, so the child was evidently illegitimate. Ottavia’s lawyer could easily have forged a document purporting to be a sworn declaration from the imaginary father to the effect that he wished his son to be named Calopezzati. That and a few bribes or threats to the clerk in Spezzano would have done it.’

A vague, dreamy look came over Zen’s face. He was silent for a full thirty seconds, then slapped his palm on the desk so hard it made Arnone start.

‘Azzo Plecita!’ he cried. ‘Calopezzati! It’s an anagram of her own name. She wanted to produce a surrogate heir while keeping the whole thing in the family and excluding outsiders.’

‘We can be a bit like that down here,’ Arnone admitted.

‘So what did you find out about the baronial bastard farmers?’

‘That took longer, because I had to search the local paper trail as well. The net result is that the only surviving members with any relation to the Calopezzati are a stepdaughter last heard of thirty years ago and a half-cousin who may or may not have emigrated to Australia.’

‘What about the brother, Roberto?’

‘It appears that he had strong connections with the Fascist movement back in the 1930s and later went on to fight in the colonial wars, Greece, Albania and back here after the Allied invasion. After that his name disappears from the records. It may well be that he was killed but never identified.’

Zen dismissed his subordinate and then sat quite silent and still, staring at the wall, until Giovanni Sforza walked in and suggested that they repair to a bar.

‘Why are you working overtime?’ Zen asked him as they walked downstairs.

‘It’s all thanks to that excellent imitation of our allies in Iraq that your men put on earlier this evening. My phone’s been ringing for the past three hours, everyone from the mayor down to the media wanting to know what the hell we think we’re doing. It was evidently a very effective operation, Aurelio, but given that I’ve been covering for you until now, might I ask what it actually achieved?’

They crossed the street and entered the only decent drinking hole in the area, a clumsy, clunky attempt to clone steely Milanese chic in these inhospitable climes.

‘I don’t know yet,’ Zen replied. ‘It was a matter of tossing a large rock into the pond and seeing what rose to the surface. I certainly wasn’t expecting any of the townspeople to talk, but as it happened someone did say something. A boy of nine, who on the day when the murder took place was playing with some friends close to the path that the victim must have taken.’

Zen ordered a beer, Sforza an expensive malt whisky. The barman poured him a scrupulously measly measure.

‘ Cosi poco?’ thundered Sforza, in a tone that made Zen realise that there was another side to his friend, and one which quite possibly accounted for the fact that he had got where he was. The barman also took the hint and filled the glass close to the brim. The two men sat down at a marble-topped table in the arid interior, which at least had the advantage of not sporting any video game consoles, television screens or recorded music.

‘So what did this boy of yours have to say?’ asked Sforza, blatantly lighting a cigarette.

‘At first he repeated the standard line about seeing and hearing nothing, but he hadn’t quite mastered the knack of improvising innocuous details to support that during follow-up questioning. Corti and Caricato were in charge and it sounds as if they did a good job. They weren’t rough with the kid, just listened to his story and elicited clarifying information. So Francesco and his friends had been playing up in the waste ground above the town? Yes. And they’d got there by the track which led up to Altomonte Vecchia? Yes. But they hadn’t seen anyone else on the track? No. After some more innocuous questions about how long they spent playing and so on, and determining that they had returned home by the same path, Corti quite casually mentioned that in that case Francesco must have noticed the bright red luxury car that was parked just at the point where the path joined the road. The boy frowned. No, it was grey, he said.’

Zen laughed.

‘Well, of course, they took him apart after that!’

Giovanni Sforza shook his head.

‘Sorry, Aurelio, I’m not as bright as Corti. We already knew that Newman was there. Who cares what colour his car was?’

‘Because it’s the first tiny crack in the wall of silence. Obviously everyone in the town knew that the car had been there and that it was subsequently removed by the person or people who murdered Newman. Moreover, it indicates the modus operandi, which was a very odd one. It looks as if Newman arrived alone in the Lancia and then voluntarily walked up the long, arduous track to the spot where his body was found, barefoot and wearing the ritual garb of a corpse laid out for burial. And all this in plain view of the people in the town, even though an alternative and much more secluded route exists, the one taken by that French tourist. Doesn’t that suggest anything to you?’

Sforza shrugged impatiently.

‘Only that the people concerned were crazy. Kidnappers are in it for the money. It’s just business to them. They may occasionally kill their hostage if negotiations break down or if the family tries to lure them into an ambush, but in this case they hadn’t even tried to get in touch. Why would they destroy a potentially very profitable piece of merchandise without even putting it on the market?’

Zen nodded noncommittally and gathered up his things.

‘Those are valid questions, Giovanni, but we shouldn’t let them mesmerise us. I don’t believe that whoever did this was crazy in the vulgar sense. The key to resolving these apparent oddities is to stop regarding them as odd, because the perpetrator almost certainly doesn’t. It all makes complete sense to him, so it might be helpful to try to see the whole ghastly business in the same way that he sees it, as a deeply deliberate and meaningful performance. The question then becomes, what was the significance of this performance and for what audience was it intended?’

‘Well, I’ll leave all that to you, Aurelio. I haven’t run a case in years. Out of training.’

He sipped his drink reflectively.

‘To change the subject, how are you adjusting to life in Calabria?’

Zen waved vaguely.

‘It depresses me. Not so much the gory details like this atrocity. It’s more the sense of a generalised and ineradicable sadness about the place, despite its natural beauty. In fact, that just makes it worse. To tell you the truth, I’m surprised you can stick it here. I can’t wait for whatever his name is to get healthy enough to take over the seat I’m keeping warm for him.’

‘The word is that you may not have to wait very much longer,’ Sforza commented. ‘As for why I can stick it here, the reason is quite simply that I am ambitious. Not an attractive quality, perhaps, but I can’t help it. I’m only too well aware of the thing you’re talking about, that pervasive tristezza, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it interfere with my career plans.’

He knocked back the rest of his whisky.

‘Whereas you, Aurelio, if you will permit me to say so, haven’t a gram of ambition in your body. Which is why I will be made questore in two or three years and you will be stuck on your current rung of the ladder until you retire. Shall we go and grab a bite to eat?’

‘I’m not hungry. And I have work to do.’

Sforza looked shocked.

‘At this hour? And with drink taken?’

Zen smiled weakly.

‘Your diagnosis of my character may well be correct, Giovanni. But if I’m not as well endowed with ambition as you are, I at least have a goal, which is to track down the people who kidnapped that poor bastard, persuaded him to walk to the place of execution they had selected and then blew his head off. Until I’ve done that, I won’t really have much interest even in a good meal, never mind the slop they serve here. Buon appetito, pero.’

The old woman tossed and turned on the lumpy, sagging mattress, but sleep wouldn’t take her. Maria lay waiting as though for a lover, but sleep didn’t come. She was too old. Sleep just didn’t want her any more.

The house was finally still once again, and the rest of the family asleep. The town too, save for the bleeping of a video game from the house across the alley, where Francesco Nicastro was playing the game he had been given for his ninth birthday. There was a lot of violence and bloodshed, but Francesco was enchanted by it. Apart from that, the town was superficially silent, but Maria could sense the whispers and rumours rustling through the streets and walls like rats, just as they had back at the beginning. Someone had been told then, and variously diluted and tainted versions had circulated through the community. The common denominator was that it was all the work of a certain person, and that no one was to interfere or intervene in any way. These stipulations had been observed. Various people had seen the dead man arrive, park his car and walk up the track leading to the old town. Some time later there had been a dull bang, its location impossible to place. Then night fell, and next day the parked car had gone. No one ever climbed up to the ruins above except on the feast of San Martino, and certainly no one had gone there now. In short, normal life had resumed as if the incident had never occurred, until this evening, when the police suddenly descended in force and invested the town, their horrible helicopters hovering overhead like vultures and their armoured vehicles sealing off all the exits.

Everyone agreed that nothing like it had been seen since the war, although Maria had longer and darker memories, of Fascist bullies descending on a town where the people had assembled for a rally to demand decent living wages and then shooting them down in cold blood. This time, however, she had not personally witnessed anything. For months now she had been bedridden with a flare-up of her arthritis, and had kept to her room. Some young policeman dressed like a soldier had had the nerve to open the door without knocking — she might easily have been in the altogether! — with his machine gun levelled. He’d had the grace to apologise and withdraw as soon as he understood the situation, but the rest of the family hadn’t been so lucky. They’d all been herded into the living room, then taken out one by one and questioned by two extremely unpleasant men in suits not unlike that which had been worn by il morto. When each person’s interrogation was over, they were taken to the kitchen and held there in isolation until the entire family had been individually questioned. Only then were they allowed to reassemble and exchange accounts of their experiences, at which point Maria had joined them.

Despite the pressure and threats — one of the thugs had demanded to see written authorisation for the illegal top floor of the house, which had been added to accommodate Maria when she couldn’t manage for herself any more — no one had said anything. What was interesting was what the police had said. The car which had been parked at the edge of town, what make was it? What colour? What was the licence number? When had it arrived? When had it been removed and by whom? These were much tougher questions to evade, particularly when the cops gradually revealed that they already knew the answers. How could a luxury hire-car like that have been left abandoned on the outskirts of a paese di merda like this without being noticed, probably broken into and possibly stolen? All six members and two generations of the family had stonewalled them, insisting that they hadn’t gone that way and had seen and heard nothing. But in all their minds, the same certainty had formed. No one outside the town except ‘him’ knew about the arrival and subsequent disappearance of the car. Now the police knew, so somebody must have talked.

Finally the helicopters had whirled away and the uniforms and suits had withdrawn, their show of power at an end. But this was not yet over, Maria sensed. Her seventy-eight years on earth had earned her many unwanted gifts, above all the dark secret she had carried intact for most of her life and would take with her to the tomb. So many years in this pitiless landscape, the only one she had ever known and which she loved beyond reason, had also given her a sixth sense for trouble. Despite the apparently baffled withdrawal of the forces of the state, she felt it very strongly now, which was perhaps why she was the only person in the household unable to sleep. To her finely tuned senses it was as obvious and irrefutable as an imminent storm is to birds. What she didn’t know, any more than them, was when it would strike and from which direction. She herself would be safe, but Maria no longer cared about herself. She wanted her family to be safe, but the auguries were clear. She had tried to deny them, just as she always tried to deny the first twinge that signalled the onset of one of her arthritic attacks, and just as uselessly. Now she was in no further doubt. With immense difficulty, Maria got up out of bed and knelt, very slowly and carefully, before the image of her namesake on the wall, hoping as always that the pain this caused her might increase the efficacy of her prayers, said as always in the Latin liturgy of her youth. Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis.

Tom Newman stretched his legs luxuriously, crossed them at the ankle and settled back to watch the show. It was, in his opinion, pretty spectacular. Beyond the clustered tables, chairs and folded parasols of the cafe’s enclave, the young beauties of the town were parading up and down the pavement in pairs, trios or larger groups, weaving their way past and through similar sets of young men. With a few rare exceptions, neither sex openly acknowledged the existence of its counterpart, but each was intensely aware of the other, as they were of everyone else on the street that night, including the young American sitting over a beer and a cigarette outside a cafe on the pedestrianised stretch of Corso Mazzini.

And for the most part, these beauties were beauties. Tom had already thrown everything he had ever heard about southern Italian women into the recycling bin. Two generations of proper nutrition and good medical care had worked wonders. Like their peers back home, they were showing a lot of midriff, but significantly more — from barely above the pubis to just below the undercurve of the breasts in some cases — and, at least in the mild ambient glow of the street lighting, significantly better. Best of all, Tom wasn’t just an onlooker but an object of considerable interest. The squads of girls continually passing and repassing regarded him with lengthy, intense and startlingly candid stares. To an almost unnerving extent, they seemed to have an instinctive sense and acceptance of what they were here for and how long they had to make it happen, and weren’t about to waste any opportunity of getting down to business. Tom didn’t get looked at in the same way back in the States, that was for sure, like he was merchandise that was being checked out. The public street was as sweaty and dizzy with sex as any club.

All in all he was disgustingly happy, he thought, signalling the barman to bring another beer. He had spent most of the afternoon selecting and acquiring a mobile phone, and had then used it to call Martin Nguyen and change the arrangements for their meeting that evening. On reflection, he had realised that he didn’t want to be stuck over dinner with some boring CEO type, so he had claimed a subsequent engagement related to his father’s kidnapping and fixed up a ten o’clock rendezvous at this bar. Tom’s Italian was still in recovery, but his efforts to speak it seemed to be both understood and appreciated. In short, if it hadn’t been for the reason why he was there, this would have been the dream vacation. But although he could feel as happy as he liked, he couldn’t show it, any more than he could approach one of the passing women — that one there, for instance, with stunning legs, a deep cleavage and the gaze of a lioness — and ask for her phone number. In a society as traditional as this, with the family at the centre of everything and the father its undisputed head, for someone in his position to go out trawling for dates would be the equivalent of pissing on the high altar.

Worse, this might go on for weeks, even months. Both Nicola Mantega and the local police chief had made that clear. Not that he was in any hurry to leave, he thought, scoping out a cutie who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, with tits out to here under a T-shirt that read, in English, WILL FUCK FOR LOVE. All Tom wanted to do was to stay indefinitely and have a ball, but that was out of the question. ‘How could you?’ people would ask in shocked tones, and he didn’t know what to answer, even to himself. For at least a decade, he and his father had led separate lives in separate cities on separate coasts. Visits were rare, limited to a couple of hours at some restaurant or show when his father came to New York on business, and phone calls were infrequent, brief and impersonal. When mamma was still alive, Tom had felt obliged to go back to San Francisco for the holidays, but after her death his father had moved into a condominium and pointedly converted the spare bedroom into an office.

That’s how it had been for years, and although the matter was never discussed, Tom had every reason to suppose that his father found the arrangement as satisfactory as he did. He had certainly never seen any reason why it shouldn’t go on in exactly the same way for the foreseeable future. But the kidnapping had changed everything. It wasn’t enough to go on as he had always done. He was going to have to learn to play the part of a loving and devoted son traumatised by the ghastly fate that had overtaken his father, just when every nerve in his being was telling him that there was something vital for him in this city, a chance not to be missed.

Martin Nguyen arrived dead on time and cut straight to the chase.

‘How long are you planning on staying?’ he asked Tom.

‘As long as it takes. Maybe longer. I kind of like it here.’

‘What about your job?’

‘I quit before coming out. I was going to anyway.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Sous-chef in an upscale Manhattan restaurant. There was a change of ownership and the new manager really sucked. Plus my girlfriend had just dumped me, so when this business came up I took advantage to tell my boss where he could shove it.’

He bit his lip. ‘When this business came up’ was cold. He was going to have to be more careful.

‘Glad to hear that there’s a silver lining to this dark cloud,’ Nguyen murmured silkily. ‘But how are you managing for money? Europe’s a total rip these days.’

‘I’ve got some savings. When they run out, I’ll head back and start over. There’s always vacancies in the restaurant business. Too bad I can’t work here, but you need an EU passport.’

A passer-by of about Tom’s height, with one of those seasoned Italian faces that were as much about character as flesh, strode over to their table.

‘I see that you’re still enjoying life in Cosenza,’ he said.

By now, Tom had recognised the intruder as the local police chief.

‘Very much!’ he returned. ‘How about you?’

A moment later, he realised that the beer had been talking, but the other man appeared unfazed by the impertinence.

‘I never feel at home in a city where you can’t smell the sea,’ he replied. ‘I shall need to see you at the Questura tomorrow morning. How early can you be there?’

After a brief discussion as to times, Tom introduced Martin Nguyen, who had been listening to this exchange with some interest.

‘Tell the signore that I wish to speak to him too,’ said the man, before leaving them with a curt nod.

‘Who was that guy?’ demanded Martin Nguyen.

‘The chief of police. He wants us both to meet with him tomorrow morning.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. To discuss the latest developments in my dad’s kidnapping, maybe.’

‘Has something happened?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then why didn’t you ask him?’

Tom bent forward with a slightly condescending look.

‘Mr Nguyen, this is not the States. The police here are more like Homeland Security than your friendly local sheriff who’s going to be running for re-election come the fall and needs your vote. If they want to tell you something, they will. If they don’t, there’s no point in asking.’

Nguyen was unappeased.

‘But what have I got to do with it?’

‘I told him you were a business associate of my dad’s. I guess he thinks you have information about what he was doing here that might be significant.’

Martin Nguyen nodded vaguely.

‘So you speak pretty good Italian, huh?’

Tom shrugged.

‘My mom used to talk to me in Italian and it seems to be coming back. It’s not that hard of a language once you know the basic rules. All I really need is more vocabulary, and I’m picking that up pretty fast.’

Nguyen digested this in silence for some moments.

‘Well, I can offer you a job right here and now,’ he finally said. ‘It’s only temporary, for as long as I have to stay here, but I’ll pay five hundred dollars a day in cash.’

‘To do what?’

‘Act as my translator and general assistant.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Tom said doubtfully. ‘Pretty much the only thing I can think about right now is my dad, you know?’

‘Okay, how about five hundred euros? That’s over six hundred bucks at current exchange rates.’

Tom thought about this proposition for at least a couple of seconds. After Dawn did a fugue back to her mother in Idaho, citing irreconcilable differences and environmental issues, he discovered that her rosy fingers had previously used his cash card, whose PIN Tom had given her when he was too slammed to go to the machine, to remove all the money in his bank account. He’d had to leverage his Visa credit limit just to get here, but that wouldn’t last for ever and there was no way of knowing how long he’d have to stay. He looked at Nguyen with what he hoped was the expression of a dutiful and disturbed son in a difficult situation.

‘Gee, I don’t know what to say! I could sure use the money, but it might look bad, you know? I mean, profiting from my father’s ordeal.’

‘Who’s to know? You’ll be paid in cash, either here or back in the States, whichever you prefer. And if someone does find out, so what? You were just helping out a family friend in a tough spot.’

Tom sighed deeply.

‘Well, okay, I guess. Plus it might help take my mind off this nightmare.’

‘But for that kind of money I expect you to be on call twenty-four seven, okay? I can’t tell when something might come up where I need you. In fact, tomorrow you’d better move to the hotel where I’m staying. I’ll comp you the room and all meals.’

He glanced at the tab and threw some money on the table.

‘Okay, I’ll be heading back. Don’t stay up too late eyeballing the brood mares. We’ve got to make an early start. I’ll pick you up around four-thirty, quarter to five.’

For the first time, Tom felt genuinely dismayed by Nguyen’s job proposition.

‘Heck, it’ll hardly be light then!’

‘We’re headed for a facility where the shift starts at six, and I need to brief the personnel. Some of them speak English, some of them don’t.’

He broke off and stared at Tom.

‘How much did your dad tell you about what we’re doing here?’

‘Practically nothing. He never talked about his work.’

Or about anything else, he thought. My dad never talked to me. My dad never spoke Italian to me.

‘Okay, I’ll fill you in tomorrow,’ said Nguyen. ‘Be sure and get a good night’s rest. I want you on deck and ready to roll when my car pulls up at your hotel.’

‘Hell, you’re the one who should worry about that, Mr Nguyen! Getting in from the States today and all. That jet-lag can kill you.’

From one of the many secret drawers artfully concealed in the lacquered cabinet of his skull, Martin Nguyen produced a lush smile of poisonous beauty.

‘I’ve given up sleeping. My doctor said it was bad for me.’

Nicola Mantega was not a particularly stupid or careless man. His fatal weakness was that he was a creature of habit.

The massive police raid that afternoon and evening on the town of Altomonte Nuova had been widely reported on the local news, but without any reason being given. When interviewed, some of the townsfolk mentioned repeated flights by police helicopters during the day to the abandoned town perched high above its successor, but claimed to have no idea what this was all about. The police themselves were saying nothing and all access to the area had been cordoned off.

Superficially, none of this was of any obvious personal concern to Mantega himself. That was how a northerner would have argued, but Nicola knew better. The people of the south had been treated as a form of insect life for so long, he liked to argue, that they had evolved some of the faculties of insects. Almost powerless against the brute species that ruled the earth — although they could deliver a very nasty, even deadly, sting on occasion — they were hypersensitive to the most minute development in their immediate environment. And now Mantega’s antennae were twitching uncontrollably. He had no idea why, but he knew that further information about this incident was needed, and urgently.

Mantega had spent the evening closeted in his office with one of those clients it was better that he should not be seen consorting with publicly. The subject under discussion was a tender submitted by the client in question for the contract to upgrade a thirty-kilometre section of the toll-free regional A3 motorway to the standard of the rest of the national network, with a view to charging the same kind of money for using it. Recent political changes both in Rome and at local level had made these kinds of negotiation more difficult than formerly, and potentially much more dangerous. This was all very tiresome, and the worst part of it for Mantega was persuading his client that such a change had in fact taken place, that tact and patience were now required to resolve any ensuing problems, and that neither he nor anyone else could smooth everything over by making a couple of phone calls, like in the good old days.

Mantega had done his best, but his mind had been occupied with other matters. His client must have noticed, because he had made a few very pointed comments about possibly ‘needing to seek counsel elsewhere’ before leaving via the fire exit at the rear of the building. Had the circumstances been different, Mantega would have been very concerned by this veiled threat, given the power base and range of contacts of the client in question. As it was, he really didn’t give a damn. His meeting with Giorgio the day before, and now the news of the police raid on Altomonte, made such issues seem relatively trivial. Estimates of the number of officers involved in the raid varied wildly, but the gist was that an operation on such a scale had not been seen in the region for years. And that was only its public face. If a hundred or more officers had been committed to the task of publicly putting the frighteners on the population of an isolated town, there would be an equal or even greater number working covertly behind the scenes. Something big was under way, that was for sure.

All of which brought Mantega’s thoughts back to his relationship with Giorgio. They had attended the same school back in San Giovanni in Fiore, but Mantega had subsequently forgotten about Giorgio’s existence until one day, years later, he popped up seeking help after being fired from his job as a security guard. As a gesture of friendship to an old classmate who had fallen on hard times, Mantega had arranged an introduction to a small-time gang in the city that did armed robberies, lorry hijacks, some drug imports and the odd minor kidnapping. All had gone well for a year or two, but in the end the gang had dumped Giorgio because, as their capo had put it, ‘This guy’s round the fucking twist.’

Giorgio had then started up in business on his own, exploiting the mainly barren and unclaimed territory between Cosenza and Crotone, but occasionally making forays into the outskirts of either city. Mantega’s fable about Aspromonte to Tom Newman the other evening had of course been disinformational nonsense. Giorgio wouldn’t dare show his face on Aspromonte. But the n’drangheta was extremely territorial, and the clans took little or no interest in affairs outside their own borders. Giorgio had therefore been able to build up a modest but thriving trade on his home turf, to which Mantega acted as a general consigliere and fixer. So when an American named Peter Newman had hired him as a go-between with the local authorities over a film deal, Mantega immediately recognised the irresistible chance to at least quadruple the money on offer by suggesting to Giorgio that he would make an excellent kidnapping prospect.

It had all seemed to make sense at the time, but ever since that meeting in the abandoned barn Mantega had been deeply disturbed. Giorgio was by nature moody and violent, but Mantega had never felt himself personally threatened before. The manner in which the bundle of banknotes had been presented as a final, non-negotiable payment, coupled with the warning about reprisals in the event of his talking and the bald announcement that Newman was dead, had terrified him. The construction magnate he had dealt with that evening simply wanted to make a killing, but Giorgio was a killer.

Mantega placed various incriminating documents that had been lying on his desk into the safe, switched off the lights, locked the door and walked slowly downstairs, mulling over the problem which had preoccupied him all evening. As he reached the front door of the office block, the solution popped up. For all Mantega knew, he could be arrested the moment he left the office and interrogated by that hard-nosed bastard that they’d brought in to cover for Gaetano Monaco. It was all very well for Giorgio to say that he should say nothing even under duress, but that was a damn sight easier to do if you knew exactly what it was that you weren’t supposed to say. Given today’s developments, Mantega didn’t have a clue, so the situation was sufficiently serious to justify his calling Giorgio.

He walked around the corner towards the phone booth that he had used the night before. Mantega was inclined to dismiss Giorgio’s warning that he was being followed as a mere bluff, but nevertheless he paid extra attention to the action on the street before proceeding any further. A couple of vehicles passed, but the occupants paid him not the slightest attention. The only sign of life was from a young couple whose romantic evening had evidently turned out badly and were now having a vociferous row as they walked home along the other side of the street, the woman loudly proclaiming that if she was to be insulted like that then she would rather kill herself here and now and have done with it — and with you, you cold, heartless bastard!

Even if Mantega had been more alert, it was unlikely that he would have recognised the woman as the same one who had apparently been meeting someone off the flight that Tom Newman had arrived on two days earlier, or her partner as the driver of the delivery truck that had been involved in an accident at that very junction near the phone box the previous night. As it was, he barely noticed them. The last thing undercover agents did was to draw attention to themselves, while this couple were screaming their heads off and the centre of attention until a flash of stark, neutered light fixed the scene on the retina. A moment later the heavens resounded as though all the gods had farted at the same moment and hailstones the size of chickpeas started hitting the street, bouncing high in the air and battering Mantega’s skull.

He sprinted for the shelter of the phone box and rang Giorgio’s mobile. There was no reply, so he dialled the other number. Mantega didn’t know which phone this rang. Giorgio told him never to use it except in a case of extreme emergency, and he never had.

‘ Pronto?’

Mantega didn’t recognise the surly male voice, but it was hard to hear anything at all with the hail drumming on the metal roof.

‘Giorgio?’

‘Never heard of him,’ the male voice said in the abrupt, no-nonsense tones of the dialect Mantega had grown up with, and which he had heard from the lips of that lawyer from San Francisco named Peter Newman. Giorgio had told him that Newman had died. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

‘My name is Nicola Mantega. I’m a business contact of Giorgio’s. I need to speak to him urgently.’

‘Never heard of you either,’ said the voice. ‘You must have a wrong number.’

Mantega put down the phone in a state of profound anxiety. The number he had called was right there on the lighted display on the phone, and was identical with the one he had written down in his Filofax disguised with a string of random numerals. He looked out at the barren street, where the young couple were now engaged in a passionate clinch beneath the portico of a building opposite. There were no two ways around it, Giorgio had cut him off. He had been paid and dismissed, and would have to sort out any personal repercussions from the kidnapping he had arranged. In short, Nicola Mantega was in the most desperate situation in which any Italian can ever find himself. He was on his own.

The four men came to the Nicastro house just before three o’clock in the morning. A black Jeep Grand Cherokee, its numberplates removed, freewheeled silently down the main street, barely visible in the dim light of the sparse streetlamps hanging out on their brackets. Engine off and lights out, the vehicle came to a halt opposite the squat dwelling of concrete and terracotta brick infill faced with unpainted grout. It was a warm, windless night, the air fresh with scents awakened by the recent downpour, utterly quiet apart from the barking of a dog somewhere near by and the occasional rumble of thunder far away to the north over Monte Pollino.

One man remained with the vehicle. The other three, faceless in black ski masks, walked unhurriedly back to their destination. While one of them disabled the electricity and telephone connections running down the wall of the house, another picked the lock in the front door. In the event the door proved to be bolted as well, which annoyed the third man so much that he raised his voice to the others, telling them to get on with it and quickly. Then the creak of an opened shutter directed one of the men’s attention to a top-floor window across the street, where an old woman was looking down at them.

‘Back to bed, nonna!’ he shouted.

Since the element of surprise had now been lost, the man who had cut the power and phone lines fixed three small charges of plastic explosive to the top, middle and bottom edge of the door on the side where the hinges were and wired them together to a fuse before joining his companions a short distance away. When the blast went off all three ran back, kicked the door open in reverse and rushed inside, wielding powerful torch beams that cut the darkness like scalpels.

In less than two minutes, they had searched every room in the house. The only inhabitant who tried to put up a fight was Antonio, the fifty-year-old head of the family. He was subdued by a pistol shot to his left kneecap and beaten unconscious. The operation then proceeded as planned and without further interruption. The mother and her eldest son and two daughters were locked up in one of the bedrooms, after which the intruders turned their attention to Francesco Nicastro. He had not made any attempt to protest or resist. Indeed, he still looked dozy and lost in his dreams. The man who had spoken angrily earlier felled him with a massive blow to the face, then picked him up like a sack of barley and threw him on to the bed. He prised his jaws open and wedged the teeth on either side with chunks of rubber cut from an old tractor tyre. One of the other men gripped the boy’s tongue firmly with a pair of pliers while the leader sliced off a chunk of it with a razor blade. All three then clattered back down the stairs, got into the Jeep and drove away.

Across the street, Maria tried to block out the cacophony of screams emanating from the Nicastro house. The knowledge that her predictions had been validated brought no comfort. Her prayers had been powerless, she was powerless, they were all powerless. She walked in slow, painful steps down the stairs to the living room and the only phone in the house.

‘Send an ambulance at once,’ Maria told the emergency operator. ‘There’s been a terrible accident.’

Martin Nguyen’s driver had been unbeatable when it came to getting maximum respect on the autostrada down from Rome, but faced with the task of finding his way around Cosenza it rapidly became clear that he didn’t have a clue. The limo was much too good to give up — leather seats, tinted windows and a/c that really worked — but under the terms of the leasing agreement no one else was allowed to drive it. Martin’s solution had been to call a cab to the Rende International Residence, then slip the guy enough cash to have him park his vehicle and act as navigator for the clueless romano.

They reached the Hotel Centrale at twenty to five. The air was mild and welcoming, but it was still dark. Tom Newman was waiting outside, and he and Martin proceeded to Aeroscan Surveying’s base in the outlying southern suburbs of the city. Neither of the Americans had been able to get breakfast at their respective hotels before leaving, so Phil Larson instantly went up a notch in Martin’s estimation by having brewed up a pot of coffee and bought some pastries from a bakery that opened early. Once Phil had got through giving them a long story about some break-in the previous night — ‘Nothing missing, it looks like, but you know how you feel kind of violated?’ — Martin opened his aluminium briefcase and passed a thick sheaf of printed matter across the desk.

‘That’s the report of the team I’ve consulted,’ he said. ‘You can read the small print later, but their principal conclusions are clear and I want them implemented subito.’

Larson looked at him curiously.

‘I didn’t know you spoke Italian, Mr Nguyen.’

‘I was born in a country then called Indochina, where the official language was French. Later I was moved to the States, where I had to learn English, then in high school I studied Spanish. Italian is pretty much the same except for the make-up and the hairstyle.’

He went over to the map which took up most of one wall.

‘These are the areas you’ve done?’ he queried, indicating the shaded zones.

Phil Larson nodded.

‘Okay, ignore the whole rest of this section and concentrate on the upper valleys of the rivers off this map to the south.’

Larson looked doubtful.

‘Hell, we don’t even have charts for that area. You said to look at the confluence of the rivers and down in the flood plain where we are now. That’s what we’ve been doing. Of course a lot of this terrain has been built on in the last fifty years or so, like this place where we are now. If the site we’re looking for is underneath any of that, we aren’t going to find it anyway.’

‘My consultants pointed that out. Plus that in a sprawling flood plain like this the river-bed will have shifted around over the centuries, and that the deforestation of the surrounding mountains a century ago has completely screwed the hydrological aspects of the situation, the amount of water run-off and hence the height of the rivers. So a lot of their data is highly indeterminate. But there are other factors involved. One is that the men who originally constructed this thing were all killed afterwards to keep the location secret.’

Phil Larson grinned nervously.

‘Not a company tradition, I hope?’

Martin ignored the comment.

‘But if the site had been within view of the city of Cosenza, then to preserve the secret all the citizens would have had to be killed too, and there is no record of such a massacre.’

‘We’re pretty well out of sight of the city here,’ Larson pointed out.

‘Yeah, but back then the main road from Rome down to Sicily ran right along this side of the valley. Anyone using it would have spotted what was going on and maybe come back later to check it out. So bearing all this in mind, your brief is to look in the upper valleys of the rivers that splay out southwards from here.’

Larson frowned.

‘But you said that we were looking for the foundations of a building. Why would anyone choose to build there? Here on the banks I can maybe see, but in the middle of a river? That’s just crazy!’

Martin glanced at Tom, but he didn’t appear to be paying any attention.

‘It’s a tomb,’ he explained to Phil. ‘The people who built it had this religious thing about the dead person resting undisturbed for ever, so beneath a river was perfect. No one except them knew where it was, so there was no way it was ever going to get dug up except by pure chance. Anyway, what do you care? You’ve been given your instructions.’

‘Well, like I said, I don’t have charts for that…’

‘You’ve also said you’re using visual navigation. Higher up, those rivers are hemmed in by the mountains, so their course can’t have changed much. Start where they join up and follow each of them up to the five-hundred metre level. Does the pilot understand English?’

‘Not so as you’d notice. I just point to the strips I want to cover every day.’

‘Go and give him his new orders. My assistant will translate.’

Outside on the concrete forecourt, the pilot was checking his machine over with the meticulous attention of a man who knows that his life depends on it. Phil Larson briefed him on the new search plan, pausing from time to time for Tom to turn it into Italian. He added that the boss was visiting, so to make a good impression they should look busy and get going as soon as possible, then returned to the office where Martin Nguyen was waiting.

Tom stayed where he was. He’d been fascinated by planes ever since he was a boy, when a friend of his father’s had taken him for a ride in a Cessna out over Marin County and done some freaky stuff that had scared him stiff and left an indelible memory. He half-hoped that this pilot might offer a repeat performance, but the Italian seemed preoccupied with other matters.