End games

‘I don’t even have a chart of those valleys,’ he complained to Tom. ‘Not that it would help much. They’re always stringing new electricity lines across them that aren’t marked. And then there are the old pulleys they used to use to bring goods across to the far side from the road. They’re abandoned, so they’re not on the chart, but half of them are still there, sagging down just about exactly the altitude we’ll be flying at.’

Tom nodded sympathetically.

‘Anyway, the whole thing’s pointless,’ the pilot went on. ‘If these Americans want to find the right scenery for this film they’re making, they could do it much cheaper from the ground.’

Tom noted that the Italian’s resentment and contempt were markedly increased by the idea that his employers were throwing their money away so stupidly.

‘Apparently they’re looking for something that’s buried under the river,’ he said, in an instinctive attempt to defend his compatriots. ‘I guess they want to use it for a location in the movie.’

‘Under the river? What kind of thing?’

Tom shrugged.

‘Some tomb.’

The pilot continued to stare at him for so long that Tom began to think he must have offended him in some way. Then he smiled wearily.

‘ Ma certo,’ he replied in a tone of contempt. ‘ La famosa tomba d’Alarico.’

It was another perfect morning in Cosenza. Sunlight sidled in through the window, stripping away the acceptable surface of things to reveal the tawdry substance beneath. Seated at his desk, head in hands, Aurelio Zen sensed its intrusive presence as a glow between his fingers. He had been awake since shortly after four o’clock, following a phone call from the Questura under his standing instructions to be summoned at any hour of the day or night in the event of any significant development in the case. By then it was too late to do anything. What had happened had happened, and it was arguably all his fault. Police operations went wrong all the time, but this was different.

For years now, Zen had been living in a world where reality seemed to have been drained of all substance. Once upon a time, and he could still remember that time, authentic experience had been the default position, as unremarkable as gravity or the weather. Now, though, the authentic sounded a melancholy blue note as it receded, a Doppler effect induced by the speed of cultural change, as though sadly waving goodbye. There were, however, still exceptions to this general rule. Zen’s experience was that for every ten kilometres you travelled between Rome and Cosenza, you moved back another year into the past, finally arriving in the mid-1950s. Authenticity was not as yet under serious threat here, and in some way that he couldn’t have explained, that slewed the ethical equations too. What would have been good enough elsewhere simply wouldn’t do here, back in the lost realm of the real.

The surgeons at Cosenza hospital were attempting to sew the severed portion of Francesco Nicastro’s tongue back on to the root, but it was uncertain whether he would ever have any feeling or control over it. His father Antonio, the sole wage-earner, was awaiting his turn for an operation to restructure his knee, but it appeared unlikely that he would be able to work again. In short, whatever the outcome of the case, the family was ruined. Zen had spent an hour interrogating the two detectives who had questioned the boy in the first place, but both Corti and Caricato swore that Francesco had been interviewed alone and that neither of them had told anyone but their immediate superiors what the outcome had been. In the end, Zen believed them, but someone must have talked. Zen was privately inclined to think that Francesco’s brother might have mentioned it to a friend — perhaps the third boy who had been playing near the path when il morto appeared — in all innocence, as a way of demonstrating what an idiot his sibling was and thereby bolstering his own status.

Natale Arnone entered with yet another coffee and some pastries. He also informed Zen that the two Americans who had been instructed to appear that morning had arrived half an hour before, adding that the older one didn’t seem too happy about being kept waiting.

‘Oh, and Signor Mantega was on the phone again last night. Used the same public box as he did before, the one that’s now tapped. Two calls. One was to a mobile phone, no reply. The other to a landline that’s been traced to a house in San Giovanni in Fiore.’

Zen looked up wearily.

‘And?’

‘A man answered. Mantega asked to speak to someone called Giorgio. The man said he wasn’t there. Mantega left instructions to have Giorgio contact him. I was just wondering if you wanted any immediate action taken.’

‘Well, add both numbers to the intercept list, naturally.’

‘That’s already been done.’

‘Who owns the property?’

‘Dionisio Carduzzi, sixty-eight years old, retired carpenter, no criminal record.’

Zen sighed.

‘All right. Have the place watched, but discreetly. See if the Digos boys can stage some sort of utility repair job requiring them to dig up the street near by. They’re to note and if possible photograph everyone who comes and goes, take vehicle details and so on. But tell them to err on the side of caution. I don’t want any more mutilation of innocents. Judging by what happened last night, this Giorgio is a ruthless sadist and evidently jumpy. After my press conference later this morning, he’s going to be even jumpier.’

He pushed the mound of papers on his desk aside and made a brief phone call to the pathologist who had conducted the post-mortem examination on the corpse found the day before, then another to the Questura’s press officer with instructions to set up a news conference for ten o’clock. After that, he told Arnone to bring on the Americans.

It was immediately clear when they entered that Arnone had been understating Martin Nguyen’s mood. No sooner was he through the doorway than he launched into a barrage of protests and veiled threats, most of which Tom Newman chose to leave untranslated.

‘I turn up here of my own free will for the meeting requested by you during our encounter last night,’ Nguyen concluded, ‘and you keep me waiting for over forty minutes! What time do you people get in to work, anyway?’

‘I have been at work since four this morning.’

‘Are you night shift? Let me speak to the day guy.’

‘An incident has occurred which demanded my attention. I apologise for the inconvenience and am glad to say that I shall not detain you for long, Signor — ’

He looked defeatedly at the name written on the folder he had opened.

‘Nguyen,’ Tom supplied.

‘Precisely,’ said Zen. ‘You’re staying at the Rende International Residence, I believe?’

‘How do you know that?’ demanded Nguyen.

‘All hotels have to report the names and passport details of their guests to the police,’ Tom muttered. ‘It’s standard procedure, nothing personal.’

Martin Nguyen sighed impatiently.

‘Since you already know, why bother asking?’

‘And you’re planning to remain there?’ Zen asked.

Nguyen shrugged.

‘Perhaps.’

‘For how long?’

‘A week at least. Possibly longer. Why?’

‘And what is the purpose of your visit to Cosenza?’

‘Business.’

‘Could you be a little more specific?’

‘I’m executive-producing a significant property for a major-player American movie company. It’s just about to go into production, and key scenes will be shot in and around this city. Luciano Aldobrandini, of whom you may perhaps have heard, is directing and he’s on track to initiate shooting shortly. Up until his disappearance, Peter Newman was acting as our representative on the ground, liaising with the local contractors, getting the necessary permits and so on. Since his skill sets are no longer available to us, I have been tasked with the additional challenge of performing his role.’

Zen’s face was as expressionless as the frescoed image of some minor saint who was being martyred in some unspeakable way but, thanks to his steadfast faith, remained at peace with himself.

‘Signor Newman appears to have spent much of his time with a notary named Nicola Mantega. What was the subject under discussion when they met?’

‘I couldn’t say. Pete never mentioned the name, but that’s normal. He was a self-starter, made his own contacts. We didn’t expect detailed reports as long as he got results.’

Zen considered this in silence for a moment.

‘And what about you, Signor, er — ’

‘Nguyen,’ Tom interposed.

‘What about me?’ the other man demanded.

‘Have you been in touch with Mantega since your arrival here?’

‘No.’

‘Do you plan to be?’

‘What business is that of yours?’

Zen gazed for some time at the window, as though there was something of vital importance to be glimpsed through the luminous screening of the blinds.

‘Signor Mantega is an interesting man,’ he remarked blandly. ‘He specialises in arranging deals between crooked businessmen and corrupt politicians. One therefore asks oneself why your company should have required his services.’

Nguyen’s face hardened.

‘Are you in fact asking yourself, or are you asking me?’

Zen pretended to consider this for a moment.

‘Well, since you put it that way, I suppose I’m asking you.’

‘Then I want a lawyer present,’ Nguyen replied curtly.

Zen sighed in a weary way.

‘I have no time for that nonsense. I’ve had a hard night, signore. I was simply hoping for your cooperation in providing some background to the case that concerns me now. But, to be honest, recent developments have rendered your status entirely peripheral and your resulting interest to me minimal. I therefore invite you to take your leave.’

After witnessing the initial confrontation, Arnone had remained standing in the corner of the room throughout. With a sweep of his hand, Zen signalled him to escort Martin Nguyen out, then turned to face Tom Newman.

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news,’ he said.

The spiny dorsal fin of the coast slipped past unnoticed beyond the vast expanse of glass shielding the saloon. Luciano Aldobrandini lay embedded in a winged leather recliner, naked except for a black thong, watching his personal recut for DVD of the film which had won him the silver at Venice back in the 1960s. It should have been the gold, but Visconti’s people had packed the jury.

All things considered, it had held up pretty well, he thought. Artless and unsophisticated, of course, and given to crude over-emphasis at times. He would make it very differently now, but it was questionable whether the result would necessarily have been an improvement. Primitive though it was in many respects, the original had a raw, driven quality to it, a sense of energy to burn, amounting to sheer recklessness at times, that now felt very, very precious.

He switched off the DVD player and summoned Pippo.

‘Bring me a Singapore Sling, darling.’

The lad frowned ominously.

‘It’s only ten to twelve.’

‘Don’t be a bore. In Singapore, it’s cocktail time.’

His phone chirruped. Luciano glanced at the screen. It was Marcello.

‘Where are you?’ the agent asked, with a brittle tone and lack of the customary foreplay which suggested a state of some agitation.

‘On board the Narcisso, southward bound to start preparations for the shoot,’ his master replied. ‘A calm sea and a prosperous voyage, since you haven’t bothered to ask. At least, I trust it will prove to be prosperous. Some of my crew members are joining me in a few days and I intend to put on a show of having started principal photography by the end of the week, as per your instructions.’

Marcello grunted.

‘From what I’ve heard, an advance crew is already in place and has been for several weeks.’

‘Heard from whom?’

‘Another client of mine.’

‘Which specific talentless cunt are you referring to?’

‘That’s privileged information, Luciano. Anyway, you wouldn’t be any the wiser if I told you. He’s a rapper.’

‘A what?’

‘You see? Right now he’s trekking on horseback along the edge of the Sila range above Cosenza. I called him about a business thing and asked how his holiday was going. “It would be blissful if it weren’t for that damned helicopter that Luciano has hired,” he said. It seems there’s a lot of very noisy low-level flying going on. When my client asked what it was about, he was told it was preparatory location scouting for your movie.’

Aldobrandini straightened up abruptly.

‘That’s absurd! You know I never delegate that sort of work.’

‘Exactly. So I engaged the services of an ex-spook who now works as a private eye in Reggio. Last night he raided the compound on the outskirts of Cosenza which this outfit uses as a base, and has just reported his findings. Briefly, the helicopter has been hired by an American company called Aeroscan Surveying. He broke into the machine and took a look inside. The entire cargo space is filled with electronic equipment and screens and seats for the operators. Further research on my part has revealed that Aeroscan is a specialised firm which uses ground-penetrating radar devices to locate objects concealed underground. Everything from unmapped sewage lines to military bunkers and archaeological remains. Are you planning to film underground, Luciano?’

‘Not till they plant me there.’

Pippo returned with a brimming glass. His master downed the contents in one and commanded a refill.

‘So this raises the question of why they are using your movie as the justification for their activities,’ Marcello went on.

‘And how they found out about the film project in the first place.’

‘Fortunately, my employee also took a look inside the temporary office they’ve set up at the site. Tacked to the wall of one of the offices was a large-scale map of the whole area around Cosenza, stamped at the bottom with a form showing details of the surveying job. The box for the title of the relevant contract contained the words “Rapture Works”.’

There was a long silence.

‘It’s beginning to look as if Jeremy’s agent was right,’ Marcello went on. ‘I’m afraid we’ve been scammed.’

Luciano Aldobrandini accepted his second Singapore Sling without even noticing.

‘But why would they do that?’ he protested. ‘All the money they’ve spent already, not to mention the risk of a lawsuit. We are going to sue, I take it?’

‘Depends. We’d have to be able to prove intention to deceive and defraud.’

‘But if all they wanted was to do an aerial survey, why drag me into it?’

‘I have no idea. But don’t forget that it was Rapture Works that insisted on the film being shot in Calabria. It’s just possible that they may have two separate projects on the go and that they’re being piggy-backed for some reason. As of now, we just don’t know.’

‘Well, I’m going to find out!’

Luciano scrolled through his address book to the name of Martin Nguyen, but the number was engaged and stayed that way for over five minutes. He finally succumbed to the robotic siren voice which intervened after ten rings and left a message. Then his eye was caught by the video screen, which had returned to muted TV mode. It showed a man on a podium speaking into a microphone. A window at the upper right read ‘Breaking News’ and the occasion appeared to be a press conference. Normally Luciano would have switched channels, but something about the tall, lean, angular figure struck him, the face particularly. It took another few moments to realise that shorn of the modern clothes — in some suitably fetching drapery, not too daring but seductively suggestive, and with longer, unkempt hair — this man, even more than the late lamented Jeremy, represented his ideal image of John of Patmos. The caption in the right-hand corner indicated that he was in fact the chief of police for the province of Cosenza. Luciano reached for the remote control and turned up the volume, just to hear if the man’s voice was as good as his stunning physiognomy.

‘… the remains of the American lawyer Peter Newman, who has subsequently been identified as a member of the Calopezzati family and hence of Calabrian origin. The victim’s head had been blown off by a charge of plastic explosive detonated by remote control. Forensic tests have revealed that the explosive substance was identical to that used last night to force an entry into a house in the new town of Altomonte, located near by. The capofamiglia, Antonio Nicastro, was then shot while attempting to defend his nine-year-old son Francesco, whose tongue was subsequently severed with a razor blade. These events are clearly related and we urge anybody in possession of any information which might be relevant to come forward and — ’

Luciano blanked the screen. Dear God, he thought, and this is where I was going to spend months making my masterpiece? ‘We just don’t know,’ Marcello had said, but now he knew, with overwhelming and irrefutable conviction. There would be no movie. He, the great Aldobrandini, had been bought and sold like a rent boy to be used and then tossed away. Whatever happened now, his genius and his reputation, his entire career, had been besmirched for ever.

He stalked out on deck and up to the wheelhouse.

‘I’ve changed my mind, Matteo,’ he told the skipper. ‘Alter course for Sardinia.’

Tom Newman felt angry. Normally a mild man, he was capable of spectacular outbursts of rage if he felt that others had taken advantage of his good nature. This was one such occasion. These people had pushed him too far. Fine, they’d soon find out what he was made of.

‘ Ma cazzo, oh, dov’e ’sto beverragio? ’ he shouted at the waiter.

The man paused in mid-stride, then flipped up his right forefinger in a gesture that read, ‘Damn, I knew I’d forgotten something.’

‘ Subito, signore! ’

Twenty seconds later, the waiter brought what looked like an innocent Campari Soda but in fact contained a shot of vodka — what the Italians called un drink, an alien name for an alien concept. Tom nodded graciously, settled back in his chair with a masterful smile and relaxed again, soaking up the sun and the scene around him. The sun was high in a blue sky flawless except for a few puffy white clouds spilling over the coastal chain of mountains from the Mediterranean to the west. Later on in the afternoon, they would bulk up, loom over the city like thugs and then unleash the mother of all thunderstorms, but for now they were merely decorative or maybe even symbolic, like in some Old Master’s frescoed ceiling of strapping lads and overweight gals, signifiers of beneficence and plenty.

Since leaving the Questura after having received Aurelio Zen’s bad news, he’d drifted at random through the streets, noticing everything with heightened awareness and interacting with whatever presented itself to his dazed consciousness. He’d bought some green peaches and fresh walnuts from one street vendor, and eaten them along with a chalky roundel of aged goat’s cheese sold by another vendor, who looked a bit like a goat himself — skinny, neurotic and driven, like the gormless offspring of some Spanish noble family.

Then there had been the cheap clothing stores run by Chinese immigrants around the bus station, the bijou boutiques on the upscale streets selling pricey goods for wedding presents and the home beautiful, and odd places with English names like Daddy amp; Son and Miss Sixty — the latter, it turned out, catering not to geriatric spinsters but the adorable young women of the neighbourhood who wanted retro Carnaby Street gear to show off their amazing legs. Tom had listened to a bootleg CD of Calabrian folk music blaring from another street stall and with the help of the salesman had managed to pick out some of the words: O sol, o sol, almo immortale, non t’asconder mai piu, che certo veggio s’io non ti miro, non poss’aver peggio. It was a hymn of praise to the sun, all about how when it is hidden from us we’re screwed. Pure paganism, but he was feeling pretty pagan himself. It was in the air here, in the pitiless light, in the facial expressions and body language of the people all around. His father was dead, the police chief had told him. Like this was the first time in the history of the world that someone’s father had died? The Greeks and Romans who’d run this place thousands of years ago would have understood that.

He’d bought the CD and felt it now in his pocket as he heard the melody again in his brain and looked at a passing woman, the fastenings of her bra standing out on her back under the tight top like widely spaced shoulder nipples. Then he saw a face he knew.

‘Signor Mantega!’

Tom sprang to his feet and shook hands with the notaio.

‘How have you been keeping?’ Mantega asked distractedly.

‘Pretty well, all things considered. What about you?’

Mantega looked startled, then made a large gesture and sighed deeply.

‘Ah, you know! Work, always work.’

‘Come and sit down,’ Tom urged.

He was feeling lonely and, with two drinks inside him, expansive, but Mantega demurred.

‘Actually, I’m in a bit of a hurry — ’

‘ Solo un momento. I need to ask you something.’

Mantega hesitated, but finally joined Tom at his table. He waved away the waiter and stared at Tom.

‘Well?’ he said pointedly.

‘It’s just this expression I heard today and didn’t understand, so I thought maybe it was dialect. La tomba d’Alarico. Does that mean anything to you?’

Mantega shrugged dismissively. He obviously couldn’t have cared less about Tom’s question, but couldn’t resist the opportunity to hold forth all the same.

‘But of course! Alaric was a barbarian chieftain who invaded Italy in the fifth century. He sacked Rome and then continued south, but died here in Cosenza and is believed to have been buried along with all the treasure he had plundered. There have been many attempts to find the tomb, all of them fruitless. When the Germans were in charge here during the war, they organised a particularly intensive search. The Goths were an important element in Nazi mythology. But even with all their resources, the results were once again negative.’

Tom shook his head in wonder.

‘I’d never even heard of Alaric. So the treasure’s still down there somewhere?’

Mantega shrugged impatiently. Now that he had said his piece, he had no further interest in this dusty subject.

‘Who knows? From time to time some enthusiast comes along and tries again, but without success so far as anyone knows.’

He yawned, and then as a show of politeness added, ‘Why are you interested in Alaric’s tomb?’

Tom gave him a conspiratorial smile.

‘You know that helicopter that’s been prowling about? Turns out it’s carrying some sort of electronic gear that can scan the subsoil. The company drew a blank down the main river-bed, so now they’re going to try the valleys higher up. At least it should be a bit quieter around here.’

Mantega gave a perfunctory nod.

‘Well, I must be going. Have you heard any further word from the police about negotiations for your father’s release?’

It was only then that Tom realised Mantega hadn’t heard the news yet. But he would eventually, and would find it very odd that Tom hadn’t told him.

‘He’s dead.’

Mantega, who had started to get up, abruptly sat down again.

‘What? How? When?’

‘A couple of days ago. They’ve been keeping it quiet until they definitively identified the body. I only just heard the news myself, so the reality hasn’t quite sunk in yet. I suppose I’m still in shock, you know?’

Mantega didn’t seem concerned about this aspect of the situation.

‘Is that your phone?’ he asked, pointing to a shiny silver telefonino lying on the table.

‘Got it just yesterday.’

‘May I borrow it for a moment?’ Mantega asked. ‘I have to make an urgent call and my own mobile has gone dead. You know how it is. I must have forgotten to recharge it.’

‘Help yourself,’ said Tom.

Mantega smiled his thanks. As if finding the street too noisy, he got up and walked into the open doorway of the cafe. Tom watched him idly, in between exchanging glances with a stunning brunette who had sat down at a neighbouring table soon after Mantega arrived and was now smoking a cigarette and talking on her headset. Tom scribbled ‘Lunch?’ and his new phone number on a scrap of paper, then signalled the waiter and told him to take it over to the woman. While this transaction was in progress, he glanced over at Nicola Mantega, who was apparently having a furious argument with someone. The waiter handed the woman the note. They spoke briefly and he pointed over at Tom. The brunette looked over, and for a moment their eyes met again. Then Mantega reappeared. He handed back Tom’s phone but did not sit down.

‘Sorry, but I have to run,’ he said, as breathlessly as though he already had been running. ‘I’ll be in touch shortly and in the meantime please accept my deepest sympathy for this shocking development. My poor boy! You must be devastated.’

Tom nodded vaguely.

‘Yes, I must.’

‘ A presto, allora.’

Mantega trotted off rapidly.

‘I’m not free for lunch,’ a voice said.

Tom looked up to find the brunette standing above him.

‘Oh, what a cute phone!’ she exclaimed. She switched it on, pressed some of the miniature buttons and scanned the screen.

‘You’re pretty cute yourself.’

The woman took this coolly.

‘You’re an American?’ she returned.

Tom smiled self-deprecatingly.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Oh, in Calabria, Americans are part of the family,’ she replied with a nicely flirtatious edge. ‘So many of our own people moved there.’

‘Yes, I know. In fact, I may be from this area myself, or at least my father seems…’

He broke off in confusion, but the brunette was now intent on an incoming call on her earpiece. She turned to Tom.

‘I must go.’

Tom gestured helplessly.

‘Okay, how about dinner?’

But she was already out of earshot, hastening along in the direction taken by Nicola Mantega.

For someone whose religious beliefs, theologically considered, amounted to little more than pagan agnosticism, Maria was a good Catholic. It was true that her views on the Trinity, which she thought of as the executive steering committee at the core of any stable family — the father, the mother and the eldest son — probably wouldn’t have passed muster with the Inquisition, had the Church still been taking a lively interest in the opinions of its dwindling flock instead of striving ever more desperately to maintain the ratio of bums to pews.

Maria accepted the existence of God in exactly the same way that she accepted the existence of the government, because you needed someone powerful to hate for not preventing, or at least mitigating, all the needless suffering that went on. She felt sorry for Jesus, having to take the blame for his father’s misjudgements, but it was hard to have much respect for a man who seemed to have spent his brief life preaching that if people were nicer to each other then the world would be a nicer place. As for the meaningless abstraction of the Holy Spirit, that had long been replaced in her mind by the warm, indulgent and eminently human person of the Madonna.

Maria conceived of the Blessed Virgin as possessing much the same range of limited and indirect, but often decisive, powers on the divine level as any mother worth her salt did here on earth. Sometimes she could help, sometimes not, but at least she could be counted on to listen sympathetically and to do her best. Her sphere of activity was of course strictly local. In the chapel dedicated to her in the old church up on the hilltop, she cured burns and eased the pains of childbirth, but if your feet or back were troubling you then you had to pay a visit to her shrines at Aprigliano or Cerenzia. It was like knowing where the different kinds of mushrooms grew or where to find the best wild asparagus.

Maria shared these unorthodox doctrinal views with just about every other elderly woman in the village, but like them she nevertheless attended mass every day. This was partly because someone had to do it, lest the family attract comment, and none of the others had the time or inclination, but largely because it got her out of the house and provided an opportunity to catch up on local gossip. On the day after the police raid on Altomonte and its horrifying sequel, almost all the other women in the community had evidently had the same idea, so the church was much more crowded than usual for evening mass. Sensing the prevailing mood, and perhaps impatient to hear the latest himself, the priest zipped through the service at a brisk pace, skipping the homily and keeping the readings brief.

The moment the congregation was dismissed, everyone got down to the real business. Many of them had already had a chance to take preliminary soundings in the course of their daily work, social calls and trips to the shops. Now the time had come to meet in committee, compare notes, sift the evidence and rough out the interim report which would later be delivered to their respective families. Lively discussion was going on both in the church itself and on the steps and street outside between small groups that constantly formed and reformed, relaying their findings to others for comparison and contrast. After about twenty minutes, a consensus gradually emerged.

Both the television news and the local paper had confirmed that the murdered man, despite having been reported following his earlier disappearance as being a visiting American, was in fact a member of the Calopezzati family which had ruled this part of Calabria like a feudal possession for almost two hundred years. The memory of their crimes and infamies was still fresh among the older generation, and there was general agreement that it was harsh but just for this Pietro Ottavio — evidently the illegitimate son of the baronessa Ottavia — to have been condemned to a symbolically ignominious death outside the family’s former stronghold as retribution for the misdeeds of his forebears.

Where dissension emerged was over the punishment of Francesco Nicastro. There were those who held that he deserved it for giving information to the police. Rules were rules and they had to be enforced, brutally if necessary, if the community was to survive in the face of the even more brutal repression that had governed the region since time immemorial. Others argued that boys like Francesco were too modern to understand the old ways, adding that in any case no real harm had been done by his mentioning the victim’s parked car, and above all that the penalty had been disproportionately severe. A few even dared to suggest that the incident was proof of the persistent rumours that ‘he’ had become addicted to the drugs in which he trafficked and had gone over the edge into madness, but the implications of this possibility were so disturbing that it was dismissed by the majority.

Both by nature and upbringing, Maria was a listener rather than a talker, particularly where the Calopezzati family was concerned. In fact, the name had not passed her lips for almost fifty years, and nothing in her speech or demeanour suggested that it meant anything more to her than to any of the other women present. She moved from group to group, nodding and shaking her head in turn, miming the appropriate righteous anger or resigned disapproval. Once she had gleaned all the facts, theories, rumours and opinions on offer, she slipped away home and shut herself up in her room. An hour later, when she emerged for dinner, she shocked the whole family by announcing that she was going into the city the next day. One of the women at church had told her about a new medication for arthritis that was now available, but you had to go to a certain doctor at the hospital to get it because the supply was strictly limited.

Maria’s son offered to drive her, but she declared that she would rather take the bus. It was more relaxing and you didn’t have to worry about parking. Her daughter-in-law, who wore the trousers in the marriage, then tried to butt in but as usual went completely over the top, making it sound as though her suocera was a senile old fool who shouldn’t be allowed out of the house, never mind turned loose in the dangerous streets of Cosenza. Maria waited until she had finished her tirade and then said, ‘I’m going to the city tomorrow, I’m going alone, and that’s all.’

Everyone knew that it was a waste of breath trying to argue with Maria when she used that tone of voice. Besides, the parents were more concerned about their son Sabatino, who had barely touched his food and sat staring blankly at the wall as if oblivious to everything about him. Francesco Nicastro was his best friend. They had played together in the stunted forest on the day when the dead man appeared. Maria rose and announced that she was going to bed early so as to get a good night’s sleep.

Once in her room, she did indeed undress, but then lay down on top of the covers, glancing alternately at the sacred image on the wall and the looming abyss of the shadowy ceiling high above. The Virgin had been unable to help her in this matter, so Maria would have to help herself, and all of them. For herself she had no fears, but she knew how the kind of men who had inflicted these injuries on the community operated, particularly if there was any truth to the rumours that their leader was possessed by demons. Whatever happened, her son and his wife and Sabatino must be protected. She would have to take stringent precautions before, during and after her trip, keep her wits about her at all times and not carry anything that might identify her if things went wrong.

Above all, she had to decide what to say and how to say it. After so many years of a silence which she had always assumed would last until her death, it was almost impossible to imagine selecting the words and framing the sentences that would bring the whole matter to light for the first time. In addition, she might very well not be believed. The story she had to tell was just that, a story. She couldn’t prove that it was true or produce any evidence or witnesses to support it. Maria had seen the new police chief on television and he looked like someone you could talk to, but that might just have been his public manner, assumed for the camera and the purposes of meeting the press. One to one, he could easily turn out to be the usual arrogant thug who would dismiss her statement as the ravings of a crazy old woman.

But none of this weakened her resolve, any more than the impenetrable silence of God, the futile gesture of his Son and the impotent anguish of the Madonna stopped her from praying or going to church. Both the gods and the police were as capricious and vindictive as any of the humans they lorded it over, but every once in a while you might be able to catch their attention and put in a good word for someone. But first you had to make that effort. It might not be sufficient, but if you had any sense of decency then it was necessary. You had to be prepared to ask, to beg, to plead, to grovel. That was all that could be done, and Maria was determined to do it.

When the papers landed on Zen’s desk early that evening, his first reaction had not been to do with the contents but with the form they took. Written under the letterhead of the US consulate in Naples, the first instalment opened with a boilerplate statement to the effect that ‘this communication contains potentially sensitive classified material’ and hence was being sent in randomly sequenced segments via fax, since no ‘mutually agreed encryption protocols’ were in place between the agencies concerned and the use of email might therefore have constituted a ‘bilateral security hazard’.

I remember when we first got fax machines at work, Zen thought. They were cutting edge then, a status marker. If you didn’t have one, you weren’t important. Now they were virtually obsolete and sat gathering dust in some unvisited corner of the building. I’ve witnessed the birth and decay of an entire technology, he thought, not just in my lifetime but within recent memory.

The communication in question was terse in the extreme. Sent in response to a phone call Zen had made the previous evening, it stated that Roberto Calopezzati had been resident in the United States from 1953 until 1965. The American consular official went on to express a disingenuously arch bewilderment at the fact that it had been necessary to contact him for this information. Surely it would have been more convenient for Zen to obtain it from his own internal sources, given that the said Calopezzati’s twelve-year stay in the US had been under the auspices of the Italian government as a legal adviser at their embassy in Washington, DC.

Zen headed down the corridor to Giovanni Sforza’s office. Livid clouds were hanging low above the city like clusters of poisonous fruit, but the storm wouldn’t break. Inside the Questura, the atmosphere was as taut as overstretched sailcloth.

‘I need your help again, Giovanni. There’s an angle to the case that’s been bothering me. It may not be relevant, but if so then it’s a remarkable set of coincidences. According to the official records both here and in the United States, Peter Newman was born in the province of Cosenza under the name Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati. Later he became an American citizen, changed his name to Newman and as far as we know never returned to Italy until recently. In short, we appear to have a Calabrian who moves to the United States, styles himself Newman — uomo nuovo — and avoids any contact with his native country for over forty years. Then one fine day he returns, is kidnapped and is murdered in a highly theatrical way for no apparent motive whatsoever.’

Sforza nodded bureaucratically.

‘And your point is?’ he asked.

‘To prove that he was indeed the person mentioned in the records. The Calopezzati family have proved very hard to trace, but I’ve learned an interesting fact about Roberto, who would be Pietro’s uncle if the documents are correct. Our records contain no mention of him after the war, nor do any other related files. But I’ve learned from other sources that a person by that name worked at the Italian embassy in Washington for twelve years from 1953. I now need to know what became of him.’

‘What post did he hold at the embassy?’

‘Legal adviser.’

Giovanni Sforza evidently didn’t know what resonance the name Calopezzati had in Calabria, but the term ‘legal adviser’ had its significance for him.

‘Secret job,’ he said. ‘That would explain the security clearance level on that file you mentioned.’

Zen looked incredulous.

‘The servizi?’

‘Used to be their standard operating procedure. It wasn’t usually covert work. To save everyone time and trouble, and foster good relations with a trusted ally, they were declared to the host government. But it complicates your task. Those people change their identities like we change our socks, only they don’t wash the used ones, they throw them away. And they’re very reluctant to divulge any information about their personnel, present or past. To anyone.’

Zen shrugged.

‘Well, without it, this is all going to take a lot longer. And we don’t have that much time. Now the news of Newman’s death is out, I’m under severe pressure. If I happen to mention in an unguarded moment that my investigation is being impeded by some secretive 007s in Rome, they’ll be under a lot of pressure too. You might mention that in your sales pitch.’

‘I can’t promise anything, but I’ll do my best.’

In the corridor, Zen was accosted by Natale Arnone, a stack of papers in his fist.

‘The report from the Digos day team shadowing Nicola Mantega just came in,’ he said. ‘I know how busy you are, so I’ve filleted it for you.’

He handed over the sheaf of paperwork with a page containing heavy underlining uppermost.

‘Mantega met Tom Newman by chance in a cafe around lunchtime. They made small talk for a while — some archaeological matter — and then Newman told Mantega that his father had been murdered. Mantega appeared perturbed by this news and immediately borrowed the American’s mobile phone, presumably because he suspects his own is being tapped, to call that number in San Giovanni that we now have on intercept. There was no reply, but it switched over to an answering machine and Mantega left this message.’

His stubby forefinger, with its immaculately trimmed nail, indicated a transcribed passage on the page.

You crazy bastard! What do you think you’redoing? Newman’s son just told me that hisfather’s dead. Well, that’s the end of it as far asI’m concerned! I trusted you, Giorgio, and now Ifeel betrayed. It’s all very well for you, lying lowwith your friends out of harm’s way. I’m the onethe cops are going to put through the mincer. Ifthey do, and I still haven’t heard from you, I’ll tellthem everything I know. Names, numbers, dates, times, places, the lot! And don’t think you canblackmail me with that video. That was about akidnapping. This is manslaughter at the veryleast, and probably murder. I had nothing to dowith that and I’m sure as hell not taking theblame. I don’t owe you anything and I shall takeall necessary measures to protect my ownposition, so get in touch by tomorrow at thelatest. If you don’t, all bets are off, and you’ll findout just what I’m — ’

‘The machine cut him off at that point,’ Natale Arnone remarked when Zen had finished reading. ‘Shall we take him? He’s clearly been withholding evidence and would probably be ready to talk with a little persuasion.’

‘True, but who knows how informative or conclusive his evidence would turn out to be? No, on balance I want to leave him loose a little while longer, along with the man whose phone he called. But he must be watched night and day and we must be prepared for him to try and slip off to another covert meeting with Giorgio at some point. If he does, we have to be ready to move in this time and close the trap. How’s the surveillance operation on the house in San Giovanni going?’

‘All in place. They’re doubling up as a maintenance crew from the gas company during the day and a parked delivery truck overnight.’

A stunning guttural rumble that would have had any rap artist weeping in awe shook the city like a celestial earthquake.

‘Young Newman also tried to pick up one of the female Digos agents. She took advantage of the situation to read the number Mantega had just called off the screen of his mobile, in case we didn’t have an intercept in place.’

‘What’s the agent’s name?’

‘Mirella Kodra.’

‘Tell her to get in touch with young Signor Newman, co-operate up to a certain point, find out whatever she can about what he’s up to and report back.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Zen heard his desk phone ringing and dashed into his office.

‘I’ve found someone who is willing, subject to certain provisos, to talk to you about the subject we discussed,’ Giovanni Sforza said, as though choosing his words carefully. ‘I’ve got him on the line now and will put him through to you.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Don’t ask. And don’t ask him either.’

‘Very well, I’ll try to avoid the tough questions.’

‘Avoid jokes too. These people take themselves very seriously indeed.’

After a number of fuzzy clicks, an unfamiliar voice spoke.

‘ Buona sera, dottore. I have been given to understand that you wish to contact a certain individual of my acquaintance. For the purposes of this conversation, we will refer to him simply as Roberto.’

‘That is correct.’

‘And that you wish to obtain a DNA sample from him. May I ask why?’

‘To positively identify the victim of a murder I’m investigating. Circumstantial evidence appears to suggest that he was Roberto’s nephew. Genetic profiling would instantly confirm or exclude that hypothesis, which in turn might well have a decisive effect on the progress of the case.’

There was a silence at the other end.

‘So you don’t wish to interview Roberto in person?’ the other man said at length.

‘Ideally, yes. He might well be able to supply other details relating to his family which are at present either vague or unknown. But I appreciate the sensitivities of your department, so if you insist I will settle for the DNA material. As you perhaps know, this isn’t an invasive procedure. A mouth swab would suffice. What is crucial, however, is that there should be irrefutable evidence that the sample was indeed taken from the individual under discussion.’

‘I can provide immaculate paperwork to support the authenticity of any sample, should Roberto consent to provide one.’

‘I haven’t the slightest doubt that you are in a position to provide any type of paperwork whatsoever,’ Zen replied with a touch of steel in his voice. ‘But should the case go to court, the person named in the documents you provided would be required to present himself before the judges in order to validate under oath the statements made therein. Do you really want to risk one of your agents being blown like that?’

A further silence ensued.

‘As it happens, Roberto is willing to meet you in person, subject to stringent conditions.’

‘Name them.’

‘First, that the meeting be here in Rome. How do you propose to arrive?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes.’

‘When would this be?’

‘Tomorrow at the earliest.’

‘Then tomorrow. I’ll take the night train.’

‘Very well. Please ask Dottor Sforza to contact me with the estimated arrival time and other details in due course. You will be met at the station and conveyed to the meeting place. A medical orderly will be present to ensure that the correct procedures for taking the DNA samples are observed. Following that, you may speak to Roberto for a limited period, on condition that his refusal to respond to any given question is accepted as binding, and that no record of your conversation with him — whether written, electronic or in any other medium — is made. Do you agree?’

‘I don’t appear to have any option.’

‘Correct. I hope the results of your visit prove helpful, dottore. Buon lavoro.’

Splayed out on the bed behind two layers of closed curtains, with CNN murmuring from the television, Martin Nguyen devoured the club sandwich that he’d ordered up from room service. It didn’t look like a club sandwich, being layered on slices of a freshly baked roll, but it tasted better than any he’d ever had. Even the fries were great. They were nicely crisp but dense inside, and tasted earthily of potato. Martin had kind of forgotten that fries were made from potatoes, but when you had to chew on them a little the whole process became clear. Al dente, he thought.

He had been forced to listen to a lot of Italian since his arrival, and found that he understood it perfectly. Not so much the content, although he was picking up quite a bit of that too, but the form. This was atavistically familiar to him, unlike the incoherent lexis-free mumblings he had to deal with back on the West Coast, where the key point of the exchange often seemed to be the speaker’s appeal to anyone present to give him a helping hand with the almost impossible task of articulating whatever banal thought had sparked and then immediately died in his brain. Every utterance ended up as a collaborative effort, like raising a barn. It was tough, backbreaking work, but it brought the community together. Italian, on the other hand, was a language much like Martin’s own lost Vietnamese: pure, plain and declarative. In neither tongue was there even an approximate equivalent for such phrases as ‘So I was, kind of, like, you know?’

Martin had necessarily learned to speak that dialect on demand, but he also had a number of other registers at his disposal when the need arose. He had been acutely aware of such a need many times that day, but all he had to fall back on were Tom Newman’s translations. The loss of his verbal karate skills had been the greatest trial during an incredibly long working day which had left Martin feeling exhausted, baffled and all the more foreign for the apparent similarities to his own native culture. First there had been the crack-of-dawn meeting at the Aeroscan base, followed by an unpleasant encounter with the local police chief, who had turned out to be both tough and intelligent, qualities which Nguyen respected but preferred not to encounter in opponents in a position of power.

Then after lunch, during which Tom and the waiter had made the simple transaction of ordering a goddamn meal sound like the finale of some Three Tenors extravaganza, he had spent hours in a dingy, stifling office with the notary that Newman had hired as a fixer trying to figure out the current state of play plus how the hell anything got done in this Latino dump, if it ever did. Throughout, he had been dependent on Tom’s translations of what was said on either side. The kid’s English was way more sophisticated than Jake’s, but Martin had no way of knowing what his Italian was like, and hence of how he, Martin Nguyen, was coming across.

To cap it all off, on the way back to the hotel Tom had blurted out the news that his father was dead. Here was cause for genuine grief. In Martin’s view, there was a time and a place for homicide. Plumb in the middle of the stealth-bomber strategy he’d devised for this project, with the victim a declared Rapture Works contractor, was just totally inappropriate. He was furious that his hefty incentive bonus had been put at risk by a bunch of peasant bandidos with more balls than brains. This one was going to need heavy spin on it. It was essential that Aeroscan’s operations continued as smoothly and invisibly as possible until the mission had been accomplished.

His mobile phone burbled into life. Martin didn’t want to answer it, but he could no more ignore a ringtone than a mother could her crying baby.

‘Yo.’

‘Hi, Jake.’

‘We’ve got issues, dude.’

‘No fucking kidding!’

‘The guy called you too?’

‘What guy?’

‘That big kahuna director we hired for the movie cover.’

‘Aldobrandini? We spoke after I arrived here.’

‘I mean real time. Like, you know, now.’

‘I’ve been totally slammed, Jake. It’s all swimming upstream here. What’s new?’

‘Aldo left a message. He somehow found out the whole thing is a scam. Said a lot of stuff about creative property rights and shit. Plus he’s threatening to get on TV and expose us, then sue our asses. What a shitty break! If Newman doesn’t get kidnapped, this never happens.’

Martin Nguyen took a moment to savour this, the longest discourse he had ever heard Jake pronounce. Then he turned his boss’s habitual brevity against him.

‘Newman’s dead.’

‘Huh?’

‘Murdered. They dressed him up as a corpse, made him walk to an old village someplace, then blew his head off.’

‘Fuck.’

After a long silence, Jake laughed.

‘Well, I guess the game’s hotting up.’

Like much of what Jake said, this didn’t make any sense to Martin, so he decided to ignore it.

‘I’ve refocused the search according to the parameters suggested by that team of consultants I told you about. The Aeroscan guy figures they can cover the area in three or four more days.’

‘Yeah, but if Brandini goes on TV and tells everyone there isn’t going to be any movie, we’re screwed.’

‘Chill, Jake. It’s just the flying permits at risk. I can stall the authorities that long.’

‘Okay, but if we get lucky, call me immediately. I’ve got a jet on standby.’

‘Well, that’s great, but it’s going to take you half a day to get here and the time difference screws up the scheduling. Plus I don’t know if you remember, but I just said that Pete Newman has been brutally murdered. That means that the cops here have a homicide investigation under way, and anyone associated with the victim — like me, for instance — is a potential witness, if not suspect. The police chief made that very clear to me today. So what with the threat of Aldobrandini going nuclear, I’m under a lot of pressure. Now Aeroscan might just come through tomorrow, in which case I’ll have to move fast without you around or maybe even in touch, because it’ll be the middle of the night over there. So it would help a lot if you told me what we’re actually looking for.’

There was a long pause.

‘It’s kind of hard to explain over the phone, plus I’ve got to go. Let me shoot you a couple of URLs. Think you have problems? Madrona went out and bought this designer dog. It’s like a total bitch.’

The line went dead. Martin felt rage coil up within him like a thwarted orgasm. For a moment he was tempted to hurl the phone at the wall, but in the end he tapped into his rage and used it to dissipate his earlier tiredness and sense of passive helplessness. He called room service and told them to remove his dirty dishes and bring a bottle of their best cognac, a soda siphon and a bucket of ice. Martin’s father had started his career as a waiter at one of the most exclusive clubs in the French colony of Cochinchine, so he had been in a position to pass on to his son a few tips about the good things in life.

After leaving his office exceptionally late, Nicola Mantega drove up the superstrada to Spezzano Grande, a ragged stack of concrete boxes perched on the precipitous slopes of the Sila massif. The radio was tuned to the same local news channel he had listened to while driving to work, and as the Alfa Romeo skimmed round the long curving viaduct leading up to the Spezzano turn-off, Mantega was surprised to hear the familiar voice of the new police chief, Aurelio Zen.

‘… where officers under my command discovered the remains of the American lawyer Peter Newman, who has subsequently been identified as a member of the Calopezzati family and hence of Calabrian origin. The victim’s head had been blown off by a charge of plastic explosive detonated by remote control. Forensic tests have revealed that the explosive substance was identical to that used last night to force an entry into a house in the new town of Altomonte, located near by. The capofamiglia, Antonio Nicastro, was then shot while attempting to defend his nine-year-old son Francesco, whose tongue was subsequently severed…’

The exit for Spezzano angled sharply right, then left up a steep gradient, and at the speed Mantega took it a lesser car than the Alfa 159 Q4 might well have spun out of control. He stopped at the side of the road until his breathing had calmed down to something approaching normal, then nosed through the narrow streets and parked in front of a pizzeria. Gina and the boys were visiting her brother in Leipzig, where he had found work stripping Communist-era plumbing out of desirable nineteenth-century apartment buildings for rich Wessis, so on top of everything else Nicola couldn’t get a home-cooked meal. The street was empty except for a kid who had been showing off his MotoGuzzi bike to his piece of arm-candy. She looked vaguely familiar, Mantega thought as he walked in and ordered. He’d definitely seen her before, maybe even that day, but where?

He sat down and gulped some beer. It wasn’t surprising that his mind was going after what he’d been put through. He’d spent a miserable afternoon pretending to listen to the needs and demands of some Oriental who had flown in from America to represent the film company that Peter Newman had worked for, but his thoughts had been elsewhere. He already knew that the interim police chief didn’t believe his story about the circumstances of Newman’s disappearance, but hadn’t had enough evidence to proceed against him when the case under investigation had merely been one of abduction. Now it was murder, and of the most atrocious kind. Crimes on that scale create their own judicial momentum, and Mantega knew that he would be one of its first victims. The only surprise was that they hadn’t come for him already.

To prepare for that onslaught, he needed to be briefed by Giorgio on what exactly had happened, and above all why, but any contact from that quarter now looked as unlikely as an intervention from the other quarter was inevitable. He had made his final pitch before lunch, borrowing Tom Newman’s mobile on the grounds that it was new and therefore untapped. The only reply was from an answering machine, on which he had left a frenzied message whose tone he now regretted. In retrospect, his spontaneous reaction to Tom’s news looked distinctly risky. Giorgio was not one to take kindly to threats and abuse. But what was he supposed to have done? The original deal they had struck was a straightforward business transaction, the victim returned a little poorer but otherwise unharmed and the perpetrators enriched by several million euros. A traditional Calabrian crime, with its roots in the immemorial banditry of the region. Nothing had ever been said about murder, still less a barbaric and apparently motiveless execution such as the one the police chief had described at his press conference.

He chomped his pizza down, then spent a little time flirting jokingly with the waitress, whose husband had been screwing the sister of the priest in Pedace ever since the difficult birth of their second child. The night outside was a still, solid block of oppressive heat. The storm that should have ripped it open, letting in the fresh air and a cooling downpour, had merely brooded over the area for a few hours and then shifted off to the east, leaving no resolution to the problems it had created. Mantega slipped gratefully into the air-conditioned zephyrs within the Alfa and drove up a tilted labyrinth of minor roads to his villa, where the electronic gates in the boundary fence automatically closed behind him. Tonight, there were no welcoming barks and plaintive whines to greet him. Attilio, his lively pit bull terrier, had come down with an acute intestinal ailment a few days earlier and was still in the care of the vet. Mantega unlocked the house, bolted the door behind him, reset the alarm system and then fetched a bottle of the local digestivo he favoured and watched an hour of mind-numbing television before going to bed.

He was awakened by stabbing pains and a sense of suffocation that induced muffled shrieks.

‘Shut up!’

The low voice was also muffled, but Mantega had already recognised Giorgio’s body odour. The gag over his mouth was removed.

‘On your feet.’

The intruder twisted Mantega’s right arm up behind his back and walked him through the dark topography of the house to the kitchen. Visibility was slightly better here, thanks to the security light on the patio. Giorgio sat his captive down on a chair beside the long table strewn with various incongruous artefacts purchased by Gina as part of her unending attempts to create a gracious home and stood over him, his back to the window, his face in shadow. He was wearing jeans, a black leather jacket and a dark woollen hat. His huge hands gleamed in the ambient light like dangling crabs.

‘Keep your voice low,’ Giorgio said. ‘The house is under surveillance.’

‘Who by?’

‘The cops, of course. It took me almost two hours to get in. They’re good, but I’m better.’

Mantega thought this over, then frowned.

‘The burglar alarm?’ prompted Giorgio. ‘One of my friends disabled that on a previous visit, before things got hot. He’s a wizard with wiring. The system looks like it’s working, but it’s just talking to itself. Or perhaps it was your dog you were thinking of? Another friend of mine tossed a chunk of poisoned meat over the fence after the cops outside had handed you off to the team that follows you around during the day.’

Mantega’s eyes had adjusted by now, and his brain was more alert. The reason for the strange gleam on Giorgio’s hands became obvious. He was wearing a pair of those skin-tight latex gloves used by doctors.

‘It seems like this is all news to you,’ Giorgio went on, ‘which just confirms my feeling that you’ve become a liability rather than an asset. All these phone calls you’ve been making, whining and bitching away like some woman! That’s not how a man conducts himself. I need men about me, Nicola, now more than ever. So I’ve decided that the time has come to sever our connection.’

One of the gleaming hands disappeared for a moment. Then it was back, holding a blade whose gleam was even more intense and much colder.

‘No one saw me come and no one will see me go. I suppose you will be missed eventually, but not for many days. Those days are vital to us to make our plans without the fear of being betrayed by a scumbag like you. Your job for us is done, Nicola. All you can do now is harm.’

To his surprise, Mantega found that he was perfectly calm.

‘You’re right about one thing, Giorgio,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of harm that I can do, even from beyond the grave. Do you think it didn’t occur to me that you might try this? The way you murdered Newman and mutilated that poor kid, it’s clear that you’ve gone out of your mind. Well, I’ve been in this game long enough not to trust crazies, so a complete statement of all our dealings — not just about Newman, but everything, back from the very beginning — is in the hands of a third party and will be deposited with the authorities if anything happens to me. Names, locations, dates, ransom paid and all particulars of both you and your friends. Given that this latest exploit of yours is headline news, that would naturally result in the biggest manhunt this country has seen for years, with you as the star of the show.’

He held up his hand.

‘Now, you may think that the whole community will form a circle and protect you faithfully whatever the cost. That would be a mistake. People round here have a healthy respect for power and patronage, but they don’t have any more time for sadistic crackheads than I do. You’ll be on your own and on the run, Giorgio. Even your friends may eventually start wondering how much your friendship is worth. Sooner or later there’ll be a fire-fight at some ruined farmhouse where you’ve been holed up in misery for months like a kidnap hostage yourself, and you will come out of it either dead or facing a life sentence without parole in that high-security hostel in Terni.’

Giorgio gestured his boredom.

‘This is just talk, Nicola. The plain fact is I don’t need you any more.’

He approached, knife held out. It was then that Mantega had his supreme inspiration.

‘Maybe not, but you do need money. And I’m talking about serious money, the kind that will buy friends and influence people or spirit you away abroad if things get too hot here. That’s what you need, Giorgio, and I know where you can get it. Therefore you need me.’

Even Mantega didn’t really believe that this last-minute appeal was going to work, but he felt he owed it to his reputation as a notaio di fiducia to give it a whirl. In the event, it stopped Giorgio in his tracks. He must be even more cash-strapped than I thought, Mantega reflected. This didn’t entirely surprise him. Giorgio’s eagerness when Mantega had suggested Peter Newman as a kidnapping prospect indicated that his finances had been at a low point. Since he had chosen to kill his hostage rather than ransom him, with the additional costs of the operation he might well be close to broke by now. Despite their operational efficiency and ruthless enforcement methods, Giorgio and his associates hadn’t progressed much beyond the ‘feast or famine’ approach of the historical brigands. Whatever money they had, they spent, then looked around for more.

Mantega stood up and smiled widely.

‘Put away that knife, Giorgio, and I’ll tell you how you can make yourself a sackful of cash in a week or two, and at no risk whatsoever. Because the beauty of this scheme is that it isn’t even illegal, strictly speaking.’

Giorgio attempted a contemptuous laugh.

‘What kind of bullshit is this?’

‘A very easy and lucrative kind,’ Mantega returned with just the right professional polished ease. ‘Draw up a chair, Giorgio. Let’s get rich!’

Aurelio Zen stayed at his desk until ten o’clock that night, feeling more and more like the captain of a doomed vessel who is reluctantly observing the tradition of going down with his ship. Should he contact the investigating magistrate and advise the arrest of Nicola Mantega and Dionisio Carduzzi, both of them prima facie material witnesses and probable accessories to murder, the former before the fact and the latter after, as the call-catcher and go-between for the man known as Giorgio? Or should he hold off and wait for the even more opportune moment which all his instincts told him was not far off?

In the end he decided that he was too tired to make an effective decision. He walked back through the brooding darkness to his apartment, packed an overnight bag, then phoned the Questura’s car pool and arranged for a vehicle to drive him first to the Cosenza Nord service station on the autostrada, where he bought a panino and a litre of mineral water, and then up the spectacular highway that snaked up out of the Crati flood plain before piercing the range of mountains in a series of tunnels and viaducts and twisting steeply down to the coast and the main north-south railway line.

It was a mild night, and Zen spent the hour or so he had to wait sitting outside on a station bench eating his ham and cheese roll, smelling the heady perfume of the sea breezes and listening to the distant hushing of waves on the beach. Leaving Cosenza felt like escaping from a locked room. By the time the Conca d’Oro night sleeper from Palermo pulled in at twenty to one in the morning, he was quite content to stretch out on his bed in a spacious Excelsior compartment and fall asleep for five and a half dreamless hours.

It was only when he was ejected from this sanctuary into the commuter rush hour at Rome that he realised to what extent he had become a provincial after just a few months in Calabria. He found it both physically difficult and emotionally repugnant to battle his way through the riptide of people coming at him from every direction, empty eyes trained like a gun on the personal zone immediately in front of them, attention absorbed by the loud songs or little voices in their heads, fingers fiddling with iPods and mobile phones, all oblivious of each other and their surroundings, marching relentlessly onwards like the ranks of the damned.

In the middle of the vast concourse of Termini station Zen gave up and came to a dazed halt. One of the zombies immediately approached. He automatically placed a cluster of small coins in its outstretched hand.

‘This way, Dottor Zen,’ it said.

‘How did you recognise me?’

‘We obtained a photograph.’

A Fiat saloon was illegally parked at the kerb. The man opened the rear door for Zen, then got into its equivalent on the far side.

‘Your document, please,’ he said as they drove away.

Zen handed over his police identification card.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To a house where you will meet the person you came to see. Our journey time will be approximately forty minutes, depending on the traffic. There will then be a short delay before the subject arrives.’

‘For security reasons?’

‘No, he wouldn’t agree to an earlier meeting. He’s an elderly man and doesn’t like making an early start.’

They drove south-east out of the city along Via Tuscolana, across the ring road and up into the foothills of the Colli Albani. When they reached Frascati, Zen’s escort announced that they were ahead of time and suggested stopping for a coffee. There were no parking spaces available on the edge of the main square, so the driver left their vehicle in the traffic lane of the main street outside the busiest and glossiest bar. One of the traffic wardens blew his whistle shrilly and came striding over, but the driver said a few words to him and the official slunk off. Frascati had been a playground for the rich and powerful since Etruscan times and the locals had learned a thing or two about dealing with such people.

Inside the bar, Zen was left to fend for himself. He ordered a cappuccino and an attractive-looking pastry and, having consumed both, eyed his minders with cold disdain. They stood at a distance, their mobile phones laid on the counter like pistols, apparently ignoring him although acutely aware of his presence. The driver, the younger and taller of the pair, was lean and hard, all prick and muscle. His superior was almost bald, with a superficially benign face, strongly featured and slightly inflated in appearance, like a wiser and sadder Mussolini.

Zen paid and walked outside to light his first cigarette of the day. As he smoked, he took in the scene all around with sharpened pleasure, eyeballing a sensational woman cradling a bottle of mineral water to her bosom like a baby. She gave him a lingering glance before moving on, the cheeks of her buttocks colluding furtively as she strolled away. Then he heard a familiar squillo and immediately reverted to his official self, striding up and down the pavement clutching his mobile phone like a life-support system.

‘Arnone, sir. You ordered me to report any developments.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘The Digos crew watching that house in San Giovanni report that the owner, Dionisio Carduzzi, has left the house only twice. Last night he went to a local bar and drank wine with some friends. This morning he bought a paper, then went to the same bar and had a coffee. After that he went home and hasn’t emerged since. His wife went to church yesterday and to the market this morning to buy vegetables and a chicken. That’s all. No one else has entered or left the house.’

He’s using pizzini, thought Zen, just like Bernardo Provenzano. Notes folded into a banknote and handed to the owner of the bar or the newsagent, or slipped under the table to one of those friends, or passed to a market vendor by his wife, or left in a missal at the church. The dilemma he had wrestled with the night before was now resolved. The only way to intercept such messages would be by mass arrests of essentially innocent people with no criminal history. That would be both clumsy and ineffective.

‘Anything else?’ he asked Arnone.

‘Two things, sir. The phone interception team reported that when Carduzzi came back from his morning expedition, he called the offices of a construction firm down in Vibo Valentia and asked for someone named Aldo. He told him that their mutual friend required the immediate services of a mechanical digger on a low-loader, two heavy-duty trucks, a dozen first-rate stonemasons and twenty unskilled labourers. The equipment and personnel were to assemble in the parking area of the Rogliano service station south of Cosenza on the A3, where they would be met and led to the work site. Payment would be in the normal way.’

‘Very well. Have someone at the meeting point and try and get photographs of the principals. Sounds like a classic abusive construction job. I can’t see it’s worth diverting manpower from ongoing assignments to follow them. Funny about them needing stonemasons, though. Cheap, poorly reinforced concrete is the mob’s trademark.’

‘Not if it’s one of their own houses,’ Arnone pointed out.

The two servizi thugs had now emerged from the bar. Mini-Mussolini walked over, touched Zen’s arm and jerked his head impatiently towards the car. Zen ignored him.

‘And the other thing?’ he asked Arnone.

‘Oh, just some crazy old woman here who insists on talking to you. Won’t say what it’s about and won’t talk to anyone else.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Name’s Maria Stefania Arrighi, resident in Altomonte Nuova. She got here at seven this morning and demanded to speak to the chief of police. She was told that you were out of town and wouldn’t be back until late, but she said she would wait. Plonked herself down on the bench in the entrance hall and has been there ever since. Do you want us to throw her out?’

‘Absolutely not, and if she leaves of her own accord, try to get a contact address and phone number.’

‘I’ll do my best, but basically she refuses to speak to anyone but you.’

Flanked by his two handlers, Zen got back into the car, which took a very steep minor road whose tight bends gave occasional views of the capital, the dome of St Peter’s just visible through the flat pall of pollution that covered the surrounding campagna, a modern equivalent of the malarial miasma that had decimated the population for centuries.

When they finally reached their destination, Zen was reminded of Arnone’s comment about the mob leaders’ private dwellings. Not that there was anything ostentatious about this long, low villa set among ancient olive groves and vineyards. The connection was more subtle, based on the fact that a good three kilometres back they had passed a sign marking the beginning of the Castelli Romani regional park. The villa clearly post-dated the creation of this protected area where new construction was strictly forbidden, but the important and powerful figure who owned it was almost certainly a member not of the Mafia but of the government — an entirely different organisation, needless to say.

The room into which Zen was shown provided no obvious clue to the identity of this person beyond the fact that he could afford to indulge in the sort of bad taste that comes with an exorbitant price tag. There were several huge oil paintings in the blandly ‘contemporary’ style favoured by Arab collectors, featuring nude females and rearing stallions in a vaguely abstract wilderness. There were also a number of coffee-table art books on display, but any attempt to investigate further the ownership of the property was prevented by Zen’s escort, who took up positions at opposite ends of the room. Twelve minutes passed before a passenger van drew up outside the house and a hydraulic lift deposited an elderly man seated in a wheelchair, which was pushed into the room by a formidable-looking woman in a starched uniform.

‘This nurse will take the sample you require and return with it so that tests may be undertaken,’ Mini-Mussolini announced.

‘Take it from whom?’ Zen demanded acidly.

‘From the person you requested to meet.’

‘And where is he?’

The man pointed to the occupant of the wheelchair, who sat mutely cradling a battered leather briefcase.

‘I have your word for that?’

‘You have my department’s word for it.’

Zen levelled him with a look.

‘I don’t even know which department you’re talking about, but if it’s the one I think it is, then I hope for all our sakes that you’re not the sharpest knife in their drawer. For my coming here to make any sense, I require documentary proof that the donor of the sample is Roberto Calopezzati. I further require to take possession of the sample and convey it personally to a police laboratory, where it will be entrusted to a technician of my choice. If you seek to impose any other solution, this has all been a complete waste of time.’

‘Go away, Gino,’ said the man in the wheelchair. ‘You two as well. This experience is difficult enough for me without having you all standing around aimlessly like characters in some Pirandello play.’

The two minders and the nurse trooped meekly out.

‘I apologise for this pantomime,’ the man said to Zen. ‘It was the idea of my successor as head of the agency you referred to. Not a bad fellow in many ways, but somewhat heavy-handed. Yes, I know you’re listening, Rizzardo, but that happens to be my opinion, for what it’s worth. Sit down, signore, sit down. I am Roberto Calopezzati, and I have brought the necessary documents to prove it. Before I present them, may I ask why I have the honour of being an object of attention to the police?’

Calopezzati was a bulky man with a strongly featured face set off by a white beard trimmed short and contrasted with jet-black cropped hair and two huge eyebrows of the same colour that lounged across his brow like furry caterpillars. His olive-green eyes were intense, direct and demanding, while his lips were thin but sensual. Only the lower half of his body, truncated at the knees, detracted from the general impression of vigour and power.

‘I assumed that your successor would have explained that,’ Zen replied.

‘Well, I suppose we could always ask him. I don’t actually know if he’s listening in “real time”, as they say these days — when did time stop being real, by the way? — but our conversation is certainly being recorded for quality-assurance purposes and for my protection. Anyway, all I have been told is that our meeting is with regard to the investigation of a murder in Cosenza.’

‘You weren’t informed of the identity of the victim?’

‘No.’

‘And you didn’t see my press conference on television?’

‘I don’t have a television.’

‘Ah well, in that case, barone, I’m afraid that I must be the bearer of bad news. All the prima facie evidence suggests that the victim was your nephew.’

Calopezzati sagged physically and looked his age for the first time.

‘Pietro?’ he whispered.

‘That’s what I’ve come here to ascertain. On the face of it, the victim was an American citizen travelling under the name of Peter Newman. When he disappeared some weeks ago while in Calabria on a business trip, the assumption was that he had been kidnapped for ransom. My investigations during that period suggested that his original identity was Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati, the son of your late sister Ottavia. The main reason why I’ve come here is to obtain a DNA sample from you which will confirm or rule out that hypothesis.’

Calopezzati sat silent and expressionless for over a minute, his body twitching violently at intervals as if stricken by a series of minor strokes. Zen let this process work itself out without comment.

‘You’ll get your sample,’ the other man said at last, ‘but it’s redundant. The dead man was indeed my nephew.’

‘Would you be prepared to comment on how Pietro Calopezzati became Peter Newman?’

‘Possibly. But first things first.’

He opened the leather case and extracted a mass of papers.

‘We’ll go through these in chronological order, with one exception which I’ll get to later.’

He passed the documents to Zen one by one.

‘My birth certificate. Various photographs from my childhood and school years. A sequence of identity cards from the following period, up to the war years, then a different set dating from my work with the servizi, concluding with the one that is currently valid. I think you will agree that all the photographs show a marked likeness, qualified of course by the passage of time. However, I don’t expect you to confirm my identity on that basis alone. As I said, I have withheld one document from the chronological order. It is this.’

He passed Zen a file card bearing the printed heading ‘Partito Fascista Italiano’. The entries below indicated that Roberto Calopezzati was enrolled in the Cosenza section of the party with the rank of caposquadrista, the commander of a squad of Blackshirts. The attached photograph fitted into the now familiar pattern, but there was also a very clear thumbprint.

‘And now for my last trick,’ the man said.

From the leather bag, he produced an ink pad in a tin box and a blank sheet of paper. He opened the pad, rolled his right thumb in the ink and then printed the resulting image on the paper. Zen compared it to the print on the Fascist file card. They were identical.

‘You are satisfied?’ Calopezzati asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then let us proceed to the sample you need. What exactly does that consist of?’

Zen paused for a moment.

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, barone, but I have the impression that while the news of your nephew’s death was a shock to you, it did not come as a complete surprise.’

‘Only in the sense that I had no idea he’d returned home. For as long as we were in contact, I explicitly advised him never to do so, and in any event not to venture south of Rome. What on earth could have induced him to do such a thing?’

‘I understand that he was employed by an American movie company to act as their mediatore during preparations for a production to be filmed there.’

Calopezzati waved his elegant hand dismissively. His feet must have been elegant too, thought Zen, wondering how they had been severed.

‘That’s just money! He could have found another job.’

‘Perhaps he thought that the risks were by now minimal,’ Zen murmured as though to himself. ‘Perhaps after so many years he had grown nostalgic for his own country. You implied that you lost contact with Pietro at some point. When did that happen?’

‘I don’t recall exactly. At some point in the 1980s. He just stopped writing and phoning, or I did. He wasn’t my child, after all.’

‘But you were responsible for taking him to America?’

‘After my sister died, I became his guardian. This was after the war, the whole country was in chaos. I moved Pietrino in with me in Rome and sent him to school there to learn Italian. He was a wild creature who had been brought up by Ottavia’s entourage of servants, spoke only dialect and didn’t respond well to discipline. Nevertheless, it was clearly my duty to protect him until he came of age, so when I entered the agency and was posted to the embassy in Washington I took him with me. Our ambassador at the time was a family friend and happened to be in a position to call in a favour from the US government in return for some help that we had provided for them. Thus it was arranged for Pietro Ottavio to become an American citizen. All in all, it seemed the best solution to the problem.’

‘Which problem?’

‘The problem of possible reprisals from my family’s numerous enemies.’

‘Were they really that dangerous?’

The man in the wheelchair made another fluent, fluid hand gesture.

‘Who can estimate danger? One of my colleagues made clandestine trips to remote areas of our former colony of Eritrea during its war with Ethiopia and came back with nothing worse than a mild case of gonorrhoea. Another went to see a Washington Redskins game one evening and was beaten to death on his way home because the stupid bastard was too proud to give them his wallet.’

Roberto Calopezzati made his eloquent gesture again.

‘Life is an acquired taste, Signor Zen, but death has mass-market appeal. Sooner or later, we all succumb to its charms. I tried to shield my nephew from them as best I could.’

What sounded like a peal of the thunder that Zen was by now habituated to — although not this early in the day — prevented any further conversation. It turned out to be the roar of a jet taking off from Ciampino, a few kilometres to the north, and obligingly faded away in a few moments.

‘And it would have been an excellent solution,’ Zen commented, ‘if only he hadn’t come back to Calabria and started talking to the locals in fluent dialect.’

‘That marked him down as someone who had been born and raised in the area, but there are plenty of calabresi in the States, God knows. How did his killers discover his identity?’

‘Speaking of that, do you know the identity of his father?’

Roberto sighed.

‘My sister told me that it was a friend of ours named Carlo Sironi. He was a fighter pilot in the war, an utterly irresistible daredevil who was shot down while attacking an Allied bombing sortie over Salerno six months before Pietro was born. He and Ottavia had spent some time together in Naples shortly before, so it’s just possible that she wasn’t lying to me. The truth is that I don’t know and don’t really care. Whoever she might have screwed, Pietro was here and it was my duty to look after him to the best of my ability. Now will you answer my question, Signor Zen? Granted that Pietro was stupid enough to speak the dialect rather than just passing himself off as a dumb American, how could his killers have found out that he was a Calopezzati?’

Zen shot him a keen glance.

‘Are you insulting my intelligence or your own, barone? There is only one possible answer, namely that he himself disclosed the information to someone, almost certainly the shady fixer he had employed to facilitate his business deals. Following your advice, Pietro had set out to become an American. Perhaps he had succeeded only too well. After forty years over there he simply couldn’t conceive that anyone in a backwater like Calabria cared about what might or might not have happened in the years before he was born. But Americans care enormously about any provable antiquity and lineage in their family history, particularly if it involves a title. It’s hardly surprising that he couldn’t resist mentioning to his new acquaintance that he was a member of an Italian baronial family founded back in the mists of time before the first shipload of American pilgrims arrived.’

Calopezzati smiled pallidly.

‘Actually, we’re only late eighteenth century.’

Tom spent much of the morning watching television with Martin Nguyen. He’d been able to hold off moving hotels for twenty-four hours, on the grounds that the police wanted him to perform various legal functions connected with his father’s death, but that morning Nguyen’s limo had shown up to whisk him off to this flashy business location about two miles from the city centre, out in what Italians called the periphery. While he was in the car, Nicola Mantega had phoned to tell him that the world-famous film director Luciano Aldobrandini would be making a surprise appearance on the popular morning TV show Ciao Italia! and that there were rumours that what he was going to say might have a direct impact on the business interests of Tom’s new employer. This news had been duly passed on and both men were now fixated on the screen, Tom’s job being to translate Aldobrandini’s words, in real time as far as possible, although Nguyen was burning a DVD as back-up.

Up to now the show had offered nothing but a succession of entry-level celebrities, burned-out celebrities, minor politicians and a footballer in drug rehab, but when the presenter finally announced the star whose name she had been teasingly trailing for almost an hour the results proved well worth the wait. Clad in a stunning cream linen suit over a blue silk shirt left largely open to reveal a perfectly judged tan, his mass of silver hair sculpted as though by some natural force, Aldobrandini looked youthful yet distinguished, strikingly virile and decisive but with vast inner reserves of gravitas.

He speedily got down to business, announcing that he had flown to Rome, ‘interrupting my annual period of creative repose’ on the Costa Smeralda, in order to break the dramatic news that he had withdrawn from the project to transfer the Book of Revelations to the screen — ‘a work I hoped and believed would crown a long career dedicated solely to my art’ — since he had lost all faith in the commitment and integrity of the American production company which had been financing it.

What followed was a presentation worthy of someone who had once played, very competently, various minor roles in post-war neo-realist films made on a shoestring budget by directors including Visconti and Fellini. Aldobrandini lamented the demise of that generation’s values in favour of the cynical manipulations of market-driven accountants and middle managers, ‘people without intelligence, without courage, without vision, without ideals, concerned only with maximising profits’. With a sad smile, he recounted his discovery that the backer of ‘the intended masterwork of my late period, a funeral oration for the entire culture which formed and nourished me’, was exploiting the project for reasons which had nothing to do with making the film.

Egged on by the eager but flustered hostess, who had obviously been primed with a list of helpful questions, Aldobrandini proceeded to disclose certain very specific details which had led him to suppose that the masterwork in question would never be made. His suspicions had been aroused, he said, by the withdrawal of the great British actor whom he had selected to play St John of Patmos. The reason given at the time had been that his agent had come to doubt the credibility of the project’s backers. Until that moment, Aldobrandini proclaimed, he had ‘never even thought of such a thing. I don’t live in that world. For me it is all about the creative challenge e basta! When it comes to high finance and commercial skulduggery, I am an innocent abroad.’ Nevertheless, this news led him to instigate certain enquiries, the results of which had appalled him.

‘I am reliably informed that for several weeks now a helicopter has been operating in and around the city of Cosenza, supposedly carrying out a detailed survey of the terrain under the pretext of selecting suitable locations for the shooting of my film. My film!’

He appealed to his interviewer with a charming gesture.

‘ Signorina, you may or may not like my work… Well, that’s very kind of you, but my point is that even my severest critics have never suggested that I am not un autore. Every single one of my films is handcrafted in every aspect and at every stage of its creation, from setting up to final editing. It is absurd to imagine that Luciano Aldobrandini would delegate the selection of locations to an outside contract! And needless to say he never did so. Nevertheless, these flights are taking place under the auspices of my American production company. Have you ever had occasion to hire a helicopter, signorina? I have, and believe me they don’t come cheap. Since that money is clearly not being spent on preparations for my film, what is it being spent on? And where does that leave me and my dreams of making a final and lasting contribution to the glorious history of Italian cinema?’

Aldobrandini held up his palms in symbolic surrender.

‘I don’t know the answer to those questions, and until I do I can have no faith in those who suggested this project and promised to finance it. I am therefore, and with the greatest reluctance, severing all personal and professional connection with this whole sorry affair. It is a sad day for me, a sad day for art and a sad day for Italy.’

Martin Nguyen turned off the TV as the hostess thanked her guest and transitioned effortlessly to a commercial break.

‘Holy fuck!’ he said.

‘Yeah, he was certainly in a hissy fit,’ Tom replied casually. ‘No one gives me ’nuff respec’ now I’m over the hill stuff.’

‘The guy’s a genius,’ said Martin in a tone of hushed reverence.

Tom gestured sceptically.

‘Well, the jury’s still pretty well out on that one. I like his early films, Terra Bruciata for example. That was one of my mom’s favourites. She said it was just how people lived where she grew up.’

‘I’m not talking about his fucking movies!’ Martin yelled. ‘He just killed us, live on national network TV! Next it’ll be all over the — ’

The phone in the room rang. Martin jerked his thumb.

‘Take it.’

Tom did so. He listened for a long time, inserting the occasional ‘ Ho capito ’, ‘ Senz’altro ’ and ‘ D’accordo, signore ’. Then he turned to Martin.

‘That was the mayor’s office. They want you to present yourself at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’

‘Present myself? What the fuck does that mean?’

‘Sorry, I’m thinking in Italian. Go to city hall and meet with them.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s about the permits your company was granted to operate those helicopter flights. Apparently they expire in forty-eight hours. Basically, they want to know if there’s any truth in Aldobrandini’s allegations. I don’t want to sound alarmist, Mr Nguyen, but I think you should take this very seriously. Italy may seem all free and easy and spontaneous on the surface, but when the going gets rough you find out that it’s basically a police state in many respects. This could just be one of those occasions.’

Martin Nguyen stared at the blank television screen.

‘Holy fuck,’ he repeated.

The convoy of vehicles came to rest at a remote spot on the banks of the Busento river a few kilometres south of Cosenza. The only access was by a dead-end dirt track leading steeply down from a minor road to the city from the village of Dipignano, which saw very little traffic now that there was a much faster route over the line of hills to the east connecting with the autostrada.

As a result, the guard who had been posted at the turn-off to deter intruders was only called upon to act once, when a farmer in a quad vehicle came along, trying to short-cut across the valley by fording the river and taking the equivalent track leading up on the western side. The guard simply shook his head and told the man that the road was ‘ chiusa per lavoro ’. What sort of work? Construction of a weir in the river-bed to improve flow levels and protect aquatic life. An environmental project. The farmer cackled cannily.

‘Glad to hear someone’s getting Rome’s money!’

Say what you liked about Giorgio — and opinions on this subject were many and various, although rarely expressed — he knew how to organise and execute a project like this on time, under budget, with minimal risk and at the shortest possible notice. The last of these attributes was perhaps the most valuable, given the nature of his business. Opportunity tended to knock rarely and with no notice whatever, so to take advantage you needed to be able to think on your feet. He had spent the previous day scouting out a suitable site. Enquiries at the few neighbouring farms in the area Giorgio had eventually chosen revealed that no helicopters had been seen or heard in this valley as yet. This was crucial to the success of Mantega’s scheme for instant riches, as was haste, since those searching for the location of the tomb might appear at any moment.

The first stage of the operation involved installing sandbags upstream to dam the flow of water — still minimal despite the recent rains, thanks to the absorption capacity of the baked hillsides all around — followed by the marking out of a circular area ten metres in diameter and the removal of the superficial rocks, gravel and vegetation. This was done by hand by the unskilled labourers, great care being taken not to mark the rocks with metal tools or to damage the various reeds and weeds that had taken root for the summer in muddy patches formed by the eddies of the stagnant stream but would be swept away once the winter floods arrived. A geotextile access path was then laid down to minimise any further disturbance to the surface and the big yellow mechanical digger unloaded from its transporter and brought up to excavate the site down to a level of about two metres.

While all this was going on, another phase of the job was taking place on the lower slopes of Monte Serratore to the south, where the stonemasons were dismantling a long-abandoned and roofless house of the type that abounded in the area and transferring the blocks of weathered basalt to the bed of a truck. These materials arrived at the construction site shortly after the team’s lunch break, following which the masons started to install them in the excavated pit in the form of a circular wall five courses deep and nine hundred and forty-three centimetres in diameter. The masons protested that this was an irrational number, but Giorgio refused to be swayed. He had no idea what kind of linear measurement would have been used by the people who had supposedly built this structure, but it certainly wouldn’t have been the standardised French import which even today wasn’t in general use in certain parts of the region. Likewise, he had chosen the circular pattern on the basis of some very old earthwork mounds up in the mountains, which the schoolteacher had told the class were the graves of the Bruttii, the original inhabitants of Calabria. This information had caused general hilarity, since the deletion of the final letter gave a word meaning ‘the uglies’. From that moment on, Giorgio’s personal motto became ‘ Sugno brutto e mi ’nde vantu ’: ugly and proud of it.

The resulting structure, however, wasn’t ugly at all. Indeed, as it gradually took shape, the stone blocks trimmed, laid and locked together with no visible mortar, Giorgio began to think for the first time that this scheme of Mantega’s might actually work. Not that it would be any great loss to him if it didn’t. His contact in Vibo Valentia owed him a couple of favours and had offered a very reasonable price for the equipment and wages. And if it did by any chance succeed, then there was no telling what kind of profits might be made on the operation. It was simply a question of what the purchaser wanted, how badly he wanted it and how much he could afford to pay. If Mantega was to be believed — and in cases offering the possibility of personal enrichment, he was — the answer to the last question was ‘almost anything’.

Dusk had gathered by the time the walling was completed and the mechanical digger started to dump the rock and gravel excavated earlier into the resulting enclosure. Its claw would inevitably scar some of the stones in a potentially suspicious way, but the constraints of time and security had forced Giorgio to make various assumptions. One of these was that once it became apparent that the supposed tomb had already been opened, the treasure seekers would not bother to dig it out to a depth greater than the five courses of blocks that had been laid, and that they would use mechanical means to do so. Any marks on the rocks removed would therefore be attributed to their own equipment. And if by any chance they took a more painstaking approach, Giorgio had already worked out various ways to hurry them up. The work they imagined they were doing would of course be illegal, so it shouldn’t take much to scare them off.

The final phases of the operation were undertaken after dark, lit by the headlights of the various trucks. The remaining stones from the demolished barn were tossed on top of the piled infill, suggesting elements of the vaulted roof which had been removed, then the surface rocks and vegetation were carefully replaced and the entire site cleared and swept by hand. Last of all, the dam of sandbags was removed, allowing the accumulated water to flow over the workings, obliterating the traces of human intervention. The construction convoy then snaked its way around the narrow country roads to the autostrada and headed south to their depot. As for Giorgio, he drove the black Jeep back up into the Sila mountains, heading home to his sister’s apartment. At the former station of San Nicola, on a windswept plateau fifteen hundred metres above sea level, he pulled off the main road. Cowbells clanked intermittently in the far distance, but there was no other sound. This part of the railway had been abandoned, but the public payphone attached to the station building still worked and there was never anyone there.

Giorgio fed in some money and had started to dial when he heard a noise close behind him. He let the receiver drop and whirled around, his pistol in one hand and his torch in the other. A pair of hallucinogenic eyes stared back at him, a feral black cat out hunting for prey amidst the long grass that had grown up between the rusted rails. After a moment it disregarded him and moved away across the row of sleepers, balks of sun-spliced timber cut from the forests that had once clad this entire region, now aged and weathered like beams of the True Cross.

‘ Pronto,’ Mantega’s voice squeaked somewhere in the distance. ‘ Pronto, pronto?’

Giorgio picked up the receiver.

‘Signor Rossi?’

‘He’s gone out.’

Giorgio hung up and climbed back into the Jeep, well pleased with the way the day had gone. The coded message was to inform Nicola Mantega that the trap was ready. Once it was found and opened — self-evidently for the second time, the contents already looted — then the notary would initiate dealings with the disappointed tomb robbers. They would almost certainly demand to inspect a sample of the supposed treasure before proceeding any further. To guarantee the authenticity of the fakes that would subsequently be offered for purchase, some genuine sample of antique Roman gold work would have to be produced for verification. That was Giorgio’s next task, and he had already decided on a way to accomplish it. This involved a kidnapping prospect he had had his eye on for some time, and would be put into effect the very next day.

Having been detained in Rome by work until early evening, Aurelio Zen decided to return to Calabria in the same way that he had arrived, rather than trekking all the way out to Fiumicino to catch a plane and then have to arrange for transport from the airport at the other end. He slept badly this time — possibly as the result of over-indulging at a restaurant near the Viminale, where he had eaten the first decent meal he had had for weeks and the only one in which tomatoes did not feature in any shape or form — and was then deposited at the junction for Cosenza shortly after four in the morning, almost an hour before the first connecting train.

By the time he got back to the city it was too late to go to bed and too early to go to work, so he killed time in the first bar he found open, drinking double espressos laced with a streak of milk, pondering his next move and generally feeling like hell. But the temperature was pleasantly mild and the air clean, with not a trace of the toxic pall that smothered the capital, dense enough to see as well as smell and taste. By the time he arrived at the Questura, he had formulated a suitable response to the demands of his superiors at the Ministry concerning his handling of the murder case which had gripped Italy and also, as they did not fail to remind him, had international implications.

Once in his office, he phoned the magistrate who had been appointed to oversee the investigation of the original presumed kidnapping and who was now so beside himself with delight at finding himself in charge of a gruesome, high-profile homicide that he had given Zen his mobile phone number. After the usual courtesies, Zen explained that he wished to file a request for an arrest warrant on one of the suspects, if the signor giudice could find a moment to receive him. The judge judiciously observed that there was no time like the present — or at least in an hour, when he would be at the Palace of Justice. Zen summoned Arnone.

‘We’re going to take Mantega,’ he told his subordinate. ‘It’s a little sooner than I would ideally have liked, but I was put under a lot of pressure at headquarters yesterday. They badly want something they can feed to the media to show that we’re on the job. It will also free up all the people who have been shadowing him. Given the way the situation appears to be evolving, I may well need them for other duties.’

‘Very good.’

‘Now listen, this is important. I want the arrest to be made as publicly as possible, for instance on the street or while he’s at lunch, and I want you to handle it. If you can arrange for reporters and photographers from the local television and press to arrive fortuitously at about the same time, so much the better.’

‘ Benissimo, capo.’

‘Oh, by the way, did anything come of that business about Giorgio ordering in a construction team from Vibo Valentia?’

‘Following your instructions, an officer was dispatched to the assembly point on the autostrada to observe events and take photos, but I haven’t debriefed her yet. I’ll make enquiries and get back to you.’

‘Let’s take care of Mantega first. I’m off to get the warrant. After that it’s up to you, but bear in mind what I said about it being a high-profile arrest. I want word of this to get around like a forest fire with a gale behind it. Understand?’

On his way out of the building, Zen caught sight of an old woman seated on the long, shiny and very hard bench placed in the entrance hall of the Questura for the use of supplicants seeking an official document or permit for one of the numerous activities for which such papers are mandatory. Zen was about to pass by, but then, recalling what Arnone had told him on the phone the day before, he stopped and went over to her.

‘Are you being looked after, signora?’

The woman eyed him with an air of determination amounting to defiance. She looked as shrivelled as a raisin and as hard as a nut, and clearly wasn’t going to be placated or put off her stride by anyone.

‘I want to speak to the chief of police,’ she said.

‘I am he.’

The woman looked at him again, as if for the first time.

‘Yes, I suppose you are,’ she conceded grudgingly.

‘And who are you, signora?’

‘ Sono una creatura. A person. My name is Maria Stefania Arrighi.’

‘Ah, yes. You came here yesterday, didn’t you?’

She nodded.

‘They told me you were away.’

‘I was. But why do you want to speak to me? I’m extremely busy this morning. If it’s not an urgent matter…’

The woman shrugged.

‘It may be urgent. It’s certainly important. To me, at least.’

Zen weighed this up.

‘I won’t be free until after lunch, signora, but I promise to see you some time today.’

‘Then I shall wait.’

‘That bench looks very uncomfortable. Let’s make an appointment for three o’clock. I’ll leave instructions for you to be shown straight up to my office. In the meantime you can do a bit of shopping, have a bite to eat…’

His voice tailed away.

‘I shall wait here,’ the woman said.

It took Zen less than an hour to obtain the arrest warrant, which was well below par for that procedure. As he walked back to the Questura, his mobile rang. It was Lucio, the technician at the police laboratory in Rome whom he had selected to analyse Roberto Calopezzati’s DNA sample, and then compare the results with those from the corpse of Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati, a.k.a. Peter Newman.

‘I’m glad to see that you still have a lot of clout at the Ministry,’ Lucio said, ‘but next time around would you mind not using it to rough us up? Three of our best people got dragged in to work with me all night on these tests.’

‘That’s your answer. It wasn’t my clout but panic on the top floor. This gaudy little murder, which would normally get buried away on the Cronaca pages, is suddenly front-page news. And it’s not being handled as one of those condescending “Made in Calabria” stories but as a “What have we come to?” guilt piece. Anyway, do you have a positive result?’

‘I wouldn’t have phoned otherwise.’

‘So there’s a definite relationship?’

There was a pause at the other end.

‘Between what?’

‘For God’s sake, Lucio! You may have been up all night, but I haven’t had that much sleep either. Between the individual whose DNA sample I gave you yesterday and the other whose DNA profile you also have in your hands.’

‘Oh. In that sense, no.’

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I mean there is no correspondence at all.’

‘But you said the results were positive!’

‘Technically, they were. Sometimes matters are not so definitive, depending on the age of the sample, possible contamination and so on. But here there is no doubt whatsoever. The two subjects possess utterly different genetic profiles.’

‘There is no possibility that one of them could be the son of the other’s sister?’

‘Absolutely not. They are quite definitely unrelated by blood in any way.’

There was a long silence.

‘That was the result you were expecting, wasn’t it?’ Lucio put in at last.

It was a stiff test, but Zen rose to the occasion.

‘Of course, Lucio! You’ve confirmed my hypothesis. Many thanks.’

He put the phone down and continued on his way, his eyes blank.

Enough was enough, thought Emanuele Pancrazi, gazing at the rapturous light streaming in through the bedroom window. Emanuele had just turned seventeen, his soul was gaping open like a mussel to filter every last drop of life on offer and only a few days remained before he would have to return home to school and everyday reality. It was time to assert himself.

Thus far, Emanuele had indulged the agenda lovingly crafted and managed by his father. This governed every aspect of their month together, mostly in the form of day trips to churches and castles, long treks in the mountains and painstaking guided tours of the supposed sites of ancient Greek cities which in practice had vanished almost entirely. The day before had been devoted to the dull and seemingly endless badlands of the Marchesato di Crotone, unenlivened as usual by his father’s commentary on the historic system of sharecropping on the vast estates which had once covered the entire region, generating equally vast unearned profits for heartless absentee landlords such as the Calopezzati family.

In some dim way, prefiguring a wisdom that he didn’t really want just yet, Emanuele realised that his visits to Cosenza were as difficult for his father as they were for him, if not more so. His parents had been separated for ten years, and he had long ago stopped wetting the bed and weeping in corners. He was young and tough and sanely egoistic, but he knew that his mother still suffered from the break-up, not because she missed his dad, as he once had, so badly, but because she felt guilty for the pain that they had both caused him. He had to assume that his father felt the same sense of culpability, and that his gruelling programme of educational experiences was not in fact a deliberate bid to wreck his son’s visit but an attempt to provide a regime of constant activity, excluding any possibility of embarrassing hiatuses when the big dark questions that lurked in the background might assert themselves and demand to be addressed.

Nevertheless, the resulting experience was enough to make Emanuele feel as though he was back at school already. That had been just about acceptable when he was ten, or even fourteen, but time had now run out for this means of dealing with an event in the distant past which had changed his life for ever but wasn’t really of much interest to him any more. Too bad if his parents couldn’t get over it. Emanuele was on holiday in the deep south, almost a thousand kilometres from the apartment in Brescia where he lived with his mother. He wanted to relax, have fun and maybe even get a chance to chat up one of those juicy girls he had glimpsed from time to time through the car window as his father drove him home after another long day at the museum. Enough cultural uplift, enough history lessons. He programmed his mobile phone to ring, faked a brief conversation, then shuffled out to the living area of the spacious apartment facing Piazza del Duomo in the heart of the old city. His father was drinking coffee and consulting a map.

‘Ah, Emanuele! I’ve been thinking about what we should do today. The Sila Piccola seems the obvious answer, with a diversion to Carlopoli to see the ruins of the monastery founded in the twelfth century by the Benedictines and later taken over by the Cistercians. This complesso monastico was the religious, economic and cultural centre of the region, its abbot at one time having been the illustrious Giocchino da Fiore, but it was later suppressed and then destroyed in an earthquake shortly after — ’

‘Actually, dad, a friend of mine from school just called. He’s on holiday down here too, staying at a villa down on the beach. He says he’s getting a bit bored with the sun and sand bit so he wants to come into Cosenza and have a look around.’

‘Who is this boy?’

‘Oh, just a friend. Anyway, we’ve arranged to meet in half an hour. We’ll prowl around the streets a bit and then grab a bite to eat somewhere. So you can take the day off.’

‘But when will you be back?’ demanded his father in an almost panicky tone.

‘Depends. I’ll call you. Okay, I’d better go and put on some sharp clothes. You know how important personal appearance is down here. Don’t want these southerners to get the idea that the rest of us are all slobs!’

Twenty minutes later, Emanuele emerged from the front door of the building and sauntered away down the main street. This initially provoked a moment of indecision in the two men sitting in a van parked outside the eighteenth-century palazzo on Via Giuseppe Campagna. Their instructions were to go to the Pancrazi apartment on the third floor, abduct the son and leave certain brutal verbal instructions with his father Achille, Professor of Ancient History at the local university. Now they faced a quandary.

On the one hand, Giorgio had made it quite clear — in one never-to-be-forgotten instance by a personally administered beating that had ended with his being pulled off the offender just in time — that he wouldn’t tolerate his associates exercising any individual initiative in operational matters. On the other, taking the boy while he was alone would involve the two men and their boss in vastly less personal risk should anything go wrong. The normal course of action would have been to report in for further instructions, but the pair had been forbidden to make contact until the mission was complete. After a hasty discussion, they decided to go for it.

Their choice was validated almost immediately. If the kid had carried on the way he had set out, down the sinuous curves of Corso Telesio towards the bridge leading over the Busento river to the broad boulevards of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century city sprawled out below, it might have proved difficult to take him unchallenged. But Emanuele soon became intrigued by the network of alleys leading off to either side of the main street, and wandered away into the warren of mediaeval dwellings which formed an increasingly abandoned slum surrounding the gentrified core of the original centre. One of the two men Giorgio had selected for this job had grown up in just that part of town and knew his way around blindfold. He also knew that, despite his colleague’s doubts, their van would fit into the alley that the boy had taken, and that there was an exit at the other end that would have them out of town in minutes, up on the superstrada into the mountains.

‘We just won the lottery!’ he said as they both pulled on their masks.

Tom Newman was seated up front in Nguyen’s Mercedes, beside the driver. Nguyen sat alone in the back, furiously silent. The car gave Tom the creeps. It was like a hearse for the living. Maybe it was this thought that sparked his idea when Nicola Mantega rang him. He kept his responses down to the ‘I’ll be there right away’ level. In theory his boss didn’t understand Italian, but Tom had already been around Martin Nguyen long enough to know that it would always be dangerous to underestimate exactly how much he understood about anything.

‘That was the police, Mr Nguyen,’ he said when Mantega hung up. ‘They want me to go to central headquarters right now. Some bureaucratic business involving my late father.’

He didn’t even get a glance of sympathy in return.

‘Get back to the hotel as soon as possible,’ was the reply. ‘These continuing distractions are a pain in the ass. If they continue, I’ll be looking for a new interpreter.’

Tom didn’t give a damn. He told the driver to pull over, stepped out into the balmy air and strutted off down the street as happy as a lord. Nicola Mantega wanted to talk to him in his office and then buy him lunch. This was very convenient, because Tom wanted to talk to il notaio about the big idea he’d had the evening before when he’d gone out to explore the dreary suburban streets of Rende, feeling lonely and disorientated for the first time since arriving, and in a weak moment had allowed himself to be seduced by an eatery named American’s Dream. The brilliantly lit interior vaguely resembled a bad acid flashback to a classic 1950s diner, with grilles and hubcaps from autos of that era arrayed on the walls and a Beach Boys album playing at an unsubtle volume. Tom had ordered a cheeseburger and fries, insalata Cesare and a beer. It took twenty minutes to arrive and was horrible. The meat patty was thin and dry, the fries limp and tasteless, the Caesar a soggy mess made with the wrong kind of lettuce, prefabricated croutons and gloopy sauce out of a bottle. The bill came to almost twenty bucks.

Big deal, he’d thought as he retreated to his gaudy, sterile, whorehouse-minus-the-whores hotel. If you travel, you’re going to have a bad meal once in a while. But while he was down at the municipio that morning, mindlessly offering Martin Nguyen a simplified version of the deputy mayor’s pronouncements, so shaded with multiple layers of nuance that they often appeared to be meaningless, Tom had had his idea. The stuff that he had tried to eat the night before had all been simple American dishes that were easy to prepare and in their way delicious — not great cuisine, but satisfying and tasty when they were properly made and you were in the mood for them. And there was evidently a demand or how could the place stay in business?

The problem wasn’t the concept, it was the execution. That was Tom’s area of expertise, plus over here political correctness hadn’t hit the table yet. Imagine being able to use raw egg in the Caesar, grind up nicely marbled chuck and foreshank fresh every day and soften hand-cut fries in pure beef dripping before crisping them at scorch temp. The concept felt solid, and in the changed financial circumstances following his father’s decease he might well be able to realise it, but he was going to need insider assistance. There should be enough seed money there once the will was probated, but Tom had already been in Italy long enough to know that money was not enough for what he had in mind. You couldn’t just rent a storefront property, kit it out with the necessary, turn on the neon sign and open the door for business. You needed some official paper or stamp to do almost anything — they even had one called the certificato di esistenza in vita, which officially affirmed that you were still alive, or at least had been when you applied for it — and while these were in theory available to any suitably qualified applicant on a first-come first-served basis, in practice the system didn’t work quite like that. If you wanted results, above all if you wanted them fast, you needed a fixer who could cut corners and get the job done. Nicola Mantega was a perfect match.

Outside the building that housed Mantega’s office, Tom noticed the stunning woman he had spoken to briefly at a cafe a couple of days ago and never heard from since. She was leaning up against some sort of maintenance truck, wearing a much more sluttish outfit than the last time, although she brought it off really well, and chatting animatedly to some handsome fuck in company overalls. Tom almost walked on, but then decided that if he was to make it in this town, he mustn’t duck the first challenge that came along.

‘ Salve! ’ he shouted in the loud but unaggressive manner of the local people his age.

The woman looked at him blankly, then seemed to fake a smile.

‘ Buon giorno.’

She seemed preoccupied and made no move to approach him. An interesting person, thought Tom, and possibly some interest on her part too, but a lot else besides. A complex situation, in short, and not without a certain promise. He strolled over to where she was standing beside the electrician or whoever he was. God, she had fabulous eyes! Huge olive-green ovals filled with an intense but indefinable expression, like the women portrayed on Greek vases.

‘You didn’t call me,’ he said.

‘No.’

That didn’t seem to leave Tom much to say, so after a long and meaningful look he turned and walked into the office building.

Given Mantega’s reputation, he had expected his business premises to have an air of discreet luxury, with lots of potted plants and a brittle, babe-aceous receptionist displaying her cleavage and her boss’s status. In the event it looked more like the back room of a failing used-car dealership, but Mantega’s welcome couldn’t have been more effusive.

‘Tom, my friend! What terrible news about your father! I am devastated, destroyed, deranged! To think that this unspeakable crime should have happened here, and that I — ’

Tom gestured negatively with his hand.

‘I’d prefer not to speak of that just now.’

Mantega effortlessly flexed his features from a tragic mask to the devotional image of a saint’s sorrowful but benign regard.

‘Of course, of course! Tactless of me. I cannot apologise enough. Please sit down.’

He waved at a lime-green plastic bucket chair with stainless steel legs that had somehow survived, tawdrily intact, from the 1970s.

‘You said you wanted to discuss something before we go to lunch,’ Tom began. ‘There’s also something I want to ask you, but that can wait.’

‘Yes, as it happens, there is something on my mind, something which would perhaps be better discussed in a secure environment. It’s a rather delicate matter, if you take my meaning, but I see no reason why the two of us, working together, shouldn’t be able to reach a mutually advantageous agreement.’

‘About what?’

‘Well, it concerns this American who arrived a few days ago.’

‘Martin Nguyen?’

‘I understand that you are working for him.’

Mantega laughed roguishly.

‘Strictly illegal, you know! Non-EU citizens are not permitted to work here without signing their lives away after months of pleading with half a dozen different heads of the bureaucratic hydra for the right to do so. After all, you’re taking bread out of the mouths of all our own poor Italian translators. I really ought to report you to the authorities!’

‘What about my father? He was working here, before…’

Mantega instantly became solemn again.

‘I managed to facilitate that on the basis that the work involved was of limited duration and scope and so straordinario that it could not be undertaken by anyone else. Your case is different. However, we’ll overlook that.’

‘I imagine that happens quite a bit here,’ observed Tom.

‘Of course, of course,’ Mantega returned complacently. ‘Otherwise we’d all be strangled by red tape and nothing would ever get done. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me. I won’t breathe a word.’

Tom gave a guarded nod.

‘So you want to reach an agreement with me concerning Signor Nguyen?’

‘It’s more to do with the people he is representing. You told me that under pretence of preparing to make a film here, they were in fact searching for the tomb of Alaric. As I told you yesterday, many others have tried in vain to locate that fabled hoard of treasure, and it may very well be that the latest arrivals will have no more luck. On the other hand, they no doubt have vastly superior technology at their disposal, so we can’t rule out such a possibility. My point is this: if they do find the tomb, I need to know.’

‘Why?’

Mantega raised his chin and looked at Tom with the air of someone doing his best to express an emotion he has read about but never experienced.

‘Because I am a patriot,’ he declared quietly. ‘Not an Italian patriot, although I consider myself to be both an Italian and a European, in that order. But first and foremost I am a Calabrian!’

He bent forward and grasped Tom’s arm so tightly it hurt.

‘And so are you, my friend, despite your American passport. In our hearts, we are both Calabrians.’

Tom was by now feeling uncomfortable in all sorts of ways.

‘What has all this to do with Rapture Works?’ he replied.

‘It’s very simple. La tomba d’Alarico is a Calabrian heritage site of inestimable archaeological value which must contain a collection of priceless artefacts beside which even the Riace bronzes would pale in comparison. Now then, supposing your employers do find it, what are their intentions?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Precisely. Of course, they may simply wish to have the glory of having made the discovery, and having done so will turn over future exploitation of the site to the appropriate authorities. In that case, I would have no quarrel with them. With a fat grant from Rome and the EU, we could build a superb extension to the Museo Civico in which to accommodate these treasures. People will fly in from all over the world to view them, bringing fame and prosperity to the city and the region. We might even consent to send some of them off to London, Paris and New York as one of those travelling museum shows you have to book tickets to get into. “The Treasures of the Tomb!” All well and good.’

His face darkened.

‘But let us suppose that their intentions are different. Whoever is behind this search has clearly spent a lot of money, and may well be motivated by the prospect of financial gain. The treasure obviously couldn’t be traded on the open market, but it wouldn’t be impossible to locate some Russian billionaire who would pay almost anything to be in possession of such items. Then again, it might end up being scrapped for the intrinsic value of the gold and the precious stones, as has tragically happened so often in the past, thereby destroying this unique and irreplaceable archive of our mutual heritage. The fact is that we simply don’t know what may happen in the event of this illegal search proving successful. I am therefore appealing to you, my friend, to inform me if that happens. Just phone me, at any hour of the day or night, and say, “The package has arrived.” We’ll then arrange a meeting at which you can give me the details. So tell me, Tommaso, are you prepared to perform your duty to the madrepatria?’

‘Well… yes. I mean, I suppose so.’

‘Wonderful! Now let’s go to lunch, and then you can tell me what you want in return. There’s a place just round the corner where I’m a regular.’

Tom had half-hoped that the brunette would still be outside the building, but there was no sign of her. They turned left into a side-street and entered a restaurant which kept such a low profile that Tom supposed that all the clientele must be regulars. This theory appeared to be supported by the number of people who greeted or were greeted by Nicola Mantega as he led the way to their table.

‘So what can I do for you?’ the older man said after rattling off some orders to the waiter in dialect.

‘Well, Signor Mantega — ’

‘Call me Nicola.’

‘The thing is this. I really like it here and I want to be able to stay, only not as a tourist. So I’d have to get one of those work permits. That would be one thing I’d need you for.’

Mantega appeared admirably unperturbed.

‘What kind of work do you have in mind?’

Tom smiled bashfully.

‘Well, this may sound like a crazy idea, but I think it just might work. I can’t remember if I told you this, but I’m a trained chef. I’ve worked in a number of famous restaurants in New York and I’ve picked up a pretty good idea of how the business operates. So my idea is to open a place here, only — and this is maybe where it sounds a bit crazy — it would be an American restaurant. The idea would be to serve steaks, ribs, burgers, salads — ’

He broke off, realising that Mantega wasn’t listening. For a moment Tom was offended, then he noticed the general silence. All the other customers in the crowded restaurant had stopped talking and were gazing at something behind them. Turning, he saw a police officer in uniform accompanied by two others wearing combat fatigues and carrying machine guns. The trio walked down the aisle and stopped at their table.

‘Nicola Mantega?’ the officer asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You are under arrest. Come with us.’

For some reason, Tom expected Mantega to make a fuss, but he evidently understood and accepted the rules of the game.

‘I’m so sorry about this nonsense,’ he told Tom as he got up. ‘Don’t worry about the bill. It will all be taken care of.’

Three o’clock, the police chief had said. There was no clock on the wall, Maria didn’t own a watch and she certainly wasn’t going to stoop to asking the unmannerly lout manning the desk, who had been spying on her with a hard look and a contemptuous smirk throughout the many hours she had spent there. She rolled up the paper wrappings in which she had brought her frugal lunch and stuffed them back into her bag.

At least it didn’t appear that she had been followed. This had been the aspect of returning a second day that had preoccupied her most. The family had of course made their usual futile fuss, but Maria had told them that the doctor she needed to see in order to get the new arthritis medicine had not been available the day before, so she was going to return and try again. This time her son had insisted on driving her, and in the end she’d given in. She wouldn’t let him park outside the clinic and wait for her, though, claiming that it might well take hours. After she had assured herself that he had driven away, she had followed much the same routine as on the previous day, but using a different set of buses around the city centre before finally completing her journey to the Questura on foot, with many detours and false starts. One thing about living in a mountain village was that it kept you agile. Despite her seventy-eight years, Maria could still put on a better turn of speed than most of these languid city dwellers, and she hadn’t noticed anyone hurrying to keep up with her.

In short, it seemed that her elaborate precautions had all been for nothing. Most likely her journey would prove to be too, even supposing that the police chief kept his word. Probably nothing that she had to tell him would seem relevant to what was happening now. It was, after all, ancient history, like the war itself. Bad things had happened but most people had survived, as they always did, and since then the world had moved on. ‘You’re living in the past, nonna!’ was one of her daughter-in-law’s favourite taunts. Maria knew that was true, but she couldn’t help it. Where else was she to live? There was no other environment that would support virtually extinct life forms such as her own. But in the course of the time she had spent waiting yesterday and again today, she had finally worked out what she would tell this Aurelio Zen. It was a mixture of truth and falsehoods, but the falsehoods were of no concern except to the dead.

A clacking of heels presaged the appearance of a uniformed officer, who checked Maria’s identity card and then told her that the chief of police was ready to receive her. They went up two flights in a lift and then down a long corridor into a smart modern office, the sort you saw on television, with incredibly brilliant bulbs embedded in the ceiling like so many tiny suns in heaven and furnishings that clearly hadn’t been made either by or for human beings. The air was stuffy and blue with smoke, but Maria didn’t mind. Her late husband had been a heavy smoker, which was why he was now late, and she still enjoyed the smell.

The chief of police rose politely as she entered, invited her to be seated and told her escort to leave. He was a handsome man with the appearance of a certain kind of priest: tall, lean, of indeterminate age, his aquiline features superficially severe but suggesting a basic bent towards such kindness and indulgence as he might be able to reconcile with the strict rules of his calling. Had she been fifty years younger, Maria would have fallen for him in a moment. As it was, she wanted to mother him, so utterly exhausted and depressed did he look, as though holding himself together only by a stubborn act of will, a quality she herself possessed and admired in others. For a moment she almost felt ashamed to be adding to his problems by demanding this audience. Then she reminded herself of their relative positions on the scale of power and hardened her heart.

‘This has been a very busy day, signora,’ Zen said crisply. ‘I fear I can only spare you a few minutes. Unless, of course, what you have to tell me is of quite extraordinary value and relevance.’

Maria felt herself rising to the challenge thus presented.

‘It is both.’

Zen unclasped his hands in a brief prayer-like gesture, implying that he would be the judge of that.

‘Please proceed.’

‘What I have to say concerns the man found dead up in the old town. On the television the other day, you said that he was a member of the Calopezzati family. That is untrue.’

Zen’s gradually hardening stare seemed to indicate that Maria had already demonstrated the first of the two qualities he had named as essential to retain his interest.

‘Have you any evidence to support this assertion?’

‘I was there when it happened.’

The police chief said nothing, just sat there staring at her with those fascinating, implacable eyes. Not a priest, she thought, an inquisitor.

‘It was just before the war ended. I was then in service at la bastiglia in the old town. Only in a lowly position, you understand. Washing and ironing the bed linen, dusting, sweeping and cleaning. The Calopezzati’s personal attendants were all unmarried sons and daughters of impoverished local gentry, another class of people altogether. They treated us even worse than the baron, to speak the truth. Anyway, my family put me out to service, like I said, and it was hard, particularly at first. I knew they had to do it, because there were too many of us at home, but it was still hard.’

Zen laid his head in his hands and rubbed his eyes.

‘ Mi scusate, signore,’ said Maria, scared. ‘Here I am rambling on…’

Zen looked up at her with a bleary smile and then said something that utterly melted her heart.

‘No, you must excuse me. It’s just that I’m very tired. Talk as much as you want. If I may say so, you have a lovely voice. Like fish.’

‘Fish?’

‘Succulent, but with a strong backbone. I’m Venetian, and it was intended as a compliment. My time is no longer of any account. Just tell me, in your own words, whatever it is that you have come to say.’

Dear God, she thought, where were you when I wanted babies? It took a moment to compose herself and remember the story that she had decided to tell.

‘I was lonely and frightened. I made friends with one of the other skivvies in that cold sepulchre, where in the first few months I sometimes got lost amongst all the corridors and stairs. Her name was Caterina Intrieri. I was fifteen years old, she was eighteen. After that we looked after each other. It made life a little easier for both of us. And then one day in the week after Pentecost, Caterina told me that she was with child. She wouldn’t say who the father was. As far as I know, she told no one else but a levatrice, a wise woman who said that she would be brought to bed about Christmas. And so she would have, except for what happened.’

Maria clasped the battered bag she held on her knees like a chicken she was bringing to market and now feared might escape.

‘What did happen?’ prompted Zen.

‘Caterina died, but the child survived and was taken by la baronessa as her own. What with the war and the constant changes of government, life was chaotic in those days. No one knew who was in charge, no one cared for anything but their own survival. With an unknown father and a dead mother, it was easy for Signora Ottavia to claim Caterina’s child as her own and have it registered with the authorities as Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati.’

‘How did the boy’s mother die?’

‘In the usual way.’

‘In childbirth?’

Maria did not respond to this question.

‘The baby was given to a wet-nurse in Camigliatello,’ she said. ‘He was with her when the fire broke out.’

Zen coughed and then lit a cigarette.

‘Tell me, what was it like, la bastiglia? I’ve never seen a photograph or a sketch. What did it look like? How did it strike the eye?’

Maria tried to remember. This was not a question she had expected to be asked, or even the same kind of question. But she was talking to the chief of police for the entire province. She wasn’t sure of the answer, but she couldn’t just sit there and say nothing. It was like being back in school.

‘There were many storeys,’ she began. ‘Four in all, not counting the underground. But we were only allowed to visit three of them. The piano nobile on the first floor was only for the family and their personal attendants.’

‘What else do you remember about it?’ asked Zen sleepily.

There was a long silence.

‘I remember the way the facade changed, depending on the time of day.’

‘Go on.’

‘It looked like something that had come from the heavens and been stuck down here like the heel of a boot. It faced west, so in the morning it was a blank wall, only with all those windows, like some insect’s eyes! During the day, it was just there. At sunset all the windows gleamed and glinted red, and at night under the full moon it looked like a ghost with its arms raised up to scare you.’

Zen smiled faintly.

‘What a pity it burned down. How did that come about, by the way?’

Maria preferred to lie as little as possible, but she had to see the matter through.

‘It was a dark and stormy night. The most violent thunderstorm that’s ever been seen in these parts. La bastiglia was by far the tallest building up in the old town. It was struck several times. Many fires broke out all at once. We servants did what we could, but all water had to be fetched one bucket at a time from the deep well that supplied the palace. It was a hopeless task.’

‘And Ottavia Calopezzati was unable to escape in time?’

Maria nodded. Stunned by a blow from a fire-iron whilst she was sleeping and then trussed like a chicken with baling twine, the murderess had indeed been unable to escape the flames.

‘So what became of her adopted child?’

‘I have no idea. After the fire, the household broke up and returned to their families, if they could find them. As I said, everyone was looking out for themselves.’

Now the police chief seemed to be suffering from a headache, no doubt brought on by overwork. He leant forward, scowling, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

‘I wonder how relevant all this is, signora. The motive for this murder is still unclear. Kidnappings go wrong for all kinds of reasons. For example, the victim may see or overhear something which would make his release perilous for the gang at any price. The question of whether or not he was the son of someone called Caterina Intrieri seems moot, to say the least.’

‘No,’ said Maria firmly. ‘He was killed because they thought he was a Calopezzati, but they were wrong.’

‘Who are “they”?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then how can you know what they may or may not have thought?’

‘I’m just telling you what everyone says.’

‘Everyone is of no use to me. What I need is someone, a specific individual prepared to come forward and identify those responsible for this crime and for the atrocities that happened in your own town shortly afterwards. I had hoped that you might be that someone, signora. Why else would you have come here yesterday, and again today, and spent hours on end waiting to see me?’

‘I wanted justice for Caterina. Her only child has been killed because it was tainted with the name of the family that made her life a misery, and the lives of everyone who lived around here then, if you could call it living.’

Zen glanced at his watch.

‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘It’s all I know,’ Maria replied stubbornly.

‘I don’t believe that for a moment, but I don’t intend to press you. However, I may need to get in touch at some point in the future. Doing so in the normal way might cause difficulties for your family. Do you understand my meaning?’

Maria got a pen and a used bus ticket out of her handbag, wrote down a telephone number in large, plump numerals and handed the ticket to Zen.

‘Call this number. If someone else answers, tell them that you work at the hospital and need to speak to me about the results of those tests I had. They’ll fetch me and then we can talk.’

Zen stood up to indicate that the interview was over.

‘You’re an interesting person, Maria,’ he said, using her name for the first time. ‘What you’ve said is extremely interesting. What you haven’t said might well be more interesting still. Do you know someone called Giorgio?’

Maria almost faltered then, dazzled by the feints setting up the knockout punch. But she too could hold herself together by sheer willpower.

‘It’s a very common name,’ she replied.

The chief of police seemed to acknowledge her fortitude with an ironic smile.

‘Excessively common, I’m inclined to think. The world would be a better place if there were fewer Giorgios in it. Or at least one fewer. I wish you a safe and speedy journey home.’

Since his son had made his own arrangements for the day, Professor Achille Pancrazi spent the afternoon working on a rather tricky review of a book by a former colleague at the University of Padua. He had initially been slightly taken aback by Emanuele’s announcement that he was going to spend the day with an unnamed school friend, largely because even after years of separation he still lived in fear of his ex-wife and knew that he would be held to account if anything went wrong. But of course nothing would, and frankly an interval of free time in these welcome but somewhat tiring visits was always welcome.

Needless to say, he hadn’t bothered to read Fraschetti’s latest effusion. He was familiar with both the subject and the author, so a perusal of the introduction and table of contents sufficed as far as content went. As for style, a brief skim of a few paragraphs taken at random was enough to show that his rival’s love affair with the jargon of the trade was by no means over. He was particularly amused by the constant references to ‘desire’, given that he knew for a fact that Fraschetti had never desired anyone of either sex in his life. But Pancrazi’s real problem was how to pitch his critical response, which would be published in the Cultura insert of a national newspaper and read by just about everyone in the scholarly world for whom the subject matter was relevant. In other words, it wasn’t so much a question of how he wanted to make his eminent — but well past his peak, despite his current fame — colleague look, but of how he wanted it to make him look. If he sounded too negative, then charges of professional envy could and would be brought, and not without a certain justification.

From way back in their far-off days together at Padua, Pancrazi had always considered Fraschetti his intellectual inferior. He didn’t gloat about this any more than he did about the fact that he was the taller of the two, but in the event it was he who’d had to move all the way down the boot to the University of bloody Cosenza to get his professorship while Fraschetti had landed the post in Turin that they’d both applied for, and then gone on to be a media don into the bargain. And why? Because the half-smart bastard had more connections than a telephone exchange, plus a superficial talent for memorable soundbites and an easy-to-grasp high concept, in this case the idea that the early Romans, far from having any sense of manifest destiny or even a coherent culture, had simply muddled along from year to year, the results being cleaned up much later by Livy and others into a neat corporate history for imperial PR purposes.

Achille Pancrazi had written and revised four drafts of his review and was just starting a fifth, in a marginally more nuanced tone, when his phone rang. The screen showed that the caller was his son. Despite the interruption, he answered with genuine pleasure.

‘ Ciao, Manuele! ’

Emanuele, on the other hand, sounded preoccupied.

‘There’s something I want to show you, dad. Can you come right now?’

‘Come where?’

‘To the chapel of Santa Caterina on the back road to Mendicino.’

‘Are you there now? I thought you and your friend were spending the day in town. Does he have a car?’

‘Don’t ask any more questions, dad, just come. Please!’

By now, Emanuele sounded desperate. Pancrazi considered that he knew the territory around Cosenza ‘tolerably well’, as he would have put it, but he was not familiar with that particular chapel, probably some devotional shrine of strictly local interest and no architectural merit. He had once joked to a colleague whose subject was the Early Modern period that he himself suffered from a professional version of Alzheimer’s symptoms. ‘I can remember the smallest details of everything that happened up to the fall of Constantinople, but the last five hundred years are just a blur.’ What on earth could Emanuele and his friend have found there in such a place to justify his driving out there ‘right now’? It was charming and flattering that they had even bothered to include him and his interests in their laddish day out together, but the whole thing still didn’t quite make sense.

The evening rush hour was in full swing and it took him almost forty minutes to reach the rendezvous. It was a small building, squat and mean, set off beside the road in the middle of nowhere, not a house in sight. There was no sign of another vehicle either, which meant that there had either been a mistake about the location of the rendezvous or the two young men had got tired of waiting. Achille decided to take a look inside anyway, if the door was unlocked. It was. The interior was no improvement on the thinly plastered rough stone outside, a cramped space with a few rows of pews set before a small altar. The few ex votos about were old and illegible and the air smelt musty. The place was obviously no longer used on any regular basis. He was about to turn back when the door slammed shut behind him.

‘Don’t turn round, professo,’ said a voice. ‘Sit down facing the altar. Keep your hands in view at all times.’

A harsh laugh.

‘Clasped in prayer, if you like.’

Achille Pancrazi knew immediately what had happened, but his first thought was for himself. God almighty, what would Reginella say when she heard? She had always despised and hated southerners, to the extent of initially refusing to allow her son to visit his father in Calabria. Achille and Emanuele had joined forces on that issue once he became old enough to take a stand on his rights and responsibilities, and they had prevailed, mocking her irrational fears, telling her that everything was different now, that it was time to wake up and stop behaving like a typical paranoid northern racist. They’d prevailed at the time, but now Reginella would exact a terrible revenge.

And why on earth was this happening to someone like him anyway? He knew that the gangs sometimes took relatively small fry, pharmacists or accountants, to keep their earnings up on a percentage basis, but it had never occurred to him that he might be on their list. All right, he was a university professor, but the pay was miserable even before the outrageous sums withheld under the divorce settlement that his ex-wife’s butch lesbian lawyer had imposed. Just look at my bank statements, he felt like saying. I may have an impressive-sounding title, but the truth is that I’m just scraping by.

‘It’s not about money,’ the man said, as though he had been reading Achille’s thoughts. ‘Just a little professional help. Things you can arrange quite easily and will cost you nothing but a little time. In return, I personally guarantee as a man of honour that you will get your son back, safe and unharmed.’

‘When?’

‘Once you have done what we ask.’

‘Yes, of course, only… You see, he’s due back at the weekend.’

‘Back where?’

‘To his mother. She’ll kill me if he’s still missing when she finds out what’s happened.’

The man laughed again.

‘Maybe we should have taken her as well!’

‘Could you do that?’ Achille found himself asking.

‘I’m not interested in your domestic problems. But it’s essential to our agreement that it remains private. If you or your wife or anyone else informs the authorities, then Emanuele will be returned to you one piece at a time, wrapped in plastic food bags. Do you understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘When we wish to contact you, we shall call your home number on your son’s mobile. If I suspect that either number is being monitored by the police, out come the skinning and butchering knives. The same if you fail to follow our instructions to the letter and on time. Are you still following me?’

The man’s patronising tone made Pancrazi really angry for the first time.

‘I’m not stupid, you know!’

‘I hope not. What we want is some old Roman treasure.’

‘Treasure?’ breathed Pancrazi faintly.

‘Gold cups, diamond jewellery, what do I know? But it has to be genuine, the real thing, good enough to pass examination by an expert.’

‘What period are we talking about here? Late republic? Early empire?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’ the man shouted.

‘Of course,’ murmured Pancrazi mildly. ‘Not your area of competence.’

There followed a silence so long that Pancrazi began to think that the man had left as silently as he arrived, until he spoke again.

‘Alaric.’

‘What about him?’

‘When did he live?’

‘Late fourth to early fifth century, roughly. The exact dates are a matter of some dispute, but a recent paper by Schondorf suggests that — ’

‘Okay, the stuff has to be older than that.’

‘And where am I supposed to get it?’

‘Not my problem, professo. But that’s what you teach, isn’t it? What you profess. The people who run the museums must give you a chance to handle the merchandise once in a while. Well, take that chance, use your wits and wait for me to call.’

‘Then what happens?’

‘We borrow the sample for a few days, then return it to you and you take it back to wherever you got it.’

‘What guarantee do I have that you’ll return it?’

The man laughed once more.

‘None whatever. But if you don’t deliver within the next forty-eight hours, your son will be returned to you in convenient bite-sized chunks. Simmer slowly in a good tomato sauce and you’ll have yourself a meal. You might want to invite your ex-wife. There’ll be plenty.’

Except for the looming presence of Natale Arnone, in full uniform and fingering the automatic pistol in the white holster attached to the diagonal strap across his ample chest, the scene of Zen’s first interview with Nicola Mantega was identical to that of the previous one with Maria. The atmosphere, however, could not have been more different. The two principals had both removed their ties and unbuttoned their shirts. The air was a broth of smoke, spent breath and body odours, seasoned with fear.

‘You’ve been a silly boy, Mantega,’ Zen said quietly. ‘It goes without saying that you’re a total waste of space from a moral and legal point of view, but I have to deal with that every day in my job and by now I’m hardened to it. What I can’t tolerate is sheer carelessness, perhaps because it calls into question my own reason for living. Evil is one thing, but a drunk driver who persistently takes blind corners on the wrong side of the road disturbs me.’

Mantega sat hunched in his chair like a resilient stuffed toy. He knew how this game was played. Zen gestured to Arnone.

‘Again.’

The young inspector crossed the room to the bank of electronic equipment and pressed a button. Mantega’s voice issued from the loudspeakers attached to the computer terminal on Zen’s desk, the recording of the call he had made on Tom Newman’s mobile to the house in San Giovanni in Fiore where Giorgio’s calls were received.

‘You crazy bastard! What do you think you’re doing? Newman’s son just told me that his father’s dead. Well, that’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned! I trusted you, Giorgio, and now I feel betrayed. It’s all very well for you, lying low with your friends out of harm’s way. I’m the one the cops are going to put through the mincer. If they do, and I still haven’t heard from you, I’ll tell them everything I know. Names, numbers, dates, times, places, the lot! And don’t think you can blackmail me with that video. That was about a kidnapping. This is manslaughter at the very least, and probably murder. I had nothing to do with that and I’m sure as hell not taking the blame. I don’t owe you anything and I shall take all necessary measures to protect my own position, so get in touch by tomorrow at the latest. If you don’t, all bets are off, and you’ll find out just what I’m — ’

Aurelio Zen came to stand directly over Nicola Mantega.

‘So did he?’

Realising that silence and inertia would no longer do, that a move was required, Mantega glanced up at Zen with an expression of polite confusion.

‘Did who do what?’

‘Did Giorgio get in touch with you?’

‘No.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Zen commented. ‘Giorgio is certainly evil and possibly mad, but he isn’t stupid and doesn’t want to be associated with imbeciles. And who shall blame him?’

Mantega hung his head and stayed silent.

‘All right,’ sighed Zen. ‘As you so aptly put it, all bets are now off.’

‘I have a right to legal representation.’

‘You are a lawyer, Signor Mantega. Were, rather, as a result of that spectacular bit of silliness nine years ago, but no doubt the old skills are still there.’

‘I want an independent witness present to represent my interests and to report any illegal pressure on your part. If you deny me my legal rights, the judges will throw the case out.’

Zen laughed flirtatiously.

‘Who said anything about judges, Nicola? I’m not intending to waste the court’s valuable time on a sleazy little go-between. Try and get it through your thick skull that this isn’t all about you! The investigating magistrate is only interested in the men who kidnapped and murdered Peter Newman, and my only interest in you is as a link to them. You know who they are and quite possibly where. My instructions are to find a way to make you communicate that information.’

Zen turned away and gazed out of the window at the helicopter that had been tormenting the city for days.

‘Arnone,’ he murmured.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘At some point in the proceedings, I foresee that Signor Mantega may attempt to resist arrest and will have to be forcibly restrained.’

‘I understand.’

Zen turned. Nicola Mantega had hunkered down again, preparing himself for the long haul ahead.

‘What was the video you mentioned in your phone call?’ Zen asked. ‘The one you advised Giorgio not to try and blackmail you with.’

There was no reply. Zen clapped his hands loudly.

‘All right, take him down and turn him over to Corti and Caricato. They are to begin conventionally, but step up the pressure if there’s no valuable product after a couple of hours. Set up a shift rota for the night. No sleep for our guest, naturally. I may take a turn myself later on, depending on how things go.’

Martin Nguyen was hiding in his room. That wasn’t how he’d put it to the front desk staff, of course. He’d told them that he would be teleconferencing until further notice and mustn’t on any account be disturbed, but the truth was that he was hiding. He lay swathed in a robe of Thai silk on the brutally unyielding bed, wondering how he could have got it so wrong about these people. He’d assumed that on average Italians were about as dumb, lazy and street-level criminal as a certain racially challenged segment of the US population, only with better cuisine and cuter noses. He’d been prepared for that. What he hadn’t been prepared for was to find them just as sharp and sophisticated as himself, if not more so.

It was just possible that this was the worst day that he’d ever had — apart from his childhood, which was hors concours in that respect. It had started with a disastrous meeting with the deputy mayor of Cosenza and two of his advisers at city hall. Panicked by the outcome, he had called Jake to consult, forgetting that it was the middle of the night over there, and then on top of everything else his fucking interpreter had gone off shift. At the same time, from a professional point of view Martin couldn’t help appreciating the precise manner in which he had been shafted. He liked to think of himself as a top pro, able to take it and dish it out with the best of them, but he had to admit that on this occasion he’d been outplayed.

The Italians had home advantage, of course, but their game had been damn near perfect. After the curt, peremptory phone call the day before, summoning him to the meeting, Martin had expected a hostile reception. Nothing of the sort! He had been shown into an impressive and comfortable suite, offered coffee and even an alcoholic liqueur — something that would have caused a scandal resulting in instant dismissal had they been elected officials back in the States — and then plied with polite enquiries as to how he was enjoying his stay in Cosenza, and suggestions of pleasurable ways in which he might spend his spare time.

Once they got down to business, however, it became clear that he wasn’t going to have much spare time. The tone might have been different from the brusque telephone call but the content remained the same: the permits which had been granted to the movie company to carry out low-level helicopter operations in the area were due to expire in a couple of days, and following Luciano Aldobrandini’s public repudiation of the project and his statements casting doubt upon its viability, it would be impossible for the city to renew them without convincing evidence that the film was indeed going ahead and that the flights in question were essential to its production.

Martin had done the best he could under the circumstances. He had attempted — with some success, he thought — to get across the enormous difficulties of working with a proud, volatile genius such as Aldobrandini notoriously was. The slightest misunderstanding was perceived as a personal insult, a temporary setback regarded as a deliberate attempt by mean-minded businessmen who thought only of money to sabotage a great artist’s crowning masterwork. There had indeed been a regrettable series of minor hitches resulting from the kidnapping of the company’s representative Peter Newman, although he hoped the mayor appreciated that no attempt had been made to leverage this horrendous crime in a way that might have brought unwelcome publicity to the region. It had taken a few days to assemble an alternative leadership team, but now that it was in place all problems would shortly be resolved. He therefore hoped that a temporary extension to the flight permits might be granted, pending such a resolution.

It was a good pitch, if he did think so himself, but for all their exquisite civility and perfect manners, the opposition hadn’t bought it. They explained that while they quite understood the dilemma in which Signor Nguyen found himself, they too, alas, were under pressure from sources located at various levels of the provincial, regional and even national government, sources whose continuing goodwill was a prerequisite for the successful outcome of many aspects of the city council’s daily work. They must therefore reluctantly inform him that the expiration date of the permits in question would apply, unless and until a demonstrable commitment to the film project, backed by a suitable retraction from its prestigious celebrity director, was forthcoming. Thank you so much for coming, signore, a pleasure to have met you, buona sera, arrivederla and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

Martin hated feeling powerless, incompetent and outclassed, and hated still more others seeing him that way, but after a couple of hours hunkered down in his room he forced himself downstairs, both to avoid cabin fever and to prove that he still had it in the nuts. The open-plan bar and restaurant area was a classy venue, if you liked glittering mirror tiles, modernistic chandeliers made of concentric rings of clear plastic, lime-green walls, curved-back leatherette chairs in a deeper shade of the same colour, and tasteful classics like Elvira Madigan and the Barber weepie for strings subliminally audible throughout. His father’s old pal President Van Thieu would have felt right at home, although he would have had the waiting staff shot after a lengthy and intensive Q amp;A with Nguyen senior.

When Martin finally got his drink, it was at least a good pour, and after negotiations with the bartender, he was brought a silver champagne bucket filled with slivers of slush to ice it down. Jake would be up by now. He wondered whether to call in with a progress report, but the only progress to date had been backwards. Still, the idea reminded him that he’d turned his mobile phone off when he retreated to his room. When he flipped it on again, there was a message from the Aeroscan guy asking him to call back. Martin sighed and took a long swig of his slurpee. Another slew of feeble excuses and hollow promises, he thought. But, as so many times that day, he was wrong.

‘Keep it brief, Larson,’ he rapped. ‘I’m on hold in a three-way conference call.’

‘Gee, I’m sorry, Mr Nguyen. I just thought I should let you know that we’ve found it.’

‘Found what?’

‘The data indicate a circular, non-ferrous structure approximately nine and a half metres in diameter buried a metre or so below the river rock up in the Busento valley about five kilometres south of the city. I guess it could have been a fish pool or a reservoir or something, but it’s unquestionably man-made and very solidly constructed.’

Martin finished the rest of his drink in one.

‘Get over here,’ he told Larson. ‘I want large-scale maps of the area and a full report.’

Back in his room, he called home over an encrypted Skype internet connection. It was twenty after noon where Jake was, which turned out to be his personal gym.

‘Zup?’ Jake said, gasping like a landed fish.

Martin let him sweat his heart rate down a few beats without an answer. He was no longer powerless and humiliated, and in no hurry to spread the excellent word.

‘That exec jet you have on hold?’ he said finally. ‘What’s the lead time on that baby?’

‘Couple of hours? More, maybe. It’s like in Fresno.’

‘Get it warmed up, Jake.’

There was a pleased laugh the other end.

‘How come?’

‘The Aeroscan rep is swinging by momentarily to report in depth, but from what he just said on the phone it looks like we just struck gold. Literally.’

‘Awesome!’

‘How soon can you be here?’

‘The leasing outfit said ten, eleven hours? What time do you have there?’

‘Nine twenty-three.’

‘In the morning?’

‘In the evening.’

‘Really?’

‘Don’t worry about that. Just get here as soon as you can. Call me from the plane when you’re an hour out and I’ll come meet you. It’ll be good whatever because we can’t move until after dark. Meanwhile I’ll chase up our Iraqi expendables and get busy renting the machinery we’ll need.’

A sudden thought struck him.

‘Hey, Jake? You have got a passport, haven’t you?’

‘A password?’

‘No, a passport. You know, a little blue booklet issued by the Feds with your name and picture inside? You’ll need one when you arrive.’

‘Bullshit. You just show them your driver’s licence. I’ve been all over. Canada, Mexico — ’

‘That’s just the attic and the basement, Jake. This is a different house. Believe me, you need a passport to get in.’

‘Okay, I’ll buy one online and have it overnighted.’

‘The process doesn’t work like that. It takes weeks.’

‘Fuck, that’s so totally twentieth century.’

‘Yeah, but listen. Remember a couple years back you visited with Paul on that Caribbean island he owns a chunk of?’

‘So?’

‘So you had a passport then which will still be valid. And another thing. The candlestick you mentioned? I’m guessing that you’ll want to export it. Could you give me a little more detail about the payload so I can start figuring out the logistics? Weight, dimensions, packaging requirements…’

‘Not off the top of my head. It’s like the Jewish national logo, only the real thing is solid gold. Let me get showered off and I’ll shoot you an email attachment. Hey, this is great news, Martin! Maybe you deserve a bonus.’

‘Maybe I do.’

Martin Nguyen sat back, a smile growing on his thin lips. It was not a pleasant smile, although Martin was in fact pleased. He Googled around a bit, then got on to eBay and typed ‘temple menorah’ in the Search box.

Nicola Mantega cracked shortly after four o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t so much what the interrogators had done to him physically as their crushingly contemptuous, mean-spirited attitude. By then the original gorillas had been relieved by a fresh pair, who would in due course be relieved by another, and so on, on and on, world without end. But what really hurt was the chief of police calling him silly.

Mantega had always prided himself on being furbissimo, a maestro of cunning schemes and shady short-cuts to riches. To be called silly was far worse than the slaps in the face and kicks to the ankle administered by Zen’s underlings when their verbal skills failed them. He, Nicola Mantega, silly? He’d show these bastards who was silly, and in the process extricate himself from this nightmare. Summoning up what remained of his dignity, he informed his tormentors that he was prepared to talk, but only to their superior. They appeared dubious, maybe even disappointed, but various phone calls were made and forty minutes later Aurelio Zen appeared in the basement interrogation room. He looked even more exhausted and dispirited than Mantega, which gave the latter hope.

‘I want to make a deal,’ he announced in a decisive tone which suggested that the terms would be his, and slapped his right palm down hard on the battered desk which, with the stool on which he was perched, constituted the only furnishings in the small, stuffy room. Zen lit a cigarette, rubbed his eyes, coughed several times, then set the cigarette down on the back of Mantega’s hand. When the latter’s cries subsided and he had been forcibly reseated on the stool, Zen looked at him blearily.

‘So sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were an ashtray.’

Mantega was still reeling from the pain, and the thought of what might yet lie in store for him.

‘Why did you hurt me?’ he demanded, his voice on the brink of breaking down.

‘Why did your friends murder the American and mutilate that poor boy?’

‘What are you talking about? They’re not my — ’

Zen sprang to his feet, grabbed Mantega’s hair and tried to jerk his head back, but the fibres he was holding came away in his hand to reveal a gleaming bald pate.

‘And you want to make a deal with me?’ laughed Zen, tossing the toupee on the desk. ‘Well, the product had better be good, because the salesman certainly doesn’t impress much.’

‘It’s good, it’s good,’ mumbled Mantega. ‘And it’ll lead you to the people you really want.’

‘I’m listening.’

Mantega took a deep breath.

‘You know that helicopter that’s been circling round the valley? Everyone thinks it’s searching out locations for that film they’re supposed to be making here. But I happen to know what it’s really doing.’

‘Which is?’

‘Searching for buried treasure.’

‘I’m not interested in treasure hunts.’

‘Of course not, signore. Neither am I, and in any case it’s very unlikely to succeed. Which is why I’ve convinced Giorgio — ’

‘Ah, so you do know him,’ Zen murmured.

‘Only by that name, which may well be false. I don’t know his family name or where he’s from and I’ve never seen his face.’

‘What did you tell Giorgio?’

‘I suggested to him…’

‘When was this?’

‘Two nights ago.’

‘On the phone?’

‘In person.’

‘That’s a certain lie. You’ve never been out of sight of my surveillance team, and they reported no such meeting.’

Mantega smiled archly. He had finally scored a point.

‘Giorgio came to my house in the early hours of the morning. He knew that there was a police cordon there, but he managed to get through it without being seen. He grew up in the mountains hunting boar and wolves and told me that he can move more silently than a leaf falling from a tree.’

‘You just said that you’d never seen his face.’

‘He wore a mask.’

‘Well, it was certainly kind of him to run such risks to drop in on an old friend,’ Zen remarked sarcastically. ‘What did he have to say?’

‘He didn’t want to talk. He came to kill me.’

‘Why?’

‘He said he’d decided that I was of no further use to him, and a possible risk.’

Zen laughed and lit another cigarette.

‘Any chance of a coffee?’ he asked one of the other officers.

The man hesitated.

‘That place by the bus station,’ the other prompted.

‘Signor Mantega?’ Zen enquired.

‘ Un cappuccino scuro. Lots of sugar.’

When the officer had left on his errand, Zen turned his eyes back to the prisoner, who was eyeing the glowing tip of his cigarette nervously.

‘So Giorgio wanted to kill you. Good for him. Nevertheless, it’s clear that he also failed in this admirable endeavour. How did you talk your way out of it?’

Invigorated by the mere thought of coffee, Mantega overlooked these gross insults.

‘By offering him the chance to make a lot of money. Giorgio used to distribute drugs in this area, acting as an agent for one of the Reggio clans. Then he started using the product himself and the reggiani found themselves a new distributor. He had a costly habit to maintain, and whatever money he made on small local jobs went on crystal meth. That’s why he needed the Newman kidnapping to replenish his funds.’

‘But he didn’t even try to bring that product to market,’ Zen objected.

Mantega nodded dejectedly.

‘I know. I can’t understand it. Anyway, I knew he must be almost out of money, so I offered him the chance to co-operate on a hoax to prise a fortune out of these Americans who are searching for the tomb of Alaric. According to my sources, they are using a form of technology that can penetrate the surface of the earth to a certain depth and then analyse the results in order to reveal the presence of any structures or objects that may be buried there. So all we have to do, I told Giorgio — who was standing there with a knife in his hand, ready to cut my throat — is mock up something that will look to the radar like it might be a subterranean tomb. But when the Americans start digging, they’ll find that the supposed tomb has already been opened and contains nothing but boulders and rubble from the Busento in its winter spate. Che palle! Someone got there before them. Which is when I get in touch. Yes, I say, the treasure of Alaric was indeed discovered just a few years ago, but those responsible are having great difficulty selling it, being just a little local firm. What would you like and how much are you prepared to pay?’

The officer who had left returned bearing a tray with their coffees. Both Zen and Mantega emptied their plastic cups in one go.

‘And you expect them to believe you?’ Zen asked.

Mantega laughed for the first time. He sensed that he was gaining the upper hand in the exchange, besides which the caffeine, on a painfully empty stomach, kicked in like a rugby full back.

‘At the time, I was more worried about Giorgio believing me! Which he did, so at least I’d saved my life. But since you ask, dottore, I think that our story might very well be believed as long as it’s properly presented, which task will be in my capable hands. Treasure hunters don’t want to think that they’ve wasted years of their lives and millions of their money chasing the end of the rainbow, so they come preselected for a certain amount of credulity. Besides, what have we got to lose? If they don’t bite, we can walk away.’

‘And if they do bite?’

Mantega gestured largely.

‘We’ll offer them some decent fakes. It’s been done before, you know.’

Zen let his head sink into his hands. He looked utterly defeated.

‘All right, so that’s how you’re proposing to fool them,’ he said. ‘How are you proposing to fool me?’

This was the moment that Mantega had been waiting for.

‘You called me silly,’ he said, a little edge in his voice, ‘but I’m not silly enough to try and fool a man like you. I may or may not succeed in fooling the treasure hunters, but that’s just a sideshow, a means to an end, which is to fool Giorgio and hand him over to you.’

By now feeling fully empowered, Mantega allowed himself to crumple up and fold forward, his body language mirroring that of his opponent, always a good move in tough negotiations.

‘Giorgio wanted to kill me!’ he cried in an emphatic but muffled voice. ‘He broke into my house in the middle of the night, woke me from sleep and threatened to cut my throat! Thank God my beloved wife and sons weren’t there. But that man is a maniac, dottore. If he did it once, he may do it again. I won’t sleep soundly until he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for killing Pietro Calopezzati, and you are the only person who can achieve that. So what I’m proposing, Dottor Zen, is that you release me to act as the mediator between Giorgio and the Americans in the hoax that I’ve outlined. At some point in the ensuing negotiations, I will arrange a meeting at which Giorgio will be present and communicate the details of the time and place to you in advance, giving you plenty of time to prepare your men to move in and arrest him. What do you say?’

Shortly before noon the next day, Achille Pancrazi set off for Reggio di Calabria, seat of the regional government and of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale. He covered the two hundred kilometres in a little under an hour and a half, parked in a side-street near the museum and then killed the remaining time in a bar over a coffee and a shot of the local spirit flavoured with bergamot, the pungent, inedible citrus native to that part of Calabria. Professor Pancrazi did not normally drink before lunch, but today he felt a need to fortify himself.

At a quarter to two precisely he arrived at the museum and proceeded to the office of the assistant director he had spoken to earlier by phone.

‘I apologise for being late,’ he said once the ritual greetings and embraces had been concluded. ‘Roadworks on the autostrada. I was stuck in a tailback for almost an hour.’

The director smiled wearily.

‘After a while, you begin to wonder why the damn thing wasn’t built properly in the first place.’

Pancrazi returned an equally weary glance, but no reply. Both men knew perfectly well why the A3, like most high-investment construction projects in the south funded by the Italian government, hadn’t been built properly in the first place.

‘Anyway, I do hope it’s not too late,’ Pancrazi added apologetically. ‘You people must be wanting your lunch, but I can manage perfectly well on my own. As I said on the phone — ’

‘No, no! For you, professor, no problem at all. Please come with me.’

The director led him out into the main galleries, then down several flights of stairs and through various doors to the basement, which housed the museum’s reserve collection and workshops. They traversed long lanes flanked by rows of tall metal shelving on which the artefacts were stored, eventually reaching a more brightly lit area where four men in blue overalls were chatting.

‘Ready for lunch, boys?’ the director said. ‘Me too. Let me introduce Professor Achille Pancrazi from Cosenza University.’

There were polite murmurs and handshakes all round.

‘What was it you wanted to inspect again, professor?’ the director remarked. ‘Those pinakes whose authenticity and origin are still in dispute, I believe.’

‘Exactly,’ said Pancrazi. He shrugged with a certain embarrassment. ‘I’ve been asked to give a paper about that type of artefact in Stockholm next weekend and I realised yesterday that the topic of your recent find is almost certain to come up, so I’d better have another look to be sure I know what I’m talking about.’

‘Of course, of course. Marco will show you where they’re currently being stored. And then I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave you to find your own way out. Shame you couldn’t make it down here in time for lunch.’

One of the workmen led Pancrazi along the racks to a section where the thin terracotta votive tablets dedicated to the cult of Persephone in the Greek city of Locri were stored.

‘Listen,’ Pancrazi whispered conspiratorially. ‘This may take some time, and of course smoking is not allowed in here. Is there somewhere I might go and have a puff if the need arises?’

‘ Ma certo, professore!’

The man led him over to a door in the outer wall. Above it was a lighted sign reading ‘Fire Exit’.

‘Just push the bar and you’re standing in the loading dock area,’ the workman said. ‘Mind you hold the door open, though. Otherwise you’ll have to go all the way round to the front to get back in.’

‘But doesn’t the alarm sound when the door’s opened?’ Pancrazi asked.

The caretaker gave him a knowing smile, as between two addicts.

‘Supposed to, but we disable it during the day. As long as you don’t let the door close behind you while you’re out there, there’ll be no problem.’

He returned to join his fellows, and the whole group started to move off in the direction of lunch. Achille Pancrazi tracked their voices across the open space of the basement until they dwindled away up the staircase. After that, it took him about fifteen minutes to search the storage area and locate the items he was seeking, and another five to pack the ones he selected to serve as a suitable ransom for his son Emanuele in layers of newspaper and a further layer of bubble-wrap. He slipped them into the large briefcase he had brought with him and left the premises through the door that the workman had pointed out to him.

By the time his modified 737 finally touched down at wherever the fuck it was, Jake felt pretty well bummed. It wasn’t about the facilities. The Boeing Business Jet was a beauty, and having it all to himself was way cool. There was a regular king-size bed, a humungous TV with wrap-around sound, a flight attendant who wasn’t Jake’s type but was there when you needed her, plus satellite internet connection so he could keep up to speed with his online gaming. He’d even got to ride up front with the pilots for a while. But eleven hours was way too long to spend cooped up in a pressurised tube five miles above the ocean. Towards the end, Jake had found a leaflet that one of the cleaners must have left in a drawer of the desk in his living quarters. It was entitled Rectal Carcinoma and God’s Plan for You, and by then he was so bored that he’d read the whole freaking thing from start to finish. Linear reading! In treeware format! It was just too weird.

Then there’d been Madrona. As soon as she heard where he was going, she was like, ‘Iddly? I’ve always wanted to go to Iddly! It’s so romantic! Can I come, Jake, can I, can I?’ Luckily he’d been able to call her on the passport angle. Like three-quarters of her fellow citizens, Madrona didn’t have one, but it was still tough to convince her that that meant she couldn’t come along. Actually, Jake kind of agreed with her. The US was the only global superpower left in the game. If that didn’t mean Americans could go anywhere they damn well chose, showing up with a wad of dollars and everyone pleased to see them, what was the point? As his plane taxied to a halt on a stand away from the terminal, he wondered how much it would cost to just buy Italy and then lease it back to the Italians as a franchised vacation facility. That would solve a lot of problems.

No sooner had the metal staircase docked with the plane than up rolled some classy European saloon from which Martin Nguyen emerged, looking even more desiccated and reptilian than usual.

‘What’s new, Jake?’

‘Not much. Feeling kind of pixellated.’

Martin ushered him into the back of the car while the driver put his overnighter in the boot. Then they sped over to a gate in the perimeter fence, where the uniformed official barely glanced at the cover of Jake’s passport before waving them through.

‘How d’you manage that?’ asked Jake wonderingly.

‘VIP pull,’ Martin returned in a tight, brisk tone. ‘Getting back into the States is going to be a whole lot harder, but that’s the price we pay for honouring freedom and keeping our homeland secure from terrorists.’

‘I guess.’

A couple of minutes later, they were on the autostrada. The airport had been built on an area of flat ground — as they so often were — but pretty soon the highway started to climb up into some spectacular scenery, different shades of green over some nice chunks of rock and not a building in sight. Jake just knew there had to be some great hiking, camping and off-road trails up in there. Plus this driver could really drive! Martin was yakking away in that clipped tone of his about how the Aeroscan data looked promising, there was definitely something in the Busento riverbed that couldn’t be any kind of geological formation, he’d inspected the site that morning and it was really isolated, they should be able to get to work tonight without being observed, the machinery had been hired and the Iraqi labourers were good to go -

‘Hey!’ said Jake.

The monologue ceased.

‘How long from here to the hotel?’

‘Fifteen minutes?’ said Nguyen. ‘Twenty max, then at least six hours before we get moving. Get some sleep, Jake. You’ll need it.’

‘Bullshit. I’ve been stuck on that goddamn plane for what feels like my whole life. Now I’m here, I want to play. Tell this guy to get off the interstate, head up into the hills, and show me what this baby will do.’

‘But Jake — ’

‘Hey, it’s on my tab! Why can’t I have a taste of what I bought?’

So Martin calls Tom Newman and passes on Jake’s instructions, then Tom calls the driver and tells him what the guys in the back want, and the driver confirms that several times just to make absolutely sure that whoever’s nuts around here it’s not him.

‘Fast for fun?’ he says in porno English.

Martin slips him a fifty-euro note.

‘ Mas rapido possibile.’

‘Huh?’ says Jake.

‘I’m a whore for languages.’

And then they’re off the gentle gradients and cambered surface of the autostrada, plunging through dense thickets of chestnuts and oaks and maples and beeches on a narrow track that looks like it was built some time back in the Stone Age, rough-surfaced a century ago and then left to rot, up impossibly steep inclines and round reverse curves tight enough to fit in your pocket, using the whole road, horn blaring, astonishing views of the valley below and the mountains opposite snatched away in an instant, a controlled four-wheel skid every twenty seconds to position the car for yet another gut-wrenching acceleration, the engine finally getting into its stride after all that tootling around town, and Jake laughing like a maniac.

‘Forget the goddamn treasure, this is worth the trip right here!’

And Martin goes to reply, only his mouth is filled with something he thinks is vomit and hopes isn’t blood.

The Italian Republic — res publica, public stuff as distinct from family and personal concerns — may be compared to the planet upon a small portion of whose surface it is located. Superficially all is flux and flow, evolution and extinction, crisis and catastrophe, but this flashy biosphere amounts to no more than an infinitesimal fraction of the entire mass. People talk loosely about saving the earth, but that celestial body is at no more risk from the worst that man can do than is its metaphorical equivalent from the whims and wiles of whichever species currently occupies top spot in the political food chain. Immutable, inaccessible and to all intents and purposes eternal, the vast deadweight of Italian bureaucracy goes spinning blindly on its way with utterly predictable momentum, indifferent to the weather outside.

In his private life, Aurelio Zen had often had cause to bemoan this fact, after being brought to the brink of tears or fury, or both, by the time and effort required to obtain — always in person at the anagrafe office of the local town council, and after a very long wait unless you had some strings to pull — the latest addition to the paper trail that follows every Italian from birth to death. Professionally, though, it was a godsend. This or that politician might currently be in or out, such and such a party reformed or deformed, the perpetual construction site of government landscaped with olive trees or houses of liberty, but the number of everyday events for which official documentation was required remained sufficiently large and various to provide the basis for a detailed biographical sketch of every citizen.

This had been even more true under the Fascist regime, and since Calabria was largely spared the bombardments that had destroyed archives in other parts of Italy and the post-war government had promptly rehired Mussolini’s officially disgraced myrmidons to curate the surviving ones, unravelling the history of the Intrieri clan proved much less difficult than might have been the case elsewhere. Caterina had been born in February 1926 in San Giovanni in Fiore, the third of nine children, and her death from natural causes was certified by the authorities of Spezzano della Sila on the sixth of December 1944, eight days after the birth of Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati in the same comune. By the 1960s, the ranks of the Intrieri family in Calabria had been depleted both by death and by internal emigration to construction jobs created by the building boom in the north. Only three were still registered as resident in the province of Cosenza: two of them middle-aged women, the other a cousin of Caterina’s who was now almost ninety.

So that trail was dead. Zen had never put much credence in it. He knew that Maria had told him the truth, but had also lied to him. What he didn’t know was where the one blurred into the other, so the Intrieri story had to be followed up. The girl had indeed died ‘of natural causes’ when Maria had said, but there was no objective evidence whatsoever that the baby who had come into the world at the same time had been hers. Caterina had been the elder and probably the dominant of the two friends, and might well have made up a dramatic story to enliven their wretched lives in that cold, lifeless mansion. Besides, why should the Intrieri murder one of their own? Unless, of course, they hadn’t known that he was. Zen had the sense of having strayed into the marshlands which infested the border between the laguna morta and laguna viva in his native Venice, a treacherous soup where you could neither stand nor sail, only be mired and dragged down.

He was saved, temporarily at least, by the appearance of the ever eager and confident Natale Arnone.

‘Just an update on Signor Mantega,’ he said, seeing the documents spread out on Zen’s desk. ‘It’s not urgent. I’ll come back.’

‘No, let me have it,’ Zen replied with a yawn. ‘I’ve had enough of deciphering words written with steel nibs dipped into pots of condensed ink and then badly blotted. Is our friend the notaio behaving himself?”

Nicola Mantega had been released at ten o’clock that morning with very stringent conditions attached to his provisional liberty. He had been given a mobile phone whose outward appearance was identical to his own Nokia model, but whose innards had been stripped out and replaced with the basic telephonic equipment, minus the camera and other gadgets, the extra space being used to house a GPS chip and a spare battery. He was to keep the phone on his person at all times and to use it exclusively for all his communications, both personal and professional. Once a minute, the chip called in to report its location to police headquarters, while all calls to or from the phone were automatically monitored.

‘He hasn’t put a foot wrong so far,’ Arnone reported. ‘He drove straight home, then phoned his wife, who’s on holiday in Germany, and told her to stay there until further notice. She didn’t want to — something about she and the kids having outstayed their welcome with her sister-in-law — but the suspect told her to go to a hotel if she couldn’t take it any more. Whatever happened, he was on no account to be disturbed at home until further notice.’

Zen smiled wanly. If he played his cards right, Mantega might yet get off with a short prison sentence for aiding and abetting Peter Newman’s kidnappers, but his wife would never forget being ordered around in that high-handed manner.

‘He spent the rest of the morning in his office making a number of calls to cancel meetings or delay deadlines on work that he apparently has in hand. Several of the men he called had obviously heard of his arrest, but he told them that it had all been a huge mistake and an embarrassment for the police which he had talked his way out of in no time.’