End games

‘No calls to Giorgio?’ asked Zen.

‘One, after lunch, to the house we have under surveillance in San Giovanni. Mantega left a brief message giving his new number, which he said was clean, and telling Giorgio to call him as soon as possible.’

‘And has he?’

‘Not so far. But he did get a call from young Signor Newman to say that some package had arrived. Mantega tried to set up a dinner appointment for tonight to discuss it, but Newman said he couldn’t get away because he’s working for that Oriental representing the American film company, I can’t recall his name — ’

‘Neither can I, and I can’t pronounce it either. Let’s call him Fu Manchu.’

‘Who?’

‘Before your time. Carry on.’

‘Well, Newman told him that Signor Manchu’s boss had arrived from the United States and he couldn’t get away, so they agreed to meet at Mantega’s office tomorrow morning. That was a lie, however. In reality, our young American has a date with the Digos agent Kodra. She set that up as per your instructions, sir.’

Zen nodded vaguely.

‘Good, good. She doesn’t have to sleep with him of course, but… I have a feeling there’s something going on here that I don’t know about, never mind understand. Several things, in fact. Maybe even many.’

He looked up at the young officer.

‘To tell the truth, Arnone, I don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But of course I didn’t say that.’

‘No, sir. And I didn’t hear it.’

‘ Bravo.’

Outside the unopenable pane of toughened glass, a continuous raft of cloud seemingly as solid as concrete stretched away featurelessly as far as the eye could see.

‘It sounds suspiciously as though Mantega’s cooperating,’ Zen remarked finally. ‘On the other hand, I wouldn’t put it past him to try and do some private enterprise on the side. I also have a feeling that the thunderstorm is about to burst, and while my reasoning faculty may be falling apart I still trust my intuition, or experience, or whatever you want to call it. What else have I to count on?’

It was a rhetorical question, but Arnone answered it.

‘Fear.’

Zen looked at him but did not reply. Arnone coughed in an embarrassed way.

‘If you will permit the observation, sir, I think you underestimate yourself. My father always said, “ La paura guarda le vigne, non la siepe.” Fear guards the vineyard, not the hedge. And I know that you are feared.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, sir. Because, with all due respect, you’re not one of us. So no one knows what you might decide to do next. Sir.’

Zen nodded.

‘That’s logical. To be honest, there are times when I terrify myself.’

Given the constraints on Tom’s time, his date had suggested a place in Rende. She’d also told him that her name was Mirella, but hadn’t asked for his.

The initial call had come while Tom was stuck out on the fringes of town in the yard of a company that rented construction equipment, clarifying contractual details between the supercilious jerk in charge and an increasingly impatient Martin Nguyen. He couldn’t talk right then, but had promised to call Mirella back as soon as possible.

‘Who was that?’ demanded Nguyen.

‘Oh, just another bureaucratic thing they need me to do before they can release my dad’s cadaver.’

‘Bullshit,’ Nguyen remarked succinctly, but didn’t follow up the comment. He’d been looking kind of unwell ever since fetching his boss in from the airport, not nearly as feisty as usual and occasionally clutching his stomach and crunching down pills.

When they finally got back to the hotel, the head honcho — some Microsoft millionaire named Jake — was still sleeping off his jet lag. Nguyen went over to six short but brawny guys who were lounging around the lobby as if expecting to get thrown out any minute. They looked Italian but didn’t speak it, so Tom’s services were not required when Nguyen took them off to a conference room he’d booked for their briefing. Apparently one of them understood English and would pass on Nguyen’s instructions to the others in their own language, which might as well have been Arabic for all that Tom could make any sense of it. Which left him free to call Mirella back.

The fact that she’d got in touch at all astonished him. He’d assumed that the striking young woman that he’d twice made a clumsy attempt to hit on had no interest in him whatsoever. She certainly hadn’t provided him with the slightest encouragement on the occasions when they’d met, purely by chance, and he had more or less forgotten her, except he hadn’t. And now here she was saying she could see him for a couple of hours that evening if he was free.

Strictly speaking, of course, he wasn’t. Martin Nguyen had given him firm instructions to be on call and ready to leave at five minutes’ notice, as a result of which he had already turned down Nicola Mantega’s invitation to a working dinner that evening to discuss what Tom knew about the apparent discovery of Alaric’s tomb. On the other hand, he’d gathered from Nguyen that the next stage of the operation wasn’t going to happen until well after dark, and hadn’t even been told what it was or whether his presence was required. So as long as he could get back to the hotel quickly if Nguyen summoned him, there was no reason to sit twiddling his thumbs in his room when he could be romancing — what a beautiful name! — Mirella.

They’d agreed to meet at seven-thirty, but Tom got there twenty minutes early to check the place out. A bank of thick thunderclouds squatted on the city like one of those unimaginably huge alien spaceships in that movie. A sense of oppression was thick on the ground. The venue turned out to be a garish pizzeria alongside an intersection just a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. It looked borderline okay, and the alternatives were even more uninspiring, as indeed was the whole area. There were the vestiges of a straggling roadside town now bypassed by the autostrada, but it mostly consisted of dormitory apartment blocks whose commuting owners ate at home, and bars and fast food outlets for students from the 1970s university slab stretching away like the Great Wall of China across the line of hills to the west.

When Tom arrived, there were a dozen students there, hanging out rather than actually eating, their voices struggling to be heard above a barrage of rap music sweetened by Italian vowels. The decor was upscale public lavatory, only with bleached-out halogen lighting, mirrors just about everywhere except the floor, and clunky plastic tables and chairs in primary colours like a play-set for giant toddlers. That was okay. Tom had already figured out that there were few things to touch Italian taste at its best and none to equal it at its worst.

He ordered a beer and found himself wondering what Mirella was going to wear. The two outfits he had seen her in so far had been so different that they didn’t provide much of a clue. In fact, thinking back, Tom realised that almost everything had been different on each occasion: the style of her hair, the make-up she wore, even her body language. It was almost as if the person he had seen on those two occasions had not in fact been the same but a pair of identical twins, structurally similar but each with a completely different personality. He smiled to himself at the absurd thought. Anyway, identical twins might just about be possible, but triplets would be pushing it, so pretty soon he’d get a take on who she really was — or rather, who she wanted him to think she was. Tom found this final insight rather disturbing. I’d never have had an idea like that back home, he thought. This place is complexing me. He wasn’t sure whether he was entirely comfortable with that.

The answer to his question about her appearance proved to be yet another enigma, so different from either of her previous personae that Tom didn’t even recognise her until she sat down at his table. Beneath a bulky blue padded coat she was wearing a prim suit in a clashing shade of muddy brown. No make-up, no jewellery, her hair drawn fiercely back and bunched in a tight bun. All in all, she looked like a small-town dental hygienist dolled up for a tough job interview in the big city. Guess I’m not going to get laid tonight, thought Tom, although under the circumstances there wouldn’t have been any chance of that anyway.

‘You seem surprised to see me,’ Mirella said.

Tom didn’t have a ready answer, so he just smiled.

‘Now then,’ she went on, ‘you told me your name on the phone but I didn’t understand it.’

‘It’s Tom. Thomas. Tommaso.’

‘Tommaso.’

He loved the way she lingered on the double consonant, caressing it with her lips as though reluctant to let it go.

‘ Un bel nome.’

A surly servitor appeared at their table. Mirella ordered some kind of pizza. Tom said he would have the same.

‘So you’re staying out here?’

Tom nodded.

‘Just around the corner. The Rende International Residence.’

‘Oh, you must be rich! I’ve only been there once, when one of my friends got married. They held the wedding reception there. Isn’t it very expensive?’

‘Well, I’m not paying. I’ve been hired by a friend of my father’s who’s working for an American film company. They’re planning to make a movie here, only he doesn’t speak Italian so he needs me to translate for him. Not my normal line of work, but you know what they say — another day, another dolore. I mean dollaro.’

‘Films! Oddio, che bello! I’ve always wanted to work in films.’

‘Well, you’ve certainly got the looks for it!’

What a lame, pathetic, dumbfuck line, he thought, but she seemed pleased by the compliment.

‘It isn’t as glamorous as it sounds,’ Tom went on quickly, with what he hoped was just the right touch of sophisticated world-weariness. ‘But what about you? Do you work?’

Mirella responded with a light, airy explosion of breath and upward dab of her startling eyes that perfectly expressed disgust, contempt and fatalistic resignation.

‘An office job with the provincial authorities. It’s very secure, very boring and I know precisely how much I’ll be earning when I reach retirement age.’

The food came.

‘So what do you do?’ Mirella asked after scarfing down two slabs of pizza with admirable greed and concentration.

‘I’m a chef. Trained, qualified and with good references. I’ve worked at some celebrity restaurants in the United States and now I’m thinking of moving here and opening up my own place. This is where my roots are, after all.’

‘So you said. What’s your family name?’

Tom paused over a long swallow of beer. If he told her the truth, she would immediately make the connection to his murdered father, who had inflicted enough damage in years gone by. Tom did not intend to let him strangle this relationship at birth from beyond the grave.

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ he said. ‘My father’s family was certainly Calabrian, but they changed their name when they moved to America and I haven’t had time to follow up that angle. These film people work you pretty hard! I’ll need to do some research in the archives. Perhaps you could help with that, Mirella. Anyway, we can talk about that some other time. In the end, I’m more interested in my future than my past.’

‘The essential is to keep them in balance.’

And so it went on. They continued to make pleasant small talk, but the conversation refused to get hot. The place itself didn’t help — it had by now been invaded by a gang of languid adolescents wearing baggy jeans with the crotch down by their knees — but Tom also sensed an inner reticence in Mirella, a desire to avoid moving towards intimacy. That was typically Calabrian, of course, and for that matter he himself had been parsimonious with the truth, but it perhaps explained why he found himself being rather more frank than he had intended when she asked her next question, as if to show her the way, to demonstrate that he was prepared to risk trusting her.

‘But I’ve also heard that this movie you’re talking about is not going to happen. Didn’t you see that interview on television with Luciano Aldobrandini? He claimed the whole thing was a fraud!’

Tom sighed theatrically.

‘He may be right. Listen, Mirella. This is in the strictest confidence, but there’s another project involved.’

By now she had finished eating, in her graceful, dedicated, methodical way, and was all attention.

‘What’s that?’

‘They think they’ve found Alaric’s tomb.’

She laughed then, for the first time.

‘You’re joking!’

Tom shrugged urbanely.

‘I doubt that they are. There’s a lot of money involved, and these people are heavyweights when it comes to business. The head of the whole outfit flew in today by private jet and they’re planning to…’

He stopped himself just in time, and covered up by reaching for his cigarettes, then dolefully replacing them.

‘I forgot, no smoking now!’

Mirella regarded him in a way he wished to prolong for the rest of his earthly existence.

‘There’s a bar next door,’ she said. ‘Let’s have our coffees there and smoke outside.’

He was about to answer when his mobile woke like a colicky baby. It was Martin Nguyen and he didn’t sound happy.

‘Where the fuck are you? I called your room and there was no answer.’

‘Slipped out to buy some cigarettes, Mr Nguyen. I’ll be there in a few minutes.’

He threw much too much money on the table and, when they were both standing, grasped Mirella’s arm for a moment, just above the elbow, and pulled her towards him.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘My boss wants me back right away. But listen…’

He tried to meet her eyes, but they were averted. It was then that, for the first time, he smelt her skin, a faint caprine odour like mild goat’s cheese, earthy and creamy. But this smell wasn’t about food.

‘ Grazie per la bella serata,’ Mirella said, disentangling herself effortlessly.

‘May I call you again?’ Tom found himself saying.

She smiled vaguely, and was gone.

Jake was woken by a call from Madrona, wanting to know if he’d got there okay. She’d been worried about him, she said. Madrona worried about everything — getting pregnant, not getting pregnant, global warming, bird flu, you name it. It was one of the many things Jake found cute about her, although he sometimes kind of sensed, like a chill draught on the back of the neck, that it might turn out to be a real ball-buster later on.

He calmed her down and then jack-knifed out of bed. The clock said some crazy-ass time, but Jake had already figured that the way to handle this trip was like some gaming environment you’re unfamiliar with. He knew he would need to accumulate a lot more experience points before he was fully up to speed, but one key factor was that the time on the clocks here was game time. Not real time, which Madrona had said was like midday, but the right time in the game. Same with everything else. This hotel Martin had booked him into wouldn’t have made the cut as a second-class casino in Reno, but in the game scenario it was hot shit. That was okay. Jake could flex with the best.

He dug out his laptop, got online and slipped effortlessly into various roles, doing damage, saving the world, getting killed a couple of times. Then he checked out Madrona’s blog — bunch of bitching about how she was having a really heavy period this month — sent a chatroom up in flames, cruised a few porno sites till he found one that rang his bells, jerked off, took a shower and got dressed. Round about ten, game time, he rode the marble-floored lift down to the lobby, feeling totally mellowed out. Martin Nguyen was in the bar nursing a glass of what looked like iced tea but probably wasn’t. Jake was tempted to make an edgy remark about him needing something to settle his delicate stomach. He himself didn’t either drink or smoke. Hell, he didn’t even smoke.

‘Dude,’ said Jake.

Martin grunted. He still didn’t look that hot, but Jake had to admire the way, when he’d got nauseous in the car on those bends, he’d just held the puke in his mouth and then swallowed it down again long enough to tell the driver to pull over.

‘Where can I get a menu?’

Martin took another gulp of whisky.

‘Kitchen’s closed.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Place is run like a mom and pop corner store. Dinner’s seven till nine-thirty, then fuck you till breakfast.’

‘Damn. I could really use some foie gras with PBJ.’

Martin grabbed his mouth real fast.

‘Got invited to the opening of this new place in Belltown couple of days back,’ Jake went on. ‘That’s their signature dish. Pan-seared foie gras with peanut butter and jelly. Awesome combo. What’s the food like here?’

‘Kind of an Italian feel,’ Martin replied in a highly stressed tone. ‘I’ll have Tom get them to fix you a sandwich or something just as soon as the little shit shows up.’

‘Tom?’

‘Pete Newman’s boy. I hired him to be my mouthpiece. He claims to be out buying smokes, but I heard him on the phone earlier schmoozing some bimbo. I’ll fire him once we’ve figured out what the deal is on this tomb site.’

He signalled the waiter to freshen up his drink. Then he caught Jake’s disapproving look.

‘Inappropriate, huh? Yeah, I guess you’re right. But what we’re going to be doing later on tonight is even more inappropriate. Smashing our way into a world heritage site and stealing priceless historic artefacts which are government property?’

He waved largely at their bleak, bedazzled surroundings.

‘You think Italian hotels suck? Imagine what their jails are like.’

‘What’s the deal with those Iraqis?’

‘I’ll call them in once we get there. My biggest challenge has been getting the equipment to the site. It’s not like the towelheads don’t know how to operate the machines. They’re Halliburton trained, for God’s sake. But the rules of the road over in Iraq are basically down to what size gun you carry, so I couldn’t just turn them loose in the traffic over here. Apart from anything else, the poor fucks would be scared shitless. They still haven’t gotten over being told that they can’t even carry side arms. In the end, I fixed to have the hardware delivered by truck to a disused quarry near the site. Don’t worry, it’ll all come together just fine, unless — ’

‘Here I am, Mr Nguyen!’

It was Tom, breathless and superficially solicitous, but looking way more pleased with himself than the purchase of a pack of smokes warranted. Martin slipped him a fifty and told him to pass it on to the right people and get Jake fed.

‘I read that material you emailed me,’ Martin said to Jake when they were alone again. ‘Let’s just see if I’ve got the story straight. I mean, if we get arrested, then I want to know what it is I’m supposed to lie about.’

‘You mean like talk me through it? Might challenge my attention span. Can’t you do me a PowerPoint presentation?’

‘I don’t have the facilities for that, Jake. I’ll try and keep it brief. Just listen up and tell me if I’ve got anything wrong.’

‘Sure, Mart. You’re the boss.’

Nguyen ignored this crack.

‘The material you sent me, plus some follow-up research I did online, tells me that we’re looking for the Great Menorah, one of the sacred vessels of the original temple in Jerusalem. It’s of cast gold, hollow within, with a hexagonal base and seven branches representing the planets plus the sun, and weighs in at about one hundred pounds. It stood beside the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple and was captured by the Romans when they sacked the city two thousand years ago.’

‘Correct.’

‘So the Romans take it back with them. We know that for sure because there’s an image of Jewish slaves carrying it in the triumphal procession carved on the Arch of Titus, after which it was stashed away in one of their temples. Seems they really hated the Jews. It wasn’t enough to beat them in battle, they had to steal their nutty one-god religion. Anyway, three and a half centuries later it’s the Romans’ turn to get conquered. Alaric cleans the city out, then heads south and ends up dying in this fleapit. His Goth homies bury him under the river with all the goodies he’d plundered, then do a total deniability with extreme prejudice operation on the work force.’

‘You got it.’

Martin knocked back his drink.

‘Let’s go outside,’ he told Jake. ‘I need to smoke.’

They stepped out into the muscular embrace of the night air. Thunder rumbled and stumbled and then a fragmentation bomb exploded overhead, showering huge drops of water on the patio and the parched lawns, hedges and trees, raising a cool, sensuous freshness that reeked of growth and decay.

‘Wow!’ said Jake. ‘They do like weather here too?’

‘So if the story about Alaric is true,’ Martin resumed, ‘then there must be a ton of other valuable stuff in the tomb, worth probably billions, supposing you could find a buyer. But we’re not interested in the money, just the menorah, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Why? Are you Jewish?’

Jake grinned.

‘Are bears Catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods?’

‘Okay, okay! Sorry I asked. It’s just that what we’re going to be doing from here on in is very high-risk. Are you sure you want to be there tonight, Jake? If anything goes wrong, I might be able to talk my way out of it. I’m just an employee, but you’re the mandante, as they say here. Might be smarter to stay here at the hotel and then cut back to your jet and get the hell out if the flares go up.’

‘No way. I’ve been waiting over a year for this moment. Chickening out now would be like not showing up for your honeymoon.’

‘Or your funeral.’

‘Don’t let that motion sickness thing get to you, Mart.’

Tom Newman sidled up to them.

‘Sorry to intrude, guys, but your food’s on the table. Crostini rossi piccanti, caciocavallo ai ferri, zuppa di finocchi. Best they could do at this hour.’

‘Cool,’ Jake replied cordially. ‘I just love ethnic food.’

It was in the small hours of the morning, about ten past four, when Nicola Mantega finally heard from Giorgio. So did the police technicians who were monitoring the new phone that Mantega had been given, and as a result the call was immediately traced to a public phone in Cerenzia, about ten kilometres east of San Giovanni in Fiore but with easy access to the superstrada. When a police car arrived twenty minutes later there was no one about, and it was unlikely that anyone in the town had seen Giorgio come or go. Nevertheless, he had been terse.

‘They moved in during the night with heavy equipment. Dug around a bit, took a look at the rocks inside, then left in a hurry.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I was watching. Oh, and I hear you got arrested and then released a few hours later. I hope you didn’t make a deal.’

‘Of course not! They simply had no evidence against me, so I — ’

‘I’ll kill you if I have to, Nicoletta. Whether you’re behind bars or walking the streets makes no difference. Remember that in the days to come and honour our agreement. If anything goes wrong, you’re a dead man whatever happens to me.’

The phrase kept recurring to Mantega as he drove into Cosenza. Sei un morto. That was how the shattered trunk of the man he had known as Peter Newman was invariably described in the media: ‘dressed like a corpse’. Giorgio might not be as powerful a figure as he liked to make out, but he was crazy. The thing about crazy people was that you never had the slightest idea what they were going to do next, any more than they did.

Tom Newman appeared at nine o’clock sharp. He looked terrible: pallid, exhausted and depressed. Since his father’s death had been in Mantega’s mind, it occurred to him that the boy might finally have realised the full horror of what had happened. But when he suggested that they adjourn to a bar for a restorative coffee and brioche, the next thing he knew Tom was standing in the street waving enthusiastically to an attractive young woman.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Oh, just a friend,’ Tom replied airily.

Over their coffees, Mantega elaborated at some length on what fools the police had made of themselves by arresting him the day before. It was vital to get this idea across to the americani. The last thing Mantega wanted was for them to suspect that they might be getting involved with someone complicit in criminal enterprises, especially since they were. Tom made sympathetic noises, but his attention was evidently wandering off in directions that Mantega couldn’t identify.

‘So, I understand that the package has arrived,’ he said once they were back in his office. ‘Am I to understand that your employers have succeeded where so many previous efforts have failed? Have they indeed located the site where Alaric the Goth was buried?’

His tone was studiously jocular if not ironical, but the young man’s response was an abrupt return to his earlier mood of sullen gloom.

‘Hell exists, but it may be empty,’ he said.

‘Scusami?’

‘They’ve found what they think is Alaric’s tomb, only when they dug it out, all that was there was a circle of stone walling filled with river rock. So now they’re thinking it must have been discovered earlier and all the stuff looted and they’re packing up to leave on their private jet this afternoon. The only question is whether I go with them.’

‘Why would you want to do that?’ murmured Mantega. ‘Judging by the encounter I just witnessed in the street, you seem to be doing quite nicely back in your ancestral home. My congratulations! The only problem now is to find a way in which you can support yourself here and enjoy to the full the ripe fruit of our soaring peaks and fertile valleys, so to speak. I know that you have ideas about opening a restaurant, but that sort of venture requires a lot of money to be done successfully.’

He leant forward and gazed at Tom intently.

‘Luckily for you, I have an idea. Some three or four years ago, I was approached by a certain party with a very unusual proposition.’

Mantega broke off and looked around cautiously.

‘You understand that I am speaking now in the strictest confidence,’ he went on in a conspiratorial undertone. ‘Nothing of what I say must be repeated beyond the four walls of this room. Agreed?’

Tom jerked his body in a spasm combining a shrug and a nod.

‘The individual’s name need not concern us,’ Mantega continued. ‘Suffice it to say that his story was so incredible that I didn’t even bother hearing him out to the end. On the contrary, I laughed in his face, told him in no uncertain terms not to bother me with such nonsense again and showed him the door.’

Mantega leant still nearer to Tom.

‘But after what you have just told me, I’m now asking myself if that wasn’t perhaps the biggest mistake that I’ve ever made in my life!’

He straightened up again, brisk and businesslike, marshalling the facts in his mind before proceeding.

‘This man claimed that by using advanced technological equipment called ground-penetrating radar, mounted on the back of a four-wheel-drive vehicle during the dry season when there’s no more than a trickle of water in the Busento, he and his associates had located the tomb of Alaric and then returned with mechanical diggers, cracked the vault and plundered the contents.’

He paused to let this sensational statement sink in. Tom Newman’s reaction was minimal, but at least he appeared to be listening.

‘The reason this person approached me, according to him, was that having got his hands on those untold treasures, he had belatedly realised that they were almost impossible to dispose of at a profit. None of the items concerned could be sold legally without a validated provenance and the necessary documentation. On the other hand, he was understandably reluctant to melt them down and sell them for the value of the raw materials. He therefore hoped that I could either arrange the necessary paperwork, or help him locate a potential purchaser who would overlook such tedious details.’

Mantega shot his visitor a glance. Tom was still listening, but he didn’t seem particularly interested.

‘So you’re saying that there’s someone around here who has the stuff that my guys were looking for stashed away in his basement or something?’

Mantega wiped the air with his hands forcefully.

‘I absolutely do not say that! Apart from anything else, I have had no contact with the man in question since that occasion several years ago. Even supposing his claims to have been true, there is no telling what he may have decided to do with the treasure in the meantime. But since, according to your account, the tomb has indeed been opened and cleaned out by someone at some stage, there is just a possibility that the artefacts it contained are still in existence, located not far from where we are now sitting, and in the hands of someone whom I can contact at any moment with one phone call. That’s all.’

He got up and strode to the window, where he stood for a moment looking pensively down at the street.

‘So?’ Tom demanded.

Mantega turned back to him with a loud laugh.

‘Quite right! Your bella ignota seems to be awaiting you below, so let us by all means wrap this up speedily.’

He started to walk back, then stopped and clutched his forehead.

‘Here, my friend, we move into the realm of the purely hypothetical,’ he pronounced, in a manner suggesting that he was perfectly at home in this abstruse sphere. ‘But since I note with pleasure that your grasp of the subjunctive has improved markedly since our initial meeting, let us suppose, purely for the sake of argument, that the person whom I mentioned earlier were still in possession of Alaric’s fabled treasure in its original form. Let us further suppose that certain other persons might wish to acquire one or more items for an agreed price, having of course inspected samples of the merchandise and had them authenticated by an independent expert of their own choice. Should any or all of this prove to be the case, then given the language problem and the need for absolute confidentiality, you — ’

He flung out a dramatic digit in Tom’s direction.

‘- would in effect be the necessary and sole mediator between the interested parties. As such, you should in my professional opinion both expect and demand a percentage of the sale price.’

Tom got to his feet and walked over to the window, positioning himself where his host had stood earlier.

‘It is her, isn’t it?’ remarked Mantega. ‘I hope she’s waiting for you. Rather than for me, I mean.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Tom said earnestly, turning back to face him. ‘Last I heard, you wanted me to collaborate on this business because you had ethical issues with this priceless Calabrian heritage site being despoiled and the contents exported by my employers. Now you’re telling me that I can make a lot of money on the side by facilitating the sale of some or all of the treasure to those very same people. Is it just me, or is there something here that doesn’t quite add up?’

Mantega smiled broadly.

‘Ah, Signor Tommaso! Your grasp of the verbal subjunctive may have improved, but you evidently haven’t yet understood that in Calabria life itself is subjunctive. Reality here has always been so harsh that we have by necessity learnt to content ourselves with the possible, the desirable and the purely imaginary.’

He went over to Tom and grasped his arm. The young man flinched, a startled look in his distant eyes. Too bad, thought Mantega. It was about time for young Tommasino to forget the American culture of crisp deals and binding handshakes and learn the intricate round-dance of male power courtship here in the south.

‘Everything I said the other day was utterly sincere,’ he declared. ‘Supposing that Alaric’s horde of treasure has indeed been found, my principal object is to secure whatever may be secured for the public good of this province, and indeed the whole nation.’

He released his grip on the other man’s arm in favour of a more flexible choreography, punctuating his remarks with intense rhetorical gestures like someone signing for the deaf.

‘But how can that be achieved? I know for a fact that the man who came to see me cares nothing for such selfless aspirations. He wants money, only money, and unless he gets it the historic artefacts from that burial site will without doubt be dispersed if not destroyed. It’s like a kidnapping! Only he knows where they are, which is certainly not in his house, or anywhere associated with him. But if your employers can be persuaded to ransom one of the items that he has seized at a sufficiently high price, it is possible that I may be able to convince him, by a mixture of cajolery and threats, that his interests are best served by taking the money on offer and handing over the rest of the loot to the authorities, rather than having me denounce him to the police.’

Breaking his tense pose, he relaxed with a fluid gesture of his right hand.

‘There will undoubtedly be some personal danger involved. I know this man to be both violent and unpredictable. Nevertheless, I ask nothing for myself but the satisfaction of having served my people. You, on the other hand, are a returning fellow-countryman, un immigrante, and it is only right that your return fare should be paid by those who neither know nor care about these matters so dear to us.’

He waved helplessly.

‘All this may well come to nothing, of course. But we owe it to ourselves and to our common heritage to try. Please, return to your employers and tell them what I have told you. Emphasise that samples of the merchandise will be provided for validation under whatever circumstances they may demand. If they show the slightest interest, then I’ll get in touch with my contact as soon as I hear from you. After that, matters should move very quickly.’

Mantega grinned broadly, as though mocking his own fervour.

‘But not a word to your girlfriend, mind. Poor women! They only have one thing to sell, but for us the possibilities are endless.’

A terrible thing had occurred. For the first time in his life that he could recall, rare periods of illness aside, Aurelio Zen couldn’t face the prospect of lunch.

Until now, this quasi-sacred Italian rite had been the high point of his working day, the central pillar that supported the whole edifice. Zen was not greedy, but given that he had to eat anyway he preferred to do so as well as possible. In every single one of his numerous postings all over the country down the years he had always succeeded, after a few days, in tracking down a restaurant or trattoria that satisfied his needs. But not in Cosenza, and the reason was clear. The city was so small that most people went home for lunch, and so far off the tourist trail that there was little or no passing trade. Good restaurants did exist, but they only served dinner and Sunday lunch. Moreover, Natale Arnone’s remark about his being feared had given Zen an uneasy feeling that if he returned to one of his usual haunts the food would not only be unpalatable but one of the staff might have spat in the tomato sauce curdling in his dish of pasta.

Nevertheless, he was hungry and the day was not too hot, so he decided to take advantage of the power which had created that fear to do something that he hadn’t done for years. He called up a car from the pool and had himself driven to the finest gastronomia in town, where he ordered a varied selection of picnic foods, and then to the densely wooded gardens of the Villa Communale up in the old city. He told the driver to return in one hour precisely and wandered off along the path beneath massive chestnut and ilex trees until he found a suitable bench in a patch of sunlight mitigated by the canopy of verdure above, with a glorious panoramic view across the valley of the Crati river to the western slopes of the Sila massif.

For the next half-hour he sat there in perfect solitude, savouring a selection of antipasti, air-cured ham and salami from the mountains before him, a sharp sheep’s cheese, chunks of crusty wholewheat bread baked in a wood-fired oven, and half a bottle of a very tolerable rose. Apart from birdsong, the only sounds were distant honks and hoots from the valley far below him. When his hunger was assuaged, he lit a cigarette — another plus for this establishment — and finished the wine along with the remaining dried tomatoes sott’olio, chewy russet roundels delivering an intensity of flavour which forced Zen to concede that this Aztec import might be good for something after all.

When he had finished, he packed up all the rubbish and deposited it in one of the bins provided by the progressive, centre-left city council, retaining only the plastic beaker he had been given for the wine. This he took to a fountain set in the sheer cliff behind and filled several times with water issuing from a metal tube embedded in the lips of a sculpted Triton, gulping it down with the greatest pleasure. The mythological frieze suggested a blow job gone horribly wrong, but a plaque above it proclaimed that the water was channelled from a natural source inside the peak on which the original Bruttii had founded their city. It was startlingly pure and stone-cold, even at this time of year, and had been issuing forth for countless centuries before that gang of Gothic military tourists had shown up to bury their dead leader somewhere beneath the mingled rivers into which it flowed.

This innocent, even lyrical, thought took the edge off his blissful mood by reminding him of work. The scene was still very pleasant, but it was as if the sun had gone behind a veil of high cirrus, although in point of fact it hadn’t. Earlier that morning, Zen had listened in to the conversation between Tom Newman and Nicola Mantega — courtesy of the electronic devices installed in the latter’s office — concerning the whereabouts of the treasure that had been buried with that Gothic chieftain. Mantega had performed very much as Zen had expected, which is to say in the manner of a third-rate tenor in a provincial opera house. He had neither the range nor the volume, not to mention the subtlety, to tackle really big roles in Rome or Milan, but he could certainly ham it up and belt it out. It remained to be seen whether anything would come of his plan for drawing Giorgio into a trap, but Zen’s only real criticism of it, having nothing better to suggest himself at present, was that it left him feeling trapped too. He longed to take action, but any move he made might ruin everything. There seemed to be nothing to do but wait and then react to events, and this was depressing him enormously.

He was summoned from his reverie by the police driver, who had not only returned at the agreed time but had come on foot to find Zen, who had forgotten all about their arrangement. He got up unwillingly and took a last, long look at the hulking plateau opposite, the perched towns and villages appearing at this distance like quarries slashed into its wooded flanks, the elegant curves of the superstrada striding insolently across the landscape on its stilted viaducts. That thought in turn suggested one action that he could take, and as soon as he returned to the Questura he summoned Natale Arnone.

‘Do I have an accent?’ he asked the young officer.

Arnone looked shifty.

‘Sir?’

‘When I speak, are you conscious of an accent? In other words, could you tell that I wasn’t from around here if you didn’t already know?’

‘Well, sir, the thing is that — ’

‘A simple yes or no will suffice, Arnone.’

‘Then yes. Sir.’

‘Right. I want you to call this number and ask for Signora Maria Arrighi. If she answers, pass the phone to me and get out. If someone else answers, and asks who’s calling, tell him or her that you are a doctor at the hospital and that you need to discuss the results of the signora ’s tests with her. If she’s not at home, find out when she will be. Do not leave a number for her to call back. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Zen did not listen to the ensuing phone call. He walked over to the window and looked out at the mass of the Sila mountains looming over the city to the east. He was now convinced that the origins of the case he was investigating lay there, and perhaps also the solution.

‘ Un momento solo,’ he heard Arnone say behind him.

Zen put his hand over the mouthpiece of the held-out phone.

‘Pull Mirella Kodra off the front-line surveillance on Mantega. It sounds as though he’s starting to have doubts about her.’

Arnone nodded. Zen removed his hand and put the receiver to his ear.

‘Signora Arrighi, this is Aurelio Zen speaking. I need to see you tomorrow.’

‘Ah, that’s difficult!’

Zen tried to visualise the room that Maria was in, a squalid cube lit by a shrill bare bulb beneath which a swarm of flies circled endlessly, and whose walls had even better ears than those installed in Nicola Mantega’s office.

‘One of my friends died last night and I’m helping with the arrangements,’ Maria went on. ‘I can’t just drop all that now and say I have to go into the city to see my doctor. It would surprise the people here and cause comment. Do you understand, dottore?’

‘Perfectly. And please allow me to offer my condolences. When is the funeral?’

‘In a few days. Benedicta had relatives abroad. They will need time to get here.’

Zen grunted.

‘Obviously I have no wish to intrude at such a painful moment, but if you were prepared to meet me tomorrow morning, I have an idea to make such a meeting possible.’

‘Which is?’

‘That you announce that you intend to make a pilgrimage on foot to the church in Altomonte Vecchia in order to pray for your friend. You might say that it is your belief that prayers sent from the old church are more powerful than those that originate in the new. And also that you wish to go alone, at — shall we say? — eleven o’clock in the morning, and be undisturbed. If you agree, I should then join you there, having ascended from the other side of the hill with some of my men, who will seal off all entrances to the old city to everyone except you.’

There was silence at the other end.

‘You are proposing an assignation?’ Maria said at last.

‘Well, yes,’ Zen said after a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

‘Why?’

At first he didn’t know how to reply, and then all the answers came at once.

‘Because you’re the only person I’ve met here whom I trust. Because you remind me of my mother, may God grant her peace. Because not long from now you will be as your friend Benedicta is, and I believe that there are things you have never told anyone which might compromise your bureaucratic status in vitam venturi saeculi.’

A long silence followed, then the acoustic at the far end of the line altered. There were background noises and a mumbly voice somewhere offstage.

‘I’m speaking to my doctor,’ Maria muttered. Then into the phone, very distinctly: ‘Tomorrow at eleven? Eh no, dottore! Mi dispiace, ma non posso veramente. I have to make a personal pilgrimage, all alone, to the church in the old town up on the hill here to pray for my dear friend Benedicta. She was a good person at heart, but the manner in which she died meant that she had no time to confess her sins and I can’t help worrying about the status of her immortal soul. So I shall be there at that time, not at the hospital. But thank you so much for having the kindness to call me. I shall not forget it.’

‘Car leaves in thirty minutes,’ Martin Nguyen snapped when Tom appeared back at the hotel. ‘You want a ride home, get your ass in gear. I’ve cancelled your room.’

Martin’s own room had been gutted and his impedimenta reduced to two armoured and combination-locked suitcases which stood beside the unmade bed. It had been a morning from hell. First the Iraqi work crew had had to be shipped off home, blissfully unaware that their death sentences had been revoked. Martin had got a break on the price from his Baghdad contact over that aspect of the deal, but he wasn’t about to pass this bit of good news on to Jake — not that he could have got through anyway. Jake’s site was down. He was offline. All you could get out of him was error messages and access denied.

‘Mantega says he knows the people who found Alaric’s treasure.’

For a moment, Martin thought that Tom was speaking Italian. He heard the words clearly but couldn’t make any sense of them.

‘Mantega?’ he queried.

‘The notary who was — ’

‘Notary!’ Martin screamed. ‘Who cares about fucking notaries? If they were any good they’d be lawyers. A goddamn fortune has just gone down the drain and you’re talking to me about notaries! Are you out of your mind? Letting crazies board a plane is against FAA regs. Buy your own ticket home!’

Tom stood his ground. On the way back to Rende that morning, he’d called Mirella and suggested dinner. She’d said she’d check her diary and would get back, but she’d taken his call and she hadn’t said no. Tom wasn’t afraid of Martin Nguyen.

‘Mantega is willing to get in touch with them and ask them to hand over samples for you to have verified as genuine by an independent expert of your choosing. If you’re satisfied that they’re authentic, further pieces would be available for purchase on an item by item basis.’

Martin speared Tom with a look.

‘How did Mantega know that we were looking for that treasure? What happened to our film location cover story?’

‘Well, there was that Aldobrandini interview. After that, knowing Mantega, he probably asked around. Quizzed the pilot or the ground staff. What do I know? It’s hard to keep an operation of that size secret in a place like this.’

That made a kind of sense, plus it was what Martin wanted to hear.

‘Okay, tell your friend the notary that we’ll give him twenty-four hours. That’s firm and non-negotiable. He has to get the samples to us for evaluation within that window.’

He tossed Tom out and started calculating time, money, ways and means. Martin had always been boss at multitasking, but he’d never had a chance to do it for such high stakes before. There was a certain drop-dead parcel of land above the Da Rang river that he’d had his eyes on for years. He’d often dreamt of wintering there, maybe even retiring and going home one of these days. The country was opening up more and more with every year that passed, even for the sons of former torturers. Most of the population was under forty and had only the vaguest memories of those times. Besides, the Vietnamese had by necessity always been pragmatists. They might still pay lip service to the party line, but all they really wanted was your money. Martin decided that it was time to assert his ethnic and cultural origins, to reassume his indochinite.

He logged on to an internet research site that employed brainy, underfunded college kids and golden-age retirees who knew everything there was to know about just one thing, and within twenty minutes had a list of a dozen possibles which he whittled down on the phone to six, then three, before selecting the curator of antiquities at a museum in Bucharest. Martin had always associated Romanians with campy vampires and taxi drivers who couldn’t find their ass in the dark without a flashlight and a map, but it turned out that the Romans had been there way back when and had left behind a ton of stuff on which this Gheorghe Alecsandri was a recognised world-class expert. Add in that the guy was cheap, available and spoke way better English than Jake and it was a no-brainer. Martin fixed for him to arrive that evening, evaluate the samples, return a thousand euros richer the next day, ask no questions and tell no tales. He then spent a half-hour online arranging for the overnight transport to the local airport of a product he had recently bought on eBay, before heading to the top floor to try and get Jake onside.

This wasn’t easy. Just getting Jake to unlock his door wasn’t easy. Getting Jake to respond to this new development really wasn’t easy, but if that sweet chunk of real estate was ever to be his then it had to be done. Jake never talked much, but now he wouldn’t talk at all. It took twenty minutes to elicit even the occasional ‘Eeeh’, but Martin doggedly kept going, repeating the gist of the story over and over again in different words. An eternity seemed to pass before he finally got Jake warmed up to a mental age of around three or four, at which point, just like a toddler, he wouldn’t shut up. Martin then had to listen to a rambling, incoherent monologue about how Jake had been totally scammed and suckered. By the rules of the game the menorah had to have been there, only it wasn’t, so the game itself must be screwed and that was like just such a total bummer, nothing made sense any more, what use was money if you couldn’t buy what you wanted…

‘Jake? Hello, Jake!’

‘Eeeh.’

‘Listen to me, Jake. Here’s something I haven’t told you. These guys mentioned some of the stuff they stole from the tomb when they opened it. One was a solid gold seven-branched candlestick. Mantega said it really impressed them because it was so big and an absolute bitch to haul away. Are you hearing me, Jake? The menorah was there, it’s safe in their hands and they’re willing to cut a deal. This ain’t over yet, so don’t go quitting on me now.’

‘Eeeh!’

‘Put the jet on hold. I’ve arranged for an expert to get here tonight, the director of a major European museum. He’ll look over the pieces that we’re being offered for evaluation purposes. If he says they’re genuine, that means their whole story and the rest of the treasure must also be genuine. In which case we get back to the other party and tell them that all we’re interested in buying is that big candlestick. After that, it’s just down to money.’

Jake scowled and slouched around a bit longer, but in the end he seemed to see the logic of this.

‘Yeah, well, like, whatever, I guess.’

The call that Nicola Mantega had been expecting came shortly after four that afternoon.

‘Check your mailbox,’ said Giorgio. ‘Collect the goods and take them to the buyers for assessment. Keep them in view at all times and bring them with you when you leave, then take them back to where you got them, put the receipt in an envelope and deliver it by hand to the address written on the paper enclosed. These items are not for sale.’

Mantega ran downstairs to the bleak entrance hall of the building and unlocked his slot in the metal bin on the wall. Alongside the usual pile of junk and bills lay a plain brown envelope, unstamped and unaddressed. Inside was a left-luggage ticket headed Fratelli Girimonti and an address near the bus station. That day’s date had been stamped below, along with the handwritten time of deposit, about five hours before. There was also a scrap of paper with an address up in the old city painfully written in block capitals.

Mantega decided to walk the length of Corso Mazzini to his destination and take a taxi back. The exercise would do him good and help calm his spirits, which were understandably in a state of some turbulence. He would also have a much better chance of spotting young Tommaso’s girlfriend or any other visible tail. At the end of the gun-barrel vista that the long straight boulevard afforded, a massive white thunderhead was visibly expanding in the thinner air high above, burgeoning out like the blast of dust and debris from a slow-motion explosion. Down in the street, every surface was denuded by the caustic sunlight whose brutal candour taught every Calabrian that what you saw was what you got and all you would ever get, thus making life easier for such people as himself, who traded in appearances that weren’t always quite so candid. He processed down Corso Mazzini, acknowledging the greetings of male acquaintances and the pointed glances of women young enough to be his daughter, telling him that while he might be a bit portly he was still powerful. They knew where the oil to cook their eggs came from. Mantega felt himself relaxing with every step he took. As long as he stayed here, in his own territory, surrounded by his people, nothing really bad could ever happen to him.

Fratelli Girimonti turned out to be an old-fashioned ironmonger’s shop, opposite the square hollowed out of the hillside where the country bus routes terminated. It sold nails and screws and nuts and bolts and washers of every size and type, drills and chisels, hatchets and hammers, nippers and clippers, not to mention the cast-iron cooking pans, barbecues and patio furniture suspended on hooks from the ceiling. For your ferrous metal needs, this was clearly the place to come. The left-luggage facility was a minor aspect of the services available there, a remnant of an earlier era when peasants and travelling salesmen arrived by bus and needed a place to deposit their baggage until they moved on or found lodgings. Nicola Mantega handed over the ticket, paid the miniscule fee due and took possession of a large and surprisingly heavy cardboard box.

He went outside and looked around for a taxi. There were always a few of them hanging around the bus station.

‘ Prego.’

It took Mantega a moment to adjust his sightline to focus on the saloon double-parked outside the ironmonger’s. It took him another to recognise the face of the new police chief staring at him through an opened slit in the tinted rear window.

‘No really, thanks so much, very kind of you but I’d really rather take a taxi,’ he blurted out.

‘I’m not being kind,’ Zen returned. ‘Get in.’

Feeling horribly conspicuous, Mantega elbowed his way through the mobile mass of street people, students, African pedlars, gypsy beggars and bargain seekers.

‘How do you know Giorgio’s people didn’t see this?’ he demanded angrily of Zen as the car pulled away.

‘Why should Giorgio expose his people to stake out a perfectly routine transaction? Besides, the surveillance team that followed you here didn’t report the presence of any competition, so I decided to take a chance. Cosenza is starting to bore me and I want to force the pace a little. Let’s have a look at the goods.’

With the aid of a nasty-looking knife supplied by Zen’s driver Mantega slit open the plastic strip sealing the cardboard box perched on his knees, revealing multiple layers of faded newsprint. Like children opening Christmas presents, both men started pulling out the packaging and flinging it on to the floor. Mantega got there first, and lifted out the most beautiful object that he had ever handled in his life. It was a beaten gold plate engraved with patterns of intertwined curling vines in relief. Zen had meanwhile found the other item, a shallow dish with intaglio designs of nymphs and satyrs. The gold glowed with all the intensity, depth and provocation of human flesh. Mantega felt himself caressing it as he would a woman’s body. He was not given to feelings of awe and had no precedent for the ones that overwhelmed him now. Somehow the objects that had emerged from their tawdry wrappings in a reused cardboard box seemed more alive than he was.

‘Where in God’s name did Giorgio get these?’ Zen asked.

‘I have no idea. He wants me to take them back to that ironmonger’s and deliver the receipt to an address up by the cathedral. He said they were not for sale. But of course you already know that.’

‘Yes, but I don’t have the address. Show me that note.’

Mantega handed it over with a sigh.

‘Please be discreet in the manner in which you handle this aspect of the operation, dottore. If Giorgio begins to suspect that I have betrayed him, he will come to me and kill me! You understand?’

For a moment he had forgotten himself, and immediately feared that the chief of police might take offence. But Zen ignored not only his remarks but the entire subject.

‘So now you have to show these little beauties to the American treasure hunters in order to demonstrate the genuinita del prodotto.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, get busy. Things are moving more and more quickly, Signor Mantega. We must adjust to their rhythm if we don’t want to be left behind.’

‘I’ll do it as soon as I return to my office.’

‘You fool! I’ll be listening in anyway. Do it now.’

It was an order. Mantega got out his phone.

‘How are you, Tommaso? Good, good. Listen, I have a message for your boss. The samples we discussed are now in my hands and I can bring them to your hotel at half an hour’s notice. But they are extremely valuable and I have been given strict orders not to let them out of my sight at any time. I therefore feel that on balance it might be best not to proceed until the person who is to examine them has arrived. Could you therefore let me know as soon as that occurs, whatever hour of the day or night it may be? I’ll expect your call.’

He closed the phone and glanced at Zen. They were on the superstrada, near Carabinieri headquarters and the new railway station. He could pick up a cab there.

‘Can I go now?’ he asked.

There was no reply. Zen’s silences felt far more menacing than anything he said, so Mantega was relieved when he finally spoke.

‘Let’s suppose that these samples are indeed certified as genuine. How do you propose to supply the merchandise for sale?’

Mantega had given a considerable amount of thought to this.

‘I shall handle that part of the negotiations. Obviously we can’t invite them to view the assembled treasure and then pick and choose what they want, since we don’t have anything to show them. But such a sale would have to be shrouded in secrecy, for the protection of the buyer just as much as the vendor, and even the richest man on earth wouldn’t be able to afford the whole hoard. When the time comes, I shall play on that aspect of the matter and try to elicit from the Americans what sort of objects they are interested in.’

Zen picked up the gold plate, whose essence seemed to hover fascinatingly between the soft glow apparent to the eye and the substantial weight of the mass beneath.

‘All right, suppose that they say that they really fancy this dinner service, only they’d like the whole eighteen-piece set.’

Mantega smiled complacently.

‘We have a long tradition of artisan work in Calabria. The lute and guitar makers of Bisignano are famous all over the world. Their ancestors were brought here from Naples centuries ago by the Calopezzati family. Isolated from all subsequent developments, they went on making their instruments just as they always had. When the use of those old instruments was rediscovered, they were the only craftsmen in the world with an unbroken tradition. It’s as if the heirs of the great Cremona violin makers were still turning out seventeenth-century fiddles. What’s true for them is true for many other trades, including goldsmiths. You may consider us ignorant provincials, dottore, but our isolation has served us well in that respect. Once we discover what it is exactly that these people want, a suitable replica can be discreetly crafted at very short notice.’

‘Very well, but Giorgio is only likely to appear when the money is handed over. How and when exactly will that take place?’

‘I shall follow a variant of the procedures for a kidnapping ransom.’

Zen eyed Mantega in a way that instantly deflated his earlier pride.

‘Ah! I’ve suspected all along that you were familiar with such matters.’

Mantega swallowed that down.

‘The case is of course not identical. With a kidnapping, the sentiment of the family is a major factor. On occasion, they will even pay without seeing the hostage first. That doesn’t apply here. Clearly the payment and the handover of the goods must be simultaneous, giving both parties a chance to ensure that all is in order. I shall suggest my villa as a suitable location, and I guarantee that Giorgio will be present. When it comes to large amounts of money, he doesn’t trust anyone but himself.’

Appropriately enough, they were now crossing the Ponte Alarico back into the city, within easy walking distance of Mantega’s office. Zen told the driver to pull over and let his passenger out.

‘You’ve got forty-eight hours to set up a meeting with Giorgio,’ he said. ‘After that, I’ll take you back into custody and proceed by other means. And don’t dream of betraying me in the smallest degree. You are complicit in the kidnapping and murder of an American citizen. Giorgio might kill you, but I’ll call my contacts at the United States consulate in Naples and have you renditioned off to wherever they’re outsourcing their torture these days.’

Gheorghe Alecsandri arrived shortly after nine that evening on a flight from Rome. When the passengers emerged, Martin Nguyen was waiting in the foyer beside his driver, who was holding up a sign with the Romanian’s name printed in block capitals. Martin had vaguely been expecting an exotic creature from the Caucasian steppes — embroidered linen blouse, floppy black pants, knee-length boots — but his hireling turned out to be indistinguishable from all the Calabrians pouring off the plane after a busy day in the capital.

Once they were in the car, Martin produced an envelope and handed it over.

‘Your fee, Doctor Alecsandri.’

The academic then made what would have been his first mistake had he been attempting to pass for one of those local commuters. He smiled, broadly, warmly and with apparent sincerity.

‘Please call me George,’ he said in impeccable English.

Martin noted approvingly that he immediately opened the envelope, extracted the sheaf of hundred-euro bills and counted them. Nguyen respected caution.

‘So, you wish me to deliver an opinion on some antiquities,’ Alecsandri said. ‘May I enquire as to their provenance?’

‘No.’

‘Ah. And neither, I assume, about your interest in them, Mr — ’

‘That’s right.’

Alecsandri looked away. It occurred to Martin that he might have sounded a bit curt, a shade too American. Business was business and the guy had already been paid, for Christ’s sake. On the other hand, Martin knew that Europeans could be awful sensitive about their precious proprieties, and he needed to keep this guy sweet for now.

‘The fact of the matter, George, is that I’m acting on behalf of a friend,’ he said, with as expansive a gesture as it was in his nature to make. ‘The items in question have been offered for sale by a third party. My friend is interested, but naturally wishes to ensure that they are genuine. Others are interested too, so we need to keep the whole enterprise absolutely secret for the moment.’

‘Of course, of course,’ the Romanian murmured. ‘You can count on my discretion.’

Martin phoned Tom Newman.

‘He’s on the ground. Get Mantega round with the samples. We’ll be there in forty minutes, max.’

In the end, it took twenty-five. At one point, Alecsandri pointed to the driver and whispered, ‘This man’s a maniac!’

‘ Un romano,’ replied Martin.

Alecsandri tossed his head lightly, as if that explained everything.

The conference began an hour later in the sitting room that formed part of the suite which Jake occupied. It had been delayed by Alecsandri’s desire to shower and change, and the length of time it took Martin to prise Jake away from his online game and Tom Newman away from his mobile phone, on which he had been making arrangements to meet some girl called Mirella at the Antica Osteria dell’Arenella for dinner the following evening. Tom had been speaking Italian, but Martin’s passive command of the language was increasing by leaps and bounds. Too bad his ability to speak it lagged behind, otherwise he could dispense with his translator altogether. But he had plans for doing so just as soon as a deal was struck, so he didn’t comment on Tom’s evident intention of taking tomorrow night off. In fact, it rather suited his purposes.

He finally got all the players assembled. Martin himself was wearing his usual Islamic fundamentalist outfit: a black lightweight woollen suit over a grey clerical-style shirt tightly buttoned at the collar and tiny, highly polished slip-on shoes. Jake sported a baseball cap turned backwards on his shaven skull, a T-shirt that read ‘AWGTHTGTTSA???’, faded jeans artfully torn at the knee and thigh, and basketball shoes that must have cost more than Martin’s whole ensemble. Tom had gone native in pigskin loafers, khaki cords, check shirt open half-way down his chest, a yellow lambs-wool pullover draped off his shoulders like a scarf, and aviator shades perched way up in the nest of blue-black curls above his broad and unfurrowed brow. Only Mantega and Alecsandri could have passed unremarked anywhere. Well, almost anywhere, because the Italian was clearly strapped, an automatic pistol peeking out of the shoulder holster he had left just sufficiently visible for his purposes.

Martin gestured to Nicola Mantega, who proceeded to unpack a large golden plate and dish from the cardboard box he had brought with him and lay them down on the long table of some faux wood. Everyone clustered around, but there weren’t enough chairs for them all to sit down.

‘You go here,’ Martin told Jake. ‘George, over there please.’

He himself remained standing, as did Mantega and Tom. Jake picked up the plate and tilted it this way and that.

‘Tableware,’ he said. ‘You ever meet Rob?’

The question was directed at Martin.

‘We worked together on NT?’ Jake went on. ‘He bought his dishes at Costco, like in a crate, hundred a time, then threw them in the garbage when he’d done. Said it was cheaper than running the dishwasher.’

‘And more environmentally friendly, no doubt.’

Martin felt furious at Jake for revealing to these foreigners that he, Martin Nguyen, worked for a moron.

‘What do those letters on your shirt mean?’ he snapped.

Jake returned one of his unfathomably shallow glances.

‘Are we going to have to go through this shit again?’

Martin realised he’d screwed up.

‘Hey, Jake, I’m sorry! Didn’t know I’d asked you before.’

‘You didn’t. That’s what it means.’

He stretched the T-shirt out tightly, his nipples poking through the cotton in a pubescently girlish manner, grinned hugely at the assembled company, then resumed fingering his wispy goatee. Gheorghe Alecsandri had meanwhile been studying the two artefacts on the table with the aid of various instruments which he took out of the bulky overnight bag he had brought up with him from the sales rep’s cubicle into which he had been checked for the night. He examined each at considerable length, first by the naked eye, then under a series of furled magnifying glasses, and finally a small microscope that fitted away neatly into a leather case. He entirely ignored the massive silence which had formed in the room since Jake’s exchange with Martin. He replaced the two pieces on the table, sat back in his chair and sighed deeply.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘They’re the real McCoy?’ prompted Martin.

The Romanian gave him a look that he understood better than Jake’s, but definitely didn’t appreciate. It was time to make enough money to buy his way out of being looked at like that, the same way you could buy your way out of living in a walkup by the freeway, if you won the lottery.

‘I can’t see what Scotch whisky has to do with the matter,’ Alecsandri replied.

‘Answer the question!’ rapped Martin.

‘They are quite certainly genuine, probably executed by a Greek artisan, or one familiar with that tradition, for a Roman patron.’

Martin looked at Jake, but he was staring at the blank screen of the TV and didn’t appear to be listening.

‘You’re sure of that?’ he insisted.

‘It is impossible to be absolutely sure. Gold is a metallic element. It cannot be carbon-dated unless it contains organic impurities, which I doubt very much is the case here.’

‘When were they made?’

‘That is conjectural. On stylistic evidence, my best guess would be the second century after Christ. Certainly no later than the third.’

He began to pack away his instruments.

‘I might add, if this aspect of the situation is of any interest to you, that they are exquisite and show very little sign of wear. It is probable that they were used for display purposes, the actual food being consumed from cheap oven-fired dishes which were eventually discarded in the manner of your friend’s colleague Rob in one of those landfill sites that have proved so useful to archaeologists in the past, as they doubtless will to those who investigate our quaint social customs in the future.’

He took one last look at the two golden objects and then stood up.

‘Quite unique and inexpressibly precious,’ he said. ‘Were they offered for sale to the institution for which I work, I shouldn’t have the slightest hesitation in advising the directors to proceed with the acquisition.’

He looked at Martin and grinned coldly.

‘But I am not such a fool as to imagine that there is any chance of that happening.’

‘Nice doing business with you, George!’ Martin replied. ‘Run along and get some sleep. My driver will take you back to the airport in time for your flight home tomorrow. Thanks for coming. We sure appreciate your input.’

When the door had closed and been locked behind the Romanian, Martin turned to Nicola Mantega.

‘Okay, this stuff’s good. What else you got?’

After listening to Tom’s translation, Nicola Mantega gave an oddly feminine shrug.

‘I’m just the negotiator. They haven’t shown me any more than what’s on the table now. But if there’s anything in particular that you’re interested in…’

‘There is. Just one, in fact. If your friends are unable to supply it, then no deal.’

‘They are not my friends, signore, but I can certainly make enquiries. Discreetly, of course, given the highly sensitive nature of the transaction. Please provide further details of the item in question.’

Jake shot Martin a Greta Garbo look and shambled off into the bedroom, mumbling to himself in Leetspeak. Taking the hint, Martin Nguyen slapped the startled Mantega on the back.

‘Hey, it’s past midnight! Let’s all get some sleep and then talk it through over lunch tomorrow.’

The three of them trooped out and headed for the lifts. Tomorrow, thought Martin, it was going to be time to try out his rudimentary Italian on Nicola Mantega. He didn’t trust himself to handle the detailed negotiations involved in the purchase and handover of the menorah, but there was another matter that he had to communicate privately to this sleazy notary public. One of Martin’s principles in life was never to leave his personal security in pawn to third parties with everything to gain and nothing to lose by revealing — or threatening to reveal — the truth. So Tom would have to be disposed of. Calabria struck Martin as a suitable place for this to happen, and Nicola Mantega as the kind of operator who might well know someone prepared, for the going rate, to take care of this chore.

A hawk was being harassed by a pack of crows. To gain altitude, they beat their wings like drowning swimmers thrashing about, then swivelled and dived as if to ram their opponent, squawking madly but always deliberately missing their target. At each feigned assault, the hawk adjusted the angle of its outstretched wings and glided on, surfing the currents of hot air rising from the rock and scrub beneath. It could easily have turned on its tormentors and gutted them with its great claws, but killing on the wing was alien to its species. For their part, the mob of crows might have attacked this competitor on their territory in earnest, flustering it enough to give one of them an opening to drive its spiky beak into the intruder’s body, but neither was such behaviour programmed into their genetic code. It was thus a confrontation that neither protagonist could win decisively, and would go on and on until one or the other tired of the game and gave up.

Aurelio Zen had never paid much attention to birds, but the stealthy approach of death had made him more attentive to any form of life. He was sitting on the top step of the burnt-out bastiglia, on the very spot where Pietro Ottavio had been explosively decapitated, looking alternately up at this dumb show in the sky and down at the tapestry of plants and shrubs that had established themselves among the charred blocks of stone in the years since the baronial residence had been consumed by fire one winter night.

The most striking specimen was a fig tree whose roots must, with their seemingly intuitive attraction to proximate water, have found out the ancient well which had once supplied the needs of the Calopezzati family and its retinue of servants, clerks, managers and armed guards. There was also a young almond on whose leaves a beetle resembling a piece of jewellery was crawling about, its carapace a brilliant green flecked with gold and black. Eventually it took to the air with a low droning noise like a clockwork toy and was snaffled up by a passing golden oriole. Zen consoled himself for its loss by turning his attention back to the aerial scrimmage. He knew the idea to be absurd, but it was difficult to believe that hawks didn’t enjoy flying for its own sake.

In this context, the electronic whining of his mobile phone came as a double shock. How he hated these attention-seeking pests to which everyone was shamelessly addicted! He recalled a dinner party in Lucca where half the guests had spent the evening yammering away to people who weren’t there while ignoring those who were. When he’d complained on the way home afterwards, Gemma had told him that that was the way it was these days. He should adapt, she’d said, but he couldn’t. It was in his nature, just as the behaviour of hawks and crows was in theirs.

‘Old woman attempted to approach up the path,’ Arnone’s voice said. ‘I’ve stopped her and sent you her photograph.’

Natale Arnone was guarding the exit from the track leading up to the abandoned town from the new settlement of Altomonte. On the other side of the hill, Luigi Caricato was performing a similar duty at the only other point of access, which Zen and the two officers had used earlier, leaving their unmarked car in the deserted car park below. Zen pressed the necessary minuscule buttons and Maria’s face appeared on the screen of his phone.

‘Let her in,’ he told Arnone. ‘Then lock the front door until further notice. Tell Caricato to do the same with the rear entrance.’

A dark pall of thunderclouds hung over the coastal mountain range to the west, but here on the heights of the Sila massif the sun shone harshly down, except in the quadrant of shadow cast by the remaining walls of the Calopezzati stronghold. Zen had arrived deliberately early for his appointment with Maria, but now the outcome of their meeting seemed almost irrelevant. It was enough to be here, in the pleasantly warm and very fresh air, surrounded by a host of plants and creatures which Zen was unable to name. A diminutive, rotund figure appeared in the distance, making its way steadily up the former main street of the town past the ruined walls stripped of all reusable material, the cellars now stocked only with rubble, and the foundations marking the outline of vanished houses where vanished people had enjoyed or suffered the finite and largely predictable selection of experiences that life affords.

When Maria reached the piazzetta, Zen got to his feet and walked over to her. They exchanged restrained greetings.

‘Are you sure you weren’t followed, signora?’ Zen asked.

He was enjoying his morning off work, but Giorgio had demonstrated his capacity of swift and merciless retribution and Zen was concerned for Maria’s safety.

‘Who would bother following an old woman like me? Besides, I took a side path which joins the main track well out of sight of the town, then stopped in the woods to see if anyone came. There’s no need for concern.’

‘You must be tired. It’s a stiff climb.’

Maria made a dismissive swishing sound.

‘I’ve done it so many times that my legs don’t even notice. I could do it on a moonless night by starlight.’

Up here in the mountains the stars would still be a luminous presence, Zen realised. It had used to be like that everywhere, but within his lifetime that celestial array had been erased like a mediaeval fresco gaudily overpainted in a more enlightened era.

‘Come and sit in the shade,’ he said. ‘It’s deliciously cool over there.’

He pointed to the steps where he had been sitting. Maria shook her head with finality.

‘Not there,’ she said.

It took Zen a moment to understand.

‘Ah, of course. Because of the murder.’

‘What murder?’ Maria demanded.

‘Why, the American lawyer. The son of Caterina Intrieri, according to you.’

Now Maria looked confused.

‘There’s a bench beside the church,’ she said. ‘It’ll be just as shady there and we’ll get the breeze from Monte Botte Donato. It’s very healthy, scented with resin. At least it used to be, before the railway came and they cut all the trees down. My father worked for the company that bought the rights. He said that felling those enormous pines was like chopping off your own limbs. But we needed the money.’

Zen noted her agitation, and the chatter with which she had tried to conceal it, but made no comment.

‘So, what is it you want from me?’ Maria said, when they had taken their places on the stone bench.

‘I want you to tell me everything you know, have heard or can guess about the man called Giorgio,’ he said with an earnest edge quite as revealing in its way as Maria’s babble. ‘You won’t give me that, of course, but I beg you to give me something, anything. This man is not only evil but quite possibly mad. He dressed up Caterina’s son as a corpse and made him walk up that path you have taken so many times, then pressed the button of a remote control, like changing channels on TV, and blew his head off. He personally cut off the tip of Francesco Nicastro’s tongue. You heard the screams. The boy may never be able to talk or eat normally again. I realise that it’s difficult for you to tell me what I know you know, because I am who I am and you are who you are. But your friend Benedicta has just died, signora. Your own death, may God forbid, cannot be long delayed. Do you want to go to your grave knowing that you protected a sadistic murderer, a threat to the community of which you are a part, because you were too proud to talk to the one person who could prevent him from doing any more harm? Deliberately and wilfully indulged, signora, pride is a mortal sin. Even the blessed sacraments may not suffice to ensure the salvation of your soul.’

Maria listened to this speech in silence.

‘Did your mother want you to be a priest rather than a policeman?’ she asked at last.

Zen smiled meekly.

‘She never got over it. But I had no vocation.’

‘Well, you certainly put our local priest to shame. A little too emphatic, perhaps, but that’s to be expected in someone so young.’

But I do have a vocation, Zen thought. It’s this stupid, meaningless, utterly compromised job that I try to do as well as I can.

‘Were the origins of the child baptised Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati ever questioned?’ he asked.

‘Only once. Some Fascist bureaucrat from the north with ideas above his station asked la baronessa to confirm that the baby was indeed her natural child.’

‘And what did she reply?’

‘“I solemnly swear that this child was born of no other woman.” Which was literally true.’

‘And Giorgio?’ prompted Zen.

Maria considered this for some time, her head tilted askew like a bird’s, her eyes focused on nothing apparent.

‘I know for certain only that he calls himself that. The rest is hearsay. I have heard that his family name is Fardella or Fardeja. I have heard that he sells foreign drugs to our young people, that he has become addicted to them himself and that he lives in San Giovanni in Fiore. But he won’t be there now.’

‘Where will he be?’

Maria looked at him as though this question were too ingenuous to bother answering.

‘In the mountains, of course. Si e dato al brigantaggio. That’s what our men have done for centuries when the authorities hunted them down. They hide away in the forest, then watch and wait their chance.’

‘You said there were no forests left.’

‘Not like before, but there are places which were too far away from the railway to be worth logging. That’s where Giorgio will be. You could send a regiment to search those crags and they’d never find him!’

The last sentence was uttered as a defiant taunt. Zen glanced up at the lid of cloud sliding over the sky. The avian duel aloft had ended with the hawk being seen off by its pack of opponents, which now sat crowing harshly atop the burned-out shell of the huge mansion.

‘But why did Giorgio kill his kidnapping hostage as soon as he found out that he was a member of the Calopezzati family?’ Zen murmured, as if talking to himself aloud.

Maria appeared to be appraising the appearance of her shoes.

‘I have heard two stories,’ she replied at last in an equally neutral tone. ‘Some people say that over a century ago, before the Great War, the Calopezzati stole a piece of land belonging to Giorgio’s great-grandmother. They used to do that all the time, to even out the borders of their estate. They would simply seize land that didn’t belong to them, put up fences and send their guards to patrol the territory. The wronged family could seek redress in court, but the judgement wouldn’t be handed down for decades, most people couldn’t afford the legal fees and everyone knew that the Calopezzati had the judges in their pockets. So Giorgio’s great-grandfather did what a man was expected to do. He took his shotgun and lay in wait for the baron one day, only he was discovered and killed by the guards. It was officially declared to be a hunting accident and no one was ever punished.’

‘And the other?’

‘That happened later. Everyone here worked for the Calopezzati, so the baron could pay as low a wage as he liked. During the Depression, things got so bad that families who didn’t have a relative in America to send them money were starving, so they organised a demonstration in San Giovanni to get a decent living wage. That was all. No attempt to take back the land that the Calopezzati had stolen, no demands for the estate to be broken up and returned to the people, and certainly no violence. They assembled in the piazza in front of the cathedral, as they did every Sunday after mass, as much as anything simply to be together, to feel that they weren’t alone in their misery. The police were present but made no attempt to intervene. What no one knew was that a squad of armed Blackshirts had climbed the bell-tower earlier that morning. Their leader was Roberto Calopezzati, the baron’s son. At his signal, they began firing live rounds into the crowd. Amongst those killed was Giorgio’s great-aunt.’

One of Aurelio Zen’s strengths was knowing when to shut up. He did so now.

‘One or both of those stories may explain why he did what he did,’ Maria concluded dreamily. ‘Of course he was mistaken about the identity of his victim. In any case, due punishment had already been inflicted.’

Her odd, oblique, glassy gaze went everywhere except for the vast ruin across the piazzetta. Never once did she glance in that direction.

‘Punishment,’ Zen echoed vaguely.

‘The fire!’

A long silence intervened. At length Zen nodded.

‘Of course. That terrible accident…’

And then, finally, Maria turned her alienated eyes on him and the blackened palace behind.

‘It wasn’t an accident.’

Zen nodded again, as though assessing a mundane fact which had just come to light.

‘Why did you kill her?’

Maria laughed then, a rasping cackle that seemed to come from the ground.

‘ Perche? Perche! Because when I was a little girl my mother taught me how to lay and light a fire. Because every morning until I was sent away into service my duty was to rise before anyone else in the household, before it was light, and bring flames to life in the hearth. Because to make sure I woke in time I drank three cups of water before going to bed and my bladder never failed me. Because I stole a jerrican of petrol from the stores and spread it throughout the house and up the stairs to show the fire which way to go. Because la baronessa managed to clean up most of the blood but the smell hung in the air for days and the stains never faded. Because Caterina appeared to me night after night, her womb gaping open like an oven. Because I was lonely and terrified yet unafraid. Because to this day I don’t know where they buried her. Because of the baby. Because.’

Zen considered this for some time.

‘You said that when Ottavia Calopezzati informed the authorities that the child she was claiming as her own had been born of no other woman, that statement was true.’

‘She strangled Caterina and did a Caesarian on her corpse with one of the kitchen knives. Miraculously, the boy survived.’

She turned to Zen and scrutinised him.

‘There, pretino mio, I have made my confession. I swear to you, before God and as an honest woman, that everything I have told you is true. Are you going to absolve me or arrest me? Not that I care. This world is nothing to me now and the world to come will be far, far worse. But at least I have achieved something in my life. Yes, I’ll go to hell, but I sent that bitch there first. And not just in the after-life but on this earth, in her flesh, with all her sins on her head, unshriven and unblessed, and me standing out here in the piazza listening to her howls.’

Unable to sustain her gaze, Zen looked away.

‘So now it’s your turn,’ said Maria. ‘Giorgio’s great-grandfather knew what he had to do when the Calopezzati seized his property. I knew what I must do when Ottavia Calopezzati murdered my friend and stole her baby. And you know what you must do.’

Zen got to his feet.

‘I’m just a lone hawk, signora. Here in Calabria, it seems that the crows always win.’

He turned and walked away, leaving her alone in that desolate landscape.

‘… unfortunately, but there are many other artefacts, inestimably rare, beautiful and precious, which we would be happy to offer for sale. It will take a little time to remove them from their secure place of storage and transport them to a suitable site for inspection, but assuming that your client’s interest in the merchandise is genuine and that he has sufficient funds…’

‘So you don’t have the candlestick?’

Nicola Mantega would have put a slow loris to shame in the languidity of the gesture with which he indicated the pain, humiliation and infinite regret it cost him to confirm that, no, the sacred menorah from the Temple of Jerusalem, alas, did not figure among the items that his contacts had recovered from Alaric’s tomb.

‘Sure you do,’ Martin Nguyen replied.

‘He just said they don’t,’ Tom Newman interjected.

‘Shut up and translate, kid.’

The setting was a fish restaurant down on the coast. Mantega had wanted to make a big-deal lunch out of it, but Martin had nixed that idea. He’d spent the morning at the airport, almost three hours wasted trying to get the replica menorah out of the hands of a bunch of customs thugs who seemed to think they worked for the KGB, and was in no mood for another lavish foodie-opera production with no surtitles. They ended up with a fish fry and salad. There were no other customers seated in the annexe at the back of the place, and the waiters, as if sensing the nature of the situation, kept their distance.

‘Okay,’ Martin continued weightily. ‘Before we go any further I need a verbal undertaking from both of you that nothing mentioned here today or resulting from it later will be disclosed to any other parties. Do you agree?’

Tom Newman nodded and muttered something in Italian to Nicola Mantega. After a pensive pause, he nodded too. Martin Nguyen flashed them his horrifying smile.

‘You may wonder why your agreement to this condition is necessary. The answer is that the scheme which I’m about to propose will mean laying ourselves open to charges of fraud, conspiracy and, at least in my case, tax evasion.’

He paused for the Italian translation — Tom seemed to have some trouble with the legal terminology — and then Mantega’s reaction. Everything seemed to be going smoothly so far, so he was amazed when Tom expressed an opinion.

‘I guess you can count me out, Mr Nguyen.’

Martin laid down his knife and fork, sipped his glass of sparkling mineral water and stared out at the lazy waves breaking on a beach that seemed both endless and pointless.

‘I have to get back home, anyway. The police called me this morning. They’re all set to release my father’s body for burial, so I’ll have to see to all that, contact the relatives, fix the funeral, get the will probated…’

His eyes clashed briefly with Martin’s as he speared a calamari ring.

‘Plus I don’t want to be involved in any criminal activities.’

Not the least of Martin’s talents was an instinctive understanding of the odds at any given juncture and a willingness to obey them.

‘I completely understand. You must of course see that poor Peter is appropriately laid to rest. But I’m not asking you to commit any crime. All I need is for you to translate my conversation with Signor Mantega and keep quiet about it afterwards. Once we have reached agreement, I will give you the balance of your wages due plus a bonus of one thousand euros towards the expenses of repatriating your father’s body. What do you say?’

The kid eventually settled for fifteen hundred, and Martin got down to business. He kept it brief and vague, partly because he suspected that Tom’s Italian wasn’t that great when it came to technical stuff, but mostly because he didn’t want him to know any more than the essential minimum even for the short period he had left to live.

‘The menorah which my employer wishes to buy is in fact in my possession,’ he announced. ‘However, it requires some work done before you, Signor Mantega, present it to the buyer at our agreed handover point. This process must take no longer than twenty-four hours.’

Mantega looked wary.

‘What kind of work?’

‘Ageing. Distressing.’

He caught Tom’s panicked glance and amplified his terms.

‘Making it look like it’s been around for ever and buried in a damp vault for the last fifteen hundred years.’

Mantega digested this.

‘So it’s a — ’ he began.

‘It’s whatever my client believes it to be,’ Martin interrupted with a significant glance.

Mantega thought some more, then nodded.

‘We can do this. But why do you need me?’

‘To clinch the sale, Signor Mantega. My client must believe in the provenance of the menorah that he will be offered for purchase. He must believe that it originally formed part of the treasure hoard in the tomb allegedly discovered by your clients. Capito?’

‘ Ho capito.’

‘Excellent. Then I think we can dispense with our translator’s services.’

He turned to Tom.

‘Run along and keep my chauffeur company. There’s a couple of matters I need to discuss privately with Signor Mantega.’

‘But you don’t speak Italian, Mr Nguyen.’

‘ Hablo il denaro. I speak money, kid. It’s a universal language. Beat it.’

Once they were alone, he and Mantega got along famously. It even turned out that the pudgy wop spoke some English. They concluded the deal in twenty minutes, after which Martin went off to the washroom for a lengthy pee during which he called Jake.

‘It’s down to the price and delivery,’ he said.

‘No way!’

‘So they say. We’ll find out tomorrow. Only I’m worried about the price, Jake. I mean strictly speaking this stuff is priceless.’

‘It’s worthless?’

‘It’s invaluable.’

‘It has no value?’

‘No, like no one knows what the market price is because there’s never been any market. I’ll jew them down as much as I can, but from what I’m hearing it looks like we’re talking seven figures. Maybe one and a half, two?’

‘Wow, you don’t know what this means to me!’

Martin Nguyen adjusted his dress before leaving.

‘I think I’ve got a pretty good idea what it’s going to mean to you,’ he said.

‘Congratulations on your demotion!’ Giovanni Sforza cried as Zen passed him in the corridor on the way back to his office.

‘What demotion?’

‘My spies tell me that the word in the bazaars and coffee houses is that Gaetano’s foot has been declassified from the list of species at risk of extinction. He’ll be taking over here on Monday, so prepare to be forcibly retired to your home in Tuscany. Beato te! Only wish I had your luck.’

‘Who’s Gaetano?’

‘Why, the man you’ve been standing in for! The silly ass who blew one of his toes off while fiddling around with the service revolver he hadn’t used in thirty years. Sometime chief of police in Catanzaro and now appointed Supreme Czar of all the Cosenzas, in which position he will no doubt wield the knout with a vengeance. Gaetano will wrap up that murder case that’s been baffling you in a matter of days. No disgrace for you, Aurelio. Down here it’s not who you are that counts, it’s who you know.’

With a twinkly smile, the bergamasco vanished into his office while Zen stomped back to his. As he crossed the open-plan area in the centre of the building, Natale Arnone emerged from one of the cubicles.

‘Ah, there you are, sir! It looks as though things are finally starting to move. Instead of going straight to his office this morning, Nicola Mantega drove to the square by the bus station and took a large cardboard box into Fratelli Girimonti. He was inside just a few minutes, then proceeded to a residential building facing Piazza del Duomo up in the old centre, where he delivered an envelope to the mailbox of an apartment owned by Achille Pancrazi, Professor of Ancient History at the university. Further enquiries revealed that Professor Pancrazi left yesterday on a flight for Milan, accompanied by his teenage son Emanuele, and has not yet returned.’

Zen lit a cigarette, as much for the symbolic warmth it represented as for the nicotine it contained. The Questura’s air-conditioning system had now been raised from the dead, so instead of his office being as sweatily airless as one of those containers in which illegal immigrants were found from time to time, it resembled the cold hold in a frozen-vegetable factory.

‘We’ll need to have a word with the professor at some point,’ Zen remarked, ‘but there’s no hurry. What did our Nicola do after that?’

‘He phoned the Americans and proposed lunch in a restaurant at San Lucido, on the coast just outside Paola.’

‘He used the phone we gave him?’

‘Yes. He appears to be co-operating in that respect.’

‘“Appears” may well be the operative word, Arnone.’

‘He and the two Americans, Signor Manchu and young Tommaso, proceeded to the restaurant, where they remained for approximately ninety minutes. Unfortunately the nature of the situation was such that it proved impossible for our surveillance team to record the conversation without the risk of disclosing their own presence.’

‘But Mantega presumably called in to report on these developments, as per the terms of his conditional release.’

‘No, sir.’

A bomb exploded overhead, leaving their ears ringing and Zen’s office sunk in near-darkness as the electricity went out.

‘ Gesu Giuseppe e Maria cacciati a jettatura e ra casa mia,’ muttered Natale Arnone, making not the sign of the cross but the two-fingered gesture to ward off evil.

‘What did Mantega do next?’ Zen asked casually.

‘He… he, er, proceeded…’

‘Can’t you just say “went”, Arnone? You’re not in court, you know.’

‘Sorry, sir. He went to a village called Grimaldi, about twenty kilometres south of here, where he visited a famous goldsmith, Michele Biafora. His work has been displayed in Naples, even in Rome. Madonna, che pioggia! It never used to rain like this.’

‘Why did he go there?’

‘We don’t know. Mantega hasn’t reported in, and once again our people couldn’t get close enough to observe the encounter. But we could easily pull Biafora in and question him directly.’

‘No, no. This is not an operation that can be performed incrementally. When the time comes, it will be all or nothing. Afterwards we can pick up the pieces, such as il professore and this goldsmith, at our leisure.’

They stood in silence for a moment, during which a dim, sickly, fuddled light made itself apparent in the room.

‘Ah, they’ve got the emergency generator working!’ Arnone cried with some pride.

‘Sort of,’ Zen replied. ‘Where’s Mantega now?’

‘Back at his office. Oh, one more thing. He also called young Newman, but not on his dedicated phone. He stopped at a service station on the autostrada and used a payphone. We picked up the intercept on Newman’s phone.’

Another series of spectacular rumbles stunned their ears, as if the remaining weakened masonry from the shattered dam were now tumbling down into the flooded valley below.

‘He asked what Tommaso was doing this evening,’ Arnone added.

‘Did he say why?’

‘No, and the American didn’t ask. He told Mantega that he would be spending the evening with his girlfriend. That’s the Digos agent you assigned to that task, Mirella Kodra.’

Zen noted the look on Arnone’s face.

‘Are you jealous?’ he enquired with a hint of malice.

‘No, no! Those Digos girls turn up their noses at ordinary cops like me. Besides, with a name like that she must be from one of the Albanian communities here. Those people are weird. It would never work out.’

He stifled a laugh.

‘Apparently that guy she teams up with when they need a young couple is openly gay. I heard he stuck his tongue in her mouth during one of their fake clinches. Mirella spat in his face and told him to go and ram a gerbil up his boyfriend’s arse!’

Arnone burst into further laughter, from the belly this time, then froze.

‘Sorry, sir. Don’t know what came over me.’

Zen had a pretty good idea, but did not comment on this aspect of the matter.

‘Very good, Arnone. Now then, I need to trace all persons by the name of Fardella or some dialect version thereof who were either born or have ever been resident in San Giovanni in Fiore. Check our own records, then get on to the town council. But discreetly. Make it sound like a routine bureaucratic enquiry of some urgency but no real significance. Report back as soon as possible.’

‘ Subito, signore! ’

Once Arnone had left, Zen called his wife.

‘It looks as though I’ll be home soon,’ he said.

‘Shall I put on the pasta?’ Gemma asked.

‘Not that soon, silly. But I’ve been reliably informed that my temporary posting here has just about reached the end of its shelf life.’

‘Good. I’ve been rather missing you. You’re an awful person to have around, Aurelio, but when you aren’t here life seems a bit boring.’

‘Accidie is a mortal sin, my child, a wilful failure to delight in God’s creation.’

‘On second thoughts, can’t you get transferred somewhere else? Maybe Iraq.’

‘I imagine that one of the few things the Iraqis don’t have to worry about at present is feeling bored.’

‘What kind of sauce do you want on the pasta?’

‘Anything you like, my love, as long as no tomatoes are involved.’

Mirella and Tom were walking up an inclined alley in the old town when the attack occurred. The evening had been a success so far, in Tom’s opinion, and he was looking forward to the rest of it. Mirella had suggested a restaurant he hadn’t known about, in the cellars of an ancient building in a mediaeval suburb called Arenella, outside the original city walls on the far side of the river. As soon as they entered the wide, low vaulted space, Tom realised that this was where he should have been eating all along.

How does one tell, he thought as they were shown to a table at the centre of the action, yet just far enough away from the glowing bed of hardwood embers covered by a wrought-iron grill where gigantic steaks were sizzling. In some indefinable way everything just felt and smelt right. There was an air of seriousness about both the diners and the waiters, although neither were in any obvious sense taking themselves seriously. Whatever that quality was, it was as much taken for granted on both sides as the silverware and glasses on the tables, or indeed the vaccination scar on Mirella’s arm. Her hair was loose and frizzy this evening, and she was wearing a sleeveless black satin top which displayed her bosom and those magnificent arms, on one of which, high up, appeared a tiny pale star that would never tan: shiny, almost translucent, infinitely touching and lovely.

No sooner were they seated than cuts of air-cured ham and other antipasti appeared on the table, together with freshly baked breadsticks and a carafe of water ‘from my own spring in the mountains’, the owner proclaimed with just the right air of arrogant nonchalance. He then announced that today he had managed to procure a supply of early mushrooms brought on by the recent unseasonable rain in the beech forests all around, and proposed a salad of ovali and rositi — ‘the finest for flavour’ — followed by pasta with more mushrooms and then a shared fiorentina steak, ‘since you are a couple, so young, so handsome and with such healthy appetites!’ His virtual commands having been approved, the owner bustled off to boss some other guests around while Tom and Mirella ate their way through shaved raw white and pink mushrooms sprinkled with oil and lemon juice, ribbons of home-made egg pasta overlaid with chunks of unctuous porcini, the best beef Tom had ever tasted, a fabulous salad, aged ewe’s-milk cheese and the slabs of Amedei dark chocolate — ‘seventy per cent pure cocoa’ the owner informed them — that came with their coffees.

It was all fabulous and shockingly nude, each course explicitly and proudly just what it was, no messing about. Tom was personally ecstatic and professionally envious. The restaurants where he had worked were capable of good things, but there was always a tendency to go that little bit too far, so as not to be left behind by other gastro-brothels in town that went way, way too far. These people had more dignity. The food they served not only tasted good, it was in good taste.

But Tom’s abiding memory of that evening, the one he knew would linger long after all else was forgotten, had nothing to do with their meal. The thunderstorm that had rocked the city that afternoon had been brief but extremely violent, and it had seemed reasonable to assume that the wrath of whichever vengeful gods ruled the region had been assuaged for that day. In Calabria, however, it was not always wise to let reason be your guide. Mirella and Tom were in the middle of their pasta course when the ‘Tuba mirum’ from Verdi’s Requiem resonated thrillingly through the tomb-like cavern of the restaurant. There was a flutter of nervous laughs all around and then everyone started eating again, but a moment later all the lights went out for the second time that day. In a brief harangue from the darkness, the owner informed his customers that alternative illumination would be provided immediately.

And so it was. By the light of the huge bed of glowing embers under the grill, the waiters carried candles to every table until little by little the place came to life again, but a finer, gentler, subtler life, more intimate and complicit than before.

‘Beeswax,’ remarked Mirella, leaning over to sniff and touch the honey-coloured column with its oval tip of flame.

Tom didn’t reply. He’d just realised that the hackneyed phrase ‘falling in love’ means precisely what it says. It felt just like falling, a blissful abandonment edged with shame and panic. God, she was beautiful! But it wasn’t about that. He felt an instinctive revulsion — what the Italians called pudore — at the idea of enumerating and rating her physical attributes, even to himself. Yeah, she had good stuff, but so did lots of other women. What they didn’t have was the mantle that surrounded Mirella like a saint’s halo. Tom had never understood that musty old artistic convention, but he realised now that it was simply a means of expressing the fact that the person portrayed was exceptional in some way which we can neither define nor deny. He also realised that he was nuts, and maybe a little bit drunk.

‘I hate the smell of those cheap paraffin candles,’ Mirella said. ‘The light they give is cheap too, thin and soulless. Luce industriale.’

She laughed at her own joke. Maybe she’s a little drunk too, thought Tom. Maybe this might be going someplace. So when Mirella said that she’d heard of a good club in the perched city looming over them, one of the new locali which had opened in an attempt to restore some life to what was increasingly a ghost town, he enthusiastically endorsed the idea. They crossed the river on a narrow planked bridge, then proceeded across the road that ran along the right bank of the Crati and up several flights of very steep steps which brought them out at the end of a dimly lit, reeking alley that led up the hillside between two rows of unremarkable buildings that seemed to lean slightly towards each other, like old people seeking moral if not physical support.

When the man appeared from a doorway just ahead and dashed straight at them, Tom assumed that he must be late for an urgent appointment. Like the well-brought-up West Coast boy he was, he turned aside to let the other man pass and so the knife merely gashed his lower ribs rather than puncturing his bowels. In fact he was only aware of it when he touched his shirt to make sure it had not been disarranged by the encounter and his hand came away sticky red. Even then it took him some time to realise whose blood it was, largely because he was watching, with some dismay, what his date was doing to the poor man who had inadvertently bumped into him and had now turned back, no doubt to apologise for his clumsiness.

With a series of snarls and grunts that didn’t even sound human, never mind female, Mirella pushed the man’s outstretched arm aside, broke his nose with the heel of her hand, skewered him in the eyes with the long, delicately rounded fingernails that Tom had admired earlier, kneed him hard between the legs and then, when he bent over shrieking, in the face. Something fell to the cobblestones with a metallic ring. A hunting knife, it looked like. Gee, thought Tom, where did that come from?

‘Police!’ Mirella shouted. ‘You’re under arrest.’

She took a canister from her handbag and handed it to Tom.

‘I need to call in. Give him a dose of this if he shows any signs of activity. Eyes, nose, mouth. Oh my God! Are you all right?’

‘Sure, no problem.’

She tore his shirt apart and examined his flesh, exploring the region with intricate, intimate palpations, then got on her mobile and started talking in a way Tom had never heard her do: curt, concise and commanding. He couldn’t make out much of what she said, she was talking so fast, but she sounded like she was in the military or something. No, police she had said. Police?

Tom might not have been able to understand what Mirella was saying, but it had an invigorating effect on the man, who had been exploring the alley on his hands and knees but now started staring around muzzily and trying to stagger to his feet. Tom administered a dose of the pepper spray, but he was standing downwind and even the mild whiff he got just about knocked him out. The assailant, who had taken it straight in the eyes, started howling and clawing at his face. And then there were sirens, winding up through the streets from the new city. Within a minute the alley was full of uniforms and paramedics in green who gave Tom a check-up on the spot before stretchering him into the back of an ambulance that had somehow managed to reverse down the narrow alley without fouling any of the police cars which had arrived earlier. Italians always seemed to know where they were in space, Tom reflected as the ambulance drove off, siren beeping in a loud, cartoonish way. Maybe that was why they were so good at art.

Sitting out on the patio of his villa the next morning, savouring a cup of Earl Grey tea and a slice of bread smeared with apricot jam, soaking up the sun and admiring the magnificent view, Nicola Mantega couldn’t help but admit that he had been rather clever, if he did say so himself. It crossed his mind for a moment that he might have been a bit too clever, but after reviewing his plans time and time again he still hadn’t found any serious flaw.

The deal he had made with Martin Nguyen, negotiated in a mishmash of his own small stock of English and Nguyen’s crude but comprehensible Italian, was a thing of beauty. The American had apparently bought a full-scale replica of the menorah from an artisan in Israel and had it air-freighted to Calabria. The thing was constructed out of hollow steel with a gilt patina to a plausible approximation of the original design and dimensions, part of the beauty of the scheme being that no one knew for sure what these were. Nguyen intended to pass this off to his employer as the genuine article, supposedly looted by the tomb robbers who had first located Alaric’s resting place. To do so successfully, he needed Mantega to have some cosmetic work done on the too-perfect replica and then present it to the purchaser in a suitably convincing way. Oh, and one other thing. For these services, he would pay Mantega a quarter of a million euros in cash.

But the real beauty of this new arrangement was that it cut Giorgio completely out of the picture. Of course, Mantega would need to lure him to a meeting where the police would be lying in wait to arrest him, but that could be done later as a quite separate operation. Or not. The word on the streets was that Gaetano Monaco would be returning shortly from sick leave to take over the position of police chief from this northern intruder who had substituted for him during his recovery from a serious injury to his foot, incurred during a heroic personal intervention in one of the cases he was dealing with. Nicola Mantega had never had any dealings with Monaco during the latter’s previous posting to the neighbouring province of Catanzaro, but on the basis of what he had been told by various contacts who had, he was likely to be a much more approachable proposition than this Aurelio Zen. It wasn’t that he was overtly corrupt, rather that he understood the infinite nuances necessary to the facilitation of all business in Calabria and was prepared to play within that set of rules.

Mantega checked his watch. No problem, there was still almost an hour before the charade got under way. He was slightly surprised not to have heard from Rocco Battista, the Cosenza low-life he had employed to execute the ‘one other thing’ that Signor Nguyen needed done. Mantega hadn’t wanted to be a party to this, but Nguyen had been both insistent and persuasive. ‘All he needs to do is walk up to my boss and say, “I think there’s something you ought to know,” and we’re both looking at jail time.’ At least Mantega had been able to talk him out of having the young man killed, pointing out that the violent death of two generations of the Newman family would be bound to produce huge publicity and a massive police intervention, neither of which was in their joint interests. Mantega’s real reasons had been moral. Killing someone who had betrayed you was honourable; killing someone because you feared that he might betray you was not. On the contrary, it suggested weakness and was therefore despicable. Besides, Mantega quite liked Tom Newman. But the Chinese or Japanese or whatever brand of Oriental Nguyen was wouldn’t be capable of understanding the finer points of Calabrian ethics, so he’d stuck to the practicalities of the matter. In the end Nguyen had settled for a serious but non-fatal wound that would look like a mugging gone wrong and put the kid in hospital until the deal was complete and the money laundered.

After their lunch down on the coast, Mantega had returned to Cosenza and done the round of various bars until he tracked down a suitable individual for this operation. Rocco Battista was a low-level thug with an equine member, a heart of gilt and the brains of a quail who was employed as a hired spacciatore to sell the illegal drugs that Giorgio imported and distributed. From Giorgio’s point of view, Rocco was the cut-out, the fall guy. He had expendable written all over his tattooed, metal-pierced, razor-chop-side-burned face, and as far as Mantega was concerned the sooner he was expended the better. But given that he was still around, he had hired the little scumbag to do the necessary to Tom Newman, who would be dining that night at that fancy restaurant in Arenella with some hottie he’d picked up. Rocco was to call him from a payphone once the job was done with a coded message signifying that all had gone according to plan, and then he would be paid. But Rocco hadn’t called, which was odd. He was such a greedy, needy little fuck that normally he would have called even if he’d screwed it up. Ma pazienza! Life was full of anomalies. The important thing was to keep your eye on the ball, and in that respect Mantega felt himself to be way ahead of the game.

He checked his watch again and reluctantly got to his feet. When it came to appointments, Americans were notoriously terribili: they always arrived on time. He went back into the house, showered, shaved, dressed soberly to impress and then descended to the basement garage. With some trepidation, he turned on the overhead lighting, fearing to be shocked by what met his eyes. But instead of shock, he was almost tempted to go down on his knees, although he wasn’t sure that was what Jews did and as far as he was aware he hadn’t a drop of Jewish blood in him, but who knew? No, it was a purely aesthetic response to an amazing artefact, taller than he was, glowing as though from within and branching out like a well-pruned tree, or an orrery at that fateful moment when all the planets are aligned.

After engaging the services of Rocco Battista the day before, Mantega had hired a local man who did small haulage jobs around the area to pick up the freight shipment that Martin Nguyen had cleared through customs and bring it to Mantega’s villa. There it was unloaded, the wooden frame levered off, the plastic bubble-wrap removed and the candelabrum erected on its two-tiered hexagonal stand. At that point the gold-plated replica had looked impressive, finely detailed but rather raw and new. Mantega had also secured the services of a renowned goldsmith whose artisanal skills were unquestioned but who had fallen foul of the law some time ago over a delicate issue involving the precise provenance of the gold that he used to create his masterpieces. Mantega had been able to help Michele Biafora extricate himself from that self-inflicted injury, and in return for that and a thousand-euro sweetener, Biafora had agreed to come to the villa late the previous evening with one of his apprentices and spend the entire night treating the replica menorah to various toxic chemical substances and a terrifying variety of pointed and edged tools that reminded Mantega of youthful visits to the dentist.

All was now in readiness for the inspection by Nguyen and his boss. The local carrier’s van was parked in the forecourt, and his two brawny sons were skulking about looking exactly like members of the gang that had supplied the goods. But there was one final refinement to add. He set the three oil lamps that Gina used to create ‘atmosphere’ for their outdoor dinner parties down on the concrete floor of the garage, fired them into life and then threw the breaker on the fuse box supplying the basement. In the lambent, uncertain radiance of the lanterns, the menorah looked even better. In fact it looked perfect.

The two Americans arrived at precisely one minute before the appointed hour. Mantega had already seen the one that Nguyen referred to as his employer, although he found this hard to believe. He had privately dubbed him ‘the ape’, and felt almost aggrieved on behalf of his employee. Mantega didn’t like Martin Nguyen, much less trust him, but he respected him as a type of man he recognised, someone who knew how to get things done. So why was he working for the creature that now slouched in wearing a T-shirt that displayed his beefy tattooed forearms, a pair of torn jeans and some garish orange sports shoes? His gait, manners, expression and communication skills suggested that he was the lost sibling of the two haulage kids outside, but Nguyen had assured him that the ape was good for the one point eight million they had agreed to stick him for.

The fact that Tom Newman wasn’t present confirmed that although Rocco Battista hadn’t been in touch, he had done the business. Unfortunately it also meant that Mantega’s carefully prepared speech in Italian about the power being out — one of those storms last night must have hit a pylon somewhere, happens all the time out here in the country, we’ll just have to make do with these old-fashioned lamps I found — went for nothing. It didn’t matter. Whatever Mantega’s doubts about the ape, the latter evidently had none whatsoever about the merchandise being offered for sale. The visit was less of an inspection than an adoration. Mantega was reminded of a nonna venerating the miracle-working statue of some saint which was displayed once a year on his feast day, except that such devout elderly women would never disport themselves like this. Casting a huge hunched shadow in the wavering lamplight, the ape danced triumphantly about the golden trophy, uttering inarticulate cries and ejaculations and running his paws over the various knobs and curves as though he wanted to have sex with it right there and then.

In the end Nguyen managed to drag him away, but not before handing Mantega a note containing instructions regarding the place and time for the final handover and pay-off, and adding that he would need help to lift the wrapped and repackaged menorah into a waiting helicopter. Mantega was naturally bursting with questions, but Nguyen had made it clear that he wasn’t going to answer any of them. Still, a quarter of a million was a quarter of a million. What had he to lose?

Rocco Battista had only made one mistake. Well, two really, but the second could be forgiven. Rocco had had no way of knowing that the girlfriend his target was escorting was a member of an elite anti-terrorist squad, well able to look after herself and her less capable companion even without her gun once she’d kicked her dress shoes off. And Rocco’s first mistake could also be forgiven. He had stripped his person of all identifying marks and documents, but naturally he had taken his mobile phone along. Rocco was in his early twenties, and would no more think of leaving the house without his phone than without his trousers. And if it hadn’t been for the intervention of Tom’s companion, no harm would have been done. As it was, though, Rocco’s defiant refusal to tell the (expletive deleted) cops the (expletive deleted) time by the (expletive deleted) clock on the (expletive deleted) wall became entirely irrelevant. The magnitude and resilience of Rocco Battista’s balls was in no doubt, but his phone proved to be as forthcoming as a logorrhoeic teenager. Un vero cacasentenze.

The cache of names and numbers that Rocco’s mobile yielded would however have meant little if Natale Arnone had not completed the assignment given him by Zen the day before. This had been to track down anyone by the name of Fardella who was connected by birth or residence with Giorgio’s presumed home town of San Giovanni in Fiore. There were five in all, two of whom had moved elsewhere and one who was in a hospice. There were also Silvia Fardella, resident in Via del Serpente 13, and her brother Giorgio of the same address, born in 1968 and a butcher by occupation. All of which made a very satisfying click when Silvia Fardella’s telephone number turned out to be present in the directory of Rocco’s mobile. Her name, however, didn’t. The script beside the number consisted of just three letters. Lui. Him.

Aurelio Zen was unable to attend immediately to the implications of this, since he had to deal with the appearance of the female Digos agent who had spent all night at the hospital with the victim she had been accompanying, on his orders, at the time of the attack. Mirella Kodra was extraordinarily lovely, he realised, in the abstracted way in which he thought of much younger women these days. Good legs, great cioccie, a fleece of fluffy hair atop an ovoid face that held its past experiences in perfect balance while eagerly looking forward to more.

‘How is Signor Newman?’ Zen asked.

‘Stable and in no danger. He managed to avoid the main thrust of the knife. The resulting injury was a clean flesh incision about a centimetre deep with no organ trauma. The wound was cleaned, sutured and dressed. He has been told to rest, avoid physical exertion but stay mobile and return tomorrow to have the dressing changed and the stitches examined. After that he will be free to go home to arrange for his father’s funeral. The doctors plan to discharge him this afternoon.’

‘Very good. Unfortunately his attacker sta faccendo il duro and we’ve barely been able to get a word out of him. We must therefore assume that young Newman was targeted for the same reason as his father — because the criminals involved believe that he is the last living representative of the Calopezzati family. Since the initial attack was unsuccessful, we must further assume that it may be repeated. I am therefore transferring you with immediate effect from surveillance duties on Nicola Mantega to bodyguard duties on the potential victim. It would be unwise for him to return to his hotel in Rende, as those concerned almost certainly know that he was staying there. I want you to find somewhere else for him to stay and to ensure his personal safety until further notice. I have a major operation in preparation and I don’t want it screwed up by some sideshow involving American tourists. Is that clear?’

The Digos agent came abruptly to attention.

‘ Sissignore! ’ she hissed.

She knows that I lied to her, thought Zen as Mirella Kodra stalked out. A major operation in preparation? Ha! He’d said that to sweeten the pill of taking this elite operative off active duties and relegating her to the status of a nursemaid. Judging by her expression and tone of voice, the pill had still tasted very bitter. And what a fatuous, obvious lie. With only two days left before being replaced by Gaetano Monaco, Zen was in no position to mount any major operations, and everyone in the building, including Mirella Kodra, knew that.

Only what if they were wrong?

Aurelio Zen didn’t think of himself as a gambler. He didn’t buy lottery tickets or even play the Totocalcio football pools. Passing the famous casino in Venice as a small child, he had asked his father what went on in there and his father had explained. Aurelio was accustomed to his father explaining things. The procedure could sometimes be a bit boring, but he valued it as one of the few links between them. Asked about some aspect of the operations of the railway he worked for, for example, his father would always deliver a lucid, detailed and convincing answer. When it came to what went on behind the imposing portal of the casino, Angelo Zen’s tone remained calm and authoritative, but the content was reduced to the gibbering of an idiot.

‘It’s for rich people. They pay a lot of money to wager a lot more on a certain number or the cards they hold. Then they wait and see what happens.’

‘And what does happen?’ Aurelio had asked, clutching his father’s hand as they walked along the redolent alley leading to the station.

‘The right number or card either comes up or it doesn’t. If it does, those rich bastards get even richer.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’

‘Then they lose everything.’

At the time, Zen hadn’t understood why anyone would want to take risks like that, entirely dependent on forces beyond one’s control, an opinion that was confirmed when his father disappeared shortly afterwards. He’d lost everything without even being conscious of placing the bet, and had never thought to do so again. But life has a way of mocking such resolutions, and he now decided — instantly and without reflection — to stake everything on one spin of the wheel. He therefore summoned Natale Arnone and instructed him to fetch Rocco Battista up from his holding cell in the basement.

The prisoner was an unprepossessing specimen, vaguely resembling a genetic cross between a wild boar and a stockfish. It is no doubt true that the triumphs of art cannot redeem the defects of nature, but the various forms of mutilation that Rocco had inflicted on his features provided conclusive evidence that there is always room for disimprovement. He shuffled into the room and was about to sit down on the chair facing Zen’s desk, when Natale Arnone adroitly removed it.

‘Stand up straight before the chief of police, you scum!’

Battista stumbled back to his feet and stood looking around dully, but probably no more dully than usual. Zen had already been told that since his initial defiant statement of intent, the prisoner had not once responded by word or gesture to any of the questions and comments of the interrogating officers. He was also acutely aware that the success of the plan he had in mind depended on his eliciting not just a response but the one he needed, so he left Battista standing there, hanging his head and staring down at the floor in a manner which suggested, in a pathetically inadequate way, that while the cops could break his bones they would never break his will.

Zen lounged back in his chair and stared unblinkingly at the individual with whom he had to deal, taking him in, sizing him up, getting his measure. After an intolerable and seemingly interminable silence had fully matured, he leant forward like a doctor who has concluded his diagnosis, and spoke.

‘In my opinion, Rocco, the root of the problem is that you are stupid. That’s not your fault. Men can no more control the degree of intelligence they were born with than they can the size of their membro virile.’

A satisfied smirk appeared on Rocco Battista’s lips.

‘They can however control what they do with the equipment that nature has provided,’ Zen went on. ‘You were observed speaking to Nicola Mantega yesterday. When I broke him early this morning, I told him that he’d been silly. In your case, the appropriate word is stupid. I therefore suggest that we take stock of the situation in which you find yourself. The only witnesses to the attack were you, the victim and his lady friend. One, two, three. When this case comes to trial, any testimony you may give in your own defence will of course be discounted as worthless. As for the victim, he appears to have gone into shock immediately after you knifed him and has only the vaguest and most confused ideas about what happened. In other words, the only credible witness — the person who will in effect decide your fate — is the woman who was accompanying him.

‘As you learned to your cost last night, she is also a police officer. Unless she wishes to relinquish that career, she will tell the magistrates simply and solely what I order her to tell them. If she testifies that your intentions were clearly homicidal, and thwarted only by the victim’s agility and alertness, you will be convicted of attempted murder. If on the other hand she deposes that, far from being flustered and off balance, you knew exactly what you were doing — inflicting a painful but non-life-threatening injury, a little lesson for Signor Newman with the implied threat that he might not get off so lightly next time — then you will go down for assault occasioning minor bodily harm.

‘Now there’s a big difference between an assault and a botched homicide, Rocco. At least ten years and possibly a lot more, depending on whether the judge’s piles are playing up. But at the bare minimum, a whole decade when instead of eating, drinking, fighting, fucking and indulging in whatever other pastimes console you for your destined role in life as a dickhead, you’ll be locked up for twenty-two hours a day with five other dickheads in a cell designed to accommodate two, under the beady eyes of the uniformed dickheads who run the house of punishment according to their own tried and trusted methods, and take particular pleasure in denying their charges the tempting option of suicide by slow strangulation from a knotted bedsheet tied to the window bars.

‘That’s the choice facing you now, Rocco. Do you want to spend your next ten to fifteen years eating shitty pizza, stomping whichever of your cretinous crew is marginally more fucked up than you that night and contributing to the alarming incidence of sexually transmitted disease, or would you prefer to escape from these horrors and settle down to a quiet life at the taxpayers’ expense? I appreciate that this is a difficult decision, particularly for someone whose head starts throbbing intolerably when the waiter says “ Acqua gassata o naturale? ” But I’m afraid that you do have to make it. Now. Specifically, in the next five minutes. If you do what I want, your prison spell will be so brief that you may barely have time to find out the hard way who gets to bugger whom in the particular wing of the facility to which you have been committed, since I doubt very much that you would be anyone’s first choice. If not, you’ll be offered virtually unlimited opportunities to suck your wife’s cock.’

Another minute passed in silence. Then Rocco Battista spoke for the first time.

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘To phone Giorgio Fardella using the number registered to his sister Silvia in San Giovanni in Fiore and listed in the directory of your mobile phone under the name Lui. Your mobile carrier has informed us that you called this number three times in the last two years, which suggests that you are known to Giorgio but not one of his close associates. I’m guessing here, but it seems probable that he employed you from time to time, no doubt on minor jobs requiring neither intelligence nor skill but involving a risk to which he was unwilling to expose the more valuable members of his organisation. Three minutes.’

Once again, Rocco achieved speech.

‘What do I say?’

‘Giorgio almost certainly will not be at his sister’s apartment in Via del Serpente, but someone will. You are to say that you have an urgent message which must be passed on without delay. The message is that Nicola Mantega is cheating Giorgio over their plan to sell fake antiquities to an American buyer. You have discovered that Mantega has made arrangements with a third party to supply the desired merchandise, thereby cutting Giorgio out of the picture and out of the profits. You will add that the deal will be concluded very shortly and that Giorgio, or someone speaking for him, should therefore summon Nicola Mantega to a personal meeting at the very earliest opportunity, preferably no later than tonight. Ninety seconds.’

In the event, it was almost half an hour before Rocco speed-dialled the number on the mobile that Zen had restored to him. It went completely against his nature to do the sensible thing, but the police chief had somehow talked him into it. What tipped the balance was that line about the bitch who had so royally kicked his arse the night before testifying that he, Rocco Battista, far from being flustered and off balance, had known exactly what he was doing. No one had ever suggested that Rocco had even the vaguest idea what he was doing. The prospect of being denounced as competent in open court, before all the judges and avvocati in their finery, quite turned his head. It might even get reported on television! ‘According to the prosecution’s leading witness, an experienced policewoman of impeccable character, Rocco Battista knew exactly what he was doing.’ Making a hoax phone call to Giorgio, who had always treated him like shit anyway, was a small price to pay for a glowing public testimonial which would change his status on the street for ever.

The helicopter ride was maybe the sweetest moment in Jake’s life. Okay, it had cost a shitload of money, but it wasn’t every day that you got to stick it to your real-time opponent in such a satisfying way.

Phil Larson was still working on the logistics of getting the Aeroscan equipment back to the States, so Jake had fixed for him to hire a sky crane from the company he’d worked with on the survey. The idea was to fly out over the ocean, something to do with the movie, plus there’d be some bulky filming gear so they would need plenty of cargo capacity. After that it all flowed like well-written code. The pilot’s English was barely comprehensible, but he turned out to be a real hot-dogger once they got airborne, plus the truck containing the payload showed up right on time. The only problem was that Martin Nguyen showed up with it, so Jake kind of had to invite him along. It would have been cooler to do it alone, but Nguyen’s muscles and body weight might well prove useful when the time came, even with the grid of rollers that covered the floor of the hold. Jake told the pilot to drive out over the water a couple of miles or kilos or whatever they called them here, then get down real close to the surface and pull over so they could open the cargo door. The guy seemed to understand, and had given Jake and Martin harnesses and restraint lines to prevent them falling out of the open door, plus headsets so they could talk over the noise of the engine and Jake could give him instructions without coming up into the cockpit.

‘We haven’t interfaced on this, Jake!’ said Martin’s hollow voice over the intercom as the bear in the air ran up the tree. ‘How can I project-manage the process without a data dump? Where are we headed? What’s the deal?’

‘Ninja looting.’

Martin started yapping again, so Jake turned the speakers off. Be great to have a set of those when Madrona started getting ballsy about babies. The helicopter flew over the wooded range of mountains that ran parallel to the coast, then out over the ocean, whatever the fuck they called it here. Who cared what they called it? It was all one big Pacific. At this point Jake realised that the pilot might need to rap with him about suitable locations for the next phase of the operation, so he turned his headset back on and guess what? In a total validation of everything Jake believed in — no, knew! — the pilot came on a moment later and said, ‘Is good?’ And it was. The helicopter circled round, dipped down and started running back the way they’d come. Jake slid back the cargo door and clipped it open. A hundred feet below, the water lay as crisply rumpled as a length of silk pulled off the bolt for the buyer’s approval.

‘Let’s go!’ he shouted to Martin.

It took maybe five minutes to get the crate positioned correctly and partially out of the doorway. Way before then Martin had started yapping again, so Jake switched him off and started just pointing and pushing. After another few minutes of slewing and shoving they succeeded in manoeuvring the crate’s centre of gravity over the sill of the helicopter’s deck, after which everything happened of its own accord. The inner end of the laden box shot violently into the air, slapping Martin upside the head, then the whole thing flipped out and fell away — splosh! Jake watched it sink, unlatched the door, slammed it shut and told the pilot to drive home. He ripped off his safety harness and pranced around the cargo space, slipping on the metal rollers and falling hard, then holding up his hand and flipping a finger at the roof.

‘End times, my fucking ass!’

You couldn’t win the God game, but he had just stalled the inevitable outcome for a century or two. Life felt good and Jake aimed to enjoy it and Madrona and maybe even their goddamn kids, but it had sure been fun playing.

It wasn’t till they were back over the coast that he noticed Martin Nguyen was still lying splayed out on the floor where he’d fallen, his head wrenched round at an angle you just knew had to be impossible except maybe for owls. As Jake gradually figured out what must have happened, all of his feelings for this man — who he’d known for like a while, and was pretty sure had screwed him over the purchase price for the menorah — came together in an impassioned outburst of raw, primal whatever.

‘Dude!’ he cried.

Tom lay on the bed staring up at an intricate pattern of cracks on the ceiling. They resembled a river delta seen from space, a satellite photograph of somewhere he’d never been, some remote place where the people had retained their traditional customs and cuisine, a lost heartland where life made sense the way it was supposed to.

The room to which he was confined was slightly larger than Rocco Battista’s cell, but not much cheerier or better furnished. There was a narrow bed, a chest of drawers and some bare shelving. The window was locked, the shutters closed and the conditioned air chilly and synthetic-smelling. Outside the door, which was also locked, stood an armed policeman who admitted nurses and doctors as necessary, gave Tom his meals, accompanied him to the toilet and then locked him up again. He responded to the patient’s Italian as though it were Japanese, occasionally shaking his head or shrugging his shoulders, but never uttered a word.

The exact time of day or night has little significance in a hospital, and it was not until a doctor came, examined the wound, checked Tom’s pulse and blood pressure, gave him a tub of painkillers and pronounced him fit to depart that he discovered that it was in fact four o’clock in the afternoon. His clothing was returned and the taciturn policeman escorted him to a car parked in a quiet courtyard within the hospital complex. They drove north to an apartment block between Piazza Loreto and Piazza Europa, in the unprepossessing modern suburbs of the city. Tom asked several times where they were going, but the policeman either ignored him or just shook his head in the contemptuous and utterly final Calabrian manner.

They parked outside a charmless structure dating from the 1970s or 1980s and remained in the car for at least five minutes while Tom’s escort scrutinised the comings and goings on the street. When he was finally satisfied, he got out, flung open Tom’s door and scurried him inside the apartment block like a movie star’s minder dodging the paparazzi. The scene within, however, was not a luxurious night-club or glittering awards ceremony but a dingy foyer with bad lighting, bad paint and seriously bad smells. The policeman spent another nervous minute while the lift trundled lethargically back to the ground floor and then conveyed them, equally lethargically, to the seventh. By the time his escort unlocked one of the doors in the corridor, Tom’s wound had started to ache quite painfully.

Behind the door was a narrow passage lined with coats and books and umbrellas. The policeman looked inside one of the rooms to the left and gestured sharply to Tom that he should enter it. It was almost a replica of the one he had just left at the hospital, only with more dust and lots of cardboard boxes filled with files and papers scattered all over the floor. The only decoration was a large rectangular photograph of uniformed men and women standing in three neatly aligned ranks in ascending levels. Some graduation ceremony, it looked like. He had to move some of the boxes aside to get to the bed, and on top of the pile of documents in one of them he noticed a certificate from a police academy stating that Mirella Kodra had excelled in the firearms training course she had taken two years previously.

So this must be the spare bedroom in her apartment. No unmarried Calabrian woman would dream of letting it be known that she had allowed a man to spend the night in her home. Therefore Tom was not categorised as a man by Mirella. He was a problem, a job, a parcel that had to be passed around like in that kid’s game. He was not a guest, still less a potential lover, just a displaced person who must grudgingly be housed and fed until he got well enough to do everyone a favour by pissing off back to where he came from. He slumped down on the bed, feeling utterly lonely and exhausted and bereft. What a fool he’d been, with his big ideas of rediscovering his Calabrian roots and opening una vera trattoria americana autentica! It wasn’t so much what he didn’t know. Given time, he could learn that. It was about what he did know and would never be able to forget, stuff that was inappropriate here, behaviour and habits and ideas that were alien, maybe even offensive. But how could he pretend to be ignorant of those things? How could a person ever unknow anything? He swallowed two of the capsules he’d been given — without water, to avoid appealing to his swinish guard — then lay down again, gasping at the pain, drew his knees up into a foetal crouch and went to sleep.

He was awoken by voices he couldn’t recognise or understand, a man and a woman, perhaps arguing. The room was in complete darkness. At length the voices fell silent and a door slammed somewhere. Footsteps came and went gently for some time, and then the door to his room opened and a figure in silhouette broke the rectangular panel of light. Mirella.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m feeling fine. You know why? Because I’m homeward bound, homeward bound. Do you know that song?’

‘You told me the other evening that this was your home.’

‘I was misinformed.’

‘Not by me.’

Tom shifted position on the bed. Those painkillers really mellowed you out. Once his eyes had adjusted, he could just about make out Mirella’s face.

‘And how are you, signorina?’ he asked with some asperity and using the third person mode of address.

‘Tired. There’s a big operation in progress. They’re hoping to arrest the man who killed your father. They needed help with setting it up but don’t want me there when it happens. That’s why I’m late, and tired. When it comes to the crunch, it’s pretty much boys only. That tires you, after a while.’

Silence fell.

‘Why are you addressing me formally?’ she said.

‘Just trying to be polite. I know almost nothing about you, and most of what I thought I knew turns out to be false. You told me you were a pen-pusher and call-catcher for the local government, but apparently you work for the police.’

Mirella sighed.

‘I’m sorry, Tommaso.’

He didn’t reply.

‘I’ll make us something to eat,’ she said.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You must eat.’

‘Forget it! I’m not accepting charity from some soup kitchen set up to save immigrants like me from starving to death and making you guys look bad.’

In the doorway, strongly shadowed, Mirella turned.

‘I am also an immigrant.’

‘Oh sure.’

‘It’s true. I’m arbereshe. Five hundred years ago, when the Turks conquered our country and burned our cities, my ancestors emigrated from Albania to a town just north of here, San Demetrio Corone. In our language, Shen Miter.’

‘Whatever you say, signorina,’ Tom replied coldly.

The next thing he knew, she was leaning over him and shouting angrily.

‘I wouldn’t do this for just anyone, you know! You could be shut up at the men’s barracks with a truckle bed and food fetched in from the canteen. I invited you here out of the kindness of my heart and you treat me as disdainfully as you would a whore!’

Her fury astonished him.

‘I’ve never been with a whore,’ was all he could find to say.

‘You’re impossible!’ she cried and stormed out, slamming the door behind her.

Pots clanked and thudded, water ran, there was the crinkle of a plastic bag. Tom got painfully to his feet. Stay mobile, the doctor had told him. Don’t bend or stretch or lift anything, but keep moving as much as you can. Just normal movements. He walked through to the kitchen. Mirella wasn’t there. He leant back against the doorpost exploring the messages that his body was sending him. The first twenty-four hours will be the worst, the doctor had said. Pleasure is a fleeting illusion but pain never lets you down. It’s the real deal. On pain, you can always count.

‘Excuse me, please.’

Mirella brushed past him. She had showered and changed into a crisp white blouse and black pants.

‘What are you making?’

‘A pasta sauce. I also bought a roast chicken and some salad.’

‘Sounds great.’

‘No, only adequate. My mother is a wonderful cook. I take after my father.’

He watched her fingers working on the wooden chopping board, the spreading stain of the onion’s white blood.

‘Italian-Americans are always bragging about how great their mother’s pasta sauce is.’

‘Then it’s good that you’re homeward bound. Over there you can live your dream of Italy. Here we have to live with the reality. My father would kill me if he knew that you were spending the night here. But you can forget the idea of talking your way on to that business jet with your employers. One is dead, the other has fled the country.’

‘What? How?’

She streamed pasta into the boiling water.

‘They were dumping a crate at sea from a helicopter and something went wrong. Never mind, there are plenty of commercial flights from Rome. Go! Leave! The people who return don’t fit in. They’re an embarrassment, like house guests who’ve outstayed their welcome. They think they’re family here, but they’re just another kind of tourist. Chine cangia a via vecchia ppe’la nova, trivuli lassa e malanova trova.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You see? You don’t even speak the language! It means that changing your old way of life for a new one removes minor problems only to create newer and bigger ones. You have to have been born and raised here to be Calabrian, but these people think they’ve inherited the title like some baron in the old days. A friend of my father who lived abroad for many years said that America nourishes your body but eats your soul. Maybe it eats your brain as well.’

She added chunks of raw, lumpy, hunchbacked tomato to the simmering onions.

‘And you accused me of being cold,’ Tom said.

‘I’m simply a realist. You Americans are idealists, and when reality doesn’t measure up to your expectations you turn brutal. You invented your own country and think that gives you the right to invent everyone else’s, even though you know nothing about their history or traditions. Why should you bother? History and traditions are the consolations of the poor. Rich people like you don’t need them.’

She turned away from the stove and started to lay the table.

‘I apologise. I invited you into my house and now I’m insulting you and your culture. That’s unspeakably rude. I don’t know what’s the matter with me tonight.’

‘I don’t care. Just keep talking. I like listening to your voice.’

She glanced at him sharply.

‘You mustn’t fall in love with me, you know.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re homeward bound, Tommaso.’

‘I am home.’

‘Don’t start that again! It’s just expatriate sentimentality, and sentiments are of no importance here. All that matters is power. Sex may matter. Pregnancy and marriage certainly do, because those things have consequences. But don’t imagine for a moment that anyone gives a damn about your feelings. Or mine, for that matter. The pasta’s ready, let’s eat.’

They ate in almost complete silence. Tom felt totally exhilarated and utterly crushed. He’d never been talked down like that in his life. Mirella said nothing more, and he was afraid that anything he said would sound stupid. But he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He remembered now something that had been submerged by the shock of what had happened in that alley, when she was taking his attacker down with her feet and threw her hands up to maintain her balance and he’d seen the tufts of hair in her armpits and realised that she wasn’t a brunette but a redhead who dyed her hair to blend in on the street. An Albanian redhead, at that. The prospect was challenging, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her, couldn’t wait for her to speak to him again, couldn’t wait to suck the sweat off those hairs, to lick the tender hollow beneath and inhale the sweet, gamy essence of her flesh.

When the meal was over, Mirella brusquely rejected Tom’s offer to help with the dirty dishes.

‘That’s woman’s work. Go and lie down. You need rest.’

‘So do you.’

‘It’s quicker and easier if I do it myself. After that I’m going to watch TV. Later on, I’ll come and check the dressing on your wound.’

‘Are you a doctor as well?’

‘No, but I’ve got excellent first-aid skills. We have to take basic training and then refreshers every year. Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing and it won’t hurt.’

She piled up a stack of plates and dishes and set them in the sink.

‘And then, if you’re not too tired, we might fuck.’

Clatter, bang went the pots and pans.

‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to move much,’ Tom said.

‘That’s all right, we’ll work something out. It’ll help you sleep.’

‘And you?’

She shrugged.

‘I like being manhandled once in a while, and opportunities for casual sex don’t come along often in Calabria. Besides, since you’re staying here everyone will assume we’ve done it anyway, so I’d be a fool not to take advantage. But if you don’t want me…’

‘Are you crazy? Of course I want you!’

‘Then there’s nothing more to say. Go and lie down.’

Tom stood there uselessly, taking up space in the tiny kitchen, getting in Mirella’s way. He had no idea what to say or do, so he asked the question that was uppermost in his mind.

‘May I kiss you, Mirella?’

‘No, that’s too intimate.’

Once again he was tongue-tied and ended up speaking the truth.

‘You’re the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.’

Mirella laughed dismissively.

‘Nonsense, I’m very normal and boring. But I’ll try not to bore you tonight, and tomorrow I’ll take you to the hospital for your final check-up and then pack you off on the plane home to your American beauties with their stainless-steel teeth.’

Tom met her eyes.

‘You can’t get rid of me that easily, Mirella. I do have to go now, but I’ll be back. I may not qualify as a Calabrian in your eyes but even you can’t deny that I’m an American. We don’t quit just because the going gets tough.’

Mirella held up her right hand and extended the little finger and thumb.

‘What’s that?’ demanded Tom angrily. ‘Some superstitious gesture against that thing you believe in here…’

She flashed him a mischievous smile.

‘ Cuntru l’affascinu? No, I’m not that fascinated by you. Not yet, at least. Anyway, that sign is made with the forefinger, not the thumb. All I meant is that I want you to phone me while you’re away. Now go to bed and get some rest, because that’s not the only thing I want.’

The trap was set. There had been no phone calls to any of Nicola Mantega’s numbers, but piecing together the previous evidence, including the recent delivery and return of the genuine Roman gold artefacts, Aurelio Zen had concluded that Giorgio was now on red alert and communicating only in writing. The team watching Mantega had therefore been instructed to keep a close eye on possible maildrops.

Shortly after six that evening, a roughly shaven individual of about thirty with the piercing gaze and rolling gait of the mountain folk had walked down the block of Corso Mazzini where Mantega’s office was situated, entered the building and emerged precisely six seconds later. He was followed back to his car and at a hastily improvised road-block near Camigliatello he was pulled over by the Polizia Stradale and arrested for drunk driving, even though his blood alcohol level was in fact zero. Long before that, Nicola Mantega’s compartment in the letter boxes mounted on the wall just inside the entrance of the office block had been opened and the plain brown envelope inside extracted. This was rushed to forensics for tests, then opened, the contents copied and replaced, the envelope resealed and replaced in Mantega’s letter box.

The allegedly drunk driver had meanwhile used the one telephone call he had been allowed to make to contact the house in San Giovanni in Fiore which was the incoming conduit for Giorgio’s communications network. Shortly afterwards, Dionisio Carduzzi was observed leaving his house and walking up the long, twisting main street of the town to Via del Serpente, part of the slum area of apartment blocks built illegally in the 1970s, many of them unfinished and unoccupied and all lacking double glazing and insulation and improperly positioned to face the full blast of the Siberian winds that dragged the temperature far below zero for much of the winter. Dionisio had entered the unit that contained Silvia Fardella’s address of official record, but his visit was a short one. No sooner had he stepped back on to the street than Nicola Mantega’s mobile in Cosenza rang and a woman’s voice said, ‘Check your mailbox.’ The yob who had apparently passed out in a shady corner of the entrance hall, clutching an empty bottle of limoncello, confirmed a moment later on his encrypted mobile that Mantega had done so. What il notaio didn’t do was inform the police of these interesting developments, but Aurelio Zen already had a copy of the missive in question in his hands. Stripped of its many orthographical errors, it read as follows:

I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE NICOLETTA BUT IT’S TOO RISKY COME TO THE DAM ON THE MUCONE RIVER AT EIGHT THIS IS URGENT AND I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE

Zen smiled unpleasantly as he put the note down on his desk. Right now Nicola Mantega must be wondering how in the name of God it had come to this, running his mind back over each of the steps which had brought him to where he stood now, on the brink of a precipice, yet unable to fault himself for a single one of them. It had all made complete sense at the time, so how on earth had he ended up having to drive off after dark to a rendezvous on a remote country road up in the Sila mountains with a drug-addicted psychotic who would slit his throat if he found out what Mantega had been up to in his collaborations with the chief of police and the late Martin Nguyen, and for that matter might very well slit his throat anyway? But Mantega would go nevertheless, because he knew that if he didn’t then sooner or later Giorgio would come to him. Better to calm him down now, deny Rocco Battista’s absurd allegations and press a large bundle of banknotes into Giorgio’s hand with the promise of more to come.

So the trap was set. Springing it, though, would be a delicate and complex operation, and Zen knew that he would only get one chance. He had therefore assembled a small group of hand-picked officials. Six of them, comprising Zen himself, Natale Arnone and four of the Digos agents, who had access to high-tech kit such as night-vision goggles, were to form the unit which tailed Mantega from the rendezvous point to wherever Giorgio was in hiding. In two separate but simultaneous operations, the residences of Dionisio Carduzzi and Silvia Fardella in San Giovanni in Fiore would be raided and searched and all persons present taken into custody.

Meticulous and detailed planning was the key to a successful outcome. The raids on the two homes in San Giovanni were relatively routine interventions straight out of the standard operating manual, needing only to be co-ordinated in time with each other and whatever events occurred after Mantega’s meeting with Giorgio. It was the latter event that was the wild card in the pack. Zen spent almost an hour poring over a large-scale military map of the area with Natale Arnone and the Digos agents, working out various scenarios and planning an appropriate response, but he knew that Giorgio was both canny and crazy, an impossible combination to finesse against with any certainty of success.

Mantega had been told to come to the dam on the Mucone river at eight o’clock that evening. This dam had been constructed shortly after the war to create an artificial lake beneath the heavily wooded slopes of Monte Pettinascura, one of the tallest peaks in the Sila range at 1,700 metres, and one of the most remote. Zen’s first step was to send one of the Digos men to the spot dressed like a hiker, to be dropped off by one of his colleagues as though he had thumbed a lift. He would not be part of the operation itself. His job was to walk up on to the foothills overlooking the Lago di Cecita, observe any activity at the scene and report back by radio. It was entirely possible that Giorgio might decide to arrive early and conceal himself until Mantega got there, or that one of his associates had been told to monitor any suspicious comings and goings in that isolated zone and warn his boss off if necessary.

The convoy of vehicles that would form a box around Mantega’s Alfa were scattered around Via Piave, Viale Trieste and Piazza Matteotti by six o’clock. A Digos agent on the roof of an adjacent building was watching the private courtyard where the car was parked. The air was oppressively close and muggy down in the valley, while over the mountain range that was their destination stacked thunderheads loured and scoured the sky. A bad silence, against which the squeals and grunts and yelps of the traffic were powerless, had saturated the streets. Zen felt his energy drained and his will sapped, but there was nothing to do but wait.

In the end, Mantega did not leave the building until shortly after seven. This meant he would have to drive fast, which was good news. The vehicles and drivers at Zen’s disposal could easily keep up with anything that wasn’t airborne, and if Mantega had to keep his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road he was that much less likely to notice that his supposedly lonely pilgrimage up into the mountains actually had more in common with the convoy enveloping the Popemobile when the Supreme Pontiff, in his infallible way, decides to pay a visit to the shrine where the cult of a miracle-working saint is celebrated. The lead man astride the MotoGuzzi played a classic hand of hiding in plain view, aggressively harrying the Alfa on the many tight bends and spectacular viaducts of the superstrada leading up from the river valley to the heights above, tailgating the luxury saloon with his headlamp blazing and making little darting movements that were blatantly obvious in both of Mantega’s rear-view mirrors before roaring out to overtake and vanish in the manner of motorcyclists the world over, only to slacken speed as his machine demonstrated that it had more zip than stamina on the long, steep gradients, and eventually be passed himself in turn, at which point the whole game started again.

The sweeper on the team was in the modified Ape van. His job was to ensure that the Popemobile didn’t have an alternative escort provided by Giorgio, and to take care of them in a suitably convincing manner if it did. The filling in the sandwich was provided by a vehicle that even Zen found interesting, despite not giving a toss about cars for the simple reason that the city in which he had grown up was one of the very few civilised niches on earth where they didn’t exist, any more than horses had before them. Back then, if you wanted to go riding, you had to row over to the Lido. Even now, if you wanted to go motoring you had to go to Mestre. And no one in his right mind would ever go to Mestre.

But this item of Digos equipment had caught Zen’s attention. As they proceeded up into the mountains, he elicited from the driver and his colleague, who were seated in the front, that the chassis was the military version of the Ferrari Laforza all-terrain vehicle and the engine — ironically enough, given their quarry — a specially tuned Alfa Romeo V6. There were six seats inside, as well as ample space for any extra gear, but the exterior bodywork was as near as makes no difference an exact replica of the cheap Fiat vans used by provincial tradesmen and wholesalers all over the country, to which no one ever paid the slightest attention. At the moment it was painted bright blue with yellow lettering which proclaimed that it belonged to Scatamacchia Formaggi e Salumi.

There was only one logical route for Nicola Mantega to get to his destination in time, so when they were past the summit a few kilometres from the Camigliatello exit, the MotoGuzzi put on a surprising turn of speed on the downward gradient, overtaking with some panache and surging ahead so far that it was able to take the turn-off while the Alfa was out of sight around the long bend behind. The driver swerved left and then right under the slender stone viaduct that carried the abandoned railway line across the ravine, turned off his lights, donned night-vision glasses and waited in the straggling outskirts of Camigliatello for Nicola Mantega to catch up, reporting in the meanwhile via the mouthpiece attached to his helmet.

Things almost went wrong when Mantega turned the opposite way, up into the village, to buy a packet of cigarettes and knock back a coffee. But Natale Arnone had been tracking the relative distance and direction of the transmitter attached to the Alfa, and the Laforza was able to park unobtrusively opposite a mini-market and wait for Mantega to proceed, at which point the convoy reformed. Because of this delay, it was now sixteen minutes to eight, of which it took il notaio another fourteen to cover the remaining stretch of twisty country road in the rapidly failing light. By the time he reached the dam, the motorcyclist had cut the power and noise of the MotoGuzzi’s engine to the absolute minimum, then turned it off and free-wheeled down a path leading to the lake which Zen had identified from the map earlier. He then ran back along the shoreline to the dam, climbed up near to the roadside and reported in when Mantega’s car came to a halt in a lay-by on the other side of the road. Once again, there was nothing to do but wait.

Two cars passed in the ensuing period of time, during which the darkness became absolute. The registration numbers of both were noted and checked against records at the Questura, but they appeared to belong to harmless local residents. No one will ever know what Mantega thought as their headlights appeared in the distance, swept across the vehicle where he sat listening to the radio and smoking cigarette after cigarette, but time in Calabria has its own rhythms which cannot be hurried. In the end he was rewarded when a black Jeep pulled up alongside the Alfa Romeo. According to the Digos agents watching the scene, the driver was a woman in her thirties or early forties, later identified as Silvia Fardella. After a brief parley, Nicola Mantega got into the Jeep, which turned right on to a steep minor road leading up into the mountains and disappeared.

This was the crunch, and it could hardly have been worse from an operational point of view. Zen had to make an instant decision which might prove disastrous. He finally ordered the motorcyclist to remount and track the Jeep as best he could. It was a risk, but Mantega might well have other preoccupations at this point and ballsy bikers were two a penny up here in the Sila high pastures. He then called off the other Digos officer on the ground and the Ape van behind and told the driver of the Laforza to proceed slowly and with due caution. Eight minutes passed before lightning freeze-framed the thickly wooded landscape and a thundercrack shook heaven and earth, followed immediately by rain that broke on the windscreen like surf, overwhelming the wipers. Aurelio Zen finally relaxed. Now, he knew, everything would go well.

Next the man on the MotoGuzzi called in to say that the Jeep had turned off the paved road and taken a dirt track leading up still more steeply into the forest. Giorgio was presumably waiting at some spot high in the wilderness above, just as Maria had predicted, and there was nothing for it but to go after him, hoping that the deafening violence of the torrential rain would force any watchers to take shelter and also cover the sound of the Laforza’s engine. The headlights could be dispensed with, thanks to the high-tech Digos toys — or so Zen assumed until on one particularly tight reverse curve of the precipitous, contorted and now seriously flooded track they unaccountably started moving sideways rather than forwards.

‘Shit!’ yelled the driver. ‘Landslip’s washed out half the road.’

The vehicle slid gently downhill for some distance before coming to rest.

‘Can you get it back on the track?’ asked Zen.

‘Maybe,’ the Digos agent replied. ‘But I’d have to use full revs and they’d be bound to hear. I say we continue on foot and hope it’s not too much further.’

Zen was aware that this was an attempt to democratise the decision-making process, but he couldn’t fault the man’s thinking.

‘ Andiamo! ’ he said decisively.

The rain had diminished slightly for the moment, but there was little comfort once outside the vehicle. One of the Digos men produced a hooded torch whose pinched beam was the only point of reference in the darkness, and the other three followed him up what was now to all intents and purposes a river-bed. It rapidly became clear to Zen that he was falling behind, and eventually he came to a halt. The others had disappeared, leaving him in the dark. He was also ludicrously dressed for the occasion, in his office clothes and smooth-soled leather shoes that were already drenched and spouting water with every step. He found his key-ring and switched on the brilliant stiletto of light attached to it. The trees to either side looked monstrous, the trunks twenty metres or more in circumference, the last remnants of the primeval forest which had covered the area for hundreds of thousands of years. There were still wild cats here, he had heard, and wolves.

Not unlike the man who had been baptised Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati, Zen started up the cruelly steep and rutted track and all things considered was making good speed when a flash of inconceivable intensity imprinted the entire surrounding landscape on his retina and the sky squealed and drummed its feet like a gutted animal. An instant later the downpour began again in the form of pebbles of hail pockmarking the molten mud ahead. Zen began running, slipped on a sheet of exposed rock and tumbled over what seemed a cliff, landing on a steep slope where he rolled over and over again before coming to rest against the trunk of one of those giant trees. The hail continued to fall deafeningly on the foliage all around, but where Zen lay the ground was covered with a deep bed of pine needles that remained dry. He heard distant gunfire — one shot, then two almost together — and got to his feet, but immediately tripped over a varicose cluster of roots. His key-ring went flying, and the miniature torch with it. There was nothing to be seen except the glittering array of stars above, each one hard, determinate and precise, but his nostrils were full of ancient odours, dense and strange, familiar and benign.

Jake dreamt he was flying. At first it was awesome, the scenery scrolling away like on Google Earth, mountains and fields and rivers and roads and towns. Some flyover state. He longed to nuke something, but he couldn’t figure out which game it was, who the bad guys were or even the basic scenario. The only thing he knew for sure was that on an earlier level his character had spawned in the shining city upon a hill. That meant his game status was Exceptional and he had unlimited powers, which was way cool except he hadn’t a clue what to do with them.

Maybe it was these doubts that triggered off what happened next, one of those dream things where everything goes bad just because it does, no reason given. There was this coffin on the floor he was trying to push out of the open doorway of the plane, only it was super heavy and wouldn’t budge until suddenly the rollers kicked in and they both went flying, flipping over slowly down to the sea beneath and then into it, still tumbling. He ended up in a kind of desert with huge cracks in the ground and these giant spiders, except they were more like cockroaches, a gazillion of them coming at him, more and more all the time. It was a classic run ’n’ gun, first-person shooter death match with randomised portals, only the software was way over-specified for his game controller, a dumb brick on a string with two buttons and a D-pad dating back to the eight-bit Nintendo games of the 1980s. He was getting killed here! This wasn’t a game, it was a fucking cartoon. Loony Tunes Two. That’s all, folks.

‘Hate to wake you, but we’ve only got about an hour to run. Care for an eye-opener?’

Jake rolled over in bed and tried to focus on the babe who was shaking his shoulder. She totally wasn’t Madrona, but he got there in the end.

‘Sure.’

‘Coffee, tea or me?’

Huh? thought Jake, but then he caught the look on her face and realised she’d been doing that thing that was big with the kids these days and gave him a headache, where you say one thing but mean something way different, ironing or something.

‘I’ll take a Diet Rockstar and some RapSnacks YoungBloodz Southern Crunk BBQ.’

‘You want ice with that?’

He got out of bed and glanced out of the window. Mountains, fields, rivers, roads, towns, like on Google Earth. Some flyover state. He turned on ESPN and watched a bunch of ads. Black guys dunking big balls, white guys hurling oval balls, brown guys hitting white balls, all in sexy slow-mo. Ball games, celebrating designer sportswear and racial diversity. Cool. He sucked down his energy drink and tooled around the net a little till he found this site with a world map showing the area of darkness — kind of like a huge cock — over the places where it was night. Right now Madrona was in the light zone, but the edge of darkness was creeping towards her all the time. The image updated automatically every minute, so you could just sit there and watch the shadow line jerk forward a notch as the sun sank slowly in the west. You learn something every day, thought Jake. Like he’d never realised that the sun went round the earth, although it was kind of obvious once you thought about it.

Then Madrona rang.

‘Yo.’

‘Where are you, hon?’

‘Beats me. I get in in like an hour?’

‘Bummer. I got a bikini wax at four or I’d come meet you.’

‘Eeeh.’

‘Are you okay, hon?’

‘I had this weird dream? Kind of creeped me out.’

‘Really? You know Crystl?’

‘I totally know her.’

‘She’s just awesome with dreams. She talked me through a whole bunch of mine and showed how they like foretell the future and stuff.’

‘Plus the movie thing tanked.’

‘You’re saying Apocalypse! isn’t going to happen?’

‘Not any time soon.’

‘How come?’

‘That’s gaming.’

He barked a laugh.

‘Chill, babe. It’s not the end of the world. Life is good!’

There is a unique flavour of melancholy to remote railway stations during the long intervals between the arrival and departure of trains. And when the station is a modernistic monstrosity constructed a few decades ago on the scale befitting a provincial capital such as Cosenza, that flavour can become almost intolerably intense.

The platform stretched away like a desolate beach at the edge of the world. Opposite, a grandiose diagram of sidings was occupied by a few rusted wagons, surplus to requirements and awaiting the scrap man. The clock ticked off precise divisions of a time without meaning anywhere else in the world. Within the cavernous vestibule behind, three uniformed employees yelled insults at each other across the resonant space with the insolence of those secure in the knowledge that under the statale ‘you pretend to work and we’ll pretend to pay you’ system, their jobs were not only guaranteed for life but left them enough free time to make some serious money in the black economy on the side.

Like mine, thought Zen. Italy was indeed the bel paese, inexplicably blessed, just as some people seemed to be. Everything went wrong all the time, but somehow it didn’t matter, while in other countries even if everything went perfectly, life was still a misery.

‘ Il treno regionale 22485 proveniente da Paola viaggia con un ritardo di circa trenta minuti.’

No, he wouldn’t lose his job. The delay to the connecting train from Cosenza to the coastal main line almost certainly meant that he would lose the seat he had reserved on the Intercity express to Rome, and therefore any hope of getting home to Lucca that night, but his job was safe. True, the powers that be had ruled that ‘the tragic and disastrous outcome’ of last night’s events had been due to Zen’s ‘precipitate actions in a complex situation demanding the greatest sensitivity and local knowledge’. Suggestions had even been made that it might be in everyone’s best interest, including his own, if he were to be offered early retirement.

On the other hand, he hadn’t been termed ‘grossly incompetent’, which was just about the only way of winkling a government employee out of his comfy shell. If those railwaymen merely treated their customers with arrogant contempt, flaunted framed portraits of Che Guavara in their offices and fiddled the petty cash from time to time, no one could touch them. If they failed to align the points correctly or signalled one train into the path of another, that would be another matter. Zen hadn’t done that. Two men were dead, but this had been deemed not to be ‘as a direct result’ of his ‘regrettable initiative’. In short, he’d been a bit naughty but all would be forgiven. The Mummy State had merely scolded her son, not disowned him.

The night before, he had eventually crawled back to the track, where he was intercepted by the Digos agent on the MotoGuzzi, who had been called in by his colleagues. Zen had ridden behind him up to the crime scene. This was a level area which served as a trysting place for the young people of the locality, judging by the beer bottles, syringes and used condoms picked out by the headlights of the black Jeep. Nicola Mantega was groaning, trying to say something and occasionally vomiting blood. Near him, Giorgio lay still. His sister, handcuffed to the grille of the Jeep, was screaming hysterically.

Accounts of what had happened varied. Natale Arnone claimed that Giorgio had fired first, he had returned fire, and the others had then shot both Giorgio and then, in error, Mantega. The Digos men agreed that Giorgio had fired shots in their general direction, ‘classic supersonic incoming whine and then the plonk of the discharge catching up, but nowhere near us’, that Arnone had fired back, hitting Mantega, and when Giorgio ignored their orders to drop his gun they had killed him. The clearing was too small and overhung by the huge pines to bring in a medivac helicopter. An hour later, an army ambulance managed to negotiate the treacherous dirt track leading to the spot, by which time Nicola Mantega was dead.

‘ Il treno regionale 22485 proveniente da Paola viaggia con un ritardo di circa venti minuti.’

Aurelio Zen gazed up at the ring of mountains that hemmed Cosenza in on every side. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that the autostrada and high-speed rail link to the national network had been constructed, but the character of cities and of their inhabitants are formed over centuries, not decades. Cosenza still viewed itself, and was viewed by others, as a backwater notable mainly for the fact that Alaric had been buried here. And he had done well, thought Zen. Whatever its shortcomings, Cosenza was an excellent place to be buried in, which is effectively what had happened to him that morning when Gaetano Monaco appeared at the Questura, bursting with confidence, energy and wisdom and eager to assume his duties and responsibilities as police chief of the province, the first of which was to show Zen the door.

‘I’m sure you did your best, but we’re not in the lagoons of Venice here!’ Monaco proclaimed. ‘No indeed! Calabria — or rather the Calabrias, as I prefer to think of this unique region, so diverse yet so cohesive, at once an infinite enigma and an endless delight — is a very special part of the world, veramente molto particulare. Molto, molto, molto! I sympathise with you, dear colleague. Your failure must pain you deeply, but I doubt whether any other outsider would have performed much better, if that is any consolation. The task you took on was simply beyond your powers. The fact is that only someone who had the good fortune to be born and to grow up here can ever hope to understand this extraordinary land and its even more extraordinary people, and know instinctively how to deal with them.’

Zen had been tempted to retort that he at least hadn’t shot himself in the foot, but in the end he’d just walked out, leaving Monaco in triumphant possession of the field. True, the raids on the two houses in San Giovanni in Fiore had gone off without a hitch, and netted a wealth of evidence as well as five of Giorgio’s suspected accomplices. True, Zen had stayed up all night interrogating the latter, and had bluffed one of them into admitting that Peter Newman had indeed been seized in a normal kidnapping-for-cash operation, but that when Mantega passed on the information that the victim’s real name was Calopezzati, Giorgio had worked himself up into a fit of rage and sworn that he must die. Pietro Ottavio was denied food and water for three days, then told that he must do penance for his family’s sins by making an arduous and humiliating pilgrimage on foot to their former stronghold in Altomonte to pray for forgiveness, following which he would be free to go.

In different circumstances, all this might have been regarded as a significant achievement. As it was, Zen had been subjected to a dressing-down by the prefetto, the magistrate investigating the case and an assortment of high officials at the Ministry in Rome, besides having to dodge a pack of newspaper and television reporters all day. Even Giovanni Sforza assiduously evaded him as though he were the carrier of some fatal virus. In the end, there had been nothing to do but leave.

‘ Il treno regionale 22485 proveniente da Paola viaggia con un ritardo di circa dieci minuti.’

A gust of wind stroked the platform with idle violence. Zen tried to visualise Lucca, and his life there with Gemma, but he couldn’t. Only this cradle-shaped tomb seemed real, all else an illusion.

‘ Buona sera, signore.’

An old lady and a boy of about fifteen stood looking at him.

‘ Signora Maria, buona sera.’

‘Allow me to present my grandson. We’re here to meet my sister. Go to the shop inside the station, Sabatino, and buy me a roll of mints. Here are five euros. You may spend the change on anything you like.’

The boy ran off.

‘Thank you,’ Maria said to Zen, once he was out of earshot.

Zen looked at her in astonishment.

‘For what?’

‘For killing that brute.’

‘But I — ’

‘It needed to be done. Now we can all rest easy.’

‘ Signora, I — ’

‘You’re a real man, the kind they don’t make any more. Your wife is a lucky woman. May God bless and keep you always.’

‘Look, I think you — ’

But Maria was no longer attending to him. Her face was averted and full of joyful expectation.

‘Ah, here comes the train!’ she said.