Medusa

V

Night slipped past the open window at a steady one hundred and forty kilometres per hour. Chips and shards of light, some isolated, others roughly clustered, were borne past on its current at an apparent speed relative to their distance from the train. Parallax, thought Zen, although his immediate memory was of twirled sparklers, wire with a fizzy firework coating that created illusionary circles and whorls of solid light in the darkness. That and fireflies. Whatever had happened to fireflies?

By now they were quite far down the valley, past Rovereto. The snow had finally petered out at about the same point as the everyday use of the German language, but early that evening in Bolzano it had at once been clear that Bruno’s warning about getting down from the mountains in time had not been just a pretext for cutting short a long day. When they finally reached the city, after one distinctly scary moment involving an uncontrolled skid and an oncoming truck, the streets were already lightly covered, while huge but seemingly weightless flakes were falling so densely as to make driving almost as difficult as in fog. In the end, Bruno had insisted on remaining at the hospital while Zen did his business there and then driving him to the station, on the basis that taxis would be impossible to find and that it was too far to walk.

‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’ he’d added, seemingly casually. ‘And you shouldn’t hang around either, dottore. They’ll get the snowploughs out on the main streets, but it all takes time and you have that train down south to catch…’

‘What’s your surname, Bruno?’ Zen had remarked equally casually.

‘Nanni, capo.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

In the event he was back at the car in just over forty minutes, and they reached the station with almost an hour to spare. The train on which Zen had a reserved sleeper was waiting on one of the central platforms, but the locomotive had not yet been coupled up and the carriages were all dark and locked. He went to the station buffet and ate a toasted cheese and ham sandwich with some excellent beer, followed by a glass of local kirsch that was so good that he bought a small bottle as a souvenir for Gemma. Then he walked along the station building to the door marked Servizio.

In the dense warmth within, half a dozen men in railway uniform were smoking, chatting and playing cards. By a combination of implied threat, backed up by his police identification, and overt bribery, backed up by his wallet, he persuaded one of the sleeping-car attendants to walk with him across the tracks. The snow had not yet started to settle here, but it was now falling more thickly than ever.

‘Do you think we’ll get away on time?’ Zen asked the attendant as he unlocked one of the blue sleeping cars.

‘No question, dottore. The whole crew’s from Rome. It would take the worst blizzard these krauts have ever seen to keep us banged up here overnight. Sorry about the cold inside. The heating’ll come on as soon as the engine hooks up.’

Once in his chilly compartment, Zen lay down fully clothed on the bunk bed, bone-weary and dispirited, and immediately fell asleep.

He surfaced briefly when something nudged the train heavily and the lights came to glaring life, then dozed again for a while, lulled by the complex and comforting sounds and motion. But for the last half-hour or so he had been on his feet at the open window, wide awake and seemingly for good. The slightly rumpled bed beckoned, the night-light glowed cosily, but sleep wouldn’t come.

He opened the bottle of kirsch he had bought for Gemma at the station, took a satisfying slug and lit a cigarette. After the day he’d had, not to mention only four hours’ sleep the previous night, he should have been exhausted. Indeed, he was exhausted. It just so happened that he was also wide awake.

This normally only happened to him when he was in the grip of a case, deeply involved and yet unable for the moment to understand what needed to be done, or how to go about it. He hadn’t previously imagined that this was the situation here. On the contrary, everything had seemed to suggest that this case had been shunted off in his direction, among a sheaf of others, as a sop to his professional pride, a transparent excuse to look busy. It seemed, however, that various supposedly subordinate departments of his mind — down in the basement, where the real work got done — were not convinced. Perhaps it had been Anton Redel’s oddly insinuating remarks, or perhaps the reception he had been given by the carabinieri in Bolzano, or the information he had gathered earlier that evening at the local hospital.

In any event, it was all nonsense. He was in charge, for God’s sake, his rational, waking self, and he had decided to go home, file his report and make an end of it. It was as home that he now thought of Lucca. He knew that few of its inhabitants would ever return the compliment, but that was their business. As far as he was concerned, he had settled in, and with the only woman he had ever met who accepted him without question just as he was. That was no little thing, and all the rest seemed to naturally follow. One of the few differences between them, which Gemma had also accepted without com¬ ment or suggestions for a cure, was that after some days there he began to feel restless.

It was in this spirit that Zen had accepted the assignment dangled before him by his superior Brugnoli in Rome. It would give him a chance to get out and about a bit, he had thought, to exercise his professional skills, spend some time away, and then return home refreshed and ready to enjoy the quiet pleasures of life in a small town so far off the beaten track that he would have to kill a good few hours of the early morning in Florence before the first connection left on the single-track branch line that ran through Pistoia and Lucca to Viareggio. Gemma had offered to come and pick him up when he had called her from Bolzano, but he had of course refused. It was humiliating enough not to own a car, and have still less desire to acquire one, without forcing your lover out of bed in the middle of the night to drive a hundred and fifty kilometres to save you from the consequences of your own inadequacy.

He took another drink from the bottle and lit another cigarette. Standing to the left-hand side of the window, he was protected from the surging air. The light of a skittish moon, constantly dodging behind rafts of cloud, provided the only sense of place, and when it came, it was dramatic: towering cliffs of raw jagged rock, densely wooded slopes, the swathe of destruction on either bank, and then of course the Adige itself, surging and boiling in the shallow stretches, sinisterly calm and muscular where the channel deepened.

Battlements clustered like birds’ nests appeared on a crag across the river, some medieval lordling’s lair perched above the highways he’d taken toll on, a previous version of the military works which Zen had viewed earlier in the day. The thought of the labour that had gone into those ingenious constructions, erected by sheer human sweat in the harshest of environments, not to mention the constant risk of being shot or blown up, was astonishing and humiliating. Depressing too, because in the end it had all been for nothing, both for the robber baron and for the young men who had died in the barren peaks Zen had visited earlier. The former had been replaced by more organized and democratic forms of extortion, while the Italian army had lost both its honour and the war at the disfatta storica of Caporetto, the battle which had wiped out all the earlier gains. Despite their heroic sacrifices and sufferings, the Alpini had been forced to withdraw.

True, at the end of the war the nation had got the whole territory back, as well as the Austrian cisalpine provinces of the Sudtirol, the valleys south of the Brennero, as a gracious crumb let fall from the grand table of the Versailles peace conference. The fact remained that young men had died in their hundreds of thousands, most of them farm labourers from the centre and south of the country who had not the slightest idea of who they were fighting, let alone why.

The train seemed to have speeded up. They were going too fast, he thought, and in the same instant involuntarily recalled a passage from a French novel he’d read, probably while he was at university. He had perhaps remembered it because it was about railways, and his father had been a railwayman. In any event, he had now forgotten everything about the book except the demonic ending featuring a troop train hurtling through a featureless landscape towards the front in some forgotten war. The conscripts, numbed with exhaustion and booze, chanted and sang, unaware of the fact that the driver had fallen from the footplate of the locomotive, that the uncontrolled machine itself was driving them towards their inevitable destruction.

La storia. Le storie. History. Stories. The two senses of the word were coming together in his mind. Despite being of a generation that had never had to go to war, Zen — like every Italian, directly or indirectly — had had his appointments both with history and the infinite stories, true and false, which had been woven around it. In his case, they had usually come in the form of official cases that he had been charged with investigating, or helping to investigate, or more cynically hindering. How many had there been? How many stories had he worked on? Unless of course, as some said, they were all the same story, whose author and outcome would never be known.

Certainly this latest addition to the list did not seem very promising, even discounting the difficulties due to the fact that he had practically been operating in a foreign country. When Mussolini’s Fascists came to power after the First World War, exploiting the internal contradictions of the former regime’s hollow victory, they had exercised their absolute power to the utmost in the newly-named Alto Adige, forbidding the use of German, encouraging internal immigration from Sicily and the South, and generally grinding down the Austrian population in a blatant attempt to persuade them to head home across the Brennero Pass and not come back.

It was small wonder that resentment against the Italians still smouldered in the area. Since the granting of regional autonomy, this largely manifested itself on the personal level to which Bruno had taken exception in the mountain bar, but back in the seventies Zen had been at the sharp end of separatist terrorism during his ‘hardship years’ in the police, the obligatory posting to either Sicily, Sardinia or the Alto Adige, the nation’s three most troubled and dangerous areas. Now, though, the terrorists had all retired and written their memoirs, while the locals were doing very nicely thank you off their status as nominally Italian but in practice self-regulating in all the issues that really mattered. They might still flaunt their cultural and linguistic diversity, but when push came to shove they were happier dealing with a remote and largely indifferent government in Rome than coming under the thumb of their own people to the north and having to do everything by the book.

Certainly Werner Haberl, the junior doctor whom Zen had interviewed at the hospital in Bolzano, showed no traces of resentment at all. On the contrary, he had handled the occasion with an urbane, amused, slightly patronizing ease, treating Zen as if dealing with a promising exchange student from some developing country such as Ethiopia. The body found in the old Minenkriegstollenlage? A memorable case, even before the carabinieri had staged their midnight raid and whisked everything away without a word of explanation. It wasn’t every day that you got a partially mummified unidentified body of indeterminate age on the slab. The last one had been that Ice Age corpse they’d found up in the Alps, about a hundred metres on the Austrian side of the border as it turned out in the end. But Otzi too had been there for a while, while the political aspects got sorted out.

Yes, he’d been present at the autopsy. They all had. Staff, students, even people from outside the department. It was a unique case, after all; none of your run-of-the-mill car crashes, drug overdoses, suicides and cardiac arrests. They’d all hovered around while the professor did the business, describing his procedures and findings minutely for the benefit of the assembled company, as well as the voice recorder from which he would subsequently transcribe his notes before writing up the official report. That had of course been taken, along with everything else, in the course of the carabinieri’s intervention last week. At four in the morning. Ten of them in two jeeps, with a military ambulance to take the cadaver and all the effects. Protests had been made, but all in vain.

Sensing an opening, Zen had immediately moved in.

‘They’ve been pretty high-handed with us too. We made a request to see the post-mortem report — purely routine matter, in order to keep the bureaucratic record straight — and they just turned us down flat. Without even the courtesy of an excuse! For some unknown reason they seem to feel that they own this case. I would dearly love to prove them wrong about that, and if there’s anything you can do to help me, I’ll be most grateful. What was the cause of death, for example?’

‘Impossible to establish definitively. There were extensive lacerations and contusions, as was to be expected in the circumstances, but the body was so decomposed that the initial post-mortem examination was inconclusive. We were about to order further forensic tests when the Aktion occurred.’

‘What about identification?’

‘Again, inconclusive. The face was very badly damaged, but a search of dental records might have yielded some results, if we’d had a chance to make one.’

‘And his clothing?’

Werner Haberl nodded.

‘That was perhaps the most interesting feature we discovered. It was not, for example, military uniform. That was important to establish, as the dry, cold conditions in those tunnels inhibit putrefaction, and our first thought was obviously that this might be one of our glorious dead. Or perhaps of yours.’

‘So the corpse had been there for some time?’

‘Judging by the condition of the flesh and organs, the pathologist conservatively estimated a period of at least twenty years and perhaps much longer. However, he could not have been a war victim. The clothes were of synthetic fabric and a more modern cut, certainly not dating from the period of the Great War, and consisted entirely of a pair of trousers, a shirt and underclothes and socks. No footwear, no jacket. Moreover, all the makers’ marks had been removed and there were no personal items in the victim’s pockets or at the scene where the body was discovered.’

‘In other words…’

‘In other words, we were apparently faced with the scenario of a young man — the pathologist’s provisional estimate is that he was aged between twenty and twenty-five when he died — entering those tunnels alone, wearing light summer clothing from which all identifying tags had been removed, without shoes or boots, and then falling to his death.’

‘Did you happen to notice any sort of marking on the man’s right arm?’

‘There was lots of superficial damage. The cadaver was in a very bad condition, as I’ve said.’

‘No, I mean something artificial. A tattoo, for example.’

Haberl paused a moment.

‘I believe there was something of the sort, now that you mention it. We didn’t pay much attention to such superficial details at the preliminary stage, but of course they would be apparent on the video of the autopsy.’

‘And where is that?’

Werner Haberl sighed wearily and rolled his eyes for an answer.

‘That’s very interesting,’ said Zen, laying one of his cards on the desk between them. ‘Here’s my number, in case you remember anything else about the events we have discussed, or if there are any further developments.’

Werner Haberl looked at the card but did not touch it.

‘I have the feeling that if there are any further developments, they will take place in Rome. Where, I note from your card, you are based, dottore.’

The honorary title emerged like sausage meat from a grinder.

‘You may well be right,’ Zen had replied, getting to his feet. ‘ Aber man kann nie wissen.’

One never knows. A safe folk precept. Right now, for instance, he himself did not remotely know where he was. The stations dodged by so quickly, their lights all extinguished, that he couldn’t read their names. But they had left the high ravines of the Adige, that much was clear. As was the moon. The weather was improving, the landscape was gentler and more cultivated, the economy productive rather than extractive. Distances sprang out, roads were straight, lights abounded, and there was traffic on the roads they crossed. Life was returning. Zen could smell its heady presence, stuffed with promise and challenge, in the mild air surging in through the window.

The train slowed slightly, clattered over a set of points and then dipped into a concrete underpass beneath another set of lines running at ninety degrees to its course. Leaving his compartment, Zen went out into the corridor. Yes, there were the lights of Verona, a city he had always irrationally loathed and never visited. Una citta bianca, a fiefdom of the priests and the army, of soulless entrepreneurs and all the loutish scum of the Venetian hinterland who had inherited the worst qualities of both their ancestors and their Austro-Hungarian invaders, without any of the redeeming features of either. And the feeling was mutual. The veronesi had always hated the lordly Venetians too.

Now they were moving out into the vast desolation of the Po flatlands. Zen returned to his compartment for another dose of kirsch and a fresh cigarette. The railway line had narrowed to a single track, as though to emphasize the precarious hold of civilization on these reclaimed swamps, while the moonlight, filtered down through a layer of mist, evoked a dimensionless landscape punctuated by the squat, rectangular outlines of the cascine; agricultural barracks, now largely abandoned, where generations of crop-sharing farmhands had been born, grown up, married, laboured and died, all within one isolated and self-sufficient community lost in this featureless plain plagued by suffocating heat in summer and clammy cold in winter.

‘In case you want to do an enhancement,’ Anton had said about the black plastic thing that came with the photographs now packed away in Zen’s overnight bag on the rack above. What was that supposed to mean?

The train rolled resonantly over a series of long metal spans laid out across the monstrous obesity of the lower Po. Its lights showed the skeletal remains of the former brick and stone structure, the central arches gutted by bombs. Another war, another battleground, another failure. Mussolini’s Chief of Staff, Marshal Badoglio, had allegedly deserted his unit at Caporetto and sought safety behind the lines. A quarter of a century later, after the Duce’s downfall, he had dithered and prevaricated about the handover to the Allies just long enough to allow the Germans to occupy all but the extreme south of the peninsula, thereby ensuring the destruction of much of the nation’s heritage and infrastructure, including the bridge they had just crossed.

A station flitted by. The train was going more slowly now, and he could just make out the name. Mirandola. A couple of houses on a minor road. He would never know anything more about Mirandola, just as he would never know anything more about the case he had been assigned. This was perfectly normal. Stories were one thing, history another. The first abounded, the second was unknowable. Despite Italy’s economic prosperity and impeccable European credentials, not to mention the glitzy ‘open government’ stance of the current regime, its public history remained riddled with the secret network of events collectively dubbed the misteri d’Italia. The wormholes pervading the body politic remained, but the worms had never been identified, still less charged or convicted.

That was the way it was. Reasons existed, but reason itself, discredited by the excesses committed in its name, had been abandoned. Even reality was little more than a designer tag for whatever tissue of lies was being worn that year. But this too was normal. None of the ways we experience the world corresponds even remotely to the scientific truths about it. Not only are our intuitions invariably wrong, it is impossible to imagine what they would be like if they were right.

I should have joined the magistratura, he thought. Antonio Di Pietro, the inspirational investigating judge who had almost single-handedly brought about the fall of the former regime, the so-called First Republic, had formerly been a policeman. Then he had studied at night for a qualification to the judiciary, having realized that only that independent body could give him the power he needed to solve at least some of the more egregious ‘mysteries of Italy’. I’ve never been that ambitious, Zen conceded gloomily. I’ve just carried on in my little rut, always taking the path of least resistance, trying to do the best I can, and then wondering why my work never amounts to anything in the end.

A clatter of points recalled him to the present. The line had now doubled again and the train was approaching a mass of orange lights, squishy in the light mist rising from the far shore of the swamplands. A cigarette and a final glug of kirsch later, they were trundling through Bologna station, past the rebuilt waiting room with the plaque commemorating yet another of those impenetrable mysteries: the bomb of 2 August 1980, which had killed eighty-four people and left over two hundred others scarred for life. Both the right and left wings of political opinion had blamed extremists of the opposing faction. There had been a flurry of investigations and a few charges had been brought, but nothing had come of it. It was as if that everyday atrocity had been an Act of God, like a hurricane or an earthquake. Shame, of course, shocking tragedy, but nothing to be done.

Now feeling tired for the first time, Zen lay down on the bed. The window was still open, and as the train entered a valley in the Apennine foothills he caught a momentary whiff of sweet wood smoke. Then there was nothing but the hammering of the wheels reverberating off the walls of the tunnels, increasingly frequent and long. Here at last he dozed off, only to be awakened by the sleeping car attendant he had bribed earlier, who told him that they were passing through Prato. He had just time to collect his things and make himself look more or less presentable before the train arrived in Florence.

He stepped wearily down on to the platform, still only halfawake, and wondering how on earth he was to fill the long hours before his connection to Lucca left. Then a lithe form emerged from the shadows and kissed him.

‘You’re looking very well. The mountain air must suit you.’

He stared at Gemma.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said irritably. ‘I told you not to bother.’

‘Well, I did. The car’s outside. Give me your bag.’

‘I can manage perfectly well. You’re not my mother!’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Anyway, thank you for coming. Sorry I’m so tetchy. I’m completely exhausted. God, it’s good to be home.’

‘Make the most of it, because the Ministry’s been in touch. Someone named Brugnoli. He wants to see you in Rome tomorrow.’

‘I don’t want to go to Rome.’

‘Well, I do. And you have to. I’ve booked us both seats on the nine o’clock.’

‘What have you got to do with it? You don’t work for Brugnoli. Or do you? Is that it? He planted you on me at the beach back in the summer to…’

‘Calm down. I just want to do some shopping.’

‘Fine, but I have to work. You can’t just expect me to drop everything, escort you round the shops and then take you to lunch.’

‘I prefer to shop alone, and I’m lunching with a friend.’

‘A friend?’

‘Her name’s Fulvia. We were at school together. We’ll take the train down together in the morning and then back again in the evening, leaving the car at the station here in Florence.’

‘But…’

‘You’re just tired. And a bit drunk, I think. It’ll all make sense in the morning.’

‘No, it won’t.’

‘All right, then it won’t. Is getting worked up about it now going to change that?’

‘Why do you always have to be right?’

‘Why do you always have to be wrong?’

‘I’m not always wrong!’

‘No, but you think you are. You even want to be. Well, I want to be right. And I usually am. I took a chance on you, don’t forget. A very big chance. Was I wrong about that?’

‘No, you were right.’

‘I rest my case. Now you rest, and I’ll drive.’