Ratking

EIGHT

By morning everything had changed: the sky was still clear, but the sun shone on a new landscape. The straggling hinter-parts of the town, the scree of recent building on the lower slopes, the patchy developments strung out beside road and railway in the valley, all this had vanished. Immediately beyond the two churches visible from Zen’s window the world abruptly ended, to begin again fifteen or twenty kilometres away, where the upper slopes of the yeasty mountain survived as a small island rising from a frozen ocean. A few other islets were visible on the other side of the valley, but apart from these patches of high ground and the stranded city itself, a glistening white mass of fog covered everything.

The Questura was barely fifty metres down the hill, but it was below the surface, and as Zen walked there from his hotel he felt the invisible moisture beading his newly shaved skin. When he looked up the light was pearly and the sky a blue so tender he could hardly take his eyes off it, with the result that on several occasions he collided with people coming the other way. But everybody was in a good mood that morning, and his apologies were returned with a smile. He remembered a Chinese fable Ellen had once told him about a man who falls off a cliff, saves himself by clutching at a plant, and then notices that two mice are gnawing away the branch on which his life depends. There is a fruit growing on the branch, which the man plucks and eats. The fruit tastes wonderful.

‘How did the mice come to be halfway down a cliff in the first place?’ he had asked her. ‘And why didn’t they eat the fruit themselves?’

He couldn’t see the point of the story at all, but Ellen refused to explain.

‘You must experience it,’ was all she would say. ‘One day it’ll suddenly hit you.’

He had been sceptical at the time, but she’d been quite right, for he had suddenly understood the story. ‘It’ll come to the same thing in the end,’ he’d told Luciano Bartocci. His days in Perugia were clearly numbered, and he would spend them like the young magistrate, on a siding running parallel to the main line but going nowhere and ending abruptly. The process had begun the day before, at the scene of the crime. It was Major Volpi who had been given responsibility for putting up roadblocks and carrying out house-to-house searches. The police had made one mistake too many in this case and would be given no further opportunities to demonstrate their incompetence. As for Zen, any day now he would receive a telegram from the Ministry summoning him back to Rome, and that would be that.

But in the meantime, how sweet the fruit tasted! And although the bureaucratic mice were invisibly at work, he still went through the motions of shifting hands and improving his grip on the branch. Thus his first action on returning to the Questura the day before had been to send his inspectors out to question the people living in the houses along the road to Cannara and talk to the local farmers, just in case anyone had seen anything. When he arrived at work that morning the result of their labours was waiting for him in a blue folder.

Five minutes after entering his office Zen reappeared in the inspectors’ room, where Geraci was watching Chiodini fill in a coupon for a competition promising the winner a lifetime supply of tomato concentrate.

‘What is this?’ he demanded.

Geraci looked warily at the folder Zen was holding up, his eyebrows working away like two caterpillars doing a mating dance.

‘It’s our report.’

‘I’ve never seen a report like this. What’s all this stuff down the side?’

‘Those are computer codes.’

‘Since when have we had a computer?’

‘We haven’t, it’s at the law courts. All packed up in boxes, down in the basement. But we’ll be getting terminals here, once it’s working. You see, this report isn’t meant to be read, it’s meant to be put into the computer.’

Zen regarded him stonily.

‘But there is no computer.’

‘Not yet, no. But they want to be ready, you see. It’s going to be wonderful! All the files from us, the Carabinieri, the Finance people, everything, is going to go straight into the computer. Anything you want to know, it’ll be there at your fingertips. Say you’ve got a report about a small red car, and you want to compare it with all the other small red cars that have been reported in the area. With the old method it would take you hours looking through files, but with the computer you just push a button and it tells you right away. And the same for all the large red cars, or the red foreign cars of any size, or the small sports cars of any colour…’

Zen passed one hand across his forehead. There were clearly various possibilities which the Chinese hadn’t thought of. For example, the mice stop gnawing, scamper down your arm, cock their legs and piss in your face.

‘Listen, you don’t mean to tell me that everyone around here gets their reports in this form. I simply don’t believe it.’

‘Of course they do! Isn’t it the same in Rome?’

Zen looked away. Of course it was the same in Rome. It would be the same everywhere, that was how the system worked. What Geraci still didn’t know was that Zen had no recent operational experience in Rome or anywhere else.

‘Mind you, some of the older officers get us to do a back-up report in the old way,’ Chiodini told him.

‘But it’s strictly unofficial,’ Geraci added hurriedly. ‘Can’t be logged or filed.’

Zen was leafing through the folder. He seemed not to have heard.

‘Did you speak to this witness?’

The inspector took the file and glanced at the entry pointed out by Zen’s broad flat finger.

‘No, that was Lucaroni.’

‘But it’s marked G.’

‘That’s right. G stands for Lucaroni.’

‘Really? I suppose you’re L?’

Geraci frowned.

‘L? No, L is already in use by the system. For example here in the same entry it says L23, right? That means an unidentified foreign car.’

‘Where is Lucaroni?’

Geraci seemed to hesitate for a moment.

‘Upstairs,’ said Chiodini.

That meant either the senior command structure or the Political Branch, whose rooms are situated on the top floor of every Questura. The fact that the same word is used for either reflects the general feeling that the distinction between them is fairly hazy.

‘Tell him I want to see him as soon as he gets back.’

He closed the door behind him. So they were getting a computer, were they? Soon the intolerable mysteries of Mediterranean life would be swept away by the electronic wonders of real time and random access for all. And just to make sure that everything was fair and above-board, the computer, like the facilities for tapping phones, would be located at the law courts, safely out of the hands of the police. ‘They’re doing to small-time corruption what the multinational corporations are doing to small-time business,’ a cynical Sardinian friend had once remarked apropos of the latest initiative to clean up the police. ‘It’s not going to stop the abuse of power, it’s just going to restrict it to the highest level. Anyone can afford to buy you or me, Aurelio, but only the big boys can manipulate judges.’

Zen glanced at the wall, where the calendar now looked oddly unbalanced. Yes, it might be time to phone Gilberto. He couldn’t leave the crucifix in the luggage locker for ever.

Lucaroni appeared about ten minutes later, all apologies for the delay.

‘I was just having a word with Personnel,’ he explained. ‘My sister’s getting married next week and I wanted to know whether there’d be any chance of a spot of leave.’

Zen passed him a page of the report.

‘Tell me about this woman who claims to have seen a large blue car near the scene of the crime.’

‘Well, there’s just what it says here,’ the inspector replied, scanning the page. ‘It was a large blue foreign saloon, she said, driven by someone with fair hair, going along the…’

‘Tell me about the woman.’

‘The driver? But we don’t…’

‘No, the woman you spoke to.’

Lucaroni made a conspicuous effort to remember.

‘Well, she was oldish. lives with her in-laws in one of those new houses along the road.’

‘How did she see the car?’

‘She was out gathering salad leaves for the evening meal. There’s very little traffic on that road and she knows most of the people, so when she saw this strange car she noticed it.’

‘She called it a “strange” car?’

‘Yes.’

‘So how did the idea that it was foreign come up?’

‘I asked her about the make and she said she didn’t know. I asked if it was foreign and she said that it was.’

Zen nodded. The old woman wouldn’t have known a Rolls-Royce from a Renault. ‘Foreign’ just meant that the car was a large luxury saloon of a kind she’d never seen before.

‘And there was only one person in it?’

‘So she said. A woman with blonde hair.’

Zen took the report back again.

‘It says “fair hair” here.’

‘Well, you can’t put blonde, can you?’ Lucaroni pointed out. ‘The computer won’t accept it. Hair is either fair or yellow.’

Zen nodded.

‘Oh, there’s one other thing.’

He pointed to the wall.

‘You remember the crucifix that used to be there? You don’t happen to know where it came from, do you?’

Lucaroni’s tongue emerged to dampen his lips. He shook his head.

‘I had a visitor in here the other day, you see. There was an accident and the thing ended up in pieces. Most unfortunate.’

‘In pieces?’ Lucaroni whispered.

Zen nodded.

‘Luckily my visitor was a Communist, so he’s not superstitious about these things. I’d be happy to pay for a new one, but I have no idea where to go. Do you think you could get me one? I’d really appreciate it.’

There was a long silence.

‘Well…’ Lucaroni began.

Zen tapped his chest with one finger.

‘But I want one that is the same. You understand? Exactly identical in every respect.’

Their glances met and held.

‘Identical,’ breathed the inspector.

‘Absolutely. I was very fond of that crucifix. It had a certain something about it, know what I mean?’

Lucaroni’s mouth was now completely out of control. His tongue shot out continually, dumping saliva on his lips, which barely had time to spread it around their shiny surfaces before the next load arrived. Zen hastened to dismiss him before he self-destructed.

A glance at the map revealed that there was a short cut down to the Miletti villa, so instead of summoning Palottino he decided to walk. What he was thinking of doing was risky enough as it was. The less official he could make it the better.

The short cut turned out to be a lane which started abruptly at the bottom of a flight of steps opposite the Questura and ran straight down the hillside like a ruled line. It must have been one of the old medieval roads into the city, now closed to traffic by the concrete retaining wall of the ring boulevard. To either side old farmhouses and new villas stood in uneasy proximity. Beyond them, a narrow fold in the hillside was being filled with rubbish to provide space for a car park. Down below, lost in the mist, he could just make out the holm-oaks and cypresses surrounding the Miletti property, a lugubrious baroque monstrosity built on a shoulder of land jutting out from the steep hillside.

Zen walked past it for another hundred and fifty metres to the separate entrance marked ‘Societa Industriale Miletti di Perugia’. At this depth the mist was still unwarmed by the sun, clinging glaucously to every surface. This was the site of Franco’s original workshops, built just below the house. In those days captains of industry were not ashamed to live close to the source of their wealth. Since production had been moved out to Ponte San Giovanni the buildings had been gutted and transformed into the administrative headquarters of SIMP. He’d been expecting tight security at the entrance, but in the event the gates were open and unmanned, and a passing employee directed him along a concrete road leading to the garage where a man in blue overalls was washing one of the Fiat saloons. Behind him a dozen or so more of the cars were lined up, their paintwork gleaming.

Zen flashed his identification with contemptuous brevity and then allowed a little time for the mechanic’s fear to be fruitful and multiply. Everyone has some reason to be afraid of the police, and fear, like money, can be spent on something quite unrelated to what has created it. When Zen judged that he had enough for his purposes he pointed to the Fiats.

‘Are you responsible for these cars?’

The man nodded. Zen gave a satisfied smile, as though he had obtained a damning admission.

‘Then what have you done with my cigarette lighter?’

‘Cigarette lighter?’ the mechanic stammered. ‘What sort of cigarette lighter?’

Zen’s smile vanished.

‘Why, how many have you found?’

‘None! I haven’t found anything.’

‘Then why did you ask what sort, eh? Think you can keep anything you find, eh? Supplement your lousy wages with a little private enterprise, is that it?’

The man flung his sponge down angrily.

‘I’ve found nothing! I’ve just cleaned them all ready for this afternoon. There was no cigarette lighter in any of them.’

‘They’re going to use the company cars for the funeral?’ Zen queried in a tone of deep disgust. ‘Talk about cheap!’

‘It’s what Signor Ruggiero would have wanted.’

‘Don’t try and change the subject! You claim not to have found any lighter, is that it?’

‘I don’t claim anything! I didn’t find any lighter and that’s all there is to it. Have a look for yourself if you want, I’ve got nothing to hide!’

‘Oh, I’m going to! Don’t you worry about that, I’m going to.’

The mechanic watched him out of the corner of his eye as he went from car to car, making an elaborate pretence of examining the interiors.

The mud surrounding the building site where Ruggiero Miletti had been murdered had proved a rich source of impressions. A preliminary investigation, completed while Zen was still present, had yielded five different footprints and two distinct sets of tyre marks. One of the two sets consistently overlaid the other, and it was distinctive, in that one of the tyres did not match the other three. Zen had imagined that this would be a rarity, but in fact four of the cars in the garage had one odd tyre. Only one configuration, however, matched that found at the murder scene.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Zen?’

It was Gianluigi Santucci. The Tuscan turned on the mechanic.

‘What has he been asking you, Massimo? If you’ve told him as much as the time, you’re out!’

‘Nothing!’ protested the mechanic energetically. ‘I’ve said nothing!’

‘That’s true,’ Zen confirmed. ‘He’s been most unhelpful.’

‘I haven’t found any lighter, I don’t know anything about any lighter,’ Massimo went on. ‘I told him so, but he wanted to look for himself. But he didn’t touch anything, Signor Gianluigi. I kept my eye on him the whole time.’

Gianluigi Santucci glared at Zen.

‘Cigarette lighter my bollocks! What are you up to? Come on!’

‘I’ve lost my lighter and I thought I might have left it in the car the other day. I didn’t want to disturb the family at a moment like this so I came to check in person. But I don’t understand what you’re getting so excited about. I mean, is this garage a secret research area or something?’

Too late, Gianluigi realized his error. In an attempt to compensate he forced a smile.

‘You haven’t understood, have you?’ he sneered. ‘You think you’re still in the game, but you couldn’t be more wrong. You’re a foreigner here. No one wants you, no one likes you, no one needs you. If you haven’t got your marching orders yet it just means no one can be bothered to tell you what’s happening any more! Now kindly fuck off out of here and don’t come back.’

When Zen reached the gate the security guard was back in his place, but he was so intent on the spluttering exclamations of his walkie-talkie, cradling it to his face and murmuring to it like a mother trying to calm a baby, that Zen’s departure went as unremarked as his arrival.

He walked on down the hill until the lane joined the main road. At the corner stood a green plastic rubbish skip, presumably the one where Ruggiero’s letter had been left. Opposite there was a bakery, an office furniture showroom, a driving school and a tobacconist displaying the familiar public telephone symbol of a blue receiver in a yellow circle. Zen went in, got two thousand lire’s worth of tokens and dialled a number in Rome.

‘Gilberto?’

‘ Who’s this? ’

‘Aurelio.’

‘ Aurelio! How’s it going? ’

‘Can you do me a favour?’

‘ Such as? ’

‘It means coming up here.’

‘ Where’s here? ’

‘Perugia. I’ve got problems.’

‘ What kind of problems? ’

‘Can you come up this afternoon?’

‘ This afternoon! Jesus.’

Even at this depth the sunlight had finally started to filter down through the mist. There was a grove of olive trees opposite the shop, on the other side of the main road. Above the rush and scurry of the traffic they stood in monumental stillness, each leaf precisely outlined against the deep blue sky.

‘ What do you want done? ’

‘Can we talk on this line?’

‘ Listen, I’m in industrial espionage, you know. How long do you think I’d stay in business if I didn’t keep my lines clean? You worry about your own end.’

Zen told his friend briefly about the murder and the large blue car that matched both the witness’s description and the tyre marks found at the scene. Then he told him what he wanted him to do and Gilberto said he would, although it might mean losing a contract to proof a leading Rome estate agent against electronic surveillance. They arranged to meet at half past four at a village a kilometre or so beyond the cemetery.

That left lots of time to kill, so Zen rode a bus back up to the centre and wandered along the Corso. The steps of the cathedral were being used as a grandstand by some of the local young people and a few early tourists. A German youth whose exaggerated features looked as though they had been moulded from foam rubber explained loudly to his companion how he needed the sun, the sun for him was a physical necessity. The two Nordic girls he had seen two days before were now basking like seals outside another cafe. One of them had even contrived to get sunburned. Her friend was delicately pulling little wafers of flaking skin off her chest, watched hungrily by a group of young men in leather jackets, narrow ties and mirror sunglasses.

All at once Zen saw a vigorous bulky figure in a dark grey overcoat with a black armband walking towards him across the piazza. It was Antonio Crepi. He prepared a greeting, but the Perugian passed by without a word or gesture, leaving Zen with his hand still uncertainly raised in salutation.

It was the first time that someone had cut him dead, and it was a shock. He had always thought of it as a superficial and outmoded gesture found only in old novels. But what had just happened had nothing to do with etiquette: Antonio Crepi had made it clear that for him, and by extension for the whole of the Perugia that mattered, Zen had ceased to exist. That’s why ghosts wail, he thought, condemned to haunt a world which has no further need of them. He walked away quickly, trying to shake off the unnerving effect of the encounter.

The air was carved into blocks by the buildings, soft and warm where the sun reached, chill and unyielding in the shadows. The continual passage from one to the other was initially as refreshing as a succession of hot and cold showers, and ultimately as enervating. Zen stopped in a small grocery and ordered a roll filled with anchovies sprinkled with vinegar and a little crushed chilli, which he ate with a glass of white wine. There was a newspaper open at the local pages on top of the freezer, and as he munched the roll Zen read an article describing the life and times of the late head of the Miletti family in such exorbitantly fulsome terms that Zen wondered in his dour Venetian way whether such a paragon would find Paradise quite good enough for him. He also wondered whether Ruggiero’s daughter had seen the article, and if so what she thought of it. Cinzia had told him what kind of drinkers the Perugians were, and what kind of lovers. What he needed to know now was what kind of murderers they were.

By four o’clock the last of the mist had disappeared, even down in the valley below the cemetery. The warm air was scented with the heady reek of diesel oil from the bus which had brought him there and was now parked in the terminus circle near by. The driver was sitting on the step, smoking and reading a newspaper. Zen stood in the fading sunlight watching the courtship of two pigeons on the tiled roof of a shed below. The gurgling male, alternately bowing down and rearing up, chased the female from one row of tiles to the next. Eventually he appeared to lose interest, disheartened by her lack of appreciation, and turned away. Instantly the female stopped too, so that both birds came to a halt like toys whose batteries have run down. It seemed the end. Relationships were just too difficult, the sexes would never see eye to eye, it was all too much bother. Something essential had broken down and next year there wouldn’t be any pigeons. Then, just as suddenly as he had stopped, the male was off again, perking up his feathers and hopping after his mate with a meaningful glint in his beady eyes. Zen had watched this cycle a dozen times or more when he felt a touch on his shoulder and turned to find Gilberto grinning up at him.

Gilberto Nieddu was so small that it wasn’t clear how he had ever managed to get into the police force. There were the inevitable rumours of bribery and favouritism, but since Gilberto’s father was only a small-time lock-smith from Nuoro this seemed unlikely. Zen preferred to think that some alert recruiting officer somewhere, realizing the appalling threat a disgruntled Gilberto would pose outside the law, had bent the rules to let him in. For four years they had worked together in Rome. The Sardinian had resigned a week after Zen’s transfer, and he was the only one of his former colleagues whom Zen still saw regularly.

‘Any problems?’ Zen asked him.

‘Only getting back here after I dumped it. You had to choose a place in the middle of nowhere.’

‘Close to the scene. Local colour.’

Gilberto was as compact as a squash ball, sallow, ugly and muscular, yet amazingly deft in his movements. For a bet, he had once broken into the flat where a certain Vice-Questore was entertaining a lady friend and removed the couple’s clothes so stealthily that the Vice-Questore thought something supernatural must have occurred and came over all religious for a while. No, Gilberto wouldn’t have had any problems stealing an unguarded car from outside a cemetery.

‘Is this all really worth it?’ the Sardinian asked Zen, who merely shrugged.

‘How much do I owe you?’

Gilberto Nieddu spat thoughtfully at the pigeons on the roof below.

‘Take me out to lunch when you get back. At the Pergola.’

‘The Pergola! Wouldn’t it work out cheaper just to pay your normal rates?’

‘Now, don’t try and wriggle out of it or I’ll send Vittorio round to see you. He’s my new enforcer. A great success. You may think you have problems now, but Vittorio can make them seem like fond memories.’

Zen handed him a key with a number stamped on the shaft.

‘This opens a luggage locker at the station. There’s something inside, wrapped up in a plastic bag. I’d like to know what it is.’

The Sardinian looked at him long and hard, shaking his head slowly.

‘You know something, Aurelio? You aren’t really cut out to be a cop.’

‘Imagine living in a country where the cops are all people who’re cut out for the job.’

‘I’ll phone you tomorrow morning.’

Zen shook his head.

‘ I ’ll phone you.’

The Sardinian spat once more.

‘Christ, you have got problems.’

The bus driver started his engine again. Zen just had time to cross to the phone booth, dial the police emergency number and give the message he had prepared before boarding the bus as the doors were closing. A few moments later they passed Gilberto walking back up the hill to the place where he had left his own car, just below the massive wall of the columbarium in the cemetery where Ruggiero Miletti had been interred two hours previously.

The switchboard on the ground floor of the Questura was manned by a chubby youth who was holding a large roll, turning it from one side to the other and studying it closely like a wrestler looking for a hold. As Zen came through the door he suddenly saw an opening and lunged forward, so that for the next thirty seconds or so he was unable to reply to his visitor’s question.

‘He wouldn’t give his name,’ he said finally. ‘Probably a hoax.’

‘What exactly did he say?’

‘Just said he wanted to report a blue Fiat abandoned on the road to Cannara, near the scene of the murder.’

He kept glancing warily at his roll out of the corner of his eye, as though it might attack him. Zen leant forward on the top of the switchboard.

‘Listen, this could be very important. I want that car brought in, turned over to the laboratory and given the works.’

‘They’ll need confirmation in writing.’

‘They’ll get it.’

The telephonist nodded. He was too eager to get back to his roll to ask how Zen had found out about the anonymous phone call.

Upstairs on the third floor Zen stepped into the inspectors’ room, but there was no one there. He was about to leave when he froze in an awkward position midway across the room. Then he heard it again, a slight but unmistakable sound from next door. Someone was in his office.

He moved as quietly as he could towards the connecting door, grasped the handle and with a single movement flung the door open.

‘About time too! I was beginning to think I’d have to spend the night here.’

He leant back against the door, his body slowly un-tensing.

‘Ellen.’

‘Ah, so you remember my name!’

‘It’s wonderful to see you.’

‘Really? I certainly wouldn’t have guessed it from the way you’ve been behaving. Why haven’t you telephoned me?’

‘I did!’ he lied automatically. ‘You were never there!’

‘I was!’

‘Not when I phoned.’

‘I’ve been home almost every evening. When did you phone?’

‘Well, anyway, let’s not quarrel. The important thing is that you’re here. How long can you stay?’

‘I’ll have to see. It depends.’

He tried to kiss her, but she evaded him in a half-angry, half-flirtatious way, so they were in the middle of a clumsy clinch when Lucaroni walked in.

‘Oh fuck!’ he said, on his way out again.

Zen turned on him.

‘Didn’t anyone ever teach you to knock? You’re not home on the farm now, you know!’

‘Sorry, chief. Really sorry. I didn’t think anybody was here. I was going to put it up for you.’

‘Put what up?’

Lucaroni unwrapped the package he was carrying to reveal a brand-new crucifix, the wounds daubed with bright red paint.

‘Just what you wanted, right?’ the inspector prompted eagerly. ‘Just like the other one.’

Zen glanced at Ellen, who was staring at him in horrified disbelief.

‘I’ll explain later,’ he said wearily. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything later.’

A small white plastic bag containing various packets of waxed paper marked ‘For Foodstuffs’ lay propped against the gear-lever of the little Fiat. The draught coming in through the ventilation ducts made it tremble continuously. They should never have come, thought Zen. What a crazy idea, picnicking up a mountain at this time of year. A crazy foreign idea.

It had all started the night before, when Ellen asked, ‘Is that Assisi over there?’ They were standing looking out of his hotel window. In the distance a mess of lights were spread out across the face of the night like a shovelful of glowing cinders, flickering and scintillating in the currents of air rising from the villages in the plain between. Let’s go there tomorrow, she’d suggested, and then talked about her previous visits, enthusing about the place so much that he grew quite determined to dislike it. But it wasn’t until Ellen came to pick him up that he discovered that she had already bought everything for a picnic lunch. One o’clock in Piazza dei Partigiani after a stressful morning at work was very different from eleven o’clock the night before after making love, but Ellen was bubbling with such enthusiasm that he hadn’t the heart to voice his reservations. But he still thought it was crazy, and he’d been right. Here they were, parked a thousand metres up the dough-shaped mountain, huddled in Ellen’s Fiat 500 because despite the sun the wind outside was wicked. Even the view was all but invisible through a windscreen coated with Roman grime. Foreign craziness!

Ellen started to unwrap the food: a mound of ricotta, slices of cooked ham, olives in oil, half a loaf of bread. On a warm sunny day in the open air it might have been idyllic. Eaten off sheets of wrapping paper balanced precariously on their shivering knees the cheese looked a disgusting white excrescence, the ham pale and sickly and the olives slimy. Even the wine, a heavy red, was a failure. Cold and shaken from the journey, thick with sediment and drunk from a plastic beaker, it tasted like medicine. But like medicine it did him good, and the food tasted better than it looked, and after a while the silence grew less tense and they began to chat about the contrast between bloody-minded, earnest Perugia, just visible on its windswept ridge as a distant smudge of grey, and Assisi, symbol of everything nice and pretty and kind, whose pink stone made even its fortifications look as innocent as an illustration in a book of fairy tales. But as Zen pointed out, at least in Perugia you were spared the relentless commercialization of the pilgrim city, the three-dimensional postcards of a glamorous St Francis preaching to an audience of stuffed animals, the bottles of ‘Monk’s Delight’ liqueur, the ceramic prayer texts suitable for mounting over the toilet, the little figurines of lovable monks with round bellies and mischievous smiles.

‘Yes, but despite all that there really is something special about the place, isn’t there?’ Ellen insisted.

It was the sort of comment, at once vague and gushing, that always irritated him. Sometimes he wondered whether that was why she kept making them.

‘To me it’s just another pretty Umbrian hill town,’ he retorted. ‘It’s a shame it’s been ruined.’

He was going too far, pushing too hard, saying things he didn’t really believe. It was quite deliberate. Something had gone wrong between them, and he intended to find out what it was. Normally he handed over responsibility for the routine maintenance of their relationship to Ellen, but she was letting him down, so he was going to try the only technique he knew: drop some explosive overboard and see what floated to the surface.

‘How can you say that?’ she demanded indignantly. ‘What about all the churches? They wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for him. The basilica is one of the greatest buildings in the world. Or would you dispute that?’

‘On the contrary, I think it’s so great that it should be put to better use. I remember when I was at university in Padua we went to see the basilica there. It’s magnificent, one of my friends said, after the revolution we’ll turn it into a sports centre. The place here would make a good Turkish baths.’

‘You’re showing your age, Aurelio. That sort of knee-jerk anticlericalism has been out of date for years.’

‘Or best of all, they could use it as an exhibition centre. They could start with a display about the concentration camp at Jasenovac.’

‘Was that in Poland?’ she repeated as she cleared away the food.

‘Yugoslavia. No one’s heard of it, it wasn’t in the Auschwitz or Belsen class. They only killed forty thousand people there.’

‘And what’s that got to do with Assisi?’

‘The commandant of Jasenovac concentration camp was a Franciscan monk.’

He opened the window a crack, but the wind made such a noise that he immediately closed it again.

‘When the Germans turned Croatia into a puppet dictatorship the Catholics there immediately got to work settling old scores with the Serbs, packing them into their churches and burning them alive, that kind of thing. The Church knew what was going on and they could easily have stopped it. But the Pope kept quiet and the atrocities went on, many of them supervised by the followers of St Francis. At the end of the war Eva Peron, the wife of the Argentinian dictator, sent us a boatload of brown cloth. Guess why.’

She shook her head.

‘To dress the Croatian thugs up as Franciscan monks so that they could escape to Italy out of the clutches of Tito’s partisans. They were fed and sheltered here in Assisi and in other monasteries and church buildings until they could get away to South America. They were good Catholic boys, after all.’

‘I don’t suppose Tito’s men were angels either.’

‘I don’t suppose they were. But at least they didn’t go around with beatific smiles mumbling about peace and goodwill.’

‘Well, I’m relieved to see that you haven’t changed after all,’ Ellen remarked as they lit their cigarettes. ‘I got a bit worried when I found you’d been sending your subordinates out to buy crucifixes.’

Zen smiled too, but privately he heard Gilberto Nieddu’s voice again, the Sardinian accent strong and clear-cut even over the bad line from Rome.

‘ Oh yes, Aurelio, I’ve identified it. No problem. For me, that is. But you’ve got problems all right. Your crucifix contains a transistorized short-wave transmitter with a cadmium-cell feed. Korean job, cheap and easy to obtain, four to five months continuous operation, use once and throw away. The mike concealed in the head of the figure is only medium-quality, technically speaking, but it would pick up a flea farting in a smallish room. The transmitter would then beam that out about two hundred metres. Somewhere within that radius there’ll be a receiver, probably rigged up to a voice-activated tape recorder. Once every so often someone comes along, swaps the cassette and takes away the highlights of your day at work.’

There was a long silence, during which the noise on the line seemed to become a third party in their conversation.

‘ What do you want me to do with it? ’

‘You’d better send it back.’

‘ Do you have any idea who it belongs to? ’

The silence lasted even longer this time.

‘Upstairs, maybe.’

Gilberto’s next words had shaken Zen more than anything that had happened so far.

‘ Watch yourself, Aurelio. Remember Carella.’

Avoiding Ellen’s eyes, Zen wrapped his coat more closely about him.

‘Anyway, let’s look on the bright side. The way things are going I should be back in Rome soon.’

‘I still don’t understand what all the fuss is about,’ Ellen replied in a slightly peevish tone. ‘Miletti’s death was nothing to do with you, surely?’

‘That remains to be proved.’

‘Oh, I see. It’s the old story. You’re guilty until proven innocent.’

‘Not necessarily. Sometimes you’re guilty anyway.’

They sat there listening to the gush and scurry of the wind buffeting the car.

‘You didn’t tell me the whole truth that evening at Ottavio’s, did you?’ Ellen asked at last.

He didn’t reply.

‘I want to know, Aurelio. I need to know.’

He turned his pale, grave face towards her.

‘When you were a child, did you have someone who used to tell you stories?’

She looked at him in surprise.

‘My father used to read to me.’

‘No, I don’t mean that. If it comes out of a book you know it’s not real. I mean someone who would just sit down and tell you things, as if they had just happened on the way home. I had an uncle who did that. For example once he went to Rome on business and when he got back he told me about a building which was like the sky at night, so big that even when you stood in front of it you couldn’t believe you were actually seeing it. Yet it was completely useless, he said. It had no roof and no floor, just hundreds of brick arches piled one on top of another like a team of acrobats. He was describing the Colosseum.’

He opened the window and pushed his cigarette out.

‘Once he was late arriving at our house. He told me that when the vaporetto arrived he had noticed something strange about it. The boat was lying far too low in the water, almost level with the surface, the decks awash. It made no sound, and even seemed to absorb the sounds around it, like a sponge soaking up water. The people who were waiting all boarded this strange boat, all except my uncle. I asked him why he hadn’t got on with the other passengers. Because that was the ferry of death, he said. He explained that the people who had got on to that ferry would get off in another world, and would never be seen in this one again. There is another city all around us, he told me. We can’t see it, but there are ways into it, although there is no way back. Anyone who boards a certain ferry or walks down a certain street or enters a certain building or goes through a certain door disappears for ever into that other city.’

Ellen was looking at him with an expression he had never seen before. For a moment he wondered if he was doing the right thing. But in some odd way the decision no longer seemed to be in his hands.

‘My uncle’s stories sounded unlikely, but they always turned out to be true. That parallel world really exists, and what happened to me in 1978 was that I unwittingly blundered into it.’

The wind surged around the little car, streaking past across the expanse of long brown grass still flattened from the snow that had lain on it over the winter.

‘I was in the kidnapping section of the Criminal Investigation Branch at the time. I was considered to be doing well. Rome Central is one of the three top postings in the country, along with Milan and Naples, and I’d worked my way there through a succession of jobs in various provincial headquarters. Promotion to Vice-Questore seemed certain and the general feeling was that if I played my cards right I would make Questore in the end. When the Red Brigade kidnapped Moro we were all thrown into the investigation, under the direction of the Political Branch. The first thing we discovered was that there seemed to be almost no information to go on. Despite all the money the Politicals had been siphoning off for years, a very sore point with the rest of us, they claimed to have no material on the terrorists beyond a few isolated descriptions and photographs. It was almost unbelievable. Here was Aldo Moro, an ex-Prime Minister, the leader of the Christian Democrat Party and one of the most powerful and influential men in Italy, at the mercy of the best-known organization of political extremists, and the people responsible for combating political extremism told us there was nothing we could do except organize random house-to-house searches. So that’s what we did, along with chasing after various red herrings which somebody provided to keep us busy. Then one day one of my inspectors, a man called Dario Carella, phoned in claiming to have seen one of the suspected terrorists. Carella had followed the man to a chemist’s shop in Piazzale della Radio and then to a bus stop. But the suspect must have noticed him, because he suddenly waved down a passing taxi and drove off. Carella had taken the number of the taxi and we discovered that it had dropped the suspect outside the San Gallicano hospital in Trastevere. Meanwhile Carella went back to the chemist’s to find out what the man had bought. The result was very interesting. The prescription had been forged, and the medicines listed were all among those regularly used by Aldo Moro. Besides suffering from Addison’s disease, Moro was a bit of a hypochondriac and he used a lot of drugs. He had a supply with him when he was captured, but this would have run out by then. It looked as though one of his captors had been sent to get more. The Political Branch were informed and the hospital duly sealed off and searched, but there was no trace of the man. Next we did a door-to-door of the whole area. You probably remember that.’

‘I certainly do. They almost wrecked my flat.’

‘That wasn’t any more successful. But Carella had an idea. The bus stop where the suspect had waited in Piazzale della Radio is served by three lines, the 97, 97c and 128. And just around the corner from the San Gallicano hospital, in Piazza Sonnino, is the terminus of the 97 and 97c. Suppose the suspect had taken the taxi to get rid of Carella, got out at the hospital to confuse matters further, walked around the corner to the terminus and then continued by bus to his original destination? In that case, this wouldn’t be Trastevere but one of the districts to the south where those two lines go, Portuense or EUR. Carella explained his idea to me, and I thought it was worth following up. It wasn’t as though we had a wealth of other leads. So I went upstairs and proposed that we should do a house-to-house on those two areas. There was nothing very original in this. It was just routine procedure, playing percentages, and I was very surprised when I heard that the proposal had been rejected. When I queried the decision I was told that it had been taken at the very highest level, as a result of information not available to me.’

He tried to remove a smudge from the windscreen with the tip of his finger, but it was on the other side of the glass.

‘Well, all right, so I thought the decision was surprising, but I’d long since realized that if I allowed that sort of thing to keep me awake at night I was going to be a chronic insomniac. But Carella was not so phlegmatic. He was a Southerner and a devout Catholic, like Moro himself, and I think he felt guilty for not having made more of the best chance anyone had so far had to rescue his hero. In short, he got a bit obsessed with the whole thing and he couldn’t accept the decision not to pursue it further. At least, that’s what I assume. We didn’t discuss it, and when he didn’t appear at work the next day I thought he was just sulking. But that night one of my other inspectors phoned and told me that Carella was in hospital after being struck by a car in the Portuense district. It was the San Gallicano hospital, as it happened. By the time I got there he was dead.’

He looked up through the clear patch of windscreen at the clouds moving slowly and peacefully across the upper reaches of the sky. The wind up there must be a different quantity from the restless gusts at work where they were.

‘This is where it gets difficult to explain. Because instead of just letting it go I allowed myself to get involved. I don’t know why. I’ve been asking myself ever since. Dario Carella wasn’t a relative or even a friend. I didn’t actually like him very much. And yet I risked everything I had worked towards, all the hope of what I might do in a position of real power, for something that was obviously doomed to failure from the start. That bothers me, it really does. I’ve always thought of myself as a sensible person, yet I allowed myself to do that. I can’t understand why.’

Ellen laughed, a short, mirthless noise.

‘Oh Christ, Aurelio, I don’t believe it!’

‘You don’t believe what?’

Her expression became opaque.

‘Nothing. Go on.’

Apparently he’d got it wrong yet again.

‘The next day I went to question the bus drivers. As I suspected, Carella had been there before me. One of the men I spoke to said that a colleague of his had identified the terrorist suspect from a photograph Carella had shown him. I got the colleague’s address and went to have a word with him. As I was walking up to his house two young bearded men in jeans and sweaters got out of a car and ran towards me. For a moment I thought they were terrorists, but I was wrong, they were Political Branch operatives. They drove me back to the ministry, where I was questioned by an officer I’d never seen before, a colonel. It was a small, stuffy room, and yet I distinctly felt a chill in the air, like a draught, and I knew that it must be coming from that other world my uncle had told me about, and that the threshold to it was somewhere very close at hand. The colonel wanted to know what I had been doing and who I had talked to. It wasn’t an easy hand to play. On the one hand I needed to stress the bus driver’s evidence in order to bolster my case, which was that Carella had somehow stumbled on a clue to Moro’s whereabouts. On the other hand I was afraid that if I made the driver sound too important he might end up under the wheel of a bus instead of behind one. In the end I was told to go home and to stay there. The next day I received a telegram informing me that my request to be transferred to clerical duties at the Ministry of the Interior had been granted. I hadn’t submitted any such request, of course.’

There was a long silence, broken only by the perpetual nudging of the wind, which seemed to be getting stronger all the time.

‘Shall we go?’ Ellen asked.

She started the engine without waiting for an answer and began to drive along the track winding down the mountain.

‘The Red Brigade were holding Moro in Portuense, weren’t they?’ she commented suddenly.

‘In a ground-floor flat in Via Montalcini. About four blocks from where Dario Carella was run over.’

It wasn’t until they reached the walls of Assisi that she spoke again.

‘It’s no good, I don’t understand. I’ll never understand. Why should they let him be killed? It doesn’t make any sense! After all, he was one of them.’

‘Perhaps he was no longer really one of them. Perhaps they didn’t know that until he was kidnapped. Perhaps once he’d gone they realized that they were better off without him. The ratking is self-regulating, it responds automatically and effectively to every situation.’

She took her eyes off the road for an instant to glance at him.

‘What have rats got to do with it?’

‘Oh, nothing. I was just trying to explain how Miletti came to be killed.’

‘Miletti?’

‘I mean Moro.’

‘How much have you had to drink?’

‘Enough to need a coffee.’

They stopped in a village strung out in ribbon development along the flat straight road from Assisi to Perugia. The air was still and it was pleasantly warm. The cafe was a brash new building full of old men playing cards.

‘I’m going back this afternoon,’ Ellen said as they stood at the bar, watched by every eye in the place.

Her visit had not been a success. The basic material of their relationship, the DNA itself, seemed to have gone wrong. As long as that condition lasted, the time they spent together, instead of adding to their store of shared experiences, depleted the existing one, leaving them more apart than when they were separated.

‘I’ll be back soon myself,’ he told her, ‘and then we’ll forget all this and have a really good time again.’

When they reached Perugia she dropped him opposite the Questura. As he stooped to kiss her Zen noticed that her cheeks were wet.

‘Why are you crying?’

She shook her head.

‘I’m afraid.’

‘Afraid of what?’

‘Of everything.’

‘There’s no need to be afraid. It’ll be all right.’

But he stood there watching until the little car had disappeared, as though Ellen were setting off on a long and dangerous journey from which she might never return.