Ratking

NINE

One day towards the end of the war five ships had appeared in the lagoon off Venice. For a few weeks they lay moored together, like a new island between the city and the Lido, and then one day they were gone. Later Zen worked out that they must have been American warships of an obsolete type, waiting to be sold or scrapped, but at the time their slightly menacing presence seemed a pure challenge, and when his friend Tommaso dared him to try and get aboard one he naturally agreed.

Close up they were as big as churches: great solid slabs of crudely painted grey with black numbers too large to read. Only the end vessel was manned by a token guard, and it was merely terrifying to slip into one of the narrow channels between them, where the water slapped back and forth, tie their skiff to the anchor cable and then shin up it to the deck. The rest of that day they spent in an alien world of pipes and gauges and controls and levers and incomprehensible signs, like the first explorers of a ruined city.

With most of the staff going home at two o’clock, the end of the working day for employees of the state, the Questura had a faintly similar air of abandonment which Zen always found attractive. The rooms and corridors were empty except for a few elderly women cleaning up the male mess of scattered newspapers, stained coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays and the odd half-eaten sandwich. They had not yet reached Zen’s office, but someone else had been there, for there was a telegram on his desk.

Although he had been expecting it, it was still a shock. He put it away in his pocket unopened, and mechanically leafed through the report on the forensic tests he had unofficially requested on the Fiat Argenta saloon which Gilberto Nieddu had stolen from outside the cemetery during Ruggiero Miletti’s funeral and left abandoned near the scene of the murder. He had pinned all his hopes on this report providing him with some positive evidence to lay before the investigating magistrate, Rosella Foria, and when it had arrived that morning he’d been bitterly disappointed.

True, the three Pirellis and the odd Michelin on the car corresponded ‘in their general type and configuration’ to the marks found at the murder site, as he had confirmed when he checked the car at the SIMP garage. But in the absence of ‘specific individuating features’ a positive identification was not possible, while the soil samples found were merely ‘consistent with types found throughout the area’. As for the interior, it was clear that the mechanic had done his work well. The only items found were inconclusive traces of paint and dust, some cigarette ash, a few yellow nylon threads and a fifty-lire coin which had fallen and lodged beside the seat support, whose metal base had protected it from the nozzle of Massimo’s vacuum cleaner. In short, nothing that would persuade Rosella Foria that there was any case for pursuing this line of inquiry, when to do so would mean admitting that the Miletti family was under suspicion. To justify that you would need a lot more than the vague phrases of the report and the confused statements of a single witness. You would practically need a photograph of one of them pulling the trigger, and it had better be a bloody good photograph, and even then the smart thing to do would be to tear it up, burn the fragments and forget you’d ever seen it.

The door opened and a grizzled face bound in a green scarf appeared. At the same moment the phone began to ring.

‘ May I speak to Commissioner Aurelio Zen, please.’

A woman’s voice, cool and distant.

‘Speaking.’

‘ This is Rosella Foria, investigating magistrate. I should like to see you in my office, please.’

The cleaning woman was already hard at work, banging her mop into the corners of the room.

‘Now?’

‘ If that is convenient.’

Her tone suggested that he’d better come even if it wasn’t.

‘It stinks!’ the cleaning woman remarked as he hung up.

‘What?’

‘He can’t control his pee.’

Her accent was so broad that Zen could barely understand.

‘I rub and scrub from morning to night but it’s no good, everything stinks.’

She waved at the crucifix Lucaroni had provided.

‘He hangs up there doing sweet fuck all and they expect us to feel sorry for Him! I just wish we could change places, that’s all! Half an hour of my life and He’d wish He was back on his nice cosy cross, believe you me.’

For once Zen accepted Palottino’s offer of a lift up to the centre of town. On the way he amused himself by constructing a prima facie case against Cinzia Miletti. The gun used to kill Ruggiero was the same calibre as the pistol registered in her name, and the old salad-gatherer said that the driver of the Fiat had blonde hair. Cinzia claimed to have gone to Perugia to meet Ivy Cook, but Zen had discovered that she’d lied about the copy of Ruggiero’s letter, and that lie too had been intended to throw suspicion on Ivy. Cinzia could have arranged the appointment in town, gone to avenge herself on the man who had abused her innocence, then driven into Perugia and made a point of accosting Zen in order to strengthen her alibi. She’d had the motive, the means and the opportunity, and if her second name hadn’t been Miletti they would have run a ballistic check on that little pistol of hers, questioned her in detail about the time during which she claimed to have been waiting for Ivy and staged an identification parade to find out if the witness who had seen the blue Fiat and its blonde driver could pick her out. As it was, that was out of the question. Luciano Bartocci might have risked it, which was precisely why he had been replaced. Rosella Foria wouldn’t make the same mistake. If only one of those nylon threads they’d found on the floor of the SIMP Fiat had been a blonde hair instead, Zen thought. But hair is either fair or yellow, Lucaroni had told him. It sounded like a line from a pop song, and he murmured it over and over to himself as the car burbled over the cobbles of Piazza Matteotti.

Rosella Foria turned out to be a rather primly dressed, fragile-looking woman in her early thirties. Although her manner was suitably authoritative, her face seemed to seek approval. Her office, although almost identical to Bartocci’s, was impeccably neat and tidy.

‘There are two matters which I wish to discuss with you, Commissioner,’ she began. ‘The first concerns a car belonging to the Miletti family which I understand has been impounded by the police.’

Zen had been expecting something of the kind.

‘Two days ago I was informed that a blue Fiat Argenta saloon had been found abandoned near the scene of the murder,’ he replied. ‘Since such a car had been sighted by a witness near the scene and at the time of the murder I followed normal procedure and sent the vehicle for forensic analysis with a view to eliminating it from suspicion.’

‘Yet you failed to notify the Public Prosecutor’s office of this development. Why?’

Despite her uncompromising tone, she was still smiling. Zen was used to dealing with men, whose signals, ritualized over centuries of aggressive display, were clear and simple to follow. But Rosella Foria was unencumbered by such traditions.

‘Because the correspondence with the car mentioned by the witness was only superficial, and I saw no reason to anticipate a positive identification.’

The magistrate drew her well-plucked brows together.

‘I don’t understand how you could fail to see the significance of your action for the investigation, given that the car belonged to the Miletti family.’

‘I didn’t know that it did.’

Rosella Foria’s frown deepened.

‘Do you mean to say that you failed to take the elementary step of tracing the registered owner of the vehicle?’

‘On the contrary, that was the first thing I did. The car proved to be registered to a Fiat dealer. From what you have just told me I assume that it was one of those leased by the Miletti firm and used by the family.’

‘It didn’t occur to you to contact the dealer in question?’

‘I certainly should have done so if the tests had produced any positive results. But in fact they were inconclusive.’

She looked at him long and hard, but he noticed her shoulders relax and knew that it would be all right. She might or might not believe him. The main thing was that he had given her a story she could pass on to Di Leonardo and the Milettis. She was off the hook.

‘All the same, it’s most unfortunate that this has happened. Needless to say, the family are extremely displeased.’

Zen did not need to ask how they had learned of it. Like every top family, they would have a contact in the force.

‘The car was apparently stolen from outside the cemetery while they were attending their father’s funeral,’ the magistrate added, watching him carefully.

Zen’s grey eyes remained impenetrably glazed.

‘Probably some youngsters took it for a joyride and then dumped it.’

‘Possibly. In any event, we may consider the incident closed. But in the present situation misunderstandings of this kind are to be avoided at all costs. I should like your assurance that you will take no further initiatives without consulting me.’

‘Are you suggesting I have exceeded my powers?’

He knew very well that she wasn’t, of course, just as he knew what she was doing: telling him to forget the legal niceties and please not lift so much as a finger without her consent, because the situation was so delicate, the moment so critical, the stakes so high.

‘I don’t feel it’s the letter of the law that we ought to be concerned with here,’ she went on in a conciliatory tone, fingering the single-strand pearl necklace which looped above the neck of her Benetton cardigan. ‘It’s more a question of not hurting people’s feelings by hasty or ill-considered gestures, of not wounding a family which has just lost one of its members in deeply distressing circumstances. Above all it’s a question of not doing this when it is demonstrably gratuitous and irrelevant to the purpose of apprehending those responsible for this crime.’

‘But it’s not demonstrably anything of the kind,’ Zen protested. Although he lacked the hard evidence he’d hoped for, it was surely time to open this woman’s eyes a little, to remind her of the possibilities that were being swept under the carpet. ‘On the contrary, in my experience it’s unheard of for criminals to phone a number they know is being monitored in order to give the location of the body of a man they have just killed. If they wanted to murder Miletti, why didn’t they do it up in the mountains or wherever they were holding him? Why risk moving him to a spot close to Perugia only to shoot him dead?’

The investigating magistrate carefully rearranged the stack of papers on the desk in front of her so that the edges were perfectly aligned.

‘If I chose, I could answer these objections with a much stronger one. You seem to forget that Dottor Miletti was murdered almost twenty-four hours before the call informing us that he had been released. During that period of time only the kidnappers knew where he was. So how could anyone else possibly have committed the crime? However, this is all beside the point. I said I had two things to tell you. The first concerned the Milettis’ car. The second is that the Carabinieri in Florence have detained a number of men who are believed to be members of the gang which kidnapped and murdered Ruggiero Miletti. I’m going there tomorrow morning to conduct the formal interrogation, but I’m informed that they’ve already made a full confession.’

This was different, this was real. Zen felt like a child on the beach whose sandy battlements have melted beneath the first big wave. Appropriately, Rosella Foria’s concluding words sounded almost maternal.

‘Don’t take it too hard, Commissioner. It’s a pity that your efforts here have not been rewarded with success, but once you’re back in Rome you will no doubt soon find other outlets for your energies.’

As soon as he got outside Zen took out the telegram which had been waiting for him at the Questura. As he had thought, it was from the Ministry, informing him that his temporary transfer to the Questura of Perugia would terminate at midnight on Friday and his normal duties at the Ministry resume with effect from 0800 Monday.

For at least a minute he stood motionless on the kerb, oblivious to the animated scene around him. Then he crumpled up the telegram and walked back to the Alfetta, where he made Palottino’s day by telling him to drive to Florence as quickly as possible.

At Carabinieri headquarters in Florence Zen was received with just that air of polite suspicion that he had expected. When he announced that he had important information about the Miletti case he was taken upstairs and handed over to Captain Rivolta, a young officer with an aristocratic appearance and a languid manner who denied any personal involvement in what Zen referred to as ‘this magnificent coup’.

‘It was a tip-off, I suppose,’ Zen suggested.

Captain Rivolta gave a minimal nod.

‘From a Sardinian gang, I believe. The usual rivalry.’

‘So they were based here in Florence?’

Rivolta repeated his fastidious gesture of assent.

‘Two brothers. They ran a furniture showroom and recycled the ransom along with takings from the business. They handled the negotiations themselves. It was they who had the Miletti’s representative killed. Apparently he caught sight of one of them during the negotiations.’

Zen nodded sagely. It was going quite well, he thought. The young captain was relaxing nicely.

‘Anyway, I understand you have some information to pass on,’ Rivolta murmured.

‘No, that’s just what I told them downstairs.’

Captain Rivolta appeared to wake up fully for the first time.

‘I’ve come to see the prisoners,’ Zen explained.

‘Well, that’s a bit difficult, I’m afraid. As you are no doubt aware, requests for interrogation rights must be presented through the appropriate channels.’

‘That’s all right, I don’t want to interrogate them. I want to beat them up.’

The young officer’s superior smile froze in place, as though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

‘Beat them up,’ he repeated mechanically.

‘Well, just one of them actually. The one who called me a fuckarse and a cocksucker when they had me at their mercy during the pay-off, up there in the mountains. The one who kicked me in the balls and in the face and then left me there to die. If your men hadn’t come out and found me, God bless them, I would have died! Phone them, if you don’t believe me!’

The captain held up his hands placatingly. Zen gave an embarrassed smile.

‘Anyway, perhaps you understand now why I came straight here as soon as I heard that you’d laid hands on the bastards. Just fifteen minutes, that’s all I ask.’

‘Well, I’m really not sure that I can agree to authorize you to, ah…’

‘I won’t leave a mark on him.’

‘Possibly not, but…’

‘I’ve done this sort of thing before.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you have. Nevertheless, there is the question of…’

Zen shot out of his chair.

‘There’s the question of teaching these fucking bastards to respect authority, Captain, that’s what the question is! Next time it might be you out there, remember. Now the politicians have taken away the death penalty what have these animals got to lose? We’ve got to stick together, Captain, make our own arrangements. Just fifteen minutes, that’s all I ask.’

Rivolta stared up at Zen, seemingly mesmerized.

‘You’re sure there won’t be any marks?’ he murmured at last.

Zen smiled unpleasantly.

‘Like I always say, it’s the ones that don’t show that hurt the most.’

The corridor was straight, evenly lit and apparently endless, with steel doors set at equal intervals on either side. Zen had unconsciously adopted the same pace as his escort, so their footsteps rapped out a single rhythm on the concrete floor. At length the sergeant stopped, produced a set of keys and unlocked one of the doors. Zen’s nostrils flared at the smell which emerged, sheep and smoke and dirt and sweat all worked together, overpowering the antiseptic odour which he hadn’t been aware of until it went under to this blast from another world.

There were two men in the cell, one lying on the bunk bed, the other leaning against the wall. They stared at the intruders. The Carabinieri sergeant produced a pair of handcuffs and snapped them with practised ease on to the wrists of the man on the bed.

‘On your feet, shithead,’ he remarked without animosity.

He grasped the man’s left elbow between forefinger and thumb and pushed him towards the door. The man winced and said something in dialect to the other prisoner. Then the door slammed shut and they were walking again, three of them now rapping out the same rhythm along the corridor.

They passed through a set of doors like an airlock, separating the cells from the rest of the building. The prisoner didn’t move fast enough for the sergeant’s liking and again he made him wince, although the only contact between them was the two-fingered grip on the man’s elbow. Then they turned left through a pair of swing doors into a small gymnasium.

‘Jesus!’ the Calabrian muttered.

The sergeant guided him over to a set of wall bars.

‘You’ll fucking well speak when you’re spoken to and not unless,’ he remarked.

‘But we talk already!’

‘You don’t understand,’ the sergeant told him. ‘That was work. This is pleasure.’

He spun the prisoner round, undid one end of the handcuffs, looped it through the wall-bars and locked it back on the man’s wrist so that the handcuffs wrenched his arms up and back in the classic strappado position.

‘O??’

Zen nodded appreciatively.

‘Very nice.’

The sergeant chopped the edge of his hand down on the elbow he had been gripping earlier. The prisoner groaned.

‘Hurt his arm,’ the sergeant commented conversationally. ‘He’s all yours, then. Fifteen minutes.’

The swing doors banged together behind him a few times and then all was quiet.

Zen lit a cigarette.

‘You remember me,’ he said, placing it between the prisoner’s lips.

The man stared at him through the smoke which drifted up into his unblinking eyes.

‘Was it you?’

The prisoner drew on the cigarette. His gaze was as absolute and incurious as a cat’s. His head shook.

‘They come looking for him but he is not there. They take the brother instead and later he is dead. From then he hates all police.’

For the Calabrian the Tuscan dialect called Italian was as foreign a language as Spanish, but Zen dimly perceived the general outlines of the story.

‘We know this only after,’ the prisoner went on. ‘We phone them to get you. We don’t want anyone killed.’

‘Except Ruggiero Miletti.’

The man mouthed the cigarette to one side.

‘We don’t kill Miletti!’

‘You’ve confessed to doing so.’

‘We don’t want to end like the brother. When the judge comes we deny everything.’

‘I don’t think she’s going to be very impressed by that.’

The prisoner looked sharply at Zen.

‘It’s a woman?’

This seemed to disturb him more than anything else.

‘What of it?’

‘They’re the worst.’

Zen sighed.

‘Look, you had the means, the opportunity and a reasonable motive. Everyone is going to assume you did it, no matter what you say.’

The prisoner let the cigarette drop from his mouth and trod it out with the care of one from a land where fire is not completely domesticated.

‘It’s the same. At Milan innocent till guilty, at Rome guilty till innocent, in Calabria guilty till guilty.’

Zen glanced at his watch.

‘I believe that you didn’t kill Ruggiero Miletti.’

‘Prison for kidnap, prison for murder. Same prison.’

He’s always known this would happen one day, Zen thought, and now that it has he feels oddly reassured. And I’m cast in the role of a smart lawyer trying to make Oedipus believe that I’ve found a loophole in fate and given a sympathetic jury I can get him off with a suspended sentence.

‘Look, I’ve read the letter Ruggiero sent to his family,’ he told the prisoner. ‘He made it clear that you treated him well. As far as the kidnapping goes you were small fry, manual workers. You’ll go to prison, certainly, but with good behaviour and a bit of luck you’ll get out one day. But if you’re sent down for killing a defenceless old man in cold blood then that’s the end. They won’t bother locking your cell, they’ll just weld up the door. And you’ll know that whatever happens, however society changes, whichever party comes to power, you’re going to die in prison and be buried in a pit of quicklime, because if any of your relatives still remember who you are they’ll be too ashamed to come and claim your body.’

The prisoner stared stoically at the floor. Zen consulted his watch again.

‘Tell me about the day you released Miletti.’

There was no reply.

‘If I’m to help you I need to know!’

Eventually the deep voice ground unwillingly into action.

‘We drive him there and leave him. That’s all.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Before light.’

‘On Monday? Four days ago?’

A grudging nod.

‘And when did you phone the family?’

‘Later.’

‘Later the same morning? On Monday?’

Another nod.

‘Which number did you phone?’

‘The same as before.’

‘When before?’

‘When we go to get the money.’

He seemed bored, as if none of this concerned him and he simply wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.

‘And who did you speak to?’

‘I don’t speak.’

Of course. The gang would have picked someone more articulate as their spokesman.

‘You don’t know anything about who answered? A man? A woman? Young? Old?’

‘A man, of course! Not of the family. Like you.’

‘Like me?’

‘From the North.’

Zen nodded, holding the man’s eyes. Time must be getting desperately short, but he didn’t dare break the concentration by glancing at his watch.

‘The man who hates the police because of what they did to his brother, how did he know who I was?’

‘He say he can smell them.’

Zen’s foot hooked the man’s ankles and pulled him off balance so that he fell forward with a short cry of pain.

‘That was very brave of you,’ Zen commented as the prisoner struggled back to his feet. ‘But we don’t have time for bravery. Who told you I was coming on the pay-off?’

The man stood motionless, eyes closed, breathing the pain away.

‘Some people say Southerners are stupid,’ Zen continued. ‘I hope you’re not going to prove them right. I can’t help you unless I know who your contact was.’

He moved closer to the prisoner, inside the portable habitat of mountain odours that surrounded him like a sheath.

‘Was it one of the family?’

No response.

‘Or someone in the Questura?’

The man’s eyelids flickered but did not open.

‘Someone called Lucaroni?’

Zen’s gaze swarmed over the prisoner’s face.

‘Chiodini?’

Behind him the doors banged open and boots rapped out across the parquet flooring.

‘Geraci?’

Suddenly the eyes were on him again, pure and polished and utterly empty of expression.

‘Everything go all right?’ asked the sergeant, appearing at Zen’s side. ‘Didn’t give you any trouble, did he?’

Zen turned slowly, rubbing his hands together.

‘It went just fine, thank you.’

The sergeant unlocked the handcuffs and the prisoner straightened his arms with a long groan. Zen buttoned up his overcoat.

‘I’ll be going then.’

‘Didn’t know you were here,’ the sergeant remarked.

The Alfetta was parked on the pavement outside, forcing pedestrians out into the street jammed with traffic. Palottino sat inside reading a comic featuring a naked woman with large breasts cowering in terror before an enormous spider brandishing a bloodstained chainsaw. It was drizzling lightly and the evening rush hour was at its peak, but thanks to a judicious use of the siren and a blatant disregard for the rules of the road the Neapolitan contrived to move the Alfetta through the traffic almost as though it did not exist. Meanwhile Zen sat gazing out at the narrow cobbled streets, teeming with quirky detail to an extent that seemed almost unreal, like the carefully contrived background to a film scene. But it was just the effect of the contrast with that other world, a world of carefully contrived monotony, designed for twenty thousand people but inhabited by more than twice that number, of whom several hundred killed themselves each year and another fifty or so were murdered, a world whose powerful disinfectant would seep into the blood and bones of the violent, gentle shepherds who had kidnapped Ruggiero Miletti, until it had driven them safely mad.

Zen lit a Nazionale and stretched luxuriously. What the Calabrian had told him made everything simple. All he had to do was get in touch with Rosella Foria before she left for Florence and pass on the information he had received and he could return to Rome exonerated and with a clear conscience. The key was that the kidnappers had telephoned on Monday, not on Tuesday, and that the number they had called was the one communicated to them by the family before the pay-off, as stipulated in Ruggiero’s letter. Whoever had answered this telephone call was at the very least an accessory to Ruggiero’s murder and could be arrested at once. The rest would follow.

As they hit the motorway, surging forward into the rain-filled darkness, Zen suddenly felt slightly lightheaded, and he told Palottino to stop at a service area so that they could get something to eat. Ten minutes later they were sitting at a formica-topped table in a restaurant overlooking the motorway. Zen was chaffing his driver about a toy panda he had bought for his brother’s little daughter, a great favourite of his. Palottino produced a number of photographs of the child, which they both admired. Encouraged by his superior’s good humour, the Neapolitan asked how things were going, and Zen felt so relaxed and obliging that he told him what had happened in Florence. Palottino laughed admiringly at the clever ruse Zen had used to gain access to the kidnappers, and at his description of the languid young captain who had fallen for it. But when it came to the prisoner’s revelations he unfortunately got the wrong end of the stick.

‘Called another number on another day!’ he jeered. ‘Oh, yes, very clever! What do they take us for, idiots?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Well, I mean no one’s going to believe that, are they? Not when there’s a recording, logged and dated, of them actually making the call on Tuesday. I mean, it’s a clear case of pull the other one, right?’

Zen stared at him. He seemed to be having difficulty focusing.

‘No. No, you don’t understand. They called another number, not the Miletti house. On Monday.’

Quickly reading the signals, Palottino did an abrupt U-turn.

‘Oh, I see! You mean you know they did. Oh, well, that’s different! Sorry, chief, I didn’t realize that. I thought it was just their word against the official record. And like we say in Naples, never believe a Calabrian unless he tells you he’s lying!’

Zen gazed down at the surface of the table gleaming dully under the flat neon light. He stood up abruptly.

‘I’ve got to go to the toilet. I’ll meet you in the car.’

As Zen washed his hands he gazed at his face in the mirror above the basin. How could he have failed to see what was obvious even to a knucklehead like Palottino? How could he have imagined for a second that the kidnappers’ unsupported assertions would be taken seriously by anyone? On the contrary, they would be indignantly dismissed as a feeble and disgusting attempt by a gang of ruthless killers to add insult to injury by smearing the family of the man they had just savagely murdered.

It was Thursday evening now. His mandate in Perugia ran until midnight on Friday. That gave him just over twenty-four hours. He phoned the Night Duty Officer at the Questura in Perugia and then, since he had some tokens left, dialled Ellen’s number in Rome. But as soon as it began to ring he pushed the rest down with his finger, breaking the connection.

He must have dozed off, for the next thing he was aware of was feeling chilled and anxious. Through the window he could see the upper limb of a huge planet which almost filled the night sky. The collision in which the earth would inevitably be destroyed was clearly only moments away, for despite its appalling size the planet’s motion was perceptible. It was even close enough for him to make out the lights of the hundreds of cities dotted across its monstrous convex surface.

‘Son of a bitch!’

The world swerved, veered, straightened up.

‘Fucking lorry drivers, think they own the road,’ Palottino commented.

When Zen looked again the rogue planet had become a ridge blanked in darkly on the clear moonlit sky and its alien cities the twinkling lights of Perugia.

It was only just gone ten o’clock, but the streets were deserted. Palottino pulled into the car park where it was never night and they got out, watched by the guard on the roof of the prison. In the blank wall of the Questura opposite a light showed in Zen’s office on the third floor.

Geraci must have heard his footsteps, for he was standing by the window with a respectful and curious expression as Zen came in.

‘Evening, chief. What’s up, then?’

The Duty Officer had told him to report to the Questura and await further instructions. Motioning the inspector to a chair, Zen went round behind the desk and sat down, rubbing his eyes.

‘I’ve just got back from Florence. The military have taken the whole gang. All of them. Well, not quite all.’

Geraci’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly, like the face of someone who has just died. The silence reformed. Zen felt himself starting to slip back into his interrupted sleep and he forced his eyes open, staring intently at Geraci until the inspector looked away.

‘I would never have agreed if it hadn’t been for the boy,’ he said.

‘How much did they offer you?’

‘It wasn’t the money,’ Geraci replied scornfully. ‘We’re from the same place, from neighbouring villages. They simply asked me to help them out. I would gain nothing myself, just the goodwill of certain people, people who are respected.’

He shook his head at the impossibility of a Northerner understanding these things.

‘Anyway, I said no. So they started to use threats, although they don’t like doing that. To them it’s a sign of weakness. But they had asked and I had refused. They can’t allow that.’

He paused and sighed.

‘Just before Christmas I heard from my sister. Her youngest boy, just three years old, a little darling, had been taken. A few days later a letter arrived for me. Inside there was a little scrap of skin and a tiny fingernail. They’d amputated his finger with a pair of wire-cutters. I never thought fingernails were beautiful until I saw this one, it was like a miniature work of art. That evening they phoned me again. The boy still had nine more fingers and ten toes, they said. I agreed to do what they asked.’

Zen pushed his chair back and stood up, trying to dominate the situation again, to rise above the pity that threatened to swamp him.

‘And what was that?’

‘Get myself transferred to the squad investigating the kidnapping and pass on any information which might be useful.’

‘And they gave you the tape-recorder and the crucifix?’

‘Not until you arrived. While Priorelli was in charge I didn’t need it, he was very open about his plans. But no one ever knew what you were thinking or what you were going to do.’

Zen allowed himself a moment to savour the irony of this. He had been uncommunicative with his staff because he thought they were all hostile to him and reporting back to the Questore, if not the Ministry or the Security Services!

‘Where was the receiver?’

‘In the broom cupboard at the end of the corridor, hidden under a pile of old boxes and papers. I played back the tapes at home and noted down anything important.’

‘And the contacts with the gang? Come on, Geraci! I want to get home, go to bed. Don’t make me do all the work.’

‘I put an advertisement in the newspaper offering a boat for sale. The day the advertisement appeared I took a certain train, got into the first carriage and left the envelope in the bin for used towels in the toilet.’

Zen shook his head slowly. His disgust was as much with himself as with Geraci, but the inspector suddenly flared up.

‘I wasn’t the biggest shit in all this! One of the Milettis was in on it too! Can you imagine that? Betraying your own father! At least I didn’t sink that low.’

Zen waved his hand wearily.

‘Don’t waste time trying to do dirt on the family. I’m not interested.’

Geraci got to his feet.

‘It’s true, I tell you! I had to pick up his messages at a service area on the motorway and leave them on the train, same as my own. Once I got there early and saw him.’

‘So who was it?’

‘I don’t know.’

Zen snorted his contempt.

‘He was all wrapped up in a coat and a scarf and wearing dark glasses, and I was watching from a distance. I didn’t want to risk being recognized either.’

‘How did he get there?’

‘In a blue Fiat Argenta saloon.’

‘Was there anyone else in the car?’

‘No.’

‘Describe him.’

‘Quite short. Medium build.’

‘How do you know it wasn’t a woman?’

‘He phoned to let me know he was coming. It was a man, all right.’

Zen turned to the window, as though he feared that his thoughts might be visible in his face. Daniele and Silvio were out. Pietro, too. Ivy Cook’s voice was deep enough to be mistaken for a man’s, but she was too tall. Cinzia was the right size, but her voice was almost hysterically feminine. No, there was really only one person it could have been.

‘How many times did this happen?’

‘Four altogether. I can give you the dates.’

Geraci took out his diary and scribbled on a blank page which he then tore out and handed to Zen.

‘Where did he leave the messages?’

‘At the Valdichiana service area on the motorway. The envelope was inside the last magazine in the top right-hand row.’

Zen sighed.

‘So let’s sum up. You claim that an unknown person in male clothing driving a Fiat saloon left four envelopes in a motorway service station. You don’t know who he was, why he was doing it or what was in the envelopes, and you can’t prove any of it. Doesn’t add up to much, does it?’

Geraci looked away in frustration.

‘Ah, what’s the use! It isn’t doing wrong that counts, it’s getting caught.’

The same was even more true of doing right, Zen reflected. The wrongdoer arouses sneaking admiration, but if you want to be merciful or generous without making people despise you then you have to be very careful indeed.

‘Tomorrow is my last day here in Perugia,’ he said wearily. ‘My tour of duty hasn’t exactly been a glittering success and the public disclosure that one of my inspectors was a spy for the gang I was supposed to be hunting would be the last straw. So you’re going to get a break, Geraci. You don’t deserve it, but I do.’

The inspector gazed at him with an immense caution, not daring to understand.

‘My conversation with the kidnappers was private. As far as I’m concerned it can remain private. I’d much prefer to turn you in, but luckily for you I can’t afford to.’

Geraci’s eyes were glowing with emotion.

‘Dottore, my mother will…’

‘Stuff your mother, Geraci! It’s me I’m thinking of, not your mother or anybody else. Now I’m sure someone like you must know a crooked doctor. I want you to take indefinite sick leave starting tomorrow. You can spend your free time writing an application for transfer to the Forestry Guards. You’re not staying in the police, that’s for damn sure! Now piss off out of here before I change my mind.’

Geraci backed up to the door.

‘God bless you, sir.’

The door closed quietly behind him.

‘God help us,’ muttered Zen.

Nine o’clock was sounding as he walked out of his hotel the next morning, sniffing the delicious air enlivened by a frisky breeze. After this, he reflected, breathing the capital’s miasmal vapours would be like drinking Tiber water after San Pellegrino. Halfway along the Corso workmen were setting up a platform, the ringing sounds of their hammers unsynchronized to the movements of the arms which produced them. As he walked towards them the problem gradually corrected itself, as though the projectionist had woken up and made the necessary adjustments. By the time he emerged from his favourite cafe, having consumed a good frothy cappuccino made with milk fresh from a churn, the foam stiff as whipped egg whites, the same process had taken place inside his head. But any impression that things were finally going his way did not last long.

‘All that material has been transferred upstairs,’ the technician on duty in the intercept room at the law courts told him.

‘What about transcripts?’

The man shook his head.

‘All upstairs with the judges. We’ve finished with that one. The line’s been disconnected and everything.’

Zen hesitated for a moment.

‘May I use your phone?’

‘Help yourself.’

There was an internal directory pinned to the wall by the phone. He dialled Luciano Bartocci’s number.

‘ Yes? ’

‘Well, it did come to the same thing in the end.’

‘ Who is this? ’

‘I’m going back to Rome tomorrow. But first I’d like to have a word with you. About ratkings.’

There was a silence.

‘ I’m very busy.’

‘It’ll only take a few moments.’

The technician was busy fitting a new leader to a reel of tape. His work probably left him little interest in listening to other people’s conversations, but Zen kept his voice low.

‘It’s vitally important.’

Zen spoke slowly, stressing each word, giving Bartocci time to think.

‘ In about half an hour. On the roof of the market building.’

Zen pushed past the women selling doughnuts and flowers and through a group of African students giggling at the photos they had just had taken in the machine. The terrace on the roof of the market was deserted except for a flock of pigeons and the two Nordic girls, one of whom was sketching the view while the other basked in the sun, her head on her friend’s lap. The puddle under a leaky tap near by had frozen overnight and not yet had time to thaw, so that the pigeons slipped and skidded as they came to drink.

When Luciano Bartocci appeared, tense and wary, Zen wasted no time.

‘I need to consult a document.’

‘Ask Foria.’

‘She’s not here. It’s urgent.’

Bartocci shook his head.

‘Out of the question.’

‘I just need a copy of the transcript of the call the gang made to tell the Milettis that they had released Ruggiero.’

‘Why?’

‘The Carabinieri in Florence have arrested the kidnappers. I’ve been to see them. They didn’t kill Ruggiero.’

‘What’s that got to do with you? Or with me, for that matter? Rosella Foria is investigating the Miletti murder. Let her investigate. That’s her job. Or do you think you’re cleverer than she is?’

‘I think I understand the situation better, thanks to you.’

Bartocci smiled at this clumsy attempt at flattery.

‘Remember what you told me about ratkings?’ Zen reminded him. ‘How each rat defends the interests of the others and so the strength of one is the strength of all? Well, I think there’s one case where that doesn’t apply, where the system goes into reverse and the rats all turn on each other.’

‘And that is?’

‘When they sense that one of their number is damaged.’

The magistrate shook his head.

‘They would simply destroy the damaged rat.’

‘But suppose they don’t know which one it is?’

Bartocci considered this for a moment.

‘It all sounds a bit theoretical.’

‘I agree. What I want to do is to test the theory. And that’s why I need to see that transcript.’

One or two pigeons were already scrabbling about at their feet, their beady eyes skinned for a hand-out. Bartocci would clearly have liked to tell Zen to go to hell, but he was trapped by the relationship which he himself had been at such pains to create, and which he wasn’t quite cynical enough to disavow now that it served not him but the other person. It was less trouble in the end just to give in.

‘You remember the bar we went to in Piazza Matteotti?’ he asked. ‘Be there later on this morning, about midday. If there’s anything for you read it there and then, seal it up and hand it back. If there isn’t then go away. And stay away.’

On the Corso the hammering had stopped and the platform was being decorated with flags and bunting and posters proclaiming a political address the following day. By then, Zen thought, I’ll be back in Rome, whatever happens. He found this oddly comforting.

The civic library was staffed by the usual sullen crew, as though it were a branch of the prison service. Since Zen was not a registered member it took his police identity card even to get him past the door. He climbed up to the periodicals room on the second floor and announced to the female attendant that he wished to consult back numbers of the local newspaper.

‘Fill in a request form,’ she replied, without looking up from her knitting.

There were no forms to be seen, but one of the other inmates explained that they were kept in the corridor on the next floor up.

‘And the accession number?’ the woman demanded when Zen brought his form back. The tip of her steel knitting needle hovered over a space as blank as Zen’s face.

‘I don’t know what the accession number is.’

‘Look it up!’

‘Can’t you do it?’

It’s not my job to fill in the forms. You have to look in the card catalogue.’

The card catalogue was in the basement. It took Zen twenty minutes to locate the section dealing with the newspaper he wanted. Since each month’s copies had a separate accession number he then had to make out six different forms, which meant going back to the third floor and copying out his name, address, profession, and reason for request twelve times.

By half past ten he was back. The woman’s knitting was making good progress. She pushed his forms away.

‘No more than three requests may be submitted at one time.’

He handed back the forms corresponding to the last three months. The woman scrutinized them in vain for further errors or omissions, laid down her knitting with a reluctant sigh and trotted off. As soon as she was out of sight Zen took out his pocket-knife and cut through a stitch in the middle of the work she had completed.

He needn’t have hurried. A further ten minutes elapsed bef ore she returned, pushing a trolley bearing three large folders fastened with black tape.

‘Keep pages in order edges straight corners aligned do not crease crinkle or tear leave at your position after use,’ she told him.

As he began his search through the classified advertisements columns, Zen realized why the kidnappers had chosen boats as their cover. Perugia is about as far from the sea as any Italian city can be, and particularly during the winter interest in buying and selling boats is low. As a result there was little chance of the gang overlooking one of the messages intended for them. The discovery of the advertisements which confirmed Geraci’s story was gratifying, but what really excited Zen was an announcement which had appeared the previous Friday, the day after the Milettis received Ruggiero’s letter giving the instructions for the final ransom payment. ‘Two-way radio for sale,’ it read. ‘Phone 8818 after 7.’

It looked innocuous enough, and yet Zen felt like an astronomer sighting a planet whose existence he had predicted from his calculations. This was the clincher, the thing that made everything else make sense. It was like in a dream where, tired of beating your fists against a locked and bolted door, you step back and notice for the first time that there is no wall on either side. Of course! It was so simple, so obvious.

In the bar opposite the post office a street-sweeper was explaining how he would sort out the national football team.

‘Too many solo artists, that’s the problem. One of them gets the ball and sees a bit of open space, all he thinks about is going forward, the rest of the team might as well not exist. When it comes off it’s magnificent, I grant you, but how often does that happen, eh? No, it’s percentages that add up in the end, this is what they don’t realize. What we need is more discipline, more organization, more teamwork.’

‘Well, this is it,’ the barman said, turning to the new customer with an interrogatory lift of the chin.

Zen identified himself and was handed a white envelope which was tucked between two bottles of fruit syrup. He opened it and took out a photocopy of a typed page: INTERCEPT: Yes? CALLER: Verona. INTERCEPT: What? You’ve got the wrong number. CALLER: OK, listen. We have released Dottor Miletti. Understand? But someone’ll have to go and pick him up. It’s his leg, he can’t walk. Here’s haw to find him. INTERCEPT: Wait a moment! Turn down that music, Daniele! CALLER:… the road to Foligno. Just beyond Santa Maria degli Angeli turn right, the Cannara road. Go to the telegraph pole with the mark and turn left. Take the second right and go about a kilometre until you see a building site beside the road on the left. The Milettis’ father is there. INTERCEPT: Wait a minute! The second on the right or the left? Hello? Hello?

Zen looked up, his breath coming short and fast. He sealed up the photocopy in the envelope enclosed and handed it back to the barman. Then he got a telephone token and dialled the police laboratory. Hair is either fair or yellow, Lucaroni had told him. But all that’s yellow isn’t hair, the laboratory confirmed. The yellow threads found in the Fiat they had examined were strands from a cheap synthetic wig.

He emerged into the bright sunlight, blinking like a mole. The last piece of the puzzle was in place. He knew who had done it and how it had been done, and with the exception of the murderer he was the only person who did know. For a few more hours the whole situation would remain fluid and he held the key cards in his hands. If he played them right then perhaps just this once the bastards wouldn’t get away with it after all. He tried not to think about what might happen if he played them wrong.