Ratking

FIVE

Smiling! Everyone was smiling and applauding! The chubby, balding presenter was smiling, the blonde starlet was smiling, the famous politician was smiling, the best-selling journalist was smiling, while the clean, well-drilled young people dancing around them were smiling hardest of all. Even the balloons they released as they gambolled about seemed to have a sleek, benevolent look as they rose, passing a shower of confetti as dense and continuous as the applause on its way down.

‘Make me a coffee, will you?’

The barman dragged himself away from the knot of men deep in conversation about the price fetched by a piece of land across the road.

‘And not even big enough to have a decent crap on!’ he hurled over his shoulder before turning to jab a finger at Zen.

‘Coffee?’ he demanded accusingly.

Zen popped two motion-sickness pills out of their plastic nests and put them in his mouth. One to two, the box said. Better safe than sorry.

On the way back to his conversation the barman punched a button on the television and suddenly they were in Texas, where folk lived and loved fit to bust and discussed it all in idiomatic but poorly synchronized Italian. When the call finally came, it took Zen several moments to realize that the phone wasn’t ringing in Sue Ellen’s en suite boudoir but in the dingy pool room at the end of the bar, where a pack of the local rogue males were playing throwing-billiards. He just managed to beat one of them to the receiver.

‘ Avellino.’

He had the list of the First Division fixtures ready. Avellino were at home to the champions.

‘Juventus.’

There was a loud clack behind him as one of the players hurled the white down the table, scattering the colours.

‘ Take the Cesena road. Stop at the sign “Sansepolcro one kilometre”. At the base of the pole.’

The line went dead and a moment later he heard the characteristic click as the interception machinery disengaged.

Outside it was pitch-dark and spitting with rain. The large Fiat saloon parked in the piazza looked ridiculous with a yellow child’s cot strapped to the roof, but this had seemingly been stipulated by the gang to make it easier for them to identify the car.

Zen climbed into the nearside front seat.

‘Take the Cesena road.’

The faint light from the dashboard caught a gold filigree ear-ring spelling ‘Ivy’ in flowing script. The ear-ring was typical of its wearer’s taste, he thought. It was presumably real gold, yet it somehow contrived to look brash and cheap, like junk jewellery trying to make up in flash what it lacked in value.

When the Fiat had emerged from the gateway of the Miletti villa at five o’clock that afternoon, Zen had been astonished to find that his driver for the ransom drop was to be Silvio’s secretary, Ivy Cook. He had been waiting there since hearing from Bartocci, less than an hour earlier, that the kidnappers had been in touch and that the car would be leaving as soon as it got dark. Pietro had finally agreed to Zen’s presence, on condition that there was no contact until the pay-off actually began, so during the intervening forty-eight hours he had had nothing to do with the case beyond having the ransom money photographed to record the serial numbers and finalizing the arrangements for collecting Ruggiero when he was released. The family’s passive resistance continued right up to the last moment: Zen was not permitted to set foot on Miletti soil but had to wait for the Fiat in the street, beyond the imposing wrought-iron gates. He’d had plenty of time to speculate about who else would be in the car. He thought he had covered every possibility, but in the event the Milettis had amazed him.

But if the Milettis had scored a point with their choice of driver, Zen felt that he got one back when Ivy named their destination: the bar, identified by Lucaroni, where Ubaldo Valesio had gone to receive the phone calls from the gang, situated in a village about ten kilometres from Perugia. Calculating that the kidnappers might use the same initial rendezvous, Zen had informed Bartocci, who had authorized a phone-tap. The resulting tapes would be voice-printed and compared with existing samples.

The headlights of the Fiat swept from one side of the narrow winding road to the other, picking out an area of ploughed field, a thicket of scrub oaks with last year’s brown leaves still clinging to the branches, an ancient wooden cart fitted with modern lorry tyres, an abandoned barn covered with posters for a dance band called ‘The Lads of the Adriatic’, a dirt track leading off into the hills. Ivy drove steadily but not too fast, and thanks to the pills he had taken Zen was not worried about the prospect of nausea. He even felt a rather pleasant sense of detachment from what was going on, almost as though everything around him were happening on television and the barman might switch to another channel at any moment. Perhaps it was just due to the way he’d been sleeping lately, a restless, shallow sleep full of dreams which never seemed to work themselves out properly, leaving him half-enmeshed in their elaborate complexities even after waking. In the morning his head felt as if the cast of a soap opera had moved in uninvited during the night, and the effort of following their interminable dreary intrigues left him mentally soiled and worn, less refreshed than when he’d gone to bed.

Or was it simply fear? For he was acutely aware that Ubaldo Valesio had waited in that bar, used that phone, and then walked out of that door, got into his car and never come back. Bartocci might be convinced of his conspiracy theory, but Zen just couldn’t take it seriously, much as he would have liked to. He had never taken part in a ransom drop personally before, but he knew what an extremely delicate moment it was. In a way it mirrored the original kidnapping itself, and carried almost equal risks for everyone concerned. It was a time when nerves were tense and misunderstandings costly or even fatal, a time when anything and everything might go wrong.

He turned slightly so that he could see Ivy out of the corner of his eye. She didn’t look frightened, but neither did she look as though she was faking anything. There was tension in the lines at the corners of her mouth, but also determination and a sense of great inner strength. Ivy Cook wouldn’t crack easily, that was one thing.

‘Is it far now?’ he asked.

‘About ten minutes.’

Her strange deep voice pronounced the words like a parody of someone from the Trento area, where the warm and cold currents of Italian and German meet and mingle.

‘What are we supposed to do when we reach the Cesena road?’ she went on.

It seemed to take him an age to remember.

‘We have to find a sign beside the road reading “Sansepolcro one kilometre”. I suppose they’ve left another message there.’

‘It’s like a treasure hunt.’

When he had met Ivy at Crepi’s dinner party her appearance had struck him as so wilfully bizarre that he had written it off as a freak effect, as though all her luggage had been lost and she’d had to raid the oddments put aside for collection by the missionary brothers. But evidently her appearance that first evening had constituted a rule rather than an exception. Tonight’s colour scheme was more sombre but just as tasteless: chocolate-brown slacks, a violet pullover and a green suede jacket.

‘You’re English, then?’

The association of thought was clear only to him, luckily!

‘My family is. I was born in South Africa. And you’re from Venice, I believe?’

‘That’s right. A district called Cannaregio, near the station.’

A fine rain blurred the view.

‘Have you lived in Italy for long?’

Ivy turned on the wipers.

‘Years!’

‘How did that happen?’

‘I was on a tour of Europe. People take a couple of years off, buy a camper and explore the world. Then they go back home, get steady jobs and never leave South Africa again. I just didn’t go home.’

A patch of lights off to the right revealed the presence of a town which slowly orbited them and disappeared into the darkness. Slip-roads came and went, labelled with the names of famous cities: Arezzo, Gubbio, Urbino, Sansepolcro. Then the road stretched away before them again, bare and gleaming and straight and dark, like a tunnel…

‘What?’

Ivy was looking at him with a peculiar expression. He realized that he had just murmured something under his breath.

‘Nothing.’

Jesus, what was in those capsules? He hadn’t even needed a prescription to buy them. Surely they were just like aspirin? The government should step in, warn people, ban the things.

He had said, ‘Daddy?’

Then reality started to move so fast that by the time he caught up it was all over and they were parked on the hard shoulder. Replaying the sequence he realized that Ivy had braked hard, the car swerving slightly on the greasy surface, then backed up. Now she was looking at him expectantly.

‘Yes?’ he said.

She pointed out of the window.

‘Isn’t that it?’

He looked out and saw the sign.

Outside it was cold and blustery, speckled with droplets of water gusting against his face. The base of the circular grey pole was concealed in a clump of long brown grass. A large spider’s web strung between the base of the sign and the pole bellied back and forth in the wind, the spider itself clinging fast to it.

Beneath the strands of dead grass his fingers touched something hard. He pulled out an empty pasta box sealed at one end with industrial adhesive tape. The damp cardboard showed a picture of a smiling mother serving a huge bowl of spaghetti to her smiling husband and two smiling children. ‘Get this fabulous apron absolutely free!’ exhorted a slash across the corner of the packet.

‘Is everything all right?’

Ivy had the door open and was leaning out, looking impatient.

‘I’m just coming.’

He tried to strip off the tape, but it was too tough and his fingers were numb and he couldn’t find where it began. When he got back to the car Ivy took it away from him and opened the other end. Why hadn’t that occurred to him?

She took out a cassette tape and pushed it into the car’s tape-deck. After a short hissy silence there was the usual voice.

‘ Play this tape once only, then put it back where you found it. At the Sansepolcro turn-off take the road to Rimini. When you reach the crossroads beyond Novafeltria stop and wait.’

There was the sound of a car behind them and it suddenly became very light. Then a figure appeared on Ivy’s side and rapped on the window. She opened it.

‘See your papers?’

The Carabinieri patrolman had the raw look of a recruit freshly dug up from one of the no-hope regions of the deep South and put through the human equivalent of a potato-peeling machine. The uniform he was wearing seemed to have been assembled from outfits designed to fit several very different people: the sleeves were too long and the neck too wide, while the cap was so small it had left a pink welt around his forehead. He scrutinized the documents as if they were a puzzle picture in which he had to spot the deliberate mistakes. Then he looked suspiciously around the car.

‘Having problems?’

‘Just stopped for a look at the map,’ Ivy told him.

‘It’s illegal to park on the hard shoulder except in case of emergency.’

‘I’m sorry. We were just leaving.’

The patrolman grunted and walked back to his vehicle. Ivy started the engine.

‘The tape,’ Zen reminded her. ‘We’ve got to put it back.’

They sat and waited. Fifteen seconds. Thirty seconds. The headlights behind showed no sign of moving.

Zen palmed the cassette and got out. He walked to the verge and made a show of urinating. After a few minutes the carabinieri vehicle revved up and screeched off down the road. Zen slipped the tape back in its nest of grass at the foot of the pole and hurried back.

It was only when they reached the turning to Sansepolcro that he felt something hard underneath his foot.

‘Damn! I forgot to put the box back.’

‘Does it matter?’

There was no telling, that was the problem. The responsibility for the consequences will be on your heads, Pietro Miletti had said. All along Zen had been haunted by the idea that he might make some blunder which would hang over him for the rest of his life, yet here he was behaving like a dope addict. He felt an overwhelming desire for a cigarette, but Ivy was a non-smoker and he had agreed not to smoke in the car.

The road to Rimini bypassed the town and in a few moments they were out in the wilds again, labouring up a steep, tortuous medieval track on which modern civilization had done no more than slap a layer of asphalt and a road number. The ascent was arduous and prolonged, twisting and turning upwards for more than twelve kilometres to the pass, almost a thousand metres high. The starkness of the landscape revealed by the headlights penetrated the car like a draught. Zen sat there unhappily taking it all in. He didn’t much care for nature in the raw: it was messy and wasteful and there was too much of it. This was a fertile source of incomprehension between him and Ellen. The wilder and more extensive the view, the better she liked it. ‘Look at that!’ she would exclaim, indicating some appalling mass of barren rock. ‘Isn’t it magnificent?’ Zen had long given up trying to understand. It all came of her being American, he supposed. Americans had more nature than anything else except money, and they got pretty excited about that too.

To take his mind off the scene outside he looked at his companion instead. Part of the oddness of her appearance, he realized, came from the fact that she didn’t look like a woman so much as a rather inept female impersonator. Not that there was anything butch about her. On the contrary, it was precisely the excessive femininity, laid on with a trowel as it were, that created the effect of someone pretending to be a woman, someone in fact rather desperately hoping to be taken for one. But this desperation was perhaps understandable. Certainly her role in the Miletti household appeared to be anything but feminine. She was evidently their dogsbody, used for tasks which no one else was prepared to take on. Typically, it had been Ivy, he’d learned, who had been sent to collect the letter from Ruggiero which the gang had left in the rubbish skip.

‘Are you married, Commissioner?’ she asked suddenly.

It was the first remark she had volunteered all evening.

‘Separated. And you?’

‘What do you think?’

Zen had no idea what he was supposed to think. Eventually Ivy herself seemed to sense the need for an explanation.

‘My association with Silvio rather precludes marriage.’

They rounded yet another bend, the headlights sweeping over a bald expanse of stricken scanty grass. It had started to rain more heavily, unless they were now actually up inside the clouds.

‘If you really want a cigarette very badly I think on the whole I should prefer you to have one,’ Ivy told him.

He gave an embarrassed laugh.

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Well, you keep fiddling with the ashtray and pushing the cigarette lighter in and out. Just open the window a crack.’

‘What about the rest of the Milettis?’ Zen asked as he lit up. The wind burbled at his ear like frantic drumming.

‘What about them?’

‘How do you get on with them?’

She took a moment to think.

‘They find me useful, on occasion.’

‘I still remember how Cinzia Miletti treated you that evening at Crepi’s.’

‘Poor Cinzia!’ murmured Ivy. ‘She’s terribly unhappy.’

‘Isn’t it a bit of a strain, though, living in the same house with them?’

‘Oh, I don’t. They would never stand for it. Ruggiero would have a fit!’

She laughed gaily, as though Ruggiero Miletti’s attitude was frightfully amusing.

‘No, I have a little flat of my own, although I have been spending more time than usual at the villa since the kidnapping. But I’ll be very glad when it’s all over and things return to normal.’

‘But you and Ruggiero don’t get on?’

That gave her pause.

‘Well, he doesn’t have a very high opinion of either foreigners or women,’ she said at last. ‘That places me at something of a disadvantage.’

Zen didn’t reply at once. He was at the honeymoon stage with his cigarette, listening to the nicotine marching through his blood.

‘And yet you’re looking forward to his getting back? I don’t understand.’

‘It’s a question of the lesser of two evils. At least we all know where we are when he’s around. For the last few months everything has rather fallen apart. Ruggiero kept all the reins in his own hands, you see. So in a sense I’ll be glad when he is back, despite his attitude to me.’

He decided to risk a shot in the dark.

‘Is it your relationship with Silvio that Ruggiero objects to?’

‘Why do you say that?’ she snapped.

Clearly this was a sensitive topic. Then she laughed, as if to cover her outburst.

‘Anyway, you’re quite right. Silvio is a very complex and tormented personality, someone who has great difficulty in coming to terms with the demands of life. I help to ease that burden for him. Ruggiero doesn’t accept that, perhaps because it would mean accepting responsibility for the way his son’s turned out.’

‘In what way is he responsible?’

The cigarette had suddenly turned bad on him.

‘Oh, in all sorts of ways. He was responsible for Loredana’s death, for one thing. Silvio has never really recovered from that.’

‘What happened?’

‘Ruggiero was driving her back from Rome late one night, and somehow the car left the road and ended up against a tree. Loredana was killed instantly. Ruggiero’s legs and collar-bone were broken and he was trapped in the wreckage for almost seven hours, pinned beside her corpse. He was discovered the next morning by a boy on his way to school. People say he has never been the same since. Loredana moderated the violence of his personality, or at least sheltered the children from it. After her death they certainly took the full brunt, Silvio in particular. He was only thirteen and he’d been particularly close to his mother. Her death was a great blow to him, and I imagine Ruggiero handled it in exactly the wrong way, telling him to snap out of it, stop snivelling, that sort of thing. He’s a man who has crushed all softness in himself, so why should his son be indulged, be allowed to cry and display his grief, be stroked and cuddled and consoled when he never was? Of course, Cinzia suffered terribly too. The others rather less, I think. Pietro was old enough to cope better, Daniele too young to understand.’

Zen wound down the window and let his half-smoked cigarette be sucked out into the airstream. The conversation no longer kept the landscape at bay but intensified it, showing its desolation to be a reality not merely natural but also human.

Eventually the car slowed to a halt. The rain was now pelting down, covering the windows with a coat of water as thick and opaque as glycerine. The headlights created a luminous swathe ahead of the car, but nothing was visible except a variety of shapes which obstinately refused to become more than that. Ivy turned the engine off. Nothing moved outside, and the only sound was the steady metallic drumming on the roof of the car.

‘Why did you ask if I was married?’ Zen asked.

She glanced at him briefly.

‘I don’t know. To break the silence, I suppose. Why does one ask anything?’

He leaned closer to the window, but saw even less as his breath fogged the glass.

‘Well, in my case it’s usually to get information out of people,’ he said. ‘Then after a while it becomes a habit, like those teachers who speak to everyone as though they’re five years old.’

‘I suppose I was trying to make you seem more human. I’m frightened of the police, you see, like most people. Almost as frightened as I am of this gang.’

The minutes slipped away, their passage recorded with unnecessary precision by the digital clock on the instrument panel.

‘They don’t ever attack people, do they?’

It sounded as though the reality of what they were doing had come home to her for the first time.

‘Who, the police?’ he joked.

Her expression showed that she no longer had any time for jokes.

‘No, it’s completely unheard of,’ he assured her. ‘Allthey want from us is the money that’s in the boot. We won’t even see them, probably.’

The rain ceased abruptly, as if it had been turned off.

‘I think I’ll just stretch my legs a bit,’ Zen announced.

The whole night was in motion, its gusts glancing blows from currents active on the fringes of the turbulence centred somewhere in the clouds swirling about overhead. The visibility had improved slightly. What he had taken to be a gate turned out to be a wall, the hump on the ground near by a heap of gravel and the massive bulk on the other side of the road a barn whose gable end still bore the faded icon of a helmeted Mussolini and the slogan ‘It is important to win, but still more important to fight.’

At first the sound might have been thunder, or an animal. Next a light appeared, and a moment later a shape swept out of the night, big as a centaur, its blinding eye striking him along with something solid. Then it was gone, leaving a weighted envelope lying on the wet black asphalt at his feet.

Back in the car he showed Ivy the black-and-white Polaroid photograph it contained.

‘That’s Ruggiero,’ she confirmed.

The picture showed a stocky man with a shock of white hair and the typical Umbrian moon-face, wearing a chequered shirt open at the neck and holding up a newspaper. He looked resentful and slightly embarrassed, like an elderly relative who had grudgingly agreed to pose in order to keep the peace at a Christmas party. The photo might have been modelled on those sent by the Red Brigades during the Moro kidnapping, but where those middle-class intellectuals had used the centre-left Repubblica to mark the date, Ruggiero Miletti was holding the Nazione, just the kind of paper which a bunch of good Catholic boys like the kidnappers would choose.

Ivy took the envelope from him, widened the opening and extracted a small coil of blue plastic strip about a centimetre wide. A message had been punched out in capital letters with a labelling machine. ‘PUT PHOTO AND MESSAGE BACK IN ENVELOPE LEAVE HERE FOLLOW BIKE.’ Zen slipped the photo and tape back into the envelope, opened the door and let them drop out.

‘Right, well, let’s get on with it.’

For the next three hours the motorbike led them a nightmare chase over more than a hundred kilometres of mountain roads that were often little more than channels covered by scree and loose gravel, furrowed by rainwater and ridged by surfacing strata of rock. All they ever saw of their guide was a faint distant tail-light, and then only rarely, at irregular moments after long periods of doubt when it seemed that they had lost the scent, made the wrong decision at some unmarked junction up in the stormy darkness.

The driving demanded constant attention. Only a narrow range of speeds was viable. Below that the car risked bogging down in the mud or grounding on an obstacle, above it the tyres might lose adhesion on the continual twists and turns or cliff-like descents, or one of the vicious potholes or rock outcrops rupture the suspension or pierce the sump. They hardly exchanged a word. Ivy had her hands full with the driving, and although Zen soon gave up trying to follow their route on the maps he had brought with him, which proved to bear only a partial and rather disturbing resemblance to the landscape, like a mild hallucination, he kept up a show of poring over them to try and assuage his guilt at being a mere passenger, unable to share her burden. And still the faint red light up ahead came and went by fits and starts, leading them on across gale-swept open moorland, through massively still pine forests, up exposed dirt tracks and over passes whose names had vanished with the inhabitants of the farms where until a few decades earlier generation after generation of human beings had eked out lives of almost unimaginable deprivation.

It was after midnight when a set of headlights appeared behind them, flooding the interior of the car with light. Ivy squinted, trying to shut out the glare that made her task still more difficult.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked edgily.

‘They must be gating us in.’

Then everything happened at once. The motorbike slowed so that for the first time they could see the outlines of the rider, a derelict farmhouse appeared in its headlight beam and the car behind them started flashing its lights. Figures appeared in the road ahead, waving them into the yard of the farmhouse. Their faces were black and completely featureless except for two oval eye-slits, the head hooded, the body shrouded in shiny waterproof capes. There were piercing whistles, then a thump as they opened the boot, where the money was packed in cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic rubbish bags. With a series of dull thuds and strangely intimate bumps the unloading began, punctuated by more of the raucous, inhuman whistles which finally blew away the remaining shreds of doubt in Zen’s mind about the reality of the kidnapping. That eerie keening, like the cry of a great predator, was used by shepherds to communicate across the vast wind-swept spaces in which they lived and worked. No outsider, no amateur, could ever fake that sound.

The rain, which had been coming and going, began to pour down again, spattering in big gobs all over the glass around them. In the still warmth of the car, bathed in the calm green glow of the instrument panel, it was impossible to imagine what conditions were like out there. Inside and outside seemed so absolutely separate that once again Zen, drifting off into pleasantly dopey inattention, had the sensation of being a mere spectator of screen images, some television documentary about hardy men who did dangerous work for big money.

‘What’s happening?’ Ivy whispered fearfully.

The activity at the back of the car had ceased and it had fallen silent.

‘They’re probably checking the money.’

He could make out nothing in the darkness around the car. The headlights revealed only the worn flagstones of the farmyard, the archway into the byre on the ground floor of the house, the crumbling steps that had once given access to the living quarters above. The door was staved in and torn half off its hinges in what looked like an act of senseless violence. At one of the gaping window frames a bit of ragged cloth twitched and flapped spasmodically in the wind.

‘Perhaps they’ve gone,’ Ivy whispered.

He didn’t answer.

‘Can’t we go?’

‘Not yet.’

Even before he finished speaking a caped and hooded figure appeared at Ivy’s shoulder, the door was wrenched open and a powerful torch shone into their faces.

‘Out! Out! Out!’

The next instant the door behind him opened too, transforming the interior of the car into a wind tunnel. A huge hand grabbed Zen’s shoulder and dragged him outside, shoving him up against the side of the car. Light hit his face as hard as the stinging raindrops. Then it abruptly disappeared, and all he could see were entrancing coloured patterns chasing each other about the glowing darkness like tropical fish.

The pain was so unexpected, so absolute, that he had no name for it and fell over without a sound, like a baby, too shocked to make any fuss.

‘Fuckarse cocksucker of a cop!’

He could just make out the outline of the figure in front of him, sweeping its heavy cape to one side, then something smashed into the side of his head. They’ve shot me, he thought. They’ve shot me like they did Valesio. They’re proving they exist, punishing us for not believing in them, like gods.

With a strange detachment he noted the final sequence of events: the roar of a car engine near by, the boot drawn back, the hiss of a tyre skidding past, the oddly painless blast which ended it.

Like Trotsky and the iceman, he thought. Of course! The solution was so obvious, so satisfying, that there was no need to try and understand it.

That explained the cold, too. Obviously if it weren’t cold the ice would melt. In fact some of it already had. The hard, smooth surface pressed to his face was covered in water. As for the purposeful darkness tugging at his clothing, this must be the wind in the tunnel. The only question, in fact, was where his father had gone, why he had left him alone. No doubt there was an answer to that, too, but he couldn’t think what it was.

Once again he called weakly, but as before there was no reply. He lay back, stretched out on the cold wet tracks, waiting for the express to Russia to come and chop off his head.

The telephone call could hardly have been vaguer.

‘ One of your men is by the farm up above Santa Sofia there, above the river, up there on the way to the church.’

The voice was male, adult, uneducated, with a strong Calabrian accent. It was one forty-three in the morning and the duty sergeant wasn’t quite sure whether he was dealing with a wrong number, a hoax, or an emergency. But the next words made sense all right.

‘ You’d better go get him before he dies.’

The Carabinieri station was at Bagno di Romagna, a small town high up in the Apennines on the borders of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. The locals were a staid lot; the sergeant, who was Sicilian, privately thought them dull. They were not given to silly pranks at any time, let alone a quarter to two on Sunday morning. So what the hell was going on?

He phoned his provincial headquarters at Cesena, who called regional headquarters at Bologna, who checked with their opposite numbers in Florence before confirming that no member of the force had been reported missing on either side of the Apennines. Better get out there and have a look just the same, Cesena told him with a hint of malice. Even down there in the coastal flatlands it was a wild night. They could imagine what conditions must be like up in the mountains, having done their stint in the sticks at one time or another.

Out where, though? Apart from the undisputed fact that the farm in question was ‘up’, the sergeant knew only that it was near a village called Santa Sofia, above a river and on the way to a church. He pored over his 1: 100 000 maps and finally selected four possibilities. If none of them proved correct they would have to wait until dawn and call out a helicopter, by which time it would probably be too late. The wind howled about the building, driving rain against the shutters.

They had been at it for over two and a half hours before the searchlight finally picked out the slumped body in the yard of an abandoned farm at over a thousand metres on the slopes of Mount Guffone. The young private at the wheel let out a gasp of surprise.

‘You see?’ the sergeant exclaimed triumphantly.

His relief at not having been made a fool of was matched by his curiosity to find out who the devil he was, this man lying chest down on the wet flagstones, face turned to one side as though asleep. There were some quite nasty-looking cuts on his head, and the sergeant was a bit apprehensive about turning him over. He would never forget that time when a corporal had been machine-gunned in an ambush on a country road near Palermo. He’d been found lying face down too, and the only sign of what had happened was a slight discoloration on the back of his jacket, as though some of the red dye from the trimming had leached on to the body of the black fabric. But when they turned him over there was a sound like a fart and all his insides had sicked out, bits that weren’t meant to be seen and which God accordingly hadn’t bothered to finish off like the rest. Amazingly, nothing had seemed to take any notice! The sky was still blue, the sun still shone, somewhere near by a lark gibbered away. Only he had watched, fascinated, as the pool of blood collecting around the spilt innards suddenly burst its confines and set off down the road, finding its way slowly and with difficulty, its bright fresh surface soon matted with dust and drowning insects.

‘What we going to do?’ asked the young private, a little concerned at the way his superior was acting.

‘Do? Well, we’ve got to find out who he is, haven’t we?’

In the end it was all right. There were no serious injuries at all, in fact. The man even mumbled something, and his eyelids flickered for a moment without opening.

‘No wonder no one knew about him!’ the sergeant exclaimed as he studied the identity card he had found in the man’s wallet. ‘He’s not one of ours at all. Stupid bastard didn’t know the difference.’

Or more likely didn’t care, he thought. The glorious traditions of the Service meant nothing to scum like that.

The man lying at their feet mumbled something again.

‘Did you hear what he said?’ the sergeant asked.

The private made a face.

‘I’m not sure. It sounded like he said “Daddy”.’

Yellowed light, stale warmth, a pervasive scent of chemicals: the contrast with his earlier dips into consciousness was total.

Zen was sitting on a stool under a bright light in a small white-curtained cubicle, thinking about Trotsky and the iceman. With his open-necked shirt, his air of dejected exhaustion and the newspaper spread open on his knee, he might almost have been a kidnap victim waiting to have his existence confirmed by means of a Polaroid photograph. But in fact he was waiting for a different kind of photograph, a different kind of confirmation.

Trotsky and the iceman had been his attempt to solve the problem of why he was still alive despite having been shot in the head. Leon Trotsky protested with his dying breath that he had been shot, not stabbed, even though Stalin’s killer had been caught with the ice-pick still in his hand. Zen’s mistake was less excusable, since all he’d suffered were a few hard kicks.

Then the wind and the darkness and the sense of utter abandonment had unlocked a memory which had already put in a passing appearance earlier that night. It was a memory he hadn’t known he had, and even now he knew very little about it beyond the fact that it involved him and his father and a railway tunnel. He didn’t know where or when it had happened. There they were, the two of them, walking into the tunnel. It must have been on a main line, because there were two sets of tracks, and the mouth of the tunnel had seemed to him – he might have been five, six? – bigger than anything he had ever seen, bigger than anything he had known could exist.

They had gone a very long way into the tunnel. He hadn’t wanted to, but since his father was holding his hand it was all right. When he looked round he found that the tunnel mouth had changed polarity and become a little patch of brightness, quite faint and very far away. The silence echoed with large drips falling from the invisible curved mass above. The air smelt dank and trapped despite the wind that poured past them, forcing them deeper into the solid darkness ahead.

Meanwhile his father, his voice reverberating in a way that hinted at the extent of the invisible spaces about them, told him about the tunnel, when it was opened and how long it was and how deep below the surface. He pointed out the sloping white stripes on the walls, whose incline indicated the nearest of the niches providing protection for plate-layers who otherwise might end up under the wheels of one of the expresses which thundered over these rails, bound for famous foreign cities.

Then, without warning or explanation, the warm grip on his hand disappeared and the soothing voice fell silent.

It was only for a moment, no doubt, as adults measure time. It must have been a joke, a little trick of the kind fathers like to play on their children, toying idly with their power, whimsical tyrants. He knew that it had been a joke, because when it was over his father laughed so much that the laughter was still echoing around them as they started back towards the light. It had sounded almost as though the tunnel itself were enjoying some deeper, darker joke whose significance not even his father had fully understood.

An unshaven young man in a white coat slouched into the cubicle and handed Zen three dark rectangular sheets of plastic.

‘No fractures.’

Zen held the X-rays up to the light. They looked as dubious as the photographs which are claimed to prove the existence of a spirit world: swirls and patches of white suspended in a grey mix.

‘You’re sure?’

It certainly hurt badly enough. But perhaps pain was no guide. Oddly enough the worst was his shoulder, where the man had seized it to pull him out of the car.

‘It’s only bruised,’ the orderly insisted. ‘But next time take it easy, eh? I might be in the other car.’

Zen had told them he’d been involved in a traffic accident, which had got a good laugh all round when it emerged that he was from Venice. For want of practice, Venetian drivers are proverbially supposed to be the worst in Italy.

He left the hospital and began to walk slowly along the boulevard leading back to the centre of Perugia. The morning was quiet and warm. The storm had blown itself out, leaving the sky pearly. There was a mild southerly breeze. A few people were about, returning from church or walking home with a newspaper or a neatly wrapped pastry. He was glad that he had dismissed Palottino, although the Neapolitan had made it clear that he strongly disapproved of this mania for walking. He had driven up to collect his superior from the Carabinieri post where he and his rescuers had returned as soon as Zen had recovered enough to assure the sergeant that he didn’t need to call an ambulance. As soon as they reached Bagno di Romagna Zen had phoned Geraci, who he’d left holding the fort, and inquired about Ivy Cook. His greatest worry was that somehow his presence had compromised her, that he might have another corpse on his hands, another death on his conscience. But Geraci was able to reassure him: Ivy had arrived home three hours earlier, badly shocked but unharmed. The money had been taken but there had been no communication from the kidnappers.

While Zen waited for his driver to arrive, his hosts tried politely to find out who he was and what he’d been doing, but he remained deliberately vague. Even with Palottino he had been discreet, not mentioning what the kidnapper had said to him. And when the Neapolitan asked, ‘You don’t think they knew?’ Zen had pretended not to understand.

‘Knew what?’

‘That you were from the police.’

‘How could they?’

Palottino had no answer to that, any more than Zen himself, though the question had tormented him for the whole drive back to Perugia. How could they have known? But they had, that was certain. ‘Fuckarse cocksucker of a cop,’ the man had said. So they knew that their orders had been deliberately disobeyed. This gang had already killed one man for less. The thought of what they might even now be doing to Ruggiero Miletti took the sparkle and warmth out of the morning and made Zen realize how exhausted he was.

As he passed through a small piazza there was a shout and a boy appeared at a window holding a bulging plastic shopping bag which he let drop to a friend in the street who stood, arms raised to catch it. But it was immediately obvious that the bag was too heavy and was falling much too fast. At the last moment the boy below ran back. The bag struck the paving, bounced, and now the boy caught it and peeled away the bag to reveal a football which he struck in a high, curling shot which ricocheted off the wall slightly to the left of a priest who had emerged from the large church which closed off one end of the piazza. Through the open door Zen could just make out the huge ornate crucifix above the high altar.

‘How could they?’ he murmured to himself again.