Ratking

SEVEN

He was in bed, in the room in Venice where he had spent his childhood, and he was still that child. A figure moved slowly through the uncertain light towards him, as faceless and monumental as Death in an old engraving. But he wasn’t frightened, because he knew that it was all just a joke, a little comedy of the kind fathers like to play with their sons.

He’d always known his father would come back. Not that he’d ever admitted it before, even to himself. But nothing and no one could ever really convince him that a world where fathers just disappeared one day and never returned could be anything other than a pitiful sham, a transparent hoax. He had never been taken in, not really, not inside, but he’d known moments of doubt, so his delight and relief were unbounded now he found that his instincts had been right all along! For here his father was, sitting down beside him, hugging and kissing him, taking his hand again and laughing at the silly terrors his little game had aroused in his son.

The phone beside his bed started to ring. It was the duty officer on the intercept desk at the law courts.

‘ We’ve just picked up a message on the Miletti family line, dottore. It was from the kidnappers. They’ve released Signore Miletti .’

Thank God, Zen thought with obscure fervour. Thank God.

‘Have you informed Dottor Bartocci?’

‘ Yes. The pick-up arrangements are to be put into effect immediately.’

‘Where has Signor Miletti been released?’

‘ If you’ve got a pen I’ll read the directions as they gave them to the family.’

Zen scribbled the instructions on the back of an envelope. They were to take the road to Foligno, turn right towards Cannara just beyond Santa Maria degli Angeli and drive until they saw a telegraph pole with a yellow mark. Here they were to turn left, then take the second right and go about a kilometre to a building site where Ruggiero Miletti was waiting, unable to move because of his bad leg. It had been this problem which had led to the complex arrangements for picking up Ruggiero on his release. Normally kidnap victims are simply turned loose in the middle of nowhere and left to find their own way to the nearest house or main road. But since Miletti was immobilized it had been agreed that he would be fetched by a group consisting of Pietro Miletti escorted by Zen and Palottino in the Alfetta, with an ambulance in attendance in case Ruggiero required immediate attention. After the events of Saturday night and Bartocci’s angry phone call the previous day, Zen half expected to be rebuffed when he rang the Milettis. But Pietro, although cool, made no attempt to change the arrangements. Now the family’s fears had been proved groundless, the bungled pay-off could be dismissed as just another example of clumsy incompetence on the part of the police, the latest in a long list of blunders.

Twenty minutes later the convoy set out. It was brilliantly sunny, as though summer had leapt forward a few months. People were moving more slowly and nonchalantly, without the pretext of a destination or purpose. They glanced curiously at the line of official vehicles which drove along the boulevard running along the lower ridges of the city, through a gateway and down in a series of long, lazy curves, dropping over two hundred metres to the valley floor. Shortly after passing the enormous domed basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli Palottino swerved across a patch of loose gravel into a minor road. The land was dead flat, divided into large ploughed fields almost devoid of trees. Modern brick and concrete duplexes squatted here and there along the road, each with a few rows of vines trained along wires suspended from concrete posts behind them. This would all have been uninhabited malarial marshland until the postwar boom made it worth draining. The road ran straight ahead, the telegraph poles passing at regular intervals to the right.

The yellow splash of paint showed up hundreds of metres away in the bright sunshine. A farm track led off to the left opposite, flanked by deep drainage ditches. Speeds dropped now and the vehicles closed up. The fields appeared to have been abandoned, the broken stalks of the crop left to rot in a vast expanse of furrowed mud which the recent rains had reduced to a sticky mess. Could there really be a building site in the middle of this swamp rapidly reverting to nature after a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with civilization, Zen wondered? There had always been a possibility that the telephone call had been a hoax and this seemed to be getting more likely all the time.

The bleak landscape made Zen think back to his dream, to his own father’s fate. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Mussolini thought the war would be over in a matter of weeks, and so that he could claim a share of the spoils for Italy he offered to send troops to the Russian front. The Germans had no illusions about the military effectiveness of their principal ally, and at first they agreed to accept only a few divisions of the Alpini, the specialist mountain troops who could hold their own with any in Europe. But that was not enough to give Mussolini the bargaining leverage he wanted. He insisted on sending more, and so two hundred and thirty thousand Italians were packed into trains and sent off to Russia, Zen’s father among them. But the war was not over in a matter of weeks, and the Italian conscripts had neither the training nor the equipment to fight a winter campaign in Russia. They suffered ninety thousand casualties. Sixty-six thousand more made the weary trek home again. As for the remaining seventy-five thousand, nothing more was ever heard of them. They simply disappeared without trace. The Soviet authorities had no reason to take any interest in the fate of a handful of foreign invaders when over twenty million of their own people had been killed while, as for the Italians, it had suddenly become clear that they had in fact been anti-Fascists to a man all along and could hardly be expected to sympathize with the relatives of those few fanatics who had been rash enough to fight for the despised Duce. In any case, the whole country was in ruins and there were more urgent matters to attend to.

‘There it is!’ Palottino burst out.

From a distance it resembled some piece of modern sculpture: disjointed planes, random angles, a lot of holes. It was only as they drew nearer that he began to make out that it was the concrete skeleton of an unfinished three-storey duplex, its half-built walls, pillars and floors rising out of a sea of mud. On each side a wide staircase led up in six zigzag sections, breaking off abruptly on an open landing about twenty metres above the ground.

They parked a short distance away. Zen got out, jumped over the ditch running alongside the track and began to work his way along the edge of the field towards the back of the concrete structure, his shoes rapidly clogging up with mud. The building site was surrounded by a token fence consisting of two slack strands of barbed wire. Pietro Miletti was slowly making his way after him.

On the south side of the structure the concrete was cleaner than to the north, where it was discoloured with moss. Here the stains were reddish-brown, from the twisted-off ends of the rusty reinforcing wire. It felt warm and sheltered. Plants had already seeded in crevices around the foundations, preparing to take over the instant man’s will failed. A yellow butterfly loped by with its strange broken flight, like an early film.

Zen looked round at the floor of unfinished concrete littered with cement bags, lengths of wire, nails and lumps of wood, a lone glove. The upper storeys had not yet been floored and through the concrete joists and beams above the sky was visible. There was no sign that anyone had been there for months.

‘Papa!’

Pietro Miletti appeared, his elegant shoes and trousers bespattered with mud.

Zen scraped some of the mud off his shoes on the bottom step of the staircase.

‘I’m afraid it was a hoax.’

‘But why should they do that? What have they got to gain?’

Pietro sounded indignant, as though the kidnappers had broken the rules of a game and ought to be penalized.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t really the gang who phoned you.’

‘It was them, all right. Do you think I don’t know his damned voice by now? Besides, who else would it be?’

‘How should I know?’ Zen snapped back, his tension finding an issue. ‘Someone who hates your guts. There must be plenty of them around.’

He turned away towards the outside of the building, veering to the right to complete his circuit of the structure. In the distance someone sounded a horn several times. The view ahead was obscured by a section of partially completed walling at the east end, but when he reached the corner Zen found that the only unpredictable feature of the landscape was a river which cut across the track about a hundred metres further on. Once, no doubt, there would have been a bridge, since swept away by floods or war. Or perhaps it had never existed. It was hard to say whether the track continued on the other side or not.

It was only when he turned to the more immediate problem of finding a way through the waste of mud that Zen noticed the figure lying slumped against the wall. He just had time to turn, plant one hand on Pietro Miletti’s chest and push him back, indignantly protesting.

The floor was made up of dark red hexagonal tiles touching at their points, separated by triangles of a deep chestnut colour. Another way of looking at it was that the basic form was a large lozenge consisting of a red hexagonal core surrounded by six brown triangular tips, or again, diagonal strips of red hexagons kept in place by pairs of triangular brown wedges. The strips ran in both directions, creating a number of crosses. It should have been possible, theoretically, to work out how many there were. But it would have taken more than just time and ingenuity. You would have needed something else, some understanding of the principles involved, access to formulae and equations, a head for figures. Something he hadn’t got, at any rate. As it was, an irrelevant image kept popping up in the corner of his eye, dragging his attention away: the image of an old man lying slumped in the mud against a wall of concrete blocks, turned away, as though death were an act as shameful as intercourse or defecation, which he had sought to conceal as far as possible, even in the bleakly exposed place where it had come to him.

Zen forced his attention back to the floor. But now a new pattern emerged as the red and brown shapes blocked together to form overlapping triangles all pointing across the room at the double doors opposite. These doors were now firmly closed, but they had opened several times since Zen’s arrival, admitting a succession of visitors who had forced their way through the mass of bodies and expectant faces in the corridor outside, sweltering under television lights and waving microphones in front of anyone who appeared.

It was six o’clock in the evening, four hours since the Deputy Public Prosecutor had summoned Zen to his office in the law courts. When he arrived he had been told to wait, and he had been waiting ever since. He was being put in his place, softened up for what was to come. And what was that? ‘When they found a policeman at the pay-off they must have panicked,’ Major Volpi had remarked to Di Leonardo when they arrived together at the scene in a Carabinieri helicopter. Yes, the death of Ruggiero Miletti was Zen’s fault. He was completely innocent, but it was his fault. Even the tiles concurred, for now the arrows had all flipped over and were pointing at him, pointing out the guilty party, the incompetent official, the unworthy son. The pain that tugged at the muscles of his stomach and chest was so intimately hurtful that he knew it was nothing but useless unspent emotion. What he needed was to break down and howl like a child, and it was the effort not to do so that was tearing at him. It was all his fault, his fault, his fault. He had never known the man, but it was his fault. He was condemned by an image which had haunted him for over thirty years: a poor defenceless body lying curled up in a vast flat dismal landscape, a father abandoned to his lonely fate. He must be guilty. There could be no excuse for such a death.

It was almost a relief when the door opposite suddenly opened and Ettore Di Leonardo appeared, immaculate as ever in a dark suit and sober tie.

‘This way!’

The Public Prosecutor called him like a dog as he strode towards the door behind which a continuous threatening murmur could be heard. Zen obediently rose and followed, wondering as a dog perhaps does at his stupidity in not understanding why they were going that way, where their enemies lay in wait.

The gentlemen of the press had had a fairly lean time of it so far. Di Leonardo’s personal secretary had issued a statement shortly after midday, a masterpiece of prolixity that took about five minutes to say that Ruggiero Miletti had been found dead and that another statement would be issued in due course. Since then anyone who had been unwise enough to venture along the corridor had been pounced upon and picked clean. Magistrates, lawyers, various clerks, a court reporter, a telephone repair man, and even a number of ordinary human beings untouched by the grace of public office had been accosted, to no avail. So when the Deputy Public Prosecutor himself suddenly appeared in person the assembled newshounds reacted like a gaggle of novices witnessing an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

Appropriately enough Di Leonardo’s first gesture, a hand raised to still the clamour, looked not unlike a blessing. When complete silence had fallen he then produced a sheet of paper from his pocket, folded it back on itself to remove the crease, smoothed it out a number of times and then read a statement to the effect that inquiries were proceeding, steps being taken, fruitful avenues opening up and concrete results expected within a short space of time. Having done so he folded the sheet of paper again, replaced it in his pocket and made to leave.

The reporters protested vociferously and blocked his path. Di Leonardo looked flabbergasted, as though never before in his experience had the media failed to be satisfied by the reading of a prepared statement. But questions continued to be hurled at him from every side, and eventually, as an extraordinary mark of favour, he consented to answer one or two of them.

The first came from a man in the front row, a crumpled, resilient-looking individual with the look of someone who has been dropped on his head from a great height at some stage in his life.

‘Is it true that the magistrate investigating the Miletti case is to be replaced?’

Di Leonardo glared back in frigid indignation.

‘Certainly not! Dottor Bartocci is and will remain in charge of the investigation into the kidnapping of Ruggiero Miletti.’

‘And into his murder?’ called a younger reporter on the fringes of the group.

‘That is another and quite separate development, whose importance and urgency I need hardly stress. In addition to the kidnapping case, Dottor Bartocci is already handling the murder of Avvocato Valesio. My wish, the wish of all of us, is simply that we may as quickly as possible get to the bottom of the shocking and cold-blooded crime which has stunned and appalled the entire country, and arrest and punish those responsible. In order to avoid placing an impossible burden on the shoulders of my young colleague, it has been decided that the investigation of the events whose tragic outcome was discovered this morning will be directed by Dottor Rosella Foria.’

‘But the murder of Signor Miletti is evidently linked to the other two cases,’ pointed out a well-known interviewer with a television news crew. ‘Why is the same magistrate not investigating all three crimes?’

Di Leonardo smiled wearily and shook his head.

‘You reporters may spin whatever theories you choose. Our task is to weigh the evidence objectively and impartially. At the present juncture there is no evidence to suggest that this crime is necessarily linked to those you have mentioned, or indeed to any others.’

There was a flurry of protest, which Di Leonardo once again stilled with a gesture of benediction.

‘But it is too soon to pronounce on these matters with any certainty,’ he went on smoothly. ‘Should any such evidence come to light in the future we will of course be prepared to review the situation.’

‘You mean Bartocci may lose the other two cases as well?’ asked the crumpled man. There was a ripple of laughter.

A tall woman with the chic, efficient look that spells Milan held up her notebook, and Di Leonardo immediately nodded encouragingly at her. It’s a fix, thought Zen, and he edged back against the wall. Mesmerized by the Public Prosecutor’s performance, no one had yet noticed him, but he had a nasty feeling that this was about to change.

‘The Miletti family have made a statement in which they lay the blame for the murder squarely on the shoulders of the police,’ the woman began. ‘They have named a Commissioner Zen, whom they claim demanded to be present when the ransom money was paid, threatening to wreck the pay-off by a show of force if they did not comply. They further assert that in the course of the pay-off Commissioner Zen’s identity was revealed and that the gang were so incensed that they assaulted him. They conclude that the death of their father was a direct result of the kidnappers’ instructions having been disobeyed, and demand that this official be subjected to the appropriate disciplinary procedures. Have you any comment to make?’

Di Leonardo smiled again. It was a beautiful smile, brimful of wisdom, understanding and compassion.

‘I don’t think I need remind anyone of the tragic blow which the Miletti family, and indeed the whole of Perugia, has suffered today. Far be it from me to criticize comments made in the heat of the moment, which should be understood for what they are, cries of unendurable suffering, a passionate outburst of all-too-comprehensible anguish. I am sure I speak for all of us here when I say that our thoughts are with the Miletti family in this ordeal.’

Di Leonardo paused for a moment, seemingly overcome by emotion. Then he looked up, brisk and businesslike again.

‘Nevertheless the fact remains that disciplinary action against officials who may have exceeded their duties or wilfully abused the position of responsibility with which they have been entrusted is a purely internal matter which will be carried out, should the situation warrant it, by the appropriate authorities at the appropriate time. The views and wishes of private individuals, however comprehensible, cannot be permitted to influence whatever decision may eventually be arrived at.’

‘Do you accept the family’s account of the events surrounding the pay-off?’ another reporter demanded.

‘I have no further comment to make.’

‘But this Zen is still in charge of the case?’

Di Leonardo shook his finger as though admonishing a backward pupil.

‘As I have already explained, Dottor Foria is directing the investigation.’

The crumpled reporter who had started the questioning now sighed theatrically and rubbed his forehead.

‘Let’s see, have I got this right? As far as the police are concerned it’s all one case and the same officer remains in charge, but when it comes to the judiciary it’s a completely unrelated development and a new magistrate has been appointed.’

‘If you study the answers I have given I think you will find that they are very clear, ‘Di Leonardo returned. ‘Should you have any further questions, I suggest you put them to Commissioner Zen himself.’

The Public Prosecutor pointed Zen out with one finger, and as everyone turned to look he slipped through the suddenly passive ranks to the safety of his office, closing the door firmly behind him. Immediately all hell broke loose.

‘What’s your reaction, dottore?’

‘How did it feel finding Miletti’s body?’

‘Do you accept responsibility for his death?’

‘A spokesman for the family has described your handling of the case as a quote disgraceful and disastrous example of official interventionism unquote. Would you care to comment?’

‘Isn’t it true that during the Moro affair you were transferred from the active list of the Rome Questura to a desk job in the Ministry following a disciplinary inquiry? Would you describe today’s events as a further setback to your career?’

As the lights glared, the cameras whirred and the microphones thrust and jabbed, Zen finally understood why he had been summoned to the law courts.

‘If you study the answers the Deputy Public Prosecutor has given, I think you will find that they are very clear,’ he told them. ‘I have nothing further to add.’

The reporters didn’t give up so easily, of course. But stolid stonewalling makes for poor copy and dull viewing, and eventually they let him go, although even then a few of the younger and hungrier among them followed him down the wide staircase and out into Piazza Matteotti, hoping for a belated indiscretion.

It was dusk, and the evening was as still and airless as the previous one when, impatient for news, Zen had gone out for a stroll. It was strange now, walking through the same streets, to know that by then it had already happened. But even on a cursory examination the doctor had been in no doubt.

‘Rigor mortis is complete but there’s no sign of it passing off. Body temperature almost down to the ambient level. He’s been dead at least eighteen hours, more likely twenty-four.’

Zen had hardly heard him at the time, shocked by the sight of the man he had been summoned to Perugia to save lying naked on a plastic sheet with a thermometer sticking out of his anus. Ruggiero Miletti had been killed the day before, on Monday morning, and yet the gang had waited until this morning to alert the family with a cruel message of hope! In all his experience Zen could remember nothing like it. Kidnappers could be violent, but in the easy, unashamed manner of men to whom violence was natural and legitimate. If they had killed their victim to teach the Milettis a lesson they would have said so, even bragged about it. But this crime, and above all the manner in which it was mockingly announced, had a twisted sophistication, a kink in the logic which Zen would have said was quite alien to a gang of Calabrian shepherds.

But he impatiently dismissed this line of thought. Little enough was left him now, but at least his dignity remained, though no one but himself could see it. If he were to start clutching at straws, hoping against hope for a way out, then even that would be lost.

Back in his office he reached for the phone and dialled his home number. As usual, Maria Grazia answered and then yelled to his mother to pick up the extension phone by her chair, in the deep underwater gloom of the living room. The connection was especially good, almost as if they were face to face, and Zen found himself resentful that he should be deprived of the usual screen of interference on an occasion when he could find nothing to say.

‘Happy birthday, mamma. Did you like the present?’

‘ Is this going to take long? Crissie’s having her baby and I don’t want to miss that. Wayne will be livid when he hears. And that half-brother of hers, do you know what he’s done? Sold the property over their heads! That couldn’t happen to us, could it? ’

‘No, mamma.’

‘ Why not? ’

Was she having a sly laugh at his expense, talking nonsense and then cornering him with a sudden question?

‘ Is it because you’re in the police? ’

‘Yes, that’s it, mamma. They wouldn’t dare do anything like that. You see, there are some advantages after all.’

‘ What? ’

‘To being in the police! You’re always telling me that I should have got a job on the railways. Anyway, if you’re still watching when the news comes on you might see me. I’m…’

‘ Oh, I haven’t time to watch the news. There’s the dolphins on Six right afterwards. They’ve kidnapped them, the bastards.’

‘Who, the dolphins?’

‘ Anyway, if you were on the railways we’d get free tickets wherever we wanted to go.’

‘I already get free travel, mamma.’

‘ I don’t! ’

‘But you never even leave the apartment any more!’

‘ That’s what I’m saying. If you had a nice job on the railways maybe I could get out and about a bit.’

There was a knock, the door opened and Luciano Bartocci appeared.

‘May I?’

After a moment’s hesitation Zen waved him forward.

‘Look, I’ve got to go,’ he said into the phone. ‘Happy birthday. See you soon.’

He hung up.

‘Sorry if I disturbed you,’ Bartocci went on. ‘I was just passing, and I thought I’d…’

He took off the heavy overcoat he was wearing and laid it across the top of the filing cabinet.

‘I won’t stay long.’

The smile trembling to be born at the corner of his mouth was even more active than usual.

‘The thing is, you see, I realize that I’ve been rather stupid, and rather selfish, and I’d like to apologize.’

Zen stood staring at the younger man in considerable embarrassment. He had no idea how to deal with the situation. A judge apologizing to a policeman! What were we coming to?

‘I asked you to collaborate unofficially,’ Bartocci went on. ‘That was irresponsible. You could have refused, of course, but it was a choice I shouldn’t have forced you to make.’

Zen watched the younger man circling the office, inspecting the fixtures and fittings as though they were evidence at the scene of a crime. He’s not apologizing to me, Zen realized. He’s apologizing to himself, for letting himself down.

‘My entire strategy was incorrect from the start,’ the magistrate continued. ‘It’s mere bourgeois adventurism to think that the conspiracies of powerful vested interests can be defeated by individual efforts. I should have known better. The ratking is self-regulating, as I told you before. The strength of each rat is the strength of all. Any individual initiative against them is doomed from the start. The system can only be destroyed politically, by collective action, a stronger system.’

The distant smile was in place on Zen’s lips. By a bigger and better ratking, he thought.

‘Did you actually hear the recording of the message the Milettis received this morning?’

For a moment Bartocci appeared slightly confused.

‘Hear it? Why?’

‘Is anyone sure it was really the kidnappers who phoned?’

There was silence while Bartocci thought through the implications of this remark. Then he smiled and shook his head.

‘I see what you’re getting at,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid it’s not on. You’ve been away from active duty for a while, haven’t you?’

Evidently the rumours about Zen’s past were beginning to catch up with him.

‘All interceptions are now subjected to voiceprint analysis as a matter of routine,’ the magistrate explained. ‘If the one this morning hadn’t matched the pattern I’d have been informed. No, I’m afraid we must accept that Miletti was murdered by his kidnappers.’

‘All right, perhaps they pulled the trigger. But there’s still the question of how they knew I would be there at the pay-off. Ubaldo Valesio reckoned that someone in the family was passing on information. Isn’t it possible that the informant deliberately told the kidnappers I would be there, knowing what the consequences were likely to be?’

‘You mean that one of the family got the gang to do their murder for them? I doubt very much whether you’ll be able to interest Rosella Foria in such a theory.’

‘Why? Is she…?’

He paused, significantly. Bartocci shook his head.

‘No, no, Rosella’s straight enough. But she does everything strictly by the book. She has to. There still aren’t many women in the judiciary, so everything they do tends to get scrutinized by their male colleagues, and not only those on the Right, I’m afraid to say. If a woman makes the slightest mistake it’s pounced on as evidence of her general incompetence. The result is a natural tendency towards caution. And after what’s happened to me Rosella’s going to be treading very carefully indeed.’

For a moment Zen wondered whether he should tell Bartocci about the photocopy of Ruggiero’s letter. Since the death of the writer the insults and threats he had dealt out to each member of his family took on a new significance. But in the end he decided against it. That letter was a card up his sleeve, the last one he had.

‘What has happened to you?’ he asked instead.

‘I’ll have to look for a new posting.’

‘You’re being transferred?’

‘Nothing as simple as that. The judiciary only resort to disciplinary action in the most blatant cases, where the alternative would make us look even worse. All I’ve done is offend one or two of the wrong people, it’s not the end of the world. No, nothing has changed. I’m quite free to stay in Perugia for the rest of my life, as an investigating magistrate. But if I want to move up the ladder I’ll have to go elsewhere.’

‘I still don’t understand why the Milettis didn’t try and stop you handling the investigation in the first place if they feel so strongly about you.’

‘They did try! But they went about it the wrong way. It was Pietro’s fault. He’s been away too long, lost his touch, forgotten how things are done. When I was assigned to investigate Ruggiero’s kidnapping, Pietro made a statement to the press drawing attention to my lack of experience and my political views and demanding that I be replaced immediately. After that I couldn’t be touched, of course. This time they went about it correctly, which is to say incorrectly. A few discreet phone calls and suddenly I find myself shunted into a siding while the investigation into Ruggiero’s murder passes me by.’

As Bartocci took his coat, the crucifix which Zen had laid on top of the filing cabinet the previous evening fell to the floor.

‘Where you’re concerned the Milettis got it wrong again,’ the magistrate remarked to Zen as they stood at the door. ‘The Ministry would have been only too happy to hand you over stuffed and pickled if they’d been asked in the proper way. But once Pietro started sounding off to the press they had to stand by you to avoid charges of bowing to pressure.’

‘I expect it’ll come to the same thing in the end,’ Zen told him as they shook hands.

The crucifix had been broken by its fall. Zen wandered over to the window, trying to push it back together again.

One effect of the years of terrorism had been to abolish night in the vicinity of prisons, and the scene outside was bleakly bright. Every detail was picked out by the floodlights mounted high up on the walls behind protective grilles. Remote-control video cameras scanned back and forth, while up on the roof a nervous-looking teenager in grey overalls went his rounds, hugging a machine-gun for comfort.

That was another slight anomaly about Ruggiero Miletti’s death, Zen reflected. Like Valesio, he had been shot through the mouth, but this time the only sign of damage was a single discreet exit wound in the back of the neck. The bullets fired into the victim’s cranium were still lodged there. When the projectile that had escaped turned up in the mud all was explained: it was a 4.5mm, low-power ammunition for a small pistol. This choice of weapons seemed rather bizarre. The negotiating cell of the gang had brutally dismantled Ubaldo Valesio’s skull with a submachine-gun while the hard men who had executed Ruggiero had done so with a small handgun, a bedside toy for nervous householders.

As Zen stood there fiddling with the crucifix, the end of the upright suddenly came away cleanly in his hand and he saw that it was hollow and that the lower part of the shaft contained a heavy rectangular pack about two centimetres long connected to a wire running back into the shaft and disappearing through a small hole into the figure of Christ. This figure was painted in the same syrupy pastel shades as the rest of the crucifix, but when Zen tapped it the head resounded not with the dull thud of plaster but with a light metallic ring.

He’s been away too long, Bartocci had said of Pietro Miletti. He’s lost his touch, forgotten how things are done. He wasn’t the only one. Zen clearly remembered the occasion when he’d felt that some detail in his office had altered. He’d thought that it was just the calendar which had been turned to the correct month, but something else had been changed too. The original crucifix had been much smaller, too small in fact to contain whatever it was he was now cradling in his hand. And to think he hadn’t noticed! At this rate he couldn’t even count on keeping his Housekeeping job much longer. People would be auctioning off whole police stations under his nose.

The broken fragments of the crucifix looked like some bizarre act of desecration. He laid them out on the desk, got a plastic bag out of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and swept all the bits and pieces into it. Then he put on his overcoat and pushed the package deep into the pocket.

It was almost eight o’clock, and the streets were dead apart from a little through traffic. While he was still undecided as to what to do a bus appeared round the corner and slowed to a halt near by. The doors opened and the driver stared at him expectantly, and Zen got in. The bus wound its way through the ring of nineteenth-century villas on the upper slopes and the post-war apartments below them, down to the modern blocks and towers on the flat land around the station, where it pulled up. The engine died and everyone got out.

Zen went over to the row of luggage lockers, laid the plastic package in one, dropped in three hundred lire coins, locked the door and pocketed the key. On the wall opposite there was an illuminated display listing the tourist attractions of the city. The word ‘cinemas’ caught his eye, and one of the names seemed familiar. He gave it to the driver of the taxi he found outside, who whisked him back up the hill again, back through time to a medieval alley smelling of woodsmoke and urine. A more unlikely situation for a cinema was hard to imagine, but the driver pointed to a set of steps burrowing up between two houses and explained that it was as near as he could get in a car.

The small piazza into which Zen eventually emerged had an eerie, underwater look, due to a uniform coating of lurid green light from a neon sign mounted on a building otherwise no different from the others. ‘CINEMA MINERVA’, it read. Zen made no attempt to find out what was showing. He paid, walked down a dark corridor and pushed through a curtain into a deep pool of sound and flickering light. The auditorium was almost empty. He walked without hesitation to the very front row, sat down and lay back, gazing up at the screen. Enormous blurred masses swarmed into view and out again. An ear the size of a flying saucer appeared for a moment and then was whisked away and replaced by a no less monstrous nose and half an eye. Giant voices boomed at each other. He snuggled down in his seat with a blissful smile, battered by images, swamped by noise, letting the film wash over him.

It was the perfect mental massage, and when it was over he rose feeling slightly numb, but tingling and refreshed. In the foyer he paused to look at the posters, and learned that he had just seen a comedy called Pull The Other One! featuring a fat balding middle-aged clerk, the slim glamorous starlet madly in love with him, the clerk’s wily roguish ne’er-do-well cousin and the cousin’s battleaxe of a wife. As he stood there he felt a hand on his shoulder.

He would never have recognized Cinzia Miletti if she hadn’t approached him, for she was virtually in disguise: a silk scarf entirely covering her hair, dark glasses and a long tweed coat buttoned right up to the chin. She lowered the glasses for an instant so that he could see her eyes, then reused them again.

‘Did you enjoy it? We did, didn’t we, Stefania?’

They were the classic female twosome, mouse and minx. Stefania played her role to perfection, managing to give the impression of existing only provisionally, to a limited extent, and being quite prepared at the drop of a hat either to become completely real or to vanish without trace, whichever was more convenient.

Zen was so astounded at finding Cinzia there on that particular evening that he could think of nothing whatever to say.

‘I think he’s just fantastic, don’t you?’ she went on unperturbed. ‘I’ve seen all his films except Do Me A Favour! which funnily enough I’ve never managed to catch although it’s on TV all the time. He’s working in America this year, you know.’

By now the foyer was completely empty. On every side images of love and violence erupted from glass-fronted posters advertising coming attractions. In her booth the cashier sat knitting behind a tank in which a solitary goldfish swam in desultory circles.

Cinzia looked at her companion.

‘I must go,’ breathed Stefania, and was gone.

‘Would you walk me home?’ Cinzia asked Zen. ‘I’m staying here in town, it’s only five minutes’ walk, not worth calling a taxi, but I don’t like to go alone. There are so many Arabs about now. Of course I’m not racist, but let’s face it, they’ve got a different culture, just like the South.’

Still he couldn’t reply, his head too full of questions to which he didn’t particularly want to know the answers. But he managed to nod agreement.

‘Of course you think I’m shameless,’ Cinzia remarked as they set off, the windless muffled night hardly disturbed by their footsteps. ‘Do you believe in a life after death? I don’t know what to think. But if there isn’t one then nothing makes any difference, does it, and if there is I’m sure it’ll all be far too spiritual for anyone to get in a huff over the way the rest of us carry on.’

The part of the city through which they were walking reminded Zen of Venice, but a Venice brutally fractured, as though each canal were a geological fault and the houses to either side had taken a plunge or been wrenched up all askew and left to tumble back on themselves, throwing out buttresses and retaining walls for support as best they could.

‘I mean, do you really think the dead sit around counting who goes to the funeral and how many wreaths there are and how much they cost?’ his companion carried on. ‘I just hate cemeteries, anyway. They remind me of death.’

Her tone was even more strident than usual. Zen wondered if she wasn’t slightly high on drink or drugs.

‘Going home to stick it up her, eh? Filthy old bumfucker! Squeeze it tight and you might just manage to get a hard-on, you miserable little rat!’

The voice was just overhead, but when they looked up there was no one there.

‘Good evening, Evelina,’ Cinzia replied calmly.

‘Don’t you good evening me, you shameless cunt! You blow-job artist! I bet you beg for it on bended knees! I bet you let him shove it where he wants! Whore! Masturbator!’

They turned a corner and the malignant ravings became blurred and indistinct.

‘Poor Evelina used to be one of the most fashionable women in Perugia,’ Cinzia explained. ‘Nobody seems to know what happened, but one day during a concert she suddenly stood up, took off her knickers and showed everyone her bottom. After that she was put away until they closed the asylums, since when she’s lived in that place. It’s one of her family’s properties, they own half the city. Sometimes you hear her singing, in the summertime. But mostly she just sits up there like a spider, sticking her head out of the window to insult the passers-by. It’s nothing personal, she says the same to everyone.’

For some time now Zen had been wondering where they were going. When Cinzia said she was staying ‘in town’, he’d assumed that she meant the Miletti villa. But although the structure of the city still defeated him in detail, he had got his bearings well enough to know that this could not be their destination. Eventually Cinzia turned up a set of steps rising steeply from the street and unlocked a door at the top.

‘You’ll come in for a moment, won’t you?’

Without waiting for an answer she disappeared, leaving the door open.

Zen slowly mounted the steps, and then paused on the threshold. Ruggiero Miletti was dead and the family blamed him. What better revenge than to disgrace him by rigging a scandal involving the dead man’s daughter, a married woman? But he told himself not to be crazy. How could they have known he was going to that cinema when he hadn’t known himself until he saw the name at the station?

A narrow stairway of glossy marble led straight into a sitting room arranged around a huge open fireplace. There was no sign of Cinzia. The room had roughly plastered walls and a low ceiling supported on enormous joists trimmed out of whole trees. Everything was spick and span, more like a hotel than a home. Zen was instinctively drawn towards the one area of disorder, a desk piled with leaflets, envelopes, magazines, newspapers, letters and bills. He picked up one of the envelopes and held it up to the light: the watermark showed the heraldic hybrid with which he was becoming familiar, with the wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. Next to it lay a note from Cinzia to her husband about collecting their daughter from school.

‘This is really Gianluigi’s place,’ Cinzia explained as she breezed in. She had changed into a striped shirt and a pair of faded jeans that were slightly too large for her. ‘I only use it when he’s away, there’s no telling who I might find here otherwise. What do you want to drink?’

‘Anything at all.’

Her bare feet padded across the polished terracotta tiles to the bottles lined along a shelf in the corner. Zen sat down on the large sofa which occupied most of one wall, thinking about that last card which he’d fondly thought he had up his sleeve. Thank God he hadn’t tried to play it! The trap had been beautifully set, and he’d only avoided it because thanks to Bartocci’s machinations he’d already fallen into another one.

Cinzia brought them both large measures of whisky and sat down astride the wicker chair in front of the writing desk, facing him over the ridged wooden back.

‘I don’t normally drink with strangers,’ she remarked. ‘It’s quite a thrill. We do all our drinking in private, you see, in the family. Like everything else, for that matter!’

Cinzia was beginning to remind Zen more than a little of his wife. Luisella had also been the child of a successful businessman, owner of one of the most important chemist’s shops in Treviso, and she too had had brothers who had dominated her childhood, driving her to defend herself in unorthodox ways. Life was a game like tennis, set up by men for men to win with powerful serves she would never be able to return. She countered by deliberately breaking the rules, exhausting her opponents and winning by default.

‘That’s a clue by the way,’ she continued. ‘You’re never going to get anywhere if you don’t understand the people involved.’

‘I thought the people involved were Calabrian shepherds.’

‘Oh, well, I don’t know anything about them. You should have asked Stefania. Her brother’s best friend is Calabrian, a medical student. But his family is extremely rich and I don’t expect he knows any shepherds.’

She got up abruptly.

‘Shall we have some music? Let’s see, I can never remember how to work this thing.’

She pressed a button and one of the hit songs of the season emerged at full volume, the tough, shallow lyrics gloatingly declaimed by a star of the mid-sixties who had traded in her artless looks and girlish lispings for a streetwise manner and a voice laden with designer cynicism.

‘I’d rather just talk,’ Zen shouted.

With a flick of her finger she restored the silence.

‘I thought you were bored. Well, what shall we talk about? How about sex? Let’s see how you rate in that area. What do you think we go in for, here in Perugia? Wife-swapping? Open marriage? Group gropes? Singles bars?’

‘None of those, I should have thought,’ Zen replied with a slight smile.

‘And quite right too. Bravo, you’re improving. There’s some of that around, of course, but it’s not traditional So what do you think is the speciality of the house? I’m talking about something typically Perugian, home-made from the very finest local ingredients only.’

She finished her drink in one gulp.

‘No idea? I don’t think you’re a very good detective, I’ve given you loads of clues. It’s incest, of course.’

She banged her empty glass down on the desk, as though she had expected to find the surface several centimetres lower than it actually was.

‘Don’t look so surprised, it makes perfect sense. From our point of view marriage has one big drawback, you see. It lets an outsider into the family. Much safer to stick to one’s close relations. There’s no trusting cousins and the like, of course. No, we’re talking mother and son, father and daughter. See what I mean? If you don’t know these things how can you hope to get anything right? For example, you disapprove of my going to the cinema this evening, but what do you think I should be doing? Cleaving to the bosom of my grieving family? What do you think they’re doing? Daniele will be locked in his bedroom watching the latest batch of video nasties. Silvio? He’ll be stripping for action with Helmut or whatever his name is this week. And Pietro will have gone to bed with a nice English murder story. Not much in the way of company, you see.’

‘And your husband?’

Zen was still irrationally worried that Gianluigi might walk in at any moment, hunting rifle in hand. Or would he use the other gun, the little 4.5mm pistol registered in Cinzia’s name? Where was that kept?

‘He’s still in Milan,’ Cinzia replied carelessly. ‘He couldn’t get a flight back because of all the journalists wanting to get down here, or so he claims. Anyway, he has nothing to do with it, he’s not family. Of course, he didn’t realize that when he married me. But you don’t break into the Miletti family as simply as that! So he’s been reduced to other expedients.’

‘And why did you marry him?’

Cinzia looked around vaguely, as if trying to remember.

‘Well, he’s very handsome. I know men don’t think so, but he is. That might almost have been enough.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

‘No. I married him to spite my father.’

Zen gave her a look of appraisal.

‘You’re not being very typically Perugian yourself, are you, telling me all this?’

Cinzia’s eyes suddenly flashed and she smiled, displaying an excessive number of rather dirty teeth.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it? I knew his death would be a release, but I thought it would be terrible, that I would suffer. I thought he would always make me suffer, whatever happened. But it’s not like that at all. All this time, all these years, I’ve been lugging this weight around with me, for so long now that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be free of it. I’d even begun to mistake it for part of my own body, an incurable growth that I’ve got to learn to live with. But it’s not, it’s not! That disease, that horror, that swelling, it was all his! I’m whole and healthy and light, I find. Sorry for his death? I feel like dancing on his coffin!’

But there were tears in her eyes. For a moment it looked as though she was going to break down.

‘There used to be this old-fashioned clothes shop on the Corso,’ she went on more quietly. ‘It’s gone now, they’ve turned it into a boutique. It was full of wooden drawers and cupboards and enormous heavy mirrors on stands and boxes of buttons and threads and trimming. All the clothes were wrapped in tissue paper. I can still remember the sound it made, a lovely special sound, as light and thin as the clothes were thick and heavy. Everything smelt of mothballs and lavender and cedar. That shop was like a dream world to me, full of secrets and wonders. My mother took me there occasionally, and we used to pass the window every Sunday after mass. They always had beautiful things in the window. There was. one I craved in particular, a pink nightdress with a lace hem and a frilly neck and a family of rabbits embroidered on the chest. I always stopped to look at it, although I knew it was much too expensive. But when my eighth birthday came I found it among my presents, with a little card from my father.’

He saw that she was weeping, not for her father but for herself, for the child she had been.

‘Well, I expect you can guess the rest! That evening he came to my room, to see how I looked in my new nightdress. He told me to sit on his knee. That was normal, I didn’t think twice about it. But what happened next wasn’t normal. I knew it must be wrong, because afterwards he made me promise not to tell anyone about it, not even Mamma. What had happened was our secret, he said. That was the agreement we’d made. He’d kept his part by buying me the nightdress, now it was up to me to keep mine. I didn’t remember making any agreement, but what could I do? Fathers know best, don’t they? So although I didn’t like him touching me the way he had, I decided not to tell anybody. I didn’t realize that by keeping quiet I was walking into a trap.’

She sniffed loudly and picked up her cigarettes.

‘After that he came to visit me almost every evening. After he had gone I found that my nightie was covered in a horrible sticky mess with a strange sour smell. I went to the bathroom and scrubbed myself until I was raw. But I still didn’t tell anyone. In the end he stopped bothering to make any pretence of cuddles, it became fucking pure and simple. And his filth was no longer just on my skin, it was inside me.’

Zen tried to think of something to say, but it was useless. Faced with this ordinary everyday atrocity, he felt ashamed to be a man, ashamed to be human.

‘Finally I threatened to tell Mamma. I was older now and more daring. It was then that he finally sprang his trap. If you do that, he told me, we shall go to prison, both of us. Because it’s really all your fault. You encouraged me, you led me on. You must have enjoyed it, otherwise you would have told someone before now! You’re as bad as me, my girl, or even worse.’

She lit her cigarette and smiled at Zen, inviting him to appreciate her father’s cleverness.

‘The worst thing about his lies was that they were partly true. Because although I hated it worse than anything, I did enjoy it too, once I got used to it. Of course it felt nice, what do you expect? And don’t you think it was flattering, in a way, to be preferred to my mother? What a position to be in! On the one hand I could send us both to prison, shame my mother, beggar my brothers, scandalize the city and blacken the Miletti name for evermore. On the other hand, I could do, I did, exactly the opposite, keeping my father satisfied and happy and my mother ignorant, helping to shore up their marriage, holding the family together and preserving my unsuspecting brothers, who thought they were so superior to me, from disgrace. Half the time I felt like a vicious little whore and the other half like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel. But mostly I just felt my power! My father used the carrot as well as the stick, of course, and that meant I got everything I wanted, clothes, jewellery, perfume. And when his friends and business associates came round, I would put on my finery and try out my power on them too. And it worked! Antonio Crepi, for example, used to give me looks that would have melted a candle. I was twelve at the time.’

‘Did your mother never suspect what was going on?’

After a long time Cinzia looked up.

‘That’s a terrible question,’ she said. ‘At the time I was sure she didn’t know. How could she have known, ‘I thought, and not done anything about it? Now I’m not so sure. She would have had every reason to look the other way. Besides…’

She stopped.

‘What?’

‘Sometimes I think she deliberately ignored what was happening, in order to punish me. Perhaps it was her way of taking revenge. Perhaps she too thought that it was my fault, that I enjoyed it, that I was as bad as he was, or even worse.’

She straightened up, her voice bright and brisk again.

‘Anyway, none of that matters now. There was a car crash, she died, he was in hospital for a long time and when he came out everything had changed. He may have seen her death as a judgement. I don’t know, we never talked about it of course. But he never came near me again, and I was left high and dry with all that power lying idle inside me. It didn’t lie idle long, needless to say.’

She gave him a wry smile.

‘So now you know everything there is to know about me! Not even my husband knows what I’ve just told you. A rare privilege, and one you didn’t deserve, to be perfectly honest. But I needed to tell someone, after all these years, and it had to be a stranger of course. You were just in the right place at the right time.’

Zen finished his whisky.

‘There’s still one thing I don’t know.’

‘What?’

‘Why you sent me that copy of your father’s letter.’

She barked out a little laugh.

‘I thought at first it must have been Ivy Cook,’ Zen went on. ‘But that doesn’t really make sense. Take the envelope, for example. Did she take it with her when she went to the rubbish skip or dash to a stationer’s and buy it? And not just any old envelope, but a special luxury brand with a griffin watermark. Like the ones on your desk.’

She gave him a bored look.

‘It’s not my desk, it’s Gianluigi’s. I expect he sent you the letter. You’ve no idea how resourceful he is. He just about owns poor Daniele ever since that business with the drugs, not to mention those photographs he has of Silvio…’

‘No, it wasn’t your husband,’ Zen interrupted. ‘It was you. You rewrote the letter after the original had been burned, had your version photocopied and then sent me the copy. The handwriting is the same as that note on the desk asking your husband to collect Loredana from school.’

‘Well, supposing I did? It’s not a criminal offence, is it, sending information to the police? You should be grateful! I may have changed a word here or there, but apart from that it’s all exact. I wrote it while the text was still fresh in my mind. It wasn’t the kind of letter that is easy to forget! When Pietro told us that you were going on the pay-off I felt that you should know what you were getting yourself into.’

Zen smiled sceptically.

‘I thought it might have something to do with the fact that when it emerged that I’d received the letter, Ivy Cook would become persona non grata in the Miletti family.’

Cinzia giggled.

‘Well, why shouldn’t I get something out of it too? That bitch has been a thorn in our flesh for too long. Help yourself to another drink, I’ll be back in a moment.’

She lurched off across the room, reaching for the wall to steady herself, and disappeared upstairs. Some time later there was the sound of a lavatory flushing, but Cinzia did not reappear. Zen sat there, thinking over what she had told him. He felt heavy, saturated, crammed with more or less repulsive odds and ends he neither wanted nor needed to know. Someone had said that nowadays doctors had to double as priests, offering general consolation and advice to their patients. But there are things you would be ashamed to tell even your doctor, things so vile they can only be confessed to the lowest, most contemptible functionaries of all. There were days when Zen felt like the Bocca de Leone in the Doges’ Palace: a stiff stone grimace clogged with vapid denunciations and false confessions, scribbles riddled with hatred or guilt, the anonymous rubbish of an entire city.

There was still no sign of Cinzia. Zen got up, walked to the foot of the stairs and called out. There was no reply. He put his foot on the first step and paused, listening.

‘Signora?’

The high marble steps curved upwards, paralleling the flight leading up from the front door. Zen started to climb them. There were three doors in the passageway at the top. Feeling like a character in a fairy tale, he chose the one to the right and opened it carefully.

‘Signora?’

The room inside was startlingly bare, reminding him of his mother’s flat in Venice. Two empty cardboard boxes sat on the floor, one at each end of the room, ignoring each other. Between them a small window showed a blank stretch of wall on the other side of the alley.

The second door he tried was the bathroom. A quick search failed to reveal any suspiciously empty bottles of barbiturates, but of course she might have taken them with her. That left just one door, and he hesitated for a moment before opening it. But the scene which met his eyes was perfectly normal. A large high old-fashioned bed almost filled the room. Cinzia Miletti was lying across it on her back, bent slightly to one side, fully clothed, her eyes closed. Her breathing seemed steady.

Zen felt he should cover her up. Her body proved unexpectedly awkward and resistant. One arm kept getting entangled in the sheets, until he began to think that she was playing a trick on him. Paradoxically, it wasn’t till her eyes opened that he knew he was wrong. Their unfocused glance passed over him without the slightest flicker of movement or response. Then they closed and she turned over and began to snore lightly. His last image before switching off the light was of Cinzia’s head lying on the pillow in the centre of a mass of long blonde hair, her mouth placidly sucking her thumb.

Outside the night had turned clear and bitterly cold, and the stars were massed in all their intolerable profusion. The light cast by one of the infrequent street lamps glistened on a freshly pasted poster extolling the virtues of Commendatore Ruggiero Franco Miletti, whose funeral would be held the following afternoon.