several degrees.
Zen went up to the counter and asked for two coffees and a glass of an interesting-looking homemade liqueur in a litre bottle on the bar. He had to repeat the order several times before the woman who was serving finally nodded and shuffled off without the slightest acknowledgement. While he waited, Zen skimmed through a story in the German-language newspaper lying on the counter, something about a rich Venezuelan who’d been killed when his car exploded outside the gates of his villa in Campione d’Italia. Good, he thought. The sooner this dead-end case he had mistakenly got involved with ceased to be national news, the better.
Bruno reappeared, ostentatiously zipping up his flies and checking the positioning of their contents. Their coffees and Zen’s liqueur arrived without a word being spoken. In fact no word had been spoken by anyone in the bar since they had entered.
‘Quiet, isn’t it?’ remarked Bruno.
Zen lit a cigarette but made no reply.
‘On the face of it,’ the patrolman went on loudly, leaning back against the bar and gazing round the room. ‘But appearances can be deceptive. In fact, everyone in this village suffers from a rare and ultimately fatal condition whose inexorable progress can only be delayed by drinking the blood of a live human being.’
He nodded solemnly.
‘That’s the price you pay for centuries of incest. Poor things. There are few of them left now, because of course once in a while, when pickings from the passing trade are slim, they get desperate and draw lots among themselves. But their normal practice is to lure travellers in here with the promise of a hot drink or some petrol for the car. This dump used to be a mining community and there’s still a warren of shafts going back into the mountains. They stack the husks in there and resell the cars to the Mafia. Once in a while some tourist goes missing somewhere on the road to Cortina. No one can prove anything.’
He pointed to the floor.
‘That’s the trapdoor, right there where you’re standing, dot ¬ tore. Lucky you didn’t come in alone. Next thing you knew, you’d be lying down in the cellar with a broken leg and these creatures pouring down the stairs, giggling and squealing and knocking each other aside in their eagerness to open up an artery so that they could feast.’
Bruno swivelled round and stabbed a finger at one of the other drinkers, a man of diminutive stature.
‘You dwarf!’ he roared. ‘How many litres have you downed over the years, eh? Sucking the rich red curd down like mother’s milk! And that swine next to you, nuzzling his snout into the still-living entrails in hopes of finding a last drop of the good stuff clinging to some gizzard!’
Zen laid some money on the counter, took Bruno by the elbow and steered him outside. It was starting to snow, even at this lower level.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Zen asked the patrolman once they were back in the car. ‘You know the problems we have in this territory! What are you trying to do, start another terrorist movement up here?’
‘Sorry about that, capo. I just lost it for a moment. But it’s all right, they don’t speak Italian.’
‘They understand it.’
‘Of course, but they’d never admit that. It would be letting the side down. Hence my little game. Must be maddening for them.’
Zen sighed massively and lit a cigarette, cranking the window down slightly. Tufts of snow landed on his face like flies.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked in a subdued voice.
‘Bologna. I used to be bored there when I was growing up, but now I can’t wait to go back. It’s like being separated from your wife. And you, capo, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘Venice.’
They drove on in silence for a while.
‘I hate the mountains,’ said Bruno.
‘So do I.’
‘And I hate the people who live here. Not because they’re foreigners. It’s their country and as far as I’m concerned they’re welcome to it. But all the bright, enterprising, intelligent people left long ago, because they hated the mountains too. I mean, who’d want to live up here? So the only people left are the scum. The village idiots, the child and wife abusers, the no-brain losers and retards of every variety.’
Another silence.
‘How long have you got to go?’ asked Zen.
‘Three months and thirteen days.’
Zen nodded.
‘From a professional point of view, I think it might be advisable to make a special exception in your case.’
Bruno peered back at him in the rear-view mirror.
‘You can do that?’
‘I’ll try. Provided you get me back to the valley, safe and sound, and by nine at the latest.’
‘You want the station, right?’
‘No, I’ve changed my mind. Drop me at the hospital. I’ll take a cab from there.’
V
Night slipped past the open window at a steady one hundred and forty kilometres per hour. Chips and shards of light, some isolated, others roughly clustered, were borne past on its current at an apparent speed relative to their distance from the train. Parallax, thought Zen, although his immediate memory was of twirled sparklers, wire with a fizzy firework coating that created illusionary circles and whorls of solid light in the darkness. That and fireflies. Whatever had happened to fireflies?
By now they were quite far down the valley, past Rovereto. The snow had finally petered out at about the same point as the everyday use of the German language, but early that evening in Bolzano it had at once been clear that Bruno’s warning about getting down from the mountains in time had not been just a pretext for cutting short a long day. When they finally reached the city, after one distinctly scary moment involving an uncontrolled skid and an oncoming truck, the streets were already lightly covered, while huge but seemingly weightless flakes were falling so densely as to make driving almost as difficult as in fog. In the end, Bruno had insisted on remaining at the hospital while Zen did his business there and then driving him to the station, on the basis that taxis would be impossible to find and that it was too far to walk.
‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’ he’d added, seemingly casually. ‘And you shouldn’t hang around either, dottore. They’ll get the snowploughs out on the main streets, but it all takes time and you have that train down south to catch…’
‘What’s your surname, Bruno?’ Zen had remarked equally casually.
‘Nanni, capo.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
In the event he was back at the car in just over forty minutes, and they reached the station with almost an hour to spare. The train on which Zen had a reserved sleeper was waiting on one of the central platforms, but the locomotive had not yet been coupled up and the carriages were all dark and locked. He went to the station buffet and ate a toasted cheese and ham sandwich with some excellent beer, followed by a glass of local kirsch that was so good that he bought a small bottle as a souvenir for Gemma. Then he walked along the station building to the door marked Servizio.
In the dense warmth within, half a dozen men in railway uniform were smoking, chatting and playing cards. By a combination of implied threat, backed up by his police identification, and overt bribery, backed up by his wallet, he persuaded one of the sleeping-car attendants to walk with him across the tracks. The snow had not yet started to settle here, but it was now falling more thickly than ever.
‘Do you think we’ll get away on time?’ Zen asked the attendant as he unlocked one of the blue sleeping cars.
‘No question, dottore. The whole crew’s from Rome. It would take the worst blizzard these krauts have ever
