wanted to knock him over and take his gun away. He was trying to kill me! Only when I hit him, he fell down here from the loft.’
Zen took no notice of him. He completed his inspection of the items he had taken from the man’s pockets, placed them in his own and only then looked at Passarini.
‘Thirty years ago, you were a witness to the murder of Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero in an abandoned military tunnel in the Dolomites. Tell me exactly what happened on that day.’
‘Don’t say anything!’ the man on the floor shouted. ‘He’s a snooper from the Interior Ministry. They’re trying to disgrace the army. Shoot him and then call an ambulance for me! I’ll sort it all out. I’ll tell them that he was responsible for the whole thing and that you saved my life.’
‘Colonel Alberto Guerrazzi was also present on that occasion,’ Zen continued. ‘So was Nestore Soldani, who was killed by a car bomb in Campione d’Italia a few days after the discovery of Ferrero’s corpse, and one day before you fled here. The three of you, with Leonardo Ferrero, formerly constituted one unit of a conspiratorial organization code-named Operation Medusa.’
‘Shoot him, Gabriele!’ Guerrazzi shouted in a voice streaked with anguish. ‘This man is a maverick who is being used by the Interior people to stir up trouble while remaining officially unaccountable. Whatever he has found out remains for the moment his private knowledge. It has not been communicated to Rome. I would know if it had. The risk is therefore containable, just as it was with Ferrero. Like him, this individual represents an Alpha-grade threat to national security. I now outrank you, and as the senior officer in this emergency situation I am ordering you to eliminate him immediately. You have the means at your disposal and I will take full responsibility. Failure to obey my order would be tantamount to treason.’
Gabriele Passarini sighed.
‘Fuck off, Alberto,’ he said.
There was a strangled sound from the floor.
‘Guerrazzi was the leader of the cell,’ Zen continued in an utterly bored tone, ‘the only one with access to higher levels of command within the organization. At a certain point, he informed the rest of you that he had been ordered to take you all up to an abandoned system of military tunnels in the Dolomites to undergo a series of ritual ordeals. The reason given, I imagine, was both to bond the cell together — you were all very new recruits to Medusa — and also to bind that organization in a mystical Blutbruderschaft union with the glorious dead of the regiment who fell there during the First World War.’
‘All honour to them!’ cried the injured man.
‘I entirely agree. All honour to them. All pity too, the poor bastards. At any rate, this is what you were told, and of course you all leapt at the chance to get out of the barracks for a lad¬ dish weekend in the mountains, just as you had at the invitation to be inducted into an elite club like Medusa in the first place. Guerrazzi here was the only one to know the real purpose of the expedition. Colonel Gaetano Comai, his commanding officer and Medusa contact, had informed him that Leonardo Ferrero had contacted a radical Communist investigative journalist named Luca Brandelli with a view to disclosing details about Operation Medusa. Comai no doubt showed him photographs taken covertly during their meeting at a pizzeria in Piazza Bra. Guerrazzi’s mission now was to find out how many other times Ferrero had talked to Brandelli and exactly how much he had revealed, and then eliminate him. I don’t know how he put it to you and Soldani, Signor Passarini, but it may well have been in terms very similar to those he used when he tried to persuade you to shoot me a moment ago.’
‘Alberto told us…’ Gabriele began.
‘Shut up!’ yelled Guerrazzi. ‘If you won’t do your duty, at least hold your tongue.’
There was a brief silence.
‘Would you by any chance have any paper here?’ Zen asked Passarini.
‘Paper?’
‘Typing paper, preferably, but anything will do. I know that you are a man of books, so I thought maybe…’
‘I’ve got some at the house.’
‘Would you be good enough to bring a few sheets over here?’
‘But why?’
‘Five or six sheets would be perfect. Oh, and please don’t think of just running off and disappearing, tempting though that obviously is. If you do, I’ll have to call headquarters and have them issue an arrest warrant for the attempted murder of Colonel Alberto Guerrazzi.’
‘It was an accident!’
‘That would be for the courts to decide, but the case would take at least three years to come to trial, should you be lucky enough to survive that long. I’m sure that the colonel and his friends would take steps to ensure that your time in prison was as unpleasant as possible, if not indeed fatal.’
Gabriele’s fear was evident even in the wavering torchlight. He nodded once and limped away.
‘I knew you’d be trouble as soon as I heard about you, Zen,’ said Guerrazzi. ‘Yes, I’ve guessed your identity, although I hope you noticed that I didn’t reveal it to our little bookworm. So we can put all this behind us. I know I can count on you to keep your silence. You’re a patriot, just as Brandelli was in his own way. He was our sworn enemy thirty years ago, of course, like all the PCI crowd, but times have changed. When I see the shallow consumerist trash running around these days I almost begin to feel nostalgic for enemies like that.’
‘I imagine that Ferrero was tortured before you threw him into that pit,’ Zen said.
Guerrazzi sighed wearily.
‘We naturally tried to extract whatever information we could about what he had divulged. Don’t think that we enjoyed it. We were acting under orders. It was our duty to obey, just as it is your duty to summon an ambulance and have me taken to hospital immediately.’
‘And then a few days later a military aircraft with Leonardo Ferrero supposedly aboard conveniently went missing over the Adriatic following a mid-air explosion.’
‘Many of your guesses so far have been very clever and cor¬ rect, Zen, but you are mistaken if you believe that I had any¬ thing to do with that.’
‘How many men were on board the plane?’
‘In theory, two.’
‘But in practice one. An innocent serviceman.’
‘It was a historic moment, Zen! The whole of Europe was teetering on the brink of armed revolution. The fate of the nation hung in the balance. In the end, the Maoists and Stalinists and anarchists were defeated, but it was a war, albeit secret and undeclared, and in any war there will be casualties. All the liberties and privileges that we take for granted today were won through struggle, sacrifice and suffering, yet how quick we are to forget! And even quicker to condemn.’
‘And to panic, as when Ferrero’s body unexpectedly turned up after all these years. What has become of it, incidentally?’
‘It was cremated last week under a false name and death certificate. I myself scattered the ashes in the Tiber.’ Guerrazzi managed a laugh. ‘One of the vigili noticed what I was doing and threatened me with a fine for polluting the environment. I took his name and number and told him that if he didn’t bugger off he would be in the next urn.’
The light increased perceptibly as Gabriele Passarini returned, holding a sheaf of paper. Zen carefully extracted a slim pile of sheets from the inside of the pack.
‘Thank you. Now then, we’re going to need to leave soon, and it’s vital that you leave no traces of your occupancy here. Go back to the house, pack up whatever you brought with you and try and make the place look as it did when you arrived. Then wait for me in the courtyard. Oh, and leave the pistol here.’
‘Don’t give it to him!’ Guerrazzi shouted, sounding genuinely panicked for the first time. ‘Give it to me! I’ll cover him while you call an ambulance!’
Ignoring him, Gabriele addressed Zen.
‘Why do you want the gun?’
‘It’s government property. Now it’s one thing for you to have critically injured Colonel Guerrazzi…’
‘It was an accident, I tell you!’
‘Exactly my point. But if you take the pistol, that’s theft. It’s the property of the state and must be returned to its assigned user.’
