‘And where is he?’
The man pointed to the occupant of the wheelchair, who sat mutely cradling a battered leather briefcase.
‘I have your word for that?’
‘You have my department’s word for it.’
Zen levelled him with a look.
‘I don’t even know which department you’re talking about, but if it’s the one I think it is, then I hope for all our sakes that you’re not the sharpest knife in their drawer. For my coming here to make any sense, I require documentary proof that the donor of the sample is Roberto Calopezzati. I further require to take possession of the sample and convey it personally to a police laboratory, where it will be entrusted to a technician of my choice. If you seek to impose any other solution, this has all been a complete waste of time.’
‘Go away, Gino,’ said the man in the wheelchair. ‘You two as well. This experience is difficult enough for me without having you all standing around aimlessly like characters in some Pirandello play.’
The two minders and the nurse trooped meekly out.
‘I apologise for this pantomime,’ the man said to Zen. ‘It was the idea of my successor as head of the agency you referred to. Not a bad fellow in many ways, but somewhat heavy-handed. Yes, I know you’re listening, Rizzardo, but that happens to be my opinion, for what it’s worth. Sit down, signore, sit down. I am Roberto Calopezzati, and I have brought the necessary documents to prove it. Before I present them, may I ask why I have the honour of being an object of attention to the police?’
Calopezzati was a bulky man with a strongly featured face set off by a white beard trimmed short and contrasted with jet-black cropped hair and two huge eyebrows of the same colour that lounged across his brow like furry caterpillars. His olive-green eyes were intense, direct and demanding, while his lips were thin but sensual. Only the lower half of his body, truncated at the knees, detracted from the general impression of vigour and power.
‘I assumed that your successor would have explained that,’ Zen replied.
‘Well, I suppose we could always ask him. I don’t actually know if he’s listening in “real time”, as they say these days — when did time stop being real, by the way? — but our conversation is certainly being recorded for quality-assurance purposes and for my protection. Anyway, all I have been told is that our meeting is with regard to the investigation of a murder in Cosenza.’
‘You weren’t informed of the identity of the victim?’
‘No.’
‘And you didn’t see my press conference on television?’
‘I don’t have a television.’
‘Ah well, in that case, barone, I’m afraid that I must be the bearer of bad news. All the prima facie evidence suggests that the victim was your nephew.’
Calopezzati sagged physically and looked his age for the first time.
‘Pietro?’ he whispered.
‘That’s what I’ve come here to ascertain. On the face of it, the victim was an American citizen travelling under the name of Peter Newman. When he disappeared some weeks ago while in Calabria on a business trip, the assumption was that he had been kidnapped for ransom. My investigations during that period suggested that his original identity was Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati, the son of your late sister Ottavia. The main reason why I’ve come here is to obtain a DNA sample from you which will confirm or rule out that hypothesis.’
Calopezzati sat silent and expressionless for over a minute, his body twitching violently at intervals as if stricken by a series of minor strokes. Zen let this process work itself out without comment.
‘You’ll get your sample,’ the other man said at last, ‘but it’s redundant. The dead man was indeed my nephew.’
‘Would you be prepared to comment on how Pietro Calopezzati became Peter Newman?’
‘Possibly. But first things first.’
He opened the leather case and extracted a mass of papers.
‘We’ll go through these in chronological order, with one exception which I’ll get to later.’
He passed the documents to Zen one by one.
‘My birth certificate. Various photographs from my childhood and school years. A sequence of identity cards from the following period, up to the war years, then a different set dating from my work with the servizi, concluding with the one that is currently valid. I think you will agree that all the photographs show a marked likeness, qualified of course by the passage of time. However, I don’t expect you to confirm my identity on that basis alone. As I said, I have withheld one document from the chronological order. It is this.’
He passed Zen a file card bearing the printed heading ‘Partito Fascista Italiano’. The entries below indicated that Roberto Calopezzati was enrolled in the Cosenza section of the party with the rank of caposquadrista, the commander of a squad of Blackshirts. The attached photograph fitted into the now familiar pattern, but there was also a very clear thumbprint.
‘And now for my last trick,’ the man said.
From the leather bag, he produced an ink pad in a tin box and a blank sheet of paper. He opened the pad, rolled his right thumb in the ink and then printed the resulting image on the paper. Zen compared it to the print on the Fascist file card. They were identical.
‘You are satisfied?’ Calopezzati asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Then let us proceed to the sample you need. What exactly does that consist of?’
Zen paused for a moment.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, barone, but I have the impression that while the news of your nephew’s death was a shock to you, it did not come as a complete surprise.’
‘Only in the sense that I had no idea he’d returned home. For as long as we were in contact, I explicitly advised him never to do so, and in any event not to venture south of Rome. What on earth could have induced him to do such a thing?’
‘I understand that he was employed by an American movie company to act as their mediatore during preparations for a production to be filmed there.’
Calopezzati waved his elegant hand dismissively. His feet must have been elegant too, thought Zen, wondering how they had been severed.
‘That’s just money! He could have found another job.’
‘Perhaps he thought that the risks were by now minimal,’ Zen murmured as though to himself. ‘Perhaps after so many years he had grown nostalgic for his own country. You implied that you lost contact with Pietro at some point. When did that happen?’
‘I don’t recall exactly. At some point in the 1980s. He just stopped writing and phoning, or I did. He wasn’t my child, after all.’
‘But you were responsible for taking him to America?’
‘After my sister died, I became his guardian. This was after the war, the whole country was in chaos. I moved Pietrino in with me in Rome and sent him to school there to learn Italian. He was a wild creature who had been brought up by Ottavia’s entourage of servants, spoke only dialect and didn’t respond well to discipline. Nevertheless, it was clearly my duty to protect him until he came of age, so when I entered the agency and was posted to the embassy in Washington I took him with me. Our ambassador at the time was a family friend and happened to be in a position to call in a favour from the US government in return for some help that we had provided for them. Thus it was arranged for Pietro Ottavio to become an American citizen. All in all, it seemed the best solution to the problem.’
‘Which problem?’
‘The problem of possible reprisals from my family’s numerous enemies.’
‘Were they really that dangerous?’
The man in the wheelchair made another fluent, fluid hand gesture.
‘Who can estimate danger? One of my colleagues made clandestine trips to remote areas of our former colony of Eritrea during its war with Ethiopia and came back with nothing worse than a mild case of gonorrhoea. Another went to see a Washington Redskins game one evening and was beaten to death on his way home because
