Aurelio Zen had never paid much attention to birds, but the stealthy approach of death had made him more attentive to any form of life. He was sitting on the top step of the burnt-out bastiglia, on the very spot where Pietro Ottavio had been explosively decapitated, looking alternately up at this dumb show in the sky and down at the tapestry of plants and shrubs that had established themselves among the charred blocks of stone in the years since the baronial residence had been consumed by fire one winter night.
The most striking specimen was a fig tree whose roots must, with their seemingly intuitive attraction to proximate water, have found out the ancient well which had once supplied the needs of the Calopezzati family and its retinue of servants, clerks, managers and armed guards. There was also a young almond on whose leaves a beetle resembling a piece of jewellery was crawling about, its carapace a brilliant green flecked with gold and black. Eventually it took to the air with a low droning noise like a clockwork toy and was snaffled up by a passing golden oriole. Zen consoled himself for its loss by turning his attention back to the aerial scrimmage. He knew the idea to be absurd, but it was difficult to believe that hawks didn’t enjoy flying for its own sake.
In this context, the electronic whining of his mobile phone came as a double shock. How he hated these attention-seeking pests to which everyone was shamelessly addicted! He recalled a dinner party in Lucca where half the guests had spent the evening yammering away to people who weren’t there while ignoring those who were. When he’d complained on the way home afterwards, Gemma had told him that that was the way it was these days. He should adapt, she’d said, but he couldn’t. It was in his nature, just as the behaviour of hawks and crows was in theirs.
‘Old woman attempted to approach up the path,’ Arnone’s voice said. ‘I’ve stopped her and sent you her photograph.’
Natale Arnone was guarding the exit from the track leading up to the abandoned town from the new settlement of Altomonte. On the other side of the hill, Luigi Caricato was performing a similar duty at the only other point of access, which Zen and the two officers had used earlier, leaving their unmarked car in the deserted car park below. Zen pressed the necessary minuscule buttons and Maria’s face appeared on the screen of his phone.
‘Let her in,’ he told Arnone. ‘Then lock the front door until further notice. Tell Caricato to do the same with the rear entrance.’
A dark pall of thunderclouds hung over the coastal mountain range to the west, but here on the heights of the Sila massif the sun shone harshly down, except in the quadrant of shadow cast by the remaining walls of the Calopezzati stronghold. Zen had arrived deliberately early for his appointment with Maria, but now the outcome of their meeting seemed almost irrelevant. It was enough to be here, in the pleasantly warm and very fresh air, surrounded by a host of plants and creatures which Zen was unable to name. A diminutive, rotund figure appeared in the distance, making its way steadily up the former main street of the town past the ruined walls stripped of all reusable material, the cellars now stocked only with rubble, and the foundations marking the outline of vanished houses where vanished people had enjoyed or suffered the finite and largely predictable selection of experiences that life affords.
When Maria reached the piazzetta, Zen got to his feet and walked over to her. They exchanged restrained greetings.
‘Are you sure you weren’t followed, signora?’ Zen asked.
He was enjoying his morning off work, but Giorgio had demonstrated his capacity of swift and merciless retribution and Zen was concerned for Maria’s safety.
‘Who would bother following an old woman like me? Besides, I took a side path which joins the main track well out of sight of the town, then stopped in the woods to see if anyone came. There’s no need for concern.’
‘You must be tired. It’s a stiff climb.’
Maria made a dismissive swishing sound.
‘I’ve done it so many times that my legs don’t even notice. I could do it on a moonless night by starlight.’
Up here in the mountains the stars would still be a luminous presence, Zen realised. It had used to be like that everywhere, but within his lifetime that celestial array had been erased like a mediaeval fresco gaudily overpainted in a more enlightened era.
‘Come and sit in the shade,’ he said. ‘It’s deliciously cool over there.’
He pointed to the steps where he had been sitting. Maria shook her head with finality.
‘Not there,’ she said.
It took Zen a moment to understand.
‘Ah, of course. Because of the murder.’
‘What murder?’ Maria demanded.
‘Why, the American lawyer. The son of Caterina Intrieri, according to you.’
Now Maria looked confused.
‘There’s a bench beside the church,’ she said. ‘It’ll be just as shady there and we’ll get the breeze from Monte Botte Donato. It’s very healthy, scented with resin. At least it used to be, before the railway came and they cut all the trees down. My father worked for the company that bought the rights. He said that felling those enormous pines was like chopping off your own limbs. But we needed the money.’
Zen noted her agitation, and the chatter with which she had tried to conceal it, but made no comment.
‘So, what is it you want from me?’ Maria said, when they had taken their places on the stone bench.
‘I want you to tell me everything you know, have heard or can guess about the man called Giorgio,’ he said with an earnest edge quite as revealing in its way as Maria’s babble. ‘You won’t give me that, of course, but I beg you to give me something, anything. This man is not only evil but quite possibly mad. He dressed up Caterina’s son as a corpse and made him walk up that path you have taken so many times, then pressed the button of a remote control, like changing channels on TV, and blew his head off. He personally cut off the tip of Francesco Nicastro’s tongue. You heard the screams. The boy may never be able to talk or eat normally again. I realise that it’s difficult for you to tell me what I know you know, because I am who I am and you are who you are. But your friend Benedicta has just died, signora. Your own death, may God forbid, cannot be long delayed. Do you want to go to your grave knowing that you protected a sadistic murderer, a threat to the community of which you are a part, because you were too proud to talk to the one person who could prevent him from doing any more harm? Deliberately and wilfully indulged, signora, pride is a mortal sin. Even the blessed sacraments may not suffice to ensure the salvation of your soul.’
Maria listened to this speech in silence.
‘Did your mother want you to be a priest rather than a policeman?’ she asked at last.
Zen smiled meekly.
‘She never got over it. But I had no vocation.’
‘Well, you certainly put our local priest to shame. A little too emphatic, perhaps, but that’s to be expected in someone so young.’
But I do have a vocation, Zen thought. It’s this stupid, meaningless, utterly compromised job that I try to do as well as I can.
‘Were the origins of the child baptised Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati ever questioned?’ he asked.
‘Only once. Some Fascist bureaucrat from the north with ideas above his station asked la baronessa to confirm that the baby was indeed her natural child.’
‘And what did she reply?’
‘“I solemnly swear that this child was born of no other woman.” Which was literally true.’
‘And Giorgio?’ prompted Zen.
Maria considered this for some time, her head tilted askew like a bird’s, her eyes focused on nothing apparent.
‘I know for certain only that he calls himself that. The rest is hearsay. I have heard that his family name is Fardella or Fardeja. I have heard that he sells foreign drugs to our young people, that he has become addicted to them himself and that he lives in San Giovanni in Fiore. But he won’t be there now.’
‘Where will he be?’
Maria looked at him as though this question were too ingenuous to bother answering.
‘In the mountains, of course. Si e dato al brigantaggio. That’s what our men have done for centuries when the authorities hunted them down. They hide away in the forest, then watch and wait their chance.’
