and ready to face the day. Having slurped down his muddy coffee, he then shaved, got dressed and left for work. Stepping out into the street was the final phase of his psychic detox ritual. Life in Calabria was by no means perfect, but the spectres and ghouls which tormented his nights could find no refuge in its merciless, crystalline light.
The next stop was a cafe and pastry shop called Dolci Idee. The display cases were laden with sugary iced cakes and buns of every description, but a sweet tooth was one item that didn’t figure on Zen’s sin list. He consumed a double espresso amaro, and then walked along one and a half blocks of the grid pattern on which the new city of Cosenza was constructed, past the church of Santa Teresa, a modern monstrosity with Romanesque pretensions, to the Questura. If the devotees of the saint had been making one sort of statement, those faithful to the cult of the state had made another, just as forceful and arguably more attractive, in the new provincial headquarters of the Polizia di Stato. This dated from the 1980s and was a wide, low building, windowless below the second storey and sheathed in ochre coloured metal sheets which were said to be bomb-proof.
The interior resembled the offices of a major business corporation rather than the grandiose follies of the Fascist era and the recycled baroque palazzi with which Zen was familiar. He tried to console himself with the thought that, as the proverb had it, everything had changed so that nothing would change, but something told him — was this the reason for those half-awake nightmares? — that something had indeed changed, and that there was no place for people like him in the new scheme of things. The basic design was open plan, with cubicles, a flat- screen computer monitor on every desk, bare walls, grey filing cabinets, corkboards stuck with memos, filtered lighting and furniture that might have been bought at Ikea. The building was nominally air-conditioned, but the system kept breaking down and none of the windows could be opened.
By virtue of his rank, Zen had an office all to himself, but with interior windows instead of walls as part of the force’s new transparent ethos. These could be, and in Zen’s case were, covered by slatted blinds which he always kept closed. On his desk that morning was a transcript of the recording made by the Digos team the night before of Nicola Mantega’s phone call to someone named Giorgio. The interest of this was not so much what Mantega had said, although that sounded conspiratorially cryptic, as the manner in which contact had been established. An eminent notaio who drove an Alfa Romeo 159 Q4 and had three mobile phones and two land lines — Zen knew, since he had ordered interceptions on all of them — did not pull up at a public phone box after midnight to make a call unless he had something to hide. Mantega clearly suspected that his private and business phones might be tapped, but not that he was being followed. All of which fitted in nicely with Zen’s view of him as a semi-competent provincial operator who knew far more than he had admitted about Newman’s disappearance.
There was a discreet knock at the door.
‘ Avanti! ’
Natale Arnone entered.
‘Here’s the material you requested, sir. And there’s some foreigner down at the desk demanding to speak to the officer in charge of the Newman case. Claims to be the victim’s son.’
‘In what language?’
‘Italian. He’s pretty fluent, but comes across as a bit rozzo. Strident and pushy. Do you want me to deal with him?’
‘I think an overwrought manner is forgivable under the circumstances. Send him up.’
Zen was looking through the paperwork which had accumulated overnight when Thomas Newman was shown in. After Arnone’s warning, Zen had expected someone resembling the classic American football player: a thick cylindrical skull welded to massive shoulders, no neck, hairy piano-leg limbs and a voice like the brass section of a 1930s big band at full discordant climax. He was confronted instead by a lithe, energetic young man whose body made no exaggerated claims and was in any case trumped by the face of a mischievous but charming cherub with a mass of glossy black curls cut negligently long. Zen invited his visitor to be seated and gestured Arnone to leave. Newman eyed the crammed ashtray on Zen’s desk.
‘May I smoke? I thought it was illegal now.’
‘It is.’
‘But you are a policeman.’
‘Exactly.’
They exchanged a glance, and Zen felt that subliminal clink of contact with another intelligence.
‘What a splendid city!’ exclaimed Newman. ‘I woke early, because of the time difference, and then went out and just walked around for hours. The light, the landscape, the buildings, the people — it all seemed magical, yet somehow familiar.’
‘You are too kind,’ Zen replied smoothly. ‘As it happens, I agree that Cosenza is the most attractive city in Calabria — not that the competition is exactly fierce. But you are of course biased in these matters, since your father is a native.’
Zen had had very few dealings with Americans, but the volatility with which Tom Newman’s mood altered in a moment was completely familiar to him.
‘You’re the second person who’s tried to get me to believe that bullshit!’
‘Might the first have been Signor Nicola Mantega? I understand that he met you at the airport last night.’
‘How did you know?’
Zen looked at him curiously.
‘How do you know Signor Mantega?’
‘My father mentioned the name to me when he called during his first week here. After the disappearance, I got Mantega’s phone number from my father’s office and then called him. He’s been very helpful and supportive.’
‘I’m sure he has,’ Zen said drily. ‘Apart from his personal legal situation regarding this matter, he may well turn out to be the intermediary once negotiations for your father’s release get under way.’
‘But why wouldn’t the kidnappers deal directly with me? I can talk to them as well as Signor Mantega.’
‘In such interactions they will want someone they know and trust. Besides, they may prefer to express themselves in dialect. It’s a very different language from standard Italian and is incomprehensible even to me but preferred by many native Calabrians, particularly at moments of great intimacy or intensity. Which no doubt explains why your father had recourse to it during his stay here.’
Tom Newman flashed his deep hazel eyes at Zen in a way that was not at all cherubic.
‘What is this crap? My father is one hundred per cent American! Is that clear?’
Zen picked his words carefully.
‘It’s clear that that is what you believe, signore, but the fact remains that during his stay in Cosenza your father has been heard speaking a variety of dialect distinctive to that mountain range over there.’
He gestured to the window, where the verdant flanks of the Sila plateau could be seen sloping down to the valley where the city lay. From the wide expanse of the flood plain came the persistent drone of the helicopter that an American film company had hired to scout out suitable locations for their next project. It was a noisy pest, but both the mayor and the prefect had given the enterprise their blessing and there was nothing to be done.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Tom Newman said in a hard tone.
Zen shrugged.
‘He would hardly have been the first Calabrian to have emigrated to la Merica. In fact he wouldn’t even have been in the first hundred thousand. But as it happens you don’t need to believe me.’
He leafed through some papers and then passed across the naturalisation details of Peter Newman supplied by the consulate in Naples together with an Italian birth certificate in the name of Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati.
‘Are these official?’ Tom asked after reading them.
‘As official as can be. Your father assumed the name Peter Newman in 1969. Before that he was Pietro Calopezzati, born in the comune of Spezzano della Sila up in those mountains half an hour’s drive from here. Are you telling me that you are completely ignorant of these facts?’
‘Why would I lie to you?’ Tom Newman snapped. ‘I didn’t even know there was anything to lie about! Anyway, what’s all this got to do with the kidnapping? That’s what you’re supposed to be investigating. Who cares if my father concealed his origins for some reason?’
‘I care about everything that may be connected to the case, Signor Newman. One never knows what may turn out to be relevant. For instance, the Calopezzati were, until the political changes shortly after your father’s birth, among the richest landowners in Italy. At this point I have no information about the present state of the
