‘May I speak to Dottor Simonelli, please.’
‘One moment.’
After a brief silence, a male voice with a distinct reedy timbre came on the line.
‘Yes?’
‘This is Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen, at the Interior Ministry. I received a message…’
‘That is correct. I am Antonio Simonelli, investigating magistrate with the Procura of Milan. Am I right in thinking that we’ve been in contact before?’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Ah,’ the voice replied. ‘I must have confused you with someone else. Anyway, I was hoping it would be possible for us to meet. I have some questions I wish to ask you relative to my investigations. Could you call on me this afternoon?’
Although his heart sank, Zen knew that this was one more hurdle he was going to have to go through. They made an appointment to meet at four o’clock in the lobby of the hotel. Zen hung up with a massive sigh and hastened downstairs to find Tania. This damned case was a hydra! No sooner had he seen off the Vatican, the Minister and an inquisitive colleague than up popped some judge from Milan.
Of all the offices in the building, those occupied by the Administration department most clearly betrayed the Ministry’s Fascist birthright: a warren of identical hutches, each containing six identical desks disposed in the same symmetrical order. Tania shared her cubicle with three other women and two men, both of whom had unwittingly been auditioned by Zen for the part of her mysterious lover. But their voices didn’t match the one he had heard on the phone, and besides, he doubted whether Tania would have gone for either the fat, balding father-of-three or his neighbour, the neurotic obsessive with bad breath. He doubted, but he couldn’t be sure. You could never tell with women. She had gone for him after all. With taste like that, who could tell what she might stoop to next?
Tania was talking on the phone when he walked in. As soon as she caught sight of Zen, a furtive air came over her. Shielding her mouth with one hand, she spoke urgently into the phone as he strode towards her. All he could make out before she hung up was ‘I’ll speak to you later,’ but it was enough. The form of the verb was familiar, her tone conspiratorial.
‘Who was that?’ he demanded.
‘Oh, just a relative.’
She actually blushed. Zen let it go, out of self-interest rather than magnanimity. What with the stresses and strains of the morning, and those that loomed later in the afternoon, he needed an interval of serenity. In a way it didn’t even seem to matter that her love was all a fake. If she was making use of him, then he would make use of her. That way they were quits.
He stared at the computer screen on the desk, which displayed a list of names and addresses, many of them in foreign countries. Surely they couldn’t all be her lovers? Tania depressed a key and the screen reverted to the READY display.
‘Shall we go?’ she asked.
But Zen continued to gaze at the screen. After a moment he pressed one of the function keys, selecting the SEARCH option. SUBJECT? queried the screen. Zen typed ‘Malta/Knights’. The screen went into a brief coma
before producing two lines of print: SOVEREIGN MILITARY ORDER OF MALTA/KNIGHTS OF MALTA/KNIGHTS OF ST JOHN OF JERUSALEM/KNIGHTS HOSPITALLERS: 1 FILE (S); 583 INSTANCE (S).
‘What does that mean?’ he asked Tania.
She surveyed the screen with the impatience of a professional aware of the value of her time.
‘It means, first of all, that these people evidently can’t make up their minds what to call themselves, so they are referred to under four different titles. The database holds one report specifically dedicated to this organization. There are also five hundred plus references in other files.’
‘What sort of references?’
Tania’s swift, competent fingers rattled the keyboard with panache. AUTHORIZATION? appeared. ZEN, she typed. Again the screen faltered briefly, then filled with text which proved to be an extract from the Ministry’s file on a Turin businessman who had been convicted of involvement in a local government corruption scandal in the early eighties. The reference Zen had requested was picked out by the cursor: ‘Member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta since 1964 with rank of Knight of Magisterial Grace.’
That sort of thing was apparently all there was, at least in the open files. He got Tania to run him off a copy of the report on the Knights of Malta, even though he knew that anything really worth knowing would be held in the ‘closed’ section of the database, accessible only with special authorization restricted to a handful of senior staff. The files stored there supposedly detailed the financial status, professional and political allegiances, family situation and sexual predelictions of almost fourteen million Italian citizens. Like everyone else, Zen had often wondered what his own entry contained. Was his connection with Tania included by now? Presumably, judging by Moscati’s mocking remarks. How much more did they know? Reading such an entry would be like seeing a copy of your own obituary, and just as difficult.
4
They strolled along the quay, hand in hand, fingers entwined. It had rained while they were in the restaurant, briefly but hard. Now the sky had cleared again, every surface glistened, and the air was flooded with elusive, evocative scents.
The little town of Fiumicino, at the mouth of the narrower of the two channels into which the Tiber divided just before it met the sea, was somewhere Zen always returned to with pleasure. The scale of the place, the narrow waterway and the low buildings flanking it, the sea tang, the bustle of a working port, all combined to remind him of the fishing villages of the Venetian lagoon. In addition, Fiumicino contained several restaurants capable of doing justice to the quality and freshness of the catches which its boats brought in.
Replete with crema di riso gratinato ai frutti di mare and grilled sea bass with artichokes, he and Tania wandered along the stone quays like a pair of young lovers without a care in the world.
‘… the best artichokes in the world,’ she was saying. ‘My aunt prepares the hearts, then they bottle them in oil, ten kilos at a time.’
‘You’re making me hungry again.’
‘You must try them, Aurelio! I’ll get Aldo to send an extra jar with the next batch of samples…’
She broke off.
‘Batch of what?’ Zen asked mechanically, so as not to reveal that he hadn’t been listening, absorbed in the spectacle of a skinny cat stalking a butterfly across a pile of empty fish crates.
‘The next time one of the family comes to Rome, I mean,’ said Tania.
‘Look!’
Balanced on its hind legs like a performing monkey, the cat was frantically pawing at the air, trying in vain to seize the elusive, substanceless quiver of colour.
‘You’ll never catch it, silly!’ laughed Tania in a slightly tipsy voice. ‘And even if you do, there’s nothing there to eat!’
Still intent on its prey, the cat stepped off the edge of the boxes. It twisted round in mid-air and landed on its feet, shooting a hostile glance at the couple who had witnessed its humiliation.
‘Actually I may go myself, this weekend,’ Tania announced as they continued on their way.
‘Go? Where?’
‘Home to Udine, to see my cousins.’
Zen freed his hand.
‘Suppose I came too?’
Tania shot him a panicky glance.
‘You? Well…’
She gave an embarrassed laugh.
‘You see, Bettina and Aldo don’t actually know about you.’
A few minutes earlier, as they walked together along the quay, Zen had found himself thinking, ‘This, or
