5
Ever since his transfer to the capital from Naples, Aurelio Zen had travelled to and from work by bus. His removal from active duty at the Questura at the time of the Aldo Moro kidnapping had had no effect on this, since the Ministry of the Interior — where he had been allocated a menial desk job — was only a few blocks from police headquarters. Even the opening of the new underground railway line had not induced him to change his habits, despite the fact that the terminus at Ottaviano was only a few blocks from his house, and the Termini stop a short walk from the Ministry. But experience showed that twenty minutes in the tunnels of the Metropolitana A left Zen’s day spavined before it had even begun. The bus journey was by no means an unrelieved joy, but at least it took place in a real city rather than that phantasmagoric subterranean realm of dismal leaky caverns which might equally well be in London, or New York — or indeed the next century.
Tania Biacis had changed Zen’s habits in this respect, as in so many others. They spent about three nights a week together, absences which Zen explained to his mother in terms of overtime or trips away from Rome. But whether Zen had slept at the flat or not, he and Tania travelled to work together by taxi every morning. It was yet another aspect of the new arrangement which was costing a small fortune, but it seemed worth it just to have that precious interval of time with Tania before they separated to go about their different jobs at the Ministry. He was perfectly willing to pay, Zen reflected as his taxi crossed Ponte Cavour on the way to Tania’s that Thursday morning. The problem was his ability.
The simple fact that was he could no longer go on supporting two households in this kind of style, and what was the point in doing it if not in style? Mistresses were not something you could get on the cheap, any more than champagne or caviar. They were a luxury, a self-indulgence for the rich. If you couldn’t afford them, you had to do without. Zen couldn’t do without Tania, but it was becoming clear that he couldn’t really afford her either — unless he found some way of making a large sum of money overnight. As the taxi turned right along the embankment of the Tiber, he found himself wondering idly how much the transcript of Ruspanti’s phone calls would fetch, assuming that his intuition about the hiding-place proved correct.
The idea was absurd, of course! He couldn’t contemplate making a personal profit from a piece of evidence which would presumably make it possible to bring the murderers of Ludovico Ruspanti and Grimaldi to justice. Of course, a cynic might argue that there was no chance of the murderers being brought to justice anyway, if the issues involved in the case were anywhere near as extensive as they appeared to be. Such a cynic — or a realist, as he would no doubt prefer to be called — might claim that in this particular case, as in so many others, justice was simply not an option, and to pretend otherwise was mere wishful thinking masquerading as idealism. In reality, there were only two possible outcomes. Zen could sell the transcript, thereby solving all his problems, or he could create a host of new problems for himself by setting in motion a major scandal with repercussions at every level of society. A rational man, the realist might well conclude, should be in no doubt which course to choose.
The taxi drew up in the narrow street, scarcely wider than an alley, where Tania lived. Almost at once the door opened and she appeared. It was a measure of what was happening to them that while Zen would once have been glad of a promptitude which allowed them a few extra minutes together, he now wondered whether she was anxious to prevent him seeing who was in the flat.
‘I phoned Tullio,’ she said, slipping in beside him with a seemingly guileless kiss. ‘He sounded very keen. He’ll see you this morning at his office in EUR.’
‘What time?’
‘About ten, he said.’
‘Did you tell him who I was?’
‘Of course not! As far as he knows, you’re just a high-ranking colleague of mine at the Ministry who needs a favour done. Not that Tullio would care. He’s made a pass or two at me himself, if it comes to that.’
Zen inspected her.
‘And did it?’
She sighed.
‘Give me a break, Aurelio!’
It was a windless grey morning, humid and close. The taxi was now wedged into the flank of the phalanx of traffic on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Zen patted her knee.
‘Sorry.’
She flashed him a smile.
‘Shall we eat out tonight?’
He nodded.
‘I’ll be out till about eight,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we could try that Chinese place behind Piazza Navona.’
Zen grunted unenthusiastically. Oriental cuisine, the latest Roman craze, left him cold. The food was excellent, but it seemed to him an exoticism as irrelevant to his life as Buddhism. The way he looked at it, you were either a Catholic or an atheist. There was no point in shopping around for odd doctrines, however original, nor eating odd food, however delicious.
The taxi dropped Tania first, at the corner of Via Venezia and Via Palermo, then drove round to the other side of the Ministry, where Zen paid it off. Lorenzo Moscati’s jibes had made it clear that their efforts to keep the affair secret had been a failure, but there was still a difference between accepting that people knew what was going on and flaunting it in their faces. The porter ticked Zen’s name off in the ON TIME column of his massive ledger.
‘Oh, dottore! They want to see you up in Personnel.’
Zen rode the lift up to the office on the fourth floor where Franco Ciliani, a tiny balding tyrant given to Etna- like eruptions of temper, presided over the thankless task of trying to complete the jigsaw of staff allocation when over half the pieces were missing at any one time.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded as Zen appeared.
‘Ciccillo said you wanted to see me.’
‘That’s not what I mean! As far as I’m concerned, you’re in Milan.’
Zen gestured a comically excessive apology.
‘Sorry, but I’m not, as you see.’
Ciliani gave a brutal shrug.
‘I don’t give a damn where you are in reality. That’s entirely your affair. I’m talking about what’s down on the roster, and that tells me you’re in Milan. So when I get a call yesterday asking why you haven’t turned up, I naturally wonder what the hell.’
‘Who did you speak to?’
Ciliani made a half-hearted attempt to locate something in the chaos of papers on his desk.
‘Shit. Sermonelli? Something like that.’
‘Simonelli?’
‘That’s it. Antonia Simonelli.’
‘Yesterday?’ queried Zen, ignoring the little matter of Simonelli’s gender.
‘That’s right. Real ball-breaker. You know what the Milanese are like.’
‘There must be some mistake. Simonelli’s here in Rome. We met yesterday.’
‘I said you’d be there by tomorrow at the latest.’
‘But I just told you…’
‘Told me?’ demanded Ciliani. ‘You told me nothing. We aren’t even having this conversation.’
‘What do you mean?’
Ciliani sighed deeply.
‘Look, you’re in Milan, right? I’m in Rome. So how can I be talking to you? It must be a hallucination. Probably the after-effects of that fever you had.’
Zen stared up at the fault-line of a huge crack running from one end of the ceiling to the other.
‘When did the original notification come through?’
Ciliani consulted his schedule.
‘Monday.’
‘I was off sick on Monday.’
He suddenly saw what must have happened. Simonelli had summoned Zen to Milan on Monday, then decided to come to Rome himself to investigate Grimaldi’s continuing silence. He had then got in touch with Zen direct, but
