‘Well, they haven’t been able to identify the doctor concerned so far. But Anna could have dreamed the whole thing, or even invented it to relieve her guilt at the fact that she had been sleeping while Carlo died. Such strong emotions are unleashed at these moments that really anything is possible.’
Zen asked Francesca to convey his profoundest sympathy to Signora Romizi and offered to help in any way he could. As he replaced the receiver with one hand, he reached for the mains switch with the other, and the bar sprang to rowdy life again.
Back at the counter, Zen consumed a second coffee, this time without additives. Like Francesca Romizi, but for very different reasons, he was sceptical about the idea of negligence on the part of the hospital staff. Carlo’s death had no more been an accident than Giovanni Grimaldi’s. From the moment Zen used his name in an unsuccessful attempt to access the Ministry’s ‘closed’ file on the Cabal, Carlo Romizi had been doomed. No wonder the hospital had been unable to trace the mysterious doctor who had visited his bedside in the small hours of the night. There was no doctor, only a killer in a white coat.
The demonstrable absurdity of this response merely guaranteed its authenticity. The comatose Romizi, utterly dependent on a life-support system, could not conceivably have been responsible for the electronic prying carried out in his name at the Ministry the night before. His death had been intended to serve as a message to Aurelio Zen. The Cabal had of course seen through Zen’s feeble attempt at disguise, but they had gone ahead and killed Romizi anyway, knowing that he had nothing whatever to do with it. It was a masterstroke of cynical cruelty, calculated not only to strike terror into Zen’s heart but also to cripple him with remorse. For it was he who had condemned Carlo Romizi to death. If Zen had chosen another name, or used his own, the Umbrian would still be alive.
These reflections were much in Zen’s mind as he arrived at the ponderous block in Piazza dell’Indipendenza which housed the consulate of a minor South American republic, three pensioni patronized largely by American backpackers, a cut-price dental surgery, a beauty salon, and the headquarters of Paragon Security Consultants. Zen was still too shocked by the reality of what had happened to work out the long-term implications, but of one thing he was absolutely determined. The file which had cost Carlo Romizi his life was going to give up its secrets. If that part of the database was ‘closed’, then he would break in. Zen had no idea how to do this, but he felt sure that Gilberto Nieddu would know someone who did.
Gilberto at first seemed something less than enchanted to see his friend.
‘No!’ he cried as Zen walked in. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!’
‘I haven’t said anything yet.’
‘I don’t care! Jesus, last time I agree to look at a faulty water heater for you, and what happens? Not only do I end up having to tear-gas the Carabinieri and then risk my neck escaping across the rooftops, but when I get home my wife assaults me with the pasta rolling-pin, accusing me of having another woman on the side! Well that was the last time, Aurelio, the very last! From now on…’
Zen got out his cigarettes and offered them to Nieddu, who ignored the gesture.
‘I’m really sorry about that, Gilberto. You see, I’d told my mother I was in Florence so that I could spend a few nights with a friend. We should all get together some time. You’d like her. She’s called Tania and…’
‘Oh I see! You sin and I pay the price.’
‘I’ll explain to Rosella…’
‘If she thinks that I’ve buddy-buddied you into covering up for me, she’ll kill us both.’
‘All right then, I’ll get Tania to call her.’
‘She’d assume that she was my mistress, pretending to be yours. Can you imagine what Rosella would do if she thought I’d tried to con her like that? Sardinian girls learn how to castrate pigs when they’re five years old. And they don’t forget.’
Zen blew a cloud of smoke at the rows of box-files and tape containers stacked on the shelves.
‘She’ll get over it, Gilberto. It might even be a good thing in the end. There’s nothing like jealousy to liven up a marriage.’
‘Spare me the pearls of wisdom, Aurelio. I’m up to my eyes in work.’
He bent ostentatiously over a blueprint of an office building which was spread out across his desk.
‘I need to see some classified information held in a computer database,’ said Zen.
Nieddu unstoppered an orange highlight pen and marked a feature on the plan.
‘I was wondering how you’d go about that,’ Zen went on.
‘Who runs the computer?’ asked Nieddu without looking up.
‘The Ministry.’
The Sardinian shot him a quick glance.
‘But you have clearance to that.’
‘Not this part.’
Nieddu shook his head and pored over the blueprint again.
‘I know someone who can do it. It’ll cost you, though.’
‘That’s no problem. But it’s urgent. I have to go up to Milan on the early train tomorrow, and I need to set it up before leaving. What’s the address?’
‘I’ll run you out there before lunch.’
‘I don’t want to put you to any more trouble, Gilberto.’
Nieddu gave him a peculiar smile.
‘You’d never find the place,’ he said. ‘And anyway, you don’t just turn up. You have to be presented.’
The new metro was going to be wonderful when it was finished, but then Romans had been saying that about one grandiose and disruptive construction project or another ever since Nero set about rebuilding the city after the disastrous fire of July 64. The national pastime of dietrologia, ‘the facts behind the facts’, was also well established by that time, and many people held that the blaze had been started deliberately so as to facilitate the Emperor’s redevelopment scheme. Nero’s response to these scurrilous rumours of state terrorism had an equally familiar ring. The whole affair was blamed on an obscure and unpopular sect of religious fanatics influenced by foreign ideologies such as monotheism and millennialism. One of the victims of the resulting campaign of persecution was a Jewish fisherman named Simon Peter, who was crucified in the Imperial Circus and buried near by, in a tomb hollowed out of the flank of the Vatican hill.
This stirring historical perspective, far from inspiring Aurelio Zen to a sense of wonder and pride, merely intensified his oppressive conviction that nothing ever changed. Being stuck for twenty minutes at Garbatella station because of a signalling fault hadn’t exactly helped his mood. The work in progress to integrate the grubby old Ostia railway into the revamped Metropolitana B line to EUR had resulted in the partial paralysis of services on both. Nevertheless, it would be wonderful when it was finished — until it started to fall apart like the A line, which been open for less than a decade and already looked and smelt like a blocked sewer.
The short walk to the office where Tullio Bevilacqua worked helped restore Zen’s spirits, although he wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting this to anyone. For both political and aesthetic reasons, it was wholly unacceptable to admire the monumental EUR complex, conceived in the late thirties for a world fair designed to show off the achievements of Fascist Italy. The war put an end to the project for an Esposizione Universale di Roma, but the architectural investment survived and, as usual in Rome, was recycled for purposes quite different from that intended by its creator.
The resulting complex — the only example of twentieth-century urban planning attempted in the capital since the First World War — had a freakish, hallucinogenic appearance at once monumental and two-dimensional, like a film set designed by Giorgio de Chirico for a production by Dino de Laurentiis. The vast rectangular blocks of white masonry evenly distributed along either side of the broad straight thoroughfares locked together at right angles created a succession of perspectives which seemed designed to demonstrate and also subvert the laws of perspective. Despite the crushing scale and geometric regularity, the effect was curiously insubstantial, abstract and ethereal, diametrically opposed both to the poky confines of the old city centre and to the sprawling jumble of the unplanned borgate on the outskirts.
Tullio Bevilacqua looked like a caricature of his brother, the same features exaggerated into an extravagance larger than life. Tullio was not just overweight but grossly fat. His balding scalp was beaded with sweat, his nose glistened with grease, his moustache bristled and curled in anarchic abandon. Seeing him, Zen felt his first twinge of sympathy for fastidious, pedantic Mauro.
