together. I’m really looking forward to it. All the best, Primo
Zen crunched the fragments into a clammy wodge which he tossed back on to the pile of smelly rubbish. Then he rolled up the sheets of newspaper and stuffed the bundles back into the plastic sack. The 27th was the following Saturday, when Tania claimed she was going back to Udine to spend the weekend with her cousin. When the rubbish was bagged, he opened the window to air out the kitchen. It was just after a quarter past seven, time to find out if his hunch about Giovanni Grimaldi’s hiding place for the transcript had been correct. Going back to the living room, he phoned the number Tullio had given him. A girlish voice answered before being silenced by a rather older boy. A brief struggle for the phone ended with a slap and crying.
‘Who is it?’ asked the victor.
‘Luigi Borsellino,’ said Zen. ‘Let me speak to your dad.’
Cutlery and crockery pinged and jangled distantly above the chatter of a family mealtime, and then a gleeful voice in Zen’s ear exclaimed ‘I’ve got it!’
‘It was there?’
‘Exactly where you said, interleaved between the pages of a fourteenth-century treatise on some obscure Syrian heresy.’
‘And you brought it out with you?’
‘No problem. The security at that place is a joke. Anyway, if they’d tried to stop me I’d have pointed out that fourteenth-century Syrians didn’t use typewriters.’
‘What does it look like?’
‘There’s about twenty pages. It starts with a list of what looks like telephone numbers.’
‘No, those will be the numbers of the bank accounts the gang uses to launder the money from the drug sales,’ Zen replied glibly. ‘Just read them out to me, will you? I’ll pick up the document itself later on this evening, but we need to take action to freeze those accounts as soon as possible.’
There were about twenty numbers altogether. Zen wrote them down in his notebook on the same page as the number his mother had passed on. To his surprise, one of the numbers Bevilacqua read out was the same, the pay-phone in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace. But the Torlonia Palace was of course one of the leading luxury hotels in Rome. It was perfectly natural that the intimates and associates of Prince Ruspanti should choose to stay there, just like other eminent visitors to the city such as Antonio Simonelli.
‘… before nine o’clock all right?’ Tullio Bevilacqua was saying.
Zen glanced at his watch. Christ! Seven thirty-one!
‘Yes, yes! I’ll see you then! Bye!’
‘But I haven’t given you the address!’ squawked Bevilacqua.
‘I’ll get it from…’
Zen broke off in confusion. ‘From Tania’, he had been going to say.
‘… from the Ministry computer.’
Bevilacqua gasped.
‘You mean… you’ve got a file on me?’
‘We’ve got a file on everyone.’
He hit the receiver rest repeatedly until he got a dialling tone, then punched the number which now figured twice on the notebook page open on his knee. It was answered immediately.
‘You’re late.’
It was the voice which had spoken to Zen the night before from the confessional in St Peter’s. The man’s arrogant tone triggered an instinctive response for which Zen was quite unprepared.
‘I’ve cornered the market in the commodity you’re interested in. I’ll be as late as I fucking well choose.’
‘Can you prove you have possession?’
The voice was the same as the night before, but the background was now thoroughly worldly: a babble of voices competing for attention against the synthetic battery of a pop band.
‘Well, I could read you a list of phone numbers, but that would be giving away information which I could sell elsewhere. Just as a taster, though, one of the numbers which Ruspanti phoned just before he died is the same as the one on which you are now speaking. But I expect you already knew that.’
There was a brief pause.
‘But now we know that you know. That makes all the difference.’
Zen said nothing.
‘Hello? Are you still there?’ the man queried peevishly.
‘I’m here. I’m waiting for you to say something worth listening to. I got an earful of your waffle last night.’
‘How much do you want?’
This was the crunch. If Zen had been bluffing, his bluff had been called. And what else could he have been doing? The idea of selling evidence to the highest bidder, never more than an idle speculation in the first place, was out of the question after what had happened to Carlo Romizi. It was unthinkable to imagine disposing of the transcript for his personal advantage, merely to restore his flagging finances and win back Tania from the rich young shit beside whom he looked drably impoverished, timidly conventional.
‘How much?’ prompted the voice impatiently.
‘Rather more than Grimaldi asked, and rather less than he got.’
The man laughed. He could relax, the deal was in the bag. Money would never be a problem for these people.
‘We offered Grimaldi thirty million, but he tried to hold out for more. I think we would be prepared to improve the price this time, to let us say fifty. But I would very strongly urge you to accept.’
Zen kept silent. What was the man talking about? The transcript wasn’t for sale, not at any price. It was sacred, stained with the innocent blood of his colleague, Carlo Romizi.
‘That figure of course applies only to the original,’ the voice stressed. ‘As you rightly surmised, the contents are already known to us.’
‘Grimaldi showed you a photocopy, I suppose, to whet your appetite for the real thing?’
‘We’ll contact you in the next day or two, dottore. I understand you’re going to Milan tomorrow?’
‘Yes, but…’
‘We shall know how to contact you. Buon viaggio.’
Zen replaced the phone slowly. Then he shrugged, as though shaking off a bad dream. Nothing would come of it. Tomorrow he would take the transcript to Milan and hand it over to Antonio Simonelli or his secretary. Then it would be out of his hands, and just as well too. He didn’t trust himself to do the right thing any longer.
The thought of Milan made him get out his notebook and look again at the list of phone numbers which Ruspanti had called from his hideaway in the Vatican. As he thought, in addition to those in Rome, there had been several calls prefixed 02, the code for Milan. Zen picked up the phone and dialled one of them, just out of curiosity. There was no answer. He tried another and got an answering machine.
‘This is 879 4632. There is no one able to answer the phone at present. If you wish to leave a message…’
The voice sounded rather like the man he had just been speaking to a moment ago in the Hotel Torlonia Palace. Which all went to show that one person can sound much like another, particularly on the telephone. There was one other Milan number on the list, and Zen was just about to dial it when the phone suddenly started to ring.
‘Yes?’
‘This is the Questore, dottore. The Ministry asked us to contact you about the phone you wanted watched. I’m afraid the situation was a bit confusing. Apparently there was some sort of publicity event being held at the hotel, a launch party for some book, so the place was thick with media people and the phones were in use all the time.’
‘I see. Thank you.’
He had expected something of the kind. The men he was dealing with were too clever to allow themselves to be trapped in that way. Zen picked up the phone again and dialled the last of the Milan numbers which Ludovico Ruspanti had called in the final week of his life.
‘Yes?’
