The voice was that of a young woman. She spoke hesitantly, as though expecting a reprimand. Zen realized that he had no idea what to say.
‘It’s me,’ he murmured finally.
There was a brief pause.
‘Ludo?’
The woman sounded tentative, incredulous. Not half as incredulous as Zen, though.
‘Who else?’
There was a stifled gasp.
‘But they told me you’d had to go away. They told me I’d never see you again…’
Her voice trailed away. Perhaps she too had become aware of the altered acoustic on the line. Someone, somewhere, was listening in.
‘Listen, can I see you tomorrow?’ Zen went on quickly.
‘You’re coming here? To see me?’
‘Yes! I’ll ring when I arrive.’
‘But remember to let it ring and then call back, so that I have time to get rid of Carmela. You forgot this time, silly! Luckily her sister is visiting this week and they’re out every evening. Well, she couldn’t very well bring her here, could she?’
Zen caught sight of the clock on the sideboard opposite. It showed five to eight, long past time for him to be gone.
‘Till tomorrow, then!’
‘Oh, I can’t wait, I can’t wait!’ the woman cried girlishly. ‘You promise?’
‘I promise.’
‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’
A superstitious revulsion rose like nausea in Zen’s throat.
‘I’ll ring you tomorrow,’ he said, and hung up.
He couldn’t believe what had just happened. Seemingly the number in Milan belonged to one of ‘Ludo’ Ruspanti’s mistresses, and — incredible as this seemed — she was apparently unaware that her lover was dead. His elation was briefly dimmed by the knowledge that someone had been eavesdropping on their conversation. Nevertheless, here was a golden opportunity which, if he could only find the right way to handle it, might lead him to the heart of the…
‘All right, Aurelio, who is she?’
Zen looked up to find Tania Biacis glowering at him from the doorway.
‘Come on!’ she shouted, advancing into the room. ‘Don’t try palming me off with clever lies. I’ve seen you taking in too many other people to fall for it myself. Just tell me the truth, then get to hell out of here!’
He had never seen her like this, furious, overbearing, utterly sure of herself. He got up, gesturing weakly.
‘You don’t think…’
‘I don’t think anything!’ she broke in brutally. ‘I just heard you speaking to her on the phone, fixing a rendezvous for tomorrow. “Oh, I can’t wait, I can’t wait!” Sounds like hot stuff, this lady of yours!’
‘So it was you listening in, on the extension in the hallway!’
‘I wasn’t listening in. I was trying to use my phone. I had no idea you were here. How the hell did you get in, anyway? You’ve had a key all along, I suppose. I might have known!’
‘The American gave me a spare key. I thought I’d hang on to it, just in case…’
‘So I get home and pick up the phone, only to hear this woman practically sticking her tongue into your ear. So you’re going away tomorrow, right? A sudden urgent mission of the highest importance to — where did you say she lives?’
‘And what about you, my dear?’ Zen retorted. ‘Who were you trying to phone so urgently the moment you got in? Was it that man who answered the phone when I called here on Tuesday?’
Tania held up her hands.
‘All right, I admit it. It wasn’t a wrong number. It was Aldo, my cousin Bettina’s husband. He was here on business.’
‘Business? You told me he worked for the post office.’
She flapped her hands in evident confusion.
‘Well, there was some… conference or something.’
The evident lie stung him to push things to the limit.
‘All right, then, let’s forget Aldo. But you still haven’t told me who you were trying to phone. Was it Primo, by any chance?’
The pink flush around her high cheek bones revealed that the name had had its effect.
‘It’s too bad he’s got to take his wife to the opera in the evening, isn’t it?’ Zen carried on. ‘Still, he’s going to pick you up from the airport and take you out to lunch, and after that, who knows?’
‘Is that why you broke in here? So that you could snoop around reading my mail? You… you… you cop!’
‘I can think of an even more insulting epithet to apply to you, if I chose to use it!’
‘Fuck off! Just fuck off out of my house!’
Zen measured her with a look.
‘What do you mean, your house?’
Tania tossed her head contemptuously.
‘Oh, you mean because you’ve been secretly paying someone to rent this place to me? Well I’d guessed that, as it happens. I’m not stupid. The only reason I hadn’t told you I knew was that I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Oh, it’s so fucking pathetic, the whole thing…’
To Zen’s utter consternation, she turned away and burst into tears. Not as a ploy; that he could have withstood. But she had moved beyond him, into uncharted areas of real grief. Yet how could it be real when she was false, and believed him to be? It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. So he fled, leaving her to her intolerable mysteries. The real world awaited him: his distraction, his toy.
6
The piazza in front of Rome’s Stazione Termini, normally thronged with buses, cars, traders’ vans and lorries, with crowds of commuters, tourists, beggars, transients and the forlorn Senegalese and Filipino immigrants who used the place as an informal clubhouse, information centre and canteen, was now a bleak, empty, rainswept wasteland. As Zen stared out of the window of the taxi at the porticoed arcade to one side and the blank wall closing off the vista, he slipped back into the dream from which the alarm clock had saved him less than half an hour earlier.
He’d been walking across just such a piazza, but in broad daylight, beneath a brutal summer sun. The light flattened the ground at his feet, reducing it to a featureless expanse bordered by a row of broken columns, the last of which cast a perfect shadow of itself on the hot paving, like the hands of a clock showing one minute to twelve. That was indeed the time, and he would never manage to catch the train, which left on the hour from the station whose enormous facade sealed off the perspective. Already he could see the plume of smoke as the locomotive pulled away from the invisible platform, inaccessible behind a high wall…
The taxi hit one of the kerbs delineating the bus lanes, jolting him awake again. The dream was still horribly vivid, though: the stillness, the stifling heat, the paralysis of his limbs, the sickening perspectives of the piazza, at once vertiginous and claustrophobic. He sat up straight, willing himself back to the here and now. It was only a dream, after all.
Having paid off the taxi, he carried his bag through the booking hall into the main concourse of the station. It was twenty past six. He’d spent a quarter of an hour blundering around the apartment, worrying that he’d remembered to pack everything except the one essential item, whatever it was, without which his journey would be in vain, and was just wondering whether to take the replica revolver when the taxi arrived, ten minutes early. In the end he’d thrown the thing into his suitcase along with a couple of spare shirts, grabbed his briefcase with the
