literal transcription, its significance remained equally cryptic.
‘Hello?’
‘Ludo! Where are you? Are you coming here?’
‘I’m not in Milan, my love.’
‘Where, then?’
‘I’m… moving around a bit. Here today, gone tomorrow.’
‘Sounds like fun.’
‘In fact I was talking to someone about you just the other day, Ariana. Someone who works for a magazine.’
‘About me?’
‘That’s right. I told him all about your dolls. He sounded very interested. In fact he wants to write an article about them.’
‘Don’t make fun of me, Ludo. It isn’t fair.’
‘I’m not! This is quite serious.’
‘But why would anyone be interested in my dolls?’
‘You’d be amazed, Ariana. So would your brother!’
‘You haven’t told him, have you?’
‘No, I can’t seem to get hold of him. Why don’t you tell him? Tell him to get in touch and let me know what he thinks about the idea. He knows how to contact me, if he wants to.’
‘But when will I see you?’
‘As soon as all this is over.’
‘All what? There’s some problem, isn’t there? I can feel it. What is it, Ludo? Tell me!’
‘Oh nothing. Just the silly games we boys play. Girls are more sensible, aren’t they?’
Zen looked at the window, but the train was running through a tunnel, and all he could see was the reflection of his own features, baffled and haggard. Perhaps a reader more familiar with the details of the case against Ruspanti might glean something more substantial from the transcript. Since someone had been prepared to kill Grimaldi and bribe Zen to obtain the damn thing, there must be some clue hidden there. The reference to ‘dolls’ might be a code of some kind. What would Ruspanti’s mistress be doing playing with dolls? Perhaps Antonio Simonelli would know what it meant.
The roar of the tunnel faded as the train emerged into bright sunshine. A moment later they had crossed the Arno and rejoined the old line running through the outskirts of Florence. Zen replaced the transcript in his briefcase, which he locked and placed on his knee as the train drew into the suburban station of Rinfredi, which it used to avoid the timewasting turn-round at the Florentine terminus of Santa Maria Novella. The stop was a brief one, and by the time he had had a chance to skim La Stampa they were once again under way, along the fast straight stretch to Prato.
‘Good morning, dottore.’
Zen looked up from his newspaper. The voice was both distinctive and familiar, but it still took him a moment to recognize the man standing beside his seat, an umbrella in one hand and a briefcase in the other, gazing down at Zen with a smile of complicity. It was the man who had been in his thoughts just a few minutes earlier, the man he was going to Milan to see, Antonio Simonelli.
‘Have you brought the transcript?’
They had barely settled down in the seats to which Simonelli had led the way. When the magistrate suggested that Zen join him in the next carriage, he had at once agreed. Policemen are accustomed to obeying the instructions of the judiciary, and besides, seeing Simonelli was the reason for Zen’s trip to Milan. This chance meeting — the magistrate had apparently just joined the train at Florence, where he had been attending a meeting — was simply a happy coincidence. Or so it had seemed, until Simonelli mentioned the transcript.
Zen instinctively tightened his grip on the briefcase, which was lying on his knees. The train rounded a curve, and sunlight suddenly streamed in through the window. In the lapel of Simonelli’s jacket, something glimmered. Zen looked more closely. It was a small silver eight-pointed cross.
‘You’re a member?’
The magistrate glanced down as though noticing the insignia for the first time.
‘I am, actually.’
‘Like Ruspanti.’
Simonelli’s laugh had an edge to it.
‘Hardly! Ruspanti was a Knight of Honour and Devotion. You need at least three hundred years of nobility behind you to achieve that. I’m just a simple Donat, the lowest of the low.’
It was only when Zen felt the magistrate’s restraining hand on his wrist that he realized that he had reached for his cigarettes. Simonelli indicated the sign on the window with a nicotine-stained finger.
‘No smoking.’
Zen let the muscles of his eyes unclasp, projecting his point of focus out of the train, beyond the dirt-flecked window with its prohibitory sign and into the landscape beyond. The slanting winter light streaked the narrow gorge of the Bisenzio where road and railway run side by side until the river peters out in the southern flanks of the Apennines. Then the road, largely disused since the motorway was opened, begins the long climb to the pass thousands of feet above, while the railway plunges into the eleven-mile tunnel under the mountains.
Why had Simonelli reserved a seat in a non-smoking section when he was himself a smoker? There were plenty of single seats available in the smoking coach where Zen was sitting, but not two together. If Simonelli had already known that the seat beside his was unoccupied, this could only be because he had booked them both in advance. The implications of this were so dizzying that he hardly heard Simonelli’s next words.
‘After all, it wouldn’t do for a judge and a policeman to break the law, would it?’
Zen glanced round at him witlessly.
‘Or at least,’ corrected Simonelli, ‘to be seen to do so.’
‘Seen to… How?’
‘By smoking in a non-smoking carriage.’
Zen nodded. Antonio Simonelli joined in until both their heads were wagging in the same tempo. They understood each other perfectly.
‘It is the original, I trust.’
Once again the magistrate’s nicotine-stained finger was extended, this time towards the briefcase Zen was hugging defensively to his body.
‘As my colleague explained to you on the phone, we’re not interested in purchasing a copy.’
Zen’s mouth opened. He laughed awkwardly.
‘No, no. Of course not.’
Simonelli glanced out of the window at the landscape, which was growing ever more rugged as they approached the mountain chain which divides Italy in two. With its many curves and steep gradients, this difficult section of line was the slowest, and even the pendolino was reduced to the speed of a normal train. Simonelli consulted his watch.
‘Do you think we’re going to be late?’ Zen asked.
‘Late for what?’
The Maltese cross in the magistrate’s lapel, its bifurcated points representing the eight beatitudes, glinted fascinatingly as the contours of the valley brought the line into the sunlight.
‘For whatever’s going to happen.’
Simonelli eyed him steadily.
‘All that’s going to happen is that you give me the transcript, and I take it to an associate who is seated in the next carriage. Once he has confirmed that it is the original, I return with the money.’
Zen stared back at the magistrate. Marco Duranti had described the supposed maintenance man who hot- wired the shower to kill Giovanni Grimaldi as stocky, muscular, of average height, with a big round face and a pronounced nasal accent, ‘a real northerner’. The description fitted Simonelli perfectly. And would not such a humble task befit ‘a simple Donat, the lowest of the low’? Despite the almost oppressive warmth of the air- conditioned carriage, Zen found himself shivering uncontrollably.
