The magistrate stared at him coldly.
‘ I am Simonelli.’
‘Of course! Please excuse me. I meant Zeppegno, of course.’
He tried to think clearly, but his experiences on the train and in the tunnel seemed to have left him incapable of much more than reacting to immediate events. The only thing he was sure of was the single thread, flimsy but as yet unbroken, which he still held in his hand. It might yet lead him to the heart of this affair, but it would not bear the weight of a judicial process. So although he found himself warming to Antonia Simonelli, he was going to have to stall her for the moment.
‘Ruspanti was murdered,’ he replied. ‘So was the minder the Vatican had assigned to him.’
The magistrate stared at him fixedly.
‘But you were quoted in the papers the other day as saying that the allegations that there were suspicious circumstances surrounding Ruspanti’s death were mischievous and ill-informed.’
‘I wasn’t consulted about the wording of that statement.’
He had Simonelli hanging on his every word. The dirtier and more devious it got, the better she liked it. The case she thought was dead had miraculously sprung to life before her eyes!
‘The familiar tale,’ she said, nodding grimly.
Zen stood up and leaned across the desk towards her.
‘Familiar, yes, but in this case also long and complex. You will naturally want to get in touch with the authorities in Bologna, and possibly even go there in person. I therefore suggest that we postpone further discussion on the matter until then.’
She glanced at her watch.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But please don’t imagine that this is any more than a postponement, dottore. I am determined to get to the bottom of this business, whatever the vested interests involved. I hope I shall have your entire cooperation, but if I have any reason to suspect that it is not forthcoming, I shall have no hesitation in using my powers to compel you to testify.’
Zen held up his hands in a protestation of innocence.
‘There’ll be no need for that. I’ve been put in an impossible position in this case, but basically I’m on the side of the angels.’
Antonia Simonelli looked at him with a finely judged mixture of wariness and confidence.
‘I’m not concerned with angels, dottore. What I need is someone who’s on the side of the law.’
The house was not immediately recognizable as such. The address, in a back street just north of the Teatro alla Scala and west of the fashion alleys of Via Monte Napoleone and Via della Spiga, appeared at first to be nothing more than a slab of blind walling, slightly less high than the modern apartment buildings on either side. It was only as his taxi pulled away that Zen noticed the doors, windows and balconies painted on the plaster, complete with painted shadows to give an illusion of depth. The facade of a severe late-eighteenth-century Austro-French palazzo had been recreated in considerable detail, and the fact that the third dimension was missing would doubtless have been less apparent by daylight than it was under the intense glare of the streetlamps, diffused by the pall of fog which had descended on the city with the coming of dusk.
It took Zen some time to locate the real entrance, a plain wooden door inset in the huge trompe I’oeil gate framed by pillars at the centre of the frontage. There was no name-plate, and the grille of the entry-phone was disguised in the plumage of the hawk which rose in fake bas-relief above an illusory niche where the actual button figured as the nippled peak of a massive painted metal bell-pull. Zen had barely touched the button when, without a challenge or a query, the door release buzzed to admit him. Only after he stepped inside did he realize, from the shock he felt, what it was he had been expecting: some aggressively contemporary space defined by the complex interaction of concrete, steel and glass. The punch-line of the joke facade, he had tacitly assumed, must lie in the contrast with something as different as possible from historical gentility.
It was the smell which initially alerted him to his error. The musty odours which assailed him the moment he stepped over the threshold were quite incompatible with the processes of late-twentieth-century life. Nor could they be reproduced or mocked up. Dense and mysterious, with overlapping strata of rot and mould and fume and smoke, they spoke of years of habitation, generations of neglect. He looked around the cavernous hallway, a huge vaulted space feebly lit by a lamp dangling from a chain so thickly encased in dust and spider-webs that it seemed to be this rather than the rusted metal which was supporting the yellowing bulb. He had a sudden urge to laugh. This was a much better joke than the predictable contrast he had imagined. It was a brilliant coup to have the fake and the reality correspond. Evidently the house really was what it had been made to resemble, an aristocratic residence dating from the period when Milan was a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
At one end of the hallway, an imposing stone staircase led upwards into regions of murky obscurity. There was no sound, no one in sight. ‘You remember how to get here?’ the voice on the phone had asked when he rang that afternoon from his hotel. The same girlish tones as before. For her part, though, she had remarked this time that he ‘sounded different, somehow’. He had got the address from SIP, the telephone company, via the Ministry in Rome. They had also supplied the names of the other two subscribers whom Ruspanti had called in Milan. One, predictably enough, was his cousin, Raimondo Falcone. The other was Marco Zeppegno. The woman had told him to arrive at eight o’clock. Apparently Carmela was taking her sister to the opera that night, and would have left by then.
The stairs led to a gallery running the length of the building on the first floor, which was conceived on a scale such as Zen had seen only in museums and government offices. Stripped of the trappings and booty which it had been designed to show off, the gallery looked as pointless and slightly macabre as a drained swimming pool. Such furnishings as there were related neither to use nor comfort. There were no chairs, but a wealth of wooden chests. A fireplace the size of a normal room took up much of one wall, but there was no heating. Acres of bare plaster were relieved only by a series of portraits of men with almost identical beards, whiskers, cravats and expressions of earnest insolence.
‘You’re not Ludo!’
He whirled round. The voice had come from the other side of the gallery, but there seemed to be no one there. Then he noticed what looked at first like a full-length oil portrait of the woman he had seen on the train, her light blue eyes turned towards him, her head surrounded by a nimbus of fine flaxen hair. He squinted at her. The air seemed thick and syrupy, as though the fog outside were seeping into the house, distorting distances and blurring detail.
‘He couldn’t come,’ Zen ventured.
‘But he promised!’
He saw now that the supposed canvas was in fact a lighted doorway from which the woman was observing his advance, without any alarm but with an expression of intense disappointment which she made no effort to disguise.
‘I spoke to him just this afternoon, and he promised he would come!’
She was wearing a shapeless dress of heavy black material which accentuated the pallor of her skin. Her manner was unnervingly direct, and she held Zen’s gaze without any apparent embarrassment.
‘He promised!’ she repeated.
‘That’s quite right. But he’s not feeling very well.’
‘Is it his tummy?’ the woman asked serenely.
Zen blinked.
‘Yes. Yes, his tummy, yes. So he asked me to come instead.’
She moved towards him, her candid blue gaze locked to his face.
‘It was you,’ she said.
Had she recognized him from the train?
‘Me?’ he replied vaguely.
She nodded, certain now.
‘It wasn’t Ludo who rang. It was you.’
He smiled sheepishly.
‘Ludo couldn’t come himself, so he sent me.’
‘And who are you?’ she asked, like a princess in a fairy story addressing the odd little man who has
