‘Why is it like that?’
She made an effort to remember.
‘It happened in the war,’ she said at last. ‘A bomb.’
‘Ah. And do you and Raimondo live here all alone?’
‘No, he’s got a place of his own somewhere. He doesn’t want to catch my illness, you see.’
Zen nodded as though this made perfect sense.
‘Is it infectious, then?’
‘So he says. He told me that if he stayed here any longer he’d end up as crazy as I am. That’s why Mummy and Daddy left, too. I drive people away. I can’t help it. It’s my illness…’
Her voice trailed away.
‘What is it?’ asked Zen.
She stood listening, her head tilted to one side. He peered at her.
‘Is something…?’
‘Ssshhh!’
She started trembling all over.
‘Someone’s coming!’
Zen strained his ears, but couldn’t detect the slightest sound.
‘It must be Carmela! I don’t know what’s happened! The opera can’t be over yet.’
She clapped her hands together in sheer panic.
‘Oh, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?’
Zen stood looking round uncertainly. Suddenly Ariana looked at him intently, sizing him up.
‘Take off your coat and jacket!’ she hissed.
She darted to the mannequin near by, removed the blouson he was wearing and tossed it to Zen. Then she bundled up his overcoat and jacket and stuffed them hurriedly under a chair. Feeling absolutely ridiculous. Zen struggled into the blouson. Ariana snatched a sort of fisherman’s cap off another dummy and put it on him.
‘Now stand there and don’t move!’
There was a sound of footsteps.
‘Ariana? Ah, there you are!’
Zen recognized the voice at once. Indeed, it seemed as if he’d been hearing nothing else for the past week. The speaker was out of sight from the position in which Zen was frozen, but he could clearly hear the tremor in Ariana’s voice.
‘Raimondo!’
‘Who were you expecting?’
‘Expecting? No one! No one ever comes here.’
You’re overdoing it, thought Zen. But the man’s brusque tone revealed no trace of suspicion.
‘Can you blame them?’
The woman moved away from Zen.
‘I thought you were in Africa,’ she said. ‘Hunting lions.’
He laughed shortly.
‘I killed them all.’
Zen’s posture already felt painfully cramped and rigid. To distract himself, he stared at the costume of the mannequin opposite him, an extraordinary collage of fur, leather, velvet and silk apparently torn into ribbons and then reassembled in layers to form a waterfall of jagged, clashing fabrics.
‘Did you see Ludo?’ the woman demanded suddenly.
The eagerness in her voice was unmistakable.
‘Cousin Ludovico?’ the man drawled negligently. ‘Yes, I saw him.’
‘When? Where? How is he? When is he coming back?’
‘Oh, not for some time, I’m afraid. Not for a long, long time.’
His voice was deliberately hard and hurtful.
‘Did a lion hurt him?’
She sounded utterly desolate. The man laughed.
‘What nonsense you talk! It wasn’t a lion, it was you. He can’t stand being around you, Ariana. It’s your own fault! You drive everyone away with your mad babbling. Everyone except your dolls. They’re the only ones who can put up with you any longer.’
There was a sound of crying.
‘I hope you’ve kept yourself busy while I’ve been away,’ the man continued.
‘Yes.’
‘Then stop blubbering and show me. Where are they? Upstairs in the workroom?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on then.’
Suddenly the man was there, close enough for Zen to touch. The woman followed, her head lowered, sobbing. She gave no sign of being aware of Zen’s presence.
‘I’ll have to keep an eye on you, Ariana,’ the man remarked coldly. ‘It looks to me as if you might be going to have one of your bad patches again.’
‘That’s not true! I’ve felt ever so well for ages now.’
‘Rubbish! You have no idea whether you’re well or not, Ariana. You never did and you never will.’
They went out of a door at the far side of the room, closing it behind them. Zen hastily removed the blouson and cap, retrieved his coat and jacket and put them on again. The gallery was as cold and silent as a crypt. Zen tiptoed across it and pattered downstairs to the hallway, where he opened the wooden door set in the painted gate and let himself out. The fog was thicker and denser by now, an intangible barrier which emerged vampire-like every night, draining substance and solidity from the surroundings to feed its own illusory reality. Zen vanished into it like a figment of the city’s imagination.
7
Zen’s hotel was next to the station, a thirty-storey tower topped with an impressive array of aerials and satellite dishes. The next morning, shaved and showered, his body pleasantly massaged by the whirlpool bath, clad in a gown of heavy white towelling with the name of the hotel picked out in red, he sat looking out of the window at the streets far below, where the Milanese were industriously going about their business beneath a sky of flawless grey.
Opposite Zen’s window, a gang of workers were welding and bolting steel beams into place to form the framework of what, according to the sign on the hoarding around the site, was to be another hotel. Judging by the violence of their gestures, there must have been a good deal of noise involved, but within the double layer of toughened glass the only sounds were the hiss of the air conditioning, the murmur of a newscaster on the American cable network to which the television was tuned, and a ringing tone in the receiver of the telephone which Zen was holding to his ear.
‘Peace be with you, signora,’ he said solemnly, as the phone was answered with an incomprehensible yelp.
‘And with you.’
‘This is the friend of Signor Nieddo. I would fain speak with Mago.’
‘Hold on.’
The receiver was banged hollowly against something. Zen turned to the television. He picked up the remote control and shuffled randomly through a variety of game shows, old films, panel discussions, direct selling pitches and all-day sportscasts. Spotting a familiar face in the welter of images, he vectored up the sound.
‘… whatsoever. Would you agree with that?’
‘I agree with no one but myself.’
‘What’s your position on the hemline debate?’
