schoolfriends had once used to delight in imitating. ‘I saw you on television this morning. A very fine performance, if I may say so.’
‘Who is this?’
‘The name I gave earlier was Marco Zeppegno, but as you know, dottore, Marco’s phone has been disconnected.’
In the background there was the constant hum of what sounded like a car’s engine.
‘I wonder why,’ Zen continued. ‘Didn’t he pay his bills? Or had he started to make nuisance calls, like Ludovico Ruspanti?’
‘Who are you? What do you want?’
Zen chuckled.
‘Bearing recent experiences in mind, I’m sure you’ll understand if I decline to answer just now. Tapping a phone in the Vatican is a matter for professionals like Grimaldi, but any radio ham can listen in to a mobile phone.’
The connection went dead. For a moment Zen thought that the man had hung up, but he came back at once, calling ‘Hello? Hello?’
‘It was only interference,’ Zen assured him. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t get rid of me that easily!’
‘What is it you want?’
‘I’ll tell you when we meet this afternoon.’
‘Impossible! I have a…’
Once again the connection was broken for several moments.
‘… until six thirty or seven. I could see you then.’
‘Very well.’
‘Come to my office,’ the man said after a long pause. ‘It’s just off Piazza del Duomo. The main entrance is closed at that time, but you can come in the emergency exit at the back. The place was burgled last week and the lock hasn’t been repaired yet. It’s in Via Foscolo, next to the chemist’s, the green door without a number. My offices are on the top floor.’
In Piazza della Repubblica, Zen boarded a two-coach orange tram marked ‘Porta Vittoria’. A notice above the large wooden-framed windows set out in considerable detail the conditions governing the transport of live fish and fowl. Goldfish and chicks, Zen learned, would be conveyed (up to a maximum of two per passenger) providing that the containers, which might under no circumstances be larger than a ‘normal parcel or shoe box’, were neither rough nor splintery, dirty nor foul-smelling, nor yet of such a form as to cause injury to other passengers. The remainder of the text, which laid down the penalties for flaunting these regulations, was too small to read with the naked eye, but the implication was that any anarchistic hotheads who took it upon themselves to carry goldfish or chicks on trams without due regard for the provisions heretofore mentioned would be prosecuted with the full rigour of the law.
Zen recalled the bewilderment of the Japanese businessmen as he barged in like a truculent drunk and attempted to commandeer their taxi. ‘Is it always like this?’ they were clearly asking themselves. ‘Is this the rule, or just an exception?’ If they really wanted to understand Italy, they could do worse than give up taxis, take to public transport and ponder the mysteries of a system which legislated for circumstances verging on the surreal yet was unable to ensure that the majority of its users even bought a ticket.
He got off at the stop opposite the Palazzo di Giustizia and ran the gauntlet of the traffic speeding across the herringbone pattern of smooth stone slabs. As he reached the safety of the kerb, a taxi drew up and Antonia Simonelli got out. She looked severe and tense.
‘It was Zeppegno all right,’ she nodded. ‘There doesn’t seem any question that it was suicide.’
There was a squeal of tyres at the kerb and someone called his name. Turning round, he found himself face to face with Tania Biacis. Another taxi had pulled up behind the first. The young man who had left the hotel with Tania sat watching from the rear seat of the taxi with an expression of alarm.
‘Okay, Aurelio,’ shouted Tania, thrusting a finger aggressively towards Antonia Simonelli. ‘I’ve asked you before and I ask you again. Who is she?’
Arm in arm, visibly reconciled, Tania and Zen walked across the pedestrianized expanses of Piazza del Duomo. At the far end, the upper storeys of several buildings were completely hidden behind a huge hoarding displaying three faces represented on the gargantuan scale which Zen associated with the images of Marx, Lenin and Stalin that had once looked down on May Day parades in Moscow’s Red Square. But like Catholicism, its old rival, Communism was no longer a serious contender in the ideological battle for hearts and minds. The icon which dominated Milan’s Cathedral Square was that of the United Colors of Benetton: the vast, unsmiling features of a Nordic woman, a Black woman and an Asian baby. These avatars of the new order, representatives of a world united by the ascendant creed of consumerism, gazed down on the masses whose aspirations they embodied with a look that was at once intense and vapid.
‘They’re suing the hospital,’ said Tania.
‘Good for them.’
‘This is all between us, but apparently Romizi’s wife was having an affair with Bernardo Travaglini.’
‘You’re joking!’
‘Once she’d got over the shock of Carlo’s death, she got in touch with Bernardo and told him her suspicions about what happened. He and De Angelis went round to the hospital with a couple of uniformed men in a squad car and put the fear of God into the director.’
Zen could easily picture the scene, the two plainclothes officials wandering menacingly about the director’s office, their words a mixture of bureaucratic minutiae and paranoia-inducing innuendo, while their uniformed cohorts guarded the door. Yes, Giorgio and Bernardo would have had the director eating out of their hands in no time at all. The irony was that Zen might have done something of the sort himself if he hadn’t been so convinced that Carlo had been the victim of the Cabal. But it now appeared that Romizi’s death had been caused by a different sort of plot.
‘Under pressure from Travaglini and De Angelis, the director came up with the name of the intern who visited Romizi that night,’ Tania continued. ‘When they called on him, the intern claimed that he had been acting on orders. He’d never been trained to use life-support equipment, and had no idea what the effect would be. He was told to reset such-and-such a knob to such-and-such a setting, and that’s what he did.’
‘They needed the bed?’
Tania shrugged.
‘That’s what it looks like. The hospital is denying the whole thing, of course. Signora Romizi’s suing the hospital, the intern and the doctor in charge have been suspended, and the Procura has opened a file on the affair.’
They crossed the square and entered the glazed main aisle of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. The elegant mall was almost empty, the offices on the upper floors and the exclusive shops at ground level both shut. Tania lingered for some time in front of a window displaying the latest creations from the teeming imagination of the legendary Falco. With a shove half-playful, half-serious, Zen propelled her towards the one establishment still open for business, the Cafe Biffi. They sat outside, under the awnings whose function here was purely decorative, in an area cordoned off from the aisle by a row of potted plants on stands. Tania opted for a breaded veal cutlet and salad. Zen said he’d have the same.
‘But if you specialize in products from the Friuli,’ Zen asked, picking up a conversation they had had earlier, ‘what are you doing here?’
‘We want to diversify, keeping the original concept of traditionally-made items from small producers whom a big exporter company won’t handle because they can’t deliver in quantity. Primo is based here in Milan, so…’
‘Don’t tell me he’s a farmer!’
‘God, you don’t let up, do you?’
Her look wavered on the edge of the brink of a real challenge. Don’t push me too hard, it said. Zen grinned in a way he knew she found irresistible.
‘You know what the police are like.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They’re bastards.’
Their food arrived, and for a while everything else was forgotten. It was almost two o’clock by now, and they
