reassuringly — it was not intermittent or qualified but immediate and continuous, with future consequences built in. A foot was involved, as well as the shin immediately above. He seemed to be naked. The surface beneath his bare soles was as rough and yet yielding as sand, but hard edges lurked in the darkness all around. It was against one of these that he must have struck his left leg.
After an interminable period of exploratory gestures in the surrounding obscurity, he eventually located something that seemed familiar. Further tactile tests seemed to confirm that this was indeed the edge of the bed. Working on this hypothesis, he groped his way along it. Sure enough, he soon came to a table-leg. Not only this, but the lamp was where it should be, according to his folk-memories of the presumed locality. A brief fiddle with the nipple on the base produced light. Stripped of its dream-enhanced pretensions, the room looked absurdly small. No wonder he had come to grief, when his mental chart had been erroneous not in a few details but on a totally different scale, like the map of a city mistaken for that of a continent.
But why had he left the safe haven of his bed in the first place? There had been an urgent reason, he remembered, connected with that resonant voice whose words he could still fugitively hear. It had exhorted him to save someone while there was still time. A life had been in danger, and he was at once deeply implicated and the only person who could prevent the atrocity. Only he hadn’t been able to understand the language in which this terrible appeal had been delivered, and so he was guilty. A child had died because he had not been quick or capable enough to save him.
A clamorous noise made itself felt in the room. Another Aurelio Zen — one who lived in the world called real and, unlike his incompetent dream double, understood its signs and portents — picked up the phone and answered.
‘Good morning, Dottor Zen. Did I wake you? My apologies, as they say. But I happened to be awake already, so I thought that we might as well get started.’
The voice was metallic, neutered, robotic.
‘Who is this?’
‘Ah, well, that’s the question, isn’t it? But don’t worry, you don’t have to answer it right away. I’ll even give you a few clues, to get you started. Here’s the first. Via Strozzi, number twenty-four.’
Zen gripped the receiver with growing anger.
‘What the hell is this? Do you know what time it is?’
A tinny laugh.
‘Questions, questions! You’re a detective, I hear. Why don’t you do a little detecting?’
‘Why don’t you go and fuck yourself?’
He slammed the phone down and lay back on the bed. Then, rolling up and over like a wounded animal, he located the bedside clock, rang the front desk and demanded to know why they had put a call through at half-past five in the morning. The clerk, who sounded as though he had been asleep himself, protested that he had not transferred any calls to Dottor Zen’s room, and indeed that there had been no calls of any sort to anyone since he had come on duty late the previous evening.
On the floor beside the bed lay the map which Tullio Legna had included with the dossier on the Vincenzo case; Zen had been studying it when he fell asleep the night before in an attempt to get some grip on the layout of the area. It was the standard 1:50,000 sheet covering Alba and the surrounding countryside and villages. He picked it up and located Palazzuole. A railway line ran nearby, and there appeared to be an isolated station which served the town.
His eye drifted away, following the lines of hills and the course of rivers, until he was brought up short by the words Trezzo Tinella. He had heard that before, and recently, too. Then, with an almost superstitious shudder, he remembered the parting shot of the voice in his somnambulistic dream: ‘Barbaresco! Santa Maria Maddalena, trezzo tinella?’
For a moment it seemed as if he had stumbled unawares on some cosmic clue, a previously unsuspected secret passage between worlds believed to be separate. Then he noticed the word Barbaresco on the map. It was, he realized, not just the name of a wine but also of a village, not far from Palazzuole. He searched the sheet until he found Santa Maria Maddalena, Fontanile, Fello, Serralunga and Sommariva. No doubt the others were all there, too. He must have read the names unconsciously the night before and then combined them in his sleep to form those sentences which had hovered so disturbingly on the brink of some painful, urgent sense.
Meanwhile he had been sleepwalking again. On this occasion the experience had left no visible scars, but there was no telling where he might have ended up if he hadn’t stubbed his toe and barked his shin on the coffee table. What was happening to him? Was he to believe Doctor Lucchese’s theory of psychic disturbance or Gianni Faigano’s misogynous ramblings about a malevolent female influence? Or were they both right? And what about that phone call? ‘Via Strozzi, number twenty-four.’ The address, if that was what it was, meant nothing to him.
He took a shower to rinse away this mood of morbid introspection, then went over to his suitcase and dug out the battered, buff-coloured railway timetable he always carried with him. Alba looked the size of Rome on the 1:50,000 map, but it didn’t figure at all on the schematic map of the national railway network printed at the front of the timetable. Zen looked it up in the index, then consulted the schedule for the line wandering off into the hills to the east. The first train of the day left in just under fifteen minutes. On a whim, he decided to try to catch it. He had been spending too much time alone in his room, brooding about his own problems and state of mind. What he needed was to get to work.
Outside the hotel, there was still no hint of the coming dawn. The street was dark and silent, the sky implacably opaque. He walked rapidly back in the direction he had taken when he arrived, glancing at his watch as he passed beneath a street lamp. Somewhere behind him, another set of solitary footsteps resounded comfortingly on the flagstones.
Once he reached the station, it became obvious that there had been no need to hurry. A two-car diesel unit stood dark and silent at the platform, but the booking office was closed and no one was about. Zen lit a cigarette and paced the platform as the clock moved spastically from three minutes to six to three minutes past. As though on cue, a door slammed and two men emerged. One wore the grey-blue uniform of the State Railways, the other was in jeans and a tattered green ski-jacket. Zen walked up to them.
‘For Palazzuole?’ he enquired, indicating the train.
‘Stop at Palazzuole!’ the uniformed man called to his unkempt companion, who was heading for the driver’s compartment.
‘ Va bene.’
The engines roared into life amid a cloud of thick black smoke. There was only one other person on the platform, a young woman in a long coat and a hat who didn’t seem interested in this train. Zen boarded and took his seat, and after a brief delay the automotrice rumbled off into the darkness, crossing numerous sets of points. To all appearances, Zen was the only passenger.
He lay back on the hard plastic seat and turned to the blank screen of the window. It reflected his face back to him: old, tired, defeated, possibly even mad. ‘We had no idea! He always seemed perfectly normal.’ That’s what people said when someone cracked up, as though to reassure themselves that such conditions were invariably obvious and predictable, and so their own lack of symptoms meant that their future sanity was not in question.
Zen sat up and refocused his eyes on the seat opposite. For a moment, the glass had seemed to display two faces: his own, and — some distance behind and to one side — that of a boy about five years old. Only his face, of extraordinary beauty, was visible, the dark eyes fixed on Zen with a look of love and reproach.
‘Palazzuole!’
Zen swivelled round. The uniformed man was standing in the doorway at the end of the carriage.
‘Palazzuole,’ he repeated, as the brakes squealed beneath them.
Zen was about to say that he didn’t have a ticket, but the guard had already disappeared. The train jerked to a halt, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Zen walked hastily to the end of the carriage and stepped down. The train revved up and sidled away, leaving him in total darkness. Almost total, rather, for once his eyes had adjusted, he realized that he could just make out his surroundings by the faint suggestion of light which now tinted the sky, diffused down through a thick layer of mist. The station building was shuttered and obviously long disused. In faded black paint on the cracked and falling plaster he could just make out the letters PAL ZUO E and the information that he was currently 243 metres above mean sea level.
He walked past the station building into the gravel-covered area behind, and along a short driveway leading to a dirt road which crossed the tracks at a slight angle. Here he got out the map and his cigarette lighter, and
