‘ If it’s true,’ emphasized Zen. ‘But when he told the judges that, Manlio was trying to save his own neck. He repeated the same story to me, but he’s still a suspect, remember. There is no independent evidence to support his claim. He might easily be lying.’
Morino nodded dubiously.
‘I suppose so. But there’s another thing.’
‘What now?’ snapped Zen testily.
‘If this was a crime of passion, a premeditated act of revenge for some alleged incident dating back forty years or more, why did Faigano wait so long? Why was he so patient? After all this time, you would think he might have resigned himself to the situation. Why didn’t he kill Vincenzo years ago?’
Zen had had no reply to this the night before, and he had none now, but he felt sure that he was on the right track at last. The details would take care of themselves. What he had to do now was to hold on to the insight he had gained, and to get this Minot in the palm of his hand. He was the key to the whole affair, of that Zen was certain.
From behind the adjoining wall came a faint stirring and banging, then a sound of flushing water. Evidently Carla couldn’t sleep either. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. He wished he could remember Amalia Arduini better, but she had faded to an impoverished set of fixed images, like worn snapshots endlessly reshuffled.
What remained? A vision of her supine and naked, her large breasts lolling around on her chest like half- trained puppies with a mind of their own. He recalled her crying one day at a restaurant when he’d said something — he had long forgotten what — which upset her, and the pleasure with which she greeted him at the door of her apartment in Via Strozzi, as if perpetually amazed that he’d actually shown up. And he also remembered moments when she would drift away from him, when his spell no longer held, and she was sucked back into personal and familial labyrinths from which he was excluded.
He sat up and reached for the phone.
‘Carla?’
‘Are you still up, too?’
‘It seems so.’
‘What are we going to do about it?’
A pause.
‘I wondered if you might want to drop by,’ Zen continued. ‘Or I could come there. I mean, you know, just so as…’
‘So as not to be alone?’
‘Yes, that’s it exactly. So as not to be alone.’
Another pause.
‘I’ll be there shortly.’
He hung up and went to put on his dressing-gown. A door closed in the hallway, and then there was a knock at his. Carla Arduini was wearing a stylish orange track-suit and a pair of running shoes. Her hair was combed back and secured by a sweat band. Zen gestured her into the room.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is odd.’
‘Isn’t it?’
She walked inside, looking around as though for a place to sit down, but in the end remained standing.
‘I was just thinking about your mother,’ said Zen, and immediately cursed his thoughtlessness.
Carla gave a hard little snort.
‘You never thought about her while she was alive. Why bother now she’s dead?’
Zen stared at her in shock.
‘Dead?’
She tossed her head.
‘But of course! Why do you think I made my move now, when I’ve known about it for years? I could easily have come to Rome and tracked you down. But she forbade me to do so. She was poor and proud. Pride was all she had left, once her looks went. She didn’t want to give you the satisfaction of knowing how much you’d hurt her. So I had to wait until she died before doing anything about it.’
Zen was now staring at her with manic intensity.
‘Until she died,’ he repeated.
A curt nod.
‘Which was recently?’
‘Back in the spring. A stroke.’
Zen looked away, his eyes narrowing.
‘So Irena was right. Of course!’
‘The doctor’s friend?’
‘Cherchez la femme,’ returned Zen. ‘I understand it all now. He had to wait until she died!’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, let alone how that bitch Irena comes into it.’
Carla laughed maliciously.
‘She couldn’t get over the fact that I was able to spot what Lucchese was playing and to name the harpsichord! She obviously doesn’t care for competition.’
Zen looked at her, frowning.
‘How did you know that, anyway?’
‘I used to have a boyfriend who listened to classical music a lot. Scarlatti was one of his favourites, and if you’ve heard one of those clattery, repetitive pieces, you’ve heard them all.’
‘And the instrument?’
‘Even easier! It was written right there above the keyboard. Andreas Ruckers me fecit. Latin was one of my best subjects at school. But you still haven’t told me what that Irena was right about.’
Zen waved the subject away.
‘It’s not important. Take no notice of me, I’m still half-asleep.’
Carla consulted her watch.
‘Why don’t we go and get a coffee? There’s a place I know which should be open, down by the station. I noticed it the morning you caught the train to Palazzuole.’
‘That was you?’ exclaimed Zen. ‘I remember seeing some woman standing there in the shadows.’
‘I heard you rummaging around in here, and when you went out I decided to follow you.’
‘And then phoned me later at the Vincenzo house. But how did you know I was there?’
‘I didn’t. But I heard you tell the guard to let you off at Palazzuole. I thought you might be going to the Vincenzo house, so I phoned up, pretending to be a reporter. To my surprise, the son himself answered, quite rudely, I must say. That confirmed my suspicions, so I kept trying until you showed up. It was a shot in the dark, but it hit the target. God, you must have been scared.’
She smiled wryly.
‘How long ago that seems now! Like years, not days. To think that I was set on terrorizing you with anonymous phone calls. But it all seemed to matter so much to me back then.’
Zen gazed at her expressionlessly.
‘And now?’
A shrug, brief, almost irritable. Zen looked away.
‘I’ll get dressed,’ he mumbled. ‘Then let’s go and try this cafe of yours.’
When they came for him, he was asleep, if you could call it sleep. Once again, there were two of them: one in plain clothes, the other a uniformed recruit cradling a machine-gun.
That first time, the evening before, Minot had just finished eating a bowl of the lentil soup he made every Sunday, and which sat in its cauldron on the stove for the rest of the week. Eating lentils made you rich, his father had told him; every one you swallowed would come back one day as a gold coin. Minot still believed this obscurely, even though he knew that they didn’t make gold coins any more.
He’d grated some raw carrot and onion into the warmed-up soup, poured in a fat slick of olive oil and then spooned it up, dunking in the heel of the day-old loaf he kept in a battered canister, where it was safe from his familiars. The lid was decorated with a faded picture of a smiling woman and the name of a once-famous brand of
