red raboso wine and a roll smeared with the creamy white paste made from salt cod, garlic and olive oil. He settled back in a corner, glancing at his watch. He had given Palazzo Sisti thirty minutes, and five were gone already. It wouldn’t do to be late. This was his one tenuous connection to the levers of power, the ‘rooms with the buttons’. He had to handle it right. But there was no saying what was right, these days.
Some time earlier Zen had intervened in a murder investigation in Sardinia on behalf of one of the country’s leading political parties. Although the outcome was quite different from the one which had been foreseen, it happened to serve the interests of the party in question just as well if not better. On his return to Rome, Zen had been summoned to a reception at party headquarters, located in Palazzo Sisti, where the elder statesman who was its leader had acknowledged his indebtedness with the words: ‘If there’s ever anything you need…’
At the time, this had seemed like a blank cheque. It could only be cashed once, so it was prudent to wait for exactly the right opportunity to present itself, but there was no hurry. A promise like this would remain valid for ever. Even the death of the politician himself would not affect the value of the undertaking he had given. The whole system within which he and everyone else operated depended on such unwritten contracts being honoured irrespective of the fate of individuals. If anything happened to l’onorevole, the promise he had made to Zen would simply devolve to his successors, along with countless others both owing and owed.
But now the unthinkable had occurred. Starting from an investigation into bribes allegedly paid to obtain construction contracts, investigating magistrates in Milan had gradually uncovered a network of kickbacks, slush funds, golden handshakes, graft, incentives, backhanders and hush money covering every aspect of business and government. Everyone had always known that such a network existed, of course. Indeed, everyone used it themselves in some minor respect at least, to speed up the bureaucratic mills or escape from some horrendous official maze. What no one had ever expected was that the extent of the corruption would ever be exposed, still less that those who had taken advantage of it at the very highest level would be arrested and brought to trial.
There had, after all, been countless such investigations before, and they had never got anywhere. It was precisely to avoid such a potentially embarrassing event that Palazzo Sisti had invited Zen to intervene in the Sardinian case, in which one of their fixers, a man named Renato Favelloni, was involved. On that occasion, as on so many in the past, they had been successful. But as the Milanese judges pursued their investigations, naming ever more famous names and signing orders against the ‘men beyond all suspicion’, it gradually became clear that something had changed. The labyrinth of power was still there, but at its heart was an absence.
The minotaur was dead, and the choking currents of persuasion and menace which had once stifled any attempt to map the workings of its empire had fallen still. The judges continued implacably on their course. Renato Favelloni was among those arrested, and true to form had immediately done a deal with his accusers, betraying those for whom he had worked in return for a potential reduction in his own sentence. The result had been a flurry of judicial communications revealing the identities of those under investigation for ‘irregular practices’ and ‘procedural abnormalities’ — as though such practices and procedures had not been both the rule and the norm for the past half-century. The most eminent name on the list was that of l’onorevole himself, whom the judges had requested should be stripped of his parliamentary immunity so that they could proceed against him.
This was something completely unprecedented, an almost unimaginable eventuality, but it was widely assumed that the matter would go no further. Like all members of the Italian parliament, l’onorevole enjoyed automatic immunity from judicial prosecution which could only be lifted by a committee of his peers. The chances of this happening seemed slim indeed. Politicans had always been understandably reluctant to allow the judiciary to stick its noses into their affairs. There was no reason to suppose that they would voluntarily permit the prosecution of a man who had been a minister in various governments for over fifteen years, one of the most powerful and influential figures in the country, widely tipped as a possible future president. If he went, which of them would be safe?
But those who reasoned thus had not yet grasped the full extent of the changes which had taken place. This was not surprising. It was humiliating to admit that the real reason why the judges in Milan were able to succeed where so many of their colleagues had failed had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union than anything which had happened in their own country. Such an admission involved recognizing that since 1945 Italian political life had been a mere puppet-show reflecting the power struggle between East and West. Now the strings had been cut, the show had closed and all bets were off. Two days earlier, as reported in the newspaper which Zen had glimpsed floating in the canal, the parliamentary committee — ‘motivated by a conviction since in the present climate justice should not just be done but be seen to be done’ — had voted to allow the judges in Milan to proceed against their eminent and esteemed colleague.
This was worse than death for l’onorevole and for all those associated with him. He would vanish for years into the Gulag Archipelago of the judicial process, awaiting a final verdict which was largely irrelevant. The damage had already been done. The parliamentary committee’s decision was far more damaging than anything the judges could do, revealing as it did the extent to which l’onorevole was exposed, and the crucial fact that he had ceased to be an important political player.
Zen’s only hope was that the favour he was actually going to inscribe on the blank cheque he had been treasuring all this while was so insignificant that l’onorevole would have no difficulty in meeting it, even in his present straitened circumstances. He glanced at his watch. In five minutes he would know. He finished the last morsel of the bacala mantecato, washed it down with the final gulp of wine and went over to the counter to pay.
As he turned towards the door, he bumped into two men who had just come in. Intent on his purpose, he made to brush past, but one of the men seized his arm.
‘My God, Aurelio, is it you?’
Zen looked round and gasped.
‘Tommaso!’
The two confronted each other awkwardly while the other man looked on with a coolly appraising smile.
‘I can’t stop now,’ Zen said hurriedly. ‘Are you staying? I’ll be back in ten minutes, less probably.’
Back in the windswept square, the strips of white plastic packaging were still frantically gyrating. As Zen made his way towards the pay phone, it suddenly started to ring in strident bursts. He stopped in his tracks, staring at it intently. Then he glanced at his watch. Exactly thirty minutes had elapsed since he had issued his ultimatum to Palazzo Sisti. Plunging into the fake snow flurries, he seized the receiver.
‘Hello?’
The silence at the other end was deeply flawed, hollow, reverberant, mined with clicks and crackles.
‘Hello? Hello?’
The response, when it finally came, was quiet and unhurried, as though rebuking Zen’s panicky urgency.
‘My advisers inform me that you uttered a threat against me. I trust this is just another of the innumerable mistakes and gross miscalculations of which they’ve been guilty.’
Christ, it was the man himself! Things must indeed have come to a pretty pass at Palazzo Sisti if l’onorevole was reduced to making his own phone calls.
‘Nothing could be further from the truth!’ Zen found himself saying in an obsequious tone. ‘I wouldn’t dream of presuming to…’
‘Maybe not, but there are plenty who would. Men I’ve worked for and with this past quarter century! Now they deny they know me. Now they smite me on the cheek, spit in my face and hand me over, bound and gagged, to my enemies!’
‘The only reason I am calling is…’
‘They may think I’m dead and buried, but they’ll see! When they least expect it I shall burst forth from the tomb and sit in judgement on those who have presumed to judge me.’
Having achieved this peroration, l’onorevole fell silent.
‘Hello?’ ventured Zen hesitantly.
‘I’m still here. Despite everything.’
‘When we met at Palazzo Sisti, onorevole, at the conclusion of the Burolo affair, you were kind enough to intimate that if I ever needed a favour then I should contact you. That is the only reason I have been bold enough to do so.’
The unctuous smarminess of his voice left Zen wanting to rinse his mouth out, but decades of servility could not be erased in a moment.
‘What do you want?’ l’onorevole demanded. ‘There’s a limit to what I can accomplish these days, but…’
