'Business. I'll swing by and pick you up around nine.'
'Take care.'
'You too.'
Gesualdo drove out of the car park along a steep, narrow, switchback street that ended at the main road a few hundred metres up the hillside. There he turned right, coasting down the cobbled corniche whose extensive views out over the bay have proved fatal to so many drivers.
Dipping down to water level at Mergellina, he drove along the front past the gardens of the Villa Communale and back into the city.
In the inverted ghetto of Posillipo, where the wealthy and powerful have paraded their wealth and power for well over two thousand years, Gesualdo had felt ill at ease, an interloper. The shocking news of the girls' departure was fully in keeping with other subliminal messages he was picking up, a kind of white noise which the place generated along with the obedient hum of luxury cars, the murmur of conversation between people who never need to raise their voices to be heard, the silence of exclusion and the discreet hushing of a tame, respectful sea.
Here, plunged into the deafening clamour and random trajectories of the streets, he was at home once more, back in the innards of the city he knew so well. He turned out of Piazza dei Martiri into a gateway in the wall of a nineteenth-century palazzo. Inside a concrete ramp led steeply down into a cavern, its dimensions too huge and complex to be grasped at once. The vaulted ceiling, barely visible in the gloom, must have been over fifty feet high. The space below extended back at least twice that distance, irregular in shape and divided by walls of bare stone left to support the streets and houses on the hill above.
Gesualdo angled his car into a vacant slot in the middle of one of the rows of vehicles parked there, for a fee, by office workers and other commuters. Unlike them, however, he did not walk back the way he had driven in, towards the steps leading up to street level, but the other way, into the deepest recesses of the subterranean car park. The ground underfoot was dusty with particles of stone scuffed up from the soft volcanic tufa forming the walls, floor and ceiling of this gigantic excavation, one of a series of such cavities underlying the entire city.
It was the Greeks who first realized that the stratum of solidified lava beneath their new city, Neapolis, was at once easy to extract and work, and strong enough to resist collapse. Both they and the Romans exploited this fact to install a complex system of subterranean aqueducts, reservoirs, road tunnels and storage spaces for grain, oil and other goods. The temperature at these depths was consistently cool, the humidity constant.
But the boom period for the underground city dated from the Spanish conquest. In one of the earliest attempts to enforce zoning regulations within the city walls, the invaders prohibitively taxed the importation of building materials. The response of the inhabitants was to reopen the ancient tunnels and caverns, this time as secret quarries, and to use the tufa to extend or amplify their homes.
The fact that they were thus undermining the very houses they were constructing apparently struck no one as ironical.
The branch of the cavern which Gesualdo was following narrowed progressively to form a giant ravine no more than ten feet across, but even higher than the main body of the cave. The lower walls had been widened, presumably to accommodate the vehicles whose tire tracks were imprinted in the fine dust covering the ground. The passage ended at a pair of rusty iron doors, from behind which a variety of industrial noises were audible: drilling, sanding, hammering. Occasional brief flashes of incredible brilliance enlivened the prevailing darkness.
Gesualdo pressed a button mounted beside the doors.
After a long pause, a muffled voice inside said something incomprehensible. Gesualdo leant forward, pressing his face to the metal.
'Roberto sent me/ he shouted.
Another long pause ensued. Then there was the sound of a bolt being drawn back, and a man's face appeared between the two doors. He was wearing welding goggles, through which he inspected the intruder cautiously.
'It's about a car/ said Gesualdo.
XII
When the phone rang the first time, Zen assumed it must be work. On his return from the trip to consult Gilberto Nieddu in Rome, he had called by the port and dropped off the grey cassette with the duty officer, a young man named Pastorelli who had merely saluted Zen and returned to a volume of Mickey Mouse comics printed on what looked like crudely recycled toilet paper. After returning the video game to the plastic bag containing the suspect's other belongings, Zen had departed as inconspicuously as he arrived.
By dint of staying out of the house most of the next day, he had managed to avoid hearing anything further about the progress — or, more likely, the lack of it — of the case to which he was supposedly devoting his every waking hour. He realized that this ostrich approach to problem solving was widely regarded as immature and escapist, but where, he demanded of the hypothetical sneerers, had all his clear thinking and tireless energy got him in the past? To Naples, was the answer, and when in Naples…
Sooner or later, nevertheless, he had to go home to meet the new tenants of the lower flat and see them properly installed. It was while he was overseeing this operation that the phone started ringing upstairs. Obedient to his 'what I don't know can't hurt me' philosophy, he decided to let the machine take it. It was not until some time later, on one of his trips up to his own flat in search of decorative materials to fake the influence of a woman's hand below — and also to remove various personal effects which might reveal more about him than he wished strangers to know — that he finally bothered to listen to the message.
'So you were in town yesterday and didn't even bother to come and see your poor mother who you've abandoned here like some old coat you've no more use for now you've gone native in the sunny south with some slut you've picked up like that time in Venice with Rosalba's baby who may I remind you happens to be my Goddaughter apart from anything else which makes you her great-Godfather but of course that didn't stop you from going right ahead and ditching Tarda who I'd just begun to think of as part of the family and someone who might one day take the place of your poor wife Luisella who just happens to be in Rome for a week and actually took the trouble to come round here and visit me unlike some I could mention even though you walked out on her fifteen years ago the same way you do on all the women in your life including your mother who I'd have thought might feel entitled to a little consideration seeing as how you wouldn't even be here today if it hadn't been for me carrying you in my belly all those long months and in wartime too with the shortages and the fear and my husband disappearing the way he did which is I suppose where you get it from not that that's any excuse and I certainly don't see why I should be punished for something I suffered enough from at the time God knows instead of which you hide there behind the answering machine like the coward you are while I sit here all alone and unloved at my age in a strange city with no one to care for me — sola, perduta, abbandonataV This was the recorded version. When he called her back, Zen was treated to a live encore, preceded by a lengthy recitative explaining how she heard about his visit from Rosa Nieddu, who 'accidentally let it slip' when she came by to drop off the girls that morning so that she could drive Gilberto to the airport and how at first she couldn't believe what she'd heard and then Rosa tried to pretend she hadn't said it and then broke down and confessed everything and they had both burst into tears and hugged each other.
'Ah, the female mafia on the job again!' murmured Zen, feeling drenched in oestrogen as though in cheap scent.
Fortunately his mother was not listening.
'Then later on Luisella called to say she needed to get in touch with you about the divorce settlement 'What? I haven't seen her for ten years! We haven't lived together for.. / 'But you're still married to her, Aurelio, and now she's met someone else and wants to have children before it's too late. I hope you don't mind, but I did just say that as you've made all that money from that American family I'm sure you'll have no trouble agreeing to any suggestions which her lawyers may make.'
'Are you out of your mind, mamma?'
'Then that evening Tarda dropped round so naturally I told her about you coming all the way up here to chat
