and crossed the block half-way down, glancing casually behind him as though checking for traffic.
The men were still there.
He remembered Pasquale's warning, which he had so thoughtlessly dismissed, his mind on other problems.
This pair looked very much like the ones who had followed the taxi from the house that morning, young and trim, wearing the casually tough uniform of their type.
Reaching the corner, he turned right and started to run, making as little noise as possible. The streets were empty, the windows dark, and his pursuers had cut off his route back to the only door open to him.
At the next corner he looked round again. One of the men was in sight, but the other had disappeared, having probably circled back around the block to cut off his escape in that direction. The fact that they were no longer making any attempt to disguise their intentions made it chillingly clear what these must be.
But then, just when all seemed lost, fate lent a hand in the form of a garbage truck on its nightly rounds. The moment he saw it, Zen realized that the deep growl of its motor had been audible for some time. Several of the crew, dressed in blue overalls, were walking alongside their vehicle. What a stroke of luck! Even the most ruthless of killers would hardly dare attempt anything before so many witnesses. Zen walked confidently towards the oncoming truck, his arm raised in greeting.
Cose note, cose note!
If there had been anyone about in Via Bernini on the night in question, this was what they would have seen.
As the man in the overcoat and hat approached, his arm raised in greeting, the orange truck slowed down and its crew surrounded him. He turned and pointed back the way he had come, as though indicating the presence of something or someone, although there was no one in sight.
At the same moment, the workman standing behind him took something from one of the many pockets of his overalls and swept it through the air as though swatting a fly.
Simultaneously, although without any obvious sense of cause and effect, the man in the overcoat tumbled forward, very much as though he had tripped on the raised edge of one of the black paving slabs — always a hazard, even in this relatively well-to-do area of the city. Luckily the other workman, now level with the rear of the still moving truck, managed to catch the falling man, thus preventing him from doing himself any serious injury.
The other workman now tossed aside his implement, which struck the paving stones with a sharp metallic ring, and bent to grasp the victim's feet. Without a word, the two men lifted him clear of the ground, holding him suspended limply in mid-air by his shoulders and calves. By now the truck, in its inexorable progress, had passed them.
With a preliminary swing they heaved the inert body up and over the tail-gate, where it disappeared from view.
While the first workman retrieved his discarded wrench, the second pressed a green button protruding from a box mounted on the rear of the truck. With a loud roaring noise, the massive ram began to descend. The top and sides were dirty and dull, but the curved blade had been polished by constant abrasion to an attractive silvery sheen. The ram moved steadily down into the body of the truck, the racket of its powerful machinery completely obliterating any sounds which might otherwise have been audible.
At this point there was an unexpected touch. Two young men appeared in the street ahead of the garbage truck, one waving a pistol, the other talking urgently into a mobile phone. The gunman fired twice, bringing down two of the blue-overalled crew, then sprinted forward and blasted another shot into the control console, disabling the ram. He then clambered aboard the orange truck, which was by now accelerating away.
His companion had meanwhile also drawn a pistol and forced the remaining members of the crew to lie on the ground. Far below, in the dense jumble of the old city, sirens started to wail and whine. The garbage truck spun around in a tight turn, almost spilling the first gunman from its roof, but he managed to cling on to a metal reinforcing ridge until the manoeuvre was complete, then inched his way forward along the roof as the truck bore down at speed on the crew members being held at gunpoint by his companion.
Three more shots sounded out, fired directly down through the roof of the cab. Like a stricken fish, the truck went wild, veering all over the street and smashing into a succession of parked cars which gradually broke its headlong progress, albeit at considerable expense to the owners, few of whom have been able to get insurance for their vehicles from those tight-arsed sons of bitches in Milan who seem to regard Naples as some sort of war zone. The resulting series of violent impacts finally dislodged the gunman whose shots were responsible for all this damage. He landed on the roof of a pale blue Lancia, which buckled beneath his weight like silk sheets as the garbage truck roared away into the night.
If there had been anyone about in Via Bernini on the night in question, this is what they would have seen. And in fact lots of people were about. The only thing stronger than otnerta was curiosity, and the combination of shots, crashes, screams and sirens had been simply too much to resist. They craned out of windows and peered down from balconies and roofs. A few hardy souls even ventured tentatively forth from their doorways.
Catching sight of a man in uniform — a fireman visiting one of his mistresses, it emerged later — the gunman who had been covering the garbage crew pressed the pistol into his hands and told him to keep them covered until the police got there. The shrieks of the converging emergency vehicles were much closer now. The man ran across the street to his partner, who was sitting up on the roof of the Lancia like someone awakening after a heavy night.
'Oh, Gesua!' he shouted. 'The cops are almost here!
Let's go, for Christ's sake.' laportadell'inferno His first conscious thought was that this was definitely the worst hangover he had ever had, on a scale and of an intensity that he had not previously believed possible.
The smell, to take just one aspect of the prevailing vileness, was such as he had not experienced since the age of seven, when a combination of freak flood tides in the Venetian lagoon and a collapsed sewer had transformed the toilet in the Zen household into a seething cornucopia of filth, spewing forth the accumulated faecal products of the neighbourhood which cascaded down the staircase and into every corner of the living area. But even that memorable event was no more than a dress rehearsal in a provincial theatre compared with the world-class, stateof-the-art, no-expense-spared, cast-of-thousands-in-a football-stadium production currently being visited upon his nostrils.
Nor were the other senses neglected. His ears, in particular, were taking a battering on an unprecedented scale, rather as if he were trapped inside the electronically enhanced bass drum during the Grand Triumphal March from the aforementioned spectacular. This hypothesis would also have accounted for the darkness, which was total except for brief, jagged, laser-like beams which traversed his surroundings without illuminating them, as in some high-tech light show designed to keep the crowd amused until the star tenor finally came on to do 'Nessun dorma'. Was this another clue? Sleep, although devoutly to be wished, was certainly out of the question.
But none of this began to explain the agony in his skull, external as well as internal, or the smell of blood on his fingers when he worked them around, squirming in the glutinous mess pressing in on him from every side, to explore the sticky patch on the back of his head, still less the fact that everything was so violently jolting and swaying, or the acrid aftertaste of vomit which coated the membranes of his mouth.
The last thing he could remember was leaving Valeria's apartment after drinking a glass and a half of her cousin's cherry brandy made 'with fruit from his country estate'.
Christ almighty, what did he use for crop-spray? Cyanide?
Or was the problem with illegal additives in the alcohol, as with the tainted wine scandals that were such a regular feature of Italian life?
Or was the problem with him? Was he blocking out some truth too horrible for remembrance, some news unfit to be imprinted? Only a glass and a half! A likely story. He must have drained the entire bottle, and then raided the remaining stocks in the cupboard like those American sailors who had gone to mix drinks, pouring the stuff down his throat as though there were no tomorrow, or rather to obliterate the possibility of one.
Nevertheless, it had arrived, his tomorrow. And just when he had consoled himself in the traditional way that things could not get any worse, in the traditional way they did. Back in the distant past, maybe a couple of seconds earlier, it had seemed absolutely impossible to improve on what had gone before, yet it now turned out that there wasn't the slightest problem about this.
As with all good dramatic effects, things got better before they got worse. The appalling noise died away to
