where he knew that Carla would be waiting for him. It was all very reassuring, like the rituals of the family he had never had.
When he and Carla emerged from the cafe, the sky above was delivering an impartial, implacable glare which merely hinted at the inferno to come later in the day, when every surface would add its note to the seamless cacophony of heat, radiating back the energy it had absorbed during hours of exposure to the midday sun.
A woman who looked about a hundred years old was roasting red and yellow peppers on a charcoal brazier, muttering some imprecation or curse to herself the while. Behind their wooden stalls drawn up in ranks in the square, under their faded acrylic parasols, traders with faces contorted into ritual masks either muttered a sales pitch in the form of a continual litany, as if reciting the Rosary, or barked their wares in harsh, rhetorical outbursts like the Messenger in some ancient play announcing a catastrophe unspeakable in normal language. This speech duly delivered, they surrendered the stage to one of their neighbours and reverted to being the unremarkable middle-aged men they were, gazing sadly at the goods whose praises they had just been singing, until the time came to don the tragic mask again and announce in a series of blood-curdling shrieks that plump young artichokes were to be had for seven hundred and fifty lire a kilo.
And not only artichokes. Just about every form of produce and merchandise known to man was on sale somewhere in the piazza, and those that were not on display — such as women, or AK-47S in their original packing cases — were available more discreetly in the surrounding streets. Zen and Carla walked through the meat section of the market, a shameless display which said, in effect, ‘These are dead animals. We raise them, we kill them, then we eat them. If they’re furry or have nice skin, we also wear them, but that’s at the other end of the piazza.’
And it was this end that they had now entered, away from the specialist sellers of olives and peppers, fennel and cauliflowers, tomatoes and lettuce. Here it was all clothing, household goods and general kitsch and bric-a- brac, and a significant number of the traders were illegal extracommunitari immigrants from Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. An understood and accepted form of racism was in force: the locals wouldn’t accept food from black hands, but they were perfectly happy to buy socks and tin-openers and screwdrivers from them, as long as the price was right.
‘What were you saying about the body in the train?’ asked Aurelio Zen as he and his companion passed the fringes of the market and emerged into the startlingly empty street beyond.
Carla glanced around before replying.
‘The buzz in the women’s toilet is that it wasn’t the Limina boy at all.’
They walked in silence until they came to Via Umberto, their traditional parting place.
‘Which judge is handling the case?’ asked Zen.
‘A woman called Nunziatella. First name Corinna.’
‘Do you know her?’
‘We’ve met a few times, and she seems to like me, but obviously I try to keep out of her way. A humble technician like me is not supposed to interfere with the work of the judges any more than is strictly necessary.’
Zen smiled, then kissed the woman briefly on both cheeks.
‘Buon lavoro, Carla.’
‘You too, Dad.’
Zen walked down Via Umberto to the corner, then turned into Via Etnea, the town’s main street. As he crossed, he glanced as always at the snow-capped mass of Etna to the right, looming up over the city like a nightmare acne pimple. After that, it was a short and pleasant walk along a hushed back-street to the little piazza where the Questura was situated.
With a nod to the armed guard in his bullet-proof booth at the door, Zen entered the building and went upstairs to his office: a cool, spacious room on the second floor of the elegant eighteenth-century palazzo, formerly a bank, which now housed the Catania police headquarters. Floor-length windows gave on to a balcony commanding a view of the street below. The walls were adorned with photographs of Carla Arduini and Signora Zen, as well as a framed poster entitled Venezia forma urbis, a large collage of aerial photographs forming a precise and evocative map of Zen’s native city.
He had never bothered to personalize his temporary quarters like this before, and if he had now, it was because he had reluctantly accepted that these were not temporary. On the contrary, Zen had every reason to suppose that he would be stuck in Catania for the rest of his career.
The proposition which had been made to him in Rome by the famous film director known as Giulio, prior to Zen’s visit to Piedmont, had turned out to be as false as it was flattering. Zen had been privately advised that an elite corps was being put together to smash the Mafia once and for all, and that following Zen’s ‘anti-terrorist triumph’ in Naples he had been chosen to join this select group, despite the notorious inconveniences and risks, occasionally fatal, of a posting to Sicily. The deal had been that in return for Zen’s assistance in the Aldo Vincenzo affair, Giulio’s contacts at the Interior Ministry would arrange for him to be sent not to one of the island’s hot spots but to an attractive backwater on the fringes of the real action. Syracuse had been mentioned as one possibility: a city ‘possessing all the charm and beauty of Sicily without being tiresomely Sicilian’, as Giulio had so invitingly put it.
Almost every aspect of this cover story had turned out to be untrue. For a start, the new ‘elite corps’ did not exist, or rather it existed already in the form of the Direzione Investigated Anti-Mafia, set up in 1995 by Judge Giovanni Falcone with the collaboration of the then Minister of Justice, Claudio Martelli. Aurelio Zen had not been invited to join this group, and not surprisingly, since it consisted of young, keen, energetic volunteers from the country’s three separate police forces. Nevertheless, he was being posted to Sicily, he had learned shortly after his return to Rome following the false close he had achieved in the Vincenzo affair. In what role, however, remained for the moment ambiguous.
‘Essentially, you’re to act as a facilitator,’ Zen’s immediate superior had told him before his departure from Rome. ‘Needless to say, the DIA are doing admirable work, on the whole. Nevertheless, there is a growing feeling abroad that, like every elite division, they sometimes exhibit a regrettable and perhaps potentially perilous tendency towards a… How shall I put it? A degree of professional myopia. There have been instances, some quite recently, when they have regretfully been perceived to be acting without due consultation, and in apparent ignorance of the wider issues involved.’
The official paused, awaiting Zen’s response. At length, realizing that it would not be forthcoming, he continued.
‘With the aforesaid factors in mind, a decision has been made at ministerial level to deploy a pool of mature and experienced officials such as yourself to liaise directly with members of the Polizia Statale seconded to the DIA. Your role will be firstly to report to us here at the Viminale on the nature and scope of DIA initiatives, both current and planned, secondly to monitor the response of all local personnel to ensuing governmental directives, and thirdly to communicate these in turn to Rome, all with a view to expediting an efficient and unproblematic implementation of official policy Do you understand?’
Zen understood only too well: he was being asked to act as a spy. The position of Head of Post in each DIA office was allocated in turn to a representative of one of the police forces involved, each responsible to a different ministry in Rome: Defence, Finance, or Interior. The novelty of the DIA was that it had been set up from the first as a cooperative venture involving all three forces, and had been specifically designed to function independently of any ministerial interference.
At the time, in the wake of the bloodbath initiated by the Corleone clan, and the killings of General Dalla Chiesa and the judges Falcone and Borsellino, it would have been politically unthinkable for any interested party to try to limit or control that independence. But times had changed. The Mafia had apparently been broken, with all but a few of its top capi jailed or in hiding, and there had been no large-scale outbreaks of violence for several years. Clearly someone in Rome, possibly several people, felt that the moment was now propitious to rein in this too- efficient and semi-autonomous organization. Even the public seemed to be starting to feel that enough was enough. Where would it all end? Were we to bring back the Inquisition?
It was in this new climate of covert consensus that Aurelio Zen had been sent south, and not to Syracuse but to Catania, the island’s second-largest city and a stronghold of various Mafia clans who had long resented the power, fame and influence of their rivals — and sometimes uneasy allies — in Palermo. The office of the DIA responsible for the provincia di Catania was presently commanded by a colonel of the paramilitary Carabinieri,
