He could deal with it. Now what?
The answer was a scream. Well, no, not quite. A keening wail, more like. A lengthy, throaty squawk. It took Zen a long and very uncomfortable moment to match it tentatively in his auditory database with one of those scarily humanoid sounds that cats emit when involved in sexual or territorial disputes. In which case the eerie ululation he had heard earlier had presumably not been the echoes of the door squeaking, but the two mogs tuning up. He wondered idly how large the pets were around here. About the size of ocelots, to judge by the figures at the end of the room and the school desks which filled it.
Only they weren’t desks, he realized. His vision was slowly filling in all the time, like a computer downloading a complex graphic screen. He could now make out that the giants lounging against the end wall were in fact statues mounted on plinths. Between them, a broad staircase led up into gloom. On the side walls, the dark patches which he had taken to be windows revealed themselves to be a series of oil paintings. At which point the files of desks shamefacedly removed their carnival masks and were transformed into rows of display cabinets lit internally by a low-wattage bulb. He was in a museum.
A brief investigation confirmed this hypothesis. Beneath a thick layer of glass, each cabinet contained a selection of coins, jewellery, amulets and similar objects of antiquity, each identified by a label with a number and a description such as ‘Greek, late 2nd century BC(?)’. It was one of those provincial museums which are open to the public for a few inconvenient hours on various randomly chosen days every month, always assuming that Spada’s relative didn’t have something more important to do.
So now only the noises remained unexplained. They had diminished in volume, but were still there, troubling and exciting the silence like fingernails raked lightly across skin. His sight satisfied, Zen tuned in to his hearing. The sounds seemed to be coming from the end of the room, where the staircase led up, presumably to the next floor of the building. He walked cautiously down the aisle between the lit display cases and started up the steps at the far end.
They were handsome steps, broad and shallow and as solid as the rock from which they had been carved, flanked to either side by elaborate stone balustrades. It occurred to Zen that this must have been the original ground floor of the palazzo, before subsequent infill or volcanic activity had raised the street level. After a considerable fetch, the stairs reached a landing and doubled back the way they had come, giving access to a room of the same dimensions and much the same appearance as the one below, but with a much higher ceiling. This would have been the reception quarters of the original design, the piano nobile. All this was quite clear, because the lights were on.
A light, rather: a clear steady beam illuminating what looked at first sight like a sexual act involving two men. One was standing, his back to the stairs where Zen stood watching. From time to time his body jerked spasmodically, each spasm accompanied by a satisfied though effortful grunt. The other man, who was on his knees before the other, was meanwhile emitting a continuous series of weak mewling sounds which were, Zen now realized, the source of the noises he had heard earlier. It took him another moment or two to understand that the distended and discoloured features of the kneeling man were those of the man known as Spada, and that he was not engaged in fellatio but being strangled.
The light wavered to one side, revealing itself as the beam of a powerful torch concealed behind the wall to Zen’s right.
‘Come on, Alfredo!’ said a bored voice. ‘It’s done, for Christ’s sake. Let’s go.’
Zen pulled out Sinico’s revolver and loosed off a shot towards the ceiling.
‘Police!’ he yelled as the appalling reverberations died away. ‘Drop your weapons and lie down on the floor with your hands above your heads.’
The strangler released his victim and turned slowly to Zen with an imposing yet slightly incredulous look. A moment later a pistol appeared in his hand.
Zen would undoubtedly have died then and there if the late Signor Spada had not intervened, slumping forward into the back of the gunman’s knees and throwing him off balance. At such close range, even a marksman as out of practice as Zen could not miss. He fired once, hitting his opponent in the upper chest. The victim, as his status now was, absorbed the shot with an expression which mingled astonishment and resignation, as if he had always known that it would end like this but — stupidly, as he now realized — hadn’t expected it just yet. Then the light went out.
Dependent now upon his hearing alone, Zen found that sense perking up just as his sight had earlier. Most of the time, we were functionally deaf, he realized. What we thought of as silence was a constant substratum of noises mentally censored as being insignificant. He recalled a camping holiday up in the Dolomites, years ago, with a friend from university. There, by night, it had been utterly silent, and yet that silence had registered not as an absence but as a massive and disturbing presence. Now that his life was at stake and every sound significant, he found himself bombarded by a barrage of aural data, some potentially identifiable — traffic, televisions, voices in the street — but all previously classified as irrelevant and therefore inaudible. Within the room in front of him, there was that intimidating silence he had experienced in the Alps all those years ago.
Then, like some unidentified animal stumbling into that remembered campsite, came three distinct sounds: a click, a creak, and a loud metallic snap. They were related both by position and by distance, but above all by the concurrent appearance of a brilliant glow within the room. Unnerved, Zen fired blind. Immediately two other sounds joined the former intruders: a tinkle of glass and a raucous clanging with a whooping siren to back it up. He ran up the remaining steps, just in time to see a young man wearing a baseball cap sitting on the exterior ledge of one of the windows, which he had evidently opened along with its corresponding shutter. He was lit from behind by the streetlamp strung on a wire almost level with the window. His face was in shadow, but he turned briefly to Zen and seemed to pause for a moment, as if in recognition. Then he abruptly disappeared.
A dull thud and the sound of running footsteps told the rest of the tale. The narrator could still prove to be lethally unreliable, however, so Zen endured another minute or so of the hellish racket of the security alarm before he ventured out into the upper room. The torch used to illuminate the execution lay on the floor near the two bodies. Switching it on, Zen quickly ascertained that he was alone, and that both Spada and his killer were dead. Zen recognized the latter as one of the two ROS agents who, together with Baccio Sinico, had tried to take him into ‘protective custody’ earlier that evening. A quick search of his jacket turned up a wallet, which identified him as Alfredo Ferraro.
By now, the shrieks of the alarm system were intolerable. Looking around, Zen realized that it had been set off by the second shot that he had fired, which had apparently struck one of the display cases. Dipping his hand in amongst the priceless relics there, he selected an object at random and headed quickly back downstairs.
It was almost midnight when the surly staff of the ferry finally deigned to allow passengers to board. The blue and white hulk had been moored to the dock for over three hours by that time, at this latest stop on its leisurely and much-delayed passage from Naples to Tunis. Needless to say, no one had bothered to explain the reason for this further delay, still less to apologize. The employees of the Tirrenia ferry company had an attitude as charmless, peremptory and inflexible as tax inspectors or prison guards — or policemen, for that matter.
But why should they care? Their jobs were state-funded sinecures, hard to obtain but virtually impossible to lose. If the passengers had had any power and money, they would have gone by air. So if you were here, pacing up and down the dock at almost one in the morning at the mercy of a bunch of incompetent slackers like them, then you evidently had neither money nor power. In which case, who cared?
The passengers’ only consolation was that if they had to wait out in the open for hours on end, this was the perfect night for it; pleasantly cool, with an almost imperceptible onshore breeze scented with a subtle briny tang, an appetizer for the voyage to come. The scene would have been almost idyllic, in fact, if it hadn’t been for the banks of floodlights mounted on tall masts, mercilessly baring the concrete and steel austerities all around. And then, of course, there were the foreigners.
These last represented a majority of the thirty or so people waiting to board the ferry, but the noise they were creating made them seem even more numerous and obnoxious. They were all in their twenties, the sexes roughly evenly represented. The males were all wearing red T-shirts with the word ARSENAL printed in large white letters, while their mates were in various stages of undress, revealing large quantities of sunburned thigh, shoulder and midriff.
One of the men, who seemed to be in charge, to the extent that anyone was, sat at the bottom of the gangway perched on four cases of Peroni beer cans. From time to time he reached down and produced a fresh can
