Her visitor’s hand waved violently, as though of its own accord.
‘Oh, please, let’s drop the formalities! Call me Corinna. What a charming outfit! And how’s the work going?’
Her tone was friendly, but oddly tense. Carla Arduini pointed to the glowing computer screen.
‘I’m afraid it will take a little more time before the system is ready to be handed over. I apologize. I do realize how impatient you and your colleagues must be to start using it, but various problems have arisen…’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that!’ Corinna Nunziatella burst out emphatically ‘I don’t know about the others, but I for one am certainly in no hurry to start using these damn things. If they’d just give me more space and some secretarial help, I’d be perfectly happy to carry on the way we’ve always done. But for some reason the Ministry seems to feel that getting us all on-line is their top priority. We have to fill out a requisition form every time we need a box of paper-clips, but a billion-lire computer system? No problem there.’
Carla smiled politely and waited for her visitor to come to the point. As though sensing this, Corinna Nunziatella coughed awkwardly.
‘I don’t really have anything much to say,’ she said. ‘I just happened to be passing so I thought I would drop in and…’
She broke off.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Carla.
‘I suppose I was wondering how you were getting along here in Catania,’ the other woman went on in a controlled manic burble. ‘It must be lonely for you, being from the north and not knowing anyone here, not having any family, any girlfriends…’
‘Actually I do have family here,’ Carla replied, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers.
Corinna Nunziatella looked at her in astonishment.
‘You do? Who?’
‘My father. He works at the Questura. You may have heard of him. Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen.’
‘But surely he’s not Sicilian?’
Carla hooted with laughter.
‘God, no! He’s from Venice.’
Catching herself up, she put one hand over her mouth.
‘I’m so sorry, dottoressa. That must have sounded frightfully rude. I didn’t mean it that way, but…’
‘That’s all right,’ Corinna replied, a grim glitter in her eyes. ‘Bash the Sicilians as much you want. I do it all the time. Just don’t call me dottoressa again, or I’ll really get angry. I can’t help it, I’m a Virgo.’
Carla’s eyes opened wide.
‘Are you really? So am I!’
‘When’s your birthday?’
‘Well, actually it’s this weekend. On Saturday.’
Corinna Nunziatella appeared to reflect.
‘Congratulations. But in the meantime, what are you doing tonight?’
Carla was slightly taken aback by this abrupt question.
‘Er, well, I’m having dinner with my father. We rediscovered each other last year, in Piedmont,’ she went on impulsively ‘And I was just getting to know him when he got transferred down here.’
‘You were just getting to know your own father?’ asked Corinna Nunziatella incredulously.
‘It’s a long story.’
The older woman gave an ironic smile.
‘Well, if you’re in the mood for long stories about fathers, I’ve got one too.’
She checked her watch.
‘I must go. How about tomorrow night? I know a nice restaurant outside the city, up in the foothills of Etna. The food’s good, and the place itself is quiet and private. You don’t feel as if you’re on display all the time, if you know what I mean.’
‘Sounds wonderful. Where is it?’
Corinna shook her head.
‘I’m not allowed to reveal my plans in advance, even to girlfriends. If you give me your address, I’ll have my escort pick you up at nineteen minutes past seven tomorrow evening.’
Carla Arduini wrote down her address and handed it to her visitor, who tucked it away in the file she was carrying.
‘Seven nineteen exactly, then,’ Corinna said. ‘Be in the entrance hall of your building by seven fifteen, but don’t open the door.’
Carla gave her an amused look.
‘Very well, I’ll try not to peek.’
The judge sighed and nodded.
‘I’m so used to this by now that I’ve forgotten how insane it must seem to someone who leads a normal life. Anyway, that’s the way things are, I’m afraid. Bear with me, if you can.’
She opened the door, then looked back at Carla with an unexpected intensity.
‘Do you think you can?’ she asked.
‘Of course I can!’ Carla replied warmly. ‘On the contrary, it’s very kind of you to think of inviting me. I have been frightfully lonely here, to tell you the truth.’
Corinna Nunziatella nodded once and left. Carla resumed her scrutiny of the screen. So many people suddenly inviting her out. It was very welcome. Despite her reservations about her father, no doubt they would have a reasonably pleasant time, while the prospect of an evening out with the eminent Judge Corinna Nunziatella was even more intriguing. Frankly, her social life since arriving in Sicily had been a disaster. She knew no one, had not managed to make any friends, and there simply wasn’t much that a young single woman could safely or pleasantly do in Catania alone by night.
Carla tried to force her attention back to her work. Lithe and articulate, her fingers began to caress the keyboard, combing the deep subconscious of the CPU, which was already on-line, via a highly secure link, with similar networks in Palermo and Trapani. The machine’s log files, which record who accessed a system and when, could not be deleted, even by the system administrator. If someone had broken in or borrowed a key, they would have left indelible fingerprints. All she had to do was to find them.
At four o’clock, Aurelio Zen left the restaurant where he and Baccio Sinico had had a long, inconclusive lunch. At five, he went food shopping. By six he was back home. The apartment he had leased was reasonably priced and very conveniently situated, on the upper floor of a three-storey palazzo just a short walk from the Questura. After bruising experiences in other Italian cities, Zen had been pleasantly surprised by the ease with which he had found such suitable accommodation, thanks to a colleague who had phoned him at work and offered him a short-term let on a property owned by a friend.
True, the exterior of the building was unprepossessing, despite its classical proportions and the pilasters, cornices and moulding surrounding every door and window. Lack of maintenance, or heavy-handed application of same, together with layers of airborne pollution and memories of ancient and uneven coats of distemper, had created an oddly incongruous effect, like skin disease on a marble bust. Once through the door, however, everything was spick-and-span, in keeping with the aristocratic restraint and harmony displayed in every detail of the hallways, stairwells and rooms, so unlike the overbearing display of Rome or Naples. For Zen, it felt almost like being back in his native Venice.
The only real difference was the constant noise of traffic outside, a noise quite specific to Catania: the squelch of tires on the river-smooth blocks of lava with which the streets were paved, like the black, dead-straight canals in the northern reaches of Venice. Actually, his hypothetical daughter Carla Arduini had come up with a far more appropriate epithet: ‘the Turin of the south’. Both cities were symmetrical, rectilinear entities planned at royal command in a single style and constructed all of a piece in a relatively short space of time. In the case of Catania, the reason for this was evident at every street corner in the smouldering dome of Etna to the north. In 1669 the volcano had erupted, submerging the whole of the city beneath a lava flow which had only stopped when it reached the sea, cooling into the low, craggy, black cliffs which still formed the coastline. Twenty-four years later, one of the devastating earthquakes for which the region had been notorious since antiquity demolished almost all the city’s
