become resident, and then got in touch with me out of the blue. I think he may have been a bit lonely. He invited me to come and stay, but I never got around to it. We were never close. As I said, it was a business relationship, while it lasted. But I was still shocked to read about what happened to him.’
Zen nodded and stood up.
‘So who do you think did it?’
Gilberto Nieddu shrugged.
‘Who knows? Nestore probably had other irons in the fire, stuff he hadn’t told me about. He claimed that he’d retired, which he could certainly have afforded to do, but men like that never really retire, any more than you or I ever will. Fine, everything’s perfect and life’s a bowl of cherries, but how are you going to get through the day? Nestore would have been wheeling and dealing within ten minutes of hitting the runway at Malpensa, and he wasn’t one to avoid risk. Rather the contrary, in fact. I can even imagine him courting it, particularly at his age. So I can only suppose that he got entangled with some real nasties, underestimated the threat and got rubbed out.’
Zen nodded neutrally but did not move.
‘That tattoo,’ he said.
‘What about it?’
‘You recognized it immediately, even from the unenhanced print.’
‘Back when he was working for me, Nestore used to wear short-sleeved shirts if the weather was warm. Showing off his biceps and chest hair, the macho look. The tattoo was very distinctive. I commented on it.’
‘Distinctive in what way?’
‘It was quite small and detailed.’
‘What did it show?’
‘A woman’s head.’
‘No script?’
‘No. Just the head, covered in hair in one of those ethnic styles. You know, sort of dreadlocks.’
‘Did you ask him what it signified?’
‘I can’t remember. No, wait a moment. I think he said it was something he’d had done while he was in the army. Some sort of fraternity for the junior officers. Anyway, I may be mistaken about the resemblance. Once the enhancement’s been done we’ll know for sure. They can do amazing things now, setting off one fragment against another in contrasting colours and so on. I should be able to send you something in the next couple of days, depending on how busy they are. Meanwhile, Ahmed will drive you wherever you want to go. For both our sakes, please keep the blinds closed until you are well clear of this area. You have your life, Aurelio, and I have mine. In either case, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.’
‘Is his name really Ahmed?’
‘Do you know, I’ve never asked.’
IX
Claudia called for the car at eleven. The sun had come out, and the air flowing in through the opened windows of the apartment seemed to be starting to warm up. Not actually hot, of course, not at this time of year, but still possible.
The traffic, on the other hand, was impossible, as usual. Where had all these people come from? What were they doing there? Where were they going, and why? There were just too many of them, that was the problem. Other people were like food or drink, or lovers for that matter. What you needed was ‘an adequate sufficiency’, as her father used to say. Anything more was not only superfluous, but potentially noxious.
When her parents were still alive, there had been no need for cars. They would just walk from their town house to Porta San Giorgio, take the chuffing train that went out into the Valpolicella and on to the shores of Lake Garda, and then alight in the straggly village where the villa stood almost opposite the station. But now the train had gone, like her parents, like the villa itself. Like Leonardo.
Lost in her memories, Claudia was a second or two late noticing that the traffic light had changed. Some sharply- dressed teenage whippersnapper promptly recalled her to her duties as a responsible road user with three aggressive blasts on the horn, and then, while she was still groping for the gear lever, cut in front of her with insolent ease, as if to say ‘Time to check into the nursing home, Grandma!’ Bastards. It wasn’t just that there were so many of them, and the majority so young and contemptuous, but that all sense of decorum had been lost. Everyone was out for what they could get, like a brood of contadini snatching the only drinking mug in the house from each other’s hands.
It suddenly occurred to her that the reason why she had such happy memories of the villa was that her parents had always seemed happy there. Well, one of the reasons. But perhaps that explained the Leonardo business as well. Like any child, she had desperately wanted her parents to be happy, but she didn’t know how to help them and they didn’t seem able to help themselves. Adults were supposed to know how to do things, but Claudia had realized very early on that her parents were utterly useless when it came to happiness. They didn’t have the first clue. Except at the villa. Which was presumably why, in her mind, it had become a magic place, with limitless and beneficent powers.
The vanished railway had run alongside the road, so once the gridlock of the city fell behind Claudia was able to follow her childhood journeys in her mind, marking the stops that the train had made and the things which had happened there. That was where the terrifying lady had complimented her on her gloves. One wore gloves then, of course. ‘ La contessa Ardigo,’ her mother had whispered, once the fearful apparition had alighted. And that other time, much later, in her teens, when a young contadino had taken something from his trousers and sprayed her with it like a water-pistol. It had smelt alkaline; strong, but not disgusting.
On this occasion her mother had made no comment, since the incident had happened while Claudia was standing alone on the vestibule at the rear of the train, admiring the view, and she hadn’t felt it necessary to share the experience with her parents. She was already aware that there were many matters in their own lives that they did not share with her, so she had just been returning the compliment really, proving what a well-brought-up young woman she was, thanks to their constant and ‘ruinously expensive’ — her father — provisions for her. There were certain things that a lady did not discuss, even with her parents.
Thirty minutes after leaving Verona, Claudia reached the outskirts of the village, now even more straggly than before. She turned right past a garish concrete block of apartments into what was still a country road, then left into the lane behind the former property and parked in the shadow of the high wall whose every stone had seemed to her, as a child, to be formed from the compacted essence of those blessed souls dwelling in paradise of which the priests spoke.
None of the new houses on the other side of the lane — infill from the boom years of the economic miracle that had given the Veneto a higher per capita GPA than Switzerland — showed any sign of life at all. It took her a tremendous effort to acknowledge that they were really there, let alone inhabited. In Claudia’s mind, that space would always be a bare upward slope of farmland lined with vines strung on wires.
She got out of the car and walked over to the green wooden door in the wall. All this stuff about her parents! She had made an agreement with herself not to think about that. And especially not about Leonardo or the later consequences. But it hadn’t seemed to work. Whatever one was not supposed to think about ended up occupying more brain room than the things you were supposed to think about. It was like a tax that had to be paid on oblivion. Sometimes she wondered if it was worth it.
She unlocked the garden door, went through and locked it behind her. Then, eyes closed, she turned around and leant back against its wooden boards. At least a minute passed before she opened her eyes again. It was all right. Everything was just as it ought to be, just as she had left it. The principal joy of the garden was that she had absolute control over it. So she did theoretically over the apartment in Verona, of course, but people came and went there, even if by invitation only, and left unmistakable traces of their presence behind. The garden was a pristine zone. No one ever came here except her. And Naldino, once. That had been only fair and natural. Here, after all, he had been conceived.
Her destination was to her left, but she didn’t glance that way, preferring as always to proceed by indirection. She walked along the gravel path winding beneath the tall sycamores and holm oaks, nodding in a familiar, slightly
