retired to a cafe opposite the station until it was time to board the last train of the day on the branch line north, one of the first ever constructed through the Apennine barrier and now hardly used for passenger traffic.
XI
The weight-and-pendulum clock in its tall, coffin-shaped case at the far end of the cavernous space marked the time as seventeen minutes past ten. The taxi driver had made it very clear that he would remain on call no later than eleven.
No lights were to be seen through the miserly windows, and those inside consisted of low-wattage bulbs as yellow as old newsprint. The room was so cold that the breath of both men was visible. A bone-chilling north- easterly outside alternately scuttered and slashed at the building, raising weird moans and wails punctuated by the death-watch beetle sounds of the clock. Zen leaned forward across the bare refectory table, his fingers interlaced.
‘I repeat, Signor Ferrero, the only real chance you have of finding out what happened to your father is through me.’
‘Which father?’
In other circumstances, Zen might have suspected an attempted joke, but he had already established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the other man had absolutely no sense of humour.
‘The one whose name you bear and of whose remains you are presently attempting to claim custody. I am prepared to assist you in that attempt, to the limits of my ability, in return for your full cooperation.’
Naldo Ferrero stared at him with open hostility.
‘What business is that of yours?’
Zen did not reply. Having had his ear talked off for the best part of an hour about the evils of globalization, the birth of the ‘Slow Food’ movement, and the need for a new rural economy based on sustainable organic farming practices, he was pretty sure that Naldo wouldn’t be able to tolerate silence for very long.
‘I don’t need to do any deals with the police,’ Ferrero retorted. ‘My judicial application is perfectly in order, and my claim can be proven by DNA testing. Besides, since when have you people been so caring?’
Zen made the mistake of smiling ironically.
‘It’s all part of the reforms of the new administration. We’re here to serve the public.’
The other man’s face became even tighter and darker.
‘So! You permit yourself to joke about it now, do you? On balance, I think I preferred the old naked face of power to this new mask, Dottor Zen.’
‘Me too, but for some reason they didn’t see fit to consult us. Now then, do you want to play cards or do you want to piss around?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘A Venetian saying. God is getting beaten at a game of scopa with Saint Peter, so He performs a quick miracle that changes the cards so that Peter is left holding a losing hand. My question to you was the apostle’s response.’
Ferrero gazed blankly back at him. The poor man had no idea how to deal with either silence or humour. An earnest garrulousness was his only means of confronting the world.
‘I’ve already told you everything I know,’ he declared stolidly.
‘All right, let’s try and separate the wheat from the chaff and summarize what you have told me, omitting any reference to agriculture, foodstuffs and grass-roots movements dedicated to putting the “commune” back into “Communist”.’
Zen consulted the notebook lying open on the table between them.
‘You learned of the discovery of an unidentified body in a system of abandoned military tunnels from the television news. Your mother, Claudia Comai, resident in Verona, had already informed you, following the death of her husband Gaetano, that your biological father had in fact been one Leonardo Ferrero, who had died before your birth in a plane crash over the Adriatic. She now phones to say that the body that has turned up in the Dolomites is his and instructs you to make a formal application to take possession of it.’
‘Those are the facts.’
‘Very well, but let’s try and put a little flesh on them, shall we? And may I remind you once more that you are not under oath and will not be required to sign a written statement on this occasion. That will of course change if I suspect that you are attempting to conceal anything or to protect anyone.’
A particularly violent gust of wind hacked at the house like an axe. The still, stale air inside seemed to vibrate under its assault.
‘I have nothing to hide,’ Naldo Ferrero stated truculently.
‘That’s as may be. But your mother certainly does.’
‘Leave my mother out of this!’
‘I’m afraid that’s not possible, assuming that she told you the truth. Did you believe her?’
‘Why would she make up a story like that?’
‘Well, it would be easy to suggest a number of reasons. Let’s assume that she’d had an affair with this Ferrero, had been genuinely in love with him, and that he’d broken off with her and then died. She might have tried to convince herself that you were his son so that something of him would remain.’
‘My mother’s not crazy!’
‘All right, let’s assume that her version of events is true. We know that Leonardo Ferrero died in a plane crash. How sane is it, after all these years, for her to tell you to make a claim for an unidentified body discovered deep underground on the basis that it is his?’
Ferrero got to his feet.
‘Do you think I give a damn either way?’ he shouted. ‘I never even met the man.’
‘You changed your name from Comai to Ferrero,’ Zen reminded him.
‘That was to please my mother! Everything I’ve ever done has been to please her. She asked me to contact the authorities in Bolzano and I did so. When I told her the result, she asked me to make a judicial application, and that’s what I’m in the process of doing. She’s my mother and I love her. This business obviously means a lot to her for one reason or another, so I’m playing my part and doing as she wishes. Personally, I couldn’t give a damn who my father is.’
He strode away and disappeared round the corner of the bar. Zen lit a cigarette and looked around. Il Ristorante La Stalla was closed for the season, but even at the height of summer it was hard to imagine such an isolated venue packed out with the boisterous crowd of noisily relaxed hedonists that would be needed to make sense of what looked like, and almost certainly was, a converted barn.
Indeed, the whole establishment had an indefinable air of failure about it, of having been bypassed by more recent developments to which it had been either unable or unwilling to adapt. Naldo had explained that it had been set up back in the eighties on communal lines, with money from a trendy left-wing film director who had installed his son here and set him up as a chef in an attempt to wean him off heroin. The cure had apparently worked only too well, for the son had subsequently left and opened a restaurant down on the coast near Ancona, a move which had been regarded as rank betrayal by the rest of the collective. To abandon their idealistic pro¬ ject up here in a remote location of the Apennine foothills — only accessible by a long unpaved track off a very minor road near a village that hadn’t been marked on the map consulted by Zen’s taxi driver — and then set up his own non-non-profit business in a hideous glass and stainless steel box right at the heart of the shameless consumerist hell down by the beach. And making a fortune at it too! Five months’ work a year and then off to Mauritius or Thailand for the winter. It was sickening, just sickening.
There had apparently been some other defections at about the same time, possibly connected to the fact that the film director’s subsidy also abruptly dried up, so when Naldo appeared he had been warmly welcomed. The ethos of the commune dictated that all work on the farm and in the restaurant must be done ‘authentically’, meaning either by hand or with the most primitive and basic equipment such as would have been used by the share-cropping family who had once lived there. It must have been easy for the remaining pioneers to see the point of having an extra set of keen, youthful muscles about the place.
