‘I always broke even.’
‘And your husband?’
Claudia was starting to feel relaxed in this man’s company. She decided to paint a romantic, glamorous and slightly mysterious picture of her marriage, even though the reality had been rather different. Intrigue him.
‘Oh, he was much more successful than me. He used to bring back suitcases full of money.’
‘Did he have a system? I’ve always wanted to hear of a really good one.’
‘No, no. He wasn’t a gambler. He came here to see his bankers.’
‘There are no banks in Campione.’
‘Well, that’s what he told me.’
Zen nodded. ‘So perhaps he was a gambler after all, but at games they don’t play in the casino.’
Claudia was confused by this response, but Zen immediately changed the subject and proceeded to ask her a series of ‘questions expecting the answer Yes’. This was a phrase she remembered from school, and a technique she remembered from a rather more recent era. Get them used to saying yes and they’ll find it harder to say no when the time comes. But what did this Zen want her to say yes to? Dinner here or back in Lugano? Followed by a nocturnal visit to the rooms upstairs at the casino dedicated to roulette, chemin de fer, vingt-et-un and other giochi francesi? Followed by what? Giochi francesi?
In the end, it all proved to be rather different from what she had imagined.
‘Perhaps I’d better lay my cards on the table,’ Zen told her, producing a plastic rectangle from his wallet. ‘Or rather my card.’
Polizia di Stato, she read.
So she had been conned, after all. And he would take her for everything she was worth, she knew that. He would destroy her. Despite her efforts to forget, some part of her had been expecting this moment for the past fifteen years. Now it had come, but she was no readier to cope with it.
‘How did you find me?’ she asked, stalling for time.
Zen was obviously still trying the charm, because he smiled.
‘I went to see your son, signora. Naldo Ferrero. I visited him last night at that rustic restaurant in the Marche. He told me that you were staying in Lugano. I enquired at various hotels until I found the one at which you are registered. The desk clerk told me that you had gone to Campione for the day. One of the staff at the casino then identified you.’
Despite the fact that the money and the number plates were Swiss, Campione was part of Italy, she reminded herself. This man could arrest her here, but on the other side of the lake he would have no such power. She furtively consulted her watch. The next ferry was due in less than ten minutes.
‘It’s about the circumstances surrounding the death,’ Zen continued. ‘And, of course, the identity of Naldo’s father.’
The time to move had not yet come. Absolute stillness was demanded now.
‘I made my statement to the police at the time,’ she replied, as though he were an impertinent journalist and she a star caught in an indiscretion. ‘They questioned me on several occasions and I said everything I have to say then, while it was all fresh in my mind. The report must still be on file somewhere. I really don’t know what you expect me to add now.’
It was a bold sally, but it apparently worked. This Zen suddenly looked discomfited, ill at ease. She glanced at her watch again, then out of the window at the darkening lake.
‘Naldo Ferrero told me that he was your natural son by Leonardo Ferrero, and that you had encouraged him to apply for legal custody of a body recently discovered in the Dolomites on the grounds that it is that of his father.’
For a moment, Claudia herself felt thoroughly confused. Don’t try and work out his strategy, she told herself. Boldness had worked once. Maybe it would work again.
‘That’s absurd!’
She sighed and made a gesture indicating how painful it was for her to admit this.
‘The fact is, Naldo is something of a fantasist. He always was as a child, but that’s natural enough. Now, though… My husband, Gaetano, was a hard man in many ways. The barracks and the home were all one to him. Orders were orders, and the slightest disobedience was punished. Naldino took after my side of the family rather than his, which of course made matters worse for both of them. As Gaetano became more intransigent and repressive, his son grew ever more rebellious. And this was an era when rebellion was in the air, remember. Anyway, after Gaetano died in that unfortunate accident, Naldino somehow convinced himself that he was not his son at all, that his real father had been someone quite different. He even changed his name, as though to try and prove it. It’s quite a common psychological phenomenon. I believe there’s even a word for it, although it escapes me at the moment.’
Zen nodded sympathetically.
‘But how could he have known which name to change his to? Where could he have got the idea that his real father was someone who died before he had been born? Someone he had never met or even heard of?’
This was a more difficult question, and one that she hadn’t had to face during her earlier questioning.
‘Oh, he’d heard of Leonardo,’ she found herself replying.
‘How?’
‘From friends.’
‘Friends of his?’
‘No, no. Friends of ours.’
‘Of you and Leonardo?’
‘Of me and my husband, of course.’
Zen took out a packet of cigarettes and offered them to her. Claudia shook her head.
‘May I?’ he asked.
She nodded distractedly. When was the ferry? There was something in the man’s polite manners, long silences and seemingly ingenuous questions that made her absolutely certain that he already knew all the answers and was merely toying with her to see what more he could get her to admit to before his final lethal pounce. Had he found The Book? She’d been a fool to keep it, but it had never occurred to her that anyone would take any interest in events which now seemed, even to her, like ancient history.
‘I’m sorry, signora, I don’t quite understand. Your son was born in 1974, correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘While your husband died in 1987?’
She nodded.
‘So Naldo was thirteen at the time of his death.’
Suddenly she saw her way clear.
‘Yes. A very delicate age, very difficult. Which is probably why he came to terms with the tragedy by denying that he had ever been his father in the first place.’
Zen’s brow remained comically furrowed.
‘But, I repeat, why choose as his surrogate father someone who was also dead, and had been from shortly before his own birth?’
Claudia made a large gesture.
‘Well, one would have to be some sort of Freudian doctor to explain that! All I know is that he decided at a certain point that his biological father, as they say these days, was a young man who formed part of what we jokingly called the ‘stable’, the group of junior officers that Gaetano had assembled around him in the regiment, and who all came quite frequently to our house.’
‘That group included Leonardo Ferrero?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Nestore Soldani?’
She looked at him in surprise.
‘Yes, him too.’
‘Who else?’
‘I can’t remember all their names. It’s so long ago.’
A tiny white speck in the gloaming announced the imminent arrival of the ferry.
