‘But, I repeat, how could your son possibly have heard of Leonardo Ferrero, who died in an accident involving a military aircraft the year before he was born?’
He glared at her across the table, all charm now stripped away.
‘Unless of course Naldo really is your love child by Leonardo Ferrero, as he claims you told him. That would also explain your late husband’s animosity to him, assuming, as I think we may under the circumstances, that he had either found out or guessed the truth.’
Claudia scooped up her bag and got to her feet, saying something about needing to visit the washroom for a moment. She rounded the table, pushing against Zen’s back. A moment later she was through the door and running as fast as she could towards the ferry dock about thirty metres away. The boat was already alongside, the lines secure. She waved frantically, praying that the deckhand would see her and hold the gangplank long enough for her to board.
He did. She clomped breathlessly down the short flight of steps into the forward saloon and sank into one of the plastic upholstered seats. The boat’s engines revved up, then settled back into a steady purring rhythm for the ten-minute crossing to Paradiso, the southern district of Lugano where her hotel was located. She’d done it!
But so had he, she realized as a figure appeared at the far end of the empty saloon. For a moment she was terrified that he was going to come at her as Gaetano had when she’d confronted him with the truth about her pregnancy, slapping and punching her face and breasts and screaming ‘ Puttana! ’
Nothing like that. He just sat down opposite her, quite calmly, another passenger on his way back to Lugano. The deck¬ hand came round and clipped her return, sold Zen a single, and then went back to join his colleague in the wheelhouse, leaving them alone.
‘Did he have a tattoo?’
Say nothing.
‘The body they found, the one that your son is trying to reclaim, had a tattoo. A woman’s face.’
Say nothing.
‘So did Nestore Soldani, another of your husband’s “stable”. I spoke to his widow earlier this afternoon.’
‘His widow?’
‘Soldani, also known as Nestor Machado Solorzano, was murdered here a few days ago. Blown up in his car as he returned home to Campione after a meeting with a person or persons unknown.’
Claudia stood up. They were a good hundred metres off the eastern coast of the lake now, surely back in Swiss waters. She could finally allow herself to get angry.
‘I don’t want to listen to any more of this nonsense! I’ve had enough of all your tricks and teasing, understand? He fell down the stairs! That’s what happened and you have no proof to the contrary. He was a cripple by then, for God’s sake! He fell down the stairs. That was the conclusion arrived at by the investigating magistrate at the time and it’s never once been queried, not once in all these years. How dare you poke your nose in here now, in a foreign country where I’m on holiday, trying to find a little peace and happiness after so much pain, and bring up the whole horrible business again? How dare you? You have no standing here. The Swiss wouldn’t let you clean the toilets in their country!’
The ferry was approaching the dock. Claudia went up the staircase and out on deck. Zen followed, catching up with her as the ferry came alongside.
‘Signora…’ he began, but got no further.
‘Shut up! Leave me alone! You’re just a bully, like all policemen. Well, you don’t scare me, do you hear? I’ve lived my life, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Go to hell! Dio boia, Dio can, vaffanculo! You can’t do anything to me!’
The deckhand was watching them with alarm, trying to work out what was going on. It occurred to Claudia that she and Zen might well appear to him to be the two lovers she had fantasized about earlier, having a classic end-of-the-affair row. She strode down the gangplank and off under the trees. Zen made no attempt to follow, but his voice floated after her from the deck of the ferry which was already pushing off for its final run down to the city centre.
‘I’m not going to do anything to you.’
The words were reassuring, but there was a disquieting undercurrent to them. It took her a moment to work out what it was. ‘ Non ti faccio niente, io.’ He’d addressed her in the familiar form used only with family, close friends, inferiors and people you are condescending to. What a nerve! The emphatic personal pronoun at the end added another dimension to her unease. ‘I’m not going to do anything to you.’ So who was? Was he going to try and enlist the aid of the local police chief? The idea was ridiculous. The Swiss were fiercely independent and notoriously bureaucratic. This Zen would need every legal document under the sun, translated into three languages, before they’d even begin to consider arresting a foreign tourist happily spending her money and causing no disturbance whatsoever on their territory.
The clerk at the desk handed her her key with that exquisitely diffident yet friendly courtesy which all the staff seemed to possess as a birthright. Claudia was of course a regular, and a generous tipper. She could afford it. The extent of her fortune, once Gaetano’s will was read, had quite bewildered her. Where had all this money come from? Not from his salary as an army officer, that was for sure. She’d asked Danilo, who had muttered about it being one of those things — and how many there were in this life! — that was better not enquired into too deeply.
In her room, immaculately remade in her absence, she opened the windows and then the shutters on to the balcony overlooking the lake. Then she called room service. A plate of Scottish wild smoked salmon, a green salad and a bottle of champagne. A rich elderly widow’s sad supper. Well, so be it. She didn’t normally drink alone, despite Danilo’s snide comment, but tonight she felt like getting slightly tipsy. She deserved it, after what she’d just been through.
The fumes of the lake rose to meet her as she went out on to the balcony, like the bad smell of a goldfish bowl in urgent need of cleaning. Across the lake, the lights of the casino at Campione were reflected in the torpid water. What had this Zen meant about her husband being a gambler at games they didn’t play in the casino? Gaetano had never understood gambling, but she had understood it immediately. It brought meaning to your life, if only for a while and at a potentially high price. But there was no price too high to be paid for meaning, nothing that could replace it, nothing that could compare. What was money besides that infinite gift? And, money aside, it didn’t matter whether you won or you lost. Something had happened, your life had been structured for a few hours, you wept or you exulted. It was like sex. Yes, that was the only thing that could compare.
There was a discreet knock at the door and a waiter entered with a wheeled trolley bearing her meal. She tipped him lavishly and then, the moment he had left, tore into the salmon and open-throated the wine almost with desperation, like Leonardo making love shortly before he grew cold and dropped her, eager to get it over with before his appetite failed him.
When hers was sated, she surveyed the wreckage of the dinner tray. It had all been so clean and perfectly arranged, and she’d turned it into this mess. Still, it was another meal, she thought with a slight burp. And more meals tomorrow and the day after, and more burps. But no more gambling. No more illusions of meaning, however fleeting. She stepped back out on to the balcony with her glass and the bottle of champagne. Far below, the fan- shaped pattern of the paving stones seemed to beat gently, like wings. She was a little drunk, she realized. And she’d never had a head for heights. Unless that was precisely what she had had, and to excess.
From a room close by, the strains of a solo violin rose above the miasma of the lake, probably the soundtrack to a movie or TV programme that someone was watching. The encounter with that policeman seemed as distant as her childhood. She found herself muttering the German lullaby rhyme which her mother had used to send her to sleep. Her parents had met in the Alto Adige shortly before the war. Her mother spoke almost perfect Italian, but her native tongue was German. Claudia’s father, however, had forbidden the language to be spoken in the house. It had remained a secret between mother and daughter, and seemed all the more powerful and precious for that.
How did the rhyme go? Her mother had later claimed it was a poem by a famous writer, but she had always had intellectual pretensions, and the verses were too natural and artless ever to have been written down. Despite the innumerable times her mother had recited it to her, she could only now remember scattered phrases, and realized that she had no precise idea what they meant. ‘ Nun der Tag mich mud gemacht… wie ein mudes Kind… Stirn, vergiss du alles Denken…’ Something about children feeling tired at the close of day, and it being time to stop doing and thinking, time to let go.
