articulate, professorial delivery and cuddly teddy-bear physique made it easy to understand the popularity he had once enjoyed in left- wing circles.
‘Let me outline the basic facts. A body has been discovered. It is as yet officially unidentified, but an individual has come forward and asserted that the dead man is one Leonardo Ferrero. I have been assigned to make preliminary enquiries. In the course of these, your name emerged as someone who had known this Ferrero.’
He had actually been on the phone to the editorial offices of L’Unita and to the Questura in Milan for the best part of an hour from his hotel room in Lugano before identifying the correct name and full address of the journalist that Marta had remembered as either Brandoni or Brandini. A call to the Ministry would have cut the time to a few minutes, but the risk of his whereabouts being traced and reported was too great.
Luca Brandelli looked at Zen in some wonderment.
‘Leonardo Ferrero, eh? Now there’s a name I never expected to hear again.’
‘You knew him, then?’
Brandelli made a qualifying gesture.
‘We met. Once. Long ago.’
‘Under what circumstances?’
‘One moment. Are you asking me to identify the body?’
Zen paused a moment, then shrugged.
‘Why not? It can’t hurt.’
He took an envelope from his coat pocket and passed over the photographs taken by the Austrian caver who had descended into the blast pit. Brandelli looked through them and frowned.
‘Where are these?’
‘Photographs of the body in situ at the place where it was found. They’re not terribly clear, I’m afraid, and the face is not visible. Not that there was much left of it, according to the hospital in Bolzano.’
‘Bolzano?’
‘Where the corpse was taken. It was discovered in an abandoned military tunnel in the Dolomites. You may have heard about it on the news, although the story seems to have died now. Or been killed.’
Brandelli handed the photographs back.
‘This makes no sense whatever,’ he said with finality. ‘To the best of my knowledge, Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero died when a military plane carrying him to Trieste exploded over the Adriatic.’
Zen nodded.
‘According to the official records, Ferrero indeed died in a plane accident.’
‘Well, I don’t necessarily believe that it was an accident, but that’s another matter.’
‘Nevertheless, an individual with a purely personal interest in the matter and no political axe to grind has asserted that the body recently discovered under the circumstances I mentioned is that of Lieutenant Ferrero. The Dolomites are a long way from the Adriatic, and the body was discovered about two hundred metres underground.’
‘So, he’s wrong. Or crazy. An attention seeker. What proof does he offer?’
‘He says that he’s a blood relative of Ferrero and that DNA tests would validate his claims.’
‘Then do them.’
Zen replaced his cup on its saucer and leaned back into the sofa, which immediately tried to swallow him. He pulled himself out of its maw and perched on the edge.
‘Unfortunately that’s not possible. About a week ago, the carabinieri raided the hospital in Bolzano at four in the morning and removed the corpse and all records of the preliminary post-mortem examination to an unknown destination. The Ministry of Defence is saying that the victim was a soldier who died in the course of an exercise testing a new nerve gas and that for safety reasons the cadaver was abandoned and the site sealed with explosives. Only it wasn’t sealed. Some cavers found their way in there, and I returned with one of them and inspected the area for myself. In short, this business has all the air of being a cover-up for yet another of our little Italian mysteries. I was wondering whether you could shed any light on it.’
Zen rearranged himself on the edge of the sofa in an attempt to find a more comfortable position. There was an ashtray on the glass-and-steel coffee table. He took out his cigarettes and made an interrogative gesture. His host’s right hand eloquently indicated that there had been no need to ask.
‘Well, it was all a long time ago…’
‘That’s what everyone keeps telling me.’
Brandelli got to his feet.
‘I was about to add, so I’d better go and retrieve my dossier on the subject.’
He was back in less than a minute, holding a very slim buffcoloured file.
‘The police raid I mentioned earlier did not come as a complete surprise,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘I had therefore taken the precaution of moving some of the most sensitive material to a bank safety-deposit box.’
Zen finished his cigarette and stubbed it out while Brandelli quickly skimmed the contents of the file.
‘Right!’ the journalist said. ‘My mind is duly refreshed and I will give you a brief guided tour of the salient facts. Off the record, of course, bearing in mind the lack of a search warrant.’
‘That’s fine. I’m operating off the record myself.’
‘Interesting. I’ve known the police do that on numerous occasions, needless to say, but they’ve never tried to enlist my help before. In fact they invariably treated me as an enemy.’
Zen nodded. ‘Times change,’ he said. ‘In this case, it’s quite possible that our interests may ultimately coincide.’
Brandelli poured them both more tea.
‘You astonish me, dottore. And at my age it’s very unusual to be astonished. Anyway, here we go. The year was 1973. I then worked for L’Unita and had already developed something of a reputation for investigative journalism thanks to various pieces which had won me the highest award in the profession, namely a number of death threats. One day I received yet another anonymous phone message. This time the caller claimed to have information to pass on regarding an affair of the highest national importance and wanted to arrange a suitable place and time for us to meet. It had to be in Verona, at the weekend and in the evening. He was very insistent about that.’
‘And you assumed that this was the set-up for an actual assassination, as opposed to the usual string of vague menaces and veiled threats.’
‘Precisely. Verona was a notorious hotbed of neo-Fascism at the time, and indeed since, so my only surprise was that the hit-man or his employers hadn’t realized this. Nevertheless, I couldn’t risk turning the caller down out of hand and possibly losing a scoop, so I set up an assignation at a pizzeria in Piazza Bra. I did not of course go there myself, but I enlisted the help of some of the Veronese compagni to keep an eye on the venue and let me know what happened. They reported that a young man had duly shown up at the agreed time. He had looked extremely nervous and preoccupied, had waited for about half an hour, looking up whenever anyone entered. When he left, a team of them followed discreetly. His destination turned out to be a local army barracks.’
Zen put down his tea cup and lit another cigarette.
‘At which point you were no doubt reminded of the method they use to catch man-killing tigers in India,’ he said. ‘They tether a goat to a stake, and then when the tiger comes to eat the goat, the hunters emerge from the undergrowth and shoot it.’
Brandelli beamed.
‘Our minds obviously work along similar lines, Dottor Zen. My contact was the goat, I was the tiger, and since I had not taken the bait that evening the hunters had not shown themselves. But a few days later the man called again. I apologized for having missed our first appointment and we made another. It was a matter of the greatest urgency, he said, a vital and shocking disclosure that would horrify the public.’
Brandelli shrugged.
‘There was still a risk, of course, but the man’s tone of voice convinced me that he was either a trained actor or telling the truth. Besides, risk is part and parcel of the trade that I had chosen. At any event, we met. And the first thing he said, once we had exchanged the agreed code words, was that he was an army officer acting under orders.’
Zen looked up sharply.
