section of the room, listening intently. The young man could be heard talking in a deliberately low voice.
‘And I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you,’ she said to Zen, coming back again.
Zen nodded and stood up.
‘What about your husband?’ he asked.
Paola Passarini looked startled.
‘My husband? What does he have to do with it?’
‘I thought that perhaps he might have some idea where your brother is.’
‘Well, by all means feel free to ask him.’
Her look was by now so intense that he finally understood.
‘I’m sorry, I meant…’
He gestured with his head towards the sound of the low voice mumbling away.
‘That’s my son, Siro,’ was the reply.
‘I see.’
‘He writes code.’
‘Code?’
‘For computers. He submits all his work online, so there’s no need to go in to the office every day. And he helps me out with the housekeeping bills. This arrangement makes sense for both of us.’
There was an aggressive quality to her declaration that merely served to undermine it. She’d married young, Zen guessed, quite possibly following a pregnancy intended, like her brother’s volunteering for the army, to make a point. But the marriage had been a failure and now she was holding on desperately to the one remaining man in her life, lest she be left all alone. He felt sorry for Paola Passarini, but there was also something unwholesome about her, like fruit picked green that rots before it ripens.
‘Thank you for your time, signora, and please excuse the disturbance.’
A door slammed and the young man strode back into the living area.
‘I’m going out for a while with Costanzo, Mamma.’
‘When will you be back?’
‘Don’t know. I may spend the night at his place.’
‘Well, be sure to phone and tell me. You know how I worry otherwise.’
In the end, the two men left the apartment almost at the same time, with the result that they found themselves waiting for the lift together. The resulting awkward silence was broken by Siro.
‘I think I know where my uncle might be.’
Zen, whose only thoughts had been about where he was going to spend the night, looked at him in astonishment, but Siro didn’t volunteer anything more.
Outside, the fog was thicker than ever. To Zen, it came as a merciful pall blanking out the horrors of the neighbourhood. Having grown up in Venice, it was hard for him to adjust to most other urban landscapes, let alone this psychotic collage of concrete brutalities unmitigated by any sense of order, never mind beauty. The young man pointed up the street, where a neon light blossomed in the plump miasma.
‘That’s where I’m meeting my friend. Come along and I’ll tell you my idea.’
They walked the twenty metres or so to a bleak cafe set back in the facia of the apartment block. It was empty, and the barman looked as though he had been about to close. A game show blared from the television suspended from a pivot above the bar. Zen ordered a coffee, Siro a Coke.
‘It was after the other guy left that it came to me,’ he said.
‘The carabinieri officer who came yesterday?’
‘If that’s what he was.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Mamma was in the bathroom when the doorbell rang, so I answered it. He introduced himself as being from the carabinieri. I asked to see his ID and he had a card to back him up. But in the window on the opposite side of his wallet was another card identifying him, under a different name, as a member of the military secret service. I read it upside down.’
Zen looked into the young man’s eyes for a very long time.
‘You don’t miss much,’ he said at last.
Siro shrugged.
‘Maybe that’s why I ended up writing computer programs. It’s all a matter of detail. I’m good at that, it seems.’
He shot Zen an incisive glance.
‘You didn’t know that the secret police were hunting for my uncle?’
‘I certainly hadn’t been informed,’ Zen replied evenly. ‘And SISMI is not noted for collaborating with other agencies. But there are often parallel investigations in progress. The right hand frequently doesn’t know what the left is doing.’
Siro seemed tempted for a moment to make a witty remark, perhaps of a political nature, but thought better of it.
‘What did he look like?’ asked Zen.
Siro shrugged.
‘A thug, basically. Broken nose, shaven head, workout shoulders. Gave me the creeps, to be honest. He kept asking Mamma about some “place in the country”. She told him that Gabriele doesn’t own any property other than his apartment in Milan. But that started me thinking. It was only when you showed up that I realized I had known the answer to his question all along.’
Zen finished his coffee and ordered them both another round.
‘It appears that your uncle may be a crucial witness in a very complex case that we are investigating,’ he said. ‘We naturally want to interview him as soon as possible, but to be frank we are also concerned about his safety.’
‘You think he may be in danger?’
‘I’m convinced of it.’
‘And the secret service? Are they part of the protection or part of the threat?’
Zen stared at the floor without answering for a very long time.
‘I don’t know the answer to that,’ he said at last.
Siro nodded.
‘It’s just that I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to Uncle Gabriele. I don’t see much of him these days, but he was always very kind to me when I was young. And my idea may be nonsense. But I don’t want to betray him if he doesn’t want to be found.’
Zen grasped the young man’s arm urgently.
‘If the servizi are after him, he will be found whether he wants it or not. So that’s no longer an issue. The only question is who gets there first. Would you rather it was them or me?’
Siro gulped down some more Coke.
‘In the past, Mamma’s family were landowners,’ he said. ‘It all started about a hundred and fifty years ago, when they got wealthy from a brickworks they owned here in Milan. They bought an agricultural estate in the country with the profits, and added to it over the years. And a century later, when Gabriele was a boy, that’s where the family used to spend the summer months. My grandfather finally sold the property in the late sixties. It had been operating at a loss for some time. The contadini were all moving here and finding jobs in construction or factories, and the ones that were left were demanding higher wages and better conditions. That era was over. So he sold up, but the buildings remained. They were of no use for modern mechanized farming, but would have been far too expensive to demolish.’
‘You see them all over the Po valley,’ Zen commented, ‘but I’ve never been inside one.’
‘I have. My uncle took me there on a day trip from Milan. I must have been eight or nine at the time. To be honest, I could¬ n’t understand why he’d bothered. Just this huge expanse of fields, flat as a pancake, and drainage ditches and irrigation canals and rows of trees, and then the cascina itself, which was already falling into ruin. All I understood at the time was that this was tremendously important to him, and because I wanted to please him I pretended to be interested as he showed me around the stables and the byre, the hayloft, the threshing floor and all the rest of it. The light, he kept saying, that pearly quality you only get here in the Valpadana. And then he
