showed me the little room he’d used when he was a child, up in the old dovecote above the family house, with all his books and a view for miles. “That was the only time in my life when I’ve been truly happy,” he told me. And I believed him, even though to me it was just a broken-down stinking ruin.’
Aman dressed in jeans and a leather jacket opened the door.
‘ Ciao, Siro!’ he called over. ‘Sorry about the delay, but this fog…’
Siro gestured to Costanzo to wait.
‘You think he’s there now?’ Zen asked.
‘He might be. He would feel safe there, I know that.’
‘And where is it?’
‘Ah, that I can’t tell you. We arrived at some small local railway station, I’ve forgotten the name, then cycled along these flat country roads for what seemed like hours. Somewhere north of Cremona, I think. And now I must go.’
The two young men left. The barman reached for the remote control to turn off the television.
‘Wait!’ Zen told him.
The television game show had given way to the news while he and Siro had been talking. The presenter was now running through the minor items at the end of the bulletin, the sweepings from the day’s events. It was the video of the hotel that had attracted Zen’s attention. An expressionless voice-over explained that a female Italian tourist had fallen to her death from the balcony of her room in Lugano. The Swiss police were treating it as an accident. Her name had been given as Claudia Giovanna Comai, a former resident of Verona.
‘Call me a taxi,’ Zen told the barman abruptly.
‘Where to?’
‘The station.’
The barman shrugged.
‘Frankly, with the weather like this it would be quicker to walk.’
Zen did exactly that. From Porta Garibaldi he took the metropolitana to the Central Station, where he caught the last train to Verona with twenty minutes to spare.
XVI
The worst part was having to take the underground. There was something aggressively demotic about this system of transportation that never failed to remind Alberto of everything that was wrong with the country. From the security point of view, however, it had the virtue of near-total anonymity.
Lepanto, his local station was called, after the street where the station was situated. Below ground, next to the tracks, the walls were plastered with huge advertisements in French informing the hordes of blacks pouring in from North Africa how they could telegraph the money they made illegally in Italy back to their starving broods in the desert, so that they too could hire a scafista to smuggle them in to pillage the wealth of Europe.
The platforms were packed with jostling, raucous, overexcited students from the high school on Viale delle Milizie. How many of them had the slightest clue what Lepanto signified? The seventh of October 1571. The decisive naval victory of Christianity over Islam, settling that matter for another four centuries. News as up-to-date as today’s headlines, but where were the Sebastiano Veniers and the Augustino Barbarigos of today? Cervantes had served among the Spanish forces during that encounter, and had sustained injuries that had permanently maimed his left hand, but he counted Lepanto ever afterwards as the most glorious day in his life, beside which the composition of Don Quixote was a mere bagatelle.
The letter from Gabriele had arrived two days earlier. Alberto had at once forwarded the envelope, though not of course the contents, to the service’s Scientifica unit. Their forensic experts had found minute traces of corn, fertilizer, mould and birdshit. An agricultural location was evidently indicated, but that and the Crema postmark was all there was to go on. However a little discreet research in the provincial land registry office had revealed that the Passarini family once owned an agricultural estate in the Valpadana. Cazzola, who had already interviewed Gabriele’s sister Paola without result, had been dispatched there on Friday to do some preliminary investigation. His call had arrived that morning.
‘I’ve visited the property, capo. I took some photographs and I’ve got a full description, but in accordance with your orders I didn’t investigate further.’
‘Very good. How soon can you get back to Rome?’
‘In a few hours. By this afternoon at the latest.’
‘We need to meet in person so that I can fully debrief you. Location seven, time D.’
‘ D’accordo, capo.’
The orange train finally disgorged itself from the tunnel, almost unrecognizable beneath the graffiti that obliterated even the windows, huge curvy garish crazed capital letters spelling God knew what, but certainly nothing sane or good. As if that wasn’t enough, at the Spagna stop the carriage was invaded by a mob of Veronese football hooligans who packed the space, drinking limoncello out of a communal bottle, smoking in open defiance of the law, and screaming ‘ Roma, Roma, vaffanculo! ’ in an obscene, pagan chant. Alberto was dearly tempted to take out one of his numerous false IDs and arrest the lot of them on the spot, but of course that was impossible under the rules of engagement.
In the event, the soccer fans got off two stations later at Termini, presumably to catch a train back north. Unfortunate¬ ly the few ordinary solid Italians who had been aboard also left, to be replaced by a mob of blacks and gypsies and asylum seekers who had been begging, picking pockets and selling counterfeit junk outside the main railway station all day, and were now going home to their illegal squatter camps on the fringes of the city. With a slight chill, Alberto suddenly realized that he was the only Italian in the carriage.
Nothing happened. If anything the atmosphere grew warmer and more relaxed as the stations ticked away. All the foreigners were chatting away to each other, laughing and telling stories in their barbaric tongues. Alberto was hesitant to admit it to himself, but what it felt like, to be perfectly honest, was something very similar to the society in which he had grown up back in the fifties. Here too there was that sense of community and of shared experience that had all but vanished from the peninsula during his lifetime. He could of course never feel at home with these people, but they seemed to feel at home with each other, each in his own clan with its own language and traditions. What did the Italy of today have to offer in return? That pack of drunken football yobs, or a bunch of flashy yuppies with one spoilt designer child in tow like a pedigree dog. We’ve lost something, he thought. We’re stronger in lots of small ways, but they’re stronger in one big way.
Nevertheless he did not relax his guard. When he left the train at Cinecitta, one stop before the terminus, a group of four Moroccans or Senegalese followed him up the escalator. They were intensely black, all dressed in loose, brightly patterned cotton robes, their skin burnished like some precious metal. As he reached ground level, a gust of cold air blew in through the portal leading to the street. They’re going to freeze in that desert gear, he thought with a mixture of admiration and contempt, buttoning up his heavy overcoat and lighting a cigarette.
Suddenly they were all around him, closed in like a pack of wild dogs, one of them demanding something in mangled Italian. Alberto had no idea what he was saying. He knew only that the tone was loud, insistent and menacing, and that he was all alone. He instinctively pulled his knife and stabbed out at the nearest of the four, but the man was no longer there. Alberto whirled around, carving the air to left and right, until an inexorable grip stilled his wrist, immobilizing the knife. Two brown eyes, infinitely wide and deep, looked into his.
‘What sort of animal are you?’ said one of the men.
And then it was over and they were gone, striding away like gods, laughing and talking amongst themselves, not bothering to glance back and see if he was coming after them. They’d even left him the knife, because for them he didn’t count. He was just a sad old man who had panicked because some strangers had asked him for a light at the entrance to an underground station.
‘ Ma che razza di animale sei? ’ Well, he’d soon show them the answer to that. Not those illegal immigrants, who would never dream of bringing the incident to the attention of the authorities, thank God, but the only two people who still mattered. They’d soon find out exactly what sort of animal he was! He checked his watch, but there was no need to worry. ‘Time D’ was still a good twenty minutes off, and it would take him no more than half that to reach the spot. He had timed the route carefully, as he always did, although he had never used ‘Location
