‘How dare you come here?’ he shouted furiously. ‘You killed my mother! What did you say to her, you bastard? You bullied her, didn’t you? You threatened her with God knows what and she threw herself off that balcony in terror and despair!’
‘Control yourself, Signor Ferrero. Your mother died in Lugano. How could I have interrogated her there? The Italian police have no jurisdiction in Switzerland. Besides, her death was the result of a tragic accident. At any rate, such is the view of the Swiss authorities, who are famously efficient and neutral.’
He was almost caught off guard when Naldo suddenly lashed out with his fist, but the space was too confined and the intended blow low and wide. Zen simply moved back a step, neither doing nor saying anything. As if appalled at his own temerity, Ferrero pushed past him and ran out of the house. Zen bent over the bed and picked up the scrapbook. It opened naturally about a quarter of the way through, for a reason that was immediately obvious. Ten photographs had been glued to the facing pages at this point.
All had been taken in a large garden. The first six showed a young man, the next two a woman of about thirty. The man might almost have been as young as sixteen or seventeen, with the lean, wiry body of an athlete, close-cut black hair and a guarded gaze laden with some emotion that Zen couldn’t quite read in the grainy, low- quality, black-and-white prints. In two of the shots he was wearing casual clothes with the oddly comical air of a style that is out of date but not yet classic. In three others he was in a bathing suit, in one case swimming on his back down a small pool. The remaining one presented him stretched out on the bed that Zen could see by turning his head, stark naked and apparently asleep.
The photographs of the woman had been rather more carefully composed, avoiding the amputational framing and dodgy focus evident in those of the man. The subject, however, was more problematic, despite the fact that Zen recognized her immediately. The younger Claudia had never been beautiful, so much was clear, but the look she gave the camera — as opaque in its way as the young man’s — revealed her to have been as troubling as she was troubled. Hers was one of those faces where a certain combination of daring, desperation and sexual greed transforms plain, pudgy features into something far more potent than standard ‘good looks’.
Her body, amply revealed by the yellow bikini she wore, provided a powerful bass to this disturbing siren song. The fact that she was slightly overweight and teetering on the brink of an early middle age added a final note. Glancing back at the shots of Leonardo, Zen realized that the look in his eyes was one of fear. This might have seemed perfectly natural under the circumstances, but the quantity and depth of the young man’s emotion was somehow disproportionate to the simple fact that he was screwing his commanding officer’s wife. Leonardo had been afraid of him, yes, but in some odd way he had been even more afraid of her.
By the time the last two photographs were taken, either Claudia or Leonardo must have worked out how to operate the timed shutter release function on the camera, since these showed both of them posed awkwardly in their swimsuits by the pool. These shots were the most powerfully suggestive of all. Zen vaguely remembered learning at school about certain atoms — or was it molecules? — that would ‘bond’ with others because they possessed a particle that the other lacked. The possibility for sniggery doppi sensi had been only too clear at the time, but he had never realized the wider implications until now. These photographs made it plain that Gaetano Comai’s wife and Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero had been doomed from the moment they met.
How they chose to deal with it was of course another matter, but that was in very little doubt from the moment that Zen turned back to the beginning of the scrapbook. This consisted of densely packed lines of handwriting in dark green ink, a journal of the affair evidently started shortly after it began. It would have taken at least an hour to read the whole thing, for it ran to almost seventy-five large pages, and Claudia proved to have had a prolix and evasive prose style, short on details but very long indeed on feelings, speculations, afterthoughts, commentary and rhetorical questions. Keenly aware that he could spare not hours but minutes, if that, Zen opted for a heuristic method, dipping and scanning, skipping and noting.
His initial researches told him little except for the fact, reading between the lines of loopy handwriting, that Leonardo’s part had initially been passive. It was Claudia who had initiated the affair when the young lieutenant appeared at the villa one summer afternoon to return some books to his commanding officer. As it happened, Gaetano Comai was away on army business, but other business soon resulted. Before long, Lieutenant Ferrero started turning up regularly at the villa, always on days when it was known that Gaetano and the staff would be absent.
He was about to put the book down again when he noticed that the thumbed softness at the edge of the used pages continued for a further distance before reverting to the hard cut edge of the original volume. Turning over two more blank sheets, he found the text resuming, but in what at first appeared a different hand. The pen was different too, a common blue ballpoint, and the writing tighter, harder and more slanted. There were three pages in all, and he read them very quickly.
Naldo Ferrero was standing immediately outside the front door, as if waiting for him to emerge.
‘I’m sorry I lashed out at you,’ he said in a contrite tone.
‘Have you filed that judicial application to recover your father’s body?’
‘Not yet. I’ve been busy. But I’m still working on it.’
Zen looked him in the eyes.
‘Signor Ferrero, when we met previously I promised to help you to the limits of my ability in return for your cooperation. I regret to say that I have been unsuccessful, but I will give you a word of advice which you would do well to take. Do not contact the judiciary about this. Do not make any further enquiries, either officially or unofficially. Go back to La Stalla, marry Marta if she’ll have you, and try and forget the whole thing. One man has already been murdered because of his connection with this affair. A second has gone to ground under a virtual sentence of death. If you pursue this matter, you may well become the third. There are very large interests at stake, and the people concerned are both powerful and ruthless. In any case, there’s nothing to be gained. I’m afraid it’s virtually certain that your father’s body no longer exists in any recognizable form. Put it all behind you and get on with your life.’
Back behind the wheel, Zen took out all his repressed emotion on the hapless rental car, forcing it mercilessly around the tight curves and along the infrequent straights, blasting other traffic with the horn and smashing the gears down to pass. At last he reached the autostrada, heading first west and then south to Cremona. When he reached the service station at Ghedi, he parked at the rear of the premises, well out of sight of the main buildings, between two huge red trailer trucks marked Transport Miedzynarodowy with an address in Poland. In the service area he bought a small electric torch, and then ordered coffee and a grappa and took them all to one of the stand- up tables. His hands were trembling so much that it was all he could do to get the cup and the glass to his mouth.
Some years earlier, on a return trip to his native Venice, Zen had inadvertently caused the death of a childhood friend by putting too much pressure on him at a vulnerable moment. Now it seemed to have happened again. There had been no way that he could have foreseen the consequences of his actions, but a sense of self- disgust remained. He only hoped that he might be granted an opportunity to make what amends he could.
XVIII
The first time the car passed by, Gabriele was heating up a packet of dried mushroom soup to which he’d added some fresh porcini from a long-remembered patch in a thicket near the river. In a minor miracle that seemed to collapse the intervening years, it had turned out still to be there. The second time, when the same car passed by in the opposite direction, he was eating the soup with some bread bought in the local town three days earlier. Dunked in the creamy brown broth, it was just about palatable.
Despite the indifferent light, he was also reading — in a very nice, tight seventh-edition copy (Hachette, 1893) — Hippolyte Taine’s Voyage en Italie. A memory popped into his mind of a friend who had noticed one of the annual postcards of Perseus holding the Medusa’s head, without of course understanding its significance, and had commented that if we could travel back to Cellini’s Florence and vice versa, we would be appalled by the smells and he by the noise.
Time travel, the only kind Gabriele was still interested in, was unfortunately not yet possible, but his days here in the country had retrofitted his sense of hearing, which had become as acute as a cat’s. At the cascina, the silence was intense, broken only by the murmur of an occasional aeroplane far above. The little strada comunale
