small town at heart, a place where rumours spread as silently and effectively as a virus. His partners had been telling the truth, Zen felt sure, and the two men next door were almost certainly wasting their time. People like Valesio, who knew everything about someone and something about everyone, not only stopped talking to others about their affairs, they very soon stopped talking even to themselves. Above all they would never commit anything to paper unless it was absolutely necessary. Ubaldo Valesio would have kept the details of his dealings with Ruggiero Miletti’s kidnappers in the only place he considered safe, his own head. With a shiver, Zen remembered the photographs Bartocci had shown him.
A clangour of bells suddenly rang out from churches near and far, calling the faithful to Mass and reminding the rest that their lunch was just an hour away. Zen fetched his coat and hat and walked through to the next room. Geraci looked up at him with an expression of intense anxiety. His face was heavy and fleshy, and the two deep furrows running from the corners of the nose to the edge of the mouth gave him a hangdog look. His chin had a weak and skimpy look, as though the material had run out before the job was quite finished, while his eyebrows were absurdly thick and bushy, with a life of their own.
‘Anything?’ Zen enquired.
Geraci shrugged. Chiodini pretended to be so intent on his labours that he did not even notice Zen’s presence.
Outside, the sun illuminated every surface with uncompromising clarity. The air seemed full of disquieting hints of summer, but the illusion lasted no longer than it took to turn the corner into a narrow alley sunk deep in shadow, where the wind whetted the cold edge of the air like a knife. Bare walls faced with crumbling plaster rose up on both sides, pierced by the high, inaccessible windows of the prison, covered with heavy steel mesh. After going about a hundred metres Zen was beginning to feel he had made a mistake in turning off the broad avenue that led directly up to the centre, but he persisted, and was rewarded when the street widened out into a little square where the wind disappeared and a cherry tree was in sumptuous blossom in a garden high above. But at the next corner the wind was back, keener than ever. He turned left down a long flight of steps to get away from it.
In the grocery at the corner a sad, pale pig of a girl, a greasy sliver of cooked ham dangling from her mouth, jerked her thumb at a set of steps opposite in response to his request for directions to the centre. It was a staircase for mountain climbers, the steps seeming to get progressively higher as he climbed. The wall it ran up looked like the face of history itself. It was founded on massive blocks of rock whose dimensions were those of ancient days, presumably Etruscan. Above this layer came another, Roman work, where the blocks, though still large, had lost the epic scale. Then came a long stretch of small cubes of pinkish stone forming the wall of a medieval house, and finally an upper storey tacked on in brick and concrete.
He stopped to catch his breath, leaning against one of the giant blocks which had weathered to form intricate niches and cavities. In several of them tiny plants had somehow contrived to put down roots in a trace of dust, in another someone had wedged an empty Diet Coke can. On the other side a breathtaking view stretched away, line after line of hills rippling off into the hazy distance. He stepped carefully over a dead pigeon on the next step and clambered grimly to the top. The street in which he came out continued upwards without respite through an ancient gateway, and still up, darkly resonant and clangorous, past basement workshops where carpenters and furniture repairers and picture framers were at work. The air, fresh and cold and delicately flavoured with wood smoke, was a luxury in itself, an air for angels to breathe.
On the wall of a nearby building was a hoarding displaying two posters. The one on the right featured a garish picture of a woman in a bathing costume being pursued by a number of eager fish with teeth like daggers. ‘For the first time in Italy,’ the caption exclaimed, ‘women and sharks in the same pool!!!’ The name of a circus appeared beneath, with the dates of its next visit to Perugia. The other poster showed a famous footballer leering suggestively at a glass of milk, but what attracted Zen’s attention was the top left-hand corner, where the mass of posters accumulated over several months was starting to curl back under its own weight, revealing a section of older strata far beneath. In the corner, in large red letters, he read ‘LETTI’. The protruding curl was almost a centimetre thick, layered like plywood, and when Zen tugged at it the whole block peeled off and fell to the ground at his feet. Now he could see almost all the earlier poster, which was headed ‘SIMP AND THE MlLETTI FAMILY.’ There were five short paragraphs of closely set writing: The arrogance and intransigence of the Miletti family, amply demonstrated on innumerable occasions in the past, are once again in evidence. Not content with shutting down the Ponte San Giovanni subsidiary, or laying off more than 800 workers in Perugia – to say nothing of their continuing exploitation of female piece-work labour and well-known anti-union policies – they are now reported to be planning to sell off a controlling interest in the Societa Industriale Miletti di Perugia to a Japanese electronics conglomerate. Having crippled a once-prosperous enterprise by a combination of managerial incompetence and ill- advised speculation in the activities of such gentlemen as Calvi, Sindona and their like, the Milettis now intend to recoup their losses by auctioning off SIMP to the highest bidder. The company named in the take-over bid already owns factories which are running well below their maximum potential production level due to the world economic recession and consequent shortage of demand. Their intention is to use SIMP as a means of eluding the EEC quotas by importing Japanese-produced goods to which nothing will be added in Umbria but a grille bearing one of the brand-names which generations of local workers have helped to make famous. The Umbrian Communists totally condemn this example of cynical stock-market manipulation. SIMP is not to be sold off like a set of saucepans. The future of our jobs and those of our children must be decided here in Perugia after a process of consultation between representatives of the workforce, the owners, and the provincial and regional authorities. Italian Communist Party
Umbrian Section
Zen turned away from the billboard and started to climb the ancient street paved with flagstones as smooth as the bed of a stream. An old woman lurched towards him, a bulging plastic bag in each hand, bellowing something incomprehensible at a man who stood looking up at the scaffolding hung with sacking that covered a house being renovated. A gang of boys on scooters swooped down the street, slabs of pizza in one hand, klaxons groaning like angry frogs, yelling insults at each other. They missed the old woman by inches, and a load of rubble gushing down a plastic chute into a hopper made a noise that sounded like a round of applause for their skill or her nonchalance.
‘Anything else?’
The waiter perched like a sparrow beside their table, looking distractedly about him. Bartocci shook his head and glanced at Zen.
‘Shall we go?’
At the cash desk the manager greeted Bartocci warmly. No bill was presented. like the rest of the almost exclusively male clientele of the noisy little restaurant, the magistrate was clearly a regular who paid by the week or month.
‘How about a little stroll before having coffee?’ Bartocci suggested once they were outside. ‘I must warn you, though, that it’s uphill, like everything in Perugia!’
It was a measure of Zen’s state of mind that he found himself wondering whether the words had more than one meaning. Lunch with Bartocci had indeed proved very much like dinner with the Milettis, except that the food was even better: macaroni in a sauce made with cream and spicy sausage meat, chunks of liver wrapped in a delicate net of membrane and charred over embers, thin dark green stalks of wild asparagus, strawberries soaked in lemon juice. But just as at Crepi’s the evening before, the conversation had been dominated by what was not discussed. Bartocci had shown himself to be particularly interested in Zen’s career and his views on various items of news: a scandal about kickbacks for building permits involving members of a Socialist city council, reports that a Christian Democrat ex-mayor had been a leading member of the Palermo Mafia, allegations that the wife of a Liberal senator in Turin was involved in the illegal export of currency. Zen knew what was happening, of course, and Bartocci knew that he knew. It was all part of the process. How would this police official from Rome react to being sounded out Off the record’ by a Communist investigating magistrate?
Zen tried to steer a middle course, neither clamming up nor trumpeting opinions, biding his time and hoping that Bartocci would get to the point. But unless he did so soon Zen was going to get very nervous indeed. He had even tried to precipitate matters by asking Bartocci about the Deputy Public Prosecutor’s criticisms of the police. But Bartocci’s response had been offhand: ‘Let’s enjoy our lunch, we’ll talk later.’
The magistrate led the way up a broad flight of steps which at first appeared to lead to someone’s front door. At the last moment they swerved to the left and continued into a tunnel burrowing underneath a conglomerate of
