Bartocci made Zen sound like a mad dog he was managing to restrain only with the greatest difficulty.
Pietro Miletti turned in the doorway.
‘Needless to say, if we do agree, the responsibility for the consequences of that decision will be on your heads. You might like to think about that before committing yourselves to this course of action.’
‘I tell you there isn’t the slightest risk!’
‘That’s what they told Valesio.’
As the door closed, Zen let out a breath he realized he had been holding for a long time. And to think he’d been agonizing about what line to take on Bartocci’s conspiracy theory! No need for that now. Henceforth, as far as the Milettis were concerned, Zen was Bartocci’s accomplice, the henchman whose men were to be used to enforce their enemy’s will.
‘You’re prepared to go, I suppose?’ the magistrate asked him with a studied casualness Zen found rather insulting.
‘It’s my job. But I would have preferred to know you were going to do it.’
Bartocci laughed boyishly.
‘I didn’t know I was going to do it myself until it happened!’
He walked over to one of the shelves in the end wall and took down a large box-file. Zen thought he was going to be shown some decisive new piece of evidence, but Bartocci simply reached through the space left vacanton the shelfand with a grunt of effort manipulated a lever. There was a loud metallic click and the whole section of wallswung outwards.
‘It was this business about the letter that decided me,’ the magistrate continued, as a widening slice of the outside world appeared in the gap. ‘Clearly the reason they claim to have burnt it is simply that they realize it would be too risky to let us examine it.’
The view expanded as he pushed the twin doors fully open. There was a small balcony just outside the hidden window, now inaccessible and covered in pigeon droppings.
‘So according to the Milettis, what have we got?’ Bartocci asked rhetorically, counting off the points on his outspread fingers. ‘One telephone call which could easily have been faked from any phone box, a letter which no one outside the family has seen, and a pay-off which will supposedly take place once arrangements have been made over a telephone number they refuse to disclose. If I hadn’t insisted on you going along on the drop we would have absolutely no proof that it had ever taken place! It’s a conjuring trick! The money which has suddenly and mysteriously become available simply vanishes into thin air as Ruggiero Miletti magically reappears. And from that moment on there would be absolutely no way of ever proving that the whole thing had been faked. No, this pay-off is our last chance, and one that I wasn’t prepared to let slip.’
They stood gazing out at the few early swallows looping around the hazy, fragrant air.
‘It’s all coming together!’ Bartocci muttered excitedly, as though to himself. ‘So many separate bits of evidence all pointing in the same direction. Yes, it’s coming together!’
Despite his lingering feeling of resentment, Zen watched the young magistrate with an almost fatherly tenderness. He knew that he was feeling what Zen himself had felt often enough in the past, on one fateful occasion in particular: this time the bastards are not going to get away with it.
FIVE
Smiling! Everyone was smiling and applauding! The chubby, balding presenter was smiling, the blonde starlet was smiling, the famous politician was smiling, the best-selling journalist was smiling, while the clean, well-drilled young people dancing around them were smiling hardest of all. Even the balloons they released as they gambolled about seemed to have a sleek, benevolent look as they rose, passing a shower of confetti as dense and continuous as the applause on its way down.
‘Make me a coffee, will you?’
The barman dragged himself away from the knot of men deep in conversation about the price fetched by a piece of land across the road.
‘And not even big enough to have a decent crap on!’ he hurled over his shoulder before turning to jab a finger at Zen.
‘Coffee?’ he demanded accusingly.
Zen popped two motion-sickness pills out of their plastic nests and put them in his mouth. One to two, the box said. Better safe than sorry.
On the way back to his conversation the barman punched a button on the television and suddenly they were in Texas, where folk lived and loved fit to bust and discussed it all in idiomatic but poorly synchronized Italian. When the call finally came, it took Zen several moments to realize that the phone wasn’t ringing in Sue Ellen’s en suite boudoir but in the dingy pool room at the end of the bar, where a pack of the local rogue males were playing throwing-billiards. He just managed to beat one of them to the receiver.
‘ Avellino.’
He had the list of the First Division fixtures ready. Avellino were at home to the champions.
‘Juventus.’
There was a loud clack behind him as one of the players hurled the white down the table, scattering the colours.
‘ Take the Cesena road. Stop at the sign “Sansepolcro one kilometre”. At the base of the pole.’
The line went dead and a moment later he heard the characteristic click as the interception machinery disengaged.
Outside it was pitch-dark and spitting with rain. The large Fiat saloon parked in the piazza looked ridiculous with a yellow child’s cot strapped to the roof, but this had seemingly been stipulated by the gang to make it easier for them to identify the car.
Zen climbed into the nearside front seat.
‘Take the Cesena road.’
The faint light from the dashboard caught a gold filigree ear-ring spelling ‘Ivy’ in flowing script. The ear-ring was typical of its wearer’s taste, he thought. It was presumably real gold, yet it somehow contrived to look brash and cheap, like junk jewellery trying to make up in flash what it lacked in value.
When the Fiat had emerged from the gateway of the Miletti villa at five o’clock that afternoon, Zen had been astonished to find that his driver for the ransom drop was to be Silvio’s secretary, Ivy Cook. He had been waiting there since hearing from Bartocci, less than an hour earlier, that the kidnappers had been in touch and that the car would be leaving as soon as it got dark. Pietro had finally agreed to Zen’s presence, on condition that there was no contact until the pay-off actually began, so during the intervening forty-eight hours he had had nothing to do with the case beyond having the ransom money photographed to record the serial numbers and finalizing the arrangements for collecting Ruggiero when he was released. The family’s passive resistance continued right up to the last moment: Zen was not permitted to set foot on Miletti soil but had to wait for the Fiat in the street, beyond the imposing wrought-iron gates. He’d had plenty of time to speculate about who else would be in the car. He thought he had covered every possibility, but in the event the Milettis had amazed him.
But if the Milettis had scored a point with their choice of driver, Zen felt that he got one back when Ivy named their destination: the bar, identified by Lucaroni, where Ubaldo Valesio had gone to receive the phone calls from the gang, situated in a village about ten kilometres from Perugia. Calculating that the kidnappers might use the same initial rendezvous, Zen had informed Bartocci, who had authorized a phone-tap. The resulting tapes would be voice-printed and compared with existing samples.
The headlights of the Fiat swept from one side of the narrow winding road to the other, picking out an area of ploughed field, a thicket of scrub oaks with last year’s brown leaves still clinging to the branches, an ancient wooden cart fitted with modern lorry tyres, an abandoned barn covered with posters for a dance band called ‘The Lads of the Adriatic’, a dirt track leading off into the hills. Ivy drove steadily but not too fast, and thanks to the pills he had taken Zen was not worried about the prospect of nausea. He even felt a rather pleasant sense of detachment from what was going on, almost as though everything around him were happening on television and the barman might switch to another channel at any moment. Perhaps it was just due to the way he’d been sleeping
