lately, a restless, shallow sleep full of dreams which never seemed to work themselves out properly, leaving him half-enmeshed in their elaborate complexities even after waking. In the morning his head felt as if the cast of a soap opera had moved in uninvited during the night, and the effort of following their interminable dreary intrigues left him mentally soiled and worn, less refreshed than when he’d gone to bed.
Or was it simply fear? For he was acutely aware that Ubaldo Valesio had waited in that bar, used that phone, and then walked out of that door, got into his car and never come back. Bartocci might be convinced of his conspiracy theory, but Zen just couldn’t take it seriously, much as he would have liked to. He had never taken part in a ransom drop personally before, but he knew what an extremely delicate moment it was. In a way it mirrored the original kidnapping itself, and carried almost equal risks for everyone concerned. It was a time when nerves were tense and misunderstandings costly or even fatal, a time when anything and everything might go wrong.
He turned slightly so that he could see Ivy out of the corner of his eye. She didn’t look frightened, but neither did she look as though she was faking anything. There was tension in the lines at the corners of her mouth, but also determination and a sense of great inner strength. Ivy Cook wouldn’t crack easily, that was one thing.
‘Is it far now?’ he asked.
‘About ten minutes.’
Her strange deep voice pronounced the words like a parody of someone from the Trento area, where the warm and cold currents of Italian and German meet and mingle.
‘What are we supposed to do when we reach the Cesena road?’ she went on.
It seemed to take him an age to remember.
‘We have to find a sign beside the road reading “Sansepolcro one kilometre”. I suppose they’ve left another message there.’
‘It’s like a treasure hunt.’
When he had met Ivy at Crepi’s dinner party her appearance had struck him as so wilfully bizarre that he had written it off as a freak effect, as though all her luggage had been lost and she’d had to raid the oddments put aside for collection by the missionary brothers. But evidently her appearance that first evening had constituted a rule rather than an exception. Tonight’s colour scheme was more sombre but just as tasteless: chocolate-brown slacks, a violet pullover and a green suede jacket.
‘You’re English, then?’
The association of thought was clear only to him, luckily!
‘My family is. I was born in South Africa. And you’re from Venice, I believe?’
‘That’s right. A district called Cannaregio, near the station.’
A fine rain blurred the view.
‘Have you lived in Italy for long?’
Ivy turned on the wipers.
‘Years!’
‘How did that happen?’
‘I was on a tour of Europe. People take a couple of years off, buy a camper and explore the world. Then they go back home, get steady jobs and never leave South Africa again. I just didn’t go home.’
A patch of lights off to the right revealed the presence of a town which slowly orbited them and disappeared into the darkness. Slip-roads came and went, labelled with the names of famous cities: Arezzo, Gubbio, Urbino, Sansepolcro. Then the road stretched away before them again, bare and gleaming and straight and dark, like a tunnel…
‘What?’
Ivy was looking at him with a peculiar expression. He realized that he had just murmured something under his breath.
‘Nothing.’
Jesus, what was in those capsules? He hadn’t even needed a prescription to buy them. Surely they were just like aspirin? The government should step in, warn people, ban the things.
He had said, ‘Daddy?’
Then reality started to move so fast that by the time he caught up it was all over and they were parked on the hard shoulder. Replaying the sequence he realized that Ivy had braked hard, the car swerving slightly on the greasy surface, then backed up. Now she was looking at him expectantly.
‘Yes?’ he said.
She pointed out of the window.
‘Isn’t that it?’
He looked out and saw the sign.
Outside it was cold and blustery, speckled with droplets of water gusting against his face. The base of the circular grey pole was concealed in a clump of long brown grass. A large spider’s web strung between the base of the sign and the pole bellied back and forth in the wind, the spider itself clinging fast to it.
Beneath the strands of dead grass his fingers touched something hard. He pulled out an empty pasta box sealed at one end with industrial adhesive tape. The damp cardboard showed a picture of a smiling mother serving a huge bowl of spaghetti to her smiling husband and two smiling children. ‘Get this fabulous apron absolutely free!’ exhorted a slash across the corner of the packet.
‘Is everything all right?’
Ivy had the door open and was leaning out, looking impatient.
‘I’m just coming.’
He tried to strip off the tape, but it was too tough and his fingers were numb and he couldn’t find where it began. When he got back to the car Ivy took it away from him and opened the other end. Why hadn’t that occurred to him?
She took out a cassette tape and pushed it into the car’s tape-deck. After a short hissy silence there was the usual voice.
‘ Play this tape once only, then put it back where you found it. At the Sansepolcro turn-off take the road to Rimini. When you reach the crossroads beyond Novafeltria stop and wait.’
There was the sound of a car behind them and it suddenly became very light. Then a figure appeared on Ivy’s side and rapped on the window. She opened it.
‘See your papers?’
The Carabinieri patrolman had the raw look of a recruit freshly dug up from one of the no-hope regions of the deep South and put through the human equivalent of a potato-peeling machine. The uniform he was wearing seemed to have been assembled from outfits designed to fit several very different people: the sleeves were too long and the neck too wide, while the cap was so small it had left a pink welt around his forehead. He scrutinized the documents as if they were a puzzle picture in which he had to spot the deliberate mistakes. Then he looked suspiciously around the car.
‘Having problems?’
‘Just stopped for a look at the map,’ Ivy told him.
‘It’s illegal to park on the hard shoulder except in case of emergency.’
‘I’m sorry. We were just leaving.’
The patrolman grunted and walked back to his vehicle. Ivy started the engine.
‘The tape,’ Zen reminded her. ‘We’ve got to put it back.’
They sat and waited. Fifteen seconds. Thirty seconds. The headlights behind showed no sign of moving.
Zen palmed the cassette and got out. He walked to the verge and made a show of urinating. After a few minutes the carabinieri vehicle revved up and screeched off down the road. Zen slipped the tape back in its nest of grass at the foot of the pole and hurried back.
It was only when they reached the turning to Sansepolcro that he felt something hard underneath his foot.
‘Damn! I forgot to put the box back.’
‘Does it matter?’
There was no telling, that was the problem. The responsibility for the consequences will be on your heads, Pietro Miletti had said. All along Zen had been haunted by the idea that he might make some blunder which would hang over him for the rest of his life, yet here he was behaving like a dope addict. He felt an overwhelming desire
