for a cigarette, but Ivy was a non-smoker and he had agreed not to smoke in the car.
The road to Rimini bypassed the town and in a few moments they were out in the wilds again, labouring up a steep, tortuous medieval track on which modern civilization had done no more than slap a layer of asphalt and a road number. The ascent was arduous and prolonged, twisting and turning upwards for more than twelve kilometres to the pass, almost a thousand metres high. The starkness of the landscape revealed by the headlights penetrated the car like a draught. Zen sat there unhappily taking it all in. He didn’t much care for nature in the raw: it was messy and wasteful and there was too much of it. This was a fertile source of incomprehension between him and Ellen. The wilder and more extensive the view, the better she liked it. ‘Look at that!’ she would exclaim, indicating some appalling mass of barren rock. ‘Isn’t it magnificent?’ Zen had long given up trying to understand. It all came of her being American, he supposed. Americans had more nature than anything else except money, and they got pretty excited about that too.
To take his mind off the scene outside he looked at his companion instead. Part of the oddness of her appearance, he realized, came from the fact that she didn’t look like a woman so much as a rather inept female impersonator. Not that there was anything butch about her. On the contrary, it was precisely the excessive femininity, laid on with a trowel as it were, that created the effect of someone pretending to be a woman, someone in fact rather desperately hoping to be taken for one. But this desperation was perhaps understandable. Certainly her role in the Miletti household appeared to be anything but feminine. She was evidently their dogsbody, used for tasks which no one else was prepared to take on. Typically, it had been Ivy, he’d learned, who had been sent to collect the letter from Ruggiero which the gang had left in the rubbish skip.
‘Are you married, Commissioner?’ she asked suddenly.
It was the first remark she had volunteered all evening.
‘Separated. And you?’
‘What do you think?’
Zen had no idea what he was supposed to think. Eventually Ivy herself seemed to sense the need for an explanation.
‘My association with Silvio rather precludes marriage.’
They rounded yet another bend, the headlights sweeping over a bald expanse of stricken scanty grass. It had started to rain more heavily, unless they were now actually up inside the clouds.
‘If you really want a cigarette very badly I think on the whole I should prefer you to have one,’ Ivy told him.
He gave an embarrassed laugh.
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘Well, you keep fiddling with the ashtray and pushing the cigarette lighter in and out. Just open the window a crack.’
‘What about the rest of the Milettis?’ Zen asked as he lit up. The wind burbled at his ear like frantic drumming.
‘What about them?’
‘How do you get on with them?’
She took a moment to think.
‘They find me useful, on occasion.’
‘I still remember how Cinzia Miletti treated you that evening at Crepi’s.’
‘Poor Cinzia!’ murmured Ivy. ‘She’s terribly unhappy.’
‘Isn’t it a bit of a strain, though, living in the same house with them?’
‘Oh, I don’t. They would never stand for it. Ruggiero would have a fit!’
She laughed gaily, as though Ruggiero Miletti’s attitude was frightfully amusing.
‘No, I have a little flat of my own, although I have been spending more time than usual at the villa since the kidnapping. But I’ll be very glad when it’s all over and things return to normal.’
‘But you and Ruggiero don’t get on?’
That gave her pause.
‘Well, he doesn’t have a very high opinion of either foreigners or women,’ she said at last. ‘That places me at something of a disadvantage.’
Zen didn’t reply at once. He was at the honeymoon stage with his cigarette, listening to the nicotine marching through his blood.
‘And yet you’re looking forward to his getting back? I don’t understand.’
‘It’s a question of the lesser of two evils. At least we all know where we are when he’s around. For the last few months everything has rather fallen apart. Ruggiero kept all the reins in his own hands, you see. So in a sense I’ll be glad when he is back, despite his attitude to me.’
He decided to risk a shot in the dark.
‘Is it your relationship with Silvio that Ruggiero objects to?’
‘Why do you say that?’ she snapped.
Clearly this was a sensitive topic. Then she laughed, as if to cover her outburst.
‘Anyway, you’re quite right. Silvio is a very complex and tormented personality, someone who has great difficulty in coming to terms with the demands of life. I help to ease that burden for him. Ruggiero doesn’t accept that, perhaps because it would mean accepting responsibility for the way his son’s turned out.’
‘In what way is he responsible?’
The cigarette had suddenly turned bad on him.
‘Oh, in all sorts of ways. He was responsible for Loredana’s death, for one thing. Silvio has never really recovered from that.’
‘What happened?’
‘Ruggiero was driving her back from Rome late one night, and somehow the car left the road and ended up against a tree. Loredana was killed instantly. Ruggiero’s legs and collar-bone were broken and he was trapped in the wreckage for almost seven hours, pinned beside her corpse. He was discovered the next morning by a boy on his way to school. People say he has never been the same since. Loredana moderated the violence of his personality, or at least sheltered the children from it. After her death they certainly took the full brunt, Silvio in particular. He was only thirteen and he’d been particularly close to his mother. Her death was a great blow to him, and I imagine Ruggiero handled it in exactly the wrong way, telling him to snap out of it, stop snivelling, that sort of thing. He’s a man who has crushed all softness in himself, so why should his son be indulged, be allowed to cry and display his grief, be stroked and cuddled and consoled when he never was? Of course, Cinzia suffered terribly too. The others rather less, I think. Pietro was old enough to cope better, Daniele too young to understand.’
Zen wound down the window and let his half-smoked cigarette be sucked out into the airstream. The conversation no longer kept the landscape at bay but intensified it, showing its desolation to be a reality not merely natural but also human.
Eventually the car slowed to a halt. The rain was now pelting down, covering the windows with a coat of water as thick and opaque as glycerine. The headlights created a luminous swathe ahead of the car, but nothing was visible except a variety of shapes which obstinately refused to become more than that. Ivy turned the engine off. Nothing moved outside, and the only sound was the steady metallic drumming on the roof of the car.
‘Why did you ask if I was married?’ Zen asked.
She glanced at him briefly.
‘I don’t know. To break the silence, I suppose. Why does one ask anything?’
He leaned closer to the window, but saw even less as his breath fogged the glass.
‘Well, in my case it’s usually to get information out of people,’ he said. ‘Then after a while it becomes a habit, like those teachers who speak to everyone as though they’re five years old.’
‘I suppose I was trying to make you seem more human. I’m frightened of the police, you see, like most people. Almost as frightened as I am of this gang.’
The minutes slipped away, their passage recorded with unnecessary precision by the digital clock on the instrument panel.
‘They don’t ever attack people, do they?’
It sounded as though the reality of what they were doing had come home to her for the first time.
‘Who, the police?’ he joked.
