‘ Well, I thought there was, you know, some problem about using him.’
‘Really? I haven’t heard anything.’
‘ I don’t mean anything official.’
‘Well, as long as it’s not official I can’t see that there’s any problem. A kidnapping, too! Wasn’t he something of a specialist? Couldn’t be better.’
‘ If you say so, dottore.’
‘It’s perfect. Ideal from every point of view. The only thing that would ruin it is delay. And that’s why I’m going to leave it in your lap, Ciliani. I want Zen and the relevant paperwork in my office within the hour. Got that?’
‘ Uh.’
‘Caccamo?’
‘ Uh.’
‘Ciliani. You seen Zen?’
‘ You tried his office? ’
‘No, I’m too stupid to think of that. Of course I’ve tried his fucking office.’
‘ Hang on, isn’t he away somewhere? Treviso? ’
‘Trieste. He was due back this morning.’
‘ Did I ever tell you about this girl from Trieste I met the time I was doing beach duty down at Ostia? She was sunbathing totally nude behind a dune, and when I… ’
‘Fuck off, Caccamo. Christ, this is all I need. Where has that son of a bitch Zen got to?’
ONE
‘No! I don’t believe it! It isn’t possible!’
‘It isn’t possible, but it happens. In short, it’s a miracle!’
‘Just a few hundred metres away from the station and they stop! This is going too far!’
‘Not quite far enough, I’d say!’
‘For the love of God, let us out of this damned train!’
‘“And yet it does not move”, as Galileo might have said. Ah well, let’s be patient.’
‘Patient! Patient! Excuse me, but in my humble opinion what this country needs is a few people who will no longer be patient! People who refuse to suffer patiently the bungling and incompetence with which we are surrounded! There! That’s what I think!’
‘It’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive, they say. It should be the motto of the State Railways.’
‘You choose to joke about it, signore, but in my humble opinion this is no joking matter. On the contrary, it is an issue of the very highest importance, symptomatic of all the gravest ills of our poor country. What does one expect of a train? That it goes reasonably fast and arrives within five or ten minutes of the time stated in the timetable. Is that too much? Does that require divine intervention to bring about? Not in any other country in the world! Nor used it to here,’
‘You can always move to Switzerland, if that’s how you feel.’
‘But now what happens? The railway service, like everything else, is a disaster. And what is the government’s response? To give their friends in the construction business billions and billions of lire to build a new railway line between Rome and Florence! And the result? The trains are slower than they were before the war! It’s incredible! A national disgrace!’
The young man sitting near the door, Roman to his elegant fingertips, smiled sarcastically.
‘Ah yes, of course, everything was better before the war,’ he murmured. ‘We know all about that.’
‘Excuse me, but you know nothing about it,’ replied the vigorous, thick-set man with the shock of silver hair and the Veronese accent. ‘Unless I am very much mistaken you weren’t even born then!’
He turned to the third occupant of the compartment, sitting by the window, a distinguished-looking man of about fifty with a pale face whose most striking feature was a nose as sharply triangular as the jib of a sailing boat. There was a faintly exotic air about him, as though he were Greek or even Levantine. His expression was cynical, suave and aloof, and a distant smile flickered on his lips. But it was his eyes that compelled attention. They were grey with glints of blue, and a slightly sinister stillness which made the Veronese shiver. A cold fish, this one, he thought.
‘What about you, signore?’ he demanded. ‘Don’t you agree that it’s a disgrace, a national disgrace?’
‘The train was delayed at Mestre,’ the stranger observed with a grave, deliberate courtesy that somehow seemed mocking. ‘That has naturally upset the schedules. There were bound to be further delays.’
‘I know the train was delayed at Mestre!’ retorted the Veronese. ‘You don’t need to remind me that the train was delayed at Mestre. And why, may I ask, was the train delayed at Mestre? Because of an unofficial stoppage by the local section of one of the railway unions. Unofficial! As if we didn’t have enough official strikes, we are also at the mercy of any local gang of workers with a grievance, who can throw the whole transport system of the nation into total chaos without, needless to say, the slightest fear of any reprisals whatsoever.’
The young Roman slapped the leg of his trousers with a rolled copy of a glossy news magazine.
‘Certainly it’s a nuisance,’ he remarked. ‘But don’t let’s exaggerate the inconvenience. Besides, there are worse things than chaos.’
‘And what might they be?’
‘Too much order.’
The Veronese made a contemptuously dismissive gesture.
‘Too much order? Don’t make me laugh! In this country too much order wouldn’t even be enough. It’s always the same. The trains are late? Build a new railway! The South is poor? Open a new factory! The young are illiterate delinquents? Hire more teachers! There are too many civil servants? Retire them earlier on big pensions! The crime rate is soaring? Pass new laws! But for the love of God don’t expect us to make the railways or the factories we have run efficiently, or make the teachers or bureaucrats do an honest day’s work, or make people respect the existing laws. Oh no! Because that would smack of dictatorship, and of tyranny, and we can’t have that.’
‘That’s not the point!’ The young Roman had finally given up his pose of ironic detachment. ‘What you want, signore, this famous “order” of yours, is something un-Italian, un-Mediterranean. It’s an idea of the North, and that’s where it should stay. It’s got no place here. Very well, so we have a few problems. There are problems everywhere in the world! Just look in the newspaper, watch the television. Do you think that this is the only country where life isn’t perfect?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with perfection! And as for this beautiful Mediterranean myth of yours, signore, permit me to say that…’
The man at the window looked away at the blank wall of the Campo Verano cemetery on the other side of the tracks. Neither this further delay nor the argument to which it had given rise seemed able to touch the mood of serenity which had been with him since he awoke that morning. Perhaps it had been the dislocation of routine that had done it, the shock of finding himself not back in Rome but inexplicably stalled at Mestre, five hundred and sixty kilometres further north. For a moment it had seemed as though reality itself had broken down like a film projector and soon everyone would be demanding their money back. After a blind tussle with his clothes in the cramped darkness of the sleeping compartment he had stepped out into the misty early-morning air, laden with the salty stench of the lagoon and the acrid odours of petroleum and chemicals from the heavy industry he could hear murmuring all around, and wandered along the platform to the bar, where he pushed his way into a group of railwaymen, ordered an espresso laced with grappa and discovered that no trains would move out of Mestre until further notice due to a dispute regarding manning levels.
I could go, he had thought. I could have gone, he thought now, simply by boarding one of the orange buses which passed the station with illuminated signs bearing that magic combination of letters: VENEZIA. But he hadn’t, and he’d been right. His mysterious mood of elation had been one to float on, gliding lightly as a shallow-bottomed skiff across the inlets and channels of the lagoon whose melancholy topography he had explored as a boy. At his age such gifts came rarely and should be handled with care, not asked to bear up under the tortuous coils of his relationship with his native city. His reward had been that the mood proved unexpectedly durable. Neither the delay
