The voice was male, adult, uneducated, with a strong Calabrian accent. It was one forty-three in the morning and the duty sergeant wasn’t quite sure whether he was dealing with a wrong number, a hoax, or an emergency. But the next words made sense all right.
‘ You’d better go get him before he dies.’
The Carabinieri station was at Bagno di Romagna, a small town high up in the Apennines on the borders of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. The locals were a staid lot; the sergeant, who was Sicilian, privately thought them dull. They were not given to silly pranks at any time, let alone a quarter to two on Sunday morning. So what the hell was going on?
He phoned his provincial headquarters at Cesena, who called regional headquarters at Bologna, who checked with their opposite numbers in Florence before confirming that no member of the force had been reported missing on either side of the Apennines. Better get out there and have a look just the same, Cesena told him with a hint of malice. Even down there in the coastal flatlands it was a wild night. They could imagine what conditions must be like up in the mountains, having done their stint in the sticks at one time or another.
Out where, though? Apart from the undisputed fact that the farm in question was ‘up’, the sergeant knew only that it was near a village called Santa Sofia, above a river and on the way to a church. He pored over his 1: 100 000 maps and finally selected four possibilities. If none of them proved correct they would have to wait until dawn and call out a helicopter, by which time it would probably be too late. The wind howled about the building, driving rain against the shutters.
They had been at it for over two and a half hours before the searchlight finally picked out the slumped body in the yard of an abandoned farm at over a thousand metres on the slopes of Mount Guffone. The young private at the wheel let out a gasp of surprise.
‘You see?’ the sergeant exclaimed triumphantly.
His relief at not having been made a fool of was matched by his curiosity to find out who the devil he was, this man lying chest down on the wet flagstones, face turned to one side as though asleep. There were some quite nasty-looking cuts on his head, and the sergeant was a bit apprehensive about turning him over. He would never forget that time when a corporal had been machine-gunned in an ambush on a country road near Palermo. He’d been found lying face down too, and the only sign of what had happened was a slight discoloration on the back of his jacket, as though some of the red dye from the trimming had leached on to the body of the black fabric. But when they turned him over there was a sound like a fart and all his insides had sicked out, bits that weren’t meant to be seen and which God accordingly hadn’t bothered to finish off like the rest. Amazingly, nothing had seemed to take any notice! The sky was still blue, the sun still shone, somewhere near by a lark gibbered away. Only he had watched, fascinated, as the pool of blood collecting around the spilt innards suddenly burst its confines and set off down the road, finding its way slowly and with difficulty, its bright fresh surface soon matted with dust and drowning insects.
‘What we going to do?’ asked the young private, a little concerned at the way his superior was acting.
‘Do? Well, we’ve got to find out who he is, haven’t we?’
In the end it was all right. There were no serious injuries at all, in fact. The man even mumbled something, and his eyelids flickered for a moment without opening.
‘No wonder no one knew about him!’ the sergeant exclaimed as he studied the identity card he had found in the man’s wallet. ‘He’s not one of ours at all. Stupid bastard didn’t know the difference.’
Or more likely didn’t care, he thought. The glorious traditions of the Service meant nothing to scum like that.
The man lying at their feet mumbled something again.
‘Did you hear what he said?’ the sergeant asked.
The private made a face.
‘I’m not sure. It sounded like he said “Daddy”.’
Yellowed light, stale warmth, a pervasive scent of chemicals: the contrast with his earlier dips into consciousness was total.
Zen was sitting on a stool under a bright light in a small white-curtained cubicle, thinking about Trotsky and the iceman. With his open-necked shirt, his air of dejected exhaustion and the newspaper spread open on his knee, he might almost have been a kidnap victim waiting to have his existence confirmed by means of a Polaroid photograph. But in fact he was waiting for a different kind of photograph, a different kind of confirmation.
Trotsky and the iceman had been his attempt to solve the problem of why he was still alive despite having been shot in the head. Leon Trotsky protested with his dying breath that he had been shot, not stabbed, even though Stalin’s killer had been caught with the ice-pick still in his hand. Zen’s mistake was less excusable, since all he’d suffered were a few hard kicks.
Then the wind and the darkness and the sense of utter abandonment had unlocked a memory which had already put in a passing appearance earlier that night. It was a memory he hadn’t known he had, and even now he knew very little about it beyond the fact that it involved him and his father and a railway tunnel. He didn’t know where or when it had happened. There they were, the two of them, walking into the tunnel. It must have been on a main line, because there were two sets of tracks, and the mouth of the tunnel had seemed to him – he might have been five, six? – bigger than anything he had ever seen, bigger than anything he had known could exist.
They had gone a very long way into the tunnel. He hadn’t wanted to, but since his father was holding his hand it was all right. When he looked round he found that the tunnel mouth had changed polarity and become a little patch of brightness, quite faint and very far away. The silence echoed with large drips falling from the invisible curved mass above. The air smelt dank and trapped despite the wind that poured past them, forcing them deeper into the solid darkness ahead.
Meanwhile his father, his voice reverberating in a way that hinted at the extent of the invisible spaces about them, told him about the tunnel, when it was opened and how long it was and how deep below the surface. He pointed out the sloping white stripes on the walls, whose incline indicated the nearest of the niches providing protection for plate-layers who otherwise might end up under the wheels of one of the expresses which thundered over these rails, bound for famous foreign cities.
Then, without warning or explanation, the warm grip on his hand disappeared and the soothing voice fell silent.
It was only for a moment, no doubt, as adults measure time. It must have been a joke, a little trick of the kind fathers like to play on their children, toying idly with their power, whimsical tyrants. He knew that it had been a joke, because when it was over his father laughed so much that the laughter was still echoing around them as they started back towards the light. It had sounded almost as though the tunnel itself were enjoying some deeper, darker joke whose significance not even his father had fully understood.
An unshaven young man in a white coat slouched into the cubicle and handed Zen three dark rectangular sheets of plastic.
‘No fractures.’
Zen held the X-rays up to the light. They looked as dubious as the photographs which are claimed to prove the existence of a spirit world: swirls and patches of white suspended in a grey mix.
‘You’re sure?’
It certainly hurt badly enough. But perhaps pain was no guide. Oddly enough the worst was his shoulder, where the man had seized it to pull him out of the car.
‘It’s only bruised,’ the orderly insisted. ‘But next time take it easy, eh? I might be in the other car.’
Zen had told them he’d been involved in a traffic accident, which had got a good laugh all round when it emerged that he was from Venice. For want of practice, Venetian drivers are proverbially supposed to be the worst in Italy.
He left the hospital and began to walk slowly along the boulevard leading back to the centre of Perugia. The morning was quiet and warm. The storm had blown itself out, leaving the sky pearly. There was a mild southerly breeze. A few people were about, returning from church or walking home with a newspaper or a neatly wrapped pastry. He was glad that he had dismissed Palottino, although the Neapolitan had made it clear that he strongly disapproved of this mania for walking. He had driven up to collect his superior from the Carabinieri post where he and his rescuers had returned as soon as Zen had recovered enough to assure the sergeant that he didn’t need to call an ambulance. As soon as they reached Bagno di Romagna Zen had phoned Geraci, who he’d left holding the fort, and inquired about Ivy Cook. His greatest worry was that somehow his presence had compromised her, that he
