‘ We’ve just picked up a message on the Miletti family line, dottore. It was from the kidnappers. They’ve released Signore Miletti .’
Thank God, Zen thought with obscure fervour. Thank God.
‘Have you informed Dottor Bartocci?’
‘ Yes. The pick-up arrangements are to be put into effect immediately.’
‘Where has Signor Miletti been released?’
‘ If you’ve got a pen I’ll read the directions as they gave them to the family.’
Zen scribbled the instructions on the back of an envelope. They were to take the road to Foligno, turn right towards Cannara just beyond Santa Maria degli Angeli and drive until they saw a telegraph pole with a yellow mark. Here they were to turn left, then take the second right and go about a kilometre to a building site where Ruggiero Miletti was waiting, unable to move because of his bad leg. It had been this problem which had led to the complex arrangements for picking up Ruggiero on his release. Normally kidnap victims are simply turned loose in the middle of nowhere and left to find their own way to the nearest house or main road. But since Miletti was immobilized it had been agreed that he would be fetched by a group consisting of Pietro Miletti escorted by Zen and Palottino in the Alfetta, with an ambulance in attendance in case Ruggiero required immediate attention. After the events of Saturday night and Bartocci’s angry phone call the previous day, Zen half expected to be rebuffed when he rang the Milettis. But Pietro, although cool, made no attempt to change the arrangements. Now the family’s fears had been proved groundless, the bungled pay-off could be dismissed as just another example of clumsy incompetence on the part of the police, the latest in a long list of blunders.
Twenty minutes later the convoy set out. It was brilliantly sunny, as though summer had leapt forward a few months. People were moving more slowly and nonchalantly, without the pretext of a destination or purpose. They glanced curiously at the line of official vehicles which drove along the boulevard running along the lower ridges of the city, through a gateway and down in a series of long, lazy curves, dropping over two hundred metres to the valley floor. Shortly after passing the enormous domed basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli Palottino swerved across a patch of loose gravel into a minor road. The land was dead flat, divided into large ploughed fields almost devoid of trees. Modern brick and concrete duplexes squatted here and there along the road, each with a few rows of vines trained along wires suspended from concrete posts behind them. This would all have been uninhabited malarial marshland until the postwar boom made it worth draining. The road ran straight ahead, the telegraph poles passing at regular intervals to the right.
The yellow splash of paint showed up hundreds of metres away in the bright sunshine. A farm track led off to the left opposite, flanked by deep drainage ditches. Speeds dropped now and the vehicles closed up. The fields appeared to have been abandoned, the broken stalks of the crop left to rot in a vast expanse of furrowed mud which the recent rains had reduced to a sticky mess. Could there really be a building site in the middle of this swamp rapidly reverting to nature after a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with civilization, Zen wondered? There had always been a possibility that the telephone call had been a hoax and this seemed to be getting more likely all the time.
The bleak landscape made Zen think back to his dream, to his own father’s fate. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Mussolini thought the war would be over in a matter of weeks, and so that he could claim a share of the spoils for Italy he offered to send troops to the Russian front. The Germans had no illusions about the military effectiveness of their principal ally, and at first they agreed to accept only a few divisions of the Alpini, the specialist mountain troops who could hold their own with any in Europe. But that was not enough to give Mussolini the bargaining leverage he wanted. He insisted on sending more, and so two hundred and thirty thousand Italians were packed into trains and sent off to Russia, Zen’s father among them. But the war was not over in a matter of weeks, and the Italian conscripts had neither the training nor the equipment to fight a winter campaign in Russia. They suffered ninety thousand casualties. Sixty-six thousand more made the weary trek home again. As for the remaining seventy-five thousand, nothing more was ever heard of them. They simply disappeared without trace. The Soviet authorities had no reason to take any interest in the fate of a handful of foreign invaders when over twenty million of their own people had been killed while, as for the Italians, it had suddenly become clear that they had in fact been anti-Fascists to a man all along and could hardly be expected to sympathize with the relatives of those few fanatics who had been rash enough to fight for the despised Duce. In any case, the whole country was in ruins and there were more urgent matters to attend to.
‘There it is!’ Palottino burst out.
From a distance it resembled some piece of modern sculpture: disjointed planes, random angles, a lot of holes. It was only as they drew nearer that he began to make out that it was the concrete skeleton of an unfinished three-storey duplex, its half-built walls, pillars and floors rising out of a sea of mud. On each side a wide staircase led up in six zigzag sections, breaking off abruptly on an open landing about twenty metres above the ground.
They parked a short distance away. Zen got out, jumped over the ditch running alongside the track and began to work his way along the edge of the field towards the back of the concrete structure, his shoes rapidly clogging up with mud. The building site was surrounded by a token fence consisting of two slack strands of barbed wire. Pietro Miletti was slowly making his way after him.
On the south side of the structure the concrete was cleaner than to the north, where it was discoloured with moss. Here the stains were reddish-brown, from the twisted-off ends of the rusty reinforcing wire. It felt warm and sheltered. Plants had already seeded in crevices around the foundations, preparing to take over the instant man’s will failed. A yellow butterfly loped by with its strange broken flight, like an early film.
Zen looked round at the floor of unfinished concrete littered with cement bags, lengths of wire, nails and lumps of wood, a lone glove. The upper storeys had not yet been floored and through the concrete joists and beams above the sky was visible. There was no sign that anyone had been there for months.
‘Papa!’
Pietro Miletti appeared, his elegant shoes and trousers bespattered with mud.
Zen scraped some of the mud off his shoes on the bottom step of the staircase.
‘I’m afraid it was a hoax.’
‘But why should they do that? What have they got to gain?’
Pietro sounded indignant, as though the kidnappers had broken the rules of a game and ought to be penalized.
‘Perhaps it wasn’t really the gang who phoned you.’
‘It was them, all right. Do you think I don’t know his damned voice by now? Besides, who else would it be?’
‘How should I know?’ Zen snapped back, his tension finding an issue. ‘Someone who hates your guts. There must be plenty of them around.’
He turned away towards the outside of the building, veering to the right to complete his circuit of the structure. In the distance someone sounded a horn several times. The view ahead was obscured by a section of partially completed walling at the east end, but when he reached the corner Zen found that the only unpredictable feature of the landscape was a river which cut across the track about a hundred metres further on. Once, no doubt, there would have been a bridge, since swept away by floods or war. Or perhaps it had never existed. It was hard to say whether the track continued on the other side or not.
It was only when he turned to the more immediate problem of finding a way through the waste of mud that Zen noticed the figure lying slumped against the wall. He just had time to turn, plant one hand on Pietro Miletti’s chest and push him back, indignantly protesting.
The floor was made up of dark red hexagonal tiles touching at their points, separated by triangles of a deep chestnut colour. Another way of looking at it was that the basic form was a large lozenge consisting of a red hexagonal core surrounded by six brown triangular tips, or again, diagonal strips of red hexagons kept in place by pairs of triangular brown wedges. The strips ran in both directions, creating a number of crosses. It should have been possible, theoretically, to work out how many there were. But it would have taken more than just time and ingenuity. You would have needed something else, some understanding of the principles involved, access to formulae and equations, a head for figures. Something he hadn’t got, at any rate. As it was, an irrelevant image kept popping up in the corner of his eye, dragging his attention away: the image of an old man lying slumped in the mud against a wall of concrete blocks, turned away, as though death were an act as shameful as intercourse or defecation, which he had sought to conceal as far as possible, even in the bleakly exposed place where it had come to him.
