‘I think he’s just fantastic, don’t you?’ she went on unperturbed. ‘I’ve seen all his films except Do Me A Favour! which funnily enough I’ve never managed to catch although it’s on TV all the time. He’s working in America this year, you know.’
By now the foyer was completely empty. On every side images of love and violence erupted from glass- fronted posters advertising coming attractions. In her booth the cashier sat knitting behind a tank in which a solitary goldfish swam in desultory circles.
Cinzia looked at her companion.
‘I must go,’ breathed Stefania, and was gone.
‘Would you walk me home?’ Cinzia asked Zen. ‘I’m staying here in town, it’s only five minutes’ walk, not worth calling a taxi, but I don’t like to go alone. There are so many Arabs about now. Of course I’m not racist, but let’s face it, they’ve got a different culture, just like the South.’
Still he couldn’t reply, his head too full of questions to which he didn’t particularly want to know the answers. But he managed to nod agreement.
‘Of course you think I’m shameless,’ Cinzia remarked as they set off, the windless muffled night hardly disturbed by their footsteps. ‘Do you believe in a life after death? I don’t know what to think. But if there isn’t one then nothing makes any difference, does it, and if there is I’m sure it’ll all be far too spiritual for anyone to get in a huff over the way the rest of us carry on.’
The part of the city through which they were walking reminded Zen of Venice, but a Venice brutally fractured, as though each canal were a geological fault and the houses to either side had taken a plunge or been wrenched up all askew and left to tumble back on themselves, throwing out buttresses and retaining walls for support as best they could.
‘I mean, do you really think the dead sit around counting who goes to the funeral and how many wreaths there are and how much they cost?’ his companion carried on. ‘I just hate cemeteries, anyway. They remind me of death.’
Her tone was even more strident than usual. Zen wondered if she wasn’t slightly high on drink or drugs.
‘Going home to stick it up her, eh? Filthy old bumfucker! Squeeze it tight and you might just manage to get a hard-on, you miserable little rat!’
The voice was just overhead, but when they looked up there was no one there.
‘Good evening, Evelina,’ Cinzia replied calmly.
‘Don’t you good evening me, you shameless cunt! You blow-job artist! I bet you beg for it on bended knees! I bet you let him shove it where he wants! Whore! Masturbator!’
They turned a corner and the malignant ravings became blurred and indistinct.
‘Poor Evelina used to be one of the most fashionable women in Perugia,’ Cinzia explained. ‘Nobody seems to know what happened, but one day during a concert she suddenly stood up, took off her knickers and showed everyone her bottom. After that she was put away until they closed the asylums, since when she’s lived in that place. It’s one of her family’s properties, they own half the city. Sometimes you hear her singing, in the summertime. But mostly she just sits up there like a spider, sticking her head out of the window to insult the passers-by. It’s nothing personal, she says the same to everyone.’
For some time now Zen had been wondering where they were going. When Cinzia said she was staying ‘in town’, he’d assumed that she meant the Miletti villa. But although the structure of the city still defeated him in detail, he had got his bearings well enough to know that this could not be their destination. Eventually Cinzia turned up a set of steps rising steeply from the street and unlocked a door at the top.
‘You’ll come in for a moment, won’t you?’
Without waiting for an answer she disappeared, leaving the door open.
Zen slowly mounted the steps, and then paused on the threshold. Ruggiero Miletti was dead and the family blamed him. What better revenge than to disgrace him by rigging a scandal involving the dead man’s daughter, a married woman? But he told himself not to be crazy. How could they have known he was going to that cinema when he hadn’t known himself until he saw the name at the station?
A narrow stairway of glossy marble led straight into a sitting room arranged around a huge open fireplace. There was no sign of Cinzia. The room had roughly plastered walls and a low ceiling supported on enormous joists trimmed out of whole trees. Everything was spick and span, more like a hotel than a home. Zen was instinctively drawn towards the one area of disorder, a desk piled with leaflets, envelopes, magazines, newspapers, letters and bills. He picked up one of the envelopes and held it up to the light: the watermark showed the heraldic hybrid with which he was becoming familiar, with the wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. Next to it lay a note from Cinzia to her husband about collecting their daughter from school.
‘This is really Gianluigi’s place,’ Cinzia explained as she breezed in. She had changed into a striped shirt and a pair of faded jeans that were slightly too large for her. ‘I only use it when he’s away, there’s no telling who I might find here otherwise. What do you want to drink?’
‘Anything at all.’
Her bare feet padded across the polished terracotta tiles to the bottles lined along a shelf in the corner. Zen sat down on the large sofa which occupied most of one wall, thinking about that last card which he’d fondly thought he had up his sleeve. Thank God he hadn’t tried to play it! The trap had been beautifully set, and he’d only avoided it because thanks to Bartocci’s machinations he’d already fallen into another one.
Cinzia brought them both large measures of whisky and sat down astride the wicker chair in front of the writing desk, facing him over the ridged wooden back.
‘I don’t normally drink with strangers,’ she remarked. ‘It’s quite a thrill. We do all our drinking in private, you see, in the family. Like everything else, for that matter!’
Cinzia was beginning to remind Zen more than a little of his wife. Luisella had also been the child of a successful businessman, owner of one of the most important chemist’s shops in Treviso, and she too had had brothers who had dominated her childhood, driving her to defend herself in unorthodox ways. Life was a game like tennis, set up by men for men to win with powerful serves she would never be able to return. She countered by deliberately breaking the rules, exhausting her opponents and winning by default.
‘That’s a clue by the way,’ she continued. ‘You’re never going to get anywhere if you don’t understand the people involved.’
‘I thought the people involved were Calabrian shepherds.’
‘Oh, well, I don’t know anything about them. You should have asked Stefania. Her brother’s best friend is Calabrian, a medical student. But his family is extremely rich and I don’t expect he knows any shepherds.’
She got up abruptly.
‘Shall we have some music? Let’s see, I can never remember how to work this thing.’
She pressed a button and one of the hit songs of the season emerged at full volume, the tough, shallow lyrics gloatingly declaimed by a star of the mid-sixties who had traded in her artless looks and girlish lispings for a streetwise manner and a voice laden with designer cynicism.
‘I’d rather just talk,’ Zen shouted.
With a flick of her finger she restored the silence.
‘I thought you were bored. Well, what shall we talk about? How about sex? Let’s see how you rate in that area. What do you think we go in for, here in Perugia? Wife-swapping? Open marriage? Group gropes? Singles bars?’
‘None of those, I should have thought,’ Zen replied with a slight smile.
‘And quite right too. Bravo, you’re improving. There’s some of that around, of course, but it’s not traditional So what do you think is the speciality of the house? I’m talking about something typically Perugian, home-made from the very finest local ingredients only.’
She finished her drink in one gulp.
‘No idea? I don’t think you’re a very good detective, I’ve given you loads of clues. It’s incest, of course.’
She banged her empty glass down on the desk, as though she had expected to find the surface several centimetres lower than it actually was.
‘Don’t look so surprised, it makes perfect sense. From our point of view marriage has one big drawback, you see. It lets an outsider into the family. Much safer to stick to one’s close relations. There’s no trusting cousins and the like, of course. No, we’re talking mother and son, father and daughter. See what I mean? If you don’t know these things how can you hope to get anything right? For example, you disapprove of my going to the cinema this
