Silvio…’
‘No, it wasn’t your husband,’ Zen interrupted. ‘It was you. You rewrote the letter after the original had been burned, had your version photocopied and then sent me the copy. The handwriting is the same as that note on the desk asking your husband to collect Loredana from school.’
‘Well, supposing I did? It’s not a criminal offence, is it, sending information to the police? You should be grateful! I may have changed a word here or there, but apart from that it’s all exact. I wrote it while the text was still fresh in my mind. It wasn’t the kind of letter that is easy to forget! When Pietro told us that you were going on the pay-off I felt that you should know what you were getting yourself into.’
Zen smiled sceptically.
‘I thought it might have something to do with the fact that when it emerged that I’d received the letter, Ivy Cook would become persona non grata in the Miletti family.’
Cinzia giggled.
‘Well, why shouldn’t I get something out of it too? That bitch has been a thorn in our flesh for too long. Help yourself to another drink, I’ll be back in a moment.’
She lurched off across the room, reaching for the wall to steady herself, and disappeared upstairs. Some time later there was the sound of a lavatory flushing, but Cinzia did not reappear. Zen sat there, thinking over what she had told him. He felt heavy, saturated, crammed with more or less repulsive odds and ends he neither wanted nor needed to know. Someone had said that nowadays doctors had to double as priests, offering general consolation and advice to their patients. But there are things you would be ashamed to tell even your doctor, things so vile they can only be confessed to the lowest, most contemptible functionaries of all. There were days when Zen felt like the Bocca de Leone in the Doges’ Palace: a stiff stone grimace clogged with vapid denunciations and false confessions, scribbles riddled with hatred or guilt, the anonymous rubbish of an entire city.
There was still no sign of Cinzia. Zen got up, walked to the foot of the stairs and called out. There was no reply. He put his foot on the first step and paused, listening.
‘Signora?’
The high marble steps curved upwards, paralleling the flight leading up from the front door. Zen started to climb them. There were three doors in the passageway at the top. Feeling like a character in a fairy tale, he chose the one to the right and opened it carefully.
‘Signora?’
The room inside was startlingly bare, reminding him of his mother’s flat in Venice. Two empty cardboard boxes sat on the floor, one at each end of the room, ignoring each other. Between them a small window showed a blank stretch of wall on the other side of the alley.
The second door he tried was the bathroom. A quick search failed to reveal any suspiciously empty bottles of barbiturates, but of course she might have taken them with her. That left just one door, and he hesitated for a moment before opening it. But the scene which met his eyes was perfectly normal. A large high old-fashioned bed almost filled the room. Cinzia Miletti was lying across it on her back, bent slightly to one side, fully clothed, her eyes closed. Her breathing seemed steady.
Zen felt he should cover her up. Her body proved unexpectedly awkward and resistant. One arm kept getting entangled in the sheets, until he began to think that she was playing a trick on him. Paradoxically, it wasn’t till her eyes opened that he knew he was wrong. Their unfocused glance passed over him without the slightest flicker of movement or response. Then they closed and she turned over and began to snore lightly. His last image before switching off the light was of Cinzia’s head lying on the pillow in the centre of a mass of long blonde hair, her mouth placidly sucking her thumb.
Outside the night had turned clear and bitterly cold, and the stars were massed in all their intolerable profusion. The light cast by one of the infrequent street lamps glistened on a freshly pasted poster extolling the virtues of Commendatore Ruggiero Franco Miletti, whose funeral would be held the following afternoon.
EIGHT
By morning everything had changed: the sky was still clear, but the sun shone on a new landscape. The straggling hinter-parts of the town, the scree of recent building on the lower slopes, the patchy developments strung out beside road and railway in the valley, all this had vanished. Immediately beyond the two churches visible from Zen’s window the world abruptly ended, to begin again fifteen or twenty kilometres away, where the upper slopes of the yeasty mountain survived as a small island rising from a frozen ocean. A few other islets were visible on the other side of the valley, but apart from these patches of high ground and the stranded city itself, a glistening white mass of fog covered everything.
The Questura was barely fifty metres down the hill, but it was below the surface, and as Zen walked there from his hotel he felt the invisible moisture beading his newly shaved skin. When he looked up the light was pearly and the sky a blue so tender he could hardly take his eyes off it, with the result that on several occasions he collided with people coming the other way. But everybody was in a good mood that morning, and his apologies were returned with a smile. He remembered a Chinese fable Ellen had once told him about a man who falls off a cliff, saves himself by clutching at a plant, and then notices that two mice are gnawing away the branch on which his life depends. There is a fruit growing on the branch, which the man plucks and eats. The fruit tastes wonderful.
‘How did the mice come to be halfway down a cliff in the first place?’ he had asked her. ‘And why didn’t they eat the fruit themselves?’
He couldn’t see the point of the story at all, but Ellen refused to explain.
‘You must experience it,’ was all she would say. ‘One day it’ll suddenly hit you.’
He had been sceptical at the time, but she’d been quite right, for he had suddenly understood the story. ‘It’ll come to the same thing in the end,’ he’d told Luciano Bartocci. His days in Perugia were clearly numbered, and he would spend them like the young magistrate, on a siding running parallel to the main line but going nowhere and ending abruptly. The process had begun the day before, at the scene of the crime. It was Major Volpi who had been given responsibility for putting up roadblocks and carrying out house-to-house searches. The police had made one mistake too many in this case and would be given no further opportunities to demonstrate their incompetence. As for Zen, any day now he would receive a telegram from the Ministry summoning him back to Rome, and that would be that.
But in the meantime, how sweet the fruit tasted! And although the bureaucratic mice were invisibly at work, he still went through the motions of shifting hands and improving his grip on the branch. Thus his first action on returning to the Questura the day before had been to send his inspectors out to question the people living in the houses along the road to Cannara and talk to the local farmers, just in case anyone had seen anything. When he arrived at work that morning the result of their labours was waiting for him in a blue folder.
Five minutes after entering his office Zen reappeared in the inspectors’ room, where Geraci was watching Chiodini fill in a coupon for a competition promising the winner a lifetime supply of tomato concentrate.
‘What is this?’ he demanded.
Geraci looked warily at the folder Zen was holding up, his eyebrows working away like two caterpillars doing a mating dance.
‘It’s our report.’
‘I’ve never seen a report like this. What’s all this stuff down the side?’
‘Those are computer codes.’
‘Since when have we had a computer?’
‘We haven’t, it’s at the law courts. All packed up in boxes, down in the basement. But we’ll be getting terminals here, once it’s working. You see, this report isn’t meant to be read, it’s meant to be put into the computer.’
Zen regarded him stonily.
‘But there is no computer.’
‘Not yet, no. But they want to be ready, you see. It’s going to be wonderful! All the files from us, the Carabinieri, the Finance people, everything, is going to go straight into the computer. Anything you want to know, it’ll be there at your fingertips. Say you’ve got a report about a small red car, and you want to compare it with all
