clumsy clinch when Lucaroni walked in.
‘Oh fuck!’ he said, on his way out again.
Zen turned on him.
‘Didn’t anyone ever teach you to knock? You’re not home on the farm now, you know!’
‘Sorry, chief. Really sorry. I didn’t think anybody was here. I was going to put it up for you.’
‘Put what up?’
Lucaroni unwrapped the package he was carrying to reveal a brand-new crucifix, the wounds daubed with bright red paint.
‘Just what you wanted, right?’ the inspector prompted eagerly. ‘Just like the other one.’
Zen glanced at Ellen, who was staring at him in horrified disbelief.
‘I’ll explain later,’ he said wearily. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything later.’
A small white plastic bag containing various packets of waxed paper marked ‘For Foodstuffs’ lay propped against the gear-lever of the little Fiat. The draught coming in through the ventilation ducts made it tremble continuously. They should never have come, thought Zen. What a crazy idea, picnicking up a mountain at this time of year. A crazy foreign idea.
It had all started the night before, when Ellen asked, ‘Is that Assisi over there?’ They were standing looking out of his hotel window. In the distance a mess of lights were spread out across the face of the night like a shovelful of glowing cinders, flickering and scintillating in the currents of air rising from the villages in the plain between. Let’s go there tomorrow, she’d suggested, and then talked about her previous visits, enthusing about the place so much that he grew quite determined to dislike it. But it wasn’t until Ellen came to pick him up that he discovered that she had already bought everything for a picnic lunch. One o’clock in Piazza dei Partigiani after a stressful morning at work was very different from eleven o’clock the night before after making love, but Ellen was bubbling with such enthusiasm that he hadn’t the heart to voice his reservations. But he still thought it was crazy, and he’d been right. Here they were, parked a thousand metres up the dough-shaped mountain, huddled in Ellen’s Fiat 500 because despite the sun the wind outside was wicked. Even the view was all but invisible through a windscreen coated with Roman grime. Foreign craziness!
Ellen started to unwrap the food: a mound of ricotta, slices of cooked ham, olives in oil, half a loaf of bread. On a warm sunny day in the open air it might have been idyllic. Eaten off sheets of wrapping paper balanced precariously on their shivering knees the cheese looked a disgusting white excrescence, the ham pale and sickly and the olives slimy. Even the wine, a heavy red, was a failure. Cold and shaken from the journey, thick with sediment and drunk from a plastic beaker, it tasted like medicine. But like medicine it did him good, and the food tasted better than it looked, and after a while the silence grew less tense and they began to chat about the contrast between bloody-minded, earnest Perugia, just visible on its windswept ridge as a distant smudge of grey, and Assisi, symbol of everything nice and pretty and kind, whose pink stone made even its fortifications look as innocent as an illustration in a book of fairy tales. But as Zen pointed out, at least in Perugia you were spared the relentless commercialization of the pilgrim city, the three-dimensional postcards of a glamorous St Francis preaching to an audience of stuffed animals, the bottles of ‘Monk’s Delight’ liqueur, the ceramic prayer texts suitable for mounting over the toilet, the little figurines of lovable monks with round bellies and mischievous smiles.
‘Yes, but despite all that there really is something special about the place, isn’t there?’ Ellen insisted.
It was the sort of comment, at once vague and gushing, that always irritated him. Sometimes he wondered whether that was why she kept making them.
‘To me it’s just another pretty Umbrian hill town,’ he retorted. ‘It’s a shame it’s been ruined.’
He was going too far, pushing too hard, saying things he didn’t really believe. It was quite deliberate. Something had gone wrong between them, and he intended to find out what it was. Normally he handed over responsibility for the routine maintenance of their relationship to Ellen, but she was letting him down, so he was going to try the only technique he knew: drop some explosive overboard and see what floated to the surface.
‘How can you say that?’ she demanded indignantly. ‘What about all the churches? They wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for him. The basilica is one of the greatest buildings in the world. Or would you dispute that?’
‘On the contrary, I think it’s so great that it should be put to better use. I remember when I was at university in Padua we went to see the basilica there. It’s magnificent, one of my friends said, after the revolution we’ll turn it into a sports centre. The place here would make a good Turkish baths.’
‘You’re showing your age, Aurelio. That sort of knee-jerk anticlericalism has been out of date for years.’
‘Or best of all, they could use it as an exhibition centre. They could start with a display about the concentration camp at Jasenovac.’
‘Was that in Poland?’ she repeated as she cleared away the food.
‘Yugoslavia. No one’s heard of it, it wasn’t in the Auschwitz or Belsen class. They only killed forty thousand people there.’
‘And what’s that got to do with Assisi?’
‘The commandant of Jasenovac concentration camp was a Franciscan monk.’
He opened the window a crack, but the wind made such a noise that he immediately closed it again.
‘When the Germans turned Croatia into a puppet dictatorship the Catholics there immediately got to work settling old scores with the Serbs, packing them into their churches and burning them alive, that kind of thing. The Church knew what was going on and they could easily have stopped it. But the Pope kept quiet and the atrocities went on, many of them supervised by the followers of St Francis. At the end of the war Eva Peron, the wife of the Argentinian dictator, sent us a boatload of brown cloth. Guess why.’
She shook her head.
‘To dress the Croatian thugs up as Franciscan monks so that they could escape to Italy out of the clutches of Tito’s partisans. They were fed and sheltered here in Assisi and in other monasteries and church buildings until they could get away to South America. They were good Catholic boys, after all.’
‘I don’t suppose Tito’s men were angels either.’
‘I don’t suppose they were. But at least they didn’t go around with beatific smiles mumbling about peace and goodwill.’
‘Well, I’m relieved to see that you haven’t changed after all,’ Ellen remarked as they lit their cigarettes. ‘I got a bit worried when I found you’d been sending your subordinates out to buy crucifixes.’
Zen smiled too, but privately he heard Gilberto Nieddu’s voice again, the Sardinian accent strong and clear- cut even over the bad line from Rome.
‘ Oh yes, Aurelio, I’ve identified it. No problem. For me, that is. But you’ve got problems all right. Your crucifix contains a transistorized short-wave transmitter with a cadmium-cell feed. Korean job, cheap and easy to obtain, four to five months continuous operation, use once and throw away. The mike concealed in the head of the figure is only medium-quality, technically speaking, but it would pick up a flea farting in a smallish room. The transmitter would then beam that out about two hundred metres. Somewhere within that radius there’ll be a receiver, probably rigged up to a voice-activated tape recorder. Once every so often someone comes along, swaps the cassette and takes away the highlights of your day at work.’
There was a long silence, during which the noise on the line seemed to become a third party in their conversation.
‘ What do you want me to do with it? ’
‘You’d better send it back.’
‘ Do you have any idea who it belongs to? ’
The silence lasted even longer this time.
‘Upstairs, maybe.’
Gilberto’s next words had shaken Zen more than anything that had happened so far.
‘ Watch yourself, Aurelio. Remember Carella.’
Avoiding Ellen’s eyes, Zen wrapped his coat more closely about him.
‘Anyway, let’s look on the bright side. The way things are going I should be back in Rome soon.’
‘I still don’t understand what all the fuss is about,’ Ellen replied in a slightly peevish tone. ‘Miletti’s death was nothing to do with you, surely?’
‘That remains to be proved.’
‘Oh, I see. It’s the old story. You’re guilty until proven innocent.’
‘Not necessarily. Sometimes you’re guilty anyway.’
