order to bolster my case, which was that Carella had somehow stumbled on a clue to Moro’s whereabouts. On the other hand I was afraid that if I made the driver sound too important he might end up under the wheel of a bus instead of behind one. In the end I was told to go home and to stay there. The next day I received a telegram informing me that my request to be transferred to clerical duties at the Ministry of the Interior had been granted. I hadn’t submitted any such request, of course.’
There was a long silence, broken only by the perpetual nudging of the wind, which seemed to be getting stronger all the time.
‘Shall we go?’ Ellen asked.
She started the engine without waiting for an answer and began to drive along the track winding down the mountain.
‘The Red Brigade were holding Moro in Portuense, weren’t they?’ she commented suddenly.
‘In a ground-floor flat in Via Montalcini. About four blocks from where Dario Carella was run over.’
It wasn’t until they reached the walls of Assisi that she spoke again.
‘It’s no good, I don’t understand. I’ll never understand. Why should they let him be killed? It doesn’t make any sense! After all, he was one of them.’
‘Perhaps he was no longer really one of them. Perhaps they didn’t know that until he was kidnapped. Perhaps once he’d gone they realized that they were better off without him. The ratking is self-regulating, it responds automatically and effectively to every situation.’
She took her eyes off the road for an instant to glance at him.
‘What have rats got to do with it?’
‘Oh, nothing. I was just trying to explain how Miletti came to be killed.’
‘Miletti?’
‘I mean Moro.’
‘How much have you had to drink?’
‘Enough to need a coffee.’
They stopped in a village strung out in ribbon development along the flat straight road from Assisi to Perugia. The air was still and it was pleasantly warm. The cafe was a brash new building full of old men playing cards.
‘I’m going back this afternoon,’ Ellen said as they stood at the bar, watched by every eye in the place.
Her visit had not been a success. The basic material of their relationship, the DNA itself, seemed to have gone wrong. As long as that condition lasted, the time they spent together, instead of adding to their store of shared experiences, depleted the existing one, leaving them more apart than when they were separated.
‘I’ll be back soon myself,’ he told her, ‘and then we’ll forget all this and have a really good time again.’
When they reached Perugia she dropped him opposite the Questura. As he stooped to kiss her Zen noticed that her cheeks were wet.
‘Why are you crying?’
She shook her head.
‘I’m afraid.’
‘Afraid of what?’
‘Of everything.’
‘There’s no need to be afraid. It’ll be all right.’
But he stood there watching until the little car had disappeared, as though Ellen were setting off on a long and dangerous journey from which she might never return.
NINE
One day towards the end of the war five ships had appeared in the lagoon off Venice. For a few weeks they lay moored together, like a new island between the city and the Lido, and then one day they were gone. Later Zen worked out that they must have been American warships of an obsolete type, waiting to be sold or scrapped, but at the time their slightly menacing presence seemed a pure challenge, and when his friend Tommaso dared him to try and get aboard one he naturally agreed.
Close up they were as big as churches: great solid slabs of crudely painted grey with black numbers too large to read. Only the end vessel was manned by a token guard, and it was merely terrifying to slip into one of the narrow channels between them, where the water slapped back and forth, tie their skiff to the anchor cable and then shin up it to the deck. The rest of that day they spent in an alien world of pipes and gauges and controls and levers and incomprehensible signs, like the first explorers of a ruined city.
With most of the staff going home at two o’clock, the end of the working day for employees of the state, the Questura had a faintly similar air of abandonment which Zen always found attractive. The rooms and corridors were empty except for a few elderly women cleaning up the male mess of scattered newspapers, stained coffee cups, overflowing ashtrays and the odd half-eaten sandwich. They had not yet reached Zen’s office, but someone else had been there, for there was a telegram on his desk.
Although he had been expecting it, it was still a shock. He put it away in his pocket unopened, and mechanically leafed through the report on the forensic tests he had unofficially requested on the Fiat Argenta saloon which Gilberto Nieddu had stolen from outside the cemetery during Ruggiero Miletti’s funeral and left abandoned near the scene of the murder. He had pinned all his hopes on this report providing him with some positive evidence to lay before the investigating magistrate, Rosella Foria, and when it had arrived that morning he’d been bitterly disappointed.
True, the three Pirellis and the odd Michelin on the car corresponded ‘in their general type and configuration’ to the marks found at the murder site, as he had confirmed when he checked the car at the SIMP garage. But in the absence of ‘specific individuating features’ a positive identification was not possible, while the soil samples found were merely ‘consistent with types found throughout the area’. As for the interior, it was clear that the mechanic had done his work well. The only items found were inconclusive traces of paint and dust, some cigarette ash, a few yellow nylon threads and a fifty-lire coin which had fallen and lodged beside the seat support, whose metal base had protected it from the nozzle of Massimo’s vacuum cleaner. In short, nothing that would persuade Rosella Foria that there was any case for pursuing this line of inquiry, when to do so would mean admitting that the Miletti family was under suspicion. To justify that you would need a lot more than the vague phrases of the report and the confused statements of a single witness. You would practically need a photograph of one of them pulling the trigger, and it had better be a bloody good photograph, and even then the smart thing to do would be to tear it up, burn the fragments and forget you’d ever seen it.
The door opened and a grizzled face bound in a green scarf appeared. At the same moment the phone began to ring.
‘ May I speak to Commissioner Aurelio Zen, please.’
A woman’s voice, cool and distant.
‘Speaking.’
‘ This is Rosella Foria, investigating magistrate. I should like to see you in my office, please.’
The cleaning woman was already hard at work, banging her mop into the corners of the room.
‘Now?’
‘ If that is convenient.’
Her tone suggested that he’d better come even if it wasn’t.
‘It stinks!’ the cleaning woman remarked as he hung up.
‘What?’
‘He can’t control his pee.’
Her accent was so broad that Zen could barely understand.
‘I rub and scrub from morning to night but it’s no good, everything stinks.’
She waved at the crucifix Lucaroni had provided.
‘He hangs up there doing sweet fuck all and they expect us to feel sorry for Him! I just wish we could change places, that’s all! Half an hour of my life and He’d wish He was back on his nice cosy cross, believe you me.’
For once Zen accepted Palottino’s offer of a lift up to the centre of town. On the way he amused himself by
