he owed, Zen thought the man was trying to cheat him. 129,ooo lire for a short ride across the city!'
'What the hell are you talking about?' the driver retorted. 'Two and a quarter hours you've had! I could have picked up three times the money doing short trips instead of freezing to death in some shitty suburb!'
Zen gradually counted out the notes. Well, that was the last amateur stake-out he'd be doing, he vowed, as the taxi roared away past a red saloon parked about fifty metres along the street, on the other side.
The only people about were an elderly couple making their way at a snail's pace along the opposite pavement.
Zen crossed over to the car, an Alfa Romeo with Rome registration plates. There were several deep scratches and dents in the bodywork and one of the hub-caps was missing, although the vehicle was quite new. Zen looked in through the dirty window. A packet of Marlboro cigarettes lay on one of the leather seats, which looked almost unused. The floor was covered in cigarette butts and scorched with burn marks. The empty box of an Adriano Celentano tape lay in the tray behind the gear-lever, the cassette itself protruding from the player.
He straightened up as footsteps approached, but it was only the elderly couple. They trudged past, the man several paces ahead of his wife. Neither of them looked at the other, although they kept up a desultory patter the whole time.
'Then we can…'
'Right.'
'Or not. Who knows?'
'Well, anyway…'
Zen noted down the registration number of the car and walked back to the house. Giuseppe was off duty, so the front door was closed and locked. The lift was on one of the upper floors. Zen pressed the light switch and set off up the stairs, taking the shallow marble steps two at a time. A rumble overhead was followed by a whining sound as the lift started down. A few moments later the lighted cubicle passed by, its single occupant revealed in fuzzy silhouette on the frosted glass.
By the time he reached the fourth floor, Zen was breathless. He paused briefly to recover before unlocking his front door. There was a clanking far below as the lift shuddered to a halt. Then the landing was abruptly plunged into darkness as the time switch expired. Zen groped his way to the door, opened it and turned on the hall light.
As he closed the door again, he noticed an envelope lying on the sideboard. He picked it up and walked along the passage, past the lugubrious cupboards, carved chests and occasional tables for which no suitabie occasion had ever presented itself. As he neared the living room, he heard the sound of voices raised in argument.
'… never in a hundred years, never in a thousand, will I permit you to marry this man! '
'But Papa, I love Alfonso more than life itself!'
'Do not dare breathe his accursed name again! Tomorrow you leave for the convent, there to take vows more sacred and more binding than those with which you seek to dishonour our house.'
'The convent! No, do not condemn me to a living death, dear Father…'
Zen pushed open the glass-panelled door. By the flickering light of the television he saw his mother asleep in her armchair. He crossed thc darkened room and turned down the volume, silencing the voices but leaving the costumed figures to go through their melodramatic motions. Then he went to the window, opened the shutters and peered out throub~h the slats in the outer jalousies.
The red car was no longer there.
He held the envelope so that it caught the light from the television. It seemed to be empty, although it was surprisingly heavy. His name was printed in block capitals, but there was no stamp or address. He wondered how it had come to be left on the sideboard. Normally post was put in the box in the hallway downstairs, or left with Giuseppe. If a message was delivered to the door, Maria Grazia would take it into the living room.
He ripped the envelope open. It still seemed empty, but something inside made a scratching sound, and when he pulled the paper walls apart he saw, clustered together at the very bottom, a quantity of tiny silvery balls. He let them roll out into his palm. In the Hickering glimmer of the television they could have been almost anything: medicine, seeds, even cake decorations. But Zen knew they were none of these.
They were shotgun pellets.
The nights brought relief. At night I moz›ed freely, I felt my strength returning. The others never venture out once darkness has fa11en. Dissolved by darkness, the world is 7io longer theirs.
They stay at home, lock their doors and watch moving pictwres made with light.
They are afraid of the dark. They are r'ght to be afraid.
Beyond their 1ocked doors and shuftered windows I cam ' into nty own, f1itting effortlessly fmm place to place, appearing and disappearing at will, yielding to the darkness as though to the embraces of a secret loz›er. Untii the lights came on, the innmtes stirred, and the prison awoke to another day.
It was easy to find my u~ay back here. I'd alu~ays come and gone as I liked. They never u~rderstood that. They never tried to understand. No one asked me anything. They told me things. They told me my imprisonment, as they called it, /md been an accident, a mistake. 'What you rnust have suffered!' they said. I'd lost my home and farnily, but they weren't satisfied with that. They wanted me to lose myself as well. What am I, but what the darkness made me? If that was a mistake, an accident, then so am l.
Sometimes the priest came. He had things to tell me too, about a loving father, a tortured son, a virgin mother. Not like my family, I thought, the father who came home drunk and fucked his wife until she screamed, and screamed again when the son was born, a pampered brat, arrogant and selfish, strutting about as though he owned the place, and all because of that thing dangling between his legs, barely the size of my little finger! But I kept my mouth shut. I didn't think the priest would want to know about them.
And who was I, when the family was together? The holy ghost, I suppose. The unholy ghost.
Thursday, 07.55 – 13.20
All the talk at the cafe the next morning was of the overnight swoop by the police and Carabinieri on leftist sympathizers in Milan, Turin and Genoa. 'About time too,' was the dentist's comment, but one of the craftsmen from the basement workshops disagreed.
'The real terrorists don't have anything to do v,~ith those sinistrini. It's just the cops trying to make a good impression. A week from now they'll all have been turned loose again and we'll be back where we started!'
The barman Ernesto and the dentist looked at Zen, who maintained a stony silence. The reason for this was neither professional reserve nor disapproval of the craftsman's cynical tone. Zen simply wasn't paying any attention to the conversation. He had problems of his own that were too pressing to allow him the luxury of discussing other people's, problems which were quite literally closer to home.
Once again he had stayed up until the small hours of the morning, trying without success to find the missing link that would explain the events of the previous days. Noi only had he not succeeded, he wasn't even sure that success was possible. The temptation to fit everything into a neat pattern, he knew, should be resisted. It might well be that two or more quite unrelated patterns were at work.
One thing was sure. During the three hours he had been absent from home the night before, someone had entered his flat and left an envelope filled with shotgun pellets on the sideboard in the hallway. Zen had locked the front door on leaving and it had still been locked on his return.
Questioning his mother obliquely, to avoid frightening her, he had confirmed that she had not let anyone in. The only other person with a key was Maria Grazia. Before leaving for work Zen had interrogated her without result.
The key was kept in her handbag, which hadn't been lost or stolen. Her family were all strict Catholics of the type who would have guilt pangs about picking up a hundredlire coin they found in the street. It was out of the question that any of them might have been bribed to pass on the key to a third party. Zen also questioned Giuseppe, who had duplicate keys to all the apartments.
He was equally categorical in his denials, and given the fanatical vigilance with which he carried out his duties it seemed unlikely that the intruder could have gained access in this way.
Which left only the metallic scraping Zen's mother had reported hearing the night before. It had come from
