fucking well need this! Not any time, and especially not now.'
Gilberto Nieddu gestured for calm, moving his hands smoothly through the air as though stroking silk.
'This lunch has been arranged for weeks, Aurelio. I didn't ask you to come along. On the contrary, you phoned me at the last moment. I would normally have said I was busy, but because you sounded so desperate I went out of rny way to see you. But I had'to explain your presence to Ochetto, otherwise he would have been suspicious. This way, he'll just think I was trying to impress him with my contacts at the Ministry. It worked beautifully. You were very convincing. And don't worry about repercussions.
He's already forgotten you exist.'
Zen smiled wanly as he dug a Nazionale out of his rapidly collapsing pack. 'You were very convincing.' Tania had said the same thing the night before, and it had apparently been Zen's 'convincing' performance in the Miletti case which had recommended him to Palazzo Sisti.
Everyone who used him for their own purposes seemed very satisfied with the results.
'So you're in the shit again, eh?' continued Nieddu, lighting a cigar and settling back in his chair. 'What's it all about this time?'
Zen pushed his glass about on the tablecloth stained with traces of the various courses they had consumed. He no longer had any desire to share his troubles with the Sardinian.
'Oh, nothing. I'm probably just imagining it.'
Nieddu eyed his friend through a screen of richly fragrant smoke.
'It's time you got out of the police, Aurelio. What's the point of slogging away like this at your age, putting your life on the line? Leave that to the young ambitious pricks who still think they're immortal. Let's face it, it's a mug's game. There's nothing in it unless you're bent, and even then it's just small change really.'
He clicked his fingers to summon the bill.
'You know, I never had any idea what was going on in the world until I went into business. I simply never realized what life was about. I mean, they don't teach you this stuff at school. What you have to grasp is, it's all there for the taking. Somebody's going to get it. If it isn't you, it'll be someone else.'
He sipped his whisky and drew at his cigar.
'All these cases you get so excited about, the Burolos and all the rest of it, do you know what that amounts to'?
Traffic accidents, that's all. If you have roads and cars, a certain number of people are going to get killed and injured. Those people attract a lot of attention, but they're really just a tiny percentage of the number who arrive safely without any fuss or bother. It's the same in business, Aurelio. The system's there, people are going to use it. The only question is whether you want to spend your time cleaning up after other people's pile-ups or driving off where you want to go. Fancy a cognac or something?'
It was after three o'clock when the two men emerged, blinking, into the afternoon sunlight. They shook hands and parted amicably enough, but as Zen walked away it felt as though a door had slammed shut behind him.
People changed, that was the inconvenient thing one always forgot. It was years now since Gilberto had left the police in disgust at the way Zen had been treated over the Moro affair, but Zen still saw him as a loyal colleague, formed in the same professional mould, sharing the same perceptions and prejudices. But Gilberto Nieddu was no longer an ex-policeman, but a prosperous and successful businessman, and his views and attitudes had changed accordingly.
On a day-to-day level this had been no more apparent ihan the movement of a clock's hands. It had taken this crisis to reveal the distance that now separated the two men. The Sardinian still wished Zen well, of course, and would help him if he could. But he found it increasingly difficult to take Aurelio's problems very seriously. To him they seemed trivial, irrelevant and self-infiicted. What was the point cf getting into trouble and taking risks with no prospect of profit at the end of it all?
Gilberto's attitude made it impossible for Zen to ask him for help, yet help was what he desperately needed for the Project that was beginning to form in his mind. If he couldn't get it through official channels or friendly contacts then there was only one other possibility.
The first sighting was just north of Piazza Venezia. After the calm of the narrow streets from which most traffic was banned, the renewed contact with the brutal realities of Roman life was even more traumatic than usual. I'm getting too old, Zen thought as he hovered indecisively at the ke rb. My reactions are slowing down. I'm losing my nerve, my confidence. So he was reassured to see that a tough-looking young man in a leather jacket and jeans was apparently just as reluctant to take the plunge. In the end, indeed, it was Zen who was the first to step out boldly into the traffic, trusting that the drivers would choose not to exercise their power to kill or maim him.
It was marginally less reassuring to catch sight of the same young man just a few minutes later in Piazza del Campidoglio. Zen had taken this route because it avoided the maelstrom of Piazza Venezia, although it meant climbing the long steep fiights of steps up the Capitoline hill. Nevertheless, when he paused for breath by the plinth where a statue of his namesake had stood until recently succumbing to air pollution, there was the young man in the leather jacket, about twenty metres behind, bending down to adjust his shoe-laces.
Zen swung left and walked down past the Mamertine prison to Via dei Fori Imperiali. He paused to light a cigarette. Twenty metres back, Leather Jacket was lounging against a railing, admiring the view. As Zen replaced his cigarettes, a piece of paper fluttered from his pocket to the ground. He continued on his way, counting his strides. When he reached twenty he looked round again.
The young man in the leather jacket was bending to pick up the paper he had dropped.
The only thing he would learn from it was that Zen had spent xzoo lire in a wine shop in Piazza Campo dei Fiori that morning. Zen, on the other hand, had leamt two things: the man was following him, and he wasn't very good at it. Without breaking his pace, he continued along the broad boulevard towards the Colisseum. This, or rather the underground station of the same name, had been his destination from the start, but he would have to lose the tail first. The men he was planning to visit had a code of etiquette as complex and inflexible as any member of Rome's vestigial aristocracy, and would take a particularly poor view of anyone arriving with an unidentified guest in tow.
Without knowing who Leather Jacket was working for, it was difficult to choose the best way of disposing of him.
If he was an independent operator, the easiest thing would be to have him arrested on some pretext. This would also be quick – a phone call would bring a patrol car in minutes – and Zen was already concerned about getting back to the house before six o'clock, when Maria Grazia went home. But if Leather Jacket was part of an organization, then this solution would sacrifice Zen's long-term advantage by showing the tail that he had been burned. He would simply be replaced by someone unknown to Zen, and quite possibly someone more experienced and harder to spot. Zen therefore reluctantly decided to go for the most difficult option, that of losing the young man without allowing him to realize what had happened. It was not until the last moment, as he was passing the entrance, that it dawned on him that the perfect territory for this purpose was conveniently to hand.
In the ticket office, three men in shirtsleeves were engaged in a heated argument about Craxi's line on combatting inflation. Zen flashed his police identity card at them and then at the woman perched on a stool at the entrance, a two-way radio in one hand and a paperback novel in the other. Without looking round to see if Leather Jacket was following, he walked through the gateway and into the Forum.
To his untutored eye, the scene before him resembled nothing so much as a building site. AII that was missing were the tall green cranes clustered together in groups like extraterrestial invaders. It seemed as if this project had only just passed the foundation level, and only then in a fragmentary and irregular way. Some areas were still pitted and troughed, awaiting the installation of drainage and wiring, while in others a few pillars and columns provided a tantalizing hint of the building to come. Elsewhere, whole sections of the massive brick structures – factories? warehouses? – which had formerly occupied the area had still not been demolished completely. For the moment, work seemed to have ground to a halt. No dump-trucks or concrete-pourers moved along the rough track running the length of the site. Perhaps some snag had arisen over the financing, Zen thought whimsically. Perhaps the government had been reshuffled yet again, and the new minister was reluctant to authorize further expenditure on a project which had already over-run its estimated cost by several hundred per cent – or was at least holding out for some financial incentive on a scale similar to that which had induced his predecessor to sign the contract in the first place.
A Carabinieri helicopter was thrashing about overhead like a shark circling for the kill. Zen tossed away his
