cigarette and strolled along a path in the patchy grass between the ruins. A fine dust covered everything, beaten into the air by passing feet from the bone-dry soil. The sun crouched low in a cloudless sky, its weak rays absorbed and reflected by the marble and brick on every side. Overhead the helicopter swept past periodically, watchful, alien, remote. Halfway up the path, which veered off to the right and started to climb the Palatine hill, Zen paused to survey the scene. At that time of year there were only a few tourists about. Among them was a young man in a leather jacket and jeans. Oddly enough, he was once again having problems with his laces.
Zen resumed his walk with a fastidious smile. If Leather Jacket thought that bending down to tie up your shoes made you invisible then he shouldn't prove too difficult to unload. In fact he felt slightly piqued that such a third-rate operator had been considered adequate for the task of shadowing him. Evidently he couldn't even inspire respect in his enemies.
The path ran up a shallow valley, between masses of ancient brickwork emerging from the grass like weathered rocky outcroppings. The signs and fences installed by the authorities had imposed some superficial order on the hill's chaotic topography, but this simply made its endless anomalies all the more incomprehensible. Nothing here was what it appeared to be, having been recycled and cannibalized so many times that its original name and function was often unclear even to experts. Although no archaeologist, Zen was intimately familiar with the many- layered complexities of the Palatine, thanks to the Angela Barilli affair.
The daughter of a leading Rome jeweller, eighteeen-yearold Angela had been kidnapped in 1975. After months of io6 negotiations and a bungled pay-off the kidnappers had broken off contact. In desperation, the Barilli family had turned to the supernatural, engaging a clairvoyant from Turin who claimed to have led the police to three other kidnap victims. The medium duly informed Angela's mother that her daughter was being held in an underground cell somewhere in the vast network of rooms and passages on the lower floors of the Imperial palace at the heart of the Palatine.
Unlikely as this seemed, the political clout wielded by the family was enough to ensure that Zen, who was directing the investigation, had to waste three days organizing a painstaking search of the area. The Barilli girl's corpse was in fact discovered the following year in a shallow concrete pit beneath a garage in the Primavalle suburb where she had been held during her ordeal, but Zen had never forgotten the three days he had spent exploring the honeycomb of caverns, tunnels, cisterns and cellars that lay beneath the surface of the Palatine. It was an area so rich in possibilities that Zen could simply disappear into the mathematics, leaving his follower to solve an equation with too many variables.
When he reached the plateau at the top of the hill, Zen turned left behind the high stone wall which closed off a large rectangle of ground surrounding a church, and waited for Leather Jacket to catch up. There was no one about, and the only sound was the distant buzzing of the helicopter. It had now moved further to the east, circling over the group of hospitals near San Giovanni in Laterano.
No doubt an important criminal was being transferred from Regina Coeli prison for treatment, with the helicopter acting as an eye in the sky against any attempt to snatch him.
Footsteps approached quickly, almost.at a run. At the last moment, Zen stepped out from behind the wall.
'Sorry!'
'Excuse me!'
The collision had only been slight, but the young man in the leather jacket looked deeply startled, as Zen had intended he should be. Close to, his sheen of toughness fell apart like an actress's glamour on the wrong side of the footlights. Despite a virile stubble, due no doubt to shaving last thing at night, his skin looked babyish, and his eyes were weak and evasive.
'It always happens!' Zen remarked.
The man stared at him, mystified.
'When there's no one about, I mean,' Zen explained.
'Have you noticed? You can walk right through the Stazione Termini at rush hour and never touch anyone, but go for a stroll up here and you end up walking straight into the only other person about!'
The man muttered something inconclusive and turned away. Zen set off in the opposite direction. Not only would the encounter have shaken Leather Jacket, but it would now be impossible for him to pass off any future contacts as mere coincidence. That constraint would force him to hang back in order to keep well out of sight, thus giving Zen the margin he needed.
He made his way through a maze of gravelled paths winding among sections of ruined brick wall several metres thick. Lumps of marble lay scattered about like discarded playthings. Isolated stone-pines rose from the ruins, their rough straight trunks cantilevering out at the top to support the broad green canopy. Here and there, excavations had scraped away the soil to expose a fraction of the hidden landscape beneath the surface. Fenced off and covered with sloping roofs of corrugated plastic sheeting, they looked like the primitive shelters of some future tribe, bringing the long history of this ancient hill full circle in the eternal darkness of a nuclear winter.
A line of pines divided this area from a formal garden with alleys flanked by close-clipped hedges. Screened by the dense thickets of evergreen trees and shrubs, Zen was able to move quickly along the paved path leading to a parterre with gravel walks, a dilapidated pavilion and terrace overlooking the Forum. A fountain dripped, bright dabs of orange fruit peeped through the greenery, paths led away in every direction. In the centre, a flight of steps led down into a subterranean corridor running back the way he had come. Dimly lit by lunettes let into the wall just below the arched ceiling, the passage seemed to extend itself as Zen hurried along it. The walls, rough, pitted plaster, were hung with cobwebs as large and thick as handkerchiefs, which fluttered in the cool draught.
At length the passage ended in another flight of steps leading up into the middle of the maze of brickwork and gravel paths which Zen had passed through earlier.
Keeping under cover of the fragments of wall, he worked his way towards the massive ruins of the Imperial palace itself. The gate was just where he remembered it, giving access to a yard used for storing odds and ends of unidentified marble. It was supposed to be locked, but one of the things that Zen had leamed in the course of his abortive search for Angela Barilli was that it was left open during the day because the staff used it as a short cut. Ignoring the sign reading 'No Admission To Unauthorized Persons', Zen walked through the yard to a passage at the back. To the left, a modern doorway led into a museum. Zen turned the other way, down an ancient metal staircase descending into the bowels of the hill.
At first, the staircase burrowed through a channel cut into the solid brickwork of the palace. As Zen walked down, the light diminished above, and simultaneously the darkness beneath began to glow. Then, without warning, he emerged into a vast underground space in which the staircase was suspended vertiginously, bolted to the brickwork. The other walls were immeasurably distant, mere banks of shadow, presences hinted at by the light seeping in far below, obscuring the ground like thick mist. Zen clutched the handrail, overwhelmed by vertigo.
Everything had been turned on its head: the ground above, the light below.
Step by step, he made his way down the zigzag staircase through layers of cavernous gloom. The floor was a bare expanse of beaten earth illuminated by light streaming in through large rectangular openings giving on to the sunken courtyard at the heart of the palace. Zen walked across it, glancing up at the metal railings high above, where a trio of tourists stood reading aloud from a guidebook. A rectangular opening in the brickwork opposite led into a dark passage which passed through a number of sombre gutted spaces and then a huge enclosed arena consisting of rows of truncated columns flanking a large grassy area.
He sat down on one of the broken columns, out of sight of the path above, and lit a cigarette. At the base of the column lay a large pine cone, its scales splayed back like the pads of a great cat's paw. The air was still, the light pale and mild, as though it too was antique. The matchstick figures displayed on Zen's digital watch continued their elaborate ballet, but the resulting patterns seemed to have lost all meaning. The only real measure of time was the slow disappearance of the cigarette smouldering between Zen's fingers and the equally deliberate progress of his thoughts.
Who could Leather Jacket be working for? Until this moment Zen had assumed that he must be connected with the break-in at his flat and the envelope full of shotgun pellets which had been left there, but now, after some consideration, he rejected this idea. Leather Jacket simply didn't look nasty enough to have a hand in the attempt to scare Zen by copying the warnings sent to Judge Giulio Bertolini before his death. He didn't care enough. It wasn't a personal vendetta he was involved in, Zen was sure of that. He was in it for the money, a cut-rate employee hired by the hour to keep track of Zen's movements. But who had hired him? The longer Zen thought about it, the more significant it seemed that Leather Jacket had put in his first appearance shortly after Zen's interview at Palazzo
