'Yes, I'm afraid there's been a slight problem with that tape, dottore.'
'Really?'
'Yes, really.'
'And what might it be?'
'Well it might be almost anything,' the clerk returned wittily. 'But what it is, quite simply, is that the tape you gave us back is not the same tape that you took out.'
'What do you mean, not the same?'
'I mean it's not the same. It's blank. There's nothing on it.'
'But… but…' Zen stammered.
'Also, the tapes we use here are specially made up for us and are not available commercially, whereas what you handed in is an ordinary BASF ferrous oxide cassette obtainable at any dealer.'
'But that's absurd! You must have muddled them up somehow.'
At that moment, the other clerk interrupted to hand Zen the file he had requested. But his colleague had no intention of letting Zen get away with his clumsy attempt to shift the blame for what had happened.
'No, dottore! That's not the problem. The problem is that the tape you brought back is a blank. Raw plastic.' ~34 Zen fiddled nervously with the Spadola file.
'What exactly are you accusing me of?' he blustered.
The clerk gestured loftily.
'I'm not accusing anyone of anything, dottore. Naturally, everyone knows how easy it is to push the wrong button on one of those machines and wipe out the previous recording..'
'I'm sure I didn't do that.'
'I know you didn't,' the clerk replied with a steely smile that revealed the trap Zen had almost fallen into. 'Our tapes are all copy-protected, so that's impossible. Besides, as I said, the brand was different. So a substitution must have taken place. The question is, where is the original?'
There was a crash as the Spadola file fell to the floor, spilling documents everywhere. As Zen bent down to pick them up, the assembled clerks signalled their colleague's triumph with a round of laughter.
Zen straightened up, holding a video cassette.
'46g29 BUR 43$/K/95,' he read from the label. 'Isn't that the one you've been making so much fuss about?'
'Where did that come from?' the clerk demanded.
'It was inside the file.'
Without another word, he went back to picking up the scattered documents. The clerk snatched the tape and bustled off, muttering angrily about checking its authenticity.
Zen wasn't worried about that, having played it through the night before, after he and Gilberto spent the best part of an hour rewinding the damn thing into the cassette by hand. His mother had gone to bed by then, still blissfully ignorant that a stranger had entered the apartment while she had been watching television.
Zen himself was still in shock from what had happened, and it was left to Gilberto to bring up the question of what was to become of his mother during his absence in Sardinia, now that their home was demonstrably under threat. In the end, Gilberto insisted that she stay with him and his wife until Zen returned.
'Quite impossible!' Zen had replied. His mother hadn't left the apartment for years. She would be lost without the familiar surroundings that replicated the family home in Venice. Anyway, she was practically senile much of the time. It was very difficult even for him to communicate with her or understand what she wanted, and it didn't help that she often forgot that her Venetian dialect was incomprehensible to other people. She could be demanding, irrational, bad-tempered and devious. Rosella Nieddu already had her hands full looking after her own family. It would be an intolerable imposition for her to have to take on a moody old woman, contemptuous and distrustful of strangers, someone who in her heart of hearts believed that the civilized world ended at Mestre.
But Gilberto had brushed these objections aside.
'So what are you going to do with her, Aurelio? Because she can't stay here.'
Zen had no answer to that.
And so it came about that early that morning an ambulance rolled up to the front door of Zen's house. The attendants brought a mobile bed up to the apartment, placed Zen's mother on it and took her downstairs in the lift before sweeping off, siren whooping and lights flashing, to the General Hospital. Thirty seconds later, siren stilled and flasher turned off, the ambulance quietly emerged on the other side of the hospital complex and drove to the modern apartment block where the Nieddus lived.
Throughout her ordeal the old lady had hardly spoken a word, though her eyes and the way she clutched her son's hand showed clearly how shocked she was. Zen had explained that there was something wrong with their apartment, something connected with the noises she had heard, and that it was necessary for them both to move out for a few days while it was put right. It made no difference what he said. His mother sat rigidly as the ambulancemen wheeled her into the neat and tidy bedroom which Rosella Nieddu had prepared for her, having shooed out the two youngest children to join their elder siblings next door. gen thanked Rosella with a warmth that elicited a hug and a kiss he found oddly disturbing. Gilberto's wife was a very attractive woman, and the contact had made Zen realize that he had neglected that side of his life for too long.
The archives clerks had gone back to their desks, now that the fun was over. Zen gathered up the papers relating go the Spadola case and started to put them into some sort of order while he awaited confirmation that the video tape he had produced from his pocket after dropping the file was indeed the genuine article.
Suddenly his hands ceased their mechanical activity.
Zen scanned the smucigy carbon-copied document he was holding, looking for the name which had leapt off the page at him.
XXX informed that Spadola was in hiding at a farmhouse near the village of Melzo. At 04.00 hours on 16 July personnel of the Squadra Mobile under the direction of Ispettor Aurelio Zen entered the house and arrested Spadola. An extensive search of the premises revealed various items of material evidence (see Appendix A), in particular a knife which proved to be marked with traces of blood consistent with that of the victim. Spadola continued to deny all involvement in the affair, even after the damning nature of the evidence had been explained to him. At the judicial confrontation with Parrucci, the accused uttered violent threats against the witness.
Once again, Zen felt the superstitious chill that had come over him that night after viewing the Burolo video.
Parrucci! The informer whose gruesome death had thrown Fausto Arcuti into a state of mortal terror! It seemed quite uncanny that the same man should figure again in the file which Zen had asked to see two days before as part of his stratagem for substituting the blank video tape.
But he had no more time to consider the matter, for at that moment the clerk reappeared, video cassette in hand.
'It's the right one,' he confirmed grudgingly. 'So where did the other come from, I'd like to know?'
Zen shrugged.
'I'd say that's pretty obvious. When I brought the tape back the other day, you got it muddled up with the file I asked to consult at the same time. When you couldn't find it you started to panic, because you knew that it had been handed back and that you would be responsible. So you substituted a blank tape, hoping that no one would notice.
Unfortunately, one of my colleagues had asked to see the tape, and he immediately discovered that…'
'That's a lie!' the man shouted.
Snatching the Spadola file from Zen, he abruptly went on to the attack.
'Look at this mess you've made! It would be no wonder if things sometimes did get confused around here with people like you wandering in and upsetting everything.
Leave it, leave it! You're just making a worse muddle.
These documents must be filed in chronological order.
Look, this judicial review shouldn't be here. It must come at the end.'
'Let me see that!'
The form was stiff and heavy, imitation parchment. The text, set in antique type and printed in the blackest of inks, was as dense and lapidary as Latin, clogged with odd abbreviations and foreshortenings, totally impenetrable.
