the line of her thigh.
'I know,' he said.
It was her turn to look surprised.
'Was it that obvious?'
'Oh come on!' he exclaimed. 'Did you honestly think I'd believe that you went to all that trouble, getting me to fake a phone call from work and all the rest of it, just so that you could go out to the cinema? I mean you don't have to explain. I don't care what you were doing. And even supposing I did, it's none of my business.'
Tania was gazing at him with dawning comprehension.
'But that was what I was doing! Just that! It was all the other times that were lies, when I told you about the films I'd seen, and going to the opera and the theatre and all the rest of it.'
She looked away as tears swelled in her eyes.
'That's why I got so embarrassed in the taxi, when you asked where I was going. It wasn't that I had a guilty secret, at least not the kind you thought! It was just that my pathetic little deception had been found out and I felt so ashamed of myself! 'It all started when you mentioned some film I'd read about in the paper. That's all I ever did do, read about it. So I thought it would be fun to pretend that I'd seen it. Then I stated doing it with other things, building a whole fantasy life that I shared with you every morning at work. It was never real, Aurelio, none of it! On the contrary! We never go anywhere, never do anything. AII Mauro wants to do is sit at home with his mother and his sister and any cousins or aunts or uncles who happen to be around.
'The irony of it is that that's one thing that attracted me to Mauro in the first place, the fact that he came with a ready-made family. My own parents are dead, as you know, and my only brother emigrated to Australia years ago. Well, I've got myself a family now, all right, and what a family! Do you know what his mother calls me? 'The tall cunt.' I've heard them discussing me behind my back.
'Why did you want to marry that tall cunt?' she asks him.
They think I can't understand their miserable dialect. 'It's your own fault,' she says. 'You should never have married a foreigner. 'Wife and herd from your own backyard.' ' This is the way they talk! This is the way they think!'
She fell silent. A car door slammed in the street outside.
Footsteps approached the house. Zen got to his feet, listening intently.
'What is it, Aurelio?'
He went to the window and looked out. Then he walked quickly through to the inner hallway, closing the door pehind him. He lifted the phone and dialled 113, the police emergency number. Keeping his voice low so that Tania would not hear, Zen gave his name, address and rank.
'There's a stolen vehicle in the street outside my house.
A red Alfa Romeo, registration number Roma 846gg P. Get a car here immediately, arrest the occupant and charge him with theft. Approach with caution, however. He may be armed.'
'Very good, dottore.'
As Zen replaced the phone, he heard a sound from the living room. No, it was more distant, beyond the living room. From the hall.
His heart began to beat very fast and his breath came in gulps. Slowly, deliberately, he walked through the doorway and past the television, brushing his fingertips along the back of his mother's chair. How could he have been so stupid, so thoughtless and selfish? To imagine that no harm could come to him in the daylight but only after dark, like a child! To put a person he loved at risk by bringing her to a place he knew to be under deadly threat.
They'd been watching the house. They'd seen him and Tania enter, and they'd had plenty of time to prepare their move. Now they had come for him.
As he approached the glass-panelled door that lay open into the hall there was a loud click, followed by the characteristic squeal as the front door opened. On the floor above, the canary chirped plaintively in response.
The scene refiected on the glass door was almost a replica of the one the night before. But this time Zen knew that he had not left the door open, and the dark figure walking towards him along the hallway did not call his name in a familiar voice, and it was carrying a shotgun.
'What's going on, Aurelio?'
Tania was standing on the threshold of the inner hallway, looking anxiously at him. Zen waved her away, but she took no notice. Outside in the streets a siren rose and fell, gradually emerging from the urban backdrop as it rapidly neared the house. The gunman, now half-way along the hall, paused. The siren wound down to a low growl, directly outside the house.
Zen jumped as something touched his shoulder. He whirled round, staring wildly at Tania's hand. She was close behind him, gazing at him with an expression of affectionate concern. He looked at the reflection of the hallway on the surface of the glass door. The gunman had v.anished. Zen grabbed Tania suddenly, holding her tightly, gasping for breath, trembling all over.
Then abruptly he thrust her away again.
'I'm sorry! I'm sorry!' he exclaimed repeatedly. 'I didn't meant to! I couldn't help it!'
After moment she came back to him of her own accord and took him in her arms.
'It's all right,' she told him. 'It's all right.'
I didn't mean to do it. I was just paying a visit, like before. They sgouldn't have tried to shut me out, though, or else done it properly. As it was, I just pushed and twisted until the whole iging came crashing down. But it made me angry. They shouldn't have done that.
I thought the noise might bring them running, but they were as deaf and blind as usual. To get my own back, I decided to make the gun disappear. I'm no stranger to guns. My father was famous for his marksmanship. After Sunday lunch, when the animals had been corralled and lassooed, wrestled to the ground like baby giants and dosed with medicine or branded, the men would hurl beer bot tles up into the air to fire at. Drunk as he was, the sweet grease of the piglet they had roasted before the fire still glistening on his lips and chin, my father could always hit the target and make the valley ring with the sound of breaking glass.
'There's nothing to it!' he used to joke. 'You just pull the trigger and the gun does the rest.'
As I lifted it from the rack, I heard someone laugh in the next room. It was sleek and fat and arrogant, his laugh, like one of the young men lounging in the street, pngering their cocks like a pocketful of money. That was when I decided to show myself.
That would stop the laughter. That would give them something to think about.
After that things happened without consulting me. A man came at me. A woman ran. I worked the trigger again and again.
Father was quite right. The gun did the rest.
Saturday, 05.05-12.50
A chill, tangy wind, laden with salt and darkness, whined and blustered about the ship, testing for weaknesses. By contrast, the sea was calm. Its shiny black surface merged imperceptibly into the darkness all around, ridged into folds, tucks and creases, heaving and tilting in the moonlight. The short choppy waves slapping the metal plates below seemed to have no perceptible effect on the ship itself, which lay as still as if it were already roped to the quay.
A man stood grasping the metal rail pudgy with innumerable coats of paint, staring out into the night as keenly as an officer of the watch. The unbuttoned overcoat flapping about him like a cloak gave him an illusory air of corpulence, but when the wind failed for a moment he was revealed as quite slender for his height. Beneath the overcoat he was wearing a rumpled suit. A tie of some nondescript hue was plastered to his shirt by the wind in a lazy curve, like a question mark. His face was lean and smooth, with an aquiline nose, and slate-blue eyes, their gaze as disconcertingly direct as a child's. His hair, its basic undistinguished brown now flecked with silvery-grey highlights at the temples, was naturally curly, and the wind ~ossed it back and forth like frantic wavelets in a storm scene on a Greek vase.
A few hundred metres astern of the ship, the full moon was reflected in the sea's unstable surface. The
