shuddering patch of brightness had an eerie illusion of depth, as if created by a gigantic searchlight aimed upwards from the ocean bed. It was deep here, off the eastern coast of the island, where the mountains plunged down to meet the sea and then kept going. Zen stood breathing in the wild air and scanning the horizon for some hint of their landfall. But there was nothing to betray the presence of the coast, unless it was the fact that the darkness ahead seemed even more unyielding, solid and impenetrable.
The steward had knocked on the cabin door to wake him twenty minutes earlier, claiming that their arrival was imminent. Emerging on deck, Zen had expected lights, bustling activity, a first view of his destination. But there was nothing. The ship might have been becalmed in midocean.
He didn't care. He felt weightless, anonymous, stripped of al] superfluous baggage. Rome was already inconceivably distant. Sardinia lay somewhere ahead, unknown, a blank. As for the reasons why he was there, standing on the deck of a Tirrenia Line ferry at five o'clock in the morning, they seemed utterly unreal and irrelevant.
When he looked again, it was over. The wall of darkness ahead had divided in two: a high mountain range below, dappled with a suggestion of contours, and the sky above, hollow with the coming dawn. Harbour lights emerged from behind the spit of land which had concealed them earlier, now differentiated from the open sea and the small bay beyond. Reading them like constellations, Zen mapped out quays and jetties, cranes and roads in the halflight. Things were beginning to put on shape and form, to wake up, get dressed and make themselves presentable.
The moment had passed. Soon it would be just another day.
Down beiow in the bar, the process was already well advanced. A predominantly male crowd, more or less dishevelled and bad-tempered, clustered around a sleepy cashier to buy a printed receipt which they then took to the gar and traded in for a plastic thimble filled with strong black coffee. On the bench seats all around young people were awakening from a rough night, rubbing their eyes, scratching their backs, exchanging little jokes and caresses. Zen had just succeeded in ordering his coffee When a robotic voice from the tannoy directed all drivers to ake their way to the car deck to disembark. He downed the coffee hurriedly, scalding his mouth and throat, before heading down into the bowels of the ship.
The vehicles bound for this small port of call on the way to Cagliari, the ship's destination, were almost exclusively commercial and military. Neither category took the slightest notice of the signs asking drivers not to switch on their engines until the bow doors had been opened. Zen made ' his way through clouds of diesel fumes to his car, sand' wiched between a large lorry and a coach filled with military conscripts looking considerably less lively than they had the night before, when they had made the harbour at Civitavecchia ring with the forced gaiety of desperate men.
He unlocked the door and climbed in. Fausto Arcuto had done him well, there was no question about that. Returning to the Rally Bar the previous afternoon, Zen had collected an envelope containing a set of keys and a piece of paper reading 'Outside Via Florio, 6g'. He turned the paper over and wrote, 'Many thanks for prompt delivery.
The Parrucci affair has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with you. Regards.' He handed this to the barman and walked round the corner to Via Florio.
There was no need to check the house number. The car, a white Mercedes saloon with cream leather upholstery, stood out a mile among the battered utility compacts of the Testaccio residents. It had been fitted with Zurich number plates, fairly recently to judge by the bright scratches on the rusty nuts. No registration or insurance documents were displayed on the windscreen, but this would have been a bit much to expect at such short notice. Zen took out his wallet and inspected the Swiss identity card in the name of Reto Gurtner which he had retained following an undercover job six years earlier. It was a fake, but extremely high quality, a product of the secret services' operation at Prato where, it was rumoured, a large number of the top forgers in the country offered their skills to SISMI in lieu of a prison sentence. The primitive lighting and Zen's constrained pose made the photograph look like a police mug-shot, not surprisingly, since it had been taken on the same equipment. Herr Gurtner of Zurich looked capable of just about anything, thought Zen, even framing an innocent man to order.
As he sat there, muffied by the Mercedes' luxurious coachwork from the farting lorries and buses all around, Zen reflected that whatever happened in Sardinia, he had at least been able to clear up his outstanding problems in Rome before leaving. The Volante patrol summoned by his 113 call from the flat had arrested a man attempting to escape in the red Alfa Romeo. He tumed out to be one Giuliano Acciari, a local hoodlum with a lengthy criminal record for housebreaking and minor thuggery. Zen recognized him as the man who had picked his pocket in the bus queue, although he did not mention this to the police. Acciari was unarmed, and a search failed to turn up the shotgun which he was assumed to have dumped upon hearing the sirens. But the police were holding Acciari for the theft of the Alfa Romeo, and had assured Zen that they would spare no effort to extract any information he might have as to the whereabouts of Vasco Spadola.
A series of shudders and a change in the pitch of the turbines announced that the ship had docked, but another ten minutes passed before a crack of daylight finally penetrated the murky reaches of the car deck. The coaches and lorries to either side of Zen rumbled into motion, and then, too soon, it was his turn.
Zen had learnt to drive back in the late fifties, but he had never really developed a taste for it. As the roads filled up, speeds increased and drivers' tempers shortened, he had seen no reason to change his views, although he was careful to keep them to himself, well aware that they would be considered dissident if not heretical. But in the present case there had been no alternative: he couldn't drag anyone else along to act as his chauffeur, and it would not be credible for Herr Reto Gurtner, the wealthy burgher of Zurich, to travel through the wilds of Sardinia by public transport.
Zen's style behind the wheel was similar to that of an elderly peasant farmer phut-phutting along at zo kph in a clapped-out Fiat truck with bald tyres and no acceleration, blithely oblivious to the hooting, light-flashing hysteria building up in his wake. The drive from Rome to the port at Civitavecchia had been a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal, but getting off the ferry presented even greater problems of clutch control and touch-steering than had the innumerable traffic lights of the Via Aurelia, at each of which the Mercedes had seemed to take fright like a horse at a fence.
Having stalled three times and then nearly rammed the side of the ship by over-revving, Zen finally managed to negotiate the metal ramp leading to Sardinian soil, or rather the stone jetty to which the ferry was moored.
Rather to his surprise, there were no formalities, no passports, no customs. But bureaucratically, of course, he was still in Italy.
It was Zen's first visit to the island. In Italy all police officials have to do a stint in one of the three 'problem areas' of the country, but Zen had chosen the Alto Adige rather than Sicily or Sardinia, because from there he could easily get back to Venice to see his mother.
The port amounted to no more than a couple of wharves where the ferries to and from the mainland touched once a week and Russian freighters periodically unloaded cargoes of timber pulp for the local papermill. At the end of the quay a narrow, badly-surfaced road curved away between outcrops of jagged pink rock. Zen drove through a straggling collection of makeshift houses that never quite became a village and along the spit of land projecting out to the harbour from the main coastline. The sun was still hidden behind the mountains, but the sky overhead was clear, a delicate, pale wintry blue. Seagulls swept back and forth foraging for food, their cries pealing out in the crisp air.
As he drove through the small town where the road inland crossed the main coastal highway, Zen's instinct was to stop the car, drop into a cafe and start picking up the clues, sniffing the air, getting his bearings. But he couldn't, for in Sardinia he was not Aurelio Zen but Reto Gurtner, and although he had as yet only a vague idea of Gurtner's character, he was sure that pausing to soak up the atmosphere formed no part of it. Or rather, he was sure that that was what the locals would assume, and it was their view of things that mattered. A rich Swiss stopping his Mercedes outside some rural dive for an earlymorning cappuccino would instantly become a suspect Swiss, and that of all things was the one Zen could least afford. He must not let the clear sky, pure air and earlymorning sense of elation go to his head, he knew. In those mountains blocking off the sun, turning their back on the sea, lived men who had survived thousands of years of foreign domination by using their wits and their intimate knowledge of the land. Generations of policemen, occasionally supplemented by the army, had been drafted there in a succession of attempts to break the complex, archaic, unwritten rules of the Codice Barbaricine and impose the laws passed in Rome. They had failed. Even Mussolini's strong-arm tactics, successful against the largely urban Mafia, had been ineffectual with these shepherds, who could simply vanish into the mountains. The
