'There was nowhere she could be hiding, and it was inconceivable that she had escaped through the bolted door leading up to the house. Eventually he realized that she must have managed to get through the hole leading to the underground stream. He put out his lantern and kept watch, and sure enough, a few hours later he heard her coming back. He struck a match and caught her wriggling in through the hole, which she had gradually worn away by continual rubbing until it was just wide enough for her to get through. His father's ban on acknowledging Elia's existence made it impossible for Turiddu to betray her secret even if he had wanted to. Anyway, it didn't seem important. As far as he was concerned, the caves where the stream flowed were just an extension of the cellar.
Elia's prison might be a little larger than her father supposed, but it was still a prison.
'All this came out when we interrogated Turiddu on Monday and Tuesday. At first he played the tough guy, but once I made it clear that his sister was dead, that she was going to take the rap for Favelloni, and that unless he co-operated he would get five to ten for aiding and abetting, he changed his mind. Underneath the bluster, he was a coward with a guilty conscieiice. There was a running feud between his family and a clan in the mountains.
The usual story, rustling and encroachment. Turiddu's father 'accidentally' shot one of the mountain men while out hunting, and they got their own back by ambushing his van. Both parents were killed. It was Turiddu's responsibility to carry on the vendetta, but he shirked it.
That sense of shame fed his hatred for anyone connected with the mountains, like Padedda. Still, he gave us what we wanted. Once he got started he poured out details so fast that the sergeant taking notes could hardly keep up.
'Eh, excuse me, would you mind confessing a little more slowly?' he kept saying.'
Once again, laughter spread through the officials grouped around, hangivg on Zen's words.
'So the motive is revenge,' said De Angelis. 'As far as this woman was concerned, whoever lived upstairs in that house was the person responsible for punishing her.'
Zen shrugged.
'Something like that. It doesn't matter anyway. She was crazy, capable of anything. And we don't need a confession. The gun she dropped after shooting Spadola was the one used in the Burolo killings, and her fingerprints match the unidentified ones on the gun-rack at the villa.'
'But how do you explain the fact that Burolo's records had been tampered with?' Travaglini objected.
'Easy. They weren't. In our version, the chaos in the cellar was due to the fact that the new shelving Burolo had put up blocked the vent Elia used to get in and out of her old home. On the night of the murders she worked the fittings loose, then pushed the whole unit over, sending the tapes and floppy disks flying, which is what caused the crash audible on the video recording. By the way, lads, how do you think this is going to make our friends of the flickering flame look? The Carabinieri seized all that material right after the killings. If our murderer didn't erase the compromising data on those discs, who did?'
De Angelis shook his head in admiration. 'You're a genius, Aurelio! How the hell did you ever manage to balls up so badly in the Moro business?'
For a moment Zen thought his fasade of cool cynicism would crack. This was too near the bone, too painful. But in the end he managed to carry it off. in 'We all make mistakes, Giorgio. The best we can hope for is not to go on making the same one over and over again.' in 'I still don't see how you arranged for the shotgun used in the Burolo murders to turn up in the cave where this Elia was,' Romizi insisted. 'Or how you fixed the fingerprints.'
Zen smiled condescendingly. 'Now, now. You can't expect me to tell you all my little secrets!'
'So Renato Favelloni walks free,' Travaglini concluded heavily.
'Not to mention l'onorevole,' added Romizi.
For a moment it seemed as though the atmosphere might turn sour. Then De Angelis struck a theatrical pose.
''I have examined my conscience,'' he declared, quoting a celebrated statement by the politician in question, ' 'and I find that it is perfectly clean.' '
'Not surprisingly,' Zen chipped in, 'given that he never uses it.'
The discussion broke up amid hoots of cynical laughter.
Before meeting Tania Biacis for dinner that evening, Zen had a number of chores to perform. The first of these was to return the white Mercedes. Early on Monday morning a Carabinieri jeep had towed the car back to Lanusei, where it had been repaired. On his return to Rome Zen had left a note for Fausto Arcuti at the Rally Bar, and earlier that morning Arcuti had phoned and told Zen to leave the car opposite the main gates of the former abattoir.
'What about locking the doors?' Zen had asked.
'Lock them, dottore, lock them! The Testaccio is a den of thieves.'
'And the keys?'
'Leave them in the car.'
'But how are you going to open it, then?'
'How do you think we opened it in the first place?'
Fausto demanded. Now that the informer was no longer fear of his life, his naturally irreverent manner had reasserted itself.
After lunch with De Angelis and Travaglini, Zen set off the Mercedes, reflecting on his conflicting feelings about being readmitted to the male freemasonry which ran not only the Criminalpol department but also the Ministry, the Mafia, the Church and the government. It all seemed very relaxing and attractive at first, the mutual back-scratching and ego-boosting, the shared values and unchallenged assumptions. Yet even before the end of lunch a reaction set in, and Zen found the cosy back-chat and the smug sense of innate superiority beginning to pall. It was all a bit cloying, a bit too reminiscent of the self-congratulatory nationalism of the Fascist epoch. Whatever happened between him and Tania, he knew it would never be easy.
But that, perhaps, was what made it worthwhile.
As he queued up to enter the maelstrom of traffic around the Colosseum, Zen noticed an unmarked grey delivery van three or four vehicles behind him. He adjusted the wing mirror until he could see the driver. It didn't look like the man he had seen that morning, but of course they might be working shifts.
He continued south, past the flank of the Palatine, then turned right along the Circus Maximus and crossed the river into Trastevere. The grey van followed faithfully. He was being tailed. This in itself was bad enough. What made it infinitely worse was that Zen felt absolutely sure he knew who was responsible.
Despite his bluster, Vasco Spadola must have known that he couldn't be certain of success in his single- handed vendetta. Things can always go wrong; that's why people take out insurance. There seemed very little doubt that the grey van represented Spadola's insurance. The men he had spotted in the van were not slavering psychotics like Spadola himself, getting a hard-on at the idea of killing.
Nor were they third-rate cowboys like Leather Jacket.
They were professionals, doing what they had been paid to do, carrying out a contract to be put into effect in the event of Spadola's death. The only other explanation was that Mauro Bevilacqua was pursuing revenge at secondhand, but that seemed wildly unlikely. Tania clearly hadn't taken his threats seriously. In any case, professional killers didn't advertise in the Yellow Pages, and a bank clerk wouldn't have known how to contact them.
Zen turned off the Lungotevere and steered at random through the back streets around the factory where his favourite Nazionali cigarettes were made. The incident had plunged him into apathetic despair. These men wouldn't give up, whatever happened. They had their reputation to consider. There was no point in having the team in the van arrested. They would simply be replaced by another crew. His only hope, a very slim one, was to find out who Spadola had placed the contract with and try to renegotiate the deal. But that was for the future. His immediate task was to lose the tail. Unfortunately this called for virtuoso driving skills Zen didn't possess.
In the end, his very incompetence proved to be his salvation. As he turned out of the back streets by Porta Portese he was so deep in thought about his problems that he failed to notice that the traffic lights had just changed to red. The white Mercedes managed to squeeze between the lines of the traffic closing in from either side, but the grey van remained trapped. Zen crossed the river again, veered round into Via Marmorata and then, once he was out of sight of the van, turned right into the Testaccio. He abandoned the car with the keys locked inside, as Arcuti had instructed him, then worked his way back to Via Marmorata on foot, taking refuge in the
