As he walked to the bus stop, Zen read in his own paper about the shooting. The murdered judge, one Bertolini, had been gunned down when returning home from work.
His chauffeur, who had also been killed, had fired at the attackers and was thought to have wounded one of them.
Bertolini was not a particularly important figure, nor did he appear to have had any connection with the trials of Red Brigades' activists. The impression was that he had been chosen because he represented a soft target, itself a humiliating comment on the decline in the power of the terrorists from the days when they had seemed able to strike at will.
Zen's eyes drifted off to the smaller headlines further down the page. BURNED ALIVE FOR ADULTERY', read one. The story described how a husband in Genova had caught his wife with another man, poured petrol over them both and set them alight. He abruptly folded the paper up and tucked it under his arm. Not that he had anything to worry about on that score, of course. He should be so lucky!
As a bus approached the stop, the various figures whn had been loitering in the vicinity marched out into the street to try their chances at the lottery of guessing where the rear doors would be when the bus stopped. Zen did reasonably well this morning, with the result that he was ruthlessly jostled from every side as the less fortunate trieci to improve on their luck. Someone at his back used his elbow so enterprisingly that Zen turned round to protest, almost losing his place as a result. But in the end justice prevailed, and Zen managed to squeeze aboard just as the doors closed.
The events reported in the newspaper had already had their effect at the Viminale. The approaches leading up to the Ministry building were guarded by armoured personnel carriers with machine-gun turrets on the roof. The barriers were lowered and all vehicles were being carefully searched. Pedestrian access, up a flight of steps from the piazza, was through a screen of heavy metal railings whose gate was normally left open, but today each person was stopped in the cage and had to present his or her identification, watched carefully by two guards wearing bulletproof vests and carrying submachine-guns.
Having penetrated these security checks, Zen walked up to the third floor, where Criminalpol occupied a suite of rooms at the front of the building. The contrast with the windowless cell to which Zen had previously been confined could hardly have been more striking. Tasteful renovation, supplemented by a scattering of potted plants and antique engravings, had created a pleasant working ambience without the oppressive scale traditionally associated with government premises.
'Quite like the old days!' was Giorgio De Angelis's comment as Zen passed by. 'The lads upstairs are loving it, of course. A few more like this and they'll be able to claw back all the special powers they've been stripped of since things quietened down.'
De Angelis was a big, burly man with a hairline which had receded dramatically to reveal a large, shiny forehead of the type popularly associated with noble and unworldly intellects. What spoiled this impression was his bulbous nose, with nostrils of almost negroid proportions from which hairs sprouted like plants that have found themselves a niche in crumbling masonry. He was from the ‹own of Crotone, east of the Sila mountains in central Calabria. One of the odd facts still lodged in Zen's brain from school was that Crotone had been the home of Pythagoras. This perhaps explained why De Angelis reminded him of a cross between a Greek philosopher and a Barbary pirate, thus neatly summing up Zen's uncertainty about his character and motives.
'Frankly, I shouldn't be a bit surprised if they set up the whole thing,' the Calabrian went on breezily. 'Apparently the Red Brigades have denied responsibility. Anyway, this Bertolini had nothing to do with terrorism. Why pick on him?'
Zen took off his overcoat and went to hang it up. He would have liked to be able to like De Angelis, the only one of his new colleagues who had made any effort to be friendly. But this very fact, coupled with the politically provocative comments which De Angelis was given to making, aroused a suspicion in Zen's mind that the Calabrian had been deliberately assigned to sound him out and try and trap him into damaging confidences. Even given the mutual hostility between the criminal investigation personnel and their political colleagues 'upstairs', De Angelis's last remark had been totally out of line.
'Have you seen the papers?' De Angelis demanded.
''The terrorists return'. 'Fear stalks the corridors of power'. Load of crap if you ask me. The fucking Red Brigades don't go round spraying people with shotgun pellets. Nothing but the best hardware for our yuppie terrorists. ~zs, Armalites, Kalashnikovs, state-of-the-art stuff. Shotguns are either old-style crime or DIY.'
He looked at Zen, who was patting his overcoat with a frown.
'You lost something?'
Zen looked round distractedly.
'What? Yes, I suppose so. But in that case it can hardly have been the Politicals either.'
'How do you mean?'
Zen's hands searched each of the pockets of the overcoai at some length, returning empty.
'Well, they'd have used the right gun, presumably.'
De Angelis looked puzzled. Then he understood, and whistled meaningfully.
'Oh, you mean… Listen Aurelio, I'd keep my voice down if you're going to say things like that.'
Too late, Zen realized that he had walked into a trap.
'I didn't mean that they'd killed him,' De Angelis explained, 'only that they'd orchestrated the media response to his death. I mean, you surely don't believe…'
'No, of course not.'
He turned away with a sickly smile. He had just given himself away in the worst possible fashion, voicing what everyone no doubt suspected but no Ministry employee who wanted to succeed could afford to say out loud. But that didn't matter, not now. All that mattered was that the video cassette of the Burolo killings was missing from his pocket.
Zen walked through the gap in the hessian-clad screens which divided off the space allotted to each official, slumped down behind his desk and lit a cigarette. He recalled with horrible clarity what had happened as he boarded the bus. It was a classic pickpocket's technique, using heavy blows in a 'safe' area like the back and shoulders to cover the light disturbance as a wallet or pocket-book was removed. The thief must have spotted the bulge in Zen's coat pocket and thought it looked promising.
Looking on the bright side, there was a good chance -well, a chance, anyway – that when the thief saw that he'd made a mistake he would simply throw the tape away.
Even if he was curious enough to watch it, the first scenes were not particularly interesting. Unless you happened to recognize Burolo and the others, it looked much like any o~her home video, a souvenir of someone's summer holiday. Everything depended on whether the thief realized that his 'mistake' had netted him something worth more than all the wallets he could steal in a lifetime. He might, or he might not. The only sure thing was that Zen could do absolutely nothing to influence the outcome one way or the other.
He had expected writing the report to be a chore, but after what had just happened it was a positive relief to pull the typewriter over, insert a sheet of paper and immerse himself in work. The first section, summarizing the sceneof-crime findings, went very fast. Owing to the evidence of the video recording and the caretaker's prompt arrival, there was no dispute about the method or timing of the killings. The murder weapon had not been recovered, but was assumed to have been the Remington shotgun that was missing from the collection Oscar kept in a rack next door to the dining room. The spent cartridges found at the scene were of the same make, type and batch as those stored in the drawers beneath this rack. Unidentified fingerprints had been found on the rack and elsewhere in the house. The nature of the victims' wounds indicated that the shots had been angled upwards, suggesting that the weapon had apparently been fired from the hip. At that range it was unnecessary to take precise aim, as the video all too vividly demonstrated.
The two pistol bullets fired by Vianello had been recovered, and one of them revealed traces of blood of a group matching stains found at a point consistent with the assassin's estimated position. A series of stains of the same blood group – which was also that of Oscar Burolo, Maria Pia Vianello and Renato Favelloni – were found leading to the vault beneath the house where Oscar's collection of video tapes and computer discs was housed. When the villa was searched, this room was found to be in a state of complete disorder: the new section of shelving Oscar had recently installed had been thrown over, and video cassettes and floppy discs lay scattered everywhere. The fingerprints found on the gun-rack were also present in profusion here.
Zen stopped typing to stub out his cigarette. From behind the hessian screen he could hear male voices
