'Si’
•C’e De Angelis?' 'Un momentino.'
The voice receded, calling out, 'Giorgio! For you.' After a further pause, Giorgio De Angelis came on the line.
'Well?' he said bad-temperedly.
'Ciao, Giorgio. Sono Aurelio.'
There was a pause, then a deafening cry.
'Aurelio! How are you? Where are you?'
'Standing outside the front door to the building. I don't have my ID and the security guard won't let me in. Can you persuade him of the error of his ways?'
'I'll be right down.'
Zen was smoking another cigarette when De Angelis appeared outside the doorway and bounded down to embrace his friend.
'How wonderful to see you looking so well!' he exclaimed.
'If s good to be back. I don't know how long for, though.'
'But what are you doing here? I thought you were off for a working holiday in the States.'
Zen immediately took a certain distance.
'You're not supposed to know that’ he said. 'No one is.' De Angelis shrugged.
'If s just something someone said. You know how it is. I had no idea whether it was true or not’
'But you passed it on to a few other people anyway.' 'Only a couple. What happened to your hand?' 'I had an accident with a knife.' 'Are you free for lunch?'
'I've already eaten. Plus I have an appointment with someone called Brugnoli, whoever he may be.' De Angelis rolled his eyes. 'Ah, our new 'facilitator'‘ 'What's that supposed to mean?' 'You'll see.'
At the security checkpoint, De Angelis showed his badge and obtained a temporary pass for Zen on his own recognizance.
'Top floor, naturally’ he said. 'If you feel like talking afterwards, I'll be at the Opera’
He inclined his head steeply backwards, seemingly inspecting the mock cupola above their heads as though for signs of earthquake damage.
'I mean really talking,' he added.
Brugnoli's office was the second on the left of the 'good' side of the top floor, the one with the view of the Quirinale. There was no sign on the door or beside it, but Zen had been assured by some young men hunched over computer screens in another room he had entered at random that this was the right place. There had been no identifying sign on their door, either.
The reception area inside the unmarked door was unlike anything Zen had ever seen at the Viminale. There was a leather sofa and matching armchairs, a low table covered in magazines and art books, a number of large potted plants with fleshy outsized leaves, a printed sign thanking Zen for not smoking, and a large video screen showing current stock prices on various international markets. In the opposite corner, next to an imposing internal door, a faux blonde in a pink lambswool twinset was picking fussily at a computer. The walls were painted a genteel pastel shade of peach and the Persian rug underneath the low table looked too threadbare and faded to be anything but a genuine antique. Gentle classical music made itself felt at a barely subliminal level, while recessed halogen lamps diffused a clear, restrained light on a space mat had either nothing or everything to hide. It looked less like the antechamber to the lair of a high-ranking ministry official than the premises of a dentist whose bill would prove to be even more painful than the treatment.
Zen introduced himself to the receptionist. She touched her computer screen in three places, like a priest blessing a communicant. A moment later, the inner door opened and a short, energetic man with receding hair and a jovial smile emerged.
'Dottor Zen! What a pleasure! You've had a smooth trip, I hope? The way back always seems shorter and sweeter than the way out, I find.'
He caught Zen staring slack-jawed at his open-necked shirt, stonewashed jeans and black running shoes.
'Dress-down Friday,' he explained. 'One of my little innovations around here. It has encountered a certain amount of resistance from some of the older team members, I'm afraid, but of course I don't insist. That's my whole philosophy of the workplace environment. 'Personal choice, personal empowerment, personal responsibility.' All that counts is results. Come in, come in!'
Zen followed Brugnoli through the doorway, feeling like a superannuated bank clerk in his fifteen-year-old suit, a shirt that felt as though it consisted mostly of starch, and shoes of the now extinct variety that could be and indeed had been resoled.
The room they entered was completely different from the reception area outside, but just as much of a surprise. It was about the same size and height as the entire upper floor of the Rutelli family's villa in Versilia, but looked as though it had been redecorated by Snaebjorn Gudmundsson. The floor was tiled, the walls studiously bare and neutral. A minimalist desk in some synthetic black material supported a flat-screen computer terminal and nothing else. No telephone, no drawers, no paperwork. There were no filing cabinets in evidence either, nor any of the usual bookshelves groaning under a weight of identically bound legal tomes. No portrait of the current occupant of the Quirinale Palace visible though the floor-length windows, no crucifixes or flags, no framed documents in cursive script certifying that
Dottor Brugnoli had been the recipient of this or that honour or award. In fact the only other objects on view in the huge space were a terracotta bust of a man's head, mounted on an exiguous metal stand which seemed to be performing a balancing act like a juggler on a high wire, and a framed Fascist-era poster showing two men in uniform chatting in the street while a sinister eavesdropper lurked in the shadows. 'Be Vigilant!' warned the caption in mock three-dimensional characters. 'Walls Have Ears.'
So this was what it had come to, thought Zen glumly. The received but always unspoken wisdom of his professional generation had now been recycled as public postmodern irony. It was definitely time for him to quit.
Meanwhile his host had retreated to the far corner of the room, where he was walking up and down talking intensely to himself. By now familiar with this epidemic which had recently started to afflict large numbers of the population, Zen turned politely away, pretending not to notice. That seemed to be the form. You'd be walking along the street, and this well-dressed and apparently successful man would come at you, head up and briefcase in hand, talking to himself. Sometimes even arguing with himself in a loud and insistent voice. It was as if all the drunks and schizos had been given million-lire clothing allowances and a middle-management job. Except that just as in the old days, when they lay in piss-stained doorways mumbling obscenities or screaming abuse, no one took the slightest notice. 'Pay no attention, he's harmless,' he recalled his mother telling him as a child in Venice about some veteran of the Great War whose mind had slipped its moorings. 'Just don't ever turn your back on them, that's all. Don't look them in the eye and never turn your back.'
He froze, frowning at some unrecovered thought. The gist of it was that he had ignored his mother's advice. That there was someone into whose eyes he had looked, and on whom he had then turned his back. One of 'them'. But that was as far as the insight went, and it made no sense.
Brugnoli terminated his conversation with a curt, 'It'll have to wait, I've got someone with me', then adjusted the microphone of his headset and turned back to Zen with a convivial smile.
'Can't offer you a chair, I'm afraid. I don't go in for that sort of thing. You know, the low chair, the high chair, the big desk, the status symbols and hierarchical markers. If you need that sort of nonsense to proclaim and bolster your standing, then you haven't got any. Besides, standing is more natural and more productive. Keeps oxygen flowing to the brain instead of the bum, don't you think?'
'I suppose so.'
'But of course I was forgetting your injuries! How thoughtless of me. Feel free to use the stool by the desk if you wish. If s a revolutionary design. You sort of kneel down into it. Works wonders for the spine and circulation.'
'I'm fine, thank you.'
'Completely?'
'More or less. I still get the odd twinge, but the doctors say that will pass. Apart from that, I'm back to
