Gilberto and his wife Rosa lived in Via Carlo Emanuele, near Porta Maggiore. They owned an apartment in a modern block, which had been borderline affordable when they bought it By now, it must have been worth a fortune. Zen walked up the gleaming stairs to the first floor and rang the bell. Outside the tall metal-framed windows, it was already dark. He had slept for over three hours.
He had to ring twice before the door opened and a man's face appeared. Unshaven, unfocussed, at once haggard and bloated, it was barely identifiable as that of Gilberto Nieddu.
'Oh, if s you,' he said, throwing the door open so violently that it slammed against the wall, and instantly turning back inside.
Zen followed, closing the door quietly behind him. The smells hit him first, a whole orchestra of them tuning up before the conductor arrived and they unleashed their full power. Once inside, the visual aspect kicked in. The pleasant, bright, orderly apartment Zen remembered had been transformed into an unrecognizable state of squalid disorder and abandon. In the living room, dirty clothes lay across the furniture and floor, an array of empty bottles and used glasses covered the table, and the air was blue with cigarette smoke. The kitchen to the left had piles of dishes and saucepans on every work surface, while still more were stacked high in the sink.
'Well, this is the scene of the crime, Dottor Zen,' Gilberto remarked with arch jocularity, reaching for one of the half-empty glasses. 'What do you make of it?'
Zen coughed apologetically. He did not sit down.
'It looks like Rosa's left you’ he said.
Nieddu laughed.
'Bravo! Nothing can escape the eagle eye and awesome intelligence of the renowned Aurelio Zen. He takes a few seemingly insignificant and unrelated clues overlooked by less astute observers, processes them faster than a supercomputer and lays bare the mystery which had baffled the finest minds of Europe. Yes, the little bitch has left me.'
Zen sighed heavily.
'When?'
'Four days ago? Three? Six? I forget. Who cares? She's gone, that’s all that matters. She's gone and she's not coming back. She made that very clear.'
He collapsed on the sofa, grabbed a bottle and poured some colourless spirit into the glass he had been using.
'Very clear indeed,' he added quietly, as though addressing the bottle.
'So where is she now?'
'Back home in Sassari with her younger brother,' Nieddu continued in the same quiet tone, all bravado gone. 'Who is threatening to come over shortly and break my legs.'
'And the children?'
'With her, of course. I came home one day to find the place empty, all their clothes and belongings gone, and a note on the table.'
Zen lit a cigarette.
'What happened?'
'A friend of hers saw me and a member of my staff having dinner at a restaurant down at the beach in Lido di Ostia when I was supposedly in Turin, on business. Rosa had had her suspicions about me for years, but this was the first time she'd ever been able to prove anything. Her note gave me to understand that she was taking steps to ensure that it would also be the last.'
Zen nodded.
'So you've been doing this for years and finally got caught.' Nieddu refilled his glass.
'Want a drink? No? Good idea. Yes, I got caught, and you know why? Because I'd stopped trying so hard. That business in Lido di Ostia, I'd never have risked anything that stupid in the old days. If I said I was going to Turin, I'd go. What happened there was another matter. But I got lazy. Mobile phones haven't helped, either. Time was, you had to say where you'd be staying
and leave the number, but now you could be anywhere.' He took a large gulp of his drink. 'But that's not really it.' 'So what is?'
Nieddu lit a cigarette and lay down on the sofa.
'She got old, Aurelio. What else can I say? She got old.'
Zen did not reply. After a while, Nieddu leaned over and flicked the ash of his cigarette into his drink.
'You know that saying about generals? That they're always superbly prepared to fight the last war? It's not just generals, it's all of us.'
‘I don't understand.'
'Can you imagine if we were twenty again, or even thirty, how easy it would be for us to win at the kind of games people that age play? We'd be unbeatable, not least because we wouldn't care too much if we won, the way we did back then. We were under too much pressure, there was too much at stake. No wonder we fucked up.'
‘I still don't see what this has to do with you and Rosa.'
‘I thought I was one of those generals. I thought I had the situation all worked out. Basically, I thought I could get away with a certain amount of action on the side, providing I was discreet about it. But that wasn't the real point'
'So what was?'
'That it was still working for us in bed. Maybe she even did have some proof of what I was getting up to, I don't know, but as long as she was getting her share of attention it didn't bother her that much. But things were changing, like they always do. You don't notice it, any more than you notice the days growing shorter at this time of year. But they are, imperceptibly. The solstice is past and winter's on its way.'
Zen drowned his cigarette in the glass that Nieddu had previously used as an ashtray, then picked it up and carried it to the kitchen.
'Where did you take my drink?' Gilberto demanded. 'You don't heed another drink,' Zen responded from the hideous kitchen. 'What you need is some food.' 'I'm not hungry.'
'That's why you need some food. 'Hunger comes from eating, thirst is quenched by drinking.' But not if you're drinking whatever this is.' 'White rum.'
Zen reappeared in the doorway. 'You need to eat, Gilberto.'
'There's nothing here to eat Nothing you'd want to eat' 'Then we'll go out' ‘I can't.' 'Why?'
Nieddu rolled up off the sofa and confronted Zen blearily.
'They all know me in this neighbourhood. And they know what’s happened. The word's gone round. And if I show up, alone or with some male friend, the gossip and the sniggering is going to start. 'Look, there's that Sardinian who cheated on his wife and got dumped.' I can't take that, Aurelio. It used to be it was the women who suffered. 'Her husband's run off with another woman.' It was okay for the man, unless he was cornuto. But things have changed. I haven't been outside the building since it happened. I've been living on what was here, tinned stuff and pasta. I can't show my face in any of the restaurants round here.'
Zen smiled and took his arm.
'Fine, we'll go somewhere near my place. There are several good places – nothing fancy, good solid home cooking – and no one will know you from Adam. Come on!'
The cab Zen called, from the cooperative he always used, arrived almost too soon. He still had not decided where to go. In the end he asked for Piazza del Risorgimento. They could walk from there.
'She lost her looks,' said Nieddu as the lighted streets slipped past. 'Rosa?'
A single, stiff nod was the only response. 'That happens,' Zen replied.
'Yes, but it happens in different ways to different women. That’s what’s so cruel. If it was uniform, like…' He paused. 'Yes?' queried Zen.
'I don't know,' said Nieddu. 'Like something. There must be something if s like, right?'
'Probably’
This is going to be a long night, thought Zen. But he already felt better, just being outside that apartment with its air of acquiescent despair.
'One minute she looked thirty, the next she looked sixty’ Nieddu went on. 'No, that’s not quite right. There were a few years when she looked thirty most of the time, except in certain positions in a certain light when she suddenly looked sixty. After that, the balance tilted the other way. She looked sixty most of the time, except once in
