buttons of the entry phone, but that hers was the second from the bottom. Almost as soon as Zen rang, the buzzer sounded and the front door unlatched. For a moment he was disconcerted by the lack of any preliminary query, but then realized that there had been no need of that. Gemma was expecting him and him alone.
As if to confirm this impression, the door to her apartment was slightly ajar. Zen knocked lightly and then entered, the bunch of roses concealed behind his back.
'Gemma?'
There was no one in the hallway. She was probably in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches to their meal. Zen smiled, touched by this discreet message. He was being received as an old friend, a member of the family almost, one of the privileged few for whom complimenti would have been an insulting mark of coldness and distance. He walked down the hall and into the living room.
'Gemma?'
But the person in the room was not Gemma. To the left of the door, just out of immediate eyeshot, stood a youngish man with blond hair and a thin moustache, wearing faded jeans and an open-necked shirt in a brilliant shade of orange.
'Buona sera, dottore’ he said.
My God, thought Zen, if s what’s-his-name, Gemma's jealous husband. He'd imagined him like this – young, lithe, athletic -but then reminded himself that whenever he read or heard about someone called by the same name as his boyhood friend in Venice, he always imagined them like that. For him, anyone called Tommaso would be always be gifted with eternal youth. In this case, however, he had been right.
'Gemma's in the dining room,' the man went on. 'Over there to your right. No, please, after you.'
Feeling utterly ridiculous with his pathetic bouquet of roses, Zen obediently walked over to the doorway, the man following.
Had Gemma told her husband that he was coming? Was this some sort of weird humiliation she had decided to inflict on him in return for his unexplained disappearance from the beach?
The moment he crossed the threshold to the next room, these thoughts vanished. Gemma was there all right. She was sitting in one of the dining chairs right opposite Zen, turned away from a. small table elaborately laid for two. Twists of synthetic orange cord secured her arms and chest to the chair. Her mouth was covered by a wide strip of metallic silver tape and her eyes were wild.
Zen instinctively started towards her, only to be halted by a voice.
'Don't touch, please. You know the old saying. 'Pretty to look at, delightful to hold, but if it gets broken consider it sold.''
Zen swung round, letting the bouquet fall to the floor in front of Gemma. There was a different man behind him now, totally bald and clean-shaven. In one hand he held a blond wig and the wispy moustache, in the other an automatic pistol fitted with a silencer.
'Against the wall please, dottore,' he said, pointing with the gun. 'You are familiar with the position, I take it.'
Zen splayed himself out against the wall, hands and feet widely spaced. He felt the pressure of the gun barrel in his back.
'Don't stain my suit,' he stupidly said.
The man laughed.
'Don't worry. By the time I've finished with you, your suit will be the last thing on your mind.'
Hands frisked him quickly and professionally. That professionalism, and the sound of the laugh, finally made everything clear. The man's next words, as he found and removed the communication device that Zen had been given at the Ministry, merely served as confirmation.
'Ah, yes, your little squawkbox. Just as well I still have a few friends in the business. All right, turn around.'
The man tossed Zen's belongings down on the floor beside the wig and moustache he had been wearing.
'Still don't recognize me?' he asked teasingly.
Zen did, but the memory brought only despair. He said nothing.
'Really? Does the name Alfredo Ferraro mean anything to you?'
Zen creased his brow and then shook his head. 'I'm afraid not.'
'You're afraid not. Well, dottore, you're right to be afraid. But it's a shame you don't remember Alfredo. Some of us do. Some of us remember him very well, as well as what happened to him and who was responsible. Which of course is why I'm here’
He held out the hand holding the pistol in a mock salutation.
'Roberto Lessi.'
Zen forced his brow to furrow again.
'Lessi? Wait, I do remember someone by that name. Yes, thaf s right. He was an officer with the carabinieri's ROS division. He saved my life when I was on that assignment in Sicily.'
The man laughed his flat, hard laugh again.
'Very good, Dottor Zen, very good.'
'You're Lessi?' gasped Zen, as though the thought had only just struck him. 'You look different, somehow. Or maybe that Mafia bomb affected my memory. Anyway, I only saw you that once, and at night'
Lessi stared at him with eyes that told Zen how close he was to death. He looked about him distractedly, taking in every detail of the situation.
'No, actually you saw me four times, if we're only counting last year.'
The man's leisurely tone gave Zen a flicker of hope for the first time. If Lessi wanted to talk, to explain and to justify himself, then there might conceivably be time to do what was necessary.
'That time out in the country near Etna was the last,' the gunman went on. 'Before that, there was the time we picked you up in the street outside your apartment, the time on the ferry to Malta, and then earlier that evening, when you gunned down my partner Alfredo Ferraro in cold blood.'
'What do you mean, cold blood?' Zen demanded instinctively. 'He had just strangled one man and was about to shoot me.'
Lessi smiled.
'Ah, so you do remember Alfredo after all. I rather thought you did, to be honest. Perhaps you remember the truth about that bomb, too. You must do.'
Zen glanced at the statically frantic figure of Gemma, just to check that her position was exactly as he had recalled it.
'Of course I do,' he said. 'The Mafia tried to murder me on the way back from my meeting with Don Gaspare Limina. He promised me safe conduct, but that was a lie. They just wanted time to get clear and to do the job far away from anywhere connected with them.'
Roberto Lessi shook his head in mock disappointment.
'Sorry, dottore. You're very convincing and I almost believe you, but in the end if s too much of a stretch. Your brain worked very well indeed when we met in Sicily and on the ferry to Malta, and I think it’s working just fine now.'
He was right, but that wasn't the point. The point was to start the ballet. Zen took a couple of apparently casual steps to his left.
'Of course it is!' he protested vehemently. 'That’s what happened. So what the hell are you doing breaking in here and threatening me and Signora Santini? You realize that this means the end of your career.'
Lessi had also moved slightly to the left, instinctively compensating to keep the same distance and angle between him and his adversary.
'My career has already ended, dottore. We screwed up, you see. Well, my ex-colleagues did.'
'What are you talking about?' Zen snapped irritably, fidgeting another step around the invisible circle.
'You remember when the Corleone clan killed Judge Falcone and his wife?' Lessi replied. 'They almost screwed up too. They planted a ton of explosives in that culvert under the motorway into Palermo from the airport, then blew the charge a second or two too early, for fear that Falcone's car would pass by before it detonated. They knew they only had one chance, and so they panicked. In the end Falcone was killed anyway, but only because he had insisted on driving when he was met at the airport. So he and his wife were sitting in the front seats of their car
