Zen thought about this for a moment, then smiled at her.
'I'll be delighted to do whatever you say.'
Gemma stood up, came round the table and kissed him lightly on the forehead.
'Good. Then let’s get going.'
While Gemma went to fetch the car, taking the two rubbish bags and a couple of old coats with her, Zen dragged the bundled body of Roberto Lessi across the dining room and through to the hallway. He opened the front door to the apartment and peered out. The light had automatically extinguished itself and the entire building was silent. Then he heard a clicking sound on the steps and Gemma reappeared.
'All set,' she said.
They lifted the bundle and carried it out on to the landing, leaving the door open to provide background lighting, then down the stairs. The car was parked right in front of the main door, the hatchback open. They heaved the body inside, next to the garbage bags, and spread the coats out over it. Then Gemma ran back upstairs and locked up, while Zen climbed into the passenger seat.
A circuit of the back streets of Lucca, deserted at this time of night, brought them to one of the gates through the enormous walls, and out on to the broad avenue that circumvented the city. Five minutes after that, they had left Italy and were on the motorway.
Years before, when he had finally accepted that his daddy would never come home again, Zen had used to calm himself to sleep by imagining that his bed was in a cabin of one of those international sleeping cars which his father had once showed him in the shunting yards near Santa Lucia station, all dark wood and velvet curtains and brass-shaded lamps and a bell to ring if you needed anything. The train was making its way through a landscape filled with dangers of every kind – battles and floods and towns ablaze – but inside everything was calm. The hideous scenes visible through the window, if you were bold enough to raise the blind a crack, merely emphasized your own seclusion and safety. Meanwhile, the wheels kept ticking along over the rail joints, clickety clack, clickety clack…
Although Zen rarely drove if he could possibly help it, the neutral, extraterritorial domain of the rete autostradale never failed to have a similar calming effect on him. For the modest price of the toll, you were admitted to a private club that stretched the length and breadth of the country, a club that displayed an aristocratic disdain for regional traditions or quirks of topography, and was just about the only institution in the country guaranteed to be open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Whether you were just outside Turin or two thousand metres up in the Abruzzi mountains, the same rules applied and the same facilities were available. The real world stopped at the toll gates, its limits clearly marked by the chain-link fencing. Viewed from within that boundary, the scene was at best picturesque and at worst uninspiring. In that farmhouse over there, its one wan light just showing through the storm-whipped windbreak, the father might be beating his wife and screwing his daughters, with two bodies buried in the cellar and a crazed aunt chained up in the attic. It didn't matter, that was another world. Pretty soon there would be another all-night service station where you could get a hot snack and a cold drink, buy a newspaper or a cassette tape, make a phone call and catch up on the TV news.
Gemma drove prudently, keeping well within the speed limit as they passed through the tunnels and across the long viaducts of the An through the southern foothills of the Apuan Alps, and then cruised down the long curved section reaching down to the coastal plain to join the main north-south motorway at Viareggio. Traffic was heavier here, mostly foreign truckers getting a head start on their long itinerary before the tourists started clogging the road later in the morning. They glided effortlessly past the big rigs, the green kilometre signs ticking off their progress. A pert crescent moon peeked archly out over the mountain chain to the east.
'Someone knew,' said Zen at last, breaking their long silence.
'Knew what?'
'Or at least suspected,' Zen continued, working out the thought which had suddenly come to him. 'And not Brugnoli. He thinks he's a player, but he's not. On the contrary, they're using him.'
Gemma took her eyes off the road for an instant to glance at him.
'When you've got a moment, would you mind telling me what on earth you're talking about?'
Zen remained silent for another minute or so, then shifted in his seat to reach his cigarettes.
'My new job,' he said, lighting up and opening the window slightly.
'What about it?'
'I couldn't understand why they had bothered to go to all that trouble, supposedly setting up this new division and making me the 'founder member'. They could easily have pressured me into early retirement if they'd wanted to, even produced a fake report from some doctor which diagnosed me as unfit for active service. But that didn't suit them, because someone suspected, just as Lessi did, that I knew more than I was letting on. And once I left the service, they would have no further hold over me. I could sell my story to the newspapers, even write a book about it'
He laughed.
'As it is, they'll never let me retire! At least not until the whole cast has changed and no one cares any more.' 'Cares about what?'
Zen finished his cigarette and let the butt slide into the slipstream, then closed the window.
'That bomb attack in Sicily, the one which almost killed me? Until this evening, I thought the Mafia were responsible. I honestly did. I couldn't remember anything much about the events leading up to it One of the doctors told me that memory loss about events preceding an incident like that is quite normal. Apparently survivors of severe car crashes usually have no idea how they happened. Mind that truck.'
'Leave the driving to me, please.'
'Sorry. Anyway, I accepted the official line about the bomb. And so did everyone else, as far as I knew. But we now know that there was at least one exception.'
'Our friend in the back.'
Zen nodded.
'But someone else must have known, too. Someone higher up the hierarchy, with enough clout to have me moved to a position where I would be safely out of the way, but still under control.'
They drove on in silence for a while.
'In which case, this person might also know that Lessi was planning to kill you’ Zen shook his head decisively.
'No, no. The person I mean operates at a different level. He's probably someone quite high up in the carabinieri or the Defence Ministry. His only thought was to protect the reputation of his force. They dumped Lessi, knowing he wouldn't talk, but they weren't so sure about me.'
'So won't they get curious when Lessi mysteriously vanishes?'
'I think it’ll be a relief, quite frankly. Anyway, Lessi's murderous little plot was quite clearly a personal matter. He wanted to get even, both for what had happened to his career and also for what happened to Alfredo Ferraro, who may have been his partner in more than just a professional sense. No, he'll have kept his private vendetta to himself, I'm sure of that’
In reality, he was a lot less sure than he sounded.
At Magra, just before the turn-off for La Spezia, they stopped for a coffee. While Gemma bought some salami, cheese and rolls to see them through the rest of the morning, Zen lifted the garbage bags containing Lessi's personal effects out of the car and carried them round to the rear of the service station. He opened one of the big dumpsters and tossed the bags inside. A broken pallet was leaning against the wall. He pulled off one of the lateral slats and used it to push the bags down, then to collapse a mound of stinking rubbish over the top of them.
Gemma returned to the car with the plastic bag of provisions. She looked flustered.
'You're never going to believe this, but I just ran into someone I used to know!' she blurted out, spinning the car round in reverse and heading off to rejoin the main highway.
'Who?'
'Oh, an old boyfriend. He came up while I was waiting at the cash register. Wanted to chat.' 'What did you say?'
'I gave him the story we agreed earlier, about going to see my sister. I couldn't think of anything else on the spur of the moment' To his surprise, Zen found himself more jealous than worried. 'How old?' 'What?'
'The boyfriend.'
Gemma laughed harshly as the headlights devoured the darkness before them. 'Oh for God's sake! But he
