wouldn't be using until August, so I arranged to borrow it for a few weeks. The friend owes me a favour and Rutelli owes him one. The old story.'
'I only know them by sight myself. We nod and greet each other, of course, but to tell the truth I've never really managed to tell them apart. Rather ordinary little men, I always thought'
'Well, they have their uses. Apparently the staff here don't know that at the moment Girolamo's in Rome, so I used his name to get a booking. After that it was just a matter of faking a previous engagement for our supposed host and the table is ours.' Gemma laughed and shook her head.
'Well, at least you're not boring,' she said. 'I didn't realize you were so well connected locally.'
'I'm not at all. In fact I don't know a soul here except you.'
Always tell as much of the truth as possible, he reminded himself. Most liars got caught out unnecessarily falsifying or embroidering quite trivial details.
'And what about you?' he asked, gazing at her.
She was wearing an apricot-coloured short-sleeved blouse of what looked like coarse silk, open at the neck to reveal a flat gold chain at her tanned throat. Her auburn-tinged hair had clearly been redone since leaving the beach, and her fingernails were painted a bright orange to match her blouse and lipstick. She's dolled herself up, thought Zen, using a vulgar Venetian dialect expression. Then he realized that she would naturally have done so, not wanting to look out of place at Augusta's. There was no reason to assume that it had anything to do with him.
'Oh, I'm just a day tripper,' Gemma replied. 'I actually live in Lucca, so if s easy enough to get here and back.'
'Is it close?'
'Half an hour on the bretella. Quick enough to come back for dinner. Have you been there?' Zen was once again glad to be able to answer truthfully. 'Never.'
The waiter arrived with a bottle of the house white and a platter of insalata di mare. Another of the many traditions of Augusta's was that if you were too preoccupied to order,, as so many important clients naturally tended to be, dishes just arrived at the table.
'If s a dull little city,' Gemma went on, 'but very calm.' 'Is your family there?'
'My father lives close by, in a nursing home. My brothers and sisters have all moved away. I did myself, once, but I came back.' 'So you live alone?' Gemma hesitated.
'Except when my son comes to visit,' she said. Zen nibbled some marinated squid.
'How old is he?'
'Twenty. He's studying engineering in Florence. That s where my husband lives. Stefano stays with him. And you?'
Zen raised his head like a tennis player realizing that what he had thought to be an unreturnable volley was in fact skimming back to his side of the court.
'Me?'
'Family’ said Gemma. 'Children.' 'No’ said Zen. Gemma laughed. 'You're parthenogenetic?' – 'Sorry?' 'Yours was a virgin birth?'
'What? Oh no. My parents are both dead, and I have no children. That s all.'
Gemma blushed and looked a little flustered.
'I'm sorry, that must have sounded tactless. I must stop trying to make jokes. It never works.'
'Oh, don't do that. There's so little to laugh at as one gets older that even the intention is encouraging.'
They finished their starters and were silent for a while.
'So where do you live?' asked Gemma as the waiter came with the dish of lasagnette.
'In Rome,' Zen replied. 'I work for one of the ministries, in a mid-level bureaucratic position.'
'Which one?'
'Interior.'
'I thought you statali all got your holidays in August' 'Well, this is not really a holiday, as such. My mother died recently. I took it quite hard – she was all I had left really – and the Ministry granted me some compassionate leave.'
Noting Gemma's serious expression, he decided to lighten the tone.
'Come August, I'll be sweltering in my office, the one with the windows painted shut, while everyone else is at the beach or in the mountains’
He drank some wine.
'And what about you?'
'I own a pharmacy which I inherited from my father’
Zen smiled sourly.
'I've always thought that a permit to run a pharmacy or a tobacconist's was the next best thing to a licence to print money.' Gemma smiled aloofly.
'Well, I don't know about that, but we do quite nicely. The location is excellent, on Via Fillungo, one of the main streets, and I employ three very bright, competent women to look after the shop. The clients trust them, rightly, and their wages reflect that. The business more or less runs itself. Apart from keeping an eye on inventory and sales, I'm not that involved these days.'
Zen smiled and nodded. He was astonished at how well the evening was going. It was because they were where they were, he supposed. In Versilia, any encounter was by definition a holiday event, with no implications for the future. If he and Gemma had met anywhere else, and had been having dinner on such a casual basis, the whole evening would have been fraught with implied or perceived meanings, but here it was innocent. Nothing that mattered happened at the beach, and nothing that happened there mattered. It was as simple as that.
Zen had just launched into a rather amusing anecdote concerning a dentist in his native Canareggio district of Venice, when he realized firstly that Pier Giorgio Butani had not grown up in Venice, and secondly that Gemma was not listening. Or rather she was not listening to him. Her attention was completely distracted by an expansive women in her late forties who had materialized at their table. Zen vaguely remembered having seen her on the beach.
'Gemma, my dear, have you heard the news?' she cried. 'What news?'
Gemma seemed less than enchanted by this turn of events.
'Massimo Rutelli!'
'What about him?'
'You haven't heard? He's dead!'
Gemma gave a facial shrug.
'Really?'
The woman looked offended at Gemma's lack of response. 'You don't understand! He was dead all afternoon! Sitting there right beside us on the beach!' 'What do you mean?'
'He was lying on his lounger at Franco's and apparently he had a stroke or something! I saw him there with that towel stretched over his back. I thought oh yes if s Signor Rutelli, although I didn't know which one and all the time it was a corpse lying there! If s horrible, just horrible! I feel sort of unclean, you know what I mean? That such a thing should happen here, of all places.'
'Yes, well, death can come at inconvenient times. My maternal grandfather passed away on the lavatory. He always used to spend a long time in mere, and it was hours before we found him. Now that really did make us feel unclean. Never mind, it’ll all be forgotten in a few days.'
She flashed the woman a cool and very final smile, and turned back pointedly to face Zen. But the intruder was not to be put off so easily.
'Aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?' she enquired cattily. 'The mystery man! We've all been wondering who was usurping the Rutellis' place.'
Zen stood up and held out his hand.
'Pier Giorgio Butani, signora. I am Girolamo Rutelli's cousin. I knew his brother only slightly, but needless to say I'm appalled at this dreadful news.'
This too was true. Anything which brought attention to the Rutelli family risked bringing attention to Zen and thereby blowing his cover.
'Teresa Pananelli,' the woman returned with a decidedly flirtatious smile. 'I'm so glad that you at least are
