Romano’s cheerful, friendly features on the distinctive red and yellow label, she reached for it as if he had been holding her arm. No need for expensive hitor-miss advertising either. The shelves of the studio where he recorded his show were stacked with those very same products, all with the labels turned outwards and sporting the Lo Chef logo that was also back-projected on the false rear wall of the set. And whenever a new product was introduced to the range, Rinaldi would extol its virtues in an extended aria based on the rhapsodic publicity gush.
He took another swig of Coke, then headed back to the glass-topped table. He knew he was overdoing it, but he had a tough decision to make. Quite some time passed before he realised that he had in fact made it, and he reached for the phone.
‘All right, I’ll do it.’
There was an audible intake of breath at the other end.
‘That’s wonderful, Romano! You’ve absolutely made the correct decision. But time is pressing. You need to come to Bologna this evening, okay? As in right now. I’ll arrange a car and book a hotel and email you the details ASAP. And once again, congratulations!’
11
As a parting shot on learning of Zen’s imminent departure from Lucca, Gemma had reminded him of their collusion in the death of Roberto Lessi and the subsequent disposal of his body at sea. In his view, this had been a clumsy man?uvre-Gemma was brandishing a weapon they both knew was far too dangerously destructive to be used. She would have done better to have reminded him that on the occasion to which she had referred, when the truth about his identity had finally emerged, he had promised her that whatever happened he would never tell her any more lies.
Despite itself being a barefaced whopper of some considerable magnitude, this had passed without comment, perhaps because at the time Zen had believed it himself. And until recently the atmosphere of the relationship, seemingly charged with infinite promise, had indeed appeared to make lies an irrelevant anachronism. Incredibly enough, he really had believed that in getting together with Gemma, and in the move from his apartment in Rome to hers in Lucca that resulted, he had magically reinvented himself. The events of recent months, however, had returned a different verdict, namely that this belief had been just another coil in the spiral of illusions that his life had come to resemble.
As with the gradual deterioration of the body, it was hard to say exactly when it had all started, but the rows were coming more frequently, and with them the lies. A trivial example had occurred when Gemma had asked why Zen was going to Bologna, mistakenly believing this to be a free choice on his part. ‘Years ago I was stationed in the city and I loved it,’ he’d replied. It was true that he couldn’t wait to leave, but it was not going back to Bologna that he was looking forward to; anywhere would have done. During the journey up in the train, he tried to remember the last time he had been posted to the city, some time during the 1970s, the terrorist anni di piombo, when ‘red’ Bologna had been one of the hotbeds of unrest. But that side of police work was handled by the DIGOS and other specialised anti-terrorist units, while Zen, as a very junior officer attached to the criminal investigation department, had been left to deal with the usual routine crimes committed by people whose interest was not in overthrowing the state but in lining their pockets or settling some personal dispute.
All he could recall were isolated incidents, such as the time he’d followed a small-time gangster to a tough suburban bar, where his target was menaced by a rival. Zen’s man responded by pulling out a flick-knife and driving it, almost up to the hilt, into his own leg. Then, without the slightest flicker of expression, he turned to the other thug and said, ‘That’s what I’m capable of doing to myself, Giorgio. Imagine what I would be capable of doing to you.’ The aggressor looked like he was about to faint and left in extreme haste, after which the gangster pulled out the knife, replaced it in his pocket, then rolled up his trouser leg and removed his prosthetic limb, to the general merriment of the company.
Or the time he went to interview a woman who claimed that her ex-husband had been stalking her. She’d sounded rather highly strung on the phone, and when Zen got to her apartment and asked some rather detailed and intimate questions she had first slapped his face, knuckles out, then burst into a lengthy and deafening fit of tears, and finally begged him to come to bed with her. In the end he’d agreed, and the results were so satisfactory that the following morning he’d suggested that they repeat the experience. To which the lady had icily replied, ‘You were Tuesday. This is Wednesday.’
And then there was the occasion when he had chased a notorious drug dealer and suspected murderer down the twisty, arcaded streets of the city centre, only to have the man disappear in front of his eyes. When Zen finally located the open door through which he must have turned, he was met by an expanse of black liquid a couple of metres below, one of the ‘lost’ canals of Bologna, now buried beneath buildings and car parks. Ripples on the surface of the water showed the escape route that the fugitive had chosen, but even at that relatively young age Zen had felt no inclination to follow.
But these were mere anecdotes, and the incidents involved might have happened elsewhere. What was lacking was any overall sense of the city as an entity in its own right, unique and unconfoundable with any other. The thing that struck him most today, in the brief taxi ride from the station to the centre, was the glaring comparison with Florence, so near and yet a world away. Bologna was already the north, home of hard workers, hearty eaters, heavy drinkers and dank, dour, depressing winters lacking any of the mitigating hints of vernal promise that regions south of the Apennines always kept up their sleeves. Unlike Zen’s other postings, moreover, the strongest impression this city seemed to have left was the efficiency of its civic mechanisms, which scored the highest possible mark on his rule-of-thumb criterion for such things, viz. the public garbage skips in the street are emptied (a) every day, (b) every week, (c) once in a while, (d) never. That and the food, which Zen sat down to sample as soon as he had installed himself at the hotel recommended by his cab driver as being conveniently close to the Questura. He had also recommended a restaurant, where Zen ate his way through an appetiser of superb culatello, that almost unobtainable delicacy which a fellow officer had once described as ‘Parma ham for grown- ups’, followed by deliciously thin and eggy layers of lasagna with the famous Bolognese ragu, and finally rabbit cooked in white wine and balsamic vinegar, a rich feast made palatable by a pleasantly astringent red wine still lively from its recent fermentation.
Considered merely from a nutritional point of view, this one meal represented more calories than his average daily intake, although he still had a hard time persuading the waiter that a dish of creamy baked custard would not provide a suitable conclusion. Instead he had a double caffe ristretto at a nearby bar and then set off to face whatever welcome awaited him at the Questura. This building was an example of Fascist grandiloquence and triumphalism at its most menacingly turgid, a massive temple to the power of the state out of all proportion to the modest piazzetta in which it was situated. Perhaps Bologna had been a left-wing hotbed even then. Certainly the message being sent couldn’t have been clearer: behind the boys in blue were the men in black.
The interior was on a scarcely less awesome scale, but Zen’s reception turned out to be reassuringly low- key. His contact was an officer named Salvatore Brunetti, whose manner resembled that of the many doctors he had encountered during his stay in the Rome clinic, who always gave the impression that Zen was a malingering crank who had nothing the matter wrong with him but must be humoured to prevent the possibility of violent outbursts.
‘So what exactly is your mission here?’ the Bologna police officer asked once the usual courtesies had been observed.
‘Perhaps it would be best if I tell you what it isn’t,’ Zen replied. ‘For example, I’m not here to intervene, take control, undermine your authority, nor above all to snitch on you to my superiors in Rome.’
Salvatore Brunetti looked back at him with the same polite, distant, mildly amused air.
‘My remit is very specific,’ Zen continued firmly, ‘and I intend to honour it to the letter. Given the identity of the victim and the circumstances under which he died, this is clearly going to be an extremely high-profile case, and has already generated a lot of media exposure and comment. My superiors at the Viminale naturally want to be kept informed of developments as they happen, in real time, with a view to exploiting them to maximum political effect if they are positive and minimising negative fallout as soon as possible if not. They have instructed me to facilitate that process. And that’s all.’
Brunetti waited a moment, then vaguely smiled.
