‘Do you happen to know when he’ll be back?’
‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure. He’s away on business. You’d need to ask at the office.’
‘And la signora?’
‘Also not at home.’
Zen smiled, pleasantly enough, but with just a hint of professional steeliness.
‘To anyone? Or just to the police?’
The housemaid looked slightly affronted.
‘What’s this about?’ she asked.
‘A personal matter. I need to speak to a member of the family. What about the son, Vincenzo?’
Ashake of the head.
‘He doesn’t live here any more.’
‘Where does he live?’
The woman shrugged in a way suggesting that it was a mockery even to ask.
‘Signora Amadori will be back in an hour or so.’
Zen nodded.
‘Might I wait for her, do you think? It’s a fairly routine matter, but we need to get it sorted out as soon as possible, and I’m a busy man. Since I’m already here…’
He gestured significantly. The maid hesitated a second, then opened the door fully and beckoned him across the threshold.
From the street, the house-like its guardian angel-had looked pleasingly plain and ordinary, with the subdued dignity of elderly people who no longer have anything they either can or need to prove. The interior, on the other hand, had been remodelled at some point in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, so that in entering one moved instantly but imperceptibly into a space not only mindful of its history and place in the greater scheme of things, but marginally more elegant and formal. The present owners had respected its simple, harmonious values, adding only a couple of inoffensive abstract oils in a now dated manner to the otherwise studiously neutral walls.
‘This way, signore,’ said the housemaid, peeling off her work gloves.
She led him up a steep stairway of marble steps with rounded edges flanked by elaborate wroughtiron banisters. The first-floor landing offered three doors. Zen was shown into what was obviously the formal salotto, at the front of the house, used on rare occasions as an impressive but impersonal ‘receiving room’. It was large, with a ceiling even higher than the one in Zen’s hutch at the hotel, and furnished with the type of 1970s ‘contemporary’ furniture designed to be admired rather than enjoyed. It was also bitterly cold.
‘Would you care for a coffee?’ the woman asked.
Zen reflected for a moment, and then gave her his warmest smile.
‘That’s very kind of you, signora. I’d love one, if it’s not too much trouble. Would it be all right if I came down and had it with you in the kitchen?’
He laughed, as though in slight embarrassment.
‘This room’s a little chilly, and at my age…’
‘Eh, the heating’s always turned off in here, unless there are guests. Yes, of course, signore, come down. It’s nothing grand like this but you’ll be nice and snug there, and I’ll announce you as soon as Signora Amadori returns.’
They walked together to the stairs, which as Zen had noted on the way up were of old marble, heavily worn and polished to a lustrous sheen. He insisted that his companion go first, and about half-way down staged a carefully controlled fall backwards, accompanied by an impressive and convincing cry of pain.
The housemaid turned to him with horrified eyes.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’
She came back up to where Zen lay and bent over him solicitously. He moaned and groaned a bit, then smiled and clambered unsteadily to his feet with the air of one bravely making light of a harrowing experience. Faking pain came easy after the crash course in the real thing that he had so recently undergone.
‘Are you all right?’ the donna cried.
‘Nothing broken!’ Zen replied, with a transparently faked if gallant attempt at jaunty humour. ‘I’ll be fine in a moment. But…’
He looked her in the eyes.
‘What’s your name, signora?’
‘Carlotta.’
‘Would you mind taking my arm as far as the bottom of the stairs, Carlotta?’
‘Of course, of course!’
‘It’s disturbing, suddenly losing your balance like that. Makes you think about the day when you’ll lose everything else too, eh?’
‘Eh, eh!’
The two of them proceeded cautiously down, step by step. At the foot of the stairs, Zen did not withdraw his arm, nor did Carlotta release it. They shuffled back along the ground-floor passageway to a door at the far end that stood open into a dimlylit, low-ceilinged area filled with odours and warmth. Leaving Zen to stand alone for a moment, Carlotta pulled over a chair and eased him into it.
‘Now stay there,’ she admonished him. ‘I’m going to prepare a tonic. It’ll make you feel much better.’
She bustled rapidly about the kitchen, opening cupboards, extracting containers, measuring ingredients, and then pouring, grinding and stirring. Carlotta’s domain was evidently the one remaining original section of the house, saved by the cost factor-no need to impress the servants-from the upwardly-mobile renovations of some two centuries earlier. Although spotlessly clean, every surface looked worn, uneven, imperfect, and somehow denser than its actual physical consistency. The single fifty-watt bulb had no doubt been imposed by her employers for the same reasons of economy that had preserved the integrity of the whole space, but the gentle ingratiation of its dim glow, reflected back up off the worn flagstones, was beyond price.
‘What’s this?’ Zen asked when Carlotta finally brought him a tumbler full of some brownish liquid.
‘Just drink it down. All in one go, mind.’
He did so. Once the initial shock of the alcohol had subsided, he vaguely identified nutmeg, orange zest, cardamom and raw garlic. He nodded several times and handed the glass back, beaming at her.
‘You’re a wonder, Carlotta!’
‘Now stay sitting where you are for five minutes, and you’ll be as right as rain.’
She took the glass to the sink, shaking her head sorrowfully.
‘I blame myself! To think that I’d polished those steps only five minutes before you arrived.’
‘No, no, no!’ Zen insisted. ‘It was all my own fault, not looking where I was going. And these old leather- soled shoes are as smooth as…’
Their increasingly intimate colloquy-Zen was starting to think that he might well be able to get some interesting information out of Carlotta before he left-was interrupted by a dry, metallic snap in the resonant distance.
‘That’ll be the signora,’ the maid declared. ‘You stay here. I’ll settle her down, then announce you as though you’d just arrived.’
She went out to the hallway, from which a duet of voices drifted back to where Zen sat idly waiting. Carlotta’s he could recognise. The newcomer indeed sounded feminine, but there was a feeble, plaintive tone to the voice which ill suited the mental image he had formed of Signora Amadori. The words themselves were alternately ballooned and baffled as if by contrary winds, but they grew ever louder and closer until Carlotta reappeared in the kitchen, accompanied by a young man whom Zen didn’t immediately recognise.
‘Well, you should have told me!’ the housemaid was saying. ‘How was I supposed to know you’d had a nosebleed? I assumed it was a wine stain. If you’d told me it was blood then naturally I’d never have washed it in hot water, but how was I to know?’
‘Why didn’t you ask?’
‘Don’t you talk like that to me, Vincenzo! I’ve cleaned your nappies in my time, never mind your designer shirts. Take your precious stuff to a laundry if you’re going to be so fussy.’
She broke off, realising that the young man had noted the police officer’s presence, but seemed unable to
