Zen walked away past the shuttered and gated market towards the bustle of activity on Via Marmorata. He was well satisfied with the way things had gone. Fausto Arcuti's lifestyle might appear unimpressive, but as a broker for favours and information he was second to none.
Moreover, Zen knew that he would want to make up for the poor figure he had cut, cowering in fear of his life in a squalid flat.
Zen's main preoccupation now was to get home with as little delay as possible. He was in luck, for no sooner had he turned on to the main traffic artery than a taxi stopped just in front of him. The family which emerged from it seemed numerous enough to fill a bus, never mind a taxi, and still the matriarch in charge kept pulling them out, like a conjuror producing rabbits from a hat. At last the supply was exhausted, however, and after an acrimonious squabble about extras, discounts and tips, they all trooped away.
In solitary splendour Zen climbed into the cab, which was as hot and smelly as a football team's changing-room, and had himself driven home.
To his relief, the red Alfa Romeo was nowhere to be seen. The lift was ready and waiting, for once, and Zen rode it up to the fourth floor. The experiences of the day had left him utterly drained.
He saw it immediately he opened the front door, a narrow black strip as thin as a razor blade and seemingly endless. It continued all the way along the hallway, gleaming where the light from the living room reflected off its surface. He bent down and picked it up. It felt cold, smooth and slippery.
He walked slowly down the hallway, gathering in the shiny strip as he went. As he passed the glass-panelled door to the living room, music welled up from the television, as though to signify his relief at finding his mother alive and well, her eyes glued to the play of light and shadow on the screen. Then he looked past her, uncomprehending, disbelieving. The gleaming strip ran riot over the entire room, heaped in coils on the sofa and chairs, running around the legs of the chairs, draped over the table. In its midst lay a small rectangular box with tape sprouting from slits in either end. Zen picked it up. 'Ministry of the Interior,' he read, 'Index No. 46yzg BUR ygg/K/gg'.
'What's the matter with you tonight?' his mother snapped. 'I asked you to bring me my camomile tea ages ago and you didn't even bother to answer.'
Zen slowly straightened up, staring at her.
'But mamma, I've only just got home.'
'Don't be ridiculous! Do you think I didn't see you? I may be old but I'm not so old I don't recognize my own son! Besides, who else would be here once Maria Grazia's gone home, eh?
A cold shiver ran through Zen's body.
'I'm sorry, mamma.'
'You didn't even have the common decency to reply when I spoke to you! You always bring me my camomile tea before Dynasty starts, you know that. But tonight you were too busy cluttering the place up with that ribbon or string or whatever it is.'
'I'll fetch it straight away,' Zen mumbled.
But he didn't do so, for at that moment he heard a sound from the hallway, and remembered that he had left the front door standing wide open.
Among the furniture stored in the hall was a wardrobe inset with long rectangular mirrors which reflected an image of the front door on to the glass panel of the livingroom door. Thus it was that even before he set foot in the hallway, Zen could see that the entrance to the apartment was now blocked by a figure thrown into silhouette by the landing light. The next moment this switched itself off, plunging everything into obscurity.
'Aurelio?' said a voice from the darkness.
Zen's breathing started again. He groped for the switch and turned on the light.
'Gilberto,' he croaked. 'Come in. Close the door.'
What is the worst, the most obscene and loathsome thing that one person can do to another? Go on, rack your brains! Let your invention run riot! (I often used to talk to myself like this as I scuttled about.) Well? Is that all? I can think of far worse things than that! I've done far worse things than that. But let's not restrict ourselves to your hand-me-down imaginations. Because whatever you or I or anyone else can think up, no matter how hideous or improbable, one thing is sure. It has happened. Not just once but time and time again.
This prison is also a torture house. No one cares what goes on here.
You know Vasco, the blacksmith? Everyone still calls him the blacksmith, though he repairs cars now. What do you think of him? A steady sort, a bit obstinate, gives himself airs? As I was passing his workshop one morning I saw him pick up his threeyear-old daughter by the hair, hold her dangling there a while, then let her fall to the floor. A moment later he was back to work, moulding some metal tubing while the child wept in a heap on the ground, her little world in pieces all around her. I wanted to comfort her, to tell her how lucky she had been. All her daddy had done was pull her hair. He could have done other things. He could have used the blowtorch on her. He could have buried her alive in the pit beneath the cars. He could have done anything.
He could have done anything.
Friday, 11.15-14.20
While the archives section presented a slightly more animated appearance during office hours than on Zen's previous visit, it could by no means have been described as a hive of activity. True, there were now about a dozen clerks on duty, but this manning level had evidently been dictated by some notional bureaucratic quota rather than the actual demands of the job, which wa:i being carried on almost entirely by one man. He had a neurotically intense expression, compulsive, jerky movements, arid the guilty air of someone concealing a shameful secret.
Unlike the others, he couldn't just sit back and read the paper or chat all morning. If there was work to be done, he just couldn't help doing it. It was this that made him a figure of fun in his colleagues' eyes. They watched him scurry about, collecting and dispatching the files which had been ordered, sorting and reshelving those which had been returned, cataloguir.g and indexing new material, typing replies to demands and queries. Their looks were derisory, openly contemptuous. They despised him for his weakness, as he did himself for that matter. Poor fellow!
What could you do with people like that? Still, he had his uses.
As on his previous visit, Zen asked to consult the file on the Vasco Spadola case. While it was being fetched, he called to the clerk who had been on duty the last time be had been there.
The man looked up from the crossword puzzle he was completing.
'You want to speak to me?' he demanded, with the incredulous tone of a surgeon interrupted while performing an open-heart operation.
Zen shook his head. 'You want to speak to me. At least, so I've been told. Something about a video tape.'
An anticipatory smile dawned on the clerk's lips.
'Ah, so it was you, was it? Yes, I remember now!'
The other clerks had all fallen silent and were watching with curiosity. Their colleague strode languidly over to the counter where Zen was standing.
'Yes, I'm afraid there's been a slight problem with that tape, dottore.'
'Really?'
'Yes, really.'
'And what might it be?'
'Well it might be almost anything,' the clerk returned wittily. 'But what it is, quite simply, is that the tape you gave us back is not the same tape that you took out.'
'What do you mean, not the same?'
'I mean it's not the same. It's blank. There's nothing on it.'
'But… but…' Zen stammered.
'Also, the tapes we use here are specially made up for us and are not available commercially, whereas what you handed in is an ordinary BASF ferrous oxide cassette obtainable at any dealer.'
'But that's absurd! You must have muddled them up somehow.'
At that moment, the other clerk interrupted to hand Zen the file he had requested. But his colleague had no intention of letting Zen get away with his clumsy attempt to shift the blame for what had happened.
'No, dottore! That's not the problem. The problem is that the tape you brought back is a blank. Raw plastic.' ~34
Zen fiddled nervously with the Spadola file.
'What exactly are you accusing me of?' he blustered.
The clerk gestured loftily.
'I'm not accusing anyone of anything, dottore. Naturally, everyone knows how easy it is to push the wrong button on one of those machines and wipe out the previous recording..'
'I'm sure I didn't do that.'
'I know you didn't,' the clerk replied with a steely smile that revealed the trap Zen had almost fallen into. 'Our tapes are all copy-protected, so that's impossible. Besides, as I said, the brand was different. So a substitution must have taken place. The question is, where is the original?'
There was a crash as the Spadola file fell to the floor, spilling documents everywhere. As Zen bent down to pick them up, the assembled clerks signalled their colleague's triumph with a round of laughter.
Zen straightened up, holding a video cassette.
'46g29 BUR 43$/K/95,' he read from the label. 'Isn't that the one you've been making so much fuss about?'
'Where did that come from?' the clerk demanded.
'It was inside the file.'
Without another word, he went back to picking up the scattered documents. The clerk snatched the tape and bustled off, muttering angrily about checking its authenticity.
Zen wasn't worried about that, having played it through the night before, after he and Gilberto spent the best part of an hour rewinding the damn thing into the cassette by hand. His mother had gone to bed by then, still blissfully ignorant that a stranger had entered the apartment while she had been watching television.
Zen himself was still in shock from what had happened, and it was left to Gilberto to bring up the question of what was to become of his mother during his absence in Sardinia, now that their home was demonstrably under threat. In the end, Gilberto insisted that she stay with him and his wife until Zen returned.
'Quite impossible!' Zen had replied. His mother hadn't left the apartment for years. She would be lost without the familiar surroundings that replicated the family home in Venice. Anyway, she was practically senile much of the time. It was very difficult even for him to communicate with her or understand what she wanted, and it didn't help that she often forgot that her Venetian dialect was incomprehensible to other people. She could be demanding, irrational, bad-tempered and devious. Rosella Nieddu already had her hands full looking after her own family. It would be an intolerable imposition for her to have to take on a moody old woman, contemptuous and distrustful of strangers, someone who in her heart of hearts believed that the civilized world ended at Mestre.
But Gilberto had brushed these objections aside.
'So what are you going to do with her, Aurelio? Because she can't stay here.'
Zen had no answer to that.
And so it came about that early that morning an ambulance rolled up to the front door of Zen's house. The attendants brought a mobile bed up to the apartment, placed Zen's mother on it and took her downstairs in the lift before sweeping off, siren whooping and lights flashing, to the General Hospital. Thirty seconds later, siren stilled and flasher turned off, the ambulance quietly emerged on the other side of the hospital complex and drove to the modern apartment block where the Nieddus lived.
Throughout her ordeal the old lady had hardly spoken a word, though her eyes and the way she clutched her son's hand showed clearly how shocked she was. Zen had explained that there was something wrong with their apartment, something connected with the noises she had heard, and that it was necessary for them both to move out for a few days while it was put right. It made no difference what he said. His mother sat rigidly as the ambulancemen wheeled her into the neat and tidy bedroom which Rosella Nieddu had prepared for her, having shooed out the two youngest children to join their elder siblings next door. gen thanked Rosella with a warmth that elicited a hug and a kiss he found oddly disturbing. Gilberto's wife was a very attractive woman, and the contact had made Zen realize that he had neglected that side of his life for too long.
The archives clerks had gone back to their desks, now that the fun was over. Zen gathered up the papers relating go the Spadola case and started to put them into some sort of order while he awaited confirmation that the video tape he had produced from his pocket after dropping the file was indeed the genuine article.
Suddenly his hands ceased their mechanical activity.
Zen scanned the smucigy carbon-copied document he was holding, looking for the name which had leapt off the page at him.
XXX informed that Spadola was in hiding at a farmhouse near the village of Melzo. At 04.00 hours on 16 July personnel of the Squadra Mobile under the direction of Ispettor Aurelio Zen entered the house and arrested Spadola. An extensive search of the premises revealed various items of material evidence (see Appendix A), in particular a knife which proved to be marked with traces of blood consistent with that of the victim. Spadola continued to deny all involvement in the affair, even after the damning nature of the evidence had been explained to him. At the judicial confrontation with Parrucci, the accused uttered violent threats against the witness.
Once again, Zen felt the superstitious chill that had come over him that night after viewing the Burolo video.
Parrucci! The informer whose gruesome death had thrown Fausto Arcuti into a state of mortal terror! It seemed quite uncanny that the same man should figure again in the file which Zen had asked to see two days before as part of his stratagem for substituting the blank video tape.
But he had no more time to consider the matter, for at that moment the clerk reappeared, video cassette in hand.
'It's the right one,' he confirmed grudgingly. 'So where did the other come from, I'd like to know?'
Zen shrugged.
'I'd say that's pretty obvious. When I brought the tape back the other day, you got it muddled up with the file I asked to consult at the same time. When you couldn't find it you started to panic, because you knew that it had been handed back and that you would be responsible. So you substituted a blank tape, hoping that no one would notice.
Unfortunately, one of my colleagues had asked to see the tape, and he immediately discovered that…'
'That's a lie!' the man shouted.
Snatching the Spadola file from Zen, he abruptly went on to the attack.
'Look at this mess you've made! It would be no wonder if things sometimes did get confused around here with people like you wandering in and upsetting everything.
Leave it, leave it! You're just making a worse muddle.
These documents must be filed in chronological order.
Look, this judicial review shouldn't be here. It must come at the end.'
'Let me see that!'
The form was stiff and heavy, imitation parchment. The text, set in antique type and printed in the blackest of inks, was as dense and lapidary as Latin, clogged with odd abbreviations and foreshortenings, totally impenetrable.
But there was no need to read it to understand the import of the document. It was enough to scan the brief phrases inserted by hand in the spaces left blank by the printer. 29 April 1964… Milan… Spadola, Vasco Emesto… culpable homicide… life imprisonment… investigating magistrate Giulio Bertolini…'
It was enough to scan the spaces, read the messages, make the connections. That was enough, thought Zen. But he had failed to do it, and now it might be too late.
Back at his desk in the Criminalpol offices, which were deserted that morning, Zen phoned the Ministry of Justice and inquired about the penal status of Vasco Ernesto Spadola, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Milan on zg April xg64. A remote and disembodied voice announced that he would be rung back with the information in due course.
Zen lit a cigarette and wandered over to the window, looking down at the forecourt of the Ministry with its pines and shrubbery which flanked the sweep of steps leading down to the huge shallow bath of the fountain in Piazza del Viminale. Although the implications of the facts he had just stumbled on were anything but c
heering, he felt relieved to find that there was at least a rational explanation for the things that had been going on. It was not just an uncanny coincidence that Zen had happened to ask for the Spadola file the day that he had read about the killing of Judge Bertolini. At some level beneath his conscious thoughts he must have recalled the one occasion on which his and the murdered judge's paths had crossed. As for Parrucci, the reason why the name had meant nothing to Zen was that he knew the informer only by his codename, 'the nightingale'. When Parrucci agreed to testify against Spadola, his name had been revealed, but by that time Zen's involvement with the case was at an end.
A thin Roman haze softened the November sunlight, giving it an almost summery languor. At a window on the other side of the piazza a woman was hanging out bedding to air on the balcony. A three-wheeled Ape van was unloading cases of mineral water outside the bar below, while on the steps of the Ministry itself three chauffeurs were having an animated discussion involving sharp decisive stabs of the index finger, exaggerated shrugs and waves of dismissal, cupped palms pleading for sanity and attention-claiming grabs at each other's sleeves. Zen only gradually became aware of an interference with these sharply etched scenes, a movement seemingly on the other side of the glass, where the ghostly figure of Tania Biacis was shimmering towards him in mid-air.
'I've been looking for you all morning.'
He turned to face the original of the reflection. She was looking at him with a slightly playful air, as though she knew that he would be wondering what she meant. But Zen had no heart for such tricks.
'I was down in Archives, sorting out that video tape business. Where is everyone, anyway?'
A distant pl ione began to ring.
'Don't go!' Zen called as he hurried back to his desk.
He snatched up the phone.
'Yes?'
'Good morning, dottore,' a voice whispered confidentially. It sounded like some tiny creature curled up in the receiver itself. 'Just calling to remind you of our lunch appointment. I hope you can still make it.'
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