Authors: Michael Dibdin
‘So she died just before her husband?’ asked Zen.
‘I suppose so, yes. A matter of weeks.’
‘
Cherchez la femme
,’ Zen intoned with a superior air.
‘Pardon?’
‘Nothing.’
He glanced at his watch.
‘Let’s go.’
Outside, the streets were dark and almost deserted. A fine drizzle was falling, backed up by a powerful but lazy wind lolling around like a drunken braggart at the street corners. The few pedestrians about glanced nervously at the tall man and his armed escort, and hastened past.
As they turned into Via Gioberti, Zen began to have serious doubts about the wisdom of his plan. If there were an assassin, resentment with a rifle, this is where he would be waiting, in a doorway or at a window opposite the restaurant. He would take down young Dario first, then the unprotected Zen. But it was too late to back out now.
There were no shots. When they reached the Maddalena, Dario burst inside ahead of Zen, brandishing his machine-gun. The restaurant was packed, but when Zen made his entrance, there was not a sound to be heard. Everyone in the place had come to a halt in the midst of whatever they were doing, the waiters poised in mid-delivery or removal of dishes, the diners stilled, forks half-way to their mouths.
‘Aurelio Zen,’ he heard himself say. ‘I’m meeting someone for dinner. Has he arrived?’
A deferential elderly man in a suit and tie emerged from behind a desk.
‘
Sì
,
certo
,’ he said imperturbably, as though the appearance of armed men in uniform were a daily occurrence. ‘This way, please.’
Accompanied by the ever-watchful Dario, Zen and the head waiter traversed the crowded room and another beyond it, to come to rest at a table at the very rear of the premises. It was occupied by Carla Arduini. She and Zen stared at each other in silence for a long time. Then the head waiter coughed self-consciously.
‘You may go,’ Zen told him. ‘You too, Dario.’
The patrolman pulled him aside.
‘This could be a set-up, chief! They put this young woman out front to get you relaxed and off your guard while the killer awaits his chance …’
‘I don’t think so.’
Dario looked distinctly disappointed that the promised excitements and risks of the evening had come to nothing, leaving him to return to his routine duties at the police station.
‘Don’t you think I should take a seat at one of those tables over there and just keep an eye on things, just in case?’ he asked hopefully.
Zen scanned the room.
‘Those tables seem to be reserved.’
Dario smiled and patted his machine-gun.
‘Believe me, I’m not going to have any problem getting seated.’
Zen sighed and nodded.
‘All right. I’ll have some food sent over. But don’t wave that thing around too much. You’ll scare the customers.’
Dario grinned impishly.
‘We’ll get great service, though!’
Indeed, waiters appeared with extraordinary promptness, bearing menus and wine lists of such complexity that Zen finally shrugged and said, ‘Just bring me something good to eat. A warm starter and a main course. I don’t care what it is, as long as it has truffles grated thickly all over it.’
He glanced at Carla Arduini, who nodded.
‘The same for me.’
‘And take some over to that lad over in the corner with the gun,’ Zen added. ‘He gets nervous if he isn’t fed properly.’
When the flurry of attendance had died away, he looked up at his companion.
‘So it was you?’
She nodded. Zen lit a cigarette and studied her.
‘And who is your collaborator? The man on the phone.’
‘I have no collaborator.’
‘But that voice …’
‘It’s an electronic device which alters your voice to any register you desire,’ Carla Arduini explained. ‘I bought one and hooked it up to my telephone at the hotel. It can make you sound like a man, a woman, a child, even an opera singer. For my purposes, a slightly metallic man’s voice seemed best.’
Zen puffed away, studying her face closely all the while.
‘And what were those purposes?’
She smiled wanly.
‘I planned to make a series of threatening phone calls, each with a vague clue to the mystery, and leave you to twist slowly in the wind, tormented by nameless fears. I’m not sure what I planned to do after that. I certainly didn’t intend you any physical harm, despite my threats. I just wanted to scare you.’
She gestured to the table where Dario was sitting.
‘It certainly looks as if I succeeded.’
A bottle of wine arrived. Zen poured them both a glass and drank his off at a gulp.
‘So why me? Or is it the police in general you have it in for? Did you just pick any officer at random?’
‘No, it was personal.’
Their first course arrived with the same promptitude as the menus, a mound of homemade pasta buried under a fall of truffle flakes so thick as to almost overflow the bowl.
‘Personal? We met for the first time two days ago,
signorina
.’
‘Yes, but I already knew who you were, you see. And as soon as I saw a news report saying that you had been sent up here to investigate the Vincenzo murder, I decided that I had to act.’
She paused.
‘No, “decided” is the wrong word. Something decided for me. Even at the time, I remember asking myself what I hoped to gain. But it was irresistible. So I booked a room next to yours in the hotel, and here I am.’
Zen wound a portion of truffle-scented noodles around his fork and began to eat. At least the food made sense.
‘Amalia mentioned your name only once,’ Carla Arduini went on, her own meal still untouched. ‘We’d had a terrible row about nothing, one of those things that happens when you have an adolescent girl and her mother living too closely together. I understand now. that I just resented her control. I wanted to create my own nest, my own way. It’s a very basic instinct.’
She pushed her dish of pasta away.
‘I can’t eat this.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘I just can’t eat it. I can’t eat anything.’
Zen clicked his fingers. A waiter instantly materialized.
‘The
signorina
is feeling unwell. Please cancel her main course and offer this to my colleague over there.’
He pointed to Dario, who had already cleaned his plate. The waiter looked around uncertainly.
‘The one with the …’
‘Exactly.’
The waiter vanished.
‘So you and your mother had a row,’ Zen continued, pouring himself more wine. ‘I still don’t see where I come into it.’
Carla Arduini pushed a breadcrumb around the white tablecloth.
‘She made me swear not to tell anyone, never to mention it, least of all to you. I think that she had decided never to tell me, but the truth came out the night we had that stupid argument. I said something cheap and cruel, taunting her with not having a man, with not being able to hold the father of her child. I even accused her of feeling jealous of me. Several boys were taking an interest in me at that point, and she seemed to disapprove. I realize now that she was just being cautions. She didn’t want the same thing that happened to her to happen to me.’
Waiters arrived with more food. Zen waved them away.
‘And that’s when she told you?’
A nod.
‘That’s when she told me about Via Strozzi, number twenty-four, in Milan, where she used to live. That’s when she finally revealed the pain and the shame she had been hiding all those years with no one to comfort her, no one to support her, no one to hold her at night …’
Zen coughed awkwardly and lit a cigarette.
‘And that’s when she told me …’ Carla Arduini began, and then broke off, cradling her head in her arms.
‘Well?’ demanded Zen with an air of exasperation. ‘What did she tell you?’
The young woman’s face rose from her arms like the eclipsed sun Zen had beheld that morning: vast, obscure and terrible.
‘She told me the name of my father.’
And so, without warning, it all starts again. He had always known this, he realized now, ever since that morning out on the sandbanks of the
Palude
Maggiore
in the northern lagoon. The trip, the longest he and his friend Tommaso had ever attempted, took a whole day’s hard rowing there and back, so they’d filched some blankets and an old army tent and camped out for the night on an island whose name, if it had one, he’d never been able to discover.
At dawn the next morning, as the dull, exhausted light strained to heave the insensible darkness off the lagoon like an elderly whore trying to get out from under a drunken client, he had wandered down to the shoreline. Tommaso was still asleep, emitting the thin, raucous snores which had kept Zen awake for much of the night. Where the glaucous water met the liquid mud, marsh birds puttered about like mechanical toys, their beady eyes on the look-out for food. An aeroplane passed high overhead, its remote presence merely emphasizing his solitude. The only other sound was an irregular succession of splashes somewhere nearby, like fish leaping or a bird diving.
When he first came on it, the stream seemed nothing much. Its gently flowing water, draining down from the marginally higher surface of the island, had cut a passage through the mudbank left by the receding tide, carving out a sequence of miniature bends, ravines and ox-bow lakes which had made him feel as though he were seeing the whole countryside from the plane which had just passed over. He had never been in a plane, of course.
He settled down to watch his private River Adige, gradually peopling the banks and highlands, surveying towns and villages and connecting them by road and rail, when a vast region of this imaginary terrain – a whole mountainside, with half the plateau beyond – cracked off and, with a terrible, slow inevitability, tumbled into the stream with one of the loud splashes he had heard earlier. The fractured surface thus exposed, as rugged and dense as a split Parmesan cheese, was riddled with scores of tiny red worms twitching frantically this way and that.
In the end he had stayed there so long that Tommaso started calling for him, warning him that they should start for home and the inevitable interrogations and punishments which awaited them. It hadn’t taken Zen long to work out that the landslides were the result of erosion by the stream, undercutting the cliffs it had created, but he was never able to predict where or when the next collapse would come. Outcroppings which looked shaky, worn and fragile seemed to survive for ever, while a fat chunk of ground you had just walked across with total confidence would suddenly reveal the tell-tale hairline crack, then slowly peel off and plunge into the current, damming it briefly before being scoured away.
For a time he had tried to influence the outcome, protecting one stretch with clumps of rushes and pieces of driftwood, undermining another with a stick. It was only after he had almost fallen into the stream himself, when the bank he was standing on suddenly gave way beneath him, that he understood that this process had its own rules which he could no more understand or alter than the scarlet worms wriggling helplessly in the exposed innards of the mudbank.
Which was how he felt now, hundreds of kilometres away and still more hundreds of years – or so it seemed – distant from that childish experience.
Something had happened
, that was clear, but he had no idea what it was, still less what it meant or might portend for the future. All he could do, as he rose at eight minutes past ten the next morning to address a meeting of the Alba police detachment in the city’s central
Commissariato
, was to try to remain faithful to this insight.
‘I have called you together to review recent developments in the Vincenzo case,’ he said in a speciously confident tone, ‘to explain my current thinking and outline the measures to be taken at this point.’
He looked around the narrow table, meeting and assessing everyone’s gaze. Present, besides himself, were Vice-Questore Tullio Legna, Ispettore Nanni Morino, and the only woman to have attained the higher echelons in the Alba command, one Caterina Frascana.
‘Since my arrival here,’ Zen continued, ‘we have been groping in the dark, stumbling into unexpected obstacles and talking to ourselves in mirrors. There’s been nothing solid to go on, no leads which didn’t turn out to be equivocal, nothing but insubstantial theories and disturbing rumours which could never be put to the test. It’s as if we’ve been collectively dreaming, even hallucinating.’
His audience sat in an awkward silence, as though at a concert of modern music, unsure whether it was over and time to applaud.
‘But that’s all in the past now!’ Zen exclaimed. ‘We can’t go on living with these doubts and uncertainties. The time has come to act, to put these nebulous suspicions to the test and determine the truth once and for all.’
The three police officials looked at him oddly, as well they might, since his speech was not directed at them but at a young woman they had never met. Zen had spent so much time wondering what to say to Carla Arduini at their rendezvous later that morning that he had quite neglected to prepare his discourse to the colleagues whom he had summoned to this meeting.
‘Someone once remarked that while fruit flies seem eager to drown in the wine you are drinking, they never show any interest in the discarded dregs,’ he went on with an air of slight desperation. ‘Perhaps you’ve noticed the same thing in your own lives. I know I have.’
The two men nodded sagely, but Caterina Frascana screwed up her face in a frown.
‘Fruit flies?’ she repeated.
Zen gave her a haughty glare.
‘I was speaking metaphorically,
signora
.’
‘Oh.’
La Frascana was clearly going to be a problem, thought Zen. The two men would sit there through any amount of bullshit, cowed into submission by Zen’s hierarchical eminence, but the woman’s eyes were lively and her sharp, alert face seemed predisposed to break into a mocking smile at any moment. With her around, he was going to have to try harder.