'Except it wasn't me, and it wasn't water.'
'Exactly. You'd switched seats, so the person who'd taken yours drank the water, which contained some high-tech poison they supplied to that undercover unit he was in. Apparently it simulates the effects of a heart attack. But he didn't want to end up in the US, where he'd done some work assignments in the past and might be recognized by the agents who were expecting you, so he sabotaged half the toilets on the plane by bunging the pillows and blankets they hand out at night down them, and then drew the senior steward's attention to the problem. That forced a diversion. He'd got this idea from some story Enrico told him, he said.'
'Enrico sounds to have been good value for a couple of drinks and a blow job.' Gemma grimaced.
'I think the experience cost him rather more than that. Lessi was obviously a psychotic. Human life meant nothing whatever to him. Anyway, when, the plane landed in Iceland, he changed into the civilian clothes he had brought with him and slipped through immigration using a false passport he had "lost" before leaving the police.'
'So it was he who attacked me in the street that night.'
'Yes. He claimed it was a total coincidence. The earlier flights back to Europe were all fully booked, so he had to wait for a late-night one. He went into town and was wandering around when he happened to catch sight of you. He said that you were drunk.'
'Iceland has that effect on you.'
'Of making you drunk?'
'Of making you need to get drunk.'
'I see. Anyway, that didn't work either, so he flew back here, assuming that you were safely out of his reach in America. Then one of his contacts got in touch and told him that your trip had been cancelled and that you were coming back to Italy. He knew your address in Rome, of course, and went to visit you there.'
She walked over and closed the window.
'Right, now I think if s time that you told me all about yourself, Dottor Zen.' 'All?'
'Everything. I think I deserve that, don't you? Under the circumstances.' 'Yes, of course. I'm just not sure where to begin.' 'How about the beginning? Whaf s your first name for a start?' 'Aurelio.'
She turned and beamed at him. 'What a lovely name! Go on.' 'Ah. Right. Well…'
This was by far the hardest thing that Zen had had to do so far that evening. He hated talking about himself. At first, he planned to give Gemma a heavily edited version of the truth, but much to his amazement he found himself telling her everything, precisely as she had asked.
She didn't even have to ask follow-up questions in the end, although she prodded him fairly hard in the initial stages. But a point came when she got up and made a large pot of coffee, turning her back on him and generating the usual amount of noise, and he just went on talking anyway. He couldn't stop!
But finally he did.
'Now it's your turn,' he told Gemma, who was sipping a mug of strong espresso opposite him at the table. 'No, no. You'll have to find out bit by bit' 'But I told you everything!' he protested. 'You had to.' 'I didn't'
'Yes, you did. Otherwise I'd have called the police and told them everything.' He laughed. 'It's a bit late for that'
'No it isn't. Even tomorrow wouldn't be too late. Or the day after that. You have Lessi's gun. You murdered him and then threatened me with the same if I didn't agree to help you dispose of his body. I think they'd believe that Particularly if some of Lessi's friends are as vindictive as you suggest'
Zen felt dazed, shocked, stunned by the wine and jolted by the coffee.
'You're going to tell them that?' he asked. Gemma laughed.
'Of course not, silly. I'm just explaining the balance of power around here. You have to do what I say, but I don't have to do what you say.'
Zen thought about this for a moment, then smiled at her.
'I'll be delighted to do whatever you say.'
Gemma stood up, came round the table and kissed him lightly on the forehead.
'Good. Then let’s get going.'
While Gemma went to fetch the car, taking the two rubbish bags and a couple of old coats with her, Zen dragged the bundled body of Roberto Lessi across the dining room and through to the hallway. He opened the front door to the apartment and peered out. The light had automatically extinguished itself and the entire building was silent. Then he heard a clicking sound on the steps and Gemma reappeared.
'All set,' she said.
They lifted the bundle and carried it out on to the landing, leaving the door open to provide background lighting, then down the stairs. The car was parked right in front of the main door, the hatchback open. They heaved the body inside, next to the garbage bags, and spread the coats out over it. Then Gemma ran back upstairs and locked up, while Zen climbed into the passenger seat.
A circuit of the back streets of Lucca, deserted at this time of night, brought them to one of the gates through the enormous walls, and out on to the broad avenue that circumvented the city. Five minutes after that, they had left Italy and were on the motorway.
Years before, when he had finally accepted that his daddy would never come home again, Zen had used to calm himself to sleep by imagining that his bed was in a cabin of one of those international sleeping cars which his father had once showed him in the shunting yards near Santa Lucia station, all dark wood and velvet curtains and brass-shaded lamps and a bell to ring if you needed anything. The train was making its way through a landscape filled with dangers of every kind – battles and floods and towns ablaze – but inside everything was calm. The hideous scenes visible through the window, if you were bold enough to raise the blind a crack, merely emphasized your own seclusion and safety. Meanwhile, the wheels kept ticking along over the rail joints, clickety clack, clickety clack…
Although Zen rarely drove if he could possibly help it, the neutral, extraterritorial domain of the rete autostradale never failed to have a similar calming effect on him. For the modest price of the toll, you were admitted to a private club that stretched the length and breadth of the country, a club that displayed an aristocratic disdain for regional traditions or quirks of topography, and was just about the only institution in the country guaranteed to be open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Whether you were just outside Turin or two thousand metres up in the Abruzzi mountains, the same rules applied and the same facilities were available. The real world stopped at the toll gates, its limits clearly marked by the chain-link fencing. Viewed from within that boundary, the scene was at best picturesque and at worst uninspiring. In that farmhouse over there, its one wan light just showing through the storm-whipped windbreak, the father might be beating his wife and screwing his daughters, with two bodies buried in the cellar and a crazed aunt chained up in the attic. It didn't matter, that was another world. Pretty soon there would be another all-night service station where you could get a hot snack and a cold drink, buy a newspaper or a cassette tape, make a phone call and catch up on the TV news.
Gemma drove prudently, keeping well within the speed limit as they passed through the tunnels and across the long viaducts of the An through the southern foothills of the Apuan Alps, and then cruised down the long curved section reaching down to the coastal plain to join the main north-south motorway at Viareggio. Traffic was heavier here, mostly foreign truckers getting a head start on their long itinerary before the tourists started clogging the road later in the morning. They glided effortlessly past the big rigs, the green kilometre signs ticking off their progress. A pert crescent moon peeked archly out over the mountain chain to the east.
'Someone knew,' said Zen at last, breaking their long silence.
'Knew what?'
'Or at least suspected,' Zen continued, working out the thought which had suddenly come to him. 'And not Brugnoli. He thinks he's a player, but he's not. On the contrary, they're using him.'
Gemma took her eyes off the road for an instant to glance at him.
'When you've got a moment, would you mind telling me what on earth you're talking about?'
Zen remained silent for another minute or so, then shifted in his seat to reach his cigarettes.
'My new job,' he said, lighting up and opening the window slightly.
'What about it?'
'I couldn't understand why they had bothered to go to all that trouble, supposedly setting up this new division and making me the "founder member". They could easily have pressured me into early retirement if they'd wanted to, even produced a fake report from some doctor which diagnosed me as unfit for active service. But that didn't suit them, because someone suspected, just as Lessi did, that I knew more than I was letting on. And once I left the service, they would have no further hold over me. I could sell my story to the newspapers, even write a book about it'
He laughed.
'As it is, they'll never let me retire! At least not until the whole cast has changed and no one cares any more.' 'Cares about what?'
Zen finished his cigarette and let the butt slide into the slipstream, then closed the window.
'That bomb attack in Sicily, the one which almost killed me? Until this evening, I thought the Mafia were responsible. I honestly did. I couldn't remember anything much about the events leading up to it One of the doctors told me that memory loss about events preceding an incident like that is quite normal. Apparently survivors of severe car crashes usually have no idea how they happened. Mind that truck.'
'Leave the driving to me, please.'
'Sorry. Anyway, I accepted the official line about the bomb. And so did everyone else, as far as I knew. But we now know that there was at least one exception.'
'Our friend in the back.'
Zen nodded.
'But someone else must have known, too. Someone higher up the hierarchy, with enough clout to have me moved to a position where I would be safely out of the way, but still under control.'
They drove on in silence for a while.
'In which case, this person might also know that Lessi was planning to kill you’ Zen shook his head decisively.
'No, no. The person I mean operates at a different level. He's probably someone quite high up in the carabinieri or the Defence Ministry. His only thought was to protect the reputation of his force. They dumped Lessi, knowing he wouldn't talk, but they weren't so sure about me.'
'So won't they get curious when Lessi mysteriously vanishes?'
'I think it’ll be a relief, quite frankly. Anyway, Lessi's murderous little plot was quite clearly a personal matter. He wanted to get even, both for what had happened to his career and also for what happened to Alfredo Ferraro, who may have been his partner in more than just a professional sense. No, he'll have kept his private vendetta to himself, I'm sure of that’
In reality, he was a lot less sure than he sounded.
At Magra, just before the turn-off for La Spezia, they stopped for a coffee. While Gemma bought some salami, cheese and rolls to see them through the rest of the morning, Zen lifted the garbage bags containing Lessi's personal effects out of the car and carried them round to the rear of the service station. He opened one of the big dumpsters and tossed the bags inside. A broken pallet was leaning against the wall. He pulled off one of the lateral slats and used it to push the bags down, then to collapse a mound of stinking rubbish over the top of them.
Gemma returned to the car with the plastic bag of provisions. She looked flustered.
'You're never going to believe this, but I just ran into someone I used to know!' she blurted out, spinning the car round in reverse and heading off to rejoin the main highway.
'Who?'
'Oh, an old boyfriend. He came up while I was waiting at the cash register. Wanted to chat.' 'What did you say?'
'I gave him the story we agreed earlier, about going to see my sister. I couldn't think of anything else on the spur of the moment' To his surprise, Zen found himself more jealous than worried. 'How old?' 'What?'
'The boyfriend.'
Gemma laughed harshly as the headlights devoured the darkness before them. 'Oh for God's sake! But he knows.' 'Knows what?'
'That I was here, in the middle of the night' 'Going to see your sister.' 'But I'm not'
Zen patted her knee in a reassuring rather than erotic way.
'Don't worry. It doesn't matter. Your ex-boyfriend doesn't matter. Neither does your husband, who'll find out sooner or later that we used his boat. None of them matters as long as we keep our wits about us and our mouths shut. The only people who can betray us are us. The rest is just hearsay.'
They ran into the roadblock the other side of La Spezia, rounding a sharp bend on a minor strada statale high above the glimmering sea to their left. A blue carabinieri jeep was parked beside the road and a uniformed officer stood on the median line waving a wand with a reflective red circular tip.
Zen swore loudly. Gemma braked to a halt. The officer approached the driver's window while his colleague watched from the car, speaking rapidly on the radio.
'Your documents, please.'
Zen handed over his personal identity card, Gemma her driving licence. The officer stepped back and scanned them by the light of his torch.
'Where are you going?' he demanded.
'To Portunciulla,' Gemma replied.
'Why so late?'
'We have a boat at the marina there. We're off to Corsica for a few days and we want to make an early start.' The officer shone his torch into the interior of the car. ‘What’s that in the back?' 'Just stuff we need for our cruise,' said Gemma.
'Open it up’
Gemma gave Zen a panicked look as she pulled a latch under the dashboard. Zen got out and walked back on the opposite side of the car from the carabiniere, who opened the hatchback and shone his torch inside. He swept aside the coats covering the bundled form of Roberto Lessi's corpse.
'What’s that?' he demanded.
'Spars,' Zen replied. 'And a new mizzen sail. What’s all this about, if you don't mind my asking?'
The officer stared suspiciously at Zen's linen suit, then slammed the hatchback shut again.
'Bank robbery in La Spezia. We're checking all the roads out of town. What's a mizzen sail?'
Zen smiled the smile of a man who is glad to have been asked that.
'If s the small triangular sail set aft on a ketch. Very much like a jib, only mounted on a boom. Its main function is to increase stability when sailing close to the wind, particularly when…'
The officer handed him back their documents.
'All right, all right,' he said wearily. 'You can go.'
As if by mutual agreement, they drove off in total silence until they had rounded the next hairpin bend. Then Gemma let out a long, almost silent scream.
‘I don't know how much more of this I can take.'
'Plenty. You're as tough as an ox. Besides, there was no real danger. Those lads were just bored. We were probably the first vehicle to come along for an hour. I've done roadblocks myself, many years ago. If s a hell of a job. Either the car you stop is not the one you're looking for, in which case the whole thing is a waste of time, or it is, in which case you stand a good chance of getting run over or shot.'
'How do you know all those nautical words you dazzled him with?'
'I told you, I'm from Venice. If s in our blood. We drink it in with our mother's milk.'
Twenty minutes later, they reached the village of Portunciulla. Judging by what Zen could make out from the car, it had once been a small fishing port, but had now been taken over by holiday lets, second homes and the pleasure-boat business. The marina was situated on the northern side of the original harbour, a series of floating docks lit by overhead floodlights and protected by an artificial breakwater. Gemma stopped at the gate and identified herself to a scruffy youth with a gormless expression. He nodded slowly and vaguely, as though remembering some incident from a previous life. Then he went inside the concrete hut he had emerged from and returned with a set of keys.
'You'll be needing a hand with your stuff,' he said, pointing to the rear of the car.
'No thanks, we-can manage’ Gemma replied crisply, slipping him a ten-thousand-lire note. 'Did you refuel the boat?'
'All taken care of’ the youth replied listlessly.
Gemma drove through the car park to the landward end of one of the docks, then turned and parked so that the car was in shadow. They both got out. The youth was standing at the door of his hut, watching them.
'You stay here and mind the luggage’ Gemma told Zen. 'I'll take the groceries and open up the boat, then come back with a cart for our friend in the back.'
She turned away into the shadows leading down to the dock. Zen lit a cigarette and watched her walk along the pier and board one of the motor cruisers moored there. What a piece of luck, he thought. What an incredible piece of luck! Whoever would have thought it?
'Look at the moon!' said a voice behind him. 'Quant'e bella!'
He turned to find the scruffy youth gazing at him with an ecstatic expression. Zen did not reply.
'If s always beautiful’ the youth went on earnestly, 'but we can't always see it'
'No’
'And even when we can, half the time we don't' 'How very true’
The youth strode up to him and grasped his right arm tightly.
'Just imagine if the moon only came out every fifty years, like an eclipse of the sun. People all over the world would stay up all night to look at it, dancing and singing and weeping for joy!'
'Quite possibly.'
The rapt expression vanished from the youth's face like a patch of condensation off glass.
'But if s there all the time,' he continued in a voice drained of all emotion. 'It's staring us in the face, so we take it for granted’ Zen threw away his spent cigarette. 'An interesting thought,' he said.
The youth was now gazing in through the rear window of the car. The shrouded body seemed to glow in the moonlight.
'If s right there in front of us, so we don't even see it’ he murmured in the same affectless tone.
'Mmm’
He turned to Zen with a piercingly intense stare.
'Maybe that’s why we don't see God either.'
Zen heard a rumbling sound. Gemma was wheeling a small handcart along the dock. He peeled off some money and handed it to the youth.
And then you die az-8 Page 16