Zen looked around quickly. The Toshiba laptop had of course gone. Maybe it really had been a bomb, as they claimed. He would never know. More to the point, the papers which Corinna Nunziatella had ‘posted’ to herself, using Carla as a cut-out, and which Zen had left on the sofa, had also disappeared.
‘Through here,’ he told Sinico, leading the way towards the bedroom. As Sinico crossed the threshold, Zen smashed the door into his face. The younger officer reeled back, clutching his forehead and staring wildly at Zen, who grabbed him by the arm and hair and hurled him forward into the bedroom, tripping him up as he passed so that he fell sprawling on the gleaming aggregate floor.
After a moment, Sinico got to his knees and then his feet, pulling a revolver from a holster at the back of trousers, but he was too shocked and too slow. Zen yanked him forwards by the arm holding the gun, chopped the weapon free with a blow to the wrist, then kneed Sinico in the chest as he went down for the second time. He picked up the revolver and checked it quickly, keeping an eye all the while on the figure splayed out on the floor, panting hard as though he were about to burst into tears.
‘I’m sorry, Baccio,’ Zen said quietly ‘I had no choice.’
Sinico looked up at him.
‘You’re mad!’ he croaked.
‘That’s conceivable, but I can’t afford to take the risk of finding out that I’m not. Don’t worry, I won’t bother you again, as long as you don’t bother me. Remember that “compassionate leave” you told me about? I’ve decided to take your advice.’
Sinico crawled up into a sitting position.
‘They’ll kill you, dottore! They’ve tried once already, and they won’t give up. You need us! You need our help, our protection!’
Zen put the revolver in his coat pocket and stared bleakly down at the younger man.
‘Who are they, Baccio? Whose friends are they?’
Sinico shook his head despairingly.
‘This is all madness!’ he said. ‘Paranoia run wild!’
Zen inclined his head.
‘As I said, that’s conceivable. It’s also conceivable that you’re just trying to keep me talking until one of those ROS thugs comes to see why we’re taking so long.’
He walked over to the doorway.
I’m leaving now,’ he told Sinico. ‘If you try to stop me, I’ll shoot you.’
Once in the living room, he crossed rapidly to the front door and opened it. The ROS agent named Lessi looked at him in surprise.
‘We’ve found something!’ Zen said in an urgent undertone. ‘Baccio thinks it might be another bomb. He wants you to take a look.’
Lessi nodded and ran inside. Zen closed the door and locked it with the complicated double-sided key, formed like a gondola’s prow, turning it four times to insert the metal security bolts into the retaining block. Without a key, it could not be opened from the inside.
He ran quickly downstairs and slunk into the shadows at the rear of the entrance hall. About twenty seconds later, the front door flew open and the other ROS man ran in, a pistol in his hand, talking urgently on his cellphone.
‘He locked the door? Don’t worry, I’ll be right there!’
Zen listened to the man’s footsteps receding above, then walked to the door and out into the night.
A few minutes after eight o’clock sounded from the massive church of San Nicolò in Piazza Dante, Zen arrived at the address to which he had been directed, in a side-street off Via Gesuiti. He was under no illusion about the value of the assurances which the man known as Spada had given him as to his safety, but neither did he care very deeply one way or the other. If his mother had still been alive, it would have been different, as it would if he’d ever had children. As it was, he discovered that it didn’t really matter what happened, although this did not prevent him from carefully checking the revolver he had taken from Baccio Sinico while he waited inside the portico of San Nicolò for eight o’clock to arrive.
The building assigned for his appointment with ‘Signor Spada’ was a handsome two-storey baroque palazzo with widely spaced windows, ornate cornices and shallow balconies protected by metal railings. The main entrance seemed to be on Via Gesuiti itself, but the address to which Zen had been directed was a door about half-way along the left-hand side. Rather to Zen’s surprise, it was open. He knocked tactfully but without result, then stepped inside. The light from the lamp strung on a wire at first-floor level across the street revealed a set of stone steps leading down to another door about a metre lower down.
Leaving the street door open, Zen made his way down. The lower door was not locked. With a very faint creak, it opened into an unlit but acoustically larger space beyond. Zen stood still, sniffing the musty air and trying to decipher a faint sound which he thought at first might be the echoes of the creaking door, amplified by the resonant chamber beyond. The interior seemed at first completely dark, but as Zen’s eyes began to adjust he became aware of a tepid luminescence which seemed to emanate from…
From whatever they were, those rows and ranks of massive structures, identical in shape and height, which ran the length and breadth of the room. Except for their size, they might almost have been old-fashioned school desks, with sloping tops which caught what little light there was and reflected it. Only they didn’t reflect it, he soon realized, they radiated it. By now, his night vision was good enough for him to make out some other features of the place, such as two hulking human forms each about three metres tall standing against the wall at the far end of the room. A warehouse of glowing furniture managed by giants? Well, he had no problem with that. That was just fine! He could deal with it. Now what?
The answer was a scream. Well, no, not quite. A keening wail, more like. A lengthy, throaty squawk. It took Zen a long and very uncomfortable moment to match it tentatively in his auditory database with one of those scarily humanoid sounds that cats emit when involved in sexual or territorial disputes. In which case the eerie ululation he had heard earlier had presumably not been the echoes of the door squeaking, but the two mogs tuning up. He wondered idly how large the pets were around here. About the size of ocelots, to judge by the figures at the end of the room and the school desks which filled it.
Only they weren’t desks, he realized. His vision was slowly filling in all the time, like a computer downloading a complex graphic screen. He could now make out that the giants lounging against the end wall were in fact statues mounted on plinths. Between them, a broad staircase led up into gloom. On the side walls, the dark patches which he had taken to be windows revealed themselves to be a series of oil paintings. At which point the files of desks shamefacedly removed their carnival masks and were transformed into rows of display cabinets lit internally by a low-wattage bulb. He was in a museum.
A brief investigation confirmed this hypothesis. Beneath a thick layer of glass, each cabinet contained a selection of coins, jewellery, amulets and similar objects of antiquity, each identified by a label with a number and a description such as ‘Greek, late 2nd century BC(?)’. It was one of those provincial museums which are open to the public for a few inconvenient hours on various randomly chosen days every month, always assuming that Spada’s relative didn’t have something more important to do.
So now only the noises remained unexplained. They had diminished in volume, but were still there, troubling and exciting the silence like fingernails raked lightly across skin. His sight satisfied, Zen tuned in to his hearing. The sounds seemed to be coming from the end of the room, where the staircase led up, presumably to the next floor of the building. He walked cautiously down the aisle between the lit display cases and started up the steps at the far end.
They were handsome steps, broad and shallow and as solid as the rock from which they had been carved, flanked to either side by elaborate stone balustrades. It occurred to Zen that this must have been the original ground floor of the palazzo, before subsequent infill or volcanic activity
had raised the street level. After a considerable fetch, the stairs reached a landing and doubled back the way they had come, giving access to a room of the same dimensions and much the same appearance as the one below, but with a much higher ceiling. This would have been the reception quarters of the original design, the piano nobile. All this was quite clear, because the lights were on.
A light, rather: a clear steady beam illuminating what looked at first sight like a sexual act involving two men. One was standing, his back to the stairs where Zen stood watching. From time to time his body jerked spasmodically, each spasm accompanied by a satisfied though effortful grunt. The other man, who was on his knees before the other, was meanwhile emitting a continuous series of weak mewling sounds which were, Zen now realized, the source of the noises he had heard earlier. It took him another moment or two to understand that the distended and discoloured features of the kneeling man were those of the man known as Spada, and that he was not engaged in fellatio but being strangled.
The light wavered to one side, revealing itself as the beam of a powerful torch concealed behind the wall to Zen’s right.
‘Come on, Alfredo!’ said a bored voice. ‘It’s done, for Christ’s sake. Let’s go.’
Zen pulled out Sinico’s revolver and loosed off a shot towards the ceiling.
‘Police!’ he yelled as the appalling reverberations died away. ‘Drop your weapons and lie down on the floor with your hands above your heads.’
The strangler released his victim and turned slowly to Zen with an imposing yet slightly incredulous look. A moment later a pistol appeared in his hand.
Zen would undoubtedly have died then and there if the late Signor Spada had not intervened, slumping forward into the back of the gunman’s knees and throwing him off balance. At such close range, even a marksman as out of practice as Zen could not miss. He fired once, hitting his opponent in the upper chest. The victim, as his status now was, absorbed the shot with an expression which mingled astonishment and resignation, as if he had always known that it would end like this but — stupidly, as he now realized — hadn’t expected it just yet. Then the light went out.
Dependent now upon his hearing alone, Zen found that sense perking up just as his sight had earlier. Most of the time, we were functionally deaf, he realized. What we thought of as silence was a constant substratum of noises mentally censored as being insignificant. He recalled a camping holiday up in the Dolomites, years ago, with a friend from university. There, by night, it had been utterly silent, and yet that silence had registered not as an absence but as a massive and disturbing presence. Now that his life was at stake and every sound significant, he found himself bombarded by a barrage of aural data, some potentially identifiable — traffic, televisions, voices in the street — but all previously classified as irrelevant and therefore inaudible. Within the room in front of him, there was that intimidating silence he had experienced in the Alps all those years ago.
Then, like some unidentified animal stumbling into that remembered campsite, came three distinct sounds: a click, a creak, and a loud metallic snap. They were related both by position and by distance, but above all by the concurrent appearance of a brilliant glow within the room. Unnerved, Zen fired blind. Immediately two other sounds joined the former intruders: a tinkle of glass and a raucous clanging with a whooping siren to back it up. He ran up the remaining steps, just in time to see a young man wearing a baseball cap sitting on the exterior ledge of one of the windows, which he had evidently opened along with its corresponding shutter. He was lit from behind by the streetlamp strung on a wire almost level with the window. His face was in shadow, but he turned briefly to Zen and seemed to pause for a moment, as if in recognition. Then he abruptly disappeared.
A dull thud and the sound of running footsteps told the rest of the tale. The narrator could still prove to be lethally unreliable, however, so Zen endured another minute or so of the hellish racket of the security alarm before he ventured out into the upper room. The torch used to illuminate the execution lay on the floor near the two bodies. Switching it on, Zen quickly ascertained that he was alone, and that both Spada and his killer were dead. Zen recognized the latter as one of the two ROS agents who, together with Baccio Sinico, had tried to take him into ‘protective custody’ earlier that evening. A quick search of his jacket turned up a wallet, which identified him as Alfredo Ferraro.
By now, the shrieks of the alarm system were intolerable. Looking around, Zen realized that it had been set off by the second shot that he had fired, which had apparently struck one of the display cases. Dipping his hand in amongst the priceless relics there, he selected an object at random and headed quickly back downstairs.
It was almost midnight when the surly staff of the ferry finally deigned to allow passengers to board. The blue and white hulk had been moored to the dock for over three hours by that time, at this latest stop on its leisurely and much-delayed passage from Naples to Tunis. Needless to say, no one had bothered to explain the reason for this further delay, still less to apologize. The employees of the Tirrenia ferry company had an attitude as charmless, peremptory and inflexible as tax inspectors or prison guards — or policemen, for that matter.
But why should they care? Their jobs were state-funded sinecures, hard to obtain but virtually impossible to lose. If the passengers had had any power and money, they would have gone by air. So if you were here, pacing up and down the dock at almost one in the morning at the mercy of a bunch of incompetent slackers like them, then you evidently had neither money nor power. In which case, who cared?
The passengers’ only consolation was that if they had to wait out in the open for hours on end, this was the perfect night for it; pleasantly cool, with an almost imperceptible onshore breeze scented with a subtle briny tang, an appetizer for the voyage to come. The scene would have been almost idyllic, in fact, if it hadn’t been for the banks of floodlights mounted on tall masts, mercilessly baring the concrete and steel austerities all around. And then, of course, there were the foreigners.
These last represented a majority of the thirty or so people waiting to board the ferry, but the noise they were creating made them seem even more numerous and obnoxious. They were all in their twenties, the sexes roughly evenly represented. The males were all wearing red T-shirts with the word ARSENAL printed in large white letters, while their mates were in various stages of undress, revealing large quantities of sunburned thigh, shoulder and midriff.
One of the men, who seemed to be in charge, to the extent that anyone was, sat at the bottom of the gangway perched on four cases of Peroni beer cans. From time to time he reached down and produced a fresh can from a partially dismantled fifth case lying open in front of him. The others all had beers in their hands, except for a separate group who were sharing a bottle of whisky, and one girl who had apparently passed out. From time to time, one of the men would start what sounded like a war chant, and pretty soon they all joined in, even the women. One of the whisky drinkers yelled at someone in the main pack, and Zen was surprised to catch what sounded like the words ‘Norman’ and ‘beer’.
So, the Normans have returned, he thought, lurking in the shadows created by a stack of metal cargo containers and trying not to look up the collapsed girl’s dress, which had ridden up over her hips in a fascinating manner. He remembered being taught at school how the people of Normandy, themselves originally invaders from Norway, had conquered Sicily in the Middle Ages and ruled the island for over a hundred years. He remembered it because, as with the increasingly few things he remembered these days, it came with a story.
The story, Zen now realized, was almost certainly apocryphal, but this knowledge did not diminish its mythic charm and power. One fine day, his teacher had told the class, a group of Norman soldiers on their way home from the crusades stopped off at a port in Sicily, quite possibly Catania. Being hard-drinking northerners, they consumed the local wine without regard to its high alcohol content,
and soon got very merry indeed.
At this point a fleet of Moorish corsair ships appeared in the harbour, striking terror into the hearts of the inhabitants, who had been collectively raped, plundered, shipped into slavery and put to the fire and the sword for as long as anyone could remember. It was like the plague. It came and went. Some people survived, others succumbed. There was nothing to be done.
Within minutes, the bells of the city’s churches started tolling out the bad news, and incidentally deafening the Normans, who grabbed a passing waiter and told him in no uncertain terms to turn off those fucking bells or else. The trembling native explained the reason for this tocsin, and advised his clients to flee immediately — ‘presumably after settling the bill’, the teacher interpolated with a sly wink at the class — since the Moors were about to rape and plunder, ship people into slavery, and generally put the city to the fire and the sword as usual.
The Normans looked at one another and smiled.
The teacher now broke off the story to give a brief lecture on physiognomical changes over the past centuries, their dietary causes, and why this meant you should eat your greens, just to show that this narrative digression had by no means extinguished his capacity for tedious pedantry. The Normans, he pointed out, would have been slightly less than the average height of Italians today, benefiting as the latter were from the ‘economic miracle’ of post-war reconstruction, but they would still have been a good head taller and proportionally broader than the Moorish marauders.
Imagine, he said, that you are one of the latter, out for a pleasant day’s looting and pillaging in an undefended town at the very toe of Italy. The inhabitants have all fled or are in hiding. The place is yours for the taking, you think. Then you round a corner to confront a horde of gigantic blond beings, completely drunk and utterly fearless, shrieking berserker battle cries and wielding their enormous swords and maces like children’s toys.
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