Inside the bar, Zen was left to fend for himself. He ordered a cappuccino and an attractive-looking pastry and, having consumed both, eyed his minders with cold disdain. They stood at a distance, their mobile phones laid on the counter like pistols, apparently ignoring him although acutely aware of his presence. The driver, the younger and taller of the pair, was lean and hard, all prick and muscle. His superior was almost bald, with a superficially benign face, strongly featured and slightly inflated in appearance, like a wiser and sadder Mussolini.
Zen paid and walked outside to light his first cigarette of the day. As he smoked, he took in the scene all around with sharpened pleasure, eyeballing a sensational woman cradling a bottle of mineral water to her bosom like a baby. She gave him a lingering glance before moving on, the cheeks of her buttocks colluding furtively as she strolled away. Then he heard a familiar squillo and immediately reverted to his official self, striding up and down the pavement clutching his mobile phone like a life-support system.
‘Arnone, sir. You ordered me to report any developments.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘The Digos crew watching that house in San Giovanni report that the owner, Dionisio Carduzzi, has left the house only twice. Last night he went to a local bar and drank wine with some friends. This morning he bought a paper, then went to the same bar and had a coffee. After that he went home and hasn’t emerged since. His wife went to church yesterday and to the market this morning to buy vegetables and a chicken. That’s all. No one else has entered or left the house.’
He’s using pizzini, thought Zen, just like Bernardo Provenzano. Notes folded into a banknote and handed to the owner of the bar or the newsagent, or slipped under the table to one of those friends, or passed to a market vendor by his wife, or left in a missal at the church. The dilemma he had wrestled with the night before was now resolved. The only way to intercept such messages would be by mass arrests of essentially innocent people with no criminal history. That would be both clumsy and ineffective.
‘Anything else?’ he asked Arnone.
‘Two things, sir. The phone interception team reported that when Carduzzi came back from his morning expedition, he called the offices of a construction firm down in Vibo Valentia and asked for someone named Aldo. He told him that their mutual friend required the immediate services of a mechanical digger on a low-loader, two heavy-duty trucks, a dozen first-rate stonemasons and twenty unskilled labourers. The equipment and personnel were to assemble in the parking area of the Rogliano service station south of Cosenza on the A3, where they would be met and led to the work site. Payment would be in the normal way.’
‘Very well. Have someone at the meeting point and try and get photographs of the principals. Sounds like a classic abusive construction job. I can’t see it’s worth diverting manpower from ongoing assignments to follow them. Funny about them needing stonemasons, though. Cheap, poorly reinforced concrete is the mob’s trademark.’
‘Not if it’s one of their own houses,’ Arnone pointed out.
The two servizi thugs had now emerged from the bar. Mini-Mussolini walked over, touched Zen’s arm and jerked his head impatiently towards the car. Zen ignored him.
‘And the other thing?’ he asked Arnone.
‘Oh, just some crazy old woman here who insists on talking to you. Won’t say what it’s about and won’t talk to anyone else.’
‘Who is she?’
‘Name’s Maria Stefania Arrighi, resident in Altomonte Nuova. She got here at seven this morning and demanded to speak to the chief of police. She was told that you were out of town and wouldn’t be back until late, but she said she would wait. Plonked herself down on the bench in the entrance hall and has been there ever since. Do you want us to throw her out?’
‘Absolutely not, and if she leaves of her own accord, try to get a contact address and phone number.’
‘I’ll do my best, but basically she refuses to speak to anyone but you.’
Flanked by his two handlers, Zen got back into the car, which took a very steep minor road whose tight bends gave occasional views of the capital, the dome of St Peter’s just visible through the flat pall of pollution that covered the surrounding campagna, a modern equivalent of the malarial miasma that had decimated the population for centuries.
When they finally reached their destination, Zen was reminded of Arnone’s comment about the mob leaders’ private dwellings. Not that there was anything ostentatious about this long, low villa set among ancient olive groves and vineyards. The connection was more subtle, based on the fact that a good three kilometres back they had passed a sign marking the beginning of the Castelli Romani regional park. The villa clearly post-dated the creation of this protected area where new construction was strictly forbidden, but the important and powerful figure who owned it was almost certainly a member not of the Mafia but of the government – an entirely different organisation, needless to say.
The room into which Zen was shown provided no obvious clue to the identity of this person beyond the fact that he could afford to indulge in the sort of bad taste that comes with an exorbitant price tag. There were several huge oil paintings in the blandly ‘contemporary’ style favoured by Arab collectors, featuring nude females and rearing stallions in a vaguely abstract wilderness. There were also a number of coffee-table art books on display, but any attempt to investigate further the ownership of the property was prevented by Zen’s escort, who took up positions at opposite ends of the room. Twelve minutes passed before a passenger van drew up outside the house and a hydraulic lift deposited an elderly man seated in a wheelchair, which was pushed into the room by a formidable-looking woman in a starched uniform.
‘This nurse will take the sample you require and return with it so that tests may be undertaken,’ Mini-Mussolini announced.
‘Take it from whom?’ Zen demanded acidly.
‘From the person you requested to meet.’
‘And where is he?’
The man pointed to the occupant of the wheelchair, who sat mutely cradling a battered leather briefcase.
‘I have your word for that?’
‘You have my department’s word for it.’
Zen levelled him with a look.
‘I don’t even know which department you’re talking about, but if it’s the one I think it is, then I hope for all our sakes that you’re not the sharpest knife in their drawer. For my coming here to make any sense, I require documentary proof that the donor of the sample is Roberto Calopezzati. I further require to take possession of the sample and convey it personally to a police laboratory, where it will be entrusted to a technician of my choice. If you seek to impose any other solution, this has all been a complete waste of time.’
‘Go away, Gino,’ said the man in the wheelchair. ‘You two as well. This experience is difficult enough for me without having you all standing around aimlessly like characters in some Pirandello play.’
The two minders and the nurse trooped meekly out.
‘I apologise for this pantomime,’ the man said to Zen. ‘It was the idea of my successor as head of the agency you referred to. Not a bad fellow in many ways, but somewhat heavy-handed. Yes, I know you’re listening, Rizzardo, but that happens to be my opinion, for what it’s worth. Sit down, signore, sit down. I am Roberto Calopezzati, and I have brought the necessary documents to prove it. Before I present them, may I ask why I have the honour of being an object of attention to the police?’
Calopezzati was a bulky man with a strongly featured face set off by a white beard trimmed short and contrasted with jet-black cropped hair and two huge eyebrows of the same colour that lounged across his brow like furry caterpillars. His olive-green eyes were intense, direct and demanding, while his lips were thin but sensual. Only the lower half of his body, truncated at the knees, detracted from the general impression of vigour and power.
‘I assumed that your successor would have explained that,’ Zen replied.
‘Well, I suppose we could
always ask him. I don’t actually know if he’s listening in “real time”, as they say these days – when did time stop being real, by the way? – but our conversation is certainly being recorded for quality-assurance purposes and for my protection. Anyway, all I have been told is that our meeting is with regard to the investigation of a murder in Cosenza.’
‘You weren’t informed of the identity of the victim?’
‘No.’
‘And you didn’t see my press conference on television?’
‘I don’t have a television.’
‘Ah well, in that case, barone, I’m afraid that I must be the bearer of bad news. All the prima facie evidence suggests that the victim was your nephew.’
Calopezzati sagged physically and looked his age for the first time.
‘Pietro?’ he whispered.
‘That’s what I’ve come here to ascertain. On the face of it, the victim was an American citizen travelling under the name of Peter Newman. When he disappeared some weeks ago while in Calabria on a business trip, the assumption was that he had been kidnapped for ransom. My investigations during that period suggested that his original identity was Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati, the son of your late sister Ottavia. The main reason why I’ve come here is to obtain a DNA sample from you which will confirm or rule out that hypothesis.’
Calopezzati sat silent and expressionless for over a minute, his body twitching violently at intervals as if stricken by a series of minor strokes. Zen let this process work itself out without comment.
‘You’ll get your sample,’ the other man said at last, ‘but it’s redundant. The dead man was indeed my nephew.’
‘Would you be prepared to comment on how Pietro Calopezzati became Peter Newman?’
‘Possibly. But first things first.’
He opened the leather case and extracted a mass of papers.
‘We’ll go through these in chronological order, with one exception which I’ll get to later.’
He passed the documents to Zen one by one.
‘My birth certificate. Various photographs from my childhood and school years. A sequence of identity cards from the following period, up to the war years, then a different set dating from my work with the servizi, concluding with the one that is currently valid. I think you will agree that all the photographs show a marked likeness, qualified of course by the passage of time. However, I don’t expect you to confirm my identity on that basis alone. As I said, I have withheld one document from the chronological order. It is this.’
He passed Zen a file card bearing the printed heading ‘Partito Fascista Italiano’. The entries below indicated that Roberto Calopezzati was enrolled in the Cosenza section of the party with the rank of caposquadrista, the commander of a squad of Blackshirts. The attached photograph fitted into the now familiar pattern, but there was also a very clear thumbprint.
‘And now for my last trick,’ the man said.
From the leather bag, he produced an ink pad in a tin box and a blank sheet of paper. He opened the pad, rolled his right thumb in the ink and then printed the resulting image on the paper. Zen compared it to the print on the Fascist file card. They were identical.
‘You are satisfied?’ Calopezzati asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Then let us proceed to the sample you need. What exactly does that consist of?’
Zen paused for a moment.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, barone, but I have the impression that while the news of your nephew’s death was a shock to you, it did not come as a complete surprise.’
‘Only in the sense that I had no idea he’d returned home. For as long as we were in contact, I explicitly advised him never to do so, and in any event not to venture south of Rome. What on earth could have induced him to do such a thing?’
‘I understand that he was employed by an American movie company to act as their mediatore during preparations for a production to be filmed there.’
Calopezzati waved his elegant hand dismissively. His feet must have been elegant too, thought Zen, wondering how they had been severed.
‘That’s just money! He could have found another job.’
‘Perhaps he thought that the risks were by now minimal,’ Zen murmured as though to himself. ‘Perhaps after so many years he had grown nostalgic for his own country. You implied that you lost contact with Pietro at some point. When did that happen?’
‘I don’t recall exactly. At some point in the 1980s. He just stopped writing and phoning, or I did. He wasn’t my child, after all.’
‘But you were responsible for taking him to America?’
‘After my sister died, I became his guardian. This was after the war, the whole country was in chaos. I moved Pietrino in with me in Rome and sent him to school there to learn Italian. He was a wild creature who had been brought up by Ottavia’s entourage of servants, spoke only dialect and didn’t respond well to discipline. Nevertheless, it was clearly my duty to protect him until he came of age, so when I entered the agency and was posted to the embassy in Washington I took him with me. Our ambassador at the time was a family friend and happened to be in a position to call in a favour from the US government in return for some help that we had provided for them. Thus it was arranged for Pietro Ottavio to become an American citizen. All in all, it seemed the best solution to the problem.’
‘Which problem?’
‘The problem of possible reprisals from my family’s numerous enemies.’
‘Were they really that dangerous?’
The man in the wheelchair made another fluent, fluid hand gesture.
‘Who can estimate danger? One of my colleagues made clandestine trips to remote areas of our former colony of Eritrea during its war with Ethiopia and came back with nothing worse than a mild case of gonorrhoea. Another went to see a Washington Redskins game one evening and was beaten to death on his way home because the stupid bastard was too proud to give them his wallet.’
Roberto Calopezzati made his eloquent gesture again.
‘Life is an acquired taste, Signor Zen, but death has mass-market appeal. Sooner or later, we all succumb to its charms. I tried to shield my nephew from them as best I could.’
What sounded like a peal of the thunder that Zen was by now habituated to – although not this early in the day – prevented any further conversation. It turned out to be the roar of a jet taking off from Ciampino, a few kilometres to the north, and obligingly faded away in a few moments.
‘And it would have been an excellent solution,’ Zen commented, ‘if only he hadn’t come back to Calabria and started talking to the locals in fluent dialect.’
‘That marked him down as someone who had been born and raised in the area, but there are plenty of calabresi in the States, God knows. How did his killers discover his identity?’
‘Speaking of that, do you know the identity of his father?’
Roberto sighed.
‘My sister told me that it was a friend of ours named Carlo Sironi. He was a fighter pilot in the war, an utterly irresistible daredevil who was shot down while attacking an Allied bombing sortie over Salerno six months before Pietro was born. He and Ottavia had spent some time together in Naples shortly before, so it’s just possible that she wasn’t lying to me. The truth is that I don’t know and don’t really care. Whoever she might have screwed, Pietro was here and it was my duty to look after him to the best of my ability. Now will you answer my question, Signor Zen? Granted that Pietro was stupid enough to speak the dialect rather than just passing himself off as a dumb American, how could his killers have found out that he was a Calopezzati?’
Zen shot him a keen glance.
‘Are you insulting my intelligence or your own, barone? There is only one possible answer, namely that he himself disclosed the information to someone, almost certainly the shady fixer he had employed to facilitate his business deals. Following your advice, Pietro had set out to become an American. Perhaps he had succeeded only too well. After forty years ov
er there he simply couldn’t conceive that anyone in a backwater like Calabria cared about what might or might not have happened in the years before he was born. But Americans care enormously about any provable antiquity and lineage in their family history, particularly if it involves a title. It’s hardly surprising that he couldn’t resist mentioning to his new acquaintance that he was a member of an Italian baronial family founded back in the mists of time before the first shipload of American pilgrims arrived.’
Calopezzati smiled pallidly.
‘Actually, we’re only late eighteenth century.’
Tom spent much of the morning watching television with Martin Nguyen. He’d been able to hold off moving hotels for twenty-four hours, on the grounds that the police wanted him to perform various legal functions connected with his father’s death, but that morning Nguyen’s limo had shown up to whisk him off to this flashy business location about two miles from the city centre, out in what Italians called the periphery. While he was in the car, Nicola Mantega had phoned to tell him that the world-famous film director Luciano Aldobrandini would be making a surprise appearance on the popular morning TV show Ciao Italia! and that there were rumours that what he was going to say might have a direct impact on the business interests of Tom’s new employer. This news had been duly passed on and both men were now fixated on the screen, Tom’s job being to translate Aldobrandini’s words, in real time as far as possible, although Nguyen was burning a DVD as back-up.
Up to now the show had offered nothing but a succession of entry-level celebrities, burned-out celebrities, minor politicians and a footballer in drug rehab, but when the presenter finally announced the star whose name she had been teasingly trailing for almost an hour the results proved well worth the wait. Clad in a stunning cream linen suit over a blue silk shirt left largely open to reveal a perfectly judged tan, his mass of silver hair sculpted as though by some natural force, Aldobrandini looked youthful yet distinguished, strikingly virile and decisive but with vast inner reserves of gravitas.
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