In the ticket office, three men in shirtsleeves were engaged in a heated argument about Craxi's line on combatting inflation. Zen flashed his police identity card at them and then at the woman perched on a stool at the entrance, a two-way radio in one hand and a paperback novel in the other. Without looking round to see if Leather Jacket was following, he walked through the gateway and into the Forum.
To his untutored eye, the scene before him resembled nothing so much as a building site. AII that was missing were the tall green cranes clustered together in groups like extraterrestial invaders. It seemed as if this project had only just passed the foundation level, and only then in a fragmentary and irregular way. Some areas were still pitted and troughed, awaiting the installation of drainage and wiring, while in others a few pillars and columns provided a tantalizing hint of the building to come. Elsewhere, whole sections of the massive brick structures – factories? warehouses? – which had formerly occupied the area had still not been demolished completely. For the moment, work seemed to have ground to a halt. No dump-trucks or concrete-pourers moved along the rough track running the length of the site. Perhaps some snag had arisen over the financing, Zen thought whimsically. Perhaps the government had been reshuffled yet again, and the new minister was reluctant to authorize further expenditure on a project which had already over-run its estimated cost by several hundred per cent – or was at least holding out for some financial incentive on a scale similar to that which had induced his predecessor to sign the contract in the first place.
A Carabinieri helicopter was thrashing about overhead like a shark circling for the kill. Zen tossed away his cigarette and strolled along a path in the patchy grass between the ruins. A fine dust covered everything, beaten into the air by passing feet from the bone-dry soil. The sun crouched low in a cloudless sky, its weak rays absorbed and reflected by the marble and brick on every side. Overhead the helicopter swept past periodically, watchful, alien, remote. Halfway up the path, which veered off to the right and started to climb the Palatine hill, Zen paused to survey the scene. At that time of year there were only a few tourists about. Among them was a young man in a leather jacket and jeans. Oddly enough, he was once again having problems with his laces.
Zen resumed his walk with a fastidious smile. If Leather Jacket thought that bending down to tie up your shoes made you invisible then he shouldn't prove too difficult to unload. In fact he felt slightly piqued that such a third-rate operator had been considered adequate for the task of shadowing him. Evidently he couldn't even inspire respect in his enemies.
The path ran up a shallow valley, between masses of ancient brickwork emerging from the grass like weathered rocky outcroppings. The signs and fences installed by the authorities had imposed some superficial order on the hill's chaotic topography, but this simply made its endless anomalies all the more incomprehensible. Nothing here was what it appeared to be, having been recycled and cannibalized so many times that its original name and function was often unclear even to experts. Although no archaeologist, Zen was intimately familiar with the many-layered complexities of the Palatine, thanks to the Angela Barilli affair.
The daughter of a leading Rome jeweller, eighteeen-yearold Angela had been kidnapped in 1975. After months of io6 negotiations and a bungled pay-off the kidnappers had broken off contact. In desperation, the Barilli family had turned to the supernatural, engaging a clairvoyant from Turin who claimed to have led the police to three other kidnap victims. The medium duly informed Angela's mother that her daughter was being held in an underground cell somewhere in the vast network of rooms and passages on the lower floors of the Imperial palace at the heart of the Palatine.
Unlikely as this seemed, the political clout wielded by the family was enough to ensure that Zen, who was directing the investigation, had to waste three days organizing a painstaking search of the area. The Barilli girl's corpse was in fact discovered the following year in a shallow concrete pit beneath a garage in the Primavalle suburb where she had been held during her ordeal, but Zen had never forgotten the three days he had spent exploring the honeycomb of caverns, tunnels, cisterns and cellars that lay beneath the surface of the Palatine. It was an area so rich in possibilities that Zen could simply disappear into the mathematics, leaving his follower to solve an equation with too many variables.
When he reached the plateau at the top of the hill, Zen turned left behind the high stone wall which closed off a large rectangle of ground surrounding a church, and waited for Leather Jacket to catch up. There was no one about, and the only sound was the distant buzzing of the helicopter. It had now moved further to the east, circling over the group of hospitals near San Giovanni in Laterano.
No doubt an important criminal was being transferred from Regina Coeli prison for treatment, with the helicopter acting as an eye in the sky against any attempt to snatch him.
Footsteps approached quickly, almost.at a run. At the last moment, Zen stepped out from behind the wall.
'Sorry!'
'Excuse me!'
The collision had only been slight, but the young man in the leather jacket looked deeply startled, as Zen had intended he should be. Close to, his sheen of toughness fell apart like an actress's glamour on the wrong side of the footlights. Despite a virile stubble, due no doubt to shaving last thing at night, his skin looked babyish, and his eyes were weak and evasive.
'It always happens!' Zen remarked.
The man stared at him, mystified.
'When there's no one about, I mean,' Zen explained.
'Have you noticed? You can walk right through the Stazione Termini at rush hour and never touch anyone, but go for a stroll up here and you end up walking straight into the only other person about!'
The man muttered something inconclusive and turned away. Zen set off in the opposite direction. Not only would the encounter have shaken Leather Jacket, but it would now be impossible for him to pass off any future contacts as mere coincidence. That constraint would force him to hang back in order to keep well out of sight, thus giving Zen the margin he needed.
He made his way through a maze of gravelled paths winding among sections of ruined brick wall several metres thick. Lumps of marble lay scattered about like discarded playthings. Isolated stone-pines rose from the ruins, their rough straight trunks cantilevering out at the top to support the broad green canopy. Here and there, excavations had scraped away the soil to expose a fraction of the hidden landscape beneath the surface. Fenced off and covered with sloping roofs of corrugated plastic sheeting, they looked like the primitive shelters of some future tribe, bringing the long history of this ancient hill full circle in the eternal darkness of a nuclear winter.
A line of pines divided this area from a formal garden with alleys flanked by close-clipped hedges. Screened by the dense thickets of evergreen trees and shrubs, Zen was able to move quickly along the paved path leading to a parterre with gravel walks, a dilapidated pavilion and terrace overlooking the Forum. A fountain dripped, bright dabs of orange fruit peeped through the greenery, paths led away in every direction. In the centre, a flight of steps led down into a subterranean corridor running back the way he had come. Dimly lit by lunettes let into the wall just below the arched ceiling, the passage seemed to extend itself as Zen hurried along it. The walls, rough, pitted plaster, were hung with cobwebs as large and thick as handkerchiefs, which fluttered in the cool draught.
At length the passage ended in another flight of steps leading up into the middle of the maze of brickwork and gravel paths which Zen had passed through earlier.
Keeping under cover of the fragments of wall, he worked his way towards the massive ruins of the Imperial palace itself. The gate was just where he remembered it, giving access to a yard used for storing odds and ends of unidentified marble. It was supposed to be locked, but one of the things that Zen had leamed in the course of his abortive search for Angela Barilli was that it was left open during the day because the staff used it as a short cut. Ignoring the sign
reading 'No Admission To Unauthorized Persons', Zen walked through the yard to a passage at the back. To the left, a modern doorway led into a museum. Zen turned the other way, down an ancient metal staircase descending into the bowels of the hill.
At first, the staircase burrowed through a channel cut into the solid brickwork of the palace. As Zen walked down, the light diminished above, and simultaneously the darkness beneath began to glow. Then, without warning, he emerged into a vast underground space in which the staircase was suspended vertiginously, bolted to the brickwork. The other walls were immeasurably distant, mere banks of shadow, presences hinted at by the light seeping in far below, obscuring the ground like thick mist. Zen clutched the handrail, overwhelmed by vertigo.
Everything had been turned on its head: the ground above, the light below.
Step by step, he made his way down the zigzag staircase through layers of cavernous gloom. The floor was a bare expanse of beaten earth illuminated by light streaming in through large rectangular openings giving on to the sunken courtyard at the heart of the palace. Zen walked across it, glancing up at the metal railings high above, where a trio of tourists stood reading aloud from a guidebook. A rectangular opening in the brickwork opposite led into a dark passage which passed through a number of sombre gutted spaces and then a huge enclosed arena consisting of rows of truncated columns flanking a large grassy area.
He sat down on one of the broken columns, out of sight of the path above, and lit a cigarette. At the base of the column lay a large pine cone, its scales splayed back like the pads of a great cat's paw. The air was still, the light pale and mild, as though it too was antique. The matchstick figures displayed on Zen's digital watch continued their elaborate ballet, but the resulting patterns seemed to have lost all meaning. The only real measure of time was the slow disappearance of the cigarette smouldering between Zen's fingers and the equally deliberate progress of his thoughts.
Who could Leather Jacket be working for? Until this moment Zen had assumed that he must be connected with the break-in at his flat and the envelope full of shotgun pellets which had been left there, but now, after some consideration, he rejected this idea. Leather Jacket simply didn't look nasty enough to have a hand in the attempt to scare Zen by copying the warnings sent to Judge Giulio Bertolini before his death. He didn't care enough. It wasn't a personal vendetta he was involved in, Zen was sure of that. He was in it for the money, a cut-rate employee hired by the hour to keep track of Zen's movements. But who had hired him? The longer Zen thought about it, the more significant it seemed that Leather Jacket had put in his first appearance shortly after Zen's interview at Palazzo Sisti.
The only surprising feature of this solution was that they should have chosen such a low-grade operative to do the job, but this was no doubt explained by the fact that Lino was in charge of that department. They might even prefer Zen to know that they were keeping tabs on him. He was their man now, after all. Why shouldn't they keep him under surveillance? What reason had they to trust him?
It was only when he had posed this question to himself that Zen realized that it wasn't rhetorical. 'Once your accomplishments in the Miletti case had been brought to our attention,' the young man had told him, 'the facts spoke for themselves.' But who had brought those 'accomplishments' to their attention in the first place? Presumably one of the 'contacts at the Ministry' the young man had mentioned earlier. 'We have been let down before by people who promised us this, that and the other, and then couldn't deliver. Why, only a few days ago we asked our man there to obtain a copy of the video tape showing the tragic events at the Villa Burolo. A simple enough request, you would think, but even that proved beyond the powers of the individual in question. Nor was this the first time that he had disappointed us.'
Zen looked up with a start. The sheer stone walls of the arena appeared to have crept closer, hemming him in.
Only the day before he had asked himself why Vincenzo Fabri had gone out on a limb with his hare-brained notion about Burolo not being the murderer's intended victim, that the killings had actually been a Mafia hit on the architect Vianello. The answer, of course, was that this had been a bungled attempt to divert suspicion from Renato Favelloni. Fabri's mission to Sardinia had only nominally been undertaken on behalf of Criminalpol. His real client had been l'onorevole. And he'd blown it! That was why Fabri had not been offered the chance to exploit the new evidence about Furio Pizzoni's real identity. It was too good a chance for Palazzo Sisti to risk wasting on someone in whom they no longe~ had any faith. Instead, they had plumped for Zen, whose record 'spoke for itself'.
Only it hadn't, of course. Someone had spoken for it first.
Someone had brought Zen's 'accomplishments in the Miletti case' to the attention of Palazzo Sisti, and suggested that this unscrupuIous manipulator of evidence and witnesses might be just the right man to bring the Burolo imbroglio to a satisfactory conclusion. And that someone, it was nom clear, could only be the Party's 'man at the Ministry', Vincenzo Fabri himself.
Zen lit another cigarette from the butt of the first, a habit he normally despised. But normality was rapidly losing its grip on his life. Vincenzo Fabri had recommended Zen to his masters as the white knight who could save Renato Favelloni from prison and 1'onorevole from disgrace. By doing so, he had not only given his most bitter enemy a chance to succeed, but to do so on the very ground where he himself had recently suffered a humiliating failure.
Why would he do a thing like that?
The only possible answer was that Fabri knew damn well that Zen was not going to succeed. So far from doing his enemy a good turn, Fabri had placed him in a trap with only two exits, each potentially fatal. If Zen failed to satisfy Palazzo Sisti, they would have him transferred to a city where his life could be terminated without attracting attention. If, on the other hand, he did what was necessary to get the Favelloni trial postponed, Fabri would tip off the judiciary and have Zen arrested for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Whatever happened, Zen was bound to lose. If his new friends didn't get him, his old enemy would.
By now the sun had disappeared behind the grove of pines whose foliage was just visible above the far end of the sunken stadium. All at once the air revealed its inner coldness, the chill at its heart. It was time to go. Leather Jacket would most likely have given up the search by now and be waiting near the entrance on Via dei Fori Imperiali.
Zen got to his feet and started to pick his way through the jumble of ruins opposite. A brick staircase and a circuitous path scuffed through the grass brought him out on a track flanked by pines leading down to the exit on Via di San Gregorio. The odours of summer, pine sap and dried shit, lingered faintly in the undergrowth. There was no sign of Leather Jacket, but in any case Zen no longer greatly cared about him. Being tailed was the least of his worries now, as for that matter was the missing video tape. To think that just that morning he had worked out an elaborate theory to explain the fact that Fabri had put in a request for it. The reason for this was now clear: he had been told to get hold of a copy by Palazzo Sisto. As for the theft, it must indeed have been the work of a pickpocket, as Zen had originally supposed. Vincenzo Fabri had bigger and better schemes in mind than pilfered videos. Had he not warned De Angelis that very morning to keep away from Zen because he was being 'measured for the drop'?
The exact nature of that drop now seemed terrifyingly clear.
I was always biddable, a born follower. Like those ducklings we had, a fox killed the mother and they would follow whoever was wearing the green rubber boots that were the first thing they saw on opening their eyes. If the boots had been able to walk by themselves, they would have followed the boots, or a bit of rubbish blown past by the wind, whatever happened to be there when the darkness cracked open. Even the fox that killed their mother.
I can see him now, standing there, the light at his back, and all the forces of the light. Come with me, he said. I can't, I told him, I mustn't. It seemed that all this had happened befo
re. Where do they come from, these memories and dreams? They must belong to someone else. There was nothing before the darkness. How could there be? We come from darkness and to darkness we return. There is nothing else. he told me. He would have taken me anyway, by force.
The light burned so much I had to close my eyes. When I opened them there were men everywhere, rushing about, shouting at each other, crowding in, their eyes swishing to and fro like scythes.
They took it in turns to pour their lies into me, filling me with unease. Everything that had happened had been a mistake. I'd done nothing wrong, it u~as all a mistake, a scandal, a tragic and shocking crime. When I tried to say something my voice astonished me, a raven's croak pa.=sing through my body, nothing to do with me. After that I kept silent. There was no point in trying to resist. They were too strong, their desires too urgent. Sooner or later, 1 knno, they u›ould have their way with me.
In the end fhey tired and let me go. You're free, they said. Like the follower I was, I believed them. I thought I could go back as though nothing had happened, as though it had all been a dream!
Thursday, 17.20 – 19.10
By the time the grubby blue and grey Metropolitana train emerged above ground at the Piramide stop, it was getting dark. Zen walked up the broad dim steps beneath a Fascist mural depicting the army, the family and the workers, and out into the street.
The city's starlings were in the grip of the madness that seizes them at the changing of the light, turning the trees into loudspeakers broadcasting their gibberish, then swarming up out of the foliage to circle about in the dusky air like scraps of windborne rubbish. In the piazza below gleaming tramlines crisscrossed in intricate patterns leading off in every direction, only to finish abruptly a few metres further on under a coat of tarmac or running headlong into a traffic divider.
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