Wednesday, 20.25 -- 22.05




'Is this going to take much longer?' the taxi driver asked
plaintively, twisting around to the back seat.
His passenger regarded him without enthusiasm.
'What do you care? You're getting paid, aren't you?'
The driver banged his palm on the steering-wheel,
making it ring dully.
'Eh, I hope so! But there's more to life than getting paid,
you know. It's almost an hour we've been sitting here. I
usually have a bite to eat around now. I mean, if you
wanted me for the evening, you should have said so.'
The street in which they were parked stretched straight
ahead between the evenly spaced blocks of flats built on
reinforced concrete stilts, the ground fioor level consisting
of a car park. In the nearest block, half of this space had
been filled in to provide a few shops, all closed. Between
two of them was a lit plate-glass frontage, above which a
blue neon sign read BAR'.
'Well?' the driver demanded.
'All right. But don't take all night about it.'
The driver clambered awkwardly out of the car,
wheezing heavily. Years of high tension and low exercise
seemed to have converted all his bone and muscle to flab.
'I'm talking about a snack, that's all!' he complained.
'Even the fucking car won't go unless you fill it up.'
Hitching up his ample trousers, he waddled off past
three metal rubbish skips overflowing with plastic bagsI
and sacks. Zen watched him pick his way across the hun.--
mocks and gullies that looked like piles of frozen snow ii;
the cheerless light of the ultra-modern streetlamps.
Nothing else moved. No one was about. Apart from the
bar, there was nothing in the vicinity to tempt the inhabi-
tants out of doors after dark. The whole area had a pro-
visional, half-finished look, as though the developer had
lost interest half-way through the job. The reason was no
doubt to be found in one of those get-out clauses which
Burolo Construction's contracts had invariably included,
allowing them to suck the lucrative marrow out of a project
without having to tackle the boring bits.
Like the others, the block near which they were parked
was brand-new and looked as if it had been put together in
about five minutes from prefabricated sections, like a
child's toy. Access to the four floors of flats was by rectan-
gular stairwells which descended like lift shafts to the cav
park at ground level. The flat roof bristled with televisicn
aerials resembling the reeds which had flourished in thi~
marshy land before the developers moved in.
Some of the windows were unshuttered, and from time
to time figures appeared in these lighted panels, providing
Zen with his only glimpse so far of the inhabitants of the
zone. There was no way of knowing whether their
shadowy gestures had any relevance to his concerns or
not. He had checked the list of residents posted outside
each stairwell. The name Bevilacqua appeared opposite
flat 14, but the door to the stairs was locked and Zen
hadn't gone as far as trying to gain entry to the block. It
seemed to him that he'd gone quite far enough as it was.
Most of his afternoon had been spent trying to find a
solution to the problem of the stolen video tape. A visit to
an electronics shop had revealed the existence of com-
plexities he had never guessed at, involving choices of
type, brand and length. In the end he'd selected one
which had the practical advantage of being sold separately
rather than in packs of three. It didn't really matter, he told
himself. Either they would check or they wouldn't. If they
did, they weren't going to feel any better disposed
fpwards Zen because he had replaced the missing video
with exactly the right kind of blank tape, or even given
them a Bugs Bunny cartoon in exchange.
Back at the Ministry, he walked down two flights of
drably functional concrete stairs to the sub-basement
where the archives department was housed. As he had
foreseen, only one clerk was on duty at that time of day, so
Zen's request to inspect the files relating to one of his old
cases, selected at random, resulted in the desk being left
unmanned for over five minutes. This was quite long
enough for Zen to browse through the rubber-stamp
collection, find the one reading 'Property of the Ministry of
the Interior -- Index No....', apply this to the labels on the
face a d spine of the video cassette and then copy the
index number from the memorandum he had been sent.
When the clerk returned with the file he had asked for,
Zer spent a few minutes leafing through it for appear-
ance's sake. The case was one that dated back almost
twenty years, to the time when Zen had been attached to
the Questura in Milan. He scanned the pages with
affection and nostalgia, savouring the contrast between
the old-fashioned report forms and the keen fiourish of his
youthful handwriting. But as the details of the case began
to emerge, these innocent pleasures were overshadowed
darker memories. Why had he asked for this of all
files.
The question was also the answer, for the Spadola case
was not just another of the many investigations Zen had
been involved with in the course of his career. It had been
at once his first great triumph and his first great disil-
lusionment.
After the war, when the fighting in Italy came to an end,
many left-wing partisans were ready and willing to carry
the armed struggle one stage further, to overthrow the
government and set up a workers' state. Some had
ideological motives, others were just intoxicated by the
thrills and glamour of making history and couldn't
stomach the prospect of retuming to a life of mundane,
poorly paid work, even supposing there was work to be
had. To such men, and Vasco Spadola was one, the
decision of the Communist leader Togliatti to follow a path
of reform rather than revolution represented a betrayal.
Once it became clear that a national uprising of the Italian
working class was not going to happen, Spadola and his
comrades put their weapons and training to use in a spor-
adic campaign of bank raids and hold-ups which they tried
to justify as 'acts of class warfare'.
The success of these ventures soon caused considerable
strains and stresses within the group. On one side were
those led by Ugo and Carlo Trocchio, who still adhered to
a doctrinaire political line, and on the other Spadola's
followers, who were beginning to appreciate the possibili-
ties of this kind of private enterprise. These problems were
eventually resolved when the Trocchio brothers were shot
dead in a cafe in the Milan suburb of Rho.
With their departure, the gang abandoned all pretence
of waging a political struggle and concentrated instead on
consolidating its grip on every aspect of the city's criminal
life. High-risk bank raids were replaced by unspectacular
percentage operations such as gambling, prostitution,
drugs and extortion. Spadola's involvement in these areas
was well known to the police, but one aspect of his par-
tisan training which he had not forgotten was how to
structure an organization in such a way that it could sur-
vive the penetration or capture of individual units. No
matter how many of his operations were foiled or his
associates arrested, Spadola himself was never implicated
until the Tondelli affair.
Bruno Tondelli himself was not one of Milan's most
savoury characters, but when he was done to death with a
butcher's knife it was still murder. The Tondellis had been
engaged in a long-running territorial dispute with
Spadola's men, which no doubt explained why Spadola
, found it expedient to disappear from sight immediately
after the murder. Nevertheless, no one in the police would
have wagered a piece of used chewing-gum on their
chances of pinning it on him.
Then one day Zen, who had been given the thankless
task of investigating Tondelli's stabbing, received a mes-
sage from an informer asking for a meeting. In order to
protect them, informers' real names and addresses were
kept in a locked file to which only a very few high-ranking
officials had access; everyone else referred to them by their
code name. The man who telephoned Zen, known as 'the
nightingale', was one of the police's most trusted and
reliable sources of information.
The meeting duly took place in a second-class compart-
ment of one of the Ferrovia Nord trains trundling up the
line to Seveso. It was a foggy night in February. At one of
the intermediate stations a man joined Zen in the pre-
arranged compartment. Pale, balding, slight and diffident,
he might have been a filing clerk or a university professor.
Vasco Spadola, he said, was hiding out in a farmhouse to
the east of the city.
'I was there the night Tondelli got killed,' the informer
went on. 'Spadola stabbed him with his own hand.
"This'll teach the whole litter of them a lesson," he said.'
'A lot of use that is to us if you won't testify,' Zen
retorted irritably.
The man gave him an arch look.
'Who said I wouldn't testify?'
And testify he duly did. Not only that, but when the
police raided the farm house near the village of Melzo,
they t'ound not only Vasco Spadola but also a knife which
proved to have traces of blood of the same group that had
once flowed in Bruno Tondelli's veins.
Spadola was sentenced to life imprisonment and Aurelio
Zen spent three days basking in glory. Then he learned
from an envious colleague that the knife had been smeared
with a sample of Tondelli's blood and planted at the scene
by the police themselves, and that the reason why 'the
nightingale' had been prepared to come into court and
testify that he had seen Spadola commit murder was that
the Tondellis had paid him handsomely to do so.
Zen closed the file and handed it back to the clerk with
the blank video cassette.
'Oh by the way, if it isn't too much trouble, do you think
you could manage to get my name right next time?' he
asked sarcastically, flourishing the memorandum.
'What's wrong with it?' the clerk demanded, taking the
substitute video without a second glance.
'My name happens to be Zen, not Zeno.'
'Zen's not Italian.'
'Quite right, it's Venetian. But since it's only three
letters long, I'd have thought that even you lot would be
capable of spelling it correctly. And while we're at it, what
the hell does this say?'
He indicated the phrase scribbled in the blank space.
'"... since it is needed by another official",' the clerk
read aloud. 'Maybe you need glasses.'
Zen frowned, ignoring the comment.
'Who asked for it?'
The clerk sighed mightily, pulled open a filing cabinet
and flicked through the cards.
'Fabri, Vincenzo.'
Even now, sitting in the taxi, looking out at the deserted
streets of the dormitory suburb, Zen could feel the sense of
panic these words had induced. Why should Vincenzo
Fabri, of all people, have put in a request for the Burolc
video? He had nothing to do with the case, no legitimate
reason for wishing to view the tape. If nothing more, it
was monstrously unfortunate. Not only would Zen's sub-
stitution of the blank tape come to light, but it would do so
through the offices of his sworn enemy. Nervously Zen lit
a cigarette, ignoring the sign on the taxi's dashboard
thanking him for not doing so, and reflected uneasily that
Vincenzo Fabri couldn't have contrived a better oppor-
tunity to disgrace his rival if he'd planned it himself.
The earlier part of Zen's evening had not improved his
mood. Dinner was always the most difficult part of his
day. In the morning he could escape to work, and when he
got home in the afternoon Maria Grazia, the housekeeper,
was there to dilute the situation with her bustling,
loquacious presence. Later in the evening things got easier
once again, as his mother switched the lights off and
settled down in front of the television, flipping from
channel to channel as the whim took her, dipping into the
various serials like someone dropping in on the neigh-
bours for a few minutes' inconsequential chat. But first
there was dinner to be got through.
Today, to make matters worse, his mother was having
one of her 'deaf' phases, when she was -- or pretended to
be -- unable to hear anything that was said to her until it
had been repeated three or four times at an ever higher
volume. Since their conversation had long been reduced to
the lowest of common denominators, Zev found himself
having to shout at the top of his voice remarks that were so
meaningless it would have been an effort even to mumble
them.
To Zen's intense relief, the television news made no
reference to the discovery of exclusive video footage
showing every gory detail of the Burolo murders. Indeed,
for once the case was not even mentioned. The news was
dominated by the shooting of Judge Giulio Bertolini and
featured an emotional interview with the victim's widow,
in the course of which she denounced the lack of protec-
tion given to her husband.
Even when Giulio received threats, nothing whatever
was done! We begged, we pleaded, we...'
"'Your husband was warned that he would be killed?' the
reporter interrupted eagerly.
Signora Bertolini made a gesture of qualification.
'Not in so many words, no. But there were tokens,
signs, strange disturbing things. For example an envelop
pushed through our letter-box with nothing inside but a lot
of tiny little metal balls, like caviare, only hard. And the:!
Giulio's wallet was stolen, and later we found it in the living
room, the papers and money all scattered about the floor.
But when we informed the public prosecutor he said ther -
were no grounds for giving my husband an armed guard.
And just a few days later he was gunned down, a helpless
victim, betrayed by the very people who should...'
Zen glanced at his mother. So far neither of them had
referred to the mysterious metallic scraping which had
disturbed her the previous night, and which he had
explained away as a rat in the skirting. He hoped Signora
Bertolini's words did not make her think of another possible
explanation which had occurred to him: that someone had
been trying to break into the flat.
'Don't you like your soup?' he remarked to his mother,
who was moodily pushing the vegetables and pasta aroun.3
in her plate.
'What?'
'YOUR SOUP! AREN'T YOU GOING TO EAT IT?'
'It's got turnip in.'
'What's wrong with that?'
'Turnips are for cattle, not people,' his mother declare~'.
her deafness miraculously improved.
'You ate them last time.'
'What?'
Zen took a deep breath.
'PUT THEM TO ONE SIDE AND EAT THE REST!' he
yelled, repeating word for word the formula she had on;e
used with him.
'I'm not hungry,' his mother retorted sulkily.
'That won't stop you eating half a box of chocolates whilc
you watch TV.'
'What?'
'NOTHING.'
Zen pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. From the
television set, Signora Bertolini continued her confused
and vapid accusations. Although he naturally sympath-
ized with her, Zen also felt a sense of revulsion. It was
hecoming too convenient to blame the authorities for
everything that happened. Soon the relatives of motorists
killed on the motorway would appear on television
claiming that their deaths were due not to the fact that
they had been doing zoo kilometres an hour on the hard
shoulder in the middle of a contraflow system, but to the
criminal negligence of the authorities in not providing for
the needs of people who were exercising their constitu-
tional right to drive like maniacs.
At one minute to seven exactly Zen walked through to
the inner hallway where the phone was and dialled the
number Tania had given him. A woman answered.
'Yes?'
'Good evening. I have a message for Signora Biacis.'
'Who's this?'
The woman's voice was frugal and clipped, as though
she had to pay for each word and resented the expense.
'The Ministry of the Interior.'
Muffied squawks penetrated to the mouthpiece which
the woman had covered with her hand while she talked to
someone else.
'Who's this?' a man abruptly demanded.
'I'm calling from the Ministry,' Zen recited. 'I have a
me ssage for Signora Biacis.'
'I'm her husband. What have you got to say?'
'You've no doubt heard about the recent terrorist out-
rage, Signor Biacis...'
'Bevilacqua, Mauro Bevilacqua,' the man cut in.
Zen noted the name on the scratch pad by the phone.
Evidently Tania Biacis, like many Italian married women,
had retained her maiden name.
'As a result, ministerial staff have been placed on an
emer cncy alert. Your wife is liable for a half-shift this
evening,'
The man snorted angrily.
'This has never happened before!'
'On the contrary, it has happened all too often.'
'I mean she's never been called in at this time before!'
'Then she's been very lucky,' Zen declared with finality,
and hung up.
That was all he'd needed to do, Zen thought as he sat in
the taxi, waiting for the driver to return. It was all he'd
been asked to do, it was all he had any right to do. But
instead of returning to the living room and his mother's
company, he'd lifted the phone again and called a taxi.
The address listed in the telephone directory after
'Bevilacqua Mauro' did not exist on Zen's map of Rome.
The taxi driver hadn't known where it was either, but after
consultations with the dispatcher it had finally been
located in one of the new suburbs on the eastern fringes of
the city, beyond the Grande Raccordo Anulare.
Whether it was that the dispatcher's instructions had
been unclear or that the driver had forgotten them, they
had only found the street after a lengthy excursion
through unsurfaced streets that briefiy became country
roads pocked with potholes and ridged into steps, where
concrete-covered drainage pipes ran across the eroded
surface. Until recently this had all been unfenced grazing
land, open campagna where sheep roamed amid the strid-
ing aqueducts and squat round towers that now gave their
names to the new suburbs which had sprung up as the
capital began its pathological post-war growth. Laid out
piecemeal as the area grew, the streets rambled aimlessly
about, often ending abruptly in cul-de-sacs that forced the
driver to make long and disorientating detours. Here was
a zone of abusive development from the early sixties, a
shanty town of troglodytic hutches run up by immigrants
from the south, each surrounded by a patch of enclosed
ground where chickens and donkeys roamed amid old
lavatories and piles of abandoned pallets. Next came an
older section of villas for the well-to-do, thick with pines
and guard dogs, giving way abruptly to a huge cleared
expanse of asphalt illuminated by gigantic searchlights
trained down from steel masts, where a band of gypsies
had set up home in caravans linked by canopies of plastic
sheeting. After that there was a field with sheep grazing,
and then the tower blocks began, fourteen storeys high,
spaced evenly across the landscape like the pieces in a
board-game for giants, on tracts of land that had been
brutally assaulted and left to die. Finally, they had found
the development of walk-up apartments where Mauro
Bevilacqua and Tania Biacis had made their home.
Zen sank back in the seat, wondering why on earth he
had come. As soon as the driver returned from his snack
he would go home. Tania must have left long ago, while
the taxi was lost in this bewildering urban hinterland. Not
that he had really intended to follow her, anyway. Putting
together her comment about her husband that morning
and then her request that Zen phone up with a fictitious
reason for her to leave the house, it seemed pretty clear
what she was up to. The last thing he wanted was proof of
that. He had accepted the fact that Tania was happily and
irrevocably married. He didn't now want to have to accept
that, on the contrary, she was having an illicit affair, but
not with him.
A silhouetted figure appeared at one of the windows of
the nearby block. Zen imagined the scene viewed from
that window: the deserted street, the parked car. It made
him think of the night before, and suddenly he under-
stood what he had found disturbing about the red car.
Like the taxi, it had been about fifty metres from his house
and on the opposite side of the street, the classic surveil-
lance position. But he had no time to follow up the
implications of this thought, because at that moment a
woman emerged from one of the staircases of the apart-
ment block.
She started to walk towards the taxi, then suddenly
stopped, turned, and hurried back the way she had come.
At the same moment, as if on cue, the taxi driver re-
appeared from the bar and a swarthy man in shirtsleeves
ran out into the car park underneath the apartment block,
looking round wildly. The woman veered sharply to her
left, making for the bar, but the man easily cut her off.
They started to struggle, the man gripping her by the
arms and trying to pull her back towards the door of the
block.
Zen got out of the taxi and walked over to them,
unfolding his identity card.
'Police! '
Locked in their clumsy tussle, the couple took no
notice. Zen shook the man roughly by the shoulder.
'Let her go!'
The man swung round and aimed a wild punch at
Zen, who dodged the blow with ease, seized the man by
the collar and pulled him off balance, then shoved him
backwards, sending him reeling headlong to the ground.
'Right, what would you like to be arrested for?' he
asked. 'Assaulting a police officer...'
'You assaulted me!' the man interrupted indignantly as
he got to his feet.
'... or interfering with this lady,' Zen concluded.
The man laughed coarsely. He was short and slightly-
built, with a compensatory air of bluster and braggadocio
which seemed to emanate from his neatly clipped
moustache.
'Lady? What do you mean, lady? She's my wife!
Understand? This is a family affair!'
Zen turned to Tania Biacis, who was looking at him in
utter amazement.
'What happened, signora?'
'She was running away from her home and her duties!'
her husband exclaimed.' His arms were outstretched to
an invisible audience.
'I... that taxi... I thought it was free,' Tania said. She
was evidently completely thrown by Zen's presence. 'I
was going to take it. Then I saw there was someone in it,
so I was going to the bar to phone for one.'
Mauro Bevilacqua glared at Zen.
'What the hell are you doing lurking about here, any-
way? It's as bad as Russia, policemen on every street
corner!'
'There happens to be a terrorist alert on,' Zen told him
coldly.
Tania turned triumphantly on her husband.
'You see! I told you!'
Having recovered her presence of mind, she appealed to
Zen.
'I work at the Ministry of the Interior. I was called in for
emergency duties this evening, but my husband wouldn't
believe me. He wouldn't let me use the car. He said it was
all a lie, a plot to get out of the house!'
Zen shook his head in disgust.
'So it's come to this! Here's your wife, signore, a key
member of a dedicated team who are giving their all, night
and day, to defend this country of ours from a gang of
ruthless anarchists, and all you can do is to hurl puerile
and scandalous accusations at her! You ought to be
ashamed of yourself.'
'It's none of your business!' Bevilacqua snapped.
'On the contrary,' Zen warned him. 'If I choose to make
it my business, you could be facing a prison sentence for
assault.'
He paused to let that sink in.
'Luckily for you, however, I have more important things
to do. Just as your wife does. But to set your fears at rest,
I'll accompany her personally to the Ministry. Will that
satisfy you? Or perhaps you'd like me to summon an
armed escort to make sure that she reaches her place of
work safely?'
Mauro Bevilacqua flapped his arms up and down like a
flightless bird trying vainly to take off.
'What I'd like! What I'd like! What I'd like is for her to
start behaving like a wife should instead of gadding about
on her own at this time of night!'
He swung round to face her.
'You should never have gone to work in the first place! I
never wanted you to go.'
'If you brought home a decent income from that stinking
bank I wouldn't have to!'
Mauro Bevilacqua looked at her with hatred in his eyes.
'We'll settle this when you get home!' he spat out, turning
on his heel.
Zen ushered Tania into the back of the taxi. He got into
the front seat, beside the driver.
'What were you doing there?' Tania asked after they had
driven in silence for some time.
He did not reply. Now that their little farce had been
played to its conclusion, all his confidence had left him. He
felt ill at ease and constrained by the situation.
'You weren't really on a stake-out, were you?' she
prompted.
Zen usually had no difficulty in thinking up plausible
stories to conceal his real motives, but on this occasion he
found himself at a loss. He couldn't tell Tania the truth and
he wouldn't lie to her.
'Not an official one.'
He glanced round at her. As they passed each street-
lamp, its light moved across her in a steady stroking move-
ment, revealing the contours of her face and body.
'You sounded very convincing,' she said.
He shrugged. 'If you're going to tell someone a pack of
lies, there's no point in doing it half-heartedly.'
With the help of Tania's directions, they quickly
regained Via Casilina, and soon the city had closed in
around them again. Zen felt as though he had returned to
earth from outer space.
'How can you stand living in that place?' he demanded.
As soon as he had spoken, he realized how rude the
question sounded. But Tania seemed unoffended.
'That's what I ask myself every morning when I leave
and every evening when I get back. The answer is simple.
Money.'
You could always economize on your social life, thought
Zen sourly, cut out the fancy dinners and the season ticket
to the opera and the weekends ski-ing and skin-diving. He
was rapidly going off Tania Biacis, he found. But he didn't
say anything. Mauro Bevilacqua had been quite right. It
was none of his business.
'So where's it to?' the driver asked as they neared Porta
Maggiore.
Zen said nothing. He wanted Tania to decide, and he
wanted her to have all the time she needed to do so.
Although Zen had aided and abetted her deception of her
husband, he actually felt every bit as resentful of her
behaviour as Mauro Bevilacqua, though of course he
couldn't let it show. He was also aware that Tania would
have to invent a different cover story for his consumption,
since the one she had used with her husband clearly
wouldn't do. He wanted it to be a good one, something
convincing, something that would spare his feelings. He'd
done the dirty work she'd requested. Now let her cover
her tracks with him, too.
'Eh, oh, signori!' the driver exclaimed. 'A bit of informa-
tion, that's all I need. This car isn't a mule, you know. It
won't go by itself. You have to turn the wheel. So, which
way?'
Tania gave an embarrassed laugh.
'To tell you the truth, I just wanted to go to the
cinema.'
Well, it was better than saying outright that she was
going to meet her lover, Zen supposed. But not much
better. Not when she had been regaling him for months
with her views of the latest films as they came out,
flaunting the fact that she and her husband went to the
cinema the way other people turned on the television.
To lie so crudely, so transparently, was tantamount to
an insult. No wonder she sounded embarrassed. She
couldn't have expected to be believed, not for a moment.
She must have done it deliberately, as a way of getting the
truth across to her faithful, stupid, besotted admirer. Well,
it had worked! He'd understood, finally!
'Did you have any particular film in mind?' he inquired
sarcastically.
'Anything at all.'
She sounded dismissive, no doubt impatient with him,
thinking that he'd missed the point. He'd soon put her
right about that.
'Via Nazionale,' he told the driver. Turning to Tania, he
added, 'I'm sure you'll be able to find what you want
there. Whatever it happens to be.'
As their eyes met, he had the uneasy feeling that he'd
somehow misunderstood. But how could he? What other
explanation was there?
'Please stop,' Tania said to the driver.
'We're not there yet.'
'It doesn't matter! Just stop.'
The taxi cut across two lanes of traffic, unleashing a
chorus of horns from behind. Tania handed the driver a
ten thousand lire note.
'Deduct that from whatever he owes you.'
She got out, slammed the door and walked away.
'Where now?' queried the driver.
'Same place you picked me up,' Zen told him.
They drove down Via Nazionale and through Piazza
Venezia. The driver jerked his thumb towards the white
mass of the monument to Vittorio Emanuele.
'You know what I heard the other day? I had this city
councillor in the back of the cab, we were going past here.
You know the Unknown Soldier they have buried up
there? This councillor, he told me they were doing main-
tenance work a couple of years ago and they had to dig up
the body. You know what they found? The poor bastard
had been shot in the back! Must have been a deserter, they
reckoned. Ran away during the battle and got shot by the
military police. Isn't that the end? Fucking monument to
military valour, with the two sentries on guard all the
time, and it turns out the poor fucker buried there was a
deserter! Makes you think, eh?'
Zen agreed that such things did indeed make you think,
but in fact his thoughts were elsewhere. The history of his
relationships with women was passing in review before
his eyes like the life of a drowning man. And indeed Zen
felt that he was drowning, in a pool of black indifference
and icy inertia. His failed marriage could be written off to
experience: he and Luisella had married too early and for
all the wrong reasons. That was a common enough story.
It was what had happened since then that was so disturb-
ing, or rather what had not happened. For Zen was acutely
aware that in the fifteen years since his marriage broke up,
he had failed to create a single lasting bond to take its
place.
The final blow had been the departure of Ellen, the
American divorcee he had been seeing on and off for over
three years. The manner of her going had hurt as much as
the fact. Ellen had made it clear that Zen had failed her in
just about every conceivable way, and once he had got
over his anger at being rejected he found this hard to
deny. The opportunity had been there for the taking, but
he had hesitated and dithered and messed about, using
his mother as an excuse, until things had come to a crisis.
Then it had been a case of too much, too late, as he had
blurted out an unconsidered offer of marriage which must
have seemed like the final insult. It wasn't marriage for its
own sake that Ellen had wanted but a sense of Zen's
commitment to her. And he just hadn't been able to feel
such a commitment.
It was no surprise, of course, at his age. With every year
that passed the number of things he really cared about
decreased, and Zen soon convinced himself that his failure
with Ellen had been an indication that love was fast
coming to seem more trouble than it was worth. Why else
should he have let the opportunity slip? And why did he
never get round to answering the postcards and letters
Ellen sent him from New York7 The whole affair had been
nothing but the self-delusion of an ageing man who
couldn't accept that love, too, was something he must
learn to give up gracefully.
Zen had just got all this nicely sorted out when Tania
Biacis walked into his life. It was the first day of his new
duties at the Ministry. Tania introduced herself as one of
the administrative assistants and proceeded to explain the
bureaucratic ins and outs of the department. Zen nodded,
smiled, grunted and even managed to ask one or two
relevant questions, but in fact he was on autopilot
throughout, all his second-hand wisdom swept away by
the living, breathing presence of this woman whom, to his
delight and despair, he found that he desired in the old,
familiar, raw, painful, hopeless way.
Unlike the Genoese couple who had featured in the
paper that morniag, however, he and Tania ran no risk of
being barbecued by an irate husband, for the simple
reason that Mauro Bevilacqua had nothing whatever to
feel jealous about, at least as far as Zen was concerned.
True, he and Tania had become very friendly, but nothing
precludes the possibility of passion as surely as friendli-
ness. Those long casual chats which had once seemed so
promising to Zen now depressed him more than anything
else. It was almost as if Tania was treating him as a sur-
rogate female friend, as though for her he was so utterly
unsexed that she could talk to him for ever without any
risk of compromising herself.
Sometimes her tone became more personal, particularly
when she talked about her father. He had been the village
schoolteacher, an utterly impractical idealist who escaped
into the mountains at every opportunity. Tania's name
was not a diminutive of Stefania, as Zen had assumed, but
of Tatania, her father having named her after Gramsci's
sister-in-law, who stood by the communist thinker
throughout the eleven years of his imprisonment by the
Fascists. But despite this degree of intimacy, Tania had
never given Zen the slightest hint that she had any per-
sonal interest in him, while he had of course been careful
not to reveal his own feelings. He quailed at the thought of
Tania's reaction if she guessed the truth. It was clear from
what she said that she and her husband lived a rich, full,
exciting life. What on earth could Zen offer her that she
could possibly want or need?
It was therefore a sickening blow to discover that Tania
apparently did want or need things that her marriage
didn't provide. Not only hadn't she thought of turning to
him to provide them, but she had treated him as someone
she could use and then lie to.
This was so painful that it triggered a mechanism which
had been created back in the mists of Zen's childhood,
when his father had disappeared into an anonymous
grave somewhere in Russia. That loss still ached like an
old fracture on a damp day, but at the time the pain had
been too fierce to bear. To survive, Zen had withdrawn
totally into the present, denying the past all reality, taking
refuge in the here and now. That was his response to
Tania's betrayal, and it was so successful that when they
arrived and the taxi driver told him how much he owed,
Zen thought the man was trying to cheat him.
129,ooo lire for a short ride across the city!'
'What the hell are you talking about?' the driver retor-
ted. 'Two and a quarter hours you've had! I could have
picked up three times the money doing short trips instead
of freezing to death in some shitty suburb!'
Zen gradually counted out the notes. Well, that was the
last amateur stake-out he'd be doing, he vowed, as the taxi
roared away past a red saloon parked about fifty metres
along the street, on the other side.
The only people about were an elderly couple making
their way at a snail's pace along the opposite pavement.
Zen crossed over to the car, an Alfa Romeo with Rome
registration plates. There were several deep scratches and
dents in the bodywork and one of the hub-caps was miss-
ing, although the vehicle was quite new. Zen looked in
through the dirty window. A packet of Marlboro cigarettes
lay on one of the leather seats, which looked almost
unused. The floor was covered in cigarette butts and
scorched with burn marks. The empty box of an Adriano
Celentano tape lay in the tray behind the gear-lever, the
cassette itself protruding from the player.
He straightened up as footsteps approached, but it was
only the elderly couple. They trudged past, the man
several paces ahead of his wife. Neither of them looked at
the other, although they kept up a desultory patter the
whole time.
'Then we can...'
'Right.'
'Or not. Who knows?'
'Well, anyway...'
Zen noted down the registration number of the car and
walked back to the house. Giuseppe was off duty, so the
front door was closed and locked. The lift was on one of
the upper floors. Zen pressed the light switch and set off
up the stairs, taking the shallow marble steps two at a
time. A rumble overhead was followed by a whining
sound as the lift started down. A few moments later the
lighted cubicle passed by, its single occupant revealed in
fuzzy silhouette on the frosted glass.
By the time he reached the fourth floor, Zen was breath-
less. He paused briefly to recover before unlocking his
front door. There was a clanking far below as the lift
shuddered to a halt. Then the landing was abruptly plun-
ged into darkness as the time switch expired. Zen groped
his way to the door, opened it and turned on the hall light.
As he closed the door again, he noticed an envelope lying
on the sideboard. He picked it up and walked along the
passage, past the lugubrious cupboards, carved chests and
occasional tables for which no suitabie occasion had ever
presented itself. As he neared the living room, he heard
the sound of voices raised in argument.
'... never in a hundred years, never in a thousand, will
I permit you to marry this man! '
'But Papa, I love Alfonso more than life itself!'
'Do not dare breathe his accursed name again! Tomor-
row you leave for the convent, there to take vows more
sacred and more binding than those with which you seek
to dishonour our house.'
'The convent! No, do not condemn me to a living death,
dear Father...'
Zen pushed open the glass-panelled door. By the flick-
ering light of the television he saw his mother asleep in her
armchair. He crossed thc darkened room and turned
down the volume, silencing the voices but leaving the
costumed figures to go through their melodramatic
motions. Then he went to the window, opened the shut-
ters and peered out throub~h the slats in the outer jalousies.
The red car was no longer there.
He held the envelope so that it caught the light from the
television. It seemed to be empty, although it was surpris-
ingly heavy. His name was printed in block capitals, but
there was no stamp or address. He wondered how it had
come to be left on the sideboard. Normally post was put in
the box in the hallway downstairs, or left with Giuseppe. If
a message was delivered to the door, Maria Grazia would
take it into the living room.
He ripped the envelope open. It still seemed empty, but
something inside made a scratching sound, and when he
pulled the paper walls apart he saw, clustered together at
the very bottom, a quantity of tiny silvery balls. He let
them roll out into his palm. In the Hickering glimmer of the
television they could have been almost anything: medi-
cine, seeds, even cake decorations. But Zen knew they
were none of these.
They were shotgun pellets.
The nights brought relief. At night I moz>ed freely, I felt my
strength returning. The others never venture out once darkness
has fa11en. Dissolved by darkness, the world is 7io longer theirs.
They stay at home, lock their doors and watch moving pictwres
made with light.
They are afraid of the dark. They are r'ght to be afraid.
Beyond their 1ocked doors and shuftered windows I cam ' into nty
own, f1itting effortlessly fmm place to place, appearing and dis-
appearing at will, yielding to the darkness as though to the
embraces of a secret loz>er. Untii the lights came on, the innmtes
stirred, and the prison awoke to another day.
It was easy to find my u~ay back here. I'd alu~ays come and gone as
I liked. They never u~rderstood that. They never tried to under-
stand. No one asked me anything. They told me things. They told
me my imprisonment, as they called it, /md been an accident, a
mistake. 'What you rnust have suffered!' they said. I'd lost my
home and farnily, but they weren't satisfied with that. They
wanted me to lose myself as well. What am I, but what the
darkness made me? If that was a mistake, an accident, then so
am l.
Sometimes the priest came. He had things to tell me too, about a
loving father, a tortured son, a virgin mother. Not like my
family, I thought, the father who came home drunk and fucked his
wife until she screamed, and screamed again when the son was
born, a pampered brat, arrogant and selfish, strutting about as
though he owned the place, and all because of that thing dangling
between his legs, barely the size of my little finger! But I kept my
mouth shut. I didn't think the priest would want to know about
them.
And who was I, when the family was together? The holy ghost, I
suppose. The unholy ghost.