After breakfast, he walked down the street and out into the vacant, paved expanses of the city’s main square, flanked by the uninspiring, red-brick mass of the cathedral towering above its unfinished marble facing, the modest but well-proportioned Palazzo del Podesta, the ornate Palazzo De’Banchi where luxury shops lurked beneath an imposing arcade, and the austere medieval facade of the Palazzo Communale, whose original delicate balance had been defaced by a monumental baroque excrescence erected in honour of one of the many popes who had sucked the city treasury dry over the centuries. There was nothing particularly wrong with any of this, but in his snobbish Venetian way Zen regarded it as not quite good enough. The enormous space seemed to make claims which the standard of the individual buildings couldn’t justify.
The temperature was still below freezing, and he pushed briskly on into a warren of narrow streets that had obviously been the city’s central food market for centuries. These were crowded with traders and their customers, mostly short, stout, elderly women enveloped in utilitarian fur coats from which their head and legs protruded as stubby appendages, giving them the appearance of so many furry pods. Zen’s smugness instantly evaporated before the array of small shops to either side, displaying a dizzying selection of fruit, vegetables, cheeses and fresh meats infinitely more enticing than anything that either his native city or indeed Lucca had to offer. After weeks on a heavily restricted diet, the delights on offer had an almost sexually direct appeal, and made Zen impatient for lunch.
Fortunately the barrow-boy delivering cartons of Sicilian blood oranges to the kerb was strong, nimble, and had his wits about him, so when the signore who had been striding purposefully along the street suddenly stopped dead right in his path at the exact point where he was planning to set the heavy cart down, he was able to slew it to one side just far enough to prevent a collision that might otherwise have resulted in an interesting opportunity to compare the juice of the oranges with the liquid after which they were named.
Zen retreated rapidly with ritualistic apologies, but his mind was elsewhere. ‘coming bo tomorrow lunch?’ He switched on his phone. There was no reply from their home number, but at the tenth tone Gemma answered her mobile.
‘Can’t talk now, we’re just going into the hall.’
Her voice was a faint graffito scratched across a concrete wall of noise.
‘I tried to call!’ Zen hurled back. ‘I tried several times, but there was no answer!’
He waited to be challenged about yet another egregious lie, but there was only the background babel. In reality, after that first attempt in the cafe outside the football stadium, he had never tried to contact Gemma about the message she had left him. He hadn’t even remembered to neglect to do so.
‘It’s about to begin, I’ll call you later,’ he thought he might have heard someone say before hanging up.
The Amadori house, whose address Zen had earlier extracted from the Questura’s records, was located in a quiet street west of the two medieval towers, one leaning at an alarming angle, that were among the city’s most famous landmarks. The pavements here were raised about half a metre above the roadway, and protected from the elements by a set of infinitely varied yet harmonious portici. The house itself was of modest outward appearance, blending with grace and tact into the gently curving line of the whole block while nevertheless contributing its individual variation on the underlying architectural theme. It must have been worth well over a million euros.
Bruno Nanni had described the elder Amadori as a lawyer, and it was a very imprudent policeman who called uninvited on such a man without an excellent cover story, and preferably a judicial warrant. Zen had therefore planned his ‘raid’ carefully. There would of course be no mention of Lorenzo Curti, except as the subject of the memorial event at the football stadium the previous evening, following which Zen had been physically assaulted and verbally abused by a young man identified to him as Vincenzo Amadori. At this stage he had no wish to press charges or otherwise make an issue of the incident, but he considered it best that Vincenzo’s parents should be informed so that they might take any action they considered appropriate. At the very least, it would be interesting to see what sort of reaction, or lack of it, he got to these allegations.
The front door was opened by a woman of about sixty, wary but unafraid, wearing a starched white blouse over a brassiere resembling a major engineering project, a gingham pinafore and pink rubber gloves. Zen presented his police identification card and asked to see Dottor Amadori.
‘ L’avvocato is not here,’ the woman replied.
‘Do you happen to know when he’ll be back?’
‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure. He’s away on business. You’d need to ask at the office.’
‘And la signora?’
‘Also not at home.’
Zen smiled, pleasantly enough, but with just a hint of professional steeliness.
‘To anyone? Or just to the police?’
The housemaid looked slightly affronted.
‘What’s this about?’ she asked.
‘A personal matter. I need to speak to a member of the family. What about the son, Vincenzo?’
Ashake of the head.
‘He doesn’t live here any more.’
‘Where does he live?’
The woman shrugged in a way suggesting that it was a mockery even to ask.
‘Signora Amadori will be back in an hour or so.’
Zen nodded.
‘Might I wait for her, do you think? It’s a fairly routine matter, but we need to get it sorted out as soon as possible, and I’m a busy man. Since I’m already here…’
He gestured significantly. The maid hesitated a second, then opened the door fully and beckoned him across the threshold.
From the street, the house-like its guardian angel-had looked pleasingly plain and ordinary, with the subdued dignity of elderly people who no longer have anything they either can or need to prove. The interior, on the other hand, had been remodelled at some point in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, so that in entering one moved instantly but imperceptibly into a space not only mindful of its history and place in the greater scheme of things, but marginally more elegant and formal. The present owners had respected its simple, harmonious values, adding only a couple of inoffensive abstract oils in a now dated manner to the otherwise studiously neutral walls.
‘This way, signore,’ said the housemaid, peeling off her work gloves.
She led him up a steep stairway of marble steps with rounded edges flanked by elaborate wroughtiron banisters. The first-floor landing offered three doors. Zen was shown into what was obviously the formal salotto, at the front of the house, used on rare occasions as an impressive but impersonal ‘receiving room’. It was large, with a ceiling even higher than the one in Zen’s hutch at the hotel, and furnished with the type of 1970s ‘contemporary’ furniture designed to be admired rather than enjoyed. It was also bitterly cold.
‘Would you care for a coffee?’ the woman asked.
Zen reflected for a moment, and then gave her his warmest smile.
‘That’s very kind of you, signora. I’d love one, if it’s not too much trouble. Would it be all right if I came down and had it with you in the kitchen?’
He laughed, as though in slight embarrassment.
‘This room’s a little chilly, and at my age…’
‘Eh, the heating’s always turned off in here, unless there are guests. Yes, of course, signore, come down. It’s nothing grand like this but you’ll be nice and snug there, and I’ll announce you as soon as Signora Amadori returns.’