They walked together to the stairs, which as Zen had noted on the way up were of old marble, heavily worn and polished to a lustrous sheen. He insisted that his companion go first, and about half-way down staged a carefully controlled fall backwards, accompanied by an impressive and convincing cry of pain.
The housemaid turned to him with horrified eyes.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’
She came back up to where Zen lay and bent over him solicitously. He moaned and groaned a bit, then smiled and clambered unsteadily to his feet with the air of one bravely making light of a harrowing experience. Faking pain came easy after the crash course in the real thing that he had so recently undergone.
‘Are you all right?’ the donna cried.
‘Nothing broken!’ Zen replied, with a transparently faked if gallant attempt at jaunty humour. ‘I’ll be fine in a moment. But…’
He looked her in the eyes.
‘What’s your name, signora?’
‘Carlotta.’
‘Would you mind taking my arm as far as the bottom of the stairs, Carlotta?’
‘Of course, of course!’
‘It’s disturbing, suddenly losing your balance like that. Makes you think about the day when you’ll lose everything else too, eh?’
‘Eh, eh!’
The two of them proceeded cautiously down, step by step. At the foot of the stairs, Zen did not withdraw his arm, nor did Carlotta release it. They shuffled back along the ground-floor passageway to a door at the far end that stood open into a dimlylit, low-ceilinged area filled with odours and warmth. Leaving Zen to stand alone for a moment, Carlotta pulled over a chair and eased him into it.
‘Now stay there,’ she admonished him. ‘I’m going to prepare a tonic. It’ll make you feel much better.’
She bustled rapidly about the kitchen, opening cupboards, extracting containers, measuring ingredients, and then pouring, grinding and stirring. Carlotta’s domain was evidently the one remaining original section of the house, saved by the cost factor-no need to impress the servants-from the upwardly-mobile renovations of some two centuries earlier. Although spotlessly clean, every surface looked worn, uneven, imperfect, and somehow denser than its actual physical consistency. The single fifty-watt bulb had no doubt been imposed by her employers for the same reasons of economy that had preserved the integrity of the whole space, but the gentle ingratiation of its dim glow, reflected back up off the worn flagstones, was beyond price.
‘What’s this?’ Zen asked when Carlotta finally brought him a tumbler full of some brownish liquid.
‘Just drink it down. All in one go, mind.’
He did so. Once the initial shock of the alcohol had subsided, he vaguely identified nutmeg, orange zest, cardamom and raw garlic. He nodded several times and handed the glass back, beaming at her.
‘You’re a wonder, Carlotta!’
‘Now stay sitting where you are for five minutes, and you’ll be as right as rain.’
She took the glass to the sink, shaking her head sorrowfully.
‘I blame myself! To think that I’d polished those steps only five minutes before you arrived.’
‘No, no, no!’ Zen insisted. ‘It was all my own fault, not looking where I was going. And these old leather-soled shoes are as smooth as…’
Their increasingly intimate colloquy-Zen was starting to think that he might well be able to get some interesting information out of Carlotta before he left-was interrupted by a dry, metallic snap in the resonant distance.
‘That’ll be the signora,’ the maid declared. ‘You stay here. I’ll settle her down, then announce you as though you’d just arrived.’
She went out to the hallway, from which a duet of voices drifted back to where Zen sat idly waiting. Carlotta’s he could recognise. The newcomer indeed sounded feminine, but there was a feeble, plaintive tone to the voice which ill suited the mental image he had formed of Signora Amadori. The words themselves were alternately ballooned and baffled as if by contrary winds, but they grew ever louder and closer until Carlotta reappeared in the kitchen, accompanied by a young man whom Zen didn’t immediately recognise.
‘Well, you should have told me!’ the housemaid was saying. ‘How was I supposed to know you’d had a nosebleed? I assumed it was a wine stain. If you’d told me it was blood then naturally I’d never have washed it in hot water, but how was I to know?’
‘Why didn’t you ask?’
‘Don’t you talk like that to me, Vincenzo! I’ve cleaned your nappies in my time, never mind your designer shirts. Take your precious stuff to a laundry if you’re going to be so fussy.’
She broke off, realising that the young man had noted the police officer’s presence, but seemed unable to come up with a satisfactory solution to this unforeseen social conundrum.
‘What are you doing here?’ Vincenzo demanded, advancing threateningly on Zen.
His intentions were clear enough, but his execution let him down. His voice was still modulating from the plangent whine he had employed with the housekeeper to his peer-speak stadium bark, and when he reached the chair where Zen was seated he stopped short, seemingly uncertain how to follow through. Zen ignored him.
‘That medicine of yours really did the trick,’ he said to Carlotta, getting to his feet. ‘I feel even better than when I arrived!’
Vincenzo swung round on the elderly donna.
‘What’s he doing here? What the fuck’s going on?’
‘You mind your tongue!’ Carlotta fired back. ‘Such language, and before a guest in your parents’ house!’
Zen glanced at his watch.
‘It’s beginning to look as though Signora Amadori must have been delayed, and I’ve got other business to attend to. The matter’s really of no urgency.’
‘Just a moment, you!’ Vincenzo shouted aggressively, although keeping his distance. Carlotta stood looking from one of them to the other, understandably out of her depth. Zen grinned at her roguishly.
‘In fact, it might be better if you don’t mention that I came at all,’ he confided in a low voice. ‘You know what lawyers are like. If Avvocato Amadori finds out that I fell on those slippery steps, he might lie awake at night worrying that I’m going to sue him.’
‘Hey, you can’t get out of it that easily…’ Vincenzo began.
‘As for you,’ Zen cried, deigning to regard him for the first time, ‘treat your mother with a little more respect!’
Vincenzo and Carlotta answered in chorus.
‘She’s not my mother!’
‘He’s not my son!’
Zen sighed, then shook his head in evident bafflement and walked out.
18
Gemma Santini reached the Bologna trade fair complex forty minutes before the event was due to begin, assuming that this would allow ample time to pick up her reserved ticket and get seated. She was wrong.
The area around the row of ticket booths was packed with people, some of whom gave every impression of having been there all night. Most were waiting their turn in a more or less orderly way for the strictly limited number of free passes being handed out to pack the hall, but a few had resorted to what Gemma privately called Neapolitan granny tactics, screaming their needs, demands and special circumstances at the attendant in the hope that they would be given what they wanted just to shut them up and get them out of there.
The moment she had learnt about the cook-off between her favourite TV personality and the awe-inspiring Edgardo Ugo which was to take place in the very city to which she was going anyway, her thoughts had turned to Luigi Piergentili. Although now a moral and physical wreck of the kind that dear Aurelio fondly imagined himself to be, in his former capacity as the dominant consigliere at the Monte dei Paschi bank Luigi had wielded a power in Tuscany and beyond second only to the equally fond imaginings of certain now-forgotten politicians. His own season of influence had been brought to an end-not entirely fortuitously, some held-by an unpleasant hit-and-run accident which had left the victim addicted, as he freely admitted, to a powerful morphine-based painkiller. Unfortunately, all of the many doctors he had consulted ultimately declined to continue prescribing this medication, citing normative pharmaceutical criteria, contra-indicative long-term health risks and, above all, a fear of losing their licences to practice medicine. It was at this point that Signor Piergentili had appealed to Gemma.