The Minister regarded Zen steadily for what seemed like a very long time. All his earlier facetiousness had deserted him.
‘Thank you, dottore,’ he said finally. ‘You did right to keep me informed, and I look forward to receiving your written report in due course.’
He flung his towel over his shoulder and padded off to the bathroom.
‘Can you find your own way out?’
The lift was through the Minister’s office, where Gino was studying a framed portrait photograph of the Minister with Giulio Andreotti. He smiled cynically at Zen.
‘Behold the secret of Rodolfo’s success,’ he said in a stage whisper.
Zen paused and looked up at the large photograph, which hung in pride of place above the Minister’s desk. Both politicians were in formal morning dress. Both looked smug, solid, utterly sure of themselves. Beneath their white bow-ties, both wore embroidered bands from which hung a prominent gilt pendant incorporating the eight-pointed cross of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
‘With Big Ears by his side,’ Gino explained, ‘he’ll go all the way.’
‘And how far is that?’ asked Zen.
Gino stabbed the outer fingers of his right hand at the photograph in the gesture used to ward off evil.
‘All the way to hell!’
The lift seemed to have a mind of its own that day. Zen was sure that he had pushed the right button, but when the doors slid apart the scene which greeted him was very different from what he had expected. Instead of the polished marble and elegant appointments of the Criminalpol offices on the third floor, he found himself in a cavernous hangar, ill-lit and foul-smelling. The oppressively low ceiling, like the squat rectangular pillars that supported it, was of bare concrete. The air was filled with a haze of black fumes and a continuous dull rumbling.
‘What can I do for you, dotto?’
A dwarf-like figure materialized at Zen’s elbow. The empty right sleeve of his jacket, flattened and neatly folded, was pinned back to the shoulder. The face, shrivelled and deeply lined, expressed a readiness to perform minor miracles and cut-price magic of all kinds.
‘Oh, Salvato!’ Zen replied.
‘Don’t tell me. You couldn’t get through on the phone.’
Salvatore ejected an impressive gob of spittle which landed on the concrete with a loud splat.
‘I had your boss Moscati down here the other day. Salvato, he says, I’ve been on the phone half an hour trying to get through, finally I decided it was quicker to come down in person.’
He waved his hand expressively.
‘But what can I do? All I’ve got is one phone. One phone for the whole Ministry to book rides, dotto! You need a switchboard down here, Moscati says to me. Don’t even think about it, I tell him. Look at the switchboard upstairs. The girls are so busy selling cosmetics and junk jewellery on the side that you can’t get through at all!’
They both laughed.
‘Where to, dotto?’ asked Salvatore, resuming his air of professional harassment.
Zen was about to confess his mistake, or rather the lift’s, when an idea sprang fully-formed into his mind.
‘Any chance of a one-way to Fiumicino in about half an hour?’
Salvatore frowned, as he always did. Then an almost incredulous smile spread slowly across his face.
‘You’re in luck, dotto!’
He pointed across the garage towards the source of the rumbling noise. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dimness, Zen could just make out a blue saloon with its bonnet open. A man in overalls was bent over the engine while another sat behind the wheel with his foot on the accelerator.
‘We’ve been having a spot of trouble with that one,’ Salvatore explained, ‘but it’s almost sorted out now. It’s the grace of God, dotto. Normally I’d have been a bit pushed to come up with a vehicle at such short notice.’
This was an understatement. The real point of the joke at which Salvatore and Zen had laughed a moment before was that the garage phone was largely tied up by the demands of the private limousine service which Salvatore and his drivers had organized. Their rates were not the lowest in Rome, but they had the edge over the competition in being able to penetrate to any part of the city, including those officially closed to motor vehicles. For a special rate, they could even lay on a police motorcycle escort to clear a lane through the Roman traffic. This was a boon to the wealthy and self-important, and was frequently used by businessmen wishing to impress clients from out of town, but it did have the effect of drastically restricting use of the pool by Ministry staff.
‘The airport in half an hour?’ beamed Salvatore. ‘No problem!’
‘Not the airport,’ Zen corrected as he stepped back into the lift. ‘The town of Fiumicino.’
In the Criminalpol suite on the third floor, Zen flipped through the items in his in-tray. It was the first time he had been into work since Friday, so there was quite a pile. Holding the stack of papers, envelopes and folders in his left hand, he dealt them swiftly into three piles: those to throw away now; those to throw away later, after noting the single relevant fact, date or time; and those to place in his out-tray, having ticked the box indicating that he had read the contents from cover to cover.
‘Dominus vobiscum,’ a voice intoned fruitily.
Zen looked up from an internal memorandum reading ‘Please call 645 9866 at lunchtime and ask for Simonelli.’ Giorgio De Angelis was looking round the edge of the hessian-covered screen which divided off their respective working areas.
‘According to the media, you’re dangerously ill with a rare infectious virus,’ the Calabrian went on, ‘so I won’t come any closer. This miraculous recovery is just one of the perks of working for the pope, I suppose. Pick up thy bed and walk and so on. How did you swing it, anyway? They say you can’t even get a cleaning job in the Vatican these days unless you have Polish blood.’
For some time after his transfer to Criminalpol, Zen had been slightly suspicious of De Angelis, fearing that his apparent bonhomie might be a strategy designed to elicit compromising admissions or disclosures. The promotion of Zen’s enemy Vincenzo Fabri to the post of Questore of Ferrara, combined with Zen’s coup in solving the Burolo affair to the satisfaction of the various political interests involved, had changed all that. With his position in the department no longer under direct threat, Zen was at last able to appreciate Giorgio De Angelis’s jovial good-humour without scanning everything he said for hidden meanings.
The Calabrian produced a newspaper article which quoted Zen as ‘reaffirming that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Ludovico Ruspanti’ and dismissing the allegations in the anonymous letter as ‘mischievous and ill-informed’.
‘Impressive prose for a man with a high fever,’ he commented, running his fingers through the babyish fuzz which was all that now grew on the impressive expanses of his skull. ‘I particularly liked the homage to our own dear Marcelli.’
Zen smiled wryly. The phrase ‘mischievous and ill-informed rumours’ was a favourite of the Ministerial under-secretary in question, who had almost certainly penned the statement.
‘But seriously, Aurelio, what really happened? Is there any truth in these allegations that Ruspanti was murdered?’
Catching the eager glint in De Angelis’s eyes, Zen realized he was going to have to come up with a story to peddle round the department. At least half the fun of working there was the conversational advantage it gave you with your relatives and friends. Whether you spoke or kept silent, it was assumed that you were in the know. As soon as his colleagues discovered that Zen was no longer ‘ill’, they were all going to want him to fill them in on the Ruspanti affair.