‘Because I did.’
It was a shot in the dark, but he had nothing to lose. The urgent tremor in the speaker’s voice revealed that it had gone home.
‘You have the transcript?’
There was a sudden eruption of sound, as though a bomb had gone off.
‘Hello?’ cried the voice. ‘Are you still there?’
Now the source of the noise was visible: a rack of spotlamps being lowered from their position high above the south transept.
‘Yes, I’m here,’ said Zen.
Why couldn’t the man see him?
‘Where is the transcript?’
‘Where Grimaldi hid it. It was I who discovered his body, and I had time to search his room before the Carabinieri got there. Someone else had been there too, but they didn’t know what to look for.’
Beyond the grille, the confessional was as silent as the grave.
‘Among Grimaldi’s belongings was a red plastic diary,’ Zen continued. ‘It was for the new year, so it was mostly empty, but he had noted down a series of letters and numbers that leads straight to the transcript, assuming you know where to look.’
‘And where’s that?’
Zen laughed teasingly.
‘Have you told anyone else where it is?’ the man demanded.
‘Not yet. It’s hard to know who to tell, with so many conflicting interests involved.’
There was a considerable silence.
‘Naturally you want to do the right thing,’ the voice suggested more calmly.
‘Naturally.’
Again the man fell silent.
‘This revelation changes everything,’ he said at last. ‘This is not the time or place to discuss it further, but I do urge you most strongly to take no further action of any kind until we contact you again.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Zen replied. ‘I don’t even know who you are. Suppose you step out of there and let me see your face.’
The sinister chuckle sounded again.
‘I’m afraid that’s not possible, dottore.’
Zen took the fake pistol from his pocket. He had been right to bring it after all.
‘You’re taking a big chance,’ he warned the man. ‘Supposing I decide to let someone else have the transcript instead?’
‘But how would you know it was someone else? You know nothing about us.’
One hand gripping the wooden railing, Zen raised himself painfully to a crouching position. Then he straightened up, gritting his teeth against the fierce aching of his knees. The revolver in one hand, he swept aside the heavy curtain covering the entrance to the confessional.
‘I do now!’ he cried.
He gazed wildly around. There was no one there. Then he heard the low chuckling once again. It was coming from a small two-way radio suspended from a nail which had been driven into the wall of the confessional, just below the grille.
‘You know nothing about us,’ the voice repeated. ‘Nothing at all.’
5
Ever since his transfer to the capital from Naples, Aurelio Zen had travelled to and from work by bus. His removal from active duty at the Questura at the time of the Aldo Moro kidnapping had had no effect on this, since the Ministry of the Interior — where he had been allocated a menial desk job — was only a few blocks from police headquarters. Even the opening of the new underground railway line had not induced him to change his habits, despite the fact that the terminus at Ottaviano was only a few blocks from his house, and the Termini stop a short walk from the Ministry. But experience showed that twenty minutes in the tunnels of the Metropolitana A left Zen’s day spavined before it had even begun. The bus journey was by no means an unrelieved joy, but at least it took place in a real city rather than that phantasmagoric subterranean realm of dismal leaky caverns which might equally well be in London, or New York — or indeed the next century.
Tania Biacis had changed Zen’s habits in this respect, as in so many others. They spent about three nights a week together, absences which Zen explained to his mother in terms of overtime or trips away from Rome. But whether Zen had slept at the flat or not, he and Tania travelled to work together by taxi every morning. It was yet another aspect of the new arrangement which was costing a small fortune, but it seemed worth it just to have that precious interval of time with Tania before they separated to go about their different jobs at the Ministry. He was perfectly willing to pay, Zen reflected as his taxi crossed Ponte Cavour on the way to Tania’s that Thursday morning. The problem was his ability.
The simple fact that was he could no longer go on supporting two households in this kind of style, and what was the point in doing it if not in style? Mistresses were not something you could get on the cheap, any more than champagne or caviar. They were a luxury, a self-indulgence for the rich. If you couldn’t afford them, you had to do without. Zen couldn’t do without Tania, but it was becoming clear that he couldn’t really afford her either — unless he found some way of making a large sum of money overnight. As the taxi turned right along the embankment of the Tiber, he found himself wondering idly how much the transcript of Ruspanti’s phone calls would fetch, assuming that his intuition about the hiding-place proved correct.
The idea was absurd, of course! He couldn’t contemplate making a personal profit from a piece of evidence which would presumably make it possible to bring the murderers of Ludovico Ruspanti and Grimaldi to justice. Of course, a cynic might argue that there was no chance of the murderers being brought to justice anyway, if the issues involved in the case were anywhere near as extensive as they appeared to be. Such a cynic — or a realist, as he would no doubt prefer to be called — might claim that in this particular case, as in so many others, justice was simply not an option, and to pretend otherwise was mere wishful thinking masquerading as idealism. In reality, there were only two possible outcomes. Zen could sell the transcript, thereby solving all his problems, or he could create a host of new problems for himself by setting in motion a major scandal with repercussions at every level of society. A rational man, the realist might well conclude, should be in no doubt which course to choose.
The taxi drew up in the narrow street, scarcely wider than an alley, where Tania lived. Almost at once the door opened and she appeared. It was a measure of what was happening to them that while Zen would once have been glad of a promptitude which allowed them a few extra minutes together, he now wondered whether she was anxious to prevent him seeing who was in the flat.
‘I phoned Tullio,’ she said, slipping in beside him with a seemingly guileless kiss. ‘He sounded very keen. He’ll see you this morning at his office in EUR.’
‘What time?’
‘About ten, he said.’
‘Did you tell him who I was?’
‘Of course not! As far as he knows, you’re just a high-ranking colleague of mine at the Ministry who needs a favour done. Not that Tullio would care. He’s made a pass or two at me himself, if it comes to that.’
Zen inspected her.
‘And did it?’
She sighed.
‘Give me a break, Aurelio!’
It was a windless grey morning, humid and close. The taxi was now wedged into the flank of the phalanx of traffic on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Zen patted her knee.
‘Sorry.’
She flashed him a smile.
‘Shall we eat out tonight?’
He nodded.
‘I’ll be out till about eight,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we could try that Chinese place behind Piazza Navona.’
Zen grunted unenthusiastically. Oriental cuisine, the latest Roman craze, left him cold. The food was excellent, but it seemed to him an exoticism as irrelevant to his life as Buddhism. The way he looked at it, you were either a Catholic or an atheist. There was no point in shopping around for odd doctrines, however original, nor eating odd food, however delicious.
The taxi dropped Tania first, at the corner of Via Venezia and Via Palermo, then drove round to the other side of the Ministry, where Zen paid it off. Lorenzo Moscati’s jibes had made it clear that their efforts to keep the affair secret had been a failure, but there was still a difference between accepting that people knew what was going on and flaunting it in their faces. The porter ticked Zen’s name off in the ON TIME column of his massive ledger.