‘I’ve got to go now, mamma. I’ll be back late. Don’t wait up for me.’
‘Oh listen, Aurelio, I almost forgot, someone phoned for you. They were going to ring again tomorrow but I told them you were going to Milan on the early train and they said they needed to speak to you urgently and so they gave me a number you’re to ring at seven thirty tonight.’
‘Who was it, mamma?’
‘I don’t remember if he gave a name, but he said it was about something you had for sale. It’s not any of the family belongings, I hope?’
Zen felt his heart beating quickly.
‘No, no. No, it’s just something to do with work. Give me the number.’
He noted down the seven digits and stared at them for some time before setting to work. Like a burglar, he made his way steadily through the flat, turning out drawers and searching cupboards, wardrobes and shelves. He became much better acquainted with Tania’s taste in clothes and jewellery, including a number of unfamiliar items bearing designer labels which even Zen had heard of. He had been allowed to see the Falco sweater, but the others had been concealed from him. None, he reckoned, could have cost much less than half a million lire.
As he passed by the extension phone in the hallway, he had an idea. He dialled the Ministry, quoted the Rome number which his mother had passed on, and asked them to find out the subscriber’s name and address. Then he went into the kitchen. Spreading an old newspaper over the floor, he lifted the plastic rubbish sack out of its bin and emptied out the contents. When the phone rang, he was on his hands and knees, separating long white worms of cold spaghetti from the whiffy mess in which they were breeding, poring over fish bones, separating scraps of orange peel from the gutted hulks of burst tomatoes. Wiping his hands quickly on a towel, he took the call in the hallway. It was the Ministry with the information he had requested.
‘The number is a public call-box, dottore, in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace. The address is…’
‘It’s all right, I know the address.’
‘Very good, dottore. Will that be all?’
Zen closed his eyes.
‘No. Contact the Questura and have a man sent round there to watch the phone. He’s to take a full description of anyone using it around seven thirty. If the person is a guest, he’s to identify him. If not, follow him.’
Back in the kitchen, he resumed his analysis of the mess on the floor. Deep in the ripest puree of all, which had been fermenting for days at the bottom of the sack, he found the first scrap of paper. Gradually he recovered the others, one by one, from a glutinous paste of coffee grounds moistened with the snot of bad egg white. In the end he traced all but two of the sixteen irregular patches into which the sheet had been torn, and carefully pieced it together again on the kitchen counter.
Dear Tania, It’s great news that you can make it on the 27th. Let me know which flight you’ll be on and I’ll meet you. I have to take my wife to the opera that evening, but we can have lunch and then spend the afternoon together. I’m really looking forward to it. All the best, Primo
Zen crunched the fragments into a clammy wodge which he tossed back on to the pile of smelly rubbish. Then he rolled up the sheets of newspaper and stuffed the bundles back into the plastic sack. The 27th was the following Saturday, when Tania claimed she was going back to Udine to spend the weekend with her cousin. When the rubbish was bagged, he opened the window to air out the kitchen. It was just after a quarter past seven, time to find out if his hunch about Giovanni Grimaldi’s hiding place for the transcript had been correct. Going back to the living room, he phoned the number Tullio had given him. A girlish voice answered before being silenced by a rather older boy. A brief struggle for the phone ended with a slap and crying.
‘Who is it?’ asked the victor.
‘Luigi Borsellino,’ said Zen. ‘Let me speak to your dad.’
Cutlery and crockery pinged and jangled distantly above the chatter of a family mealtime, and then a gleeful voice in Zen’s ear exclaimed ‘I’ve got it!’
‘It was there?’
‘Exactly where you said, interleaved between the pages of a fourteenth-century treatise on some obscure Syrian heresy.’
‘And you brought it out with you?’
‘No problem. The security at that place is a joke. Anyway, if they’d tried to stop me I’d have pointed out that fourteenth-century Syrians didn’t use typewriters.’
‘What does it look like?’
‘There’s about twenty pages. It starts with a list of what looks like telephone numbers.’
‘No, those will be the numbers of the bank accounts the gang uses to launder the money from the drug sales,’ Zen replied glibly. ‘Just read them out to me, will you? I’ll pick up the document itself later on this evening, but we need to take action to freeze those accounts as soon as possible.’
There were about twenty numbers altogether. Zen wrote them down in his notebook on the same page as the number his mother had passed on. To his surprise, one of the numbers Bevilacqua read out was the same, the pay-phone in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace. But the Torlonia Palace was of course one of the leading luxury hotels in Rome. It was perfectly natural that the intimates and associates of Prince Ruspanti should choose to stay there, just like other eminent visitors to the city such as Antonio Simonelli.
‘… before nine o’clock all right?’ Tullio Bevilacqua was saying.
Zen glanced at his watch. Christ! Seven thirty-one!
‘Yes, yes! I’ll see you then! Bye!’
‘But I haven’t given you the address!’ squawked Bevilacqua.
‘I’ll get it from…’
Zen broke off in confusion. ‘From Tania’, he had been going to say.
‘… from the Ministry computer.’
Bevilacqua gasped.
‘You mean… you’ve got a file on me?’
‘We’ve got a file on everyone.’
He hit the receiver rest repeatedly until he got a dialling tone, then punched the number which now figured twice on the notebook page open on his knee. It was answered immediately.
‘You’re late.’
It was the voice which had spoken to Zen the night before from the confessional in St Peter’s. The man’s arrogant tone triggered an instinctive response for which Zen was quite unprepared.
‘I’ve cornered the market in the commodity you’re interested in. I’ll be as late as I fucking well choose.’
‘Can you prove you have possession?’
The voice was the same as the night before, but the background was now thoroughly worldly: a babble of voices competing for attention against the synthetic battery of a pop band.
‘Well, I could read you a list of phone numbers, but that would be giving away information which I could sell elsewhere. Just as a taster, though, one of the numbers which Ruspanti phoned just before he died is the same as the one on which you are now speaking. But I expect you already knew that.’
There was a brief pause.
‘But now we know that you know. That makes all the difference.’
Zen said nothing.
‘Hello? Are you still there?’ the man queried peevishly.
‘I’m here. I’m waiting for you to say something worth listening to. I got an earful of your waffle last night.’
‘How much do you want?’
This was the crunch. If Zen had been bluffing, his bluff had been called. And what else could he have been doing? The idea of selling evidence to the highest bidder, never more than an idle speculation in the first place, was out of the question after what had happened to Carlo Romizi. It was unthinkable to imagine disposing of the transcript for his personal advantage, merely to restore his flagging finances and win back Tania from the rich young shit beside whom he looked drably impoverished, timidly conventional.
‘How much?’ prompted the voice impatiently.
‘Rather more than Grimaldi asked, and rather less than he got.’
The man laughed. He could relax, the deal was in the bag. Money would never be a problem for these people.