There was a whistle blast from the platform outside, a whine as the automatic doors closed, then a slight jolt of movement. Zen glanced at his watch. Seven o’clock on the dot. A moment later the window was covered in a speckle of rain as the train emerged into the grey dawn. Inside, the broad strip of fluorescent panelling on the ceiling of the coach bathed everything in a coolly efficient radiance. Zen lowered his head over the papers again and started to read.
Some time later he sensed someone standing behind him, craning over him. He hastily covered the type-written page, but it was only one of the stewards, offering him an airplane-style breakfast tray, an assortment of sad pastries and unloved rolls in plastic shrouds. Zen waved it away, then reclaimed the cup and asked for coffee. Beyond the window, the flat expanses of the Tiber flood-plain slipped past like a video being fast-forwarded. They were on the new direttissima line by now, the train humming purposefully along at its top speed on the custom-built high-speed track.
Zen read quickly through the rest of the transcript, then laid it on the table, face down, and sighed. Giovanni Grimaldi had been felled in his shower like a beast at the abattoir because he had threatened to reveal the contents of this document, yet Zen had just read it from cover to cover and it meant almost nothing to him.
He turned back to the beginning and read it through once more. Whether Ruspanti had been aware of the tap on his own line, or was concerned about possible eavesdroppers the other end, he had gone to great pains to say nothing of any consequence. About half the calls amounted to little more than requests to be contacted ‘at the usual number’ or ‘in the normal way’. In others, Ruspanti referred to ‘the sum agreed’ or ‘under discussion’, or urged that ‘the measures previously outlined be put into immediate effect’. Only twice did he mention anything more specific. The first instance occurred in the course of the call to the pay-phone in the lobby of the Hotel Torlonia Palace the previous Thursday. His patience had finally run out, Ruspanti said. If ‘Zeppegno’ couldn’t be persuaded to ‘do the decent thing’ by the weekend at the latest, then he would ‘have no alternative but to make public the matter which you know about’.
This might well have some bearing on the circumstances of Ruspanti’s death, given the timing. But as the nature of the secret he threatened to make public was not even hinted at, and the name mentioned was presumably false, it did not amount to very significant evidence. The other call was to the last of the Milan numbers which Zen had tried the night before, but although it sounded an intimate note perceptible even in the unrelievedly literal transcription, its significance remained equally cryptic.
‘Hello?’
‘Ludo! Where are you? Are you coming here?’
‘I’m not in Milan, my love.’
‘Where, then?’
‘I’m… moving around a bit. Here today, gone tomorrow.’
‘Sounds like fun.’
‘In fact I was talking to someone about you just the other day, Ariana. Someone who works for a magazine.’
‘About me?’
‘That’s right. I told him all about your dolls. He sounded very interested. In fact he wants to write an article about them.’
‘Don’t make fun of me, Ludo. It isn’t fair.’
‘I’m not! This is quite serious.’
‘But why would anyone be interested in my dolls?’
‘You’d be amazed, Ariana. So would your brother!’
‘You haven’t told him, have you?’
‘No, I can’t seem to get hold of him. Why don’t you tell him? Tell him to get in touch and let me know what he thinks about the idea. He knows how to contact me, if he wants to.’
‘But when will I see you?’
‘As soon as all this is over.’
‘All what? There’s some problem, isn’t there? I can feel it. What is it, Ludo? Tell me!’
‘Oh nothing. Just the silly games we boys play. Girls are more sensible, aren’t they?’
Zen looked at the window, but the train was running through a tunnel, and all he could see was the reflection of his own features, baffled and haggard. Perhaps a reader more familiar with the details of the case against Ruspanti might glean something more substantial from the transcript. Since someone had been prepared to kill Grimaldi and bribe Zen to obtain the damn thing, there must be some clue hidden there. The reference to ‘dolls’ might be a code of some kind. What would Ruspanti’s mistress be doing playing with dolls? Perhaps Antonio Simonelli would know what it meant.
The roar of the tunnel faded as the train emerged into bright sunshine. A moment later they had crossed the Arno and rejoined the old line running through the outskirts of Florence. Zen replaced the transcript in his briefcase, which he locked and placed on his knee as the train drew into the suburban station of Rinfredi, which it used to avoid the timewasting turn-round at the Florentine terminus of Santa Maria Novella. The stop was a brief one, and by the time he had had a chance to skim La Stampa they were once again under way, along the fast straight stretch to Prato.
‘Good morning, dottore.’
Zen looked up from his newspaper. The voice was both distinctive and familiar, but it still took him a moment to recognize the man standing beside his seat, an umbrella in one hand and a briefcase in the other, gazing down at Zen with a smile of complicity. It was the man who had been in his thoughts just a few minutes earlier, the man he was going to Milan to see, Antonio Simonelli.
‘Have you brought the transcript?’
They had barely settled down in the seats to which Simonelli had led the way. When the magistrate suggested that Zen join him in the next carriage, he had at once agreed. Policemen are accustomed to obeying the instructions of the judiciary, and besides, seeing Simonelli was the reason for Zen’s trip to Milan. This chance meeting — the magistrate had apparently just joined the train at Florence, where he had been attending a meeting — was simply a happy coincidence. Or so it had seemed, until Simonelli mentioned the transcript.
Zen instinctively tightened his grip on the briefcase, which was lying on his knees. The train rounded a curve, and sunlight suddenly streamed in through the window. In the lapel of Simonelli’s jacket, something glimmered. Zen looked more closely. It was a small silver eight-pointed cross.
‘You’re a member?’
The magistrate glanced down as though noticing the insignia for the first time.
‘I am, actually.’
‘Like Ruspanti.’
Simonelli’s laugh had an edge to it.
‘Hardly! Ruspanti was a Knight of Honour and Devotion. You need at least three hundred years of nobility behind you to achieve that. I’m just a simple Donat, the lowest of the low.’
It was only when Zen felt the magistrate’s restraining hand on his wrist that he realized that he had reached for his cigarettes. Simonelli indicated the sign on the window with a nicotine-stained finger.
‘No smoking.’
Zen let the muscles of his eyes unclasp, projecting his point of focus out of the train, beyond the dirt-flecked window with its prohibitory sign and into the landscape beyond. The slanting winter light streaked the narrow gorge of the Bisenzio where road and railway run side by side until the river peters out in the southern flanks of the Apennines. Then the road, largely disused since the motorway was opened, begins the long climb to the pass thousands of feet above, while the railway plunges into the eleven-mile tunnel under the mountains.