Zen tapped the desk where his identification lay. The woman opened her black grained-leather bucket bag and passed over a laminated card with her photograph and an inscription to the effect that the holder was Simonelli, Antonia Natalia, investigating magistrate at the Procura of Milan. Zen nodded and handed it back.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I suppose I must have sounded a bit crazy.’
The woman said nothing, but her expression did not contradict the idea.
‘I’ve had a slight shock,’ Zen explained. ‘On the way here a man fell from the train. I had to help retrieve the body from the tunnel.’
‘That can’t have been very pleasant,’ the magistrate murmured sympathetically.
‘I had been talking to him just a few moments earlier.’
‘It was someone you know, then?’
He looked at her.
‘I thought it was you.’
The woman’s guarded manner intensified sharply.
‘If that was intended as a joke…’ she began.
‘I don’t think the people involved intended it as a joke.’
She eyed him impatiently.
‘You’re speaking in riddles.’
Zen nodded.
‘Let me try and explain. On Wednesday I received a message at the Ministry asking me to call a certain Antonio Simonelli at a hotel in Rome. When I did so, he identified himself as an investigating magistrate from Milan working on a case of fraud involving Ludovico Ruspanti, and asked me to meet him to discuss the circumstances of the latter’s death.’
The woman seemed about to say something, but after a moment she just waved her hand.
‘Go on.’
Zen sat silent a moment, considering how best to do so.
‘At the time I thought he was trying to obtain information off the record which might help him prosecute the case against Ruspanti’s associates. That risked placing me in a rather awkward position. When the Vatican called me in, I was asked to sign an undertaking not to disclose any information which I came by as a result of my investigations. I therefore answered his questions as briefly as possible.’
The woman opened a drawer of her desk and removed a slim file which she opened.
‘Go on,’ she repeated without looking up.
Zen pretended to look at the view for a moment. He decided to make no mention of the transcript of Ruspanti’s phone calls. That was lost for ever, scattered beyond any hope of retrieval by the gale which had sucked it away and strewn it the length of the eleven-mile tunnel. The only thing to do now was to pretend that it had never existed.
‘On the train up here this morning,’ he continued, ‘I was approached by the same man. He asked why I was travelling to Milan. I said I had an appointment with one of his colleagues at the Procura. He must have realized then that the game was up, I suppose. He went off towards the toilets, fused the lights and threw himself out.’
The woman looked steadily at Zen.
‘Describe him.’
‘Burly, muscular. Big moon face, slightly dished. Strong nasal accent, from the Bergamo area, I should say. Smoked panatellas.’
Antonia Simonelli selected a photograph from the file lying open on the desk and passed it to Zen. A paper sticker at the bottom read ZEPPEGNO, MARCO. Zen suppressed a gasp of surprise. There had been so many fakes and hoaxes in the case so far — including the fifty million lire, which had turned out to consist of a thin layer of real notes covering bundles of blank paper — that he had assumed that the names which appeared in the transcript were also pseudonyms. But perhaps Ruspanti had deliberately raised the stakes by mentioning the real name of one of the men he was threatening on a phone he knew to be tapped, making it clear that he was ready to start playing dirty. That would certainly explain why the individual concerned had been desperate to suppress the transcript by any means, including the murder of Giovanni Grimaldi.
Zen handed the photograph back.
‘You know about him, then?’
Antonia Simonelli nodded.
‘I know all about him!’
‘Including whether he is — was — a member of the Order of Malta?’
She looked at him with surprise.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
Zen said nothing. After a moment, the magistrate tapped the keyboard of the laptop computer.
‘Since 1975,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t an aspect of his activities that concerned you?’
She gave a frown of what looked like genuine puzzlement.
‘Only in that it was perfectly typical of him. Joining the Order is something that businessmen like Zeppegno like to do at a certain point. It provides social cachet and range of useful contacts, and demonstrates that your heart is in the right place and your bank account healthy. But I repeat, why do you ask?’
Zen shrugged.
‘He was wearing the badge, on the train. I asked him if he was a member, and he said he was. I just wondered if that was a lie too, like everything else he had told me.’
Antonia Simonelli wagged her finger at him.
‘On the contrary, dottore! Apart from the little matter of his identity, everything he told you was true.’
A smile unexpectedly appeared on the woman’s face, softening her features and providing a brief glimpse of the private person.
‘Antonio Simonelli, indeed!’ she exclaimed. ‘You have to hand it to the old bastard. What a nerve! Supposing we had been in touch before, and you were aware of my gender?’
‘He checked that by suggesting that we had. It was only when I said I didn’t know him — you — that he asked to meet me.’
She sighed.
‘So he’s dead?’
‘Well, the identification still has to be confirmed, of course, but…’
‘Who’s handling the case?’
‘Bologna. That took another half hour to work out. He jumped out right on the border between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. In the end we had to get a length of rope and measure the distance from the body to the nearest kilometre marker.’
‘And there’s no doubt that it was suicide?’
Zen looked away. This was the question he had been asking himself ever since the torch beams picked out the corpse sprawled by the trackside. The circumstances had conspired to prevent anything but the most cursory investigation at the scene. Short of closing the Apennine tunnel, and thus paralysing rail travel throughout Italy, the corpse could not be left in situ while the Carabinieri in Bologna dispatched their scene-of-crime experts. Fortunately there happened to be a doctor travelling on the train who was able to pronounce the victim dead. Zen then carried out a nominal inspection before authorizing the removal of the body. By the time the train reached Bologna, no one had the slightest interest in questioning that they were dealing with a case of suicide. The only remaining mystery was the victim’s identity, since there were no papers or documents on the body.
Zen shook his head.
‘The only person who was anywhere near him when he fell from the train was a woman who had gone to the toilet, and she wouldn’t have had the strength. Anyway, she was a German tourist with no connection with the dead man. No, he must have done it himself. There’s simply no other possibility.’
Antonia Simonelli got up from her desk.
‘I’m sure you’re right, dottore,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I’d come to know Zeppegno quite well, and if you’d asked me, I’d have said that he just wasn’t someone who would ever commit suicide. He thought too highly of himself for that.’
She waved at the file, the photographs, the computer.
‘For the past five years I have been painstakingly assembling a case against a cartel of Milanese businessmen. Zeppegno was typical. His family were provincial bourgeois with aspirations. His father ran an electrical business in a town near Bergamo. By a combination of graft and hard work, Marco gradually built up a chain of household appliance suppliers in small towns across Lombardy. As an individual unit, each of his outlets was modest enough, but taken together they represented a profitable slice of the market.