‘Yeah, go for it!’ Martin yelled. ‘Stick it to him! Ram it up his ass till he bleeds! Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him!’
Natale Arnone reappeared in Zen’s office two minutes before his deadline expired. He had phoned in earlier to report that the fingerprints of the corpse found at Altomonte matched those of Peter Newman and that the American’s son had left his hotel at about two o’clock that afternoon but had not yet returned. The rest of Arnone’s afternoon and early evening had been spent tracking down any surviving members of the Calopezzati family, as well as the individual named on Pietro Ottavio’s birth certificate as the father. The latter had turned out to be a dead end.
‘I checked with our central database in Rome as well as those for the civil authorities of every region in the country. The name Azzo Plecita does not appear in any of them. Only a fraction of the earlier paper archives have been digitalised, of course, but it did occur to me that la baronessa might just have made it all up.’
‘Why would she do that?’
Arnone looked pleased by Zen’s interest in his theory.
‘Well, we know that she never married, so the child was evidently illegitimate. Ottavia’s lawyer could easily have forged a document purporting to be a sworn declaration from the imaginary father to the effect that he wished his son to be named Calopezzati. That and a few bribes or threats to the clerk in Spezzano would have done it.’
A vague, dreamy look came over Zen’s face. He was silent for a full thirty seconds, then slapped his palm on the desk so hard it made Arnone start.
‘Azzo Plecita!’ he cried. ‘Calopezzati! It’s an anagram of her own name. She wanted to produce a surrogate heir while keeping the whole thing in the family and excluding outsiders.’
‘We can be a bit like that down here,’ Arnone admitted.
‘So what did you find out about the baronial bastard farmers?’
‘That took longer, because I had to search the local paper trail as well. The net result is that the only surviving members with any relation to the Calopezzati are a stepdaughter last heard of thirty years ago and a half-cousin who may or may not have emigrated to Australia.’
‘What about the brother, Roberto?’
‘It appears that he had strong connections with the Fascist movement back in the 1930s and later went on to fight in the colonial wars, Greece, Albania and back here after the Allied invasion. After that his name disappears from the records. It may well be that he was killed but never identified.’
Zen dismissed his subordinate and then sat quite silent and still, staring at the wall, until Giovanni Sforza walked in and suggested that they repair to a bar.
‘Why are you working overtime?’ Zen asked him as they walked downstairs.
‘It’s all thanks to that excellent imitation of our allies in Iraq that your men put on earlier this evening. My phone’s been ringing for the past three hours, everyone from the mayor down to the media wanting to know what the hell we think we’re doing. It was evidently a very effective operation, Aurelio, but given that I’ve been covering for you until now, might I ask what it actually achieved?’
They crossed the street and entered the only decent drinking hole in the area, a clumsy, clunky attempt to clone steely Milanese chic in these inhospitable climes.
‘I don’t know yet,’ Zen replied. ‘It was a matter of tossing a large rock into the pond and seeing what rose to the surface. I certainly wasn’t expecting any of the townspeople to talk, but as it happened someone did say something. A boy of nine, who on the day when the murder took place was playing with some friends close to the path that the victim must have taken.’
Zen ordered a beer, Sforza an expensive malt whisky. The barman poured him a scrupulously measly measure.
‘ Cosi poco?’ thundered Sforza, in a tone that made Zen realise that there was another side to his friend, and one which quite possibly accounted for the fact that he had got where he was. The barman also took the hint and filled the glass close to the brim. The two men sat down at a marble-topped table in the arid interior, which at least had the advantage of not sporting any video game consoles, television screens or recorded music.
‘So what did this boy of yours have to say?’ asked Sforza, blatantly lighting a cigarette.
‘At first he repeated the standard line about seeing and hearing nothing, but he hadn’t quite mastered the knack of improvising innocuous details to support that during follow-up questioning. Corti and Caricato were in charge and it sounds as if they did a good job. They weren’t rough with the kid, just listened to his story and elicited clarifying information. So Francesco and his friends had been playing up in the waste ground above the town? Yes. And they’d got there by the track which led up to Altomonte Vecchia? Yes. But they hadn’t seen anyone else on the track? No. After some more innocuous questions about how long they spent playing and so on, and determining that they had returned home by the same path, Corti quite casually mentioned that in that case Francesco must have noticed the bright red luxury car that was parked just at the point where the path joined the road. The boy frowned. No, it was grey, he said.’
Zen laughed.
‘Well, of course, they took him apart after that!’
Giovanni Sforza shook his head.
‘Sorry, Aurelio, I’m not as bright as Corti. We already knew that Newman was there. Who cares what colour his car was?’
‘Because it’s the first tiny crack in the wall of silence. Obviously everyone in the town knew that the car had been there and that it was subsequently removed by the person or people who murdered Newman. Moreover, it indicates the modus operandi, which was a very odd one. It looks as if Newman arrived alone in the Lancia and then voluntarily walked up the long, arduous track to the spot where his body was found, barefoot and wearing the ritual garb of a corpse laid out for burial. And all this in plain view of the people in the town, even though an alternative and much more secluded route exists, the one taken by that French tourist. Doesn’t that suggest anything to you?’
Sforza shrugged impatiently.
‘Only that the people concerned were crazy. Kidnappers are in it for the money. It’s just business to them. They may occasionally kill their hostage if negotiations break down or if the family tries to lure them into an ambush, but in this case they hadn’t even tried to get in touch. Why would they destroy a potentially very profitable piece of merchandise without even putting it on the market?’
Zen nodded noncommittally and gathered up his things.
‘Those are valid questions, Giovanni, but we shouldn’t let them mesmerise us. I don’t believe that whoever did this was crazy in the vulgar sense. The key to resolving these apparent oddities is to stop regarding them as odd, because the perpetrator almost certainly doesn’t. It all makes complete sense to him, so it might be helpful to try to see the whole ghastly business in the same way that he sees it, as a deeply deliberate and meaningful performance. The question then becomes, what was the significance of this performance and for what audience was it intended?’
‘Well, I’ll leave all that to you, Aurelio. I haven’t run a case in years. Out of training.’
He sipped his drink reflectively.
‘To change the subject, how are you adjusting to life in Calabria?’
Zen waved vaguely.
‘It depresses me. Not so much the gory details like this atrocity. It’s more the sense of a generalised and ineradicable sadness about the place, despite its natural beauty. In fact, that just makes it worse. To tell you the truth, I’m surprised you can stick it here. I can’t wait for whatever his name is to get healthy enough to take over the seat I’m keeping warm for him.’
‘The word is that you may not have to wait very much longer,’ Sforza commented. ‘As for why I can stick it here, the reason is quite simply that I am ambitious. Not an attractive quality, perhaps, but I can’t help it. I’m only too well aware of the thing you’re talking about, that pervasive tristezza, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it interfere with my career plans.’