‘My consultants pointed that out. Plus that in a sprawling flood plain like this the river-bed will have shifted around over the centuries, and that the deforestation of the surrounding mountains a century ago has completely screwed the hydrological aspects of the situation, the amount of water run-off and hence the height of the rivers. So a lot of their data is highly indeterminate. But there are other factors involved. One is that the men who originally constructed this thing were all killed afterwards to keep the location secret.’
Phil Larson grinned nervously.
‘Not a company tradition, I hope?’
Martin ignored the comment.
‘But if the site had been within view of the city of Cosenza, then to preserve the secret all the citizens would have had to be killed too, and there is no record of such a massacre.’
‘We’re pretty well out of sight of the city here,’ Larson pointed out.
‘Yeah, but back then the main road from Rome down to Sicily ran right along this side of the valley. Anyone using it would have spotted what was going on and maybe come back later to check it out. So bearing all this in mind, your brief is to look in the upper valleys of the rivers that splay out southwards from here.’
Larson frowned.
‘But you said that we were looking for the foundations of a building. Why would anyone choose to build there? Here on the banks I can maybe see, but in the middle of a river? That’s just crazy!’
Martin glanced at Tom, but he didn’t appear to be paying any attention.
‘It’s a tomb,’ he explained to Phil. ‘The people who built it had this religious thing about the dead person resting undisturbed for ever, so beneath a river was perfect. No one except them knew where it was, so there was no way it was ever going to get dug up except by pure chance. Anyway, what do you care? You’ve been given your instructions.’
‘Well, like I said, I don’t have charts for that…’
‘You’ve also said you’re using visual navigation. Higher up, those rivers are hemmed in by the mountains, so their course can’t have changed much. Start where they join up and follow each of them up to the five-hundred metre level. Does the pilot understand English?’
‘Not so as you’d notice. I just point to the strips I want to cover every day.’
‘Go and give him his new orders. My assistant will translate.’
Outside on the concrete forecourt, the pilot was checking his machine over with the meticulous attention of a man who knows that his life depends on it. Phil Larson briefed him on the new search plan, pausing from time to time for Tom to turn it into Italian. He added that the boss was visiting, so to make a good impression they should look busy and get going as soon as possible, then returned to the office where Martin Nguyen was waiting.
Tom stayed where he was. He’d been fascinated by planes ever since he was a boy, when a friend of his father’s had taken him for a ride in a Cessna out over Marin County and done some freaky stuff that had scared him stiff and left an indelible memory. He half-hoped that this pilot might offer a repeat performance, but the Italian seemed preoccupied with other matters.
‘I don’t even have a chart of those valleys,’ he complained to Tom. ‘Not that it would help much. They’re always stringing new electricity lines across them that aren’t marked. And then there are the old pulleys they used to use to bring goods across to the far side from the road. They’re abandoned, so they’re not on the chart, but half of them are still there, sagging down just about exactly the altitude we’ll be flying at.’
Tom nodded sympathetically.
‘Anyway, the whole thing’s pointless,’ the pilot went on. ‘If these Americans want to find the right scenery for this film they’re making, they could do it much cheaper from the ground.’
Tom noted that the Italian’s resentment and contempt were markedly increased by the idea that his employers were throwing their money away so stupidly.
‘Apparently they’re looking for something that’s buried under the river,’ he said, in an instinctive attempt to defend his compatriots. ‘I guess they want to use it for a location in the movie.’
‘Under the river? What kind of thing?’
Tom shrugged.
‘Some tomb.’
The pilot continued to stare at him for so long that Tom began to think he must have offended him in some way. Then he smiled wearily.
‘ Ma certo,’ he replied in a tone of contempt. ‘ La famosa tomba d’Alarico.’
It was another perfect morning in Cosenza. Sunlight sidled in through the window, stripping away the acceptable surface of things to reveal the tawdry substance beneath. Seated at his desk, head in hands, Aurelio Zen sensed its intrusive presence as a glow between his fingers. He had been awake since shortly after four o’clock, following a phone call from the Questura under his standing instructions to be summoned at any hour of the day or night in the event of any significant development in the case. By then it was too late to do anything. What had happened had happened, and it was arguably all his fault. Police operations went wrong all the time, but this was different.
For years now, Zen had been living in a world where reality seemed to have been drained of all substance. Once upon a time, and he could still remember that time, authentic experience had been the default position, as unremarkable as gravity or the weather. Now, though, the authentic sounded a melancholy blue note as it receded, a Doppler effect induced by the speed of cultural change, as though sadly waving goodbye. There were, however, still exceptions to this general rule. Zen’s experience was that for every ten kilometres you travelled between Rome and Cosenza, you moved back another year into the past, finally arriving in the mid-1950s. Authenticity was not as yet under serious threat here, and in some way that he couldn’t have explained, that slewed the ethical equations too. What would have been good enough elsewhere simply wouldn’t do here, back in the lost realm of the real.
The surgeons at Cosenza hospital were attempting to sew the severed portion of Francesco Nicastro’s tongue back on to the root, but it was uncertain whether he would ever have any feeling or control over it. His father Antonio, the sole wage-earner, was awaiting his turn for an operation to restructure his knee, but it appeared unlikely that he would be able to work again. In short, whatever the outcome of the case, the family was ruined. Zen had spent an hour interrogating the two detectives who had questioned the boy in the first place, but both Corti and Caricato swore that Francesco had been interviewed alone and that neither of them had told anyone but their immediate superiors what the outcome had been. In the end, Zen believed them, but someone must have talked. Zen was privately inclined to think that Francesco’s brother might have mentioned it to a friend — perhaps the third boy who had been playing near the path when il morto appeared — in all innocence, as a way of demonstrating what an idiot his sibling was and thereby bolstering his own status.
Natale Arnone entered with yet another coffee and some pastries. He also informed Zen that the two Americans who had been instructed to appear that morning had arrived half an hour before, adding that the older one didn’t seem too happy about being kept waiting.
‘Oh, and Signor Mantega was on the phone again last night. Used the same public box as he did before, the one that’s now tapped. Two calls. One was to a mobile phone, no reply. The other to a landline that’s been traced to a house in San Giovanni in Fiore.’
Zen looked up wearily.
‘And?’
‘A man answered. Mantega asked to speak to someone called Giorgio. The man said he wasn’t there. Mantega left instructions to have Giorgio contact him. I was just wondering if you wanted any immediate action taken.’