Calopezzati sat silent and expressionless for over a minute, his body twitching violently at intervals as if stricken by a series of minor strokes. Zen let this process work itself out without comment.
‘You’ll get your sample,’ the other man said at last, ‘but it’s redundant. The dead man was indeed my nephew.’
‘Would you be prepared to comment on how Pietro Calopezzati became Peter Newman?’
‘Possibly. But first things first.’
He opened the leather case and extracted a mass of papers.
‘We’ll go through these in chronological order, with one exception which I’ll get to later.’
He passed the documents to Zen one by one.
‘My birth certificate. Various photographs from my childhood and school years. A sequence of identity cards from the following period, up to the war years, then a different set dating from my work with the servizi, concluding with the one that is currently valid. I think you will agree that all the photographs show a marked likeness, qualified of course by the passage of time. However, I don’t expect you to confirm my identity on that basis alone. As I said, I have withheld one document from the chronological order. It is this.’
He passed Zen a file card bearing the printed heading ‘Partito Fascista Italiano’. The entries below indicated that Roberto Calopezzati was enrolled in the Cosenza section of the party with the rank of caposquadrista, the commander of a squad of Blackshirts. The attached photograph fitted into the now familiar pattern, but there was also a very clear thumbprint.
‘And now for my last trick,’ the man said.
From the leather bag, he produced an ink pad in a tin box and a blank sheet of paper. He opened the pad, rolled his right thumb in the ink and then printed the resulting image on the paper. Zen compared it to the print on the Fascist file card. They were identical.
‘You are satisfied?’ Calopezzati asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Then let us proceed to the sample you need. What exactly does that consist of?’
Zen paused for a moment.
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, barone, but I have the impression that while the news of your nephew’s death was a shock to you, it did not come as a complete surprise.’
‘Only in the sense that I had no idea he’d returned home. For as long as we were in contact, I explicitly advised him never to do so, and in any event not to venture south of Rome. What on earth could have induced him to do such a thing?’
‘I understand that he was employed by an American movie company to act as their mediatore during preparations for a production to be filmed there.’
Calopezzati waved his elegant hand dismissively. His feet must have been elegant too, thought Zen, wondering how they had been severed.
‘That’s just money! He could have found another job.’
‘Perhaps he thought that the risks were by now minimal,’ Zen murmured as though to himself. ‘Perhaps after so many years he had grown nostalgic for his own country. You implied that you lost contact with Pietro at some point. When did that happen?’
‘I don’t recall exactly. At some point in the 1980s. He just stopped writing and phoning, or I did. He wasn’t my child, after all.’
‘But you were responsible for taking him to America?’
‘After my sister died, I became his guardian. This was after the war, the whole country was in chaos. I moved Pietrino in with me in Rome and sent him to school there to learn Italian. He was a wild creature who had been brought up by Ottavia’s entourage of servants, spoke only dialect and didn’t respond well to discipline. Nevertheless, it was clearly my duty to protect him until he came of age, so when I entered the agency and was posted to the embassy in Washington I took him with me. Our ambassador at the time was a family friend and happened to be in a position to call in a favour from the US government in return for some help that we had provided for them. Thus it was arranged for Pietro Ottavio to become an American citizen. All in all, it seemed the best solution to the problem.’
‘Which problem?’
‘The problem of possible reprisals from my family’s numerous enemies.’
‘Were they really that dangerous?’
The man in the wheelchair made another fluent, fluid hand gesture.
‘Who can estimate danger? One of my colleagues made clandestine trips to remote areas of our former colony of Eritrea during its war with Ethiopia and came back with nothing worse than a mild case of gonorrhoea. Another went to see a Washington Redskins game one evening and was beaten to death on his way home because the stupid bastard was too proud to give them his wallet.’
Roberto Calopezzati made his eloquent gesture again.
‘Life is an acquired taste, Signor Zen, but death has mass-market appeal. Sooner or later, we all succumb to its charms. I tried to shield my nephew from them as best I could.’
What sounded like a peal of the thunder that Zen was by now habituated to — although not this early in the day — prevented any further conversation. It turned out to be the roar of a jet taking off from Ciampino, a few kilometres to the north, and obligingly faded away in a few moments.
‘And it would have been an excellent solution,’ Zen commented, ‘if only he hadn’t come back to Calabria and started talking to the locals in fluent dialect.’
‘That marked him down as someone who had been born and raised in the area, but there are plenty of calabresi in the States, God knows. How did his killers discover his identity?’
‘Speaking of that, do you know the identity of his father?’
Roberto sighed.
‘My sister told me that it was a friend of ours named Carlo Sironi. He was a fighter pilot in the war, an utterly irresistible daredevil who was shot down while attacking an Allied bombing sortie over Salerno six months before Pietro was born. He and Ottavia had spent some time together in Naples shortly before, so it’s just possible that she wasn’t lying to me. The truth is that I don’t know and don’t really care. Whoever she might have screwed, Pietro was here and it was my duty to look after him to the best of my ability. Now will you answer my question, Signor Zen? Granted that Pietro was stupid enough to speak the dialect rather than just passing himself off as a dumb American, how could his killers have found out that he was a Calopezzati?’
Zen shot him a keen glance.
‘Are you insulting my intelligence or your own, barone? There is only one possible answer, namely that he himself disclosed the information to someone, almost certainly the shady fixer he had employed to facilitate his business deals. Following your advice, Pietro had set out to become an American. Perhaps he had succeeded only too well. After forty years over there he simply couldn’t conceive that anyone in a backwater like Calabria cared about what might or might not have happened in the years before he was born. But Americans care enormously about any provable antiquity and lineage in their family history, particularly if it involves a title. It’s hardly surprising that he couldn’t resist mentioning to his new acquaintance that he was a member of an Italian baronial family founded back in the mists of time before the first shipload of American pilgrims arrived.’
Calopezzati smiled pallidly.
‘Actually, we’re only late eighteenth century.’
Tom spent much of the morning watching television with Martin Nguyen. He’d been able to hold off moving hotels for twenty-four hours, on the grounds that the police wanted him to perform various legal functions connected with his father’s death, but that morning Nguyen’s limo had shown up to whisk him off to this flashy business location about two miles from the city centre, out in what Italians called the periphery. While he was in the car, Nicola Mantega had phoned to tell him that the world-famous film director Luciano Aldobrandini would be making a surprise appearance on the popular morning TV show Ciao Italia! and that there were rumours that what he was going to say might have a direct impact on the business interests of Tom’s new employer. This news had been duly passed on and both men were now fixated on the screen, Tom’s job being to translate Aldobrandini’s words, in real time as far as possible, although Nguyen was burning a DVD as back-up.