Once in his office, he phoned the magistrate who had been appointed to oversee the investigation of the original presumed kidnapping and who was now so beside himself with delight at finding himself in charge of a gruesome, high-profile homicide that he had given Zen his mobile phone number. After the usual courtesies, Zen explained that he wished to file a request for an arrest warrant on one of the suspects, if the signor giudice could find a moment to receive him. The judge judiciously observed that there was no time like the present — or at least in an hour, when he would be at the Palace of Justice. Zen summoned Arnone.
‘We’re going to take Mantega,’ he told his subordinate. ‘It’s a little sooner than I would ideally have liked, but I was put under a lot of pressure at headquarters yesterday. They badly want something they can feed to the media to show that we’re on the job. It will also free up all the people who have been shadowing him. Given the way the situation appears to be evolving, I may well need them for other duties.’
‘Very good.’
‘Now listen, this is important. I want the arrest to be made as publicly as possible, for instance on the street or while he’s at lunch, and I want you to handle it. If you can arrange for reporters and photographers from the local television and press to arrive fortuitously at about the same time, so much the better.’
‘ Benissimo, capo.’
‘Oh, by the way, did anything come of that business about Giorgio ordering in a construction team from Vibo Valentia?’
‘Following your instructions, an officer was dispatched to the assembly point on the autostrada to observe events and take photos, but I haven’t debriefed her yet. I’ll make enquiries and get back to you.’
‘Let’s take care of Mantega first. I’m off to get the warrant. After that it’s up to you, but bear in mind what I said about it being a high-profile arrest. I want word of this to get around like a forest fire with a gale behind it. Understand?’
On his way out of the building, Zen caught sight of an old woman seated on the long, shiny and very hard bench placed in the entrance hall of the Questura for the use of supplicants seeking an official document or permit for one of the numerous activities for which such papers are mandatory. Zen was about to pass by, but then, recalling what Arnone had told him on the phone the day before, he stopped and went over to her.
‘Are you being looked after, signora?’
The woman eyed him with an air of determination amounting to defiance. She looked as shrivelled as a raisin and as hard as a nut, and clearly wasn’t going to be placated or put off her stride by anyone.
‘I want to speak to the chief of police,’ she said.
‘I am he.’
The woman looked at him again, as if for the first time.
‘Yes, I suppose you are,’ she conceded grudgingly.
‘And who are you, signora?’
‘ Sono una creatura. A person. My name is Maria Stefania Arrighi.’
‘Ah, yes. You came here yesterday, didn’t you?’
She nodded.
‘They told me you were away.’
‘I was. But why do you want to speak to me? I’m extremely busy this morning. If it’s not an urgent matter…’
The woman shrugged.
‘It may be urgent. It’s certainly important. To me, at least.’
Zen weighed this up.
‘I won’t be free until after lunch, signora, but I promise to see you some time today.’
‘Then I shall wait.’
‘That bench looks very uncomfortable. Let’s make an appointment for three o’clock. I’ll leave instructions for you to be shown straight up to my office. In the meantime you can do a bit of shopping, have a bite to eat…’
His voice tailed away.
‘I shall wait here,’ the woman said.
It took Zen less than an hour to obtain the arrest warrant, which was well below par for that procedure. As he walked back to the Questura, his mobile rang. It was Lucio, the technician at the police laboratory in Rome whom he had selected to analyse Roberto Calopezzati’s DNA sample, and then compare the results with those from the corpse of Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati, a.k.a. Peter Newman.
‘I’m glad to see that you still have a lot of clout at the Ministry,’ Lucio said, ‘but next time around would you mind not using it to rough us up? Three of our best people got dragged in to work with me all night on these tests.’
‘That’s your answer. It wasn’t my clout but panic on the top floor. This gaudy little murder, which would normally get buried away on the Cronaca pages, is suddenly front-page news. And it’s not being handled as one of those condescending “Made in Calabria” stories but as a “What have we come to?” guilt piece. Anyway, do you have a positive result?’
‘I wouldn’t have phoned otherwise.’
‘So there’s a definite relationship?’
There was a pause at the other end.
‘Between what?’
‘For God’s sake, Lucio! You may have been up all night, but I haven’t had that much sleep either. Between the individual whose DNA sample I gave you yesterday and the other whose DNA profile you also have in your hands.’
‘Oh. In that sense, no.’
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘I mean there is no correspondence at all.’
‘But you said the results were positive!’
‘Technically, they were. Sometimes matters are not so definitive, depending on the age of the sample, possible contamination and so on. But here there is no doubt whatsoever. The two subjects possess utterly different genetic profiles.’
‘There is no possibility that one of them could be the son of the other’s sister?’
‘Absolutely not. They are quite definitely unrelated by blood in any way.’
There was a long silence.
‘That was the result you were expecting, wasn’t it?’ Lucio put in at last.
It was a stiff test, but Zen rose to the occasion.
‘Of course, Lucio! You’ve confirmed my hypothesis. Many thanks.’
He put the phone down and continued on his way, his eyes blank.
Enough was enough, thought Emanuele Pancrazi, gazing at the rapturous light streaming in through the bedroom window. Emanuele had just turned seventeen, his soul was gaping open like a mussel to filter every last drop of life on offer and only a few days remained before he would have to return home to school and everyday reality. It was time to assert himself.
Thus far, Emanuele had indulged the agenda lovingly crafted and managed by his father. This governed every aspect of their month together, mostly in the form of day trips to churches and castles, long treks in the mountains and painstaking guided tours of the supposed sites of ancient Greek cities which in practice had vanished almost entirely. The day before had been devoted to the dull and seemingly endless badlands of the Marchesato di Crotone, unenlivened as usual by his father’s commentary on the historic system of sharecropping on the vast estates which had once covered the entire region, generating equally vast unearned profits for heartless absentee landlords such as the Calopezzati family.
In some dim way, prefiguring a wisdom that he didn’t really want just yet, Emanuele realised that his visits to Cosenza were as difficult for his father as they were for him, if not more so. His parents had been separated for ten years, and he had long ago stopped wetting the bed and weeping in corners. He was young and tough and sanely egoistic, but he knew that his mother still suffered from the break-up, not because she missed his dad, as he once had, so badly, but because she felt guilty for the pain that they had both caused him. He had to assume that his father felt the same sense of culpability, and that his gruelling programme of educational experiences was not in fact a deliberate bid to wreck his son’s visit but an attempt to provide a regime of constant activity, excluding any possibility of embarrassing hiatuses when the big dark questions that lurked in the background might assert themselves and demand to be addressed.