He looked up at the young officer.
‘To tell the truth, Arnone, I don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But of course I didn’t say that.’
‘No, sir. And I didn’t hear it.’
‘ Bravo.’
Outside the unopenable pane of toughened glass, a continuous raft of cloud seemingly as solid as concrete stretched away featurelessly as far as the eye could see.
‘It sounds suspiciously as though Mantega’s cooperating,’ Zen remarked finally. ‘On the other hand, I wouldn’t put it past him to try and do some private enterprise on the side. I also have a feeling that the thunderstorm is about to burst, and while my reasoning faculty may be falling apart I still trust my intuition, or experience, or whatever you want to call it. What else have I to count on?’
It was a rhetorical question, but Arnone answered it.
‘Fear.’
Zen looked at him but did not reply. Arnone coughed in an embarrassed way.
‘If you will permit the observation, sir, I think you underestimate yourself. My father always said, “ La paura guarda le vigne, non la siepe.” Fear guards the vineyard, not the hedge. And I know that you are feared.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, sir. Because, with all due respect, you’re not one of us. So no one knows what you might decide to do next. Sir.’
Zen nodded.
‘That’s logical. To be honest, there are times when I terrify myself.’
Given the constraints on Tom’s time, his date had suggested a place in Rende. She’d also told him that her name was Mirella, but hadn’t asked for his.
The initial call had come while Tom was stuck out on the fringes of town in the yard of a company that rented construction equipment, clarifying contractual details between the supercilious jerk in charge and an increasingly impatient Martin Nguyen. He couldn’t talk right then, but had promised to call Mirella back as soon as possible.
‘Who was that?’ demanded Nguyen.
‘Oh, just another bureaucratic thing they need me to do before they can release my dad’s cadaver.’
‘Bullshit,’ Nguyen remarked succinctly, but didn’t follow up the comment. He’d been looking kind of unwell ever since fetching his boss in from the airport, not nearly as feisty as usual and occasionally clutching his stomach and crunching down pills.
When they finally got back to the hotel, the head honcho — some Microsoft millionaire named Jake — was still sleeping off his jet lag. Nguyen went over to six short but brawny guys who were lounging around the lobby as if expecting to get thrown out any minute. They looked Italian but didn’t speak it, so Tom’s services were not required when Nguyen took them off to a conference room he’d booked for their briefing. Apparently one of them understood English and would pass on Nguyen’s instructions to the others in their own language, which might as well have been Arabic for all that Tom could make any sense of it. Which left him free to call Mirella back.
The fact that she’d got in touch at all astonished him. He’d assumed that the striking young woman that he’d twice made a clumsy attempt to hit on had no interest in him whatsoever. She certainly hadn’t provided him with the slightest encouragement on the occasions when they’d met, purely by chance, and he had more or less forgotten her, except he hadn’t. And now here she was saying she could see him for a couple of hours that evening if he was free.
Strictly speaking, of course, he wasn’t. Martin Nguyen had given him firm instructions to be on call and ready to leave at five minutes’ notice, as a result of which he had already turned down Nicola Mantega’s invitation to a working dinner that evening to discuss what Tom knew about the apparent discovery of Alaric’s tomb. On the other hand, he’d gathered from Nguyen that the next stage of the operation wasn’t going to happen until well after dark, and hadn’t even been told what it was or whether his presence was required. So as long as he could get back to the hotel quickly if Nguyen summoned him, there was no reason to sit twiddling his thumbs in his room when he could be romancing — what a beautiful name! — Mirella.
They’d agreed to meet at seven-thirty, but Tom got there twenty minutes early to check the place out. A bank of thick thunderclouds squatted on the city like one of those unimaginably huge alien spaceships in that movie. A sense of oppression was thick on the ground. The venue turned out to be a garish pizzeria alongside an intersection just a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. It looked borderline okay, and the alternatives were even more uninspiring, as indeed was the whole area. There were the vestiges of a straggling roadside town now bypassed by the autostrada, but it mostly consisted of dormitory apartment blocks whose commuting owners ate at home, and bars and fast food outlets for students from the 1970s university slab stretching away like the Great Wall of China across the line of hills to the west.
When Tom arrived, there were a dozen students there, hanging out rather than actually eating, their voices struggling to be heard above a barrage of rap music sweetened by Italian vowels. The decor was upscale public lavatory, only with bleached-out halogen lighting, mirrors just about everywhere except the floor, and clunky plastic tables and chairs in primary colours like a play-set for giant toddlers. That was okay. Tom had already figured out that there were few things to touch Italian taste at its best and none to equal it at its worst.
He ordered a beer and found himself wondering what Mirella was going to wear. The two outfits he had seen her in so far had been so different that they didn’t provide much of a clue. In fact, thinking back, Tom realised that almost everything had been different on each occasion: the style of her hair, the make-up she wore, even her body language. It was almost as if the person he had seen on those two occasions had not in fact been the same but a pair of identical twins, structurally similar but each with a completely different personality. He smiled to himself at the absurd thought. Anyway, identical twins might just about be possible, but triplets would be pushing it, so pretty soon he’d get a take on who she really was — or rather, who she wanted him to think she was. Tom found this final insight rather disturbing. I’d never have had an idea like that back home, he thought. This place is complexing me. He wasn’t sure whether he was entirely comfortable with that.
The answer to his question about her appearance proved to be yet another enigma, so different from either of her previous personae that Tom didn’t even recognise her until she sat down at his table. Beneath a bulky blue padded coat she was wearing a prim suit in a clashing shade of muddy brown. No make-up, no jewellery, her hair drawn fiercely back and bunched in a tight bun. All in all, she looked like a small-town dental hygienist dolled up for a tough job interview in the big city. Guess I’m not going to get laid tonight, thought Tom, although under the circumstances there wouldn’t have been any chance of that anyway.
‘You seem surprised to see me,’ Mirella said.
Tom didn’t have a ready answer, so he just smiled.
‘Now then,’ she went on, ‘you told me your name on the phone but I didn’t understand it.’
‘It’s Tom. Thomas. Tommaso.’
‘Tommaso.’
He loved the way she lingered on the double consonant, caressing it with her lips as though reluctant to let it go.
‘ Un bel nome.’
A surly servitor appeared at their table. Mirella ordered some kind of pizza. Tom said he would have the same.
‘So you’re staying out here?’
Tom nodded.
‘Just around the corner. The Rende International Residence.’
‘Oh, you must be rich! I’ve only been there once, when one of my friends got married. They held the wedding reception there. Isn’t it very expensive?’
‘Well, I’m not paying. I’ve been hired by a friend of my father’s who’s working for an American film company. They’re planning to make a movie here, only he doesn’t speak Italian so he needs me to translate for him. Not my normal line of work, but you know what they say — another day, another dolore. I mean dollaro.’