He waved helplessly.
‘All this may well come to nothing, of course. But we owe it to ourselves and to our common heritage to try. Please, return to your employers and tell them what I have told you. Emphasise that samples of the merchandise will be provided for validation under whatever circumstances they may demand. If they show the slightest interest, then I’ll get in touch with my contact as soon as I hear from you. After that, matters should move very quickly.’
Mantega grinned broadly, as though mocking his own fervour.
‘But not a word to your girlfriend, mind. Poor women! They only have one thing to sell, but for us the possibilities are endless.’
A terrible thing had occurred. For the first time in his life that he could recall, rare periods of illness aside, Aurelio Zen couldn’t face the prospect of lunch.
Until now, this quasi-sacred Italian rite had been the high point of his working day, the central pillar that supported the whole edifice. Zen was not greedy, but given that he had to eat anyway he preferred to do so as well as possible. In every single one of his numerous postings all over the country down the years he had always succeeded, after a few days, in tracking down a restaurant or trattoria that satisfied his needs. But not in Cosenza, and the reason was clear. The city was so small that most people went home for lunch, and so far off the tourist trail that there was little or no passing trade. Good restaurants did exist, but they only served dinner and Sunday lunch. Moreover, Natale Arnone’s remark about his being feared had given Zen an uneasy feeling that if he returned to one of his usual haunts the food would not only be unpalatable but one of the staff might have spat in the tomato sauce curdling in his dish of pasta.
Nevertheless, he was hungry and the day was not too hot, so he decided to take advantage of the power which had created that fear to do something that he hadn’t done for years. He called up a car from the pool and had himself driven to the finest gastronomia in town, where he ordered a varied selection of picnic foods, and then to the densely wooded gardens of the Villa Communale up in the old city. He told the driver to return in one hour precisely and wandered off along the path beneath massive chestnut and ilex trees until he found a suitable bench in a patch of sunlight mitigated by the canopy of verdure above, with a glorious panoramic view across the valley of the Crati river to the western slopes of the Sila massif.
For the next half-hour he sat there in perfect solitude, savouring a selection of antipasti, air-cured ham and salami from the mountains before him, a sharp sheep’s cheese, chunks of crusty wholewheat bread baked in a wood-fired oven, and half a bottle of a very tolerable rose. Apart from birdsong, the only sounds were distant honks and hoots from the valley far below him. When his hunger was assuaged, he lit a cigarette — another plus for this establishment — and finished the wine along with the remaining dried tomatoes sott’olio, chewy russet roundels delivering an intensity of flavour which forced Zen to concede that this Aztec import might be good for something after all.
When he had finished, he packed up all the rubbish and deposited it in one of the bins provided by the progressive, centre-left city council, retaining only the plastic beaker he had been given for the wine. This he took to a fountain set in the sheer cliff behind and filled several times with water issuing from a metal tube embedded in the lips of a sculpted Triton, gulping it down with the greatest pleasure. The mythological frieze suggested a blow job gone horribly wrong, but a plaque above it proclaimed that the water was channelled from a natural source inside the peak on which the original Bruttii had founded their city. It was startlingly pure and stone-cold, even at this time of year, and had been issuing forth for countless centuries before that gang of Gothic military tourists had shown up to bury their dead leader somewhere beneath the mingled rivers into which it flowed.
This innocent, even lyrical, thought took the edge off his blissful mood by reminding him of work. The scene was still very pleasant, but it was as if the sun had gone behind a veil of high cirrus, although in point of fact it hadn’t. Earlier that morning, Zen had listened in to the conversation between Tom Newman and Nicola Mantega — courtesy of the electronic devices installed in the latter’s office — concerning the whereabouts of the treasure that had been buried with that Gothic chieftain. Mantega had performed very much as Zen had expected, which is to say in the manner of a third-rate tenor in a provincial opera house. He had neither the range nor the volume, not to mention the subtlety, to tackle really big roles in Rome or Milan, but he could certainly ham it up and belt it out. It remained to be seen whether anything would come of his plan for drawing Giorgio into a trap, but Zen’s only real criticism of it, having nothing better to suggest himself at present, was that it left him feeling trapped too. He longed to take action, but any move he made might ruin everything. There seemed to be nothing to do but wait and then react to events, and this was depressing him enormously.
He was summoned from his reverie by the police driver, who had not only returned at the agreed time but had come on foot to find Zen, who had forgotten all about their arrangement. He got up unwillingly and took a last, long look at the hulking plateau opposite, the perched towns and villages appearing at this distance like quarries slashed into its wooded flanks, the elegant curves of the superstrada striding insolently across the landscape on its stilted viaducts. That thought in turn suggested one action that he could take, and as soon as he returned to the Questura he summoned Natale Arnone.
‘Do I have an accent?’ he asked the young officer.
Arnone looked shifty.
‘Sir?’
‘When I speak, are you conscious of an accent? In other words, could you tell that I wasn’t from around here if you didn’t already know?’
‘Well, sir, the thing is that — ’
‘A simple yes or no will suffice, Arnone.’
‘Then yes. Sir.’
‘Right. I want you to call this number and ask for Signora Maria Arrighi. If she answers, pass the phone to me and get out. If someone else answers, and asks who’s calling, tell him or her that you are a doctor at the hospital and that you need to discuss the results of the signora ’s tests with her. If she’s not at home, find out when she will be. Do not leave a number for her to call back. Got that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Zen did not listen to the ensuing phone call. He walked over to the window and looked out at the mass of the Sila mountains looming over the city to the east. He was now convinced that the origins of the case he was investigating lay there, and perhaps also the solution.
‘ Un momento solo,’ he heard Arnone say behind him.
Zen put his hand over the mouthpiece of the held-out phone.
‘Pull Mirella Kodra off the front-line surveillance on Mantega. It sounds as though he’s starting to have doubts about her.’
Arnone nodded. Zen removed his hand and put the receiver to his ear.
‘Signora Arrighi, this is Aurelio Zen speaking. I need to see you tomorrow.’
‘Ah, that’s difficult!’
Zen tried to visualise the room that Maria was in, a squalid cube lit by a shrill bare bulb beneath which a swarm of flies circled endlessly, and whose walls had even better ears than those installed in Nicola Mantega’s office.
‘One of my friends died last night and I’m helping with the arrangements,’ Maria went on. ‘I can’t just drop all that now and say I have to go into the city to see my doctor. It would surprise the people here and cause comment. Do you understand, dottore?’
‘Perfectly. And please allow me to offer my condolences. When is the funeral?’
‘In a few days. Benedicta had relatives abroad. They will need time to get here.’
Zen grunted.
‘Obviously I have no wish to intrude at such a painful moment, but if you were prepared to meet me tomorrow morning, I have an idea to make such a meeting possible.’