When they had eaten, Anton lit a small cheroot.
‘So, the photographs.’
He got up and went over to the stairs leading to the bedrooms. Zen’s driver appeared at the table.
‘Ready when you are, capo.’
Zen relaxed into Italian as if into a warm lavender-scented bath. He dug out his battered pack of Nazionali and lit up.
‘Calm down, Bruno. I’m not quite finished yet.’
‘ Benissimo. Only it’s just starting to snow. We should be able to make it down the mountain if we start soon, otherwise…’
He shrugged expressively.
‘I’ll be as quick as possible,’ Zen told him.
‘I’ll go and get the car warmed up.’
Bruno walked off back to his table as Anton reappeared, holding an envelope which he placed on the table between them. It contained four colour prints which Zen looked through one by one without saying anything. Indeed, it was difficult to find anything to say. The pictures looked like reproductions of modern art, all blobs and scurries, masses and evasions of colour and form whose presumed significance could only be their apparent lack thereof.
‘Rudi didn’t have much time, and his camera is not so good,’ Anton explained through a cloud of cigar smoke. ‘But it is digital, so I’ve enclosed a diskette with the files.’
‘Files?’
‘In case you want to do an enhancement. They’re compressed, of course. You’ll need to unzip them.’
Zen extracted a black plastic rectangle from the envelope. He nodded sagely and puffed on his cigarette. Yet another foreign language. Compression and unzipping he could more or less understand, but what sort of magic was involved in an enhancement?
‘This one, for instance,’ the Austrian added, selecting one of the prints and turning it the right way up. Zen suddenly realized that it showed the outflung wreck of the corpse lying broken on the floor of the blast pit. It was dressed only in a shirt and slacks. The feet appeared to be bare. The face was turned away, but the right arm lay outstretched across the jagged rocks. Anton pointed to some markings just above the elbow.
‘It might be significant to know exactly what this is,’ he said. ‘But such details will naturally have emerged during the postmortem examination.’
Was there a hint of irony in his tone? It was hard to tell with the Austrians. They liked to present themselves as slow, cosy, complacent country bumpkins, but their empire had produced some of the most incisive thinkers and artists in Europe. Zen called the waitress and settled the bill.
‘Well, thank you for your cooperation, Herr Redel. I hope you have good walking tomorrow.’
‘It looks like it will be cross-country skiing with this weather. But they rent langenlauf equipment here, so either way I shall enjoy myself.’
The two men shook hands. Then Zen looked his guest straight in the eye.
‘What do you think really happened?’
Anton Redel looked understandably confused by this question.
‘Well, of course I am not a policeman. But if this had occurred somewhere else, say in the elevator shaft of an abandoned city warehouse, I’d probably suspect that others were involved.’
‘Others?’
‘Some gangsters, perhaps. Drugs or some such thing. They kill the man and then hide his body in the shaft. Or they just throw him down. Maybe the corpse will never be found. Even if it is, it may be too late to identify him.’
He gave Zen a charming, thick-lipped Austrian smile.
‘But of course this is ridiculous! There are many dangers up here in the mountains, but criminal organizations are not among them.’
Outside the insulating double doors, the snow was now descending in earnest frothy flakes that were deceptively insubstantial as they floated into the lights of the hostel, but already lay several centimetres deep on its concrete forecourt. Bruno had drawn the marked police Alfa right up to the entrance. Zen got into the back seat and they set off.
To Zen’s relief, Bruno was not one of those police drivers for whom the point of the exercise was to validate their virility. Indeed, for the first thirty minutes or so, when the snow was still heavy and the road treacherous, he was almost excessively cautious as they negotiated the frequent reverse curves and steep gradients in very poor visibility. After that, the snow gradually turned to sleet and eventually a slushy rain, the surface reverted to a reliable shiny black, and they were able to speed up.
In the back, Zen relaxed, dozy after so much unaccustomed exercise and fresh air, but also taunted by the question which Anton Redel had no doubt intended merely as a courtesy. Did he feel that his visit had been worthwhile? The honest answer was ‘No’, but this was in keeping with every other aspect of this case which had been tossed into his lap, he suspected, more than anything else as a sop to give him the illusion of being gainfully employed.
‘You might want to take a look at these,’ was how the departmental head had put it when he handed Zen a bunch of files at the termination of his weekly briefing at the headquarters of the Interior Ministry on the Viminale hill in Rome. ‘They’re mostly quite routine, I think, but it would be valuable to have any input or suggestions you might have to offer.’
Zen had accepted the files in the same spirit, and taken them back that evening to the apartment in Lucca that he shared with Gemma, the new woman in his life. There were eight in all, the very number confirming Zen’s suspicions that none of this was intended to be taken too seriously. Most of the cases indeed appeared to be fairly routine. The exception was the one that he had brought with him to the Alto Adige.
This already had a certain curiosity value based on its provenance. Rather than being forwarded to police headquarters in Rome by one of the Ministry’s provincial questure, it had been obtained ‘through channels’ from the carabinieri, who were handling the case. When Zen made a few phone calls to query various aspects of the report, his interest immediately quickened. He had done this often enough in the past, and was familiar with the standard response: a mixture of obscurantism, grudging disclosures and resentful passing off of the intruder to subordinates, the officer who had been called having more pressing matters to attend to. This was standard procedure, and he had frequently employed it himself when the boot was on the other foot.
This time, though, things went quite differently. Zen’s call was immediately transferred to the officer in charge, a Colonel Miccoli, who evinced an almost embarrassing readiness to address any and all questions that his esteemed colleague might have. Of course Zen wasn’t wasting his time! Full disclosure and cooperation between the two forces of order was of the essence to effective law enforcement in a modern democracy. ‘ Mi casa es su casa,’ quoted the colonel, adding that he had spent several months liaising with the Spanish anti-terrorist squad back in the nineties over some Basque suspects who had allegedly spent several years in hiding in Sardinia.
He had some interesting and amusing anecdotes to tell about that episode, but almost nothing to say about the case concerning which Zen had called. Everything was in limbo at the moment and it would be injudicious to draw any premature conclusions. The body had been removed from the tunnel complex and flown by helicopter to the central hospital in Bolzano. Yes, a post-mortem examination had been performed, but the results appeared to be inconclusive. No, it had not been possible to positively identify the victim as yet. Misadventure seemed the most likely cause of death, but foul play had not entirely been ruled out. In short, it was a question of time, and at worst the affair might turn out to be one of those minor mysteries associated with a mountainous district whose rugged remoteness naturally attracted — how should he put it? — amateurs of extreme sports and thrill-seekers of all kinds. He would of course pass on any further details should they become available. It had been a pleasure to have the opportunity of discussing the case with Dottor Zen. Not at all, on the contrary, the pleasure had all been his.