Another silence.
‘How long have you got to go?’ asked Zen.
‘Three months and thirteen days.’
Zen nodded.
‘From a professional point of view, I think it might be advisable to make a special exception in your case.’
Bruno peered back at him in the rear-view mirror.
‘You can do that?’
‘I’ll try. Provided you get me back to the valley, safe and sound, and by nine at the latest.’
‘You want the station, right?’
‘No, I’ve changed my mind. Drop me at the hospital. I’ll take a cab from there.’
V
Night slipped past the open window at a steady one hundred and forty kilometres per hour. Chips and shards of light, some isolated, others roughly clustered, were borne past on its current at an apparent speed relative to their distance from the train. Parallax, thought Zen, although his immediate memory was of twirled sparklers, wire with a fizzy firework coating that created illusionary circles and whorls of solid light in the darkness. That and fireflies. Whatever had happened to fireflies?
By now they were quite far down the valley, past Rovereto. The snow had finally petered out at about the same point as the everyday use of the German language, but early that evening in Bolzano it had at once been clear that Bruno’s warning about getting down from the mountains in time had not been just a pretext for cutting short a long day. When they finally reached the city, after one distinctly scary moment involving an uncontrolled skid and an oncoming truck, the streets were already lightly covered, while huge but seemingly weightless flakes were falling so densely as to make driving almost as difficult as in fog. In the end, Bruno had insisted on remaining at the hospital while Zen did his business there and then driving him to the station, on the basis that taxis would be impossible to find and that it was too far to walk.
‘I can’t wait to get out of here,’ he’d added, seemingly casually. ‘And you shouldn’t hang around either, dottore. They’ll get the snowploughs out on the main streets, but it all takes time and you have that train down south to catch…’
‘What’s your surname, Bruno?’ Zen had remarked equally casually.
‘Nanni, capo.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
In the event he was back at the car in just over forty minutes, and they reached the station with almost an hour to spare. The train on which Zen had a reserved sleeper was waiting on one of the central platforms, but the locomotive had not yet been coupled up and the carriages were all dark and locked. He went to the station buffet and ate a toasted cheese and ham sandwich with some excellent beer, followed by a glass of local kirsch that was so good that he bought a small bottle as a souvenir for Gemma. Then he walked along the station building to the door marked Servizio.
In the dense warmth within, half a dozen men in railway uniform were smoking, chatting and playing cards. By a combination of implied threat, backed up by his police identification, and overt bribery, backed up by his wallet, he persuaded one of the sleeping-car attendants to walk with him across the tracks. The snow had not yet started to settle here, but it was now falling more thickly than ever.
‘Do you think we’ll get away on time?’ Zen asked the attendant as he unlocked one of the blue sleeping cars.
‘No question, dottore. The whole crew’s from Rome. It would take the worst blizzard these krauts have ever seen to keep us banged up here overnight. Sorry about the cold inside. The heating’ll come on as soon as the engine hooks up.’
Once in his chilly compartment, Zen lay down fully clothed on the bunk bed, bone-weary and dispirited, and immediately fell asleep.
He surfaced briefly when something nudged the train heavily and the lights came to glaring life, then dozed again for a while, lulled by the complex and comforting sounds and motion. But for the last half-hour or so he had been on his feet at the open window, wide awake and seemingly for good. The slightly rumpled bed beckoned, the night-light glowed cosily, but sleep wouldn’t come.
He opened the bottle of kirsch he had bought for Gemma at the station, took a satisfying slug and lit a cigarette. After the day he’d had, not to mention only four hours’ sleep the previous night, he should have been exhausted. Indeed, he was exhausted. It just so happened that he was also wide awake.
This normally only happened to him when he was in the grip of a case, deeply involved and yet unable for the moment to understand what needed to be done, or how to go about it. He hadn’t previously imagined that this was the situation here. On the contrary, everything had seemed to suggest that this case had been shunted off in his direction, among a sheaf of others, as a sop to his professional pride, a transparent excuse to look busy. It seemed, however, that various supposedly subordinate departments of his mind — down in the basement, where the real work got done — were not convinced. Perhaps it had been Anton Redel’s oddly insinuating remarks, or perhaps the reception he had been given by the carabinieri in Bolzano, or the information he had gathered earlier that evening at the local hospital.
In any event, it was all nonsense. He was in charge, for God’s sake, his rational, waking self, and he had decided to go home, file his report and make an end of it. It was as home that he now thought of Lucca. He knew that few of its inhabitants would ever return the compliment, but that was their business. As far as he was concerned, he had settled in, and with the only woman he had ever met who accepted him without question just as he was. That was no little thing, and all the rest seemed to naturally follow. One of the few differences between them, which Gemma had also accepted without com¬ ment or suggestions for a cure, was that after some days there he began to feel restless.
It was in this spirit that Zen had accepted the assignment dangled before him by his superior Brugnoli in Rome. It would give him a chance to get out and about a bit, he had thought, to exercise his professional skills, spend some time away, and then return home refreshed and ready to enjoy the quiet pleasures of life in a small town so far off the beaten track that he would have to kill a good few hours of the early morning in Florence before the first connection left on the single-track branch line that ran through Pistoia and Lucca to Viareggio. Gemma had offered to come and pick him up when he had called her from Bolzano, but he had of course refused. It was humiliating enough not to own a car, and have still less desire to acquire one, without forcing your lover out of bed in the middle of the night to drive a hundred and fifty kilometres to save you from the consequences of your own inadequacy.
He took another drink from the bottle and lit another cigarette. Standing to the left-hand side of the window, he was protected from the surging air. The light of a skittish moon, constantly dodging behind rafts of cloud, provided the only sense of place, and when it came, it was dramatic: towering cliffs of raw jagged rock, densely wooded slopes, the swathe of destruction on either bank, and then of course the Adige itself, surging and boiling in the shallow stretches, sinisterly calm and muscular where the channel deepened.
Battlements clustered like birds’ nests appeared on a crag across the river, some medieval lordling’s lair perched above the highways he’d taken toll on, a previous version of the military works which Zen had viewed earlier in the day. The thought of the labour that had gone into those ingenious constructions, erected by sheer human sweat in the harshest of environments, not to mention the constant risk of being shot or blown up, was astonishing and humiliating. Depressing too, because in the end it had all been for nothing, both for the robber baron and for the young men who had died in the barren peaks Zen had visited earlier. The former had been replaced by more organized and democratic forms of extortion, while the Italian army had lost both its honour and the war at the disfatta storica of Caporetto, the battle which had wiped out all the earlier gains. Despite their heroic sacrifices and sufferings, the Alpini had been forced to withdraw.