True, at the end of the war the nation had got the whole territory back, as well as the Austrian cisalpine provinces of the Sudtirol, the valleys south of the Brennero, as a gracious crumb let fall from the grand table of the Versailles peace conference. The fact remained that young men had died in their hundreds of thousands, most of them farm labourers from the centre and south of the country who had not the slightest idea of who they were fighting, let alone why.
The train seemed to have speeded up. They were going too fast, he thought, and in the same instant involuntarily recalled a passage from a French novel he’d read, probably while he was at university. He had perhaps remembered it because it was about railways, and his father had been a railwayman. In any event, he had now forgotten everything about the book except the demonic ending featuring a troop train hurtling through a featureless landscape towards the front in some forgotten war. The conscripts, numbed with exhaustion and booze, chanted and sang, unaware of the fact that the driver had fallen from the footplate of the locomotive, that the uncontrolled machine itself was driving them towards their inevitable destruction.
La storia. Le storie. History. Stories. The two senses of the word were coming together in his mind. Despite being of a generation that had never had to go to war, Zen — like every Italian, directly or indirectly — had had his appointments both with history and the infinite stories, true and false, which had been woven around it. In his case, they had usually come in the form of official cases that he had been charged with investigating, or helping to investigate, or more cynically hindering. How many had there been? How many stories had he worked on? Unless of course, as some said, they were all the same story, whose author and outcome would never be known.
Certainly this latest addition to the list did not seem very promising, even discounting the difficulties due to the fact that he had practically been operating in a foreign country. When Mussolini’s Fascists came to power after the First World War, exploiting the internal contradictions of the former regime’s hollow victory, they had exercised their absolute power to the utmost in the newly-named Alto Adige, forbidding the use of German, encouraging internal immigration from Sicily and the South, and generally grinding down the Austrian population in a blatant attempt to persuade them to head home across the Brennero Pass and not come back.
It was small wonder that resentment against the Italians still smouldered in the area. Since the granting of regional autonomy, this largely manifested itself on the personal level to which Bruno had taken exception in the mountain bar, but back in the seventies Zen had been at the sharp end of separatist terrorism during his ‘hardship years’ in the police, the obligatory posting to either Sicily, Sardinia or the Alto Adige, the nation’s three most troubled and dangerous areas. Now, though, the terrorists had all retired and written their memoirs, while the locals were doing very nicely thank you off their status as nominally Italian but in practice self-regulating in all the issues that really mattered. They might still flaunt their cultural and linguistic diversity, but when push came to shove they were happier dealing with a remote and largely indifferent government in Rome than coming under the thumb of their own people to the north and having to do everything by the book.
Certainly Werner Haberl, the junior doctor whom Zen had interviewed at the hospital in Bolzano, showed no traces of resentment at all. On the contrary, he had handled the occasion with an urbane, amused, slightly patronizing ease, treating Zen as if dealing with a promising exchange student from some developing country such as Ethiopia. The body found in the old Minenkriegstollenlage? A memorable case, even before the carabinieri had staged their midnight raid and whisked everything away without a word of explanation. It wasn’t every day that you got a partially mummified unidentified body of indeterminate age on the slab. The last one had been that Ice Age corpse they’d found up in the Alps, about a hundred metres on the Austrian side of the border as it turned out in the end. But Otzi too had been there for a while, while the political aspects got sorted out.
Yes, he’d been present at the autopsy. They all had. Staff, students, even people from outside the department. It was a unique case, after all; none of your run-of-the-mill car crashes, drug overdoses, suicides and cardiac arrests. They’d all hovered around while the professor did the business, describing his procedures and findings minutely for the benefit of the assembled company, as well as the voice recorder from which he would subsequently transcribe his notes before writing up the official report. That had of course been taken, along with everything else, in the course of the carabinieri’s intervention last week. At four in the morning. Ten of them in two jeeps, with a military ambulance to take the cadaver and all the effects. Protests had been made, but all in vain.
Sensing an opening, Zen had immediately moved in.
‘They’ve been pretty high-handed with us too. We made a request to see the post-mortem report — purely routine matter, in order to keep the bureaucratic record straight — and they just turned us down flat. Without even the courtesy of an excuse! For some unknown reason they seem to feel that they own this case. I would dearly love to prove them wrong about that, and if there’s anything you can do to help me, I’ll be most grateful. What was the cause of death, for example?’
‘Impossible to establish definitively. There were extensive lacerations and contusions, as was to be expected in the circumstances, but the body was so decomposed that the initial post-mortem examination was inconclusive. We were about to order further forensic tests when the Aktion occurred.’
‘What about identification?’
‘Again, inconclusive. The face was very badly damaged, but a search of dental records might have yielded some results, if we’d had a chance to make one.’
‘And his clothing?’
Werner Haberl nodded.
‘That was perhaps the most interesting feature we discovered. It was not, for example, military uniform. That was important to establish, as the dry, cold conditions in those tunnels inhibit putrefaction, and our first thought was obviously that this might be one of our glorious dead. Or perhaps of yours.’
‘So the corpse had been there for some time?’
‘Judging by the condition of the flesh and organs, the pathologist conservatively estimated a period of at least twenty years and perhaps much longer. However, he could not have been a war victim. The clothes were of synthetic fabric and a more modern cut, certainly not dating from the period of the Great War, and consisted entirely of a pair of trousers, a shirt and underclothes and socks. No footwear, no jacket. Moreover, all the makers’ marks had been removed and there were no personal items in the victim’s pockets or at the scene where the body was discovered.’
‘In other words…’
‘In other words, we were apparently faced with the scenario of a young man — the pathologist’s provisional estimate is that he was aged between twenty and twenty-five when he died — entering those tunnels alone, wearing light summer clothing from which all identifying tags had been removed, without shoes or boots, and then falling to his death.’
‘Did you happen to notice any sort of marking on the man’s right arm?’
‘There was lots of superficial damage. The cadaver was in a very bad condition, as I’ve said.’