‘No, I mean something artificial. A tattoo, for example.’
Haberl paused a moment.
‘I believe there was something of the sort, now that you mention it. We didn’t pay much attention to such superficial details at the preliminary stage, but of course they would be apparent on the video of the autopsy.’
‘And where is that?’
Werner Haberl sighed wearily and rolled his eyes for an answer.
‘That’s very interesting,’ said Zen, laying one of his cards on the desk between them. ‘Here’s my number, in case you remember anything else about the events we have discussed, or if there are any further developments.’
Werner Haberl looked at the card but did not touch it.
‘I have the feeling that if there are any further developments, they will take place in Rome. Where, I note from your card, you are based, dottore.’
The honorary title emerged like sausage meat from a grinder.
‘You may well be right,’ Zen had replied, getting to his feet. ‘ Aber man kann nie wissen.’
One never knows. A safe folk precept. Right now, for instance, he himself did not remotely know where he was. The stations dodged by so quickly, their lights all extinguished, that he couldn’t read their names. But they had left the high ravines of the Adige, that much was clear. As was the moon. The weather was improving, the landscape was gentler and more cultivated, the economy productive rather than extractive. Distances sprang out, roads were straight, lights abounded, and there was traffic on the roads they crossed. Life was returning. Zen could smell its heady presence, stuffed with promise and challenge, in the mild air surging in through the window.
The train slowed slightly, clattered over a set of points and then dipped into a concrete underpass beneath another set of lines running at ninety degrees to its course. Leaving his compartment, Zen went out into the corridor. Yes, there were the lights of Verona, a city he had always irrationally loathed and never visited. Una citta bianca, a fiefdom of the priests and the army, of soulless entrepreneurs and all the loutish scum of the Venetian hinterland who had inherited the worst qualities of both their ancestors and their Austro-Hungarian invaders, without any of the redeeming features of either. And the feeling was mutual. The veronesi had always hated the lordly Venetians too.
Now they were moving out into the vast desolation of the Po flatlands. Zen returned to his compartment for another dose of kirsch and a fresh cigarette. The railway line had narrowed to a single track, as though to emphasize the precarious hold of civilization on these reclaimed swamps, while the moonlight, filtered down through a layer of mist, evoked a dimensionless landscape punctuated by the squat, rectangular outlines of the cascine; agricultural barracks, now largely abandoned, where generations of crop-sharing farmhands had been born, grown up, married, laboured and died, all within one isolated and self-sufficient community lost in this featureless plain plagued by suffocating heat in summer and clammy cold in winter.
‘In case you want to do an enhancement,’ Anton had said about the black plastic thing that came with the photographs now packed away in Zen’s overnight bag on the rack above. What was that supposed to mean?
The train rolled resonantly over a series of long metal spans laid out across the monstrous obesity of the lower Po. Its lights showed the skeletal remains of the former brick and stone structure, the central arches gutted by bombs. Another war, another battleground, another failure. Mussolini’s Chief of Staff, Marshal Badoglio, had allegedly deserted his unit at Caporetto and sought safety behind the lines. A quarter of a century later, after the Duce’s downfall, he had dithered and prevaricated about the handover to the Allies just long enough to allow the Germans to occupy all but the extreme south of the peninsula, thereby ensuring the destruction of much of the nation’s heritage and infrastructure, including the bridge they had just crossed.
A station flitted by. The train was going more slowly now, and he could just make out the name. Mirandola. A couple of houses on a minor road. He would never know anything more about Mirandola, just as he would never know anything more about the case he had been assigned. This was perfectly normal. Stories were one thing, history another. The first abounded, the second was unknowable. Despite Italy’s economic prosperity and impeccable European credentials, not to mention the glitzy ‘open government’ stance of the current regime, its public history remained riddled with the secret network of events collectively dubbed the misteri d’Italia. The wormholes pervading the body politic remained, but the worms had never been identified, still less charged or convicted.
That was the way it was. Reasons existed, but reason itself, discredited by the excesses committed in its name, had been abandoned. Even reality was little more than a designer tag for whatever tissue of lies was being worn that year. But this too was normal. None of the ways we experience the world corresponds even remotely to the scientific truths about it. Not only are our intuitions invariably wrong, it is impossible to imagine what they would be like if they were right.
I should have joined the magistratura, he thought. Antonio Di Pietro, the inspirational investigating judge who had almost single-handedly brought about the fall of the former regime, the so-called First Republic, had formerly been a policeman. Then he had studied at night for a qualification to the judiciary, having realized that only that independent body could give him the power he needed to solve at least some of the more egregious ‘mysteries of Italy’. I’ve never been that ambitious, Zen conceded gloomily. I’ve just carried on in my little rut, always taking the path of least resistance, trying to do the best I can, and then wondering why my work never amounts to anything in the end.
A clatter of points recalled him to the present. The line had now doubled again and the train was approaching a mass of orange lights, squishy in the light mist rising from the far shore of the swamplands. A cigarette and a final glug of kirsch later, they were trundling through Bologna station, past the rebuilt waiting room with the plaque commemorating yet another of those impenetrable mysteries: the bomb of 2 August 1980, which had killed eighty-four people and left over two hundred others scarred for life. Both the right and left wings of political opinion had blamed extremists of the opposing faction. There had been a flurry of investigations and a few charges had been brought, but nothing had come of it. It was as if that everyday atrocity had been an Act of God, like a hurricane or an earthquake. Shame, of course, shocking tragedy, but nothing to be done.
Now feeling tired for the first time, Zen lay down on the bed. The window was still open, and as the train entered a valley in the Apennine foothills he caught a momentary whiff of sweet wood smoke. Then there was nothing but the hammering of the wheels reverberating off the walls of the tunnels, increasingly frequent and long. Here at last he dozed off, only to be awakened by the sleeping car attendant he had bribed earlier, who told him that they were passing through Prato. He had just time to collect his things and make himself look more or less presentable before the train arrived in Florence.
He stepped wearily down on to the platform, still only halfawake, and wondering how on earth he was to fill the long hours before his connection to Lucca left. Then a lithe form emerged from the shadows and kissed him.
‘You’re looking very well. The mountain air must suit you.’
He stared at Gemma.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said irritably. ‘I told you not to bother.’
‘Well, I did. The car’s outside. Give me your bag.’
‘I can manage perfectly well. You’re not my mother!’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Anyway, thank you for coming. Sorry I’m so tetchy. I’m completely exhausted. God, it’s good to be home.’