Had Pinuccia ever had fantasies about him? He had been one of the local landowner’s sons, after all. This was an aspect of the situation which had never occurred to him at the time. He had been far too busy becoming himself to give a moment’s thought to who he actually was, but others might not have been so dim. And his once-beloved’s failure to recognize him, although a blessing given the circumstances, nevertheless felt like a loss. She was no longer she and he was no longer he. Alone in the familiar environs of the cascina, he had grown accustomed to thinking of himself as a boy again, but that boy was as dead as poor Leonardo.
The ride back was calm and uneventful, a magic adventure in the moonlight-soaked landscape. The only problem was the mist, which had curdled in patches now in that unpredictable way it had, so that one moved from almost total transparency to opacity in a second, and for no apparent reason at all. And then out again, from a clump so thick he had to dismount and walk, watching his way carefully, only to stumble suddenly into a clarity so perfect it made mock of his caution. Passing one of the places where an irrigation canal ran over the drainage ditches on a slender stone aqueduct, he recalled his childish fascination with this physical oxymoron: water flowing over water.
Back at his base, he checked the fine cotton thread he had strung across the door set in the main gateway, its green-painted slatted planks faded now to a gentle blue. The tell-tale was unbroken. He bent under it and stepped through into the echoing aia, looking around the space which was so familiar to him that it was almost invisible behind its panoply of memories. He kept expecting a door or window to open and a voice to shout, ‘Gabriele! Welcome home!’ But those voices were all dead. How much work had been done here, how many lives lived out! Like a battlefield, he thought; an endless, indecisive engagement in a meaningless war fought with outdated equipment for reasons that no one could now remember.
Back in his eyrie, as he had named it when he first moved there at the age of fifteen, he carefully lowered and secured the light-proof blinds he had cut from an oilskin tablecloth, before replacing the batteries of the camping lantern and turning it on. Despite the windbreaks of elms and poplars around the house, in this level landscape any light might show for miles, and would immediately attract interest.
He filled the saucepan with water from the bucket in the corner, set it on the butane stove and settled down to read the paper he had brought back. Most of the articles didn’t interest him — the usual exaggerated fuss about some impending cabinet reshuffle in Rome — but his eye was caught by one of the headlines on the Cronaca page, about a killing in some town called Campione d’Italia. There was a photograph of the victim, who was identified as Nestor Machado Solorzano, a citizen of Venezuela. To Gabriele’s eye, he very much resembled a slightly older Nestore Soldani.
He skimmed rapidly through the article, then re-read it several times with close attention. According to his wife Andreina, speaking through an interpreter, the victim had been phoned at home on his birthday and had driven out to an impromptu appointment with a person or persons unknown in Capolago, just across the Swiss border. On his return, the BMW Mini Cooper which he was driving had blown up at the entrance to their villa in Campione. The explosion had utterly destroyed the car and gates, and shattered the windows of the surrounding houses. Virtually no trace of the victim’s body had been recovered.
Gabriele quickly worked out the dates. The murder had occurred the day after he had left Milan, having read about the discovery of Leonardo’s body.
The pasta water boiled over. He removed the saucepan from the stove with trembling hands. To think that only an hour or so earlier he had been jeering at himself for having panicked unnecessarily, and raising philosophical questions about the nature of the proof that would be required to justify his having fled into hiding here. Here was his proof! So far as he was aware, only three men knew for sure what had happened to Leonardo Ferrero, and one of them was now dead, killed by a bomb in his car two days after the discovery of the body.
That left only him and Alberto. He was loath to contact Alberto — indeed, he half-suspected him of being behind the series of mute, implicitly menacing postcards that arrived every year around the anniversary of Leonardo’s death — but now he felt he had no choice. Whoever had killed Nestore would have his name next on their list. This was no longer a game of hide-and-seek but of life-and-death. He couldn’t hide out at here at the cascina for ever, but neither did he wish to live in perpetual terror back in Milan, or to emigrate and eke out a miserable existence in some foreign country where they would still be able to reach him sooner or later.
In short, he had no choice but to force the issue, and Alberto was the only person he could turn to. It would have to be drafted carefully, of course, giving nothing away about his present location, still less his fears. He must sound confident and assertive, even a little dangerous. He would outline his quite reasonable apprehensions on hearing the news of Nestore’s death, make it absolutely clear that the secret of Operation Medusa would remain forever sacrosanct, and demand further details of who had murdered Soldani and what was being done to bring them to justice and protect the two remaining members of the Verona cell.
He would enclose his mobile phone number with a date and time for Alberto to call, allowing him a week to formulate an appropriate and satisfactory response. The letter would be posted from one of the larger local towns that he could reach easily by train from the unmanned station at which he had arrived, Crema perhaps. When the time came for Alberto to call, he would make a return trip in the other direction, to Mantua, taking the call on the train. They would never be able to trace his whereabouts, and at the very least he would know exactly where he stood. One thing he had learned from his time in the army was that while imaginary fears exhausted and paralysed him, real and present danger left him cool and collected. It was time to confront the enemy, whoever they might be, to force them to come forward and reveal themselves. Whatever the outcome, it could not be worse than living in a state of perpetual uncertainty and inchoate terror.
VII
As soon as Zen entered the bar just off Via Nazionale, the broad paved ditch between the Viminale and Quirinale hills, he felt an intruder. The political centre of the country might lie further down the hillside, at Palazzo de Montecitorio and Palazzo Madama in the centro storico, but this was where those entrusted with the dirty work of implementing any decisions made by the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate gathered. Like its counterpart in the business world, which was also heavily represented, this society was rigidly hierarchical, and the resulting distinctions extended far beyond the workplace. You would no more think of frequenting your superior’s bar or restaurant than you would of moving into his office. It would be inappropriate and embarrassing for all concerned.
Zen could not determine the exact status of the clientele in this establishment, discreetly hidden away on a side street near the opera house, but it was definitely a cut above his own; senior rather than middle management. The woman enthroned at the cashier’s dais looked as though she had put in a few decades being chased around the desk by most of the men in the bar before taking early retirement in her current position. While paying for his coffee, Zen slid his Ministry identification card on to the counter between them. The woman glanced at it and at him, then reached down into some cubby-hole inviolate from the common gaze, and handed over a blank white envelope.
Without wasting thanks or a smile on her, Zen proceeded to the bar, where despite the tip he had laid down with his receipt he had to wait until several other men, who had arrived after him and had not troubled themselves to prepay the cashier, were served with due ceremony and attention. This was a club you couldn’t buy your way into. You had to belong.