‘Absolutely, but may I call you back? I’m on another call at the moment.’
‘No problem, I’m here all morning. I give you the number of my direct line.’
Zen noted it down and then folded up the phone with a mental note to use it with extreme caution in the future. If they had gone to all the trouble of bugging the apartment he shared with Gemma, they would almost certainly be monitoring his mobile.
Five minutes later, he was walking down Via del Fosso. It had started raining lightly, and there seemed to be no one about. At the corner he turned left towards the church of San Francesco, stopping at the tobacconist’s to buy a carton of Nazionali and a phone card. At the payphone opposite the church he inserted the card and dialled the number that Werner Haberl had given him in Bolzano. He checked the street while it rang. There was nothing unusual to be seen.
‘ Hallo.’
‘ Herr Doktor Haberl, bitte.’
‘ Am Apparat.’
‘It’s Aurelio Zen, doctor. My apologies for the delay. Now then, what were you saying about our friend in the tunnel?’
‘Yes. So, I have just heard from a colleague that a man named Naldo Ferrero has phoned the hospital yesterday. He claimed that he was legally entitled to take possession of the body and wished to know how he should go about it. When my colleague told him that the cadaver was no longer in our custody, he became quite agitated and threatened to make a formal denuncia to the police. It was then explained to him that the police themselves had removed the body.’
‘On what grounds did he lay claim to the corpse?’
‘Well, that’s why I thought you might be interested. This Ferrero said he is the dead man’s son.’
Zen was silent for a moment.
‘Did he leave a contact number?’
‘Yes, yes, we have all his details. We do that as a matter of routine, at the beginning of a call. Do you have a pen and paper?’
Zen wrote down the claimant’s address and phone number and thanked Werner Haberl profusely for his cooperation. Then he depressed the receiver rest and inspected the street again. As before, everything seemed normal. He dialled again. The phone rang over a dozen times before a weary-sounding woman answered.
‘La Stalla.’
‘May I speak to Naldo Ferrero, please?’
‘Just a moment.’
She set down the receiver and Zen heard her call ‘Naldo!’ distantly. The amount of credit left on the phone card had roughly halved in value before a man finally came on the line.
‘Yes?’
‘Good morning, Signor Ferrero. I’m phoning about your late father.’
He paused, but there was no reply.
‘I’m from an insurance company,’ Zen went on. ‘It seems that there is some dispute about the manner and date of your father’s decease. I was hoping that you might be prepared to let me have half an hour or so of your time with a view to clarifying these and other issues arising. There’s a good deal of money involved.’
More silence, then a contemptuous grunt.
‘Insurance company, my arse,’ said Ferrero. ‘My father died thirty years ago. His body was not recovered, but the fact of his death was not in dispute. Any outstanding insurance claims would therefore have been settled at that time. So who the hell are you?’
‘Someone who might be able to help you recover your late father’s remains after all these years.’
‘I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself. And if, as I suspect, you’re from the police, then it may interest you to know that I am in the course of preparing a formal appeal to the judiciary in Bolzano denouncing the illegal intervention that took place at the hospital there, resulting in the removal of my father’s corpse and the conspiracy of silence regarding its present whereabouts. And that’s all I have to say on the matter!’
The phone slammed down.
Zen’s final call was to the customer service desk at the local office of the gas company. He gave a false address in Via del Fosso and explained that he had heard that there had recently been an emergency call-out to another house in the street because of a reported leak. Could the company please confirm that this had been taken care of, and that there was no possible risk to nearby homes? After a computer search, the service representative told him that he must have been misinformed. There had been no gas leaks reported anywhere in Lucca within the previous month.
He left the cabin and walked back the way he had come. The only person he saw was a derelict with a broken nose and shaven hair nursing a bottle of wine on a bench next to the channelled river that flowed down the centre of the street.
When Gemma returned shortly before eleven-thirty, Zen was in the bedroom putting the finishing touches to his packing. He closed up the battered suitcase and carried it into the living room.
‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he told her.
‘You can’t cancel lunch! Not on my birthday.’
‘No, it’s not that. But I have to go away for a few days again.’
‘What now?’
‘I just had a call from the family lawyer in Venice. Had to take the call outside on the stairs, incidentally. Couldn’t get a clear signal here in the apartment, and then the damn thing died on me completely.’
This for the benefit of anyone listening in on the installed bugging devices.
‘Anyway, there’s apparently been some sort of snag over my mother’s will. Nothing serious, he says, but I’ll need to pop up there to sort it all out and sign some papers. And when I called the Ministry to request leave, just as a formality, they told me I could take advantage of being in the area to check progress in some murder case in Padua. It sounds unutterably boring, but I couldn’t very well say no. But I should be back in a few days, with any luck.’
‘You seem to have an awful lot of work all of a sudden.’
‘That’s the way this job always is. It comes in waves.’
‘Actually, that works out quite nicely. My son has apparently met someone who he thinks might turn out to be “quite serious” and wants me to vet her. This will give me a chance to spend a couple of days away. Now then, let’s get going.’
‘Perhaps you could drop me at the station afterwards,’ Zen said very distinctly. ‘There’s a train to Florence around five that connects with the Eurostar to Venice. That way I can see the lawyer first thing in the morning and get it over with as quickly as possible.’
Gemma put her briefcase down on the table, then clicked her fingers, opened the flap and extracted a number of sheets of paper.
‘I almost forgot. That friend of yours in Rome you asked me to exchange email addresses with sent you these pictures. He says that…’
Zen cut her off hurriedly.
‘I’ll look at them in the restaurant. Come on, let’s go out and celebrate your birthday!’
Under the pretext of being concerned about the off-side rear tyre of Gemma’s vehicle, Zen inspected the street carefully before they set off, and then again as they drove through the back streets. There was no obvious sign of a tail.
Like Zen’s native Venice, Lucca was a real civitas, though bounded not by water but its massive encircling walls. When you passed through one of the tunnel-like portals, you knew that you had left the city; when you passed in again, there was no doubt that you were back. He found this both relaxing and reassuring. They drove through the modest post-war suburban fringes of the town and up into the pleasant, winding valley of the Serchio. The rain was more intense here, but it suited the landscape, as intensely rural as Lucca was urban: unoppressively pretty and unspectacularly wild, unassuming, unspoilt and almost unvisited.
The restaurant was homely but attractive, with a smouldering wood fire that perfumed the entire room, and the food as good as Gemma had promised. They shared a bowl of homemade pappardelle with a sauce of wild porcini mushrooms, followed by a fritto misto of rabbit, lamb and chicken with astringent steamed greens. The wine was drinkable, the almond tart just right and only the coffee a bit of a disappointment, but at that point who cared?