‘My mother’s not crazy!’
‘All right, let’s assume that her version of events is true. We know that Leonardo Ferrero died in a plane crash. How sane is it, after all these years, for her to tell you to make a claim for an unidentified body discovered deep underground on the basis that it is his?’
Ferrero got to his feet.
‘Do you think I give a damn either way?’ he shouted. ‘I never even met the man.’
‘You changed your name from Comai to Ferrero,’ Zen reminded him.
‘That was to please my mother! Everything I’ve ever done has been to please her. She asked me to contact the authorities in Bolzano and I did so. When I told her the result, she asked me to make a judicial application, and that’s what I’m in the process of doing. She’s my mother and I love her. This business obviously means a lot to her for one reason or another, so I’m playing my part and doing as she wishes. Personally, I couldn’t give a damn who my father is.’
He strode away and disappeared round the corner of the bar. Zen lit a cigarette and looked around. Il Ristorante La Stalla was closed for the season, but even at the height of summer it was hard to imagine such an isolated venue packed out with the boisterous crowd of noisily relaxed hedonists that would be needed to make sense of what looked like, and almost certainly was, a converted barn.
Indeed, the whole establishment had an indefinable air of failure about it, of having been bypassed by more recent developments to which it had been either unable or unwilling to adapt. Naldo had explained that it had been set up back in the eighties on communal lines, with money from a trendy left-wing film director who had installed his son here and set him up as a chef in an attempt to wean him off heroin. The cure had apparently worked only too well, for the son had subsequently left and opened a restaurant down on the coast near Ancona, a move which had been regarded as rank betrayal by the rest of the collective. To abandon their idealistic pro¬ ject up here in a remote location of the Apennine foothills — only accessible by a long unpaved track off a very minor road near a village that hadn’t been marked on the map consulted by Zen’s taxi driver — and then set up his own non-non-profit business in a hideous glass and stainless steel box right at the heart of the shameless consumerist hell down by the beach. And making a fortune at it too! Five months’ work a year and then off to Mauritius or Thailand for the winter. It was sickening, just sickening.
There had apparently been some other defections at about the same time, possibly connected to the fact that the film director’s subsidy also abruptly dried up, so when Naldo appeared he had been warmly welcomed. The ethos of the commune dictated that all work on the farm and in the restaurant must be done ‘authentically’, meaning either by hand or with the most primitive and basic equipment such as would have been used by the share-cropping family who had once lived there. It must have been easy for the remaining pioneers to see the point of having an extra set of keen, youthful muscles about the place.
But the sense of failure ran deeper than that. There was a generalized reek of frustration, even despair, as unmistakable as mould. Things hadn’t worked out the way they were supposed to. The members of the commune had worked their fingers to the bone, followed the idealistic principles of the movement to the letter, but they’d been let down by events. And not just here! The whole country, it had turned out, was ideologically rotten to the core. After all the valiant and tireless struggles against entrenched corruption, blatant scandals, extreme right-wing terrorism, attempted military coups and a host of secret organizations aimed at keeping the powerful in power and everyone else in subjection, those responsible had finally been ousted, only to be replaced by Silvio Berlusconi and his opportunistic pals. It had turned out that the majority of Italians did indeed want un paese normale, only not as the left had intended that slogan, meaning a ‘Scandinavian’ model of probity and socialism with a human face, but in the most literal sense of the phrase: a country much like any other; no better, no worse.
That’s what they’d voted for and that’s what they’d got, leaving the sinistrini to weep into their pasta and bean soup prepared from ingredients grown according to the highest principles of biological agriculture, and to squabble self- destructively about whose fault it was that everything had gone wrong. Not for the first time, Zen reflected on the irony of the fact that those who had explicitly declared History to be the final court of appeal should be so reluctant to accept its judgements.
The dry strokes of the long-case clock combined in a syncopated pattern with two sets of footsteps. Marta, the short, anxious- looking woman who had greeted Zen upon his arrival, went behind the bar and started sorting glasses. Naldo, wearing his usual sullen grimace, headed back to the table. Zen suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to get out of there, and fast. When it came to interrogations, his rule of thumb was simple: if you can discover the thing that a man despises about himself, which may of course be very different from what others despise about him, then he’s yours. But despite his best efforts, he had failed to find this crucial key to Naldo Ferrero, and there was nothing more for him here. He stood up, crushing his cigarette out on the floor.
‘I shall need to speak to your mother, Signor Ferrero.’
‘You can’t.’
Zen sighed. How he would have loved to take the little squirt down to the police station in Pesaro and make him sweat blood!
‘I can get her details from my colleagues in Verona, of course, but I thought you might have wished to save me the time and effort. Never mind. The net result will be the same.’
‘Your time and effort will be wasted. My mother has gone to Switzerland.’
Zen was genuinely surprised.
‘Leaving the country at this juncture casts considerable doubt on your account of her role in this affair, to say the least,’ he remarked coldly.
‘It’s got nothing whatever to do with that! She always goes to Lugano at this time of year. The next time she calls, I’m going to tell her to stay there until further notice. Whether or not she had an affair with someone thirty years ago is of no relevance to the identity and manner of death of this body that’s turned up. She knows nothing about that and I’m not going to let you terrorize her as you’ve tried to terrorize me!’
He stood there, swaying slightly on the balls of his feet, as if expecting to be punched and quite prepared to hit back. Ignoring him, Zen took out his mobile and called the taxi driver, who had driven on to a neighbouring town after dropping him at the restaurant. The man said he would be there in fifteen minutes. Zen put his phone away and started towards the door.
‘Would you like a drink or something while you wait?’ the woman behind the bar asked as he passed. She was small-bodied but large-breasted, with an amiable air of blowsy sensuality that must have absolutely devastated the ranks of some small-town PCI sezione a decade earlier. Now she looked wiser and sadder and worn-out in some way that went beyond mere physical or mental exhaustion.
‘The espresso machine is turned off during the week, and it takes ages to heat up, but we have beer or…’
Zen sensed that she was trying to compensate for Naldo’s aggressive manner earlier, out of both politeness and concern about the possible consequences.
‘Do you have any grappa?’ Zen asked.
The woman raised her eyes to his for the first time.
‘We have a local one, hand-made in limited batches using small copper stills…’
‘I’d be delighted to try it,’ Zen replied with a warm smile. ‘But only on condition that you join me.’