Belardinelli caught the eye of the older aide, who was now checking the walls for cracks.
‘He’s good, isn’t he?’
‘Very,’ the other man responded.
It was impossible to tell whether this was intended as a compliment.
‘What about Ferrero’s family?’ Belardinelli asked Alberto.
‘His father is now dead. His mother is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s and is in a nursing home. There are two sisters, but of course they believe that their brother died in that plane crash thirty years ago.’
‘And where is the corpse at present?’
‘In the morgue of a military hospital here in Rome.’
Alberto gestured deferentially.
‘I didn’t feel it appropriate to take any further action until we had spoken, dottore.’
Belardinelli strode over to the desk, switched off the tape recorder and gestured to his two aides to get moving.
‘Have it cremated,’ he told Alberto. ‘At once. Under a false name. Dispose of the ashes yourself.’
At the door, he turned again.
‘This man from the Viminale.’
‘Zen?’
‘Yes. If you get a chance, bury him too. Do you understand?’
Alberto nodded complaisantly. ‘Of course, dottore. Of course.’
XIII
Well, thought Claudia, this is different. Difference was of course why one came here in the first place, but still.
‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘I’d be delighted.’
The man smiled in a gracious, deferential way, but there was a look in his eye… A good ten years younger than me, she thought as he walked off towards the stairs. Just like Leonardo. Ten years meant a lot more back then, of course. But still.
Claudia turned back and tried to apply herself to her game. Venetian, he’d said, when she queried the name. ‘ Venessiani gran signori.’ He certainly seemed to have all the qualities of a gentleman, but the interesting kind who knows exactly when to stop behaving like one. ‘ Veronesi tuti mati,’ the dialect rhyme concluded. People from Verona had the reputation of being a bit crazy, and Claudia felt in the mood to do something crazy.
But that was another reason why one went abroad. Campione wasn’t strictly speaking abroad, of course, but its ambiguous status made it still more fascinating. The place was an exception to every rule, a case apart. And afterwards one took the ferry back to Lugano, just around the peninsula and across the lake, and alighted at the stop a few steps from the Grand Hotel Lugubre Magnifique, as she always thought of it, so reassuringly Swiss, sedate and safe.
She and Gaetano had come here at least once a year back in the early days, and always, as now, in the off-season. She would never forget the sense of excitement and occasion, and above all the way Gaetano changed when they were there, becoming even more ardent and edgy, as though he were one of the serious gamblers the casino had attracted then, men who thought nothing of hazarding a million lire — a lifetime’s wages for many people in those days — on a night’s play.
In reality, though, Gaetano had spent little time at the tables.
‘Why do you bother coming if you’re not going to play?’ she’d asked once.
‘I’m visiting my bankers,’ he’d replied with an oblique smile.
He’d been at Campione before and during the war, when, according to him, it had been a notorious base for espionage, money laundering and shady unaccredited diplomats on various inadmissible missions.
But as long as she and her husband made a few token appearances together in the sala dei giocatori, it had been perfectly in order for her to return there without him, and her presence was accepted without the slightest comment by the staff and the other players. In a way it was like going to church. There were certain forms that had to be observed, but the only thing that really mattered was that they all worshipped the same god. In this case, money.
But the money had never been important to Claudia. Any more than God, for that matter. It was the freedom she loved, the sexy air of sweat and risk and tension. She had always set herself very strict limits on how much to lose, and then stuck by them rigidly, just as she had in her extramarital affairs. There were rules not to be broken, although she had broken the fundamental one with Leonardo: never to get involved with someone whom you and your husband knew socially. But Leonardo too had been a case apart.
A rattle of coins recalled her attention to the game she had been playing mechanically all along. One hundred francs, the maximum jackpot! A good omen, she thought, slipping anoth¬ er coin into the slot. Still, the nerve of that Zen, plonking himself down at her machine while she’d slipped out for a moment to attend to an urgent personal need. And then apologizing so charmingly and inviting her to have coffee with him later that afternoon.
It was humiliating, being reduced to playing the slot machines, but it would have been even more humiliating to come alone in the evening to play in the quiet, spacious rooms upstairs reserved for the giochi francesi, where the serious gamblers foregathered from ten or eleven o’clock on. Besides, the old villa which had housed the casino in those days had been demolished in favour of this fadedly glitzy monstrosity, shortly to be replaced in its turn by the state-of-the-art Las Vegas fantasy structure they were building just a step up the steep hillside behind. Everything changed. The important thing was to try not to care too much.
Twenty francs down now. She lined up the symbols, punched hold on a couple of columns, and then turned the wheels loose. What had Gaetano been doing all those times they’d come here so many years ago? Even then, as a scatterbrained newly-wed, she noticed that he had always brought a couple of empty suitcases that were no longer empty when they returned across the border at Chiasso. That was before they’d built the motorway, of course, and she remembered all too well the sometimes interminable delays at the border.
Gaetano had been tense then, his body stiff with stress in the back seat beside her, his mood withdrawn and almost angry. But the staff car, its passengers and uniformed driver had always been waved through customs control without questions, still less a search. Often Nestore was at the wheel. She’d always liked Nestore, in an innocently flirty sort of way. He’d always liked Campione, too. ‘If I ever get rich, this is where I want to live!’ he’d joked.
Looking back, it seemed odd that Nestore or one of the other young officers in her husband’s ‘stable’ had always been invited along to act as chauffeur. In fact, going there at all had been a bit odd, come to think of it. Gaetano had never taken her to any of the places she really wanted to visit, such as Paris, Vienna or London. Only and always to Campione, a dull little lakeside town dedicated to gambling. And this despite the fact that Gaetano didn’t gamble. But she hadn’t remarked on this at the time. Young wives don’t. Just so long as he’s happy. Just so long as he doesn’t blame me for his unhappiness. Just so long as he’s not interested in someone else.
It occurred to her now that one could very easily have imagined a scenario in which her husband had been interested in someone else, and had parked his wife at the casino in Campione, with an underling to keep an eye on her, in order to give him an opportunity to meet his mistress, perhaps in the very room to which she would be returning tonight, and which they had always shared on those earlier visits. But it wasn’t convincing. Gaetano had been twenty years older than her, and after they had married, he had very soon ceased to be seriously interested in sex.