‘Mamma was in the bathroom when the doorbell rang, so I answered it. He introduced himself as being from the carabinieri. I asked to see his ID and he had a card to back him up. But in the window on the opposite side of his wallet was another card identifying him, under a different name, as a member of the military secret service. I read it upside down.’
Zen looked into the young man’s eyes for a very long time.
‘You don’t miss much,’ he said at last.
Siro shrugged.
‘Maybe that’s why I ended up writing computer programs. It’s all a matter of detail. I’m good at that, it seems.’
He shot Zen an incisive glance.
‘You didn’t know that the secret police were hunting for my uncle?’
‘I certainly hadn’t been informed,’ Zen replied evenly. ‘And SISMI is not noted for collaborating with other agencies. But there are often parallel investigations in progress. The right hand frequently doesn’t know what the left is doing.’
Siro seemed tempted for a moment to make a witty remark, perhaps of a political nature, but thought better of it.
‘What did he look like?’ asked Zen.
Siro shrugged.
‘A thug, basically. Broken nose, shaven head, workout shoulders. Gave me the creeps, to be honest. He kept asking Mamma about some “place in the country”. She told him that Gabriele doesn’t own any property other than his apartment in Milan. But that started me thinking. It was only when you showed up that I realized I had known the answer to his question all along.’
Zen finished his coffee and ordered them both another round.
‘It appears that your uncle may be a crucial witness in a very complex case that we are investigating,’ he said. ‘We naturally want to interview him as soon as possible, but to be frank we are also concerned about his safety.’
‘You think he may be in danger?’
‘I’m convinced of it.’
‘And the secret service? Are they part of the protection or part of the threat?’
Zen stared at the floor without answering for a very long time.
‘I don’t know the answer to that,’ he said at last.
Siro nodded.
‘It’s just that I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to Uncle Gabriele. I don’t see much of him these days, but he was always very kind to me when I was young. And my idea may be nonsense. But I don’t want to betray him if he doesn’t want to be found.’
Zen grasped the young man’s arm urgently.
‘If the servizi are after him, he will be found whether he wants it or not. So that’s no longer an issue. The only question is who gets there first. Would you rather it was them or me?’
Siro gulped down some more Coke.
‘In the past, Mamma’s family were landowners,’ he said. ‘It all started about a hundred and fifty years ago, when they got wealthy from a brickworks they owned here in Milan. They bought an agricultural estate in the country with the profits, and added to it over the years. And a century later, when Gabriele was a boy, that’s where the family used to spend the summer months. My grandfather finally sold the property in the late sixties. It had been operating at a loss for some time. The contadini were all moving here and finding jobs in construction or factories, and the ones that were left were demanding higher wages and better conditions. That era was over. So he sold up, but the buildings remained. They were of no use for modern mechanized farming, but would have been far too expensive to demolish.’
‘You see them all over the Po valley,’ Zen commented, ‘but I’ve never been inside one.’
‘I have. My uncle took me there on a day trip from Milan. I must have been eight or nine at the time. To be honest, I could¬ n’t understand why he’d bothered. Just this huge expanse of fields, flat as a pancake, and drainage ditches and irrigation canals and rows of trees, and then the cascina itself, which was already falling into ruin. All I understood at the time was that this was tremendously important to him, and because I wanted to please him I pretended to be interested as he showed me around the stables and the byre, the hayloft, the threshing floor and all the rest of it. The light, he kept saying, that pearly quality you only get here in the Valpadana. And then he showed me the little room he’d used when he was a child, up in the old dovecote above the family house, with all his books and a view for miles. “That was the only time in my life when I’ve been truly happy,” he told me. And I believed him, even though to me it was just a broken-down stinking ruin.’
Aman dressed in jeans and a leather jacket opened the door.
‘ Ciao, Siro!’ he called over. ‘Sorry about the delay, but this fog…’
Siro gestured to Costanzo to wait.
‘You think he’s there now?’ Zen asked.
‘He might be. He would feel safe there, I know that.’
‘And where is it?’
‘Ah, that I can’t tell you. We arrived at some small local railway station, I’ve forgotten the name, then cycled along these flat country roads for what seemed like hours. Somewhere north of Cremona, I think. And now I must go.’
The two young men left. The barman reached for the remote control to turn off the television.
‘Wait!’ Zen told him.
The television game show had given way to the news while he and Siro had been talking. The presenter was now running through the minor items at the end of the bulletin, the sweepings from the day’s events. It was the video of the hotel that had attracted Zen’s attention. An expressionless voice-over explained that a female Italian tourist had fallen to her death from the balcony of her room in Lugano. The Swiss police were treating it as an accident. Her name had been given as Claudia Giovanna Comai, a former resident of Verona.
‘Call me a taxi,’ Zen told the barman abruptly.
‘Where to?’
‘The station.’
The barman shrugged.
‘Frankly, with the weather like this it would be quicker to walk.’
Zen did exactly that. From Porta Garibaldi he took the metropolitana to the Central Station, where he caught the last train to Verona with twenty minutes to spare.
XVI
The worst part was having to take the underground. There was something aggressively demotic about this system of transportation that never failed to remind Alberto of everything that was wrong with the country. From the security point of view, however, it had the virtue of near-total anonymity.
Lepanto, his local station was called, after the street where the station was situated. Below ground, next to the tracks, the walls were plastered with huge advertisements in French informing the hordes of blacks pouring in from North Africa how they could telegraph the money they made illegally in Italy back to their starving broods in the desert, so that they too could hire a scafista to smuggle them in to pillage the wealth of Europe.
The platforms were packed with jostling, raucous, overexcited students from the high school on Viale delle Milizie. How many of them had the slightest clue what Lepanto signified? The seventh of October 1571. The decisive naval victory of Christianity over Islam, settling that matter for another four centuries. News as up-to-date as today’s headlines, but where were the Sebastiano Veniers and the Augustino Barbarigos of today? Cervantes had served among the Spanish forces during that encounter, and had sustained injuries that had permanently maimed his left hand, but he counted Lepanto ever afterwards as the most glorious day in his life, beside which the composition of Don Quixote was a mere bagatelle.
The letter from Gabriele had arrived two days earlier. Alberto had at once forwarded the envelope, though not of course the contents, to the service’s Scientifica unit. Their forensic experts had found minute traces of corn, fertilizer, mould and birdshit. An agricultural location was evidently indicated, but that and the Crema postmark was all there was to go on. However a little discreet research in the provincial land registry office had revealed that the Passarini family once owned an agricultural estate in the Valpadana. Cazzola, who had already interviewed Gabriele’s sister Paola without result, had been dispatched there on Friday to do some preliminary investigation. His call had arrived that morning.