‘I’ve visited the property, capo. I took some photographs and I’ve got a full description, but in accordance with your orders I didn’t investigate further.’
‘Very good. How soon can you get back to Rome?’
‘In a few hours. By this afternoon at the latest.’
‘We need to meet in person so that I can fully debrief you. Location seven, time D.’
‘ D’accordo, capo.’
The orange train finally disgorged itself from the tunnel, almost unrecognizable beneath the graffiti that obliterated even the windows, huge curvy garish crazed capital letters spelling God knew what, but certainly nothing sane or good. As if that wasn’t enough, at the Spagna stop the carriage was invaded by a mob of Veronese football hooligans who packed the space, drinking limoncello out of a communal bottle, smoking in open defiance of the law, and screaming ‘ Roma, Roma, vaffanculo! ’ in an obscene, pagan chant. Alberto was dearly tempted to take out one of his numerous false IDs and arrest the lot of them on the spot, but of course that was impossible under the rules of engagement.
In the event, the soccer fans got off two stations later at Termini, presumably to catch a train back north. Unfortunate¬ ly the few ordinary solid Italians who had been aboard also left, to be replaced by a mob of blacks and gypsies and asylum seekers who had been begging, picking pockets and selling counterfeit junk outside the main railway station all day, and were now going home to their illegal squatter camps on the fringes of the city. With a slight chill, Alberto suddenly realized that he was the only Italian in the carriage.
Nothing happened. If anything the atmosphere grew warmer and more relaxed as the stations ticked away. All the foreigners were chatting away to each other, laughing and telling stories in their barbaric tongues. Alberto was hesitant to admit it to himself, but what it felt like, to be perfectly honest, was something very similar to the society in which he had grown up back in the fifties. Here too there was that sense of community and of shared experience that had all but vanished from the peninsula during his lifetime. He could of course never feel at home with these people, but they seemed to feel at home with each other, each in his own clan with its own language and traditions. What did the Italy of today have to offer in return? That pack of drunken football yobs, or a bunch of flashy yuppies with one spoilt designer child in tow like a pedigree dog. We’ve lost something, he thought. We’re stronger in lots of small ways, but they’re stronger in one big way.
Nevertheless he did not relax his guard. When he left the train at Cinecitta, one stop before the terminus, a group of four Moroccans or Senegalese followed him up the escalator. They were intensely black, all dressed in loose, brightly patterned cotton robes, their skin burnished like some precious metal. As he reached ground level, a gust of cold air blew in through the portal leading to the street. They’re going to freeze in that desert gear, he thought with a mixture of admiration and contempt, buttoning up his heavy overcoat and lighting a cigarette.
Suddenly they were all around him, closed in like a pack of wild dogs, one of them demanding something in mangled Italian. Alberto had no idea what he was saying. He knew only that the tone was loud, insistent and menacing, and that he was all alone. He instinctively pulled his knife and stabbed out at the nearest of the four, but the man was no longer there. Alberto whirled around, carving the air to left and right, until an inexorable grip stilled his wrist, immobilizing the knife. Two brown eyes, infinitely wide and deep, looked into his.
‘What sort of animal are you?’ said one of the men.
And then it was over and they were gone, striding away like gods, laughing and talking amongst themselves, not bothering to glance back and see if he was coming after them. They’d even left him the knife, because for them he didn’t count. He was just a sad old man who had panicked because some strangers had asked him for a light at the entrance to an underground station.
‘ Ma che razza di animale sei? ’ Well, he’d soon show them the answer to that. Not those illegal immigrants, who would never dream of bringing the incident to the attention of the authorities, thank God, but the only two people who still mattered. They’d soon find out exactly what sort of animal he was! He checked his watch, but there was no need to worry. ‘Time D’ was still a good twenty minutes off, and it would take him no more than half that to reach the spot. He had timed the route carefully, as he always did, although he had never used ‘Location seven’ before. It was somewhere he had been saving for a long time as a ‘one-time-only’ venue, in much the same way that he had nurtured Cazzola along for many years as a potential one-time-only resource, should the need arise.
He had spotted Cazzola shortly after taking up his post as a divisional commander at SISMI’s headquarters. He had already formed a clear impression of the kind of man he was looking for — young, insecure, ambitious, diligent, malleable but not too bright — and Cazzola fitted this identikit portrait to perfection. Alberto had taken him under his wing, flattered and encouraged him, and arranged for him to be promoted into a meaningless but fine-sounding role as his personal aide-de- camp. Within a year, he owned Cazzola. ‘You’re like a father to me,’ the young man had once blurted out.
Once Alberto’s authority had been established beyond question, he had tested out his protege on a few minor but strictly illegal missions of no real importance in themselves. The object had been to ensure that Cazzola was prepared to perform any and all tasks under Alberto’s personal direction and authorization, reporting only to him, and to keep quiet about them at the time and afterwards. He had passed these tests with flying colours.
So when the long-dreaded eventuality finally came to pass, Alberto had the instruments he needed to hand. Over the years, he had used the resources of the servizi to keep track of the other two former members of his cell. Nestore’s move to Venezuela, and the change of name and citizenship that followed, had thrown him off the scent until Soldani had solved the problem himself by enlisting Alberto’s help in setting up various illicit but lucrative deals involving petroleum and guns. With an antiquarian bookshop licensed with the city of Milan under his own name, Gabriele had posed no such problem. In both cases, Alberto’s approach had been oblique and tacit. Each year on the anniversary of Leonardo’s death, he had sent them both a blank postcard of the Cellini bronze depicting Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa, as a reminder both of the event that would link them for the rest of their lives and also of the fact that he knew where they lived.
As soon as the storm broke, however, he had moved on to the offensive, using the considerable powers which his position afforded him for information gathering and logistical support, and then calling in Cazzola to execute his orders. Nestor Machado Solorzano, as Nestore now styled himself, had been his first target. Cazzola had kept him under surveillance, reporting on the target’s helpfully regular life and then breaking into his wife’s car and identifying the type of telecomando that the couple used to open the automatic gates of their villa. After that it was just a question of requisitioning some Semtex and a radio-controlled detonator from stores for a fictional anti-terrorist operation and then putting Cazzola’s bomb-making training to work, linking the two together in an unobtrusive package and retuning the detonator to the wavelength of the remote control transmitter.
While he and Nestore were having their meaningless discussion at the remote station halfway up Monte Generoso, Cazzola had put yet more of his technical skills to work in the mainline car park down by the lake. His tutor, a former professional car thief whose sentence had been halved thanks to the intervention of one of Alberto’s contacts, boasted that he could open any car in less than twenty seconds without attracting attention or setting off the alarm. Cazzola had proved an excellent pupil, and the bomb had been planted under the driving seat of Nestore’s BMW Mini Cooper S even before its owner had boarded the train back down the mountain.