So much blood. About twenty thousand Turks had been killed at Lepanto, together with half that number of Christians. The human body contains almost six litres of blood. Say one hundred and eighty thousand litres in all. The scuppers of the galleys must have been awash in it, the Gulf of Patras turned to a new Red Sea.
Once the initial pressurized gush had subsided, Alberto carefully searched the body, but Cazzola had indeed been doing everything strictly by the book, and there was nothing that could have identified him. Even if there had been, enquiries would not get very far. Like every other agent of SISMI, Alberto himself included, all records of his existence had been removed from the hands of the civil authorities and destroyed. To all intents and purposes, Cazzola had never existed.
Like a wraith, Alberto thought with satisfaction as he closed and locked the metal door behind him.
XVII
Zen’s train was due to arrive at Verona shortly after two in the morning, but delays due to the fog prevalent throughout the region lengthened the journey time considerably. He dozed off immediately after the departure from Milan, but woke once they reached Brescia, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to sleep again. In many cases he had worked on, there had been a moment like this when events took on a rhythm of their own, imposing themselves like a dance partner who has suddenly decided to lead. But never had he felt this change with such urgency as now.
From the station he caught one of the two remaining cabs in the rank to the Questura on the east bank of the Adige, showed his identification to the desk sergeant and asked for the duty officer and a double espresso. The former turned out to be a gangly, dopey-looking youth who was probably in his mid-twenties but looked like a teenager to Zen. He had apparently been awakened from a deep sleep, but his manner turned rapidly from resentment to alarm as this nocturnal intruder displayed his credentials and explained the reason for his visit.
‘A local resident, one Claudia Giovanna Comai, died some thirty-six hours ago as a result of a fall from her hotel room in Lugano. The Swiss are treating it as an accident, but my superiors at Criminalpol have reason to suppose that this is not in fact the case. They have therefore dispatched me here to search the archives for various documents which might tend to prove or disprove this hypothesis. It is a matter of the greatest urgen¬ cy, as the time of my arrival, so inconvenient for both of us, should amply demonstrate.’
While the young officer was still groggy from this blow, Zen followed up by demanding the use of a secure internal land- line to call Rome and report progress. He was shown into an office on the ground floor and left there while his guide went off to look for the key to the archives. Zen called the operator at the Ministry of the Interior and directed her to put him through to the police authorities at the provincial capital in Cremona.
His reception there, coming from the source it did, was far more cordial than the one he had been accorded personally in Verona. Zen outlined the sketchy information he had acquired from Paola Passarini’s son regarding the property previously owned by the family and sold by them in the late sixties, and requested that full details be obtained from the local comune the moment they opened. He would ring back later in the day to learn the outcome.
As soon as the duty officer unlocked the door leading to the vast storage area in the basement, Zen felt at home. Archives were much the same all over the country, and he had visited most of them at one time or another in his career. To him they were sad but restful places, sheltered graveyards for forgotten intrigues, mysteries and atrocities about which no one cared any more. Above all, they were complete. Italian bureaucrats might have their faults, but like the medieval monks they resembled in so many ways they never threw anything away, although they had of course been known to destroy a document on orders from above, or to let certain well-connected persons remove it while their backs were supposedly turned.
This aspect of official record-keeping had been of some concern to Zen, given the apparent situation. His other worry was the computer screen perched on a desk near the door, but the young officer assured him that although the catalogue was gradually being digitized, this process was slightly behind schedule owing to technical problems and staff shortages and so far covered only those cases dating from 1994. The earlier material was accessed through a series of card index filing cabinets using a system perfectly familiar to Zen. He dismissed his companion with an unsubtle hint about his no doubt needing to get some more sleep, and then set to work. Shortly afterwards the desk sergeant appeared with a plastic mug containing a double shot of espresso. Deep in communion with the files, Zen almost made the mistake of tipping him.
The documents on record in the names of Claudia and Gaetano Comai were not extensive, and apart from the inevitable interlarding of pages regarding purely routine matters they solely concerned the matter of the latter’s death. Zen settled down to read them, noting various details from the contemporary reports and also the name of the officer who had conducted the investigation enquiries. When he had everything he needed, he replaced the files and went back upstairs.
The desk sergeant had never heard of any Armando Boito, and very much doubted that his superior would have either.
‘We’re too young,’ he explained in a cringingly apologetic tone of voice that Zen had never before heard used with those particular words. ‘The Personnel people keep all the records on former staff on file, of course, but they won’t be in until eight.’
Zen walked out under the portico of the Questura for a smoke. A rain as serious and solid as hail was falling. Beyond the other side of the street, the vast bulk of the Adige glided past like the collective unconscious of the sleeping city, a viscous colloid the colour of old blood, laden with muck and garbage, amorphous forms and sodden hulks, shattered hopes and broken dreams. The massed range of the Alps behind had unleashed a storm that would fill the wide channel of the river close to the level of the high embankments by evening. People would shake their heads and exchange fashionable worries about the climate changing, but in truth it had always been like this. There were no landscapes in Italy. Nature had always been the adversary.
Every instinct was telling Zen to push forward. Short on sleep, but high on adrenalin and caffeine, he felt restless and totally wakeful, but there was nothing he could usefully do until the day staff arrived for work, both here and in Cremona. It then occurred to him that he was going to need to rent a car, and that the places that opened earliest would be at the airport. He went back inside and got the number of the local taxi cooperative from the duty sergeant. At this point, having thrown his weight to such good effect, he could probably have talked his way into getting driven out there in a patrol car, but he already sensed that things were rapidly approaching a point where the fewer official dealings that were involved the better.
When the taxi dropped him off at the airport, the only sign of life in the glistening terminal was a check-in line for some crack-of-dawn cut-price flight to Ibiza. The car rental booths were right down the other end, near the arrivals gate, a walk of what felt like almost a kilometre, and none of them was open. Zen sat down on one of the array of steel benches nearby, fighting the urge to lie down and surrender to sleep by thinking about his interview with Claudia Comai. He realized now that she had understood everything he said alla rovescia, inside out. ‘I made my statement to the police at the time,’ she’d told him. ‘They questioned me on several occasions and I said everything I have to say then, while it was all fresh in my mind. The report must still be on file somewhere.’