But time was exactly what Aurelio Zen did not have.
In the small town of Sant’ Ambrogio at the foot of the hill, he parked the Fiat in the huge piazza just north of the medieval centre, and then proceeded on foot. In due course he found a grocery and a newsagent’s where you could send or receive faxes. From the former he obtained a ham and cheese roll, from the latter the number of their fax machine. Then he walked back to the phone box in the piazza and called his contact at the Questura in Cremona.
‘Yes, yes, we have the information you requested, dottore. The property you described does indeed exist, although it’s now completely abandoned. Shall I give you the details now? Fax them to your hotel? Absolutely, dottore. At once. There’s just one thing, if I may be so bold…’
‘Well?’ demanded Zen, chewing on the roll.
‘When I called the land registry office, the woman there had the file we needed ready to hand. She said that this was the second time in the past few days that there had been an enquiry about the former Passarini property.’
‘Who was the other caller?’
‘Someone at the Ministry of Defence, she said. So I naturally wondered if there was perhaps something going on there that we should know about. We could easily send a few men out there to search the place.’
Zen almost choked on his roll.
‘No, no, no! That won’t be necessary. There’s no interest in the property itself. It must be a ruin by now anyway. It’s just a question of the deeds.’
‘Ah, right. But what exactly is this concerning?’
‘An on-going criminal investigation based in Rome which for obvious reasons I can’t discuss. The Ministry of Defence also has an interest in the case. And to make things still more difficult, there is a civil lawsuit in progress, the evidence in which is germane to our own enquiries. One of the items regarded the ownership of this property back in the sixties. So it’s purely a matter of background information relating to an affair which is of no interest whatsoever to the Provincia di Cremona. Otherwise of course I’d have alerted you.’
To his relief, the inspector in Cremona sounded convinced.
‘ Perfetto, dottore. Forgive me for bringing it up, but I thought I’d better ask. We naturally like to keep track of anything important that might be happening on our territory.’
‘Of course.’
‘Excellent. Well then, I’ll fax the information to you right away.’
Zen left the phone booth and stood outside, smoking a cigarette and staring at the rectangular piazza lined with savagely pollarded trees. It was enormous for the size of the town, a parade ground big enough to drill a regiment. There must have been a sheep market here once upon a time, with flocks brought down from the hills above. That would explain it.
He went back into the booth and phoned Gemma. There was no answer, so he left a brief message on the answering machine, almost certainly too brief for the listeners to trace the number he was calling from. As he walked back to the newsagent’s, he remembered that Gemma had told him that she was planning to spend a couple of days visiting her son.
That gave him another idea. Having picked up the fax from the Questura in Cremona, he bought a sheet of paper — nothing came free in the Veneto — and faxed a message to his friend Giorgio De Angelis at Criminalpol, asking him to send a team of their technical people up to the apartment in Via del Fosso and remove any electronic surveillance equipment they found there. He didn’t bother mentioning the spare key held by a neighbour on the floor below. The Ministry’s specialists could open any door known to man while you were blowing your nose.
Back in the Fiat, he decided to take a quick look at the remains of Claudia and Gaetano Comai’s country property. It was only a few kilometres away, and the nearest link road to the autostrada lay in that direction anyway. Following Armando Boito’s instructions, he located the filling station easily enough, then turned left down a street along the side of the new apartment block. About three-quarters of the way down, what was obviously the original nineteenth-century wall of the estate replaced the modern cast-iron fence mounted on a concrete base installed by the developers. The old stone wall continued around the corner at the next cross-street, running along the rear of the property. At its mid-point, a green wooden door was inset in the wall. Stickers on the rear bumper of a battered white Toyota parked next to it exhorted people to say no to NATO genocide bombing in Serbia, save the whales, and think globally but act locally.
There was an odd, disturbing sound in the air, presumably a dog shut up here to guard the property, far from the snuffly intimacy and comforting odours of the pack. Single dogs had become the norm these days, Zen reflected as he opened the back door of the car and unlatched his suitcase. Single children too. He’d been an only child himself, of course, but things had been different back then. In the neighbourhood of Venice where Zen had grown up, there had been a community of children who played and learned together, swearing and daring and egging each other on, tussling for rank and status, inventing elaborate games for which no expensive products were necessary, exploring their territory and staging raids and mock battles with their rivals to either side. But all that had gone. Now both dogs and children had to try and make sense of life all on their own. No wonder they whined so much.
He approached the door in the wall, holding the small toolkit that he had removed from his suitcase. He had acquired this useful piece of equipment during his years as an inspector in Naples, when a petty thief had unwittingly blundered into the middle of a major operation Zen had been involved in. The burglar had gladly agreed to trade his freedom for a vow of silence and a set of his working instruments, plus a crash course in how to use them.
They had served Zen well on many occasions, but one glance at the lock told him that they would be of no use here. This was an old-fashioned barrel lock wrought by hand out of iron, contemporary with the original villa. It might have caused a slight problem even for the Ministry’s technicians. Zen’s bag of tricks, designed to cope with modern industrial products, would be powerless against it.
The wailing sounded out again, louder and more prolonged than before. Zen glanced at the white Toyota. It had the old- fashioned number plates starting with the two-letter code for the province where the vehicle was registered, in this case Pesaro. He grasped the handle of the garden door and pushed his shoulder against it. The door stuck for a moment on the stone ledge at the bottom, then swung open.
The remaining strip of garden consisted of dense shrubbery against the wall to either side and between the thrusting lower trunks of deciduous trees much too large for this space. A clearly-trodden path led off through this miniature glade, and Zen followed it past outcroppings of bushes and ground cover to a wall of giant cypresses where the path curved back, eventually revealing a diminutive brick house in the corner of the garden.
The wailing burst out with renewed vigour and volume, peaking in howls of grief with indecipherable words embedded in them. Zen stopped a few metres short of the little building. He knew now what he would find there, and had no wish to cause embarrassment by intruding. He could easily have slipped away unnoticed, but instead he continued to the low front door and opened it.
He looked cautiously around the tiny room before entering, knowing from experience how easily grief could find relief in violence, but there was no one there. To his left, between the windows, hung a mirror covered in black cloth. To his right, a miniaturized dresser with a central cupboard and many smaller cabinets and drawers to either side. At the far end, a table and chairs, a stove and fireplace, and another door. It was from there that the sounds were coming.