‘Who are you?’
‘You are Passarini?’
Another pause, interspersed by the dull howls of a third voice.
‘Help me, Gabriele! My leg is broken!’
A torch beam shot out like a flick-knife, transfixing Zen.
‘Drop your weapon on the ground and move away from it,’ the man above said.
‘I am not armed. We need to talk. I have no intention of harming you.’
A brief, caustic laugh.
‘Just what Alberto said! You people from the servizi would lie to your mothers about your own name and the date of your birthday.’
‘Please, Gabriele!’ cried the other voice. ‘All right, you won. Now I’m a battlefield casualty. Despite everything, we used to be comrades in arms. By your honour as a soldier, call an ambulance, for the love of God!’
Zen abandoned his imaginary plinth, switched on his torch and strode over to the shed from which these pleas were coming. He finally made out the ancient wooden door and pulled it open. Inside, the darkness was as absolute as in the military tunnels he had explored with Anton Redel. Once again, the torch acted as the presiding deity.
An overwhelming stench of damp mingled with lingering bovine odours and the acoustics of a crypt in which continual whimpers and moans reverberated like a choir of the damned. The building was all of brick. The floor was a tight herringbone pattern, while the vaulted ceiling strengthened the ecclesiastical analogy. The design was at once sturdy, graceful and perfectly proportioned, only this was not a church but a cowshed. They did ugly things in those days too, Zen thought, but they didn’t make ugly things. They just didn’t know how.
‘Over here, Gabriele!’
The swirling echoes cancelled out any directional help that the voice had intended to give, but the torch beam soon picked out the crumpled form lying supine on the flooring in the centre of the hall about five metres away.
‘Call an ambulance! Do you have a mobile? Use mine if not. You wouldn’t want my death on your conscience as well, would you? We’ll just forget what’s happened here. Enough is enough. No more deaths.’
Zen walked towards and then around the man, keeping the torch fixed on his head and face.
‘Gabriele?’ the man asked wonderingly.
‘No, not Gabriele.’
The man lay breathing rapidly and shallowly. His right leg was twisted forward some thirty degrees at the knee. There was blood on his face and hands and on the brick flooring.
Zen transferred the torch to his left hand, knelt down and started to frisk the man’s pockets with his right. The position was awkward, the light source too close to the subject, and he didn’t see the knife until it was curving up towards his throat. But his attacker was hampered in his movements and Zen was able to roll away in time to avoid the blade. Neither man spoke. Zen stood up and kicked the hand holding the knife, which clattered away into one of the cow stalls. He retrieved it, retracted the blade and placed it in his pocket. Then he resumed his search. Having collected all the contents of the man’s jacket and coat pockets, he stood examining them by the light of the torch. As he was doing so, another source of light made its presence felt as Gabriele Passarini made his way towards them, moving in the oddly aggressive manner of people with a limp. He still had the torch in one hand and the pistol in the other.
‘What was I supposed to do?’ Passarini asked, as if talking to himself. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted to knock him over and take his gun away. He was trying to kill me! Only when I hit him, he fell down here from the loft.’
Zen took no notice of him. He completed his inspection of the items he had taken from the man’s pockets, placed them in his own and only then looked at Passarini.
‘Thirty years ago, you were a witness to the murder of Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero in an abandoned military tunnel in the Dolomites. Tell me exactly what happened on that day.’
‘Don’t say anything!’ the man on the floor shouted. ‘He’s a snooper from the Interior Ministry. They’re trying to disgrace the army. Shoot him and then call an ambulance for me! I’ll sort it all out. I’ll tell them that he was responsible for the whole thing and that you saved my life.’
‘Colonel Alberto Guerrazzi was also present on that occasion,’ Zen continued. ‘So was Nestore Soldani, who was killed by a car bomb in Campione d’Italia a few days after the discovery of Ferrero’s corpse, and one day before you fled here. The three of you, with Leonardo Ferrero, formerly constituted one unit of a conspiratorial organization code-named Operation Medusa.’
‘Shoot him, Gabriele!’ Guerrazzi shouted in a voice streaked with anguish. ‘This man is a maverick who is being used by the Interior people to stir up trouble while remaining officially unaccountable. Whatever he has found out remains for the moment his private knowledge. It has not been communicated to Rome. I would know if it had. The risk is therefore containable, just as it was with Ferrero. Like him, this individual represents an Alpha-grade threat to national security. I now outrank you, and as the senior officer in this emergency situation I am ordering you to eliminate him immediately. You have the means at your disposal and I will take full responsibility. Failure to obey my order would be tantamount to treason.’
Gabriele Passarini sighed.
‘Fuck off, Alberto,’ he said.
There was a strangled sound from the floor.
‘Guerrazzi was the leader of the cell,’ Zen continued in an utterly bored tone, ‘the only one with access to higher levels of command within the organization. At a certain point, he informed the rest of you that he had been ordered to take you all up to an abandoned system of military tunnels in the Dolomites to undergo a series of ritual ordeals. The reason given, I imagine, was both to bond the cell together — you were all very new recruits to Medusa — and also to bind that organization in a mystical Blutbruderschaft union with the glorious dead of the regiment who fell there during the First World War.’
‘All honour to them!’ cried the injured man.
‘I entirely agree. All honour to them. All pity too, the poor bastards. At any rate, this is what you were told, and of course you all leapt at the chance to get out of the barracks for a lad¬ dish weekend in the mountains, just as you had at the invitation to be inducted into an elite club like Medusa in the first place. Guerrazzi here was the only one to know the real purpose of the expedition. Colonel Gaetano Comai, his commanding officer and Medusa contact, had informed him that Leonardo Ferrero had contacted a radical Communist investigative journalist named Luca Brandelli with a view to disclosing details about Operation Medusa. Comai no doubt showed him photographs taken covertly during their meeting at a pizzeria in Piazza Bra. Guerrazzi’s mission now was to find out how many other times Ferrero had talked to Brandelli and exactly how much he had revealed, and then eliminate him. I don’t know how he put it to you and Soldani, Signor Passarini, but it may well have been in terms very similar to those he used when he tried to persuade you to shoot me a moment ago.’
‘Alberto told us…’ Gabriele began.
‘Shut up!’ yelled Guerrazzi. ‘If you won’t do your duty, at least hold your tongue.’
There was a brief silence.
‘Would you by any chance have any paper here?’ Zen asked Passarini.
‘Paper?’
‘Typing paper, preferably, but anything will do. I know that you are a man of books, so I thought maybe…’
‘I’ve got some at the house.’
‘Would you be good enough to bring a few sheets over here?’
‘But why?’
‘Five or six sheets would be perfect. Oh, and please don’t think of just running off and disappearing, tempting though that obviously is. If you do, I’ll have to call headquarters and have them issue an arrest warrant for the attempted murder of Colonel Alberto Guerrazzi.’
‘It was an accident!’
‘That would be for the courts to decide, but the case would take at least three years to come to trial, should you be lucky enough to survive that long. I’m sure that the colonel and his friends would take steps to ensure that your time in prison was as unpleasant as possible, if not indeed fatal.’