‘That’s absurd! Comai personally inducted me into Medusa. As cell leader, I recruited the other three. They reported to me and I reported to Comai. If he had doubts about the organization, why would he do all that?’
Zen nodded. ‘That’s an interesting point. Another is the cellular structure of Medusa. The idea of course is to protect the organization from external scrutiny in the event of a breakdown in security. Since each cell is discrete, its members cannot betray anything more than their own limited knowledge. By the same token, however, they cannot know anything more either. They cannot know, for example, whether the organization actually exists at all.’
He shone the torch beam at Guerrazzi’s face.
‘Your induction occurred during the three-month period preceding Lieutenant Ferrero’s death, right?’
‘How can you know?’
‘Because the beginning of that period is when Colonel Comai discovered that Ferrero had been having an affair with his wife Claudia. Or rather, that’s when she told him.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Ferrero had broken off the affair a few months earlier, and he chose the cruellest way, a wall of silence. The coward’s way, she calls it in her journal. It was very difficult and dangerous for Claudia to contact her young lover, and on the few occasions when she tried he simply refused to respond. In a word, he had tired of her, and was no doubt also worried about the effect on his career if her husband found out. Anyway, he dropped her.’
‘This is all…’
‘Shortly afterwards, Claudia discovered that she was pregnant. She broke both the good news and the bad to her husband. She was going to be a mother at last, and he a father. It was a new beginning for their marriage, and in order that love and trust might henceforth be abounding there was one past peccadillo that she wanted to confess to, just so as to clear the air. She backdated the end of the affair with Ferrero by about a year, so that her husband would have no suspicion that the child was not his, and indeed it seems that he never did.’
Guerrazzi looked completely dazed, and not just by pain or the light.
‘Signora Comai’s object in all this was to protect herself against possible future indiscretions by her ex-lover, and more importantly to get her own back. She knew exactly how ambitious Ferrero was, and in his military career he would soon be facing the same wall of silence to which he had treated her. It was a just punishment that would hurt him just as he had hurt her. Colonel Comai had other ideas, however. It was he, no doubt, who suggested that Leonardo Ferrero would be an excellent choice for one of the other three members of the newly formed Medusa cell.’
‘He mentioned his name.’
Zen murmured indulgently.
‘The idea was a stroke of genius on his part, I must admit. A stupid man would have made do with one assassin, or even have done it himself. But Comai couldn’t know how many other people knew about Ferrero’s liaison with his wife. If the young lieutenant turned up dead in an alley somewhere then tongues might have started to wag. Besides, an individual might have betrayed him, but a group like yours was bound together by a sense of shared responsibility and guilt. To reveal the truth would have been to betray your comrades in arms, not to mention a patriotic conspiracy of the highest secrecy and significance.’
‘This is all bluff, Zen! You have no proof.’
‘Proof exists, in the form of Claudia Comai’s journal. I read it earlier today, although apart from a few details it merely confirmed what I already knew or had guessed. And I could easily have brought it with me, had I been interested in collecting evidence. But this case is never going to come to court. Apart from anything else, the principals are all dead. Colonel Comai was almost certainly murdered by his wife, by the way. At the time of Ferrero’s death, Claudia assumed that he had been killed by accident in that plane crash. It was another fifteen years before her husband finally revealed the truth in the course of a marital row. A short time later he fell, or more likely was pushed, to his death. And his widow Claudia herself ended her life at a hotel in Lugano.’
He paused for a moment.
‘Which leaves only you, Guerrazzi.’
He went over to the wall where Passarini had left the pistol and carefully wiped the weapon clean of fingerprints on his scarf before setting it down on the floor about two metres beyond the furthest reach of the injured man.
‘You should be able to reach that in due course. It will be totally dark in here, of course, and moving will be painful. But under the circumstances you may well decide that the alternatives are even less desirable.’
Zen got out Guerrazzi’s SISMI identification and checked that the signature on the blank sheets of paper corresponded to that on the card. He then went through the rest of the other man’s belongings. The keys he retained and the knife he tossed into a corner. Lastly he removed the battery from the mobile phone and then threw them separately to different ends of the shed.
‘So you’re appointing yourself judge, jury and executioner,’ Guerrazzi commented with a certain bitter satisfaction.
‘Just the first two, colonnello, and then only after conducting a full investigation. Unlike you, who took on all three roles on nothing but the unsupported word of a vengeful husband.’
‘I was a soldier obeying the orders of my commanding officer!’
‘What you were was a fool, Guerrazzi. Take these tattoos with the face of the Gorgon, for example. Ferrero and Soldani both had them. I imagine that you and Passarini did too.’
‘It was part of the induction ceremony.’
‘To make life easy for the opposition, no doubt. No need for lengthy interrogations or the third degree. To identify you as a member, all they had to do was roll up your sleeve. And it wasn’t as if Colonel Comai didn’t know any better. He regularly used to smuggle in huge amounts of cash through Switzerland, using the casino at Campione as his clearing house. You can’t do that without powerful friends, and Comai was almost certainly paymaster to one of the real extreme right-wing conspiratorial organizations that were operating at the time. But he knew that the real thing wouldn’t be colourful enough to attract young idiots like you, so he dreamt up this fantasy secret society complete with tattoos and passwords and induction ceremonies and bonding rituals and all the rest of it. And you fell for the hoax, and on the strength of it you have committed two murders and were planning a third.’
‘It’s not true! It can’t be true!’
‘It is true, colonnello. Your entire career has been predicated on a lie. You are evidently a great admirer of military discipline and traditions. So am I, in my way, so I shall now leave you to reflect on the situation and then do as you see fit.’
Zen walked down the alley and out of the building, closing the heavy door behind him and wiping off the handle. After the damp, fetid atmosphere inside the stalla, the night air smelt wonderful.
Gabriele Passarini was waiting with his bags in the courtyard.
‘Right, let’s be off!’ said Zen briskly. ‘Got all your stuff?’
‘Everything except my bicycle.’
‘Is there anything about it to link it to you?’
‘No.’
Passarini hesitated.
‘In fact it’s a ladies’ model.’
‘Then forget it. We must leave immediately.’
‘But what about him?’
He gestured to the cowshed.
‘Oh, that’s all sorted out,’ Zen replied, picking up one of Passarini’s bags and leading the way to the gate. ‘Colonel Guerrazzi and I have come to an understanding and he’s given me full instructions. As soon as we’re clear of the area, I’ll call a number he provided and dispatch a military ambulance to come and pick him up. We couldn’t use the civilian service, of course. They’d want to know what he’d been doing here and how it happened and who we were and all the rest of it. This way, the whole incident will just be forgotten.’