‘You’d already heard, I take it.’
‘Heard?’
‘About Leonardo.’
‘No, actually.’
Alberto gave him one of his trademark coded looks, which might be decrypted roughly as ‘Obviously I don’t believe you, but equally obviously you don’t intend or expect me to. Honour is therefore satisfied, and we’re back where we started, only one level up.’
‘I don’t bother any more,’ Nestore said.
‘Bother?’
‘With the news.’
Alberto laughed indulgently.
‘No, of course not! Neither do I. If those media clowns have heard of it, it isn’t news. But I thought you might…’
The winding path, proceeding gently in ascent, had brought them to a viewpoint with a slatted wooden bench overlooking the lake. The gnarled roots of the huge beeches showed above ground between outcrops of rock covered in lichen and some patchy grass. Alberto extracted a pair of small binoculars from his pocket and looked down through them to the terminus of the railway far below. Nestore subsided on to the bench.
‘So you haven’t?’ Alberto remarked, replacing the binoculars in his pocket.
Another unaltered trait: picking up some apparently discarded conversational thread as though it were one among dozens of chess games he was playing simultaneously and with equal mastery. For a vertiginous moment, Nestore felt twenty again, not in the conventional jokey sense in which he’d said it to his mistress, but with a kind of terror. We always misremember youth, he thought. The fact is that it was scary and demanding. He was happy being the age he now was, with the various perks and comforts that age had brought. He wasn’t up to youth any more, and he certainly wasn’t prepared to be dicked around by Alberto.
‘Haven’t what?’ he demanded in a tone that reflected this feeling.
‘Any inside channels. Contacts from the old days, perhaps.’
‘Like who?’
Alberto’s casual, almost irritated shrug struck the first false note in their encounter.
‘Oh, I don’t know!’
Asmall lizard sped across the rocky ledge between them.
‘Gabriele, for instance.’
‘Why should I?’
‘Why shouldn’t you?’
‘Passarini was a wimp, even back then. I don’t associate with wimps.’
Alberto nodded, as though evaluating some important and complex piece of data.
‘So you’re no longer in touch with Gabriele.’
Nestore got to his feet.
‘I’m no longer in touch with anyone from those days, Alberto. And the only reason I’m talking to you is because you dragged me up here with an urgent summons that made it all sound vitally important, a matter of life and death. I don’t get it. All right, Leonardo’s body has been found. So what?’
Alberto slipped immediately into another of the roles that Nestore knew so well, but had forgotten; in this instance, that of the great professor indulging a promising student by deliberately misinterpreting his ploddingly literal question for a more suggestively meaningful one.
‘Before the Viminale moved, I would absolutely have agreed with you,’ he replied, nodding slowly. ‘The investigation was initially being handled by the Brothers-in-Law, and the combination of their own ineptitude and a little judicious guidance orchestrated by yours truly promised to bring the whole unfortunate business to a speedy and discreet conclusion.’
This is how women must feel, thought Nestore, listening to some bore droning on, trying to impress them. Except that they at least know what he wants. But what did Alberto want?
‘What day is it?’
He was pleased to note the momentary flash of startled confusion before the reply came.
‘Why, Sunday.’
‘Correct. It also happens to be my birthday, and I’m celebrating by having lunch out with my friends, none of whom would know you from the Romanian guest worker who washes the dishes at the very exclusive restaurant where I am due in just under an hour. I am no longer Nestore Soldani. My name is Nestor Machado Solorzano and I am a Venezuelan citizen living a blameless life in a quietly luxurious tax haven in southern Switzerland. I am grateful for the help that you provided in the past over those oil contracts and arms deals, but you got your cut at the time. In short, Alberto, unless you can demonstrate in the next thirty seconds that what happened all those years ago is of the slightest consequence to me now, then with all due respect I invite you to stick your Italian intrigues up your arse and leave me in peace.’
He had been expecting fury and fireworks, but to his astonishment — disappointment even — Alberto just crumpled.
‘Of course, of course!’ he murmured. ‘I’m sorry. Let’s start back to the station. The train will be along soon and you’ll be back in Campione in good time for your lunch. I had no idea that it was your birthday and I apologize for intruding. Only I had to be sure, do you see?’
When there was no answer, he repeated the apparently rhetorical question in an even more emphatically anguished tone.
‘Do you see?’
I was completely wrong about him, thought Nestore. The old boy’s gone to pieces. It’s all front, bluster and bluff, and the generalized paranoia of the old.
‘See what?’ he demanded roughly.
‘That I had to be sure.’
‘Sure of what?’
Alberto paused for a moment, holding his companion by the arm. He gave a brief laugh to signal an upcoming joke.
‘That I’d “secured my flanks”. Remember that pedant Oddone in his lecture on Cannae? “Aemilius Paullus had imprudently neglected to secure his flanks.” At which Andrea promptly pipes up, “And his rear was wide open too.” Ah, happy days!’
Nestore pointedly consulted his watch, and Alberto hastened to lead the way along the path again.
‘Anyway, that’s rather my position just now, you see.’
‘“Securing your flanks”. Meaning me and Gabriele?’
There was no reply.
‘What’s become of Gabriele, anyway?’
Not that he gave a toss. This was just a social chat now, a question of finding some topic in common to keep the embarrassment of silence at bay.
‘He runs a bookshop in Milan,’ Alberto murmured.
Nestore nodded.
‘I can imagine him doing that.’
‘Only he doesn’t seem to be there at the moment. Or at his house either. In fact he seems to have disappeared. It’s all a bit worrying. Are you sure you have no idea where he might be?’
‘We haven’t been in touch for over twenty years.’
‘Ah, right. Well, we’re looking into it. We’ll find him sooner or later. It’s just that time is of the essence.’
‘“We”?’
Alberto’s demeanour changed in some indefinable way.
‘I moved over to intelligence work about the same time that you went off to South America.’
‘The servizi?’
Alberto acknowledged the point with a self-satisfied bow.
‘SISMI, the Servizio Informazioni e Sicurezza Militare. Better promotion prospects, not to mention the possibility of assisting you in your business ventures, but above all a real opportunity to serve my country. There’s little chance of Italy being involved in open warfare in the immediate future, but there’s no end to the covert wars. The post offers me superior challenges and superior resources. That’s how I’ve been able to maintain up-to-date records on you and Gabriele, just in case the need should ever arise.’
‘The need for what?’
‘To meet and talk frankly about the situation. Above all, to ensure that our secret remains ours, and will not become a public scandal which could compromise public trust in our armed forces in the most disastrous way, as well as reopening the terrible scars left on our body politic by the events of the seventies.’
Pompous prick, thought Nestore.
‘Well, I’m glad I’ve been able to reassure you,’ he said affably.
‘Indeed. Now it’s just a question of tracking down Gabriele and having the same conversation with him. I’m sure the outcome will be the same too. I hear the train coming. Many thanks for your cooperation, Nestore, and profound apologies for the disturbance. But I did have to be sure. You understand that, don’t you? I did have to be sure.’