And they proved it too, dying.
Wednesday, 20.25 – 22.05
'Is this going to take much longer?' the taxi driver asked plaintively, twisting around to the back seat.
His passenger regarded him without enthusiasm.
'What do you care? You're getting paid, aren't you?'
The driver banged his palm on the steering-wheel, making it ring dully.
'Eh, I hope so! But there's more to life than getting paid, you know. It's almost an hour we've been sitting here. I usually have a bite to eat around now. I mean, if you wanted me for the evening, you should have said so.'
The street in which they were parked stretched straight ahead between the evenly spaced blocks of flats built on reinforced concrete stilts, the ground fioor level consisting of a car park. In the nearest block, half of this space had been filled in to provide a few shops, all closed. Between two of them was a lit plate-glass frontage, above which a blue neon sign read BAR'.
'Well?' the driver demanded.
'All right. But don't take all night about it.'
The driver clambered awkwardly out of the car, wheezing heavily. Years of high tension and low exercise seemed to have converted all his bone and muscle to flab.
'I'm talking about a snack, that's all!' he complained.
'Even the fucking car won't go unless you fill it up.'
Hitching up his ample trousers, he waddled off past three metal rubbish skips overflowing with plastic bagsI and sacks. Zen watched him pick his way across the hun.-mocks and gullies that looked like piles of frozen snow ii; the cheerless light of the ultra-modern streetlamps.
Nothing else moved. No one was about. Apart from the bar, there was nothing in the vicinity to tempt the inhabitants out of doors after dark. The whole area had a provisional, half-finished look, as though the developer had lost interest half-way through the job. The reason was no doubt to be found in one of those get-out clauses which Burolo Construction's contracts had invariably included, allowing them to suck the lucrative marrow out of a project without having to tackle the boring bits.
Like the others, the block near which they were parked was brand-new and looked as if it had been put together in about five minutes from prefabricated sections, like a child's toy. Access to the four floors of flats was by rectangular stairwells which descended like lift shafts to the cav park at ground level. The flat roof bristled with televisicn aerials resembling the reeds which had flourished in thi~ marshy land before the developers moved in.
Some of the windows were unshuttered, and from time to time figures appeared in these lighted panels, providing Zen with his only glimpse so far of the inhabitants of the zone. There was no way of knowing whether their shadowy gestures had any relevance to his concerns or not. He had checked the list of residents posted outside each stairwell. The name Bevilacqua appeared opposite flat 14, but the door to the stairs was locked and Zen hadn't gone as far as trying to gain entry to the block. It seemed to him that he'd gone quite far enough as it was.
Most of his afternoon had been spent trying to find a solution to the problem of the stolen video tape. A visit to an electronics shop had revealed the existence of complexities he had never guessed at, involving choices of type, brand and length. In the end he'd selected one which had the practical advantage of being sold separately rather than in packs of three. It didn't really matter, he told himself. Either they would check or they wouldn't. If they did, they weren't going to feel any better disposed fpwards Zen because he had replaced the missing video with exactly the right kind of blank tape, or even given them a Bugs Bunny cartoon in exchange.
Back at the Ministry, he walked down two flights of drably functional concrete stairs to the sub-basement where the archives department was housed. As he had foreseen, only one clerk was on duty at that time of day, so Zen's request to inspect the files relating to one of his old cases, selected at random, resulted in the desk being left unmanned for over five minutes. This was quite long enough for Zen to browse through the rubber-stamp collection, find the one reading 'Property of the Ministry of the Interior – Index No…', apply this to the labels on the face a d spine of the video cassette and then copy the index number from the memorandum he had been sent.
When the clerk returned with the file he had asked for, Zer spent a few minutes leafing through it for appearance's sake. The case was one that dated back almost twenty years, to the time when Zen had been attached to the Questura in Milan. He scanned the pages with affection and nostalgia, savouring the contrast between the old-fashioned report forms and the keen fiourish of his youthful handwriting. But as the details of the case began to emerge, these innocent pleasures were overshadowed darker memories. Why had he asked for this of all files.
The question was also the answer, for the Spadola case was not just another of the many investigations Zen had been involved with in the course of his career. It had been at once his first great triumph and his first great disillusionment.
After the war, when the fighting in Italy came to an end, many left-wing partisans were ready and willing to carry the armed struggle one stage further, to overthrow the government and set up a workers' state. Some had ideological motives, others were just intoxicated by the thrills and glamour of making history and couldn't stomach the prospect of retuming to a life of mundane, poorly paid work, even supposing there was work to be had. To such men, and Vasco Spadola was one, the decision of the Communist leader Togliatti to follow a path of reform rather than revolution represented a betrayal.
Once it became clear that a national uprising of the Italian working class was not going to happen, Spadola and his comrades put their weapons and training to use in a sporadic campaign of bank raids and hold-ups which they tried to justify as 'acts of class warfare'.
The success of these ventures soon caused considerable strains and stresses within the group. On one side were those led by Ugo and Carlo Trocchio, who still adhered to a doctrinaire political line, and on the other Spadola's followers, who were beginning to appreciate the possibilities of this kind of private enterprise. These problems were eventually resolved when the Trocchio brothers were shot dead in a cafe in the Milan suburb of Rho.
With their departure, the gang abandoned all pretence of waging a political struggle and concentrated instead on consolidating its grip on every aspect of the city's criminal life. High-risk bank raids were replaced by unspectacular percentage operations such as gambling, prostitution, drugs and extortion. Spadola's involvement in these areas was well known to the police, but one aspect of his partisan training which he had not forgotten was how to structure an organization in such a way that it could survive the penetration or capture of individual units. No matter how many of his operations were foiled or his associates arrested, Spadola himself was never implicated until the Tondelli affair.
Bruno Tondelli himself was not one of Milan's most savoury characters, but when he was done to death with a butcher's knife it was still murder. The Tondellis had been engaged in a long-running territorial dispute with Spadola's men, which no doubt explained why Spadola , found it expedient to disappear from sight immediately after the murder. Nevertheless, no one in the police would have wagered a piece of used chewing-gum on their chances of pinning it on him.
Then one day Zen, who had been given the thankless task of investigating Tondelli's stabbing, received a message from an informer asking for a meeting. In order to protect them, informers' real names and addresses were kept in a locked file to which only a very few high-ranking officials had access; everyone else referred to them by their code name. The man who telephoned Zen, known as 'the nightingale', was one of the police's most trusted and reliable sources of information.