'I'm calling from the Ministry,' Zen recited. 'I have a me ssage for Signora Biacis.'
'I'm her husband. What have you got to say?'
'You've no doubt heard about the recent terrorist outrage, Signor Biacis…'
'Bevilacqua, Mauro Bevilacqua,' the man cut in.
Zen noted the name on the scratch pad by the phone.
Evidently Tania Biacis, like many Italian married women, had retained her maiden name.
'As a result, ministerial staff have been placed on an emer cncy alert. Your wife is liable for a half-shift this evening,'
The man snorted angrily.
'This has never happened before!'
'On the contrary, it has happened all too often.'
'I mean she's never been called in at this time before!'
'Then she's been very lucky,' Zen declared with finality, and hung up.
That was all he'd needed to do, Zen thought as he sat in the taxi, waiting for the driver to return. It was all he'd been asked to do, it was all he had any right to do. But instead of returning to the living room and his mother's company, he'd lifted the phone again and called a taxi.
The address listed in the telephone directory after 'Bevilacqua Mauro' did not exist on Zen's map of Rome.
The taxi driver hadn't known where it was either, but after consultations with the dispatcher it had finally been located in one of the new suburbs on the eastern fringes of the city, beyond the Grande Raccordo Anulare.
Whether it was that the dispatcher's instructions had been unclear or that the driver had forgotten them, they had only found the street after a lengthy excursion through unsurfaced streets that briefiy became country roads pocked with potholes and ridged into steps, where concrete-covered drainage pipes ran across the eroded surface. Until recently this had all been unfenced grazing land, open campagna where sheep roamed amid the striding aqueducts and squat round towers that now gave their names to the new suburbs which had sprung up as the capital began its pathological post-war growth. Laid out piecemeal as the area grew, the streets rambled aimlessly about, often ending abruptly in cul-de-sacs that forced the driver to make long and disorientating detours. Here was a zone of abusive development from the early sixties, a shanty town of troglodytic hutches run up by immigrants from the south, each surrounded by a patch of enclosed ground where chickens and donkeys roamed amid old lavatories and piles of abandoned pallets. Next came an older section of villas for the well-to-do, thick with pines and guard dogs, giving way abruptly to a huge cleared expanse of asphalt illuminated by gigantic searchlights trained down from steel masts, where a band of gypsies had set up home in caravans linked by canopies of plastic sheeting. After that there was a field with sheep grazing, and then the tower blocks began, fourteen storeys high, spaced evenly across the landscape like the pieces in a board-game for giants, on tracts of land that had been brutally assaulted and left to die. Finally, they had found the development of walk-up apartments where Mauro Bevilacqua and Tania Biacis had made their home.
Zen sank back in the seat, wondering why on earth he had come. As soon as the driver returned from his snack he would go home. Tania must have left long ago, while the taxi was lost in this bewildering urban hinterland. Not that he had really intended to follow her, anyway. Putting together her comment about her husband that morning and then her request that Zen phone up with a fictitious reason for her to leave the house, it seemed pretty clear what she was up to. The last thing he wanted was proof of that. He had accepted the fact that Tania was happily and irrevocably married. He didn't now want to have to accept that, on the contrary, she was having an illicit affair, but not with him.
A silhouetted figure appeared at one of the windows of the nearby block. Zen imagined the scene viewed from that window: the deserted street, the parked car. It made him think of the night before, and suddenly he understood what he had found disturbing about the red car.
Like the taxi, it had been about fifty metres from his house and on the opposite side of the street, the classic surveillance position. But he had no time to follow up the implications of this thought, because at that moment a woman emerged from one of the staircases of the apartment block.
She started to walk towards the taxi, then suddenly stopped, turned, and hurried back the way she had come.
At the same moment, as if on cue, the taxi driver reappeared from the bar and a swarthy man in shirtsleeves ran out into the car park underneath the apartment block, looking round wildly. The woman veered sharply to her left, making for the bar, but the man easily cut her off.
They started to struggle, the man gripping her by the arms and trying to pull her back towards the door of the block.
Zen got out of the taxi and walked over to them, unfolding his identity card.
'Police! '
Locked in their clumsy tussle, the couple took no notice. Zen shook the man roughly by the shoulder.
'Let her go!'
The man swung round and aimed a wild punch at Zen, who dodged the blow with ease, seized the man by the collar and pulled him off balance, then shoved him backwards, sending him reeling headlong to the ground.
'Right, what would you like to be arrested for?' he asked. 'Assaulting a police officer…'
'You assaulted me!' the man interrupted indignantly as he got to his feet.
'… or interfering with this lady,' Zen concluded.
The man laughed coarsely. He was short and slightlybuilt, with a compensatory air of bluster and braggadocio which seemed to emanate from his neatly clipped moustache.
'Lady? What do you mean, lady? She's my wife!
Understand? This is a family affair!'
Zen turned to Tania Biacis, who was looking at him in utter amazement.
'What happened, signora?'
'She was running away from her home and her duties!' her husband exclaimed.' His arms were outstretched to an invisible audience.
'I… that taxi… I thought it was free,' Tania said. She was evidently completely thrown by Zen's presence. 'I was going to take it. Then I saw there was someone in it, so I was going to the bar to phone for one.'
Mauro Bevilacqua glared at Zen.
'What the hell are you doing lurking about here, anyway? It's as bad as Russia, policemen on every street corner!'
'There happens to be a terrorist alert on,' Zen told him coldly.
Tania turned triumphantly on her husband.
'You see! I told you!'
Having recovered her presence of mind, she appealed to Zen.
'I work at the Ministry of the Interior. I was called in for emergency duties this evening, but my husband wouldn't believe me. He wouldn't let me use the car. He said it was all a lie, a plot to get out of the house!'
Zen shook his head in disgust.
'So it's come to this! Here's your wife, signore, a key member of a dedicated team who are giving their all, night and day, to defend this country of ours from a gang of ruthless anarchists, and all you can do is to hurl puerile and scandalous accusations at her! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.'
'It's none of your business!' Bevilacqua snapped.
'On the contrary,' Zen warned him. 'If I choose to make it my business, you could be facing a prison sentence for assault.'
He paused to let that sink in.
'Luckily for you, however, I have more important things to do. Just as your wife does. But to set your fears at rest, I'll accompany her personally to the Ministry. Will that satisfy you? Or perhaps you'd like me to summon an armed escort to make sure that she reaches her place of work safely?'
Mauro Bevilacqua flapped his arms up and down like a flightless bird trying vainly to take off.
'What I'd like! What I'd like! What I'd like is for her to start behaving like a wife should instead of gadding about on her own at this time of night!'