And who was I, when the family was together? The holy ghost, I suppose. The unholy ghost.
Thursday, 07.55 – 13.20
All the talk at the cafe the next morning was of the overnight swoop by the police and Carabinieri on leftist sympathizers in Milan, Turin and Genoa. 'About time too,' was the dentist's comment, but one of the craftsmen from the basement workshops disagreed.
'The real terrorists don't have anything to do v,~ith those sinistrini. It's just the cops trying to make a good impression. A week from now they'll all have been turned loose again and we'll be back where we started!'
The barman Ernesto and the dentist looked at Zen, who maintained a stony silence. The reason for this was neither professional reserve nor disapproval of the craftsman's cynical tone. Zen simply wasn't paying any attention to the conversation. He had problems of his own that were too pressing to allow him the luxury of discussing other people's, problems which were quite literally closer to home.
Once again he had stayed up until the small hours of the morning, trying without success to find the missing link that would explain the events of the previous days. Noi only had he not succeeded, he wasn't even sure that success was possible. The temptation to fit everything into a neat pattern, he knew, should be resisted. It might well be that two or more quite unrelated patterns were at work.
One thing was sure. During the three hours he had been absent from home the night before, someone had entered his flat and left an envelope filled with shotgun pellets on the sideboard in the hallway. Zen had locked the front door on leaving and it had still been locked on his return.
Questioning his mother obliquely, to avoid frightening her, he had confirmed that she had not let anyone in. The only other person with a key was Maria Grazia. Before leaving for work Zen had interrogated her without result.
The key was kept in her handbag, which hadn't been lost or stolen. Her family were all strict Catholics of the type who would have guilt pangs about picking up a hundredlire coin they found in the street. It was out of the question that any of them might have been bribed to pass on the key to a third party. Zen also questioned Giuseppe, who had duplicate keys to all the apartments.
He was equally categorical in his denials, and given the fanatical vigilance with which he carried out his duties it seemed unlikely that the intruder could have gained access in this way.
Which left only the metallic scraping Zen's mother had reported hearing the night before. It had come from the other side of the room, she said, where the large wardrobe stood. It now seemed clear that the noise had been made by someone picking the lock of the door leading to the fire escape, only to find that it was blocked by the wardrobe which had been placed in front of it.
Since this attempt had failed, the intruder had returned during Zen's absence the evening before and tried the riskier option of picking the lock of the front door.
Almost the most disturbing thing about the incident was what had not happened. Nothing had been stolen, nothing had been disarranged. Apart from the envelope, the intruder had left no sign whatever of his presence. He had come to leave a message, and perhaps the most important element of that message was that he had done nothing else. As a demonstration of power, of arrogant self-confidence, it made Zen think of the Villa Burolo killer. 'I can come and go whenever I wish,' was the message. 'This time I have chosen simply to deliver an envelope. Next time… who knows?'
Determined that there should not be a next time, Zen had made Maria Grazia swear by Santa Rita of Cascia, whose image she wore as a lucky charm, that she would bolt the front door after his departure and not leave the apartment until he returned.
'But what about the shopping?' she protested.
'I'll get something from the tavola calda,' Zen snapped impatiently. 'It's not important!'
Cowed by her employer's unaccustomed brusqueness, Maria Grazia timidly reminded him that she would have to leave by six o'clock at the latest in order to deal with her own family's needs.
'I'll be back by then,' he replied. 'Just don't leave the apartment unattended, not even for a moment. Understand? Keep the door bolted and don't open it except for me.'
As soon as he got to work, Zen called the vehicle registration department and requested details of the red Alfa Romeo he had seen in the street the night before. It was a long shot, but there was something about the car that made him suspicious, although he wasn't quite clear what it was.
The information he received was not encouraging. The owner of the vehicle turned out to be one Rino Attilio Lusetti, with an address in the fashionable Parioli area north of the Villa Borghese. A phone call to the Questura elicited the information that Lusetti had no criminal record. By now Zen knew that this was a wild-goose chase, but having nothing better to do he looked up Lusetti in the telephone directory and rang the number. An uneducated female voice informed him that Dottor Lusetti was at the university. After a series of abortive phone calls to various departments of this institution, Zen eventually discovered that the car which had been parked near his house for the two previous nights was owned by the Professor of Philology in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Rome.
Giorgio De Angelis wandered into Zen's cubicle while he was making the last of these calls.
'Problems?' he asked as Zen hung up.
Zen shrugged. 'Just a private matter. Someone keeps parking his car in front of my door.'
'Give his windscreen a good coat of varnish,' De Angelis advised. 'Polyurethane's the best. Weatherproof, durable, opaque. An absolute bastard to get off.'
Zen nodded. 'What's this you've been telling Romizi about a train that goes round in circles?'
De Angelis laughed raucously, throwing his head back and showing his teeth. Then he glanced round the screens to check that the official in question wasn't within earshot.
'That fucking Romizi! He'd believe anything. You know he loves anchovy paste? But he's a tight bastard, so he's always moaning about how much it costs. So I said to him,
"Listen, do you want to know how to make it yourself?
You get a cat, right? You feed the cat on anchovies and olive oil, nothing else. What comes out the other end is anchovy paste." '
'He didn't believe you, did he?'
'I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if he gives it a try.
I just wish I could be there. What I'd give to see him spreading cat shit on a cracker!'
As De Angelis burst out laughing again, a movement nearby attracted Zen's attention. He turned to find Vincenzo Fabri looking at them through a gap in the screens.
He was wearing a canary yellow pullover and a pale blue tie, with a marooh sports jacket and slacks, and chunky hand-stiched shoes. Expensive leisurewear was Fabri's hallmark, matching his gestures, slow and calm, and his deep, melodious voice. 'I'm so relaxed, so laid back,' the look said, 'just a lazy old softy who wants an easy time.'
Zen, who still wore a suit to work, felt by comparison like an old-fashioned ministerial apparatchik, a dull, dedicated workaholic. The irony was that Vincenzo Fabri was the most fiercely ambitious person Zen had come across in the whole of his career. E4is conversation was larded with references to country clubs, horses, tennis, sailing and holidays in Brazil. Fabri wanted all that and more. He wanted villas and cars and yachts and clothes and women.