It was marginally less reassuring to catch sight of the same young man just a few minutes later in Piazza del Campidoglio. Zen had taken this route because it avoided the maelstrom of Piazza Venezia, although it meant climbing the long steep fiights of steps up the Capitoline hill. Nevertheless, when he paused for breath by the plinth where a statue of his namesake had stood until recently succumbing to air pollution, there was the young man in the leather jacket, about twenty metres behind, bending down to adjust his shoe-laces.
Zen swung left and walked down past the Mamertine prison to Via dei Fori Imperiali. He paused to light a cigarette. Twenty metres back, Leather Jacket was lounging against a railing, admiring the view. As Zen replaced his cigarettes, a piece of paper fluttered from his pocket to the ground. He continued on his way, counting his strides. When he reached twenty he looked round again.
The young man in the leather jacket was bending to pick up the paper he had dropped.
The only thing he would learn from it was that Zen had spent xzoo lire in a wine shop in Piazza Campo dei Fiori that morning. Zen, on the other hand, had leamt two things: the man was following him, and he wasn't very good at it. Without breaking his pace, he continued along the broad boulevard towards the Colisseum. This, or rather the underground station of the same name, had been his destination from the start, but he would have to lose the tail first. The men he was planning to visit had a code of etiquette as complex and inflexible as any member of Rome's vestigial aristocracy, and would take a particularly poor view of anyone arriving with an unidentified guest in tow.
Without knowing who Leather Jacket was working for, it was difficult to choose the best way of disposing of him.
If he was an independent operator, the easiest thing would be to have him arrested on some pretext. This would also be quick – a phone call would bring a patrol car in minutes – and Zen was already concerned about getting back to the house before six o'clock, when Maria Grazia went home. But if Leather Jacket was part of an organization, then this solution would sacrifice Zen's long-term advantage by showing the tail that he had been burned. He would simply be replaced by someone unknown to Zen, and quite possibly someone more experienced and harder to spot. Zen therefore reluctantly decided to go for the most difficult option, that of losing the young man without allowing him to realize what had happened. It was not until the last moment, as he was passing the entrance, that it dawned on him that the perfect territory for this purpose was conveniently to hand.
In the ticket office, three men in shirtsleeves were engaged in a heated argument about Craxi's line on combatting inflation. Zen flashed his police identity card at them and then at the woman perched on a stool at the entrance, a two-way radio in one hand and a paperback novel in the other. Without looking round to see if Leather Jacket was following, he walked through the gateway and into the Forum.
To his untutored eye, the scene before him resembled nothing so much as a building site. AII that was missing were the tall green cranes clustered together in groups like extraterrestial invaders. It seemed as if this project had only just passed the foundation level, and only then in a fragmentary and irregular way. Some areas were still pitted and troughed, awaiting the installation of drainage and wiring, while in others a few pillars and columns provided a tantalizing hint of the building to come. Elsewhere, whole sections of the massive brick structures – factories? warehouses? – which had formerly occupied the area had still not been demolished completely. For the moment, work seemed to have ground to a halt. No dump-trucks or concrete-pourers moved along the rough track running the length of the site. Perhaps some snag had arisen over the financing, Zen thought whimsically. Perhaps the government had been reshuffled yet again, and the new minister was reluctant to authorize further expenditure on a project which had already over-run its estimated cost by several hundred per cent – or was at least holding out for some financial incentive on a scale similar to that which had induced his predecessor to sign the contract in the first place.
A Carabinieri helicopter was thrashing about overhead like a shark circling for the kill. Zen tossed away his cigarette and strolled along a path in the patchy grass between the ruins. A fine dust covered everything, beaten into the air by passing feet from the bone-dry soil. The sun crouched low in a cloudless sky, its weak rays absorbed and reflected by the marble and brick on every side. Overhead the helicopter swept past periodically, watchful, alien, remote. Halfway up the path, which veered off to the right and started to climb the Palatine hill, Zen paused to survey the scene. At that time of year there were only a few tourists about. Among them was a young man in a leather jacket and jeans. Oddly enough, he was once again having problems with his laces.
Zen resumed his walk with a fastidious smile. If Leather Jacket thought that bending down to tie up your shoes made you invisible then he shouldn't prove too difficult to unload. In fact he felt slightly piqued that such a third-rate operator had been considered adequate for the task of shadowing him. Evidently he couldn't even inspire respect in his enemies.
The path ran up a shallow valley, between masses of ancient brickwork emerging from the grass like weathered rocky outcroppings. The signs and fences installed by the authorities had imposed some superficial order on the hill's chaotic topography, but this simply made its endless anomalies all the more incomprehensible. Nothing here was what it appeared to be, having been recycled and cannibalized so many times that its original name and function was often unclear even to experts. Although no archaeologist, Zen was intimately familiar with the many-layered complexities of the Palatine, thanks to the Angela Barilli affair.
The daughter of a leading Rome jeweller, eighteeen-yearold Angela had been kidnapped in 1975. After months of io6 negotiations and a bungled pay-off the kidnappers had broken off contact. In desperation, the Barilli family had turned to the supernatural, engaging a clairvoyant from Turin who claimed to have led the police to three other kidnap victims. The medium duly informed Angela's mother that her daughter was being held in an underground cell somewhere in the vast network of rooms and passages on the lower floors of the Imperial palace at the heart of the Palatine.
Unlikely as this seemed, the political clout wielded by the family was enough to ensure that Zen, who was directing the investigation, had to waste three days organizing a painstaking search of the area. The Barilli girl's corpse was in fact discovered the following year in a shallow concrete pit beneath a garage in the Primavalle suburb where she had been held during her ordeal, but Zen had never forgotten the three days he had spent exploring the honeycomb of caverns, tunnels, cisterns and cellars that lay beneath the surface of the Palatine. It was an area so rich in possibilities that Zen could simply disappear into the mathematics, leaving his follower to solve an equation with too many variables.
When he reached the plateau at the top of the hill, Zen turned left behind the high stone wall which closed off a large rectangle of ground surrounding a church, and waited for Leather Jacket to catch up. There was no one about, and the only sound was the distant buzzing of the helicopter. It had now moved further to the east, circling over the group of hospitals near San Giovanni in Laterano.