Only it hadn't, of course. Someone had spoken for it first.
Someone had brought Zen's 'accomplishments in the Miletti case' to the attention of Palazzo Sisti, and suggested that this unscrupuIous manipulator of evidence and witnesses might be just the right man to bring the Burolo imbroglio to a satisfactory conclusion. And that someone, it was nom clear, could only be the Party's 'man at the Ministry', Vincenzo Fabri himself.
Zen lit another cigarette from the butt of the first, a habit he normally despised. But normality was rapidly losing its grip on his life. Vincenzo Fabri had recommended Zen to his masters as the white knight who could save Renato Favelloni from prison and 1'onorevole from disgrace. By doing so, he had not only given his most bitter enemy a chance to succeed, but to do so on the very ground where he himself had recently suffered a humiliating failure.
Why would he do a thing like that?
The only possible answer was that Fabri knew damn well that Zen was not going to succeed. So far from doing his enemy a good turn, Fabri had placed him in a trap with only two exits, each potentially fatal. If Zen failed to satisfy Palazzo Sisti, they would have him transferred to a city where his life could be terminated without attracting attention. If, on the other hand, he did what was necessary to get the Favelloni trial postponed, Fabri would tip off the judiciary and have Zen arrested for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Whatever happened, Zen was bound to lose. If his new friends didn't get him, his old enemy would.
By now the sun had disappeared behind the grove of pines whose foliage was just visible above the far end of the sunken stadium. All at once the air revealed its inner coldness, the chill at its heart. It was time to go. Leather Jacket would most likely have given up the search by now and be waiting near the entrance on Via dei Fori Imperiali.
Zen got to his feet and started to pick his way through the jumble of ruins opposite. A brick staircase and a circuitous path scuffed through the grass brought him out on a track flanked by pines leading down to the exit on Via di San Gregorio. The odours of summer, pine sap and dried shit, lingered faintly in the undergrowth. There was no sign of Leather Jacket, but in any case Zen no longer greatly cared about him. Being tailed was the least of his worries now, as for that matter was the missing video tape. To think that just that morning he had worked out an elaborate theory to explain the fact that Fabri had put in a request for it. The reason for this was now clear: he had been told to get hold of a copy by Palazzo Sisto. As for the theft, it must indeed have been the work of a pickpocket, as Zen had originally supposed. Vincenzo Fabri had bigger and better schemes in mind than pilfered videos. Had he not warned De Angelis that very morning to keep away from Zen because he was being 'measured for the drop'?
The exact nature of that drop now seemed terrifyingly clear.
I was always biddable, a born follower. Like those ducklings we had, a fox killed the mother and they would follow whoever was wearing the green rubber boots that were the first thing they saw on opening their eyes. If the boots had been able to walk by themselves, they would have followed the boots, or a bit of rubbish blown past by the wind, whatever happened to be there when the darkness cracked open. Even the fox that killed their mother.
I can see him now, standing there, the light at his back, and all the forces of the light. Come with me, he said. I can't, I told him, I mustn't. It seemed that all this had happened before. Where do they come from, these memories and dreams? They must belong to someone else. There was nothing before the darkness. How could there be? We come from darkness and to darkness we return. There is nothing else. he told me. He would have taken me anyway, by force.
The light burned so much I had to close my eyes. When I opened them there were men everywhere, rushing about, shouting at each other, crowding in, their eyes swishing to and fro like scythes.
They took it in turns to pour their lies into me, filling me with unease. Everything that had happened had been a mistake. I'd done nothing wrong, it u~as all a mistake, a scandal, a tragic and shocking crime. When I tried to say something my voice astonished me, a raven's croak pa.=sing through my body, nothing to do with me. After that I kept silent. There was no point in trying to resist. They were too strong, their desires too urgent. Sooner or later, 1 knno, they u›ould have their way with me.
In the end fhey tired and let me go. You're free, they said. Like the follower I was, I believed them. I thought I could go back as though nothing had happened, as though it had all been a dream!
Thursday, 17.20 – 19.10
By the time the grubby blue and grey Metropolitana train emerged above ground at the Piramide stop, it was getting dark. Zen walked up the broad dim steps beneath a Fascist mural depicting the army, the family and the workers, and out into the street.
The city's starlings were in the grip of the madness that seizes them at the changing of the light, turning the trees into loudspeakers broadcasting their gibberish, then swarming up out of the foliage to circle about in the dusky air like scraps of windborne rubbish. In the piazza below gleaming tramlines crisscrossed in intricate patterns leading off in every direction, only to finish abruptly a few metres further on under a coat of tarmac or running headlong into a traffic divider.
Instead of making a detour to the traffic lights on Via Ostiense, Zen walked straight out into the vehicles convero ng on the piazza from every direction. Maybe that was where the starlings got the idea, he thought. Maybe their frenzied swarming was just an attempt to imitate the behaviour patterns of the dominant life-form. But tonight the traffic didn't bother him. He was as invulnerable to accidents as a prisoner under sentence of death. Respecting his doomed self-assurance, the traffic flowed around him, casting him ashore on the far side of the piazza, at the foot of the marble pyramid.
The most direct route to where he was going lay through Porta San Paolo and along Via Marmorata. But now that he was nearly there Zen's fears about being followed revived, so instead of the busy main road he took the smaller and quieter street flanked by the city walls on one side and dull apartment blocks on the other. Apart from a few prostitutes setting up their pitches in the strip of grass and shrubs between the street and the wall, there was no one about. He turned right through the arches opened in the wall, then left, circling the bulky mound which gave its name to the Testaccio district. At the base of the hill stood a line of squat, formless, jerry-built huts, guarded by savage dogs. Here metal was worked and spray-painted, engines mended, bodywork repaired, serial numbers altered. During Zen's time at the Questura this had been one of the most important areas in the city for recycling stolen vehicles.
The other main business of the district had been killin8, but that had ceased with the closure of the slaughterhouse complex that lay between the Testaccio hill and the river.
Any killing that went on now was related to the part-time activities of some of the inhabitants, of which the trade in second-hand cars was only the most notable example. As for the abattoir, it was now a mecca for aspirant yuppies like Vincenzo Fabri, who thronged to the former killingfloors in their Mercedes and B M Ws to acquire the art of sitting on a horse. Opposite, a few exclusive night-clubs had sprung up to attract those of the city's gilded youth who liked to go slumming in safety.