Vendetta

'Then it's. all right.'

'It looks like it,' she said with a slightly ironic smile.

'How do you know where I live?' Zen asked, as they walked up the piazza.

'I looked you up in the phone book. I thought you'd be the only Zen, but there are about a dozen of you in Rome.

Are the others relatives?'

Zen shook his head absently. He was wondering whether Vasco Spadola had employed the same simple method to track him down.

In a rosticceria just north of the piazza they bought a double portion of the only main dish left, a rabbit stew, and two of the egg-shaped rice croquettes called 'telephone wires', because when you pull them apart the ball of melted mozzarella in the middle separates into long curving strands. Then they walked on, out of the clutches of the old city and across the river. Zen paused to draw Tania's attention to the view downstream towards the island, the serried plane trees lining the stone-faced embankment, the river below as smooth and still as a darker vein in polished marble. While she was looking, he looked over his shoulder again. This time there was no doubt.

They moved on, towards the wildly exuberant fagade which might have been a grand opera house or the palace of a mad king, but was in fact the law courts. Here they paused until the traffic lights brought the cars to a reluctant, grudging halt, then crossed the Lungotevere and turned right down the side of the law courts.

'Wait a minute,' Zen told Tania as they passed the corner.

A few moments later a young man in a denim suit trimmed with a sheepskin collar appeared, striding quickly along. Zen stepped in front of him, flourishing his identity card.

'Police! Your papers!'

The man gawked at him open-mouthed.

'I haven't done anything!'

'I didn't say you had.'

The man took out his wallet and produced a battered identity card in the name of Roberto Augusto Dentice. In the photograph he looked younger, timid and studious.

Zen plucked the wallet out of his hand.

'You've got no right to do that!' the man protested.

Ignoring him, Zen riffled through the compartments of the wallet, inspecting papers and photographs. Among fhem was a permit issued by the Rome Questura, authorizing Roberto Augusto Dentice to practise as a private detective within the limits of the Province of Rome.

'All right, what's going on?' Zen demanded.

'What do you mean?'

'Someone's hired you to follow me. Who and why?'

'I don't know what you're talking about. I was just going for a walk.'

'And I suppose you were just going for a walk yesterday. when you followed me all the way from that restaurant to the Palatine? You really like walking, don't you?

You should join the Club Alpino.'

On the main road behind them, a chorus of horns sounded out like the siren of a great ocean liner.

'What are you talking about?' the man said. 'I was at home all day yesterday.'

Zen's instinct was to arrest Dentice on some pretext and shut him up in a room with one of the heavier-handed officials, but he no longer worked at the Questura where such facilities were available, and besides, Tania was waiting.

'All right,' he said in a voice laden with quiet menace.

'Let me explain what I'm talking about. This job you're doing, whatever it may be, ends here. If I so much as catch sight of you again, even casually, on a bus or in a bar, anywhere at all, then this permit of yours will be withdrawn and I'll make damn sure that you never get another. Do we understand each other?'

These tactics proved unexpectedly successful. Faced with violence and menaces the man might have remained defiant, but at the threat of unemployment his resistance suddenly collapsed.

'No one told me you were a cop!' he complained.

'What did they tell you?'

'Just to follow you after work.'

'How did you report?'

'He phoned me in the evening. And he paid cash. I don't know who he is, honest to God!'

Zen handed back the man's wallet and papers and turned away without another word.

'What was all that about?' Tania asked as they resumed their walk.

'My mistake. I thought he looked like someone wanted for questioning in the Bertolini killing.'

That was the second time that afternoon that he had broken his rule about not lying to Tania, Zen reflected. No doubt it had been an unrealistic ideal in the first place.

It felt odd to be walking home with the woman who had occupied so much of his thoughts recently, to pass the cafe at the corner in her company, to walk into the entrance hall together under Giuseppe's eagle eye, travel up in the lift to the fourth floor, unlock the front door, admit her to his home, his other life.

He was acutely aware that, for the first time in years, his mother was not there. Freed from the grid of rules and regulations her presence imposed, the apartment seemed larger and less cluttered than usual, full of possibilities. Zen felt a momentary stab of guilt, as though he had manoeuvred her transfer to the Nieddus just so that he could bring Tania back to the flat. It was strangely exciting, and he caught himself speculating on what might happen after lunch. Rather to his surprise, Zen found that he could quite easily imagine going to bed with Tania. Without any voyeuristic thrill, he visualized the two of them lying in the big brass bed he had occupied alone for so long. Naked, Tania looked thinner and taller than ever, but that didn't matter. She looked like she belonged there.

Zen put these thoughts out of his mind, not from a sense of shame but out of pure superstition. Life rarely turns out the way you imagine it is going to, he reasoned, so the more likely it seemed that he and Tania would end up in bed together, the less likely it was to happen.

Maria Grazia had been told to stay away for the time peing, and since Zen had no idea where she kept the everyday cutlery and crockery, he and Tania foraged around in the kitchen and the sideboard in the dining room, assembling china, silverware and crystal that Zen had last seen about twelve years previously, at a dinner to celebrate his wedding anniversary. Unintimidated by these formal splendours, they ate the rice croquettes with their fingers, mopped up the stew with yesterday's bread and drank a lukewarm bottle of Pinot Spumante which had been standing on a shelf in the living room since the Christmas before last. Tania ate hungrily and without the slightest self-consciousness. When they finally set aside their little piles of rabbit bones, she announced, 'That's the best meal I've had for ages.'

Zen pushed the fruit bowl in her direction.

'I find that hard to believe.'

She gave him a surprised glance.

'Given the life you lead,' he explained.

'Oh, that!'

She skinned a tangerine and started dividing it into segments.

'Look, there's something we'd better clear up,' she said.

'You see, I didn't quite tell you the truth.'

He thought of them sitting together in the speeding taxi, the bands of light outlining the swell of her breasts, the line of her thigh.

'I know,' he said.

It was her turn to look surprised.

'Was it that obvious?'

'Oh come on!' he exclaimed. 'Did you honestly think I'd believe that you went to all that trouble, getting me to fake a phone call from work and all the rest of it, just so that you could go out to the cinema? I mean you don't have to explain. I don't care what you were doing. And even supposing I did, it's none of my business.'

Tania was gazing at him with dawning comprehension.

'But that was what I was doing! Just that! It was all the other times that were lies, when I told you about the films I'd seen, and going to the opera and the theatre and all the rest of it.'

She looked away as tears swelled in her eyes.

'That's why I got so embarrassed in the taxi, when you asked where I was going. It wasn't that I had a guilty secret, at least not the kind you thought! It was just that my pathetic little deception had been found out and I felt so ashamed of myself! 'It all started when you mentioned some film I'd read about in the paper. That's all I ever did do, read about it. So I thought it would be fun to pretend that I'd seen it. Then I stated doing it with other things, building a whole fantasy life that I shared with you every morning at work. It was never real, Aurelio, none of it! On the contrary! We never go anywhere, never do anything. AII Mauro wants to do is sit at home with his mother and his sister and any cousins or aunts or uncles who happen to be around.