Including things like that could easily make him the laughing-stock of the department, while if he left them out he laid himself open to the charge of suppressing evidence. Fortunately, it was no part of Zen's brief to draw conclusions or offer opinions. All that was needed as a concise report describing the various lines of investigation which had been conducted by the police and the Carabinieri and outlining the evidence against the various suspects. A clerical chore, in short, to which he was bringing nothing but an ability to read between the lines of official documents, picking out the grain of what was not being said from the overwhelming chaff of what was. Watching the video had been the last stage in this procedure. There was nothing left to do except sit down and write the thing, and this he would do the next morning, while it was all fresh in his mind. By the afternoon, the Burolo affair would have no more significance for him than for any other member of the public.
Once again, footsteps sounded in the street below. A few minutes later the silence was abruptly shattered as a car started up and accelerated away with a squeal of tyres.
By the time Zen reached the window it had already passed far beyond the area of street visible through the closed jalousies. The sound of its engine gradually faded away, echoing and reverberating ever more distantly through the intersecting channels of streets. The streetlight was in its waxing phase, and as the light gradually intensified
Zen saw that the red car which had been parked further along the street was no longer there. He closed the shutters, wondering why its presence or absence should be of any concern to him. Finding no answer, he decided it was time to go to bed.
Nearly over now. Everything's going, the doubfs, the fears, the cares,'.the confusion, even the pain. All draining away of its own accord. There's nothing I need do, nothing more to be done.
When I saw him standing there, the gun in his hand, it was like seeing myself in a mirror. He had taken my part, emerging from nowhere, implacable, confident, unsurprised. He sounded impatient, taunting me with a strange name, threatening me.
'There's no point in trying to hide,' he said. 'Let's get it over with. ' As usual, I did what I was told.
He cried out, in rage and disbelief. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn't that. Then something overwhelmed me, knocking me over, opening me up. I couldn't have resisted even if I'd wanted to. It wasn't like the prst time, the man under the table wounding me with his pistol. All he gave me was pain. This was different. I knew at once that I was carrying a death.
It won't be long now. Already I feel light and insubstantial, as though I were dissolving. The darkness is on the move, billowing out to enshroud me, winding me in its endless folds. Everything is in flux. Solid rock gives way at my touch, the ground flows beneath me as though the river had returned to its courses, unexplored caverns burst open like preworks as I advance. I am lost, I who know this place better than I know my own body!
Wednesday, 07.20-12.30
As Zen closed the front door behind him its hinges emitted their characteristic squeal, which was promptly echoed from the fioor above. One of the tenants there kept a caged bird which was apparently under the illusion that Zen's front door was a fellow inmate and responded to its mournful cry with encouraging chirps.
Zen clattered down the stairs two at a time, ignoring the ancient lift in its wrought-iron cage. Thank God for work, he thought, which gave him an unquestionable excuse to escape from his dark, cluttered apartment and the elderly woman who had taken it over to such an extent that he felt like a child again, with no rights or independent existence.
What would happen when he no longer had this readymade way of filling his days? The government had recently been making noises about the need to reduce the size of the bloated public sector. Early retirement for senior staff was one obvious option. Fortunately it was unlikely that anything more than talk would come of it. A government consisting of a coalition of five parties, each with an axe to grind and clients to keep happy, found it almost impossible to pass legislation that was likely to prove mildly unpopular with anyone, never mind tackle the bureaucratic hydra which kept almost a third of the working population in guaranteed employment. Nevertheless, he would have to retire one day. The thought of it continued to haunt him like the prospect of some chronic illness. How would he get through the day? What would he do? His life had turned into a dead end.
Giuseppe, the janitor, was keeping a watchful eye on the comings and goings from the window of his mezzanine flat. Zen didn't stop to mention the scraping noises he had seemed to hear the night before. In broad daylight the whole thing seemed as unreal as a dream.
The streets were steeped in mild November sunlight and ringing with sounds. Gangs of noisy schoolchildren passed by, flaunting the personalities that would be buried alive for the next five hours. The metallic roars of shutters announced that the shops in the area were opening for business. A staccato hammering and the swishing of a paint sprayer issued from the open windows of the basement workshops where craftsmen performed mysterious operations on lengths of moulded wood. But the traffic dominated: the uniform hum of new cars, the idiosyncratic racket of the old, the throaty gurgle of diesels, the angry buzzing of scooters and three-wheeled vans, the buses' hollow roar, the chainsaw of an unsilenced trail bike, the squeal of brakes, the strident discord of horns in conflict.
At the corner of the block the newsagent was adding the final touches to the display of newspapers and magazines which were draped around his stall in a complex overlapping pattern. As usual, Zen stopped to buy a paper, but he did not even glance at the headlines. He felt good, serene and carefree, released from whatever black magic had gripped his soul the night before. There would be time enough later to read about disasters and scandals which had nothing whatever to do with him.
Across the street from the newsstand at the corner of the next block was the cafe which Zen frequented, largely because it had resisted the spreading blight of skimmed milk, which reduced the rich foam of a proper cappuccino to an insipid froth. The barman, who sported a luxuriant moustache to compensate for his glossily bald skull, greeted Zen with respectful warmth and turned away unbidden to prepare his coffee.
'Barbarians!' exclaimed a thickset man in a tweed suit, looking up from the newspaper spread out before him on the bar. 'Maniacs! What's the sense of it all? What can they hope to achieve?'
Zen helped himself to a flaky brioche before broaching the chocolate-speckled foam on the cappuccino which Ernesto placed before him. I." was only after they had been meeting in the bar each morning for several years that Zen had finally discovered, thanks to an inflamed molar requiring urgent attention, that the indignant newspaperreader was the dentist whose name appeared on one of the two brass plates which Giuseppe burnished religiously every morning. He congratulated himself on having resisted the temptation to look at the paper. No doubt there had been some dramatic new revelation about the Burolo affair. Hardly a day went by without one. But while for the dentist such things were a form of entertainment, a pretext for a display of moral temperament, for Zen it was work, and he didn't start work for another half hour. Idly, he wondered what the other men in the bar would say if they knew that he was carrying a video tape showing the Burolo killings in every last horrific detail.