For a moment Zen thought his fasade of cool cynicism would crack. This was too near the bone, too painful. But in the end he managed to carry it off. in 'We all make mistakes, Giorgio. The best we can hope for is not to go on making the same one over and over again.' in 'I still don't see how you arranged for the shotgun used in the Burolo murders to turn up in the cave where this Elia was,' Romizi insisted. 'Or how you fixed the fingerprints.'
Zen smiled condescendingly. 'Now, now. You can't expect me to tell you all my little secrets!'
'So Renato Favelloni walks free,' Travaglini concluded heavily.
'Not to mention l'onorevole,' added Romizi.
For a moment it seemed as though the atmosphere might turn sour. Then De Angelis struck a theatrical pose.
'"I have examined my conscience,"' he declared, quoting a celebrated statement by the politician in question, ' "and I find that it is perfectly clean." '
'Not surprisingly,' Zen chipped in, 'given that he never uses it.'
The discussion broke up amid hoots of cynical laughter.
Before meeting Tania Biacis for dinner that evening, Zen had a number of chores to perform. The first of these was to return the white Mercedes. Early on Monday morning a Carabinieri jeep had towed the car back to Lanusei, where it had been repaired. On his return to Rome Zen had left a note for Fausto Arcuti at the Rally Bar, and earlier that morning Arcuti had phoned and told Zen to leave the car opposite the main gates of the former abattoir.
'What about locking the doors?' Zen had asked.
'Lock them, dottore, lock them! The Testaccio is a den of thieves.'
'And the keys?'
'Leave them in the car.'
'But how are you going to open it, then?'
'How do you think we opened it in the first place?'
Fausto demanded. Now that the informer was no longer fear of his life, his naturally irreverent manner had reasserted itself.
After lunch with De Angelis and Travaglini, Zen set off the Mercedes, reflecting on his conflicting feelings about being readmitted to the male freemasonry which ran not only the Criminalpol department but also the Ministry, the Mafia, the Church and the government. It all seemed very relaxing and attractive at first, the mutual back-scratching and ego-boosting, the shared values and unchallenged assumptions. Yet even before the end of lunch a reaction set in, and Zen found the cosy back-chat and the smug sense of innate superiority beginning to pall. It was all a bit cloying, a bit too reminiscent of the self-congratulatory nationalism of the Fascist epoch. Whatever happened between him and Tania, he knew it would never be easy.
But that, perhaps, was what made it worthwhile.
As he queued up to enter the maelstrom of traffic around the Colosseum, Zen noticed an unmarked grey delivery van three or four vehicles behind him. He adjusted the wing mirror until he could see the driver. It didn't look like the man he had seen that morning, but of course they might be working shifts.
He continued south, past the flank of the Palatine, then turned right along the Circus Maximus and crossed the river into Trastevere. The grey van followed faithfully. He was being tailed. This in itself was bad enough. What made it infinitely worse was that Zen felt absolutely sure he knew who was responsible.
Despite his bluster, Vasco Spadola must have known that he couldn't be certain of success in his single-handed vendetta. Things can always go wrong; that's why people take out insurance. There seemed very little doubt that the grey van represented Spadola's insurance. The men he had spotted in the van were not slavering psychotics like Spadola himself, getting a hard-on at the idea of killing.
Nor were they third-rate cowboys like Leather Jacket.
They were professionals, doing what they had been paid to do, carrying out a contract to be put into effect in the event of Spadola's death. The only other explanation was that Mauro Bevilacqua was pursuing revenge at secondhand, but that seemed wildly unlikely. Tania clearly hadn't taken his threats seriously. In any case, professional killers didn't advertise in the Yellow Pages, and a bank clerk wouldn't have known how to contact them.
Zen turned off the Lungotevere and steered at random through the back streets around the factory where his favourite Nazionali cigarettes were made. The incident had plunged him into apathetic despair. These men wouldn't give up, whatever happened. They had their reputation to consider. There was no point in having the team in the van arrested. They would simply be replaced by another crew. His only hope, a very slim one, was to find out who Spadola had placed the contract with and try to renegotiate the deal. But that was for the future. His immediate task was to lose the tail. Unfortunately this called for virtuoso driving skills Zen didn't possess.
In the end, his very incompetence proved to be his salvation. As he turned out of the back streets by Porta Portese he was so deep in thought about his problems that he failed to notice that the traffic lights had just changed to red. The white Mercedes managed to squeeze between the lines of the traffic closing in from either side, but the grey van remained trapped. Zen crossed the river again, veered round into Via Marmorata and then, once he was out of sight of the van, turned right into the Testaccio. He abandoned the car with the keys locked inside, as Arcuti had instructed him, then worked his way back to Via Marmorata on foot, taking refuge in the doorway of the ornate fire station at the corner until he saw a number thirty tram approaching the stop.
He got off the tram near Porta Maggiore and walked round to Gilberto Nieddu's flat, where his mother had been staying for the past week. Zen had promised to collect her that afternoon, but now he was going to have to ask for more time. Gilberto had insisted that everything had gone well, but he was bound to say that. Zen knew that looking after his mother must have been a terrible imposition, and one that would now have to be prolonged. Until he had resolved the problem of the grey van his mother could not return home. He did not look forward to breaking this news to the Nieddus.
Gilberto was at work, so it was Rosella Nieddu who greeted Zen at the door of their pleasant, modern flat in Via Carlo Emanuele. To Zen's amazement, his mother was playing a board-game with the two youngest Nieddu daughters. It was so long since he had seen her do anything except slump in a comatose state in front of the television that this perfectly ordinary scene of domestic life seemed as bizarre and alarming as if the tram he had just been on had suddenly veered off the rails and started careering freely about the streets, menacing the passersby.
'Hello, Aurelio!' she called gaily, beaming a distracted smile in his direction. 'Everything all right?'
Without waiting for his response, she turned back to the children. 'No, not there! Otherwise I'll gobble you up like this, bang bang bang bang bang!'
The girls tittered nervously. 'But Auntie, you can't go there, it's the wrong way,' the elder pointed out.
'Oh! So it is! Silly old me. Silly old Auntie.'
Zen felt a pang of jealous hurt, all the stronger for being completely absurd. She's not your auntie, he felt like shouting. She's my mamma! Mine! Mine!
Taking Rosella Nieddu aside, he hesitantly broached the subject of his mother staying one more night.
'That's wonderful!' she replied, interrupting his deliberately vague explanations. 'Did you hear that, kids?
Auntie Zen's not leaving today after all!'
A look of sheer delight instantly appeared on the children's faces. They rushed about, doing a sort of war-dance around the old lady, screaming at the top of their voices while she looked on happily, a benign totem-pole.
'What a treasure your mother is!' Rosella Nieddu enthused.
'Why, er, yes. Yes, of course.'
'She's been absolutely tireless with those two. I love them dearly, of course, but sometimes I think they're going to drive me round the bend. But your mother has the patience of a saint. And she knows all these wonderful games and tricks and stories! I haven't had to do a thing.