End Games - 11 (19 page)

It was only when he was ejected from this sanctuary into the commuter rush hour at Rome that he realised to what extent he had become a provincial after just a few months in Calabria. He found it both physically difficult and emotionally repugnant to battle his way through the riptide of people coming at him from every direction, empty eyes trained like a gun on the personal zone immediately in front of them, attention absorbed by the loud songs or little voices in their heads, fingers fiddling with iPods and mobile phones, all oblivious of each other and their surroundings, marching relentlessly onwards like the ranks of the damned.

In the middle of the vast concourse of Termini station Zen gave up and came to a dazed halt. One of the zombies immediately approached. He automatically placed a cluster of small coins in its outstretched hand.

‘This way, Dottor Zen,’ it said.

‘How did you recognise me?’

‘We obtained a photograph.’

A Fiat saloon was illegally parked at the kerb. The man opened the rear door for Zen, then got into its equivalent on the far side.

‘Your document, please,’ he said as they drove away.

Zen handed over his police identification card.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To a house where you will meet the person you came to see. Our journey time will be approximately forty minutes, depending on the traffic. There will then be a short delay before the subject arrives.’

‘For security reasons?’

‘No, he wouldn’t agree to an earlier meeting. He’s an elderly man and doesn’t like making an early start.’

They drove south-east out of the city along Via Tuscolana, across the ring road and up into the foothills of the Colli Albani. When they reached Frascati, Zen’s escort announced that they were ahead of time and suggested stopping for a coffee. There were no parking spaces available on the edge of the main square, so the driver left their vehicle in the traffic lane of the main street outside the busiest and glossiest bar. One of the traffic wardens blew his whistle shrilly and came striding over, but the driver said a few words to him and the official slunk off. Frascati had been a playground for the rich and powerful since Etruscan times and the locals had learned a thing or two about dealing with such people.

Inside the bar, Zen was left to fend for himself. He ordered a cappuccino and an attractive-looking pastry and, having consumed both, eyed his minders with cold disdain. They stood at a distance, their mobile phones laid on the counter like pistols, apparently ignoring him although acutely aware of his presence. The driver, the younger and taller of the pair, was lean and hard, all prick and muscle. His superior was almost bald, with a superficially benign face, strongly featured and slightly inflated in appearance, like a wiser and sadder Mussolini.

Zen paid and walked outside to light his first cigarette of the day. As he smoked, he took in the scene all around with sharpened pleasure, eyeballing a sensational woman cradling a bottle of mineral water to her bosom like a baby. She gave him a lingering glance before moving on, the cheeks of her buttocks colluding furtively as she strolled away. Then he heard a familiar
squillo
and immediately reverted to his official self, striding up and down the pavement clutching his mobile phone like a life-support system.

‘Arnone, sir. You ordered me to report any developments.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘The Digos crew watching that house in San Giovanni report that the owner, Dionisio Carduzzi, has left the house only twice. Last night he went to a local bar and drank wine with some friends. This morning he bought a paper, then went to the same bar and had a coffee. After that he went home and hasn’t emerged since. His wife went to church yesterday and to the market this morning to buy vegetables and a chicken. That’s all. No one else has entered or left the house.’

He’s using
pizzini
, thought Zen, just like Bernardo Provenzano. Notes folded into a banknote and handed to the owner of the bar or the newsagent, or slipped under the table to one of those friends, or passed to a market vendor by his wife, or left in a missal at the church. The dilemma he had wrestled with the night before was now resolved. The only way to intercept such messages would be by mass arrests of essentially innocent people with no criminal history. That would be both clumsy and ineffective.

‘Anything else?’ he asked Arnone.

‘Two things, sir. The phone interception team reported that when Carduzzi came back from his morning expedition, he called the offices of a construction firm down in Vibo Valentia and asked for someone named Aldo. He told him that their mutual friend required the immediate services of a mechanical digger on a low-loader, two heavy-duty trucks, a dozen first-rate stonemasons and twenty unskilled labourers. The equipment and personnel were to assemble in the parking area of the Rogliano service station south of Cosenza on the A3, where they would be met and led to the work site. Payment would be in the normal way.’

‘Very well. Have someone at the meeting point and try and get photographs of the principals. Sounds like a classic abusive construction job. I can’t see it’s worth diverting manpower from ongoing assignments to follow them. Funny about them needing stonemasons, though. Cheap, poorly reinforced concrete is the mob’s trademark.’

‘Not if it’s one of their own houses,’ Arnone pointed out.

The two
servizi
thugs had now emerged from the bar. Mini-Mussolini walked over, touched Zen’s arm and jerked his head impatiently towards the car. Zen ignored him.

‘And the other thing?’ he asked Arnone.

‘Oh, just some crazy old woman here who insists on talking to you. Won’t say what it’s about and won’t talk to anyone else.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Name’s Maria Stefania Arrighi, resident in Altomonte Nuova. She got here at seven this morning and demanded to speak to the chief of police. She was told that you were out of town and wouldn’t be back until late, but she said she would wait. Plonked herself down on the bench in the entrance hall and has been there ever since. Do you want us to throw her out?’

‘Absolutely not, and if she leaves of her own accord, try to get a contact address and phone number.’

‘I’ll do my best, but basically she refuses to speak to anyone but you.’

Flanked by his two handlers, Zen got back into the car, which took a very steep minor road whose tight bends gave occasional views of the capital, the dome of St Peter’s just visible through the flat pall of pollution that covered the surrounding
campagna
, a modern equivalent of the malarial miasma that had decimated the population for centuries.

When they finally reached their destination, Zen was reminded of Arnone’s comment about the mob leaders’ private dwellings. Not that there was anything ostentatious about this long, low villa set among ancient olive groves and vineyards. The connection was more subtle, based on the fact that a good three kilometres back they had passed a sign marking the beginning of the Castelli Romani regional park. The villa clearly post-dated the creation of this protected area where new construction was strictly forbidden, but the important and powerful figure who owned it was almost certainly a member not of the Mafia but of the government – an entirely different organisation, needless to say.

The room into which Zen was shown provided no obvious clue to the identity of this person beyond the fact that he could afford to indulge in the sort of bad taste that comes with an exorbitant price tag. There were several huge oil paintings in the blandly ‘contemporary’ style favoured by Arab collectors, featuring nude females and rearing stallions in a vaguely abstract wilderness. There were also a number of coffee-table art books on display, but any attempt to investigate further the ownership of the property was prevented by Zen’s escort, who took up positions at opposite ends of the room. Twelve minutes passed before a passenger van drew up outside the house and a hydraulic lift deposited an elderly man seated in a wheelchair, which was pushed into the room by a formidable-looking woman in a starched uniform.

‘This nurse will take the sample you require and return with it so that tests may be undertaken,’ Mini-Mussolini announced.

‘Take it from whom?’ Zen demanded acidly.

‘From the person you requested to meet.’

‘And where is he?’

The man pointed to the occupant of the wheelchair, who sat mutely cradling a battered leather briefcase.

‘I have your word for that?’

‘You have my department’s word for it.’

Zen levelled him with a look.

‘I don’t even know which department you’re talking about, but if it’s the one I think it is, then I hope for all our sakes that you’re not the sharpest knife in their drawer. For my coming here to make any sense, I require documentary proof that the donor of the sample is Roberto Calopezzati. I further require to take possession of the sample and convey it personally to a police laboratory, where it will be entrusted to a technician of my choice. If you seek to impose any other solution, this has all been a complete waste of time.’

‘Go away, Gino,’ said the man in the wheelchair. ‘You two as well. This experience is difficult enough for me without having you all standing around aimlessly like characters in some Pirandello play.’

The two minders and the nurse trooped meekly out.

‘I apologise for this pantomime,’ the man said to Zen. ‘It was the idea of my successor as head of the agency you referred to. Not a bad fellow in many ways, but somewhat heavy-handed. Yes, I know you’re listening, Rizzardo, but that happens to be my opinion, for what it’s worth. Sit down,
signore
, sit down. I am Roberto Calopezzati, and I have brought the necessary documents to prove it. Before I present them, may I ask why I have the honour of being an object of attention to the police?’

Calopezzati was a bulky man with a strongly featured face set off by a white beard trimmed short and contrasted with jet-black cropped hair and two huge eyebrows of the same colour that lounged across his brow like furry caterpillars. His olive-green eyes were intense, direct and demanding, while his lips were thin but sensual. Only the lower half of his body, truncated at the knees, detracted from the general impression of vigour and power.

‘I assumed that your successor would have explained that,’ Zen replied.

‘Well, I suppose we could always ask him. I don’t actually know if he’s listening in “real time”, as they say these days – when did time stop being real, by the way? – but our conversation is certainly being recorded for quality-assurance purposes and for my protection. Anyway, all I have been told is that our meeting is with regard to the investigation of a murder in Cosenza.’

‘You weren’t informed of the identity of the victim?’

‘No.’

‘And you didn’t see my press conference on television?’

‘I don’t have a television.’

‘Ah well, in that case,
barone
, I’m afraid that I must be the bearer of bad news. All the prima facie evidence suggests that the victim was your nephew.’

Calopezzati sagged physically and looked his age for the first time.

‘Pietro?’ he whispered.

‘That’s what I’ve come here to ascertain. On the face of it, the victim was an American citizen travelling under the name of Peter Newman. When he disappeared some weeks ago while in Calabria on a business trip, the assumption was that he had been kidnapped for ransom. My investigations during that period suggested that his original identity was Pietro Ottavio Calopezzati, the son of your late sister Ottavia. The main reason why I’ve come here is to obtain a DNA sample from you which will confirm or rule out that hypothesis.’

Calopezzati sat silent and expressionless for over a minute, his body twitching violently at intervals as if stricken by a series of minor strokes. Zen let this process work itself out without comment.

‘You’ll get your sample,’ the other man said at last, ‘but it’s redundant. The dead man was indeed my nephew.’

‘Would you be prepared to comment on how Pietro Calopezzati became Peter Newman?’

‘Possibly. But first things first.’

He opened the leather case and extracted a mass of papers.

‘We’ll go through these in chronological order, with one exception which I’ll get to later.’

He passed the documents to Zen one by one.

‘My birth certificate. Various photographs from my childhood and school years. A sequence of identity cards from the following period, up to the war years, then a different set dating from my work with the
servizi
, concluding with the one that is currently valid. I think you will agree that all the photographs show a marked likeness, qualified of course by the passage of time. However, I don’t expect you to confirm my identity on that basis alone. As I said, I have withheld one document from the chronological order. It is this.’

He passed Zen a file card bearing the printed heading ‘Partito Fascista Italiano’. The entries below indicated that Roberto Calopezzati was enrolled in the Cosenza section of the party with the rank of
caposquadrista
, the commander of a squad of Blackshirts. The attached photograph fitted into the now familiar pattern, but there was also a very clear thumbprint.

‘And now for my last trick,’ the man said.

From the leather bag, he produced an ink pad in a tin box and a blank sheet of paper. He opened the pad, rolled his right thumb in the ink and then printed the resulting image on the paper. Zen compared it to the print on the Fascist file card. They were identical.

‘You are satisfied?’ Calopezzati asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then let us proceed to the sample you need. What exactly does that consist of?’

Zen paused for a moment.

‘Correct me if I’m wrong,
barone
, but I have the impression that while the news of your nephew’s death was a shock to you, it did not come as a complete surprise.’

‘Only in the sense that I had no idea he’d returned home. For as long as we were in contact, I explicitly advised him never to do so, and in any event not to venture south of Rome. What on earth could have induced him to do such a thing?’