‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is odd.’
‘Isn’t it?’
She walked inside, looking around as though for a place to sit down, but in the end remained standing.
‘I was just thinking about your mother,’ said Zen, and immediately cursed his thoughtlessness.
Carla gave a hard little snort.
‘You never thought about her while she was alive. Why bother now she’s dead?’
Zen stared at her in shock.
‘Dead?’
She tossed her head.
‘But of course! Why do you think I made my move now, when I’ve known about it for years? I could easily have come to Rome and tracked you down. But she forbade me to do so. She was poor and proud. Pride was all she had left, once her looks went. She didn’t want to give you the satisfaction of knowing how much you’d hurt her. So I had to wait until she died before doing anything about it.’
Zen was now staring at her with manic intensity.
‘Until she died,’ he repeated.
A curt nod.
‘Which was recently?’
‘Back in the spring. A stroke.’
Zen looked away, his eyes narrowing.
‘So Irena was right. Of course!’
‘The doctor’s friend?’
‘Cherchez la femme,’ returned Zen. ‘I understand it all now. He had to wait until she died!’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, let alone how that bitch Irena comes into it.’
Carla laughed maliciously.
‘She couldn’t get over the fact that I was able to spot what Lucchese was playing and to name the harpsichord! She obviously doesn’t care for competition.’
Zen looked at her, frowning.
‘How did you know that, anyway?’
‘I used to have a boyfriend who listened to classical music a lot. Scarlatti was one of his favourites, and if you’ve heard one of those clattery, repetitive pieces, you’ve heard them all.’
‘And the instrument?’
‘Even easier! It was written right there above the keyboard. Andreas Ruckers me fecit. Latin was one of my best subjects at school. But you still haven’t told me what that Irena was right about.’
Zen waved the subject away.
‘It’s not important. Take no notice of me, I’m still half-asleep.’
Carla consulted her watch.
‘Why don’t we go and get a coffee? There’s a place I know which should be open, down by the station. I noticed it the morning you caught the train to Palazzuole.’
‘That was you?’ exclaimed Zen. ‘I remember seeing some woman standing there in the shadows.’
‘I heard you rummaging around in here, and when you went out I decided to follow you.’
‘And then phoned me later at the Vincenzo house. But how did you know I was there?’
‘I didn’t. But I heard you tell the guard to let you off at Palazzuole. I thought you might be going to the Vincenzo house, so I phoned up, pretending to be a reporter. To my surprise, the son himself answered, quite rudely, I must say. That confirmed my suspicions, so I kept trying until you showed up. It was a shot in the dark, but it hit the target. God, you must have been scared.’
She smiled wryly.
‘How long ago that seems now! Like years, not days. To think that I was set on terrorizing you with anonymous phone calls. But it all seemed to matter so much to me back then.’
Zen gazed at her expressionlessly.
‘And now?’
A shrug, brief, almost irritable. Zen looked away.
‘I’ll get dressed,’ he mumbled. ‘Then let’s go and try this cafe of yours.’
When they came for him, he was asleep, if you could call it sleep. Once again, there were two of them: one in plain clothes, the other a uniformed recruit cradling a machine-gun.
That first time, the evening before, Minot had just finished eating a bowl of the lentil soup he made every Sunday, and which sat in its cauldron on the stove for the rest of the week. Eating lentils made you rich, his father had told him; every one you swallowed would come back one day as a gold coin. Minot still believed this obscurely, even though he knew that they didn’t make gold coins any more.
He’d grated some raw carrot and onion into the warmed-up soup, poured in a fat slick of olive oil and then spooned it up, dunking in the heel of the day-old loaf he kept in a battered canister, where it was safe from his familiars. The lid was decorated with a faded picture of a smiling woman and the name of a once-famous brand of boiled sweets.
When he’d finished eating, Minot sluiced out the bowl under the tap and left it to dry. Then he went next door, sat down and turned on the television, an old black-and-white set given to him by a neighbour who had changed to colour. He could only get two channels, and either the picture or the sound was often indecipherable, but Minot didn’t care. He wasn’t interested in any of the programmes anyway. He just liked having the set on. It made the room more lively.
He was watching a film when the police arrived. There was heavy interference on the screen, with ghost doubles floating about and the picture skipping upwards repeatedly like the facial tic which used to afflict Angelin when things got tense. But the soundtrack was clear enough, and at first Minot thought that the noise of the jeep drawing up and the imperious knocking was part of the movie. It was only when the rat perched on top of the set swivelled towards the door, nostrils twitching, then leapt down and disappeared, that he had realized his mistake.
He was taken by surprise this second time, but for a different reason. Ever since they had locked him into his cell the previous evening, the air had been throbbing with loud music from a radio which someone had left on somewhere close by. He had tried shouting and banging on the door to get them to turn it off, but all in vain. In the end he had lain down on the bench provided and tried to get some sleep.
The bench made a primitive bed, but Minot was not fussy in this respect, any more than in others. The cot he slept on at home was no more spacious and hardly any softer, but the only time he’d ever had trouble sleeping was when the resident rodents used to scurry over the covers and tickle his face with their feet or whiskers. He’d solved that problem by fixing rounded wooden caps just below the frame, one at the top of each leg, so that the bed seemed to be resting on four giant mushrooms. The rats couldn’t climb past the caps, and after that Minot slept in peace.
As he would have done that night, too, if it hadn’t been for that damned music! He hadn’t made any fuss when the cops told him they were taking him into detention. He’d been more or less expecting something of the sort anyway, ever since the maresciallo had taken to dropping in — and to dropping heavy hints. In any case, Minot wasn’t the type to give them any satisfaction by getting upset.