‘A ring?’ snapped Zen. ‘Without continuity of evidence, that’s no more use than your famous button!’
Minot stood up and stretched lazily.
‘What have you got to lose, dottore? If you don’t like the product, you don’t have to go through with the deal. But you will, I promise you that. Just get the papers for my release written up. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.’
As ten o’clock sounded, at various intervals and pitches from bell towers all over town, Aurelio Zen mounted the steps of the Palazzo Lucchese and pushed the recessed brass bell beside the door on the first floor. He rang five times, ever more lengthily, then sat down on one of the shallow stone steps leading up to the next floor and lit a cigarette.
The bells ceased and silence fell. Somewhere inside the building, Zen could now make out a brittle tinkling sound he associated with adjacent wine-glasses in the sink of his apartment back in Rome when the neighbouring refrigerator rattled into action. At length another sound intervened: a dull, regular clumping, as if someone were pounding with a hammer. It was coming, he realized, from the steps below. A few moments later an elderly woman emerged, formidably breathless, on the landing. She turned on Zen a face so creased and contoured that it could have been classified as an historic site, produced a large key from her dauntingly capacious handbag and set about unlocking the front door.
‘Good morning,’ said Zen.
Much to his surprise, the crone responded with a complacent smile. Dear God, he thought, she used to be a beauty.
‘I’m here to see Prince Lucchese,’ he continued, standing up. ‘My name’s Aurelio Zen. He’s expecting me.’
The woman sighed and made a compendious gesture suggesting that the prince was a busy man, even slightly eccentric in his way, and not to be held to prior appointments or arrangements; that she herself had been battling with this situation for longer than she cared to remember; and that if Zen had just arrived, he should join the queue.
‘Wait here,’ she told him. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
The door closed behind her. Zen resumed his seat and smoked quietly for some time. Eventually the door opened again and a withered hand waved impatiently.
‘The prince will see you now.’
Inside, the sense of spacious gloom and dilapidated gentility was unchanged, like a museum exhibit preserved under a bell jar. The old woman indicated a door to the left at the end of the hall.
‘In there.’
It was yet a different room from his previous visits, as though the prince had decided to give Zen a gradual guided tour of the palace. This one was a sort of antechamber, as long and narrow as a corridor, but with a hexagonal bay at the far end. The walls were bare, the ceiling high. A small teak table, an embroidered sofa and a darkened cane chair were the only furnishings. Lucchese was sitting in the latter, resplendently casual in the now-familiar silk dressing-gown.
‘Ah, there you are!’ exclaimed Lucchese in a tone of irritation. ‘I almost changed my mind about this business after speaking to you. My upbringing does not permit me to display spontaneous emotion, but when you rang earlier, I was working on the allemande from Bach’s D major partita. Do you know Wanda Landowska’s famous mot on the subject? She’d had an argument with another musician over stylistic issues. “Very well,” was her parting shot, “you play Bach your way and I’ll play him his way!” This morning, for the first time, I felt I was playing Bach his way, and then the phone rings…’
A gesture.
‘What did you make of Arianna?’
‘The cleaning lady?’
‘My mother, actually.’
Zen gulped.
‘I didn’t realize…’
‘My real reason for agreeing to see you,’ the prince continued evenly, ‘has nothing to do with this hand-over you called about. For various reasons, not least a demand I received this morning from the electricity company, leads me to think that the moment has come for me to present my bill. Before doing so, however, we need to conclude two pieces of outstanding business. The first concerns your recent tendency to somnambulism. What time is this Minot person arriving with the “item” you wish to appraise?’
Zen snapped his fingers apart and together again.
‘An hour? Maybe less.’
‘In that case, we’re going to have to deal with this more peremptorily than I would ideally wish,’ Lucchese replied, flexing his own fingers with a loud detonation of joints, which apparently caused him no discomfort. ‘My preliminary analysis has led me to the conclusion that you have recently suffered the loss — or, what is almost more disturbing, the unexpected reappearance — of a child, sibling or parent. Is this in fact the case?’
Zen nodded.
‘Which?’ demanded Lucchese.
‘All three.’
The prince stared at him in disbelief.
‘I recently discovered that my mother’s husband was not in fact my father,’ Zen explained. ‘Also that I have a half-sister living in Naples.’
‘That’s two,’ Lucchese prompted him in a deliberately unempathetic tone.
Zen gazed down at the puddle of unclean light forming on the floorboards as the sun grazed up against the cloud cover outside.
‘A former girlfriend of mine also informed me that she was pregnant, and that I was the father. She subsequently announced that she had had an abortion. In which case, I have lost a child as well.’
Lucchese’s mask of professional indifference withered and crisped like a letter thrown on a fire. He rose and embraced Zen warmly, patting his back.
‘In a case like this, caro dottore, it’s not a question of trying to work out why you were sleepwalking, but of asking ourselves why you didn’t throw yourself off the nearest high building! You must have the constitution of a rock.’
Unseen, Zen smiled wearily.
‘Several times, I thought I might be going mad.’
‘A sure sign that you weren’t.’
Lucchese released him and reached into his pocket for some papers which he shuffled about nervously.
‘I needed to get that straight, you see, because of the second piece of business I mentioned. I refer, of course, to the results on those DNA tests you wanted done. They arrived this morning.’
Zen stared at him as though in terror.
‘So soon? But I thought…’
‘My brother runs the lab in Turin which processes these things. I arranged for your samples to be moved to the top of the list.’
‘And what…? That’s to say, are we…?’
Lucchese did not reply. Zen sighed.
‘It’s bad, then.’
‘That depends. It’s certainly definitive. I talked to my brother in person this morning, and he made that absolutely clear. So I wanted to make sure that you are aware of the potential consequences, psychological and otherwise, and to assure myself that you are strong enough to cope with it.’
Zen stared at him bleakly.