‘I’m so happy for you,’ Zen replied nastily. ‘He sounds a real fire-eater.’
He lowered his voice.
‘But listen, cara. Tell him to keep this under wraps until further notice, all right? It looks as though there may be some powerful players involved, and my position is already extremely delicate.’
Ellen spoke distantly in English. A disgruntled but incisive male voice replied. Zen didn’t understand a single word the man said, but he took an instant dislike to him.
‘Do you have a fax number?’ Ellen asked in Italian.
Zen consulted the internal directory and dictated the number to her.
‘Bill wants to ask a few questions,’ she told him.
There was a brief exchange in English off-stage before Ellen returned to translate.
‘Is he dead?’
Zen tried to remember what Ellen looked like in bed. All he could call to mind were her nipples, large and dark and surprisingly insensitive, judging by how hard she liked them tweaked.
‘The person we found is certainly dead. Very dead.’
Another off-stage buzz while this was translated for Bill’s benefit.
‘Where was the body found?’ Ellen asked in Italian.
‘On an island in the lagoon.’
More whispering, then Ellen’s translation.
‘Have you any idea what happened and who is responsible?’
Zen glanced at the window. It was no longer snowing, but the sagging sky looked ready to burst anew at any moment.
‘Nothing worth discussing at this stage. But if the case is going to break, it’ll do so in the next forty-eight hours. Until then I need a free hand. That means a press blackout and no interference from the family.’
Ellen duly translated. There was a pause, then a brief male response.
‘Bill agrees,’ said Ellen.
‘Bravo for Bill.’
He grinned maliciously.
‘Is he good news in other ways?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean, Aurelio?’
‘If you don’t know by now, it’s too late to learn.’
‘It’s never too late,’ Ellen retorted.
Zen laughed.
‘I’ve discovered that too.’
‘So I gather,’ remarked Ellen primly. ‘Tania, isn’t it? Is she good news?’
Zen’s smile abruptly disappeared.
‘All the best, Ellen,’ he said with finality.
‘And to you, Aurelio.’
She breathed a long transatlantic sigh.
‘I’d like to see you happy, but somehow…’
‘Somehow what?’
This time the synthetic silence went on so long that he began to think that they really had been cut off.
‘Somehow I just can’t imagine it,’ Ellen said at last.
Zen instinctively touched his genitals in the gesture traditionally used to ward off bad luck.
‘Just make sure the material I requested gets here on time,’ he told her coldly, and hung up.
Aldo Valentini arrived shortly before three o’clock, having been plucked from the bosom of his in-laws by helicopter and deposited at a landing pad in the hospital complex just north of the Questura. Despite these excitements, the Ferrarese looked poised and spruce in a Sunday leisure outfit which had evidently cost considerably more than the off-the-peg suits he wore to work so as not to upstage his boss Francesco Bruno, who prided himself on being a snappy dresser. Aurelio Zen was there to meet him, the soles of his shoes soaked from the melting slush all around, coat and tie flying in the mini-hurricane created by the rotors.
‘Did everything go all right?’ he asked as Valentini stepped out, ducking unnecessarily to avoid the spinning blades.
‘I just wish someone would lay on something like this every time we have to go over there! It’s only three or four times a year, but the prospect fills me with dread weeks before, and the memory lingers for months afterwards.’
‘What’s so awful about it?’
Zen couldn’t have cared less — an only child, deprived of any close relations, he had always considered family life a sanctioned form of incest — but he needed to keep Valentini sweet.
‘It’s Virgilio,’ Valentini explained as they walked back along Calle Capello. ‘The guy’s a librarian and he’s envious of this glamorous and exciting lifestyle which he thinks I have. If I tell some anecdote about the job he accuses me of not being interested in his work, and if I suck up to him like he wants then he gets pissed off because he thinks I’m being patronizing. You can’t win.’
Zen agreed that in-laws were notoriously a problem, and privately congratulated himself on not having any.
‘Anyway, this helicopter transfer certainly did wonders for my prestige,’ Valentini went on. ‘They were dying to know what it was all about, but I made it clear that my lips were sealed.’
He glanced at Zen.
‘What is it about, anyway?’