Medusa - 9 (23 page)

How did the rhyme go? Her mother had later claimed it was a poem by a famous writer, but she had always had intellectual pretensions, and the verses were too natural and artless ever to have been written down. Despite the innumerable times her mother had recited it to her, she could only now remember scattered phrases, and realized that she had no precise idea what they meant. ‘
Nun der Tag mich müd gemacht … wie ein
müdes Kind … Stirn, vergiss du alles Denken
…’ Something about children feeling tired at the close of day, and it being time to stop doing and thinking, time to let go.

If only she could! But she knew what Zen’s appearance portended. He thought he had been so clever, apparently talking about Leonardo and Naldino and Nestore, but she had seen right through him. The discovery of Leonardo’s body had clearly triggered a reinvestigation of all the circumstances surrounding Gaetano’s death. A new man had come along, insusceptible to the pressures that had been brought to bear on Inspector Boito, and much better informed about the affair with Leonardo, and he had instantly realized the truth. It was all very well to say that he was powerless while she remained in Switzerland, but she couldn’t stay at the hotel for ever. And the moment she returned home, he would be watching and waiting, biding his time. They might even arrest her at the frontier. What would she get? Twenty-five years? A life sentence. She would die in prison.

From the room below the music drifted up again, the same theme, but this time taken up by the whole orchestra. Below, the splayed paving stones of the courtyard glowed up at her. ‘
Und die Seele unbewacht will in freien Flügen schweben
…’ She’d understood that
die Seele
meant
l’anima
, the soul, and then there was something about flying, but she’d never understood
unbewacht
. And when she’d asked her mother, she had started to weep and then said, ‘It means unwatched, unsupervised, without anyone to tell you what to do or say or feel or how to behave or anything else. It means to be at perfect liberty, free at last.’

At the time, this outburst had just made the idea more problematic, not to mention threatening in some sense, as though a taboo had been broken. Nor had she really understood what
die Seele
meant, except as an ideal version of herself, with better hair and none of the acne and period pains and the fat which had been quite a big problem at the time, although it had turned out all right later on. And she certainly hadn’t understood
unbewacht
. Watched over was exactly what she had so desperately wanted to be, and particularly when she was asleep, except that her parents weren’t up to the job. Her mother’s tears had been the final proof of that.

It occurred to her for the first time that in her marriage to Gaetano, and even perhaps her affair with Leonardo, she had merely been replaying the hand of cards that her parents had been dealt, as if to prove to them posthumously that it could after all have been a winner.

She leant over the balcony, gazing down at the paving stones spread out like interlocking angels’ wings.
Unbewacht
. She understood the word now all right, and she understood Seele and she understood her mother. She also understood, and it was perhaps her supreme moment, that this understanding had come too late, not as an epiphany but an epitaph.

XIV

The door was opened by a bearded man who ignored Aurelio Zen’s identification card and waved him into a large room insulated from the harsh external environment of the Milan suburbs both by a hovering layer of stringed music and by shelves of books stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, leaving only a minimal escape hatch in the form of the door through which Zen had entered.

‘Quite a change from the last time the police called on me,’ said Luca Brandelli. ‘That was back in the terrorist years. For some reason they’d got it into their heads that I knew where Toni Negri and the Red Brigades leaders were hiding out, so they went through the place with a bulldozer. A good third of my research files disappeared for ever.’

‘They weren’t returned?’

‘The files were. Shame about the contents. Still, one can’t have everything.’

Brandelli was a stocky, powerful man of medium height, with a full head of loose white curls and a beard to match. He shuffled about the apartment in faded jeans, a baggy sweater and moccasins, as if to proclaim in advance that wherever he was taking his stand, it wasn’t on his appearance. No, he’d given up the journalism, he told Zen while he prepared a pot of Chinese green tea in the minuscule kitchen.

‘I can get by on my pension, more or less, so I’ve decided to devote my remaining years to writing a book.’

‘What about?’

‘A definitive account, explanation and analysis of all the
misteri d’Italia
.’

‘A slim volume, then,’ commented Zen.

‘Virtually invisible.’

They returned to the living room, temporarily bonded by this shared moment of irony. Brandelli walked over and turned off the radio.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Schubert after Mozart won’t do. That’s when everything started to go wrong. For all his facile melodic gush, Schubert was a neurotic. Even Beethoven, although eminently sane, couldn’t escape self-consciousness. Whereas Mozart had no self at all, in his music I mean. Nor should we forget that Karl Marx was born in 1818, and in Trier, a stagnating little provincial town on the Moselle with a glorious past as a Roman colony, a staid present at least thirty years behind the times, and no future to speak of. Some people argue that he rebelled against that very childhood, or at least forgot it. I disagree. You may forget your childhood, but your childhood does not forget you. To all intents and purposes Marx grew up in the 1780s, a child of the Enlightenment, a pre-Romantic. It was only when he went to Paris in his mid-twenties that he formulated his doctrine of “merciless criticism of everything existing”.’

The two men sat down, Zen on a spongy sofa, his host on a creaky wicker chair opposite.

‘Marx always looked back to earlier eras of production – and hence of course social organization and personal psychology – with a great sense of warmth and nostalgia, just as I look back to the struggles of the working class in Genoa and Turin in the 1950s. Whatever those people were doing, and whatever mistakes they may have made in retrospect, they weren’t doing it for themselves. They were as selfless in their work as was Mozart, just as Marx’s vision of a socialist future was based on the sense of community, however wrongly organized, that still lingered in the Trier of his youth, but had since been obliterated by Romantic egotism. In Paris, it was all “Me, me, me! My feelings, my needs!”. He recognized the danger, and tried to avert it by his overt hostility to the most fashionable contemporary revolutionary movements, and above all by his lifelong labour to formulate a broad, dialectic solution which would transcend the individual in order to remake him. It was a noble attempt, but in the end it failed. The neurotic ego won. Schubert banished Mozart, and we’re still living with the consequences two hundred years later.’

Aurelio Zen sipped his tea and said nothing. The room was very warm, almost suffocating. He wished that he had removed his coat, but to do so now might seem pointed. Luca Brandelli cleared his throat stagily.

‘But I think that I’m in danger of making my diagnosis appear a symptom of the disease,’ he said. ‘Enough from me, let’s talk about me. In what specific manner may I be of service to the authorities on this occasion?’

Zen took his time about answering and sipped his tea, considering the best way forward.

‘I may be able to contribute a chapter to the book you’re working on,’ he said at last. ‘Or perhaps an episode, an anecdote. At worst, a footnote.’

‘Concerning what?’

‘Something that happened thirty years ago.’

‘Well, as I said, my records of that period are incomplete, and my memory is not what it used to be.’

Zen nodded sympathetically.

‘Does the name Ferrero mean anything to you?’ he asked.

Now it was Brandelli’s turn to take refuge in the tea ceremony.

‘Leonardo Ferrero,’ added Zen.

‘Possibly.’

‘Possibly meaning yes, or possibly meaning no?’

They exchanged a glance.

‘Possibly meaning I’d like to know a bit more about the nature of your interest in this affair before committing myself to an answer. As a good citizen, one naturally wishes to cooperate with the authorities, even though I note that in this instance they haven’t presented themselves with the necessary documentation to command an answer. Nevertheless, I still have a somewhat tattered and faded sense of journalistic honour and responsibility. So before going any further, and in the absence of the aforesaid official documentation, I would like to know a little more about the circumstances before replying.’

Talkative, but a bit of a bore, thought Zen. But the man was obviously intelligent, and the combination of his articulate, professorial delivery and cuddly teddy-bear physique made it easy to understand the popularity he had once enjoyed in left- wing circles.

‘Let me outline the basic facts. A body has been discovered. It is as yet officially unidentified, but an individual has come forward and asserted that the dead man is one Leonardo Ferrero. I have been assigned to make preliminary enquiries. In the course of these, your name emerged as someone who had known this Ferrero.’

He had actually been on the phone to the editorial offices of
L’Unità
and to the Questura in Milan for the best part of an hour from his hotel room in Lugano before identifying the correct name and full address of the journalist that Marta had remembered as either Brandoni or Brandini. A call to the Ministry would have cut the time to a few minutes, but the risk of his whereabouts being traced and reported was too great.

Luca Brandelli looked at Zen in some wonderment.

‘Leonardo Ferrero, eh? Now there’s a name I never expected to hear again.’

‘You knew him, then?’

Brandelli made a qualifying gesture.

‘We met. Once. Long ago.’

‘Under what circumstances?’

‘One moment. Are you asking me to identify the body?’

Zen paused a moment, then shrugged.

‘Why not? It can’t hurt.’

He took an envelope from his coat pocket and passed over the photographs taken by the Austrian caver who had descended into the blast pit. Brandelli looked through them and frowned.

‘Where are these?’

‘Photographs of the body in situ at the place where it was found. They’re not terribly clear, I’m afraid, and the face is not visible. Not that there was much left of it, according to the hospital in Bolzano.’

‘Bolzano?’

‘Where the corpse was taken. It was discovered in an abandoned military tunnel in the Dolomites. You may have heard about it on the news, although the story seems to have died now. Or been killed.’

Brandelli handed the photographs back.

‘This makes no sense whatever,’ he said with finality. ‘To the best of my knowledge, Lieutenant Leonardo Ferrero died when a military plane carrying him to Trieste exploded over the Adriatic.’

Zen nodded.

‘According to the official records, Ferrero indeed died in a plane accident.’

‘Well, I don’t necessarily believe that it was an accident, but that’s another matter.’

‘Nevertheless, an individual with a purely personal interest in the matter and no political axe to grind has asserted that the body recently discovered under the circumstances I mentioned is that of Lieutenant Ferrero. The Dolomites are a long way from the Adriatic, and the body was discovered about two hundred metres underground.’

‘So, he’s wrong. Or crazy. An attention seeker. What proof does he offer?’

‘He says that he’s a blood relative of Ferrero and that DNA tests would validate his claims.’

‘Then do them.’

Zen replaced his cup on its saucer and leaned back into the sofa, which immediately tried to swallow him. He pulled himself out of its maw and perched on the edge.

‘Unfortunately that’s not possible. About a week ago, the
carabinieri
raided the hospital in Bolzano at four in the morning and removed the corpse and all records of the preliminary post-mortem examination to an unknown destination. The Ministry of Defence is saying that the victim was a soldier who died in the course of an exercise testing a new nerve gas and that for safety reasons the cadaver was abandoned and the site sealed with explosives. Only it wasn’t sealed. Some cavers found their way in there, and I returned with one of them and inspected the area for myself. In short, this business has all the air of being a cover-up for yet another of our little Italian mysteries. I was wondering whether you could shed any light on it.’

Zen rearranged himself on the edge of the sofa in an attempt to find a more comfortable position. There was an ashtray on the glass-and-steel coffee table. He took out his cigarettes and made an interrogative gesture. His host’s right hand eloquently indicated that there had been no need to ask.

‘Well, it was all a long time ago…’

‘That’s what everyone keeps telling me.’

Brandelli got to his feet.

‘I was about to add, so I’d better go and retrieve my dossier on the subject.’

He was back in less than a minute, holding a very slim buffcoloured file.

‘The police raid I mentioned earlier did not come as a complete surprise,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘I had therefore taken the precaution of moving some of the most sensitive material to a bank safety-deposit box.’

Zen finished his cigarette and stubbed it out while Brandelli quickly skimmed the contents of the file.

‘Right!’ the journalist said. ‘My mind is duly refreshed and I will give you a brief guided tour of the salient facts. Off the record, of course, bearing in mind the lack of a search warrant.’

‘That’s fine. I’m operating off the record myself.’

‘Interesting. I’ve known the police do that on numerous occasions, needless to say, but they’ve never tried to enlist my help before. In fact they invariably treated me as an enemy.’