Maria got a pen and a used bus ticket out of her handbag, wrote down a telephone number in large, plump numerals and handed the ticket to Zen.
‘Call this number. If someone else answers, tell them that you work at the hospital and need to speak to me about the results of those tests I had. They’ll fetch me and then we can talk.’
Zen stood up to indicate that the interview was over.
‘You’re an interesting person, Maria,’ he said, using her name for the first time. ‘What you’ve said is extremely interesting. What you haven’t said might well be more interesting still. Do you know someone called Giorgio?’
Maria almost faltered then, dazzled by the feints setting up the knockout punch. But she too could hold herself together by sheer willpower.
‘It’s a very common name,’ she replied.
The chief of police seemed to acknowledge her fortitude with an ironic smile.
‘Excessively common, I’m inclined to think. The world would be a better place if there were fewer Giorgios in it. Or at least one fewer. I wish you a safe and speedy journey home.’
Since his son had made his own arrangements for the day, Professor Achille Pancrazi spent the afternoon working on a rather tricky review of a book by a former colleague at the University of Padua. He had initially been slightly taken aback by Emanuele’s announcement that he was going to spend the day with an unnamed school friend, largely because even after years of separation he still lived in fear of his ex-wife and knew that he would be held to account if anything went wrong. But of course nothing would, and frankly an interval of free time in these welcome but somewhat tiring visits was always welcome.
Needless to say, he hadn’t bothered to read Fraschetti’s latest effusion. He was familiar with both the subject and the author, so a perusal of the introduction and table of contents sufficed as far as content went. As for style, a brief skim of a few paragraphs taken at random was enough to show that his rival’s love affair with the jargon of the trade was by no means over. He was particularly amused by the constant references to ‘desire’, given that he knew for a fact that Fraschetti had never desired anyone of either sex in his life. But Pancrazi’s real problem was how to pitch his critical response, which would be published in the Cultura insert of a national newspaper and read by just about everyone in the scholarly world for whom the subject matter was relevant. In other words, it wasn’t so much a question of how he wanted to make his eminent — but well past his peak, despite his current fame — colleague look, but of how he wanted it to make him look. If he sounded too negative, then charges of professional envy could and would be brought, and not without a certain justification.
From way back in their far-off days together at Padua, Pancrazi had always considered Fraschetti his intellectual inferior. He didn’t gloat about this any more than he did about the fact that he was the taller of the two, but in the event it was he who’d had to move all the way down the boot to the University of bloody Cosenza to get his professorship while Fraschetti had landed the post in Turin that they’d both applied for, and then gone on to be a media don into the bargain. And why? Because the half-smart bastard had more connections than a telephone exchange, plus a superficial talent for memorable soundbites and an easy-to-grasp high concept, in this case the idea that the early Romans, far from having any sense of manifest destiny or even a coherent culture, had simply muddled along from year to year, the results being cleaned up much later by Livy and others into a neat corporate history for imperial PR purposes.
Achille Pancrazi had written and revised four drafts of his review and was just starting a fifth, in a marginally more nuanced tone, when his phone rang. The screen showed that the caller was his son. Despite the interruption, he answered with genuine pleasure.
‘ Ciao, Manuele! ’
Emanuele, on the other hand, sounded preoccupied.
‘There’s something I want to show you, dad. Can you come right now?’
‘Come where?’
‘To the chapel of Santa Caterina on the back road to Mendicino.’
‘Are you there now? I thought you and your friend were spending the day in town. Does he have a car?’
‘Don’t ask any more questions, dad, just come. Please!’
By now, Emanuele sounded desperate. Pancrazi considered that he knew the territory around Cosenza ‘tolerably well’, as he would have put it, but he was not familiar with that particular chapel, probably some devotional shrine of strictly local interest and no architectural merit. He had once joked to a colleague whose subject was the Early Modern period that he himself suffered from a professional version of Alzheimer’s symptoms. ‘I can remember the smallest details of everything that happened up to the fall of Constantinople, but the last five hundred years are just a blur.’ What on earth could Emanuele and his friend have found there in such a place to justify his driving out there ‘right now’? It was charming and flattering that they had even bothered to include him and his interests in their laddish day out together, but the whole thing still didn’t quite make sense.
The evening rush hour was in full swing and it took him almost forty minutes to reach the rendezvous. It was a small building, squat and mean, set off beside the road in the middle of nowhere, not a house in sight. There was no sign of another vehicle either, which meant that there had either been a mistake about the location of the rendezvous or the two young men had got tired of waiting. Achille decided to take a look inside anyway, if the door was unlocked. It was. The interior was no improvement on the thinly plastered rough stone outside, a cramped space with a few rows of pews set before a small altar. The few ex votos about were old and illegible and the air smelt musty. The place was obviously no longer used on any regular basis. He was about to turn back when the door slammed shut behind him.
‘Don’t turn round, professo,’ said a voice. ‘Sit down facing the altar. Keep your hands in view at all times.’
A harsh laugh.
‘Clasped in prayer, if you like.’
Achille Pancrazi knew immediately what had happened, but his first thought was for himself. God almighty, what would Reginella say when she heard? She had always despised and hated southerners, to the extent of initially refusing to allow her son to visit his father in Calabria. Achille and Emanuele had joined forces on that issue once he became old enough to take a stand on his rights and responsibilities, and they had prevailed, mocking her irrational fears, telling her that everything was different now, that it was time to wake up and stop behaving like a typical paranoid northern racist. They’d prevailed at the time, but now Reginella would exact a terrible revenge.
And why on earth was this happening to someone like him anyway? He knew that the gangs sometimes took relatively small fry, pharmacists or accountants, to keep their earnings up on a percentage basis, but it had never occurred to him that he might be on their list. All right, he was a university professor, but the pay was miserable even before the outrageous sums withheld under the divorce settlement that his ex-wife’s butch lesbian lawyer had imposed. Just look at my bank statements, he felt like saying. I may have an impressive-sounding title, but the truth is that I’m just scraping by.
‘It’s not about money,’ the man said, as though he had been reading Achille’s thoughts. ‘Just a little professional help. Things you can arrange quite easily and will cost you nothing but a little time. In return, I personally guarantee as a man of honour that you will get your son back, safe and unharmed.’
‘When?’
‘Once you have done what we ask.’
‘Yes, of course, only… You see, he’s due back at the weekend.’
‘Back where?’
‘To his mother. She’ll kill me if he’s still missing when she finds out what’s happened.’
The man laughed again.
‘Maybe we should have taken her as well!’
‘Could you do that?’ Achille found himself asking.
‘I’m not interested in your domestic problems. But it’s essential to our agreement that it remains private. If you or your wife or anyone else informs the authorities, then Emanuele will be returned to you one piece at a time, wrapped in plastic food bags. Do you understand?’
‘I understand.’
‘When we wish to contact you, we shall call your home number on your son’s mobile. If I suspect that either number is being monitored by the police, out come the skinning and butchering knives. The same if you fail to follow our instructions to the letter and on time. Are you still following me?’
The man’s patronising tone made Pancrazi really angry for the first time.
‘I’m not stupid, you know!’
‘I hope not. What we want is some old Roman treasure.’
‘Treasure?’ breathed Pancrazi faintly.
‘Gold cups, diamond jewellery, what do I know? But it has to be genuine, the real thing, good enough to pass examination by an expert.’
‘What period are we talking about here? Late republic? Early empire?’
‘How the fuck should I know?’ the man shouted.
‘Of course,’ murmured Pancrazi mildly. ‘Not your area of competence.’
There followed a silence so long that Pancrazi began to think that the man had left as silently as he arrived, until he spoke again.
‘Alaric.’
‘What about him?’