Zen knocked the pages into order and read through what he had written, making a few corrections here and there. Then he put the report into a cardboard folder and carried it through the gap in the screens separating his work area from that of Carlo Romizi.
'How's it going'?' he remarked.
Romizi looked up from the railway timetable he ha been studying.
'Bid you know that there's a train listed in here tha' doesn't exist?'
In every organization there is at least one person of whom all his colleagues think, 'How on earth did he get the job?' In Criminalpol, that person was Carlo Romizi, an Umbrian with a face like the man in the moon. Even after sume gruelling tour of duty, Romizi always looked as fresh as a new-laid egg, and his expression of childlike astonishment never varied.
'No, I didn't know that,' Zen replied.
'De Angelis just told me.'
'Which one is it?'
'That's the whole point! They don't say. Every year they invent a train which just goes from one bit of the timetable to another. Each individual bit looks all right, but if you put it all together you discover that the train just goes round and round in circles, never getting anywhere. Apparently it started one year when they made a mistake. Now they do it on purpose, as a sort of joke. I haven't found it yet, but it must be here. De Angelis told me about it.'
Zen nodded non-committally.
'What did la Biacis want?' he asked casually.
The effort of memory made Romizi frown.
'Oh, she was nagging me about some expense claim I put in. Apparently Moscati thinks it was excessive. I mean excessively excessive. I said I'd send in a revised claim, only I forgot.'
Youth is only a lightness of the heart, Zen thought as he walked away, as happy as a bird and all because Tania had not treated Romizi to her confidences after all.
In stark contrast to the Criminalpol suite, the administrative offices on the ground floor were designed in the old style, with massive desks drawn up in rows like tanks on parade. Tania was nowhere to be seen. One of her colleagues directed Zen to the accounts department, where he spent some time trying to attract the attention of a clerk who sat gazing into the middle distance, a telephone receiver hunched under each ear, repeating 'But of course!' and 'But of course not!' Without looking up, he handed Zen a form marked 'Do not fold, spindle or mutilate', on which he had scribbled 'Personnel?'
In the personnel department or. the fourth floor, Franco Ciliani revealed that the Biacis woman had just left after breaking his balls so comprehensively that he doubted whether they would ever recover.
'You know what her problem is?' Ciliani demanded rhetorically. 'She's not getting enough. The thing with women is, if you don't fuck them silly every few days they lose all sense of proportion. We should drop her husband a line, remind him of his duties.'
Apart from these words of wisdom, Ciliani was unable to help, but as Zen was walking disconsolately downstairs again, Tania suddenly materialized beside him.
'I've been looking for you everywhere,' he said.
'Except the women's toilet, presumably.'
'Ah.'
He handed her the folder as they continued downstairs together.
'This is the report Moscati asked for. Can you get a couple of copies up there before lunch?'
'Of course!' Tania replied rather tartly. 'That's what I'm here for.'
'What's the matter? Did Ciliani say something to you?'
She shrugged. 'No, he just gets on my nerves, that's all.
It's not his fault. He reminds me of my husband.'
This remark was so bizarre that Zen ignored it. Everything Tania had said so far had suggested that she and her husband were blissfully happy together, a perfect couple.
As they reached the third-floor landing, Zen reached over and took her arm.
'What was it you wanted me to do for you?'
She looked at him, then looked away. 'Nothing. It doesn't matter.'
She didn't move, however, and he didn't let go of her arm. With his free hand he gestured towards the stairs.
Whoever had designed the Ministry of the Interior had been a firm believer in the idea that an institution's prestige is directly proportional to the dimensions of its main staircase, which was built on a scale that seemed to demand heroic gestures and sumptuous costumes.
'Perhaps it would work better if we sang,' Zen suggested with a slightly hysterical smile.
'Sang?' Tania repeated blankly.
He knew he should never have opened his mouth, but he was feeling light-headed because of her presence there beside him.
'This place reminds me of an opera. I mean, talking doesn't seem quite enough. You know what I mean?'
He released her, stretched out one arm, laid his other hand on his chest and intoned, 'What was it you wanted me to do for you?'
Tania's face softened into a smile.
'And what would I say?'
'You'd have an aria where you told me. About twenty times over.'
They looked at each other for a moment. Then Tania ribbfed something on a piece of paper.
'Ring this number at seven o'clock this evening. Say you're phoning from here and that because of the murder of that judge there's an emergency on and I'm needed till midnight.'
Zen took the paper from her.
'That's all?'
'That's all.'
He nodded slowly, as though he understood, and turned away.
Blood everywhere, my blood. I'm collapsing like a sack of grai›~ the rats have gnawed a hole in. No one will ever pnd me. No on..but me knows about this place. I will have disappeared.
I made things disappear. People too, but that came later, an ' caused less stir. People drop dead all the time anyway. Things ar more durable. A bowl or chair, a spade, a knife, can hang aroun ' a house so long that no one remembers where it came from..'seems that it's always been there. When it suddenly disappearec; everyone tried to hush up the scandal. 'It must be somewhere.'
Don't worry, it'll turn up, just wait and see.' A crack hai! appeared in their world. And through it, for a moment, they fe.":: the chill and caught a glimpse of the darkness that awaited thentoo.
I've got together quite a collection, one way and another. Wh will become of it now, I wonder? Cups, pens, string, ribbo›. playing cards, wallets, nails, clothing, tools, all piled up in tii darkness like offerings to the god whose absence I sense at night, in the space between the stars, featureless and vast.
Things don't just disappear for no reason. 'There's a reason fri~ everything,' as old Tommaso likes to say, nodding that misshapen head of his that looks like a lump of rock left standing in a field for farmers to curse and plough around, or else blow up. I'd like to blow it up, his wise old head. 'What's the reason for this, then? '
I'd ask as 1 pulled the trigger. Too late for that now.
Perhaps he would have understood, at the last. Perhaps the othe;s did, too. Perhaps the look on their faces was not just pain and terror, but understanding. At all events, the crack was there, the possibility of grace, thanks to me. Things are not what they seevi.
There's more to this place than meets the eye. 1 was living proof of that.