Back to Bologna by Michael Dibdin Read Free Book Online Page B

around Vincenzo Amadori without being observed by them that he had overlooked the fact that there were other people in the bar. This wouldn’t have mattered in law-abiding Bologna, but Ancona was a port city, crawling with down-and-outs, illegal migrants and criminal elements of every description. One of them must have noted the chic little Nikon nestling in Tony’s fingers and determined to make it his own.
    He shrugged nonchalantly as he turned right on to the main road into town. All things considered, it was no big deal. He could buy a new camera and didn’t really need the gun. Indeed, the lone thief had actually done him a favour. Incidents like that merely validated his status as an authentic
investigatore privato
. Everyone knew that private eyes got sapped all the time. It was part of the job description, particularly if you had to operate in a tough, pitiless part of the world like Emilia-Romagna.

7
    There had always been aspects of life that Aurelio Zen had found problematic, even in the halcyon years before his midlife medical crisis had multiplied their number virtually to infinity. One of them was being brutally woken out of deep sleep, another was talking to total strangers on the phone. The morning following his return from Rome he got both.
    He was first bawled and battered into consciousness by a sinister figure in a white hooded robe, who turned out on closer inspection to be Gemma. She had been washing her hair in the shower when the phone rang, and her exertions to rouse Zen caused a secondary shower to splash down on his face, which still bore the traces of a rapidly fading expression of blissful ignorance.
    ‘It’s for you!’ Gemma shouted, waving the telephone she was holding in one hand while covering the mouthpiece of the receiver with the other. ‘Your work! They say it’s urgent!’
    She emphasised this fact with a kick, which went wide as Zen rolled over in bed at that moment. Gemma promptly lost her balance, dropped the phone in a failed attempt to steady herself, then sat down rather suddenly on the floor. This caused her to swear, and Zen to feel the onset of a rising tide of laughter which soon floated him back to full wakefulness.
    As usual these days, Gemma failed to see the lighter side of the situation and flounced out of the room, loudly abusing Zen with a string of vicious expletives and slamming the door so hard that it bounced open again. He went to shut it properly, his initial humour fading fast. What had all that been about? One more irrational and unpredictable fit of hysteria. Welcome to another day at Via del Fosso. The phone lying on the floor seemed to be emitting gurgling sounds. He picked it up.
    ‘
Pronto?
’
    ‘Is this Aurelio Zen?’ a voice barked in his ear.
    Zen wasted a sarcastically unctuous smile on the plastic mouthpiece.
    ‘It is indeed!’ he announced in a falsely jocular tone. ‘He himself, as ever was, larger than life and twice as real. And whom, pray, have I the honour of addressing?’
    ‘Gaetano Foschi.’
    The name rang a bell, but it was only after the caller had testily supplied further information that Zen linked it with the short-tempered, workaholic southerner who was deputy head of the Criminalpol section of the Interior Ministry.
    ‘What the hell’s going on there?’ Foschi demanded. ‘The place sounds like a madhouse.’
    ‘It often feels like it too.’
    ‘What? Why aren’t you answering your duty issue phone?’
    ‘It’s not switched on.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘I’m on sick leave.’
    ‘Says who?’
    ‘Dottor Brugnoli,’ Zen replied with the air of a chess master declaring checkmate.
    ‘Ah, you’re one of Brugnoli’s babies, are you? Well, I’m sorry to have to inform you that life around here has become rather more spartan during your prolonged absence. As in stake them out on the mountain and see who survives.’
    ‘I don’t follow you.’
    ‘Call me back on your encrypted mobile. This line is not