Blood Rain - 7 Read Online Free Page B

man on the spot, and Aurelio Zen — unambitious and deeply compromised — had been their choice.
    Superficially, Zen had to admit, it was not a bad job. Every week, each DIA office submitted a strictly confidential report on its current activities to headquarters in Rome. Thanks to a highly placed contact there, copies of these were passed to the Interior Ministry on the Viminale hill — as well, no doubt, as to the other two interested ministries. On the following Monday, a transcript of that portion of the report pertaining to the province of Catania turned up on Zen’s desk. His official title was Liaison Officer, and he supposedly functioned as a sort of surrogate uncle dispatched by the new, ‘caring’ ministry in Rome. His real job was to amplify and amend the extract from the DIA’s bare-bones document in the course of casual conversation with the seven officers of the Polizia Statale on the local DIA roster.
    He took them out for a coffee, a beer, even a meal, ostensibly to discuss their personal problems and keep them informed about pension plans, medical benefits, alternative career openings and the like. Then, at a certain point, he would let drop one of the facts garnered from his perusal of the previous week’s DIA report, in a manner which suggested that he respected his younger colleagues for doing such important and dangerous work and would be interested in knowing further details. These were generally forthcoming. Like anyone else, Zen’s contacts loved to chat, bitch and gossip about their work, except that in their case this was impossible, stuck as they were deep in enemy territory. But here was a senior officer in their own force, a man of wisdom and discretion hand-picked by the authorities in Rome to look after their personal and professional well-being. If they couldn’t trust him, whom could they trust?
    Today, Zen was lunching with Baccio Sinico, an inspector in his early thirties who had been in Sicily for almost three years, first in Trapani and then Catania, and now wanted to be transferred back to his native Bologna. This put Zen in an even more awkward position than usual. Sinico’s request was perfectly in order, and would already have been approved if it had not been for Zen’s intervention. Of all his contacts inside the DIA, Sinico had turned out to be by far the most informative and uninhibited, and Zen didn’t want to lose him. At the same time, he completely understood and sympathized with the man’s wish to return home.
    It wasn’t so much a question of the physical danger, he had realized, although this was real enough. But in the course of their conversations Zen had sensed that Sinico was afflicted by another complaint, at once vaguer and more disturbing. Although Sicily was part of Italy and therefore of Europe, it didn’t feel like it. In everything one did, saw and heard, there was a sense of being cut off from the mainstream, from il continente , as Sicilians termed the mainland. The result was a peculiarly insular arrogance, a natural reaction to centuries of being either ignored or exploited by whoever happened to be in power in the places that mattered.
    Baccio Sinico was suffering from a reaction to this mentality, as perhaps was Zen himself, on those not infrequent mornings when he woke at three or four in his darkened apartment for no apparent reason and found it impossible to seduce sleep again. This will end badly, he thought, standing at the open window, the smoke from his cigarette wafting gently away on the sea breeze which came by night to mitigate the rigours of the southern sun. All was balmy, all was calm, but an ancient instinct buried deep within his cortex refused to be fooled. This will end badly, it told him, with all the authority of a source at once disinterested and well-informed. This will end badly.
     
     
     

 
    Her journey to work seemed, as always, a crude parody of her entire existence: a cartoon-strip version, at once focusing and