Free A Long Finish - 6 by Michael Dibdin Page A

home just at the moment was far from inviting. His tour of duty in Naples had ended in professional triumph and private turmoil. The most disturbing aspect of the latter had been the discovery that Tania Biacis, with whom he had once had a transient, desultory affair, was pregnant – and that, according to her, he was the father.
    He had barely started coming to terms with this development when he was transferred back to the Ministry in Rome, where Tania was also employed, and reinstated in the ranks of the élite Criminalpol division as a just recompense for having supposedly smashed a murderous terrorist conspiracy single-handed. But when he cornered Tania in the corridor one day and tried to arrange a meeting to discuss the situation, her response had been brutal.
    ‘There’s nothing to discuss, Aurelio. It’s all taken care of.’
    He literally had no idea what she was talking about.
    ‘I had an abortion,’ she explained icily. ‘Termination of pregnancy, yes?’
    ‘But you … I mean, it’s dead?’
    ‘He, actually. Yes, very dead indeed.’
    Her tone had an exaggerated brutality about it, a determined refusal to admit feeling directed as much at herself as at him.
    ‘If it makes you feel any better,’ she went on, ‘I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure it was yours in the first place. But after seeing you again, carrying on in that high-handed, arrogant, selfish way, I knew that I couldn’t afford to take the risk. So I had it removed. End of story.’
    But it wasn’t, at least for Zen. His initial sense of shameful relief had quickly proved itself to be illusory – a deceptively fragile crust covering a quagmire in which he was now struggling, as it sometimes seemed, for his sanity, if not his life. Every instinct told him to put the episode behind him, to wipe it out of his consciousness as thoroughly as the foetus had apparently been expunged from its mother’s womb. But there seemed to be no surgical procedures prescribed for this particular intervention.
    To make matters worse, he had to see Tania every day at work. Not even Zen’s current celebrity gave him any leverage over the rigid employment hierarchies of the Ministry of the Interior. He could no more have had his ex-mistress transferred to another department than he could have had the building moved from the Viminale hill to the Aventine on the grounds that the air was more salubrious and the view superior.
    As though sensing his discomfiture, Tania appeared to go out of her way to discover or manufacture reasons for crossing his path. Zen had no idea how she herself felt about what had happened. His one attempt to find out had been repulsed with a heavy barrage of rhetoric about a woman’s right to choose, all of which he agreed with but which brought him no closer to understanding this particular instance of the general principle.
    There was no one he could discuss it with, either. He was no longer on speaking terms with his former friend, Gilberto Nieddu, after what Zen saw as the latter’s betrayal in the Naples case when Nieddu had been entrusted with the prototype of a video game, which he had promptly taken off to Russia and sold to the local mafia for a figure which he gloatingly declined to disclose.
    His only other resource in a matter as personal as this was his mother, and she seemed to have taken a turn not so much for the worse as towards the far distance, from which zone – like an assiduous but incompetent spy – she relayed incomprehensible or misleading messages, with the names all muddled up and the dates and times confused. Even the unfailing good sense of Maria Grazia, their Calabrian housekeeper, had been tried to the limit at times. To raise the question of dead babies and hypothetical sons with someone who had so recently made startling disclosures about Zen’s own paternity – all of which she now denied having ever uttered – would be merely asking for more and deeper trouble.
    But if Zen had good reasons for