Fascination was replaced by fear.

‘What?’

‘Were you speaking to someone in Rome?’

‘No, no! Salerno! I’m from Salerno.’

And she started rooting in her bag for the identity card which was her only poor talisman against the dark powers of the state.

Zen looked through his change until he found another telephone token, which he handed to her.

‘Here. Now you can dial again.’

The woman stared at him suspiciously. He put the token down beside the phone and turned away.

‘It’s my sister,’ she said suddenly, gripping his arm. ‘She works for the Pope. At the Vatican! She’s a cleaner. The pay’s rotten, but it’s still something to work for the Pope, isn’t it? But her husband won’t let me in the house because of what my brother found out about him, the dirty bastard. So I phone her whenever I come up to see my grandson. She hasn’t got a phone, you see, so I phone from the station. They’re stingy bastards, those priests. Still, it’s better than packing anchovies, at least your fingers don’t stink. But listen, can that criminal do that? Forbid me to see my own sister? Isn’t there a law against that?’

Mumbling something about emergencies, Zen pulled away from the woman’s grasp and crossed the concourse towards the distant neon sign reading POLIZIA FERROVIARIA.

‘Welcome home,’ he muttered under his breath. His earlier mood already seemed as remote and irrelevant as a childhood memory.

The heavy front door closed behind him with a definitive bang, shutting him in, shutting out the world. As he moved the switch the single bulb which lit the entrance hall ended its long, wan existence in an extravagant flash, leaving him in the dark, just back from school. Once he had kissed his mother he would run out to play football in the square outside. Astonishingly, he even seemed to hear the distant sound of lapping water. Then it faded and a didactic voice began pontificating about the ecology of the Po Delta. Those liquid ripples overlaying the constant rumble of traffic came not, of course, from the backwater canals of his childhood, but from the television.