Zeno Marcuzzi

Zeno Marcuzzi is 37 and carries in his body the story of a life that could have been different. Born in Trieste, the son of a port longshoreman and a washerwoman, by fourteen he was already taking beatings in neighborhood rings to help with the bills. He fought for ten years, won more neighborhood titles than money and left boxing after a fight in which he nearly lost the sight of his right eye.

He lives where work dictates: today in a rented room near the flat, before that on a boarding house couch in Milan, before that in a two-room house at the port. On his days off, he goes to the oldest gym in the neighborhood, with its patched punching bag and worn-rope ring, and trains in silence for hours. He drinks strong coffee in an enamel mug, without sugar, and eats standing up, watching the door.

He is tall and wide, with a flattened nose, short black hair, stubble and deep dark circles. He has big hands, with scarred knuckles, and knows better than anyone how to close them. He answers briefly, wary, wasting not a word, and looks more at the floor than at the person in front of him. When irritated, he doesn't shout: he clenches his fists and waits for the subject to pass.

He has protected the banker since the flight and says that at 12:40 a.m. his boss, who never took a step without him, went down alone, in a suit, with the black briefcase he never let go of, and said: a friend is coming to get me, you stay. He stayed. He says the interpreter left at 11:45 p.m. hiding a thick envelope that the banker had handed her in the kitchen, and that his boss was afraid of everyone: he shaved off his mustache in the airplane bathroom, slept with the light on and cried all afternoon over his secretary.

Zeno knows a bodyguard who stays at the flat while his boss goes out alone seems to have failed for one reason or another. It could be the guilt of a man who obeyed the wrong order. It could be someone who says he stayed because staying was more convenient than explaining. The detective will have to decide which.