Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery
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Authors: Michael Dibdin
Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery
Michael Dibdin
Vintage (2012)
In Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen, Michael Dibdin has given the mystery one of its most complex and compelling protagonists: a man wearily trying to enforce the law in a society where the law is constantly being bent. In this, the first novel he appears in, Zen himself has been assigned to do some law bending. Officials in a high government ministry want him to finger someone--anyone--for the murder of an eccentric billionaire, whose corrupt dealings enriched some of the most exalted figures in Italian politics.But Oscar Burolo's murder would seem to be not just unsolvable but impossible. The magnate was killed on a heavily fortified Sardinian estate, where every room was monitored by video cameras. Those cameras captured Burolo's grisly death, but not the face of his killer. And that same killer, elusive, implacable, and deranged, may now be stalking Zen. Inexorable in its suspense, superbly atmospheric,
Vendetta
is further proof of Dibdin's mastery of the crime novel.
From Publishers Weekly
Corruption in high places, underworld skulduggery and a vendetta among mountainfolk are ingredients for murder in this literate, suspenseful thriller. An intruder guns down an eccentric Sardinian billionaire, his wife and two guests in his seemingly impregnable villa. Enter befuddled Venetian inspector Aurelio Zen, last encountered in Dibdin's Ratking. Zen, who has a perfunctory love life, a half-senile, bad-tempered mother and an intuitive faculty sometimes worthy of his name, now works for an Italian government ministry in Rome. He's dispatched to Sardinia to get the chief suspect, a politician's friend, off the hook. Two crazies want Zen rubbed out: a just-released convict whom he'd sent to jail years ago, and the killer, whose lyrical, half-mad ramblings punctuate the narrative--of course, the two could be the same person. Spinning a plot as convoluted as Sardinia's winding streets, Dibdin illuminates a deeply corrupted society and ultimately vindicates his hero, who outmaneuvers the supercops trying to silence him.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Aurelio Zen, the Italian Maigret, now working out of Rome's criminal investigation division, is assigned the Villa Burolo massacre--in which every member of the wealthy Burolo's house party died, with the scene captured on videotape (as were most of the activities at the villa)! While Zen ponders, someone lifts the videotape from his house and taunts him with notes. But it's only after Zen's superiors send him off to Sardinia to frame the
murderer'' they have at hand that Zen draws the right connections between a recently slain magistrate, an informer, and the threats against himself--which tie in with the prison release of Vasco Ernesto Spadola. Waylaid in a ravine, Zen barely escapes Spadola- -before assigning the massacre murders to a complicated bit of demented revenge at the hands of a simple-minded woman. A multilayered tale in which Dibdin (Dirty Tricks, p. 970, etc.) juggles cynicism (in Italian officialdom, expediency wins the day--every time), humor (Zen's lust), and chagrin (Zen's relationship with his mother versus hers with her family of
Auntie''-sitters). But the interspersing of the killer's thoughts is far too corny a ploy for a writer of Dibdin's skill. --
Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Michael Dibdin
VENDETTA
Michael Dibdin was born in England and raised in Northern Ireland. He attended Sussex University and the University of Alberta in Canada. He spent five years in Perugia, Italy, where he taught English at the local university. He went on to live in Oxford, England, and Seattle, Washington. He was the author of eighteen novels, eleven of them in the popular Aurelio Zen series, including
Ratking,
which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and
Cabal,
which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He died in 2007.
BOOKS BY MICHAEL DIBDIN
IN THE AURELIO ZEN SERIES
Ratking
Vendetta
Cabal
Dead Lagoon
Così Fan Tutti
A Long Finish
Blood Rain
And Then You Die
Medusa
Back to Bologna
End Games
OTHER FICTION
The Last Sherlock Holmes Story
A Rich Full Death
The Tryst
Dirty Tricks
The Dying of the Light
Dark Specter
Thanksgiving
FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, SEPTEMBER
1998
Copyright © 1991 by Michael Dibdin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited, London, in 1990, and subsequently in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York, in 1991.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dibdin, Michael.
Vendetta / Michael Dibdin.
p. cm. — (Vintage crime/Black Lizard)
eISBN: 978-0-307-82250-5
1. Zen, Aurelio (Fictitious character)—Fiction.
2. Police—Italy—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.
[PR6054.I26V4 1997]
823’.914—dc21 96-46856
Author photograph © Isolde Ohlbaum
Random House Web address:
www.randomhouse.com
v3.1
to Moselle
Contents
Rome
WEDNESDAY: 0150–0245
A
URELIO
Z
EN LOUNGED ON THE SOFA
like a listless god, bringing the dead back to life. With a flick of his finger he made them rise again. One by one the shapeless, blood-drenched bundles stirred, shook themselves, crawled about a bit, then floated upward until they were on their feet again. This extremely literal resurrection had taken them by surprise, to judge by their expressions, or perhaps it was the sight of one another’s bodies that was so shocking, the hideous injuries and disfigurements, the pools and spatters of blood everywhere. But as Zen continued to apply his miraculous intervention, all this was set to rights, too: the gaping rents in flesh and fabric healed themselves, the blood mopped itself up, and in no time at all the scene looked almost like the ordinary dinner party it had been until the impossible occurred. None of the four seemed to notice the one remarkable feature of this spurious afterlife, namely that everything happened backwards.
“He did it.”
Zen’s mother was standing in the doorway, her nightdress clutched around her skimpy form.
“What’s wrong, Mamma?”
She pointed at the television, which now showed a beach of brilliant white sand framed by smoothly curved rocks. A man was swimming backward through the wavelets. He casually dived up out of water, landed neatly on one of the rocks, and strolled backward to the shaded lounging chairs where the others sat sucking smoke out of the air and blowing it into cigarettes.
“The one in the swimming costume. He did it. He was in love with his wife so he killed him. He was in another one, too, last week on channel five. They thought he was a spy but it was his twin brother. He was both of them. They do it with mirrors.”
Mother and son gazed at each other across the room lit by the electronically preserved sunlight of a summer now more than three months in the past. It was almost two o’clock in the morning, and even the streets of Rome were hushed.
Zen pressed the pause button of the remote control unit, stilling the video.
“Why are you up, Mamma?” he asked, trying to keep his irritation out of his voice. This was breaking the rules. Once she had retired to her room, his mother never reappeared. It was respect for these unwritten laws that made their life together just about tolerable from his point of view.
“I thought I heard something.”
Their eyes still held. The woman who had given Zen life might have been the child he had never had, awakened by a nightmare and seeking comfort. He got up and walked over to her.
“I’m sorry, Mamma. I turned the sound right down …”
“I don’t mean the TV.”
He interrogated those bleary, evasive eyes more closely. “What, then?”
She shrugged pettishly. “A sort of scraping.”
“Scraping? What do you mean?”
“Like old Umberto’s boat.”
Zen was often brought up short by his mother’s ability to knock him off balance by some reference to a past which for her was infinitely more real than the present would ever be. He had quite forgotten Umberto, the portly, dignified proprietor of a general grocery near the San Geremia bridge. He used the boat to transport fruit and vegetables from the Rialto market, as well as boxes, cases, bottles, and jars to and from the cellars of his house, which the ten-year-old Zen had visualised as an Aladdin’s cave crammed with exotic delights. When not in use, the boat was moored to a post in the little canal opposite the Zens’ house. The post had a tin collar to protect the wood, and a few moments after each
vaporetto
passed down the Cannaregio, the wash would reach Umberto’s boat and set it rubbing its gunwale against the collar, producing a series of metallic rasps.