Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (10 page)

“Where now?” queried the driver.

“Same place you picked me up,” Zen told him.

They drove down Via Nazionale and through Piazza Venezia. The driver jerked his thumb toward the white mass of the monument to Vittorio Emanuele.

“You know what I heard the other day? I had this city councilor in the back of the cab, and we were going past here. You know the Unknown Soldier they have buried up there? This councilor, he told me they were doing maintenance work a couple of years ago and they had to dig up the body. You know what they found? The poor bastard had been shot in the back! Must have been a deserter, they reckoned. Ran away during the battle and got shot by the military police. Isn’t that the end? Fucking monument to military valour with the two sentries on guard all the time, and it turns out the poor fucker buried there was a deserter! Makes you think, eh?”

Zen agreed that such things did indeed make you think, but in fact his thoughts were elsewhere. The history of his relationships with women was passing in review before his eyes like the life of a drowning man. And indeed Zen felt that he was drowning in a pool of black indifference and icy inertia. His failed marriage could be written off to experience: he and Luisella had married too early and for all the wrong reasons. That was a common enough story. It was what had happened since then that was so disturbing, or rather what had
not
happened. For Zen was acutely aware that in the fifteen years since his marriage broke up, he had failed to create a single lasting bond to take its place.

The final blow had been the departure of Ellen, the American divorcée he had been seeing on and off for over three years. The manner of her going had hurt as much as the fact. Ellen had made it clear that Zen had failed her in just about every conceivable way, and once he had got over his anger at being rejected, he found this hard to deny. The opportunity had been there for the taking, but he had hesitated and dithered and messed about, using his mother as an excuse, until things had come to a crisis. Then it had been a case of too much, too late, as he had blurted out an unconsidered offer of marriage which must have seemed like the final insult. It wasn’t marriage for its own sake that Ellen had wanted but a sense of Zen’s commitment to her. And he just hadn’t been able to feel such a commitment.

It was no surprise, of course, at his age. With every year that passed, the number of things he really cared about decreased, and Zen soon convinced himself that his failure with Ellen had been an indication that love was fast coming to seem more trouble than it was worth. Why else should he have let the opportunity slip? And why did he never get around to answering the postcards and letters Ellen sent him from New York? The whole affair had been nothing but the self-delusion of an ageing man who couldn’t accept that love, too, was something he must learn to give up gracefully.

Zen had just got all this nicely sorted out when Tania Biacis walked into his life. It was the first day of his new duties at the Ministry. Tania introduced herself as one of the administrative assistants and proceeded to explain the bureaucratic ins and outs of the department. Zen nodded, smiled, grunted, and even managed to ask one or two relevant questions, but in fact he was on autopilot throughout, all his secondhand wisdom swept away by the living, breathing presence of this woman whom, to his delight and despair, he found that he desired in the old, familiar, raw, painful, hopeless way.

Unlike the Genoese couple who had been featured in the paper that morning, however, he and Tania ran no risk of being barbecued by an irate husband, for the simple reason that Mauro Bevilacqua had nothing whatever to feel jealous about, at least as far as Zen was concerned. True, he and Tania had become very friendly, but nothing precludes the possibility of passion as surely as friendliness. Those long casual chats which had once seemed so promising to Zen now depressed him more than anything else. It was almost as if Tania were treating him as a surrogate female friend, as though for her he was so utterly unsexed that she could talk to him forever without any risk of compromising herself.

Sometimes her tone became more personal, particularly when she talked about her father. He had been the village schoolteacher, an utterly impractical idealist who escaped into the mountains at every opportunity. Tania’s name was not a diminutive of Stefania, as Zen had assumed, but of Tatania, her father having named her after Gramsci’s sister-in-law, who stood by the Communist thinker throughout the eleven years of his imprisonment by the Fascists. But despite this degree of intimacy, Tania had never given Zen the slightest hint that she had any personal interest in him, while he had of course been careful not to reveal his own feelings. He quailed at the thought of Tania’s reaction if she guessed the truth. It was clear from what she said that she and her husband lived a rich, full, exciting life. What on earth could Zen offer her that she could possibly want or need?

It was therefore a sickening blow to discover that Tania apparently
did
want or need things that her marriage didn’t provide. Not only hadn’t she thought of turning to him to provide them, but she had treated him as someone she could use and then lie to.

This was so painful that it triggered a mechanism which had been created back in the mists of Zen’s childhood, when his father had disappeared into an anonymous grave somewhere in Russia. That loss still ached like an old fracture on a damp day, but at the time the pain had been too fierce to bear. To survive, Zen had withdrawn totally into the present, denying the past all reality, taking refuge in the here and now. That was his response to Tania’s betrayal, and it was so successful that when they arrived and the taxi driver told him how much he owed, Zen thought the man was trying to cheat him.

“A hundred and twenty nine thousand lire for a short ride across the city!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” the driver retorted. “Two and a quarter hours you’ve had! I could have picked up three times the money doing short trips instead of freezing to death in some shitty suburb!”

Zen grudgingly counted out the notes. Well, that was the last amateur stakeout he’d be doing, he vowed, as the taxi roared away past a red sedan parked about fifty metres along the street on the other side.

The only people about were an elderly couple making their way at a snail’s pace along the opposite pavement. Zen crossed over to the car, an Alfa Romeo with Rome registration plates. There were several deep scratches and dents in the bodywork and one of the hubcaps was missing, although the vehicle was quite new. Zen looked in through the dirty window. A packet of Marlboro cigarettes lay on one of the leather seats, which looked almost unused. The flooring was covered in cigarette butts and scorched with burn marks. The empty box of an Adriano Celentano tape lay in the tray behind the gear lever, the cassette itself protruding from the player.

He straightened up as footsteps approached, but it was only the elderly couple. They trudged past, the man several paces ahead of his wife. Neither of them looked at the other, although they kept up a desultory patter the whole time.

“Then we can …”

“Right.”

“Or not. Who knows?”

“Well, anyway …”

Zen wrote down the registration number of the car and walked back to the house. Giuseppe was off duty, so the front door was closed and locked. The lift was on one of the upper floors. Zen pressed the light switch and set off up the stairs, taking the shallow marble steps two at a time. A rumble overhead was followed by a whining sound as the lift started down. A few moments later the lighted cubicle passed by, its single occupant revealed in fuzzy silhouette on the frosted glass.

By the time he reached the fourth floor, Zen was breathless. He paused briefly to recover before unlocking his front door. There was a clanking far below as the lift shuddered to a halt. Then the landing was abruptly plunged into darkness as the time switch expired. Zen groped his way to the door, opened it, and turned on the hall light. As he closed the door again, he noticed an envelope lying on the sideboard. He picked it up and walked along the passage, past the lugubrious cupboards, carved chests, and occasional tables for which no suitable occasion had ever presented itself. As he neared the living room, he heard the sound of voices raised in argument.

“… never in a hundred years, never in a thousand, will I permit you to marry this man!”

“But Papa, I love Alfonso more than life itself!”

“Do not dare breathe his accursed name again! Tomorrow you leave for the convent, there to take vows more sacred and more binding than those with which you seek to dishonour our house.”

“The convent! No, do not condemn me to a living death, dear Father …”

Zen pushed open the glass-panelled door. By the flickering light of the television he saw his mother asleep in her armchair. He crossed the darkened room and turned down the volume, silencing the voices but leaving the costumed figures to go through their melodramatic motions. Then he went to the window, opened the shutters, and peered out through the slats in the outer jalousies. The red sedan was no longer there.

He held the envelope so that it caught the light from the television. It seemed to be empty, although it was surprisingly heavy. His name was printed in block capitals, but there was no stamp or address. He wondered how it had come to be left on the sideboard. Normally post was put in the box in the hallway downstairs or left with Giuseppe. If a message was delivered to the door, Maria Grazia would have taken it into the living room.

He ripped the envelope open. It still seemed empty, but something inside made a scratching sound, and when he pulled the paper walls apart, he saw a quantity of tiny silvery balls clustered together at the very bottom. He let them roll out into his palm. In the flickering glimmer of the television they could have been almost anything: medicine, seeds, even cake decorations. But Zen knew they were none of these.

They were shotgun pellets.

The nights brought relief. At night I moved freely, I felt my strength returning. The others never venture out once darkness has fallen. Dissolved by darkness, the world is no longer theirs. They stay at home, lock their doors, and watch moving pictures made with light.

They are afraid of the dark. They are right to be afraid.

Beyond their locked doors and shuttered windows I came into my own, flitting effortlessly from place to place, appearing and disappearing at will, yielding to the darkness as though to the embraces of a secret lover. Until the lights came on, the inmates stirred, and the prison awoke to another day.

It was easy to find my way back here. I’d always come and gone as I liked. They never understood that. They never tried to understand. No one asked me anything. They told me things. They told me my imprisonment, as they called it, had been an accident, a mistake. “What you must have suffered!” they said. I’d lost my home and family, but they weren’t satisfied with that. They wanted me to lose myself as well. What am I, but what the darkness made me? If that was a mistake, an accident, then so am I.

·   ·   ·

Sometimes the priest came. He had things to tell me, too, about a loving father, a tortured son, a virgin mother. Not like my family, I thought, the father who came home drunk and fucked his wife until she screamed, and she screamed again when the son was born, a pampered brat, arrogant and selfish, strutting about as though he owned the place, and all because of that thing dangling between his legs, barely the size of my little finger! But I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t think the priest would want to know about them.

And who was I, when the family was together? The holy ghost, I suppose. The unholy ghost.

THURSDAY: 0755–1320

A
LL THE TALK AT THE CAFE
the next morning was of the overnight swoop by the police and Carabinieri on leftist sympathisers in Milan, Turin, and Genoa. “About time too,” was the dentist’s comment, but one of the craftsmen from the basement workshops disagreed.

“The real terrorists don’t have anything to do with those
sinistrini.
It’s just the cops trying to make a good impression. A week from now they’ll all have been turned loose again and we’ll be back where we started!”

The barman Ernesto and the dentist looked at Zen, who maintained a stony silence. The reason for this was neither professional reserve nor disapproval of the craftsman’s cynical tone. Zen simply wasn’t paying any attention to the conversation. He had problems of his own that were too pressing to allow him the luxury of discussing other people’s problems which were quite literally closer to home.

Once again he had stayed up until the small hours of the morning, trying without success to find the missing link that would explain the events of the previous days. Not only hadn’t he succeeded, he wasn’t even sure that success was possible. The temptation to fit everything into a neat pattern, he knew, should be resisted. It might well be that two or more quite unrelated patterns were at work.

One thing was sure. During the three hours he had been absent from home the night before, someone had entered his flat and left an envelope filled with shotgun pellets on the sideboard in the hallway. Zen had locked the front door on leaving and it had still been locked on his return. Questioning his mother obliquely to avoid frightening her, he had confirmed that she had not let anyone in. The only other person with a key was Maria Grazia. Before leaving for work, Zen had interrogated her without result. The key was kept in her handbag, which hadn’t been lost or stolen. Her family were all strict Catholics of the type who would have guilt pangs about picking up a hundred lire coin they found in the street. It was out of the question that any of them might have been bribed to pass on the key to a third party. Zen also questioned Giuseppe, who had duplicate keys to all the apartments. He was equally categorical in his denials, and given the fanatical vigilance with which he carried out his duties it seemed unlikely that the intruder could have gained access in this way.