Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (4 page)

Once again, footsteps sounded in the street below. A few minutes later the silence was abruptly shattered as a car started up and accelerated away with a squeal of tyres. By the time Zen reached the window it had already passed far beyond the area of street visible through the closed jalousies. The sound of its engine gradually faded away, echoing and reverberating ever more distantly through the intersecting channels of the streets. The streetlight was in its waxing phase, and as the light gradually intensified, Zen saw that the red car which had been parked further along the street was no longer there. He closed the shutters, wondering why its presence or absence should be of any interest or concern to him. Finding no answer, he decided that it was time to go to bed.

Nearly over now. Everything’s going, the doubts, the fears, the cares, the confusion, even the pain. All draining away of its own accord. There’s nothing I need do, nothing more to be done.

When I saw him standing there, the gun in his hand, it was like seeing myself in a mirror. He had taken my part, emerging from nowhere, implacable, confident, unsurprised. He sounded impatient, taunting me with a strange name, threatening me. “There’s no point in trying to hide,” he said. “Let’s get it over with.” As usual, I did what I was told.

He cried out in rage and disbelief. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn’t that. Then something overwhelmed me, knocking me over, opening me up. I couldn’t have resisted even if I’d wanted to. It wasn’t like the first time, the man under the table wounding me with his pistol. All he gave me was pain. This was different. I knew at once that I was carrying a death.

It won’t be long now. Already I feel light and insubstantial, as though I am dissolving. The darkness is on the move, billowing out to enshroud me, wind me in its endless folds. Everything is in flux. Solid rock gives way at my touch, the ground flows beneath me as though the river had returned to its courses, unexplored caverns burst open like fireworks as I advance. I am lost, I who know this place better than I know my own body!

WEDNESDAY: 0720–1230

A
S
Z
EN CLOSED THE FRONT DOOR
behind him, its hinges emitted their characteristic squeal, which was promptly echoed from the floor above. One of the tenants there kept a caged bird, which was apparently under the illusion that Zen’s front door was a fellow inmate and responded to its mournful cry with encouraging chirps.

Zen clattered down the stairs two at a time, ignoring the ancient lift in its wrought-iron cage. Thank God for work, he thought, which gave him an unquestionable excuse to escape from his dark, cluttered apartment and the elderly woman who had taken it over to such an extent that he felt like a child again, with no rights or independent existence. What would happen when he no longer had this ready-made way of filling his days? The government had recently been making noises about the need to reduce the size of the bloated public sector. Early retirement for senior staff was one obvious option. Fortunately it was unlikely that anything more than talk would come of it. A government consisting of a coalition of five parties, each with an axe to grind and clients to keep happy, found it almost impossible to pass legislation that was likely to prove mildly unpopular with anyone, never mind tackle the bureaucratic hydra which kept almost a third of the working population in guaranteed employment. Nevertheless, he would have to retire one day. The thought of it continued to haunt him like the prospect of some chronic illness. How would he get through the day? What would he do? His life had turned into a dead end.

Giuseppe, the janitor, was keeping a watchful eye on the comings and goings from the window of his mezzanine flat. Zen didn’t stop to mention the scraping noises his mother had claimed to hear the night before. In broad daylight the whole thing seemed as unreal as a dream.

The streets were steeped in mild November sunlight and ringing with sounds. Gangs of noisy schoolchildren passed by, flaunting the personalities that would be buried alive for the next five hours. The metallic roars of shutters announced that the shops in the area were opening for business. A staccato hammering and the swishing of a paint sprayer issued from the open windows of the basement workshops where craftsmen performed mysterious operations on lengths of moulded wood. But the traffic dominated: the uniform hum of new cars, the idiosyncratic racket of the old, the throaty gurgle of diesels, the angry buzzing of scooters and three-wheeled vans, the buses’ hollow roar, the chainsaw sound of an unsilenced trail bike, the squeal of brakes, the strident discord of horns in conflict.

At the corner of the block the newsagent was adding the final touches to the display of newspapers and magazines draped around his stall in a complex overlapping pattern. As usual, Zen paused to buy a paper, but he did not even glance at the headlines. He felt good, serene and carefree, released from whatever black magic had gripped his soul the night before. There would be time enough later to read about disasters and scandals which had nothing whatever to do with him.

Across the street from the newsstand, at the corner of the next block, was the cafe which Zen frequented, largely because it had resisted the spreading blight of skimmed milk, which reduced the rich foam of a proper
cappuccino
to an insipid froth. The barman, whose face sported a luxuriant moustache to compensate for his glossily bald skull, greeted Zen with respectful warmth and turned away unbidden to prepare his coffee.

“Barbarians!” exclaimed a thickset man in a tweed suit, looking up from the newspaper spread out before him on the bar. “Maniacs! What’s the sense of it all? What can they hope to achieve?”

Zen helped himself to a flaky brioche before broaching the chocolate-speckled foam on the
cappuccino
which Ernesto had placed before him. It was only after they had been meeting in the bar each morning for several years that Zen had finally discovered, thanks to an inflamed molar requiring urgent attention, that the indignant newspaper reader was the dentist whose name appeared on one of the two brass plates which Giuseppe burnished religiously every morning. He congratulated himself on having resisted the temptation to look at the paper. No doubt there had been some dramatic new revelation about the Burolo affair. Hardly a day went by without one. But while for the dentist such things were a form of entertainment, a pretext for a display of moral temperament, to Zen it was work, and he didn’t start work for another half hour. Idly, he wondered what the other men in the bar would say if they knew that he was carrying a video tape showing the Burolo killings in every last horrific detail.

At the thought, he put his coffee cup down and patted his coat pocket, reassuring himself that the video cassette was still there. That was one mistake he certainly couldn’t allow himself! There had already been one leak recently, when stills from the tape Burolo had made showing love scenes between his wife and the young lion-keeper had been published in a trashy scandal magazine. Such a magazine, or even one of the less scrupulous private TV stations, would be willing to pay a small fortune for a video of the killings themselves. The missing tape would immediately be traced to Zen, who had signed it out from Archives. Everyone would assume that Zen himself had sold the tape, and the denials of the magazine or TV station—if they bothered to deny it—would be discounted as part of the deal. Vincenzo Fabri had been waiting for months for just such an opportunity to present itself. He wouldn’t let it go to waste!

Zen now knew that he had badly bungled his unexpected promotion from his previous menial duties to the ranks of the Ministry’s prestigious Criminalpol division. This had been due to a widespread but mistaken idea of the work which this group did. The press, intoxicated by the allure of elite units, portrayed it as a unit of high-powered supercops who sped about the peninsula cracking cases which proved too difficult for the local officials. Zen, as he had ruefully reflected many times since, should have known better. He of all people should have realised that police work never took any account of individual abilities. It was a question of carrying out certain procedures, that was all. Occasionally these procedures resulted in crimes being solved, but that was incidental to their real purpose, which was to maintain or adjust the balance of power within the organisation itself. The result was a continual shuffling and fidgeting, a ceaseless and frenetic activity which was easy to mistake for purposeful action.

Nevertheless, it was a mistake which Zen should never have made and which had cost him dearly. When dispatched to Bari or Bergamo or wherever it might be, he had thrown himself whole-heartedly into the case, asking probing questions, dishing out criticism, reorganising the investigation, and generally stirring things up as much as possible. This was the quickest way to get results, he fondly imagined, not having realised that the results desired by the Ministry flowed automatically from his having been sent. He didn’t have to lift a finger, in fact it was important that he didn’t. Far from being the “007 from the Ministry,” which the press liked to portray, Criminalpol personnel were comparable to inspectors of schools or airports. Their visits provided a chance for the Ministry to get a reasonably reliable picture of what was happening, a reminder to the local authorities that all power ultimately lay with Rome, and a signal to concerned pressure groups that something was being done. No one wanted Zen to solve the case he had been sent to look into. Not the local police, who would then be asked why they had failed to achieve similar results unaided, nor the Ministry, to whom any solution would just pose a fresh set of problems. All he needed to do to keep everyone happy was just to go through the motions.

Unfortunately by the time he finally realised this, Zen had already alienated most of his new colleagues. Admittedly he had started with a serious handicap owing to the manner of his appointment, which had been engineered by one of the suspects in the Miletti kidnapping case he had investigated in Perugia. Zen’s subsequent promotion had naturally been regarded by many people as a form of payoff, which was bound to cause resentment. But this might eventually have been forgiven if it hadn’t been for the newcomer’s tactless display of energy together with the bad luck of his having made an enemy of one of the most articulate and popular men on the staff. Vincenzo Fabri had tried unsuccessfully on a number of occasions to use political influence to have himself promoted, and he couldn’t forgive Zen for having succeeded where he had failed. Fabri provided a focus for the feelings of antipathy which Zen had aroused, which he kept alive with a succession of witty, malicious anecdotes that only came to Zen’s ears when the damage had been done. And because Fabri’s grudge was completely irrational, Zen knew that it was all the more likely to last.

He crumpled his paper napkin into a ball, tossed it into the rubbish bin, and went to pay the cashier sitting at a desk in the angle between the two doors of the cafe. The newspaper the dentist had been reading lay open on the bar, and Zen couldn’t ignore the thunderous headline: THE RED BRIGADES RETURN. Scanning the article beneath, he learned that a judge had been gunned down at his home in Milan the night before.

So that was what the dentist’s rhetorical questions had referred to. What indeed was the sense of it all? There had been a time when such mindless acts of terrorism, however shocking, had at least seemed epic gestures of undeniable significance. But that time had long passed, and reruns were not only as morally disgusting as the originals, but also dated and secondhand.

As he walked to the bus stop, Zen read about the shooting in his own paper. The murdered judge, one Bertolini, had been gunned down when returning home from work. His chauffeur, who had also been killed, had fired at the attackers and was thought to have wounded one of them. Bertolini was not a particularly important figure, nor did he appear to have had any connection with the trials of Red Brigades’ activists. The impression was that he had been chosen because he represented a soft target, itself a humiliating comment on the decline in the power of the terrorists from the days when they had seemed able to strike at will.

Zen’s eye drifted off to the smaller headlines further down the page. BURNED ALIVE FOR ADULTERY read one. The story described how a husband in Genova had caught his wife with another man, poured petrol over them both, and set them alight. He abruptly folded the paper up and tucked it under his arm. Not that he had anything to worry about on that score, of course. He should be so lucky!

As a bus approached the stop, the various figures who had been loitering in the vicinity marched out into the street to try their chances at the lottery of guessing where the rear doors would be when the bus stopped. Zen did reasonably well this morning, with the result that he was ruthlessly jostled from every side as the less fortunate tried to improve on their luck. Someone at his back used his elbow so enterprisingly that Zen turned round to protest, almost losing his place as a result. But in the end justice prevailed, and Zen managed to squeeze aboard just as the doors closed.

The events reported in the newspaper had already had their effect at the Viminale. The approaches leading up to the Ministry building were guarded by armoured personnel carriers with machine-gun turrets on the roof. The barriers were lowered and all vehicles were being carefully searched. Pedestrian access, up a flight of steps from the piazza, was through a fence of heavy metal screen railings whose gate was normally left open, but today each person was stopped in the cage and had to present his or her identification while being watched carefully by two guards wearing bulletproof vests and carrying submachine guns.

Having penetrated these security checks, Zen walked up to the third floor, where Criminalpol occupied a suite of rooms at the front of the building. The contrast with the windowless cell to which Zen had previously been confined could hardly have been more striking. Tasteful renovation, supplemented by a scattering of potted plants and antique engravings, had created a pleasant working ambience without the oppressive scale traditionally associated with government premises.