Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (19 page)

29
TH
A
PRIL
1964 … M
ILAN
 … S
PADOLA
, V
ASCO
E
RNESTO … CULPABLE HOMICIDE … LIFE IMPRISONMENT … INVESTIGATING MAGISTRATE
G
IULIO
B
ERTOLINI
 …

It was enough to scan the spaces, read the messages, make the connections. That was enough, thought Zen. But he had failed to do it, and now it might be too late.

Back at his desk in the Criminalpol offices, which were deserted that morning, Zen phoned the Ministry of Justice and enquired about the penal status of Vasco Ernesto Spadola, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Milan on 29 April 1964. A remote and disembodied voice announced that he would be rung back with the information in due course.

Zen lit a cigarette and wandered over to the window, looking down at the forecourt of the Ministry with its pines and shrubbery flanking the sweep of steps leading down to the huge shallow bath of the fountain in Piazza del Viminal. Although the implications of the facts he had just stumbled on were anything but cheering, he felt relieved to find that there was at least a rational explanation for the things that had been going on. It had not been just an uncanny coincidence that Zen had happened to ask for the Spadola file the day that he had read about the killing of Judge Bertolini. At some level below his conscious thoughts he must have recalled the one occasion on which his path and that of the murdered judge had crossed. As for Parrucci, the reason why the name had meant nothing to Zen was that he knew the informer only by his code name “the nightingale.” When Parrucci agreed to testify against Spadola, his name had of course been revealed, but by that time Zen’s involvement with the case was at an end.

A thin Roman haze softened the November sunlight, giving it an almost summery languor. At a window on the other side of the piazza a woman was hanging out bedding to air on the balcony. A three-wheeled Ape van was unloading cases of mineral water outside the bar below, while on the steps of the Ministry itself three chauffeurs were having an animated discussion involving sharp decisive stabs of the index finger, exaggerated shrugs and waves of dismissal, cupped palms pleading for sanity, and attention-claiming grabs at each other’s sleeves. Zen only gradually became aware of an interference with these sharply etched scenes, a movement seemingly on the other side of the glass where the ghostly figure of Tania Biacis was shimmering toward him in midair.

“I’ve been looking for you all morning.”

He turned to face the original of the reflection. She was looking at him with a slightly playful air, as though she knew that he would be wondering what she meant. But Zen had no heart for such tricks.

“I was down in Archives, sorting out that video tape business. Where is everyone, anyway?”

A distant phone began to ring.

“Don’t go!” Zen called as he hurried back to his desk. He snatched up the phone.

“Yes?”

“Good morning, dottore,” a voice whispered confidentially. It sounded like some tiny creature curled up in the receiver itself. “Just calling to remind you of our lunch appointment. I hope you can still make it.”

“Lunch? Who is this?”

There was long silence.

“We talked last night,” the voice remarked pointedly.

Belatedly, Zen remembered his arrangement with Fausto Arcuti.

“Oh, right! Good. Fine. Thanks. I’ll be there.”

He put the receiver down and turned. Tania Biacis was standing close behind him and his movement brought them into contact for a moment. Zen’s arm skimmed her breast, their hands jangled briefly together like bells.

“Oh, there you are!” he cried. “Where’s everyone gone to?”

It was as though he regretted being alone with her!

“They’re at a briefing. The chief wants to see you.”

“Immediately?”

“When else?”

He frowned. The Ministry of Justice might phone back at any minute, and as it was Friday the staff would go off duty for the weekend in half an hour. He
had
to have that information.

“Would you do me a favour?” he asked.

The words were exactly the ones she had used to him two days earlier. It was clear from her expression that she remembered.

“Of course,” she replied, with a faint smile that grew wider as he responded, “You don’t know what it is yet.”

“You decided before I told you what I wanted,” she pointed out.

“But I had reasons which you may not have.”

Tania sighed. “I don’t know what you must think of me,” she said despondently.

“Don’t you? Don’t you really?”

They looked at each other in silence for some time.

“So what is it you want?” she asked eventually.

Zen looked at her in some embarrassment. Now that his request had become the subject of so much flirtatious persiflage, it would be ridiculous to admit that he had only wanted her to field a phone call for him.

“I can’t tell you here,” he said. “It’s a bit complicated, and … well, there’re various reasons. Look, I don’t suppose you could have lunch with me?”

It was a delaying tactic. He was counting on her to refuse.

“But you’ve already got a lunch engagement,” she frowned.

It took him a little while to understand.

“Oh, the phone call! No, that’s … that’s for another day.”

Tania inspected her fingernails for a moment. Then she reached out and lightly, deliberately, scratched the back of his hand. The skin turned white and then red, as though burned.

“I have to be home by three,” she told him. She sounded like an adolescent arranging a date.

Zen was about to reply when the phone rang again.

“Ministry of Justice, Records Section, calling with reference to your enquiry re Spadola, Vasco Ernesto.”

“Yes?”

“The subject was released from Asinara Prison on October 7th of this year.”

Zen’s response was a silence so profound that even the disembodied voice unbent sufficiently to add, “Hello? Anyone there?”

“Thank you. That’s all.”

He hung up and turned back to Tania Biacis.

“Shall we meet downstairs, then?” he suggested casually, as though they’d been lunching together for years. She nodded.

“Now please go and see what Moscati wants before he takes it out on me.”

Lorenzo Moscati, head of Criminalpol, was a short stout man with smooth, rounded features which looked as though they were being flattened out by an invisible stocking mask.

“Eh, finally!” he exclaimed when Zen appeared. “I’ve been able to round up everyone except you. Where did you get to? Never mind, no point in you attending the briefing anyway. All about security for the
camorra
trial in Naples next week. But that won’t concern you because you’re off to Sardinia, you lucky dog! That report you did on the Burolo case was well received, very well received indeed. Now we want you to go and put flesh on the bones, as it were. You leave on Monday. See Ciliani for details of flights and so on.”

Zen nodded. “While I’m here, there’s something else I’d like to discuss,” he said.

Moscati consulted his watch. “Is it urgent?”

“You could say that. I think someone’s trying to kill me.”

Moscati glanced at his subordinate to check that he’d heard right, then again to see if Zen was joking.

“What makes you think that?”

Zen paused, wondering where to begin.

“Strange things have been happening to me recently. Someone’s picked the lock to my apartment and broken in while I’m not there. But instead of taking anything, they leave things instead.”

“What sort of things?”

“First an envelope full of shotgun pellets. Then something which had been stolen from me at the bus stop a couple of days earlier.”

“What?”

Zen hesitated. He obviously couldn’t tell Moscati about the theft of the Ministry’s video.

“A book I was carrying in my pocket. I assumed some thief thought it was my wallet. But last night I got home to find my apartment covered in paper. The book had been torn apart page by page and scattered all over the floor.”

“Sounds like some prankster with a twisted sense of humour,” Moscati remarked dismissively. “I wouldn’t …”

“That’s what I thought, at first.” Zen didn’t mention that his principal suspect had been Vincenzo Fabri. “Then I remembered that the widow of that judge who was shot said that exactly the same things had happened to her husband just before he was murdered. Meanwhile, someone has been watching my apartment from a stolen Alfa Romeo recently, and yesterday I was followed halfway across the city. Nevertheless, it didn’t seem to add up to anything until I heard that an informer named Parrucci had been found roasted to death near Viterbo. Parrucci was the key witness in a murder investigation case I handled twenty years ago when I was working in Milan. The investigating magistrate in that case was Giulio Bertolini.”

All trace of impatience had vanished from Moscati’s manner. He was following Zen’s words avidly.

“A gangster named Vasco Spadola was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released from prison about a month ago. Since then both the judge who prepared the case and the man who gave evidence against Spadola have been killed. It doesn’t seem too farfetched to conclude that the police officer who conducted the investigation is next on his list.”

A strange light burned in Lorenzo Moscati’s eyes. “So it’s
not
political, after all!”

“The killing of Bertolini? No, it was straight revenge, a personal vendetta. You see, the evidence against Spadola was faked and Parrucci’s testimony paid for by the victim’s family. Presumably Bertolini didn’t know that, but …”

“Do you realise what this means?” Moscati enthused. “The Politicals have been holding up this Bertolini affair as proof that terrorism isn’t finished after all and so they still need big budgets and lots of manpower. If we can show that it’s not political at all, they’ll never live it down! That bastard Cataneo won’t dare show his face in public for a month!”

Zen nodded wearily as he understood the reasons for his superior’s sudden interest in the affair.

“Meanwhile my life is in danger,” Zen reminded him. “Two men have been killed and I’m number three. I want protection.”

Moscati grasped Zen’s right arm just above the elbow, as though giving him a transfusion of courage and confidence.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it! The very best. A crack squad has been set up to handle just this sort of situation. All handpicked men, weapons experts, highly skilled, using the very finest and most modern equipment. With them looking after you, you’ll be as safe as the President of the Republic himself.”

Zen raised his eyebrows. This sounded too good to be true. “When will this become effective?”

Moscati held up his hands in a plea for patience and understanding.

“Naturally there are a lot of calls on their time at the moment. In the wake of the Bertolini killing, everyone’s a bit anxious. It’ll be a question of reviewing the situation on an on-going basis, assessing the threat as it develops and then allocating the available resources accordingly.”

Zen nodded. It
had
been too good to be true.

“But in the meantime you’ll put a man outside my house?”

Moscati gestured regretfully.

“It’s out of my hands, Zen. Now this new squad exists, all applications for protection have to be routed through them. It’s so they can draw up a map of potential threats at any given time, then put it on the computer and see if any overall patterns emerge. Or so they claim. If you ask me, they’re just protecting their territory. Either way my hands are tied, unfortunately. If I start allocating men to protection duties, they’ll cry foul and we’ll never hear the end of it.”

Zen nodded and turned to leave. From a bureaucratic point of view, the logic of Moscati’s position was flawless. He knew only too well that it would be a sheer waste of time to point out any discrepancy between that logic and common sense.

As the working day for state employees came to an end, doors could be heard opening all over the Ministry. The corridors began to hum with voices which, amplified by the resonant acoustic, rapidly became a babble, a tumult prefiguring the crowds surging invisibly toward the hallway where Zen stood waiting. Within a minute they were everywhere. The enormous staircase was barely able to contain the human throng eager to get home, have lunch and relax, or else hasten to their clandestine afternoon jobs in the booming black economy—“the Italy that works” as Fausto Arcuti had joked.

Ever since Tania Biacis had accepted his invitation to lunch, Zen had been racking his brains over the choice of restaurant. Given her wide and sophisticated experience of eating out in Rome, this was not something to be taken lightly. The only places he knew personally these days were those close to the Ministry and therefore regularly patronised by its staff, and it would clearly be unwise to go there. Quite apart from the risk of compromising Tania, Zen didn’t want to have to deal with winks, nudges, or loaded questions from his colleagues. Again, it was important to get the class of establishment right. Nothing cheap or seedy, of course, but neither anything so grand or pretentious that it might make her feel that he was trying the crude, old, I’m-spending-a-lot-of-money-on-you-so-you’ll-have-to-come-across approach. Finally, there were the practicalities to consider. If Tania had to be home by three, it had to be somewhere in the centre, where by this time most of the better restaurants might well be full. Every possibility that occurred to Zen failed one of these tests. He was still at a loss when Tania appeared.

“So, where are we going?” she demanded.

She sounded tense and snappy, as though she was already regretting having agreed to come. Zen panicked. He should never have confused his fantasies with reality like this. The situation was all wrong. It would end in disaster and humiliation.

“There’s a place in Piazza Navona,” he found himself saying as he led the way out into the pale sunlight. “It’s crowded with tourists in summer, but at this time of year …”