Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (27 page)

He nodded toward Furio Padedda, who was just finishing his beer.

“Is he a friend of yours?” asked Zen.

Turiddu slapped the table so hard that the bottle nearly fell over.

“Him? He’s no one’s friend, not round here! He’s a foreigner. He’s got friends all right, up in the mountains.”

He lowered his voice to a sly whisper.

“They don’t grow crops up there, you know. They don’t grow anything, the lazy bastards. They just take whatever they want. Sheep, cattle. Sometimes people too. Then they get very rich very quick!”

One of his companions said something brief and forceful in Sardinian. Turiddu frowned but was silent.

A shadow fell across the table. Zen looked up to find Furio Padedda standing over him.

“Good evening, Herr Gurtner,” he said, stressing the foreign title.

“What the fuck you want, Padedda?” growled Turiddu.

“I just wanted to greet our friend from Switzerland here. Been having a drink, have you? Several drinks, in fact.”

“None of your fucking business,” Turiddu told him.

“I was thinking of Herr Gurtner,” Padedda continued in an even tone. “He should be careful. Our Sardinian grappa might be a little strong for him.”

He waved his companion over.

“Let me introduce my friend Patrizio. Patrizio, Herr Reto Gurtner of Zurich.”

Patrizio held out his hand and said something incomprehensible. Zen smiled politely.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand dialect.”

Padedda’s eyes narrowed. “Not even your own?”

A silence like thick fog fell over the pizzeria. You could feel it, taste it, smell it, see it.

“Enzo spent eight years in Switzerland working on the Saint Bernard tunnel,” Padedda explained. “He speaks Swiss German fluently. Oddly enough, it seems that Herr Reto Gurtner does not.”

I knew him at once. They think they’re so clever, the others, but their cleverness is lost on me. It’s a poison that doesn’t take, a disease I’m immune to. Their conjuring tricks are meant for them, the children of the light to whom everything is what it seems, the way it looks. The policeman just provided himself with false papers and a big car and—presto!—he was magically transformed in his own eyes and theirs into a foreign businessman come to buy property. They believe in property, they believe in documents and papers, names and dates. How could they not believe in him? Living out a lie themselves, how could they recognise his lies?

But I knew who he was the moment I set eyes on him. I knew why he had come and why he wanted to see the house. I knew what lay behind his sly questions and insinuating remarks, his prying and peeping.

I was very bold, I confronted him openly. He shied away, seeming not to know me. The darkness showed its hand for an instant, like a brief eclipse of the sun, and I read death in his eyes. I’d seen it before with the animals father killed. I knew what it meant.

·   ·   ·

Perhaps he too sensed that something was going on. Perhaps he even suspected that his life was in danger. But how could he have had the slightest idea who it was that represented that danger?

SUNDAY: 0700–1120

P
ERHAPS IF THE KIDNAP ATTEMPT
had not occurred when he had been driving back from it, Oscar Burolo might have shown his appreciation to the local church by donating a set of real bells. It was the kind of showy gesture he was fond of, stage-managed to look like an impulsive act of generosity, although in fact he would have costed the whole thing down to the last lira and got a massive discount from the foundry in return for some building work using materials recycled from another contract. Nevertheless, the village church would have got its bells. As it was, it had to make do with a gramophone record of a carillon played through loudspeakers, and it was this that woke Aurelio Zen shortly before dawn the following morning. The gramophone record was very old, with a loud scratch which Zen’s befuddled brain translated as high-velocity shots being fired at him by a marksman perched in the bell tower. Luckily, by the time they reached his room the bullets had slowed down considerably, and in the end they just hovered in the air about his face, darting this way and that like dragonflies, a harmless nuisance.

As the recorded bells finally fell silent, Zen opened his eyes on a jumble of colours and blurred shapes. He waited patiently for things to start making sense, but when minutes went by and his surroundings still refused to snap into focus, he began to worry that he had done some permanent injury to his brain. He hauled himself upright in bed, slumping back against the wooden headboard.

Things improved somewhat. True, he still had a splitting headache and felt like he might throw up at any moment, but to his relief the objects in the room began—a little reluctantly, it seemed—to assume the shapes and relationships he vaguely remembered from the previous day. There was the large plywood wardrobe with the door that wouldn’t close properly and the wire clothes hangers hanging like bats from a branch. There was the small table with its cumbersome ceramic lamp, and the three cheap ugly wooden chairs squatting like refugees awaiting bad news. From a ceiling the colour of spoiled milk, a long rusty chain supported a dim light whose irregular thick glass bowl must have looked very futuristic in about 1963.

There was the washbasin, the rack for glasses below the mirror and the dud bulb above, the metal rubbish bin with its plastic liner, the barred window lying open into the room. He must have forgotten to close it when he went to bed. That was why the air seemed stiff with cold and why the sound of the bells had wakened him. He didn’t feel cold in bed, though, probably because he was still fully dressed except for his shoes and jacket. He laboriously transferred his gaze to the floor, a chilly expanse of speckled black and white aggregate polished to a hard shine. There they were, the two shoes on their sides and the discarded jacket on its back above them like the outline drawing of a murder victim.

He lay back, exhausted by this effort, trying to piece together the events of the previous evening. Quite apart from resulting in the worst hangover he had ever experienced, he knew that what had happened hadn’t been good news. But what
had
happened?

He remembered arriving back at the hotel. The bar was empty except for the old man called Tommaso and a younger man playing the pinball machine in the corner. The proprietor called Zen over and handed him his identity card and a bill.

“The hotel’s closing for repairs.”

“You didn’t tell me when I checked in.”

“I’m telling you now.”

The pinball player had turned to watch them, and Zen had recognised him. He had even known his name—Patrizio—although he had no recollection of how or where they had met. What had he been doing all evening?

Abandoning this intractable problem, Zen swung his feet down on to the icy floor and stood up. This was a mistake. Previously he had had to deal with the electrical storm in his head, a stomach badly corroded by the toxic waste swilling around inside it, limbs that twitched, joints that ached and a mouth that seemed to have been replaced by a plaster replica. The only good news, in fact, had been that the room wasn’t spinning round and round like a fairground ride. That was why it had been a mistake standing up.

Washing, shaving, dressing, and packing were so many stations of the cross for Aurelio Zen that morning. But it wasn’t until he lit a cigarette in the mistaken belief that it might make him feel better and found tucked inside the packet of Marlboros a book of matches whose cover read Pizzeria Il Nuraghe that the merciful fog obscuring the events of the previous evening suddenly lifted.

He collapsed on one of the rickety wooden chairs, its feet scraping atrociously on the polished floor slabs. Zen didn’t notice. He wasn’t in his hotel room any longer. He was sitting at the table in the pizzeria, drunker than he had ever been in his life: horribly, monstrously, terminally drunk. Five men, three seated and two standing, were staring at him with expressions of pure, malignant hostility. The situation was totally out of control. Nothing he could say or do would have any effect whatsoever.

For a moment he thought that they might be going to assault him, but in the end Furio Padedda and his friend Patrizio had just turned away and walked out. Then the man called Turiddu threw some banknotes on the table and he and his companions left, too, without a word.

Outside, the air was thick with scents brought out by the rain: creosote, wild thyme, wood smoke, urine, motor oil. To judge by the stillness of the street, it might have been the middle of the night. Then a motorcycle engine opened up the night like a crude tin-opener, all jagged, torn edges. The bike emerged from the shadows of an alley and moved slowly and menacingly toward Zen. By the volatile moonlight, he recognised the rider as Furio Padedda. The lion-keeper bestrode the machine like a horse, urging it on with tightenings of his knees. From a strap around his shoulders hung a double-barrelled shotgun.

Then a figure appeared in the street some distance ahead of Zen. One ahead and one behind, the classic ambush. The correct procedure was to go on the offensive, take out one or the other before they could complete the squeeze. But if Zen had been following correct procedures he would never have been there in the first place without any backup. Even in his prime, twenty years ago, he couldn’t have handled either man, never mind both of them. As Zen approached the blocker, he saw that it was Turiddu. With drunken fatalism, he kept walking. Ten metres. Five. Two. One. He braced himself for the arm across the throat, the foot to the groin.

Then he was past and nothing had happened. He sensed rather than saw Turiddu fall in behind him, his footsteps blending with the raucous murmur of Padedda’s motorcycle. Zen forced himself not to hurry or look round. He walked on past rows of darkened windows, closed shutters, and locked doors, followed by the two men, until at last he reached the piazza and the hotel.

Now, mulling it over in his room, his thoughts crawling through the wreckage of his brain like the stunned survivors of an earthquake, Zen realised that he owed his escape to the enmity between the two Sardinians. Both had no doubt intended to punish the imposter, but neither was prepared to allow the other that honour, and cooperation was out of the question. Back at the hotel, the proprietor, alerted by Padedda’s associate Patrizio, had delivered his ultimatum. There was no other accommodation in the village, and in any case, there was no point in Zen remaining now that Reto Gurtner had been exposed as a fraud. Whatever he said or did, everyone would assume that he was a policeman, a government spy. The farce was over. He would drive to Cagliari that morning and book a ticket on the night ferry to the mainland. When he returned to the village, it would be in his official capacity. At least that way he could compel respect.

His inability to do so at present was amply demonstrated by the length of time it took him to get breakfast in the bar downstairs. At least half a dozen of the locals had drifted in and out again, replete with
cappucinos
and pastries, before Zen was finally served a lukewarm cup of coffee that tasted as though it had been made from secondhand grounds and watered milk.

“Good-bye for now,” he told the proprietor as he stalked out.

The remark elicited a sharp glance that expressed anxious defiance as well as hostility. It gladdened Zen for a moment, until he reflected that his implied threat was the first step on the path that had led to the Gestapo tactics of the past.

The weather had changed. The sky was overcast, the air still and humid. Zen’s hangover felt like an octopus clinging to every cell of his being. Every movement involved an exhausting struggle against its tenacious resistance. He found himself looking forward luxuriously to sinking into the Mercedes’s leather upholstery and driving away from this damned village, listening to the radio broadcasts from Rome, that lovely, civilised city where Tania was even now rising from her bed, sipping her morning coffee, thinking of him perhaps. He could allow himself to dream. Given all he’d been through, he’d surely earned the right to a little harmless self-indulgence.

Halfway across the piazza, beside the village war memorial, Zen had to stop, put his suitcase down, and catch his breath. The dead of the 1915–18 war covered two sides of the rectangular slab, the same surname often repeated six or eight times like a litany. The Sardinians had formed the core of the Italian Army’s mountain divisions; half the young men of the village must have died at Isonzo and on the Piave. The later conflicts had taken a lesser toll. Thirty had died in 1940–45, four in Spain and five in Abyssinia.

As Zen picked up the leaden suitcase again, he noticed a tall thin man in a beige overcoat staring at him. His deception would be common knowledge by now, he realised, and his every action a cause for suspicion. He dumped the suitcase in the boot of the Mercedes, got inside, and turned the ignition on. Nothing happened. It was a measure of his befuddlement that it took him several minutes to realise that nothing was going to happen, no matter how many times he twisted the key. At first he thought he might have drained the battery by leaving the lights on, but when he tried the windscreen wiper, it worked normally. He had invented problems with the Mercedes as a way of breaking the ice with Turiddu and his friends the night before, and the wretched car was apparently now taking its revenge by playing up just when he needed it most. Then he noticed the envelope tucked under the wiper blade like a parking ticket.

Zen got out of the car and plucked it free. The envelope was blank. Inside was a single sheet of paper. Furio Padedda is a liar, he read. He was not in the bar the night the foreigners were killed, but the Melega clan of Orgosolo know where he was.

The message had been printed by a hand seemingly used to wielding larger and heavier implements than a pen. The letters were uneven and dissimilar, laboriously crafted, starting big and bold but crowded together at the right-hand margin as though panicked by the prospect of falling off the edge of the page.