Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (28 page)

Despite his predicament, Zen couldn’t help smiling. So the humiliating disaster of the previous night had worked to his advantage, after all. Turiddu had seen an opportunity to even the score with his rival, no doubt easing his conscience with the reflection that Zen had not yet been officially identified as a policeman. If the information was true, it might be just what Zen needed to fabricate a case against Padedda and so keep Palazzo Sisti off his back. Unfortunately Turiddu’s hatred for the foreigner from the mountains, whatever its cause, did not make him a very reliable informant. Nevertheless, there was something about the note which made Zen feel that it wasn’t pure fiction, although in his present condition he couldn’t work out what it was.

He stuffed the letter into his pocket, wondering what to do next. For no reason at all, he decided to ring Tania.

The phone was of the new variety that accepted coins as well as tokens. Zen fed in his entire supply of change and dialled the distant number. Never had modern technology seemed more miraculous to him than it did then, stranded in a hostile, poverty-stricken, Sardinian village listening to a telephone ringing in Tania’s flat, a universe away in Rome.

“Yes?”

It was a man’s voice, abrupt and bad-tempered.

“Signora Biacis, please.”

“Who’s speaking?”

“I’m calling from the Ministry of the Interior.”

“For Christ’s sake! Don’t you know this is Sunday?”

“Certainly I know!” he replied impatiently. The coins were dropping through the machine with alarming frequency. “Do you think I like having to work today either?”

“What do you want with my wife?”

“I’m afraid that’s confidential. Just let me speak to her, please.”

“Eh no, certainly not! And don’t bother ringing any more, signor, because she isn’t in! She won’t be in! Not ever, not for you! Understand? Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on behind my back! You think I’m a fool, don’t you? A simpleton! Well, you’re wrong about that! I’ll teach you to play games with a Bevilacqua! Understand? I know what you’ve been doing, and I’ll make you pay for it! Adulterer! Fornicator!”

At this point Zen’s money ran out, sparing him the rest of Mauro Bevilacqua’s tirade. He walked despondently back to the Mercedes. By now the octopus had slackened its grip somewhat, but it still took Zen five minutes to work out how to open the bonnet. Once he had done so, however, he realised at once why the car would not start. This was no credit to his mechanical knowledge, which was nonexistent. But even he could see that the spray of wires sticking out of the centre of the motor, each cut cleanly through, meant that some essential component had been deliberately removed.

He closed the bonnet and looked around the piazza. The phone box was now occupied by the man in the beige overcoat. With a deep sigh, Zen reluctantly returned to the hotel. Why on earth should anyone want to prevent him from leaving? Did Padedda need time to cover his tracks? Or was this sabotage Turiddu’s way of reconciling his anonymous letter with the burdensome demands of
omertá?

The proprietor greeted Zen’s reappearance with a perfectly blank face, as though he had never seen him before.

“My car’s broken down,” Zen told him. “Is there a taxi service, a car hire, anything like that?”

“There’s a bus.”

“What time does it leave?”

“Six o’clock.”

“In the evening?”

“In the morning.”

Zen gritted his teeth. Then he remembered the railway down in the valley. It was a long walk, but by now he was prepared to consider anything to get out of this cursed place.

“And the train doesn’t run on Sunday,” the proprietor added, as though reading his thoughts.

A phone started ringing in the next room. The proprietor went to answer it. Zen sat down at one of the tables and lit a cigarette. He felt close to despair. Just as he had received information that might well make his mission a success, every door had suddenly slammed shut in his face. At this rate, he would have to phone the Carabinieri at Lanusei and ask them nicely to come and pick him up. It was the last thing he wanted to do. To avoid compromising his undercover operation, he had left behind all his official identification. Involving the rival force would involve lengthy explanations and verifications and his highly questionable business there would inevitably be revealed, probably stymieing his chances of bringing the affair to a satisfactory conclusion. But there appeared to be no alternative, unless he wanted to spend the night in the street or in a cave like the beggar woman.

He looked up as the thin man in the beige overcoat walked in. Instead of going up to the bar, however, he headed for the table where Zen was sitting.

“Good morning, dottore.”

Zen stared at him.

“You don’t recognise me?” the man asked.

He seemed disappointed. Zen inspected him more carefully. He was about forty years old, with the soft, pallid look of one who works indoors. At first sight he had seemed tall, but Zen now realised that this was due to the man’s extreme thinness. As far as he knew, he had never seen him before in his life.

“Why should I?” he retorted crossly.

The man drew up a chair and sat down.

“Why indeed? It’s like at school, isn’t it? The pupils all remember their teacher, even years later, but you can’t expect the teacher to recall all the thousands of kids who have passed through their hands at one time or other. But I still recognise you, dottore. I knew you right away. You haven’t aged very much. Or perhaps you were already old, even then.”

He took out a packet of the domestic
toscani
cigars and broke one in half, replacing one end in the packet and putting the other between his lips.

“Have you got a light?”

Zen automatically handed over his lighter. He felt as though all this was happening to someone else, someone who perhaps understood what was going on. Certainly he didn’t.

The man lit the cigar with great care, rotating it constantly, never letting the flame touch the tobacco. When it was glowing satisfactorily, he slipped the lighter into his pocket.

“But that’s mine!” Zen protested, sounding like a child whose toy has been taken away.

“You won’t be needing it any more. I’ll keep it as a souvenir.”

He stood up and took his coat off, draping it over a chair, then walked over to the bar and rapped on the chrome surface with his knuckles.

“Eh, service!”

The proprietor emerged from the back room, scowling furiously.

“Give me a glass of beer. Something decent, not any of your local crap.”

Shorn of his coat, the man’s extreme thinness was even more apparent. It gave him a disturbing two-dimensional appearance, as though when he turned sideways he might disappear altogether.

The proprietor banged a bottle and a glass down on the counter.

“Three thousand lire.”

The thin man threw a banknote down negligently.

“There’s five. Have a drink on me. Maybe it’ll cheer you up.”

He carried the bottle and glass back to the table and proceeded to pour the beer as carefully as he had lit the cigar, tilting the glass and the bottle toward each other so that only a slight head formed.

“Miserable fuckers, these Sardinians,” he commented to Zen. “Forgive me if I don’t shake hands. Someone once told me that it’s bad luck, and I certainly don’t need any more of that. Strange, though, you not remembering my face. Maybe the name means something. Vasco Spadola.”

Time passed, a lot perhaps, or a little. The thin man sat and smoked and sipped his beer until Zen finally found his voice.

“How did you know where I was?”

It was a stupid question. But perhaps all questions were stupid at this point.

Spadola picked up his overcoat, patted the pockets, and pulled out the previous day’s edition of
La Nazione,
which he tossed on the table.

“I read about it in the paper.”

Zen turned the newspaper round. Halfway down the page was a photograph of himself he barely recognised. It must have been taken years ago, dug out of the newspaper’s morgue. He looked callow and cocksure, ridiculously self-important. Beneath the photograph was an article headed, “New Evidence in Burolo Affair?” Zen skimmed the text.

A
CCORDING TO SOURCES CLOSE TO THE FAMILY OF
R
ENATO
F
AVELLONI, ACCUSED OF PLOTTING THE MURDERS AT THE
V
ILLA
B
UROLO, DRAMATIC NEW EVIDENCE HAS RECENTLY COME TO LIGHT IN THIS CASE RESULTING IN THE REOPENING OF A LINE OF INVESTIGATION PREVIOUSLY REGARDED AS CLOSED
. A
SENIOR OFFICIAL OF THE
M
INISTRY’S ELITE
C
RIMINALPOL SQUAD
, V
ICE
-Q
UESTORE
A
URELIO
Z
EN, IS BEING SENT TO
S
ARDINIA TO ASSESS AND COORDINATE DEVELOPMENTS AT THE SCENE
. F
URTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS ARE EXPECTED SHORTLY
.

Zen put the paper down. Of course. He should have guessed that Palazzo Sisti would take care to publicise his imminent trip to the area in order to ensure that the “dramatic new evidence” he fabricated got proper attention from the judiciary.

“Shame I missed you in Rome,” Spadola told him. “Giuliano spent over a week setting the whole thing up, watching your apartment, picking the locks, leaving those little messages to soften you up. By that Friday we were all set to go. I didn’t know you’d sussed out the car, though. Giuliano was always a bit careless about things like that. Same with that tape he took instead of your wallet. It comes of being an eldest son, I reckon, Mamma’s favourite. You think you can get away with anything.”

He paused to draw on his cigar.

“When the cops rolled up, I had to beat it out the back way. I was lucky to get away, carrying the gun and all. I had to dump it in a rubbish skip and come back for it later. All that effort gone to waste, and what was worse, they’d got Giuliano. I knew he wouldn’t have the balls to hold out once they got to work on him. I reckoned I’d have to lie low for months, waiting for you to get fed up being shepherded about by a minder or holed up in some safe house. I certainly didn’t expect to be sitting chatting to you in a cafe two days later!”

He broke out in gleeful laughter.

“Even when I read the report in the paper, I never expected it to be this easy! I thought you would be staying in some barracks somewhere, guarded day and night, escorted around in bulletproof limousines. Still, I had to come. You never know your luck, I thought. But never in my wildest dreams did I imagine anything like this!”

The door of the bar swung open to admit Tommaso and another elderly man. They greeted the proprietor loudly and shot nervous glances at Zen and Spadola.

Zen ground out his cigarette. “All right, so you’ve found me. What now?”

Spadola released a breath of cigar smoke into the air above Zen’s head.

“What now? Why, I’m going to kill you of course!”

He took a gulp of beer.

“That’s why I didn’t want to shake hands. One of the people I met in prison used to be a soldier for the Pariolo family in Naples. You worked there once, didn’t you? Gianni Ferrazzi. Does the name ring a bell? It might have been after your time. Anyway, this lad had twenty or thirty hits to his credit, he couldn’t remember exactly how many himself, and everything went fine until he made shook hands with the victim before doing the job. He hadn’t meant to, he knew it was bad luck, but they were presented, the man stuck out his paw, what was he supposed to do? It would have looked suspicious if he’d refused. He still went ahead and made the hit, even though he knew he’d go down for it. That’s what I call real professionalism.

“To be honest, I thought that it would be a bit like that with you. Impersonal, I mean, anonymous, like a paid hit. That’s the way it was with that judge Bertolini, unfortunately. I just hadn’t thought the thing through that first time. The bastard never even knew why he died. I had enough to cope with, what with his driver pulling a gun and his wife screaming her head off from the house. I realised afterwards that I wanted a lot more than that, otherwise I might just as well hire it out and save myself the trouble. I mean the victim’s got to understand, he’s got to know who you are and why you’re doing it, otherwise what kind of revenge is it?

“So I swore that you and Parrucci would be different. I certainly got my money’s worth out of him, but you were more difficult. Once this terrorist scare started after I shot Bertolini, it seemed too risky to try and kidnap someone from the Ministry. They would have cracked down hard. I had no intention of getting caught. I’ve done twenty years for a murder I didn’t commit, so they owe me this one free!”

He leant back in his chair with a blissful smile.

“Ah, but I never imagined anything like this! To sit here like this, two old friends chatting at a table, and tell you that I’m going to kill you, and you knowing it’s true, that you’re going to die! And all the time those two old bastards over there are discussing the price of sheep’s milk or some fucking thing, and the barman’s cleaning the coffee machine, and the television’s blatting away next door, and the ice-cream freezer in the corner is humming. And you’re going to die! I’m going to kill you while all this is going on! And it’ll still go on once you’re dead. Because you’re not needed, Zen. None of us is. Have you ever thought about that? I have. I spent twenty years thinking about it. Twenty years, locked up for a murder I didn’t even do!”

Spadola squeezed the last puff of acrid smoke from his cigar and threw the butt on the floor.

“You want to know who killed Tondelli? His cousin, that’s who. It was over a woman, a barroom scuffle. Once he was dead, the Tondellis saw a way to use it against me and paid that cunt Parrucci to perjure himself. You bastards did the rest. But even supposing I had killed him, so what? People die all the time, one way or another. It doesn’t make a fucking bit of difference to anything.

“That’s
what you can’t admit, you others. That’s what scares you shitless. And so you make little rules and regulations, like at school, and anyone who breaks them has to stand in the corner with a dunce’s cap on. What a load of bullshit! The truth of it is that
you’re
the first to break the rules, to cheat and lie and perjure yourselves to get a lousy raise, a better job or a fatter pension!
You’re
the ones who ought to be punished! And believe it or not, my friend, that’s what’s going to happen, just this once. Take it in, Zen! You’re going to die. Soon. Today. And I’m telling you this, warning you, and you know it’s true, and yet there’s absolutely nothing whatsoever that you can do about it! Not a single fucking thing!”