Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (34 page)

The assembled officials nodded admiringly.

“No one else had thought of this as a way around the famous problem of access, for the simple reason that the vent was too small to admit a normal adult. But that was precisely what attracted me to the idea. There were already indications suggesting that the killer might have been exceptionally small. The upward angle of fire, for one thing, and the fact that on the video Burolo and even Vianello’s wife, who was tiny herself, look
down
at the person confronting them. Then there was the ghost that child claimed to have seen one night, a woman who looked like a little old witch. As soon as this woman Elia hobbled up to me in the village, asking for money, I put two and two together and made five.”

This elicited a ripple of appreciative laughter.

“But mightn’t she have done it?” asked Carlo Romizi earnestly. “I mean, I saw this thing on the television which seemed to be suggesting that …”

Zen gestured impatiently. “Of course she might! She wouldn’t have been much use to me otherwise, would she?”

“No, I mean
really.”

Zen turned to the others. “Quick, someone! Get on the phone to Palazzo Sisti. They’ll have your mug all over the morning papers, Carlo. ‘Italian Believes Favelloni Innocent! After months of research, Palazzo Sisti announced last night that they had located someone who believes in the innocence of Renato Favelloni. “It’s true he’s an Umbrian,” admitted a spokesman for
l’onorevole,
“but we feel this may be the beginning of a significant swing in public opinion.” ’ ”

Zen stood back, letting the waves of laughter wash over him. I could grow to like this, he thought, the good-humoured, easy-going chaffing, the mutual admiration of male society. As a fatherless child with no one to teach him the unwritten rules, he had always found it difficult to play the game with the necessary confidence and naturalness. But perhaps it wasn’t too late even now.

“What I still don’t understand is how you managed to tie it up so neatly at the end,” Travaglini commented.

“There was nothing to it really,” Zen replied modestly. “There were various ways I could have worked it, but when Spadola showed up in the village, it seemed a good idea to kill two jailbirds with one stone, so to speak. I couldn’t predict exactly what would happen if I brought him and Elia together, but there seemed a good chance that one or both might not survive. Which suited me down to the ground, of course. The last thing I wanted was the magistrates getting a chance to interrogate her.”

“Have they found her body yet?” someone asked.

Zen shook his head.

“The cave system is very extensive and has never been mapped. As you can imagine, the locals don’t have much time for speleology. They used the cave mouths for storage and shelter, but no one had bothered to explore any further. The Carabinieri flew in a special team trained in pot-holing …”

“Complete with designer wet suits by Armani,” De Angelis put in.

Everyone laughed. The glamorous image of their paramilitary rivals was always a sore point with the police.

“By Wednesday, two of the Carabinieri had managed to get lost themselves,” Zen resumed, “and the others were busy looking for them. All they found of the woman was a few bloodstains matching those at the villa and a collection of odds and ends she’d apparently stolen, things of no value.”

Travaglini offered Zen a cigarette, which he felt constrained to accept even though it wasn’t a brand he favoured. Such are the burdens of popularity, he reflected.

“What are you doing about a motive?”

“No problem. One of the villagers, a man called Turiddu, claimed that his family had once owned the farmhouse which Burolo bought. At the time I thought he was bragging, but it turned out to be true. The Carabinieri also confirmed that Elia was Turiddu’s sister, and that she’d been found locked up in a cellar. The story is that when she was fifteen she fell in love with someone her father disapproved of. The man suggested that he get her pregnant to force her father to consent to their marriage. Simple-minded Elia agreed. Once he’d had her a few times, the young man changed his mind about marriage, of course. Although she wasn’t pregnant, Elia told her father what had happened, hoping he would force the man to keep his word. Unfortunately her lover got wind of this and ran off to a branch of the family in Turin.

“Since he was out of reach, Elia’s father took revenge on his daughter instead, locking her up in the cellar and telling everyone that she had gone away to stay with relatives on the mainland. She spent the next thirteen years there, in total darkness and solitude, sleeping on the bare floor in her own filth. Twice a day her mother brought her some food, but she never spoke to her or touched her again. Turiddu told us that he was forbidden to mention her existence, even within the family. This naturally made him even more curious about this strange sister of his who had committed this terrible nameless sin. He started sneaking down to the cellar when his parents were out to gawp at her. And then one day, to his astonishment, he found she wasn’t there.

“There was nowhere she could be hiding, and it was inconceivable that she had escaped through the bolted door leading up to the house. Eventually he realised that she must have managed to get through the hole leading to the underground stream. He put out his lantern and kept watch, and sure enough, a few hours later he heard her coming back. He struck a match and caught her wriggling in through the hole, which she had gradually worn away by continual rubbing until it was just wide enough for her to get through. His father’s ban on acknowledging Elia’s existence made it impossible for Turiddu to betray her secret even if he had wanted to. Anyway, it didn’t seem important. As far as he was concerned, the caves where the stream flowed were just an extension of the cellar. Elia’s prison might be a little larger than her father supposed, but it was still a prison.

“All this came out when we interrogated Turiddu on Monday and Tuesday. At first he played the tough guy, but once I made it clear that his sister was dead, that she was going to take the rap for Favelloni, and that unless he cooperated he would get five to ten for aiding and abetting, he changed his mind. Underneath the bluster, he was a coward with a guilty conscience. There was a running feud between his family and a clan in the mountains. The usual story, rustling and encroachment. Turiddu’s father ‘accidentally’ shot one of the mountain men while out hunting, and they got their own back by bombing his van. Both parents were killed. It was Turiddu’s responsibility to carry on the vendetta, but he shirked it. That sense of shame fed his hatred for anyone connected with the mountains, like Padedda. Still, he gave us what we wanted. Once he got started, he poured out details so fast that the sergeant taking notes could hardly keep up. ‘Eh, excuse me, would you mind confessing a little more slowly?’ he kept saying.”

Once again, laughter spread through the officials grouped around, hanging on Zen’s words.

“So the motive is revenge,” said De Angelis. “As far as this woman was concerned, whoever lived upstairs in that house was the person who was responsible for punishing her.”

Zen shrugged. “Something like that. It doesn’t matter anyway. She was crazy, capable of anything. And we don’t need a confession. The gun she dropped after shooting Spadola was the one used in the Burolo killings, and her fingerprints match the unidentified ones on the gun rack at the villa.”

“But how do you explain the fact that Burolo’s records had been tampered with?” Travaglini objected.

“Easy. They weren’t. In our version, the chaos in the cellar was due to the fact that the new shelving Burolo had put up blocked the vent Elia used to get in and out of her old home. On the night of the murders she worked the fittings loose, then pushed the whole unit over, sending the tapes and floppy disks flying, which is what caused the crash audible on the video recording. By the way, lads, how do you think this is going to make our friends of the flickering flame look? The Carabinieri seized all that material right after the killings. If our murderer didn’t erase the compromising data on those disks, who did?”

De Angelis shook his head in admiration. “You’re a genius, Aurelio! How the hell did you ever manage to balls it up so badly in the Moro business?”

For a moment Zen thought his facade of cool cynicism would crack. This was too near the bone, too painful. But in the end he managed to carry it off.

“We all make mistakes, Giorgio. The best we can hope for is not to go on making the same one over and over again.”

“I still don’t see how you arranged for the shotgun used in the Burolo murders to turn up in the cave where this Elia was,” Romizi insisted. “Or how you fixed the fingerprints.”

Zen smiled condescendingly. “Now, now. You can’t expect me to tell you all my little secrets!”

“So Renato Favelloni walks free,” Travaglini concluded heavily.

“Not to mention
l’onorevole,”
added Romizi.

For a moment it seemed as though the atmosphere might turn sour. Then De Angelis struck a theatrical pose.

“ ‘I have examined my conscience,’ ” he declaimed, quoting a celebrated statement by the politician in question, “ ‘and I find that it is perfectly clean.’ ”

“Not surprisingly,” Zen chipped in, “given that he never uses it.”

The discussion broke up amid hoots of cynical laughter.

Before meeting Tania Biacis for dinner that evening, Zen had a number of chores to perform. The first of these was to return the white Mercedes. Early on Monday morning a Carabinieri jeep had towed the car back to Lanusei, where it had been repaired. On his return to Rome Zen left a note for Fausto Arcuti at the Rally Bar, and earlier that morning Arcuti had phoned and told Zen to leave the car opposite the main gates of the former abattoir.

“What about locking the doors?” Zen had asked.

“Lock them, dottore, lock them! The Testaccio is a den of thieves.”

“And the keys?”

“Leave them in the car.”

“But how are you going to open it, then?”

“How do you think we opened it in the first place?” Fausto demanded. Now that the informer was no longer in fear of his life, his naturally irreverent manner had reasserted itself.

After lunch with De Angelis and Travaglini, Zen set off in the Mercedes, reflecting on his conflicting feelings about being readmitted to the male freemasonry which ran not only the Criminalpol department but also the Ministry, the Mafia, the Church, and the government. It all seemed very attractive at first, the mutual back-scratching and ego-boosting, the shared values and unchallenged assumptions. Yet even before the end of lunch a reaction set in, and Zen found that the cosy back-chat and the smug sense of innate superiority was beginning to pall. It was all a bit cloying, a bit too reminiscent of the self-congratulatory nationalism of the Fascist epoch. Whatever happened between him and Tania, he knew it would never be easy. But that, perhaps, was what made it worthwhile.

As he queued up to enter the maelstrom of traffic around the Colosseum, Zen noticed an unmarked grey delivery van three or four vehicles behind him. He adjusted the rearview mirror until he could see the driver. It didn’t look like the man he had seen that morning, but of course they might be working shifts.

He continued south past the flank of the Palatine, then turned right along the Circus Maximus and crossed the river into Trastevere. The grey van followed faithfully. He was being tailed, no question about that. This in itself was bad enough. What made it infinitely worse was that Zen felt absolutely sure he knew who was responsible.

Despite his bluster, Vasco Spadola must have known that he couldn’t be certain of success in his twenty-year-old vendetta. Things can always go wrong; that’s why people take out insurance. There seemed very little doubt that the grey van represented Spadola’s insurance. The men he had seen were not slavering psychotics like Spadola himself, getting a hard-on at the idea of killing. Neither were they third-rate cowboys like Leather Jacket. They were professionals, doing what they had been paid to do, carrying out a contract to be put into effect in the event of Spadola’s death. The only other explanation was that Mauro Bevilacqua was pursuing revenge secondhand, but that seemed wildly unlikely. Tania clearly hadn’t taken his threats seriously. In any case, professional killers didn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages, and a bank clerk wouldn’t have known how to contact them.

Zen turned off the Lungotevere and steered at random through the back streets around the factory where his favourite Nazionali cigarettes were made. The incident had plunged him into apathetic despair. These men wouldn’t give up, whatever happened. They had their reputation to consider. There was no point in having the team in the van arrested. They would simply be replaced by another crew. His only hope, a very slim one, was to find out who Spadola had placed the contract with and try to renegotiate the deal. But that was for the future. His immediate task was to lose the tail. Unfortunately this called for virtuoso driving skills Zen didn’t possess.

In the end, his very incompetence proved to be his salvation. As he turned out of the backstreets by Porta Portese, he was so deep in thought about his problems that he failed to notice that the traffic light had just changed to red. The white Mercedes just managed to squeeze between the lines of the traffic closing in from either side, but the grey van remained trapped. Zen crossed the river again, veered round into Via Marmorata and then, once he was out of sight of the van, turned right into the Testaccio. He abandoned the car with the keys locked inside, as Arcuti had instructed him, then worked his way back on foot to Via Marmorata, taking refuge in the doorway of the ornate fire station at the corner until he saw a Number 30 tram approaching the stop.

He got off the tram near Portomaggiore and walked round to Gilberto Nieddu’s flat, where his mother had been staying for the past week. Zen had promised to collect her that afternoon, but now he was going to have to ask for more time. Gilberto had insisted that everything had gone well, but he was bound to say that. Zen knew that looking after his mother must have been a terrible imposition and one that would now have to be prolonged. Until he had resolved the problem of the grey van, his mother could not return home. He did not look forward to breaking this news to the Nieddus.