Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (8 page)

And they proved it too, dying.

WEDNESDAY: 2025–2205

“I
S THIS GOING TO TAKE MUCH LONGER
?” the taxi driver asked plaintively, twisting around to the back seat.

His passenger regarded him without enthusiasm.

“What do you care? You’re getting paid, aren’t you?”

The driver banged his palm on the steering wheel, making it ring dully.

“Eh, I hope so! But there’s more to life than getting paid, you know. It’s almost an hour we’ve been sitting here. I usually have a bite to eat around now. I mean, if you wanted me for the evening, you should have said so.”

The street in which they were parked stretched straight ahead between the evenly spaced blocks of flats built on reinforced concrete stilts, the ground floor level consisting of a car park. In the nearest block, half of this space had been filled in to provide a few shops, all closed. Between two of them was a lit plate-glass frontage above which a blue neon sign read BAR.

“Well?” the driver demanded.

“All right. But don’t take all night about it.”

The driver clambered awkwardly out of the car, wheezing heavily. Years of high tension and low exercise seemed to have converted all his bone and muscle to flab.

“I’m talking about a snack, that’s all!” he complained. “Even the fucking car won’t go except you fill it up.”

Hitching up his ample trousers, he waddled off past three metal rubbish skips overflowing with plastic bags and sacks. Zen watched him pick his way across the hummocks and gullies that looked like piles of frozen snow in the cheerless light of the ultramodern streetlamps.

Nothing else moved. No one was about. Apart from the bar, there was nothing in the vicinity to tempt the inhabitants out-of-doors after dark. The whole area had a provisional, partially finished look, as though the developer had lost interest halfway through the job. The reason was no doubt to be found in one of those get-out clauses which Burolo Construction’s contracts had invariably included, allowing them to suck the lucrative marrow out of a project without having to tackle the boring bits.

Like the others, the block near which they were parked was brand new and looked as if it had been put together in about five minutes from prefabricated sections like a child’s toy. Access to the four floors of flats was by rectangular stairwells which descended like lift shafts to the car park at ground level. The flat roof bristled with television aerials resembling the reeds which had flourished in this marshy land before the developers moved in.

Some of the windows were unshuttered, and from time to time figures appeared in these lighted panels, providing Zen with his only glimpse so far of the inhabitants of the zone. There was no way of knowing whether their shadowy gestures were of any relevance to his concerns or not. He had checked the list of residents posted outside each stairwell. The name Bevilacqua appeared opposite Flat 14, but the door to the stairs was locked and Zen hadn’t gone as far as to try and gain entry to the block. It seemed to him that he’d gone quite far enough as it was!

Most of his afternoon had been spent trying to find a solution to the problem of the stolen video tape. A visit to an electronics shop had revealed the existence of complexities he had never guessed at, involving choices of type, brand, and length. In the end he’d selected one which had the practical advantage of being sold separately rather in packs of three. It didn’t really matter, he told himself. Either they would check or they wouldn’t. If they did, they weren’t going to feel any better disposed toward Zen because he had replaced the missing video with exactly the right kind of blank tape or even given them a Bugs Bunny cartoon in exchange.

Back at the Ministry, he walked down two flights of drably functional concrete stairs to the subbasement where the Archives department was housed. As he had foreseen, only one clerk was on duty at that time of day, so Zen’s request to inspect the files relating to one of his old cases, selected at random, resulted in the desk being left unmanned for over five minutes. This was quite long enough for Zen to browse through the rubber stamp collection, find the one reading PROPERTY OF THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR—Index No. _____, apply this to the labels on the face and spine of the video cassette, and then copy the index number from the memorandum he had been sent.

When the clerk returned with the file he had asked for, Zen spent a few minutes leafing through it for appearance’s sake. The case was one that dated back almost twenty years to the time when Zen had been attached to the Questura in Milan. He scanned the pages with affection and nostalgia, savouring the contrast between the old-fashioned report forms and the keen flourish of his youthful handwriting. But as the details of the case began to emerge, these innocent pleasures were overshadowed by darker memories. Why had he asked for
this,
of all files?

The question was also the answer, for the Spadola case was not just another of the many investigations Zen had been involved with in the course of his career. It had been at once his first great triumph and his first great disillusionment.

After the war, when the fighting in Italy came to an end, many left-wing partisans were ready and willing to carry the armed struggle one stage further, to overthrow the government and set up a workers’ state. Some had ideological reasons, others were just intoxicated by the thrills and glamour of making history and couldn’t stomach the prospect of returning to a life of mundane, poorly paid work, even supposing there was work to be had. To such men, and Vasco Spadola was one, the decision of the Communist leader Togliatti to follow a path of reform rather than revolution represented a betrayal. Once it became clear that a national uprising of the Italian working class was not going to happen, Spadola and his comrades put their weapons and training to use in a sporadic campaign of bank raids and hold-ups which they tried to justify as acts of class warfare.

The success of these ventures soon caused considerable strains and stresses within the group. On one side were those led by Ugo and Carlo Trocchio, who still adhered to a doctrinaire political line, and on the other Spadola’s followers, who were beginning to appreciate the possibilities of this kind of private enterprise. These problems were eventually resolved when the Trocchio brothers were shot dead in a cafe in the Milan suburb of Rho.

With their departure, the gang abandoned all pretence of waging a political struggle and concentrated instead on consolidating its grip on every aspect of the city’s criminal life. High-risk bank raids were replaced by unspectacular percentage operations such as gambling, prostitution, drugs, and extortion. Spadola’s involvement in these areas was well known to the police, but one aspect of his partisan training which he had not forgotten was how to structure an organisation in such a way that it could survive the penetration or capture of individual units. No matter how many of his operations were foiled or his associates arrested, Spadola himself was never implicated until the Tondelli affair.

Bruno Tondelli himself was not one of Milan’s most savoury characters, but when he was done to death with a butcher’s knife, it was still murder. The Tondellis had been engaged in a long-running territorial dispute with Spadola’s men, which no doubt explained why Vasco found it expedient to disappear from sight immediately after the murder. Nevertheless, no one in the police would have wagered a piece of used chewing gum on their chances of pinning it on him.

Then one day Zen, who had been given the thankless task of investigating Tondelli’s stabbing, received a message from an informer asking for a meeting. In order to protect them, informers’ real names and addresses were kept in a locked file to which only a very few high-ranking officials had access. Everyone else referred to them by their code name. The man who telephoned Zen, known as “the nightingale,” was one of the police’s most trusted and reliable sources of information.

The meeting duly took place in a second class compartment of one of the
Ferrovia Nord
trains trundling up the line to Seveso. It was a foggy night in February. At one of the intermediate stations a man joined Zen in the prearranged compartment. Pale, balding, slight, and diffident, he might have been a filing clerk or a university professor. Vasco Spadola, he said, was hiding out in a farmhouse to the east of the city.

“I was there the night Tondelli got killed,” the informer went on. “Spadola stabbed him with his own hand. ‘This’ll teach the whole litter of them a lesson,’ he said.”

“A lot of use that is to us if you won’t testify,” Zen retorted irritably.

The man gave him an arch look.

“Who said I wouldn’t testify?”

And testify he duly did. Not only that, but when the police raided the farmhouse near the village of Melzo, they found not only Vasco Spadola but also a knife which proved to have traces of blood of the same group that had once flowed in Bruno Tondelli’s veins.

Spadola was sentenced to life imprisonment and Aurelio Zen spent three days basking in glory. Then he learned from an envious colleague that the knife had been smeared with a sample of Tondelli’s blood and planted at the scene by the police themselves, and that the reason why the nightingale had been prepared to come into court and testify that he had seen Spadola commit murder was that the Tondellis had paid him handsomely to do so.

Zen closed the file and handed it back to the clerk with the blank video cassette.

“Oh, by the way, if it isn’t too much trouble, do you think you could manage to get my name right next time?” he asked sarcastically, flourishing the memorandum.

“What’s wrong with it?” the clerk demanded, taking the substitute video without a second glance.

“My name happens to be Zen, not Zeno.”

“Zen’s not Italian.”

“Quite right, it’s Venetian. But since it’s only three letters long, I’d have thought that even you lot would be capable of spelling it correctly. And while we’re at it, what the hell does this say?”

He indicated the phrase scribbled in the blank space.

“ ‘… since it is needed by another official,’ ” the clerk read aloud. “Maybe you need glasses.”

Zen frowned, ignoring the comment.

“Who asked for it?”

The clerk sighed mightily, pulled open a filing cabinet and flicked through the cards.

“Fabri, Vincenzo.”

Although it was still light as Zen left the Ministry to go home, he felt the presence of the superstitious fear that had haunted him the night before. This was more than just bad luck. It seemed like a plot, a deliberate and carefully laid scheme designed to humiliate him.

Why on earth should Vincenzo Fabri, of all people, have put in a request for the Burolo video? He had nothing to do with the case, no legitimate reason for wishing to view the tape. And today, of all days! Whatever the reason, it was monstrously unfortunate. Not only would Zen’s substitution of the blank tape immediately come to light, but it would do so through the offices of his sworn enemy. Whether or not this series of events was just a coincidence, Fabri wouldn’t fail to capitalise on the numerous possibilities it offered for disgracing his rival.

Dinner was always the most difficult part of Zen’s day. In the morning he could escape to work, and when he got home in the afternoon, Maria Grazia, the housekeeper, was there to dilute the situation with her bustling, loquacious presence. Later in the evening things got easier once again as his mother switched the lights off and settled down in front of the television, flipping from channel to channel as the whim took her, dipping into the various serials like someone dropping in on the neighbours for a few minutes of inconsequential chat. But first there was dinner to be got through.

Today, to make matters worse, his mother was having one of her deaf phases, when she was—or pretended to be—unable to hear anything that was said to her until it had been repeated three or four times at ever higher volume. Since their conversation had long been reduced to the lowest of common denominators, Zen found himself having to shout at the top of his voice remarks that were so meaningless it would have been an effort even to mumble them.

To Zen’s intense relief, the television news made no reference to the discovery of exclusive video footage of the Burolo murders frame by gory frame. Indeed, for once the case was not even mentioned. The news was dominated by the shooting of Judge Giulio Bertolini and featured an emotional interview with the victim’s widow, in the course of which she denounced the lack of protection given to her husband.

“Even when Giulio received threats, nothing whatever was done! We begged, we pleaded, we—”

“Your husband was warned that he would be killed?” the reporter interrupted eagerly.

Signora Bertolini made a gesture of qualification.

“Not in so many words, no. But there were tokens, signs, strange disturbing things. For example, an envelope was pushed through our letter box with nothing inside but a lot of tiny little metal balls, like caviare, only hard. And then Giulio’s wallet was stolen, and later we found it in the living room, the papers and money all scattered about the floor. But when we informed the public prosecutor, he said there were no grounds for giving my husband an armed guard. And just a few days later he was gunned down, a helpless victim, betrayed by the very people who should …”

Zen glanced at his mother. So far neither of them had referred to the mysterious metallic scraping which had disturbed her the previous night and which he had dismissed as a rat in the skirting. He hoped Signora Bertolini’s words did not make her think of another possible explanation which had occurred to him: that someone had been trying to break into the flat.

“Don’t you like your soup?” he asked his mother, who was moodily pushing the vegetables and pasta around in her plate.

“What?”

“YOUR SOUP! AREN’T YOU GOING TO EAT IT?”

“It’s got turnip in.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Turnips are for cattle, not people,” his mother declared, her deafness miraculously improved.