Vendetta az-2

by Michael Dibdin

  Nothing could touch him, or so it seemed.

  Such was the spell cast by Burolo that it was only by an effort of attention that one became aware of the others present. The slightly saturnine man with thinning grey hair and a wedge-shaped face sitting to Oscar's left was a Sicilian architect named Vianello who had collaborated with Burolo Construction on the plans for a new electricity generating station at Rieti. Unfortunately their tender had been rejected on technical grounds – a previously unheard-of eventuality – and the contract had gone to another firm. Dottor Vianello was wearing an immaculate pale cream cotton suit and a slightly strained smile, possibly due to the fact that he was having to listen to Oscar's wife's account of an abortive shopping trip to Olbia. Rita Burolo had once been an exceptionally attractive woman, and the sense of power which this had given her had remained, even now that her charms were visibly wilting.

  Her inane comments had commanded total attention for so long that Rita had at last come to believe that she had more to offer the world than her legs and breasts, which was a consolation now that the latter were no longer quite first-division material. Opposite her sat the Sicilian architect's wife, a diminutive pixie of a woman with frightened eyes and a faint moustache. Maria Pia Vianello gazed at the spectacle of her hostess in full career with a kind of awestruck amazement, like a schoolgirl with a crush on her teacher. Clearly, she would never dream of tryin8 to dominate a gathering in this way.

  Despite these superficial dissimilarities, however, the Vianellos and the Burolos basically had much in common.

  No longer young, but rich enough to keep age at bay for a few years yet, the men ponderous with professional gravitas, like those toy figurines which cannot be knocked over because they are loaded with lead, the women exuding the sullen peevishness of those who have been pampered with every luxury except freedom and responsibility. The remaining couple were different.

  Zen reversed the tape again briefly, hauling the swimmer up out of the water once more, and then froze the picture, studying the man who had dominated the news for the previous three months. Renato Favelloni's sharp, ferrety features and weak chest and limbs, coupled with greasy hair and an over-ready smile, gave him the air of a small-town playboy, by turns truculent and toadying, convinced of being God's gift to the world in general and women in particular, but quite prepared to lower himself to any dirty work in the interests of getting ahead. At first Zen had found it almost incomprehensible that such a man could have been the linchpin of the deals that were rumoured to have taken place between Oscar Burolo and the senior political figure who was referred to in the press as '1'onorevole', the formula reputedly used by Burolo in his secret memoranda of their relationship. Only gradually had he come to understand that it was precisely Favelloni's blatant sleaziness which made him acceptable as a go-between. There are degrees even in the most cynical corruption and manipulation. By embodying the most despicable possible grade, Renato Favelloni made his clients feel relatively decent by comparison.

  His wife, like Renato himself, was a good ten years younger than the other four people present, and exactly the kind of stunning bimbo that Rita Burolo must have been at the same age. This cannot have recommended Nadia Favelloni to Oscar's wife any more than the younger woman's habit of wandering around the place half-naked.

  Having reached the age at which women begin to employ clothing for purposes of concealment rather than display, Signora Burolo discreetly retained a flowing wrap of some material that was a good deal less transparent than it first appeared.

  A sense of revulsion suddenly overcame Zen at the thought of what was shortly to happen to that pampered, veiled flesh. Vanity, lust, jealousy, boredom, bitchiness, beauty, wit – what did any of it matter? As the doomed faces glanced flirtatiously at the camera, wondering how they were coming across, Zen felt like screaming at them, 'Go away! Get out of that house now!'

  The Favellonis had done precisely that, of course, which was one reason why everyone in Italy from the magistrate investigating the case to the know-all in your local bar agreed with Zen's mother that Renato Favelloni was 'the one who did it'. With the seedy fixer and his disturbingly bare-breasted wife out of the way, the two maturer couples had settled down to a quiet dinner in the villa's dining room, with its rough tiled floor and huge trestle table which had originally graced the refectory of a Franciscan monastery. The meal had been eaten and coffee and liqueurs served when Oscar once again switched on the camera to record the after-dinner talk, dominated as always by his booming, emphatic voice, punctuated by blows of his hairy fist on the table-top.

  Apart from a distant metallic crash whose source and relevance were in dispute, the first sign of what was about to happen appeared in Signora Vianello's nervous eyes.

  The architect's wife was sitting next to their host, who was in the middle of a bawdy tale concerning a well-known TV presenter and a stripper turned member of parliament who had appeared on his talk show, and what they had reputedly got up to during the commercial break. Maria Pia Vianello had been listening with a vague, blurry smile, as though she wasn't quite sure whether it was proper for her to appear to understand. Then her eyes were attracted by something on the other side of the room, something which made such considerations irrelevant. The vague smile abruptly vanished, leaving her features completely blank.

  No one else had noticed anything. The only sound in the room was Oscar's voice. Whatever Signora Vianello had seen was on the move, and her eyes tracked it across the room until Oscar saw it too. He broke off in midsentence, threw his napkin on the table and stood up.

  'What do you want?'

  There was no answer, no sound whatever. Oscar's wife and Dottor Vianello, who were sitting with their backs to the camera, looked round. Rita Burolo emitted a scream of terror. Vianello's expression did not change, except to harden slightly.

  'What do you want?' Burolo repeated, his brows knitted in puzzlement and annoyance. Abruptly, he pushed his chair aside and strode towards the intruder, staring masterfully downwards as though to cow an unruly child.

  You could say what you liked, thought Zen, but the man had guts. Or was he just foolhardy, trying to show off to his guests, to preserve an image of bravado to the last? At all events, it was only in the final moment that any fear entered Oscar's eyes, as he flung up his hands in an instinctive attempt to protect his face.

  A brutal eruption of noise swamped the soundtrack.

  Literally disintegrated by the blast, Oscar's hands disappeared, while bright red blotches appeared all over his face and neck like an instant infection. He reeled away, holding up the stumps of his wrists. Somehow he managed to recover his balance and turn back, only to receive the second discharge, which carried away half his chest and flung him against the corner of the dining table, where he collapsed in a bloody heap at his wife's feet.

  Rita Burolo scrambled desperately away from the corpse as Vianello dived under the table, a pistol appearing in his hand. The ratchet sound of a shotgun being reloaded by pump action mingled with two sharp light cracks from the architect's pistol. Then the soundtrack was bludgeoned twice more in quick succession. The first barrel scoured the space below the table, gouging splinters out of the wood, shattering plates and glasses, wounding Signora Vianello terribly in the legs and reducing her husband to a nightmare figure crawling about on the floor like a tormented animal. The second caught Rita Burolo trying desperately to climb out of the window that lay open on to the terrace.

  As she was further away than the others, the wounds she sustained were more dispersed, covering her in a spray as fine and evenly distributed as drizzle on a windscreen.

  With a despairing cry she fell through the window to the paving stones of the terrace, where she slowly bled to death.

  Despite her lacerated legs, Maria Pia Vianello somehow struggled to her feet. For all her diminutive stature, she too gave the impression of looking down at the intruder.

  'Just a moment, please,' she muttered over the dry, clinica
l sound of the gun being reloaded. 'I'm afraid I'm not quite ready yet. I'm sorry.'

  The shot took her at close range, flaying her so fearfully that loops of intestine protruded through the wall of her abdomen in places. Then the second barrel spun her round. She clutched the wall briefly, then collapsed into a dishevelled heap, leaving a complex pattern of dark streaks on the whitewashed plaster.

  It had taken less than twenty seconds to turn the room into an abattoir. Fifteen seconds later, the caretaker would appear, having run from the two-room service flat where he and his wife had been watching a variety show on television. Until then, apart from wine dripping from a broken bottle at the edge of the table and a swishing caused by the convulsive twitches of the dying Vianello's arm, there was no sound whatsoever. 'If anyone ever manages to break into this place, I'll believe in ghosts,' the security analyst had assured Oscar Burolo. Nevertheless, someone or something had got in, butchered the inhabitants and then vanished without trace, all in less than a minute and in perfect silence. Even in broad daylight and the company of others it was difficult to ignore this almost supernatural dimension of the killings. In the eerie doldrums of the night, all alone, it seemed impossible to believe that there could be a rational explanation for them.

  The silence of the running tape was broken by a distant scraping sound. Zen felt his skin crawl and the hairs on his head stir. He reached for the remote control unit and stilled the video. The noise continued, a low persistent scraping. 'Like old Umberto's boat,' his mother had said.

  Zen walked quietly across to the inner hallway of the apartment, opened the door to his mother's bedroom and looked inside.

  'Can you hear it?' a voice murmured in the darkness.

  'Yes, mamma.'

  'Oh good. I thought it might be me, imagining it. I'm not quite right in the head sometimes, you know.'

  He gazed towards the invisible bed. It was the first time that she had ever made such an admission. They were both silent for some time, but the noise did not recur.

  'Where is it coming from?' he asked.

  'The wardrobe.'

  'Which wardrobe?'

  There were three of them in the room, filled with clothes that no one would ever wear again, carefully preserved from moths by liberal doses of napthalene, which gave the room its basic funereal odour.

  'The big one,' his mother replied.

  The biggest wardrobe occupied the central third of the wall giving on to the internal courtyard of the building. Its positioning had occasioned Zen some anxiety at the time, since it obstructed access to the fire escape, but the wardrobe was too big to fit anywhere else.

  Zen walked over to the bed and straightened the counterpane and sheets. Then he patted the hand which emerged from the covers, all the obsolete paraphenalia of muscles and arteries disturbingly revealed by the parchment-like skin.

  'It was just a rat, mamma.'

  The best way of dispelling her formless, childish fears was by giving her a specific unpleasantness to focus on.

  'But it sounded like metal.'

  'The skirting's lined with zinc,' he improvised. 'To stop them gnawing through. I'll speak to Giuseppe in the morning and we'll get the exterminators in. You try and get sorne sleep now.'

  Back in the living room, he turned off the television and reound the video tape, trying to dispel his vague sense of unease by thinking about the report which he had to write the next day. It was the lateness of the hour that made everything seem strange and threatening now, the time when – according to what his uncle had once told him -a house belongs not to the people who happen to live there now, but to all those who have preceded them over the centuries. Tomorrow morning everything would have snapped back into proportion and the uncanny aspects of the Burolo case would seem mere freakish curiosities. The only real question was whether to mention them at all. It wasn't that he wanted or needed to conceal anything. For that matter he wouldn't have known where to begin, since he had no idea who the report was destined for. The problem was that there were certain aspects of the Burolo case which were very difficult to mention without laying yourself open to the charge of being a credulous nincompoop. For example, the statement made by the sevenyear-old daughter of Oscar Burolo's lawyer, who had visited the villa in late July. As a special treat she had been allowed to stay up for dinner with the adults, and in the excitement of the moment had sneaked some of her father's coffee, with the result that she couldn't sleep. It was a luminous summer night, and eventually the child left her room and set out to explore the house. According to her statement, in one of the rooms in the older part of the villa she saw a figure moving about. 'At first I was pleased,' she said. 'I thought it was a child, and I was lonely for someone to play with. But then i remembered that there were no children at the villa. I got scared and ran back to my room.'

  Including things like that could easily make him the laughing-stock of the department, while if he left them out he laid himself open to the charge of suppressing evidence. Fortunately, it was no part of Zen's brief to draw conclusions or offer opinions. All that was needed as a concise report describing the various lines of investigation which had been conducted by the police and the Carabinieri and outlining the evidence against the various suspects. A clerical chore, in short, to which he was bringing nothing but an ability to read between the lines of official documents, picking out the grain of what was not being said from the overwhelming chaff of what was. Watching the video had been the last stage in this procedure. There was nothing left to do except sit down and write the thing, and this he would do the next morning, while it was all fresh in his mind. By the afternoon, the Burolo affair would have no more significance for him than for any other member of the public.

  Once again, footsteps sounded in the street below. A few minutes later the silence was abruptly shattered as a car started up and accelerated away with a squeal of tyres.

  By the time Zen reached the window it had already passed far beyond the area of street visible through the closed jalousies. The sound of its engine gradually faded away, echoing and reverberating ever more distantly through the intersecting channels of streets. The streetlight was in its waxing phase, and as the light gradually intensified

  Zen saw that the red car which had been parked further along the street was no longer there. He closed the shutters, wondering why its presence or absence should be of any concern to him. Finding no answer, he decided it was time to go to bed.

  Nearly over now. Everything's going, the doubfs, the fears, the cares,'.the confusion, even the pain. All draining away of its own accord. There's nothing I need do, nothing more to be done.

  When I saw him standing there, the gun in his hand, it was like seeing myself in a mirror. He had taken my part, emerging from nowhere, implacable, confident, unsurprised. He sounded impatient, taunting me with a strange name, threatening me.

  'There's no point in trying to hide,' he said. 'Let's get it over with. ' As usual, I did what I was told.

  He cried out, in rage and disbelief. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn't that. Then something overwhelmed me, knocking me over, opening me up. I couldn't have resisted even if I'd wanted to. It wasn't like the prst time, the man under the table wounding me with his pistol. All he gave me was pain. This was different. I knew at once that I was carrying a death.

  It won't be long now. Already I feel light and insubstantial, as though I were dissolving. The darkness is on the move, billowing out to enshroud me, winding me in its endless folds. Everything is in flux. Solid rock gives way at my touch, the ground flows beneath me as though the river had returned to its courses, unexplored caverns burst open like preworks as I advance. I am lost, I who know this place better than I know my own body!

  Wednesday, 07.20-12.30

  As Zen closed the front door behind him its hinges emitted their characteristic squeal, which was promptly echoed from the fioor above. One of the tenants there kept a caged bird which was apparently under the illusion that Zen's front doo
r was a fellow inmate and responded to its mournful cry with encouraging chirps.

  Zen clattered down the stairs two at a time, ignoring the ancient lift in its wrought-iron cage. Thank God for work, he thought, which gave him an unquestionable excuse to escape from his dark, cluttered apartment and the elderly woman who had taken it over to such an extent that he felt like a child again, with no rights or independent existence.

  What would happen when he no longer had this readymade way of filling his days? The government had recently been making noises about the need to reduce the size of the bloated public sector. Early retirement for senior staff was one obvious option. Fortunately it was unlikely that anything more than talk would come of it. A government consisting of a coalition of five parties, each with an axe to grind and clients to keep happy, found it almost impossible to pass legislation that was likely to prove mildly unpopular with anyone, never mind tackle the bureaucratic hydra which kept almost a third of the working population in guaranteed employment. Nevertheless, he would have to retire one day. The thought of it continued to haunt him like the prospect of some chronic illness. How would he get through the day? What would he do? His life had turned into a dead end.