Vendetta az-2

by Michael Dibdin

  Giuseppe, the janitor, was keeping a watchful eye on the comings and goings from the window of his mezzanine flat. Zen didn't stop to mention the scraping noises he had seemed to hear the night before. In broad daylight the whole thing seemed as unreal as a dream.

  The streets were steeped in mild November sunlight and ringing with sounds. Gangs of noisy schoolchildren passed by, flaunting the personalities that would be buried alive for the next five hours. The metallic roars of shutters announced that the shops in the area were opening for business. A staccato hammering and the swishing of a paint sprayer issued from the open windows of the basement workshops where craftsmen performed mysterious operations on lengths of moulded wood. But the traffic dominated: the uniform hum of new cars, the idiosyncratic racket of the old, the throaty gurgle of diesels, the angry buzzing of scooters and three-wheeled vans, the buses' hollow roar, the chainsaw of an unsilenced trail bike, the squeal of brakes, the strident discord of horns in conflict.

  At the corner of the block the newsagent was adding the final touches to the display of newspapers and magazines which were draped around his stall in a complex overlapping pattern. As usual, Zen stopped to buy a paper, but he did not even glance at the headlines. He felt good, serene and carefree, released from whatever black magic had gripped his soul the night before. There would be time enough later to read about disasters and scandals which had nothing whatever to do with him.

  Across the street from the newsstand at the corner of the next block was the cafe which Zen frequented, largely because it had resisted the spreading blight of skimmed milk, which reduced the rich foam of a proper cappuccino to an insipid froth. The barman, who sported a luxuriant moustache to compensate for his glossily bald skull, greeted Zen with respectful warmth and turned away unbidden to prepare his coffee.

  'Barbarians!' exclaimed a thickset man in a tweed suit, looking up from the newspaper spread out before him on the bar. 'Maniacs! What's the sense of it all? What can they hope to achieve?'

  Zen helped himself to a flaky brioche before broaching the chocolate-speckled foam on the cappuccino which Ernesto placed before him. I." was only after they had been meeting in the bar each morning for several years that Zen had finally discovered, thanks to an inflamed molar requiring urgent attention, that the indignant newspaperreader was the dentist whose name appeared on one of the two brass plates which Giuseppe burnished religiously every morning. He congratulated himself on having resisted the temptation to look at the paper. No doubt there had been some dramatic new revelation about the Burolo affair. Hardly a day went by without one. But while for the dentist such things were a form of entertainment, a pretext for a display of moral temperament, for Zen it was work, and he didn't start work for another half hour. Idly, he wondered what the other men in the bar would say if they knew that he was carrying a video tape showing the Burolo killings in every last horrific detail.

  At the thought, he put down his coffee cup and patted his coat pocket, reassuring himself that the video cassette was still there. That was one mistake he certainly couldn't allow himself. There had already been one leak, when stills from the tape Burolo had made showing love scenes between his wife and the young lion-keeper had been published in a trashy scandal magazine. Such a magazine, or even one of the less scrupulous private TV stations, would be willing to pay a small fortune for a video of the killings themselves. The missing tape would immediately be traced to Zen, who had signed it out from Archives.

  Everyone would assume that Zen himself had sold the tape, and the denials of the magazine or TV station – if they bothered to deny it – would be discounted as part of the deal. Vincenzo Fabri had been waiting for months for just such an opportunity to present itself. He wouldn't let it go to waste!

  Zen now knew that he had badly bungled his unexpected promotion from his previous menial duties to the ranks of the Ministry's prestigious Criminalpol division. This had been due to a widespread but mistaken idea of the work which this group did. The press, intoxicated by the allure of elite units, portrayed it as a team of highpowered 'supercops' who sped about the peninsula cracking the cases which proved too difficult for the local officials. Zen, as he had ruefully reflected many times since, should have known better. He of all people should have realized that police work never took any account of individual abilities. It was a question of carrying out certain procedures, that was all. Occasionally these procedures resulted in crimes being solved, but that was incidental to their real purpose, which was to maintain or adjust the balance of power within the organization itself. The result was a continual shuffling and fidgeting, a ceaseless and frenetic activity which it was easy to mistake for purposeful action.

  Nevertheless, it was a mistake which Zen should never have made, and which had cost him dearly. When dispatched to Bari or Bergamo or wherever it might be, he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the cases he had been assigned, asking probing questions, dishing out criticism, reorganizing the investigation and generally stirring things up as much as possible. This was the quickest way to get results, he fondly imagined, not having realized that the results desired by the Ministry flowed automatically from his having been sent. He didn't have to lift a finger, in fact it was important that he didn't. Far from being the 'oop from the Ministry' which the press liked to portray, Criminalpol personnel were comparable to inspectors of schools or airports. Their visits provided a chance for the mistry to get a reasonably reliable picture of what was happening, a reminder to the local authorities that all power ultimately lay with Rome, and a signal to concerned pressure groups that something was being done. No one wanted Zen to solve the case he had been sent to look into.

  Not the local police, who would then be asked why they had failed to achieve similar results unaided, nor the Ministry, to whom any solution would merely pose a fresh set of problems. All he needed to do in order to keep everyone happy was just go through the motions.

  Unfortunately, by the time he finally realized this, Zen had already alienated most of his new colleagues. Admittedly he had started with a serious handicap, owing to the manner of his appointment, which had been engineered by one of the suspects in the Miletti kidnapping case he had investigated in Perugia. Zen's subsequent promotion had naturally been regarded by many people as a form of pay-off, which was bound to cause resentment. But this might eventually have been forgiven, if it hadn't been for the newcomer's tactless display of energy, together with the bad luck of his having made an enemy of one of the most articulate and popular men on the staff. Vincenzo Fabri had tried unsuccessfully on a number of occasions to use political influence to have himself promoted, and he couldn't forgive Zen for succeeding where he had failed.

  Fabri provided a focus for the feelings of antipathy which Zen had aroused, and which he kept alive with a succession of witty, malicious anecdotes that only came to Zen's ears when the damage had been done. And because Fabri's grudge was completely irrational, Zen knew that it was all the more likely to last.

  He crumpled his paper napkin into a ball, tossed it into the rubbish bin and went to pay the cashier sitting at a desk in the angle between the two doors of the cafe. The newspaper the dentist had been reading lay open on the bar, and Zen couldn't ignore the thunderous headline:

  THE RED BRIGADES RETURN'. Scanning the article beneath, he learned that a judge had been gunned down at his home in Milan the night before.

  So that was what the dentist's rhetorical questions had referred to. What indeed was the sense of it all? There had been a time when such mindless acts of terrorism, however shocking, had at least seemed epic gestures of undeniable significance. But that time had long passed, and re-runs were not only as morally disgusting as the originals, but also dated and second-hand.

  As he walked to the bus stop, Zen read in his own paper about the shooting. The murdered judge, one Bertolini, had been gunned down when returning home from work.

  His chauffeur, who had also been killed, had fired at the attackers and was though
t to have wounded one of them.

  Bertolini was not a particularly important figure, nor did he appear to have had any connection with the trials of Red Brigades' activists. The impression was that he had been chosen because he represented a soft target, itself a humiliating comment on the decline in the power of the terrorists from the days when they had seemed able to strike at will.

  Zen's eyes drifted off to the smaller headlines further down the page. BURNED ALIVE FOR ADULTERY', read one. The story described how a husband in Genova had caught his wife with another man, poured petrol over them both and set them alight. He abruptly folded the paper up and tucked it under his arm. Not that he had anything to worry about on that score, of course. He should be so lucky!

  As a bus approached the stop, the various figures whn had been loitering in the vicinity marched out into the street to try their chances at the lottery of guessing where the rear doors would be when the bus stopped. Zen did reasonably well this morning, with the result that he was ruthlessly jostled from every side as the less fortunate trieci to improve on their luck. Someone at his back used his elbow so enterprisingly that Zen turned round to protest, almost losing his place as a result. But in the end justice prevailed, and Zen managed to squeeze aboard just as the doors closed.

  The events reported in the newspaper had already had their effect at the Viminale. The approaches leading up to the Ministry building were guarded by armoured personnel carriers with machine-gun turrets on the roof. The barriers were lowered and all vehicles were being carefully searched. Pedestrian access, up a flight of steps from the piazza, was through a screen of heavy metal railings whose gate was normally left open, but today each person was stopped in the cage and had to present his or her identification, watched carefully by two guards wearing bulletproof vests and carrying submachine-guns.

  Having penetrated these security checks, Zen walked up to the third floor, where Criminalpol occupied a suite of rooms at the front of the building. The contrast with the windowless cell to which Zen had previously been confined could hardly have been more striking. Tasteful renovation, supplemented by a scattering of potted plants and antique engravings, had created a pleasant working ambience without the oppressive scale traditionally associated with government premises.

  'Quite like the old days!' was Giorgio De Angelis's comment as Zen passed by. 'The lads upstairs are loving it, of course. A few more like this and they'll be able to claw back all the special powers they've been stripped of since things quietened down.'

  De Angelis was a big, burly man with a hairline which had receded dramatically to reveal a large, shiny forehead of the type popularly associated with noble and unworldly intellects. What spoiled this impression was his bulbous nose, with nostrils of almost negroid proportions from which hairs sprouted like plants that have found themselves a niche in crumbling masonry. He was from the ‹own of Crotone, east of the Sila mountains in central Calabria. One of the odd facts still lodged in Zen's brain from school was that Crotone had been the home of Pythagoras. This perhaps explained why De Angelis reminded him of a cross between a Greek philosopher and a Barbary pirate, thus neatly summing up Zen's uncertainty about his character and motives.

  'Frankly, I shouldn't be a bit surprised if they set up the whole thing,' the Calabrian went on breezily. 'Apparently the Red Brigades have denied responsibility. Anyway, this Bertolini had nothing to do with terrorism. Why pick on him?'

  Zen took off his overcoat and went to hang it up. He would have liked to be able to like De Angelis, the only one of his new colleagues who had made any effort to be friendly. But this very fact, coupled with the politically provocative comments which De Angelis was given to making, aroused a suspicion in Zen's mind that the Calabrian had been deliberately assigned to sound him out and try and trap him into damaging confidences. Even given the mutual hostility between the criminal investigation personnel and their political colleagues 'upstairs', De Angelis's last remark had been totally out of line.

  'Have you seen the papers?' De Angelis demanded.

  '"The terrorists return". "Fear stalks the corridors of power". Load of crap if you ask me. The fucking Red Brigades don't go round spraying people with shotgun pellets. Nothing but the best hardware for our yuppie terrorists. ~zs, Armalites, Kalashnikovs, state-of-the-art stuff. Shotguns are either old-style crime or DIY.'

  He looked at Zen, who was patting his overcoat with a frown.

  'You lost something?'

  Zen looked round distractedly.

  'What? Yes, I suppose so. But in that case it can hardly have been the Politicals either.'

  'How do you mean?'

  Zen's hands searched each of the pockets of the overcoai at some length, returning empty.

  'Well, they'd have used the right gun, presumably.'

  De Angelis looked puzzled. Then he understood, and whistled meaningfully.

  'Oh, you mean… Listen Aurelio, I'd keep my voice down if you're going to say things like that.'

  Too late, Zen realized that he had walked into a trap.

  'I didn't mean that they'd killed him,' De Angelis explained, 'only that they'd orchestrated the media response to his death. I mean, you surely don't believe…'

  'No, of course not.'

  He turned away with a sickly smile. He had just given himself away in the worst possible fashion, voicing what everyone no doubt suspected but no Ministry employee who wanted to succeed could afford to say out loud. But that didn't matter, not now. All that mattered was that the video cassette of the Burolo killings was missing from his pocket.

  Zen walked through the gap in the hessian-clad screens which divided off the space allotted to each official, slumped down behind his desk and lit a cigarette. He recalled with horrible clarity what had happened as he boarded the bus. It was a classic pickpocket's technique, using heavy blows in a 'safe' area like the back and shoulders to cover the light disturbance as a wallet or pocket-book was removed. The thief must have spotted the bulge in Zen's coat pocket and thought it looked promising.

  Looking on the bright side, there was a good chance -well, a chance, anyway – that when the thief saw that he'd made a mistake he would simply throw the tape away.

  Even if he was curious enough to watch it, the first scenes were not particularly interesting. Unless you happened to recognize Burolo and the others, it looked much like any o~her home video, a souvenir of someone's summer holiday. Everything depended on whether the thief realized that his 'mistake' had netted him something worth more than all the wallets he could steal in a lifetime. He might, or he might not. The only sure thing was that Zen could do absolutely nothing to influence the outcome one way or the other.

  He had expected writing the report to be a chore, but after what had just happened it was a positive relief to pull the typewriter over, insert a sheet of paper and immerse himself in work. The first section, summarizing the sceneof-crime findings, went very fast. Owing to the evidence of the video recording and the caretaker's prompt arrival, there was no dispute about the method or timing of the killings. The murder weapon had not been recovered, but was assumed to have been the Remington shotgun that was missing from the collection Oscar kept in a rack next door to the dining room. The spent cartridges found at the scene were of the same make, type and batch as those stored in the drawers beneath this rack. Unidentified fingerprints had been found on the rack and elsewhere in the house. The nature of the victims' wounds indicated that the shots had been angled upwards, suggesting that the weapon had apparently been fired from the hip. At that range it was unnecessary to take precise aim, as the video all too vividly demonstrated.

  The two pistol bullets fired by Vianello had been recovered, and one of them revealed traces of blood of a group matching stains found at a point consistent with the assassin's estimated position. A series of stains of the same blood group – which was also that of Oscar Burolo, Maria Pia Vianello and Renato Favelloni – were found leading to the vault beneath the house where Oscar's collection of
video tapes and computer discs was housed. When the villa was searched, this room was found to be in a state of complete disorder: the new section of shelving Oscar had recently installed had been thrown over, and video cassettes and floppy discs lay scattered everywhere. The fingerprints found on the gun-rack were also present in profusion here.

  Zen stopped typing to stub out his cigarette. From behind the hessian screen he could hear male voices raised in dispute about the merits and demerits of the new Fiat hatchback. He recognized the voices of Vincenzo Fabri and another official, Bernardo Travaglini. Then a flicker of movement nearby caught his eye and he looked round to find Tania Biacis standing by his desk.

  'Sorry?' he muttered.

  'I didn't say anything.'

  'Oh.'

  He gazed at her helplessly, paralysed by his desire to reach out and touch her. These exchanges, full of non sequiturs and dead ends, were typical of their conversation.

  Presumably Tania just assumed that Zen was a bit scatterbrained and thought no more about it. He hoped so, anyway.

  'This is for you.'

  She handed him an envelope from the batch of internal mail she was delivering.

  'So what was it last night?' Zen asked. 'The opera, the new Fellini?'

  'The Opera's on strike,' she said after a momentary hesitation. 'As for Federico, we gave up on him after that last one. Granted the man used to be a genius, but enough's enough. No, we went out to eat at this little place out in the country near Tivoli. Have you been there? It's all the rage at the moment. Enrico Montesano was there, with the most peculiar woman I've ever seen in my life, if she was a woman. But you'd better hurry, if you want to go.

  The food's going downhill already. In another week it'll be ruined.' ?en sat looking at her, hardly heeding what she said.