Vendetta az-2

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen flexed his fingers, making the joints creak like old wood. He had now disposed of the suspects the judiciary had ad rejected. It only remained to discuss their eventual choice, currently awaiting trial in Nuoro prison. And here he had to tread very carefully indeed.

  'The remaining possibility centred on Renato Favelloni,' he wrote. 'Favelloni had visited the Burolo property on many previous occasions, and had been staying there during the period immediately prior to the murders. Early that evening he and his wife were flown by Oscar Burolo to Olbia airport to catch Alisarda flight IGxzg to Rome.

  According to Nadia Favelloni, shortly before the flight was cailed her husband told her that he had forgotten a very !mportant document at the villa and had to return to g t it.

  She was to go on to Rome while he would take a later tlight. Nadia Favelloni duly left on IGxx3, but an examination of passenger lists revealed that Favelloni had made no booking for a later flight. Under questioning, Favelloni first claimed that he had flown to Milan instead. When it was pointed out to him that his name did not appear ov. the passenger list of the Milan fiight either, he stated that the purpose of his trip had been to visit his mistress. This was why he had told his wife the false story about leaving a document at the Villa Burolo, and why he had booked under a false name. His wife was jealous, and had once hired a private detective to check on his movements. However, none of the staff or passengers on the Milan fiight was able to identify Favelloni, and since his mistress's testimony is suspect, there is no proof that he ever left Sardinia on the night of the murders.

  'The key to the Burolo case throughout has been the question of access. Oscar Burolo had paid an enormou.' sum of money to turn his property into a fortress, yet th.:murderer was able to enter and leave the property without setting off any of the alarms, all within a few minutes.

  How was this possible'? 'The most likely explanation requires some consideration of the provision made to enable the inhabitants of the villa themselves to come and go. Since Burolo refused to employ security guards to man the gates or the control room, thii had to be done automatically, by means of a remote control or 'proximity' device similar to those used for opening garage doors. But while most commercially available models are of little value in security terms, since their codes can easily be duplicated, the system at the Villa Burolo was virtually unbreakable, because the code changed every time it was used. Along with the existing code, causing the gates to open, the remote cuntrol unit transmitted a new randomly-generated cluster, replacing the previous code, which would serve to operate the mechanism at the next occasion. Since each signal was uni.~ue, it was impossible for a would-be intruder to duplicate it. But anyone who had been admitted to the Vilia could easily remove the device and use it to re-enter the perimeter without triggering the alarms.'

  So far, so good, thought Zen. Technical jargon about remoute control devices was no problem. Where the Favelloni angle got sticky was when it came to dealing not with means and opportunity but with motive. It was widely assumed that the reason Renato Favelloni had paid so many visits to the Villa Burolo that summer was that he was involved in negotiations between Oscar Burolo and the politician referred to as 1'onorevole, whose influence had allegedly been instrumental in getting Burolo Construction its lucrative public-sector contracts. According to the rumours circulating in the press and elsewhere, the two men had recently fallen out, and Oscar had threatened to make public the records he kept detailing their mutually rewarding transactions over the years. Before he could carry out this threat, however, he and his guests had been gunned down, his documentary collection of video tapes and fioppy discs ransacked, and I'onorevole spared any possible future embarrassment.

  This was the aspect of the case which was presumably occupying the attention of the investigating magistrate, but Aurelio Zen, unprotected by the might and majesty of the judiciary, wanted to give the subject the widest possible berth. Fortunately, he had a convenient excuse for doing so. Although these theories had been widely touted, because of the secrecy in which the prosecutiori case was prepared they remained mere theories, lacking any substantive backing whatsoever. Once Renato Favelloni was brought to trial – in a few weeks, perhaps – all this would very rapidly change, but until then no one could know the extent or gravity of the evidence against him.

  Thus all Zen needed to do was to plead ignorance.

  'As already stressed, the details for the case remain sub judice,' Zen concluded, 'but the fact that the charge is one of conspiracy to murder indicates that another person or persons are thought to be implicated. This might indeed have been inferred from the fact that Dottor Vianello's pistol shot apparently wounded the assassin, probably in the leg, while a medical examination of the accused revealed no recent lesions. 1n this hypothesis, Renato Favelloni would have removed the remote-control devicc from the villa and passed it on to an accomplice, probabl~a professional gunman, who used it to enter Villa Burol~› and leave again, having carried out the murders. One would of course expect a professional killer to use his ow;weapon, probably with a silencer. It can be argued that this anomaly merely strengthens the case against Favelloni, indicating that an attempt was made to disguise the fact that the crime was a premeditated conspiracy against the life of Oscar Burolo.'

  Zen knocked the pages into order and read through what he had written, making a few corrections here and there. Then he put the report into a cardboard folder and carried it through the gap in the screens separating his work area from that of Carlo Romizi.

  'How's it going'?' he remarked.

  Romizi looked up from the railway timetable he ha been studying.

  'Bid you know that there's a train listed in here tha' doesn't exist?'

  In every organization there is at least one person of whom all his colleagues think, 'How on earth did he get the job?' In Criminalpol, that person was Carlo Romizi, an Umbrian with a face like the man in the moon. Even after sume gruelling tour of duty, Romizi always looked as fresh as a new-laid egg, and his expression of childlike astonishment never varied.

  'No, I didn't know that,' Zen replied.

  'De Angelis just told me.'

  'Which one is it?'

  'That's the whole point! They don't say. Every year they invent a train which just goes from one bit of the timetable to another. Each individual bit looks all right, but if you put it all together you discover that the train just goes round and round in circles, never getting anywhere. Apparently it started one year when they made a mistake. Now they do it on purpose, as a sort of joke. I haven't found it yet, but it must be here. De Angelis told me about it.'

  Zen nodded non-committally.

  'What did la Biacis want?' he asked casually.

  The effort of memory made Romizi frown.

  'Oh, she was nagging me about some expense claim I put in. Apparently Moscati thinks it was excessive. I mean excessively excessive. I said I'd send in a revised claim, only I forgot.'

  Youth is only a lightness of the heart, Zen thought as he walked away, as happy as a bird and all because Tania had not treated Romizi to her confidences after all.

  In stark contrast to the Criminalpol suite, the administrative offices on the ground floor were designed in the old style, with massive desks drawn up in rows like tanks on parade. Tania was nowhere to be seen. One of her colleagues directed Zen to the accounts department, where he spent some time trying to attract the attention of a clerk who sat gazing into the middle distance, a telephone receiver hunched under each ear, repeating 'But of course!' and 'But of course not!' Without looking up, he handed Zen a form marked 'Do not fold, spindle or mutilate', on which he had scribbled 'Personnel?'

  In the personnel department or. the fourth floor, Franco Ciliani revealed that the Biacis woman had just left after breaking his balls so comprehensively that he doubted whether they would ever recover.

  'You know what her problem is?' Ciliani demanded rhetorically. 'She's not getting enough. The thing with women is, if you don't fuck
them silly every few days they lose all sense of proportion. We should drop her husband a line, remind him of his duties.'

  Apart from these words of wisdom, Ciliani was unable to help, but as Zen was walking disconsolately downstairs again, Tania suddenly materialized beside him.

  'I've been looking for you everywhere,' he said.

  'Except the women's toilet, presumably.'

  'Ah.'

  He handed her the folder as they continued downstairs together.

  'This is the report Moscati asked for. Can you get a couple of copies up there before lunch?'

  'Of course!' Tania replied rather tartly. 'That's what I'm here for.'

  'What's the matter? Did Ciliani say something to you?'

  She shrugged. 'No, he just gets on my nerves, that's all.

  It's not his fault. He reminds me of my husband.'

  This remark was so bizarre that Zen ignored it. Everything Tania had said so far had suggested that she and her husband were blissfully happy together, a perfect couple.

  As they reached the third-floor landing, Zen reached over and took her arm.

  'What was it you wanted me to do for you?'

  She looked at him, then looked away. 'Nothing. It doesn't matter.'

  She didn't move, however, and he didn't let go of her arm. With his free hand he gestured towards the stairs.

  Whoever had designed the Ministry of the Interior had been a firm believer in the idea that an institution's prestige is directly proportional to the dimensions of its main staircase, which was built on a scale that seemed to demand heroic gestures and sumptuous costumes.

  'Perhaps it would work better if we sang,' Zen suggested with a slightly hysterical smile.

  'Sang?' Tania repeated blankly.

  He knew he should never have opened his mouth, but he was feeling light-headed because of her presence there beside him.

  'This place reminds me of an opera. I mean, talking doesn't seem quite enough. You know what I mean?'

  He released her, stretched out one arm, laid his other hand on his chest and intoned, 'What was it you wanted me to do for you?'

  Tania's face softened into a smile.

  'And what would I say?'

  'You'd have an aria where you told me. About twenty times over.'

  They looked at each other for a moment. Then Tania ribbfed something on a piece of paper.

  'Ring this number at seven o'clock this evening. Say you're phoning from here and that because of the murder of that judge there's an emergency on and I'm needed till midnight.'

  Zen took the paper from her.

  'That's all?'

  'That's all.'

  He nodded slowly, as though he understood, and turned away.

  Blood everywhere, my blood. I'm collapsing like a sack of grai›~ the rats have gnawed a hole in. No one will ever pnd me. No on..but me knows about this place. I will have disappeared.

  I made things disappear. People too, but that came later, an ' caused less stir. People drop dead all the time anyway. Things ar more durable. A bowl or chair, a spade, a knife, can hang aroun ' a house so long that no one remembers where it came from..'seems that it's always been there. When it suddenly disappearec; everyone tried to hush up the scandal. 'It must be somewhere.'

  Don't worry, it'll turn up, just wait and see.' A crack hai! appeared in their world. And through it, for a moment, they fe.":: the chill and caught a glimpse of the darkness that awaited thentoo.

  I've got together quite a collection, one way and another. Wh will become of it now, I wonder? Cups, pens, string, ribbo›. playing cards, wallets, nails, clothing, tools, all piled up in tii darkness like offerings to the god whose absence I sense at night, in the space between the stars, featureless and vast.

  Things don't just disappear for no reason. 'There's a reason fri~ everything,' as old Tommaso likes to say, nodding that misshapen head of his that looks like a lump of rock left standing in a field for farmers to curse and plough around, or else blow up. I'd like to blow it up, his wise old head. 'What's the reason for this, then? '

  I'd ask as 1 pulled the trigger. Too late for that now.

  Perhaps he would have understood, at the last. Perhaps the othe;s did, too. Perhaps the look on their faces was not just pain and terror, but understanding. At all events, the crack was there, the possibility of grace, thanks to me. Things are not what they seevi.

  There's more to this place than meets the eye. 1 was living proof of that.

  And they proved it too, dying.

  Wednesday, 20.25 – 22.05

  'Is 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 fioor 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 unless you fill it up.'

  Hitching up his ample trousers, he waddled off past three metal rubbish skips overflowing with plastic bagsI and sacks. Zen watched him pick his way across the hun.-mocks and gullies that looked like piles of frozen snow ii; the cheerless light of the ultra-modern 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, half-finished look, as though the developer had lost interest half-way 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 cav park at ground level. The flat roof bristled with televisicn aerials resembling the reeds which had flourished in thi~ 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 had 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 trying to 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 than 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 fpwards 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 sub-basement 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 a d 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, Zer 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 fiourish of his youthful handwriting. But as the details of the case began to emerge, these innocent pleasures were overshadowed 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 motives, others were just intoxicated by the thrills and glamour of making history and couldn't stomach the prospect of retuming 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.