Vendetta az-2

by Michael Dibdin

  Which left only the metallic scraping Zen's mother had reported hearing the night before. It had come from the other side of the room, she said, where the large wardrobe stood. It now seemed clear that the noise had been made by someone picking the lock of the door leading to the fire escape, only to find that it was blocked by the wardrobe which had been placed in front of it.

  Since this attempt had failed, the intruder had returned during Zen's absence the evening before and tried the riskier option of picking the lock of the front door.

  Almost the most disturbing thing about the incident was what had not happened. Nothing had been stolen, nothing had been disarranged. Apart from the envelope, the intruder had left no sign whatever of his presence. He had come to leave a message, and perhaps the most important element of that message was that he had done nothing else. As a demonstration of power, of arrogant self-confidence, it made Zen think of the Villa Burolo killer. 'I can come and go whenever I wish,' was the message. 'This time I have chosen simply to deliver an envelope. Next time… who knows?'

  Determined that there should not be a next time, Zen had made Maria Grazia swear by Santa Rita of Cascia, whose image she wore as a lucky charm, that she would bolt the front door after his departure and not leave the apartment until he returned.

  'But what about the shopping?' she protested.

  'I'll get something from the tavola calda,' Zen snapped impatiently. 'It's not important!'

  Cowed by her employer's unaccustomed brusqueness, Maria Grazia timidly reminded him that she would have to leave by six o'clock at the latest in order to deal with her own family's needs.

  'I'll be back by then,' he replied. 'Just don't leave the apartment unattended, not even for a moment. Understand? Keep the door bolted and don't open it except for me.'

  As soon as he got to work, Zen called the vehicle registration department and requested details of the red Alfa Romeo he had seen in the street the night before. It was a long shot, but there was something about the car that made him suspicious, although he wasn't quite clear what it was.

  The information he received was not encouraging. The owner of the vehicle turned out to be one Rino Attilio Lusetti, with an address in the fashionable Parioli area north of the Villa Borghese. A phone call to the Questura elicited the information that Lusetti had no criminal record. By now Zen knew that this was a wild-goose chase, but having nothing better to do he looked up Lusetti in the telephone directory and rang the number. An uneducated female voice informed him that Dottor Lusetti was at the university. After a series of abortive phone calls to various departments of this institution, Zen eventually discovered that the car which had been parked near his house for the two previous nights was owned by the Professor of Philology in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Rome.

  Giorgio De Angelis wandered into Zen's cubicle while he was making the last of these calls.

  'Problems?' he asked as Zen hung up.

  Zen shrugged. 'Just a private matter. Someone keeps parking his car in front of my door.'

  'Give his windscreen a good coat of varnish,' De Angelis advised. 'Polyurethane's the best. Weatherproof, durable, opaque. An absolute bastard to get off.'

  Zen nodded. 'What's this you've been telling Romizi about a train that goes round in circles?'

  De Angelis laughed raucously, throwing his head back and showing his teeth. Then he glanced round the screens to check that the official in question wasn't within earshot.

  'That fucking Romizi! He'd believe anything. You know he loves anchovy paste? But he's a tight bastard, so he's always moaning about how much it costs. So I said to him,

  "Listen, do you want to know how to make it yourself?

  You get a cat, right? You feed the cat on anchovies and olive oil, nothing else. What comes out the other end is anchovy paste." '

  'He didn't believe you, did he?'

  'I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if he gives it a try.

  I just wish I could be there. What I'd give to see him spreading cat shit on a cracker!'

  As De Angelis burst out laughing again, a movement nearby attracted Zen's attention. He turned to find Vincenzo Fabri looking at them through a gap in the screens.

  He was wearing a canary yellow pullover and a pale blue tie, with a marooh sports jacket and slacks, and chunky hand-stiched shoes. Expensive leisurewear was Fabri's hallmark, matching his gestures, slow and calm, and his deep, melodious voice. 'I'm so relaxed, so laid back,' the look said, 'just a lazy old softy who wants an easy time.'

  Zen, who still wore a suit to work, felt by comparison like an old-fashioned ministerial apparatchik, a dull, dedicated workaholic. The irony was that Vincenzo Fabri was the most fiercely ambitious person Zen had come across in the whole of his career. E4is conversation was larded with references to country clubs, horses, tennis, sailing and holidays in Brazil. Fabri wanted all that and more. He wanted villas and cars and yachts and clothes and women.

  Compared to the Oscar Burolos of the world, Fabri was a third-rater, of course. He wasn't interested in the real thing: power, influence, prestige. All he wanted were the trinkets and trappings, the toys and the bangles. But he wanted them so badly. Zen, who no longer wanted anything very much except Tania Biacis, didn't know whether to envy or despise Fabri for the childlike voracity of his desires.

  'Giorgio!' Fabri called softly, beckor,ing to De Angelis.

  His expression was one of amused complicity, as though he wanted to share a secret with the only man in the world who could really appreciate it.

  At the same moment, the phone on Zen's desk began to warble.

  'Yes?'

  'Is this, ah… that's to say, am I speaking to, ah, Dottor Aurelio Zen?'

  Fabri, who had ignored Zen's presence until now, was staring at him insistently whilst he murmured something in De Angelis's ear.

  'Speaking.'

  'Ah, this is, ah… that's to say I'm calling from, ah, Palazzo Sisti.'

  The voice paused significantly. Zen grunted neutrally.

  He knew that he had heard of Palazzo Sisti, but he had no idea in what context.

  'There's been some, ah… interest in the possibility of seeing whether it might be feasible to arrange…'

  The rest of the sentence was lost on Zen as Tania Biacis suddenly appeared beside him, saying something which was garbled by the obscure formulations of his caller. Zen covered the mouthpiece of the phone with one hand.

  'Sorry?'

  'Immediately,' Tania said emphatically, as though she had already said it once too often. She looked tired and drawn and there were dark rings under her eyes.

  'Are you all right?' Zen asked her.

  'Me? What have I got to do with it?'

  The phrase was delivered like a slap in the face. From the uncovered earpiece of the phone, the caller's voice squawked on like a radio programme no one is listening to.

  'So you'll see to that, will you?' Tania insisted.

  'See to what?'

  'The video tape! They were extremely unpleasant about it. I said you'd call them back within the hour. I don't see why I should have to deal with it. It's got nothing whatever to do with me!'

  She turned angrily away, pushing past De Angelis, who was on his way back to his desk. He looked gJum and preoccupied, his former high spirits quite doused. Fabri had disappeared again.

  Zen uncovered the phone. 'I'm sor.y. I was interrupted.'

  'So that's agreed, is it?' the voice said. It was a question in form only.

  'Well…'

  'I'll expect you in about twenty minutes.'

  The line went dead.

  Zen thought briefly about calling Archives, but what was the point? It was obvious what had happened. Fabri had told them that the tape of the Burolo killings was blank and they were urgently trying to contact Zen to find out what had happened to the original. This was no doubt the news that he had been gleefully passing on to De Angelis.

  But how had Fabri found out so quickly that Zen h
ad been t'he previous borrower? Presumably Archives must have told him. Unless, of course…

  Unless it had been the video tape, and not a wallet or pocket-book, that had been the thief's target all along. It would have been a simple matter for Fabri to find some pickpocket who would have been only too glad to do a favour for such an influential man. Once the tape was in his hands, Fabri had put in an urgent request for the tape at Archives, ensuring that Zen was officially compromised. Now he would no doubt sell the original to the highest bidder, thus making himself a small fortune and at the same time creating a scandal which might well lead to criminal charges being brought against his enemy. It was a masterpiece of unscrupulousness against which Zen was absolutely defenceless.

  As he emerged from the portals of the Ministry and made his way down the steps and through the steel barrier under the eye of the armed sentries, Zen wondered if he was letting his imagination run away with him. In the warm hazy sunlight the whole thing suddenly seemed a bit far-fetched. He lit a cigarette as he waited for the taxi he had ordered. He had decided against using an official car, since the caller had left him in some doubt as to whether or not this was an official visit. In fact, he had left him in doubt about almost everything, including his name. The only thing Zen knew for certain was that the call had come from Palazzo Sisti. The significance of this was still obscure to Zen, but the name was evidently familiar enough to the taxi driver, who switched on his meter without requesting further directions.

  They drove down the shallow valley between the Viminale and Quirinale hills, leaving behind the broad utilitarian boulevards of the nineteenth-century suburbs, across Piazza Venezia and into the cramped, crooked intestines of the ancient centre. Zen stared blankly out of the window, lost in troubled thoughts. Whatever the truth about the video tape, there was still the other threat hanging over him. The form of the message he had received the night before had been disturbing enough, but its content was even more so. According to Signora Bertolini, her husband had 'received threats' before his death.

  'There were tokens, signs,' she h d said. 'For example an envelope pushed through our letter-box with nothing inside but a lot of tiny little metal balls, like caviare, only hard.'

  It was no doubt symptomatic of their respective lifestyles that the contents of the envelope had made Zen think of cake decorations and Signora Bertolini of caviare, but there was little doubt that they had been the same.

  And a few days after receiving his 'message', Judge Giulio Bertolini had been killed by just such little metal balls, fired at high velocity from a shotgun.

  Zen had no intention of letting his imagination run away with him to the extent of supposing that there was any direct connection between the two events. What he did suspect was that someone, probably Vincenzo Fabri, was trying to put the wind up him, to knock him off balance so that he would be too agitated to think clearly and perceive the real nature of the threat to him. No doubt Fabri's thief had first attempted to enter Zen's flat to steal the video, and, having been foiled by the blocked emergency exit, had picked Zen's pocket in the bus queue the following morning. Then Fabri had seen the newscast in which the judge's widow spoke about the envelope, and with typical opportunism had seen a way to further ensure the success of his scheme, by keeping Zen preoccupied with false alarms on another front.

  The taxi wound slowly through the back streets just north of the Tiber, finally drawing up in a small piazza. By the standards of its period, Palazzo Sisti was modest in scale, but it made up for this by a wealth of architectural detail. The Sisti clan had clearly known their place in the complex hierarchy of sixteenth-century Roman society, but had wished to demonstrate that despite this their taste and distinction was no whit inferior to that of the Farnese or Barberini families. But neither their taste nor their modesty had availed them anything in the long run, and today their creation could well have been just another white elephant that had been divided up into flats and offices, if it had not been for the two armed Carabinieri sitting in their jeep on the other side of the piazza and the large white banner stretched across the faqade of the building, bearing the slogan A FAIRER ALTERNATIVE and the initials of one of the smaller political parties which made up the government's majority in parliament.

  Zen nodded slowly. Of course, that was where he had heard the name before. 'Palazzo Sisti' was used by newscasters to refer to the party leadership, just as 'Piazza del Gesu' indicated the Christian Democrats. This particular party had been much in the news recently, the reason being that prominent among its leaders was a certain exMinister of Public Works who was rumoured to have enjoyed a close and mutually profitable relationship with Oscar Burolo, prior to the latter's untimely demise.

  The entrance was as dark as a tunnel, wide and high enough to accommodate a carriage and team, lit only by a single dim lantern suspended from the curved ceiling. At the other end it opened into a small courtyard tightly packed with limousines, whose drivers, dressed in neat cheap suits like funeral attendants, were standing around swapping gossip and polishing the chrome.

  A glass door to the left suddenly opened, and an elderly man no bigger than a large dwarf scuttled out.

  'Yes?' he called brusquely to Zen.

  A young woman carrying a large pile of files followed him out of the lodge.

  'Well?' she demanded.

  'I don't know!' the porter cried exasperatedly. 'Understand? I don't know!'

  'It's your job to know.'

  'Don't tell me what my job is!'

  'Very well, you tell me!'

  Zen walked over to them.

  'Excuse me.'

  They both turned to glare at him.

  'Aurelio Zen, from the Ministry of the Interior.'

  The porter shrugged.

  'What about it?'

  'I'm expected.'

  'Who by?'

  'If I knew that, I wouldn't need to waste my time talking to a prick like you, would I?'

  The woman burst into hoots of laughter. A phone started to ring shrilly in the lodge. Throwing them both a look of deep disgust, the porter went to answer it.

  'Yes? Yes, dottore. Yes, dottore. No, he just got here.

  Very good, dottore. Right away.'

  Emerging from his lodge, the porter jerked his thumb at a flight of stairs opposite.

  'First floor. They're expecting you.'

  'And the Youth Section?' the young woman asked.

  'How many times do I have to tell you, I don't know!'

  The staircase was a genteel cascade of indolently curving marble which made the one at the Ministry look vulgar and cheap. As Zen reached the first-floor landing, a figure he had taken to be a statue detached itself from the niche where it had been standing and walked towards him. The man had an air of having been assembled, like Frankenstein's monster, from a set of parts, each of which might have looked quite all right in another context, but didn't get along at all weli together. He stopped some distance away, his gaze running over Zen's clothing.

  'I'm not carrying one,' Zen told him. 'Never do, in fact.'

  The man looked at him as though he had spoken in a foreign language.

  'You see, it's no use carrying a gun unless you're prepared to use it,' Zen went on, discursively. 'If you're not, it just makes matters worse. It gives you a false sense of security and makes everyone else nervous. So you're better off without it really.'

  The man stared at Zen expressionlessly for a moment, then turned his back.

  'This way.'

  He led Zen along a corridor which at first sight appeared to extend further than the length of the building. This illusion was explained when it became clear that the two men walking towards them were in fact their own reflections in the huge mirror that covered the end wall. The corridor was lit at intervals by tall windows giving on to the courtyard. Opposite each window a double door of polished walnut gleamed sweetly in the mellow light.

  Zen's escort knocked at one of the doors and stood listening intently, holding the
wrought silver handle.

  'Come!' a distant voice instructed.

  The room was long and relatively narrow. One wall was covered by an enormous tapestry, so faded that it was impossible to make out anything except the general impression of a hunting scene. Facing this stood a glassfronted bookcase, where an array of more or less massive tomes lay slumbering in a manner that suggested they had not been disturbed for a considerable time.

  At the far end of the room, a young man was sitting at an antique desk in front of a window that reached all the way up to the distant ceiling. As Zen came in, he put down the sheaf of typed pages he had been perusing and walked round the desk, his hand held out in greeting.

  'Good morning, dottore. So glad that you felt able to see your way clear to, ah…'

  He was in his early thirties, slim and refined, with thin straight lips, delicate features, and eyes that goggled slightly, as though they were perpetually astonished by what they saw. His fastidious gestures and diffident manner gave him the air of a fin de siecle aesthete, rather than a political animal.

  He waved Zen towards a chair made of thin struts of some precious wood, with a woven cane seat. It looked extremely valuable and horribly fragile. Zen lowered himself on to it apprehensively. The young man returned to the other side of the desk, where he remained standing for a moment with hands outspread, like a priest at the altar.

  'First of all, dottore, let me express, on behalf of… the interest and, ah… that's to say, the really quite extraordinary excitement aroused by your, ah…'

  He picked up the pages he had been reading and let them fall back to the desk again, as a knock resounded in the cavernous space behind.

  'Come!' the young man enunciated.

  A waiter appeared carrying a tray with two coffee cups.

  'Ah, yes. I took the liberty of, ah…'

  He waggled his forefinger at the two cups.

  'And which one is…? 'With the red rim,' the waiter told him.

  The young man sighed expressively as the door closed again.

  'Unfortunately caffeine, for certain people…'