Vendetta az-2

by Michael Dibdin

  Resignedly, Zen turned to face his tormentor. This was a showdown he could not dodge.

  'What do you mean by that?'

  Fabri faked a smile of complicity.

  'Oh, come on! No hard feelings! In your shoes I'd have done the same. But it just goes to prove what I've been saying. Do things by the book like us poor suckers and what do you get? A lot of headaches, long hours, and a boot up the bum when things go wrong. Whereas if you look after number one, cultivate the right contacts and forget about procedures, you get covered in glory, name in the paper and friends in high places!'

  'To be fair, you should take some of the credit,' Zen replied.

  'Me? What are you talking about?'

  'Well, you recommended me, didn't you?'

  Fabri's eyes narrowed dangerously.

  'Recommended you to who?'

  'To Palazzo Sisti.'

  A moment's silence was broken by a rather forced laugh from Vincenzo Fabri.

  'Do me a favour, will you? I don't go to bed with politicians, and if I did I certainly wouldn't choose that bunch of losers!'

  'It's all right, Vincenzo,' Zen reassured him. 'They told me. I asked who had put them on to me and they said it was their contact a: the Ministry.'

  Fabri laughed dismissively.

  'And what's that got to do with me?'

  'Well, they said this person, this contact, had already tried to fiddle the Burolo case for them, except he'd made a complete balls-up of it. As far as I know, you're the only person here who's done any work on that case.'

  'You're Iying!'

  It was Zen's turn to switch on a smile of complicity.

  'Look, it's all right, Vincenzo! We're among friends here. No hard feelings, as you said yourself. I for one certainly don't hold it against you. But then I'm hardly in a position to, of course.'

  Fabri stared at him furiously.

  'I tell you once and for all that I have nothing whatever to do with Palazzo Sisti! Is that clear?'

  Zen appeared taken aback by this ringing denial.

  'Are you sure?'

  'Of course I'm fucking sure!'

  Zen shook his head slowly.

  'Well, that's very odd. Very odd indeed. All 1 can say is that's what I was told. But if you say it's not true…'

  'Of course it's not true! How dare you even suggest such a thing?'

  'Admittedly I can't prove anything,' Zen muttered.

  'Of course you can't!'

  'Can you?'

  The reply was quick and pointed. Fabri recoiled from it as from a drawn knife.

  'What? Can I what?'

  'Can you prove that the allegations made by I'onorevole's private secretary are untrue?'

  'I don't need to prove it!' Fabri shouted.

  No one had moved, yet Zen sensed that the arrangement of the group had changed subtly. Before, he had been confronted by a coherent mass of officials, united in their opposition to the outsider. Now a looser gathering of individuals stood between him and Fabri, shuffling their feet and looking uncertainly from one man to the other.

  'Don't you?' Zen replied calmly. 'Oh, well in that case, of course, there's nothing more to be said.'

  He turned away.

  'Exactly!' Fabri called after him. 'There's nothing more to be said!'

  When Zen reached the line of screens that closed off his desk he glanced back. The group of officials had broken up into smaller clusters, chatting together in low voices. Vincenzo Fabri was talking at full speed in an undertone, gesticulating dramatically, demanding the undivided attention he felt was his by right. But some of his listeners were gazing down at the floor in a way which suggested that they were not totally convinced by Fabri's protestations. They accepted that Zen was an unscrupulous grafter on the make. The difference was that they now suspected that Fabri was one too, and that the reason for his bitterness was not moral indignation but the fact that his rival was more successful.

  Giorgio De Angelis, keeping a foot in both camps as usual, patted Fabri on the shoulder in a slightly patronizing way before walking over to join Zen.

  'Congratulations. It was about time something like that happened to Vincenzo.'

  A wan smile brightened Zen's face.

  'So tell me all about it!' De Angelis continued. 'How on earth did you manage to do it?'

  Zen's smile died. Of all his colleagues, De Angelis was the one with whom he had the closest relationship, yet the Calabrian clearly took it for granted that Zen had 'fixed' the Burolo case. Well, if no one was going to believe him anyway, he might as well take the credit for his supposed villainy!

  He turned his smile on again.

  'The funny thing is, I hadn't been going to use the woman at all originally. The person I had in mind was Furio Padedda. He seemed the perfect candidate from everyone's point of view.'

  'But Padedda was involved too, wasn't he?' said De Angelis.

  Zen shook his head. No one seemed to be able to get the story straight, no doubt because the only thing that really concerned them was the headline news which the media, carefully orchestrated by Palazzo Sisti, had been trumpeting all week: that the case against Renato Favelloni had collapsed.

  'Padedda and the Melega family were planning to kidnap Burolo, successfully this time, and extort a huge sum of money from the family. They might well have killed him too, after they got paid, but that was all in the future. On the night of the murders, Padedda was attending a meeting of the gang up in the mountains. But I certainly could have used him, if all else had failed. He even had a convenient wound on his arm. His blood group is different from that of the stains at the villa, but we could have got round that somehow.'

  One by one, the other officials had approached to hear Zen's story. It was a situation new to him, and one he found rather embarrassing. Unlike Fabri, he had never enjoyed being the centre of attention. But things had changed. If Fabri could no longer count on star billing, neither could Zen avoid the fame – or rather notoriety – which had been thrust upon him.

  'But in the event I didn't need Padedda. As soon as I'd visited the scene I knew how I was going to work it. As you probably know, Burolo's villa was originally a farm house. The farms in that area were all built over caves giving access to an underground stream where they got their water. When I inspected the cellar of the Villa Burolo I noticed that the air was very fresh. The caretaker explained that it was naturally ventilated, and pointed out an opening at floor level. Since we were underground, I realized right away that the air could only have come from the cave system.'

  The assembled officials nodded admiringly.

  'No one else had thought of this as a way around the famous problem of access, for the simple reason that the vent was too small to admit a normal adult. But that was precisely what attracted me to the idea. There were already indications suggesting that the killer might have been exceptionally small. The upward angle of fire, for one thing, and the fact that on the video Burolo and even Vianello's wife, who was tiny herself, look down at the person confronting them. Then there was the ghost that child claimed to have seen one night, a woman who looked like a little old witch. As soon as this woman Elia hobbled up to me in the village, asking for money, I put two and two together and made five.'

  This elicited a ripple of appreciative laughter.

  'But mightn't she have done it?' asked Carlo Romizi earnestly. 'I mean I saw this thing on the television which seemed to be suggesting that…'

  Zen gestured impatiently.

  'Of course she might! She wouldn't have been much use to me otherwise, would she?'

  'No, I mean really.'

  Zen frowned. 'Oh, you mean really!'

  He turned to the others. 'Quick, someone! Get on the phone to Palazzo Sisti. They'll have your mug all over the morning papers, Carlo. "Italian Believes Favelloni Innocent. After months of research, Palazzo Sisti announced last night that they had located someone who believes in the innocence of Renato Favelloni. 'It's true that he's an Umbrian,' admitted a
spokesman for l'onorevole, 'but we feel this may be the beginning of a significant swing in public opinion'." '

  Zen stood back, letting the waves of laughter wash over him. I could grow to like this, he thought, the good-humoured, easy-going chaffing, the mutual admiration of male society. Fatherless from early childhood, with no one to teach him the unwritten rules, he had always found it difficult to play the game with the necessary confidence and naturalness. But perhaps it wasn't too late even now.

  'What I still don't understand is how you managed to tie it up so neatly at the end,' Travaglini commented.

  'There was nothing to it really,' Zen replied modestly.

  'There were various ways I could have worked it, but when Spadola showed up in the village it seemed a good idea to kill two jailbirds with one stone, so to speak. I couldn't predict exactly what would happen if I brought him and Elia together, but there seemed a good chance that one or both might not survive. Which suited me down to the ground, of course. The last thing I wanted was the magistrates getting a chance to interrogate her.'

  'Have they found her body yet?' someone asked.

  Zen shook his head.

  'The cave system is very extensive and has never been mapped. As you can imagine, the locals don't have much time for speleology. They used the cave mouths for storage and shelter but no one apart from Elia had bothered to explore any further. The Carabinieri flew in a special team trained in pot-holing…'

  'Complete with designer wet-suits by Armani,' De Angelis put in.

  Everyone laughed. The glamorous image of their paramilitary rivals was always a sore point with the police.

  'By Wednesday, two of the Carabinieri had managed to get lost themselves,' Zen resumed, 'and the others were busy looking for them. All they found of the woman were a few blood stains matching those at the villa, and a collection of odds and ends she'd apparently stolen, things of no value.'

  Travaglini offered Zen a cigarette which he felt constrained to accept, even though it wasn't a brand he favoured. Such are the burdens of popularity, he reflected.

  'What are you doing about a motive?'

  'No problem. One of the villagers, a man called Turiddu, claimed that his family had owned the farm house which Burolo bought. At the time I thought he was bragging, but it turned out to be true. The Carabinieri also confirmed that Elia was Turiddu's sister, and that she'd been found locked in a cellar. The story is that when she was fifteen she fell in love with someone her father disapproved of. The man suggested that he get her pregnant to force her father to consent to their marriage. Simpleminded Elia agreed. Once he'd had her a few times, the young man changed his mind about marriage, of course.

  Although she wasn't pregnant, Elia told her father what had happened, hoping he would force the man to keep his word. Unfortunately her lover got wind of this and ran off to a branch of the family in Turin.

  'Since he was out of reach, Elia's father took revenge on his daughter instead, locking her up in the cellar and telling everyone that she had gone away to stay with relatives on the mainland. She spent the next thirteen years there, in total darkness and solitude, sleeping on the bare floor in her own filth. Twice a day her mother brought her some food, but she never spoke to her or touched her again. Turiddu told us that he was forbidden to mention her existence, even within the family. This naturally made him even more curious about this strange sister of his, who had committed this terrible nameless sin. He started sneaking down to the cellar when his parents were out, to gawp at her. And then one day, to his astonishment, he found she wasn't there.

  'There was nowhere she could be hiding, and it was inconceivable that she had escaped through the bolted door leading up to the house. Eventually he realized that she must have managed to get through the hole leading to the underground stream. He put out his lantern and kept watch, and sure enough, a few hours later he heard her coming back. He struck a match and caught her wriggling in through the hole, which she had gradually worn away by continual rubbing until it was just wide enough for her to get through. His father's ban on acknowledging Elia's existence made it impossible for Turiddu to betray her secret even if he had wanted to. Anyway, it didn't seem important. As far as he was concerned, the caves where the stream flowed were just an extension of the cellar.

  Elia's prison might be a little larger than her father supposed, but it was still a prison.

  'All this came out when we interrogated Turiddu on Monday and Tuesday. At first he played the tough guy, but once I made it clear that his sister was dead, that she was going to take the rap for Favelloni, and that unless he co-operated he would get five to ten for aiding and abetting, he changed his mind. Underneath the bluster, he was a coward with a guilty conscieiice. There was a running feud between his family and a clan in the mountains.

  The usual story, rustling and encroachment. Turiddu's father "accidentally" shot one of the mountain men while out hunting, and they got their own back by ambushing his van. Both parents were killed. It was Turiddu's responsibility to carry on the vendetta, but he shirked it.

  That sense of shame fed his hatred for anyone connected with the mountains, like Padedda. Still, he gave us what we wanted. Once he got started he poured out details so fast that the sergeant taking notes could hardly keep up.

  "Eh, excuse me, would you mind confessing a little more slowly?" he kept saying.'

  Once again, laughter spread through the officials grouped around, hangivg on Zen's words.

  'So the motive is revenge,' said De Angelis. 'As far as this woman was concerned, whoever lived upstairs in that house was the person responsible for punishing her.'

  Zen shrugged.

  'Something like that. It doesn't matter anyway. She was crazy, capable of anything. And we don't need a confession. The gun she dropped after shooting Spadola was the one used in the Burolo killings, and her fingerprints match the unidentified ones on the gun-rack at the villa.'

  'But how do you explain the fact that Burolo's records had been tampered with?' Travaglini objected.

  'Easy. They weren't. In our version, the chaos in the cellar was due to the fact that the new shelving Burolo had put up blocked the vent Elia used to get in and out of her old home. On the night of the murders she worked the fittings loose, then pushed the whole unit over, sending the tapes and floppy disks flying, which is what caused the crash audible on the video recording. By the way, lads, how do you think this is going to make our friends of the flickering flame look? The Carabinieri seized all that material right after the killings. If our murderer didn't erase the compromising data on those discs, who did?'

  De Angelis shook his head in admiration. 'You're a genius, Aurelio! How the hell did you ever manage to balls up so badly in the Moro business?'

  For a moment Zen thought his fasade of cool cynicism would crack. This was too near the bone, too painful. But in the end he managed to carry it off. in 'We all make mistakes, Giorgio. The best we can hope for is not to go on making the same one over and over again.' in 'I still don't see how you arranged for the shotgun used in the Burolo murders to turn up in the cave where this Elia was,' Romizi insisted. 'Or how you fixed the fingerprints.'

  Zen smiled condescendingly. 'Now, now. You can't expect me to tell you all my little secrets!'

  'So Renato Favelloni walks free,' Travaglini concluded heavily.

  'Not to mention l'onorevole,' added Romizi.

  For a moment it seemed as though the atmosphere might turn sour. Then De Angelis struck a theatrical pose.

  '"I have examined my conscience,"' he declared, quoting a celebrated statement by the politician in question, ' "and I find that it is perfectly clean." '

  'Not surprisingly,' Zen chipped in, 'given that he never uses it.'

  The discussion broke up amid hoots of cynical laughter.

  Before meeting Tania Biacis for dinner that evening, Zen had a number of chores to perform. The first of these was to return the white Mercedes. Early on Monday morning a Carabinieri jeep had towed
the car back to Lanusei, where it had been repaired. On his return to Rome Zen had left a note for Fausto Arcuti at the Rally Bar, and earlier that morning Arcuti had phoned and told Zen to leave the car opposite the main gates of the former abattoir.

  'What about locking the doors?' Zen had asked.

  'Lock them, dottore, lock them! The Testaccio is a den of thieves.'

  'And the keys?'

  'Leave them in the car.'

  'But how are you going to open it, then?'

  'How do you think we opened it in the first place?'

  Fausto demanded. Now that the informer was no longer fear of his life, his naturally irreverent manner had reasserted itself.

  After lunch with De Angelis and Travaglini, Zen set off the Mercedes, reflecting on his conflicting feelings about being readmitted to the male freemasonry which ran not only the Criminalpol department but also the Ministry, the Mafia, the Church and the government. It all seemed very relaxing and attractive at first, the mutual back-scratching and ego-boosting, the shared values and unchallenged assumptions. Yet even before the end of lunch a reaction set in, and Zen found the cosy back-chat and the smug sense of innate superiority beginning to pall. It was all a bit cloying, a bit too reminiscent of the self-congratulatory nationalism of the Fascist epoch. Whatever happened between him and Tania, he knew it would never be easy.

  But that, perhaps, was what made it worthwhile.

  As he queued up to enter the maelstrom of traffic around the Colosseum, Zen noticed an unmarked grey delivery van three or four vehicles behind him. He adjusted the wing mirror until he could see the driver. It didn't look like the man he had seen that morning, but of course they might be working shifts.

  He continued south, past the flank of the Palatine, then turned right along the Circus Maximus and crossed the river into Trastevere. The grey van followed faithfully. He was being tailed. This in itself was bad enough. What made it infinitely worse was that Zen felt absolutely sure he knew who was responsible.

  Despite his bluster, Vasco Spadola must have known that he couldn't be certain of success in his single-handed vendetta. Things can always go wrong; that's why people take out insurance. There seemed very little doubt that the grey van represented Spadola's insurance. The men he had spotted in the van were not slavering psychotics like Spadola himself, getting a hard-on at the idea of killing.