Vendetta az-2

by Michael Dibdin

  Tall, large-boned and small-breasted, with brows that arched high above her deep brown eyes, prominent cheekbones, a strong neck and a light down on her protruding upper lip, which was usually curved as if in suppressed amusement, Tania Biacis resembled a Byzantine Madonna come down from her mosaic in some chilly apse, a Madonna not of sorrow but of joy, of secret glee, who knew that the universe was actually the most tremendous joke and could hardly believe that everyone else was taking it seriously. Like himself, Tania was a northerner, from a village in the Friuli region east of Udine. This had created an immediate bond between them, and as the days went by Zen had learned of her interest in films, music, sailing, ski-ing, cookery, travel and foreign languages. He also discovered that she was fourteen years younger than him, and married.

  'I don't care what your dealer told you,' Vincenzo Fabri proclaimed loudly. 'Until a gearbox has done ioo,ooo kilometres – under on-road conditions, not on some test track in Turin – not even Agnelli himself knows how it's going to hold up.'

  'What do I care?' retorted Travaglini. 'With the discount I'm getting I can drive it until the warranty runs out and still break even on the trade-in. That's a year's free motoring.'

  'Would you do me a favour?' Tania whispered hurriedly.

  'Of course.'

  'You don't know what it is yet.'

  'It doesn't matter.'

  Zen saw nothing wild or extravagant in this claim, which represented the simple truth. But as she turned away with a disconcerted look he realized that it had sounded all wrong, either too gushing or too casual.

  'Forget it,' she told him, disappearing through a gap in the screens like an actor leaving the stage.

  Zen sat there taking in her absence with a sharp pain he'd forgotten about, the kind that comes with love you don't ask for or even necessarily want, but which finds you out. It was normal to suffer like this in one's youth, of course, but what had he done to deserve such a fate at his age?

  He tore open the memorandum she had brought him.

  'From: Dogliotti, Assistant Registrar, Archives.

  'To: Zeno, Vice-Questore, Polizia Criminale.

  Subject: 46429 BUR 4gg/K/95 (Video cassette, one).

  You are requested to return the above item at your earliest convenience since it is… in the blank space, someone had scrawled an illegible phrase.

  Zen stuffed the memorandum into his pocket with a weary sigh. He had been so concerned about the largescale repercussions if the tape fell into the wrong hands that he had completely forgotten the immediate problems involved. The Ministry's copy of the Burolo video was of course just that, a copy, the original being retained by the magistrates in Nuoro. Technically speaking its loss was no more than an inconvenience, but that didn't mean that Zen could just drop down to Archives and tell them what had happened. In theory, official files could only be taken out of the Ministry with a written exeat permit signed by the relevant departmental head. In practice no one took the slightest notice of this, but the moment anything went wrong the letter of the law would be strictly applied.

  Once again, Zen turned to the task in hand as an escape from these problems. The next section of the report was considerably less straightforward than the one he had just written. While the facts of the Burolo case were simple enough, the interpretations which could be placed on them were political dynamite. Zen's completed report would be stored in the Ministry's central database, accessible by anyone with the appropriate terminal and codeword, his views and conclusions electronically enshrined for ever. At least he didn't have to deal with the dreaded glowing screens himself! The use of computers was spreading inexorably through the various law enforcement agencies, although the dream of a unified electronic data pool had faded with the discovery that the systems chosen by the Carabinieri and the police were incompatible, both with each other and with the quite different system used by the judiciary. It was a sign of their elite status that those Criminalpol officials who wished to do so had been allowed to retain their battered manual Olivettis with the curvy fifties' styling that was now fashionable once more.

  Zen lit another of the coarse-flavoured domestic cigarettes, looked up at the rectangular tiles of the suspended ceiling for inspiration, then began to pound the keys again.

  'Because of the exceptional diffiiwlty of unauthorized access to the villa, the number of suspects was extremely limited. Nevertheless, five possibilities have at various times been considered worthy of investigation. The first, chronologically, concerns Alfonso and Giuseppina Bini.

  Bini acted as caretaker and general handyman at the villa, while his wife cooked and cleaned. Both had worked for Burolo for over ten years. At the time of the murders, the couple claim to have been watching television in their quarters in the north wing of the property. This is separated from the dining room by the width of the whole building, including the massive exterior walls of the original farm house. As Giuseppina Bini is slightly deaf, the volume of the television was turned quite high. Subsequent tests confirmed the couple's story that the gunshots were at first almost inaudible. It was only when they were repeated that Alfonso went to investigate.

  'The evidence against the Binis never amounted to more than the fact of their presence at the villa at the relevant time, but since the only other people present were all dead, and it was apparently impossible for any intruder to have entered the property, it is understandable that the couple came under suspicion. However, the case against them, which already lacked any viable motive, was further weakened by the discovery of the video tape recording Alfonso Bini's evidently genuine shock on discovering the bodies, and by the fact that a meticulous search failed to uncover any trace of the murder weapon at the villa, where the couple had remained throughout.'

  Zen paused to give his numbed fingers a chance to xecover. Next on his list was the vendetta theory, which involved filling in the background about the attempted kidnapping of Oscar Burolo. This had surprised no one, except for the fact that the intended victim had got away with nothing but a scratch on his shoulder. God damn it, peopie had murmured in tones of exasperated admiration, how does he do it? Kidnapping was notoriously a way of life in Sardinia, and what had Burolo done but choose a property on the very edge of the Barbagia massif itself, the heartland of the kidnapping gangs and the location of the underground lairs where they hid their victims? He was asking for it!

  And he duly got it. Fortunately for Oscar, the Lincoln Continental he had been driving at the time was a rather special model, built for the African president who figured in the fictitious 'slave' story. Oscar did a lot of work in Africa, which he liked to describe as 'a land of opportunity', rolling his eyes comically to suggest what kind of opportunities he had in mind. The president in question was unfortunately toppled from power just after taking delivery of the vehicle and just before Oscar could collect on the contract the president had signed for the constructiov, of a new airport in the country's second-largest city, a job which had promised to be even more lucrative than most of those which Oscar was involved in.

  Where other companies might reckon on a profit margin of 2o or 3o per cent, regarding anything above that as an extraordinary windfall, the projects which Burolo Construction undertook seemed able to generate profits that were often in excess of the total original budget. Oscar had earned the sobriquet 'King Midas' for his ability to turn the hardest rock, the most arid soil and the foulest marshland into pure gold. In the case of the African airport, his bill had already soared to a sum amounting to almost 4 percent of the country's gross national product, but on this occasion Oscar was constrained to realism. Even if the new regime had been disposed to honour the commitments of the former president, it would have had considerable difficulty in doing so, since the latter had prudently diverted another considerable slice of the country's GNP to the Swiss bank account that was now financing his premature retirernent. All this was very regrettable, but Oscar was a realist. He knew that while governments come and go, business goes on for eve
r. So rather than stymie his chances of profitable intervention in the country's future by pointless litigation, he reluctantly agreed to accept a settlernent which barely covered his expenses. To sweeten the pill, he asked for and was given the Lincoln Continental as well.

  At the time Oscar had seen the car as just another of the fancy gadgets with which he loved to surround himself, but it undoubtedly saved his life when the kidnappers tried to take him. He was driving back from the local village church when it happened. Much to most people's surprise, Oscar never missed Sunday Mass. Experience had taught him the importance of keeping on the right side of those in power, and compared with the kind of kickbacks, favours and general dancing of attendance which some of his patrons expected, God seemed positively modest in His demands. It was true that you could never be absolutely certain that He was there, and if so whether He was prepared to come up with the goods, but much the same could be said about most of the people in Rome too. As long as all that was needed to stay in with Him was taking communion every Sunday, Oscar thought it was well worth the effort. Unfortunately the local village church lacked a suitable landing place for the Agusta, so he had to drive.

  As he rounded one of the many sharp bends that Sunday, Oscar found the road blocked by what appeared to be a minor accident. A car was lying on its side in the ditch, while the lorry which had apparently forced it off the road was slewed around broadside on to the approaching limousine. Three men were kneeling beside a fourth who was lying face-down in the road.

  As Oscar got out to help, the men turned towards him.

  'instantly, I knew!' he told countless listeners later.

  'Don't ask me how. I just knew!'

  He leapt back into the car as the 'accident victim' rolled to one side, revealing the rifles and shotguns on which he'd been lying. Several shots were fired, one of which wounded Oscar slightly in the shoulder. He didn't even notice. He threw the Lincoln into reverse and accelerated back up the road.

  Tlie kidnappers gave chase on fnot, firing as they ran.

  But the African president, even more of a reaiist than Burolo himself, had specified armour-plating and bulletp;roof windows, and the kidnappers' shots rattled harmlessly away. When he reached the corner, Oscar reversed on to the shoulder to turn the car round. As hc did so, the youngest of the four men sprinted forward, leaped on to the bonnet, pressed the muzzle of his rifle against the windscreen and fired. In the event, the shot barely chipped the toughened glass, but for a second Oscar had stared death in the face. His reaction was to slam on the brakes, sending the man reeling into the road, and then accelerate right over him.

  By the time the police arrived at the scene there was nothing to see except a few tyre marks and a little blood mixed in with the loose gravel in the centre of the road. A few days later the funeral of a young shepherd named Antonio Melega took place in a mountain village some forty kilometres to the north-west. According to his grimfaced, taciturn relatives, he had been struck by a hit-andrun driver while walking home from his pastures.

  The abortive kidnap made Oscar Burolo an instant hero among the island's villa-owning fraternity, eminently kidnappable every one. One enterprising shopkeeper did a brisk trade in T-shirts reading 'Italians 1, Sardinians 0' until the local mayor protested. But although Burolo was quite happy to be lionized, in private he was a frightened man, haunted by the memory of that dull bump beneath the car and the man's muffled cry as the tons of armourplating crushed the life out of him. He knew that by killing one of the kidnappers he had opened an account that would only be closed with his own death. Burolo had been born in the north, but his father had been from a little village in the province of Matera, and he had told his son about blood feuds and the terrible obligation of vendetta which could be placed on a man against his will, destroying him and everyone close to him because of something he had nothing to do with and of which he perhaps even disapproved. Young Oscar had been deeply impressed by these stories. To his childish ear they had the ring of absolute truth, matching as they did the violent and arbitrary rituals of the world he shared with other boys his age. Just as he had known the kidnappers the moment their eyes met, so now he knew they would not rest until they had avenged the death of their colleague.

  Faced with this knowledge, a lesser man might have called it quits, sold off the villa – if he could find a purchaser! – and taken his holidays elsewhere in future. But Oscar's realism had its limits, and it ended where his vanity began. Had it been a business deal, with no one but himself and the other party any the wiser, he might have cut and run. But he had invested all his self-esteem in the villa, to say nothing of several billion lira, and it would take more than some bunch of small-time sheep-shaggers, as he jeeringly referred to them, to see him off.

  Nevertheless, someone had seen him off, and the friends and relatives of the late Antonio Melega naturally came under suspicion. Apart from the sheer ferocity of the killings, some of the physical evidence seemed to support this hypothesis. Sardinians, particularly those from the poorer mountain areas, are the shortest of all Mediterranean peoples. The fingerprints found on the ejected shotgun cartridges were exceptionally small – 'like a child's', the Carabinieri's expert had remarked, an unfortunate phrase which had provoked much mirth in the rival force. But an adult gunman of small statur was another matter, and would also explain the low angle of fire which had previously been attributed to the gun being held at hip level. Moreover, sheep rustlers would necessarily be skilled in moving and acting soundlessly, hence the eerie silence which had so impressed everyone who had seen the video tape.

  'Unfortunately,.' Zen typed, 'there was an insurn;ountable problem about this attractive hypothesis, namely the question of access. The defences of the Villa Burolo had been specifically designed to prevent an incursion of precisely this kind. It is true that the control room itself was not manned at the time of the murders, but the system was designed to set off alarms all over the villa in the event of any intrusion. In order to test the effectiveness of these alarms, a specialist alpine unit of the Carabinieri attempted to break into the villa by a variety of means, including the use of parachutes and hang-gliders. In every case, the alarms were activated. Any direct assault of the premises, whether by local kidnappers or any other group, thus had to be ruled out.'

  Placing an asterisk after 'group', Zen added at the foot of the page: 'Subsequent to an assessment of the situation undertaken by this department in late September, Dottor Vincenzo Fabri suggested that the intended victim of the killings might not have been Oscar Burolo, who was unarmed and whose demeanour throughout the video recording showed him to be unafraid of the intruder, but his guest Edoardo Vianello. Fabri pointed out that the fact that the architect was carrying a pistol showed that he feared for his safety, and raised the possibility that an investigation into Vianello's professional affairs might reveal an involvement with the organized crime for which his native Sicily is notorious. To overcome the problem of access, Fabri suggested that Giuseppina Bini was secretly working for the Mafia, drawing attention to the fact that in 1861 her maternal grandfather had been born in Agrigento. For some reason, however, this ingenious theory failed to attract the serious attention it no doubt merited.'

  Zen smiled sourly. It was rare for him to get an opportunity to put one over on Vincenzo Fabri. What the hell had the man been up to, he wondered, floating this kind of wild and unsubstantiated rumour?

  The next candidate on Zen's list came into the category of light relief.

  'Furio Pizzoni was detained on his return to the villa about two hours after the killings had taken place. When questioned as to his earlier whereabouts, he claimed to have spent the evening in a bar in the local village. This alibi was subsequently confirmed by the owner of the bar and several customers. Pizzoni undoubtedly had access to the remote control device mentioned below (see Favelloni, Renato), but given his alibi and the absence of any evident motive, interest in him soon faded, although it was briefly revived by the discovery o
f video tapes showing amorous encounters between him and Rita Burolo.'

  Zen drew the last fragrant wisps of smoke from his cigarette and crushed it out. After a moment's thought, he decided against going into any more details. Even the magazine which had paid so dearly for the photographs made from one of those ~ideo tapes had drawn a discreet veil of verbiage over the exact nature of this little love triangle. It was difficult to offer a tasteful account of the fact that the murdered woman had been in the habit of meeting Pizzoni by moonlight in the hut which the lions used during the day and rolling nude on the straw bedaubed with their sweat and excrement while the young man pleasured her in a variety of ways undreamt of in the animal kingdom. For some people it was still more difficul". to accept that Oscar Burolo had known about these orgies and had done nothing whatever about them apart from rigging up a small video camera in the rafters of the hut to record the scene for his future delectation.

  Suddenly Zen caught the sound of Tania's voice behind the screens.

  'You promise?'

  She sounded anxious.

  'But of course!'

  The heavy, monotonous voice was that of an official called Romizi.

  'Otherwise it'll mean a lot of trouble for me,' Tania stressed.

  'Don't worry! I'll take care of it.'

  Zen slumped forward until his forehead touched the cool metal casing of the typewriter. So she had found someone else to ask her favour of, after he had scared her away with his tactless impetuosity. He took a deep breath, expelled it as a long sigh, and began to pound the Olivetti's stubborn keys again.

  'Given the killer's need of specialized knowledge to overcome the villa's security defences, it was inevitable that the only surviving member of Oscar Burolo's imme tiate family, his son Enzo, should come under suspicion. Relations between Enzo and his father had reportedly been strained for some time, largely owing to the young man's refusal to agree to give up his attempt to become a professional violinist in favour of a career in law or medicine. That August, Enzo Burolo was attending a music school in America, and inquiries by the FBI confirmed that he had been in the Boston area during the period immediately preceding and following the murders. This line of investigation was therefore also dropped. '