Vendetta az-2

by Michael Dibdin

  'Lunch? Who is this?'

  There was long silence.

  'We talked last night,' the voice remarked pointedly.

  Zen finally remembered his arrangement with Fausto Arcuti.

  'Oh, right! Good. Fine. Thanks. I'll be there.'

  He put the receiver down and turned. Tania Biacis was standing close behind him and his movement brought them into contact for a moment. Zen's arm skimmed her breast, their hands jangled briefly together like bells.

  'Oh, there you are,' he cried. 'Where's everyone gone to?'

  It was as though he regretted being alone with her! 'They're at a briefing. The chief wants to see you.'

  'Immediately?'

  'When else?'

  He frowned. The Ministry of Justice might phone back at any minute, and as it was Friday the staff would go off duty for the weekend in half-an-hour. He had to have that information.

  'Would you do me a favour?' he asked.

  The words were exactly the ones she had used to him two days earlier. It was clear from her expression that she remembered.

  'Of course,' she replied, with a faint smile that grew wider, as he responded, 'You don't know what it is yet.'

  'You decided before I told you what I wantecl,' she pointed out.

  'But I had reasons which you may not have.'

  Tania sighed.

  'I don't know what you must think of me,' she said despondently.

  'Don't you? Don't you really?'

  They looked at each other in silence for some time.

  'So what is it you want?' she asked eventually.

  Zen looked at her in some embarrassment. Now that his request had become the subject of so much flirtatious persiflage, it would be ridiculous to admit that he had only wanted her to field a phone call for him.

  'I can't tell you here,' he said. 'It's a bit complicated, and well, there're various reasons. Look, I don't suppose you could have lunch with me?'

  It was a delaying tactic. He was counting on her to refuse.

  'But you've already got a lunch engagement,' she objected.

  It took him a little while to understand.

  'Oh, the phone call! No, that's… that's for another day.'

  Tania inspected her fingernails for a moment. Then she reached out and lightly, deliberately, scratched the back of his hand. The skin turned white and then red, as though burned.

  'I'd have to be home by three,' she told him. She sounded like an adolescent arranging a date.

  Zen was aboat to reply when 'he phone rang again.

  'Ministry of Justice, Records Section, calling with reference to your inquiry in re Spadola, Vasco Ernesto.'

  'Yes?'

  'The subject was released from Asinara prison on y October of this year.'

  Zen's response was a silence so profound that even the disembodied voice unbent sufficiently to add, 'Hello?

  Anyone there?'

  'Thank you. That's all.'

  He hung up and turned back to Tania Biacis.

  'Shall we meet downstairs then?' he suggested casually, as though they'd been lunching together for years.

  She nodded. 'Fine. Now p1ease go and see what Moscati wants before he takes it out on me.'

  Lorenzo Moscati, head of Criminalpol, was a short stout man with smooth, rounded features which looked as though they were being flattened out by an invisible stocking-mask.

  'Eh, finally!' he exclaimed when Zen appeared. 'I've been able to round up everyone except you. Where did you get to? Never mind, no point in you attending the briefing anyway. All about security for the Camorra trial in Naples next week. But that won't concern you, because you're off to Sardinia, you lucky dog! That report you did on the Burolo case was well received, very well received indeed. Now we want you to go and put flesh on the bones, as it were. You leave on Monday. See Ciliani for details of flights and so on.'

  Zen nodded.

  'While I'm here, there's something else I'd like to discuss,' he said.

  Moscati consulted his watch. 'Is it urgent?'

  'You could say that. I think someone's trying to kill me.'

  Moscati glanced at his subordinate to check that he'd heard right, then again to see if Zen was joking.

  'What makes you think that?'

  Zen paused, wondering where to begin.

  'Strange things have been happening to me recently.

  Someone's picked the lock to my apartment and broken in while I'm not there. But instead of taking anything, they leave things instead.'

  'What sort of things?'

  'First an envelope full of shotgun pellets. Then something which had been stolen from me at the bus-stop a couple of days earlier.'

  'What'?'

  Zen hesitated. He obviously couldn't tell Moscati about the theft of the Ministry's video.

  'A book I was carrying in my pocket. I assumed some thief thought it was my wallet. But last night I got home to find my apartment covered in paper. The book had been torn apart page by page and scattered all over the floor.'

  'Sounds like some prankster with a twisted sense of humour,' Moscati remarked dismissively. 'I wouldn't…'

  'That's what I thought, at first.' He didn't mention that his principal suspect had been Vincenzo Fabri. 'Then I remembered that the widow of the judge who was shot said that exactly the same things had happened to her husband just before he was murdered. Meanwhile someone has been watching my apartment from a stolen Alfa Romeo recently, and yesterday I was followed half-way across the city. Nevertheless, it didn't seem to add up to anything until I heard that an informer named Parrucci had been found roasted to death near Viterbo. Parrucci was the key witness in a murder investigation case I handled twenty years ago, when I was working in Milan.

  The investigating magistrate in that case was Giulio Bertolini.'

  All trace of impatience had vanished from Moscati's manner. He was following Zen's words avidly.

  'A gangster named Vasco Spadola was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released from prison about a month ago. Since then both the judje who prepared the case and the man who gave evidence against Spadola have been killed. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to conclude that the police officer who conducted the investigation is next on his list.'

  A strange light burned in Lorenzo Moscati's eyes.

  'So it's not political, after all!'

  'The killing of Bertolini? No, it was straight revenge, a personal vendetta. You see, the evidence against Spadola was faked and Parrucci's testimony paid for by the victim's family. Presumably Bertolini didn't know that, but…'

  'Do you realize what this means?' Moscati enthused.

  'The Politicals have been holding up this Bertolini affair as proof that terrorism isn't finished after all and so they still need big budgets and lots of manpower. If we can show that it's not political at all they'll never live it down!

  That bastard Cataneo won't dare show his face in public for a month!'

  Zen nodded wearily as he understood the reasons for his superior's sudden interest in the affair.

  'Meanwhile my life is in danger,' he reminded him.

  'Two men have been killed and I'm number three. I want protection.'

  Moscati grasped Zen's right arm just above the elbow, as though giving him a transfusion of courage and confidence.

  'Don't worry, you'll get it! The very best. A crack squad has been set up to handle just this sort of situation. AII hand-picked men, weapons experts, highly skilled, using the very finest and most modern equipment. With them looking after you, you'll be as safe as the President of the Republic himself.'

  Zen raised his eyebrows. This sounded too good to be true.

  'When will this become effective?'

  Moscati held up his hands in a plea for patience and understanding.

  'Naturally there are a lot of calls on their time at the moment. In the wake of the Bertolini killing, everyone's a bit anxious. It'll be a question of reviewing the situation on an on-g
oing basis, assessing the threat at it develops and then allocating the available resources accordingly.'

  Zen nodded. It had been too good to be true.

  'But in the meantime you'll put a man outside my house?'

  Moscati gestured regretfully. 'It's out of my hands, Zen.

  Now this new squad exists, all applications for protection have to be routed through them. It's so they can draw up a map of potential threats at any given time, then put it on the computer and see if any overall patterns emerge. Or so they claim. If you ask me, they're just protectirig their territory. Either way, my hands are tied, unfortunately. If I start allocating men to protection duties they'll cry foul and we'll never hear the end of it.'

  Zen nodded and turned to leave. From a bureaucratic point of view, the logic of Moscati's position was flawless.

  He knew only too well that it would be a sheer waste of time to point out any discrepancy between that logic and common sense.

  As the working day for state employees came to an end, doors could be heard opening all over the Ministry. The corridors began to hum with voices which, amplified by the resonant acoustic, rapidly became a babble, a tumult which prefigured the crowds surging invisibly towards the entrance hall where Zen stood waiting. Within a minute they were everywhere. The enormous staircase was barely able to contain the human throng eager to get home, have lunch and relax, or else hasten to their clandestine afternoon jobs in the booming black economy, 'the Italy that works', as Fausto Arcuti had joked.

  Ever since Tania Biacis had accepted his invitation to lunch, Zen had been racking his brains over the choice of restaurant. Given her wide and sophisticated experience of eating out in Rome, this was not something to be taken lightly. The only places he knew personally these days were those close to the Ministry and therefore regularly patronized by its staff, and it would clearly be unwise to go there. Quite apart from the risk of compromising Tania, Zen didn't want to have to deal with winks,. nudges or loaded questions from his colleagues. Again, it was important to get the class of establishment right. Nothing cheap or seedy, of course, but neither anything so grand or pretentious that it might make her feel that he was trying the crude old 'I'm spending a lot of money on you so you'll have to have to come across' approach. Finally, there were the practicalities to consider. If Tania had to be home by three, it had to be somewhere in the centre, where by this time most of the better restaurants might well be full.

  Every possibility that occurred to Zen failed one of these tests. He was still at a loss when Tania appeared.

  'So, where are we going?' she demanded.

  She sounded tense and snappy, as though she was already regretting having agreed to come. Zen panicked.

  He should never have confused his fantasies with reality like this. The situation was all wrong. It would end in disaster and humiliation.

  'There's a place in Piazza Navona,' he found himself saying as he led the way out into the pale sunlight. '1t's crowded with tourists in summer, but at this time of year…'

  He didn't add that the last time he was there had been with Ellen.

  Outside the Ministry Zen hailed a taxi. The brief journey did nothing to alleviate his fears that a major fiasco was in the offing. He and Tania sat as far apart as possible, exchanging brief banalities like a married couple after a row.

  The taxi dropped them by the small fountain at the south end of the piazza. As they walked out into its superb amplitude, two kids sped past on a moped, one standing on the pillion grasping the driver's shoulders. The noise scattered a fiock of pigeons which rose like a single being and went winging around the obelisk rising above the central fountain, while a second flock of shadows mimicked its progress across the grey stones below. The breeze caught the water spurting out of cleavages in the fountain, winnowing it out in an aerosol of fine drops where a fragmentary rainbow briefly shimmered. Just for a moment Zen thought that everything was going to be all right after all. Then he caught sight of the restaurant, shuttered and bolted, the chairs and tables piled high, and knew that he'd been right the first time. 'Chiuso per turno' read a sign in the window.

  Tania Biacis looked at her watch. 'It's getting late.'

  Zen nodded. 'Perhaps we'd better leave it till another hme.'

  He knew that there would be no other time.

  Tania stared intently at the faqade of the palazzo opposite, as though trying to decipher a message written in the whorls and curlicues of stone.

  'Your place isn't very far away, is it? We could pick up something from a rosticceria and take it back there, if you don't mind that is. The food's not that important. What we really want to do is talk, isn't it?'

  She made it sound so natural and sensible that Zen was almost unsurprised.

  'Well, if that's… all right.'

  'All right?'

  'I mean, it's all right with me.'

  'With me, too. Otherwise I wouldn't have suggested it.'

  'Then it's. all right.'

  'It looks like it,' she said with a slightly ironic smile.

  'How do you know where I live?' Zen asked, as they walked up the piazza.

  'I looked you up in the phone book. I thought you'd be the only Zen, but there are about a dozen of you in Rome.

  Are the others relatives?'

  Zen shook his head absently. He was wondering whether Vasco Spadola had employed the same simple method to track him down.

  In a rosticceria just north of the piazza they bought a double portion of the only main dish left, a rabbit stew, and two of the egg-shaped rice croquettes called 'telephone wires', because when you pull them apart the ball of melted mozzarella in the middle separates into long curving strands. Then they walked on, out of the clutches of the old city and across the river. Zen paused to draw Tania's attention to the view downstream towards the island, the serried plane trees lining the stone-faced embankment, the river below as smooth and still as a darker vein in polished marble. While she was looking, he looked over his shoulder again. This time there was no doubt.

  They moved on, towards the wildly exuberant fagade which might have been a grand opera house or the palace of a mad king, but was in fact the law courts. Here they paused until the traffic lights brought the cars to a reluctant, grudging halt, then crossed the Lungotevere and turned right down the side of the law courts.

  'Wait a minute,' Zen told Tania as they passed the corner.

  A few moments later a young man in a denim suit trimmed with a sheepskin collar appeared, striding quickly along. Zen stepped in front of him, flourishing his identity card.

  'Police! Your papers!'

  The man gawked at him open-mouthed.

  'I haven't done anything!'

  'I didn't say you had.'

  The man took out his wallet and produced a battered identity card in the name of Roberto Augusto Dentice. In the photograph he looked younger, timid and studious.

  Zen plucked the wallet out of his hand.

  'You've got no right to do that!' the man protested.

  Ignoring him, Zen riffled through the compartments of the wallet, inspecting papers and photographs. Among fhem was a permit issued by the Rome Questura, authorizing Roberto Augusto Dentice to practise as a private detective within the limits of the Province of Rome.

  'All right, what's going on?' Zen demanded.

  'What do you mean?'

  'Someone's hired you to follow me. Who and why?'

  'I don't know what you're talking about. I was just going for a walk.'

  'And I suppose you were just going for a walk yesterday. when you followed me all the way from that restaurant to the Palatine? You really like walking, don't you?

  You should join the Club Alpino.'

  On the main road behind them, a chorus of horns sounded out like the siren of a great ocean liner.

  'What are you talking about?' the man said. 'I was at home all day yesterday.'

  Zen's instinct was to arrest Dentice on some pretext and shut him up in a room with
one of the heavier-handed officials, but he no longer worked at the Questura where such facilities were available, and besides, Tania was waiting.

  'All right,' he said in a voice laden with quiet menace.

  'Let me explain what I'm talking about. This job you're doing, whatever it may be, ends here. If I so much as catch sight of you again, even casually, on a bus or in a bar, anywhere at all, then this permit of yours will be withdrawn and I'll make damn sure that you never get another. Do we understand each other?'

  These tactics proved unexpectedly successful. Faced with violence and menaces the man might have remained defiant, but at the threat of unemployment his resistance suddenly collapsed.

  'No one told me you were a cop!' he complained.

  'What did they tell you?'

  'Just to follow you after work.'

  'How did you report?'

  'He phoned me in the evening. And he paid cash. I don't know who he is, honest to God!'

  Zen handed back the man's wallet and papers and turned away without another word.

  'What was all that about?' Tania asked as they resumed their walk.

  'My mistake. I thought he looked like someone wanted for questioning in the Bertolini killing.'

  That was the second time that afternoon that he had broken his rule about not lying to Tania, Zen reflected. No doubt it had been an unrealistic ideal in the first place.

  It felt odd to be walking home with the woman who had occupied so much of his thoughts recently, to pass the cafe at the corner in her company, to walk into the entrance hall together under Giuseppe's eagle eye, travel up in the lift to the fourth floor, unlock the front door, admit her to his home, his other life.

  He was acutely aware that, for the first time in years, his mother was not there. Freed from the grid of rules and regulations her presence imposed, the apartment seemed larger and less cluttered than usual, full of possibilities. Zen felt a momentary stab of guilt, as though he had manoeuvred her transfer to the Nieddus just so that he could bring Tania back to the flat. It was strangely exciting, and he caught himself speculating on what might happen after lunch. Rather to his surprise, Zen found that he could quite easily imagine going to bed with Tania. Without any voyeuristic thrill, he visualized the two of them lying in the big brass bed he had occupied alone for so long. Naked, Tania looked thinner and taller than ever, but that didn't matter. She looked like she belonged there.