Vendetta az-2

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen put these thoughts out of his mind, not from a sense of shame but out of pure superstition. Life rarely turns out the way you imagine it is going to, he reasoned, so the more likely it seemed that he and Tania would end up in bed together, the less likely it was to happen.

  Maria Grazia had been told to stay away for the time peing, and since Zen had no idea where she kept the everyday cutlery and crockery, he and Tania foraged around in the kitchen and the sideboard in the dining room, assembling china, silverware and crystal that Zen had last seen about twelve years previously, at a dinner to celebrate his wedding anniversary. Unintimidated by these formal splendours, they ate the rice croquettes with their fingers, mopped up the stew with yesterday's bread and drank a lukewarm bottle of Pinot Spumante which had been standing on a shelf in the living room since the Christmas before last. Tania ate hungrily and without the slightest self-consciousness. When they finally set aside their little piles of rabbit bones, she announced, 'That's the best meal I've had for ages.'

  Zen pushed the fruit bowl in her direction.

  'I find that hard to believe.'

  She gave him a surprised glance.

  'Given the life you lead,' he explained.

  'Oh, that!'

  She skinned a tangerine and started dividing it into segments.

  'Look, there's something we'd better clear up,' she said.

  'You see, I didn't quite tell you the truth.'

  He thought of them sitting together in the speeding taxi, the bands of light outlining the swell of her breasts, the line of her thigh.

  'I know,' he said.

  It was her turn to look surprised.

  'Was it that obvious?'

  'Oh come on!' he exclaimed. 'Did you honestly think I'd believe that you went to all that trouble, getting me to fake a phone call from work and all the rest of it, just so that you could go out to the cinema? I mean you don't have to explain. I don't care what you were doing. And even supposing I did, it's none of my business.'

  Tania was gazing at him with dawning comprehension.

  'But that was what I was doing! Just that! It was all the other times that were lies, when I told you about the films I'd seen, and going to the opera and the theatre and all the rest of it.'

  She looked away as tears swelled in her eyes.

  'That's why I got so embarrassed in the taxi, when you asked where I was going. It wasn't that I had a guilty secret, at least not the kind you thought! It was just that my pathetic little deception had been found out and I felt so ashamed of myself! 'It all started when you mentioned some film I'd read about in the paper. That's all I ever did do, read about it. So I thought it would be fun to pretend that I'd seen it. Then I stated doing it with other things, building a whole fantasy life that I shared with you every morning at work. It was never real, Aurelio, none of it! On the contrary! We never go anywhere, never do anything. AII Mauro wants to do is sit at home with his mother and his sister and any cousins or aunts or uncles who happen to be around.

  'The irony of it is that that's one thing that attracted me to Mauro in the first place, the fact that he came with a ready-made family. My own parents are dead, as you know, and my only brother emigrated to Australia years ago. Well, I've got myself a family now, all right, and what a family! Do you know what his mother calls me? "The tall cunt." I've heard them discussing me behind my back.

  "Why did you want to marry that tall cunt?" she asks him.

  They think I can't understand their miserable dialect. "It's your own fault," she says. "You should never have married a foreigner. 'Wife and herd from your own backyard.' " This is the way they talk! This is the way they think!'

  She fell silent. A car door slammed in the street outside.

  Footsteps approached the house. Zen got to his feet, listening intently.

  'What is it, Aurelio?'

  He went to the window and looked out. Then he walked quickly through to the inner hallway, closing the door pehind him. He lifted the phone and dialled 113, the police emergency number. Keeping his voice low so that Tania would not hear, Zen gave his name, address and rank.

  'There's a stolen vehicle in the street outside my house.

  A red Alfa Romeo, registration number Roma 846gg P. Get a car here immediately, arrest the occupant and charge him with theft. Approach with caution, however. He may be armed.'

  'Very good, dottore.'

  As Zen replaced the phone, he heard a sound from the living room. No, it was more distant, beyond the living room. From the hall.

  His heart began to beat very fast and his breath came in gulps. Slowly, deliberately, he walked through the doorway and past the television, brushing his fingertips along the back of his mother's chair. How could he have been so stupid, so thoughtless and selfish? To imagine that no harm could come to him in the daylight but only after dark, like a child! To put a person he loved at risk by bringing her to a place he knew to be under deadly threat.

  They'd been watching the house. They'd seen him and Tania enter, and they'd had plenty of time to prepare their move. Now they had come for him.

  As he approached the glass-panelled door that lay open into the hall there was a loud click, followed by the characteristic squeal as the front door opened. On the floor above, the canary chirped plaintively in response.

  The scene refiected on the glass door was almost a replica of the one the night before. But this time Zen knew that he had not left the door open, and the dark figure walking towards him along the hallway did not call his name in a familiar voice, and it was carrying a shotgun.

  'What's going on, Aurelio?'

  Tania was standing on the threshold of the inner hallway, looking anxiously at him. Zen waved her away, but she took no notice. Outside in the streets a siren rose and fell, gradually emerging from the urban backdrop as it rapidly neared the house. The gunman, now half-way along the hall, paused. The siren wound down to a low growl, directly outside the house.

  Zen jumped as something touched his shoulder. He whirled round, staring wildly at Tania's hand. She was close behind him, gazing at him with an expression of affectionate concern. He looked at the reflection of the hallway on the surface of the glass door. The gunman had v.anished. Zen grabbed Tania suddenly, holding her tightly, gasping for breath, trembling all over.

  Then abruptly he thrust her away again.

  'I'm sorry! I'm sorry!' he exclaimed repeatedly. 'I didn't meant to! I couldn't help it!'

  After moment she came back to him of her own accord and took him in her arms.

  'It's all right,' she told him. 'It's all right.'

  I didn't mean to do it. I was just paying a visit, like before. They sgouldn't have tried to shut me out, though, or else done it properly. As it was, I just pushed and twisted until the whole iging came crashing down. But it made me angry. They shouldn't have done that.

  I thought the noise might bring them running, but they were as deaf and blind as usual. To get my own back, I decided to make the gun disappear. I'm no stranger to guns. My father was famous for his marksmanship. After Sunday lunch, when the animals had been corralled and lassooed, wrestled to the ground like baby giants and dosed with medicine or branded, the men would hurl beer bot tles up into the air to fire at. Drunk as he was, the sweet grease of the piglet they had roasted before the fire still glistening on his lips and chin, my father could always hit the target and make the valley ring with the sound of breaking glass.

  'There's nothing to it!' he used to joke. 'You just pull the trigger and the gun does the rest.'

  As I lifted it from the rack, I heard someone laugh in the next room. It was sleek and fat and arrogant, his laugh, like one of the young men lounging in the street, pngering their cocks like a pocketful of money. That was when I decided to show myself.

  That would stop the laughter. That would give them something to think about.

  After that things happened without consulting me. A man came at me. A woman ran. I worked the trigger again and again.
/>   Father was quite right. The gun did the rest.

  Saturday, 05.05-12.50

  A chill, tangy wind, laden with salt and darkness, whined and blustered about the ship, testing for weaknesses. By contrast, the sea was calm. Its shiny black surface merged imperceptibly into the darkness all around, ridged into folds, tucks and creases, heaving and tilting in the moonlight. The short choppy waves slapping the metal plates below seemed to have no perceptible effect on the ship itself, which lay as still as if it were already roped to the quay.

  A man stood grasping the metal rail pudgy with innumerable coats of paint, staring out into the night as keenly as an officer of the watch. The unbuttoned overcoat flapping about him like a cloak gave him an illusory air of corpulence, but when the wind failed for a moment he was revealed as quite slender for his height. Beneath the overcoat he was wearing a rumpled suit. A tie of some nondescript hue was plastered to his shirt by the wind in a lazy curve, like a question mark. His face was lean and smooth, with an aquiline nose, and slate-blue eyes, their gaze as disconcertingly direct as a child's. His hair, its basic undistinguished brown now flecked with silvery-grey highlights at the temples, was naturally curly, and the wind ~ossed it back and forth like frantic wavelets in a storm scene on a Greek vase.

  A few hundred metres astern of the ship, the full moon was reflected in the sea's unstable surface. The shuddering patch of brightness had an eerie illusion of depth, as if created by a gigantic searchlight aimed upwards from the ocean bed. It was deep here, off the eastern coast of the island, where the mountains plunged down to meet the sea and then kept going. Zen stood breathing in the wild air and scanning the horizon for some hint of their landfall. But there was nothing to betray the presence of the coast, unless it was the fact that the darkness ahead seemed even more unyielding, solid and impenetrable.

  The steward had knocked on the cabin door to wake him twenty minutes earlier, claiming that their arrival was imminent. Emerging on deck, Zen had expected lights, bustling activity, a first view of his destination. But there was nothing. The ship might have been becalmed in midocean.

  He didn't care. He felt weightless, anonymous, stripped of al] superfluous baggage. Rome was already inconceivably distant. Sardinia lay somewhere ahead, unknown, a blank. As for the reasons why he was there, standing on the deck of a Tirrenia Line ferry at five o'clock in the morning, they seemed utterly unreal and irrelevant.

  When he looked again, it was over. The wall of darkness ahead had divided in two: a high mountain range below, dappled with a suggestion of contours, and the sky above, hollow with the coming dawn. Harbour lights emerged from behind the spit of land which had concealed them earlier, now differentiated from the open sea and the small bay beyond. Reading them like constellations, Zen mapped out quays and jetties, cranes and roads in the halflight. Things were beginning to put on shape and form, to wake up, get dressed and make themselves presentable.

  The moment had passed. Soon it would be just another day.

  Down beiow in the bar, the process was already well advanced. A predominantly male crowd, more or less dishevelled and bad-tempered, clustered around a sleepy cashier to buy a printed receipt which they then took to the gar and traded in for a plastic thimble filled with strong black coffee. On the bench seats all around young people were awakening from a rough night, rubbing their eyes, scratching their backs, exchanging little jokes and caresses. Zen had just succeeded in ordering his coffee When a robotic voice from the tannoy directed all drivers to ake their way to the car deck to disembark. He downed the coffee hurriedly, scalding his mouth and throat, before heading down into the bowels of the ship.

  The vehicles bound for this small port of call on the way to Cagliari, the ship's destination, were almost exclusively commercial and military. Neither category took the slightest notice of the signs asking drivers not to switch on their engines until the bow doors had been opened. Zen made ' his way through clouds of diesel fumes to his car, sand' wiched between a large lorry and a coach filled with military conscripts looking considerably less lively than they had the night before, when they had made the harbour at Civitavecchia ring with the forced gaiety of desperate men.

  He unlocked the door and climbed in. Fausto Arcuto had done him well, there was no question about that. Returning to the Rally Bar the previous afternoon, Zen had collected an envelope containing a set of keys and a piece of paper reading 'Outside Via Florio, 6g'. He turned the paper over and wrote, 'Many thanks for prompt delivery.

  The Parrucci affair has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with you. Regards.' He handed this to the barman and walked round the corner to Via Florio.

  There was no need to check the house number. The car, a white Mercedes saloon with cream leather upholstery, stood out a mile among the battered utility compacts of the Testaccio residents. It had been fitted with Zurich number plates, fairly recently to judge by the bright scratches on the rusty nuts. No registration or insurance documents were displayed on the windscreen, but this would have been a bit much to expect at such short notice. Zen took out his wallet and inspected the Swiss identity card in the name of Reto Gurtner which he had retained following an undercover job six years earlier. It was a fake, but extremely high quality, a product of the secret services' operation at Prato where, it was rumoured, a large number of the top forgers in the country offered their skills to SISMI in lieu of a prison sentence. The primitive lighting and Zen's constrained pose made the photograph look like a police mug-shot, not surprisingly, since it had been taken on the same equipment. Herr Gurtner of Zurich looked capable of just about anything, thought Zen, even framing an innocent man to order.

  As he sat there, muffied by the Mercedes' luxurious coachwork from the farting lorries and buses all around, Zen reflected that whatever happened in Sardinia, he had at least been able to clear up his outstanding problems in Rome before leaving. The Volante patrol summoned by his 113 call from the flat had arrested a man attempting to escape in the red Alfa Romeo. He tumed out to be one Giuliano Acciari, a local hoodlum with a lengthy criminal record for housebreaking and minor thuggery. Zen recognized him as the man who had picked his pocket in the bus queue, although he did not mention this to the police. Acciari was unarmed, and a search failed to turn up the shotgun which he was assumed to have dumped upon hearing the sirens. But the police were holding Acciari for the theft of the Alfa Romeo, and had assured Zen that they would spare no effort to extract any information he might have as to the whereabouts of Vasco Spadola.

  A series of shudders and a change in the pitch of the turbines announced that the ship had docked, but another ten minutes passed before a crack of daylight finally penetrated the murky reaches of the car deck. The coaches and lorries to either side of Zen rumbled into motion, and then, too soon, it was his turn.

  Zen had learnt to drive back in the late fifties, but he had never really developed a taste for it. As the roads filled up, speeds increased and drivers' tempers shortened, he had seen no reason to change his views, although he was careful to keep them to himself, well aware that they would be considered dissident if not heretical. But in the present case there had been no alternative: he couldn't drag anyone else along to act as his chauffeur, and it would not be credible for Herr Reto Gurtner, the wealthy burgher of Zurich, to travel through the wilds of Sardinia by public transport.

  Zen's style behind the wheel was similar to that of an elderly peasant farmer phut-phutting along at zo kph in a clapped-out Fiat truck with bald tyres and no acceleration, blithely oblivious to the hooting, light-flashing hysteria building up in his wake. The drive from Rome to the port at Civitavecchia had been a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal, but getting off the ferry presented even greater problems of clutch control and touch-steering than had the innumerable traffic lights of the Via Aurelia, at each of which the Mercedes had seemed to take fright like a horse at a fence.

  Having stalled three times and then nearly rammed the side of the ship by over-revving, Zen finally managed to negotiate
the metal ramp leading to Sardinian soil, or rather the stone jetty to which the ferry was moored.

  Rather to his surprise, there were no formalities, no passports, no customs. But bureaucratically, of course, he was still in Italy.

  It was Zen's first visit to the island. In Italy all police officials have to do a stint in one of the three 'problem areas' of the country, but Zen had chosen the Alto Adige rather than Sicily or Sardinia, because from there he could easily get back to Venice to see his mother.

  The port amounted to no more than a couple of wharves where the ferries to and from the mainland touched once a week and Russian freighters periodically unloaded cargoes of timber pulp for the local papermill. At the end of the quay a narrow, badly-surfaced road curved away between outcrops of jagged pink rock. Zen drove through a straggling collection of makeshift houses that never quite became a village and along the spit of land projecting out to the harbour from the main coastline. The sun was still hidden behind the mountains, but the sky overhead was clear, a delicate, pale wintry blue. Seagulls swept back and forth foraging for food, their cries pealing out in the crisp air.

  As he drove through the small town where the road inland crossed the main coastal highway, Zen's instinct was to stop the car, drop into a cafe and start picking up the clues, sniffing the air, getting his bearings. But he couldn't, for in Sardinia he was not Aurelio Zen but Reto Gurtner, and although he had as yet only a vague idea of Gurtner's character, he was sure that pausing to soak up the atmosphere formed no part of it. Or rather, he was sure that that was what the locals would assume, and it was their view of things that mattered. A rich Swiss stopping his Mercedes outside some rural dive for an earlymorning cappuccino would instantly become a suspect Swiss, and that of all things was the one Zen could least afford. He must not let the clear sky, pure air and earlymorning sense of elation go to his head, he knew. In those mountains blocking off the sun, turning their back on the sea, lived men who had survived thousands of years of foreign domination by using their wits and their intimate knowledge of the land. Generations of policemen, occasionally supplemented by the army, had been drafted there in a succession of attempts to break the complex, archaic, unwritten rules of the Codice Barbaricine and impose the laws passed in Rome. They had failed. Even Mussolini's strong-arm tactics, successful against the largely urban Mafia, had been ineffectual with these shepherds, who could simply vanish into the mountains. The mass arrests of their relatives in raids on whole villages merely served to strengthen the hands of the outlaws by making them into local folk heroes. Any collaboration with the authorities was considered treachery of the most vile kind and punished accordingly. To Sardinians, mainland Italians were either policemen, soldiers, teachers, tax gatherers, pureaucrats or, more recently, tourists. They stayed for a while, took what they wanted, and then left, as ignorant as when they had arrived of the local inhabitants, the harsh brand of Latin they spoke and the complex and often violent code for resolving conflicts among shepherds whose flocks roamed freely across the open mountains.