Vendetta az-2

by Michael Dibdin

  Even before the Mercedes had come to a complete halt, the gate started to swing open. Zen pressed his foot down on the accelerator and the car, still in third gear, promptly stalled. Managing to restart it at the third attempt, he drove through the barrier, only to find his way blocked by a second gate, identical to the first, which had meanwhile closed behind him, trapping the car between the wiremesh fencing and a parallel inner perimeter of razorbarbed wire. Remote-control cameras mounted on the inner gateposts scanned the Mercedes with impersonal curiosity. After about thirty seconds the inner gate swung silently open, admitting Zen to the late Oscar Burolo's private domain.

  The narrow strip of tarmac wound lazily up the hillside.

  After about fifty metres, Zen spotted the line of stumpy metal posts planted at irregular intervals, depending on the contours of the land, which marked the villa's third and most sophisticated defence of all: a phase-seeking microwave fence, invisible, intangible, impossible to cross undetected. Within the triply-defended perimeter, the whole property was protected by heat-seeking infra-red detectors, a move-alarm TV system and microwave radar.

  All the experts were agreed that security at the Villa Burolo was, if anything, excessive. It just hadn't been sufficient.

  Oscar's private road continued to climb steadily upwards, smashing its way through ancient stretches of dry-stone walling that were almost indistinguishable from outbreaks of the rock that was never far from the surface, loose boulders of all sizes lying scattered about like some kind of crop, but in fact nothing grew there except a low scrub of juniper, privet, laurel, heather, rosemary and gorse, a prickly stubble as tough and enduring as the rocks themselves.

  Finally the land levelled out briefly, then fell away more steeply to a hollow where the house appeared, sheltered from the bitter northerly winds. From this angle, the Villa Burolo seemed a completely modern creation. The south and east sides of the original farmhouse were concealed by new wings containing the guest suites, kitchen, scullery, laundry room, garage and service accommodation. To the right, in a quarry-like area scooped out of the hillside, was the helicopter landing pad and a steel mast housing the radio beacon for night landings and aerials for Oscar's extensive communications equipment.

  Zen parked the Mercedes and walked over to the main entrance, surmounted by a pointed arch of vagueli Moorish appearance. There was no bell or knocker iri sight, when the door opened at his approach and th~ caretaker appeared, Zen realized that it had been absurd to expect one. No one dropped in unexpectedly at the Villa Burolo, not when their every movement from the entrance gate to the front door was being monitored by four independent electronic surveillance systems.

  As soon as he set eyes on Alfonso Bini, Zen knew why the caretaker had been ruled out as a suspect virtually from the start. Bini was one of those men so neutered by a lifetime of service that it was difficult to imagine them being able to tie their own shoe-laces unless instructed to do so. He greeted the distinguished foreign visitor with pallid correctness. Yes, Dottor Confalone had explained the situation. Yes, he would be glad to show Signo'r Gurtner around.

  No doubt on Confalone's instructions, the tour started with the new wing, in order to dispel any idea that the property was in any way primitive or rustic. Zen patiently endured an interminable exhibition of modern conveniences, ranging from en suite jacuzzis and a fully equipped gymnasium to a kitchen that would have done credit to a three-star hotel. In the laundry room, a frightenedlooking woman was folding towels. Zen guessed that this was the caretaker's wife, although Bini ignored her as though she was just another of the appliances stacked in neatly forbidding ranks along the wall. The only aspect of all this which was of any interest to Zen was a small room packed with video monitors and banks of switches.

  'Security?' he queried.

  Bini nodded and pointed to a row of red switches near fhe door, labelled with the names of the various alarm systems. The only ones switched on were the field sensors on the inner perimeter fence and the microwave radar.

  'So someone has to be here all the time?' Zen asked.

  Bini made a negative tutting sound.

  'Only if you want to check the screens. If any of the systems picks up anything irregular, an alarm goes off.'

  He threw a switch marked 'Test'. A chorus of electronic shrieks rose from every part of the building.

  'Very impressive,' murmured Zen. 'My client certainly need have no worries about anyone breaking in.'

  The caretaker said nothing. His face was set so hard it looked as though it might crack.

  Once the villa's luxury credentials had been established, Zen was taken into the older part of the house to appreciate its aesthetic qualities. A short passageway cut through the thick outer walls of the original farm brought them into a large lounge furnished with leather armchairs, inlaid hardwood tables, Afghan carpets and bookcases full of antique bindings. The head of a disgruntled-looking wild boar emerged from the stonework above an enormous open fireplace as though the animal had charged through the wall and got stuck.

  Zen walked over to a carved rosewood gun-rack near the door and inspected the shotguns on display, including an early Beretta and a fine Purdy.

  'Do they go with the property?' he asked.

  The caretaker shrugged.

  'There seems to be one missing,' Zen pursued, indicating the empty slot.

  Bini turned pointedly away towards the sliding doors opening on to the terrace.

  'What's this?' Zen called after him, pointing to a wooden hatch in the flooring.

  'The cellar,' replied the caretaker tonelessly.

  'And next door?'

  Bini pretended not to hear. Ignoring him, Zen walked through the doorway into the dining room of the villa. In the lounge, the stones of the original walls had been left uncovered as a design feature, but here they had been plastered and painted white. Zen looked around the room that was horribly familiar to him from the video. It was a shock, somehow, to find the walls not splashed and flecked and streaked with blood, but pristine and spotless.

  A shuffling in the doorway behind him announced the caretaker's presence.

  'Fresh paint?' Zen queried, sniffing the air.

  Just for a moment, something stirred into life in the old man's passive gaze. Angelo Confalone would have briefed him carefully, of course. 'Say nothing about what happened! Don't mention Burolo's name! Just keep your mouth shut and with any luck you might keep your job.'

  Bini had done his best to obey these instructions so far, but now the strain was beginning to show.

  'Nice and clean,' Zen commented approvingly.

  The caretaker's mouth cracked open in a ghastly grin.

  'My wife, she cleans everything, every day…'

  Zen nodded. He had read the investigators' reports on the couple. Giuseppina Bini was one of those elderly women who, having grown up when doctors were expensive and often ineffective, strove obsessively to keep the powers of sickness and death at bay by banishing their agents, dirt and dust, from every corner of the house. This had made it virtually certain that the dried spots of blood found on the dining room floor and on the steps leading to the cellar must have been deposited by the lightlywounded killer. In which case, thought Zen, he must have destroyed the discs and tapes after the murders, despite the horrendous risks involved in staying at the scene once ghe alarm had been raised and the police were on their way. It didn't make any sense, he told himself for the fiftieth time. If the object was to destroy both Burolo and his records, surely the killer would either have used a silenced weapon or eliminated Bini and his wife as well, thus giving himself ample time to erase Burolo's records before making good his escape. And if the discs and tapes had been erased after they were seized by the Carabinieri -the long arm of Palazzo Sisti would no doubt have been capable of this – then why did the killer make his way down to the cellar and ransack the shelves at all?

  It made no sense, no sense at all, although Zen had a tantalizing feeling that the solutio
n was in fact right under his nose, simple and obvious. But that was no concern of his in any case. His reason for visiting the villa had nothing to do with viewing the scene of the crime. Nevertheless, for the sake of appearances he asked Bini to show him the cellar before they went outside. The caretaker duly levered up a brass ring and lifted the hatch to reveal a set of worn stone steps leading down.

  'It's not locked?' Zen asked.

  Bini clicked a switch on the wall and a neon light flickered into life below.

  'There are no locks here,' he said. 'If you keep your jewels in a safe, you don't need to lock the jewel case.'

  The cellar was large, stretching the entire width of th~original farm. Zen sniffed the air.

  'Nice and fresh down here.'

  The caretaker indicated a narrow fissure at floor level.

  'The air comes in there. They used to cure cheeses and hams here in the old days. Even in the summer it stays cool.'

  Zen nodded. This constant temperature was no doubt why Oscar had used the place as a storage vault. But now the twin neon bars illuminated an empty expanse of whitewashed walls and bare stone floor. There was nothing to show that this had once been the nerve-centre of an operation which had apparently succeeded in fulfilling the alchemist's dream of turning dross into gold.

  Once they got above ground again, the caretaker led Zen out on to the terrace.

  'The swimming-pool,' he announced.

  Wild follies and outrageous whims die with the outsized ego that created them, and their corpses make depressing viewing. Even drained and boarded over, a swimmingpool is still a swimming-pool, but Oscar's designer beach was an all-or-nothing affair. Once the plug had been pulled and the machinery turned off, it stood revealed for what it was: a tacky, pretentious monstrosity. The transplanted sand was dirty and threadbare, the rocks showed their cement joints, and the mystery of those azure depths stood revealed as a coat of blue paint applied to the vast concrete pit where the body of some small animal lay drowned in a shrinking puddle of water.

  'We can get everything going again,' Bini assured his visitor. 'It's all set up.'

  But he sounded unconvinced. Even if some crazy foreigner did buy the place, nothing would ever be the same again. Villa Burolo was not a house, it was a performance. Now the star was dead it would always be a flop.

  'Well, it certainly seems to be a very pleasant and impressive property,' Zen remarked with a suitably Swiss lack of enthusiasm. 'I'll just have a look around the grounds, on my own.'

  Bini turned back into the house, clearly relieved that his ordeal was over.

  When he had gone, Zen strolled slowly along the terrace, rounding the comer of the original farmhouse.

  Despite the encircling wire, there was no sense of being in a guarded enclosure, for the boundaries of the property had been cleverly situated so as to be invisible from the villa. The view was extensive, ranging from the sea, across the wide valley he had crossed in the Mercedes, to the mountain slopes where the village was just visible as an intrusive smudge.

  When he reached the dining-room window, Zen looked round to ensure that he was unobserved, then crouched down to examine the slight discolouration of the flagstones marking the spot where Rita Burolo had bled to death. Another thing that made no sense, he thought.

  None of the investigators had commented on the remarkable fact that the murderer had made no attempt to find out whether Signora Burolo was dead or not. As it happened, she had gone into an irreversible coma by the time she was found, but how was the killer to know that? A few minutes either way, a stronger constitution or a lesser loss of blood, and the Burolo case would have been solved before it began.

  Nor was this the only instance in which the killer had displayed a most unprofessional carelessness. For although Oscar Burolo had concealed video equipment about the villa to tape the compromising material he stored in the vault, he camouflaged these clandestine operations behind a very public obsession with recording poolside frolics and informal dinner parties. Thus no attempt had been made to disguise the large video camera mounted on its tripod in the corner of the dining room. In the event, no glimpse of the murderer had been recorded on the tape, but how could he have been absolutely sure of that? And if there was even the slightest possibility that some damning clue had been captured by the camera, why had he made no attempt to remove or destroy the tape?

  Once again, Zen felt his reason swamped by the sense of something grossly abnormal about the Burolo case. What did this almost supernatural indifference indicate, if not the killer's knowledge that he was invulnerable? There was no need for him to take precautions. The efforts of the police and judiciary were as vain as Oscar Burolo's expensive security measures. The murderer could not be caught any more than he could be stopped.

  He walked back along the terrace to the west face of the villa. Beyond the sad ruins of the pool, the land sloped steeply upwards towards the lurid forest he had noticed earlier. The trees were conifers of some kind, packed together in a tight, orderly mass that looked like a reafforestation project. Beyond them lay the main mountain range, a mass of shattered granite briefly interrupted by a smooth grey wall, presumably a dam. Zen continued along the terrace to the wall which concealed the service block and helicopter pad, a half-hearted imitation of the traditional pasture enclosures, higher and with the stones cemented together. On the other side was a neat kitchen garden with a system of channels to carry water to the growing vegetables from the hosepipe connected to an outside tap. Zen took a path leading uphill towards a group of low concrete huts about fifty metres away from the house and partially concealed by a row of cherry trees.

  As he passed the line of trees, a low growl made the air vibrate with a melancholy resonance that brought Zen out in goose-flesh. There were three huts, a small one and two large structures which backed on to an enclosure of heavyduty mesh fencing. Both of these had metal doors mounted on runners. One of them was slightly open, and it was from here that the noise had come.

  The inside of the hut was in complete darkness. A hot, smothering, acrid odour filled the air. Something rustled restlessly in the further reaches of the dark. As Zen's eyes gradually adjusted, he made out a figure bending over a heap of some sort on the ground. The resonant vibration thrilled the air again, like a giant breathing stertorously in a drunken slumber. The bending figure suddenly whirled round, as though caught in some guilty act.

  'Who are you?'

  Zen advanced a step or two into the hut.

  'Stay there!'

  The man walked towards him with swift, light stridei.

  He was short and stocky, with wiry black hair and the fac~: of a pugnacious gnome.

  'What are you doing?'

  'Looking over the house.'

  'This is not the house.'

  Zen switched on his fatuous Swiss smile. 'Looking over the property, I should have said.'

  The man was staring at him with an air of deep suspicion.

  'Who are you?' he repeated.

  Zen held out his hand, which was ignored.

  'Reto Gurtner.'

  'You're Italian?'

  'Swiss.'

  The low growl sounded out again. Inside the hut, its weight of emotion seemed even greater, an expression of grief and loss that was almost unbearable.

  'What was that noise?' Zen asked.

  The man continued to eye him with open hostility, as though trying to stare him out.

  'A lion,' he said at last.

  'Ah, a lion.'

  Zen's tone remained politely conversational, as though lions were an amenity without which no home was complete.

  'Where in Switzerland?' the man demanded.

  He was wearing jeans and a blue tee-shirt. A large hunting knife in a leather sheath was attached to his belt.

  His bare arms were hairy and muscular. A long white scar ran in a straight line from just below his right elbow to the wrist.

  'From Zurich,' Zen replied.

  'You want to buy the ho
use?'

  'Not personally. I am here on behalf of a client.'

  The words of the young man at Palazzo Sisti echoed in his mind. 'You will visit the scene of the crime, interview witnesses, interrogate suspects. In the course of your investigations you will discover concrete evidence demolishing Furio Padedda's alibi and linking him to the murder of Oscar Burolo.

  All this will take no more than a few days at the most.'

  Something inconceivably huge and fast passed overhead, blocking out the light for an instant like a rapid eclipse of the sun. An instant later there was an earthshattering noise, as if a tall stone column had collapsed on top of the hut. Even after the moment had passed, the rumbles and echoes continued to reverberate in the walls and ground for several seconds.

  The lion-keeper was on his knees at the far end of the hut, bent over the heap on the ground. Zen started towards him, his shoes rustling on the straw underfoot.

  'Stay there!' the man shouted.

  Zen stopped. He looked around the hot, still, fetid gloom of the hut. Two pitchforks, some large plastic buckets, a shovel and lengths of rope and chain were strewn about the floor in disorder. A coiled whip and a pump-action shotgun hung from nails hammered into the roof supports.

  'What was that?' Zen called.

  The man got to his feet.

  'The air force. They come here to practise flying low over the mountains. When Signor Burolo was…'

  He broke off.

  'Yes?' Zen prompted.

  'They didn't bother us then.'

  I bet they didn't, thought Zen. A few phone calls and a hefty contribution to the officers' mess fund would have seen to that.

  The low melancholy growl was repeated once more, a feeble echo of the jet's brief uproar, like a child feebly imitating a word it does not understand.

  It does not sound happy, the lion,' Zen observed.

  'It is dying.'

  'Of what?'

  'Of old age.'

  'The planes disturb it'

  'Strangers too.'