The man's tone was uncompromising. Zen pointed to the scar on his forearm.
'But it is still dangerous, I see.'
The man brushed past him towards the door.
'A very neat job, though,' Zen commented, following him out. 'More like a knife or a bullet than claws.'
'You know a lot about lions?' the keeper demanded sarcastically, as they emerged into the brilliant sunlight and pure air.
'Only what I read in the papers.'
The man walked over to the smaller hut and brought out a plastic bucket filled with a bloody mixture of hearts, lungs and intestines.
'I notice that you keep a shotgun in there,' Zen pursued, 'so I assume there is reason for fear.'
The man regarded him with blank eyes.
'There is always reason for fear when you are dealing with creatures to whom killing comes naturally.'
Seeing him standing there in open defiance, the bucket of guts in his hand, ready to feed the great beasts that he alor.e could manage, it was easy to see Furio Padedda's attraction for a certain type of woman. It was to these concrete huts that Rita Burolo had come to disport herself with the lion-keeper, unaware that their antics were being recorded by the infra-red video equipment her husband had rigged up under the roof.
How had Oscar felt, viewing those tapes which -according to gloating sources in the investigating magistrate's office – made hard-core porno videos look tame by comparison? Had his motive for making them been simple voyeurism, or was he intending to blackmail his wife? Was she independently wealthy? Had he hoped in this way h~ stave off bankruptcy until his threats forced 1'onorevole to intervene in his favour? Supposing he had mentioned the existence of the tapes to her, and she had passed on the information to her lover. To a proud and fiery Sardinian, the fact that his amorous exploits had been recorded for posterity might well have seemed a sufficient justification for murder. Or rather, Zen realized, as he sat moodily sipping his vernaccia, it could easily be made to appear that it had. Which was all that concerned him, after all.
The bar had emptied appreciably as the men drifted home to eat the meals their wives and mothers had shopped for that morning. Zen stared blearily at his watch, eventually deciphering the time as twenty to nine. He pushed his chair back, rose unsteadily and walked over to the counter, where the burly proprietor was rinsing glasses.
'When can I get something to eat?'
Reto Gurtner would have phrased the question more politely, but he had stayed behind at the table.
'Tomorrow,' the proprietor replied without looking up from his work.
'How do you mean, tomorrow?'
'The restaurant's only open for Sunday lunch out of season.'
'You didn't tell me that!'
'You didn't ask.'
Zen turned away with a muttered obscenity.
'There's a pizzeria down the street,' the proprietor added grudgingly.
Zen barged through the glass doors of the hotel. The piazza was deserted and silent. As he passed the Mercedes, Zen patted it like a faithful, friendly pet, a reassuring presence in this alien place. A roll of thunder sounded out, closer yet still quiet, a massively restrained gesture.
In the corner of the piazza stood the village's only public hone pox a high-tech glass booth perched there as if it hag jusf landed from outer space. Zen eyed it wistfully, but tge risk was just too great. Tania would have had time to think things over by now. Supposing she was off hand or indifferent, a cold compensation for her excessive warmth the day before? He would have to deal witg ppat eventually, of course, but not now, not here, with all the other problems he had.
The village was as still and dead as a ghost town. Zen shambled along, looking for the pizzeria. All of a sudden pe stopped in his tracks, then whirled around wildly, scanning the empty street behind him. No one. What had it been? A noise? Or just drunken fancy? 'They must have stumbled on something they weren't supposed to see,' the Carabiniere had said of the murdered couple in the camper. 'It can happen to anyone, round here. All you need is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
As the alcoholic mists in Zen's mind cleared for a moment, he had an image of a child scurrying along an alleyway running parallel to the main street, appearing at intervals in the dark passages with steps leading up. A child playing hide-and-seek in the darkness. But had he imagined it, or had he really caught sight of somethin8 out of the corner of his eye, on the extreme periphery of vision, something seen but not registered until now?
He shook his head sharply, as though to empty it of all this nonsense. Then set off again, a little more hurriedly now.
The pizzeria was just around the corner where the street curved downhill, among the new blocks on the outskirts of the village. The exterior was grimly basic -reinforced concrete framework, bare brickwork infill, adhesive plastic letters spelling 'Pizza Tavola Calda' on the window – but inside th place was bright, brash and cheerful, decorated with traditional masks, dolls, straw baskets and woven and embroidered hangings. To Zen's astonishment, the young man in charge even welcomed him warmly. Things were definitely looking up.
After a generous antipasto of local air-cured ham and salami, a large pizza and most of a flask of red wine, they looked even better. Zen lit a cigarette and looked around at the group of teenagers huddled conspiratorially in the corner, the table-top laden with empty soft-drink bottles.
If only he had had someone to talk to, it would have been perfect. As it was, his only source of entertainment was the label of the bottled mineral water he had ordered. This consisted of an assurance by a professor at Cagliari University that the contents were free of microbacteriological impurities, together with an encomium on its virtues that seemed to imply that in sufficient quantities it would cure everything but old age. Zen studied the chemical analysis, which listed among other things the abbassamento crioscopico, concentrazione osmotica and conducibilita elettrica specipca a x8'C. Each litre contained 0.00009 grams of barium. Was this a good thing or a bad thing?
The door of the pizzeria opened to admit the half-witted midget he had seen outside Confalone's office that morning. She was dripping wet, and Zen realized suddenly that the hushing sound he had been hearing for some time now, like static on a radio programme, was caused by a downpour of rain. The next instant a deafening peal of thunder rang out, seemingly right overhead. One of the teenagers shrieked in mock terror, the others giggled nervously. The beggar woman limped theatrically over to Zen's table and demanded money.
'I gave you something this morning,' Reto Gurtner replied in a tone of distaste.
The owner shouted angrily in Sardinian and the woman turned away with a face as blank as the wooden carnival masks hanging on the wall and went to sit on a chair near the door, looking out at the torrential rain. She must know a thing or two, thought Zen, wandering about from place to place, privileged by madness.
When the owner came to clear Zen's table, he apologized for the fact that he'd been bothered.
'I try to keep her out of here, but what can you do? She's got nowhere to go.'
'Homeless?'
The man shrugged.
'She's got a brother, but she won't live with him. Claims he's an impostor. She sleeps rough, in caves and shepherd's huts, even on the street. She's harmless, but quite mad. Not that it's surprising, after what happened to her.'
He made no effort to lower his voice, although the woman was sitting near by, perched on her chair like a large doll. Zen glanced at her, but she was still staring rigidly at the door.
'It's all right,' the owner explained. 'She doesn't understand Italian, only dialect.'
Zen eagerly seized this opportunity to talk.
'What happened to her?'
The young man shook his head and sighed.
'I wasn't around then, but people say she just disappeared one day, years ago. She was about fifteen at the time. The family said she'd gone to stay with relatives who'd emigrated to Tuscany. Then a few years ago her parents died in… in an accident. The
son was away doing his military service at the time. When the police went to the house they found Elia shut up in the cellar like an animal, almost blind, covered in filth and half crazy.'
Reto Gurtner looked suitably horrified by this example of Mediterranean barbarism.
'But why?'
The young man sighed.
'Now, you understand, this village is just like anywhere else. Televisions, pop music, motorbikes.'
He waved at the teenagers in the corner.
'The young people stay out till all hours, even the girls.
They do what they like. Twenty years ago it was different.
People say that Elia was seeing a man from a nearby farm.
Perhaps she stayed out too late one summer night, and…'
He broke off as the door banged open and three men walked in. The beggar woman sprang to her feet, staring at them like a wild animal about to pounce or fiee. One of the men spat a few words of dialect at her. She flinched as though he had struck her, then ran out. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
The three newcomers were wearing the local heavyweight gear, durable, anonymous and mass-produced, but there was nothing faceless or conventional about their behaviour. They took over the pizzeria as though it were the venue for a party being given in their honour. The leader, who had obviously had quite a lot to drink already, threw his weight around in a way that seemed almost offensively familiar, going behind the counter and sampling the various plates of toppings, talking continuously in a loud raucous voice. Zen could understand nothing of what was being said, but although the owner kept smiling and responded in the required jocular fashion, it seemed an effort, and Zen thought he would have been happier if the men had gone away.
Having done the rounds, chaffed the owner and his wife and grabbed a plate of olives and salami and a litre of wine, the trio seated themselves at the table next to Zen's.
Once their initial high spirits had subsided, their mood rapidly turned sombre, as though all three had immense grievances which could never be redressed. The leader in particular not only looked fiercely malcontent, but was scowling at Zen as though he was the origin of all his troubles. His bristly jet-black beard, curly hair and enormous hook nose gave him a Middle Eastern appearance, like a throwback to the island's Phoenician past. He reminded Zen of someone he had seen earlier, although he couldn't think who. From time to time, between gulped half glassfuls of wine, the man muttered in dialect to his companions, bitter interjections which received no reply.
Zen began to feel alarmed. The man was clearly drunk, his mood explosive and unpredictable, and he was staring at him more and more directly, as though beating up this stranger might be just what was needed to make his evening. To defuse the situation before it got out of hand, Zen leaned over to the three men.
'Excuse me,' he said in his best Reto Gurtner manner.
'Could you tell me if there's a garage round here?'
'A garage?' the man replied after a momentary hesitation. 'For what?'
Zen explained that his car was making a strange knocking noise and he was worried that it might break down.
'What kind of car7'
'A Mercedes.'
After a brief discussion in dialect with his companions, the man replied that Vasco did repairs locally, but he wouldn't have the parts for a Mercedes. Otherwise there was a mechanic in Lanusei, but he was closed tomorrow, it being Sunday.
'You're on holiday?' he asked.
As Zen recited his usual explanation of who he was and what he was doing, the man's expression gradually changed from hostility to sympathetic interest. After a few minutes he invited Zen to join them at their table. Zen hesitated, but only for a fraction of a moment. This was an invitation which he felt it would be decidedly unwise to refuse.
Three quarters of an hour and another flask of wine later, he was being treated almost like an old friend. The hook-nosed man, who introduced himself as Turiddu, was clearly delighted to have a fresh audience for his long and rather rambling monologues. His companions said hardly a word. Turiddu talked and Zen listened, occasionally throwing in a polite question with an air of wide-eyed and disinterested fascination with all things Sardinian. Turiddu's grievances, it turned out, were global rather than personal. Everything was wrong, everything was bad and getting worse. The country, by which he appeared t~› mean that particular part of the Oliastra, was in a total mess. It was a disaster. The government in Rome poure.i in money, but it was all going to waste, leaking awai through the sieve-like conduits of the development agencies, provincial agricultural inspectorates, the irrigation consortia and land-reclamation bodies.
'In the old days the landowner, he arranged everything, decided everything. You couldn't fart without his permission, but at least there was only one of him. Now we've got these new bosses instead, these pen-pushers in the regional government, hundreds and hundreds of them!
And what do they do? Just like the landowner, they look after themselves!'
Turiddu broke off briefly to gulp some more wine and accept one of Zen's cigarettes.
'And when they do finally get round to doing something, it's even worse! The old owners, they understood the land. It belonged to them, so they made damn sure it was looked after, even though we had to break our bums doing the work. But these bureaucrats, what do they know? All they do is sit in some office down in Calgliari and look at maps all day!'
Turiddu's companions sat listening to this harangue with indulgent and slightly embarrassed smiles, as though what he was saying was true enough but it was pointless and rather demeaning to mention it, particularly to a stranger.
'There's a lake up there in the mountains,' Turiddu continued, striking a match casually on his thumbnail. 'A river used to flow down towards the valley, where it disappeared underground into the caves. The rock down here is too soft, the water runs through it. So what did those bastards in Cagliari do? They looked at their maps, saw this river that seemed to go nowhere, and they said,
"Let's dam the lake, so instead of all that water going to waste we can pipe it down to Oristano to grow crops."'
Turiddu broke off to shout something at the pizzeria owner in Sardinian. The young man came over with an unlabeld bottle and four new glasses.
'Be careful,' he warned Zen with humorous exaggeration, tapping the bottle. 'Dynamite!'
'Dynamite my arse,' Turiddu grumbled when he had gone. 'I've got stuff at home, the real stuff, makes this taste like water.'
He filled the four tumblers to the brim, spilling some on the tablecloth, and downed his at one gulp.
'Anyway, what those clever fuckers in Cagliari didn't realize was that all that water from the lake didn't just disappear. It was there, underground, if you knew where fp look for it. All the farms round here were built over caves where the river ran underground. With that and a bit of fodder, you could keep cattle alive through the winter, then let them loose up in the mountains when spring came. But once that fucking dam was built, all the water – our water -went down the other side to those soft idle bastards on the west coast. As if they didn't have an easy enough life already! Oh, they paid us compensation, of course. A few lousy million lire to build a new house here in the village.
And what are we supposed to do here? There's no work. The mountains take what little rain there is, the winter pasture isn't worth a shit. What's the matter? You're not drinking.'
Zen obediently gulped down the liquid in his glass as the Sardinian had done, and almost gagged. It was raw grappa, steely, unfiltered, virtually pure alcohol.
'Good,' he gasped. 'Strong.'
Turiddu shrugged.
'I've got some at home makes this taste like water.'
The door of the pizzeria swung open. Zen looked round and recognized Furio Padedda, who had just walked in with another man. Zen turned back to his new companions, glad of their company, their protection.
'Tell me, why is that bit of forest on the other side of the valley so green? It al
most looks as though somenne was watering it.'
Turiddu gave an explosive laugh that turned into a coughing fit.
'They are! We are, with our water!'
He refilled all the glasses with grappa.
'The dam they built, it was done on the cheap. Bunch of crooks from Naples. It leaks, not much but all the time. On the surface the soil is dry, but those trees have roots that go down twenty metres or more. Down there it's like a marsh. The trees grow like geese stuffed for market.'
Zen glanced round at Furio Padedda and his companion, who were sitting near the door, drinking beer.
Despite his drunkenness, Turiddu had not missed Zen's interest in the newcomers.
'You know them?' he demanded with a contemptuous jerk of his thumb at the other table.
'One of them. We met today at the villa where he works.'
Turiddu regarded him with a stupified expression.
'That place? You're not thinking of buying it?'
Zen looked suitably discreet.
'My client will make the final decision. But it seems an attractive house.'
The three men glanced rapidly at each other, their looks dense with exchanged information, like deaf people communicating in sign language.
'Why, is there something wrong with it?'
Zen's expression remained as smooth as processed cheese. Turiddu struggled visibly with his thoughts for a moment.
'It used to belong to my family,' he announced finally.
'Before they took our water away.'
He stared drunkenly at Zen, daring him to disbelieve his story. Zen nodded thoughtfully. It might be true, but he doubted it. Turiddu was a bit of a fantasist, he guessed, a man with longings and ambitions that were too big for his small-town habitat but not quite big enough to give him the courage to leave.
The Sardinian laughed again. 'You saw the electric fences and the gates and all that? He spent a fortune on that place, to make it safe, the poor fool. And it's all useless!'
Zen frowned. 'Do you mean to say that the security system is defective in some way?'
But Turiddu did not pursue the matter. He was looking around with a vague expression, a cigarette whirh he had forgotten to light dangling from his lips.
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