A community like this, a mentally ill relative would be,~ perpetual source of shame.
He released the handbrake of the Mercedes and put the gear-leaver into neutral. Then he got out and started to, push with all his might, struggling to overcome the vehicle's inertia and the slight inclin:. leading up to th: main street. His headache sprang back into achve life and his aching limbs protested. After a violent effort the c.ir rolled on to the cracked concrete slabs of the street. Zen turned the wheel so that it was facing downhill, then got moving and jumped back inside. Soon the car was rolliny, quite fast down the steeply inclined main street and round the curve leading out of the village. He wasn't in the clenr yet, not by a long way, but he was exhilarated by his initial success. By the time he reached the new houses on the outskirts, the car was travelling as fast as he would wanted to go anyway. He even had to use the horn several times to warn groups of villagers of his silent approach.
When I saw him leaving I thought everything was lost. l'd followed him everywhere, gun in hand, flitting through the shadows like a swift at dusk. All for nothing. There was always someone there, foiling my plans, as though some god protected him! And now he was beyond my reach.
He thought he was safe, I thought I'd failed. What neither of us understood was that his death was already installed in him, lodged in his body like our sins in the Bleeding Heart above the fireplace. I used tn think the Ireart was from one of the pigs father hgd slaughtered. I kept expecting to find the beast's guts on another wall and its cock and balls nailed to the door. Once the lunp went out in the middle of a thunderstorm and Mother made me get down on my knees and pray to be forgiven or God would strike us dead on the spot. So I knelt to the great pig in the sky whosefarts terrifi'ed mother, praying it wouldn't shit all over us.
Which is just what it did, a little later on. Be careful what you pray for. You might give God ideas.
I wandered off, neither knowing nvr caring where I went. All places were equal noxo. Mygeet brought me here, like a horse that know,s its own way home. He would be far away, I thought, speeding through the corridors of light in his big white car.
But there was only one exit from the maze in which we both were trapped. Even as I despaired, he was on his way there, bringing me the death I needed.
Sunday, 11.20 – 13.25
It was only as he approached the series of hairpin bends by which the road descended from the village that Zer: realized Vasco Spadola might well have sabotaged the Mercedes's brakes as well as its engine. By then the car was doing almost ~o kph and accelerating all the time.
The brakes engagea normally, and a moment later Zen saw that his fears had been groundless. Spadola's exacting sense of what was due to him made it unthinkable that he would choose such an indirect and mechanical means ot executing his revenge. His desires were urgent and personal. They had to be satisfied personally, face to face, like a perverted sex act.
The car drifted downhill in a luxurious silence cushioned by the hum of the tyres and the hushing of thc wind. The hairpin bends followed one another with bareli a pause. The motion reminded Zen of sailing on the Venetian lagoons, continually putting the boat about from one tack to the other as he negotiated the narrow channels between the low, muddy islets. He felt strangely exhilarated by that moment when life and death had seemed balanced on the response of a brake lever, as on the toss of a coin. In Rome, when he first sensed that someone was on his trail, he had felt nothing but cold, clammy terror, a paralysing suffocation. But here in this primitive landscape what was happening seemed perfectly natural and right. This is what men were made for, he thought. The rest we have to work at, but this comes naturaly. This is what we are good at.
Even in this euporic state, howtever, he realized that some men were better at it than others, and that Vasco gpadola was certainly too good for him. If he was to survive, he had to start thinking. Fortunately his brain seemed to be working with exceptional clarity, despite the pangover. There was as yet no sign of pursuit on the road above, but as soon as Spadola emerged from the hotel he was bound to notice that the Mercedes was gone, and to realize that it could only have moved under the force of gravity. All he needed to do after that was follow the road downhill, and sooner or later – and it was likely to be sooner rather than later – he would catch up.
Below, the road wound down to the junction where Zen had stopped to consult the map on his way to the Villa Burolo twenty-four hours earlier. On the other side of the junction, he remembered, an unsurfaced track led to the station built to serve the village in the days when people were prepared to walk four or five kilometres to take advantage of the new railway. This station was Zen's goal.
There was bound to be a telephone, and the stationmaster, owing his allegiance – and more in.portantly his job – not to the locals but to the state, was bound to let Zen use it. All Criminalpol officials were provided with a codeword, changed monthly, which acted as turn-key providing the user with powers to dispose of the facilities of the forces of order from one end of the country to the other. One brief phone call, and helicopters and jeeps full of armed police would descend on the area, leaving Spadola the choice of returning to the prison cell he had so recently vacated or dying in a hail of machine-gun fire. All Zen had to do was make sure the police arrived before Spadola.
He had banked on being able to freewheel the Mercedes all the way, but as soon as he got close enough to see the track, he noticed a feature not shown on the map: a low rise of land intervening between the road and the railway.
It was difficult to estimate exactly how steep it was from the brief glances he was able to spare as he approached the last of the hairpin bends. For a moment he was tempted tc~ let the car gather speed on the final straight stretch, gambling that the accumulated momentum would be enough to carry it over the ridge. But the risk was too great. If hi didn't make it, he would be forced to abandon the Mercedes at the bottom of the slope, in full view of the road, which would be tantamount to leaving a sign explaining his intentions. When Spadola arrived, he would simply drive along the track, easily overtaking Zen before he could reach the station on foot.
By now he was seconds away from the junction. The onIy alternative was to turn on to the main road, which ran gent]y downhill to the right. Trying to conserve speed, he took the hirn so fast that the tyres lost their grip on a triangular patch of gravel in the centre of the junction and the Mercedes started to drift sideways towards the ditch on the other side. At the last moment the steering abruptls came back, almost wrenching the wheel from Zen's hands.
He steered back to the right-hand side, thankful that therc was so little traffic on these Sardinian roads. As the car started to gather speed again, he glanced at the road winding its way up tn the village. Several hundred metres above, he spotted a small patch of bright yellow approach – ing the second hairpin. Then a fold of land rose between like a passing wave and he Iost sight of it.
The road stretched invitingly away in a gentle downward slope. Zen felt his anxieties being lulled by the car's smooth, even motion, but he knew that this sense of security was an illusion. Once on the main road, Spadola's Fiat would outstrip the engineless Mercedes in a matter of minutes, while every kilometre Zen travelled away from the station was a kilometre he would have to retrace painfully on foot. The car was not now the asset it had seemed, but a liability. He had to get rid of it, but how? If he left it by the roadside, Spadola would know he was close by. He pad to ditch it somewhere out of sight, thus buying time to get back to the station on foot while Spadola continued to scour the roads for the elusive white Mercedes. Unfortenately the barren scrub-covered hills offered scant possibilities for concealing a bicycle, let alone a car.
Up ahead he saw the junction with the side-road leading down to the Villa Burolo, but he did not take it, remembering that it bottomed out in a valley where he would be stranded. What he needed was a smaller, less conspicuous turn-off, something Spadola might overlook. But time was gptting desperately shor
t! He kept glancing compulsively in the rear-view mirror, dreading the moment when he saw the yellow Fiat on his tail. Once that happened, his fate would be sealed.
Almost too late, he caught sight of a faint dirt track opening off the other side of the road. There was no time for mature reflection or second thoughts. With a flick of his wrists, he swung the Mercedes squealing across the asphait on to the twin ruts of bare red earth. Within moments a low hummnck had almost brought the car to a halt, but in the end its forward momentum prevailed, and after that it was all Zen could do to keep it on the track, which curved back on itself, becoming progressively rougher and steeper. The steering-wheel writhed and twisted in Zen's hands until the track straightened out and ran down more gently into a holIow sunk between steep, rocky slopes where a small windowless stone hut stood in a grove of mangy trees.
Zen stopped the Mercedes at the very end of the track, out of sight of the main road. He got out and stood listening intently. The land curved up all around, containing the silence like liquid in a pot, its surface faintly troubled by a distant sound that might have been a fiying insect. Zen turned his head, tracking the car as it drove past along the road above, the engine noise fading away without any change in pitch or intensity. His shoulders slumped in relief. Spadola had not seen him turn off and had not noticed the tyre marks in the earth.
He walked over to the hut, a crude affair of stones piled one on top of the other, with a corrugated iron roof. He stooped down and peered in through the low, narrow open doorway. A faint draught carrying a strong smell of sheep blew towards him from the darkness within. It must once have been a shepherd's hut, used for storing cheese and curing hides, but was now clearly abandoned. Zen knelt down and wriggled inside, crouching on the floor of bare rock. The sheepy reek was overpowering. As his eyes adjusted to the obscurity, Zen found himself standing at the edge of a large irregular fissure in the rock. Holding his hand over the opening, he discovered that this was tke source of the draught that stirred the fetid air in the hut.
Then he remembered Turiddu saying that the whole area was riddled with caves which had once brought water down underground from the lake in the mountains. This idea of water was very attractive. His hangover had left him with the most atrocious thirst. But of course there was no more water in the caves since they had buiit the dam.
That was evidently why the hut had been abandoned, like so many of the local farms, including the one Oscar Burolo had bought for a song. Presumably this was one of the entrances to that system of caves. It was large enough to climb down into, but there was no saying what that impenetrable darkness concealed, a cosy hollow he could hide in or a sheer drop into a cavern the size of a church.
Nevertheless, he was strongly tempted to stay put. He felt safe in the hut, magically concealed and protected. In fact he knew it would be suicidal to stay. Indeed, he had already wasted far too much precious time. Before long, the road Spadola was following would start to go uphill, and he would know that Zen could not have passed that way. The network of side-roads would complicate his search slightly, but in the end a process of elimination was bound to lead him to this gully and the stranded Mercedes. The first thing he would do then would be to search the hut.
But this knowledge didn't make the alternative any more appealing. The idea of setting out on foot across country with only the vaguest idea nf where he was going was something Zen found quite horrifying. His preferred view of nature was through the window of a train whisking him from one city to another. Man's contrivances he understood, but in the open he was as vulnerable as a fox in the streets, his survival skills non-existent, his native cunning an irrelevance. Nothing less than the knowledge that his life was at stake could have impelled him to leave the hut and start to climb the boulder-strewn slope opposite.
He laboured up the hillside, using his hands to scramble up the steeper sections, grasping at rocks and shrubs, his clothes and shoes already soiled with the sterile red dirt, the leaden sky weighing down on him. He felt terrible. His limbs ached, thirst piagued him and his headache had swollen to monstrous dimensions. Half-way to the top he stopped to rest. As he stood there, panting for breath, cruelly aware how unfit he was for this kind of thing, his brain blithely presented him with the information it had withheld earlier. The anonymous note left under the windscreen-wiper of the Mercedes had claimed that Padedda's whereabouts on the night of the Burolo murders was known to 'the Melega clan of Orgosolo'. It was that name which had seemed to authenticate the writer's allegations. Antonio Melega, Zen belatedly remembered, was the young shepherd who had been buried a few days after the abortive kidnapping of Oscar Burolo, having been run over by an unidentified vehicle.
The faint hum of a passing car stirred the heavy silence.
The main road was still out of sight, and there was no particular reason to suppose that the vehicle had been Spadola's yellow Fiat. But the incident served as a reminder of Zen's exposed position on the hillside, above the hollow where the Mercedes stood out as prominently as a trashed refrigerator in a ravine. Putting every other thought out of his head, Zen attacked the slope as though it were an enemy, kicking and punching, grunting and cursing, until at last he reached the summit and the ground levelled off, conceding defeat.
Before him the landscape stretched monotonously away towards undesirable horizons. Zen trudged on through a wilderness nf armour-plated plants that might have been dead for all the signs of life they showed. To take his mind off the brutal realities of his situation, Zen tried to work out how the information he had obtained might be brought to bear on the Burolo case. And the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he had stumbled on the key to the whole mystery.
The irony was that having been sent to Sardinia to rig the Burolo case by incriminating Furio Padedda, he now possessed evidence which strongly suggested that the Sardinian was in fact guilty. With the lions Oscar had bought to patrol the grounds of his villa after the kidnap attempt, had come a man calling himself Furio Pizzoni. His real name, Palazzo Sisti had discovered, was Padedda, and he was not from the Abruzzo mountains but from those around Nuoro. And Padedda's friends, according to Turiddu's drunken revelations the night before, in addition to the traditional sheep-rustling, were also engaged in its more lucrative modern variation, kidnapping. Turiddu's companions had shut him up at that point, but the implications were clear.
There had never been any question that the Melega family, with a dead brother to avenge, had an excellent motive for murdering Oscar Burolo, and the ruthless dedication to carry it out. What no one had been able to explain was how a gang of Sardinian shepherds had been able to gain entrance to the villa despite its sophisticated electronic defences, but given an ally within Burolo's gates this obstacle could have been easily overcome.
According to their testimony, Alfonso Bini and his wife pad been watching television in their quarters at the time pf the murder. If Padedda, instead of drinking in the ~llage, had concealed himself at the villa, there would pave been nothing to stop him entering the room from which the alarms were controlled and throwing the cutout switches. For that matter, he could have carried out ghe killings himself. The wound on his arm, which had lpoked suspiciously like a bullet mark to Zen, corresponded to the fact that the assassin had been lightly wounded by Vianello. Padedda would no doubt have used his own shotgun, familiar and reliable, to do the killings, removing one of Burolo's weapons to confuse the issue. Zen recalled the ventilation hole in the wall of the underground vault to which the trail of blood-stains led. Had that been searched for the missing weapon? And had ejected cartridges from the shotgun which Padedda kept hanging in the lions' house been compared with those found at the scene of the crime? Such checks should have been routine, but Zen knew only too well how often routine broke down under the pressure of preconceived ideas about guilt and innocence.
A car engine suddenly roared up out of nowhere and Zen threw himself to the ground. He lay holding his breath, his face pressed to the d
irt, cowering for cover in the sparse scrub as a yellow car flashed by a few metres in front of him. It seemed impossible that he had escaped notice, but the car kept going. A few moments later it had disappeared.
He stood up cautiously, rubbing the cuts on his face and hands caused by his crash-landing in the prickly shrubbery. Now that he knew it was there, he could see the thin grey line of asphalt cutting through the landscape just ahead of him. There was no time to lose. Spadola had taken the direction leading down into the valley. He would soon see that the Mercedes was not there and couldn't have climbed the other side, and would cross this road off his list, turn back and try again. Zen's only consolation was that Spadola had not yet found the abandoned car, and therefore did not know that Zen was on foot.
He ran across the raised strip of asphalt and on through the scrub on the other side, hurrying forward until the contours of the hill hid him from the road. He could see the railway now, running along a ledge cut into the slope below. Rather than lose height by climbing down to it, he continued across the top on a coverging course which he hoped would bring him more or less directly to the station.
Meanwhile the bits and pieces of the puzzle continued to put themselves together in his mind without the slightest effort on his part.
As with Favelloni, it was impossible to know whether Padedda had actually carried out the killings or mer ly provided access to the villa. On balance, Zen thought the latter more likely. The Melegas, like Vasco Spadola, would have wanted the satisfaction of taking vengeance in person. This also explained the bizarre fact that no attempt had been made to destroy the video tape. It was possible that such unsophisticated men, unlike Renato Favelloni, might have ignored the camera as just another bit of the incomprehensible gadgetry the house was full of. Afterwards the Melegas would have had no difficulty in persuading a few of the villagers to come forward and claim that they had seen Padedda in the local bar that evening, while the age-old traditions of omerta would stop anyone else from contradicting their testimony. It all made sense, it all fitted together.
Vendetta az-2 Page 22
