Vendetta az-2

by Michael Dibdin

  The noises woke him, crashing sounds close at hand, their source invisible in the eerie gloom. He looked round wildly, forgetting for a merciful moment where he was.

  Then he saw the line of scuffed footmarks running back across the undulating surface and the dangling branches he had broken in his reckless flight, and understood. Far from vanishing into the trackless wastes of the forest, he had left a trail a child could have followed. But the creature following him was no child, and it was almost upon him.

  He knew this was the end. Physically exhausted by his ordeal, weakened by hunger, thirst and loss of blood, this final blow had crippled his morale as well. Further resistance was futile. Nothing he had done since leaving the village had made the slightest difference to the outcome.

  He might just as well have ordered a last drink and sat in the bar waiting to die. Yet to his disgust, for it seemed a m kind of weakness, a cowardice, he was unable to let things take their course even now. Instead he must stagger on through that sunken landscape, that lumber room of dead growth, without direction or purpose, out of control to the last.

  In this frame of mind, he was incapable of surprise, even when he stumbled across the path weaving through the forest like a road across the bed of a flooded valley.

  The trodden surface showed signs of recent use, no doubt by animals, though there were no signs of any droppings. In one direction the path ran downhill, presumably leading out of the lower flank of the forest. Zen turned the other way. Encroaching branches beside the path had already been broken off, and his own footsteps were invisible in the general disturbance of the forest floor. If Spadola went the wrong way when he reached the path, Zen would have gained amp]e time to find a secure sanctuary. Hope teased his heart, banishing the deathly calm of his fatalistic resignation.

  The path wound uphill in a lazily purposeful way that lulled Zen's attention, until suddenly he found himself standing on the brink of a deep chasm in the forest floor, scanning the trough of darkness in front of him. He could see nothing: no path, no ground, no trees. It was as if the world ended there.

  After standing there indecisively for some moments, he realized the ravine offered the hiding-place he had been seeking, if he could manage to scramble down the precipiious slope below him. Nevertheless, he had to overcome a strong reluctance to descend into ".hat black hole, although he knew this revulsion was the height of foolishness. It was not the dark he should be afraid of but Spadola. He lowered himseif on to a rocky outcrop and started to clamber down.

  At first the descent was easier than he had imagined, with numerous ledges and projections. But the further down he went, the fainter grew the glimmers of light fro the surface far above, until at length he could hardly make out his next foothold. The idea of losing his footing and plunging off into nothingness made his palms sweat and his limbs shake in a way that o~eatly increased the chances of this happening. The only measure of how deep the chasm was came from the falling rocks he dislodged.

  Gradually the clattering became briefer and less resonant, until he sensed rather than saw that he had reached the bottom.

  As his pupils dilated fully, he could just make out the hunched shapes of boulders all around, and realized that he was standing in the channel cut by the river which had flowed down from the lake above before the dam was built. N7 The huge rocks littering its bed would have been washed down in the former torrent's spectacular seasonal surges.

  When he heard the scurry of falling stones behind him, Zen's first thought was that the dam had given way and the black tide, unpenned, was surging towards him, sweeping away everything in its path. Then he realized the sound had come from above.

  Frantically, he began to pick his way down the riverbed, crawling round and over the shattered lumps of granite, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the killer on his trail. As soon as the noises of Spadola's descent ceased, Zen could go to ground in some obscure nook or cranny. It would take an army weeks to search that chaotic maze.

  But, to his dismay, the channel ended almost immediately, widening out into a circular gully closed off by a wall of dull white rock, rounded like the end of a bath. The foliage above was thinned out by this space where nothing grew, allowing a trace more light to filter down to the depths. Zen gazed at the freakish rock formation surrounding,him. He did not understand what could have caused it, but one thing was clear. The wall of smooth white rock was at least ten metres high and absolutely sheer. Zen couldn't possibly climb it, and with Spadola hard on his heels he couldn't turn back. He had fallen into a perfect natural trap, a killing ground from which there was no escape.

  The sound of tumbling rocks announced the approach of the hunter. With a weary slackness of heart, as though performing a duty for the sake of appearances, Zen knelt down and squeezed himself into a narrow crevice underneath a tilting boulder. As soon as Spadola reached the end of the gully, he would become aware that Zen could not have climbed out and must therefore be hiding nearby. He would flush him out almost at once. This time it really was the end. There was nothing to do but wait. He lay absolutely still, as though part of the rock was pressing in on him.

  'Well, fuck me!'

  Zen felt so lonely and scared that the words, the first he had heard since leaving the village, brought tears to his eyes. He was suddenly desperate to live, terrified of death, of extinction, of the unknown. How precious were the most banal moments of everyday life, precisely because they were banal!

  A might roar scoured the enclosed confines of the gully. As the shot echoed away, Spadola's peals of manic laughter could be heard.

  'Come on out, Zen! The game's over. Time to pay up.'

  The voice was close by, although Zen couid see nothing but a jumble of rocks.

  'Are you going to come out and die like a man, or do you want to play hide-and-seek? It's up to you, but if you piss me about I might just decide to kill you a little more slowly. Maybe a little shot in the balls, for openers. I'm not a vindictive man, but there are limits to my patience.'

  Like rats leaving a doomed ship, all Zen's faculties seemed to have fled the body wedged in its rocky tomb.

  He was incapable ot movement, speech or thought, already as good as dead.

  Spadola laughed.

  'Ah, so there you are! Decided to spare me the trouble, have you? Very wise.'

  Zen still couldn't see Spadola, but somehow he had been spotted. The anomaly didn't bother him. It seemed perfectly consistent with everything else that had happened. Footsteps approached. Zen tried to think of something significant in his last moments, and failed.

  Something stirred the air close to his face. Less than a metre away, close enough to touch, a boot hit the ground and a trousered leg swished past.

  'There's no point in trying to hide,' Spadola shouted, his voice echoing slightly. 'I can still see you. Let's just get it over with, shall we? It's been fun, but…'

  There was a loud gunshot, followed by a scream of rage and fury. Then two more shots rang out simultan- eously, one deafeningly close to Zen, the other a repetition of the first. Pellets bounced and rattled against the rocks, ricocheting like hailstones.

  It seemed impossible that the silence could ever recover from such a savage violation, but before long the echoes died away as though nothing had happened. Zen had no idea what had happened, so he waited a long time, sampling the silence, before emerging from his hiding-place.

  He found Spadola almost immediately, his body fiung backwards across the rocks, a limp, discarded carapace.

  Something had scooped a raw crater out of his belly, around which circles of lesser destruction spread out like ripples on a pond. The shotgun lay close by, wedged between two rocks.

  Zen searched dispassionately through the dead man's pockets until he found his lighter, then sat down on a rock and lit a cigarette. From this perch he could see the end of the gully. Beneath the wall of white rock the ground opened up to form a cavernous sluice funnelling downwards, the edges clea
n and rounded. As he sat there, the cigarette smouldering peacefully between his fingers, Zen recalled what Turiddu had said about the soft rocks and the hard rocks, and realized that the white surface closing off the gully was the limestone that overlaid the granite at this point, rubbed to a smooth curve by the whirling water before it disappeared underground into the pool of darkness at the base of the cliff which was now a main entrance to the cave system underlying the whole area.

  Something glinted in the shadows just inside the cavern. Like the immortal he had once seemed to be, playing God with the video of the Burolo killings, Zen made his way towards it as though immune to danger.

  The grey rock was stained with something sticky that, smelling it, he knew was drying blood. A double-barrel pump-action Remington shotgun lay near by. The metal was still warm. By the flickering flame of his cigarette lighter, Zen read the inscription engraved on the barrel: 251 'To Oscar, Christmas 1979, from his loving wife Rita.'

  Friday, 11.20 – 20.45

  'He threatened to kill me?'

  'Oh, yes! Me too, for that matter. But it's only talk. He has to call his mother if he finds a spider in the bath. Now if she'd said it we might have something to worry about.'

  The cafe on Via Veneto accurately reflected the faded glories of the street itself. The mellow tones of marble, leather and wood predominated. Dim lighting discreetly revealed the understated splendours of an establishment so prestigious it had no need to put on a show. Its famous name appeared everywhere, on the cups and saucers, the spoons, the sugar-bowl and ashtray, the peach-coloured napkins ar,d tablecloth and the staff' azure jackets. The waiters conducted themselves like family retainers, studiously polite yet avoiding any hint o1 familiarity. A sumptuous calm reigned.

  The cafe was too far from the Viminale to be one of the regular haunts of Ministry personnel, who in any case would have balked at paying 4'000 lire for a cup of coffee they could get elsewhere for 800, with a hefty dose of Roman pandemonium thrown in for free. This was one reason why Zen had invited Tania there for their first meeting since his return from Sardinia. The other was a desire he still didn't completely understand, to do things differently, to break free of old habits, to change his life, himself.

  'How did he find out?'

  She smiled, anticipating his reaction.

  'He hired a private detective.'

  'To follow you?'

  'To follow you!'

  So that was who Leather Jacket had been working for, thought Zen, not Spadola or Fabri, but Mauro Bevilacqua!

  Ironically, he might have considered that possibility earlier if it hadn't seemed wishful thinking to imagine that Tania's husband could have any reason to feel jealous ofhim.

  'He didn't want to admit even to the detective that his wife might be unfaithful,' Tania explained. 'He was afraid people would laugh at him and call him a cuckold.'

  'Which he wasn't, of course. Isn't, I mean.'

  'Well, it depends on how you look at it. According to the strictest criteria, a husband is a cuckold if his wife has even thought of being unfaithful.'

  They exchanged a glance.

  'In that case we're all cuckolds,' Zen replied lightly.

  'That's why Mauro would claim that his vigilance was completely justified.'

  This time they both laughed.

  Zen lit a Nazionale and studied the young woman sitting opposite him, her legs crossed, her right foot rising and falling gently in time to her pulse. Clad in the currently fashionable outfit of black mid-length coat, short black skirt and black patterned tights, with bright scarlet lipstick and short wet-look hair, she looked very different from the last time he had seen her. Not that he minded.

  The Tania he loved – he felt able to use the word now, at least to himself – was invulnerable to change, and 'as for this new image she had chosen to show the world, he found it exciting, sophisticated and sexy. A week ago he would have hated it, but the life which had almost miraculously been returned to him in Sardinia was no longer quite the same as it had been before he had passed through that ordeal.

  'But it must be a nightmare for you,' he said seriously. 'It was bad enough having to live there before, but now that his suspicions have been proven, or apparently proven…'

  'I don't live there any more.'

  For a moment they both remained silent, the news lying on the table between them like an unopened letter.

  Tania lifted the pack of Nazionali and shook a cigarette loose.

  'May I?'

  'I didn't know you smoked.'

  'I do now.'

  He held the lighter for her. She lit up and blew nut smoke self-consciously, like a schoolgirl.

  'He hit rne,. you see.'

  Zen signalled his shock with a sharp intake of breath.

  'So I hit him back. With the frying pan. It had hot fat in it. Not much, but enough to give him a nasty burn. When his mother found out I thought she'd go for me with the carving knife, but in the end she backed off and started babbling to herself in this creepy way, hysterical but very controlled, saying I was a northern witch who had put her son under a spell but she knew how to destroy my power.

  It scared me to death. I knew then that I had to leave.'

  'Where did you go?'

  He dropped the question casually, like the experienced interrogator that he was, as though it were a minor detail of no significance.

  'To a friend's.'

  'A friend's.'

  She took a notebook and pen from her handbag, wrote an address and handed it to him. He read, 'Tania Biacis, c/o Alessandra Bruni, Via dei Gelsi 47. Tel. 78847.'

  'It's in Centocelle. I'm staying there temporarily, until I find somewhere for myself. You know how difficult it is.'

  He nodded.

  'And Mauro?'

  'Mauro? Mauro's still living with his mamma.'

  Everything about her had a new edge to it, and Zen couldn't be sure that this wasn't an ironical reference to his own situation.

  Ignoring this, he said, 'That restaurant in Piazza Navona, it's open tonight.'

  She waited for him to spell it out.

  'Would you think of… I mean, I don't suppose you're free or anything, but…'

  'I'd love to.'

  'Really?'

  She laughed, this time without malice.

  'Don't look so surprised!'

  'But I am surprised.'

  Her laughter abruptly subsided.

  'So am I, to tell you the truth. I can't quite see how we got here. Still, here we are.'

  'Here we are,' he agreed, and signalled to the waiter.

  On the broad pavement outside, Zen pulled Tania against him and kissed her briefly on both cheeks in a way that might have been purely friendly, if they had been friends. She coloured a little, but said nothing. Then, having agreed to meet at the restaurant that evening, Tania hailed a taxi to take her to Palazzo di Montecitorio, the parliament building, where she had to run an errand for Lorenzo Moscati, while Zen returned to the Ministry on foot.

  The winter sunlight, hazy with air pollution, created a soothing warmth that eased the lingering aches in Zen's body. A surgeon in Nuoro had spent three hours picking shotgun pellets out of his limbs and lower back, but apart from those minor subcutaneous injuries and a slightly swollen ankle, his ordeal had left no permanent scars. He strolled along without haste, drinking in the sights and sounds. How precious it all seemed, how rich and various, unique and detailed! He spent five minutes watching an old man at work collecting -ardboard boxes from outside a shoe shop, deftly collapsing and fiattening each one. An unmarked grey delivery van with reflecting windows on he rear doors drove past with a roar and pulled in to the side of the street, squashing one of the cardboard boxes. he old man waved his fist impotently, then retrieved the ox, straightened it out and brushed it clean before adding it to the tall pile already tied to the antique pram he used as cart.

  Zen walked past the open doorway of a butcher's shop, rom which came a series of loud bangs and a s
mell of lood. The delivery van roared by and double-parked at he corner of the street, engine running. Outside a pet hop, a row of plastic bags filled with water were hanging om a rack. In each bag, a solitary goldfish twitched to and fro, trapped in its fragile bubble-world. A mechanical treet-cleaner rolled past, leaving a swathe of glistening sphalt in its wake, looping out round the obstruction caused by the grey van. No one got in or out of the van.

  Nothing was loaded or unloaded. A tough-looking young man, clean-shaven, with cropped hair sat behind the wheel, staring straight ahead. He paid no attention to Zen.

  Up in the Criminalpol suite on the third floor of the Ministry, the other officials were in the midst of a heated discussion with Vincenzo Fabri at its centre.

  'The British have got the right idea,' Fabri was prolaiming loudly. 'Catch them on the job and gun them down. Forget the legal bullshit.'

  'But that's different!' Bernardo Travaglini protested.

  'The IRA are terrorists.'

  'There's no difference! Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, they're our Northern Ireland! Except we're dumb enough to respect everyone's rights and do things by the book.'

  'That's not the point, Vincenzo,' De Angelis interrupted. 'Thatcher's got an absolute majority, she can do what she wants. But here in Italy we've got a democracy.

  You've got to take account of people's opinions.'

  'Screw people's opinions!' Fabri exploded. 'This is war!

  The only thing that matters is who is going to win, the state or a bunch of gangsters. And the answer is they are, unless we stop pissing about and match them for ruthlessness.'

  He caught sight of Zen sidling past and broke off suddenly.

  'Now there's somebody who's got the right idea,' he exclaimed. 'While the rest of us are sweating it out down in Naples, trying to protect a bunch of criminals who would be better off dead, Aurelio here pops over to Sardinia and turns up, quote, new evidence in the Burolo case, unquote, which just happens to put a certain politician's chum in the clear. That's the way to do things! Never mind the rights and wrongs of the situation. Results are all that matters.'