Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (18 page)

He walked slowly down the hallway, gathering in the shiny strip as he went. As he passed the glass-panelled door to the living room, music welled up from the television as though to signify his relief at finding his mother alive and well, her eyes glued to the play of light and shadow on the screen. Then he looked past her, uncomprehending, disbelieving. The gleaming strip ran riot over the entire room, heaped in coils on the sofa and chairs, running around the legs of the chairs, draped over the table. In its midst lay a small rectangular box with tape sprouting from slits in either end. Zen picked it up.
Ministry of the Interior,
he read,
Index No 46429 BUR 433/K/95.

“What’s the matter with you tonight?” his mother snapped. “I asked you to bring me my camomile tea ages ago and you didn’t even bother to answer.”

Zen got slowly to his feet, staring at her.

“But Mamma, I’ve only just got home.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! Do you think I didn’t see you? I may be old, but I’m not so old I don’t recognise my own son! Besides, who else would be here once Maria Grazia’s gone home, eh?”

A cold shiver ran through Zen’s body.

“I’m sorry, Mamma.”

“You didn’t even have the common decency to reply when I spoke to you! You always bring me my camomile tea before
Dynasty
starts, you know that. But tonight you were too busy cluttering the place up with that ribbon or string or whatever it is.”

“I’ll fetch it right away,” Zen mumbled.

But he didn’t do so, for at that moment he heard a sound from the hallway and remembered that he had left the front door standing wide open.

Among the furniture stored in the hallway was a wardrobe inset with long rectangular mirrors which reflected an image of the front door onto the glass panel of the living room door. Thus even before he set foot in the hallway, Zen could see that the entrance to the apartment was now blocked by a figure thrown into silhouette by the landing light. The next moment this switched itself off, plunging everything into obscurity.

“Aurelio?” said a voice from the darkness.

Zen’s breathing started again. He groped for the switch and turned on the light.

“Gilberto,” he croaked. “Come in. Close the door.”

What is the worst, the most obscene and loathsome thing that one person can do to another? Go on, rack your brains! Let your invention run riot! (I often used to talk to myself like this as I scuttled about.) Well? Is that all? I can think of far worse things than that! I’ve
done
far worse things than that. But let’s not restrict ourselves to your hand-me-down imaginations. Because whatever you or I or anyone else can think up, no matter how hideous or improbable, one thing is sure. It has happened. Not just once but time and time again.

This prison is also a torture house. No one cares what goes on here.

You know Vasco, the blacksmith? Everyone still calls him the blacksmith, though he repairs cars now. What do you think of him? A steady sort, a bit obstinate, gives himself airs? As I was passing his workshop one morning I saw him pick up his three-year-old daughter by the hair, hold her dangling there a while, then let her fall to the floor. A moment later he was back to work, moulding some metal tubing while the child wept in a heap on the ground, her little world in pieces all around her. I wanted to comfort her, to tell her how lucky she had been. All her daddy had done was pull her hair. He could have done other things. He could have used the blowtorch on her. He could have buried her alive in the pit beneath the cars. He could have done anything.

He could have done anything.

FRIDAY: 1115–1420

W
HILE THE
A
RCHIVES SECTION PRESENTED
a slightly more animated appearance during office hours than on Zen’s previous visit, it could by no means have been described as a hive of activity. True, there were now about a dozen clerks on duty, but this manning level had evidently been dictated by some notional bureaucratic quota rather than the actual demands of the job, which was being carried on almost entirely by one man. He had a neurotically intense expression, compulsive, jerky movements, and the guilty air of someone concealing a shameful secret.

Unlike the others, he couldn’t just sit back and read the paper or chat all morning. If there was work to be done, he just couldn’t help doing it! It was this that made him a figure of fun in his colleagues’ eyes. They watched him scurry about, collecting and dispatching the files which had been ordered, sorting and reshelving those which had been returned, cataloguing and indexing new material, typing replies to demands and queries. Their looks were derisory, openly contemptuous. They despised him for his weakness, as he did himself for that matter. Poor fellow! What could you do with people like that? Still, he had his uses.

As on his previous visit, Zen asked to consult the file on the Vasco Spadola case. While it was being fetched, he called to the clerk who had been on duty the last time he had been there.

The man looked up from the crossword puzzle he was completing.

“You want to speak to me?” he demanded, with the incredulous tone of a surgeon interrupted whilst performing an open-heart operation.

Zen shook his head. “You want to speak to me. At least, so I’ve been told. Something about a video tape.”

An anticipatory smile dawned on the clerk’s lips.

“Ah, so it was you, was it? Yes, I remember now!”

The other clerks had all fallen silent and were watching with curiosity. Their colleague strode languidly over to the counter where Zen was standing.

“Yes, I’m afraid there’s been a slight problem with that tape, dottore.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“And what might it be?”

“Well it
might
be almost anything,” the clerk returned wittily. “But what it
is,
quite simply, is that the tape you gave us back is not the same tape that you took out.”

“What do you mean, not the same?”

“I mean it’s not the same. It’s blank. Clear? There’s nothing on it.”

“But … but …” Zen stammered.

“Also, the tapes we use here are specially made up for us and are not available commercially, whereas what you handed in is an ordinary BASF ferrous oxide cassette obtainable at any dealer.”

“But that’s absurd! You must have muddled them up somehow.”

At that moment, the other clerk interrupted to hand Zen the file he had requested. But his colleague had no intention of letting Zen get away with his clumsy attempt to shift the blame for what had happened.

“No, dottore! That’s not the problem. The problem is that the tape you brought back is a blank. Raw plastic.”

Zen fiddled nervously with the Spadola file.

“What exactly are you accusing me of?” he blustered.

The clerk gestured loftily. “I’m not accusing anyone of anything, dottore. Naturally, everyone knows how easy it is to push the wrong button on one of those machines and wipe out the previous recording …”

“I’m sure I didn’t do that.”

“I
know
you didn’t,” the clerk replied with a steely smile that revealed the trap Zen had almost fallen into. “Our tapes are all copy-protected, so that’s impossible. Besides, as I said, the brand was different. So a substitution must have taken place. The question is, where is the original?”

There was a crash as the Spadola file fell to the floor, spilling documents everywhere. As Zen bent down to pick them up, the assembled clerks signalled their colleague’s triumph with a round of laughter.

Zen straightened up, holding a video cassette.

“46429 BUR 433/K/95,” he read from the label. “Isn’t that the one you’ve been making so much fuss about?”

“Where did that come from?” the clerk demanded.

“It was inside the file.”

Without another word, he went back to picking up the scattered documents. The clerk snatched the tape and bustled off, muttering angrily about checking its authenticity.

Zen wasn’t worried about that, having played it through the night before after he and Gilberto spent the best part of an hour rewinding the damn thing into the cassette by hand. His mother had gone to bed by then, still blissfully ignorant that a stranger had entered the apartment while she had been watching television.

Zen himself was still in shock from what had happened, and it was left to Gilberto to bring up the question of what was to become of his mother during his absence in Sardinia, now that their home was demonstrably under threat. In the end, Gilberto insisted that she stay with him and his wife until Zen returned.

“Quite impossible!” Zen had replied. His mother hadn’t left the apartment for years. She would be lost without the familiar surroundings that replicated the family home in Venice. Anyway, she was practically senile much of the time. It was very difficult even for him to communicate with her or understand what she wanted, and it didn’t help that she often forgot that her Venetian dialect was incomprehensible to other people. She could be demanding, irrational, bad-tempered, and devious. Rosella Nieddu already had her hands full looking after her own family. It would be an intolerable imposition for her to have to take on a moody old woman, contemptuous and distrustful of strangers, someone who in her heart of hearts believed that the civilised world ended at Mestre.

But Gilberto had brushed these objections aside.

“So what
are
you going to do with her, Aurelio? Because she can’t stay here.”

Zen had no answer to that.

And so it came about that early the following morning an ambulance rolled up to the front door of Zen’s house. The attendants brought a mobile bed up to the apartment, placed Zen’s mother on it, and took her downstairs in the lift before sweeping off, siren whooping and lights flashing, to the General Hospital. Thirty seconds later, siren stilled and flasher turned off, the ambulance quietly emerged on the other side of the hospital complex and drove to the modern apartment block where the Nieddus lived.

Throughout her ordeal the old lady had hardly spoken a word, though her eyes and the way she clutched her son’s hand showed clearly how shocked she was. Zen had explained that there was something wrong with their apartment, something connected with the noises she had heard, and that it was necessary for them both to move out for a few days while it was put right. It made no difference what he said. His mother sat rigidly as the ambulance men wheeled her into the neat and tidy bedroom which Rosella Nieddu had prepared for her, having shooed out the two youngest children to join their elder siblings next door. Zen thanked Rosella with a warmth that elicited a hug and a kiss he found oddly disturbing. Gilberto’s wife was a very attractive woman, and the contact had made Zen realise that he had neglected that side of his life for too long.

The Archives clerks had gone back to their desks, now that the fun was over. Zen gathered up the papers relating to the Spadola case and started to put them into some sort of order while he awaited confirmation that the video tape he had produced from his pocket after dropping the file was indeed the genuine article.

Suddenly his hands ceased their mechanical activity. Zen scanned the smudgy carbon-copied document he was holding, looking for the name which had leapt off the page at him.

 … 
INFORMED THAT
S
PADOLA WAS IN HIDING AT A FARMHOUSE NEAR THE VILLAGE OF
M
ELZO
. A
T
0400
HOURS ON
J
ULY
16
TH PERSONNEL OF THE
S
QUADRA
M
OBILE UNDER THE DIRECTION OF
I
SPETTORE
A
URELIO
Z
EN ENTERED THE HOUSE AND ARRESTED
S
PADOLA
. A
N EXTENSIVE SEARCH OF THE PREMISES REVEALED VARIOUS ITEMS OF MATERIAL EVIDENCE (SEE
A
PPENDIX
A),
IN PARTICULAR A KNIFE WHICH PROVED TO BE MARKED WITH TRACES OF BLOOD CONSISTENT WITH THOSE OF THE VICTIM
. S
PADOLA CONTINUED TO DENY ALL INVOLVEMENT IN THE AFFAIR, EVEN AFTER THE DAMNING NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE HAD BEEN EXPLAINED TO HIM
. A
T THE JUDICIAL CONFRONTATION WITH
P
ARRUCCI, THE ACCUSED UTTERED VIOLENT THREATS AGAINST THE WITNESS
 …

Once again, Zen felt the superstitious chill that had come over him that night after viewing the Burolo video. Parrucci! The informer whose gruesome death had thrown Fausto Arcuti into a state of mortal terror! It seemed quite uncanny that the same man should have figured in the file which Zen had asked to see two days earlier as part of his strategem for substituting the blank video tape.

But he had no more time to consider the matter, for at that moment the clerk reappeared, video cassette in hand.

“It’s the right one,” he confirmed grudgingly. “So where did the other come from, I’d like to know?”

Zen shrugged. “I’d say that’s pretty obvious. When I brought the tape back the other day, you got it muddled up with the file I asked to consult at the same time. When you couldn’t find it, you started to panic because you knew that it had been handed back and that you would be responsible. So you substituted a blank tape, hoping that no one would notice. Unfortunately, one of my colleagues had asked to see the tape, and he immediately discovered that—”

“That’s a lie!” the man shouted.

Snatching the Spadola file from Zen, he abruptly went on to the attack.

“Look at this mess you’ve made! It would be no wonder if things sometimes
did
get confused around here with people like you wandering in and upsetting everything. Leave it, leave it! You’re just making a worse muddle. These documents must be filed in chronological order. Look, this judicial review shouldn’t be here. It must come at the end.”

“Let me see that!”

The form was stiff and heavy, imitation parchment. The text, set in antique type and printed in the blackest of inks, was as dense and lapidary as Latin, clogged with odd abbreviations and foreshortenings, totally impenetrable. But there was no need to read it to understand the import of the document. It was enough to scan the brief phrases inserted by hand in the spaces left blank by the printer.