Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (26 page)

He shook his head sharply, as though to empty it of all this nonsense. Then he 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, the 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 tabletop 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 the water’s virtues which 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
conducibilitá elettrica specified a 18 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 realised 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 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 apologised 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 imposter. 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 quite nearby, 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.”

“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 flee. One of the men spat a few words of dialect at her, and 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 voice. Zen could understand nothing of what was being said. 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 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 whom. From time to time, between gulped half-glassfuls of wine, the man muttered to his companions, bitter interjections in dialect 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 leader 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 car?”

“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 to mean that particular part of the Oliastra, was in a total mess. It was a disaster. The government in Rome poured in money, but it was all going to waste, leaking away through the sievelike 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 around 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 Cagliari and look at maps all day!”

Turiddu’s companions sat listening to this harangue with indulgent and slightly embarrassed smiles, as 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 toward 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 unlabelled bottle and four new glasses.

“Be careful!” the barman 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 realise was that all that water from the lake didn’t just disappear. It was there, underground, if you knew where to 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 recognised Furio Padedda. The lion-keeper 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 almost looks as though someone is 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 stupefied 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 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 which he had forgotten to light dangling from his lips.

“Just take my advice, my friend,” he said. “Have nothing to do with that place. Terrible things have happened there, things you can’t wash away with water, even if there was any. There are plenty of nice villas up north on the coast, houses for rich foreigners. Down here is not the place for them. There are too many naughty boys. Like that one over there, for instance.”