Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (3 page)

Such was the spell cast by Burolo that it was only by an effort of attention that one became aware of the others present. The slightly saturnine man with thinning grey hair and a wedge-shaped face sitting to Oscar’s left was a Sicilian architect named Vianello who had collaborated with Burolo Construction on the plans for a new electricity generating station at Rieti. Unfortunately their offer had been rejected on technical grounds—a previously unheard-of eventuality—and the contract had gone to another firm. Dottor Vianello was wearing an immaculate pale cream cotton suit and a slightly strained smile, possibly due to the fact that he was having to listen to Oscar’s wife’s account of an abortive shopping expedition to Olbia. Rita Burolo had once been an exceptionally attractive woman, and the sense of power which this had given her had remained even now that her charms were visibly wilting. Her inane comments had commanded total attention for so long that Rita had at last come to believe that she had more to offer the world than her legs and breasts, which was quite a consolation now that the latter were no longer quite first-division material. Opposite her sat the wife of the Sicilian architect, a diminutive pixie of a woman with frightened eyes and a faint moustache. Maria Pia Vianello gazed at the spectacle of her hostess in full career with a kind of awestruck amazement, like a schoolgirl with a crush on her teacher. Clearly
she
would never dream of trying to dominate a gathering in this way.

Despite these superficial dissimilarities, however, the Vianellos and the Burolos were basically much of a muchness. No longer young, but rich enough to keep age at bay for a few years yet, the men ponderous with professional
gravitas,
like those toy figurines which cannot be knocked over because they are loaded with lead, the women exuding the sullen peevishness of those who have been pampered with every luxury except freedom and responsibility. The remaining couple were different.

Zen reversed the tape again briefly, hauling the swimmer up out of the water once more, and then froze the picture, studying the man who had dominated the news for the previous three months. Renato Favelloni’s sharp, ferrety features and weak chest and limbs, coupled with lanky hair and an overready smile, gave him the air of a small-town playboy, by turns truculent and toadying, convinced of being God’s gift to the world in general and women in particular, but quite prepared to lower himself to any dirty work in the interest of getting ahead. At first Zen had found it almost incomprehensible that such a man could have been the linchpin of the deals that were rumoured to have taken place between Oscar Burolo and the senior political figure who was referred to in the press as
l’onorevole,
the formula reputedly used by Burolo in his secret memoranda of their relationship. Only gradually had he come to understand that it was precisely Favelloni’s blatant sleaziness which made him acceptable as a go-between. There are degrees even in the most cynical corruption and manipulation. By embodying the most despicable possible grade, Renato Favelloni made his clients feel relatively decent by comparison.

His wife, like Renato himself, was a good ten years younger than the other four people present, and exactly the kind of stunning bimbo that Rita Burolo must have been at the same age. This cannot have recommended Nadia Favelloni to Oscar’s wife any more than the younger woman’s habit of wandering around the place half-naked. Having reached the age at which women begin to employ clothing for purposes of concealment rather than display, Signora Burolo discreetly retained a flowing wrap of some material that was a good deal less transparent than it first appeared.

A sense of revulsion suddenly overcame Zen at the thought of what was shortly to happen to that pampered, veiled flesh. Vanity, lust, jealousy, boredom, bitchiness, beauty, wit—what did any of it matter? As the doomed faces glanced flirtatiously at the camera, wondering how they were coming across, Zen felt like screaming at them, “Go away! Get out of that house now!”

The Favellonis had done precisely that, of course, which was one reason why everyone in Italy from the magistrate investigating the case to the know-it-all in your local bar agreed with Zen’s mother that Renato Favelloni was “the one who did it.” With the seedy fixer and his disturbingly bare-breasted wife out of the way, the two maturer couples had settled down to a quiet dinner in the villa’s dining room, with its rough tiled floor and huge trestle table which had originally graced the refectory of a Franciscan monastery. The meal had been eaten and coffee and liqueurs served when Oscar once again switched on the camera to record the after-dinner talk, dominated as always by his booming, emphatic voice, punctuated by blows of his hairy fist on the tabletop.

Apart from a distant metallic crash whose source and relevance were in dispute, the first sign of what was about to happen appeared in Signora Vianello’s nervous eyes. The architect’s wife was sitting next to their host, who was in the middle of a bawdy tale concerning a well-known TV presenter, a stripper turned member of parliament who had appeared on his talk show, and what they had reputedly got up to during the commercial break. Maria Pia Vianello had been listening with a vague, blurry smile, as though she wasn’t quite sure whether it was proper for her to appear to understand. Then her eyes were attracted by something on the other side of the room, something which made such considerations irrelevant. The vague smile abruptly vanished, leaving her features completely blank.

No one else had noticed anything. The only sound in the room was Oscar’s voice. Whatever Signora Vianello had seen was on the move, and her eyes tracked it across the room until Oscar saw it too. He broke off in midsentence, threw his napkin on the table and stood up.

“What do you want?”

There was no answer, no sound whatever. Oscar’s wife and Dottor Vianello, who were sitting with their backs to the camera, looked round. Rita Burolo emitted a scream of terror. Vianello’s expression did not change, except to harden slightly.

“What do you want?” Burolo repeated, his brows knitted in puzzlement and annoyance. Abruptly he pushed his chair aside and strode toward the intruder, staring masterfully downward as though to cow an unruly child. You could say what you liked, thought Zen, but the man had guts. Or was he just foolhardy, trying to show off to his guests, to preserve an image of bravado to the last? At all events, it was only in the final moment that any fear entered Oscar’s eyes, and he flung up his hands in an instinctive attempt to protect his face.

A brutal eruption of noise swamped the soundtrack. Literally disintegrated by the blast, Oscar’s hands disappeared, while bright red blotches appeared all over his face and neck like an instant infection. He reeled away, holding up the stumps of his wrists. Somehow he managed to recover his balance and turn back, only to receive the second discharge, which carried away half his chest and flung him against the corner of the dining table where he collapsed in a bloody heap at his wife’s feet.

Rita Burolo scrambled desperately away from the corpse as Vianello dived under the table, a pistol appearing in his hand. The ratchet sound of a shotgun being reloaded by pump action mingled with two sharp light cracks from the architect’s pistol. Then the soundtrack was bludgeoned twice more in quick succession. The first barrel scoured the space below the table, gouging splinters out of the wood, shattering plates and glasses, wounding Signora Vianello terribly in the legs, and reducing her husband to a nightmare figure crawling about on the floor like a tormented animal. The second caught Rita Burolo trying desperately to climb out of the window that opened out to the terrace. As she was further away than the others, the wounds she sustained were more dispersed, covering her in a spray as fine and evenly distributed as drizzle on a windscreen. With a despairing cry she fell through the window to the paving stones of the terrace, where she slowly bled to death.

Even though her legs were lacerated, Maria Pia Vianello somehow struggled to her feet. Despite her own diminutive stature, she too gave the impression of looking down at the intruder.

“Just a moment, please,” she muttered over the dry, clinical sound of the gun being reloaded. “I’m afraid I’m not quite ready yet. I’m sorry.”

The shot took her at close range, flaying her so fearfully that loops of intestine protruded through the wall of her abdomen in places. Then the second barrel spun her round. She clutched the wall briefly, then collapsed into a dishevelled heap, leaving a complex pattern of dark streaks on the whitewashed plaster.

It had taken less than twenty seconds to turn the room into an abattoir. Fifteen seconds later, the caretaker would appear, having run from the two-room service flat where he and his wife had been watching a variety show on television. Until then, apart from wine dripping from a broken bottle at the edge of the table and a swishing caused by the convulsive twitches of the dying Vianello’s arm, there was no sound whatsoever. “If anyone ever manages to break into this place, I’ll believe in ghosts,” the security analyst had assured Oscar Burolo. Nevertheless, someone or something
had
got in, butchered the inhabitants, and then vanished without trace, all in less than a minute, and in the most perfect silence. Even in broad daylight and the company of others it was difficult to ignore this almost supernatural dimension of the killings. In the eerie doldrums of the night, all alone, it seemed almost impossible to believe that there could be a rational explanation for them.

The silence of the running tape was broken by a distant scraping sound. Zen felt his skin crawl and the hairs on his head stir. He reached for the remote control unit and stilled the video. The noise continued, a low persistent scraping. “Like old Umberto’s boat,” his mother had said.

Zen walked quietly across to the inner hallway of the apartment, opened the door to his mother’s bedroom, and looked inside.

“Can you hear it?” a voice murmured in the darkness.

“Yes, Mamma.”

“Oh, good. I thought it might be me imagining it. I’m not quite right in the head sometimes, you know.”

He gazed toward the invisible bed. It was the first time that she had ever made such an admission. They were both silent for some time, but the noise did not recur.

“Where is it coming from?” he asked.

“The wardrobe.”

“Which wardrobe?”

There were three of them in the room, filled with clothes that no one would ever wear again, carefully preserved from moths by liberal doses of napthalene, which gave the room its basic funereal odour.

“The big one,” his mother replied.

The biggest wardrobe occupied the central third of the wall that opened onto the internal courtyard of the building. Its positioning had occasioned Zen some anxiety at the time, since it obstructed access to the fire escape, but the wardrobe was too big to fit anywhere else.

Zen walked over to the bed and straightened the counterpane and sheets. Then he patted the hand which emerged from the covers, all the obsolete paraphernalia of muscles and arteries disturbingly revealed by the parchmentlike skin.

“It was just a rat, Mamma.”

The best way of dispelling her formless, childish fears was by giving her a specific unpleasantness to focus on.

“But it sounded like metal.”

“The skirting’s lined with zinc,” he improvised. “To stop them gnawing through. I’ll speak to Giuseppe in the morning and we’ll get the exterminators in. You try and get some sleep now.”

Back in the living room, he turned off the television and rewound the video tape, trying to dispel his vague sense of unease by thinking about the report which he had to write the next day. It was the lateness of the hour that made everything seem strange and threatening now, the time when—according to what Zen’s uncle had once told him—a house belongs not to the person who happened to live there now, but to all those who have preceded him over the centuries. Tomorrow morning everything would have snapped back into proportion and the uncanny aspects of the Burolo case would seem mere freakish curiosities. The only real question was whether to mention them at all. It wasn’t that he wanted or needed to conceal anything. For that matter he wouldn’t have known where to begin, since he had no idea who the report was destined for. The problem was that there were certain aspects of the Burolo case which were very difficult to mention without laying himself open to the charge of being a credulous nincompoop. For example, the statement made by the seven-year-old daughter of Oscar Burolo’s lawyer, who had visited the villa in late July. As a special treat, she had been allowed to stay up for dinner with the adults, and in the excitement of the moment she had sneaked some of her father’s coffee, with the result that she couldn’t sleep. It was a luminous summer night, and eventually the child left her room and set out to explore the house. According to her statement, in one of the rooms in the older part of the villa she saw a figure moving about. “At first I was pleased,” she said. “I thought it was a child, and I was lonely for someone to play with. But then I remembered that there were no children at the villa. I got scared and ran back to my room.”

Including things like that could easily make him the laughing-stock of the department, while if he left them out he laid himself open to the charge of suppressing evidence. Fortunately it was no part of Zen’s mandate to draw conclusions or offer opinions. All that was needed was a brief report describing the various lines of investigation which had been conducted by the police and the Carabinieri and outlining the evidence against the various suspects. A clerical chore, in short, to which he was bringing nothing but an ability to read between the lines of official documents, picking out the grain of what was not being said from the overwhelming chaff of what was. Watching the video had been the last stage in this procedure. There was nothing left to do except sit down and write the thing, and this he would do next morning, while it was all fresh in his mind. By the afternoon, the Burolo affair would have no more significance for him than for any other member of the public.