Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (30 page)

By now he was seconds away from the junction. The only alternative was to turn onto the main road, which ran gently downhill to the right. Trying to conserve speed, he took the turn 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 toward the ditch on the other side. At the last moment the steering abruptly came back, almost wrenching the wheel from Zen’s hands. He steered back to the right-hand side, thankful that there 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 to the village. Several hundred metres above, he spotted a small patch of bright yellow approaching the second hairpin. Then a fold of land rose between like a passing wave and he lost 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 the asset it 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 had to ditch it somewhere out of sight, buying time to get back to the station on foot while Spadola continued to scour the roads for the elusive white Mercedes. Unfortunately, the barren, scrub-covered hills offered scant possibilities for concealing a bicycle, never mind a car.

He reached the junction with the side road to the Villa Burolo, but 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 getting desperately short! He kept glancing compulsively in the rearview 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 sent the Mercedes squealing across the asphalt onto the twin ruts of bare red earth. Within moments a low hummock 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, but he managed to hold on. Eventually the track straightened out and ran down more gently into a hollow 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. He got out and stood listening intently. Out of sight of the main road, 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 flying 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 inside. A faint draught blew toward him from the darkness within, carrying a strong smell of sheep. 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 reek was overpowering. As his eyes adjusted to the obscurity, Zen discovered that he was standing at the edge of a large irregular fissure in the rock. When he held his hand over the opening, he discovered that this was the 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. The 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 built the dam. That’s why the hut had been abandoned like so many of the local farms, including the one Oscar Burolo had bought for a song. This was presumably one of the entrances to that system of caves. It was large enough to climb down into, but of course 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 that 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 palatable. The idea of setting out on foot across country with only the vaguest idea of 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. Men’s contrivances he understood, but in the open he was as vulnerable as a fox in the streets, his survival skills nonexistent, 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 plagued him, and his headache had swollen to monstrous dimensions. Halfway 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 for the night of the murders was known to “the Melega clan of Orgosolo.” It was that name which had seemed to authenticate the writer’s allegations. Antonio Melega, he 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, so 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 toward undesirable horizons. Zen trudged on through a wilderness of 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 struggled 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, which 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 easily have been overcome. According to their testimony, Alfonso Bini and his wife had been watching television in their quarters at the time of the murder. If Padedda, instead of drinking in the village, had concealed himself at the villa, there was nothing to stop him entering the room from which the alarms were controlled and throwing the cut-out switches. For that matter, he could have carried out the killings himself. The wound on his arm, which had looked 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 dirt, 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 so he 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 converging 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 merely 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. Unlike Renato Favelloni, such unsophisticated men might well 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
omertá
would stop anyone else from contradicting their testimony. It all made sense, it all fitted together.

Zen hurried on, forcing himself to maintain a punishing pace. To his right, he could see the whole of the valley stretching across to the ridge on the other side where the Villa Burolo was visible as a white blur. Further up, toward the mountains, the unnatural green of the forest fed by the leaking dam stained the landscape like a spillage of some pollutant. A distant rumble gave him pause for a moment until he realised that it was not a car but two distant aircraft. After some time, he made out the speeding black specks of the jet fighters swooping across the mountain slopes on their low-altitude manoeuvres. Then they disappeared up a valley and silence fell again. He pushed on, torn between satisfaction at having finally cracked the Burolo case and frustration at the thought that unless he managed to get to a telephone before Spadola caught up with him, the villagers’ silence would remain unbroken forever and Renato Favelloni would be sent to prison for a crime he had not committed. Of course, Favelloni no doubt royally deserved any number of prison terms for other crimes which would never be brought home to him, protected as he was by
l’onorevole.
But as Vasco Spadola had remarked, that was not the point.

The going was not easy. The baked red earth, baked hard by months of drought, supported nothing but low bushes, bristling like porcupines with wiry branches, abrasive leaves, and sharp thorns that snagged his clothing continually. Fortunately the plants never grew very close together, so it was possible to find a way through. But the constant turning and winding through the labyrinth of bush increased the distance he had to cover and made his progress much more tiring. And he
was
tired. His dissipations the night before had resulted in a shallow, drunken sleep that had only scratched the surface of his immense weariness.