Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (33 page)

“How did he find out?”

She smiled, anticipating his reaction.

“He hired a private detective.”

“To follow you?”

“No, 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 of
him.

“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 midi-length overcoat, short black skirt and black patterned tights, with bright scarlet lipstick and short wet-look hair, she looked very different from the last time that 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.

“It must be a nightmare for you,” he said sympathetically. “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 which might contain anything.

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 out smoke self-consciously, like a schoolgirl.

“He hit me, 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 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 down an address and handed it to him. He read,
Tania Biacis, c/o Alessandra Bruni, Via dei Gelsi 47. Tel 788447.

“It’s in Centocelle. I’m staying there temporarily until I find something 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 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 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 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 cardboard boxes left outside a shoe shop, deftly collapsing and flattening each one. An unmarked grey delivery van with reflecting windows on the rear doors drove past with a roar and pulled in to the side of the street, squashing one of the cardboard boxes. The old man waved his fist impotently, then retrieved the box, straightened it out and brushed it clean before adding it to the tall pile already tied to the antique pram he used as a cart.

Zen walked on past the open doorway of a butcher’s shop, from which came a series of loud regular bangs and a smell of blood. The delivery van roared by and double-parked at the corner of the street, engine running. Outside a pet shop, a row of plastic bags filled with water were hanging from a rack. In each bag, a solitary goldfish twitched to and fro, trapped in its fragile bubble-world. A mechanical street cleaner rolled past, leaving a swathe of glistening asphalt in its wake, looping around 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 short, 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 centered on Vincenzo Fabri.

“The British have got the right idea,” Fabri was proclaiming 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 sliding 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.”

Resignedly Zen turned to face his tormentor. This was a showdown he could not dodge.

“What do you mean by that?”

Fabri faked a smile of complicity.

“Oh, come on! No hard feelings! In your shoes I’d have done the same. But it just goes to prove what I’ve been saying. Do things by the book like us poor suckers and what do you get? A lot of headaches, long hours, and a boot up the bum if things go wrong. Whereas if you look after number one, cultivate the right contacts, and forget about procedures, you get covered in glory, name in the paper, and friends in high places!”

“To be fair, you should take some of the credit,” Zen replied.

“Me? What are you talking about?”

“Well, you recommended me, didn’t you?”

Fabri’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Recommended you to who?”

“To Palazzo Sisti.”

A moment’s silence was broken by a rather forced laugh from Vincenzo Fabri.

“Do me a favour, will you? I don’t go to bed with politicians, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t choose that bunch of losers!”

“It’s all right, Vincenzo,” Zen reassured him. “They told me. I asked who had put them on to me and they said it was their contact at the Ministry.”

Fabri laughed dismissively. “And what’s that got to do with me?”

“Well, they said this person, this contact, had already tried to fiddle the Burolo case for them, except he’d made a complete balls-up of it. As far as I know, you’re the only person here who’s done any work on that case.”

“You’re lying!”

It was Zen’s turn to switch on a smile of complicity.

“Look, it’s all right, Vincenzo! We’re among friends here. No hard feelings, as you said yourself. I for one certainly don’t hold it against you. But then I’m hardly in a position to, of course.”

Fabri stared at him furiously. “I tell you once and for all that I have nothing whatever to do with Palazzo Sisti! Is that clear?”

Zen appeared taken aback by this ringing denial. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m fucking sure!”

Zen shook his head slowly. “Well, that’s very odd. Very odd indeed. All I can say is that’s what I was told. But if you say it’s not true …”

“Of course it’s not true! How dare you even suggest such a thing?”

“Admittedly, I can’t prove anything,” Zen muttered.

“Of course you can’t!”

“Can
you?”

The reply was quick and pointed. Fabri recoiled from it as from a drawn knife.

“What? Can I what?”

“Can you prove that the allegations made by
l’onorevole
’s private secretary are untrue?”

“I don’t
need
to prove it!” Fabri shouted.

No one had moved, yet Zen sensed that the arrangement of the group had changed subtly. Before, he had been confronted by a coherent mass of officials, united in their opposition to the outsider. Now, a looser gathering of individuals stood between him and Fabri, shuffling their feet and looking uncertainly from one man to the other.

“Don’t you?” Zen replied calmly. “Oh well, in that case, of course, there’s nothing more to be said.”

He turned away.

“Exactly!” Fabri called after him. “There’s nothing more to be said!”

When Zen reached the line of screens that closed off his desk, he glanced back. The group of officials had broken up into smaller clusters, chatting together in low voices. Vincenzo Fabri was talking at full speed in an undertone, gesticulating dramatically, demanding the undivided attention he felt was his by right. But some of his listeners were gazing down at the floor in a way which suggested that they were not totally convinced by Fabri’s protestations. They accepted that Zen was an unscrupulous grafter on the make. The difference was that they now suspected that Fabri was one, too, and the reason for his bitterness was not moral indignation but the fact that his rival was more successful.

Giorgio De Angelis, keeping a foot in both camps as usual, patted Fabri on the shoulder in a slightly patronising way before walking over to join Zen.

“Congratulations. It was about time something like that happened to Vincenzo.”

A wan smile brightened Zen’s face.

“So tell me all about it!” De Angelis continued. “How on earth did you manage to do it?”

Zen’s smile died. Of all his colleagues, De Angelis was the one with whom he had the closest relationship, yet the Calabrian clearly took it for granted that Zen had fixed the Burolo case. Well, if no one was going to believe him anyway, he might as well take the credit for his supposed villainy!

He turned his smile on again. “The funny thing is, I hadn’t been going to use the woman at all originally. The person I had in mind was Furio Padedda. He seemed the perfect candidate from everyone’s point of view.”

“But Padedda was involved, too, wasn’t he?” said De Angelis.

Zen shook his head. No one seemed to be able to get the story straight, no doubt because the only thing that really concerned them was the headline news which the media, carefully orchestrated by Palazzo Sisti, had been trumpeting all week: that the case against Renato Favelloni had collapsed.

“Padedda and the Melega family were planning to kidnap Burolo, successfully this time, and extort a huge sum of money from the family. They might well have killed him, too, after they got paid, but that was all in the future. On the night of the murders, Padedda was attending a meeting of the gang up in the mountains. But I certainly could have used him, if all else had failed. He even had a convenient wound on his arm. His blood group is different from that of the stains at the villa, but we could have got around that somehow.”

One by one, the other officials had approached to hear Zen’s story. It was a situation new to him, and one he found rather embarrassing. Unlike Fabri, he had never enjoyed being the centre of attention. But things had changed. If Fabri could no longer count on star billing, neither could Zen avoid the fame—or rather notoriety—which had been thrust upon him.

“But I didn’t need Paddeda. As soon as I’d visited the scene, I knew how I was going to work it. As you probably know, Burolo’s villa was originally a farmhouse. The farms in that area were all built over caves giving access to an underground stream where they got their water. When I inspected the cellar of the Villa Burolo, I noticed that the air was very fresh. The caretaker explained that it was naturally ventilated and pointed out an opening at floor level. Since we were underground, I realised right away that the air could only have come from the cave system.”