Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (15 page)

Zen resumed his walk with a fastidious smile. If Leather Jacket thought that bending down to tie up your shoes made you invisible, then he shouldn’t prove too difficult to unload. In fact he felt slightly piqued that such a third-rate operative had been considered adequate for the task of shadowing him. Evidently he couldn’t even inspire respect from his enemies.

The path ran up a shallow valley between masses of ancient brickwork emerging from the grass like weathered rocky outcroppings. The signs and fences installed by the authorities had imposed some superficial order on the hill’s chaotic topography, but this simply made its endless anomalies all the more bizarre and incomprehensible. Nothing here was what it appeared to be, having been recycled and cannibalised so many times that its original name and function were often unclear even to experts. Although no archeologist, Zen was intimately familiar with the many layered complexities of the Palatine, thanks to the Angela Barilli affair.

The daughter of a leading Rome jeweller, eighteen-year-old Angela had been kidnapped in 1975. After months of negotiations and a bungled payoff, the kidnappers had broken off contact. In desperation, the Barilli family had turned to the supernatural, engaging a clairvoyant from Turin who claimed to have led the police to three other kidnap victims. The medium duly informed Angela’s mother that her daughter was being held in an underground cell somewhere in the vast network of rooms and passages on the lower floors of the Imperial palace at the heart of the Palatine.

Unlikely as this seemed, the political clout wielded by the family was enough to ensure that Zen, who was directing the investigation, had to waste three days organising a painstaking search of the area. The Barilli girl’s corpse was in fact discovered the following year in a shallow concrete pit beneath a garage in the Primavalle suburb where she had been held during her ordeal, but Zen had never forgotten the three days he had spent exploring the honeycomb of caverns, tunnels, cisterns, and cellars that lay beneath the surface of the Palatine. It was an area so rich in possibilities that Zen could simply disappear into the mathematics, leaving his follower to solve an equation with too many variables.

Reaching the plateau at the top of the hill, Zen turned left behind the high stone wall which closed off a large rectangle of ground surrounding a church and waited for Leather Jacket to catch up. There was no one about, and the only sound was the distant buzzing of the helicopter. It had now moved further to the east, circling over the group of hospitals near San Giovanni in Laterano. No doubt an important criminal was being transferred from Regina Coeli prison for treatment, with the helicopter acting as an eye in the sky against any attempt to snatch him.

Footsteps approached quickly, almost at a run. At the last moment, Zen stepped out from behind the wall.

“Sorry!”

“Excuse me!”

The collision had only been slight, but the young man in the leather jacket looked deeply startled, as Zen had intended he should be. Close up, his sheen of toughness fell apart like an actress’s glamour on the wrong side of the footlights. Despite a virile stubble no doubt due to shaving last thing at night, his skin looked babyish and his eyes were weak and evasive.

“It always happens!” Zen remarked.

The man stared at him, mystified.

“When there’s no one about, I mean,” Zen explained. “Have you noticed? You can walk right through the Stazione Termini at rush hour and never touch anyone, but go for a stroll up here and you end up walking straight into the only other person about!”

The man muttered something inconclusive and turned away. Zen set off in the opposite direction. Not only would the encounter have shaken Leather Jacket, but it would now be impossible for him to pass off any future contacts as mere coincidence. That constraint would force him to hang back in order to keep well out of sight, thus giving Zen the margin he needed.

He made his way through a maze of gravelled paths winding among sections of ruined brick wall several metres thick. Lumps of marble lay scattered about like discarded playthings. Isolated stone pines rose from the ruins, their rough straight trunks cantilevering out at the top to support the broad green canopy. Here and there, excavations had scraped away the soil to expose a fraction of the hidden landscape beneath the surface. Fenced off and covered with sloping roofs of corrugated plastic sheeting, they looked like the primitive shelters of some future tribe, bringing the long history of this ancient hill full circle in the eternal darkness of a nuclear winter.

A line of pines divided this area from a formal garden with alleys flanked by close-clipped hedges. Screened by the dense thickets of evergreen trees and shrubs, Zen was able to move quickly along the paved path leading to a parterre with gravel walks, a dilapidated pavilion and terrace overlooking the Forum. A fountain dripped, bright dabs of orange fruit peeped through the greenery, and paths led away in every direction. In the centre, a flight of steps led down into a subterranean corridor running back the way he had come. Dimly lit by lunettes let into the wall just below the arched ceiling, the passage seemed to extend itself as Zen hurried along it. The walls, rough, pitted plaster, were hung with cobwebs as large and thick as handkerchiefs which fluttered in the cool draught.

The passage ended in another flight of steps leading up into the middle of the maze of brickwork and gravel paths which Zen had passed through earlier. Keeping under cover of the fragments of wall, he worked his way toward the massive ruins of the Imperial palace itself. The gate was just where he remembered it, barring off a niche giving access to a yard used for storing odds and ends of unidentified marble. It was supposed to be locked, but one of the things that Zen had learned in the course of his abortive search for Angela Barilli was that it was left open during the day because the staff used it as a shortcut. Ignoring the sign reading NO ADMISSION TO UNAUTHORISED PERSONS, Zen walked through the yard to a passage at the back. To the left, a modern doorway led into a museum. Zen turned the other way, down an ancient metal staircase descending into the bowels of the hill.

At first the staircase burrowed through a channel cut into the solid brickwork of the palace. As Zen walked down, the light diminished above, while simultaneously the darkness beneath began to glow. Then, without warning, he suddenly emerged into a vast underground space in which the staircase was suspended vertiginously, bolted to the brickwork. The other walls were immeasurably distant, mere banks of shadow, presences hinted at by the light seeping in far below, obscuring the ground like thick mist. Zen clutched the handrail, overwhelmed by vertigo. Everything had been turned on its head: the ground above, the light below.

Step by step, he made his way down the zigzag staircase through layers of cavernous gloom. The floor was a bare expanse of beaten earth illuminated by light streaming in through large rectangular openings giving on to the sunken courtyard at the heart of the palace. Zen walked across it, glancing up at the metal railings high above, where a trio of tourists stood reading aloud from a guidebook. A rectangular opening in the brickwork opposite led into a dark passage which passed through a number of sombre gutted spaces and then a huge enclosed arena consisting of rows of truncated columns flanking a large grassy area.

He sat down on one of the broken columns, out of sight of the path above, and lit a cigarette. At the base of the column lay a large pine cone, its scales splayed back like the pads of a great cat’s paw. The air was still, the light pale and mild, as though it too were antique. The matchstick figures displayed on Zen’s digital watch continued their elaborate ballet, but the resulting patterns seemed to have lost all meaning. The only real measure of time was the slow disappearance of the cigarette smouldering between Zen’s fingers and the equally deliberate progress of his thoughts.

Who could Leather Jacket be working for? Until now Zen had assumed that he must be connected with the break-in at his flat and the envelope full of shotgun pellets which had been left there, but after some consideration he now rejected this idea. Leather Jacket simply didn’t look nasty enough to have a hand in the attempt to scare Zen by copying the bizarre warnings sent to Judge Giulio Bertolini before his death. He didn’t
care
enough. It wasn’t a personal vendetta he was involved in, Zen was sure of that. He was in it for the money, a cut-rate employee hired by the hour to keep track of Zen’s movements. But who had hired him? The longer Zen thought about it, the more significant it seemed that Leather Jacket had put in his first appearance shortly after Zen’s interview at Palazzo Sisti.

The only surprising feature of this solution was that they should have chosen such a low-grade operative to do the job, but this was no doubt explained by the fact that Lino was in charge of that department. They might even prefer Zen to know that they were keeping tabs on him. He was their man now, after all. Why shouldn’t they keep him under surveillance? What reason had they to trust him, after all?

It was only when he had asked himself this question that Zen realised that it wasn’t rhetorical.
Once your accomplishments in the Miletti case had been brought to our attention,
the young man had told him,
the facts spoke for themselves.
But who had brought those accomplishments to their attention in the first place? Presumably one of the contacts at the Ministry the young man had mentioned earlier.
We have been let down before by people who promised us this, that, and the other, and then couldn’t deliver. Why, only a few days ago we asked our man there to obtain a copy of the video tape showing the tragic events at the Villa Burolo. A simple enough request, you would think, but even that proved beyond the powers of the individual in question. Nor was this the first time that he had disappointed us.

Zen looked up with a start. The sheer stone walls of the arenas appeared to have crept closer, hemming him in. Only the day before he had asked himself why Vincenzo Fabri had gone out on a limb with his harebrained notion about Burolo not being the murderer’s intended victim, that the killings had actually been a Mafia hit on the architect Vianello. The answer, of course, was that this had been a bungled attempt to divert suspicion from Renato Favelloni. Fabri’s mission to Sardinia had only nominally been undertaken on behalf of Criminalpol. His real client had been
l’onorevole.

And he’d blown it! That was why Fabri had not been offered the chance to exploit the new evidence about the lionkeeper Furio Pizzoni’s real identity. It was too good a chance for Palazzo Sisti to risk wasting on someone in whom they no longer had any faith. Instead, they had plumped for Zen, whose record “spoke for itself.” Only it hadn’t, of course. Someone had spoken for it first. Someone had brought Zen’s “accomplishments in the Miletti case” to the attention of Palazzo Sisti and suggested that this unscrupulous manipulator of evidence and witnesses might be just the right man to bring the Burolo imbroglio to a satisfactory conclusion. And that someone, it was now clear, could only be the Party’s man at the Ministry, Vincenzo Fabri himself.

Zen lit another cigarette from the butt of the first, a habit he normally despised. But normality was rapidly losing its grip on his life. Vincenzo Fabri had recommended Zen to his masters as the white knight who could save Renato Favelloni from prison and
l’onorevole
from disgrace. By doing so, he had not only given his bitterest enemy a chance to succeed, but to do so on the very ground where he himself had recently suffered a humiliating failure. Why would he do a thing like that?

The only possible answer was that Fabri knew damn well that Zen was not going to succeed. So, far from doing his enemy a good turn, Fabri had placed him in a trap with only two exits, each potentially fatal. If Zen failed to satisfy Palazzo Sisti, they would have him transferred to a city where his life could be terminated without attracting attention. If on the other hand he did what was necessary to get the Favelloni trial postponed, Fabri would tip off the judiciary and have Zen arrested for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Whatever happened, Zen was bound to lose. If his new friends didn’t get him, his old enemy would.

By now the sun had disappeared behind the grove of pines whose foliage was just visible above the far end of the sunken stadium. At once the air revealed its inner coldness, the chill at its heart. It was time to go. Leather Jacket would most likely have given up the search by now and be waiting near the entrance on Via dei Fori Imperiali.

Zen got to his feet and started to pick his way through the jumble of ruins opposite. A brick staircase and a circuitous path scuffed through the grass brought him out on a track flanked by pines leading down to the exit on Via di San Gregorio. The odours of summer, pine sap and dried shit, lingered faintly in the undergrowth. There was no sign of Leather Jacket, but in any case Zen no longer greatly cared about him. Being tailed was the least of his worries now, and as for that matter, so was the missing video tape. To think that just that morning he had worked out an elaborate theory to explain the fact that Fabri had put in a request for it. The reason for this was now clear: Palazzo Sisti had told him to get hold of a copy. As for the theft, it must indeed have been the work of a pickpocket, as Zen had originally supposed. Vincenzo Fabri had bigger and better schemes in mind than pilfered videos. Had he not warned De Angelis that very morning to keep away from Zen because he was being measured for the drop? The exact nature of that drop now seemed terrifyingly clear.

I was always biddable, a born follower. Like those ducklings we had, a fox killed the mother and they would follow whoever was wearing the green rubber boots that were the first thing they saw on opening their eyes. If the boots had been able to walk by themselves, they would have followed the boots, or a bit of rubbish blown past by the wind, whatever happened to be there when the darkness cracked open. Even the fox that killed their mother.