Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (20 page)

He didn’t add that the last time he was there had been with Ellen.

Outside the Ministry, Zen hailed a taxi. The brief journey did nothing to alleviate his fears that a major fiasco was in the offing. He and Tania sat as far apart as possible, exchanging brief banalities like a married couple after a row.

The taxi dropped them by the small fountain at the south end of the piazza. As they walked out into its superb amplitude, two kids sped past on a moped, one standing on the pillion and grasping the driver’s shoulders. The noise scattered the flock of pigeons, which rose like a single being and went winging around the obelisk rising above the central fountain, while a second flock of shadows mimicked their progress across the grey stones below. The breeze caught the water spurting out of cleavages in the fountain, winnowing it out in an aerosol of fine droplets where a fragmentary rainbow briefly shimmered. Just for a moment Zen thought that everything was going to be all right after all. Then he caught sight of the restaurant, shuttered and bolted, the chairs and tables piled high, and knew that he’d been right the first time.
Chiuso per turno
read a sign in the window.

Tania Biacis looked at her watch. “It’s getting late.”

Zen nodded. “Perhaps we’d better leave it till another time.”

He knew that there would be no other time.

Tania stared intently at the facade of the palazzo opposite, as though trying to decipher a message written in the whorls and curlicues of stone.

“Your place isn’t very far away, is it? We could pick up something from a
rosticceria
and take it back there, that’s if you don’t mind. The food’s not that important. What we really want to do is talk, isn’t it?”

She made it sound so natural and sensible that Zen was almost unsurprised.

“Well, if that’s … all right.”

“All right?”

“I mean, it’s all right with me.”

“With me, too. Otherwise I wouldn’t have suggested it.”

“Then it’s all right.”

“It looks like it,” she said with a slightly ironic smile.

“How do you know where I live?” Zen asked as they walked up the piazza.

“I looked you up in the phone book. I thought you’d be the only one, but there are about a dozen of you in Rome. Are the others relatives?”

Zen shook his head absently. He was wondering whether Vasco Spadola had employed the same simple method to track him down.

In a
rosticceria
just north of the piazza they bought two of the egg-shaped rice croquettes called telephone wires, because when you pull them apart the ball of melted mozzarella in the middle separates into long curving strands, and a double portion of the only main dish left, a rabbit stew. Then they walked on, out of the clutches of the old city and across the river. Zen paused to draw Tania’s attention to the view downstream toward the island, the serried plane trees lining the stone-faced embankment, the river below as smooth and still as a darker vein in polished marble. While she was looking, he looked over his shoulder again. This time there was no doubt.

They moved on toward the wildly exuberant facade which might have been a grand opera house or the palace of a mad king, but was in fact the law courts. Here they paused until the traffic lights brought the cars to a reluctant, grudging halt, then crossed the Lungotevere and turned right alongside the law courts.

“Wait a minute,” Zen told Tania as they passed the corner.

A few moments later a young man in a denim suit trimmed with a sheepskin collar appeared, striding quickly along. Zen stepped in front of him, flourishing his identity card.

“Police! Your papers!”

The man gawked at him open-mouthed.

“I haven’t done anything!”

“I didn’t say you had.”

The man took out his wallet and produced a battered identity card in the name of Roberto Augusto Dentice. In the photograph, he looked younger, timid and studious. Zen plucked the wallet out of his hand.

“You’ve got no right to do that!” the man protested.

Ignoring him, Zen riffled through the compartments of the wallet, inspecting papers and photographs. Among them was a permit issued by the Rome Questura authorising Roberto Augusto Dentice to practice as a private detective within the limits of the province of Rome.

“All right, what’s going on?” Zen demanded.

“What do you mean?”

“Someone’s hired you to follow me. Who and why?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was just going for a walk.”

“And I suppose you were just going for a walk yesterday, when you followed me all the way from that restaurant to the Palatine? You really like walking, don’t you? You should join the Club Alpino.”

On the main road behind them, a chorus of horns sounded out like the siren of a great ocean liner.

“What are you talking about?” the man said. “I was at home all day yesterday.”

Zen’s instinct was to arrest the man on some pretext and shut him up in a room with one of the heavier-handed officials. But he no longer worked at the Questura where such facilities were available, and besides, Tania was waiting.

“All right,” he said in a voice laden with quiet menace. “Let me explain what I’m talking about. This job you’re doing, whatever it may be, ends here. If I so much as catch sight of you again, even casually, on a bus or in a bar, anywhere at all, then this permit of yours will be withdrawn and I’ll make damn sure that you never get another. Do we understand each other?”

These tactics proved unexpectedly successful. Faced with violence and menaces, the man might have remained defiant, but at the threat of unemployment his resistance suddenly collapsed.

“No one told me you were a cop!” he complained.

“What
did
they tell you?”

“Just to follow you after work.”

“How did you report?”

“He phoned me in the evening. And he paid cash. I don’t know who he is, honest to God!”

Zen handed back the man’s wallet and papers and turned away without another word.

“What was all that about?” Tania asked as they resumed their walk.

“My mistake. I thought he looked like someone wanted for questioning in the Bertolini killing.”

That was the second time that afternoon that he had broken his rule about not lying to Tania, Zen reflected. No doubt it had been an unrealistic ideal in the first place.

It felt odd to be walking home with the woman who had occupied so much of his thoughts recently, to pass the cafe at the corner in her company, to walk into the entrance hall together under Giuseppe’s eagle eye, travel up in the lift to the fourth floor, unlock the front door, admit her to his home, his other life. He was acutely aware that for the first time in years his mother was not there. Freed from the grid of rules and regulations her presence imposed, the apartment seemed larger and less cluttered than usual, full of possibilities. Zen felt a momentary stab of guilt, as though he had manoeuvred her transfer to the Nieddus just so that he could bring Tania here! It was strangely exciting, like being an adolescent again, and he found himself speculating on what might happen after lunch. Rather to his surprise, Zen found that he could quite easily imagine going to bed with Tania. Without any voyeuristic thrill, he visualised the two of them lying in the big brass bed he had occupied alone for so long. Naked, Tania looked thinner and taller than ever, but that didn’t matter. She looked like she belonged there.

Zen put these thoughts out of his mind. Life rarely turns out the way you imagine it is going to, he reasoned, so the more likely it seemed that he and Tania might end up in bed together, the less likely it would happen.

Maria Grazia had been told to stay away for the time being, and since Zen had no idea where she kept the everyday cutlery and crockery, he and Tania foraged around in the kitchen and the sideboard in the dining room, assembling china, silverware, and crystal Zen had last seen about twelve years previously at a dinner to celebrate his wedding anniversary. Unintimidated by these formal splendours, they ate the rice croquettes with their fingers, mopped up the stew with yesterday’s bread, and drank a lukewarm bottle of pinot spumante which had been standing on a shelf in the living room since the Christmas before last. Tania ate hungrily and without the slightest self-consciousness. When they finally set aside their little piles of rabbit bones, she announced, “That’s the best meal I’ve had in ages.”

Zen pushed the fruit bowl in her direction. “I find that hard to believe.”

She gave him a surprised glance.

“Given the life you lead,” he explained.

“Oh, that!”

She skinned a tangerine and started dividing it into segments.

“Look, there’s something we’d better clear up,” she said. “You see, I didn’t quite tell you the truth.”

He thought of them sitting together in the speeding taxi, the bands of light outlining the swell of her breasts, the line of her thigh.

“I know,” he said.

It was her turn to look surprised.

“Was it that obvious?”

“Oh, come on!” he exclaimed. “Did you honestly think I’d believe that you went to all that trouble, getting me to fake a phone call from work and all the rest of it, just so that you could go out to the cinema? I mean you don’t have to explain. I don’t care what you were doing. And even supposing I did, it’s none of my business.”

Tania was gazing at him with dawning comprehension.

“But that
was
what I was doing! Just that! It was all the other times that were lies, when I told you about the films I’d seen, and going to the opera and the theatre and all the rest of it.”

Tears swelled in her eyes. She looked away.

“That’s why I got so embarrassed in the taxi, when you asked where I was going. It wasn’t that I had a guilty secret, at least not the kind you thought! It was just that my pathetic little deception had been found out and I felt so ashamed of myself!

“It all started when you mentioned some film I’d read about in the paper. That’s all I ever
did
do, read about it. So I thought it would be fun to pretend that I’d seen it. Then I started doing it with other things, building a whole fantasy life that I shared with you every morning at work. It was never real, Aurelio, none of it! On the contrary! We never go anywhere, never do anything. All Mauro wants to do is sit at home with his mother and his sister and any cousins or aunts or uncles who happen to be around.

“The irony of it is that that’s one thing that attracted me to Mauro in the first place, the fact that he came with a ready-made family. My own parents are dead, as you know, and my only brother emigrated to Australia years ago. Well, I’ve got myself a family now all right, and
what
a family! Do you know what his mother calls me? ‘The tall cunt.’ I’ve heard them discussing me behind my back. ‘Why did you want to marry that tall cunt?’ she asks him. They think I can’t understand their miserable dialect. ‘It’s your own fault,’ she says. ‘You should never have married a foreigner. Wife and herd from your own backyard.’ This is the way they talk! This is the way they think!”

She broke off.

“What is it, Aurelio?”

He had got to his feet, listening. He went to the window and looked out. Then he turned and walked quickly toward the inner hallway, closing the door behind him. He lifted the phone and dialled 113, the police emergency number. Keeping his voice low so that Tania would not hear, Zen gave his name, address, and rank.

“There’s a stolen vehicle in the street outside my house. A red Alfa Romeo, registration number Roma 84693 P. Get a car here immediately, arrest the occupant, and charge him with theft. Approach with caution, however. He may be armed.”

“Very good, dottore.”

As Zen replaced the phone, he heard a sound from the living room. No, it was more distant, beyond the living room. From the hallway.

His heart began to beat very fast. Slowly, deliberately, he walked through the doorway and past the television, brushing his fingertips along the back of his mother’s chair. How could he have been so stupid, so thoughtless and selfish? To imagine that no harm could come to him in the daylight but only after dark, like a child! To put a person he loved at risk by bringing her to a place he knew to be under deadly threat. They’d been watching the house. They’d seen Tania and him enter, and they’d had plenty of time to prepare their move. Now they had come for him.

As he approached the glass-panelled door that opened into the hallway, there was a loud click, followed by the characteristic squeal as the front door opened. On the floor above, the canary chirped plaintively in response.

The scene reflected on the glass door was almost a replica of the one the night before. But this time Zen knew that he had not left the door open, and the dark figure walking toward him along the hallway did not call his name in a familiar voice, and it was carrying a shotgun.

“What’s going on, Aurelio?”

Tania was standing on the threshold of the inner hallway, looking anxiously at him. Zen waved her away, but she took no notice. Outside in the streets a siren rose and fell, gradually emerging from the urban backdrop as it rapidly neared the house. The gunman, now halfway along the hall, paused. The siren wound down to a low growl, directly outside the house.

Zen jumped as something touched his shoulder. He whirled round, staring wildly at Tania’s hand. She was close behind him, gazing at him with an expression of affectionate concern. He looked at the reflection of the hallway on the surface of the glass door. The figure had vanished. Zen grabbed Tania suddenly, holding her tightly, gasping for breath, trembling all over.

Then he abruptly thrust her away again.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he exclaimed repeatedly. “I didn’t mean to! I couldn’t help it!”

After a moment she came back to him of her own accord and took him in her arms.

“It’s all right,” she told him. “It’s all right.”

I didn’t mean to do it. I was just paying a visit, like before. They shouldn’t have tried to shut me out though, or else done it properly. As it was, I just pushed and twisted until the whole thing came crashing down. But it made me angry. They shouldn’t have done that.