Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (21 page)

I thought the noise might bring them running, but they were as deaf and blind as usual. To get my own back, I decided to make the gun disappear. I’m no stranger to guns. My father was famous for his marksmanship. After Sunday lunch, when the animals had been corralled and lassoed, wrestled to the ground like baby giants, and dosed with medicine or branded, the men would hurl beer bottles up into the air to fire at. Drunk as he was, the sweet grease of the piglet they had roasted before the fire still glistening on his lips and chin, my father could always hit the target and make the valley ring with the sound of breaking glass. “There’s nothing to it!” he used to joke. “You just pull the trigger and the gun does the rest.”

As I lifted it from the rack, I heard someone laugh in the next room. It was sleek and fat and arrogant, his laugh, like one of the young men lounging in the street, fingering their cocks like a pocket full of money. That was when I decided to show myself. That would stop the laughter. That would give them something to think about.

After that, things happened without consulting me. A man came at me. A woman ran. I worked the trigger again and again.

Father was quite right. The gun did the rest.

Sardinia

SATURDAY: 0505–1250

A
CHILL, TANGY WIND
, laden with salt and darkness, whined and blustered about the ship, testing for weaknesses. By contrast, the sea was calm. Its shiny black surface merged imperceptibly into the darkness all around, ridged into folds, tucks, and creases, heaving and tilting in the moonlight. The choppy waves slapping the metal plates below seemed to have no effect on the motion of the ship itself, which lay still as though it were already roped to the quay.

A man stood grasping the metal rail thick with innumerable coats of paint, staring out into the night as keenly as an officer of the watch. The unbuttoned overcoat flapping about like a cloak gave him an illusory air of corpulence, but when the wind failed for a moment, he was revealed as quite slender for his height. Beneath the overcoat he was wearing a rumpled suit. A tie of nondescript hue was plastered to his shirt by the wind in a lazy curve like a question mark. His face was lean and smooth with an aquiline nose and slate-blue eyes whose gaze was as disconcertingly direct as a child’s. His hair, its basic undistinguished brown now flecked with silvery-grey highlights at the temples, was naturally curly, and the wind tossed it back and forth like the frantic wavelets in the storm scene on a Greek vase. The man himself, for that matter, might well have been the model for one of the figures in such a scene, grasping a trident, a fishing-net, or wrestling with some fabulous sea-beast, a monster from the deep.

A few hundred metres astern of the ship, the full moon reflected up at him from the sea’s unstable surface. It was deep here, off the eastern coast of the island, where the mountains plunged down to meet the sea and then kept going. Zen stood breathing in the wild air and scanning the horizon for some hint of their landfall. But there was nothing to betray the presence of the coast, unless it was the fact that the darkness ahead seemed even more unyielding, solid and impenetrable. The steward had knocked on the cabin door to wake him twenty minutes earlier, claiming that their arrival was imminent. Emerging on deck, Zen had expected lights, bustling activity, a first view of his destination. But there was nothing. The ship might have been becalmed in midocean.

He didn’t care. He felt weightless, anonymous, stripped of all superfluous baggage. Rome was already inconceivably distant. Sardinia lay somewhere ahead, unknown, a blank. As for the reasons why he was there, standing on the deck of a Tirrenia Line ferry at five o’clock in the morning, they seemed utterly unreal and irrelevant.

When he looked again, it was over. The wall of darkness ahead had divided in two: a high mountain range below, dappled with a suggestion of contours, and the sky above, hollow with the coming dawn. Harbour lights emerged from behind the spit of land which had concealed them earlier, now differentiated from the open sea and the small bay beyond. Reading them like constellations, Zen mapped out quays and jetties, cranes and roads in the half-light. Things were beginning to put on shape and form, waking up to get dressed and make themselves presentable. The moment had passed. Soon it would be just another day.

Down below in the bar, the process was already well advanced. A predominantly male crowd, more or less dishevelled and bad-tempered, clustered around a sleepy cashier to but a printed receipt which they then took to the bar and traded in for a plastic thimble filled with strong black coffee. On the bench seats all around, young people were awakening from a rough night, rubbing their eyes, scratching their backs, exchanging little jokes and caresses. Zen had just succeeded in ordering his coffee when a robotic voice from the tannoy directed all drivers disembarking to make their way to the car deck. He downed the coffee hurriedly, scalding his mouth and throat, before heading down into the bowels of the ship.

The vehicles bound for this small port of call on the way to Cagliari, the ship’s destination, were almost exclusively commercial and military. Neither category took the slightest notice of the signs asking drivers not to switch on their engines until the bow doors had been opened. Zen made his way through clouds of diesel fumes to his car, sandwiched between a large lorry and a coach filled with military conscripts looking considerable less lively than they had the night before when they had made the harbour at Civitavecchia ring with the forced gaiety of desperate men. He unlocked the door and climbed in. Fausto Arcuti had done him well, there was no question about that. Returning to the Rally Bar the previous afternoon, Zen had collected an envelope containing a set of keys and a piece of paper reading, Outside Via Florio, 63. He turned the paper over and wrote: Many thanks for prompt delivery. The Parrucci affair has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with you. Regards.

He handed the note to the barman and walked round the corner to Via Florio.

There was no need to check the house number. The car, a white Mercedes sedan with cream leather upholstery, stood out a mile among the battered compacts of the Testaccio residents. It had been fitted with Zurich numberplates, fairly recently to judge by the bright scratches on the rusty nuts. No registration or insurance documents were displayed on the windscreen, but this would have been a bit much to expect at such short notice. Zen took out his wallet and inspected the Swiss identity card in the name of Reto Gurtner which he had retained following an undercover job six years earlier. It was a fake, but extremely high quality, a product of the secret service’s operation at Prato where, it was rumoured, a large number of the top forgers in the country offered their skills to SISMI in lieu of a prison sentence. The primitive lighting and Zen’s constrained pose made the photograph look like a police mug shot, not surprisingly, since it had been taken on the same equipment. Herr Gurtner of Zurich looked capable of just about anything, thought Zen, even framing an innocent man to order.

As he sat there, the Mercedes’ luxurious coachwork muffling him from the farting lorries and buses all around, Zen reflected that whatever happened in Sardinia, he had at least been able to clear up his outstanding problems in Rome before leaving. The
Volante
patrol summoned by his 113 call from the flat had arrested a man attempting to escape in the red Alfa Romeo. He turned out to be one Giuliano Acciari, a local hoodlum with a lengthy criminal record for housebreaking and minor thuggery. Zen thought he recognised him as the man who had picked his pocket in the bus queue, although he did not mention this to the police. Acciari was unarmed, and a search failed to turn up the shotgun which he was assumed to have dumped on hearing the sirens. But the police were holding Acciari for the theft of the Alfa Romeo and had assured Zen that they would spare no effort to extract any information Acciari might have as to the whereabouts of Vasco Spadola.

A series of shudders and a change in the pitch of the turbines announced that the ship had docked, but another ten minutes passed before a crack of daylight finally penetrated the murky reaches of the car deck. The coaches and lorries to either side of Zen rumbled into motion and then, too soon, it was his turn.

Zen had learnt to drive back in the late fifties, but he had never really developed a taste for it. As the roads filled up, speeds increased, and drivers’ tempers shortened, he had seen no reason to change his views, although he was careful to keep them to himself, well aware that they would be considered dissident, if not heretical. But in the present case there had been no alternative: he couldn’t drag anyone else along to act as his chauffeur, and it would not be credible for Herr Reto Gurtner, the wealthy burgher of Zurich, to travel through the wilds of Sardinia by public transport.

Zen’s style behind the wheel was that of an elderly peasant farmer phut-phutting along at 20 kph in a worn-out Fiat truck with bald tyres and no acceleration, blithely oblivious to the hooting, light-flashing hysteria building up in his wake. The drive from Rome to the port at Civitavecchia the day before had been a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal, but getting off the ferry presented even greater problems of clutch control and touch steering than the innumerable traffic lights of the Via Aurelia, at each of which the Mercedes had seemed to take fright like a horse at a fence. Having stalled three times and then nearly rammed the side of the ship by overrevving, Zen finally managed to negotiate the metal ramp leading to Sardinian soil, or rather the stone jetty to which the ferry was moored. Rather to his surprise, there were no formalities, no passports, no customs. But bureaucratically, of course, he was still in Italy.

The port amounted to no more than a couple of wharves where the ferries to and from the mainland touched once a week and Russian freighters periodically unloaded cargoes of timber pulp for the local papermill. At the end of the quay a narrow, badly surfaced road curved away between outcrops of jagged pink rock. Zen drove through a straggling collection of makeshift houses that never quite became a village and along the spit of land projecting out to the harbour from the main coastline. The sun was still hidden behind the mountains, but the sky overhead was clear, a delicate pale wintry blue. Seagulls swept back and forth foraging for food, their cries pealing out in the crisp air. It was Zen’s first visit to the island. All police officials have to do a stint in one of the three problem areas of the country, but Zen had chosen the Alto Adige rather than Sicily or Sardinia because from there he could easily get back to Venice to see his mother. As he drove through the small town where the road inland crossed the main coastal highway, his instinct was to stop the car, drop into a cafe, and start picking up the clues, sniffing the air, getting his bearings. But he couldn’t, for in Sardinia he was not Aurelio Zen but Reto Gurtner, and although he had as yet only a vague idea of Gurtner’s character, he was sure that pausing to soak up the atmosphere formed no part of it. Or rather, he was sure that that was what the locals would assume, and it was their view of things that mattered. A rich Swiss stopping his Mercedes outside some rural dive for an early morning cappucino would instantly become a suspect Swiss, and that of all things was the one Zen could least afford.

For he must not let the clear sky, pure air and early morning sense of elation go to his head, he knew. In those mountains blocking off the sun, turning their back on the sea, lived men who had survived thousands of years of foreign domination by using their wits and their intimate knowledge of the land. Thousands of policemen, occasionally supplemented by the army, had been drafted there in a succession of attempts to break the complex, archaic, unwritten rules of the
Codice Barbaricine
and impose the laws passed in Rome. They had failed. Even Mussolini’s strong-arm tactics, successful against the largely urban Mafia, had been ineffective with these shepherds who could simply vanish into the mountains. The mass arrests of their relatives in raids on whole villages merely served to strengthen the hands of the outlaws, making them into folk heroes. Any collaboration with the authorities was considered treachery of the most vile kind and punished accordingly. To Sardinians, mainland Italians were either policemen, soldiers, teachers, tax gatherers, bureaucrats, or more recently, tourists. They stayed for a while, took what they wanted, and then left, as ignorant as when they had arrived of the local inhabitants, the harsh brand of Latin they spoke, and the complex and often violent code for resolving conflicts among shepherds whose flocks roamed freely across the open mountains. This was why Zen had decided to go about this unofficial undercover operation in the guise of a foreigner. All outsiders were suspect in Sardinia, but a foreigner was much less likely to attract suspicion than a lone Italian, who would automatically be assumed to be a government spy of some type. Besides, Herr Reto Gurtner had a good reason for visiting this out-of-the-way corner of the island at this unseasonable time of the year. He was looking for a property.