Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (22 page)

The Mercedes hummed purposefully along the road that wound and twisted its way up from the coast through a parched, scorched landscape. To either side, jagged crags of limestone rose like molars out of acres of sterile red soil. Giant cactuses with enormous prickly ears grew there along with small groves of eucalyptus and olive and the odd patch of stunted vines that seemed to be wild. There was a gratifying absence of traffic about, and Zen was just getting into his stride when he was brought to a halt at a level crossing consisting of a chain with a metal plate dangling from it. He had been vaguely aware of a set of narrow-gauge railway tracks running alongside the road, but they looked so poorly maintained that he had assumed the line was disused.

On the other side of the chain, an elderly woman was chatting to a schoolboy wearing a satchel with the inscription Iron Maiden in fluorescent orange and green. They both turned to stare at the Mercedes. Zen gave them a bland, blank look he imagined to be typically Swiss. They continued to stare. Zen took the opportunity of consulting the map. That too was surely a typically Swiss thing to do.

A train consisting of an ancient diesel locomotive and two decrepit coaches staggered to a stop at the crossing. The Iron Maiden fan climbed in to join a mob of other schoolchildren, the locomotive belched a cloud of fumes, and a moment later the road was clear again. Zen put the car in gear, stalled, let off the handbrake, started to roll backward, engaged the clutch, restarted the motor, stalled, engaged the handbrake, disengaged the clutch, restarted the motor, released the handbrake, engaged the clutch, and drove away. None of this, he felt, was typically Swiss. The look the crossing-keeper gave him suggested that she felt the same.

Fortified by the information from the map and the occasional faded and rusted road sign, Zen continued inland for a dozen kilometres before turning left up a steep road twisting up the mountainside in a series of switchback loops. At each corner he caught a glimpse of the village above. The nearer he got, the less attractive it looked. From a distance, it resembled some natural disaster, a landslip perhaps. Close up, it looked like a gigantic rubbish tip. There was nothing distinctively Sardinian about it. It could have been any one of thousands of communities in the South kept alive by injections of cash from migrant workers, the houses piled together higgledy-piggledy, many of them unfinished, awaiting the next cheque from abroad. The dominant colours were white and ochre, the basic shape the rectangle. Strewn across the steep slope, the place had a freakish, temporary air, as though by the next day it might all have been dismantled and moved elsewhere. And yet it might well have been there when Rome itself was but a village.

The final curves of the road had already been colonised by the zone of new buildings. Some were mere skeletons of reinforced concrete, others had a shell of outer walling but remained uninhabited. A few were being built story by story, the lower floor already in use while the first floor formed a temporary flat roof from which the rusted reinforcement wires for the next stage protruded like the stalks of some superhardy local plant that had learned to flourish in cement. The road gradually narrowed and became the main street of the village proper. Zen painfully squeezed the Mercedes past parked vans and lorries, cravenly giving way to any oncoming traffic, until he reached a small piazza that was really no more than a broadening of the main street. The line of buildings was broken here by a terrace planted with stocky trees overlooking a stunning panorama that stretched all the way down to the distant coastline and the sea beyond. Somewhere down there, Zen knew, indistinguishable to the naked eye, lay the Villa Burolo.

He parked on the other side of the piazza, in front of a squat, fairly new building with a sign reading, Bar—Restaurant—Hotel. It was still early and the few people about were all intent on business of one kind or another, but Zen was conscious of their eyes on him as he got out of the car and removed his suitcase from the boot. Stranger in town, they were thinking. Foreign car. Tourist? At this time of year? Zen was acutely aware of their puzzlement, their suspicion. He wanted to cultivate it briefly, letting the questions form and the implications be raised before he supplied an answer which, he hoped, would then come as a satisfying relief.

He pushed through the plate-glass doors into a bar which might have looked glamorously stylish when it had been built, some time in the mid-sixties, but which had aged gracelessly. The stippled plaster was laden with dust, the tinted metal facades were dented and scratched, the pine trim had been bleached by sunlight and stained by liquids and was warping off the wall in places. All these details were mercilessly reflected from every angle by a series of mirrors designed to increase the apparent size of the room, but which in fact reduced it to a nightmarish maze of illusory perspectives and visual cul-de-sacs.

“With or without?” the proprietor demanded when Zen asked if he had a room available.

Zen had given some thought to the question of how Reto Gurtner should speak, eventually deciding against funny accents or deliberate mistakes. It would be typically Swiss, he decided, to speak pedantically correct Italian, but slowly and heavily, as though all the words were equal citizens and it would be invidious and undemocratic to emphasise some at the expense of others.

“I beg your pardon?”

“A shower.”

“Yes, please. With a shower.”

The proprietor plucked a key from a row of hooks and slapped it down on the counter. He was plump, with a bushy black beard and receding hair. His manner was deliberately ungracious, as though the shameful calling of taking in guests for money had been forced on him by stern necessity and he loathed it as a form of prostitution. He took Zen’s faked papers without a second glance and started copying the relevant details onto a police registration form.

“Would it be possible to have a
cappucino?”
Zen enquired politely.

“At the bar.”

Zen duly took the four paces needed to reach this installation. The proprietor completed the form, held it up to the light as though to admire the watermark, folded it in two with exaggerated precision, and placed it with the papers in a small safe let into the wall. He then walked over to the bar, where he set about washing up some glasses.

An elderly man came into the bar. He was wearing a brown corduroy suit with leather patches at the seat and behind the knees and a flat cap. His face was as hard and smooth and irregular as a piece of granite exposed to centuries of harsh weather.

“Oh, Tommaso!” the proprietor called, setting a glass of wine on the counter. The man knocked the wine back in one gulp and started rolling a cigarette. Meanwhile he and the proprietor conversed animatedly in a language that might have been Arabic as far as Zen was concerned.

“May I have my
cappucino,
please?” he asked plaintively.

The proprietor glanced at him as though he had never seen him before and was both puzzled and annoyed to find him there.

“Cappucino?”
he demanded in a tone which suggested that this drink was some exotic foreign speciality.

Zen’s instinct was to match rudeness with rudeness, but Reto Gurtner, he felt sure, would remain palely polite under any provocation.

“If you please. Perhaps you would also be good enough to direct me to the offices of Dottor Confalone,” he added.

The elderly man looked up from licking the gummed edge of his cigarette paper. He spat out a shred of tobacco which had found its way on to his tongue.

“Opposite the post office,” he said.

“Is it far?”

There was a brief roar as the proprietor frothed the milk with steam.

“Five minutes,” he said quickly, as though to forestall the old man from making any further unwise disclosures.

Zen stirred sugar into his coffee. He himself never took sugar, but he felt that Reto Gurtner would have a sweet tooth. Similarly, the cigarettes he produced were not his usual Nazionali but cosmopolitan Marlboros.

“I have an appointment, you see,” he explained laboriously to no one in particular. “In half an hour. I don’t know how it is here in Italy, but in Switzerland it is very important to be punctual. Especially when it’s business.”

Neither the proprietor nor the old man showed the slightest interest in this observation, but from the studious way they avoided glancing at each other Zen knew that the point had been taken. The disturbing mystery of Herr Gurtner’s descent on the village had been reduced to a specific, localised puzzle.

It was just after nine o’clock when Aurelio Zen, spruce and clean-shaven, emerged from the hotel. The main street of the village was a deep canyon of shadow, but the alleys and steps running off to either side were slashed with sunshine, revealing panels of brilliant white walling inset with dark rectangular openings. Behind and above them rose a rugged chaos of rock and tough green shrubs, the ancient mountain backbone of the island, last vestige of the submerged Tyrrhenian continent.

Zen walked purposefully along, smiling in a pleasant, meaningless way at everyone he passed like a benevolent but rather simple-minded giant. The Sards were the shortest of all Mediterranean races, while Zen was above average height for an Italian, thanks to his father’s quirky theories about food. A self-educated Socialist, he had been an enthusiast for many useless things, of which Mussolini’s vapid patriotism had, briefly, been the last. Among these had been a primitive vegetarianism, in particular the notion that beans and milk were the foundation of a healthy diet. From the moment Aurelio was weaned, he had eaten a large dish of these two ingredients mashed together every lunchtime. His father’s belief in the virtues of this wonder food had been based on a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas culled from his wide but eclectic reading, but by the purest chance he had happened to hit on two cheap and easily obtainable sources of complementary protein, with the result that Zen had grown up unaffected by the shortages of meat and fish which stunted the development of other children in wartime Venice.

The reactions to Herr Gurtner’s bland Swiss smile varied interestingly. The young men hanging about in the piazza, as though work were not so much unavailable as beneath their dignity, surveyed the tall stranger like an exotic animal on display in a travelling circus: odd and slightly absurd, but also potentially dangerous. To their elders, clustered on the stone benches between the trees, he was just another piece in the hopeless puzzle which life had become, over which they shook their heads loosely and muttered incoherent comments.

The men, old and young, massed in groups, using the public spaces as an extension of their living rooms, but the women Zen saw were always alone and on the move. They had rights of passage only and scurried along as though liable to be challenged at any moment, clutching their wicker shopping baskets like official permits. The married ones ignored Zen totally, the nubile shot him glances as keen and challenging as a thrown knife. Only the old women, having nothing more to fear or hope from the enemy, gave him cool but not unfriendly looks of appraisal. Dressed all in black, they looked like pyramids of different-sized tyres narrowing from massive hips through bulbous waists to the tiny scarf-wrapped heads.

The exception which proved this rule of female purpose and activity was a half-witted woman who approached Zen just as he reached his destination, asking for money. Even by Sardinian standards, she was exceptionally small, almost dwarflike. She was wearing a dark brown pullover and a long full skirt of some heavy, navy blue material. Her head and feet were bare and dirty, and she limped so aggressively that Zen assumed that she was faking or at least exaggerating her disability for professional reasons. He offered her five hundred lire before realising that Herr Reto Gurtner, coming from a nation which prided itself on providing for all its citizens, would disapprove of begging on principle. Fortunately the woman was clearly too crazy to pick up on any such subtleties. Zen forced the money into her hand while she stared fixedly at him like someone who has mistaken a stranger for an old acquaintance. He turned away into the doorway flanked by a large plastic sign: Dott. Angelo Confalone—Solicitor—Notary Public—Estate Agent—Chartered Accountant—Insurance Broker—Tax and Investment Specialist. Also, teeth pulled and horoscopes cast, thought Zen as he climbed the steps to the second floor.

Angelo Confalone was a plush young man who received Herr Gurtner with an expansive warmth, in marked contrast to the cold stares and hostile glances which had been his lot thus far. It was a pleasure, he intimated, to have dealings with someone so distinguished and sophisticated, so different from the usual run of his clients. He wasn’t Sardinian himself, it soon emerged, from Genoa in fact, but his sister had married someone from the area who had pointed out that there was an opening in the village, it was a long story and one he would not bore Herr Gurtner with, but the long and short of it was that one had to start somewhere.

Zen nodded his agreement. “We have a saying in my country: No matter how high the mountain, you have to start climbing at the bottom.”

The lawyer laughed with vivacious insincerity and complimented Herr Gurtner on his Italian.

“And now to business, if you please,” Zen told him. “You have, I believe, something for me to look at.”

“Indeed.”

Indeed! When Reto Gurtner had phoned him the day before with regard to finding a suitable holiday property for a client in Switzerland, Angelo Confalone could hardly believe his luck. Ever since Oscar Burolo’s son had instructed him to put his father’s illfated Sardinian retreat on the market, Confalone had been asking himself who on earth in his right mind would ever want to buy the Villa Burolo after the lurid publicity given to the horrors that had occurred there. Mindful of this, Enzo Burolo had offered to double the usual commission in order to get the place off their hands quickly, but Confalone still couldn’t see any way that he would be able to take advantage of this desirable sweetener. Unless some rich foreigner happens along, he had concluded, I’m just wasting my time.