Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (23 page)

And lo and behold, just a few weeks later, Reto Gurtner had telephoned. He had inspected several properties in the north of the island, he said, but his client had specifically asked him to look on the east coast, where he had vacationed several years earlier and of whose spectacular and rugged beauty he retained fond memories. If Dottor Confalone by any chance knew of any suitable properties on the market …

A man wearing even one of the many hats mentioned on Angelo Confalone’s business plate should perhaps have been shrewd enough to frown momentarily at this happy coincidence, but the young lawyer was too busy calculating his percentage from the sale of the property, which was now of course in a very different price bracket from the subsistence-level farm whose original purchase by Oscar Burolo he had also negotiated.

Confalone regarded his visitor complacently.

“As you are no doubt aware, Herr Gurtner, properties of a standard high enough to satisfy your client’s requirements are few and far in this area. As for one coming on the market, you would normally have to wait years. It so happens, however, that I am in a position to offer you a villa which has only just become available, and which I can truly and honestly describe without risk of hyperbole as the finest example of its type to be found anywhere in the island, the Costa Smeralda included.”

He went on in this vein for some time, expatiating on the imaginative way in which the original farmhouse had been modernised and extended without sacrificing the unique authenticity of its humble origins.

“The original owner was a man of vision and daring who brought his unlimited resources and great expertise in the construction business to bear on the …”

“He was realising a dream?” Zen suggested.

Confalone nodded vigorously. “Exactly. Precisely. I couldn’t have put it better myself. He was realising a dream.”

“And why is he now selling it, his dream?”

The lawyer’s vivacity vanished.

“For family reasons,” he murmured. “There was … a death. In the family.”

He awaited Herr Gurtner’s response with some trepidation. For the kind of commission the Burolos were offering, Confalone was quite prepared to try and conceal the truth. But commission wasn’t everything. He had his career to consider, and that meant that he couldn’t afford to lie.

But Reto Gurtner appeared satisfied.

“I should like to see this most interesting property at once,” he declared, rising to his feet.

Confalone’s relief was apparent in his voice.

“Certainly, certainly! I shall be privileged to accompany you personally and—”

“Thank you, that will not be necessary. There is a caretaker at the house? If you will be good enough to ring and let them know that I am coming, I prefer to look around on my own. We Swiss, you know, are very methodical. I do not wish to try your patience!”

After some polite insistence, Angelo Confalone gave way gracefully. Double commission and no time wasted doing the honours! He could hardly believe his luck.

Zen emerged from the lawyer’s offices to a chorus of horns. The street had been blocked by a lorry delivering cartons of dairy produce to a nearby grocery. He slipped through the narrow space between the lorry and the wall and made his way along the cracked concrete slabs with which the street was paved, well pleased with the way things were going. Back in Rome, the idea of forestalling his official mission with a bit of private enterprise had appeared at best a forlorn attempt to leave no stone unturned, at worst a foolhardy scheme which might well end in disaster and humiliation. But from his present perspective, Rome itself seemed a city as distant and as foreign as Marseilles or Madrid. It was here, and only here, that Zen could hope to find the solution to his problems.

Not that he expected to crack the Burolo case, of course! There was nothing to crack, anyway. The evidence against Renato Favelloni was overwhelming. The only question was whether the architect had done the job personally or hired it out to a professional. The key to the whole affair had been the video tapes and computer diskettes stored in the underground vault at Oscar’s villa. Here Oscar had kept in electronic form all the information recording in meticulous detail the history of his construction company’s irresistible rise. After the murders, this material had been impounded by the authorities, but when the investigating magistrate’s staff came to examine them, they found that the computer data had been irretrievably corrupted, probably by exposure to a powerful magnetic field.

Insistent rumours began to circulate to the effect that the disks had been in perfect condition when they were seized by the Carabinieri, and these rumours were strengthened about a month later when a leading news magazine published what purported to be a transcription of part of Oscar’s records. The material concerned a contract agreed in 1979 for the construction of a new prison near Latina, a creation of the Fascist era on the Lazio coast, popularly known as Latrina. Burolo Construction had undercut the estimated minimum tender for the project by almost sixty percent. Their bid was duly accepted, despite the fact that the plan which accompanied it was vague in some places and full of inaccuracies in others.

No sooner had work begun than the site proved to be marshy and totally unsuitable for the type of construction envisaged. Burolo Construction promptly applied to the Ministry of Public Works for the first of a series of revised budgets which eventually pushed the cost of the prison from the 4 thousand million lire specified in the original contract to over 36 thousand million. This much was public knowledge. What the news magazine’s article showed was how it had been done.

The central figure was a politician referred to in Burolo’s electronic notes as
l’onorevole.
Although the article did not name him, it left little doubt in the reader’s mind that the person referred to was a leading figure in one of the smaller parties making up the governing coalition, who had been Minister of Public Works at the time the prison contract was agreed. According to his notes Oscar had paid Renato Favelloni 350 million lire to ensure that Burolo Construction would get the contract. A comment which some claimed to find typical of Oscar’s sardonic style noted that this handout exceeded the normal rate, which apparently varied between six and eight percent of the contract fee. The records also listed the dates and places on which Oscar had contacted Favelloni and one on which he had met
l’onorevole
himself.

No sooner has this article appeared than the journalists responsible were summoned to the law courts in Nuoro and directed to disclose where they had obtained the information. On refusing, they were promptly jailed for culpable reticence. But that wasn’t the end of the affair, for the following issue of the magazine contained an interview with Oscar’s son. Enzo Burolo not only substantiated the claims made in the original article, but advanced new and even more damaging allegations. In particular, he claimed that six months prior to the killings his father had paid 70 million lire to obtain the contract for a new generating station for ENEL, the electricity board. Despite this exorbitant backhander, Burolo Construction did not get the contract.

According to Enzo, Oscar Burolo was so infuriated that he vowed to stop paying kickbacks altogether. From that point on, his company’s fortunes went into a nosedive. In a desperate attempt to break the system, Oscar had leagued together with other construction firms to form a ring that tendered for contracts at realistic prices, but in each case the bidding was declared invalid on some technicality and the contract subsequently awarded to a company outside the ring.

Burolo Construction soon found itself on the verge of bankruptcy, but when Oscar applied to the banks for a line of credit he discovered that he was no longer a favoured client. His letters were mislaid, his calls not returned, the people he had plied with gifts and favours were permanently unavailable. Furious and desperate, Oscar had played his last card, contacting Renato Favelloni to demand the protection of
l’onorevole
himself. If this was not forthcoming, he warned Favelloni, he would reveal the full extent of their collaboration, including detailed accounts of the payoffs over the Latina prison job and a video tape showing Favelloni himself in an unguarded moment discussing his relationship with various men of power,
l’onorevole
included. Discussions and negotiations had continued throughout the summer, but according to Enzo this had been a mere delaying tactic which his father’s enemies used to gain time in which to prepare their definitive response, which duly came on that fateful day in August, just hours after Renato Favelloni had left the Villa Burolo.

From that moment on, the case against Favelloni developed an irresistible momentum. True, there were still those who raised doubts. For example, if the destruction of Burolo’s records had been as vital to the success of the conspiracy as the murder of Oscar himself, how was it that the magazine had been able to obtain an uncorrupted copy of one of the most incriminating of the disks? Even more to the point, why did the killer use a weapon as noisy as a shotgun if he needed time to destroy the records and make good his escape? But these questions were soon answered. The magazine’s information, it was suggested, came not from the original disk but from a copy which the wily Burolo had deposited elsewhere, to be made public in the event of his death. As for the noise factor, there was nothing to show that the disks and videos had not been erased before the killings. Indeed, the metallic crash reproduced on the video recording seemed to strengthen this hypothesis. As for the weapon, this had presumably been chosen with a view to making the crime appear a savage act of casual violence. In short, such details appeared niggling attempts to undermine the case against Renato Favelloni and his masters at Palazzo Sisti, a case which now appeared overwhelming.

Luckily for Zen, the case itself was not his only concern. There was no way he could realistically hope to get Favelloni off the hook. His aim was simply to avoid making powerful and dangerous enemies at Palazzo Sisti, and the best way to do this seemed to be to take a leaf out of Vincenzo Fabri’s book. In other words, he had to make it look as if he had done his crooked best to frame Padedda, but that his best just hadn’t been good enough. This wasn’t as easy as it sounded. The situation had to be handled very carefully indeed if he was to avoid sending an innocent man to prison and yet convince Palazzo Sisti that he was not a disloyal employee to be ruthlessly disposed of, but like Fabri, a well-meaning sympathiser who was unfortunately not up to the demands of the job. In Rome his prospects of achieving this had appeared extremely dubious, but he was now beginning to feel that he could bring it off. The tide had turned with the arrest of Giuliano Acciari and—yes, why not admit it?—with that lunch with Tania and the embrace with which it had concluded. A fatalist at heart, Zen had learnt from bitter experience that when things weren’t going his way, there was no point in trying to force them to do so. Now that they were, it would be equally foolish not to take advantage of the situation.

He strolled along the street, glancing into shop windows and along the dark alleys that opened off to either side, scanning the features and gestures of the people he met. He felt that he was beginning to get the feel of the place, to sense the possibilities it offered.

Then he saw—or seemed to see—something that brought all his confident reasoning crashing down around him. In an alleyway to the left of the main street, a cul-de-sac filled with plastic rubbish sacks, a few empty oil drums, and some building debris, stood a figure holding what looked like a gun.

A moment later it was gone, and a moment after that Zen found himself questioning whether it had ever existed. Don’t be absurd, he told himself as he stepped into the alley, determined to dispel this mirage created by his own overheated imagination. The man who had broken into his house in Rome was safely under arrest, and even if Spadola had taken up his twenty-year-old vendetta in person, how could he have tracked his quarry down so quickly? Zen had had every reason to take the greatest care when collecting the Mercedes and driving it to Civitavecchia. He wasn’t thinking of Spadola so much as Vincenzo Fabri and the people at Palazzo Sisti. But he hadn’t been followed, he was sure of that.

The alley narrowed to a crevice between the buildings on either side, barely wide enough for one person to pass. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Zen saw that it continued for some distance, dipped steeply, and then turned sharply left, presumably leading to a street below. There was no sign that anyone had been there recently.

When he heard the footsteps behind him, closing off his escape, he whirled around. For a moment everything seemed to be repeating itself in mirror image: once again he was faced with a figure holding a gun. But this time the weapon was a stubby submachine gun, the man was wearing battle dress, and there was no doubt about the reality of the experience. At the end of the alley, in the street, stood a blue jeep marked Carabinieri.

“Papers!” the man barked.

Zen reached automatically for his wallet. Then his hand dropped again.

“They took them at the hotel,” he explained, accentuating his Northern intonation slightly.

The Carabiniere looked him up and down. “This isn’t the way to the hotel.”

“I know. I was just curious. I’m from Switzerland, you see. Our towns are more rationally built, but they lack these interesting and picturesque aspects.”

The Carabiniere appeared to relax slightly. “Tourist?” he asked.

Zen ran through his well rehearsed spiel, taking care to mention Angelo Confalone several times. The Carabiniere’s expression gradually shifted from suspicion to a slightly patronising complacency. Finally he ushered Zen back to the street.

“All the same,” he said as they reached the jeep, “it’s maybe better not to go exploring too much. There was a case last spring, a couple of German tourists in a camper found shot through the head. They must have stumbled on something they weren’t supposed to see. It can happen to anyone, round here. All you need is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”