Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (24 page)

The jeep roared away.

I thought their deaths would change everything, but nothing changed. Night after night I returned, as though next time the sentence might be revoked, the dream broken. In vain. Even here, where the darkness is entire, I knew I was only on parole. Nothing would ever change that. I was banished, exiled for life into this world of light which divides and pierces, driving its aching distances into us.

Perhaps I had not done enough, I thought. Perhaps a further offering was required, another death. But whose? I lost myself in futile speculations. There is a power that punishes us, that much seemed clear. Its influence extends everywhere, pervasive and mysterious, but can it also be influenced? Since we are punished, we must have offended. Can that offence be redeemed? And so on endlessly, round and round, dizzying myself in the search for some flaw in the walls that shut me in, that shut me out.

A good butcher doesn’t stain the meat, my father used to say, though everything else was stained, clothes and skin and face, as he wrestled the animal to the ground and stuck the long knife into its throat, panting, drenched in blood from head to toe, the pig still twitching. Yet when he strung it up and peeled away the skin, the meat was unblemished. That’s all I need be, I thought. A good butcher, calm, patient, and indifferent. All I lacked was the chosen victim.

Then the policeman came.

SATURDAY: 2010–2225

B
Y EIGHT O’CLOCK THAT EVENING
, Herr Reto Gurtner was in a philosophical mood. Aurelio Zen, on the other hand, was drunk and lonely.

The night was heavy and close, with occasional rumbles of thunder. The bar was crowded with men of all ages, talking, smoking, drinking, playing cards. Apart from the occasional oblique glance, they ignored the stranger sitting at a table near the back of the room. But his presence disturbed them, no question about that. They would much rather that he had not been there. In an earlier, rougher era they would have seen him off the premises and out of the village. That was no longer possible, and so, reflected the philosophical Gurtner, they were willing him into nonexistence, freezing him out, closing the circle against him.

Despite evident differences in age, education, and income, all the men were dressed in very similar clothes: sturdy, drab, and functional. In Rome it was the clothes you noticed first these days, not the mass-produced figures whose purpose seemed to be to display them to advantage. But here in this dingy backward Sardinian bar it was still the people that mattered. We’ve thrown out the baby with the bath water, reflected the philosophical Gurtner. Eradicating poverty and prejudice, we’ve eradicated something else too, something as rare as any of the threatened species the ecologists make so much fuss about, and just as impossible to replace once it has become extinct.

Bullshit, Aurelio Zen exclaimed angrily, pouring himself another glass of
vernaccia
from the carafe he had ordered. The storm-laden atmosphere, the distasteful nature of his business, his sense of total isolation, the fact that he was missing Tania badly, all these had combined to put him in a sour and irrational mood. This priggish, patronising Zuricher was the last straw. Who did he think he was, coming over here and going on as though poverty were something romantic and valuable? Only a nation as crassly and smugly materialistic as the Swiss could afford to indulge in that sort of sentimentality.

He gulped the tawny wine that clung to the sides of the glass like spirits. It was tasting better all the time. Once again he thought of phoning Tania, and once again he rejected the idea. The more he lovingly recalled, detail by detail, what had happened that lunch-time, the more unlikely it appeared. He must surely have imagined the light in her eyes, the lift in her voice. The facts were not in dispute, it was a question of how you interpreted them. It was the same with the Burolo case. It was the same with
everything!

Zen peered intently at the tabletop, which swam in and out of focus in a fascinating way. For a moment he seemed to have caught a glimpse of a great truth, a unified field theory of human existence, a simple basic formula that explained everything.

This wine is very strong, Reto Gurtner explained in his slightly pedantic accent. You have drunk a lot of it on an empty stomach. It has gone to your head. The thing to do now is to get something to eat.

Well, it was easy to say that! Hadn’t he been waiting for all this time for some sign of life in the restaurant area? It was now nearly a quarter past eight, and the lights were still dimmed and the curtain drawn. What time did they eat here, for God’s sake?

Once again the thunder growled distantly, reminding Zen of the jet fighter which had startled him at the villa earlier that day. There had been no hint of a storm then. On the contrary, the sky was free of any suspicion of cloud, a perfect dome of pale bleached blue from which the winter sun shone brilliantly yet without ferocity, a tyrant mellowed by age. The route to the villa lay along the same road by which he had arrived, but in this direction it looked quite different. Instead of a forbidding wall of mountains closing off the view, the land swept down and away, rippling over hillocks and outcrops, reaching down to the sea, a shimmering inconclusive extension of the panorama like the row of dots after an incomplete sentence. In all that vast landscape there was no sign of man’s presence, except for a distant plume of smoke from the paper mill near the harbour where he had disembarked that morning. The only eyesore was a large patch of greenery off to the left on the flanks of the mountain range. Its almost fluorescent shade reminded Zen of the unsuccessful colour postcards of his youth. Presumably it was a forest, but how did any forest rooted in that grudging soil come to glow in that hysterical way?

The road looped down to the main road leading up over the mountains toward Nuoro, the provincial capital where Renato Favelloni now languished in judicial custody. According to the map, the unsurfaced track opposite petered out after a short distance at an isolated station on the metre-gauge railway. Zen turned right, then after a few kilometres, he forked left onto a road in bad need of repair which ran across the lower slopes of the valley and crossed the railway line before climbing the other side to join the main coastal highway.

Some distance before the junction, a high, wire-mesh fence came down from the ridge to Zen’s left to run alongside the road. At regular intervals, large signs warned: Private Property, Keep Out, Electrified Fencing, Beware of the Lions. The landscape was bare and windswept, a desolate chaos of rock, scrub, and stunted trees. After some distance, a surfaced driveway opened off the road to the left, leading to a gate of solid steel set in the wire-mesh fence.

Even before the Mercedes had come to a complete halt, the gate started to swing open. Zen pressed his foot down on the accelerator and the car, still in third gear, promptly stalled. Managing to restart it at the third attempt, he drove through the barrier, only to find his way blocked by a second gate identical to the first, which had meanwhile closed behind him, trapping the car between the wire-mesh fencing and a parallel inner perimeter of razor-barbed wire. Remote control cameras mounted on the inner gateposts scanned the Mercedes with impersonal curiosity. Thirty seconds later, the inner gate swung silently open, admitting Zen to the late Oscar Burolo’s private domain.

The narrow strip of tarmac wound lazily up the hillside. After about fifty metres, Zen spotted the line of stumpy metal posts planted at irregular intervals, depending on the contours of the land. The posts marked the villa’s third and most sophisticated defence of all: a phase-seeking microwave fence, invisible, intangible, impossible to cross undetected. Within the triply defended perimeter, the whole property was protected by heat-seeking infrared detectors, a move-alarm TV system, and microwave radar. All the experts agreed that security at the Villa Burolo was, if anything, excessive. It just hadn’t been sufficient.

Oscar’s private road continued to climb steadily upward, smashing its way through ancient stretches of dry-stone walling that were almost indistinguishable from outbreaks of the rock that was never far from the surface. Loose boulders of all sizes lying scattered about like some kind of crop, but in fact nothing grew there except a low scrub of juniper, privet, laurel, heather, rosemary, and gorse, a prickly stubble as tough and enduring as the rocks themselves.

Finally the land levelled out briefly, then fell away more steeply to a hollow where the house appeared, sheltered from the bitter northerly winds. From this angle, the Villa Burolo seemed a completely modern creation. The south and east sides of the original farmhouse were concealed by new wings containing the guest suites, kitchen, scullery, laundry room, garage, and service accommodation. To the right, in a quarrylike area scooped out of the hillside, was the helicopter landing pad and a steel mast housing the radio beacon for night landings and aerials for Oscar’s extensive communications equipment.

Zen parked the Mercedes and walked over to the main entrance, surmounted by a pointed arch of vaguely Moorish appearance. There was no bell or knocker in sight, but when the door opened at his approach and the caretaker appeared, Zen suddenly realised that it had been absurd to expect one. No one dropped in unexpectedly at the Villa Burolo, not when their every movement from the entrance gate to the front door was being monitored by four independent electronic surveillance systems.

As soon as he set eyes on Alfonso Bini, Zen knew why the caretaker had been ruled out as a suspect virtually from the start. Bini was one of those men so neutered by a lifetime of service that it was difficult to imagine him being able to tie his own shoelaces unless instructed to do so. He greeted the distinguished foreign visitor with pallid correctness. Yes, Dottor Confalone had explained the situation. Yes, he would be glad to show Signor Gurtner around.

No doubt on Confalone’s instructions, the tour started with the new wing in order to dispel any idea that the property was in any way primitive or rustic. Zen patiently endured an interminable exhibition of modern conveniences ranging from en suite Jacuzzis and a fully equipped gymnasium to a kitchen that would have done credit to a three-star hotel. In the laundry room, a frightened-looking woman was folding towels. Zen guessed that this was the caretaker’s wife, although Bini ignored her as though she were just another of the appliances stacked in neat, forbidding ranks along the wall. The only aspect of all this which was of any interest to Zen was a small room packed with video monitors and banks of switches.

“Security?” he queried.

Bini nodded and pointed to a row of red switches near the door, labelled with the names of the various alarm systems. The only ones switched on were the field sensors on the inner perimeter fence and the microwave radar.

“So someone has to be here all the time?” Zen asked.

Bini made a negative tutting sound.

“Only if you want to check the screens. If any of the systems picks up anything irregular, an alarm goes off.”

He threw a switch marked Test. A chorus of electronic shrieks rose from every part of the building.

“Very impressive,” murmured Zen. “My client certainly need have no worries about anyone breaking in.”

The caretaker said nothing. His face was set so hard it looked as though it might crack.

Once the villa’s luxury credentials had been established, Zen was taken into the older part of the house to appreciate its aesthetic qualities. A short passageway cut through the thick outer walls of the original farm brought them into a large lounge furnished with leather armchairs, inlaid hardwood tables, Afghan carpets, and bookcases full of antique bindings. The head of a disgruntled-looking wild boar emerged from the stonework above an enormous open fireplace as though the animal had charged through the wall and got stuck.

Zen walked over to a carved rosewood gun rack near the door and inspected the shotguns on display, including an early Beretta and a fine Purdy.

“Do they go with the property?” he asked.

The caretaker shrugged.

“There seems to be one missing,” Zen pursued, indicating the empty slot.

Bini turned pointedly away toward the sliding doors opening on to the terrace.

“What’s this?” Zen called after him, pointing to a wooden hatch in the flooring.

“The cellar,” replied the caretaker tonelessly.

“And next door?”

Bini pretended not to hear. Ignoring him, Zen walked through the doorway into the dining room of the villa. In the lounge, the stones of the original walls had been left uncovered as a design feature, but here they had been plastered and painted white. Zen looked around the room that was horribly familiar to him from the video. It was a shock, somehow, to find the walls not splashed and flecked and streaked with blood, but pristine and spotless. A shuffling in the doorway behind him announced the caretaker’s presence.

“Fresh paint?” Zen queried, sniffing the air.

Just for a moment, something stirred in the old man’s passive gaze. Angelo Confalone would have briefed him carefully, of course. “Say nothing about what happened! Don’t mention Burolo’s name! Just keep your mouth shut and with any luck you might keep your job.”

Bini had done his best to obey these instructions so far, but now the strain was beginning to show.

“Nice and clean,” Zen commented approvingly.

The caretaker’s mouth cracked open in a ghastly grin. “My wife, she cleans everything, every day …”

Zen nodded. He had read the investigators’ reports on the couple. Giuseppina Bini was one of those elderly women who, having grown up when doctors were expensive and often ineffective, strove obsessively to keep the powers of sickness and death at bay by banishing their agents, dirt and dust, from every corner of the house. This had made it virtually certain that the dried spots of blood found on the dining room floor and on the steps leading to the cellar must have been deposited by the lightly wounded killer. In which case, thought Zen, he must have destroyed the disks and tapes
after
the murders, despite the horrendous risks involved in staying at the scene once the alarm had been raised and the police were on their way. It didn’t make any sense, he told himself for the fiftieth time. If the object was to destroy both Burolo and his records, surely the killer would either have used a silenced weapon or eliminated Bini and his wife as well, thus giving himself ample time to erase Burolo’s records before making good his escape. And if the disks and tapes had been erased after they were seized by the Carabinieri—the long arm of Palazzo Sisti would no doubt have been capable of this—then why did the killer make his way down to the cellar and ransack the shelves at all?