Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (29 page)

Spadola put his fingers to his lips and blew a kiss up into the air like a connoisseur appreciating a fine wine.

“This is the ultimate! I’ve never felt anything like it. It makes up for everything. Well, no, let’s not exaggerate. Nothing could make up for what I’ve been through. But if it’s any consolation, you’ve made me a very happy man today. You destroyed my life, it’s true, but you have also given me this moment. My mother, may she rest in peace, used to say that I was destined to great sorrows and great joys. And she was right. She was so right.”

He broke off, biting his lip; tears welled up in his eyes.

“I suppose it’s no use telling you that I had nothing to do with the evidence against you being faked,” Zen said dully.

Spadola rocked violently back and forth in his chair as though seized by an involuntary spasm.

“I don’t believe it! This is too much! It’s too good to be true!” He panted for breath. “Do you remember what you said that morning at the farm near Melzo? I told you I was innocent. I told you I hadn’t done it. I knew I’d been betrayed, and that made it all the harder to bear. If I’d really knifed that fucking Southerner, you’d never have got a word out of me, but knowing it was all a fix, I thought I’d go crazy. And do you know what you said when I screamed my innocence in your face? You said, ‘Yes, well you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ And you looked at me in that sly way you educated people have when you’re feeling pleased with yourselves.
Of course
you had nothing to do with it, dottore! Just like this what’s-his-name, the politician in this murder case you’re investigating.
He
didn’t have anything to do with it either, did he? People like you never do have anything to do with it!”

“I don’t mean that I didn’t plant the knife myself. I mean I didn’t even know that it had been planted. It was done without my knowledge, behind my back.”

“Then you’re an incompetent bastard. It was your case, your responsibility! I’ve spent twenty years of my life, the only one I’ll ever have, shut up in a stinking damp cell with barely room to turn around, locked up for hours in the freezing-cold darkness …”

He broke off, shuddering uncontrollably, his cheeks glistening wet.

“Go on, take a good look! I’m not ashamed of my tears! Why should I be? They’re pearls of suffering,
my
suffering. I should make you lick them up, one by one, before I blow your evil head off!”

“Cut the crap, Spadola!” Zen exploded. “Even if you didn’t do the Tondelli job, you were guilty as hell of at least four other murders. What about Ugo Trocchio and his brother? You had them killed and you know it. We knew it, everyone knew it. We couldn’t prove it because people were too scared to talk. And so it went on, until some of my colleagues decided that it was time you were taken out of circulation. Since they couldn’t do it straight, they did it crooked. As I say, I didn’t know. If I had known, I would have tried to stop it. But the fact remains that you earned that twenty-year sentence several times over.”

“That’s not the point!” Spadola shouted, so loudly that the men at the bar turned to stare at him.

“Christ almighty, if everyone who broke the law in this country was sent to prison, who’d be left to guard them? We’d need a whole new set of politicians, for a start! But it doesn’t work that way, does it? It’s a game! And I was good! I was fucking brilliant! You couldn’t pin a damn thing on me. I had you beat inside out. So you moved the goalposts!”

“That’s part of the game too.”

Spadola drained off his beer and stood up.

“Maybe. But the game stops here, Zen. What happens now is real.”

His voice was perfectly calm again. He stood staring down at Zen.

“I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m crazy, telling you what I’m going to do, warning you, giving you a chance to escape. There’s no way I can get away with it, that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Not in broad daylight, not in the middle of this village. Well, we’ll see. Maybe you’re right. I agree that that’s a possibility. Maybe you’re cleverer than me. Maybe you’ll figure out a way to save your skin this time around. That doesn’t worry me. I’ll get you in the end, whatever happens. And meanwhile that slim hope is part of your punishment, Zen, just like I was tormented with talk of appeals and parole that never came to anything.”

He put on his overcoat.

“You’ve probably noticed that your car’s not working. I removed the distributor and cut the leads. Just to save you time, I’ll tell you that the phone box is out of order now, too. As for the locals, I doubt if they’d tell you the time by the clock on the wall. I showed them the paper, you see, told them who you are. Oddly enough, they didn’t seem terribly surprised. Between the two of us, I think they must have sussed you out already.

“So I’ll see you later, dottore. I can’t say when exactly. That’s part of the punishment, too. It could be in a few minutes. I might suddenly get the urge. Or it might not be until late tonight. It all depends on my mood, how I’m feeling. I’ll know when the moment has come. I’ll sense it. Don’t worry about the pain. It’ll be quick and clean, I promise. Nothing fancy like with Parrucci. I really had it in for him in a big way. They used to call him the nightingale, didn’t they? Because of how beautifully he sang, I suppose. He turned out to be more of a screamer in the end. I had to take a walk, I couldn’t handle it myself. He was tougher than he looked, though. When I got back an hour or so later, he was still whimpering, what was left of him. I had to finish him off with a pistol. Sickening, really. Well, I’m off for a piss.”

He walked across the restaurant area and disappeared through a door marked Toilets.

“Let me use your phone!” Zen told the proprietor. “That man is a criminal. He has threatened to kill me. I’m a Vice-Questore at the Ministry of the Interior. If you don’t help, you’ll be an accessory to murder.”

The proprietor gazed at him stonily.

“But your name is Reto Gurtner. I’ve seen your papers. You’re a Swiss businessman from Zurich.”

“My name is Aurelio Zen! I’m a high-ranking official!”

“Prove it.”

“Let me use the phone! Quickly, before he comes back!”

“There’s no phone here.”

“But I heard it ringing when I came in.”

“That was the television.”

Given a few more minutes, Zen might have been able to change the man’s mind with a combination of threats and pleas. But the few seconds before Vasco Spadola reappeared were too precious to gamble on that slim possibility. Besides, it would take the Carabinieri at least fifteen minutes to reach the village, and that would be plenty of time for Spadola to carry out his threat. Zen turned and ran.

Outside in the piazza, people had begun to gather for the promenade before lunch. Zen stood uncertainly by the door. Who could he turn to? Angelo Confalone? But it was Sunday. The lawyer’s office would be closed and Zen had no idea where he lived. For a moment he thought of appealing to the crowd, throwing himself on their mercy. But there was no time to indulge in public oratory, and besides, he had been branded a spy, a proven liar, an agent of the hated government in Rome. Anyone who helped him would risk placing his own position in the community in jeopardy. Spadola was right. He was on his own.

Then he saw the Mercedes and realised that there was just one faint hope. It hung by the slenderest of threads, but he had nothing to lose. Anything was better than staying in the village, hiding in corners waiting to be rooted out and killed.

As he shoved his way unceremoniously through the knots of bystanders, Zen noticed Turiddu standing in a group of other men. They were all staring at him, talking in low voices and pointing at a yellow Fiat Uno with Rome numberplates parked nearby. To one side, all alone, stood Elia, the mad beggar woman. Zen belatedly noted the resemblance between her and Turiddu, and realised that he must be the brother she had rejected. That explained his anger on finding her at the pizzeria the night before. In a community like this, a mentally ill relative would be a perpetual source of shame.

He released the handbrake of the Mercedes and put the gear lever into neutral. Then he got out and started to push with all his might, struggling to overcome the vehicle’s inertia and the slight incline leading up to the main street. His headache sprang back into active life and his aching limbs protested. After a violent effort, the car rolled onto the cracked concrete slabs of the street. Zen turned the wheel so that it was facing downhill, then got it moving, and jumped back inside. Soon the car was moving quite fast on the steeply inclined main street and round the curve leading out of the village. He wasn’t in the clear yet, not by a long way, but he was exhilarated by his initial success. By the time he reached the new houses on the outskirts, the car was moving as fast as he would have wanted to go anyway. He even had to use the horn several times to warn groups of villagers of his silent approach.

When I saw him leaving I thought everything was lost. I’d followed him everywhere, gun in hand, flitting through the shadows like a swift at dusk. All for nothing. There was always someone there, foiling my plans, as though some god protected him! And now he was beyond my reach.

He thought he was safe, I thought I’d failed. What neither of us understood was that his death was already installed in him, lodged in his body like our sins in the Bleeding Heart above the fireplace. I used to think the heart was from one of the pigs father had slaughtered. I kept expecting to find the beast’s guts on another wall and its cock and balls nailed to the door. Once the lamp went out in the middle of a thunderstorm and Mother made me get down on my knees and pray to be forgiven or God would strike us dead on the spot. So I knelt to the great pig in the sky whose farts terrified mother, praying it wouldn’t shit all over us.

Which is just what it did, a little later on. Be careful what you pray for. You might give God ideas.

I wandered off, neither knowing nor caring where I went. All places were equal now. My feet brought me here like a horse that knows its own way home. He would be far away, I thought, speeding through the corridors of light in his big white car.

But there was only one exit from the maze in which we both were trapped. Even as I despaired, he was on his way there, bringing me the death I needed.

SUNDAY: 0940–1325

I
T WAS ONLY AS HE APPROACHED
the series of hairpin bends by which the road descended from the village that Zen realised Vasco Spadola might well have sabotaged the Mercedes’ brakes as well as its engine. By then the car was doing almost 50 kph and accelerating all the time.

The brakes engaged normally, and a moment later Zen saw that his fears had been groundless. Spadola’s exacting sense of what was due to him made it unthinkable that he would choose such an indirect and mechanical means of executing his revenge. His desires were urgent and personal. They had to be satisfied personally, face to face, like a perverted sex act.

The car drifted downhill in a lush silence cushioned by the hum of the tyres and the hushing of the wind. The hairpin bends followed one another with barely a pause. Zen found himself reminded of sailing on the Venetian lagoons, continually putting the boat about from one tack to the other as he negotiated the narrow channels between the low, muddy islets. He felt strangely exhilarated by that moment when life and death had seemed balanced on the response of a brake lever as on the toss of a coin. In Rome, when he had first sensed that someone was on his trail, he had felt nothing but cold, clammy terror, a paralysing suffocation. But here in this primitive landscape, what was happening seemed perfectly natural and right. This is what men were made for, he thought. The rest we have to work at, but this comes naturally. This is what we are good at.

Even in this euphoric state, however, he realised that some men were better at it than others, and that Vasco Spadola was certainly too good for him. If he was to survive, he had to start thinking. Fortunately his brain seemed to be working with exceptional clarity, despite his hangover. There was as yet no sign of pursuit on the road above, but as soon as Spadola emerged from the hotel he was bound to notice that the Mercedes was gone and realise that it could only have moved under the force of gravity. All he needed to do after that was follow the road downhill, and sooner or later—and it was likely to be sooner rather than later—he would catch up.

Below, the road wound down to the junction where Zen had stopped to consult the map on his way to the Villa Burolo twenty-four hours earlier. On the other side of the junction, he remembered, an unsurfaced track led to the station built to serve the village in the days when people were prepared to walk four or five kilometres to take advantage of the new railway. This station was Zen’s desperate goal. It didn’t matter that there were no trains on Sunday. The station was bound to have a telephone, and the stationmaster, owing his allegiance—and more importantly his job—not to the locals but to the State, was bound to let Zen use it. All Criminalpol officials were provided with a codeword, changed monthly, which acted as a turnkey providing the user with powers to dispose of the facilities of the forces of order from one end of the country to the other. One brief phone call, and helicopters and jeeps full of armed police would descend on the area, leaving Spadola the choice of returning to the prison cell he had so recently vacated or of dying in a hail of machine-gun fire. All Zen had to do was make sure the police arrived before Spadola.

He had banked on being able to freewheel the Mercedes all the way, but as soon as he got close enough to see the track, he noticed a feature not shown on the map: a low rise of land intervening between the road and the railway. It was difficult to estimate exactly how steep it was from the brief glances he was able to spare as he approached the last of the treacherous hairpin bends. For a moment he was tempted to let the car gather speed on the final straight stretch, gambling that the accumulated momentum would be enough to carry it over the ridge. But the risk was too great. If he didn’t make it, he would be forced to abandon the Mercedes at the bottom of the slope, in full view of the road, which would be tantamount to leaving a sign explaining his intentions. When Spadola arrived, he would simply drive along the track, easily overtaking Zen before he could reach the station on foot.