Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (5 page)

“Quite like the old days!” was Giorgio De Angelis’s comment as Zen passed by. “The lads upstairs are loving it, of course. A few more like this and they’ll be able to claw back all the special powers they’ve been stripped of since things quietened down.”

De Angelis was a big, burly man with a hairline which had receded dramatically to reveal a large, shiny forehead of the type popularly associated with noble and unworldly intellects. What spoiled this impression was his bulbous nose, with nostrils of almost Negroid proportions from which hairs sprouted like plants that have found themselves a niche in crumbling masonry. He was from the town of Crotone, east of the Sila mountains in central Calabria. One of the odd facts still lodged in Zen’s brain from school was that Crotone had been the home of Pythagoras. This perhaps explained why De Angelis reminded him of a cross between a Greek philosopher and a Barbary pirate, thus neatly summing up Zen’s uncertainty about his character and motives.

“Frankly, I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if they set up the whole thing,” the Calabrian went on breezily. “Apparently the Red Brigades have denied responsibility. Anyway, this Bertolini had nothing to do with terrorism. Why pick on him?”

Zen took off his overcoat and went to hang it up. He would have liked to be able to like De Angelis, the only one of his new colleagues who had made any effort to be friendly. But this very fact, coupled with the politically provocative comments which De Angelis was given to making, aroused a suspicion in Zen’s mind that the Calabrian had been deliberately assigned to sound him out and try and trap him into damaging confidences. Even given the mutual hostility between the criminal investigation personnel and their political colleagues upstairs, De Angelis’s last remark had been totally out of line.

“Have you seen the papers?” De Angelis demanded. “ ‘The terrorists return.’ ‘Fear stalks the corridors of power.’ Load of crap, if you ask me. The fucking Red Brigades don’t go round spraying people with shotgun pellets. Nothing but the best hardware for our yuppie terrorists. M42s, Armalites, Kalashnikovs, state-of-the-art stuff. Shotguns are either old-style crime or DIY.”

He looked at Zen, who was patting his overcoat with a frown.

“You lost something?”

Zen looked round distractedly. “What? Yes, I suppose so. But in that case it can hardly have been the Politicals either.”

“How do you mean?”

Zen’s hands searched each of the pockets of the overcoat at some length, returning empty.

“Well, they’d have used the right gun, presumably.”

De Angelis looked puzzled. Then he understood, and whistled meaningfully.

“Oh, you mean … Listen Aurelio, I’d keep my voice down if you’re going to say things like that.”

Too late, Zen realised that he had walked into a trap.

“I didn’t mean that they’d killed him,” De Angelis explained, “only that they’d orchestrated the media response to his death. I mean, you surely don’t believe …”

“No, of course not.”

He turned away with a sickly smile. He had just given himself away in the worst possible fashion, voicing what everyone no doubt suspected but what no Ministry employee who wanted to succeed could afford to say out loud. But that didn’t matter, not now. All that mattered was that the video cassette of the Burolo killings was missing from his pocket.

Zen walked through the gap in the Hessian-clad screens which divided off the space allotted to each official, slumped down behind his desk, and lit a cigarette. He recalled with horrible clarity what had happened as he boarded the bus. It was a classic pickpocket’s technique, using heavy blows in a safe area like the back and shoulders to cover the light disturbance as a wallet or pocket-book was removed. The thief must have spotted the bulge in Zen’s coat pocket and thought it looked promising.

Looking on the bright side, there was a good chance—well, a chance, anyway—that when the thief saw that he’d made a mistake, he would simply throw the tape away. Even if he was curious enough to watch it, the first scenes were not particularly interesting. Unless you happened to recognise Burolo and the others, it looked much like any other home video, a souvenir of someone’s summer holiday. Everything depended on whether the thief realised that his mistake had netted him something worth more than all the wallets he could steal in a lifetime. He might, or he might not. The only sure thing was that Zen could do absolutely nothing to influence the outcome one way or the other.

He had expected writing the report to be a chore, but after what had just happened, it was a positive relief to pull the typewriter over, insert a sheet of paper, and immerse himself in work. The first section, summarising the scene-of-crime findings, went very fast. Owing to the evidence of the video recording and the caretaker’s prompt arrival, there was no dispute about the method or timing of the killings. The murder weapon had not been recovered, but was assumed to have been the Remington shotgun that was missing from the collection Oscar kept in a rack next door to the dining room. The spent cartridges found at the scene were of the same make, type, and batch as those stored in the drawers beneath this rack. Unidentified fingerprints had been found on the rack and elsewhere in the house. The nature of the victims’ wounds indicated that the shots had been angled upward, suggesting that the weapon had apparently been fired from the hip. At that range it was unnecessary to take precise aim, as the video all too vividly demonstrated.

The two pistol bullets fired by Vianello had been recovered, and one of them revealed traces of blood of a group matching stains found at a point consistent with the assassin’s estimated position. A series of stains of the same blood group—which was also that of Oscar Burolo, Maria Pia Vianello, and Renato Favelloni—was found leading to the vault beneath the house where Oscar’s collection of video tapes and computer discs were housed. When the villa was searched, this room was found to be in a state of complete disorder: the new section of shelving Oscar had recently installed had been thrown over, and video cassettes and floppy discs lay scattered everywhere. The fingerprints found on the gun rack were also present in profusion here.

Zen stopped typing to stub out his cigarette. From behind the Hessian screen he could hear male voices raised in dispute about the merits and demerits of the new Fiat hatchback. He recognised the voices of Vincenzo Fabri and another official called Bernardo Travaglini. Then a flicker of movement nearby caught his eye and he looked round to find Tania Biacis standing by his desk.

“Sorry?” he muttered.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Oh.”

He gazed at her helplessly, paralysed by his desire to reach out and touch her. These exchanges, full of non sequiturs and dead ends, were typical of their conversation. Presumably Tania just assumed that Zen was a bit scatterbrained and thought no more about it. He hoped so, anyway.

“This is for you.”

She handed him an envelope from the batch of internal mail she was delivering.

“So what was it last night?” Zen asked. “The opera, the new Fellini?”

“The opera’s on strike,” she said after a momentary hesitation. “As for Federico, we gave up on him after that last one. Granted the man used to be a genius, but enough’s enough. No, we went out to eat at this little place out in the country near Tivoli. Have you been there? It’s all the rage at the moment. Enrico Montesano was there with the most peculiar woman I’ve ever seen in my life, if she
was
a woman. But you’d better hurry if you want to go. The food’s going downhill already. In another week it’ll be ruined.”

Zen sat looking at her, hardly heeding what she said. Tall, large-boned and small-breasted, with brows that arched high above her deep brown eyes, prominent cheekbones, a strong neck, and a light down on her protruding upper lip, which was usually curved as if in suppressed amusement, Tania Biacis resembled a Byzantine madonna come down from her mosaic in some chilly apse, a madonna not of sorrow but of joy, of secret glee, who knew that the universe was actually the most tremendous joke and could hardly believe that everyone else was taking it seriously. Like himself, Tania was a Northerner, from a village in the Friuli region east of Udine. This had created an immediate bond between them, and as the days went by, Zen had learned of her interest in films, music, sailing, skiing, cookery, travel, and foreign languages. He also discovered that she was fourteen years younger than him and married.

“I don’t care what your dealer told you,” Vincenzo Fabri proclaimed loudly. “Until a gearbox has done a hundred thousand kilometres—under on-road conditions, not on some test track in Turin—not even Agnelli himself knows how it’s going to hold up.”

“What do I care?” retorted Travaglini. “With the discount I’m getting, I can drive it until the warranty runs out and still break even on the trade-in. That’s a year’s free motoring.”

“Would you do me a favour?” Tania whispered hurriedly.

“Of course.”

“You don’t know what it is yet.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He saw nothing wild or extravagant in this claim, which represented the simple truth. But as she turned away with a disconcerted look, he realised that it had sounded all wrong, either too gushing or too casual.

“Forget it,” she told him, disappearing through a gap in the screens like an actor leaving the stage.

Zen sat there taking in her absence with a sharp pain he’d forgotten about, the kind that comes with love you don’t ask for or even necessarily want, but which finds you out. It was normal to suffer like this in one’s youth, of course, but what had he done to deserve such a fate at his age?

He tore open the memorandum she had brought him.

F
ROM
: D
OGLIOTTI
, A
SSISTANT
R
EGISTRAR
, A
RCHIVES
.

T
O
: Z
ENO
, V
ICE
-Q
UESTORE
, P
OLIZIA
C
RIMINALE
.

S
UBJECT
: 46429 BUR 433/K/95 (V
IDEO CASSETTE, ONE
).

Y
OU ARE REQUESTED TO RETURN THE ABOVE ITEM AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE SINCE IT IS
_________________________.

In the blank space, someone had scrawled an illegible phrase.

Zen stuffed the memorandum into his pocket with a weary sigh. He had been so concerned about the large-scale repercussions if the tape fell into the wrong hands that he had completely forgotten the immediate problems involved. The Ministry’s copy of the Burolo video was of course just that, a copy, the original being retained by the magistrates in Nuoro. Technically speaking, its loss was no more than an inconvenience, but that didn’t mean that Zen could just drop down to Archives and tell them what had happened. In theory, official files could only be taken out of the Ministry with a written exeat permit signed by the relevant departmental head. In practice no one took the slightest notice of this, but the moment anything went wrong, the letter of the law would be strictly applied.

Once again, Zen turned to the task in hand as an escape from these problems. The next section of the report was considerably less straightforward than the one he had just written. While the facts of the Burolo case were simple enough, the interpretations which could be placed on them were political dynamite. Zen’s completed report would be stored in the Ministry’s central database, accessible by anyone with the appropriate terminal and codeword, his views and conclusions electronically enshrined forever. At least he didn’t have to deal with the dreaded glowing screens himself! The use of computers was spreading inexorably through the various law enforcement agencies, although the dream of a unified electronic data pool had faded with the discovery that the systems chosen by the Carabinieri and the police were incompatible both with each other and with the quite different system used by the judiciary. It was a sign of their elite status that those Criminalpol officials who wished to do so had been allowed to retain their battered manual Olivettis with the curvy fifties styling that was now fashionable again.

Zen lit another of the coarse-flavoured domestic Nazionali cigarettes, looked up at the rectangular tiles of the suspended ceiling for inspiration, then began to pound the keys again.

B
ECAUSE OF THE EXCEPTIONAL DIFFICULTY OF UNAUTHORISED ACCESS TO THE VILLA, THE NUMBER OF SUSPECTS WAS EXTREMELY LIMITED
. N
EVERTHELESS, FIVE POSSIBILITIES HAVE AT VARIOUS TIMES BEEN CONSIDERED WORTHY OF INVESTIGATION
. T
HE FIRST, CHRONOLOGICALLY, CONCERNS
A
LFONSO AND
G
IUSEPPINA
B
INI
. B
INI ACTED AS CARETAKER AND GENERAL HANDYMAN AT THE VILLA, WHILE HIS WIFE COOKED AND CLEANED
. B
OTH HAD WORKED FOR
B
UROLO FOR OVER TEN YEARS
. A
T THE TIME OF THE MURDERS, THE COUPLE CLAIM TO HAVE BEEN WATCHING TELEVISION IN THEIR QUARTERS IN THE NORTH WING OF THE PROPERTY
. T
HIS IS SEPARATED FROM THE DINING ROOM BY THE WIDTH OF THE WHOLE BUILDING, INCLUDING THE MASSIVE EXTERIOR WALLS OF THE ORIGINAL FARMHOUSE
. A
S
G
IUSEPPINA
B
INI IS SLIGHTLY DEAF, THE VOLUME OF THE TELEVISION WAS TURNED QUITE HIGH
. S
UBSEQUENT TESTS CONFIRMED THE COUPLE’S STORY THAT THE GUNSHOTS WERE AT FIRST ALMOST INAUDIBLE
. I
T WAS ONLY WHEN THEY WERE REPEATED THAT
A
LFONSO WENT TO INVESTIGATE
.

T
HE EVIDENCE AGAINST THE
B
INIS NEVER AMOUNTED TO MORE THAN THE FACT OF THEIR PRESENCE AT THE VILLA AT THE RELEVANT TIME, BUT SINCE THE ONLY OTHER PEOPLE PRESENT WERE ALL DEAD AND IT WAS APPARENTLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANY INTRUDER TO HAVE ENTERED THE PROPERTY, IT IS UNDERSTANDABLE THAT THE COUPLE CAME UNDER SUSPICION
. H
OWEVER, THE CASE AGAINST THEM, WHICH ALREADY LACKED ANY CONCEIVABLE VIABLE MOTIVE, WAS FURTHER WEAKENED BY THE DISCOVERY OF THE VIDEO TAPE RECORDING
A
LFONSO
B
INI’S EVIDENTLY GENUINE SHOCK ON DISCOVERING THE BODIES AND BY THE FACT THAT A METICULOUS SEARCH FAILED TO UNCOVER ANY TRACE OF THE MURDER WEAPON AT THE VILLA, WHERE THE COUPLE HAD REMAINED THROUGHOUT
.