Vendetta

Wednesday, 07.20-12.30

As Zen closed the front door behind him its hinges emitted their characteristic squeal, which was promptly echoed from the fioor above. One of the tenants there kept a caged bird which was apparently under the illusion that Zen's front door was a fellow inmate and responded to its mournful cry with encouraging chirps.

Zen clattered down the stairs two at a time, ignoring the ancient lift in its wrought-iron cage. Thank God for work, he thought, which gave him an unquestionable excuse to escape from his dark, cluttered apartment and the elderly woman who had taken it over to such an extent that he felt like a child again, with no rights or independent existence.

What would happen when he no longer had this readymade way of filling his days? The government had recently been making noises about the need to reduce the size of the bloated public sector. Early retirement for senior staff was one obvious option. Fortunately it was unlikely that anything more than talk would come of it. A government consisting of a coalition of five parties, each with an axe to grind and clients to keep happy, found it almost impossible to pass legislation that was likely to prove mildly unpopular with anyone, never mind tackle the bureaucratic hydra which kept almost a third of the working population in guaranteed employment. Nevertheless, he would have to retire one day. The thought of it continued to haunt him like the prospect of some chronic illness. How would he get through the day? What would he do? His life had turned into a dead end.

Giuseppe, the janitor, was keeping a watchful eye on the comings and goings from the window of his mezzanine flat. Zen didn't stop to mention the scraping noises he had seemed to hear the night before. In broad daylight the whole thing seemed as unreal as a dream.

The streets were steeped in mild November sunlight and ringing with sounds. Gangs of noisy schoolchildren passed by, flaunting the personalities that would be buried alive for the next five hours. The metallic roars of shutters announced that the shops in the area were opening for business. A staccato hammering and the swishing of a paint sprayer issued from the open windows of the basement workshops where craftsmen performed mysterious operations on lengths of moulded wood. But the traffic dominated: the uniform hum of new cars, the idiosyncratic racket of the old, the throaty gurgle of diesels, the angry buzzing of scooters and three-wheeled vans, the buses' hollow roar, the chainsaw of an unsilenced trail bike, the squeal of brakes, the strident discord of horns in conflict.

At the corner of the block the newsagent was adding the final touches to the display of newspapers and magazines which were draped around his stall in a complex overlapping pattern. As usual, Zen stopped to buy a paper, but he did not even glance at the headlines. He felt good, serene and carefree, released from whatever black magic had gripped his soul the night before. There would be time enough later to read about disasters and scandals which had nothing whatever to do with him.

Across the street from the newsstand at the corner of the next block was the cafe which Zen frequented, largely because it had resisted the spreading blight of skimmed milk, which reduced the rich foam of a proper cappuccino to an insipid froth. The barman, who sported a luxuriant moustache to compensate for his glossily bald skull, greeted Zen with respectful warmth and turned away unbidden to prepare his coffee.

'Barbarians!' exclaimed a thickset man in a tweed suit, looking up from the newspaper spread out before him on the bar. 'Maniacs! What's the sense of it all? What can they hope to achieve?'

Zen helped himself to a flaky brioche before broaching the chocolate-speckled foam on the cappuccino which Ernesto placed before him. I." was only after they had been meeting in the bar each morning for several years that Zen had finally discovered, thanks to an inflamed molar requiring urgent attention, that the indignant newspaperreader was the dentist whose name appeared on one of the two brass plates which Giuseppe burnished religiously every morning. He congratulated himself on having resisted the temptation to look at the paper. No doubt there had been some dramatic new revelation about the Burolo affair. Hardly a day went by without one. But while for the dentist such things were a form of entertainment, a pretext for a display of moral temperament, for Zen it was work, and he didn't start work for another half hour. Idly, he wondered what the other men in the bar would say if they knew that he was carrying a video tape showing the Burolo killings in every last horrific detail.

At the thought, he put down his coffee cup and patted his coat pocket, reassuring himself that the video cassette was still there. That was one mistake he certainly couldn't allow himself. There had already been one leak, when stills from the tape Burolo had made showing love scenes between his wife and the young lion-keeper had been published in a trashy scandal magazine. Such a magazine, or even one of the less scrupulous private TV stations, would be willing to pay a small fortune for a video of the killings themselves. The missing tape would immediately be traced to Zen, who had signed it out from Archives.

Everyone would assume that Zen himself had sold the tape, and the denials of the magazine or TV station – if they bothered to deny it – would be discounted as part of the deal. Vincenzo Fabri had been waiting for months for just such an opportunity to present itself. He wouldn't let it go to waste!

Zen now knew that he had badly bungled his unexpected promotion from his previous menial duties to the ranks of the Ministry's prestigious Criminalpol division. This had been due to a widespread but mistaken idea of the work which this group did. The press, intoxicated by the allure of elite units, portrayed it as a team of highpowered 'supercops' who sped about the peninsula cracking the cases which proved too difficult for the local officials. Zen, as he had ruefully reflected many times since, should have known better. He of all people should have realized that police work never took any account of individual abilities. It was a question of carrying out certain procedures, that was all. Occasionally these procedures resulted in crimes being solved, but that was incidental to their real purpose, which was to maintain or adjust the balance of power within the organization itself. The result was a continual shuffling and fidgeting, a ceaseless and frenetic activity which it was easy to mistake for purposeful action.

Nevertheless, it was a mistake which Zen should never have made, and which had cost him dearly. When dispatched to Bari or Bergamo or wherever it might be, he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the cases he had been assigned, asking probing questions, dishing out criticism, reorganizing the investigation and generally stirring things up as much as possible. This was the quickest way to get results, he fondly imagined, not having realized that the results desired by the Ministry flowed automatically from his having been sent. He didn't have to lift a finger, in fact it was important that he didn't. Far from being the 'oop from the Ministry' which the press liked to portray, Criminalpol personnel were comparable to inspectors of schools or airports. Their visits provided a chance for the mistry to get a reasonably reliable picture of what was happening, a reminder to the local authorities that all power ultimately lay with Rome, and a signal to concerned pressure groups that something was being done. No one wanted Zen to solve the case he had been sent to look into.

Not the local police, who would then be asked why they had failed to achieve similar results unaided, nor the Ministry, to whom any solution would merely pose a fresh set of problems. All he needed to do in order to keep everyone happy was just go through the motions.

Unfortunately, by the time he finally realized this, Zen had already alienated most of his new colleagues. Admittedly he had started with a serious handicap, owing to the manner of his appointment, which had been engineered by one of the suspects in the Miletti kidnapping case he had investigated in Perugia. Zen's subsequent promotion had naturally been regarded by many people as a form of pay-off, which was bound to cause resentment. But this might eventually have been forgiven, if it hadn't been for the newcomer's tactless display of energy, together with the bad luck of his having made an enemy of one of the most articulate and popular men on the staff. Vincenzo Fabri had tried unsuccessfully on a number of occasions to use political influence to have himself promoted, and he couldn't forgive Zen for succeeding where he had failed.

Fabri provided a focus for the feelings of antipathy which Zen had aroused, and which he kept alive with a succession of witty, malicious anecdotes that only came to Zen's ears when the damage had been done. And because Fabri's grudge was completely irrational, Zen knew that it was all the more likely to last.

He crumpled his paper napkin into a ball, tossed it into the rubbish bin and went to pay the cashier sitting at a desk in the angle between the two doors of the cafe. The newspaper the dentist had been reading lay open on the bar, and Zen couldn't ignore the thunderous headline:

THE RED BRIGADES RETURN'. Scanning the article beneath, he learned that a judge had been gunned down at his home in Milan the night before.

So that was what the dentist's rhetorical questions had referred to. What indeed was the sense of it all? There had been a time when such mindless acts of terrorism, however shocking, had at least seemed epic gestures of undeniable significance. But that time had long passed, and re-runs were not only as morally disgusting as the originals, but also dated and second-hand.

As he walked to the bus stop, Zen read in his own paper about the shooting. The murdered judge, one Bertolini, had been gunned down when returning home from work.

His chauffeur, who had also been killed, had fired at the attackers and was thought to have wounded one of them.

Bertolini was not a particularly important figure, nor did he appear to have had any connection with the trials of Red Brigades' activists. The impression was that he had been chosen because he represented a soft target, itself a humiliating comment on the decline in the power of the terrorists from the days when they had seemed able to strike at will.

Zen's eyes drifted off to the smaller headlines further down the page. BURNED ALIVE FOR ADULTERY', read one. The story described how a husband in Genova had caught his wife with another man, poured petrol over them both and set them alight. He abruptly folded the paper up and tucked it under his arm. Not that he had anything to worry about on that score, of course. He should be so lucky!

As a bus approached the stop, the various figures whn had been loitering in the vicinity marched out into the street to try their chances at the lottery of guessing where the rear doors would be when the bus stopped. Zen did reasonably well this morning, with the result that he was ruthlessly jostled from every side as the less fortunate trieci to improve on their luck. Someone at his back used his elbow so enterprisingly that Zen turned round to protest, almost losing his place as a result. But in the end justice prevailed, and Zen managed to squeeze aboard just as the doors closed.

The events reported in the newspaper had already had their effect at the Viminale. The approaches leading up to the Ministry building were guarded by armoured personnel carriers with machine-gun turrets on the roof. The barriers were lowered and all vehicles were being carefully searched. Pedestrian access, up a flight of steps from the piazza, was through a screen of heavy metal railings whose gate was normally left open, but today each person was stopped in the cage and had to present his or her identification, watched carefully by two guards wearing bulletproof vests and carrying submachine-guns.

Having penetrated these security checks, Zen walked up to the third floor, where Criminalpol occupied a suite of rooms at the front of the building. The contrast with the windowless cell to which Zen had previously been confined could hardly have been more striking. Tasteful renovation, supplemented by a scattering of potted plants and antique engravings, had created a pleasant working ambience without the oppressive scale traditionally associated with government premises.

'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 ‹own 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. ~zs, 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 overcoai 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 realized 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 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 recognize Burolo and the others, it looked much like any o~her home video, a souvenir of someone's summer holiday. Everything depended on whether the thief realized 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, summarizing the sceneof-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 upwards, 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 – were found leading to the vault beneath the house where Oscar's collection of video tapes and computer discs was 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 recognized the voices of Vincenzo Fabri and another official, 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.' ?en 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, ski-ing, 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 ioo,ooo 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.'

Zen saw nothing wild or extravagant in this claim, which represented the simple truth. But as she turned away with a disconcerted look he realized 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.

'From: Dogliotti, Assistant Registrar, Archives.

'To: Zeno, Vice-Questore, Polizia Criminale.

Subject: 46429 BUR 4gg/K/95 (Video cassette, one).

You 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 largescale 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 for ever. 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 once more.

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

'Because of the exceptional diffiiwlty of unauthorized access to the villa, the number of suspects was extremely limited. Nevertheless, five possibilities have at various times been considered worthy of investigation. The first, chronologically, concerns Alfonso and Giuseppina Bini.

Bini acted as caretaker and general handyman at the villa, while his wife cooked and cleaned. Both had worked for Burolo for over ten years. At the time of the murders, the couple claim to have been watching television in their quarters in the north wing of the property. This is separated from the dining room by the width of the whole building, including the massive exterior walls of the original farm house. As Giuseppina Bini is slightly deaf, the volume of the television was turned quite high. Subsequent tests confirmed the couple's story that the gunshots were at first almost inaudible. It was only when they were repeated that Alfonso went to investigate.

'The evidence against the Binis 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. However, the case against them, which already lacked any viable motive, was further weakened by the discovery of the video tape recording Alfonso Bini'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.'

Zen paused to give his numbed fingers a chance to xecover. Next on his list was the vendetta theory, which involved filling in the background about the attempted kidnapping of Oscar Burolo. This had surprised no one, except for the fact that the intended victim had got away with nothing but a scratch on his shoulder. God damn it, peopie had murmured in tones of exasperated admiration, how does he do it? Kidnapping was notoriously a way of life in Sardinia, and what had Burolo done but choose a property on the very edge of the Barbagia massif itself, the heartland of the kidnapping gangs and the location of the underground lairs where they hid their victims? He was asking for it!

And he duly got it. Fortunately for Oscar, the Lincoln Continental he had been driving at the time was a rather special model, built for the African president who figured in the fictitious 'slave' story. Oscar did a lot of work in Africa, which he liked to describe as 'a land of opportunity', rolling his eyes comically to suggest what kind of opportunities he had in mind. The president in question was unfortunately toppled from power just after taking delivery of the vehicle and just before Oscar could collect on the contract the president had signed for the constructiov, of a new airport in the country's second-largest city, a job which had promised to be even more lucrative than most of those which Oscar was involved in.

Where other companies might reckon on a profit margin of 2o or 3o per cent, regarding anything above that as an extraordinary windfall, the projects which Burolo Construction undertook seemed able to generate profits that were often in excess of the total original budget. Oscar had earned the sobriquet 'King Midas' for his ability to turn the hardest rock, the most arid soil and the foulest marshland into pure gold. In the case of the African airport, his bill had already soared to a sum amounting to almost 4 percent of the country's gross national product, but on this occasion Oscar was constrained to realism. Even if the new regime had been disposed to honour the commitments of the former president, it would have had considerable difficulty in doing so, since the latter had prudently diverted another considerable slice of the country's GNP to the Swiss bank account that was now financing his premature retirernent. All this was very regrettable, but Oscar was a realist. He knew that while governments come and go, business goes on for ever. So rather than stymie his chances of profitable intervention in the country's future by pointless litigation, he reluctantly agreed to accept a settlernent which barely covered his expenses. To sweeten the pill, he asked for and was given the Lincoln Continental as well.

At the time Oscar had seen the car as just another of the fancy gadgets with which he loved to surround himself, but it undoubtedly saved his life when the kidnappers tried to take him. He was driving back from the local village church when it happened. Much to most people's surprise, Oscar never missed Sunday Mass. Experience had taught him the importance of keeping on the right side of those in power, and compared with the kind of kickbacks, favours and general dancing of attendance which some of his patrons expected, God seemed positively modest in His demands. It was true that you could never be absolutely certain that He was there, and if so whether He was prepared to come up with the goods, but much the same could be said about most of the people in Rome too. As long as all that was needed to stay in with Him was taking communion every Sunday, Oscar thought it was well worth the effort. Unfortunately the local village church lacked a suitable landing place for the Agusta, so he had to drive.

As he rounded one of the many sharp bends that Sunday, Oscar found the road blocked by what appeared to be a minor accident. A car was lying on its side in the ditch, while the lorry which had apparently forced it off the road was slewed around broadside on to the approaching limousine. Three men were kneeling beside a fourth who was lying face-down in the road.

As Oscar got out to help, the men turned towards him.

'instantly, I knew!' he told countless listeners later.

'Don't ask me how. I just knew!'

He leapt back into the car as the 'accident victim' rolled to one side, revealing the rifles and shotguns on which he'd been lying. Several shots were fired, one of which wounded Oscar slightly in the shoulder. He didn't even notice. He threw the Lincoln into reverse and accelerated back up the road.

Tlie kidnappers gave chase on fnot, firing as they ran.

But the African president, even more of a reaiist than Burolo himself, had specified armour-plating and bulletp;roof windows, and the kidnappers' shots rattled harmlessly away. When he reached the corner, Oscar reversed on to the shoulder to turn the car round. As hc did so, the youngest of the four men sprinted forward, leaped on to the bonnet, pressed the muzzle of his rifle against the windscreen and fired. In the event, the shot barely chipped the toughened glass, but for a second Oscar had stared death in the face. His reaction was to slam on the brakes, sending the man reeling into the road, and then accelerate right over him.

By the time the police arrived at the scene there was nothing to see except a few tyre marks and a little blood mixed in with the loose gravel in the centre of the road. A few days later the funeral of a young shepherd named Antonio Melega took place in a mountain village some forty kilometres to the north-west. According to his grimfaced, taciturn relatives, he had been struck by a hit-andrun driver while walking home from his pastures.

The abortive kidnap made Oscar Burolo an instant hero among the island's villa-owning fraternity, eminently kidnappable every one. One enterprising shopkeeper did a brisk trade in T-shirts reading 'Italians 1, Sardinians 0' until the local mayor protested. But although Burolo was quite happy to be lionized, in private he was a frightened man, haunted by the memory of that dull bump beneath the car and the man's muffled cry as the tons of armourplating crushed the life out of him. He knew that by killing one of the kidnappers he had opened an account that would only be closed with his own death. Burolo had been born in the north, but his father had been from a little village in the province of Matera, and he had told his son about blood feuds and the terrible obligation of vendetta which could be placed on a man against his will, destroying him and everyone close to him because of something he had nothing to do with and of which he perhaps even disapproved. Young Oscar had been deeply impressed by these stories. To his childish ear they had the ring of absolute truth, matching as they did the violent and arbitrary rituals of the world he shared with other boys his age. Just as he had known the kidnappers the moment their eyes met, so now he knew they would not rest until they had avenged the death of their colleague.

Faced with this knowledge, a lesser man might have called it quits, sold off the villa – if he could find a purchaser! – and taken his holidays elsewhere in future. But Oscar's realism had its limits, and it ended where his vanity began. Had it been a business deal, with no one but himself and the other party any the wiser, he might have cut and run. But he had invested all his self-esteem in the villa, to say nothing of several billion lira, and it would take more than some bunch of small-time sheep-shaggers, as he jeeringly referred to them, to see him off.

Nevertheless, someone had seen him off, and the friends and relatives of the late Antonio Melega naturally came under suspicion. Apart from the sheer ferocity of the killings, some of the physical evidence seemed to support this hypothesis. Sardinians, particularly those from the poorer mountain areas, are the shortest of all Mediterranean peoples. The fingerprints found on the ejected shotgun cartridges were exceptionally small – 'like a child's', the Carabinieri's expert had remarked, an unfortunate phrase which had provoked much mirth in the rival force. But an adult gunman of small statur was another matter, and would also explain the low angle of fire which had previously been attributed to the gun being held at hip level. Moreover, sheep rustlers would necessarily be skilled in moving and acting soundlessly, hence the eerie silence which had so impressed everyone who had seen the video tape.

'Unfortunately,.' Zen typed, 'there was an insurn;ountable problem about this attractive hypothesis, namely the question of access. The defences of the Villa Burolo had been specifically designed to prevent an incursion of precisely this kind. It is true that the control room itself was not manned at the time of the murders, but the system was designed to set off alarms all over the villa in the event of any intrusion. In order to test the effectiveness of these alarms, a specialist alpine unit of the Carabinieri attempted to break into the villa by a variety of means, including the use of parachutes and hang-gliders. In every case, the alarms were activated. Any direct assault of the premises, whether by local kidnappers or any other group, thus had to be ruled out.'

Placing an asterisk after 'group', Zen added at the foot of the page: 'Subsequent to an assessment of the situation undertaken by this department in late September, Dottor Vincenzo Fabri suggested that the intended victim of the killings might not have been Oscar Burolo, who was unarmed and whose demeanour throughout the video recording showed him to be unafraid of the intruder, but his guest Edoardo Vianello. Fabri pointed out that the fact that the architect was carrying a pistol showed that he feared for his safety, and raised the possibility that an investigation into Vianello's professional affairs might reveal an involvement with the organized crime for which his native Sicily is notorious. To overcome the problem of access, Fabri suggested that Giuseppina Bini was secretly working for the Mafia, drawing attention to the fact that in 1861 her maternal grandfather had been born in Agrigento. For some reason, however, this ingenious theory failed to attract the serious attention it no doubt merited.'

Zen smiled sourly. It was rare for him to get an opportunity to put one over on Vincenzo Fabri. What the hell had the man been up to, he wondered, floating this kind of wild and unsubstantiated rumour?

The next candidate on Zen's list came into the category of light relief.

'Furio Pizzoni was detained on his return to the villa about two hours after the killings had taken place. When questioned as to his earlier whereabouts, he claimed to have spent the evening in a bar in the local village. This alibi was subsequently confirmed by the owner of the bar and several customers. Pizzoni undoubtedly had access to the remote control device mentioned below (see Favelloni, Renato), but given his alibi and the absence of any evident motive, interest in him soon faded, although it was briefly revived by the discovery of video tapes showing amorous encounters between him and Rita Burolo.'

Zen drew the last fragrant wisps of smoke from his cigarette and crushed it out. After a moment's thought, he decided against going into any more details. Even the magazine which had paid so dearly for the photographs made from one of those ~ideo tapes had drawn a discreet veil of verbiage over the exact nature of this little love triangle. It was difficult to offer a tasteful account of the fact that the murdered woman had been in the habit of meeting Pizzoni by moonlight in the hut which the lions used during the day and rolling nude on the straw bedaubed with their sweat and excrement while the young man pleasured her in a variety of ways undreamt of in the animal kingdom. For some people it was still more difficul". to accept that Oscar Burolo had known about these orgies and had done nothing whatever about them apart from rigging up a small video camera in the rafters of the hut to record the scene for his future delectation.

Suddenly Zen caught the sound of Tania's voice behind the screens.

'You promise?'

She sounded anxious.

'But of course!'

The heavy, monotonous voice was that of an official called Romizi.

'Otherwise it'll mean a lot of trouble for me,' Tania stressed.

'Don't worry! I'll take care of it.'

Zen slumped forward until his forehead touched the cool metal casing of the typewriter. So she had found someone else to ask her favour of, after he had scared her away with his tactless impetuosity. He took a deep breath, expelled it as a long sigh, and began to pound the Olivetti's stubborn keys again.

'Given the killer's need of specialized knowledge to overcome the villa's security defences, it was inevitable that the only surviving member of Oscar Burolo's imme tiate family, his son Enzo, should come under suspicion. Relations between Enzo and his father had reportedly been strained for some time, largely owing to the young man's refusal to agree to give up his attempt to become a professional violinist in favour of a career in law or medicine. That August, Enzo Burolo was attending a music school in America, and inquiries by the FBI confirmed that he had been in the Boston area during the period immediately preceding and following the murders. This line of investigation was therefore also dropped. '

Zen flexed his fingers, making the joints creak like old wood. He had now disposed of the suspects the judiciary had ad rejected. It only remained to discuss their eventual choice, currently awaiting trial in Nuoro prison. And here he had to tread very carefully indeed.

'The remaining possibility centred on Renato Favelloni,' he wrote. 'Favelloni had visited the Burolo property on many previous occasions, and had been staying there during the period immediately prior to the murders. Early that evening he and his wife were flown by Oscar Burolo to Olbia airport to catch Alisarda flight IGxzg to Rome.

According to Nadia Favelloni, shortly before the flight was cailed her husband told her that he had forgotten a very !mportant document at the villa and had to return to g t it.

She was to go on to Rome while he would take a later tlight. Nadia Favelloni duly left on IGxx3, but an examination of passenger lists revealed that Favelloni had made no booking for a later flight. Under questioning, Favelloni first claimed that he had flown to Milan instead. When it was pointed out to him that his name did not appear ov. the passenger list of the Milan fiight either, he stated that the purpose of his trip had been to visit his mistress. This was why he had told his wife the false story about leaving a document at the Villa Burolo, and why he had booked under a false name. His wife was jealous, and had once hired a private detective to check on his movements. However, none of the staff or passengers on the Milan fiight was able to identify Favelloni, and since his mistress's testimony is suspect, there is no proof that he ever left Sardinia on the night of the murders.

'The key to the Burolo case throughout has been the question of access. Oscar Burolo had paid an enormou.' sum of money to turn his property into a fortress, yet th.:murderer was able to enter and leave the property without setting off any of the alarms, all within a few minutes.

How was this possible'? 'The most likely explanation requires some consideration of the provision made to enable the inhabitants of the villa themselves to come and go. Since Burolo refused to employ security guards to man the gates or the control room, thii had to be done automatically, by means of a remote control or 'proximity' device similar to those used for opening garage doors. But while most commercially available models are of little value in security terms, since their codes can easily be duplicated, the system at the Villa Burolo was virtually unbreakable, because the code changed every time it was used. Along with the existing code, causing the gates to open, the remote cuntrol unit transmitted a new randomly-generated cluster, replacing the previous code, which would serve to operate the mechanism at the next occasion. Since each signal was uni.~ue, it was impossible for a would-be intruder to duplicate it. But anyone who had been admitted to the Vilia could easily remove the device and use it to re-enter the perimeter without triggering the alarms.'

So far, so good, thought Zen. Technical jargon about remoute control devices was no problem. Where the Favelloni angle got sticky was when it came to dealing not with means and opportunity but with motive. It was widely assumed that the reason Renato Favelloni had paid so many visits to the Villa Burolo that summer was that he was involved in negotiations between Oscar Burolo and the politician referred to as 1'onorevole, whose influence had allegedly been instrumental in getting Burolo Construction its lucrative public-sector contracts. According to the rumours circulating in the press and elsewhere, the two men had recently fallen out, and Oscar had threatened to make public the records he kept detailing their mutually rewarding transactions over the years. Before he could carry out this threat, however, he and his guests had been gunned down, his documentary collection of video tapes and fioppy discs ransacked, and I'onorevole spared any possible future embarrassment.

This was the aspect of the case which was presumably occupying the attention of the investigating magistrate, but Aurelio Zen, unprotected by the might and majesty of the judiciary, wanted to give the subject the widest possible berth. Fortunately, he had a convenient excuse for doing so. Although these theories had been widely touted, because of the secrecy in which the prosecutiori case was prepared they remained mere theories, lacking any substantive backing whatsoever. Once Renato Favelloni was brought to trial – in a few weeks, perhaps – all this would very rapidly change, but until then no one could know the extent or gravity of the evidence against him.

Thus all Zen needed to do was to plead ignorance.

'As already stressed, the details for the case remain sub judice,' Zen concluded, 'but the fact that the charge is one of conspiracy to murder indicates that another person or persons are thought to be implicated. This might indeed have been inferred from the fact that Dottor Vianello's pistol shot apparently wounded the assassin, probably in the leg, while a medical examination of the accused revealed no recent lesions. 1n this hypothesis, Renato Favelloni would have removed the remote-control devicc from the villa and passed it on to an accomplice, probabl~a professional gunman, who used it to enter Villa Burol~› and leave again, having carried out the murders. One would of course expect a professional killer to use his ow;weapon, probably with a silencer. It can be argued that this anomaly merely strengthens the case against Favelloni, indicating that an attempt was made to disguise the fact that the crime was a premeditated conspiracy against the life of Oscar Burolo.'

Zen knocked the pages into order and read through what he had written, making a few corrections here and there. Then he put the report into a cardboard folder and carried it through the gap in the screens separating his work area from that of Carlo Romizi.

'How's it going'?' he remarked.

Romizi looked up from the railway timetable he ha been studying.

'Bid you know that there's a train listed in here tha' doesn't exist?'

In every organization there is at least one person of whom all his colleagues think, 'How on earth did he get the job?' In Criminalpol, that person was Carlo Romizi, an Umbrian with a face like the man in the moon. Even after sume gruelling tour of duty, Romizi always looked as fresh as a new-laid egg, and his expression of childlike astonishment never varied.

'No, I didn't know that,' Zen replied.

'De Angelis just told me.'

'Which one is it?'

'That's the whole point! They don't say. Every year they invent a train which just goes from one bit of the timetable to another. Each individual bit looks all right, but if you put it all together you discover that the train just goes round and round in circles, never getting anywhere. Apparently it started one year when they made a mistake. Now they do it on purpose, as a sort of joke. I haven't found it yet, but it must be here. De Angelis told me about it.'

Zen nodded non-committally.

'What did la Biacis want?' he asked casually.

The effort of memory made Romizi frown.

'Oh, she was nagging me about some expense claim I put in. Apparently Moscati thinks it was excessive. I mean excessively excessive. I said I'd send in a revised claim, only I forgot.'

Youth is only a lightness of the heart, Zen thought as he walked away, as happy as a bird and all because Tania had not treated Romizi to her confidences after all.

In stark contrast to the Criminalpol suite, the administrative offices on the ground floor were designed in the old style, with massive desks drawn up in rows like tanks on parade. Tania was nowhere to be seen. One of her colleagues directed Zen to the accounts department, where he spent some time trying to attract the attention of a clerk who sat gazing into the middle distance, a telephone receiver hunched under each ear, repeating 'But of course!' and 'But of course not!' Without looking up, he handed Zen a form marked 'Do not fold, spindle or mutilate', on which he had scribbled 'Personnel?'

In the personnel department or. the fourth floor, Franco Ciliani revealed that the Biacis woman had just left after breaking his balls so comprehensively that he doubted whether they would ever recover.

'You know what her problem is?' Ciliani demanded rhetorically. 'She's not getting enough. The thing with women is, if you don't fuck them silly every few days they lose all sense of proportion. We should drop her husband a line, remind him of his duties.'

Apart from these words of wisdom, Ciliani was unable to help, but as Zen was walking disconsolately downstairs again, Tania suddenly materialized beside him.

'I've been looking for you everywhere,' he said.

'Except the women's toilet, presumably.'

'Ah.'

He handed her the folder as they continued downstairs together.

'This is the report Moscati asked for. Can you get a couple of copies up there before lunch?'

'Of course!' Tania replied rather tartly. 'That's what I'm here for.'

'What's the matter? Did Ciliani say something to you?'

She shrugged. 'No, he just gets on my nerves, that's all.

It's not his fault. He reminds me of my husband.'

This remark was so bizarre that Zen ignored it. Everything Tania had said so far had suggested that she and her husband were blissfully happy together, a perfect couple.

As they reached the third-floor landing, Zen reached over and took her arm.

'What was it you wanted me to do for you?'

She looked at him, then looked away. 'Nothing. It doesn't matter.'

She didn't move, however, and he didn't let go of her arm. With his free hand he gestured towards the stairs.

Whoever had designed the Ministry of the Interior had been a firm believer in the idea that an institution's prestige is directly proportional to the dimensions of its main staircase, which was built on a scale that seemed to demand heroic gestures and sumptuous costumes.

'Perhaps it would work better if we sang,' Zen suggested with a slightly hysterical smile.

'Sang?' Tania repeated blankly.

He knew he should never have opened his mouth, but he was feeling light-headed because of her presence there beside him.

'This place reminds me of an opera. I mean, talking doesn't seem quite enough. You know what I mean?'

He released her, stretched out one arm, laid his other hand on his chest and intoned, 'What was it you wanted me to do for you?'

Tania's face softened into a smile.

'And what would I say?'

'You'd have an aria where you told me. About twenty times over.'

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Tania ribbfed something on a piece of paper.

'Ring this number at seven o'clock this evening. Say you're phoning from here and that because of the murder of that judge there's an emergency on and I'm needed till midnight.'

Zen took the paper from her.

'That's all?'

'That's all.'

He nodded slowly, as though he understood, and turned away.

Blood everywhere, my blood. I'm collapsing like a sack of grai›~ the rats have gnawed a hole in. No one will ever pnd me. No on..but me knows about this place. I will have disappeared.

I made things disappear. People too, but that came later, an ' caused less stir. People drop dead all the time anyway. Things ar more durable. A bowl or chair, a spade, a knife, can hang aroun ' a house so long that no one remembers where it came from..'seems that it's always been there. When it suddenly disappearec; everyone tried to hush up the scandal. 'It must be somewhere.'

Don't worry, it'll turn up, just wait and see.' A crack hai! appeared in their world. And through it, for a moment, they fe.":: the chill and caught a glimpse of the darkness that awaited thentoo.

I've got together quite a collection, one way and another. Wh will become of it now, I wonder? Cups, pens, string, ribbo›. playing cards, wallets, nails, clothing, tools, all piled up in tii darkness like offerings to the god whose absence I sense at night, in the space between the stars, featureless and vast.

Things don't just disappear for no reason. 'There's a reason fri~ everything,' as old Tommaso likes to say, nodding that misshapen head of his that looks like a lump of rock left standing in a field for farmers to curse and plough around, or else blow up. I'd like to blow it up, his wise old head. 'What's the reason for this, then? '

I'd ask as 1 pulled the trigger. Too late for that now.

Perhaps he would have understood, at the last. Perhaps the othe;s did, too. Perhaps the look on their faces was not just pain and terror, but understanding. At all events, the crack was there, the possibility of grace, thanks to me. Things are not what they seevi.

There's more to this place than meets the eye. 1 was living proof of that.

And they proved it too, dying.