Vendetta

Saturday, 20.10 – 22.25

By 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 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 non-existence, 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 bathwater, 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 apout, 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, patronizing Zuricher was the last straw. Who did he think he was, coming over here and going on as though poverty was 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 lunchtime, 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 oc a great truth, a unified field theory of humar. existence, a simple hasic 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 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.

There had been no hint of a storm then. On the contrary, the sky was free from 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. The predominant colours were reddish ochre and olive green, mingled together like the ingredients of a sauce, retaining their individuality yet also creating something new. In all that vast landscape there was no sign of man's presence, except for a distant plume of smoke from the papermill 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 towards 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 forked left on to a road badly in need of repair which ran across the lower slopes of the valley, crossing 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 ~ees. After some time 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 wiremesh fencing and a parallel inner perimeter of razorbarbed wire. Remote-control cameras mounted on the inner gateposts scanned the Mercedes with impersonal curiosity. After about thirty seconds 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, which 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 infra-red detectors, a move-alarm TV system and microwave radar.

All the experts were 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 upwards, 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 quarry-like 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 vagueli Moorish appearance. There was no bell or knocker iri sight, when the door opened at his approach and th~ caretaker appeared, Zen realized 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 them being able to tie their own shoe-laces 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 Signo'r 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 frightenedlooking woman was folding towels. Zen guessed that this was the caretaker's wife, although Bini ignored her as though she was just another of the appliances stacked in neatly 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 fhe 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 towards 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 into life 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 lightlywounded killer. In which case, thought Zen, he must have destroyed the discs and tapes after the murders, despite the horrendous risks involved in staying at the scene once ghe 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 discs 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?

It made no sense, no sense at all, although Zen had a tantalizing feeling that the solution was in fact right under his nose, simple and obvious. But that was no concern of his in any case. His reason for visiting the villa had nothing to do with viewing the scene of the crime. Nevertheless, for the sake of appearances he asked Bini to show him the cellar before they went outside. The caretaker duly levered up a brass ring and lifted the hatch to reveal a set of worn stone steps leading down.

'It's not locked?' Zen asked.

Bini clicked a switch on the wall and a neon light flickered into life below.

'There are no locks here,' he said. 'If you keep your jewels in a safe, you don't need to lock the jewel case.'

The cellar was large, stretching the entire width of th~original farm. Zen sniffed the air.

'Nice and fresh down here.'

The caretaker indicated a narrow fissure at floor level.

'The air comes in there. They used to cure cheeses and hams here in the old days. Even in the summer it stays cool.'

Zen nodded. This constant temperature was no doubt why Oscar had used the place as a storage vault. But now the twin neon bars illuminated an empty expanse of whitewashed walls and bare stone floor. There was nothing to show that this had once been the nerve-centre of an operation which had apparently succeeded in fulfilling the alchemist's dream of turning dross into gold.

Once they got above ground again, the caretaker led Zen out on to the terrace.

'The swimming-pool,' he announced.

Wild follies and outrageous whims die with the outsized ego that created them, and their corpses make depressing viewing. Even drained and boarded over, a swimmingpool is still a swimming-pool, but Oscar's designer beach was an all-or-nothing affair. Once the plug had been pulled and the machinery turned off, it stood revealed for what it was: a tacky, pretentious monstrosity. The transplanted sand was dirty and threadbare, the rocks showed their cement joints, and the mystery of those azure depths stood revealed as a coat of blue paint applied to the vast concrete pit where the body of some small animal lay drowned in a shrinking puddle of water.

'We can get everything going again,' Bini assured his visitor. 'It's all set up.'

But he sounded unconvinced. Even if some crazy foreigner did buy the place, nothing would ever be the same again. Villa Burolo was not a house, it was a performance. Now the star was dead it would always be a flop.

'Well, it certainly seems to be a very pleasant and impressive property,' Zen remarked with a suitably Swiss lack of enthusiasm. 'I'll just have a look around the grounds, on my own.'

Bini turned back into the house, clearly relieved that his ordeal was over.

When he had gone, Zen strolled slowly along the terrace, rounding the comer of the original farmhouse.

Despite the encircling wire, there was no sense of being in a guarded enclosure, for the boundaries of the property had been cleverly situated so as to be invisible from the villa. The view was extensive, ranging from the sea, across the wide valley he had crossed in the Mercedes, to the mountain slopes where the village was just visible as an intrusive smudge.

When he reached the dining-room window, Zen looked round to ensure that he was unobserved, then crouched down to examine the slight discolouration of the flagstones marking the spot where Rita Burolo had bled to death. Another thing that made no sense, he thought.

None of the investigators had commented on the remarkable fact that the murderer had made no attempt to find out whether Signora Burolo was dead or not. As it happened, she had gone into an irreversible coma by the time she was found, but how was the killer to know that? A few minutes either way, a stronger constitution or a lesser loss of blood, and the Burolo case would have been solved before it began.

Nor was this the only instance in which the killer had displayed a most unprofessional carelessness. For although Oscar Burolo had concealed video equipment about the villa to tape the compromising material he stored in the vault, he camouflaged these clandestine operations behind a very public obsession with recording poolside frolics and informal dinner parties. Thus no attempt had been made to disguise the large video camera mounted on its tripod in the corner of the dining room. In the event, no glimpse of the murderer had been recorded on the tape, but how could he have been absolutely sure of that? And if there was even the slightest possibility that some damning clue had been captured by the camera, why had he made no attempt to remove or destroy the tape?

Once again, Zen felt his reason swamped by the sense of something grossly abnormal about the Burolo case. What did this almost supernatural indifference indicate, if not the killer's knowledge that he was invulnerable? There was no need for him to take precautions. The efforts of the police and judiciary were as vain as Oscar Burolo's expensive security measures. The murderer could not be caught any more than he could be stopped.

He walked back along the terrace to the west face of the villa. Beyond the sad ruins of the pool, the land sloped steeply upwards towards the lurid forest he had noticed earlier. The trees were conifers of some kind, packed together in a tight, orderly mass that looked like a reafforestation project. Beyond them lay the main mountain range, a mass of shattered granite briefly interrupted by a smooth grey wall, presumably a dam. Zen continued along the terrace to the wall which concealed the service block and helicopter pad, a half-hearted imitation of the traditional pasture enclosures, higher and with the stones cemented together. On the other side was a neat kitchen garden with a system of channels to carry water to the growing vegetables from the hosepipe connected to an outside tap. Zen took a path leading uphill towards a group of low concrete huts about fifty metres away from the house and partially concealed by a row of cherry trees.

As he passed the line of trees, a low growl made the air vibrate with a melancholy resonance that brought Zen out in goose-flesh. There were three huts, a small one and two large structures which backed on to an enclosure of heavyduty mesh fencing. Both of these had metal doors mounted on runners. One of them was slightly open, and it was from here that the noise had come.

The inside of the hut was in complete darkness. A hot, smothering, acrid odour filled the air. Something rustled restlessly in the further reaches of the dark. As Zen's eyes gradually adjusted, he made out a figure bending over a heap of some sort on the ground. The resonant vibration thrilled the air again, like a giant breathing stertorously in a drunken slumber. The bending figure suddenly whirled round, as though caught in some guilty act.

'Who are you?'

Zen advanced a step or two into the hut.

'Stay there!'

The man walked towards him with swift, light stridei.

He was short and stocky, with wiry black hair and the fac~: of a pugnacious gnome.

'What are you doing?'

'Looking over the house.'

'This is not the house.'

Zen switched on his fatuous Swiss smile. 'Looking over the property, I should have said.'

The man was staring at him with an air of deep suspicion.

'Who are you?' he repeated.

Zen held out his hand, which was ignored.

'Reto Gurtner.'

'You're Italian?'

'Swiss.'

The low growl sounded out again. Inside the hut, its weight of emotion seemed even greater, an expression of grief and loss that was almost unbearable.

'What was that noise?' Zen asked.

The man continued to eye him with open hostility, as though trying to stare him out.

'A lion,' he said at last.

'Ah, a lion.'

Zen's tone remained politely conversational, as though lions were an amenity without which no home was complete.

'Where in Switzerland?' the man demanded.

He was wearing jeans and a blue tee-shirt. A large hunting knife in a leather sheath was attached to his belt.

His bare arms were hairy and muscular. A long white scar ran in a straight line from just below his right elbow to the wrist.

'From Zurich,' Zen replied.

'You want to buy the house?'

'Not personally. I am here on behalf of a client.'

The words of the young man at Palazzo Sisti echoed in his mind. 'You will visit the scene of the crime, interview witnesses, interrogate suspects. In the course of your investigations you will discover concrete evidence demolishing Furio Padedda's alibi and linking him to the murder of Oscar Burolo.

All this will take no more than a few days at the most.'

Something inconceivably huge and fast passed overhead, blocking out the light for an instant like a rapid eclipse of the sun. An instant later there was an earthshattering noise, as if a tall stone column had collapsed on top of the hut. Even after the moment had passed, the rumbles and echoes continued to reverberate in the walls and ground for several seconds.

The lion-keeper was on his knees at the far end of the hut, bent over the heap on the ground. Zen started towards him, his shoes rustling on the straw underfoot.

'Stay there!' the man shouted.

Zen stopped. He looked around the hot, still, fetid gloom of the hut. Two pitchforks, some large plastic buckets, a shovel and lengths of rope and chain were strewn about the floor in disorder. A coiled whip and a pump-action shotgun hung from nails hammered into the roof supports.

'What was that?' Zen called.

The man got to his feet.

'The air force. They come here to practise flying low over the mountains. When Signor Burolo was…'

He broke off.

'Yes?' Zen prompted.

'They didn't bother us then.'

I bet they didn't, thought Zen. A few phone calls and a hefty contribution to the officers' mess fund would have seen to that.

The low melancholy growl was repeated once more, a feeble echo of the jet's brief uproar, like a child feebly imitating a word it does not understand.

It does not sound happy, the lion,' Zen observed.

'It is dying.'

'Of what?'

'Of old age.'

'The planes disturb it'

'Strangers too.'

The man's tone was uncompromising. Zen pointed to the scar on his forearm.

'But it is still dangerous, I see.'

The man brushed past him towards the door.

'A very neat job, though,' Zen commented, following him out. 'More like a knife or a bullet than claws.'

'You know a lot about lions?' the keeper demanded sarcastically, as they emerged into the brilliant sunlight and pure air.

'Only what I read in the papers.'

The man walked over to the smaller hut and brought out a plastic bucket filled with a bloody mixture of hearts, lungs and intestines.

'I notice that you keep a shotgun in there,' Zen pursued, 'so I assume there is reason for fear.'

The man regarded him with blank eyes.

'There is always reason for fear when you are dealing with creatures to whom killing comes naturally.'

Seeing him standing there in open defiance, the bucket of guts in his hand, ready to feed the great beasts that he alor.e could manage, it was easy to see Furio Padedda's attraction for a certain type of woman. It was to these concrete huts that Rita Burolo had come to disport herself with the lion-keeper, unaware that their antics were being recorded by the infra-red video equipment her husband had rigged up under the roof.

How had Oscar felt, viewing those tapes which -according to gloating sources in the investigating magistrate's office – made hard-core porno videos look tame by comparison? Had his motive for making them been simple voyeurism, or was he intending to blackmail his wife? Was she independently wealthy? Had he hoped in this way h~ stave off bankruptcy until his threats forced 1'onorevole to intervene in his favour? Supposing he had mentioned the existence of the tapes to her, and she had passed on the information to her lover. To a proud and fiery Sardinian, the fact that his amorous exploits had been recorded for posterity might well have seemed a sufficient justification for murder. Or rather, Zen realized, as he sat moodily sipping his vernaccia, it could easily be made to appear that it had. Which was all that concerned him, after all.

The bar had emptied appreciably as the men drifted home to eat the meals their wives and mothers had shopped for that morning. Zen stared blearily at his watch, eventually deciphering the time as twenty to nine. He pushed his chair back, rose unsteadily and walked over to the counter, where the burly proprietor was rinsing glasses.

'When can I get something to eat?'

Reto Gurtner would have phrased the question more politely, but he had stayed behind at the table.

'Tomorrow,' the proprietor replied without looking up from his work.

'How do you mean, tomorrow?'

'The restaurant's only open for Sunday lunch out of season.'

'You didn't tell me that!'

'You didn't ask.'

Zen turned away with a muttered obscenity.

'There's a pizzeria down the street,' the proprietor added grudgingly.

Zen barged through the glass doors of the hotel. The piazza was deserted and silent. As he passed the Mercedes, Zen patted it like a faithful, friendly pet, a reassuring presence in this alien place. A roll of thunder sounded out, closer yet still quiet, a massively restrained gesture.

In the corner of the piazza stood the village's only public hone pox a high-tech glass booth perched there as if it hag jusf landed from outer space. Zen eyed it wistfully, but tge risk was just too great. Tania would have had time to think things over by now. Supposing she was off hand or indifferent, a cold compensation for her excessive warmth the day before? He would have to deal witg ppat eventually, of course, but not now, not here, with all the other problems he had.

The village was as still and dead as a ghost town. Zen shambled along, looking for the pizzeria. All of a sudden pe stopped in his tracks, then whirled around wildly, scanning the empty street behind him. No one. What had it been? A noise? Or just drunken fancy? 'They must have stumbled on something they weren't supposed to see,' the Carabiniere had said of the murdered couple in the camper. 'It can happen to anyone, round here. All you need is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

As the alcoholic mists in Zen's mind cleared for a moment, he had an image of a child scurrying along an alleyway running parallel to the main street, appearing at intervals in the dark passages with steps leading up. A child playing hide-and-seek in the darkness. But had he imagined it, or had he really caught sight of somethin8 out of the corner of his eye, on the extreme periphery of vision, something seen but not registered until now?

He shook his head sharply, as though to empty it of all this nonsense. Then set off again, a little more hurriedly now.

The pizzeria was just around the corner where the street curved downhill, among the new blocks on the outskirts of the village. The exterior was grimly basic -reinforced concrete framework, bare brickwork infill, adhesive plastic letters spelling 'Pizza Tavola Calda' on the window – but inside th place was bright, brash and cheerful, decorated with traditional masks, dolls, straw baskets and woven and embroidered hangings. To Zen's astonishment, the young man in charge even welcomed him warmly. Things were definitely looking up.

After a generous antipasto of local air-cured ham and salami, a large pizza and most of a flask of red wine, they looked even better. Zen lit a cigarette and looked around at the group of teenagers huddled conspiratorially in the corner, the table-top laden with empty soft-drink bottles.

If only he had had someone to talk to, it would have been perfect. As it was, his only source of entertainment was the label of the bottled mineral water he had ordered. This consisted of an assurance by a professor at Cagliari University that the contents were free of microbacteriological impurities, together with an encomium on its virtues that seemed to imply that in sufficient quantities it would cure everything but old age. Zen studied the chemical analysis, which listed among other things the abbassamento crioscopico, concentrazione osmotica and conducibilita elettrica specipca a x8'C. Each litre contained 0.00009 grams of barium. Was this a good thing or a bad thing?

The door of the pizzeria opened to admit the half-witted midget he had seen outside Confalone's office that morning. She was dripping wet, and Zen realized suddenly that the hushing sound he had been hearing for some time now, like static on a radio programme, was caused by a downpour of rain. The next instant a deafening peal of thunder rang out, seemingly right overhead. One of the teenagers shrieked in mock terror, the others giggled nervously. The beggar woman limped theatrically over to Zen's table and demanded money.

'I gave you something this morning,' Reto Gurtner replied in a tone of distaste.

The owner shouted angrily in Sardinian and the woman turned away with a face as blank as the wooden carnival masks hanging on the wall and went to sit on a chair near the door, looking out at the torrential rain. She must know a thing or two, thought Zen, wandering about from place to place, privileged by madness.

When the owner came to clear Zen's table, he apologized for the fact that he'd been bothered.

'I try to keep her out of here, but what can you do? She's got nowhere to go.'

'Homeless?'

The man shrugged.

'She's got a brother, but she won't live with him. Claims he's an impostor. She sleeps rough, in caves and shepherd's huts, even on the street. She's harmless, but quite mad. Not that it's surprising, after what happened to her.'

He made no effort to lower his voice, although the woman was sitting near by, perched on her chair like a large doll. Zen glanced at her, but she was still staring rigidly at the door.

'It's all right,' the owner explained. 'She doesn't understand Italian, only dialect.'

Zen eagerly seized this opportunity to talk.

'What happened to her?'

The young man shook his head and sighed.

'I wasn't around then, but people say she just disappeared one day, years ago. She was about fifteen at the time. The family said she'd gone to stay with relatives who'd emigrated to Tuscany. Then a few years ago her parents died in… in an accident. The son was away doing his military service at the time. When the police went to the house they found Elia shut up in the cellar like an animal, almost blind, covered in filth and half crazy.'

Reto Gurtner looked suitably horrified by this example of Mediterranean barbarism.

'But why?'

The young man sighed.

'Now, you understand, this village is just like anywhere else. Televisions, pop music, motorbikes.'

He waved at the teenagers in the corner.

'The young people stay out till all hours, even the girls.

They do what they like. Twenty years ago it was different.

People say that Elia was seeing a man from a nearby farm.

Perhaps she stayed out too late one summer night, and…'

He broke off as the door banged open and three men walked in. The beggar woman sprang to her feet, staring at them like a wild animal about to pounce or fiee. One of the men spat a few words of dialect at her. She flinched as though he had struck her, then ran out. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

The three newcomers were wearing the local heavyweight gear, durable, anonymous and mass-produced, but there was nothing faceless or conventional about their behaviour. They took over the pizzeria as though it were the venue for a party being given in their honour. The leader, who had obviously had quite a lot to drink already, threw his weight around in a way that seemed almost offensively familiar, going behind the counter and sampling the various plates of toppings, talking continuously in a loud raucous voice. Zen could understand nothing of what was being said, but although the owner kept smiling and responded in the required jocular fashion, it seemed an effort, and Zen thought he would have been happier if the men had gone away.

Having done the rounds, chaffed the owner and his wife and grabbed a plate of olives and salami and a litre of wine, the trio seated themselves at the table next to Zen's.

Once their initial high spirits had subsided, their mood rapidly turned sombre, as though all three had immense grievances which could never be redressed. The leader in particular not only looked fiercely malcontent, but was scowling at Zen as though he was the origin of all his troubles. His bristly jet-black beard, curly hair and enormous hook nose gave him a Middle Eastern appearance, like a throwback to the island's Phoenician past. He reminded Zen of someone he had seen earlier, although he couldn't think who. From time to time, between gulped half glassfuls of wine, the man muttered in dialect to his companions, bitter interjections which received no reply.

Zen began to feel alarmed. The man was clearly drunk, his mood explosive and unpredictable, and he was staring at him more and more directly, as though beating up this stranger might be just what was needed to make his evening. To defuse the situation before it got out of hand, Zen leaned over to the three men.

'Excuse me,' he said in his best Reto Gurtner manner.

'Could you tell me if there's a garage round here?'

'A garage?' the man replied after a momentary hesitation. 'For what?'

Zen explained that his car was making a strange knocking noise and he was worried that it might break down.

'What kind of car7'

'A Mercedes.'

After a brief discussion in dialect with his companions, the man replied that Vasco did repairs locally, but he wouldn't have the parts for a Mercedes. Otherwise there was a mechanic in Lanusei, but he was closed tomorrow, it being Sunday.

'You're on holiday?' he asked.

As Zen recited his usual explanation of who he was and what he was doing, the man's expression gradually changed from hostility to sympathetic interest. After a few minutes he invited Zen to join them at their table. Zen hesitated, but only for a fraction of a moment. This was an invitation which he felt it would be decidedly unwise to refuse.

Three quarters of an hour and another flask of wine later, he was being treated almost like an old friend. The hook-nosed man, who introduced himself as Turiddu, was clearly delighted to have a fresh audience for his long and rather rambling monologues. His companions said hardly a word. Turiddu talked and Zen listened, occasionally throwing in a polite question with an air of wide-eyed and disinterested fascination with all things Sardinian. Turiddu's grievances, it turned out, were global rather than personal. Everything was wrong, everything was bad and getting worse. The country, by which he appeared t~› mean that particular part of the Oliastra, was in a total mess. It was a disaster. The government in Rome poure.i in money, but it was all going to waste, leaking awai through the sieve-like conduits of the development agencies, provincial agricultural inspectorates, the irrigation consortia and land-reclamation bodies.

'In the old days the landowner, he arranged everything, decided everything. You couldn't fart without his permission, but at least there was only one of him. Now we've got these new bosses instead, these pen-pushers in the regional government, hundreds and hundreds of them!

And what do they do? Just like the landowner, they look after themselves!'

Turiddu broke off briefly to gulp some more wine and accept one of Zen's cigarettes.

'And when they do finally get round to doing something, it's even worse! The old owners, they understood the land. It belonged to them, so they made damn sure it was looked after, even though we had to break our bums doing the work. But these bureaucrats, what do they know? All they do is sit in some office down in Calgliari and look at maps all day!'

Turiddu's companions sat listening to this harangue with indulgent and slightly embarrassed smiles, as though what he was saying was true enough but it was pointless and rather demeaning to mention it, particularly to a stranger.

'There's a lake up there in the mountains,' Turiddu continued, striking a match casually on his thumbnail. 'A river used to flow down towards the valley, where it disappeared underground into the caves. The rock down here is too soft, the water runs through it. So what did those bastards in Cagliari do? They looked at their maps, saw this river that seemed to go nowhere, and they said,

"Let's dam the lake, so instead of all that water going to waste we can pipe it down to Oristano to grow crops."'

Turiddu broke off to shout something at the pizzeria owner in Sardinian. The young man came over with an unlabeld bottle and four new glasses.

'Be careful,' he warned Zen with humorous exaggeration, tapping the bottle. 'Dynamite!'

'Dynamite my arse,' Turiddu grumbled when he had gone. 'I've got stuff at home, the real stuff, makes this taste like water.'

He filled the four tumblers to the brim, spilling some on the tablecloth, and downed his at one gulp.

'Anyway, what those clever fuckers in Cagliari didn't realize was that all that water from the lake didn't just disappear. It was there, underground, if you knew where fp look for it. All the farms round here were built over caves where the river ran underground. With that and a bit of fodder, you could keep cattle alive through the winter, then let them loose up in the mountains when spring came. But once that fucking dam was built, all the water – our water -went down the other side to those soft idle bastards on the west coast. As if they didn't have an easy enough life already! Oh, they paid us compensation, of course. A few lousy million lire to build a new house here in the village.

And what are we supposed to do here? There's no work. The mountains take what little rain there is, the winter pasture isn't worth a shit. What's the matter? You're not drinking.'

Zen obediently gulped down the liquid in his glass as the Sardinian had done, and almost gagged. It was raw grappa, steely, unfiltered, virtually pure alcohol.

'Good,' he gasped. 'Strong.'

Turiddu shrugged.

'I've got some at home makes this taste like water.'

The door of the pizzeria swung open. Zen looked round and recognized Furio Padedda, who had just walked in with another man. Zen turned back to his new companions, glad of their company, their protection.

'Tell me, why is that bit of forest on the other side of the valley so green? It almost looks as though somenne was watering it.'

Turiddu gave an explosive laugh that turned into a coughing fit.

'They are! We are, with our water!'

He refilled all the glasses with grappa.

'The dam they built, it was done on the cheap. Bunch of crooks from Naples. It leaks, not much but all the time. On the surface the soil is dry, but those trees have roots that go down twenty metres or more. Down there it's like a marsh. The trees grow like geese stuffed for market.'

Zen glanced round at Furio Padedda and his companion, who were sitting near the door, drinking beer.

Despite his drunkenness, Turiddu had not missed Zen's interest in the newcomers.

'You know them?' he demanded with a contemptuous jerk of his thumb at the other table.

'One of them. We met today at the villa where he works.'

Turiddu regarded him with a stupified expression.

'That place? You're not thinking of buying it?'

Zen looked suitably discreet.

'My client will make the final decision. But it seems an attractive house.'

The three men glanced rapidly at each other, their looks dense with exchanged information, like deaf people communicating in sign language.

'Why, is there something wrong with it?'

Zen's expression remained as smooth as processed cheese. Turiddu struggled visibly with his thoughts for a moment.

'It used to belong to my family,' he announced finally.

'Before they took our water away.'

He stared drunkenly at Zen, daring him to disbelieve his story. Zen nodded thoughtfully. It might be true, but he doubted it. Turiddu was a bit of a fantasist, he guessed, a man with longings and ambitions that were too big for his small-town habitat but not quite big enough to give him the courage to leave.

The Sardinian laughed again. 'You saw the electric fences and the gates and all that? He spent a fortune on that place, to make it safe, the poor fool. And it's all useless!'

Zen frowned. 'Do you mean to say that the security system is defective in some way?'

But Turiddu did not pursue the matter. He was looking around with a vague expression, a cigarette whirh he had forgotten to light dangling from his lips.

'Just take my advice, my friend,' he said. 'Have nothing to do with that place. Terrible things have happened there, things you can't wash away with water, even if there was any. There are plenty of nice villas up north, on the coast, houses for rich foreigners. Down here is not the place for them. There are too many naughty boys. Like that one over there, for instance.'

He nodded towards Furio Padedda, who was just finishing his beer.

'Is he a friend of yours?' asked Zen.

Turiddu slapped the table so hard that the bottle nearly fell over.

'Him? He's no one's friend, not round here! He's a foreigner. He's got friends all right, up in the mountains.'

He lowered his voice to a sly whisper.

'They don't grow crops up there, you know. They don't grow anything, the lazy bastards. They just take whatever they want. Sheep, cattle. Sometimes people too. Then they get very rich very quick!'

One of his companions said something brief and forceful in Sardinian. Turiddu frowned but was silent.

A shadow fell across the table. Zen looked up to find Furio Padedda standing over him.

'Good evening, Herr Gurtner,' he said, stressing the foreign title.

'What the fuck do you want, Padedda?' growled Turiddu.

'I just wanted to greet our friend frcm Switzerland here.

Been having a drink, have you? Several drinks, in fact.'

'None of your fucking business,' Turiddu told him.

'I was thinking of Herr Gurtner,' Padedda continued in an even tone. 'He should be careful. Our Sardinian grappa might be a little strong for him.'

He called his companion over.

'Let me introduce my friend Patrizio. Patrizio, Herr Reto Gurtner of Zurich.'

Patrizio held out his hand and said something incomprehensible. Zen smiled politely.

'I'm sorry, I don't understand dialect.'

Padedda's eyes narrowed.

'Not even your own?'

A silence like thick fog fell over the pizzeria. You could feel it, taste it, smell it, see it.

'Patrizio spent eight years in Switzerland working on the Saint Bernard tunnel,' Padedda explained. 'He speaks Swiss German fluently. Oddly enough, it seems that Herr Reto Gurtner does not.'

I knew him at once. They think they're so clever, the others, but their cleverness is lost on me. It's a poison that doesn't take, a disease I'm immune to. Their conjuring tricks are meant for them, the children of the light to whom everything is what it seems, the way it looks. The policeman just provided himself with false papers and a big car and – presto! – he was magically transformed in his own eyes and theirs into a foreign businessman come to buy property. They believe in property, they believe in documents and papers, namcs and dates. How could they not believe in him? Living out a lie themselves, hou~ could they recognize his lies?

But I knew who he was the moment I set eyes on him. I kneu› wh!i he Jmd come and why he wanted to see the house. I knew what lay behind his sly questions and insinuating remarks, his prying and peeping.

I was very bold, I confronted him openly. He shied away, seeming not to know me. The darkness showed its hand for an instant, like a brief eclipse of the sun, and I read death in his eyes. I'd seen it before with the animals Father killed. I knew what it meant.

Perhaps he too sensed that something was going on. Perhaps he even suspected that his life was in danger. But how could he have had the slightest idea who it was that represented that danger?