Michael Dibdin: Vendetta

Zen walked past the open doorway of a butcher's shop, rom which came a series of loud bangs and a smell of lood. The delivery van roared by and double-parked at he corner of the street, engine running. Outside a pet hop, a row of plastic bags filled with water were hanging om a rack. In each bag, a solitary goldfish twitched to and fro, trapped in its fragile bubble-world. A mechanical treet-cleaner rolled past, leaving a swathe of glistening sphalt in its wake, looping out round the obstruction caused by the grey van. No one got in or out of the van.

Nothing was loaded or unloaded. A tough-looking young man, clean-shaven, with cropped hair sat behind the wheel, staring straight ahead. He paid no attention to Zen.

Up in the Criminalpol suite on the third floor of the Ministry, the other officials were in the midst of a heated discussion with Vincenzo Fabri at its centre.

'The British have got the right idea,' Fabri was prolaiming loudly. 'Catch them on the job and gun them down. Forget the legal bullshit.'

'But that's different!' Bernardo Travaglini protested.

'The IRA are terrorists.'

'There's no difference! Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, they're our Northern Ireland! Except we're dumb enough to respect everyone's rights and do things by the book.'

'That's not the point, Vincenzo,' De Angelis interrupted. 'Thatcher's got an absolute majority, she can do what she wants. But here in Italy we've got a democracy.

You've got to take account of people's opinions.'

'Screw people's opinions!' Fabri exploded. 'This is war!

The only thing that matters is who is going to win, the state or a bunch of gangsters. And the answer is they are, unless we stop pissing about and match them for ruthlessness.'

He caught sight of Zen sidling past and broke off suddenly.

'Now there's somebody who's got the right idea,' he exclaimed. 'While the rest of us are sweating it out down in Naples, trying to protect a bunch of criminals who would be better off dead, Aurelio here pops over to Sardinia and turns up, quote, new evidence in the Burolo case, unquote, which just happens to put a certain politician's chum in the clear. That's the way to do things! Never mind the rights and wrongs of the situation. Results are all that matters.'

Resignedly, Zen turned to face his tormentor. This was a showdown he could not dodge.

'What do you mean by that?'

Fabri faked a smile of complicity.

'Oh, come on! No hard feelings! In your shoes I'd have done the same. But it just goes to prove what I've been saying. Do things by the book like us poor suckers and what do you get? A lot of headaches, long hours, and a boot up the bum when things go wrong. Whereas if you look after number one, cultivate the right contacts and forget about procedures, you get covered in glory, name in the paper and friends in high places!'

'To be fair, you should take some of the credit,' Zen replied.

'Me? What are you talking about?'

'Well, you recommended me, didn't you?'

Fabri's eyes narrowed dangerously.

'Recommended you to who?'

'To Palazzo Sisti.'

A moment's silence was broken by a rather forced laugh from Vincenzo Fabri.

'Do me a favour, will you? I don't go to bed with politicians, and if I did I certainly wouldn't choose that bunch of losers!'

'It's all right, Vincenzo,' Zen reassured him. 'They told me. I asked who had put them on to me and they said it was their contact a: the Ministry.'

Fabri laughed dismissively.

'And what's that got to do with me?'

'Well, they said this person, this contact, had already tried to fiddle the Burolo case for them, except he'd made a complete balls-up of it. As far as I know, you're the only person here who's done any work on that case.'

'You're Iying!'

It was Zen's turn to switch on a smile of complicity.

'Look, it's all right, Vincenzo! We're among friends here. No hard feelings, as you said yourself. I for one certainly don't hold it against you. But then I'm hardly in a position to, of course.'

Fabri stared at him furiously.

'I tell you once and for all that I have nothing whatever to do with Palazzo Sisti! Is that clear?'

Zen appeared taken aback by this ringing denial.

'Are you sure?'

'Of course I'm fucking sure!'

Zen shook his head slowly.

'Well, that's very odd. Very odd indeed. All 1 can say is that's what I was told. But if you say it's not true…'

'Of course it's not true! How dare you even suggest such a thing?'

'Admittedly I can't prove anything,' Zen muttered.

'Of course you can't!'

'Can you?'

The reply was quick and pointed. Fabri recoiled from it as from a drawn knife.

'What? Can I what?'

'Can you prove that the allegations made by I'onorevole's private secretary are untrue?'

'I don't need to prove it!' Fabri shouted.

No one had moved, yet Zen sensed that the arrangement of the group had changed subtly. Before, he had been confronted by a coherent mass of officials, united in their opposition to the outsider. Now a looser gathering of individuals stood between him and Fabri, shuffling their feet and looking uncertainly from one man to the other.

'Don't you?' Zen replied calmly. 'Oh, well in that case, of course, there's nothing more to be said.'

He turned away.

'Exactly!' Fabri called after him. 'There's nothing more to be said!'

When Zen reached the line of screens that closed off his desk he glanced back. The group of officials had broken up into smaller clusters, chatting together in low voices. Vincenzo Fabri was talking at full speed in an undertone, gesticulating dramatically, demanding the undivided attention he felt was his by right. But some of his listeners were gazing down at the floor in a way which suggested that they were not totally convinced by Fabri's protestations. They accepted that Zen was an unscrupulous grafter on the make. The difference was that they now suspected that Fabri was one too, and that the reason for his bitterness was not moral indignation but the fact that his rival was more successful.

Giorgio De Angelis, keeping a foot in both camps as usual, patted Fabri on the shoulder in a slightly patronizing way before walking over to join Zen.

'Congratulations. It was about time something like that happened to Vincenzo.'

A wan smile brightened Zen's face.

'So tell me all about it!' De Angelis continued. 'How on earth did you manage to do it?'

Zen's smile died. Of all his colleagues, De Angelis was the one with whom he had the closest relationship, yet the Calabrian clearly took it for granted that Zen had 'fixed' the Burolo case. Well, if no one was going to believe him anyway, he might as well take the credit for his supposed villainy!

He turned his smile on again.

'The funny thing is, I hadn't been going to use the woman at all originally. The person I had in mind was Furio Padedda. He seemed the perfect candidate from everyone's point of view.'

'But Padedda was involved too, wasn't he?' said De Angelis.

Zen shook his head. No one seemed to be able to get the story straight, no doubt because the only thing that really concerned them was the headline news which the media, carefully orchestrated by Palazzo Sisti, had been trumpeting all week: that the case against Renato Favelloni had collapsed.

'Padedda and the Melega family were planning to kidnap Burolo, successfully this time, and extort a huge sum of money from the family. They might well have killed him too, after they got paid, but that was all in the future. On the night of the murders, Padedda was attending a meeting of the gang up in the mountains. But I certainly could have used him, if all else had failed. He even had a convenient wound on his arm. His blood group is different from that of the stains at the villa, but we could have got round that somehow.'