Michael Dibdin: Vendetta

'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.'