Michael Dibdin: Vendetta

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.