Michael Dibdin: Vendetta

Aurelio Zen lounged on the sofa like a listless god, bringing the dead back to life. With a flick of his finger he made them rise again. One by one the shapeless, blooddrenched bundles stirred, shook themselves, crawled about a bit, then floated upwards until they were on their feet again. This extremely literal resurrection had taken them by surprise, to judge by their expressions, or perhaps it was the sight of each others' bodies that was so shocking, the hideous injuries and disfigurements, the pools and spatters of blood everywhere. But as Zen continued to apply his miraculous intervention, all this was set to rights too: the gaping rents in flesh and fabric healed themselves, the blood mopped itself up, and in no time at all the scene looked almost like the ordinary dinner party it had been until the impossible occurred. None of the four seemed to notice the one remarkable feature of this spurious afterlife, namely that everything happened backwards.

'He did it.'

Zen's mother was standing in the doorway, her nightdress clutched around her skimpy form.

'What's wrong, mamma?'

She pointed at the television, which now showed a beach of brilliant white sand framed by smoothly curved rocks. A man was swimming backwards through the wavelets. He casually dived up out of the water, landed neatly on one of the rocks and strolled backwards to the shaded lounging chairs where the others sat sucking smoke out of the air and blowing it into cigarettes.

'The one in the swimming costume. He did it. He was in love with his wife so he killed him. He was in another one too, last week, on Channel Five. They thought he was a spy but it was his twin brother. He was both of them. They do it with mirrors.'

Mother and son gazed at each other across the room lit by the electronically preserved sunlight of a summer now more than three months in the past. It was almost two o'clock in the moming, and even the streets of Rome were hushed.

Zen pressed the pause button of the remote control unit, stilling the video.

'Why are you up, mamma?' he asked, trying to keep his irritation out of his voice. This was breaking the rules.

Once she had retired to her room, his mother never reappeared. It was respect for these unwritten laws that made their life together just about tolerable from his point of view.

'I thought I heard something.'

Their eyes still held. The woman who had given Zen life might have been the child he had never had, awakened by a nightmare and seeking comfort. He got up and walked over to her.

'I'm sorry, mamma. I turned the sound right down…'

'I don't mean the TV.'

He interrogated those bleary, evasive eyes more closely.

'What, then?'

She shrugged pettishly.

'A sort of scraping.'

'Scraping? What do you mean?'

'Like old Umberto's boat.'

Zen was often brought up short by his mother's references to a past which for her was infinitely more real than the present would ever be. He had quite forgotten Umberto, the portly, dignified proprietor of a general grocery near the San Geremia bridge. He used the boat to transport fruit and vegetables from the Rialto market, as well as boxes, cases, bottles and jars to and from the cellars of his house, which the ten-year-old Zen had visualized as an Aladdin's cave crammed with exotic delights. When not in use, the boat was moored to a post in the little canal opposite the Zens' house. The post had a tin collar to protect the wood, and a few moments after each vaporetto passed down the Cannaregio the wash would reach Umberto's boat and set it rubbing its gunwale against the collar, producing a series of metallic rasps.

'It was probably me moving around in here that you heard,' Zen told her. 'Now go back to bed, before you catch cold.'

'It didn't come from in here. It came from the other side.

Across the canal. Just like that damned boat.'

Zen took her by the arm, which felt alarmingly fragile.

Widowed by the war, his mother had confronted the world alone on his behalf, wresting concessions from tradesmen and bureaucrats, labouring at menial jobs to eke out her pension, cooking, cleaning, sewing, mending and making do, tirelessly and ingeniously hollowing out and shoring up a space for her son to grow up in. Small wonder, he thought, that the effort had reduced her to this pittance of a person, scared of noises and the dark, with no interest in anything but the television serials she watched, whose plots and characters were gradually becoming confused in her mind. Such motherhood as she had known was like those industrial jobs that leave workers crippled and broken, the only difference being that there was no one mothers could sue for damages.

Zen led her back into the musty bedroom she occupied at the back of the apartment, filled with the furniture she had brought with her from their home in Venice. The pieces were all elaborately carved from some wood as hard, dark and heavy as iron. They covered every inch of wall space, blocking up the fire escape as well as most of the window, which anyway she always kept tightly shuttered.

'Are you going to stay up and watch the rest of that film?' she asked as he tucked her in.

'Yes, mamma, don't worry, I'll be just in there. If you hear anything, it's only me.'

'It didn't come from in there! Anyway, I told you who did it. The skinny one in the swimming costume.'

'I know, mamma,' he murmured wearily. 'That's what everyone thinks.'

He wandered back to the living room just as two o'clock began to strike from the churches in the Vatican. Zen stood surveying the familiar faces locked up on the flickering screen. They were familiar not just to him, but to everyone who had watched television or looked at the papers that autumn. For months the news had been dominated by the dramatic events and still more sensational implications of the 'Burolo affair'.

In a way it was quite understandable that Zen's mother had confused the characters involved with the cast of a film she had seen. Indeed, it was a film that Zen was watching, but a film of a special kind, not intended for commercial release and only available to him, as an officer of the Criminalpol section of the Ministry of the Interior, in connection with the report he had been asked to prepare, summarizing the case to date. He wasn't really supposed to take it home, but the Ministry didn't run to video machines for its employees, even those of Vice-Questorial rank. So what was he supposed to do -Zen had demanded, in his ignorance of the nature of video tape – hold it up to the window, frame by frame?

He sat down on the sofa again, groped for the remote control unit and pressed the play button, releasing the blurred figures to laugh, chat and generally ham it up for the camera. They knew it was there, of course. Oscar Burolo made no secret of his mania for recording the highpoints of his life. On the contrary, every visitor to the entrepreneur's Sardinian hideaway had been impressed by the underground vault containing hundreds of video tapes, as well as computer discs all carefully shelved and indexed. Like all good libraries, Oscar's collection was constantly expanding. Indeed, shortly before his death a complete new section of shelving had been installed to accommodate the latest additions.

'But do you actually ever watch any of them'?' the guest might ask.

'I don't need to watch them,' Oscar would reply, smiling in a peculiar way. 'It's enough to know that they're there.'

If the six people relaxing at the water's edge were in any way uneasy about the prospect of having their antics preserved for posterity, they certainly didn't show it. An invitation to the Villa Burolo was so sought-after that no one was going to quibble about the conditions. Quite apart from the experience itself it was something to brag about at dinner parties for months to come. 'You mean to say you've actually been there?' people would ask, their envy showing like an ill-adjusted slip. 'Tell me, is it true that he has lions and tigers freely roaming the grounds and that the only way in is by helicopter?' Secure in the knowledge that no one was likely to contradict him, Oscar Burolo's ex-guest could freely choose whether to distort the facts and I solemnly assure you, I who have been there and seen it with my own eyes, that Burolo has a staff of over thirty servants – or rather slaves! – whom he bought, cash down, from the president of a certain African country or, in more sophisticated company, to suggest that the truth was actually stranger than the various lurid and vulgar fictions which had been circulating.