Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (17 page)

Zen ran up the stairs to the second floor. As on the other landings, there were two flats, one to the left and the other facing the stairs. There were numbers on the doors, but no names. Zen continued halfway up the next flight of steps, where he stopped, waiting for the man to emerge again.

The voice of a television newscaster was blaring away in one of the apartments nearby. “… investigation appears to have ground to halt. The authorities have denied that a fresh wave of arrests is imminent. The secretary of the Radical Party today called for alternatives to the terrorist hypothesis to be considered, pointing out that Judge Bertolini never presided in political …”

A door opened on the floor above and women’s voices drowned out the rest of the sentence.

“Bye, then!”

“Bye! I’ll make the pasta, but don’t forget the artichokes, eh?”

“Don’t worry. Some thrushes too, if Gabriele has any luck.”

“A bit of good wine wouldn’t come amiss either.”

“That goes without saying.”

“And remind Stefania to bring a pudding. You know what she’s like!”

The door closed. An elderly woman appeared on the stairs. She was wearing a long coat of some heavy, dark, dowdy-looking material, trimmed with cheap fur at the collar, and wore a woollen scarf over her shoulders. She paused to take in Zen, leaning against the wall.

“No more puff, eh?” she cackled.

Zen nodded ruefully. “It’s my heart. I have to be careful.”

“Quite right! You can’t be too careful. Not that it makes any difference in the end. My sister’s brother-in-law, that’s by her second marriage, to someone from Ancona, although now they live here in Rome because he got a job with the radio, her husband I mean, he does the sound for the football matches.”

“The brother-in-law?”

“Eh, no, the husband! The brother-in-law doesn’t do anything, that’s what I’m telling you, he just dropped dead one day. And do you know the funny thing?”

There was the sound of a door opening on the second floor. Zen glanced round the angle of staircase. In the doorway facing the steps the man from the Rally Bar stood nodding and muttering something to someone inside the flat.

“The funny thing is,” the woman went on, “that very evening he had to go to Turin to see his cousin’s twin girls who’d been born the weekend before, and the train, the one he’d been going to take, you know what happened? It came off the rails, just outside Bologna. And there was another train coming the other way that would have run straight into the wreckage, except that it was late so they had time to stop it. Otherwise it would have been a terrible disaster with hundreds and hundreds of people killed, including poor Carlo, who was dead already, as I said. It all goes to show that when your time comes, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The door below had closed and the man’s footsteps could be heard faintly descending the steps and echoing in the courtyard outside. The old woman cackled again and hobbled downstairs past Zen. As soon as she had gone, he walked down to the landing and knocked on the door in an authoritative way.

There was a scurry of steps inside.

“Who is it?” piped a childish voice.

“Gas Board. We’ve got a suspected leak in the building, got to check all the apartments.”

The door opened a crack, secured by a chain. There seemed to be no one there.

“Let me see your identification.”

Looking much lower down the opening, Zen finally spotted a small face and two eyes fixed unblinkingly on him. He got out his police identity card and dropped it through the centimetre-wide crack.

“Show this to your father.”

The eyes regarded him doubtfully. The girl couldn’t have been more than about seven or eight years old. She tried to shut the door, but Zen had planted his foot in it.

The child turned away, the card held between her index finger and thumb like something dangerous or disgusting. After some time a still younger girl appeared, keeping well away from the door but watching Zen with an air of fascination.

Zen smiled at her. “Hello, there.”

“Have you come to kill my daddy?” she asked brightly.

Before Zen could reply, the child was shooed away by a man’s voice.

“Good evening, Fausto,” called Zen. “It’s been a long time.”

A figure scarcely larger than the children’s appeared round the rim of the door.

“Dottore!” breathed a hushed voice. “What an honour. What a pleasure. You’re alone?”

“Alone.”

“You’ll have to move your foot. I can’t get the chain undone.”

“I just want to ask you a small favour, Fausto. Maybe I can do you one in return.”

“Just move your fucking foot!”

Zen did so. There was a metallic rattle and in a single movement the door opened, a hand pulled Zen inside and the door closed again.

“Please forgive my language, dottore. I’m a bit nervous at the moment.”

Fausto was a small, wiry man with the extreme skinniness that betrays an undernourished childhood. His face was marked by a scar which split his upper lip. He claimed that he’d got it in a knife fight, but Zen thought it was more likely the result of a bungled operation for a cleft palate.

In compensation for the rigours of his childhood, Fausto had survived the passing years with remarkably little sign of ageing. That he had survived at all was a minor miracle, given the number of men he had betrayed. The recruitment of Fausto Arcuti had led directly to one of the great successes of Zen’s years at the Questura in Rome, the smashing of the kidnap and extortion ring organised by a playboy named Francesco Fortuzzi. Arcuti had worked from inside the gang, continuing to supply information right up until the last moment. Then when the police swooped, he had been allowed to slip through the net along with various other minor figures who had never realised that they owed their escape to the fact that Zen was covering Fausto’s tracks. The long-term prospects for informers were bleak. Once a man had sold his soul to the authorities, they could always threaten to expose him if he refused to collaborate again, and the risks of such collaboration grew with every successful prosecution. Sooner or later the criminal milieu figured out where the leaks were coming from. Against all the odds, however, Arcuti had survived.

“Come in!” he said, leading Zen inside. “What a pleasure! And so unexpected! Maria, bring us something to drink. You other kids, get the fuck out of here.”

The apartment consisted of two small, smelly rooms crudely lit by exposed high-wattage bulbs. Forlorn pieces of ill-assorted furniture stood scattered about like refugees in transit. The walls were bedecked with images of the Virgin, the Bleeding Heart of Jesus, and various saints. Over the television hung a large three-dimensional picture of the crucifixion. As you moved your head, Christ’s eyes opened and closed and blood seeped from his wounds.

“Sit down, dottore, sit down!” Arcuti exclaimed, clearing the sofa of toys and clothes. “Sorry about the mess. The wife’s out at work all day, so we never seem to get things sorted out.”

The eldest girl carried in a bottle of
amaro
and two glasses.

“I’d prefer to take you out to the bar,” Arcuti said, pouring them each a drink, “but the way things are …”

“I’ve just come from there,” Zen told him.

“I suppose you followed Mario?”

“If that’s his name. The one with the Mickey Mouse ears.”

Arcuti nodded wearily. “Half-smart, that’s Mario. It’s okay when they’re clever and it’s okay when they’re stupid. It’s the ones in between that kill you.”

“So what’s the problem?” Zen murmured, sipping his drink.

Arcuti sighed. “It’s this Parrucci business. It’s got us all spooked.”

“Parrucci?” frowned Zen. The name meant nothing to him.

“You probably haven’t heard about it. There’s no reason why you should have, he wasn’t working for you. In fact, he wasn’t working for anyone, that’s what makes it worse. He’d given it all up years ago. Of course in this business you never really retire, but Parrucci had been out of it for so long he must have thought he was safe. No one even knew he’d been in the game until it happened.”

The informer drained his glass in a single gulp and poured himself another.

“We found out because of the way they did it. So we asked around, and it turned out that Parrucci had been one of the top informers up north, years ago. But he’d put all that behind him. Wanted to settle down and bring up his kids normally. That’s why they picked him, I reckon.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, if they knock off someone who’s still active, it looks like a personal vendetta. People who are not involved don’t take much notice. But something like this is a warning to everyone. Once you inform, you’re marked for life. We’ll come for you, even if it takes years. That’s what they’re saying.”

Zen lit a cigarette. He knew he was smoking too much, but this was not the time to worry about it.

“What did they do to him?” he asked.

Arcuti shook his head. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

He sat staring at the carpet for some time, balanced on the forward edge of the threadbare armchair. Then he grabbed a cigarette from the packet lying open beside him and lit up, glaring defiantly at Zen.

“You really want to know? All right, I’ll tell you. In dialect, if a man is full of energy and drive, they say he has fire in his belly. That’s a good thing, unless you have too much, unless you break the rules and start playing the game on your own account. What they used to do with traitors, down south, was to get a big iron cooking pot and build a charcoal fire inside. Then they stretched the poor bastard out on his back, tied him up, set the pot on his stomach, and then used the bellows until the metal got red-hot. Eventually the pot burnt its way down into the man’s stomach under its own weight. It could take hours, depending on how much they used the bellows.”

“That’s what they did to Parrucci?”

“Not exactly. That’s the traditional method, but you know how it is these days, people can’t be bothered. Parrucci they kidnapped from his house and took him out to the country, out near Viterbo somewhere. They broke into a weekend cottage, stripped him naked, laid him out flat across the electric cooker with his wrists and ankles roped together, and then turned on the hot plates.”

“Jesus.”

Arcuti knocked back the second glass of
amaro
amid frantic puffs at his cigarette.

“Now do you see why I’m nervous, dottore? Because I could be the next name on the list!”

“How do you know there’ll be any more?”

“Because no one’s claimed responsibility. Usually when something like this happens, you find out who did it and why. They make damn sure you know! That’s the whole point. But this time no one’s saying anything. The only reason for that is that the job isn’t finished yet.”

Zen glanced at his watch. To his dismay, he found that it was almost ten to six. At six o’clock Maria Grazia would leave to go home, and from then on Zen’s mother would be alone in the apartment.

Fausto Arcuti had noticed his visitor’s gesture.

“Anyway, that’s enough of my problems. What can I do for you, dottore?”

“It’s a question of borrowing a car for a few days, Fausto.”

“Any particular sort of car?”

“Something fairly classy, if you can. But the main thing is, it needs to be registered in Switzerland.”

“Actually registered?”

Zen corrected himself. “It needs to have Swiss number plates.”

Arcuti drew the final puff of smoke from his cigarette and let it drown in the dregs of
amaro.

“This car, you want to borrow it for how long?”

“Let’s say the inside of a week.”

“And afterwards, will it be, er, compromised in any way?”

Zen gave him a pained look. “Fausto, if I wanted to do anything illegal, I’d use a police car.”

Arcuti conceded a thin smile. “And how soon do you need it?”

“Tomorrow ideally, but I don’t suppose there’s any chance of that.”

The informer shrugged.

“Why ever not, dottore? You’re doing business with the Italy that works! I may be shut up in this lousy, rotten, stinking hole, but I still have my contacts.”

He produced the piece of paper Zen had given the man called Mario.

“I can contact you at this number?”

“In the evening. During the day I’m at the Ministry.”

“Which department?”

“Criminalpol.”

Arcuti whistled. “Congratulations! Well, if I have any luck I’ll phone you in the morning. I won’t give any name. I’ll just say that I wanted to confirm our lunch date. There’ll be a message for you at the bar here.”

“Thanks, Fausto. In return, I’ll see what I can do to shed some light on this Parrucci business.”

“I’d appreciate it, dottore. It’s not just for me, though that’s not exactly the way I’d choose to go. But the girls, it’s wrong for them to have to grow up like this.”

Zen walked away past the shuttered and gated market toward the bustle of activity on Via Marmorata. He was well satisfied with the way things had gone. Fausto Arcuti’s lifestyle might appear unimpressive, but as a broker for favours and information he was second to none. Moreover, Zen knew that he would want to make up for the poor figure he had cut, cowering in fear of his life in a squalid flat.

Zen’s main preoccupation now was to get home with as little delay as possible. He was in luck, for no sooner had he turned on to the main traffic artery than a taxi stopped just in front of him. The family which emerged from it seemed numerous enough to fill a bus, never mind a taxi, and still the matriarch in charge kept pulling them out like a conjuror producing rabbits from a hat. At length the supply was exhausted, however, and after an acrimonious squabble about extras, discounts, and tips, they all trooped away. In solitary splendour Zen climbed into the cab, which was as hot and smelly as a football team’s changing room, and had himself driven home.

To his relief, the red Alfa Romeo was nowhere to be seen. The lift was ready and waiting, for once, and Zen rode it up to the fourth floor. The experiences of the day had left him utterly drained.

He saw it immediately he opened the front door, a narrow black strip as thin as a razor blade and seemingly endless. It continued all the way along the hallway, gleaming where the light from the living room reflected off its surface. He bent down and picked it up. It felt cold, smooth, and slippery.