Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (31 page)

At last he reached the crest of a small ridge which had formed his horizon for some time and caught sight of the station for the first time, about half a kilometre away to his right, a squat building with a steeply pitched roof. The railway itself was invisible at that distance, so the buildings looked as if they had been set down at random in the middle of nowhere. Below, the track he had originally been planning to take in the car wound through the scrub. Zen ran down the hill to join it. The track showed no signs of recent use. Low bushes were growing over the wheel ruts, and rocks had sprouted everywhere. But now that he was within sight of his goal, the walking was almost a pleasure.

The first sign of what was to come was that one end of the station roof had fallen in. Then he saw that the windows and doors were just gaping holes. By the time he reached the yard, it was evident that the station was a complete ruin. The ground floor rooms were gutted, strewn with beams and plaster from the fallen ceiling, the walls charred where someone had lit a fire in one corner. Outside, the gable wall still proclaimed the name of the village in faded letters, with the height in metres above sea level, but it was clearly many years since the station had been manned. The whole line was a pointless anachronism whose one train a day served no purpose except to provide a few thousand people with jobs and, above all, keep the lucrative subsidies flowing in from Rome.

Zen shook his head. He couldn’t believe this was happening. It was like a bad dream. Automatically he reached for a cigarette, only to remember that Spadola had taken his lighter. He blasphemed viciously, then tried to force himself to think. It was tempting to think of spending the night at the station and catching the train the next morning, but that would be as shortsighted as staying in the shepherd’s hut. It would be equally foolish to try and make off across country. The Barbagia was one of the wildest and least populated areas of the country. Without a map and a compass, the chances of getting lost and dying of exposure were very high.

That left just two possibilities: he could walk back along the track to the main road and then try and hitch a lift to the nearest town, or he could follow the railway line up into the mountains. The problem with taking the road was that Vasco Spadola would surely see him. Walking the railway would be a long and tiring business, and he would probably have to spend a night in the open. But if the worst came to the worst, he could flag down the train the next morning or even jump aboard at the speed it would be going. But the decisive advantage was that the railway was out of sight of the road, which Spadola would now be patrolling in increasing frustration.

The unlit cigarette clenched between his lips, Zen stepped across the disused passing loop where pulpy cacti ran riot and started to walk along the line of rusty rails which curved off to the left, following the contours of the hillside. He had imagined walking along the railway as being tedious but relaxing, but in fact it was every bit as demanding as negotiating the scrub. The ancient rails, rough-hewn, weathered and split, were placed too close together to step comfortably on each one and too far to take them two at a time, while the ballast in between was jagged, uneven, and rife with plants.

A thunderous rumble sounded in the distance once again. Zen stopped and looked up to spot the jets at their sport in the mountains. It was only moments later that he realised another sound had been concealed in the cavernous booming of the jets, a rhythmic purr that was quieter but much closer. For a moment it seemed to be coming from the railway line, and Zen’s hopes briefly flared. Then he swung round and saw the yellow Fiat driving along the track to the station.

Instinctively he crouched down, looking for cover. But this time it was too late. Its engine revving furiously, the Fiat had left the track and was smashing its way through the scrub toward him. Zen leapt up and started to run as fast as he could in the opposite direction. Almost immediately he tripped over a rusty signal wire and went flying, landing on a small boulder and turning his ankle agonisingly. Behind him, the frantic roaring of the car engine reached a peak, then abruptly died. A car door slammed. Zen forced himself to his knees. Some fifty metres away the yellow Fiat lay trapped in a thicket of scrub. Beside the car, a shotgun in his hand, stood Vasco Spadola.

Zen tried to stand up, but his left ankle gave way and he stumbled. He tried again. This time the ankle held, although it hurt atrociously. He now knew that Spadola was going to kill him, but he couldn’t just stand there and let it happen, even though it meant torturing himself in vain. He started to hobble away as fast as he could, gasping at every step. Repeatedly he tripped, lost his precarious balance, and ended up on his hands and knees in the rocky dust. He did not look back. There was no point. Spadola would catch up with him in a matter of minutes. He wondered how good a shot Spadola was and whether he would hear the blast that killed him.

When he finally stopped to look round, he found that Spadola was still some fifty metres away, dawdling along, the shotgun balanced loosely in the crook of his arm. With a groan, Zen turned back to his calvary. So that was how it was going to be. Spadola was in no hurry to finish him off. On the contrary, the longer he could draw out the agony, the more complete his revenge would be. Only the approach of night would force him to close in for the kill, lest his prey escape under cover of darkness. But that was many hours away yet. In the meantime, he was content to dog Zen’s footsteps, not trying to overtake him but not letting him rest either, harrying him on relentlessly toward the inevitable bloody conclusion.

Zen plodded blindly on in a nightmare of pain, confusion, and despair. He neither knew nor cared which direction he was going in. All his hopes and calculations had come to nothing. Unless Palazzo Sisti managed to throw a political wrench in the works at the last moment, Renato Favelloni would be convicted of the Burolo murders while Furio Padedda and the Melega family watched with ironic smiles, never guessing that they owed their freedom to a vendetta very similar to the one which had cost Oscar and the others their lives. To cap it all, Spadola would probably get away with it, too. The villagers would say nothing, particularly since it would involve them as accessories to Zen’s murder. When his corpse was eventually discovered, it would be assumed that he had fallen victim to the long-running guerilla war between the islanders and the State. His colleagues in Rome would shake their heads and agree that it had been crazy to improvise a one-man undercover operation in Sardinia without even telling anyone what he was doing. “He was
asking
for it!” Vincenzo Fabri would crow triumphantly, just as people had said about Oscar when he chose a villa so close to the kidnappers’ heartland. No one would want to tug too hard on any of the loose ends that remained. As Zen well knew, the police were part of the forces of order in more senses than one. They liked things to make sense, they liked files that could be closed. If this order happened to correspond to the truth, well and good, but in the last resort they’d rather have a false solution that was neat and tidy than no solution at all. Certainly there was never any encouragement to throw things back into chaos by suggesting that the things might not be quite what they appeared.

Without the slightest warning, something impossibly fast for its monstrous size overshadowed the world and the sky fell apart with a hellish roar. At first Zen thought that Spadola had fired at him. Then, swivelling round, he saw the second jet sharking silently through the air toward him. Absurdly, he started to wave, to shout for help! Vasco Spadola broke into hoots of derisory laughter that were lost in the din as the fighter screamed past overhead, not deigning to notice the antics of the petty creatures which crawled about on the bed of this sea of air it used as a playground.

After that, Zen lost all track of time. Reality was reduced to a patch of baked red soil, always different, always the same. His task was to find a way through the dense, prickly plants that grew there. Sometimes they were widely spaced. Then he had only the constant jarring pain from his ankle to contend with, the choking thirst and the hammering headache. But usually the plants formed patterns restricting his moves like hostile pieces in a board game. Then he had to raise his eyes and try to find a way through the maze. If he got it wrong or the plants ahead of him closed up entirely, then he had to force his way through. Branches poked him, thorns ripped his clothes and scratched his skin. Several times he almost got stuck, only to wrench himself free with a final effort. But stopping or turning back was not permitted, although by now he could hardly remember why.

At some point in this timeless torment he found himself confronted by a new obstacle, unforeseen by the rules of the game which had absorbed him hitherto. It was a wire mesh fence, about four metres high, supported on concrete stakes and stretching away in either direction as far as the eye could see. Some distance behind it stood a similar fence of barbed wire.

Zen’s first thought was that it was some sort of military installation. It wasn’t until he saw a sign reading Beware of the Lions that he realised he had blundered into the perimeter fence of the Villa Burolo. He started to follow the fence as it marched up the hillside. But where it cut effortlessly through the undergrowth, dividing the wilderness in two with surrealistic precision, Zen had to scramble, wriggle, dodge, and feint. Denser thickets in his path constantly forced him to seek alternate routes, and as he became more exhausted, he began to lose his footing on the steep slope. His hands were soon scuffed and scratched, his clothing tattered, his legs bruised and bleeding.

It was some time before it occurred to him that he might try to attract attention by setting off the villa’s alarm systems. If he could set the sirens off, the caretaker might turn on the closed-circuit television scanners, see the armed figure of Spadola and phone the police. The problem was that in order to minimise false alarms, the outer fence was not connected to the system, so Zen had to lob stones at the inner fence with its attached sensors. This consisted of single strands of razor wire, and was very hard to hit. Zen’s aim gradually improved, but before any of the stones connected with the target something that sounded like a swarm of bees whined past his head. An instant later he heard the gunshot.

When he turned round, Spadola had already broken open the shotgun and was reloading the spent barrel. He gestured angrily at Zen, waving him away from the fence. This incident served to remind Zen of the realities of his situation. The noise the shot made passing overhead suggested that it had been travelling fast enough to do significant damage to his hands, face, and neck. At the very least, such injuries would cause serious loss of blood, in turn inducing a shocked condition in which further resistance would become impossible. Spadola could do that any time he wanted to. The fact that he had deliberately aimed high proved that. He was in total command of the situation and would carry out the killing when it suited him and not before. Meanwhile, Zen could only struggle like an animal being used for scientific research, its agony the subject of dispassionate study, its feeble attempts to escape as predictable as they are vain.

Eventually the fence, obeying the forgotten whims of a dead man, changed direction to run north across the mountainside. Zen had now to choose between following it into unknown territory or continuing up the face of the mountain toward the lurid green forest massed at the head of the valley now closed by the dam. And he had to choose quickly because Spadola was suddenly forcing the pace. But as soon as he saw that his quarry was continuing to struggle up into ever higher and wilder regions, he slackened off again. What had concerned him, presumably, was that Zen might try to circle round the Burolo property to the main road. If he asked himself why his victim had selected the harder and more hopeless option, he probably put it down to his growing confusion and disorientation.

Zen toiled up the successive ridges of the mountainside toward the forest. Close to, it was not the upper surface of the forest that struck the eye but its lower depths, a dull brown stagnancy killed off by the tall victors of the struggle for survival. Their outspread branches formed a roof which closed off all light to the ground, condemning their own lower branches together with the losers of the race, whose spindly skeletons rose from a mulch of pine needles and rotting branches. This was what Zen had been hoping for. Vasco Spadola thought that he could play cat and mouse with his victim for hours yet, spinning out the game until the approach of night. What he hadn’t realised was that in that unnatural forest, beneath those trees gorged on water seeping from the flawed dam, it was
always
night.

Zen glanced back to find that Spadola had broken into a run. Teeth gritted against the stabbing pain in his ankle, Zen ran, too. He ran with the desperation of a man who knows that his life depends on it, and for the first crucial moments, despite his injury, he ran faster. After that, Spadola rapidly started to narrow the gap, but by then it was too late. Zen had reached the cover of the trees. Another shot rang out, and Zen felt stinging pains all over his arms, legs, and back. When he clapped a hand to his neck, as though slapping a mosquito, it came away stained with blood. Then he saw the lead pellets in his hand, little black lumps lodged just under the skin like burrowing ticks.

As Zen made his way deeper into the forest, he knew that there would be no further reprieves. The sadistic pleasure of killing his enemy by degrees had been replaced in Spadola’s mind by an urgent desire to finish him off before it was too late. Because unless he could do so before darkness fell, he had lost. There was no way he could patrol the perimeter of the forest and stop Zen from slipping away into the night.

After so many hours in the open, entering the forest was like stepping into a cathedral: hushed, mysterious, dim and intimate in details, vast and complex in design. Zen barged on, forcing aside the brittle tendrils that waved outward from the trunks like sea-weed under water. The darkness thinned to a dimness that limited visibility to about ten metres, except when a clearing caused by a rocky outcrop punched a hole in the dense fabric of the forest. In one of these, he suddenly caught sight of a great curtain of concrete towering above the trees. The thought of that hanging lake increased his impression of being underwater. Beyond the immediate circle of bare columnlike trunks, nothing was visible. Despite the moisture that forced its way out through the faults in the dam to keep the undersoil perpetually damp, nothing grew beneath the killing cover of the trees. The forest was a reservoir of silence and darkness. No breezes entered, nothing stirred.