Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery (9 page)

“You ate them last time.”

“What?”

Zen took a deep breath.

“PUT THEM TO ONE SIDE AND EAT THE REST!” he yelled, repeating word for word the formula she had once used with him.

“I’m not hungry,” his mother retorted sulkily.

“That won’t stop you eating half a box of chocolates while you watch TV.”

“What?”

“NOTHING.”

Zen pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. From the television set, Signora Bertolini continued her confused and vapid accusations. Although he naturally sympathised with her, Zen also felt a sense of revulsion. It was becoming too convenient to blame the authorities for everything that happened. Soon the relatives of motorists killed on the
autostrada
would appear on television claiming that their deaths were due not to the fact that they had been doing two hundred kilometres an hour on the hard shoulder in the middle of a contraflow system, but to the criminal negligence of the highway authorities in not providing for the needs of people who were exercising their constitutional right to drive like maniacs.

At exactly one minute to seven Zen walked to the inner hallway where the phone was and dialled the number Tania had given him. A woman answered.

“Yes?”

“Good evening. I have a message for Signora Biacis.”

“Who’s this?”

The woman’s voice was frugal and clipped, as though she had to pay for each word and resented the expense.

“The Ministry of the Interior.”

Muffled squawks penetrated to the mouthpiece which the woman had covered with her hand while she talked to someone else.

“Who’s this?” a man abruptly demanded.

“I’m calling from the Ministry,” Zen recited. “I have a message for Signora Biacis.”

“I’m her husband. What have you got to say?”

“You’ve no doubt heard about the recent terrorist outrage, Signor Biacis—”

“Bevilacqua, Mauro Bevilacqua,” the man cut in.

Zen noted the name on the scratch pad by the phone. Evidently Tania Biacis, like many Italian married women, had retained her maiden name.

“As a result, all Ministerial staff have been placed on an emergency alert. Your wife is liable for a half-shift this evening.”

The man snorted angrily. “This has never happened before!”

“On the contrary, it has happened all too often.”

“I mean she’s never been called in at this time before!”

“Then she’s been very lucky,” Zen declared with finality and hung up.

That was all he’d needed to do, Zen thought as he sat in the taxi, waiting for the driver to return. It was all he’d been asked to do, it was all he had any right to do. But instead of returning to the living room and his mother’s company, he’d lifted the phone again and called a taxi.

The address listed in the telephone directory after “Bevilacqua Mauro” did not exist on Zen’s map of Rome. The taxi driver hadn’t known where it was either, but after consultations with the dispatcher it had finally been located in one of the new suburbs on the eastern fringes of the city, beyond the
Grande Raccordo Anulare.

Whether it was that the dispatcher’s instructions had been unclear or that the driver had forgotten them, they had only found the street after a lengthy excursion through unsurfaced streets that briefly became country roads, pocked with potholes and ridged into steps where concrete-covered drainage pipes ran across the eroded surface. Until recently this had all been unfenced grazing land, the open
campagna
where sheep roamed amid striding aqueducts and squat round towers which now gave their name to the suburbs which had sprung into being as the capital, turned cancerous by money and power, began its pathological postwar growth. Laid out piecemeal as the area grew, the streets rambled aimlessly about, often ending abruptly in cul-de-sacs that forced the driver to make long and disorienting detours. Here was a zone of abusive development from the early sixties, a shanty town of troglodytic hutches run up by immigrants from the south, each surrounded by a patch of enclosed ground where chickens and donkeys roamed amid old lavatories and piles of abandoned pallets. Next came an older section of villas for the well-to-do, thick with pines and guard dogs, giving way abruptly to a huge cleared expanse of asphalt illuminated by gigantic searchlights trained down from steel masts, where a band of gypsies had set up home in caravans linked by canopies of plastic sheeting. After that there was a field with sheep grazing, and then the tower blocks began, fourteen storys high, spaced evenly across the landscape like the pieces in a board game for giants amid tracts of land that had been brutally assaulted and left to die. And finally they had found the development of walk-up apartments where Mauro Bevilacqua and Tania Biacis made their home.

Zen sank back in the seat, wondering why on earth he had come. As soon as the driver returned from his snack, he would go home. Tania must have left long ago, while the taxi was lost in this bewildering urban hinterland. Not that he had really intended to follow her, anyway. Putting together her comment about her husband that morning and then her request that Zen phone up with a fictitious reason for her to leave the house, it seemed pretty clear what she was up to. The last thing he wanted was proof of that. He had accepted the fact that Tania was happily and irrevocably married. He didn’t now want to have to accept that, on the contrary, she was having an illicit affair, but not with him.

A silhouetted figure appeared at one of the windows of the nearby block. Zen imagined the scene viewed from that window: the deserted street, the parked car. It made him think of the night before, and suddenly he understood what he had found disturbing about the red car. Like the taxi, it had been about fifty metres from his house and on the opposite side of the street, the classic surveillance position. But he had not time to follow up the implications of this thought because at that moment a woman emerged from one of the stairwells of the apartment block.

She started to walk toward the taxi, then suddenly stopped, turned, and hurried back the way she had come. At the same moment, as if on cue, the taxi driver reappeared from the bar and a swarthy man in his shirtsleeves ran out into the car park underneath the apartment block, looking round wildly. The woman veered sharply to her left, making for the bar, but the man easily cut her off. They started to struggle, the man gripping her by the arms and trying to pull her back toward the door of the apartment.

Zen got out of the taxi and walked over to them, unfolding his identity card.

“Police!”

Locked in their clumsy tussle, the couple took no notice. Zen shook the man roughly by the shoulder.

“Let her go!”

The man swung round and aimed a wild punch at Zen, who dodged the blow with ease, seized the man by the collar and pulled him off balance, then shoved him backward, sending him reeling headlong to the ground.

“Right, what would you like to be arrested for?” he asked. “Assaulting a police officer—”

“You assaulted
me!”
the man interrupted indignantly as he got to his feet.

“—or interfering with this lady,” Zen concluded.

The man laughed coarsely. He was short and slightly built, with a compensatory air of bluster and braggadocio which seemed to emanate from his neatly clipped moustache.

“Lady? What do you mean, lady? She’s my wife! Understand? This is a family affair!”

Zen turned to Tania Biacis, who was looking at him in utter amazement.

“What happened, signor?”

“She was running away from her home and her duties!” her husband exclaimed. His arms were outstretched to an invisible audience.

“I … that taxi … I thought it was free,” Tania said. She was evidently completely thrown by Zen’s presence. “I was going to take it. Then I saw there was someone in it, so I was going to go to the bar to phone for one.”

Mauro Bevilacqua glared at Zen.

“What the hell are you doing lurking about here, anyway? It’s as bad as Russia, policemen on every street corner!”

“There happens to be a terrorist alert on,” Zen told him coldly.

Tania turned triumphantly on her husband.

“You see! I told you!”

Having recovered her presence of mind, she appealed to Zen.

“I work at the Ministry of the Interior. I was called in for emergency duties this evening, but my husband wouldn’t believe me. He wouldn’t let me use the car. He said it was all a lie, a plot to get out of the house!”

Zen shook his head in disgust.

“So it’s come to this! Here’s your wife, signor, a key member of a dedicated team who are giving their all, night and day, to defend this country of ours from a gang of ruthless anarchists, and all you can do is to hurl puerile and scandalous accusations at her! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“It’s none of your business!” Bevilacqua snapped.

“On the contrary,” Zen warned him. “If I chose to make it my business, you’d be facing a prison sentence for assault.”

He paused to let that sink in.

“Luckily for you, however, I have more important things to do. Just as your wife does. But to set your fears at rest, I’ll accompany her personally to the Ministry. Will that satisfy you? Or perhaps you’d like me to summon an armed escort to make sure that she reaches her place of work safely?”

Mauro Bevilacqua flapped his arms up and down like a flightless bird trying vainly to take off.

“What I’d like! What I’d like! What I’d like is for her to start behaving like a wife should instead of gadding about on her own at this time of night!”

He swung round to face her.

“You should never have gone to work in the first place! I never wanted you to go.”

“If you brought home a decent income from that stinking bank, I wouldn’t have to!”

Mauro Bevilacqua looked at her with hatred in his eyes. “We’ll settle this when you get home!” he spat out, turning on his heel.

Zen ushered Tania into the back of the taxi. He got into the front seat beside the driver.

“What
were
you doing there?” Tania asked after they had driven in silence for some time.

He did not reply. Now that their little farce had been played to its conclusion, all his confidence had left him. He felt constrained and ill at ease.

“You weren’t really on a stakeout, were you?” she prompted.

Zen usually had no difficulty in thinking up plausible stories to conceal his real motives, but on this occasion he found himself at a loss. He couldn’t tell Tania the truth and he wouldn’t lie to her.

“Not an official one.”

He glanced round at her. As they passed each streetlamp, its light moved across her in a steady stroking movement, revealing the contours of her face and body.

“You sounded very convincing,” she said.

He shrugged. “If you’re going to tell someone a pack of lies, there’s no point in doing it half-heartedly.”

With the help of Tania’s directions, they quickly regained Via Casilina, and soon the city had closed in around them again. Zen felt as though he had returned to the earth from outer space.

“How can you stand living in that place?” he demanded.

As soon as he had spoken, he realised how rude the question sounded. But Tania seemed unoffended.

“That’s what I ask myself every morning when I leave and every evening when I get back. The answer is simple. Money.”

You could always economise on your social life, thought Zen sourly, cut out the fancy dinners and the season ticket to the opera and the weekends skiing and skindiving. He was rapidly going off Tania Biacis, he found. But he didn’t say anything. Mauro Bevilacqua had been quite right. It was none of his business.

“So where to?” the driver asked as they neared Portomaggiore.

Zen said nothing. He wanted Tania to decide, and he wanted her to have all the time she needed to do so. Although Zen had aided and abetted her deception of her husband, he actually felt every bit as resentful of her behaviour as Mauro Bevilacqua himself, though of course Zen couldn’t let it show. He was also aware that Tania would have to invent a different cover story for his consumption, since the one she had used with her husband clearly wouldn’t do. He wanted it to be a good one, something convincing, something that would spare his feelings. He’d done the dirty work she’d requested. Now let her cover her tracks with him, too.

“Eh, oh, signor!” the driver exclaimed. “A bit of information, that’s all I need. This car isn’t a mule, you know. It won’t go by itself. You have to turn the wheel. So, which way?”

Tania gave an embarrassed laugh.

“To tell you the truth, I just wanted to go to the cinema.”

Well, it was better than saying outright that she was going to meet her lover, Zen supposed. But not much better. Not when she had been regaling him for months with her views of the latest films as they came out, flaunting the fact that she and her husband went to the cinema the way other people turned on the television.

To lie so crudely, so transparently, was tantamount to an insult. No wonder she sounded embarrassed. She couldn’t have expected to be believed, not for a moment. She must have done it deliberately, as a way of getting the truth across to her faithful, stupid, besotted admirer. Well, it had worked! He’d understood, finally!

“Did you have any particular film in mind?” he enquired sarcastically.

“Anything at all.”

She sounded dismissive, no doubt impatient with him, thinking that he’d missed the point. He’d soon put her right about that.

“Via Nazionale,” he told the driver. Turning to Tania, he added, “I’m sure you’ll be able to find what you want there. Whatever it happens to be.”

As their eyes met, he had the uneasy feeling that he’d somehow misunderstood. But how could he? What other explanation was there?

“Please stop,” Tania said to the driver.

“We’re not there yet.”

“It doesn’t matter! Just stop.”

The taxi cut across two lanes of traffic, unleashing a chorus of horns from behind. Tania handed the driver a ten thousand lire note.

“Deduct that from whatever he owes you.”

She got out, slammed the door and walked away.