Saturday, 05.05-12.50



A chill, tangy wind, laden with salt and darkness, whined
and blustered about the ship, testing for weaknesses. By
contrast, the sea was calm. Its shiny black surface merged
imperceptibly into the darkness all around, ridged into
folds, tucks and creases, heaving and tilting in the moon-
light. The short choppy waves slapping the metal plates
below seemed to have no perceptible effect on the ship
itself, which lay as still as if it were already roped to the
quay.
A man stood grasping the metal rail pudgy with
innumerable coats of paint, staring out into the night as
keenly as an officer of the watch. The unbuttoned overcoat
flapping about him like a cloak gave him an illusory air of
corpulence, but when the wind failed for a moment he was
revealed as quite slender for his height. Beneath the
overcoat he was wearing a rumpled suit. A tie of some
nondescript hue was plastered to his shirt by the wind in a
lazy curve, like a question mark. His face was lean and
smooth, with an aquiline nose, and slate-blue eyes, their
gaze as disconcertingly direct as a child's. His hair, its basic
undistinguished brown now flecked with silvery-grey
highlights at the temples, was naturally curly, and the wind
~ossed it back and forth like frantic wavelets in a storm scene
on a Greek vase.
A few hundred metres astern of the ship, the full moon
was reflected in the sea's unstable surface. The shuddering
patch of brightness had an eerie illusion of depth, as if
created by a gigantic searchlight aimed upwards from the
ocean bed. It was deep here, off the eastern coast of the
island, where the mountains plunged down to meet the
sea and then kept going. Zen stood breathing in the wild
air and scanning the horizon for some hint of their land-
fall. But there was nothing to betray the presence of the
coast, unless it was the fact that the darkness ahead
seemed even more unyielding, solid and impenetrable.
The steward had knocked on the cabin door to wake him
twenty minutes earlier, claiming that their arrival was
imminent. Emerging on deck, Zen had expected lights,
bustling activity, a first view of his destination. But there
was nothing. The ship might have been becalmed in mid-
ocean.
He didn't care. He felt weightless, anonymous, stripped
of al] superfluous baggage. Rome was already inconceiv-
ably distant. Sardinia lay somewhere ahead, unknown, a
blank. As for the reasons why he was there, standing on
the deck of a Tirrenia Line ferry at five o'clock in the
morning, they seemed utterly unreal and irrelevant.
When he looked again, it was over. The wall of darkness
ahead had divided in two: a high mountain range below,
dappled with a suggestion of contours, and the sky above,
hollow with the coming dawn. Harbour lights emerged
from behind the spit of land which had concealed them
earlier, now differentiated from the open sea and the small
bay beyond. Reading them like constellations, Zen map-
ped out quays and jetties, cranes and roads in the half-
light. Things were beginning to put on shape and form, to
wake up, get dressed and make themselves presentable.
The moment had passed. Soon it would be just another
day.
Down beiow in the bar, the process was already well
advanced. A predominantly male crowd, more or less
dishevelled and bad-tempered, clustered around a sleepy
cashier to buy a printed receipt which they then took to the
gar and traded in for a plastic thimble filled with strong
black coffee. On the bench seats all around young people
were awakening from a rough night, rubbing their eyes,
scratching their backs, exchanging little jokes and
caresses. Zen had just succeeded in ordering his coffee
When a robotic voice from the tannoy directed all drivers to
ake their way to the car deck to disembark. He downed
the coffee hurriedly, scalding his mouth and throat, before
heading down into the bowels of the ship.
The vehicles bound for this small port of call on the way
to Cagliari, the ship's destination, were almost exclusively
commercial and military. Neither category took the slight-
est notice of the signs asking drivers not to switch on their
engines until the bow doors had been opened. Zen made
' his way through clouds of diesel fumes to his car, sand-
' wiched between a large lorry and a coach filled with mili-
tary conscripts looking considerably less lively than they
had the night before, when they had made the harbour at
Civitavecchia ring with the forced gaiety of desperate men.
He unlocked the door and climbed in. Fausto Arcuto had
done him well, there was no question about that. Return-
ing to the Rally Bar the previous afternoon, Zen had collec-
ted an envelope containing a set of keys and a piece of
paper reading 'Outside Via Florio, 6g'. He turned the
paper over and wrote, 'Many thanks for prompt delivery.
The Parrucci affair has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with
you. Regards.' He handed this to the barman and walked
round the corner to Via Florio.
There was no need to check the house number. The car,
a white Mercedes saloon with cream leather upholstery,
stood out a mile among the battered utility compacts of the
Testaccio residents. It had been fitted with Zurich number
plates, fairly recently to judge by the bright scratches on
the rusty nuts. No registration or insurance documents
were displayed on the windscreen, but this would have
been a bit much to expect at such short notice. Zen took
out his wallet and inspected the Swiss identity card in the
name of Reto Gurtner which he had retained following an
undercover job six years earlier. It was a fake, but
extremely high quality, a product of the secret services'
operation at Prato where, it was rumoured, a large number
of the top forgers in the country offered their skills to
SISMI in lieu of a prison sentence. The primitive lighting
and Zen's constrained pose made the photograph look like
a police mug-shot, not surprisingly, since it had been
taken on the same equipment. Herr Gurtner of Zurich
looked capable of just about anything, thought Zen, even
framing an innocent man to order.
As he sat there, muffied by the Mercedes' luxurious
coachwork from the farting lorries and buses all around,
Zen reflected that whatever happened in Sardinia, he had
at least been able to clear up his outstanding problems in
Rome before leaving. The Volante patrol summoned by
his 113 call from the flat had arrested a man attempting to
escape in the red Alfa Romeo. He tumed out to be one
Giuliano Acciari, a local hoodlum with a lengthy criminal
record for housebreaking and minor thuggery. Zen recog-
nized him as the man who had picked his pocket in the
bus queue, although he did not mention this to the
police. Acciari was unarmed, and a search failed to turn
up the shotgun which he was assumed to have dumped
upon hearing the sirens. But the police were holding
Acciari for the theft of the Alfa Romeo, and had assured
Zen that they would spare no effort to extract any infor-
mation he might have as to the whereabouts of Vasco
Spadola.
A series of shudders and a change in the pitch of the
turbines announced that the ship had docked, but another
ten minutes passed before a crack of daylight finally pene-
trated the murky reaches of the car deck. The coaches and
lorries to either side of Zen rumbled into motion, and
then, too soon, it was his turn.
Zen had learnt to drive back in the late fifties, but he had
never really developed a taste for it. As the roads filled up,
speeds increased and drivers' tempers shortened, he had
seen no reason to change his views, although he was
careful to keep them to himself, well aware that they
would be considered dissident if not heretical. But in the
present case there had been no alternative: he couldn't
drag anyone else along to act as his chauffeur, and it
would not be credible for Herr Reto Gurtner, the wealthy
burgher of Zurich, to travel through the wilds of Sardinia
by public transport.
Zen's style behind the wheel was similar to that of an
elderly peasant farmer phut-phutting along at zo kph in a
clapped-out Fiat truck with bald tyres and no acceleration,
blithely oblivious to the hooting, light-flashing hysteria
building up in his wake. The drive from Rome to the port
at Civitavecchia had been a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal,
but getting off the ferry presented even greater problems
of clutch control and touch-steering than had the innumer-
able traffic lights of the Via Aurelia, at each of which the
Mercedes had seemed to take fright like a horse at a fence.
Having stalled three times and then nearly rammed the
side of the ship by over-revving, Zen finally managed to
negotiate the metal ramp leading to Sardinian soil, or
rather the stone jetty to which the ferry was moored.
Rather to his surprise, there were no formalities, no
passports, no customs. But bureaucratically, of course, he
was still in Italy.
It was Zen's first visit to the island. In Italy all police
officials have to do a stint in one of the three 'problem
areas' of the country, but Zen had chosen the Alto Adige
rather than Sicily or Sardinia, because from there he could
easily get back to Venice to see his mother.
The port amounted to no more than a couple of wharves
where the ferries to and from the mainland touched once a
week and Russian freighters periodically unloaded cargoes
of timber pulp for the local papermill. At the end of the
quay a narrow, badly-surfaced road curved away between
outcrops of jagged pink rock. Zen drove through a
straggling collection of makeshift houses that never quite
became a village and along the spit of land projecting out
to the harbour from the main coastline. The sun was still
hidden behind the mountains, but the sky overhead was
clear, a delicate, pale wintry blue. Seagulls swept back and
forth foraging for food, their cries pealing out in the crisp
air.
As he drove through the small town where the road
inland crossed the main coastal highway, Zen's instinct
was to stop the car, drop into a cafe and start picking up
the clues, sniffing the air, getting his bearings. But he
couldn't, for in Sardinia he was not Aurelio Zen but Reto
Gurtner, and although he had as yet only a vague idea of
Gurtner's character, he was sure that pausing to soak up
the atmosphere formed no part of it. Or rather, he was
sure that that was what the locals would assume, and it
was their view of things that mattered. A rich Swiss stop-
ping his Mercedes outside some rural dive for an early-
morning cappuccino would instantly become a suspect
Swiss, and that of all things was the one Zen could least
afford. He must not let the clear sky, pure air and early-
morning sense of elation go to his head, he knew. In those
mountains blocking off the sun, turning their back on the
sea, lived men who had survived thousands of years of
foreign domination by using their wits and their intimate
knowledge of the land. Generations of policemen, occasion-
ally supplemented by the army, had been drafted there in
a succession of attempts to break the complex, archaic,
unwritten rules of the Codice Barbaricine and impose the
laws passed in Rome. They had failed. Even Mussolini's
strong-arm tactics, successful against the largely urban
Mafia, had been ineffectual with these shepherds, who
could simply vanish into the mountains. The mass arrests
of their relatives in raids on whole villages merely served
to strengthen the hands of the outlaws by making them
into local folk heroes. Any collaboration with the authori-
ties was considered treachery of the most vile kind and
punished accordingly. To Sardinians, mainland Italians
were either policemen, soldiers, teachers, tax gatherers,
pureaucrats or, more recently, tourists. They stayed for a
while, took what they wanted, and then left, as ignorant
as when they had arrived of the local inhabitants, the
harsh brand of Latin they spoke and the complex and
often violent code for resolving conflicts among shepherds
whose flocks roamed freely across the open mountains.
This was why Zen had decided to go about this unofficial
undercover operation in the guise of a foreigner. All out-
siders were suspect in Sardinia, but a foreigner was much
likely to attract suspicion than a lone Italian, who
would automatically be assumed to be a government spy
of some type. Besides, Herr Reto Gurtner had a good
reason for visiting this out-of-the-way corner of the island
at this unseasonable time of the year. He was looking for a
property.
The Mercedes hummed purposefully along the road that
wound and twisted its way up from the coast through a
parched, scorched landscape. To either side, jagged crags
of limestone rose like molars out of acres of sterile red soil.
Giant cactuses with enormous prickly ears grew there, and
small groves of eucalyptus and olive and the odd patch of
wild-looking stunted vines. There was a gratifying absence
of traffic on the road, and Zen was just getting into his
stride when he was brought to a halt at a level-crossing
consisting of a chain with a metal plate dangling from it.
He had been vaguely aware of a set of narrow-gauge
railway tracks running alongside the road, but they looked
so poorly maintained that he had assumed the line was
disused.
On the other side of the chain, an elderly woman was
chatting to a schoolboy wearing a satchel with the inscrip-
hon 'Iron Maiden' in fluorescent orange and green. They
both turned to stare at the Mercedes. Zen gave them a
bland, blank look he imagined to be typically Swiss. They
continued to stare. Zen took the opportunity of consulting
the map. That too was surely a typically Swiss thing to do.
A train consisting of an ancient diesel locomotive and
two decrepit carriages staggered to a stop at the crossing.
The Iron Maiden fan climbed in to join a mob of other
schoolchildren, the locomotive belched a cloud of fumes
and a moment later the road was clear again. Zen put the
car in gear, stalled, let off the handbrake, started to roll
backwards, engaged the clutch, restarted the motor, stal-
led, engaged the handbrake, released the clutch, restarted
the motor, released the handbrake, engaged the clutch
and drove away. None of this, he felt, was typically Swiss.
The look the crossing-keeper gave him suggested that she
felt the same.
Fortified by the information from the map and the
occasional faded and rusted road sign, Zen continued
inland for a dozen kilometres before turning left on to a
steep road twisting up the mountainside in a series of
switchback loops. At each corner he caught a glimpse of
the village above. The nearer he got, the less attractive it
looked. From a distance, it resembled some natural
disaster, a landslip perhaps. Close up, it looked like a
gigantic rubbish tip. There was nothing distinctively Sar-
dinian about it. It could have been any one of thousands of
communities in the south kept alive by injections of cash
from migrant workers, the houses piled together higgledy-
piggledy, many of them unfinished, awaiting the next
cheque from abroad. The dominant colours were white
and ochre, the basic shape the rectangle. Strewn across the
steep slope, the place had a freakish, temporary air, as
though by the next day it might all have been dismantled
and moved elsewhere. And yet it might well have been
there when Rome itself was but a village.
The final curves of the road had already been colonized
by the zone of new buildings. Some were mere skeletons
of reinforced concrete, others had a shell of outer walling
but remained uninhabited. A few were being built storey
by storey, the lower floor already in use while the first
floor formed a temporary flat roof from which the rusted
reinforcement wires for the next stage protruded like the
stalks of some super-hardy local plant that had learned to
flourish in cement. The road gradually narrowed and
became the main street of the village proper. Zen painfully
squeezed the Mercedes past parked vans and lorries,
cravenly giving way to any oncoming traffic, until he
reached a small piazza that was really no more than a
broadening of the main street. The line of buildings was
broken here by a terrace planted with stocky trees over-
Iooking a stunning panorama that stretched all the way
down to the distant coastline and the sea beyond. Some-
where down there, Zen knew, indistinguishable to the
naked eye, lay the Villa Burolo.
He parked on the other side of the piazza, in front of a
squat, fairly new building with a sign reading 'Bar -- Res-
taurant -- Hotel'. It was still early and the few people about
were all intent on business of one kind or another, but Zen
was conscious that their eyes were on him as he got out of
the car and removed his suitcase from the boot. 'Stranger
in town,' they were thinking. 'Foreign car. Tourist? At this
time of year?' Zen was acutely aware oE their puzzlement,
their suspicion. He wanted to cultivate it briefly, to let the
questions form and the implications be raised before he
supplied an answer which, he hoped, would come as a
satisfying relief.
He pushed through the plate-glass doors into a bar
which might have looked glamorously stylish when it had
been built, some time in the mid sixties, but which had
aged gracelessly. The stippled plaster was laden with dust,
the tinted metal faqades were dented and scratched, the
pine trim had been bleached by sunlight and stained by
liquids and was warping off the wall in places. All these
details were mercilessly reflected from every angle by a
series of mirrors des~o ed to increase the apparent size of
the room, but which in fact reduced it to a nightmarish
maze of illusory perspectives and visual cul-de-sacs.
'With or without?' the proprietor demanded when Zen
asked if he had a room available.
Zen had given some thought to the question of how
Reto Gurtner should speak, eventually deciding against
funny accents or deliberate mistakes. It would be typically
Swiss, he decided, to speak pedantically correct Italian,
but slowly and heavily, as though all the words were equal
citizens and it was invidious and undemocratic to
emphasize some at the expense of others.
'I beg your pardon?'
'A shower.'
'Yes, please. With a shower.'
The proprietor plucked a key from a row of hooks and
slapped it down on the counter. He was plump, with a
bushy black beard and receding hair. His manner was
deliberately ungracious, as though the shameful calling of
taking in guests for money had been forced on him by
stern necessity, and he loathed it as a form of prostitution.
He took Zen's faked papers without a second glance and
started copying the relevant details on to a police registra-
tion form.
'Would it be possible to have a cappuccino?' Zen inquired
politely.
'At the bar.'
Zen duly took the four paces needed to reach this instal-
lation. The proprietor completed the form, held it up to the
light as though to admire the watermark, folded it in two
with exaggerated precision, and placed it with the papers
in a small safe let into the wall. He then walked over to the
bar, where he set about washing up some glasses.
An elderly man came into the bar. He was wearing a
brown corduroy suit with leather patches on the seat and
behind the knees, and a flat cap. His face was as hard and
smooth and irregular as piece of granite exposed to centur-
ies of harsh weather.
'Oh, Tommaso!' the proprietor called, setting a glass of
wine on the counter. The man knocked the wine back in
one gulp and started rolling a cigarette. Meanwhile he and
the proprietor conversed animatedly in a language that
might have been Arabic as far as Zen was concerned.
'May I have my cappuccino, please?' he asked plaintively.
The proprietor glanced at him as though he had never
seen him before, and was both puzzled and annoyed to
find him there.
'Cappuccino?' he demanded in a tone which suggested
that this drink was some exotic foreign speciality.
Zen's instinct was to match rudeness with rudeness, but
Reto Gurtner, he felt sure, would remain palely polite
under any provocation.
'If you please. Perhaps you would also be good enough
to direct me to the offices of Dottor Confalone,' he added.
The elderly man looked up from licking the gummed
edge of his cigarette paper. He spat out a shred of tobacco
which had found its way on to his tongue.
'Opposite the post office,' he said.
'Is it far?'
There was a brief roar as the proprietor frothed the milk
with steam. 'Five minutes,' he said quickly, as though to
forestall the old man from making any further unwise
disclosures.
Zen stined sugar into his coffee. He himself never took
sugar, but he felt that Reto Gurtner would have a sweet
tooth. Similarly, the cigarettes he produced were not his
usual Nazionali but cosmopolitan Marlboros.
'I have an appointment, you see,' he explained labori-
ously, to no one in particular. 'In half an hour. I don't
know how it is here in Italy, but in Switzerland it is very
important to be punctual. Especially when it's business.'
Neither the proprietor nor the old man showed the
slightest interest in this observation, but from the studious
way they avoided glancing at each other Zen knew that
the point had been taken. The disturbing mystery of Herr
Gurtner's descent on the village had been reduced to a
specific, localized puzzle.
It was just after nine o'dock when Zen, spruce and
clean-shaven, emerged from the hotel. The main street of
the village was a deep canyon of shadow, but the alleys
and steps running off to either side were slashed with
sunshine, revealing panels of brilliant white wall inset
with dark rectangular openings. Behind and above them
rose a rugged chaos of rock and tough green shrubs, the
ancient mountain backbone of the island, last vestige of
the submerged Tyrrhenian continent.
Zen walked purposefully along, smiling in a pleasant,
meaningless way at everyone he passed, like a benevolent
but rather simple-minded giant. The Sards were the short-
est of all Mediterranean races, while Zen was above aver-
age height for an Italian, thanks perhaps in part to his
father's quirky theories about food. A self-educated
socialist, he had been an enthusiast for many useless
things, of which Mussolini's vapid patriotism had, briefly,
been the last. Another had been a primitive vegetarianism,
in particular the notion that beans and milk were the
foundation of a healthy diet. From the moment Aurelio
was weaned, he had eaten a large dish of these two
ingredients mashed together every lunchtime. His father's
belief in the virtues of this wonder-food had been based on
a hotchpotch of half-baked ideas culled from his wide and
eclectic reading, but by the purest chance he had hap-
pened to hit on two cheap and easily obtainable sources of
complementary protein, with the result that Zen had
grown up unaffected by the shortages of meat and fish
which stunted the development of other children in war-
time Venice.
The reactions to Herr Gurtner's bland Swiss smile varied
interestingly. The young men hanging about in the piazza,
as though work were not so much unavailable as beneath
their dignity, surveyed the tall stranger like an exotic
animal on display in a travelling circus: odd and slightly
absurd, but also potentially dangerous. To their elders,
clustered on the stone benches between the trees, he was
just another piece in the hopeless puzzle which life had
come, over which they shook their heads loosely and
muttered incoherent comments.
The men, old and young, massed in groups, using the
public spaces as an extension of their living rooms, but the
women Zen saw were always alone and on the move.
They had right of passage only, and scurried along as
Though liable to be challenged at any moment, clutching
their wicker shopping baskets like official permits. The
married ones ignored Zen totally, the nubile shot him
glances as keen and challenging as a thrown knife. Only
the old women, having nothing more to fear or hope from
the enemy, gave him cool but not unfriendly looks of
appraisal. Dressed all in black, they looked like pyramids
of different-sized tyres, their bodies narrowing from mas-
sive hips through bulbous waists to tiny scarf-wrapped
heads.
The exception which proved this rule of female purpose
and activity was a half-witted woman who approached
Zen just as he reached his destination, asking for money.
Even by Sardinian standards, she was exceptionally small,
almost dwarf-like. She was wearing a dark brown pullover
and a long full skirt of some heavy navy-blue material. Her
head and feet were bare and dirty, and she limped so
aggressively that Zen assumed that she was faking or at
least exaggerating her disability for professional reasons.
He offered her goo lire before realizing that Herr Reto
Gurtner, coming from a nation which prided itself on
providing for all its citizens, would disapprove of begging
on principle. Fortunately the woman was clearly too crazy
to pick up on any such subtleties. Zen forced the money
into her hand while she stared fixedly at him like someone
who has mistaken a stranger for an old acquaintance. He
huned away into the doorway flanked by a large plastic
sign reading 'Dott. Angelo Confalone -- Solicitor -- Notary
Public -- Estate Agent -- Chartered Accountant -- Insurance
Broker -- Tax and Investment Specialist'. Also teeth pulled
and horoscopes cast, thought Zen as he climbed the steps
to the second floor.
Angelo Confalone was a plush young man who received
Herr Gurtner with an expansive warmth, in marked con-
trast to the cold stares and hostile glances which had been
his lot thus far. It was a pleasure, he intimated, to have
dealings with someone so distinguished and sophisti-
cated, so different from the usual run of his clients. He
wasn't Sardinian himself, it soon emerged, from Genoa in
fact, but his sister had married someone from the area who
had pointed out that there was an opening in the village, it
was a long story and one he would not bore Herr Gurtner
with, but the long and short of it was that one had to start
somewhere.
Zen nodded his agreement.
'We have a saying in my country. No matter how high
the mountain, you have to start climbing at the bottom.'
The lawyer laughed with vivacious insincerity and com-
plimented Herr Gurtner on his Italian.
'And now to business, if you please,' Zen told him. 'You
have, I believe, something for me to look at.'
'Indeed.'
Indeed! When Reto Gurtner had phoned him the day
before with regard to finding a suitable holiday property
for a client in Switzerland, Angelo Confalone could hardly
believe his luck. Ever since Oscar Burolo's son had instruc-
ted him to put his father's ill-fated Sardinian retreat on the
market, Confalone had been asking himself who on earth
in his right mind would ever want to buy the Villa Burolo
after the lurid publicity given to the horrors that had
occurred there. Mindful of this, Enzo Burolo had offered to
double the usual commission in order to get the place off
their hands quickly, but Confalone still couldn't see any
way that he would be able to take advantage of this desir-
able sweetener. Unless some rich foreigner happens
along, he had concluded, then I'm just wasting my time.
And lo and behold, just a few weeks later, Reto Gurtner
pad telephoned. He had inspected several properties in
the north of the island, he said, but his client had speci-
fically asked him to look on the east coast, where he had
vacationed several years earlier and of whose spectacular
and rugged beauty he retained fond memories. If Dottor
Confalone by any chance knew of any suitable properties
on the market...
A man wearing even one of the many hats mentioned
on Angelo Confalone's business plate should perhaps
have been shrewd enough to frown momentarily at this
happy coincidence, but the young lawyer was too busy
calculating his percentage from the sale of the property,
which was now of course in a very different price bracket
from the subsistence-level farm whose original purchase
by Oscar Burolo he had also negotiated.
Confalone regarded his visitor complacently.
'As you are no doubt aware, Herr Gurtner, properties of
a standard high enough to satisfy your client's require-
ments are few and far between in this area. As for one
coming on the market, you would normally have to wait
years. It so happens, however, that I am in a position to
offer you a villa which has only just become available, and
which I can truly and honestly describe, without risk of
hyperbole, as the finest example of its type to be found
anywhere in the island, the Costa Smeralda included.'
He went on in this vein for some time, expatiating on
the imaginative way in which the original farmhouse had
been modernized and extended without sacrificing the
unique authenticity of its humble origins.
'The original owner was a man of vision and daring who
brought his unlimited resources and great expertise in the
construction business to bear on the...'
'He was realizing a dream?' Zen suggested.
Confalone nodded vigorously.
'Exactly. Precisely. I couldn't have put it better myself.
He was realizing a dream.'
'And why is he now selling it, his dream?'
The lawyer's vivacity vanished.
'For family reasons,' he murmured. 'There was... a
death. In the family.'
He awaited Herr Gurtner's response with some trepi-
dation. For the kind of money the Burolos were offering,
Confalone was quite prepared to try and conceal the truth.
But money wasn't everything. He had his career to con-
sider, and that meant that he couldn't afford to lie.
But Reto Gurtner appeared satisfied.
'I should like to see this most interesting property at
once,' he declared, rising to his feet.
Confalone's relief was apparent in his voice.
'Certainly, certainly! I shall be privileged to accompany
you personally and...'
'Thank you, that will not be necessary. There is a care-
taker at the house? If you will be good enough to ring and
let them know that I am coming, I prefer to look around on
my own. We Swiss, you know, are very methodical. I do
not wish to try your patience!'
After some polite insistence, Angelo Confalone gave
way gracefully. Double commission and no time wasted
doing the honours! He could hardly believe his luck.
Zen emerged from the lawyer's offices to a chorus of
horns, the street having been blocked by a lorry delivering
cartons of dairy produce to a nearby grocery. He slipped
through the narrow space between the lorry and the wall
and made his way along the cracked concrete slabs with
which the street was paved, well pleased with the way
things were going. Back in Rome, the idea of forestalling
his official mission with a bit of private enterprise had
appeared at best a forlorn attempt to leave no stone un-
turned, at worst a foolhardy scheme which might well end
in disaster and humiliation. But from his present perspect-
ive, Rome itself seemed an irrelevance, a city as distant
and as foreign as Marseilles or Madrid. It was here, and
only here, that Zen could hope to find the solution to his
problems.
Not that he expected to 'crack' the Burolo case, of
course. There was nothing to crack, anyway. The evi-
Jence against Renato Favelloni was overwhelming. The
only question was whether he had done the job personally
or hired it out to a professional. The key to the whole affair
gad been the video tapes and computer diskettes stored in
the underground vault at Oscar Burolo's villa. Here Burolo
had kept in electronic form all the information recording in
meticulous detail the history of his construction com-
pany's irresistible rise. After the murders, this material
had been impounded by the authorities, but when the
investigating magistrate's staff came to examine them,
they found that the computer data had been irretrievably
corrupted, probably by exposure to a powerful magnetic
field.
Insistent rumours began to circulate to the effect that the
discs had been in perfect condition when they were seized
by the Carabinieri, and these were strengthened about a
month later when a leading news magazine published
what purported to be a transcription of part of Burolo's
records. The material concerned a contract agreed in 1979
for the construction of a new prison near Latina, a creation
of the Fascist era on the Lazio coast, popularly known as
'Latrina'. Burolo Construction had undercut the estimated
minimum tender for the project by almost 6o per cent.
Their bid was duly accepted, despite the fact that the plan
which accompanied it was vague in some places and full of
inaccuracies in others.
No sooner had work begun than the site proved to be
marshy and totally unsuitable for the type of construction
envisaged. Burolo Construction promptly applied to the
Ministry of Public Works for the first of a series of revised
budgets which eventually pushed the cost of the prison
from the 4,ooo million lire specified in the original contract
to over 36,ooo million. This much was public knowledge.
What the news magazine's article showed was how it had
been done.
Although the article did not name the politician referred
to in Burolo's electronic notes as 'l'onorevole', it left little
doubt in the reader's mind that he was a leading figure in
one of the smaller parties making up the governing coali-
tion, who had been Minister of Public Works at the time
the prison contract was agreed. According to his notes,
Oscar Burolo had paid Renato Favelloni ggo million lire to
ensure that Burolo Construction would get the contract. A
comment which some claimed to find typical of Oscar's
sardonic style noted that this handout exceeded the nor-
mal rate, which apparently varied between 6 and 8 per
cent of the contract fee. The records also listed the dates
and places on which Oscar had contacted Favelloni, and
one on which he had met l'onorevole himself.
No sooner has this article appeared than the journal-
ists responsible were summoned to the law courts in
Nuoro and directed to disclose where they had obtained
the information. On refusing, they were promptly jailed
for culpable reticence. But that wasn't the end of the
affair, for the following issue of the magazine contained
an interview with Oscar's son. Enzo Burolo not only
substantiated the claims made in the original article, but
advanced new and even more damaging allegations. In
particular, he claimed that six months prior to the kill-
ings his father had paid yo million lire to obtain the con-
tract for a new generating station for ENEL, the
electricity board. Despite this exorbitant backhander,
Burolo Construction did not get the contract.
According to Enzo, Oscar Burolo was so infuriated that
he vowed to stop paying kickbacks altogether. From that
point on, his company's fortunes went into a nosedive. In
a desperate attempt to break the system, Oscar had
leagued together with other construction firms to form a
ring that tendered for contracts at realistic prices, but in
each case the bidding was declared invalid on some
technicality and the contract subsequently awarded to a
company outside the ring.

Burolo Construction soon found itself on the verge of
bankruptcy, but when Oscar applied to the banks for a
line of credit he discovered that he was no longer a
favoured client. His letters were mislaid, his calls not
turned, the people he had plied with gifts and favours
vrere permanently unavailable. Furious and desperate,
Oscar had played his last card, contacting Renato Favel-
loni to demand the protection of 1'onorevole himself. If this
was not forthcoming, he warned Favelloni, he would
reveal the full extent of their collaboration, including
detailed accounts of the payoffs over the Latina prison job
and a video tape showing Favelloni himself in an
unguarded moment discussing his relationship with
various men of power, l'onorevole included. Discussions
and negotiations had continued throughout the summer,
but according to Enzo this had been a mere delaying
tactic which his father's enemies used to gain time in
which to prepare their definitive response, which duly
came on that fateful day in August, just hours after
Renato Favelloni had left the Villa Burolo.
From that moment on, the case against Favelloni
developed an irresistible momentum. True, there were
stiII those who raised doubts. For example, if the destruc-
tion of Burolo's records had been as vital to the success of
the conspiracy as the murder of Oscar himself, how was
it that the magazine had been able to obtain an uncor-
rupted copy of one of the most incriminating of the discs?
Even more to the point, why did the killer use a weapon
as noisy as a shotgun if he needed time to destroy the
records and make good his escape'? But these questions
were soon answered. The magazine's information, it was
suggested, came not from the original disc but from a
copy which the wily Burolo had deposited elsewhere, to
be made public in the event of his death. As for the noise
factor, there was nothing to show that the discs and
videos had not been erased before the killings. Indeed,
the metallic crash reproduced on the video recording
seemed to strengthen this hypothesis. As for the weapon,
this had presumably been chosen with a view to making
the crime appear a savage act of casual violence. In short,
such details appeared niggling attempts to undermine the
case against Renato Favelloni and his masters at Palazzo
Sisti, a case which now appeared overwhelming.
Luckily for Zen, the case itself was only peripherally
his concern. There was no way he could realistically hope
to get Favelloni off the hook. His aim was simply to avoid
making powerful and dangerous enemies at Palazzo Sisti,
and the best way to do this seemed to be to take a leaf out
of Vincenzo Fabri's book. In other words, he had to make
it look as if he had done his crooked best to frame
Padedda, but that his best just hadn't been good enough.
This wasn't as easy as it sounded. The thing had to be
handled very carefully indeed if he was to avoid sending
an innocent man to prison and yet convince Palazzo Sisti
that he was not a disloyal employee to be ruthlessly dis-
posed of but, like Fabri, a well-meaning sympathizer who
was unfortunately not up to the demands of the job. In
Rome his prospects of achieving this had appeared
extremely dubious, but he was now beginning to feel that
he could bring it off. The tide had turned with the arrest
of Giuliano Acciari and -- yes, why not admit it? -- with
that lunch with Tania and the embrace with which it had
concluded. A fatalist at heart, Zen had learnt from bitter
experience that when things weren't going his way there
was no point in trying to force them to do so. Now that
they were, it would be equal!y foolish not to take advan-
tage of the situation.
He strolled along the street, glancing into shop win-
dows and along the dark alleys that opened off to either
side, scanning the features and gestures of the people he
met. He felt that he was beginning to get the feel of the
place, to sense the possibilities it offered.
Then he saw -- or seemed to see -- something that
brought all his confident reasoning crashing down

around him. In an alleyway to the left of the main street,
a cul-de-sac filled with plastic rubbish sacks, a few empty
oil drums and some building debris, stood a figure hold-
ing what looked like a gun.
   A moment later it was gone, and a moment after that
Zen found himself questioning whether it had ever
existed. Don't be absurd, he told himself as he stepped
into the ailey, determined to dispel this mirage created by
his own overheated imagination. The man who had
broken into his house in Rome was safely under arrest,
and even if Spadola had taken up his vendetta in person,
how could he have tracked his quarry down so quickly?
Zen had had every reason to take the greatest care when
collecting the Mercedes ar.d driving it to Civitaveccia. He
wasn't thinking of Spadola so much as Vincenzo Fabri
and the people at Palazzo Sisti. But he hadn't been fol-
lowed, he was sure of that.
The alley narrowed to a crevice between the buildings
on each side, barely wide enough for one person to
pass. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Zen saw that it
continued for some distance, dipping steeply, and then
turned sharply 1ef't, presumably leading to a street
below. There was no sign that anyone had been there
recently.
When he heard the footsteps behind him, closing off
his escape, he whirled around. For a moment everythiny,
seemed to be repeating itself in mirror-image: once again
he was faced with a figure holding a gun. But this time
the weapon was a stubby submachine-gun, the man was
wearing battledress, and there was no doubt about the
reality of the experience. At the end of the alley, in the
street, stood a blue jeep marked 'Carabinieri'.
'Papers!' the man barked.
Zen reached automatically for his wallet. Then his hand
dropped again.
'They took them at the hotel,' he explained, accentu-
ating his northern intonation slightly.
The Carabiniere looked him up and down. 'This isn't the
way to the hotel.'
'I know. I was just curious. I'm from Switzerland, you
see. By us the towns are more rational built, without these
so interesting and picturesque aspects.'
You're overdoing it, he told himself. But the Carabiniere
appeared to relax slightly.
'Tourist?' he nodded.
Zen ran through his well-rehearsed spiel, taking care to
mention Angelo Confalone several times. The Cara-
biniere's expression gradually shifted from suspicion to a
slightly patronizing complacency. Finally he ushered Zen
back to the street.
'All the same,' he said as they reached the jeep, 'it's
maybe better not to go exploring too much. There was a
case last spring, a couple of German tourists in a camper
found shot through the head. They must have stumbled
on something they weren't supposed to see. It can happen
to anyone, round here. All you need is to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time.'
The jeep roared away.

I thought their deaths would change everything, but nothing
chganged. Night after night I returned, as though next time the
sentence might be revoked, the dream broken. In vain. Even here,
were the darkness is entire, I knew I was only on parole.
Nothing would ever change that. E was banished, exiled for life
into this world of light which divides and pierces, driving its
aching distances into us.
Perhaps I had not done enough, I thought. Perhaps a further
offering was required, "nother death. But whose? I i'ost myself in
futile speculations. There is a power that punishes us, that much
seemed clear. Its influence ertends everywhere, pervasive and
mysterious, but can it also be influenced? Since we are punished,
we must have offended.-- Can that offence be redeemed ? And so on,
endlessly, round and round, dizzying myself in the search for
some flaw in the walls that shut me in, that shut me out.
A good butcher doesn't stain the meat, my father used to say,
though everything else was stained, clothes and skin and face, as
he wrestled the animal to the ground and stuck the long knife into
its throat, panting, drenched in blood from head to toe, the pig
still twitching. Yet when he strung it up and peeled away the
skin, the meat was unblemished. That's all I need be, I thought. A
good butcher, calm, patient and indifferent. All I lacked was the
chosen victim.

Then the policeman came.