Sunday, 11.20 -- 13.25 It was only as he approached the series of hairpin bends by which the road descended from the village that Zer: realized Vasco Spadola might well have sabotaged the Mercedes's brakes as well as its engine. By then the car was doing almost ~o kph and accelerating all the time. The brakes engagea normally, and a moment later Zen saw that his fears had been groundless. Spadola's exacting sense of what was due to him made it unthinkable that he would choose such an indirect and mechanical means ot executing his revenge. His desires were urgent and per- sonal. They had to be satisfied personally, face to face, like a perverted sex act. The car drifted downhill in a luxurious silence cushioned by the hum of the tyres and the hushing of thc wind. The hairpin bends followed one another with bareli a pause. The motion reminded Zen of sailing on the Venetian lagoons, continually putting the boat about from one tack to the other as he negotiated the narrow channels between the low, muddy islets. He felt strangely exhilar- ated by that moment when life and death had seemed balanced on the response of a brake lever, as on the toss of a coin. In Rome, when he first sensed that someone was on his trail, he had felt nothing but cold, clammy terror, a paralysing suffocation. But here in this primitive land- scape what was happening seemed perfectly natural and right. This is what men were made for, he thought. The rest we have to work at, but this comes naturaly. This is what we are good at. Even in this euporic state, howtever, he realized that some men were better at it than others, and that Vasco gpadola was certainly too good for him. If he was to survive, he had to start thinking. Fortunately his brain seemed to be working with exceptional clarity, despite the pangover. There was as yet no sign of pursuit on the road above, but as soon as Spadola emerged from the hotel he was bound to notice that the Mercedes was gone, and to realize that it could only have moved under the force of gravity. All he needed to do after that was follow the road downhill, and sooner or later -- and it was likely to be sooner rather than later -- he would catch up. Below, the road wound down to the junction where Zen had stopped to consult the map on his way to the Villa Burolo twenty-four hours earlier. On the other side of the junction, he remembered, an unsurfaced track led to the station built to serve the village in the days when people were prepared to walk four or five kilometres to take advantage of the new railway. This station was Zen's goal. There was bound to be a telephone, and the station- master, owing his allegiance -- and more in.portantly his job -- not to the locals but to the state, was bound to let Zen use it. All Criminalpol officials were provided with a codeword, changed monthly, which acted as turn-key providing the user with powers to dispose of the facilities of the forces of order from one end of the country to the other. One brief phone call, and helicopters and jeeps full of armed police would descend on the area, leaving Spadola the choice of returning to the prison cell he had so recently vacated or dying in a hail of machine-gun fire. All Zen had to do was make sure the police arrived before Spadola. He had banked on being able to freewheel the Mercedes all the way, but as soon as he got close enough to see the track, he noticed a feature not shown on the map: a low rise of land intervening between the road and the railway. It was difficult to estimate exactly how steep it was from the brief glances he was able to spare as he approached the last of the hairpin bends. For a moment he was tempted tc~ let the car gather speed on the final straight stretch, gam- bling that the accumulated momentum would be enough to carry it over the ridge. But the risk was too great. If hi didn't make it, he would be forced to abandon the Mercedes at the bottom of the slope, in full view of the road, which would be tantamount to leaving a sign explaining his intentions. When Spadola arrived, he would simply drive along the track, easily overtaking Zen before he could reach the station on foot. By now he was seconds away from the junction. The onIy alternative was to turn on to the main road, which ran gent]y downhill to the right. Trying to conserve speed, he took the hirn so fast that the tyres lost their grip on a triangular patch of gravel in the centre of the junction and the Mercedes started to drift sideways towards the ditch on the other side. At the last moment the steering abruptls came back, almost wrenching the wheel from Zen's hands. He steered back to the right-hand side, thankful that therc was so little traffic on these Sardinian roads. As the car started to gather speed again, he glanced at the road winding its way up tn the village. Several hundred metres above, he spotted a small patch of bright yellow approach - ing the second hairpin. Then a fold of land rose between like a passing wave and he Iost sight of it. The road stretched invitingly away in a gentle down- ward slope. Zen felt his anxieties being lulled by the car's smooth, even motion, but he knew that this sense of security was an illusion. Once on the main road, Spadola's Fiat would outstrip the engineless Mercedes in a matter of minutes, while every kilometre Zen travelled away from the station was a kilometre he would have to retrace pain- fully on foot. The car was not now the asset it had seemed, but a liability. He had to get rid of it, but how? If he left it by the roadside, Spadola would know he was close by. He pad to ditch it somewhere out of sight, thus buying time to get back to the station on foot while Spadola continued to scour the roads for the elusive white Mercedes. Unfor- tenately the barren scrub-covered hills offered scant possi- bilities for concealing a bicycle, let alone a car. Up ahead he saw the junction with the side-road leading down to the Villa Burolo, but he did not take it, remem- bering that it bottomed out in a valley where he would be stranded. What he needed was a smaller, less conspicuous turn-off, something Spadola might overlook. But time was gptting desperately short! He kept glancing compulsively in the rear-view mirror, dreading the moment when he saw the yellow Fiat on his tail. Once that happened, his fate would be sealed. Almost too late, he caught sight of a faint dirt track opening off the other side of the road. There was no time for mature reflection or second thoughts. With a flick of his wrists, he swung the Mercedes squealing across the asphait on to the twin ruts of bare red earth. Within moments a low hummnck had almost brought the car to a halt, but in the end its forward momentum prevailed, and after that it was all Zen could do to keep it on the track, which curved back on itself, becoming progressively rougher and steeper. The steering-wheel writhed and twisted in Zen's hands until the track straightened out and ran down more gently into a holIow sunk between steep, rocky slopes where a small windowless stone hut stood in a grove of mangy trees. Zen stopped the Mercedes at the very end of the track, out of sight of the main road. He got out and stood listening intently. The land curved up all around, con- taining the silence like liquid in a pot, its surface faintly troubled by a distant sound that might have been a fiying insect. Zen turned his head, tracking the car as it drove past along the road above, the engine noise fading away without any change in pitch or intensity. His shoulders slumped in relief. Spadola had not seen him turn off and had not noticed the tyre marks in the earth. He walked over to the hut, a crude affair of stones piled one on top of the other, with a corrugated iron roof. He stooped down and peered in through the low, narrow open doorway. A faint draught carrying a strong smell of sheep blew towards him from the darkness within. It must once have been a shepherd's hut, used for storing cheese and curing hides, but was now clearly abandoned. Zen knelt down and wriggled inside, crouching on the floor of bare rock. The sheepy reek was overpowering. As his eyes adjusted to the obscurity, Zen found himself standing at the edge of a large irregular fissure in the rock. Holding his hand over the opening, he discovered that this was tke source of the draught that stirred the fetid air in the hut. Then he remembered Turiddu saying that the whole area was riddled with caves which had once brought water down underground from the lake in the mountains. This idea of water was very attractive. His hangover had left him with the most atrocious thirst. But of course there was no more water in the caves since they had buiit the dam. That was evidently why the hut had been abandoned, like so many of the local farms, including the one Oscar Burolo had bought for a song. Presumably this was one of the entrances to that system of caves. It was large enough to climb down into, but there was no saying what that impenetrable darkness concealed, a cosy hollow he could hide in or a sheer drop into a cavern the size of a church. Nevertheless, he was strongly tempted to stay put. He felt safe in the hut, magically concealed and protected. In fact he knew it would be suicidal to stay. Indeed, he had already wasted far too much precious time. Before long, the road Spadola was following would start to go uphill, and he would know that Zen could not have passed that way. The network of side-roads would complicate his search slightly, but in the end a process of elimination was bound to lead him to this gully and the stranded Mercedes. The first thing he would do then would be to search the hut. But this knowledge didn't make the alternative any more appealing. The idea of setting out on foot across country with only the vaguest idea nf where he was going was something Zen found quite horrifying. His preferred view of nature was through the window of a train whisk- ing him from one city to another. Man's contrivances he understood, but in the open he was as vulnerable as a fox in the streets, his survival skills non-existent, his native cunning an irrelevance. Nothing less than the knowledge that his life was at stake could have impelled him to leave the hut and start to climb the boulder-strewn slope opposite. He laboured up the hillside, using his hands to scramble up the steeper sections, grasping at rocks and shrubs, his clothes and shoes already soiled with the sterile red dirt, the leaden sky weighing down on him. He felt terrible. His limbs ached, thirst piagued him and his headache had swollen to monstrous dimensions. Half-way to the top he stopped to rest. As he stood there, panting for breath, cruelly aware how unfit he was for this kind of thing, his brain blithely presented him with the information it had withheld earlier. The anonymous note left under the windscreen-wiper of the Mercedes had claimed that Padedda's whereabouts on the night of the Burolo mur- ders was known to 'the Melega clan of Orgosolo'. It was that name which had seemed to authenticate the writer's allegations. Antonio Melega, Zen belatedly remembered, was the young shepherd who had been buried a few days after the abortive kidnapping of Oscar Burolo, having been run over by an unidentified vehicle. The faint hum of a passing car stirred the heavy silence. The main road was still out of sight, and there was no particular reason to suppose that the vehicle had been Spadola's yellow Fiat. But the incident served as a re- minder of Zen's exposed position on the hillside, above the hollow where the Mercedes stood out as prominently as a trashed refrigerator in a ravine. Putting every other thought out of his head, Zen attacked the slope as though it were an enemy, kicking and punching, grunting and cursing, until at last he reached the summit and the ground levelled off, conceding defeat. Before him the landscape stretched monotonously away towards undesirable horizons. Zen trudged on through a wilderness nf armour-plated plants that might have been dead for all the signs of life they showed. To take his mind off the brutal realities of his situation, Zen tried to work out how the information he had obtained might be brought to bear on the Burolo case. And the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he had stumbled on the key to the whole mystery. The irony was that having been sent to Sardinia to rig the Burolo case by incriminating Furio Padedda, he now possessed evidence which strongly suggested that the Sar- dinian was in fact guilty. With the lions Oscar had bought to patrol the grounds of his villa after the kidnap attempt, had come a man calling himself Furio Pizzoni. His real name, Palazzo Sisti had discovered, was Padedda, and he was not from the Abruzzo mountains but from those around Nuoro. And Padedda's friends, according to Turiddu's drunken revelations the night before, in addi- tion to the traditional sheep-rustling, were also engaged in its more lucrative modern variation, kidnapping. Turid- du's companions had shut him up at that point, but the implications were clear. There had never been any question that the Melega family, with a dead brother to avenge, had an excellent motive for murdering Oscar Burolo, and the ruthless dedication to carry it out. What no one had been able to explain was how a gang of Sardinian shepherds had been able to gain entrance to the villa despite its sophisticated electronic defences, but given an ally within Burolo's gates this obstacle could have been easily overcome. According to their testimony, Alfonso Bini and his wife pad been watching television in their quarters at the time pf the murder. If Padedda, instead of drinking in the ~llage, had concealed himself at the villa, there would pave been nothing to stop him entering the room from which the alarms were controlled and throwing the cut- out switches. For that matter, he could have carried out ghe killings himself. The wound on his arm, which had lpoked suspiciously like a bullet mark to Zen, correspon- ded to the fact that the assassin had been lightly wounded by Vianello. Padedda would no doubt have used his own shotgun, familiar and reliable, to do the killings, removing one of Burolo's weapons to confuse the issue. Zen recalled the ventilation hole in the wall of the underground vault to which the trail of blood-stains led. Had that been searched for the missing weapon? And had ejected cartridges from the shotgun which Padedda kept hanging in the lions' house been compared with those found at the scene of the crime? Such checks should have been routine, but Zen knew only too well how often routine broke down under the pressure of preconceived ideas about guilt and innocence. A car engine suddenly roared up out of nowhere and Zen threw himself to the ground. He lay holding his breath, his face pressed to the dirt, cowering for cover in the sparse scrub as a yellow car flashed by a few metres in front of him. It seemed impossible that he had escaped notice, but the car kept going. A few moments later it had disappeared. He stood up cautiously, rubbing the cuts on his face and hands caused by his crash-landing in the prickly shrub- bery. Now that he knew it was there, he could see the thin grey line of asphalt cutting through the landscape just ahead of him. There was no time to lose. Spadola had taken the direction leading down into the valley. He would soon see that the Mercedes was not there and couldn't have climbed the other side, and would cross this road off his list, turn back and try again. Zen's only con- solation was that Spadola had not yet found the aban- doned car, and therefore did not know that Zen was on foot. He ran across the raised strip of asphalt and on through the scrub on the other side, hurrying forward until the contours of the hill hid him from the road. He could see the railway now, running along a ledge cut into the slope below. Rather than lose height by climbing down to it, he continued across the top on a coverging course which he hoped would bring him more or less directly to the station. Meanwhile the bits and pieces of the puzzle continued to put themselves together in his mind without the slightest effort on his part. As with Favelloni, it was impossible to know whether Padedda had actually carried out the killings or mer ly provided access to the villa. On balance, Zen thought the latter more likely. The Melegas, like Vasco Spadola, would have wanted the satisfaction of taking vengeance in per- son. This also explained the bizarre fact that no attempt had been made to destroy the video tape. It was possible that such unsophisticated men, unlike Renato Favelloni, might have ignored the camera as just another bit of the incomprehensible gadgetry the house was full of. After- wards the Melegas would have had no difficulty in per- suading a few of the villagers to come forward and claim that they had seen Padedda in the local bar that evening, while the age-old traditions of omerta would stop anyone else from contradicting their testimony. It all made sense, it all fitted together. Zen hurried on, forcing himself to maintain a punishing pace. To his right, he could see the whole of the valley stretching across to the ridge on the other side where the Villa Burolo was visible as a white blur. Further up towards the mountains, the unnatural green of the forest fed by the leaking dam stained the landscape like a spillage of some pollutant. A distant rumble gave him pause for a ~pment, until he realized that it was not a car but two aircraft. After some time he made out the speeding black specks of the jet fighters swooping across the mountain slopes on their low-altitude manoeuvres. Then they dis- appeared up a valley and silence fell again. He pushed on, torn between satisfaction at having finally cracked ghe Burolo case and frustration at the thought that unless he managed to get to a telephone before Spadola caught up with him, the villagers' silence would remain unbroken for ever, and Renato Favelloni would be sent tp prison for a crime he had not committed. Of course, Favelloni no doubt royally deserved any number of prison terms for other crimes which would never be brought home to him, protected as he was by l'onorevole. But, as Vasco Spadola had remarked, that was not the point. The going was not easy. The red earth, baked hard by months of drought, supported nothing but low bushes bristling like porcupines, with wiry branches, abrasive leaves and sharp thorns that snagged his clothing con- tinually. Fortunately, the plants didn't generally grow very close together, and it was always possible to find a way through. But the constant meandering increased the distance he had to cover, and made his progress much more tiring. And he was tired. His dissipations the night before had resulted in a shallow, drunken sleep that had only scratched the surface of his immense weariness. 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 that he had originally planned 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 on it, and rocks had sprouted in the wheel ruts. But now he was within sight of his goal, walking was almost a pleasure. The first hint of what was to come was that one end of the station roof had fallen in. Then he saw that the win- dows 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 ce!ling, the walls charred where someone had lit a tire in one corner. Outside, the gable wall still proclaimed the name of the village in faded letters, witn 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 anachron- ism whose one train a day served no purpose except to keep the lucrative subsidies flowing in from Rome. Zen shook his head. He couldn't believe this was hap- pening. It was 1!ke 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 morn- ing, but that would be as short-sighted 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 eventually dying of starvation or exposure were very high, That left just two possibilities: he could walk back along the track to the main road and then walk or try and hitch a lift to the nearest town, or he could follow the railway line up into the mountains. The problern with taking the road was the high risk ot Spadola coming along it. Walking along the railway would be a long and tiring business, and he might 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. The decisive advantage, however, was that the railway was out of sight of the road, which Spadola would now be patrolling with 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 relatively relaxing, but in fact it was every bit as demanding as negotiating the scrub. The ancient sleepers, rough-hewn, weathered and split, were placed too close together to step on each one and too far to take them two at a time, while the ballast in between was jagged, uneven and choked 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 realized another sound had been concealed in their caver- nous booming, 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 flared briefly. 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 towards him. Zen leapt up and started to run as fast as he could away from the car. Almost immediately he tripped over a rusty signal-wire and went fiying, landing on a small boulder and turning his ankle over agonizingly. 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. But although he now knew that Spadola was going to kill him, 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. At the best pace he could manage, 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 losely in the crook of his arm. With a groan, Zen hobbled off again. 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 towards the inevitable bloody conclusion. Zen plodded blindly on in a nightmare of pain, confusion and despair. He now 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 spanner 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 ge gad fallen victim to the long-running guerilla war between the islanders and the state. His colleagues in gome 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 ~umphantly, just as people had said about Oscar when pe chose a villa so close to the kidnappers' heartland. No one would want to tug too hard on any of the loose ends ~hat 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 to be closed. If this order happened to correspond to the truth, well and good, but in the last resort they would rather have a false solution than no solution at all. Certainly there was never any encouragement to throw things back into chaos by suggesting that 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 towards him. Absurdly, he started to wave, to call 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 the same, always different. His sole 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 and find a way through the maze. If he got it wrong, or when 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 go~ stuck, only to wrench himself free with a final effort. But stopping or turning back was not permitted, though bv 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 con- crete 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 realized 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 wilder- ness in two with surrealistic precision, Zen had to scramble, wriggle, dodge and feint. Denser thickets in his path constantly forced him to seek alternative 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 sys- tems. 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 prob- lem was that in order to minimize 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 sug- gested 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 a animal being used for scientific research, its agony the subject of dispassionate study, its feeble attempts to escape as pre- dictable as they are vain. At length 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 towards 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 continuin8 to struggle up into ever higher and wilder regions, he fell back again. What had conerned 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 towards the forest. By now the contrast between the hys- terical green of the conifers and the sombre tones of the parched, abstemious landscape was less evident than it had been from a distance. 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 realized 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. After so many hours in the open, entering the forest was like stepping into a huge building: hushed, mysterious, dim and intimate in detail, vast and complex in design. Zen barged on, forcing aside the brittle tendrils that waved outwards from the trunks, like seaweed under water. Qnce his eyes had adjusted, 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 sud- denly caught sight of a great curtain of concrete, towering above the trees. The thought of that hanging lake increased his impression of being under water. Beyond the immediate circle of bare column-like tree trunks, nothing was visible. Despite the moisture that forced its way out through the faults in the dam to keep the undersoil per- petually damp, nothing grew beneath the killing cover of the trees. The forest was a reservoir of silence and dark- ness. No breezes entered, nothing stirred. The bare soil, soft with composted droppings, squel- ched underfoot. It was that sound which could give him away, he realized. In the deathly hush beneath the trees, the least noise would betray his position, and it was impossible to move without making a noise. But by the same token, Spadola could only hear Zen if he himself stopped moving, in which case he would fall ever further behind, the sounds would grow fainter and his bearings on their source less precise. So Zen's strategy was to plough or. without once stopping or looking back, and then, once he was deep inside the forest, to stop and stay absolutely still. Then the tables would be turned. Deprived of any clue as to Zen's whereabouts, Spadola could only beat about a random, while the noise he made doing so would give Zen ample warning of his approach. If neces- sary, Zen could simply repeat the process until darkness fell. The advantage now lay with him. The Aoor of the forest sloped gently to the east, follow- ing the contours of the invisible mountainside. Zen pushed on, his arms held up to protect his face from the dead twigs sticking out from the tree trunks. Several times he tripped agonizingly. Once he stumbled on a root sur- facing like a monstrous worm and fell against a broken branch that cut his forehead open. But he felt nothing until he stopped, satisfied that he had gone far enough. Then all the injuries he had suffered ganged up to air their griev- ances. Surrendering to his exhaustion, Zen stretched out on the ground and closed his eyes. The noises woke him, crashing sounds close at hand, their source invisible in the eerie gloom. He looked round wildly, forgetting for a merciful moment where he was. Then he saw the line of scuffed footmarks running back across the undulating surface and the dangling branches he had broken in his reckless flight, and understood. Far from vanishing into the trackless wastes of the forest, he had left a trail a child could have followed. But the creature following him was no child, and it was almost upon him. He knew this was the end. Physically exhausted by his ordeal, weakened by hunger, thirst and loss of blood, this final blow had crippled his morale as well. Further resis- tance was futile. Nothing he had done since leaving the village had made the slightest difference to the outcome. He might just as well have ordered a last drink and sat in the bar waiting to die. Yet to his disgust, for it seemed a m kind of weakness, a cowardice, he was unable to let things take their course even now. Instead he must stagger on through that sunken landscape, that lumber room of dead growth, without direction or purpose, out of control to the last. In this frame of mind, he was incapable of surprise, even when he stumbled across the path weaving through the forest like a road across the bed of a flooded valley. The trodden surface showed signs of recent use, no doubt by animals, though there were no signs of any droppings. In one direction the path ran downhill, pre- sumably leading out of the lower flank of the forest. Zen turned the other way. Encroaching branches beside the path had already been broken off, and his own footsteps were invisible in the general disturbance of the forest floor. If Spadola went the wrong way when he reached the path, Zen would have gained amp]e time to find a secure sanc- tuary. Hope teased his heart, banishing the deathly calm of his fatalistic resignation. The path wound uphill in a lazily purposeful way that lulled Zen's attention, until suddenly he found himself standing on the brink of a deep chasm in the forest floor, scanning the trough of darkness in front of him. He could see nothing: no path, no ground, no trees. It was as if the world ended there. After standing there indecisively for some moments, he realized the ravine offered the hiding-place he had been seeking, if he could manage to scramble down the pre- cipiious slope below him. Nevertheless, he had to over- come a strong reluctance to descend into ".hat black hole, although he knew this revulsion was the height of foolish- ness. It was not the dark he should be afraid of but Spadola. He lowered himseif on to a rocky outcrop and started to clamber down. At first the descent was easier than he had imagined, with numerous ledges and projections. But the further down he went, the fainter grew the glimmers of light fro the surface far above, until at length he could hardly make out his next foothold. The idea of losing his footing and plunging off into nothingness made his palms sweat and his limbs shake in a way that o~eatly increased the chances of this happening. The only measure of how deep the chasm was came from the falling rocks he dislodged. Gradually the clattering became briefer and less resonant, until he sensed rather than saw that he had reached the bottom. As his pupils dilated fully, he could just make out the hunched shapes of boulders all around, and realized that he was standing in the channel cut by the river which had flowed down from the lake above before the dam was built. N7 The huge rocks littering its bed would have been washed down in the former torrent's spectacular seasonal surges. When he heard the scurry of falling stones behind him, Zen's first thought was that the dam had given way and the black tide, unpenned, was surging towards him, sweeping away everything in its path. Then he realized the sound had come from above. Frantically, he began to pick his way down the riverbed, crawling round and over the shattered lumps of granite, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the killer on his trail. As soon as the noises of Spadola's descent ceased, Zen could go to ground in some obscure nook or cranny. It would take an army weeks to search that chaotic maze. But, to his dismay, the channel ended almost immedi- ately, widening out into a circular gully closed off by a wall of dull white rock, rounded like the end of a bath. The foliage above was thinned out by this space where nothing grew, allowing a trace more light to filter down to the depths. Zen gazed at the freakish rock formation surround- ing,him. He did not understand what could have caused it, but one thing was clear. The wall of smooth white rock was at least ten metres high and absolutely sheer. Zen couldn't possibly climb it, and with Spadola hard on his heels he couldn't turn back. He had fallen into a perfect natural trap, a killing ground from which there was no escape. The sound of tumbling rocks announced the approach of the hunter. With a weary slackness of heart, as though performing a duty for the sake of appearances, Zen knelt down and squeezed himself into a narrow crevice under- neath a tilting boulder. As soon as Spadola reached the end of the gully, he would become aware that Zen could not have climbed out and must therefore be hiding nearby. He would flush him out almost at once. This time it really was the end. There was nothing to do but wait. He lay absolutely still, as though part of the rock was pressing in on him. 'Well, fuck me!' Zen felt so lonely and scared that the words, the first he had heard since leaving the village, brought tears to his eyes. He was suddenly desperate to live, terrified of death, of extinction, of the unknown. How precious were the most banal moments of everyday life, precisely because they were banal! A might roar scoured the enclosed confines of the gully. As the shot echoed away, Spadola's peals of manic laughter could be heard. 'Come on out, Zen! The game's over. Time to pay up.' The voice was close by, although Zen couid see nothing but a jumble of rocks. 'Are you going to come out and die like a man, or do you want to play hide-and-seek? It's up to you, but if you piss me about I might just decide to kill you a little more slowly. Maybe a little shot in the balls, for openers. I'm not a vindictive man, but there are limits to my patience.' Like rats leaving a doomed ship, all Zen's faculties seemed to have fled the body wedged in its rocky tomb. He was incapable ot movement, speech or thought, already as good as dead. Spadola laughed. 'Ah, so there you are! Decided to spare me the trouble, have you? Very wise.' Zen still couldn't see Spadola, but somehow he had been spotted. The anomaly didn't bother him. It seemed perfectly consistent with everything else that had hap- pened. Footsteps approached. Zen tried to think of some- thing significant in his last moments, and failed. Something stirred the air close to his face. Less than a metre away, close enough to touch, a boot hit the ground and a trousered leg swished past. 'There's no point in trying to hide,' Spadola shouted, his voice echoing slightly. 'I can still see you. Let's just get it over with, shall we? It's been fun, but...' There was a loud gunshot, followed by a scream of rage and fury. Then two more shots rang out simultan- eously, one deafeningly close to Zen, the other a repeti- tion of the first. Pellets bounced and rattled against the rocks, ricocheting like hailstones. It seemed impossible that the silence could ever recover from such a savage violation, but before long the echoes died away as though nothing had happened. Zen had no idea what had happened, so he waited a long time, samp- ling the silence, before emerging from his hiding-place. He found Spadola almost immediately, his body fiung backwards across the rocks, a limp, discarded carapace. Something had scooped a raw crater out of his belly, around which circles of lesser destruction spread out like ripples on a pond. The shotgun lay close by, wedged between two rocks. Zen searched dispassionately through the dead man's pockets until he found his lighter, then sat down on a rock and lit a cigarette. From this perch he could see the end of the gully. Beneath the wall of white rock the ground opened up to form a cavernous sluice funnelling downwards, the edges clean and rounded. As he sat there, the cigarette smouldering peacefully between his fingers, Zen recalled what Turiddu had said about the soft rocks and the hard rocks, and realized that the white surface closing off the gully was the limestone that over- laid the granite at this point, rubbed to a smooth curve by the whirling water before it disappeared underground into the pool of darkness at the base of the cliff which was now a main entrance to the cave system underlying the whole area. Something glinted in the shadows just inside the cavern. Like the immortal he had once seemed to be, playing God with the video of the Burolo killings, Zen made his way towards it as though immune to danger. The grey rock was stained with something sticky that, smelling it, he knew was drying blood. A double-barrel pump-action Remington shotgun lay near by. The metal was still warm. By the flickering flame of his cigarette lighter, Zen read the inscription engraved on the barrel: 251 'To Oscar, Christmas 1979, from his loving wife Rita.'