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 authorities 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 outsiders 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 inscriphon '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, stalled, 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 Sardinian 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 higgledypiggledy, 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 overIooking a stunning panorama that stretched all the way down to the distant coastline and the sea beyond. Somewhere 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 – Restaurant – 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 registration 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 installation. 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 centuries 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
