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 laboriously, 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 shortest of all Mediterranean races, while Zen was above average 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 happened 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 wartime 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 massive 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 contrast 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 sophisticated, 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 complimented 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 instructed 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 desirable 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 specifically 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 requirements 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.'
