'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 trepidation. 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 consider, 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 caretaker 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 unturned, at worst a foolhardy scheme which might well end in disaster and humiliation. But from his present perspective, 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 eviJence 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 company'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 coalition, 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 normal 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 journalists 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 killings his father had paid yo million lire to obtain the contract 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 Favelloni 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 destruction 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 uncorrupted 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 disposed 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 advantage of the situation.
