He strolled along the street, glancing into shop windows 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 holding 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 followed, 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, accentuating 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 Carabiniere'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.
Saturday, 20.10 – 22.25
By eight o'clock that evening, Herr Reto Gurtner was in a philosophical mood. Aurelio Zen, on the other hand, was drunk and lonely.
The night was heavy and close, with occasional rumbles of thunder. The bar was crowded with men of all ages, talking, smoking, drinking, playing cards. Apart from the occasional oblique glance, they ignored the stranger sitting at a table near the back of the room. But his presence disturbed them, no question about that.
They would much rather he had not been there. In an earlier, rougher era they would have seen him off the premises and out of the village. That was no longer possible, and so, reflected the philosophical Gurtner, they were willing him into non-existence, freezing him out, closing the circle against him.
Despite evident differences in age, education and income, all the men were dressed in very similar clothes: sturdy, drab and functional. In Rome it was the clothes you noticed first these days, not the mass-produced figures whose purpose seemed to be to display them to advantage. But here in this dingy backward Sardinian bar it was still the people that mattered. We've thrown out the baby with the bathwater, reflected the philosophical Gurtner. Eradicating poverty and prejudice, we've eradicated something else too, something as rare as any of the threatened species the ecologists make so much fuss apout, and just as impossible to replace once it has become extinct.
Bullshit, Aurelio Zen exclaimed angrily, pouring himself another glass of vernaccia from the carafe he had ordered.
The storm-laden atmosphere, the distasteful nature of his business, his sense of total isolation, the fact that he was missing Tania badly, all these had combined to put him in a sour and irrational mood. This priggish, patronizing Zuricher was the last straw. Who did he think he was, coming over here and going on as though poverty was something romantic and valuable? Only a nation as crassly and smugly materialistic as the Swiss could afford to indulge in that sort of sentimentality.
He gulped the tawny wine that clung to the sides of the glass like spirits. It was tasting better all the time. Once again he thought of phoning Tania, and once again he rejected the idea. The more he lovingly recalled, detail by detail, what had happened that lunchtime, the more unlikely it appeared. He must surely have imagined the light in her eyes, the lift in her voice. The facts were not in dispute, it was a question of how you interpreted them. It was the same with the Burolo case. It was the same with everything.
Zen peered intently at the tabletop, which swam in and out of focus in a fascinating way. For a moment he seemed to have caught a glimpse oc a great truth, a unified field theory of humar. existence, a simple hasic formula that explained everything.
This wine is very strong, Reto Gurtner explained in his slightly pedantic accent. You have drunk a lot of it on an empty stomach. It has gone to your head. The thing to do now is to get something to eat.
Well, it was easy to say that! Hadn't he been waiting all this time for some sign of life in the restaurant area? It was now nearly a quarter past eight, and the lights were still dimmed and the curtain drawn. What time did they eat here, for God's sake?
Once again the thunder growled distantly, reminding Zen of the jet fighter which had startled him at the villa.
There had been no hint of a storm then. On the contrary, the sky was free from any suspicion of cloud, a perfect dome of pale bleached blue from which the winter sun shone brilliantly yet without ferocity, a tyrant mellowed by age. The route to the villa lay along the same road by which he had arrived, but in this direction it looked quite different. Instead of a forbidding wall of mountains closing off the view, the land swept down and
