spray as fine and evenly distributed as drizzle on a windscreen.
With a despairing cry she fell through the window to the paving stones of the terrace, where she slowly bled to death.
Despite her lacerated legs, Maria Pia Vianello somehow struggled to her feet. For all her diminutive stature, she too gave the impression of looking down at the intruder.
'Just a moment, please,' she muttered over the dry, clinical sound of the gun being reloaded. 'I'm afraid I'm not quite ready yet. I'm sorry.'
The shot took her at close range, flaying her so fearfully that loops of intestine protruded through the wall of her abdomen in places. Then the second barrel spun her round. She clutched the wall briefly, then collapsed into a dishevelled heap, leaving a complex pattern of dark streaks on the whitewashed plaster.
It had taken less than twenty seconds to turn the room into an abattoir. Fifteen seconds later, the caretaker would appear, having run from the two-room service flat where he and his wife had been watching a variety show on television. Until then, apart from wine dripping from a broken bottle at the edge of the table and a swishing caused by the convulsive twitches of the dying Vianello's arm, there was no sound whatsoever. 'If anyone ever manages to break into this place, I'll believe in ghosts,' the security analyst had assured Oscar Burolo. Nevertheless, someone or something had got in, butchered the inhabitants and then vanished without trace, all in less than a minute and in perfect silence. Even in broad daylight and the company of others it was difficult to ignore this almost supernatural dimension of the killings. In the eerie doldrums of the night, all alone, it seemed impossible to believe that there could be a rational explanation for them.
The silence of the running tape was broken by a distant scraping sound. Zen felt his skin crawl and the hairs on his head stir. He reached for the remote control unit and stilled the video. The noise continued, a low persistent scraping. 'Like old Umberto's boat,' his mother had said.
Zen walked quietly across to the inner hallway of the apartment, opened the door to his mother's bedroom and looked inside.
'Can you hear it?' a voice murmured in the darkness.
'Yes, mamma.'
'Oh good. I thought it might be me, imagining it. I'm not quite right in the head sometimes, you know.'
He gazed towards the invisible bed. It was the first time that she had ever made such an admission. They were both silent for some time, but the noise did not recur.
'Where is it coming from?' he asked.
'The wardrobe.'
'Which wardrobe?'
There were three of them in the room, filled with clothes that no one would ever wear again, carefully preserved from moths by liberal doses of napthalene, which gave the room its basic funereal odour.
'The big one,' his mother replied.
The biggest wardrobe occupied the central third of the wall giving on to the internal courtyard of the building. Its positioning had occasioned Zen some anxiety at the time, since it obstructed access to the fire escape, but the wardrobe was too big to fit anywhere else.
Zen walked over to the bed and straightened the counterpane and sheets. Then he patted the hand which emerged from the covers, all the obsolete paraphenalia of muscles and arteries disturbingly revealed by the parchment-like skin.
'It was just a rat, mamma.'
The best way of dispelling her formless, childish fears was by giving her a specific unpleasantness to focus on.
'But it sounded like metal.'
'The skirting's lined with zinc,' he improvised. 'To stop them gnawing through. I'll speak to Giuseppe in the morning and we'll get the exterminators in. You try and get sorne sleep now.'
Back in the living room, he turned off the television and reound the video tape, trying to dispel his vague sense of unease by thinking about the report which he had to write the next day. It was the lateness of the hour that made everything seem strange and threatening now, the time when – according to what his uncle had once told him -a house belongs not to the people who happen to live there now, but to all those who have preceded them over the centuries. Tomorrow morning everything would have snapped back into proportion and the uncanny aspects of the Burolo case would seem mere freakish curiosities. The only real question was whether to mention them at all. It wasn't that he wanted or needed to conceal anything. For that matter he wouldn't have known where to begin, since he had no idea who the report was destined for. The problem was that there were certain aspects of the Burolo case which were very difficult to mention without laying yourself open to the charge of being a credulous nincompoop. For example, the statement made by the sevenyear-old daughter of Oscar Burolo's lawyer, who had visited the villa in late July. As a special treat she had been allowed to stay up for dinner with the adults, and in the excitement of the moment had sneaked some of her father's coffee, with the result that she couldn't sleep. It was a luminous summer night, and eventually the child left her room and set out to explore the house. According to her statement, in one of the rooms in the older part of the villa she saw a figure moving about. 'At first I was pleased,' she said. 'I thought it was a child, and I was lonely for someone to play with. But then i remembered that there were no children at the villa. I got scared and ran back to my room.'
Including things like that could easily make him the laughing-stock of the department, while if he left them out he laid himself open to the charge of suppressing evidence. Fortunately, it was no part of Zen's brief to draw conclusions or offer opinions. All that was needed as a concise report describing the various lines of investigation which had been conducted by the police and the Carabinieri and outlining the evidence against the various suspects. A clerical chore, in short, to which he was bringing nothing but an ability to read between the lines of official documents, picking out the grain of what was not being said from the overwhelming chaff of what was. Watching the video had been the last stage in this procedure. There was nothing left to do except sit down and write the thing, and this he would do the next morning, while it was all fresh in his mind. By the afternoon, the Burolo affair would have no more significance for him than for any other member of the public.
Once again, footsteps sounded in the street below. A few minutes later the silence was abruptly shattered as a car started up and accelerated away with a squeal of tyres.
By the time Zen reached the window it had already passed far beyond the area of street visible through the closed jalousies. The sound of its engine gradually faded away, echoing and reverberating ever more distantly through the intersecting channels of streets. The streetlight was in its waxing phase, and as the light gradually intensified
Zen saw that the red car which had been parked further along the street was no longer there. He closed the shutters, wondering why its presence or absence should be of any concern to him. Finding no answer, he decided it was time to go to bed.
Nearly over now. Everything's going, the doubfs, the fears, the cares,'.the confusion, even the pain. All draining away of its own accord. There's nothing I need do, nothing more to be done.
When I saw him standing there, the gun in his hand, it was like seeing myself in a mirror. He had taken my part, emerging from nowhere, implacable, confident, unsurprised. He sounded impatient, taunting me with a strange name, threatening me.
'There's no point in trying to hide,' he said. 'Let's get it over with. ' As usual, I did what I was told.
He cried out, in rage and disbelief. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn't that. Then something overwhelmed me, knocking me over, opening me up. I couldn't have resisted even if I'd wanted to. It wasn't like the prst time, the man under the table wounding me with his pistol. All he gave me was pain. This was different. I knew at once that I was carrying a death.
It won't be long now. Already I feel light and insubstantial, as though I were dissolving. The darkness is on the move, billowing out to enshroud me, winding me in its endless folds. Everything is in flux. Solid rock gives way at my touch, the ground flows beneath me as though the river had returned to its courses, unexplored caverns burst open like preworks as I advance. I am lost, I who know this place better than I know my own body!
