'But I heard it ringing when I came in.'
'That was the television.'
Given a few more minutes, Zen might have been able to change the man's mind with a combination of threats and pleas. But the few seconds before Vasco Spadola reappeared were too precious to gamble on that slim possibility. Besides, it would take the Carabinieri at least fifteen minutes to reach the village, and that would be plenty of time for Spadola to carry out his threat. Zen turned and ran.
Outside in the piazza, people had begun to gather for the promenade before lunch. Zen stood uncertainly by the door. Who could he turn to? Angelo Confalone? But it was Sunday. The lawyer's office would be closed and Zen had no idea where he lived. For a moment he thought of appealing to the crowd, of throwing himself on their mercy. But there was no time to indulge in public oratory, and besides, he had been branded a spy, a proven liar, an agent of the hated government in Rome. Anyone who helped him would risk placing his own position in the community in jeopardy. Spadola was right. He was on his own.
Then he saw the Mercedes, and realized that there was just one faint hope. It hung by the narrowest of threads, but he had nothing to lose. Anything was better than skulking about the village, hiding in corners waiting to be routed out and killed.
As he shoved his way unceremoniously through the knots of bystanders, Zen noticed Turiddu standing in a group of other men. They were all staring at him, talking in Iow voices and pointing at a yellow Fiat Uno with Rome number plates parked nearby. To one side, all alone, stood Elia, the mad beggar woman. Zen belatedly noted the resemblance between her and Turiddu, and realized that he must he the brother she had rejected. That explained his anger on finding her at the pizzeria the night before.
A community like this, a mentally ill relative would be,~ perpetual source of shame.
He released the handbrake of the Mercedes and put the gear-leaver into neutral. Then he got out and started to, push with all his might, struggling to overcome the vehicle's inertia and the slight inclin:. leading up to th: main street. His headache sprang back into achve life and his aching limbs protested. After a violent effort the c.ir rolled on to the cracked concrete slabs of the street. Zen turned the wheel so that it was facing downhill, then got moving and jumped back inside. Soon the car was rolliny, quite fast down the steeply inclined main street and round the curve leading out of the village. He wasn't in the clenr yet, not by a long way, but he was exhilarated by his initial success. By the time he reached the new houses on the outskirts, the car was travelling as fast as he would wanted to go anyway. He even had to use the horn several times to warn groups of villagers of his silent approach.
When I saw him leaving I thought everything was lost. l'd followed him everywhere, gun in hand, flitting through the shadows like a swift at dusk. All for nothing. There was always someone there, foiling my plans, as though some god protected him! And now he was beyond my reach.
He thought he was safe, I thought I'd failed. What neither of us understood was that his death was already installed in him, lodged in his body like our sins in the Bleeding Heart above the fireplace. I used tn think the Ireart was from one of the pigs father hgd slaughtered. I kept expecting to find the beast's guts on another wall and its cock and balls nailed to the door. Once the lunp went out in the middle of a thunderstorm and Mother made me get down on my knees and pray to be forgiven or God would strike us dead on the spot. So I knelt to the great pig in the sky whosefarts terrifi'ed mother, praying it wouldn't shit all over us.
Which is just what it did, a little later on. Be careful what you pray for. You might give God ideas.
I wandered off, neither knowing nvr caring where I went. All places were equal noxo. Mygeet brought me here, like a horse that know,s its own way home. He would be far away, I thought, speeding through the corridors of light in his big white car.
But there was only one exit from the maze in which we both were trapped. Even as I despaired, he was on his way there, bringing me the death I needed.
Sunday, 11.20 – 13.25
It was only as he approached the series of hairpin bends by which the road descended from the village that Zer: realized Vasco Spadola might well have sabotaged the Mercedes's brakes as well as its engine. By then the car was doing almost ~o kph and accelerating all the time.
The brakes engagea normally, and a moment later Zen saw that his fears had been groundless. Spadola's exacting sense of what was due to him made it unthinkable that he would choose such an indirect and mechanical means ot executing his revenge. His desires were urgent and personal. They had to be satisfied personally, face to face, like a perverted sex act.
The car drifted downhill in a luxurious silence cushioned by the hum of the tyres and the hushing of thc wind. The hairpin bends followed one another with bareli a pause. The motion reminded Zen of sailing on the Venetian lagoons, continually putting the boat about from one tack to the other as he negotiated the narrow channels between the low, muddy islets. He felt strangely exhilarated by that moment when life and death had seemed balanced on the response of a brake lever, as on the toss of a coin. In Rome, when he first sensed that someone was on his trail, he had felt nothing but cold, clammy terror, a paralysing suffocation. But here in this primitive landscape what was happening seemed perfectly natural and right. This is what men were made for, he thought. The rest we have to work at, but this comes naturaly. This is what we are good at.
Even in this euporic state, howtever, he realized that some men were better at it than others, and that Vasco gpadola was certainly too good for him. If he was to survive, he had to start thinking. Fortunately his brain seemed to be working with exceptional clarity, despite the pangover. There was as yet no sign of pursuit on the road above, but as soon as Spadola emerged from the hotel he was bound to notice that the Mercedes was gone, and to realize that it could only have moved under the force of gravity. All he needed to do after that was follow the road downhill, and sooner or later – and it was likely to be sooner rather than later – he would catch up.
Below, the road wound down to the junction where Zen had stopped to consult the map on his way to the Villa Burolo twenty-four hours earlier. On the other side of the junction, he remembered, an unsurfaced track led to the station built to serve the village in the days when people were prepared to walk four or five kilometres to take advantage of the new railway. This station was Zen's goal.
There was bound to be a telephone, and the stationmaster, owing his allegiance – and more in.portantly his job – not to the locals but to the state, was bound to let Zen use it. All Criminalpol officials were provided with a codeword, changed monthly, which acted as turn-key providing the user with powers to dispose of the facilities of the forces of order from one end of the country to the other. One brief phone call, and helicopters and jeeps full of armed police would descend on the area, leaving Spadola the choice of returning to the prison cell he had so recently vacated or dying in a hail of machine-gun fire. All Zen had to do was make sure the police arrived before Spadola.
He had banked on being able to freewheel the Mercedes all the way, but as soon as he got close enough to see the track, he noticed a feature not shown on the map: a low rise of land intervening between the road and the railway.
It was difficult to estimate exactly how steep it was from the brief glances he was able to spare as he approached the last of the hairpin bends. For a moment he was tempted tc~ let the car gather speed on the final straight stretch, gambling that the accumulated momentum would be enough to carry it over the ridge. But the risk was too great. If hi didn't make it, he would be forced to abandon the Mercedes at the bottom of the slope, in full view of the road, which would be tantamount to leaving a sign explaining his intentions. When Spadola arrived, he would simply drive along the track, easily overtaking Zen before he could reach the station on foot.
By now he was seconds away from the junction. The onIy alternative was to turn on to the main road, which ran gent]y downhill to the right. Trying to conserve speed, he took the hirn so fast that the tyres lost their grip on a triangular patch of gravel in the centre of the junction and the Mercedes started to drift sideways towards the ditch on the other side. At the last moment the steering abruptls came back, almost wrenching the wheel from Zen's hands.
He steered back to the right-hand side, thankful that therc was so little traffic on these Sardinian roads. As
