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 away, rippling over hillocks and outcrops, reaching down to the sea, a shimmering inconclusive extension of the panorama like the row of dots after an incomplete sentence. The predominant colours were reddish ochre and olive green, mingled together like the ingredients of a sauce, retaining their individuality yet also creating something new. In all that vast landscape there was no sign of man's presence, except for a distant plume of smoke from the papermill near the harbour where he had disembarked that morning. The only eyesore was a large patch of greenery off to the left, on the flanks of the mountain range. Its almost fluorescent shade reminded Zen of the unsuccessful colour postcards of his youth. Presumably it was a forest, but how did any forest rooted in that grudging soil come to glow in that hysterical way?
The road looped down to the main road leading up over the mountains towards Nuoro, the provincial capital where Renato Favelloni now languished in judicial custody. According to the map, the unsurfaced track opposite petered out after a short distance at an isolated station on the metre-gauge railway. Zen turned right, then after a few kilometres forked left on to a road badly in need of repair which ran across the lower slopes of the valley, crossing the railway line, before climbing the other side to join the main coastal highway.
Some distance before the junction, a high wire-mesh fence came down from the ridge to Zen's left to run alongside the road. At regular intervals, large signs warned 'Private Property – Keep Out – Electrified Fencing – Beware of the Lions'. The landscape was bare and windswept, a desolate chaos of rock, scrub and stunted ~ees. After some time a surfaced driveway opened off the road to the left, leading to a gate of solid steel set in the wire-mesh fence.
Even before the Mercedes had come to a complete halt, the gate started to swing open. Zen pressed his foot down on the accelerator and the car, still in third gear, promptly stalled. Managing to restart it at the third attempt, he drove through the barrier, only to find his way blocked by a second gate, identical to the first, which had meanwhile closed behind him, trapping the car between the wiremesh fencing and a parallel inner perimeter of razorbarbed wire. Remote-control cameras mounted on the inner gateposts scanned the Mercedes with impersonal curiosity. After about thirty seconds the inner gate swung silently open, admitting Zen to the late Oscar Burolo's private domain.
The narrow strip of tarmac wound lazily up the hillside.
After about fifty metres, Zen spotted the line of stumpy metal posts planted at irregular intervals, depending on the contours of the land, which marked the villa's third and most sophisticated defence of alclass="underline" a phase-seeking microwave fence, invisible, intangible, impossible to cross undetected. Within the triply-defended perimeter, the whole property was protected by heat-seeking infra-red detectors, a move-alarm TV system and microwave radar.
All the experts were agreed that security at the Villa Burolo was, if anything, excessive. It just hadn't been sufficient.
Oscar's private road continued to climb steadily upwards, smashing its way through ancient stretches of dry-stone walling that were almost indistinguishable from outbreaks of the rock that was never far from the surface, loose boulders of all sizes lying scattered about like some kind of crop, but in fact nothing grew there except a low scrub of juniper, privet, laurel, heather, rosemary and gorse, a prickly stubble as tough and enduring as the rocks themselves.
Finally the land levelled out briefly, then fell away more steeply to a hollow where the house appeared, sheltered from the bitter northerly winds. From this angle, the Villa Burolo seemed a completely modern creation. The south and east sides of the original farmhouse were concealed by new wings containing the guest suites, kitchen, scullery, laundry room, garage and service accommodation. To the right, in a quarry-like area scooped out of the hillside, was the helicopter landing pad and a steel mast housing the radio beacon for night landings and aerials for Oscar's extensive communications equipment.