And what are we supposed to do here? There's no work. The mountains take what little rain there is, the winter pasture isn't worth a shit. What's the matter? You're not drinking.'
Zen obediently gulped down the liquid in his glass as the Sardinian had done, and almost gagged. It was raw grappa, steely, unfiltered, virtually pure alcohol.
'Good,' he gasped. 'Strong.'
Turiddu shrugged.
'I've got some at home makes this taste like water.'
The door of the pizzeria swung open. Zen looked round and recognized Furio Padedda, who had just walked in with another man. Zen turned back to his new companions, glad of their company, their protection.
'Tell me, why is that bit of forest on the other side of the valley so green? It almost looks as though somenne was watering it.'
Turiddu gave an explosive laugh that turned into a coughing fit.
'They are! We are, with our water!'
He refilled all the glasses with grappa.
'The dam they built, it was done on the cheap. Bunch of crooks from Naples. It leaks, not much but all the time. On the surface the soil is dry, but those trees have roots that go down twenty metres or more. Down there it's like a marsh. The trees grow like geese stuffed for market.'
Zen glanced round at Furio Padedda and his companion, who were sitting near the door, drinking beer.
Despite his drunkenness, Turiddu had not missed Zen's interest in the newcomers.
'You know them?' he demanded with a contemptuous jerk of his thumb at the other table.
'One of them. We met today at the villa where he works.'
Turiddu regarded him with a stupified expression.
'That place? You're not thinking of buying it?'
Zen looked suitably discreet.
'My client will make the final decision. But it seems an attractive house.'
The three men glanced rapidly at each other, their looks dense with exchanged information, like deaf people communicating in sign language.
'Why, is there something wrong with it?'
Zen's expression remained as smooth as processed cheese. Turiddu struggled visibly with his thoughts for a moment.
'It used to belong to my family,' he announced finally.
'Before they took our water away.'
He stared drunkenly at Zen, daring him to disbelieve his story. Zen nodded thoughtfully. It might be true, but he doubted it. Turiddu was a bit of a fantasist, he guessed, a man with longings and ambitions that were too big for his small-town habitat but not quite big enough to give him the courage to leave.
The Sardinian laughed again. 'You saw the electric fences and the gates and all that? He spent a fortune on that place, to make it safe, the poor fool. And it's all useless!'
Zen frowned. 'Do you mean to say that the security system is defective in some way?'
But Turiddu did not pursue the matter. He was looking around with a vague expression, a cigarette whirh he had forgotten to light dangling from his lips.
'Just take my advice, my friend,' he said. 'Have nothing to do with that place. Terrible things have happened there, things you can't wash away with water, even if there was any. There are plenty of nice villas up north, on the coast, houses for rich foreigners. Down here is not the place for them. There are too many naughty boys. Like that one over there, for instance.'
He nodded towards Furio Padedda, who was just finishing his beer.
'Is he a friend of yours?' asked Zen.
Turiddu slapped the table so hard that the bottle nearly fell over.
'Him? He's no one's friend, not round here! He's a foreigner. He's got friends all right, up in the mountains.'
He lowered his voice to a sly whisper.
'They don't grow crops up there, you know. They don't grow anything, the lazy bastards. They just take whatever they want. Sheep, cattle. Sometimes people too. Then they get very rich very quick!'
One of his companions said something brief and forceful in Sardinian. Turiddu frowned but was silent.
A shadow fell across the table. Zen looked up to find Furio Padedda standing over him.
'Good evening, Herr Gurtner,' he said, stressing the foreign title.
'What the fuck do you want, Padedda?' growled Turiddu.
'I just wanted to greet our friend frcm Switzerland here.
Been having a drink, have you? Several drinks, in fact.'
'None of your fucking business,' Turiddu told him.
'I was thinking of Herr Gurtner,' Padedda continued in an even tone. 'He should be careful. Our Sardinian grappa might be a little strong for him.'
He called his companion over.
'Let me introduce my friend Patrizio. Patrizio, Herr Reto Gurtner of Zurich.'
Patrizio held out his hand and said something incomprehensible. Zen smiled politely.
'I'm sorry, I don't understand dialect.'
Padedda's eyes narrowed.
'Not even your own?'
A silence like thick fog fell over the pizzeria. You could feel it, taste it, smell it, see it.
'Patrizio spent eight years in Switzerland working on the Saint Bernard tunnel,' Padedda explained. 'He speaks Swiss German fluently. Oddly enough, it seems that Herr Reto Gurtner does not.'
I knew him at once. They think they're so clever, the others, but their cleverness is lost on me. It's a poison that doesn't take, a disease I'm immune to. Their conjuring tricks are meant for them, the children of the light to whom everything is what it seems, the way it looks. The policeman just provided himself with false papers and a big car and – presto! – he was magically transformed in his own eyes and theirs into a foreign businessman come to buy property. They believe in property, they believe in documents and papers, namcs and dates. How could they not believe in him? Living out a lie themselves, hou~ could they recognize his lies?
But I knew who he was the moment I set eyes on him. I kneu› wh!i he Jmd come and why he wanted to see the house. I knew what lay behind his sly questions and insinuating remarks, his prying and peeping.
I was very bold, I confronted him openly. He shied away, seeming not to know me. The darkness showed its hand for an instant, like a brief eclipse of the sun, and I read death in his eyes. I'd seen it before with the animals Father killed. I knew what it meant.
Perhaps he too sensed that something was going on. Perhaps he even suspected that his life was in danger. But how could he have had the slightest idea who it was that represented that danger?
Sunday, 07.00 – 11.20
Perhaps if the kidnap attempt had not occurred when he had been driving back from it, Oscar Burolo might have shown his appreciation to the local church by donating a set of real bells. It was the kind of showy gesture he was fond of, stage-managed to look like an impulsive act ~›t generosity, although in fact he would have costed the whole thing down to the last lira and got a massive discount from the foundry in return for some building work using materials recycled from another contract. Nevertheless, the village church would have got its bells. As it was, it had to make do with a gramophone record of a carillon played through loudspeakers, and it was this that woke Aurelio Zen shortly before dawn the following morning.
The gramophone record was very old, with a loud scratch which Zen's befuddled brain translated as high-velociti shots being fired at him by a marksman perched in thv bell-tower. Luckily, by the time they reached his room the bullets had slowed down considerably, and in the ena they just hovered in the air about his face, darting this waxand that like dragonflies, a harmless nuisance.
As the recorded bells finally fell silent, Zen opened his eyes on a jumble of colours and blurred shapes, impossible to sort by size or distance. He waited patiently for things to start making sense, but when minutes went by and hi~ surroundings still refused to snap into focus, he began tc worry that he had done some permanent injury to his brain. pe hauled himself upright in bed, slumping back against the wooden headboard.