The road stretched invitingly away in a gentle downward slope. Zen felt his anxieties being lulled by the car's smooth, even motion, but he knew that this sense of security was an illusion. Once on the main road, Spadola's Fiat would outstrip the engineless Mercedes in a matter of minutes, while every kilometre Zen travelled away from the station was a kilometre he would have to retrace painfully on foot. The car was not now the asset it had seemed, but a liability. He had to get rid of it, but how? If he left it by the roadside, Spadola would know he was close by. He pad to ditch it somewhere out of sight, thus buying time to get back to the station on foot while Spadola continued to scour the roads for the elusive white Mercedes. Unfortenately the barren scrub-covered hills offered scant possibilities for concealing a bicycle, let alone a car.
Up ahead he saw the junction with the side-road leading down to the Villa Burolo, but he did not take it, remembering that it bottomed out in a valley where he would be stranded. What he needed was a smaller, less conspicuous turn-off, something Spadola might overlook. But time was gptting desperately short! He kept glancing compulsively in the rear-view mirror, dreading the moment when he saw the yellow Fiat on his tail. Once that happened, his fate would be sealed.
Almost too late, he caught sight of a faint dirt track opening off the other side of the road. There was no time for mature reflection or second thoughts. With a flick of his wrists, he swung the Mercedes squealing across the asphait on to the twin ruts of bare red earth. Within moments a low hummnck had almost brought the car to a halt, but in the end its forward momentum prevailed, and after that it was all Zen could do to keep it on the track, which curved back on itself, becoming progressively rougher and steeper. The steering-wheel writhed and twisted in Zen's hands until the track straightened out and ran down more gently into a holIow sunk between steep, rocky slopes where a small windowless stone hut stood in a grove of mangy trees.
Zen stopped the Mercedes at the very end of the track, out of sight of the main road. He got out and stood listening intently. The land curved up all around, containing the silence like liquid in a pot, its surface faintly troubled by a distant sound that might have been a fiying insect. Zen turned his head, tracking the car as it drove past along the road above, the engine noise fading away without any change in pitch or intensity. His shoulders slumped in relief. Spadola had not seen him turn off and had not noticed the tyre marks in the earth.
He walked over to the hut, a crude affair of stones piled one on top of the other, with a corrugated iron roof. He stooped down and peered in through the low, narrow open doorway. A faint draught carrying a strong smell of sheep blew towards him from the darkness within. It must once have been a shepherd's hut, used for storing cheese and curing hides, but was now clearly abandoned. Zen knelt down and wriggled inside, crouching on the floor of bare rock. The sheepy reek was overpowering. As his eyes adjusted to the obscurity, Zen found himself standing at the edge of a large irregular fissure in the rock. Holding his hand over the opening, he discovered that this was tke source of the draught that stirred the fetid air in the hut.
Then he remembered Turiddu saying that the whole area was riddled with caves which had once brought water down underground from the lake in the mountains. This idea of water was very attractive. His hangover had left him with the most atrocious thirst. But of course there was no more water in the caves since they had buiit the dam.
That was evidently why the hut had been abandoned, like so many of the local farms, including the one Oscar Burolo had bought for a song. Presumably this was one of the entrances to that system of caves. It was large enough to climb down into, but there was no saying what that impenetrable darkness concealed, a cosy hollow he could hide in or a sheer drop into a cavern the size of a church.
Nevertheless, he was strongly tempted to stay put. He felt safe in the hut, magically concealed and protected. In fact he knew it would be suicidal to stay. Indeed, he had already wasted far too much precious time. Before long, the road Spadola was following would start to go uphill, and he would know that Zen could not have passed that way. The network of side-roads would complicate his search slightly, but in the end a process of elimination was bound to lead him to this gully and the stranded Mercedes. The first thing he would do then would be to search the hut.
But this knowledge didn't make the alternative any more appealing. The idea of setting out on foot across country with only the vaguest idea nf where he was going was something Zen found quite horrifying. His preferred view of nature was through the window of a train whisking him from one city to another. Man's contrivances he understood, but in the open he was as vulnerable as a fox in the streets, his survival skills non-existent, his native cunning an irrelevance. Nothing less than the knowledge that his life was at stake could have impelled him to leave the hut and start to climb the boulder-strewn slope opposite.
He laboured up the hillside, using his hands to scramble up the steeper sections, grasping at rocks and shrubs, his clothes and shoes already soiled with the sterile red dirt, the leaden sky weighing down on him. He felt terrible. His limbs ached, thirst piagued him and his headache had swollen to monstrous dimensions. Half-way to the top he stopped to rest. As he stood there, panting for breath, cruelly aware how unfit he was for this kind of thing, his brain blithely presented him with the information it had withheld earlier. The anonymous note left under the windscreen-wiper of the Mercedes had claimed that Padedda's whereabouts on the night of the Burolo murders was known to 'the Melega clan of Orgosolo'. It was that name which had seemed to authenticate the writer's allegations. Antonio Melega, Zen belatedly remembered, was the young shepherd who had been buried a few days after the abortive kidnapping of Oscar Burolo, having been run over by an unidentified vehicle.
The faint hum of a passing car stirred the heavy silence.
The main road was still out of sight, and there was no particular reason to suppose that the vehicle had been Spadola's yellow Fiat. But the incident served as a reminder of Zen's exposed position on the hillside, above the hollow where the Mercedes stood out as prominently as a trashed refrigerator in a ravine. Putting every other thought out of his head, Zen attacked the slope as though it were an enemy, kicking and punching, grunting and cursing, until at last he reached the summit and the ground levelled off, conceding defeat.
Before him the landscape stretched monotonously away towards undesirable horizons. Zen trudged on through a wilderness nf armour-plated plants that might have been dead for all the signs of life they showed. To take his mind off the brutal realities of his situation, Zen tried to work out how the information he had obtained might be brought to bear on the Burolo case. And the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he had stumbled on the key to the whole mystery.
The irony was that having been sent to Sardinia to rig the Burolo case by incriminating Furio Padedda, he now possessed evidence which strongly suggested that the Sardinian was in fact guilty. With the lions Oscar had bought to patrol the grounds of his villa after the kidnap attempt, had come a man calling himself Furio Pizzoni. His real name, Palazzo Sisti had discovered, was Padedda, and he was not from the Abruzzo mountains but from those around Nuoro. And Padedda's friends, according to Turiddu's drunken revelations the night before, in addition to the traditional sheep-rustling, were also engaged in its more lucrative modern variation, kidnapping. Turiddu's companions had shut him up at that point, but the implications were clear.