The path wound uphill in a lazily purposeful way that lulled Zen's attention, until suddenly he found himself standing on the brink of a deep chasm in the forest floor, scanning the trough of darkness in front of him. He could see nothing: no path, no ground, no trees. It was as if the world ended there.
After standing there indecisively for some moments, he realized the ravine offered the hiding-place he had been seeking, if he could manage to scramble down the precipiious slope below him. Nevertheless, he had to overcome a strong reluctance to descend into ".hat black hole, although he knew this revulsion was the height of foolishness. It was not the dark he should be afraid of but Spadola. He lowered himseif on to a rocky outcrop and started to clamber down.
At first the descent was easier than he had imagined, with numerous ledges and projections. But the further down he went, the fainter grew the glimmers of light fro the surface far above, until at length he could hardly make out his next foothold. The idea of losing his footing and plunging off into nothingness made his palms sweat and his limbs shake in a way that o~eatly increased the chances of this happening. The only measure of how deep the chasm was came from the falling rocks he dislodged.
Gradually the clattering became briefer and less resonant, until he sensed rather than saw that he had reached the bottom.
As his pupils dilated fully, he could just make out the hunched shapes of boulders all around, and realized that he was standing in the channel cut by the river which had flowed down from the lake above before the dam was built. N7 The huge rocks littering its bed would have been washed down in the former torrent's spectacular seasonal surges.
When he heard the scurry of falling stones behind him, Zen's first thought was that the dam had given way and the black tide, unpenned, was surging towards him, sweeping away everything in its path. Then he realized the sound had come from above.
Frantically, he began to pick his way down the riverbed, crawling round and over the shattered lumps of granite, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the killer on his trail. As soon as the noises of Spadola's descent ceased, Zen could go to ground in some obscure nook or cranny. It would take an army weeks to search that chaotic maze.
But, to his dismay, the channel ended almost immediately, widening out into a circular gully closed off by a wall of dull white rock, rounded like the end of a bath. The foliage above was thinned out by this space where nothing grew, allowing a trace more light to filter down to the depths. Zen gazed at the freakish rock formation surrounding,him. He did not understand what could have caused it, but one thing was clear. The wall of smooth white rock was at least ten metres high and absolutely sheer. Zen couldn't possibly climb it, and with Spadola hard on his heels he couldn't turn back. He had fallen into a perfect natural trap, a killing ground from which there was no escape.
The sound of tumbling rocks announced the approach of the hunter. With a weary slackness of heart, as though performing a duty for the sake of appearances, Zen knelt down and squeezed himself into a narrow crevice underneath a tilting boulder. As soon as Spadola reached the end of the gully, he would become aware that Zen could not have climbed out and must therefore be hiding nearby. He would flush him out almost at once. This time it really was the end. There was nothing to do but wait. He lay absolutely still, as though part of the rock was pressing in on him.
'Well, fuck me!'
Zen felt so lonely and scared that the words, the first he had heard since leaving the village, brought tears to his eyes. He was suddenly desperate to live, terrified of death, of extinction, of the unknown. How precious were the most banal moments of everyday life, precisely because they were banal!
A might roar scoured the enclosed confines of the gully. As the shot echoed away, Spadola's peals of manic laughter could be heard.
'Come on out, Zen! The game's over. Time to pay up.'
The voice was close by, although Zen couid see nothing but a jumble of rocks.
'Are you going to come out and die like a man, or do you want to play hide-and-seek? It's up to you, but if you piss me about I might just decide to kill you a little more slowly. Maybe a little shot in the balls, for openers. I'm not a vindictive man, but there are limits to my patience.'
Like rats leaving a doomed ship, all Zen's faculties seemed to have fled the body wedged in its rocky tomb.
He was incapable ot movement, speech or thought, already as good as dead.
Spadola laughed.
'Ah, so there you are! Decided to spare me the trouble, have you? Very wise.'
Zen still couldn't see Spadola, but somehow he had been spotted. The anomaly didn't bother him. It seemed perfectly consistent with everything else that had happened. Footsteps approached. Zen tried to think of something significant in his last moments, and failed.
Something stirred the air close to his face. Less than a metre away, close enough to touch, a boot hit the ground and a trousered leg swished past.
'There's no point in trying to hide,' Spadola shouted, his voice echoing slightly. 'I can still see you. Let's just get it over with, shall we? It's been fun, but…'
There was a loud gunshot, followed by a scream of rage and fury. Then two more shots rang out simultan- eously, one deafeningly close to Zen, the other a repetition of the first. Pellets bounced and rattled against the rocks, ricocheting like hailstones.
It seemed impossible that the silence could ever recover from such a savage violation, but before long the echoes died away as though nothing had happened. Zen had no idea what had happened, so he waited a long time, sampling the silence, before emerging from his hiding-place.
He found Spadola almost immediately, his body fiung backwards across the rocks, a limp, discarded carapace.
Something had scooped a raw crater out of his belly, around which circles of lesser destruction spread out like ripples on a pond. The shotgun lay close by, wedged between two rocks.
Zen searched dispassionately through the dead man's pockets until he found his lighter, then sat down on a rock and lit a cigarette. From this perch he could see the end of the gully. Beneath the wall of white rock the ground opened up to form a cavernous sluice funnelling downwards, the edges clean and rounded. As he sat there, the cigarette smouldering peacefully between his fingers, Zen recalled what Turiddu had said about the soft rocks and the hard rocks, and realized that the white surface closing off the gully was the limestone that overlaid the granite at this point, rubbed to a smooth curve by the whirling water before it disappeared underground into the pool of darkness at the base of the cliff which was now a main entrance to the cave system underlying the whole area.
Something glinted in the shadows just inside the cavern. Like the immortal he had once seemed to be, playing God with the video of the Burolo killings, Zen made his way towards it as though immune to danger.
The grey rock was stained with something sticky that, smelling it, he knew was drying blood. A double-barrel pump-action Remington shotgun lay near by. The metal was still warm. By the flickering flame of his cigarette lighter, Zen read the inscription engraved on the barreclass="underline" 251 'To Oscar, Christmas 1979, from his loving wife Rita.'
Friday, 11.20 – 20.45
'He threatened to kill me?'
'Oh, yes! Me too, for that matter. But it's only talk. He has to call his mother if he finds a spider in the bath. Now if she'd said it we might have something to worry about.'
The cafe on Via Veneto accurately reflected the faded glories of the street itself. The mellow tones of marble, leather and wood predominated. Dim lighting discreetly revealed the understated splendours of an establishment so prestigious it had no need to put on a show. Its famous name appeared everywhere, on the cups and saucers, the spoons, the sugar-bowl and ashtray, the peach-coloured napkins ar,d tablecloth and the staff' azure jackets. The waiters conducted themselves like family retainers, studiously polite yet avoiding any hint o1 familiarity. A sumptuous calm reigned.