Cabal: An Aurelio Zen Mystery by Michael Dibdin

Author:Michael Dibdin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 057127062X
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2012-06-06T05:00:00+00:00

Zen put the note down with a sigh. They had had a video recorder for two years now, but his mother still refused to believe that it was possible to tape a television program successfully without the set being switched on and the volume turned up.

“… refuse to recognize deterministic limitations on my right to be whoever I choose. No one has the right to tell me who I am, to chain me to the Procrustean bed of so-called ‘objective reality.’ All that counts is my fantasy, my genius, my flair, eternally fashioning and refashioning myself and the world around me …”

The voice vanished abruptly as Zen twisted the volume control. He took out his pen and scrawled a message at the bottom of his mother’s note to the effect that he had got back safely from Florence and would see her for dinner. For some reason he found his mother’s absence disturbing. It was good that she was out and about, of course, keeping herself busy. Nevertheless, there was something about the whole arrangement that jarred. He set the note down on top of the television, walked back down the hallway, and opened the last door on the right.

The pent-up odors of the past broke over him like a wave: camphor and mildew, patent medicines and obsolete toiletries, stiffened leather, smoky fur, ghostly perfumes, the whiff of sea fog. He pushed his way through the piles of overflowing trunks, chests, and boxes. Spiders and wood lice froze, then broke ranks and scattered in panic as the colossus approached. There it was, in the far corner, perched on a plinth of large cardboard boxes containing back numbers of Famiglia Cristiana from the early 1950s. The gaily painted wooden box had originally been stamped with the insignia of the State Railways and a warning about the detonators it had contained. Zen still vividly recalled his wonder at the transformation wrought by his father’s paintbrush, which had magically turned this discarded relic into a toy box for little Aurelio.

Reaching over so far his stomach muscles protested, he pulled the box down and removed the lid. Then he sifted through the contents—windup train set, tin drum, lead soldiers and battleships—until he found the revolver that had been made specially for him by a machinist in the locomotive works at Mestre. The man had been an ardent Blackshirt, and although unfireable, the gun was an accurate replica of the 9mm Beretta he carried when he went out to raise hell with his fellow squadristi. Zen weighed it in his hand, tracing the words MUSSOLINI DUX incised in the solid barrel, remembering epic battles and cowboy showdowns in the back alleys of the Cannaregio. The pistol had been the envy of all his friends, but its connections with the leader whose adventurism had caused his father’s death perhaps explained Zen’s lifelong reluctance to carry a firearm, or even learn to use one.

He squeezed his way back out of the storeroom with a sigh of relief, as though emerging from a prison cell.

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