Vendetta - 2 by Michael Dibdin

Author:Michael Dibdin [Dibdin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Police Procedural, General, Historical, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780571161652
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 1990-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tania sighed.

‘I don’t know what you must think of me,’ she said despondently.

‘Don’t you? Don’t you really?’

They looked at each other in silence for some time.

‘So what is it you want?’ she asked eventually.

Zen looked at her in some embarrassment. Now that his request had become the subject of so much flirtatious persiflage, it would be ridiculous to admit that he had only wanted her to field a phone call for him.

‘I can’t tell you here,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit complicated, and well, there’re various reasons. Look, I don’t suppose you could have lunch with me?’

It was a delaying tactic. He was counting on her to refuse.

‘But you’ve already got a lunch engagement,’ she objected.

It took him a little while to understand.

‘Oh, the phone call! No, that’s … that’s for another day.’

Tania inspected her fingernails for a moment. Then she reached out and lightly, deliberately, scratched the back of his hand. The skin turned white and then red, as though burned.

‘I’d have to be home by three,’ she told him. She sounded like an adolescent arranging a date.

Zen was aboat to reply when ‘he phone rang again.

‘Ministry of Justice, Records Section, calling with reference to your inquiry in re Spadola, Vasco Ernesto.’

‘Yes?’

‘The subject was released from Asinara prison on y October of this year.’

Zen’s response was a silence so profound that even the disembodied voice unbent sufficiently to add, ‘Hello?

Anyone there?’

‘Thank you. That’s all.’

He hung up and turned back to Tania Biacis.

‘Shall we meet downstairs then?’ he suggested casually, as though they’d been lunching together for years.

She nodded. ‘Fine. Now p1ease go and see what Moscati wants before he takes it out on me.’

Lorenzo Moscati, head of Criminalpol, was a short stout man with smooth, rounded features which looked as though they were being flattened out by an invisible stocking-mask.

‘Eh, finally!’ he exclaimed when Zen appeared. ‘I’ve been able to round up everyone except you. Where did you get to? Never mind, no point in you attending the briefing anyway. All about security for the Camorra trial in Naples next week. But that won’t concern you, because you’re off to Sardinia, you lucky dog! That report you did on the Burolo case was well received, very well received indeed. Now we want you to go and put flesh on the bones, as it were. You leave on Monday. See Ciliani for details of flights and so on.’

Zen nodded.

‘While I’m here, there’s something else I’d like to discuss,’ he said.

Moscati consulted his watch. ‘Is it urgent?’

‘You could say that. I think someone’s trying to kill me.’

Moscati glanced at his subordinate to check that he’d heard right, then again to see if Zen was joking.

‘What makes you think that?’

Zen paused, wondering where to begin.

‘Strange things have been happening to me recently.

Someone’s picked the lock to my apartment and broken in while I’m not there. But instead of taking anything, they leave things instead.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘First an envelope full of shotgun pellets. Then something which had been stolen from me at the bus-stop a couple of days earlier.

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