Vendetta: An Aurelio Zen Mystery Read Online Free Page B

imagining it. I’m not quite right in the head sometimes, you know.”
    He gazed toward the invisible bed. It was the first time that she had ever made such an admission. They were both silent for some time, but the noise did not recur.
    “Where is it coming from?” he asked.
    “The wardrobe.”
    “Which wardrobe?”
    There were three of them in the room, filled with clothes that no one would ever wear again, carefully preserved from moths by liberal doses of napthalene, which gave the room its basic funereal odour.
    “The big one,” his mother replied.
    The biggest wardrobe occupied the central third of the wall that opened onto the internal courtyard of the building. Its positioning had occasioned Zen some anxiety at the time, since it obstructed access to the fire escape, but the wardrobe was too big to fit anywhere else.
    Zen walked over to the bed and straightened the counterpane and sheets. Then he patted the hand which emerged from the covers, all the obsolete paraphernalia of muscles and arteries disturbingly revealed by the parchmentlike skin.
    “It was just a rat, Mamma.”
    The best way of dispelling her formless, childish fears was by giving her a specific unpleasantness to focus on.
    “But it sounded like metal.”
    “The skirting’s lined with zinc,” he improvised. “To stop them gnawing through. I’ll speak to Giuseppe in the morning and we’ll get the exterminators in. You try and get some sleep now.”
    Back in the living room, he turned off the television and rewound the video tape, trying to dispel his vague sense of unease by thinking about the report which he had to write the next day. It was the lateness of the hour that made everything seem strange and threatening now, the time when—according to what Zen’s uncle had once told him—a house belongs not to the person who happened to live there now, but to all those who have preceded him over the centuries. Tomorrow morning everything would have snapped back into proportion and the uncanny aspects of the Burolo case would seem mere freakish curiosities. The only real question was whether to mention them at all. It wasn’t that he wanted or needed to conceal anything. For that matter he wouldn’t have known where to begin, since he had no idea who the report was destined for. The problem was that there were certain aspects of the Burolo case which were very difficult to mention without laying himself open to the charge of being a credulous nincompoop. For example, the statement made by the seven-year-old daughter of Oscar Burolo’s lawyer, who had visited the villa in late July. As a special treat, she had been allowed to stay up for dinner with the adults, and in the excitement of the moment she had sneaked some of her father’s coffee, with the result that she couldn’t sleep. It was a luminous summer night, and eventually the child left her room and set out to explore the house. According to her statement, in one of the rooms in the older part of the villa she saw a figure moving about. “At first I was pleased,” she said. “I thought it was a child, and I was lonely for someone to play with. But then I remembered that there were no children at the villa. I got scared and ran back to my room.”
    Including things like that could easily make him the laughing-stock of the department, while if he left them out he laid himself open to the charge of suppressing evidence. Fortunately it was no part of Zen’s mandate to draw conclusions or offer opinions. All that was needed was a brief report describing the various lines of investigation which had been conducted by the police and the Carabinieri and outlining the evidence against the various suspects. A clerical chore, in short, to which he was bringing nothing but an ability to read between the lines of official documents, picking out the grain of what was not being said from the overwhelming chaff of what was. Watching the video had been the last stage in this procedure. There