Vendetta

In Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen, Michael Dibdin has given the mystery one of its most complex and compelling protagonists: a man wearily trying to enforce the law in a society where the law is constantly being bent. In this, the first novel he appears in, Zen himself has been assigned to do some law bending. Officials in a high government ministry want him to finger someone--anyone--for the murder of an eccentric billionaire, whose corrupt dealings enriched some of the most exalted figures in Italian politics.But Oscar Burolo''s murder would seem to be not just unsolvable but impossible. The magnate was killed on a heavily fortified Sardinian estate, where every room was monitored by video cameras. Those cameras captured Burolo''s grisly death, but not the face of his killer. And that same killer, elusive, implacable, and deranged, may now be stalking Zen. Inexorable in its suspense, superbly atmospheric, Vendetta is further proof of Dibdin''s mastery of the crime novel.

"Dibdin has a gift for shocking the unshockable reader." —Ruth Rendell"Vendetta has tension, wit, a strong sense of place and a hero you can't help but root for." —The Wall Street Journal"A literate, suspenseful thriller.... Spinning a plot as convoluted as Sardinia's winding streets, Dibdin iluminates a deeply corrupted society." —Milwaukee Journal"Heart-pounding.... Vendetta is a terrifying tale of revenge." —Mystery News

Auteur
Michael Dibdin was born in England and raised in Northern Ireland. He attended Sussex University and the University of Alberta in Canada. He spent five years in Perugia, Italy, where he taught English at the local university. He went on to live in Oxford, England and Seattle, Washington. He was the author of eighteen novels, eleven of them in the popular Aurelio Zen series, including Ratking, which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger, and Cabal, which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier. His work has been translated into eighteen languages. He died in 2007.

Échantillon de lecture
WEDNESDAY: 0150-0245

AURELIO ZEN LOUNGED ON THE SOFA like a listless god, bringing the dead back to life. With a flick of his finger he made them rise again. One by one the shapeless, blood-drenched bundles stirred, shook themselves, crawled about a bit, then floated upward until they were on their feet again. This extremely literal resurrection had taken them by surprise, to judge by their expressions, or perhaps it was the sight of one another's bodies that was so shocking, the hideous injuries and disfigurements, the pools and spatters of blood everywhere. But as Zen continued to apply his miraculous intervention, all this was set to rights, too: the gaping rents in flesh and fabric healed themselves, the blood mopped itself up, and in no time at all the scene looked almost like the ordinary dinner party it had been until the impossible occurred. None of the four seemed to notice the one remarkable feature of this spurious afterlife, namely that everything happened backwards.

"He did it."

Zen's mother was standing in the doorway, her nightdress clutched around her skimpy form.

"What's wrong, Mamma?"

She pointed at the television, which now showed a beach of brilliant white sand framed by smoothly curved rocks. A man was swimming backward through the wavelets. He casually dived up out of water, landed neatly on one of the rocks, and strolled backward to the shaded lounging chairs where the others sat sucking smoke out of the air and blowing it into cigarettes.

"The one in the swimming costume. He did it. He was in love with his wife so he killed him. He was in another one, too, last week on channel five. They thought he was a spy but it was his twin brother. He was both of them. They do it with mirrors."

Mother and son gazed at each other across the room lit by the electronically preserved sunlight of a summer now more than three months in the past. It was almost two o'clock in the morning, and even the streets of Rome were hushed.

Zen pressed the pause button of the remote control unit, stilling the video.

"Why are you up, Mamma?" he asked, trying to keep his irritation out of his voice. This was breaking the rules. Once she had retired to her room, his mother never reappeared. It was respect for these unwritten laws that made their life together just about tolerable from his point of view.

"I thought I heard something."

Their eyes still held. The woman who had given Zen life might have been the child he had never had, awakened by a nightmare and seeking comfort. He got up and walked over to her.

"I'm sorry, Mamma. I turned the sound right down . . ."

"I don't mean the TV."

He interrogated those bleary, evasive eyes more closely. "What, then?"

She shrugged pettishly. "A sort of scraping."

"Scraping? What do you mean?"

"Like old Umberto's boat."

Zen was often brought up short by his mother's ability to knock him off balance by some reference to a past which for her was infinitely more real than the present would ever be. He had quite forgotten Umberto, the portly, dignified proprietor of a general grocery near the San Geremia bridge. He used the boat to transport fruit and vegetables from the Rialto market, as well as boxes, cases, bottles, and jars to and from the cellars of his house, which the ten-year-old Zen had visualised as an Aladdin's cave crammed with exotic delights. When not in use, the boat was moored to a post in the little canal opposite the Zens' house. The post had a tin collar to protect the wood, and a few moments after each vaporetto passed down the Cannaregio, the wash would reach Umberto's boat and set it rubbing its gunwale against the collar, producing a series of metallic rasps.

"It was probably me moving around in here that you heard," Zen told her. "Now go back to bed before you catch cold."

"It didn't come from in here. It came from the other side. Across the canal. Just like that damned boat."

Zen took her by the arm, which felt alarmingly fragile. Widowed by the war, his mother had affronted the world alone on his behalf, wresting concessions from tradesmen and bureaucrats, labouring at menial jobs to eke out her pension, cooking, cleaning, sewing, mending, and making do, tirelessly and ingeniously hollowing out and shoring up a space for her son to grow up in. Small wonder, he thought, that the effort had reduced her to this pittance of a person, scared of noises and the dark, with no interest in anything but the television serials she watched, whose plots and characters were gradually becoming confused in her mind. Such motherhood as she had known was like those industrial jobs that leave workers crippled and broken, the only difference being that there was no one mothers could sue for damages.

Zen led her back into the musty bedroom she occupied at the back of the apartment, filled with the furniture she had brought with her from their home in Venice. The pieces were all elaborately carved from some wood as hard, dark, and heavy as iron. They covered every inch of wall space, blocking up the fire escape as well as most of the window, which she always kept tightly shuttered anyway.

"Are you going to stay up and watch the rest of that film?" she asked as he tucked her in.

"Yes, Mamma, don't worry, I'll be just in there. If you hear anything, it's only me."

"It didn't come from in there! Anyway, I told you who did it. The skinny one in the swimming costume."

"I know, Mamma," he murmured wearily. "That's what everyone thinks."

He wandered back to the living room just as two o'clock began to strike from the churches in the Vatican. Zen stood surveying the familiar faces locked up on the flickering screen. They were familiar not just to him but to everyone who had watched television or looked at the papers th…