"Dibdin, Michael - Aurelio Zen 02 - Vendetta UC - part 01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dibdin Michael)

streaks on the whitewashed plaster.
It had taken less than twenty seconds to turn the room
into an abattoir. Fifteen seconds later, the caretaker would
appear, having run from the two-room service flat where he
and his wife had been watching a variety show on tele-
vision. Until then, apart from wine dripping from a broken
bottle at the edge of the table and a swishing caused by
the convulsive twitches of the dying Vianello's arm, there
was no sound whatsoever. 'If anyone ever manages to
break into this place, I'll believe in ghosts,' the security
analyst had assured Oscar Burolo. Nevertheless, someone
or something had got in, butchered the inhabitants and
then vanished without trace, all in less than a minute and
in perfect silence. Even in broad daylight and the company
of others it was difficult to ignore this almost supernatural
dimension of the killings. In the eerie doldrums of the
night, all alone, it seemed impossible to believe that there
could be a rational explanation for them.
The silence of the running tape was broken by a distant
scraping sound. Zen felt his skin crawl and the hairs on his
head stir. He reached for the remote control unit and
stilled the video. The noise continued, a low persistent
scraping. 'Like old Umberto's boat,' his mother had said.
Zen walked quietly across to the inner hallway of the
apartment, opened the door to his mother's bedroom and
looked inside.
'Can you hear it?' a voice murmured in the darkness.
'Yes, mamma.'
'Oh good. I thought it might be me, imagining it. I'm not
quite right in the head sometimes, you know.'
He gazed towards 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 giving on to 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 paraphenalia of
muscles and arteries disturbingly revealed by the