"Dibdin, Michael - Aurelio Zen 02 - Vendetta UC - part 03" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dibdin Michael)

at once his first great triumph and his first great disil-
lusionment.
After the war, when the fighting in Italy came to an end,
many left-wing partisans were ready and willing to carry
the armed struggle one stage further, to overthrow the
government and set up a workers' state. Some had
ideological motives, others were just intoxicated by the
thrills and glamour of making history and couldn't
stomach the prospect of retuming to a life of mundane,
poorly paid work, even supposing there was work to be
had. To such men, and Vasco Spadola was one, the
decision of the Communist leader Togliatti to follow a path
of reform rather than revolution represented a betrayal.
Once it became clear that a national uprising of the Italian
working class was not going to happen, Spadola and his
comrades put their weapons and training to use in a spor-
adic campaign of bank raids and hold-ups which they tried
to justify as 'acts of class warfare'.
The success of these ventures soon caused considerable
strains and stresses within the group. On one side were
those led by Ugo and Carlo Trocchio, who still adhered to
a doctrinaire political line, and on the other Spadola's
followers, who were beginning to appreciate the possibili-
ties of this kind of private enterprise. These problems were
eventually resolved when the Trocchio brothers were shot
dead in a cafe in the Milan suburb of Rho.
With their departure, the gang abandoned all pretence
of waging a political struggle and concentrated instead on
consolidating its grip on every aspect of the city's criminal
life. High-risk bank raids were replaced by unspectacular
percentage operations such as gambling, prostitution,
drugs and extortion. Spadola's involvement in these areas
was well known to the police, but one aspect of his par-
tisan training which he had not forgotten was how to
structure an organization in such a way that it could sur-
vive the penetration or capture of individual units. No
matter how many of his operations were foiled or his
associates arrested, Spadola himself was never implicated
until the Tondelli affair.
Bruno Tondelli himself was not one of Milan's most
savoury characters, but when he was done to death with a
butcher's knife it was still murder. The Tondellis had been
engaged in a long-running territorial dispute with
Spadola's men, which no doubt explained why Spadola
, found it expedient to disappear from sight immediately
after the murder. Nevertheless, no one in the police would
have wagered a piece of used chewing-gum on their
chances of pinning it on him.
Then one day Zen, who had been given the thankless
task of investigating Tondelli's stabbing, received a mes-