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

sage from an informer asking for a meeting. In order to
protect them, informers' real names and addresses were
kept in a locked file to which only a very few high-ranking
officials had access; everyone else referred to them by their
code name. The man who telephoned Zen, known as 'the
nightingale', was one of the police's most trusted and
reliable sources of information.
The meeting duly took place in a second-class compart-
ment of one of the Ferrovia Nord trains trundling up the
line to Seveso. It was a foggy night in February. At one of
the intermediate stations a man joined Zen in the pre-
arranged compartment. Pale, balding, slight and diffident,
he might have been a filing clerk or a university professor.
Vasco Spadola, he said, was hiding out in a farmhouse to
the east of the city.
'I was there the night Tondelli got killed,' the informer
went on. 'Spadola stabbed him with his own hand.
"This'll teach the whole litter of them a lesson," he said.'
'A lot of use that is to us if you won't testify,' Zen
retorted irritably.
The man gave him an arch look.
'Who said I wouldn't testify?'
And testify he duly did. Not only that, but when the
police raided the farm house near the village of Melzo,
they t'ound not only Vasco Spadola but also a knife which
proved to have traces of blood of the same group that had
once flowed in Bruno Tondelli's veins.
Spadola was sentenced to life imprisonment and Aurelio
Zen spent three days basking in glory. Then he learned
from an envious colleague that the knife had been smeared
with a sample of Tondelli's blood and planted at the scene
by the police themselves, and that the reason why 'the
nightingale' had been prepared to come into court and
testify that he had seen Spadola commit murder was that
the Tondellis had paid him handsomely to do so.
Zen closed the file and handed it back to the clerk with
the blank video cassette.
'Oh by the way, if it isn't too much trouble, do you think
you could manage to get my name right next time?' he
asked sarcastically, flourishing the memorandum.
'What's wrong with it?' the clerk demanded, taking the
substitute video without a second glance.
'My name happens to be Zen, not Zeno.'
'Zen's not Italian.'
'Quite right, it's Venetian. But since it's only three
letters long, I'd have thought that even you lot would be
capable of spelling it correctly. And while we're at it, what
the hell does this say?'
He indicated the phrase scribbled in the blank space.
'"... since it is needed by another official",' the clerk