"Dibdin, Michael - Aurelio Zen 02 - Vendetta UC - part 06" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dibdin Michael)

Thursday, 17.20 -- 19.10



By the time the grubby blue and grey Metropolitana train
emerged above ground at the Piramide stop, it was getting
dark. Zen walked up the broad dim steps beneath a Fascist
mural depicting the army, the family and the workers, and
out into the street.
The city's starlings were in the grip of the madness that
seizes them at the changing of the light, turning the trees
into loudspeakers broadcasting their gibberish, then
swarming up out of the foliage to circle about in the dusky
air like scraps of windborne rubbish. In the piazza below
gleaming tramlines crisscrossed in intricate patterns
leading off in every direction, only to finish abruptly a few
metres further on under a coat of tarmac or running head-
long into a traffic divider.
Instead of making a detour to the traffic lights on Via
Ostiense, Zen walked straight out into the vehicles con-
vero ng on the piazza from every direction. Maybe that
was where the starlings got the idea, he thought. Maybe
their frenzied swarming was just an attempt to imitate the
behaviour patterns of the dominant life-form. But tonight
the traffic didn't bother him. He was as invulnerable to
accidents as a prisoner under sentence of death. Respec-
ting his doomed self-assurance, the traffic flowed around
him, casting him ashore on the far side of the piazza, at the
foot of the marble pyramid.
The most direct route to where he was going lay through
Porta San Paolo and along Via Marmorata. But now that he
was nearly there Zen's fears about being followed revived,
so instead of the busy main road he took the smaller and
quieter street flanked by the city walls on one side and dull
apartment blocks on the other. Apart from a few pros-
titutes setting up their pitches in the strip of grass and
shrubs between the street and the wall, there was no one
about. He turned right through the arches opened in the
wall, then left, circling the bulky mound which gave its
name to the Testaccio district. At the base of the hill stood
a line of squat, formless, jerry-built huts, guarded by sav-
age dogs. Here metal was worked and spray-painted,
engines mended, bodywork repaired, serial numbers
altered. During Zen's time at the Questura this had been
one of the most important areas in the city for recycling
stolen vehicles.
The other main business of the district had been killin8,
but that had ceased with the closure of the slaughterhouse
complex that lay between the Testaccio hill and the river.