"Dibdin, Michael - Aurelio Zen 02 - Vendetta UC - part 07" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dibdin Michael)

These documents must be filed in chronological order.
Look, this judicial review shouldn't be here. It must come
at the end.'
'Let me see that!'
The form was stiff and heavy, imitation parchment. The
text, set in antique type and printed in the blackest of inks,
was as dense and lapidary as Latin, clogged with odd
abbreviations and foreshortenings, totally impenetrable.
But there was no need to read it to understand the import
of the document. It was enough to scan the brief phrases
inserted by hand in the spaces left blank by the printer. 29
April 1964... Milan... Spadola, Vasco Emesto... culp-
able homicide ... life imprisonment ... investigating
magistrate Giulio Bertolini...'
It was enough to scan the spaces, read the messages,
make the connections. That was enough, thought Zen. But
he had failed to do it, and now it might be too late.
Back at his desk in the Criminalpol offices, which were
deserted that morning, Zen phoned the Ministry of Justice
and inquired about the penal status of Vasco Ernesto
Spadola, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in
Milan on zg April xg64. A remote and disembodied voice
announced that he would be rung back with the infor-
mation in due course.
Zen lit a cigarette and wandered over to the window,
looking down at the forecourt of the Ministry with its
pines and shrubbery which flanked the sweep of steps
leading down to the huge shallow bath of the fountain in
Piazza del Viminale. Although the implications of the
facts he had just stumbled on were anything but
cheering, he felt relieved to find that there was at least a
rational explanation for the things that had been going
on. It was not just an uncanny coincidence that Zen had
happened to ask for the Spadola file the day that he had
read about the killing of Judge Bertolini. At some level
beneath his conscious thoughts he must have recalled the
one occasion on which his and the murdered judge's
paths had crossed. As for Parrucci, the reason why the
name had meant nothing to Zen was that he knew the
informer only by his codename, 'the nightingale'. When
Parrucci agreed to testify against Spadola, his name had
been revealed, but by that time Zen's involvement with
the case was at an end.
A thin Roman haze softened the November sunlight,
giving it an almost summery languor. At a window on the
other side of the piazza a woman was hanging out bedding
to air on the balcony. A three-wheeled Ape van was
unloading cases of mineral water outside the bar below,
while on the steps of the Ministry itself three chauffeurs
were having an animated discussion involving sharp deci-