"Dibdin, Michael - Aurelio Zen 02 - Vendetta UC - part 09" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dibdin Michael)

Saturday, 20.10 -- 22.25



By eight o'clock that evening, Herr Reto Gurtner was in a
philosophical mood. Aurelio Zen, on the other hand, was
drunk and lonely.
The night was heavy and close, with occasional rum-
bles of thunder. The bar was crowded with men of all
ages, talking, smoking, drinking, playing cards. Apart
from the occasional oblique glance, they ignored the
stranger sitting at a table near the back of the room. But
his presence disturbed them, no question about that.
They would much rather he had not been there. In an
earlier, rougher era they would have seen him off the
premises and out of the village. That was no longer pos-
sible, and so, reflected the philosophical Gurtner, they
were willing him into non-existence, freezing him out,
closing the circle against him.
Despite evident differences in age, education and
income, all the men were dressed in very similar clothes:
sturdy, drab and functional. In Rome it was the clothes
you noticed first these days, not the mass-produced
figures whose purpose seemed to be to display them to
advantage. But here in this dingy backward Sardinian bar
it was still the people that mattered. We've thrown out
the baby with the bathwater, reflected the philosophical
Gurtner. Eradicating poverty and prejudice, we've eradi-
cated something else too, something as rare as any of the
threatened species the ecologists make so much fuss
apout, and just as impossible to replace once it has become
extinct.
Bullshit, Aurelio Zen exclaimed angrily, pouring himself
another glass of vernaccia from the carafe he had ordered.
The storm-laden atmosphere, the distasteful nature of his
business, his sense of total isolation, the fact that he was
missing Tania badly, all these had combined to put him in
a sour and irrational mood. This priggish, patronizing
Zuricher was the last straw. Who did he think he was,
coming over here and going on as though poverty was
something romantic and valuable? Only a nation as crassly
and smugly materialistic as the Swiss could afford to
indulge in that sort of sentimentality.
He gulped the tawny wine that clung to the sides of the
glass like spirits. It was tasting better all the time. Once
again he thought of phoning Tania, and once again he
rejected the idea. The more he lovingly recalled, detail by
detail, what had happened that lunchtime, the more
unlikely it appeared. He must surely have imagined the