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

hag jusf landed from outer space. Zen eyed it wistfully,
but tge risk was just too great. Tania would have had
time to think things over by now. Supposing she was
off hand or indifferent, a cold compensation for her
excessive warmth the day before? He would have to deal
witg ppat eventually, of course, but not now, not here,
with all the other problems he had.
The village was as still and dead as a ghost town. Zen
shambled along, looking for the pizzeria. All of a sudden
pe stopped in his tracks, then whirled around wildly,
scanning the empty street behind him. No one. What had
it been? A noise? Or just drunken fancy? 'They must have
stumbled on something they weren't supposed to see,'
the Carabiniere had said of the murdered couple in the
camper. 'It can happen to anyone, round here. All you
need is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.'
As the alcoholic mists in Zen's mind cleared for a
moment, he had an image of a child scurrying along an
alleyway running parallel to the main street, appearing at
intervals in the dark passages with steps leading up. A
child playing hide-and-seek in the darkness. But had he
imagined it, or had he really caught sight of somethin8
out of the corner of his eye, on the extreme periphery of
vision, something seen but not registered until now?
He shook his head sharply, as though to empty it of all
this nonsense. Then set off again, a little more hurriedly
now.
The pizzeria was just around the corner where the
street curved downhill, among the new blocks on the
outskirts of the village. The exterior was grimly basic --
reinforced concrete framework, bare brickwork infill,
adhesive plastic letters spelling 'Pizza Tavola Calda' on the
window -- but inside th place was bright, brash and
cheerful, decorated with traditional masks, dolls, straw
baskets and woven and embroidered hangings. To Zen's
astonishment, the young man in charge even welcomed
him warmly. Things were definitely looking up.
After a generous antipasto of local air-cured ham and
salami, a large pizza and most of a flask of red wine, they
looked even better. Zen lit a cigarette and looked around at
the group of teenagers huddled conspiratorially in the
corner, the table-top laden with empty soft-drink bottles.
If only he had had someone to talk to, it would have been
perfect. As it was, his only source of entertainment was
the label of the bottled mineral water he had ordered. This
consisted of an assurance by a professor at Cagliari
University that the contents were free of microbac-
teriological impurities, together with an encomium on its
virtues that seemed to imply that in sufficient quantities it
would cure everything but old age. Zen studied the