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

light in her eyes, the lift in her voice. The facts were not in
dispute, it was a question of how you interpreted them. It
was the same with the Burolo case. It was the same with
everything.
Zen peered intently at the tabletop, which swam in and
out of focus in a fascinating way. For a moment he seemed
to have caught a glimpse oc a great truth, a unified field
theory of humar. existence, a simple hasic formula that
explained everything.
This wine is very strong, Reto Gurtner explained in his
slightly pedantic accent. You have drunk a lot of it on an
empty stomach. It has gone to your head. The thing to do
now is to get something to eat.
Well, it was easy to say that! Hadn't he been waiting all
this time for some sign of life in the restaurant area? It was
now nearly a quarter past eight, and the lights were still
dimmed and the curtain drawn. What time did they eat
here, for God's sake?
Once again the thunder growled distantly, reminding
Zen of the jet fighter which had startled him at the villa.
There had been no hint of a storm then. On the contrary,
the sky was free from any suspicion of cloud, a perfect
dome of pale bleached blue from which the winter sun
shone brilliantly yet without ferocity, a tyrant mellowed by
age. The route to the villa lay along the same road by
which he had arrived, but in this direction it looked quite
different. Instead of a forbidding wall of mountains closing
off the view, the land swept down and away, rippling over
hillocks and outcrops, reaching down to the sea, a shim-
mering inconclusive extension of the panorama like the
row of dots after an incomplete sentence. The predomi-
nant colours were reddish ochre and olive green, mingled
together like the ingredients of a sauce, retaining their
individuality yet also creating something new. In all that
vast landscape there was no sign of man's presence,
except for a distant plume of smoke from the papermill
near the harbour where he had disembarked that morn-
ing. The only eyesore was a large patch of greenery off to
the left, on the flanks of the mountain range. Its almost
fluorescent shade reminded Zen of the unsuccessful
colour postcards of his youth. Presumably it was a forest,
but how did any forest rooted in that grudging soil come to
glow in that hysterical way?
The road looped down to the main road leading up over
the mountains towards Nuoro, the provincial capital
where Renato Favelloni now languished in judicial cus-
tody. According to the map, the unsurfaced track opposite
petered out after a short distance at an isolated station on
the metre-gauge railway. Zen turned right, then after a
few kilometres forked left on to a road badly in need of