"Dibdin, Michael - Aurelio Zen 02 - Vendetta UC - part 10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dibdin Michael)

Sunday, 07.00 -- 11.20


Perhaps if the kidnap attempt had not occurred when he
had been driving back from it, Oscar Burolo might have
shown his appreciation to the local church by donating a
set of real bells. It was the kind of showy gesture he was
fond of, stage-managed to look like an impulsive act ~>t
generosity, although in fact he would have costed the
whole thing down to the last lira and got a massive dis-
count from the foundry in return for some building work
using materials recycled from another contract. Neverthe-
less, the village church would have got its bells. As it was,
it had to make do with a gramophone record of a carillon
played through loudspeakers, and it was this that woke
Aurelio Zen shortly before dawn the following morning.
The gramophone record was very old, with a loud scratch
which Zen's befuddled brain translated as high-velociti
shots being fired at him by a marksman perched in thv
bell-tower. Luckily, by the time they reached his room the
bullets had slowed down considerably, and in the ena
they just hovered in the air about his face, darting this wax-
and that like dragonflies, a harmless nuisance.
As the recorded bells finally fell silent, Zen opened his
eyes on a jumble of colours and blurred shapes, impossible
to sort by size or distance. He waited patiently for things to
start making sense, but when minutes went by and hi~
surroundings still refused to snap into focus, he began tc
worry that he had done some permanent injury to his
brain. pe hauled himself upright in bed, slumping back
against the wooden headboard.
Things improved Somewhat True, he Still had a Sp]it-
ting headache and felt like he might throw up at any
moment, hut to his relief the objects in the room began --
a little reluctantly, it seemed -- to assume the shapes and
relationships he vaguely remembered from the previous
cfay. There was the large plywood wardrobe with the
cfoor that wouldn't close properly and the wire coat-
pangers hanging like bats from a branch. There was the
small table with its cumbersome ceramic lamp, and the
three cheap ugly wooden chairs squatting like refugees
awaiting bad news. From a ceiling the colour of spoiled
milk a long rusty chain supported a dim light, whose
irregular thick glass bowl must have looked very futur-
istic in about 1963.
There was the washbasin, the rack for glasses below
the mirror and the dud bulb above, the metal rubbish bin
with its plastic liner, the barred window lying open into
the room. He must have forgotten to close it when he