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

everyone happy was just go through the motions.
Unfortunately, by the time he finally realized this, Zen
had already alienated most of his new colleagues. Admit-
tedly he had started with a serious handicap, owing to the
manner of his appointment, which had been engineered
by one of the suspects in the Miletti kidnapping case he
had investigated in Perugia. Zen's subsequent promotion
had naturally been regarded by many people as a form of
pay-off, which was bound to cause resentment. But this
might eventually have been forgiven, if it hadn't been for
the newcomer's tactless display of energy, together with
the bad luck of his having made an enemy of one of the
most articulate and popular men on the staff. Vincenzo
Fabri had tried unsuccessfully on a number of occasions to
use political influence to have himself promoted, and he
couldn't forgive Zen for succeeding where he had failed.
Fabri provided a focus for the feelings of antipathy which
Zen had aroused, and which he kept alive with a success-
ion of witty, malicious anecdotes that only came to Zen's
ears when the damage had been done. And because
Fabri's grudge was completely irrational, Zen knew that it
was all the more likely to last.
He crumpled his paper napkin into a ball, tossed it into
the rubbish bin and went to pay the cashier sitting at a
desk in the angle between the two doors of the cafe. The
newspaper the dentist had been reading lay open on the
bar, and Zen couldn't ignore the thunderous headline:
THE RED BRIGADES RETURN'. Scanning the article
beneath, he learned that a judge had been gunned down
at his home in Milan the night before.
So that was what the dentist's rhetorical questions had
referred to. What indeed was the sense of it all? There had
been a time when such mindless acts of terrorism, how-
ever shocking, had at least seemed epic gestures of
undeniable significance. But that time had long passed,
and re-runs were not only as morally disgusting as the
originals, but also dated and second-hand.
As he walked to the bus stop, Zen read in his own paper
about the shooting. The murdered judge, one Bertolini,
had been gunned down when returning home from work.
His chauffeur, who had also been killed, had fired at the
attackers and was thought to have wounded one of them.
Bertolini was not a particularly important figure, nor did
he appear to have had any connection with the trials of
Red Brigades' activists. The impression was that he had
been chosen because he represented a soft target, itself a
humiliating comment on the decline in the power of the
terrorists from the days when they had seemed able to
strike at will.
Zen's eyes drifted off to the smaller headlines further