Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen looked up at the window. He nodded slowly to himself. That would do nicely. It was too trivial to have excited any interest from any of the resident staff, but the family connection would provide exactly the kind of illusory logic he needed to justify his involvement to anyone who asked. He noted down the date and case number in his diary and replaced the list in the metal tray.

  When the Personnel office responded to the phone half an hour later, Zen went along and introduced himself. The clerk in charge dug out the chit which had been faxed up from Rome.

  ‘Zen, Aurelio. Criminalpol. Temporary transfer regarding …’

  He frowned at the form.

  ‘That’s odd. They’ve forgotten to fill that bit in.’

  Zen shook his head.

  ‘Typical! The people they’re employing these days can’t remember their own names half the time.’

  He took out his notebook.

  ‘It’s to do with someone called Zulian. I’ve got the details here somewhere … Yes, here you go.’

  He showed the reference number and date to the clerk, who copied them on to the chit.

  ‘I’ll need some office space,’ Zen remarked. ‘What have you got available?’

  The clerk consulted a wall-chart.

  ‘How long are you going to be here?’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘Hard to say. A week or two at least.’

  ‘There’s a desk free in three one nine until the seventeenth. Gatti’s on holiday until then.’

  Room 319 was a small office at the front of the building, overlooking the canal. Zen was looking down at a refrigerated barge marked GELATI SANSON squeezing past the police launches moored outside the Questura when the door opened to admit Aldo Valentini, whose name figured alongside that of the absent Gatti on the door.

  Valentini was a mild, scholarly-looking man with Armani glasses and a skimpy blond beard like grass which has been growing under a plank. He seemed pleased to have company, and suggested that he and Zen pop out to get some breakfast. As they emerged into the sunlight, bucking the incoming tide of staff hastening to sign themselves in so that they could slip out again, Valentini inquired about the reason for Zen’s transfer.

  ‘You must be joking!’ he barked in the slightly nasal accent of his native Ferrara. ‘Ada Zulian! A woman who doesn’t even know the right time …’

  Zen gestured impatiently.

  ‘What does that matter, as long as she knows the right people?’

  Aldo Valentini conceded the point with a shrug. He led the way to a bar at the end of the quay. A red neon sign over the door read Bar dei Greci, after the nearby Orthodox church. There was no sign of any Greeks inside, although the barman’s accent suggested that he was from somewhere well to the south of Chioggia.

  ‘All the same, la Zulian!’ exclaimed Valentini when they had ordered coffee. ‘God almighty, she’s been in and out of the loony bin like a yo-yo for the last twenty years. This complaint of hers ended up on my desk, largely because no one else would touch it with a bargepole.’

  He broke off to take one of the pastries from the plate on the bar.

  ‘We searched the whole place from top to bottom,’ he continued, his moustache white with icing sugar from the pastry he had selected. ‘Even put a man outside the front door. No one came or went, yet the woman still claimed she was being persecuted. It’s a clear case of hysteria and attention-seeking.’

  Zen took a bite of a flaky cream-filled croissant.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. It’s always the hopeless cases who want a second opinion. I’ll just go through the motions and then endorse your conclusions. It’s a total waste of time, but what do I care? There are worse places to spend a few days.’

  He washed the pastry down with a gulp of coffee.

  ‘So, what’s been happening round here?’

  Valentini shrugged.

  ‘Bugger all, as usual. Mestre and Marghera see a reasonable amount of action, particularly in drugs, but we just don’t have a big enough slice of the mainland for it to add up to anything much. As for the city itself, forget it. Criminals are like everyone else these days. If you can’t drive there, they don’t want to know.’

  Zen nodded slowly.

  ‘What about that kidnapping that was all over the papers a few months back? Some American.’

  ‘You mean the Durridge business?’

  Zen lit a cigarette.

  ‘That must have livened things up a bit.’

  ‘It might, if they’d let us near it,’ Valentini retorted shortly.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The Carabinieri got there first, and when we applied for reciprocity we were told the files had been returned under seal to Rome.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Christ knows what that was all about. Once upon a time we could have pulled a few strings of our own and found out, but these days …’

  He pointed to the headline in the newspaper lying on the counter. THE OLD FOX FIGHTS FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE, it read, above a photograph of the politician in question. Zen picked the paper up and scanned the article, which concerned alleged payments made by a number of leading industrialists into a numbered Swiss bank account allegedly used to fund the party in question. The paper’s cartoonist made play with the slogan adopted by the party at the last election: ‘A Fairer Alternative’. In a secondary article, a spokesman for the regionalist Northern Leagues hailed the development as ‘a death blow to the clique of crooks who have bled this country dry for decades’ and called for new electoral laws designed to radically redraw the political map of the country.

  ‘It’s total chaos,’ remarked Valentini sourly. ‘You can’t get anything done any more. No one knows what the rules are.’

  Feeling a touch on his arm, Zen looked round. A young woman with blonde hair, wearing a ski-jacket and jeans, stood staring at him, smiling inanely and stabbing one finger in the air. For a moment Zen thought she must be mad, or perhaps from some religious sect or other. Then he caught sight of the suspended rectangle of cardboard circling slowly in the draught above his head. The logo on each side showed a smouldering cigarette in a red circle with a broad slash across it.

  ‘Don’t tell me you can’t even smoke any more!’ he exclaimed incredulously to Valentini, who shrugged sheepishly.

  ‘The city council passed a by-law making it compulsory to provide a no-smoking area. It’s just for show, to keep the tourists happy. Normally no one pays any attention in a place like this, but every once in a while some arsehole insists on the letter of the law.’

  He slipped some money to the cashier and they stepped outside. Already the sunshine was looser and more generous. Zen paused to look at a series of posters gummed to the wall. The design was identical to the ones he had seen earlier that morning, on the window of the closed café in Cannaregio, but these were much newer. At the top was a drawing of the lion of Saint Mark, rampant, its expression full of defiance. The huge black capitals beneath read NUOVA REPUBBLICA VENETA and the text announced a rally the following evening in Campo Santa Margherita.

  ‘Total chaos,’ Aldo Valentini repeated, leading the way back to the Questura. ‘Every day it turns out that another big name, someone you would have sworn was absolutely untouchable, is under investigation on charges ranging from corruption to association with the Mafia. Result, no one dares to do a friend a favour any more. Nothing would please me more than to see this country turn into a paradise of moral probity, but how the hell are we supposed to get by in the meantime?’

  Zen nodded. This was a conversation he had been having at least once a day for several months. By now he had the lines off by heart.

  ‘It’s just like in Russia,’ he declared. ‘The old system may have been terrible, but at least it functioned.’

  ‘My brother-in-law’s just moved into a new house near Rovigo,’ Valentini continued. ‘The telephone people tell him he’ll have to wait six weeks to get a phone installed, so he gets on to the engineer and o
ffers him a bustarella, you know. Nothing exorbitant, just the odd fifty thousand or so to move up to the top of the list.’

  ‘The normal thing,’ murmured Zen.

  ‘The normal thing. You know what the guy tells him? “No way, dottore,” he says. “It’s more than my job’s worth.” Can you believe it? “It’s more than my job’s worth.”’

  ‘Disgusting.’

  ‘How the hell are you supposed to get anything done with that sort of attitude? It’s enough to make you sick.’

  He tossed his cigarette into the canal, where a seagull made a half-hearted pass at it before landing on the gunwale of the outermost police launch.

  Back in their office, a man stood framed in the sunlight streaming in through the window. He turned as Zen and Valentini entered.

  ‘Aldo?’

  He came forward, frowning at Zen.

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked suspiciously.

  Valentini introduced them.

  ‘Aurelio Zen, Enzo Gavagnin. Enzo’s head of the Drugs Squad.’

  Enzo Gavagnin had a large womanish face and the stocky, muscular body of a gondolier. He inspected Zen coolly.

  ‘New posting?’

  Zen shook his head.

  ‘I’m with the Ministry,’ he said. ‘On temporary assignment.’

  Enzo Gavagnin glanced at Valentini.

  ‘An emissary from Rome, eh?’ he murmured in a manner both humorous and pointed. ‘I hope you haven’t been giving away any of our secrets, Aldo.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had any,’ Valentini replied lightly. ‘Anyway, anyone who comes all this way to take the Ada Zulian case off my hands is a friend as far as I’m concerned.’

  Gavagnin laughed loudly.

  ‘Fair enough! Anyway, the reason I came was about that breaking-and-entering on Burano.’

  ‘The Sfriso business?’

  ‘If you want to reduce your work-load still further then you’re in luck, because I’ve discovered that there’s an angle which ties it in to a case we’ve been working on for some time …’

  Valentini looked doubtful.

  ‘I don’t know, Enzo. If I shed two cases the same morning, people might start to ask questions.’

  Gavagnin took Valentini’s arm and led him away.

  ‘It’s just because of the possible conflict of interest. Naturally we don’t want our on-going investigation compromised, so it’s better all round if …’

  The pair disappeared behind the glass panelling around Valentini’s desk, becoming fuzzy, unfocused images of their former selves. Zen went into his own cubicle and dug the phone book out of the desk drawer. He looked up Paulon, M and dialled the number.

  ‘Well?’

  The reply was abrupt to the point of rudeness.

  ‘Marco?’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Aurelio.’

  There was a brief pause.

  ‘Aurelio! How’s it going? I was reading about you in the paper just a while ago. That business in St Peter’s. I used to go fishing with him, I thought, and here he is consorting with Archbishops and the like! Gave me quite a thrill. Are you here in town?’

  ‘Yes. Can we meet?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘I need some advice, maybe some help.’

  ‘Well I’m out delivering all morning, but … Do you know the osteria on the San Girolamo canal, just opposite the church?’

  Enzo Gavagnin backed out of Valentini’s cubicle, having concluded his business. He glanced shrewdly at Zen as he passed by.

  ‘What’s it called?’ asked Zen.

  ‘Damned if I know, tell you the truth! I’ve been going there after lunch every weekday for the last twenty years, but I’ve never bothered to ask about the name. Everyone calls it “The Hole in the Wall”. It’s got red paint on the windows. Opposite the church. What’s it about, anyway?’

  ‘I’ll explain later. Thanks, Marco.’

  He stood up, buttoning his coat. The preliminaries were complete. It was time to go and pretend to do his job.

  Her first thought, when the bell rings, is that it is just another trick, another in the succession of cruel practical jokes which seem designed to test her endurance, her fragile sanity. No one calls at Palazzo Zulian these days, except when her nephews drive over from Verona every weekend, as regular as the tides. But this is Tuesday, and Nanni and Vincenzo will be at work doing whatever it is they do …

  The bell rings again, dispelling the lingering possibility that the whole thing had taken place in her mind. What happens twice is real, thinks Ada, sidling across the hallway to the room on the other side, overlooking the alley. An angled mirror fixed to a support just outside the window gives a view of the door, so that you can see who is calling without them seeing you, and decide whether to receive them. But immediately Ada whips her head back, for there in the glass is another face, looking straight back at her.

  ‘Contessa!’

  A strange voice. Not one of her tormentors, or a new one at least. She risks another look. The gaunt figure in a black hat and overcoat is still there, staring straight up at the tell-tale. It’s no use hiding. If she can see him, he can see her. Stands to reason, Ada Zulian tells herself, reluctantly turning back towards the door and walking downstairs.

  The stranger is tall and thin, with a hatchet face and clear grey eyes. His expression is stern, almost saturnine, yet his manner is courteous and respectful. He speaks the dialect with ease and precision, in the true Cannaregio accent – the purest in the city, Ada has always held. He hands her a plastic-covered card with writing and a photograph of himself. She frowns at the name typed in capital letters.

  ‘Zen?’ she says slowly.

  She inspects him again, more critically this time.

  ‘That’s right, contessa,’ the man nods. ‘Angelo’s boy.’

  Ada sniffs loudly.

  ‘Giustiniana’s, you mean. Your father had only one thing to do with it, excuse me. Fancy going off to Russia and getting himself killed like that, leaving his wife here all alone! At least my Silvestro fell defending our territories in Dalmatia. What has Russia to do with us, for heaven’s sake? Come in, come in, I’m feeling cold just thinking about it.’

  While Ada locks and bolts the door again, her visitor stands looking about him in the bleary, uncertain light of the andron. The plaster feels clammy and cold and gives slightly to the touch like a laden sponge. A mysterious smile appears on the man’s face as he absorbs the dank odours and the watery echoes seeping in from the canal at the other end of the hall.

  ‘She used to bring you round here while she worked,’ Ada continues, leading the way upstairs. ‘And once she saw I didn’t mind, she’d leave you here while she went off to do other jobs. Of course you won’t remember, you were only a toddler.’

  The man says nothing. Ada Zulian painfully attains the level expanse of the portego and waves him into the salon.

  ‘What brings you here, anyway? Your mother never calls any more, not that anyone else does either. Not since that trouble I had with Rosetta. Anyone would think it was catching!’

  ‘But I gather you’ve been having some more problems recently,’ the man remarks cautiously.

  Ada Zulian looks at him.

  ‘Perhaps I have and perhaps I haven’t,’ she replies sharply. ‘What business is that of yours, Aurelio Battista?’

  ‘Well, since you informed the police …’

  ‘The police? What have you to do with the police?’

  ‘I work for them.’

  Ada’s laughter startles the silence. The man looks taken aback.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he demands.

  ‘The police? But you were such a timid little fellow! So serious, so anxious, so easily scared! That’s what gave me the idea in the first place.’

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘To dress you up as Rosetta! I still had all her dresses then, her little blouses and socks, everything. When I went to San Clemente, they took everything away and burnt it.
But at that time I still thought she might come back one day. Really, I mean. Just walk in, as suddenly and inexplicably as she disappeared. I wanted to have everything ready for her, just in case. I wouldn’t have asked any questions, you know. I would have taken her back and carried on as though nothing had ever happened …’

  She looks away suddenly, as though she had seen something move in the nether recesses. Only one of the windows is unshuttered, and the dim expanses of the salon are further multiplied and complicated by a profusion of mirrors of every shape and size, all framed in the same gilded wood as the furniture.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ Ada goes on at last, ‘I think you helped keep her at bay. As long as you were there, running about in her dresses, Rosetta didn’t dare show her face.’

  She sits down on a low, hard sofa covered with worn dark pink silk.

  ‘Either that, or it was the cause of the whole thing! Perhaps she resented the fact that I’d found someone to replace her, and decided to get her own back. It’s hard to say. But you did look sweet, Aurelio! If only I’d thought to take some photographs.’

  The man has been standing looking at her with an air of deferential attention. Now he claps his hands loudly and starts striding about the room with quite unnecessary vigour.

  ‘Three weeks ago, contessa, you dialled the police emergency number and reported the presence of intruders in your house. A patrol boat was dispatched and the house searched from top to bottom. It proved to be empty. Subsequent investigations have failed to reveal a single fact to substantiate your allegations of trespass and persecution.’

  He pauses impressively, looking down at the elderly woman perched on the antique settle.

  ‘Well, of course!’ she retorts. ‘Do you think they’re stupid?’

  The man frowns.

  ‘The police?’

  She laughs.

  ‘I know they’re stupid! No, I’m talking about my visitors. They’re far too sly to let themselves be caught by some flat-foot from Ferrara. Swamp-dwellers! They all have malaria, poor things. Runs in the family, rots their brains.’

  ‘When was the last occurrence of this kind?’ the man inquires in a decidedly supercilious tone.

  ‘Last night,’ Ada replies pertly. ‘It was almost dawn by the time they finally left me in peace.’