Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  He walked along the Fondamenta delle Cappucine in search of the wine-shop which Marco had mentioned. Up ahead, a canopy of evergreen shrubbery spilt out over a high wall, betraying the presence of one of the city’s secret gardens, the original vegetable plots which had once lain at the centre of each of its hundred islands, providing produce for the inhabitants of the waterfront houses. As Zen passed beneath the tree, he saw that it was filled with feral cats, perched on every branch like a flock of birds.

  The tide had turned, but it was still low enough to expose the mudbanks on either side of the San Girolamo canal. Two labourers were at work there, one pushing a wheelbarrow along a path of duckboards laid out from the quay, the other working with a spade in the canal bed itself, turning over slabs of slime as thick and black as tar. The fetid odour of the disturbed mud hung heavy in the air, a noxious miasma so strong it was almost tangible.

  ‘Watch out!’

  The cry came from above. Swivelling, Zen beheld an old woman staring down at him with what looked like indignation. He shrugged impatiently.

  ‘What’s the matter, signora?’

  ‘The pipe!’ she shouted back. ‘You were going to trip.’

  It was only then that Zen noticed the metal tubing stretched across his path, leading from a narrow lane at one side to a red barge, stranded by the tide, bearing the legend POZZI NERI and a phone number.

  ‘Thank you!’ he called shamefacedly to his saviour, who shrugged and ducked back into her house.

  Zen stepped over the tubing and continued on his way. Living now in a city which had had mains drainage for over two thousand years, he had forgotten about the ‘black wells’, the septic tanks over which every Venetian house was built and into which flowed such effluvia as could not be discharged directly into the canals.

  A little further along he saw first the church which Marco had mentioned, then the osteria itself. The trim was indeed red, or had been at some time within living memory. A faded sign over the door read ‘Finest Wines of the Piave from our own Estate on Draught and in Bottle’. The interior was smoky and dark after the noontide glare outside, but even before Zen’s eyes had adjusted he heard a familiar voice hail him with a long soft ‘Ciao!’, rising and falling like a passing wave.

  One of the card-players at the rear of the premises rose from the table and strode towards him, a calloused hand extended in greeting. Marco Paulon was a sturdy, muscular man whose hide looked as wrinkled and tanned as bacon. His face was a pudgy, shapeless mass in which his eyes twinkled, bright and shiny, like two metal buttons dropped into a bowl of polenta. He and Zen had not been especially close as children, but they had stayed in touch thanks to a mutually advantageous arrangement whereby Paulon kept an eye on the Zen property and undertook basic running repairs in return for the use of the ground floor as extra storage space for his haulage business.

  He steered Zen to a vacant table by the window and shouted an order for two glasses of fragolino.

  ‘What’s all this about you and Ada Zulian?’ he demanded cheerily.

  Zen gawped. Surely not even Rosalba’s grapevine could have disseminated his cover story so quickly. But it soon became clear that Marco had his information from the contessa herself.

  ‘The old girl isn’t up to carrying much these days, so I quite often pick up things she’s ordered when I deliver to the shops, and then drop them off on my way back to Mestre. I went round just before lunch with a case of mineral water she’d ordered and she told me you’d been there. To be honest, I thought it was another of her hallucinations. Fat chance, I thought, the police sending Aurelio up from Rome on account of Ada Zulian!’

  The proprietor brought two glasses of the sweetish foaming wine and the two friends drank each other’s health. Then Zen leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘Actually, I arranged it myself.’

  Marco Paulon raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Didn’t anyone query it?’

  Zen swirled his glass around, making the wine gyrate like a spinning coin. He closed one eye in an exaggerated wink.

  ‘They probably would have, if I’d told them. So I put it about that I was being sent to look into the Durridge case. Do you remember? The American who disappeared here a couple of months ago. There was a big fuss about it in the press.’

  Paulon smiled admiringly.

  ‘You cunning bastard.’

  Zen looked up at a calendar pinned to the wall beside Marco’s head. Superimposed on the numbered squares for each date of the month was a wavy green line indicating the rise and fall of the tides in the lagoon. The trough was almost at the centre of the square for that day, indicating that low tide had been at noon.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s enough water to get about yet,’ he said.

  Marco frowned.

  ‘Depends where you want to go. I’ve moored the boat up by Sant’Alvise. It never dries out there.’

  He looked inquiringly at Zen, who sighed.

  ‘The thing is, Marco, I need to make it look as though I know something about the Durridge case without actually wasting any time doing any real work on it. Know what I mean?’

  Marco smiled again and shook his head.

  ‘Still the same Aurelio! I remember you at school. You did less work than anyone in the class, yet you ended up with the best marks. I never understood how you did it. With the rest of us, it was what we didn’t know that stood out, but you could take the two or three odd bits of stuff you remembered and make it look as though you knew more than the teacher! We hated you for it.’

  Zen finished his wine.

  ‘You’re exaggerating,’ he murmured.

  ‘No I’m not!’ Paulon returned aggressively. ‘Look where it’s got you. You have a cushy desk job in Rome while I’m humping crates of groceries around the city.’

  Zen lit a cigarette and said nothing. After a moment, Marco Paulon smiled.

  ‘But there you go! Whoever said life was fair?’

  He took a cigarette from the pack which Zen had left lying on the table.

  ‘So, Aurelio, what can I do for you? Don’t worry about time. I can always make an extra run tomorrow if necessary.’

  Zen lit Marco’s cigarette.

  ‘Ideally, I’d like to take a look at the island where this Durridge was living when he was kidnapped.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Quite a long way, I’m afraid. One of those old fortress islands out near the Porto di Malamocco.’

  Marco Paulon smoked peacefully for a while.

  ‘Police launch broken down, has it?’ he murmured at length.

  Zen signalled the proprietor to bring more wine.

  ‘It’s the crew I’m worried about,’ he said. ‘Some kids fresh off the farm who’ve taken a hurry-up course in boat handling at La Spezia. I can probably trust them not to drown me, as long as the fog holds off, but that’s as far as it goes. What I need is an inside view from someone who knows the lagoon. Something to lard the report so that it looks like I’ve spent a lot of time on the case. Someone like you, in short.’

  Marco Paulon nodded earnestly. He picked up the new glass of fragolino which had just arrived at the table.

  ‘Welcome back, Aurelio. Welcome home!’

  The two men downed their wine and bickered amicably over the bill, Zen gracefully giving way in the end. Outside, a warm wash of diffuse sunlight flattened every perspective, obliterating details and distinctions, calling everything into question. In a yard near the quay two house-painters were shaking and folding a dropsheet as big as a sail.

  ‘It looks like Ada’s complaint is catching,’ Marco announced in a jocular tone. ‘My cousin was telling me the other day about someone else who’s cracked up and started seeing people who aren’t there.’

  They turned the corner into a broad swathe of shadow cast by the walls of an abandoned factory.

  ‘Mind you,’ added Marco, ‘he’s from Burano, and they’re all halfwits out there. Especially my cousin.’

  He leapt
nimbly down into a broad-bottomed wherry moored alongside the quay. Zen followed more cautiously, stepping on to the rectangle of old carpet which protected the foredeck. The open hold was filled with an assortment of merchandise en route from the wholesaler’s warehouse at Mestre to various retail outlets scattered around the city: shrink-wrapped tins of beans and tomatoes, plastic-covered demijohns of wine, huge cardboard boxes containing packs of soap powder, tampons and batteries.

  Marco Paulon turned on the ignition and freed the tiller, then cast off the aft mooring line, secured to one of the wooden posts driven into the canal bed at regular intervals. He pointed to a marble plaque set in the wall of the former factory about a metre above the level of the quay. It bore an engraved line and the words Marea alta 4.11.66.

  ‘They make so much fuss about the floods,’ he remarked, ‘but if you ask me the freak lows are even worse. You can’t even get down the Cannaregio half the time, and as for the back canals, forget it! The whole city needs to be dredged urgently, but it’s impossible to get any work done now the contractors have stopped taking bribes.’

  There was a throaty roar as he started up the diesel engine, which then settled down to a steady hum much like a bus, but with a reverberant underwater growl.

  ‘Let go forward,’ he called.

  It took Zen a moment or two to remember the significance of this phrase. Then he reached up and untied the remaining rope securing the comacina to its mooring, brought it inboard and coiled it neatly. A dark foliage of mud blossomed on the surface of the water as Marco put the motor in reverse with the rudder hard over to push the bow out from the quay. Then he engaged forward gear and they eased out into the canal.

  ‘Guess who owns all that!’ he shouted, pointing to the ruined factory. Zen made his way unsteadily past the cargo to join Paulon in the stern of the boat.

  ‘Ada Zulian!’ crowed Marco triumphantly.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘For years no one knew,’ Marco went on. ‘The contessa kept it quiet. Thought it was undignified for Zulian to be connected to anything as common as a cotton mill.’

  He laughed explosively.

  ‘The joke is, the place is worth more derelict than it ever was as a going concern. Here’s Ada dependent on people like me doing her favours out of the kindness of our hearts, when she could make herself a billion any time she wanted just by selling that place!’

  Zen ducked instinctively as they passed under a low bridge. Marco throttled back, then swung the tiller hard to the right, sounding the boat’s siren as a warning to any craft which might be coming the other way around the blind corner.

  ‘So what’s the word about the Durridge business?’ Zen asked.

  Wedging the tiller under his expansive bottom, Marco produced a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Zen.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What have people been saying about it? What do they think happened?’

  Marco throttled back to let a taxi pass by. The passenger, an adolescent girl in a wheelchair, gazed at them solemnly. Zen tried again.

  ‘What sort of man was this Durridge? What did he do? Who did he see?’

  Marco frowned and spat into the water. Zen’s heart sank. His companion clearly knew nothing whatever of any interest about the vanished American, but no Venetian was ever going to admit to ignorance about anything.

  ‘He was your typical rich foreigner,’ Marco announced at length. ‘Came and went all the time. Used the city as a hotel. Took no interest in us, the staff.’

  He paused for inspiration.

  ‘Used to give huge parties at his house. The watertaxi people made a fortune ferrying the guests to and fro. The caterers did well too …’

  He broke off and pointed to a ponderous four-storey building which they were passing.

  ‘Palazzo Zen, Aurelio!’ he remarked jocularly. ‘When are you moving back in?’

  Zen smiled and dutifully surveyed the show-home constructed by his ancestors in those distant centuries when they had been one of the most illustrious and powerful families in the city. He was glad to allow Marco to change the subject and let them both off the hook. Clearly there was going to be no easy way into the Durridge case. His information so far had been restricted to reading newspaper clippings, meagre snippets of information puffed out to several columns with speculations and repetitions and a photograph of Ivan Durridge in one of the white linen suits he habitually wore.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though,’ Marco continued with geater confidence. ‘He was never kidnapped.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Paulon shrugged.

  ‘If you ask me, it was like with Tonio.’

  A double sheet of newspaper drifted slowly past. Looking at it, Zen recognized it as the same one which the barman had been reading when he had had coffee with Aldo Valentini that morning. As he scanned the headline – THE OLD FOX FIGHTS FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE – he suddenly thought of a way to get access to the closed files on the Durridge case. But if the article was correct, he would have to move fast.

  ‘Antonio Puppin,’ Marco went on, answering the question Zen had ill-manneredly neglected to ask. ‘Went hunting out on the salt-marshes one day and never came back. When his boat turned up adrift everyone feared the worst, although the body was never found. Anyway, a couple of years later he got caught by the Carabinieri at a roadblock near Grado – this was back in the terrorist years, and they were asking for everyone’s papers …’

  They swept under a high arched bridge and emerged with startling suddenness into the open lagoon just beside the busy ferry piers at Fondamente Nove. ‘It turned out he’d done a bunk,’ Marco shouted above the roar of the engine he’d just gunned up to full revs. ‘He’d been working for the brother of an ex-girlfriend who ran a garage …’

  Zen stopped listening. He’d lost track of Marco’s story, let alone its bearing on the Durridge affair. That was how things were on the lagoon, where the hazy light and the pervasive instability of water defeated every attempt at clarity or precision, but also tempered the arrogance and aggression so prevalent on the mainland. This was what had formed him, he realized. This was the code he carried with him, the basic genetic circuits burned into his very being.

  In the extreme distance, to the right of the cemetery of San Michele, the remote islands of Torcello and Burano were visible as smudges on the horizon, the latter distinguishable by its drunkenly inclined bell tower.

  ‘What was that about someone seeing ghosts on Burano?’ he murmured to Marco.

  ‘Not on Burano. That’s where the guy’s from. Name’s Giacomo Sfriso. He and his brother have a drift trawler they take out to sea, as well as a lot of tidal nets. Both in their mid-twenties, and doing very well for themselves by all accounts. Very well indeed.’

  They rounded the mole of reclaimed land beyond the Arsenale, forming dry-docks and a sports field.

  ‘Then one evening last month Giacomo went out in a sandolo,’ Marco continued. ‘No one paid any attention. Everyone knew the Sfriso boys worked round the clock. That’s how they got so rich, people said. Darkness fell and he didn’t come back, but still no one worried. Giacomo knew the lagoon like his own backyard.’

  He swung the tiller over, dipping the gunwale in the water and sending the boat careening round towards the large white mass of San Pietro.

  ‘Only when he finally got back to Burano, at five o’clock the next morning, still pitch dark out, he was babbling like a madman! No one could make out what the hell he was talking about. His brother Filippo called the doctor, who stuck a needle in him, but when he came around he was just as bad. Gibbering away about walking corpses and the like. Since when, according to my informants, that particular fish has been several centimetres short of its minimum landing length.’

  The boat slid under the elaborate iron footbridge connecting the island of San Pietro to the Arsenale. These were the hinderparts of the city, a dense mass of brick tenements formerly inhabited by the army of manual
labourers employed in the dockyards. Nowhere were there more dead ends and fewer through routes, nowhere were the houses darker and more crowded, nowhere was the dialect thicker and more impenetrable. It was not for nothing that the Cathedral of San Pietro, symbol of Rome’s claims on the Republic, had been relegated to these inauspicious outskirts, while the Doges’ private chapel lorded it over the great Piazza.

  Marco brought the wherry alongside a quay opposite a slipway where a number of old vaporetti were drawn up awaiting repair or cannibalization. Securing a rope fore and aft to the stripped tree trunks sunk in the mud, he set about foraging among the packages in the hold.

  ‘Give me a hand, will you?’ he called to Zen.

  Together they tugged the pile apart, separating crates and boxes until Marco at length dived in and emerged with a small cubical pack which, from the way he bent his knees to lift it, obviously weighed a lot.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Zen.

  Marco heaved the pack on to the quay and wiped his brow. Leaping ashore, he tore open the pack and extracted a yellow leaflet which he handed to Zen.

  ‘Back in a moment,’ he said, and disappeared into an alley with the package, leaving Zen to peruse the leaflet. Like the poster he had seen earlier, it was headed NUOVA REPUBBLICA VENETA over the emblem of a lion couchant. The text concerned some complicated issue of city versus regional funding for improvements to the refuse disposal facility on Sacca San Biagio, and was clearly the latest instalment in a serial you needed to have been following from the beginning to understand. Zen had just reached the slogan in block capitals at the bottom – A VENETIAN SOLUTION TO VENETIAN PROBLEMS – when Marco jumped aboard again and cast off.

  ‘Next stop your island,’ he announced, revving the engine.

  Zen waved the leaflet.

  ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘Municipal elections the week after next.’