‘But which party?’
Marco paused to yell a greeting at the skipper of a wherry proceeding in the other direction.
‘Just a few local lads who think they can take on Rome and win.’
‘And can they?’
Marco shrugged.
‘I’d like to see someone do it. Everyone says it’ll be a disaster, but what have the last forty years been for us? The city has turned into a geriatric hospital, there’s no work, no houses, and all our taxes go to line the pockets of some Mafia fat cats down south. Christ knows if Dal Maschio will be any better, but he sure as hell can’t be any worse, and if he makes those bastards in Rome shit in their beds then he gets my vote!’
Zen stared at him.
‘Who did you say?’
‘Dal Maschio.’
‘Ferdinando Dal Maschio?’
‘Do you know him?’
Zen shook his head.
‘No, no.’
The boat slipped along the canal alongside the public gardens on the islet of Sant’Elena and then out, as if through a secret door, into the broad basin of San Marco. A big cargo vessel was gliding past, on its way from the docks to the breach in the littoral sandbar at Porto di Lido giving access to the open sea. A tug pulling two barges laden with rubbish ploughed past in the other direction, while ferries and fishing smacks crossed to and fro. Marco pointed the wherry’s bows towards the distant island of San Clemente, where Ada Zulian had spent two years in the mental hospital. Out here in the open lagoon there were short sharp waves which slapped vigorously at the planking and splashed gobs of salt water into the men’s faces. Marco throttled back to give way to a car ferry on its way to the Lido.
‘I forgot to tell you the best bit about the guy from Burano,’ he shouted as the waves slapped and hammered and the wherry wallowed in the swell. ‘Guess where he claims to have seen this ghost?’
Zen shook his head.
‘On Sant’Ariano!’ cried Marco. ‘The isle of the dead!’
His way clear again, he gunned up the engine and headed out of the shipping lane into the quiet backwaters behind San Giorgio.
‘But it’s no joke for Giacomo’s family,’ he concluded soberly. ‘Seems he just hangs around the house all day, muttering to himself. He can’t go to the toilet by himself, never mind handle a boat. His mother and brother have been driven nearly crazy themselves.’
The lagoon shimmered and shifted like fish scales in the sunshine. Aurelio Zen lay back, closed his eyes and tried determinedly to summon up an image of Tania Biacis, his … his what? Lover? Mistress? Partner? Part of the charm of their relationship was that it eluded definition. Despite this, it had always felt overwhelmingly real and solid, yet after only a few hours’ exposure to the pervasive vapours of the lagoon Zen felt these certainties dissolving. He no longer had any vivid sense of Tania, no clear image of her presence, no aching void created by her absence. This was doubly ironic in that she was the reason he had agreed to Ellen’s idea in the first place.
‘The family are seriously unhappy about the way the investigation has bogged down, Aurelio,’ Ellen had told him. ‘Bill – that’s my new guy, he’s a lawyer – the firm he works for has the Durridge account, and I mentioned to him that I just happened to know this Italian policeman.’
The moment Ellen stopped speaking, even for an instant, the line went dead.
‘I mean it’s your town, Aurelio. You know the people, you speak the language. Anyway, when Bill put it to the Durridges’ people they simply jumped at the idea.’
Despite the years since Ellen had left Zen and returned to her native America, her Italian had remained fluent, although her accent had deteriorated, the vowels flattened and denatured, whole phrases mumbled almost incomprehensibly, like an old man trying to eat without his dentures. It was chilling to recall that he had once found such mannerisms charming.
‘The bottom line is – I’m quoting Bill here – they need a body. Dead or alive. Preferably the former, of course, but if the worst comes to the worst …’
She paused, and a dumb white silence intervened. It was as if one of them had hung up, as if the whole conversation had been taped and edited. Then she spoke again, and everything resumed as if there had been no pause, no lacuna, no doubt.
‘Until then the whole estate is in turn-round. If you free up the cash flow, Bill says, you can name your fee. We’re talking serious money here.’
‘And a serious criminal offence,’ Zen had returned dryly. ‘It is strictly illegal for a state employee to engage in secondary paid employment …’
‘Oh come on, Aurelio! You guys only work mornings anyway. Plus Bill can arrange for the money to be paid indirectly – into a numbered Swiss bank account if you like.’
It was tempting, but he would never have accepted if Tania had not just received a court order to vacate the apartment in Parione which Zen had found for her, and on which he had been paying the rent. Her position there had always been precarious – the landlord had been trying to evict her for over a year – but she and Zen had shied away from talking about the future. Whatever happened, painful and disturbing decisions would have to be taken, and they had tacitly agreed to put them off as long as possible so as not to break the spell of a period of frivolous irresponsibility whose appeal lay partly in the knowledge that it could not possibly last.
The very fact that Tania had hinted that she might be prepared to live with Zen – and, inevitably, his mother – represented a major concession on her part. Only a few months earlier, he would have been overjoyed by this change of heart. Ever since Tania Biacis had broken up with her husband, Zen had been trying to persuade her to move in with him. Yet now the moment had arrived, he had immediately felt a stab of alarm, not least at the discovery that Tania and his mother got along. The two women had been introduced the previous month, and to Zen’s amazement the effect had been one of mutual self-recognition. He had counted on being able to divide and rule. If his mother and his lover liked each other, where did that leave him?
He must have dozed off, for the next thing he was aware of was a mighty bump which sent him tumbling over sideways on the bilge boards. Looking up, he saw an enormous expanse of brick walling towering over the boat.
‘Kidnapped!’
Marco made fast to a mooring ring set in the wall. He pointed disgustedly to the rickety metal ladder, slimy with weed, which scaled the face of the brick cliff.
‘How are you going to get an unwilling victim down from there?’ he demanded. ‘Even if he was unconscious, you’d need a crane to get him in the boat.’
He bent over Zen, finger raised didactically.
‘And on that particular afternoon you’d never have got the boat alongside in the first place. It was one of the lowest tides I can recall. The whole lagoon ground to a halt! You’d have thought someone had pulled the plug. Nothing but mud, as far as the eye could see.’
Marco Paulon lay back complacently on the after-decking.
‘Take it from me, Aurelio. This American of yours has done a bunk! He’ll turn up one day, safe and sound, just like Tonio Puppin. And who’s to blame them? There are probably times you wouldn’t mind dropping out of your own life for a while, hey?’
A miniature blizzard whirled up into the sunny air, momentarily enshrouding the figure of the man who stood talking into the pay telephone.
‘Immediately, yes,’ he insisted. ‘Aurelio Zen. Z, E, N. Vice-Questore, Criminalpol.’
The scurrying breeze eased once more, and the tubular bars of expanded polystyrene packaging immediately fell back to the nearest surface. The man picked one up off the ledge of the telephone booth and toyed with it as he talked.
‘Remind him of the Renato Favelloni case. Remind him that he told me if I ever needed anything I should get in touch. Tell him I’ll call back in thirty minutes exactly. If I don’t get a satisfactory response at that time, I shall have to reconsider my position.’
Once again the illusory snowstorm littered the air with flying
white fragments caught up in the eddying wind currents at the corner of the square. Aurelio Zen snapped the one he had been playing with, replaced the receiver and plucked his phonecard from its slot.
There was no bar or café in this campo, which was dominated by the sprawling brickwork of a church as matter-of-fact as the abandoned factory belonging to the Zulian family. Zen turned down an alley tunnelling under the houses opposite. It crossed two low bridges over canals hardly wider than ditches. A torn plastic bag stamped with the name of a supermarket chain drifted slowly by on the incoming tide like a ragged jellyfish.
Zen turned in at a glazed door under a metal sign reading ENOTECA. In the small dark room inside, a few elderly men sat sipping wine and exchanging raucous remarks in slithering, sibilant dialect. Zen ordered a glass of red raboso wine and a roll smeared with the creamy white paste made from salt cod, garlic and olive oil. He settled back in a corner, glancing at his watch. He had given Palazzo Sisti thirty minutes, and five were gone already. It wouldn’t do to be late. This was his one tenuous connection to the levers of power, the ‘rooms with the buttons’. He had to handle it right. But there was no saying what was right, these days.
Some time earlier Zen had intervened in a murder investigation in Sardinia on behalf of one of the country’s leading political parties. Although the outcome was quite different from the one which had been foreseen, it happened to serve the interests of the party in question just as well if not better. On his return to Rome, Zen had been summoned to a reception at party headquarters, located in Palazzo Sisti, where the elder statesman who was its leader had acknowledged his indebtedness with the words: ‘If there’s ever anything you need …’
At the time, this had seemed like a blank cheque. It could only be cashed once, so it was prudent to wait for exactly the right opportunity to present itself, but there was no hurry. A promise like this would remain valid for ever. Even the death of the politician himself would not affect the value of the undertaking he had given. The whole system within which he and everyone else operated depended on such unwritten contracts being honoured irrespective of the fate of individuals. If anything happened to l’onorevole, the promise he had made to Zen would simply devolve to his successors, along with countless others both owing and owed.
But now the unthinkable had occurred. Starting from an investigation into bribes allegedly paid to obtain construction contracts, investigating magistrates in Milan had gradually uncovered a network of kickbacks, slush funds, golden handshakes, graft, incentives, backhanders and hush money covering every aspect of business and government. Everyone had always known that such a network existed, of course. Indeed, everyone used it themselves in some minor respect at least, to speed up the bureaucratic mills or escape from some horrendous official maze. What no one had ever expected was that the extent of the corruption would ever be exposed, still less that those who had taken advantage of it at the very highest level would be arrested and brought to trial.
There had, after all, been countless such investigations before, and they had never got anywhere. It was precisely to avoid such a potentially embarrassing event that Palazzo Sisti had invited Zen to intervene in the Sardinian case, in which one of their fixers, a man named Renato Favelloni, was involved. On that occasion, as on so many in the past, they had been successful. But as the Milanese judges pursued their investigations, naming ever more famous names and signing orders against the ‘men beyond all suspicion’, it gradually became clear that something had changed. The labyrinth of power was still there, but at its heart was an absence.
The minotaur was dead, and the choking currents of persuasion and menace which had once stifled any attempt to map the workings of its empire had fallen still. The judges continued implacably on their course. Renato Favelloni was among those arrested, and true to form had immediately done a deal with his accusers, betraying those for whom he had worked in return for a potential reduction in his own sentence. The result had been a flurry of judicial communications revealing the identities of those under investigation for ‘irregular practices’ and ‘procedural abnormalities’ – as though such practices and procedures had not been both the rule and the norm for the past half-century. The most eminent name on the list was that of l’onorevole himself, whom the judges had requested should be stripped of his parliamentary immunity so that they could proceed against him.
This was something completely unprecedented, an almost unimaginable eventuality, but it was widely assumed that the matter would go no further. Like all members of the Italian parliament, l’onorevole enjoyed automatic immunity from judicial prosecution which could only be lifted by a committee of his peers. The chances of this happening seemed slim indeed. Politicans had always been understandably reluctant to allow the judiciary to stick its noses into their affairs. There was no reason to suppose that they would voluntarily permit the prosecution of a man who had been a minister in various governments for over fifteen years, one of the most powerful and influential figures in the country, widely tipped as a possible future president. If he went, which of them would be safe?
But those who reasoned thus had not yet grasped the full extent of the changes which had taken place. This was not surprising. It was humiliating to admit that the real reason why the judges in Milan were able to succeed where so many of their colleagues had failed had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union than anything which had happened in their own country. Such an admission involved recognizing that since 1945 Italian political life had been a mere puppet-show reflecting the power struggle between East and West. Now the strings had been cut, the show had closed and all bets were off. Two days earlier, as reported in the newspaper which Zen had glimpsed floating in the canal, the parliamentary committee – ‘motivated by a conviction since in the present climate justice should not just be done but be seen to be done’ – had voted to allow the judges in Milan to proceed against their eminent and esteemed colleague.
This was worse than death for l’onorevole and for all those associated with him. He would vanish for years into the Gulag Archipelago of the judicial process, awaiting a final verdict which was largely irrelevant. The damage had already been done. The parliamentary committee’s decision was far more damaging than anything the judges could do, revealing as it did the extent to which l’onorevole was exposed, and the crucial fact that he had ceased to be an important political player.
Zen’s only hope was that the favour he was actually going to inscribe on the blank cheque he had been treasuring all this while was so insignificant that l’onorevole would have no difficulty in meeting it, even in his present straitened circumstances. He glanced at his watch. In five minutes he would know. He finished the last morsel of the bacalà mantecato, washed it down with the final gulp of wine and went over to the counter to pay.
As he turned towards the door, he bumped into two men who had just come in. Intent on his purpose, he made to brush past, but one of the men seized his arm.
‘My God, Aurelio, is it you?’
Zen looked round and gasped.
‘Tommaso!’
The two confronted each other awkwardly while the other man looked on with a coolly appraising smile.
‘I can’t stop now,’ Zen said hurriedly. ‘Are you staying? I’ll be back in ten minutes, less probably.’
Back in the windswept square, the strips of white plastic packaging were still frantically gyrating. As Zen made his way towards the pay phone, it suddenly started to ring in strident bursts. He stopped in his tracks, staring at it intently. Then he glanced at his watch. Exactly thirty minutes had elapsed since he had issued his ultimatum to Palazzo Sisti. Plunging into the fake snow flurries, he seized the receiver.
‘Hello?’
The silence at the other end was deeply flawed, hollow, reverberant, mined with clicks and crackles.
‘Hello? Hello?’
The response, when it finally came, was quiet and unhurried, as though rebuking Zen’s panicky urgency.
Christ, it was the man himself! Things must indeed have come to a pretty pass at Palazzo Sisti if l’onorevole was reduced to making his own phone calls.
‘Nothing could be further from the truth!’ Zen found himself saying in an obsequious tone. ‘I wouldn’t dream of presuming to …’
‘Maybe not, but there are plenty who would. Men I’ve worked for and with this past quarter century! Now they deny they know me. Now they smite me on the cheek, spit in my face and hand me over, bound and gagged, to my enemies!’
‘The only reason I am calling is …’
‘They may think I’m dead and buried, but they’ll see! When they least expect it I shall burst forth from the tomb and sit in judgement on those who have presumed to judge me.’
Having achieved this peroration, l’onorevole fell silent.
‘Hello?’ ventured Zen hesitantly.
‘I’m still here. Despite everything.’
‘When we met at Palazzo Sisti, onorevole, at the conclusion of the Burolo affair, you were kind enough to intimate that if I ever needed a favour then I should contact you. That is the only reason I have been bold enough to do so.’
The unctuous smarminess of his voice left Zen wanting to rinse his mouth out, but decades of servility could not be erased in a moment.
‘What do you want?’ l’onorevole demanded. ‘There’s a limit to what I can accomplish these days, but …’
Zen paused.
‘I take it I may speak openly?’
‘Oh, please! You take me for a fool? That’s why I am calling you. Our tracer identified the number from which you rang earlier. I’m speaking from a secure line. But I haven’t got all day, Zen. For the second time, what do you want?’
The square was still deserted, but Zen brought the receiver close to his mouth and lowered his voice.
‘It’s question of access to a police file, onorevole.’
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