Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘I’d have thought that was one of the few areas in which you were better qualified to act than I.’

  ‘This particular file has been sealed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s one of the things I want to find out. It concerns the disappearance of an American called Ivan Durridge.’

  There was a long silence. Zen eyed the circling flock of plastic flakes and said nothing.

  ‘I seem to recall the affair vaguely,’ l’onorevole said at last. ‘What is your interest in it?’

  Zen knew better than to try and conceal the truth from this man.

  ‘Private enterprise,’ he replied promptly. ‘I’ve been retained by the family to look into it, but first of all I need to know why the case was closed. I can’t afford to step on anyone’s toes.’

  There was a dry laugh the other end.

  ‘Neither can I.’

  Another silence.

  ‘I’ll have to see what other interests are involved,’ the voice replied at length. ‘I’ll ask around. Assuming I get a nihil obstat from my sources, how do you want the material delivered?’

  Zen caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked round. A young man in overalls passed by carrying four wooden chairs, their legs interlocked, on his shoulders.

  ‘I’ll get in touch later today and leave details with your staff. Thank you very much for granting me this much of your valuable time, onorevole. I can’t tell you how I appreciate it.’

  At the other end there was nothing but the static-corroded silence, but it was some time before Zen replaced the receiver and turned away.

  Back in the osteria, Tommaso was sitting alone at a table facing the door. He stood up and waved as Zen came in, then called to the barman to bring a flask of wine.

  ‘I was beginning to think I’d imagined the whole thing,’ he exclaimed, clasping Zen’s shoulder and arm as though to prove that it was not in fact an apparition. ‘How long has it been now? And then not even to let me know you’re here! Honestly, Aurelio, I’m offended.’

  ‘I only arrived this morning, Tommaso. And I was just about to contact you, as it happens.’

  He pinched his friend’s cheek and gave one of his rare unconstrained smiles. Tommaso Saoner looked exactly the same as he had for as long as Zen could remember: the perpetual dark stubble, the stolid, graceless features, the glasses with rectangular lenses and thick black rims through which he peered out at the world as though through a television set.

  ‘Your health, Aurelio!’ cried Tommaso, pouring their wine.

  ‘And yours.’

  They drained off their glasses.

  ‘Where’s your companion?’ asked Zen.

  Tommaso’s expression grew serious.

  ‘Ferdinando? He had to go.’

  ‘Ferdinando Dal Maschio?’

  Tommaso beamed in delight.

  ‘You’ve heard of him? The movement is growing in numbers and importance every day, of course, but I had no idea that they were talking about us in Rome already!’

  Zen produced his cigarettes, then looked round guiltily.

  ‘Is it all right to smoke here?’

  Tommaso frowned.

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘I was told this morning that the council had set aside non-smoking areas in all public places.’

  Tommaso burst out laughing.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! That’s just for the tourists. There’s no such nonsense in genuine Venetian bars like this, where real Venetians go to drink good Veneto wine. Anyway, that bunch of crooks and incompetents on the council will be out on their collective ears in a couple of weeks, once the people get a chance to express their contempt for them. And as soon as we get in we’ll repeal all their stupid by-laws.’

  Zen offered his friend a cigarette.

  ‘“We”?’ he queried.

  Tommaso declined the cigarette with a waggle of his finger.

  ‘I mean the movement. Nuova Repubblica Veneta. What are they saying about us in Rome?’

  Zen lit his cigarette, gazing at Saoner.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘But you said …’

  ‘I’ve heard about Dal Maschio, but not in Rome. It was here. From his wife, Cristiana Morosini. Her mother is a neighbour of ours.’

  Tommaso’s elation vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  ‘Don’t take any notice of what she told you,’ he retorted. ‘It’s all a load of scurrilous nonsense. Believe me, the things Ferdinando has had to put up from that whore, she’s lucky he didn’t leave long ago – and give her a damn good thrashing first!’

  Zen considered his friend through a cloud of smoke.

  ‘No doubt he deemed that such a course would have been politically inadvisable.’

  Missing the irony in Zen’s voice, Tommaso merely nodded earnestly.

  ‘But she deserved it, believe you me. Most women would be proud to have a husband who has single-handedly transformed politics in the Veneto, broken the mould and offered a new and inspiring vision of a twenty-first century Venice, independent and revitalized!’

  Tommaso’s eyes were shining with enthusiasm. Zen poured them both more of the light, prickly wine.

  ‘But not Cristiana,’ Saoner went on bitterly. ‘Instead, she did everything possible to undermine him, first ridiculing him to his face and in public, and then cuckolding him with a reporter from the mainland. Is it any wonder he sought solace in the arms of some of his admirers?’

  He tossed off his wine and made a visible effort to change the subject.

  ‘Anyway, that’s enough politics. What happy wind brings you home, Aurelio?’

  Zen emitted a self-pitying sigh.

  ‘Mamma heard from Rosalba that Ada Zulian had been complaining about some sort of harassment. It’s all in her head, of course, but to my mother Ada is still la contessa and nothing would do but I had to put in for a temporary transfer and come up to look into it personally.’

  As he retailed this latest pack of lies, Zen marvelled at the way his cover story was changing and developing, growing ever more detailed and plausible with every telling. If he wasn’t careful, he would start believing it himself pretty soon.

  Tommaso nodded seriously.

  ‘Funnily enough, we were discussing the Zulian family at a meeting just the other day. The contessa has been under a lot of pressure to sell that old factory they own, but like a true Venetian she’s refused. “Chi vende, scende.” The question we were discussing is what use to put such sites to when we come to power. Ferdinando used the Zulian case as an example. An international consortium has reportedly offered a fortune to turn the Sant’Alvise site into a hotel complex. That’s out of the question, of course, but the problem we face is whether to develop such vacant land for housing or for light industry. Ferdinando’s view is that …’

  As Tommaso Saoner launched into a detailed analysis of the issue, Zen nodded and tried not to yawn. He hadn’t much appetite for politics at the best of times, and none at all for the lunatic-fringe, single-issue variety. No wonder Cristiana had lost patience with her husband if this was the kind of thing she had to put up with at home. As the image of her plump, sensuous features floated into his mind, Zen found himself thinking over what Tommaso had said about her, and wondering idly just how much of a whore she really was. Shaking off these fantasies with a stab of guilt, he reminded himself to ring Tania.

  ‘… within the context of a viable long-term development strategy,’ concluded Saoner, eyeing Zen in a manner which suggested that a reply was expected.

  ‘Absolutely!’ said Zen. ‘I totally agree.’

  Tommaso frowned.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘In principle,’ Zen added quickly.

  ‘What principle? The only principle involved is whether Venice is to belong to us Venetians or to a bunch of foreigners who buy up property at inflated prices which our own people can’t afford, so that our yo
ung folk have to emigrate to the mainland while half the houses in the city stand empty.’

  Zen stubbed out his cigarette.

  ‘I’m pretty much a foreigner myself these days, Tommaso. And my house is standing empty.’

  Tommaso looked startled. He barked a rather aggressive laugh.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Aurelio! You don’t have to account for your actions. You’re one of us, a true Venetian born and bred. What you do with your property is no one’s business but your own.’

  He clasped Zen’s hand and looked him in the eye.

  ‘Why don’t you join us? The movement needs men like you.’

  Zen gave an embarrassed shrug.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ he said, withdrawing his hand.

  ‘You know everything about it,’ Tommaso replied fervently. ‘You know it in your bones.’

  He continued to scrutinize Zen with a child-like candour and intensity which made Zen feel acutely uncomfortable. He shrugged again.

  ‘I’ve never joined a political party in my life.’

  ‘We’re a movement, not a party! And the people who’re flocking to join us are precisely those who’ve never had anything to do with the established parties, who are fed up with the old corrupt gang and the empty slogans. You’ve had plenty of experience of that, I’ll be bound. Why, I was hearing a year or two ago about the way you were used by those bastards propping up this rotten government! That murder in Sardinia. Palazzo Sisti were up to their necks in that, weren’t they? But in the end the whole thing got blamed on some local girl who had very conveniently got herself killed. Typical! But things are changing, thanks to movements like ours.’

  He clutched Zen’s arm again.

  ‘There’s a rally tomorrow evening, Aurelio. Why don’t you come along? Meet the people who are making things happen here and then make up your own mind!’

  ‘I’ll see,’ said Zen vaguely. ‘I think I may be doing something.’

  All the exaltation drained from Tommaso’s face. He stood up and threw some money on the table.

  ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you from your work any longer, Aurelio. What’s bothering la contessa this time? Has she started seeing visions of her dead daughter again?’

  ‘It’s skeletons in the bedroom now,’ Zen replied.

  Tommaso laughed and shook his head.

  ‘Poor old girl.’

  They walked to the door together.

  ‘Does anyone know what actually happened to Rosetta Zulian?’ Zen asked as they stepped out into the covered alley.

  ‘She disappeared,’ Tommaso replied vaguely.

  Zen nodded.

  ‘But no one seems to know how or when.’

  ‘Does it matter? It was all so long ago.’

  ‘Not for Ada,’ Zen insisted. ‘I’m sure she’s dreaming these ghostly intruders who are making her life a misery. But like all dreams, it must be a distortion of something real. The more I know about what actually happened, the easier it will be for me to sort out what’s going on.’

  ‘Sounds like a job for a psychiatrist, not a policeman,’ Tommaso Saoner commented dismissively.

  He was about to turn away down a side alley when he suddenly paused and looked back at Zen, his glasses glinting in the gloom.

  ‘There’s someone who probably does know what happened, if anyone does,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Who’s that?’ demanded Zen.

  Tommaso Saoner smiled knowingly.

  ‘Come along to the rally tomorrow night and I’ll introduce you. Campo Santa Margherita, seven o’clock.’

  He slapped Zen’s shoulder jovially.

  ‘It’s wonderful to have you back in the city, Aurelio! Venice isn’t Venice without her sons. Until tomorrow!’

  Aurelio Zen walked slowly home through the darkening streets. The routes leading to the railway station and the car parks were already packed with the human tide of commuters, students and tourists which washed into and out of the city every day, temporarily boosting the population to what it had been fifty years before and creating an illusory air of vitality. But once evening came the ebb set in, draining away this transient throng and revealing the desolate reality.

  The thought of this diurnal tide reminded Zen of what Marco Paulon had said about the Durridge case: if anyone wished to kidnap Ivan Durridge from his island home, they could not have chosen a worse time. Marco remembered the day in question all too well. The low tide that afternoon had been exceptional, draining the lagoon to over a metre below its average level and stranding Paulon on a mudbank halfway to Murano.

  ‘I was stuck there for four hours in the pouring rain with a cargo of beans and salt cod. I’d been going that way for years, at all states of the tide, and never run aground. It rained so much I had to pump out the bilge three times, yet there wasn’t enough water outside to drown a butterfly! So when I heard on the news next morning that this American had been kidnapped, I thought to myself, I’d like to have the boat they used. You couldn’t have got within fifty metres of the island that afternoon!’

  The memory of Marco’s words sparked a fugitive idea in Zen’s mind, something to do not with Durridge but with Ada Zulian. He tried in vain to corner it as it scurried about the fringes of his consciousness. And meanwhile he kept walking, veering to right and left without the slightest hesitation, unaware that a choice had even been made. It had all come back to him, that intimate, subconscious knowledge of the city built up over years of boyhood exploration, a whole decade of wandering through its intricately linked ramifications. Despite the span of time which had elapsed, virtually nothing of that urban fabric had changed. He thought of his conversation with l’onorevole, of the Burolo affair and the terrifying bleakness of the Sardinian landscape. There he had felt vulnerable, incompetent and exposed, totally out of his depth. This was just the opposite. He went on his way, secure and confident, enveloped by a city whose devious, introverted complexities were as familiar to him as the processes of his own mind.

  Durridge, Zulian … What was the connection? Intruders, perhaps? But Ada Zulian’s poltergeists, if they had any existence outside her fears and fantasies, seemed completely gratuitous manifestations, devoid of any motive except mischievous mockery. Indeed, the great problem with believing in them at all, apart from Ada’s history of mental disturbance, was that it was impossible to see why anyone should go to so much trouble for so little purpose. Why waste your time scaring a solitary old lady when with the same skills you could make a fortune burgling one of the city’s more affluent residents?

  But then why kidnap an American millionaire and fail to make a ransom demand? Perhaps Marco Paulon was right, and Durridge had simply staged a dramatic disappearance for reasons of his own. Certainly there was no indication that he had felt himself to be at risk. Although his home was quite literally a fortress, it could hardly have been less secure. The ‘octagons’, as they were known from their shape, were originally built to defend the three gaps in the sandbars which divide the lagoon from the open sea. Most were now in ruin, but one of those just inside the Porto di Malamocco had been bought in the fifties by an English eccentric who had completely renovated it.

  Many rich people aspire to own islands, but an island in the Venetian lagoon, within sight and easy reach of the city, yet perfectly private, verdant and isolated, is a privilege reserved for very few. Ivan Durridge got his chance when the Englishwoman, old and ailing, sold her ottagono for a small fortune. Expecting some ostentatious pleasure pavilion, Zen had been surprised by what awaited him at the top of the metal ladder leading up the brick walling. The floor of the artificial island was now covered in trees, shrubs and plants artfully arranged to form a dense, seemingly natural garden.

  In its midst stood the guardhouse, a long low structure of military severity which had been skilfully transformed into a residence retaining the essential characteristics of the original while suggesting something of the rustic pleasures of a country cottage. The only visible security precaution w
as a faded notice warning intruders to beware of the dog. Of the dog itself there was no sign, and judging by the condition of the notice it might well have departed along with the previous owner. Zen wandered idly about the property, inspired less by the sense that there was anything to be discovered than by the beauty of the spot and the need to spend some time there in order to justify putting Marco to the trouble of bringing him. He was standing on the lawn in front of the house, looking up at the ragged blue patch of sky visible through the encircling foliage, when a cry disturbed his reverie.

  ‘Hey!’

  Zen had grown so accustomed to the peace and quiet that he started violently. The thought that he might not be alone on the island had never occurred to him. He looked round. At the corner of the house stood an elderly man dressed in baggy dark overalls.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded gruffly.

  Zen lit a cigarette with elaborate nonchalance.

  ‘Well?’ the man demanded, walking across the lawn towards him. ‘This is private property.’

  ‘Police.’

  The man’s expression of mute hostility did not change. His face was marked with a series of concentric wrinkles, like ripples on water.

  ‘And you are …?’ barked Zen.

  ‘Calderan, Franco.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Doing? I live here! I’m the gardener and caretaker. I worked for the English signora, then for the American.’

  Zen sniffed sceptically, as though this were a transparent fiction.

  ‘Where were you the day your employer disappeared?’

  The man frowned.

  ‘I’ve already made my statement.’

  ‘So make it again!’ snapped Zen. ‘Or are you afraid the two accounts won’t tally? Maybe you’ve forgotten whatever pack of lies you made up the first time?’

  Franco Calderan stared down at the lawn, on whose flawlessly even surface were imprinted two parallel lines like skidmarks. He glared at Zen, as though he were responsible for this blemish.

  ‘I told them the truth! It was Tuesday, my day off. I rowed over to Alberoni and caught the bus to go and see my sister and her family, same as every week. They can vouch for me!’