Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen’s sneer indicated the value he ascribed to alibis which depended on the corroboration of the suspect’s relations.

  ‘Who knew that Tuesday was your day off?’

  ‘Nobody! Everybody!’

  ‘First you say one thing, then another! Why are you lying? Who are you trying to protect?’

  Zen broke off, appalled at himself. Why the hell was he browbeating this old man? But he had been a policeman too long not to try and make Calderan sweat a little in return for his surly welcome.

  ‘I’m not protecting anyone! Everyone knew that I went to see my sister on Tuesdays, and have done these thirty years!’

  He took a step forward, confronting Zen openly.

  ‘Anyway, what are you doing coming out here and raking all this over again? I’ve been through it all often enough already! Or haven’t you bothered to read what I told your colleagues?’

  Calderan’s eyes narrowed as a new suspicion struck him.

  ‘You say you’re from the police? Let me see your identification.’

  Zen had obliged, and after some further acrimonious exchanges he had been able to depart in a relatively dignified manner. But the experience had merely had the effect of making his private investigation of the Durridge affair seem even more of a mockery. The case had already been fully investigated, and at a time when clues and memories were still fresh. What hope had he of solving the mystery now, three months after the event?

  While these thoughts occupied Zen’s mind, his internal autopilot steered him through the viscera of San Polo and brought him out at a small wooden landing-stage on the sinuous waterway which dissected the city. The ferry which served it was at the other side, and Zen joined the young couple waiting on the pier. The man was gazing with glazed eyes at the water, a hiss like distant surf emanating from the personal stereo headphones inserted into his ears. His partner, who was heavily pregnant, was reading a copy of Gente magazine featuring an article on the home life of Umberto Bossi, ‘the charismatic leader of the separatist Leghe’. Both were wearing dark glasses and energetically chewing gum.

  As the ferry made its way towards them, Zen remembered that he must give Palazzo Sisti a fax number to which they could transmit the file on the Durridge case. No country had taken to the new electronic technology more avidly than Italy, where it had cut through the Gordian knot of the postal service at one stroke. For decades, people had debated ways and means for reforming la posta, with its endless rules and regulations, the surly arrogance of its superabundant staff, and above all its inability to get a letter to its destination in less than a week. Now the debate was over. Those who had access to one of the miraculous machines had leapt straight from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, while the rest – including Zen, in this instance – remained bogged in the quagmire of the twentieth.

  The Questura had a bank of fax machines, of course, but given the degree of irregularity involved in this transaction it would be too risky to have the incriminating file sent there. Whom did he know with a fax machine? Marco Paulon, perhaps, but he’d asked Marco enough favours for one day. Besides, he wouldn’t be home. When he’d dropped Zen off in Campo San Stin, where he had a delivery to make, Marco had mentioned that he was going to visit his cousin on Burano and catch up on the latest stories of crazy fisherman and walking corpses.

  The ferry bumped alongside and the passengers disembarked. Zen walked down the wooden steps, handed his five-hundred-lire coin to the boatman and stepped aboard. Tommaso Saoner would either have a fax machine or know someone who did, but Zen’s encounter with his former friend had been such an unsettling experience that he didn’t feel confident about enlisting his help in such a delicate matter. It was of course notoriously difficult to pick up the threads of a relationship which had once been so close – it is not only the houses of one’s childhood which seem diminished when one goes back – but Zen had been almost shocked by the change in Tommaso. This political movement he had got himself involved with seemed to have affected him like a religious conversion.

  The only thing like it he could remember was the playboy son of one of his colleagues at the Questura in Milan who had become a Maoist. One evening he walked into a dinner party in the family home and shot one of the guests, a leading judge, with his father’s revolver. Almost more chilling than the act of violence itself had been the boy’s unshakeable conviction that he had acted rightly, in the only manner either comprehensible or justifiable, and that anyone who did not do likewise was either a hypocrite or a cretin, and in either case condemned to the dustbin of history. But that was back in 1978. No one got excited by politics any more. How could Tommaso have fallen hook, line and sinker for some fringe party whose programme, from what Zen had heard of it, sounded like total lunacy? Christ, he’d probably be the only other person at this rally he’d promised to attend!

  The ferry headed out into the crowded waters of the canalazzo. Zen and the young couple, standing amidships, swayed back and forth as the wash of passing vessels struck the hull. The ferrymen standing at bow and stern rowed steadily, pushing their oars into the water in short thrusts, as though turning over soil. Soon they nosed in at the pier on the other bank, where another cluster of passengers stood waiting to cross. Zen set off along the alley leading back from the water, walking on the boards which had been laid down to cover a trench for a new gas main.

  When he neared the Ponte Guglie, he went into a grocer’s shop which was still open. The shop was dim and vaulted, so densely crowded with goods that it was almost impossible to move. As Zen’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he made out the owner lurking at the counter like a spider in its web. He bought some coffee, mineral water and a packet of biscuits for breakfast. The grocer rang up his purchases on one of the huge state-of-the-art electronic registers required by the tax authorities, which looked as out of place in these troglodytic surroundings as a computer in a cave.

  Hefting his green plastic bag of purchases, Zen continued along the Cannaregio canal, his feet aching at the unaccustomed exercise, and turned off into the alley which gradually widened into the triangular campo with the circular stone well-head, its carvings obliterated by time and touch. He noted the strip of whitened paving, caused by droppings from the birds which perched on the power and phone cables crossing the street at this point. How often had he come this way? How many times had he followed this route home? The thought inspired a sort of vertigo. He recoiled from contact with all those other selves, each of which had seemed so absolute at the time, but were now revealed as just another in a restless, flickering series of imposters. I’m getting as bad as Ada Zulian and that fisherman from Burano, he thought. I should never have come. I should have stayed in Rome, where you can drive everywhere and no one believes in ghosts.

  The house felt cold and empty. As Zen opened the door to the living room, the telephone started to ring. He stood, staring at it but making no attempt to answer. It rang eleven times before cutting off with a brief peep. Eyeing the instrument warily, Zen set down his shopping and circled round the room to the window, and threw open the casements. The cool evening air flowed in over the sill, setting up currents and eddies in the whole room. He had the sensation that the floor was rocking gently back and forth, like a boat at its mooring. It was some time before he became aware that he was not the only one enjoying the dusk. From one of the bedrooms on the top floor of the house opposite, a young woman stood looking down at him.

  Zen waved to her.

  ‘Good evening.’

  Cristiana Morosini smiled vaguely and nodded. She seemed to be about to say something when the phone in the room behind him began to ring again. With an impatient shrug, Zen turned away to answer it.

  ‘Hello? Who? Tania! Oh, I was just going to call you! Did you ring a moment ago? No? I just got home and it was ringing as I came in, but I couldn’t reach it in time. I thought it might have been you.’

  He dug out his cigarettes.

  ‘Oh, all right. It doesn’t look as t
hough there’s much to be done, but I’ll stretch it out as long as I can …’

  He paused to light up.

  ‘Of course I’m missing you, sweetheart, but it’s a question of the money, isn’t it? I mean that’s why I’m here. The family are paying by the day, so the longer I take over it the better, no?’

  He clasped the receiver to his ear for some time.

  ‘Of course I appreciate your situation, Tania. I just hope you appreciate mine. It would be nice to get a little appreciation, once in a while. It’s not that much fun camping out in this house like a squatter.’

  Whorls of smoke from his cigarette drifted like weed about the room, delineating its tidal currents and stagnant pools.

  ‘Because this is not my real work. That’s what’s different about it. I don’t have to run errands for Americans. I’d be much happier to stay in Rome, go through the motions at the office and then come round and see you in the evening. But we’ve got to think about the future. We can’t go on in the way we have been, and my apartment isn’t large enough for all of us to share, so unless we get some money from somewhere …’

  He broke off and listened, sighing.

  ‘I’m not angry! But quite frankly I’ve got enough problems as it is without having you phoning me up to nag me because I don’t sound sufficiently sorry about not being there. Understand? Under the circumstances, I think you could show a little more consideration.’

  He held the receiver away from his ear. It continued to emit angry squawks. He set it down on the table and walked back to the window. Cristiana Morosini had disappeared. He walked back to the table and picked up the phone, but the vocal ostinato had been replaced by a steady electronic humming.

  Replacing the receiver, he walked through to the kitchen and opened the window there. The increased flow of air immediately cancelled all the existing currents, scouring out a new deep channel from one window to the other. Zen leant on the windowsill and gazed morosely down at the darkly mobile surface of the water in the canal below. He had completely failed to strike the right note with Tania. She had wanted to be reassured, to be soothed and wooed, and he hadn’t been able to do it. It was like a language he had once learned, but had forgotten.

  Similar episodes had occurred before, but never when they were apart. Until now, separation had always brought out the best in them, and when they were together such failures were quickly forgotten. But now they were apart, a conversation such as the one they had just had became emblematic of more general shortcomings, problems and inadequacies in the relationship as a whole. Judging by Tania’s manner, she felt that there was no shortage of these.

  He let his spent cigarette drop into the canal. The tide was high again, just as it had been when he had looked out from the bedroom on the morning of his arrival. He closed the window and walked back to the living room, where he picked up the plastic shopping bag. He eyed the phone briefly. It wasn’t too late to call Tania back and apologize, to talk the whole thing through and …

  He turned away and carried the shopping through to the kitchen, where he arranged the items artistically on the bare shelves. It was too late. He felt divided from Tania by infinitely more than the actual distance between them. It was as if she were on the other side of the world, or even some other world.

  He stood back, admiring his work. It might not be the home beautiful, but at least he could have a cup of coffee in the morning. As for the evening looming up before him, big, blank and empty, that was a much less alluring prospect. He would have to find somewhere to have dinner, for a start. The prospect of eating alone in some dreary, over-priced trattoria did not appeal. When he spoke to Tania, he had deliberately exploited the draw-backs of his situation for dramatic effect, but the fact remained that in many ways it was not enviable. Despite this, he hadn’t the slightest desire to be anywhere else, least of all back in Rome.

  As though in response to this thought, the phone began to ring again. For a moment he toyed with the idea of not answering. The last thing he wanted was to have to resume the laborious task of trying to communicate meaningfully with Tania. He had nothing whatever to say to her. But it would only make matters worse in the long run to hide there, pretending not to be home. Heaving a deep sigh, he walked through to the living room and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Aurelio Battista, is that you?’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Oh thank God you’re there! I’ve rung twice already but there was no reply. I think I’d have gone mad if you hadn’t answered this time!’

  ‘Contessa?’

  ‘They’re here! It’s worse than ever! They’ve got knives! For God’s sake come quickly!’

  By the time he turns up, of course, her shield and strength, her bold avenger, the intruders have cleared off. He searches every room in the palazzo, but there is no one there. As she told him earlier, they’re not stupid. Neither is he, Giustiniana’s son. He was always quick on the uptake, even as a child, she’ll give him that. Ada recalls being astonished, sometimes, by the things he’d come out with, finding a connection between two things she’d quite forgotten about, or hadn’t even noticed in the first place.

  That’s no comfort here, though. She herself has still got all her wits about her, whatever folk may say, and much good it’s done her. Mere human intelligence is powerless against the adversaries she faces. The Church might have helped, but Ada turned her back on God after what He allowed to happen to Rosetta. She does not go so far as to deny His existence, but she’ll be damned if she’ll acknowledge it.

  This time, though, she almost blurted out a prayer. It had never been so bad before. She had grown used to the continual harassment, the sudden scurries and scampering in the dark, the flashing and stabbing lights, the shouts and screams and mocking laughter. It was all horrible, but at least the ritual seemed to have rules which until tonight had never been broken. The most important, from her point of view, was that whatever the creatures might get up to in the way of noise and nuisance, they never actually laid hands on her.

  She’d known for a long time that they had hands, because in her panic she had sometimes run up against them. They were substantial all right, whatever people might say. But until now all physical contact between them had been accidental, the result of her panic and their inability to get out of her way fast enough. That she could just about tolerate, but what had happened tonight was quite unspeakable, just too awful for words …

  Which is precisely the problem, she finds, when she tries to explain. Whatever she says, however she phrases it, the whole thing sounds unreal, phantasmagoric, even to her. She doesn’t even quite believe her own experience, so how can she expect anyone else to do so? She glances once again at Aurelio Battista, crouching beside her on the low hard settle. His tone is sympathetic enough, but she’s already beginning to regret having phoned him.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ he asks, dampening the rag in the dilute vinegar she is using as an antiseptic.

  Ada dabs the shallow cuts across the inside of her wrists.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘I’ll call an ambulance boat, contessa. We must get these injuries seen to.’

  But that’s precisely what she doesn’t want. It’s one thing having the police involved. Despite Daniele Trevisan’s warnings, the policemen she’s dealt with so far have been perfectly correct, for all their evident scepticism. But the doctors are another matter altogether. Ada will never forget what they did to her the last time, even though she cannot actually remember in any detail what they did do. Never again, that much is certain. She’d rather slit her wrists than go back to San Clemente!

  As it is, she is not even being consulted. Giustiniana’s boy is speaking into the telephone, giving orders in a peremptory way, referring to her as ‘the patient’, as though she were some sort of object. To get her own back, she blots him out in turn, replacing him with an earlier version dressed in a skirt and blouse, playing with one of Rosetta’s do
lls, all alone in this vast cold salon, dwarfed by the furniture …

  ‘They’ll be here shortly,’ says the other Aurelio Battista. ‘Now then, what became of the knife?’

  She points to the other side of the salon, towards the enormous dining table reputedly made from the timbers of a captured Turkish galley. ‘The dragon table’, little Aurelio used to call it, crawling about its giant legs carved in the form of claws … As he is again now, down on his hands and knees to gather up the carving knife lying there on the floor.

  ‘Is this yours, contessa?’ he asks, carrying the knife towards her by the tip of the blade.

  Ada nods dumbly.

  ‘It’s so blunt,’ she murmurs.

  He sets the knife down on a chair and stands looking down at her.

  ‘One of them held my arm while the other cut me,’ she explains. ‘He had to press quite hard, the knife is so blunt. It hurt.’

  But it’s the fear rather than the pain she remembers most clearly. She knows now that they weren’t trying to kill her, but at the time she had no such assurance, and her terror was so extreme that she had lost control of her bladder. She does not tell Zen that her principal concern had been to remove all trace of this before he arrived.

  ‘Can you describe the intruders?’ he asks, sitting down again.

  Of course she can. But she is unwilling to do so. She knows only too well that the grotesque appearance of the figures, with their exaggerated features and fantastic costumes, sounds totally absurd, something from a

  nightmare. And sure enough, as she talks about the tall one with the huge hooked nose, sunken eyes and gaping rictus, his voluminous clothes chequered like a harlequin, a knowing look comes over her visitor’s face.

  ‘Do you go out much, contessa?’ he asks casually.

  She carefully disguises the fact that she cannot see the point of this question at all.

  ‘Once or twice a week to the shops …’