Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen turned over the papers one by one. He waded through reports of drug dealers, suppliers, users and informers. He searched through the desk drawers and the filing cabinet in the corner of the room, all without learning anything other than he had already guessed: that Enzo Gavagnin was a professionally respected officer with a heavy workload and a wide range of contacts in both the force and the local underworld. All this was to be expected. After half an hour, Zen had found nothing to justify his suspicions even to himself, let alone a cynical superior.

  At any other time this might have discouraged him, but that morning he was invulnerable to setbacks. Lighting his first cigarette of the day, he thought it through again. He was pretty sure that the litter on the desk would yield nothing. It was too ephemeral, too heterogenous and too likely to be dispersed by a careless or over-zealous cleaner. A cleverer man than Gavagnin, calculating on precisely such an assumption, might have decided that this made it the perfect place to hide a sensitive document. But Gavagnin was not clever, at least not in that way. If he had something to hide, he would hide it, and not in plain view.

  What would he be hiding? That was the key. If Zen knew what he was looking for, he would know where to look. If Filippo Sfriso’s allegations were true, Gavagnin would need to be able to pass on news, to give and receive instructions. That meant a phone number, perhaps more than one. Where would such a man keep them?

  Zen closed his eyes and concentrated, creating a mental hologram of Enzo Gavagnin, an image he could revolve slowly in his consciousness, seeking the answer to his problem. Who was Gavagnin? A swaggering, unscrupulous fixer, energetic and resourceful, but utterly devoid of any moral sense. Someone incapable of imagining that anything he did could be wrong, even though he knew it was illegal. Someone who would not be troubled by this contradiction. Someone above suspicion in his own eyes.

  In short, a mamma’s boy. Mothers fell in love with their sons when their husbands proved unfaithful, Zen believed. This explained his own predicament, his need to be confirmed by the women in his life, and his excessive response when – as last night – this occurred. For Signora Zen had never had the chance to grow disillusioned with her husband, who had disappeared in Russia, an immortal hero whom his son could never hope to supplant. Gavagnin, on the other hand, having been bathed in the river of maternal adoration, felt himself immune to the contingencies of everyday life. Like Achilles, however, he might be wrong about that.

  Zen had already noticed the phone book on his first search, in the bottom drawer of Gavagnin’s desk. It was two years out of date, lacked a cover and started midway through the names beginning with C. Zen picked it up and fingered the flimsy pages. There were various marginal marks and underscorings, but Zen was looking for something simpler, something gross and blatant, something meant. And towards the middle of the book he found it, in an advertising insert printed in colour on shiny paper, easy to find. Beneath a picture of a leather armchair, three numbers had been noted down in a jerky handwriting which Zen recognized from other documents written by Gavagnin.

  The numbers made no sense in themselves, which merely strengthened Zen’s conviction that he had found what he was looking for. They each consisted of nine digits, the first four written separately, as though they were area codes. Zen picked up the phone and dialled the first number, but got only a continuous tone indicating that no such connection existed. He tried the other two numbers with the same result.

  Taking a blank sheet of paper from the top drawer, Zen copied out the three numbers and sat staring at them for some time. Then he picked up the phone and tried dialling the digits without the initial zero. That didn’t work either, nor did dialling just the last five digits, ignoring the prefix. He lit another cigarette and pored over the sequence of numbers once more. After some time, he lifted the receiver and dialled once more, adding the final digit of the prefix to the five which followed. This time the number rang.

  There was no answer. Zen depressed the receiver and tried the same method with the next series of digits. This time he was connected to an answering machine.

  ‘Leave your message after the tone,’ recited a recorded male voice with a strong Veneto accent.

  Zen hung up and tried the last number. The response was immediate.

  ‘Well?’ demanded an irascible male voice.

  Zen had been planning to say he’d got a wrong number, but he had a sudden, gleeful inspiration.

  ‘This is Enzo,’ he said in an approximation of Gavagnin’s guttural tones.

  ‘Why are you calling at this time in the morning, for fuck’s sake?’

  On any other day, Zen would have hung up at that point. He already had the confirmation he needed, and to proceed further might ruin everything, if the man the other end realized that he was not in fact Gavagnin. But he was feeling too good to stop. Besides, what could go wrong on such a morning? His luck was in. He was on a roll.

  ‘Filippo has agreed to co-operate,’ he murmured.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘That’s not what you told us yesterday,’ the man replied with a new edge.

  ‘This happened last night. After I told him that his mother would be the next to have an accident.’

  This time the silence seemed to last for ever.

  ‘You exceeded your instructions,’ said the voice. ‘You should have consulted us.’

  Zen said nothing.

  ‘Do you have the goods?’ the man asked.

  ‘I know where they are,’ replied Zen, and replaced the receiver.

  He folded up the paper with numbers and put it in his pocket, then replaced the directory in the drawer. That should give Gavagnin something to think about, he thought as he walked upstairs with a mischievous smile.

  His own office was as he had left it the day before, except that the wire tray contained a buff memorandum from the Forensic laboratory with the results of the fingerprint tests on the knife used to attack Ada Zulian. As he had expected, the only prints on the knife – apart from a partial of Zen’s thumb on the base of the handle – were identical to those taken from the contessa herself.

  Zen dropped the memo into the file he had opened on the case. Although it told him nothing he did not already know, it was a timely reminder that he had better cover his tracks by devoting some time and energy to the investigation which was the notional reason for his presence in the city. He prowled about the office, trying to think of a way to force the issue.

  A sudden racket drew him to the window. In a barge moored on the opposite bank of the canal, a man was stripping the bark off a tree trunk with a chain-saw. As Zen watched, he shaped the end to a rough point and then manoeuvred the stake into position with a rope before ramming it down into the mud with a pile-driver mounted in the bow of the barge. Within minutes, the mooring pole was in place. The whole city was constructed on a subterranean forest of such piles, Zen recalled, laid down centuries ago to stabilize the mudbanks of the lagoon and make them habitable.

  For some reason the thought triggered a surge of panic, an intolerable sense of constriction, asphyxiation and dread. His earlier elation was abruptly banished as though it had never been. A moment before he had been thinking about walking to the Bar dei Greci for some well-earned breakfast, buoyed by the knowledge of a job well done and a rival elegantly dished. Now all that had been swept away by an overwhelming need to get out, to escape from this wasteland of water and stone, and feel solid ground beneath his feet again. Similar attacks of claustrophobia may well have been one of the factors which had driven earlier generations of Venetians to colonize substantial stretches of the Mediterranean coastline. Aurelio Zen’s solution was less ambitious but just as effective.

  In the early sixties, a relative of Silvio Morosini who worked in one of the glassworks on Murano had been sent to New York for two weeks as one of a group of Italian artisans demonstrating their traditional skills at a trade fair. On his return, the instant celebrity was fêted at a huge dinner party. Everyone was ag
og to hear from his lips what the fabled city of skyscrapers and millionaires was really like. After a suitably impressive pause, the latter-day Marco Polo duly pronounced. ‘New York,’ he said with a dismissive shrug, ‘is Mestre.’

  Mestre certainly wasn’t New York, but for therapeutic purposes it would do. Zen went downstairs and commandeered a launch to take him ‘as a matter of the greatest urgency’ to the concrete and asphalt expanses of Piazzale Roma, from which a taxi sped him across the aptly named Ponte della Libertà to the mainland. As the diesel-engined Fiat traversed the freeways and flyovers of Marghera, where the pall of pollution was so bad that vehicles could only be driven on alternate days depending on whether their registration number was odd or even, Zen felt his crisis gradually easing. By the time he had paid off the taxi and walked down a street clogged with stalled and honking traffic and across a piazza filled with rows of parked cars wedged so tightly that it would have been easier to climb over them than to find a way through, he could no longer remember why he had come. To leave those quiet streets and that clean air, for this? The idea was palpably crazy.

  He made his way on foot to the station buffet, where he breakfasted badly and expensively before catching a train back to the city. As Zen watched the slums and muddle of the mainland recede, he noticed an electronic sign attached to the tower-block offices of a local bank. Unlike similar displays elsewhere, this one showed not only the time and the date but also the state of the tide. A simple calculation yielded the information that high water that evening would be around nine o’clock. Which suited Zen nicely.

  Back in the city, he made his way on foot to Palazzo Zulian. The sun was just showing through the thick haze, a white disc which might have been the source of the cold which gripped the air. Just before turning into the narrow passageway leading to the door, Zen inadvertently stepped in a large turd which the dog’s owner had disguised with a sprinkling of sawdust. He cleaned up the mess as best he could, wiping his shoe along the wall and pavement, but he was not in the best possible humour as he approached Palazzo Zulian. Nor was his mood improved by a raucous shout from overhead.

  ‘Go away! Get out of here!’

  He looked up. Ada was not visible, but the voice was hers.

  ‘Be off, I say!’

  ‘Not until I’ve spoken to you, contessa,’ Zen replied.

  A head emerged from the carved window at first-floor level.

  ‘Ah, good morning, Aurelio Battista! So you’ve finally decided to show your face around here. About time too!’

  Zen gawked up at her.

  ‘Thanks for the welcome,’ he retorted sarcastically.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you! I didn’t even know you were there. I was shouting at that tomcat on the wall. I made the mistake of throwing him some scraps last week, and now he sits there all day staring at me like a beggar. Now stay put and I’ll send your man down to open the door. Let me tell you, I’m going to give you a piece of my mind!’

  Ada drew back into the house and closed the window. Zen looked round, and was reassured to see that the cat in question did in fact exist. Noticing his glance, it gave a self-pitying mew.

  ‘Piss off,’ said Zen.

  The cat blinked and looked away disdainfully. Inside the house there was a clatter of boots on the stairs. A key turned in the lock and the door opened to reveal Bettino Todesco clutching a service revolver.

  ‘Ah, it’s you, chief,’ he said, putting the weapon back in its holster.

  ‘Who the hell did you think it was?’ Zen snapped, pushing past.

  ‘Well she said it was, but I don’t take that much notice of what she says any more.’

  He leant forward and whispered confidentially to Zen.

  ‘If I have to spend another night here I’ll go round the bend myself.’

  Zen frowned at him.

  ‘Why, has anything happened?’

  Todesco shook his head lugubriously.

  ‘I wish something would happen. Anything would be better than having to listen to that woman maundering on. If she’s not bitching about this, she’s moaning about that, or talking to people who aren’t there. Gives me the creeps, I can tell you.’

  Zen nodded.

  ‘All right, Todesco, go off home and get some rest. But be at the Questura by six o’clock this evening. I need you for an operation I have in mind.’

  ‘Very good, chief.’

  Zen made his way up the stairs leading through the mezzanine level to the hallway transecting the house from front to back. The diminutive figure of Ada Zulian stood silhouetted against the window at the far end.

  ‘So you’ve dismissed your spy,’ she remarked sourly, ‘but I suppose he’ll be back. A fat lot of use it was calling the police! I complain of intruders in my house, and all they do is force another one on me.’

  She sniffed suspiciously. Zen shifted uneasily in his shoes. There was still a strong stink of dogshit. Some of the stuff must have got trapped in the crack between the sole and the uppers.

  ‘I should have listened to Daniele Trevisan,’ Ada Zulian went on. ‘He told me to keep the police out of it.’

  ‘Well then, you’ll be glad to hear that we’re about to get out of it,’ Zen snapped.

  Ada put her head on one side and stared up at him. Her face looked inexpressibly ancient, a palimpsest of all the faces it had ever been: baby, child, adolescent and the whole parabola of womanhood. It was all there, superimposed like layers of paint.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she inquired mildly.

  ‘I mean you win, contessa! You want the police out of your hair and I want you and your bullyboys out of mine. Is it a deal?’

  Ada Zulian peered at him.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Aurelio Battista? Come into the salon and I’ll make some camomile tea to calm you down.’

  ‘What will calm me down is you calling off your friends and relations!’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh come on, contessa! You told people about the police guard on the house …’

  ‘I mentioned it to my family …’

  ‘… who mentioned it to their powerful contacts, who mentioned it to my superiors at the Questura, who have been making my life a misery ever since. Fair enough! I was only trying to protect you, because you were a family friend, and this is the thanks I get!’

  He walked right up to her, emphasizing his points by stabbing one palm with two fingers of the other hand.

  ‘That policeman who just left will not be coming back, contessa. Understand? Neither will his colleagues. Neither will I. You won’t be bothered with any of us any more. And all I ask in return is that you get in touch with all the people you complained to about me and tell them to very kindly stop breaking my balls.’

  Ada glared at him.

  ‘There’s no call to use that sort of language.’

  ‘I don’t care what sort of language you use, contessa, just as long as you get the message across.’

  He turned on his heel and walked back to the stairs.

  ‘And if the intruders return?’ Ada called querulously after him. ‘What will become of me then?’

  Zen turned and stared back at her implacably.

  ‘But they won’t return, will they? They were never here in the first place. They never existed, except in your dreams. And I have enough real work to do without trying to police people’s dreams.’

  He nodded curtly.

  ‘Good day, contessa. And goodbye.’

  Zen paid for his broken sleep and early rising with a blurred mental focus which ensured that the rest of the day passed in a dopy haze punctuated by various isolated episodes which forced themselves on his attention, one being the moment when Enzo Gavagnin publicly accused him of being an undercover agent acting for the Ministry in Rome.

  The encounter took place in the Bar dei Greci, where Zen had gone to try and blast away his mental fog with stiff draughts of espresso doppio ristretto. When Gavagnin appeared beside
him at the bar, Zen was reading a newspaper report of a speech by Umberto Bossi, demanding immediate national elections to ‘restore credibility to the government before the demands of local demagogues for regional autonomy lead to the break-up of Italy’. A leader commented that now Bossi saw a real chance of achieving power at national level, he was distancing himself from those such as Ferdinando Dal Maschio who were still pursuing the separatist goals which Bossi had once espoused.

  ‘What the hell were you doing in my office this morning?’ demanded Gavagnin aggressively.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Zen replied. Thanks to his dazed condition, this was literally true. He had temporarily forgotten that he had ever visited Gavagnin’s office, let alone why, and thus had no trouble sounding innocently baffled. But Gavagnin’s fury was not assuaged.

  ‘Don’t try and deny it!’ he snapped. ‘When I got in this morning I couldn’t breathe for the stink of those camelshit Nazionali. You’re the only one in the building who smokes them.’

  Zen merely shrugged and went on reading the paper. Gavagnin snatched it from his hands.

  ‘Admit it, you’re a spy!’ he shouted. ‘A snooper from the Ministry. All that bullshit about being sent up here to look into some madwoman’s stories about things going bump in the night! What a load of crap! It’s us you’re investigating, isn’t it? You’re checking us out on behalf of your masters in Rome. That’s what you were doing in my office. Going through my papers to try and find something to use against me. And why? Because I’m with the Nuova Repubblica Veneta, and we’ve got the old regime shitting in its pants!’

  He continued in this vein for some time, but Zen simply stared levelly at him and said nothing. As time went on, Gavagnin’s tone became distracted rather than confrontational, his tone more pleading than threatening. In the end, he turned on his heel and stalked out.