Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  Zen closed the window and turned round. Ada Zulian had sat up in bed, the covers clutched around her, staring indignantly at him as though he were the intruder.

  ‘It’s all right, contessa,’ Zen told her. ‘You’re safe now. We’ve got the bastards.’

  He hurried to the door and downstairs, turning on the lights as he went. When he reached the portego he almost tripped over someone lying sprawled on the marble paving. He stopped, gazing in horror at the blue police uniform, the long hair, the puddle of blood all around. Pia Nunziata opened her eyes and attempted a pallid smile.

  ‘It isn’t as bad as it looks,’ she muttered.

  Zen knelt down beside her.

  ‘I had no idea they’d be armed,’ he said helplessly.

  ‘They weren’t.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘It was Bettino.’

  ‘What?’

  The policewoman’s attempted shrug turned into a wince and a groan.

  ‘It was an accident. He didn’t know I was following him. We heard the racket upstairs and came running. I happened to bump into him, and he must have thought …’

  Zen shook his head wearily.

  ‘Where are you hit?’

  ‘My arm. The upper part, where it’s soft. It’s just a flesh wound. I don’t think there’s any danger.’

  She glanced down at the fingers of her left hand, clutched tightly around the sleeve of her uniform jacket.

  ‘It’s starting to hurt, though.’

  Zen straightened up.

  ‘We’ll get you to hospital right away.’

  ‘The worst of it is, the bastard got away.’

  ‘Todesco?’

  ‘The man in the skeleton costume. Bettino was so concerned about me that he didn’t even try and stop him. Martufò was looking after the canal side, but the man got out by the street door and ran off.’

  Zen nodded.

  ‘It’s all right, I’d thought of that. Now then, can you walk or shall I get a stretcher?’

  Grimacing with the pain, Pia Nunziata got to her feet. Zen took her elbow to help her up.

  ‘Not that fucking arm!’ she screamed.

  She looked at him.

  ‘Sir.’

  Downstairs, the doors at either end of the andron had both been thrown open and a gentle current of air flowed through the echoey space, emptying out the odours of mould and decay. As Zen and Pia Nunziata made their way slowly down the staircase, two patrolmen in uniform entered through the street door, escorting a lanky figure in handcuffs dressed in a skintight black costume with the outline of a skeleton superimposed in white fluorescent paint.

  ‘Sons of whores!’ the young man shouted angrily. ‘This is an outrage!’

  ‘Load him into the boat,’ Zen told the policemen.

  ‘We’ve committed no crime!’ the skeleton protested. ‘We’re members of the family!’

  ‘Wait!’ called Zen. ‘On second thoughts, dump him over there in the corner for now. We’ve got to get our colleague to Emergency, and we can’t hang about waiting for an ambulance.’

  He pointed to a massive iron hook protruding from the stonework.

  ‘If he gives you any trouble, suspend him by his cuffs from that for a while.’

  ‘You’ll regret this, you heap of shit!’ shrieked the skeleton.

  Taking no notice of this outburst, Aurelio Zen led the injured policewoman across the worn marble slabs and out of the waterdoor of Palazzo Zulian.

  Gobs of slush fell in slanting lines through the air, tautening at moments to rain which drummed on umbrellas and slapped against skin, colder and harder than the sleet. The crowds in the narrow streets manoeuvred like craft in a crowded channel, tilting or raising their umbrellas to avoid fouling or collision. As if all this were not bad enough, hooligan gusts of wind played rough and tumble with anyone they caught, slitting open seams and sneaking in at cuff and collar until your clothes felt wetter in than out.

  Despite the weather – to say nothing of a night both shorter and a good deal more stressful than the one he had spent with Cristiana – Aurelio Zen entered the Questura the next morning with the air of a conquering hero. Not only had he demonstrated in the teeth of professional and public scepticism that the case on which he was engaged existed independently of the workings of Ada Zulian’s florid imagination. He had also solved it, and in the most dramatic and absolute fashion, capturing the persons responsible in the act and at the scene of the crime. It was a coup such as every official dreamed of, an unqualified success, secure from any of the stratagems by which judges and juries contrive to frustrate the police and deny them their rightful triumphs.

  This euphoria lasted all of two minutes, such being the time it took Zen to climb the stairs to his office, where he was greeted by a familiar figure, beaming jovially and exuding an air of collusive bonhomie.

  ‘Good morning, dottore. I wasn’t hoping to see you again so soon. God, it’s cold! There’s snow on the way, if you ask me.’

  Zen eyed Carlo Berengo Gorin with open hostility.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Same as yesterday! I’d like to be more original, but I’m only a hireling, when all’s said and done.’

  Zen stared at the lawyer truculently. Then he turned and slammed the door shut behind him.

  ‘Another visit? This must be costing Enzo Gavagnin a fortune.’

  Gorin frowned.

  ‘I think you must have …’

  ‘How much do you charge to take on a case like this, avvocato?’ Zen demanded, hanging his rain-spattered overcoat on the stand. ‘Whatever it is, a type like Giulio Bon doesn’t have that kind of money to throw around. He’d rather sweat it out for the duration and then tell me to fuck off when my time’s up. He knows the rules. He’d no sooner hire a lawyer to spring him from a routine questioning than he’d hire a limousine to take him to the airport. And if by any chance he did, he’d go for the cut-price end of the market.’

  He sneered at Gorin as he brushed past and sat down at his desk. Success in the Zulian case had made him confident.

  ‘I worked out that much at the time,’ he said, lighting his first cigarette of the day. ‘And when I saw you leaving Gavagnin’s office, and remembered how he’d carried on when Bon arrived, I knew that he must have summoned you. Nice gesture for an old friend, I thought. Shitty thing to do to a colleague, but nothing more to it than that.’

  ‘Excuse me, but …’

  ‘But then I realized that what’s true for Bon is true for Gavagnin. If he’d called a lawyer, why the most expensive in the city? It’s a routine case, after all.’

  Zen gazed intently at Gorin.

  ‘Or perhaps it isn’t. And perhaps you have special rates for certain … friends.’

  The lawyer stroked his beard, in which bright beads of water were nesting.

  ‘I believe we’re at cross-purposes, dottore,’ he said with an embarrassed smile. ‘When I said that the purpose of my visit was the same as yesterday, I was speaking generically.’

  Zen shook a parcel of ash off his cigarette into the metal wastebin.

  ‘Then perhaps you’d be good enough to get to the point, avvocato. I have work to do.’

  ‘Perhaps not as much as you think, dottore.’

  ‘Meaning what, avvocato?’

  Gorin shrugged and heaved a long sigh.

  ‘You’re going to have to let them go, you know.’

  Zen nodded lightly, as if this were something he had foreseen and which made perfect sense.

  ‘Let them go,’ he repeated.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘Who are we talking about?’ Zen inquired urbanely.

  Carlo Berengo Gorin looked taken aback for a moment.

  ‘Why, the clients of mine you arrested last night! The Ardit brothers.’

  Zen felt himself starting to hyperventilate. He drew largely on his cigarette.

  ‘Ridiculous!’ he snapped.

/>   ‘What’s ridiculous?’

  Feeling the need to assert himself, Zen stood up and walked over to the window. In the canal below, a collapsed red umbrella edged past on the incoming tide. Zen turned to face Gorin.

  ‘The men in question were arrested last night at Palazzo Zulian, which they had entered illicitly, in the act of carrying out an assault on the owner. The timely intervention of the police, led personally by myself, prevented their criminal designs and the pair were arrested in flagrante delicto. The entire matter has been communicated to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is in the process of opening a dossier on the case. The matter is therefore in the hands of the judiciary, and I fail to see how I can be of any assistance to you.’

  ‘Who’s handling it?’

  Zen consulted his notebook.

  ‘Dottore Marcello Mamoli.’

  Gorin shook his head sadly.

  ‘In that case, I doubt there’s anything I can do for you. Marcello and I were at law school together. He was always a stickler for procedure.’

  Zen scowled at him.

  ‘I don’t need you to do anything for me! Save that for your clients, avvocato. They’re the ones who need help.’

  ‘On the contrary, dottore. Why do you think I bothered coming here in the first place? I wanted to give you a chance to avoid getting covered in shit. You’re one of us, after all.’

  ‘What do you mean, one of us?’ asked Zen.

  Gorin looked at him but said nothing.

  ‘And what do you mean by covered in shit?’ shouted Zen angrily. ‘It’s your clients who’re in it up to their necks!’

  ‘What’s the charge?’ murmured Gorin.

  Zen counted on his fingers.

  ‘Breaking and entering. Resisting arrest with consequent injury to a police officer. Intimidation. Attempted extortion.’

  ‘Breaking and entering is out. They had a key.’

  ‘They stole a key.’

  ‘They were given one by their aunt, the contessa.’

  ‘A key to the street door, yes. But not to the waterdoor, which is how they came and went.’ Gorin shrugged.

  ‘If you give someone a key to your house, you are granting them access to the property. The fact that my clients chose to travel by water rather than on foot is of no legal significance whatsoever.’

  He grinned maliciously.

  ‘As for the injury to your officer, I have to say that I think it unwise of you to bring that up, since I gather that the individual in question was wounded by a gunshot inflicted by one of her colleagues. Certainly neither of my clients could have been responsible, since they were not armed. Why would they be? They were visiting their aunt.’

  ‘They weren’t visiting her!’ Zen exploded. ‘They were terrorizing her! They were trying to drive her mad, or rather trying to make everyone believe she was mad!’

  Carlo Berengo Gorin looked pained.

  ‘There is no evidence whatsoever to support such wild allegations.’

  ‘No evidence! This has been going on for weeks, avvocato! What would they have had to do, in your view, for there to be evidence? Kill her?’

  Gorin waggled his forefinger in the air.

  ‘There is absolutely no proof that my clients were responsible for the earlier intrusions – or indeed that they ever took place at all.’

  ‘But that must be the presumption.’

  Gorin oscillated his hand in the air, fingers outstretched, as though turning a large doorknob back and forth.

  ‘If it weren’t for the testimony of the contessa herself, perhaps,’ he murmured. ‘But that alters the balance of probability quite dramatically.’

  ‘What testimony?’

  Carlo Berengo Gorin looked from side to side, sighing.

  ‘I really shouldn’t be cutting you in on the defence case, but, well, as one Venetian to another … When she’s summoned to appear before Mamoli, Ada Zulian will tell him that last night’s episode, so far from being one in a long series, was quite different from anything she had experienced before. Her nephews’ performance, it seems, was so crude that she guessed immediately that it was them. It lacked all the fluidity and “other-worldliness”, to use her own term, of the previous manifestations.’

  Zen violently hurled the butt of his cigarette, which had burned down to the filter, into the bin.

  ‘That’s absurd! The carnival costumes the accused were wearing corresponded exactly with the description the contessa gave me of the figures who have been tormenting her. No one’s going to believe that it was sheer coincidence.’

  ‘Of course not. But you’re not the only person whose ear she bent about these ghostly apparitions of hers. The old girl’s been going on about it to her nephews for weeks, and last night they played a little trick on her by dressing up in carnival gear and acting out her fantasies.’

  Gorin shrugged.

  ‘Many people may consider such a jape was in extremely questionable taste, to put it mildly. There is, however, nothing remotely illegal about it.’

  He shook his head mournfully.

  ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to let them go, dottore.’

  Zen glanced at his watch, then at the slashing rain outside the window.

  ‘There’s another charge I omitted to mention,’ he told Gorin solemnly. ‘One of the brothers referred to my men as “sons of whores”, while the other called me a “heap of shit”.’

  Gorin laughed a little uneasily.

  ‘Oh come on Zen! You’ll hear that kind of thing down at the bar any day.’

  ‘That’s different. If someone insults me when I’m off duty, that’s a personal matter. I can choose to ignore him or to retaliate. But last night I was abused whilst carrying out my duties as a state functionary. The offence was thus not only to me personally but to the office I hold. To let such a thing go unpunished would be to undermine the authority of the legal process and inded the very fabric of an ordered, democratic society.’

  Gorin gestured with his hands cupped together, appealing to sanity and common sense.

  ‘Be reasonable, dottore! If you go round bursting into the homes of respectable citizens in the middle of the night, firing off guns in all directions, you can’t expect a very warm welcome!’

  ‘Your clients are in contravention of article 341 of the Criminal Code, which penalizes insults to the honour or prestige of a public official, made in his presence and during the execution of his duties. There is no question of their being released at the present time.’

  Gorin gave him a long, measured look.

  ‘All right,’ he nodded, ‘if that’s the way you want to play it. But it isn’t going to look good you clutching vindictively at 341 because your main charges have gone up in smoke. This is the second time in twenty-four hours that you’ve screwed up. If you’re going to take such a hard line, I’ll mention your irregular detention of Signor Bon to Mamoli. I don’t think he’s going to be very impressed. Nor do I think that he’ll be taken in by this vindictive and spiteful attempt to harass my clients on a technicality. You may be able to get away with that sort of high-handed behaviour in Rome, but here in Venice we still have standards.’

  He turned and strode across the office to the door. Zen stood quite still, staring fixedly at the space which the lawyer had just vacated. He was still in this trance when Aldo Valentini arrived.

  ‘Our friend Enzo is deep in the shit!’ cackled the Ferrarese gleefully. ‘Having got back from bum-sniffing the politicos, the boss has summoned all the departmental heads to his office to hear the party line. Not only has Gavagnin not shown up, he hasn’t even phoned in to apologize. And Francesco Bruno is a man who doesn’t take kindly to being stood up.’

  Zen nodded absent-mindedly. Valentini looked at him more closely.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  Zen sighed.

  ‘What’s the biggest mistake you can make in this job?’

  Valentini shrugged.

  ‘There’s so many to choose f
rom. Accepting too small a bribe? Making a pass at Bruno’s wife? Failing to make a pass at Bruno’s wife?’

  He slapped his thigh loudly.

  ‘I’ve got it! It’s taking Bettino Todesco along on an operation without unloading his pistol first.’

  Zen shot him a hurt glance.

  ‘Nice one.’

  ‘How is she, anyway?’ asked Valentini with a smile to show he’d meant no harm.

  ‘At home, recovering. A couple of days’ leave and she’ll be fine. But she was lucky. That fool Todesco could have killed her, firing blind like that.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to him?’

  ‘An official reprimand, loss of accumulated promotion points and compulsory attendance at a firearms retraining course. But that’s nothing compared to the unofficial hazing he’ll have to put up with around here. It’s tough enough being a policeman without having your own colleagues shooting at you.’

  He collected his coat and hat and made for the door.

  ‘See you later, Aldo.’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ the Ferrarese called after him. ‘You haven’t told me about the biggest mistake you can make in this job.’

  Zen turned in the open doorway. He closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘To take it seriously,’ he murmured. ‘To think you have any hope of achieving anything. To imagine that anyone is going to support you.’

  The quay outside the Questura glistened greasily under the steady drench. Mino Martufò, draped in a waterproof cape, was securing the mooring lines of one of the police launches.

  ‘Are you doing anything?’ Zen asked him.

  ‘Where to, dottò?’

  ‘Palazzo Zulian.’

  He stepped aboard the launch. Freeing the mooring rope, Martufò followed, pushing off with his foot. He revved the motor, bringing the craft around, then engaged the throttle. The bow lifted and they surged off along the canal, riding a thick cushion of wash. Zen stood facing forward, eyes closed, gaunt and unsmiling, the raindrops dripped down his cheeks like tears. Mino Martufò looked at his superior with concern.