Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘We really fixed those bastards, sir, eh?’

  Zen did not respond. Emerging into the crowded waters of the bacino di San Marco, the Sicilian dragged the launch into a slewing turn, narrowly missing an incoming ferry and a barge piled high with crates of artichokes.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Zen told him tonelessly. ‘This is the new Italy. We’ve got to foster good relations with the public. We could be privatized at any moment.’

  Martufò glanced twice at his superior before judging it safe to laugh heartily.

  ‘After all the talk about botched jobs and cock-ups, it’s really great to have taken part in an operation that was a total success from beginning to end,’ he enthused. ‘Okay, it was a shame about la Nunziata, but like I said when we were playing cards, they should never have let ladies join.’

  ‘You think that your virile flesh would have resisted the bullet better?’

  There was no further talk until they drew near Palazzo Zulian. Rain pocked the surface of the canal. There was not enough water to get the launch up to the water-steps, so Zen disembarked by the bridge and walked around to the street door.

  It was opened by Contessa Ada Zulian in person. She inspected Zen suspiciously.

  ‘Where are they?’ she demanded.

  ‘Where are who?’

  ‘My poor nephews! I was told they would be at liberty again by now, but I’ve rung their house several times without …’

  Zen brushed past her into the dank expanse of the lower hallway.

  ‘Do by all means come in,’ Ada commented with pointed irony. ‘Make yourself at home. Perhaps you’d like a drink, or even a meal. Can I offer you anything?’

  ‘You can offer me an explanation, contessa.’

  Ada put her head on one side and stared at him with the impersonal acuity of a gull.

  ‘But there is nothing whatever to explain.’

  Zen marched up to her and stared her in the eye.

  ‘I came all the way up here from Rome to take on your case, a case which no one else believed in, simply and solely out of the goodness of my heart, because you’re an old acquaintance of my mother’s. I have been openly mocked by my colleagues at the Questura for insisting on taking your complaints seriously when everyone else had decided that you were out of your fucking head.’

  ‘There’s no call …’

  ‘I’ve bent over backwards to help you in every way possible, even giving you my home telephone number so that you can call me at any hour of the day or night. Perhaps because I’m an outsider here now, to whom everything feels at once familiar and strange, I succeed in deciphering the pattern which no one had spotted – including you, contessa – and set a trap resulting in the arrest of the two people who have been tormenting you for so long. And what thanks do I get? You tell Gorin that you’re prepared to lie in your teeth in order to get them off and make me look like the biggest idiot of all time!’

  Ada gave a slight shrug. She turned away and started upstairs.

  ‘But they’re my nephews.’

  ‘I don’t care if they’re the Patriarch’s catamites!’ Zen shouted as he started after her. ‘Don’t you understand what they were doing? Don’t you understand what they would have done, sooner or later, if I hadn’t intervened?’

  Ada Zulian walked upstairs without replying. When she reached the gleaming gallery on the first floor, she turned to face him.

  ‘You take everything so literally, Aurelio Battista. But then you always did. I remember once when Giustiniana left you here, you …’

  Zen stopped on the last but one step, so that they were on a level.

  ‘They would have killed you,’ he said quietly.

  Ada gave a little burble of laughter.

  ‘What are you talking about? It was just a silly prank! Nanni’s always had a taste for practical jokes, and Vincenzo will go along with anything his elder brother suggests.’

  Taking her arm, Zen led her into the salon and pushed her down on the low sofa. He sat down beside her and leant close, his voice a mere whisper.

  ‘At first, their plan was to have you declared mentally unfit. And they very nearly succeeded. All the people I spoke to when I arrived here were convinced that your story of ghostly intruders was proof that you had finally taken leave of your senses. With your previous history, your nephews would have had no difficulty in having you committed. They would then have applied to have control of the family affairs transferred to them, on the grounds that you were mentally unfit to manage the estate.’

  Ada Zulian smiled vapidly at him. Her bright, shallow eyes twitched to and fro, refusing to engage his.

  ‘After a suitable interval,’ Zen continued, ‘they would have entered into negotiations with interested parties over the sale of the old mill site on Sant’Alvise. A plot like that must be worth billions, but Nanni and Vincenzo wouldn’t want the money going to their mad old aunt. Nor could they withdraw huge sums from your account without attracting comment, so they would probably have done a deal with the buyer. The sum named in the contract, and paid to you, would be a fraction of the real selling price. The difference would be paid into a numbered bank account which Nanni and Vincenzo could tap any time they needed a little spending money for another Porsche or a new wardrobe.’

  Ada’s smile was still there, fixed in place as if by glue.

  ‘What an idea!’ she murmured.

  ‘But my arrival forced them to step up the pace. They had been counting on the fact that no one would bother to investigate your complaints very seriously. The police had a quick look around and put a man on the door to see whether anyone came or went. That didn’t bother your nephews, of course, since they were moving around by water. Given the state of the back canal here, they could only operate for an hour or so each side of high tide, but it gave them the run of the house, unobserved by anyone – although I caught a glimpse of them rowing home the night I arrived.

  ‘But once I took over the case Nanni and Vincenzo realized that they were going to have to change tactics. They attacked you physically for the first time, scratching your wrists with the carving knife. That’s why I put a guard inside the house. If I hadn’t, they would have returned the following night and repeated the attack, except this time the cuts would have been deeper. They might have used the evidence of your slashed wrists to demonstrate that you were once again suicidal, or they might have gone all the way and made sure that your next “suicide attempt” was successful.’

  Shaking off Zen’s grip, Ada Zulian got to her feet.

  ‘This is preposterous and insulting nonsense! If you will not stop defaming my relations in this way, I must ask you to leave my house immediately.’

  ‘How can you pretend that the earlier episodes had nothing to do with Nanni and Vincenzo? You know it was them. No other explanation makes any sense.’

  Ada Zulian gave him a haughty look.

  ‘My daughter walked out of this house fifty years ago and has never been seen again. Does that make sense?’

  Zen slapped his forehead.

  ‘For the love of God! If you imagined those other intrusions, how do you explain that each of them happened to coincide with the period when the canal giving on to the waterdoor happens to be navigable?’

  Ada shrugged impatiently.

  ‘Perhaps it’s got something to do with the moon. That’s what controls the tides, isn’t it? I always feel a bit odd around full moon.’

  ‘Why didn’t you suffer from these hallucinations during the period when your nephews knew that there was a police guard in the house?’

  Ada made a bored moue.

  ‘I really neither know nor care, Aurelio Battista. And now – if you’ve quite finished – I have various tasks which require my attention.’

  Zen stared at her, breathing hard, trying to control his fury.

  ‘Don’t patronize me, contessa!’ he hissed. ‘My mother may have scrubbed your floors and dusted your furniture, but that doesn’t make me your drudge and factotum
, to be dismissed when my usefulness is at an end.’

  He was gratified to see fear in her eyes, but she said nothing more. Making one last effort, he cupped his hands together, imploring her understanding.

  ‘If you don’t back me in this, I shall have to let your nephews go.’

  Ada sniffed.

  ‘Do you expect me to perjure myself just to further your career?’

  ‘I’m thinking of you, contessa, not me! Once your nephews are loose, you’ll be in the same danger as before. Is that what you want? To live in terror of what they might decide to do next?’

  A smile spread slowly across Ada Zulian’s thin lips.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I shall live in terror,’ she replied calmly. ‘You need have no fear about that, Aurelio Battista. On the contrary, I have every reason to suppose that my nephews are going to be very nice to me for the foreseeable future. Very nice indeed!’

  He walked back to the Questura. It was colder than ever, and the rain had turned to a soft barrage of sleet which glistened briefly on clothes and hands before vanishing. Zen pulled down the brim of his hat and plodded along, contemplating the ruin of his hopes and plans. He had foreseen various ways in which the Ada Zulian case might collapse or backfire, but he had never expected to be outwitted by an old woman everyone agreed was crazy. I should be so crazy, he thought glumly.

  He had been made use of in masterly fashion. Even if the contessa had not guessed earlier that her nephews were involved – which would suppose a superhuman degree of cunning and courage – she was clearly in no doubt about it now. That much was obvious from the complacent way she had dismissed Zen and his fears for her safety.

  Of course she was in no danger from Nanni and Vincenzo! They knew only too well that the one thing standing between them and a stiff fine or prison sentence was Ada’s statement that their ‘silly prank’ had been but a crude imitation of the experiences she had complained about earlier. Should she choose to withdraw this assurance at any time in the future, they would face immediate prosecution.

  It was a perfect arrangement for everyone concerned. Ada had her nephews exactly where she wanted them, without the family being dragged through a public scandal. As for Nanni and Vincenzo, having to be ‘very nice indeed’ to their aunt was a small price to pay for being spared the consequences of their actions. The contessa was happy, and so were her nephews. The only loser was Zen, who had been totally outsmarted. And there was nothing whatever he could do about it.

  This knowledge was hard enough to bear in itself, but the real blow was that with the collapse of the Zulian case he no longer had a valid motive for remaining in Venice. This meant an end to any hopes of solving the Durridge affair, but that was of secondary importance. His only interest in the fate of Ivan Durridge had been as a means of extracting money from the family which he could use to rent a larger house in Rome – large enough to share with his mother and Tania – and the charms of this living arrangement had abruptly faded. No, the real problem with leaving Venice was that it meant kissing goodbye not to the Durridge case but to Cristiana Morosini, with whom he belatedly realized that he was in love.

  Emerging into a small campo, Zen paused for a moment to take his bearings. A series of posters on a billboard opposite showed a chic young couple setting out for a night on the town. Providing equal time for a less glamorous view of life, a clothes-line strung between two balconies overhead displayed an assortment of grey, baggy underpants and knickers. Zen continued on his way, carefully avoiding the stick of drips dropping from the washing to the pavement beneath.

  The prospect of his appointment with Cristiana that afternoon now induced a kind of panic. And yet just a few days before, everything had seemed so easy. His desire for Cristiana had been pure and simple, uncontaminated by the murky complications of a sustainable relationship and unthreatening to his existing obligations and commitments in that regard. He had been in control then, the consumer selecting his pleasures, the tourist arranging his itinerary.

  Now all that had changed. That infant eroticism, biddable and easily satisfied, had grown up into a moody, fractious adolescent, making demands, issuing statements, taking positions, unsure of its own identity and contemptuous of other people’s. Whatever happened between him and Cristiana that afternoon, it would never have the serendipitous quality of that first encounter. From now on, whatever happened would be meant, something to be weighed and measured and taken responsibility for. He heaved a long sigh. The medical authorities were quite right: there was no such thing as safe sex.

  It was Sunday tomorrow, so whatever happened he would have a day’s grace in which to try and find out what Cristiana’s feelings were. She had said she would be free between two and three. That gave him time to sign off at the Questura and have lunch somewhere before going home to wait. He strode along more rapidly. The sleet had eased and people were out and about, fitting in a last burst of activity before retiring home for a lunch of coma-inducing proportions.

  He passed a carpenter’s workshop stacked with lengths of wood of every size and shape, leaning at all angles in all directions, every piece covered with a layer of fine sawdust as thick as fallen snow. In the barber’s next door, an unhappy boy of about eight was being shorn while his family looked on from a line of chairs arranged along the back wall. Zen was paying so much attention to these little scenes that he almost didn’t see the jointed metal pipe snaking across the pavement until it was too late. In the event he was able to change pace just in time and avoid tripping.

  He walked on, taking in the red tanker barge marked POZZI NERI tied up next to the bridge and the flotilla of smaller craft moored alongside, blocking the canal. A comprehensive array of emergency services was represented: the Carabinieri, the city police, the fire and ambulance brigades. Even as Zen watched, a uniformed figure emerged from a boat marked VIGILI URBANI, clambered over the intervening vessels to the quay and ran off along the alley from which the pipes led back to the sewage tanker.

  Zen frowned. After a momentary hesitation, he turned into the alley where the vigile had disappeared. The line of tubing was longer than he had imagined, leading through a maze of narrow lanes and low porticos, all deserted. At length it emerged into a spacious courtyard surrounded on all sides by tall tenement houses from whose windows people were staring down at the scene below. About a dozen more, mostly men in uniform, were grouped loosely around a circular opening in the centre of the yard. A motorized winch mounted on a tripod had been erected over the manhole and a taut cable descended into the darkness beneath.

  Zen only realized that the cable was moving when a head and shoulders appeared in the opening. Two men in orange waterproof gear stepped forward and helped a third clamber out on to the pavement of bricks laid in a herringbone pattern. He was wearing a black rubber wet suit and a breathing apparatus, and was covered from head to foot in umber slime. He detached the end of a white synthetic rope which had been tied to his belt and passed it to the others, who made it fast to the cable on which he had been standing. Then one of them set the winch in motion once more.

  Zen went up to a man in the uniform of a Carabinieri major and asked what was going on.

  ‘Body in the cesspit,’ he replied shortly, barely glancing at Zen. ‘This is the fourth time they’ve tried to bring it out. Keeps slipping off the rope.’

  This explained the strain visible on the faces of the men working the winch. They didn’t want to have to send their colleague back down to the subterranean cistern which received all the sewage of the surrounding tenements, much less replace him themselves in due course. Lovingly they coaxed the cable inch by inch on to the drum, taking up slack with leather-gloved hands to avoid any jerks or shudders which might precipitate its cargo back into those feculent depths.

  ‘Maintenance people found it when they came to drain the tank this morning,’ the Carabiniere muttered under his breath. ‘Took the cover off and were just getting the tubing set up when one of them caught sight of this fac
e looking up at them from the surface of the shit below. Poor bastard nearly fell in himself. And you are?’

  Zen was spared having to reply by a loud gasp and stifled cries from the other spectators. Something had appeared in the hole at the centre of the courtyard, something as smooth, shapeless and sticky as a bar of softened chocolate. With evident reluctance, the three men clustered around the winch, laid hands on it and began to pull. But the object appeared unwilling to be hauled into the light of day. Again and again it jammed in the opening. The men shouted warnings and instructions to each other, desperate lest it escape them yet again.

  At last they got its centre of gravity over the rim of the pozzo nero, and the six hands guided it clear of the hole and let it slump down on to the brick paving with a soft squelch. The racket of the winch died away. Under its sheath of slime, the object was only just recognizable as a human body. The men set about freeing the cradle of rope looped about its limbs. The Carabinieri officer pushed through the circle of onlookers.

  ‘Can you clean it up a bit, lads?’ he asked one of the men.

  ‘Gino’s just gone to fetch some water, sir.’

  The corpse lay face down, the hands clasped behind the back. Close to, the stench of fermenting excrement was almost unbearable. Everyone stood in embarrassed silence. At length a clatter of boots announced the return of Gino, staggering under the weight of two pails of water. Standing as far from the corpse as possible, he poured the contents of one bucket over its back. It at once became clear that the hands were not clasped but tied together, the thumbs tightly bound with copper wire. Equally clearly, the victim had tried hard to break free: one of the thumbs was almost severed.

  ‘Clumsy job,’ said the Carabinieri major in a tone of professional disapproval. ‘He’d have drowned anyway, and if they’d gone back and uncovered the manhole once he was dead they could have passed the whole thing off as an accident.’

  ‘Perhaps they didn’t want to pass it off as an accident,’ murmured Zen.

  ‘What do you mean?’