Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘Anyone you like,’ muttered Sfriso. ‘It’s all the same to me.’

  Zen smiled and nodded.

  ‘Bravo. That was the right answer.’ He offered Sfriso a cigarette.

  ‘I think we can do business,’ he said languidly. ‘Are you interested?’

  Filippo Sfriso stared at the packet of Nazionali for a long time. Then he prised one loose and put it between his lips, nodding slowly.

  *

  At nine o’clock that night, Aurelio Zen called Marcello Mamoli at his home on the fashionable stretch of the Zattere, near the Santo Spirito church. Before doing so he tried Cristiana once again, but there was still no reply. Mamoli, on the other hand, answered almost immediately.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘This is Aurelio Zen phoning from the Questura, signor giudice. I have taken Filippo Sfriso’s statement.’

  In the distance he could hear the sounds of the meal from which the magistrate had been summoned by the donna di servizio who had answered the phone.

  ‘Is this really so urgent that you must disturb me during dinner?’ demanded Mamoli.

  ‘I wouldn’t have done so otherwise,’ Zen retorted.

  He himself had not yet had a chance to eat anything.

  ‘A copy of the full statement will be with you tomorrow, signor giudice, but I’ll summarize the main points and outline the action I propose to take.’

  ‘Please be brief. My guests are waiting for me.’

  Zen mouthed a silent obscenity at the phone.

  ‘The Sfriso brothers were involved in a drug smuggling operation for a syndicate based in Mestre,’ he said out loud. ‘They would be given the name, description and ETA of the carrier, typically an oil tanker or a bulk freighter bound for Marghera. The drop took place at a prearranged point out at sea. The package was heaved over the side with a float on it, and the Sfrisos came up in their fishing boat and hauled it in. Some time later – it might be days or weeks – they were phoned with instructions about passing on the packages.’

  Mamoli grunted.

  ‘The Sfrisos acted as a cut-out for the gang. Thanks to them, there was no direct link between the smuggling and distribution ends of the operation, thus limiting any damage due to arrests or tip-offs. The ship was clean if it was searched on arrival, and the drugs were only handed over when they were needed for immediate sale. Naturally it depended on the syndicate being able to trust the Sfrisos with large amounts of pure heroin, but this wasn’t a problem until …’

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ Mamoli cut in.

  Zen took a deep breath.

  ‘To Sant’Ariano.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The ossuary island up in the northern lagoon where the dead from all the church cemeteries were dumped when the land was needed for …’

  ‘I am tolerably familiar with the history of the city,’ Marcello Mamoli replied icily. ‘What escapes me is the connection between Sant’Ariano and the affair we have been discussing.’

  ‘Sant’Ariano is where the Sfrisos stored the packages of heroin between receiving and delivering them. The place has such a sinister reputation that hardly anyone ever goes there. They dug a cache somewhere on the island and went to pick up fresh supplies as and when they needed them. One day last month Giacomo went to collect the remaining three kilos of one consignment. When he got back he was babbling madly about meeting a walking corpse and there was no sign of the packages. Filippo has searched Sant’Ariano many times since then. He located the site of the cache easily enough, but it was empty. The island is covered with dense undergrowth and Giacomo apparently got lost and abandoned the heroin somewhere in the middle of it.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Mamoli told him. Lowering the receiver, he called to someone in the house, ‘Please start without me. I’ll be there in a minute.’

  ‘Hello?’ said Zen tentatively.

  ‘I’m here,’ Mamoli snapped back. ‘Please get to the point.’

  Zen’s tone hardened.

  ‘The point? The point is that somewhere on Sant’Ariano there is a canvas bag containing three kilos of heroin. If we can recover it, we can set up a meeting, lure the gang into a trap and smash the whole operation. Sfriso has agreed to co-operate.’

  Mamoli grunted.

  ‘Why don’t we just substitute another package? Or use a dummy?’

  ‘Each package is sealed and bar-coded to reveal any tampering. The contact man would spot the fake package at once. We could arrest him, but the others would get away and the …’

  ‘So what do you propose?’

  ‘I would like to order an immediate search of Sant’Ariano.’

  ‘Then do so, dottore.’

  ‘I have your authorization to proceed?’

  ‘Certainly. And now I must …’

  ‘By whatever means seem to me most appropriate?’

  ‘Of course. And now I really must get back to my guests. Good night, dottore.’

  *

  In the end, Zen decided to take the copy of Filippo Sfriso’s statement to the Procura in person. It meant a long detour on his way home, but he had nothing better to do. In fact the walk was just what he needed to think through the problem facing him, to weigh up the options open to him and perhaps even come to a decision. It was a fine night for walking. An abrasive, icy wind had dried and polished the town, making the stonework sparkle, the metal gleam and burnishing the air till it shone darkly. The tide was high, and the cribbed water in the small canals shuffled fretfully about.

  Although Mamoli had given him a free hand, Zen knew that he would have to take the responsibility if anything went wrong. This seemed all too possible. Not only did he have to locate a small canvas bag on an island several thousand square metres in extent and entirely covered with impenetrable brush and scrub, but he had to do so without the gang knowing that any search had been made. Both Giacomo and Filippo Sfriso had told them on many occasions how and where the missing heroin had been mislaid. The gang had no doubt tried more than once to recover it themselves. If they learned that the police had instituted a full-scale search of Sant’Ariano, they certainly wouldn’t respond when Filippo Sfriso announced a few days later that Enzo Gavagnin’s fate had jogged his memory, he had located the stuff and when would they like to drop by and pick it up?

  As he cut through the maze of back alleys between Santa Maria Formosa and the Fenice, Zen found himself shying away from the thought of what had happened to Gavagnin. The pathologist’s report had been faxed over from the hospital, and Zen was not likely to forget the details of the injuries inflicted on Gavagnin before he died, nor the phrase ‘the presence of a considerable quantity of excrement in the lungs and stomach’ under the heading Cause of Death.

  That was true only in the sense that boats sank because of the presence of a considerable quantity of water in the hull. In reality, Enzo Gavagnin had been killed because of what Zen had said on the phone the other morning. He had been so eager to get even for Gavagnin’s slights that he had made up some story on the spur of the moment without even considering what the consequences might be. He had been as irresponsible as Todesco. Zen too had fired blind, and with fatal results.

  Buffeted by biting gusts of wind, he crossed Campo San Stefano and the high wooden bridge over the canalazzo before entering the sheltered passages and paths on the other bank. At the offices of the Procura, he watched the caretaker deposit the sealed envelope containing Filippo Sfriso’s statement in the pigeonhole marked MAMOLI, returned to the cold comfort of the streets. As he passed the monstrous sprawl of the Frari, he caught a whiff of cooking borne past on a gust of wind from someone’s supper and realized that he had eaten nothing since the morning. Until now the sheer press of events had sustained him, but as it receded he suddenly felt absolutely ravenous. It was by now almost ten o’clock, and the only places open would be those catering to the city’s vestigial youth culture.

  He walked down to the Rialto bridge and made his way to Campo San Luca, where the dwindlin
g band of young Venetians hang out of an evening. The main throng had already departed, but a number of locali remained open to serve the hard core. Zen chose the one which seemed to be pandering least to the prevailing fashion for American-style food and drink, and ordered a pizza and a draught beer. While he waited to be served, he lit a cigarette to calm his hunger pains and tried to ignore the attention-seeking clientele and concentrate on his immediate problems.

  Although he recognized his responsibility for Gavagnin’s death, he didn’t feel any exaggerated sense of remorse. That would have been pointless in any case. All he could do now was to try and bring the killers themselves to justice. They had murdered Gavagnin because they believed he knew where the cache of heroin was hidden. That proved that they had not managed to locate it themselves. If Zen could succeed where they had failed, he could consign the whole gang to the pozzo nero of the prison system and – in his own mind at least – be quits. But how to find Giacomo’s missing bag in the first place?

  Assuming that the required manpower was available, such searches were normally a relatively simple matter: you organized a line of men and walked them across the ground. Such methods were clearly impossible on the terrain in question. Zen had been to Sant’Ariano once, forty years before, on a dare with Tommaso. They’d taken a small skiff belonging to the Saoner family and rowed all the way, up beyond Burano and Torcello, past abandoned farms and hunting lodges, on towards the fringes of the laguna morta. He had never forgotten the silence of those swampy wastelands, the sense of solitude and desolation.

  The Germans had mounted an anti-aircraft battery on the island during the closing months of the war, so it was not quite as untouched as it would have been five years earlier, or as it would be now that the undergrowth had reclaimed the clearing and access road which had been made. Nevertheless, both he and Tommaso had been overwhelmed by the aura of the place. It was not only the thought of the unknown, uncountable dead whose remains had been tipped there like so much rubbish, thousands and thousands of bones and skulls, a whole hillock of them held in by a retaining wall. Almost as frightening as those reminders of mortality had been the evidence of life: a profusion of withered, gnarled, spiny plants and shrubs which sprouted from that sterile desert, and above all the host of rodents and reptiles which scuttled and slithered and nested amongst the bones.

  The arrival of the waiter with Zen’s order banished these memories. But as he wolfed down the pizza, scalding his tongue in the process, he realized that a conventional search of Sant’Ariano was out of the question. The only way it could be made to work would be by giving each man a machete and a chain-saw and felling every tree, shrub and bush on the island. They might find the heroin, but they wouldn’t catch the gang. What he needed was a totally different approach, something quick, effective and unobtrusive. Unfortunately he had a gnawing suspicion that it didn’t exist.

  The pizza was a sad imitation of the real thing, but it filled his stomach. He was just lighting a cigarette to go with the rest of his beer when Cristiana Morosini walked in. She was with three other women, and did not notice Zen at his table in a corner at the back. He drew hard on his cigarette and tried to think what to do. Cristiana was bound to catch sight of him sooner or later, and if he hadn’t greeted her by then she would be even more annoyed with him than she already was. That Zen really knows how to treat a woman: first he stands her up, then he cuts her dead.

  In the event the dilemma was solved for him almost immediately. Cristiana and one of the other women got up and walked towards Zen’s table, heading for the toilets at the back of the premises. When she saw him she hesitated an instant, then smiled coolly.

  ‘Ciao, Aurelio.’

  She turned to the other woman.

  ‘Be with you in a minute, Wanda.’

  Zen stood up, gesturing embarrassedly.

  ‘I’ve been trying to phone you all afternoon …’

  ‘I was out.’

  ‘I’m dreadfully sorry about missing our appointment. Something unexpected came up suddenly, a dramatic development in the case I’m working on.’

  Cristiana raised her eyebrows, whether in interest or scepticism it was hard to tell.

  ‘Not to worry,’ she replied. ‘I was busy myself, as it happens. Nando insisted on flying me down to Pellestrina for another photo opportunity. He’s confident of carrying the city itself so now he’s concentrating on the islands.’

  She looked at him speculatively.

  ‘So has this dramatic development anything to do with the Durridge case?’

  Zen shrugged awkwardly.

  ‘It’s not really something I can discuss in public.’

  She met his look with one of her own.

  ‘I can’t just abandon my friends like that.’

  ‘Of course not. But I’m planning to stay up late anyway. There are one or two things I need to think over. If you want to stop by for a nightcap later …’

  At that moment the woman called Wanda – who must be Cristiana’s sister-in-law, Zen realized – emerged from the toilets. Cristiana nodded lightly and turned away.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said.

  Zen walked slowly home, puzzling over the significance of Cristiana’s continuing intimacy with the Dal Maschio family. She might be separated from her husband, but she still evidently went out with his sister and came running when he snapped his fingers. Zen felt a scorch of indigestion in his gut, partly from eating too quickly and partly from jealousy. For a supposedly estranged wife, Cristiana seemed to be at her husband’s beck and call to an astonishing degree. He didn’t blame her for keeping on the right side of such a powerful man, but he did wonder where the limits of her compliance might lie.

  Not that there was anything to complain about in this trip to Pellestrina, a bizarre community three kilometres long and a stone’s throw wide, built on a sandbank in the shadow of the murazzi, the massive sea defences erected by the Republic three hundred years earlier. Zen smiled, imagining how Dal Maschio would have worked that into his speech. ‘What these walls have been for three centuries, the Nuova Repubblica Veneta is today – a bulwark protecting our culture, our economy, our very homes, from being swept away by the storms of change and decay!’

  In order to provide a suitable dramatic photo, Dal Maschio would no doubt have piloted his wife to Pellestrina in a helicopter owned by the company in which he was a partner. As a former air force ace, he would have been able to make a spectacular landing on some patch of grass or sand which looked too small to …

  And then, in a flash, he saw the solution to the problem which had been obsessing him all evening! The way to locate the missing three kilos of heroin on Sant’Ariano was to go in vertically, not hacking through the scrub but dipping from the sky! He was so pleased by this revelation that he would have walked right past his own front door if he had not almost bumped into someone coming in the opposite direction.

  ‘Christ!’ the man screamed.

  Zen peered at the dingy figure dressed in a military greatcoat over what looked like a pair of pyjamas. The cord he was holding in one hand gradually went slack as a dog bearing a marked resemblance to a mobile doormat hobbled into the ambit of the streetlight.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ Zen demanded.

  The man shook his head in confusion. His eyes were still dilated in terror.

  ‘I thought it was …’ he whispered hoarsely.

  ‘Thought it was who?’

  Daniele Trevisan swallowed hard.

  ‘Someone else.’

  Zen walked up to him.

  ‘Do you mean my father?’ he asked tonelessly.

  Daniele Trevisan bit his lip and said nothing. As though in sympathy, his dog raised one leg and voided its bladder against the wall.

  ‘You mistook me for him the day I arrived,’ Zen reminded the old man gently.

  Trevisan assumed a self-pitying expression.

  ‘I’m getting old,’ he whined. ‘I get things confused.’

 
A barbed wind whipped through the campo, spraying a fine white dust of snow in their faces.

  ‘Listen, Daniele,’ Zen said weightily, ‘my father is dead. Do you understand?’

  To his amazement, the old man burst into peals of mocking laughter.

  ‘Understand?’ he cried. ‘Oh yes! Yes, I understand all right!’

  Zen stared menacingly at him. Daniele Trevisan’s hilarity ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  ‘Of course,’ he muttered in a conciliatory tone. ‘Dead. To be sure.’

  And without another word he shuffled away, dragging his reluctant dog away from the patch of urine-soaked plaster.

  At first it looked as though the clouds which had hidden the sun for most of the week had fallen to earth like a collapsed parachute, covering every surface with a billowy white mantle. The next moment, shivering at the bedroom window as he clipped back the internal shutters, Zen thought vaguely of the aqua alta. It was only when he became aware of the intense cold streaming in through the gap between window and frame that he realized that it was snow. A sprinkling of fat flakes was still tumbling down from the thick grey sky. Every aspect of roofs and gardens, pavements and bridges, had been rethought. Only the water, immune by its very nature to this form of inundation, remained untouched.

  He glanced back towards the empty bed, its sheets and covers decorously unruffled. Although he had stayed up till well after midnight, Cristiana had not shown up. He tried to persuade himself that this was all for the best in the long run. By standing him up, she had evened the score and demonstrated that she was not someone to be trifled with. Next time they could meet as equals, with nothing to prove to each other. As long as there was a next time, of course.

  He dressed hurriedly, dispensing with a shower, and made his way downstairs, stiff with cold. The primitive central heating system only operated on the first floor, and as it did not have a timer it had to be switched on manually each morning. If he had known it was going to freeze, he might have risked the wrath of his mother’s parsimonious household gods and left the thing on all night. As it was, there was nothing to do but put on his overcoat and hold his fingers under the warm water from the tap to unjam the muscles.