Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  Having assembled the coffee machine and put it on the flame, he returned to the living room and picked up the phone. Despite the day and the hour, or perhaps because of them, the Questura answered almost immediately. Zen identified himself and asked to be connected to the nearest airborne section. This turned out to be situated in the international airport at Tessera, on the shores of the lagoon just outside Mestre. Zen huddled miserably on the sofa while the necessary connections were made. He had never felt so cold in his life. He recalled that first flurry of snow during his encounter with Daniele Trevisan, and then the old man’s bizarre behaviour, the way he had mistaken Zen for his father, and his father’s disappearance in the icy wastes of Russia so many years ago …

  It was several minutes before the duty officer at Tessera responded, and several more before Zen could impress on him the nature and urgency of the task before them. By then, the entire house was filled with a horrible stench compounded of burning coffee and melted rubber. Zen slammed the phone down and ran into the kitchen to find the caffettiera glowing red-hot at the base and emitting clouds of nauseating black smoke. Having warmed his hands under the running water, he had evidently forgotten to put any in the machine.

  He threw the windows wide open to air the place out. Snowflakes melted damply on his eyes and lips in frigid mockery of the caresses he had been denied the night before. He ran cold water on the coffee maker, but it had fused up solid and was evidently past repair. With a sigh of disgust he tossed it into the canal at the back of the house and returned to the living room, where he phoned Marco Paulon and made his excuses for not being able to come to lunch after all. Then he called the Questura again and arranged for a police launch to collect him from the Ponte Guglie in half an hour.

  It must have been an illusion, but it seemed less cold outside the house than in. A solitary row of neat, closely spaced footprints was the only flaw on the glistening surface of the campo. They led back to a house two doors from the Morosinis. Signora Vivian, thought Zen automatically, a big raw-boned woman who ate like a horse, walked like a bird and had attended early Mass every Sunday since her first communion.

  Zen set off down the alley to the Cannaregio, scuffing up heaps of downy snow with every step. The city was muffled and mute. Even the perpetual ostinato of water, the constant undercurrent of Venetian life, had ceased. Zen trudged on towards the Guglie bridge, where he found a café open. He ordered an espresso with a shot of grappa on the side, on account of the cold, and scanned the headlines in La Stampa. A leading industrialist had committed suicide rather than answer questions about alleged fiscal irregularities. A judge claimed that ‘an unholy alliance’ of the Mafia and the Secret Service was responsible for recent bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan. Four children had been killed and eleven critically injured by a mortar attack on a school in Bosnia. Neo-Nazis had kicked a black teenager to death at a bus-stop in London. Milan were favourites for their local Derby with Juventus.

  The snow had thickened by the time Zen left the bar. The police launch was already tied up by the water-steps at the foot of the bridge, the crew slapping their arms and stamping their feet in a vain attempt to keep warm. They didn’t much like having to turn out on Sunday, especially one when the weather was providing a sharp reminder of just how close the lagoon was to the glacial peaks of Austria and the frozen plains of Hungary. The personnel of the airborne section weren’t going to be that keen either, but that was just too bad. Time was of the essence. For Zen’s plan to work, the drug syndicate had to believe that Filippo Sfriso had been so shocked by the murder of Gavagnin that he changed his mind about trying to cheat them. They would of course want to believe it, which made matters easier, but for the scenario to be credible Sfriso would have to be able to deliver as soon as the gang contacted him on his release from custody the following day.

  The launch cut a swathe through the grey waters of the Cannaregio, passing an almost empty vaporetto heading in the other direction. Once they were clear of the canal the helmsman opened up the throttle and the boat surged forward, flanking the dingy northern flanks of the city before bearing round towards Murano and the dredged channel to the airport. Although the sky was overcast, the air was clear enough to reveal the snowclad Dolomites over a hundred kilometres away to the north. With the wind chill it felt bitterly cold in the cockpit, but Zen stuck it out with the two crewmen as a matter of principle. By the time they rounded the bend leading up to the moorings outside the airport terminal his face felt as though it had turned to bone.

  The police airborne unit was housed in a utilitarian block which had formed part of the original military airfield at Tessera, now being transformed to serve the needs of international tourism. As one of the specialized departments of the force, offering both glamour and higher pay, the airborne division attracted a different class of recruit from the general intake, and Zen was favourably impressed by the group of men to whom he was introduced by Leonardo Castrucci, the commanding officer. Unlike police drivers, whose reputation for reckless aggression was notorious, the flight crews had a reserved and dependable air.

  Knowing that the success or failure of the enterprise depended to a large extent on the degree of dedication these men brought to it, Zen went out of his way to get them on his side. He greeted them one by one, asking where they were from and how they felt about being posted to this part of the country. Within five minutes, the natural resentment they felt about being hauled out of bed at eight o’clock on a freezing Sunday morning for a spot of compulsory overtime was forgotten in a sense of shared enterprise and professional pride.

  ‘Okay, lads,’ Zen said, stepping back to address them as a group for the first time. ‘We all know the frustrations of police work well enough. The jobs where the only people we can get our hands on are the poor bastards who never knew which end was up in the first place, while the ringleaders get off scot-free. The jobs left dangling because someone thought we didn’t have quite enough evidence to proceed, or because the outcome might have inconvenienced somebody else’s cousin’s aunt’s mother-in-law’s stepson.’

  There were smiles and a stifled laugh. Zen nodded soberly.

  ‘Today, by contrast, we have a chance to achieve something real, solid and unequivocal.’

  He pointed to the laminated map of the Provincia di Venezia which occupied most of the wall to his left.

  ‘There’s a gang of drug dealers operating in our territory, peddling heroin on the streets of our towns and cities. We can put each and every member of that gang behind bars for the next twenty years.’

  He walked over to the map and pointed out an irregular sliver of white in the northern lagoon.

  ‘This is the island of Sant’Ariano, just a few kilometres east of here.’

  There was no visible reaction from the group. Zen had already ascertained that none of them was from Venice. They did not know about Sant’Ariano’s sinister vocation, and he had no intention of enlightening them.

  ‘Somewhere on that island is a canvas bag containing three kilos of pure heroin with an estimated street value of half a billion lire. But its value to us is far greater. We know the identity of the gang’s courier, and he was agreed to deliver the drugs under our supervision.

  We can draw the gang into an ambush, put them under surveillance, identify their base and smash the whole operation once and for all.’

  He held up a monitory finger.

  ‘But time is pressing! We need to locate the drugs by this evening at the latest. The island is covered with dense scrub and shrubbery, and we have no idea whereabouts the bag is. To make matters worse, it will probably be at least partially covered by snow.’

  Zen looked round at the four men, making eye contact with each in turn. He shrugged casually.

  ‘In short, I’m asking you to do a job which would normally take several hundred men a week, to do it in a few hours, in total secrecy, and in the middle of a blizzard.’

  Smiles gradually replaced the crews’ init
ial look of apprehension. Zen held up his hands in a gesture of disclaimer.

  ‘I’m not a pilot!’ he exclaimed. ‘I simply have no idea what’s feasible and what’s not. What I do know is that the only way of locating that package in the time available, given the nature of the terrain, is to go in from the air. If you can’t do it, just say so. I won’t try and argue with you. I’ll just apologize for ruining your day off, go back to the city and tell my bosses that there’s nothing to be done. You must decide. The fate of the investigation is in your hands.’

  He sat down and lit a cigarette, pointedly ignoring the others. After a moment’s silence, the pilots started to shuffle and glance uneasily at each other.

  ‘We’d need two machines,’ one of them said eventually.

  ‘We could go in low to scatter the snow,’ another put in.

  ‘It’s the vegetation that’ll be the problem.’

  ‘One man on a hoist with something to part the branches …’

  ‘Or a metal sensor? There must be some metal on the bag, a zipper or something.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘It’ll be damn tricky,’ someone said.

  ‘But we can do it,’ Leonardo Castrucci concluded firmly. ‘And you must do me the honour of riding in the lead machine with me, dottore.’

  Zen opened his mouth in horror, but no sound emerged.

  *

  He sat gripping the metal frame of the seat with both hands as if his life depended on it. If only it had! Zen had never felt so frightened in his life, even on the rare occasions when he had had to face armed criminals. Even at its worst, that fear was natural. This experience was altogether different, a nebulous, visceral terror, triumphantly irrational. In vain he invoked statistics indicating that people who did this every day of their working lives were nevertheless in more danger driving to the airport than they ever were once aloft.

  The only saving grace was that the violent juddering of the helicopter disguised his own trembling, just as the roar of the engine hid his involuntary moans and cries. He looked past the hunched figure of Leonardo Castrucci at the dark shape of the other helicopter, hovering stationary a hundred metres away to the south. Although the snow had thickened to a pointillist pall which made the operation yet more difficult and hazardous, it at least ensured that the search could be conducted in perfect secrecy. Potential spies on the few inhabited islands in this part of the lagoon might be able to hear the distant noise of the helicopters, but with visibility down to a few hundred metres there was no danger of them being seen.

  For the searchers, the snow was just one more in a series of factors stacking the odds against them. The powerful searchlight attached to the bow of each machine was trained down, creating a cone of light in which the puffy flakes swam like microbes under a microscope. Above the open hatch in the floor of the helicopter, the co-pilot stood ready to raise or lower the metal cable wound around a hoist. At the other end, the third member of the crew dangled from a body harness among the shrubbery, searching the foliage with an alloy pole held in his gloved hands.

  ‘Go!’ said a voice in the headset clamped to Zen’s ears.

  Castrucci eased the machine forward.

  ‘Stop!’ said the voice.

  And there they hung, rotors whirling, trapped in a mindless hell of noise and turbulence while the man on the hoist searched the next patch of ground. Zen glanced nervously at the man in the pilot’s seat beside him. Not the least part of his torment was the sense that Leonardo Castrucci did not normally do this sort of thing any longer, but felt obligated to put on a show to impress his guest. It had been a matter of nods and winks, exchanged glances and unspoken words between the younger pilots. It would be just his luck to get himself killed by some superannuated ace trying to show off. Perhaps Cristiana would end up the same way, with Dal Maschio trying too hard to impress the crowd at some election rally somewhere. The thought seemed oddly comforting.

  ‘Go! Stop!’

  A large-scale chart of the island had been photocopied and ruled out in strips running north-south, which the two machines were sweeping alternately. Castrucci had calculated that the search would take about five hours, but it was becoming clear that it would require far longer than that. Indeed, it seemed increasingly unlikely that they would be able complete the operation before the darkness closed in and made it impossible.

  ‘Go! Stop!’

  For Aurelio Zen, every minute seemed an hour, each hour an eternity of living hell. He had always been afraid of flying, paralysed and stupefied by the sense of the emptiness beneath. So far in his professional life he had mostly managed to avoid travelling by air, but that morning he had totally failed to see the trap until it was too late. The men of the airborne section had naturally taken it for granted that Zen would wish to be present during the search he had instigated, and Zen had not dared to risk dissipating the esprit de corps he had so painstakingly created. As he was led to his doom, he had prayed that helicopters provided a different flying experience from other aircraft.

  ‘Go! Stop!’

  It was different all right. It was much, much worse than he had ever imagined possible. The lurches and jolts which filled him with panic on ordinary planes, the mysterious and alarming noises whose significance he pondered endlessly, were all intensified a hundred times, and without the slightest remission.

  ‘Go! Stop!’

  He looked out of the window, trying in vain to locate the other machine. Until now they had been moving at roughly the same rate along their notional strips of territory, but now the blue-and-white hull bearing the word POLIZIA and the identification number BN409 was nowhere to be seen. He was about to say something to Leonardo Castrucci when the intercom crackled into life. This time it was a different voice.

  ‘We’ve found something.’

  Castrucci banged the controls in frustration, tilting the whole machine violently to port. The co-pilot grabbed the hoist to prevent himself tumbling out of the open hatch, there was a shriek from the man on the cable below, and Zen found himself mumbling an urgent prayer to the Virgin. Having got the machine back on an even keel, Castrucci vented his anger at his subordinate.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Satriani! How many times do I have to tell you to use the proper call-up procedure! You’re not phoning your mistress, you know.’

  After an icy silence, the intercom hissed again.

  ‘Bologna Napoli four zero nine calling Cagliari Perugia five seven seven. Come in, please.’

  ‘Receiving you, Bologna Napoli four zero nine.’

  ‘We’ve found something.’

  Zen switched on his microphone.

  ‘Is it the bag?’ he demanded eagerly.

  There was a brief crackly silence.

  ‘No, not the bag.’

  ‘What then?’ demanded Castrucci irritably.

  ‘The man on the hoist reports …’

  The voice broke off.

  ‘Well?’ snapped Castrucci.

  ‘He says he’s found a skeleton.’

  Without even realizing it, Zen had tensed up with expectation. Now his whole frame slumped despondently.

  ‘This island was used as a dumping ground for all the cemeteries of Venice,’ he told the distant pilot. ‘Nothing could be less surprising than to find a skeleton.’

  ‘This one’s wearing a suit.’

  Zen stared straight ahead at the grey, wintry sky.

  ‘A suit?’ he breathed into the microphone.

  ‘And it’s standing upright.’

  *

  The discovery of the heroin came almost as an afterthought. The corpse had been removed by then, after being photographed from every conceivable angle. At first they tried to transfer it to a stretcher in one piece, but the moment they disturbed it the whole thing fell to the ground in a dismal heap. After that it was a question of trying to pick up all the pieces. Some of them still had portions of gristle and flesh attached to them, and the skull and scalp were more or less intact. Quite a
lot of clothing was also recovered. They bundled the whole lot into a body bag and hoisted it into one of the helicopters to be flown back to the city.

  Aurelio Zen went with it, and thus missed the moment when a scene-of-crime man doing a routine sweep of the area stumbled over the canvas bag a few metres away from the bramble bush across which the body had been lying. By the time the news reached him at the Questura, its significance had been overtaken by events to such an extent that his initial reaction was one of irritation. Another complication he would willingly have done without!

  After a moment’s thought he called the switchboard and asked to be put through to Aldo Valentini. The Ferrarese was not at home, but a woman who answered the phone volunteered the information that the family were lunching with their in-laws. Zen dialled the number which she gave him and waited in some trepidation for Valentini’s reaction. It soon turned out that he need not have worried.

  ‘Aurelio! Ciao! What’s going on?’

  ‘We’ve got a bit of a crisis I’m afraid. I’m sorry to disturb you, but it’s urgent.’

  Valentini’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  ‘You mean I get to get out of here?’

  Zen laughed with genuine relief.

  ‘I thought you would bite my head off for ruining your Sunday!’

  ‘My Sunday is already comprehensively ruined, courtesy of my brother-in-law. If you can give me a cast-iron excuse for leaving, you’ve got a friend for life.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Rovigo. Where the relative in question resides.’

  ‘I’ll have a helicopter there in half an hour.’

  ‘A helicopter?’

  ‘Like I said, this is urgent. I’ll call back later with details of the pick-up.’

  He hung up and immediately dialled another number. There was a long pause before the connection was made, another before anyone answered, and when the reply came it made no sense to Zen.