Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  He stared across the table at Saoner, who had stopped fiddling with his fish.

  ‘Gavagnin may have been braver than Bugno, but he wasn’t very bright. It was he who tipped me off to the link between the Nuova Repubblica Veneta and the Durridge case in the first place. When I had Bon brought in for questioning, Gavagnin revealed that both Bon and he were members. And the next thing I know there’s an expensive lawyer by the name of Carlo Berengo Gorin beating at my door.’

  He observed Saoner flinch, and nodded.

  ‘You know him, don’t you? And I learned from …’

  He paused. He had almost named Cristiana!

  ‘… from a friend that Dal Maschio does too. I suppose he’s the party lawyer.’

  Tommaso Saoner feigned a bored shrug.

  ‘What’s all this got to do with me?’

  Zen unhurriedly ate some grilled sardine before replying.

  ‘Domenico Zuin has made a full confession of his part in the kidnapping of Ivan Durridge. It was made freely, in the presence of Zuin’s legal representative, and I have it in my office now, ready for delivery to the Deputy Public Prosecutor.’

  ‘I repeat, what’s it got to do with me?’

  Zen looked him in the eye.

  ‘You were once my best friend, Tommaso. I’m giving you a chance to get out while there’s still time.’

  Saoner stared at him, his expression alternating between anxiety and anger.

  ‘And what makes you think anyone will believe whatever pack of lies this man has trotted out?’ he sneered.

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘I’m sure that Zuin has trimmed some of the details, and twisted others to cast himself in a good light. For example, he claims that he never left the boat, and that it was Gavagnin and Bon who took the foreigners ashore. That may well be a lie. I couldn’t really care less.’

  He stripped the bones of his last sardine, exposing the succulent flesh.

  ‘What foreigners?’ Saoner asked with deliberate casualness.

  ‘He doesn’t know who they were or where they were from. He didn’t recognize the language they spoke, but it wasn’t Italian. There were four of them, all young and tough-looking. Zuin picked them up from a hotel near the Fenice in his taxi, along with Bon and Gavagnin. Bon had told him that the men wanted to be landed on the island in the lagoon which he and Bon had explored earlier with Bugno.’

  He pushed his plate aside and lit another cigarette. Saoner’s food lay untouched.

  ‘In the late morning, while the tide was still high enough, Zuin ferried them all over to the ottagono. He claims that the foreigners went ashore with Gavagnin and Bon while he returned to the city and got on with his work. Of course he subsequently heard about the disappearance of the American, like everyone else. But he’d been paid, and it was none of his business.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Tommaso inquired ironically.

  ‘It’s enough.’

  Saoner laughed contemptuously. Zen regarded him with a serious expression.

  ‘Look at it this way, Tommaso. Zuin landed six men on the island. We know that Giulio Bon took Durridge’s boat, just to confuse the issue, and as the tide was ebbing he must have left fairly soon afterwards. We also know that Durridge was still on the island shortly after one o’clock, when he spoke briefly to a relative on the telephone. By then it was too late to approach the island from the water. And yet when Franco Calderan returned at five o’clock from visiting his sister on the Lido he found the place deserted.’

  He leant forward.

  ‘So how did Durridge and the others get off the island?’

  Saoner shrugged impatiently.

  ‘This is your life, eh, Aurelio? Picking over theories about what might or might not have happened, like a pack of grubby, dog-eared playing cards! Well I could play that game too, I suppose, only I’m too busy living.’

  Zen looked at him and nodded.

  ‘I’m glad you and your friends are having so much fun, Tommaso, but someone has to clean up after you.’

  ‘Leave the party out of it!’ Saoner snapped. ‘You don’t have a shred of evidence to implicate us. What if Zuin and his confederates happened to be members? So are thousands of ordinary, decent, hard-working Venetians! They are our strength and our pride! They guarantee the future of this city, Zen, while people like you can only grub around digging up dirty secrets from its past.’

  He got to his feet.

  ‘Nothing you’ve said amounts to any more than unsubstantiated, opportunistic slander. Now that we are close to getting our hands on the levers of power, our enemies will move heaven and earth to throw a spanner in the works.’

  ‘The Sayings of Chairman Dal Maschio, page ninety-four,’ retorted Zen.

  Saoner flushed.

  ‘I’m not just a parrot, you know.’

  ‘You mean you thought up that cheap rhetoric yourself? That’s even worse!’

  Saoner stared down at him coldly.

  ‘We were once friends, Zen, but that doesn’t mean that I have to listen to your insults.’

  He turned away. Leaving enough money on the table to cover their meal, Zen hastily rose and followed him out of the restaurant.

  ‘Wait, Tommaso! I’m sorry if I offended you. It just worries me to see how you’ve fallen under the spell of these people. I’m sure you have nothing personally to do with Durridge’s murder, but …’

  Tommaso Saoner swung round on him.

  ‘Murder?’

  A couple entering the restaurant looked at them sharply. Zen took his friend’s arm and steered him further along the alley.

  ‘We found the body on that ossuary island we once visited together,’ he murmured. ‘It wasn’t much more than a skeleton itself after the vermin and the birds had eaten their fill. But they don’t eat bones. Durridge’s were shattered, the spine rammed up into the skull.’

  He gripped Saoner’s arm, pulling him round and looking him in the eyes.

  ‘How do you pluck a man off one island and drop him on another in such a way as to break every bone in his body? What do you think, Tommaso? Which of the greasy playing cards would you pick from the pack?’

  They stared at each other for a long moment. Then Saoner twisted violently away.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted in a voice edged with desperation. ‘I didn’t ask you to confide in me! I don’t know what sort of game you’re playing, and I don’t want to know! Just leave me alone! Leave me alone!’

  He strode rapidly away down the alley. Zen started after him, then stopped, turned and set off slowly in the other direction.

  The day might earlier have seemed an augury of spring, but by mid-afternoon the realities of February had asserted themselves. Once past their peak, both the warmth and the light faded fast. Darkness massed in the chilly evening air, silvering the window of Zen’s office to form a mirror which perfectly reflected the decline of his hopes for the Durridge case.

  Giulio Bon would not talk. For almost two hours, Zen had interrogated him in the presence of Carlo Berengo Gorin. Much to Zen’s surprise, the lawyer had made no attempt to intervene. On the contrary, he had ostentatiously turned his back on the proceedings, dividing his attention equally between the arts supplement of La Repubblica and a large cigar which he extracted from its aluminium tube and fussed over for some considerable time before it was ignited to his entire satisfaction.

  Zen had been prepared for Gorin to do everything in his power to obstruct the smooth progress of the interrogation, but with Domenico Zuin’s statement already on its way to Marcello Mamoli he had felt confident of prevailing. Indeed, he had rather looked forward to being able to repay Gorin for the slights he had suffered the previous week. The case against Bon was overwhelming. However much Gorin might fuss and fidget, he would be forced to concede defeat in the end.

  It took Zen only a few minutes to realize that the lawyer’s air of apparent complacency was the very opposite of good news. If Carlo Berengo Gorin was not perched on the edge of his c
hair, ready to pounce at the slightest hint of a procedural inexactitude, it was not because he sensed that the game was lost but because he knew he had already won. Too late, Zen realized that he had made a fatal mistake in revealing the extent of his progress in the case to Tommaso Saoner.

  Saoner must have passed on the information to his associates, who had contacted Gorin with an offer for Bon’s silence. This might have taken the form of a simple cash injection or, more likely, of some similar offer combined with a promise of political pressure on the Appeal Court once the Nuova Repubblica Veneta ‘got its hands on the levers of power’. This had then been communicated to Bon by Gorin during the initial consultation to which they were entitled under the provisions of the Criminal Code.

  Once that deal had been struck, any business which Zen might have hoped to transact was dead in the water. If there had been any hope of an eventual breakthrough, he would have been happy to continue the interrogation through the night if necessary. As it was, after going through the motions of confronting Bon with the statement Zuin had made implicating him as the prime mover of the second landing on the ottagono, and failing to get any response, he abandoned the proceedings.

  Zen still had one more card up his sleeve. Getting out the folder containing the information which Pia Nunziata had obtained from air traffic control at Tessera, he walked across the office to the wall-map of the Province of Venice. The extract from the records showed all the flights which had been logged on the day when Ivan Durridge had disappeared. Zen had already deleted most of the entries, which referred to arrivals and departures at the airport. There was also a certain amount of toing and froing around the city itself, most of it centering on the Naval college on Sant’Elena and the Coastguard headquarters on the Giudecca.

  Once all this had been eliminated, there remained three flights whose course would have taken them near Sant’Ariano. One of these, a training flight out over the Adriatic from the USAF base at Treviso, could be discounted. The remaining two were civil flights, both involving helicopters. One originated at ten o’clock in the morning in Trieste and overflew the lagoon en route to Vicenza. The other commenced shortly before two in the afternoon from the San Nicolò airfield, calling at Alberoni, on the southern tip of the Lido, before continuing to Gorizia, a city in the extreme north-east of the Friuli region, straddling the border with what had until recently been Yugoslavia. The machine involved was registered to a company named Aeroservizi Veneti.

  Zen ran his finger across the shiny surface of the map, locating the various places mentioned. There was San Nicolò at the northern tip of the Lido. There was Alberoni, a few kilometres from the ottagono where Ivan Durridge had made his home. At this scale, Gorizia would be somewhere on the ceiling, but it looked as though the route passed more or less directly over Sant’Ariano, marked with a cross on the map, and thence over the plains of the Piave and Tagliamento rivers.

  The door at the other end of the office crashed open and Aldo Valentini came running in.

  ‘It’s on!’ he cried.

  He went rapidly through the drawers of his desk, snatching papers, a map of the city, a pistol and shoulder-holster.

  ‘It’s going to be a nightmare! The gang’s obviously suspicious. Instead of the usual straightforward drop they’ve told Sfriso to take the heroin to a bar in Mestre and await instructions. They’ll probably string him along for hours before they make their move.’

  The phone started ringing. Valentini snatched it up.

  ‘Yes? Yes? Who? What?’

  He laid the receiver down on the desk.

  ‘It’s for you!’

  Zen walked over and took the phone from him.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, Aurelio.’

  It was Cristiana.

  ‘Well, hello there.’

  Aldo Valentini dashed back to the door.

  ‘Best of luck!’ Zen called after him.

  ‘For what?’ asked Cristiana.

  ‘Colleague of mine. He’s got a difficult operation coming up. You came through on his line, for some reason.’

  ‘I don’t understand. When I asked for you, they said there was no one of that name in the building. What’s going on, Aurelio?’

  Zen smiled ruefully. Already he had become a non-person.

  ‘I’ll explain later,’ he told Cristiana. ‘When can I see you?’

  She sounded embarrassed.

  ‘Well, that depends when … when you’re free.’

  ‘About eight?’

  ‘Oh that’s too late!’

  He frowned momentarily.

  ‘Too late for what?’

  ‘I mean … couldn’t we make it earlier?’

  ‘How early?’

  ‘Would about six be all right?’

  Her tone sounded oddly constrained. Zen took this to be a good sign, evidence that she was in the grip of the same turbulence that was disturbing his own emotional life, drawing them both away from the tried and familiar towards a new future together.

  ‘Will that give you time to get home after work?’ he asked.

  There was a brief silence the other end.

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ she said at last.

  She sounded so strange that Zen almost asked her if she was all right. But these were not things to discuss on the phone. In a few hours they could work it all out face to face.

  ‘Then I’ll see you at six,’ he said.

  There was a brief pause.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Cristiana.

  Zen hung up, wondering why she wanted to see him so urgently. Perhaps after what the switchboard had told her she was afraid that he was going to abandon her and take off back to Rome without any warning. He could see how plausible that might look from her point of view. His tour of duty in the city had come to an end, he’d had his bit of fun with her, now it was time to go home. Zen smiled. He’d soon set her mind at rest about that.

  But first he had a less agreeable task to perform. Whatever the motivation for the dressing-down he had received at the hands of Francesco Bruno that morning, he could not deny that it had been richly deserved. He glanced at his watch. There was just time to call in at Palazzo Zulian and make his apologies before going home to keep his appointment with Cristiana. They might very well not be accepted, but under the circumstances it was the least he could do to try.

  Yet instead of collecting his hat and coat and going out, Zen found himself picking up the phone again. Now that the sustaining momentum of the Durridge case had receded, he had lost his steerage-way and was drifting at the whim of every current. The thought of Ada Zulian reminded him of his mother, and he realized with a guilty start that he had not phoned her since leaving Rome a week before. Reluctantly, he dialled the familiar number.

  ‘Hello? Mamma? Are you all right? You sound different.’

  ‘It’s me, Aurelio.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Me, Tania. Remember?’

  For a moment he wondered if he’d dialled the wrong number.

  ‘Tania!’ he exclaimed over-effusively. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Your mother’s out.’

  ‘Out? Where?’

  For a moment there was no reply.

  ‘And you, Aurelio?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  A sigh.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Still here in Venice, of course. Where do you think? I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch, but I’ve been very busy.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Everything’s all wrong.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘STOP SAYING SORRY!’

  ‘Sorry. I mean …’

  ‘You’re not sorry, you don’t give a damn!’

  There was a shocked silence.

  ‘You’re a heartless bastard, Aurelio,’ Tania said dully. ‘God knows why I ever got involved with you.’

  Zen held the receiver at arm’s length a moment, then replaced it on its rest. He fel
t as though he had just had a bruising encounter with a rude, angry stranger in a language which neither of them spoke well. All that remained was a confused sense of bafflement, aggression and – above all – meaninglessness. For while the slightly bizarre tone of his conversation with Cristiana would be resolved the moment they met, his failure to communicate with Tania, both literally and figuratively, was caused by deep structural flaws in the relationship which could never be resolved. He felt absolutely certain of that now.

  He gathered up his things and headed for the door. He was turning the handle when Valentini’s phone rang again. Thinking it might be some urgent communication about the drug bust, Zen went back to answer it. At first there seemed to be no one there. Then he distinguished a low sound of sobbing.

  ‘Aurelio, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I’ve been so lonely, and it’s been a terrible time. The landlord sent the bailiffs in. I got back from work to find the door barred and all my belongings piled up in the street. It would all have been looted if one of the priests from the College next door hadn’t kept an eye on it.’

  She paused, but he didn’t speak.

  ‘I moved to a hotel for a few days, but as soon as your mother heard what had happened she invited me over here. She’s been wonderful, Aurelio. We’re getting on really well.’

  She sighed.

  ‘I know I’ve been difficult, Aurelio, but you must try and undertand it from my point of view. I married young and it went disastrously wrong. I didn’t want to make another mistake I would live to regret. That’s why I’ve been so cautious about the idea of us living together. But you’ve been right to insist. Relationships never stand still. If people don’t grow closer together then they get further apart. For a while it was fine us being lovers and living separate lives, but not any more. That stage is over. We must move on.’

  She paused. Again Zen said nothing.

  ‘I want us all to live together,’ Tania went on in a quiet, firm voice. ‘I want us to be a real family, to have a home and children and be together all the time. Your mother needs that. She needs company, particularly with you being away so much of the time. That’s why she’s always going off to babysit for those friends of yours, the Nieddus. That’s where she is now, by the way.’