Dead Lagoon - 4 (3 page)

When he reached the corner, his first thought was that he must have lost his bearings. Not only was there no sign of the café, but the barber’s and ironmonger’s next door had also vanished. Zen looked around him distractedly. Yes, there was the palazzo on the other side of the canal, and there the church. This
was
the corner, no doubt about it, but all that was to be seen was a stretch of grimy glass covered in faded posters protesting against the forcible evictions of sitting tenants. A workshop for carnival masks had taken over the shops next door.

A gaunt grizzled man came shuffling along the alley. He wore an ancient suit, a grubby pullover and tartan carpet slippers. Some distance behind him, a mangy dog trailed along dispiritedly at the end of a length of filthy rope.

‘Excuse me!’ Zen called. ‘Do you know what’s happened to Claudio’s bar?’

The man’s eyes widened in fright.

‘Is it you, Anzolo? I never thought to see you again.’

Zen stared more closely at him.

‘Daniele?’ he breathed. ‘I’m Aurelio. Angelo’s son.’

The old man squinted back at him. His crumpled face was unshaven. A mass of red veins covered his nose. Three lone teeth remained in his bottom gum, sticking up like the money tabs in the huge silver cash register which used to lord it over Claudio’s bar.

‘Aurelio?’ he muttered at last. ‘The little hooligan who used to terrorize the whole neighbourhood and make his mother’s life a misery? I can still hear her words. “For the love of God, Daniele, give him a damn good thrashing! I can’t control him any more. At this age, it takes a man to keep them in line.”’

He tugged his dog viciously away from a niffy patch of plaster it was investigating.

‘How is Giustiniana, anyway?’

‘My mother’s fine, Daniele.’

‘And what are you doing here?’

‘I’m on business.’

‘What sort of business?’

‘I’m in the police.’

Daniele Trevisan drew back.

‘The
police
?’

‘What about it?’

‘Nothing. It’s just the way you were going …’

‘Yes?’ demanded Zen.

‘Well, to be frank, I’d have expected you to end up on the other side of the law, if anything.’

Zen smiled thinly.

‘And Claudio?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

The old man looked as bewildered as the victim of a practical joke. Zen waved at the locked door, the fly-posted window.

‘Gone!’ Daniele exclaimed. ‘Claudio’s moved down to the bridge, where the tourists are. You can’t turn a profit round here any more. And what’s the police business that has brought you here, if it’s not an indiscreet question from an old family friend?’

But Zen had caught sight of the
vaporetto
approaching and hurried off, leaving Daniele Trevisan looking after him with a quizzical, slightly malicious smile.

At first it looked as though Zen would not be in time to catch the boat, but fortunately another ferry, bound for the station, arrived at the landing stage first, forcing its opposite number to throttle back and drift in mid-stream, awaiting its turn. The result was that Zen was able to saunter across the Tre Archi bridge and even light a cigarette before boarding.

As they passed the modernistic council houses on San Girolamo and emerged into the open waters of the lagoon, the full strength of the wind became clear for the first time. The boat banged and buffeted its way through the short, hard waves, swathes of spray drenching the decking and the windows of the helmsman’s cabin. Zen’s cigarette obliged him to stand outside, at the top of the stairs leading down to the saloon. It was rush hour, and the boat was packed with school-children and commuters. They sat or stood impassively, reading papers, talking together or staring blankly out of the windows. Apart from the pitching and rolling, the crunch of the waves and the draughts of air laden with salt, not fumes, it might almost have been the bus which Zen took to work every morning in Rome. He eyed the children hunched under their satchels, chattering brightly or horsing about. They thought this was normal, he reflected, as he once had. They thought everywhere was like this. They thought that nothing would ever change.

At Fondamente Nove, Zen changed to avoid the detour to Murano. It would have been quicker to get off at the next stop, by the hospital, and walk through the back streets to the Questura, but as he was in plenty of time he rode the
circolare destra
through the Arsenale shipyards and out into the sweeping vistas of the deep-water channel beyond. The wind’s work was even clearer here, cutting up the water into staccato wavelets breaking white at the crest. They slapped and banged the hull, sending up a salty spindrift which acted as a screen for brief miniature rainbows and coated Zen’s face like sweat.

When they reached the Riva degli Schiavoni he disembarked, crossed the broad promenade, bustling even at that hour, and plunged into the warren of dark, deserted alleys beyond. He was largely following his nose at this point, but it proved a good guide, bringing him out on a bridge leading over the San Lorenzo canal near the three-storey building which housed the police headquarters for the
Provincia di Venezia
. Zen held his identity card up to the camera above the bell and the door release hummed loudly. Since the years of terrorism, police stations had been defended like colonial outposts in enemy territory. The fact that the Questura and the
Squadra Mobile
headquarters next door were both traditional buildings typical of this unglamorous area of the city made such measures seem all the more bizarre.

The guard on duty behind a screen of armoured glass in the vestibule was sleepy and offhand. No one was in yet, he told Zen, a claim substantiated by the bank of video screens behind him, showing a selection of empty rooms, corridors and staircases. Zen walked upstairs to the first floor and opened a door at random. The scene which met his eyes inside was absolutely predictable to anyone who had worked in police offices anywhere in Italy from Aosta to Siracuse. The air was stale and stuffy, used up and warmed over. The bare walls were painted a shade of off-white reminiscent of milk left too long out of the fridge. A double neon tube housing, its cover missing, hung from the ceiling on frail chains. The available space was divided into three areas by screens of the thick frosted glass commonly associated with shower cubicles, set in gilt-anodized aluminium frames. At the centre of each squatted a large wooden desk.

Zen went over to one of the desks and looked through the contents of the three-tiered metal tray until he found what he was looking for: a sheaf of computer printout stapled together at the upper left-hand corner. The top sheet bore the words NOTIZIE DI REATI DENUNCIATI ALLA POLIZIA GIUDIZIARIA and the dates of the previous week. The pages inside listed all the incidents which had been brought to the attention of the police during the period in question. Zen leafed through the pages, looking for something suitable.

It was a delicate business. He didn’t want to attract unwanted attention by poaching a case which had already been assigned, or in which someone was taking a special interest for one reason or another. On the other hand, he couldn’t just select some minor misdemeanour at random. There had to be something special about it to justify his being sent up all the way from the élite Criminalpol squad in Rome to take over the case. He was still puzzling over this problem when a familiar name leapt out at him.

He read the entry again, then dropped the document and lit a cigarette. The
contessa
! Christ almighty. For a time he was lost in memories. Then he looked at the page again. Two weeks earlier, Ada Zulian had reported intruders at her home, claiming that it was part of a campaign of systematic persecution which had been going on for over a month. She had renewed her complaints the previous week.

Zen looked up at the window. He nodded slowly to himself. That would do nicely. It was too trivial to have excited any interest from any of the resident staff, but the family connection would provide exactly the kind of illusory logic he needed to justify his involvement to anyone who asked. He noted down the date and case number in his diary and replaced the list in the metal tray.

When the Personnel office responded to the phone half an hour later, Zen went along and introduced himself. The clerk in charge dug out the chit which had been faxed up from Rome.

‘Zen, Aurelio. Criminalpol. Temporary transfer regarding …’

He frowned at the form.

‘That’s odd. They’ve forgotten to fill that bit in.’

Zen shook his head.

‘Typical! The people they’re employing these days can’t remember their own names half the time.’

He took out his notebook.

‘It’s to do with someone called Zulian. I’ve got the details here somewhere … Yes, here you go.’

He showed the reference number and date to the clerk, who copied them on to the chit.

‘I’ll need some office space,’ Zen remarked. ‘What have you got available?’

The clerk consulted a wall-chart.

‘How long are you going to be here?’

Zen shrugged.

‘Hard to say. A week or two at least.’

‘There’s a desk free in three one nine until the seventeenth. Gatti’s on holiday until then.’

Room 319 was a small office at the front of the building, overlooking the canal. Zen was looking down at a refrigerated barge marked GELATI SANSON squeezing past the police launches moored outside the Questura when the door opened to admit Aldo Valentini, whose name figured alongside that of the absent Gatti on the door.

Valentini was a mild, scholarly-looking man with Armani glasses and a skimpy blond beard like grass which has been growing under a plank. He seemed pleased to have company, and suggested that he and Zen pop out to get some breakfast. As they emerged into the sunlight, bucking the incoming tide of staff hastening to sign themselves in so that they could slip out again, Valentini inquired about the reason for Zen’s transfer.

‘You must be joking!’ he barked in the slightly nasal accent of his native Ferrara. ‘Ada Zulian! A woman who doesn’t even know the right time …’

Zen gestured impatiently.

‘What does that matter, as long as she knows the right people?’

Aldo Valentini conceded the point with a shrug. He led the way to a bar at the end of the quay. A red neon sign over the door read
Bar dei Greci,
after the nearby Orthodox church. There was no sign of any Greeks inside, although the barman’s accent suggested that he was from somewhere well to the south of Chioggia.

‘All the same,
la Zulian
!’ exclaimed Valentini when they had ordered coffee. ‘God almighty, she’s been in and out of the loony bin like a yo-yo for the last twenty years. This complaint of hers ended up on my desk, largely because no one else would touch it with a bargepole.’

He broke off to take one of the pastries from the plate on the bar.

‘We searched the whole place from top to bottom,’ he continued, his moustache white with icing sugar from the pastry he had selected. ‘Even put a man outside the front door. No one came or went, yet the woman still claimed she was being persecuted. It’s a clear case of hysteria and attention-seeking.’

Zen took a bite of a flaky cream-filled croissant.

‘I’m sure you’re right. It’s always the hopeless cases who want a second opinion. I’ll just go through the motions and then endorse your conclusions. It’s a total waste of time, but what do I care? There are worse places to spend a few days.’

He washed the pastry down with a gulp of coffee.

‘So, what’s been happening round here?’

Valentini shrugged.

‘Bugger all, as usual. Mestre and Marghera see a reasonable amount of action, particularly in drugs, but we just don’t have a big enough slice of the mainland for it to add up to anything much. As for the city itself, forget it. Criminals are like everyone else these days. If you can’t drive there, they don’t want to know.’

Zen nodded slowly.

‘What about that kidnapping that was all over the papers a few months back? Some American.’

‘You mean the Durridge business?’

Zen lit a cigarette.

‘That must have livened things up a bit.’

‘It might, if they’d let us near it,’ Valentini retorted shortly.

‘How do you mean?’

‘The Carabinieri got there first, and when we applied for reciprocity we were told the files had been returned under seal to Rome.’

He shrugged.

‘Christ knows what that was all about. Once upon a time we could have pulled a few strings of our own and found out, but these days …’

He pointed to the headline in the newspaper lying on the counter. THE OLD FOX FIGHTS FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE, it read, above a photograph of the politician in question. Zen picked the paper up and scanned the article, which concerned alleged payments made by a number of leading industrialists into a numbered Swiss bank account allegedly used to fund the party in question. The paper’s cartoonist made play with the slogan adopted by the party at the last election: ‘A Fairer Alternative’. In a secondary article, a spokesman for the regionalist Northern Leagues hailed the development as ‘a death blow to the clique of crooks who have bled this country dry for decades’ and called for new electoral laws designed to radically redraw the political map of the country.

‘It’s total chaos,’ remarked Valentini sourly. ‘You can’t get anything done any more. No one knows what the rules are.’

Feeling a touch on his arm, Zen looked round. A young woman with blonde hair, wearing a ski-jacket and jeans, stood staring at him, smiling inanely and stabbing one finger in the air. For a moment Zen thought she must be mad, or perhaps from some religious sect or other. Then he caught sight of the suspended rectangle of cardboard circling slowly in the draught above his head. The logo on each side showed a smouldering cigarette in a red circle with a broad slash across it.

‘Don’t tell me you can’t even smoke any more!’ he exclaimed incredulously to Valentini, who shrugged sheepishly.

‘The city council passed a by-law making it compulsory to provide a no-smoking area. It’s just for show, to keep the tourists happy. Normally no one pays any attention in a place like this, but every once in a while some arsehole insists on the letter of the law.’