Dead Lagoon - 4 (22 page)

A head emerged from the carved window at first-floor level.

‘Ah, good morning, Aurelio Battista! So you’ve finally decided to show your face around here. About time too!’

Zen gawked up at her.

‘Thanks for the welcome,’ he retorted sarcastically.

‘I wasn’t talking to you! I didn’t even know you were there. I was shouting at that tomcat on the wall. I made the mistake of throwing him some scraps last week, and now he sits there all day staring at me like a beggar. Now stay put and I’ll send your man down to open the door. Let me tell you, I’m going to give you a piece of my mind!’

Ada drew back into the house and closed the window. Zen looked round, and was reassured to see that the cat in question did in fact exist. Noticing his glance, it gave a self-pitying mew.

‘Piss off,’ said Zen.

The cat blinked and looked away disdainfully. Inside the house there was a clatter of boots on the stairs. A key turned in the lock and the door opened to reveal Bettino Todesco clutching a service revolver.

‘Ah, it’s you, chief,’ he said, putting the weapon back in its holster.

‘Who the hell did you think it was?’ Zen snapped, pushing past.

‘Well she said it was, but I don’t take that much notice of what she says any more.’

He leant forward and whispered confidentially to Zen.

‘If I have to spend another night here I’ll go round the bend myself.’

Zen frowned at him.

‘Why, has anything happened?’

Todesco shook his head lugubriously.

‘I wish something
would
happen. Anything would be better than having to listen to that woman maundering on. If she’s not bitching about this, she’s moaning about that, or talking to people who aren’t there. Gives me the creeps, I can tell you.’

Zen nodded.

‘All right, Todesco, go off home and get some rest. But be at the Questura by six o’clock this evening. I need you for an operation I have in mind.’

‘Very good, chief.’

Zen made his way up the stairs leading through the mezzanine level to the hallway transecting the house from front to back. The diminutive figure of Ada Zulian stood silhouetted against the window at the far end.

‘So you’ve dismissed your spy,’ she remarked sourly, ‘but I suppose he’ll be back. A fat lot of use it was calling the police! I complain of intruders in my house, and all they do is force another one on me.’

She sniffed suspiciously. Zen shifted uneasily in his shoes. There was still a strong stink of dogshit. Some of the stuff must have got trapped in the crack between the sole and the uppers.

‘I should have listened to Daniele Trevisan,’ Ada Zulian went on. ‘He told me to keep the police out of it.’

‘Well then, you’ll be glad to hear that we’re about to get out of it,’ Zen snapped.

Ada put her head on one side and stared up at him. Her face looked inexpressibly ancient, a palimpsest of all the faces it had ever been: baby, child, adolescent and the whole parabola of womanhood. It was all there, superimposed like layers of paint.

‘What do you mean?’ she inquired mildly.

‘I mean you win,
contessa
! You want the police out of your hair and I want you and your bullyboys out of mine. Is it a deal?’

Ada Zulian peered at him.

‘Are you feeling all right, Aurelio Battista? Come into the salon and I’ll make some camomile tea to calm you down.’

‘What will calm me down is you calling off your friends and relations!’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh come on,
contessa
! You told people about the police guard on the house …’

‘I mentioned it to my family …’

‘… who mentioned it to their powerful contacts, who mentioned it to my superiors at the Questura, who have been making my life a misery ever since. Fair enough! I was only trying to protect you, because you were a family friend, and this is the thanks I get!’

He walked right up to her, emphasizing his points by stabbing one palm with two fingers of the other hand.

‘That policeman who just left will not be coming back,
contessa
. Understand? Neither will his colleagues. Neither will I. You won’t be bothered with any of us any more. And all I ask in return is that you get in touch with all the people you complained to about me and tell them to very kindly stop breaking my balls.’

Ada glared at him.

‘There’s no call to use that sort of language.’

‘I don’t care what sort of language you use,
contessa
, just as long as you get the message across.’

He turned on his heel and walked back to the stairs.

‘And if the intruders return?’ Ada called querulously after him. ‘What will become of me then?’

Zen turned and stared back at her implacably.

‘But they won’t return, will they? They were never here in the first place. They never existed, except in your dreams. And I have enough real work to do without trying to police people’s dreams.’

He nodded curtly.

‘Good day,
contessa
. And goodbye.’

Zen paid for his broken sleep and early rising with a blurred mental focus which ensured that the rest of the day passed in a dopy haze punctuated by various isolated episodes which forced themselves on his attention, one being the moment when Enzo Gavagnin publicly accused him of being an undercover agent acting for the Ministry in Rome.

The encounter took place in the
Bar dei Greci,
where Zen had gone to try and blast away his mental fog with stiff draughts of
espresso doppio ristretto.
When Gavagnin appeared beside him at the bar, Zen was reading a newspaper report of a speech by Umberto Bossi, demanding immediate national elections to ‘restore credibility to the government before the demands of local demagogues for regional autonomy lead to the break-up of Italy’. A leader commented that now Bossi saw a real chance of achieving power at national level, he was distancing himself from those such as Ferdinando Dal Maschio who were still pursuing the separatist goals which Bossi had once espoused.

‘What the hell were you doing in my office this morning?’ demanded Gavagnin aggressively.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Zen replied. Thanks to his dazed condition, this was literally true. He had temporarily forgotten that he had ever visited Gavagnin’s office, let alone why, and thus had no trouble sounding innocently baffled. But Gavagnin’s fury was not assuaged.

‘Don’t try and deny it!’ he snapped. ‘When I got in this morning I couldn’t breathe for the stink of those camelshit
Nazionali
. You’re the only one in the building who smokes them.’

Zen merely shrugged and went on reading the paper. Gavagnin snatched it from his hands.

‘Admit it, you’re a spy!’ he shouted. ‘A snooper from the Ministry. All that bullshit about being sent up here to look into some madwoman’s stories about things going bump in the night! What a load of crap! It’s us you’re investigating, isn’t it? You’re checking us out on behalf of your masters in Rome. That’s what you were doing in my office. Going through my papers to try and find something to use against me. And why? Because I’m with the
Nuova Repubblica Veneta,
and we’ve got the old regime shitting in its pants!’

He continued in this vein for some time, but Zen simply stared levelly at him and said nothing. As time went on, Gavagnin’s tone became distracted rather than confrontational, his tone more pleading than threatening. In the end, he turned on his heel and stalked out.

Another of the landmarks punctuating Zen’s prevailing mental fog had been the arrival of the documents relating to the complaint which Ada Zulian had made about her near-neighbour at the time, Andrea Dolfin. They were brought – with a speed and efficiency belying the warnings Zen had received – by a uniformed messenger attached to the Central Archives of the Province of Venice, recently re-sited in a custom-built concrete bunker beneath the car park on the artificial island of the Tronchetto.

The move from the Archives’ former premises in a
palazzo
facing the Rialto had led to considerable disruption and, it was rumoured, the loss of several thousand documents. This still left a few million to shelve and classify, however, but by good luck the items which Zen had requested the previous day were evidently lodged in one of the sections that was up and running. Zen lit one of his despised domestic cigarettes and settled down to study the sheets of stiff parchment-like paper covered in heavy typewriting. The document, dated May 1946, consisted of the
denuncia
made to the authorities by Contessa Ada Zulian, resident in the eponymous palace, concerning the alleged activities of Andrea Dolfin, resident in Calle del Forno, followed by a report into the investigation subsequently carried out by a
commissario di polizia.

The draft of Ada Zulian’s statement ran to almost fifteen pages. Reading through them, Zen could not help smiling faintly at the increasing frustration of the police officer who had interviewed her, evident even in the bureaucratic language employed. ‘The deponent was asked to address herself to the substance of the complaint …’ ‘A number of allegations concerning other residents of the Cannaregio district, being extraneous to the matter in hand, have been omitted …’ ‘The deponent was yet again urged to express herself with greater brevity and concision …’

There was nothing humorous about what the
contessa
had to say, however. Stripped of her characteristic longueurs and digressions, the essence of her accusation was that the said Andrea Dolfin had three years earlier kidnapped and murdered Rosa Coin, daughter of Daniele Coin, formerly resident in Campo di Ghetto Nuovo.

Although Ada’s charges were unsubstantiated by any evidence, they were sufficiently grave to force the police to launch an investigation. The conclusions of the resulting report hinged on two key documents. The first was a photocopy of an extract from German records listing those Venetian Jews deported in 1943. The names of all seven members of the Coin family appeared, but the entry for Rosa Coin had been crossed out and the comment ‘Found hanged’ added in the margin.

This initially appeared to support Ada’s allegations. Andrea Dolfin had been for a time a prominent member of the Fascist administration in Venice, and although he had lost his official status when Mussolini was overthrown, he remained a trusted figure enjoying good relations with the occupying German authorities. Given this fact, and the lack of any other evidence as to how Rosa Coin had met her death, Andrea Dolfin was regarded as a suspect by the police and was questioned on a number of occasions, but without result.

The investigation was dramatically terminated by the arrival of a letter from the supposed victim herself. So far from having died in 1943, it appeared that Rosa Coin was living in Palestine, the sole survivor of her family. A former neighbour in the Ghetto had written to her, revealing Ada Zulian’s allegations, which Rosa proceeded to refute point by point. Her letter made it clear that she was not only alive, but that she owed her survival to none other than Andrea Dolfin, who had used his privileged position to shelter her during the final months of the war. Once Rosa’s identity had been confirmed by the British authorities in Palestine, the case was immediately dropped.

Zen was reading the final lines of the report, which noted that Contessa Ada Zulian had been diagnosed as suffering from ‘hysteria and delusional melancholia’ since the disappearance of her daughter in mysterious circumstances, when the phone rang.

‘Yes!’ he barked gruffly.

‘Hello, sweetie.’

A smile spread slowly across Zen’s face.

‘Well, hello there,’ he breathed.

They shared an intimate moment of silence.

‘How are things?’ Cristiana asked at length.

‘Things are fine. Things are great. Never have they been better.’

‘Good.’

‘How about your things?’

‘They’re not complaining either.’

Another long supple silence.

‘When can we …?’ Zen began, but Cristiana had started talking at the same moment.

‘… make it tonight, unfortunately.’

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t think I wouldn’t love to, but I have to turn up with you-know-who for this press gala at the Danieli.’

The quality of the silence which ensued was rather different.

‘I thought you were separated,’ Zen said at last.

‘Not publicly. Can you can imagine what the media would make of a story like that, especially just before the elections? Nando’s made plenty of enemies who would just love to get their hands on some juicy scandal.’

‘Why should you care?’

‘For one thing, because I don’t care to have my name dragged through the gutter. And for another, because I want to keep on the right side of Nando.’

‘I see,’ said Zen icily.

‘No, you don’t. You don’t need to. But I’ve got to be realistic. Nando’s already a very powerful man, and the way things are looking he stands a good chance of being elected mayor next month. There’s nothing to be gained by making a sworn enemy of someone in that sort of position. They can do too much harm. By going along with public appearances when he asks me, I keep some leverage.’

She laughed deliberately, to lighten the mood.

‘I don’t want to end up like your ancestors, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Renier Zen and … what was the other one? You said last night they had a habit of winning all the battles but losing the war.’

‘Oh. Yes. But listen …’

‘Just a moment!’

There was a noise in the background and Cristiana greeted someone who had come into the agency.

‘The boss,’ she explained in an undertone to Zen.

‘Shall I call you back?’

‘That’s all right. Now you were enquiring about seat availability over the weekend period, I believe?’

Zen grinned broadly, his fit of pique forgotten.

‘It wasn’t so much
seats
I was thinking of …’

‘That’s simply the formula we use at booking stage,’ Cristiana returned crisply. ‘You would of course be upgraded automatically at check-in.’