Dead Lagoon - 4 (38 page)

Thanks to these constant interruptions it was another twenty minutes before they emerged into the sweeping vistas of Campo Santa Margherita. Dal Maschio strode the length of the square, past the row of plane trees tossing their branches in the wind and the isolated market house with its ancient sign listing the minimum legal length for each type of fish that could be sold there. Here he veered right, towards the church of the Carmelites, and turned in under a
sottoportego
bearing an almost illegible sign dating from the war, a stencilled yellow arrow beneath the word PLATZKOMMANDANT.

Zen turned back, seeking somewhere to wait and watch. There was only one bar still open, a dingy wineshop thick with tobacco smoke and the sound of vigorous sparring in the local dialect. A number of figures were dimly visible in the dull fumed light, both male and female, all far gone in years and drink. They turned to gaze at Zen as he made his way to a table by the window. This vetting concluded, most of them resumed their previous heated exchanges, taking no further notice of the newcomer, but one couple continued to watch him.

Zen shot them a glance as he sat down. The man he recognized as Andrea Dolfin, but the woman – adrift and becalmed somewhere in her sixties – he had never seen before, although something about her looked familiar. The proprietor, a burly man with the air of someone who had seen every kind of trouble, and seen it off, marched over to Zen’s table and asked what he’d like, in a tone which suggested that he’d also like to know what the hell he was doing there. Zen ordered a
caffè corretto alla grappa
. Lowering the net curtain which covered the bottom half of the window, he assured himself that the entrance into which Dal Maschio had disappeared was visible from where he was sitting.

When he turned back to the lighted room, Dolfin and the woman were still staring at him and talking quietly together in a furtive undertone. The old man pointed at him, without making the slightest attempt to disguise the fact. He murmured something to the woman, who smiled in a sad, absent way. Zen turned back to the window, knowing that the gesture was an evasion. No one would be leaving the meeting on the other side of the square for at least an hour. When he looked back, the two pairs of eyes were still gazing in his direction.

After all Zen had been through that day, this insolent scrutiny was the last straw. If even half of what Ada Zulian had hinted at was true, Andrea Dolfin ought to be afraid to show his face in public, never mind mock the police. Having been betrayed by Cristiana and humiliated by Ferdinando Dal Maschio, he wasn’t in a mood to take any insolence from Andrea Dolfin. Rising to his feet, he crossed the foggy expanses of the bar towards his tormentor.

‘What the hell are you laughing at?’

Dolfin looked up with a slight frown, as though noticing Zen for the first time.

‘A joke,’ he said.

‘At my expense, apparently.’

Dolfin shrugged.

‘Not in particular,
dottore
. On the other hand, we’re none of us exempt.’

Zen sat down and looked the old man in the eyes.

‘It doesn’t surprise me that you only come out after dark,’ he hissed. ‘After what Ada Zulian told me this afternoon, I wonder you have the nerve to go on living at all.’

‘The more I see of life, the more I wonder that any of us do.’

The proprietor brought Zen his coffee.

‘Everything all right, Andrea?’ he asked, glancing suspiciously at Zen.

‘Fine, fine.’

Zen swallowed the coffee down at one gulp.

‘Do you want me to tell you what she said?’

Dolfin smiled broadly.

‘I’ve heard it many times before. Ada never made any secret of her views. On the contrary.’

The man’s complacent tone infuriated Zen. He pointed to the woman sitting beside Dolfin.

‘What about your lady friend? Does she know? Do you want me to tell her what Ada has to say about you and her daughter?’

Andrea Dolfin gazed back at him calmly.

‘Why not?’

He stroked the woman’s ravaged face with the back of his fingers.

‘I don’t think you two know each other, by the way. This is Aurelio Zen, my dear. He claims to be the son of Angelo Zen, the railwayman, although I’d always understood that Angelo’s only child was born dead.’

Dolfin looked back at Zen. He held out a limp hand towards the woman.

‘And this,
dottore,
is Rosetta Zulian.’

Zen’s initial reaction was one of disbelief, closely followed by anger. What did Dolfin take him for? The man’s wickedness was matched only by his effrontery. The tale which Ada Zulian had told him earlier that evening had been rambling, oblique and full of lacunae, a rebus spelling out a truth too terrible to be put into words, but Zen had been left in very little doubt as to what must have happened in the nightmare period following the German invasion half a century earlier.

Alone of all her family, Rosa Coin had survived the operation to ‘cleanse’ Venice of its Jewish population. That much was certain from the police report which Zen had read. Her parents and siblings had been packed off to the death camps, but Rosa’s name was struck off the list of deportees since she had been ‘found hanged’. Yet just two years later a person calling herself Rosa Coin turned up alive and well in Israel, claiming that but for Andrea Dolfin she would have shared the fate of the rest of her family and hundreds of her friends and neighbours.

When Ada had suggested, if only to ridicule the idea, that the Germans might have been mistaken about the identity of the dead girl, Zen had realized that the apparent contradictions in her tale resolved themselves if one simply substituted the name Rosetta for Rosa. Ada Zulian still could not admit to herself that her daughter was dead, so she had told her story inside out. It was
Rosetta
who had been kidnapped and killed by Dolfin, who had lured her to his house with sweets and treats.

Thanks to his contacts, he would already have known that Rosa’s family was to be included in the next group of deportees. Perhaps he had even arranged to have them included himself, so as to facilitate his evil scheme. That was the key to the whole plan. Once he was assured of it, he could do what he liked with the hapless Rosetta. Then, when she was dead, Dolfin had gone to the Coin family with a proposal which he knew they were bound to accept, hideous as it was. They and their other children were doomed, but their daughter Rosa might live, her entry struck off the deportation list as already dead when the corpse of her lookalike friend was ‘found hanging’.

What parent could refuse? Despite their horror, their outrage and anguish, the Coins could not refuse this gruesome exchange. No doubt Dolfin made it easy for them, pretending that Rosetta had died of illness or by accident. In any case, he was running absolutely no risk of being exposed. In the Nazi-occupied Italy of 1943, Jews were non-persons, bureaucratic data deprived of rights or civil status, mere apparitions awaiting their turn to be processed out of existence altogether. It was unthinkable for them to lay charges against anyone, never mind a powerful and influential ally of the puppet regime. The Coins had no choice but to accept, and thus Rosetta Zulian vanished from the face of the earth, leaving no trace of evidence against the man who had callously plotted and carried out her murder. Ada Zulian might suspect the truth, but neither she nor anyone else could ever prove anything. It was the perfect crime.

For Dolfin to have got away with that was loathsome enough. For him to be touted as a paragon of selfless heroism by the unwitting Rosa Coin was even worse. But to desecrate his victim’s memory by parading this alcoholic doxy as Rosetta Zulian was a gesture of arrogance and contempt almost beyond belief. Zen felt a suffusion of fury suffocating him. On some level he knew that it had less to do with Andrea Dolfin, whatever his sins, than with Francesco Bruno and Carlo Berengo Gorin, with Tommaso Saoner and Giulio Bon, and above all with Cristiana Dal Maschio and her husband. But that insight was impotent against his overwhelming urge to lash out, to smash his fist into Dolfin’s face and shatter that mask of serene detachment once and for all.

It was something in the woman’s face that restrained him, a quality of rapt attention whose meaning was enigmatic but which was utterly compelling in its intensity. As he returned her insistent gaze, Zen realized why she had appeared familiar when he walked into the bar: the woman bore a quite astonishing resemblance to Ada Zulian. You had to be looking the right way to see it, looking beyond the seedy details, the quirks of dress and accidents of age, to the underlying genetic structure. Then, like a trick drawing, it suddenly clicked into place, bold and unmistakable.

As so often in this waterborne city, Zen had the sensation that the whole room was in motion, the floor undulating gently like the deck of a boat. But the instability was all internal. In a twinkling, all the ideas he had so confidently been rehearsing seemed as insubstantial as a dream on awakening. No amount of elaborate theorizing counted for anything beside Zen’s abrupt conviction that the woman sitting opposite him was indeed Rosetta Zulian.

Noting the consternation on Zen’s face, Andrea Dolfin smiled artfully.

‘She was always a great favourite of mine. Weren’t you, dear?’

The woman continued to gaze expressionlessly at Zen.

‘Her mother pretended to think there was something unnatural about it,’ Dolfin continued. ‘Wishful thinking! The plain truth was less palatable. Rosetta simply preferred my company to that of her mother.’

He made a disparaging moue.

‘Not that that was any great accomplishment on my part.
La contessa
was obsessed to an absurd degree with considerations of her family’s lineage and gentility. The rest of us just laughed at her pretensions, but poor Rosetta had to live with them, day in, day out. Ada set rigorously high standards of behaviour and taste, but her conception of the aristocratic ideal didn’t allow much room for maternal love. On top of that, she wouldn’t permit her daughter to associate with the local girls of her age, whom she of course considered common. Since the Zulians scarcely mingled in the social circles that Ada might have regarded as acceptable, poor Rosetta was starved of both affection and company.’

He exchanged a glance with his companion.

‘Her response was to come and visit me whenever she could, and to make a secret friend in the Ghetto, a world to which her mother had no access.’

The woman smiled elliptically. There was something bizarre about her continuing silence, and the way that Dolfin was discussing her as though she weren’t present.

‘It shouldn’t be necessary to say it, but after what Ada has no doubt hinted I had better make it quite clear that there was never any question of carnal relations between us. Quite apart from anything else, my own proclivities in that regard – they have ceased to trouble me for many years – happened to be for my own sex. My lover was killed in 1941 fighting the British at Benghazi. He was the reason I joined the party in the first place. All that died with him, all the big ideas, the high hopes. I had to start again, like someone after an accident. I had to think about all the things I’d taken for granted. And that’s where Rosa helped me.’

He looked at the woman and smiled.

‘She says I saved her life, but she’d already saved mine.’

Zen looked at him sharply.

‘I thought it was Rosa Coin whose life you saved.’

The woman looked at the old man and gestured impatiently. Then she spoke for the first time.

‘That’s enough bullshit, Andrea.’

The voice was pure Venetian, as turbid and swirling as water churned up by a passing boat. She turned back to face Zen.

‘I am Rosa Coin.’

Zen searched her eyes for a long time without finding any weakness. He shook his head feebly.

‘But she … she lives in Israel.’

‘I used to. Some cousins of mine who lived in Trieste went out there after the war, and once they were settled they invited me to join them. I didn’t know what else to do. Andrea had been hiding me in his house, but I couldn’t go on living there once the war was over. I wanted to make a fresh start, to begin again, a new life in a new nation.’

Zen got out his cigarettes. After a moment’s hesitation he offered one to the woman, who took it with a shrug.

‘I shouldn’t, but …’

‘At this stage, my dear,’ Dolfin put in, ‘I can’t really see what you have to gain by giving up.’

Zen lit their cigarettes.

‘You were talking about moving to Israel,’ he said.

She nodded.

‘I lived there for almost ten years. It was a wonderful experience which I don’t regret for a single moment, but I never really felt at home. At first I assumed that that would pass. Where is a Jew at home if not in Israel? It was a long time before I realized that I must give up the idea of ever being at home anywhere. I would always be an Italian in Israel and a Jew in Europe. And once I accepted that, there seemed no reason not to come back to Venice.’

Zen smoked quietly for a moment. Now that the fit of rage had left him, he felt dazed and drained.

‘And Rosetta?’ he murmured.

‘Everything I told you about her was true,’ said Andrea Dolfin. ‘She had the run of my house, and came and went as she pleased. One afternoon I came home to find a note from her on the dining table. She apologized for putting me to so much trouble, but she said she knew I’d understand.’

He sighed.

‘I did, and I didn’t. In the end, it’s impossible to understand something like that. Anyway, it made no difference. She’d been dead for several hours.’

Dolfin struck his fist hard on the table.

‘She should have told me! At the very least I could have given her some practical advice. She must have thought it would be quick and painless, like an execution. She didn’t know that without a drop, hanging is a form of slow strangulation. I could have told her. I’d seen enough partisans hanged that way, from lampposts and balconies. I knew how long it took them to die. She should have told me! She should have trusted me!’