Dead Lagoon - 4 (17 page)

The construction site where Sergio Scusat was working was on a small islet to the south of the Sacca Fisola, with a fine view of the garbage incinerator which occupied the eastmost island. Scusat was the foreman of a team of labourers repairing an apartment block. Access was by a concrete jetty jutting out into the water. As the tide was still high, they were able to come alongside. Zen stepped ashore and walked over to the other side of the jetty, where a broad-beamed boat with a curving prow was tied up. He climbed down into the stern and opened the engine housing.

‘Where’s the serial number on these things?’

Mino Martufò joined him and pointed to a series of numbers etched into a small plaque to the left of the block letters reading VOLVO.

‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’

The shout came from the scaffolding on the apartment block. Two men were slapping mortar on a section of external walling. A third stood staring down at the jetty.

‘Scusat?’ Zen called back.

‘Well?’

‘Police!’

The man slipped down through the scaffolding as nimbly as a monkey and walked over to where Zen was standing.

‘What’s all this about?’ he demanded.

Sergio Scusat was a short, wiry man, his sallow face covered as though in make-up powder by plaster dust. His paper hat, folded from a newspaper page, had a party air at odds with his morose expression.

‘Is this your boat?’

‘Well?’

‘How did you acquire her?’

Scusat looked at Zen and blinked.

‘I bought her.’

‘When?’

‘Just before Christmas. I answered an advertisement in the
Nuova Venezia
.’

‘Who was the vendor?’

‘A boatyard. It was all legal and above-board. She’d been out of the water for years, but they’d overhauled her and put in a reconditioned engine. She’s a good boat and the price was right. What’s all this about, anyway?’

Zen regarded him for a moment.

‘Have you got any proof of sale?’

‘It was a cash deal. I handed over the money, they handed over the boat. What’s the problem?’

‘So you have no way of proving that you in fact acquired the vessel in the manner you have just described?’

‘Why should I need to prove it?’

Zen glowered at him.

‘The boat is stolen property.’

‘I paid good money for that boat!’ Sergio Scusat retorted truculently. ‘There were no documents for her because she’d been laid up for so long. That was why they had to sell her cheap.’

Zen eyed the man sceptically.

‘And who are “they”?’

‘The boatyard I bought it from! Down at Chioggia.’

Zen eyed him.

‘Would the owner’s name be Giulio Bon, by any chance?’

‘That’s right! Why?’

‘Ah!’

Zen closed his eyes for a moment, then looked back at Scusat.

‘I must ask you to come with me to the Questura,
signore
.’

The man shot him a look of sullen fright.

‘I’ve done nothing wrong!’ he cried.

‘No doubt, but I need to take a written statement of everything you have told me before I can proceed further.’

He pointed to the launch, gurgling quietly beside the concrete jetty.

‘This way, please.’

*

Aurelio Zen strolled slowly through the east end of the city, the maze of former slums crushed in between the Pietà canal and the high fortress walls of the Arsenale. This was a secretive and impenetrable district, of no particular interest in itself and on the way to nowhere else. In Zen’s childhood it had had a tough – even dangerous – reputation, and he had rarely ventured there. The rest of the city was etched into his mind like a map, but this one forgotten corner was a blank where he could still get lost.

And that was the idea: a sense of physical disorientation to match the one he felt inside. His initial spasm of elation at the breakthrough in the Durridge case was now just a fading memory. That had been young love, aware only of its own delight. Now it was time to get serious, to decide whether to make something of it, to settle down and found a family, or to break off the affair, walk away and try and forget the whole thing ever happened.

All this dangerous excitement was the more unwelcome in that Zen had anticipated nothing of the kind. His purpose in searching for Durridge’s boat had been the search itself. He hadn’t remotely expected to find anything of interest, only to be able to lay his labours before the family like a dog panting mightily before its owner in lieu of the stick it has failed to fetch. When he’d phoned Ellen the night before, after returning from the NRV rally, he had got the impression that some such gesture in return for the fee the Durridges were paying him – not that he had seen any of it yet – was desirable if not essential.

On the face of it, the reappearance of the missing
topa
was just what Zen needed to make the family feel that they were getting value for money, particularly in view of the link to Bon, one of the three men who had trespassed on Durridge’s island home a month before the American disappeared.

But what was good news for the Durridge family was not necessarily good news for Zen himself. The material which had been made available to him through the good offices of Palazzo Sisti seemed to suggest that the Durridge case had been closed down because of its political sensitivity. If that was so, then any policeman or magistrate who sought to reopen it would be putting himself at risk to some extent. The question was how grave this risk was. Did it justify giving up the Durridges’ money? The terms of Zen’s private investigation were not only generous in themselves, but Ellen had passed on the news that the family had offered an additional lump sum of one hundred thousand dollars payable in the event of the discovery of the missing man, dead or alive, and the arrest of those responsible.

That was more than twice Zen’s annual salary, which like that of all police officials had been frozen for the past five years as part of the government’s drive to reduce public spending in a country where each newborn baby came into the world owing over half a million lire. Nevertheless, even a year earlier Zen would have had no real doubt as to which decision to take. Money might be very desirable in all sorts of ways, but it was no substitute for life and health and nights free from gnawing anxiety and bad dreams.

But things were changing fast in Italy. These days, the men who woke from nightmares between sweated sheets were the very ones who had inflicted the experience on Zen at the time of the Aldo Moro affair, and for many years after. Now
their
names were being spoken of in connection with that event, and with all the other horrors of post-war Italy – spoken not furtively, in corners, but in committees of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. In a world where a judge could go on record as saying that the Italian Mafia and the Italian government were one and the same, nothing and no one was sacred any longer.

In such a world, it was no longer possible to calculate the odds with any certainty. The hand which had closed the Durridge file might even now be in cuffs, unable to influence even its own fate, never mind that of others. Or, on the contrary, it might still be hovering over the buttons of power, all the more dangerous and unpredictable for the knowledge that its days were numbered. There was simply no way of knowing.

Zen stopped on a bridge, leaning over the railing. The walls of the canal, exposed by the tide, presented bands of colour ranging from brick red at the top through green and blue to a brown which turned slime grey underwater. He had no idea where he was. Time seemed to have stopped. The sky was overcast, an even grey. There was no breath of wind in the airless canyons of these back canals. The houses all around were shuttered, silent.

Zen looked down, staring at the pitted black metal of the railing. It was the French who had added these refinements when they put an end to the Republic’s thousand-year independence. Until then the city’s bridges had been mere arcs of stone, to all appearances as weightless and insubstantial as their reflections, across which the inhabitants went nimbly about their business. Not only were guard-rails or balustrades unnecessary for a people who spent half their life in boats, but they were, as Silvio Morosini had once remarked, ‘an insult to the water’.

Zen let go of the railing and straightened up. He crossed the bridge and turned right, then left, then right again, striding along with ever greater determination. He knew where he was now, and where he was going, and what he would do when he got there.

*

‘Dating from
when?’

‘Nineteen forty-five or six.’

‘If it still exists, it’ll be in Central Archives.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘On the Tronchetto. You have to send in a written request. The stuff is supposed to arrive next day, but don’t hold your breath. Some sections are either missing or inaccessible. It’s best to fax your requirements, mark it “extremely urgent”, and then send a follow-up every hour or so until something happens. Number’s in the directory.’

‘Thanks.’

Zen replaced the receiver. Taking a sheet of headed notepaper from the drawer, he wrote
Denunzia fornita
alla P.G. dalla parte di Zulian, Ada in re Dolfin, Andrea
in the wide, curling script he had been taught at the little school just opposite the Ghetto in the years immediately after the war. He remembered thinking of the Ghetto then as something from ancient history, like the doges and the Ten and the galleys, a prison island where the Jews had been shut up in the far-off days when such minorities had been persecuted. The fact that there were almost no Jews living there any longer had merely seemed to confirm its anachronistic nature.

He finished writing out his request for the archive file relating to the complaint which Ada Zulian had made about Andrea Dolfin at that time, now itself part of history, and was just about to take it downstairs to the fax machine when the phone rang.

‘Yes?’

‘Could I speak to Aurelio Zen, please?’

‘Cristiana! What a pleasure to hear you.’

‘How did you know it was me?’

Zen sat back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk.

‘Your voice is very distinctive,’ he said.

‘No one else seems to think so.’

‘Then they must be stupid.’

There was a gurgle of laughter the other end.

‘But then I was already thinking about you,’ Zen added.

There was a pause while they waited to see who was going to make the next move, and what it would be.

‘I went to see your husband speak last night,’ Zen remarked.

‘Did the earth move for you?’

Zen laughed.

‘No, I had to fake it. But he certainly knows how to work a crowd.’

‘You should see his way with women.’

Zen was about to add another line of banter when the roar of a motor outside made the windowpanes rattle.

‘Just a moment,’ he told Cristiana.

He got up and went over to the window. A police launch had just come alongside the quay below. In the cockpit, a muscular man wearing a pair of oil-stained overalls stood beside a uniformed patrolmen. Zen went back to the phone.

‘I have to go, Cristiana. Something’s come up suddenly. I’ll call you back.’

‘Don’t bother with that. I’ll see you later.’ ‘I don’t know exactly when I’m going to be able to get home.’

‘I’ll be there,’ said Cristiana, and hung up.

Zen replaced the phone slowly. The engine noise outside died away and was replaced by a babble of voices. He crossed back to the window. The launch had now moored. The man in overalls was standing on the quay beside his police escort, who was being harangued by another man. The patrolman shrugged largely several times and gestured towards the Questura. The other man turned round, looking straight up at the window where Zen was standing. It was Enzo Gavagnin.

Zen ran quickly to the door, threw it open and sprinted along the corridor and downstairs, two steps at a time. The group of men had reached the vestibule by the time Zen got there. Enzo Gavagnin marched straight up to him.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

Zen was so breathless he could not answer at once.

‘Todesco tells me you authorized him to bring this man in,’ Gavagnin went on aggressively.

‘Have you some objection to that?’ Zen gasped.

‘Giulio is a friend of mine. I’m not letting him be persecuted by some arsehole from Rome who thinks he can come up here and throw his weight about as much as he likes!’

Zen turned to the patrolman, a hulking, popeyed individual with a face like an over-inflated balloon.

‘Anything happen at Palazzo Zulian last night, Todesco?’

‘Nossir.’

‘No incidents of any kind?’

‘Nossir.’

‘Very good. Take Signor Bon up to my office.’

‘Yessir.’

Enzo Gavagnin thrust himself in front of Zen, staring at him with an air of barely-contained fury.

‘Let me see your warrant!’

Zen glanced at him.

‘Signor Bon is not under arrest.’

‘Then what the hell is he doing here?’

‘I need to ask him a few questions.’

‘With regard to what?’ snapped Gavagnin.

‘To a case I’m working on.’

‘Valentini said you were working on the Ada Zulian case. Would you mind telling me what the fuck Giulio has to do with that?’

Zen shrugged.

Everything connects in the end, Enzo,’ he remarked archly. ‘We’re all part of the great web of life.’

Gavagnin scowled.

‘And what were you doing at the rally last night?’ he demanded. ‘Is that connected to the case you’re working on as well?’

‘What were
you
doing there?’ Zen shot back.

‘I happen to be a founder member of the movement, just like Giulio,’ Gavagnin replied stiffly. ‘Unlike you, we’re true Venetians, and proud of it!’

Zen nodded solemnly.

‘But I hear your granny screws Albanians,’ he murmured in dialect.

‘What?’

Ignoring him, Zen turned away and followed the clattering boots of Bettino Todesco leading his charge upstairs.