Dead Lagoon - 4 Read online

  Ada retrieves the errant apple, picks up the bags and carries them through the lounge to the kitchen. There is just enough light seeping in through the shutters to see her way. In the distance she can hear the shouts of the men working on the Pagan house. She leaves the shopping on the kitchen table and returns to the salon, reaching for the light switch. There is a searing flash and the skeleton stands before her, inside the room now, its claw-like paw outstretched towards her, the skull hidously grinning.

  A hand grasps her shoulder. She whirls round. Facing her, at waist level, is a child with long blonde hair and a smooth, round alabaster face of utter purity and stillness, the very image of Rosetta. Moaning, weeping, Ada blunders across the room, bumping heavily into the skeletal form, scrabbling at the telephone.

  *

  The long convoy of carriages eased to a halt at the platform and the whirring of the locomotive died away. The driver clambered down from his cab and headed for the canteen, passing the rows of darkened trains drawn up at the other platforms in readiness for the early morning departures, still several hours away.

  For a moment it seemed as though the train which had just arrived was also empty. Then a door opened, halfway along. A man stepped down to the platform and stood sniffing the air. He was tall and rather gaunt, with a pale, grave face dominated by an angular nose. He wore a long overcoat and a homburg hat, from beneath which emerged tufts of dark hair streaked here and there with silver.

  The line of sleeping cars jolted slightly as a locomotive was coupled to the other end, ready to pull the train back across the long bridge to the mainland to continue its journey to Trieste. Reaching up to the floor of the carriage, the man lifted down a battered leather suitcase, slammed the door shut and set off along the platform. The station was deserted, the café and newsagent’s closed. The man walked through the harsh glare of the foyer and out on to the broad steps where he paused again, scenting the air. Then, as though satisfied, he started down the steps and turned left.

  At the foot of the Scalzi bridge two youths were unloading bundles of newspapers and magazines from a motorboat and stacking them beside a shuttered kiosk. The man spoke to them in dialect. One of the lads flourished a knife with which he slit open a pack of papers like gutting a fish. Money changed hands. The man turned away, scanning the headlines: MESTRE SMOG ALARM and GREEN LIGHT FOR THE LAGOON METRO.

  He turned left again, off the broad thoroughfare and away from the shuttered shops, into an alley barely wide enough for him to carry the suitcase comfortably. His footsteps resounded like blows. A solitary cat fled at his approach, a half-eaten fish head hanging from its mouth. High in one wall, a single bleary window betrayed the presence of an insomniac or early riser. As the man passed under the lamp jutting out at first-floor level on its wrought-iron bracket, his shadow caught him up and sped ahead, looming ever larger across the rectangular paving stones. At the next corner he turned right, into another alley which gradually widened to form a wedge of open space with a rusty iron-capped well-head at its centre. Here, for the first time, his brisk steps faltered as the pavement went soggy beneath his feet, as though reverting to the marshy field it had once been. Memories crowded in on him like a gang of importunate child beggars.

  The houses were built on three storeys: a ground-floor cellar with rectangular grilled openings, then the broad span of the main living area with its elegantly arched windows grouped in pairs, and finally the shallow square-windowed strip of bedrooms just below the roof. The uniformity of the façades was complicated by a horizontal and vertical grid of electric and phone cables, water and gas pipes, by metal strengthening bolts, exhaust vents, guttering, washing-lines, lamp standards and flowerpot holders. Some properties were smartly painted, ochre or russet, while elsewhere the plaster was flaking off like sunburned skin.

  The man stopped in front of the most decrepit-looking house of all, facing the well. At ground level the plaster facing had virtually disappeared, revealing the pattern of red brickwork beneath. The shutters closing the first-floor windows were worn down to the bare wood, the scrolled and fluted stone sill was stained with brown streaks from the low metal railing. The doorframe was of the same white Istrian stone, with the number of the house stencilled on it in red paint in an oval frame. Beside the door was a bell-push shaped like an inverted breast. Above, a bowed strip of brass read ZEN.

  The man took a key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock. The door creaked open. The passage inside was musty and cold. The light flickered yellowly to life, revealing a cramped vista of crumbling plaster, dull composite tiles, a set of stairs. Taking several rapid breaths, the man closed the door behind him and started up the steps. They twisted round to the left, doubling back on themselves to end at a small landing. A further flight continued up to the bedrooms. The man set down his suitcase and stood there gazing at the door, slightly ajar, in front of him. Then he abruptly pushed it open and barged in.

  Emptied of its furnishings, the room looked spacious and serene, yet how much smaller than he remembered it! Whenever he had returned in his imagination – even a moment before, dithering on the landing – it had seemed a cavernous, epic space. He almost laughed, now, to see how insignificant it really was. But he did not laugh, for something in him died at that moment, and he knew that he had lost another and perhaps the most important of the few remaining threads which bound him to his childhood.

  In the kitchen, a note had been left on the draining-board: Dear Aurelio, I’ve done the best I can, the old place looks a bit shabby, what can you expect, at least it’s clean and I’ve made the bed in your old room, we’ll expect you for lunch, it’ll be like the old days! Rosalba. The man laid down the scrap of lined paper gently, as though it might break, and returned to the living room, where he set about opening windows, unbolting the heavy wooden shutters, pressing them back to lie flat against the wall and folding down the metal clips which held them in place. The cold night air flowed into the room, scouring out the lingering odours of absence and neglect. Leaving the windows open, the man returned to the door, picked up his suitcase and went upstairs.

  On this floor, more of the original furniture remained, making the low-ceilinged bedroom feel cramped and stuffy. The mirror-fronted wardrobe which stretched the length of one wall created an illusory sense of spaciousness belied by the stale, confined air. The man laid his suitcase down on the bed and turned to survey himself in the wall of mirrors. His double looked back at him with a drawn, wary look and the air of someone stranded against his will in a remote and inhospitable hotel. Nothing suggested that of all rooms in the world this was the most familiar to him.

  He opened this window too, breathing in the crisp, salty air. In the canal below, the murky water shifted and stirred. All else was still. The city might have been deserted. To someone accustomed to life in Rome, where the reverberant hum of traffic on the hollow tufo is a constant presence, night and day, such absolute, unqualified silence was troubling, as though some vital life function had ceased. The man turned back into the room, sat down on the bed and took his shoes off. Then, overcome by weariness, he lay down and closed his eyes against the sickly yellow light emitted by the lamp, a complex extravanganza of tinted Murano glass, all curlicues and convolutions …

  A splashing roused him. He felt chilled to the bone, stiff, exhausted, confused. It took him a long time to realize where he was, and when he did the news was comfortless. It had all been a terrible mistake. He should never have come.

  The noise which had awakened him was still there, steady, regular, reverberating in the confined space between the houses. He got up off the bed, swung his bare feet down to the chilly tiles the colour and sheen of parmesan and padded over to the window. There was still no sign of the dawn. The man glanced at his watch. It was just after five.

  Further down the canal, by the bridge, a streetlamp partly illuminated a segment of the water. There was something moving there, a boat of some kind. As the man watched, it entered the patch o
f lighted water and was revealed in silhouette: a small dinghy being paddled by two bulky, shapeless figures. The craft rounded the corner and disappeared. Silence fell once more. Rubbing his eyes, Aurelio Zen closed the window and went back to bed.

  When he awoke again the room was filled with an astringent brilliance which made him blink, an abrasive slapping of wavelets and the edgy scent which had surprised him the moment he stepped out of the train. He had forgotten even the most obvious things about the place, like the pervasive risky odour of the sea.

  Since his mother had come to live with him in Rome, Zen had returned only rarely to his native city, brief fleeting visits to ensure that the house was still standing, or to wrestle some necessary piece of paper away from the commune. He had deliberately avoided examining the reasons for this voluntary exile too closely, pretending to himself and others that it was due to the demands of his career. There was something in that, but he sensed that there was much else besides; painful, murky matters which he kept filed away in an inaccessible portion of his mind under the vague heading ‘Personal’.

  Now, though, it was all gradually returning to him. The urgent plashing he could hear below, he realized, was the final ripples of wash from a vessel passing down the nearby Cannaregio canal. Last night there had been no such traffic, which is why the similar sound he had heard then had drawn him instinctively to the window. He recalled the dinghy, the muffled figures. The more he thought about the incident, the odder it seemed. What could anyone have been doing rowing around the back canals of the city at such an hour? Perhaps he had never woken at all. Perhaps it had all been a dream. No other solution seemed to make sense.

  Outside, a skittish wind frisked about the courtyard, glancing off the stone walls, pouncing out from narrow alleys. The sun, barely veiled by haze, set up blocks of shadow seemingly more solid than the surfaces from which all substance had been leached by its slanting, diffuse light. Aurelio Zen slammed the front door behind him and set off towards the café on the quay of the Cannaregio. Rosalba had done wonders in getting the house habitable, but the cupboards and larder were bare. He should have remembered to bring a pack of coffee, at least.

  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 h
is 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.