Dead Lagoon

A ragged line of geese passed overhead, silhouetted against the caul of high cirrus, heading out towards the open sea. Over towards Marghera, a bloated sun subsided into a dense bank of smog, dwarfing the striped stacks of the refineries. Giacomo noted the rippled layers of cloud spreading across the sky like wash from a motorboat. The weather was changing. Tomorrow would be squally and cold, a bitter north-easterly bora raising choppy seas on the lagoon.

But tomorrow was another day. For now the air was still, the water smooth as oil, the creak of the oars against the thole and the gentle plashing of the blades the only sound. People thought Giacomo a bit odd, sculling out to tend his nets in this day and age. No one rowed any more except the yuppy oarsmen from the city’s boating clubs. But Giacomo had no interest in reviving the picturesque traditions of the past. If he preferred oars to outboards, he had his reasons. On an evening such as this, the noise of a motor carried for miles across the water, and Giacomo did not want any inquisitive ears tracking his progress through the shoals and along the winding creeks to his destination.

His eyes alertly scanned the water ahead. The channel he was following was unmarked and the tide was ebbing fast. It would have been better to come at another time, but Giacomo simply carried out the orders he received by telephone. Tomorrow, the voice had said, so tomorrow it must be. He would be well enough paid for his pains. Meanwhile, he needed all his skill. The flat-bottomed skiff drew only a few centimetres, but it was always easy to run aground in these treacherous backwaters.

He raised his head, locating the long low ridge, exuberantly green, towards which he was making such slow progress along the tortuous windings of the tideway. To the east, the desolate swamps and salt-flats of the laguna morta — the dead marshlands, unrefreshed by tidal currents — merged seamlessly into the gathering dusk. The schoolteacher on Burano said that there had once been a splendid city here, with fine palaces and churches and paved streets, all swallowed up hundreds of years ago by the shifting topography of the lagoon.

Standing in the stern of the boat, Giacomo paused to light a cigarette. The teacher was a good soul, and would pay well over the odds for crabs and mussels, but she’d had the misfortune to be born on the mainland, and it was well known that mainlanders would believe anything. Giacomo breathed out a lungful of smoke, which drifted indolently away across the water towards the drooping heads of the wild grasses on a nearby mudbank. The dull roar of a plane taking off from the international airport at Tessera reminded him of his business. Dipping the crossed oars into the water once more, he leant forward with his whole body, urging the sandolo across the shallow water.

The light was fading fast by the time Giacomo beached the skiff on the flats exposed by the ebbing tide. He stepped out, his waders sinking into the mud, and hauled the craft clear of the water. Before him rose a mass of creepers and brambles, overgrown bushes and stunted trees, spilling down over the low wall sealing off the island. At the centre, a set of steps led to a bricked-up gateway. Slinging a blue canvas bag over his shoulder, Giacomo squelched off across the quagmire towards a stretch of wall completely submerged beneath the burgeoning greenery.

Beneath the overhanging shrubbery it was already night. Giacomo took a rubber-covered torch from his pocket and shone it round. A rat jumped from a hollow in the wall into the shallow water at its base. The hollow had been formed by the removal of two of the flat ochre bricks of the three-hundred-year-old wall. Giacomo remembered the effort it had taken, hammering away with a mallet and a cold chisel for the best part of twenty minutes. They built to last in those days, even for such clients as these. Other bricks had been gouged out above, and using these holds Giacomo scaled the wall and perched on the top. All was still. Even in broad daylight, people gave this particular island a wide berth. Nothing would persuade anyone in their right mind to venture there once darkness had fallen.

The surface inside was much higher, almost level with the top of the wall. Giacomo stepped down and started to push his way through the undergrowth, following a series of almost imperceptible markers: the torn ligaments of a branch dangling from a bush, a patch of flattened grass, the sucker of a bramble bush, thick as a squid’s tentacle, lopped off clean by a fisherman’s gutting-knife. The ground crunched and slithered underfoot, as though he were walking on layers of broken crockery.

A sudden scuttling noise brought him to a halt, wielding his torchbeam like a staff. The island was infested with snakes, and Giacomo tried with limited success to convince himself that this was the only feature of the place which scared him. He lit another cigarette to calm his nerves and pushed on through the spiny undergrowth, across the grating, shifting surface, until he made out the final mark: a desiccated bough leaning across a briar patch as though it had fallen from the dead tree above. One contorted branch pointed towards him, marking the path back. Another, bifurcated like a petrified hand, stuck out at an angle to one side. Following it, Giacomo quickly located the mound of shards, white in the torchlight. At the same moment, he heard the scuttling sound again.

It was only when he unslung the bag from his shoulder that he realised he had forgotten to pack the small spade he usually brought. Well, he wasn’t going back, that was for damn sure. Nor had he any intention of touching the things with his hands. Tossing away his cigarette, he snapped a length off the dead bough and started to prod and jab at the mound, freeing a long femur here, the smooth gleam of a scapula there, a rounded skull, a big hip and pelvis. At last the dull gleam of the oilcloth wrapping appeared.

The stick broke as he redoubled his efforts. He hastily tore another from the branch behind him, and when that broke too used his boot to free the package. Breathing hard, he unwound the oilcloth, revealing three blocks wrapped in silver foil and plastic shrink-wrapping. They were about the size and shape of a cork float, but much heavier — precisely one kilogram each, in fact. Giacomo carefully lifted them in turn and transferred them to the canvas bag. Then he added the oilcloth wrapping and fastened the bag before turning for home.

The torch beam wavered and probed the darkness all around, seeking the gnarled bough which pointed the route home. It was nowhere to be seen.

Giacomo searched the shrubbery in increasing desperation until he found the broken branch entangled in the thorns. It must have keeled over when he snapped part of it off to use as a spade. For a moment he almost gave way to panic. Then, with an effort, he got a grip on himself and started to study the undergrowth all around. It must be that way, surely, to the right of that squat, lopsided shrub. Yes, that was it. He recognized it.

A few metres further on, the path, if that’s what it had been, petered out in a mass of briars twice as high as a man. He must have been mistaken. He started back, but he was unable to find the clearing where the cache had been located. Then he saw what looked like one of the markers guiding him back to the boat and threw himself at it, plunging through the shrubbery like a speedboat through breaking waves, ripping and tearing the undergrowth apart until its spiky tendrils fouled his limbs and brought him up short in an impenetrable mass of brambles.

Instinctively he glanced up at the sky, but the nebulous wash of cloud drifting in from the east had swallowed the stars. The evil jungle, its roots fattened on hundreds of thousands of human skeletons, pressed in on every side, shutting out the world.

Giacomo muttered a fervent prayer, a thing he had last done when a vicious combination of wind and tide had caught him and Filippo on a lee shore just beyond the northern mole at the entrance to the Porto di Lido. It had worked then, but he was less sanguine that his patron saint would intercede for him this time. Fishing was one thing, his present business quite another. Still, reciting the prayer helped to calm his panic. Disentangling himself from the briars, he worked his way through the undergrowth, searching for one of the signs which marked the path, trying not to think about what he was grinding and crushing under his boots.

When the man in white appeared, blocking his path, Giacomo felt a brief surge of relief at the thought that he was no longer alone. Then he remembered where he was, and terror rose in his throat like vomit. He forced himself to look again. The figure was still there, splayed across a mass of brambles, the panels of its jacket rippling and heaving as though in the wind. But there was no wind. Then he saw the face, what was left of it, and the rats running in and out of the sleeves. He took it in at one glance — a mass of half-eaten meat and tissue, the chest a bloody cage, the white suit ripped to shreds — and dropped the bag and fled, powered by an irresistible dread, a superstitious horror which sent him stumbling across that dune of human bones, tearing through the vegetation parasitic on that rich meal, running for his life and his reason from the isle of the dead.

On the way home from the bakery, she stops to buy some salad and fruit. The pale rain is still falling limply, covering the pavements in a greasy sheen and raising a rash of pockmarks on the surface of the water. Sebastiano and his son huddle over their produce under the green awning jury-rigged from the masts at either end of the barge.

‘Eh, contessa! Take a look at this fennel! Fresh from Sant’Erasmo, the genuine stuff.’

Even though she knows he’s trying to make a sale, Ada can’t help feeling flattered at the way he calls her ‘ contessa ’, without a trace of irony or obsequiousness, the way people did when titles were just a fact of life, a description like the colour of your hair or eyes. So she orders some of his overpriced fennel along with the salad leaves, apples and grapes. It is while Sebastiano is weighing out the fruit that Ada catches sight of the figure fixing her with his moronic leer from the other side of the canal, his cloak billowing about him.

‘What’s the matter?’ says Sebastiano, looking up from the makeshift counter of slatted wooden boxes piled high with potatoes and lemons and tomatoes. Following her fixed gaze, he turns to look. The dead-end alley opposite is empty except for some scaffolding whose protective tarpaulin screen is flapping in the stiff easterly wind.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks, looking at her with barely veiled anxiety.

A wherry full of plastic sacks of sand and cement comes up the canal, its temporary foredeck of planks supporting a battered wheelbarrow and a cement mixer lying on its side. Going to the Pagan house, as Ada still thinks of it, even though Maria Pagan has been dead a year or more. Now some foreigner has bought the property and is paying a fortune to have it done up…

‘Carry la Contessa Zulian’s shopping home for her,’ Sebastiano barks at his son, a gangling youth wearing a jacket inscribed Washington Redskins, a single gold earring and a baseball cap turned back to front. The boy scowls and mutters something under his breath to which Sebastiano responds with a guttural monosyllable. Father and son sway back and forth as their barge heaves at its moorings under the swell of the passing wherry, pinching the bald tyres which serve as fenders. Ada Zulian recalls seeing a motor vehicle, many years ago, when her parents took her to the Lido. Waving away the offers of help, she tells Sebastiano she’ll pay him next week and trudges off, listing slightly to port, a bulging blue-and-white striped plastic bag in each hand.

On the stone pillar supporting the railing of the bridge perches a seagull with a bit of bloody liver in its beak. Ada carefully avoids looking it in the eye, lest she be beguiled. As she reaches the top step of the bridge, the gull tumbles sideways off the pillar, unfolding its wings and skimming the surface of the water before rising with a lazy flap to catch the wind which tosses it high above the houses like a scrap of paper.

‘Ada!’

At first she is loathe to look round, in case there is no one there. But when the call is repeated she recognizes the voice of Daniele Trevisan. There he is, leaning out of his window on the other side of the canal.

‘How’s it going?’ he asks.

Ada Zulian is suddenly overwhelmed by a giddy conviction that all this has happened before. Which it has, of course, years ago, before the war, before her marriage, when they were both young. Only then it was she at the window and Daniele below in the street, murmuring sweet nothings…

‘Are you all right?’ asks Daniele Trevisan, just as Sebastiano had earlier.

Ada grasps her bags and plods down the steps of the bridge, greasy from the rain. Everyone is always so worried about her! Ever since Rosetta suddenly reappeared, forcing Ada to go to ground among the lunatics on San Clemente, people have been overwhelmingly solicitious. She knows that she should be grateful for this show of concern, but in fact it rather gets on her nerves. In any case, what is she supposed to say? She knows all too well that it is impossible for her to discuss her real problems without all that solicitude dissolving in knowing looks and sniggers.

‘The place is full of ghosts,’ she mutters.

‘What?’

‘They should do something.’

Daniele regards her from his lofty perch with a gaze as unblinking as the gull’s.

‘Who should?’

Ada shrugs vaguely.

‘The authorities. I’m thinking of calling them, making a complaint.’

Daniele Trevisan waves his hands and sighs.

‘Come up a minute, Ada. Sit down and have a cup of coffee and a chat.’

She looks at him and shakes her head.

‘I must be getting home.’

‘Don’t call the police!’ he implores her. ‘You don’t want to start telling people you’ve been seeing ghosts again.’

‘There was mud on the floor,’ says Ada Zulian, but he doesn’t hear.

‘Keep the police out of it!’ insists Daniele. ‘If you need to talk to anyone, talk to me.’

Ada hefts her bags and goes on her way with a smile and a nod. Why is he so anxious that she should not phone the police? There is no doubt in Ada’s mind that she is dealing with something real. The other time, with Rosetta, there had never been anything tangible. How she would have treasured it, if there had! But she had always known at heart that the little girl she had so desperately called home night after night, until some exasperated neighbour finally denounced her to the police, had never really been there in the first place. That frail and vulnerable figure lurking in the shadows at the edge of her mind had always been as insubstantial as thought, and Ada’s frantic attempts to summon her nothing more than someone crying out in their sleep.

But this is different. She told Daniele two things, but as usual he only heard the one he wanted to hear, the one which fitted his idea of mad old Ada and her ghosts. He completely ignored what she said about the mud. But Ada has seen the mud. She has touched it and smelt it. She knows it’s real, and she also knows that ghosts don’t leave footprints behind them. So they can’t be ghosts, the figures who haunt her house and scuttle along the margins of her life. What, then?

She shivers as she edges along the canal and turns into a narrow alley leading to the back door of Palazzo Zulian, formerly reserved for tradesmen and domestic staff. Everything has turned topsy-turvy now that people have forgotten the use of boats. No one comes and goes by water any more except the dead.

The first thing she notices is the chair, fallen forward across the dull marble pavement. It is of some wood as dark and heavy as pig-iron, elaborately carved, centuries old, grotesque. It has stood there in the hall all Ada’s life. She would gladly throw it in the canal, but that is impossible. Her duty is to preserve the family heritage intact. Besides, she couldn’t lift the thing. It has moved, though, seemingly of its own accord. There have been many such incidents lately, objects seemingly coming to life in her absence like a flock of birds and settling back in a slightly different configuration. She has tried in vain to make out any pattern or purpose to the phenomenon. It is the very triviality of the whole thing which makes it so disturbing.

The staircase leading to the first floor is a shadowy tunnel burrowing upwards into the innards of the huge building. Ada clicks the switch uselessly. The bulb must have gone, like so many in the house. There are no servants now, of course, so she must get by as best she can until Nanni and Vincenzo call. At least her nephews have stuck by her, despite their frequent differences of opinion. Not that they’re particularly warm or cordial, but at least they drive over from the mainland to see her every once in a while. That’s something these days, when the young are worse than Turks…

She pauses at the top of the staircase, in the long hallway running the length of the building. Amplified by the bare vaulted expanse of the andron below, the lapping of wavelets against the disused watersteps fills the air, as though someone were swimming in the canal. For a moment it seems to Ada that she can hear something else, a whispering or rustling, somewhere nearby. Mice, no doubt. She has given up trying to keep them down since her cat died, and hasn’t the heart to get another. There have been enough absences in her life as it is.

Leaving her bags on the landing, she opens the door into the first of the suite of rooms on the canal side of the building, the only one still in use. The great space is dark, the shutters tightly fastened. Surely she opened them before going out? Or was that yesterday? A noise behind her makes her start and look round, but it is only one of her plastic shopping bags subsiding. An apple tumbles over the collapsed rim and rolls away towards the edge of the top step. Just beyond, at the bottom of the long flight of stairs, its long bony arm upraised and pointing at her, stands a skeleton.

She runs inside the salon, slams the door shut and leans back against it, panting for breath. Which possibility is worse, that the skeleton is not real, or that it is? Nothing more happens. There is no sound. It is a very long time before she can force herself to open the door, eyes tightly closed. When she opens them, the portego, the landing, the stairs and the hallway below are all empty.

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 cafe 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 facades 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 of 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 cafe 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 cafe, 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 elite 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.’

He slipped some money to the cashier and they stepped outside. Already the sunshine was looser and more generous. Zen paused to look at a series of posters gummed to the wall. The design was identical to the ones he had seen earlier that morning, on the window of the closed cafe in Cannaregio, but these were much newer. At the top was a drawing of the lion of Saint Mark, rampant, its expression full of defiance. The huge black capitals beneath read NUOVA REPUBBLICA VENETA and the text announced a rally the following evening in Campo Santa Margherita.

‘Total chaos,’ Aldo Valentini repeated, leading the way back to the Questura. ‘Every day it turns out that another big name, someone you would have sworn was absolutely untouchable, is under investigation on charges ranging from corruption to association with the Mafia. Result, no one dares to do a friend a favour any more. Nothing would please me more than to see this country turn into a paradise of moral probity, but how the hell are we supposed to get by in the meantime?’

Zen nodded. This was a conversation he had been having at least once a day for several months. By now he had the lines off by heart.

‘It’s just like in Russia,’ he declared. ‘The old system may have been terrible, but at least it functioned.’

‘My brother-in-law’s just moved into a new house near Rovigo,’ Valentini continued. ‘The telephone people tell him he’ll have to wait six weeks to get a phone installed, so he gets on to the engineer and offers him a bustarella, you know. Nothing exorbitant, just the odd fifty thousand or so to move up to the top of the list.’

‘The normal thing,’ murmured Zen.

‘The normal thing. You know what the guy tells him? “No way, dottore, ” he says. “It’s more than my job’s worth.” Can you believe it? “It’s more than my job’s worth.”’

‘Disgusting.’

‘How the hell are you supposed to get anything done with that sort of attitude? It’s enough to make you sick.’

He tossed his cigarette into the canal, where a seagull made a half-hearted pass at it before landing on the gunwale of the outermost police launch.

Back in their office, a man stood framed in the sunlight streaming in through the window. He turned as Zen and Valentini entered.

‘Aldo?’

He came forward, frowning at Zen.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked suspiciously.

Valentini introduced them.

‘Aurelio Zen, Enzo Gavagnin. Enzo’s head of the Drugs Squad.’

Enzo Gavagnin had a large womanish face and the stocky, muscular body of a gondolier. He inspected Zen coolly.

‘New posting?’

Zen shook his head.

‘I’m with the Ministry,’ he said. ‘On temporary assignment.’

Enzo Gavagnin glanced at Valentini.

‘An emissary from Rome, eh?’ he murmured in a manner both humorous and pointed. ‘I hope you haven’t been giving away any of our secrets, Aldo.’

‘I didn’t know we had any,’ Valentini replied lightly. ‘Anyway, anyone who comes all this way to take the Ada Zulian case off my hands is a friend as far as I’m concerned.’

Gavagnin laughed loudly.

‘Fair enough! Anyway, the reason I came was about that breaking-and-entering on Burano.’

‘The Sfriso business?’

‘If you want to reduce your work-load still further then you’re in luck, because I’ve discovered that there’s an angle which ties it in to a case we’ve been working on for some time…’

Valentini looked doubtful.

‘I don’t know, Enzo. If I shed two cases the same morning, people might start to ask questions.’

Gavagnin took Valentini’s arm and led him away.

‘It’s just because of the possible conflict of interest. Naturally we don’t want our on-going investigation compromised, so it’s better all round if…’

The pair disappeared behind the glass panelling around Valentini’s desk, becoming fuzzy, unfocused images of their former selves. Zen went into his own cubicle and dug the phone book out of the desk drawer. He looked up Paulon, M and dialled the number.

‘Well?’

The reply was abrupt to the point of rudeness.

‘Marco?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Aurelio.’

There was a brief pause.

‘Aurelio! How’s it going? I was reading about you in the paper just a while ago. That business in St Peter’s. I used to go fishing with him, I thought, and here he is consorting with Archbishops and the like! Gave me quite a thrill. Are you here in town?’

‘Yes. Can we meet?’

‘Of course!’

‘I need some advice, maybe some help.’

‘Well I’m out delivering all morning, but… Do you know the osteria on the San Girolamo canal, just opposite the church?’

Enzo Gavagnin backed out of Valentini’s cubicle, having concluded his business. He glanced shrewdly at Zen as he passed by.

‘What’s it called?’ asked Zen.

‘Damned if I know, tell you the truth! I’ve been going there after lunch every weekday for the last twenty years, but I’ve never bothered to ask about the name. Everyone calls it “The Hole in the Wall”. It’s got red paint on the windows. Opposite the church. What’s it about, anyway?’

‘I’ll explain later. Thanks, Marco.’

He stood up, buttoning his coat. The preliminaries were complete. It was time to go and pretend to do his job.

Her first thought, when the bell rings, is that it is just another trick, another in the succession of cruel practical jokes which seem designed to test her endurance, her fragile sanity. No one calls at Palazzo Zulian these days, except when her nephews drive over from Verona every weekend, as regular as the tides. But this is Tuesday, and Nanni and Vincenzo will be at work doing whatever it is they do…

The bell rings again, dispelling the lingering possibility that the whole thing had taken place in her mind. What happens twice is real, thinks Ada, sidling across the hallway to the room on the other side, overlooking the alley. An angled mirror fixed to a support just outside the window gives a view of the door, so that you can see who is calling without them seeing you, and decide whether to receive them. But immediately Ada whips her head back, for there in the glass is another face, looking straight back at her.

‘ Contessa! ’

A strange voice. Not one of her tormentors, or a new one at least. She risks another look. The gaunt figure in a black hat and overcoat is still there, staring straight up at the tell-tale. It’s no use hiding. If she can see him, he can see her. Stands to reason, Ada Zulian tells herself, reluctantly turning back towards the door and walking downstairs.

The stranger is tall and thin, with a hatchet face and clear grey eyes. His expression is stern, almost saturnine, yet his manner is courteous and respectful. He speaks the dialect with ease and precision, in the true Cannaregio accent — the purest in the city, Ada has always held. He hands her a plastic-covered card with writing and a photograph of himself. She frowns at the name typed in capital letters.

‘Zen?’ she says slowly.

She inspects him again, more critically this time.

‘That’s right, contessa,’ the man nods. ‘Angelo’s boy.’

Ada sniffs loudly.

‘Giustiniana’s, you mean. Your father had only one thing to do with it, excuse me. Fancy going off to Russia and getting himself killed like that, leaving his wife here all alone! At least my Silvestro fell defending our territories in Dalmatia. What has Russia to do with us, for heaven’s sake? Come in, come in, I’m feeling cold just thinking about it.’

While Ada locks and bolts the door again, her visitor stands looking about him in the bleary, uncertain light of the andron. The plaster feels clammy and cold and gives slightly to the touch like a laden sponge. A mysterious smile appears on the man’s face as he absorbs the dank odours and the watery echoes seeping in from the canal at the other end of the hall.

‘She used to bring you round here while she worked,’ Ada continues, leading the way upstairs. ‘And once she saw I didn’t mind, she’d leave you here while she went off to do other jobs. Of course you won’t remember, you were only a toddler.’

The man says nothing. Ada Zulian painfully attains the level expanse of the portego and waves him into the salon.

‘What brings you here, anyway? Your mother never calls any more, not that anyone else does either. Not since that trouble I had with Rosetta. Anyone would think it was catching!’

‘But I gather you’ve been having some more problems recently,’ the man remarks cautiously.

Ada Zulian looks at him.

‘Perhaps I have and perhaps I haven’t,’ she replies sharply. ‘What business is that of yours, Aurelio Battista?’

‘Well, since you informed the police…’

‘The police? What have you to do with the police?’

‘I work for them.’

Ada’s laughter startles the silence. The man looks taken aback.

‘What’s so funny?’ he demands.

‘The police? But you were such a timid little fellow! So serious, so anxious, so easily scared! That’s what gave me the idea in the first place.’

‘What idea?’

‘To dress you up as Rosetta! I still had all her dresses then, her little blouses and socks, everything. When I went to San Clemente, they took everything away and burnt it. But at that time I still thought she might come back one day. Really, I mean. Just walk in, as suddenly and inexplicably as she disappeared. I wanted to have everything ready for her, just in case. I wouldn’t have asked any questions, you know. I would have taken her back and carried on as though nothing had ever happened…’

She looks away suddenly, as though she had seen something move in the nether recesses. Only one of the windows is unshuttered, and the dim expanses of the salon are further multiplied and complicated by a profusion of mirrors of every shape and size, all framed in the same gilded wood as the furniture.

‘To tell you the truth,’ Ada goes on at last, ‘I think you helped keep her at bay. As long as you were there, running about in her dresses, Rosetta didn’t dare show her face.’

She sits down on a low, hard sofa covered with worn dark pink silk.

‘Either that, or it was the cause of the whole thing! Perhaps she resented the fact that I’d found someone to replace her, and decided to get her own back. It’s hard to say. But you did look sweet, Aurelio! If only I’d thought to take some photographs.’

The man has been standing looking at her with an air of deferential attention. Now he claps his hands loudly and starts striding about the room with quite unnecessary vigour.

‘Three weeks ago, contessa, you dialled the police emergency number and reported the presence of intruders in your house. A patrol boat was dispatched and the house searched from top to bottom. It proved to be empty. Subsequent investigations have failed to reveal a single fact to substantiate your allegations of trespass and persecution.’

He pauses impressively, looking down at the elderly woman perched on the antique settle.

‘Well, of course!’ she retorts. ‘Do you think they’re stupid?’

The man frowns.

‘The police?’

She laughs.

‘I know they’re stupid! No, I’m talking about my visitors. They’re far too sly to let themselves be caught by some flat-foot from Ferrara. Swamp-dwellers! They all have malaria, poor things. Runs in the family, rots their brains.’

‘When was the last occurrence of this kind?’ the man inquires in a decidedly supercilious tone.

‘Last night,’ Ada replies pertly. ‘It was almost dawn by the time they finally left me in peace.’

‘What happened?’

‘The same as usual. It’s the skeleton I’m most frightened of. It makes such sudden rushes at me.’

‘How many of them are there?’

Ada shrugs, as if considering the matter.

‘It’s hard to tell. They come and go. Often I’ve thought they’ve gone, then suddenly another one pops out from somewhere.’

‘Have they attacked you?’

She shakes her head.

‘They just try and scare me, keep me awake all night, never knowing what’s going to happen next.’

The man considers her for a long time.

‘How do they get in?’ he asks.

‘Don’t ask me! They just appear. In my bedroom it was last time. A light came on, I woke, and there they were.’

Despite herself, her voice shakes slightly as she remembers her terror.

‘Was the front door locked?’

‘Locked and bolted, as always. But nothing stops them.’

She pulls up the sleeve over her dress and displays a livid patch on her arm.

‘There! That’s what I got from bumping into one of them. There are others, too, not decent to be viewed. I showed the doctor, though.’

The man nods.

‘I’ve read the file on your case,’ he says. ‘The medical evidence is apparently inconclusive. The contusions could have resulted from a collision with some household object. A chair or table, for example.’

‘Do they think I go staggering about bumping into the furniture like some drunk?’ Ada protests. ‘Anyway, what about the mud?’

‘The report mentioned some marks on the floor. There was no sign of shoe tread or other distinguishing features.’

He sighs deeply.

‘You see the problem is, contessa, that after what happened before, people are disinclined to believe what you tell them.’

‘I can’t help that,’ returns Ada flatly.

‘On that occasion, you were convicted of causing a public nuisance by calling your deceased daughter Rosetta home every evening. You subsequently spent two years in a mental institution where you were diagnosed as suffering from persistent delusions. It is therefore only natural that without some concrete evidence that the phenomena you now describe have any reality outside your own imagination, it is going to be difficult if not impossible for me to take the matter further.’

‘I didn’t ask you to come,’ Ada retorts.

Her visitor takes a notebook from his pocket and writes something on a page which he tears out and hands to her.

‘That’s my number,’ he says. ‘I’m only just round the corner, in the old house. If this happens again, give me a call, whatever the time, day or night.’

Ada looks at the number, then at his eyes. She nods.

Leaving the palazzo, Aurelio Zen turned left into an alley so narrow he had to walk sideways, like a crab. It seemed to come to a dead end at a small canal, but at the last moment a portico was revealed, leading to a bridge. The tide was out and the water had shrivelled to a gutter a few centimetres deep between fat expanses of black slime where tethered boats lolled like capsized beetles. A little further along the canal, the elegant facade of Palazzo Zulian stood out from its neighbours.

The air, walled off from the prevailing breezes, was heavy with the stench of mud. An assortment of debris was visible at the bottom of the water: the wheel of a pram, a punctured bucket, a boot. A large rat slithered across the mud and hopped into an open drain. In older buildings, people still kept a heavy stone on the toilet cover to stop the creatures from getting loose in the house.

The alley scuttled off between the houses on the other side, eventually joining a broader street with shops and a church. Zen made his way past doors whose numbers read like the dates of an impossible life: 1684–1679, 1635–1628. He crossed a bridge where a man was manoeuvring a handcart laden with cans of cooking oil up the ridged pavement on the wheels fitted to the leading edge. The house opposite was clad in scaffolding and sacking, with a large plastic chute to carry waste rubble to a barge moored alongside, now aground in the mud. A workman was shovelling sand out of another boat into a wheelbarrow which his mate was holding on the plank bridge they had rigged up.

Zen squinted at the frontage. Surely that was where the Pagan family lived? The two boys had been at school with him, although they were never part of the same set. Presumably they must have inherited by now and were having the place done up. He was surprised to feel a stab of envy. If only he could afford to have the Zen house turned into a proper home for all of them, with a separate flat for his mother and plenty of space for him and Tania…

He immediately dismissed the idea. It was absurd to think that he could make a life for himself here at this late stage. There was nothing here for him now. He had used the place up, converted it to experiences and memories that made up the person he was. To return would be to condemn himself to a form of spiritual incest. Nothing new could happen to him here, nothing real. Besides, Tania wouldn’t want to move to a city which, despite its glamour, was essentially a provincial backwater. He walked on, frowning at the realization that this was the first time he had thought of Tania since his arrival.

Under the flat bland noonday light, the wedge-shaped campo looked like a small-scale replica of itself, a set of mocked-up frontages. How different it seemed in the eye of memory! Grand in stature, full of significance, peopled with a vast and various cast of every age and character, inexhaustible and yet coherent… Now it looked diminished, paltry and deserted. The city was dying. The paper Zen had bought earlier that morning had spelled out the grim rate of attrition. The preceding twenty-four hours had seen six births and twenty-one deaths. Twenty-one unique and irreplaceable repositories of local life and lore had been destroyed, while most of the six new citizens would be forced to emigrate in search of work and accommodation. In another fifty years, there would be no Venetians left at all.

Of all the houses in the neighbourhood, the Morosinis’ had been the liveliest and most welcoming. It was identical in size and layout to the Zens’, yet the two homes could hardly have been more different in every other way. The Cannaregio area was midway between the station and the slaughterhouse, and most local men worked for one or the other. Like Aurelio’s father, Silvio Morosini was a railwayman, and he had taken full advantage of this once the war came. No heroics for Silvio, who had decidedly left-wing sympathies but also an uncanny sense of which way the wind was blowing and when to keep his head down.

Angelo Zen could also have claimed exemption — the railways were then the sinews of both the economy and the war effort — but he had preferred to volunteer and was sent off to serve in the ill-trained and worse-equipped token force which Mussolini dispatched to the Russian front in order to bolster his status with his German ally. There Angelo had disappeared, along with the tens of thousands of other Italians unaccounted-for and presumed dead. The growing certainty of that death, coupled with the lack of any proof which would permit its recognition, had infiltrated the Zen household like an icy draught from the frozen battlefields and prison camps where the Armata Russa had met its miserable and ignominious fate.

But where Zen’s father was a dominating absence, celebrated at every turn by stilted sepia photographs of a figure whose third dimension increasingly seemed as hypothetical as the existence of an afterlife, Silvio Morosini was one of a crowd of unequivocally real presences jostling and clamouring for attention in the household of which he was the nominal head. In fact this position was filled by his wife Rosalba, who had been Giustiniana Zen’s closest friend long before her marriage and was not about to desert her and the fatherless only child now that Rosalba’s prediction that the union in question would come to no good had, God forbid, come true.

The result had been that Aurelio had grown up treating the Morosini house more or less as his own, and had often taken advantage of this freedom to escape from the intolerable spectacle of his mother weeping silently as she went about her work. The quarrels in Silvio’s and Rosalba’s home were frequent, open and vociferous, shows in which anyone present was expected to join, whether or not they were actually involved or indeed had any idea what the whole thing was supposed to be about. Everyone got their chance to yell and posture and strut about, and in the midst of these amateur dramatics the original cause of contention gradually frittered away, forgotten if not forgiven. The young Aurelio did not necessarily want to live permanently in such an atmosphere, but it certainly made a refreshing contrast to the stifling tensions of his own home, whose existence could not be admitted never mind assuaged.

Like the whole neighbourhood, and the city itself, the Morosini house was of course a quieter place these days. Rosalba had continued to keep in touch by letter and phone when Giustiniana moved to Rome to be with her son, and Zen had thus been kept informed of the children’s marriages and of Silvio’s death the previous year. It was nevertheless a shock to be confronted by the old woman who came to greet him at the head of the stairs. On the phone, Rosalba still sounded much the same as ever, and Zen had irrationally been expecting her to look the same. But the vigorous, bustling woman he remembered now bore an astonishing resemblance to his fading memories of Rosalba’s grandmother, a legendary figure who had been born before Venice belatedly joined the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. All her features had drawn inwards towards each other, like a contracting universe, producing a compact, miniaturized version of the face he remembered.

‘Welcome home, Aurelio!’ she cried, embracing him repeatedly. ‘I hope you found everything as you expected it. I did the best I could in the time, but it’s no easy task to bring a house back from the dead when it’s stood empty for so many years.’

Zen smiled warmly at her.

‘You did wonders, Rosalba. A real miracle.’

Seeing her as she really was, he felt ashamed of having agreed to let her do the heavy work of preparing the house for his arrival, even though it had been her idea. He had merely phoned to let her know he was coming and to ask her to see if the house, to which she had a key, could be made habitable. He might have known that she would not trust anyone else to do the job properly.

‘Let me take your coat,’ Rosalba continued animatedly. ‘I expect you find it cold here now you’ve got used to living down south.’

Zen sniffed the air appreciatively.

‘Something smells good.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing much. A little risoto de sepe col nero followed by sole. Come in, come in!’

Installed in the large armchair in the living room, Zen sipped a glass of sparkling wine while Rosalba gave him a crash course in local news and gossip. The armchair had formerly been the throne from which Silvio Morosini had dispensed judgements and decrees and generally lorded it over his unruly clan. At that time, Zen would no more have dreamt of sitting in it than of touching the firm plump legs of Silvio’s elder daughter Antonia, who was then causing him so much distress and bewilderment as the first member of the opposite sex he found himself unable to dismiss as ‘just a girl’. Antonia, for her part, had regarded Zen as suitable football and playground fodder for her brothers, but of no conceivable personal interest to her whatsoever. And now she was a mother of four and an estate agent in Vicenza.

‘… always flying off somewhere on the other side of the world. My grandchildren know Rio de Janeiro and Hong Kong better than they do our poor Venice. And when they do come, it’s just to gawk like everyone else. Families are what we need, not tourists! But what can you do? There’s no work, and the kind of rents they charge are just crazy, even though half the houses just stand empty…’

She broke off, perhaps remembering that the Zens’ house had been unoccupied since Giustiniana’s move to Rome.

‘Some more wine?’ she suggested, appearing in the doorway with the bottle. ‘And then we can eat.’

They were joined for lunch by a young woman who was introduced to Zen as Cristiana Morosini. A late and unexpected addition to the family, Cristiana had been a mere toddler when Zen had joined the police and left the city for a series of postings on the mainland. She was now a good-looking woman in her early thirties, with a slow, sensual manner and a striking resemblance to Zen’s memories of her elder sister. As she served the risotto, dark grey from the cuttlefish ink, Rosalba explained that Cristiana had left her husband, a local politician, after discovering that he was screwing one of his supporters.

‘Mamma!’

‘There’s no need to be coy with an old family friend. He’s seen you running around the house bare-arsed often enough, haven’t you Aurelio?’

‘Delicious,’ murmured Zen, savouring the combination of nutty rice, chewy cuttlefish and unctuous sauce.

‘I’m not being coy,’ Cristiana protested. ‘But one is a grotesque understatement.’

She held up three velvety white fingers.

‘There was that rich bitch from the Zattere, for a start. Then there’s Maria Luisa Squarcina, and don’t forget the Populin woman. She denies it, but she would, wouldn’t she? That’s three, not counting various secretaries, journalists and assorted hangers-on And those are only the ones everybody knows about. If you could fuck your way into office, Nando would be running the country by now.’

‘And what brings you back home, Aurelio?’ asked Rosalba. ‘You said on the phone that it was work, but what kind of work exactly?’

Zen washed down a delicious salty mouthful with some more wine.

‘Well of course it’s strictly confidential…’

‘You can count on us,’ Rosalba assured him.

‘We won’t breathe a word,’ seconded Cristiana.

Zen’s mother used to say that there were two ways of making sure everyone in Venice knew something: you could either get every parish priest in the city to read it out after Mass, or you could tell Rosalba Morosini.

‘The fact is,’ said Zen, ‘it’s a bit of a fiddle. I’ve been feeling rather homesick, and I wanted to sort out one or two things to do with the house. The problem was that I didn’t have any leave due, so I had to make it look like work.’

‘You put in for a transfer.’

‘Right. At the Ministry, where I work, we get reports from all over the country listing every crime reported and the action taken. Normally it all goes straight into the computer and gets pulped up into statistics, but I pulled out the reports for Venice and looked through them to find something suitable. Lo and behold, what do I see but the name of Ada Zulian…’

‘La contessa!’ cried Rosalba.

Zen nodded.

‘Apparently she’d phoned in with a complaint about intruders in her house. So I pulled a few strings and had myself drafted up here on a temporary basis to investigate.’

The lie was as effortless and unpremeditated as the evasive clouds of ink emitted by the cuttlefish they were eating.

‘Ada and her ghosts!’ cried Rosalba, having served her guest another helping of risotto. ‘It all started when her daughter disappeared. She never got over it. Lisa Rosteghin’s sister was a nurse in the mental hospital on San Clemente, and the stories she tells about Ada…! Apparently at one point a deputation of the other lunatics came to see the director to complain about her behaviour. “Excuse us, dottore, ” they said, “but you’ve go to do something — this woman’s driving us crazy!”’

‘I remember her sidling up to me in the street,’ said Cristiana, wiping her lips with her napkin, ‘and calling me by the dead girl’s name in that creepy way she has. It put the fear of God into me, I can tell you.’

‘“This woman’s driving us crazy!”’ Rosalba repeated in a tone of hilarity. ‘Mind you, she was always half-mad if you ask me. The Saoners used to rent a house from her at one time, and you know what? When she sent in her account, they found she had charged them for the paper and ink the bill was written with! Can you believe it?’

‘What happened to her daughter?’ asked Zen idly.

Rosalba’s animation instantly evaporated. She shrugged.

‘No one really knows. It was during the last years of the war. So many terrible things happened.’

She cleared the dishes and walked off to the kitchen. Zen looked up to find Cristiana’s big liquid eyes fixed on him like a pair of sea anemones. He barely had time to register their soft, tenacious presence before her mother returned.

‘Speaking of the Saoners, do you know what’s become of Tommaso?’ Zen asked as Rosalba served him a glistening leaf-shaped slab of sole.

‘The younger brother? Well, that’s the way I still think of him. He used to be your best friend, didn’t he?’

A host of remembered images of his best friend rose briefly in Zen’s mind like a flock of disturbed pigeons.

‘We lost touch years ago. Is he married yet?’

It was Cristiana who replied.

‘No, and he’s given up his job to concentrate on politics. He’s one of Nando’s right-hand men.’

‘I must look him up,’ mused Zen. ‘Does he still live in Calle del Magazen?’

‘You’re more likely to find him at party headquarters,’ said Cristiana tartly. ‘They’re there most of the time these days, with the municipal elections coming up. Nando has inspired them to give their all to the movement — especially to the female supporters.’

‘And how’s Giustiniana?’ asked Rosalba gaily. ‘Have some more sole, for goodness sake. You’re not eating!’

Aurelio Zen made his way slowly through the hushed and vacant spaces of the town in a daze brought on by the wine he had drunk at lunch, the grappa he had allowed Rosalba to talk him into having afterwards, and not least by his encounter with Cristiana Morosini, whose white flesh had somehow become inextricably confused in his memories with that of the fresh tender sole which had melted in his mouth. His mind was a jumble of contradictory thoughts and feelings, an inner landscape equivalent to the one all around him: blocks of every size and shape thrown together as though at random, like bricks tipped in a heap. Like so much else, this intimate disorder now seemed foreign to him, accustomed as he was to the planned vistas and grand boulevards of the capital. Everything was turning out very differently from what he had imagined.

He walked along the Fondamenta delle Cappucine in search of the wine-shop which Marco had mentioned. Up ahead, a canopy of evergreen shrubbery spilt out over a high wall, betraying the presence of one of the city’s secret gardens, the original vegetable plots which had once lain at the centre of each of its hundred islands, providing produce for the inhabitants of the waterfront houses. As Zen passed beneath the tree, he saw that it was filled with feral cats, perched on every branch like a flock of birds.

The tide had turned, but it was still low enough to expose the mudbanks on either side of the San Girolamo canal. Two labourers were at work there, one pushing a wheelbarrow along a path of duckboards laid out from the quay, the other working with a spade in the canal bed itself, turning over slabs of slime as thick and black as tar. The fetid odour of the disturbed mud hung heavy in the air, a noxious miasma so strong it was almost tangible.

‘Watch out!’

The cry came from above. Swivelling, Zen beheld an old woman staring down at him with what looked like indignation. He shrugged impatiently.

‘What’s the matter, signora?’

‘The pipe!’ she shouted back. ‘You were going to trip.’

It was only then that Zen noticed the metal tubing stretched across his path, leading from a narrow lane at one side to a red barge, stranded by the tide, bearing the legend POZZI NERI and a phone number.

‘Thank you!’ he called shamefacedly to his saviour, who shrugged and ducked back into her house.

Zen stepped over the tubing and continued on his way. Living now in a city which had had mains drainage for over two thousand years, he had forgotten about the ‘black wells’, the septic tanks over which every Venetian house was built and into which flowed such effluvia as could not be discharged directly into the canals.

A little further along he saw first the church which Marco had mentioned, then the osteria itself. The trim was indeed red, or had been at some time within living memory. A faded sign over the door read ‘Finest Wines of the Piave from our own Estate on Draught and in Bottle’. The interior was smoky and dark after the noontide glare outside, but even before Zen’s eyes had adjusted he heard a familiar voice hail him with a long soft ‘ Ciao! ’, rising and falling like a passing wave.

One of the card-players at the rear of the premises rose from the table and strode towards him, a calloused hand extended in greeting. Marco Paulon was a sturdy, muscular man whose hide looked as wrinkled and tanned as bacon. His face was a pudgy, shapeless mass in which his eyes twinkled, bright and shiny, like two metal buttons dropped into a bowl of polenta. He and Zen had not been especially close as children, but they had stayed in touch thanks to a mutually advantageous arrangement whereby Paulon kept an eye on the Zen property and undertook basic running repairs in return for the use of the ground floor as extra storage space for his haulage business.

He steered Zen to a vacant table by the window and shouted an order for two glasses of fragolino.

‘What’s all this about you and Ada Zulian?’ he demanded cheerily.

Zen gawped. Surely not even Rosalba’s grapevine could have disseminated his cover story so quickly. But it soon became clear that Marco had his information from the contessa herself.

‘The old girl isn’t up to carrying much these days, so I quite often pick up things she’s ordered when I deliver to the shops, and then drop them off on my way back to Mestre. I went round just before lunch with a case of mineral water she’d ordered and she told me you’d been there. To be honest, I thought it was another of her hallucinations. Fat chance, I thought, the police sending Aurelio up from Rome on account of Ada Zulian!’

The proprietor brought two glasses of the sweetish foaming wine and the two friends drank each other’s health. Then Zen leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘Actually, I arranged it myself.’

Marco Paulon raised his eyebrows.

‘Didn’t anyone query it?’

Zen swirled his glass around, making the wine gyrate like a spinning coin. He closed one eye in an exaggerated wink.

‘They probably would have, if I’d told them. So I put it about that I was being sent to look into the Durridge case. Do you remember? The American who disappeared here a couple of months ago. There was a big fuss about it in the press.’

Paulon smiled admiringly.

‘You cunning bastard.’

Zen looked up at a calendar pinned to the wall beside Marco’s head. Superimposed on the numbered squares for each date of the month was a wavy green line indicating the rise and fall of the tides in the lagoon. The trough was almost at the centre of the square for that day, indicating that low tide had been at noon.

‘I don’t suppose there’s enough water to get about yet,’ he said.

Marco frowned.

‘Depends where you want to go. I’ve moored the boat up by Sant’Alvise. It never dries out there.’

He looked inquiringly at Zen, who sighed.

‘The thing is, Marco, I need to make it look as though I know something about the Durridge case without actually wasting any time doing any real work on it. Know what I mean?’

Marco smiled again and shook his head.

‘Still the same Aurelio! I remember you at school. You did less work than anyone in the class, yet you ended up with the best marks. I never understood how you did it. With the rest of us, it was what we didn’t know that stood out, but you could take the two or three odd bits of stuff you remembered and make it look as though you knew more than the teacher! We hated you for it.’

Zen finished his wine.

‘You’re exaggerating,’ he murmured.

‘No I’m not!’ Paulon returned aggressively. ‘Look where it’s got you. You have a cushy desk job in Rome while I’m humping crates of groceries around the city.’

Zen lit a cigarette and said nothing. After a moment, Marco Paulon smiled.

‘But there you go! Whoever said life was fair?’

He took a cigarette from the pack which Zen had left lying on the table.

‘So, Aurelio, what can I do for you? Don’t worry about time. I can always make an extra run tomorrow if necessary.’

Zen lit Marco’s cigarette.

‘Ideally, I’d like to take a look at the island where this Durridge was living when he was kidnapped.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Quite a long way, I’m afraid. One of those old fortress islands out near the Porto di Malamocco.’

Marco Paulon smoked peacefully for a while.

‘Police launch broken down, has it?’ he murmured at length.

Zen signalled the proprietor to bring more wine.

‘It’s the crew I’m worried about,’ he said. ‘Some kids fresh off the farm who’ve taken a hurry-up course in boat handling at La Spezia. I can probably trust them not to drown me, as long as the fog holds off, but that’s as far as it goes. What I need is an inside view from someone who knows the lagoon. Something to lard the report so that it looks like I’ve spent a lot of time on the case. Someone like you, in short.’

Marco Paulon nodded earnestly. He picked up the new glass of fragolino which had just arrived at the table.

‘Welcome back, Aurelio. Welcome home!’

The two men downed their wine and bickered amicably over the bill, Zen gracefully giving way in the end. Outside, a warm wash of diffuse sunlight flattened every perspective, obliterating details and distinctions, calling everything into question. In a yard near the quay two house-painters were shaking and folding a dropsheet as big as a sail.

‘It looks like Ada’s complaint is catching,’ Marco announced in a jocular tone. ‘My cousin was telling me the other day about someone else who’s cracked up and started seeing people who aren’t there.’

They turned the corner into a broad swathe of shadow cast by the walls of an abandoned factory.

‘Mind you,’ added Marco, ‘he’s from Burano, and they’re all halfwits out there. Especially my cousin.’

He leapt nimbly down into a broad-bottomed wherry moored alongside the quay. Zen followed more cautiously, stepping on to the rectangle of old carpet which protected the foredeck. The open hold was filled with an assortment of merchandise en route from the wholesaler’s warehouse at Mestre to various retail outlets scattered around the city: shrink-wrapped tins of beans and tomatoes, plastic-covered demijohns of wine, huge cardboard boxes containing packs of soap powder, tampons and batteries.

Marco Paulon turned on the ignition and freed the tiller, then cast off the aft mooring line, secured to one of the wooden posts driven into the canal bed at regular intervals. He pointed to a marble plaque set in the wall of the

former factory about a metre above the level of the quay. It bore an engraved line and the words Marea alta 4.11.66.

‘They make so much fuss about the floods,’ he remarked, ‘but if you ask me the freak lows are even worse. You can’t even get down the Cannaregio half the time, and as for the back canals, forget it! The whole city needs to be dredged urgently, but it’s impossible to get any work done now the contractors have stopped taking bribes.’

There was a throaty roar as he started up the diesel engine, which then settled down to a steady hum much like a bus, but with a reverberant underwater growl.

‘Let go forward,’ he called.

It took Zen a moment or two to remember the significance of this phrase. Then he reached up and untied the remaining rope securing the comacina to its mooring, brought it inboard and coiled it neatly. A dark foliage of mud blossomed on the surface of the water as Marco put the motor in reverse with the rudder hard over to push the bow out from the quay. Then he engaged forward gear and they eased out into the canal.

‘Guess who owns all that!’ he shouted, pointing to the ruined factory. Zen made his way unsteadily past the cargo to join Paulon in the stern of the boat.

‘Ada Zulian!’ crowed Marco triumphantly.

‘Really?’

‘For years no one knew,’ Marco went on. ‘The contessa kept it quiet. Thought it was undignified for Zulian to be connected to anything as common as a cotton mill.’

He laughed explosively.

‘The joke is, the place is worth more derelict than it ever was as a going concern. Here’s Ada dependent on people like me doing her favours out of the kindness of our hearts, when she could make herself a billion any time she wanted just by selling that place!’

Zen ducked instinctively as they passed under a low bridge. Marco throttled back, then swung the tiller hard to the right, sounding the boat’s siren as a warning to any craft which might be coming the other way around the blind corner.

‘So what’s the word about the Durridge business?’ Zen asked.

Wedging the tiller under his expansive bottom, Marco produced a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Zen.

‘How do you mean?’

‘What have people been saying about it? What do they think happened?’

Marco throttled back to let a taxi pass by. The passenger, an adolescent girl in a wheelchair, gazed at them solemnly. Zen tried again.

‘What sort of man was this Durridge? What did he do? Who did he see?’

Marco frowned and spat into the water. Zen’s heart sank. His companion clearly knew nothing whatever of any interest about the vanished American, but no Venetian was ever going to admit to ignorance about anything.

‘He was your typical rich foreigner,’ Marco announced at length. ‘Came and went all the time. Used the city as a hotel. Took no interest in us, the staff.’

He paused for inspiration.

‘Used to give huge parties at his house. The watertaxi people made a fortune ferrying the guests to and fro. The caterers did well too…’

He broke off and pointed to a ponderous four-storey building which they were passing.

‘Palazzo Zen, Aurelio!’ he remarked jocularly. ‘When are you moving back in?’

Zen smiled and dutifully surveyed the show-home constructed by his ancestors in those distant centuries when they had been one of the most illustrious and powerful families in the city. He was glad to allow Marco to change the subject and let them both off the hook. Clearly there was going to be no easy way into the Durridge case. His information so far had been restricted to reading newspaper clippings, meagre snippets of information puffed out to several columns with speculations and repetitions and a photograph of Ivan Durridge in one of the white linen suits he habitually wore.

‘I’ll tell you one thing, though,’ Marco continued with geater confidence. ‘He was never kidnapped.’

‘How do you mean?’

Paulon shrugged.

‘If you ask me, it was like with Tonio.’

A double sheet of newspaper drifted slowly past. Looking at it, Zen recognized it as the same one which the barman had been reading when he had had coffee with Aldo Valentini that morning. As he scanned the headline — THE OLD FOX FIGHTS FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE — he suddenly thought of a way to get access to the closed files on the Durridge case. But if the article was correct, he would have to move fast.

‘Antonio Puppin,’ Marco went on, answering the question Zen had ill-manneredly neglected to ask. ‘Went hunting out on the salt-marshes one day and never came back. When his boat turned up adrift everyone feared the worst, although the body was never found. Anyway, a couple of years later he got caught by the Carabinieri at a roadblock near Grado — this was back in the terrorist years, and they were asking for everyone’s papers…’

They swept under a high arched bridge and emerged with startling suddenness into the open lagoon just beside the busy ferry piers at Fondamente Nove. ‘It turned out he’d done a bunk,’ Marco shouted above the roar of the engine he’d just gunned up to full revs. ‘He’d been working for the brother of an ex-girlfriend who ran a garage…’

Zen stopped listening. He’d lost track of Marco’s story, let alone its bearing on the Durridge affair. That was how things were on the lagoon, where the hazy light and the pervasive instability of water defeated every attempt at clarity or precision, but also tempered the arrogance and aggression so prevalent on the mainland. This was what had formed him, he realized. This was the code he carried with him, the basic genetic circuits burned into his very being.

In the extreme distance, to the right of the cemetery of San Michele, the remote islands of Torcello and Burano were visible as smudges on the horizon, the latter distinguishable by its drunkenly inclined bell tower.

‘What was that about someone seeing ghosts on Burano?’ he murmured to Marco.

‘Not on Burano. That’s where the guy’s from. Name’s Giacomo Sfriso. He and his brother have a drift trawler they take out to sea, as well as a lot of tidal nets. Both in their mid-twenties, and doing very well for themselves by all accounts. Very well indeed.’

They rounded the mole of reclaimed land beyond the Arsenale, forming dry-docks and a sports field.

‘Then one evening last month Giacomo went out in a sandolo,’ Marco continued. ‘No one paid any attention. Everyone knew the Sfriso boys worked round the clock. That’s how they got so rich, people said. Darkness fell and he didn’t come back, but still no one worried. Giacomo knew the lagoon like his own backyard.’

He swung the tiller over, dipping the gunwale in the water and sending the boat careening round towards the large white mass of San Pietro.

‘Only when he finally got back to Burano, at five o’clock the next morning, still pitch dark out, he was babbling like a madman! No one could make out what the hell he was talking about. His brother Filippo called the doctor, who stuck a needle in him, but when he came around he was just as bad. Gibbering away about walking corpses and the like. Since when, according to my informants, that particular fish has been several centimetres short of its minimum landing length.’

The boat slid under the elaborate iron footbridge connecting the island of San Pietro to the Arsenale. These were the hinderparts of the city, a dense mass of brick tenements formerly inhabited by the army of manual labourers employed in the dockyards. Nowhere were there more dead ends and fewer through routes, nowhere were the houses darker and more crowded, nowhere was the dialect thicker and more impenetrable. It was not for nothing that the Cathedral of San Pietro, symbol of Rome’s claims on the Republic, had been relegated to these inauspicious outskirts, while the Doges’ private chapel lorded it over the great Piazza.

Marco brought the wherry alongside a quay opposite a slipway where a number of old vaporetti were drawn up awaiting repair or cannibalization. Securing a rope fore and aft to the stripped tree trunks sunk in the mud, he set about foraging among the packages in the hold.

‘Give me a hand, will you?’ he called to Zen.

Together they tugged the pile apart, separating crates and boxes until Marco at length dived in and emerged with a small cubical pack which, from the way he bent his knees to lift it, obviously weighed a lot.

‘What’s that?’ asked Zen.

Marco heaved the pack on to the quay and wiped his brow. Leaping ashore, he tore open the pack and extracted a yellow leaflet which he handed to Zen.

‘Back in a moment,’ he said, and disappeared into an alley with the package, leaving Zen to peruse the leaflet. Like the poster he had seen earlier, it was headed NUOVA REPUBBLICA VENETA over the emblem of a lion couchant. The text concerned some complicated issue of city versus regional funding for improvements to the refuse disposal facility on Sacca San Biagio, and was clearly the latest instalment in a serial you needed to have been following from the beginning to understand. Zen had just reached the slogan in block capitals at the bottom — A VENETIAN SOLUTION TO VENETIAN PROBLEMS — when Marco jumped aboard again and cast off.

‘Next stop your island,’ he announced, revving the engine.

Zen waved the leaflet.

‘What’s all this?’

‘Municipal elections the week after next.’

‘But which party?’

Marco paused to yell a greeting at the skipper of a wherry proceeding in the other direction.

‘Just a few local lads who think they can take on Rome and win.’

‘And can they?’

Marco shrugged.

‘I’d like to see someone do it. Everyone says it’ll be a disaster, but what have the last forty years been for us? The city has turned into a geriatric hospital, there’s no work, no houses, and all our taxes go to line the pockets of some Mafia fat cats down south. Christ knows if Dal Maschio will be any better, but he sure as hell can’t be any worse, and if he makes those bastards in Rome shit in their beds then he gets my vote!’

Zen stared at him.

‘Who did you say?’

‘Dal Maschio.’

‘Ferdinando Dal Maschio?’

‘Do you know him?’

Zen shook his head.

‘No, no.’

The boat slipped along the canal alongside the public gardens on the islet of Sant’Elena and then out, as if through a secret door, into the broad basin of San Marco. A big cargo vessel was gliding past, on its way from the docks to the breach in the littoral sandbar at Porto di Lido giving access to the open sea. A tug pulling two barges laden with rubbish ploughed past in the other direction, while ferries and fishing smacks crossed to and fro. Marco pointed the wherry’s bows towards the distant island of San Clemente, where Ada Zulian had spent two years in the mental hospital. Out here in the open lagoon there were short sharp waves which slapped vigorously at the planking and splashed gobs of salt water into the men’s faces. Marco throttled back to give way to a car ferry on its way to the Lido.

‘I forgot to tell you the best bit about the guy from Burano,’ he shouted as the waves slapped and hammered and the wherry wallowed in the swell. ‘Guess where he claims to have seen this ghost?’

Zen shook his head.

‘On Sant’Ariano!’ cried Marco. ‘The isle of the dead!’

His way clear again, he gunned up the engine and headed out of the shipping lane into the quiet backwaters behind San Giorgio.

‘But it’s no joke for Giacomo’s family,’ he concluded soberly. ‘Seems he just hangs around the house all day, muttering to himself. He can’t go to the toilet by himself, never mind handle a boat. His mother and brother have been driven nearly crazy themselves.’

The lagoon shimmered and shifted like fish scales in the sunshine. Aurelio Zen lay back, closed his eyes and tried determinedly to summon up an image of Tania Biacis, his… his what? Lover? Mistress? Partner? Part of the charm of their relationship was that it eluded definition. Despite this, it had always felt overwhelmingly real and solid, yet after only a few hours’ exposure to the pervasive vapours of the lagoon Zen felt these certainties dissolving. He no longer had any vivid sense of Tania, no clear image of her presence, no aching void created by her absence. This was doubly ironic in that she was the reason he had agreed to Ellen’s idea in the first place.

‘The family are seriously unhappy about the way the investigation has bogged down, Aurelio,’ Ellen had told him. ‘Bill — that’s my new guy, he’s a lawyer — the firm he works for has the Durridge account, and I mentioned to him that I just happened to know this Italian policeman.’

The moment Ellen stopped speaking, even for an instant, the line went dead.

‘I mean it’s your town, Aurelio. You know the people, you speak the language. Anyway, when Bill put it to the Durridges’ people they simply jumped at the idea.’

Despite the years since Ellen had left Zen and returned to her native America, her Italian had remained fluent, although her accent had deteriorated, the vowels flattened and denatured, whole phrases mumbled almost incomprehensibly, like an old man trying to eat without his dentures. It was chilling to recall that he had once found such mannerisms charming.

‘The bottom line is — I’m quoting Bill here — they need a body. Dead or alive. Preferably the former, of course, but if the worst comes to the worst…’

She paused, and a dumb white silence intervened. It was as if one of them had hung up, as if the whole conversation had been taped and edited. Then she spoke again, and everything resumed as if there had been no pause, no lacuna, no doubt.

‘Until then the whole estate is in turn-round. If you free up the cash flow, Bill says, you can name your fee. We’re talking serious money here.’

‘And a serious criminal offence,’ Zen had returned dryly. ‘It is strictly illegal for a state employee to engage in secondary paid employment…’

‘Oh come on, Aurelio! You guys only work mornings anyway. Plus Bill can arrange for the money to be paid indirectly — into a numbered Swiss bank account if you like.’

It was tempting, but he would never have accepted if Tania had not just received a court order to vacate the apartment in Parione which Zen had found for her, and on which he had been paying the rent. Her position there had always been precarious — the landlord had been trying to evict her for over a year — but she and Zen had shied away from talking about the future. Whatever happened, painful and disturbing decisions would have to be taken, and they had tacitly agreed to put them off as long as possible so as not to break the spell of a period of frivolous irresponsibility whose appeal lay partly in the knowledge that it could not possibly last.

The very fact that Tania had hinted that she might be prepared to live with Zen — and, inevitably, his mother — represented a major concession on her part. Only a few months earlier, he would have been overjoyed by this change of heart. Ever since Tania Biacis had broken up with her husband, Zen had been trying to persuade her to move in with him. Yet now the moment had arrived, he had immediately felt a stab of alarm, not least at the discovery that Tania and his mother got along. The two women had been introduced the previous month, and to Zen’s amazement the effect had been one of mutual self-recognition. He had counted on being able to divide and rule. If his mother and his lover liked each other, where did that leave him?

He must have dozed off, for the next thing he was aware of was a mighty bump which sent him tumbling over sideways on the bilge boards. Looking up, he saw an enormous expanse of brick walling towering over the boat.

‘Kidnapped!’

Marco made fast to a mooring ring set in the wall. He pointed disgustedly to the rickety metal ladder, slimy with weed, which scaled the face of the brick cliff.

‘How are you going to get an unwilling victim down from there?’ he demanded. ‘Even if he was unconscious, you’d need a crane to get him in the boat.’

He bent over Zen, finger raised didactically.

‘And on that particular afternoon you’d never have got the boat alongside in the first place. It was one of the lowest tides I can recall. The whole lagoon ground to a halt! You’d have thought someone had pulled the plug. Nothing but mud, as far as the eye could see.’

Marco Paulon lay back complacently on the after-decking.

‘Take it from me, Aurelio. This American of yours has done a bunk! He’ll turn up one day, safe and sound, just like Tonio Puppin. And who’s to blame them? There are probably times you wouldn’t mind dropping out of your own life for a while, hey?’

A miniature blizzard whirled up into the sunny air, momentarily enshrouding the figure of the man who stood talking into the pay telephone.

‘Immediately, yes,’ he insisted. ‘Aurelio Zen. Z, E, N. Vice-Questore, Criminalpol.’

The scurrying breeze eased once more, and the tubular bars of expanded polystyrene packaging immediately fell back to the nearest surface. The man picked one up off the ledge of the telephone booth and toyed with it as he talked.

‘Remind him of the Renato Favelloni case. Remind him that he told me if I ever needed anything I should get in touch. Tell him I’ll call back in thirty minutes exactly. If I don’t get a satisfactory response at that time, I shall have to reconsider my position.’

Once again the illusory snowstorm littered the air with flying white fragments caught up in the eddying wind currents at the corner of the square. Aurelio Zen snapped the one he had been playing with, replaced the receiver and plucked his phonecard from its slot.

There was no bar or cafe in this campo, which was dominated by the sprawling brickwork of a church as matter-of-fact as the abandoned factory belonging to the Zulian family. Zen turned down an alley tunnelling under the houses opposite. It crossed two low bridges over canals hardly wider than ditches. A torn plastic bag stamped with the name of a supermarket chain drifted slowly by on the incoming tide like a ragged jellyfish.

Zen turned in at a glazed door under a metal sign reading ENOTECA. In the small dark room inside, a few elderly men sat sipping wine and exchanging raucous remarks in slithering, sibilant dialect. Zen ordered a glass of red raboso wine and a roll smeared with the creamy white paste made from salt cod, garlic and olive oil. He settled back in a corner, glancing at his watch. He had given Palazzo Sisti thirty minutes, and five were gone already. It wouldn’t do to be late. This was his one tenuous connection to the levers of power, the ‘rooms with the buttons’. He had to handle it right. But there was no saying what was right, these days.

Some time earlier Zen had intervened in a murder investigation in Sardinia on behalf of one of the country’s leading political parties. Although the outcome was quite different from the one which had been foreseen, it happened to serve the interests of the party in question just as well if not better. On his return to Rome, Zen had been summoned to a reception at party headquarters, located in Palazzo Sisti, where the elder statesman who was its leader had acknowledged his indebtedness with the words: ‘If there’s ever anything you need…’

At the time, this had seemed like a blank cheque. It could only be cashed once, so it was prudent to wait for exactly the right opportunity to present itself, but there was no hurry. A promise like this would remain valid for ever. Even the death of the politician himself would not affect the value of the undertaking he had given. The whole system within which he and everyone else operated depended on such unwritten contracts being honoured irrespective of the fate of individuals. If anything happened to l’onorevole, the promise he had made to Zen would simply devolve to his successors, along with countless others both owing and owed.

But now the unthinkable had occurred. Starting from an investigation into bribes allegedly paid to obtain construction contracts, investigating magistrates in Milan had gradually uncovered a network of kickbacks, slush funds, golden handshakes, graft, incentives, backhanders and hush money covering every aspect of business and government. Everyone had always known that such a network existed, of course. Indeed, everyone used it themselves in some minor respect at least, to speed up the bureaucratic mills or escape from some horrendous official maze. What no one had ever expected was that the extent of the corruption would ever be exposed, still less that those who had taken advantage of it at the very highest level would be arrested and brought to trial.

There had, after all, been countless such investigations before, and they had never got anywhere. It was precisely to avoid such a potentially embarrassing event that Palazzo Sisti had invited Zen to intervene in the Sardinian case, in which one of their fixers, a man named Renato Favelloni, was involved. On that occasion, as on so many in the past, they had been successful. But as the Milanese judges pursued their investigations, naming ever more famous names and signing orders against the ‘men beyond all suspicion’, it gradually became clear that something had changed. The labyrinth of power was still there, but at its heart was an absence.

The minotaur was dead, and the choking currents of persuasion and menace which had once stifled any attempt to map the workings of its empire had fallen still. The judges continued implacably on their course. Renato Favelloni was among those arrested, and true to form had immediately done a deal with his accusers, betraying those for whom he had worked in return for a potential reduction in his own sentence. The result had been a flurry of judicial communications revealing the identities of those under investigation for ‘irregular practices’ and ‘procedural abnormalities’ — as though such practices and procedures had not been both the rule and the norm for the past half-century. The most eminent name on the list was that of l’onorevole himself, whom the judges had requested should be stripped of his parliamentary immunity so that they could proceed against him.

This was something completely unprecedented, an almost unimaginable eventuality, but it was widely assumed that the matter would go no further. Like all members of the Italian parliament, l’onorevole enjoyed automatic immunity from judicial prosecution which could only be lifted by a committee of his peers. The chances of this happening seemed slim indeed. Politicans had always been understandably reluctant to allow the judiciary to stick its noses into their affairs. There was no reason to suppose that they would voluntarily permit the prosecution of a man who had been a minister in various governments for over fifteen years, one of the most powerful and influential figures in the country, widely tipped as a possible future president. If he went, which of them would be safe?

But those who reasoned thus had not yet grasped the full extent of the changes which had taken place. This was not surprising. It was humiliating to admit that the real reason why the judges in Milan were able to succeed where so many of their colleagues had failed had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union than anything which had happened in their own country. Such an admission involved recognizing that since 1945 Italian political life had been a mere puppet-show reflecting the power struggle between East and West. Now the strings had been cut, the show had closed and all bets were off. Two days earlier, as reported in the newspaper which Zen had glimpsed floating in the canal, the parliamentary committee — ‘motivated by a conviction since in the present climate justice should not just be done but be seen to be done’ — had voted to allow the judges in Milan to proceed against their eminent and esteemed colleague.

This was worse than death for l’onorevole and for all those associated with him. He would vanish for years into the Gulag Archipelago of the judicial process, awaiting a final verdict which was largely irrelevant. The damage had already been done. The parliamentary committee’s decision was far more damaging than anything the judges could do, revealing as it did the extent to which l’onorevole was exposed, and the crucial fact that he had ceased to be an important political player.

Zen’s only hope was that the favour he was actually going to inscribe on the blank cheque he had been treasuring all this while was so insignificant that l’onorevole would have no difficulty in meeting it, even in his present straitened circumstances. He glanced at his watch. In five minutes he would know. He finished the last morsel of the bacala mantecato, washed it down with the final gulp of wine and went over to the counter to pay.

As he turned towards the door, he bumped into two men who had just come in. Intent on his purpose, he made to brush past, but one of the men seized his arm.

‘My God, Aurelio, is it you?’

Zen looked round and gasped.

‘Tommaso!’

The two confronted each other awkwardly while the other man looked on with a coolly appraising smile.

‘I can’t stop now,’ Zen said hurriedly. ‘Are you staying? I’ll be back in ten minutes, less probably.’

Back in the windswept square, the strips of white plastic packaging were still frantically gyrating. As Zen made his way towards the pay phone, it suddenly started to ring in strident bursts. He stopped in his tracks, staring at it intently. Then he glanced at his watch. Exactly thirty minutes had elapsed since he had issued his ultimatum to Palazzo Sisti. Plunging into the fake snow flurries, he seized the receiver.

‘Hello?’

The silence at the other end was deeply flawed, hollow, reverberant, mined with clicks and crackles.

‘Hello? Hello?’

The response, when it finally came, was quiet and unhurried, as though rebuking Zen’s panicky urgency.

‘My advisers inform me that you uttered a threat against me. I trust this is just another of the innumerable mistakes and gross miscalculations of which they’ve been guilty.’

Christ, it was the man himself! Things must indeed have come to a pretty pass at Palazzo Sisti if l’onorevole was reduced to making his own phone calls.

‘Nothing could be further from the truth!’ Zen found himself saying in an obsequious tone. ‘I wouldn’t dream of presuming to…’

‘Maybe not, but there are plenty who would. Men I’ve worked for and with this past quarter century! Now they deny they know me. Now they smite me on the cheek, spit in my face and hand me over, bound and gagged, to my enemies!’

‘The only reason I am calling is…’

‘They may think I’m dead and buried, but they’ll see! When they least expect it I shall burst forth from the tomb and sit in judgement on those who have presumed to judge me.’

Having achieved this peroration, l’onorevole fell silent.

‘Hello?’ ventured Zen hesitantly.

‘I’m still here. Despite everything.’

‘When we met at Palazzo Sisti, onorevole, at the conclusion of the Burolo affair, you were kind enough to intimate that if I ever needed a favour then I should contact you. That is the only reason I have been bold enough to do so.’

The unctuous smarminess of his voice left Zen wanting to rinse his mouth out, but decades of servility could not be erased in a moment.

‘What do you want?’ l’onorevole demanded. ‘There’s a limit to what I can accomplish these days, but…’

Zen paused.

‘I take it I may speak openly?’

‘Oh, please! You take me for a fool? That’s why I am calling you. Our tracer identified the number from which you rang earlier. I’m speaking from a secure line. But I haven’t got all day, Zen. For the second time, what do you want?’

The square was still deserted, but Zen brought the receiver close to his mouth and lowered his voice.

‘It’s question of access to a police file, onorevole.’

There was a brief silence.

‘I’d have thought that was one of the few areas in which you were better qualified to act than I.’

‘This particular file has been sealed.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s one of the things I want to find out. It concerns the disappearance of an American called Ivan Durridge.’

There was a long silence. Zen eyed the circling flock of plastic flakes and said nothing.

‘I seem to recall the affair vaguely,’ l’onorevole said at last. ‘What is your interest in it?’

Zen knew better than to try and conceal the truth from this man.

‘Private enterprise,’ he replied promptly. ‘I’ve been retained by the family to look into it, but first of all I need to know why the case was closed. I can’t afford to step on anyone’s toes.’

There was a dry laugh the other end.

‘Neither can I.’

Another silence.

‘I’ll have to see what other interests are involved,’ the voice replied at length. ‘I’ll ask around. Assuming I get a nihil obstat from my sources, how do you want the material delivered?’

Zen caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked round. A young man in overalls passed by carrying four wooden chairs, their legs interlocked, on his shoulders.

‘I’ll get in touch later today and leave details with your staff. Thank you very much for granting me this much of your valuable time, onorevole. I can’t tell you how I appreciate it.’

At the other end there was nothing but the static-corroded silence, but it was some time before Zen replaced the receiver and turned away.

Back in the osteria, Tommaso was sitting alone at a table facing the door. He stood up and waved as Zen came in, then called to the barman to bring a flask of wine.

‘I was beginning to think I’d imagined the whole thing,’ he exclaimed, clasping Zen’s shoulder and arm as though to prove that it was not in fact an apparition. ‘How long has it been now? And then not even to let me know you’re here! Honestly, Aurelio, I’m offended.’

‘I only arrived this morning, Tommaso. And I was just about to contact you, as it happens.’

He pinched his friend’s cheek and gave one of his rare unconstrained smiles. Tommaso Saoner looked exactly the same as he had for as long as Zen could remember: the perpetual dark stubble, the stolid, graceless features, the glasses with rectangular lenses and thick black rims through which he peered out at the world as though through a television set.

‘Your health, Aurelio!’ cried Tommaso, pouring their wine.

‘And yours.’

They drained off their glasses.

‘Where’s your companion?’ asked Zen.

Tommaso’s expression grew serious.

‘Ferdinando? He had to go.’

‘Ferdinando Dal Maschio?’

Tommaso beamed in delight.

‘You’ve heard of him? The movement is growing in numbers and importance every day, of course, but I had no idea that they were talking about us in Rome already!’

Zen produced his cigarettes, then looked round guiltily.

‘Is it all right to smoke here?’

Tommaso frowned.

‘Why ever not?’

‘I was told this morning that the council had set aside non-smoking areas in all public places.’

Tommaso burst out laughing.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! That’s just for the tourists. There’s no such nonsense in genuine Venetian bars like this, where real Venetians go to drink good Veneto wine. Anyway, that bunch of crooks and incompetents on the council will be out on their collective ears in a couple of weeks, once the people get a chance to express their contempt for them. And as soon as we get in we’ll repeal all their stupid by-laws.’

Zen offered his friend a cigarette.

‘“We”?’ he queried.

Tommaso declined the cigarette with a waggle of his finger.

‘I mean the movement. Nuova Repubblica Veneta. What are they saying about us in Rome?’

Zen lit his cigarette, gazing at Saoner.

‘I have no idea.’

‘But you said…’

‘I’ve heard about Dal Maschio, but not in Rome. It was here. From his wife, Cristiana Morosini. Her mother is a neighbour of ours.’

Tommaso’s elation vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

‘Don’t take any notice of what she told you,’ he retorted. ‘It’s all a load of scurrilous nonsense. Believe me, the things Ferdinando has had to put up from that whore, she’s lucky he didn’t leave long ago — and give her a damn good thrashing first!’

Zen considered his friend through a cloud of smoke.

‘No doubt he deemed that such a course would have been politically inadvisable.’

Missing the irony in Zen’s voice, Tommaso merely nodded earnestly.

‘But she deserved it, believe you me. Most women would be proud to have a husband who has single-handedly transformed politics in the Veneto, broken the mould and offered a new and inspiring vision of a twenty-first century Venice, independent and revitalized!’

Tommaso’s eyes were shining with enthusiasm. Zen poured them both more of the light, prickly wine.

‘But not Cristiana,’ Saoner went on bitterly. ‘Instead, she did everything possible to undermine him, first ridiculing him to his face and in public, and then cuckolding him with a reporter from the mainland. Is it any wonder he sought solace in the arms of some of his admirers?’

He tossed off his wine and made a visible effort to change the subject.

‘Anyway, that’s enough politics. What happy wind brings you home, Aurelio?’

Zen emitted a self-pitying sigh.

‘Mamma heard from Rosalba that Ada Zulian had been complaining about some sort of harassment. It’s all in her head, of course, but to my mother Ada is still la contessa and nothing would do but I had to put in for a temporary transfer and come up to look into it personally.’

As he retailed this latest pack of lies, Zen marvelled at the way his cover story was changing and developing, growing ever more detailed and plausible with every telling. If he wasn’t careful, he would start believing it himself pretty soon.

Tommaso nodded seriously.

‘Funnily enough, we were discussing the Zulian family at a meeting just the other day. The contessa has been under a lot of pressure to sell that old factory they own, but like a true Venetian she’s refused. “Chi vende, scende.” The question we were discussing is what use to put such sites to when we come to power. Ferdinando used the Zulian case as an example. An international consortium has reportedly offered a fortune to turn the Sant’Alvise site into a hotel complex. That’s out of the question, of course, but the problem we face is whether to develop such vacant land for housing or for light industry. Ferdinando’s view is that…’

As Tommaso Saoner launched into a detailed analysis of the issue, Zen nodded and tried not to yawn. He hadn’t much appetite for politics at the best of times, and none at all for the lunatic-fringe, single-issue variety. No wonder Cristiana had lost patience with her husband if this was the kind of thing she had to put up with at home. As the image of her plump, sensuous features floated into his mind, Zen found himself thinking over what Tommaso had said about her, and wondering idly just how much of a whore she really was. Shaking off these fantasies with a stab of guilt, he reminded himself to ring Tania.

‘… within the context of a viable long-term development strategy,’ concluded Saoner, eyeing Zen in a manner which suggested that a reply was expected.

‘Absolutely!’ said Zen. ‘I totally agree.’

Tommaso frowned.

‘You do?’

‘In principle,’ Zen added quickly.

‘What principle? The only principle involved is whether Venice is to belong to us Venetians or to a bunch of foreigners who buy up property at inflated prices which our own people can’t afford, so that our young folk have to emigrate to the mainland while half the houses in the city stand empty.’

Zen stubbed out his cigarette.

‘I’m pretty much a foreigner myself these days, Tommaso. And my house is standing empty.’

Tommaso looked startled. He barked a rather aggressive laugh.

‘Don’t be silly, Aurelio! You don’t have to account for your actions. You’re one of us, a true Venetian born and bred. What you do with your property is no one’s business but your own.’

He clasped Zen’s hand and looked him in the eye.

‘Why don’t you join us? The movement needs men like you.’

Zen gave an embarrassed shrug.

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ he said, withdrawing his hand.

‘You know everything about it,’ Tommaso replied fervently. ‘You know it in your bones.’

He continued to scrutinize Zen with a child-like candour and intensity which made Zen feel acutely uncomfortable. He shrugged again.

‘I’ve never joined a political party in my life.’

‘We’re a movement, not a party! And the people who’re flocking to join us are precisely those who’ve never had anything to do with the established parties, who are fed up with the old corrupt gang and the empty slogans. You’ve had plenty of experience of that, I’ll be bound. Why, I was hearing a year or two ago about the way you were used by those bastards propping up this rotten government! That murder in Sardinia. Palazzo Sisti were up to their necks in that, weren’t they? But in the end the whole thing got blamed on some local girl who had very conveniently got herself killed. Typical! But things are changing, thanks to movements like ours.’

He clutched Zen’s arm again.

‘There’s a rally tomorrow evening, Aurelio. Why don’t you come along? Meet the people who are making things happen here and then make up your own mind!’

‘I’ll see,’ said Zen vaguely. ‘I think I may be doing something.’

All the exaltation drained from Tommaso’s face. He stood up and threw some money on the table.

‘Well, I mustn’t keep you from your work any longer, Aurelio. What’s bothering la contessa this time? Has she started seeing visions of her dead daughter again?’

‘It’s skeletons in the bedroom now,’ Zen replied.

Tommaso laughed and shook his head.

‘Poor old girl.’

They walked to the door together.

‘Does anyone know what actually happened to Rosetta Zulian?’ Zen asked as they stepped out into the covered alley.

‘She disappeared,’ Tommaso replied vaguely.

Zen nodded.

‘But no one seems to know how or when.’

‘Does it matter? It was all so long ago.’

‘Not for Ada,’ Zen insisted. ‘I’m sure she’s dreaming these ghostly intruders who are making her life a misery. But like all dreams, it must be a distortion of something real. The more I know about what actually happened, the easier it will be for me to sort out what’s going on.’

‘Sounds like a job for a psychiatrist, not a policeman,’ Tommaso Saoner commented dismissively.

He was about to turn away down a side alley when he suddenly paused and looked back at Zen, his glasses glinting in the gloom.

‘There’s someone who probably does know what happened, if anyone does,’ he said slowly.

‘Who’s that?’ demanded Zen.

Tommaso Saoner smiled knowingly.

‘Come along to the rally tomorrow night and I’ll introduce you. Campo Santa Margherita, seven o’clock.’

He slapped Zen’s shoulder jovially.

‘It’s wonderful to have you back in the city, Aurelio! Venice isn’t Venice without her sons. Until tomorrow!’

Aurelio Zen walked slowly home through the darkening streets. The routes leading to the railway station and the car parks were already packed with the human tide of commuters, students and tourists which washed into and out of the city every day, temporarily boosting the population to what it had been fifty years before and creating an illusory air of vitality. But once evening came the ebb set in, draining away this transient throng and revealing the desolate reality.

The thought of this diurnal tide reminded Zen of what Marco Paulon had said about the Durridge case: if anyone wished to kidnap Ivan Durridge from his island home, they could not have chosen a worse time. Marco remembered the day in question all too well. The low tide that afternoon had been exceptional, draining the lagoon to over a metre below its average level and stranding Paulon on a mudbank halfway to Murano.

‘I was stuck there for four hours in the pouring rain with a cargo of beans and salt cod. I’d been going that way for years, at all states of the tide, and never run aground. It rained so much I had to pump out the bilge three times, yet there wasn’t enough water outside to drown a butterfly! So when I heard on the news next morning that this American had been kidnapped, I thought to myself, I’d like to have the boat they used. You couldn’t have got within fifty metres of the island that afternoon!’

The memory of Marco’s words sparked a fugitive idea in Zen’s mind, something to do not with Durridge but with Ada Zulian. He tried in vain to corner it as it scurried about the fringes of his consciousness. And meanwhile he kept walking, veering to right and left without the slightest hesitation, unaware that a choice had even been made. It had all come back to him, that intimate, subconscious knowledge of the city built up over years of boyhood exploration, a whole decade of wandering through its intricately linked ramifications. Despite the span of time which had elapsed, virtually nothing of that urban fabric had changed. He thought of his conversation with l’onorevole, of the Burolo affair and the terrifying bleakness of the Sardinian landscape. There he had felt vulnerable, incompetent and exposed, totally out of his depth. This was just the opposite. He went on his way, secure and confident, enveloped by a city whose devious, introverted complexities were as familiar to him as the processes of his own mind.

Durridge, Zulian… What was the connection? Intruders, perhaps? But Ada Zulian’s poltergeists, if they had any existence outside her fears and fantasies, seemed completely gratuitous manifestations, devoid of any motive except mischievous mockery. Indeed, the great problem with believing in them at all, apart from Ada’s history of mental disturbance, was that it was impossible to see why anyone should go to so much trouble for so little purpose. Why waste your time scaring a solitary old lady when with the same skills you could make a fortune burgling one of the city’s more affluent residents?

But then why kidnap an American millionaire and fail to make a ransom demand? Perhaps Marco Paulon was right, and Durridge had simply staged a dramatic disappearance for reasons of his own. Certainly there was no indication that he had felt himself to be at risk. Although his home was quite literally a fortress, it could hardly have been less secure. The ‘octagons’, as they were known from their shape, were originally built to defend the three gaps in the sandbars which divide the lagoon from the open sea. Most were now in ruin, but one of those just inside the Porto di Malamocco had been bought in the fifties by an English eccentric who had completely renovated it.

Many rich people aspire to own islands, but an island in the Venetian lagoon, within sight and easy reach of the city, yet perfectly private, verdant and isolated, is a privilege reserved for very few. Ivan Durridge got his chance when the Englishwoman, old and ailing, sold her ottagono for a small fortune. Expecting some ostentatious pleasure pavilion, Zen had been surprised by what awaited him at the top of the metal ladder leading up the brick walling. The floor of the artificial island was now covered in trees, shrubs and plants artfully arranged to form a dense, seemingly natural garden.

In its midst stood the guardhouse, a long low structure of military severity which had been skilfully transformed into a residence retaining the essential characteristics of the original while suggesting something of the rustic pleasures of a country cottage. The only visible security precaution was a faded notice warning intruders to beware of the dog. Of the dog itself there was no sign, and judging by the condition of the notice it might well have departed along with the previous owner. Zen wandered idly about the property, inspired less by the sense that there was anything to be discovered than by the beauty of the spot and the need to spend some time there in order to justify putting Marco to the trouble of bringing him. He was standing on the lawn in front of the house, looking up at the ragged blue patch of sky visible through the encircling foliage, when a cry disturbed his reverie.

‘Hey!’

Zen had grown so accustomed to the peace and quiet that he started violently. The thought that he might not be alone on the island had never occurred to him. He looked round. At the corner of the house stood an elderly man dressed in baggy dark overalls.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded gruffly.

Zen lit a cigarette with elaborate nonchalance.

‘Well?’ the man demanded, walking across the lawn towards him. ‘This is private property.’

‘Police.’

The man’s expression of mute hostility did not change. His face was marked with a series of concentric wrinkles, like ripples on water.

‘And you are…?’ barked Zen.

‘Calderan, Franco.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Doing? I live here! I’m the gardener and caretaker. I worked for the English signora, then for the American.’

Zen sniffed sceptically, as though this were a transparent fiction.

‘Where were you the day your employer disappeared?’

The man frowned.

‘I’ve already made my statement.’

‘So make it again!’ snapped Zen. ‘Or are you afraid the two accounts won’t tally? Maybe you’ve forgotten whatever pack of lies you made up the first time?’

Franco Calderan stared down at the lawn, on whose flawlessly even surface were imprinted two parallel lines like skidmarks. He glared at Zen, as though he were responsible for this blemish.

‘I told them the truth! It was Tuesday, my day off. I rowed over to Alberoni and caught the bus to go and see my sister and her family, same as every week. They can vouch for me!’

Zen’s sneer indicated the value he ascribed to alibis which depended on the corroboration of the suspect’s relations.

‘Who knew that Tuesday was your day off?’

‘Nobody! Everybody!’

‘First you say one thing, then another! Why are you lying? Who are you trying to protect?’

Zen broke off, appalled at himself. Why the hell was he browbeating this old man? But he had been a policeman too long not to try and make Calderan sweat a little in return for his surly welcome.

‘I’m not protecting anyone! Everyone knew that I went to see my sister on Tuesdays, and have done these thirty years!’

He took a step forward, confronting Zen openly.

‘Anyway, what are you doing coming out here and raking all this over again? I’ve been through it all often enough already! Or haven’t you bothered to read what I told your colleagues?’

Calderan’s eyes narrowed as a new suspicion struck him.

‘You say you’re from the police? Let me see your identification.’

Zen had obliged, and after some further acrimonious exchanges he had been able to depart in a relatively dignified manner. But the experience had merely had the effect of making his private investigation of the Durridge affair seem even more of a mockery. The case had already been fully investigated, and at a time when clues and memories were still fresh. What hope had he of solving the mystery now, three months after the event?

While these thoughts occupied Zen’s mind, his internal autopilot steered him through the viscera of San Polo and brought him out at a small wooden landing-stage on the sinuous waterway which dissected the city. The ferry which served it was at the other side, and Zen joined the young couple waiting on the pier. The man was gazing with glazed eyes at the water, a hiss like distant surf emanating from the personal stereo headphones inserted into his ears. His partner, who was heavily pregnant, was reading a copy of Gente magazine featuring an article on the home life of Umberto Bossi, ‘the charismatic leader of the separatist Leghe ’. Both were wearing dark glasses and energetically chewing gum.

As the ferry made its way towards them, Zen remembered that he must give Palazzo Sisti a fax number to which they could transmit the file on the Durridge case. No country had taken to the new electronic technology more avidly than Italy, where it had cut through the Gordian knot of the postal service at one stroke. For decades, people had debated ways and means for reforming la posta, with its endless rules and regulations, the surly arrogance of its superabundant staff, and above all its inability to get a letter to its destination in less than a week. Now the debate was over. Those who had access to one of the miraculous machines had leapt straight from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, while the rest — including Zen, in this instance — remained bogged in the quagmire of the twentieth.

The Questura had a bank of fax machines, of course, but given the degree of irregularity involved in this transaction it would be too risky to have the incriminating file sent there. Whom did he know with a fax machine? Marco Paulon, perhaps, but he’d asked Marco enough favours for one day. Besides, he wouldn’t be home. When he’d dropped Zen off in Campo San Stin, where he had a delivery to make, Marco had mentioned that he was going to visit his cousin on Burano and catch up on the latest stories of crazy fisherman and walking corpses.

The ferry bumped alongside and the passengers disembarked. Zen walked down the wooden steps, handed his five-hundred-lire coin to the boatman and stepped aboard. Tommaso Saoner would either have a fax machine or know someone who did, but Zen’s encounter with his former friend had been such an unsettling experience that he didn’t feel confident about enlisting his help in such a delicate matter. It was of course notoriously difficult to pick up the threads of a relationship which had once been so close — it is not only the houses of one’s childhood which seem diminished when one goes back — but Zen had been almost shocked by the change in Tommaso. This political movement he had got himself involved with seemed to have affected him like a religious conversion.

The only thing like it he could remember was the playboy son of one of his colleagues at the Questura in Milan who had become a Maoist. One evening he walked into a dinner party in the family home and shot one of the guests, a leading judge, with his father’s revolver. Almost more chilling than the act of violence itself had been the boy’s unshakeable conviction that he had acted rightly, in the only manner either comprehensible or justifiable, and that anyone who did not do likewise was either a hypocrite or a cretin, and in either case condemned to the dustbin of history. But that was back in 1978. No one got excited by politics any more. How could Tommaso have fallen hook, line and sinker for some fringe party whose programme, from what Zen had heard of it, sounded like total lunacy? Christ, he’d probably be the only other person at this rally he’d promised to attend!

The ferry headed out into the crowded waters of the canalazzo. Zen and the young couple, standing amidships, swayed back and forth as the wash of passing vessels struck the hull. The ferrymen standing at bow and stern rowed steadily, pushing their oars into the water in short thrusts, as though turning over soil. Soon they nosed in at the pier on the other bank, where another cluster of passengers stood waiting to cross. Zen set off along the alley leading back from the water, walking on the boards which had been laid down to cover a trench for a new gas main.

When he neared the Ponte Guglie, he went into a grocer’s shop which was still open. The shop was dim and vaulted, so densely crowded with goods that it was almost impossible to move. As Zen’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he made out the owner lurking at the counter like a spider in its web. He bought some coffee, mineral water and a packet of biscuits for breakfast. The grocer rang up his purchases on one of the huge state-of-the-art electronic registers required by the tax authorities, which looked as out of place in these troglodytic surroundings as a computer in a cave.

Hefting his green plastic bag of purchases, Zen continued along the Cannaregio canal, his feet aching at the unaccustomed exercise, and turned off into the alley which gradually widened into the triangular campo with the circular stone well-head, its carvings obliterated by time and touch. He noted the strip of whitened paving, caused by droppings from the birds which perched on the power and phone cables crossing the street at this point. How often had he come this way? How many times had he followed this route home? The thought inspired a sort of vertigo. He recoiled from contact with all those other selves, each of which had seemed so absolute at the time, but were now revealed as just another in a restless, flickering series of imposters. I’m getting as bad as Ada Zulian and that fisherman from Burano, he thought. I should never have come. I should have stayed in Rome, where you can drive everywhere and no one believes in ghosts.

The house felt cold and empty. As Zen opened the door to the living room, the telephone started to ring. He stood, staring at it but making no attempt to answer. It rang eleven times before cutting off with a brief peep. Eyeing the instrument warily, Zen set down his shopping and circled round the room to the window, and threw open the casements. The cool evening air flowed in over the sill, setting up currents and eddies in the whole room. He had the sensation that the floor was rocking gently back and forth, like a boat at its mooring. It was some time before he became aware that he was not the only one enjoying the dusk. From one of the bedrooms on the top floor of the house opposite, a young woman stood looking down at him.

Zen waved to her.

‘Good evening.’

Cristiana Morosini smiled vaguely and nodded. She seemed to be about to say something when the phone in the room behind him began to ring again. With an impatient shrug, Zen turned away to answer it.

‘Hello? Who? Tania! Oh, I was just going to call you! Did you ring a moment ago? No? I just got home and it was ringing as I came in, but I couldn’t reach it in time. I thought it might have been you.’

He dug out his cigarettes.

‘Oh, all right. It doesn’t look as though there’s much to be done, but I’ll stretch it out as long as I can…’

He paused to light up.

‘Of course I’m missing you, sweetheart, but it’s a question of the money, isn’t it? I mean that’s why I’m here. The family are paying by the day, so the longer I take over it the better, no?’

He clasped the receiver to his ear for some time.

‘Of course I appreciate your situation, Tania. I just hope you appreciate mine. It would be nice to get a little appreciation, once in a while. It’s not that much fun camping out in this house like a squatter.’

Whorls of smoke from his cigarette drifted like weed about the room, delineating its tidal currents and stagnant pools.

‘Because this is not my real work. That’s what’s different about it. I don’t have to run errands for Americans. I’d be much happier to stay in Rome, go through the motions at the office and then come round and see you in the evening. But we’ve got to think about the future. We can’t go on in the way we have been, and my apartment isn’t large enough for all of us to share, so unless we get some money from somewhere…’

He broke off and listened, sighing.

‘I’m not angry! But quite frankly I’ve got enough problems as it is without having you phoning me up to nag me because I don’t sound sufficiently sorry about not being there. Understand? Under the circumstances, I think you could show a little more consideration.’

He held the receiver away from his ear. It continued to emit angry squawks. He set it down on the table and walked back to the window. Cristiana Morosini had disappeared. He walked back to the table and picked up the phone, but the vocal ostinato had been replaced by a steady electronic humming.

Replacing the receiver, he walked through to the kitchen and opened the window there. The increased flow of air immediately cancelled all the existing currents, scouring out a new deep channel from one window to the other. Zen leant on the windowsill and gazed morosely down at the darkly mobile surface of the water in the canal below. He had completely failed to strike the right note with Tania. She had wanted to be reassured, to be soothed and wooed, and he hadn’t been able to do it. It was like a language he had once learned, but had forgotten.

Similar episodes had occurred before, but never when they were apart. Until now, separation had always brought out the best in them, and when they were together such failures were quickly forgotten. But now they were apart, a conversation such as the one they had just had became emblematic of more general shortcomings, problems and inadequacies in the relationship as a whole. Judging by Tania’s manner, she felt that there was no shortage of these.

He let his spent cigarette drop into the canal. The tide was high again, just as it had been when he had looked out from the bedroom on the morning of his arrival. He closed the window and walked back to the living room, where he picked up the plastic shopping bag. He eyed the phone briefly. It wasn’t too late to call Tania back and apologize, to talk the whole thing through and…

He turned away and carried the shopping through to the kitchen, where he arranged the items artistically on the bare shelves. It was too late. He felt divided from Tania by infinitely more than the actual distance between them. It was as if she were on the other side of the world, or even some other world.

He stood back, admiring his work. It might not be the home beautiful, but at least he could have a cup of coffee in the morning. As for the evening looming up before him, big, blank and empty, that was a much less alluring prospect. He would have to find somewhere to have dinner, for a start. The prospect of eating alone in some dreary, over-priced trattoria did not appeal. When he spoke to Tania, he had deliberately exploited the draw-backs of his situation for dramatic effect, but the fact remained that in many ways it was not enviable. Despite this, he hadn’t the slightest desire to be anywhere else, least of all back in Rome.

As though in response to this thought, the phone began to ring again. For a moment he toyed with the idea of not answering. The last thing he wanted was to have to resume the laborious task of trying to communicate meaningfully with Tania. He had nothing whatever to say to her. But it would only make matters worse in the long run to hide there, pretending not to be home. Heaving a deep sigh, he walked through to the living room and picked up the receiver.

‘Aurelio Battista, is that you?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Oh thank God you’re there! I’ve rung twice already but there was no reply. I think I’d have gone mad if you hadn’t answered this time!’

‘ Contessa?’

‘They’re here! It’s worse than ever! They’ve got knives! For God’s sake come quickly!’

By the time he turns up, of course, her shield and strength, her bold avenger, the intruders have cleared off. He searches every room in the palazzo, but there is no one there. As she told him earlier, they’re not stupid. Neither is he, Giustiniana’s son. He was always quick on the uptake, even as a child, she’ll give him that. Ada recalls being astonished, sometimes, by the things he’d come out with, finding a connection between two things she’d quite forgotten about, or hadn’t even noticed in the first place.

That’s no comfort here, though. She herself has still got all her wits about her, whatever folk may say, and much good it’s done her. Mere human intelligence is powerless against the adversaries she faces. The Church might have helped, but Ada turned her back on God after what He allowed to happen to Rosetta. She does not go so far as to deny His existence, but she’ll be damned if she’ll acknowledge it.

This time, though, she almost blurted out a prayer. It had never been so bad before. She had grown used to the continual harassment, the sudden scurries and scampering in the dark, the flashing and stabbing lights, the shouts and screams and mocking laughter. It was all horrible, but at least the ritual seemed to have rules which until tonight had never been broken. The most important, from her point of view, was that whatever the creatures might get up to in the way of noise and nuisance, they never actually laid hands on her.

She’d known for a long time that they had hands, because in her panic she had sometimes run up against them. They were substantial all right, whatever people might say. But until now all physical contact between them had been accidental, the result of her panic and their inability to get out of her way fast enough. That she could just about tolerate, but what had happened tonight was quite unspeakable, just too awful for words…

Which is precisely the problem, she finds, when she tries to explain. Whatever she says, however she phrases it, the whole thing sounds unreal, phantasmagoric, even to her. She doesn’t even quite believe her own experience, so how can she expect anyone else to do so? She glances once again at Aurelio Battista, crouching beside her on the low hard settle. His tone is sympathetic enough, but she’s already beginning to regret having phoned him.

‘Does it hurt?’ he asks, dampening the rag in the dilute vinegar she is using as an antiseptic.

Ada dabs the shallow cuts across the inside of her wrists.

‘It’s nothing.’

He shakes his head.

‘I’ll call an ambulance boat, contessa. We must get these injuries seen to.’

But that’s precisely what she doesn’t want. It’s one thing having the police involved. Despite Daniele Trevisan’s warnings, the policemen she’s dealt with so far have been perfectly correct, for all their evident scepticism. But the doctors are another matter altogether. Ada will never forget what they did to her the last time, even though she cannot actually remember in any detail what they did do. Never again, that much is certain. She’d rather slit her wrists than go back to San Clemente!

As it is, she is not even being consulted. Giustiniana’s boy is speaking into the telephone, giving orders in a peremptory way, referring to her as ‘the patient’, as though she were some sort of object. To get her own back, she blots him out in turn, replacing him with an earlier version dressed in a skirt and blouse, playing with one of Rosetta’s dolls, all alone in this vast cold salon, dwarfed by the furniture…

‘They’ll be here shortly,’ says the other Aurelio Battista. ‘Now then, what became of the knife?’

She points to the other side of the salon, towards the enormous dining table reputedly made from the timbers of a captured Turkish galley. ‘The dragon table’, little Aurelio used to call it, crawling about its giant legs carved in the form of claws… As he is again now, down on his hands and knees to gather up the carving knife lying there on the floor.

‘Is this yours, contessa?’ he asks, carrying the knife towards her by the tip of the blade.

Ada nods dumbly.

‘It’s so blunt,’ she murmurs.

He sets the knife down on a chair and stands looking down at her.

‘One of them held my arm while the other cut me,’ she explains. ‘He had to press quite hard, the knife is so blunt. It hurt.’

But it’s the fear rather than the pain she remembers most clearly. She knows now that they weren’t trying to kill her, but at the time she had no such assurance, and her terror was so extreme that she had lost control of her bladder. She does not tell Zen that her principal concern had been to remove all trace of this before he arrived.

‘Can you describe the intruders?’ he asks, sitting down again.

Of course she can. But she is unwilling to do so. She knows only too well that the grotesque appearance of the figures, with their exaggerated features and fantastic costumes, sounds totally absurd, something from a nightmare. And sure enough, as she talks about the tall one with the huge hooked nose, sunken eyes and gaping rictus, his voluminous clothes chequered like a harlequin, a knowing look comes over her visitor’s face.

‘Do you go out much, contessa?’ he asks casually.

She carefully disguises the fact that she cannot see the point of this question at all.

‘Once or twice a week to the shops…’

‘You never go to the Piazza, for example?’

She looks at him in bewilderment. The last time she went to the Piazza was before the war, when her husband was still alive. Who would she go with now? And why?

‘Whatever for?’ she demands.

The man shrugs.

‘Some people just like to go and stroll about there, to see and be seen. At carnival, for example.’

Ada Zulian tosses her head.

‘Carnival is for children. I have no children.’

They confront each other for a moment over this. Then the man nods, as though acknowledging what it cost her to say this.

‘This is the second night that this has happened,’ he says, moving to a less painful topic.

Ada nods.

‘And before that?’ he asks.

She thinks back, but before she can answer he comes back with another question.

‘Is there any pattern to these… experiences?’

‘How do you mean?’ she replies warily.

‘Do they occur at any particular time of day, or any particular day of the week?’

Ada spots the trap just in time. The doctors asked her just such a question the last time, about Rosetta’s reappearances. That was before she was on her guard with the doctors, when she still trusted them, before she knew what they were capable of. So she told them the truth, that her daughter appeared each night at exactly six o’clock. Her inquisitors had seized on that with evil glee. Six o’clock, they pointed out, was precisely the time that the real Rosetta had been expected to return home on the day she vanished. The fact that the hallucinations conformed to such a regular pattern was incontrovertible proof that they were manifestations of an obsessional delusion.

Well, she learned her lesson the hard way, but learned it she did. She won’t be caught that way again.

‘No,’ she replies firmly. ‘They come at any time they please. There’s no pattern at all.’

Aurelio Battista frowns.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I can prove it!’ cries Ada triumphantly.

She gets up and marches over to the cabinet in which she keeps the set of leather-bound folio volumes which her father used to record the accounts of the family cotton business. It is in the ample acres of blank pages at the rear of these volumes that Ada enters every day, in a hand so minute as to be practically illegible, the credit and debit balance of her own life.

She pulls out the volume she is currently using and flips back through the pages to the point, just over a month earlier, when these manifestations began to occur. In a steady, even tone, showing no trace whatever of excitement or disturbance, she recites the date, time and duration of each intrusion to Aurelio Battista, who writes it all down solemnly in his notebook.

As Ada replaces the huge volume in the cabinet, vindicated by the facts, she hears the seesaw clamour of a siren outside and sees a flashing blue light infiltrating the shutters on the windows at the front of the house, above the canal. In an instant, all her hard-won serenity deserts her. Can Giustiniana’s boy really be going to turn her over to the doctors?

‘I’ll need the key to the waterdoor,’ he tells her, putting away his notebook.

A cunning idea suggests itself to her.

‘The waterdoor? But that hasn’t been used for years. I’ve no idea where the key is.’

The siren dies to a guttural groan beneath the house. Aurelio Battista walks over to the window and undoes the fastenings.

‘Make fast to the mooring rings,’ he calls down. ‘We’ll be down in a moment.’

He turns to Ada. The flashing blue lamp on the roof of the boat makes the whole room pulse.

‘The key, contessa?’

Ada returns to the cabinet, opens a drawer and paws around among the keys of all shapes and sizes, some antiques, some modern copies, each labelled in her father’s pedantically legible script.

‘I’ve really no idea where it can be,’ she says. ‘Heaven knows when the thing was last opened.’

In fact she remembers all too well. It was when her father’s condition became critical and he had to be moved to hospital.

But her visitor is not to be deterred from his purposes so easily.

‘Then we’ll walk round to the bridge,’ he tells her. ‘There are steps down to the water there.’

He fetches Ada’s coat and leads her downstairs. But when they reach the andron he leaves her and walks over to the massive door at the end giving on to the canal. And there the key is, of course, attached to the wall by a nail. When the man lifts it off, a rusty silhouette remains behind on the plaster. The throbbing of the launch makes the whole entrance vibrate.

He inserts the key into the lock, which turns smoothly. The door swings open under its own weight without a sound. The tide is high enough for the ambulance to be roped in against the watersteps. One of the attendants jumps ashore while the other manoeuvres a gangplank on to the paving of the hallway. Aurelio Battista is shouting instructions to the other man, who nods earnestly. Something about what is to be done with her once they reach the hospital. With a sinking feeling, Ada acknowledges that matters are slipping out of her control. She has tried so hard, but now it is suddenly all too much. She starts to scream, to struggle, then subsides to the paving and lets them have their way with her. There is a flurry of movement, a clink of instruments, a sting in her arm, and then everything tactfully recedes.

He almost didn’t go home. If it hadn’t been for the carving knife, which he’d wrapped in newspaper in a crude attempt to preserve any fingerprints, he would probably have wandered off looking for a suitable place to eat. As it was he went home first, and that changed everything.

Approaching the house up the long wedge of the campo, he noticed that the lights were on. He knew he hadn’t left them on himself. His mother had lectured him too often as a child about the shameful waste of leaving lights burning in an empty room, as well as the danger of a fire if a burning electric bulb — it was impossible to explain to her that there was no actual flame — were left unattended.

For a moment, he thought twice about entering the house. What had happened to Ada Zulian had shocked him more than he had allowed himself to reveal. Even if her injuries were self-inflicted, and the balance of probability had to lie in that direction, this new development was very disturbing. A degree more pressure on the knife blade would have been sufficient to sever the artery. Such had been the implied message of those shallow cuts on Ada’s wrist. For some reason Zen felt it to be directed at him, at his presence in the city, his intrusion into whatever was going on.

Putting aside these fancies, he opened the front door as quietly as possible and made his way upstairs. Long before he reached the landing, he could already hear noises from the living room. His only weapon was Ada’s knife. Grasping the handle through the newspaper wrapping, he crept across the landing and stood listening by the door. There was no question that someone was moving about in there.

Footsteps approached the door on the other side. Zen stood there, clutching the knife. The knob turned and a woman appeared silhouetted in the doorway. Zen lowered the knife.

‘Good evening,’ he said, as though the whole situation were perfectly normal.

Cristiana Morosini gestured awkwardly.

‘I thought you’d gone out to dinner,’ she said. ‘My mother’s feather duster is missing. She thought she might have left it over here. I used the key you left with her to get in.’

Zen nodded and walked past her into the living room.

‘Ada Zulian phoned,’ he said.

He set the wrapped knife down on the table.

‘How is she?’

‘How is she?’ Zen repeated, a hysterical edge creeping into his voice. ‘Not so good. Not so good at all. She tried to kill herself, or make it look as though she had.’

Cristiana Morosini rolled her eyes.

‘Not again!’

Zen glanced at her sharply.

‘It’s happened before?’

Cristiana nodded.

‘A couple of years ago. She slashed her wrists with a kitchen knife. Fortunately one of her nephews found her in time, and they managed to patch her up. But Mamma’s right, you know. This is a case for the doctors.’

Zen shrugged.

‘Well, the doctors have got her now. I packed her off to the hospital.’

‘Were her injuries that serious?’

He shook his head.

‘It’s just to keep her under observation, really. I want to make sure she’s not left alone until I have a chance to think the whole thing over and decide what to do.’

This neutral topic exhausted, they stood awkwardly eyeing each other. Zen glanced at his watch.

‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’ he demanded abruptly.

Cristiana shrugged.

‘I’ve already eaten. Mamma made sopa de pesse.’

‘Come and keep me company anyway. As an old friend of the family. I’m lonely, Cristiana. This place gives me the creeps. I don’t know why I’ve come. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I need someone to talk to. I also need a fax machine. Do you have a fax machine, Cristiana? If so you could satisfy all my needs.’

They looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then Cristiana smiled and started to button up her coat.

‘There’s one at the office where I work. As for eating, the places round here aren’t up to much, but there’s a pizzeria which isn’t bad. We could go there if you like.’

Zen luxuriated for a moment under her intense lambent gaze.

‘I’m in your hands,’ he said.

‘Oh God, there’s Gabriella Rosteghin,’ exclaimed Cristiana with a gleeful laugh. ‘That means this’ll be all over the neighbourhood tomorrow morning.’

‘What will?’ murmured Zen.

‘You and I, of course.’

Zen looked over at the giggling group of teenage girls casting glances in their direction from the other end of the pizzeria.

‘We haven’t done anything yet,’ he said mildly.

‘So much the better! Gabriella prefers it that way. It gives her more scope. She doesn’t need to worry about fitting in with the facts.’

Zen sipped his beer.

‘Tell me about this Nuova Repubblica Veneta business,’ he said. ‘What’s it all about? How did it get started?’

Cristiana sighed and shook her head.

‘About four years ago, Nando joined the Lega Veneta, which had just been formed. I told him at the time that he was making a mistake. Politics draws you in, little by little, until you forget everything else. Mind you, no one had any inkling how popular the League would prove to be. Even Bossi thought it would take at least a decade to convince people that there was a viable alternative to the traditional parties. In the event, of course, the thing was a runaway success from the start. Everyone began to scent the possibility of power. That’s when the trouble started.’

The pizzas they had ordered arrived, Cristiana having decided that she could after all manage something, and for a while they turned their attention to eating.

‘I saw Tommaso Saoner today,’ Zen said, pausing to gulp some beer. ‘I didn’t recognize him at all. It might have been a different person, the way he was talking.’

Cristiana nodded vigorously.

‘That’s just what happened to Nando. He’s changed completely, just as I predicted. He used to be easygoing, and such fun! But the moment he got involved in politics he turned into a total fanatic. It’s a drug. It gets into your blood and you become a different person.’

They ate in silence for a while.

‘That’s what caused the split with Bossi,’ Cristiana went on. ‘Nando wanted the Lega Veneta to take its distance from the Northern Leagues, which he claimed were too dominated by Lombardy. Although the Dal Maschio family is Venetian, Nando was brought up in Pavia, and he’s never forgotten how the people there made fun of his accent. Anyway, his proposals were turned down, so he promptly resigned along with Saoner and a few others and formed his own breakaway group.’

‘And do they really want to resurrect the Venetian Republic?’

Cristiana nodded.

‘“Our past is our future, our future is our past.” That’s one of Nando’s slogans. It doesn’t make any sense, does it? But he really believes it. He isn’t a charlatan, like so many politicians. He believes everything he says.’

She pushed her half-eaten pizza away.

‘Anyway, that’s enough about him!’

She sized up Zen with her eyes for a moment.

‘You’re married too, aren’t you?’

He shrugged.

‘Legally, yes. But that’s all in the past. And my past is certainly not my future. Not if I’ve got anything to do with it, anyway.’

Cristiana laughed.

‘Children?’ she asked.

Zen shook his head.

‘Although I sometimes feel as though there’s another me that’s still married to Luisella and is probably a father by now.’

He looked at her.

‘Do you ever feel that? That every time you come to a crossroads in your life, there’s a ghostly double which splits off and goes the other way, the route you didn’t take. I know exactly what he’s like, my married version. I might as well be him. I could easily be. It just so happens that I’m not.’

He smiled wryly and got out his cigarettes.

‘Listen to the pizzeria philosopher! Sorry, I’m talking nonsense.’

The bevy of teenage girls passed by their table on the way out.

‘Ciao, Cristiana.’

‘ Ciao, Gabriella.’

Swathed in smirks and giggles, the group sallied forth into the night. With their departure, the room seemed to contract, becoming a smaller and more intimate space.

‘Do you ever think about coming home?’ asked Cristiana lightly.

‘Home?’

‘To live, I mean.’

When Zen did not reply, she added, ‘But perhaps you have a reason for wanting to stay in Rome. Something, or someone.’

He shook his head slowly.

‘Only my job.’

‘But you could get a transfer here if you wanted.’

‘Probably. But I haven’t had a reason for coming back here. Not so far.’

He looked at her.

‘It’s your home,’ said Cristiana. ‘Isn’t that reason enough?’

Zen shrugged.

‘It’s more often seemed a reason for staying away. Those ghostly doubles I was talking about are thicker on the ground here than anywhere else.’

There was a brief silence between them.

‘Speaking of ghosts, Ada Zulian described one of her intruders to me this evening,’ Zen murmured, as though to himself. ‘She said it had a large hook nose, a fixed grin and gaping eyes and wore a loose-fitting costume in black and white check, like a harlequin. The other had pale flawless features, neither male nor female, and was dressed in a cloak of gold and scarlet.’

Cristiana sniffed dismissively.

‘Sounds like carnival.’

Zen nodded.

‘Exactly what occurred to me. But where could Ada have seen carnival costumes? She hardly ever leaves the house, and then only to go to the local shops. You don’t see people dressed up like that in this area. She doesn’t have a television and never reads the papers.’

‘Perhaps she remembers it from when she was a child.’

Zen drained off the last of his beer and clicked his fingers to summon the waiter.

‘When Ada was a child, the carnival didn’t exist. The children got dressed up as bunnies or cowboys or pirates, and there was a dance for the parents if the weather was good, but that was all. The chichi spectacle they put on these days, with all the jet setters from Milan and Rome dolled up in fantastic costumes which cost the earth, that’s all a recent invention. I’m willing to bet that Ada Zulian has never seen a “traditional” Venetian carnival outfit in her life.’

‘She must have done,’ retorted Cristiana, standing to put on her coat. ‘Otherwise how could she describe it?’

Outside, a fine drizzle had started to fall. They walked home through the deserted streets and over the darkened waterways as though they owned them, as though the whole city were their private domain. The knowledge that they were a subject of gossip lent a nimbus of glamour to what in different circumstances might have seemed a fairly homely outing.

They also laughed a lot. Cristiana Morosini had a mordant, malicious sense of humour which Zen found refreshingly direct after months of feminist earnestness. In principle he agreed with Tania’s views — or at least did not disagree with them enough to argue — but they were relentlessly correct and offered no scope for heartless humour. As Cristiana recounted a succession of decidely unsisterly anecdotes about a mutual acquaintance, Zen found himself responding with a warmth and freedom he had not felt for a very long time.

When they reached their houses, they stopped, suddenly awkward.

‘Well, good night,’ said Zen. ‘Thank you for coming along. I really enjoyed myself.’

‘So did I.’

She took a card from her purse and handed it to him.

‘This is where I work. The fax and phone numbers are on it. Give me a ring and I’ll tell you whether anything has arrived.’

Zen watched her walk to her door and unlock it. She looked round and waved, and only then did he turn away.

By morning, a dense fog had settled on the city. When a combination of high tides and strong onshore winds flooded the streets with the dreaded aqua alta, the council posted maps showing the zones affected and the routes on higher ground which remained open, but the fog respected no limits. It ebbed and flowed according to its own laws, blossoming here, thinning there, blurring outlines, abolishing distinctions and making the familiar strange and unlikely.

‘What the…!’

‘For the love of…!’

‘Watch where you’re going!’

‘You think you own the street?’

Catching sight of a dishevelled elderly man with a dog at his heels, Zen hastily slipped back into the enshrouding obscurity of the fog before he got entangled in another episode of Daniele Trevisan’s vaporous reminiscences. But he had not gone much further before another collision occurred.

‘Excuse me!’

‘Oh!’

‘Rosalba?’

‘Ah, if it isn’t Casanova himself!’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘“I’m just going over to see Wanda,” she tells me last night. That’s Wanda Dal Maschio, Nando’s sister, somehow they’ve remained on good terms despite what’s happened. The next thing I know, Lisa Rosteghin’s phoning me to ask who’s the tall dark stranger Cristiana’s been seen having a pizza with!’

Zen gave a feeble smile.

‘I just wanted to catch up on the local gossip.’

‘Of course!’ returned Rosalba heartily. ‘Once Cristiana got back and I found out it was you, I knew there was no question of any hanky-panky. Why, you’re old enough to be her father!’

Zen’s smile slowly faded. Rosalba picked up her shopping and slipped back into the fog, disappearing within moments.

‘Thick as snot,’ her voice called back. ‘Mind how you go, Aurelio.’

On the Cannaregio, a slight breeze was at work, stirring the fog into currents of differing density. The palaces and churches fronting the canal came and went, the forms firming up and vagueing away like a print from an old photographic plate damaged by the ravages of time. A barge nosed through out from a side canal into the main channel, hooting mournfully. Similar sirens and signals, muffled by the moist air, resounded in the distance.

Zen was making slow progress towards the ferry stop when he was hurled headlong to the cobbles, banging his knee and shoulder painfully. Getting up again and looking round, he saw the line of tubing over which he had tripped, straight lengths of metal bolted together with blue concertina inserts in plastic to accommodate corners. Down at the quayside one of the ubiquitous red barges marked POZZI NERI would be moored ready to receive the contents of whichever septic tank was being drained that morning.

He picked up his briefcase, lit a cigarette and continued on his way across the bridge to the floating platform where a dozen people were already waiting. Spectral in the fog, the massive wooden pilings chained together to form a tripod securing the platform, their tops phallically rounded, looked like an idol dedicated to some god of the lagoon. From time to time invisible craft passed by, the wash making the landing stage shift restlessly at its moorings.

At length a muffled cone of light appeared in the fog, gradually brightening and widening until the boat itself became visible, one of the motoscafi with a rakishly high bow like a torpedo boat. The waiting crowd filed on board and the ferry continued cautiously on its way, creeping through the water, the engine barely turning over, the searchlight at the bow scanning back and forth. Once they cleared the mouth of the Cannaregio the water started to heave dully, making the boat yaw and wallow.

At Fondamente Nove, where he had to change, Zen stopped off in a bar for a caffe corretto. The barman had the radio on, and Zen caught the end of some local news item about a fisherman who had been found drowned somewhere in the northern lagoon. The police were said to be investigating. Zen tossed off the scalding coffee, heady with grappa, and wandered over to the window to look for his ferry. The steamer to Burano and Treporti was just casting off, but there was no activity at the pier where the number 5 stopped.

On the wall beside the window was another of the calendars which he had seen the previous day at the osteria where he had met Marco Paulon, with the fall and rise of the tides in the lagoon superimposed on the days of the month. Zen lifted it down from its hook and copied the information for the earlier part of the month into his notebook, glancing out of the window from time to time. There was still no sign of the circolare destra. After waiting five minutes, he decided to walk.

Away from the slight breezes of the open lagoon, the fog blocked the winding cuts and alleys, as thick as silt. Zen waded through it, narrowly avoiding a number of close encounters with walls, canals and other pedestrians, until he emerged at length in Campo San Lorenzo. A blue-and-white launch was just setting off from the Questura with the ear-splitting roar to which police drivers always aspired, whatever their vehicle. Zen climbed the stairs to the office he had been assigned on the second floor. Aldo Valentini was standing by the window, looking out at the swirling grey pall.

‘Filthy stuff,’ he said vehemently, catching sight of Zen’s reflection in the glass. ‘Coats your throat and lungs. Can’t you taste it? All the pollution from Mestre and Marghera packaged for your convenience in easy-to-breathe aerosol form.’

Zen slumped behind his desk and phoned the Ospedale Civile. Putting on his most brutal tone, he cowed an unwilling functionary of that institution into briefing him on the condition of Ada Zulian. Eventually he was connected to a woman doctor who reported that the patient had made a complete recovery and was anxious to go home but was being kept at the hospital in accordance with the instructions which Zen had given the ambulance crew the night before. She had been visited by her nephews, who had strongly supported their aunt’s right to be discharged if she so wished.

‘And of course they’re absolutely right,’ the doctor concluded. ‘Quite apart from the considerable pressure on our facilities here, it’s no part of our business to keep patients confined when they’re able and willing to leave.’

‘I quite understand,’ Zen murmured soothingly. ‘Thank you so much for your forbearance. Unfortunately there’s a bit of a demand for transport at present, but I’ll come and pick up the contessa just as soon as a boat becomes available.’

He hung up before the doctor could reply. Opening his briefcase, he extracted a bundle wrapped in newspaper and folded back the wrapping to reveal a large carving knife.

‘Where can I get this printed?’ he asked Valentini.

‘The lab’s at the university. If you leave it with Renaldi in the basement he’ll have it sent over. I’ll take it down for you, if you like. I’ve got bugger all else to do after getting bumped off the Sfriso case.’

Being from Ferrara, Valentini pronounced it ‘Sfrizo’. Zen looked up.

‘Isn’t that the break-in you were talking about yesterday?’

‘It was. Now it’s a drowning. Out by Burano.’

Zen suddenly recalled what Marco Paulon had told him on the way to the ottagono the day before.

‘Sfriso? Is he the same man who claimed to have seen the dead on Sant’Ariano walking around?’

Aldo Valentini nodded.

‘And now he’s joined them. One of the monks rowing back to San Francesco del Deserto fished him out of the water yesterday afternoon. I spent most of last night at Burano, trying to piece together what happened, only to get in this morning and find that Gavagnin has taken over the case. He’s giving the brother a hard time downstairs even now.’

‘Why did they take you off the case?’

Valentini scowled.

‘Damned if I know. First of all Gavagnin tried to take the break-in away from me. Claimed it was linked to some drugs case he’s working on. I couldn’t see it. The Sfriso brothers were just a couple of typical Burano fishermen.’

‘What was the break-in about?’

‘It happened one Sunday while they were at Mass with their mother. The house was torn apart, but nothing was taken. A neighbour saw the intruders leaving and phoned one one three, but by the time we got a boat there they were long gone. The only strange thing about it was that the Sfrisos wouldn’t co-operate. They didn’t want to pursue the matter, they said. Wouldn’t even file a complaint until I told them they had to.’

Zen nodded to show a polite interest.

‘And now one of them’s dead. Is there any suggestion of foul play?’

Valentini shrugged.

‘I didn’t see any, but it’s out of my hands. Gavagnin must have pulled some strings upstairs this time. They didn’t even bother to discuss it with me, just told me to hand over the file.’

He sighed.

‘It’s really pissed me off, I can tell you. First interesting thing happens in months and it gets pulled out from under my feet.’

He took the carving knife from Zen and wrapped it up again.

‘What was this used to do?’

Zen briefly ran through the events of the previous night. Aldo Valentini yawned loudly.

‘I’ll bet you anything you like the prints on the handle are hers.’

Zen shrugged.

‘Probably. Still, I’m going to have to put a man in the house. I don’t want her dead next time.’

‘It’d be better to get the old girl committed again. The chief isn’t going to agree to tying up personnel indefinitely to keep someone with her psychiatric record from slitting her wrists. We’re not running a nanny service, you know.’

Zen put his finger to his lips.

‘If I do that, I’ll be out of work too,’ he said in a stage whisper. ‘I only just got here, for God’s sake. I want to spin it out for a week at least.’

Valentini smiled broadly.

‘Oh well, put like that, of course, the case for ongoing police intervention becomes overwhelming. I’ll take this downstairs, then go and grab some breakfast.’

He headed for the door, shaking his head.

‘Bastards!’

Once Valentini had gone, Zen phoned the Questore’s office. Francesco Bruno, the provincial police chief, was out of town, and the call was taken by his deputy. Zen outlined the history of his involvement with the case so far and explained why he wished to post a guard inside Palazzo Zulian. The Deputy Questore at first expressed considerable doubts about this, and an even greater amazement that a Criminalpol operative had been commissioned to investigate such a comparatively insignificant case.

‘Exactly!’ Zen retorted triumphantly. ‘This woman clearly must have powerful connections to have me sent up here. It is therefore all the more essential that we do not leave ourselves open to any possible criticism. How’s it going to look if we wash our hands of the affair and then she goes and kills herself?’

The Deputy Questore speedily acknowledged the force of this argument. Armed with this authorization from on high, Zen spent the next twenty minutes punishing the internal telephone system until he had made the necessary arrangements. He then typed up a confirmation, took it down to Personnel and extracted a receipt, thereby giving the staff an interest in seeing that his orders were actually carried out.

Back at his desk, he rang Serenissmi Viaggi, the travel agency where Cristiana Morosini worked. He had phoned Palazzo Sisti before leaving home to pass on the fax number, but the subordinate he had spoken to then had been unable or unwilling to reveal whether or not l’onorevole had been successful in obtaining the material Zen wished to consult. So his disappointment at not being able to speak to Cristiana herself, who had gone out on some errand, was mitigated by the news that a fax transmission in his name had indeed arrived and was awaiting collection.

Zen grabbed his hat and coat and hurried out. The light in the corridors and stairwell seemed slightly hazy, as though the drench all around had seeped through the walls to taint the air inside as well. Somewhere below a door slammed shut and a pair of metal-tipped shoes began running along an echoing passage. Zen continued down. As he reached the landing he met a tubby, choleric man dashing up the stairs two at a time.

‘Aren’t you Enzo Gavagnin?’ said Zen.

‘Well?’ snapped the other, whirling round.

‘Aurelio Zen, Vice-Questore. We met yesterday. I’m here on secondment from the Ministry.’

Enzo Gavagnin’s eyes became smaller and more intense.

‘Excuse me! I for one have no time to chat.’

‘Oh quite,’ Zen murmured languidly. ‘Sounds like a big case you’re working on. A drowned fisherman, eh? I’ve never heard the like! Did he slip on a squid or get his waders caught in the winch?’

Gavagnin glared at him.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ he growled in dialect.

Outside, the fog was thicker than ever. Buildings loomed up like ships, towering above the narrow lanes where featureless figures slipped in and out of the clammy banks of vapour. As Zen passed on the corner, he caught sight of Aldo Valentini drowning his sorrows with a sandwich and glass of wine. For a moment he was tempted to join him, but he kept going, stopping at a bakery to buy half a loaf of olive bread. He chewed contentedly as he walked along, savouring the warm pulp of the dough and the sweet black putrefaction of the olives.

Serenissimi Viaggi was in an alley just north of the Piazza, lined with shops selling carnival masks and costumes. A group of tourists passed by like soldiers on patrol in enemy territory, bunched for protection, cameras ready to shoot at the slightest opportunity. One of them looked at the posters in the window of the agency and frowned, momentarily disturbed by the idea that a city he thought of only as a holiday destination was offering holidays elsewhere.

Inside the small shop were two desks piled with brochures and timetables and computer equipment. One was unoccupied. An anorexically cadaverous woman with unnaturally white skin and black hair was seated behind the other. She did not look up as Zen entered.

‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I’m Cristiana’s friend. I’ve come to pick up the fax which arrived for me.’

The woman sighed mightily. She stood up and walked over to the other desk. After rummaging through the papers scattered there for some time, she returned with a large envelope which she handed to Zen, still avoiding any eye contact but fixing the half-eaten loaf in his hand with a look full of disapproval.

‘Thirty-eight thousand,’ she said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

The woman tapped the keys of a printing calculator.

‘Fourteen pages fax reception at two thousand a page equals twenty-eight thousand, plus five thousand handling fee makes thirty-three, plus VAT at fifteen per cent four nine five oh say another five equals thirty-eight thousand in all. Do you want a receipt?’

Zen paid and shuffled out into the fog, clutching the envelope. He turned right, off the main street, away from the crowds, glancing at the shopfronts to either side. In Campo Santa Maria Formosa he found what he had been looking for: a small, cosy wine bar, almost empty at that hour. The walls were panelled with varnished laths, as though the hull of a boat had been flattened out like pollo alla diavola. The windows were screened by a lace curtain hanging on a rail. Brass lamps with bulbous glass shades cast patches of soft yellow light in the intimate gloom.

At the bar, a brown-flecked marble slab, three men stood discussing the merits of various models of outboard engine. Zen took a seat at a trestle table near the back of the room, facing the door. When the barman came over, he ordered some breaded crab claws and a quarter litre of white wine. He waited till the man had gone, then opened the envelope and spread the contents on the table.

The document faxed by Palazzo Sisti consisted of fourteen pages of double-spaced typing. There was no heading or other indication that the text formed part of an official report, the material having been retyped on to plain paper in order to conceal the source or to edit out any items which might have compromised friends or allies of l’onorevole.

Zen skimmed quickly through the report, then went back to the beginning and started again, reading more carefully and making marks and comments in the margin here and there. The first thing he learned was that the missing man’s real name was not Durridge but

He had been born in 1919 in Sarajevo, a city as notorious then, in the aftermath of the war which had been sparked off there, as it was again now that it had been abandoned to its fate by a world seemingly eager to demonstrate that it had learned nothing from the horrors of the intervening seventy-five years.

Zen casually placed the envelope over the fax sheets as the barman returned with his food and drink. He tore open one of the golden-breaded pincers, exposing the pink bone, and savoured the sweet flesh with sips of wine while he read on. When Ivan was twenty, another European conflict engulfed his country, only this time he was able to take an active hand. Unfortunately he backed the wrong faction, and when Tito’s Communist partisans took power of the new Yugoslavia the family were forced to make a hasty exit. They slipped across the Adriatric to Italy and thence to the United States, where Ivan changed his surname and went on to make a fortune in the trucking business.

Zen finished the last of the crab. He poured himself more wine, lit a cigarette and went back to the report. Durridge had first come to the attention of the Italian authorities in March 1988, when he had bought the ottagono in the lagoon and applied to the local Questura for a residence permit. Since then, according to the records of the frontier police, he had come and gone between Venice and Chicago four or five times a year. There were only two other instances of his name in official files. The first was a complaint which Durridge had made towards the end of September the previous year about an alleged trespass. The other, just over a month later, was when Franco Calderan phoned the Carabinieri to report that his employer was missing.

‘… weed fouled round the screw then…’

‘… tilt the whole issue and clean it by hand…’

‘… still swear by the little Fiat my father used…’

Zen blew an almost perfect smoke-ring towards the ceiling and called for more wine. Franco Calderan had returned from his day off on the Lido shortly after five o’clock that afternoon, the 11th. He used his own small dinghy for the crossing, and as soon as he approached the landing place he noticed that his master’s boat was absent from its mooring.

This boat, a traditional broad-beamed topa fitted with a Volvo diesel engine instead of the traditional lugsail, had not been seen since. Durridge never used it without Calderan aboard, having learned the hard way about the hazards of navigation on the lagoon when he ran aground south of the Fondi dei Sette Morti and had to spend the night aboard in the open until a fishing vessel returning to Chioggia threw him a line. Since the boat was nevertheless missing, the investigators’ assumption was that it had been taken by the same person or persons who had abducted Ivan Durridge.

As Marco Paulon had already indicated to Zen, the time frame for such a kidnapping was extremely tight. Durridge was known to have been on the island shortly after one o’clock that afternoon, since his sister had spoken to him on the phone from Florida. By two o’clock at the latest the tide would have been too low to permit embarkation or disembarkation from the ottagono. The possibility that the kidnappers had arrived by air was briefly considered, but ruled out because of the difficulty of landing a machine on the small patch of lawn which was the only open ground anywhere on the island, and entirely surrounded by mature trees — the Carabinieri themselves had had to come and go by boat throughout their investigation. One thing which no one questioned was that the American was a textbook target for a professional kidnapping: rich, solitary and living in isolation. All that was necesary to confirm this hypothesis was a ransom demand.

Thus far the report was quite clearly a more or less literal transcription of a file opened by the Carabinieri in Venice. The investigation was proceeding normally at local level, with no hint that the case had any further implications. Then, early in January, the Carabinieri suddenly received instructions from their superiors at the Ministry of Defence ordering them to suspend all activity relating to the Durridge case and forward any existing files and related material under seal to Rome for ‘assessment’.

The final section of the transcript consisted of selections — this was where the editing had taken place — of an internal memorandum addressed to a figure referred to only as ‘a senior official in the Defence Ministry’. It ran as follows:

With respect to the case to which you refer, a parallel agency has recently revealed a previous interest in Ivan Durridge/ which might be prejudiced by inquiries at judicial level. These have therefore been suspended in the interests of state security while the agency in question conducts its own investigation, the results of which will be communicated to all relevant parties and institutions in due course.

Well that’s that then, thought Zen, draining his glass of wine. ‘Parallel agency’ was a euphemism for the secret service organizations, in this case probably the Defence Ministry’s own SISMI unit. Whether Durridge had been their agent or their target was of no more than academic interest. Anything involving the secret services was out of his league. The most he could hope for was to massage the evidence so as to keep his private investigation going a little longer in the interests of siphoning as much money as possible out of the Durridge family. But how?

He pored over the fax again. Almost every lead seemed to have been exhausted. Eventually he spotted two possible openings. The first concerned the earlier landing on the ottagono, back in the summer; the other the fate of Durridge’s boat. Neither could remotely be described as promising, but by rapidly juggling them both he might manage to convey a mirage of solid progress and attainable goals to his employers, given their understandable desire to be deceived.

Back at the Questura, he set the wheels in motion. Durridge’s complaint to the police following the landing on his island in September had been duly logged at the time, and while the Carabinieri had been forced to send all their records to Rome, the Questura had received no such request for the simple reason that they had never opened a file on the Durridge case in the first place. Zen simply phoned downstairs for the relevant documents and ten minutes later they were on his desk.

To his disappointment, they seemed to offer no possibilities for fruitful exploitation and development. Not only had the three trespassers been apprehended and identified, but they were all respectable local men. Giulio Bon was from Chioggia, where he ran a boatyard. His companions lived in the city itself. Massimo Bugno was a crewhand on ACTV’s ferries and waterbuses, while Domenico Zuin owned a watertaxi.

As luck would have it, a police patrol boat had been in the area when Ivan Durridge’s complaint had been received on the 113 emergency number, and it was able to intercept the intruders as they left in a boat belonging to the said Zuin. All three protested their innocence. They had not known that the island was inhabited, assuming it to be abandoned like so many others in the lagoon. They had meant no harm, intending only to share a bottle of wine and a game of cards.

Zen got up from his desk and walked to the window. Now the fog seemed to have penetrated not just the building but also his mind, woozy from the wine. He had grown soft after years in the south, where people cut their wine with Coke and only the rich kids thought it chic to get pissed on imported beer. Back home again, he had automatically slipped back into the northern tradition, drinking a grappa with his morning coffee and then keeping a slow burn going with glasses of wine all day, but his brain could no longer handle it.

He lit a cigarette, whose smoke rubbed up against the glass like a cat, as though seeking union with the fog outside. There was nothing in the trespassing incident that he could show the Durridges’ lawyer. That left the boat. Returning to the desk, he called the office which kept records of all craft licensed to operate on waterways within the Province of Venice and asked them to send over details of any boats registered since the 1st of November previous.