Dead Lagoon

Emerging at the south end of the Arsenale canal, the launch turned hard to starboard, passing astern of a vaporetto landing-stage being towed away for installation or repair, and shot in under the Selpolcro bridge without any slackening of pace. It screeched past an orange-and-green garbage barge hoisting a street-sweeper’s cart aboard and surged along the canal, creating a wash which had the tethered vessels heaving at their moorings like frightened horses, before revving loudly in reverse at the last moment to slide in alongside the Fondamenta di San Lorenzo.

While the helmsman jumped ashore and secured the mooring ropes, the armed patrolman took up a position on the quayside, glancing alternately to left and right. Then the door of the cabin opened and the burly figure of Bettino Todesco appeared in the cockpit. He surveyed the scene briefly, then disappeared back into the cabin. A moment later he emerged, handcuffed to a figure whose head and shoulders were swathed in a blanket. The pair stepped ashore and hurried across the quay and into the open doorway of the Questura.

Forty seconds later, Filippo Sfriso was sitting in an office on the second floor of the building. The shutters were closed and Todesco stood guard at the door. Sfriso looked as though he were in shock. His body was subject to uncontrollable spasms of trembling, his face was pale and expressionaless, his gaze vacant. Neither man spoke. The door opened and Aurelio Zen walked in. Filippo Sfriso rose slowly to his feet. He stared at Zen, his eyes widening in terror.

‘You!’

Before Zen could answer, Sfriso picked up his chair and threw it at him. Zen managed to raise one hand in time to fend it off, but one of the legs scraped his forehead painfully. Meanwhile Sfriso was off and running for the door. Bettino Todesco was taken by surprise, but managed to grab one of Sfriso’s legs as the Buranese got the door open. They fell to the floor in the corridor, locked together in a violent struggle.

Sfriso started kicking his captor’s head with his free leg, but Todesco hung on gamely until Zen came to his aid. Between the two of them they succeeded in subduing the prisoner, but Todesco was understandably keen to administer some punishment for the abuse he had suffered, and under the circumstances — the scrape on his forehead was quite painful — Zen was content to indulge him. Then they dragged Sfriso back into the office, where Zen dangled his police identity card in front of Sfriso’s battered face.

‘That was stupid, even by your standards. You’re already under arrest for reticenza. Now I can add resisting arrest and assulting a police officer.’

‘I thought you were…’ Sfriso began.

‘I know what you thought,’ Zen interrupted hastily, before Sfriso revealed too much about Zen’s irregular activities in front of Todesco. ‘You thought I was another “bent policeman”, like Enzo Gavagnin.’

He took out his pack of cigarettes and lit up.

‘But you were wrong,’ he went on. ‘You said more than you should have done, the other evening, and you said it to the wrong man. That was stupid too. But you are stupid, Filippo, aren’t you? You and your brother. Otherwise you would never have got mixed up in any of this.’

Sfriso hung his head and said nothing. Zen smoked quietly for a while, looking down at him.

‘These men are killers,’ he said at length. ‘They kill indirectly, by peddling drugs to kids in Mestre and Marghera. But they also kill directly, as you know only too well.’

He walked over to Sfriso, sitting down next to him.

‘You told me what they did to Giacomo,’ he said. ‘They seem to like drowning people.’

After what seemed like an age, Sfriso’s head slowly came up. He stared blearily at Zen, who nodded.

‘This time it was the turn of Enzo Gavagnin,’ Zen murmured. ‘They wired his thumbs together and threw him into a cesspool. Like with Giacomo, they did other things to him first. Do you want to see the photos? Clearly they didn’t believe Gavagnin’s protestations of ignorance any more than they did your brother’s.’

He leant close to Sfriso.

‘What about you, Filippo?’ he breathed. ‘You’re the only one left now. Do you think they’ll believe you?’

He leant his head quizzically on one side.

‘I wouldn’t rate your chances particularly high, myself. They didn’t believe Giacomo. They didn’t believe Gavagnin. Why should they believe you?’

He crushed out his cigarette underfoot.

‘No, I think it’s a pretty solid bet that they’ll assume that you’re holding out on them too. I wonder what they’ll do to you. Leave you to drown slowly in a tank of shit like Gavagnin? Or will it be something even more original? What do you think they’ll come up with? And when? How long will it be before your mother loses her other son?’

Sfriso’s face crumpled and he began to weep.

‘Stop tormenting me!’

Zen laughed harshly.

‘No problem, Filippo! I’ll leave that to them. Unless you agree to co-operate.’

‘What is it you want?’

‘Everything. Names, dates, places, people. The whole story from the beginning, up to and including your brother’s death and your interrogation by Gavagnin.’

A sly glint came into Sfriso’s eye.

‘And in return I get a free pardon?’

This time Zen’s laughter was openly contemptuous.

‘Of course! Plus a state pension for life and a villa in Capri. No, Filippino, all I can undertake to do for you is to save your miserable skin. When you come to trial, the fact that you’ve co-operated will of course weigh in your favour, but I’m afraid you’re still going to have to spend several years behind bars. Not an attractive prospect, I know, but it beats moving permanently to San Michele.’

Conflicting emotions chased each other across Filippo Sfriso’s moist features.

‘You’re trying to trap me into confessing,’ he blurted out.

Zen waved casually around at the office.

‘Do you see anyone taking notes or making a tape recording? We’re just having a chat, Filippo. If you agree to my proposition, I will summon the lawyer of your choice before starting the interview, which will be conducted in his presence and according to the usual rules.’

He broke off, glancing at Sfriso.

‘Which lawyer would you nominate, incidentally?’

Sfriso barked out a laugh.

‘Do I look like someone who has a lawyer on call? I’m just a poor fisherman.’

‘Hardly poor, and not just a fisherman. Otherwise you wouldn’t be needing a lawyer.’

Zen looked up at the ceiling.

‘Let me suggest a few names. How about Carlo Berengo Gorin, for example? They say he’s very good.’

He glanced back at Sfriso’s face as he spoke Gorin’s name. There was no flicker of recognition.

‘Anyone you like,’ muttered Sfriso. ‘It’s all the same to me.’

Zen smiled and nodded.

‘ Bravo. That was the right answer.’ He offered Sfriso a cigarette.

‘I think we can do business,’ he said languidly. ‘Are you interested?’

Filippo Sfriso stared at the packet of Nazionali for a long time. Then he prised one loose and put it between his lips, nodding slowly.

At nine o’clock that night, Aurelio Zen called Marcello Mamoli at his home on the fashionable stretch of the Zattere, near the Santo Spirito church. Before doing so he tried Cristiana once again, but there was still no reply. Mamoli, on the other hand, answered almost immediately.

‘Well?’

‘This is Aurelio Zen phoning from the Questura, signor giudice. I have taken Filippo Sfriso’s statement.’

In the distance he could hear the sounds of the meal from which the magistrate had been summoned by the donna di servizio who had answered the phone.

‘Is this really so urgent that you must disturb me during dinner?’ demanded Mamoli.

‘I wouldn’t have done so otherwise,’ Zen retorted.

He himself had not yet had a chance to eat anything.

‘A copy of the full statement will be with you tomorrow, signor giudice, but I’ll summarize the main points and outline the action I propose to take.’

‘Please be brief. My guests are waiting for me.’

Zen mouthed a silent obscenity at the phone.

‘The Sfriso brothers were involved in a drug smuggling operation for a syndicate based in Mestre,’ he said out loud. ‘They would be given the name, description and ETA of the carrier, typically an oil tanker or a bulk freighter bound for Marghera. The drop took place at a prearranged point out at sea. The package was heaved over the side with a float on it, and the Sfrisos came up in their fishing boat and hauled it in. Some time later — it might be days or weeks — they were phoned with instructions about passing on the packages.’

Mamoli grunted.

‘The Sfrisos acted as a cut-out for the gang. Thanks to them, there was no direct link between the smuggling and distribution ends of the operation, thus limiting any damage due to arrests or tip-offs. The ship was clean if it was searched on arrival, and the drugs were only handed over when they were needed for immediate sale. Naturally it depended on the syndicate being able to trust the Sfrisos with large amounts of pure heroin, but this wasn’t a problem until…’

‘So where do we go from here?’ Mamoli cut in.

Zen took a deep breath.

‘To Sant’Ariano.’

‘Where?’

‘The ossuary island up in the northern lagoon where the dead from all the church cemeteries were dumped when the land was needed for…’

‘I am tolerably familiar with the history of the city,’ Marcello Mamoli replied icily. ‘What escapes me is the connection between Sant’Ariano and the affair we have been discussing.’

‘Sant’Ariano is where the Sfrisos stored the packages of heroin between receiving and delivering them. The place has such a sinister reputation that hardly anyone ever goes there. They dug a cache somewhere on the island and went to pick up fresh supplies as and when they needed them. One day last month Giacomo went to collect the remaining three kilos of one consignment. When he got back he was babbling madly about meeting a walking corpse and there was no sign of the packages. Filippo has searched Sant’Ariano many times since then. He located the site of the cache easily enough, but it was empty. The island is covered with dense undergrowth and Giacomo apparently got lost and abandoned the heroin somewhere in the middle of it.’

‘Just a minute,’ Mamoli told him. Lowering the receiver, he called to someone in the house, ‘Please start without me. I’ll be there in a minute.’

‘Hello?’ said Zen tentatively.

‘I’m here,’ Mamoli snapped back. ‘Please get to the point.’

Zen’s tone hardened.

‘The point? The point is that somewhere on Sant’Ariano there is a canvas bag containing three kilos of heroin. If we can recover it, we can set up a meeting, lure the gang into a trap and smash the whole operation. Sfriso has agreed to co-operate.’

Mamoli grunted.

‘Why don’t we just substitute another package? Or use a dummy?’

‘Each package is sealed and bar-coded to reveal any tampering. The contact man would spot the fake package at once. We could arrest him, but the others would get away and the…’

‘So what do you propose?’

‘I would like to order an immediate search of Sant’Ariano.’

‘Then do so, dottore.’

‘I have your authorization to proceed?’

‘Certainly. And now I must…’

‘By whatever means seem to me most appropriate?’

‘Of course. And now I really must get back to my guests. Good night, dottore.’

In the end, Zen decided to take the copy of Filippo Sfriso’s statement to the Procura in person. It meant a long detour on his way home, but he had nothing better to do. In fact the walk was just what he needed to think through the problem facing him, to weigh up the options open to him and perhaps even come to a decision. It was a fine night for walking. An abrasive, icy wind had dried and polished the town, making the stonework sparkle, the metal gleam and burnishing the air till it shone darkly. The tide was high, and the cribbed water in the small canals shuffled fretfully about.

Although Mamoli had given him a free hand, Zen knew that he would have to take the responsibility if anything went wrong. This seemed all too possible. Not only did he have to locate a small canvas bag on an island several thousand square metres in extent and entirely covered with impenetrable brush and scrub, but he had to do so without the gang knowing that any search had been made. Both Giacomo and Filippo Sfriso had told them on many occasions how and where the missing heroin had been mislaid. The gang had no doubt tried more than once to recover it themselves. If they learned that the police had instituted a full-scale search of Sant’Ariano, they certainly wouldn’t respond when Filippo Sfriso announced a few days later that Enzo Gavagnin’s fate had jogged his memory, he had located the stuff and when would they like to drop by and pick it up?

As he cut through the maze of back alleys between Santa Maria Formosa and the Fenice, Zen found himself shying away from the thought of what had happened to Gavagnin. The pathologist’s report had been faxed over from the hospital, and Zen was not likely to forget the details of the injuries inflicted on Gavagnin before he died, nor the phrase ‘the presence of a considerable quantity of excrement in the lungs and stomach’ under the heading Cause of Death.

That was true only in the sense that boats sank because of the presence of a considerable quantity of water in the hull. In reality, Enzo Gavagnin had been killed because of what Zen had said on the phone the other morning. He had been so eager to get even for Gavagnin’s slights that he had made up some story on the spur of the moment without even considering what the consequences might be. He had been as irresponsible as Todesco. Zen too had fired blind, and with fatal results.

Buffeted by biting gusts of wind, he crossed Campo San Stefano and the high wooden bridge over the canalazzo before entering the sheltered passages and paths on the other bank. At the offices of the Procura, he watched the caretaker deposit the sealed envelope containing Filippo Sfriso’s statement in the pigeonhole marked MAMOLI, returned to the cold comfort of the streets. As he passed the monstrous sprawl of the Frari, he caught a whiff of cooking borne past on a gust of wind from someone’s supper and realized that he had eaten nothing since the morning. Until now the sheer press of events had sustained him, but as it receded he suddenly felt absolutely ravenous. It was by now almost ten o’clock, and the only places open would be those catering to the city’s vestigial youth culture.

He walked down to the Rialto bridge and made his way to Campo San Luca, where the dwindling band of young Venetians hang out of an evening. The main throng had already departed, but a number of locali remained open to serve the hard core. Zen chose the one which seemed to be pandering least to the prevailing fashion for American-style food and drink, and ordered a pizza and a draught beer. While he waited to be served, he lit a cigarette to calm his hunger pains and tried to ignore the attention-seeking clientele and concentrate on his immediate problems.

Although he recognized his responsibility for Gavagnin’s death, he didn’t feel any exaggerated sense of remorse. That would have been pointless in any case. All he could do now was to try and bring the killers themselves to justice. They had murdered Gavagnin because they believed he knew where the cache of heroin was hidden. That proved that they had not managed to locate it themselves. If Zen could succeed where they had failed, he could consign the whole gang to the pozzo nero of the prison system and — in his own mind at least — be quits. But how to find Giacomo’s missing bag in the first place?

Assuming that the required manpower was available, such searches were normally a relatively simple matter: you organized a line of men and walked them across the ground. Such methods were clearly impossible on the terrain in question. Zen had been to Sant’Ariano once, forty years before, on a dare with Tommaso. They’d taken a small skiff belonging to the Saoner family and rowed all the way, up beyond Burano and Torcello, past abandoned farms and hunting lodges, on towards the fringes of the laguna morta. He had never forgotten the silence of those swampy wastelands, the sense of solitude and desolation.

The Germans had mounted an anti-aircraft battery on the island during the closing months of the war, so it was not quite as untouched as it would have been five years earlier, or as it would be now that the undergrowth had reclaimed the clearing and access road which had been made. Nevertheless, both he and Tommaso had been overwhelmed by the aura of the place. It was not only the thought of the unknown, uncountable dead whose remains had been tipped there like so much rubbish, thousands and thousands of bones and skulls, a whole hillock of them held in by a retaining wall. Almost as frightening as those reminders of mortality had been the evidence of life: a profusion of withered, gnarled, spiny plants and shrubs which sprouted from that sterile desert, and above all the host of rodents and reptiles which scuttled and slithered and nested amongst the bones.

The arrival of the waiter with Zen’s order banished these memories. But as he wolfed down the pizza, scalding his tongue in the process, he realized that a conventional search of Sant’Ariano was out of the question. The only way it could be made to work would be by giving each man a machete and a chain-saw and felling every tree, shrub and bush on the island. They might find the heroin, but they wouldn’t catch the gang. What he needed was a totally different approach, something quick, effective and unobtrusive. Unfortunately he had a gnawing suspicion that it didn’t exist.

The pizza was a sad imitation of the real thing, but it filled his stomach. He was just lighting a cigarette to go with the rest of his beer when Cristiana Morosini walked in. She was with three other women, and did not notice Zen at his table in a corner at the back. He drew hard on his cigarette and tried to think what to do. Cristiana was bound to catch sight of him sooner or later, and if he hadn’t greeted her by then she would be even more annoyed with him than she already was. That Zen really knows how to treat a woman: first he stands her up, then he cuts her dead.

In the event the dilemma was solved for him almost immediately. Cristiana and one of the other women got up and walked towards Zen’s table, heading for the toilets at the back of the premises. When she saw him she hesitated an instant, then smiled coolly.

‘ Ciao, Aurelio.’

She turned to the other woman.

‘Be with you in a minute, Wanda.’

Zen stood up, gesturing embarrassedly.

‘I’ve been trying to phone you all afternoon…’

‘I was out.’

‘I’m dreadfully sorry about missing our appointment. Something unexpected came up suddenly, a dramatic development in the case I’m working on.’

Cristiana raised her eyebrows, whether in interest or scepticism it was hard to tell.

‘Not to worry,’ she replied. ‘I was busy myself, as it happens. Nando insisted on flying me down to Pellestrina for another photo opportunity. He’s confident of carrying the city itself so now he’s concentrating on the islands.’

She looked at him speculatively.

‘So has this dramatic development anything to do with the Durridge case?’

Zen shrugged awkwardly.

‘It’s not really something I can discuss in public.’

She met his look with one of her own.

‘I can’t just abandon my friends like that.’

‘Of course not. But I’m planning to stay up late anyway. There are one or two things I need to think over. If you want to stop by for a nightcap later…’

At that moment the woman called Wanda — who must be Cristiana’s sister-in-law, Zen realized — emerged from the toilets. Cristiana nodded lightly and turned away.

‘We’ll see,’ she said.

Zen walked slowly home, puzzling over the significance of Cristiana’s continuing intimacy with the Dal Maschio family. She might be separated from her husband, but she still evidently went out with his sister and came running when he snapped his fingers. Zen felt a scorch of indigestion in his gut, partly from eating too quickly and partly from jealousy. For a supposedly estranged wife, Cristiana seemed to be at her husband’s beck and call to an astonishing degree. He didn’t blame her for keeping on the right side of such a powerful man, but he did wonder where the limits of her compliance might lie.

Not that there was anything to complain about in this trip to Pellestrina, a bizarre community three kilometres long and a stone’s throw wide, built on a sandbank in the shadow of the murazzi, the massive sea defences erected by the Republic three hundred years earlier. Zen smiled, imagining how Dal Maschio would have worked that into his speech. ‘What these walls have been for three centuries, the Nuova Repubblica Veneta is today — a bulwark protecting our culture, our economy, our very homes, from being swept away by the storms of change and decay!’

In order to provide a suitable dramatic photo, Dal Maschio would no doubt have piloted his wife to Pellestrina in a helicopter owned by the company in which he was a partner. As a former air force ace, he would have been able to make a spectacular landing on some patch of grass or sand which looked too small to…

And then, in a flash, he saw the solution to the problem which had been obsessing him all evening! The way to locate the missing three kilos of heroin on Sant’Ariano was to go in vertically, not hacking through the scrub but dipping from the sky! He was so pleased by this revelation that he would have walked right past his own front door if he had not almost bumped into someone coming in the opposite direction.

‘Christ!’ the man screamed.

Zen peered at the dingy figure dressed in a military greatcoat over what looked like a pair of pyjamas. The cord he was holding in one hand gradually went slack as a dog bearing a marked resemblance to a mobile doormat hobbled into the ambit of the streetlight.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ Zen demanded.

The man shook his head in confusion. His eyes were still dilated in terror.

‘I thought it was…’ he whispered hoarsely.

‘Thought it was who?’

Daniele Trevisan swallowed hard.

‘Someone else.’

Zen walked up to him.

‘Do you mean my father?’ he asked tonelessly.

Daniele Trevisan bit his lip and said nothing. As though in sympathy, his dog raised one leg and voided its bladder against the wall.

‘You mistook me for him the day I arrived,’ Zen reminded the old man gently.

Trevisan assumed a self-pitying expression.

‘I’m getting old,’ he whined. ‘I get things confused.’

A barbed wind whipped through the campo, spraying a fine white dust of snow in their faces.

‘Listen, Daniele,’ Zen said weightily, ‘my father is dead. Do you understand?’

To his amazement, the old man burst into peals of mocking laughter.

‘Understand?’ he cried. ‘Oh yes! Yes, I understand all right!’

Zen stared menacingly at him. Daniele Trevisan’s hilarity ended as abruptly as it had begun.

‘Of course,’ he muttered in a conciliatory tone. ‘Dead. To be sure.’

And without another word he shuffled away, dragging his reluctant dog away from the patch of urine-soaked plaster.

At first it looked as though the clouds which had hidden the sun for most of the week had fallen to earth like a collapsed parachute, covering every surface with a billowy white mantle. The next moment, shivering at the bedroom window as he clipped back the internal shutters, Zen thought vaguely of the aqua alta. It was only when he became aware of the intense cold streaming in through the gap between window and frame that he realized that it was snow. A sprinkling of fat flakes was still tumbling down from the thick grey sky. Every aspect of roofs and gardens, pavements and bridges, had been rethought. Only the water, immune by its very nature to this form of inundation, remained untouched.

He glanced back towards the empty bed, its sheets and covers decorously unruffled. Although he had stayed up till well after midnight, Cristiana had not shown up. He tried to persuade himself that this was all for the best in the long run. By standing him up, she had evened the score and demonstrated that she was not someone to be trifled with. Next time they could meet as equals, with nothing to prove to each other. As long as there was a next time, of course.

He dressed hurriedly, dispensing with a shower, and made his way downstairs, stiff with cold. The primitive central heating system only operated on the first floor, and as it did not have a timer it had to be switched on manually each morning. If he had known it was going to freeze, he might have risked the wrath of his mother’s parsimonious household gods and left the thing on all night. As it was, there was nothing to do but put on his overcoat and hold his fingers under the warm water from the tap to unjam the muscles.

Having assembled the coffee machine and put it on the flame, he returned to the living room and picked up the phone. Despite the day and the hour, or perhaps because of them, the Questura answered almost immediately. Zen identified himself and asked to be connected to the nearest airborne section. This turned out to be situated in the international airport at Tessera, on the shores of the lagoon just outside Mestre. Zen huddled miserably on the sofa while the necessary connections were made. He had never felt so cold in his life. He recalled that first flurry of snow during his encounter with Daniele Trevisan, and then the old man’s bizarre behaviour, the way he had mistaken Zen for his father, and his father’s disappearance in the icy wastes of Russia so many years ago…

It was several minutes before the duty officer at Tessera responded, and several more before Zen could impress on him the nature and urgency of the task before them. By then, the entire house was filled with a horrible stench compounded of burning coffee and melted rubber. Zen slammed the phone down and ran into the kitchen to find the caffettiera glowing red-hot at the base and emitting clouds of nauseating black smoke. Having warmed his hands under the running water, he had evidently forgotten to put any in the machine.

He threw the windows wide open to air the place out. Snowflakes melted damply on his eyes and lips in frigid mockery of the caresses he had been denied the night before. He ran cold water on the coffee maker, but it had fused up solid and was evidently past repair. With a sigh of disgust he tossed it into the canal at the back of the house and returned to the living room, where he phoned Marco Paulon and made his excuses for not being able to come to lunch after all. Then he called the Questura again and arranged for a police launch to collect him from the Ponte Guglie in half an hour.

It must have been an illusion, but it seemed less cold outside the house than in. A solitary row of neat, closely spaced footprints was the only flaw on the glistening surface of the campo. They led back to a house two doors from the Morosinis. Signora Vivian, thought Zen automatically, a big raw-boned woman who ate like a horse, walked like a bird and had attended early Mass every Sunday since her first communion.

Zen set off down the alley to the Cannaregio, scuffing up heaps of downy snow with every step. The city was muffled and mute. Even the perpetual ostinato of water, the constant undercurrent of Venetian life, had ceased. Zen trudged on towards the Guglie bridge, where he found a cafe open. He ordered an espresso with a shot of grappa on the side, on account of the cold, and scanned the headlines in La Stampa. A leading industrialist had committed suicide rather than answer questions about alleged fiscal irregularities. A judge claimed that ‘an unholy alliance’ of the Mafia and the Secret Service was responsible for recent bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan. Four children had been killed and eleven critically injured by a mortar attack on a school in Bosnia. Neo-Nazis had kicked a black teenager to death at a bus-stop in London. Milan were favourites for their local Derby with Juventus.

The snow had thickened by the time Zen left the bar. The police launch was already tied up by the water-steps at the foot of the bridge, the crew slapping their arms and stamping their feet in a vain attempt to keep warm. They didn’t much like having to turn out on Sunday, especially one when the weather was providing a sharp reminder of just how close the lagoon was to the glacial peaks of Austria and the frozen plains of Hungary. The personnel of the airborne section weren’t going to be that keen either, but that was just too bad. Time was of the essence. For Zen’s plan to work, the drug syndicate had to believe that Filippo Sfriso had been so shocked by the murder of Gavagnin that he changed his mind about trying to cheat them. They would of course want to believe it, which made matters easier, but for the scenario to be credible Sfriso would have to be able to deliver as soon as the gang contacted him on his release from custody the following day.

The launch cut a swathe through the grey waters of the Cannaregio, passing an almost empty vaporetto heading in the other direction. Once they were clear of the canal the helmsman opened up the throttle and the boat surged forward, flanking the dingy northern flanks of the city before bearing round towards Murano and the dredged channel to the airport. Although the sky was overcast, the air was clear enough to reveal the snowclad Dolomites over a hundred kilometres away to the north. With the wind chill it felt bitterly cold in the cockpit, but Zen stuck it out with the two crewmen as a matter of principle. By the time they rounded the bend leading up to the moorings outside the airport terminal his face felt as though it had turned to bone.

The police airborne unit was housed in a utilitarian block which had formed part of the original military airfield at Tessera, now being transformed to serve the needs of international tourism. As one of the specialized departments of the force, offering both glamour and higher pay, the airborne division attracted a different class of recruit from the general intake, and Zen was favourably impressed by the group of men to whom he was introduced by Leonardo Castrucci, the commanding officer. Unlike police drivers, whose reputation for reckless aggression was notorious, the flight crews had a reserved and dependable air.

Knowing that the success or failure of the enterprise depended to a large extent on the degree of dedication these men brought to it, Zen went out of his way to get them on his side. He greeted them one by one, asking where they were from and how they felt about being posted to this part of the country. Within five minutes, the natural resentment they felt about being hauled out of bed at eight o’clock on a freezing Sunday morning for a spot of compulsory overtime was forgotten in a sense of shared enterprise and professional pride.

‘Okay, lads,’ Zen said, stepping back to address them as a group for the first time. ‘We all know the frustrations of police work well enough. The jobs where the only people we can get our hands on are the poor bastards who never knew which end was up in the first place, while the ringleaders get off scot-free. The jobs left dangling because someone thought we didn’t have quite enough evidence to proceed, or because the outcome might have inconvenienced somebody else’s cousin’s aunt’s mother-in-law’s stepson.’

There were smiles and a stifled laugh. Zen nodded soberly.

‘Today, by contrast, we have a chance to achieve something real, solid and unequivocal.’

He pointed to the laminated map of the Provincia di Venezia which occupied most of the wall to his left.

‘There’s a gang of drug dealers operating in our territory, peddling heroin on the streets of our towns and cities. We can put each and every member of that gang behind bars for the next twenty years.’

He walked over to the map and pointed out an irregular sliver of white in the northern lagoon.

‘This is the island of Sant’Ariano, just a few kilometres east of here.’

There was no visible reaction from the group. Zen had already ascertained that none of them was from Venice. They did not know about Sant’Ariano’s sinister vocation, and he had no intention of enlightening them.

‘Somewhere on that island is a canvas bag containing three kilos of pure heroin with an estimated street value of half a billion lire. But its value to us is far greater. We know the identity of the gang’s courier, and he was agreed to deliver the drugs under our supervision.

We can draw the gang into an ambush, put them under surveillance, identify their base and smash the whole operation once and for all.’

He held up a monitory finger.

‘But time is pressing! We need to locate the drugs by this evening at the latest. The island is covered with dense scrub and shrubbery, and we have no idea whereabouts the bag is. To make matters worse, it will probably be at least partially covered by snow.’

Zen looked round at the four men, making eye contact with each in turn. He shrugged casually.

‘In short, I’m asking you to do a job which would normally take several hundred men a week, to do it in a few hours, in total secrecy, and in the middle of a blizzard.’

Smiles gradually replaced the crews’ initial look of apprehension. Zen held up his hands in a gesture of disclaimer.

‘I’m not a pilot!’ he exclaimed. ‘I simply have no idea what’s feasible and what’s not. What I do know is that the only way of locating that package in the time available, given the nature of the terrain, is to go in from the air. If you can’t do it, just say so. I won’t try and argue with you. I’ll just apologize for ruining your day off, go back to the city and tell my bosses that there’s nothing to be done. You must decide. The fate of the investigation is in your hands.’

He sat down and lit a cigarette, pointedly ignoring the others. After a moment’s silence, the pilots started to shuffle and glance uneasily at each other.

‘We’d need two machines,’ one of them said eventually.

‘We could go in low to scatter the snow,’ another put in.

‘It’s the vegetation that’ll be the problem.’

‘One man on a hoist with something to part the branches…’

‘Or a metal sensor? There must be some metal on the bag, a zipper or something.’

There was a silence.

‘It’ll be damn tricky,’ someone said.

‘But we can do it,’ Leonardo Castrucci concluded firmly. ‘And you must do me the honour of riding in the lead machine with me, dottore.’

Zen opened his mouth in horror, but no sound emerged.

He sat gripping the metal frame of the seat with both hands as if his life depended on it. If only it had! Zen had never felt so frightened in his life, even on the rare occasions when he had had to face armed criminals. Even at its worst, that fear was natural. This experience was altogether different, a nebulous, visceral terror, triumphantly irrational. In vain he invoked statistics indicating that people who did this every day of their working lives were nevertheless in more danger driving to the airport than they ever were once aloft.

The only saving grace was that the violent juddering of the helicopter disguised his own trembling, just as the roar of the engine hid his involuntary moans and cries. He looked past the hunched figure of Leonardo Castrucci at the dark shape of the other helicopter, hovering stationary a hundred metres away to the south. Although the snow had thickened to a pointillist pall which made the operation yet more difficult and hazardous, it at least ensured that the search could be conducted in perfect secrecy. Potential spies on the few inhabited islands in this part of the lagoon might be able to hear the distant noise of the helicopters, but with visibility down to a few hundred metres there was no danger of them being seen.

For the searchers, the snow was just one more in a series of factors stacking the odds against them. The powerful searchlight attached to the bow of each machine was trained down, creating a cone of light in which the puffy flakes swam like microbes under a microscope. Above the open hatch in the floor of the helicopter, the co-pilot stood ready to raise or lower the metal cable wound around a hoist. At the other end, the third member of the crew dangled from a body harness among the shrubbery, searching the foliage with an alloy pole held in his gloved hands.

‘Go!’ said a voice in the headset clamped to Zen’s ears.

Castrucci eased the machine forward.

‘Stop!’ said the voice.

And there they hung, rotors whirling, trapped in a mindless hell of noise and turbulence while the man on the hoist searched the next patch of ground. Zen glanced nervously at the man in the pilot’s seat beside him. Not the least part of his torment was the sense that Leonardo Castrucci did not normally do this sort of thing any longer, but felt obligated to put on a show to impress his guest. It had been a matter of nods and winks, exchanged glances and unspoken words between the younger pilots. It would be just his luck to get himself killed by some superannuated ace trying to show off. Perhaps Cristiana would end up the same way, with Dal Maschio trying too hard to impress the crowd at some election rally somewhere. The thought seemed oddly comforting.

‘Go! Stop!’

A large-scale chart of the island had been photocopied and ruled out in strips running north-south, which the two machines were sweeping alternately. Castrucci had calculated that the search would take about five hours, but it was becoming clear that it would require far longer than that. Indeed, it seemed increasingly unlikely that they would be able complete the operation before the darkness closed in and made it impossible.

‘Go! Stop!’

For Aurelio Zen, every minute seemed an hour, each hour an eternity of living hell. He had always been afraid of flying, paralysed and stupefied by the sense of the emptiness beneath. So far in his professional life he had mostly managed to avoid travelling by air, but that morning he had totally failed to see the trap until it was too late. The men of the airborne section had naturally taken it for granted that Zen would wish to be present during the search he had instigated, and Zen had not dared to risk dissipating the esprit de corps he had so painstakingly created. As he was led to his doom, he had prayed that helicopters provided a different flying experience from other aircraft.

‘Go! Stop!’

It was different all right. It was much, much worse than he had ever imagined possible. The lurches and jolts which filled him with panic on ordinary planes, the mysterious and alarming noises whose significance he pondered endlessly, were all intensified a hundred times, and without the slightest remission.

‘Go! Stop!’

He looked out of the window, trying in vain to locate the other machine. Until now they had been moving at roughly the same rate along their notional strips of territory, but now the blue-and-white hull bearing the word POLIZIA and the identification number BN409 was nowhere to be seen. He was about to say something to Leonardo Castrucci when the intercom crackled into life. This time it was a different voice.

‘We’ve found something.’

Castrucci banged the controls in frustration, tilting the whole machine violently to port. The co-pilot grabbed the hoist to prevent himself tumbling out of the open hatch, there was a shriek from the man on the cable below, and Zen found himself mumbling an urgent prayer to the Virgin. Having got the machine back on an even keel, Castrucci vented his anger at his subordinate.

‘For Christ’s sake, Satriani! How many times do I have to tell you to use the proper call-up procedure! You’re not phoning your mistress, you know.’

After an icy silence, the intercom hissed again.

‘Bologna Napoli four zero nine calling Cagliari Perugia five seven seven. Come in, please.’

‘Receiving you, Bologna Napoli four zero nine.’

‘We’ve found something.’

Zen switched on his microphone.

‘Is it the bag?’ he demanded eagerly.

There was a brief crackly silence.

‘No, not the bag.’

‘What then?’ demanded Castrucci irritably.

‘The man on the hoist reports…’

The voice broke off.

‘Well?’ snapped Castrucci.

‘He says he’s found a skeleton.’

Without even realizing it, Zen had tensed up with expectation. Now his whole frame slumped despondently.

‘This island was used as a dumping ground for all the cemeteries of Venice,’ he told the distant pilot. ‘Nothing could be less surprising than to find a skeleton.’

‘This one’s wearing a suit.’

Zen stared straight ahead at the grey, wintry sky.

‘A suit?’ he breathed into the microphone.

‘And it’s standing upright.’

The discovery of the heroin came almost as an afterthought. The corpse had been removed by then, after being photographed from every conceivable angle. At first they tried to transfer it to a stretcher in one piece, but the moment they disturbed it the whole thing fell to the ground in a dismal heap. After that it was a question of trying to pick up all the pieces. Some of them still had portions of gristle and flesh attached to them, and the skull and scalp were more or less intact. Quite a lot of clothing was also recovered. They bundled the whole lot into a body bag and hoisted it into one of the helicopters to be flown back to the city.

Aurelio Zen went with it, and thus missed the moment when a scene-of-crime man doing a routine sweep of the area stumbled over the canvas bag a few metres away from the bramble bush across which the body had been lying. By the time the news reached him at the Questura, its significance had been overtaken by events to such an extent that his initial reaction was one of irritation. Another complication he would willingly have done without!

After a moment’s thought he called the switchboard and asked to be put through to Aldo Valentini. The Ferrarese was not at home, but a woman who answered the phone volunteered the information that the family were lunching with their in-laws. Zen dialled the number which she gave him and waited in some trepidation for Valentini’s reaction. It soon turned out that he need not have worried.

‘Aurelio! Ciao! What’s going on?’

‘We’ve got a bit of a crisis I’m afraid. I’m sorry to disturb you, but it’s urgent.’

Valentini’s voice dropped to a whisper.

‘You mean I get to get out of here?’

Zen laughed with genuine relief.

‘I thought you would bite my head off for ruining your Sunday!’

‘My Sunday is already comprehensively ruined, courtesy of my brother-in-law. If you can give me a cast-iron excuse for leaving, you’ve got a friend for life.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Rovigo. Where the relative in question resides.’

‘I’ll have a helicopter there in half an hour.’

‘A helicopter?’

‘Like I said, this is urgent. I’ll call back later with details of the pick-up.’

He hung up and immediately dialled another number. There was a long pause before the connection was made, another before anyone answered, and when the reply came it made no sense to Zen.

‘Is that you, Ellen?’ he asked tentatively.

A burst of incomprehensible verbiage followed. He was just about to hang up when he heard a familiar voice speaking broken Italian.

‘Aurelio? What’s going on? Do you know what time it is?’

‘This can’t wait, Ellen.’

‘Five in the goddamn morning! Sunday morning!’

‘I think we’ve found him.’

As in their earlier conversation, every pause seemed disturbing because of the acoustic flatness caused by the satellite equipment switching the circuits to more profitable use. It was as if the line had gone dead, yet the moment he spoke again the connection instantly resumed. The quality of silence was evidently meaningless in electronic terms.

‘I’m going to need his dental and medical records and anything else you can lay hands on which might assist in the identification of the remains,’ Zen continued. ‘Ideally a DNA profile, if one exists. Get on to this lawyer about it. What’s his name? Bill?’

‘That’s who you just spoke to.’

‘I’m so happy for you,’ Zen replied nastily. ‘He sounds a real fire-eater.’

He lowered his voice.

‘But listen, cara. Tell him to keep this under wraps until further notice, all right? It looks as though there may be some powerful players involved, and my position is already extremely delicate.’

Ellen spoke distantly in English. A disgruntled but incisive male voice replied. Zen didn’t understand a single word the man said, but he took an instant dislike to him.

‘Do you have a fax number?’ Ellen asked in Italian.

Zen consulted the internal directory and dictated the number to her.

‘Bill wants to ask a few questions,’ she told him.

There was a brief exchange in English off-stage before Ellen returned to translate.

‘Is he dead?’

Zen tried to remember what Ellen looked like in bed. All he could call to mind were her nipples, large and dark and surprisingly insensitive, judging by how hard she liked them tweaked.

‘The person we found is certainly dead. Very dead.’

Another off-stage buzz while this was translated for Bill’s benefit.

‘Where was the body found?’ Ellen asked in Italian.

‘On an island in the lagoon.’

More whispering, then Ellen’s translation.

‘Have you any idea what happened and who is responsible?’

Zen glanced at the window. It was no longer snowing, but the sagging sky looked ready to burst anew at any moment.

‘Nothing worth discussing at this stage. But if the case is going to break, it’ll do so in the next forty-eight hours. Until then I need a free hand. That means a press blackout and no interference from the family.’

Ellen duly translated. There was a pause, then a brief male response.

‘Bill agrees,’ said Ellen.

‘Bravo for Bill.’

He grinned maliciously.

‘Is he good news in other ways?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean, Aurelio?’

‘If you don’t know by now, it’s too late to learn.’

‘It’s never too late,’ Ellen retorted.

Zen laughed.

‘I’ve discovered that too.’

‘So I gather,’ remarked Ellen primly. ‘Tania, isn’t it? Is she good news?’

Zen’s smile abruptly disappeared.

‘All the best, Ellen,’ he said with finality.

‘And to you, Aurelio.’

She breathed a long transatlantic sigh.

‘I’d like to see you happy, but somehow…’

‘Somehow what?’

This time the synthetic silence went on so long that he began to think that they really had been cut off.

‘Somehow I just can’t imagine it,’ Ellen said at last.

Zen instinctively touched his genitals in the gesture traditionally used to ward off bad luck.

‘Just make sure the material I requested gets here on time,’ he told her coldly, and hung up.

Aldo Valentini arrived shortly before three o’clock, having been plucked from the bosom of his in-laws by helicopter and deposited at a landing pad in the hospital complex just north of the Questura. Despite these excitements, the Ferrarese looked poised and spruce in a Sunday leisure outfit which had evidently cost considerably more than the off-the-peg suits he wore to work so as not to upstage his boss Francesco Bruno, who prided himself on being a snappy dresser. Aurelio Zen was there to meet him, the soles of his shoes soaked from the melting slush all around, coat and tie flying in the mini-hurricane created by the rotors.

‘Did everything go all right?’ he asked as Valentini stepped out, ducking unnecessarily to avoid the spinning blades.

‘I just wish someone would lay on something like this every time we have to go over there! It’s only three or four times a year, but the prospect fills me with dread weeks before, and the memory lingers for months afterwards.’

‘What’s so awful about it?’

Zen couldn’t have cared less — an only child, deprived of any close relations, he had always considered family life a sanctioned form of incest — but he needed to keep Valentini sweet.

‘It’s Virgilio,’ Valentini explained as they walked back along Calle Capello. ‘The guy’s a librarian and he’s envious of this glamorous and exciting lifestyle which he thinks I have. If I tell some anecdote about the job he accuses me of not being interested in his work, and if I suck up to him like he wants then he gets pissed off because he thinks I’m being patronizing. You can’t win.’

Zen agreed that in-laws were notoriously a problem, and privately congratulated himself on not having any.

‘Anyway, this helicopter transfer certainly did wonders for my prestige,’ Valentini went on. ‘They were dying to know what it was all about, but I made it clear that my lips were sealed.’

He glanced at Zen.

‘What is it about, anyway?’

Zen kicked a mushy mound of snow out of his way and gave Valentini a rapid rundown on the progress of the Sfriso case. The wind had moderated and veered round to a mild sirocco with just enough easterly steel in it to keep off the rain. As a result, the city was filled with piles of snow like rotting garbage.

‘That’s a real coup!’ Valentini exclaimed with a low whistle. ‘Congratulations, Aurelio. But where do I come into it?’

‘I want you to take over the case.’

Aldo Valentini stopped and stared at Zen.

‘Why would you give something like that away?’

Zen clapped him on the arm.

‘Because underneath this cynical exterior I’m a saint!’

He grinned at Valentini’s expression.

‘No, I didn’t really think you’d buy that. The truth is simpler. The case is going to be taken away from me anyway. My remit here only covers the Zulian affair. No one’s going to let me hijack a big breakthrough like this, and as long as it’s got to go to someone else, why not you? It was yours originally, after all.’

Valentini sighed.

‘Thanks, Aurelio. I really appreciate it. But it won’t work.’

‘Why not?’

‘If drugs are involved, it’ll go to Ruzza or Castellaro. It’s their area of competence, after all.’

Zen shook his head decisively.

‘Their area of incompetence, you mean. Their boss was working hand-in-glove with the gang. Gavagnin had been bought and sold, and who knows how many of his colleagues with him? There’s no telling how far the rot may have spread, and it would only take one tip-off to ruin the whole operation. Bruno is going to give the follow-up to someone outside the Drugs Squad whether he wants to or not, just to cover his own back.’

A slow smile spread across Valentini’s face as he acknowledged the truth of this. The stakes in a successful outcome to the Sfriso case could hardly have been higher. Even more than smashing the drug gang, it was a question of dishing the Carabinieri, who had lifted the Gavagnin killing from under the noses of the police. Their own colleague’s death being investigated by their hated rivals and sworn enemies!

One of the many welcome innovations of the new Criminal Code had been provisions for greater cooperation between the various law enforcement agencies — five, if you counted the Border Guards, the Forestry Guards, and the enforcement arm of the Ministry of Finance — but this amounted to little more than fine words without any bearing on the realities of the situation they purported to describe. As long as the competing power bases at ministerial level were each allowed to maintain their own police forces, those forces were going to be in competition.

In this case, the Polizia had opened a file of their own on Gavagnin’s death, but the military had all the relevant information and they were playing it very close to their chests, using every delaying tactic in the book. The result was a grudge match with huge amounts of ego and status at stake. Any police officer who succeeded in dishing the Flying Flames over this one would be guaranteed not just fast-track promotion but legendary status amongst his colleagues for the rest of his career.

Having unloaded the Sfriso case on to the willing shoulders of Aldo Valentini, Zen phoned Marcello Mamoli. The Deputy Public Prosecutor was a good deal less amenable about being disturbed at home on Sunday than Valentini had been.

‘This continuing invasion of my private life is absolutely intolerable, Zen! I’m simply not prepared to go on living in a state of perpetual harassment.’

Zen assumed his most ingratiating tone.

‘A hundred thousand apologies, signor giudice. I would not have presumed to disturb you at such a time if it were not that there has been a development which absolutely changes the scope and thrust of the investigation…’

‘Get on with it!’

‘The search of Sant’Ariano which you so wisely instructed me to undertake has been an overwhelming success. We have recovered not only the missing consignment of heroin, but also a corpse.’

Mamoli was silent a moment.

‘Has the victim been identified?’

‘Not yet, signor giudice. It was however recovered in close proximity to the bag containing the heroin, and the presumption must be that it was this body, viewed by torchlight in the dark, which convinced Giacomo Sfriso that he had seen a walking corpse.’

‘But on Sant’Ariano!’ exclaimed Mamoli. ‘Why should anyone be killed there? Why should anyone be there in the first place, come to that?’

‘These are the very questions to which I hope to have answers shortly, signor guidice. Filippo Sfriso has named three men whom he suspects of having a hand in his brother’s death. They are Giulio Bon, of Chioggia, and Massimo Bugno and Domenico Zuin, both from Venice. I would like authorization to take all three into custody and question them separately about these events and related matters.’

He had retailed this lie with complete assurance, but now he held his breath. Everything depended on Mamoli’s response. After a moment the magistrate sighed.

‘Very well, Zen. Seeing as it’s Sunday, I’ll let you run with this for now. But tomorrow I’m going to want a full accounting of the measures you have taken, and God help you if it doesn’t add up.’

It took Zen the best part of an hour to organize the paperwork and logistics of the next part of the operation. This was the part of his work he had always disliked, particularly in a strange town where the staff were just names, their characters and capabilities unknown to him. In the end he divided the task between three separate teams, each with its own boat. He took charge of the first, and chose two names at random from the duty sheet to lead the other two.

The three launches left just after half past four. The raids were synchronized to prevent any tip-offs, while the return to the Questura was staggered so that none of the detainees knew that the others were also being held for questioning. Giulio Bon and Domenico Zuin were both at home watching Milan play Juventus on television, while Massimo Bugno was picked up at a nearby bar where he had gone to play cards.

At the Questura, the three were taken to separate offices which Zen had commandeered on different floors of the building, where he visited them in the course of the early evening. Zuin and Bugno both seemed bewildered by what had happened. When Zen offered them the services of a court-appointed lawyer, Zuin shrugged as though it had nothing to do with him, while Bugno protested incoherently that there must have been some mistake.

‘Too fucking right, son,’ Zen told him in dialect. ‘And you’re the one who made it.’

Giulio Bon was an altogether stiffer proposition. The only statement he made was to demand the services of his lawyer. Zen nodded helpfully.

‘What was his name, again?’

Bon frowned.

‘The same as before!’ he insisted. ‘The plump one with the beard.’

‘I’ve yet to meet an undernourished lawyer, and so many of them wear beards these days, particularly the ones who are losing the stuff on top. Unless you can recall the name of your legal representative, Signor Bon, I’ll have to select one off the rota.’

Bon scowled but said nothing more. Leaving him in the charge of an armed guard, Zen returned to his office. He was in no hurry to proceed. The longer the three were left to soak in their own sense of anxiety, isolation and helplessness, the more likely one of them would be to crack when the time came. And one was all the leverage Zen needed to break the Durridge case wide open.

He sat down and lit a cigarette. Mamoli had made it clear that the state of grace which Zen currently enjoyed was exceptional and must end with the start of the next working week. The next stage would be to apply for arrest warrants and turn the three men over to Mamoli for formal interrogation, but before he did that he would need either a confession or some substantial piece of evidence. There was no certainty that he would be able to obtain either, particularly with his official position under threat now that the Ada Zulian investigation had folded. Not only had he no authorization from the Ministry to investigate the Durridge case, but officially speaking there was no such thing. He was a phantom chasing a chimera.

In short, it promised to be a stressful and exhausting twenty-four hours, and the first thing to do was to make sure that his emotional flanks were covered. He picked up the phone and dialled the Morosinis’ number. It was Rosalba who answered, and before he could get in a single word Zen had to sit out several minutes of being told off for not coming to Sunday lunch. His protests that he had not known that he was invited merely made matters worse.

‘What were you expecting, a piece of pasteboard with gold lettering? Do you think we would want to send an old family friend to eat Sunday lunch all alone in some miserable trattoria? Is that the kind of people you think we are?’

Quickly trying a new tack, Zen started to explain that he had had to turn down an earlier invitation from the Paulons.

‘Fabia Paulon?’ exclaimed Rosalba indignantly. ‘That slut couldn’t cook an egg without…’

‘In any case, I’ve been at work all day.’

‘On Sunday?’ cried Rosalba, hardly pausing in her stride. ‘What are they thinking of? Let them get some of the younger men to do it. There’s no cause to drag an old man like you out of the house on his one day of…’

‘Is Cristiana there?’ Zen cut in.

‘I’ll call her. And listen, Aurelio, come to dinner tomorrow.’

‘If I’m free.’

‘Free? What is this, a prison? Make yourself free!’

Zen smiled minimally.

‘I’m working on it.’

‘What?’

‘Just call your daughter, will you?’

‘What’s it about?’ demanded Rosalba, suddenly suspicious.

‘I need to have a word with her about her husband.’

Rosalba grunted and put the phone down. Zen stubbed out his cigarette and stared at the window. The winter dusk was gathering like a hostile mob. Footsteps crossed a distant floor and then a cherished voice caressed his senses.

‘Aurelio.’

‘Hello, darling.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it last night, but I just couldn’t get rid of the people I was with.’

‘What about tonight?’

There was a pause.

‘Mamma said you wanted to talk to me about Nando.’

‘That was just to give me a reason for calling. I don’t want to put you in an awkward position.’

‘Or yourself,’ Cristiana added tartly.

‘That too. So, what about it?’

‘Would about seven be okay? Or earlier?’

Zen’s heart leapt.

‘Earlier, earlier! Now.’

She laughed.

‘I’m at the office now,’ he said, ‘but I’ll come straight home. Will you be there?’

‘Is this all to do with the dramatic development you mentioned last night?’

‘Very much so. I’ll tell you when I see you. Will you be there when I get back?’

There was a brief pause.

‘Yes.’

Zen smiled secretly.

‘Yes,’ he echoed.

What a pleasure it is to walk out of an evening, a nephew at each elbow lest she slip on the snowy pavement! They’re at her beck and call these days, dear Nanni and sweet little Vincenzo. She has only to suggest how nice it would be to take a walk and perhaps drop in on Daniele Trevisan for a chat and a cup of something warming, and before she knows it they’ll be ringing her doorbell, eager to oblige.

Ada can remember a time, and not so long ago either, when things were very different. Weeks would go by without her seeing her nephews. Even worse, she was treated to midnight visits by mocking simulacra who borrowed Nanni’s clipped, high-pitched voice and Vincenzo’s stooping stance for their own malign purposes. They led her a merry dance for a while, these apparitions, but in the end she turned the tables on them — and with a vengeance!

Nothing’s too much trouble for Nanni and Vincenzo nowadays. They call on her every day, run errands for her, do her shopping, bring presents and generally lavish attentions of all kinds on her. And if by any chance they happen to be forgetful or remiss she need only mention Aurelio Battista, son of her old friend Signora Giustiniana, whom she helped out with some cleaning work when her husband went off and got lost in Russia. ‘Dispersed’, they called it in the papers, but Ada knew what that meant. People used to vanish in those days. It was almost normal. A child here, a man there, a whole family…

For her part, Ada still thinks of Aurelio Battista as that effeminate, long-haired lad she used to dress up in Rosetta’s clothes while his mother went the rounds of the neighbourhood, trying to make ends meet. But apparently for other people, Nanni and Vincenzo included, he is — she giggles at the thought — a Very Powerful and Important Official. Having cleaned the boy’s bottom when he had an accident, Ada remains unimpressed by these trappings of authority, but Nanni and Vincenzo seem to be completely taken in. The happy result is that whenever she wishes to bring her nephews to heel, she has only to drop a passing reference to her friend’s son — the merest casual comment, such as ‘Dottore Zen called by yet again yesterday, but I pretended to be out’ — and in an instant, as though by magic, the boys become completely tractable! It is a weapon all the more effective in that she hardly ever has occasion to use it.

This evening, though, had been one. Having been molly-coddled as children — Ada had warned her sister time and time again that central heating rots one’s moral fibre, but would she listen? — Vincenzo and Nanni are reluctant to venture out in what they call cold weather. They should have seen the winter of ’47, when the canals froze over and people walked across to the Giudecca! But as usual, all Ada had to do was mention quite casually, in passing, that her friend the policeman had dropped round again and tried to get her to implicate her nephews so that he could have them arrested and thrown into prison to await trial, and how after a while she had started to wonder if it might not be easier just to give him what he wanted and be rid of this new harassment, which was almost as bad as the previous one…

Speak of the devil! There is Aurelio Battista, picking his way towards them along the snow-encrusted alley. She knows by the way the grip on her elbows tightens that Nanni and Vincenzo have seen him too. A flurry of anxiety, the first for days, troubles the surface of her new-found serenity. She hopes there won’t be a scene, just when everything has worked out so nicely.

The tall figure striding towards them glances up, taking in the trio ahead. He eyes them each briefly, his gaze lingering a moment on Ada, then passes by without the slightest glimmer of recognition. Vincenzo glances at Nanni, who lets go of his aunt’s arm. Crouching down, he scoops up a double handful of the soft wet snow, moulds it firmly into a ball as hard as a rock and, before Ada can work out what he has in mind, hurls it. She watches bemusedly as it speeds through the darkening air, then Vincenzo yanks her round and marches her along the street towards Daniele’s house.

Behind them, a cry rends the silence. Ada wriggles free of her nephew’s grasp and looks round. Aurelio Battista stands rubbing the back of his head and staring at her. His hat lies capsized on the snow near by. Ada wonders what can have happened. Perhaps he’s troubled by migraine, poor boy. She suffered from it herself at one time, before that role was usurped by other and greater torments, and she dimly recalls that just this sort of cold, wet weather often brought it on. Something has certainly made Giustiniana’s boy very tense and snappy. Snatching up his hat, he strides towards her.

‘Come along, Auntie,’ croons Vincenzo softly.

They have almost reached their goal. Dear Daniele! How pleased he will be to see them. He used to be rather sweet on her at one time — well, besotted, actually. And under different circumstances she might easily have been tempted, because Daniele Trevisan was then one of the handsomest lads in the neighbourhood, and with very winning manners, considering his origins. But for a Zulian to ally herself with someone whose father was in trade was of course quite out of the question.

They have arrived. Nanni is already ringing Daniele’s bell, while Vincenzo brushes a trace of fluff off the sleeve of her coat. What dear, thoughtful boys they are!

But what’s this? Aurelio Battista suddenly shoves his way rudely between them, fixing her with his eyes, waving his finger in her face. ‘Give them to me, Ada!’ he spits out.

‘Give them to me, and I’ll tell you what really happened to Rosetta.’

At least, that’s what he seems to say, but of course it’s quite impossible that he could have spoken those words, or indeed anything remotely resembling them.

‘Don’t you want to know the truth, Ada, after all these years? Give me your nephews and I’ll tell you!’

It is only now that she belatedly realizes that the figure before her is not Aurelio Battista at all, but some species of demon which has assumed his form. As always, the knowledge that she is not faced with anything real and irremediable is both disturbing and obscurely comforting. She is determined to retain the initiative, however. She is an old hand when it comes to dealing with this sort of thing.

‘What do you know about it?’ she demands with a sneer.

The creature before her leans closer.

‘I know about Rosa Coin.’

It steps back, nods once, then turns and walks off, merging almost immediately into the massed shadows.

‘Come on, Auntie dear,’ urges Nanni.

Before her, in the open doorway, Daniele stands looking at her with the same smile as all those years ago, when he used to stand for hours beneath her window, waiting for her to show her face.

‘You’ll catch your death standing out there in the cold,’ he tells her kindly.

But she is not standing. She is sliding, slipping to the icy pavement where she thrashes about like a landed fish, gasping for air, biting her tongue in a vain attempt to silence the endless screaming in her head.

By the time Zen reached home he had got the trembling under control, but his breath was still spastic and his heart clamoured for attention. It was only when he saw lights on in the house that he remembered that Cristiana was waiting for him.

Her presence, so ardently desired just a little while ago, now seemed an inconvenience he could well have done without. After what had just happened he needed time to unwind, to unclench his knotted psyche and become himself again, the self he recognized and was prepared to take responsibility for. The last thing he wanted at such a moment was to have to play sophisticated and ambiguous courtship games with the daughter of an old family friend.

Cristiana must have heard the front door open, for she was waiting for him at the top of the stairs. The tight-fitting red sweater and jeans she was wearing emphasized the contours of her figure. As Zen reached the landing, she stepped forward and laid her hand on his shoulder. She was bending forward, as if to kiss him, when she saw the expression on his face and drew back.

‘What’s wrong?’

He shook his head.

‘Nothing.’

He led her inside the living room and closed the door behind them, shutting out the world.

‘I ran into Ada Zulian out walking with her nephews,’ he said as he took off his coat and hat. ‘One of them threw a snowball at me. It sounds childish, but it actually hurt quite badly. It hit me on the ear, and he’d squeezed it down to a ball of ice.’

‘What did you do?’

Zen shrugged awkwardly.

‘There were only one thing to do, really, and that was ignore it.’

‘You could have thrown one back.’

‘That would really have been stupid. Besides, it would have missed. I’m a hopeless shot.’

Cristiana disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Isn’t there a law against assaulting police officials?’

‘Of course, but I can’t invoke it. Everyone knows that I tried and failed to bring that pair to court. If I charged them with assaulting me with a snowball, I’d make myself a complete laughing-stock. Which is precisely what the little bastard was counting on.’

Cristiana reappeared with a bottle of spumante and two glasses. Zen forced a smile.

‘What are we celebrating?’

‘My freedom.’

As she untwisted the wire cage securing the cork, Zen had an involuntary mental image of Enzo Gavagnin’s blue, partially severed thumbs.

‘How do you mean?’

Cristiana popped the cork and filled their glasses.

‘Finish telling me about Ada Zulian. What did you do in the end?’

‘Oh, I was wonderful! I ignored the nephews and went for Ada herself.’

She handed him his drink.

‘Cincin!’

They clinked glasses.

‘What do you mean, you went for her?’ asked Cristiana.

Zen sighed deeply.

‘I’ve had quite a stressful few days, one way and another, and getting hit by that snowball was the last straw. I’m afraid I went completely over the top.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I…’

He broke off, biting his lip.

‘Christ, it was unforgivable!’

Cristiana took his hand and drew him down to the sofa.

‘I’ll forgive you.’

He sat staring blankly at the worn patch of carpet which covered the centre of the floor.

‘I told her that I knew what had happened to her little girl, the one who disappeared.’

He turned to meet Cristiana’s eyes, then looked away again.

‘I said I’d tell her if she agreed to testify against her nephews.’

Cristiana nodded briskly, as though all this was quite in order.

‘And what did she say?’

Zen laughed harshly and gulped at his wine.

‘She didn’t say anything. She threw a fit. Collapsed in the snow, writhing around, foaming at the mouth, screaming her head off.’

‘God!’

‘It happened right in front of Daniele Trevisan’s house. He and the nephews took her inside.’

He glanced at Cristiana.

‘I’d like to know how she is. I don’t suppose they’d talk to me, but…’

‘Of course.’

She picked up the receiver and dialled.

‘Mamma? I’m over at Wanda’s. She says that Lisa Rosteghin heard from Gabriella that Ada Zulian has had some sort of fit in the street right outside Trevisan’s place. Have you heard anything about it? No? Well, listen, could you phone Daniele and find out? We can’t, you see, because he’d want to know how we found out and then it might come out about Gabriella and Beppo Raffin, the kid who lives across the street, whereas you could make out you heard from Signora Vian…’

She paused, gazing vaguely into indeterminate space.

‘No, don’t call us. We’re… we’re not actually at Wanda’s. We went out. I’ll phone back in a few minutes. Okay? Ciao.’

She turned back to Zen and sipped her wine.

‘And your freedom?’ he asked.

She laughed.

‘That was just an excuse to open some bubbly. Do you know what my bastard husband has done? Flown to Rome with that bitch Populin! He’s got a cover story — some televised debate on the break-up of Italy — but basically we’re talking dirty weekend.’

She touched Zen’s hand.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’

He dug out his battered pack of Nazionali. It had a rumpled, collapsed look. Zen squeezed the sides experimentally.

‘Precisely one,’ he said, shaking the remaining cigarette free.

‘Oh, I won’t take it if it’s your last.’

He removed the cigarette from the packet and placed the tip against her lips.

‘Let’s share,’ he said.

‘It wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t been trying so hard to act the good little wife for the benefit of the press,’ Cristiana went on, inhaling deeply.

Zen squeezed her hand sympathetically.

‘Quite apart from that,’ he murmured, ‘it might not be such a bad idea to keep a certain distance from Dal Maschio.’

Cristiana passed him the cigarette.

‘You mean he’s in some sort of trouble?’

He put the tip, damp from her saliva, into his mouth.

‘Would that bother you?’

She glanced at her watch.

‘I’d better see what Mamma has found out before she gets impatient, tries Wanda’s number and discovers that she hasn’t seen me since yesterday.’

Rosalba Morosini had evidently found out quite a lot, and proceeded to give her daughter a lengthy account which Cristiana subsequently passed on to Zen in abridged form.

‘Ada’s all right. They were about to call a doctor when she came out of it. The nephews tried to get her to lodge a complaint, but Daniele refused to testify against you.’

‘Good for him.’

Cristiana stared at him.

‘Do you really know what became of the little girl?’

Zen handed her back the cigarette.

‘No more than I know what became of my father.’

She crushed out the cigarette and poured them more wine.

‘And Nando?’

Zen tried to shrug it off.

‘Oh, I expect I’m just jealous, that’s all.’

She looked at him acutely.

‘That’s not all.’

He looked away.

‘Not quite all, perhaps.’

She took his hand between hers and carried it to the upper slope of her breast. They looked at each other.

‘This is strictly confidential, of course,’ he began.

‘Of course.’

Somewhere in the distance, a ship’s hooter sounded a long, mournful note.

‘There is no evidence against Dal Maschio himself,’ Zen murmured, moving his hand slightly. ‘But some of his associates appear to be implicated in a number of investigations currently proceeding…’

He broke off.

‘I sound like a policeman,’ he said.

‘You are a policeman.’

‘I don’t want to be. Not now.’

‘Have you got any more cigarettes?’

‘Upstairs.’

She nodded slowly.

‘Upstairs,’ she said.

He was woken by a cry below the window.

‘ Spazzino PRONTI!!! ’

Zen lay back in bed, listening to the other tenants tossing down their bags of rubbish for the street sweeper to add to the pile in his hand-cart. He felt clear-headed, relaxed and lucid. There was no doubt about it: Cristiana was good for him.

This time she had not been able to stay the night. Rosalba was expecting her home and would have phoned Wanda Dal Maschio if her daughter had not reappeared. It would have been perfect if she had still been there, a warm, sleepy presence, a token that what had happened the night before had indeed been real. Unlike the previous occasion, Zen now had no anxieties about facing Cristiana by the cold light of morning. On the contrary, he was already missing her. They had stayed up talking late the night before, and there had been no moment of awkwardness or strain. Everything had seemed perfectly easy and normal, as though they had known each other all their lives.

The house did not feel quite as cold as the day before, and when he threw open the window it was clear that a thaw had set in. All but the largest heaps of snow were already gone, leaving only a faint sheen of water which made the worn paving stones gleam like a fishmonger’s slab. Diffuse sunlight lent a vernal suppleness to the bright, clean air. It was a day for assignations and excursions, a day to tear up your plans and arrangements and make things up as you went along, preferably in the company of a friend or lover.

As he set out in search of his morning coffee, Zen’s heart sank at the very different prospect before him. It seemed absurd to spend such a day sitting in poky, neonlit offices being lied to by the likes of Giulio Bon. He no longer cared one way or the other about the Durridge case. But there was no alternative. It would be as dangerous now to abandon the investigation as to pursue it — perhaps more so. The only way he could justify the measures he had already taken was by seeing the thing through to the end.

At the Questura, he surveyed the various options open to him and tried to decide how to proceed. Based on the way the men had reacted to being taken into custody the day before, Bugno seemed the weakest link in the chain, so Zen sent for him first. While he waited, he skimmed through the man’s file. Born in 1946, married with three children, an employee of the muncipal transport company ACTV, Bugno had no previous convictions. The only black marks against him were a failure to vote in a recent general election and the complaint of trespass made the previous year by Ivan Durridge.

Massimo Bugno had a big bald head, a deeply-indented broken nose, a weak chin, bushily compensatory moustache and the general air of someone who fears that he has forgotten to turn off the bath water. He was evidently considerably less refreshed than Zen by the night he had spent in a cell in the windowless annexe behind the Questura. Zen invited him to sit down. He glanced at his watch.

‘What shift are you on this week, Massimo? Your workmates will be starting to wonder what’s become of you.’

‘Why are you holding me here?’ Bugno whined. ‘What have I done?’

Zen lifted the file off the desk in front of him.

‘On the 27th of September last year, you and two other men landed on a private ottagono near Malamocco. The owner called the police, and you were subsequently apprehended by a patrol boat.’

Bugno frowned.

‘That’s all over!’ he protested. ‘No charges were ever brought. It was all a fuss over nothing, anyway. We were…’

He hesitated.

‘We were fishing. The motor packed up. We drifted on to the island. We left as soon as we could.’

Zen raised his eyebrows.

‘Fishing? That’s not what you told us at the time.’

Bugno dampened his lips rapidly with his tongue.

‘Well, it was something like that. I don’t exactly remember.’

Zen nodded.

‘Let’s see if your memory is any better when it comes to your next visit to the island.’

‘You’re mistaken. I’ve never been back there.’

Zen was surprised and dismayed in equal measure. For the first time, Massimo Bugno had spoken with a casual ease which carried complete conviction. Suddenly Zen had the horrible sensation that his whole theory about the Durridge kidnapping was totally and utterly wrong. His reaction was to lash out.

‘Still feeling big and brave, are we?’ he sneered at Bugno. ‘Your wife isn’t, I can tell you that much. She’s been ringing every five minutes wanting to know what’s going on and when she can expect you home. She’s worried, the kids are terrified, the neighbours are gossiping, but what can I tell her? It all depends on you, Massimo.’

Bugno wrung his hands piteously.

‘What do you want me to do? What do you want me to say?’

‘The truth!’ Zen shouted.

‘But I’ve told you the truth!’

Zen swung his fist as though to strike him, then drew it aside at the last moment and drove it into his palm with a resounding smack.

‘Stop messing me about, Bugno!’

Bugno looked abject.

‘I’m sorry, dottore! I’m really sorry! I just don’t know what you want me to say.’

‘What were you doing on the eleventh of November last year?’

Massimo Bugno frowned.

‘November?’

‘November, yes! Are you deaf? Answer the question!’

Suddenly Bugno’s face cleared.

‘The eleventh? Ah, well, that weekend I would have been out of town.’

Zen laughed contemptuously.

‘Had the alibi nice and pat, didn’t you? Now I know you’re guilty, Bugno, and so help me God I’ll get a confession if I have to beat it out of you.’

‘It’s the truth! I was on the mainland, near Belluno, at my father-in-law’s farm. I can prove it!’

‘Oh I’m sure you can dig up a few relatives who are prepared to perjure themselves on your behalf.’

‘It’s my father-in-law’s birthday!’

‘The eleventh?’

‘The eighth.’

‘What’s the eighth got to do with it? Don’t try and confuse the issue!’

‘You don’t understand. His birthday is on the eighth, but the kids were in school and Lucia and I had to work. We drove up there at the weekend and stayed over till Sunday evening. I was nowhere near the city on the eleventh!’

Bugno stared fixedly at Zen, as though trying to hypnotize him into belief. There was no need for that. Zen had no doubt that Bugno was telling the truth. On the other hand, he couldn’t afford to turn him loose until he had questioned the other two men.

‘Have it your own way!’ he snapped, and called the guard to have Bugno taken back to the cells.

Before dealing with Massimo Zuin, Zen phoned down to the local bar for a cappuccino and a pastry. A few minutes later Aldo Valentini breezed in, followed almost immediately by Pia Nunziata, her right arm in a sling, carrying a beige envelope in her left hand.

‘What are you doing here?’ Zen asked her indignantly. ‘You’re supposed to be taking the week off.’

The policewoman nodded.

‘I was going to, but all my friends, relatives and neighbours kept popping in and ringing up every five minutes to ask how I was. In the end I decided I’d rather be at work.’

She handed him the envelope and walked out, almost colliding with the waiter carrying Zen’s breakfast. Zen gave him a tip calculated to ensure an equally prompt response next time, then tore open the envelope and scanned the four sheets of flimsy paper inside, headed Heyman, Croft, Kleinwort and Biggs, Attorneys at Law. In the next cubicle, Aldo Valentini was typing frantically.

‘How’s it going, Aldo?’ Zen called.

‘Still waiting for the gang to call, Sfriso’s at home with a tap on the line, I’m trying to organize a rapid response for any of the scenarios they might throw at us, enough to drive you round the bend, didn’t sleep a wink all night.’

Zen dipped the last bite of pastry in his coffee, then stood up and put on his hat and coat. Domenico Zuin was going to have to wait.

Outside, a gentle drowsiness pervaded the air. Zen turned left, walking north towards the hospital complex behind the church dedicated to the hybrid San Zanipolo. A boy on a miniature bicycle was dashing about the square at high speed, ignoring the ritualistic cries of ‘Come here!’ from his mother, who was chatting expansively to a friend by the bridge. Zen walked along the quay lined with mooring posts painted in blue-and-white stripes like barbers’ poles, and entered the imposing courtyard of the hospital.

The pathology department was located in a remote outbuilding on the other side of the huge ex-conventual complex. Zen made his way through groups of patients in dressing gowns and visitors clutching flowers and fruit and walked down a tree-lined alley to a green door marked HISTOPATHOLOGY. A dingy corridor inside led to a room packed with laboratory equipment. A young woman in a white coat directed Zen to a small room on the other side of the lab, where he donned a gown and rubber boots. Already the air was tainted with the cloying odour of formaldehyde.

Inside the post-mortem room there were six metal tables, three of them occupied. An assistant was sewing up a female corpse whose body cavity now contained a pair of rubber gloves, strips of bloodsoaked muslin and a copy of the morning’s Corriere dello Sport. At the next table, another assistant pulled the caul of cut scalp down over a male cadaver’s face and set about sawing the skull open. Zen asked him where he could find the pathologist. The man waved vaguely with the bone-flecked saw at a glass-fronted office in the end wall where a florid man in a white plastic cape and rubber boots was talking loudly on the telephone.

‘… and then once Anna and Patrizio finally turned up, nothing would do but we all had to sit through the whole thing again from the beginning! Do you believe it? And when Claudio tried gently to tell him that enough was enough, he got completely pissed off and started asking what kind of friends we were… It’s absurd! He’s only had the damn thing a month and already he thinks he’s Visconti.’

He glanced up at Zen.

‘Anyway, Marco, I must go. What? That’s right, the corpses are getting restless, heh heh. Speak to you later.’

He put the phone down.

‘Now then, what can I do for you?’

Zen introduced himself and inquired about the progress of the autopsy on cadaver 40763, such being the number assigned to the remains which had been found on Sant’ Ariano.

‘Done, finished, complete,’ the pathologist remarked carelessly. ‘I like to get the really putrid stuff out of the way early on, if at all possible.’

Zen handed him the sheets faxed over by the law firm representing the Durridge family.

‘I believe this is medical information relating to a missing person,’ he said. ‘It’s in English, but…’

‘So’s half the literature,’ the pathologist retorted. ‘You want to know if it’s the same man?’

He glanced at the material, then walked over to the door, beckoning to Zen. The pathologist led the way to the far end of the post-mortem room. On an isolated table lay a long plastic bag with a zipper running from one end to the other. He opened the bag, releasing a stench which overpowered even the pervading odour of formaldehyde. Inside lay a partially reassembled skeleton and an assortment of bones, some of which had bits of flesh and gristle clinging to them. The pathologist removed the jawbone and compared the teeth to a sketch in the fax, then bent over the skull and repeated the process with the upper jaw.

‘Looks like a perfect match,’ he murmured. ‘There’s a couple of missing teeth, but they probably broke loose on impact.’

He pointed to a row of jars at the foot of the table, where various organs were floating in pink liquid.

‘Tough organ, the heart. It survived even this degree of decomposition.’

He patted the skull lightly.

‘Our subject suffered from coronary artery disease. According to these medical records, so did this American.’

‘So it’s the same man?’ Zen asked eagerly.

The pathologist gestured a disclaimer.

‘I can’t issue an official identification without running some tests on the other data in here.’

‘But off the record…’ Zen insisted.

‘Off the record, I’d say there’s very little question that it’s the same man.’

Zen released a long sigh.

‘I suppose it’s impossible to determine the cause of death with the body in this condition?’

‘In most cases it would certainly have been very difficult,’ the pathologist replied. ‘But this one is perfectly straightforward.’

He pointed to the base of the skull.

‘Observe this lesion. The cervical vertebrae have been driven straight up into the skull. And again here, the fracture dislocation of the hips and the multiple pelvic fractures.’

He looked at Zen.

‘The evidence speaks for itself.’

‘And what does it say?’ Zen inquired dryly.

‘The man fell to his death.’

Zen gaped at the pathologist.

‘Fell?’

‘Oh yes. And from quite a considerable height. At least the fourth floor, and probably higher.’

Zen laughed.

‘That’s impossible!’

‘I beg your pardon?’ the pathologist returned with a piqued expression.

‘There are no buildings where this man was found! There are no structures of any kind, only bushes and shrubs.’

The pathologist zipped up the body bag.

‘Perhaps he died elsewhere and the corpse was subsequently moved to the site where you found it. There is no way of telling once the flesh has gone. But I can assure you that injuries such as these can occur only in the way I have described.’

Zen nodded meekly.

‘Of course, dottore. I didn’t mean to…’

‘There are minor variations, depending on the primary point of impact. I recall a case a few years back, an air force trainee whose parachute failed to open. He landed on his head, with the result that the vault of the skull was driven down over the spine. That presents very similar lesions to this one, but with cranial impact you also get extensive fracturing of the vault and the base of the skull. That is absent here, so he must have come down feet first. It’s purely a matter of chance.’

He removed his rubber gloves and shook Zen’s hand.

‘Leave these medical details with me and I’ll send over a full report in due course.’

Zen was so deep in thought as he left the hospital that he did not notice the funeral when he tried to push his way through the cortege and was indignantly repulsed. Only then did he become aware of the dirge-like bell strokes, and the blue motor launch bearing a coffin submerged in flowers and wreaths with sprays of lilies and palm leaves crossed with violet ribbons. He took off his hat respectfully as the hearse cast off for the short trip to San Michele, followed by a line of watertaxis bearing the mourners.

Once the crowd had dispersed, he began to walk slowly back to the Questura. But though his pace was deliberate, his mind was racing. The Durridge case had entered a phase of extreme delicacy, and Zen knew that he needed to decide exactly what he was going to do and not do before making his next moves. A mistake at this point would not only jeopardize any hope of bringing the investigation to a successful conclusion, but might well leave Zen himself at risk, professionally if not personally.

All the elements of the case were now before him. It was just a question of fitting them together in the right way, so that the overall picture could be deciphered. And the key to the puzzle, he felt sure, was the question of how Ivan Durridge had died. How could a man fall to his death when there was nowhere to fall from? As for the pathologist’s idea that the corpse might have been moved subsequent to death, that was simply not credible, given the terrain. It would have been possible to transport the body to Sant’ Ariano by boat, assuming you knew the lagoon well, but no one could have carried it across the island through that dense undergrowth. It would have had to be hoisted into place using a crane, or…

As he entered the Questura, the policeman on guard behind the armoured glass screen in the vestibule called to him.

‘The Questore wants to see you in his office immediately, dottore. Top floor, first on the right.’

Francesco Bruno was sitting behind his desk initialling papers when Zen entered. Well dressed, carefully groomed and quietly spoken, there was nothing about him to suggest the policeman. He could equally well have been a senior manager in a multinational company, or indeed a political figure with a high public profile.

‘Ah, at last!’ he murmured as Zen came in. ‘I was beginning to think you’d gone back to Rome already.’

‘Sorry, sir. I just slipped out for a moment to look into one or two things…’

Bruno waved impatiently.

‘I’ve got nothing against my officers popping out for the occasional coffee. Unfortunately the matter I have to raise with you is rather more serious.’

He picked up a copy of a newspaper lying on his desk, folded it carefully and handed it to Zen. The article was headed ELDERLY VENETIAN ARISTOCRAT THREATENED BY UNDERCOVER POLICEMAN. The text below described how Contessa Ada Zulian had been accosted in the street by an official working for the Ministry of the Interior, who had attempted to blackmail her into altering her testimony to allow the State to prosecute her nephews. When Contessa Zulian refused, the official — ‘whose name is known to this paper’ — made a number of cruel and gratuitous references to a personal tragedy suffered by the Zulian family. The contessa, whose health had long been extremely fragile, collapsed and had to be taken to a nearby house, where she made a slow recovery. The article went on to condemn this ‘typical example of the arrogance and brutality of Rome’, and invited readers to make their indignation clear by voting overwhelmingly for the Nuova Repubblica Veneta in the forthcoming municipal elections.

Zen glanced at the cover of the newspaper.

‘This is a party journal,’ he remarked, tossing it down on the desk. ‘They’re just playing politics.’

‘Playing to win!’ retorted Francesco Bruno. ‘If the opinion polls are right, they’re likely to be the biggest party on the city council after the local elections. Ferdinando Dal Maschio will be a person of immense power and influence in the capital of the province whose police chief I am.’

Bruno kept looking straight at Zen, but there was a strangely absent quality about his gaze, as though he weren’t really seeing what he was looking at.

‘Times have changed, dottore! It’s just not good enough any longer for police officers to swagger about like a pack of licensed bully-boys. It’s essential for all of us to realize that we are the servants of the public, not its masters. Accountability is the name of the game.’

He got to his feet, sighing loudly, and wandered over to the window.

‘Here we are, trying to build a new Italy, with nothing but the old materials to hand! I appreciate that it’s difficult for the older personnel such as yourself to change your ways overnight, but this incident involving the Contessa Zulian is completely unacceptable by any standards. There is simply no excuse for it.’

He turned to face Zen.

‘I simply won’t permit this sort of heavy-handed loutishness to wreck the carefully nurtured public relations which I and my staff have been at such pains to build up. You Criminalpol people come and go, but the rest of us have to live and work here. To do so successfully involves winning and retaining the respect and trust of the local population, and more especially their elected representatives.’

Francesco Bruno sat down and started initialling documents again.

‘I’ve issued a press statement to the effect that your transfer here will cease as of midnight tonight,’ he said without looking up.

Zen did not move. After some time, the Questore raised his head and nodded once at Zen.

‘That’s all.

On the way back to his office, Zen met Pia Nunziata and asked her to come and have a coffee with him.

‘You’re supposed to be on sick leave and I’ve just been told to clear my desk,’ he said when she looked doubtful. ‘Technically speaking, we’re not here in the first place.’

The Bar dei Greci was empty apart from two elderly men mumbling at each other over their glasses of wine. Pia Nunziata asked for a mineral water. Zen ordered himself a coffee and a grappa. He felt he deserved it.

‘Why have they told you to leave?’ the policewoman asked as they sat down.

‘I was sent here to investigate the Zulian case, and there is no Zulian case.’

‘But we caught them red-handed!’

Zen shot her a curious glance, then nodded.

‘Ah, I forgot that you’ve been away. They wriggled out of it, I’m afraid. The contessa refused to testify against her nephews, and without that we can’t proceed. So you got shot in vain, and I’m out of a job.’

He lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke upwards and making the No Smoking sign revolve lazily.

‘Nevertheless, there is one small matter I’d like to clear up before I leave, and I was wondering if you would help me. I haven’t time to do it myself, and I need the answer quite urgently.’

‘I’ll be glad to help,’ Pia Nunziata replied simply.

‘But without telling anyone what you’re doing, understand? Now I’ve been given my marching orders, it might complicate things.’

The policewoman nodded.

‘You can rely on me.’

Zen held her eye for a moment.

‘I need some technical information relating to air traffic. I don’t know where flights in this area are controlled from, but it’s probably either the international airport at Tessera or the NATO airbase at Treviso. What I want is a record of any low-altitude flights over the lagoon on the eleventh of November last year.’

He sipped his grappa while Pia Nunziata laboriously copied this into her notebook.

‘Do you want me to write it for you?’ asked Zen.

‘It’s all right, thanks. I’m getting used to writing with my other hand.’

‘Get whatever information you can, in as complete a form as possible, and above all as soon as possible. By tomorrow, this will be history.’

‘I’ll do what I can, sir.’

The policewoman left to start her inquiries, while Zen finished his cigarette and grappa before returning to the Questura to interview Domenico Zuin, an encounter he regarded with considerable apprehension. Apart from Giulio Bon, there was no evidence that either of the men who had taken part in the first landing on the ottagono had also participated in the kidnapping of Ivan Durridge a month later. Bon was linked to this event through his sale of Durridge’s boat, but any attempt to interrogate him directly would result in the intervention of Carlo Berengo Gorin. As for Massimo Bugno, it now appeared likely that he had no connection with the kidnapping.

That left Domenico Zuin as the key to the whole affair. If he could be persuaded to co-operate, Zen stood a real chance of achieving enough progress in the Durridge case to force Francesco Bruno to extend his transfer. But that was a very big if. Zuin was a much tougher proposition than Bugno, and the tactics which had proved successful in that case would not necessarily work in the other. Bugno was an employee, accustomed to following orders and obeying those in authority, while Zuin was an entrepreneur, a member of the privileged elite who formed the city’s watertaxi monopoly. He couldn’t be so easily cowed or browbeaten, as he proceeded to demonstrate the moment he was led into Zen’s office.

‘I want a lawyer.’

Domenico Zuin had a trim, muscular body and one of those faces Zen associated with Americans: hair like an inverted scrubbing-brush, skin that looked as if it had been shaved down to the dermis, excessively white teeth and slightly protuberant eyes.

‘I’m saying nothing without a lawyer present,’ he insisted.

Zen shrugged.

‘I’m not asking you to say anything. I’ll do the talking. I want to fill you in on the situation, so that when we bring a lawyer in and make everything official, you’ll have a clear idea of how you want to play this one.’

He offered Zuin a cigarette, which was refused with an abrupt jerk of the head. Zen lit one himself and exhaled a cloud of smoke into the air between them, transected by a seam of dazed sunlight.

‘Basically I’d say that you’re looking at a minimum of two to four,’ he continued conversationally. ‘I can’t see squeezing it below that, whatever we do. On the other hand, it could well be more. A lot more.’

He picked up Zuin’s file and scanned the contents.

‘Let’s see, what have we got here? Two counts of bribery. One aggravated assault, charges dropped when witness withdrew. A few run-ins involving under-age rent-boys. Nothing that need concern us.’

He tossed the file back on the desk.

‘I can see no reason why we shouldn’t land you a nice two to four in that VIP facility near Parma where they’re putting all these corrupt businessmen and politicians. You wouldn’t object to sharing a cell with them, I suppose? You might even make a few useful contacts.’

He gazed over at Zuin, who was staring at the floor, visibly struggling to keep his resolution not to speak.

‘That’s assuming we can position Giulio Bon correctly, of course,’ Zen went on. ‘Ideally, we need the third man to come in with us. It would look much better that way.’

Zuin glanced up quickly and their eyes met for a moment.

‘I can quite see why you decided not to take Bugno along the second time,’ Zen murmured. ‘Not a good man in a crisis.’

Zuin’s eyes started to twitch from side to side, as though dazzled by every surface they landed on.

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

Zen gave him a look, level and lingering.

‘Yes, you do. What you don’t know — what nobody knows yet — is that we’ve found the body.’

The skin over Zuin’s cheekbones tightened.

‘All that’s left of it, that is,’ added Zen, stubbing out his cigarette. ‘But that’s enough to tell us who it was and how he died. Which changes everything. It means we’re talking about murder.’

There was a knock at the door. Zen got up, walked over and opened it. Pia Nunziata stood in the passageway, holding a folder which she passed to Zen.

‘That was quick,’ he commented.

‘It was very straightforward,’ the policewoman said. ‘I phoned the airport, they looked out their records for that day and faxed them over.’

Zen thanked her and walked back to his desk, looking through the papers. Domenico Zuin sat staring at him with an expression of extreme anxiety. Zen suddenly had an idea.

‘It looks like you’ve left it too late,’ he murmured, shaking his head sadly. ‘I had hoped to let you off lightly, Zuin. Make out you just went along in the boat, didn’t have any idea what it was all about, that sort of thing. Bon is the one I had targeted. He was the one who screwed the whole thing up by selling Durridge’s boat, after all. It seems only fair that he should take the rap.’

Zuin’s shock was evident on his face.

‘Didn’t you know about that?’ asked Zen. ‘I suppose Bon claimed he’d scuttled the thing, but in the end his greed got the better of him. You can get quite a nice price for a topa these days, even without the proper papers.’

He sighed.

‘Anyway, he’s decided to go for a pre-emptive strike.’

He tapped the sheets of paper.

‘One of my colleagues has been interviewing Bon downstairs. This is a draft of his statement. I’m afraid he’s dropped you right in it. He claims he only went along to handle the boat and had no part in what followed. But what’s really damaging is where he says…’

He pretended to pore over the page.

‘Here we are. My colleague asked about how you left the ottagono. Bon replies, “I left in the same way we arrived, by boat.” Question, “With Domenico Zuin.” Witness, “No, he remained on the island.” Question, “Then how did he get off again?” Witness, “The same way as Durridge, presumably.”’

‘He’s lying!’ Zuin burst out.

Zen shrugged.

‘He’s talking. And that’s all that counts.’

He came round and sat on the edge of the desk, looking down at Zuin.

‘You don’t seem to understand. This American disappears. There’s a brief flurry of interest and then the whole thing dies down. Now, suddenly, his body turns up. All hell’s going to break loose!’

He spread his hands wide in appeal.

‘Try to see it from my point of view, Zuin. I’ve got an illustrious corpse on my hands. I need someone I can take to the magistrates in the next few hours. I’d rather it was Giulio Bon than you, but if you clam up and he plays along there’s nothing I can do. You’re looking at a minimum of ten to fifteen, and if they believe Bon it’ll be life. Ergastolo. Life meaning life. Meaning death.’

Domenico Zuin slammed his fists down on his thighs.

‘You can’t let him get away with this!’

Zen frowned.

‘The only way around it I can see is to get the other man on our side. You must have taken someone else along, a replacement for Bugno. If he supports your version of events, we could still swing it.’

Zuin looked down at the floor.

‘He’s dead.’

‘Pity. Anyone I know?’

‘You should do,’ Zuin replied caustically. ‘He worked here.’

Zen gazed out through the window.

‘Of course,’ he murmured.

He got up, walked quickly round the desk and picked up the phone.

‘Get me the Law Courts,’ he told the switchboard operator.

He looked over at Domenico Zuin.

‘I’m going to take a chance on you,’ he declared. ‘If we move fast, we might just be able to pip Bon at the post.’

He turned back to the phone.

‘Hello? This is Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen phoning from the Questura. Please send a court-appointed lawyer over here immediately. I have a witness who wishes to make a statement.’

The bells of the city were all pealing midday as Zen left the Questura and crossed the small square on the other side of the canal. Trapped by the walls on every side, the sound ricocheted to and fro until the whole campo rang like a bell. Nevertheless, the chronology they represented was only one — and by no means the most important — of a number of distinct strands of whose progress he was aware.

Since Francesco Bruno had issued his ultimatum, time had become as real a player in the Durridge case as any of the people involved, and Zen knew that success or failure depended on how well he mastered its ebb and flow, its tricky, shifting tidal currents. The clock hardly came into it. Already he had accomplished more in a single morning than in most weeks of his professional life. What mattered was the sense of utter commitment to the case which had come to him as he stood before Francesco Bruno like a schoolchild before a master and heard himself being dismissed. As a result of that experience, Zen knew exactly what he was working for.

The ideal which inspired him was nothing as abstract as Justice or Truth. His dream was personal, and attainable. Having scored a great coup by solving the Durridge case where everyone else had failed, he would apply for a permanent transfer and return in triumph to his native city. He would bring his mother back from her exile in Rome, back to her friends and the way of life she had been forced to give up. Once the Durridge case came to court, Cristiana Morosini would have the perfect excuse for divorcing her disgraced husband. And a year or so later, she and Zen could marry without exciting any adverse comment. The Zen house would be a home again, once more to resound with laughter and life.

He checked his euphoria. Much remained to be done. The next hurdle to be surmounted was lunch with Tommaso Saoner.

‘I’d be delighted, Aurelio,’ Saoner had replied urbanely when Zen phoned to invite him, ‘but unfortunately I’ve already got an engagement.’

‘Break it.’

There was a pause before Saoner’s laugh. He sounded embarrassed by his friend’s peremptory tone.

‘I’m afraid I can’t, Aurelio.’

‘I’m afraid you must.’

This time Saoner’s laugh was drier.

‘Don’t play the policeman with me.’

‘I’m playing the friend, Tommaso. But the policeman isn’t far behind, and neither are the judges and the courts and the reporters and the television cameras. I’ll be at El S’ciopon at half past twelve.’

As he walked towards the restaurant, situated in an alley near the church of San Lio, he was suddenly brought up short. The scene before him — a certain combination of bridge, canal, alley, courtyard and wall — was just one of an almost infinite repertoire of variants on that series which the city contained, and it took him a moment to work out why this particular example seemed so significant. Then he realized that this was where he had seen the moored boats of the emergency services and the jointed metal tubing which led to the septic tank in which Enzo Gavagnin had met his hideous death.

The Carabinieri were evidently still hard at work on the case, for there were two of their launches tied up alongside. As Zen crossed the bridge, a uniformed officer emerged from one of them. He glanced up at Zen, then looked again.

‘Rodrigo! Pietro!’

Two Carabinieri rushed out on deck, brandishing machine-guns. The officer had already leapt ashore. Zen looked round, trying to spot the object of their attentions.

‘Stop!’ yelled the officer.

‘Halt or I shoot!’ cried a younger voice.

Zen stepped back to let them pass, and promptly tripped over a panic-stricken cat dashing past. Both went flying, but the cat recovered quickly and scampered off. Running boots clattered to a halt by Zen’s ear. A rough hand grasped his collar and rolled him over to receive a gun barrel in the eye.

‘Move and you’re dead,’ the man holding the gun informed him succinctly.

Zen did not move. He did not speak or even, to his knowledge, breathe. Slower footsteps neared on the cobbles.

‘That’s him all right! It’s the old story of the murderer always returning to the scene of the crime. He’s a cool one, though! He was standing right next to me when we pulled the body out of the cesspool. Even asked me what had happened! Then he turned to me and brazenly admitted that he’d killed him. Well, we’ve got him now.’

Zen gasped in pain as a pair of plastic handcuffs bit into his wrists. One of the patrolmen held a machine-gun to his forehead while the other searched him for concealed weapons.

‘He’s clean, boss.’

‘Right, let’s go!’

The two patrolmen hauled Zen to his feet.

‘Have a look at my wallet,’ Zen murmured to the Carabineri officer.

‘Trying to bribe me, eh?’ the man shouted. ‘That’s a very serious offence!’

‘In my jacket pocket, left-hand side.’

The major looked at Zen sharply.

‘Keep him covered, Rodrigo!’ he barked. ‘Pietro, search him!’

Knows how to delegate, this one, thought Zen.

‘Here it is, sir,’ said Pietro, flourishing Zen’s black leather wallet.

‘Check the identity card in the window,’ Zen told him.

The Carabiniere’s eyes flicked down.

‘ Cazzo! ’ he exclaimed.

‘What is it?’ the major demanded irritably. ‘What’s the matter?’

Pietro handed over the wallet to his superior.

Thanks to this delay, the restaurant was almost full by the time Zen got there. There was no sign of Tommaso, so Zen ordered some wine and water and munched at the breadsticks to stave off his hunger. After fifteen minutes he gave in to the waiter’s pointed requests to take his order. The room was now packed and several people had been turned away. Zen ordered the set lunch — spaghetti with clams followed by grilled sardines and radicchio di Treviso al forno — and stuck his head in his newspaper.

The main stories concerned the latest episodes in the long-running saga of corruption in high places, and Zen dutifully ploughed his way through a leading article suggesting that while on the one hand the events currently unfolding were a political and social earthquake without parallel in the history of mankind, a cataclysmic upheaval compared to which the French and Russian revolutions were largely cosmetic rites of passage, it was perfectly clear to any sophisticated observer that nothing had really changed and that the whole affair was simply one more example of the national genius for adapting to circumstances, despite the earnest lucubrations of commentators from abroad who had as usual missed the point, bless their cotton socks.

The inside pages featured a gatefold spread showing the leader of the Nuova Repubblica Veneta, accompanied by his charming and attractive wife, being acclaimed by his enthusiastic supporters in Pellestrina, Burano and Treporti. There were shots of Dal Maschio at the controls of the helicopter he had piloted to each of these outposts, shots of Dal Maschio striding purposefully about the streets greeting the inhabitants and kissing babies, shots of Dal Maschio addressing an election rally. ‘Venice is the heart of the lagoon,’ he had reportedly declared, ‘and the NRV is the very heartbeat of Venice. Keep the lagoon alive! Keep Venice alive! Vote for the New Venetian Republic!’ At his side Cristiana stood smiling vacuously, sensuously solid in a pink dress and a fur coat worn off the shoulder.

The first course arrived, and Zen folded up his paper and started to eat. The clams were the genuine local article, vongole veraci, stewed in olive oil with garlic and parsley until the shells opened to reveal the tiny morsels of tender gristle inside. Zen slowly worked his way through them and the long strands of spaghetti soaked in the rich sauce. He was winding up a final coil of pasta when Tommaso finally arrived to claim the chair opposite.

‘I couldn’t get here any earlier. I had to change all my arrangements. What the hell is this about, Aurelio?’

The waiter loomed up. Tommaso took off his heavy glasses, which had steamed up, and said he’d skip the primo and have whatever was quickest to follow.

‘What’s going on?’ he demanded as soon as the man had gone.

Zen wiped the oil off his lips with his napkin.

‘I need some information.’

Tommaso Saoner replaced his glasses and regarded Zen coldly.

‘I’m not an informer, Aurelio.’

Zen lit a cigarette.

‘Supplying information to the police doesn’t make you an informer, Tommaso. On the contrary, it’s the duty of every good citizen.’

Saoner poured himself some wine and broke off a crust of bread.

‘Information about what?’

‘About Ivan Durridge.’

Saoner glanced away, then quickly looked back at Zen.

‘Who?’

Zen shook his head in genuine embarrassment. Tommaso Saoner had been his friend for years at a time when a minute lasted longer than a month did now. Where were they now, that Tommaso and that Aurelio, so much more alive than the pallid impostors who had succeeded to their titles?

‘You know who,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows.’

He puffed out a cloud of smoke.

‘But you know more than everyone, Tommaso.’

Saoner frowned.

‘I thought you did when I phoned you,’ Zen went on, ‘and now I’m sure. Don’t try and lie to me, Tommaso. It won’t work. I know you too well.’

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

A faint smile appeared on Zen’s lips.

‘It’s a funny thing. All the people I’ve spoken to about the Durridge case have said exactly the same thing. Domenico Zuin, Giulio Bon, and now you. Is it some formula you’re taught when you join?’

The waiter brought the main course, and for a moment Saoner took refuge in the distraction offered by the task of filleting the sardines.

‘Join what?’ he asked eventually.

Zen sighed impatiently.

‘Come on, Tommaso! You may not consider me a friend any longer, but please don’t treat me as a fool.’

He stabbed a mouthful of the pink and purple chicory leaves, their delicate bitter flavour rounded and filled out by baking.

‘Zuin and Bon are both members. So is Massimo Bugno, who went along on the reconnaissance but didn’t measure up. So they replaced him with Enzo Gavagnin, who was not just a member but one of Dal Maschio’s lieutenants. Like you.’

He stared across the table at Saoner, who had stopped fiddling with his fish.

‘Gavagnin may have been braver than Bugno, but he wasn’t very bright. It was he who tipped me off to the link between the Nuova Repubblica Veneta and the Durridge case in the first place. When I had Bon brought in for questioning, Gavagnin revealed that both Bon and he were members. And the next thing I know there’s an expensive lawyer by the name of Carlo Berengo Gorin beating at my door.’

He observed Saoner flinch, and nodded.

‘You know him, don’t you? And I learned from…’

He paused. He had almost named Cristiana!

‘… from a friend that Dal Maschio does too. I suppose he’s the party lawyer.’

Tommaso Saoner feigned a bored shrug.

‘What’s all this got to do with me?’

Zen unhurriedly ate some grilled sardine before replying.

‘Domenico Zuin has made a full confession of his part in the kidnapping of Ivan Durridge. It was made freely, in the presence of Zuin’s legal representative, and I have it in my office now, ready for delivery to the Deputy Public Prosecutor.’

‘I repeat, what’s it got to do with me?’

Zen looked him in the eye.

‘You were once my best friend, Tommaso. I’m giving you a chance to get out while there’s still time.’

Saoner stared at him, his expression alternating between anxiety and anger.

‘And what makes you think anyone will believe whatever pack of lies this man has trotted out?’ he sneered.

Zen shrugged.

‘I’m sure that Zuin has trimmed some of the details, and twisted others to cast himself in a good light. For example, he claims that he never left the boat, and that it was Gavagnin and Bon who took the foreigners ashore. That may well be a lie. I couldn’t really care less.’

He stripped the bones of his last sardine, exposing the succulent flesh.

‘What foreigners?’ Saoner asked with deliberate casualness.

‘He doesn’t know who they were or where they were from. He didn’t recognize the language they spoke, but it wasn’t Italian. There were four of them, all young and tough-looking. Zuin picked them up from a hotel near the Fenice in his taxi, along with Bon and Gavagnin. Bon had told him that the men wanted to be landed on the island in the lagoon which he and Bon had explored earlier with Bugno.’

He pushed his plate aside and lit another cigarette. Saoner’s food lay untouched.

‘In the late morning, while the tide was still high enough, Zuin ferried them all over to the ottagono. He claims that the foreigners went ashore with Gavagnin and Bon while he returned to the city and got on with his work. Of course he subsequently heard about the disappearance of the American, like everyone else. But he’d been paid, and it was none of his business.’

‘That’s all?’ Tommaso inquired ironically.

‘It’s enough.’

Saoner laughed contemptuously. Zen regarded him with a serious expression.

‘Look at it this way, Tommaso. Zuin landed six men on the island. We know that Giulio Bon took Durridge’s boat, just to confuse the issue, and as the tide was ebbing he must have left fairly soon afterwards. We also know that Durridge was still on the island shortly after one o’clock, when he spoke briefly to a relative on the telephone. By then it was too late to approach the island from the water. And yet when Franco Calderan returned at five o’clock from visiting his sister on the Lido he found the place deserted.’

He leant forward.

‘So how did Durridge and the others get off the island?’

Saoner shrugged impatiently.

‘This is your life, eh, Aurelio? Picking over theories about what might or might not have happened, like a pack of grubby, dog-eared playing cards! Well I could play that game too, I suppose, only I’m too busy living.’

Zen looked at him and nodded.

‘I’m glad you and your friends are having so much fun, Tommaso, but someone has to clean up after you.’

‘Leave the party out of it!’ Saoner snapped. ‘You don’t have a shred of evidence to implicate us. What if Zuin and his confederates happened to be members? So are thousands of ordinary, decent, hard-working Venetians! They are our strength and our pride! They guarantee the future of this city, Zen, while people like you can only grub around digging up dirty secrets from its past.’

He got to his feet.

‘Nothing you’ve said amounts to any more than unsubstantiated, opportunistic slander. Now that we are close to getting our hands on the levers of power, our enemies will move heaven and earth to throw a spanner in the works.’

‘The Sayings of Chairman Dal Maschio, page ninety-four,’ retorted Zen.

Saoner flushed.

‘I’m not just a parrot, you know.’

‘You mean you thought up that cheap rhetoric yourself? That’s even worse!’

Saoner stared down at him coldly.

‘We were once friends, Zen, but that doesn’t mean that I have to listen to your insults.’

He turned away. Leaving enough money on the table to cover their meal, Zen hastily rose and followed him out of the restaurant.

‘Wait, Tommaso! I’m sorry if I offended you. It just worries me to see how you’ve fallen under the spell of these people. I’m sure you have nothing personally to do with Durridge’s murder, but…’

Tommaso Saoner swung round on him.

‘Murder?’

A couple entering the restaurant looked at them sharply. Zen took his friend’s arm and steered him further along the alley.

‘We found the body on that ossuary island we once visited together,’ he murmured. ‘It wasn’t much more than a skeleton itself after the vermin and the birds had eaten their fill. But they don’t eat bones. Durridge’s were shattered, the spine rammed up into the skull.’

He gripped Saoner’s arm, pulling him round and looking him in the eyes.

‘How do you pluck a man off one island and drop him on another in such a way as to break every bone in his body? What do you think, Tommaso? Which of the greasy playing cards would you pick from the pack?’

They stared at each other for a long moment. Then Saoner twisted violently away.

‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted in a voice edged with desperation. ‘I didn’t ask you to confide in me! I don’t know what sort of game you’re playing, and I don’t want to know! Just leave me alone! Leave me alone!’

He strode rapidly away down the alley. Zen started after him, then stopped, turned and set off slowly in the other direction.

The day might earlier have seemed an augury of spring, but by mid-afternoon the realities of February had asserted themselves. Once past their peak, both the warmth and the light faded fast. Darkness massed in the chilly evening air, silvering the window of Zen’s office to form a mirror which perfectly reflected the decline of his hopes for the Durridge case.

Giulio Bon would not talk. For almost two hours, Zen had interrogated him in the presence of Carlo Berengo Gorin. Much to Zen’s surprise, the lawyer had made no attempt to intervene. On the contrary, he had ostentatiously turned his back on the proceedings, dividing his attention equally between the arts supplement of La Repubblica and a large cigar which he extracted from its aluminium tube and fussed over for some considerable time before it was ignited to his entire satisfaction.

Zen had been prepared for Gorin to do everything in his power to obstruct the smooth progress of the interrogation, but with Domenico Zuin’s statement already on its way to Marcello Mamoli he had felt confident of prevailing. Indeed, he had rather looked forward to being able to repay Gorin for the slights he had suffered the previous week. The case against Bon was overwhelming. However much Gorin might fuss and fidget, he would be forced to concede defeat in the end.

It took Zen only a few minutes to realize that the lawyer’s air of apparent complacency was the very opposite of good news. If Carlo Berengo Gorin was not perched on the edge of his chair, ready to pounce at the slightest hint of a procedural inexactitude, it was not because he sensed that the game was lost but because he knew he had already won. Too late, Zen realized that he had made a fatal mistake in revealing the extent of his progress in the case to Tommaso Saoner.

Saoner must have passed on the information to his associates, who had contacted Gorin with an offer for Bon’s silence. This might have taken the form of a simple cash injection or, more likely, of some similar offer combined with a promise of political pressure on the Appeal Court once the Nuova Repubblica Veneta ‘got its hands on the levers of power’. This had then been communicated to Bon by Gorin during the initial consultation to which they were entitled under the provisions of the Criminal Code.

Once that deal had been struck, any business which Zen might have hoped to transact was dead in the water. If there had been any hope of an eventual breakthrough, he would have been happy to continue the interrogation through the night if necessary. As it was, after going through the motions of confronting Bon with the statement Zuin had made implicating him as the prime mover of the second landing on the ottagono, and failing to get any response, he abandoned the proceedings.

Zen still had one more card up his sleeve. Getting out the folder containing the information which Pia Nunziata had obtained from air traffic control at Tessera, he walked across the office to the wall-map of the Province of Venice. The extract from the records showed all the flights which had been logged on the day when Ivan Durridge had disappeared. Zen had already deleted most of the entries, which referred to arrivals and departures at the airport. There was also a certain amount of toing and froing around the city itself, most of it centering on the Naval college on Sant’Elena and the Coastguard headquarters on the Giudecca.

Once all this had been eliminated, there remained three flights whose course would have taken them near Sant’Ariano. One of these, a training flight out over the Adriatic from the USAF base at Treviso, could be discounted. The remaining two were civil flights, both involving helicopters. One originated at ten o’clock in the morning in Trieste and overflew the lagoon en route to Vicenza. The other commenced shortly before two in the afternoon from the San Nicolo airfield, calling at Alberoni, on the southern tip of the Lido, before continuing to Gorizia, a city in the extreme north-east of the Friuli region, straddling the border with what had until recently been Yugoslavia. The machine involved was registered to a company named Aeroservizi Veneti.

Zen ran his finger across the shiny surface of the map, locating the various places mentioned. There was San Nicolo at the northern tip of the Lido. There was Alberoni, a few kilometres from the ottagono where Ivan Durridge had made his home. At this scale, Gorizia would be somewhere on the ceiling, but it looked as though the route passed more or less directly over Sant’Ariano, marked with a cross on the map, and thence over the plains of the Piave and Tagliamento rivers.

The door at the other end of the office crashed open and Aldo Valentini came running in.

‘It’s on!’ he cried.

He went rapidly through the drawers of his desk, snatching papers, a map of the city, a pistol and shoulder-holster.

‘It’s going to be a nightmare! The gang’s obviously suspicious. Instead of the usual straightforward drop they’ve told Sfriso to take the heroin to a bar in Mestre and await instructions. They’ll probably string him along for hours before they make their move.’

The phone started ringing. Valentini snatched it up.

‘Yes? Yes? Who? What?’

He laid the receiver down on the desk.

‘It’s for you!’

Zen walked over and took the phone from him.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Aurelio.’

It was Cristiana.

‘Well, hello there.’

Aldo Valentini dashed back to the door.

‘Best of luck!’ Zen called after him.

‘For what?’ asked Cristiana.

‘Colleague of mine. He’s got a difficult operation coming up. You came through on his line, for some reason.’

‘I don’t understand. When I asked for you, they said there was no one of that name in the building. What’s going on, Aurelio?’

Zen smiled ruefully. Already he had become a non-person.

‘I’ll explain later,’ he told Cristiana. ‘When can I see you?’

She sounded embarrassed.

‘Well, that depends when… when you’re free.’

‘About eight?’

‘Oh that’s too late!’

He frowned momentarily.

‘Too late for what?’

‘I mean… couldn’t we make it earlier?’

‘How early?’

‘Would about six be all right?’

Her tone sounded oddly constrained. Zen took this to be a good sign, evidence that she was in the grip of the same turbulence that was disturbing his own emotional life, drawing them both away from the tried and familiar towards a new future together.

‘Will that give you time to get home after work?’ he asked.

There was a brief silence the other end.

‘That’s not a problem,’ she said at last.

She sounded so strange that Zen almost asked her if she was all right. But these were not things to discuss on the phone. In a few hours they could work it all out face to face.

‘Then I’ll see you at six,’ he said.

There was a brief pause.

‘Goodbye,’ said Cristiana.

Zen hung up, wondering why she wanted to see him so urgently. Perhaps after what the switchboard had told her she was afraid that he was going to abandon her and take off back to Rome without any warning. He could see how plausible that might look from her point of view. His tour of duty in the city had come to an end, he’d had his bit of fun with her, now it was time to go home. Zen smiled. He’d soon set her mind at rest about that.

But first he had a less agreeable task to perform. Whatever the motivation for the dressing-down he had received at the hands of Francesco Bruno that morning, he could not deny that it had been richly deserved. He glanced at his watch. There was just time to call in at Palazzo Zulian and make his apologies before going home to keep his appointment with Cristiana. They might very well not be accepted, but under the circumstances it was the least he could do to try.

Yet instead of collecting his hat and coat and going out, Zen found himself picking up the phone again. Now that the sustaining momentum of the Durridge case had receded, he had lost his steerage-way and was drifting at the whim of every current. The thought of Ada Zulian reminded him of his mother, and he realized with a guilty start that he had not phoned her since leaving Rome a week before. Reluctantly, he dialled the familiar number.

‘Hello? Mamma? Are you all right? You sound different.’

‘It’s me, Aurelio.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Me, Tania. Remember?’

For a moment he wondered if he’d dialled the wrong number.

‘Tania!’ he exclaimed over-effusively. ‘How are you?’

‘Your mother’s out.’

‘Out? Where?’

For a moment there was no reply.

‘And you, Aurelio?’

‘Sorry?’

A sigh.

‘Where are you?’

‘Still here in Venice, of course. Where do you think? I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch, but I’ve been very busy.’

‘Of course.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Everything’s all wrong.’

‘Sorry?’

‘STOP SAYING SORRY!’

‘Sorry. I mean…’

‘You’re not sorry, you don’t give a damn!’

There was a shocked silence.

‘You’re a heartless bastard, Aurelio,’ Tania said dully. ‘God knows why I ever got involved with you.’

Zen held the receiver at arm’s length a moment, then replaced it on its rest. He felt as though he had just had a bruising encounter with a rude, angry stranger in a language which neither of them spoke well. All that remained was a confused sense of bafflement, aggression and — above all — meaninglessness. For while the slightly bizarre tone of his conversation with Cristiana would be resolved the moment they met, his failure to communicate with Tania, both literally and figuratively, was caused by deep structural flaws in the relationship which could never be resolved. He felt absolutely certain of that now.

He gathered up his things and headed for the door. He was turning the handle when Valentini’s phone rang again. Thinking it might be some urgent communication about the drug bust, Zen went back to answer it. At first there seemed to be no one there. Then he distinguished a low sound of sobbing.

‘Aurelio, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I’ve been so lonely, and it’s been a terrible time. The landlord sent the bailiffs in. I got back from work to find the door barred and all my belongings piled up in the street. It would all have been looted if one of the priests from the College next door hadn’t kept an eye on it.’

She paused, but he didn’t speak.

‘I moved to a hotel for a few days, but as soon as your mother heard what had happened she invited me over here. She’s been wonderful, Aurelio. We’re getting on really well.’

She sighed.

‘I know I’ve been difficult, Aurelio, but you must try and undertand it from my point of view. I married young and it went disastrously wrong. I didn’t want to make another mistake I would live to regret. That’s why I’ve been so cautious about the idea of us living together. But you’ve been right to insist. Relationships never stand still. If people don’t grow closer together then they get further apart. For a while it was fine us being lovers and living separate lives, but not any more. That stage is over. We must move on.’

She paused. Again Zen said nothing.

‘I want us all to live together,’ Tania went on in a quiet, firm voice. ‘I want us to be a real family, to have a home and children and be together all the time. Your mother needs that. She needs company, particularly with you being away so much of the time. That’s why she’s always going off to babysit for those friends of yours, the Nieddus. That’s where she is now, by the way.’

Still Zen did not speak.

‘We don’t need to talk about this on the phone,’ Tania said. ‘I just wanted to let you know how I feel, and to know that you understand, and that you share that feeling. I’ve been so lonely, Aurelio, after that awful row we had last week. I don’t know what all that was about, or who was right or wrong. I don’t care. All I want to know is when you’re coming home.’

‘This is my home.’

There was a long silence.

‘What did you say?’ Tania asked at last.

He stared sightlessly at the desk, its surface wrinkled with the indentations of ball-point pens.

‘Aurelio? Are you there?’

Zen gripped the receiver tightly.

‘I said, this is my home.’

‘But what does that mean, Aurelio? What does it mean?’

He sat quite still, saying nothing. After a time there was a click the other end, then an impersonal electronic tone.

It is some time during the long, sleepless night that it occurs to Ada that her persecution may not have ceased but simply taken on a new guise.

She has never slept well, even before there was a reason to stay awake, deciphering each creaking board and squeaking hinge, fighting off her drowsiness lest she wake to find the intruders already there, in full possession. She can barely recall what it means to sleep well. A sort of absence, wasn’t it? A stillness like the lagoon on a hot summer night. From time to time, like a passing breeze, a dream would ruffle the otherwise invisible surface. Then the intimate, horizonless darkness closed in again, and the next thing you knew it was morning.

It’s been years since she slept like that. Now she is no longer always sure when she’s dreaming and when she’s awake. Perhaps there is no essential difference. Nothing seemed more real than Rosetta, after all, and yet she vanished without the slightest trace or explanation, just like a dream. Had she only dreamt that she’d had a daughter? That would be both a comfort and a clarification, if she could bring herself to believe it. But she can’t. Despite the years that have passed, she can still recall the silky fuzz on the child’s arms, the milky smell of her breath, her oddly pedantic intonation, the tender shade of those hazel eyes…

Her dreams are not like that. They may be scary or confusing, devious and deranged, but they cannot make her weep. Perhaps that’s why Ada prefers their company. At all events, she gets a lot of ideas as she lies there night after night, suspended between sleep and wakefulness. They are not pleasant or useful ideas. They are certainly not the sort of ideas she would choose to have, if she had a choice. It can’t even be said that they are better than nothing — nothing would be infinitely preferable — but they are all she has to go on. Ada is used to mending and making do.

The idea she had in the night was especially unwelcome, so much so that she pushed it to one side and took refuge in the restless, exhausted prostration that passes for sleep with her. In fact it is not until she hears the bell, goes to the window and catches sight of the figure standing outside the door below that she even remembers what it was. Her tormentors have not relented, they have merely changed the form in which they present themselves. And with the diabolical cunning which typifies them, the vehicle they have chosen is the man who claimed to be protecting her from them — her shield and strength, her bold avenger.

It all makes sense! Aurelio Battista, Giustiniana’s boy, that milk-sop dreamer, turn out a policeman? She’d known from the beginning that the thing was utterly absurd. Her new idea makes much better sense, but the sense it makes is so horrific in its implications that it takes Ada quite some time to master the trembling which has taken over her limbs at the knowledge that the man standing at her front door is no more the real Aurelio Zen than the cruelly mocking figures which had disrupted her life for so long were the real Nanni and Vincenzo.

The doorbell rings, long and insistently. Ada draws back hastily from the window before the figure glances up at the angled mirror and catches her looking at him. But of course it’s no use hiding. They know she’s there, and are merely going through the motions of requesting admittance. If she does not respond, the phantasm below will simply turn on its shadowless side and slip into the house through the joints in the stone like vapours from the canal. Better to face the threat boldly and try and fend it off with some invention of her own. After all, she is no slouch at fabrication herself.

The expression of mingled shock and suspicion on her caller’s face when Ada opens the door and graciously bids him enter demonstrates that this was the right thing to do. Her opponents have been thrown off balance and for the moment she has regained the initiative.

‘Come upstairs,’ she says warmly, ‘and have… have a glass of something.’

She was about to offer tea, but realized just in time that this would mean leaving the room and taking her eyes off the intruder. She knows better than that.

‘I just came to apologize, contessa,’ he mutters in a respectful tone as they walk upstairs.

Ada fixes her visitor — she decides to call him Zeno — with an untroubled eye.

‘Apologize? Whatever for?’

The look he gives her is almost comic in its consternation.

‘For what happened yesterday. I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be provoked like that, but… Well, I’d had a difficult day at work. When your nephews started to taunt me, it was just the last straw.’

Ada laughs archly as they enter the salon.

‘I admit I was a trifle taken aback by your comments.’

Her visitor looks suitably mortified.

‘They were unforgivable.’

‘You see, I thought that I was the only person who knew what had happened.’

A bold thrust, and it drives home. Zeno stands there gawping at her like an idiot.

‘To Rosetta?’ he murmurs.

She corrects his mistake with an indulgent smile.

‘To Rosa. Rosa Coin.’

He nods like a somnambulist. Ada sits down on the chaise-longue and indicates with a gracious wave that her visitor should take the rather less comfortable chair opposite.

‘Of course, one had heard the most extraordinary rumours,’ she continues smoothly. ‘As though the Germans could possibly have mistaken a Venetian aristocrat for the offspring of some Jewish tradesman!’

In a vain attempt to look confident and relaxed, Zeno crosses his legs and clasps his knees with his hands.

‘And… taken the wrong child, you mean?’

‘The thing is clearly absurd!’ Ada declares airily. ‘But you know what people are. Once they’ve taken an idea into their heads…’

Nod, nod, goes the head opposite. It’s not even a good likeness, she thinks dismissively. Giustiniana Zen’s boy, if he were still alive, wouldn’t look anything like that.

‘For a time I suspected a man called Dolfin,’ she goes on without faltering. ‘He lived quite close by and Rosetta used to call at his house now and then. He bribed her, you see, with sweets and cakes and all that sort of thing. That’s the only reason she went. I had no access to such luxuries at that time, but Dolfin had friends in high places and could get anything he wanted. That’s the only reason she used to visit him, of course. It was pure cupboard love.’

As Zeno goes on nodding, Ada realizes with a thrill that this is all he can do. Her opponents are condemned to nod to her tune for ever. She has outmanoeuvred them completely. After all these years of confusion and uncertainty, she sees her way clear at last.

‘So when she vanished like that, I naturally suspected Dolfin of having a hand in it. It’s not natural, a man like that, living all alone, inviting young girls into his house. And this was during the war, don’t forget. In those days a body was just a body.’

Nod, nod. Ada nods too, but with an ironical edge of which her visitor remains ignorant.

‘But then I got a letter, out of the blue! That’s where she lives now. Apparently she had been hidden away until the war was over, and then spirited away to the promised land.’

She beams at her visitor triumphantly.

‘I hope that clears the matter up once and for all.’

There is a long silence. Then Zeno stands up, awkwardly.

‘I shan’t be seeing you again, contessa.’

Ada frowns. She can hardly believe her ears. Are her opponents conceding defeat? Is her victory assured?

As though in answer to her questions, he adds, ‘There’s nothing more I can do here.’

A wave of sweet relief sweeps through her. She longs to sing and dance and openly exult, but good breeding has taught her never to gloat.

‘I quite understand.’

He extends his hand.

‘Goodbye, then.’

It is the final snare, but she is not such a fool as to touch him. Ignoring the outstretched hand, she leads the way back to the portego. At the top of the stairs, she turns to him.

‘Goodbye,’ she says, gracefully but with finality.

He stares at her for a moment, then walks past her and down the stairs, out of the house, out of her life. Ada turns away, reeling against the tide flowing past. Her ghosts are deserting her, streaming down the stairs and out of the open doorway.

No longer haunted, the house settles, shifts and shrinks. For a moment, Ada feels a sense of panic. She’s grown used to the cushioning effect of those spectral presences, to the ample dimensions and flexible boundaries of the unreal space they generate all around. This rigid, po-faced insistence on the facts at first seems unduly mean and constricting.

But she sharply tells herself to pull her socks up. The Zulians haven’t stayed around as long as they have by sulking in a corner because life isn’t perfect. Her madness has abandoned her and that’s that. There’s no point in whining about it. Sanity is clearly going to take some getting used to, but she’ll manage somehow. After all, she always has.

He crossed a square in front of a gaunt, graceless church and set off along a back canal, watched by a clan of feral cats perched on the wooden crates which had been set up for them to shelter in. The darkness which had fallen seemed to have seeped into Zen’s mind. Listening to Ada Zulian’s pathetic attempts to both admit and deny the tragedy which had shattered her life, shadow-boxing with the intolerable facts, had been a deeply disturbing experience. For the first time, he began to wonder whether the truth about the mysteries which surrounded him was not merely unknown but in some essential way unknowable.

It was the nature of the place, he reflected. If Rome was a labyrinth of powerful and competing cliques, each with its portfolio of secrets to defend, here everything was a trick of the light, an endlessly shifting play of appearances without form or substance. What you saw was what you got, and all you would ever get. The fate of Ivan Durridge, like that of Rosetta Zulian and indeed his own father, would remain shrouded in mystery for ever, a subject for speculation, innuendo and senile ramblings. Zen felt like a fly trapped in a web woven by a long-dead spider.

If he had not had the prospect of seeing Cristiana in just a few minutes, this sense of futility would have been almost unbearable. But beside that gain, all other losses seemed light. What did the rest matter, since he had found his destined mate? How could he care about professional setbacks when his private life was about to be thrillingly renewed and made over? How ironic that the new should also be the old, that the woman with whom he would share his future should be a figure from his childhood, and live opposite the house where he had grown up!

A chill breeze had sprung up, infiltrating the city like a host of spies. Rounding the corner into the wedge-shaped campo, Zen was reassured to see light seeping through the shutters on the first floor of his house. His one anxiety was that Cristiana might have been delayed. Normally she didn’t get home from work until seven o’clock, but she must have made some special arrangement in order to see him. He closed the front door gratefully behind him, shutting out the wind, and climbed eagerly upstairs.

There was no one on the landing. Zen hung his coat and hat on the rack and opened the door into the living room. He could see no sign of Cristiana there, either. She must be in the kitchen, he thought with a warm rush of emotion, preparing dinner. He was halfway across the room before he noticed the man lounging in the high-backed armchair with its back to the door. This was the chair in which his father had always sat, and which his son to this day had never presumed to use. Zen stopped dead in his tracks, his heart racing, his stomach knotted up.

‘How did you get in?’

Ferdinando Dal Maschio got to his feet, smiling easily.

‘My wife provided a key.’

He stood there, letting Zen come to him.

‘I gather that you two have been seeing a certain amount of each other. Under the circumstances, though, I’m prepared to overlook that.’

He glanced at his watch.

‘There’s an important meeting of the party later this evening. That’s why I got Cristiana to arrange your little tryst earlier than usual. She agreed, of course, just as she did when I asked her to take a copy of that fax with the background to the Durridge case which you were sent by your crooked patrons in Rome.’

Dal Maschio’s eyes glittered.

‘Whatever you and Cristiana may have got up to, Zen, that woman belongs to me. All I need do is whistle and she comes running. The same goes for your friend Tommaso Saoner.’

He laughed mockingly.

‘Tommaso told me all about the way you tried to shake his faith in the cause over lunch. I could have told you that you were wasting your time. Tommaso is one of my most trusted and trustworthy colleagues, the man I plan to name as my deputy when I am elected mayor. Besides, nothing you had to tell him would have come as any surprise. He was in on the whole thing from the very start!’

‘He didn’t know that Durridge was dead,’ snapped Zen.

Ferdinando Dal Maschio acknowledged the point with an inclination of the head.

‘It makes no difference. Tommaso would rather die himself than betray the movement. Just as Cristiana would rather betray you than disappoint this little whim of mine to surprise you in your own house. They’re both mine, body and soul. That’s the sort of devotion I inspire in people, Zen.’

Zen stared coldly at Dal Maschio.

‘You’re trespassing,’ he said in a hard voice.

‘You’re the one who’s trespassing, Zen.’

‘This is my house.’

‘It’s my city.’

‘No more than it is mine.’

Dal Maschio shook his head.

‘The municipal election results will prove you wrong. The latest opinion poll gives the Nuova Repubblica Veneta a clear lead over our nearest rivals.’

‘That may change when its leader is arrested on charges of kidnapping and murder,’ Zen retorted.

Dal Maschio spread his hands wide.

‘You want to talk about the Durridge affair? No problem. I’ll tell you everything there is to know.’

He circled round to stand behind the chair in which he had been sitting and leant on it, using the back as a lectern.

‘Let me say first of all that I wouldn’t get mixed up in anything like that now. They say that a week is a long time in politics, but the things that have happened in the past few months have astonished even me. If you’d told me last November that we’d be looking at victory in the municipal elections and the very real possibility of achieving a presence at national level within a year, I’d have thought you were crazy.’

He smiled nostalgically.

‘It’s hard to remember now that at that time we were more of a debating club than a credible political force. The idea was to galvanize people into rethinking everything they had taken for granted for too long, to smash the mould and suggest radical new solutions to the problems confronting the city we all love. Part of our strategy was to establish contacts with like-minded groups on the mainland. We talked to the regional Leghe, of course, but also to the German-language separatist movement in the Alto Adige, and to various Ladino and Friulano groups. But our closest relationship was with the newly-independent Republic of Croatia, not only because of our historical ties with that region, but because the Croats had achieved what the rest of us could still only dream about — the dissolution of the spurious nation state and the reclamation of regional independence, cultural integrity and political autarchy.’

Zen yawned loudly and lit a cigarette.

‘Save me the speeches.’

Dal Maschio looked at him intently.

‘You’re good at sneering, aren’t you?’

There was no reply. Dal Maschio nodded.

‘It’s all right. I understand. I used to feel the same way myself. It’s a way of protecting yourself against feeling, against action. If you admitted your identity as a Venetian, born and bred in these islands, speaking this dialect and conditioned to the core by those experiences, you would not only have to admit all the pain and pride which such an admission would bring with it, you would also have to act to preserve and defend those values. You would either have to be prepared to fight, or to admit your laziness and your cowardice. Much easier just to avoid the issue by sneering.’

‘You said you were going to tell me about Durridge. Either do so, or fuck off out of here.’

Dal Maschio shrugged and smiled.

‘As I say, the Croats were an inspiration for everyone in the separatist movement, but their successful struggle had a special significance for us Venetians. The Dalmatian coastline of the new Croatia was of course the first and last outpost of the Venetian empire. Its beautiful and historic towns were all built by our forebears, and one day, perhaps, our flag may fly there once more. However that may be, the Croat and Venetian peoples cannot be indifferent to each other. So when I was approached by one of the Croatian delegation with a proposal which promised to be mutually beneficial, I was naturally inclined to look on it with favour.’

Abandoning his pose, he walked round the chair and sat down in it, crossing his legs.

‘They wanted Ivan Durridge, or rather. I’d never heard of the man, but my Croatian contact filled me in. Durridge was a Serb, from Sarajevo, and he was responsible for some of the worst atrocities committed during the war. I won’t attempt to list the things he did. Some of them are too obscene to mention. I was shown pictures and eye-witness reports by the survivors. Can you imagine a woman and her daughters having their eyelids cut off, being repeatedly raped and then forced to watch their sons and brothers impaled? That was the least of crimes, and here he was living in luxury on his private island in the lagoon!’

He jabbed a finger peremptorily at Zen.

‘And as if all that wasn’t enough, he was also gunrunning for the Bosnian Serbs in the current conflict. That’s why the investigation into his disappearance was hushed up by the secret services. You remember the scandal over the Gladio organization which was set up to sabotage a possible Communist takeover after the war? Gladio had arms caches all over Italy, yet only a few have come to light. With things changing so rapidly here, the secret service chiefs wanted those dumps cleaned out as fast as possible, and of course they weren’t averse to lining their pockets at the same time. Ivan Durridge satisfied both requirements. He took the guns off their hands and paid money into the Swiss bank account of their choice in return.’

‘How much money did the Croatians pay you?’ Zen demanded.

Dal Maschio shook his head sadly.

‘You may find this hard to believe, Zen, but it wasn’t actually about money. It was about establishing credibility and goodwill with a potential ally and trading-partner in the federal and regional Europe of the future.’

‘And it didn’t bother you that all those fine words cost a man his life?’

Dal Maschio got to his feet again and walked towards Zen, waving his arms to emphasize his words.

‘That had nothing to do with us! The plan was to fly Durridge up to Gorizia, then “accidentally” stray over the border and land him at a prearranged spot just inside Slovenia. The Croatian commandos who had immobilized Durridge before I landed the helicopter would then drive him to Zagreb, where he would be put on trial for his war crimes. That’s what I was told was going to happen, and that’s what I believe.’

He sighed.

‘Unfortunately Durridge had other ideas, and maybe he was right. He’d been pretty badly beaten up by the time I got there. Gavagnin said he reckoned they would have killed him if it hadn’t been for that phone call from his sister. They held a gun to his balls while he talked to her, but that made them realize that they needed him alive and functioning until we took off, to prevent the alarm being raised. Unfortunately once we were airborne they made the mistake of relaxing their vigilance. The next thing we knew, Durridge opened the door and jumped out.’

Dal Maschio shrugged.

‘As I’ve said, I wouldn’t do it again. The stakes are too high to fool around with stunts like that now. On the other hand, I’m not ashamed of what I did. The Croats are our ideological and political allies, and Ivan Durridge was a war criminal.’

‘While you’re just a common criminal,’ said Zen, tossing his cigarette butt into an ashtray.

‘I’ve never been charged with any criminal offence, much less convicted of one. And I never will be.’

‘We’ll see about that.’

‘Mere bravado,’ exclaimed Dal Maschio contemptuously. ‘If you had any solid evidence against me you wouldn’t be standing here making empty threats, you’d have me under arrest. But there’s nothing to connect me or any member of the movement with the Durridge kidnapping, apart from an unsubstantiated statement by some taxi skipper.’

‘How did Giulio Bon get hold of Durridge’s boat?’ demanded Zen.

‘He found it cast adrift in the lagoon.’

‘One of your helicopters appears in the air traffic control records as flying from the Lido to Gorizia on the day Durridge vanished. The route passes over both the ottagono and Sant’Ariano. Is that supposed to be a coincidence?’

‘Neither more nor less of a coincidence than the fact that the road to Verona passes through Padua and Vicenza,’ Dal Maschio returned promptly. ‘I was flying from the Lido to Gorizia. Which way did you expect me to go, via the Po valley?’

‘Why were you going in the first place?’

‘I was delivering a cargo of fish to a restaurant in Gorizia owned by a friend in the Friulano separatist movement. It was a genuine order, and I have the waybills and invoices to prove it.’

Noting the expression on Zen’s face, he laughed.

‘You’ve got nothing against me but scraps and rags of circumstantial evidence that wouldn’t serve to convict a known criminal, let alone the city’s mayor elect. And thanks to the Questore’s prompt response to our article this morning about your disgraceful treatment of Contessa Zulian, your mandate for action expires in just a few hours. Francesco Bruno evidently has a very acute sense for the prevailing political realities. Face it, Zen, you’re beaten.’

He stepped forward suddenly, gripping Zen’s arms.

‘But if only you will, you can convert that defeat into victory! You’re one of us, Zen! You know you are! And we’re the winning team. Already now, and increasingly in the future. We’ve got the little people with us already, because we speak the language they understand. Now we need to get the professionals on board, the educated middle class with managerial skills. People like you!’

Zen shook himself free.

‘What are you doing in Rome?’ cried Dal Maschio. ‘The regime you serve is morally and financially bankrupt. It’s exactly the same as working for the KGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The centre can’t hold any longer, Zen. The periphery is where the action is. In the new Europe, the periphery is the centre. It’s time to come home. Time to come back to your roots, back to what is real and meaningful and enduring.’

Zen turned away.

‘Save the rhetoric for your meeting.’

‘It’s not just rhetoric, and you know it! Do you want a Europe that is like an airport terminal where every language is spoken badly, where any currency is accepted but there is nothing but soulless trash to buy and fake food to eat? You don’t! You can’t!’

‘Neither do I want one where politicans conspire to commit criminal offences aided and abetted by corrupt policemen in the pay of the local mob.’

Dal Maschio shrugged.

‘You probably won’t believe me, but I swear I never had the slightest notion that Gavagnin was involved with a drugs racket. That was another part of his life altogether. He didn’t confide in me and I didn’t pry. In any case, given that there’s a market in illicit drugs, why should the Sicilians make all the money? No, I’m only joking…’

Zen regarded him bleakly.

‘I think you’d better go.’

Dal Maschio glanced at his watch and began to button up his coat.

‘Sooner or later you’re going to have to choose, Zen. The new Europe will be no place for rootless drifters and cosmopolitans with no sense of belonging. It will be full of frontiers, both physical and ideological, and they will be rigorously patrolled. You will have to be able to produce your papers or suffer the consequences.’

He leant towards Zen, almost whispering.

‘There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.’

He walked out of the room and downstairs. Zen stood quite still, listening intently to the clatter of Dal Maschio’s footsteps as though they were a message telling him what to do next. The slam of the front door seemed to release him from this act of attention. He strode to the landing and grabbed his coat and hat.

Outside, the wind had freshened. It skittered about the courtyard, banking off the angled walls and blowing back from fissures barely wide enough to sidle down. At the far end of the street leading towards the Cannaregio a man could be seen emerging from the shadows into the cone of yellow light cast by a streetlamp. Zen jammed his hat firmly on his head and set off in the same direction, the hem of his coat billowing about him.

Dal Maschio kept up a brisk pace until he reached the lighted thoroughfare crowded with commuters heading for the station. Here he slowed to a relaxed but still purposeful stride which allowed him to respond in the appropriate way to the many greetings he received. For a privileged few he paused long enough to exchange a few remarks and slap a shoulder playfully, but most received no more than a smile and a nod acknowledging their existence but indicating that he was a busy and important man who could not be expected to recognize everyone who recognized him.

Zen adjusted the distance between them to take account of the situation, closing in as the crowds became thicker, falling back again as they crossed the Scalzi bridge and entered the relatively deserted streets beyond. Here Dal Maschio was accosted less often, but he nearly always stopped to speak. An area like Santa Croce, with its ugly tenements, failing shops and ageing population, was the heartland of the Nuova Repubblica Veneta, and its leader could not afford to leave anyone feeling slighted or ignored.

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

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

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

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

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

‘What the hell are you laughing at?’

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

‘A joke,’ he said.

‘At my expense, apparently.’

Dolfin shrugged.

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

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

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

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

The proprietor brought Zen his coffee.

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

‘Fine, fine.’

Zen swallowed the coffee down at one gulp.

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

Dolfin smiled broadly.

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

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

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

Andrea Dolfin gazed back at him calmly.

‘Why not?’

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

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

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

‘And this, dottore, is Rosetta Zulian.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman continued to gaze expressionlessly at Zen.

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

He made a disparaging moue.

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

He exchanged a glance with his companion.

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

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

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

He looked at the woman and smiled.

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

Zen looked at him sharply.

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

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

‘That’s enough bullshit, Andrea.’

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

‘I am Rosa Coin.’

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

‘But she… she lives in Israel.’

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

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

‘I shouldn’t, but…’

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

Zen lit their cigarettes.

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

She nodded.

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

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

‘And Rosetta?’ he murmured.

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

He sighed.

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

Dolfin struck his fist hard on the table.

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

He broke off, struggling to control his emotion. The woman covered his trembling hands with her long, slim, articulate fingers, like a benign insect.

‘I’d failed Rosetta,’ Dolfin went on in a low voice, ‘so I decided to make amends by saving her friend. That meant concealing the truth from Ada Zulian. I could claim that that was a difficult decision over which I agonized long and hard, but it would be a lie. If her daughter had been driven to take her life, the contessa was at least partly to blame. If I’d failed Rosetta, what had her mother done? Perhaps it was just as well that she never knew the truth.’

He took the woman’s hands in his.

‘The main cause of Rosetta’s despair was undoubtedly the fact that the Coin family were among those Jews who had been selected for the next round of deportations. The Ghetto had been cut off from the rest of the city, like in the old days, but with my position it wasn’t hard to persuade the guards to let me take Rosa Coin out for a few hours on my personal recognizance. I told them that she had been my secretary, and that I needed her to help put my papers in order before she was deported. I did not tell the Coins about Rosetta. I only said that I would do what I could to save their daughter.’

The woman dropped her cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. She wiped her rheumy eyes on her sleeve.

‘When the police came, they never doubted the identity of the corpse. I’d dressed it in Rosa’s clothes, including the Star of David, and cut the hair to match. I told them she had hanged herself while I was out. They weren’t surprised, given the fate in store for her. They took the body away and told the Germans what had happened. And meanwhile the real Rosa was hiding in my attic, where she stayed for the rest of the war.’

‘I remember my father calling me,’ the woman said in a dreamy voice, as though talking to herself. ‘Andrea was sitting on the best chair, the one only visitors used. I had only met him once, when I was out walking with Rosetta, but she had told me how kind he had been to her since her father was killed. Papa said I was to go and stay with Signor Dolfin for a few days, until things got better again. He tried to make it sound casual, but his voice was hoarse and my mother was crying and I knew that something strange and terrible was happening.’

She started to weep.

‘Afterwards, when Andrea told me the truth, I tried to imagine the unspeakable anguish they must have felt, knowing that they were seeing me for the last time, yet having to pretend that everything was all right so as not to scare me.’

Zen was staring out of the window, his attention drawn by a movement on the other side of the square. A group of men had emerged from the sottoportego and were now standing in a circle, talking loudly and gesturing expansively. The sound of their voices could be heard faintly even inside the bar. Zen got to his feet.

‘I apologize for intruding, and for my rudeness. Please forgive me.’

Andrea Dolfin glanced out at the square.

‘You’re surely not going to meet that band of hooligans, dottore?’

Zen shook his head.

‘My interest in them is purely professional.’

Dolfin raised his eyebrows.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve got something on Dal Maschio!’

‘Would that surprise you?’

Dolfin laughed harshly.

‘It would surprise me if you could make it stick.’

The men in the square had concluded their discussion and were leaving in different directions in twos and threes. Zen buttoned up his overcoat and threw a note on the table to pay for his coffee.

‘After what you’ve just told me, I’m certainly going to try,’ he declared grimly.

Dolfin frowned.

‘What has that got to do with Dal Maschio?’

Zen looked at Rosa Coin.

‘Nothing. Everything.’

The windswept expanse of Campo Santa Margherita was deserted when Zen emerged from the bar. He turned left, walking quickly. It was a clear night, the darkness overhead pinked with stars and a bright battered moon rising. In the distance, on the bridge over the canal, Zen could just make out the figure of Dal Maschio and his two companions. Slowing his stride to match theirs, he followed.

The three men walked at a leisurely pace past the church of San Barnaba, through the dark passage burrowing beneath the houses on the far side, along walkways suspended over small canals or jutting out from the side of buildings linked by clusters of telephone and electricity cables and a washing-line from which an array of teddy bears dangled by their ears. The sound of their voices drifted back to Zen, resonant in the narrow streets, more faint in the open, sometimes snatched away altogether by the wind.

They crossed the bowed wooden bridge over the fretful, jostling waters of the canalazzo and rounded the church blocking the entrance to Campo San Stefano, where the trio came to a halt. Concealed in the shadows cast by a neighbouring church, Zen looked on as they concluded their discussion and said good night. Dal Maschio saluted his cohorts with a last masterful wave and walked off down a street to the left. The other two continued on across the square. Deprived of their leader’s inspirational presence, they walked more quickly and in silence, eager to get home.

Zen followed them along the cut to Campo Manin, past the hideous headquarters of the Cassa di Risparmio bank and into the warped grid of alleyways beyond. The bitter wind had sent the usual crew of fops and flaneurs scurrying for cover, clearing the streets for Zen and his quarry. By the church of San Bartolomeo the two men paused briefly to say good night. One turned up the street leading to the Rialto bridge while the other, with Zen in attendance, continued straight on towards Cannaregio.

Lengthening his stride, Zen gradually closed the gap between them, and when they reached the broad thoroughfare of the Strada Nova he made his move. Hearing footsteps close behind him, the man looked round. Shock and suspicion mingled in his expression as he recognized his pursuer. Then, as though by an intense effort of will, he smiled.

‘How lucky we happened to meet! I was just going to ring you. I wanted to apologize for being so snappy at lunch.’

A trace of an answering smile appeared on Zen’s lips.

‘Dal Maschio told you to smooth things over, did he?’

Tommaso Saoner’s cheek twitched.

‘Don’t try and provoke me, Aurelio. I’ve offered you an apology and as far as I’m concerned the matter is closed. Just get on with your life and leave me to get on with mine, and we can still be friends.’

Zen shook his head decisively.

‘That’s no longer possible, Tommaso.’

Saoner stared fixedly at him for a moment. Then he shrugged.

‘So be it.’

He began walking again. Zen followed, a few paces behind. They passed through Campo Santa Fosca and rounded the corner of Palazzo Correr. Shortly after the next bridge, Saoner turned off to the right. When Zen entered the alley after him, Saoner wheeled round.

‘This is not your way home!’

‘Venice belongs to all its sons,’ Zen declaimed rhetorically. ‘The whole city is my home.’

Tommaso Saoner hesitated for a moment. Then he strode rapidly away, taking an erratic route through back lanes to the Ghetto Nuovo and across the San Girolamo canal, not pausing or looking round until he stopped in front of his house in Calle del Magazen. He was still fumbling in his overcoat pocket for his keys when Zen stepped between him and the door.

‘You can’t get away as easily as that, Tommaso.’

Saoner stared at him truculently.

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘It wasn’t just luck that we met this evening. I knew you’d be at the meeting and I followed you all the way from Campo Santa Margherita. We’ve got to talk.’

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

Saoner tried to push past Zen to the door. There was a brief scuffle, which ended with Saoner sprawling on the pavement.

‘I wouldn’t try and push me around, Tommaso,’ Zen said quietly. ‘I’ve dealt with much tougher customers than you in my time.’

Crouching on the ground, Saoner examined his glasses, which had fallen off.

‘I’ll have you charged with assault,’ he muttered, getting to his feet.

‘And I’ll have you charged as an accomplice in the kidnapping and murder of Ivan Durridge.’

A silvery sheen crept over the walls and paving as the moon showed for the first time above the houses opposite.

‘They didn’t kill Durridge!’ Saoner declared passionately. ‘The man jumped out!’

‘If he did, it was because he preferred to die quickly rather than suffer what the Croatians had in store for him. But you didn’t know he was dead, did you? You thought Durridge was in Croatia awaiting trial for his war crimes.’

‘Ferdinando explained the whole thing to me this evening. The only reason he hadn’t told me before was that he didn’t want to implicate me.’

Zen laughed in his face.

‘Don’t be so naive, Tommaso. The reason he didn’t tell you is that he doesn’t trust you. He thinks of you as another Massimo Bugno, a shallow, fair-weather vessel, useful for running errands around the city but not to be relied on when a storm blows up.’

‘That’s not true!’

There was real pain in Saoner’s voice.

‘It’s of no importance,’ said Zen offhandedly. ‘The essential point is that Dal Maschio masterminded the kidnap of Ivan Durridge and piloted the helicopter from which he fell to his death. We’re talking about the man who may be the next mayor of this city — and that’s just the first item on his agenda. Dal Maschio is ruthless, cunning and ambitious. He’s going to go all the way to the top, unless he’s stopped now. And we’ve got to stop him, Tommaso. You’ve got to help me stop him.’

Saoner grunted contemptuously.

‘You’re out of your mind. Who cares what happened to Ivan Durridge? The man was a war criminal, for God’s sake. All the Croats wanted was to do what the Israelis have done in the past, to grab the beast and bring him to trial. And all we did was to help them. It’s not our fault that the crazy bastard decided to jump out of the chopper. It’s got nothing to do with us, and nothing to do with the fine, positive ideals that the movement represents, and which I will never let you destroy with these shabby, cynical manoeuvres. Now get out of my way!’

Zen stood aside. Surprised, Saoner hesitated for a moment, wary of this sudden capitulation. Then he stepped towards the door, groping in his pocket with an expression of growing puzzlement. A gentle tinkling sound drew his attention.

‘Is this what you’re looking for?’

Zen dangled a set of keys in the air.

‘You dirty pickpocket! Give those to me!’

Zen slowly shook his head.

‘You need to spend some time alone, Tommaso, thinking over what I’ve just said. I don’t want you to rush your decision. You can have till morning if you like. But in the end you’ll agree to testify. I know you too well to…’

Saoner struck him across the face.

‘I’ll never betray the movement! Never, no matter what you do to me!’

Zen regarded him steadily, rubbing his cheek where the blow had landed.

‘I’m not going to do anything to you, Tommaso. You have to do it yourself.’

He dropped the keys into his pocket.

‘You can go anywhere you like, apart from crossing to the mainland. The use of phones is also prohibited, as is any attempt to involve anyone other than me. I won’t be far behind you, but as long as you don’t try and break these rules I won’t interfere.’

The two men stared long and hard at each other.

‘You’re crazy,’ Saoner muttered at last.

Zen shrugged.

‘One of us is. Some time between now and dawn we’ll find out which.’

At first Saoner made no attempt to get away. He set off at a moderate pace, as though out for a stroll to settle his stomach or thoughts before bed. By now the city had been given over to its cats. They appeared everywhere, perched singly on walls and lounging on ledges, clustered in silent congregation at the centre of a square, viciously disputing a scrap of food or absorbed in a fastidiously conscientious ritual of grooming.