the flagstones. But Zen’s lungs were still raw from the cigarette he had just smoked, while Saoner was running with manic energy, like a man fleeing some unimaginable horror. As his quarry vanished over a bridge on to a grubby islet where the metal scaffolding of the football stadium reared up in the darkness, Zen gave up the chase.
Breathless and cold, he walked slowly back through the deserted streets of Sant’Elena and across the strip of scrubby pine forest to the vaporetto stop. An immense weariness overwhelmed him and he sank down on a bench. Scurries of wind plucked at his clothing like invisible fingers. He felt utterly despondent. He had done all he could do, and it had not been enough. He had lied to Tommaso in the most blatant and hurtful way about Dal Maschio’s opinion of him, but all to no avail. He had underestimated the hold a man like Dal Maschio could exercise over his followers, and the potency of the atavistic cravings from which he had concocted his ideological designer drugs.
The noise of an approaching ferry roused him from his stupor. Reluctantly he hauled himself to his feet and hobbled stiffly down the path to the landing-stage. Someone was already waiting there. Then Zen saw that the vaporetto was going to the Lido, not to the city. He was about to return to his bench when the waiting figure was caught in the boat’s lights as it nudged in alongside. It was Tommaso Saoner.
Zen hurried down the gangway just in time to climb aboard. Saoner had already gone below. The helmsman reversed engines to clear the landing-stage, then eased the craft out into the deep-water channel, passing astern of a car ferry also bound for the Lido. Zen edged round the deck until he came to a window with a view of the cabin. Tommaso Saoner sat bolt upright on his seat, staring straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to the tears streaming down his cheeks. Zen drew back into the darkness, wrapping his coat tightly around him. The wind had eased, but it was colder than ever. A shattered image of the moon tossed and bobbed on the lumpy seas, permuting its scattered fragments like a shaken kaleidoscope.
The wind dropped away as the ferry drew into the lee of the island. Zen waited to let Tommaso Saoner get off first, but it was not until the deck-hand went down to the cabin to rouse him that Saoner rose to his feet. At first he seemed unwilling to budge, but after a brief exchange with the mariner, who pointed out that the boat was going out of service, he climbed up the steps and went ashore.
Of all the topographical freaks in the lagoon, the Lido had always seemed to Zen the most disturbing. In summer, its vocation as a seaside resort lent the place an illusory air of normality, but in the bleak depths of February its true nature was mercilessly exposed. Here was a perfectly normal contemporary urban scene, with asphalt streets called Via this and Piazza that, complete with road signs and traffic lights. There was the usual jumble of apartments and villas, offices and hotels, the usual roar of cars and lorries, scooters, bikes and buses. Everything about the place was perfectly banal, in short, except that it was built on an isolated sandbar a few hundred metres wide between the shallow reaches of the lagoon and the open expanses of the Adriatic.
By the time Zen got ashore, Saoner was already fifty metres ahead, striding down the wide central avenue which led to the sea. Zen almost let him go, but at the last moment his curiosity got the better of him. A pair of headlights split the darkness at an intersection ahead. A car appeared and paused briefly before crossing the main street and disappearing to the right. It was immediately followed by a delivery van, three more cars, a lorry, and finally a milk tanker. Zen loped along the tree-lined pavement, trying to work out some rational explanation for this mysterious nocturnal convoy. Such was the state of his brain that it took him about a minute to realize that all the vehicles must have disembarked from the car ferry he had seen earlier. Satisfied, he scanned the street ahead to find that the figure he had been following had disappeared.
Despite his immense fatigue, he ran all the rest of the way to the huge piazza where the avenue joined the lungomare. During the summer this was the heart of the fashionable tourist area, but now the gardens looked drab and tatty and the wind made the trees shudder as though in pain. Zen looked all round, from the moth-balled hulk of the Grand Hotel des Bains to the gleaming strip of the boulevard skirting the beach where surf foamed dimly at the limit of vision.
‘Tommaso!’ he shouted.
The wind dismantled the word and flung the pieces away, but he called again and again.
‘Tommaso! Tommaso!’
He walked all around the piazza and along the road in both directions, but there was no sign of any other living soul. Fugitive traces of light were beginning to appear in the east before he finally gave up and turned away to begin the slow journey back to the city.
Winter sunlight, hard and brilliant, searched the grimy window and marked out a skewed square on the floor. Some vestige of childhood superstition made Aurelio Zen avoid setting foot in it as he went to and fro, collecting his belongings from all over the flat and returning them to the battered leather suitcase which had been the companion of his travels for almost thirty years.
The chore did not take long. He had brought only the bare minimum with him, and much of that he had never got around to unpacking in the first place. At a loss again, he sank down in a chair, gazing down at the glaring patch on the tiled floor. It was a beautiful day, everyone agreed, for the time of year. Overcome by exhaustion, Zen closed his eyes. The sun-struck square was still visible, branded on his retinas as a throbbing block of darkness.
He opened his eyes again, reached out a hand for the phone and dialled. Once again, no reply. He let it ring a long time, seeing the deserted apartment in Rome, hearing the bell shrilling periodically in the traffic-troubled stillness. At length he replaced the receiver and glanced at his watch. There were still almost two hours before his train left. He felt like a child again, waiting for school to end, for the bell to sound and real life to begin.
As if in response to his thoughts, a bell did ring, gurgling throatily in the stairwell. Zen looked up apprehensively. On the wall opposite hung a large canvas supposedly painted by his mother’s uncle. He realized for the first time that he had no idea what, if anything, the turbid whorls of colour were supposed to represent. It had never occurred to him to ask. He had taken the thing for granted all his life, as though it had come with the wall.
The bell rang again. He stood up and walked over to the window, but there was no one to be seen. He opened the window and dipped his face into the cold, clear air outside. On his doorstep, dressed in a grey tweed coat and a green headscarf, Cristiana Morosini stood gazing up at him. They looked at each other for a time without speaking. Then Zen turned back inside and pushed the door release button.
When she entered the room, he was still standing by the window, facing the door. Cristiana hesitated in the doorway for a moment, then walked a little way into the room, coming to rest with her feet in the patch of sunlight. She looked around nervously, opening and closing her lips several times without any sound emerging. Then she saw the open suitcase.
‘You’re leaving?’
Zen eyed her in silence for a moment.
‘Why didn’t you use your key to get in?’ he asked. ‘Or has your husband still got it?’
Cristiana waved her hands vaguely. Zen felt a sentimental stab of pity for those plump white fingers which had explored his body so thoroughly and so satisfyingly. Whatever had happened certainly wasn’t their fault.
‘I was going to phone and let you know he’d be here,’ Cristiana faltered, ‘but Nando said he wanted it to be a surprise.’
‘And what Nando wants, Nando gets.’
Her expression hardened slightly.
‘He’s still my husband.’
‘And what does that make me, Cristiana? What does it make you?’
His voice was so strident that it made the windowpane shiver. Cristiana shrugged peevishly.
‘I don’t know what to say, Aurelio. I thought it was just a fling. I liked you, and Nando had hurt me badly. I thought I deserved to get my own back, and to have a little fun too.’
Zen looked away, shaking his head in simulated disgust.
‘Oh come on!’ Cristiana exclaimed with something like anger. ‘Imagine what you’d be saying now if this had turned out the other way round, and I was being possessive and clingy when all you wanted was to go home and forget it ever happened. I knew all along you had someone in Rome. It never occurred to me that you were taking it seriously.’
‘Of course I wasn’t!’
He looked back at her with a fixed smile.
‘Apart from the sex, Cristiana, my interest in you was purely professional. I hoped you might let drop something about your husband which would be helpful to me in my investigation.’
