hand extended in greeting. Marco Paulon was a sturdy, muscular man whose hide looked as wrinkled and tanned as bacon. His face was a pudgy, shapeless mass in which his eyes twinkled, bright and shiny, like two metal buttons dropped into a bowl of polenta. He and Zen had not been especially close as children, but they had stayed in touch thanks to a mutually advantageous arrangement whereby Paulon kept an eye on the Zen property and undertook basic running repairs in return for the use of the ground floor as extra storage space for his haulage business.
He steered Zen to a vacant table by the window and shouted an order for two glasses of fragolino.
‘What’s all this about you and Ada Zulian?’ he demanded cheerily.
Zen gawped. Surely not even Rosalba’s grapevine could have disseminated his cover story so quickly. But it soon became clear that Marco had his information from the contessa herself.
‘The old girl isn’t up to carrying much these days, so I quite often pick up things she’s ordered when I deliver to the shops, and then drop them off on my way back to Mestre. I went round just before lunch with a case of mineral water she’d ordered and she told me you’d been there. To be honest, I thought it was another of her hallucinations. Fat chance, I thought, the police sending Aurelio up from Rome on account of Ada Zulian!’
The proprietor brought two glasses of the sweetish foaming wine and the two friends drank each other’s health. Then Zen leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘Actually, I arranged it myself.’
Marco Paulon raised his eyebrows.
‘Didn’t anyone query it?’
Zen swirled his glass around, making the wine gyrate like a spinning coin. He closed one eye in an exaggerated wink.
‘They probably would have, if I’d told them. So I put it about that I was being sent to look into the Durridge case. Do you remember? The American who disappeared here a couple of months ago. There was a big fuss about it in the press.’
Paulon smiled admiringly.
‘You cunning bastard.’
Zen looked up at a calendar pinned to the wall beside Marco’s head. Superimposed on the numbered squares for each date of the month was a wavy green line indicating the rise and fall of the tides in the lagoon. The trough was almost at the centre of the square for that day, indicating that low tide had been at noon.
‘I don’t suppose there’s enough water to get about yet,’ he said.
Marco frowned.
‘Depends where you want to go. I’ve moored the boat up by Sant’Alvise. It never dries out there.’
He looked inquiringly at Zen, who sighed.
‘The thing is, Marco, I need to make it look as though I know something about the Durridge case without actually wasting any time doing any real work on it. Know what I mean?’
Marco smiled again and shook his head.
‘Still the same Aurelio! I remember you at school. You did less work than anyone in the class, yet you ended up with the best marks. I never understood how you did it. With the rest of us, it was what we didn’t know that stood out, but you could take the two or three odd bits of stuff you remembered and make it look as though you knew more than the teacher! We hated you for it.’
Zen finished his wine.
‘You’re exaggerating,’ he murmured.
‘No I’m not!’ Paulon returned aggressively. ‘Look where it’s got you. You have a cushy desk job in Rome while I’m humping crates of groceries around the city.’
Zen lit a cigarette and said nothing. After a moment, Marco Paulon smiled.
‘But there you go! Whoever said life was fair?’
He took a cigarette from the pack which Zen had left lying on the table.
‘So, Aurelio, what can I do for you? Don’t worry about time. I can always make an extra run tomorrow if necessary.’
Zen lit Marco’s cigarette.
‘Ideally, I’d like to take a look at the island where this Durridge was living when he was kidnapped.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Quite a long way, I’m afraid. One of those old fortress islands out near the Porto di Malamocco.’
Marco Paulon smoked peacefully for a while.
‘Police launch broken down, has it?’ he murmured at length.
Zen signalled the proprietor to bring more wine.
‘It’s the crew I’m worried about,’ he said. ‘Some kids fresh off the farm who’ve taken a hurry-up course in boat handling at La Spezia. I can probably trust them not to drown me, as long as the fog holds off, but that’s as far as it goes. What I need is an inside view from someone who knows the lagoon. Something to lard the report so that it looks like I’ve spent a lot of time on the case. Someone like you, in short.’
Marco Paulon nodded earnestly. He picked up the new glass of fragolino which had just arrived at the table.
‘Welcome back, Aurelio. Welcome home!’
The two men downed their wine and bickered amicably over the bill, Zen gracefully giving way in the end. Outside, a warm wash of diffuse sunlight flattened every perspective, obliterating details and distinctions, calling everything into question. In a yard near the quay two house-painters were shaking and folding a dropsheet as big as a sail.
‘It looks like Ada’s complaint is catching,’ Marco announced in a jocular tone. ‘My cousin was telling me the other day about someone else who’s cracked up and started seeing people who aren’t there.’
They turned the corner into a broad swathe of shadow cast by the walls of an abandoned factory.
‘Mind you,’ added Marco, ‘he’s from Burano, and they’re all halfwits out there. Especially my cousin.’
He leapt nimbly down into a broad-bottomed wherry moored alongside the quay. Zen followed more cautiously, stepping on to the rectangle of old carpet which protected the foredeck. The open hold was filled with an assortment of merchandise en route from the wholesaler’s warehouse at Mestre to various retail outlets scattered around the city: shrink-wrapped tins of beans and tomatoes, plastic-covered demijohns of wine, huge cardboard boxes containing packs of soap powder, tampons and batteries.
Marco Paulon turned on the ignition and freed the tiller, then cast off the aft mooring line, secured to one of the wooden posts driven into the canal bed at regular intervals. He pointed to a marble plaque set in the wall of the
former factory about a metre above the level of the quay. It bore an engraved line and the words Marea alta 4.11.66.
‘They make so much fuss about the floods,’ he remarked, ‘but if you ask me the freak lows are even worse. You can’t even get down the Cannaregio half the time, and as for the back canals, forget it! The whole city needs to be dredged urgently, but it’s impossible to get any work done now the contractors have stopped taking bribes.’
There was a throaty roar as he started up the diesel engine, which then settled down to a steady hum much like a bus, but with a reverberant underwater growl.
‘Let go forward,’ he called.
It took Zen a moment or two to remember the significance of this phrase. Then he reached up and untied the remaining rope securing the comacina to its mooring, brought it inboard and coiled it neatly. A dark foliage of mud blossomed on the surface of the water as Marco put the motor in reverse with the rudder hard over to push the bow out from the quay. Then he engaged forward gear and they eased out into the canal.
‘Guess who owns all that!’ he shouted, pointing to the ruined factory. Zen made his way unsteadily past the cargo to join Paulon in the stern of the boat.
‘Ada Zulian!’ crowed Marco triumphantly.
‘Really?’
‘For years no one knew,’ Marco went on. ‘The contessa kept it quiet. Thought it was undignified for Zulian to be connected to anything as common as a cotton mill.’
He laughed explosively.
‘The joke is, the place is worth more derelict than it ever was as a going concern. Here’s Ada dependent on people like me doing her favours out of the kindness of our hearts, when she could make herself a billion any time
