you know.’
Zen put his finger to his lips.
‘If I do that, I’ll be out of work too,’ he said in a stage whisper. ‘I only just got here, for God’s sake. I want to spin it out for a week at least.’
Valentini smiled broadly.
‘Oh well, put like that, of course, the case for ongoing police intervention becomes overwhelming. I’ll take this downstairs, then go and grab some breakfast.’
He headed for the door, shaking his head.
‘Bastards!’
Once Valentini had gone, Zen phoned the Questore’s office. Francesco Bruno, the provincial police chief, was out of town, and the call was taken by his deputy. Zen outlined the history of his involvement with the case so far and explained why he wished to post a guard inside Palazzo Zulian. The Deputy Questore at first expressed considerable doubts about this, and an even greater amazement that a Criminalpol operative had been commissioned to investigate such a comparatively insignificant case.
‘Exactly!’ Zen retorted triumphantly. ‘This woman clearly must have powerful connections to have me sent up here. It is therefore all the more essential that we do not leave ourselves open to any possible criticism. How’s it going to look if we wash our hands of the affair and then she goes and kills herself?’
The Deputy Questore speedily acknowledged the force of this argument. Armed with this authorization from on high, Zen spent the next twenty minutes punishing the internal telephone system until he had made the necessary arrangements. He then typed up a confirmation, took it down to Personnel and extracted a receipt, thereby giving the staff an interest in seeing that his orders were actually carried out.
Back at his desk, he rang Serenissmi Viaggi, the travel agency where Cristiana Morosini worked. He had phoned Palazzo Sisti before leaving home to pass on the fax number, but the subordinate he had spoken to then had been unable or unwilling to reveal whether or not l’onorevole had been successful in obtaining the material Zen wished to consult. So his disappointment at not being able to speak to Cristiana herself, who had gone out on some errand, was mitigated by the news that a fax transmission in his name had indeed arrived and was awaiting collection.
Zen grabbed his hat and coat and hurried out. The light in the corridors and stairwell seemed slightly hazy, as though the drench all around had seeped through the walls to taint the air inside as well. Somewhere below a door slammed shut and a pair of metal-tipped shoes began running along an echoing passage. Zen continued down. As he reached the landing he met a tubby, choleric man dashing up the stairs two at a time.
‘Aren’t you Enzo Gavagnin?’ said Zen.
‘Well?’ snapped the other, whirling round.
‘Aurelio Zen, Vice-Questore. We met yesterday. I’m here on secondment from the Ministry.’
Enzo Gavagnin’s eyes became smaller and more intense.
‘Excuse me! I for one have no time to chat.’
‘Oh quite,’ Zen murmured languidly. ‘Sounds like a big case you’re working on. A drowned fisherman, eh? I’ve never heard the like! Did he slip on a squid or get his waders caught in the winch?’
Gavagnin glared at him.
‘Go fuck yourself,’ he growled in dialect.
Outside, the fog was thicker than ever. Buildings loomed up like ships, towering above the narrow lanes where featureless figures slipped in and out of the clammy banks of vapour. As Zen passed on the corner, he caught sight of Aldo Valentini drowning his sorrows with a sandwich and glass of wine. For a moment he was tempted to join him, but he kept going, stopping at a bakery to buy half a loaf of olive bread. He chewed contentedly as he walked along, savouring the warm pulp of the dough and the sweet black putrefaction of the olives.
Serenissimi Viaggi was in an alley just north of the Piazza, lined with shops selling carnival masks and costumes. A group of tourists passed by like soldiers on patrol in enemy territory, bunched for protection, cameras ready to shoot at the slightest opportunity. One of them looked at the posters in the window of the agency and frowned, momentarily disturbed by the idea that a city he thought of only as a holiday destination was offering holidays elsewhere.
Inside the small shop were two desks piled with brochures and timetables and computer equipment. One was unoccupied. An anorexically cadaverous woman with unnaturally white skin and black hair was seated behind the other. She did not look up as Zen entered.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I’m Cristiana’s friend. I’ve come to pick up the fax which arrived for me.’
The woman sighed mightily. She stood up and walked over to the other desk. After rummaging through the papers scattered there for some time, she returned with a large envelope which she handed to Zen, still avoiding any eye contact but fixing the half-eaten loaf in his hand with a look full of disapproval.
‘Thirty-eight thousand,’ she said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
The woman tapped the keys of a printing calculator.
‘Fourteen pages fax reception at two thousand a page equals twenty-eight thousand, plus five thousand handling fee makes thirty-three, plus VAT at fifteen per cent four nine five oh say another five equals thirty-eight thousand in all. Do you want a receipt?’
Zen paid and shuffled out into the fog, clutching the envelope. He turned right, off the main street, away from the crowds, glancing at the shopfronts to either side. In Campo Santa Maria Formosa he found what he had been looking for: a small, cosy wine bar, almost empty at that hour. The walls were panelled with varnished laths, as though the hull of a boat had been flattened out like pollo alla diavola. The windows were screened by a lace curtain hanging on a rail. Brass lamps with bulbous glass shades cast patches of soft yellow light in the intimate gloom.
At the bar, a brown-flecked marble slab, three men stood discussing the merits of various models of outboard engine. Zen took a seat at a trestle table near the back of the room, facing the door. When the barman came over, he ordered some breaded crab claws and a quarter litre of white wine. He waited till the man had gone, then opened the envelope and spread the contents on the table.
The document faxed by Palazzo Sisti consisted of fourteen pages of double-spaced typing. There was no heading or other indication that the text formed part of an official report, the material having been retyped on to plain paper in order to conceal the source or to edit out any items which might have compromised friends or allies of l’onorevole.
Zen skimmed quickly through the report, then went back to the beginning and started again, reading more carefully and making marks and comments in the margin here and there. The first thing he learned was that the missing man’s real name was not Durridge but
He had been born in 1919 in Sarajevo, a city as notorious then, in the aftermath of the war which had been sparked off there, as it was again now that it had been abandoned to its fate by a world seemingly eager to demonstrate that it had learned nothing from the horrors of the intervening seventy-five years.
Zen casually placed the envelope over the fax sheets as the barman returned with his food and drink. He tore open one of the golden-breaded pincers, exposing the pink bone, and savoured the sweet flesh with sips of wine while he read on. When Ivan was twenty, another European conflict engulfed his country, only this time he was able to take an active hand. Unfortunately he backed the wrong faction, and when Tito’s Communist partisans took power of the new Yugoslavia the family were forced to make a hasty exit. They slipped across the Adriatric to Italy and thence to the United States, where Ivan changed his surname and went on to make a fortune in the trucking business.
Zen finished the last of the crab. He poured himself more wine, lit a cigarette and went back to the report. Durridge had first come to the attention of the Italian authorities in March 1988, when he had bought the ottagono in the lagoon and applied to the local Questura for a residence permit. Since then, according to the records of the frontier police, he had come and gone between Venice and Chicago four or five times a year. There were only two other instances of his name in official files. The first was a complaint which Durridge had made towards the end of September the previous year about an alleged trespass. The other, just over a month later, was when Franco Calderan phoned the Carabinieri to report that his employer was missing.
‘… weed fouled round the screw then…’
‘… tilt the whole issue and clean it by hand…’
