‘… still swear by the little Fiat my father used…’
Zen blew an almost perfect smoke-ring towards the ceiling and called for more wine. Franco Calderan had returned from his day off on the Lido shortly after five o’clock that afternoon, the 11th. He used his own small dinghy for the crossing, and as soon as he approached the landing place he noticed that his master’s boat was absent from its mooring.
This boat, a traditional broad-beamed topa fitted with a Volvo diesel engine instead of the traditional lugsail, had not been seen since. Durridge never used it without Calderan aboard, having learned the hard way about the hazards of navigation on the lagoon when he ran aground south of the Fondi dei Sette Morti and had to spend the night aboard in the open until a fishing vessel returning to Chioggia threw him a line. Since the boat was nevertheless missing, the investigators’ assumption was that it had been taken by the same person or persons who had abducted Ivan Durridge.
As Marco Paulon had already indicated to Zen, the time frame for such a kidnapping was extremely tight. Durridge was known to have been on the island shortly after one o’clock that afternoon, since his sister had spoken to him on the phone from Florida. By two o’clock at the latest the tide would have been too low to permit embarkation or disembarkation from the ottagono. The possibility that the kidnappers had arrived by air was briefly considered, but ruled out because of the difficulty of landing a machine on the small patch of lawn which was the only open ground anywhere on the island, and entirely surrounded by mature trees — the Carabinieri themselves had had to come and go by boat throughout their investigation. One thing which no one questioned was that the American was a textbook target for a professional kidnapping: rich, solitary and living in isolation. All that was necesary to confirm this hypothesis was a ransom demand.
Thus far the report was quite clearly a more or less literal transcription of a file opened by the Carabinieri in Venice. The investigation was proceeding normally at local level, with no hint that the case had any further implications. Then, early in January, the Carabinieri suddenly received instructions from their superiors at the Ministry of Defence ordering them to suspend all activity relating to the Durridge case and forward any existing files and related material under seal to Rome for ‘assessment’.
The final section of the transcript consisted of selections — this was where the editing had taken place — of an internal memorandum addressed to a figure referred to only as ‘a senior official in the Defence Ministry’. It ran as follows:
With respect to the case to which you refer, a parallel agency has recently revealed a previous interest in Ivan Durridge/ which might be prejudiced by inquiries at judicial level. These have therefore been suspended in the interests of state security while the agency in question conducts its own investigation, the results of which will be communicated to all relevant parties and institutions in due course.
Well that’s that then, thought Zen, draining his glass of wine. ‘Parallel agency’ was a euphemism for the secret service organizations, in this case probably the Defence Ministry’s own SISMI unit. Whether Durridge had been their agent or their target was of no more than academic interest. Anything involving the secret services was out of his league. The most he could hope for was to massage the evidence so as to keep his private investigation going a little longer in the interests of siphoning as much money as possible out of the Durridge family. But how?
He pored over the fax again. Almost every lead seemed to have been exhausted. Eventually he spotted two possible openings. The first concerned the earlier landing on the ottagono, back in the summer; the other the fate of Durridge’s boat. Neither could remotely be described as promising, but by rapidly juggling them both he might manage to convey a mirage of solid progress and attainable goals to his employers, given their understandable desire to be deceived.
Back at the Questura, he set the wheels in motion. Durridge’s complaint to the police following the landing on his island in September had been duly logged at the time, and while the Carabinieri had been forced to send all their records to Rome, the Questura had received no such request for the simple reason that they had never opened a file on the Durridge case in the first place. Zen simply phoned downstairs for the relevant documents and ten minutes later they were on his desk.
To his disappointment, they seemed to offer no possibilities for fruitful exploitation and development. Not only had the three trespassers been apprehended and identified, but they were all respectable local men. Giulio Bon was from Chioggia, where he ran a boatyard. His companions lived in the city itself. Massimo Bugno was a crewhand on ACTV’s ferries and waterbuses, while Domenico Zuin owned a watertaxi.
As luck would have it, a police patrol boat had been in the area when Ivan Durridge’s complaint had been received on the 113 emergency number, and it was able to intercept the intruders as they left in a boat belonging to the said Zuin. All three protested their innocence. They had not known that the island was inhabited, assuming it to be abandoned like so many others in the lagoon. They had meant no harm, intending only to share a bottle of wine and a game of cards.
Zen got up from his desk and walked to the window. Now the fog seemed to have penetrated not just the building but also his mind, woozy from the wine. He had grown soft after years in the south, where people cut their wine with Coke and only the rich kids thought it chic to get pissed on imported beer. Back home again, he had automatically slipped back into the northern tradition, drinking a grappa with his morning coffee and then keeping a slow burn going with glasses of wine all day, but his brain could no longer handle it.
He lit a cigarette, whose smoke rubbed up against the glass like a cat, as though seeking union with the fog outside. There was nothing in the trespassing incident that he could show the Durridges’ lawyer. That left the boat. Returning to the desk, he called the office which kept records of all craft licensed to operate on waterways within the Province of Venice and asked them to send over details of any boats registered since the 1st of November previous.
Only then, having exhausted every pretext for further delay, did he go downstairs and order a launch to take him to the Ospedale Civile and the inevitable confrontation with Ada Zulian.
If Zen had been worried that his presence at the rally of the Venetian separatist movement that evening would be in any way conspicuous, he was reassured immediately on rounding the corner into Campo Santa Margherita. With the coming of night a fidgety, fickle wind had sprung up, thinning out the fog. It was evident at a glance that the huge irregular space was awash with people.
Normally a political gathering on this scale would have attracted a highly visible police presence, squads in riot gear massed in the streets all around, not so much in anticipation of any real trouble as to convey the none- too-subtle message that whatever the featured speakers might propose, neither they nor their supporters should forget that it was the State and its agents alone who disposed.
In this case, however, Zen himself was the only policeman present, as far as he could see. Perhaps after all the revelations of recent months the State was finally losing its nerve, or perhaps it had more dangerous opponents to impress with its shows of force. For the people who had come to hear Ferdinando Dal Maschio were no angry students or striking workers. Their advanced age and undemonstrative demeanour marked them out as ordinary, law-abiding residents of the Dorsoduro quarter, not given to breaches of the peace or violent excesses of any kind.
They were packed most densely at the far end, where a temporary podium had been erected. At the back of the stage, beneath a banner showing a lion rampant and the name of the party, four men sat listening to a fifth who stood haranguing the crowd through the loudspeakers mounted to either side. On the fringes of these core supporters a second crowd had gathered, less committed but hovering there, looking about them or moving aimlessly back and forth, sampling the speeches, not yet convinced but letting themselves be wooed.
It was here that Zen took his place, as of right, amongst the waverers and spectators. He had spent the first part of the afternoon trying to get Ada Zulian to accept the idea of having a police guard in her house during the hours of darkness. Zen had supposed that the old lady would have been comforted by such conspicuous protection, instead of which she had protested vehemently against this ‘gross invasion of privacy’. Zen had not been helped in his efforts to soothe her by the rough-and-ready manners of Bettino Todesco, the policeman who would be on duty that night, or by the fact that he had to take Ada’s fingerprints in order to compare them with those which might be found on the knife.
In the end, Ada had insisted on phoning her nephews. Nanni and Vincenzo Ardit had driven over from their home in Verona as soon as they heard that their aunt was in hospital and were spending the afternoon in the city, where they had the use of one of the family’s properties not far from Palazzo Zulian. It was thus only a matter of moments before one of them turned up to lend his aunt moral support.
