‘I recall my mother saying that his name had been linked to that affair. I don’t really remember the details, but if anyone knows anything about it this long afterwards it’ll be Andrea.’
A window high above their heads opened with a loud creak.
‘Who’s that?’
The voice was that of an elderly male, the tone peremptory to the point of rudeness.
‘Tommaso Saoner. I’ve someone here who wants to meet you.’
‘But do I want to meet him? Or is it a her? Have you turned pimp in more ways than one, Saoner? I’ve been trying to shut out the sound of your beastly speeches all evening.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with politics, Andrea. This is an old school friend of mine, Aurelio Zen.’
‘Zen? You mean Stefano? No, he died. Guido? Biagio? Alberto?’
‘Aurelio!’ shouted Tommaso.
Zen could just make out the grizzled head leaning out of a window high above amid the swirling mist.
‘There’s no one by that name. I knew an Angelo Zen once, but he’s dead.’
‘I’m his son,’ Zen called out.
‘Angelo Giovanni,’ the voice continued unheedingly. ‘We were Young Fascists together, among the very first to join. But he had no children. I believe there had been a boy who was stillborn. And before he could make any more, Angelo went off to Russia and…’
‘Are you going to keep us standing here all night?’ demanded Tommaso.
‘All right, all right! Don’t be so impatient!’
A moment later there came the buzz of the door-release. Tommaso pushed the door ajar.
‘I’ve got to get back,’ he told Zen. ‘There’s a policy meeting I must attend. Maybe I’ll catch you later, if Andrea hasn’t managed to persuade you that you don’t exist!’
He strode back through the portico and out into the lighted campo, humming with activity. Zen stepped inside and stood uncertainly in the hallway.
‘Come up!’ called a voice somewhere above.
Zen closed the door and started upstairs. When he reached the first-floor landing, he found himself confronted by a gaunt man in his eighties, wearing a voluminous dressing-gown of some thick red material and resting on a rubber-tipped cane. His face was heavy and jowly, as though all its youthful qualities had drained to the bottom.
‘What was that about Tommaso being a pimp?’ Zen asked him, feeling the need to take the initiative.
The old man cackled sourly.
‘He’s been trying to get me to join this political movement he’s involved with, the ones who were shouting in the square just a moment ago.’
He ushered Zen through an open doorway.
‘I’ve told him over and over again that I’m finished with all that. I got taken in once, but I was young and stupid, and at least Mussolini was the real thing! To be fooled again at my age, and with a cheap imitation like this Dal Maschio — no thank you!’
The room they entered was of about the same dimensions as its equivalent in Zen’s house, but so crammed with possessions that it appeared much smaller. Every scrap of available wall space was covered by furniture or shelving, which in turn supported a vast array of objects of all kinds: a ship’s bell, coins and medals, torn fragments of a flag, a fossilized fish, the six-pronged ferro from the prow of a gondola, stray bits of statuary, books in Arabic and Greek, instruments either medical or musical, a coiled whip, a girl’s ivory hairband…
‘Where on earth did all this come from?’ asked Zen, looking round wonderingly.
‘It’s loot.’
‘Beg pardon?’
Andrea Dolfin regarded him with a malicious eye.
‘Don’t you know your Venetian history? You should, with a name like Zen — if that is your name. Ours is a history of plunder and rapine. Next time you’re passing through the Piazza, take a look around. Virtually everything you see was stolen. We extracted more booty from our fellow-Christians in Constantinople than the Turks ever did. And in my own small way I’m carrying on that tradition.’
He waved Zen towards a square leather chair with a high back and short legs.
‘Sit down, please, and tell me what I can do for you.’
Zen lowered himself with difficulty into the chair, which seemed to have been made for a fat dwarf.
‘I am a police official,’ he said. ‘I’m working on a case involving Contessa Zulian. Tommaso thought you might be able to tell me what happened to her daughter Rosetta.’
Andrea Dolfin stood staring down at him in silence for some time.
‘Rosetta Zulian.’
He shuffled slowly, his bare feet encased in battered leather sandals.
‘This is Tommaso’s revenge,’ he murmured in a low voice. ‘I made mock of his zealous rantings, and in reprisal he has sent you here with a cargo of terrible memories.’
He turned, looking back at Zen from a shadowy recess at the rear of the room.
‘Do you drink, at least?’
Zen made a gesture indicating that he had been known to take a drop from time to time. The old man opened a sideboard and produced a dark brown bottle and two none-too-clean glasses.
‘Recioto di Valpolicella,’ he announced as he hobbled back towards Zen. ‘Made by my son, as a hobby. This is the 1983. The ’81 was a dream but it’s all gone. This could use a little more time, but it’s not bad even now.’
He poured them both a glass. Zen sipped the rich ruby dessert wine. The flavour was almost overwhelmingly grapey, full of restrained sweetness, mellow yet intense.
‘So you’re from the police?’ remarked Andrea Dolfin, subsiding in a grubby upholstered armchair and propping his feet up on an ebony putto, half of its head torn away to expose the jagged, splintered grain of the wood. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have made such a point of telling you about my loot.’
Zen gazed at him over the wineglass and said nothing.
‘Not that the people I took it from made any objection,’ Dolfin went on. ‘They were above such things by then, you see, or below them. In a word, they were dead.’
He smiled a small, remote smile.
‘There was nothing I could do for them, but in some cases I felt able to give some of their possessions a good home. Later, when the war was over, I meant to trace some of the relatives and try and give the stuff back, but what with one thing and another I never got around to it.’
He looked at Zen.
‘Shocking, eh? Are you going to take me in?’
Zen was silent a moment, as though considering the idea.
‘Tell me about Rosetta Zulian,’ he said at last.
A spasm contorted Dolfin’s features for an instant. Then it vanished as though it had never been and a dreamy, vacant expression appeared on his face.
‘What can I tell you? It all seems so long ago, so far away… Rosetta was a strange, solitary child. She never played with the other kids in the neighbourhood. She preferred to go her own way, making her friends where and as she found them. Her closest friend was a girl from — would you believe it? — the Ghetto. You can imagine how the contessa, with her ridiculous pretensions, felt about that!’
He leant forward to pour them both more wine.
‘The friend’s name was Rosa, Rosa Coin. I lived in the area myself at the time, in Calle del Forno, just off the Ghetto Vecchio, and I often used to see them coming and going. The similarity of their names was not the only thing they had in common. Both had the same wavy brown hair, the same sallow skin and dark eyes, the same skinny, angular, hard little bodies. In a word, they were doubles. And not just physically. They shared a certain same intensity of manner, swinging from exaltation to despair in a moment. Even their interests were similar. Rosetta played the piano, Rosa the violin. They used to joke about forming a duo, once the war was over…’
The old man’s expression became grim.
‘It seemed so easy to say at the time. The war brought its hardships, of course, but for most of us life carried on much as before until Mussolini was overthrown. Then the Americans and British invaded from the south, and the Germans from the north, and for the next two years the country became a battlefield.’
