hold your breath. Some sections are either missing or inaccessible. It’s best to fax your requirements, mark it “extremely urgent”, and then send a follow-up every hour or so until something happens. Number’s in the directory.’
‘Thanks.’
Zen replaced the receiver. Taking a sheet of headed notepaper from the drawer, he wrote Denunzia fornita alla P.G. dalla parte di Zulian, Ada in re Dolfin, Andrea in the wide, curling script he had been taught at the little school just opposite the Ghetto in the years immediately after the war. He remembered thinking of the Ghetto then as something from ancient history, like the doges and the Ten and the galleys, a prison island where the Jews had been shut up in the far-off days when such minorities had been persecuted. The fact that there were almost no Jews living there any longer had merely seemed to confirm its anachronistic nature.
He finished writing out his request for the archive file relating to the complaint which Ada Zulian had made about Andrea Dolfin at that time, now itself part of history, and was just about to take it downstairs to the fax machine when the phone rang.
‘Yes?’
‘Could I speak to Aurelio Zen, please?’
‘Cristiana! What a pleasure to hear you.’
‘How did you know it was me?’
Zen sat back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk.
‘Your voice is very distinctive,’ he said.
‘No one else seems to think so.’
‘Then they must be stupid.’
There was a gurgle of laughter the other end.
‘But then I was already thinking about you,’ Zen added.
There was a pause while they waited to see who was going to make the next move, and what it would be.
‘I went to see your husband speak last night,’ Zen remarked.
‘Did the earth move for you?’
Zen laughed.
‘No, I had to fake it. But he certainly knows how to work a crowd.’
‘You should see his way with women.’
Zen was about to add another line of banter when the roar of a motor outside made the windowpanes rattle.
‘Just a moment,’ he told Cristiana.
He got up and went over to the window. A police launch had just come alongside the quay below. In the cockpit, a muscular man wearing a pair of oil-stained overalls stood beside a uniformed patrolmen. Zen went back to the phone.
‘I have to go, Cristiana. Something’s come up suddenly. I’ll call you back.’
‘Don’t bother with that. I’ll see you later.’ ‘I don’t know exactly when I’m going to be able to get home.’
‘I’ll be there,’ said Cristiana, and hung up.
Zen replaced the phone slowly. The engine noise outside died away and was replaced by a babble of voices. He crossed back to the window. The launch had now moored. The man in overalls was standing on the quay beside his police escort, who was being harangued by another man. The patrolman shrugged largely several times and gestured towards the Questura. The other man turned round, looking straight up at the window where Zen was standing. It was Enzo Gavagnin.
Zen ran quickly to the door, threw it open and sprinted along the corridor and downstairs, two steps at a time. The group of men had reached the vestibule by the time Zen got there. Enzo Gavagnin marched straight up to him.
‘What the hell’s going on?’
Zen was so breathless he could not answer at once.
‘Todesco tells me you authorized him to bring this man in,’ Gavagnin went on aggressively.
‘Have you some objection to that?’ Zen gasped.
‘Giulio is a friend of mine. I’m not letting him be persecuted by some arsehole from Rome who thinks he can come up here and throw his weight about as much as he likes!’
Zen turned to the patrolman, a hulking, popeyed individual with a face like an over-inflated balloon.
‘Anything happen at Palazzo Zulian last night, Todesco?’
‘Nossir.’
‘No incidents of any kind?’
‘Nossir.’
‘Very good. Take Signor Bon up to my office.’
‘Yessir.’
Enzo Gavagnin thrust himself in front of Zen, staring at him with an air of barely-contained fury.
‘Let me see your warrant!’
Zen glanced at him.
‘Signor Bon is not under arrest.’
‘Then what the hell is he doing here?’
‘I need to ask him a few questions.’
‘With regard to what?’ snapped Gavagnin.
‘To a case I’m working on.’
‘Valentini said you were working on the Ada Zulian case. Would you mind telling me what the fuck Giulio has to do with that?’
Zen shrugged.
Everything connects in the end, Enzo,’ he remarked archly. ‘We’re all part of the great web of life.’
Gavagnin scowled.
‘And what were you doing at the rally last night?’ he demanded. ‘Is that connected to the case you’re working on as well?’
‘What were you doing there?’ Zen shot back.
‘I happen to be a founder member of the movement, just like Giulio,’ Gavagnin replied stiffly. ‘Unlike you, we’re true Venetians, and proud of it!’
Zen nodded solemnly.
‘But I hear your granny screws Albanians,’ he murmured in dialect.
‘What?’
Ignoring him, Zen turned away and followed the clattering boots of Bettino Todesco leading his charge upstairs.
Zen sat behind the desk, Bon in front of it. A female uniformed officer stood over a reel-to-reel tape recorder on a metal stand, threading the yellow leader through the slit in the empty reel. Outside, the sky lowered dull and flat over the furrowed red tiles and tall square chimneys of the houses opposite, on the other side of the canal.
The policewoman straightened up. ‘Ready,’ she told Zen, who nodded. The reels of the recorder started to revolve. Zen recited the date, the time, the place.
‘Present are Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen and Sottotenente…’
He glanced inquiringly at the policewoman, a svelte but rather severe brunette who contrived to make her duty-issue uniform look as though it sported a designer label from one of the better houses.
‘Nunziata, Pia,’ she replied, having paused the tape.
‘… and Sottotenente Pia Nunziata,’ Zen continued. ‘Also present is Signor Giulio Bon, resident at forty-three Via della Traversa, Chioggia, in the Province of Venice.’
He cleared his throat and turned to gaze at the subject of the interview.
‘What is your occupation, Signor Bon?’
Giulio Bon had been staring at the floor between his feet. He shuffled uneasily, working the toe of his right shoe about on the fake marble, and mumbled something inaudible.
‘Speak up, please!’ Zen told him.
