sent to New York for two weeks as one of a group of Italian artisans demonstrating their traditional skills at a trade fair. On his return, the instant celebrity was feted at a huge dinner party. Everyone was agog to hear from his lips what the fabled city of skyscrapers and millionaires was really like. After a suitably impressive pause, the latter-day Marco Polo duly pronounced. ‘New York,’ he said with a dismissive shrug, ‘is Mestre.’
Mestre certainly wasn’t New York, but for therapeutic purposes it would do. Zen went downstairs and commandeered a launch to take him ‘as a matter of the greatest urgency’ to the concrete and asphalt expanses of Piazzale Roma, from which a taxi sped him across the aptly named Ponte della Liberta to the mainland. As the diesel-engined Fiat traversed the freeways and flyovers of Marghera, where the pall of pollution was so bad that vehicles could only be driven on alternate days depending on whether their registration number was odd or even, Zen felt his crisis gradually easing. By the time he had paid off the taxi and walked down a street clogged with stalled and honking traffic and across a piazza filled with rows of parked cars wedged so tightly that it would have been easier to climb over them than to find a way through, he could no longer remember why he had come. To leave those quiet streets and that clean air, for this? The idea was palpably crazy.
He made his way on foot to the station buffet, where he breakfasted badly and expensively before catching a train back to the city. As Zen watched the slums and muddle of the mainland recede, he noticed an electronic sign attached to the tower-block offices of a local bank. Unlike similar displays elsewhere, this one showed not only the time and the date but also the state of the tide. A simple calculation yielded the information that high water that evening would be around nine o’clock. Which suited Zen nicely.
Back in the city, he made his way on foot to Palazzo Zulian. The sun was just showing through the thick haze, a white disc which might have been the source of the cold which gripped the air. Just before turning into the narrow passageway leading to the door, Zen inadvertently stepped in a large turd which the dog’s owner had disguised with a sprinkling of sawdust. He cleaned up the mess as best he could, wiping his shoe along the wall and pavement, but he was not in the best possible humour as he approached Palazzo Zulian. Nor was his mood improved by a raucous shout from overhead.
‘Go away! Get out of here!’
He looked up. Ada was not visible, but the voice was hers.
‘Be off, I say!’
‘Not until I’ve spoken to you, contessa,’ Zen replied.
A head emerged from the carved window at first-floor level.
‘Ah, good morning, Aurelio Battista! So you’ve finally decided to show your face around here. About time too!’
Zen gawked up at her.
‘Thanks for the welcome,’ he retorted sarcastically.
‘I wasn’t talking to you! I didn’t even know you were there. I was shouting at that tomcat on the wall. I made the mistake of throwing him some scraps last week, and now he sits there all day staring at me like a beggar. Now stay put and I’ll send your man down to open the door. Let me tell you, I’m going to give you a piece of my mind!’
Ada drew back into the house and closed the window. Zen looked round, and was reassured to see that the cat in question did in fact exist. Noticing his glance, it gave a self-pitying mew.
‘Piss off,’ said Zen.
The cat blinked and looked away disdainfully. Inside the house there was a clatter of boots on the stairs. A key turned in the lock and the door opened to reveal Bettino Todesco clutching a service revolver.
‘Ah, it’s you, chief,’ he said, putting the weapon back in its holster.
‘Who the hell did you think it was?’ Zen snapped, pushing past.
‘Well she said it was, but I don’t take that much notice of what she says any more.’
He leant forward and whispered confidentially to Zen.
‘If I have to spend another night here I’ll go round the bend myself.’
Zen frowned at him.
‘Why, has anything happened?’
Todesco shook his head lugubriously.
‘I wish something would happen. Anything would be better than having to listen to that woman maundering on. If she’s not bitching about this, she’s moaning about that, or talking to people who aren’t there. Gives me the creeps, I can tell you.’
Zen nodded.
‘All right, Todesco, go off home and get some rest. But be at the Questura by six o’clock this evening. I need you for an operation I have in mind.’
‘Very good, chief.’
Zen made his way up the stairs leading through the mezzanine level to the hallway transecting the house from front to back. The diminutive figure of Ada Zulian stood silhouetted against the window at the far end.
‘So you’ve dismissed your spy,’ she remarked sourly, ‘but I suppose he’ll be back. A fat lot of use it was calling the police! I complain of intruders in my house, and all they do is force another one on me.’
She sniffed suspiciously. Zen shifted uneasily in his shoes. There was still a strong stink of dogshit. Some of the stuff must have got trapped in the crack between the sole and the uppers.
‘I should have listened to Daniele Trevisan,’ Ada Zulian went on. ‘He told me to keep the police out of it.’
‘Well then, you’ll be glad to hear that we’re about to get out of it,’ Zen snapped.
Ada put her head on one side and stared up at him. Her face looked inexpressibly ancient, a palimpsest of all the faces it had ever been: baby, child, adolescent and the whole parabola of womanhood. It was all there, superimposed like layers of paint.
‘What do you mean?’ she inquired mildly.
‘I mean you win, contessa! You want the police out of your hair and I want you and your bullyboys out of mine. Is it a deal?’
Ada Zulian peered at him.
‘Are you feeling all right, Aurelio Battista? Come into the salon and I’ll make some camomile tea to calm you down.’
‘What will calm me down is you calling off your friends and relations!’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh come on, contessa! You told people about the police guard on the house…’
‘I mentioned it to my family…’
‘… who mentioned it to their powerful contacts, who mentioned it to my superiors at the Questura, who have been making my life a misery ever since. Fair enough! I was only trying to protect you, because you were a family friend, and this is the thanks I get!’
He walked right up to her, emphasizing his points by stabbing one palm with two fingers of the other hand.
‘That policeman who just left will not be coming back, contessa. Understand? Neither will his colleagues. Neither will I. You won’t be bothered with any of us any more. And all I ask in return is that you get in touch with all the people you complained to about me and tell them to very kindly stop breaking my balls.’
Ada glared at him.
‘There’s no call to use that sort of language.’
‘I don’t care what sort of language you use, contessa, just as long as you get the message across.’
He turned on his heel and walked back to the stairs.
‘And if the intruders return?’ Ada called querulously after him. ‘What will become of me then?’
Zen turned and stared back at her implacably.
‘But they won’t return, will they? They were never here in the first place. They never existed, except in your dreams. And I have enough real work to do without trying to police people’s dreams.’
He nodded curtly.
‘Good day, contessa. And goodbye.’
Zen paid for his broken sleep and early rising with a blurred mental focus which ensured that the rest of the day passed in a dopy haze punctuated by various isolated episodes which forced themselves on his attention, one
