being the moment when Enzo Gavagnin publicly accused him of being an undercover agent acting for the Ministry in Rome.
The encounter took place in the Bar dei Greci, where Zen had gone to try and blast away his mental fog with stiff draughts of espresso doppio ristretto. When Gavagnin appeared beside him at the bar, Zen was reading a newspaper report of a speech by Umberto Bossi, demanding immediate national elections to ‘restore credibility to the government before the demands of local demagogues for regional autonomy lead to the break-up of Italy’. A leader commented that now Bossi saw a real chance of achieving power at national level, he was distancing himself from those such as Ferdinando Dal Maschio who were still pursuing the separatist goals which Bossi had once espoused.
‘What the hell were you doing in my office this morning?’ demanded Gavagnin aggressively.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Zen replied. Thanks to his dazed condition, this was literally true. He had temporarily forgotten that he had ever visited Gavagnin’s office, let alone why, and thus had no trouble sounding innocently baffled. But Gavagnin’s fury was not assuaged.
‘Don’t try and deny it!’ he snapped. ‘When I got in this morning I couldn’t breathe for the stink of those camelshit Nazionali. You’re the only one in the building who smokes them.’
Zen merely shrugged and went on reading the paper. Gavagnin snatched it from his hands.
‘Admit it, you’re a spy!’ he shouted. ‘A snooper from the Ministry. All that bullshit about being sent up here to look into some madwoman’s stories about things going bump in the night! What a load of crap! It’s us you’re investigating, isn’t it? You’re checking us out on behalf of your masters in Rome. That’s what you were doing in my office. Going through my papers to try and find something to use against me. And why? Because I’m with the Nuova Repubblica Veneta, and we’ve got the old regime shitting in its pants!’
He continued in this vein for some time, but Zen simply stared levelly at him and said nothing. As time went on, Gavagnin’s tone became distracted rather than confrontational, his tone more pleading than threatening. In the end, he turned on his heel and stalked out.
Another of the landmarks punctuating Zen’s prevailing mental fog had been the arrival of the documents relating to the complaint which Ada Zulian had made about her near-neighbour at the time, Andrea Dolfin. They were brought — with a speed and efficiency belying the warnings Zen had received — by a uniformed messenger attached to the Central Archives of the Province of Venice, recently re-sited in a custom-built concrete bunker beneath the car park on the artificial island of the Tronchetto.
The move from the Archives’ former premises in a palazzo facing the Rialto had led to considerable disruption and, it was rumoured, the loss of several thousand documents. This still left a few million to shelve and classify, however, but by good luck the items which Zen had requested the previous day were evidently lodged in one of the sections that was up and running. Zen lit one of his despised domestic cigarettes and settled down to study the sheets of stiff parchment-like paper covered in heavy typewriting. The document, dated May 1946, consisted of the denuncia made to the authorities by Contessa Ada Zulian, resident in the eponymous palace, concerning the alleged activities of Andrea Dolfin, resident in Calle del Forno, followed by a report into the investigation subsequently carried out by a commissario di polizia.
The draft of Ada Zulian’s statement ran to almost fifteen pages. Reading through them, Zen could not help smiling faintly at the increasing frustration of the police officer who had interviewed her, evident even in the bureaucratic language employed. ‘The deponent was asked to address herself to the substance of the complaint…’ ‘A number of allegations concerning other residents of the Cannaregio district, being extraneous to the matter in hand, have been omitted…’ ‘The deponent was yet again urged to express herself with greater brevity and concision…’
There was nothing humorous about what the contessa had to say, however. Stripped of her characteristic longueurs and digressions, the essence of her accusation was that the said Andrea Dolfin had three years earlier kidnapped and murdered Rosa Coin, daughter of Daniele Coin, formerly resident in Campo di Ghetto Nuovo.
Although Ada’s charges were unsubstantiated by any evidence, they were sufficiently grave to force the police to launch an investigation. The conclusions of the resulting report hinged on two key documents. The first was a photocopy of an extract from German records listing those Venetian Jews deported in 1943. The names of all seven members of the Coin family appeared, but the entry for Rosa Coin had been crossed out and the comment ‘Found hanged’ added in the margin.
This initially appeared to support Ada’s allegations. Andrea Dolfin had been for a time a prominent member of the Fascist administration in Venice, and although he had lost his official status when Mussolini was overthrown, he remained a trusted figure enjoying good relations with the occupying German authorities. Given this fact, and the lack of any other evidence as to how Rosa Coin had met her death, Andrea Dolfin was regarded as a suspect by the police and was questioned on a number of occasions, but without result.
The investigation was dramatically terminated by the arrival of a letter from the supposed victim herself. So far from having died in 1943, it appeared that Rosa Coin was living in Palestine, the sole survivor of her family. A former neighbour in the Ghetto had written to her, revealing Ada Zulian’s allegations, which Rosa proceeded to refute point by point. Her letter made it clear that she was not only alive, but that she owed her survival to none other than Andrea Dolfin, who had used his privileged position to shelter her during the final months of the war. Once Rosa’s identity had been confirmed by the British authorities in Palestine, the case was immediately dropped.
Zen was reading the final lines of the report, which noted that Contessa Ada Zulian had been diagnosed as suffering from ‘hysteria and delusional melancholia’ since the disappearance of her daughter in mysterious circumstances, when the phone rang.
‘Yes!’ he barked gruffly.
‘Hello, sweetie.’
A smile spread slowly across Zen’s face.
‘Well, hello there,’ he breathed.
They shared an intimate moment of silence.
‘How are things?’ Cristiana asked at length.
‘Things are fine. Things are great. Never have they been better.’
‘Good.’
‘How about your things?’
‘They’re not complaining either.’
Another long supple silence.
‘When can we…?’ Zen began, but Cristiana had started talking at the same moment.
‘… make it tonight, unfortunately.’
‘Oh.’
‘Don’t think I wouldn’t love to, but I have to turn up with you-know-who for this press gala at the Danieli.’
The quality of the silence which ensued was rather different.
‘I thought you were separated,’ Zen said at last.
‘Not publicly. Can you can imagine what the media would make of a story like that, especially just before the elections? Nando’s made plenty of enemies who would just love to get their hands on some juicy scandal.’
‘Why should you care?’
‘For one thing, because I don’t care to have my name dragged through the gutter. And for another, because I want to keep on the right side of Nando.’
‘I see,’ said Zen icily.
‘No, you don’t. You don’t need to. But I’ve got to be realistic. Nando’s already a very powerful man, and the way things are looking he stands a good chance of being elected mayor next month. There’s nothing to be gained by making a sworn enemy of someone in that sort of position. They can do too much harm. By going along with public appearances when he asks me, I keep some leverage.’
She laughed deliberately, to lighten the mood.
‘I don’t want to end up like your ancestors, you know.’
‘What?’
‘Renier Zen and… what was the other one? You said last night they had a habit of winning all the battles but losing the war.’
