the commune. He had deliberately avoided examining the reasons for this voluntary exile too closely, pretending to himself and others that it was due to the demands of his career. There was something in that, but he sensed that there was much else besides; painful, murky matters which he kept filed away in an inaccessible portion of his mind under the vague heading ‘Personal’.
Now, though, it was all gradually returning to him. The urgent plashing he could hear below, he realized, was the final ripples of wash from a vessel passing down the nearby Cannaregio canal. Last night there had been no such traffic, which is why the similar sound he had heard then had drawn him instinctively to the window. He recalled the dinghy, the muffled figures. The more he thought about the incident, the odder it seemed. What could anyone have been doing rowing around the back canals of the city at such an hour? Perhaps he had never woken at all. Perhaps it had all been a dream. No other solution seemed to make sense.
Outside, a skittish wind frisked about the courtyard, glancing off the stone walls, pouncing out from narrow alleys. The sun, barely veiled by haze, set up blocks of shadow seemingly more solid than the surfaces from which all substance had been leached by its slanting, diffuse light. Aurelio Zen slammed the front door behind him and set off towards the cafe on the quay of the Cannaregio. Rosalba had done wonders in getting the house habitable, but the cupboards and larder were bare. He should have remembered to bring a pack of coffee, at least.
When he reached the corner, his first thought was that he must have lost his bearings. Not only was there no sign of the cafe, but the barber’s and ironmonger’s next door had also vanished. Zen looked around him distractedly. Yes, there was the palazzo on the other side of the canal, and there the church. This was the corner, no doubt about it, but all that was to be seen was a stretch of grimy glass covered in faded posters protesting against the forcible evictions of sitting tenants. A workshop for carnival masks had taken over the shops next door.
A gaunt grizzled man came shuffling along the alley. He wore an ancient suit, a grubby pullover and tartan carpet slippers. Some distance behind him, a mangy dog trailed along dispiritedly at the end of a length of filthy rope.
‘Excuse me!’ Zen called. ‘Do you know what’s happened to Claudio’s bar?’
The man’s eyes widened in fright.
‘Is it you, Anzolo? I never thought to see you again.’
Zen stared more closely at him.
‘Daniele?’ he breathed. ‘I’m Aurelio. Angelo’s son.’
The old man squinted back at him. His crumpled face was unshaven. A mass of red veins covered his nose. Three lone teeth remained in his bottom gum, sticking up like the money tabs in the huge silver cash register which used to lord it over Claudio’s bar.
‘Aurelio?’ he muttered at last. ‘The little hooligan who used to terrorize the whole neighbourhood and make his mother’s life a misery? I can still hear her words. “For the love of God, Daniele, give him a damn good thrashing! I can’t control him any more. At this age, it takes a man to keep them in line.”’
He tugged his dog viciously away from a niffy patch of plaster it was investigating.
‘How is Giustiniana, anyway?’
‘My mother’s fine, Daniele.’
‘And what are you doing here?’
‘I’m on business.’
‘What sort of business?’
‘I’m in the police.’
Daniele Trevisan drew back.
‘The police?’
‘What about it?’
‘Nothing. It’s just the way you were going…’
‘Yes?’ demanded Zen.
‘Well, to be frank, I’d have expected you to end up on the other side of the law, if anything.’
Zen smiled thinly.
‘And Claudio?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
The old man looked as bewildered as the victim of a practical joke. Zen waved at the locked door, the fly- posted window.
‘Gone!’ Daniele exclaimed. ‘Claudio’s moved down to the bridge, where the tourists are. You can’t turn a profit round here any more. And what’s the police business that has brought you here, if it’s not an indiscreet question from an old family friend?’
But Zen had caught sight of the vaporetto approaching and hurried off, leaving Daniele Trevisan looking after him with a quizzical, slightly malicious smile.
At first it looked as though Zen would not be in time to catch the boat, but fortunately another ferry, bound for the station, arrived at the landing stage first, forcing its opposite number to throttle back and drift in mid- stream, awaiting its turn. The result was that Zen was able to saunter across the Tre Archi bridge and even light a cigarette before boarding.
As they passed the modernistic council houses on San Girolamo and emerged into the open waters of the lagoon, the full strength of the wind became clear for the first time. The boat banged and buffeted its way through the short, hard waves, swathes of spray drenching the decking and the windows of the helmsman’s cabin. Zen’s cigarette obliged him to stand outside, at the top of the stairs leading down to the saloon. It was rush hour, and the boat was packed with school-children and commuters. They sat or stood impassively, reading papers, talking together or staring blankly out of the windows. Apart from the pitching and rolling, the crunch of the waves and the draughts of air laden with salt, not fumes, it might almost have been the bus which Zen took to work every morning in Rome. He eyed the children hunched under their satchels, chattering brightly or horsing about. They thought this was normal, he reflected, as he once had. They thought everywhere was like this. They thought that nothing would ever change.
At Fondamente Nove, Zen changed to avoid the detour to Murano. It would have been quicker to get off at the next stop, by the hospital, and walk through the back streets to the Questura, but as he was in plenty of time he rode the circolare destra through the Arsenale shipyards and out into the sweeping vistas of the deep-water channel beyond. The wind’s work was even clearer here, cutting up the water into staccato wavelets breaking white at the crest. They slapped and banged the hull, sending up a salty spindrift which acted as a screen for brief miniature rainbows and coated Zen’s face like sweat.
When they reached the Riva degli Schiavoni he disembarked, crossed the broad promenade, bustling even at that hour, and plunged into the warren of dark, deserted alleys beyond. He was largely following his nose at this point, but it proved a good guide, bringing him out on a bridge leading over the San Lorenzo canal near the three- storey building which housed the police headquarters for the Provincia di Venezia. Zen held his identity card up to the camera above the bell and the door release hummed loudly. Since the years of terrorism, police stations had been defended like colonial outposts in enemy territory. The fact that the Questura and the Squadra Mobile headquarters next door were both traditional buildings typical of this unglamorous area of the city made such measures seem all the more bizarre.
The guard on duty behind a screen of armoured glass in the vestibule was sleepy and offhand. No one was in yet, he told Zen, a claim substantiated by the bank of video screens behind him, showing a selection of empty rooms, corridors and staircases. Zen walked upstairs to the first floor and opened a door at random. The scene which met his eyes inside was absolutely predictable to anyone who had worked in police offices anywhere in Italy from Aosta to Siracuse. The air was stale and stuffy, used up and warmed over. The bare walls were painted a shade of off-white reminiscent of milk left too long out of the fridge. A double neon tube housing, its cover missing, hung from the ceiling on frail chains. The available space was divided into three areas by screens of the thick frosted glass commonly associated with shower cubicles, set in gilt-anodized aluminium frames. At the centre of each squatted a large wooden desk.
Zen went over to one of the desks and looked through the contents of the three-tiered metal tray until he found what he was looking for: a sheaf of computer printout stapled together at the upper left-hand corner. The top sheet bore the words NOTIZIE DI REATI DENUNCIATI ALLA POLIZIA GIUDIZIARIA and the dates of the previous week. The pages inside listed all the incidents which had been brought to the attention of the police during the period in question. Zen leafed through the pages, looking for something suitable.
