winch in motion once more.
Zen went up to a man in the uniform of a Carabinieri major and asked what was going on.
‘Body in the cesspit,’ he replied shortly, barely glancing at Zen. ‘This is the fourth time they’ve tried to bring it out. Keeps slipping off the rope.’
This explained the strain visible on the faces of the men working the winch. They didn’t want to have to send their colleague back down to the subterranean cistern which received all the sewage of the surrounding tenements, much less replace him themselves in due course. Lovingly they coaxed the cable inch by inch on to the drum, taking up slack with leather-gloved hands to avoid any jerks or shudders which might precipitate its cargo back into those feculent depths.
‘Maintenance people found it when they came to drain the tank this morning,’ the Carabiniere muttered under his breath. ‘Took the cover off and were just getting the tubing set up when one of them caught sight of this face looking up at them from the surface of the shit below. Poor bastard nearly fell in himself. And you are?’
Zen was spared having to reply by a loud gasp and stifled cries from the other spectators. Something had appeared in the hole at the centre of the courtyard, something as smooth, shapeless and sticky as a bar of softened chocolate. With evident reluctance, the three men clustered around the winch, laid hands on it and began to pull. But the object appeared unwilling to be hauled into the light of day. Again and again it jammed in the opening. The men shouted warnings and instructions to each other, desperate lest it escape them yet again.
At last they got its centre of gravity over the rim of the pozzo nero, and the six hands guided it clear of the hole and let it slump down on to the brick paving with a soft squelch. The racket of the winch died away. Under its sheath of slime, the object was only just recognizable as a human body. The men set about freeing the cradle of rope looped about its limbs. The Carabinieri officer pushed through the circle of onlookers.
‘Can you clean it up a bit, lads?’ he asked one of the men.
‘Gino’s just gone to fetch some water, sir.’
The corpse lay face down, the hands clasped behind the back. Close to, the stench of fermenting excrement was almost unbearable. Everyone stood in embarrassed silence. At length a clatter of boots announced the return of Gino, staggering under the weight of two pails of water. Standing as far from the corpse as possible, he poured the contents of one bucket over its back. It at once became clear that the hands were not clasped but tied together, the thumbs tightly bound with copper wire. Equally clearly, the victim had tried hard to break free: one of the thumbs was almost severed.
‘Clumsy job,’ said the Carabinieri major in a tone of professional disapproval. ‘He’d have drowned anyway, and if they’d gone back and uncovered the manhole once he was dead they could have passed the whole thing off as an accident.’
‘Perhaps they didn’t want to pass it off as an accident,’ murmured Zen.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Maybe they wanted to send a message. To keep the others in line.’
‘What others?’
Zen shrugged. One of the men wearing gloves heaved the inert body on to its back. The viscous brown filth clung to it like mud, smoothing out the features and draining into the open mouth. Someone in the background started to retch. With obvious reluctance, Gino picked up the other pail and poured the water unceremoniously over the head and chest of the corpse.
‘Jesus!’ breathed Zen.
The Carabinieri officer glanced sharply at him.
‘Do you know him?’
Zen nodded slowly.
‘Then who is he? And who are you, for that matter? Do you know who killed him?’
Zen raised his head and gazed at the blank wall opposite.
‘I did,’ he said.
He turned and walked quickly away, then broke into a run. Behind him voices were calling to him to stop, but he couldn’t stop. There was too much to do and to undo, too much to remember, too much to forget.
He ran almost all the way to Campo San Bartolomeo, pushing ruthlessly past anyone in his way, and up the steep steps of the Rialto bridge. Pausing briefly for breath at the top, he raced down the other side and out on to the wooden jetty where three watertaxis were moored. In the cabin of the first in line, five men sat chatting familiarly over plastic cups of coffee. Zen appeared in the companion-way and demanded to be taken to the San Toma pier. One of the men looked up at Zen with an expression which mingled contempt and pity.
‘San Toma? That’s just a few hundred metres along the canal. Two stops on the vaporetto.’
‘I’m in a hurry!’
The man shrugged.
‘It’s not worth my while for a fare like that.’
Zen climbed down into the cabin and thrust his identity card into the man’s face.
‘If you don’t get this tub under way in ten seconds, I’ll have your licence revoked and you’ll spend the rest of your life humping frozen fish and tinned tomatoes around town.’
Shocked by the violence in Zen’s voice, and not realizing that it was directed not at them but at himself, the men sprang into action. Within moments the taxi was cutting its way through the turbid waters, its bow aimed at the volta del canal where the city’s central waterway snakes back on itself, heading east towards the open sea.
From the pier at San Toma it was only a short walk to the offices of the Procura. The entrance to this organ of the Italian State was an apt symbol of that institution as a whole: six large doors led into the building, but only one was open. Zen joined the crowd of people shoving their way in and out and made his way upstairs to the Deputy Public Prosecutors’ department.
Marcello Mamoli was ‘in a meeting’, he was informed by a woman with a pinched and put-upon expression hunched over a typewriter in the reception area. For once the euphemism proved correct, as Zen discovered by opening a selection of doors further down the corridor. As though in deliberate contrast to the windowless glory- hole in which their secretary eked out her working life, the space inside was pointlessly vast. Six men were seated around a table which glistened like an ice-rink, and was only slightly smaller. All six looked round as the door opened. One of them got to his feet and stood staring furiously at Zen.
‘What is the meaning of this intrusion?’
Zen strode over to the table.
‘I must speak to Dottore Marcello Mamoli.’
‘Must you, indeed?’ retorted the other sarcastically. ‘And who might you be?’
‘My name is Aurelio Zen. I’m with Criminalpol, on temporary secondment to the Questura here in Venice.’
The magistrate smiled coldly.
‘Extremely temporary, from what I hear.’
He straightened his shoulders and glared at Zen.
‘I am Mamoli. What possible justification do you have to offer for bursting in on an important and confidential meeting in this way?’
Marcello Mamoli was a pale, fastidious-looking man of about forty whose small, sharp features were partially mitigated by a large pair of bifocal glasses.
‘I apologize to you and your colleagues for the interruption,’ Zen declared in grovelling tones, ‘but this is a matter of the greatest possible urgency.’
Mamoli regarded him with disfavour.
‘On the contrary, dottore, it has been a total waste of everyone’s time! I am shocked and surprised that the Ministry thought it worthwhile troubling me with such a farce. My colleagues and I have had dealings with Criminalpol operatives many times before and I’m glad to say that we have generally been impressed by their level of professionalism. That makes it all the more unaccountable that you should have been taken in by something like the Zulian case, a transparent tissue of…’
‘This has nothing to do with Ada Zulian.’
Marcello Mamoli was clearly not pleased to have been wrong-footed.
‘Then what is it about?’ he demanded icily.
