wasn’t a problem until…’
‘So where do we go from here?’ Mamoli cut in.
Zen took a deep breath.
‘To Sant’Ariano.’
‘Where?’
‘The ossuary island up in the northern lagoon where the dead from all the church cemeteries were dumped when the land was needed for…’
‘I am tolerably familiar with the history of the city,’ Marcello Mamoli replied icily. ‘What escapes me is the connection between Sant’Ariano and the affair we have been discussing.’
‘Sant’Ariano is where the Sfrisos stored the packages of heroin between receiving and delivering them. The place has such a sinister reputation that hardly anyone ever goes there. They dug a cache somewhere on the island and went to pick up fresh supplies as and when they needed them. One day last month Giacomo went to collect the remaining three kilos of one consignment. When he got back he was babbling madly about meeting a walking corpse and there was no sign of the packages. Filippo has searched Sant’Ariano many times since then. He located the site of the cache easily enough, but it was empty. The island is covered with dense undergrowth and Giacomo apparently got lost and abandoned the heroin somewhere in the middle of it.’
‘Just a minute,’ Mamoli told him. Lowering the receiver, he called to someone in the house, ‘Please start without me. I’ll be there in a minute.’
‘Hello?’ said Zen tentatively.
‘I’m here,’ Mamoli snapped back. ‘Please get to the point.’
Zen’s tone hardened.
‘The point? The point is that somewhere on Sant’Ariano there is a canvas bag containing three kilos of heroin. If we can recover it, we can set up a meeting, lure the gang into a trap and smash the whole operation. Sfriso has agreed to co-operate.’
Mamoli grunted.
‘Why don’t we just substitute another package? Or use a dummy?’
‘Each package is sealed and bar-coded to reveal any tampering. The contact man would spot the fake package at once. We could arrest him, but the others would get away and the…’
‘So what do you propose?’
‘I would like to order an immediate search of Sant’Ariano.’
‘Then do so, dottore.’
‘I have your authorization to proceed?’
‘Certainly. And now I must…’
‘By whatever means seem to me most appropriate?’
‘Of course. And now I really must get back to my guests. Good night, dottore.’
In the end, Zen decided to take the copy of Filippo Sfriso’s statement to the Procura in person. It meant a long detour on his way home, but he had nothing better to do. In fact the walk was just what he needed to think through the problem facing him, to weigh up the options open to him and perhaps even come to a decision. It was a fine night for walking. An abrasive, icy wind had dried and polished the town, making the stonework sparkle, the metal gleam and burnishing the air till it shone darkly. The tide was high, and the cribbed water in the small canals shuffled fretfully about.
Although Mamoli had given him a free hand, Zen knew that he would have to take the responsibility if anything went wrong. This seemed all too possible. Not only did he have to locate a small canvas bag on an island several thousand square metres in extent and entirely covered with impenetrable brush and scrub, but he had to do so without the gang knowing that any search had been made. Both Giacomo and Filippo Sfriso had told them on many occasions how and where the missing heroin had been mislaid. The gang had no doubt tried more than once to recover it themselves. If they learned that the police had instituted a full-scale search of Sant’Ariano, they certainly wouldn’t respond when Filippo Sfriso announced a few days later that Enzo Gavagnin’s fate had jogged his memory, he had located the stuff and when would they like to drop by and pick it up?
As he cut through the maze of back alleys between Santa Maria Formosa and the Fenice, Zen found himself shying away from the thought of what had happened to Gavagnin. The pathologist’s report had been faxed over from the hospital, and Zen was not likely to forget the details of the injuries inflicted on Gavagnin before he died, nor the phrase ‘the presence of a considerable quantity of excrement in the lungs and stomach’ under the heading Cause of Death.
That was true only in the sense that boats sank because of the presence of a considerable quantity of water in the hull. In reality, Enzo Gavagnin had been killed because of what Zen had said on the phone the other morning. He had been so eager to get even for Gavagnin’s slights that he had made up some story on the spur of the moment without even considering what the consequences might be. He had been as irresponsible as Todesco. Zen too had fired blind, and with fatal results.
Buffeted by biting gusts of wind, he crossed Campo San Stefano and the high wooden bridge over the canalazzo before entering the sheltered passages and paths on the other bank. At the offices of the Procura, he watched the caretaker deposit the sealed envelope containing Filippo Sfriso’s statement in the pigeonhole marked MAMOLI, returned to the cold comfort of the streets. As he passed the monstrous sprawl of the Frari, he caught a whiff of cooking borne past on a gust of wind from someone’s supper and realized that he had eaten nothing since the morning. Until now the sheer press of events had sustained him, but as it receded he suddenly felt absolutely ravenous. It was by now almost ten o’clock, and the only places open would be those catering to the city’s vestigial youth culture.
He walked down to the Rialto bridge and made his way to Campo San Luca, where the dwindling band of young Venetians hang out of an evening. The main throng had already departed, but a number of locali remained open to serve the hard core. Zen chose the one which seemed to be pandering least to the prevailing fashion for American-style food and drink, and ordered a pizza and a draught beer. While he waited to be served, he lit a cigarette to calm his hunger pains and tried to ignore the attention-seeking clientele and concentrate on his immediate problems.
Although he recognized his responsibility for Gavagnin’s death, he didn’t feel any exaggerated sense of remorse. That would have been pointless in any case. All he could do now was to try and bring the killers themselves to justice. They had murdered Gavagnin because they believed he knew where the cache of heroin was hidden. That proved that they had not managed to locate it themselves. If Zen could succeed where they had failed, he could consign the whole gang to the pozzo nero of the prison system and — in his own mind at least — be quits. But how to find Giacomo’s missing bag in the first place?
Assuming that the required manpower was available, such searches were normally a relatively simple matter: you organized a line of men and walked them across the ground. Such methods were clearly impossible on the terrain in question. Zen had been to Sant’Ariano once, forty years before, on a dare with Tommaso. They’d taken a small skiff belonging to the Saoner family and rowed all the way, up beyond Burano and Torcello, past abandoned farms and hunting lodges, on towards the fringes of the laguna morta. He had never forgotten the silence of those swampy wastelands, the sense of solitude and desolation.
The Germans had mounted an anti-aircraft battery on the island during the closing months of the war, so it was not quite as untouched as it would have been five years earlier, or as it would be now that the undergrowth had reclaimed the clearing and access road which had been made. Nevertheless, both he and Tommaso had been overwhelmed by the aura of the place. It was not only the thought of the unknown, uncountable dead whose remains had been tipped there like so much rubbish, thousands and thousands of bones and skulls, a whole hillock of them held in by a retaining wall. Almost as frightening as those reminders of mortality had been the evidence of life: a profusion of withered, gnarled, spiny plants and shrubs which sprouted from that sterile desert, and above all the host of rodents and reptiles which scuttled and slithered and nested amongst the bones.
The arrival of the waiter with Zen’s order banished these memories. But as he wolfed down the pizza, scalding his tongue in the process, he realized that a conventional search of Sant’Ariano was out of the question. The only way it could be made to work would be by giving each man a machete and a chain-saw and felling every tree, shrub and bush on the island. They might find the heroin, but they wouldn’t catch the gang. What he needed was a totally different approach, something quick, effective and unobtrusive. Unfortunately he had a gnawing
