It was a delicate business. He didn’t want to attract unwanted attention by poaching a case which had already been assigned, or in which someone was taking a special interest for one reason or another. On the other hand, he couldn’t just select some minor misdemeanour at random. There had to be something special about it to justify his being sent up all the way from the elite Criminalpol squad in Rome to take over the case. He was still puzzling over this problem when a familiar name leapt out at him.
He read the entry again, then dropped the document and lit a cigarette. The contessa! Christ almighty. For a time he was lost in memories. Then he looked at the page again. Two weeks earlier, Ada Zulian had reported intruders at her home, claiming that it was part of a campaign of systematic persecution which had been going on for over a month. She had renewed her complaints the previous week.
Zen looked up at the window. He nodded slowly to himself. That would do nicely. It was too trivial to have excited any interest from any of the resident staff, but the family connection would provide exactly the kind of illusory logic he needed to justify his involvement to anyone who asked. He noted down the date and case number in his diary and replaced the list in the metal tray.
When the Personnel office responded to the phone half an hour later, Zen went along and introduced himself. The clerk in charge dug out the chit which had been faxed up from Rome.
‘Zen, Aurelio. Criminalpol. Temporary transfer regarding…’
He frowned at the form.
‘That’s odd. They’ve forgotten to fill that bit in.’
Zen shook his head.
‘Typical! The people they’re employing these days can’t remember their own names half the time.’
He took out his notebook.
‘It’s to do with someone called Zulian. I’ve got the details here somewhere… Yes, here you go.’
He showed the reference number and date to the clerk, who copied them on to the chit.
‘I’ll need some office space,’ Zen remarked. ‘What have you got available?’
The clerk consulted a wall-chart.
‘How long are you going to be here?’
Zen shrugged.
‘Hard to say. A week or two at least.’
‘There’s a desk free in three one nine until the seventeenth. Gatti’s on holiday until then.’
Room 319 was a small office at the front of the building, overlooking the canal. Zen was looking down at a refrigerated barge marked GELATI SANSON squeezing past the police launches moored outside the Questura when the door opened to admit Aldo Valentini, whose name figured alongside that of the absent Gatti on the door.
Valentini was a mild, scholarly-looking man with Armani glasses and a skimpy blond beard like grass which has been growing under a plank. He seemed pleased to have company, and suggested that he and Zen pop out to get some breakfast. As they emerged into the sunlight, bucking the incoming tide of staff hastening to sign themselves in so that they could slip out again, Valentini inquired about the reason for Zen’s transfer.
‘You must be joking!’ he barked in the slightly nasal accent of his native Ferrara. ‘Ada Zulian! A woman who doesn’t even know the right time…’
Zen gestured impatiently.
‘What does that matter, as long as she knows the right people?’
Aldo Valentini conceded the point with a shrug. He led the way to a bar at the end of the quay. A red neon sign over the door read Bar dei Greci, after the nearby Orthodox church. There was no sign of any Greeks inside, although the barman’s accent suggested that he was from somewhere well to the south of Chioggia.
‘All the same, la Zulian!’ exclaimed Valentini when they had ordered coffee. ‘God almighty, she’s been in and out of the loony bin like a yo-yo for the last twenty years. This complaint of hers ended up on my desk, largely because no one else would touch it with a bargepole.’
He broke off to take one of the pastries from the plate on the bar.
‘We searched the whole place from top to bottom,’ he continued, his moustache white with icing sugar from the pastry he had selected. ‘Even put a man outside the front door. No one came or went, yet the woman still claimed she was being persecuted. It’s a clear case of hysteria and attention-seeking.’
Zen took a bite of a flaky cream-filled croissant.
‘I’m sure you’re right. It’s always the hopeless cases who want a second opinion. I’ll just go through the motions and then endorse your conclusions. It’s a total waste of time, but what do I care? There are worse places to spend a few days.’
He washed the pastry down with a gulp of coffee.
‘So, what’s been happening round here?’
Valentini shrugged.
‘Bugger all, as usual. Mestre and Marghera see a reasonable amount of action, particularly in drugs, but we just don’t have a big enough slice of the mainland for it to add up to anything much. As for the city itself, forget it. Criminals are like everyone else these days. If you can’t drive there, they don’t want to know.’
Zen nodded slowly.
‘What about that kidnapping that was all over the papers a few months back? Some American.’
‘You mean the Durridge business?’
Zen lit a cigarette.
‘That must have livened things up a bit.’
‘It might, if they’d let us near it,’ Valentini retorted shortly.
‘How do you mean?’
‘The Carabinieri got there first, and when we applied for reciprocity we were told the files had been returned under seal to Rome.’
He shrugged.
‘Christ knows what that was all about. Once upon a time we could have pulled a few strings of our own and found out, but these days…’
He pointed to the headline in the newspaper lying on the counter. THE OLD FOX FIGHTS FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE, it read, above a photograph of the politician in question. Zen picked the paper up and scanned the article, which concerned alleged payments made by a number of leading industrialists into a numbered Swiss bank account allegedly used to fund the party in question. The paper’s cartoonist made play with the slogan adopted by the party at the last election: ‘A Fairer Alternative’. In a secondary article, a spokesman for the regionalist Northern Leagues hailed the development as ‘a death blow to the clique of crooks who have bled this country dry for decades’ and called for new electoral laws designed to radically redraw the political map of the country.
‘It’s total chaos,’ remarked Valentini sourly. ‘You can’t get anything done any more. No one knows what the rules are.’
Feeling a touch on his arm, Zen looked round. A young woman with blonde hair, wearing a ski-jacket and jeans, stood staring at him, smiling inanely and stabbing one finger in the air. For a moment Zen thought she must be mad, or perhaps from some religious sect or other. Then he caught sight of the suspended rectangle of cardboard circling slowly in the draught above his head. The logo on each side showed a smouldering cigarette in a red circle with a broad slash across it.
‘Don’t tell me you can’t even smoke any more!’ he exclaimed incredulously to Valentini, who shrugged sheepishly.
‘The city council passed a by-law making it compulsory to provide a no-smoking area. It’s just for show, to keep the tourists happy. Normally no one pays any attention in a place like this, but every once in a while some arsehole insists on the letter of the law.’
He slipped some money to the cashier and they stepped outside. Already the sunshine was looser and more generous. Zen paused to look at a series of posters gummed to the wall. The design was identical to the ones he had seen earlier that morning, on the window of the closed cafe in Cannaregio, but these were much newer. At the top was a drawing of the lion of Saint Mark, rampant, its expression full of defiance. The huge black capitals beneath read NUOVA REPUBBLICA VENETA and the text announced a rally the following evening in Campo Santa Margherita.
‘Total chaos,’ Aldo Valentini repeated, leading the way back to the Questura. ‘Every day it turns out that another big name, someone you would have sworn was absolutely untouchable, is under investigation on charges
