suspicion that it didn’t exist.
The pizza was a sad imitation of the real thing, but it filled his stomach. He was just lighting a cigarette to go with the rest of his beer when Cristiana Morosini walked in. She was with three other women, and did not notice Zen at his table in a corner at the back. He drew hard on his cigarette and tried to think what to do. Cristiana was bound to catch sight of him sooner or later, and if he hadn’t greeted her by then she would be even more annoyed with him than she already was. That Zen really knows how to treat a woman: first he stands her up, then he cuts her dead.
In the event the dilemma was solved for him almost immediately. Cristiana and one of the other women got up and walked towards Zen’s table, heading for the toilets at the back of the premises. When she saw him she hesitated an instant, then smiled coolly.
‘ Ciao, Aurelio.’
She turned to the other woman.
‘Be with you in a minute, Wanda.’
Zen stood up, gesturing embarrassedly.
‘I’ve been trying to phone you all afternoon…’
‘I was out.’
‘I’m dreadfully sorry about missing our appointment. Something unexpected came up suddenly, a dramatic development in the case I’m working on.’
Cristiana raised her eyebrows, whether in interest or scepticism it was hard to tell.
‘Not to worry,’ she replied. ‘I was busy myself, as it happens. Nando insisted on flying me down to Pellestrina for another photo opportunity. He’s confident of carrying the city itself so now he’s concentrating on the islands.’
She looked at him speculatively.
‘So has this dramatic development anything to do with the Durridge case?’
Zen shrugged awkwardly.
‘It’s not really something I can discuss in public.’
She met his look with one of her own.
‘I can’t just abandon my friends like that.’
‘Of course not. But I’m planning to stay up late anyway. There are one or two things I need to think over. If you want to stop by for a nightcap later…’
At that moment the woman called Wanda — who must be Cristiana’s sister-in-law, Zen realized — emerged from the toilets. Cristiana nodded lightly and turned away.
‘We’ll see,’ she said.
Zen walked slowly home, puzzling over the significance of Cristiana’s continuing intimacy with the Dal Maschio family. She might be separated from her husband, but she still evidently went out with his sister and came running when he snapped his fingers. Zen felt a scorch of indigestion in his gut, partly from eating too quickly and partly from jealousy. For a supposedly estranged wife, Cristiana seemed to be at her husband’s beck and call to an astonishing degree. He didn’t blame her for keeping on the right side of such a powerful man, but he did wonder where the limits of her compliance might lie.
Not that there was anything to complain about in this trip to Pellestrina, a bizarre community three kilometres long and a stone’s throw wide, built on a sandbank in the shadow of the murazzi, the massive sea defences erected by the Republic three hundred years earlier. Zen smiled, imagining how Dal Maschio would have worked that into his speech. ‘What these walls have been for three centuries, the Nuova Repubblica Veneta is today — a bulwark protecting our culture, our economy, our very homes, from being swept away by the storms of change and decay!’
In order to provide a suitable dramatic photo, Dal Maschio would no doubt have piloted his wife to Pellestrina in a helicopter owned by the company in which he was a partner. As a former air force ace, he would have been able to make a spectacular landing on some patch of grass or sand which looked too small to…
And then, in a flash, he saw the solution to the problem which had been obsessing him all evening! The way to locate the missing three kilos of heroin on Sant’Ariano was to go in vertically, not hacking through the scrub but dipping from the sky! He was so pleased by this revelation that he would have walked right past his own front door if he had not almost bumped into someone coming in the opposite direction.
‘Christ!’ the man screamed.
Zen peered at the dingy figure dressed in a military greatcoat over what looked like a pair of pyjamas. The cord he was holding in one hand gradually went slack as a dog bearing a marked resemblance to a mobile doormat hobbled into the ambit of the streetlight.
‘What on earth’s the matter?’ Zen demanded.
The man shook his head in confusion. His eyes were still dilated in terror.
‘I thought it was…’ he whispered hoarsely.
‘Thought it was who?’
Daniele Trevisan swallowed hard.
‘Someone else.’
Zen walked up to him.
‘Do you mean my father?’ he asked tonelessly.
Daniele Trevisan bit his lip and said nothing. As though in sympathy, his dog raised one leg and voided its bladder against the wall.
‘You mistook me for him the day I arrived,’ Zen reminded the old man gently.
Trevisan assumed a self-pitying expression.
‘I’m getting old,’ he whined. ‘I get things confused.’
A barbed wind whipped through the campo, spraying a fine white dust of snow in their faces.
‘Listen, Daniele,’ Zen said weightily, ‘my father is dead. Do you understand?’
To his amazement, the old man burst into peals of mocking laughter.
‘Understand?’ he cried. ‘Oh yes! Yes, I understand all right!’
Zen stared menacingly at him. Daniele Trevisan’s hilarity ended as abruptly as it had begun.
‘Of course,’ he muttered in a conciliatory tone. ‘Dead. To be sure.’
And without another word he shuffled away, dragging his reluctant dog away from the patch of urine-soaked plaster.
At first it looked as though the clouds which had hidden the sun for most of the week had fallen to earth like a collapsed parachute, covering every surface with a billowy white mantle. The next moment, shivering at the bedroom window as he clipped back the internal shutters, Zen thought vaguely of the aqua alta. It was only when he became aware of the intense cold streaming in through the gap between window and frame that he realized that it was snow. A sprinkling of fat flakes was still tumbling down from the thick grey sky. Every aspect of roofs and gardens, pavements and bridges, had been rethought. Only the water, immune by its very nature to this form of inundation, remained untouched.
He glanced back towards the empty bed, its sheets and covers decorously unruffled. Although he had stayed up till well after midnight, Cristiana had not shown up. He tried to persuade himself that this was all for the best in the long run. By standing him up, she had evened the score and demonstrated that she was not someone to be trifled with. Next time they could meet as equals, with nothing to prove to each other. As long as there was a next time, of course.
He dressed hurriedly, dispensing with a shower, and made his way downstairs, stiff with cold. The primitive central heating system only operated on the first floor, and as it did not have a timer it had to be switched on manually each morning. If he had known it was going to freeze, he might have risked the wrath of his mother’s parsimonious household gods and left the thing on all night. As it was, there was nothing to do but put on his overcoat and hold his fingers under the warm water from the tap to unjam the muscles.
Having assembled the coffee machine and put it on the flame, he returned to the living room and picked up the phone. Despite the day and the hour, or perhaps because of them, the Questura answered almost immediately. Zen identified himself and asked to be connected to the nearest airborne section. This turned out to be situated in the international airport at Tessera, on the shores of the lagoon just outside Mestre. Zen huddled miserably on the sofa while the necessary connections were made. He had never felt so cold in his life. He recalled that first flurry of
