Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  There were gasps from the audience. Dal Maschio shrugged coyly.

  ‘That’s not bad, is it? In fact it’s well in excess of the gross national product of several emergent nations. But for us it’s only the beginning. Far from being an idle dream, independence is the only policy which can realize the unlimited potential of our unique city. But we must not fall into the trap of complacency, my friends. Do not waste your votes just because you believe – absolutely correctly, mind you – that our victory is a foregone conclusion. Let us not merely win these municipal elections, but win them massively, decisively, with an overwhelming landslide which sends a clear signal to the morally and economically bankrupt regime in Rome! Let’s force them to call elections at a national level in the immediate future, so that we can liberate ourselves once and for all from the burdens which have weighed us down for so long, and begin at last to forge our own destiny in this unique and incomparable city state!’

  Dal Maschio turned away. It seemed the speech was over, and scattered applause broke out. Then, as though struck by a sudden inspiration, he grasped the microphone again and continued with hoarse vehemence.

  ‘Fifteen hundred years ago our forefathers gathered here, on the bleak mudbanks of the lagoon, seeking refuge from foreign domination, from oppression and servitude. They turned their back on the mainland and, over the centuries, made of this inhospitable and unpromising site a city which is one of the wonders of the world. They never bowed to emperor or pope but always held their own course, owing allegiance to no one but always seeking to further the interests of the Republic. Maybe they weren’t always too particular about the methods they used or the people they allied themselves with, but for over a thousand years they made the name of Venice respected and feared. If we wish to be great again, if we simply wish to survive, we must follow their example – as Europeans, as Italians, but first and foremost as Venetians!’

  The applause which followed was lengthy and enthusiastic. From the fringes of the crowd some wag yelled ‘Self-rule for the Giudecca!’ but this sarcasm was swamped by repeated ovations for Dal Maschio and his associates.

  Zen was just wondering how he could attract Tommaso’s attention when a pair of youths wearing NRV armbands appeared at his elbow and urged him to join up. One was short and chubby, his soft baby-face features contradicted by a small slot of a mouth and hard, shifty eyes set rather too close together. His companion was older and slighter, with a small moustache, long oily perfumed curls and wrap-around sunglasses tapering to a point at his ears. Zen declined their exhortations to ‘stand up and be counted’, and when they persisted he told them that he was there to meet Tommaso Saoner.

  The elder of the two activists looked at him sharply.

  ‘Are you called Zen by any chance?’ he demanded.

  ‘No, it was my father’s name.’

  The born-again Venetian did a double take, then shook his head to show that he had no time for jokes.

  ‘Tommaso told us to look out for you,’ he said curtly. ‘Come this way.’

  The pair moved off, shoving their way roughly through the crowd. The podium was now darkened, and volunteers were already beginning to dismantle the structure. Under one of the plane trees whose roots made the paving warp and buckle like choppy seas, Ferdinando Dal Maschio was meeting his public. He greeted them familiarly, as though each were already an old friend, a member of the family. It was an impressive performance, all the more so in that it looked entirely natural.

  Stationed around Dal Maschio and unobtrusively controlling access to him stood a ring of his lieutenants, including Tommaso Saoner and a chubby man with watchful eyes whom Zen recognized with a shock as Enzo Gavagnin. The elder of the two youths went up to Saoner and spoke to him briefly. Tommaso looked over to where Zen was standing and waved him to approach.

  ‘Well, Aurelio, what’s your verdict?’

  Saoner’s face was flushed, his pupils enlarged, his movements jerky and his breath rapid. Zen recalled what Cristiana had said about politics being a drug. In different circumstances, he would have assumed that Tommaso was drunk.

  ‘Good turnout,’ Zen replied shortly.

  But Tommaso was not so easily put off.

  ‘And Dal Maschio?’ he asked eagerly. ‘What did you think of him?’

  Zen shrugged.

  ‘He’s a natural politician.’

  That got through.

  ‘Stop beating about the bush, Aurelio! Are you with us or against us?’

  Zen eyed him with mock alarm.

  ‘Is there no other choice?’

  ‘Not for someone like you, a Venetian born and bred! You heard what Dal Maschio said. We have only a few years left, a decade or two at most, to save the city and everything that makes us what we are!’

  ‘I thought the speeches were over, Tommaso.’

  Enzo Gavagnin wandered over to join them. He nodded curtly at Zen, then turned to Saoner.

  ‘Friend of yours?’

  Tommaso glanced at Zen.

  ‘He used to be.’

  Gavagnin detonated a bright yellow gob of spit on the pavement.

  ‘And now?’

  Tommaso Saoner shrugged suddenly and forced a smile.

  ‘Oh, Aurelio’s all right. He’ll come round in the end. The logic of our arguments are inescapable. There is simply no other viable response to the problems we face.’

  He took Zen’s arm and steered him away from the menacing attention of Enzo Gavagnin.

  ‘Come and meet Andrea.’

  Tommaso led him out of the dispersing crowd, right across the campo and under a low portico leading under the houses. The caged lamp on the whitewashed ceiling cast the pattern of a gigantic spider-web on the ground. A small courtyard narrowed to a blind alley ending at a small canal. The tide was high again, the water lapping invisibly at the steps. Zen felt a surge of relief that Bettino Todesco was on duty at Palazzo Zulian. All might not yet be well, but at least the worst had been averted.

  Eight houses faced each other across the yard, not counting the upper storeys built over the portico. Tommaso stopped at the last on the right-hand side. The plastic nameplate above the bell read DOLFIN.

  ‘I don’t know if he’s home,’ Tommaso murmured. ‘He doesn’t have a phone, so we’ll have to take our chances.’

  ‘What makes you think he knows anything about Rosetta Zulian?’ asked Zen.

  Tommaso shrugged and rang again.

  ‘I recall my mother saying that his name had been linked to that affair. I don’t really remember the details, but if anyone knows anything about it this long afterwards it’ll be Andrea.’

  A window high above their heads opened with a loud creak.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  The voice was that of an elderly male, the tone peremptory to the point of rudeness.

  ‘Tommaso Saoner. I’ve someone here who wants to meet you.’

  ‘But do I want to meet him? Or is it a her? Have you turned pimp in more ways than one, Saoner? I’ve been trying to shut out the sound of your beastly speeches all evening.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with politics, Andrea. This is an old school friend of mine, Aurelio Zen.’

  ‘Zen? You mean Stefano? No, he died. Guido? Biagio? Alberto?’

  ‘Aurelio!’ shouted Tommaso.

  Zen could just make out the grizzled head leaning out of a window high above amid the swirling mist.

  ‘There’s no one by that name. I knew an Angelo Zen once, but he’s dead.’

  ‘I’m his son,’ Zen called out.

  ‘Angelo Giovanni,’ the voice continued unheedingly. ‘We were Young Fascists together, among the very first to join. But he had no children. I believe there had been a boy who was stillborn. And before he could make any more, Angelo went off to Russia and …’

  ‘Are you going to keep us standing here all night?’ demanded Tommaso.

  ‘All right, all right! Don’t be so impatient!’

  A moment later there came the buzz
of the door-release. Tommaso pushed the door ajar.

  ‘I’ve got to get back,’ he told Zen. ‘There’s a policy meeting I must attend. Maybe I’ll catch you later, if Andrea hasn’t managed to persuade you that you don’t exist!’

  He strode back through the portico and out into the lighted campo, humming with activity. Zen stepped inside and stood uncertainly in the hallway.

  ‘Come up!’ called a voice somewhere above.

  Zen closed the door and started upstairs. When he reached the first-floor landing, he found himself confronted by a gaunt man in his eighties, wearing a voluminous dressing-gown of some thick red material and resting on a rubber-tipped cane. His face was heavy and jowly, as though all its youthful qualities had drained to the bottom.

  ‘What was that about Tommaso being a pimp?’ Zen asked him, feeling the need to take the initiative.

  The old man cackled sourly.

  ‘He’s been trying to get me to join this political movement he’s involved with, the ones who were shouting in the square just a moment ago.’

  He ushered Zen through an open doorway.

  ‘I’ve told him over and over again that I’m finished with all that. I got taken in once, but I was young and stupid, and at least Mussolini was the real thing! To be

  fooled again at my age, and with a cheap imitation like this Dal Maschio – no thank you!’

  The room they entered was of about the same dimensions as its equivalent in Zen’s house, but so crammed with possessions that it appeared much smaller. Every scrap of available wall space was covered by furniture or shelving, which in turn supported a vast array of objects of all kinds: a ship’s bell, coins and medals, torn fragments of a flag, a fossilized fish, the six-pronged ferro from the prow of a gondola, stray bits of statuary, books in Arabic and Greek, instruments either medical or musical, a coiled whip, a girl’s ivory hairband …

  ‘Where on earth did all this come from?’ asked Zen, looking round wonderingly.

  ‘It’s loot.’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  Andrea Dolfin regarded him with a malicious eye.

  ‘Don’t you know your Venetian history? You should, with a name like Zen – if that is your name. Ours is a history of plunder and rapine. Next time you’re passing through the Piazza, take a look around. Virtually everything you see was stolen. We extracted more booty from our fellow-Christians in Constantinople than the Turks ever did. And in my own small way I’m carrying on that tradition.’

  He waved Zen towards a square leather chair with a high back and short legs.

  ‘Sit down, please, and tell me what I can do for you.’

  Zen lowered himself with difficulty into the chair, which seemed to have been made for a fat dwarf.

  ‘I am a police official,’ he said. ‘I’m working on a case involving Contessa Zulian. Tommaso thought you might be able to tell me what happened to her daughter Rosetta.’

  Andrea Dolfin stood staring down at him in silence for some time.

  ‘Rosetta Zulian.’

  He shuffled slowly, his bare feet encased in battered leather sandals.

  ‘This is Tommaso’s revenge,’ he murmured in a low voice. ‘I made mock of his zealous rantings, and in reprisal he has sent you here with a cargo of terrible memories.’

  He turned, looking back at Zen from a shadowy recess at the rear of the room.

  ‘Do you drink, at least?’

  Zen made a gesture indicating that he had been known to take a drop from time to time. The old man opened a sideboard and produced a dark brown bottle and two none-too-clean glasses.

  ‘Recioto di Valpolicella,’ he announced as he hobbled back towards Zen. ‘Made by my son, as a hobby. This is the 1983. The ’81 was a dream but it’s all gone. This could use a little more time, but it’s not bad even now.’

  He poured them both a glass. Zen sipped the rich ruby dessert wine. The flavour was almost overwhelmingly grapey, full of restrained sweetness, mellow yet intense.

  ‘So you’re from the police?’ remarked Andrea Dolfin, subsiding in a grubby upholstered armchair and propping his feet up on an ebony putto, half of its head torn away to expose the jagged, splintered grain of the wood. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have made such a point of telling you about my loot.’

  Zen gazed at him over the wineglass and said nothing.

  ‘Not that the people I took it from made any objection,’ Dolfin went on. ‘They were above such things by then, you see, or below them. In a word, they were dead.’

  He smiled a small, remote smile.

  ‘There was nothing I could do for them, but in some cases I felt able to give some of their possessions a good home. Later, when the war was over, I meant to trace some of the relatives and try and give the stuff back, but what with one thing and another I never got around to it.’

  He looked at Zen.

  ‘Shocking, eh? Are you going to take me in?’

  Zen was silent a moment, as though considering the idea.

  ‘Tell me about Rosetta Zulian,’ he said at last.

  A spasm contorted Dolfin’s features for an instant. Then it vanished as though it had never been and a dreamy, vacant expression appeared on his face.

  ‘What can I tell you? It all seems so long ago, so far away … Rosetta was a strange, solitary child. She never played with the other kids in the neighbourhood. She preferred to go her own way, making her friends where and as she found them. Her closest friend was a girl from – would you believe it? – the Ghetto. You can imagine how the contessa, with her ridiculous pretensions, felt about that!’

  He leant forward to pour them both more wine.

  ‘The friend’s name was Rosa, Rosa Coin. I lived in the area myself at the time, in Calle del Forno, just off the Ghetto Vecchio, and I often used to see them coming and going. The similarity of their names was not the only thing they had in common. Both had the same wavy brown hair, the same sallow skin and dark eyes, the same skinny, angular, hard little bodies. In a word, they were doubles. And not just physically. They shared a certain same intensity of manner, swinging from exaltation to despair in a moment. Even their interests were similar. Rosetta played the piano, Rosa the violin. They used to joke about forming a duo, once the war was over …’

  The old man’s expression became grim.

  ‘It seemed so easy to say at the time. The war brought its hardships, of course, but for most of us life carried on much as before until Mussolini was overthrown. Then the Americans and British invaded from the south, and the Germans from the north, and for the next two years the country became a battlefield.’

  He snatched a gulp of wine.

  ‘Even then we got off pretty lightly here in Venice, apart from the Jews. Two hundred of them, including the Coin family, were deported to the death camps.’

  ‘And Rosetta Zulian?’ Zen put in a trifle pointedly.

  Andrea Dolfin smiled and nodded.

  ‘The old man is losing track of the subject, eh? It’s true. When I start to think about those days, I sometimes get confused, and forget who was who and what really happened. It’s not hard to do in the case of Rosetta Zulian, because what did happen was so incredible.’

  He clicked the forefinger and thumb of his right hand.

  ‘She vanished, just like that! In the spring of 1944, it was. She would have been about fifteen. One afternoon she left home, telling her mother she would be back by six. She was never seen again. No body was ever discovered. No trace of her, alive or dead, was ever found.’

  Dolfin shook his head sadly.

  ‘The contessa never got over it. Her husband had been killed just a couple of years before, and now this. She started making absurd accusations.’

  He shot Zen a glance.

  ‘That’s why I had to move, to tell you the truth. She started putting it about that I’d done away with her daughter.’

  Dolfin shrugged.

  ‘Normally I’d just have laughed it off, but it was a difficult moment for me just after th
e war. There were people who had it in for me because I’d been in the party. As though I’d been the only Fascist in Venice!’

  He laughed bitterly.

  ‘She even made a formal complaint to the police! Nothing came of it, of course, but there were plenty of folk prepared to believe that there’s no smoke without fire, enough to make life in the old house impossible for me. So I pulled up my roots and moved over here to Dorsoduro. The people round this way are quite different. They don’t care what you may or may not have done fifty years ago, just as long as you leave them in peace now.’

  He stood up painfully, wrapping the russet dressing-gown about his spare form.

  ‘And then that fool Saoner expects me to sign up for his fantasies of an independent Venice! I might, on condition that we bulldoze the Cannaregio and make it into a car park. So many terrible things have happened here, so many crimes, so many horrors. Who wants to remember all that? We’d all end up like Ada

  Zulian, talking to people who aren’t there and ignoring those who are.’

  Recognizing that the interview was at an end, Zen stood up, buttoning his coat.

  ‘Thank you for your hospitality,’ he said. ‘The wine was excellent.’

  ‘It is not so bad,’ Andrea conceded. ‘I’m sorry I’m unable to tell you any more about Rosetta Zulian.’

  He looked Zen in the eye.

  ‘I fear it’s just one of those episodes which will remain a mystery for ever.’

  The next day dawned dull and cold. Aurelio Zen was up to watch as the light imperceptibly reclaimed the eastern sky. He had paid for his late afternoon nap with a broken, restless sleep from which even so early an awakening came as a relief. He had no idea how long he had slept. It might have been hours or minutes, but his abiding memory of the experience was of a continual tossing and turning which was the outward expression of his inner turmoil.