Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  Still Zen did not speak.

  ‘We don’t need to talk about this on the phone,’ Tania said. ‘I just wanted to let you know how I feel, and to know that you understand, and that you share that feeling. I’ve been so lonely, Aurelio, after that awful row we had last week. I don’t know what all that was about, or who was right or wrong. I don’t care. All I want to know is when you’re coming home.’

  ‘This is my home.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘What did you say?’ Tania asked at last.

  He stared sightlessly at the desk, its surface wrinkled with the indentations of ball-point pens.

  ‘Aurelio? Are you there?’

  Zen gripped the receiver tightly.

  ‘I said, this is my home.’

  ‘But what does that mean, Aurelio? What does it mean?’

  He sat quite still, saying nothing. After a time there was a click the other end, then an impersonal electronic tone.

  *

  It is some time during the long, sleepless night that it occurs to Ada that her persecution may not have ceased but simply taken on a new guise.

  She has never slept well, even before there was a reason to stay awake, deciphering each creaking board and squeaking hinge, fighting off her drowsiness lest she wake to find the intruders already there, in full possession. She can barely recall what it means to sleep well. A sort of absence, wasn’t it? A stillness like the lagoon on a hot summer night. From time to time, like a passing breeze, a dream would ruffle the otherwise invisible surface. Then the intimate, horizonless darkness closed in again, and the next thing you knew it was morning.

  It’s been years since she slept like that. Now she is no longer always sure when she’s dreaming and when she’s awake. Perhaps there is no essential difference. Nothing seemed more real than Rosetta, after all, and yet she vanished without the slightest trace or explanation, just like a dream. Had she only dreamt that she’d had a daughter? That would be both a comfort and a clarification, if she could bring herself to believe it. But she can’t. Despite the years that have passed, she can still recall the silky fuzz on the child’s arms, the milky smell of her breath, her oddly pedantic intonation, the tender shade of those hazel eyes …

  Her dreams are not like that. They may be scary or confusing, devious and deranged, but they cannot make her weep. Perhaps that’s why Ada prefers their company. At all events, she gets a lot of ideas as she lies there night after night, suspended between sleep and wakefulness. They are not pleasant or useful ideas. They are certainly not the sort of ideas she would choose to have, if she had a choice. It can’t even be said that they are better than nothing – nothing would be infinitely preferable – but they are all she has to go on. Ada is used to mending and making do.

  The idea she had in the night was especially unwelcome, so much so that she pushed it to one side and took refuge in the restless, exhausted prostration that passes for sleep with her. In fact it is not until she hears the bell, goes to the window and catches sight of the figure standing outside the door below that she even remembers what it was. Her tormentors have not relented, they have merely changed the form in which they present themselves. And with the diabolical cunning which typifies them, the vehicle they have chosen is the man who claimed to be protecting her from them – her shield and strength, her bold avenger.

  It all makes sense! Aurelio Battista, Giustiniana’s boy, that milk-sop dreamer, turn out a policeman? She’d known from the beginning that the thing was utterly absurd. Her new idea makes much better sense, but the sense it makes is so horrific in its implications that it takes Ada quite some time to master the trembling which has taken over her limbs at the knowledge that the man standing at her front door is no more the real Aurelio Zen than the cruelly mocking figures which had disrupted her life for so long were the real Nanni and Vincenzo.

  The doorbell rings, long and insistently. Ada draws back hastily from the window before the figure glances up at the angled mirror and catches her looking at him. But of course it’s no use hiding. They know she’s there, and are merely going through the motions of requesting admittance. If she does not respond, the phantasm below will simply turn on its shadowless side and slip into the house through the joints in the stone like vapours from the canal. Better to face the threat boldly and try and fend it off with some invention of her own. After all, she is no slouch at fabrication herself.

  The expression of mingled shock and suspicion on her caller’s face when Ada opens the door and graciously bids him enter demonstrates that this was the right thing to do. Her opponents have been thrown off balance and for the moment she has regained the initiative.

  ‘Come upstairs,’ she says warmly, ‘and have … have a glass of something.’

  She was about to offer tea, but realized just in time that this would mean leaving the room and taking her eyes off the intruder. She knows better than that.

  ‘I just came to apologize, contessa,’ he mutters in a respectful tone as they walk upstairs.

  Ada fixes her visitor – she decides to call him Zeno – with an untroubled eye.

  ‘Apologize? Whatever for?’

  The look he gives her is almost comic in its consternation.

  ‘For what happened yesterday. I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be provoked like that, but … Well, I’d had a difficult day at work. When your nephews started to taunt me, it was just the last straw.’

  Ada laughs archly as they enter the salon.

  ‘I admit I was a trifle taken aback by your comments.’

  Her visitor looks suitably mortified.

  ‘They were unforgivable.’

  ‘You see, I thought that I was the only person who knew what had happened.’

  A bold thrust, and it drives home. Zeno stands there gawping at her like an idiot.

  ‘To Rosetta?’ he murmurs.

  She corrects his mistake with an indulgent smile.

  ‘To Rosa. Rosa Coin.’

  He nods like a somnambulist. Ada sits down on the chaise-longue and indicates with a gracious wave that her visitor should take the rather less comfortable chair opposite.

  ‘Of course, one had heard the most extraordinary rumours,’ she continues smoothly. ‘As though the Germans could possibly have mistaken a Venetian aristocrat for the offspring of some Jewish tradesman!’

  In a vain attempt to look confident and relaxed, Zeno crosses his legs and clasps his knees with his hands.

  ‘And … taken the wrong child, you mean?’

  ‘The thing is clearly absurd!’ Ada declares airily. ‘But you know what people are. Once they’ve taken an idea into their heads …’

  Nod, nod, goes the head opposite. It’s not even a good likeness, she thinks dismissively. Giustiniana Zen’s boy, if he were still alive, wouldn’t look anything like that.

  ‘For a time I suspected a man called Dolfin,’ she goes on without faltering. ‘He lived quite close by and Rosetta used to call at his house now and then. He bribed her, you see, with sweets and cakes and all that sort of thing. That’s the only reason she went. I had no access to such luxuries at that time, but Dolfin had friends in high places and could get anything he wanted. That’s the only reason she used to visit him, of course. It was pure cupboard love.’

  As Zeno goes on nodding, Ada realizes with a thrill that this is all he can do. Her opponents are condemned to nod to her tune for ever. She has outmanoeuvred them completely. After all these years of confusion and uncertainty, she sees her way clear at last.

  ‘So when she vanished like that, I naturally suspected Dolfin of having a hand in it. It’s not natural, a man like that, living all alone, inviting young girls into his house. And this was during the war, don’t forget. In those days a body was just a body.’

  Nod, nod. Ada nods too, but with an ironical edge of which her visitor remains ignorant.

  ‘But then I got a letter, out of the blue! That’s where she lives now. Apparently she had been hidden away until the w
ar was over, and then spirited away to the promised land.’

  She beams at her visitor triumphantly.

  ‘I hope that clears the matter up once and for all.’

  There is a long silence. Then Zeno stands up, awkwardly.

  ‘I shan’t be seeing you again, contessa.’

  Ada frowns. She can hardly believe her ears. Are her opponents conceding defeat? Is her victory assured?

  As though in answer to her questions, he adds, ‘There’s nothing more I can do here.’

  A wave of sweet relief sweeps through her. She longs to sing and dance and openly exult, but good breeding has taught her never to gloat.

  ‘I quite understand.’

  He extends his hand.

  ‘Goodbye, then.’

  It is the final snare, but she is not such a fool as to touch him. Ignoring the outstretched hand, she leads the way back to the portego. At the top of the stairs, she turns to him.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she says, gracefully but with finality.

  He stares at her for a moment, then walks past her and down the stairs, out of the house, out of her life. Ada turns away, reeling against the tide flowing past. Her ghosts are deserting her, streaming down the stairs and out of the open doorway.

  No longer haunted, the house settles, shifts and shrinks. For a moment, Ada feels a sense of panic. She’s grown used to the cushioning effect of those spectral presences, to the ample dimensions and flexible boundaries of the unreal space they generate all around. This rigid, po-faced insistence on the facts at first seems unduly mean and constricting.

  But she sharply tells herself to pull her socks up. The Zulians haven’t stayed around as long as they have by sulking in a corner because life isn’t perfect. Her madness has abandoned her and that’s that. There’s no point in whining about it. Sanity is clearly going to take some getting used to, but she’ll manage somehow. After all, she always has.

  He crossed a square in front of a gaunt, graceless church and set off along a back canal, watched by a clan of feral cats perched on the wooden crates which had been set up for them to shelter in. The darkness which had fallen seemed to have seeped into Zen’s mind. Listening to Ada Zulian’s pathetic attempts to both admit and deny the tragedy which had shattered her life, shadow-boxing with the intolerable facts, had been a deeply disturbing experience. For the first time, he began to wonder whether the truth about the mysteries which surrounded him was not merely unknown but in some essential way unknowable.

  It was the nature of the place, he reflected. If Rome was a labyrinth of powerful and competing cliques, each with its portfolio of secrets to defend, here everything was a trick of the light, an endlessly shifting play of appearances without form or substance. What you saw was what you got, and all you would ever get. The fate of Ivan Durridge, like that of Rosetta Zulian and indeed his own father, would remain shrouded in mystery for ever, a subject for speculation, innuendo and senile ramblings. Zen felt like a fly trapped in a web woven by a long-dead spider.

  If he had not had the prospect of seeing Cristiana in just a few minutes, this sense of futility would have been almost unbearable. But beside that gain, all other losses seemed light. What did the rest matter, since he had found his destined mate? How could he care about professional setbacks when his private life was about to be thrillingly renewed and made over? How ironic that the new should also be the old, that the woman with whom he would share his future should be a figure from his childhood, and live opposite the house where he had grown up!

  A chill breeze had sprung up, infiltrating the city like a host of spies. Rounding the corner into the wedge-shaped campo, Zen was reassured to see light seeping through the shutters on the first floor of his house. His one anxiety was that Cristiana might have been delayed. Normally she didn’t get home from work until seven o’clock, but she must have made some special arrangement in order to see him. He closed the front door gratefully behind him, shutting out the wind, and climbed eagerly upstairs.

  There was no one on the landing. Zen hung his coat and hat on the rack and opened the door into the living room. He could see no sign of Cristiana there, either. She must be in the kitchen, he thought with a warm rush of emotion, preparing dinner. He was halfway across the room before he noticed the man lounging in the high-backed armchair with its back to the door. This was the chair in which his father had always sat, and which his son to this day had never presumed to use. Zen stopped dead in his tracks, his heart racing, his stomach knotted up.

  ‘How did you get in?’

  Ferdinando Dal Maschio got to his feet, smiling easily.

  ‘My wife provided a key.’

  He stood there, letting Zen come to him.

  ‘I gather that you two have been seeing a certain amount of each other. Under the circumstances, though, I’m prepared to overlook that.’

  He glanced at his watch.

  ‘There’s an important meeting of the party later this evening. That’s why I got Cristiana to arrange your little tryst earlier than usual. She agreed, of course, just as she did when I asked her to take a copy of that fax with the background to the Durridge case which you were sent by your crooked patrons in Rome.’

  Dal Maschio’s eyes glittered.

  ‘Whatever you and Cristiana may have got up to, Zen, that woman belongs to me. All I need do is whistle and she comes running. The same goes for your friend Tommaso Saoner.’

  He laughed mockingly.

  ‘Tommaso told me all about the way you tried to shake his faith in the cause over lunch. I could have told you that you were wasting your time. Tommaso is one of my most trusted and trustworthy colleagues, the man I plan to name as my deputy when I am elected mayor. Besides, nothing you had to tell him would have come as any surprise. He was in on the whole thing from the very start!’

  ‘He didn’t know that Durridge was dead,’ snapped Zen.

  Ferdinando Dal Maschio acknowledged the point with an inclination of the head.

  ‘It makes no difference. Tommaso would rather die himself than betray the movement. Just as Cristiana would rather betray you than disappoint this little whim of mine to surprise you in your own house. They’re both mine, body and soul. That’s the sort of devotion I inspire in people, Zen.’

  Zen stared coldly at Dal Maschio.

  ‘You’re trespassing,’ he said in a hard voice.

  ‘You’re the one who’s trespassing, Zen.’

  ‘This is my house.’

  ‘It’s my city.’

  ‘No more than it is mine.’

  Dal Maschio shook his head.

  ‘The municipal election results will prove you wrong. The latest opinion poll gives the Nuova Repubblica Veneta a clear lead over our nearest rivals.’

  ‘That may change when its leader is arrested on charges of kidnapping and murder,’ Zen retorted.

  Dal Maschio spread his hands wide.

  ‘You want to talk about the Durridge affair? No problem. I’ll tell you everything there is to know.’

  He circled round to stand behind the chair in which he had been sitting and leant on it, using the back as a lectern.

  ‘Let me say first of all that I wouldn’t get mixed up in anything like that now. They say that a week is a long time in politics, but the things that have happened in the past few months have astonished even me. If you’d told me last November that we’d be looking at victory in the municipal elections and the very real possibility of achieving a presence at national level within a year, I’d have thought you were crazy.’

  He smiled nostalgically.

  ‘It’s hard to remember now that at that time we were more of a debating club than a credible political force. The idea was to galvanize people into rethinking everything they had taken for granted for too long, to smash the mould and suggest radical new solutions to the problems confronting the city we all love. Part of our strategy was to establish contacts with like-minded groups on the mainland. We talked to the regional Leghe, of course, but also to the
German-language separatist movement in the Alto Adige, and to various Ladino and Friulano groups. But our closest relationship was with the newly-independent Republic of Croatia, not only because of our historical ties with that region, but because the Croats had achieved what the rest of us could still only dream about – the dissolution of the spurious nation state and the reclamation of regional independence, cultural integrity and political autarchy.’

  Zen yawned loudly and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Save me the speeches.’

  Dal Maschio looked at him intently.

  ‘You’re good at sneering, aren’t you?’

  There was no reply. Dal Maschio nodded.

  ‘It’s all right. I understand. I used to feel the same way myself. It’s a way of protecting yourself against feeling, against action. If you admitted your identity as a Venetian, born and bred in these islands, speaking this dialect and conditioned to the core by those experiences, you would not only have to admit all the pain and pride which such an admission would bring with it, you would also have to act to preserve and defend those values. You would either have to be prepared to fight, or to admit your laziness and your cowardice. Much easier just to avoid the issue by sneering.’

  ‘You said you were going to tell me about Durridge. Either do so, or fuck off out of here.’

  Dal Maschio shrugged and smiled.

  ‘As I say, the Croats were an inspiration for everyone in the separatist movement, but their successful struggle had a special significance for us Venetians. The Dalmatian coastline of the new Croatia was of course the first and last outpost of the Venetian empire. Its beautiful and historic towns were all built by our forebears, and one day, perhaps, our flag may fly there once more. However that may be, the Croat and Venetian peoples cannot be indifferent to each other. So when I was approached by one of the Croatian delegation with a proposal which promised to be mutually beneficial, I was naturally inclined to look on it with favour.’