Dead Lagoon - 4

by Michael Dibdin

  Abandoning his pose, he walked round the chair and sat down in it, crossing his legs.

  ‘They wanted Ivan Durridge, or rather . I’d never heard of the man, but my Croatian contact filled me in. Durridge was a Serb, from Sarajevo, and he was responsible for some of the worst atrocities committed during the war. I won’t attempt to list the things he did. Some of them are too obscene to mention. I was shown pictures and eye-witness reports by the survivors. Can you imagine a woman and her daughters having their eyelids cut off, being repeatedly raped and then forced to watch their sons and brothers impaled? That was the least of crimes, and here he was living in luxury on his private island in the lagoon!’

  He jabbed a finger peremptorily at Zen.

  ‘And as if all that wasn’t enough, he was also gunrunning for the Bosnian Serbs in the current conflict. That’s why the investigation into his disappearance was hushed up by the secret services. You remember the scandal over the Gladio organization which was set up to sabotage a possible Communist takeover after the war? Gladio had arms caches all over Italy, yet only a few have come to light. With things changing so rapidly here, the secret service chiefs wanted those dumps cleaned out as fast as possible, and of course they weren’t averse to lining their pockets at the same time. Ivan Durridge satisfied both requirements. He took the guns off their hands and paid money into the Swiss bank account of their choice in return.’

  ‘How much money did the Croatians pay you?’ Zen demanded.

  Dal Maschio shook his head sadly.

  ‘You may find this hard to believe, Zen, but it wasn’t actually about money. It was about establishing credibility and goodwill with a potential ally and trading-partner in the federal and regional Europe of the future.’

  ‘And it didn’t bother you that all those fine words cost a man his life?’

  Dal Maschio got to his feet again and walked towards Zen, waving his arms to emphasize his words.

  ‘That had nothing to do with us! The plan was to fly Durridge up to Gorizia, then “accidentally” stray over the border and land him at a prearranged spot just inside Slovenia. The Croatian commandos who had immobilized Durridge before I landed the helicopter would then drive him to Zagreb, where he would be put on trial for his war crimes. That’s what I was told was going to happen, and that’s what I believe.’

  He sighed.

  ‘Unfortunately Durridge had other ideas, and maybe he was right. He’d been pretty badly beaten up by the time I got there. Gavagnin said he reckoned they would have killed him if it hadn’t been for that phone call from his sister. They held a gun to his balls while he talked to her, but that made them realize that they needed him alive and functioning until we took off, to prevent the alarm being raised. Unfortunately once we were airborne they made the mistake of relaxing their vigilance. The next thing we knew, Durridge opened the door and jumped out.’

  Dal Maschio shrugged.

  ‘As I’ve said, I wouldn’t do it again. The stakes are too high to fool around with stunts like that now. On the other hand, I’m not ashamed of what I did. The Croats are our ideological and political allies, and Ivan Durridge was a war criminal.’

  ‘While you’re just a common criminal,’ said Zen, tossing his cigarette butt into an ashtray.

  ‘I’ve never been charged with any criminal offence, much less convicted of one. And I never will be.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  ‘Mere bravado,’ exclaimed Dal Maschio contemptuously. ‘If you had any solid evidence against me you wouldn’t be standing here making empty threats, you’d have me under arrest. But there’s nothing to connect me or any member of the movement with the Durridge kidnapping, apart from an unsubstantiated statement by some taxi skipper.’

  ‘How did Giulio Bon get hold of Durridge’s boat?’ demanded Zen.

  ‘He found it cast adrift in the lagoon.’

  ‘One of your helicopters appears in the air traffic control records as flying from the Lido to Gorizia on the day Durridge vanished. The route passes over both the ottagono and Sant’Ariano. Is that supposed to be a coincidence?’

  ‘Neither more nor less of a coincidence than the fact that the road to Verona passes through Padua and Vicenza,’ Dal Maschio returned promptly. ‘I was flying from the Lido to Gorizia. Which way did you expect me to go, via the Po valley?’

  ‘Why were you going in the first place?’

  ‘I was delivering a cargo of fish to a restaurant in Gorizia owned by a friend in the Friulano separatist movement. It was a genuine order, and I have the waybills and invoices to prove it.’

  Noting the expression on Zen’s face, he laughed.

  ‘You’ve got nothing against me but scraps and rags of circumstantial evidence that wouldn’t serve to convict a known criminal, let alone the city’s mayor elect. And thanks to the Questore’s prompt response to our article this morning about your disgraceful treatment of Contessa Zulian, your mandate for action expires in just a few hours. Francesco Bruno evidently has a very acute sense for the prevailing political realities. Face it, Zen, you’re beaten.’

  He stepped forward suddenly, gripping Zen’s arms.

  ‘But if only you will, you can convert that defeat into victory! You’re one of us, Zen! You know you are! And we’re the winning team. Already now, and increasingly in the future. We’ve got the little people with us already, because we speak the language they understand. Now we need to get the professionals on board, the educated middle class with managerial skills. People like you!’

  Zen shook himself free.

  ‘What are you doing in Rome?’ cried Dal Maschio. ‘The regime you serve is morally and financially bankrupt. It’s exactly the same as working for the KGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The centre can’t hold any longer, Zen. The periphery is where the action is. In the new Europe, the periphery is the centre. It’s time to come home. Time to come back to your roots, back to what is real and meaningful and enduring.’

  Zen turned away.

  ‘Save the rhetoric for your meeting.’

  ‘It’s not just rhetoric, and you know it! Do you want a Europe that is like an airport terminal where every language is spoken badly, where any currency is accepted but there is nothing but soulless trash to buy and fake food to eat? You don’t! You can’t!’

  ‘Neither do I want one where politicans conspire to commit criminal offences aided and abetted by corrupt policemen in the pay of the local mob.’

  Dal Maschio shrugged.

  ‘You probably won’t believe me, but I swear I never had the slightest notion that Gavagnin was involved with a drugs racket. That was another part of his life altogether. He didn’t confide in me and I didn’t pry. In any case, given that there’s a market in illicit drugs, why should the Sicilians make all the money? No, I’m only joking …’

  Zen regarded him bleakly.

  ‘I think you’d better go.’

  Dal Maschio glanced at his watch and began to button up his coat.

  ‘Sooner or later you’re going to have to choose, Zen. The new Europe will be no place for rootless drifters and cosmopolitans with no sense of belonging. It will be full of frontiers, both physical and ideological, and they will be rigorously patrolled. You will have to be able to produce your papers or suffer the consequences.’

  He leant towards Zen, almost whispering.

  ‘There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.’

  He walked out of the room and downstairs. Zen stood quite still, listening intently to the clatter of Dal Maschio’s footsteps as though they were a message telling him what to do next. The slam of the front door seemed to release him from this act of attention. He strode to the landing and grabbed his coat and ha
t.

  Outside, the wind had freshened. It skittered about the courtyard, banking off the angled walls and blowing back from fissures barely wide enough to sidle down. At the far end of the street leading towards the Cannaregio a man could be seen emerging from the shadows into the cone of yellow light cast by a streetlamp. Zen jammed his hat firmly on his head and set off in the same direction, the hem of his coat billowing about him.

  Dal Maschio kept up a brisk pace until he reached the lighted thoroughfare crowded with commuters heading for the station. Here he slowed to a relaxed but still purposeful stride which allowed him to respond in the appropriate way to the many greetings he received. For a privileged few he paused long enough to exchange a few remarks and slap a shoulder playfully, but most received no more than a smile and a nod acknowledging their existence but indicating that he was a busy and important man who could not be expected to recognize everyone who recognized him.

  Zen adjusted the distance between them to take account of the situation, closing in as the crowds became thicker, falling back again as they crossed the Scalzi bridge and entered the relatively deserted streets beyond. Here Dal Maschio was accosted less often, but he nearly always stopped to speak. An area like Santa Croce, with its ugly tenements, failing shops and ageing population, was the heartland of the Nuova Repubblica Veneta, and its leader could not afford to leave anyone feeling slighted or ignored.

  Thanks to these constant interruptions it was another twenty minutes before they emerged into the sweeping vistas of Campo Santa Margherita. Dal Maschio strode the length of the square, past the row of plane trees tossing their branches in the wind and the isolated market house with its ancient sign listing the minimum legal length for each type of fish that could be sold there. Here he veered right, towards the church of the Carmelites, and turned in under a sottoportego bearing an almost illegible sign dating from the war, a stencilled yellow arrow beneath the word PLATZKOMMANDANT.

  Zen turned back, seeking somewhere to wait and watch. There was only one bar still open, a dingy wineshop thick with tobacco smoke and the sound of vigorous sparring in the local dialect. A number of figures were dimly visible in the dull fumed light, both male and female, all far gone in years and drink. They turned to gaze at Zen as he made his way to a table by the window. This vetting concluded, most of them resumed their previous heated exchanges, taking no further notice of the newcomer, but one couple continued to watch him.

  Zen shot them a glance as he sat down. The man he recognized as Andrea Dolfin, but the woman – adrift and becalmed somewhere in her sixties – he had never seen before, although something about her looked familiar. The proprietor, a burly man with the air of someone who had seen every kind of trouble, and seen it off, marched over to Zen’s table and asked what he’d like, in a tone which suggested that he’d also like to know what the hell he was doing there. Zen ordered a caffè corretto alla grappa. Lowering the net curtain which covered the bottom half of the window, he assured himself that the entrance into which Dal Maschio had disappeared was visible from where he was sitting.

  When he turned back to the lighted room, Dolfin and the woman were still staring at him and talking quietly together in a furtive undertone. The old man pointed at him, without making the slightest attempt to disguise the fact. He murmured something to the woman, who smiled in a sad, absent way. Zen turned back to the window, knowing that the gesture was an evasion. No one would be leaving the meeting on the other side of the square for at least an hour. When he looked back, the two pairs of eyes were still gazing in his direction.

  After all Zen had been through that day, this insolent scrutiny was the last straw. If even half of what Ada Zulian had hinted at was true, Andrea Dolfin ought to be afraid to show his face in public, never mind mock the police. Having been betrayed by Cristiana and humiliated by Ferdinando Dal Maschio, he wasn’t in a mood to take any insolence from Andrea Dolfin. Rising to his feet, he crossed the foggy expanses of the bar towards his tormentor.

  ‘What the hell are you laughing at?’

  Dolfin looked up with a slight frown, as though noticing Zen for the first time.

  ‘A joke,’ he said.

  ‘At my expense, apparently.’

  Dolfin shrugged.

  ‘Not in particular, dottore. On the other hand, we’re none of us exempt.’

  Zen sat down and looked the old man in the eyes.

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me that you only come out after dark,’ he hissed. ‘After what Ada Zulian told me this afternoon, I wonder you have the nerve to go on living at all.’

  ‘The more I see of life, the more I wonder that any of us do.’

  The proprietor brought Zen his coffee.

  ‘Everything all right, Andrea?’ he asked, glancing suspiciously at Zen.

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  Zen swallowed the coffee down at one gulp.

  ‘Do you want me to tell you what she said?’

  Dolfin smiled broadly.

  ‘I’ve heard it many times before. Ada never made any secret of her views. On the contrary.’

  The man’s complacent tone infuriated Zen. He pointed to the woman sitting beside Dolfin.

  ‘What about your lady friend? Does she know? Do you want me to tell her what Ada has to say about you and her daughter?’

  Andrea Dolfin gazed back at him calmly.

  ‘Why not?’

  He stroked the woman’s ravaged face with the back of his fingers.

  ‘I don’t think you two know each other, by the way. This is Aurelio Zen, my dear. He claims to be the son of Angelo Zen, the railwayman, although I’d always understood that Angelo’s only child was born dead.’

  Dolfin looked back at Zen. He held out a limp hand towards the woman.

  ‘And this, dottore, is Rosetta Zulian.’

  Zen’s initial reaction was one of disbelief, closely followed by anger. What did Dolfin take him for? The man’s wickedness was matched only by his effrontery. The tale which Ada Zulian had told him earlier that evening had been rambling, oblique and full of lacunae, a rebus spelling out a truth too terrible to be put into words, but Zen had been left in very little doubt as to what must have happened in the nightmare period following the German invasion half a century earlier.

  Alone of all her family, Rosa Coin had survived the operation to ‘cleanse’ Venice of its Jewish population. That much was certain from the police report which Zen had read. Her parents and siblings had been packed off to the death camps, but Rosa’s name was struck off the list of deportees since she had been ‘found hanged’. Yet just two years later a person calling herself Rosa Coin turned up alive and well in Israel, claiming that but for Andrea Dolfin she would have shared the fate of the rest of her family and hundreds of her friends and neighbours.

  When Ada had suggested, if only to ridicule the idea, that the Germans might have been mistaken about the identity of the dead girl, Zen had realized that the apparent contradictions in her tale resolved themselves if one simply substituted the name Rosetta for Rosa. Ada Zulian still could not admit to herself that her daughter was dead, so she had told her story inside out. It was Rosetta who had been kidnapped and killed by Dolfin, who had lured her to his house with sweets and treats.

  Thanks to his contacts, he would already have known that Rosa’s family was to be included in the next group of deportees. Perhaps he had even arranged to have them included himself, so as to facilitate his evil scheme. That was the key to the whole plan. Once he was assured of it, he could do what he liked with the hapless Rosetta. Then, when she was dead, Dolfin had gone to the Coin family with a proposal which he knew they were bound to accept, hideous as it was. They and their other children were doomed, but their daughter Rosa might live, her entry struck off the deportation list as already dead when the corpse of her lookalike friend was ‘found hanging’.

  What parent could refuse? Despite their horror, their outrage and anguish, the Coins could not refuse this gruesome exchange. No doubt Dolfin made it e
asy for them, pretending that Rosetta had died of illness or by accident. In any case, he was running absolutely no risk of being exposed. In the Nazi-occupied Italy of 1943, Jews were non-persons, bureaucratic data deprived of rights or civil status, mere apparitions awaiting their turn to be processed out of existence altogether. It was unthinkable for them to lay charges against anyone, never mind a powerful and influential ally of the puppet regime. The Coins had no choice but to accept, and thus Rosetta Zulian vanished from the face of the earth, leaving no trace of evidence against the man who had callously plotted and carried out her murder. Ada Zulian might suspect the truth, but neither she nor anyone else could ever prove anything. It was the perfect crime.

  For Dolfin to have got away with that was loathsome enough. For him to be touted as a paragon of selfless heroism by the unwitting Rosa Coin was even worse. But to desecrate his victim’s memory by parading this alcoholic doxy as Rosetta Zulian was a gesture of arrogance and contempt almost beyond belief. Zen felt a suffusion of fury suffocating him. On some level he knew that it had less to do with Andrea Dolfin, whatever his sins, than with Francesco Bruno and Carlo Berengo Gorin, with Tommaso Saoner and Giulio Bon, and above all with Cristiana Dal Maschio and her husband. But that insight was impotent against his overwhelming urge to lash out, to smash his fist into Dolfin’s face and shatter that mask of serene detachment once and for all.

  It was something in the woman’s face that restrained him, a quality of rapt attention whose meaning was enigmatic but which was utterly compelling in its intensity. As he returned her insistent gaze, Zen realized why she had appeared familiar when he walked into the bar: the woman bore a quite astonishing resemblance to Ada Zulian. You had to be looking the right way to see it, looking beyond the seedy details, the quirks of dress and accidents of age, to the underlying genetic structure. Then, like a trick drawing, it suddenly clicked into place, bold and unmistakable.

  As so often in this waterborne city, Zen had the sensation that the whole room was in motion, the floor undulating gently like the deck of a boat. But the instability was all internal. In a twinkling, all the ideas he had so confidently been rehearsing seemed as insubstantial as a dream on awakening. No amount of elaborate theorizing counted for anything beside Zen’s abrupt conviction that the woman sitting opposite him was indeed Rosetta Zulian.