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 snow during his encounter with Daniele Trevisan, and then the old man’s bizarre behaviour, the way he had mistaken Zen for his father, and his father’s disappearance in the icy wastes of Russia so many years ago …
It was several minutes before the duty officer at Tessera responded, and several more before Zen could impress on him the nature and urgency of the task before them. By then, the entire house was filled with a horrible stench compounded of burning coffee and melted rubber. Zen slammed the phone down and ran into the kitchen to find the
caffettiera
glowing red-hot at the base and emitting clouds of nauseating black smoke. Having warmed his hands under the running water, he had evidently forgotten to put any in the machine.
He threw the windows wide open to air the place out. Snowflakes melted damply on his eyes and lips in frigid mockery of the caresses he had been denied the night before. He ran cold water on the coffee maker, but it had fused up solid and was evidently past repair. With a sigh of disgust he tossed it into the canal at the back of the house and returned to the living room, where he phoned Marco Paulon and made his excuses for not being able to come to lunch after all. Then he called the Questura again and arranged for a police launch to collect him from the Ponte Guglie in half an hour.
It must have been an illusion, but it seemed less cold outside the house than in. A solitary row of neat, closely spaced footprints was the only flaw on the glistening surface of the
campo
. They led back to a house two doors from the Morosinis. Signora Vivian, thought Zen automatically, a big raw-boned woman who ate like a horse, walked like a bird and had attended early Mass every Sunday since her first communion.
Zen set off down the alley to the Cannaregio, scuffing up heaps of downy snow with every step. The city was muffled and mute. Even the perpetual ostinato of water, the constant undercurrent of Venetian life, had ceased. Zen trudged on towards the Guglie bridge, where he found a café open. He ordered an espresso with a shot of grappa on the side, on account of the cold, and scanned the headlines in
La Stampa
. A leading industrialist had committed suicide rather than answer questions about alleged fiscal irregularities. A judge claimed that ‘an unholy alliance’ of the Mafia and the Secret Service was responsible for recent bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan. Four children had been killed and eleven critically injured by a mortar attack on a school in Bosnia. Neo-Nazis had kicked a black teenager to death at a bus-stop in London. Milan were favourites for their local Derby with Juventus.
The snow had thickened by the time Zen left the bar. The police launch was already tied up by the water-steps at the foot of the bridge, the crew slapping their arms and stamping their feet in a vain attempt to keep warm. They didn’t much like having to turn out on Sunday, especially one when the weather was providing a sharp reminder of just how close the lagoon was to the glacial peaks of Austria and the frozen plains of Hungary. The personnel of the airborne section weren’t going to be that keen either, but that was just too bad. Time was of the essence. For Zen’s plan to work, the drug syndicate had to believe that Filippo Sfriso had been so shocked by the murder of Gavagnin that he changed his mind about trying to cheat them. They would of course
want
to believe it, which made matters easier, but for the scenario to be credible Sfriso would have to be able to deliver as soon as the gang contacted him on his release from custody the following day.
The launch cut a swathe through the grey waters of the Cannaregio, passing an almost empty
vaporetto
heading in the other direction. Once they were clear of the canal the helmsman opened up the throttle and the boat surged forward, flanking the dingy northern flanks of the city before bearing round towards Murano and the dredged channel to the airport. Although the sky was overcast, the air was clear enough to reveal the snowclad Dolomites over a hundred kilometres away to the north. With the wind chill it felt bitterly cold in the cockpit, but Zen stuck it out with the two crewmen as a matter of principle. By the time they rounded the bend leading up to the moorings outside the airport terminal his face felt as though it had turned to bone.
The police airborne unit was housed in a utilitarian block which had formed part of the original military airfield at Tessera, now being transformed to serve the needs of international tourism. As one of the specialized departments of the force, offering both glamour and higher pay, the airborne division attracted a different class of recruit from the general intake, and Zen was favourably impressed by the group of men to whom he was introduced by Leonardo Castrucci, the commanding officer. Unlike police drivers, whose reputation for reckless aggression was notorious, the flight crews had a reserved and dependable air.
Knowing that the success or failure of the enterprise depended to a large extent on the degree of dedication these men brought to it, Zen went out of his way to get them on his side. He greeted them one by one, asking where they were from and how they felt about being posted to this part of the country. Within five minutes, the natural resentment they felt about being hauled out of bed at eight o’clock on a freezing Sunday morning for a spot of compulsory overtime was forgotten in a sense of shared enterprise and professional pride.
‘Okay, lads,’ Zen said, stepping back to address them as a group for the first time. ‘We all know the frustrations of police work well enough. The jobs where the only people we can get our hands on are the poor bastards who never knew which end was up in the first place, while the ringleaders get off scot-free. The jobs left dangling because someone thought we didn’t have quite enough evidence to proceed, or because the outcome might have inconvenienced somebody else’s cousin’s aunt’s mother-in-law’s stepson.’
There were smiles and a stifled laugh. Zen nodded soberly.
‘Today, by contrast, we have a chance to achieve something real, solid and unequivocal.’
He pointed to the laminated map of the
Provincia di
Venezia
which occupied most of the wall to his left.
‘There’s a gang of drug dealers operating in our territory, peddling heroin on the streets of our towns and cities. We can put each and every member of that gang behind bars for the next twenty years.’