Michael Dibdin - Dead Lagoon

The lie was as effortless and unpremeditated as the evasive clouds of ink emitted by the cuttlefish they were eating.

‘Ada and her ghosts!’ cried Rosalba, having served her guest another helping of risotto. ‘It all started when her daughter disappeared. She never got over it. Lisa Rosteghin’s sister was a nurse in the mental hospital on San Clemente, and the stories she tells about Ada…! Apparently at one point a deputation of the other lunatics came to see the director to complain about her behaviour. “Excuse us, dottore, ” they said, “but you’ve go to do something — this woman’s driving us crazy!”’

‘I remember her sidling up to me in the street,’ said Cristiana, wiping her lips with her napkin, ‘and calling me by the dead girl’s name in that creepy way she has. It put the fear of God into me, I can tell you.’

‘“This woman’s driving us crazy!”’ Rosalba repeated in a tone of hilarity. ‘Mind you, she was always half-mad if you ask me. The Saoners used to rent a house from her at one time, and you know what? When she sent in her account, they found she had charged them for the paper and ink the bill was written with! Can you believe it?’

‘What happened to her daughter?’ asked Zen idly.

Rosalba’s animation instantly evaporated. She shrugged.

‘No one really knows. It was during the last years of the war. So many terrible things happened.’

She cleared the dishes and walked off to the kitchen. Zen looked up to find Cristiana’s big liquid eyes fixed on him like a pair of sea anemones. He barely had time to register their soft, tenacious presence before her mother returned.

‘Speaking of the Saoners, do you know what’s become of Tommaso?’ Zen asked as Rosalba served him a glistening leaf-shaped slab of sole.

‘The younger brother? Well, that’s the way I still think of him. He used to be your best friend, didn’t he?’

A host of remembered images of his best friend rose briefly in Zen’s mind like a flock of disturbed pigeons.

‘We lost touch years ago. Is he married yet?’

It was Cristiana who replied.

‘No, and he’s given up his job to concentrate on politics. He’s one of Nando’s right-hand men.’

‘I must look him up,’ mused Zen. ‘Does he still live in Calle del Magazen?’

‘You’re more likely to find him at party headquarters,’ said Cristiana tartly. ‘They’re there most of the time these days, with the municipal elections coming up. Nando has inspired them to give their all to the movement — especially to the female supporters.’

‘And how’s Giustiniana?’ asked Rosalba gaily. ‘Have some more sole, for goodness sake. You’re not eating!’

Aurelio Zen made his way slowly through the hushed and vacant spaces of the town in a daze brought on by the wine he had drunk at lunch, the grappa he had allowed Rosalba to talk him into having afterwards, and not least by his encounter with Cristiana Morosini, whose white flesh had somehow become inextricably confused in his memories with that of the fresh tender sole which had melted in his mouth. His mind was a jumble of contradictory thoughts and feelings, an inner landscape equivalent to the one all around him: blocks of every size and shape thrown together as though at random, like bricks tipped in a heap. Like so much else, this intimate disorder now seemed foreign to him, accustomed as he was to the planned vistas and grand boulevards of the capital. Everything was turning out very differently from what he had imagined.

He walked along the Fondamenta delle Cappucine in search of the wine-shop which Marco had mentioned. Up ahead, a canopy of evergreen shrubbery spilt out over a high wall, betraying the presence of one of the city’s secret gardens, the original vegetable plots which had once lain at the centre of each of its hundred islands, providing produce for the inhabitants of the waterfront houses. As Zen passed beneath the tree, he saw that it was filled with feral cats, perched on every branch like a flock of birds.

The tide had turned, but it was still low enough to expose the mudbanks on either side of the San Girolamo canal. Two labourers were at work there, one pushing a wheelbarrow along a path of duckboards laid out from the quay, the other working with a spade in the canal bed itself, turning over slabs of slime as thick and black as tar. The fetid odour of the disturbed mud hung heavy in the air, a noxious miasma so strong it was almost tangible.

‘Watch out!’

The cry came from above. Swivelling, Zen beheld an old woman staring down at him with what looked like indignation. He shrugged impatiently.

‘What’s the matter, signora?’

‘The pipe!’ she shouted back. ‘You were going to trip.’

It was only then that Zen noticed the metal tubing stretched across his path, leading from a narrow lane at one side to a red barge, stranded by the tide, bearing the legend POZZI NERI and a phone number.

‘Thank you!’ he called shamefacedly to his saviour, who shrugged and ducked back into her house.

Zen stepped over the tubing and continued on his way. Living now in a city which had had mains drainage for over two thousand years, he had forgotten about the ‘black wells’, the septic tanks over which every Venetian house was built and into which flowed such effluvia as could not be discharged directly into the canals.

A little further along he saw first the church which Marco had mentioned, then the osteria itself. The trim was indeed red, or had been at some time within living memory. A faded sign over the door read ‘Finest Wines of the Piave from our own Estate on Draught and in Bottle’. The interior was smoky and dark after the noontide glare outside, but even before Zen’s eyes had adjusted he heard a familiar voice hail him with a long soft ‘ Ciao! ’, rising and falling like a passing wave.

One of the card-players at the rear of the premises rose from the table and strode towards him, a calloused hand extended in greeting. Marco Paulon was a sturdy, muscular man whose hide looked as wrinkled and tanned as bacon. His face was a pudgy, shapeless mass in which his eyes twinkled, bright and shiny, like two metal buttons dropped into a bowl of polenta. He and Zen had not been especially close as children, but they had stayed in touch thanks to a mutually advantageous arrangement whereby Paulon kept an eye on the Zen property and undertook basic running repairs in return for the use of the ground floor as extra storage space for his haulage business.

He steered Zen to a vacant table by the window and shouted an order for two glasses of fragolino.

‘What’s all this about you and Ada Zulian?’ he demanded cheerily.

Zen gawped. Surely not even Rosalba’s grapevine could have disseminated his cover story so quickly. But it soon became clear that Marco had his information from the contessa herself.

‘The old girl isn’t up to carrying much these days, so I quite often pick up things she’s ordered when I deliver to the shops, and then drop them off on my way back to Mestre. I went round just before lunch with a case of mineral water she’d ordered and she told me you’d been there. To be honest, I thought it was another of her hallucinations. Fat chance, I thought, the police sending Aurelio up from Rome on account of Ada Zulian!’

The proprietor brought two glasses of the sweetish foaming wine and the two friends drank each other’s health. Then Zen leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘Actually, I arranged it myself.’

Marco Paulon raised his eyebrows.

‘Didn’t anyone query it?’

Zen swirled his glass around, making the wine gyrate like a spinning coin. He closed one eye in an exaggerated wink.

‘They probably would have, if I’d told them. So I put it about that I was being sent to look into the Durridge case. Do you remember? The American who disappeared here a couple of months ago. There was a big fuss about it in the press.’