Michael Dibdin - Dead Lagoon

‘I’ll tell you one thing, though,’ Marco continued with geater confidence. ‘He was never kidnapped.’

‘How do you mean?’

Paulon shrugged.

‘If you ask me, it was like with Tonio.’

A double sheet of newspaper drifted slowly past. Looking at it, Zen recognized it as the same one which the barman had been reading when he had had coffee with Aldo Valentini that morning. As he scanned the headline — THE OLD FOX FIGHTS FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE — he suddenly thought of a way to get access to the closed files on the Durridge case. But if the article was correct, he would have to move fast.

‘Antonio Puppin,’ Marco went on, answering the question Zen had ill-manneredly neglected to ask. ‘Went hunting out on the salt-marshes one day and never came back. When his boat turned up adrift everyone feared the worst, although the body was never found. Anyway, a couple of years later he got caught by the Carabinieri at a roadblock near Grado — this was back in the terrorist years, and they were asking for everyone’s papers…’

They swept under a high arched bridge and emerged with startling suddenness into the open lagoon just beside the busy ferry piers at Fondamente Nove. ‘It turned out he’d done a bunk,’ Marco shouted above the roar of the engine he’d just gunned up to full revs. ‘He’d been working for the brother of an ex-girlfriend who ran a garage…’

Zen stopped listening. He’d lost track of Marco’s story, let alone its bearing on the Durridge affair. That was how things were on the lagoon, where the hazy light and the pervasive instability of water defeated every attempt at clarity or precision, but also tempered the arrogance and aggression so prevalent on the mainland. This was what had formed him, he realized. This was the code he carried with him, the basic genetic circuits burned into his very being.

In the extreme distance, to the right of the cemetery of San Michele, the remote islands of Torcello and Burano were visible as smudges on the horizon, the latter distinguishable by its drunkenly inclined bell tower.

‘What was that about someone seeing ghosts on Burano?’ he murmured to Marco.

‘Not on Burano. That’s where the guy’s from. Name’s Giacomo Sfriso. He and his brother have a drift trawler they take out to sea, as well as a lot of tidal nets. Both in their mid-twenties, and doing very well for themselves by all accounts. Very well indeed.’

They rounded the mole of reclaimed land beyond the Arsenale, forming dry-docks and a sports field.

‘Then one evening last month Giacomo went out in a sandolo,’ Marco continued. ‘No one paid any attention. Everyone knew the Sfriso boys worked round the clock. That’s how they got so rich, people said. Darkness fell and he didn’t come back, but still no one worried. Giacomo knew the lagoon like his own backyard.’

He swung the tiller over, dipping the gunwale in the water and sending the boat careening round towards the large white mass of San Pietro.

‘Only when he finally got back to Burano, at five o’clock the next morning, still pitch dark out, he was babbling like a madman! No one could make out what the hell he was talking about. His brother Filippo called the doctor, who stuck a needle in him, but when he came around he was just as bad. Gibbering away about walking corpses and the like. Since when, according to my informants, that particular fish has been several centimetres short of its minimum landing length.’

The boat slid under the elaborate iron footbridge connecting the island of San Pietro to the Arsenale. These were the hinderparts of the city, a dense mass of brick tenements formerly inhabited by the army of manual labourers employed in the dockyards. Nowhere were there more dead ends and fewer through routes, nowhere were the houses darker and more crowded, nowhere was the dialect thicker and more impenetrable. It was not for nothing that the Cathedral of San Pietro, symbol of Rome’s claims on the Republic, had been relegated to these inauspicious outskirts, while the Doges’ private chapel lorded it over the great Piazza.

Marco brought the wherry alongside a quay opposite a slipway where a number of old vaporetti were drawn up awaiting repair or cannibalization. Securing a rope fore and aft to the stripped tree trunks sunk in the mud, he set about foraging among the packages in the hold.

‘Give me a hand, will you?’ he called to Zen.

Together they tugged the pile apart, separating crates and boxes until Marco at length dived in and emerged with a small cubical pack which, from the way he bent his knees to lift it, obviously weighed a lot.

‘What’s that?’ asked Zen.

Marco heaved the pack on to the quay and wiped his brow. Leaping ashore, he tore open the pack and extracted a yellow leaflet which he handed to Zen.

‘Back in a moment,’ he said, and disappeared into an alley with the package, leaving Zen to peruse the leaflet. Like the poster he had seen earlier, it was headed NUOVA REPUBBLICA VENETA over the emblem of a lion couchant. The text concerned some complicated issue of city versus regional funding for improvements to the refuse disposal facility on Sacca San Biagio, and was clearly the latest instalment in a serial you needed to have been following from the beginning to understand. Zen had just reached the slogan in block capitals at the bottom — A VENETIAN SOLUTION TO VENETIAN PROBLEMS — when Marco jumped aboard again and cast off.

‘Next stop your island,’ he announced, revving the engine.

Zen waved the leaflet.

‘What’s all this?’

‘Municipal elections the week after next.’

‘But which party?’

Marco paused to yell a greeting at the skipper of a wherry proceeding in the other direction.

‘Just a few local lads who think they can take on Rome and win.’

‘And can they?’

Marco shrugged.

‘I’d like to see someone do it. Everyone says it’ll be a disaster, but what have the last forty years been for us? The city has turned into a geriatric hospital, there’s no work, no houses, and all our taxes go to line the pockets of some Mafia fat cats down south. Christ knows if Dal Maschio will be any better, but he sure as hell can’t be any worse, and if he makes those bastards in Rome shit in their beds then he gets my vote!’

Zen stared at him.

‘Who did you say?’

‘Dal Maschio.’

‘Ferdinando Dal Maschio?’

‘Do you know him?’

Zen shook his head.

‘No, no.’

The boat slipped along the canal alongside the public gardens on the islet of Sant’Elena and then out, as if through a secret door, into the broad basin of San Marco. A big cargo vessel was gliding past, on its way from the docks to the breach in the littoral sandbar at Porto di Lido giving access to the open sea. A tug pulling two barges laden with rubbish ploughed past in the other direction, while ferries and fishing smacks crossed to and fro. Marco pointed the wherry’s bows towards the distant island of San Clemente, where Ada Zulian had spent two years in the mental hospital. Out here in the open lagoon there were short sharp waves which slapped vigorously at the planking and splashed gobs of salt water into the men’s faces. Marco throttled back to give way to a car ferry on its way to the Lido.

‘I forgot to tell you the best bit about the guy from Burano,’ he shouted as the waves slapped and hammered and the wherry wallowed in the swell. ‘Guess where he claims to have seen this ghost?’

Zen shook his head.

‘On Sant’Ariano!’ cried Marco. ‘The isle of the dead!’

His way clear again, he gunned up the engine and headed out of the shipping lane into the quiet backwaters behind San Giorgio.

‘But it’s no joke for Giacomo’s family,’ he concluded soberly. ‘Seems he just hangs around the house all day, muttering to himself. He can’t go to the toilet by himself, never mind handle a boat. His mother and brother have been driven nearly crazy themselves.’