Michael Dibdin - Dead Lagoon

Bugno wrung his hands piteously.

‘What do you want me to do? What do you want me to say?’

‘The truth!’ Zen shouted.

‘But I’ve told you the truth!’

Zen swung his fist as though to strike him, then drew it aside at the last moment and drove it into his palm with a resounding smack.

‘Stop messing me about, Bugno!’

Bugno looked abject.

‘I’m sorry, dottore! I’m really sorry! I just don’t know what you want me to say.’

‘What were you doing on the eleventh of November last year?’

Massimo Bugno frowned.

‘November?’

‘November, yes! Are you deaf? Answer the question!’

Suddenly Bugno’s face cleared.

‘The eleventh? Ah, well, that weekend I would have been out of town.’

Zen laughed contemptuously.

‘Had the alibi nice and pat, didn’t you? Now I know you’re guilty, Bugno, and so help me God I’ll get a confession if I have to beat it out of you.’

‘It’s the truth! I was on the mainland, near Belluno, at my father-in-law’s farm. I can prove it!’

‘Oh I’m sure you can dig up a few relatives who are prepared to perjure themselves on your behalf.’

‘It’s my father-in-law’s birthday!’

‘The eleventh?’

‘The eighth.’

‘What’s the eighth got to do with it? Don’t try and confuse the issue!’

‘You don’t understand. His birthday is on the eighth, but the kids were in school and Lucia and I had to work. We drove up there at the weekend and stayed over till Sunday evening. I was nowhere near the city on the eleventh!’

Bugno stared fixedly at Zen, as though trying to hypnotize him into belief. There was no need for that. Zen had no doubt that Bugno was telling the truth. On the other hand, he couldn’t afford to turn him loose until he had questioned the other two men.

‘Have it your own way!’ he snapped, and called the guard to have Bugno taken back to the cells.

Before dealing with Massimo Zuin, Zen phoned down to the local bar for a cappuccino and a pastry. A few minutes later Aldo Valentini breezed in, followed almost immediately by Pia Nunziata, her right arm in a sling, carrying a beige envelope in her left hand.

‘What are you doing here?’ Zen asked her indignantly. ‘You’re supposed to be taking the week off.’

The policewoman nodded.

‘I was going to, but all my friends, relatives and neighbours kept popping in and ringing up every five minutes to ask how I was. In the end I decided I’d rather be at work.’

She handed him the envelope and walked out, almost colliding with the waiter carrying Zen’s breakfast. Zen gave him a tip calculated to ensure an equally prompt response next time, then tore open the envelope and scanned the four sheets of flimsy paper inside, headed Heyman, Croft, Kleinwort and Biggs, Attorneys at Law. In the next cubicle, Aldo Valentini was typing frantically.

‘How’s it going, Aldo?’ Zen called.

‘Still waiting for the gang to call, Sfriso’s at home with a tap on the line, I’m trying to organize a rapid response for any of the scenarios they might throw at us, enough to drive you round the bend, didn’t sleep a wink all night.’

Zen dipped the last bite of pastry in his coffee, then stood up and put on his hat and coat. Domenico Zuin was going to have to wait.

Outside, a gentle drowsiness pervaded the air. Zen turned left, walking north towards the hospital complex behind the church dedicated to the hybrid San Zanipolo. A boy on a miniature bicycle was dashing about the square at high speed, ignoring the ritualistic cries of ‘Come here!’ from his mother, who was chatting expansively to a friend by the bridge. Zen walked along the quay lined with mooring posts painted in blue-and-white stripes like barbers’ poles, and entered the imposing courtyard of the hospital.

The pathology department was located in a remote outbuilding on the other side of the huge ex-conventual complex. Zen made his way through groups of patients in dressing gowns and visitors clutching flowers and fruit and walked down a tree-lined alley to a green door marked HISTOPATHOLOGY. A dingy corridor inside led to a room packed with laboratory equipment. A young woman in a white coat directed Zen to a small room on the other side of the lab, where he donned a gown and rubber boots. Already the air was tainted with the cloying odour of formaldehyde.

Inside the post-mortem room there were six metal tables, three of them occupied. An assistant was sewing up a female corpse whose body cavity now contained a pair of rubber gloves, strips of bloodsoaked muslin and a copy of the morning’s Corriere dello Sport. At the next table, another assistant pulled the caul of cut scalp down over a male cadaver’s face and set about sawing the skull open. Zen asked him where he could find the pathologist. The man waved vaguely with the bone-flecked saw at a glass-fronted office in the end wall where a florid man in a white plastic cape and rubber boots was talking loudly on the telephone.

‘… and then once Anna and Patrizio finally turned up, nothing would do but we all had to sit through the whole thing again from the beginning! Do you believe it? And when Claudio tried gently to tell him that enough was enough, he got completely pissed off and started asking what kind of friends we were… It’s absurd! He’s only had the damn thing a month and already he thinks he’s Visconti.’

He glanced up at Zen.

‘Anyway, Marco, I must go. What? That’s right, the corpses are getting restless, heh heh. Speak to you later.’

He put the phone down.

‘Now then, what can I do for you?’

Zen introduced himself and inquired about the progress of the autopsy on cadaver 40763, such being the number assigned to the remains which had been found on Sant’ Ariano.

‘Done, finished, complete,’ the pathologist remarked carelessly. ‘I like to get the really putrid stuff out of the way early on, if at all possible.’

Zen handed him the sheets faxed over by the law firm representing the Durridge family.

‘I believe this is medical information relating to a missing person,’ he said. ‘It’s in English, but…’

‘So’s half the literature,’ the pathologist retorted. ‘You want to know if it’s the same man?’

He glanced at the material, then walked over to the door, beckoning to Zen. The pathologist led the way to the far end of the post-mortem room. On an isolated table lay a long plastic bag with a zipper running from one end to the other. He opened the bag, releasing a stench which overpowered even the pervading odour of formaldehyde. Inside lay a partially reassembled skeleton and an assortment of bones, some of which had bits of flesh and gristle clinging to them. The pathologist removed the jawbone and compared the teeth to a sketch in the fax, then bent over the skull and repeated the process with the upper jaw.

‘Looks like a perfect match,’ he murmured. ‘There’s a couple of missing teeth, but they probably broke loose on impact.’

He pointed to a row of jars at the foot of the table, where various organs were floating in pink liquid.

‘Tough organ, the heart. It survived even this degree of decomposition.’

He patted the skull lightly.

‘Our subject suffered from coronary artery disease. According to these medical records, so did this American.’

‘So it’s the same man?’ Zen asked eagerly.

The pathologist gestured a disclaimer.

‘I can’t issue an official identification without running some tests on the other data in here.’

‘But off the record…’ Zen insisted.

‘Off the record, I’d say there’s very little question that it’s the same man.’

Zen released a long sigh.

‘I suppose it’s impossible to determine the cause of death with the body in this condition?’