Michael Dibdin: Dead Lagoon

‘You must be joking!’ he barked in the slightly nasal accent of his native Ferrara. ‘Ada Zulian! A woman who doesn’t even know the right time…’

Zen gestured impatiently.

‘What does that matter, as long as she knows the right people?’

Aldo Valentini conceded the point with a shrug. He led the way to a bar at the end of the quay. A red neon sign over the door read Bar dei Greci, after the nearby Orthodox church. There was no sign of any Greeks inside, although the barman’s accent suggested that he was from somewhere well to the south of Chioggia.

‘All the same, la Zulian!’ exclaimed Valentini when they had ordered coffee. ‘God almighty, she’s been in and out of the loony bin like a yo-yo for the last twenty years. This complaint of hers ended up on my desk, largely because no one else would touch it with a bargepole.’

He broke off to take one of the pastries from the plate on the bar.

‘We searched the whole place from top to bottom,’ he continued, his moustache white with icing sugar from the pastry he had selected. ‘Even put a man outside the front door. No one came or went, yet the woman still claimed she was being persecuted. It’s a clear case of hysteria and attention-seeking.’

Zen took a bite of a flaky cream-filled croissant.

‘I’m sure you’re right. It’s always the hopeless cases who want a second opinion. I’ll just go through the motions and then endorse your conclusions. It’s a total waste of time, but what do I care? There are worse places to spend a few days.’

He washed the pastry down with a gulp of coffee.

‘So, what’s been happening round here?’

Valentini shrugged.

‘Bugger all, as usual. Mestre and Marghera see a reasonable amount of action, particularly in drugs, but we just don’t have a big enough slice of the mainland for it to add up to anything much. As for the city itself, forget it. Criminals are like everyone else these days. If you can’t drive there, they don’t want to know.’

Zen nodded slowly.

‘What about that kidnapping that was all over the papers a few months back? Some American.’

‘You mean the Durridge business?’

Zen lit a cigarette.

‘That must have livened things up a bit.’

‘It might, if they’d let us near it,’ Valentini retorted shortly.

‘How do you mean?’

‘The Carabinieri got there first, and when we applied for reciprocity we were told the files had been returned under seal to Rome.’

He shrugged.

‘Christ knows what that was all about. Once upon a time we could have pulled a few strings of our own and found out, but these days…’

He pointed to the headline in the newspaper lying on the counter. THE OLD FOX FIGHTS FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE, it read, above a photograph of the politician in question. Zen picked the paper up and scanned the article, which concerned alleged payments made by a number of leading industrialists into a numbered Swiss bank account allegedly used to fund the party in question. The paper’s cartoonist made play with the slogan adopted by the party at the last election: ‘A Fairer Alternative’. In a secondary article, a spokesman for the regionalist Northern Leagues hailed the development as ‘a death blow to the clique of crooks who have bled this country dry for decades’ and called for new electoral laws designed to radically redraw the political map of the country.

‘It’s total chaos,’ remarked Valentini sourly. ‘You can’t get anything done any more. No one knows what the rules are.’

Feeling a touch on his arm, Zen looked round. A young woman with blonde hair, wearing a ski-jacket and jeans, stood staring at him, smiling inanely and stabbing one finger in the air. For a moment Zen thought she must be mad, or perhaps from some religious sect or other. Then he caught sight of the suspended rectangle of cardboard circling slowly in the draught above his head. The logo on each side showed a smouldering cigarette in a red circle with a broad slash across it.

‘Don’t tell me you can’t even smoke any more!’ he exclaimed incredulously to Valentini, who shrugged sheepishly.

‘The city council passed a by-law making it compulsory to provide a no-smoking area. It’s just for show, to keep the tourists happy. Normally no one pays any attention in a place like this, but every once in a while some arsehole insists on the letter of the law.’

He slipped some money to the cashier and they stepped outside. Already the sunshine was looser and more generous. Zen paused to look at a series of posters gummed to the wall. The design was identical to the ones he had seen earlier that morning, on the window of the closed cafe in Cannaregio, but these were much newer. At the top was a drawing of the lion of Saint Mark, rampant, its expression full of defiance. The huge black capitals beneath read NUOVA REPUBBLICA VENETA and the text announced a rally the following evening in Campo Santa Margherita.

‘Total chaos,’ Aldo Valentini repeated, leading the way back to the Questura. ‘Every day it turns out that another big name, someone you would have sworn was absolutely untouchable, is under investigation on charges ranging from corruption to association with the Mafia. Result, no one dares to do a friend a favour any more. Nothing would please me more than to see this country turn into a paradise of moral probity, but how the hell are we supposed to get by in the meantime?’

Zen nodded. This was a conversation he had been having at least once a day for several months. By now he had the lines off by heart.

‘It’s just like in Russia,’ he declared. ‘The old system may have been terrible, but at least it functioned.’

‘My brother-in-law’s just moved into a new house near Rovigo,’ Valentini continued. ‘The telephone people tell him he’ll have to wait six weeks to get a phone installed, so he gets on to the engineer and offers him a bustarella, you know. Nothing exorbitant, just the odd fifty thousand or so to move up to the top of the list.’

‘The normal thing,’ murmured Zen.

‘The normal thing. You know what the guy tells him? “No way, dottore, ” he says. “It’s more than my job’s worth.” Can you believe it? “It’s more than my job’s worth.”’

‘Disgusting.’

‘How the hell are you supposed to get anything done with that sort of attitude? It’s enough to make you sick.’

He tossed his cigarette into the canal, where a seagull made a half-hearted pass at it before landing on the gunwale of the outermost police launch.

Back in their office, a man stood framed in the sunlight streaming in through the window. He turned as Zen and Valentini entered.

‘Aldo?’

He came forward, frowning at Zen.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked suspiciously.

Valentini introduced them.

‘Aurelio Zen, Enzo Gavagnin. Enzo’s head of the Drugs Squad.’

Enzo Gavagnin had a large womanish face and the stocky, muscular body of a gondolier. He inspected Zen coolly.

‘New posting?’

Zen shook his head.

‘I’m with the Ministry,’ he said. ‘On temporary assignment.’

Enzo Gavagnin glanced at Valentini.

‘An emissary from Rome, eh?’ he murmured in a manner both humorous and pointed. ‘I hope you haven’t been giving away any of our secrets, Aldo.’

‘I didn’t know we had any,’ Valentini replied lightly. ‘Anyway, anyone who comes all this way to take the Ada Zulian case off my hands is a friend as far as I’m concerned.’

Gavagnin laughed loudly.

‘Fair enough! Anyway, the reason I came was about that breaking-and-entering on Burano.’

‘The Sfriso business?’

‘If you want to reduce your work-load still further then you’re in luck, because I’ve discovered that there’s an angle which ties it in to a case we’ve been working on for some time…’