Michael Dibdin - Dead Lagoon

He leant forward.

‘So how did Durridge and the others get off the island?’

Saoner shrugged impatiently.

‘This is your life, eh, Aurelio? Picking over theories about what might or might not have happened, like a pack of grubby, dog-eared playing cards! Well I could play that game too, I suppose, only I’m too busy living.’

Zen looked at him and nodded.

‘I’m glad you and your friends are having so much fun, Tommaso, but someone has to clean up after you.’

‘Leave the party out of it!’ Saoner snapped. ‘You don’t have a shred of evidence to implicate us. What if Zuin and his confederates happened to be members? So are thousands of ordinary, decent, hard-working Venetians! They are our strength and our pride! They guarantee the future of this city, Zen, while people like you can only grub around digging up dirty secrets from its past.’

He got to his feet.

‘Nothing you’ve said amounts to any more than unsubstantiated, opportunistic slander. Now that we are close to getting our hands on the levers of power, our enemies will move heaven and earth to throw a spanner in the works.’

‘The Sayings of Chairman Dal Maschio, page ninety-four,’ retorted Zen.

Saoner flushed.

‘I’m not just a parrot, you know.’

‘You mean you thought up that cheap rhetoric yourself? That’s even worse!’

Saoner stared down at him coldly.

‘We were once friends, Zen, but that doesn’t mean that I have to listen to your insults.’

He turned away. Leaving enough money on the table to cover their meal, Zen hastily rose and followed him out of the restaurant.

‘Wait, Tommaso! I’m sorry if I offended you. It just worries me to see how you’ve fallen under the spell of these people. I’m sure you have nothing personally to do with Durridge’s murder, but…’

Tommaso Saoner swung round on him.

‘Murder?’

A couple entering the restaurant looked at them sharply. Zen took his friend’s arm and steered him further along the alley.

‘We found the body on that ossuary island we once visited together,’ he murmured. ‘It wasn’t much more than a skeleton itself after the vermin and the birds had eaten their fill. But they don’t eat bones. Durridge’s were shattered, the spine rammed up into the skull.’

He gripped Saoner’s arm, pulling him round and looking him in the eyes.

‘How do you pluck a man off one island and drop him on another in such a way as to break every bone in his body? What do you think, Tommaso? Which of the greasy playing cards would you pick from the pack?’

They stared at each other for a long moment. Then Saoner twisted violently away.

‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted in a voice edged with desperation. ‘I didn’t ask you to confide in me! I don’t know what sort of game you’re playing, and I don’t want to know! Just leave me alone! Leave me alone!’

He strode rapidly away down the alley. Zen started after him, then stopped, turned and set off slowly in the other direction.

The day might earlier have seemed an augury of spring, but by mid-afternoon the realities of February had asserted themselves. Once past their peak, both the warmth and the light faded fast. Darkness massed in the chilly evening air, silvering the window of Zen’s office to form a mirror which perfectly reflected the decline of his hopes for the Durridge case.

Giulio Bon would not talk. For almost two hours, Zen had interrogated him in the presence of Carlo Berengo Gorin. Much to Zen’s surprise, the lawyer had made no attempt to intervene. On the contrary, he had ostentatiously turned his back on the proceedings, dividing his attention equally between the arts supplement of La Repubblica and a large cigar which he extracted from its aluminium tube and fussed over for some considerable time before it was ignited to his entire satisfaction.

Zen had been prepared for Gorin to do everything in his power to obstruct the smooth progress of the interrogation, but with Domenico Zuin’s statement already on its way to Marcello Mamoli he had felt confident of prevailing. Indeed, he had rather looked forward to being able to repay Gorin for the slights he had suffered the previous week. The case against Bon was overwhelming. However much Gorin might fuss and fidget, he would be forced to concede defeat in the end.

It took Zen only a few minutes to realize that the lawyer’s air of apparent complacency was the very opposite of good news. If Carlo Berengo Gorin was not perched on the edge of his chair, ready to pounce at the slightest hint of a procedural inexactitude, it was not because he sensed that the game was lost but because he knew he had already won. Too late, Zen realized that he had made a fatal mistake in revealing the extent of his progress in the case to Tommaso Saoner.

Saoner must have passed on the information to his associates, who had contacted Gorin with an offer for Bon’s silence. This might have taken the form of a simple cash injection or, more likely, of some similar offer combined with a promise of political pressure on the Appeal Court once the Nuova Repubblica Veneta ‘got its hands on the levers of power’. This had then been communicated to Bon by Gorin during the initial consultation to which they were entitled under the provisions of the Criminal Code.

Once that deal had been struck, any business which Zen might have hoped to transact was dead in the water. If there had been any hope of an eventual breakthrough, he would have been happy to continue the interrogation through the night if necessary. As it was, after going through the motions of confronting Bon with the statement Zuin had made implicating him as the prime mover of the second landing on the ottagono, and failing to get any response, he abandoned the proceedings.

Zen still had one more card up his sleeve. Getting out the folder containing the information which Pia Nunziata had obtained from air traffic control at Tessera, he walked across the office to the wall-map of the Province of Venice. The extract from the records showed all the flights which had been logged on the day when Ivan Durridge had disappeared. Zen had already deleted most of the entries, which referred to arrivals and departures at the airport. There was also a certain amount of toing and froing around the city itself, most of it centering on the Naval college on Sant’Elena and the Coastguard headquarters on the Giudecca.

Once all this had been eliminated, there remained three flights whose course would have taken them near Sant’Ariano. One of these, a training flight out over the Adriatic from the USAF base at Treviso, could be discounted. The remaining two were civil flights, both involving helicopters. One originated at ten o’clock in the morning in Trieste and overflew the lagoon en route to Vicenza. The other commenced shortly before two in the afternoon from the San Nicolo airfield, calling at Alberoni, on the southern tip of the Lido, before continuing to Gorizia, a city in the extreme north-east of the Friuli region, straddling the border with what had until recently been Yugoslavia. The machine involved was registered to a company named Aeroservizi Veneti.

Zen ran his finger across the shiny surface of the map, locating the various places mentioned. There was San Nicolo at the northern tip of the Lido. There was Alberoni, a few kilometres from the ottagono where Ivan Durridge had made his home. At this scale, Gorizia would be somewhere on the ceiling, but it looked as though the route passed more or less directly over Sant’Ariano, marked with a cross on the map, and thence over the plains of the Piave and Tagliamento rivers.

The door at the other end of the office crashed open and Aldo Valentini came running in.

‘It’s on!’ he cried.

He went rapidly through the drawers of his desk, snatching papers, a map of the city, a pistol and shoulder-holster.