Michael Dibdin - Dead Lagoon

‘I quite understand.’

He extends his hand.

‘Goodbye, then.’

It is the final snare, but she is not such a fool as to touch him. Ignoring the outstretched hand, she leads the way back to the portego. At the top of the stairs, she turns to him.

‘Goodbye,’ she says, gracefully but with finality.

He stares at her for a moment, then walks past her and down the stairs, out of the house, out of her life. Ada turns away, reeling against the tide flowing past. Her ghosts are deserting her, streaming down the stairs and out of the open doorway.

No longer haunted, the house settles, shifts and shrinks. For a moment, Ada feels a sense of panic. She’s grown used to the cushioning effect of those spectral presences, to the ample dimensions and flexible boundaries of the unreal space they generate all around. This rigid, po-faced insistence on the facts at first seems unduly mean and constricting.

But she sharply tells herself to pull her socks up. The Zulians haven’t stayed around as long as they have by sulking in a corner because life isn’t perfect. Her madness has abandoned her and that’s that. There’s no point in whining about it. Sanity is clearly going to take some getting used to, but she’ll manage somehow. After all, she always has.

He crossed a square in front of a gaunt, graceless church and set off along a back canal, watched by a clan of feral cats perched on the wooden crates which had been set up for them to shelter in. The darkness which had fallen seemed to have seeped into Zen’s mind. Listening to Ada Zulian’s pathetic attempts to both admit and deny the tragedy which had shattered her life, shadow-boxing with the intolerable facts, had been a deeply disturbing experience. For the first time, he began to wonder whether the truth about the mysteries which surrounded him was not merely unknown but in some essential way unknowable.

It was the nature of the place, he reflected. If Rome was a labyrinth of powerful and competing cliques, each with its portfolio of secrets to defend, here everything was a trick of the light, an endlessly shifting play of appearances without form or substance. What you saw was what you got, and all you would ever get. The fate of Ivan Durridge, like that of Rosetta Zulian and indeed his own father, would remain shrouded in mystery for ever, a subject for speculation, innuendo and senile ramblings. Zen felt like a fly trapped in a web woven by a long-dead spider.

If he had not had the prospect of seeing Cristiana in just a few minutes, this sense of futility would have been almost unbearable. But beside that gain, all other losses seemed light. What did the rest matter, since he had found his destined mate? How could he care about professional setbacks when his private life was about to be thrillingly renewed and made over? How ironic that the new should also be the old, that the woman with whom he would share his future should be a figure from his childhood, and live opposite the house where he had grown up!

A chill breeze had sprung up, infiltrating the city like a host of spies. Rounding the corner into the wedge-shaped campo, Zen was reassured to see light seeping through the shutters on the first floor of his house. His one anxiety was that Cristiana might have been delayed. Normally she didn’t get home from work until seven o’clock, but she must have made some special arrangement in order to see him. He closed the front door gratefully behind him, shutting out the wind, and climbed eagerly upstairs.

There was no one on the landing. Zen hung his coat and hat on the rack and opened the door into the living room. He could see no sign of Cristiana there, either. She must be in the kitchen, he thought with a warm rush of emotion, preparing dinner. He was halfway across the room before he noticed the man lounging in the high-backed armchair with its back to the door. This was the chair in which his father had always sat, and which his son to this day had never presumed to use. Zen stopped dead in his tracks, his heart racing, his stomach knotted up.

‘How did you get in?’

Ferdinando Dal Maschio got to his feet, smiling easily.

‘My wife provided a key.’

He stood there, letting Zen come to him.

‘I gather that you two have been seeing a certain amount of each other. Under the circumstances, though, I’m prepared to overlook that.’

He glanced at his watch.

‘There’s an important meeting of the party later this evening. That’s why I got Cristiana to arrange your little tryst earlier than usual. She agreed, of course, just as she did when I asked her to take a copy of that fax with the background to the Durridge case which you were sent by your crooked patrons in Rome.’

Dal Maschio’s eyes glittered.

‘Whatever you and Cristiana may have got up to, Zen, that woman belongs to me. All I need do is whistle and she comes running. The same goes for your friend Tommaso Saoner.’

He laughed mockingly.

‘Tommaso told me all about the way you tried to shake his faith in the cause over lunch. I could have told you that you were wasting your time. Tommaso is one of my most trusted and trustworthy colleagues, the man I plan to name as my deputy when I am elected mayor. Besides, nothing you had to tell him would have come as any surprise. He was in on the whole thing from the very start!’

‘He didn’t know that Durridge was dead,’ snapped Zen.

Ferdinando Dal Maschio acknowledged the point with an inclination of the head.

‘It makes no difference. Tommaso would rather die himself than betray the movement. Just as Cristiana would rather betray you than disappoint this little whim of mine to surprise you in your own house. They’re both mine, body and soul. That’s the sort of devotion I inspire in people, Zen.’

Zen stared coldly at Dal Maschio.

‘You’re trespassing,’ he said in a hard voice.

‘You’re the one who’s trespassing, Zen.’

‘This is my house.’

‘It’s my city.’

‘No more than it is mine.’

Dal Maschio shook his head.

‘The municipal election results will prove you wrong. The latest opinion poll gives the Nuova Repubblica Veneta a clear lead over our nearest rivals.’

‘That may change when its leader is arrested on charges of kidnapping and murder,’ Zen retorted.

Dal Maschio spread his hands wide.

‘You want to talk about the Durridge affair? No problem. I’ll tell you everything there is to know.’

He circled round to stand behind the chair in which he had been sitting and leant on it, using the back as a lectern.

‘Let me say first of all that I wouldn’t get mixed up in anything like that now. They say that a week is a long time in politics, but the things that have happened in the past few months have astonished even me. If you’d told me last November that we’d be looking at victory in the municipal elections and the very real possibility of achieving a presence at national level within a year, I’d have thought you were crazy.’

He smiled nostalgically.

‘It’s hard to remember now that at that time we were more of a debating club than a credible political force. The idea was to galvanize people into rethinking everything they had taken for granted for too long, to smash the mould and suggest radical new solutions to the problems confronting the city we all love. Part of our strategy was to establish contacts with like-minded groups on the mainland. We talked to the regional Leghe, of course, but also to the German-language separatist movement in the Alto Adige, and to various Ladino and Friulano groups. But our closest relationship was with the newly-independent Republic of Croatia, not only because of our historical ties with that region, but because the Croats had achieved what the rest of us could still only dream about — the dissolution of the spurious nation state and the reclamation of regional independence, cultural integrity and political autarchy.’