Dead Lagoon - 4 (24 page)

‘Who’s handling it?’

Zen consulted his notebook.

‘Dottore Marcello Mamoli.’

Gorin shook his head sadly.

‘In that case, I doubt there’s anything I can do for you. Marcello and I were at law school together. He was always a stickler for procedure.’

Zen scowled at him.

‘I don’t need you to do anything for me! Save that for your clients,
avvocato
. They’re the ones who need help.’

‘On the contrary,
dottore
. Why do you think I bothered coming here in the first place? I wanted to give you a chance to avoid getting covered in shit. You’re one of us, after all.’

‘What do you mean, one of us?’ asked Zen.

Gorin looked at him but said nothing.

‘And what do you mean by covered in shit?’ shouted Zen angrily. ‘It’s your clients who’re in it up to their necks!’

‘What’s the charge?’ murmured Gorin.

Zen counted on his fingers.

‘Breaking and entering. Resisting arrest with consequent injury to a police officer. Intimidation. Attempted extortion.’

‘Breaking and entering is out. They had a key.’

‘They
stole
a key.’

‘They were given one by their aunt, the
contessa
.’

‘A key to the street door, yes. But not to the waterdoor, which is how they came and went.’ Gorin shrugged.

‘If you give someone a key to your house, you are granting them access to the property. The fact that my clients chose to travel by water rather than on foot is of no legal significance whatsoever.’

He grinned maliciously.

‘As for the injury to your officer, I have to say that I think it unwise of you to bring that up, since I gather that the individual in question was wounded by a gunshot inflicted by one of her colleagues. Certainly neither of my clients could have been responsible, since they were not armed. Why would they be? They were visiting their aunt.’

‘They weren’t visiting her!’ Zen exploded. ‘They were terrorizing her! They were trying to drive her mad, or rather trying to make everyone believe she
was
mad!’

Carlo Berengo Gorin looked pained.

‘There is no evidence whatsoever to support such wild allegations.’

‘No evidence! This has been going on for weeks,
avvocato
! What would they have had to do, in your view, for there to be evidence? Kill her?’

Gorin waggled his forefinger in the air.

‘There is absolutely no proof that my clients were responsible for the earlier intrusions – or indeed that they ever took place at all.’

‘But that must be the presumption.’

Gorin oscillated his hand in the air, fingers outstretched, as though turning a large doorknob back and forth.

‘If it weren’t for the testimony of the
contessa
herself, perhaps,’ he murmured. ‘But that alters the balance of probability quite dramatically.’

‘What testimony?’

Carlo Berengo Gorin looked from side to side, sighing.

‘I really shouldn’t be cutting you in on the defence case, but, well, as one Venetian to another … When she’s summoned to appear before Mamoli, Ada Zulian will tell him that last night’s episode, so far from being one in a long series, was quite different from anything she had experienced before. Her nephews’ performance, it seems, was so crude that she guessed immediately that it was them. It lacked all the fluidity and “other-worldliness”, to use her own term, of the previous manifestations.’

Zen violently hurled the butt of his cigarette, which had burned down to the filter, into the bin.

‘That’s absurd! The carnival costumes the accused were wearing corresponded exactly with the description the
contessa
gave me of the figures who have been tormenting her. No one’s going to believe that it was sheer coincidence.’

‘Of course not. But you’re not the only person whose ear she bent about these ghostly apparitions of hers. The old girl’s been going on about it to her nephews for weeks, and last night they played a little trick on her by dressing up in carnival gear and acting out her fantasies.’

Gorin shrugged.

‘Many people may consider such a jape was in extremely questionable taste, to put it mildly. There is, however, nothing remotely illegal about it.’

He shook his head mournfully.

‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to let them go,
dottore
.’

Zen glanced at his watch, then at the slashing rain outside the window.

‘There’s another charge I omitted to mention,’ he told Gorin solemnly. ‘One of the brothers referred to my men as “sons of whores”, while the other called me a “heap of shit”.’

Gorin laughed a little uneasily.

‘Oh come on Zen! You’ll hear that kind of thing down at the bar any day.’

‘That’s different. If someone insults me when I’m off duty, that’s a personal matter. I can choose to ignore him or to retaliate. But last night I was abused whilst carrying out my duties as a state functionary. The offence was thus not only to me personally but to the office I hold. To let such a thing go unpunished would be to undermine the authority of the legal process and inded the very fabric of an ordered, democratic society.’

Gorin gestured with his hands cupped together, appealing to sanity and common sense.

‘Be reasonable,
dottore
! If you go round bursting into the homes of respectable citizens in the middle of the night, firing off guns in all directions, you can’t expect a very warm welcome!’

‘Your clients are in contravention of article 341 of the Criminal Code, which penalizes insults to the honour or prestige of a public official, made in his presence and during the execution of his duties. There is no question of their being released at the present time.’

Gorin gave him a long, measured look.

‘All right,’ he nodded, ‘if that’s the way you want to play it. But it isn’t going to look good you clutching vindictively at 341 because your main charges have gone up in smoke. This is the second time in twenty-four hours that you’ve screwed up. If you’re going to take such a hard line, I’ll mention your irregular detention of Signor Bon to Mamoli. I don’t think he’s going to be very impressed. Nor do I think that he’ll be taken in by this vindictive and spiteful attempt to harass my clients on a technicality. You may be able to get away with that sort of high-handed behaviour in Rome, but here in Venice we still have standards.’

He turned and strode across the office to the door. Zen stood quite still, staring fixedly at the space which the lawyer had just vacated. He was still in this trance when Aldo Valentini arrived.

‘Our friend Enzo is deep in the shit!’ cackled the Ferrarese gleefully. ‘Having got back from bum-sniffing the politicos, the boss has summoned all the departmental heads to his office to hear the party line. Not only has Gavagnin not shown up, he hasn’t even phoned in to apologize. And Francesco Bruno is a man who doesn’t take kindly to being stood up.’

Zen nodded absent-mindedly. Valentini looked at him more closely.

‘Is something wrong?’

Zen sighed.

‘What’s the biggest mistake you can make in this job?’

Valentini shrugged.

‘There’s so many to choose from. Accepting too small a bribe? Making a pass at Bruno’s wife? Failing to make a pass at Bruno’s wife?’

He slapped his thigh loudly.

‘I’ve got it! It’s taking Bettino Todesco along on an operation without unloading his pistol first.’

Zen shot him a hurt glance.

‘Nice one.’

‘How is she, anyway?’ asked Valentini with a smile to show he’d meant no harm.

‘At home, recovering. A couple of days’ leave and she’ll be fine. But she was lucky. That fool Todesco could have killed her, firing blind like that.’

‘What’s going to happen to him?’

‘An official reprimand, loss of accumulated promotion points and compulsory attendance at a firearms retraining course. But that’s nothing compared to the unofficial hazing he’ll have to put up with around here. It’s tough enough being a policeman without having your own colleagues shooting at you.’

He collected his coat and hat and made for the door.

‘See you later, Aldo.’

‘Wait a minute!’ the Ferrarese called after him. ‘You haven’t told me about the biggest mistake you can make in this job.’

Zen turned in the open doorway. He closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

‘To take it seriously,’ he murmured. ‘To think you have any hope of achieving anything. To imagine that anyone is going to support you.’

The quay outside the Questura glistened greasily under the steady drench. Mino Martufò, draped in a waterproof cape, was securing the mooring lines of one of the police launches.

‘Are you doing anything?’ Zen asked him.

‘Where to,
dottò
?’

‘Palazzo Zulian.’

He stepped aboard the launch. Freeing the mooring rope, Martufò followed, pushing off with his foot. He revved the motor, bringing the craft around, then engaged the throttle. The bow lifted and they surged off along the canal, riding a thick cushion of wash. Zen stood facing forward, eyes closed, gaunt and unsmiling, the raindrops dripped down his cheeks like tears. Mino Martufò looked at his superior with concern.

‘We really fixed those bastards, sir, eh?’

Zen did not respond. Emerging into the crowded waters of the
bacino di San Marco
, the Sicilian dragged the launch into a slewing turn, narrowly missing an incoming ferry and a barge piled high with crates of artichokes.

‘Take it easy,’ Zen told him tonelessly. ‘This is the new Italy. We’ve got to foster good relations with the public. We could be privatized at any moment.’

Martufò glanced twice at his superior before judging it safe to laugh heartily.

‘After all the talk about botched jobs and cock-ups, it’s really great to have taken part in an operation that was a total success from beginning to end,’ he enthused. ‘Okay, it was a shame about
la Nunziata
, but like I said when we were playing cards, they should never have let ladies join.’

‘You think that your virile flesh would have resisted the bullet better?’

There was no further talk until they drew near Palazzo Zulian. Rain pocked the surface of the canal. There was not enough water to get the launch up to the water-steps, so Zen disembarked by the bridge and walked around to the street door.

It was opened by Contessa Ada Zulian in person. She inspected Zen suspiciously.

‘Where are they?’ she demanded.

‘Where are who?’

‘My poor nephews! I was told they would be at liberty again by now, but I’ve rung their house several times without …’

Zen brushed past her into the dank expanse of the lower hallway.

‘
Do
by all means come in,’ Ada commented with pointed irony. ‘Make yourself at home. Perhaps you’d like a drink, or even a meal. Can I offer you anything?’

‘You can offer me an explanation,
contessa
.’

Ada put her head on one side and stared at him with the impersonal acuity of a gull.

‘But there is nothing whatever to explain.’

Zen marched up to her and stared her in the eye.

‘I came all the way up here from Rome to take on your case, a case which no one else believed in, simply and solely out of the goodness of my heart, because you’re an old acquaintance of my mother’s. I have been openly mocked by my colleagues at the Questura for insisting on taking your complaints seriously when everyone else had decided that you were out of your fucking head.’

‘There’s no call …’

‘I’ve bent over backwards to help you in every way possible, even giving you my home telephone number so that you can call me at any hour of the day or night. Perhaps because I’m an outsider here now, to whom everything feels at once familiar and strange, I succeed in deciphering the pattern which no one had spotted – including you,
contessa
– and set a trap resulting in the arrest of the two people who have been tormenting you for so long. And what thanks do I get? You tell Gorin that you’re prepared to lie in your teeth in order to get them off and make me look like the biggest idiot of all time!’

Ada gave a slight shrug. She turned away and started upstairs.

‘But they’re my nephews.’

‘I don’t care if they’re the Patriarch’s catamites!’ Zen shouted as he started after her. ‘Don’t you understand what they were doing? Don’t you understand what they
would
have done, sooner or later, if I hadn’t intervened?’

Ada Zulian walked upstairs without replying. When she reached the gleaming gallery on the first floor, she turned to face him.

‘You take everything so literally, Aurelio Battista. But then you always did. I remember once when Giustiniana left you here, you …’

Zen stopped on the last but one step, so that they were on a level.

‘They would have killed you,’ he said quietly.

Ada gave a little burble of laughter.

‘What
are
you talking about? It was just a silly prank! Nanni’s always had a taste for practical jokes, and Vincenzo will go along with anything his elder brother suggests.’

Taking her arm, Zen led her into the salon and pushed her down on the low sofa. He sat down beside her and leant close, his voice a mere whisper.

‘At first, their plan was to have you declared mentally unfit. And they very nearly succeeded. All the people I spoke to when I arrived here were convinced that your story of ghostly intruders was proof that you had finally taken leave of your senses. With your previous history, your nephews would have had no difficulty in having you committed. They would then have applied to have control of the family affairs transferred to them, on the grounds that you were mentally unfit to manage the estate.’

Ada Zulian smiled vapidly at him. Her bright, shallow eyes twitched to and fro, refusing to engage his.

‘After a suitable interval,’ Zen continued, ‘they would have entered into negotiations with interested parties over the sale of the old mill site on Sant’Alvise. A plot like that must be worth billions, but Nanni and Vincenzo wouldn’t want the money going to their mad old aunt. Nor could they withdraw huge sums from your account without attracting comment, so they would probably have done a deal with the buyer. The sum named in the contract, and paid to you, would be a fraction of the real selling price. The difference would be paid into a numbered bank account which Nanni and Vincenzo could tap any time they needed a little spending money for another Porsche or a new wardrobe.’