He walked over to the map and pointed out an irregular sliver of white in the northern lagoon.
‘This is the island of Sant’Ariano, just a few kilometres east of here.’
There was no visible reaction from the group. Zen had already ascertained that none of them was from Venice. They did not know about Sant’Ariano’s sinister vocation, and he had no intention of enlightening them.
‘Somewhere on that island is a canvas bag containing three kilos of pure heroin with an estimated street value of half a billion lire. But its value to us is far greater. We know the identity of the gang’s courier, and he was agreed to deliver the drugs under our supervision.
We can draw the gang into an ambush, put them under surveillance, identify their base and smash the whole operation once and for all.’
He held up a monitory finger.
‘But time is pressing! We need to locate the drugs by this evening at the latest. The island is covered with dense scrub and shrubbery, and we have no idea whereabouts the bag is. To make matters worse, it will probably be at least partially covered by snow.’
Zen looked round at the four men, making eye contact with each in turn. He shrugged casually.
‘In short, I’m asking you to do a job which would normally take several hundred men a week, to do it in a few hours, in total secrecy, and in the middle of a blizzard.’
Smiles gradually replaced the crews’ initial look of apprehension. Zen held up his hands in a gesture of disclaimer.
‘I’m not a pilot!’ he exclaimed. ‘I simply have no idea what’s feasible and what’s not. What I
do
know is that the only way of locating that package in the time available, given the nature of the terrain, is to go in from the air. If you can’t do it, just say so. I won’t try and argue with you. I’ll just apologize for ruining your day off, go back to the city and tell my bosses that there’s nothing to be done. You must decide. The fate of the investigation is in your hands.’
He sat down and lit a cigarette, pointedly ignoring the others. After a moment’s silence, the pilots started to shuffle and glance uneasily at each other.
‘We’d need two machines,’ one of them said eventually.
‘We could go in low to scatter the snow,’ another put in.
‘It’s the vegetation that’ll be the problem.’
‘One man on a hoist with something to part the branches …’
‘Or a metal sensor? There must be some metal on the bag, a zipper or something.’
There was a silence.
‘It’ll be damn tricky,’ someone said.
‘But we can do it,’ Leonardo Castrucci concluded firmly. ‘And you must do me the honour of riding in the lead machine with me,
dottore
.’
Zen opened his mouth in horror, but no sound emerged.
*
He sat gripping the metal frame of the seat with both hands as if his life depended on it. If only it had! Zen had never felt so frightened in his life, even on the rare occasions when he had had to face armed criminals. Even at its worst, that fear was natural. This experience was altogether different, a nebulous, visceral terror, triumphantly irrational. In vain he invoked statistics indicating that people who did this every day of their working lives were nevertheless in more danger driving to the airport than they ever were once aloft.
The only saving grace was that the violent juddering of the helicopter disguised his own trembling, just as the roar of the engine hid his involuntary moans and cries. He looked past the hunched figure of Leonardo Castrucci at the dark shape of the other helicopter, hovering stationary a hundred metres away to the south. Although the snow had thickened to a pointillist pall which made the operation yet more difficult and hazardous, it at least ensured that the search could be conducted in perfect secrecy. Potential spies on the few inhabited islands in this part of the lagoon might be able to hear the distant noise of the helicopters, but with visibility down to a few hundred metres there was no danger of them being seen.
For the searchers, the snow was just one more in a series of factors stacking the odds against them. The powerful searchlight attached to the bow of each machine was trained down, creating a cone of light in which the puffy flakes swam like microbes under a microscope. Above the open hatch in the floor of the helicopter, the co-pilot stood ready to raise or lower the metal cable wound around a hoist. At the other end, the third member of the crew dangled from a body harness among the shrubbery, searching the foliage with an alloy pole held in his gloved hands.
‘Go!’ said a voice in the headset clamped to Zen’s ears.
Castrucci eased the machine forward.
‘Stop!’ said the voice.
And there they hung, rotors whirling, trapped in a mindless hell of noise and turbulence while the man on the hoist searched the next patch of ground. Zen glanced nervously at the man in the pilot’s seat beside him. Not the least part of his torment was the sense that Leonardo Castrucci did not normally do this sort of thing any longer, but felt obligated to put on a show to impress his guest. It had been a matter of nods and winks, exchanged glances and unspoken words between the younger pilots. It would be just his luck to get himself killed by some superannuated ace trying to show off. Perhaps Cristiana would end up the same way, with Dal Maschio trying too hard to impress the crowd at some election rally somewhere. The thought seemed oddly comforting.
‘Go! Stop!’
A large-scale chart of the island had been photocopied and ruled out in strips running north-south, which the two machines were sweeping alternately. Castrucci had calculated that the search would take about five hours, but it was becoming clear that it would require far longer than that. Indeed, it seemed increasingly unlikely that they would be able complete the operation before the darkness closed in and made it impossible.
‘Go! Stop!’
For Aurelio Zen, every minute seemed an hour, each hour an eternity of living hell. He had always been afraid of flying, paralysed and stupefied by the sense of the emptiness beneath. So far in his professional life he had mostly managed to avoid travelling by air, but that morning he had totally failed to see the trap until it was too late. The men of the airborne section had naturally taken it for granted that Zen would wish to be present during the search he had instigated, and Zen had not dared to risk dissipating the
esprit de corps
he had so painstakingly created. As he was led to his doom, he had prayed that helicopters provided a different flying experience from other aircraft.
‘Go! Stop!’
It was different all right. It was much, much worse than he had ever imagined possible. The lurches and jolts which filled him with panic on ordinary planes, the mysterious and alarming noises whose significance he pondered endlessly, were all intensified a hundred times, and without the slightest remission.
‘Go! Stop!’
He looked out of the window, trying in vain to locate the other machine. Until now they had been moving at roughly the same rate along their notional strips of territory, but now the blue-and-white hull bearing the word POLIZIA and the identification number BN409 was nowhere to be seen. He was about to say something to Leonardo Castrucci when the intercom crackled into life. This time it was a different voice.
‘We’ve found something.’
Castrucci banged the controls in frustration, tilting the whole machine violently to port. The co-pilot grabbed the hoist to prevent himself tumbling out of the open hatch, there was a shriek from the man on the cable below, and Zen found himself mumbling an urgent prayer to the Virgin. Having got the machine back on an even keel, Castrucci vented his anger at his subordinate.
‘For Christ’s sake, Satriani! How many times do I have to tell you to use the proper call-up procedure! You’re not phoning your mistress, you know.’
After an icy silence, the intercom hissed again.
‘Bologna Napoli four zero nine calling Cagliari Perugia five seven seven. Come in, please.’
‘Receiving you, Bologna Napoli four zero nine.’
‘We’ve found something.’
Zen switched on his microphone.
‘Is it the bag?’ he demanded eagerly.
There was a brief crackly silence.
‘No, not the bag.’
‘What then?’ demanded Castrucci irritably.
‘The man on the hoist reports …’
The voice broke off.
‘Well?’ snapped Castrucci.
‘He says he’s found a skeleton.’
Without even realizing it, Zen had tensed up with expectation. Now his whole frame slumped despondently.
‘This island was used as a dumping ground for all the cemeteries of Venice,’ he told the distant pilot. ‘Nothing could be less surprising than to find a skeleton.’
‘This one’s wearing a suit.’
Zen stared straight ahead at the grey, wintry sky.
‘A suit?’ he breathed into the microphone.
‘And it’s standing upright.’
*
The discovery of the heroin came almost as an afterthought. The corpse had been removed by then, after being photographed from every conceivable angle. At first they tried to transfer it to a stretcher in one piece, but the moment they disturbed it the whole thing fell to the ground in a dismal heap. After that it was a question of trying to pick up all the pieces. Some of them still had portions of gristle and flesh attached to them, and the skull and scalp were more or less intact. Quite a lot of clothing was also recovered. They bundled the whole lot into a body bag and hoisted it into one of the helicopters to be flown back to the city.
Aurelio Zen went with it, and thus missed the moment when a scene-of-crime man doing a routine sweep of the area stumbled over the canvas bag a few metres away from the bramble bush across which the body had been lying. By the time the news reached him at the Questura, its significance had been overtaken by events to such an extent that his initial reaction was one of irritation. Another complication he would willingly have done without!
After a moment’s thought he called the switchboard and asked to be put through to Aldo Valentini. The Ferrarese was not at home, but a woman who answered the phone volunteered the information that the family were lunching with their in-laws. Zen dialled the number which she gave him and waited in some trepidation for Valentini’s reaction. It soon turned out that he need not have worried.
‘Aurelio!
Ciao
! What’s going on?’
‘We’ve got a bit of a crisis I’m afraid. I’m sorry to disturb you, but it’s urgent.’
Valentini’s voice dropped to a whisper.
‘You mean I get to get out of here?’
Zen laughed with genuine relief.
‘I thought you would bite my head off for ruining your Sunday!’
‘My Sunday is already comprehensively ruined, courtesy of my brother-in-law. If you can give me a cast-iron excuse for leaving, you’ve got a friend for life.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Rovigo. Where the relative in question resides.’
‘I’ll have a helicopter there in half an hour.’
‘A
helicopter
?’
‘Like I said, this is urgent. I’ll call back later with details of the pick-up.’
He hung up and immediately dialled another number. There was a long pause before the connection was made, another before anyone answered, and when the reply came it made no sense to Zen.
‘Is that you, Ellen?’ he asked tentatively.
A burst of incomprehensible verbiage followed. He was just about to hang up when he heard a familiar voice speaking broken Italian.
‘Aurelio? What’s going on? Do you know what time it is?’
‘This can’t wait, Ellen.’
‘Five in the goddamn morning!
Sunday
morning!’
‘I think we’ve found him.’
As in their earlier conversation, every pause seemed disturbing because of the acoustic flatness caused by the satellite equipment switching the circuits to more profitable use. It was as if the line had gone dead, yet the moment he spoke again the connection instantly resumed. The quality of silence was evidently meaningless in electronic terms.
‘I’m going to need his dental and medical records and anything else you can lay hands on which might assist in the identification of the remains,’ Zen continued. ‘Ideally a DNA profile, if one exists. Get on to this lawyer about it. What’s his name? Bill?’
‘That’s who you just spoke to.’
‘I’m so happy for you,’ Zen replied nastily. ‘He sounds a real fire-eater.’
He lowered his voice.
‘But listen,
cara
. Tell him to keep this under wraps until further notice, all right? It looks as though there may be some powerful players involved, and my position is already extremely delicate.’
Ellen spoke distantly in English. A disgruntled but incisive male voice replied. Zen didn’t understand a single word the man said, but he took an instant dislike to him.
‘Do you have a fax number?’ Ellen asked in Italian.
Zen consulted the internal directory and dictated the number to her.
‘Bill wants to ask a few questions,’ she told him.
There was a brief exchange in English off-stage before Ellen returned to translate.
‘Is he dead?’
Zen tried to remember what Ellen looked like in bed. All he could call to mind were her nipples, large and dark and surprisingly insensitive, judging by how hard she liked them tweaked.
‘The person we found is certainly dead. Very dead.’
Another off-stage buzz while this was translated for Bill’s benefit.
‘Where was the body found?’ Ellen asked in Italian.
‘On an island in the lagoon.’
More whispering, then Ellen’s translation.
‘Have you any idea what happened and who is responsible?’
Zen glanced at the window. It was no longer snowing, but the sagging sky looked ready to burst anew at any moment.
‘Nothing worth discussing at this stage. But if the case is going to break, it’ll do so in the next forty-eight hours. Until then I need a free hand. That means a press blackout and no interference from the family.’
Ellen duly translated. There was a pause, then a brief male response.
‘Bill agrees,’ said Ellen.