‘Well, I mustn’t keep you from your work any longer, Aurelio. What’s bothering la contessa this time? Has she started seeing visions of her dead daughter again?’
‘It’s skeletons in the bedroom now,’ Zen replied.
Tommaso laughed and shook his head.
‘Poor old girl.’
They walked to the door together.
‘Does anyone know what actually happened to Rosetta Zulian?’ Zen asked as they stepped out into the covered alley.
‘She disappeared,’ Tommaso replied vaguely.
Zen nodded.
‘But no one seems to know how or when.’
‘Does it matter? It was all so long ago.’
‘Not for Ada,’ Zen insisted. ‘I’m sure she’s dreaming these ghostly intruders who are making her life a misery. But like all dreams, it must be a distortion of something real. The more I know about what actually happened, the easier it will be for me to sort out what’s going on.’
‘Sounds like a job for a psychiatrist, not a policeman,’ Tommaso Saoner commented dismissively.
He was about to turn away down a side alley when he suddenly paused and looked back at Zen, his glasses glinting in the gloom.
‘There’s someone who probably does know what happened, if anyone does,’ he said slowly.
‘Who’s that?’ demanded Zen.
Tommaso Saoner smiled knowingly.
‘Come along to the rally tomorrow night and I’ll introduce you. Campo Santa Margherita, seven o’clock.’
He slapped Zen’s shoulder jovially.
‘It’s wonderful to have you back in the city, Aurelio! Venice isn’t Venice without her sons. Until tomorrow!’
Aurelio Zen walked slowly home through the darkening streets. The routes leading to the railway station and the car parks were already packed with the human tide of commuters, students and tourists which washed into and out of the city every day, temporarily boosting the population to what it had been fifty years before and creating an illusory air of vitality. But once evening came the ebb set in, draining away this transient throng and revealing the desolate reality.
The thought of this diurnal tide reminded Zen of what Marco Paulon had said about the Durridge case: if anyone wished to kidnap Ivan Durridge from his island home, they could not have chosen a worse time. Marco remembered the day in question all too well. The low tide that afternoon had been exceptional, draining the lagoon to over a metre below its average level and stranding Paulon on a mudbank halfway to Murano.
‘I was stuck there for four hours in the pouring rain with a cargo of beans and salt cod. I’d been going that way for years, at all states of the tide, and never run aground. It rained so much I had to pump out the bilge three times, yet there wasn’t enough water outside to drown a butterfly! So when I heard on the news next morning that this American had been kidnapped, I thought to myself, I’d like to have the boat they used. You couldn’t have got within fifty metres of the island that afternoon!’
The memory of Marco’s words sparked a fugitive idea in Zen’s mind, something to do not with Durridge but with Ada Zulian. He tried in vain to corner it as it scurried about the fringes of his consciousness. And meanwhile he kept walking, veering to right and left without the slightest hesitation, unaware that a choice had even been made. It had all come back to him, that intimate, subconscious knowledge of the city built up over years of boyhood exploration, a whole decade of wandering through its intricately linked ramifications. Despite the span of time which had elapsed, virtually nothing of that urban fabric had changed. He thought of his conversation with l’onorevole, of the Burolo affair and the terrifying bleakness of the Sardinian landscape. There he had felt vulnerable, incompetent and exposed, totally out of his depth. This was just the opposite. He went on his way, secure and confident, enveloped by a city whose devious, introverted complexities were as familiar to him as the processes of his own mind.
Durridge, Zulian… What was the connection? Intruders, perhaps? But Ada Zulian’s poltergeists, if they had any existence outside her fears and fantasies, seemed completely gratuitous manifestations, devoid of any motive except mischievous mockery. Indeed, the great problem with believing in them at all, apart from Ada’s history of mental disturbance, was that it was impossible to see why anyone should go to so much trouble for so little purpose. Why waste your time scaring a solitary old lady when with the same skills you could make a fortune burgling one of the city’s more affluent residents?
But then why kidnap an American millionaire and fail to make a ransom demand? Perhaps Marco Paulon was right, and Durridge had simply staged a dramatic disappearance for reasons of his own. Certainly there was no indication that he had felt himself to be at risk. Although his home was quite literally a fortress, it could hardly have been less secure. The ‘octagons’, as they were known from their shape, were originally built to defend the three gaps in the sandbars which divide the lagoon from the open sea. Most were now in ruin, but one of those just inside the Porto di Malamocco had been bought in the fifties by an English eccentric who had completely renovated it.
Many rich people aspire to own islands, but an island in the Venetian lagoon, within sight and easy reach of the city, yet perfectly private, verdant and isolated, is a privilege reserved for very few. Ivan Durridge got his chance when the Englishwoman, old and ailing, sold her ottagono for a small fortune. Expecting some ostentatious pleasure pavilion, Zen had been surprised by what awaited him at the top of the metal ladder leading up the brick walling. The floor of the artificial island was now covered in trees, shrubs and plants artfully arranged to form a dense, seemingly natural garden.
In its midst stood the guardhouse, a long low structure of military severity which had been skilfully transformed into a residence retaining the essential characteristics of the original while suggesting something of the rustic pleasures of a country cottage. The only visible security precaution was a faded notice warning intruders to beware of the dog. Of the dog itself there was no sign, and judging by the condition of the notice it might well have departed along with the previous owner. Zen wandered idly about the property, inspired less by the sense that there was anything to be discovered than by the beauty of the spot and the need to spend some time there in order to justify putting Marco to the trouble of bringing him. He was standing on the lawn in front of the house, looking up at the ragged blue patch of sky visible through the encircling foliage, when a cry disturbed his reverie.
‘Hey!’
Zen had grown so accustomed to the peace and quiet that he started violently. The thought that he might not be alone on the island had never occurred to him. He looked round. At the corner of the house stood an elderly man dressed in baggy dark overalls.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded gruffly.
Zen lit a cigarette with elaborate nonchalance.
‘Well?’ the man demanded, walking across the lawn towards him. ‘This is private property.’
‘Police.’
The man’s expression of mute hostility did not change. His face was marked with a series of concentric wrinkles, like ripples on water.
‘And you are…?’ barked Zen.
‘Calderan, Franco.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Doing? I live here! I’m the gardener and caretaker. I worked for the English signora, then for the American.’
Zen sniffed sceptically, as though this were a transparent fiction.
‘Where were you the day your employer disappeared?’
The man frowned.
‘I’ve already made my statement.’
‘So make it again!’ snapped Zen. ‘Or are you afraid the two accounts won’t tally? Maybe you’ve forgotten whatever pack of lies you made up the first time?’
Franco Calderan stared down at the lawn, on whose flawlessly even surface were imprinted two parallel lines like skidmarks. He glared at Zen, as though he were responsible for this blemish.
‘I told them the truth! It was Tuesday, my day off. I rowed over to Alberoni and caught the bus to go and see my sister and her family, same as every week. They can vouch for me!’
Zen’s sneer indicated the value he ascribed to alibis which depended on the corroboration of the suspect’s relations.
‘Who knew that Tuesday was your day off?’
‘Nobody! Everybody!’
‘First you say one thing, then another! Why are you lying? Who are you trying to protect?’