He slumped down in his chair again. He had just lit another cigarette when the phone began to ring again. He sat staring tight-lipped at the table. The phone rang eleven times before stopping.
‘Persistent,’ commented Cristiana when the noise finally stopped.
As though in response, the phone started trilling again. This time it rang fifteen times.
‘Not to say obstinate,’ Cristiana added.
After a brief pause, shrill bursts of ringing jarred the silence once again. Cristiana stood up.
‘May I?’
Zen breathed a long sigh. He waved at the open doorway. Cristiana marched into the living room and lifted the receiver.
‘Yes? Who? No, there’s no one here by that name.’
She slammed the phone down and unplugged the cord from the socket. When she straightened up again, Zen was standing behind her. He caught hold of her shoulders, turned her towards him and kissed her on the mouth. They measured each other with their eyes in a final brief interval of lucidity, then blindly collided again.
It was the strangeness that woke him, the presence of another body in that bed where he had always slept alone, and which was not quite wide enough for two. He closed his eyes and lay back on the pillow, smiling at some memory from the night before. The sheets were still damp with sweat, the whole bed perfumed with evocative scents.
Cristiana shifted slightly in her sleep, as though the memories which were keeping Zen awake had reached into her dreams too. And indeed it might all have been a dream, so unlikely did it seem in the chill darkness of — was it really only ten to six? He put his watch back on the bedside table and rolled over, seeking the precise position which would enable him to complete the jigsaw of sleep.
But whichever way he turned, images of Cristiana darted through his mind like silver fish. All the other women in his life had made him feel that however much they seemed to be enjoying themselves in bed, in the end they were only doing him a favour. With Cristiana, it had been abundantly clear from that very first kiss that everything she did was done for her own pleasure as well as his. She displayed an eager greed for caresses of all kinds, an inclusive sensuality which had brought a succession of climaxes in its wake and raised Zen to a state of exaltation he had never experienced before.
Shying away from the memory of some of the things he had said and done, he sat up in bed. Sleep was clearly out of the question. He had a momentary urge to grasp Cristiana’s plump white shoulder, to turn her over and start feeding on her breasts and belly. Instead, he forced himself to turn back the covers and stand up. What had happened had happened, but to start acting like an adolescent in heat at his age, and at this time in the morning, would be ridiculous.
He walked quickly across the icy tiles to the bathroom. But even beneath the tepid spray of the shower, thoughts of Cristiana’s languorous, compliant body gave him no peace. It occurred to him for the first time that he might be making a complete fool of himself. This prospect finally succeeded in calming the tumult in his loins. He had no precise idea what sort of humiliation might be in store for him, only a lurking sense that he was vulnerable in various ways.
He dressed and went downstairs to make coffee. By the brutal light of the bare bulb in the kitchen, love’s sweet dream faded still further. What had they done? What were they going to do? Above all, what were they going to say to one another? The prospect of greeting Cristiana, of having to sit down and make small talk, filled Zen with limitless dread. The conversation of their bodies the night before had been as effortless and natural as the soft declension of surf on a beach, but to convert that exchange into the hard currency of language and everyday life seemed a daunting prospect.
The coffee gurgled and gushed. He poured himself a cup which fumed in the chill air and scribbled a note to Cristiana, explaining that he had had to go in to work early and would ring her later that morning. Deciding that this looked cold and bureaucratic, he tore it up and wrote another, attempting to explain the riot of emotions in his heart. That ended up in the bin too. The note he eventually left on the table owed more to the first draft than the second, but with several allusions to his feelings about what had happened the previous night.
Outside, the darkness was still untouched by signs of dawn. It was much colder than it had been the day before, a still, rigid cold. There was hardly a breath of wind. The only sounds were the lapping of water and the cries of gulls circling high above. Zen set off walking fast, burning off the energy surging through his body. Thinking about his youth, as he had often done in the past few days, it seemed like a film overlaid with grandiose gushing music which flooded every banal scene with emotion and made it seem transcendent and unique. Being older, he thought, meant living the same film without the music.
Now, though, the soundtrack was back in place. He felt strong and vigorous, invincible and serene. The doubts and difficulties which had beset him earlier now seemed trivial. A woman had offered herself to him and he had satisfied both her and himself. What could touch him? He kept up a cracking pace all the way to Santa Maria Formosa, his breath blossoming thickly in the frigid air. He passed a street-sweeper mending his broom, a convocation of feral cats, a somnambulant barman setting out his tables, a kid of eighteen folding back the tarpaulin over a moored boat. All seemed to eye him with admiration and envy, waving him past, wishing him well.
At that hour, the isolated palazzo on the San Lorenzo canal which housed the Questura di Venezia was to all appearances as deserted as the rest of the city. Zen walked upstairs to the first floor, and then along the passage to the door marked GAVAGNIN — RUZZA — CASTELLARO. Inside, a solitary fly buzzed in feeble bursts against the window whose glass was bleary with the first hints of dawn. Enzo Gavagnin’s territory was immediately discernible by the extent of the damage surrounding it. The wastebin was dented, the ashtray overflowing, the scar and burn marks on the surface of the desk that much more numerous and profound, the litter of memos, notes and files on top of it that much messier and more impenetrable.
Zen turned over the papers one by one. He waded through reports of drug dealers, suppliers, users and informers. He searched through the desk drawers and the filing cabinet in the corner of the room, all without learning anything other than he had already guessed: that Enzo Gavagnin was a professionally respected officer with a heavy workload and a wide range of contacts in both the force and the local underworld. All this was to be expected. After half an hour, Zen had found nothing to justify his suspicions even to himself, let alone a cynical superior.
At any other time this might have discouraged him, but that morning he was invulnerable to setbacks. Lighting his first cigarette of the day, he thought it through again. He was pretty sure that the litter on the desk would yield nothing. It was too ephemeral, too heterogenous and too likely to be dispersed by a careless or over-zealous cleaner. A cleverer man than Gavagnin, calculating on precisely such an assumption, might have decided that this made it the perfect place to hide a sensitive document. But Gavagnin was not clever, at least not in that way. If he had something to hide, he would hide it, and not in plain view.
What would he be hiding? That was the key. If Zen knew what he was looking for, he would know where to look. If Filippo Sfriso’s allegations were true, Gavagnin would need to be able to pass on news, to give and receive instructions. That meant a phone number, perhaps more than one. Where would such a man keep them?
Zen closed his eyes and concentrated, creating a mental hologram of Enzo Gavagnin, an image he could revolve slowly in his consciousness, seeking the answer to his problem. Who was Gavagnin? A swaggering, unscrupulous fixer, energetic and resourceful, but utterly devoid of any moral sense. Someone incapable of imagining that anything he did could be wrong, even though he knew it was illegal. Someone who would not be troubled by this contradiction. Someone above suspicion in his own eyes.
In short, a mamma’s boy. Mothers fell in love with their sons when their husbands proved unfaithful, Zen believed. This explained his own predicament, his need to be confirmed by the women in his life, and his excessive response when — as last night — this occurred. For Signora Zen had never had the chance to grow disillusioned with her husband, who had disappeared in Russia, an immortal hero whom his son could never hope to supplant. Gavagnin, on the other hand, having been bathed in the river of maternal adoration, felt himself immune to the contingencies of everyday life. Like Achilles, however, he might be wrong about that.
Zen had already noticed the phone book on his first search, in the bottom drawer of Gavagnin’s desk. It was two years out of date, lacked a cover and started midway through the names beginning with C. Zen picked it up and fingered the flimsy pages. There were various marginal marks and underscorings, but Zen was looking for something simpler, something gross and blatant, something meant. And towards the middle of the book he found it, in an advertising insert printed in colour on shiny paper, easy to find. Beneath a picture of a leather armchair, three numbers had been noted down in a jerky handwriting which Zen recognized from other documents written by Gavagnin.
The numbers made no sense in themselves, which merely strengthened Zen’s conviction that he had found what he was looking for. They each consisted of nine digits, the first four written separately, as though they were area codes. Zen picked up the phone and dialled the first number, but got only a continuous tone indicating that no such connection existed. He tried the other two numbers with the same result.
Taking a blank sheet of paper from the top drawer, Zen copied out the three numbers and sat staring at them for some time. Then he picked up the phone and tried dialling the digits without the initial zero. That didn’t work either, nor did dialling just the last five digits, ignoring the prefix. He lit another cigarette and pored over the sequence of numbers once more. After some time, he lifted the receiver and dialled once more, adding the final digit of the prefix to the five which followed. This time the number rang.
There was no answer. Zen depressed the receiver and tried the same method with the next series of digits. This time he was connected to an answering machine.
‘Leave your message after the tone,’ recited a recorded male voice with a strong Veneto accent.
Zen hung up and tried the last number. The response was immediate.
‘Well?’ demanded an irascible male voice.
Zen had been planning to say he’d got a wrong number, but he had a sudden, gleeful inspiration.
‘This is Enzo,’ he said in an approximation of Gavagnin’s guttural tones.
‘Why are you calling at this time in the morning, for fuck’s sake?’
On any other day, Zen would have hung up at that point. He already had the confirmation he needed, and to proceed further might ruin everything, if the man the other end realized that he was not in fact Gavagnin. But he was feeling too good to stop. Besides, what could go wrong on such a morning? His luck was in. He was on a roll.
‘Filippo has agreed to co-operate,’ he murmured.
There was a long silence.
‘That’s not what you told us yesterday,’ the man replied with a new edge.
‘This happened last night. After I told him that his mother would be the next to have an accident.’
This time the silence seemed to last for ever.
‘You exceeded your instructions,’ said the voice. ‘You should have consulted us.’
Zen said nothing.
‘Do you have the goods?’ the man asked.
‘I know where they are,’ replied Zen, and replaced the receiver.
He folded up the paper with numbers and put it in his pocket, then replaced the directory in the drawer. That should give Gavagnin something to think about, he thought as he walked upstairs with a mischievous smile.
His own office was as he had left it the day before, except that the wire tray contained a buff memorandum from the Forensic laboratory with the results of the fingerprint tests on the knife used to attack Ada Zulian. As he had expected, the only prints on the knife — apart from a partial of Zen’s thumb on the base of the handle — were identical to those taken from the contessa herself.
Zen dropped the memo into the file he had opened on the case. Although it told him nothing he did not already know, it was a timely reminder that he had better cover his tracks by devoting some time and energy to the investigation which was the notional reason for his presence in the city. He prowled about the office, trying to think of a way to force the issue.
A sudden racket drew him to the window. In a barge moored on the opposite bank of the canal, a man was stripping the bark off a tree trunk with a chain-saw. As Zen watched, he shaped the end to a rough point and then manoeuvred the stake into position with a rope before ramming it down into the mud with a pile-driver mounted in the bow of the barge. Within minutes, the mooring pole was in place. The whole city was constructed on a subterranean forest of such piles, Zen recalled, laid down centuries ago to stabilize the mudbanks of the lagoon and make them habitable.
For some reason the thought triggered a surge of panic, an intolerable sense of constriction, asphyxiation and dread. His earlier elation was abruptly banished as though it had never been. A moment before he had been thinking about walking to the Bar dei Greci for some well-earned breakfast, buoyed by the knowledge of a job well done and a rival elegantly dished. Now all that had been swept away by an overwhelming need to get out, to escape from this wasteland of water and stone, and feel solid ground beneath his feet again. Similar attacks of claustrophobia may well have been one of the factors which had driven earlier generations of Venetians to colonize substantial stretches of the Mediterranean coastline. Aurelio Zen’s solution was less ambitious but just as effective.