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.’
Ada’s smile was still there, fixed in place as if by glue.
‘What an idea!’ she murmured.
‘But my arrival forced them to step up the pace. They had been counting on the fact that no one would bother to investigate your complaints very seriously. The police had a quick look around and put a man on the door to see whether anyone came or went. That didn’t bother your nephews, of course, since they were moving around by water. Given the state of the back canal here, they could only operate for an hour or so each side of high tide, but it gave them the run of the house, unobserved by anyone — although I caught a glimpse of them rowing home the night I arrived.
‘But once I took over the case Nanni and Vincenzo realized that they were going to have to change tactics. They attacked you physically for the first time, scratching your wrists with the carving knife. That’s why I put a guard inside the house. If I hadn’t, they would have returned the following night and repeated the attack, except this time the cuts would have been deeper. They might have used the evidence of your slashed wrists to demonstrate that you were once again suicidal, or they might have gone all the way and made sure that your next “suicide attempt” was successful.’
Shaking off Zen’s grip, Ada Zulian got to her feet.
‘This is preposterous and insulting nonsense! If you will not stop defaming my relations in this way, I must ask you to leave my house immediately.’
‘How can you pretend that the earlier episodes had nothing to do with Nanni and Vincenzo? You know it was them. No other explanation makes any sense.’
Ada Zulian gave him a haughty look.
‘My daughter walked out of this house fifty years ago and has never been seen again. Does that make sense?’
Zen slapped his forehead.
‘For the love of God! If you imagined those other intrusions, how do you explain that each of them happened to coincide with the period when the canal giving on to the waterdoor happens to be navigable?’
Ada shrugged impatiently.
‘Perhaps it’s got something to do with the moon. That’s what controls the tides, isn’t it? I always feel a bit odd around full moon.’
‘Why didn’t you suffer from these hallucinations during the period when your nephews knew that there was a police guard in the house?’
Ada made a bored moue.
‘I really neither know nor care, Aurelio Battista. And now — if you’ve quite finished — I have various tasks which require my attention.’
Zen stared at her, breathing hard, trying to control his fury.
‘Don’t patronize me, contessa!’ he hissed. ‘My mother may have scrubbed your floors and dusted your furniture, but that doesn’t make me your drudge and factotum, to be dismissed when my usefulness is at an end.’
He was gratified to see fear in her eyes, but she said nothing more. Making one last effort, he cupped his hands together, imploring her understanding.
‘If you don’t back me in this, I shall have to let your nephews go.’
Ada sniffed.
‘Do you expect me to perjure myself just to further your career?’