‘Do I look like someone who has a lawyer on call? I’m just a poor fisherman.’
‘Hardly poor, and not just a fisherman. Otherwise you wouldn’t be needing a lawyer.’
Zen looked up at the ceiling.
‘Let me suggest a few names. How about Carlo Berengo Gorin, for example? They say he’s very good.’
He glanced back at Sfriso’s face as he spoke Gorin’s name. There was no flicker of recognition.
‘Anyone you like,’ muttered Sfriso. ‘It’s all the same to me.’
Zen smiled and nodded.
‘ Bravo. That was the right answer.’ He offered Sfriso a cigarette.
‘I think we can do business,’ he said languidly. ‘Are you interested?’
Filippo Sfriso stared at the packet of Nazionali for a long time. Then he prised one loose and put it between his lips, nodding slowly.
At nine o’clock that night, Aurelio Zen called Marcello Mamoli at his home on the fashionable stretch of the Zattere, near the Santo Spirito church. Before doing so he tried Cristiana once again, but there was still no reply. Mamoli, on the other hand, answered almost immediately.
‘Well?’
‘This is Aurelio Zen phoning from the Questura, signor giudice. I have taken Filippo Sfriso’s statement.’
In the distance he could hear the sounds of the meal from which the magistrate had been summoned by the donna di servizio who had answered the phone.
‘Is this really so urgent that you must disturb me during dinner?’ demanded Mamoli.
‘I wouldn’t have done so otherwise,’ Zen retorted.
He himself had not yet had a chance to eat anything.
‘A copy of the full statement will be with you tomorrow, signor giudice, but I’ll summarize the main points and outline the action I propose to take.’
‘Please be brief. My guests are waiting for me.’
Zen mouthed a silent obscenity at the phone.
‘The Sfriso brothers were involved in a drug smuggling operation for a syndicate based in Mestre,’ he said out loud. ‘They would be given the name, description and ETA of the carrier, typically an oil tanker or a bulk freighter bound for Marghera. The drop took place at a prearranged point out at sea. The package was heaved over the side with a float on it, and the Sfrisos came up in their fishing boat and hauled it in. Some time later — it might be days or weeks — they were phoned with instructions about passing on the packages.’
Mamoli grunted.
‘The Sfrisos acted as a cut-out for the gang. Thanks to them, there was no direct link between the smuggling and distribution ends of the operation, thus limiting any damage due to arrests or tip-offs. The ship was clean if it was searched on arrival, and the drugs were only handed over when they were needed for immediate sale. Naturally it depended on the syndicate being able to trust the Sfrisos with large amounts of pure heroin, but this wasn’t a problem until…’
‘So where do we go from here?’ Mamoli cut in.
Zen took a deep breath.
‘To Sant’Ariano.’
‘Where?’
‘The ossuary island up in the northern lagoon where the dead from all the church cemeteries were dumped when the land was needed for…’
‘I am tolerably familiar with the history of the city,’ Marcello Mamoli replied icily. ‘What escapes me is the connection between Sant’Ariano and the affair we have been discussing.’
‘Sant’Ariano is where the Sfrisos stored the packages of heroin between receiving and delivering them. The place has such a sinister reputation that hardly anyone ever goes there. They dug a cache somewhere on the island and went to pick up fresh supplies as and when they needed them. One day last month Giacomo went to collect the remaining three kilos of one consignment. When he got back he was babbling madly about meeting a walking corpse and there was no sign of the packages. Filippo has searched Sant’Ariano many times since then. He located the site of the cache easily enough, but it was empty. The island is covered with dense undergrowth and Giacomo apparently got lost and abandoned the heroin somewhere in the middle of it.’
‘Just a minute,’ Mamoli told him. Lowering the receiver, he called to someone in the house, ‘Please start without me. I’ll be there in a minute.’
‘Hello?’ said Zen tentatively.
‘I’m here,’ Mamoli snapped back. ‘Please get to the point.’
Zen’s tone hardened.
‘The point? The point is that somewhere on Sant’Ariano there is a canvas bag containing three kilos of heroin. If we can recover it, we can set up a meeting, lure the gang into a trap and smash the whole operation. Sfriso has agreed to co-operate.’
Mamoli grunted.
‘Why don’t we just substitute another package? Or use a dummy?’
‘Each package is sealed and bar-coded to reveal any tampering. The contact man would spot the fake package at once. We could arrest him, but the others would get away and the…’
‘So what do you propose?’
‘I would like to order an immediate search of Sant’Ariano.’
‘Then do so, dottore.’
‘I have your authorization to proceed?’
‘Certainly. And now I must…’
‘By whatever means seem to me most appropriate?’
‘Of course. And now I really must get back to my guests. Good night, dottore.’
In the end, Zen decided to take the copy of Filippo Sfriso’s statement to the Procura in person. It meant a long detour on his way home, but he had nothing better to do. In fact the walk was just what he needed to think through the problem facing him, to weigh up the options open to him and perhaps even come to a decision. It was a fine night for walking. An abrasive, icy wind had dried and polished the town, making the stonework sparkle, the metal gleam and burnishing the air till it shone darkly. The tide was high, and the cribbed water in the small canals shuffled fretfully about.
Although Mamoli had given him a free hand, Zen knew that he would have to take the responsibility if anything went wrong. This seemed all too possible. Not only did he have to locate a small canvas bag on an island several thousand square metres in extent and entirely covered with impenetrable brush and scrub, but he had to do so without the gang knowing that any search had been made. Both Giacomo and Filippo Sfriso had told them on many occasions how and where the missing heroin had been mislaid. The gang had no doubt tried more than once to recover it themselves. If they learned that the police had instituted a full-scale search of Sant’Ariano, they certainly wouldn’t respond when Filippo Sfriso announced a few days later that Enzo Gavagnin’s fate had jogged his memory, he had located the stuff and when would they like to drop by and pick it up?
As he cut through the maze of back alleys between Santa Maria Formosa and the Fenice, Zen found himself shying away from the thought of what had happened to Gavagnin. The pathologist’s report had been faxed over from the hospital, and Zen was not likely to forget the details of the injuries inflicted on Gavagnin before he died, nor the phrase ‘the presence of a considerable quantity of excrement in the lungs and stomach’ under the heading Cause of Death.
That was true only in the sense that boats sank because of the presence of a considerable quantity of water in the hull. In reality, Enzo Gavagnin had been killed because of what Zen had said on the phone the other morning. He had been so eager to get even for Gavagnin’s slights that he had made up some story on the spur of the moment without even considering what the consequences might be. He had been as irresponsible as Todesco. Zen too had fired blind, and with fatal results.