He walked down to the Rialto bridge and made his way to Campo San Luca, where the dwindling band of young Venetians hang out of an evening. The main throng had already departed, but a number of locali remained open to serve the hard core. Zen chose the one which seemed to be pandering least to the prevailing fashion for American-style food and drink, and ordered a pizza and a draught beer. While he waited to be served, he lit a cigarette to calm his hunger pains and tried to ignore the attention-seeking clientele and concentrate on his immediate problems.
Although he recognized his responsibility for Gavagnin’s death, he didn’t feel any exaggerated sense of remorse. That would have been pointless in any case. All he could do now was to try and bring the killers themselves to justice. They had murdered Gavagnin because they believed he knew where the cache of heroin was hidden. That proved that they had not managed to locate it themselves. If Zen could succeed where they had failed, he could consign the whole gang to the pozzo nero of the prison system and — in his own mind at least — be quits. But how to find Giacomo’s missing bag in the first place?
Assuming that the required manpower was available, such searches were normally a relatively simple matter: you organized a line of men and walked them across the ground. Such methods were clearly impossible on the terrain in question. Zen had been to Sant’Ariano once, forty years before, on a dare with Tommaso. They’d taken a small skiff belonging to the Saoner family and rowed all the way, up beyond Burano and Torcello, past abandoned farms and hunting lodges, on towards the fringes of the laguna morta. He had never forgotten the silence of those swampy wastelands, the sense of solitude and desolation.
The Germans had mounted an anti-aircraft battery on the island during the closing months of the war, so it was not quite as untouched as it would have been five years earlier, or as it would be now that the undergrowth had reclaimed the clearing and access road which had been made. Nevertheless, both he and Tommaso had been overwhelmed by the aura of the place. It was not only the thought of the unknown, uncountable dead whose remains had been tipped there like so much rubbish, thousands and thousands of bones and skulls, a whole hillock of them held in by a retaining wall. Almost as frightening as those reminders of mortality had been the evidence of life: a profusion of withered, gnarled, spiny plants and shrubs which sprouted from that sterile desert, and above all the host of rodents and reptiles which scuttled and slithered and nested amongst the bones.
The arrival of the waiter with Zen’s order banished these memories. But as he wolfed down the pizza, scalding his tongue in the process, he realized that a conventional search of Sant’Ariano was out of the question. The only way it could be made to work would be by giving each man a machete and a chain-saw and felling every tree, shrub and bush on the island. They might find the heroin, but they wouldn’t catch the gang. What he needed was a totally different approach, something quick, effective and unobtrusive. Unfortunately he had a gnawing suspicion that it didn’t exist.
The pizza was a sad imitation of the real thing, but it filled his stomach. He was just lighting a cigarette to go with the rest of his beer when Cristiana Morosini walked in. She was with three other women, and did not notice Zen at his table in a corner at the back. He drew hard on his cigarette and tried to think what to do. Cristiana was bound to catch sight of him sooner or later, and if he hadn’t greeted her by then she would be even more annoyed with him than she already was. That Zen really knows how to treat a woman: first he stands her up, then he cuts her dead.
In the event the dilemma was solved for him almost immediately. Cristiana and one of the other women got up and walked towards Zen’s table, heading for the toilets at the back of the premises. When she saw him she hesitated an instant, then smiled coolly.
‘ Ciao, Aurelio.’
She turned to the other woman.
‘Be with you in a minute, Wanda.’
Zen stood up, gesturing embarrassedly.
‘I’ve been trying to phone you all afternoon…’
‘I was out.’
‘I’m dreadfully sorry about missing our appointment. Something unexpected came up suddenly, a dramatic development in the case I’m working on.’
Cristiana raised her eyebrows, whether in interest or scepticism it was hard to tell.
‘Not to worry,’ she replied. ‘I was busy myself, as it happens. Nando insisted on flying me down to Pellestrina for another photo opportunity. He’s confident of carrying the city itself so now he’s concentrating on the islands.’
She looked at him speculatively.
‘So has this dramatic development anything to do with the Durridge case?’
Zen shrugged awkwardly.
‘It’s not really something I can discuss in public.’
She met his look with one of her own.
‘I can’t just abandon my friends like that.’
‘Of course not. But I’m planning to stay up late anyway. There are one or two things I need to think over. If you want to stop by for a nightcap later…’
At that moment the woman called Wanda — who must be Cristiana’s sister-in-law, Zen realized — emerged from the toilets. Cristiana nodded lightly and turned away.
‘We’ll see,’ she said.
Zen walked slowly home, puzzling over the significance of Cristiana’s continuing intimacy with the Dal Maschio family. She might be separated from her husband, but she still evidently went out with his sister and came running when he snapped his fingers. Zen felt a scorch of indigestion in his gut, partly from eating too quickly and partly from jealousy. For a supposedly estranged wife, Cristiana seemed to be at her husband’s beck and call to an astonishing degree. He didn’t blame her for keeping on the right side of such a powerful man, but he did wonder where the limits of her compliance might lie.
Not that there was anything to complain about in this trip to Pellestrina, a bizarre community three kilometres long and a stone’s throw wide, built on a sandbank in the shadow of the murazzi, the massive sea defences erected by the Republic three hundred years earlier. Zen smiled, imagining how Dal Maschio would have worked that into his speech. ‘What these walls have been for three centuries, the Nuova Repubblica Veneta is today — a bulwark protecting our culture, our economy, our very homes, from being swept away by the storms of change and decay!’
In order to provide a suitable dramatic photo, Dal Maschio would no doubt have piloted his wife to Pellestrina in a helicopter owned by the company in which he was a partner. As a former air force ace, he would have been able to make a spectacular landing on some patch of grass or sand which looked too small to…
And then, in a flash, he saw the solution to the problem which had been obsessing him all evening! The way to locate the missing three kilos of heroin on Sant’Ariano was to go in vertically, not hacking through the scrub but dipping from the sky! He was so pleased by this revelation that he would have walked right past his own front door if he had not almost bumped into someone coming in the opposite direction.
‘Christ!’ the man screamed.
Zen peered at the dingy figure dressed in a military greatcoat over what looked like a pair of pyjamas. The cord he was holding in one hand gradually went slack as a dog bearing a marked resemblance to a mobile doormat hobbled into the ambit of the streetlight.
‘What on earth’s the matter?’ Zen demanded.
The man shook his head in confusion. His eyes were still dilated in terror.
‘I thought it was…’ he whispered hoarsely.
‘Thought it was who?’
Daniele Trevisan swallowed hard.
‘Someone else.’
Zen walked up to him.
‘Do you mean my father?’ he asked tonelessly.
Daniele Trevisan bit his lip and said nothing. As though in sympathy, his dog raised one leg and voided its bladder against the wall.
‘You mistook me for him the day I arrived,’ Zen reminded the old man gently.
Trevisan assumed a self-pitying expression.
‘I’m getting old,’ he whined. ‘I get things confused.’
A barbed wind whipped through the campo, spraying a fine white dust of snow in their faces.
‘Listen, Daniele,’ Zen said weightily, ‘my father is dead. Do you understand?’
To his amazement, the old man burst into peals of mocking laughter.
‘Understand?’ he cried. ‘Oh yes! Yes, I understand all right!’
Zen stared menacingly at him. Daniele Trevisan’s hilarity ended as abruptly as it had begun.
‘Of course,’ he muttered in a conciliatory tone. ‘Dead. To be sure.’