At first it looked as though the clouds which had hidden the sun for most of the week had fallen to earth like a collapsed parachute, covering every surface with a billowy white mantle. The next moment, shivering at the bedroom window as he clipped back the internal shutters, Zen thought vaguely of the aqua alta. It was only when he became aware of the intense cold streaming in through the gap between window and frame that he realized that it was snow. A sprinkling of fat flakes was still tumbling down from the thick grey sky. Every aspect of roofs and gardens, pavements and bridges, had been rethought. Only the water, immune by its very nature to this form of inundation, remained untouched.
He glanced back towards the empty bed, its sheets and covers decorously unruffled. Although he had stayed up till well after midnight, Cristiana had not shown up. He tried to persuade himself that this was all for the best in the long run. By standing him up, she had evened the score and demonstrated that she was not someone to be trifled with. Next time they could meet as equals, with nothing to prove to each other. As long as there was a next time, of course.
He dressed hurriedly, dispensing with a shower, and made his way downstairs, stiff with cold. The primitive central heating system only operated on the first floor, and as it did not have a timer it had to be switched on manually each morning. If he had known it was going to freeze, he might have risked the wrath of his mother’s parsimonious household gods and left the thing on all night. As it was, there was nothing to do but put on his overcoat and hold his fingers under the warm water from the tap to unjam the muscles.
Having assembled the coffee machine and put it on the flame, he returned to the living room and picked up the phone. Despite the day and the hour, or perhaps because of them, the Questura answered almost immediately. Zen identified himself and asked to be connected to the nearest airborne section. This turned out to be situated in the international airport at Tessera, on the shores of the lagoon just outside Mestre. Zen huddled miserably on the sofa while the necessary connections were made. He had never felt so cold in his life. He recalled that first flurry of snow during his encounter with Daniele Trevisan, and then the old man’s bizarre behaviour, the way he had mistaken Zen for his father, and his father’s disappearance in the icy wastes of Russia so many years ago…
It was several minutes before the duty officer at Tessera responded, and several more before Zen could impress on him the nature and urgency of the task before them. By then, the entire house was filled with a horrible stench compounded of burning coffee and melted rubber. Zen slammed the phone down and ran into the kitchen to find the caffettiera glowing red-hot at the base and emitting clouds of nauseating black smoke. Having warmed his hands under the running water, he had evidently forgotten to put any in the machine.
He threw the windows wide open to air the place out. Snowflakes melted damply on his eyes and lips in frigid mockery of the caresses he had been denied the night before. He ran cold water on the coffee maker, but it had fused up solid and was evidently past repair. With a sigh of disgust he tossed it into the canal at the back of the house and returned to the living room, where he phoned Marco Paulon and made his excuses for not being able to come to lunch after all. Then he called the Questura again and arranged for a police launch to collect him from the Ponte Guglie in half an hour.
It must have been an illusion, but it seemed less cold outside the house than in. A solitary row of neat, closely spaced footprints was the only flaw on the glistening surface of the campo. They led back to a house two doors from the Morosinis. Signora Vivian, thought Zen automatically, a big raw-boned woman who ate like a horse, walked like a bird and had attended early Mass every Sunday since her first communion.
Zen set off down the alley to the Cannaregio, scuffing up heaps of downy snow with every step. The city was muffled and mute. Even the perpetual ostinato of water, the constant undercurrent of Venetian life, had ceased. Zen trudged on towards the Guglie bridge, where he found a cafe open. He ordered an espresso with a shot of grappa on the side, on account of the cold, and scanned the headlines in La Stampa. A leading industrialist had committed suicide rather than answer questions about alleged fiscal irregularities. A judge claimed that ‘an unholy alliance’ of the Mafia and the Secret Service was responsible for recent bomb attacks in Florence, Rome and Milan. Four children had been killed and eleven critically injured by a mortar attack on a school in Bosnia. Neo-Nazis had kicked a black teenager to death at a bus-stop in London. Milan were favourites for their local Derby with Juventus.
The snow had thickened by the time Zen left the bar. The police launch was already tied up by the water-steps at the foot of the bridge, the crew slapping their arms and stamping their feet in a vain attempt to keep warm. They didn’t much like having to turn out on Sunday, especially one when the weather was providing a sharp reminder of just how close the lagoon was to the glacial peaks of Austria and the frozen plains of Hungary. The personnel of the airborne section weren’t going to be that keen either, but that was just too bad. Time was of the essence. For Zen’s plan to work, the drug syndicate had to believe that Filippo Sfriso had been so shocked by the murder of Gavagnin that he changed his mind about trying to cheat them. They would of course want to believe it, which made matters easier, but for the scenario to be credible Sfriso would have to be able to deliver as soon as the gang contacted him on his release from custody the following day.
The launch cut a swathe through the grey waters of the Cannaregio, passing an almost empty vaporetto heading in the other direction. Once they were clear of the canal the helmsman opened up the throttle and the boat surged forward, flanking the dingy northern flanks of the city before bearing round towards Murano and the dredged channel to the airport. Although the sky was overcast, the air was clear enough to reveal the snowclad Dolomites over a hundred kilometres away to the north. With the wind chill it felt bitterly cold in the cockpit, but Zen stuck it out with the two crewmen as a matter of principle. By the time they rounded the bend leading up to the moorings outside the airport terminal his face felt as though it had turned to bone.
The police airborne unit was housed in a utilitarian block which had formed part of the original military airfield at Tessera, now being transformed to serve the needs of international tourism. As one of the specialized departments of the force, offering both glamour and higher pay, the airborne division attracted a different class of recruit from the general intake, and Zen was favourably impressed by the group of men to whom he was introduced by Leonardo Castrucci, the commanding officer. Unlike police drivers, whose reputation for reckless aggression was notorious, the flight crews had a reserved and dependable air.
Knowing that the success or failure of the enterprise depended to a large extent on the degree of dedication these men brought to it, Zen went out of his way to get them on his side. He greeted them one by one, asking where they were from and how they felt about being posted to this part of the country. Within five minutes, the natural resentment they felt about being hauled out of bed at eight o’clock on a freezing Sunday morning for a spot of compulsory overtime was forgotten in a sense of shared enterprise and professional pride.
‘Okay, lads,’ Zen said, stepping back to address them as a group for the first time. ‘We all know the frustrations of police work well enough. The jobs where the only people we can get our hands on are the poor bastards who never knew which end was up in the first place, while the ringleaders get off scot-free. The jobs left dangling because someone thought we didn’t have quite enough evidence to proceed, or because the outcome might have inconvenienced somebody else’s cousin’s aunt’s mother-in-law’s stepson.’
There were smiles and a stifled laugh. Zen nodded soberly.
‘Today, by contrast, we have a chance to achieve something real, solid and unequivocal.’
He pointed to the laminated map of the Provincia di Venezia which occupied most of the wall to his left.
‘There’s a gang of drug dealers operating in our territory, peddling heroin on the streets of our towns and cities. We can put each and every member of that gang behind bars for the next twenty years.’
He walked over to the map and pointed out an irregular sliver of white in the northern lagoon.
‘This is the island of Sant’Ariano, just a few kilometres east of here.’
There was no visible reaction from the group. Zen had already ascertained that none of them was from Venice. They did not know about Sant’Ariano’s sinister vocation, and he had no intention of enlightening them.
‘Somewhere on that island is a canvas bag containing three kilos of pure heroin with an estimated street value of half a billion lire. But its value to us is far greater. We know the identity of the gang’s courier, and he was agreed to deliver the drugs under our supervision.
We can draw the gang into an ambush, put them under surveillance, identify their base and smash the whole operation once and for all.’
He held up a monitory finger.
‘But time is pressing! We need to locate the drugs by this evening at the latest. The island is covered with dense scrub and shrubbery, and we have no idea whereabouts the bag is. To make matters worse, it will probably be at least partially covered by snow.’
Zen looked round at the four men, making eye contact with each in turn. He shrugged casually.
‘In short, I’m asking you to do a job which would normally take several hundred men a week, to do it in a few hours, in total secrecy, and in the middle of a blizzard.’
Smiles gradually replaced the crews’ initial look of apprehension. Zen held up his hands in a gesture of disclaimer.
‘I’m not a pilot!’ he exclaimed. ‘I simply have no idea what’s feasible and what’s not. What I do know is that the only way of locating that package in the time available, given the nature of the terrain, is to go in from the air. If you can’t do it, just say so. I won’t try and argue with you. I’ll just apologize for ruining your day off, go back to the city and tell my bosses that there’s nothing to be done. You must decide. The fate of the investigation is in your hands.’
He sat down and lit a cigarette, pointedly ignoring the others. After a moment’s silence, the pilots started to shuffle and glance uneasily at each other.
‘We’d need two machines,’ one of them said eventually.
‘We could go in low to scatter the snow,’ another put in.
‘It’s the vegetation that’ll be the problem.’
‘One man on a hoist with something to part the branches…’
‘Or a metal sensor? There must be some metal on the bag, a zipper or something.’
There was a silence.
‘It’ll be damn tricky,’ someone said.
‘But we can do it,’ Leonardo Castrucci concluded firmly. ‘And you must do me the honour of riding in the lead machine with me, dottore.’
Zen opened his mouth in horror, but no sound emerged.
He sat gripping the metal frame of the seat with both hands as if his life depended on it. If only it had! Zen had never felt so frightened in his life, even on the rare occasions when he had had to face armed criminals. Even at its worst, that fear was natural. This experience was altogether different, a nebulous, visceral terror, triumphantly irrational. In vain he invoked statistics indicating that people who did this every day of their working lives were nevertheless in more danger driving to the airport than they ever were once aloft.
The only saving grace was that the violent juddering of the helicopter disguised his own trembling, just as the roar of the engine hid his involuntary moans and cries. He looked past the hunched figure of Leonardo Castrucci at the dark shape of the other helicopter, hovering stationary a hundred metres away to the south. Although the snow had thickened to a pointillist pall which made the operation yet more difficult and hazardous, it at least ensured that the search could be conducted in perfect secrecy. Potential spies on the few inhabited islands in this part of the lagoon might be able to hear the distant noise of the helicopters, but with visibility down to a few hundred metres there was no danger of them being seen.
For the searchers, the snow was just one more in a series of factors stacking the odds against them. The powerful searchlight attached to the bow of each machine was trained down, creating a cone of light in which the puffy flakes swam like microbes under a microscope. Above the open hatch in the floor of the helicopter, the co-pilot stood ready to raise or lower the metal cable wound around a hoist. At the other end, the third member of the crew dangled from a body harness among the shrubbery, searching the foliage with an alloy pole held in his gloved hands.
‘Go!’ said a voice in the headset clamped to Zen’s ears.
Castrucci eased the machine forward.
‘Stop!’ said the voice.
And there they hung, rotors whirling, trapped in a mindless hell of noise and turbulence while the man on the hoist searched the next patch of ground. Zen glanced nervously at the man in the pilot’s seat beside him. Not the least part of his torment was the sense that Leonardo Castrucci did not normally do this sort of thing any longer, but felt obligated to put on a show to impress his guest. It had been a matter of nods and winks, exchanged glances and unspoken words between the younger pilots. It would be just his luck to get himself killed by some superannuated ace trying to show off. Perhaps Cristiana would end up the same way, with Dal Maschio trying too hard to impress the crowd at some election rally somewhere. The thought seemed oddly comforting.
‘Go! Stop!’
A large-scale chart of the island had been photocopied and ruled out in strips running north-south, which the two machines were sweeping alternately. Castrucci had calculated that the search would take about five hours, but it was becoming clear that it would require far longer than that. Indeed, it seemed increasingly unlikely that they would be able complete the operation before the darkness closed in and made it impossible.
‘Go! Stop!’
For Aurelio Zen, every minute seemed an hour, each hour an eternity of living hell. He had always been afraid of flying, paralysed and stupefied by the sense of the emptiness beneath. So far in his professional life he had mostly managed to avoid travelling by air, but that morning he had totally failed to see the trap until it was too late. The men of the airborne section had naturally taken it for granted that Zen would wish to be present during the search he had instigated, and Zen had not dared to risk dissipating the esprit de corps he had so painstakingly created. As he was led to his doom, he had prayed that helicopters provided a different flying experience from other aircraft.