It was different all right. It was much, much worse than he had ever imagined possible. The lurches and jolts which filled him with panic on ordinary planes, the mysterious and alarming noises whose significance he pondered endlessly, were all intensified a hundred times, and without the slightest remission.
‘Go! Stop!’
He looked out of the window, trying in vain to locate the other machine. Until now they had been moving at roughly the same rate along their notional strips of territory, but now the blue-and-white hull bearing the word POLIZIA and the identification number BN409 was nowhere to be seen. He was about to say something to Leonardo Castrucci when the intercom crackled into life. This time it was a different voice.
‘We’ve found something.’
Castrucci banged the controls in frustration, tilting the whole machine violently to port. The co-pilot grabbed the hoist to prevent himself tumbling out of the open hatch, there was a shriek from the man on the cable below, and Zen found himself mumbling an urgent prayer to the Virgin. Having got the machine back on an even keel, Castrucci vented his anger at his subordinate.
‘For Christ’s sake, Satriani! How many times do I have to tell you to use the proper call-up procedure! You’re not phoning your mistress, you know.’
After an icy silence, the intercom hissed again.
‘Bologna Napoli four zero nine calling Cagliari Perugia five seven seven. Come in, please.’
‘Receiving you, Bologna Napoli four zero nine.’
‘We’ve found something.’
Zen switched on his microphone.
‘Is it the bag?’ he demanded eagerly.
There was a brief crackly silence.
‘No, not the bag.’
‘What then?’ demanded Castrucci irritably.
‘The man on the hoist reports…’
The voice broke off.
‘Well?’ snapped Castrucci.
‘He says he’s found a skeleton.’
Without even realizing it, Zen had tensed up with expectation. Now his whole frame slumped despondently.
‘This island was used as a dumping ground for all the cemeteries of Venice,’ he told the distant pilot. ‘Nothing could be less surprising than to find a skeleton.’
‘This one’s wearing a suit.’
Zen stared straight ahead at the grey, wintry sky.
‘A suit?’ he breathed into the microphone.
‘And it’s standing upright.’
The discovery of the heroin came almost as an afterthought. The corpse had been removed by then, after being photographed from every conceivable angle. At first they tried to transfer it to a stretcher in one piece, but the moment they disturbed it the whole thing fell to the ground in a dismal heap. After that it was a question of trying to pick up all the pieces. Some of them still had portions of gristle and flesh attached to them, and the skull and scalp were more or less intact. Quite a lot of clothing was also recovered. They bundled the whole lot into a body bag and hoisted it into one of the helicopters to be flown back to the city.
Aurelio Zen went with it, and thus missed the moment when a scene-of-crime man doing a routine sweep of the area stumbled over the canvas bag a few metres away from the bramble bush across which the body had been lying. By the time the news reached him at the Questura, its significance had been overtaken by events to such an extent that his initial reaction was one of irritation. Another complication he would willingly have done without!
After a moment’s thought he called the switchboard and asked to be put through to Aldo Valentini. The Ferrarese was not at home, but a woman who answered the phone volunteered the information that the family were lunching with their in-laws. Zen dialled the number which she gave him and waited in some trepidation for Valentini’s reaction. It soon turned out that he need not have worried.
‘Aurelio! Ciao! What’s going on?’
‘We’ve got a bit of a crisis I’m afraid. I’m sorry to disturb you, but it’s urgent.’
Valentini’s voice dropped to a whisper.
‘You mean I get to get out of here?’
Zen laughed with genuine relief.
‘I thought you would bite my head off for ruining your Sunday!’
‘My Sunday is already comprehensively ruined, courtesy of my brother-in-law. If you can give me a cast-iron excuse for leaving, you’ve got a friend for life.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Rovigo. Where the relative in question resides.’
‘I’ll have a helicopter there in half an hour.’
‘A helicopter?’
‘Like I said, this is urgent. I’ll call back later with details of the pick-up.’
He hung up and immediately dialled another number. There was a long pause before the connection was made, another before anyone answered, and when the reply came it made no sense to Zen.
‘Is that you, Ellen?’ he asked tentatively.
A burst of incomprehensible verbiage followed. He was just about to hang up when he heard a familiar voice speaking broken Italian.
‘Aurelio? What’s going on? Do you know what time it is?’
‘This can’t wait, Ellen.’
‘Five in the goddamn morning! Sunday morning!’
‘I think we’ve found him.’
As in their earlier conversation, every pause seemed disturbing because of the acoustic flatness caused by the satellite equipment switching the circuits to more profitable use. It was as if the line had gone dead, yet the moment he spoke again the connection instantly resumed. The quality of silence was evidently meaningless in electronic terms.
‘I’m going to need his dental and medical records and anything else you can lay hands on which might assist in the identification of the remains,’ Zen continued. ‘Ideally a DNA profile, if one exists. Get on to this lawyer about it. What’s his name? Bill?’