Read Online Dead Lagoon - 4 by Michael Dibdin - Free Book Online

Zen recognized it as the same one which the barman had been reading when he had had coffee with Aldo Valentini that morning. As he scanned the headline – THE OLD FOX FIGHTS FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE – he suddenly thought of a way to get access to the closed files on the Durridge case. But if the article was correct, he would have to move fast.
    ‘Antonio Puppin,’ Marco went on, answering the question Zen had ill-manneredly neglected to ask. ‘Went hunting out on the salt-marshes one day and never came back. When his boat turned up adrift everyone feared the worst, although the body was never found. Anyway, a couple of years later he got caught by the Carabinieri at a roadblock near Grado – this was back in the terrorist years, and they were asking for everyone’s papers …’
    They swept under a high arched bridge and emerged with startling suddenness into the open lagoon just beside the busy ferry piers at Fondamente Nove. ‘It turned out he’d done a bunk,’ Marco shouted above the roar of the engine he’d just gunned up to full revs. ‘He’d been working for the brother of an ex-girlfriend who ran a garage …’
    Zen stopped listening. He’d lost track of Marco’s story, let alone its bearing on the Durridge affair. That was how things were on the lagoon, where the hazy light and the pervasive instability of water defeated every attempt at clarity or precision, but also tempered the arrogance and aggression so prevalent on the mainland. This was what had formed him, he realized. This was the code he carried with him, the basic genetic circuits burned into his very being.
    In the extreme distance, to the right of the cemetery of San Michele, the remote islands of Torcello and Burano were visible as smudges on the horizon, the latter distinguishable by its drunkenly inclined bell tower.
    ‘What was that about someone seeing ghosts on Burano?’ he murmured to Marco.
    ‘Not on Burano. That’s where the guy’s from. Name’s Giacomo Sfriso. He and his brother have a drift trawler they take out to sea, as well as a lot of tidal nets. Both in their mid-twenties, and doing very well for themselves by all accounts. Very well indeed.’
    They rounded the mole of reclaimed land beyond the Arsenale, forming dry-docks and a sports field.
    ‘Then one evening last month Giacomo went out in a sandolo ,’ Marco continued. ‘No one paid any attention. Everyone knew the Sfriso boys worked round the clock. That’s how they got so rich, people said. Darkness fell and he didn’t come back, but still no one worried. Giacomo knew the lagoon like his own backyard.’
    He swung the tiller over, dipping the gunwale in the water and sending the boat careening round towards the large white mass of San Pietro.
    ‘Only when he finally got back to Burano, at five o’clock the next morning, still pitch dark out, he was babbling like a madman! No one could make out what the hell he was talking about. His brother Filippo called the doctor, who stuck a needle in him, but when he came around he was just as bad. Gibbering away about walking corpses and the like. Since when, according to my informants, that particular fish has been several centimetres short of its minimum landing length.’
    The boat slid under the elaborate iron footbridge connecting the island of San Pietro to the Arsenale. These were the hinderparts of the city, a dense mass of brick tenements formerly inhabited by the army of manual labourers employed in the dockyards. Nowhere were there more dead ends and fewer through routes, nowhere were the houses darker and more crowded, nowhere was the dialect thicker and more impenetrable. It was not for nothing that the Cathedral of San Pietro, symbol of Rome’s claims on the Republic, had been relegated to these inauspicious outskirts, while the Doges’ private chapel lorded it over the great Piazza.
    Marco brought the wherry alongside a quay opposite a slipway where a number of old vaporetti were drawn up awaiting