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

deputation of the other lunatics came to see the director to complain about her behaviour. “Excuse us, dottore, ” they said, “but you’ve go to do something – this woman’s driving us crazy!”’
    ‘I remember her sidling up to me in the street,’ said Cristiana, wiping her lips with her napkin, ‘and calling me by the dead girl’s name in that creepy way she has. It put the fear of God into me, I can tell you.’
    ‘“This woman’s driving us crazy!”’ Rosalba repeated in a tone of hilarity. ‘Mind you, she was always half-mad if you ask me. The Saoners used to rent a house from her at one time, and you know what? When she sent in her account, they found she had charged them for the paper and ink the bill was written with! Can you believe it?’
    ‘What happened to her daughter?’ asked Zen idly.
    Rosalba’s animation instantly evaporated. She shrugged.
    ‘No one really knows. It was during the last years of the war. So many terrible things happened.’
    She cleared the dishes and walked off to the kitchen. Zen looked up to find Cristiana’s big liquid eyes fixed on him like a pair of sea anemones. He barely had time to register their soft, tenacious presence before her mother returned.
    ‘Speaking of the Saoners, do you know what’s become of Tommaso?’ Zen asked as Rosalba served him a glistening leaf-shaped slab of sole.
    ‘The younger brother? Well, that’s the way I still think of him. He used to be your best friend, didn’t he?’
    A host of remembered images of his best friend rose briefly in Zen’s mind like a flock of disturbed pigeons.
    ‘We lost touch years ago. Is he married yet?’
    It was Cristiana who replied.
    ‘No, and he’s given up his job to concentrate on politics. He’s one of Nando’s right-hand men.’
    ‘I must look him up,’ mused Zen. ‘Does he still live in Calle del Magazen?’
    ‘You’re more likely to find him at party headquarters,’ said Cristiana tartly. ‘They’re there most of the time these days, with the municipal elections coming up. Nando has inspired them to give their all to the movement – especially to the female supporters.’
    ‘And how’s Giustiniana?’ asked Rosalba gaily. ‘Have some more sole, for goodness sake. You’re not eating!’

    Aurelio Zen made his way slowly through the hushed and vacant spaces of the town in a daze brought on by the wine he had drunk at lunch, the grappa he had allowed Rosalba to talk him into having afterwards, and not least by his encounter with Cristiana Morosini, whose white flesh had somehow become inextricably confused in his memories with that of the fresh tender sole which had melted in his mouth. His mind was a jumble of contradictory thoughts and feelings, an inner landscape equivalent to the one all around him: blocks of every size and shape thrown together as though at random, like bricks tipped in a heap. Like so much else, this intimate disorder now seemed foreign to him, accustomed as he was to the planned vistas and grand boulevards of the capital. Everything was turning out very differently from what he had imagined.
    He walked along the Fondamenta delle Cappucine in search of the wine-shop which Marco had mentioned. Up ahead, a canopy of evergreen shrubbery spilt out over a high wall, betraying the presence of one of the city’s secret gardens, the original vegetable plots which had once lain at the centre of each of its hundred islands, providing produce for the inhabitants of the waterfront houses. As Zen passed beneath the tree, he saw that it was filled with feral cats, perched on every branch like a flock of birds.
    The tide had turned, but it was still low enough to expose the mudbanks on either side of the San Girolamo canal. Two labourers were at work there, one pushing a wheelbarrow along a path of duckboards laid out from the quay, the other working with a spade in the canal bed itself, turning over slabs of slime as thick and black as tar. The fetid odour of the