Dead Lagoon - 4 by Michael Dibdin

Author:Michael Dibdin [Dibdin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Political, Fiction
ISBN: 9780571270859
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 1994-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Zen paid for his broken sleep and early rising with a blurred mental focus which ensured that the rest of the day passed in a dopy haze punctuated by various isolated episodes which forced themselves on his attention, one being the moment when Enzo Gavagnin publicly accused him of being an undercover agent acting for the Ministry in Rome.

The encounter took place in the Bar dei Greci, where Zen had gone to try and blast away his mental fog with stiff draughts of espresso doppio ristretto. When Gavagnin appeared beside him at the bar, Zen was reading a newspaper report of a speech by Umberto Bossi, demanding immediate national elections to ‘restore credibility to the government before the demands of local demagogues for regional autonomy lead to the break-up of Italy’. A leader commented that now Bossi saw a real chance of achieving power at national level, he was distancing himself from those such as Ferdinando Dal Maschio who were still pursuing the separatist goals which Bossi had once espoused.

‘What the hell were you doing in my office this morning?’ demanded Gavagnin aggressively.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Zen replied. Thanks to his dazed condition, this was literally true. He had temporarily forgotten that he had ever visited Gavagnin’s office, let alone why, and thus had no trouble sounding innocently baffled. But Gavagnin’s fury was not assuaged.

‘Don’t try and deny it!’ he snapped. ‘When I got in this morning I couldn’t breathe for the stink of those camelshit Nazionali. You’re the only one in the building who smokes them.’

Zen merely shrugged and went on reading the paper. Gavagnin snatched it from his hands.

‘Admit it, you’re a spy!’ he shouted. ‘A snooper from the Ministry. All that bullshit about being sent up here to look into some madwoman’s stories about things going bump in the night! What a load of crap! It’s us you’re investigating, isn’t it? You’re checking us out on behalf of your masters in Rome. That’s what you were doing in my office. Going through my papers to try and find something to use against me. And why? Because I’m with the Nuova Repubblica Veneta, and we’ve got the old regime shitting in its pants!’

He continued in this vein for some time, but Zen simply stared levelly at him and said nothing. As time went on, Gavagnin’s tone became distracted rather than confrontational, his tone more pleading than threatening. In the end, he turned on his heel and stalked out.

Another of the landmarks punctuating Zen’s prevailing mental fog had been the arrival of the documents relating to the complaint which Ada Zulian had made about her near-neighbour at the time, Andrea Dolfin. They were brought – with a speed and efficiency belying the warnings Zen had received – by a uniformed messenger attached to the Central Archives of the Province of Venice, recently re-sited in a custom-built concrete bunker beneath the car park on the artificial island of the Tronchetto.

The move from the Archives’ former premises in

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