Dead Lagoon - 4 Read Online Free PDF Page A

bucking the incoming tide of staff hastening to sign themselves in so that they could slip out again, Valentini inquired about the reason for Zen’s transfer.
    ‘You must be joking!’ he barked in the slightly nasal accent of his native Ferrara. ‘Ada Zulian! A woman who doesn’t even know the right time …’
    Zen gestured impatiently.
    ‘What does that matter, as long as she knows the right people?’
    Aldo Valentini conceded the point with a shrug. He led the way to a bar at the end of the quay. A red neon sign over the door read Bar dei Greci, after the nearby Orthodox church. There was no sign of any Greeks inside, although the barman’s accent suggested that he was from somewhere well to the south of Chioggia.
    ‘All the same, la Zulian !’ exclaimed Valentini when they had ordered coffee. ‘God almighty, she’s been in and out of the loony bin like a yo-yo for the last twenty years. This complaint of hers ended up on my desk, largely because no one else would touch it with a bargepole.’
    He broke off to take one of the pastries from the plate on the bar.
    ‘We searched the whole place from top to bottom,’ he continued, his moustache white with icing sugar from the pastry he had selected. ‘Even put a man outside the front door. No one came or went, yet the woman still claimed she was being persecuted. It’s a clear case of hysteria and attention-seeking.’
    Zen took a bite of a flaky cream-filled croissant.
    ‘I’m sure you’re right. It’s always the hopeless cases who want a second opinion. I’ll just go through the motions and then endorse your conclusions. It’s a total waste of time, but what do I care? There are worse places to spend a few days.’
    He washed the pastry down with a gulp of coffee.
    ‘So, what’s been happening round here?’
    Valentini shrugged.
    ‘Bugger all, as usual. Mestre and Marghera see a reasonable amount of action, particularly in drugs, but we just don’t have a big enough slice of the mainland for it to add up to anything much. As for the city itself, forget it. Criminals are like everyone else these days. If you can’t drive there, they don’t want to know.’
    Zen nodded slowly.
    ‘What about that kidnapping that was all over the papers a few months back? Some American.’
    ‘You mean the Durridge business?’
    Zen lit a cigarette.
    ‘That must have livened things up a bit.’
    ‘It might, if they’d let us near it,’ Valentini retorted shortly.
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘The Carabinieri got there first, and when we applied for reciprocity we were told the files had been returned under seal to Rome.’
    He shrugged.
    ‘Christ knows what that was all about. Once upon a time we could have pulled a few strings of our own and found out, but these days …’
    He pointed to the headline in the newspaper lying on the counter. THE OLD FOX FIGHTS FOR HIS POLITICAL LIFE, it read, above a photograph of the politician in question. Zen picked the paper up and scanned the article, which concerned alleged payments made by a number of leading industrialists into a numbered Swiss bank account allegedly used to fund the party in question. The paper’s cartoonist made play with the slogan adopted by the party at the last election: ‘A Fairer Alternative’. In a secondary article, a spokesman for the regionalist Northern Leagues hailed the development as ‘a death blow to the clique of crooks who have bled this country dry for decades’ and called for new electoral laws designed to radically redraw the political map of the country.
    ‘It’s total chaos,’ remarked Valentini sourly. ‘You can’t get anything done any more. No one knows what the rules are.’
    Feeling a touch on his arm, Zen looked round. A young woman with blonde hair, wearing a ski-jacket and jeans, stood staring at him, smiling inanely and stabbing one finger in the air. For a moment Zen thought she must be mad, or perhaps from some religious sect or other. Then he caught sight of the