Dead Lagoon - 4 by Michael Dibdin Page B

her shield and strength, her bold avenger, the intruders have cleared off. He searches every room in the palazzo , but there is no one there. As she told him earlier, they’re not stupid. Neither is he, Giustiniana’s son. He was always quick on the uptake, even as a child, she’ll give him that. Ada recalls being astonished, sometimes, by the things he’d come out with, finding a connection between two things she’d quite forgotten about, or hadn’t even noticed in the first place.
    That’s no comfort here, though. She herself has still got all her wits about her, whatever folk may say, and much good it’s done her. Mere human intelligence is powerless against the adversaries she faces. The Church might have helped, but Ada turned her back on God after what He allowed to happen to Rosetta. She does not go so far as to deny His existence, but she’ll be damned if she’ll acknowledge it.
    This time, though, she almost blurted out a prayer. It had never been so bad before. She had grown used to the continual harassment, the sudden scurries and scampering in the dark, the flashing and stabbing lights, the shouts and screams and mocking laughter. It was all horrible, but at least the ritual seemed to have rules which until tonight had never been broken. The most important, from her point of view, was that whatever the creatures might get up to in the way of noise and nuisance, they never actually laid hands on her.
    She’d known for a long time that they had hands, because in her panic she had sometimes run up against them. They were substantial all right, whatever people might say. But until now all physical contact between them had been accidental, the result of her panic and their inability to get out of her way fast enough. That she could just about tolerate, but what had happened tonight was quite unspeakable, just too awful for words …
    Which is precisely the problem, she finds, when she tries to explain. Whatever she says, however she phrases it, the whole thing sounds unreal, phantasmagoric, even to her. She doesn’t even quite believe her own experience, so how can she expect anyone else to do so? She glances once again at Aurelio Battista, crouching beside her on the low hard settle. His tone is sympathetic enough, but she’s already beginning to regret having phoned him.
    ‘Does it hurt?’ he asks, dampening the rag in the dilute vinegar she is using as an antiseptic.
    Ada dabs the shallow cuts across the inside of her wrists.
    ‘It’s nothing.’
    He shakes his head.
    ‘I’ll call an ambulance boat, contessa . We must get these injuries seen to.’
    But that’s precisely what she doesn’t want. It’s one thing having the police involved. Despite Daniele Trevisan’s warnings, the policemen she’s dealt with so far have been perfectly correct, for all their evident scepticism. But the doctors are another matter altogether. Ada will never forget what they did to her the last time, even though she cannot actually remember in any detail what they did do. Never again, that much is certain. She’d rather slit her wrists than go back to San Clemente!
    As it is, she is not even being consulted. Giustiniana’s boy is speaking into the telephone, giving orders in a peremptory way, referring to her as ‘the patient’, as though she were some sort of object. To get her own back, she blots him out in turn, replacing him with an earlier version dressed in a skirt and blouse, playing with one of Rosetta’s dolls, all alone in this vast cold salon, dwarfed by the furniture …
    ‘They’ll be here shortly,’ says the other Aurelio Battista. ‘Now then, what became of the knife?’
    She points to the other side of the salon, towards the enormous dining table reputedly made from the timbers of a captured Turkish galley. ‘The dragon table’, little Aurelio used to call it, crawling about its giant legs carved in the form of claws … As he is again now, down on his hands and knees to gather up the