by R P Nathan
“Whatever.” I fumbled in my handbag for my purse and pulled out a minicab card from it; handed it to Patrick. “These guys are usually pretty quick. Let’s get back over to your place and call the police from there.”
◆◆◆
We didn’t talk on the cab ride back to Aunty Jean’s. The driver had the radio tuned to a Turkish music station, and we just sat on the backseat as the songs filled the silence.
I ached from the attack and the flashback grip of fear. The winged lion. Loredan. I felt like I was on the verge of tears, welled with a disappointment I didn’t properly understand. All I knew was I didn’t want to talk or think about anything or anyone. I just wanted to stare through the dirty glass at the beating rain and darkness.
We hit traffic and got caught in a long queue in Kentish Town. All I wanted was to get back to Patrick’s house so we could call the police, and then they could come and inspect the crime scene – because that was what it was – and then I could get back to my own bed as soon as possible. But it wasn’t to be and we just sat there with me getting crosser and crosser. The driver had turned the music louder as well which didn’t help my mood. Every few minutes Patrick tried getting my attention but I refused to talk to him.
Eventually though when we had been there for nearly twenty minutes, no way forward or back, cars ahead, cars behind, I had to listen to what he was trying to say.
“We need John when we get the police round, Sarah. He’s the only one that really knows anything about Loredan.”
He was right of course. I knew he was right. But I shot him a black look all the same. “He had his chance to come with us.” I looked straight out ahead past the driver’s shoulder and out through the windscreen. The rain continued to pour down. Wash me away, I thought. Wash me away from here.
“We should have insisted. And anyway if it hadn’t been for your stupid argument maybe he would have—”
“Stupid?” I blinked at him, my blood hot in me instantly. “How can you say that? How can you…” I wrestled with my overheating emotions. On the verge of tears. Just the unfairness of it all, the disappointment, the whole fucking thing.
But he was still talking. “You shouldn’t have said that stuff to him about being obsessed. I think you need to apologise to him and then he’ll talk to the police with us.”
“Apologise? For what? The only thing he cares about is finding that stupid cross.”
“Not the only thing, Sarah. He cares about you. He always has.”
I heard him speak the words and it felt like he’d thumped me. The wind was knocked out of me, and I could say nothing. Just the words in my head. He always has.
“We’re not going anywhere here.” Patrick’s voice was like a nagging headache. “Let’s ask the cab driver to take us over to John’s place.”
“You want to go somewhere else?” the driver asked his eyes still on the road.
“Come on, Sarah. We may as well.”
“They’ve dug up the road further on. I was stuck here for an hour yesterday.”
“You see.”
Suddenly I couldn’t fight it any more. I shrugged and sighed. “Sure. Why not.”
“Great.” Patrick sounded delighted. “Can you take us to Highbury Fields please.”
The driver looked just as pleased as he glanced over his shoulder. Behind us a small gap had formed. We three-pointed and then suddenly, as if breaking free, we were moving again.
◆◆◆
It was almost eleven by the time we reached John’s place. Patrick had been there before and led the way up the front steps of a converted Victorian villa overlooking Highbury Fields. He rang one of the six doorbells, spoke to the intercom, and we were buzzed into a dirty hallway, the worn black and white floor tiles strewn with mail. I trailed behind Patrick as he trotted up the tatty carpeted stairs to the second floor. A door was flung open by a guy a bit younger than us, early twenties, in a long stripy shirt worn outside tight jeans.
“Hey Patrick,” he said delighted, high-fiving him. “Haven’t seen you for ages man. Hi,” he said expansively to me. “I’m Jed.” I really wasn’t in the mood and gave him a lukewarm smile in return. “Come in,” he said eagerly to us both.
“We wanted to talk to John,” Patrick said as we walked into the living area. Another guy who looked a lot like Jed was kneeling in front of the TV, Playstation controller in his hands. He shrugged at us and looked back at the screen.
“He’s gone out,” said Jed sitting down cross-legged and picking up the other controller. “About an hour ago. For food, I guess. You’re welcome to wait. Help yourself to a beer from the fridge—. Oh come on. I wasn’t ready.”
I exchanged a glance with Patrick as Jed pummelled the controller in his hand in an effort to catch up in the racing game they were playing.
“You want a drink?” asked Patrick.
“No.” I had a headache already and didn’t need to add to it. We sat there on the sofa for a few minutes while they played; like we were their parents or something. But John didn’t show and they kept upping the volume until my head was splitting.
“Guys,” I said. “Guys!”
Jed looked round, the game paused, the car on his side of the split screen frozen in its inexorable spin towards a crash barrier.
“Could we wait in John’s room, maybe? Might be a bit quieter.”
“Don’t see why not,” he said looking back immediately to the TV. “It’s that door on the right.”
We got up and walked over to it. There was the realistic sound of a crash behind us and I raised my eyes to the ceiling. God, I felt old.
“I wonder what time he’ll be back,” said Patrick.
“Soon I hope,” I said reaching for the door handle. “He can’t be too long if he’s just gone out for food.”
“I guess not.”
I turned the handle. “I don’t really care so long as it’s quieter in here.” I pushed the door open and switched on the light. “So long as—”
I stopped.
Blinked a few times.
And we both just stood there for a long time.
Not saying a word.
Just trying to take it all in.
Chapter 36
“What the fuck is all this?” Patrick breathed out at last.
I shook my head. I’d never seen anything like it. There were books everywhere: on the shelves, on the desk, round his bed, and piled on the floor beside it. Books on Venetian life and literature and art and history; multiple Italian dictionaries and primers on grammar and Venetian dialect; Venetian biography and books on the Venetian empire; travel books and maps on Crete and Rhodes and the Peloponnese. But most of all books on Cyprus. Loads of books about Cyprus. A library section’s worth. Four volume histories, personal memoirs, travellers tales, even cookery books. Books everywhere.
But even more than the books was what was on the walls. They were covered in A4 and A3 sized photocopies, enlargements of pages from more books. So many that the room itself had become a continuum of words. The underlying blue paint was barely visible, papered over by the dizzying expanse of white and grey, at a distance featureless, disorientating, like fog, like snow, but as we got closer form appeared and structure surfaced from the flat landscape and we saw book extracts and diary entries, handwritten and typeset and, as we walked around the room, names began to jump out at us: Polidoro and Bragadino, Nicosia and Famagusta, Loredan and the Cross of St Peter and Paul.
Some of the pages were from Shaeffer’s diary: in part faithfully transcribed and word processed and printed out, in part still in the original, Shaeffer’s copperplate enlarged to twice or four times its original size, its regular beauty rendered lumpy and careless by the rigid typesetting around it, all the passages in the room being spoken at once, literal overload, whiteout.
“I take it back,” said Patrick after a few minutes more. “He is obsessed.”
“Have you been here before?”
“Not in his room. Not ever I don�
�t think.” We were circling round each other, our eyes on the walls reaching out to the words but both afraid to touch anything, engendered by a feeling of deep unease. It was like the lair of a psychopath.
We stopped by his desk. Above it was a gap in the papering, just the crusty pieces of blue tack left on the wall, the sheet which should have been pride of place torn down, lying on the desk in front of us.
“Why’s he taken that one off?” Patrick gingerly picked it up. It was different to the others on the wall. The words here were dense on the page, single spaced in a small font.
“Do you think we should even be in here?” I glanced over my shoulder as I thought I’d heard a sound. “I mean what if he comes back now?”
“Well we’re waiting for him aren’t we?” He shrugged, immune to the weirdness now, totally absorbed by the paper in his hands. And then he let out a shriek that had me jumping out of my skin.
“What Patrick? What?”
“This is Polidoro’s code. This is his letter. Look it starts, Dear Antonio.” He stared at me, his eyes wide. “Which means that John has cracked it too. Decoded it. Translated it. Maybe ages ago. Why didn’t he tell us?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t even want to think about it. I gave my head a little shake. “That doesn’t matter now,” I said trying to sound decisive, but my heart and head were pounding. I took a breath to calm myself. “The important thing now is what does it say?”
Chapter 37
Dear Antonio
I write because I am soon to leave Venice. You know that I have not settled since my return from Famagusta, the pain from that time never leaving me. Yet I am also still bound to that place so that your ever-patient offers to join you and your dear son in Verona have fallen on deaf ears. You have supported me these past seven years and my gratitude to you is undying. Yet though the money you have sent me has kept me physically, my sorrow cannot be assuaged.
The dead of Cyprus haunt me.
I see their faces in my dreams and my waking. Often now I stand by the Lagoon and look out to sea, and I know I must return to it if I am to throw off my cloak of sadness. Even if it kills me; for I am not alive now. I am a ghost. I am air. Yet not so light as air.
Three days ago the sons of Bragadino came to me with a proposition. And it coincided so well with my own thoughts that it left me overjoyed. They want me to bring back the remains of my dear master. To seek him out, even to the Sultan’s Court itself, and recover what exists still of Captain Bragadino so that he might have a final Christian resting. They have promised me money but it is not for that I would go. I go for the love of my master and the chance to repay the kindness he once showed me. A ship leaves in ten days and I shall leave with it.
There is another motive too. To see once again the stone which we have talked about. To look again upon beauty such as I have never seen in woman; a depth of blue which makes me cry even at the memory of it. To return with my liege’s body will remake me as a man in men’s eyes; but to look into that overwhelming blue again will heal me for myself.
But if I bring this thing back I will not do it for Venice. Venice has failed me, Antonio, and those like me. Why could they not have raised the effort they did for Lepanto in order to save Cyprus? And why should we poor survivors of Famagusta fester forgotten whilst the scions of the Golden Book receive glory? That is why I will not tell the Ten where this treasure is hid, even if they put me on the rack for it.
They suspect me, of course, for my lord Bragadino sent word to Venice that the cross had been hidden. And the Ten took the journal I wrote on that bloody isle, no doubt in the hope of finding news of the treasure within it. Yet they will be disappointed for I did not understand then where the treasure was. But seven years have passed. Seven long years when I have walked heavy-hearted through the streets of Venice and have thought of nothing else but the events of those days in Cyprus.
And now I know.
Though I have told the Ten otherwise, now I know.
I retraced my steps. We rode for three hours that night. But by my reckoning we travelled no more than three leagues for we were careful and did not use our torches, travelling by moonlight alone. So three leagues. And then we were blindfolded and descended a gentle incline until the ground below our feet became paved. And I thought then what place would have a paved courtyard? Surely not just some remote village.
Standing there I heard the sound of many buzzing bees, yet thought nothing of it at the time. It was only many years later when I heard that sound again while walking through the gardens of Sant’Elena that it occurred to me where we had been taken that morning: a monastery, for monks favour honey greatly. And then everything became clear. We must have been at the monastery dedicated to the icon of the Virgin. And so I had my starting point.
When we walked from the monastery through the trees I remember a cooling breeze kissing my right cheek and it did not vary so although difficult with roots and branches the path must have been straight. We walked for two hours, a distance I judged as being nearly four miles, until we reached the beach. Then, when we were made to stand parallel to the shoreline with the sea on our left, the rising sun shone straight in from that direction so I knew that the beach faced east. Also I am sure the breeze had not changed direction and now blew directly into my face. So the wind was from the south and we had walked east from the monastery.
And yet there was a final piece of information that I had known all along. After the cross had been shown to us and we had been blindfolded again, mine had been put on slightly too high so that I could see a fraction out of my right eye. Risking all, I raised my head just for an instant and there to the right saw three rocks, giant granite boulders placed there by God’s hand and standing sentinel to the beach well above high tide. Five paces to the left of the largest, Captain Bragadino’s servant Alvise was climbing out of a hole. I looked down to the ground again immediately and no one suspected me.
So now you too know the secret. If I do not return, then perhaps one day, when the world has changed, you or your son Gianni that I love so much, may go there and recover the treasure for yourselves. And, if you do ever find yourself in that cove, dig down into the fine sand and you will come upon a wooden box and, inside that, the most magical of treasures.
Farewell then my brother.
I do not expect to return from this voyage. I am not sure even whether this letter will reach you for the Ten have been active recently. No doubt they will intercept and try to read it but I am sure our childhood code is too strong even for them. I trust you retain the wit to read the letter should it make it to you. If the Ten question you then you should say I am mad or you should tell them the secret: whichever you wish. But if you can, tell them I am mad for they want to believe it in any case.
I trust that God will protect you and that one day we shall meet again and, if not, that one day you and your Gianni will benefit from the blood that has been shed for all Venice. Wish me luck on my quest, which I undertake for both my lord and myself. And pray for me. So that one day, if I should somehow survive, I will be able to settle and need walk like a ghost no more.
Your loving brother
Girolamo
Chapter 38
Patrick sat down on the bed and stared at the piece of paper in his hands. When he finally looked up at me, there were tears glistening in his eyes. “It’s so sad. For Polidoro, I mean. After all he’d been through at Famagusta to then come back and feel so isolated and unhappy.”
I sighed. “It must have been like US soldiers coming back from Vietnam. Everyone wanting to pretend it never happened. And then there was the huge victory at Lepanto and everyone celebrated that instead.”
“What was Lepanto?”
“A massive naval battle. Soon after the fall of Famagusta. It checked the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.”
“So Polidoro and the other survivors of Famagusta would have been forgotten?”
“Right. Who cares about a defeat when you’ve had a bi
g victory… But Polidoro cared. He couldn’t forget about the people he’d left behind. He was haunted by it. So, years later, he goes off to bring back Bragadino’s skin and the cross.” I started pacing round the room.
“That must have been around 1578,” said Patrick. “He mentions seven years in the letter.”
“And he recovers the skin but he then winds up in a Turkish gaol for another nine years.” I grimaced.
“And the thing he really wanted, the thing that would have really made him happy, the jewel, eluded him. When he finally came back he was empty-handed.”
“And sick,” I said, remembering the description of the Veronese portrait from Shaeffer’s diary. “He’d been tortured and he was starving and had developed a goitre.”
“What’s a goitre?” asked Patrick.
“It’s caused by iodine deficiency. Your thyroid gets overactive and makes your neck swell up.”
“Ugh. But at least when he got back they’d have treated him well, wouldn’t they? At least he was a hero.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Though I bet the Council of Ten still had him under surveillance thinking he knew something about the cross.” I frowned and looked at my watch. We’d been there nearly an hour and it was pushing midnight. “When’s John going to get back?” I muttered.
“And where’s Julius right at this moment?” sighed Patrick. “Why did he have to go out there on his own? Where is he?”
I shrugged. “Why don’t we find out.” I pulled down an atlas from the bookshelves and flicked through the pages till I came to a double sheet showing the Eastern Mediterranean and Cyprus. “OK, here’s Famagusta on the eastern side of the island. Now, they rode three leagues that night, right? That’s nine, maybe ten, miles. So if we draw a circle ten miles around Famagusta, what places does that throw up?” I stood over the map, pencil poised and then felt a sudden shiver down my spine. There was a circle there already, about an inch in diameter, faint as though it had been rubbed out. “John’s done this before us,” I said.
