by Petr Macek
He hurriedly scrawled a few sentences for Paolo in reply and while I covered him he hid the paper in a chink in the cover of the cast-iron candelabra lamp. Then we went to the hotel.
It happened soon after night fell over the city and the Venetian palaces became enshrouded in a golden robe of artificial light. A terrified scream echoed over the canal. It broke through the embankment all the way to our window and alarmed all the local residents in the block.
In the houses along the water the wooden shutters opened all at once, as though the old palaces were opening their tired eyes. The detective and I also looked out. The piteous howling of a woman, standing in the street in the middle of her spilled shopping, led our gaze to the canal.
Lying face down in the water was the body of a dead man. As always, whenever death appeared nearby, it piqued Holmes’s interest.
“Let us go take a look,” he said to me, putting on his overcoat.
We ran downstairs and arrived at the body before the police.
A gondolier had pulled the body up onto the shore and examined it to see if there was any point in attempting to revive him. But it was hopeless, as I could see at first glance. According to the colour of the skin the body had been in the water for too long.
But my initial professional interest suddenly turned to horror when I saw the face of the dead man. The detective also recognised him at the same time.
Lying at our feet on the embankment was Paolo.
“My God,” I cried.
I pushed aside the gondolier and kneeled next to the body. I moved the wet hair from the face and slapped it on the cheeks in a foolish attempt to revive the body. He had foam in his mouth and the water on his face smelled of grease.
I looked desperately at Holmes.
“We cannot help him,” he mumbled and knelt down next to us.
He closed the poor wretch’s eyelids and looked through his pockets. He frisked the soaked jacket and the pockets of the lining. None of the observers had the courage to protest.
“Are you looking for something?”
“His wallet. Aha, here it is!” said the detective, opening the leather portmanteau.
I winced when he removed a photograph of Paolo’s wife and children. There was also some money, from which Holmes deduced that the motive had not been robbery. Even his watch was still there. Otherwise the pockets of the jacket, vest and trousers were empty.
A carabinier finally appeared in the crowd.
The detective returned the wallet to the pocket and quickly surveyed the body before the police sealed off the area. There was nothing more that we could do besides stand silently by during the official examination.
“We ought to get out of here,” Holmes whispered to me. “I would not want someone to take notice of us and potentially take us in for questioning. It might reveal our connection to Paolo.”
It was easy to disappear, as the crowd kept pushing forward, and hence squeezed us out.
Holmes took me aside in order to collect his thoughts. He left me in front of the hotel and ran across the bridge to the illuminated island under the lamp on the other side of the canal in order to check the drop off point.
“Just as I feared,” he said when he returned.
In my heart I was still with dear Paolo and his family, so I had to ask him to explain what he meant. I was not capable of reflection.
“The drop off point is empty,” said the detective. “Somebody must have followed us, seen how we placed the message inside and waited for Paolo to come pick it up.”
“Followed us?” I cried.
“Yes, just as Paolo feared at our first meeting. Fool that I am, I thought his fears unfounded. I was quite wrong!”
“How awful!”
A police boat neared upon the water. The officers hopped out onto the bank and started to ask questions among the bystanders. They were looking for the woman who had discovered the body, and soon they naturally also learned about the two unknown men who had taken an interest in the body.
But we were already safe. Holmes’s thoughts were still occupied with Paolo’s murder.
“He drowned,” said the detective later that night when we returned to the hotel. “This was preceded by a struggle, probably following a sudden ambush.”
“On what do you base your assumptions?”
“I discovered a wound on the back of his head. It was not large enough to have been the primary cause of death; the attack from behind only stunned him. It clearly was not planned; this can be seen in the murder weapon, which was no doubt a randomly picked up stone. Then the murderer pushed him in the water and made sure that he was not swimming.”
“How brutal!”
“The angle of the hit and the power with which it was struck also suggest to me another interesting fact. This was a smaller person, not possessing great strength. I might almost say that it was a woman.”
“What woman would be capable of such a cold-hearted and premeditated murder?” I said, struggling to believe it.
“I haven’t the slightest idea, Watson. Please give me a moment to think; I must have peace and quiet.”
With these words he fell into a long silence, from which I did not want to disturb him further. I left him on the terrace of our hotel while I sampled a cigar and a bottle of the light local wine. Then I went to bed.
Just as I expected, however, this night too would be neither peaceful nor quiet.
After a few hours of sleep I felt somebody shaking me by the shoulder. It was Holmes. Clearly he had not gone to sleep at all. His eyes were bloodshot and there were deep circles beneath them. Evidently he had been thinking about the case the whole time.
“Get up,” he said. “We must go!”
“Have you gone mad? At this hour?” I said, drawing the blanket over my head. “It is still dark out! What would we do?”
“It will be daybreak soon,” he continued. “And Paolo’s murderer already has a big head start. I would not like to give him even more time to escape.”
Sighing, I yielded and pulled on my trousers and jacket. While the city slept we stole out of the hotel and returned to the spot where the dead body had been discovered.
All was peaceful. Nothing attested to the tragedy that had taken place here only a few hours earlier. The police had taken away the body, the crowd had left long ago, and the rats and pigeons had taken care of the bread that the terrified woman had spilled.
“What are we looking for? The corpse was carried here by the water and all of the tracks have floated away.”
“You must not give up so easily,” said the detective. “How many times have we faced a case that seemed unsolvable only to succeed in cracking it?”
Although he was undoubtedly correct, I was curious to see what the detective would do next. To my surprise he lay down on his stomach, leaned over the curb of the embankment, and put his hand in the water.
“Paolo’s body was discovered after nine o’clock in the evening,” said Holmes. “We left him the message at five. As he picked it up, it is clear that he died some time in between. The body was unusually cold; it had been lying in the water for more than an hour, which narrows the time of death even more. I believe that it happened at dusk, when the shadows lengthen.”
He was no doubt correct. Even I was capable of making these deductions. But I still did not understand how the time of death would help us uncover the identity of the murderer.
But the detective was far from finished.
“The water is rather warm,” he said, swishing his fingers in the canal. “Its corridor is wide and most of the day the sun shines on it.”
“My theory,” he continued, drying his fingers on his coat, “is that the body floated here from one of the tributaries, which are narrow and shady. And those winding streets around them
practically invite wrongdoing.”
I glanced around both sides of the canal, which was one of the main city communications, and which after several hundred yards flowed into the Grand Canal.
“But there are dozens of these side streams!”
“Use your brain, my friend! I know that I pulled you out of bed at an ungodly hour, but even in this condition you are capable of deducing this basic physical fact!”
“Currents!” I cried. “All we have to do is figure out where they go and they will lead us to the site of the murder!”
“You see, you are not so poorly off after all,” said the detective, slapping me on the shoulder. “But that is not all. At such a busy hour Paolo would not float along the surface more than a few minutes without being discovered. I think we ought to head to the closest stream against the current, which is this one.”
He was pointing at a rivulet on the other side of the canal. We crossed the arched bridge and headed towards it.
It was a typical Venetian rivulet, just a few yards wide, hardly big enough for a craft to pass through, and with a humble walkway running alongside it. On both sides rose the flaking walls of a palace, above which shone the first rays of the morning sun.
For the first time I felt just how confined the city really was. We could not even walk side by side and we had to proceed in single file. Venice suddenly began to feel rotten, as though something distasteful and corrupted were lurking behind the romantic facade and glistening surface of the Grand Canal.
After a few hundred yards the rivulet forked, merging into two other canals, along which the walkway was even narrower. Laundry hung on lines between the houses: shirts, stockings, trousers and striped gondoliers´ leotards. Above the water rose a strange haze; everything suggested that visitors were unwelcome.
“Where to now?”
“Each of us will take one side. If either of us comes across anything suspicious we will signal the other.”
Without waiting for me to reply he plunged into the morning gloom of the street on his right.
I never would have told him that I was afraid, but I humbly admit to you, dear reader, that I was terrified. As his footsteps grew more distant a shiver went down my spine. I was alone against a narrow and twisting wall, the air smelled of sewerage, and just a few hours earlier our friend had lost his life somewhere here. I would not be surprised were some rogue to take mine as well. I could only hope that the criminals were still fast asleep in their beds.
I started off on the opposite side from where Holmes had disappeared and carefully stepped along the cobblestones. Behind the closed windows above me Venice started to awaken. Coffee was brewing, kettles were whistling, toilets were flushing.
All of these sounds terrified me and distracted me from what the detective had asked me to do. If a letter from the murderer with an exact description of how he had killed Paolo were lying in plain view, I surely would not have noticed it.
I had already gone quite a ways from the crossroads where we had separated when from a distance I heard Holmes calling.
Exhaling with the relief of not having to continue along the dark and unfriendly street, I ran back. A few yards after the confluence of the canal I found the detective kneeling at the edge of the bank and staring at the water.
“What did you find?”
“A stain,” he said.
Indeed, on the surface of the water together with other waste floated an odd greasy stain. It was slowly dissolving in the water, but more grease flowed from the ducts protruding into the canal from grooves in the pavement. Perhaps it came from the drainage of one of the restaurants.
“You surely must have noticed that Paolo’s clothes were greasy. It is likely that the water carried him from here.”
I looked in the direction in which he pointed. Nearby the current flowed into another, wider canal.
“Our friend drowned somewhere between this spot and the start of the street. If we thoroughly search the pavement and the banks we will no doubt find clues.”
Like a bloodhound that has found the trail, the detective began scanning the ground yard by yard. The morning light was gaining in intensity and it was only a matter of ten or twenty minutes before people would begin to appear and the water would be filled with rowboats and gondolas.
I also searched, though I did not know precisely for what. Holmes fortunately was not counting on me.
“Eureka!” he cried presently, picking up from the ground a cobblestone lying haphazardly in a puddle under a gutter. “If I am not mistaken this is the murder weapon! The edge of the stone corresponds to the size of the wound in Paolo’s skull and confirms my theory that the killer used the first thing he could find.”
Upon closer examination of the stone we found dark and smudgy stains resembling human blood.
“You see, it is not difficult to calculate the exact time of death when we measure the speed of the current of all the canals through which the body floated and consider the distance which it travelled. I do not think that it will differ much from my estimate.”
“We now know where and how the murder occurred,” I said, “but I still do not understand how it will get us closer to the murderer. The water washed off the fingerprints and it is hardly likely we will find any witnesses.”
“The time has come for real detective work!” said Holmes, removing from his pocket his indispensable magnifying glass. He bent over the pavement and despite his rheumatism paced quickly back and forth with his nose just an inch from the surface.
The bulldog persistence with which he had apprehended so many criminals was again in evidence.
“You see how the mildew on the curb is scraped off here, whereas elsewhere there is an unbroken mossy growth?” he pointed out. “This is where the killer dragged the unconscious Paolo to the water and threw him in.”
The detective knelt on the damp cobblestones and examined the spot more closely. A short distance from us the doors of a house opened and a worker emerged. Unfortunately he was headed towards the spot that my companion was currently examining.
“Make certain nobody walks here!” Holmes barked. “I only need a few more minutes!”
I stopped the sleepy man and asked him to take a different route, hoping against hope that no one else would come. I did not want to get into a skirmish with a gondolier’s fists.
Another whoop from the detective allayed my fears. He put away the magnifying glass and between the place where we found the rock and where Paolo’s body had been thrown into the water he used his pocket knife to pick up a cobblestone and proudly showed me the soil sticking to it.
“This soil is the answer to our entire investigation,” he explained to me, as clearly I was unable to follow the trail of his logical deductions. “You will not find this soil in all of Venice. The local soil is coarse and dark with a large proportion of sand. But the soil that I am holding in my hand was brought here on the shoes of the murderer, probably a size five.”
“I assume you already know where the soil comes from,” I said.
“Reddish clay mixed with brick dust is quite uncommon. But we were walking on it yesterday in the courtyard of the Minutti factory.”
“They followed us from there!”
“He followed us,” Holmes corrected me. “There was only one killer.”
“How can you be certain?”
“The clues and simple logic, my friend. The spontaneous nature of the murder, confirmed by the murder weapon that we found, testifies to the fact that it was not planned. Somebody from the factory was suspicious about us and followed us. And he needed to know who would collect our message.”
“But there was not much in it.”
“No, but it makes clear that we are not who we pretended to be in the factory. And although at first he only shadowed Paolo, he then decided to kill
him. He pushed him into the water and perhaps even waited to make certain that he would not swim out alive.”
“We must assume that Lord Darringford already knows about our investigation.”
“Yes, Paolo’s death has deprived us of an important ally and a pair of trump cards.”
“And who is the murderer?”
“Isn’t it obvious!” said the detective, waving his hands. “Think, Watson: A woman, I’d say about five foot seven, who could have followed us from the factory. She is not too strong, but has the guile and resolve to murder a stronger man.”
“That Amazon! Pascuale’s secretary!”
“Yes. A woman who moves about in the man’s world and intends to make her mark in it.”
I shook my head incredulously. Another persistent thought sprang to my mind.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Holmes interjected, as though reading my thoughts. “It occurred to me too that Paolo was not her first victim. If she indeed killed Minutti, however, it means that she is Lord Darringford’s right hand in the factory, no matter what Signor Pascuale thinks.”
“The corrupt consigliere overestimated his importance.”
“Naturally he too served a purpose. Betrayal. He sold Minutti’s patents while the factory owner was still alive. Darringford thus stole the prototype weapon in cold blood.”
“What next?” I asked as we made our way back to the hotel.
“I think there is nothing else for us in Venice,” the detective replied. “I do not think that we will see that woman here again. She has done what she needed to do; she knows that we will come after her, and we do not have any evidence against Pascuale. Do not forget that we are here in secret; we cannot go to the police.”
My friend was right.
We spent another two days in Italy, but found no clues that would lead us to Paolo’s murderer. She had vanished. Whoever Lord Darringford was, he knew how to erase all traces of his people.
It was time for us to return to England.
But there was still one more surprise for us in Italy before our departure. Upon returning to the hotel from our last walk through the streets and bridges of Venice we found an eerie message. Nailed to the door of our room was a golden carnival mask, its androgynous features twisted in a malicious smile.
