Yet Another Death in Venice (The Simon Bognor Mysteries)

by Tim Heald

  “I just wonder if he was really related to Silverburger,” said Bognor. “I mean, in a way, with which we all agree and sympathize. In the sight of man rather than the sight of God.”

  “A real follower of the rule of Saint Francis isn’t much interested in the sight of man. The sight of God is much more important even if it passeth all understanding. Which it does.”

  “That’s not my idea of the average Franciscan,” he said. “My experience is that they’re much more interested in their fellow man than most contemplatives. They’re friars after all. Jolly souls. Convivial. Wasn’t Tuck a Franciscan?”

  “Friar Tuck was a fictional device. He didn’t exist. In any case, you’re thinking of Anglican Franciscans. Not the same thing at all.”

  “Tuck was pre-Reformation.” Bognor had read modern history. He suspected Monica of having acquired her knowledge of the subject from the writings of Sir Arthur Bryant. Like Barbara Cartland. The certainty was certainly similar.

  “Would have been if he were real.” At least Lady Bognor was consistent.

  “My feeling is that Roman Catholic Franciscan friars can differentiate between generalities about fraternité, egalité, and similar revolutionary claptrap and real-life blood brotherhood. And what I’m saying is that Father Carlo admitted to me that he and Irving Silverburger had the same mother and the same father. That’s all, but it’s interesting. That’s all.”

  Monica said a rude word and put the phone into its cradle. There was a click, then nothing. Bognor found himself staring stupidly at the silent receiver. At length, he replaced the phone and sat staring at it thoughtfully. Then he decided to Skype his old friend and colleague in Venice.

  “Michael,” he said, smiling. Dibdini had an old machine, which necessitated a headset and microphone. This made him look like an old-fashioned commentator of the Snagge era. He half expected a mellifluous “In … out, one … out, two … out,” as if he were describing the Oxford and Cambridge boat race.

  After they had exchanged greetings in broken Italanglais, Bognor remarked nonchalantly that he had breakfasted with Father Carlo. “Ah,” said Dibdini, “he is everywhere that Carlo.”

  “We had breakfast at The Connaught.”

  “Ah,” Dibdini said again, but chuckling this time. “The Board of Trade will have paid for breakfast. Father Carlo never pays for his meals, but he eats very well. One day, I, too, must take a vow of poverty.” He smiled. “And did you discover anything? Was it worth the price? Will Her Majesty’s Government forgive the extravagance?”

  “Perhaps,” said Bognor. “Tell me, Michael, do you have friends at the Frari?”

  Dibdini gave the impression of considering the question intimately, examined his fingers, and said at length, “But why do you ask?”

  It was on the tip of Bognor’s tongue to repeat the old saw about never responding to a question with another question, but he thought better of it and merely repeated his sentence.

  Once more, Dibdini appeared to think. Eventually, he seemed to come to a decision.

  “I have a particular friend who knows about the Franciscans in Venice. He knows many of their secrets, which are numerous. He understands where, as you say, the bodies are buried.”

  “Might he be able to tell us about Father Carlo?”

  Dibdini inspected his fingernails ostentatiously and at length.

  Eventually, he spoke, “What exactly do you wish to know?”

  “I need to know where Father Carlo comes from,” said Bognor. “I need to know who his parents were. Whether he has or had brothers and sisters.”

  Dibdini smiled.

  “I see you have heard the rumors,” he said. Bognor said nothing but smiled back, unflinching. “I will speak to my friend.”

  Bognor reflected that, while some of his best friends were foreign, foreigners, even when friendly, were not the same as the British. They were, well, foreign, even when much nicer than most British people. Dibdini was a case in point. Bognor was very fond of him, regarded him as a friend, thought him much nicer than the average Brit and certainly much nicer than anyone in the prime minister’s office even though they were nearly all British. Having said all that, Dibdini was foreign and, as such, unreadable at times. Bognor couldn’t always fathom him. This didn’t matter, but it could be disconcerting. By the same token, Father Carlo who was much less likable was just as foreign and therefore, in a sense, just as impenetrable.

  “How did Accrington Stanley play?” his friend wanted to know. This was further evidence of Michael’s foreignness. The only people who supported Accrington Stanley either lived in Accrington or abroad. British football fans just sniggered. This was doubtless unfair on Accrington of which Bognor knew nothing at all apart from the name and that of the football club. If pressed, he would have said that it was full of men in flat caps who ate pies and raced pigeons plus their long-suffering wives who affected shapeless clothes and their children who seldom if ever washed and wore clogs on their feet. And the loos, if they existed, were outdoors. This only showed how little he knew, how prejudiced he was, and how much less open-minded than Dibdini. He hadn’t the faintest idea what had happened to Accrington Stanley and cared less. He hated football with a passion and associated it with the above, but above all with money of which he had not nearly enough and not nearly as much as those who played the game professionally, even if they played for a team as poor as Accrington Stanley.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Haven’t the foggiest.”

  The North-South divide, he reflected, was all too real. He regarded himself as tolerably enlightened, liberal even, and yet he knew that he had little or no understanding of life north of the Trent and didn’t much care for the idea of it. He knew that his feelings were reciprocated by the denizens of that baffling part of the world. The really sad thing was that he cared so little. Much the same applied to abroad, and yet he had a sneaking regard for “Johnny Foreigner” particularly now that the Great had been so emphatically removed from Britain and by a member of the Bullingdon no less. The fact that he was from Brasenose went some way to explaining why we now had aircraft carriers with no aircraft, but not far. The French would never have countenanced such a humiliation, or any number of countries on which we had once upon a time looked down our long and aristocratic nose.

  Father Carlo was foreign, so was the deceased, so, for that matter, was his partner in crime prevention. Being foreign made them suspicious, almost as much as if they had come from somewhere vague and cold such as the north. Time was when the sort of cut-glass accent to which Bognor aspired, but which had vanished into a new world of glottal stops and adenoidal cat noises made popular by such orally challenged public figures as Prime Minister Edward Heath, was the correct voice of law and order. Nowadays, if someone talked proper with the kind of voice that Bognor still regarded as accentless and “correct,” it was a demonstration of guilt. Time was when the good guys had been at English public schools; nowadays, a public education was evidence of nefariousness. Bad guys went to Eton.

  He sighed. He hoped prejudice had never colored his forensic judgment. He was, he told himself, completely open and fair, acknowledging no bias toward evil in anybody irrespective of class, creed, or color. He was a believer in science, objectivity, and—above all—fair play. Just because someone was underprivileged, physically threatened, or in some way less than adequate, didn’t make them criminal. It helped. He knew that statistics proved unpalatable truths. But he was above such lies. He approached all his cases with an entirely open mind unsullied by anything at all. To him, all men were innocent until proved otherwise. Having said that, he acknowledged that some were less likely to be innocent than others.

  Foreigners, he said to himself. He really meant bloody foreigners but didn’t use the adjective even silently to himself.

  “Accrington was one of the founders of the league only it collapsed and was taken over by another club called Stanley Villa, which played at a ground called Stanley Park or something. Th
ey were refounded in the sixties by someone called Stanley Wotherspoon, which was nice. They were recently readmitted to the league at the expense of Oxford, who originally replaced them. They’re really bad. Why do you support them?”

  “I like the name,” said Dibdini. “It is very English. Very curious.”

  There was no answer to this, and he did not attempt one. “What rumors about Father Carlo?” he asked instead. “He seems smarmy to me, but that’s not a crime. Nor even a sin.”

  “This,” said Dibdini, looking at his fingernails again, “and that.”

  “I see,” said Bognor, seeing nothing. Father Carlo always seemed a bit of a pantomime villain and more panto than villain. Still … this was pure prejudice. Bognor disliked unctuousness, was suspicious of holy orders in general and Roman Catholics in particular. None of this, however, made Father Carlo a murderer.

  At that moment, his thoughts and the Skype were interrupted by an unknocking Harvey Contractor.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, not looking at all sorry, “but I’ve got some info on the padre. I thought you might enjoy it.”

  “Sorry, Michael,” he said. “I’ll try to find out about Accrington Stanley, but I fear duty calls.” At saying this, he turned off his foreign friend and felt momentarily like God. Less so, however, when Contractor said, “Accrington Stanley, zero; Crewe Alexandra, eight.”

  “Silly score,” he thought, “and two silly names.”

  “I don’t think Father Carlo has ever taken an exam in his life,” said Contractor, excited to the extent that he was, in Churchillian argot, intoxicated by his own exuberance.

  “What makes you say that?” Bognor was intrigued by the urbane otherworldliness of a certain sort of cleric—usually Roman Catholic, often a Jesuit. He thought of Father Lancelot in Macau with his carefully graded bottles of whiskey and of the suave Mervyn Stockwood who was reputed, as an admittedly Anglican bishop, to have a cellar divided not into clarets and burgundies but wines suitable for laity, clerisy, episcopacy, and royalty. That, at least, was the gossip. He suspected that Father Carlo had just such a cellar and was a little sketchy on the precise theology of, say, transubstantiation. “Better on Saint-Estèphe than Saint John the Divine,” he murmured, but Contractor was too bound up in his discoveries to notice.

  “You have to pass exams in order to be ordained. Even in the Roman Catholic church,” he said.

  Bognor had Contractor down as a militant atheist, school of Dawkins, despite his protestations about being open-minded. He himself was characteristically wishy-washy—an Anthony Howard sort of liberal agnostic who enjoyed the noise but was less sure of the content. A message man, not given to massage. Or something like that. He was not sure about Marshall McLuhan but that was almost certainly a red herring. Besides it was the confusion of method and message that defined McLuhan. He was not sure that was Father Carlo’s problem.

  “No one in this country ever asks questions,” Contractor said with enviable certainty. Bognor felt it was much more complicated than that, but this was an important part of a problem Bognor was reluctant to recognize. He always thought life was more complicated than it seemed. Sometimes, however, it was ludicrously simple and the answer was staring him straight in the face. He was one of those people who was reluctant to admit that two and two added up to four. Maybe they did but maybe they didn’t. It depended what you meant by two; or indeed by four. This painful ability to see many sides of the most simple puzzle was becoming worse with age. It prevented him rising to the very top of his profession, but paradoxically you could argue that it had also enabled him to get where he was. Life was like that. Complicated.

  “The result being that there are a lot of people walking around who have never been asked the simplest things about themselves. The net result is that we have more than our share of conmen. We are not a nation of fact-checkers.”

  “Vulgar,” said Bognor, “like discussing money, especially one’s own, and particularly at mealtimes.”

  Contractor thought vulgarity had something to do, if anything, with fractions.

  “If you say so,” he said, which was Contractor’s way of implying that his boss’s ideas went out with the Ark. “But the fact is that we are inclined to let people invent their own curriculum vitae and that isn’t always an advantage.”

  “Honesty is a particularly English virtue. Assuming it in others is even more so.” He knew he sounded pompous or at least sententious. Too bad. It was what he believed. Or had, once upon a time.

  “It’s led to an epidemic of conmen. If you take things at face value, word gets around. Leads to all sorts of unpleasantness. Most of all taking advantage. All kinds of low life do just that. One doesn’t ask questions. Not the done thing, old boy. If someone sports an Eton tie, we assume he is entitled to same. Fact of life.”

  “I was always brought up to believe that wearing an old school tie was essentially infra dig,” Bognor spoke huffily and sounded insufferably pompous. His awareness of this did not make it any easier or any less real. Contractor said nothing. There was no need.

  “Acceptance is a peculiarly English vice,” he said. “But the church is different. The minute someone sports a dog collar, he is sacrosanct, inviolate. He can get away with murder. Literally.”

  “Are you implying … ?”

  “That Father Carlo dunnit?” Contractor affected to think about this as if it were a novelty. “It’s possible. Half the popes in history were murderers or rapists. Read John Julius Norwich.”

  “But Father Carlo …”

  “Could be our man. I didn’t say he was our man. That’s different.”

  “You said that Carlo had never passed an exam; that he isn’t entitled to fatherhood, as it were.”

  “Too smooth by half.”

  Bognor smiled. “Priests who stay with the Jesuits at Farm Street are like that. Particularly ones who are attached to the Frari in Venice. Of course he’s smooth. Those two qualifications alone are enough. He has to be smooth. He has to be able to hold his own at dinner in The Connaught; has to be able to snap his fingers at the sommelier; send back the wine when it’s corked; know his rognons from his sweetbreads, if you follow me. I’ll bet he doesn’t wear a rough brown habit and open-toed sandals in London.”

  “If he does, the habit will have been knocked up in Savile Row and the sandals will be from Lobb’s not a pair of Mr. Clark’s open-toed, mass-produced jobs.”

  “Precisely,” said Bognor. “I can picture him. Typical smart Roman. But that doesn’t make him a murderer.”

  “It does, if allied to ecclesiastical illiteracy. He may be able to do offal in a way that will keep the maître d’ at The Connaught happy, but he doesn’t know his apostles from his Apocrypha. He thinks Saint John is a little place run by Fergus whatsit.”

  “Henderson. Top to tail. Most Italian priests of a certain rank are perfectly conversant with fine dining and some of them are a bit shaky when it comes to the sacraments. Father Carlo obviously belongs to that group. You can’t make monsignor without cutting the mustard, and your average cardinal is a class act. RC priests in continental Europe aren’t like Church of England clergy here.” Bognor felt he knew his stuff, and he was only a little out-of-date. That was to do with his time, which was past but only just. In his day, the C of E was the Conservative Party at prayer. Now, like so many Englishmen, he was “lapsed” C of E, but he had been brought up when things were different and when being an Anglican mattered. Nowadays, only the God Squad bothered. Not like Europe where people still went in droves and the parish priest was king even if he had the morals of a monkey.

  “I still think Father Carlo is a reprobate even by the standards of the church in Italy,” said Contractor, sounding unnaturally pompous especially for one so young. This cheered Bognor profoundly for even when he sounded pompous he was not naturally so.

  “Yes. Well, Father Carlo is certainly worth a chat over a glass of good claret, but I think you will find him clean. Not good but clean
.”

  “I still don’t think he ever passed an exam.”

  “That,” Bognor said with a certainty that stemmed from the comparative ignorance of his subordinate, “is neither here nor there. It simply isn’t about exams. Roman Catholicism isn’t like that. Nor Christianity, come to that.”

  “If God existed,” Contractor protested sulkily, “he would expect his representatives on Earth to be properly qualified.”

  “If Father Carlo really wasn’t qualified to represent our Lord in this world, he is making a remarkably good fist of it.

  Wouldn’t you agree?” asked Bognor, who found Father Carlo plausible. Frighteningly so.

  “In the sense that he represents God at five-star hotels I might agree,” said Contractor. “I just think he cuts a less impressive figure in the confessional. Not to mention the pulpit.”

  “I grant you that Father Carlo is a lounge lizard sort of cleric, but we can’t all be about hair shirts and flagellation. Even duchesses have faith. Being privileged doesn’t bar you from taking part.”

  “I always subscribe to that stuff about rich men and the eyes of needles,” said Contractor, sniffing. “But maybe I’m a purist.”

  “All we know about the reverend gentleman,” said Bognor, “is that he was a friend of the deceased and that he was in the city when he was exterminated. We don’t have a vestige of motive, let alone proof.”

  “Silverburger doesn’t strike me as religious. But then nor does Father Carlo.”

  This was silly. Bognor told him so and backed up his argument with references to Monsignor Ronald Knox, the quintessentially svelte Father Hollins, and Monsignor Gilbey, who had lived at The Travellers Club in Pall Mall and celebrated mass in a broom cupboard there.

  “Socially acceptable priests don’t go around killing people,” Bognor said sententiously. “Rather the reverse. Killing people would be regarded as in very poor taste by those who mattered.”