As winter came on, driven out by his wife’s silent recriminations, or so he told himself, Dr. Stein walked the crowded streets almost every afternoon. Sometimes he was accompanied by an English captain of the Night Guard, Henry Gorrall, to whom Dr. Stein had become an unofficial assistant, helping identify the cause of death of one or another of the bodies found floating in the backwaters of the city.
There had been more murders than usual that summer, and several well-bred young women had disappeared. Dr. Stein had been urged to help Gorrall by the Elders of the Beth Din; already there were rumors that the Jews were murdering Christian virgins and using their blood to animate a Golem. It was good that a Jew—moreover, a Jew who worked at the city hospital, and taught new surgical techniques at the school of medicine—was involved in attempting to solve this mystery.
Besides, Dr. Stein enjoyed Gorrall’s company. He was sympathetic to Gorrall’s belief that everything, no matter how unlikely, had at base a rational explanation. Gorrall was a humanist, and did not mind being seen in the company of a man who must wear a yellow star on his coat. On their walks through the city, they often talked on the new philosophies of nature compounded in the university of Florence’s Great Engineer, Leonardo da Vinci, quite oblivious to the brawling bustle all around them.
Ships from twenty nations crowded the quay in the long shadow of the Campanile, and their sailors washed through the streets. Hawkers cried their wares from flotillas of small boats that rocked on the wakes of barges or galleys. Gondoliers shouted vivid curses as skiffs crossing from one side of the Grand Canal to the other got in the way of their long, swift craft. Sometimes a screw-driven Florentine ship made its way up the Grand Canal, its Hero’s engine laying a trail of black smoke, and everyone stopped to watch this marvel. Bankers in fur coats and tall felt hats conducted the business of the world in the piazza before San Giacometto, amid the rattle of the new clockwork abacuses and the subdued murmur of transactions.
Gorrall, a bluff muscular man with a bristling black beard and a habit of spitting sideways and often, because of the chaw of tobacco he habitually chewed, seemed to know most of the bankers by name, and most of the merchants, too—the silk and cloth-of-gold mercers and sellers of fustian and velvet along the Mercerie, the druggists, goldsmiths and silversmiths, the makers of white wax, the ironmongers, coopers and perfumers who had stalls and shops in the crowded little streets off the Rialto. He knew the names of many of the yellow-scarfed prostitutes, too, although Dr. Stein wasn’t surprised at this, since he had first met Gorrall when the captain had come to the hospital for mercury treatment of his syphilis. Gorrall even knew, or pretended to know, the names of the cats which stalked between the feet of the crowds or lazed on cold stone in the brittle winter sunshine, the true rulers of Venice.
It was outside the cabinet of one of the perfumers of the Mercerie that Dr. Stein for a moment thought he saw his daughter. A grey-haired man was standing in the doorway of the shop, shouting at a younger man who was backing away and shouting that there was no blame that could be fixed to his name.
“You are his friend!”
“Sir, I did not know what it was he wrote, and I do not know and I do not care why your daughter cries so!”
The young man had his hand on his long knife, and Gorrall pushed through the gathering crowd and told both men to calm down. The wronged father dashed inside and came out again, dragging a girl of about fourteen, with the same long black hair, the same white, high forehead, as Dr. Stein’s daughter.
“Hannah,” Dr. Stein said helplessly, but then she turned, and it was not her. Not his daughter. The girl was crying, and clasped a sheet of paper to her bosom—wronged by a suitor, Dr. Stein supposed, and Gorrall said that it was precisely that. The young man had run off to sea, something so common these days that the Council of Ten had decreed that convicted criminals might be used on the galleys of the navy because of the shortage of free oarsman. Soon the whole city might be scattered between Corfu and Crete, or even farther, now that Florence had destroyed the fleet of Cortés, and opened the American shore.
Dr. Stein did not tell his wife what he had seen. He sat in the kitchen long into the evening, and was still there, warmed by the embers of the fire and reading in Leonardo’s Treatise on the Replication of Motion by the poor light of a tallow candle, when the knock at the door came. It was just after midnight. Dr. Stein picked up the candle and went out, and saw his wife standing in the door to the bedroom.
“Don’t answer it,” she said. With one hand she clutched her shift to her throat; with the other she held a candle. Her long black hair was down to her shoulders.
“This isn’t Lodz, Belita,” Dr. Stein said, perhaps with unnecessary sharpness. “Go back to bed. I will deal with this.”
“There are plenty of Prussians here, even so. One spat at me the other day. Abraham says that they blame us for the bodysnatching, and it’s the doctors they’ll come for first.”
The knocking started again. Husband and wife both looked at the door. “It may be a patient,” Dr. Stein said, and pulled back the bolts.
The rooms were on the ground floor of a rambling house that faced onto a narrow canal. An icy wind was blowing along the canal, and it blew out Dr. Stein’s candle when he opened the heavy door. Two city guards stood there, flanking their captain, Henry Gorrall.
“There’s been a body found,” Gorrall said in his blunt, direct manner. “A woman we both saw this very day, as it happens. You’ll come along and tell me if it’s murder.”
The woman’s body had been found floating in the Rio di Noale. “An hour later,” Gorrall said, as they were rowed through the dark city, “and the tide would have turned and taken her out to sea, and neither you or I would have to chill our bones.”
It was a cold night indeed, just after St. Agnes Eve. An insistent wind off the land blew a dusting of snow above the roofs and prickly spires of Venice. Fresh ice crackled as the gondola broke through it, and larger pieces knocked against its planking. The few lights showing in the facades of the palazzos that lined the Grand Canal seemed bleary and dim. Dr. Stein wrapped his ragged loden cloak around himself and asked, “Do you think it murder?”
Gorrall spat into the black, icy water. “She died for love. That part is easy, as we witnessed the quarrel this very afternoon. She wasn’t in the water long, and still reeks of booze. Drank to get her courage up, jumped. But we have to be sure. It could be a bungled kidnapping, or some cruel sport gone from bad to worse. There are too many soldiers with nothing to do but patrol the defenses and wait for a posting in Cyprus.”
The drowned girl had been laid out on the pavement by the canal, and covered with a blanket. Even at this late hour, a small crowd had gathered, and when a guard twitched the blanket aside at Dr. Stein’s request, some of the watchers gasped.
It was the girl he had seen that afternoon, the perfumer’s daughter. The soaked dress which clung to her body was white against the wet flags of the pavement. Her long black hair twisted in ropes about her face. There was a little froth at her mouth, and blue touched her lips. Dead, there was nothing about her that reminded Dr. Stein of his daughter.
Dr. Stein felt the skin move over the bones of her hand, pressed one of her fingernails, closed her eyelids with thumb and forefinger. Tenderly, he covered her with the blanket again. “She’s been dead less than an hour,” he told Gorrall. “There’s no sign of a struggle, and from the flux at her mouth I’d say it’s clear she drowned.”
“Killed herself most likely, unless someone pushed her in. The usual reason, I’d guess, which is why her boyfriend ran off to sea. Care to make a wager?”
“We both know her story. I can find out if she was with child, but not here.”
Gorrall smiled. “I forget that you people don’t bet.”
“On the contrary. But in this case I fear you’re right.”
Gorrall ordered his men to take the body to the city hospital. As they lifted it into the gondola, he said to Dr. Stein
, “She drank to get courage, then gave herself to the water. Not in this little canal. Suicides favor places where their last sight is a view, often of a place they love. We’ll search the bridge at the Rialto—it is the only bridge crossing the Grand Canal, and the tide is running from that direction—but all the world crosses there, and if we’re not quick, some beggar will have carried away her bottle and any note she may have left. Come on, Doctor. We need to find out how she died before her parents turn up and start asking questions. I must have something to tell them, or they will go out looking for revenge.”
If the girl had jumped from the Rialto bridge, she had left no note there—or it had been stolen, as Gorrall had predicted. Gorrall and Dr. Stein hurried on to the city hospital, but the body had not arrived. An hour later, a patrol found the gondola tied up in a backwater. One guard was dead from a single swordcut to his neck. The other was stunned, and remembered nothing. The drowned girl was gone.
Gorrall was furious, and sent out every man he had to look for the bodysnatchers. They had balls to attack two guards of the night watch, he said, but when he had finished with them they’d sing falsetto under the lash on the galleys. Nothing came of his enquiries. The weather turned colder, and an outbreak of pleurisy meant that Dr. Stein had much work in the hospital. He thought no more about it until a week later, when Gorrall came to see him.
“She’s alive,” Gorrall said. “I’ve seen her.”
“A girl like her, perhaps.” For a moment, Dr. Stein saw his daughter, running towards him, arms widespread. He said, “I don’t make mistakes. There was no pulse, her lungs were congested with fluid, and she was as cold as the stones on which she lay.”
Gorrall spat. “She’s walking around dead, then. Do you remember what she looked like?”
“Vividly.”
“She was the daughter of a perfumer, one Filippo Rompiasi. A member of the Great Council, although of the two thousand five hundred who have that honor, I’d say he has about the least influence. A noble family so long fallen on hard times that they have had to learn a trade.” Gorrall had little time for the numerous aristocracy of Venice, who, in his opinion, spent more time scheming to obtain support from the Republic than playing their part in governing it. “Still,” he said, scratching at his beard, “it’ll look very bad that the daughter of a patrician family walks around after having been pronounced dead by the doctor in charge of her case.”
“I don’t recall being paid,” Dr. Stein said.
Gorrall spat again. “Would I pay someone who can’t tell the quick from the dead? Come and prove me wrong and I’ll pay you from my own pocket. With a distinguished surgeon as witness, I can draw up a docket to end this matter.”
The girl was under the spell of a mountebank who called himself Dr. Pretorious, although Gorrall was certain that it wasn’t the man’s real name. “He was thrown out of Padua last year for practicing medicine without a license, and was in jail in Milan before that. I’ve had my eye on him since he came ashore on a Prussian coal barge this summer. He vanished a month ago, and I thought he’d become some other city’s problem. Instead, he went to ground. Now he proclaims this girl to be a miraculous example of a new kind of treatment.”
There were many mountebanks in Venice. Every morning and afternoon there were five or six stages erected in the Piazza San Marco for their performances and convoluted orations, in which they praised the virtues of their peculiar instruments, powders, elixirs and other concoctions. Venice tolerated these madmen, in Dr. Stein’s opinion, because the miasma of the nearby marshes befuddled the minds of her citizens, who besides were the most vain people he had ever met, eager to believe any promise of enhanced beauty and longer life.
Unlike the other mountebanks, Dr. Pretorious was holding a secret court. He had rented a disused wine store at the edge of the Prussian Fondaco, a quarter of Venice where ships were packed tightly in the narrow canals and every other building was a merchant’s warehouse. Even walking beside a captain of the city guard, Dr. Stein was deeply uneasy there, feeling that all eyes were drawn to the yellow star he must by law wear, pinned to the breast of his surcoat. There had been an attack on the synagogue just the other day, and pigshit had been smeared on the mezuzah fixed to the doorpost of a prominent Jewish banker. Sooner or later, if the bodysnatchers were not caught, a mob would sack the houses of the wealthiest Jews on the excuse of searching out and destroying the fabled Golem which existed nowhere but in their inflamed imaginations.
Along with some fifty others, mostly rich old women and their servants, Gorrall and Dr. Stein crossed a high arched bridge over a dark, silently running canal, and, after paying a ruffian a soldi each for the privilege, entered through a gate into a courtyard lit by smoky torches. Once the ruffian had closed and locked the gate, two figures appeared at a tall open door that was framed with swags of red cloth.
One was a man dressed all in black, with a mop of white hair. Behind him a woman in white lay half-submerged in a kind of tub packed full of broken ice. Her head was bowed, and her face hidden by a fall of black hair. Gorrall nudged Dr. Stein and said that this was the girl.
“She looks dead to me. Anyone who could sit in a tub of ice and not burst to bits through shivering must be dead.”
“Let’s watch and see,” Gorrall said, and lit a foul-smelling cigarillo.
The white-haired man, Dr. Pretorious, welcomed his audience, and began a long rambling speech. Dr. Stein paid only a little attention, being more interested in the speaker. Dr. Pretorious was a gaunt, bird-like man with a clever, lined face and dark eyes under shaggy brows which knitted together when he made a point. He had a habit of stabbing a finger at his audience, of shrugging and laughing immodestly at his own boasts. He did not, Dr. Stein was convinced, much believe his speech, a curious failing for a mountebank.
Dr. Pretorious had the honor, it appeared, of introducing the true Bride of the Sea, one recently dead but now animated by an ancient Egyptian science. There was much on the long quest he had made in search of the secret of this ancient science, and the dangers he had faced in bringing it here, and in perfecting it. He assured his audience that as it had conquered death, the science he had perfected would also conquer old age, for was that not the slow victory of death over life? He snapped his fingers, and, as the tub seemed to slide forward of its own accord into the torchlight, invited his audience to see for themselves that this Bride of the Sea was not alive.
Strands of kelp had been woven into the drowned girl’s thick black hair. Necklaces layered at her breast were of seashells of the kind that anyone could pick from the beach at the mouth of the lagoon.
Dr. Pretorious pointed to Dr. Stein, called him out. “I see we have here a physician. I recognize you, sir. I know the good work that you do at the Pietà, and the wonderful new surgical techniques you have brought to the city. As a man of science, would you do me the honor of certifying that this poor girl is at present not living?”
“Go on,” Gorrall said, and Dr. Stein stepped forward, feeling both foolish and eager.
“Please, your opinion,” Dr. Pretorious said with an ingratiating bow. He added, sotto voce, “This is a true marvel, Doctor. Believe in me.” He held a little mirror before the girl’s red lips, asked Dr. Stein if he saw any evidence of breath.
Dr. Stein was aware of an intense sweet, cloying odor: a mixture of brandy and attar of roses. He said, “I see none.”
“Louder, for the good people here.” Dr. Stein repeated his answer.
“A good answer. Now, hold her wrist. Does her heart beat?”
The girl’s hand was as cold as the ice from which Dr. Pretorious lifted it. If there was a pulse, it was so slow that Dr. Stein was not allowed enough time to find it. He was dismissed, and Dr. Pretorious held up the girl’s arm by the wrist, and with a grimace of effort pushed a long nail though her hand.
“You see,” he said with indecent excitement, giving the wrist a little shake so that the pierced hand flopped to and fro. “You see! No b
lood! No blood! Eh? What living person could endure such a cruel mutilation?”
He seemed excited by his demonstration. He dashed inside the doorway, and brought forward a curious device, a glass bowl inverted on a stalk of glass almost as tall as he, with a band of red silk twisted inside the bowl and around a spindle at the bottom of the stalk. He began to work a treadle, and the band of silk spun around and around.
“A moment,” Dr. Pretorious said, as the crowd began to murmur. He glared at them from beneath his shaggy eyebrows as his foot pumped the treadle. “A moment, if you please. The apparatus must receive a sufficient charge.”
He sounded flustered and out of breath. Any mountebank worth his salt would have had a naked boy painted in gilt with cherub wings to work the treadle, Dr. Stein reflected, and a drumroll besides. Yet the curious amateurism of this performance was more compelling than the polished theatricality of the mountebanks of the Piazza San Marco.
Gold threads trailed from the top of the glass bowl to a big glass jar half-filled with water and sealed with a cork. At last, Dr. Pretorious finished working the treadle, sketched a bow to the audience—his face shiny with sweat—and used a stave to sweep the gold threads from the top of the glass bowl onto the girl’s face.
There was a faint snap, as of an old glass broken underfoot at a wedding. The girl’s eyes opened and she looked about her, seeming dazed and confused.
“She lives, but only for a few precious minutes,” Dr. Pretorious said. “Speak to me, my darling. You are a willing bride to the sea, perhaps?”
Gorrall whispered to Dr. Stein, “That’s definitely the girl who drowned herself?” and Dr. Stein nodded. Gorrall drew out a long silver whistle and blew on it, three quick blasts. At once, a full squad of men-at-arms swarmed over the high walls. Some of the old women in the audience started to scream. The ruffian in charge of the gate charged at Gorrall, who drew a repeating pistol with a notched wheel over its stock. He shot three times, the wheel ratchetting around as it delivered fresh charges of powder and shot to the chamber. The ruffian was thrown onto his back, already dead as the noise of the shots echoed in the courtyard. Gorrall turned and levelled the pistol at the red-cloaked doorway, but it was on fire, and Dr. Pretorious and the dead girl in her tub of ice were gone.
In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus Page 62
