by David Hewson
3
A name from the past
GIULIA MORELLI SIFTED THE REPORT SHEETS ON HER desk. Giulia was duty captain on the evening shift. It was hot inside the modern police block by Piazzale Roma, and the work was beginning to bore her. Sometimes she thought of applying for a transfer. Rome, maybe, or Milan. Anywhere she might find some kind of challenge to keep her mind turning.
Then she stared at the pages in front of her and felt the years roll away in an instant. The dead girl’s name seemed to yell at her. Giulia Morelli stabbed at the phone and managed to catch the reporting officer. He was changing before coming off shift, and none too keen to hang around the overheated police station. The tone of her voice ensured he would not leave without telling his story.
She listened keenly for five minutes, finding herself increasingly perplexed, then put the phone down, walked to the window, threw it open, and lit a cigarette. Outside, the last commuters were heading for their cars in the vast multi-storey close to the bridge to terra firma and Mestre, where most of them lived. She watched the straggle of figures and thought about what the officer had just told her. It made no sense. Perhaps it did not say anything about the case of Susanna Gianni at all.
They had been called to San Michele by an irate undertaker whose party had arrived on time for the ceremony, only to find the superintendent missing. They finally found the man in a building used for disinterments, apparently in some kind of distress. When the undertaker remonstrated with him, the superintendent turned violent and attacked two of the party before being restrained.
The senior officer called to the incident attempted to interview the cemetery employee, but to little avail. According to the report, the unfortunate event was caused by a sudden loss of temper in the heat. The superintendent was cautioned for minor assault, then allowed to go home. The authorities were to be told, but there would be no formal action. Only one unusual detail was noted on the report, and the officer had again confirmed it, though with no further information, when she had spoken to him. In the disinterment room was the coffin of one Susanna Gianni. It had been opened to expose the corpse. And, so it seemed to the officer, something had been removed from the casket. The shape of a long object, perhaps a metre high, was superimposed against the remains of the cadaver.
With the care and foresight she had come to expect of the uniformed branch, the officer had thought this worthy of mention but not of action. Once he had arranged for the superintendent to be taken home by police launch, he had allowed the removal of the casket—and, with it, Susanna Gianni’s bones—to continue. It appeared there was no private arrangement. The disposal of the body was carried out that afternoon by the city cemetery service. The box would be ashes by now. What remained of Susanna Gianni—even the girl’s name still made the policewoman’s blood race—would be strewn among the sea of skeletons which made up the public ossuary on one of the lagoon’s smaller islands.
Giulia Morelli lacked the energy to curse the idiot. She picked up the phone, arranged for a launch, and within five minutes found herself heading up the Grand Canal for Cannaregio, wondering what might have made a cemetery superintendent, one surely used to dealing with corpses over the years, lose his mind so quickly and in such unusual company. Wondering, too, about who had taken that mysterious object from the murdered girl’s coffin, and why.
She ordered the launch to dock at Sant’ Alvise and walked briskly south into the tangle of fascist-era apartment blocks. She had told the launch to wait for her and, against standing orders, planned to conduct the interview alone. The details of the Gianni case were now, a decade later, somewhat hazy in her memory. Even so, she recalled the care with which it was discussed, particularly in the company of a lowly cadet as she was then. There was no reason to raise a fuss now, not until she saw something worth fighting for.
He lived in a block at the edge of the development. The building was clean but shabby. She walked into the dingy communal hallway and pressed the light switch. A perpendicular line of dim yellow bulbs came on overhead. His apartment was on the third floor. She looked for the light. It was out. Giulia Morelli, for no reason she could fully understand, found she was patting her purse to feel the shape of the small police pistol that lived there.
“Stupid,” she hissed quietly, and began to climb the stairs.
The third floor was in virtual darkness. She cursed herself for having left the flashlight behind, wondered, too, why she had been so anxious to interview the man alone. The case was a decade old. The uniformed officer at the helm of her launch had not even been in the force when Susanna Gianni died.
The apartment was at the end of the corridor, somewhere in an inky pool of darkness. She called the man’s name and immediately sensed she had made some kind of a mistake. There was a noise coming from ahead. A glimmer of dull yellow light leaked out from behind a door that stood no more than an inch ajar. She edged closer to it, hearing more clearly: it was a long, breathy moan, a sound that could betoken anything from ecstasy to death.
She reached into her bag and took out the police radio. The signal was dead. Mussolini had built these old apartment blocks well. Giulia Morelli kept the handset tight in her left hand, then reached into the bag for the gun, grasped the weapon, and walked briskly through the door, taking care to stand in the shadow cast by the wan light from a single bulb.
There were words in her throat, cold, officious words, ones which worked on most occasions, sending a little fear into the small-time crooks who were, almost exclusively, her customers. The words died before she was able to say them. Giulia Morelli took in what she could of the scene—the light was poor and the protagonist was deep in shadow, his face invisible to her. All that was apparent of him was a single, lean arm wielding a long, bloodied knife and a smell: cheap, strong cigarettes—African, maybe—and the rank odour of sweaty fear.
She could think of nothing but the painting, the damn painting that had haunted her ever since she’d seen it as a child. It stood in the chancel of San Stae, Tiepolo’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, depicting a man apparently in rapture, arm raised to heaven, a half-hidden attacker carefully testing his skin, wondering where to begin with the blade. She had asked her mother about the painting, always seeking to know the story. Her mother had evaded the question, mumbling something she failed to understand: that the saint was to be “flayed.” It was only later, when she found the word in a dictionary, that she understood. This was the moment before the horror. The executioner was planning the act, that of skinning his victim alive. And the condemned man was looking to heaven in bliss, awaiting his deliverance with joy, something Giulia Morelli knew she would never understand.
The cemetery superintendent was not in rapture. He was, she thought, dead already, or at least she hoped as much. His throat was cut, carefully, from side to side, revealing a broad, bloody band of flesh and sinew. And his murderer, who remained out of sight—though he was, she knew, now moving—was slowly finishing the job, stabbing into the tendons, severing what he could find in the man’s throat.
She gripped the gun. It wriggled in her sweaty grasp. Her fingers twisted on the grip, then slipped, and she heard the metal clatter on the tiled floor. Giulia Morelli could look at nothing but the dead man, wondering, wondering.
A shape rose to her left. A leg came out and kicked her hard. She fell to her knees, waiting for the blow, wondering if she had the courage to look upwards, to heaven, to nothingness, like the saint in the painting. But he was there and she did not wish to see his face.
She tried to speak, but there were no intelligible words in her head. Something silver flashed in front of her eyes. She felt a sudden slash of pain in her side, followed shortly afterwards by the rush of warm blood. Her breath came in sudden, jerky gasps. She waited.
And then the radio came to life in her palm. She had, she realised, been gripping tight on the panic button. Somehow her faint call for help had leaked out of Mussolini’s brickwork and found a human ear. A voice barked at
them. At the foot of the stairs outside in the communal hallway, which might have been on the far side of the world as far as she was concerned, there were footsteps. Too soon for the police, she knew, but the dark shape above her, dropping blood from the knife onto her face, could not know that.
“You are under arrest,” Giulia Morelli said, and wondered why she felt like laughing. He was gone. There was no one else in the room. No one but the dead superintendent, who stared back at her with glassy, terrified eyes and a gory gash for what was once a throat.
She placed a hand on her side, felt the wound the knife had made. She’d live. She would find this man. She would discover why he had robbed Susanna Gianni’s grave and what he had stolen from it. There was work to be done, much of it.
Giulia Morelli stumbled to her feet. There were men at the door. A caretaker, perhaps. Another resident. It was important, she knew, to take control.
“Touch nothing,” she said, trying to think straight, trying to establish the kind of control which was required.
They gaped at her, half-amazed, half-terrified. She followed the direction of their gaze and saw the blood staining her jacket, running down her short skirt, coagulating hot and sticky on her knees.
“Touch...” she repeated, then felt her eyes turn upwards in her head, saw the murky yellow light of the apartment turn black and, finally, disappear altogether.
4
Spritz! Spritz! Spritz!
THREE WEEKS AFTER THE OPENING OF SUSANNA Gianni’s grave and the death of a certain cemetery superintendent in Cannaregio, Daniel Forster walked out of the arrivals area of Marco Polo airport carrying a violin case which was neither old nor malodorous. It was as modest as the instrument inside and the small, soft suitcase which hung from his other arm and contained almost his entire wardrobe: enough clothes, he hoped, to see him through the next five weeks. The flight from Stansted had taken two hours, crossing the snow-covered Alps before descending rapidly into the northeast corner of the Adriatic. Though he had just turned twenty, this was Daniel’s first trip abroad. His new passport, still without a stamp inside, sat in the pocket of his green cotton windcheater along with the plastic envelope from Thomas Cook which contained 300 euros, almost the entire contents of his student current account.
He stood a little under six feet tall, with flowing fair hair and a pleasant, innocuous face still somewhat unformed by adulthood. Hovering uncertainly in the airport hall, he looked like a trainee tour-guide waiting for his first assignment. Then a large man dressed in dark trousers and a baggy blue sweatshirt marched over, bent down to peer in his eyes, and inquired, “Mr. Daniel?”
Daniel blinked, surprised. “Signor Scacchi?”
The man laughed, a grand, booming noise that rose from somewhere deep within his vast stomach. He was in his late thirties, perhaps, and had the ruddy, weather-worn face of a farmer or fisherman. There was a bittersweet smell of alcohol on his breath. “Signor Scacchi! Do I look like a peacock? Do you think I can trill? Come! Come!”
Daniel followed this stranger out of the hall and found they were, within a few steps, by the side of the lagoon. A dozen or more sleek water taxis, each with finely polished wood decks, sat waiting for customers. They walked past them to the public jetty, where an old blue motorised fishing boat sat. In the prow, slumped against each other like lovers, were two slender men. In the mid part of the vessel, a woman wearing jeans and a purple T-shirt bustled over two plastic picnic hampers, her back turned. Next to her, a small, pure-black field spaniel with short ears and a compact nose peered curiously at the contents of the boxes and was shooed away, constantly and to little avail.
The large man looked at the passengers in the boat, waited for a moment to see if their attention would come his way, then, realising this was a lost cause, clapped his hands loudly and announced, “Please! Please! Our guest is arrived! We must welcome him.”
The smaller of the two men stood up. He wore a fawn suit, well-cut, and was, Daniel judged, in his late sixties. This was, he assumed, his host, Signor Scacchi. His face was tanned and lined, almost to the point of emaciation. He appeared ill, as did the younger man by his side, who now lay back on the pillows in the stern of the boat and favoured the newcomer with an expressionless glance.
“Daniel!” the old man said, smiling to reveal a set of too-white dentures. He was short, with a slight hunch. “Daniel! He has come! See, Paul. See, Laura. I told you. Ten days’ notice and us complete strangers. Still, he has come!”
The woman turned to face him. She had a fine, attractive face, with round, full cheeks tapering to a delicate chin. Her large eyes were an extraordinary shade of green. Her hair, long and straight, falling to her shoulders, was a subtle shade of auburn. She peered at Daniel as if he were a creature from outer space, but with a friendly curiosity, as if his presence somehow amused her.
“He did come,” she said in a soft voice only lightly coloured by the Venetian accent, then almost automatically reached into her handbag, took out a pair of large plastic sunglasses, and placed them on her face.
“Well, who’d have thought it?” Paul murmured. He was, Daniel thought, American. He wore a faded denim shirt and jeans of a similar colour. Sprawled in the front of the boat, he had the awkward lack of grace of a teenager and, at first glance, young looks, too, though a moment’s consideration showed them to be cracked and faded, like those of a fifty-year-old trying to appear thirty.
“Of course,” the large man said, then passed the luggage to Laura and extended a huge hand to help Daniel into the lazily shifting boat. “Who wouldn’t come to Venice when asked? I am Piero, since no one seems minded to conclude the introductions,” the man announced. “The fool of the family, though a distant relative so that scarcely matters. And this is my boat, the lovely Sophia, a lady who is loyal, true, and always starts when you need her, which means, I guess, she’s no lady at all. Not that I would know about such matters—there, I said it before Laura said it for me.”
The dog nudged at Daniel’s trousers. Piero reached down and ruffled its head with affection. “And this is Xerxes. So called because he is the finest general of the marshes you will find. No duck escapes his beady little eyes, eh?”
The merest mention of the word “duck” had set the dog’s stumpy tail wagging. Piero chucked him lovingly underneath the chin, then reached into one of the hampers and fed a small circle of salami into Xerxes’ gaping mouth.
Scacchi leaned forward, rocking the little motorboat, pumped his empty hand up and down in a drinking gesture, and announced, “Spritz! Spritz! Spritz!”
“Naturally,” Laura replied from behind the sunglasses, then reached into the second hamper, withdrawing a set of bottles.
“Seats, please,” Piero bellowed, then, with a tug on the starter rope, brought the small diesel engine into life and clambered to the rear to steer it. One of the water-taxi drivers sitting on his gleaming vessel stared at the grubby little boat and said something in a dialect which Daniel could not begin to understand. Piero replied just as unfathomably and extended a single digit at the man. The boat lurched back to clear the jetty, and then they were moving, out from the airport, out into the flat expanse of the Venetian lagoon. What had for years been an idea, an entire imagined universe inside Daniel Forster’s head, suddenly became real. In the far distance, rising from the sea like some bizarre forest, the outline of Venice, of campaniles and palaces, slowly became visible, growing tantalisingly larger as they travelled towards it.
“Spritz,” Scacchi repeated.
Laura gave the old man three bottles: one of Campari, one of white Veneto wine, and a third of sparkling mineral water. Then she made up five glasses with ice, a segment of precut lemon, and, from a small jar, a single green olive in each, and passed them to the old man.
Scacchi looked at him, and for the first time Daniel saw something sly in his face. “You know what this is?”
“I read about it,” he replied. “I wondered what it would taste like.”
/> “You hear that?” Scacchi declared. “Such a fine Italian accent! This is spritz, my lad, and it tells you much you need to know about this city. Look. Campari, for our potent blood. Wine for our love of life. Water for our purity—no laughing there, Paul. An olive for our earthiness. And, finally, lemon, to remind you that if you bite us, we bite back. Here.”
He passed him a glass, full to the brim with the dark-red drink. Daniel took a sip. It was mainly Campari, strong and with the same bittersweet aroma he had smelled on Piero’s breath.
Laura smiled at him as if expecting some reaction. “And food too,” she said, offering a plate full of flat breads filled with cheese and Parma ham. Daniel took one and realised he had no idea of her age. The plain, cheap clothes and obscuring glasses seemed designed to make her look older, and in this they failed. She was, perhaps, twenty-eight or even younger, not in the early to mid thirties which her dress seemed to indicate.
“To Daniel!” Scacchi announced. The four of them raised their glasses. Xerxes barked softly. The boat rocked a little. Scacchi wisely went back to his seat next to Paul. “May these next few weeks open his eyes to the world!”
“To Daniel!” they repeated.
“I’m honoured,” he said in return. “And I hope I shall do the job well.”
“Of course you will,” Scacchi said with a wave of his skeletal hand. “I knew that when I asked you. For the rest, I have fixed some amusements. All other time is your own.”
“I shall try to use it well.”
“As you see fit,” Scacchi said with a yawn.
Then the old man took a long swig from the glass, placed it on the wooden bench seat that ran around the interior of the boat, leaned his head against Paul’s shoulder, and, with no more ado, fell fast asleep in the prow.
The moto topo Sophia edged its way out towards the wide expanse of the lagoon, following the channel from the airport at first, then picking a shorter route to the miniature city perched on the bow. They fell into silence while Scacchi slept. Paul touched the old man’s hair occasionally. Piero drank. Laura offered Daniel a cigarette, seemed pleased when he refused, lit one anyway, and tapped the ash over the side. After a while Paul slept, too, curling his arms around Scacchi, placing his head against the old man’s in a fond gesture which seemed touched with sadness. Piero and Laura exchanged glances. She refilled Piero’s glass more than once. The July day was beginning to fade, casting the city ahead in a gorgeous pink-and-gold light.
