Lucifer's Shadow

by David Hewson

  I apologised profusely, touching my cap several times, and stumbled over the bridge beneath a dark arch and found myself, wide-eyed and more than a touch fearful, in the realm of the Jews.

  10

  An awkward interview

  GIULIA MORELLI RANG THE BELL ON THE ANCIENT house in San Cassian. The housekeeper answered the door. She wore a plain nylon housecoat and smiled uncomfortably when she saw the police ID. The woman was blinking at the sunlight, as if she hated to be outside.

  The policewoman remembered the last time she interviewed Scacchi. It was at the station, at his own request, in the company of a cheap lawyer. Nothing came of the discussion. Scacchi was as slippery as an eel, but charming too.

  She peered at the servant, as if half recognising her. “Have we met before?”

  “I don’t believe so,” the woman replied briskly. “What do you want, please?”

  Yet they had exchanged glances at least once, when she had seen Scacchi on the boat, fast asleep, and realised that he might be able to offer some insight into the strange events which followed the disinterment of Susanna Gianni. The housekeeper had been at the helm of the craft, steering it with a professional air of disdain towards the mass of waterborne traffic on the Cannaregio canal.

  “I would like an interview with Signor Scacchi. Is he at home?”

  “Yes. For what reason?”

  “I will discuss that with him myself. It is a private matter.”

  The housekeeper bristled. “He is tired. I will not allow him to be disturbed. Do the police not make appointments?”

  Giulia Morelli found it impossible not to smile. The woman was implacable in her determination to protect the man and had moved her body to fill the doorway, as if she would block any intruder with her physical presence. “I am sorry. You are quite correct. I should have called beforehand. Most of my appointments are not with gentlemen like Scacchi, you understand. I forget myself.”

  The white housecoat did not move from the door. There was a noise from inside the hallway.

  “I wanted to ask Scacchi’s advice on a matter of which he has specialist knowledge. Nothing more.”

  The old man shuffled into view. From the expression on the housekeeper’s face, she was unaware he had been eavesdropping.

  “One must always help the police, Laura,” Scacchi insisted, and beckoned Giulia Morelli into the house. “Some coffee, Captain? We haven’t spoken since you sought that lost bauble from St. Petersburg, I believe.”

  She followed him up the stairs into an elegant living room, sitting on the sofa at his beckoning. He slumped into an armchair opposite. The young man from the boat was in the corner, peering at a set of ancient books.

  “Daniel,” Scacchi declared. “Cease your studies and meet a Venetian police officer. Captain Giulia Morelli. Daniel Forster. Daniel is English— at least it says as much on his passport—but we are fast developing a theory that he is a foundling who was spirited away to that cold climate as an infant.”

  Daniel Forster was handsome, though somewhat ingenuous, she thought. Was it possible he was blushing?

  “You are on holiday?” she asked.

  “He does a little research for me,” Scacchi interrupted.

  “Work which is as good as a holiday,” Daniel said in near-perfect Italian. “I can’t thank Signor Scacchi sufficiently for the kindness he has shown me.”

  She watched the old man’s expression. It seemed troubled. Scacchi was not a man to dispense kindness without a purpose. The housekeeper returned with two small cups of coffee. Scacchi waved at the door. “The captain is on police business. I think you should take your books elsewhere, Daniel. You, too, Laura.”

  They left, a little reluctantly, it seemed to her. The old man folded his hands on his knees, smiled, and said, “Well, Captain. What have you come to arrest me for this time?”

  “Scacchi.” She beamed. “I have only arrested you once before and was unable, or unwilling, to press charges, in any case. You are most unfair.”

  “Huh! I have the single most ambitious woman in the Venice police in my parlour and she wishes me to think this is a social call?”

  “Not at all. As I told your charming and most protective housekeeper, I merely seek your advice. And have some to offer in return too.”

  His face was grey and miserable when he allowed the pleasantries to drop. Scacchi was sick. It was obvious the rumours she had heard were correct. Giulia Morelli felt sorry for the old man.

  “You know why I have come, surely?”

  “I am an antiquarian, my dear. Not a psychic.”

  “The Gianni girl. You were familiar with the family.”

  He stared at her sourly. “Ten years ago. Who wants to drag up that terrible story again?”

  “You read about the murdered cemetery superintendent. Surely? What the papers did not tell you is that earlier that day he had exhumed the poor girl’s body, on forged papers too. And something was in that coffin, Scacchi.”

  “What?” he asked immediately.

  “I don’t know. A personal object of some value. Of some size too. I think it was too large to be jewellery.”

  He opened his hands as if bemused. “You are asking my advice about an object you cannot identify which may or may not have been taken from a casket which has lain underground for a decade. What do you expect me to say?”

  Giulia Morelli hesitated. She had so little information.

  “You knew the Giannis....”

  “Only slightly.”

  “You met the girl. Perhaps you knew what she was buried with.”

  He shook his head. “Fantasies, my dear.”

  “Perhaps.” There was another reason she had come. “But you must know something, Scacchi. Whatever was taken from that coffin has caused one man’s death already. If someone should be unwise enough to accept it, perhaps there will be more. There is something strange here, and dangerous. Think of that, and call me.”

  Scacchi sighed. “You are young. You still have a romantic, a distant notion about death.”

  She thought of the blade flashing through the air of the grubby apartment and the corpse opposite her. “I think not.”

  He studied her face with weary, perceptive eyes. “I read about your... ordeal in the paper. I am glad you were not seriously hurt. You have chosen a dangerous profession, Captain.”

  Was that a threat? she wondered. Scacchi’s perfect manners surely made such a thing impossible.

  “Sometimes we invite danger into our lives without even knowing,” she replied. “I thought I was going to interview an irate cemetery superintendent. Not interrupt a murder.”

  Scacchi coughed, a dry, dead sound. “Surely not, my dear,” he remarked. “You thought you saw the ghost of that poor dead girl. And you couldn’t resist chasing it.”

  Giulia Morelli said nothing. From beyond the door she heard the sound of the housekeeper and the young man, Daniel. They were laughing, an easy, intimate laughter of a kind she rarely heard. She looked at Scacchi and wondered if she had been crazy to think he could help.

  Outside, the bell of San Cassian tolled twelve.

  11

  From the past

  RIZZO SAT IN THE SMALL, BARE APARTMENT BEHIND A locked door and closed curtains. He lived in a basic public-housing block in Cannaregio, not far from the old Jewish ghetto. His neighbours were, in the main, elderly, and wisely kept their noses out of his business. It was an ideal location from which to pursue his chosen trade.

  The violin was safe inside its case in the luggage locker in Mestre. Even if it was discovered there, nothing linked him to the stolen instrument. All the risk came from any attempt to realise its value. He had to find a buyer, one who understood its worth and was willing to pay the price. And he had to achieve all this without making his disloyalty known to Massiter. In the gossipy world of stolen artefacts, this was no easy task. Rizzo had on occasion dealt in contraband tobacco, cocaine, and marijuana in addition to the run-of-the-mill objects he lifte
d from tourist pockets. These were all saleable items which could be moved through any number of third parties familiar to him. An ancient violin was a different matter. In order to establish the kind of price it might fetch, he needed the right advice and, to back up what that told him, some research of his own.

  There was one possible solution. Three years before, he had, by a roundabout route, come into possession of a small, decorative antique carriage-clock, an item of little interest to the customary outlets he used for moving stolen goods. After some phone calls, he had established three individuals who might offer him a price for it: two dealers— one in Mestre, one in Treviso—and a third figure, a city man he knew as Arturo, who seemed ready to buy and sell on an occasional basis, though only through a third party so that the two of them never met. The Treviso dealer had taken the clock in the end, for a miserly price, but Rizzo had carefully filed away the dealers’ numbers for future reference. The day after he acquired the violin, he had phoned all three anonymously, described the instrument as accurately as he could, with its markings and the curious inscription on the label. The first two dealers had laughed at him. The violin must be a fake, they said. Even if it were not, no one could possibly buy it. Any instrument of that calibre would be bought by an active, performing musician who would never take the risk of using a stolen violin in public.

  Arturo had made the same point, yet there was, Rizzo felt, a note of measurable interest in his voice. He had asked detailed questions about the instrument: its colour, its size, and whether it had two parallel lines of stain on its belly—a sign, Rizzo judged, of a particular maker. When he confirmed the last point, Arturo fell silent for a moment, then asked, unwisely, what price Rizzo had in mind. The figure came straight out of Rizzo’s head: $100,000. Arturo had whistled and said the game was too rich for him. No one would pay such a sum for an instrument that could never be played in a concert hall. But he asked for Rizzo’s name and number and, when they were refused, suggested they speak again later, when his caller was willing to accept a more realistic price.

  The conversation ended with both parties knowing it would one day, at Rizzo’s choosing, resume. Yet it was hardly an ideal position. Rizzo preferred to have several potential buyers, each bidding against the others. With just three calls he had, in some way he failed to understand, managed to alert Massiter to the existence of the violin. To widen the net would be to invite Massiter’s discovery of his theft, the consequences of which Rizzo cared not to contemplate. There were only two options: to take the thing out of its locker and throw it into the marshland out by the airport, where it could rot in the filthy salt waters of the lagoon, hidden forever. Or to squeeze the best price he could out of Arturo and get the thing off his hands as quickly as possible. To achieve the latter demanded information about the goods he had for sale. There seemed no better way to acquire that than to look into the background of its last owner.

  Rizzo spent two hours in the city library, going through back issues of Il Gazzettino, and came away with ten photocopied pages of cuttings. Susanna Gianni’s death had caused quite a stir in the city at the time, prompting a string of stories, each accompanied by the same photograph that he had seen on her headstone. It was perhaps this buried memory that had made her long-dead face so mesmeric when he had encountered it on San Michele. There had been a time when it was present on the front pages of the newspapers almost every day.

  She was a local girl who grew up on the Lido. Her devoted single mother had, the reporters said, taken on extra cleaning work in the beachfront hotels in order to pay for her music lessons. By the time Susanna was twelve, the word “prodigy” was being used, an idea helped by the rumour, spread about by her mother, that the family was in some way distantly related to the legendary maestro Paganini. Only one mention was made of her instrument. In the year of her death, a preview of the concert which closed the summer school at La Pietà reported that she had been bought a fine and valuable fiddle by an anonymous admirer. No value had been placed upon the violin, which was described as a Giuseppe Guarneri from Cremona. Nor was there a photograph of her with anything which looked like the fiddle Rizzo had taken from her dead arms. Nevertheless, he knew this later instrument had to be the one which was now in his possession. Clearly visible on the label of the fiddle now in Mestre was the name Joseph Guarnerius and a date, 1733. It was also, without doubt, the one in the photograph Massiter had shown him in the apartment.

  The newspaper accounts told of her music, not of Susanna Gianni. There was no hint of affairs or a darker side to her character, though knowing Il Gazzettino, he doubted such tittle-tattle would be carried even if it existed. At the start of the last summer of her life, there was every expectation that she would be the star of the summer school paid for by the great benefactor Massiter and, in all probability, move on to the international circuit afterwards. The girl had gone missing after the closing concert, where she had performed triumphantly. Two days later her naked body was found in a rio near Piazzale Roma. She had been badly beaten, but the cause of death was drowning. Susanna Gianni was last seen at the farewell party hosted by Hugo Massiter in the Hotel Danieli. The police had no witnesses who saw her leave or any idea of how or why she had travelled from the waterfront by San Marco across the canal to the dank quarter on the far side of the city where she met her death. Nor was there any mention of the violin, a detail which, it seemed to Rizzo, would surely have been noted had the fiddle been found next to the body, lending the scene a melodramatic touch the papers would surely not have missed. He knew nothing of music. Perhaps the violin had remained at the school and was reunited with its late owner only when she was interred.

  Murder is a rarity in Venice. The savage attack on Susanna Gianni and the lack of any progress by the police in finding her killer provided the papers with their best story in years. A week later it was over as sensationally as it had begun. Anatole Singer, the leader of the school, a lean, balding Russian in his late forties, was found hanged in his suite in the Gritti Palace. In a suicide note Singer confessed to attacking the girl when she refused his advances. He had lured her to a remote meeting place near Piazzale Roma after the farewell party on the pretext of meeting an American agent who would find her work in New York. Susanna rebuffed him, and so he raped her in a drunken rage, then threw her, unconscious, into the water.

  All this, it seemed to Rizzo, was described in a very pat, logical way for a man who was about to hang himself. As a criminal by trade, Rizzo believed that confession, under any circumstances, was a most unnatural act. Even if one did feel the need to make a clean breast of matters, why do so just before committing suicide? What was the point? Every crime needed a purpose. He had not murdered the cemetery superintendent lightly. The man’s death was required in order to save his own skin, since Massiter would surely kill him if he knew about the fiddle. And where was the gain in Singer’s confession? These doubts did not trouble the heads of the city detectives, however. They had declared the case closed. Within a fortnight, the Gianni story was dead, as dead as its apparent protagonists.

  The last cutting in the file was a tribute to Susanna from Hugo Massiter himself. Rizzo stared at the decade-old picture of Massiter. He had only a little more hair and the same dress sense, with a neck scarf folded neatly over his throat. The article described Massiter as the “well-known international art expert and philanthropist.” Rizzo stifled a laugh. It was difficult to decide who was more stupid: the press or the police.

  He picked up the phone and dialled the local number. A woman answered, then called Arturo to the phone. The familiar thin, reedy voice came on the line. Rizzo explained his proposition: $80,000, not a penny less.

  “Give me time,” the thin voice said.

  “Two weeks. There’s some guy in Rome who’s creaming himself for this thing.”

  “Two weeks,” the voice repeated glumly. “Ciao. ”

  In the small, dark apartment, Rizzo smiled. There was triumph in the air. He even knew Arturo’s
full name. The servant had said it when she called to him.

  “Ciao, Scacchi,” Rizzo said, then hung up.

  12

  The mysterious Levis

  What should I have expected? The smell of incense in the air? Strange people in strange clothes eyeing this suspicious Gentile invader from the world outside? I had no idea. The very oddness of this task had banished imagination from my head. When I walked over that wooden bridge, I might have been ready to enter the Tower of Babel. Instead, I discovered ordinariness in abundance. The ghetto is much like any other corner of the city, only plainer. The towering buildings which line the circular perimeter of the island are just a few rooms deep. Beyond them is a small cobbled square with a well in its centre, a scattering of modest-sized trees, and—the only curiosity—men and women dressed uniformly in dark clothes, sitting on benches, toying with beads, and reading books.

  I asked a young chap with a wispy black beard where I might find Dr. Levi (speaking very slowly and clearly so he might understand). He pointed with a long, pale finger at a house in the corner of the square, next to a curious jumble of buildings surmounted by what looked like the wooden cabin of Noah’s Ark. I crossed and entered by the downstairs door. There was the smell of cooking—potato and cabbage—and the noise of young families. I read the list of names on the wall, then climbed—and climbed—all six floors, past doors half-open, past arguments and banter, the bawl of infants, and, once, the unmistakable sound of sobbing, and was relieved when I reached the top to find myself in something that might pass for silence.

  I knocked on the single door. It opened and a young man’s a fable face, clean-shaven, intelligent, with glittering brown eyes and a high forehead, met mine, smiling, with an amused expression upon it.