One of them clapped her hands to her face. ‘But it’s not cooked!’
‘Even better this way. Very healthy. See my dad over there.’ He nodded his head towards Marco. ‘He’s eighty-three. You wouldn’t think so, eh? It’s because he eats raw fish every day.’ Marco, who was neither eighty-three nor, for that matter, Luciano’s dad did his best to enter into the spirit of things by giving them a broken-toothed grin. Then he turned to me and shook his head.
‘ Incorreggibile .’
‘He’s impressive though. I’d never have thought it possible to flirt whilst holding a mollusc. What’s good today, Marco?’ I had, by now, learned that it was never any good asking for what I wanted. Marco and Luciano would sell me what they wanted to sell me, and that was the end of the matter. So ‘what’s good today’ was just shorthand for ‘tell me what I’m going to be leaving with’.
‘Ah, have the monkfish. Very good, very fresh today. You could eat it raw.’
I suppressed a sigh as I looked at a mountain of sardines, perfect for grilling. But if Marco said monkfish, monkfish it would be. ‘That’d be lovely,’ I smiled.
‘How much?’
‘Enough for three,’ I said without thinking. He gave me the two biggest tails. Enough for four. ‘Isn’t that rather a lot?’ I said.
He grinned. ‘No no. It’ll reduce when you cook it . . .’
Monkfish, then. I was pretty sure I had some stock in the freezer, and a couple of carrots in the salad drawer. A place that, until the arrival of Federica, might as well have had ‘Here Be Dragons’ affixed to it. It was a bit late in the season now, but not too late to pick up some asparagus, broad beans and fresh peas. I also bought some flowers for Fede to go with the second-hand ones I’d passed on to her. Bonus points, I thought. There were, I knew, better places to go for flowers in the city, places where the most gorgeous and exotic blooms would be trimmed and tethered, and beautifully presented. Knowing nothing about flowers, those places frightened me. The ones from the market might not be quite so artistically presented and might only last a few days, but they looked the part. I felt quite the model boyfriend as I fought my way back over the Rialto Bridge. Boyfriend? Was I too old to be a boyfriend? Probably. I didn’t care.
I was still whistling a happy tune by the time I arrived home. I never whistled. I felt like glad-handing total strangers and ruffling the hair of street urchins. The weekly newsletter containing the latest offers from the nearest supermarket had been slid under the door, together with the electricity bill. A couple of flyers. And then, something else. An envelope. No address, neither handwritten nor printed. Advertising then. I stuck them all in the bag of vegetables and carried everything upstairs.
I had a small amount of translation work to crack on with that afternoon, and dinner to prepare. Nothing too complicated, just monkfish with spring vegetables, but it would take a little bit of work if it was going to look suitably cheffy and pretty.
I reckoned I had a little bit of time left to check out Francesco’s story about Paul Considine. I stuck some early Jethro Tull on the stereo, and logged on.
It took a bit of searching. There were pages and pages about his art, about his being long-listed for the 2009 Turner Prize, and no shortage of comment, of course, about the unfortunate incident of a few days back. But no references to his arrest. I searched deeper. ‘Paul Considine glass’ just brought up pages of reviews and images. I changed it to ‘Paul Considine glass arrest’. And there it was. A single article from the Standard, in 2005. He hadn’t been famous at the time, just another struggling artist, and a fight in a London pub wouldn’t have been enough to make the national papers. But from what I could gather, he’d been arrested after hitting somebody with a bottle in a pub. The other guy, it seemed, had had a knife on his person and hadn’t pressed charges. Still. After one double whisky too many, Paul Considine, it seemed, had thought it a great idea to attack somebody with a glass bottle.
There were no other accounts of the incident. Strange. Surely it would have come back to haunt him when he became famous? Then I remembered what Gwen had told me about Lewis Fitzgerald, and his fondness for litigation and super-injunctions. For all his faults, then, it seemed as if he was very good at protecting his assets.
Francesco had been right. I didn’t know much about art. Or, more precisely, I only knew about art by dead people. And maybe I didn’t really know as much as I thought about people in general either.
I felt vaguely depressed. Considine had a violent streak. Lewis seemed like a spiv. Francesco . . . Francesco, I was starting to think was probably just a cheap crook. I started to worry if the Nice Welsh Lady really had actually murdered her husband. Everything just seemed a bit grubby and sordid. If that’s what the contemporary art world was like, well they could keep it. I flicked through my diary. I had a few more openings to go to in the next few days, and more abstracts to translate, but my heart wasn’t in it any more.
Cooking. Cooking would sort me out. The monkfish wouldn’t take much time to cook, but a little bit of preparation would speed things up. And I’d need a starter as well. I replaced Jethro Tull with more Jethro Tull, and headed for the kitchen.
I prepared a dozen discs of polenta, and caramelised some red onions with a splash of balsamic vinegar. I put the onions on top of the polenta discs, and crumbled some cubes of mozzarella on top. I’d stick them in the oven when people arrived until the cheese melted, and they’d be just perfect as snacks whilst I cracked on with the fish. I set to preparing the vegetables.
Fede arrived at about six o’clock, paused only to remove the Tull from the hi-fi – she’d got it down to such a fine art by now that she scarcely needed to break her stride – and walked into the kitchen where she found me working on vegetables. She slipped her arms around me and kissed the back of my neck.
‘What are you doing, tesoro ?’
‘Skinning the beans.’
‘Why?’
‘They just look prettier. Greener.’
‘But do they really taste that different? Is it really worth it?’
‘I’m not sure they taste any better. But they do look very pretty.’
‘This is dinner for three, caro . Not Masterchef .’
I grinned. ‘I know. But it’s been a bit of a rubbish couple of days. This kind of cheered me up. Along with Jethro Tull of course.’ I gave her my best hangdog expression.
She sighed. ‘Okay, if it’s been that bad I’ll put it back on for you as a special treat. So, tell me all about it.’
I told her more about my meeting with Francesco Nicolodi and what I’d found out about Paul Considine. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Okay, so Considine was an asshole ten years ago. Doesn’t mean he is now. And it’s a big stretch from “has fight in bar” to “serially murders critics with broken glass”. Anyway, I still think there’s no way he could have murdered someone like that. Far too many things to go wrong.’
‘I know. It’s just that I kind of went the extra mile to try and help him out. And now, well, everyone involved in this just seems a little bit seedy. I’m not sure I want to do any more. For that matter, I don’t think there’s anything else I can do.’
‘Then don’t. I mean, it’s a shame we haven’t got a real, proper mystery again. But it sounds as if you’ve done all you can. Let Vanni sort it out.’ She gave me a peck on the cheek. ‘The beans look lovely. Very green. And I’ll put some nice Jethro Tull on for you.’ She’d never used the words ‘nice’ and ‘Jethro Tull’ in the same sentence before. I thought to myself again what a lucky man I was . . .
Dario arrived about thirty minutes later, and we munched through polenta discs together as he showed us his latest batch of photos of little Emily. Federica smiled politely throughout.
‘Aww, just look at her, Fede.’
‘I’m looking, Nathan.’
‘Isn’t she lovely, though?’
Fede took my face in her hands. ‘Okay, I don’t know what you’ve done with him, but I want my old Nathan
back, and I want him back right now.’ Then Dario looked hurt, and she relented. ‘She is lovely,’ she smiled.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m going back to the kitchen. You two can fight over control of the stereo in the meantime. If it’s any help, Gramsci is going through a bit of an Alan Parsons Project phase.’
I poured some vegetable stock into a pan, and chucked in the asparagus. Just a minute or two, nothing more. Then the peas, then the beans. Just a couple of minutes more. Then the monkfish. Cover and cook, just five minutes. Then I poured the resulting stew into three bowls and served it up. Get this wrong, even by a few minutes, and you’d end up with a chewy piece of fish on a bed of stewed and overcooked vegetables. Get it right, and your friends would say lovely things about you.
Dario grinned, and took a sip of wine. ‘He’s very good, isn’t he?’
Fede smiled at me. ‘He is. That was very good, caro . Especially the very green bits.’
I had to agree. ‘The green bits, I think, really made it.’ I took the plates out to the kitchen and washed up. Then I cleared away the debris of the shopping. The morning’s mail was still in the empty bag of vegetables. I put the electricity bill to one side and dropped the supermarket newsletter straight into recycling. I scrunched up the flyers and was about to drop them in as well, when something caught my eye. I unscrunched them. One of them was for a pawn shop in Mestre which may or may not have been a front for money-laundering. The other was for the exhibition on Lazzaretto Vecchio.
I smoothed it out. An image of the lazzaretto against the background of the lagoon, together with a list of participating artists and their works. Considine’s name was at the top. His piece in the British pavilion, I remembered, was called Seven by Seven by Seven . This was simpler, Seven by Seven . The opening date and time had been scribbled out, and underneath someone had written Friday 20 May 2015. Midnight .
My own, personal vernissage .
I shook my head. Whoever you are, I don’t think so. I turned it over. The reverse was blank, except for the words Help me, Nathan .
Oh hell.
I checked my watch. Nearly nine o’clock. How the hell was I going to manage this? Dario and Fede, I knew, would try and talk me out of it. Or, worse, they would insist on coming with me. Moreover, Fede was supposed to be staying over with me tonight. Somehow, I needed a way of steering us back to the Lido.
I tore open the blank envelope. It was a postcard. I saw the image on the card, and nearly cried out. Then the thought struck me that it might just be a solution. I folded the flyer away, and ran back into the living room. ‘Fede, Dario. I think I’ve got a problem.’
‘You’ve forgotten your quarterly tax return?’ said Dario.
‘Again,’ whispered Federica, but not quite sotto voce enough.
I shook my head. ‘No, this is different. This is weird different. Take a look at this.’ I waved the postcard at them. ‘It arrived in the post this morning. Or, more to the point, it was slipped under the door this morning.’ I passed it around. A gaunt, cloaked figure, bearing a scythe, astride a horse, flying through the clouds; leading a host of demonic, bat-winged creatures.
‘Gustav Doré,’ said Federica.
‘I thought it might be. The Angel of Death?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘Where’s it from? The Inferno ?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Not the Inferno . Not the Rime of the Ancient Mariner . I’m really not sure. Perhaps his series on Edgar Allan Poe?’
‘It’s from his illustrated Bible. Round about 1870, I think,’ said Dario. There was silence around the table.
‘You what?’ I said.
‘He illustrated a French edition of the Bible. This is called “The Vision of Death”. From Revelation , the opening of the fourth seal. “And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him”.’
‘Yes yes yes but . . . how?’ I asked.
‘It’s the cover of Hawkwind’s “Angels of Death”.’ He looked puzzled. ‘You should know that, Nathan.’
‘I know the track. There’s an album called Angels of Death ?’
‘Sure. It’s a compilation of their three RCA albums.’
‘ Sonic Attack. Church of Hawkwind. Choose Your Masques . That explains it. I had the three of them already.’
‘Ah, you see there was a distribution problem in Italy. Church of Hawkwind didn’t come out over here until the 1990s. But there are four tracks from it on the compilation.’
‘I didn’t think you were a fan?’
‘Not really, but there’s usually a track or two on each album worth listening to.’
‘Any bonus tracks on there?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Nothing at all. If you’ve got the originals you don’t need it. But the cover’s really good.’
We stopped talking. We became aware that Federica was staring at us. Not in a good way.
She closed her eyes and held her hands in front of her face, palms outwards. ‘Can we just stop talking about this? Please?’
‘Sorry,’ we both said.
‘Good. So what is this? A warning? A threat?’
‘Someone’s stuck a picture of a man with a scythe under my door. It might not be a threat, but it’ll do until something better comes along.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Dario.
‘It’s a man with a scythe, Dario. A man with a scythe.’
‘Sure.’ He poured himself some more wine then patted my arm. ‘If you ask me, it’s this guy Nicolodi. You’ve had two big fights with him in the last few days, right? And he knows all about that guy losing his head and the picture found in his pocket. He knows where you live because you gave him your card. So he walks by one afternoon, sticks this through your door in the hope that it’ll scare you.’
I drew a deep breath, and nodded. ‘You’re probably right. It does make sense.’
‘Almost,’ said Federica. ‘With one problem. Where did he get the card?’
Dario shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Yes it does.’ She reached over for the card, and turned it over so that the reverse side was facing us. ‘Where’s it from? There’s no way to tell?’
‘It could have come from anywhere,’ I said. ‘Any church or gallery shop in the city.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. Because I’m absolutely certain this image isn’t in any church or gallery in Venice. Which means whoever bought it must have done so before they came here. Before they ever met you. Now why would someone do that?’
Dario shook his head. ‘The Accademia. The Cini foundation. The Correr museum. There must be others. Any of them might be selling copies of this.’
‘They might. But I’m not so sure about that.’
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I like Dario’s theory. It’s kind of reassuring.’
‘It is,’ said Federica, ‘but there’s something not quite right about it. I don’t think that postcard was bought in this city. Now who travels around with a copy of “The Vision of Death” with them, just on the offchance?’
‘People who listen to too much Black Sabbath?’ suggested Dario. I smiled, but he continued, ‘Or, I don’t know, weirdos . . . murderers . . . serial killers . . .’
‘That’s not helping, Dario.’ I stopped him before he could go any further. We sat in silence for a few moments.
‘So what are we going to do?’ said Federica.
‘I’ll call Vanni in the morning. I know it’s not much to go on, but it’s all I can think of.’
She nodded. ‘Okay, do that. But why not call him now?’
‘He won’t be there now. It’ll just be some cop that I don’t know. And I’ll have to tell him that someone’s sent me a picture of a man with a scythe. And I’ll seem like a mad person. I mean, in the morning it’ll probably all seem like nonsense. And Dario’s probably right.’
‘Mr Blake-Hoyt was found beheaded with a picture of Judith beheading Holofernes in his pocket. And all that coul
d have been a coincidence. You get attacked with a glass arrow, and a picture of Saint Sebastian is stuck in your pocket. Stretching the definition of coincidence. Now you get a picture of the Angel of Death slid under your door. And now that doesn’t seem like a coincidence any more.’
I nodded. I opened my mouth to speak, and closed it again. They’d both given me an opportunity here, but I was going to have to lie to them.
‘You all right, buddy?’ asked Dario.
I shook my head. ‘No. No, I’m really not.’ I paused, ‘Fed, is your mum still with you?’
‘She went home yesterday, why?’
‘I’m just thinking – you know the idea was for you to stay over tonight?’
‘Yes. Ah, I know what you’re thinking. You’d like us to go back to the Lido?’
I breathed a sigh of relief, but not for the reason they were thinking. ‘It’s stupid, I know, but—’
‘No, it’s not. I don’t really think we’re going to be horribly murdered in our beds tonight, but it’s not stupid at all. So would you feel better if we headed off back to my place?’
‘Thanks,’ I breathed. ‘What about Dario?’
‘Only if I get to choose the music.’
We all laughed. ‘I’ll head back to Mestre, vecio .’
‘You sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure. I haven’t met any of these people. If there is a psycho stalking the streets I’m pretty sure he’s not looking for me.’
‘Thanks. That makes me feel better. A very little better.’
‘Thanks for dinner.’ He leant over and kissed Federica. ‘Look after him, okay?’
‘I’ll call you tomorrow, Dario,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘I hope so.’
I finished the washing-up after he left. Fede fetched our coats. ‘I think there’s everything you need over there, isn’t there?’ I nodded. ‘And you’ve got no surgery tomorrow, or any openings to go to?’
I shook my head. ‘Just some translating. I can do that on your PC. I’ll just drop back to feed the cat.’
‘Good.’ She hugged me. ‘This is all silly, I’m sure. But why give this Francesco guy the satisfaction? In a day or two he’ll be out of town, and this will all be done with.’
Vengeance in Venice Page 17
