Brotherhood of the Tomb

by Daniel Easterman

  He thought back to each of the places they had passed. The Fondaco dei Turchi should not have been in such a state of disrepair: it had been rebuilt in the last century and later turned into a museum. There should have been a forest of television aerials on the roof of the Palazzo Vendramin. The gilding and the coloured paints had long ago flaked away from the golden palace of the Contarinis.

  And now the madness settled in him like a snake, coiling and uncoiling through his body. He had seen no motoscqfi, no vaporetti, not a single motorized craft anywhere on the canal. Gondolas had not carried felze since the last century. There had been no imbarcaderi crowded with passengers waiting to board the water buses. No police boats, no vigili urbani, no ambulances, no electric lights.

  He looked up. They were about to go under the bridge. High above, looking down at him from the bridge, dark figures huddled against the parapet. They wore black capes and tricorn hats, and on their faces low white masks, beaked, like birds of prey: the bauta, the carnival costume of the eighteenth century.

  The gondola slid without a sound beneath the low arch. The lights were blotted out. All became darkness.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Patrick sat up in bed, shaking. Someone had turned on a light. Makonnen. He heard his voice again.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Canavan?’

  He was sweating. When he closed his eyes, he could still see the Canal in darkness, the white masked faces peering over the bridge.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘I’m okay. Don’t worry. Everything’s all right.’

  They were sharing a room in a small pensione on the Rio della Verona. On the day before, they had flown to Rome from Glasgow and taken the first train to Venice.

  ‘What time is it?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘It’s after four o’clock. You were shouting in your sleep. In Italian. You were shouting in Italian.’

  What was I saying?’

  Makonnen hesitated.

  ‘I ... don’t know exactly. I couldn’t make out all the words. Once you cried out “Chi e lei? Dove mi sta portando - Who are you? Where are you taking me?”

  Those had been the words he had tried to shout to the gondolier. He had not forgotten. He had forgotten nothing. The gondola, the dark fagades, the bridge lit up by fireworks: his memory of them was real, and as clear as that of the hallucination he had experienced in Dublin. But this had been a dream, surely nothing more.

  ‘What are you frightened of, Mr Canavan? What is it?’

  Patrick felt the sweat growing cold on his skin.

  The night was chilly. He could feel the all-pervading damp of Venice rising from the small canal outside.

  ‘You know what frightens me,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ replied the priest. ‘I do not mean that. That frightens me too. That is natural. You are right to be frightened. But there is something else. Something else is frightening you.’

  Patrick did not reply at once. He had not told Makonnen about Francesca’s photograph or his discovery that the object in front of which she was standing had been her own tomb. There had been no time to think properly about it. Nor had he spoken of the hallucination he had had in Dublin.

  ‘Tell me, Father,’ he began, ‘do you believe in ghosts?’

  Makonnen looked at him uneasily.

  ‘Ghosts? I’ve never really thought ... You must know that the Church does not encourage tampering with the supernatural.’ He paused. ‘Do you think you have seen a ghost? Is that what you are frightened of? A ghost?’ There was no mockery in the priest’s voice, no hint of a rebuke. Men could be frightened of the dead, that was natural. In Ethiopia, in many parts of Africa, the dead were not so separate from the living.

  Patrick shivered.

  ‘Listen, Father. I’m not sure I believe in a God, much less in spirits. But...’

  Carefully, he explained to Makonnen what he had found. He took Francesca’s photograph from his pocket and showed it. The inscription on the stone was clear, there was no mistaking it. Only Francesca’s identity remained in doubt. For Makonnen, but not for Patrick. When he finished, the priest did not speak at first. They lay silently in their cold beds, listening to the water lapping the edges of the canal.

  ‘Is that why we have come to Venice?’ Makonnen asked finally. ‘To find this woman? You think she is still alive, that something very cruel has been done to you. Is that it?’

  ‘I came here to find Migliau. To discover what he knows about Passover.’

  ‘But you want to find the truth. You want to find this woman, if she is still alive. If she is not, after all, a ghost. That is so, isn’t it?’

  Patrick nodded. It was true. Until this moment, he had not admitted it to himself. That was why he had chosen Venice over Rome as a place in which to start their investigation. But he did not speak of the hallucination or the clarity of his dream. Were they connected in some way? He might have to see a doctor. Perhaps the stress of the past few weeks, combined with the pressures that had led him to leave the Company...

  ‘Turn out the light, Father. Let’s get some sleep. We have to start early in the morning.’

  He woke at seven, unrefreshed. Makonnen was already up, whispering prayers in a corner, underneath a small bronze crucifix. He was dressed in clothes Patrick had bought for him in Belfast, on the day after their escape from Glendalough. A heavy, rust-coloured sweater, brown tweed trousers and dark tan brogues. He still seemed uneasy in his new clothes, as though he wore his priesthood like a carapace between his flesh and the alien, layman’s garb he was forced to wear. At first, indeed, he had been reluctant to exchange his clerical dress for new garments, but Patrick had persuaded him that it was essential for his safety. Somewhere, hidden eyes would be watching for a black priest. Makonnen could not change his blackness, but he could at least avoid drawing attention to his vocation.

  From Glendalough they had headed straight for Dublin. There had been no immediate pursuit: clearly, Van Doren’s messy end had disabled the helicopter and thrown his surviving agents into confusion. Patrick had driven like a madman down twisting roads, with Makonnen beside him, very still, very subdued, staring into the cone of light ahead as though transfixed by something ungodly torn out of the surrounding blackness.

  In Dublin, they stopped long enough to draw money from a cash machine and to hire a fresh car from Boland’s on Pearse Street. They left the Mercedes near Trinity College: with any luck, it would be days before anyone realized it had been abandoned. By seven o’clock they were heading north on the Swords road. An hour later they were nearing the border.

  Instinct made Patrick cautious. The Irish border is simplicity to cross - and simplicity to watch. He knew an unapproved road that turned east after Dundalk. It ran high along the cliffs overlooking Dundalk Bay, then down towards Newry, skirting Carlingford Lough. He knew it would be impossible to travel that way at night. The road turned and twisted, and in parts only feet separated it from the cliffs edge: without lights it would have been suicide. But lights would have drawn the attention of British border patrols watching for illegal traffic.

  They spent the night in a guest house in Dundalk and left early the following morning. Patrick waited until the main road was clear of traffic before turning right. The road was little more than a country lane with a tarred surface. It rose through a series of bends before opening out over the sea. There were mountains beyond it. And the river coming down to meet it, dressed in silk. A red sea, and a green sea, and a blue sea, catching fire, and the mountains heavy and full of mist.

  Soon after that they crossed the border, though there was no marker to say that they had done so. No one challenged them. And before long they were back on the main road, heading into Newry.

  They passed in silence through a changed world. Makonnen was in a black mood, a mood that matched the landscape. There seemed to be a church on every corner: a blind and obsessive religious force lay like a dull cancer at the heart of the country’s darkness
. By the roadside, as regular as traffic signs, tin plates had been nailed to the trees. They bore painted admonitions for the ungodly: ‘Prepare to meet thy God!’, ‘Christ Jesus died for your sins’, ‘Ye must be born again’.

  After a short stay in Belfast to cash money and change cars, they headed for Larne. They reached the harbour in the middle of the afternoon and crossed on the ferry to Scotland. No one stopped them. There were no security checks to pass through at either Larne or Stranraer. For the first time since leaving Glendalough, Patrick had started to breathe a little more easily.

  There were regular flights to Rome from Glasgow. They stayed overnight in order to take the 07.40 British Caledonian/Alitalia flight via Amsterdam, rather than pass through Heathrow. Makonnen still had his passport. His arrival at Fiumicino airport would be recorded, but that could not be avoided. At Rome, they took the first rapido to Venice, arriving after the fall of darkness. Only forty-eight hours had passed since their escape from Glendalough. It seemed much longer.

  ‘Did you sleep in the end?’ Makonnen had finished his prayers and was standing now, slightly defensive, as though some trick of light had revealed Patrick to him with another face.

  ‘Yes. Very well, thank you.’

  ‘You did not dream again?’

  Patrick shook his head. Curiously, he still remembered his dream. This had never happened to him before, such clarity, such breadth of detail.

  ‘I think we should have breakfast,’ he said. ‘I want to discuss our plans.’

  This was the first time either man had mentioned the making of plans. Each stage of their flight had run into the next, each destination the one before, as if some force of nature were driving them. There had been no planning, no intent.

  They breakfasted in a small downstairs room, facing the canal. Patrick gazed through the window, watching the dull winter light fall heavy and unannounced on the high water. There was nothing special about the view: just the weathered facade of a small palazzo, grained and marbled with age and damp. But it told him all he needed to know: that he was in Venice once more, that he could be nowhere else. It was as if he had never been away.

  Yellow plaster fell away from bare brick, like skin exposing bone. In places, heavy iron staples pinned the bricks together. Grilles covered half the windows, giving the whole the semblance of a prison or an asylum. High up, a single window lay open where someone had hung a carpet out to air. A large white cat sat on a low windowsill, eyeing the dirty water malevolently with one blue and one yellow eye; God alone knew how it had contrived to get there or how it would get away again.

  Patrick felt tired. The weight of the past was so heavy here, it lay on everything and everyone. Even in the centre of Cairo or the suq in Damascus, he had not felt so strongly the presence of the past. Here, he could believe that a crack might open up between it and the present, a fissure between the thick walls separating the years from one another. He looked away from the scene outside and poured strong black coffee into Makonnen’s cup.

  ‘Father, there may be risks in what I am about to ask you to do. If you don’t feel able to take them, you just have to say. I don’t want to force you to do anything.’

  The priest looked up from his coffee and gave a rather glum smile.

  ‘I’m afraid I have already been forced by circumstances. I did not choose to come here. I did not choose to be involved in any of this. But I am here. I am involved.’

  He sipped from the cup and spread a little butter

  on a brioche.

  ‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you should let anyone hear you referring to me as “Father”, do you? My Christian name is Assefa. And perhaps I can call you Patrick.’

  Patrick nodded. They were the only guests in the small dining-room, but even Venetian walls -especially Venetian walls, he thought - have ears.

  ‘Very well. Listen. It will have to be your job to investigate Migliau. Find out what you can: his daily routine, his movements over the next few days, anything unusual that people may have noticed.’

  ‘But I can’t just turn up at the basilica and start asking questions. Maybe you could do that. You could pose as an American journalist or a writer. American journalists are a sort of infestation - nobody thinks twice if he sees one crawling in his direction, unless

  it’s to get out of the way. But who ever heard of the Ethiopian press?’

  Patrick slipped a piece of focaccia into his mouth and washed it down with a sip of coffee.

  ‘Is there anyone you know in Venice? A personal friend, someone from the seminary or the Accademia?’

  Assefa pondered. His friends from the Accademia Pontificia had all entered diplomatic service, mainly abroad. He had lost track of most of his friends from the seminary. And then he remembered Claudio. Claudio Surian. He had been in his fourth year of training for the priesthood when, quite abruptly, he had abandoned his vocation. He and Assefa had been close friends, but not even Assefa had known how serious Claudio’s problems had become. Claudio had refused to answer his letters and made it clear that a visit would be out of the question.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have an old friend here. He is not a priest. But he may know the answers to some of your questions. And I am sure he will know how to find the answers to the rest.’

  ‘Excellent. But you must be sure to swear him to secrecy. He must understand that your life is in danger. Tell him enough to make him appreciate that fact, but no more.’

  ‘I understand. Don’t worry - he will be very discreet.’ Assefa drained his cup and reached for the pot. ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘What do you intend to do?’

  Patrick glanced at the wall on the opposite bank. It was so close he felt he could reach out and touch it. The past was like that, close enough to hold. Yet a man could drown in the waters that separated him from it.

  ‘I also have some old friends to see,’ he said.

  if they are still alive. And if they will see me.’

  Assefa reached out his hand and laid it on top of Patrick’s.

  ‘Be careful, Patrick,’ he whispered. Someone had come into the room and was sitting down several tables away. ‘You have said several times that my life is in danger. You have saved it twice already, and I am very grateful. But I am more afraid for you than I am for myself. Only my life is in danger. But you, Patrick, I fear that your soul is in peril.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  The water-taxi dipped and bobbed through heavy waves, throwing up a light spray in its wake. Out in the open, it was growing choppy. A fine drizzle fell, reducing visibility and covering the windows of the small cabin with a veil-like condensation. The motoscafo had taken the most direct route for San Michele, down through Cannaregio, along the Canale della Misericordia, and out into the lagoon.

  Wherever the truth might lie, Patrick’s search began here at Venice’s cemetery island. He had to start where he had left off eighteen years earlier. When news of Francesca’s death reached him, he had been in Dublin. She had gone to Venice to visit an aged aunt, while he stayed behind to catch up on work after the Christmas vacation. The telegram had reached him a week later: TERRIBILE INCIDENTE. FRANCESCA MORTA. FUNERALE DOMATTINA. ALESSANDRO CONTARINI.

  He had already arrived in Venice before the reality of her death hit him. It had been like a punch, heavy and hard, leaving him breathless and filled with a dull, incomprehensible pain. They said she had drowned while rowing alone in the lagoon, that her body had been recovered by fishermen who had witnessed the accident. The next day, tired and numb, he had followed the funeral barge in a gondola draped in mourning. There had been mist all along the Grand Canal, and a deep chill over the lagoon.

  Her father, mother and brothers had been polite but distant. They had never approved of the relationship and saw no reason to grant him further access to their tight family circle. They were Contarinis, descendants of Doges, rich, vain and powerful. They had made it clear that he would not be welcome to stay on once the formalities of mourning wer
e over, and the day after the funeral he had returned to Dublin with his grief still intact: unshared and ultimately unacknowledged, it had festered in him for years and left wounds that would never heal.

  As the little motoscafo approached the landing-stage on the north-west corner of the island, Patrick caught sight of a mournful procession directly ahead of them. A cortege of gondolas festooned in black struggled to keep pace with the motorized hearse that led them. In front, the chief mourners stood rigidly in the thickening rain, all dressed in heavy black coats. Among rows of black umbrellas, one stood out, bright red, like an obscene gesture. Dark plumes hung bedraggled above the hearse, drenched in sea-spray and drizzle.

  They hung back until the mourners had landed. Patrick had come full circle. It would not have surprised him to have recognized the faces in the procession, or to have seen one of them beckon to him, summoning him to the graveside.

  The mourners wound their lugubrious way past tall, dark cypresses and frowning monuments of granite and marble. The bier was draped in black and gold and topped with winter flowers. At the front of the procession, a tall priest walked with his head bent, reading prayers from a rain-drenched book.

  Patrick told the driver to wait and stepped off onto the landing-stage. He passed directly through the cloister bordering the church that stands guard over the entrance. Death began here, in the form of huge stone plaques, lovingly inscribed and less lovingly covered in graffiti.

  The cemetery itself was carefully laid out. It dated from the end of the eighteenth century, when Napoleon had decreed that the dead of Venice be brought here for burial. It was a small city, an intricate maze of streets and lanes and passageways. Rain-sleek domes and gabled roofs and the pinnacles of dark mausoleums formed a jagged line against a slate-grey sky. Tall tombs of white Carrara marble towered over the modest resting-places of the middle-classes and the pitiful headstones of the poor. Gates of wrought iron led up to heavy, studded doors. But no one passed in or out, and there were no windows anywhere.