Carnival for the Dead

by David Hewson

  He was aware that his voice had risen in volume somewhat and now echoed round the empty hall of the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni with an unintentional and brusque volume.

  She eyed him, interested, waiting.

  ‘It doesn’t mean that,’ Aitchison went on. ‘Fingebat is the third person imperfect. Not the perfect tense, which is how you said it. This note means Carpaccio was creating, or conceiving, or conjuring this. It implies an unfinished, incomplete action. He was devising this picture, and then . . .’

  His eyes fell on the dog. Once again he had the feeling it was asking an impenetrable question.

  The woman scribbled something on a small, cheap notepad and announced, ‘Clearly there was some unfinished business, I imagine. I’ll look into that idea. Enjoy Venice if you can.’

  She turned without another word and left. Aitchison immediately regretted his rudeness. Sofia Bianchi was friendly, engaging, interesting. Not so far off his own age and unattached, perhaps. He didn’t meet many women like that. Only ingenuous young students, devoid of interest and opinion, angling, on occasion, for nothing more than a better mark. Now he was alone in front of the canvas: an ancient saint staring out of a window, as if listening to some distant voice, not that it made sense to allude to sound in paintings at all. The thing was there to enrage him, just like the dog.

  He walked to the doorway. The warden was counting his money: a handful of notes and coins.

  ‘If you see a volpino, signore,’ the man said without looking up, ‘remember. A little kindness never goes amiss.’

  ‘I was never much fond of animals,’ Aitchison replied.

  He’d scarcely crossed the little bridge by the scuola of the Slavs when the shower turned into a storm of hard, cold rain lashing from the black sky above. Aitchison had no umbrella, no hat. There was only one thing to do and that was to head into the first dark alley he could find, hoping that the buildings on both sides would keep off a little of the downpour on this biting winter evening.

  Aitchison had no idea where he was headed, or how once again to find his way back to the waterfront and St Mark’s Basin, the only geographical reference point he knew nearby that might guide him home.

  The darkness seemed to seep from the sky, consuming the streets, the stones, the ragged walls around him. After a few minutes he entered a lane that eventually broadened so that he could walk upright, free of the bitter rain.

  Finally there was a light. At the end of another dingy passageway stood a tiny bridge over a canal so slender a younger man might be tempted to leap it. When he crossed to the other side he found himself standing beneath a large lampshade bearing a Nastro Azzurro logo. It stood over the door of what looked like a house with opaque windows, next to a sign with a long and curious name – Cason dei Sette Morti – etched in fading red letters. The House of the Seven Dead Men. He was surprised to realize that his Italian had come along a little simply through the process of listening and guesswork.

  The place was a bar. Had to be. Jerome Aitchison pushed open the door and walked in, ordering without thinking the drink he’d seen them all consuming, every local, in the many places where he’d encountered them. Spritz, they called it, not an Italian name, he thought, an Austrian one, bequeathed to Venice by history.

  The liquid in the glass was a livid shade of red and stank of Campari and prosecco. A fat green olive was plunged deep into the glass, on a wooden skewer. Aitchison gulped at it, not caring about the taste.

  There was fried fish on the bar, plate after plate of it, small crisp bodies like whitebait, larger ones, mackerel perhaps, and chunks of unidentifiable fillet. They looked cold but fresh. He was ravenous and quite alone apart from the portly, ancient woman, in a stained apron and old black cotton dress, who stood behind the counter, arms folded.

  ‘Food,’ Aitchison said.

  She looked at him blankly.

  ‘Mangia.’

  Pointing at the plates of fish, he made an eating gesture, one so crude and animal he immediately felt ashamed of it.

  This place was turning him into a beast. He would never have behaved so badly in Cambridge. It was the fault of Venice. Of the damned dog somehow.

  Outside the wind caught and sent sheets of rain lashing against the grubby narrow windows. The woman looked at her watch. She was going to close the place on him. He just knew it.

  ‘This,’ Aitchison repeated, pointing at some unidentifiable carcasses on the plates behind the counter, taking out his last fifty-euro note.

  He picked up the glass, which was now reduced to stained ice and the half-eaten olive.

  ‘And this.’

  Dogs, he thought.

  After a little while, seated at a bare, low table by the window, he could hear them beyond the opaque, dusty glass, yapping and snarling out in the night. Not howling, not sounding desperate or frightened. More like animals in conversation which was, he knew, ridiculous, though the bittersweet strength of the spritz damaged his conviction on this and other matters, not least his whereabouts within the entwined tangle of lanes that was Castello.

  A hand appeared from nowhere. It was the woman reaching for his glass. She tapped her watch. It was five minutes past eight. The dead of night in Venice in January. An entire day had passed somehow, disappeared between his fingers like sand trickling from a broken hourglass. The money was running out. It seemed inconceivable that he could ever return to Cambridge. The future looked like the Venetian night: black and impenetrable.

  He grabbed the spritz and finished it. By then her fingers were on the plate. Jerome Aitchison snatched at the last remaining piece of fish there – something like a headless sardine, skin and bone and all – and shovelled it into his mouth. He’d paid for all this, not much, but it was his money, and he would have what it was worth.

  ‘Arrivederci,’ the old woman said without a smile.

  Goodbye. Or, more accurately, he recalled from the guidebook, Until we meet again.

  Not bloody likely, Aitchison thought. He muttered something obscene, his mouth still full of the fish he’d grabbed off the plate, then shambled to the door and stomped outside.

  Finally the rain had ceased. The sky had cleared. A stiff and bone-chilling wind was weaving through Castello, howling a little as it wound its way down the narrow, bleak lanes and across the channels of black water. Above him he could see a bright moon, one so large it seemed to turn the slimy walls of the alley leading to the little bridge a strange shade of silver.

  ‘Damn this place,’ cursed Aitchison. One moment ugly as hell. The next quite bewitching, like a painting itself, daring the visitor to interpret what he saw in front of his own eyes.

  Or was seeing.

  Tenses. The perfect against the imperfect. The complete versus the unfinished. In his hunger and thirst he had quite forgotten the baffling inscription on the cartellino. What had the woman called Sofia Bianchi said? That she’d studied the work, had written notes on it.

  Aitchison leaned against the wall of the Cason dei Sette Morti and fumbled in his pocket to find the sheet of paper. The woman’s phone number was on the bottom. He tried not to think about that. He could dream of calling her all he liked. He lacked the words, the wit, the courage.

  The page was crumpled, a little stained from the rain that had seeped into his coat. By the dim light of the window, as the old crone inside cleaned up to the sound of a tinny radio, he was, however, able to read the words.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Aitchison spluttered, aware that a bony piece of fish leapt out of his mouth with the venom of his reaction. ‘Stuff and nonsense. Quite impossible. Utter . . .’

  The dog was on the bridge ahead, seated, the same tight, pale bundle of fur that he’d seen that afternoon, and the day before, on the wall of the scuola of the Slavs, and alive out in the street. Its head was up, alert and bright-eyed. Staring at him eagerly, as if in anticipation.

  An involuntary spasm gripped his chest. A cough half-formed at the back of his throat and held there, stif
f and awkward.

  His left hand went to his neck. Then the right, letting go of Sofia Bianchi’s notes on St Augustine in his Study which fluttered towards the ground, before being picked up by the wind, propelled over the canal, and out towards the Basin of St Mark.

  As Jerome Aitchison, a retiring bachelor from Cambridge, stumbled to his knees in the back lanes of Castello her observations on the Carpaccio canvas flew high into the night sky, over the chimneys and rooftops of Venice before falling, seemingly at random, into the face of a recently arrived female Roman pathologist perched on a seat by the lagoon, tears in her eyes, remembering a lost friend, one who had once shared this view of San Giorgio Maggiore, newly revealed by the welcome departure of the cruise liner which had previously concealed it.

  Glad of the distraction, the woman put aside her grief and then her reading matter, a prolix academic report of a symposium in the city to which she had been invited the following May, and snatched the damp paper from her cheek. The sheet was so wet it tore in two. Curiosity – she was a singularly inquisitive woman – meant that she had to read the fragment in her fingers. It was in English, under the heading, ‘Carpaccio’s Dog’.

  ‘The style of the painting clearly owes much to the influence of fifteenth-century works from the Netherlands, though the subject is entirely Carpaccio’s own. It stems from his commission to mark the lives of the three Slav saints commemorated in the scuola. The incident recorded in this work is an apocryphal story from church lore of the time. St Augustine is at his desk, writing a letter to his beloved and saintly friend, seeking advice for a treatise he wishes to produce discussing the joy of the blessed. Unknown to him, his correspondent has, at that very moment, died. Miraculously, St Augustine hears his voice quite clearly as he puts pen to paper, and listens as his friend asks, from beyond the grave, why such a question is necessary, since the answer can only be given once life, this life, is over.’

  Intrigued by the tale the pathologist continued.

  ‘The role of the charming little dog is open to interpretation, though doubtless symbolic, like many of the other details contained in this cryptic and compelling work. Is he there to remind Augustine to return to the world of the present and concentrate on the fleeting opportunities to seek grace within his own life while there is still time? Or, more darkly, as some direct reminder of the saint’s own mortality, a hint that he should perhaps be looking forward to death in order to discover the answer to a question which Augustine clearly feels pressing, and worthy of discussion? The breed – the volpino — is a rare and curious one, believed by some in the Veneto to possess uncanny powers of divination, a canine clairvoyant if you like. It also carries the reputation of being a harbinger of change. A portent of death, or some other momentous event. Though perhaps, more likely, it is simply a loving pet, transfixed by his master’s astonishment and impending grief at the loss of a dear and close friend, yet . . .’

  Here, tantalizingly, the torn piece of paper ended. She scrabbled around for the rest, determined to find out whose unexpected death, announced in such an unlikely fashion, was the source of the work.

  The errant sheet was sticking to the iron arm of the bench seat. She managed to snatch it just as the wind threatened to steal the torn scrap of damp paper for the lagoon.

  ‘St Jerome,’ she said out loud as she read the words there. The woman thought for a moment then read the rest.

  ‘The patron saint of Dalmatia.’ She racked her brain for a connection. There was none.

  ‘Never heard of him,’ she muttered and let go of the scraps of print. They disappeared on the breeze, out over the black water.

  In the back alleys behind, a middle-aged British lecturer scrabbled on the damp, grubby ground, choking, gagging on the hard dry fish bone that had stuck like a thorn in his throat.

  A life imperfect. Yet – and he wished to scream this but couldn’t – continuing. Unfinished.

  Jerome Aitchison’s eyes were on the pale white creature in front of him. It hadn’t moved an inch and its bright little teeth, sharp as needles, animated by the faintest and lowest of growls, shone bare and menacing in the moonlight.

  THE FLIGHT OF THE ANGEL

  She was woken by the sonorous tones of Salute’s bells, so loud, so close it felt as if they shook the building as much as the tremors of the passing cruise liners. When the peals began to die she heard her mobile trilling from the living room. The pages of the short story lay scattered across the bed. Strange dreams, of dogs and dragons and paintings, still scurried around the back of her head. The bedroom curtains were open, allowing through the harsh clear light of the winter morning. The horn of a distant boat sounded, hollow and reedy in the thin lagoon air. It was that which finally reminded Teresa Lupo where she was and why.

  With a conscious effort she dragged herself out of bed and got to the phone.

  ‘Doctor! Doctor!’ said an excited voice. ‘It is I! Tosi! You remember me?’

  ‘Tosi?’

  The name brought a face to mind: a careful old man holding sway over an antiquated morgue somewhere near Venice’s Piazzale Roma bus station.

  ‘Alberto Tosi,’ he said slowly. ‘That awful case in Murano which you and your friends solved so cleverly. You recall?’

  Murano. A glass furnace and mysterious ashes. Leo Falcone shot, almost killed. A strange and disturbing interlude that should have been a happy holiday.1

  ‘How could I forget?’ she muttered.

  ‘And now you’re back! This is fortuitous. I cannot believe my luck!’

  More of the bizarre story from the night before was returning, and with it her puzzlement. Whoever wrote that knew she was in Venice, and of her background. The comment about a dead friend could only refer to Nic Costa’s late wife. During the difficult investigation which introduced her to Alberto Tosi she and Emily had grown close. It was only a matter of time until Teresa happened upon one of the places they used to visit and found, as the odd tale predicted, the recollections of her dead friend sharp and painful.

  Tosi was aware of her presence too.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t see me. I waved. You were on the vaporetto with a lady in a fur coat. Yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘An elegant woman. Beautiful.’

  ‘Alberto . . .’

  There was no need to lay it on quite so thickly.

  ‘I phoned the Rome Questura and spoke to that young deputy of yours. He seemed very keen to provide your number.’

  Thank you, Silvio, she thought. I know I shouldn’t be bunking off like this too.

  ‘You and your mother shall be my guests for the carnival,’ Tosi went on. ‘Today, at lunchtime. We begin with the Flight of the Angel. After that, anything you wish. And then . . .’

  She did not recall such fulsome enthusiasm when she was in Venice before. In fact there had been some distinct tension between the Romans and the local police on that occasion, and no small amount of unpleasantness in the end.

  It was important to clarify the position from the beginning. Teresa was not blind to Tosi’s advantageous position within the city. His family, if she recalled correctly, had held official positions in the police for generations. The old man ought to be able to open doors which would otherwise have remained closed to a mere visiting Roman.

  So she told him as much as she could about Sofia and the mystery of her disappearance. Nothing more. Certainly nothing about a strange story concerning a lost and damaged Englishman wandering into a scuola in Castello which, she felt sure, was no invention on the part of the unknown author who had set down the narrative delivered the previous evening in a manila envelope bearing her name.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ Tosi declared the moment she’d finished. ‘What must you think of me? Here you are on a mission of some urgency and delicacy. And an old man who’s a virtual stranger pesters you for his own selfish purposes. Please . . .’

&nb
sp; ‘You weren’t to know.’

  ‘I must help. May we meet?’

  She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was just after eight.

  They arranged a rendezvous by the Ponte agli Incurabili at ten thirty. After that, if she agreed, he would take her to see the Flight of the Angel, whatever that was. An essential sight, he insisted, and on the way to the Castello Questura where he would introduce her to a police officer more amenable than any to be found in the main Questura near the Piazzale Roma.

  This seemed to make excellent sense.

  ‘What purpose of yours?’ she asked out of interest.

  ‘I won’t waste your time with it now,’ the old man replied. ‘Let me do what I can to assist in regard to your aunt. I am retired, I regret. Times have changed. Rationalization . . .’ He spoke the word with a bitterness that seemed uncharacteristic. ‘Nothing matters any more except money. But I can still open a few doors.’

  When he’d rung off she checked the kitchen. She should have realized the night before that there was nothing for breakfast. Nowhere in her brief wanderings nearby had she found a shop.

  Hunting for food was not the way she wanted to start the day, but in the circumstances there was no choice. In Rome it had seemed obvious that she needed to be here. Thanks to the tension with her mother, she had never thought through why or how she would proceed once they arrived. At that moment she felt lost for a way forward. She was a pathologist, not a cop. She had no official standing, no way of forcing either the police or the Carabinieri to do her bidding. Even if she had some kind of lead – and the peculiar tale from the previous night scarcely fitted that description – she doubted it would do much good. A woman with a bohemian history, someone who had seemingly tried to kill herself in Venice sixteen years before, had gone missing without trace. Teresa Lupo understood what kind of response a stranger arriving from Rome with such a story would receive, even one who came with the blessing of a retired Venetian pathologist. Sympathy, a careful, polite audience, then a shrug.

  What could they do? People went missing all the time. Usually they turned up unhurt and a little shame-faced.