Carnival for the Dead

by David Hewson

Damned sure she thought, and started to type the beginning of an email to his personal address as she spoke.

  ‘Come home,’ Chiara urged her. ‘What more can you do?’

  ‘Something,’ she murmured.

  There had to be more that her mother knew. A question she hadn’t covered already.

  In desperation she asked, ‘Where did Sofia live? When she was here before?’

  ‘I don’t have an address,’ Chiara replied. ‘Why would I keep something so long?’

  ‘Didn’t you go there? When you came over to see her in hospital? Surely you had to pick up some things. When she moved to Rome. Her belongings.’

  There was a pause on the line, then Chiara said, ‘No. I never saw where she lived. Sofia said she never wanted to go back to the place. Ever. Too many bad memories. Whatever things she had there she left behind. Didn’t want them.’

  ‘You never found out?’

  ‘She was adamant. Why would I argue? There was never any point in that. I know you only ever saw a lovely aunt bearing gifts. Sofia could be as stubborn as a mule too.’

  ‘I think I did see that actually,’ Teresa said, half-remembering a few incidents from the past. A pleasant firmness rather than tantrums. Sofia had a mind of her own. That rebelliousness in her was attractive to any teenager.

  The call ended with a touch more warmth than most of late. Teresa dashed off a warning message to Silvio asking him to keep his long nose out of things unless she asked for his help.

  She needed to talk to Tosi. Filippo Strozzi, Camilla and the charming young Englishman had little if anything to offer her. Little that she could discern at the moment anyway. The old pathologist, with his connections and boundless knowledge of the city, could surely prove more useful.

  There was a knock on the door. It was Camilla. She looked exhausted. There was an envelope in her hands.

  ‘This was pushed under the door when I came back just now,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d want it straight away.’

  Teresa’s name was on the front, printed the usual way. She looked at it and felt the need to apologize for the very awkward and embarrassing scene in the pasticceria that morning.

  ‘No matter,’ Camilla said. ‘It’s funny really. Who on earth could dream up something like that?’

  There was a knowing look in her eyes.

  ‘Sofia wanted to be a writer,’ the young Croatian woman added.

  ‘She used to tell me that too. But she never finished anything. Not that I know of anyway. Your illness. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pried like that.’

  ‘It’s no great secret. Not among my friends anyway. And you’re one of them now, aren’t you?’

  I’d like to think so.’

  Teresa took the envelope.

  ‘He’s never sent anything in the middle of the day,’ Camilla asked, ‘has he?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Camilla kept looking at the envelope.

  ‘Then I suppose it must be important,’ she added.

  The Count of Saint-Germain

  ‘You managed the accents very well,’ Teresa Lupo said after Saint-Germain had finished telling his story, entirely from memory it seemed.

  ‘Not really. That voice was north Yorkshire, not west. I stayed with the Sitwells at Wood End in Scarborough for a while after the Great War. Sacheverell was working on a small book about baroque art in Italy and Spain and required a mentor. A decent man, much mocked as if he were some upper-class prune, which was unfair and untrue.’

  ‘I have to say, Arnaud, that your facility for name-dropping would be rather more impressive if they were ones I’d actually heard of.’

  His right hand went to his mouth and a laugh, a little like a hiccup, emerged from behind it.

  ‘I do apologize. The Sitwells were an interesting English family. Once famous. Largely forgotten now, I imagine.’

  Arnaud seemed content with his story. She was not. Teresa Lupo sat next to him on the bank, watching the sun die over the ragged low horizon of the thin line of littoral land that separated the lagoon from the Adriatic. It struck her once more that she felt trapped inside a swirling, formless painting by the English artist Turner, a canvas of undefined horizons framing an indeterminate world that challenged the viewer to fill in the gaps.

  ‘The point of this story being what exactly?’ she asked.

  ‘That one never knows what lies inside the blood. Nothing special, mostly. But on occasion . . .’

  He smiled then frowned then shrugged, a jumble of gestures that seemed to mix the French with the English and the Italian. The universal man.

  ‘Blood is blood,’ she pointed out.

  ‘That’s a very simplistic view. Sacheverell’s sister, the more famous Edith, suffered all her life from Marfan syndrome. It made her extraordinarily tall and gaunt, much mocked like her brother. A freak of nature or so her vile peers believed. It was only two decades ago, thirty years after Edith died, that someone established for certain that Marfan is a genetic condition which may be inherited. Paganini had it, I suspect, which probably explains a little about him, though not everything. Blood is the gift our parents hand down to us, not knowing for one second what lies hidden inside. The colour of hair, one’s chances of being fat or skinny, teeth, eyes . . . If a father or mother can pass on a predisposition to cancer or short-sightedness who’s to say that something else might not slip from generation to generation? The entire population of the earth consisted of fewer than eight hundred million human beings when I was a child. By the middle of this strange century I expect to witness it surpass ten billion, even with the current penchant for sophisticated mass destruction. Think like the scientist you are. And then – this is important – think a little more. On a simple statistical basis alone can you possibly hope to predict what random chromosomal mutations such impossible numbers might bring? Leaving aside the invisible demons that lurk inside those genes. Depression, depravity, criminal wickedness . . .’

  ‘Criminal wickedness!’ she cried. ‘Don’t try and tell me that’s passed on from generation to generation too.’

  ‘If you’d known as many villains as I . . .’

  ‘I’ve known my share! They’re the product of circumstance. A want of love. Cruelty on the part of others. Poverty. Misery . . .’

  He nodded and said, ‘Those things too.’

  ‘Those things only! If you’re trying to say a man or a woman is condemned at birth to being a thief or a murderer by nothing more than their blood then . . . what’s the point? We’re nothing more than robots walking to a predestined fate. It would be so unfair . . .’

  ‘It’s unfair to have cancer in your genes,’ he pointed out. ‘Or Marfan.’

  ‘You’ve no choice about that!’

  ‘Could Hitler have elected to be someone else?’ he asked. ‘A mere house painter?’

  ‘Of course!’

  Arnaud shook his head and stared sadly at the ground.

  ‘Not so. I spent some time in Berlin in the Twenties, until a few bullet-headed idiots thought I had a touch of the Jew about me. Let me tell you. Wickedness was in that man all along, waiting for the spur which history so readily supplied. Had the Great War not humiliated Germany and given him both motive and platform from which to spout his hate-filled lunacies perhaps he would have been one more half-crazed nonentity with grandiose dreams. Nevertheless the material for what he became was there from the beginning. Do not misunderstand me. I don’t believe one’s fate is inevitable. That dark seed requires watering, germination. A catalyst. Like any other disease.’

  She wanted to argue. Yet he seemed so certain, so convinced.

  ‘Something brought your Plague Doctor to life,’ he said. ‘What was it?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ she replied immediately.

  ‘Try guessing,’ he suggested. ‘It’s a useful trick. I recommend it highly. Particularly to those of a fixed disposition.’

  ‘True love,’ she said.

  It was the first thing that
came into her mind. Yet it felt apposite.

  A sudden sour scowl crossed his face.

  ‘You made that up!’ Saint-Germain said in a sharp, accusing tone.

  ‘You told me to guess. Don’t you like the idea?’

  ‘Nothing but good comes of true love. Even an old fool like me knows that. So I can only assume you mean one of the masks that wickedness wears, like some carnival character chasing around in the dark, hoping to hide his true identity. Like your Medico della Peste himself. Beneath the disguise, what? Lust. Envy. Covetousness. Hatred.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she murmured. ‘It’s possible I mean true love. Gone wrong, of course. No less true for that. And I don’t mean him. I’m not . . .’ She tried to reach for the words. ‘I’m not at all sure about him.’ She gazed at the man next to her and asked, ‘Are you Marco? The doctor in this story? Someone struggling between science and sense and . . . whatever else there is?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Saint-Germain replied straight away. ‘I’m many things. This is about you. Not me. Don’t you see that?’

  He harrumphed and grumped for a while, watching her with his keen, bright eyes, wanting to hear something, she thought, not that she had any idea what it was.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he continued, ‘this capacity for evil is in all of us then and it’s largely down to fortune whether we encounter the circumstance that breathes life into it or not. Just as it’s luck that determines when or if that faulty gene breaks and gives you cancer or Marfan or the physique of an Olympian.’

  ‘Free will . . .’

  ‘ . . . is the label we attach to actions we want to do, choose to do, consciously in any case, whatever the circumstances. Perhaps ten per cent of our daily behaviour, no more. Everything else . . .’

  He winked at her, broke into the slightest of grins, leaned forward and said, ‘I have to say it’s odd hearing an atheist argue the case for redemption.’

  His fine black eyebrows rose.

  ‘The point of your story . . .’ she continued.

  ‘ . . . is that we carry within us invisible burdens, surprises, perhaps good, perhaps bad, all slumbering, dreaming. Waiting for the circumstance, the catalyst, the trigger that will rouse them from their sleep. That happened to me and now I must bear the consequences. The cost is curious but given the sheer weight of humanity it would be arrogant indeed if you were to assume I must be alone. And arrogance, before you ask, is a wasteful, petty thing. A product of the vestigial cerebral appendage known as the ego. I removed that unsightly little birthmark somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century and frankly I feel well shot of it.’

  There was a noble sadness to this man that seemed almost physical, like a crippled limb, real enough to touch.

  ‘This Camilla had the same affliction as you?’ she asked.

  ‘You think this Camilla exists?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If she did, or does,’ he replied, shaking his head, not meeting her eyes, ‘then it was something entirely different. Something older, perhaps. Something rather more vile in that it pursued and damaged the innocent, those who never sought or deserved its attention.’

  ‘Are you really asking me to accept she was a vamp—?’

  ‘Please don’t use that word. It’s inaccurate and judgemental. My inkling is that, if the unfortunate child does exist, she suffers from some unknown variant of porphyria. An obscure disease of the blood.’

  ‘What kind?’

  He sighed.

  ‘I really don’t know. You must understand the position of those of us who are, for want of a better word, freaks. Physical or psychological or both – the two do tend to go hand in hand in my experience. There’s an army of people out there only too keen to hand us over to some university, some laboratory. To be turned into an object of curiosity, a specimen. Quite unacceptable. It will never happen to me, I promise. I’m much too clever to be caught by their traps. In return it means I avoid acting and interacting in their world too directly. It would be dangerous. And wrong, for them and for me. Also . . .’

  He looked a little shame-faced.

  ‘I know my limitations. Lord knows I ought to. I’ve lived with them long enough. I’m not blessed with an inquisitive, deductive nature. I’m an artist, not a scientist. The dread tedium of rationality, of work, has been beyond me for centuries. I need practical people like you for that. As badly, as urgently, as Camilla needed whatever it was that brave young man gave her.’

  The melancholy seemed to envelop him like an invisible cloud.

  ‘“In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.”’

  ‘Who said that?’ she asked.

  ‘My late friend Sacheverell Sitwell in one of his books. Easy for him. He could see both. I see one only, as, I’m afraid, do you.’

  Teresa thought of the bones in the coffin in the Basilica San Marco. They were human. Blood once coursed over them, flesh clothed the limbs they formed.

  ‘You don’t have a vote, do you?’ she asked. ‘In the symposium?’

  He looked a little guilty and asked meekly, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘If you did,’ Teresa went on, ‘which way would you go?’

  ‘The third way,’ he said immediately.

  She laughed in spite of herself.

  ‘What third way? He’s either St Mark or he’s not! Please . . .’

  He smiled at her and said nothing. She felt like a schoolchild foxed by a question that was beyond her.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘I am Arnaud, the Count of Saint-Germain. Allow me to elaborate.’

  ‘Let me start a little way in, with Pushkin,’ Saint-Germain began, licking his fingers then turning the pages of his book. She could see the contents were handwritten with a quill or fountain pen, in a very old-fashioned script that leaned vertiginously to the left. ‘This is from Aleksandr’s short story The Queen of Spades which he wrote in 1834. Three years later the idiot was dead in a duel with his brother-in-law, that vicious French prune d’Anthès. St Petersburg was a rum old place in those days, I can tell you.’

  He cleared his throat and began to read.

  ‘“You have heard of Count Saint-Germain, about whom so many marvellous stories are told. You know that he represented himself as the discoverer of the elixir of life, of the Philosopher’s Stone, and so forth. Some laughed at him as a charlatan; but Casanova, in his memoirs, says that he was a spy. Be that as it may, Saint-Germain, in spite of the mystery surrounding him, was a very fascinating person, and was much sought after in the best circles of society. Even to this day my grandmother retains an affectionate recollection of him, and becomes quite angry if anyone speaks disrespectfully of him.”’

  Saint-Germain frowned.

  ‘It’s true I appear in Casanova’s memoirs, dressed up in the most ridiculous garb. An Armenian cloak and sporting an ivory wand, for God’s sake. That was as much a work of fiction as The Queen of Spades. I have never claimed knowledge of such nonsense as the Philosopher’s Stone, nor would I have offered up card tricks for money, as Aleksandr suggests in the story. Happily Tchaikovsky left me out of the opera he wrote from this little tale. Although to be honest I couldn’t have sued, could I? By then I was supposedly fifty years in the grave – I first faked my death in February 1784, rather poorly if I’m honest. It takes a few goes to get the hang of that particular trick.’

  ‘Impressive,’ she observed.

  ‘Thank you. Now here’s something about my musical abilities. Jemima, Marchioness Grey, was a charming hostess when I lived in London in the 1740s. A great supporter of the songs I contributed to L’Incostanza Delusa, a little pastiche of an opera we put on at the Haymarket Theatre for a few months in 1745. Largely, it has to be said, to annoy Handel, who was desperate to drag people into his oratorios at the King’s up the road. Infantile, I know, but I was younger then. Jemima writes of an evening recital I gave at a house in Upper Brook Street . . . “His Play indeed is delightful! The viol
in in his hands has all the softness and sweetness of a flute, and yet all the strength of the loudest strings. His execution is not of that rapid prodigious kind such as that of Veracini and Geminiani; but his style is more easy and harmonious and his excellence is softness. He piques himself you know upon the expression of the passions in his music, especially the tender ones, and both his composition and his manner are almost all affettuoso, for his music is entirely fitted to his own way of performing and would be nothing I am convinced from anybody else.”’

  Teresa Lupo raised her plastic cup and said, ‘Praise indeed.’

  ‘Bloody times though. This was the middle of the Jacobite rebellion. When Bonnie Prince Charlie’s men got as far as Derbyshire the English did what comes naturally to them in a crisis: arrest the foreigners. Here’s that sad old stick Horace Walpole writing to a friend in Florence on 9 December 1745 . . . “We begin to take up people . . . the other day they seized an odd man who goes by the name of Count Saint-Germain. He has been here these two years, and will not tell who he is, or whence, but professes that he does not go by his right name. He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman. The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain. However, nothing has been made out against him; he is released, and, what convinces me he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks of his being taken up for a spy.”’

  Saint-Germain shook his head and took a bite on a ham sandwich left by the crew of the departed Tintoretto.

  ‘Was this true?’ Teresa asked.

  He looked exasperated.

  ‘If you believe in fashionable theories about infinite universes I suppose Walpole’s tendentious drivel is bound to be true in one of them, isn’t it? But not any I know. When people arrest someone like me as a spy it’s decidedly difficult trying to explain things, particularly to the numskulls in the police and security services. So I may have manufactured a few stories, as did they. I have never stolen from commoners, not in the conventional sense of the word. A life like mine makes it easy enough to build a fortune without resorting to larceny. I have always invested sensibly, from the beginning of the railways, to oil, banking, commodities, futures, technology, alternative power. Also I didn’t go to Mexico until the liberal constitution of 1812, have never pretended to be Polish – the language is too difficult for a simple soul like me – or a priest for that matter. Saint-Germain is not my real name . . .’