Carnival for the Dead

by David Hewson

  ‘But they didn’t,’ she told him. ‘Did they?’

  Tosi looked cross for a moment.

  ‘Do you never have doubts?’ he asked. ‘Does the fact our profession shows us the very stuff of which men and women are made . . . does that blind us to the obvious sometimes? To things that others can see?’

  ‘No,’ she said immediately. Then thought for a moment, and added, ‘Or rather I mean . . . I don’t think so.’

  He smiled and said, ‘The answer you’re looking for, then, is yes. You do.’

  ‘You have me there,’ she admitted.

  ‘When I was eleven years old,’ Tosi continued, ‘I came here alone and began to fish just there.’ He pointed to the dilapidated narrow bridge. ‘It was always the best place for some reason. The fish seemed to like it and they were always . . .’ He took a pained breath. ‘Fat fish. That day I caught a squid, the biggest I’d ever taken. The sight of it . . .’

  He stopped.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘It had the eyes of a woman. Not a squid at all. I was young. I didn’t understand. I thought I’d made some extraordinary discovery. So I ran all the way to the fish stall in the Via Garibaldi, to show it to the man there. He was a good fellow. He loved us little rascals. He didn’t even look at what I gave him, just took it. I’ll never forget the expression on his face when he saw what it was. He screamed and crossed himself and threw the thing on the ground, cursing me as a fool, yelling at me.’

  ‘Some genetic mutation . . .’ she suggested.

  ‘That’s what we’d say today,’ he agreed. ‘The fishermen didn’t think so. They said that whenever a woman had been murdered and dumped in the lagoon they’d catch squid like that. With the eyes of a human being, not the little black ones of a fish.’

  She waited. There was more.

  ‘But I was eleven years old,’ he went on. ‘A brat who wasn’t scared of anything. Who didn’t believe in ghosts or fairy stories.’

  ‘So you came back?’

  He pointed at the low dark shape of the building ahead and the bridge over the water.

  ‘The very next day I walked here with my little rod and tackle and bait. And I fished in the very same place. The next thing I caught was the body of a woman with no eyes and no heart.’

  She couldn’t look at his face at that moment.

  ‘After that,’ he said, ‘I knew I’d become a pathologist too, like my father, like his father before him, even though I’d always wanted to be an airline pilot or a soldier. Something different. When I looked at that sad, torn body in the water I finally understood. Death asks such difficult questions of us on occasion that it’s only right someone takes on the job of trying to answer them.’

  Tosi hugged himself in his thick winter coat. He looked a little relieved to have told this story.

  ‘Not that I or anyone else had any answers about that poor woman. No one wanted to talk about her. I was only eleven, remember. Some things are never said in front of children. But when I turned twenty-five, after I qualified as a doctor in Bologna then returned here as an apprentice pathologist, I finally found the means to read the files on her from the Questura.’

  She watched him as he hesitated.

  ‘The woman was a prostitute working in the docks. Murdered by an unhappy client, the police assumed. Not that they ever found the culprit. She was half-Turkish, strangely enough. The eyes were the result of fish feeding – there was other damage too. Her heart had been removed by whoever killed her, of course.’

  ‘I’m sorry I dragged you all this way,’ Teresa told him.

  ‘No. The hospital gave you the address. It was important you should come and see for yourself. No one has lived in that place in my lifetime. No local would dare.’

  ‘Sofia gave the hospital that address.’

  ‘A mistake. What else could it be?’

  ‘Someone must own it, Alberto.’

  ‘I checked that too. It’s one more piece of unwanted property belonging to the Church. As if they don’t have enough spare ruins on their hands already.’

  ‘May I look?’ she asked, offering to take the torch. ‘Just from the outside? I don’t mind if you stay here.’

  ‘I will not stay here,’ he said and led the way.

  It was very much as she pictured it from the story about Camilla and Jason Cunningham that she’d read the night before. White walls streaked with dirt that looked like smeared mascara. A solitary exposed position where the constant lazy lapping of the lagoon must have entered through every window, day and night.

  But this was not the house of Marco, the mysterious doctor and his patient, a fictional version of the real Camilla Dushku. The narrow bridge, metal on rusting posts stuck into the lagoon at crazy angles, shook so wildly as they crossed it she wondered whether the thing was safe at all. The door had a padlock and chain over it. There were iron railings covering the nearest windows. The shutters behind were boarded up and covered in peeling paint.

  ‘No one’s been here for years,’ Tosi said. ‘There was talk of the Church selling the place to some gullible foreigner at one point. The locals said no. Their opinion of the Casino degli Spiriti is very well known. They made it clear any potential owner would understand it too. This is not the Grand Canal where there’s always some hot-headed halfwit ready to buy that cursed place, Ca’ Dario. Not even the boldest of strangers would take on a hovel like this out of pure bravado.’

  She stepped forward and took a professional look at the area near the door, the state of the step, the chain and the padlock. Teresa Lupo had worked with Leo Falcone and his crew for a long time. They were good teachers.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s impossible Sofia could have lived here.’

  ‘The hospital must have got the address wrong,’ he said eagerly. ‘These things happen. It was a long time ago. One number could put her several streets from this place. I did tell you.’

  ‘And I should have listened to you in the first place.’

  Tosi shook his head and said, ‘No. That would have disappointed me greatly. Because it would have meant I didn’t know you at all.’ He leaned forward and patted her shoulder. ‘You’re a very persistent young woman, you know. I only wished we’d worked together on more than just a single case.’

  ‘We’re working together now,’ she told him. ‘Very well, I think.’

  He laughed a little at that. They went back across the flimsy bridge. When they were on the pavement she linked her arm through Tosi’s and they wandered towards the vaporetto stop.

  ‘I’ll walk home from here,’ he said. ‘Through all those back streets I used to play in as a child. It seems like only yesterday, you know. Where do the years go? What do we do with them?’

  ‘We help people, Alberto. You haven’t retired from that.’

  They stopped by the narrow alley that led down to the houses and shops she’d seen earlier.

  ‘I’ll walk too,’ she said. ‘I can find the Arsenale from here.’

  ‘You’re sure? You’re in the labyrinth now.’

  ‘I’m good at labyrinths. Or at least, I’m getting better at them.’

  The street, when they reached it, was busy and lively and quite unlike any near Dorsoduro or San Marco, broad enough to be a rio terà or a piscina perhaps. The shops, which were just beginning to close, seemed local. The cafés were full of cheery, red-faced men drinking wine and spritz. There were busy lines in the bakery, the butcher, the greengrocer’s store. It could have been Rome, Testaccio maybe.

  Except . . . meandering slowly up the wide calle was a carnival band, making a joyously dreadful noise with their drums and ragged collection of instruments. They were dressed like medieval characters: jesters and knights and soldiers. The solitary woman wore the long velvet gown of a princess and a headband of cheap pearls. She tapped away at a xylophone in what seemed a random fashion. A happy middle-aged drunk followed them, dancing and clapping to the music, shouting for the locals to come out and
see.

  Icy sleet was starting to fall. No one seemed to mind.

  ‘I can find my own way,’ she said and kissed Tosi’s cold rough cheek.

  Teresa Lupo watched him walk back towards Giardini and the bridge to Sant’Elena. Tosi had a very upright, certain gait. Good for his age, she thought. No, wonderful.

  When he was out of sight she retraced her steps to the general store she’d seen earlier. The place was starting to close. She walked in briskly, determined she would not be thrown out till she’d found what she wanted. The place seemed to sell everything. One wall was given over to artists’ materials, canvases, brushes, and paint mixes with extraordinary labels: ‘Tintoretto’s Scarlet’, ‘Caravaggio’s Black’, ‘Raphael’s Sky Blue’. The display next to it was full of detergent and rat traps. The shelves below contained dusty plastic children’s toys for the beach.

  ‘We sell everything,’ the man behind the counter said.

  ‘So I can see. I’d like a crowbar, a hammer, a screwdriver and a torch,’ Teresa said, thrusting a fifty-euro note at him.

  That was enough money to keep him open an extra five minutes. She was out of there in three, with all the items safely stowed in a plastic bag in case she accidentally bumped into Tosi again.

  There was no one between her and the Celestia vaporetto stop. Not a soul on the waterfront as she walked back to the abandoned building sitting on its perch above the lagoon next to the wall of the Arsenale.

  The torch was more powerful than Tosi’s. She flicked it along the rattling iron bridge as she walked across. The state of repair was shocking. Even sixteen years before it must have been too bad for regular use. Tosi was right. Sofia didn’t live here. But someone had used the place. Someone had put the very same building in the story about Camilla and Jason and their need for one another.

  Teresa got to the door and shone her torch on the padlock and chain. Under Tosi’s weak light the evidence had been barely visible. But now she could see clearly and there was no mistaking the signs. Scratch marks, fresh on the metal around the lock. They were shiny and recent.

  The sort of thing Falcone wouldn’t miss in a million years.

  ‘Thank you for that, Leo,’ she murmured.

  Then she turned and looked back at the city to make sure no one was watching. It was a ridiculous precaution. From this distant promontory in the back streets of Castello, Venice appeared dark and dead to the world.

  Teresa Lupo put the torch on the stone steps, took the crowbar out of the bag, placed the head in the first loop of chain next to the padlock, twisted it into place, then heaved with all her might on the lever she’d made. It took two turns to break the thing. After that she inserted the corner of the bar in the narrow crack in the door frame and began to work at it, slowly, patiently.

  In a few minutes she had enough space to force the thicker end through, then to lean back and place her weight against the iron bar, levering it against the door.

  There was a loud crack, not unlike the sound of the shot that had rung across the Piazza San Marco just two days before. The door sprang open with a sudden, violent lurch. Beyond it she could see nothing. The interior ahead was so black, so lacking in shape and form, it might have been the place where the physical world came to an end.

  She reached for the torch. As she was doing so something came to her, both familiar and terrible, triggering so many memories. Of work, of Rome. Of events like this when she was never alone but surrounded by police officers and her own forensic staff.

  It was the rank, cloying smell of decay, of physical corruption, one a police pathologist came to know well over the years.

  She picked up the tools in the carrier bag, then the torch with her free hand, and walked ahead into the stinking dark.

  A narrow, empty interior hall ran the width of the building parallel to the waterfront. Flashing around the beam of the torch she saw scrawls on the walls, graffiti in curled, painted lettering that looked as if it might have been hundreds of years old. The floorboards were cracked and, in places, shattered altogether so that brittle, rotten shards of wood projected upwards, ready to trip or spear the unwary.

  There was nothing here except a ludicrous, battered hat stand leaning drunkenly next to the interior door ahead. She walked forward and shone the torch at it. A single piece of fancy headgear was perched on the top. It rang a bell she couldn’t place at that moment. Circular, theatrical, with a long feather peeking out of the back. The colour, as she got the torch closer, was a rich shade of scarlet, the material velvet.

  It looked old-fashioned. But not old.

  The door was ajar already. She pushed it fully open and turned the beam on the floor ahead, checking it was secure.

  The room seemed in a better state of repair. The smell was becoming stronger. She flashed the light around the walls. This might once have been some kind of private home but now it seemed more like a derelict chapel. Vast canvases hung from every inch of spare space, old Biblical scenes, mostly violent: crucifixions, martyrdoms, the flayings and whippings and beheadings she’d seen enough of in Rome.

  She walked on slowly, carefully, watching the floor. There was no furniture that she could see. Just the paintings and, as she got to the centre of the room, what looked like a vast Murano chandelier, dangling uncertainly above her.

  It seemed incongruous somehow, all the more so when she saw that it was festooned with electric light bulbs, some of which seemed quite recent.

  The place had power. It was probably hot-wired into some conduit from the promenade. Wouldn’t be hard.

  She thought about looking for a light switch. But that would only draw attention.

  Not yet.

  Edging sideways, forgetful for a moment, she bumped into something solid and the physical shock made her shriek briefly. Her high, pained cry echoed off the damp walls and the closed wooden shutters that covered what must have been high, long windows giving out onto the lagoon.

  She flashed the torch at the object. It was an old dining chair, high and formal, the fabric seat and backing torn to shreds. A small dark shape squeaked and ran away from the light.

  Mice. Rats.

  There was another sound and it came from above. Light and scratchy. More vermin. Or birds. Pigeons. Gulls. Fighting their way through what had to be a wrecked tiled roof, taking shelter from the bitter night where they could.

  Teresa turned back towards the wall facing the door and flicked the beam over the area furthest from the point where she’d come in.

  A shape was visible on the ground, dimly human. Kneeling in front of some kind of makeshift altar with what looked like a small gilt cross and above it a painting of the crucifixion.

  Please God, she thought. Not Sofia.

  She stepped forward and the smell became so strong she started to breathe in short, rapid gasps. The beam flickered towards what lay there and she reminded herself of all the corpses, all the violence she’d witnessed over the years.

  Never like this. With such a possible connection.

  It was a woman and she was tied to a low pole set in a wooden base. Under the bright light of the torch Teresa could see that she wore precisely the same kind of dress Filippo Strozzi had shown her that morning in the painting in the Accademia. Sky-blue, with a scarlet cape, shining ribbons, golden hair and a crown decorated with pearls. The jewellery was cheap and theatrical. A plain female mask, bright white, the area beneath the mouth stained with dried blood, covered her face. The elastic band holding it was still visible around the back of the long, flowing hair of a cheap wig. Her hands were in front in the gesture of prayer, kept there by several loops of dark hessian rope.

  The shaft of an arrow, its feathers shiny and black, stood out of her breast at a sharp angle. The point, Teresa guessed, had gone directly into her heart. The shot must have come from close up: a man standing above her, aiming down, just as in the Carpaccio canvas.

  She shook her head. Why was she thinking like this? She wasn’t here as a police patho
logist. She didn’t even fit that description any more.

  All the same it was impossible not to see this from a professional point of view. The man had taken this woman, tied her to the low post, some ship apparatus perhaps, and forced her to kneel, binding her hands, placing the mask over her face.

  ‘Bastard,’ Teresa muttered.

  She could see now that the rope was drawn viciously, cutting deeply into the skin. Her nails were ragged and broken and there was still black caked material beneath some of them.

  Good for you, Teresa whispered. You fought.

  A wooden church lectern rose behind the body, with an empty shelf for the Bible and the rearing, bold body of an eagle, wings outstretched, at the top. She put a hand on it to steady herself. For the first time since she’d been a rookie pathologist the acrid fresh tang of recent blood made her feel faint.

  Teresa bent down and faced the mask, desperate to remove it though her personal instincts clashed with the professional, the strict rule of the criminal investigator whose first commandment was, always: Do not touch.

  Struggling with this internal dilemma, she looked at the wound in the woman’s chest. The blood had congealed in a black sticky mess around the entry point of the arrow. Ragged flesh was just visible near the rough-edged tear where the shaft pierced the fabric of the gown. She could picture the coming procedure in the morgue. The naked body on the shining silver table. The necessary incisions, the injuries a pathologist would inflict in the search for fact, plain and obvious or hidden inside veins and wounds and bloody tissue.

  She placed the bag with the tools on the dry wooden floor, the torch by its side.

  The mask had to go, however much her counterpart in Venice would shriek. But first she took the dead fingers in front of her. They were still a little mobile and it wasn’t difficult to imagine how, just a few short days before, they must have moved with life and warmth and, in this tiny room, during those last moments, the most awful sense of terror.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, hearing her own voice echo in this small, dank, reeking room. ‘If I could have been here . . .’