Carnival for the Dead

by David Hewson

  ‘Get out,’ the young Englishman yelled at them. ‘Run.’

  He lurched in front of her, fetched the figure in the tight harlequin suit a hard blow to the side of the head.

  Camilla dashed through the door. Teresa stayed where she was. The cops had to be here soon. She wanted to see what was behind that leering ebony mask.

  The blow had sent the man in the costume of diamonds stumbling back towards the door at the rear. He was clutching at his head. He looked hurt and old at that moment. The mask had slipped just a little and she could see a plaster there. The wound from the night before, she thought. This was not going the way he planned.

  Then he reached into an unseen pocket by his waist and took out a small black pistol and started to clamber to his feet, painfully, not with any great ease.

  ‘Time to go now, Jason,’ Teresa said, taking his elbow. ‘This is someone else’s job I––’

  She didn’t get to finish the sentence. There were loud noises from outside. Men shouting. Boots on stone. Something so familiar she was surprised it took her a moment to place the din. It was the rattle of batons against body armour, the kind of commotion cops created when they wanted to make their presence clear.

  Teresa yelled at Jason Cunningham and pushed him quickly towards the front door.

  The figure on the floor was half-up, hand on a chair. He looked winded and wasn’t moving. Perhaps the blow from Jason had been more serious than it looked.

  Uniforms shoving and shouting. She just got to see what was happening before a familiar voice – Paola Boscolo’s – began bellowing at her to get out of the way.

  I deserve better than that, she thought, and took a last look back.

  The harlequin was more animated now, scrambling urgently across the tiles, working his way towards the rear exit, then on his feet again, starting to flee. Two long steps and he was outside and the cops were barely in the place, hunting around with their weapons, scared and alert.

  She saw the silk diamonds disappear into a pool of darkness.

  ‘Will you move?’ Paola Boscolo yelled.

  ‘There’s a way out of the back,’ she said, pointing at the gloomy maw that led off from the rear of the store. ‘He went out there. I think the alley leads round to the arcades. If you don’t get a move on . . .’

  A familiar sight. Big, muscular men in blue, visors down, armour on their chests, pushing everything, everyone out of the way.

  ‘He’s armed,’ Teresa added as they fought past her.

  Not that she needed to mention that really. They had their weapons out already.

  Six or eight of them ran ahead with the sturdy young policewoman at their heels. They were yelling at someone out there, ordering him to stop. Not saying the obvious. The threat. If you don’t . . .

  She closed her eyes. He couldn’t run so well, it seemed. She wanted to see this man, but alive.

  There was a moment approaching, one she hated. It was always wrong, irrational, stupid. Force against force. Brute power against individual unreason.

  Once, not so long ago, she had been the one who almost died. Someone else, someone close by was murdered in her place. Yet she still believed, against her own reason, that she had sensed the instant at which another’s life had departed. It was the kind of conviction that belonged in fiction, in the fantasies of Arnaud, the Count of Saint-Germain, not in the mind of a rational and analytical woman of science. Back then, though, it had seemed real enough.

  There was the violent crack of a single shot echoing off the damp Venetian walls. Then another.

  More shouts, from the cops. More warnings.

  A third, lone explosion rent the darkness. After that came a storm of gunfire, too many rounds to count, backed by yells of fear and aggression, the racket that always came with violence and blood.

  ‘Here we go,’ she muttered, and waited for the instant she knew from before, the moment she’d experienced when she expected to die in a hut somewhere among the distant ruins of Ostia Antica.

  The sudden skip of a heartbeat, the terrifying inability to take a single breath. The sense that something, some spirit, some element of life, had left the world.

  That feeling never came for some reason.

  The noise from beyond the back door fell to a low murmur of voices.

  When the gunfire ended Teresa walked out the back, weaving her way through the uniforms, feeling their armoured vests brush against her. Paola Boscolo and two helmeted officers stood over a broken, awkward shape on the black cobbles near some tall commercial rubbish bins. The diamond patterns of the harlequin suit were just visible in the darkness. The mask was half torn off to reveal a gaping wound to the temple.

  ‘He shot himself,’ the policewoman said. ‘Dammit.’

  Close up Teresa could see blood on the dead man’s chest, on his right shoulder, near the stomach.

  ‘He shot himself a lot by the look of things,’ she said, trying to keep the edge out of her voice.

  One of the uniforms threw up his visor and glared at her.

  ‘It was dark. He fired first. We weren’t to know.’

  ‘Certainly sounded that way,’ she agreed.

  ‘You’re safe, aren’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Safe. Yes. And quite . . .’ What was the word? ‘Ignorant. Likely to remain so, don’t you think?’

  The cops were starting to get angry, the way officers did when they knew something had gone wrong.

  ‘That’s the problem with dead people,’ Teresa went on, feeling her temper rise. ‘They can be so very uncommunicative.’

  Paolo Boscolo’s heavy form came in front of her, separating Teresa from the men. There was no politeness or warmth on the policewoman’s face.

  ‘Wait for me in front of the shop,’ Boscolo ordered. ‘I’ll need statements from you all.’

  Teresa didn’t move. She looked around the place, trying to think straight.

  ‘I said . . .’ the policewoman repeated.

  ‘Heard you the first time.’

  She returned to the store. Camilla was by the doorway in Jason’s arms. She looked lost, distraught, someone whose world had been torn apart. She’d come to Venice to find a better, easier life. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  Teresa placed a hand on the young man’s arm and said, ‘You saved us there. Thank you.’

  ‘Wasn’t nothing,’ he murmured, holding the girl tightly.

  She looked Camilla in the eye and said, ‘I want you to go to the hospital with the medics. You need to see that consultant of yours.’

  ‘I’m not hurt!’ the girl objected.

  ‘Indulge me,’ Teresa pleaded.

  A couple of the cops asked what was going on. They weren’t close to the action inside. They hadn’t seen her arguing with the officers near the corpse so they listened, looked at the Questura card she showed them, then agreed to get an ambulance launch.

  After that the three of them waited close by the end of the arcade. Teresa wished again she had a cigarette, considered begging one from one of the cops, thought better of it.

  Camilla said, ‘Jason told me. I’m glad Sofia’s safe. I’m . . .’

  She slapped him lightly on the arm, a child’s clip, playful almost.

  ‘I am disappointed by your deceit.’

  ‘We’re sneaky buggers, the English,’ Jason said with a quick grin. ‘It’s just that most of the time we don’t let on.’

  Teresa smiled and said, ‘I’d like to see her now.’

  He stepped back into the shadows. Teresa joined him. Jason Cunningham was smart enough. He didn’t need to be told. Before they went he darted forward, kissed Camilla quickly on the cheek and asked, ‘You’ll be all right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  Then Teresa took his arm and the two of them slunk out of the cul-de-sac, talking nonsense, ignoring the busy, engaged cops there, darting back into the arcades the moment they could.

  She didn’t ask any questions a
s they walked through the pitch-black loggia, past Il Gobbo, past the busy bars and the crowds of puzzled, half-drunk carnival-goers. This louche dark face of the city seemed on edge. There were police everywhere. The shots must have echoed through the alleys and piazzas and calli of the Rialto. People knew something was wrong.

  Jason strode ahead, confident every step of the way, walking so quickly at times it was hard for her to keep up. Hard to concentrate too. She was thinking of so many things. Seeing Sofia finally. Holding her. Calling her mother with the news. Finally managing to achieve something that might heal the fragile breach between them, one that had widened so much over the last few days.

  People didn’t simply disappear from your life. Sometimes you let them go. They’d done that, both of them, with Sofia, one consciously, the other, Teresa, so absorbed in her work and career that she’d never managed to notice how her aunt, a kind of sister, had slipped into the shadows, struggling to survive. She and her mother had done this with each other too. It would not happen again.

  She followed him through a narrow low sotoportego and found herself in a tiny campiello as black and bleak as any she’d met in the city. Every wall of the cramped square seemed solid dank brick, without windows or decoration save for graffiti and a crooked marble wellhead in the centre. There was only the meanest of light from a lone lamp by the entrance arch.

  So quickly she didn’t see, he was gone and she found herself alone, cold and shivering in the faint dashes of dying sleety rain chasing into the square from the squally sky.

  ‘Jason,’ she called. ‘Jason.’

  She waited, hearing her own breath, aware she was lost in a distant backwater beyond the bridge.

  Then he stepped out in front of her and in the faint light she could see he was beaming like a schoolkid. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness. In the right-hand corner there was some kind of alcove so small and black, halfway into the ground, that it was invisible until she found a reason to stare there.

  He was holding his right arm. There was blood on it, close to the elbow.

  ‘Did he hurt you?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really.’

  He still clung to himself, grimacing a little.

  ‘For God’s sake, when will you learn to think of yourself before others?’

  ‘When I feel like it,’ Jason Cunningham replied. ‘I’m sorry I left you there. I wanted to check it was all right.’

  He took a few steps towards her.

  ‘Sofia’s scared as hell. Got a right to be and she doesn’t know the half of it.’

  His good arm beckoned her towards the alcove. As they got closer to the far wall she could see there was a door there. Jason pulled on the latch. Beyond, lit by a string of weak bulbs on a line of twisting wire, was a worn stone staircase leading steeply down into the damp Venetian earth. As she looked another door opened at the very end and she could see a face, a distant one.

  Cautiously, Teresa began to walk down the passage, heart pumping, mind racing, her footsteps echoing off the uneven brick walls. There was a fragrance rising from whatever lay ahead. As she watched more lights went on there, turning the figure ahead into a silhouette, without a face, any sign or feature she could recognize.

  She knew something though. She was approaching the pleasant, welcome aroma of a bakery, of yeast and flour and rising bread. As she got closer to the bottom of the steps she felt the hot breath of some unseen oven begin to wash over her like a kitchen memory from childhood.

  The narrow brick artery beneath these unseen buildings in the back of the Rialto seemed to run forever. She heard someone behind, glanced back and saw Jason following her down. Then she was there, stumbling off the last worn step, and the heat hit her like a desert wind. The place was so bright she blinked, felt a little giddy. When she opened her eyes Sofia stood in front of her, arms wide open, dressed in a tight white baker’s gown, chest covered in flour, a bleached hat on her head hiding what must have been long blonde curls tucked tightly beneath.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Teresa asked, close to tears. ‘Where . . .?’ She’d rehearsed this moment so many times in her head. Practised the speeches, of love and gratitude, admonition, and a resolute determination that things would change.

  Every word was now gone. The two women threw their arms around each other, held that close position for a long time.

  Teresa felt a great choking sob rise inside her then find some welcome release.

  ‘We’re safe? Really?’ Sofia whispered in her ear.

  The sound of her voice was reward in itself.

  ‘I believe so,’ Teresa began. ‘I think . . .’

  A man walked briskly into view ahead of them. He was dressed like Sofia, in white overalls covered with flour and a baker’s hat, and smiling rather foolishly as if embarrassed. When Teresa met his gaze he took off the hat briefly and bowed.

  She recognized his face.

  ‘Jerome Aitchison,’ Teresa said, astonished, not least because close up, in the flesh, she couldn’t for one moment feel afraid.

  ‘The very one,’ he said in English. Then, apologetically, ‘I mean . . .’

  He tried again, this time with a short sentence in Italian. It wasn’t very good but she got the drift.

  Teresa let go of Sofia. Jason was by her side. He seemed more composed than any of them though he was still clutching at his arm.

  ‘You need that looked at,’ she said to him, aware how mundane and inappropriate the words seemed.

  ‘Bleeding all over a bakery,’ he answered. ‘Dead right I do.’ He grinned. ‘Good place to hide though. You don’t think Signora Rizzolo can make bread as well in that little place of hers, do you? Not when there’s so much it goes all over town, into restaurants and places. There’s just pastries there. I’m OK with them. But bread . . .’

  He let go of his elbow for a moment and held out his hands, waving his fingers.

  ‘There’s life in those,’ Teresa said and wondered if her head would ever stop spinning.

  ‘Dead right. Jerome here and Sofia needed somewhere to hide when all the trouble started. It was obvious really. People think bread comes out of nowhere. Manna from the skies. No one ever looks inside a bakery. So I put ’em to work. There’s a little room at the back where they can stay. Taught ’em how to do a good job too. Brought in the shopping every night. Can’t live off bread alone.’

  He pulled a loaf off a stacked rack close by and tore it in half.

  ‘Even when it’s this good. You try that!’

  ‘Another time,’ Teresa said, waving away the crust, her head full of its wonderful scent.

  She looked at Aitchison and thought of the photograph she’d found of him in Amsterdam. All the shyness, the awkwardness, the solitary bachelor identity were there, only magnified.

  Lights were starting to go on in her head.

  ‘You and Jerome . . .’ she began.

  Sofia giggled, walked over and cuddled him.

  ‘He’s the loveliest man in the world. We’re getting married.’ Her face fell. ‘When we can.’

  ‘And Michael Ruskin?’

  Her bright features fell even further.

  ‘Michael promised me we’d be friends again,’ Sofia said quietly. ‘I told him that was all it could be. Otherwise I wouldn’t come back to Venice at all. I told him.’ She pouted like a spoilt teenager. ‘I knew he’d try it on, of course. He was always pushy like that. But he was adamant he didn’t have that problem any more.’

  ‘What problem?’ Teresa asked.

  ‘His temper.’ She stared at the floor and shuffled her feet, shy, ashamed even. ‘And the rest. When I met Jerome . . .’

  Sofia’s eyes widened and Teresa wanted to pinch herself. She’d seen this ingenuous, infuriating look so many times.

  ‘You’d think an old boyfriend would rejoice in your happiness, wouldn’t you?’ she asked. ‘Not turn so foul and scary we had to hide around the Rialto at night just so we could meet . . .’

  ‘Me in that
ridiculous costume,’ Aitchison added immediately and took her hand. ‘That was fun!’

  ‘Not after a while it wasn’t,’ she went on. ‘Michael was so . . . persistent. It got worse when I told him about Jerome. Not better at all. I was frightened of him. Of what he might do, to both of us.’

  ‘Ursula’s dress?’ Teresa asked. ‘The one from the painting. The one in your room.’

  Sofia shuddered.

  ‘Ugh. That was odd. I came back one day and he’d put it there. Let himself into my apartment without a word. Why? I was supposed to finish it for him or something. Wear it for some special occasion he had planned. Carnival. I don’t know. The way he was behaving was so creepy. I knew we needed to get away from him there and then. I wrote you that letter. Jerome and I met up round the corner that night and . . .’ She giggled. ‘We ran away!’

  Teresa remembered the Casino degli Spiriti and the body kneeling there, hands tied tightly in a gesture of prayer. Another victim in the dress of the martyred saint from the Accademia.

  ‘Carpaccio,’ she murmured.

  ‘I wish I’d never shown him those pictures,’ Sofia said quietly. ‘It’s as if they unhinged him. Changed him. Not that he needed much of a push, if you ask me. He always had . . .’ She twirled a finger by the side of her head. ‘ . . . a loopy side, if I’m honest.’

  Saint-Germain’s trigger, Teresa thought. The darkness was there to begin with. All it required was a catalyst.

  ‘That painter chap changed me,’ Aitchison said brightly. ‘We met there. In that little place with the dragons. And the dog.’

  They hugged again, all flour and grasping arms. Teresa watched and sighed.

  Two peas from the same pod. Fleeing the murderous clutches of the monster who called himself Michael Ruskin, aided by a young and resourceful Englishman who seemed to think it his life’s mission to help others.

  ‘Who sent me those stories?’ she asked.

  All three of them stared at her in silence.

  ‘What stories? We just wanted to stay out of his way for a few days,’ Sofia replied, wide-eyed still. ‘If he didn’t stop being so horrible I thought I might go with you to the police and make him see reason. He was so . . . incensed. Then he made that terrible thing happen. In the piazza. That girl. The man they thought was Jerome.’