by David Hewson
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘The bones are still the bones. They’re unchanged by anything we’ve said or done.’
‘Then why go to all that very articulate trouble?’ he asked.
‘Because I owed it to someone. And myself too.’
Much had happened over the preceding months, some of it requiring several trips to the city, pleasant visits during which she’d watched winter lift and the light of spring put life back into the streets and piazzas and waterways.
Jerome Aitchison and Sofia became engaged at the end of February, only postponing an immediate wedding because of the near-hysterical pleas of Chiara for a more decorous interval. They waited precisely six weeks before marrying in a civil ceremony in San Marco, surrounded by friends.
By that time it was obvious the wounds had healed between Teresa’s mother and her aunt, so quickly and surely it was hard to believe they existed in the first place. A fresh honesty, a new affection was there. And some stability too. Sofia had stayed on to work for the bakery. She’d never looked happier. Jerome – Teresa now thought of him this way, more because of his childlike qualities than his elevation to unclehood – had picked up some part-time lecturing responsibilities at Ca’ Foscari, with the promise of further work when his rapidly improving Italian allowed.
Both continued to live in the same crooked palazzo along the waterfront. Like Filippo Strozzi and Camilla, they paid rent to the civil court, not a bank account in the name of an imaginary man called Michael Ruskin.
Strozzi, determined to rely more on making music than masks, had opened a jazz club in San Barnaba. Camilla remained wedded to papier-mâché for the moment but had plans to return to art college since her illness appeared to be in remission.
Jason’s injuries had required a six-week stay in the hospital near the Fondamenta Nove. Throughout he had occupied a private room overlooking the water, a luxury organized by Alberto Tosi with some deft behind-the-scenes tugging of strings. Teresa always visited him when she came, and usually found Camilla there. The relationship between these two changed visibly over that time. Before, the young woman’s reliance on Jason for the transfusions had, perhaps, served to deter any personal interest she might have felt. She’d felt dependent on the young Englishman, and a one-sided need was never a sound basis for love.
Over the weeks she’d visited him in hospital that had changed. They became equals, reliant on one another in equal measure. In late April she and Teresa had pushed him in his wheelchair along the waterfront to the vaporetto stop, then taken the slow boat out to the distant island of Burano. It had been the first warm day of spring. They’d eaten at a small restaurant near the fermata at Mazzorbo, a local place that served duck shot by hunters in the nearby marshes. Jason had said little, just smiled. Teresa watched the two of them then took herself off for a walk before catching the boat back to Venice. Words were no longer necessary. In the strange way that human relationships worked, the shared vulnerability that came from Jason’s new reliance on Camilla, pushing the wheelchair along the pavement, helping him in and out of bed, dispelled any remaining barriers between them as subtly as the spring rain washing away the winter dirt and grime from the city pavements.
The following evening they all went to Strozzi’s little club, a basement close to the Ponte dei Pugni. Sofia and Jerome were man and wife. Jason was walking then, with the aid of a stick, Camilla by his side. And Signora Rizzolo, whose pasticceria continued to prosper, arrived on Alberto Tosi’s long, proud arm.
Peroni, who’d come with Teresa for that trip, remarked when they got back to the hotel, ‘I never believed all that bilge about Venice being romantic. Not until now.’
Then he’d called room service and a bellhop in uniform arrived with champagne and flowers, clearly pre-ordered.
This was not the kind of life she could possibly hope to sustain even if she wished it.
The next afternoon the man charged under the name of Michael Ruskin had been given an indefinite custodial sentence under the mental health laws. The counts of murder – of the Gabriellis and the unfortunate market porter killed in the store then clothed in the costume of a harlequin – remained on the books. The judgement of the prosecutors was that he was not sufficiently sane for them to be pursued. He was sentenced in his absence. Since entering prison Ruskin’s health had waned, in ways the doctors failed to understand. He seemed to be suffering from an unidentifiable debilitating disease, one that left him confined to bed, attached, in a very short space of time, to a life-support system.
Two days after the case was heard he died. The cause remained a matter of debate, as was much else about the man. The authorities still had no clear idea of his true identity, only a long and growing list of the false names – masks, as Teresa thought of them – he had used around the world.
From the outset the local police refused to allow her to interview him or see the medical reports, even though she was now back in her position in the Rome Questura, her authority if anything enhanced by what had happened. Venice was Venice. Rome was Rome. Nations apart. The unfortunate administrator Orsini, however, had been demoted to work in a traffic control unit in Ostia. The lesson had not been lost on Teresa Lupo’s colleagues.
‘Signora Rizzolo is a wonderful woman,’ Tosi declared with a sly smile as they approached the outdoor tables of the pensione. The remark brought her back to the present. ‘It’s hard to keep secrets here, isn’t it?’
‘You’ve got so many,’ she observed. ‘It would be rash to expect them all to stay under lock and key.’
Everyone was there, seated at the best table by the water. Sofia looked very beautiful, Jerome deeply adoring.
‘More coffee?’ Tosi asked as they sat down, Teresa by Jason and Camilla, Tosi next to Signora Rizzolo. ‘The pasticceria has some lovely new dolci. Jason calls them Eccles cakes. One can hardly believe they’re English.’
Sofia and Chiara waved across the table. They were mid-sentence in what appeared to be a long and somewhat risqué story about teenage misbehaviour, one to which Jerome Aitchison listened attentively if a little shocked as they cawed and hooted over the details.
Teresa kissed Camilla and held her, then did the same for Jason. The stick was gone. He looked as fit and healthy and happy as ever.
There was small talk, and the cakes were delicious if unfamiliar.
Her mind drifted. It was hard to associate those cold, bleak winter nights with this glorious afternoon, warm and sunny, not far from the Ponte agli Incurabili, not too distant from the alleys and arcades of the Rialto either. The canal glistened. The black, restless grebes she remembered from February were still there, followed by a line of bobbing chicks.
‘Penny for them,’ Jason said with a wink.
‘A penny for what?’
‘For your thoughts. It’s an English expression.’
‘I feel they’re worth rather more than that, actually.’
‘Those fools from the First International Symposium on the Genetic Analysis of the Skeletal Remains Attributed to St Mark didn’t think so,’ Tosi broke in. ‘I should have seen what that was all about the moment they came up with such a pompous mouthful.’
‘It was a vote about the dead, Alberto,’ she said. ‘I was contemplating the living for a change. They matter rather more. I was thinking . . . that I’m glad things worked out so well. In the end.’
Most of them anyway.
In a short space of time the afternoon turned more raucous. Teresa was glad in a way that Peroni hadn’t been able to come. He would have loved a family gathering like this, would have joined in the jokes and the ridiculous banter easily, in a way she would always find impossible. For them the events of the previous February lay in the past, buried by the pleasure of the present. There was no visible aftermath, no nagging doubts or misgivings. She envied them this facility for setting the dark to one side. She wondered why such a rational feat of practical amnesia was so impossible for her.
After a while bright scarlet glasses
of spritz began to emerge. She sipped at one, just a touch. That was enough, though they were all too busy and too engaged to notice. The bittersweet taste, the olive and the slice of orange, all brought back too many memories of those freezing nights near Il Gobbo. A reminder that she could have fallen into that murky and enticing trap too, so easily.
Just after five her phone buzzed. It was a message, a short one, that read, ‘I trust you won’t forget to visit St Augustine and his little dog one last time. We close at six. On the dot. Those are the rules of the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni.’
She found herself unable to breathe for an instant. A mental picture of that dark hall by the bridge in Castello came back sharp and clear, as if from yesterday. And the stiff warden of an indeterminate age, a man who knew all about paintings and little dogs.
‘I have to go,’ she said, then kissed them all and left for the fast boat to Castello.
The vaporetto was quieter than during carnival, with locals and tourists happily enjoying the warm sun and the wide expansive view of St Mark’s Basin. Turner was a winter soul. He had deserted Venice now. In his place the coming summer brought a different palette of colours, bright and sharp and forthright. Those of a native, Tintoretto or Tiziano.
She got off at Arsenale and immediately found the direct route to the little scuola by the canal. For a reason she’d never quite fathomed she’d stayed away ever since February, even when there were spare hours on some earlier visits. Something about the paintings, both there and in the Accademia, continued to unsettle her. They were like the city, hard to dislodge from one’s thoughts. Like the man who called himself Michael Ruskin too, still half-hidden in the shadows of mystery. Incomplete, indeterminate.
Victor Carpathius Fingebat.
A riddle painted by a curious artist more than five centuries before. A signature of a kind. A boast, even. Some kind of challenge saying: read me, digest me, bring me to life. In her mind’s eye she could see the cartellino, the bewildered saint and the little dog as she walked up the freshly swept street towards the modest white Palladian building at its head.
The place seemed busier than she expected when she strode through the green door. Automatically, Teresa turned to her left, where the man would be waiting for her with his dark suit, old-fashioned glasses and owlish eyes.
‘I’ve been meaning to give you a piece of my mind . . .’ she began, alarmed at the way her right index finger had begun to wag the moment she entered the cool, dark interior. ‘I . . .’
A middle-aged woman in a white polo shirt was seated at the little table. She had grey hair tied back in a severe bun and a puzzled, rather stern face.
‘The standard donation is three euros,’ she said, indicating the box.
A flicker of fury began to rise at the back of Teresa Lupo’s head. This was one more trick of his.
‘Someone was supposed to meet me here. A man. I expected the warden who usually . . .’
The woman shushed her into silence, her eyes darting to the centre of the hall.
It was packed, Teresa saw, the benches occupied by a rapt party of schoolgirls. English again, judging by the badge on their blazers, which bore the name of a school in Manchester. The children appeared a good couple of years younger than the class in February, little more than twelve or thirteen, too young to be bored by ancient and exotic art. A few had watched the encounter at the entrance. Most had their eyes on a tall, rather shambling middle-aged man in a pale and crumpled linen suit who stood by the painting of St Augustine in his study, waiting for the fuss to end.
The same teacher she’d seen there before. The one about whom the warden had been so rude, calling him, if she recalled correctly, an ‘English popinjay’.
His hair seemed darker, brown not the fair to grey colour she recalled. His face was fetching yet unremarkable, the sort one would notice immediately then forget the moment he departed the room.
‘May I continue?‘ he asked very politely.
Teresa sat down rather grumpily on a seat next to the entrance. The woman dangled her fingers across the donations box once more. Teresa passed across some coins and received in return the same kind of antiquated entrance ticket she’d received back in February. Nothing here ever changed, she thought. Except for the price on the ticket, and the person who handed it over.
‘The Golden Legend,’ the man began, ‘is a set of stories, as I’ve said. Myths and fables. One man’s dreams about people who may or may not have been real. Lies intended to throw light upon a larger, more reticent truth. As you will have read . . .’
‘Sir . . .’
A small girl with a pigtail, seated at the very front, the place where the swots always wanted to be, had her hand up.
‘Lucy, isn’t it?’
He didn’t seem familiar with this class. A local guide, she suspected, brought in for visiting parties.
‘That’s right,’ the girl said primly. ‘Are you saying none of them are true?’
He beamed at her and asked, ‘None of what?’
‘The dragons. And the lions. And the monsters.’
‘And the dog,’ Teresa added testily. ‘Don’t forget the dog.’
Lucy gave her a very grown-up basilisk stare as if she’d intruded on some private audience.
‘Sorry,’ Teresa said, and waved him on.
‘I’ve never seen a dragon,’ the man continued. ‘Or a monster. But I’ve seen plenty of lions in my time. And dogs . . . Well. We’ve all seen dogs.’
‘Apart from the dogs, I mean,’ the girl said in the persistent and slightly crabby tone of a precocious child. ‘And the lions.’
He frowned, thinking.
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’ Lucy persisted.
‘On whether you believe the only things that exist are those you can see and touch.’ He paused. ‘Well? Do you?’
The girl put a finger to her pudgy cheek, thinking. There was a mischievous look on her face. Teresa recognized this kind of child. Serious on the surface, rascally underneath.
‘No,’ she declared after a while. ‘In fact I think the only person who’d believe that would be a . . .’
She waved her hands at her classmates, beckoning, calling for some kind of answer.
‘A prune!’ they chanted in unison, then fell to giggling and nudging each other with their small, sharp elbows.
A light went on in Teresa Lupo’s head. She stared at the man standing in front of the Carpaccio canvases. He shrugged his shoulders, eyed her and winked.
A prune. Arnaud’s favourite word for someone who’d been a fool.
These children had heard that joke a lot over the last few days too, she guessed. They’d grown to like their guide to the art and history of Venice, to think it fun to throw his own quip back at him. He was a clown, an entertainer. A knowledgeable escort spending a few days a week with any passing group of schoolchildren that cared to hire him. One who must surely have bumped into Sofia on their mutual winding circuit of the city sights.
He smiled at them as they laughed, smiled at her too, his tanned cheeks suffused with a touch more colour.
She sat in silence, half-listening, looking at the picture of St Augustine, perplexed at his wooden desk, surrounded by the panoply of an organized intellectual life, the little dog, ears pricked and alert, at his feet. His attention caught by something from beyond the bright sunny window, unable to comprehend what it might be.
The rest of the talk was very similar to the one she’d heard in February. It ended on the dot, with the chimes of a nearby church. Six of them. A pretty young teacher joined them close to the end and afterwards led the girls away in a tightly disciplined line. The woman at the door coughed and harrumphed, looking at her watch. Teresa left too and waited outside.
When the man in the linen suit emerged into the golden evening sunlight he looked around him, at the scuola, at the beautiful little bridge over the rio. He was taller than she had pictured, not the rather dapper middle-aged gentle
man who was Arnaud, the Count of Saint-Germain, in her imagination. His suit must once have been natty. Now it was threadbare in parts, as was his hat, which was the floppy, foldable kind one expected of a traveller in the tropics. There were leather patches on the jacket’s elbows and the odd stain here and there. His footwear had seen much better days, being battered soft brown sandals worn with pale pink socks. The stick was the same though. Black and shiny, with a silver handle.
‘Children,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Who’d have thought they’d perform the introductions for me? Little devils. Talking of which . . .’
A small white dog was trotting across the bridge towards them, its gait certain and steady, as if the animal was returning from an appointment. It came and sat obediently at his feet.
Teresa bent down. Two serene black eyes returned her gaze. She remembered that far-off night on the Ponte dei Pugni, and Peroni’s instructions. A little warily she held out the back of her hand to let the dog sniff it. Then, once accepted, she patted the stiff dry fur on his head.
‘You’re very privileged,’ the man said. ‘He can be very picky.’
‘Now I see him like this, in the open, in the sunlight . . . He’s not a volpino, is he?’
‘Very similar in appearance. The volpino’s a rare breed. I think this one’s some kind of terrier. Several kinds really. Does it matter? He’s a loyal and loving companion. Really no trouble at all. May I buy you a spritz?’
Oh yes, she said. Her earlier resolution had disappeared altogether.
They walked round the corner, down an alley, across a tiny campiello with stone walls so old they looked like a suntanned giant’s peeling skin. She knew where they were going, though she understood too she’d never be able to find the place herself with any great ease.
The Cason dei Sette Morti looked much brighter than it had in February when Tosi had brought her here. Even then it had seemed more welcoming than its fictional counterpart in the story called Carpaccio’s Dog.
‘You made this place sound horrible in that tale you made up about Jerome,’ she told him as they walked in.
