Carnival for the Dead

by David Hewson

  ‘I don’t want my secrets bandied around in public,’ he replied. ‘The baccalà here’s much too good to be shared with the hoi polloi from the cruise ships. Besides, I wasn’t entirely sure about Jerome Aitchison when I sent off that little tale. It would have been rash to have dismissed the idea that he’d made off with poor Sofia. Don’t assume omniscience on my part. You couldn’t be more wrong.’

  The same pleasant old bartender was there. He greeted them cheerily and immediately set about heating some milk in the coffee machine then spooning it onto a saucer which he set in front of the little dog. After that, again without being asked, he reached for the Campari bottle, prosecco and olives.

  ‘You’re a regular,’ Teresa observed.

  ‘A creature of habit,’ he agreed. ‘You must try the baccalà. And the sarde en saor. None better.’

  The man behind the counter passed over two glasses of the most perfect spritz she’d ever tasted, cold and sweet and bitter, an inexplicable jumble of flavours that she would forever associate with Venice and never attempt to enjoy elsewhere. Then he brought several plates of food before retiring to the tiny patio, just visible behind the bar. There he stretched out on a rickety old sun bed and proceeded to smoke a cigar, eyes closed, clearly not expecting any more custom for the night.

  Teresa looked around her at the random collection of books, old amusement machines, photographs, grandfather clocks and the obscure fortune-telling device which still had a sign declaring ‘broken’ taped over the coin slot. In some odd way it reminded her of the painting she’d just seen, Augustine in his cluttered academic study, hiding from the light of the world, but seeing it from the window nevertheless.

  ‘Alberto Tosi told me this place got its name from some ridiculous old lagoon tale,’ she said, half to herself. ‘One about ghosts and dead men walking.’

  She looked at the man next to her, long and lean in his shabby linen suit.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts too?’

  He tried his spritz and a smear of salt cod on bread, closing his eyes briefly out of pure pleasure. A drop of Campari spilled onto the sleeve of his wrinkled jacket. It wasn’t, she saw, alone.

  ‘I’m prepared to believe in anything that’s willing to believe in me. What about you?’

  She reached forward and lightly pinched his arm, then tried to remove the pink smear of alcohol.

  ‘You don’t seem much of a ghost.’

  ‘I was never aware,’ he replied archly, ‘that I claimed to be one.’

  ‘What do I call you? Arnaud?’

  ‘As good a name as any.’

  ‘What do you have to say to me, Arnaud?’ she asked.

  He took a deep breath and tried to smile. There was such sadness in him, so deep a sense of resignation, of acceptance, that she could detect straight away the Saint-Germain she’d imagined, reserved, intelligent, charming yet infinitely melancholy too. Only the shell, the mask of outward appearance, stood between the character in the book and the man sipping his drink next to her, on a battered stool in this back-alley bar in the distant reaches of Castello.

  ‘That I’m sorry for the pain,’ he said. ‘Sorry I couldn’t do more to lessen it. I tried to tell you. It’s part of my . . . condition that I see some things too well and others not at all. I lack a forensic mind. I am by nature fated to watch, not participate. So I endeavoured to pass on to you what facts I possessed in the hope that someone more astute might know what to do with them. To assemble them into some kind of logical order, one that might bring about a happy conclusion.’

  ‘You could have gone to the police.’

  ‘You did and what good did it do? I knew no more than I told you in those small fictions. They were a collection of facts, of possibilities. Of questions demanding answers.’

  ‘They were infuriating puzzles!’

  He hesitated then said, ‘There was that aspect to them, I’ll admit. I felt from what Sofia told me that you might need to approach the problem a little more . . . loosely than might otherwise have been the case. A touch of the imagination was required. From what I’d learned I wasn’t sure you were up to that. Not in your Roman frame of mind.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  ‘Was I wrong?’ His eyes darkened. ‘Besides, I had my reasons. I don’t expect you to accept them, but they were . . . they are . . . real enough for me.’

  ‘This man Ruskin . . . Who was he?’

  He put down his piece of bread and the remains of a cold sardine.

  ‘I believe you’d label him schizophrenic. A psychopath. Some such convenient term. There are so many to choose from today. Progress, I suppose.’

  ‘And you, Arnaud. What would you call him?’

  He looked her directly in the face and said, ‘Brother.’

  She was lost for words.

  ‘We don’t choose who shares our blood, do we?’ he went on. ‘Nor do we control those who possess it. I didn’t him, any more than you could Sofia.’

  She tried to laugh.

  ‘Oh please. The insane nonsense in those stories . . .’

  He parked his spritz on the counter and gazed at her, a little cross.

  ‘Believe what you wish. He was my brother. As I tried to tell you, sometimes a man, or a woman, is born with a hidden poison inside them. It’s not their fault. It’s not theirs to master. If they’re lucky it never surfaces. When it does . . . then we all pay the cost.’

  ‘The trigger,’ she said.

  He waved a hand around the cluttered interior of the Cason dei Sette Morti.

  ‘ . . . is this. Read Ruskin. Everyone’s Venice is different. Where you see antiquity I see squalor. Where another marvels at beauty a second turns away in horror at some gross, naked display of poor taste. Yet it remains a place of wonder for most of us. For him . . .’ He seemed unsure of his words. ‘What common sense and decency he had departed the moment he set foot here. That painting didn’t help.’

  He frowned, seeking the right words.

  ‘I think he wanted his own Ursula somehow. An eternal bride. Always virginal. Forever pure. As far as I understand – and be assured, we weren’t sufficiently on speaking terms of late to discuss this – he came to feel he was haunted by the ghost of Ruskin and Rose La Touche much as Ruskin was plagued by the insane obsession he had with Carpaccio’s Ursula. Possessed twice over, as it were. I should have realized it wasn’t a good sign when he took that name. This was years ago. Don’t fool yourself that Sofia was alone, the first. That dismal hovel they call the Casino degli Spiriti.’ He shuddered. ‘Lord knows I had trouble enough with that place in the past . . .’

  She recalled Tosi’s story, of the murder there when he was a child, the squid with the eyes of a woman.

  ‘If you’re talking about what I think, that was more than fifty years ago,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Is that all?’ The question didn’t affect him in the slightest. ‘I really should have seen he was up to no good there again.’ He picked up the spritz and took a swig, glaring at her for a moment. ‘I merely passed on the description in case it proved of some use. Had I known for one instant you intended to break in . . . Good Lord! That was the one night you shook me off, deliberately I thought. And see what happened! Thank God you weren’t so elusive in the Rialto.’

  Teresa Lupo blinked, trying to take this in.

  ‘I was trying to lose Alberto Tosi! You mean you followed me around? Everywhere? Beginning to end?’

  ‘From the moment you and your mother stepped off that vaporetto,’ he replied. ‘I got your picture from the papers and spent many freezing hours meeting every boat that matched with a train or flight from Rome. Of course I wasn’t going to leave you entirely alone. Do you think I have no conscience? I was fortunate he’d disappeared from that apartment of his by then. And that I still had a key. He let me use the place a few years before when we were on better terms. He was a very forgetful man sometimes. So many different places to go, I imagine. I’ve never understood why anyone wants more than
a single home. One’s too many sometimes.’

  Her outrage was growing. She stabbed a finger at him and said, ‘You were there? Looking at those cameras? Spying on us all?’

  ‘Only as much as I needed!’ he protested. ‘I didn’t know he had those nasty little things until I got in. And I did turn them off so he couldn’t peek himself. Though I suspect he was beyond that by then. It was foolish of me. He might have noticed. I was desperate and I never think straight in such conditions. Do you see my problem? I’m not up to subterfuge, I’m afraid.’

  ‘He was your brother! And you didn’t know where he was?’

  Arnaud said nothing, simply stared at her.

  ‘Oh, you mean like Sofia,’ she replied. ‘There you have me.’

  ‘I told you. He was an acquisitive man. He had other places to go. Ones that he never shared with me, for all the obvious reasons. It was never my intention to come back here at all. I never would have, had I not learned Sofia had returned too. An astonishing decision given the circumstances. Why on earth did she do it?’

  The two of them had had that conversation often enough over the past few months. Sofia never really understood the problem. The past was the past. Gone.

  ‘She loves it here. Ruskin assured her what had happened, the baby, the affair . . . they were behind them. Forgotten. She could have the apartment on the cheap and he wouldn’t bother her.’

  ‘Ha!’ Arnaud shook his head in amazement. ‘Cunning on his part, naivety on hers. It was clear to me from the beginning something untoward would happen. His nature was never forgiving at the best. When Aitchison came along, the emergence of a rival, as he saw it, only served to add fuel to the impending blaze. I was pleased she had the good sense to disappear when she did but concerned all the same. He was not a man given to abandoning his obsessions easily.’

  ‘So it became my job to find her?’

  Teresa still felt a sense of outrage at the way she’d been used.

  ‘Who else?’ he asked. ‘Sofia’s a talkative woman. She told everyone about her brilliant niece in Rome. Several times over.’ He waved an arm around the bar. ‘Over cicchetti here a few times, believe it or not. All about Jason and Strozzi and Camilla. Jerome too in the end. She felt able to confide in me for some reason. People do. I’ve no idea why. Your light never found the bushel in any of those conversations, and that’s the truth. Where else should I look for assistance than the genius of the Questura? I needed someone who could make an intelligent and dedicated effort to get to the bottom of this riddle.’

  He leaned down and fed the dog a morsel of fish.

  ‘I’d have been an idiot not to enlist you in some way.’

  ‘You could have told me something certain! Something . . . ’ She struggled for the right words. ‘Solid. Meaningful.’

  ‘I told you what I knew. Sofia had gone missing by then. Aitchison too. Perhaps that very talented musician in his wheelchair was hiding them. Or the Croatian girl. Or that brave young Englishman. I needed someone with a forensic eye to work things out. To take a look at them and try to comprehend what was going on and how she might be saved. It required a methodical mind, and that kind of thing has always been beyond me. I find it a touch tedious, if I’m honest.’

  There was an infuriating expression of offended innocence in his eyes.

  ‘You could have—’

  ‘Could have what?’ he interrupted. ‘Written you a letter?’

  ‘They were stories!’

  ‘Life’s a story, isn’t it? Imagine if I’d tried to outline our problem as plain fact. A stranger writes to you to say a man with a mysterious genetic condition is loose somewhere in Venice, possibly with mischief on his mind when it comes to your aunt and her missing boyfriend. He’s no idea where but has some stories to tell which you will doubtless find rather far-fetched. You’d have regarded me as a madman and gone back to stumbling round in circles with your pathologist friend.’

  ‘I had to sort your facts from your fantasies,’ Teresa complained.

  ‘As did I. That was the point. I couldn’t. I’m not very good at that kind of thing, thank you very much.’ He frowned, frustrated that he seemed incapable of making his point. ‘I have rather more memories in this head than it was built for. I tried to set down what I knew as best I could, in a form calculated to prick your curiosity while passing on the jumble of information I possessed. For the life of me I can’t think how else I could have achieved any of this. Can you?’

  She was outraged to discover herself lost for an answer.

  ‘Quite,’ Arnaud went on. ‘It wasn’t easy writing those tales, you know. Though I have to say . . .’ He preened his shabby collar with pride. ‘I do think they’re rather good given the time available. And the fact I was almost as much in the dark about details as anyone. Also, I sent that chap Tosi your way, even if I did rather misjudge him. Once I read about that investigation of his it seemed the right thing to do. The papers said you’d worked together before, which was a happy coincidence.’

  ‘Tosi was on my side already. I made sure of that.’

  ‘To the genius of the Questura!’ he declared, raising his glass in a toast.

  There wasn’t the least note of sarcasm in his voice. She doubted the man was capable of it.

  ‘And if I’d not found Ruskin? That night? If I’d failed to work out that . . . hint he left?’

  Sagittarius. The knowledge was there all along. The story had prompted its return.

  ‘But you did find him,’ he said, a little puzzled.

  ‘Camilla could have died.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Arnaud insisted. ‘Unless it suited his purpose somehow. Nothing about him was random or excessive, hard as you may find that to believe. Camilla was your bait. He would have made sure you got to her one way or another. That was what he wanted. To murder some unfortunate porter, place him in the harlequin costume, and fool you all into thinking the dreaded Michael Ruskin was dead. Then follow you to Sofia. Just as he did with Aitchison and that unfortunate pimp in the first place. When it came to devious matters, he had one song to sing usually. I imagine we should all be thankful for that.’

  His face fell. He picked at the olive in his glass.

  ‘I regret the porter,‘ he noted glumly. ‘I should have been able to save him. The Gabriellis were gone before I understood how bad matters were turning. But that man will remain on my conscience.’

  ‘If you didn’t know . . .’

  ‘Regrets and sorrow are rarely eased by logic in my experience.’

  They remained silent for a while. Then his mood lifted abruptly, as if he could shift from dark to light in an instant.

  ‘On a cheerier subject . . . your speech to the symposium! Magnificent. Very moving. If I contributed a little I’m flattered, but all the credit remains yours. Such a forceful and persuasive delivery. Wasted on those fools, sadly . . .’

  ‘You were there too?’ she cried.

  His bright blue eyes creased with bafflement.

  ‘I don’t spend all my time with schoolchildren. Of course I was there. Wouldn’t have missed it for all the tea in China. There’s a spectators’ gallery at the back. Didn’t you see? Not hard to wangle your way into academic affairs, you know. Not with my experience. A touch of flattery goes a long way with those people. They ought to get out more.’

  ‘You’re a very infuriating man!’

  He smiled and made a self-deprecating gesture with his shoulders.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And now?’ she asked.

  ‘Now . . .’

  For the first time since they’d met he seemed unsure of himself.

  Arnaud reached into the pocket of his linen jacket and took out a small glass antique medicine vial with a silver stopper. It was full of a black viscous liquid. He removed the top and held it for her to sniff.

  Her heart fell. He seemed so serious, so determined and sincere.

  ‘Very like Calabrian bitter,’ she agreed.

  ‘Vecchio
Amaro del Capo? This is a little sweeter. As I’ve already said I feel it’s important the cochineal is real, from Lanzarote beetles. Nothing artificial. Though I may well be wrong.’

  Then he retrieved a packet of tissues from a plastic bag in his pocket, spat very daintily in one and placed it and the glass bottle back in the bag.

  ‘For you,’ he said.

  She didn’t move.

  ‘Don’t you want it?’

  ‘No.’

  He seemed amazed.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, Arnaud.’

  I can get you help, she wanted to say. I can find someone who might get to the bottom of this fantasy. Unwind the tangle of lines that led to Michael Ruskin. This man’s brother. Of that she was in no doubt.

  But what then? What if he was cured? What would remain of him? How could one remove such a fascinating form of madness without reducing the man to a shell of himself? What if the remedy was worse than the disease?

  He was still waiting, holding the bag with the little vial and the tissue.

  ‘You said something once,’ she told him. ‘Or someone did. In a story I read. You talked about the glorious wonder of doubt.’

  ‘What doubt?’ he asked, proffering the bag at her again. ‘You live, you die. Think of this conversation twenty, thirty years hence. Will you feel so confident of your position then? You don’t have to believe me. Just take it. If this little bottle contains nothing more than cheap aperitif and a lunatic’s saliva, where’s the harm?’

  ‘And your brother? If you expect me to believe this fairy tale, what did it do for him?’

  ‘I told you. A poison in the blood. We don’t blame mankind for cancer. We use our innate intelligence to try to eradicate the disease instead.’ He waved the bag like an adult offering a toy to a child. ‘Perhaps you can find an answer to that in here too. Don’t be so tiresome, please.’

  ‘Tiresome? You’re calling me tiresome?’

  There was no point in arguing. As ever she required facts. That night in the campiello in the Rialto came back to her. Words exchanged in an unknown language. The man called Michael Ruskin broken by the loss of a child, turned into a murderous monster. Through what?