The Teleportation Accident

by Ned Beauman

  ‘Not much. It’s old, I think. Goes back to Barbarigo’s time at least. But during the plague that killed my great-grandmother, the priest there started taking in the sick. Before long it filled up, and then the priest himself died, and after the plague went away there was no one who wanted to take it over.’

  Instead of heading straight for the church, Sauvage made his way up the low hill on his right, and the gondolier followed. When they got to the top, Sauvage unfolded a sheet of paper that had been tucked inside his purse: a workmanlike pencil sketch of the view from the hill on which they stood, with the Arsenal on the left and the marshes stretching off to the right. ‘I came here to check something I couldn’t quite confirm from the other shore. This drawing was made fifteen years ago by a Siamese man who came to Venice to learn to paint. The church should be here in the foreground, next to the trees. But it isn’t.’

  ‘Maybe he just left it out. Orientals are godless, after all.’

  ‘He’s a Christian, actually, and he didn’t leave anything out. I asked him.’

  ‘You met him?’

  ‘Yes. He’s still in Venice. I bought this from him and he made me a gift to go with it.’ Sauvage took a small cloth bag from his belt and showed the contents to the gondolier.

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘What do they look like?’

  ‘Armoured raspberries.’

  ‘They’re called lychees. They come from Siam.’

  ‘How do they get all the way to Venice?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sauvage ate one, then peeled three more and dropped them on the grass. ‘Maybe the wolves will find these and it will make up for some of the scraps they don’t get.’ It saddened him to think that in a hundred years there would be no wild animals left in cities.

  They went back down the hill towards the church. Pink flowers burst from the bark of the Judas trees near by as if their trunks were stuffed beyond capacity. ‘Why are you so interested in this church?’ said the gondolier.

  ‘You say it was — oops — abandoned sixty years ago,’ said Sauvage, nearly tripping on a dead vine. ‘And that’s how it looks. But fifteen years ago, it wasn’t here. Don’t you think that’s interesting?’

  As they came closer, they could see that not only had the steeple collapsed but also the front wall of the church, leaving the whole structure open like a cart shed. Inside, there was nothing but rotting pews leading up to an altar and a stained-glass window at the opposite end, which confided none of its colours in the moonlight. ‘Have you ever seen anyone enter or leave this church?’ said Sauvage.

  ‘I told you, I don’t often come to Vignole. But I can assure you no one uses this place.’

  ‘How can you be certain?’

  The gondolier pointed. ‘Bats.’ And indeed Sauvage could see the silhouettes of dozens of the little creatures hanging upside down from the rafters, a few of them stirring or swaying in the gloom. The stone under his feet was scurfy with dried guano. ‘Rats don’t mind people. Nor do cats or birds or spiders. But bats can’t stand to be disturbed too often.’

  ‘Let’s see if you’re right,’ said Sauvage, moving further into the church. He spoke louder than usual, trying to weigh the echo.

  ‘We shouldn’t be here. A lot of people died where we stand.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of ghosts.’

  ‘We should go back to the boat.’

  ‘If I’m wrong, we will.’

  ‘Turn back.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I told you to turn back, Frenchman.’

  ‘Or what?’ said Sauvage. ‘You’ll peck me to death with your beak?’

  And then Sauvage was flat on the ground with the gondolier kneeling on his back and a blade of some kind pressed against the side of his neck. ‘De Gorge sent you, didn’t he?’ shouted the gondolier.

  ‘No! De Gorge is my enemy!’

  ‘How many others does he have in Venice? Tell me or I’ll kill you.’

  ‘My name is Bernard Sauvage, son of Nicolas Sauvage.’

  ‘I think I’ll just kill you either way.’

  But at that moment the air itself seemed to shuffle, faster than Sauvage could follow, like a card-sharp setting up a crooked game of bonneteau, and at the same time there was a sound of cogs turning and pulleys running, and then there was a bright doorway in front of him where before there had only been darkness and empty space. If the option to inhale had at that moment been available to Sauvage, which it wasn’t, he would definitely still have been rendered breathless.

  ‘Let him go, Melchiorre.’

  The order wasn’t much more than a croak. But the gondolier did as he was told. Sauvage got to his feet, rubbing a bruised shoulder. Probably, he thought, it was only his cheap bauta that had saved him from a broken nose when he was knocked forward.

  The room beyond the doorway was lit by oil lamps, and far bigger than it had any right to be. In the centre of the room was a bed, and in the bed lay a man in a mask. The wooden frame of the bed was hinged in the middle so that the man could sit up in it, and a draughtsman’s table was suspended by a complicated skeletonic sort of crane at an angle in front of the man so that he could work without changing his position. At the edges of the room were workbenches cluttered with tools and brushes and paint and twine and cloth and metal.

  ‘Come inside, boy, and sit down,’ said the man in the bed, gesturing to a stool. As he entered the room, Sauvage reached instinctively to take off his bauta out of respect, but the man stopped him. ‘No, keep your mask on,’ he said. ‘It’s Carnival. I intend to die in mine.’

  ‘The Théâtre des Encornets,’ said Sauvage softly as he came closer.

  ‘You recognise it?’

  ‘Of course. I lived in Paris until the year it was destroyed.’

  The man’s mask was a gilded replica of the grand front of the opera house as it had stood until 1679. The density of detail was astonishing, a hundred times more exquisite than any doll’s house or architective ornament Sauvage had ever seen, so that you could see every nipple on every nude on every marble frieze; and yet the mask was not quite mimetic, because the façade had been artfully distorted to imply the shape of a human face; and not just a general human face, but the face of a man who had visited Sauvage’s childhood home in Paris several times before Sauvage’s father’s death.

  ‘Was it difficult to find me?’ said Lavicini.

  ‘Very,’ said Sauvage.

  ‘So you know the lengths to which I’ve gone to hide myself. And yet you didn’t care who you brought with you?’

  Sauvage glanced at Melchiorre. ‘He told me that he hadn’t been to Vignole for months. But he hopped over that loose plank in the jetty without even looking down. I knew he was lying.’

  ‘Yes, Melchiorre has been very loyal.’

  ‘When did you build this place?’

  ‘Eleven years ago. A few seasons after I left Paris.’

  ‘Why build a false church? Why not just a false cottage? A false barn?’

  ‘No one ever looks at a chapel and wonders what it’s hiding.’

  ‘And the bats?’

  ‘Melchiorre, show him a bat,’ said Lavicini. The gondolier duly retrieved an object from one of the workbenches and then came back to show it to Sauvage. The bat had an iron skeleton, black velvet wings, and no face or feet. ‘They hang on a frame, and after Melchiorre winds the spring, they move in their sleep all night.’

  ‘And that wolf?’

  ‘The wolves are real.’ Lavicini coughed as if his lungs were brimming with hot tallow, and Sauvage was glad of his mask because he couldn’t help but wince. ‘Is it common knowledge that I am alive?’

  ‘De Gorge knows, of course, but not many others. It took me a long time to be sure.’

  ‘Yes. No one should ever have been able to find out. But after everything went wrong, I started to be careless. I didn’t bother to take all the precautions I’d planned.’

  ‘What do you mean, “everything went wrong”?’
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  ‘You still haven’t worked out what happened at the Théâtre des Encornets?’

  ‘I know most of it, I think. I know you planned it all. But there’s one thing I’ve never been able to understand.’

  ‘What?’

  Sauvage hesitated. ‘You were a friend of my father’s. He thought you were a good man. I can’t believe you would have let two dozen men and women die like that. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I did not let two dozen men and women die.’

  ‘I watched them dig out the bodies the next morning.’

  ‘You’ve seen my bats, and you still believe that?’

  ‘So no one died that night?’ said Sauvage.

  The other man shook his head. ‘That is not quite correct either.’

  The circumflex of reflected candlelight in the drop of almond syrup that oozed slowly down the pale dough of the choux bun at the creamy summit of the chocolate croquembouche that was served one summer night in 1677 in the patisserie belonging to the only real Parisian pastry chef in Venice: that had been Lavicini as he sat opposite the ninth of de Gorge’s deep-pocketed emissaries to visit him since he left his job at the Arsenal to become a designer for the opera. He, too, hung in that drop of syrup, quite ready, if it was licked up by this fat Frenchman, to be licked up with it. Every previous offer from de Gorge he had rejected out of hand. He didn’t want to work for a monster like that. But the day after Pentecost the only woman Lavicini had ever really loved had told him that God wanted her to go back to her husband. His friend Foscolo, the playwright, had drowned himself in the Lagoon last year after a courtesan broke his heart, but Lavicini wasn’t seriously considering suicide. All the same, he couldn’t bear to go on living in the same city as his Wormwood, his star who had made the waters bitter. He didn’t care any more where he was, or what he had to do, as long as he would never again have to worry about catching sight of her by accident as he hurried across the Rialto Bridge. So he waited for the Frenchman facing him to take his first bite of the croquembouche, and then announced that this time he was ready to take de Gorge’s job. The lackey guffawed in triumph, spraying flecks of cream across the table, and shouted for brandy. Two weeks later, without ever having quite sobered up, Lavicini arrived in Paris.

  He’d been at the Théâtre des Encornets nearly a year before his Wormwood wrote to him. She said she’d been arguing with God night and day ever since he left. And God simply would not back down. He still wanted her to be faithful. But she didn’t care so much what God wanted any more. God could hang. If Lavicini would come back to Venice, and forgive her for her indecision, then they could be together again.

  He nearly jumped on a horse there and then. But he had another nine years left on his contract, and he knew de Gorge defended his contracts like other men defended their virgin daughters. He might get away for a few weeks, but eventually he would be hunted down, beaten, and brought back to Paris. The only way out of the contract was death.

  And it was around this time that his friend Villayer disappeared. Lavicini guessed straight away that Louis had ordered the assassination, but it wasn’t until a few weeks afterwards that he discovered it was his own employer who had actually paid the assassin. There was often business in Paris with which Louis didn’t wish to dirty his soft hands even from the safe distance of Versailles, so de Gorge was sometimes called upon to make arrangements on his behalf, and in return Louis kept on attending the Théâtre des Encornets, ensuring that it would remain the most fashionable venue in the capital. Lavicini wanted to avenge his friend, but much more formidable men than he had gone against de Gorge and ended up dining on their own noses and ears. Also, he had no appetite for violence. Instead, he decided that he would have to find a way of staging his own death that would not just utterly dupe de Gorge, but also utterly destroy de Gorge’s livelihood. And some months later, when Nicolas Sauvage died in the same circumstances as Villayer, it redoubled his determination.

  On the night of the premiere of The Lizard Prince, twenty-five costumed automata sat fidgeting in private audience boxes. Lavicini had been obliged to buy them all tickets at full price under false names. Many years earlier, when Louis XIV was still a child, a toymaker called Camus had reportedly designed for him a little carriage complete with mechanical horses, mechanical coachman, mechanical page, and mechanical lady passenger, but Lavicini’s own creations were so far advanced that he did not believe even such experienced eyes as the Sun King’s would recognise them for what they really were. Hidden in the ceiling above the automata, packed into crates along with two tons of broken ice, were twenty-five corpses that Lavicini had purchased from a porter at a failing anatomy school, explaining that he was an upholsterer who had received a very elaborate and unusual request from an aristocratic English client. And in place all throughout the Théâtre des Encornets were the contrivances that would be required to give the appearance that it was the devil himself who had destroyed part of the Théâtre des Encornets when he came to claim the soul of Adriano Lavicini, the Sorceror of Venice, while leaving no identifiable trace of the automata.

  Towards the end of the second act, Lavicini poked his head hastily into every room backstage to make sure they were empty, and then slipped out of the theatre by a side door. Some superstitious instinct prevented him from turning back to watch as an apocalyptic rumble rose within the building behind him. Instead, he hurried on towards the convent of the Filles du Calvaire, opposite which there was a cold vacant room above a butcher’s shop where he intended to spend his last night in Paris.

  So it wasn’t until the next morning, when he returned in disguise to the ruins of the Théâtre des Encornets, that he heard about the dead ballerina. He moved through the crowd of onlookers, listening to conversations, needing to be certain that the truth was not suspected. And indeed no one knew that Lavicini was still alive. But everyone knew that a dancer called Marguerite was dead. He had to wander a long time before he could complete the story: she had fainted at her first sight of the Extraordinary Mechanism, and had then been carried backstage and deposited on a couch, where she was still lying when the opera house collapsed. Lavicini remembered then that the couch faced away from the door to that dressing room. That was why he hadn’t noticed her on his final backstage inspection. He’d never spoken to Marguerite, but he remembered her face, because Montand always seemed to pay special attention to her during the rehearsals.

  Lavicini knew then that he could never see his Wormwood again. He’d planned to live with her in Venice under a false name until her husband died, and then they’d run away to some exotic place where no one had ever heard the name Lavicini. But now, if he returned to her, he would have to confess that a girl had died to help bring them back together, as if sacrificed to their love, a proxy for the suicide that Lavicini himself hadn’t had the conviction to commit. Adultery was one thing, but the guilt of being party to a murder would drive his Wormwood out of her senses. She couldn’t ever find out. But he couldn’t keep back the truth if he was with her. He decided it was better if, like the rest of the world, she never found out that he’d survived the destruction of the Théâtre des Encornets.

  Nevertheless, he went back to Venice. If he couldn’t have his Wormwood, he would at least have his home. Out on Vignole, he could live out his penance in a sort of exile, while still in sight of the Arsenal, where he’d worked as a younger, happier man. And during the months of Carnival he could wander the city, like Hephaestus returned to Olympus, in the masks he built and painted like tiny stage sets the rest of the year. Even if he jostled past his Wormwood a dozen times in a day, it wouldn’t matter, because he would never have to know it was her.

  ‘All the way to Paris, and all the way back, because of a woman?’ said Sauvage when Lavicini had finished his story.

  ‘Because of two women, really.’ Lavicini coughed again for a long time. ‘Why have you come here?’

  Sauvage gathered his resolve. ‘I’ve written a play,’ he said, ‘and I want you
to design the set. I had to find you because no one else can do it.’

  ‘I have many talented successors in Paris.’

  ‘No. The play is set two and a half centuries in the future. I don’t believe there is another man alive who could make that seem real. It’s about a young man whose friends are about to be murdered by a tyrant just like the Sun King. But instead of trying to save them, he runs away to a colony in the New World.’

  ‘What happens to him?’

  ‘He meets a man who has become very wealthy from the sale of currycombs, who sends him to find an inventor who is trying to build an Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place. But not a stage device like yours — a real one. A sort of reproducible miracle. The hero does find the inventor, but he also encounters an agent of the Ottoman Empire who wants to take the inventor back to Constantinople.’

  ‘Does this agent succeed?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet. The important thing is that the hero comes to realise his cowardice and he returns to the land of his birth to overthrow the tyrant. But he is too late to save his friends.’

  ‘De Gorge always used to tell me that the hero of a successful play must be a man the audience would be happy to invite into their homes for supper. Otherwise no one will want to sit through the whole thing. Your “hero” who abandons his friends to their deaths — he doesn’t sound like that sort of man.’

  ‘De Gorge knows no more than a low pimp.’

  ‘A very astute low pimp.’

  ‘The point is that the hero has a change of heart. He redeems himself by his rebellion. Without that, the story is meaningless.’

  ‘And I assume you hope to encourage the same sort of thinking in your audience?’

  ‘Louis killed my father. I don’t know how else to take my revenge. I’m no Cromwell. I’m a playwright.’

  Lavicini shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Bernard, but I can’t design your set. I’m much too ill. Before more than a few more moons have risen, I’m going to die here, inside the Théâtre des Encornets, just as I was supposed to in the first place. You were lucky to find me still warm. I’m grateful for your visit, but I’m afraid you’ll leave empty-handed. Swap masks with Melchiorre before you go. If you were followed, that will cause some confusion.’