by L. S. Hilton
‘It’s Franz’s wedding gift!’ Carlotta announced, as though that explained everything. She brandished her left hand, now adorned with a gold wedding band.
I did feel that the elastane gussets might inhibit us all from doing him as a present, but I removed my silk beach pyjamas, ruefully discarded my own underwear and began to climb in.
‘I’m doing a tableau. Like, Botticelli? Franz is really into art.’
I’m not unaccustomed to remaining socially at ease in a room full of naked strangers, but that left me somewhat bewildered.
‘So you’ve already had the ceremony?’ I floundered.
‘Oh sure. Got it over with at the mairie this morning. Franz and the boys are at the casino right now. I thought a post-wedding bachelor party was, like, more sensible.’
‘Can’t be too careful in Monaco!’ chimed in one of the bodystockings.
‘And this is . . . ?’ I tried again.
‘So, when they arrive, we’re going to be arranged in the garden. You ladies are going to be the waves, and I’ll be, like, Venus.’
‘Venus?’
‘The goddess,’ Carlotta explained pityingly. ‘The one in the painting? With the big shell?’
‘Gotcha. Venus. Fabulous, Carlotta. Great idea.’
Carlotta draped herself in a length of white georgette and led us out to the garden. The wives, stunned into obedience, followed meekly. Only one woman, square in a beige skirt suit, appeared to have demurred. Carlotta twinkled her fingers at her as we passed her seat beneath the Ernst. The woman ignored her.
‘Who’s that?’
‘My stepdaughter. I adore her.’
Outside, the wedding planner handed us each a huge fan in a spectrum of blues from turquoise to navy. The bride hoicked herself up onto the fountain, giving us a generous view of her honeymoon Hollywood. We were instructed to arrange ourselves on our side, leaning on one stretched arm, while the wedding planner lackadaisically demonstrated how we were to use our fans to represent the waves. The grass was scratchy and there were definitely ants, but I could see that from the house we would appear as a sea of naked female flesh, with Carlotta-as-goddess floating above us. Quite effective, and unexpectedly touching from Carlotta.
The planner and her assistants were assembling a huge polystyrene clam shell behind the fountain to better frame Carlotta’s assets.
‘She saw this in Harper’s,’ muttered the woman next to me. ‘Ridiculous.’ Looking more closely, I saw it was Elena. I had quite a while to look, because we were required to lie there, sweat gathering attractively in the creases of our manmade fibres, while a string quartet picked their way over us to conceal themselves behind the shell. Someone got poked with the spike of the cello, Carlotta had a mid-level screaming fit about the white roses and carnations suspended on invisible fibres, which kept tangling in her ringlets, two water nymphs defected on the grounds that their recent peels couldn’t take exposure to sunlight, and by the time the musicians wheezed their way through Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’ to the slightly horrified gaze of Franz and his guests, we resembled less Botticelli’s Venus than Cranach’s. The one with the angry bees.
‘People are just, like, so uncreative,’ Carlotta grumbled afterwards, once Franz had led his re-swathed beloved down a path of rose petals to the white silk Bedouin tent erected for the dancing.
‘Still, Poppy Bismarck had Heston Blumenthal do her wedding cake’ – she stabbed at her phone for effect – ‘and she only got, like, two thousand likes on her feed.’
7
I had been back home in Venice a few days when things began moving. That is, objects in my flat began to move around. First it was a sweatshirt I used to work out in, strayed from its basket to the bed-head. Next my breakfast cup, a Lalique design of gold leaf on cream porcelain, found on the window seat when I was certain I had washed it and put it back on the shelf before leaving for the gallery. And someone seemed to have been drinking my wine, though I had to admit I was a suspect there. The mysterious chocolate bar I thought I’d picked up by mistake before the Ibiza trip was still in the cupboard. I took a good look at it, remembering that something had felt off in the flat back then. Ghosts are as much a cliché of Venice as masks. Maybe that was why I was so fond of the place; but my own particular phantoms tended to keep to their quarters. I chucked the chocolate in the bin and banged the lid closed, telling myself I was being stupid.
But then it started with the books. I had picked up an order from the Libreria Toletta, some catalogues of Beijing artists and a new biography of Titian, and left the bag on my desk while I walked over to Masha’s tiny flat for my lesson. I stopped at a gift shop on the way, the kind that sold dubious Byzantine icons to tourists. In the back they had a small selection of Russian goods, pots of red caviar and scented black tea. I picked up a jar of rose-petal jam, which Masha would carefully spoon into a crystal dish and serve next to dry little sponge cakes after our class. I think I took even more pleasure in that small luxury than she did.
To my surprise, I found Masha seated on a plastic chair in the tiny square in front of her building. She seldom went out, beyond a ponderous weekly trip to the Rialto market. A couple of times I’d gone along with her, to help carry the bags. She was flapping at her face with a large black fan and gripping the arm of a man I recognised as the waiter from the café on the corner. Another woman in a blue nylon housecoat, perhaps a neighbour, was offering her glass of water.
‘Masha! S toboi vse vporyadke?’ Are you all right?
‘There’s been a burglary’ said the other woman, in Italian.
I bent down, bringing my face close to Masha’s. Her heavy eye make-up was a coaly mess. She had obviously been crying.
‘The signora had been to church,’ offered the waiter, ‘and when she came back, there was a man in her apartment.’
‘My God! Masha, what happened? Have you called the police?’
‘They’ve been and gone. Nothing was taken,’ put in the woman. She looked almost disappointed at the smallness of the drama. ‘But the signora has had a shock.’
Masha’s hands were encased in neat white gloves, buttoned at the wrist. I held them gently, noting that they seemed pathetically frail and tiny.
‘Masha, I know you must be very upset, but did you see him? The burglar?’
‘Nyet, nyet.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the waiter, ‘but I need to get back to work. I’ve left the bar unattended.’
‘That’s all right. I’m one of her students. We can take care of her, can’t we?’ I nodded to the woman. ‘Come on, let’s get you inside.’
The neighbour explained that she lived across the campo and had heard Masha calling for help. The thief had pushed past her at her front door and escaped down the stairs; no one had seen anything.
‘The carabinieri are sending a counsellor,’ she sniffed.
We helped Masha up the stairs and I called a locksmith while the neighbour made tea. Masha went over the scene again and again: how she had set off on the vaporetto to light a candle at San Zan Degolà, how she had known something was wrong when she returned, how the man had pushed her against the wall when she disturbed him.
‘Are you sure he took nothing? Did the police check?’ Usually the only people who were robbed in Venice were tourists. The locksmith arrived and I let them talk, discreetly paying him in cash as he bent over the keyhole. There was no damage; he agreed with the verdict of the carabinieri, that Masha must simply have forgotten to close her door properly and the thief had seen an opportunity.
‘Probably one of those Rom people,’ put in the neighbour with another sniff. ‘We’re none of us safe. I said to them – what’s the Questura doing about all these gypsies?’
I ignored her. ‘Do you need to rest, Masha? This gentleman is going to make sure everything is safe. Shall I help you to bed?’
‘Spasibo, Elisabeth. Such a kind girl.’
‘I’ll call someone to come and sit with you.’ Masha had a whole netwo
rk of old Russian girlfriends, many of whose relatives had found work in Venice’s innumerable hotels. Their lives provided an ongoing soap opera for the babushki – Masha was always gossiping about them. She removed a tumble of items from her capacious handbag and eventually proffered a worn diary; in a remarkably short time the stuffy room was filled with old ladies who had crossed the city at lightning speed, equipped with vodka and paper bags of dusty biscuits. Soon the samovar was going and Masha, reclining on her divan in wafts of smoke and Russian chatter, was hosting a party.
‘Are you sure you’ll be OK?’ I didn’t like to leave her – she had seemed so vulnerable, but I didn’t want to intrude either. Masha patted my cheek, and I made to leave with the locksmith. But as he closed the door, I spotted something. On the wall behind hung one of Masha’s many icons, a large waxed print of a mournful, sloe-eyed Madonna. The picture had been hidden while the man was working, but now I could see that the thick paper in its cheap red frame was ripped – no, slashed, the oval of the sallow face bisected by a thin cut. I stared at it for a moment, thinking that perhaps the thief had been looking for hidden banknotes stashed in the frame. I didn’t want to distress Masha further by pointing it out – perhaps, given where the picture hung, she might not notice for a while. I closed the door and followed the workman down the stairs.
*
When I eventually got back to my flat, the books were lying on my bed. Had I left them there? In my concern for Masha, I couldn’t remember. One of them, a large illustrated compendium of Caravaggio’s paintings, was open at the illustration of the Medusa, the wonderful copy of which I had seen at Yermolov’s pavilion. Yet I hadn’t bought it – perhaps the shop assistant had placed it in the cloth book bag by mistake? I checked the receipt. No Caravaggio. For a moment I considered an absent-minded fit of klepto-mania, but lack of control had not been a big feature around my gaff of late. I went and returned it the next morning. Then, when my next Russian lesson was due, I couldn’t find my grammar, a tattered old red Penguin edition with the Cyrillic alphabet at the front. I searched, swearing under my breath, but it had vanished in that maddening way that socks do. I had to go along without it, but when I got back home it caught my eye as I unlocked the door, balanced on the curtain rail above the Récamier chaise in the window bay.
That evening felt long; I spent it on the window seat, watching the campo with a bottle of Barolo. I didn’t much want to leave for the gallery the next day, but I forced myself, and when I got home everything was where it ought to be, and I felt ashamed that I’d taken a different route back before removing my shoes to climb the stairs and working the key silently into the lock before slamming open the door. A few days went by, and then, after I had been to the market and edged inside with my arms hung to the elbows with blue plastic bags of tomatoes, peaches, a kilo of clams, the Caravaggio book was lying in the middle of the floor.
Quietly, I set the bags down without closing the door. I crossed the room and opened the windows wide. I listened for a long time. Three doors led off the back of the main space of the flat: the kitchen, the bathroom, then the dressing room, with a closet behind with the washing machine and wide shelves for household equipment. The drier clicked off its cycle as I checked the cupboard, making me start, but nothing else had been moved. The huge old walnut linen press against the wall opposite the bathtub remained locked – I ran my fingers around the joints, but the key was on the ring in my bag and the hinges were unmarked. I walked around the book on the floor, trying to work out what else was off, why the air in the flat still crackled with interference. All my pictures were askew. Very slightly, as though the frames had been knocked by a duster, but all angled slightly to the left, the right top corner higher. Gingerly I approached the book, squatted down to open it. One of the pages was marked. I didn’t need to look to know it would be the Medusa. The marker was a postcard, and the postcard was of a painting by George Stubbs. A leafy, romantic eighteenth-century landscape with a horse and three figures – Colonel Pocklington with His Sisters. I remembered it well, from my work on the Stubbs catalogue at the House.
I fetched a chair and set the pictures right, sat on it and lit a fag. After a bit I had to get up to fetch an ashtray and I was still sitting there when it was full.
Someone knew.
Knew about the fake Stubbs my old boss Rupert had tried to flog. So they probably knew about his partnership with Cameron Fitzpatrick, from whom I had taken the painting. Knew what I had done to Cameron. There were six people who had any degree of certain knowledge of that story. One of them was me. Three of them were dead – Cameron, Leanne, Renaud Cleret. Which left two people who could betray my story. Rupert, and Romero da Silva of the Roman anti-Mafia police division. It made no sense. Rupert had nothing on me, and even if he wanted to bring me down, he couldn’t without ruining his own life. That had always been my safeguard as far as he was concerned. Da Silva was a policeman – if he wanted to question me, arrest me even, there were procedures, official rules. Not this absurd jiggery-pokery. There had to be someone I hadn’t factored in. I removed the postcard from the pages and ran my fingers over Medusa’s frozen scream. Caravaggio. Yermolov?
*
Perhaps things might have gone differently with Alvin if he hadn’t called at that particular moment.
‘Hello?’ I answered my work phone cautiously. I didn’t recognise the number.
‘Hey, Elisabeth. Elisabeth, is that you?’
‘This is Elisabeth.’
‘It’s Alvin – I’m in Venice. I thought I’d stop by, see if you were around.’
‘Well, here I am.’
‘I’m just passing through. I came on the train. Off to Rovinj.’ Croatia.
‘That’s nice.’
He paused. I was scanning the taut under-shadow of our brief conversation on Ibiza, calculating. ‘That’s not what I heard, Elisabeth.’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘I’ve just got in. I’m taking the boat, like, super-early.’
Useful.
‘Are you calling to ask me for a drink then?’ I answered brightly.
‘Uh, yeah. Sure. Actually, I am.’
‘Good. I really feel like a drink. How about I meet you at the Accademia bridge? It’s easy to find.’
*
Before I left, I checked the times of the ferry departures to Croatia online. Then I called up my bank accounts. I stared at the figures for a moment. From what I hear of love, it’s very like money. In both cases, presence and absence are the same – when it’s there it may as well not be and when it isn’t it never leaves you. And both come with warnings, which everyone ignores. My wariness about Alvin knowing Angelica Belvoir had faded, but now, with the Caravaggio book and the Stubbs postcard on the floor beside me, I knew that my instincts had not been overreacting. Of all the gallerists in the world, why had Yermolov sent Kazbich to find me? Because he must have wanted me to do the valuation, me in particular. And I’d turned it down. So this was – a warning? I could imagine that a man like Yermolov was not accustomed to, or pleased by, being refused. I was tempted to call Kazbich immediately, to ask him what the hell was going on, but I stopped myself.
Elisabeth Teerlinc was real, wasn’t she? Her gallery was real, her flat was real, those numbers on the screen were real. Judith Rashleigh was a largely insignificant memory, and she was going to stay that way. Whatever Yermolov might know, I had to deal with Alvin first. Quickly I straightened up the room, sprayed on some scent and brushed out my hair, knotted a scarf around my bag and set off to meet my date.
Over at Accademia we drank an aperitif at the little bar under the bridge. I was just thrilled to see Alvin; at least I was determined he should think so. It was a hot evening, all the more reason to keep my rule about avoiding Harry’s Bar, which happened to be the most likely place for Alvin to bump into some random acquaintance. After our drink, we crossed over to find a water taxi to take us across to Paradiso Perduto, a place I liked over by the Ghetto. Aside
from having hundred-year-old Delamain licked off your nipples in the Coco Chanel suite at the Paris Ritz, there’s nothing like hailing a Venetian water taxi to make you feel rich. Which was how Elisabeth Teerlinc was staying.
On the way, I filled Alvin in on the official biography of Elisabeth, which included an international school in London, a retired father who lived near Geneva and a few vague years in finance before I felt the call of my true vocation as a gallerist. It was a decent enough back story. I’d spent a few days building it up when I first arrived in Venice. The school I’d checked out online, a Nash edifice near Regent’s Park where the international rich parked their neglected offspring between ski trips, nowhere that risked locating me in the tight, knowledgeable network of the English system. I’d become quite fond of my old dad, a retired corporate insurance lawyer who had devoted himself to collecting rare books after my mother’s tragically early death from cancer. The dead mother usually put paid to any further questions. I had a photo on my work phone of our ‘family home’ in Switzerland, a solid nineteenth-century villa I’d amalgamated from the pictures in a couple of real-estate catalogues. Dad’s study was on the right, with bay windows overlooking the water. My career in ‘finance’ had involved a couple of internships at consultancy firms, interns being difficult to track down and sufficiently imprecise to follow up without determined inquisitiveness. Anyone who asked more got the word ‘Lehmans’, which generally elicited a more sympathetic response than my poor mother’s demise. Elisabeth had spent a couple of years finding herself in India when she realised a career in business was not for her, including six months on an ashram (now defunct) in Rajasthan. If the cancer didn’t put paid to inquisitiveness, yoga guaranteed it.