by L. S. Hilton
‘I watched you. The first time. I watched you look at my paintings.’
‘And?’
‘You know. Your Russian accent is terrible, but you have a good eye.’
‘Thank you.’
So he had thought I was good enough after all. I wasn’t bitter. Sex and understanding. We could have gone somewhere with that, maybe. Someone uncharitable once said that the synthetic light of mutual self-regard represents the narrowest horizon of the human soul, but nonetheless it was good to feel it, just the once.
26
The installation arrived next morning. According to our agreement, Jovana had copied the film to the tapes and provided three vintage Junost portable televisions on which they could be shown, the ‘staged’ murder intercut with the close-up shots of Balensky in his PVC panties. Neither of us felt the need to view them. I watched Yermolov overseeing the bonfire out on the cliff as I packed the small bag with which I had travelled from St Moritz. It seemed tacky to keep the clothes, though I had a moment of regret about a particularly beautiful Fendi skirt – cloud-coloured duchesse satin stiffened to a full fifties wheel with buckram. As a travelling outfit, I chose a navy cashmere sweater with grey tweed Chanel pants, Ferragamo ballerinas and the huge, ridiculously swollen Mulberry silk Dries Van Noten coat Madame Poulhazan had chosen to throw over my cocktail dresses.
I rang for the butler, not an activity for which my early education had prepared me, and told him to inform Mr Yermolov that I was leaving. I asked for a car to the station in Nice, retracing the trip I had made months before.
I found Yermolov in his study. I had become accustomed to those fluttering, twining hands, but now, standing in the doorway, I saw them as though for the first time, twisting over the desk in front of him, and they unnerved me once more. Perhaps because they reminded me of myself. Stillness was something for which I no longer had a talent.
‘So – time for me to leave.’
He didn’t try to stop me. He asked if I needed the plane to return to Venice.
‘So you can crash me into an Alp? Thanks, but I’ll take the train.’
‘You are unkind.’
‘So are you. That’s why we get on so well.’
‘May I call you?’ He was only being polite. Our strange, delicious intimacy was over, and we both knew it.
‘No need. Proshchai, Pavel.’ I hadn’t called him by his name before.
‘Proshchai.’ Good luck.
*
Once I was in the carriage for the Milan train, I spread out my documents across the table. Judith, Elisabeth, and the last passport I had bought in Amsterdam, which had carried me to France and England and Serbia and now, if the guards could be arsed to check, back to Italy. Katherine Olivia Gable.
I watched the familiar signs as we crossed over the border into Italy. It felt right, somehow, to be making this trip, as it had in many ways been my first. I’d wanted so much, back then. Money, yes, and freedom and independence, but also beautiful things, beautiful views, to prove to Rupert that he couldn’t treat me like a no-mark pleb, to myself that all my efforts had been worth it. Admittedly that trip hadn’t involved a very coherent plan.
Call me sentimental, but you never forget your first dead body. I had left James slowly softening in the bedroom of the Hôtel du Cap, Cameron under a bridge in Rome, Leanne on another bed, in another city, Renaud – well, at least I still thought of him, and then Julien, that flare of surprise in his eyes, which perhaps Balensky had seen in mine. Masha and Balensky and Moncada and Edouard Guiche . . . It’s not your fault, Judith. The lights were coming on in the carriages, a steward pushed a refreshments cart with a tinny bell awkwardly down the aisle.
*
In the spring of 1606, Caravaggio committed a murder. The next four years of his life, his last, were spent more or less on the run. The victim, Ranuccio of Terni, was killed on a tennis court, over a point in the game, a gambling debt, the avenging of an offence, in self-defence – everybody talked, and nobody knew. Caravaggio had flicked his sword, the accessory of his painful striving to be accepted as a gentleman, at his opponent’s cock, some said in a gesture of contempt which went wrong when he severed the femoral artery. Others said the killing was the result of Caravaggio’s nature, that his wildness caused him to deliberately look for a chance to risk his own neck. If he wanted a thrill, he got it, leaving the city with a bounty placed on the production of his own severed head.
The first picture from his exile was of a whore, a girl named Lena, as an ecstatic Magdalen, in the colours of death – red, white, black. Most of the canvas is darkness. Head thrown back, absurdly luscious mouth parted, a tear creeping beneath her narrowed eyelid the only hint at penitence. The picture fits so beautifully with the narrative of Caravaggio’s life that many viewers have been prepared to ignore the fact that he obviously didn’t paint it. The rendering is crass, the shadows of the face bungled, working Lena’s nose into a snout that grows more hideous the longer you look. People want so badly to see a story, something that makes sense, all Caravaggio’s darting, agonised violence of technique condensed into a sentimental narrative of repentance, that they overlook its bathetic feebleness.
What Caravaggio did paint, as the Pope’s troops scoured the Roman countryside in pursuit, was a second version of the Supper at Emmaus. It is a joyless, shrunken rendering. The innkeeper and his wife are crushed with age. Christ is aged too, so weary he can barely lift his hand above the table in blessing. The meal has passed from meagre to squalid, a scrap of rancid meat, a few stale, crumbled loaves. It is twilight in this picture, and no miracles play in the shadows. The only connection with the picture of Lena is the sidelighting of the figures. Everything else is darkness. If anything at all of the painter’s state after his crime can be understood from the pictures, it isn’t sexy chocolate-box sorrow. Everyone at that dismal table just looks knackered. Come to think of it, so was I.
*
Before I got halfway up the stairs to the flat I knew there was someone waiting for me. The smell was a bit of a giveaway. It tumbled down to meet me, a stinking meniscus atop the sodden Venetian air I had let in from the street. I suppose I could have turned around even then, but I quelled my instinct to run. Part of me knew it was already too late and besides, I was curious. Still, as I dragged my bag through the miasma up the last flight, my eyes were hot with unruly tears. This was the nearest anywhere had ever come to feeling like home.
When I turned on the lights, I saw the chair, and I saw the picture. A copy of the Medusa, hanging above the bed as though it had always been there. Nice touch. Caravaggio’s paintings are cruel to other artworks, always the prettiest girl in the room. Just one will render a roomful of masterpieces invisible. He was waiting for me in the velvet armchair, dragged round so the winged back flared out towards the door, the elbows of his dark linen jacket resting on either arm, watching the painting.
‘Hello, stranger,’ I said, for my own benefit more than his.
Alvin wasn’t looking too good. Six weeks in a wardrobe can do that to a person. I’d triplebagged him, which had held the maggots back, but damp was always going to be a problem in this town.
Whoever had dressed him had rinsed him down first; the reeking bin liners were clumped in the bathtub, a Milky Way of black plastic swirled with some white tendrils of softly rotten flesh. His soft tissues had disintegrated to mulch, the pancreas would have eaten itself, bringing up blue-green blisters on the scraps of flesh that clung stubbornly to the remaining cartilage. I breathed shallow, through my mouth, as I moved around to face him. Methane and hydrogen sulphide. I hadn’t shared my flat back in London with medical students for nothing. The head, with its horribly protruding curtain of shredded bright red tongue was hooked over one of my coat hangers, its wires torn into the fabric, with the jacket slung in an approximation of shoulders. The rest of him was piled neatly in a puddle on the seat, his scuffed Sebagos positioned where his feet would have reached. A card was pinned to his lapel with
one of the safety pins my dry-cleaner used. I made myself reach out and touch the slimy bone, and we both of us stayed there for a moment, looking at the face of death. When I bent to unpin the card, the coat hanger came loose and Alvin with it, the eyeless head bouncing off the chair, thudding to the floor, rolling up against the bed. I felt the vibrations of its fall like a siren, and when at last they ceased the room was still, so still that I thought I could hear the dust of my absence swirling gently in their wake.
*
I recognised the card. I’d owned its duplicate once, in Como, where I thought I had so successfully played dumb about the disappearance of Cameron Fitzpatrick. ‘Ispettore Romero da Silva, Guardia di Finanza’, the print read. On the other side was a number in biro and a miniature message in neat block capitals.
‘You need to call me.’
*
Kazbich had shopped me. Kazbich had known about Fitzpatrick. Kazbich had inadvertently given Elena her crazy plan of blackmail. And there was only one person to whom Kazbich could have suggested Fitzpatrick’s death required attention. Da Silva. Kazbich had been working with Moncada, whom both Renaud Cleret and da Silva were pursuing in connection with Mafia fakes. But how were Kazbich and da Silva connected? Kazbich was in Belgrade; obviously da Silva was responsible for my homecoming tableau, but why hang the Medusa? Kazbich’s dying request, a revenge from beyond whatever grave Yermolov had consigned him to?
‘You need to call me.’
I had been waiting for this moment for so long. I stepped over Alvin and took a peek into the square. No massed bands of cops with riot shields. Da Silva was going to let me come along quietly.
*
I showered in my beautiful bathroom for what was perhaps the last time. As I scrubbed my nails, my fingers twisted over my wrists, writhing like eels until I had to pull them apart and press my palms against my skull to still them. That was where the cuffs would go. Not much longer. I dressed without looking at Alvin, clean cotton underwear, jeans, a T-shirt and sweatshirt. I picked up the heavy down jacket I had bought against the Venetian fog. I thought I wouldn’t be allowed to keep my bag, but I stuffed a few things in it – always the toothbrush, deodorant, moisturiser. A book – would that be allowed? Pulling my wet hair into a topknot, I looked into the mirror. Hello, Judith. All done then. I stepped onto the landing to make the call, and heard the trill of the mobile once, below me in the campo, before da Silva picked up.
*
He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Taller than I remembered, still the same broad-shouldered, neat physique. He wasn’t in uniform, and he was alone. The first time we’d met, I could have embraced him, for the sheer relief that the geyser of tension inside me was stilled. There was a different quality to my resignation now. I touched him on the shoulder.
‘Sono pronta.’ I’m ready.
He turned, and his eyes were gentle as they took me in, sneakers to wet tendrils of falling hair. I raised a hand to push it from my face but the hand stopped halfway, inviting. Old habits.
‘I said, I’m ready.’
‘I thought you might like to go somewhere quiet. Somewhere we can talk.’
‘Aren’t you going to arrest me?’ I asked stupidly.
‘No.’
‘But –’ My hand made a spastic gesture upwards, at the flat. I’d left the light on. Alvin waited behind the shutters.
‘As I said, I think you need to talk to someone. To me.’ His dark jacket swung open. I thought I saw a holster at his hip, but it could have been a shadow. I nodded.
‘I have a boat waiting. Please, come this way,’ he added courteously.
On the trip round to the Arsenale, da Silva offered me a cigarette, but I shook my head. I didn’t look at Venice, just at my knees, scrunched under my chin, my hands winding and clasping. The driver handed me out at the gates of the naval offices, attended by their two huge white lions, saluting da Silva as he climbed after me onto the quay, a steadying arm at my back. I’d walked past a hundred times; the Arsenale was the second site for the Biennale exhibits, though now in the dark it looked like what it had always really been, a fortress.
‘Do you prefer to speak in English or in Italian?’
We sat in a small, brightly lit office, a window open on the canal. We had passed several uniforms in the lobby, but da Silva was still unaccompanied. On the table were two full espresso cups, plastic glasses and a bottle of water, no tape recorder. I thought dully that it must be built into the walls, or maybe there was one of those two-way mirrors? I didn’t much care.
‘English is better, maybe.’ I was too exhausted to think in the formal grammar of Italian. The coffee was acrid in my throat, I poured half a glass of water and gulped it.
‘Very good.’ Still soft, his voice coaxing. ‘Where do you wish to begin?’
I drew my knees up under my chin, squatting in the chair. He waited me out.
‘It was the oil,’ I began. I didn’t know the sound of my own voice. ‘I put the almond oil in the bath.’
*
It was the almond oil. That was how she smelled, of almonds. My sister.
She was born when I was twelve. Katherine my mum named her, for Katherine Hepburn. We had a new place after she came; I had my own bedroom for the first time, and the hospital sent my mum home with a bag of things, disposable nappies and bibs, samples of baby milk, shampoo for her delicate head, and the almond oil, to rub in the funny creases of her arms and legs after her bath. I’d thought of babies as fat, but Katherine wasn’t, at first. She was just a little bag of skin and bones, like a monkey, the skin of her tiny round tummy so thin and tight you could see the veins pulsing there. I loved her puffy little frog hands, the way her wisps of hair sang in my mouth. She was my sister and I was going to take care of her, I was going to take her to the park and make her daisy chains, I was going to get her a little tea set like the one in the Milly-Molly-Mandy stories, with real china cups and little patterned plates. My mum showed me how to change her nappy and rub her back when she had drunk her milk. She lay between us on the sofa while we ate our tea and she made us laugh and laugh with her huge eyes and her questing fingers.
My mum was good for a bit. She took Katherine to the clinic on the bus and pushed her to the shops in the buggy, slumped sideways in the tiny pink anorak she’d bought with the family allowance. I knew enough about how babies were made, but I never asked who Katherine’s dad was. My mum never talked about my dad, and that didn’t matter at all. It was the three of us, and I would rush home from school every day to see her. When it wasn’t too cold I’d take her to the swings at the top of the close and set her carefully on my lap while I sang to her, all the nursery rhymes I could remember from when I was little. She would laugh when I did ‘Jack and Jill’, making the swing fall down the hill, her face scrunching up in what I knew was a smile.
And then my mum wasn’t so good. She started going to the pub again, and when Katherine woke up in the night she wasn’t there to give her the bottle. I didn’t mind. I could do it. I’d mix the formula carefully by the marks on the plastic, then stand it in a cereal bowl of boiling water from the kettle to get it warm enough, testing a few drops on the inside of my wrist like I’d seen my mum do, just like I was a nurse, and when she’d drunk it and was all cosy and sleepy again I’d rock her against my shoulder and open the kitchen curtain and show her the stars and the lights from town, and put her in under the blankets in my bed, curled against me like a comma.
I started to worry about my mum again. In the mornings she wouldn’t be up, and there’d be the smell of it on her, that greasy sheen on her skin and her make-up all over the pillowcase. I’d stand by her bed in my school uniform, holding Katherine; I was always missing the school bus because I didn’t want to leave unless I knew she was awake to take care of her. I started nipping home at lunchtime, just to check, letting myself quietly into the flat to see if I could hear the telly or the radio, check to see if the buggy was inside the door, or if my mum had got her
self up and taken Katherine for some fresh air. Then I stopped going to school altogether, because my mum was hardly at home, and I didn’t want to leave my sister, at least until the school rang up and my mum gave me down the banks for skiving. I had to go to the headmaster’s office to say why I’d been truanting, but I couldn’t say why, because I thought they might put Katherine in a home.
‘You’re a bright girl, Judith,’ the headmaster told me. ‘Don’t lose your chance. You could go to university.’ He wasn’t unkind, just puzzled. I looked at the floor when he asked me why I was stopping off and chewed my ponytail and tried to look like all the other girls in my class who bunked off all the time. I said I didn’t know, but I was sorry, sir, and he shook his head and said not to let it happen again. So I had to start going to school, in case they sent the social round and Katherine got taken away.
My sister must have been about five months old when it happened, because my mum had started to give her baby food out of glass jars. Sometimes I would mash up a banana for her and spoon it into her gummy mouth, scooping the dribbly bits back from under her lip. She could sit up, and she wouldn’t eat unless she had her own spoon to hold, except she kept dropping it, or poking herself with it, so it took ages to feed her.
That day, when I opened the door, the flat smelled of sweet almonds. It was winter, already getting dark, but there were no lights on. My mum was on the sofa, an empty bottle of white wine and a half-empty bottle of gin beside her. She must have started as soon as I left for school. Katherine wasn’t in her cot in my mum’s room, or in my bed. The only strip of light came from under the bathroom door. I didn’t want to go in there. I made a cup of tea and put it on the floor by my mum, drew the kitchen curtains. I wanted mum to wake up, but she didn’t. So then I had to go into the bathroom.
At first I thought she was OK, because she was warm, but when I got her out of the bath I realised it was the water. It was slippery, still tepid. Her face was grey. My mum had put the special yellow towel with the hood next to the bath, so I wrapped her in that. Her head lolled in the hollow of my neck as though she was sleeping. I stood by the sofa, and then I sat down by her feet because my legs felt shaky.