The Wolves of Venice

by Alex Connor

  “They wanted the shoes found.”

  “By the woman who owes the shop? What good would that do?”

  “Perhaps they thought she would go to the authorities with them.”

  “But Marina didn’t.”

  “No.”

  Caterina rose to her feet, pacing again. “After a while they would have known that she didn’t report finding the shoes. Which means that they would either think she hadn’t found them. Or that she had destroyed them.”

  Der Witt nodded. “Or, as I said before, they were deliberately frightening her.”

  “Yes!” Caterina snapped. “And I’m involved. Marina Castilano came to me. You told me what you thought. Gabriella confided in me. I am tied up in this and I’m scared. God, I’m so scared.”

  Der Witte gestured to the door. “You have a guard now.”

  “The African?” Caterina asked, “yes, I trust him.”

  “To protect you?”

  “Of course to protect me! This morning I had another visit from Marina Castilano. She had come to tell me that she had never destroyed the shoes, that she had felt it was wrong to get rid of them. So she had hidden them, without telling anyone, not even her sister. In an entirely different place in the shop.”

  The Dutchman looked up. “And?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “What?”

  “Someone entered the shop and took them —”

  He shook his head. “Perhaps she forgot where she had put them? Or mislaid them.”

  “She says not. She was certain, and I believed her. The shoes are gone.” Caterina repeated. “Now you tell me, my friend, who knew they were there? Who took them?”

  He glanced at his hat, turning it in his big hands, his head bowed. “Perhaps the more important question is why?”

  Chapter Twenty One

  Tintoretto’s studio,

  June 1548

  Tintoretto was not about to show his pleasure and ignored Marco when he walked in, directing his conversation to one of his other assistants. Softened by pleas from Rosella, he had decided not to dismiss Marco, but he was reluctant to welcome him back like the prodigal son. Instead he ignored him, walked past him holding a canvas and then nudged him out of the way twice before he spoke to him directly.

  “Marco, pass me that portfolio. That one! Yes, that one!” he said, rubbing his face with the palm of his left hand. “I dreamt of her again last night. I had thought I was cured.”

  “Who did you dream of?”

  “An absent apprentice.” He said sarcastically, then shrugged. “No, I dreamed of a model I once had. I can remember her and I cannot remember her, at the same time. So strange. Her face troubles me. I am in love with her face.”

  “I heard you were in love with someone else entirely.”

  The painter turned to face Marco. “Little pigs with their big ears. I suppose that fat oaf Aretino told you? You shouldn’t believe all you hear from that source. He lies from his mouth and his arse.”

  Marco bit his tongue, unwilling to contradict. “So, who is this woman you dream of?”

  “A face from a while ago. I drew her, I know I did, and I would not have destroyed the sketches. She was fascinating. I wanted to use her in a painting.” He put aside several studies and continued to search through the portfolio. “She’s in here somewhere. I have to find her.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Does it matter?” Tintoretto repeated. “You ask if my interrupted sleep, my delay in my deliveries, my assistants working non stop to fill in for me – you ask if it matters? Yes, it matters! And I will not rest until I find her!” Tintoretto replied, moving towards the back door of the studio. “I am taking the drawings into the garden —”

  “But it’s raining.”

  Exasperated, he blew out his cheeks. “Rain, why today? Why now? This is impossible! I have to find her.”

  “What does she look like?” Marco asked, eager to help, to dampen the guilt he was feeling.

  His argument with Ira and his exchange with Rosella had flustered him, but the task Aretino had set for him was proving impossible. Several times he had considered telling Aretino that he was unable to carry out his wishes, but always decided against it. He would lie awake staring up at the ceiling and see, in amongst the painted panels and carved finials, faces which grimaced at him. Goblin night gargoyles; ghosts a bad conscience had conjured up. And he wondered if he would dream of his mother again. If she would come to rebuke him, to swing beside his bed, her nightgown white against the dark window behind.

  In the morning Marco depressed any thought of refusal. Too afraid of displeasing Aretino, too scared of the humiliation, the revenge the writer would be sure to publicly claim.

  “Maybe I can help?” Marco said, putting aside all thought of Aretino and glancing over to Tintoretto. “If you describe this girl, I could look through the drawings with you.”

  “She was” the artist thought for a long moment, “very young, her face a little too wide, if I am being critical, her nose had a tiny – minuscola – bump, but her eyes were large, like a beautiful fish...”

  In the past Marco would have laughed, comfortable in the secure atmosphere of the studio. But he now felt panicked, out of place, a horse underwater.

  “...She had a strange quality about her. She was like a creature from the lagoon itself.” Impatiently Tintoretto began to look through the sketches again, studying them, then passing them over to Marco. “I would not have thrown her image away. I know that much for certain ...” Finally he jabbed his finger down on a small sepia drawing of a girl’s head.

  Marco glanced at him, “Is that her?”

  Tintoretto sat down heavily. “It was her.”

  “Was?”

  “I had hoped I was wrong.” He felt tears prick behind his eyes, his hand shaking as he laid down the drawing. “I saw her only a while ago, Marco, but she didn’t look like this. Not any more.” Tintoretto crossed the studio and returned a few moments later with another drawing, a very meticulous, detailed sketch. His hand still shaking, he laid it beside the first.

  “Gabriella. Her name was Gabriella Russo.” He pointed to the sketch. “This is the one I drew of her in the Morgue.”

  Marco stared at the drawing, “Jesus Christ...”

  “She was murdered. Her body dismembered then thrown into a canal.” Tintoretto studied the two drawings of the same face, one beautiful, one destroyed. “I remember Gabriella very well, she was quiet, reserved, but once, when I was drawing her, she smiled at me. The light was coming in from the window and I noticed her front tooth was chipped. She told me she had run away from home, and that her father had chipped her tooth when he hit her...”

  Marco kept staring the macabre sketch. “I don’t remember her.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. She only came here twice. On both occasions you were absent. The first time you were ill and stayed at home, the second… oh, I don’t remember, there was a reason you didn’t come. But then you’re lazy, sometimes you just can’t make yourself move!... When I paid her she promised to come back, but she never did. If I remember rightly, she worked as a maid for the Cabriole sisters.” he sighed, genuinely moved. “I’m sorry, Gabriella. So sorry it was you.”

  “Did she have family in Venice?”

  “No,” Tintoretto replied. “But I should tell her employers what happened to her. And then go to the authorities. Gabriella is dead and buried, but they will want to have her formally identified for the files —”

  “Do you need to do that?”

  “No, I do not need to do it, Marco, but I will. In the same way I did not need to pay for her funeral, but I did.”

  Rebuked, Marco changed tack. “You said that her father hit her. Do you think he killed her?”

  “She was raped before she died,” Tintoretto replied. “The doctor told me that when I went back to arrange the funeral. The bastard had let them do a full post mortem on her, even though I had tried to prevent it. Money, you see
, as always. Everything is for sale in Venice.” He shook his head. “It was because of the post mortem that they discovered the rape.”

  “But” Marco persisted, “do you think her father killed her?”

  “He can’t have done, because he died ten years ago. And ghosts don’t kill...” Tintoretto glanced at the gruesome drawing again. “... only men do that.”

  Book Three

  That summer Baldassare Donato began his career and was feted as a singer at St Marks, his tenor voice as mellifluous as a lute, whilst Venetian music formed its own style to suit the interior of the Basilica San Marco, with its opposing choir stalls that made notes hover like moths. They say that the Venetian polychoral style was created to allow singers and instruments to perform together, or in opposition, harmonised by the great machinery of the organ. Then something else caught the interest; rumours coming from Rome that there was a miraculous castrato performing in St Marks; Giovanni Spolatti, a castrated youth whose voice was unearthly.

  Are you impressed by my knowledge?

  Of course not, it is common to Venetians. We all appreciated music and art, Titian returning from his travels to find my master his rival, the little dyer flexing his muscles with his four paintings in the church of Scuola Grande di San Marco. I imagine Aretino’s public praising of his work would have irked Titian, but the older master was soon back at his tricks, making his canvases sigh and dance for the nobility. I will say that he had aged from his sojourn abroad, his beard longer, grey interruptions in his hair: but his ego was intact, his promenades across St Marks slow and mannered, like a sleek cat lifting his tail to re-mark his territory.

  Only a week after Aretino had asked the favour of me, my father was taken ill, my absence from the writer’s company a blessing. People may well have wondered at my sudden compassion for a parent who despised me, but my father’s illness gave me a blessed respite. I had toiled over the question of Rosella - how could I sanction an association with the likes of Adamo Baptista? And at other times I would look to excuse my anxiety. Rosella was a grown woman and besides, what was an introduction? Merely the means of one person meeting another, via a mutual acquaintance. My mind see-sawed like the Spanish tumblers in the park: up and down, up and down. Always knowing that, at any time, there could be a fall from grace.

  With my father’s sickness came the need for Ira. He might reject my personal summons, but he could not reject a patient.

  Have I mentioned how hot it was that August? Abnormally hot, as though we had fallen from a usual summer heat into a glassworker’s furnace. Even the stonework was hot to the touch, the fruit ripening early and rotting before it hit the ground. Normally we would have left Venice for our home in the countryside, but my father’s sickness marooned us. Like the merchants, we remained, and, like the merchants, we sweated.

  Aretino did not send word, or request my presence. At first relieved, I became anxious by the silence, then relaxed as a further week passed without communication. Another followed. News had travelled of my father’s illness and we were left alone, only Cara and I in attendance, and Ira visiting the sickroom daily. I was assured that my parent’s illness was not life threatening, but that his convalescence would be protracted.

  My relief was shameful.

  And then, as the third week of August exited, I woke to hear the rain beating on the shutters. It was fearsome in its attack, hailstones the size of grapes storming the canals and bouncing off the roof tiles. Under the thundering noise the church bells marked out the hour of seven as I hurried towards my father’s bedroom.

  Cara was asleep on the settle at the foot of his bed, her plump body partially uncovered, the pink flesh of her dimpled knees peeking from under the cover. She slept with her mouth open, her muffled snores suppressed by the noise of the falling hailstones, her left hand clutching a rosary. I didn’t wake her, even though I was aware that something very terrible was going to happen.

  I realise what you’re thinking, that my father had died. But you’re wrong. The storm seemed to rejuvenate him, break his fever, the shutter banging to the rhythm of the church bell striking. And I knew what my father’s recovery meant - I was released, forced to respond to Aretino. If I had hoped the writer had left Venice I was disappointed. The wolf was just waiting for my reaction. To see how greedy I was, how ambitious. To see if I would chose him over my friends; treachery over loyalty; innocence over corruption.

  I was juggling with my soul.

  And knew it.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Barent der Witt closed the front door of his house and slid the bolt. For several moments he waited, listening with his ear against the wood, straining for footsteps. There were none, merely the sound of a dog barking, the noise echoing down the alleyway which lead to the Dutchman’s home. He waited a little longer, thinking of something he had overheard earlier – that the Inquisition were interested in him.

  Fingering the glass vial around his neck, der Witt moved through the back kitchen and into the yard beyond. Quickly he uprooted several plants and, placing them in a bowl of water to prevent them drying out, hid them under a grid. He then hurried back into the house. Abortion was illegal, but the authorities often turned a blind eye, a favour they did not extend to sorcery... The Dutchman glanced around his study, judging it as a stranger would. The desk was under the shuttered window and covered with paperwork, maps and drawings. Beside it was a mounted skeleton of a monkey and a snake in a glass jar, yellowing with age. Compasses, a pair of callipers and a globe professed intellectual interests, but at the base of the desk, half hidden under the knee space, was a Ouija board.

  Fuji, as it was known in China, had travelled to India and Europe, used as a form of necromancy and communication with the spirit world. As it became wildly used, the practice was condemned and regarded by the Catholic authorities as a form of divination. Fearful of all devilry, the Inquisition had ruled that the use of Ouija boards was against God; that it was blasphemous, a means to conjure up demons. They were not the only authorities to fear the practice. Even in der Witt’s homeland the Dutch church had banned the board and declared it a means of occultism.

  Der Witt was still listening, straining for sounds outside and imaging at any moment the door being broken open. Nothing happened. Footsteps passed by, then seemed to retrace their steps, the Dutchman scarcely breathing. Had someone informed on him? His heart pounded, sweat running down the small of his back. Venice was open to many different nationalities and religions, but sorcery was forbidden by visitor and resident alike. His gaze moved back to the Ouija board - should he gamble on moving, on trying to hide it? Or would such an attempt alert them to his presence?

  The Dutchman moved against the wall, away from the window, waiting. Silence outside. Had they gone? He kept waiting. Silence. But an instant later the footsteps sounded again, running towards the entrance. Out of the corner of Der Witt’s eye he could see the edge of the Ouija board and flinched as he heard a fist slam against the locked door.

  *

  “Signora Castilano?”

  `Marina nodded, flattered as the famous – if unkempt – Tintoretto entered her shop. Uncharacteristically flirtatious, she twittered like a canary, already imagining the kudos of his patronage. Il Furioso knew a great many influential people and powerful patrons. If he was not fashionable himself – she tried to ignore the worn boots he was wearing and the paint spotted breeches – his sitters most certainly were.

  “What can I do for you, Signor?”

  Tintoretto looked about him - reeling from the plethora of dummies, clothes, ornamentation and fabric on every available space within the confines of the shop.

  “I have some unfortunate news…”

  Marina said nothing and waited for him to continue.

  “… you had a maid called Gabriella…” Her face was no more than a stiff mask as he went on. “It is my sad duty to report that she is dead.”

  He had expected some response, perhaps even a sob. But instead the
woman continued to stare at him blankly.

  “… Signor Castilano —”

  “You are wrong, Gabriella left Venice.”

  He shook his head. “I wish with all my heart it was so, but I have seen her body with my own eyes. Poor Gabriella —”

  “We have had news of her in Rome.”

  The lie was so obvious he almost smiled. “No, that is not possible. As I say, I saw her, I drew her corpse when she was found —”

  Marina sat down heavily, her legs failing.

  “May I get you a glass of water, signora?” Tintoretto asked. “Are you alone here?”

  “Why does that matter!”

  Her response alarmed him. “It does not, I was merely asking —”

  “I do not believe what you have told me, Signor. I think you are lying.”

  “Why would I?” he said firmly. “What would I have to gain from such a cruel trick? I came here only to tell you what had happened to your maid and to try and set your mind at rest —”

  She laughed harshly. “At rest! You want to set my mind at rest?” Her voice plummeted. “If this is true —”

  “It is.”

  “ – you are not setting my mind at rest.”

  “Forgive me, signora, I do not understand.”

  “ — was her death an accident?”

  He paused, unwilling to reveal the full details. “No, it was not an accident.”

  “So Gabriella drowned herself?”

  “She drowned, yes.”

  Marina’s eyes flickered. “Someone else drowned her?”

  He nodded. “Yes, I am sorry to tell you that they did.”

  Her voice was strained. “She was murdered?...” He nodded. “…Have you have reported this to the authorities?”

  “I have just done so.”

  Her mouth opened and closed, but she said nothing, Tintoretto speaking again. “Gabriella is now laid to rest —”

  She interrupted him. “Who killed her?”

  “Who knows?”