by David Hewson
I reread that last sentence, and how I hate it! To hell with pessimism (excuse my language). We are Scacchis, all. There is a profession here, a good one, that keeps me close to words and music. We may not be artists ourselves, but we are, at least, their mouthpiece, and that counts for something. Nor is any of this a simple way to make a living. Today, tired from the previous night’s work, I misunderstood Leo’s instructions and arranged the imposition wrongly for the printing of a small pamphlet on the nature of the rhinoceros. Everything will have to be redone, at Uncle’s expense; there is no unmaking my mistake (printing is a business which punishes errors very severely). Leo beat me, but not hard, and I deserved it. An apprentice is there to learn.
Across from our house, in the parish church, is a painting of the martyrdom of San Cassian, the patron saint of teachers, if you recall. I stared at it for ages this evening. It is a dark, gloomy work with no joy inside the pigment (martyrdoms, which litter the churches here, tend to fall into that category, I suppose!). Cassian’s bare, muscular form fills the foreground; around him, madness in their faces, wielding pens and knives and even an adze, the saint’s tormentors prepare to send him to eternity. The tale the priest tells is that Cassian was their master; the pupils turned on him when he sought to teach them Christian ways.
There is an important allegory there. The priest assures me so. Still, I cannot help but wonder. What would make not one but several pupils turn on their master with such deadly intent? Had he punished them more than they deserved? They are fallen; you can see it in their faces. But what made them fall? I see no sign of Satan anywhere in the picture.
I feel the tone of this letter is becoming cheerless, so you have perhaps put it to one side already and gone with your newfound friends to the dancing and the fiesta. I send you my fond love, my dearest sister, and am glad to hear your health is much improved.
6
An appointment with the Englishman
HUGO MASSITER WAS FIFTY-ONE. HE SEEMED, IN RIZZO’S eyes, like a character out of one of those sixties films that sometimes came up late at night on RAI. Movies where the women always wore short skirts and too much makeup and the men seemed possessed by some weird version of Mediterranean cool, like ageing play-boys pretending to be teenagers. Massiter dressed straight out of that era. Today the Englishman wore a pair of fawn slacks with a knife-edge crease down the front, a white shirt ironed so much it had the appearance of a fancy restaurant tablecloth and—the finishing touch—a light-blue silk neck scarf tucked in at the open collar.
He was tall and must have been good-looking once. His face had a patrician cragginess. He was tanned in the cracked way the English male went when he spent too much time under the hot sun. He could break into a sudden smile that seemed permeated with some genuine warmth if he wanted. But his hairline was receding, and, against all obvious attempts to hide the fact, a shiny red patch of forehead was growing larger all the time. More memorably, there was the question of the eyes. Massiter had grey eyes, large, intelligent, and piercing. He looked at people as if he had some extra sense of focus, seeing more than their outward appearance. When Rizzo wanted to know what Hugo Massiter was really thinking, all he had to do was seek the answer in those eyes. In their cold frankness lay all the answers and, Rizzo felt, the true measure of Massiter’s character. It was the eyes that made him fear the Englishman. Sometimes they looked only half-human.
It was three weeks since Susanna Gianni’s early disinterment, and Massiter ought to be thinking of other things. He sipped from a glass of sparkling mineral water, then stared out of the window at the Grand Canal. The small apartment was in Dorsoduro, between the Accademia and Salute. It was on the second floor of a converted palace and must, Rizzo knew, have cost a fortune. Massiter could afford it. He had homes in London and New York too. The art trade paid better than thieving from tourists, though Rizzo suspected that if everything were out in the open, there might be precious little moral daylight between them.
Massiter turned and stared at him. Rizzo knew the expression. It said: I know when you are lying. Rizzo thought: Yeah?
“Tell me again what happened.”
“Hey. The same as I told you a million times. What else is there to say?”
“Describe her.”
Massiter scared him. Still, there were limits. “Listen. If you’d wanted a picture taken, you should have said. There was some dead woman there. End of story.”
The words jogged something in Massiter’s memory. He walked to the antique desk by the window and retrieved a folder. Then he took a photograph from it and came to sit next to Rizzo, very close. The pale leather sofa breathed expensively with the weight of his body. Rizzo stared at the painting on the opposite wall: a swirl of modernist colours. The feeling that he was trapped inside some old movie came to him again. Maybe Fellini’s corpse was stuffed behind one of the floorlength mirrored wardrobes that lined the room. Maybe Massiter kept some ancient white open-topped Alfa Spyder in the car park at Piazzale Roma and drove it down the coast road on fine days, letting what hair he had left fly in the wind. Scalp apart, the man seemed impervious to time.
“Take a look at the picture.”
This was a new photo. The girl was standing outside La Pietà, the big white church down from San Marco. She wore a black dress and held in her hands the old, fat fiddle that was now safely tucked away in a left-luggage locker at Mestre station. It was a sunny day. In the background there were other musicians, as if this were before or after a concert. It was impossible for Rizzo to take his eyes off the girl. She shone from the picture, full of happiness and life, eyes bright and...it came to him. Focused. She was smiling at the person behind the camera. Massiter, in all probability. With a touch more hair ten years ago, maybe, when that white Spyder had a little less rust. It came to Rizzo, too, that his first impression, gained from the image on the headstone, was no mistake. She was in the process of some change, turning from girl to woman, and it was impossible not to want to sit and stare as it happened. Some head-turning, magnetic beauty was emerging from inside her, being revealed like a work of art in the process of creation. Was this why Massiter was so obsessed with her? It didn’t fit. Those cold grey eyes had no room in them for that kind of feeling.
“You’re sure this is the girl in the coffin?”
“Am I sure? She’d been dead for ten years. What do you think?”
“It could have been her?”
“Sure.”
“The hair?”
“Sure. The hair was just like that. To the tee.” There was no explaining to Massiter that some change had happened, a change the girl had never expected when Massiter had snapped her image one sunny day a decade ago.
“And there was nothing else in the coffin? No note, for example?”
Rizzo looked straight into the Englishman’s face, not flinching from his gaze. “There was a dead body in a shroud. Nothing else. Like I told you a million times. I’m sorry.”
Massiter sighed and placed the photograph on the table. Rizzo tried hard not to stare at it.
“And then there is the matter of this dead superintendent.”
Rizzo prayed he wouldn’t pee himself. “What?”
Massiter’s eyes turned on him. Rizzo felt cold.
“Oh, come! Poor chap murdered the very same day. You must have read about it?”
Rizzo nodded, surprised how calm he was. “Sure. I read about it. Never made the connection, that’s all.”
Massiter blinked, then sorted through a sheaf of newspaper cuttings on the table and pulled out a report of the killing. There was a bad picture of the dead superintendent accompanying the story. He looked a lot younger. “You didn’t see him? In the cemetery?”
“Don’t recall,” Rizzo replied, making sure he looked intently at the photograph. “No. Not the guy I spoke to.”
The Englishman made a noncommittal noise, then went to the table, picked up a white cardboard box full of tissue paper, and, as carefully as a surgeon, withdrew f
rom it a small painted object. It was a tiny, primitive ikon of the Virgin, the kind of bauble the antique shops stole out east, then sold to the tourists. Rizzo knew people who knocked up cheap copies in a backstreet studio on Giudecca. This looked like the genuine article. The halo round the Virgin’s head shone like pure gold.
“See this,” Massiter said, holding the ikon in front of him. “Next week I’ll put it through an auction in New York. It’ll fetch fifty, maybe sixty thousand dollars. That’s where your money comes from.”
Rizzo whistled. “Whoa. Am I in the wrong business.”
“You’re a thief,” Massiter said bluntly. “That’s how we know each other.”
That much was true enough. He had tried to lift the Englishman’s wallet one Sunday morning near Salute. Massiter was smart enough to spot the trick and then, to Rizzo’s amazement, invite him for a coffee instead of an appointment with the cops. It was a neat way of finding someone to do the odd dirty job. Rizzo guessed he had his equivalents in New York and London, maybe found in pretty much the same way.
“You’ve got me there,” he said.
Massiter placed the ikon in his hands. It felt tiny, delicate.
“It came out of Serbia,” Massiter said. “Do you ever stop to think about the merchandise that’s available from the Balkans these days?”
“Can’t say I have.” Rizzo felt slightly shocked to hear it called “merchandise.” Art was art, even if it was stolen. He placed the object back in Massiter’s hands. He didn’t like having that kind of money perched between his fingers.
“No,” Massiter said. “I imagine not. This is from a small monastery on the Kosovo border. Taken by some Christians I know, as it happens, but I’m strictly agnostic in these matters. I’ll deal with anybody.”
Rizzo could believe that. “Business, huh.”
“You know what they’re like? The kind of people who do this?”
Rizzo knew. There were Balkan crooks everywhere these days, Bosnian and Kosovan, Albanian and Serb. They would carve your eyes out with spoons just for saying “Ciao” in the wrong accent.
He nodded. Massiter shuffled closer to him on the pale leather sofa, then placed a hand on his knee. The Englishman had long, powerful hands, Rizzo saw, and wondered why he had never noticed that before.
“Last year, one of these...people stole from me. Really. It’s true. I help them in their business. I pay them on time. I send them gifts. I pat their children on their filthy, lice-ridden heads.”
Rizzo’s chest felt tight. “I would never do that, Signor Massiter. You’ve got to know I would never do that to you, not in a million y—”
“Quiet.”
Massiter had moved his hand and placed two fingers firmly on Rizzo’s lips now. The big grey eyes filled Rizzo’s gaze, like twin planets full of ice and hate.
“They stole from me, Rizzo,” he said. “After all the trust I placed in them.”
There was a smell on him, Rizzo realised. More perfume than aftershave, almost like incense.
He took his fingers away from Rizzo’s face. Rizzo hoped he wouldn’t piss himself.
“Stupid idea, huh?”
Massiter nodded. “I think so. Are you following me?”
“I’m following,” he said.
“No. You’re not.” Massiter took a sip of his water. His hand was steady as a rock. “You’re a thief. Which is useful up to a point. The lesson you must learn is this. Stealing what passes through my hands is bad. Stealing something that’s mine is much, much worse.”
“I wouldn’t steal...”
Massiter broke into a smile, the warm, welcome-to-the-party smile that might have got him a bit part in the movies. “Oh, do be quiet, old chap. I am trying to explain. Some things I possess in order to sell them. Some things—objects of a greater beauty—I possess for myself alone. If you steal the former, I am angry. If you steal the latter, well...it would be impolite to spell it out, don’t you think?”
Rizzo said nothing. Massiter laughed. “Do you know the difference between us, Rizzo?”
“You’re smart. I’m dumb.”
The Englishman laughed again and patted Rizzo lightly on the shoulder. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You’re quite the clever boy. No. The difference is that you steal things for themselves. While I...acquire them in order that I might, if they are of suitable quality, become their owner. What interests you is the object. What interests me is the act of possession.”
“Got you,” Rizzo said uncertainly.
“Let me put it more succinctly. You are a thief. I am a collector. We’ll leave it at that, shall we?”
The Englishman got up, stretching his legs as if they hurt.
“That girl owned an object which belongs to me. I have missed it since her death. I hear things, Rizzo. I hear something very like it could be for sale right now, if a man were to go to the right place and offer the right kind of money. I wonder where it is. I wonder how it got there.”
Rizzo made sure he didn’t move a single muscle in his face. “What do you want me to do?”
“Why,” Massiter replied, with the warm, beaming smile again, “watch. Listen. Be my eyes. Be my ears.” He looked at the large and expensive watch on his wrist. It was close to one. “Then tell me everything you know. But for now, you’d best get the hell out of here. I have a reception to attend, with people who know me to be the very picture of modern rectitude. And since I’m paying for the thing, I’ll be damned if I don’t get a little entertainment while they drink my wine.”
7
Beyond the law
Intrigue! Intrigue!
There. I have you instantly. None of this is fiction, either. Your hapless brother is in the thick of it, and I cannot help but wonder what dangers and mysteries lurk around the corner.
Yesterday Leo called me in to the parlour and said very gravely that I was to go about important and confidential business on behalf of the House of Scacchi. Vivaldi, that Red Priest of great fame, is teetering on his throne. His muse, it seems, has left him, and so have several of his players. The priest’s reputation rests, of course, on the little band of female musicians he had gathered together at La Pietà. Well, sickness, arguments (plenty of them), and attrition over the years have left him short. Vivaldi must play his usual concert season, yet lacks the talent to perform his works.
I thought for one ghastly moment that Leo was expecting me to don a frock and enter the lists, and was about to plead terror, incontinence, or a sudden stiffness in the hands—anything I could think of. Uncle shook his head impatiently, reading my mind, and explained. “Not you, lad. He needs a fiddle-player, and I know just the one. I’m too busy. Be the girl’s chaperone. Take a gondola there and back. Spare no expense. Vivaldi’s a fading power in this city, no doubt, but even a ghost may have influence.”
“You want me to accompany the lady to the church, sir? Is she ill?”
“No,” he replied, and I thought I saw a touch of sly fear in his eyes. “She is a Jew!”
I had not the faintest idea what to make of this. “A Jew? But this is impossible. How can she play in a Christian church, Uncle? I don’t believe Vivaldi may allow it.”
“I don’t believe Vivaldi need know! The lady in question is presentable and highly talented. She can play anything the priest may throw at her— and more. If she were Gentile, and a man, I daresay she’d be packing the concert hall by herself. But she’s a Jew and a pretty little thing, so that’s that. She has neither a hook nose nor a beard. Provided you can get her there safely and persuade her to remove her red scarf before you enter the church, Vivaldi won’t think twice. And once he hears her play, he’s caught!”
The dusty parlour felt cold as he said this. I may not know much about Jews, but I do know they are not allowed to walk the streets without some badge announcing their breeding and may not, under any circumstance, enter a church. Imprisonment, or worse, would surely follow. And prison, too, for any who encouraged them to break the Doge’s law.
; “I think the schedule is not so busy, sir, that you may not undertake this yourself. I am just a lad. I don’t know the city so well as you.”
Leo’s eyes, dark at the best of times, narrowed and became unreadable. “I believe I am the one who enters the daily catalogue of this trade’s calendar, Lorenzo. When I took you in from penury and made you my apprentice, you agreed to do my every bidding. Now, kindly meet that side of your contract.”
“But, sir! What if we are caught!”
“Then I shall be most disappointed and deny all knowledge of your tricks. This is a dirty world. You cannot prosper without dipping your hands into the muck from time to time.”
Yes, I thought. My hands.
“Besides, boy. You may find it more enjoyable than you expect.”
I said nothing, hoping he would relent. But Uncle Leo is made of sti f board. He never bends. He never so much as wavers.
“And if I refuse, sir?”
“Then you can pack your bag and find your own way through this life. If I don’t have a congratulatory letter from Vivaldi on my desk by tomorrow morning, you might as well do that anyway. Fat use you are to me in the press room, spilling ink and printing pages upside down.”
With that he thrust some small coinage into my hand—enough for the gondola only if I walked all the way to meet my Hebrew charge and back again—and a scribbled piece of paper, then went back to reading the proofs of some piece of medical quackery destined for the Arabs.
I am, sister, still alive, of course, and free enough to write this letter, which you will, I trust, burn immediately. So you may see that, so far anyway, this adventure has not yet devoured the life of your little brother, though it gives me small opportunity to sleep at night, for a variety of reasons.