by S. D. Sykes
“We visited the island of Burano,” I said.
“Burano? Is that where the fellow is hiding then?”
Giovanni caught my eye, urging me in some desperation not to say anything more. “We were looking for Adolpho Bredani,” I said.
“Bredani? Why?”
“Because the man should have been at the water gate when I found Enrico’s body.”
Giovanni cut in at this point, his voice nervous and soft. “We thought it was wise to find Bredani, and then question him.”
Bearpark turned to his clerk sharply. “And did you find him, on this escapade to Burano?” Even on his deathbed, Bearpark retained the capacity to intimidate his servants.
Giovanni was silenced, so I stepped in. “No. We didn’t. Bredani’s family claim that they haven’t seen him,” I said. “But they were lying.”
Bearpark gave a sigh. “You know that Adolpho Bredani is my wife’s brother?”
“Yes,” I said, “Giovanni told me.”
“So why are you suggesting that he’s involved with this? He’s a member of my own family.”
“I find his behavior suspicious,” I said.
Bearpark repositioned the spectacles upon his nose, and then peered at me without blinking. “Ridiculous. I’ve done nothing but help that man, so I can tell you this for nothing. He would never have been involved in such a crime.” Bearpark wagged a finger at me. “He would not repay my kindness with such treachery.” He then began to slide down under the sheets, seemingly exhausted by this outburst. “The man will be in a tavern somewhere, stewing in his own guilt.” He paused. “Yes, yes. I know that he likes to drink a little too much, but he is no murderer. I expect he slipped away from his post to enjoy the carnival, and now he is too ashamed to face me.”
Giovanni sidled over to me cautiously, while not dropping his eyes from Bearpark. “Oswald, please. My master is truly exhausted,” he whispered. “I think you should refrain from asking any more questions.”
I bowed my head with some reluctance, because Giovanni was right. The old man had closed his eyes and was beginning to snore. “Very well.”
I turned to leave the room, just as Mother burst through the door, followed by an entourage of servants and kitchen staff. At the head of this unexpected group was a boy who held a great tureen of soup aloft as if it were the Ark of the Covenant, while the cook brought up the rear, his arms folded and his face set into a scowl of disapproval. Hector scampered along in their wake in the hope that some of the broth might fall upon the floor.
“Come along now, Oswald,” Mother announced. “You need to stop talking. The soup is ready.”
“We’ve finished anyway,” I said.
She didn’t listen. “Out you go. Master Bearpark needs his soup.” She gestured to the tureen with reverence. “This broth was made to my own special formulation. An English soup to cure an Englishman.”
How I longed to tell the assembled company the truth. That Mother no more knew how to make a broth than she knew how to sew a gown. Servants had cared for her since the day of her birth, and though she might sometimes loiter in the kitchen giving orders, they were usually ignored or immediately forgotten, once she had breezed out again. In light of this, I was finding it increasingly difficult to understand her sudden enthusiasm for domesticity.
I looked to Bearpark and saw a defeated man, lacking the willpower to resist the momentum of the soup and its many followers. I left him to Mother, but, as Giovanni and I reached the final few steps onto the piano nobile, we met Filomena climbing slowly toward us. She was holding a belly that threatened to destabilize her at any moment, so I stood aside to let her pass and bowed my head. I will admit, I was sorely tempted to ask her some questions about her brother Adolpho, but she looked away upon seeing Giovanni’s face, and gave me only the slightest nod in response to my acknowledgment.
When she was out of earshot, I said to Giovanni, “Why is there such hostility between you and Monna Filomena?”
I thought he might answer with another of his infuriating shrugs, but instead he gave a short sigh. “She’s just an island nobody, Oswald. A peasant with the manners and morals of a fishwife. I don’t know why my master married her.”
“I think you should show her more respect, Giovanni.”
He continued down the narrow steps and didn’t answer.
Chapter Fourteen
In those times I did not often seek solace in wine, as it had a disheartening effect upon my spirits, and my melancholia fed upon itself quite readily without the need for any farther nourishment. After my interview with Bearpark, however, I quickly found a servant and requested some sweet Malmey, needing a tonic to soothe my growing unease. I couldn’t find Bredani, I couldn’t find Enrico’s lover, and now there was a mysterious letter of denunciation to take into consideration. My investigation was stalling, and I had only five days to find a murderer.
I hid myself in a quiet corner of the piano nobile and nursed the large bowl of syrupy wine. I was feeling somewhat restored, until Bernard and his sister Margery decided to join me. Margery’s bruised eye shone like a Sussex beacon, though she had tried to lessen its impact by draping her wimple across her face.
“Goodness me, my lord,” remarked Bernard. “You are looking so pale. Do you need a tonic? I’m sure Margery could spare a drop of her St. Thomas’s water. It has done wonders for her recovery, you know.”
“No thank you,” I said swiftly. “I’m just a little tired.” I then closed my eyes, in an attempt to discourage any farther opportunity for conversation. My hint went unheeded, however, for I sensed that the two pilgrims had drawn their stools close to mine.
“Have you noticed that the stars are brighter in the sky here, Margery?” said Bernard. “I looked out of the window last night, and it was as if somebody had thrown tiny balls of fire into the sky.” I opened my left eye a crack, to see that Margery was nodding to this nonsense, while sorting through a purse of her pewter badges, holding each to the light for inspection. “Have you observed the same phenomenon, my lord?” The man might have noticed a difference in the night sky, but didn’t possess the wit to see that I was pretending to be asleep. I didn’t answer, but this still didn’t stop him from continuing. “I wonder if we are closer to the sky here in Venice, than we were in England? I always felt that we were going down a hill as we traveled south. But maybe, it was just the opposite? Perhaps we were actually climbing a mountain?”
As Bernard continued in this vein, I genuinely fell asleep, waking only when somebody tugged at my sleeve with a vigorous shake. It was Giovanni. “Oswald. Quickly. I have some news.”
I rubbed my eyes. “What is it?”
He whispered into my ear, speaking to me in Venetian for once. “Adolpho Bredani has been found.”
I sat up straight, suddenly revived. “Good. Where is he?”
“At a tavern in Dorsoduro called the Bacaro da Mario. Do you know it?” I shook my head. Enrico had not dragged me to this particular inn on one of our many nights of “entertainment,” nor was it somewhere that I had played at dice. Giovanni was disappointed by my answer. “I had hoped you might know the way there,” he said.
“No. Your man will have to lead us,” I said.
Giovanni frowned for some reason at this suggestion. “Yes. Very well then.”
I stood up from my chair, to see that Bernard and Margery were still sitting nearby, with concerned looks upon their faces. Bernard might not speak Venetian, but he had clearly caught the tone of our conversation. “Is there something wrong?” he asked. “Has the murderer struck again?”
“There’s nothing to be worried about,” I said.
I walked toward the door, but Bernard caught up with me. “Do take care, my lord. I believe all this violence has been created by a celestial intervention. It would explain those small balls of fire that I saw in—”
I’m afraid that I closed the door, thus removing the need to answer him, then caught up with Giovanni at the bottom of the ext
erior staircase, where he was talking to the man who had located Adolpho. It was the fellow who held his head at an odd angle.
Giovanni nodded to me as I approached. “This man tells me that Bredani is staying in a room above the Bacaro. With a woman.” Giovanni accompanied this disclosure with a short, disapproving puff of disgust. “She is a whore, I believe.”
“Did this man actually see Adolpho?” I said.
“So he says.”
“And Adolpho didn’t see him? They did work together here, after all.” I thought it unlikely that Adolpho would not have noticed this man, since his appearance was so singular. His jaw jutted out strongly to the left, whereas his prominent forehead leaned to the right, as if the two features of his head were trying to balance on a set of scales.
Giovanni folded his arms. “He promises that nobody saw him.”
“Then we need to get to this tavern quickly, in case Bredani moves on.” I pointed to the man. “Can he show us the way there?”
Giovanni translated my question, and the man nodded his head enthusiastically on its strange diagonal axis.
“You need to gather at least two other men from the household to accompany us,” I told Giovanni. Then I placed my hand firmly upon the clerk’s arm. “This time they must be strong and young. Do you understand me? We might need to bring Bredani back by force.” He nodded without argument, for he was no keener than I was to wander into Dorsoduro with only this odd-looking servant as our companion and protector.
Now it was decided how we would proceed, I returned quickly to my room and picked out my oldest cloak and my sturdiest boots. I had advised Giovanni to do the same, though when he reappeared in the courtyard moments later, he had tempered the elegance of his outfit with only a gray woolen cape and a pair of clean overshoes. It seemed he could not sacrifice his dedication to fashion, even though I had been at pains to warn him about our destination. I had visited many of the roughest, most dissolute of taverns of Venice with Enrico, but I had never even heard of Bacaro da Mario. If Enrico had avoided this place, then it promised to be truly appalling.
Our mistake, in retrospect, was to take Giovanni’s advice and take the ferry across the Canal Grande, rather than use the Rialto Bridge. In theory, this should have been a quicker option, but the oarsmen who row their long traghetti boats from one bank to the other were involved in a heated argument on the opposite side of the canal, and we had to shout repeatedly to get their attention.
Once we had finally placed our feet on the soil of Dorsoduro, our guide led us into the network of streets, his feet scurrying before us in short spurts of energy, like a mouse running from one hiding hole to the next. Our guards also seemed nervous, constantly looking over their shoulders and stabbing their pikes at shadows. We might have been only a few furlongs from their own sestiere of San Marco, but there was something about crossing the Canal Grande that had made them deeply uncomfortable.
Our guide eventually stopped outside an unpromising building at the end of a long alley, at a house that didn’t advertise itself as a tavern, for there were no signs in the street, nor could we hear the noise of a crowd within. I will admit to feeling nervous myself at this point, but as we walked through a long and twisting hallway, we finally found a group of men and women sitting about a table and laughing. The men were poorly dressed, in rough leather tunics and dirty shirts, and the women were hardly dressed at all. As we entered the chamber, they stopped talking and turned in unison to look at our faces.
“Where is Adolpho Bredani?” I said quickly.
Nobody answered, apart from a man wiping out small bowls with a rag. He pointed to a narrow staircase in the corner, which we went up, before pushing our way into a dingy room. There was no sign of Adolpho, but the bed was occupied by a woman. She shouted something abusive at our entrance, before returning her head to the pillow. Giovanni shielded his eyes, as this woman was naked beneath the sheets.
“Where is Bredani?” I said, approaching the woman. She was thin, with pale skin and long red hair—so untypical of the usual Venetian—and I wondered if she had been captured by the Tartars and sold to this brothel.
She said something, but her accent was too strong, so I asked Giovanni to translate. His reaction to this request was to behave as if I had asked him to jump into a pool of freezing water, taking a few deep breaths before he then exchanged a series of quarrelsome words with the girl, while still holding his hand in front of his eyes, so as not to be offended again by her nudity.
“What’s she saying?” I demanded to know.
Giovanni removed his hand briefly and turned to me. “She says that Bredani left the room shortly before we arrived. A child knocked at the door with a message.”
“What message?”
“Somebody wanted to see him outside.” Giovanni replaced the hand in front of his eyes. “She tells me that Bredani dressed quickly and left the room immediately. She thinks it was urgent.”
“Does she know where he went?”
“No. She says she has no idea.” Giovanni took another deep breath and coughed. “She also says that Bredani can go to Hell.”
We clattered back down the stairs to the tavern, where the drinkers once again watched us with interested eyes, while the man in the corner continued to wipe out bowls with a rag. I could only assume he was the innkeeper, so I approached him first. “Where’s Bredani gone?”
He still didn’t look up. “He pays for a bed and a woman. I don’t follow him around.”
I was feeling all the frustration of another wasted journey, when a woman tugged at my cloak. I had assumed she was young from behind, but now that I could see her face, her true age was revealed. She must have been in her fifth or even sixth decade. Her clothes had once been fine, but they were dusty and worn at the edges—the sagging neckline of her dress edged with patchy fur. She pointed to a broken door that appeared to lead into a courtyard. “He went that way,” she told me.
“When?”
“Not long before you arrived.” She then held out her hand, expecting payment for this fragment of information. I indicated for Giovanni to retrieve one of his precious coins, when a girl burst in through this same broken door and screamed that there was a dead man outside.
Giovanni and I pushed through to find ourselves in a small, enclosed courtyard that smelled as bad as a piss-alley. Before us, on the beaten earth next to a pile of broken bowls and plates, lay a dead man. His throat was freshly cut, and his blood was pooling across the ground. I rushed to his side and listened for breath, but could hear nothing, not even a shallow gasp for air.
As I shook the body to try to find any sign of life, Giovanni peered over my shoulder, crossed himself, and then whispered into my ear, “It’s Bredani.”
I looked at the dead man’s face and a sinking feeling gripped my stomach. “So it’s him?” I sighed, realizing that Bredani had been murdered only moments before we arrived, as his body was still warm to the touch.
I stood up and quickly looked over the wall of the courtyard into the alley beyond, in case our murderer was still lurking in the dark recesses of this covered passageway, but I saw exactly what I had expected. An empty corridor, with nothing but a solitary cat. Adolpho’s murder had been performed with the precision and speed of an executioner, and such a man would not be hanging back, waiting to admire the repercussions of his crime.
I rubbed my face with frustration, and then turned back to Giovanni. “Somebody knew we were coming. That’s why Bredani is dead.”
Giovanni was now leaning against a wall and fanning himself. “What do you mean, Oswald?”
“He was murdered so that he could not speak to us.”
Giovanni ceased the fanning and stood up straight. “But how would anyone know that we wanted to talk to him? I didn’t tell anybody.”
I felt a temper brewing. “Where’s our guide? The man with the strange head?” I found the fellow hiding in a corner of the courtyard, biting his nails. “Did you tell somebody that we were c
oming here?” I said in my plainest Venetian. He shook his head vigorously, but was unable to speak. “Were you followed?” I said, but still he could not answer.
Giovanni pulled me away with unexpected force. “Please, Oswald. Leave this poor man alone. He’s one of the most entrustful servants in the household.”
“The word is ‘trusted’!”
“There’s no need to be angry,” said Giovanni. “It won’t help our investigation.”
“Of course I’m angry!” I said. “Adolpho’s murderer knew we were coming.”
Giovanni straightened his hair. “I’m not so sure about that. It could be a . . .” He paused for a moment. “I don’t know the word in English. When two things happen together for no reason.”
“You mean a coincidence?”
His face brightened as he repeated the word. “Yes. A coincidence. I did know it.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” I told him. “Especially not when I’m investigating a murder.”
“But sometimes such things happen, Oswald. A man such as Adolpho Bredani would have had many enemies. Anybody could have murdered him. Who is to say this crime has something to do with Enrico Bearpark?”
“I say it does.”
“But—”
At this moment, the red-haired girl appeared at the door to the inn. She had dressed herself in a loose chemise, but her pale, translucent skin was still conspicuous in the moonlight. Upon seeing Adolpho’s body, she let out a short, frightened gasp, before trying to step back inside.
I acted quickly, grasping the back of her chemise and pushing her to the wall. “Ask her who did this.” I said to Giovanni, as she spat at me and tried to get away.
I held her tightly, as Giovanni shielded his eyes once again and then translated my questions. Did Adolpho have any enemies? Who was the child who came to the door? What was the exact message the child conveyed? At each question she either spat at me or kept her mouth frozen in an unwavering scowl. Eventually we released her without having gained any useful information.