The Venetian

by Mark Tricarico

  “What did they say?”

  “They said they would look into it,” replied Tomaso. Again, the wave of the hand. “But they were scared. They had never seen anything like this.”

  I imagine no one has ever seen anything like this. This was no simple assault for a man’s purse. “I do not understand. Why would anyone kill poor Ciro? And…like that?” He couldn’t separate the talk from the images in his mind. He wondered if he ever would. Tomaso’s vivid descriptions poured over him once more. He couldn’t imagine what his father was going through having actually seen it, the mangled body of his child.

  “It was the guild Paolo,” Tomaso replied irritably, the old dynamic returning. Their last encounter bubbled up in Paolo’s mind as clear as if it had been only days ago. Tomaso absently patted Paolo’s arm as though to apologize, their first touch in seven years. He softened his voice. “It was a message. They were sending a message. Ciro must have been up to something.”

  “But what? Ciro would never have gotten involved in anything that could result in this.”

  “I do not know. He had changed. I just don’t know.” He sighed, shoulders sagging, a soft resignation in his voice. “This was meant to be some kind of a warning. We have all heard the stories.”

  “What stories?”

  “What stories?” Tomaso smiled sadly. “You as much as spat them in my face seven years ago.”

  Of course he remembered. For weeks afterward, he wished he had held his tongue. But in his heart he knew he couldn’t have, that he would again say the words he had said those seven years ago if given the opportunity. He could not abide self-righteousness when it was so brazenly misplaced. Perhaps he would hold himself up to the same standards one day, if he had the courage. It is a simple thing to judge others when one has led a life unblemished by experience.

  He had attacked the glassmakers’ guild. He wanted to hurt his father just as he had been hurt. Did they practice their art for beauty’s sake? Paolo wanted to know. Did they create glass to create joy? Or merely to create wealth? All the furnaces had been moved to Murano, an isolated island in the lagoon. To protect Venice from burning the authorities had said. It was nonsense. Was his father so gullible, so willing to be deceived? Who was the naïve one? No foreign glassmakers are allowed to work in the Republic. No glassmakers are allowed to practice their craft outside the Republic. No glassmakers, however loyal to God or Venice, can so much as go on holiday without permission. Who is more beholden to greed? He had fired the questions at his father like stones, wanting to bludgeon him with his words.

  “I remember,” Paolo said, again studying his hands. “But that was about the guild moving the shops to Murano because it was easier to control the glassblowers and control the trade. To keep the secrets. To ensure a monopoly. Murano was but a gilded cage. But this…” Paolo’s voice trailed off, his hand gesturing at the empty air between them.

  “Paolo,” Tomaso began. Was it patience on his face? Affection? “Do you truly believe one can exist without the other?” It was a look Paolo hadn’t seen since he was a boy, since he had so ably demonstrated to his father’s delight his affinity for the glass. “There can be no heaven without a hell, no? The guild would never banish the glassblowers to Murano without a way of ensuring that they remained there.”

  Could it be true? Were the rumors true? How could his father work for the guild if he believed it capable of such monstrous treachery? The pathetic man before him slipped away and in a moment he saw the father he once knew. He felt his anger rising. “Then why? Why did you say those things to me when all I wanted was to share my joy with you? If you believe what you say now, how could you curse the Arsenale when you knew what the guild was capable of? What they would do to protect their precious secrets. Of the two, which one should disgust you more?”

  Tomaso said nothing. Paolo wanted to reach across the table and shake his father, make him speak. He had no shortage of words seven years ago. But instead he found his anger ebbing. He looked closely at his father, Tomaso’s face sagging like wax in the sun. Paolo wanted to be angry, wanted to hold on to his rage, but he couldn’t. This wasn’t the man he had known. Absurd as it was, he thought it unjust to be angry at the miserable person before him.

  “There is nothing I can say Paolo, nothing to wash away those words. But what I say now is not rumor. Following the fall of Constantinople, Venetian glassmaking experienced a great evolution. My brothers in the trade before me adapted many of the techniques from the East, incorporating them into our own methods, and creating something wholly unique in the world. Only Venice, for example, can produce looking glass.”

  Paolo began to speak but Tomaso waved away the question. “Yes, yes I know. I mean in the new way, coating the glass with tin and mercury. That in itself is enough to kill for, yet it is but one small example.” Tomaso took a breath, as though the act of breathing, of living, was now something he only remembered occasionally. “This place is not, nor ever was, built upon Christian ideals of charity. It is, above all, an apparatus, an enterprise, the sole purpose of which is to make money. And as much wealth as it accumulates, it is but a drop, an infinitesimal amount of that which its insatiable soul desires.”

  “What are you saying father?”

  “The rumors are true, Paolo. Ciro must have been leaving Venice, and the guild murdered him for it.”

  A hard rap at the door startled them both, Paolo knocking over the wine he had placed on the table earlier. They looked at one another, eyes wide like frightened animals. Who could it be at this hour? Paolo rose slowly, eyes darting between Tomaso and the door. He righted the now empty wine bottle, ignoring the red puddle on the table and the steady drip down to the floor. He walked to the door and cautiously opened it. Chill air rushed in, the briny scent of the canals filling the small room. A tall, barrel-chested man stood in the shadow of the threshold, a voluminous cloak over his shoulders, a dark hood covering his head.

  “Yes?”

  “Paolo Avesari?” Paolo couldn’t see the man’s face, his voice coming from the black void beneath the hood.

  “Yes?”

  “Your brother has been murdered. Please come with me.”

  “Who are you?”

  If Paolo’s tone made any impression, the stranger didn’t show it. “Your brother’s murder involves matters of state.” Despite Paolo’s height, he found himself looking up, peering into the dark pit of the faceless hood. This was a man accustomed to people doing as he asked.

  “Come with me,” he said again. “I have been sent by the Council of Ten.”

  Six

  The man had not realized that Tomaso was there as well. He faltered imperceptibly, regaining his composure in an instant. Murmuring some disingenuous sympathies, more to the expanse of the room than either of them, he stepped back, inviting the two men to join him outside with a thick, muscled arm.

  “Come. Please.” He inclined his head slightly. It was not a request.

  “Where are we going? It is getting late,” said Paolo. He did not want to go anywhere with this man. He knew about the Council of Ten. The real problem was that now, The Council of Ten knew about him.

  “Palazzo Ducale.” The Doge’s Palace. The answer was curt, meant more to silence than offer information. Clearly it would be the last question Paolo would be allowed to ask.

  Paolo shuddered at the thought of being summoned by The Ten. Everyone in Venice knew of the council, but it was precisely what wasn’t known that gave them their power. Fear was a most useful weapon. Created back in the fourteenth century, the council was formally tasked with maintaining the security of the Republic and preserving the government from overthrow. Overseeing Venice’s diplomatic and intelligence services, The Ten employed an extensive network of informants, both in the Republic and abroad. Wearing black mantles as a symbol of their office, they became known as the Black Inquisitors. Their examinations were conducted in darkness, their decisions not open to appeal. The accused could not cross question their
accusers. Everything about them dwelled beneath a layer of shadow, even the oath they swore: jura, perjura, secretum, prodere, noli—swear, foreswear, and reveal not the secret.

  Like most secretive organizations designed to serve those in power, the Council of Ten protected ordinary citizens only to the extent that the interests of the citizenry happened to temporarily align with those of the State. Paolo couldn’t help but wonder on what side of the line his interests currently placed him.

  They walked silently through the night, the scrape of their soles muffled by the layer of fog draped over the lagoon. Paolo watched his father in the blurry dark as he shuffled slowly behind the council’s man. The life seemed to seep from his body with each step. He had risen without a word when the visitor asked them to come, his face betraying not a feeling one way or the other. Moments ago he looked as though he could kill a man. Now he seemed resigned to go wherever the prevailing force wished him to, for good or ill, it no longer mattered. His docility was unnerving, and Paolo found himself becoming angry all over again. Ciro was dead, brutally murdered, and this man, their father, should not allow himself to be led about like a side of beef on its way to the knife. Paolo clenched his fists, wondered if he would ever find a reason to love his father again.

  Overlooking the Piazza San Marco, the palace, in addition to being the residence of the Doge, housed the political bodies of the State. The enormous building seemed a jumbled mix of unrelated notions. Courts of law and administrative offices shared space with courtyards, grand staircases, and cavernous ballrooms. But it was the prison on the ground floor that worried Paolo.

  The white arcade of the lower floor was the first part of the palace to emerge from the gloom. Ghostlike, it seemed to float above the lagoon, each line of its stone arches projecting its own diaphanous shadow, glowing with fog filtered moonlight.

  The palace began to assume the familiar shape it held in daylight, the pale pink stone reconstructing itself before their eyes as they approached. How beautiful during the day. How very different now. He glanced at his father, saw little sign that Tomaso knew, or cared, what was happening, or what could happen in this place.

  They were not brought through the courtyard where the sweeping staircase led to the Door of Paper where government decrees were posted. Instead they were led silently through a small door in the façade, the seams of which were invisible. They openly share their secrets with us. Perhaps we will never leave this place.

  The narrow passageway was dark and soggy underfoot, Paolo keeping one hand on the dank stone wall, the other on Tomaso’s arm. They followed not with sight, but by the sound of the footsteps ahead. At once airless and yet filled with the smell of the lagoon, the passage seemed to engulf the men, assaulting them in turns, depriving them of their senses or flooding them with too much.

  The passage turned this way and that, meandering up before plunging back down. Paolo had lost all sense of direction almost immediately, yet their escort moved through the endless stone fissure with a quick confidence. Paolo wondered how many times this man had led others like he and his father through this wet maze in the middle of the night.

  They finally emerged into a more formal, yet not much larger corridor. Paolo, while not being able to see much more, could sense the change. This was a place frequented by people, a place the light was allowed to enter. The flicker of a low flame illuminated a small portion of the hall ahead.

  “This way.”

  The voice startled Paolo, a loud bark after the confining silence of the passageway. Moving toward the light, he heard the sound of rustling papers.

  “Ah,” said a small man once they had arrived at the doorway. He was seated behind a comically large desk, smiling warmly. He turned to their escort, raised his thin eyebrows, and the man quietly removed himself.

  Looking about, Paolo saw that the room was covered in cupboards, filled to bursting with yellowed documents in rolls and folios, sheets loosely spilling from an army of drawers and cabinets. Following Paolo’s eyes, the man inclined his head and smiled proudly as though to suggest the worth of a man can be derived from the amount of paper he has accumulated.

  “Welcome, gentlemen.” Still seated, he spread his arms wide in greeting. For a moment Paolo feared he might rise to embrace them. He smiled again. This man was accustomed to bearing his teeth. It was a practiced smile Paolo noticed however, one without warmth or compassion. It was a smile that did not extend to the eyes, one meant to deceive. His teeth were too large for his mouth in much the same way his eyes were too small for his head. They were two hard, almost black little pebbles that seemed to have been pressed into his face with so much force that they simply stayed there. They sat, embedded below a wispy receding hairline. A small pink hand gestured to two hard chairs in front of the desk.

  With the cheerful greeting out of the way, he exhaled deeply, as though to get down to the real business at hand. He straightened his face, rearranging all the bends and curves that come with emotion into sharp geometric patterns.

  “Gentlemen,” he began more seriously, “I’m very sorry to bring you here at this late hour.” He smiled. “And so soon after such a horrific…incident.” He winced as if feeling a portion of their pain. “Do you know who I am?” he asked suddenly as though the thought had only just occurred to him.

  “Yes,” answered Paolo cautiously. His father, sitting motionless beside him, said nothing. “You are the Deputato alla Segreta del Consiglio dei Dieci,” the Deputy of the Secret Works of the Council of Ten.

  The deputy opened his mouth silently, a look of amused surprise rippling across his face, a reaction that happened all at once on most, but seemed to occur sequentially on this man.

  “You know me?”

  Paolo silently pointed at the title on the door, undecided whether this was mere oversight on the deputy’s part or a piece of sinister theater, the whole of which he was unable to divine.

  The man clapped his hands together with a loud bark of laughter that sounded too deep for his delicate frame. This man is dangerous thought Paolo.

  “Of course!” He smiled. Cocking his head quizzically he asked, “Such a strange title, no? It sounds so…so…” he trailed off, his eyes searching the space behind his guests as his thin right hand slowly circled, trying to pluck the elusive word from the air. “Fearsome.” He said the word clearly, a cold edge to his voice. He dropped his eyes in time to the word and stared intently at Paolo. His hand became still, suspended above the desk. Paolo gazed back, impassive. After a few seconds the deputy blinked, his face becoming once more that of the jovial civil servant. “Mah,” he said, waving a dismissive hand. “Silly men long ago making silly titles for themselves.”

  He smiled, inhaling with his mouth closed and nostrils flaring, quickly transforming his face as he had done before, now the serious man. Clasping his hands together, he leaned forward, his conjoined knuckles covering his mouth. Paolo looked at the small fleshy knobs of his elbows on the desk and wondered if they hurt. With a sigh, the deputy unclasped his hands and leaned back in his chair, defeated by the apparent emotional war he was waging.

  “Your brother Ciro,” he said, addressing Paolo. “Your son,” he said turning to Tomaso, “is dead. Murdered.” Neither man spoke, or even breathed, waiting for the deputy to continue. “And the other man,” he said, again searching the space above their heads.

  “Alessandro,” Paolo offered. “Alessandro Simoneti.”

  “Yes, the stizzador. Dead in the canal, his throat cut.” The little man waved a dismissive hand and Paolo clutched the sides of his chair. Alessandro had been with the family for thirty years, had been a part of the family as much as any of them.

  “The council has deemed this to be a matter worth looking into.” He looked expectantly at the two men, but was met with silence. “Ah,” he said raising his hands in feigned recognition, “but I imagine you have deduced this for yourselves, as you are here with me in the middle of the night.” He offered a smile filled with re
gret for the inconvenience.

  “This was no robbery, or even a revenge killing for some offense,” he continued. “We believe this somehow involves a risk to the security of the Republic.”

  Paolo leaned forward in his chair. Perhaps his father was right. “I don’t understand. The security of the Republic?”

  “Yes.” The deputy smiled, spreading his hands once more in supplication. “I am sorry but I cannot say any more at this time.”

  “But you will investigate?”

  “Oh yes, absolutely.”

  “We want whoever did this to be brought to justice,” Paolo said vehemently.

  “Oh he will be,” responded the deputy, thrusting forth his head and smiling in a way that exposed only his canine teeth. Paolo pressed himself into his chair, the hard back unyielding.

  The deputy continued to smile, said no more, oblivious to, or enjoying the awkward silence that had descended upon the room. Finally, loudly placing both his hands back on his desk and taking another deep breath, he signaled the end of the meeting. He turned to Paolo.

  “And because of the sensitive nature of the investigation, you will be removed from your post at the Arsenale. I am sure you understand.”

  Paolo didn’t understand. He couldn’t see the connection between his brother’s murder and his position at the Arsenale. He looked at his father in bewilderment, but only found Tomaso mirroring his own confusion.

  He turned back to the deputy, opened his mouth to speak, but was silenced by a meaty hand on his shoulder. The man that had brought them there had returned. Paolo hadn’t heard a thing.

  “You may go,” said the deputy.

  Seven

  The knock sounded like more of an attack than the announcement of a visitor, rumbling through the small kitchen, rousing Paolo with a start. He had not slept since the encounter with the deputy, puzzling through the small hours of the night and early morning. Tomaso had returned to Murano once they left the palace, Paolo saying he could stay but his father insisting on going. Paolo wasn’t even sure how he had gotten back, as late as it was. Tomaso had always been determined though. Paolo had tried to talk to him about the strange summons and what it might mean, Tomaso as empty then as when they had been at the Doge’s Palace. They parted with few words.