A new crisis calls for a new purpose, and this purpose felt good to me. It was nearly enough: and when I added to myself, “And I’m going to get those two bastards,” I knew it was fully enough. It meant I wasn’t going to play safe any longer.
I tidied the house up to the accompaniment of a cassette of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, after which I set out for central London again. It had stopped raining.
On the tube I tried to think a little more concretely about the whole business. First of all, who had the painting? presumably Toni Sambon. He (and perhaps his agent in Venice, whoever that might be) was/were trying to sell the thing to Osgood. Those two masked thugs knew he had it and had traced him to England, but had got to his flat just too late to nab him. Toni, judging from his extreme terror of the previous night, knew that someone was after him: maybe, come to think of it, it had been because he’d seen me apparently lurking around the house last night that he’d moved off the next day. Even if he’d recognized that it was me, the fact that I was keeping tabs would have been enough to scare him, or at least make him very wary. If so, I’d saved him—saved his life perhaps.
Now those two thugs: just who were they? From some of the language they’d used I’d guess they were political thugs—terrorists. (And probably this meant that the name Alfredo was just an assumed “combat” name.) So what did terrorists want with a Cima Madonna and Bambino? Hardly the sort of thing to inflame the passions of the oppressed masses. Well, they’d said they had a buyer, so the answer must simply be money. Terrorists were always carrying out bank raids to finance their operations, and no doubt a suitable buyer would pay enough for the Cima to make it worth their while to come to England after it—and do over a lonely London artist or two along the line.
I’d have to find out somehow who had taken the thing in the first place: why hadn’t I followed up the case at the time? All I knew was that one of the other paintings stolen at the same time had passed through Osgood’s hands very shortly after the original theft: the small Palma il Giovane—perhaps because it was small and thus more easily smuggled. Toni had only had a photograph of the Cima, so perhaps that was still in Italy.
One little point: if they were terrorists, why had they had toy guns? Again, perhaps a question of smuggling; they might not risk crossing borders with their real guns. So it would probably be wise of me to try to keep my dealings with them in this country.
But I realized I was already relishing the idea of a journey abroad. To my favorite foreign country—and my favorite foreign city, which had been mentioned a few times so far: it was Toni’s and Palma il Giovane’s and Alvise Vivarini’s hometown, and Cima’s adopted town, and it was where Toni’s mysterious “agent” was. And anyway I wasn’t playing safe any longer, was I?
In fact it would be nice for “abroad” to have a thrill of daring about it once again—just as it had always had in the past, when taking my holiday on the Continent had been another act of rebellion against the family (though always followed up by my usual guilt-assuaging presents of Perugina chocolate and souvenir tea towels on return).
So, first of all to Osgood again, and a few rather more pointed questions this time: his threats to queer my reviews would sound a bit silly now. I thought of the fact that I hadn’t mentioned his name to the thugs the previous night. Well, it certainly hadn’t been in order to protect the poor man; I suppose there just hadn’t seemed to be any advantage in giving his name away—and perhaps it had been the first indication of my new role as savior of Cima da Conegliano from the barbarians.
The Alma-Tadema was still there in the window, giving the come-on to all passersby. Melinda gave me a rather less fleshly welcome as I entered. It was just the word Hello, but breathed forth like a mystic enchantment.
“Hi,” I said, “Ozzers in?”
“Oh, no, he’s gone.”
“How do you mean, gone?”
“Gone to the Continent. For a couple of weeks.”
“What? I mean, did you know—that is, when?”
“Well, when I say he’s gone, he’s going. His plane leaves this afternoon. He just came in this morning and announced his decision and I had to book him on the earliest plane.” Which would still be a lower plane than the one she lived on, her dreamy tone suggested.
“Kind of sudden then.”
“Oh, yes. But he’s often like that. He was planning to go very soon anyway. I just had to anticipate everything.”
“And where he’s going exactly?” I said, guessing the answer.
“Paris.”
I’d guessed wrong. “Oh.”
“And then a few other places. Ending up in Venice, I think.”
Not so wrong. “When’s he getting to Venice?”
“I’m not sure. He only got me to book the first part of the journey. But I suppose after a week or so. He mentioned Lyons and Milan as well, you see.”
“And I suppose you don’t know where he’ll be staying in Venice?”
“No. He usually calls us from each place and lets us know his number then, in case of anything urgent coming up. Is it still this Cima you’re interested in?”
“That’s right. The man with the ducks. Osgood didn’t say anything about it, did he?”
“No. He never talks to me about the pictures.”
This seemed odd in a picture gallery. “And you don’t have any idea what he’s going to Venice for?”
“No. You do promise that you’re nothing to do with the police?”
“Do I look like it?”
“No. You haven’t got that fascist aura.”
“At heart I’m an anarchist too,” I assured her. Well, I felt like one that morning anyway. “I’m just curious. I’m trying to trace this picture. So you’ve no idea what he might be doing in Venice?”
“Well, I suppose he might be going to see Zennaro.”
“Who?”
“He’s a painter in Venice that Ozzers is interested in. He sometimes sells through the Blue Moon.”
“Ah. Any good?”
“We-ell…” Her face puckered into unwonted frowning lines. “Rather traditional sort of stuff. Not really a Blue Moon artist, if you know what I mean. I don’t know why Ozzers is so fond of him.”
“Well, thanks for all your help—and, again, it would probably be best not to mention anything to Osgood. Oh, where in Soho is the Blue Moon? It sounds a place I should get to know.”
She told me and I thanked her. “Oh and by the way, I’m afraid that invitation for the private view is no longer valid.”
“Oh.”
“No. I had a bit of a fire. Lost all the paintings.”
“Oh, what a shame,” she said, as if I were telling her of how I dropped a Yorkie Bar down a drain. “Well, better luck next time.”
“Thank you.” I said good-bye and she returned to her newspaper. Judging from her look of concentration, it was Doonesbury she was now reading.
* * *
As usual in the daylight, Soho looked a little apologetic for its sleaziness. The doorman at the strip club next to the Blue Moon invited me in as I walked by, but without much conviction. The photos in his window weren’t anything like as sexy as the picture in Osgood’s window. The Blue Moon looked even sleazier and more apologetic than its neighbors: the window needed cleaning and the final n of the name on the signboard was dangling by one nail, so that it looked like an overlarge comma. I passed under it quickly.
I peered through the glass and saw a window display of what looked like upturned brooms of varying sizes, all of which were sprouting large colored wings. There was a title below: Angels of the House.
I walked in. At first sight the place looked like a secondhand shop for domestic appliances. There were ancient Hoovers, mops, brushes, clothes racks, coat stands, shelf brackets.… But then one saw the strange position or color or decoration of each object—the Hoover upside down embedded in concrete, with a knotted scarf around its roofward-pointing nozzle (Char was the curt title to this one), the cloth
es rack draped with shredded pieces of Union Jack, two coat stands leaning toward each other with their pegs turning into entwined tentacles (Desire).… A plump man in a black shirt and tight jeans was sitting with a copy of Time Out in a wicker chair next to the Hoover.
He did no more than glance at me, so I kept pottering around. The whole of the front room of the gallery was given over to this jumble. But there was another room beyond that was full of paintings. They were in various styles, each labeled with an artist’s name and a number. No prices. None of it was my sort of stuff. I looked around for anything with a Venetian subject, but it was difficult to recognize any subject anywhere: then I saw the name Zennaro next to what looked like a geometrical problem from a math book that had been colored in by some bored pupil. Staring hard, I realized that the shapes bore a kind of diagrammatic resemblance to some of the more famous buildings of Venice, like San Giorgio Maggiore, the Rialto Bridge, the Bridge of Sighs. They were all superimposed on one another and painted in the brightest oranges, purples, greens.…
I went back to the broom-cupboard half of the gallery and approached the man in the wicker chair. He looked up and said, “Hi.”
“Er, hi. I’m interested in that Zennaro painting. Do you have any more of his stuff?”
He didn’t curl his lip at my taste, but it took him a second or two to put his look of professional interest on. “Oh, yeah, Zennaro. Up-and-coming. We don’t have anything else just at the moment. He’s getting a name over here. If you’re interested in that one, it’s going for two hundred and twenty.”
“Ah. Well, no. I’m not too keen on the colors there, but I like the style. I’m thinking of my wallpaper, you see. It would clash.”
“Yes, of course.” He relaxed in his chair, perhaps realizing there would be no need to bother pulling out any jargon on me.
“It was Mr. Osgood who put me onto this man Zennaro,” I said.
He definitely blinked in surprise, but then his face went professionally smooth again. “Oh, yeah? Well, he put you onto a pretty good thing, I reckon. Definitely up-and-coming.”
“It was a bit of a surprise to me,” I said. “I didn’t know Mr. Osgood dealt with this end of the market.”
“Yeah, well, in fact he only comes to us for a bit of cleaning now and again. We do some cleaning and restoring in the back room there. Sideline like.” He indicated a closed door in the far wall.
“Oh, so Osgood’s got nothing to do with this gallery in fact.”
“No.” He said it a shade too vehemently. “Well, call again. We’ll probably have a Zennaro you’ll like sooner or later.”
“I don’t suppose I could have a peep into the cleaning room? I’d be awfully fascinated.” I found I was slipping into an upper-class-twit role. Anything to persuade him I was harmless.
“Afraid not.” His tone was quite firm. He didn’t offer any explanation and I didn’t press for one. To be fair, very few restorers would welcome observers while they worked; all trades have their secrets, and the art trade more than most.
“Oh, well, it was just a thought,” I said. “I’ll pop by again to see if you’ve got a Zennaro that would tone in nicely.”
“Yeah, sure.” He returned to Time Out.
“Well, good-bye and thanks awfully.” I just managed to stop myself adding “toodle-pip,” and then when I reached the door I thought, Why not? and turned and said it. After all, I wasn’t likely ever to return—certainly not to see the paintings.
6
I TOOK the train to Venice. I wanted to know that I was traveling, feel the miles that I was covering. And my journey on the 14:30 from Victoria was unambiguously a journey: a choppy Channel crossing; the lights and bustle of the Gare du Nord and then Gare de Lyon; fitful sleep in the couchette with the mysterious SNCR nappy-liner sheets and the heating on too high; standing out in the corridor with other bleary-eyed passengers, watching Lago Maggiore and its islands slip by under a steady drizzle; the fascist architecture of Milan station, and the noise of Italy and Italians. And then the last three and a half hours to Venice with occasional glances at the hazy Po plain and occasional reading of an Agatha Christie novel.
I was feeling good—or, at least, I was feeling certain that I was doing the right thing: the right thing to get me on the road to feeling good.
Even the last-minute phone call to my mother hadn’t left me as guilty as it usually did. She hadn’t given me the line about my only ever calling her to tell her I was going away, and she had actually finished by telling me to enjoy myself. Of course I hadn’t filled her in on any of the background reasons for the trip.
After Mestre I put my book away and just watched as blocks of flats gave way to oil refineries on the right, and to mud and river on the left, and then as both these gave way to the lagoon, an almost rippleless expanse of olive-oil green, hazing away to gray on the horizon. It must have been two years since I last enjoyed this spectacle, this unparalleled sense of arrival. And as I came out of the station with my rucksack on my back and saw the Grand Canal there in front of me, I asked myself that corny question, why should this saddest of cities have the power to lift the heart so?
For I felt great. It’s a case of true love between me and the city. At least it is on my part; the Serenissima, of course, is a two-faced old bitch—but, as with Cleopatra, that’s half her charm.
I first came to the city when a student (that same holiday during which I saw the Cima in fact). I’d been hitching up and down Italy and was already half-drunk with the country and with the beauty of the art and the women; Venice—even in August, with the hordes of trippers and the inflated prices and the mosquitoes—was the final cup. I just floated around the place in a sort of ecstatic dream: I was my own gondola. I know I spent one whole night wandering the empty streets, finally watching sunrise come up over the Lido from the Punto della Dogana, and feeling, as I felt now, besotted.
In later years I had shamelessly pulled strings to get a job each year on that pre-university course, and my love for the place only increased with each visit. All this of course lays me open to the scorn of those who point to the city’s artificiality, its debased role as museum cum funfair, its tattered gaudy beauty, like that of an old whore with cheap crowd-pulling clothes and makeup. But I feel that what such people are really bugged by is Venice’s too-accessible beauty: they usually go on to profess a preference for some out-of-the-way place like Bassano or Feltre, as one might claim to prefer Balakirev to Tchaikovsky, Morisot to Renoir. You have, in fact, to make a very conscious effort at resistance to be scornful about Venice, and I see no reason to. I just swoon straight into her clammy arms.
I took the vaporetto down the Grand Canal and sat out front in the cold gray air, the only person foolish enough to do so. As so often in winter, it was quite a bit colder in Venice than in London. By the time we reached St. Mark’s I was frozen, with my ears likely to shatter into ice splinters if touched.
As the boat pulled out again into the lagoon, with me still foolishly sitting there, admiring the glimpse of the greatest square in the world, and noticing they still hadn’t put the winged lion back on the pillar at the water’s edge, somebody tapped my shoulder. I glanced around and saw a uniform. I fished out my ticket and offered it.
“No, signore, documenti, passaporto.”
I realized it wasn’t a ticket inspector but a carabiniere—complete with gun hanging on his shoulder. I fished out my passport from my anorak pocket. “Why?” I said.
He made no answer but looked through its pages. I looked back down the boat and saw another carabiniere passing down the cabin. He too had a gun at the ready.
The one standing over me handed me back my passport. “Turista?”
I explained I was going to a hotel near Via Garibaldi. He nodded and left. I noticed the resigned faces of all the passengers as they proffered their documents. The carabinieri got off at the next stop, San Zaccaria.
I got off at the stop after that, the Arsenale, and I made my way throug
h the various stalls and attractions of the city’s winter funfair to a small cheap hotel I’d stayed at on a couple of occasions when my accommodation wasn’t being paid for by others. I got a single room without a bath, from which I could, if I leaned far enough out of the window, see a strip of lagoon. Otherwise I saw a blank wall about six feet away.
It struck me, as I looked around this completely anonymous room—bed with coverlet well turned down, hard chair, never-to-be-used wardrobe, sink without a plug, and chipped water glass—that it felt more comfortable to me than Jim’s house. Maybe, despite all my half hankerings for a home, I was naturally a cheap-hotel dweller.
I stripped, washed, and put on clean clothes and then set out. It was already dusk, and cobwebby mist was creeping up on the city, swathing even the funfair in its forlorn embrace. The children clung to their damp miniplanes, cars, and trains with scared-looking faces; the lights of the various stalls all glowed fuzzily, distantly. The only real life was to be found in the arcade of the videogames—a barrage of buzzing and crashing and bleeping and squealing; but the people using the machines were all grim-faced and mute.
I looked at this scene and suddenly found myself accepting the invitation of the fog to indulge in exquisite melancholy. Instead of turning right toward St. Mark’s, the natural direction of all feet on their first day in Venice, I turned left toward the Public Gardens. I walked on past the last stalls, and then there was just the steady dull clanging of the fog-warning bell somewhere out in the lagoon and the occasional mournful hoot from a boat. To my right the lagoon was a gray blur. There was hardly anyone around. I reached the gardens and walked along its gravelly paths, with just the cats and statues for company—and of course my memories. I stopped at a damp bench near a bust of Verdi and sat down. The bush that hid him from a bust of Wagner hadn’t been trimmed, I was pleased to note. I found myself humming Celeste Aïda.
On our very first entwined walk Lucy and I had sat on this bench, in very similar weather, and among other things Lucy had taught me some tunes from Aïda—it was, she’d explained, Verdi’s warmest opera. She had been shocked to learn that I’d never been to or heard a single opera of Verdi’s. (I still haven’t, but I know every word of the aria Celeste Aïda: it became our song.)
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