Every Picture Tells a Story

by Gregory Dowling

“Yes. And I’m not exactly living in luxury now.”

  “But do you mean to say you’ve never been to London to see how your pictures sell there?”

  “No. Never had enough time or money.”

  “So you get paid everything through Busetto?” This was taking artistic dreaminess too far.

  Another all-purpose shrug. “Yes. He pays for all the materials and gives me a regular down payment for each picture. I suppose I could check that I’m getting a fair deal.…”

  I said, “If you’re interested, two hundred pounds was the price quoted to me for one of your works in London—about four hundred and fifty thousand lire.”

  “What?” This had really opened his eyes. “The stronzo gives me fifty thousand a picture. And a hundred for the—the other ones.”

  “Go and get a plane. You may find you don’t need to do those other ones anymore.”

  He was looking at his paintings and obviously making some calculations in his head. I suppose he had fallen into a passive acceptance of drudgery as his natural state. Then he said, “How much do you think they make on those other ones?”

  And I’d thought I might be helping him onto the path of honesty. I said rather sourly, “You could go and ask the top man himself. He’s coming to Venice today—and he’s staying at the Danieli, so that’ll give you an idea of the kind of money he’s making.”

  “Look, who are you and how do you know all this?”

  “I told you. An investigator. Let’s say an art-loving investigator. My advice to you is to go and find out who’s buying your pictures and set yourself up again without Busetto. Perhaps even set up somewhere else—do you have to be in Venice?”

  Shrug. “That’s what I paint.”

  “Couldn’t you equally well paint, I don’t know, Mestre?”

  He looked at me with surprise. “What—Mestre? Oh, come on.…”

  So he was just another soppy romantic. I was about to ask if he’d ever tried painting anything else but then took hold of myself; these questions were hardly pertinent to my real quest. “You’ve never heard of Toni Sambon?”

  “Who?”

  I repeated the name and he automatically shrugged but then said, “Wasn’t he some kind of terrorist?”

  “Well, he was involved. But you’ve never had anything to do with him?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “Never mind. What about the paintings you’ve disguised. How much do you know about them?”

  “I look at them.”

  Well, that was something.

  He went on: “You know, I have to choose the best way of covering them. How many layers they’ll need. I did a course in restoring. About the only useful thing I got from the Accademia.”

  “So you can tell me if you’ve ever covered over a Cima da Conegliano.”

  “No. Nothing that period. It’s almost all this seventeenth-or eighteenth-century rubbish.”

  “Nor an Alvise Vivarini then?”

  “No.”

  “A Palma il Giovane?”

  “Hundreds of them, I expect. I don’t always know the painters. Most of the time I don’t care either.”

  “Do you mean you don’t care who they are or you don’t care how you cover them?”

  “Oh, I do it properly. I don’t know what they’re like at the other end, taking it off, but I do my end properly. I suppose there are bound to be accidents sometimes, but I expect they can touch them up.”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” I’d done a lot of touching up in my time: from replacing ships’ rigging in Dutch seascapes that had been cleaned too vigorously to resupplying whole landscapes in eighteenth-century portraits. “How do they know which ones to clean off?”

  “I always paint a little green circle on them somewhere.”

  I looked at the one on the easel. In the top left-hand corner there was a green circle. “I see. What’s under that one?”

  “A portrait of some Venetian nobleman. I don’t know who by.”

  I said, “Why did Busetto call on you yesterday?”

  He looked at me sharply, but then obviously decided he wasn’t going to ask me how I knew that. He said, “I was supposed to deliver some of these paintings to him tomorrow. He came to tell me to wait a while. I don’t know why.”

  Well, it was nice to know my visit had had some effect on Busetto. It didn’t look as if this visit was going to have any effect on Zennaro—any beneficent effect, at any rate. I gazed at him and it crossed my mind that maybe if I hadn’t had that freak success in my first few years, I too would still be a drudging attic artist, getting by with occasional forgeries the eventual sales of which I would be careful never to ask about. Then, as I looked at his faded coat, faded jeans, faded hair and beard, I rejected the thought almost with revulsion: no, I might have been an exploited fool as a criminal, but I’d surely never been quite so colorlessly unenterprising with regard to my own works: my success might have been an inflated one, but I’d sweated for it—and made sure I got a fair deal. Whereas poor Zennaro, for all the stridency of his paintings and for all his quickness with a knife, was obviously a born loser.

  And then I laughed out loud: I was such a winner of course.

  “What are you laughing at?” he said, at once ready to take offense—and to take up the knife too perhaps.

  “At myself, don’t worry.”

  “Look, I’ve had enough now. You’d better get out or there’ll be trouble.”

  This was typically vague and not really very frightening but I thought maybe I should be generous enough to let him finish on an assertive note. “Okay,” I said. Then I added, “I would take back those paintings to Busetto. Just tell him you’ve had enough.”

  He answered with a shrug. Even his gestures, it struck me, were faded noncommittal versions of what body language usually was in Italy.

  “Doesn’t it interest you in the slightest to know what happens to those paintings?” I asked.

  “No, why should it?” I’d touched him on something he really felt about. “Why should I be bothered if one more crappy seventeenth-century painting gets lost or destroyed? There’s too much bloody concern for dead art. What about us living artists? Look at the money that gets spent on museums and restoring old churches and all that while I can’t pay the rent.”

  I walked to the door. Before I’d even reached it he was bending over the picture he’d stabbed. I felt no sudden rush of sympathy: the last thread of fellow feeling had been snapped by his little tirade, while I imagined the Frari church being pulled down to make way for a gallery of his paintings.

  At the last moment, before closing the door, I asked, “Did you learn knife fighting at the Accademia too?”

  “Military service,” he said.

  “I see,” I said. Of course this didn’t explain why he still carried a knife around in one of the most tranquil cities in Italy. Maybe it was just a way to make his criminal status feel big rather than just sordid.

  I went down the stairs. Signora Trevisan was now humming to Lucio Dalla. I wondered whether she’d ever find out she was living under an international art smuggler.

  11

  AS I walked back down Via Garibaldi I felt a new surge of exultation. I was getting closer and closer to that Cima, I felt sure. I didn’t need to feel so worried by time limits: I could hold Osgood off by threatening him with what I knew. I reached the end of Via Garibaldi and the view of the city spread out in splendor on the sun-dancing lagoon did its usual spirit-lifting job as well. I almost felt like painting it there and then, to prove my superiority to Zennaro.

  Except of course I’d then be up against Carpaccio, Canaletto, Guardi, Turner.…

  It was a shade hazier today—not quite the knife-edge clarity of the previous day: the Salute looked even lighter and crispier: as if one bite would reduce it to powdery flakes; it made me feel like going for another pasticcino. I resisted, however, and instead went over to the newspaper stand and bought a Gazzettino.

  My holiday spirits evaporate
d pretty damn quickly once I’d opened up the paper. The front-page news had little effect on me: it was all about trouble in the Middle East and trouble with new tax laws in Italy: another world. I passed straight to the Venice section of the paper. I was crossing the bridge over the Rio dell’Arsenale when I suddenly realized I’d seen my name. It had leaped straight into my brain while my eyes were skimming over the page, and it took me a few seconds to locate where I’d seen it. It was in a brief article at the bottom of the page with the headline:

  RISSA IN VIA GARIBALDI

  Turista inglese cade in canale

  “Brawl in Via Garibaldi. English tourist falls into canal.” I read through the article quickly. It gave the facts with reasonable accuracy: it told of my fall and rescue, the aid given by the people on the spot and in the pasticceria. It gave my name, age, address (London, England), and hotel. It was presumably from the hotel that they had obtained the information. The article mentioned the fact that many of the onlookers claimed to have seen the man I was arguing with—Michele Busetto, 47—push me in. He had denied doing so deliberately, stating that he had merely slipped. Sig. Phipps himself had upheld this version of the facts. Sig. Phipps had refused any medical attention, merely returning to his hotel for a wash and new clothes, despite the temperature and despite the fact that the canal is one of the most polluted in the city.

  How the hell had the Gazzettino got to hear about such a minor incident so quickly? Well, I suppose all Via Garibaldi had known, and ten minutes later most of Castello, and half an hour later the news was probably crossing the causeway to Mestre. You don’t have to stay very long in Venice to realize that the city, as well as being the ex-bride of the Adriatic, ex-ruler over an empire that linked east and west, ex-center of all maritime traffic, and an architectural and artistic wonder of the world, is a village. Quite possibly the editor of the Gazzettino had been in the pasticceria himself. Or his wife. Or his next-door neighbor.

  I made my way to the next newspaper stand and bought Venice’s other paper, La Nuova Venezia. I wasn’t in that. Its editor must have been in another pasticceria yesterday evening. I folded the two papers and put them under my arm and walked on down the Riva pensively. I had lost my anonymity, and all I had gained in exchange was Busetto’s home address.

  I looked at the other Venetian news. There was an article on the killings in both papers, but neither of them said anything more concrete than that the investigations were proceeding. Giudice Menegazzi had questioned several people suspected of having affiliations with extremist political groups. There was a photograph of him: he looked rather Edward G. Robinson.

  By now I was getting closer to St. Mark’s and at each bridge I crossed the crowds got thicker; well, on a sunny Sunday like this people flock into Venice from the mainland for a day out; the cold is no deterrent, but rather an excellent opportunity to flaunt fur coats. I suddenly got nervous about all these faces, all of them equipped with eyes—and I couldn’t know whose eyes. I found myself yearning for Friday’s evening fog, recalling it (quite untruthfully) as a kind of comforting cocoon that had provided a clammy but cozy anonymity.

  And then I thought about the hotel: perhaps even now they were setting the booby-trap bomb under my pillow. I turned around and started walking back. I was going to have to move elsewhere.

  When I told the young man at the desk that I’d decided to go on to Verona, he raised an eyebrow or two but made no problems. He said he would make out the bill while I got my stuff ready. He turned to my pigeonhole to give me my key and took out an envelope. “This was left for you.”

  “Oh, yes? Who by?” It bore my name in block capitals and nothing else.

  “I don’t know. I found it on the desk a moment ago when I came out of the bar.”

  “I see. Okay, thanks. I’ll be down in a minute.” I went up the stairs trying not to look too curious. As soon as I’d rounded the first corner I tore the thing open. It was written entirely in block capitals and in Italian. It read:

  MR. MARTIN PHIPPS. KEEP OUT OF THIS BUSINESS. GO BACK TO LONDON UNLESS YOU WANT YOUR NOSE TO FINISH LIKE OTHER PEOPLE’S TONGUES. THIS IS NOT A JOKE.

  A FRIEND

  In fact I didn’t feel like laughing.

  I opened my door and it didn’t explode. There were no cobras under the bed either. I threw my things into the rucksack—still slimy from the previous evening. Henry James and Lorenzetti I put into the rubbish bin.

  I paid the bill with the credit card and apologized for leaving so abruptly and for any trouble I’d caused the previous evening. Forty-five minutes later I left my luggage at the station deposit (noticing that the English translation of consegna and ritiro was still the wrong way around: it has been so since my first visit to the city). This strategy left open the possibility of my sleeping outside Venice, in Mestre or Padua—or Tuscany. Or in a couchette on the train back to London.

  But this was feeble defeatist thinking again. I left the station and walked down the Lista di Spagna, with its tacky tourist shops, all open even though it was Sunday. I had a look again at Busetto’s address according to the Gazzettino: Cannaregio followed by a four-figure number. Once again I cursed the Venetian address system. Cannaregio extends from the station almost to the Rialto and San Giovanni e Paolo. I looked at the numbers above the shops: we were in the two hundreds here. It looked as if I was going to spend another morning traipsing the back streets of the city.

  Well, there are worse ways of spending one’s time. I was glad too that it was Cannaregio, which in some ways is the most soothing sestiere. It isn’t so teasingly intricate in its geography as most of Venice; it has no large bustling squares and offers no sudden surprises—just occasional views of the lonely northern lagoon. A good walk around it might calm me down a little.

  I found the house about an hour later: it was a tall building not far from the Church of the Madonna dell’Orto. He didn’t answer his doorbell. After the success of the morning, naturally my immediate instinct was to reach for my credit card, but a few seconds’ thought deterred me. For a start there were six bells by the side of the front door, which meant there would be quite a high chance of someone walking by as I fiddled with the card on Busetto’s lock; and then Busetto was no mere bum of an artist and would probably have a better lock than Zennaro; and finally I wanted to speak to him, not just rifle through his flat.

  So I crossed a bridge over to the Fondamenta della Madonna dell’Orto. The church contains my favorite Cima: the first painting of his I ever saw and one of the greatest. I just had to hope Lucy wouldn’t be there, perhaps combining Mass with a Cima crawl.

  As I came into the open space in front of the church I saw an old tramp peering at the coat of arms by the side of the door. I recognized him: Professor Perkins, expert on Lorenzo Lotto and worst-dressed art historian in the world. Today he was wearing a coat that had apparently just been taken out of a tumble dryer, and trousers he had borrowed from Charlie Chaplin. He looked at me absently when I greeted him, “Good morning, Professor.”

  “Ah, er, yes.” He had obviously recognized me, but without any enthusiasm. I’d never meant much to him ever since I admitted I hadn’t read his article on the correct dating of Lotto’s Annunciation at Jesi.

  “Sight-seeing?” I said.

  “Well, I…” His face showed intense distaste. “I was hoping to see the Tintoretto Presentation, but they’re having some service or other.”

  “Well, it is Sunday,” I said.

  “Yes, I know. Worst day for seeing anything. Masses and suchlike in every church.”

  “Yes, thoughtless of them,” I said. “Still we can always go in and look at the Cima.” The painting is right next to the entrance door, on the very first altar.

  “Well, yes,” he said, again without any enthusiasm, “but I particularly wanted to see that Tintoretto. Some American fool in the Burlington writing about organ paintings with some theory about musical symbolism.…”

  He wittered on for a half a minute or so.
As usual, he became incomprehensible after the first ten seconds, since he took for granted that you were not only up on all the details of Burlington Magazine controversies, but also knew all the little private nicknames that were in current usage among art historians. “So I decided I’d prove quite definitely that it couldn’t have been painted with that in mind by going to the original contract for the painting, but then old Foulface came out with some nonsense about the painting not respecting certain stipulations anyway, so I thought I’d better check up on the foreground figures. And I find I can’t get close to the thing after walking all the way over here.”

  “Let’s go and look at the Cima anyway,” I said. “That’s worth any walk.” Even a walk across boring old Venice, I decided not to add.

  He followed me in again. I was pleased to see the painting was still there despite Busetto living so nearby. I hoped the lock on the church door was better than Zennaro’s. Professor Perkins started up sotto voce about the fatuously incorrect identification of the buildings in the background on the part of another American, but I managed to blank out his voice as I gazed. John the Baptist and four saints under a ruined classical portico. A clear wintry light that seemed to come from the window of the church itself, and a sharply painted background of castles and hills. I felt a much-needed sense of calm come over me.

  You can’t look at a painting like this one and be agitated. After just a few seconds I felt all the tension go out of me. And after a minute I felt as if I’d done a full course of yoga. I was glad Mass was going on; otherwise Professor Perkins would certainly drag me over to see the Tintorettos, and for all my admiration for him (Tintoretto, not the professor) he was what I didn’t need just then: his Last Judgment with its swirling turmoil of bodies and skeletons, angels and demons, would not sustain the mood of calm. (It sent Effie Ruskin running out of the church.) And I hadn’t felt so good since—well, since the last Cima. The evening before. And this time there was no voice from the past to sound the last trump in my ear.

  “Look at that owl,” I whispered. “I’d forgotten about him.”