Every Picture Tells a Story

by Gregory Dowling

  “What was that?” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Listen.”

  And I heard it too—a yelp or bellow, apparently from next door. From Palazzo Sambon. It was a male voice and it was impossible to interpret the emotion behind it beyond the fact that it seemed to be uttering the protracted e sound of the English word help.

  We both leaned out as far as possible, but could see nothing. And then there was a flicker of light apparently from one of the windows—as if a swirling torch beam had momentarily stabbed through a chink in the shutters —perhaps.

  “It’s from there,” she said, “isn’t it?”

  “Yes. We’d better—”

  “What?”

  “Go and see.”

  “You’re not going to climb out—”

  “No, of course not,” I said, already turning from the window. “I’ll go down to that loose shutter in the alleyway.” I put my anorak on. “Where’s that torch?”

  She took it from a drawer in the bedside table. I said, “Thanks. I won’t do anything silly,” though I wondered whether going to see was in itself silly. I picked up the front-door key and slid out of the room before she could make any further protest. I went down the stairs on tiptoes, and when I reached the first floor, I took a glove from my pocket and stuffed it between the bell and the clapper. I didn’t want any more attention called to myself than necessary. When I opened the front door onto the square, I was pleased to note that there was no tinkle, even muffled, from above.

  The square outside was deserted, a cool windless expanse. I ran alongside the front of Palazzo Sambon, staring up at its stained white facade. The windows were, as ever, shuttered and silent. I turned left down the alley that ran along the side of the palazzo toward the canal. I reached the window with the loose shutter. The shutter was in fact pushed wide open.

  I stared into the black silent interior. I switched the torch on and its beam prodded a few yards into the damp gloom. There was nothing to see—or to hear.

  Suddenly there were footsteps from the campo and I spun around guiltily. I recognized Lucy almost immediately—but that almost meant a split second in which my heart was pounding at my teeth.

  “What the—” I started in a hoarse whisper.

  “Did you think I was going to let you go in there alone?” she whispered back.

  She’d gotten dressed in absolutely record time. I could see her black cords below the big gray coat. She peered through the window. Still no noise, no movement. She took hold of my arm, which saved me from grabbing hold of hers. “You sure we should go in?”

  Of course I wasn’t. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I’d said it now. “You wait here.” I put the torch in my pocket and placed my hands on the sill.

  “Don’t be stupid. Of course I’m coming too.”

  I didn’t argue with her. I swung myself up and over in two reasonably graceful actions. I then stood by to help her over: she did it in one extremely graceful action. I got the torch out and played it around the room. It was a small side room and an empty doorway opposite gave onto the main entrance hall.

  We stood still and listened again. Still there was nothing.

  “Turn the torch off,” she whispered.

  “Why?” I said, doing so and plunging ourselves into complete blackness.

  “You don’t want to warn them—”

  “Don’t I? Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe the voice wasn’t from here anyway,” I said.

  “You know it was.”

  I started toward the doorway and she let out a whispered scream. “Where are you?”

  “Here.” I stretched my hand out and took hers.

  “Don’t leave me, whatever you do.”

  “No,” I said, and added rather foolishly, “never.”

  We passed through into the entrance hall and I switched the torch back on again, turning its beam to the left in the direction of the entrance door from the square, and then to the right toward the watergate. There was nothing to be seen, and only the sloshing of the water at the steps to be heard. In the opposite wall was the arched entrance to the stairway.

  “We’re not going up there, are we?” she said.

  “You can wait here if you like.”

  “On my own? You don’t think we should—we should call the police.…”

  “Well, not now we’ve come in,” I said, as if my only concern was not to look inconsistent to some unseen observer. And I started firmly toward the staircase. I was even on the point of saying something encouraging or comforting when she whispered, “You’re crushing my fingers.”

  “Oh, sorry.” We paused at the foot of the stairs and I played the beam up their gray dusty extent and tried not to think of Psycho. We started slowly upward. This was possibly the stupidest thing I’d done so far, I suddenly thought, and then thought, So why not stop now?

  Because that would be even stupider.

  We kept walking, and I felt our hands getting damply glued together, as if they were trying to blend in with the building’s atmosphere.

  We reached the big arched doorway to the first floor and the torchlight revealed gray stucco work and flickering frescoes: dynasties of Sambons, I imagined, staring down at us with hostility. As we passed through the doorway someone—an only dimly seen dark shape —leaped at me, striking at the torch with one hand. Lucy screamed—and so did I probably, I can’t really remember. The torch fell to the ground, swirling shadows around the room like great Dracula cloaks. I was turning to this figure when a fist—presumably his—smashed into my jaw and I lost my footing. I rolled over and stared confusedly back up to where Lucy was struggling with the assailant. The torch was pointing across the floor in the opposite direction, so all I could see were the squirming dark shapes of their two grappling bodies in the doorway. Lucy’s voice came breathily clear: “Let go, let me go—” The other person was saying nothing. I was just rising when all movement stopped and a new voice whispered in Italian, “Don’t move or I slit her throat.”

  My eyes worked out that he was standing behind her with something held to her throat. It wasn’t actually glinting in the torchlight, but I was prepared to believe that it would if I turned the light on it. Lucy’s arms were both pulled behind her back.

  “Oh, my God,” Lucy said, and her voice sounded merely tired.

  “Don’t move,” the voice whispered again. It was male and Veneto and slightly muffled. I didn’t recognize it. I couldn’t make out the features of the man, just that he had a scarf pushed up to the level of his eyes.

  We didn’t move. For five seconds. Then I said, “Look, how long—”

  “Shut up. Take hold of the torch—slowly—and turn it off.”

  I realized those five seconds hadn’t been merely a terror tactic. He’d been trying to work out what to do. I obeyed his instructions, and thought with an almost sick feeling how infinitely more horrible this sudden darkness must be for Lucy than for me.

  “Now throw it across the room. And no tricks. I’ve still got this knife at your friend’s throat. Go on, throw it.”

  I was trying to think if I had anything else on me that would convincingly sound like a torch thrown, but all I had was a packet of paper hankies. With an underarm lob I sent the torch skidding as undestructively as possible across the floor. I heard it clunk into the opposite wall.

  Then suddenly Lucy let out a gasp and I heard her stagger forward and fall. The man’s footsteps clattered down the stairs.

  “You okay?” I said, slithering toward her.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” she said in three gasps that weren’t quite sobs.

  I reached her. She was kneeling up and we clung to each other in that position. She breathed short and hard against me but didn’t burst into tears. Neither did I, for that matter.

  “Who was it?” she said after a few seconds.

  “God knows.”

  “Get the torch.”

  “Yes.”
All this, rather pointlessly perhaps, was still in a whisper.

  I got to my feet and moved to where I thought the torch must have landed. I groped around on the cold dusty marble. After a few seconds Lucy said in a hoarse whisper, “Where are you?” and the question was taken up by the Sambons all around the big chilly room. I found it and switched it on, illuminating Lucy, still kneeling with her hands clasped tight, like a pious Victorian painting. She stood up and I walked toward her.

  “He wasn’t the person we heard yelling,” Lucy said.

  “No,” I said. Our voices were just a little less tense, though not much louder. It was as if we thought that the place couldn’t have any worse surprises. “Let’s check the rooms out here,” I went on.

  We moved to the nearest one, Lucy again holding on to my arm, though lightly, not desperately. I shone the torch through the doorway, and before I’d even seen anything I felt her fingers crook from touch to clutch.

  And then I saw too. It was only because she’d been to my left that she’d seen it sooner than I had, not because it was in any way difficult to see. Osgood couldn’t be that, alive or dead. Now he was dead.

  He lay flat on the floor—well, not flat of course, but supine. His swelling hill of a belly had two great wounds from which blood was still flowing, and his forehead was blown away. It was difficult in the torchlight to see where his red scarf ended and the blood began.

  “Look at the hands,” Lucy said. I straightaway knew what to expect. And I was right. I shifted the torchlight and found the soggy heap of fingers some inches away. There was a stained meat hatchet lying with them. I left the light on them till Lucy said, “Stop it, stop it.”

  I played the torch quickly over the rest of the room: cobwebby walls and grimy marble floor. A spider scuttled across the floor and hid beneath a large pistol on the floor. I kept the torch on it. It had what looked like a telephoto lens for a barrel. I guessed it was a silencer.

  “Don’t touch it,” Lucy said.

  “I’m not going to,” I said. “There’s a spider. I mean—” I found myself giving a stupid nervous laugh. I forced myself to speak calmly. “I suppose he forgot it in the panic.”

  “He must have put it down to—to do that with the fingers. God, it’s sick.” She was still clutching deep into my arm—as if to assure herself that I was still there. Or that her fingers were.

  “Yes. You feel all right?”

  “I’m not going to be sick, if that’s what you mean. It’s Osgood, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “God, it’s sick. Come on, let’s get out.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  We went back down the stairs in silence and across the empty hall. There was still no sound but the swirling and sloshing at the watergate steps. We found the shutters still wide open. I peered out; there was no one in the alley. I climbed out and then gave Lucy an unnecessary hand. “Let’s go straight to the hotel,” I said, “where we can think about what to do.”

  “What do you mean, think? It’s obvious, isn’t it? We call the police.”

  “Please, let’s get out of the open first and then we can discuss.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss. All right, I’m coming.”

  We entered the hotel and tiptoed on up the stairs. We could hear the television on in the signora’s room: she was having to put up with a Neapolitan comedian. I removed my glove from the bell.

  As soon as we were in the bedroom I said, “Look, Lucy, it’s not so easy as all that.”

  “This is bloody murder, Martin. And bloody bloody murder.” I noticed how bloodless she was. She sat on the bed and I saw her hands were shaking.

  “I know.”

  “Look, every moment you put off going to the phone, you’re giving that bastard extra time to escape.”

  “Yes, but—” I stopped. “Listen.”

  The distant sound of a motorboat could be heard. I went to the window and opened it. It wasn’t in this canal, which was too congested with parked boats to permit any movement anyway. Around the corner in the next canal I could hear the boat coming to a stop and a hubbub of voices. I went and opened the door onto the corridor. We could now hear voices and running footsteps in the campo. A voice shouted, “Fermi, polizia!”

  “I don’t think there’s any urgency for us to intervene,” I said.

  “Yes, but—but we’ve got to tell them what we saw.”

  “Why? Could you describe the man who attacked you?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point then?”

  “You tell them the whole truth. All of it.”

  “We’ve been through all this. Look, I’m not going to the police. Do you know how long people wait in prison in this country just to get put on trial? And terrorist suspects don’t get kid-glove treatment either.”

  “Look, Martin—”

  “There’s no look about it. You haven’t been to prison and I have. And I know I don’t ever want to go back again.”

  “Okay, okay. What about earlier this evening? Those men who attacked you. I saw them. I could tell the police about them.”

  “Go on, describe them.”

  “They—they both had beards, dark hair—er, big coats. One had tinted glasses. Um…”

  “False beards, wigs, and fake glasses. Before going into action, these guys disguise themselves. Did you see their features at all?”

  “Well, they were turned away from me in the restaurant and—and outside it was dark.”

  “So you’ve got nothing to tell the police of any use. Take my advice, keep your head down.” I went to the window and listened. I could hear the sound of distant shouting voices and clumping feet.

  “This is bloody irresponsible,” she said, her voice shaking as well as her hands now.

  “Well, that’s the way I am,” I said. I was forcing my voice to remain calm, and it came out more sarcastic than I intended.

  “And suppose they come in here to question people in the hotel?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll clear out, spare you all possible embarrassment. Okay?”

  “You can’t—where are you going to go?”

  “Don’t let it bother you. Just forget you’ve ever seen me.”

  “Martin, don’t be such a bloody fool, you—”

  “Look, just face it. I am a bloody fool and I am bloody irresponsible and that’s all there bloody well is to it. Okay?” I was mainly scared and flustered by that point, but it was easier to express myself in anger. Why couldn’t she understand what the thought of jail meant to me?

  “How are you going to get out anyway? There’ll be policemen all over the square.”

  “I’ll go down to the canal and make my way along the boats to the bridge.”

  “You’re mad—they’ll catch you.”

  “Well, if they do, I’ll confess everything this time. Unless you’d prefer me to keep your name out of things. I don’t want to screw your job up.”

  “Just my whole bloody emotional life. Go on then. Get out. I don’t want to hear any more sarcastic cracks.”

  I picked up my shoulder bag and slung it around my neck and then went to the door, my eyes glancing around the room to see if I’d forgotten anything. As I opened it she said, “Martin—” Her voice had a sudden pleading note, and I looked and saw her hands stretched out in a vague gesture of conciliation.

  I stood there for half a second and felt a great urge to chuck my bag down and just bury myself in her arms. Then there was another cry of “Polizia!” from next door and I gave a quick resolute headshake. “Ciao,” I said. “It was good…” and I pulled the door to. Again I didn’t know what I meant by this exit line, but I suppose it was meant as final. What possible point could there be in trying to make things up at that moment? Better to accept the clean break.

  I reached the first floor and heard the television still on; she was watching a film with two Sicilian comedians now; maybe it was some kind of penitential rite for her. I tiptoed on
down to the ground floor. I made my way to the back of the dark entrance hall, where a small window gave onto the canal. It refused to open at my first pull; it was rusted into place. Another tug and it jerked open with a sharp grating noise. I stood rigidly silent—except for my heart—and listened to the policemen’s voices and the Sicilian comedians. There was no other noise; no laughter from the signora and no sign of perturbation either. I brushed off my anorak the little rush of rust that had fallen there and pulled myself onto the sill. There wasn’t any sign of life from Palazzo Sambon; no shutters had been opened as far as I could see, and only faint voices could be heard. I looked at the building opposite and saw that all its shutters were closed as well. It seemed I would be unobserved.

  I lowered myself down to the boat below the window, which rocked under my weight. There was a bridge about twenty yards beyond Palazzo Sambon, and as far as I could see there were boats tied up all the way down the canal. Obviously the tricky part of my trip would be passing in front of the palazzo: if they were to open a shutter at that moment, or the watergate itself, I would find it hard to explain myself.

  I started my progress, clambering from boat to boat, getting my feet wet in some of them, where the owner hadn’t bothered to bail out. I passed below the windows of Palazzo Sambon, glancing up and seeing the dark shutters all still in place. Then, just as I was stepping into a small rickety canoe moored in front of the palazzo’s seaweedy steps I heard voices on the other side of the door: “Open that door.”

  Any precipitate movement on my part would set the boat sloshing wildly, sending giveaway slobbers of spray into the palazzo itself. And yet only precipitate action would get me away. I could see tiny stabs of light at the crack at the foot of the door, showing they were carrying torches. The moment the door was opened I’d be caught like a rabbit in car headlights. I couldn’t even curl up at the bottom of the boat, it was so small. I looked desperately around while I heard fiddling and scraping at the other side of the door.

  “Sorry, sir, it’s locked,” said a southern voice.

  “Oh, leave it then. They didn’t get out that way obviously.”