“You make a habit of hanging around outside restaurants then,” Lucy said.
“I didn’t have any choice, did I? Then when he came out he didn’t start going back in the direction of the hotel, so I thought, Well, I’ll just follow him, see where he’s going, and he went to the Rialto and got on a vaporetto going toward the station. I thought, Well, I can’t speak to him here, on the vaporetto, and anyway by now I was really curious. I mean, what was he doing wandering around Venice in the middle of the night? He got off at San Marcuola and made his way up here, through Cannaregio, looking at a map. And then I saw him go down that alley by the side of the palazzo.” He said this pointing at the alley in question, as we had just come out into the square. The hotel had several windows lit up tonight; presumably the students kept late hours.
“So,” he continued, “I kept following him. I mean, a great fat man like that, climbing through windows.”
“It must have been quite a sight,” I agreed.
“Weren’t you scared?” Lucy said.
“Well, a bit. But mostly I thought it would be great to take him by surprise in there. I mean, that would really give me the—the advantage.”
I said, “And instead…” and let the sentence trail away. We had all stopped in the middle of the square and were looking up through the gathering mist at the cracked elegance of Palazzo Sambon. We could hear the sound of chatter from the hotel—jolly public-school vowel sounds drifting through the mist.
“Well, I’d gone up the stairs, feeling my way, and was sort of groping around on the first floor, and then I heard a scream—I mean, a really horrible scream—and gunshots … with a silencer, but gunshots all the same. Then somebody comes running out at me and swipes at me with the gun. I fall over and lie there for a bit, feeling sick. I don’t know how long for. When I get up I want to go back down the stairs, but I go in the wrong direction and I find Osgood’s body. So then I make for the stairs as quickly as possible—but bump into you. Well, I didn’t know it was you until I heard you speak. But all I wanted was to get out.”
“I see,” I said again.
“Anyway, after that I decided it was best to clear out of my flat and go and lie low for a bit. So I went and stayed with a friend of mine in—” He stopped, obviously deciding it was better not to say where. “And then tonight I’m watching the news and I see you. And I decide I’ve got to find out where I stand: what’s been going on—and who the hell are you.” He went silent. The whole account had come out in his usual plaintive, half-sulky tones, as of a child explaining just why he’d been forced to steal his younger brother’s lollipop.
“You’d better go along and tell the police all this,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? And they’re going to believe me?”
“Why shouldn’t they?”
He ignored this question. “And anyway what’s the point, seeing as they know the guy who did it’s dead?”
“Gerosa?”
“Yes, that terrorist the police shot.”
I said, “So why did you tell us all this if you don’t want to tell the police?”
“Well, I didn’t come along meaning to tell you all this. I wanted to get an explanation—to see where I stood.”
“What do you mean, where you stood?”
“Well, I wanted to check out—to check out if you’d recognized me or not that night. I was going to ask sort of discreet questions. But when she suddenly jumped away like that, I realized she’d recognized my voice.”
“Well, it was pretty silly to whisper in exactly the same way you’d done that night,” Lucy said—a schoolmistress reprimanding a silly boy with chalk on his hands after writing a rude word on the blackboard.
He immediately went on the whining defensive. “But I wasn’t—I was doing a hoarse one this time. At least that’s what I meant it to be. And I was speaking with a Ciosoto accent.”
“Ciosoto?” Lucy said.
“From Chioggia,” I informed her. I said to him, “Well, maybe that was just a bit oversubtle for us.”
“But anyway,” he said, “once you’d recognized me I just wanted to make it clear that I didn’t have anything to do with the murder.”
Lucy said in English, “Martin, we’ve got to let the police know this.”
“Yes, I know. Persuade him, though.”
She turned to him. “Come into the hotel with us and we’ll talk it all through.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I’m not stupid.”
This was too stupid to be argued with. I said, “Look, you can’t stay on the run forever.”
“Why? Are you going to give me away?”
“These are things the police have to know.”
“Well, not from me.”
“Okay then, from us.”
“But then you’ll have to tell them you were there too,” he said with a note of triumph.
“We already have done,” I said.
“What?” His triumph took a nosedive. “But—but—” Clearly he’d been basing this whole encounter on the assumption that we had things to hide as well. He said, “I don’t believe you.” But his voice was uncertain.
“That’s up to you. But I expect the newspapers will tell you so tomorrow.”
“Look, I—look, I’d better go—that is—see you—” He backed away from us, still blathering. Then he halted and said, “Er, my knife…” It was a plea, not an order.
I half expected Lucy to say she was confiscating it permanently, but she tossed it to him. Of course he missed it and had to go groping on the ground, nearly tripping over his cloak in the process. Then he ran off into the mist.
“Not quite Al Capone,” Lucy said.
I said, “This is serious.”
“Yes, I know. But does it change anything right now? Can’t it wait till the morning?”
“Well, probably.” You can’t beat good old procrastination.
A light went off in the hotel. I said, “Let’s walk around a bit, shall we? Wait until they’ve all gone to bed.”
“Martin, it’s cold.”
“Well, we’ll walk quickly. Let’s just go down the side of Palazzo Sambon.”
“Have you gone completely mad?”
“No. I just have a—well, I suppose it’s what you call a hunch.”
“What about?”
“I don’t know. Various things.”
“About what—what’s-his-name was saying?”
“What’s his name?”
“Yes, him.”
“No, go on Lucy, tell me his name.”
“But you know it.”
“Yes, but do you?” I had turned and placed my good hand on her shoulder as I said this.
“Does it matter? He’s Busetto—no, Zanaldo.”
“Zennaro. Zennaro. Busetto was the one who was paying him, the one who got killed.”
“Yes, I remember. Martin, what’s the matter with you?”
“Come with me.” I took her by the hand and led her down that narrow alley toward the canal. She made a token attempt to draw back, but then resigned herself to my madness. The window at the end of the alley by which we’d entered had a new shutter, which was firmly closed. But I walked on past it to the edge of the canal.
“Listen,” I said.
We said nothing for a few seconds. All was as quiet as only nocturnal Venice can be. We couldn’t even hear any oh reallys from the hotel.
“I can’t hear anything,” she said after a while.
“Exactly.”
“Martin, if you don’t tell me what you’re talking about—or not talking about—I am going to push you into the canal.”
I told her.
23
IT must have been about two hours later that I was woken by the slightest of noises—but a noise I had obviously been unconsciously waiting for: I heard the gentle sloshing of the canal water and the squeaking of ropes against poles. Just what we’d heard the evening of the murder, before Osgood’s death scream.
I slipped out of
bed and padded over to the window. I opened it and leaned out. There was nothing to see: just the faint rocking of the boats and the broken surface of the water.
“What’s up?” Lucy had sat up in bed.
“Listen.”
She listened. “Can you see anything?”
“No.”
“So what do you think…?”
“I think Toni’s probably in there.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just have a feeling. He has to have gone somewhere.”
“But here? After all that’s happened—”
“Exactly. The last place anyone would think of.” I was getting dressed as I spoke, in my one-handed way.
“So what are you going to do?”
“Go down and see.”
“Martin, you really are mad. Look, why not call the police now?”
“Maybe there isn’t time.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s another bloody hunch. Look, you get onto the police. I want to get down there and check—”
“Oh, my God, you mean that wasn’t him that entered just now.”
“No, he’s in there already.”
“So it was her.”
“Exactly.”
“Martin, don’t—”
“You call the police,” I said, and closed the door. I ran down the stairs to the little room on the ground floor with the window onto the canal. I pulled open the window, not worrying about the grating noise this time. As I only had one useful arm, I used a chair to climb onto the sill. I swiveled and dropped down to the boat below with a heavy thump, which set it rocking crazily.
I made my clambering way, just as I had that other evening, from boat to boat. I reached the seaweedy steps of Palazzo Sambon and stepped out onto them, clutching at the nearest pole in order not to slip. I pushed at the door and it scraped open.
I stared into the black emptiness of the entrance hall. Then I stepped into it.
Listening hard, I could hear footsteps going up the stairs to the right. They didn’t pause or hesitate, so I presumably hadn’t been heard. I ran on tiptoes across the hall and started up the stairs myself.
I’d reached the first landing when I heard voices above me, on the first floor. Furtive voices, which nonetheless started a whispery echo around the dark spaces of the building. I kept running, as quietly as possible. I could now see torchlight ahead of me, issuing from the big hall of the piano nobile.
Francesca Sambon’s voice said in Venetian, “Maybe we’d better turn the flashlight off, in case it gets seen outside.”
At this point I yelled, “Toni, don’t trust her!”
There was an immediate flurry of movement while the echoes took up my cry. The torch beam stabbed out to the stairs.
“Who’s that?” Francesca’s voice said, and the beam swiveled and hit me full in the face. “Oh, you.”
“Toni,” I said, trying to squint past the dazzle, but failing of course, “don’t trust your sister.”
“What do you mean?” His voice came from somewhere behind the light, with a touch of uncertainty.
“Get away from her.”
“Come up the stairs,” Francesca said, speaking in English now. “Slowly, I have a gun pointed at you.”
“Francesca,” said Toni, “what the—”
“Shut up.” She addressed him in Venetian. “Tasi.”
“Toni, don’t let her do this.…” I hadn’t moved on the stairs.
“Francesca, have you gone mad?” Toni said.
“Shut up.” Then in English to me: “Come up the stairs.”
I didn’t move. She said to Toni, “You go and join him on the stairs.”
“What?”
“Move.” She must have shoved him: the torch beam wavered, and amid the swirling of shadows Toni came pitching down the stairs, letting out a sharp cry of alarm. One flailing arm struck me in the face and then he was a dazed bundle on the landing. I jumped down beside him and he dragged himself up to a figure two: just as I’d seen him in Kensington that evening—and just as bewildered and scared. “Francesca,” he said, dully. I put my good hand on his shoulder, and he repeated the name. He seemed not to have broken anything.
The light held us both unwaveringly. I squinted up and said, “There’s no point in killing us, you know. My friend Lucy is calling the police at this moment.” I spoke in English. I felt securer in that language.
“Kill us?” Toni said.
“Why else do you think she came alone to see you in the middle of the night with a gun?”
“Francesca?” They were like the questions of a little boy.
“I don’t believe you,” Francesca said. “You’re on your own.”
“Francesca!” Toni’s voice was now the plea of a little boy begging to be told that the ghost story wasn’t true. The cry echoed around the building, dynasties of plaintive Sambons.
“Shut up,” she said. Then to me: “You’re bluffing.” It was the confident decided tone of the businesswoman—but she wasn’t certain enough to pull the trigger.
I said, “And anyway the police know all about you.”
“Don’t lie.”
“I told them this evening the whole thing about you. The Guardi pictures. You and Osgood.” I just had to keep talking, eroding her certainty, like the canal water slobbering away toothlessly but remorselessly at the foundations of the palazzo. Because, like Padoan, she was one who killed for certainties—the certainty that murder was the most efficient way of furthering her plans. She was a businesswoman after all, not a mere sadist.
“How did you—” she said, and halted. I’d definitely caught her off guard here.
“You gave yourself away with a tiny lie when I saw you with Lucy. That got me suspicious at once,” I lied myself.
“What?” The waves of doubt were swirling stronger, sucking away at her assurance. She had to hear what I said before she dared pull that trigger.
“Lucy said she’d just told you about my being pushed in the canal, and you said, ‘I didn’t know that—it was Busetto, wasn’t it?’ Well, Lucy certainly hadn’t mentioned Busetto’s name, since she didn’t know anything about him, and she hasn’t got a great memory for names anyway. The only way you could have known the name was by having read the Gazzettino the previous day—and yet when I’d called on you that morning you hadn’t asked any questions about my—my row with Busetto, even though we’d been talking about him.”
“And so? What does this mean?”
“Well, nothing by itself. It just seemed odd. All I could think was that you must have had some reason for not wanting me to know you’d read the paper. And the only reason that came into my mind was that perhaps you’d been the one to leave that threatening message at my hotel on Sunday morning. Because I hadn’t told you where I was staying.”
Toni was slowly getting up. “Francesca,” he said again, “what is all this?”
“Silence,” she said to him. Then to me: “But that proved nothing by itself.”
“Well, just that you didn’t like me looking into the whole business. You tried to get me to go off down to Rome by mentioning friends of Toni down there, and then when I didn’t do that, you did your best to—to make up to me, presumably so that you could keep a close eye on what I’d found out.”
“Make up to you?” She didn’t know this idiom.
“You tried to pull your charm on me. Which nearly worked, I have to admit.” Then, thinking this might restore too much of her confidence, I added, “But something held me back—I had a kind of inner feeling that something was rotten at bottom.” I even wondered, as I said this, if it might not be true.
“What is all this?” Toni repeated, now to me. “What didn’t she want you to find out?”
I said to him, without turning from the glare of the torch beam, “She was afraid that I might stumble onto the fact that she had stolen the Guardi painting, not you.”
“What painting?” he said. “You mean our Guardis
at home?”
“Oh, you didn’t know anything about this?”
“About what?”
“About the fact that you were supposed to have taken a Guardi painting of Morning with you when you left the house, after your row with your mother.”
“What?”
“Which is why your mother wouldn’t forgive you.”
“Francesca!” Again that pleading note: Please, say it’s not true.
Instead she said, “I needed the money, Toni.” It wasn’t an apology, merely an explanation. “I was going to write and tell you.”
“So Mother thinks I’m a thief, on top of everything.”
It wasn’t the time to point out that he was of course a thief—merely not a thief from his own family. I said to him, “Your sister was opening up her shop, without your parents’ support, which must have been a fairly expensive venture, and your departure like that made it very easy for her. She even knew, through you, of a crooked dealer she could go to in Venice. So the whole thing was perfect. What was it you said, Francesca? To be successful you need to know when to be careful and when to be impulsive, and this was a moment to be impulsive, I suppose.”
“And you gave me the blame,” Toni said.
“They were already furious with you, it hardly seemed to matter,” she said with a touch of impatience.
“So then,” I went on, “Busetto must have got in touch with Osgood about the Guardi painting, who presumably had just heard from Toni himself about the Cima and the Vivarini. I suppose Osgood knew the provenance of the Guardi—”
“So that’s why he asked me all those questions about the family,” Toni said, in dull remembrance.
“And this gave him a double reason for visiting Venice: firstly to get hold of the Cima and Vivarini, and secondly to persuade you”—I was addressing Francesca now—“to hand over the other Guardi. Your story of him blackmailing you about your brother didn’t make much sense. It was you yourself who was being blackmailed—and a pretty powerful blackmail, given the fact that your parents were now supporting your venture financially. It wasn’t just a question of having to face angry parents if they found out the true story, but perhaps of going bust.”
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