Every Picture Tells a Story

by Gregory Dowling

  “I’d put years of work into that shop,” she said. “I wasn’t going to fail for such a foolish reason.”

  “So when there seemed a risk of Osgood getting publicly involved over Busetto’s murder, you were terrified of course that the true story might come out. And when I told you that I’d speak to him about the whole business, you took another impulsive decision: he’d have to die. Again a question of knowing how to use the moment—and what better moment than during a spate of terrorist killings?”

  “He was no loss to anyone.”

  “Is that what you’re going to say about killing us?”

  “No!” Toni almost screamed. The idea had only just got through to him.

  “Silence.”

  It was terrible not being able to see her: I could only imagine her, standing there, small but firm, her finger on the trigger. I spoke in Italian now, to make sure my words got across: “Francesca, it’ll serve no purpose. You’re not going to get away with it.”

  Toni said, “Francesca, no, no, no…” He was almost whimpering.

  I felt if anything was going to persuade her to shoot, it was going to be that kind of noise. I said, “The police know it wasn’t the terrorists who killed Osgood.”

  She answered me in Italian now. “They can’t know. The terrorists claimed the killing.”

  “But now that the terrorists are under arrest they know that that was merely confusion on the terrorists’ part—a mere freak bit of luck for you, with one of them getting killed on the night of the killing, and the others assuming he’d done the murder. But that’s all been cleared up now.”

  “How?” Her voice was challenging—but the waves were beating in fast now, swirling around her supports, smashing at them.

  “The police know that the man who followed Osgood into the building wasn’t anything to do with the terrorists—and wasn’t the killer either: so the killer must have entered the palazzo by another entrance. Which can only mean the watergate. And the only people who could use that entrance are the people with keys to it: the owners of the building.”

  “And what about the gun?” she said—but the challenging tone had almost totally given way to desperation now.

  “Yes, it was a gun known to have been stolen by terrorists: presumably you found it in some secret cache of Toni’s at your house when you were look- ing for places to store your stuff for your shop. But leaving it near the corpse was too much of a giveaway: nobody would be that distracted. It could only have been left by someone wanting to give a false trail to the police.”

  Her voice suddenly took on a new tone of cold fury: it struck me that I wouldn’t like to be her employee. The words came out sharp and biting: “Everything would have gone smoothly if you hadn’t started pushing your nose in. You know Amica magazine was going to do a feature on my shop? Business was really going to take off.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Then, feeling that probably wasn’t quite enough to make her throw down the gun: “But shooting us isn’t going to solve anything.”

  “If I don’t shoot you I’m in the shit—and maybe if I shoot you I’m in the shit too. But at least I’ll have had the satisfaction.”

  The first thing that shocked me in these words was the crude language: it was so unexpected from her lips. Then the message got across. I couldn’t think of anything to say but, “Don’t do it.…”

  She said just one word—“Stronzo”—but got a world of emotion into it, nearly all of it hatred, some desperation. I’d broken too many of her supports, and she wasn’t going to go down gracefully, harmlessly, like the Campanile of San Marco, but take as many victims as she could with her.

  Toni’s voice sounded like the cracked bells of the campanile as he said once more, “Francesca…”

  And then a shot sounded.

  We both of us leaped to one side—and at once realized that the torch beam had swirled up to the ceiling, revealing in a mad sweep grimy stucco work. I stared up the stairs and saw a confused shadowy struggle. Then an arm was raised and came down with a crack on some hard surface. One of the bodies fell to the ground and Lucy’s voice said, “There.” It sounded like a prayer.

  I ran up the stairs to where she was standing over the inert body of Francesca. She leaned on the marble balustrade and I took hold of her with my one good arm. “I hope the bloody evening’s over now,” she said, and fainted.

  24

  “I LOVE Burano,” Lucy said, “it’s pure Cav and Pag.”

  “It’s what?”

  “Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci.”

  “This is more opera talk, I suppose.” We were walking along the side of one of the canals of Burano. The sun and washing were out—a satisfactory combination both from the utilitarian and aesthetic point of view. The houses themselves, in their irregular shapes and cheerful colors, were reflected in the water, like another, even brighter row of washing—Sunday best perhaps. The male inhabitants seemed more luxuriously mustachioed than usual and the female ones just more luxurious. Mind you, my eye was possibly being selective.

  “Oh, come on, Martin. Even you’ve heard of them.”

  “Heard of them. Never heard them. Hum me the good bits.”

  “I’ll play them both to you back in London. But honestly, don’t those houses just look as if they’re about to be whisked away for a chorus of dancing peasants to come on?”

  “Dancing fishermen you mean—or more likely dancing souvenir sellers. Close your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Go on, close them and just listen.”

  She did so. “Wow,” she said, “the birds agree with me. It’s the opening chorus from Cav.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You’d think we were in the middle of a wood.”

  “An aviary more like. They’re all in cages.” Every other house seemed to have put their canary out on the windowsill to enjoy the sun.

  “I chose the right place for an outing then,” I said. “I thought somewhere cheerful and unreal might be a good idea.”

  “Because Venice is real?”

  “Well, it makes everywhere else seem unreal while you’re there, whereas Burano is just—just brazenly theatrical.”

  “So this trip is to forget, right?”

  “Well, at least to feel fairly distant from it all.”

  She took my hand and said, “You chose absolutely right. It’s perfect.”

  We came out into a little open grassy space by the lagoon. Sheets were hanging out on lines—colored sheets of course. Across the water to our left lay the island of San Francesco del Deserto. To the right was Mazzorbo. A few yards out a gondola was moored—a bright blue gondola. “I don’t know why Zennaro doesn’t come here,” I said. “Then he wouldn’t have to invent the colors.”

  “I gather he doesn’t rely on your exciting browns and grays.”

  “Colors aren’t exciting. It’s what you do with them.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know. I’m sorry. Like rubbish dumps and gasworks.”

  “Let’s enjoy the view,” I said.

  She smiled and looked over toward San Francesco. “That’s the kind of place I could understand becoming a monk to live in.”

  “I don’t think they’d let you.”

  We stood in silence and gazed for a while. Eventually she said. “One of the nicest things about these lagoon views is that they’re completely horizontal.”

  After a pause I said, “You’re thinking about—”

  “Yes.”

  She had come upon Francesca from the back that night because she’d done what I had nonseriously suggested some evenings before: she had climbed from the hotel window to the window of Palazzo Sambon. “I couldn’t bear the thought of you there on your own,” she had said afterward, “and I thought it might be a good idea to come in by another way.” Well, there was no doubt it had been, but her faint had been delayed reaction to those moments of vertical fear on the windowsill.

  “It’s a pity about the bell towers then,” I said.r />
  “No, they set off the flatness nicely.” We strolled over to a bench and sat down. She said, “The other nice thing about Burano is that there are no sights to feel guilty about not seeing. No museums or galleries.”

  “A great Tiepolo in the church,” I said.

  “You go. I’m just going to sit here and soak up the horizontal lines.”

  “The Tiepolo can wait,” I said. We sat and watched a lone boat chug across the lagoon, which was otherwise completely undisturbed—a sheet of taut tinfoil aglow in the sun. After a while she said, “Mind you, some things I’m not going to forget: like Francesca killing herself.”

  “No.” This had happened when the police had arrived. She had managed to grab the gun that Lucy had wrested from her and which, after Lucy’s faint, had lain forgotten at the top of the stairs; she had simply put it into her mouth and pulled the trigger. Her final businesswoman’s impulse.

  “Horrible.” Lucy shivered. “Poor Toni. His own sister.”

  “Do you mean poor Toni, seeing her dying—or poor Toni finding out what she’d been planning?”

  “Well, both. I mean, my brother makes me angry sometimes but…” She shook her head. “When do you think she decided on the murder?”

  “Well, I suppose when he phoned her, dripping wet—”

  “No,” she said. “You’ve forgotten that poor Frenchman.” In his account to the police, Toni had told how, after pulling himself out of the canal, he had assaulted a tourist and stolen his Carnival costume. He had then phoned his sister, who had told him to meet her in a bar in Cannaregio. As soon as it was dark enough she had taken him to the old Palazzo Sambon, letting him in by the water entrance and promising to return with a complete change of clothes and some money.

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose as soon as she heard from him she decided that he’d have to die. I imagine that was in her mind when she suggested he should go to the old palazzo. She must have thought it would look a credible place for him to commit suicide.”

  “And she had another of his guns to suicide him with.”

  “Yes, she must have come across quite a little cache in the house when she was looking for places to stow all her stuff for her shop. You know, when she told me that, about not having said anything to her parents until the place opened, it did make me wonder a little. I mean, she had to have pretty good powers of—well, dissimulation.”

  “Which means lying.”

  “Yes. Okay, we most of us have to tell little ones now and again, but this must have meant concealing all her activities for months—and this just didn’t seem to fit her image, which seemed based on her oh-so-honest look-you-in-the-face eyes. And that magic smile. Well, as I say, it made me wonder.”

  “‘She deceived her father in marrying you.…’ That kind of thing.”

  “Exactly. There was always some tiny little detail that didn’t click in her ‘niceness.’ It made me wonder a bit when I saw one of her employees who was still on a trial period being, well, dead-grumpy with Francesca; not even bothering to hide her feelings. I only had to think about how deferential I got with Mr. Robin when I was angling for a job to find it a bit odd. I mean, you might be naturally boot-faced, but when your job’s at stake, you make some kind of effort to smile—unless your boss really is the pits. I didn’t consciously follow these thoughts through at the time, but they must have lodged in my mind somewhere, and I suppose helped in my overall picture of her as—as—”

  “A wrong ’un.”

  “Exactly. The only thing she was really sincere about was wanting Toni to get out of Venice. I suppose she’d meant to let him know sooner or later about what she’d done—the Guardi picture business—probably relying on his big-brotherly feelings toward her. I mean, I’d seen how protective he could be toward her—he wouldn’t even let me mention her name, and she must have come to accept that as her due. But even she would have realized that just then, with the killings et cetera, wouldn’t have been a tactful moment to add to his problems.”

  We fell silent. After a while Lucy said, “Well, so much for forgetting it all.”

  “I said, feeling remote from it, not forgetting.”

  A boat came slowly toward us and the man in it called out, “San Francesco?”

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t think he’s taken you for him,” Lucy said. “Do we want to visit San Francesco?”

  “Well, why not?” I said, and stood up. “Can monks marry you?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Repeat what you said. Slowly. Clearly.”

  “It was just an idea.”

  “Repeat it or I shove you in the water.”

  “Okay, under duress…” I repeated the words, and to the boatman’s tolerant surprise Lucy flung herself into my arms and kissed me passionately. She broke free seconds later when I managed to get out the words, “Mind my shoulder,” and she said to the boatman, “We’re going to get married.”

  “Bravi,” he said indulgently.

  As we sat on opposite sides of the boat watching the cypresses of the island monastery approach she said, “Admit it, it’s just the thought of a gondola wedding that put the idea into your head.”

  “That and the thought of your father’s expression when I first call him Pop.”

  She rose impulsively and kissed me, causing the boat to sway wildly. (It was her rising rather than the actual kiss that did it.) “Ueeh, signorina!” the boatman protested. She smiled an apology back at him, then said to me, “I want to go back now and tell everyone—shout it to everyone. All over London.”

  “Well, I’m intending to stick around a bit here.”

  “In Venice?”

  “Yes. You know there was a reward for the paintings. Enough to keep me here for a few weeks. I want to do some work.”

  “Paint?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean Mestre or the oil refineries at Marghera?”

  “No.” I patted the bag I’d brought with me. “I’m going to do some sketches of Burano today—and San Francesco, why not?”

  “Burano?”

  “Yes.”

  “You?”

  “Me. And one or two views of the Grand Canal tomorrow.”

  “And perhaps a gondola wedding or two—with a sunset behind the Salute?”

  “Why not?” I said offhandedly.

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  She realized I was serious. “This is pretty daring, isn’t it?”

  I was immensely glad that despite the smile as she said this, she wasn’t being ironic. “It seems worth a try,” I said.

  “And I thought back there you didn’t want to think of work for the moment.”

  “Well, I’ll probably spend an hour or so turning the paper round before I make the first stroke, but—well, you keep pushing.”

  “It’s going to be a bit of a surprise for quite a lot of people, isn’t it? Phipps goes picturesque.”

  “My gallerist for a start. But it’s going to be good.”

  “Are you certain?” she said. Her eyes, it struck me, were dancing with light just like the lagoon: something else I could try and paint.

  “No,” I said. “But I’ve been rather put off certainty over the last few days. Padoan was certain. And Francesca.”

  “God save wobblers,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s probably why I like Venice so much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not going to say it.” I looked around the lagoon, with its uncertain horizons, its uncertain blend of sun and haze, its uncertain divisions between land and water.… “I’ll paint it for you.”

  Previous books by Gregory Dowling

  DOUBLE TAKE

  SEE NAPLES AND KILL

  Every Picture Tells A Story. Copyright © 1991 by Gregory Dowling. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case
of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: July 1991

  eISBN 9781466891210

  First eBook edition: January 2015