There, just ahead of them, was the tenement in which Surian and his father lived. In a city where a new building is almost a contradiction in terms, the block seemed not merely old but ailing, as though infected by some insidious and wasting disease.
Drawing closer, they noticed a small knot of people milling round the front entrance. At first he took them for a group of casual loiterers, but it was soon apparent that they had a purpose in gathering there. A handful of schoolchildren, satchels still in their hands, skittered about, excited yet curiously silent. The rest of the crowd was made up mainly of women and old men. Patrick and Assefa were about to push through the crowd when they noticed a policeman at the centre. He was trying to take a statement from one old woman, but everyone else insisted on talking as well.
‘Che cosa e successo? E morto qualcuno?’
‘Poveretto, si e ammazzato.’
‘Chi era? Tu lo conosce vi?’
Patrick’s first thought was that someone had taken note of their visit here yesterday. But that would scarcely explain the crowd or the excited jabbering. At that moment, a small boy tried to squeeze between Patrick’s legs, in order to get to the front. Patrick reached down and grabbed him by the neck. The child squealed and tried to wriggle free. A woman looked round at them and laughed. Patrick smiled at her reassuringly.
‘Hang on,’ Patrick said to the boy. He could not have been more than five or six. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘Stronzo, lasciami andare! Lemme go! Get yer friggin’ hands off of me!’ shouted the little brute.
‘Not until you tell me where you’re going.’
‘Inna house, where d’you think?’
‘What for?’
‘See the man.’
‘The man? What man?’
‘The dead man, stupid. Jumped out of the winder inter the courtyard. Lemme in.’
A chill passed through Patrick. Without another word, he let the boy go. His hand was numb and useless.
‘It may not be him, Patrick.’ Assefa had moved to Patrick’s side. But his voice carried no conviction.
They squeezed their way through the crowd. No one challenged their right to pass. The main door stood open, leading into the courtyard.
Only a weak light managed to struggle past the high walls. The windows round the courtyard were lit up, as though in celebration of some festival. Indistinct faces stared out into the gathering dark, some curious, indifferent, but each drawn by the same fascination with violent and unexpected death.
The child’s courage had failed him a couple of yards inside the entrance. He was standing nervously, unable to take another step, yet rooted hard to the spot by morbid curiosity and a last pale ghost of bravado. On the other side of the courtyard, a huddled form lay unmoving on the ground. Patrick and Assefa went across. Someone had covered the body with an old bedspread. Blood had spilled out from underneath, forming a dark, sludgy pool on the concrete. Patrick bent down and raised the edge of the coarse fabric.
An imperfect, wounded light sloped across the lifeless face beneath the cloth. Patrick’s first thought was that someone had played a joke on them. The face staring up at him was not human at all, but a dummy’s face, white and hard, with painted eyes and varnished cheeks. It was the face of Arlecchino, cracked down the centre and smeared at the base with common blood. Patrick’s fingers fumbled at the mask, pulling it back to reveal Claudio Surian’s face. The back of the skull had caved in: fragments of white bone jutted out awkwardly, as though desperately trying to break free of their harness of blood and flesh.
It was dark by the time they got to the Lista di Spagna. Assefa still felt numb. Neither he nor Patrick thought for a moment that Claudio had jumped to his death. They were pilgrims come to a dark temple: godless, blind, sick at heart. All about them, veils were being torn and lamps extinguished. The city had become an altar for mad gods, a slab for the perfection of sacrifice. They could sense the blood in the air, smell it in their breath, like rotting garbage, feel it warm and intimate against their flesh.
The shops on the Lista were brightly lit, though less busy at this time of year than at the height of the tourist season, when they took the brunt of the daily excursions arriving at the railway station nearby. L’Unita’s offices were in a calle near the station. They turned out to be little more than a cluster of rooms above a travel agency, cramped, stuffy, and crammed full of files, typewriters, telephones, and telex and fax machines. There seemed to be no room for human beings, yet half a dozen reporters had managed to squeeze themselves miraculously behind an array of barricades: desks, filing cabinets - anything that might serve to keep colleagues and the world at large at bay for half a minute.
Assefa forced his way past a large, bearded man who was trying to strangle the handset of a telephone while shouting obscenities at it at the top of his voice:
‘Porca puttana, andate tutti a lagare, mi avete rotto i coglioni!’
Behind the bearded man, seated at a desk piled high with reference books, and about forty discarded plastic cups, a young woman was furiously mangling the ends of her fingers against the unresponsive keys of an antediluvian typewriter.
‘Permesso?’ Assefa said, but his voice was drowned by the booming of the man at the telephone. He called again, more loudly this time, but there was still no response. The woman remained impregnable behind her desk. Exasperated, Assefa found a copy of Devoto’s dictionary, opened it at the middle, and slammed it shut with a bang like a gunshot.
Heads everywhere looked up from work, startled. Only the bearded man seemed oblivious of the report.
‘That wasn’t very amusing,’ said the woman at the desk. ‘What the hell do you want?’
‘I’m looking for Siniscalchi, Aldo Siniscalchi. Do you know where I can find him?’
Her mouth opened and closed. She was not a pretty woman, and the action lent her something of the appearance of a fish. She glanced at Patrick, who was standing a few paces behind the priest, then back at Assefa.
‘Who are you?’ she asked. Abruptly, she had passed from simply brusque to defensive.
‘I’m a friend of his. An acquaintance, anyway. Claudio Surian introduced us - we met last night at Bartolini’s. Aldo had arranged to see me again tonight, but...’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Her voice sounded stiff and unnatural. ‘I can’t help you. Ald... Signor Siniscalchi was shot two hours ago outside the trattoria where he’d just eaten lunch. He...’ For a second, she seemed on the verge of tears, then she took control of her emotions again. This was a newspaper office, Siniscalchi’s murder was tomorrow’s front page lead.
‘Some fucking fascist from Ordine Nuovo gunned him down,’ she exclaimed. ‘They’ve been threatening him for months. He’s been doing a series on them. Fascist bastards.’
‘You’re sure?’ asked Patrick. His heart was beating in long, uneasy strokes. He felt sick and tired.
‘Sure?’
‘That it was Ordine Nuovo. You’re sure they were responsible?’
‘No, of course I’m not sure! They didn’t sign their names. But who the fuck else would do it?’ Then his accent seemed to register with her. ‘Hey, who are you anyway? American? CIA?’
‘He was following up this Migliau business. Isn’t that right?’
She raised her eyebrows, little pale eyebrows that scarcely gave definition to her eyes.
‘What has that to do with it?’
‘Everything. Forget Ordine Nuovo. Dig up anything you can on. Migliau. Find him and you’ll find your friend’s killers.’ He hesitated. ‘And Claudio Surian’s as well.’
He turned with Assefa and made for the door. Just as he reached for the handle, the woman shouted after him.
‘Hey! American! What’s your name anyway?’
Patrick turned.
‘Canavan. Patrick Canavan. If you find Migliau tell him I was here. Tell him I haven’t finished yet. Tell him I’ve just started.’ It was like the child in the tenement, a soft, faint
hint of bravado, a muted whistle in the dark.
The woman looked hard at him, puzzled, a little disturbed.
‘What’s your friend’s name?’
Assefa turned and answered her.
‘Just a moment,’ she said. Getting to her feet, she picked her way with practised ease across a series of obstacles to another desk. After rummaging for half a minute, she surfaced triumphantly, brandishing a fat padded bag.
‘He left this for you,’ she shouted above a din of clattering typewriters and ringing telephones. ‘Said he wouldn’t be here tonight when you called, that he had some big lead to follow up.’ Her face fell. Again tears threatened to displace her false toughness. ‘You don’t think ... ? Cristo! Anyway, he said I was to give this to you. I think it’s a book.’
THIRTY-FIVE
The book turned out to be a rare copy of Corradini’s Famiglie Antiche e Nobili di Venezia, or Ancient and Noble Families of Venice. It was a respectable, heavy volume bound in dull burgundy leather and edged with gilt; the date of publication was 1791, at Venice. The book’s author was Marco Corradini, a man of aristocratic birth and political aspiration who, like so many Venetian noblemen of his day, found himself in penurious circumstances. Unlike most of his fellows, however, Corradini was possessed of brains, a personable manner, and a classical education.
Patrick and Assefa knew nothing of the work, save what they had been able to glean from a florid preface by a certain Professor Enrico Battistella. They had taken a taxi at the Piazzale Roma and crossed the causeway to the mainland, where their driver had deposited them at a shabby pensione near the docks in Porto Marghera.
Coming here, it was as though the magic of Venice had been abolished by a single stroke of a rival magician’s wand. The dark industrial streets of Mestre and the gaunt, high-stepping cranes of its port were the apparatus of a different sorcery, their weary inhabitants the succubi of another, flatter dream. A smell of refined oil wafted through blind and congested streets: there were no spices here, or precious oils, or unguents. Necessity, not vice or luxury, paved the streets of Mestre.
The pensione had not asked for proof of identity, nor had it required them to sign its register, if it had one: a small extra payment had taken care of that. Surian had mentioned the place the evening before,
when Assefa told him the whereabouts of their first hotel. He had said the pensione was sometimes used by members of Prima Linea and other underground groups of the far left. But as far as Patrick and Assefa could see, the clientele was made up chiefly of prostitutes serving the port, their clients - mainly merchant sailors - and a handful of migrant workers from Sicily.
Siniscalchi had placed two slips of paper in the book, the first in the chapter devoted to the several branches of the Contarini family, the second in a much shorter section that dealt with the house of Migliau. In the margin, he had marked in pencil several passages that must have seemed to him worthy of note.
The first of these was a quotation from a document found by Corradini in the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. The text described it as a chronicle that had been kept on the blank pages of a vellum manuscript of Macrobius’s commentary on the Somnium Scipionis. The chronicle had been kept by a certain Brother Ubertino of Florence between 1223 and 1268. The passage marked by Siniscalchi was dated 1264, on the newly-instituted Feast of Corpus Christi.
Assefa read the passage slowly for Patrick’s benefit, explaining to him any particularly difficult words or phrases. The chronicle had been written in the Florentine dialect of the period, that was later to dominate Italian as a whole, and Brother Ubertino’s language had been tidied up and somewhat modernized by both Corradini and Battistella, so it did not prove particularly hard to follow.
‘ “This last week the flagellanti have been seen in our streets once more. And this despite the decree issued last month by the Doge and the Consiglio, that none in holy orders, whether lay or religious, should in any wise consort with such as term themselves ‘fraternities of discipline’, nor yet sit upon the councils that govern them. They were first seen here in the year of the plague, five years past now, having come in a body from Perugia, and it is said they number many thousands and are afraid of no one.
“You may behold them now on feast days and high holidays, parading in the streets or the piazza before the basilica, and ofttimes before other of the city churches, wearing, as is their custom, black veils of wondrous length, even to the ground, and beating their backs with leathern whips, all the time accompanying their efforts by howling and crying after the manner of wild beasts, or demons come up out of hell.” ‘
Assefa paused and asked Patrick if he was following the text.
‘I think I get the general drift. Do you know exactly who these flagellanti were?’
Assefa nodded.
‘Flagellants. The movement started in northern Italy about 1259 and soon spread into Germany and elsewhere. Thousands of people joined in religious processions, beating themselves with whips, weeping, seeking salvation.’
‘I see. But I don’t understand what this has got to do with Migliau or the Contarinis.’
Assefa shrugged.
‘Let’s go a bit further.’ He started reading again.
“Yesterday, I was visited shortly after Lauds by Umberto Trevisan, a young scholar who often comes here to use our great library. He told me that there are already many factions among the flagellanti and that, for the most part, they are but poor men, cripples, beggars, the feeble-minded, and women, as is indeed common in these manifestations of heresy. But there
are among them also certain gentlemen of good family and rich merchants besides that have bad consciences or little sense, and that fear the devil more than they love God.
“And he told me privily that he had heard that certain among the Contarinis, the Participazios, the Dandolos, and the Zianis have in secret pledged allegiance to a grim fraternity, wherein are none of the poor or ignoble to be found.”’
Assefa glanced up from the book. Patrick’s question had just been answered.
‘ “This is a most private matter for them, and has nothing in it of public flagellation or display. That they meet in private and hold secret cabals is the sum of Master Trevisan’s knowledge, for of their rites and heretical dispositions he knows, or pretends to know, nothing.”’
Assefa looked up.
‘There’s a mark a couple of lines later, where Corradini quotes Brother Ubertino again. It’s an extract from his entry for the Wednesday following Corpus Christi, about a week after the bit we’ve just read.
“I received tidings yesterday through Father Domenico, who came to hear my confession, that my friend Umberto Trevisan was yesterday in secret condemned by the three Avvogadori, whereupon he was rowed out to the Canale Orfano, and there his hands were tied behind his back and weights of lead attached to each of his several limbs, to make the faster work of his drowning, as was then carried out. May our Lord have mercy on his soul and give him peace. I thought it prudent not to confess to Father Domenico the matters lately divulged to me by my friend, though this lie heavy on my soul. This last night I have spent in prayer for his deliverance out of purgatory, yet I do not rest easy, and shall not again, I think.”’
THIRTY-SIX
Neither Patrick nor Assefa said a word, yet their thoughts were as transparent to one another as though they had been spoken.
The second passage was an account in Corradini’s own words.
‘”I reckon it neither nice nor proper, howsoever my lord Pisani deem it, to speak in these pages of the peccadilloes of the Nobility or the dissolution of the Rich, lest the common rabble, emboldened by talk of lasciviousness in their Betters, and encouraged falsely by the wanton behaviour of some of them that rule them, foment discord in this most serene of Republics. And yet, such is the manner of this Age, wherein Nobility is become Baseness and Baseness Nobility, that of certain families I know not what else I may in truth relate.
‘”W
itness the numbers resorting to Spaderra’s and Ancilloto’s, the less to drink Coffee, I think, than to murmur against the State; or the rakes that gather nightly in the Casino degli Spiriti and old Cornaro’s place, to play at Bassetto or at Spigolo for a heap of gold sequins or a lady’s favours; or the Ladies with their cicisbei, betaking themselves in masks and pomaded wigs to see the latest plays at the Fenice or the Malibran.” ‘
‘Can’t you skip a little, get to the bit that interests us?’
‘I suppose so. Let’s see ...’ His finger ran lightly down the page, he frowned, bit his lip, and at last found something.
‘Here we are: I think this is it. There’s a footnote that says the next few paragraphs were omitted from the first edition and have been reinstated by Battistella from Corradini’s autograph manuscript.
‘ “Your Honours, if any among you care to listen, let me unfold to you Secrets that will make your Blood run cold, for herein lies the heart of our corruption, that a Family of Jewes are become Lords in Venice, and some of our most ancient Lines fast arrived at the deepest of depravities.
“You know well that there are Masons in this City, devoted to secret Worships and abominable Doctrines. Many, I know, deem the Contarinis and Migliaus, the Rezzonicos and Dandolos to belong to that Fraternity. Indeed, there may be some, that are so inclined. But most, I think, hold to a different Allegiance.” ‘
Assefa paused.
‘This begins to sound familiar,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Patrick whispered. ‘Don’t stop.’
“I have heard tell - I will not say from whence -that certain of them assemble in one another’s Houses late at night, when the eyes of Men are fast asleep or fixed on Cards in the Ridotto. They travel in hooded Gondolas with muted oars, and are seen by no one, not even their own Servantes, for it is said they row alone to their destinations. What Infamies they practise or what corrupted rites perform, neither reason may know nor piety guess at.
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