Carnival for the Dead

by David Hewson

  ‘Not women who are forty-six years old,’ she told herself, staring at the jumbled array of objects on the table, the computer, papers, bills, letters, a raffia box with needles and thread, a couple of paintbrushes that needed cleaning, and the vase containing the bouquet from the night before.

  The mannequin in its expensive silk dress gazed at her from the doorway. Sofia was broke. Why spend money on something like that?

  Somewhere at the back of her head lurked an unwanted stub of knowledge, a statistic that had fallen out of an official report. One that correlated the age of those who went missing with the eventual outcome of the case. The older they were, the bleaker the possibilities. Was that true? Perhaps her memory was playing tricks.

  She needed food. She needed coffee. More than anything she needed hard information, not strange, anonymous fairy tales posted to her by name.

  Teresa Lupo checked herself. She had only the word of the young woman downstairs for that. She was in an unfamiliar city, surrounded by people she didn’t know. It made sense to question everything.

  The phone beeped. It was a message from Tosi confirming the appointment. Automatically, out of habit, she deleted the text and, without thinking, the message before it, from Peroni, not seeing its content as her fingers flew across the phone.

  Then, without much care, she got dressed and went downstairs one floor, stopping outside the bright purple door, wondering what she wanted to say, to ask. There was a drawing of a star sign there, Virgo. A starry-eyed woman out of Botticelli, with a crown of flowers.

  She was still thinking when Camilla Dushku answered, wearing a heavy cashmere jumper the same colour as the woodwork and floppy, old-fashioned jeans. She was smiling. Her long dark hair was shiny and well managed in a way that Teresa Lupo always found difficult to comprehend. The young woman’s complexion was perfect though remarkably pale. She was already beckoning Teresa into the room with an amiable, frank cheerfulness.

  There was the enticing smell of coffee and fresh pastries.

  ‘I heard your door close,’ Camilla Dushku said, waving her in. ‘You don’t miss a thing in this funny old place. You want breakfast?’

  Teresa was still staring at the painting.

  ‘Sofia did that,’ Camilla told her. ‘She did one for all of us. A gift. Horoscopes. And painting. Talents of hers, I think.’

  The living room of the young woman’s apartment lay directly below that of Sofia’s. It was precisely the same size and shape, with a similar, if slightly lower, aspect onto the Giudecca canal from the windows at the front. But this room was both modern and organized, so rigidly laid out that it might have been some kind of store or workshop. All with a single purpose: the production of masks, hundreds of them, rank upon rank of blank faces, every set of empty eyes staring blindly into space.

  White and gold, black and scarlet, shiny, dull, simple and ornate, the masks were everywhere, on the walls, on the large work table at the centre of the room, hanging to dry on frames lined up in a row in the corridor to the kitchen.

  ‘Carnival,’ Camilla said simply, noting Teresa’s interest.

  ‘People say that as if it explains everything.’

  ‘It explains a lot. I made more money last night than I do in a month usually.’ She made a grasping gesture with her hands. ‘Men with masks tip more handsomely for some reason. And when it’s not carnival then . . .’

  She pointed to a couple of large industrial plastic buckets by the window. On one side stood pots of powder and shredded paper; on the other what looked like masks-in-the-making, plain simple faces waiting to be painted and varnished.

  Papier-mâché, Teresa realized.

  ‘This is what you do?’ she asked.

  ‘It is now. Beats painting pretty views for tourists.’ Camilla smiled. ‘I think Sofia was beginning to work that out too. I was going to show her how to make masks one day.’

  Past and present. Perfect and imperfect, continuous, unfinished. ‘I am going to’ is not the same as ‘I was going to’. Tenses mattered to the fictional Englishman in that story the night before. They were important in real life too.

  ‘Perhaps you still can,’ Teresa said.

  ‘I hope so. Is she coming back?’

  ‘I can’t answer that. I don’t know where she is. Why she left. I don’t know anything. That’s why I’m here.’

  Camilla shook her head, went into the kitchen for a moment and came back with two cups of strong coffee and some fresh and fragrant pastries, like round doughnuts with nuts and fruit in them.

  Teresa tried one and nodded.

  ‘Frittelle,’ Camilla told her. ‘Only in carnival. Unless you’re a tourist.’

  ‘Nice,’ she said, and meant it. There was nothing quite like this – sweet, spicy and seemingly proud of its simplicity – in Rome.

  Camilla held out her pale fine hands and smiled.

  ‘Sofia told me my fortune once. With those cards of hers. She said I had a long and happy life ahead of me. With children!’

  The cards, the crystal ball, the signs of the zodiac. Teresa remembered those from when she was a kid. They were one of the few points of disagreement between her and her aunt. The rational, level-headed child never understood why an intelligent, popular adult should resort to such superstition. They’d agreed not to talk about the subject. It surprised her that even now, thirty years on, her aunt still clung to those habits. A fortune-teller couldn’t foresee her own future. Sofia had been adamant about that. It was one of the many reasons Teresa had found the idea so ridiculous.

  ‘We have breakfast then I take you downstairs to meet Filippo. He’s as anxious as I am to know where Sofia is. As you are too,’ Camilla emphasized. ‘This is so strange.’

  ‘It is,’ Teresa agreed. ‘Who’s Filippo?’

  The young woman gestured around the room with her right arm.

  ‘The man downstairs. He taught me how to make all these for his shop. You’ll like him. Everyone does.’

  Filippo Strozzi’s door, the red one at ground level, was ajar when they walked down the stone stairs. There was a small picture of Taurus the bull, in Sofia’s hand. Piano music, the dazzling sound of waves of cascading arpeggios, flooded the hallway. With the light from the windows about the entrance this glorious burst of sound lent the old palazzo a fetching, human appearance. For the first time Teresa found she could imagine Sofia here, wandering from floor to floor, eating frittelle, drinking coffee, chatting. It felt at that moment like a student house and Sofia, in some ways, seemed to resemble a perpetual undergraduate, an individual always on the cusp of knowledge, never quite attaining it.

  Camilla pushed open the door and they walked in. The music continued and Teresa realized to her astonishment that it was not the product of a sound system but live, coming from a large bearded man perched behind a battered grand piano set in the window, occupying most of the space there. He was clearly determined to finish, and she was glad of that. He played beautifully, fluently, his arms moving with the determined power and confidence of a performer.

  Only once did he look up and, briefly, smile. He was a massive man, more than burly, fat and muscle in a frame that filled a ragged grey sack-like sweater. Perhaps fifty, Teresa thought, with a serious Mediterranean face, heavy jowls covered with a grizzled beard that looked as if it didn’t get much attention. His hair was shoulder-length, grey and black, moving as he bent to the pulsing cadence of the testing piece that occupied him. He wore unfashionable round wire-rimmed spectacles. Behind them gleamed two rather prominent and intelligent eyes. There was no music on the piano, no notation anywhere that she could see. He was playing this complex and challenging piece entirely from memory, for pleasure, she imagined, not practice, since his face appeared relaxed, not taut with concentration.

  Years before, as a student herself, Teresa had had a boyfriend who was determined to become a concert pianist. For a while she’d listened to him practise, fascinated by his technique and approach to the work. This piece was famil
iar from that time, one of the most difficult Chopin études of all: Opus 10 No. 1, the ‘Waterfall’, a pyrotechnic display of technical proficiency that was, she seemed to recall, designed as much to strengthen and flex the player’s fingers as to demonstrate his or her mastery over arpeggios and stretch.

  She closed her eyes. It was brief, two minutes at the most, and part way through when she came in. He performed the piece with an uncommon and fluent skill save for one detail that she still remembered from those years before, seated at the feet of a man who was now a teacher in Perugia, not the concert pianist he’d once hoped.

  When the music came to a fiery end it sounded different somehow, not in the notes themselves but in the tonal quality. Then it came back to her.

  ‘Pedal,’ Teresa said without thinking. She opened her eyes and looked at Filippo Strozzi, her spirits cheered already by his presence, the bright and obvious talent and enthusiasm he had displayed at the piano. ‘I had a friend who played that. He always used pedal at the end. Practised for hours. Said it was essential. Personal taste I imagine . . .’

  The room was dreadfully cold. The temperature seemed to descend a couple of degrees further at that moment. She fell silent.

  Camilla looked briefly aghast. The man at the keyboard thought for a moment, smiled and then reached down for something and began to retreat from the instrument. Teresa realized that he was seated in a shiny modern wheelchair, one with a battery mechanism that propelled him round and then out from the piano.

  ‘Pedals are rather beyond me I’m afraid,’ Filippo Strozzi said wryly.

  He folded his arms and stared at her. Grey sweater, black shirt peeking above it, dark heavy workman’s oversized jeans, John Lennon spectacles. The costume of a musician. But his legs had the stiff, flabby stillness of the invalid.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Teresa groaned. Her face was glowing in spite of the cold. She was blushing like an embarrassed child. ‘I’m so sorry. So . . .’

  The wheelchair buzzed over. He extended a hand. She took it, liking the firmness and warmth of his touch, unexpected in such a chilly room.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘How were you to know? What does it matter? I’m Filippo. And you are Sofia’s niece, Teresa. The police officer from Rome. She told me about you. Camilla too.’

  ‘Pathologist,’ she corrected him. ‘I only work with the police.’

  ‘On investigations?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m a forensic officer. Not an investigative one. Not in the real sense.’

  He nodded then ran himself over to the small dining table set beneath what looked like a Modigliani print, and indicated two chairs there.

  Money, she thought.

  There was none in this room either. The temperature, the threadbare carpet, even the battered piano showed that Strozzi, like Sofia, was leading a pauper’s life, struggling to get by.

  She and Camilla took a seat.

  ‘Who lives on the top floor?’ she asked.

  ‘Why?’

  Strozzi seemed a man who didn’t waste words.

  ‘I’m trying to imagine Sofia’s life here. I’ve met you both now. The top floor—’

  ‘That belongs to Signor Ruskin,’ Camilla interrupted. ‘This is his property. He’s English. His mother was a friend of Peggy Guggenheim all those years ago, or so they say. You know the gallery around the corner?’

  Teresa nodded, recalling the modern, half-built palazzo on the Grand Canal where the grande dame of American art had lived and partied wildly several decades before.

  ‘Michael . . . Signor Ruskin,’ Strozzi added, ‘is back in London now and has been for several weeks. We see him rarely. He has other properties in Venice, beside this one. Usually it’s just us here. Three. Two now.’

  He frowned and said, ‘Sofia never mentioned going away. Where do you think she is?’

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’

  Teresa outlined the known facts as she understood them, though kept the detail of the story once more to herself. Both listened carefully. They seemed to know a good deal about Sofia’s past, the marriages, the travel, the dreams.

  ‘She painted here,’ Strozzi told her. ‘Tried to sell a few things to the tourists. To work as a tour guide when she could.’ He sighed. ‘It’s not easy making a living this way. Venice was once the richest city in the Adriatic. A place for princes. But then we had banking and commerce and trade. And war. With all these things comes money. Now . . .’ He was staring directly at her, perhaps trying to say more than he was willing to put into words. ‘Fishing is the only industry left. Fishing for men. The tourists who trek endlessly to our door, to look, to wonder. Hopefully to buy.’

  He drove the wheelchair forward and removed a mask from the wall. It was a woman’s, a sad, pale face, mouth downturned, tears painted beneath the eyes.

  ‘I came here to be a musician,’ Strozzi said. ‘What finer home could I have? Then one day . . .’ Another long, resigned sigh. ‘I am riding through Switzerland on my fine BMW motorbike. Only two hundred kilometres an hour, you understand. I was not in a hurry . . .’

  ‘Filippo,’ Camilla scolded him. ‘How can you joke about such things?’

  ‘What else is there to do after all these years? I crash, my legs are gone, and let me be frank. I am not so good a pianist that my disability may become a selling point. It’s expensive ferrying around a man in my condition. So I must get by as I can. I play at weddings and social events. Peanuts mostly. I’ve got a small mask shop around the corner. I teach people, talented artists like Camilla, how to make them. Not cheap. Real masks. The bauta, the Moretta, the Colombina. And this . . .’

  He reversed and Teresa knew what he would pick up.

  ‘The Medico della Peste.’

  Strozzi put it on and was transformed. Both anonymous and threatening.

  ‘The Plague Doctor,’ Camilla said. ‘He’s my favourite.’

  Teresa Lupo met those bleak, crystal eyes and remembered the man in the black cloak and buckled hat who had helped them off the boat at Zattere the afternoon before. It was ridiculous, she knew, but she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been waiting for their arrival.

  Strozzi removed the mask and placed it on the table.

  ‘Sofia thought it would be easy to make a living in a place so full of foreigners. But nothing’s so simple. We have a strange relationship, visitors and those of us who live off them. You’d think it would be close. Symbiotic. That they would appreciate us for our knowledge, and we them for their money. In truth there’s resentment on both sides. They detest us for what they see as our avarice. We despise them because we know that without their custom we could not survive. Dependence breeds neither cordiality nor respect.’

  He reached for the mask and briefly placed it over his face again.

  ‘See. Making masks is the most honest, most open way for any of us to get by. Sofia has yet to learn that, I think. It’s hard for her. She’s so truthful and decent.’

  Strozzi stared at her again and she was struck by how earnest he seemed.

  ‘Do you really have no idea where she’s gone?’ he asked.

  ‘None.’

  ‘She has a habit of disappearing like this?’

  Too close.

  ‘Sofia told you that?’ Teresa asked.

  Camilla was shaking her head as if this was news to her.

  ‘No,’ Strozzi said. ‘I guessed. She and I were born in the same year. I am three months older than her. In all that time I have lived in five places in Italy, the last two decades here in Venice. Sofia seemed to have visited everywhere, and always found it lacking somehow.’

  ‘But she had friends here, surely? She lived in Venice before. Sixteen years ago. Didn’t she tell you that?’

  ‘She didn’t mention it to me,’ Camilla said.

  Strozzi shrugged and said nothing.

  ‘She came out with us sometimes,’ the young woman continued. ‘There’s a place in Campo Santa Margherita. A pizzeria. We would
have dinner there. And we talked during the day, of course. But in the evening . . .’

  ‘She went out on her own?’ Teresa persisted.

  ‘Most nights I heard the door go around seven,’ Strozzi said. ‘When she came back . . . I don’t know. I sleep early. Ten, ten thirty at the latest. I’m a true Venetian these days. I’m sorry.’

  ‘She knew someone called Gobbo,’ she said, watching for their reaction. The name clearly meant nothing. Then she recalled the precise entry in the diary upstairs. ‘No. It was written Il Gobbo. As if it was a nickname or something.’

  They looked at each other, clearly lost for any connection.

  ‘She must have been seeing someone,’ Camilla said. ‘I heard her leave too, and get back sometimes. It was late. After midnight.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘I think so.’ She hesitated then added, ‘I didn’t want to spy on anyone. We all have our own lives here.’

  But I don’t know what Sofia’s was, Teresa thought. I believed I did and I was wrong.

  ‘She was making a costume,’ she told them. ‘For the carnival I imagine.’

  ‘No,’ Camilla said immediately. ‘You mean that thing on the dummy behind the door? I never saw that before last night. I didn’t know Sofia could even sew.’

  ‘A costume?’ Strozzi asked.

  ‘I’ve never seen a true carnival costume that looks like that,’ Camilla insisted. ‘They’re as specific as the masks. You’re allowed a little improvisation. But the styles, the characters are fixed. That wasn’t one of them.’

  Strozzi reached for the table and picked up his mobile phone.

  ‘Take a photo, please,’ he said, giving it to Teresa. ‘I would like to see this.’

  A nickname. An odd costume. A crazy story written by whom? Sofia herself? If so why deny authorship? Or the work of someone else? Someone who knew where she was and wanted to help? Even – this had to be faced – an abductor playing some cruel and intricate game? These were all threads without attachments, pointless without context or meaning.

  ‘Have you heard of an Englishman called Aitchison?’ she asked, clutching at straws.