Carnival for the Dead

by David Hewson

  They both shook their heads. There was no more time for this. She had to meet Alberto Tosi and then go with him to the Castello Questura.

  ‘Bring me the photo,’ Strozzi repeated. ‘Let me think about this. Perhaps Sofia said something I’ve forgotten.’

  Camilla followed her and took several shots of the gown and the dummy. Now Teresa looked at it again the thing seemed wrong for the carnival. The fabric was too rich, the small crown fetching rather than showy. The style seemed old, not eighteenth- or seventeenth-century, but something more ancient: the kind of dress seen in a painting from Caravaggio or earlier. It was light too, and thin. Most of the carnival costumes she’d seen were heavy and designed for outdoors in the bitter Venetian winter. No one could wear this on a freezing February day.

  ‘Where did this man Aitchison come from?’ Camilla asked.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me,’ Teresa muttered.

  ‘I could try.’

  The acerbic comment seemed to have offended her. She was a bright young woman, a little ingenuous at first sight. Not Italian either. On the walk up the stairs she’d told how she came here two years before from her native Dubrovnik, looking to find a better living than could be made in Croatia.

  ‘All right,’ Teresa said and led her into the bedroom.

  The yellow pages of the short story lay scattered on the crumpled bed. She didn’t remember turning over every single one so that the typed side was face down on the duvet.

  Teresa flipped over the nearest. The other side was blank too. The same for the next one. Growing ever more furious she dashed her fingers through the pile of sheets.

  There wasn’t a word on any of them. The story from the previous night, Carpaccio’s Dog, was gone entirely, disappeared from this strange mustard-coloured paper as if by magic.

  Camilla waited, embarrassed.

  ‘Forget it,’ Teresa said, then asked her to take the photographs to Filippo Strozzi.

  When the girl had gone she lay down on the bed in the midst of the blank sheets of paper, fighting back the tears, stamping her fists angrily into the mattress, furious in the sea of yellow that flew around her like gigantic confetti.

  When she finally managed to recover some of her composure she glanced at her watch. The appointment with Tosi was only twenty minutes away. She sat upright on the bed, wiped her face, tried to think.

  Everything had an explanation if only you could find it. That simple truth was central to her view of the world, of life. A tenet of faith almost.

  She picked up one of the sheets of paper and rubbed it between her fingers. The colour, the thickness, the texture . . . all these were unusual. She wasn’t insane, not imagining the eerie narrative of an English character named Jerome Aitchison and some dark, unresolved encounter in the back streets of Castello. It had been set out on these very pages then somehow made to disappear once she had read it. Offering up evidence then removing proof of its existence, shifting any blame, and perhaps even suspicion, on to her.

  Back in the living room she looked at the manila envelope in which the short story had arrived. It had a strange and very firm adhesive seal and a lined plastic interior. The thing was airtight. Some chemical process must have been involved, one which began the degradation of the ink once it was exposed to air.

  She placed a sheet of the yellow paper in an envelope then, on the way out, begged a postage stamp from Camilla, discovering as she did so that there was no Internet access in the building. Nor had she a modern laptop she could use. These matters would be rectified the following morning, regardless of the expense, if Sofia was still missing by then.

  On the way to the bridge she posted the paper sample to her assistant, Silvio Di Capua, in Rome. It would not arrive till Tuesday. She’d no idea how long it would take him to come up with an answer. Di Capua was a talented man with a wide range of forensic interests. Perhaps not long.

  Tosi stood where she expected him, a tall, lean man in his early seventies. He was resting on a black walking stick and wore an ankle-length black overcoat and a moleskin trilby hat. She felt better for seeing him, better too for knowing that she was, finally, in possession of a scrap of evidence, proof of something strange pertaining to Sofia’s disappearance. Even if it no longer contained a single word.

  ‘Doctor! Teresa!’ Tosi said when she reached him.

  They exchanged kisses, cold lips against cold cheeks.

  Then, smiling, the old man declared, ‘And you look so at home in Venice already! Like a native!’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘The dog,’ he said. ‘The little white dog with you . . . I . . .’

  He peered round her, back at the promenade beyond the Ponte agli Incurabili. Teresa followed the line of his gaze. The rear quarters of a small white animal were disappearing down an alley beyond the bridge. Its head was out of view and the animal was trotting at quite a pace.

  ‘I thought it was yours,’ Tosi said. ‘So many dogs in Venice. We love the little creatures, which is why you must always tread carefully, even when the weather isn’t arctic.’

  The vaporetto was making its way across the canal already, moving steadily towards the fermata, cutting through the dappled water that shone silver under the low winter sun.

  ‘I don’t have a dog,’ she said. ‘Can we go to the police station now?’

  It was one of the smaller, faster boats that worked the outside of the islands and sped across the Basin of St Mark packed to the gills. Young and old, families, locals, tourists, either wrapped up well in winter coats or trapped inside incongruous carnival costumes, faces hidden behind masks ancient and modern, traditional and bizarre.

  The light was so pale and weak there seemed no dividing line between lagoon and sky. The biting air made her throat ache. As they docked a pair of bright-eyed crested grebes watched from the water, heads bobbing with interest as if amazed by the sight.

  There were so many passengers it took a good five minutes to disembark then make their way through the crowds admiring the Bridge of Sighs.

  ‘I know a quick way,’ Alberto Tosi declared then led her by the arm and entered the shady loggia by the side of the Doge’s Palace. The piazza seemed impossibly full. Men and women in feathers and masks, cloaks and billowing hooped dresses, grand aristocratic jackets and gowns. Children threaded their way through the forest of bodies as miniature lords and ladies, spacemen, cartoon characters, cowboys, beasts and insects.

  Ahead of her a man in the full-length gown of a Benedictine monk with the mask of a demon on his face walked quickly into the crowd. He was smoking a cigar and carrying, inexplicably, a baseball bat. Tosi scurried into the shadow of the palace, tugging her along. Then they ran into a solid wall of bodies. She knew this place. There was no easy exit route until they managed to get past the façade of the basilica then find the back lanes into Castello and the local Questura. He’d led her here deliberately; had they turned right when leaving the boat they could have escaped the crush entirely.

  An army of gaily coloured bodies blocked their path. As they were forced to stop she heard the sound of trumpets, a fanfare voluntary, bright and military. Ahead, out of the side arch of the palace, came a procession of dignitaries, men and women grandly arrayed, one in the guise of the Doge himself, a beautiful creature by his side bedecked in jewels as the Dogaressa, his duchess.

  They came to a halt and Tosi scratched his head.

  ‘This is so not my kind of thing,’ Teresa muttered through gritted teeth.

  ‘I may have made a wrong decision back there,’ he confessed.

  Tosi turned round. The return route to the waterfront was blocked by a new influx of spectators. They were trapped for as long as the ceremony would take.

  ‘You were determined I should see this, weren’t you?’ she said.

  ‘No!’ He looked offended. She felt guilty. ‘It’s not easy getting anywhere in carnival. The first day particularly.’ His eyes rose to the upright brick column of the campanile rising
above the piazza, and then the ornate windows and pinnacle at its summit. ‘Especially when the angel is about to exercise her wings.’

  ‘What?’ she demanded.

  ‘The angel. She comes down from the campanile into the square. On a wire.’ Tosi thought about whether to say what was on his mind. ‘In the old days we used to call it the Flight of the Turk and make one of them walk down the wire. Now it’s some pretty actress usually. In a gown. Hooked to the wire. This year that girl from the television. Luisa Cammarota. The one from the papers.’

  The name rang a bell. One more Italian starlet, forever in and out of the magazines for her colourful private life. Blonde hair and the kind of figure Italian men of a certain age liked to ogle.

  Teresa could not believe this was delaying their visit to the police and told him so.

  ‘Sorry,’ the old Venetian said with a shrug. ‘I appreciate the urgency. But look around you. With so many people here no one will get anywhere very easily. Besides the police will be very occupied too. You wouldn’t have seen an officer until after the angel had flown anyway. And it is quite a sight.’

  ‘You did this on purpose, Alberto!’

  Tosi grinned and put an apologetic finger briefly to his lips, like a child.

  ‘Carnival is the busiest time of the year,’ he replied. ‘Nothing happens quickly.’

  ‘Nothing ever happens quickly in Venice.’

  ‘Thank you!’ he said, beaming, then took her arm and propelled them forward until they were closer to the basilica. Something was happening. The steady beat of a military drum preceded a long line of men and women in ornate ancient costumes, soldiers and courtly ladies then a man in red with the horned hat she recognized. The Doge for the day emerged again and this time she could see him clearly. He was grinning, embarrassed, unduly proud, some local elevated for the procession more than two hundred years after the last real ruler of Venice had handed over the keys to the city to Napoleon.

  It took ten minutes for this supposedly noble party to work their way through the crowds and cameras then proceed to the platform at the far end of the piazza, near the Museo Correr, with a speed that would certainly be denied to ordinary bystanders trapped in the general melee.

  With the Venetian skill for pushing others out of the way, Tosi yelled ‘Permesso! Permesso!’ and barged forward, both elbows working, creating a little room for them near a rubbish bin. Once there he smiled broadly, reached into his coat and retrieved two tiny pocket telescopes, handing one to her.

  ‘I always come prepared,’ he said. ‘Look . . .’

  The loudspeaker had started the announcements, in alternate Italian and English, a breathless commentator describing the illustrious history of the carnival, the importance of the coming angel’s flight, and the beauty of the ‘famous actress’ Luisa Cammarota, who would soon descend to earth among them.

  ‘Ridiculous,’ Teresa grumbled, and placed the tiny telescope to her right eye then attempted to focus on the top of the campanile.

  It wasn’t easy. The feeble winter sun had risen a little over the lagoon now. After some fiddling and squinting she found the pinnacle of the bell tower and scanned the line of open stone arches near the top, seeing nothing out of the ordinary.

  Tosi nudged her finger upwards. The focus of the scope travelled beyond the obvious to the ledge above the open windows, a narrow sliver of marble set against the flat brickwork beneath the green peak of the spire a hundred metres or so above the hard piazza pavement.

  There was a roar of delight from the crowd around her. As she watched, two figures appeared, a man walking freely, without fear, at the very edge of the tower and a woman in a long, flowing feathery dress. She was attached to twin wires which ran directly from the spire across the piazza to the stage at the end of the square. Her young and beautiful face was rigid and expressionless, with fear or cold or possibly both. Teresa did remember her now, a glamorous showgirl-cum-actress.

  She took away the scope. Heights didn’t bother her normally. But this seemed so bizarre, so unnecessary. And the man supervising the angel’s descent was walking around quite normally, unperturbed by the idea that one step too far would send him plummeting to the ground.

  ‘Watch please,’ Tosi insisted, pushing at her little telescope. ‘Even Romans don’t see a spectacle like this every day.’

  This was true.

  When her attention returned to the spire the woman was in the air, starting her descent to the piazza. This wasn’t a fairground ride. It was slow and stately, which seemed to make the tension all the worse.

  Teresa’s attention wandered. She checked the man on the ledge again, who seemed so pleased with his work that she expected him to sit down on the edge of the narrow parapet and dangle his legs over the edge like a happy child.

  This thought made her feel a little giddy, so she roamed a little with the telescope, admiring the detail of the tower, so ornate and beautiful, with crests and shields and gold features one would never appreciate with the naked eye. As she scanned the white marble section beneath, a face appeared at one of the open arches.

  The starlet who was the angel came from the Veneto region and had some part in one of the nightly quiz shows. The crowd loved her. It was obvious from the way they screamed her name as she came closer.

  Photographers, Teresa thought. They had to have them in the tower to capture an occasion such as this. And wasn’t that a camera the man had in his hand? A small dark one, with a long barrel-like lens.

  She tried to fiddle with the focus ring to get the image sharper.

  The figure was now clearer for the simple reason that he had walked out to stand boldly on the marble ledge beyond the arches, paralleling the wire supervisor above him, who was surely unaware of what was happening beneath his feet.

  The man wore a costume she was coming to recognize: the Plague Doctor. A long black cloak, a broad felt hat with a buckle, a dark ruff at the neck. And that sinister, expressionless mask with the long, nightmare nose that bent down pointing towards the piazza pavement so far below.

  The thing in his hand wasn’t a camera. It was a gun.

  ‘Alberto!’ she cried, but the old man wasn’t listening. His attention was with that of the crowd around them, focused on the figure of the angel descending slowly to the ground, her long feathery gown extending so far below her she seemed of an extraordinary height as she waved and smiled and blew kisses to the massed thousands gathered in the piazza.

  Over the roars and shouts and catcalls there was a single explosive crack. Teresa’s eyes dashed back to the Plague Doctor. His arm was extended, the gun rigid in his fingers. The woman on the wire was perhaps twenty metres away, moving further from him all the time. Not an easy shot.

  One bullet gone already, target missed, and no one, it seemed, had noticed but her.

  ‘Get the damned police,’ she screamed, tugging at the old man’s arm, pointing at the campanile, the last place anyone in the piazza was looking at that moment. ‘Look up there!’

  Finally he did as he was told, turning the scope to the tower, scanning it.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ Tosi murmured.

  He began to wave around him, bellowing in a hoarse Venetian accent. There was no one in a uniform anywhere near. Only this noisy, gleeful crowd that saw nothing but a grand and glorious spectacle, a beautiful angel descending into their midst, waving to each and every one of them.

  Teresa looked at the tower again. The black figure was aiming. One more crack. This time the crowd fell silent, puzzled by something. She spun the telescope round to the wire in the middle of the piazza. The starlet was writhing around inside her harness, clearly terrified, uncomprehending. There was what looked like blood on her right thigh, staining the pure white feathered gown all the way down to its distant hem.

  As Teresa watched she heard the loud retort of another shot. Sparks flew from the metal wire no more than an arm’s length from the angel’s head. The poor girl folded in on herself, in fear and bewilder
ment, Teresa thought, not pain. There was no more blood. That shot had missed too. One in three, and she was getting further away from him all the time. It would surely take a serious marksman to kill someone with a pistol in such a situation, halfway across the piazza of San Marco.

  She turned the scope back to the tower. The supervisor on the roof was aware something was wrong. Arms waving, shouting words no one could hear, he was managing to force the wire mechanism to move more quickly. After a few long seconds the angel arrived on the platform, into the arms of the costumed figures there, and two or three baffled police officers.

  Safe. With what appeared, from a distance, to be a minor gunshot wound.

  She took Tosi’s scope from her face and squinted into the sun, trying to make sense of what was going on at the summit of the campanile. The Plague Doctor was still there, the gun by his side, a black figure motionless and silent on the ledge, staring down into the crowd. The mass of people had forgotten the wounded angel now. Every face in the Piazza San Marco was turned to him, every throat silent. The pregnant stillness joined them all in anticipation, like an audience waiting for the climax of a performance.

  She knew what was coming somehow. All the same she shivered and felt strangely distant as the figure in the dark flowing costume let go of the weapon, watched it tumble slowly out of his fingers, over the edge of the white marble ledge, turning and turning as it fell to the crowd below.

  Head bent forward, the man watched and waited for it to disappear. Then he made a long theatrical bow, deathly white mask rigid, bent downwards, right hand waving below him, into the empty space beyond the campanile ledge, as if in thanks to those who had followed his act. After that, fearless, determined, he simply allowed himself to sink forwards over the ledge, hands by his side, plunging head first down towards the sea of bodies beneath him.

  Romans can push and shove too, Teresa thought as she yelled ‘Police’ and ‘Doctor’ and anything else she could think of, fighting her way towards the area where he must have fallen. The press of bodies was against her, pushing and screaming to get away from whatever had happened in the shadows of the Procuratie near the famous café of Florian.