Carnival for the Dead

by David Hewson

  ‘We’re here for a party?’ she asked, astonished.

  ‘A brief one, and we won’t be disturbed,’ he answered, happy again. ‘This is a gathering of pathologists, isn’t it? Where else would we go but Poveglia, the Island of the Dead?’

  The guests, most of them in smart evening dress, unlike her, disembarked, glasses in hand, onto the modest patch of land by the jetty. The gathering was then treated to a brief lecture by a pale and elegant young woman in a long black gown who spoke in the monotone high-pitched drone of a TV presenter of late-night horror movies.

  ‘My,’ Teresa Lupo murmured as she listened to the tale of Poveglia, the most haunted place in the Venetian lagoon. ‘I do feel terrified.’

  She stood, automatically, a little way from the rest of them, finding herself next to a slightly built man in an old-fashioned though smart blue suit, white shirt and subtle dark tie. He had a kindly, handsome face that defied age, being anything from pushing forty to mid-fifties. In spite of the heat he wore a crisp cream fedora which he lifted by way of greeting. His hair was very black though not, she guessed, artificially so, and his features spoke of Spain or the far south of Italy, a region where the dark features of the African dalliance in Europe, a thousand years before, still left their stamp. Some of the paintings of Mark had made him look a little like this. Nothing contemporary, of course, or even mildly authentic, if such a word could be used of images so antique. Like the legends surrounding the saint, they were simply one more diversion based on fantasy. While the apostle certainly came from north Africa, all the evidence was that he belonged to the Greek community, not the native one.

  ‘One should not expect pathologists to quake and quiver in the presence of death,’ the man said. ‘I am the Count of Saint-Germain. You are Dr Lupo. It is an honour. Call me Arnaud.’

  ‘Teresa. You’re a count and a scientist? From France?’

  ‘From many places over the years.’

  ‘I don’t recall seeing you earlier. At the symposium.’

  His face wrinkled in the hunt for an answer. On reflection she put his age at the higher end of the scale, fifty perhaps, though he looked very well maintained.

  ‘I’m a jackdaw, though less visible,’ he answered. ‘I toy with many things. Music was my first love, writing the second. But I’m easily bored. Time hangs heavy for a man like me, and I sleep little. Rarely, to be honest. It’s only natural that an inquisitive mind should seek other subjects, science among them. You’re the same. I can tell.’

  The actress hired to send shivers down their spine – she could be nothing else, the pathologist surmised – continued with her horror story. Of how the island was used to isolate plague victims in Roman times and then became the burial pit for the dead when La Peste devastated Venice in 1630, introduced, on this occasion, by German and French soldiers engaged in the Thirty Years’ War. That outbreak cost more than forty thousand lives, a third of the city’s population. Many of its victims’ bones now lay beneath a shallow covering of earth around the abandoned hospital and church of Poveglia, in this distant and, to most outsiders, forbidden corner of the lagoon. Nor did the tragedy end there. In the early part of the twentieth century the city opened a psychiatric hospital on the island, in spite of warnings from locals that the place was cursed by its black past. Inmates complained of tormenting ghosts and strange spirits. The doctor in charge experimented with cruel, crude practices, lobotomies and other unproven medical trials. When he began to see demons too he leapt from the church tower only to survive and be torn apart by his own patients. Deserted for eighty years, Poveglia was now nothing more than a curiosity for prurient searchers of occult thrills and a place where a few nonchalant locals raised vines on the massed corpses of those buried below.

  At this point the actress reached down, scratched at the earth, saw something, and raised it in her right hand, feigning shock like a player from a B-movie giallo. From a distance it looked like a human femur. Some of the guests began grubbing at the ground around them with the toes of their shoes, digging for bones too, and a few even picked up what they found, displaying it, Teresa Lupo was glad to see, with something approaching shame on some of their faces.

  ‘It’s downright disrespectful,’ she complained bitterly. ‘They wouldn’t dream of doing this somewhere that had a crucifix over the gate. In San Michele.’

  ‘There is a crucifix,’ the man said, in excellent Italian tinged by another accent she couldn’t place. ‘On the church tower. This entire island is a graveyard. Shattered corpse upon shattered corpse. One cannot expect order. Only the living may impose that upon the dead, and no one is fool enough to stay here long enough to countenance such a task.’

  ‘They still deserve dignity, don’t you think? All the more so if they have no grave, no place to leave flowers.’

  He was looking at her, a curious expression in his face, one she couldn’t quite read.

  ‘And they wonder why people come to Venice to contemplate mortality,’ the Count of Saint-Germain mused. ‘Is there a better place on earth?’

  She studied this odd man, of an uncertain nationality. He wasn’t like the others. Perhaps in one important way . . .

  ‘Probably not, but it’s a good place to study life too.’

  ‘Precisely the same discipline,’ he observed. ‘Though most people miss that point. Shall we walk a little? I find amateur theatricals tedious.’

  The pathologist readily agreed and so they slunk away from the body of the group by the launch Tintoretto, where a fresh round of drinks and food was being served amidst, no doubt, much chatter about bones and departmental budgets and the pleasantly Malthusian implications of plague.

  Beyond the crumbling buildings of the hospital the island was delightful, a tiny oasis of well-tended green vines that were carefully manicured in dead straight rows and set on a single expansive field on the city side of the island. The sweep of lush grapes looked like the garden of a long-deserted country mansion, still fertile and mysteriously cared for after humanity had fled elsewhere.

  The Count of Saint-Germain walked with a black lacquered cane topped with a silver handle though he seemed very fit and agile, stepping ahead of her, kicking stones out of the way, pointing out potholes in the overgrown path ahead, and, close to a wild and untidy apple tree, removing, with his fingers, a large black scorpion in their way. He deposited the creature carefully on an adjoining dry-stone wall with an admonition – to the arthropod, not her – to be more careful in the future.

  They found a thicket of dense grass at the water’s edge and sat there, admiring the view back to the city which appeared on the horizon like some petrified stone forest of campaniles, churches and palazzi, fed by a constant traffic of boats crawling across the still and mirrored surface of the lagoon.

  ‘How do you intend to vote tomorrow?’ she asked after a suitable interval, aware there was a note of pleading to her voice.

  ‘Vote?’ he asked, as if this were news to him. ‘There’s a vote?’

  ‘The resolution’s been written already. Alberto Tosi is to propose it. Some pompous prig from Barcelona will second.’

  Arnaud, the Count of Saint-Germain, nodded and didn’t speak.

  ‘It says,’ she went on, ‘that, after suitable scientific analysis, there’s an overwhelming probability the remains in the sarcophagus are indeed those of St Mark.’

  ‘Probability,’ he repeated. ‘What a weasel word that’s become. Did you know they now teach in universities that the origins of probability theory may be found in the correspondence in 1654 between Pascal and Fermat?’ He tut-tutted. ‘Have the idiots who feed this pap to the young ever read those letters? Shocking.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Mathematics . . . It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Pascal seemed a pleasant enough chap until he became ill. Pierre de Fermat was an honourable and knowledgeable gentleman, though I feel we could have done without his blasted last theorem, published posthumously by the way. He didn’t dare deliver that
devious little prank to the world while he was alive.’

  She was unable to comprehend fully what seemed to lie behind his words.

  ‘Arnaud. You speak of them as if . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he interrupted. ‘The point is that never once in this correspondence does either man use the word probabilité. Only, and I find this instructive, the more alluring and everyday term hasard. Chance, luck. As in, to quote Pierre, “la somme des hasards . . .” You see the point? Using the word probable attaches, quite deliberately, some quasi-scientific rectitude to the notion. The idea of luck, of randomness is replaced by a relentless march towards certainty, a Darwinian destruction of the glorious wonder of doubt, a despicable act which is both immoral and, I would argue, entirely unscientific. I don’t believe Pascal or Fermat felt party to such a conspiracy for one moment. They were explorers in an unknown land, grateful for what little knowledge they were able to extract. Religious fellows too, and they never saw any conflict in that either.’

  Teresa Lupo watched two large car ferries manoeuvre past each other on the lagoon like elephantine ballet dancers performing a pas de deux.

  ‘The vote, Arnaud?’

  He looked at her and, for a moment, she felt something akin to a chill. There seemed to be an ocean of accumulated wisdom and self-knowledge in his deep, dark eyes.

  ‘What about you?’

  The question was welcome. This was the first time in three days anyone had asked for her opinion.

  ‘It’s very clear from the carbon-dating results that the bones come from around the first century AD. Simple forensic science proves they represent the remains of a single corpse. That head the Copts worship in Alexandria is nothing to do with the remains here. We can also rule out any possibility whatsoever that they might belong to Alexander the Great, not that I had much time for that nonsense in the first place.’

  ‘Good for you,’ he said, and tipped his hat.

  ‘The mitochondrial DNA is remarkably similar to that of some modern samples from the remaining Hellenic community in Alexandria, which is a second reason for abandoning all thoughts of our Macedonian hero, since his would have been entirely different. This is a tentative link. Two thousand years ago there were a hundred and fifty thousand Greeks in the city. Today, fewer than a thousand. Nevertheless the probability . . .’

  He coughed into his fist and stared at her.

  ‘. . . the possibility,’ she corrected herself, ‘is that the remains in the basilica are those of a man of Greek origin, born in north Africa, around the time of Christ.’

  ‘If you’re lucky,’ he added. ‘Remember my friends Pascal and Fermat.’

  ‘I will not put my name to a piece of religious chicanery,’ she insisted. ‘We know it’s one body. We have a rough idea of its origin and age. To deduce a direct identification with Mark simply from the literature surrounding a body-snatching incident in Alexandria twelve hundred years ago is unscientific and irrational.’

  He frowned then said, ‘Yet Tosi and his friends may be right.’

  ‘Which is not the same as saying they are. Besides . . .’ Something larger, and more ill-defined, grated about this entire episode. Her obvious discomfort appeared to interest him. ‘It’s wrong. I don’t understand why they’re so desperate to achieve this result.’

  ‘I believe they justify it on the grounds that the Church needs all the help it can get.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with me. Or you, I imagine.’

  The light was starting to fade. From somewhere near the campanile came the long, slow hoot of a waking owl.

  ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ he mused. ‘Here we are on an island built upon the skeletons of forty thousand lost souls. Just a few steps away is a learned conclave of self-appointed experts debating the identity of a few grey, fragile bones that have sat in a basilica, first in Alexandria, latterly here, for almost two thousand years, worshipped, adored on a daily basis.’ He picked at the earth with his shoe. Those sharp eyes were on her again. ‘No one asks their names, do they?’

  ‘Too late now, isn’t it?’

  ‘I imagine so. Doesn’t it worry you? Being here with a stranger? On a tiny island that’s the resting place for so many who suffered an agonizing death not so long ago?’

  She could only laugh.

  ‘You should see what I do on a daily basis. The dead don’t scare me, not half as much as the living.’ She shrugged her shoulders. Teresa Lupo was a muscular, well-built woman, fit and active. Nothing, she felt, frightened her easily. ‘They’re not so bad either, so long as you speak your mind and tell them the truth. Four hundred years is a very long time ago, by the way.’

  ‘Not for everyone,’ he murmured ruefully, unable to look her in the eye at that moment.

  This strange man toyed again with the pebbles at their feet. Another black scorpion, or perhaps the same one as before, dodged the movement of his shiny shoes and scurried off into the grass.

  ‘How old are you, Arnaud?’ she asked, willing to play this game for a little while anyway.

  ‘That’s a very personal question! What would you think of me if I asked the same of you?’

  ‘I’m thirty-six. Anyone can ask my age. I don’t mind.’

  ‘Well I do.’ He looked miserable, mournful. ‘I have my reasons.’

  ‘You mean Pascal? Fermat . . .?’

  His face turned grim and sad, and the words just poured out.

  ‘For starters. I also mean Louis XV, Madame Pompadour, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Casanova – who at one point had the nerve to impersonate me. A creature of the most enduring charm but an utter prune as a man – Beethoven, Cagliostro, Pushkin, Chopin, Marx, Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck, Theodore Roosevelt, T. E. Lawrence, that interesting American Ambrose Bierce, Thomas Edison, Robert Oppenheimer.’ He brightened briefly. ‘Oh, and those charming young men at Google. They’re alive, for now anyway. Acquaintances all. Not friends. The longer you live, the fewer you have. I don’t expect you to understand.’

  He took something out of the pocket of his jacket. It was a small book, backed in black pock-marked leather and very old.

  ‘I am the Count of Saint-Germain. I’ve written operas and concerti, swindled royal families of their riches, though only when they deserved it. Made love to a select number of beautiful women along the way then disappeared discreetly before the inevitable, usually anyway. I’ve dabbled in science and alchemy and commerce and politics.’ He stared at the lagoon. ‘And here I am, back in Venice, on Poveglia, the Island of the Dead, still breathing, still thinking, still . . . sleepless after all these long years.’ He glanced at her. ‘I could tell you more if you were interested.’

  There was the sound of a ship’s horn. It sounded like that of the Tintoretto.

  ‘On the way back, I think.’

  ‘You didn’t laugh.’

  ‘You didn’t seem funny.’

  His mouth screwed up in a wry smile, very like that of a child.

  ‘I can be. Sometimes. But not now.’ He looked around him. ‘Not here.’ He shook his aristocratic head. ‘When that woman held up the bone of one of those poor creatures as if it were a trophy I saw the expression on your face. You were hurt. It caused you pain.’

  ‘I’m a pathologist. I never forget that what passes through my hands was once a human being. The beloved child of doting parents, if he or she was lucky. Someone’s wife or husband. What we are today, just as they are what we shall be tomorrow.’

  This last sentence seemed to affect him. There was a second hoot of the boat’s horn. Then he uttered a very mild and ancient swear word, an epithet Teresa Lupo had once heard from her maternal grandmother in a moment of rare heat.

  ‘I don’t believe it. They’re leaving without you,’ he declared, standing up.

  The launch hove into view rounding the green promontory of the Poveglia vineyard, heading back towards Venice. It was already a good way out into the lagoon. She could see the crowd on the deck. They stood together with their backs to
the island, still and silent, a little ashamed perhaps.

  ‘They know the way you’re going to vote,’ Saint-Germain shouted. ‘This is their way of stopping you. Hey! Hey!’

  The Tintoretto carried on regardless, picking up speed.

  ‘Us, Arnaud!’ she insisted as she made her way along the narrow overgrown path to the jetty, blind to all potholes and scorpions. ‘They’re stopping us.’

  He didn’t seem to hear.

  There was a hamper of food on the rickety wooden landing stage, a bottle of prosecco in an ice bucket, a selection of bedding, a sleeping bag, a roll of toilet paper, an electric lantern and a handwritten note signed by Alberto Tosi. It read, ‘Dear Doctor. We looked for you, without success. So we assume you wish to be alone on this curious little island, for professional reasons which are only understandable. This is not a problem. The place is safe. We leave food and drink and will send a launch back for you tomorrow around midday.’

  ‘Midday,’ she spluttered. ‘By which time their names will be on Tosi’s resolution, making the declaration unanimous.’

  She took her phone out of her bag. Her stubby fingers stabbed at the buttons. There was no signal.

  Saint-Germain reached the landing stage a few moments later, a little out of breath. He retrieved a very modern BlackBerry from his jacket pocket, looked at the screen and shook his head.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, panting. ‘We’re a long way from civilization.’

  ‘And don’t they know it! Damn Venice. There’s trouble every time I come to this place.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about trouble here.’ He shook his head. ‘That bastard Casanova . . .’