by David Hewson
The Plague Doctor stood next to it, a black glove on the metal lid, leaning on the thing casually, relaxed. The little white dog sat next to him, a tiny triangle of pale fur, erect, alert, just like the animal in the Carpaccio painting.
There were no windows on any of the buildings that faced onto this grim little place, none that were illuminated anyway. Only a single iron street lamp, the bulb flickering uncertainly. For the first time since she came to Venice Teresa was aware of the smell of drains: a rank, fetid odour of decay and age.
She walked up to the man and asked the question about Sofia again. The beak didn’t turn away this time. The black eyes simply stared at her. She wondered whether the cloak exaggerated his bulk. It was hard to tell.
‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Talk to me.’
He took his hand off the metal cover of the wellhead and reached inside his cloak. Then the Plague Doctor withdrew a large manila envelope of the kind she knew already, too well.
She didn’t want to get angry. It was important to think clearly, to talk to this man. To understand.
He held out the envelope more forcefully. She thrust the thing aside with a wave of her hand.
There was an unfamiliar stinging in her eyes. She felt desperate and lost and not in the least afraid.
‘For God’s sake . . .’ she begged him.
The black figure stepped forward, thrust the thing at her and ordered, in a voice that was muffled by the large, heavy mask, ‘Take it!’
‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘What kind of charade is this? Masks and mysteries and stupid, stupid games. Where’s Sofia?’
It seemed impossible but, as she spoke those words, the man appeared to shrink a little in front of her, bowed by doubt or guilt or shame.
The dog got off its little hind legs, stared at her, as if outraged by the tone and volume of her voice. Then the animal trotted off into the darkness at the corner of the campiello, out through another sotoportego just visible as a dim and dingy arch in the shadows.
‘In the end it’s the mystery that lasts,’ the Plague Doctor said in the same muffled, fuzzy voice she’d heard before. ‘Not the explanation.’
‘Enough damned riddles I . . .’
His black-gloved hand went to the mask’s thin, inhuman lips, right finger upright, a gesture for silence.
She had no idea why she obeyed.
He placed the envelope on the dull metal cover of the well and then said simply, ‘I’m grateful you were kind to my dog.’
After that he walked off into the pool of darkness that had swallowed up the little animal a few moments before.
She wanted to follow but she couldn’t. Something about his manner told her he was strong and fast. And that if she did manage to tear off that eerie white mask whatever lay beneath would offer no answers whatsoever.
‘He doesn’t know where she is either,’ she murmured in the noxious, grubby courtyard, her words falling on walls tattooed with inane graffiti and spray-painted murals.
He’s giving me these things so that I find out. Because, for some strange reason, he’s powerless himself.
Teresa Lupo picked up the envelope, thrust it beneath her jacket, then walked back to the Bridge of Fists and on to home.
The sense of helpless bewilderment followed her up the winding stone staircase of the crooked little palazzo close to the Ponte agli Incurabili, past the closed doors of Filippo Strozzi and Camilla Dushku, both apartments in darkness and silence. It was almost one o’clock. Physically she felt tired but her mind was alert, almost elated somehow. She had seen, touched, something that was real, not myth or fantasy on a sheet of paper, not cryptic paint on a five-hundred-year-old canvas.
There was someone in this city who needed to prise open the secret of Sofia’s fate too. For some reason he was unwilling to reveal himself, and chose instead to wear the garb of the Plague Doctor. Just like Jerome Aitchison high on the San Marco campanile.
This man possessed, or was perhaps merely accompanied by, the dog that seemed to run through this affair like a meandering Delphic thread.
She was now inclined to the view that this was the person who greeted them that first day on the vaporetto stop at Zattere. It was also feasible – she had to face this – that more than one interested party had assumed this disguise. It was common. Aitchison had adopted it for his performance on the campanile. The purpose of masks and cloaks was to deliver anonymity, to fox the unwary. To lull the innocent into seeing safety where there was danger, fact where there was nothing but lies and fiction.
One man was dead, a young woman had been lucky to escape a terrible yet amateurish attack. Danger lurked here, and perhaps it did not come from the direction she’d expected, the figure of the Plague Doctor, at least the one she’d just met. She’d heard his muffled voice in the darkness of the cramped campiello near the Bridge of Fists and there was something unmistakable inside it.
Trepidation and a sad, almost resigned anxiety.
He thinks I’m not up to this, she thought, staring at the envelope, half-reluctant to open it. And maybe he’s right.
A light was flashing on the netbook, indicating a message.
Teresa pulled the machine over, ran her finger across the keys to bring it back to life, sighing as she saw the name on the single email waiting there.
It was unknown for Orsini to work at night. He was a bureaucrat, an admin drone from upstairs. A grey man in a grey suit who approved budgets and hirings and firings. Someone who handed over clocks at retirement parties, signed off purchase orders and internal reports, never once coming close to the base material of the Questura’s work, humanity in extremis, ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
Yet there he was, writing only two hours earlier, just after eleven at night. Perhaps, she thought, reading it, Orsini had been drinking too. The tone was different, unexpected. Intemperate, aggressive, finger-pointing in the way it raised old grievances, some she’d forgotten, a few she’d never realized were much of an issue in the first place. A button had been pressed and it unleashed such venom in her direction that she would have been offended if his petty complaints weren’t so pathetically amusing.
She pushed back the computer and gazed out of the window. There were few lights out on the water at this time of night, just a handful of distant vessels moving on the Giudecca canal, and some illumination from the houses and the streets of the island opposite. Sofia had been missing for more than a week. If she wasn’t found soon she probably never would be. Not alive anyway.
Some crucial part of this task was hers alone. A man in a black cloak and ivory mask had made that perfectly clear. There was no time for distractions. When she reached down to stroke that strange little dog Teresa Lupo was aware that she had invited something into her life. She’d once have damned it as superstition. Now she felt another word was necessary. Faith? Or plain, simple doubt? An acceptance that the world was, perhaps, more complex and more unpredictable than she had hitherto accepted?
The drink was making her head hurt. A decision was needed.
Teresa Lupo copied Orsini’s email to several key people: the commissario in charge of the Questura, Silvio, several other administrative officials who worked alongside the man. Above it she typed out a simple note of resignation, stating plainly that she was unable return to the Questura to reassume her old position under any circumstances.
With immediate effect she was quitting her post as the chief forensic officer of the Rome Questura and would not seek anything in the way of compensation or paid notice.
She looked at the words. A career of thirteen years, built with care and sweat and dedication, stood in the balance in front of her.
Without a moment’s hesitation, she hit the send key then took the envelope and whatever it contained to bed.
Every Last Drop
Jason Cunningham never had a dog at home. Too much trouble, Auntie Flo said. Messy. Bothersome. A pest.
This one didn’t look messy. It was small an
d white and perky. Friendly little thing with a pointy nose and gleaming black eyes. Unlike him the dog didn’t look lost, stranded in some back alley in Venice, wondering where to go.
He bent down, made tutting noises and patted its little head.
‘You’re a nice chap,’ Jason said, though he knew it wouldn’t understand a word of English.
He’d idly followed as the dog trotted into a constricted dead-end lane, a tunnel of black brick and mould that ended in a sullen line of canal. The water there was a blue-green colour swilling around idly as if wondering where to go, a faint medical odour rising from the surface. There wasn’t a sign, let alone a fence to keep people from falling in. If it was dark or someone was blind or sick or drunk they’d step off the slimy paving stones and tumble straight into the viscous depths of the lagoon. This shocked him. Must happen all the time, the young Englishman muttered to himself and then heard a little voice inside his head add: maybe on purpose once in a while too.
Someone at work had killed himself a year or two back. Young man. About Jason Cunningham’s age. Hanged himself in the woods. No one really knew why.
Jason was abroad, alone, for the first time in his life. Abroad. He remembered the way some folk used that word back home in Yorkshire. It carried the same kind of chill scariness Uncle Arthur and Auntie Flo used when talking about vampires and black people and the Conservative Party.
He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and felt the coins there. There was no need to count them. He’d done that three or four times already. Money didn’t grow on trees, his auntie said, repeatedly. It was seven euros an hour ago and would still be seven euros now. Enough for a sandwich and a bottle of water. It was winter in Venice. Bitterly cold. Yorkshire cold. Dry and bright but chilly enough to leave patches of ice on the worn cobblestones. Not the weather he’d expected at all though he felt he’d managed all right at first. And then . . .
The thieves who’d snatched his wallet at the station had ripped from his waist the little pouch he’d bought down Wakefield market. He still had his clothes in his rucksack: all neatly folded and as clean as he could keep them. And his passport too. Some elusive memory told him he could find the British consul, whoever he was, and throw himself on the man’s mercy. He had an idea of what a consul would look like: some southerner in a suit, with a posh accent and a snooty expression. If Jason was lucky maybe he could get repatriated. Sent back home like a beggar. The whole process sounded humiliating. Finding himself dumped back in Britain with no job, no money, nowhere to go, and a big label round his neck that read, ‘Failure’.
‘Sod that,’ he muttered, staring at the canal with its funny colour and faint aroma of disinfectant, wondering whether the water was as cold and nasty as it looked.
He turned round, still puzzled how any sane person could know which way was up or down or in or out in this place. He’d been in the condition his late father would have called discombobulated ever since he arrived the night before. The free map he’d picked up at the airport was useless. It tried to describe a real city, one with turnings and landmarks and some logic to it, not the maze of nameless alleys that had swallowed him up the moment he stepped off the Alilaguna ferry at a long-lost place called Fondamenta Nove.
He was by the side of a broad stretch of water that looked very like the sea. Ahead was a white island surrounded by an ornate wall with a church somewhere to the left. Beyond it was a larger shape he’d seen from the boat stop. They’d been calling the name for the place when he arrived. He remembered because it sounded nice: Murano. To his right was what looked like a castle wall, in bright, handsome yellow-brown brick rising out of the water, with stone pikes on the top. He was at a dead end, the corner where one smaller canal met the larger stretch of lagoon ahead, with no bridge across to the forbidding-looking castle place to one side, and nowhere else to go except back into the alleys behind or left, past a succession of largely derelict warehouses.
Ahead of him, at the end of a narrow and rickety bridge over the lagoon, was a strange little house set all on its own, standing above the water on a low platform stained with algae and seaweed. Two storeys tall, its white marble walls were streaked with dark stains like the running mascara on some teary-eyed tart. The place looked as if it had been some kind of miniature church once upon a time, one that had decided to shrug off its spire and crosses for some reason and start a new life beyond the influence of God.
As Jason watched, the little white dog got up off its haunches and trotted across the bridge to the front step, moving with a happy, rolling gait.
There was no sign saying ‘keep out’ or anything that looked like it in Italian. So out of curiosity he followed the animal. A notice had been posted in a holder next to the polished wooden door. He walked up for a closer look. In English it read, ‘Blood donors needed. Generous rates for suitable applicants. With perks.’
Perks.
The word reminded him of Uncle Arthur. He was always asking, ‘But where are the bloody perks?’ The week before, as part of what the money men down in London called the ‘credit crunch’, the bank had closed the bakery where the two of them worked. They’d found out what a perk really added up to then: eight weeks’ wages and a place in the dole queue, alongside half the men in Yorkshire it seemed.
He’d lived with Arthur and his wife Flo since his dad, a good baker, a dedicated one who got him the job in the first place, died of emphysema two years before. One room in a tiny terrace in Garibaldi Street. It cost him most of his pay packet though if he whispered the slightest murmur of complaint Arthur and Flo quickly gathered together, elbow to elbow, and catalogued with pointing fingers the breadth and depth of his ingratitude. There was washing and food included, they told him. The grub was good. He had a home.
It still seemed a lot of cash.
Then along came the men from London with their layoff envelopes, smiling grimly as they slipped them into the hands of the silent bakery workers.
‘Bastards,’ Arthur had said, grasping for his.
Straight away Arthur had gone down the pub with some of the other men, got steaming drunk and wound up with a kicking from some blokes he’d turned mouthy with.
It was the most money Jason Cunningham had ever seen. That was a perk all right and it had got him out of Garibaldi Street and Wakefield. Out of the clutches of his Uncle Arthur and Auntie Flo. He was nineteen. Lost and now, since he’d got robbed at the station, skint.
He stepped up to the door and pulled the rusty iron stay of what he took to be a very old-fashioned bell. It was a while before someone answered.
Jason Cunningham stood there, shuffling awkwardly on his big feet, blowing on his hands to keep them warm. The dog had trotted back across the bridge and disappeared.
When the door opened Jason said, ‘I’ve come about the blood.’
The man who took him into the house was a middle-aged Italian with a kindly smile. He wore a white nylon collarless jacket, like a dentist. They went into what appeared to be a doctor’s room with a large mahogany desk, lots of books, a computer and a variety of medical instruments. The strange house, a little palace, was surrounded by water on all four sides which made every sound, the man’s soft and amiable voice, the whirring of the computer on the desk, the squawk of seagulls and the steady rhythm of the waves, seem to hover in the air.
‘We require one specific blood type only,’ he announced. ‘What is yours?’
‘Don’t rightly know.’
‘Shall we find out?’
The man reached into the drawer of a metal cabinet and retrieved a plastic envelope with a sheet of paper and a little plastic gadget which he opened to reveal a short, sharp spike.
‘Needles,’ Jason murmured, shivering. ‘Is this a hospital or something?’
‘It’s a private clinic. I’m the doctor. My name is Marco. We pay one hundred euros per donation.’
‘And the perks?’
‘Vouchers for four nights’ accommodation in a very nice hostel close
to the station. I can also offer a free ticket which will get you into some of the historic sites. If that is your . . . thing.’
‘Seems very generous.’
The doctor spoke good English and smiled pleasantly. A nice chap, Jason thought.
‘Only if your blood is the right type, I’m afraid. If not I give you twenty euros for your trouble . . .’
It didn’t hurt really. Just a little prick on the finger then Marco smeared the blood in several places on a sheet of card and waited a minute or two, watching the stain on the paper for some kind of sign.
‘Bravo!’ he declared finally. He seemed genuinely delighted. Perhaps even a touch relieved. ‘For future reference you are blood type AB positive. It’s worth remembering. Only three per cent of the English belong to this group. Congratulations.’
He asked for Jason’s passport and wrote down some details.
‘You mean I’m special?’
‘We’re all special, Jason.’
‘But I’m special enough to flog you some of my blood?’
Marco’s head went to one side. He had bushy grey hair, a long, beak-like nose and keen icy blue eyes. Something about him reminded Jason of a bird. Like the kestrel a young lad kept as a pet in an old film that was set in Yorkshire, one his dad had taken him to as a treat years ago.
‘Flog? I mean you no harm. Why would you wish to flog me?’
‘Flog. Flog! It’s Yorkshire. Means sell. For money, like.’
‘Ah. Strictly speaking we will take some plasma. It comes from your blood. The red cells . . . you get them back. You’ll see. And after . . . I give you the money. And a cappuccino and some biscotti if you wish.’
‘I’d prefer a cup of tea and a sandwich if you don’t mind.’
‘Tea with milk the English way, and a panino, then.’
‘Ta.’
He frowned again then led Jason through to a large white-painted room with some old religious prints on the wall. The heavy blinds at the windows were drawn so that the dazzling winter sun from the open lagoon was completely excluded. But the space was bright with artificial light and it had the smell of a hospital: soap, fresh sheets, chemicals and antiseptic. A complicated machine sat on a trolley beneath the window. It looked a little like a fancy food mixer, but with knobs and wires and tubing.