by David Hewson
‘A little,’ she said. ‘But not for the phone.’
‘Coffee then?’ Tosi asked, full of excitement. ‘Or dinner. It will take your mind off things.’
‘That’s very kind, but not tonight,’ she said straight out. ‘I have two favours to ask.’
‘The first?’
‘I want you to get me into that big hospital near Zanipolo. The one where Sofia was treated sixteen years ago. I need to talk to an administrator––’
‘They won’t show you her medical records,’ he said quickly. ‘Not even with me there. Privacy. Privilege. You know the score.’
‘I don’t need her medical records. Bear with me.’
‘I will always bear with my dearest Roman friend and colleague!’
His constant politeness and enthusiasm were so old-fashioned, and called up the very picture of him, erect and alert in a smart, ancient suit. She had, she realized, become exceptionally fond of Alberto Tosi over the last few days.
‘You’re so kind,’ she told him.
‘Nonsense. You’re a visitor and my guest in Venice, in a way. And the second?’
She hesitated.
‘The second, I forget,’ she said.
‘That’s not like you.’
‘No. Perhaps not. Will you call me back? We could go to the hospital this afternoon if you like.’
‘Let me see what I can do,’ he promised, and rang off.
Teresa Lupo still couldn’t quite believe the request she had so nearly put to this decent, honourable, law-abiding old man, though she understood only too well what had prompted the thought. It was the recurrent image of the archer in that last canvas in the Ursula cycle, face turned away from the viewer, body taut and stretched, ready for the kill.
There was danger here somewhere. What she had so very nearly said to Alberto Tosi was that it might be better for everyone concerned if, from now on, she carried a gun.
‘I must be going mad,’ she murmured.
As Sofia did. Sixteen years ago. And perhaps more recently.
Half an hour later Tosi called back, full of good cheer and enthusiasm. They had an interview at four thirty.
She knew this place from the assignment a few years before when Leo Falcone was shot and badly wounded in Murano. The main Venice hospital was, like so much else in the city, unique, a compromise between ancient and modern, the practical and the spiritual. On the waterfront side, facing – unfortunately, it always seemed to her – the graveyard island of San Michele, it was a sprawling line of buildings, some recent, some centuries old, a ragtag collection of linked wards, clinics and theatres so labyrinthine a newcomer would require a map to navigate them. Ambulance boats came and went from an emergency stop on the canal next to the main building. The sick and the recovering who could transport themselves emerged from doors near the Ospedale vaporetto stop and were taken, some hobbling on crutches or hunched in wheelchairs, to the boats that ran round the island.
The canal was the way she always came. Tosi knew another, guiding her from the San Zaccaria vaporetto stop near San Marco through the dark, winding lanes and alleys of Castello, so purposefully and with such a knowledge of every turn and diversion that she was soon hopelessly lost, and clueless about the direction in which they were headed.
Then they passed one more fashionable shop of carnival costumes and masks and emerged into the light again in a broad open space she recognized. They were next to the old-fashioned pasticceria of Rosa Salva, opposite the great church of Giovanni e Paolo, Zanipolo to the locals, with its vast, cold interior full of dead doges and sundry nobles.
Adjoining the imposing basilica was another smaller façade, a contrast to the classical brick of Zanipolo since it was of white marble as ornate and Byzantine in appearance as the front of the supposed resting place of St Mark himself. A sign by the door revealed it to be the Scuola Grande di San Marco, a larger, more affluent version of the same kind of charitable fellowship that was the abode of Carpaccio’s dog.
Tosi walked briskly through the front door. Teresa followed and found herself surrounded by the sounds and smells of a modern hospital, soap and disinfectant, low, querulous voices, the ringing of telephones.
‘I taught here for years,’ Tosi declared. ‘The police may have short memories but the medical profession . . .’
In the space of fifteen minutes they found themselves in the office of a friendly female administrator who kissed Tosi on both cheeks and listened carefully and with great patience to his fulsome introduction of ‘the famed professor from Rome’ before he handed over to Teresa to outline her problem.
The woman let her finish then sighed and said, ‘As a doctor you must appreciate the issue of confidentiality. That and the fact we are talking about records from a long time ago. An attempted suicide, a termination elsewhere, a patient who left the city shortly after and was never treated again . . . Would you keep such records in Rome?’
‘Probably not,’ Teresa admitted. ‘I’m not asking for anything other than practical information. An address. Any details of friends or relatives that may have been left as contacts.’
‘She was your aunt. Did you not have an address yourself?’
Teresa took a deep breath and said, ‘I didn’t know any of this was happening. My mother had lost touch with Sofia when she came here. The first she heard was when she was called to the hospital.’
Tosi seemed puzzled.
‘Sofia must have had an address in the city, surely. Your mother would have fetched clothes for her. Dealt with the mail.’
‘No,’ Teresa insisted. ‘She said that Sofia was in such a state she wouldn’t talk about what had happened in Venice. When she was well enough she came back to Rome. After that, when she was better, she went her own way.’
The administrator shook her head and said, ‘This is very strange.’
‘I couldn’t agree more.’ Teresa heard the desperation in her own voice when she added, ‘Can you help me?’
‘I’ll ask for some coffee and see what records we have,’ the woman said.
They waited for the best part of an hour, staring out of the window at the vaporetti, the ambulance launches and the white, still outline of San Michele and its hidden cemetery across the narrow stretch of water. The afternoon turned to a beautiful, soft, pale dusk. Then a gentle darkness seemed to fall from the sky and night swiftly descended on the lagoon.
To pass the time Teresa asked Tosi to tell her more about the First International Symposium on the Genetic Analysis of the Skeletal Remains Attributed to St Mark. She had to admit it sounded an interesting prospect, an adventure almost, one that attempted to unravel the truth of a mystery that went back two millennia.
‘Which way do you think you’ll vote?’ she asked, recalling the fictional conversation with Arnaud in the story that had appeared earlier that day.
‘Whichever way the evidence suggests,’ he answered immediately.
‘For or against?’
‘One of the two,’ he answered, a little puzzled.
‘Unless there’s a third possibility.’
Alberto Tosi stared at her. He looked baffled.
‘What third possibility? Either it’s Mark himself. The apostle. Cousin of Barnabas, if I recall correctly. Didn’t he bring a jug of water to the Last Supper?’
She laughed.
‘Why ask me, Alberto?’
‘Because you posed a very odd question. It’s Mark, or at the very least the body of a man of Mark’s origins, antiquity, race perhaps. Or it’s someone else. A stranger. Some skeletal cuckoo in the nest, an impostor revealed through his DNA.’
He stared at her and added, ‘Unless you have another suggestion?’
‘No,’ she answered, though she felt she was supposed to know one.
When the woman finally returned she had a blue folder containing a single sheet of paper.
‘We do still have some records,’ she announced. ‘I can’t show you them. As I’ve already said that would be improper
, though I can tell you they reveal nothing you don’t know already. Miss Bianchi suffered complications after a termination. She’d also taken an overdose of barbiturates and was very distressed on both counts. She was here for a week, no more. Then we discharged her into the care of her sister. These are the only address and contact details we hold.’
She passed across the single sheet. It contained the family’s old address in Rome, before the move to Frascati, and the number there. Next to it was an address in Venice, marked as Sofia’s home. Like so many Venetian house names it was simply a sestiere, Castello, and a number.
‘What’s wrong with street names?’ Teresa asked, once again in despair at the opaque way Venetians wrote their addresses.
Tosi peered over her shoulder, glanced at the woman and said, ‘Celestia, surely?’
She nodded, played with the computer in front of her. It came up with a map and a circle over a single building, seemingly set on its own by the waterfront close to the Arsenale, jutting out into the lagoon.
Alberto Tosi was staring at the screen, his kindly face frozen in a stern expression, one of disgust, of fear even.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’ he asked.
‘That’s the address we have. One stop away,’ the administrator said. ‘I hope that’s––’
‘Thank you,’ Teresa said, and nearly dragged Tosi out of the building, down to the vaporetto.
It was a short ride on one of the faster small boats. Tosi sat in the front, uncharacteristically silent, staring at the floor. Opposite them five cheery workmen played cards across the seats in the bows, laughing and telling jokes. A cloud of beer fumes hung around them.
‘What’s wrong?’ Teresa asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’
‘Alberto. I think we know each other well enough now. Please. Tell me.’
He took off his hat and placed it on his lap then shook his grey head.
‘Sofia can’t have given them this address,’ Tosi said. ‘No one lives there. No one would dare.’
‘You know it?’
He peered at her. There was, when she was this close to him, a terrible sense of resignation, of sadness, in the man, she thought. He’d expected to be the Venice pathologist till he died. The modern world had ejected him from that post: one, she felt sure, he was quite capable of performing. He was a widower, lonely, lost, in need of something to fill the day. She had provided that, and been grateful for his assistance in return.
But now, in the bows of the little vaporetto as it rode the choppy lagoon swell, she saw another side to him: the man who emerged when the day was empty, and there was no one to help or amuse, no academic institution to entertain, no quest, no sense of adventure.
He was a child at heart, she realized, and like a child both easily bored and, perhaps, frightened too.
The boat was coming to dock at a tiny jetty marked Celestia. No one else got up to leave. No one stood on the gangplank waiting to board. This was a stop in the middle of nowhere, some back alley on the ragged, half-derelict north-eastern strip of Venice that attracted no tourists, and not many locals either.
‘I was a Castello brat,’ the old man said eventually. ‘We had a house off the Via Garibaldi where the Arsenale workers used to live once upon a time. Those years after the war when I was a child . . . they were a magical time for me. We used to roam among the ruins, day and night, scavenging for wild chicory, fishing in the canals. Everyone was starving for a while. There wasn’t anywhere you wouldn’t look, not if it meant you could bring home something to eat.’
The boat banged hard against the jetty, jolting them as they climbed to their feet. He took her arm and said, ‘Come. Let me show you something.’
This was the first night she’d noticed much in the way of cloud. A dull grey circle above them marked the presence of the moon but did little to illuminate this lonely backwater. Beyond the light of the jetty Castello looked pitch black. Most of the waterfront buildings hereabouts seemed to consist of deserted, abandoned warehouses and industrial units. One solitary figure got up as they left, as if remembering something, joining them when they disembarked, scuttering off down an alley towards what looked like a residential street with a few shops a couple of hundred metres away at its foot. Something ran close to the disappearing stranger’s legs. A dog, surely.
Tosi turned left into the pool of darkness along the waterfront and casually pulled a torch out of one of the deep pockets of his winter coat, flicking it on as they walked.
‘No one lives here,’ he said.
‘Sixteen years ago . . .’
‘No one lived here then.’
They walked for a few minutes without seeing another soul. Then he stopped by the side of what looked like a small abandoned mansion, once grand with Palladian columns at the front, now crumbling and stitched together with scaffolding and timber. Tosi was running the beam of the torch up and down a patch of the front wall as if searching for something.
‘I used to come here fishing. Just little ones mainly, lots of bones, hardly any flesh. Nothing tasted too good. The lagoon was dirtier then. But we were hungry. Even the city pathologist – did I mention my father held this position before me? – didn’t find it easy to put food on the table after the war.’
Teresa stood next to him watching the flickering, moving torch beam.
‘I can imagine,’ she said.
‘No you can’t.’
He stopped and looked at her.
‘This city is full of strange stories. You think you know that, but you don’t. Some of them are so strange we’re reluctant to share them with foreigners.’
She felt like laughing, but refrained. This mood of his was new to her, and she understood he would be offended.
‘Alberto,’ Teresa said lightly. ‘Once we’ve found Sofia – and we will – you want me to help verify the bones of an apostle who’s supposed to be lying in a crypt not far from here. A man from north Africa, a friend of Jesus. Here in some cold tomb in Venice. I’m not unused to your peculiarities, honestly.’
He looked briefly amused.
‘I wasn’t talking for one moment about him. No, the real oddities are much smaller. Much more personal. Like this one . . .’
The torch moved to a part of the wall next to a lined column by the door. She looked and saw what appeared to be a figure scratched there in the white Istrian stone. A childlike scrawl, etched deep into the marble, stained with soot and dirt. It appeared to portray the upper torso of a man wearing a large and tall turban. In his right hand he held what looked like . . .
She leaned in closer to look and felt a sudden start as the scrawl became clearer.
It was a heart, visibly spouting blood, small fountains of it, as if freshly released.
‘I remember the day I heard this story,’ Tosi announced. ‘I can’t have been more than ten years old. One of the older boys, a little tyke with bony fists and a vivid imagination, took great delight in telling me. A long time ago there was a man who lived nearby, half-Venetian, half-Turk. A madman. Violent and insane. His mother cared for him, kept him out of trouble as much as she could. Then one day, for no good reason but rage, he murdered her. Butchered her. Ran along the waterfront here afterwards, screaming, crying, holding the heart he’d just ripped from her body.’
Teresa examined the wall more closely. The scratched figure there must have been centuries old.
‘When he got here, in front of what was then a local scuola, he stumbled. Or God tripped him. You choose.’ Tosi took a deep breath and she could hear his old lungs wheezing. ‘The heart fell out of his hand, rolled along the ground and then . . .’ He paused for a moment. ‘Then it spoke. In his mother’s voice. The heart said, “Poor son! Poor boy! Have you hurt yourself? Have you scraped your knee again? Come here. Mamma will make it better. Come to me. Come to me, son . . .”’
Tosi took a few steps to the edge of the pavement by the dark churning waters of the lagoon.
‘He threw himsel
f in, clutching the heart, and drowned immediately. All of this was witnessed by a mason who’d been working here. Immediately after he scratched this image in the wall to record what had occurred. This was the early eighteenth century, I believe. The young man wore a turban because of his Turkish lineage. A terrible story.’
‘Terrible,’ Teresa agreed. ‘We’ve lots of ghost stories like it in Rome. The Italians are a superstitious bunch.’
‘I’m Venetian, not Italian. We all believed this place was haunted. Being children, that meant we’d come here, of course. We’d walk up to the house over the water where they’d lived – it was abandoned, had been for years – and try to peek through the windows, rattle the door.’
He flicked the torch further along the calle then out over the lagoon. She saw something emerge out of the darkness. It was a low, narrow ramshackle bridge. As the beam moved further she began to make out the shape of a building in darkness at the end. It looked like a small palazzo or an abandoned chapel, set on a platform above the water, a solitary place. Beyond, across a narrow rio, stood the castellated exterior wall of the deserted Arsenale dockyards.
‘That was the house,’ Tosi told her.
‘I need to see,’ Teresa said. ‘Sofia lived here.’
‘No!’ Tosi said, almost shouted. ‘She didn’t! That’s not possible.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘They call it the Casino degli Spiriti.’
‘I don’t believe in spirits. And even if I did, I doubt they’d need a house. What happened here . . . the mad Turk, the mother . . . even if it was true, as you said yourself, it was ages ago.’
‘You didn’t let me finish my story,’ he said, staring balefully at her.
She folded her arms and waited, watching her breath turn to mist in the bitter air.
From somewhere over the lagoon a solitary gull began to caw into the night. It made a lonely, desolate noise.
‘We would come here as children. The fishing was always good for some reason. No adults bothered us. The locals . . . this part of Castello. They’re all superstitious. They said they heard voices from that place. Saw ghosts, the mother walking along, holding her own heart, crying for her son.’