by David Hewson
Sofia looked at her teary-eyed and said, ‘This is my fault, isn’t it? All of it.’
‘Take this,’ Teresa said, pulling her phone out of her pocket. ‘Call home. Say I’ll call too in a while. Chiara needs to hear from you. It’s not your fault. Not at all.’
A few minutes later Jason was out of there, rushed to an ambulance launch on the nearest canal. They wouldn’t let her go with him. No room, they said. No need. The man they knew as Michael Ruskin was taken in a police boat to the main Questura at Piazzale Roma and the most secure cell the state police of Venice owned.
Teresa had begged a cigarette from one of the police officers by that time. She stood by the wellhead, sucking the smoke into her lungs. It tasted foul and wonderful at the same time.
Paola Boscolo was there. She didn’t look mad any more. Nor did she seem keen to start any kind of interview.
After a while this got on Teresa’s nerves.
‘Don’t you even have any questions?’ she demanded, close to breaking. ‘I have.’
‘Tomorrow,’ the woman told her. ‘Tomorrow will be fine.’
‘If he dies . . .’
‘He won’t,’ Boscolo said. ‘That’s what the doctor hoped anyway. He was lucky you were here. She said you may have saved him.’ Paola Boscolo reached over and touched her arm. ‘We were all lucky you were here if I’m honest. I’m sorry if it didn’t seem that way.’
‘Jason . . .’
Teresa couldn’t think of anything but the young Englishman, smiling in his subterranean bakery, proud of his secret charges, safe there until they stepped out into the black, icy night.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Paola Boscolo added. ‘Believe that. Believing makes a difference. Pray for that. Pray with me if you like. This is Venice. You’re never far from God.’
Teresa wanted to scream.
‘God seemed a long way from here tonight, don’t you think?’
‘No, actually,’ the young policewoman said straight away. ‘I don’t.’
Teresa smiled at her as best she could. A friendly gesture. There hadn’t been many of those, though this intelligent, unassuming officer had probably deserved them.
‘I found this,’ Boscolo said, holding out her hand. ‘On the well here. It’s got your name on it.’ A pause. ‘Like the others, I guess. Like the one that disappeared.’
A manila envelope. A few pages inside.
‘Yes,’ Teresa said, looking at it. ‘Just like those.’
One more chapter from Arnaud, the Count of Saint-Germain.
‘Thank you,’ she said then took the envelope and thrust it into the pocket of her winter jacket.
The Nature of the Bones
She was roused by the sound of shouting. A coarse Venetian voice. Anger and bewilderment. Teresa Lupo shook herself awake and found she was looking up at a large, red-faced man in overalls who was holding a long Dutch hoe, blade upright.
It was warm already beneath a lagoon sky that was a constant shade of forthright blue.
‘This is private land,’ he said angrily. ‘What are you doing? It’s forbidden. The whole of Poveglia is forbidden.’
Teresa struggled to her feet, feeling stiff and a little confused.
‘We were brought here last night. It was official. The boat. The jetty . . .’
Arnaud, she thought, suddenly remembering.
His blanket still lay on the ground, but crumpled as if someone had tossed it to one side. The farmer – she assumed this was the man who owned the vines – had a small dinghy tied to a post at the foot of the patch of open space where she’d slept.
‘There was someone else,’ she insisted. ‘He was ill. He died. I tried to get help. Did you move him?’
The man lowered the hoe and seemed a little less threatening. A small black-and-white spaniel ran to join them from the direction of the jetty and the abandoned hospital.
‘There’s no one here but you. Fast asleep in my vineyard.’
‘That’s not possible,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I was left with a man. His name was Arnaud, the Count of Saint-Germain. We spoke. For a long time.’ About what? It seemed distant, like a past event, dimly remembered. ‘He died. Or . . .’ Her head felt foggy and she so wanted it to clear. ‘I thought so. There was a party on the landing stage by the hospital last night. A group of pathologists from Venice. They thought it . . . appropriate.’
He stared at her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. ‘I had no idea we were coming to a place like this. Trespassing. They left me here. I think they thought it was some kind of joke.’
‘A night on Poveglia is a joke?’ he asked. ‘Let’s find your dead friend. The one who can walk.’
They went everywhere, even inside the ruined hospital which had a bleakness about it that depressed her. There was no trace of the Count of Saint-Germain.
‘Perhaps your dead friend had a boat of his own,’ the farmer proposed. ‘He’s not here, I assure you. My dog would have sniffed him out by now.’
‘I can see that,’ Teresa observed, gazing at the shoreline, recalling what Arnaud had said about exercise and swimming in particular. The animal seemed very interested in a small patch of pebbly sand by the jetty, sniffing there constantly. Bobbing away on the water a few hundred metres into the channel was what looked like a cream hat, floating on the lazy lagoon swell.
Teresa Lupo checked her watch. It was just after eight. The symposium was due to meet for its final session at ten in the Aula San Trovaso in Dorsoduro, not far from the San Basilio vaporetto stop. There was still time.
She looked the farmer in the eye.
‘I’m very sorry for the inconvenience and disrespect we’ve shown you, signore. Still, I have another favour to ask, one that will get me off your hands. It’s essential I return to Venice immediately. I have an important meeting at the university in Dorsoduro. Things will go terribly wrong if I’m not there.’
‘A meeting about what?’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
‘About the true nature of the bones reputed to be those of St Mark.’ She pointed to the distant city. ‘In the basilica. There.’
‘I read about that in the paper,’ he said. ‘You must have lots of spare time on your hands.’
She reached into her bag and handed over her purse.
‘Take what you want. If there’s not enough I can get more from a machine. After the meeting.’
The farmer scratched his head and looked at the spaniel.
‘The taxi thieves would charge you a hundred and fifty or more to come out here.’
‘Take it,’ she instructed him.
He put a hand to his mouth and thought for a while.
‘But I’m a little slower, and you have to put up with me and my dog. We say a hundred and twenty-five. Plus tip.’
Venetians, she thought.
‘May we leave?’
He didn’t move.
‘You don’t want to go to the hotel first?’ The farmer pointed at her. ‘You look as grubby as me.’
She brushed at the front of her shirt, which was once white and was now covered in grass stains and worse, then decided not to look any further.
‘I’ll go as I am, thank you.’
The Roman pathologist crossed the lagoon in the bows of the little dinghy, her hand on the soft, damp pelt of the farmer’s spaniel, her face directly into the briny breeze. It was a journey to remember, one that put her on the same level as the flat, shining water and made her feel, albeit briefly, she was a part of the small, enclosed world that was Venice.
An hour and a half after leaving Poveglia they docked at a taxi jetty on the broad promenade of Zattere, almost opposite the redbrick Molino Stucky of Giudecca.
She paid the farmer then climbed up the steps to the cobbled pavement gleaming in the warm morning sun. The street was busy with people. Locals going shopping. Tourists walking hand in hand, admiring the lovely view across the channel. A memory rose in h
er head and she failed to understand why. To the left, just in view, was Palladio’s magnificent basilica of Redentore. A place to visit one day.
A few people gave her quizzical looks. Teresa Lupo felt scruffy and tired and mad but none of this mattered because now, finally, she knew just what she wanted to say. Every word had formed in her head as the boat bobbed slowly towards the city. It had been there all along, since childhood perhaps, though she’d always stifled those thoughts. They required, she believed, a catalyst, a trigger. One that turned out to be a man called Arnaud, the Count of Saint-Germain, and a sequence of apparently incomprehensible events that now possessed some semblance of order.
The members of the symposium were on a coffee break when she stormed into the grand lecture room. Immediately the buzz of chatter subsided, to be replaced by a tense and awkward silence.
The Venetian pathologist Alberto Tosi, ostensibly her sponsor, stood there frozen, his cup paused halfway to his mouth.
‘How . . . um . . . delightful to see you,’ he said.
‘Really?’ she replied with a smile. She took the coffee from his hand and put it on the table. Several men in dark suits shuffled out of earshot, mumbling inaudibly. ‘First question, Alberto. Did you abandon only me in Poveglia last night? Or was there someone else, too? A man, perhaps an observer here. He was called Saint-Germain. Nice-looking fellow. Fifties, or so you’d think. Blue suit. Cream fedora. Fetching smile.’
‘We . . . I . . . but . . .’
‘Kindly stop babbling. Saint-Germain?’
‘Everyone did look for you. I promise.’
‘Far?’ she wondered.
‘Not so far,’ he admitted. ‘What did you say this man’s name was?’
She repeated it and saw immediately that Tosi hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.
‘I’m sorry. About . . .’ He shuffled on his rickety legs, like a teenager caught stealing apples. ‘We needed an agreement. No one meant you any harm.’
‘Have you voted?’
‘We’ve heard the arguments. We didn’t need to. We’re of one mind.’
‘Have . . . you . . . voted?’
‘Not yet. But how many choices do we have? In all honesty?’
‘You tell me.’
He laughed and said, ‘Why, two, of course!’
She folded her arms, looked him in the eye and declared, ‘I want my say, Alberto. I want it now. After you’ve heard me out, then we vote.’
Teresa Lupo edged a little closer to him, took hold of the old man’s tie, and tightened the knot far enough to make him gulp. Then she added, ‘You will agree to that, won’t you?’
Five minutes later they were back at their seats in the lecture hall, two rows of serious-faced academics, loyal servants of the Church, listening intently, aware they had no alternative.
THE MAN IN THE LINEN SUIT
‘Teresa!’ Tosi said, beaming.‘How delightful to see you. The journey?’
A few hours on the fast train from Rome with her mother, chatting intermittently but pleasantly. It was nothing. The weather was beautiful, warm and sunny. Venice looked glorious. It was early May. Much had happened in the preceding months.
Now there was time to compose her thoughts, her words.
The old pathologist was on his own when she walked into the meeting room of the Aula San Trovaso. A solitary agnostic among believers.
‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘How does it stand with the vote?’
Tosi frowned.
‘From what I’ve seen of things so far, if they pick the Pope this way there must be good business in the Vatican for a crooked bookmaker.’
‘Closed minds?’ she asked.
‘With all the certainty of the tomb.’
She laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.
‘We’re supposed to be like that, aren’t we? The roles seem to have been reversed.’
She smiled at someone she half-recognized across the room. He was, if memory served correctly, a senior lecturer in forensic pathology at one of the great universities in Spain.
These were intelligent men. Their minds might be set, but that was not the same as fixed.
‘Who’s the chairman?’
He pointed out a German professor from Frankfurt, a cadaverous individual with long grey hair and half-moon glasses who stood near the podium, examining a paper.
‘Bernhardt. I think he’s framed the resolution already. We’re supposed to vote soon. Planes to catch. Departments to run.’ Tosi looked a little sad. ‘I’ll have to find some other diversion now.’
‘I thought you had one,’ Teresa told him, and patted the old man’s arm.
Tosi blushed. He knew full well what she was talking about.
‘Do we have the table booked for afterwards?’
‘Of course.’
She’d been looking forward to this for weeks. Sofia and Jerome, Camilla and Jason, Strozzi, Tosi . . . and her mother too. All taking tea and cake on the little wooden jetty of the Pensione Calcina overlooking the Giudecca canal. Once a man called John Ruskin stayed here, his head full of insane dreams about a beautiful doomed saint in a painting in the Accademia, a short walk away by the Grand Canal.
First things first . . .
She walked across and introduced herself to the professor from Frankfurt.
He started to make some small talk.
‘Is your mind made up?’ she broke in.
He looked a little taken aback by her brusqueness.
‘I am of an opinion.’
‘May I?’ she said, pointing at the paper in his hand.
Bernhardt passed it over. There was no surprise there. A simple, straightforward finding of probability so certain that it amounted to a kind of proof.
Teresa Lupo took him to one side and began to speak. These were decent individuals to a man, and every one was a man.
Ten minutes later the gathering had assembled in the seats of the lecture room for one last meeting before the vote. She stood at the lectern, looking everyone in the eye before she began.
‘Gentlemen,’ the Roman pathologist declared, ‘I have a counter resolution for you to consider. Before I read it there are some things – important things – I must say. The rudimentary facts of the examinations you have all conducted are clear. The remains in the basilica of San Marco are undoubtedly those of one man, of Greek origin, probably born in North Africa, around the time of the first century AD. This clearly rules out any chance that the preserved head in the possession of the Copts in Alexandria belonged to the same individual who is interred here. Equally we can dismiss any notion that the cadaver of Alexander the Great has been residing in Venice for the last twelve hundred years. The evidence you have assembled suggests that the bones in the Basilica San Marco may indeed be those of the evangelist St Mark.’
In the front row the German professor brightened visibly. Alberto Tosi looked greatly puzzled.
She thought of Arnaud, the Count of Saint-Germain, his lecture on Pascal and Fermat, and the little black book he carried with him everywhere.
‘Where we differ,’ she went on, ‘is in the question of proof, and there you do yourselves a disservice. You should not press science into service to reaffirm your religion any more than I should use it as a prop to support my own atheism. If you extend your questions beyond the verifiable facts and enter the realm of conjecture, you’re wandering into the territory of history, which is a place none of us belongs since in this respect it is not a science but an interpretative art.’
Saint-Germain’s face, kindly, cunning, rose in her head, though it was nothing more than ink on paper.
‘Worse, in so doing, in seeking to replace your doubts with certainty, your questions with answers, you damage, not fortify, your cause. If religion needs proof then what place is there in any of your schemes for faith? What are you but a bunch of doubting Thomases looking for something to prod with your curious fingers? My views are not yours, and that is our mutual prerogative
. But if I did believe I’d surely hope I’d have the courage and determination to follow my convictions on their strength alone, without the need of some sample of dusty DNA to bolster them. A talisman to hold up to the world, with a unanimous declaration from a group of highly talented, if decidedly partial, observers who’ve conspired to get together in this room and declare to all and sundry, “Look, we were right all along”.’
They listened, intently she felt.
‘As an outsider I would have to ask myself seeing this, “Whom precisely are they hoping to convince? Me? Or themselves?”’
Someone cleared his throat at the back of the room, and she thought she heard a murmured note of appreciation.
‘The resolution I propose to you, then, is this.’
She picked up a piece of paper from the desk. It was blank, a prop, nothing more.
‘This symposium declares that the bones which reside in the sarcophagus in the Basilica San Marco are those of one man whose identity, unsurprisingly, is incapable of absolute verification after such a great passage of time. If an individual’s strength of belief leads him to feel these are the remains of Mark the Apostle then that is, indeed, what they are. Should one think otherwise, a natural scepticism ought to allow for the undeniable truth that we live in a world which remains full of mysteries and conundrums, some of which, thankfully, may never be answered.’
She paused, watching them.
‘This is both a question of faith and of doubt, gentlemen, and to what extent one depends upon the other. That is my resolution. Do I have a seconder?’’
Tosi’s arm shot up immediately, like a soldier’s coming to salute.
Twenty minutes later they were outside, walking towards the Pensione Calcina, watching the gentle flow of traffic on the Giudecca canal.
‘You spoke so well,’ Tosi said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Such eloquence.’
She wanted to say, They were not my words. Not entirely.
‘Don’t feel bad, Alberto. It wasn’t a contest. We didn’t lose.’
‘Two votes against twenty? That’s not losing?’