The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  The policeman had grown bored of the football match and was picking through the coffee cups and notepads on the desk.

  ‘Do you have a search warrant?’ Massimo barked, and then smiled awkwardly at the inspector, hoping he would take the outburst as a joke. Inspector Scarpa’s eyebrows had raised.

  Now the policeman had seen something; Massimo could tell from his expression what it was.

  ‘Well, thank you for looking after my hotel. I’m grateful to you. I’ll make sure I’m more careful in future.’

  ‘Careful in what way?’ Inspector Scarpa said as the officer lifted the gloves into view and all eyes turned on Massimo.

  * * * *

  He asked for a glass of grappa and they brought him one. The inspector looked like an indulgent uncle who has caught his nephew watching a pornographic film. The face seemed born to police work. Tell me all about it, was its message. It was big enough and friendly enough to absorb lots of information. The inspector was a sponge.

  Massimo told them everything, right up until the previous night when he had seen the woman in the street. The only details he changed concerned the checking of the second-floor room: he could not admit to Adelina searching it for him. The inspector had made a barely imperceptible gesture with his hand when he mentioned Adelina’s name and thereafter his concentration was qualified with a slight frown, as if he couldn’t quite understand Massimo’s dialect.

  When he was finished, Inspector Scarpa said, ‘Can we see the room?’

  Massimo swallowed the last drops of the grappa; his ‘Sorry?’ was strangled slightly by its fire.

  ‘The room you checked. Where you heard the intruder.’

  ‘There was no intruder. Just a window that wasn’t locked properly.’

  ‘Can we see it?’

  ‘I don’t see why this is so—’

  Inspector Scarpa held up his hand. In a soporific voice, he said: ‘Per favore, Signore Poerio. Please. Indulge us. We shan’t take up too much more of your precious time.’

  The first sting of sarcasm. It hit home more acutely, coming from Inspector Scarpa’s affable mouth. They suspected him of something. Well, let them.

  ‘This way,’ he said, brusquely, and set off for the stairs without waiting for them to gather. On the second floor he slipped the bunch of keys, from his waistband and hunted for the relevant master. As he did so, the inspector ran his fingers along the slender knuckles of his opposing hand, eliciting cracks from the joints with little tweaks and twists. The sounds were unbearably loud in the corridor. Massimo dropped his keys. Nobody seemed to mind.

  ‘Adelina, you say?’ muttered the inspector, in a faraway voice. ‘Adelina?’

  ‘Yes. What of it?’

  Another shrug. ‘It’s familiar. It’s familiar to me.’

  Massimo opened the door and stood back to let the other four men into the room. In the mirror, before he could enter, he saw them looking down at a body. The crimson rug that it lay on had once been white. He reacted more quickly than he believed he could have, closing the door and locking it before the police had a chance to stop him. Fists pounded the door, yet still there was no rage in Scarpa’s voice. He sounded saddened. Perhaps he and his father had been closer than he let on. What was it pop had said? You don’t think your papa has his contacts?

  Massimo hurried downstairs and pulled on his coat. His mind would not stand still long enough for him to formulate a plan. He should pack a suitcase. He should contact Adelina. Perhaps he should steal the police car.

  Instead, he locked the hotel doors behind him and scurried west along the canal. Once past the Piazza San Marco he paused on the Calle Vallaresso, listening for sirens. In Harry’s Bar, he pushed past the lunchtime gathering and found a telephone. He dialled and let it ring for a full three minutes but his father did not answer. Then he tried Adelina’s number. An Englishman answered.

  ‘Adelina,’ Massimo said. ‘I need to speak to Adelina.’

  ‘Now capisco, amico.’ His Italian was frustratingly poor.

  ‘Adelina Gaggio. She lives there. Can you get her for me?’

  ‘Non. Nobody here by that name.’

  Massimo had punched in the correct number. There was no doubt. ‘Please. You have to—’

  ‘Hey? You deaf? I said nobody here called Adelina. Testa di cazzo.’

  Massimo slammed the receiver down. He could go there, to the street Adelina had mentioned, but without an address it could take hours to find her and even then she might not be in. She might be at work.

  The glass company.

  Excitedly, he dialled 12 and obtained the number from directory services. When he got through to the receptionist at Murano her contact list did not contain any reference to Adelina Gaggio.

  ‘Has she been with us long?’ the receptionist tried. ‘She might not be on our list if she joined us recently.’

  ‘Five years,’ Massimo said. A white, abject face stared at him from behind the bar. He was about to order a bellini from it when he realised it was his own, reflected in a mirror. ‘At least five years.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘She must—’

  ‘Very sorry, sir.’

  What now? He struggled to keep himself from crying out. He had nobody to go to, other than the police, and they would not be patient with a man who had locked some of their colleagues in a room with a woman he had ostensibly murdered. But surely they would see that his panic was inspired by innocence. If he had killed somebody in his own hotel, would he not take pains to dispose of the body, rather than blithely stroll around Venice having left the main entrance unlocked?

  How could Adelina have lied to him? The coolness of the woman as she came out of the room. How could it be that he had called her after twenty years only to find that he had invited a deranged killer onto the premises? The police would not believe him if he told them this, but it was all he had to offer.

  He dialled 112 and was patched through. He tried to explain but every time he finished a sentence, the police operator would ask him to expand on every iota of information or ask him to spell the names he mentioned. Then the operator would fudge the spelling and get him to repeat it.

  ‘Adelina,’ the voice buzzed. ‘What’s that? A-D-A . . . ?’

  It dawned on him then, and he replaced the receiver gently. He glanced out of the front windows but how could he chance it? Then again, they would have any rear exit covered too. They would not expect him to leave by the front door.

  He saw a group of suits standing to return to the office and he hurried after them, catching up with them, and purposefully barging into a middle-aged woman. He put on a big smile and apologized profusely as they filtered on to the street. He put his hand on her arm. There was wine in her. She was happy and forgiving. She covered his hand with her own and said it was perfectly all right. He asked her what she had had for lunch. He asked her the name of the perfume she was wearing. In this manner he passed along the street with his new friends. He didn’t look back until he was in sight of a safe alleyway he could move down. Only now were the police cars drawing up outside Harry’s Bar. He ran.

  * * * *

  This time his father did pick up the phone. But he heard a click, as soft as a pair of dentures nestling together, and he understood that what ought to have been the safest house of all was now the most dangerous.

  ‘I’m okay, pop,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Massimo,’ his father said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Massimo killed the connection, hoping that even those few seconds had not been enough to expose him to the authorities a second time. He had been running for days, it seemed, but it could only have been a matter of hours. The sunlight was failing now. The light on the canals was turning the colour of overripe peaches. From the east, a wedge of flat, grey sky was closing upon Venice like the metal lid to a box of secrets. Freezing air ran before it, as though the weather too was trying to escape the city’s confused sprawl.

  His thoughts turned
to the inspector, who had seemed so understanding, yet had contained an edge as hard as the coming cold snap. The policeman’s past seemed as caught up in the Europa as his own. He wished he had had the time to ask his father about the incident that Scarpa had mentioned. He would have been a ten-year-old when the hotel had provided a torture chamber for some of its guests. He couldn’t remember a thing about it, but then he would have been shielded from such an appalling event. He thought of the way his father had said sorry and did not like what his mind came up with.

  With no better task to turn to, Massimo caught a vaporetto to San Tomàand hurried the two hundred metres or so to the Campo dei Frari. The woman at the reception desk of the Archivio di Stato looked as impenetrable as a bad clam but she was sympathetic to his needs, even if the five-hour window for requesting materials had lapsed.

  It didn’t take long. Once he had been shown how to access the microfiches and blow them up on the viewer, it was simply a matter of trawling through the front pages of Il Gazzettino from 1973. A photograph of the Europa’s exterior halted him before any of the words did. The headline took up much of the page but this had no impact on him once he had noticed the small photograph at the foot of the page, the torture victim who had died. He didn’t need to read the caption to know it was the woman he had entertained in his hotel the previous night.

  * * * *

  It was there, in black and white, and his brain had sucked it in even though he had averted his eyes, fearful of an image decades old. Yet he wasn’t happy. They could have got it wrong. They could have mixed up her picture. Theymust have got it wrong. The alternatives were too outlandish to swallow.

  Everywhere he looked, there were gloves lying companionless. In the canal, sitting on windowsills, hunched on the ground near lamp-posts and benches. His panic mounted as he counted them. Nothing looked quite so dismal as a discarded glove. Did each one signify a terrible death in the city? Just because two bodies. . . three bodies had been found didn’t mean that more were lying in wait, stretching back to a time when the killer had set out on her spree.

  Snow had begun to fall on the city. Already the narrow streets and uneven roofs were dusted with white while the canal absorbed the flakes and remained black. In some areas, where the light was poor, the canals escaped from view completely. They became plumbless moats that one could look into without hope of ever finding an end.

  At Fondamente Nuove he persuaded a vaporetto pilot preparing to go home to take him to San Michele. The promise of ten thousand lire if he waited to bring him back was enough of a lure. On the short journey, Massimo watched the waters creaming at the bow while Venice fell away behind them. A series of lights came on around the Sacca della Misericordia, as though people had opened their windows to watch his journey.

  The island loomed out of the dark. More and more, his father had made references to this place, with its pretty cypress trees. It would be expensive to find him a plot here, but it seemed, even through Leopoldo’s oblique language, that his heart was set upon it.

  Even from here, in such unsociable weather, Massimo could smell the perfume of cut flowers on the graves. As the vaporetto drew up alongside, the white stone of the Convento di San Michele seemed lambent in the murk.

  ‘You know the cemetery is closed, Signor?’

  ‘Just wait for me,’ Massimo ordered, and then: ‘Do you have a torch?’

  The pilot sat back and rummaged for cigarettes in his jacket pocket. ‘Yes. And I might allow you to hire it, if you ask me nice.’

  It was not such a difficult cemetery to break into. Beyond the entry archway, the cloisters marked the beginning of the graveyard proper. But Massimo ignored it. Adelina might well have been buried here, but she was not here now. The island could not take bodies indefinitely. Having gorged on the dead for so long, it had reached bursting point. Now the bones of the resting were lifted every ten years or so for another final journey to an ossuary on the mainland, in order to make way for the next wave of cadavers. If Adelina’s name was to be found here, it would be on a plaque, not a headstone. Massimo trained the feeble torchlight on the neatly arranged plinths, readying himself for a long night’s hunt. At least they were easier to read than the weathered slabs.

  The snow that had begun to fall on the heart of the city found its way out here after half an hour. Massimo blew on his hands to keep them warm and tried to ignore the impatient hoots from the vaporetto horn. The pilot was going nowhere; his pockets would remain empty if he did.

  He covered the cemetery in a slow strafing movement, his hopes lifting with every plaque that did not bear her name. Perhaps, simply, he was going mad after all. When he did not find her here, he could return to the mainland and find it had returned to normal. All he needed was this restorative jaunt to pick clean the tired crevices of his mind.

  But then, of course, of course:Adelina Gaggio, 1963-1973. The characters were chiselled in marble as cleanly as if they had been formed that very afternoon.

  He found himself back at the water’s edge with no recollection of climbing over the monastery wall. The pilot had turned his back on him and was eyeing the wink of lights across the Venice coastline. It was a pale comfort to Massimo, but the longer he stared at his home, the more he wanted to be back there. He would turn himself in and try to help the police as best he could, even if it meant being charged for obstruction, or worse.

  ‘Start the engine, friend,’ he said, as he clambered on board. The pilot did not move. A white glove lay on one of the seats. Massimo struggled to piece together a sudden scattering of jigsaw pieces in his thoughts, but none of the pieces would fit: they seemed to be from different puzzles and he knew they could not match the complete picture he was striving for.

  ‘I don’t—’ he began, but his words were coated with too much breath, too much saliva to complete his sentence.

  He touched the pilot and watched as he toppled back in his seat. Massimo recoiled as he saw the pilot grinning at him. But the grin was too low on his face, and too wide and wet.

  The glove was nothing of the sort. Or rather, it could only have fitted the pilot’s hand. It had been skinned with a surgeon’s precision.

  ‘It doesn’t fit,’ she said. ‘None of them ever fit.’

  She solidified at his side, as if structuring herself from the particles of dark that helped to make up what the night was. Almost immediately it was as if she had always been there.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mass,’ she whispered. ‘When you called me, why, it wasn’t you calling me at all. It was the hotel. It was the Europa, bringing me home. Our true resting place is never the final resting place, is it? It’s where we drop. That’s what takes our essence. The rug in the room you were so afraid of. That has the flavour of my final breath in its weave. It’s an always place. More real, I suppose, than our city, trapped in a yesterday none of us believe in any more. More real than I ever was.’

  He was paralysed with fear and doubt.

  He saw her hand come free of the glove, which she dropped over the side of the boat. What he thought at first to be tattoos of some kind, a weird graffiti that sprawled across her flesh, revealed itself to him as the veins and sinews of a severely damaged hand. The fingernails were warped with the aftershock of septicaemia. They looked as thick and twisted as ram’s horn.

  ‘They sliced my fingers as though they were bits of meat, Mass. They stuck splinters under my fingernails and set fire to my palm. They skinned me. For fun. For fun. And your father took money for it. Hush money. He pocketed his bundle of notes and at the centre of them was my pain, wrapped so very tightly.’

  Massimo was weeping now. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘You were my friend. I didn’t know.’

  She gently rubbed his neck with her grotesque claw. ‘You saw what was happening. But you forgot. I called to you. The men shouted at you to go away. And your father gave you money to forget. But you saw all right. Every cry for help since, haven’t you chosen to ignore it? Haven’t you always turned your b
ack and thought, “Well, what can I do?” You’re like this city, Mass. You close your eyes to ugliness. And the blood that runs through you is as cold as the water in those canals.’

  He had slumped against her. So exhausted was he, and so enchanted by the Venetian lights, that he failed to notice what her hand was doing until it was withdrawing.

  She said, ‘Your hand, when you held mine, Mass - didn’t they fit together so perfectly?’

  His flailing mind saw that her hand, with its five gnarled horns, was sheathed by a new glove. A really quite beautiful glove that waxed and waned in his eyes like the beat of water in the canals. It was a deep, glistening red. He was going to ask her what material produced such a fine colour, but he was too tired to speak. The last thing he saw before he became indivisible from the night was the flash of a cleaver as she pulled back the deep corners of her cloak. And even that was beautiful.