Brotherhood of the Tomb (22 page)

Patrick shrugged.

‘Perhaps I might have to be a little rough with him.’

Surian smiled sardonically.

‘I’m sure. Well ...’ He pulled on his cigarette. ‘I wish you luck.’

‘You aren’t going to help?’

‘I didn’t say that. Yes, I’ll help if I can. Migliau’s bad news. A lot of people would like to see him out of action. There’s just one problem.’

What’s that?’

Surian stubbed the last of his cigarette out on the edge of his stool.

‘I made some enquiries after Assefa left this morning. A friend of mine works in the local office of the party newspaper, l’Unita. He was a little surprised when I told him I wanted information on Cardinal Migliau. What do you think he told me?’

Patrick said nothing.

‘Early this morning, his best contact in the Carabinieri was in touch. Nobody is supposed to know, but it seems that Cardinal Migliau has been missing for three days. He was last seen going to his bedroom in the Palazzo Patriarcale on Monday. On Tuesday morning, his servant found the room empty. The church authorities waited twenty-four hours for a ransom note, then

contacted the Carabinieri yesterday. A GIS squad arrived in Venice yesterday evening from Lavarno. Now, signore, suppose you tell me just what’s going on?’

TWENTY-NINE

It was dark by the time they left. The rain had stopped, but the atmosphere still held a muggy dampness, through which a nagging chill crept like neuralgia through bone. Patrick walked with Makonnen and Surian as far as the Rio Terra San Leonardo, where they parted company. The priest and his friend continued along the main street to the Lista di Spagna, where Surian had arranged to meet the reporter from l’Unita in a cafe.

Patrick headed down to Santa Marcuola, where he took the water-bus across to the opposite bank, disembarking at San Stae. From there he plunged into a maze of narrowing lanes and alleyways, losing himself in their bewildering complexity. Yet he was never really lost. Each time he took a wrong turning, it came right in the end. He was guided by a directional instinct he had picked up during the two summers and single winter he had spent in Venice with Francesca.

Little had altered since then. Shops had changed hands, street lights stood where none had been before, a few buildings had received fresh coats of paint. But the configuration of passages and bridges was just as he remembered it.

Deeper and deeper he sank into the skein of alleys and canals, twisting and turning, yet always heading in the general direction of the Frari. It was not late, but the streets were nearly deserted. He passed a small pasticceria, where a group of men stood drinking coffee and talking in low voices at the counter. A scrawny cat ran across his path, darting from one doorway to the next. Patrick paused on the

next bridge to take his bearings.

Surian’s news had rattled him. He had managed to convince the mask-maker that he knew nothing about Migliau’s disappearance. But he could not rid himself of the nagging thought that there was a connection between it and the recent events in which he himself had been involved. Had Migliau been kidnapped? Certainly, that seemed more probable than that the cardinal should have taken flight simply because Patrick had uncovered some photographs in Dublin.

There was, however, a third possibility: that Migliau’s disappearance was in some way connected with Passover. If that was true, it could mean that fear of exposure had panicked the Brotherhood into bringing the date forward. For all Patrick knew, Passover could be starting at this very moment.

He walked on, wetting his feet from time to time in unseen puddles. People were at home, watching television, eating. He felt hungry, but he wanted to get this over before it grew much later. The calle through which he was walking seemed familiar. The house was not far now. But the closer he got, the slower his steps became. He looked round nervously, as though expecting to see Francesca tailing him. These were her streets. If her ghost walked anywhere, it walked here.

The house faced onto the Rio delle Meneghette, but the land entrance was at the end of the Calle Molin. The Contarinis had bought the palazzo in 1740, when the last of the Grimani-Calerghis died without issue. It was by no means the largest or the finest of the many palazzi in which different branches of the Contarinis had lived over the centuries. But it was the last of them and, in some ways, the closest to the family’s heart - the closest, even, to the secret

they had kept alive for generation after generation.

Seen from the back or the side, like all Venetian mansions, it was unprepossessing. An old street lamp cast a baleful glow over a low wall from which the plaster had fallen away. Behind the wall, Patrick knew, there lay a courtyard, and beyond that the rear of the palazzo itself lay draped in a cloak of shadows. Here, leading onto the street, was a rickety door from which the paint had peeled, exposing the wood beneath. A corroded knocker shaped like a Moor’s head hung crookedly in its centre.

Patrick grasped the knocker tightly and banged several times. Hollow echoes rang along the calle. Footsteps sounded further back, then a door closed with a loud crash. But in the Palazzo Contarini, all was silent and dark. He raised the knocker and banged again, three times. A church bell rang in the distance, as though in mockery.

All at once he heard the sound of bolts being drawn deep within, and a door opening, and slow feet limping across the flagged courtyard. He pictured it, its blue and black and yellow tiles worn down with age, the ancient well-head carved with lions and a leaping unicorn. The footsteps reached the outer door and stopped.

‘Chi e? Che diavolo volete a quest’ ora?!’ The voice was that of an old woman, thin and petulant, speaking in the lugubrious accent of the Veneto.

‘My name is Canavan. I want to see Alessandro Contarini. I want to speak with him.’

‘Allessandro Contarini e morto. Dead! Please go away!’

‘Tell him I have to speak with him. He will remember my name. Canavan. Tell him my name is Patrick Canavan. He knows who I am. He will know what I have come to speak about.’

‘I tell you the Count is dead! There’s no one here. No one at all. Go away.’

Suddenly, a light went on in an upper window. He saw a shadowed face against the glass, then a hand throwing the window open.

‘Chi e, Maria? Che cosa vogliono? What do they want?’ A man’s voice this time, old and tired, but aristocratic.

‘He says his name is Canavan. He is asking for the Count.’

There was a long pause. Then the man at the window called again.

‘Tell him the Count is dead. There is nothing for him here.’

Patrick cupped his hands round his mouth. ‘I’ve come to talk about Francesca! You owe me this. Your family owe me an answer!’

There was a longer pause. In the alleyway, a crippled dog went past, dragging its hind legs. Patrick felt the rotting and the paralysis all about him, pervading the city. Death and decay, and a terrible stillness of the will that had lapsed into inertia.

‘Let him come up,’ the man replied at last. ‘I’ll speak with him.’

The window closed heavily. Patrick waited by the door. The dog had dragged itself into a space between two houses and lay down whimpering. Was it in pain? Patrick had no strength for compassion; there were no empty spaces left inside him. He heard a key turning in a heavy lock.

The old woman swung the door open, stepping aside to let Patrick through. She carried a hurricane lamp in one hand, but her face was turned away, shrouded in a raddled weave of shadows. She held back until he had passed, then closed and locked the door.

A shaft of yellow light fell across the courtyard from the window on the second floor. Patrick’s eye followed it up to the window itself. He could just make out the indistinct shape of someone standing near the glass, peering down into the courtyard.

The old woman slipped the key into her pocket and stepped in front of Patrick. As she did so, light from the lamp slanted across her face, revealing a little of her features to him. A sliver of memory scraped his flesh.

‘Maria? Is that you, Maria? It’s me, Patrick Canavan. Didn’t you know my name? I used to come here with Francesca. All those years ago - do you remember?’

‘Non mi ricordo di lei. I don’t remember you. No one came here with the Lady Francesca. The Lady Francesca is dead.’

But she did remember: he could hear it in her voice, sense it in the way she held back from him, as though afraid. What was she frightened of? The past?

They entered the palazzo through a low doorway on the ground floor. Generations ago, this had been where the family stored merchandise and laid their gondolas to rest through the long winter months. Not many years ago, when Patrick had last been here, there had still been boats and oars and curiosities from the Contarini past: the marble heads of Doges, three plaster angels, cracked and wound with string, great seals of state bearing the motto Pax Tibi Marce, several candelabra, each filled with a thousand candles of yellow wax, the remains of a fifteenth-century altarpiece, glittering with gold and lapis lazuli, a gaming table from the Ridotto casino, puppets dressed in faded Commedia dell’ Arte costumes, and a miniature theatre in which they could perform. He had gone there several times with

Francesca, to make the puppets dance and sing, to sit in a chair in which the last Doge of Venice had sat, and to make love silently, away from the sharp eyes of her ever-watchful family.

Now the long rooms stood cold and empty. As Patrick followed Maria to the staircase, something small and grey scurried past, fleeing the light. There was a noise of scampering, then silence again.

The stairs led to the mezzanino, once the floor on which the Contarinis, like all rich merchants of the Serenissima, had conducted their business. Even in Francesca’s day, there had been busy offices here. But now, like the floor beneath, it was hollow and echoing, and smelled terribly of neglect. Patrick thought of the weed-choked mausoleum on San Michele. He could not understand what was going on. What had happened to the Contarinis in such a short space of time? Had they suddenly lost their wealth? Or had some other, less material calamity overtaken them?

Finally, they arrived at the piano nobile, formerly the heart of the house, where the family had slept and eaten and entertained their many guests. Maria opened wide the curiously carved door that led into the great central room, stretching the length of the floor and fronting the canal outside.

The room was lit by three weak electric bulbs suspended from a cobwebbed ceiling. In the centre, the old electric chandelier hung dull and unlit, festooned with long strands of web and choked with dust. On every side, the ravages of long neglect were apparent: chairs and sofas, ottomans and tabourets, their fabric damp and rotting; unpolished tables and sideboards on which the bodies of dead cockroaches lay in shiny carapaces; broken ornaments heaped together on an uncarpeted floor.

But something else caught Patrick’s eye. When he

had last been here, the rear wall had been hung with a great Gobelins tapestry sequence, almost as long as the room itself. The tapestry was no longer there, but in its place a mural had been revealed. Patrick could make out few details, but the general theme was clear. The mural was divided into panels, each depicting a scene from the life and ministry of Jesus. Something in the style reminded him of the work of Tiepolo; certainly, the fresco dated from the eighteenth century, no earlier. The figures were lightly drawn, turning pigment to light and story to form with great skill.

Clad in the damask robes and jewelled turbans of Ottoman Turks, the Wise Men laid tribute at the feet of the Infant Jesus. In the next panel, Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt while, in the background, Herod’s soldiers smashed the skulls of the newly born against marble pavements and pillars of brass.

Towards the centre of the mural, the artist had woven the Stations of the Cross into a continuous narrative sequence: the flagellation, the first faltering steps on the Via Dolorosa, the first fall, the nailing to the cross, the deposition. And finally, the scene at the Tomb, as the disciples bring Christ’s mutilated body to be buried.

Patrick faltered, recognizing in this last scene the original for the representation on the door of the Contarini mausoleum. And at last he saw what he had missed on San Michele. It was obvious and simple, and it took his breath away. In most versions of the Entombment, there are four besides the crucified Christ: Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and the two Marys. Here, there are ten disciples and no women. But it is the figure of Christ that fills Patrick with horror. For in this painting, Jesus is alive and bound and struggling as they carry him to his grave.

THIRTY

‘The artist was Tiepolo. Not Giambattista, but his older son Domenico. The style’s a little lighter, less allegorical. He painted it in 1758, just after he finished work on the Villa Valmarana. That was a few years after his father came back from Germany, of course: my grandfather used to say Giambattista helped him with some of the larger figures.’

The voice was that of the man who had called to Patrick from the window. He was seated at the far end of the room on a high-backed chair. The electric light made him look drained. He seemed smaller than Patrick remembered. His hands were white against the arms of the chair.

‘What happened to the tapestries?’ Patrick asked.

Alessandro Contarini smiled.

‘They were sold. I believe they fetched a lot of money. More than you can imagine. Much more than even I could afford. I think you will find them gracing the walls of a bank somewhere in Texas. Or is it California?’ He smiled again and looked directly at Patrick, as though the location of the tapestries were a confidence between friends.

‘Tell me,’ he went on, ‘do you think that is possible? Will the walls of a bank in Texas become more graceful simply because they have been covered by antique tapestries?’ He paused, folding his hands sweetly on his lap, like a well-behaved child. ‘Perhaps not. Perhaps not.’

He lifted one hand as though to admonish the thought of grace in such an alien and uncultured place, then beckoned, a nervous gesture, more Asiatic than Italian. So soft and so deliberate.