Stone Virgin (21 page)

The ground for the site was granted by Doge Jacopo Tiepolo in 1334 but it seems that the building was not finally finished until 1430, with the completion of the apse and cross vault. The Supplicanti were a flagellant order founded by one Matteo da Polenta in 1296, dedicated to poverty, with a rule of extreme harshness. By the early fourteenth century there were twelve communities in Italy. It seems to have been a numerous and successful order. Pardi says that in 1341, at its first general assembly, it numbered sixteen hundred brothers, with four hundred claimants for admission. The church of the Santissima Annunciata was consecrated in 1432. In 1494, before the end of that same century, within the lifetime almost certainly of some of the novice monks, the church had been suppressed and the Supplicanti, on the advice of the Maggior Consiglio, expelled bag and baggage from Venice by Pope Pius II. The grounds are not specified in either of my sources beyond the customary phrase used in both:
rilassatezza di costumi
, laxness of habits. Almost certainly sexual. But what can have caused such a rapid and presumably collective deterioration?

Raikes looked up vaguely, possessed once more by the astonishment that this discovery had produced in him when he had first come upon it in the musty little room on the first floor of the Consulate. In not much more than half a century this
rilassatezza
had become serious enough for the monks to be sent packing. The affair seemed to have been kept within church jurisdiction – he could find no reference to any criminal proceedings. The hearing had been held
in camera
. Transcripts must have been made but it had been a papal process and the relevant papers, if they existed at all, would presumably be on some obscure shelf in the Vatican archives. As inaccessible, as far as he was concerned, as if they had been on the moon. There was a chance they had been published elsewhere of course. The trouble really was that he had neither time nor scope for the sort of research that would be necessary. However, he had written to a former colleague in Cambridge – his first museum appointment had been at the Fitzwilliam there – asking him to find out what he could through the libraries of the Museum and the University, about the transactions of the Supplicanti in Venice. Something might come from that …

With a start Raikes realized that beyond the lamplit zone of his table, beyond the membrane of his window, darkness had descended. He glanced at his watch: it was after nine. For three hours he had been sitting here, writing and musing. Now there was no time for the shower he had intended to take, no time for more than a sandwich on his way to Lattimer’s house. Fortunately this was not far away, in the Quartiere Grimani. He was annoyed with himself; such lapses were becoming common with him these days, symptom of his preoccupation. Or obsession, he thought uneasily. Now he would arrive dishevelled and in disarray before a no doubt impeccably turned-out Lattimer. He had no idea, either, why Lattimer had suddenly phoned to invite him.

2

HE FOLLOWED THE
directions that Lattimer had given him. The house was on the north side of the Canareggio Canal, in the Ghetto Vecchio – no more than ten minutes walk. The street lamps were lit along the
fondamenta
and light from them flexed across the surface of the water. A grain barge passed Raikes, going northwards in the direction of the Lagoon, leaving behind it a sustained aftermath of sound, gentle slaps of water against the canal walls, squeaking complaints of strained rope as the moored boats sidled in the wash.

The house was in a street at right angles to the canal, a tall, narrow, three-storey building with steps to the front door and a heavy brass knocker. The door was opened by a square-jawed thickset man in early middle age, an Italian, gravely polite. He was leading Raikes across the short hall when Lattimer himself emerged from a door beyond. ‘Ah, you found me then,’ he said, smiling his narrow smile. Once again Raikes experienced that cold and vigorous grip, once again had to exert a countervailing pressure – there was a quality of steel in Lattimer’s fingers. He was casually dressed, in cardigan and slacks, but there was about him none of the carelessness – either of the elegant variety or the merely sloppy – that the Englishman normally displays in such garb; the cardigan was close-fitting, the slacks sharply creased, the shades of blue carefully matched. Even in a society where nothing but the loin cloth was
de rigueur
, Raikes thought, Lattimer’s would have been conspicuous for the symmetry of its folds.

‘Come in here,’ he said, moving to open a door. ‘Luigi will get us a drink. What will you have? I’ve got just about everything, I think, except hemlock, we’ve run out of that.’ He laughed in the barking fashion which Raikes now suddenly remembered.

‘Whisky, please,’ he said.

‘What a good idea.’ Lattimer looked at Luigi. ‘Just bring a bottle of Scotch, would you?’ he said. ‘
E soda e ghiaccio. Basta che li porti
, we’ll help ourselves.’

Luigi withdrew, with a barely audible
va bene
. He had a formidable breadth of shoulder, Raikes noticed.

The room into which Lattimer now led the way was long and high-ceilinged with an arched alcove at the far end and it immediately struck Raikes as beautiful. This was as much a sense of careful spacing, and dimension, as of the objects themselves, which were not very numerous in any case: Afghan carpet, all brown and gold and dull pink, Gothic Madonna in wood, with traces of gilt and red still on her, standing in a corner, a low table inlaid with blue tiles, a cabinet full of glass objects. His glance stayed on a gleaming skeletal bird in the alcove.

‘That’s an uncommonly accurate bit of work’, he said. ‘It’s a heron, isn’t it?’

‘Odd if it weren’t accurate,’ Lattimer said, in the sardonic, point-scoring tone customary with him. ‘It is the very bird itself.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘There is a man in France who does them. I ran a show for him last summer. It was a sell-out. He gets the carcase, big dramatic birds are best, eagles, cranes, that sort of thing. Then he has a way of stripping them, some sort of acid bath, but he doesn’t give the formula away of course.’

Luigi came in with the drinks tray, put it down on the tiled table, looked briefly at Lattimer, then silently withdrew. The tiles were matched in colour but there was no overall design, Raikes noticed, each tile being decorated with its own pattern of leaves and flowers. They had obviously been collected separately.

‘Iznik tiles,’ Lattimer said. Even engaged in pouring out the drinks he had been taking note of where Raikes was looking. There was something oddly eager in this attention to a visitor’s reaction. It was at odds with the manner, assured to the point of arrogance, and with the composure of the face.

‘Fine work,’ Raikes said, with a sense of fulfilling expectations.

‘I should think so.’ Lattimer passed over Raikes’s whisky. ‘They have lost the secret of that blue,’ he said. ‘Tiles like that haven’t been produced in Turkey since the seventeenth century. They were mosque tiles originally, I suppose you know.’

Raikes nodded, swallowing some of his drink. He did not much like Lattimer, he decided. The fellow was overbearing even when he was merely offering information. He wondered once again why he had been asked. He had wanted to come, of course, mainly in the hope of learning more about Chiara Litsov. ‘You didn’t finish telling me about the bird,’ he said.

‘Well, he assembles the skeleton again and fixes it together, don’t ask me how, fabricates various bits and pieces, seals the whole thing, gives it washes of metal solution. You end up with a chrome or steel or silver bird. Expensive of course, for obvious reasons. They’ll be copied before long but I expect to clear up quite a bit first.’ Lattimer paused for a moment. He was smiling that narrow smile of his. ‘The glory of changeless metal,’ he said.

Raikes realized that this was a reference, rather a sly one, to the conversation at the Litsovs’, the day he had gone there for lunch and antagonized the artist. But before he could make any rejoinder, Lattimer was asking him to pass over his glass for a refill and the next moment he had begun to discuss the wooden Madonna in the corner.

‘My pride and joy,’ he said, pouring out for both of them generous measures of Scotch. ‘I wouldn’t part with her for any consideration.’

Raikes looked across at the hieratic hands, the serene, slightly simpering face. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a valuable piece.’

‘Yes, but it’s not so much that, it’s the way I got her. She was in a private collection in Rome. The family had always thought her an eighteenth-century fake – there were a lot of French fakes of Gothic wooden sculptures about, still are as a matter of fact, especially the Chartres style. But I knew as soon as I saw her that she was genuine. I knew who she was and where she had come from. I didn’t say anything of course.’

Lattimer poured himself more whisky. He had downed the last glass very quickly indeed – Raikes had barely touched his. ‘No, I’m not a fool,’ he went on. ‘They were selling up, you know. The beauty of it was that I knew everything about her. I knew she had been at one time on the north transept of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, together with various other pieces, most of which have never been recovered. It is supposed that they were moved to protect them from the excesses of the Revolution. I knew she had been in Lenoir’s museum until the 1840s. Then she disappeared. And here, after a hundred years, she was. And they thought she was a fake. There was a kind of beauty in the situation. I got her for a hundred pounds.’

Lattimer’s face was quite composed still, but his eyes were shining at this triumphant deception. It was the first time Raikes had seen him look anything like moved or excited. ‘That’s why I keep her,’ he said. ‘Not because she’s worth a lot.’

He was silent for some moments. Then, with a marked change of tone, he said, ‘Let me tell you this, Raikes, I respect the work you do. I regard it as highly important work. Invaluable.’

Despite himself Raikes felt a glow at this. He knew the man before him, however exquisite his taste, was a bully. He had seen the way he had treated Wiseman, merely over a difference of opinion; and he could himself sense the same kind of almost brutal assertiveness in everything Lattimer said. Yet the praise pleased him, in the potent, corruptive way the praise of bullies pleases.

‘That is not what Mrs Litsov seemed to think,’ he said.

Disappointingly, Lattimer did not take this up. ‘More important than what a surgeon does, for example,’ he said.

‘Oh, come now,’ Raikes said. ‘A surgeon preserves life.’

‘Life would still go on if there were no surgeons. There would be more suffering, of course, but life would not be threatened with extinction. Life can spawn more life. You can’t spawn Gothic Madonnas. They talk about the uniqueness of the human individual. I dare say it’s true. But why should it be interesting? What value has uniqueness got when you’re talking about millions? I suppose the individual dandelion is unique too. I’ve always found the whole notion intensely boring. For a true concept of uniqueness you have to go to the artefacts of the past, to your Madonna, for example. Human lives are expendable, Simon. Works of art are not.’

Raikes was not sure for a moment or two whether this was meant seriously. He was distracted, too, by this use of his first name. But Lattimer’s eyes were on him, pale, staring intently. ‘I’m afraid I can’t agree,’ he said.

‘It’s the truth of the matter, whether you agree or not. And people have always known it, whatever the pious platitudes. What do you think you are all doing in Venice? Do you really think all this money would be spent and all this concerted effort made if it was just a question of saving lives? Of course not. It is objects that we really care about. The floods of 1966, which were what really started all these international restoration projects, and all these millions of dollars flowing in from abroad, they weren’t such terribly serious floods as these things go. I mean, in the scale of cataclysms they would rank near the bottom. If it hadn’t been Venice, if there had only been people to worry about, what would anyone have done? If it had been ten times as bad, and somewhere else, what would anyone have done? I’ll tell you. They would have sent a few food parcels and forgotten all about it.’

Lattimer paused to drain his glass. ‘I took that message in with my mother’s milk,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m in this business. You can’t go wrong. That’s why I love Venice so much. That’s why I keep a house here. Venice is the greatest storehouse of artefacts in the world. It is an artefact itself, more than any other city. Brick and stone, built on water. Here, let me give you some more whisky.’

He refilled his own glass. Raikes wondered if he usually drank so much, decided probably not. There was some sense of strain or tension in him, as apparent in the unbridled speech as in the drinking. Perhaps something had happened to bother Lattimer, made him want to let off steam. Perhaps, Raikes thought, I have been invited simply as someone insignificant, someone to talk to. He felt oppressed. There was something distinctly disconcerting, even alarming, about Lattimer, the fine-drawn immobility of his face, the pale eyes which stared so intently, the neatness of his person, the beauty of his house, the unrelenting dogmatism with which he expressed himself. Underlying this Raikes sensed an intention of friendliness, even perhaps some quality of appeal – though whether for sympathy or merely admiration he could not tell.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it was a man who made my Madonna after all, and for me that is the most truly remarkable thing about her.’

Lattimer remained silent for some moments, looking down into his glass. Then he said, ‘You work for a museum, don’t you, one of the London ones?’

‘The Victoria and Albert, yes. The Conservation Department.’

‘What do you call yourself? What’s the job description?’

‘I’m called a Conservation Officer.’

‘I don’t suppose they pay you much of a salary, do they?’