The Demonologist (6 page)

“What’s that place?” Tess asks, pointing across the canal at the white dome and elegant columns of the Chiesa della Salute.

“A cathedral,” I say. “One of the plague churches they built in the seventeenth century, as a matter of fact.”

“Plague church?”

“They built it to protect themselves when a terrible disease—the Black Death—came to Venice. Took out almost half the population. They didn’t have the medicine to fight it at the time, so all they felt they could do was build a church and hope God would save them.”

“And did he?”

“The plague eventually lifted. As it would have whether anyone built a church or not.”

Tess twirls a new bundle of noodles around her fork.

“I think it was God. Even if you don’t,” she says decisively. Takes a cheek-bulging mouthful. Chews and grins at the same time.

T
HAT EVENING, TIRED BUT EXCITED, WE GO FOR A SHORT STROLL
along the twisting
calles
surrounding the hotel before bed. I have a better-than-average sense of direction (it comes with the travel-guide map study) and can see our course in my head: three jagged sides of a square and then back again. Yet shortly after setting out, the turns become unexpected, the lane breaking off into two smaller canalside
fondamenta
, forcing a decision—left? right?—I didn’t think I’d have to make. Still, I figure I’m holding to the idea of going around the square and returning to the Grand Canal, even if it takes us a little longer.

After half an hour, we’re lost.

But it’s okay. Tess is here. Holding my hand, oblivious to my internal calculations, my attempts to guess north from south. The old man on the plane was wrong. Being lost in Venice is as charming as the guide books say it is. It all depends on who walks next to you. With Tess, I could be lost forever. Then it occurs to me, with the sharp pinch of emotion, that so long as I am with her, I could never be truly lost.

Just as I am about to abandon my masculinity altogether and ask someone for directions, we come upon the doors to Harry’s Bar.
Hemingway had his own table here for the winter of 1950
. The guidebook returns this fact to me, along with the more useful recollection of the map of the area. We aren’t too far off. We probably never were. The Bauer is just around the corner.

“We’re home,” I tell Tess.

“We were lost back there, weren’t we?”

“Maybe a little.”

“I could tell from your face. It does this thing sometimes”—she hardens her brow—“when you’re thinking.”

“Your face does the same thing.”

“Of course it does. I’m like you, and you’re like me.”

The simple truth of her observation stops me, but Tess walks ahead. My guide, leading me to the hotel doors.

T
HE NEXT DAY MY PLAN IS TO DO A LITTLE SIGHTSEEING, VISIT
the address the Thin Woman provided me in the afternoon, then wipe my hands of my official business and enjoy the evening and tomorrow with Tess unencumbered. Yet as we start out in a private gondola, Tess marveling at the long boat’s smooth progress through the chop, I begin to suspect my timing is a mistake. I should have gotten my work (whatever it is) over with first thing, because my speculation over what I have been asked to observe here has, even over breakfast, graduated to niggling worry. The strangeness of my assignment was sort of thrilling over the last twenty-four hours, a distraction from unwelcome realities. I could see the episode playing out as something to be retold in the lecture hall, a winning, screwball anecdote at conference wine-and-cheeses. Now, though, in the gold haze of Venetian light, the butterflies in my stomach have turned to warring wasps, churning and stinging.

What had the Thin Woman called it? A case. A
phenomenon
. Not the analysis of a discovered text or interpretation of verse (the only sort of fieldwork I might be expected to lend my expertise to). She came to me for my knowledge of the Adversary, one of the Bible’s many names for the Devil.
Apocryphal documentation of demonic activity in the ancient world
.

None of this, of course, can be discussed with Tess. So I play cheerful tour guide as best I can. All the while struggling to tell myself that this day is merely a little out of the ordinary, that I shouldn’t fear the unusual simply because it takes me out of my habitat of library, study, and seminar room. Indeed, maybe more days like this would have made me more present, as Diane had wished I’d been. Excitement makes you more alive.

But the fact is, as the morning sun rises to beat shadowlessly down on the old city, it feels less like excitement and more like fear.

W
E START AT THE
D
OGE
’
S
P
ALACE
. I
T
’
S A SHORT WALK FROM THE
hotel to San Marco, and once we step out onto the broad plaza, we take in the structure’s immensity from a distance. It’s true what one of the guidebooks said: the long arcade of columns on the building’s lower level lend the walled floors atop them the illusion of floating. I hadn’t expected the sheer size of it, the tons of stone, no matter how gracefully assembled, suggesting long-buried narratives of labor, injury, lost lives.

Among these lost lives, I tell Tess, were the condemned men brought here to be given a final chance at salvation.

“Why were they condemned?” she asks.

“They’d done bad things. And then they had to be punished.”

“But they were brought here first?”

“So the story goes.”

“How
does
the story go?”

I tell her about the column. The book said it was on the exposed side facing St. Mark’s Basin, opposite the island of San Giorgio. Count three columns in and there it is: worn around its marble base from all the prisoners and, over the centuries since, curious tourists attempting the impossible. The challenge is to put your hands behind your back (as the prisoners’ hands would have been bound) and, facing outward, step around the entire column. For the condemned, it was a cruel offering of potential freedom, as the myth holds that the task has never been achieved.

Tess thinks I should go first. I slip my fingers into my belt and get up onto the base’s edge. A single sliding step and I’m off.

“Can’t do it,” I say.

“My turn!”

Tess reverse-hugs the marble, faces me, grinning. Then she starts. Little shuffles on her heels, inching around. And keeps going. I stand there with my iPhone video camera ready to capture her fall, but instead she disappears as she circles the column. A moment later she emerges again, still shuffling around. Except now the grin is gone. In
its place is a blank look I take to be severe concentration. I return the iPhone to my pocket.

When she’s made it all the way around to the starting point she stands there, looking out over the water, as though listening to whispered instructions from the lapping waves.

“Tess!” A shout meant to awaken her from wherever she’s gone as much as to celebrate her accomplishment. “You did it!”

She steps down. And with her recollection of who I am and where she is, her smile returns.

“What do I win?” she asks.

“Your place in history. Apparently nobody’s ever done that before.”

“And salvation. Do I win that, too?”

“That, too. C’mon,” I say, taking her hand. “Let’s get out of this sun.”

W
E WALK ACROSS THE ALREADY-CROWDED PLAZA TO THE BASILICA.
The sun, aloof but scorching, makes even this short journey fatiguing. Or maybe the early rising after a long flight has me weaker than I figured. In any case, by the time we enter the cool of the cathedral, I’m feeling tilted, as though standing on the deck of a sailboat.

It’s partly an excuse to regain my balance when I stop to point up at the mosaic decorating the dome above us. The images tell the story of Creation: God’s invention of light, Adam in the garden, the serpent and his temptation of Eve, the Fall. There is an astonishing simplicity to the images, especially in the context of the building’s overwhelming, Byzantine architecture. It’s as though the builders intended to distract one from the real materials of faith, rather than depict them. Yet here, in this overhead pocket, is the familiar narrative of Genesis, laid out in an almost children’s book illustration, and the impact of it takes my breath away.

At first, I assume this is an aesthetic response: a man in awe of towering artistic achievement. But it isn’t the beautiful that transfixes me. It is the sublime. The unsettling presence of the serpent and its implications not only upon the iconic “Eve,” but the two real
people pictured in the mosaic, a man and woman touched not by a symbol, but by a physically embodied evil. The green-scaled length. The forked tongue.

And then, in the hushed tomb of the church, the sound of a whisper next to my ear. The serpent’s eyes focused not on a girl holding out her hand for an apple, but upon me.

“Dad?”

Tess has her hands against my lower back.

“What’s wrong?”

“Me?” she says. “What’s wrong with
you
? I’m holding you up.”

“Sorry. Got a bit dizzy for a second there.”

She squints. Knows I’m not giving her all the details and determining whether she needs to hear them now or not.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” she suggests. “We can have a rest before your meeting.”

She’s your child,
the imagined O’Brien qualifies in my head as Tess leads me out into the piazza’s bustle.
She knows more than you could ever hide
.

I
’
M FEELING MUCH STRONGER AFTER LUNCH
. T
HE BABYSITTER THE
concierge has arranged for arrives at our room to look after Tess for the couple hours I will be away. Stout, matronly, “fully registered,” as the hotel assured me. I trust her at once. As does Tess. The two of them engaged in Italian lessons before I’m out the door.

“Be back soon,” I call to Tess, who rushes to deliver a farewell kiss.

“
Arrivederci
, Dad!”

She closes the door behind me. And I’m alone. It’s only once I’m down among others in the ordered comings and goings of the lobby that I feel able to pull out the address the Thin Woman gave me.

Santa Croce 3627
.

A typically Venetian designation. No street name, no apartment number, no postal code. Even the most extensive online map zooming could provide only a couple-hundred-square-meter area where it might be. To find the doorway I’m to knock on, I’ll have to be on the ground, looking for signs.

I board a vaporetto at the hotel’s dock and head back along the
Grand Canal to the Rialto stop. The bridge is as busy today as when we passed under it yesterday, and as I work my way across it to enter the Santa Croce
sestiere
on the other side, my hesitations about whatever awaits me at 3627 lift away, and I am merely a visitor among visitors, passing the vendors’ stalls and asking “How much?” in the languages of the world.

Then I’m following the relatively easy route highlighted in the printout I unfold from my pocket. There are people here, too, other map readers like me, though as I proceed their numbers diminish. Before long there are only locals returning to their homes with grocery bags. Kids kicking soccer balls against ancient walls.

I should be close. But how can I know? Only some of the doors have numbers next to them. And they aren’t in anything approaching order. 3688 is followed by 3720. So I turn back, thinking the numbers will get smaller, only to find 3732 comes after 3720. Much of the time, I’m just trying to remember landmarks to which I can stick a mental pin: these drooping window-box flowers on the second floor, those stern-faced old men drinking espresso outside a café. Yet when I cut back and follow what I’m sure is the same path, the café is gone, the flower box replaced by an undershirt left out to dry.

It is only at the moment I start to head back in the direction (or what I believe to be the direction) of the Rialto that I find it.

Stenciled in chipped, gold paint on a wooden door smaller than any other is
3627
. It must be an original, maintained since the time when it was built for shorter, seventeenth-century Venetians. Its size, along with the tiny script of the numbers, gives the impression of an address that has long done its best to avoid notice altogether.

A doorbell button flickers like a nightlight even now at midday. I press it twice. It’s impossible to know whether it makes a sound within or not.

In a moment, the door is pulled open. From out of the interior shadows, a middle-aged man emerges wearing a gray flannel suit far too hot for the temperature of the day. His eyes blink at me through the smudged lenses of his wire-frame glasses, the only evidence of dishevelment in his otherwise excessively formal appearance.

“Professor Ullman,” he says. It is not a question.

“If you know my name, I must be at the right place,” I answer, a smile meant to invite him to participate in some humor at the strangeness of our meeting, but there is nothing in his expression that registers anything other than my presence at his door.

“You are late,” he says in accented but perfectly articulated English. He opens the door wider and makes an impatient, sweeping motion with his hand, ushering me inside.

“There was no designated time for my arrival that I was aware of.”

“It is late,” he repeats, a hint of weariness in his voice, suggesting he is referring to something other than the time.

I step into what appears to be a waiting room of some kind. Wooden chairs with their backs against the walls. A coffee table with Italian news magazines that, judging by the acts of terror and blockbuster movies featured on their covers, are more than a few years old. If it
is
a waiting room, no one else waits here. And there is nothing—no signage, reception desk, explanatory posters—to indicate what service might be provided.

“I am a physician,” the man in the suit says.