‘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.
‘Please, Signor Canavan, come closer, let me see you better.’ He made a faint, dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘Leave us, Maria. We wish to be alone.’
Patrick heard the door close behind him with a muted click. He took several steps towards the count,
