downstairs. God knows what’s going on, but I don’t intend to hang around here to find out. You’ve got to help me find a back way out of this place.’
‘But the doctor said ...’
‘I don’t give a damn what he said. I can’t stay here. Nor can you. Passover starts in a couple of days. We don’t have any time to lose.’
THIRTY-FOUR
They walked to Cannaregio through the clamorous dim light of mid-afternoon. Like refugees nearing an ill- marked border, they looked about them constantly, at every moment fearful of arrest. Every face, every gesture seemed to threaten betrayal or discovery.
Gradually, they left the more populated streets behind and began to relax. Patrick told Assefa what had happened after leaving him the night before. He described the chase after someone he had thought was Francesca, his collapse from exhaustion, and his dream. When he finished, Assefa walked beside him for a while in silence. They crossed the Rio di Noale onto the long stretch of the Fondamenta della Misericordia. A boat carrying refuse passed, headed for the Canale della Sacche. The driver waved at them and smiled. A faint smell of rotting garbage hung in the air for a moment.
‘You say you passed a square in which men were chasing a pig,’ said Assefa at last.
“Yes. Blind men. With knives.’
With knives, yes. And this scene - did it mean anything to you?’
‘Mean anything?’ Patrick could sense his friend’s unease. He watched the heavy boat piled high with rubbish chug out of sight. Why should it mean something? It was the sort of thing you see in dreams. Nonsense, really.’ But he knew that could not be true. Nothing else in his dreams had been nonsense, they had all made perfect sense: and he could remember the details with all the exactness that an invalid remembers pain.
Assefa shook his head.
‘No, Patrick. Not nonsense. In the eighteenth century - are you listening, Patrick? This is important - in the eighteenth century, on each of the two Sundays of the Carnival every year, the city would arrange for blind men to gather in a square in order to slaughter a pig. It was a sort of spectacle, something for the nobili to laugh at, to feel superior about. Are you telling me you’ve never heard of it?’
Patrick shook his head.
‘And yet you dreamed of it. You knew nothing about it, yet you dreamed it was happening.’
By the time they reached the Ghetto area, it was almost dark. Centuries ago, the Jews of Venice had been confined to this section of the city, the first of a multitude of ghettoes throughout the world. Now, only a couple of synagogues survived on the edge of squalor. As they passed the Scuola Canton, Patrick wondered what Migliau would do with the Jews if he came to power. Would he return them to their ghettoes, force them to wear the letter ‘O’ on their chests or yellow hats once more, make them pay over and over for the supposed crime of killing his god? For a moment, he dismissed such thoughts as ridiculous: not even a pope could bring the Middle Ages back again. And at once he remembered the small plaque that faces the main synagogue in the Calle del Ghetto Vecchio, commemorating the deaths of two hundred Venetian Jews at the hands of the Nazis.
There, just ahead of them, was the tenement in which Surian and his father lived. In a city where a new building is almost a contradiction in terms, the block seemed not merely old but ailing, as though infected by some insidious and wasting disease.
Drawing closer, they noticed a small knot of people milling round the front entrance. At first he took them for a group of casual loiterers, but it was soon apparent that they had a purpose in gathering there. A handful of schoolchildren, satchels still in their hands, skittered about, excited yet curiously silent. The rest of the crowd was made up mainly of women and old men. Patrick and Assefa were about to push through the crowd when they noticed a policeman at the centre. He was trying to take a statement from one old woman, but everyone else insisted on talking as well.
‘Che cosa e successo? E morto qualcuno?’
‘Poveretto, si e ammazzato.’
‘Chi era? Tu lo conosce vi?’
Patrick’s first thought was that someone had taken note of their visit here yesterday. But that would scarcely explain the crowd or the excited jabbering. At that moment, a small boy tried to squeeze between Patrick’s legs, in order to get to the front. Patrick reached down and grabbed him by the neck. The child squealed and tried to wriggle free. A woman looked round at them and laughed. Patrick smiled at her reassuringly.
‘Hang on,’ Patrick said to the boy. He could not have been more than five or six. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘Stronzo, lasciami andare! Lemme go! Get yer friggin’ hands off of me!’ shouted the little brute.
‘Not until you tell me where you’re going.’
‘Inna house, where d’you think?’
‘What for?’
‘See the man.’
‘The man? What man?’
‘The dead man, stupid. Jumped out of the winder inter the courtyard. Lemme in.’
A chill passed through Patrick. Without another word, he let the boy go. His hand was numb and useless.
‘It may not be him, Patrick.’ Assefa had moved to Patrick’s side. But his voice carried no conviction.
They squeezed their way through the crowd. No one challenged their right to pass. The main door stood open, leading into the courtyard.
Only a weak light managed to struggle past the high walls. The windows round the courtyard were lit up, as though in celebration of some festival. Indistinct faces stared out into the gathering dark, some curious, indifferent, but each drawn by the same fascination with violent and unexpected death.
The child’s courage had failed him a couple of yards inside the entrance. He was standing nervously, unable to take another step, yet rooted hard to the spot by morbid curiosity and a last pale ghost of bravado. On the other side of the courtyard, a huddled form lay unmoving on the ground. Patrick and Assefa went across. Someone had covered the body with an old bedspread. Blood had spilled out from underneath, forming a dark, sludgy pool on the concrete. Patrick bent down and raised the edge of the coarse fabric.
An imperfect, wounded light sloped across the lifeless face beneath the cloth. Patrick’s first thought was that someone had played a joke on them. The face staring up at him was not human at all, but a dummy’s face, white and hard, with painted eyes and varnished cheeks. It was the face of Arlecchino, cracked down the centre and smeared at the base with common blood. Patrick’s fingers fumbled at the mask, pulling it back to reveal Claudio Surian’s face. The back of the skull had caved in: fragments of white bone jutted out awkwardly, as though desperately trying to break free of their harness of blood and flesh.
It was dark by the time they got to the Lista di Spagna. Assefa still felt numb. Neither he nor Patrick thought for a moment that Claudio had jumped to his death. They were pilgrims come to a dark temple: godless, blind, sick at heart. All about them, veils were being torn and lamps extinguished. The city had become an altar for mad gods, a slab for the perfection of sacrifice. They could sense the blood in the air, smell it in their breath, like rotting garbage, feel it warm and intimate against their flesh.
The shops on the Lista were brightly lit, though less busy at this time of year than at the height of the tourist season, when they took the brunt of the daily excursions arriving at the railway station nearby. L’Unita’s offices were in a calle near the station. They turned out to be little more than a cluster of rooms above a travel agency, cramped, stuffy, and crammed full of files, typewriters, telephones, and telex and fax machines. There seemed to be no room for human beings, yet half a dozen reporters had managed to squeeze themselves miraculously behind an array of barricades: desks, filing cabinets - anything that might serve to keep colleagues and the world at large at bay for half a minute.
Assefa forced his way past a large, bearded man who was trying to strangle the handset of a telephone while shouting obscenities at it at the top of his voice:
‘Porca puttana, andate tutti a lagare, mi avete rotto i coglioni!’
Behind the bearded man, seated at a desk piled high with reference books, and about forty discarded plastic cups, a young woman was furiously mangling the ends of her fingers against the unresponsive keys of an antediluvian typewriter.
