‘Permesso?’ Assefa said, but his voice was drowned by the booming of the man at the telephone. He called again, more loudly this time, but there was still no response. The woman remained impregnable behind her desk. Exasperated, Assefa found a copy of Devoto’s dictionary, opened it at the middle, and slammed it shut with a bang like a gunshot.
Heads everywhere looked up from work, startled. Only the bearded man seemed oblivious of the report.
‘That wasn’t very amusing,’ said the woman at the desk. ‘What the hell do you want?’
‘I’m looking for Siniscalchi, Aldo Siniscalchi. Do you know where I can find him?’
Her mouth opened and closed. She was not a pretty woman, and the action lent her something of the appearance of a fish. She glanced at Patrick, who was standing a few paces behind the priest, then back at Assefa.
‘Who are you?’ she asked. Abruptly, she had passed from simply brusque to defensive.
‘I’m a friend of his. An acquaintance, anyway. Claudio Surian introduced us - we met last night at Bartolini’s. Aldo had arranged to see me again tonight, but...’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Her voice sounded stiff and unnatural. ‘I can’t help you. Ald... Signor Siniscalchi was shot two hours ago outside the trattoria where he’d just eaten lunch. He...’ For a second, she seemed on the verge of tears, then she took control of her emotions again. This was a newspaper office, Siniscalchi’s murder was tomorrow’s front page lead.
‘Some fucking fascist from Ordine Nuovo gunned him down,’ she exclaimed. ‘They’ve been threatening him for months. He’s been doing a series on them. Fascist bastards.’
‘You’re sure?’ asked Patrick. His heart was beating in long, uneasy strokes. He felt sick and tired.
‘Sure?’
‘That it was Ordine Nuovo. You’re sure they were responsible?’
‘No, of course I’m not sure! They didn’t sign their names. But who the fuck else would do it?’ Then his accent seemed to register with her. ‘Hey, who are you anyway? American? CIA?’
‘He was following up this Migliau business. Isn’t that right?’
She raised her eyebrows, little pale eyebrows that scarcely gave definition to her eyes.
‘What has that to do with it?’
‘Everything. Forget Ordine Nuovo. Dig up anything you can on. Migliau. Find him and you’ll find your friend’s killers.’ He hesitated. ‘And Claudio Surian’s as well.’
He turned with Assefa and made for the door. Just as he reached for the handle, the woman shouted after him.
‘Hey! American! What’s your name anyway?’
Patrick turned.
‘Canavan. Patrick Canavan. If you find Migliau tell him I was here. Tell him I haven’t finished yet. Tell him I’ve just started.’ It was like the child in the tenement, a soft, faint hint of bravado, a muted whistle in the dark.
The woman looked hard at him, puzzled, a little disturbed.
‘What’s your friend’s name?’
Assefa turned and answered her.
‘Just a moment,’ she said. Getting to her feet, she picked her way with practised ease across a series of obstacles to another desk. After rummaging for half a minute, she surfaced triumphantly, brandishing a fat padded bag.
‘He left this for you,’ she shouted above a din of clattering typewriters and ringing telephones. ‘Said he wouldn’t be here tonight when you called, that he had some big lead to follow up.’ Her face fell. Again tears threatened to displace her false toughness. ‘You don’t think ... ? Cristo! Anyway, he said I was to give this to you. I think it’s a book.’
THIRTY-FIVE
The book turned out to be a rare copy of Corradini’s Famiglie Antiche e Nobili di Venezia, or Ancient and Noble Families of Venice. It was a respectable, heavy volume bound in dull burgundy leather and edged with gilt; the date of publication was 1791, at Venice. The book’s author was Marco Corradini, a man of aristocratic birth and political aspiration who, like so many Venetian noblemen of his day, found himself in penurious circumstances. Unlike most of his fellows, however, Corradini was possessed of brains, a personable manner, and a classical education.
Patrick and Assefa knew nothing of the work, save what they had been able to glean from a florid preface by a certain Professor Enrico Battistella. They had taken a taxi at the Piazzale Roma and crossed the causeway to the mainland, where their driver had deposited them at a shabby pensione near the docks in Porto Marghera.
Coming here, it was as though the magic of Venice had been abolished by a single stroke of a rival magician’s wand. The dark industrial streets of Mestre and the gaunt, high-stepping cranes of its port were the apparatus of a different sorcery, their weary inhabitants the succubi of another, flatter dream. A smell of refined oil wafted through blind and congested streets: there were no spices here, or precious oils, or unguents. Necessity, not vice or luxury, paved the streets of Mestre.
The pensione had not asked for proof of identity, nor had it required them to sign its register, if it had one: a small extra payment had taken care of that. Surian had mentioned the place the evening before,
when Assefa told him the whereabouts of their first hotel. He had said the pensione was sometimes used by members of Prima Linea and other underground groups of the far left. But as far as Patrick and Assefa could see, the clientele was made up chiefly of prostitutes serving the port, their clients - mainly merchant sailors - and a handful of migrant workers from Sicily.
Siniscalchi had placed two slips of paper in the book, the first in the chapter devoted to the several branches of the Contarini family, the second in a much shorter section that dealt with the house of Migliau. In the margin, he had marked in pencil several passages that must have seemed to him worthy of note.
The first of these was a quotation from a document found by Corradini in the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. The text described it as a chronicle that had been kept on the blank pages of a vellum manuscript of Macrobius’s commentary on the Somnium Scipionis. The chronicle had been kept by a certain Brother Ubertino of Florence between 1223 and 1268. The passage marked by Siniscalchi was dated 1264, on the newly-instituted Feast of Corpus Christi.
Assefa read the passage slowly for Patrick’s benefit, explaining to him any particularly difficult words or phrases. The chronicle had been written in the Florentine dialect of the period, that was later to dominate Italian as a whole, and Brother Ubertino’s language had been tidied up and somewhat modernized by both Corradini and Battistella, so it did not prove particularly hard to follow.
‘ “This last week the flagellanti have been seen in our streets once more. And this despite the decree issued last month by the Doge and the Consiglio, that none in holy orders, whether lay or religious, should in any wise consort with such as term themselves ‘fraternities of discipline’, nor yet sit upon the councils that govern them. They were first seen here in the year of the plague, five years past now, having come in a body from Perugia, and it is said they number many thousands and are afraid of no one.
“You may behold them now on feast days and high holidays, parading in the streets or the piazza before the basilica, and ofttimes before other of the city churches, wearing, as is their custom, black veils of wondrous length, even to the ground, and beating their backs with leathern whips, all the time accompanying their efforts by howling and crying after the manner of wild beasts, or demons come up out of hell.” ‘
Assefa paused and asked Patrick if he was following the text.
‘I think I get the general drift. Do you know exactly who these flagellanti were?’
Assefa nodded.
‘Flagellants. The movement started in northern Italy about 1259 and soon spread into Germany and elsewhere. Thousands of people joined in religious processions, beating themselves with whips, weeping, seeking salvation.’
‘I see. But I don’t understand what this has got to do with Migliau or the Contarinis.’
Assefa shrugged.
‘Let’s go a bit further.’ He started reading again.
“Yesterday, I was visited shortly after Lauds by Umberto Trevisan, a young scholar who often comes here to use our great library. He told me that there are already many factions among the flagellanti and that, for the most
