“The only miracles are those we make ourselves, Rebecca! Come with me now. Be safe.”
“Safe? None of us is safe as long as he walks free. Tomorrow. If he is in chains. Then we could take to our heels and hope we’re out of the city before he points his accusing finger at us.”
“Now!”
“I cannot,” she replied. “Nor must you ask me anymore. Go, Lorenzo. If there is some God, perhaps he will take pity on us, for all our sins. Quick,” she declared. “Before they return and guess what’s up. I play at La Pietà at this carnival he’s fixed. You may see me there if you are so foolish as not to heed my words.”
I kissed her once, fondly, on the cheek and felt the way she withdrew herself from my embrace. Then I left Ca’ Dario and walked the city into the early hours, planning, planning, planning. When the bell of San Cassian struck one, I made my way back into Ca’ Scacchi, through the dark side entrance of the warehouse, which gave me secret entry. Leo deserved an explanation, and an apology, before he sent me penniless on my way.
I scrambled up the back stairs, went into the main house by the window, and found myself in my old room: the third along on the third floor. The boy from Treviso who, a few short months before, had arrived here excited and unprepared for this new world now seemed a stranger to me. He lived inside my memory, but as another, unfamiliar and unfathomable. I collected a few things I believed would be useful for the itinerant life that would follow whatever transpired the coming day: some clothes, a handful of letters from my darling Lucia, a tiny portrait of my mother. Then I took that silver Star of David Rebecca had given me, which I had removed in anger, and placed it round my neck.
After that, quietly, not wishing to make a sound until I chose the moment, I found my way downstairs. Leo was about, in his cups probably, since this seemed to be his preferred medicine for dealing with adversity.
The fire was dying. A sputtering candle sat upon the table. Sure enough, my uncle was there, a bottle of wine and some glasses before him. He sat slumped, immobile, drunk. This was not an ideal moment for our conversation, but I knew it must take place. I had wronged Leo, imagining him to be that cruel master in the painting across the rio in San Cassian. In truth he was simply a sad fellow struggling to make his way in the world as best he knew.
“Uncle,” I said softly, hoping to wake him, and came from behind to place a hand upon his shoulder.
His body rolled, a strange and terrifying movement. Then Leo’s face turned sideways and fell to the table, his bloody mouth agape, a yawning space where his front teeth should have been. There was gore in his throat. One eye was now a dark and liquid socket. His right hand, the claw, ended in stumps. I felt some cold inner voice inside me start to scream and knew in an instant who alone could have been responsible for this vile deed.
“Lorenzo,” said a familiar English voice in front of me. Delapole’s figure came out from a pool of darkness by the fireplace. Gobbo stood with him, eyes downcast, as if he felt some little shame. “Your uncle was an awkward fellow, to be sure. ‘I do not know, sir. I do not know’ was all the wretched man could squeal, however much we stuck him. And still we lack that manuscript. It is too late now for the copyists. But I will have it. The thing is mine, and I must possess that which belongs to me. Poor Leo said it must be hidden. Now, where could that be, do you think?”
“I do not know,” I answered, and backed towards the staircase which lay behind me.
Delapole’s face came further into the candlelight, yellow and cadaverous in its cast. He wore a sardonic smile. “Oh, such palpable lies, and told to one who has favoured you so! This Venetian toying with the truth appalls me, lad, and does you no good at all. Why, after I’d removed those crippled fingers, even Uncle Leo convinced me he told the truth at last. What good did it do him, anyway? By that stage he was making so much noise it quite offended my ears. And so I took this out to silence the row. Catch, boy! Catch!”
His right arm moved. Some small object flew through the air and brushed, cold and damp and bloody, against my cheek. I thought of that gory gaping hole at the back of Leo’s throat and knew what Delapole had launched towards me. Marchese was right: some demon lived inside this man’s skin, and now it was loose upon the earth.
“Fetch him, Gobbo,” Delapole said, yawning. “We’ll tear it out of that scrawny frame in five minutes and let his corpse confess his master’s murder. Such perfect symmetry. Then it’s plain sailing all the way to Vienna, I fancy.”
The squat, ugly shape of the fellow I once called friend began to move towards me through the shadows, past Leo’s mutilated corpse, travelling as fast as a hound closing on a fox. Without thinking, I said a prayer.
54
Public relations
They sat on the podium, half-blinded by the lights: Daniel, Massiter, Fabozzi, and, pale-faced and a little scared, Amy, as a representative of the orchestra. Something, guilt or shame, lingered in her face. There was scant time between the press conference and Scacchi’s funeral, but Daniel was determined that he would speak with her before he left the room.
The concert had now gained an unmistakable momentum. The tale proved a perfect story for a news business suffering late-summer lassitude. There was the air of mystery, too: Daniel’s reluctance, until that day, to be seen in public, and the violent deaths of his two close associates. The reporters sniffed something deeper, Daniel believed, and would, given half a chance, do everything to throw him off guard. There must have been more than a hundred of them in the room, with a battery of photographers forever firing off flashes. As he posed in front of the electric cloud of camera flashes, a polite, static grin on his face, he knew none in the audience could begin to guess what kind of headlines they would be reading before the weekend was out.
Massiter rose and greeted them in a succinct speech of welcome, noting that their location had musical antecedents: Tchaikovsky had composed his Fourth Symphony while staying in the hotel in 1877. It must have preceded Onegin directly, coming at the time when his life was beginning to descend into chaos and insanity. Daniel found it discomforting to know that somewhere, in a suite above his head, Tchaikovsky must have agonised over his failed marriage, his homosexuality, and the long, hard work about to begin on the opera. Another ghost flitting through Venice. Another reason why he could never wear the face Massiter hoped to place upon him: he lacked the capacity for self-torture. With genius came, too often, a blight, and that perhaps had been why the concerto which now bore his name had lain hidden, anonymous, in Ca’ Scacchi for just a few decades short of three hundred years. There was a human being behind the music, still waiting to rise from the dust.
He made a mental note of that idea and then, as Massiter sat down to light applause, rose on his bidding. He blinked at the ranks of dim faces judging him and knew that the Daniel Forster who had, only that summer, walked naively onto the moto topo Sophia at Marco Polo airport would have wilted beneath the heat of their attention.
Daniel found it difficult to remember that person. He nodded modestly at the audience and announced himself as a composer, not an orator, asking for questions which he promised to answer as honestly as he could. For thirty minutes they came, from all directions, some intelligent, some stupid, some simply incomprehensible. In return he fudged, politely thanking Massiter for his sponsorship, Fabozzi and Amy for their support as fellow musicians. The several persistent enquiries about the death of Scacchi and Paul he fielded discreetly, suggesting that they would be best directed to the police.
When an English reporter pressed him on the point, Daniel’s voice broke a little, then he paused, before saying simply, “Please — they were my friends. I bury Signor Scacchi today, a man whose kindness towards me has been surpassed only by that of Mr. Massiter here. Without Signor Scacchi, I would never have come to Venice. Without his introduction to Mr. Massiter, I would never have found such a benefactor and come out of my happy obscurity into this dazzling brightness. Indulge me a little at this moment, ladies and gentlemen. When today is over, when you have heard this concerto in full and I have this sad duty out of the way, speak to me again and I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can. But for now you must be patient. Judge me by what you hear tonight, not my inarticulate ramblings here.”