“Yes?” Scacchi required more.
“And because he is so…ordinary.”
“Ordinary? Surely not. Look again.”
The old man was right. “Because he is so fetching. So attractive,” Daniel said.
“Precisely! Compare this to Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony , painted probably no more than eighty years before. There you have devils with tails and snouts, demons ready to devour your entrails. This chap has nothing but a few feathers as his cloak and a smile as fetching as any sweet soul on earth. There you have it, Daniel. Everything you need to know about the Venetian Lucifer. That he wears such an engaging grin it is hard not to sup with him. Such a modern concept, don’t you think? Except if you look at the canvas there…”
Scacchi pointed to an oval work on the ceiling at the centre of the room.
“You will see the selfsame pose used for Eve offering Adam the fated apple. There was always a touch of misogyny in Tintoretto, if you ask me. On the way out we’ll take a look at the Annunciation downstairs. Poor girl looks as if she should never have stepped outside the kitchen, let alone mothered the Son of God.”
Daniel found it difficult to take his eyes off the figure of Satan, with its perplexing smile and pleading expression. “Why did you bring me here, Scacchi?”
“For your betterment. A man must recognise Satan when he sees him, Daniel. Particularly in a city such as this. I am no moralist, so personally I care little whether you run with one side or the other. What matters, I think, is that it is you who decides. When the Devil comes to you, there are only three options. Do you do what he wants? What ‘goodness’ demands? Or what your own nature tells you, and that may be either or none of the aforementioned? The answer, naturally, should be the last. But unless you see him — or her — for what he truly is, you can’t even begin to decide. Are you with me?”
It seemed, to Daniel, a distant argument. “I am not sure I have met the Devil. Or care to.”
Scacchi gazed at him, seeming disappointed. “That is the child inside you talking. You should be wary of him. This Venetian Lucifer will come, in his or her own time. Now…” He looked at his wristwatch. “We must be going. Musicians hate a latecomer.”
After leaving the scuola, they caught the vaporetto, disembarking at San Zaccaria accompanied by hordes of tourists headed for the Doge’s Palace and the famous piazza. On the way Scacchi announced that he had enrolled Daniel into the summer music school at the church as a speculative gift, a small pleasure to relieve the tedium of sifting the papers in the cellar. If the course was not to Daniel’s taste, he could leave at any time, though the old man hoped he would persevere. The event had some fame. It took place every two years under the sponsorship of Massiters, the international art agency whose eponymous English founder, an occasional Venetian resident, appeared at irregular intervals to applaud and inspect the beneficiaries of his generosity.
The programme attracted young musicians from around the world, partly through reputation and partly because of its location in the church of La Pietà, “Vivaldi’s church,” as the sign outside had it, though Scacchi quickly denounced this as a fraud. The original was rebuilt shortly after the composer’s death, he explained. The white classical façade photographed by thousands of tourists each week had been tacked on at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Red Priest would recognise precious little of the modern church, Scacchi said, and certainly not the lush oval interior which had replaced the customary bare, dark medieval space still seen elsewhere in the city.
The large double doors were open, giving the tourists a direct view into the nave. A middle-aged woman in a flowery dress was perched behind a desk at the foot of the steps, checking the credentials of those arriving for the event. She smiled brightly at Scacchi and greeted him with affection. Too rapidly for Daniel, and in a smattering of Italian and dialect, Scacchi spoke to her and pushed a piece of paper into her hand. Her eyebrows rose. She shrugged. Then she scribbled Daniel’s name on a plastic name badge and passed it over the table. Scacchi took it up gratefully and with profuse thanks.
“We locals get a discount on the boats and buses,” the old man explained with a victorious grin. “So why not for a little music course too? These foreigners…” He waved his hand at the crowd of young people milling inside the church. “They have money to burn.”
“Speaking of money, Signor Scacchi,” said the woman behind the table, “would you like me to present the fattura to your house at a later date?”
“As you see fit,” he replied. “A gentleman does not carry cash, naturally.”
“Naturally…” She scribbled something on a torn piece of paper and thrust it into a supermarket carrier bag half-full of such notes. Daniel somehow doubted Scacchi would ever hear of it again.
“Wear your badge always,” the woman warned. Daniel pinned it to his shirt and, at Scacchi’s beckoning, followed him into La Pietà, pausing by the iron gate that led to the oval hall, listening to the murmur of young excited voices in a dozen different English accents.
Scacchi watched him. “It doesn’t matter, does it?” he asked eventually.
“No,” Daniel replied. “I don’t care if Vivaldi wouldn’t recognise a thing. I can still feel his presence.”
“Or of those who came after and believed in him so much they placed his presence here, straight out of the ether. Either way,” Scacchi mused, “it’s all the same. Reincarnation has always seemed to me the silliest of ideas. Yet I do think there is something in the notion that a fragment of a person survives, like dust on a carpet. We breathe it in, consuming each other and the dead of past centuries while perhaps picking up a little of their stain upon our characters.”
A cello was being tuned. Two fiddles joined in.
“I’m not good enough,” Daniel said immediately. “These people are in a different league.”
“Nonsense!” Scacchi said reproachfully. “You told me in your letters you played regularly and had taken examinations.”
“And that is true, Scacchi. But exams and talent are not necessarily the same thing.”
“Oh, come. It’s just a little fun. Some playing. Some theory. Some composition. You can compose a bit, I trust?”
“A bit.”
“Then you’ll be fine. See the strutting cockerel over there?”
The old man pointed out a short figure in black shirt and trousers, with a head of abundant dark hair and a small imperial, like a misplaced moustache, beneath his lower lip.
“Guido Fabozzi,” Daniel said. “I have seen him on television.”
“Been the boss for the last four of these things. Since the incident…”
Daniel saw the look on the old man’s face. Scacchi had let something slip. “The incident?”
“There was a…problem. But that was ten years ago now. Nothing you need worry about. Fabozzi is a good man, for all his pomposity. I’ll have a word with him. Make sure he goes easy on you.”
“No! I stand or fall by my own efforts. Please.”
Scacchi seemed to like that. He touched Daniel lightly on the shoulder. Then he cast his eyes around the church again, found a figure in pale colours on the far side of the nave, and pointed him out.
“And there you have the great man himself. Hugo Massiter. Lord of all he surveys. We work in the same trade, though I doubt he’d acknowledge as much. No time like the present!”
They crossed the floor of the church, nodding politely at the sea of young faces there, until they stood beneath a large and impressive ceiling painting, which Scacchi announced as Tiepolo’s Triumph of Faith . Hugo Massiter was a man of around fifty, Daniel judged, dressed in a curiously anachronistic fashion: light shirt and trousers, blue neck scarf, and a pair of expensive plastic-framed sunglasses pushed back onto his glossy forehead. He was engaged in a one-sided conversation with a slim girl in a white shirt and jeans who listened intently to his animated speech. Scacchi held back for a moment, allowed Massiter to recognise their presence, then walked forward and embraced the man.