My own expression mirrored her earnestness. “Of course,” I replied. “And I am but a humble farm boy from Treviso. Shall I not read an English playwright, too, and steal his wit for my own purposes when it suits me? And if you are ever false with me, Rebecca, then Heaven mocks itself. I’ll not believe it.”
We stood in that dark, cramped alley, so close our hands almost touched, feeling like two clowns, not knowing whose turn it was to laugh and whose to make the jest.
“You are an odd one, Lorenzo,” she whispered, eyeing me with that curious, crooked expression of hers.
“I shall take that as a compliment and make the same remark to you in return.”
She snorted and, briefly, she took my hand. Her touch was warm and soft and delicate, and a sensation stole over me which I have never before encountered. “And I made you risk so much. All for nothing.”
At that I had to laugh. “Nothing? Rebecca, I…” Oh, dear. There I was, briefly tongue-tied again. “I wouldn’t have been anywhere else in the world this afternoon. As for what happens in Venice of an evening, let me think a little. It’s easier to hide secrets in the dark than in the day.”
“But…?”
“No.” I was adamant. “One thing at a time.”
In silence, we dawdled back to the ghetto. I stopped at the bridge, with an ill-mannered guard who watched her walk across the drawbridge, then noted, “Five minutes later and that little kike would have been in deep shit, boy. Not that I’d mind an hour or two in the cell with her, eh?”
I refuse to follow the city fashion and carry a small dagger in the waistcoat. If one chooses where one walks, there is, I believe, no need of such a weapon. Nor do I much fancy the idea of wearing some hidden jewellery designed for no other purpose than to wound my fellow man. Nevertheless, at that moment I fancied I had just such a blade inside my jacket and, in my imagination, I withdrew it, slowly stuck the swine in the chest, then heaved his bleeding corpse into the canal.
“Yes, sir,” I answered lamely as this regrettable daydream played in my head.
Then I walked back through the dark and narrow streets of the city, over the bridge, back into San Cassian, where the whores stood around the campo whispering filthy come-ons to any who chose to hear. When I walk I think. By the time I opened the door to Ca’ Scacchi, I knew how it might be done.
18
The Grand Canal
After some frantic scribbling and a swift shower, Daniel was downstairs in Ca’ Scacchi, ready to catch the vaporetto to San Marco, six pages of solo violin tucked inside a clear plastic envelope. Laura joined him, dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, hair swept back behind her head.
“Night off,” she said. “And tomorrow too.”
“Ah.”
Scacchi and Paul wished him well. Then he and Laura walked to the canal, caught the boat, and sat together in the stern. For once she did not wear the sunglasses. In some odd way he felt this was a victory for him.
“On a date?” he asked hesitantly.
Laura glared at him. “What an impertinent question! I am going to see my mother. As I do every Wednesday, if it’s any of your business. She’s in an old people’s home in Mestre.”
“I’m sorry. Is she ill?”
“No. Merely old. I was a late child.”
“I was being presumptuous.”
“True.”
“I thought there must be a man.”
Her green eyes opened wide. “A man! Daniel, do you not think that Scacchi and Paul are enough men for one life? Furthermore, I seem to have acquired a third child of late, and one who can be just as infuriating as the others. You think I am short of men?”
“Oops,” he said softly, smiling at the water. Her anger, which was clearly feigned, was amusing. Laura loved Scacchi and Paul. She enjoyed his own presence, too, he believed, which disturbed him mildly. He had avoided relationships in the past. There had been other cares: his mother, studying, and the part-time work he was always seeking to pay his way. When he thought about the kind of woman he hoped one day to meet, he always had the same image: of a person around his age who carried a fiddle case from concert to concert and shared his interest in old books and music. Someone from a similar mould, not a delightfully eccentric servant, and one who was older too.
“Oops,” she repeated with a wicked gleam in her eye. “And what kind of English word is that?”
A tourist, a burly, bearded man in his late fifties in shorts and a tennis shirt, several cameras laden round his neck, stared at her.
“Oops!” Laura bellowed at him gleefully. The fellow got up and walked to the middle of the boat. They both laughed.
“And since we are now allowed to ask personal questions, Daniel Forster, you will kindly tell me about yourself. There is, I assume, some English rose of a girlfriend back home? Come. Tell me.”
He was aware that he was blushing, vividly. Laura’s face fell.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I forgot. You looked after your mother. It was for so much of the time?”
“A lot,” he replied. “And I never regretted a moment.”
Laura watched the water and said without looking at him, “And is this when your life begins, then? With the crazy strangers in Ca’ Scacchi?”
“Perhaps.”
She folded her arms and, determined to steer the conversation elsewhere, murmured, “I suppose this American girl is pretty. The Locanda Cipriani. I have lived here all my life and been there just once.”
Daniel thought about Amy Hartston. “She’s very pretty,” he said. “In an American way.”
“I know,” she hissed. “Perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect ass. Always smiling. Always polite.” The bad English accent returned. “ ‘’Ave a nice day!’ ”
“I think that may be stereotypical.”
“Huh!”
“And I hope,” he added, “she can play the violin better than me.” He waved the plastic envelope. “Because this stuff is hard.”
She picked up the paper and looked at his neat, upright rendition of the notes on the staves. “Doesn’t look too hard.”
“Oh, doesn’t it? You know about these things?”
“No. But it’s just a few sparrow droppings on the page, isn’t it? Not like those spiderwebs you see them staring at in the concerts.”
He sighed. “It starts like that but soon quickens. In any case, I shall let you in to a secret about music. Sometimes, dear Laura, the slowest parts are the hardest. There is, you see, nowhere to hide in all those quiet spaces.”
She regarded him closely, thinking. “There are occasions,” she said eventually, “when I don’t know what to make of you. What a very mature and perceptive thing for a young man to say. Furthermore… Oh! Oh! See, Daniel! Tell me the name of that house, please.”
Laura was pointing at a small palace on the starboard side of the boat. Daniel stared at it. This was not one of the buildings he recognised, yet it was undoubtedly remarkable. The narrow building sat crookedly a little way down from the Guggenheim gallery, a small pink-and-off-white oddity, with three rose windows set off-centre to its right and a skin that appeared tattooed with smaller glasswork. Three rows of arched glass ran from the first to the fourth floor. A set of inverted funnel chimneys topped the flat roof.
“I haven’t a clue,” he said.
“Hah! So much for education! That is one of the oldest on the Grand Canal. Even after all these years I stop to look at it every time I go past. Ca’ Dario. Fifteenth century. There’s a rumour it’s cursed. Plenty of murders and suicides over the years.”