Massiter turned to face the water. Daniel detected some concern in his manner.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. “I don’t know about this.”
“Really?” Amy asked, suddenly animated. “This was before my time, but it was some story. The poor kid was being chased by the creep who was the school leader. Turns out he attacked her after the final concert and murdered her. Then he killed himself when the cops were closing in. She was quite a player, too, they say.”
Massiter drained his glass and refilled it immediately. “Her name was Susanna Gianni, and she was, my dears, the finest violinist of her age I have ever heard. To think I picked that damned Russian for the job. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t reproach myself for it. If it weren’t for me, Susanna would be alive today.”
His grey eyes seemed damp. Amy placed her hand on his knee. It seemed, to Daniel, an oddly adult gesture. “Hugo. I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was so personal. You can’t blame yourself for what someone else does.”
“But I do, I’m afraid. Even after ten years. Still, this isn’t a subject for now. Look. We arrive.”
The island was quite close. The tower of the campanile was visible several hundred yards inland from the vaporetto jetty. The speedboat slowed to a crawl, made a sharp right, then entered the mouth of a narrow canal thick with algae. Massiter swatted a mosquito, looked at his watch, and ordered Dimitri to moor the boat temporarily a little way from the restaurant, in a solitary location next to a vegetable field.
“Damned if I couldn’t get a table till nine. What cheek! Still, you can play for your supper now, instead of later. Come! Instruments out! Let me hear these pieces you’ve invented for me.”
Amy pulled a face. “Jesus, Hugo. Do I have to? I hate composition. I’m a player.”
“And an excellent one too. The best we have this year, Amy. Fabozzi told me so himself.”
“Maybe,” she replied. “That doesn’t mean I can write.”
He stared at her, seeming offended. “You mean you didn’t bring anything?”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a printed manuscript. “I’ve got some Vivaldi. The Seasons. We never play it in the school. I thought it might make a change.”
Massiter looked horrified. “Good God, girl! If I want to hear that one more time — which I never shall — I’ll go to the nearest pizza parlour. I’ve a good mind to make you starve by way of punishment. Women!” His temper was up.
“Perhaps,” Daniel suggested, “I have a solution.”
“I hope so. Or none of us shall eat tonight.”
Daniel picked up the plastic envelope with the six sheets of handwritten music inside. “Amy, it would be a great compliment if you could sight-read what I’ve written.”
“Why?” Massiter asked. “Can’t you play it yourself?”
“Not terribly well,” he admitted. “I never professed to be a great violinist, Hugo. Just because you can hear something in your head doesn’t mean you can reproduce it with your fingers.”
“Musicians!” Massiter raged. “Most stubborn creatures on earth. Well. You heard, my girl. Play, or it’s back to town and no supper for the pair of you.”
“Gimme,” she said sullenly, and snatched the pages from Daniel’s hand, then sat, for a full five minutes, reading through them. Massiter calmed down a little. Daniel listened to the buzz of insects and the gentle movement of fish bobbing for flies, wondering, with no small amount of rising panic, if he had played his hand correctly. Amy’s expression changed as she worked her way through the pages. She became more serious and absorbed. When she was done, she turned to him and asked, “What is this, Daniel? What’s it meant to be?”
“A violin solo,” he replied stupidly.
“I know that. Give me the context. It sounds eighteenth century, almost like Vivaldi, but not quite. And it’s part of something much bigger, I think. What is it?”
Massiter regarded both of them intently. Daniel understood why Scacchi found it difficult to reveal anything but the truth in the face of those staring grey eyes.
“I imagine it to be a solo passage in something like a Vivaldi violin concerto. In between the ritornelli. I was playing with the form. Trying to write something which matched the occasion.”
Amy squinted at him. “I’m to imagine what the rest is, I suppose? Without hearing it in my head, it is damned hard to work out how this fits in.”
He cursed himself. He had chosen the first obvious violin flourish he could find and never, for a moment, considered the need for context. “That would be fine,” he murmured.
“Fine?” She was bemused. “How can you write the middle of something without at least dreaming up the beginning, if not the end? I don’t understand.”
Massiter had relaxed into the corner of the boat. “Music or starvation, my dear,” he said. “What’ll it be?”
“Brits!”
She passed the sheets to Daniel, asking him to turn the pages for her, took the Guarneri out of its case, stood up, and, after a moment’s consideration, began to play. The rich, full tone of the slim fiddle rang out over the drone of mosquitoes. Massiter closed his eyes and listened, utterly still. Daniel found the notes chilled his blood, gaining several new dimensions over the passage he had scanned in his head as he wrote them down. It began with the long, slow, stately grace of a dirge, then, through a series of turning, quickening changes, moved up the scale gradually, relentlessly, until the solo closed in a rapid, majestic, ringing display of double-stopped fury. If he had to apply a single word to the passage it would, he believed, be resurrection. The music started in the realm of the dead and ascended, with a certain steady pace, to a world full of life and colour and movement.
Amy sat down and gave him a frank look. “How did I do? Be honest. It’s your music.”
“You were wonderful,” he stuttered. “Marvellous.”
She shook her head. “Wow. That stuff’s amazing, Daniel. Can I keep these sheets? Can I work on them?”
“Of course.”
“Here. Sign it for me. I can sell it if I’m ever broke.”
He held his hands awkwardly on his lap, palms down. “I don’t have a pen.”
Massiter was watching him like a hawk. He picked a tortoiseshell fountain pen out of his shirt pocket and held it out. “Here, Daniel,” he said with a wan smile. “Use mine.”
With a shaky hand, and hating himself all the while, Daniel scrawled his name on the first page.
“That was stunning,” Massiter said. “On both your parts. Now, let’s eat.”
It was a feast, as Massiter had promised. They devoured a succession of small plates, sharing each: sea urchins and soft-shelled crabs, shrimp and lobster, pasta stained with squid ink, John Dory served whole, with the mark of Saint Peter’s thumbprint still on the side, and monkfish as fat and sweet as scampi. Massiter uttered a few deprecatory words about the Veneto whites, then picked a firm, flinty Alto Adige from the South Tyrol to go with the fish. They drank two bottles, with a grappa each at the end, and talked of Venice and colleges and food, anything but the music they had just heard.
When the meal was done, they walked round to the little basilica. Massiter bribed the caretaker to let them in and turn on the lights, then revealed, with a proud wave, the famous Doomsday mosaic. Daniel was impressed to see, just as Piero had promised, a small dog in one corner which might have been ancestor to the legendary Xerxes, duckhound and helmsdog extraordinaire. Afterwards, with the night well fallen, they went outside and stared at the stars: a perfect lagoon evening, with the sky a soft, dark blue above them.
The caretaker hung around, waiting for more tips. Massiter eyed the campanile and suggested they make the long climb to the top. From there, he said, the lights of Venice would wink back at them from the horizon.