Giulia Morelli lacked the energy to curse the idiot. She picked up the phone, arranged for a launch, and within five minutes found herself heading up the Grand Canal for Cannaregio, wondering what might have made a cemetery superintendent, one surely used to dealing with corpses over the years, lose his mind so quickly and in such unusual company. Wondering, too, about who had taken that mysterious object from the murdered girl’s coffin, and why.
She ordered the launch to dock at Sant’ Alvise and walked briskly south into the tangle of fascist-era apartment blocks. She had told the launch to wait for her and, against standing orders, planned to conduct the interview alone. The details of the Gianni case were now, a decade later, somewhat hazy in her memory. Even so, she recalled the care with which it was discussed, particularly in the company of a lowly cadet as she was then. There was no reason to raise a fuss now, not until she saw something worth fighting for.
He lived in a block at the edge of the development. The building was clean but shabby. She walked into the dingy communal hallway and pressed the light switch. A perpendicular line of dim yellow bulbs came on overhead. His apartment was on the third floor. She looked for the light. It was out. Giulia Morelli, for no reason she could fully understand, found she was patting her purse to feel the shape of the small police pistol that lived there.
“Stupid,” she hissed quietly, and began to climb the stairs.
The third floor was in virtual darkness. She cursed herself for having left the flashlight behind, wondered, too, why she had been so anxious to interview the man alone. The case was a decade old. The uniformed officer at the helm of her launch had not even been in the force when Susanna Gianni died.
The apartment was at the end of the corridor, somewhere in an inky pool of darkness. She called the man’s name and immediately sensed she had made some kind of a mistake. There was a noise coming from ahead. A glimmer of dull yellow light leaked out from behind a door that stood no more than an inch ajar. She edged closer to it, hearing more clearly: it was a long, breathy moan, a sound that could betoken anything from ecstasy to death.
She reached into her bag and took out the police radio. The signal was dead. Mussolini had built these old apartment blocks well. Giulia Morelli kept the handset tight in her left hand, then reached into the bag for the gun, grasped the weapon, and walked briskly through the door, taking care to stand in the shadow cast by the wan light from a single bulb.
There were words in her throat, cold, officious words, ones which worked on most occasions, sending a little fear into the small-time crooks who were, almost exclusively, her customers. The words died before she was able to say them. Giulia Morelli took in what she could of the scene — the light was poor and the protagonist was deep in shadow, his face invisible to her. All that was apparent of him was a single, lean arm wielding a long, bloodied knife and a smelclass="underline" cheap, strong cigarettes — African, maybe — and the rank odour of sweaty fear.
She could think of nothing but the painting, the damn painting that had haunted her ever since she’d seen it as a child. It stood in the chancel of San Stae, Tiepolo’s Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, depicting a man apparently in rapture, arm raised to heaven, a half-hidden attacker carefully testing his skin, wondering where to begin with the blade. She had asked her mother about the painting, always seeking to know the story. Her mother had evaded the question, mumbling something she failed to understand: that the saint was to be “flayed.” It was only later, when she found the word in a dictionary, that she understood. This was the moment before the horror. The executioner was planning the act, that of skinning his victim alive. And the condemned man was looking to heaven in bliss, awaiting his deliverance with joy, something Giulia Morelli knew she would never understand.
The cemetery superintendent was not in rapture. He was, she thought, dead already, or at least she hoped as much. His throat was cut, carefully, from side to side, revealing a broad, bloody band of flesh and sinew. And his murderer, who remained out of sight — though he was, she knew, now moving — was slowly finishing the job, stabbing into the tendons, severing what he could find in the man’s throat.
She gripped the gun. It wriggled in her sweaty grasp. Her fingers twisted on the grip, then slipped, and she heard the metal clatter on the tiled floor. Giulia Morelli could look at nothing but the dead man, wondering, wondering.
A shape rose to her left. A leg came out and kicked her hard. She fell to her knees, waiting for the blow, wondering if she had the courage to look upwards, to heaven, to nothingness, like the saint in the painting. But he was there and she did not wish to see his face.
She tried to speak, but there were no intelligible words in her head. Something silver flashed in front of her eyes. She felt a sudden slash of pain in her side, followed shortly afterwards by the rush of warm blood. Her breath came in sudden, jerky gasps. She waited.
And then the radio came to life in her palm. She had, she realised, been gripping tight on the panic button. Somehow her faint call for help had leaked out of Mussolini’s brickwork and found a human ear. A voice barked at them. At the foot of the stairs outside in the communal hallway, which might have been on the far side of the world as far as she was concerned, there were footsteps. Too soon for the police, she knew, but the dark shape above her, dropping blood from the knife onto her face, could not know that.
“You are under arrest,” Giulia Morelli said, and wondered why she felt like laughing. He was gone. There was no one else in the room. No one but the dead superintendent, who stared back at her with glassy, terrified eyes and a gory gash for what was once a throat.
She placed a hand on her side, felt the wound the knife had made. She’d live. She would find this man. She would discover why he had robbed Susanna Gianni’s grave and what he had stolen from it. There was work to be done, much of it.
Giulia Morelli stumbled to her feet. There were men at the door. A caretaker, perhaps. Another resident. It was important, she knew, to take control.
“Touch nothing,” she said, trying to think straight, trying to establish the kind of control which was required.
They gaped at her, half-amazed, half-terrified. She followed the direction of their gaze and saw the blood staining her jacket, running down her short skirt, coagulating hot and sticky on her knees.
“Touch…” she repeated, then felt her eyes turn upwards in her head, saw the murky yellow light of the apartment turn black and, finally, disappear altogether.
4
Spritz! Spritz! Spritz!
Three weeks after the opening of Susanna Gianni’s grave and the death of a certain cemetery superintendent in Cannaregio, Daniel Forster walked out of the arrivals area of Marco Polo airport carrying a violin case which was neither old nor malodorous. It was as modest as the instrument inside and the small, soft suitcase which hung from his other arm and contained almost his entire wardrobe: enough clothes, he hoped, to see him through the next five weeks. The flight from Stansted had taken two hours, crossing the snow-covered Alps before descending rapidly into the northeast corner of the Adriatic. Though he had just turned twenty, this was Daniel’s first trip abroad. His new passport, still without a stamp inside, sat in the pocket of his green cotton windcheater along with the plastic envelope from Thomas Cook which contained 300 euros, almost the entire contents of his student current account.