He launched the pewter pot against the wall and cursed me vilely. “What gave you the right?” he demanded. “To barter with our lives this way?”
“I thought Leo might take her from me,” I answered, not entirely honestly, and needed immediately to correct myself. “I believed he might have thrust himself upon her in return for his patronage.”
Jacopo stared at me, incredulous. “Leo! He lives in his dreams, Lorenzo. Can’t you see? And besides, if my sister thought that was the price of her deliverance, who were you to decide otherwise?”
This question outraged me. “I am the one who loves her!”
“Hah!”
“I am the father of her child,” I said quietly.
His face reddened with fury, then he seized the mug he had poured for me and claimed it for himself. “This madness gets worse with every moment. Be gone, Lorenzo. Your presence offends me.”
“Delapole is a villain and a murderer! We must not let her near him.”
“A little late for that, lad. I have not seen her since we visited him, at your suggestion, two days ago, and listened to every order and instruction that he laid down as the price of staying outside the Doge’s clutches. Perhaps she packs his trunks for him, Lorenzo. Yes, I think that is it. She is his housemaid. For tomorrow he reveals himself as owner of the muse, and soon after we all depart for different climes, I know not where.”
My spirits sank. Such images ran through my mind. “She would not willingly give in to him…” I began to say.
“Oh, child!” He was now furious. “Your innocence is more galling and more dangerous than a thousand criminals combined! Do you still not know us, Lorenzo? Do you still not realise what we are?”
I wished to stop up my ears. I wished to be out of that room, and stood up to leave. His powerful arm dragged me down.
“You will listen even if I have to pin you down upon the floor! How do you think we fled Munich and survived when so many others perished? And did this same trick in Geneva? What separates us from all those other Hebrew families in this ghetto? Our looks? Our manners? Or our history?”
This small, dark room now seemed oppressive. Its drapes and hangings threatened to close in and stifle me.
“You are drunk, Jacopo,” I said quietly. “You should sleep, and speak again when reason has returned to your head.”
“Reason never leaves me,” he answered bitterly. “I would not dare allow it. So tell me. How do you think a woman, a fair one at that, escapes a room of soldiers come to kill her? How does a pair like us throw off our pauper’s cloak and fit ourselves out in velvet?”
“I will not hear this!”
He grabbed me by the shoulders and spat the words into my face. “You will listen to every word! What do you think I dispense on these night visits to the middle-aged ladies of the Republic? Just a potion? Or a little comfort after, bedding painted matrons? Lorenzo, we are the very picture of practicality. We’ll earn our living as best we can, in what small space you Gentiles allow. And when that doesn’t work, we’ll whore our way out of trouble and scurry for the next stop on the road. Though I had hoped this was an end of it.”
These words rang true, for all their hated resonance.
“If Rebecca sees an opportunity between the sheets with your Englishman, that is her decision. Not yours. Or mine. Necessity is a harsh mistress, Lorenzo. You heed her words or pay a hefty price.”
He had said his piece and not enjoyed it. Jacopo Levi regarded me with the sullen misery of drunkards everywhere, loathing himself as much as he loathed me.
“All of this may be true,” I answered. “But I cannot wait to hear it. I have intelligence of this man from Rome, Jacopo. He is a murderer, of the most vile kind.”
“Your fantasies are fast becoming tedious, lad,” he murmured. “Be gone. I had fancied myself a little longer in this city and resent the fact that you have changed my plans. You are a meddler and a fool and think you may excuse both by being well-meaning in your intentions. You bore me. Go. I have drinking to do.”
“Jacopo—”
“Go! Before I lose my temper and do something I’ll regret!”
So I left him there, with his black thoughts and his wine and his emptiness. The sun was almost down when I began to make my way through the streets. Night stole upon Venice. The moon’s face shone from the filmy black surface of the canals. I slipped through the darkness like a thief and raced south, to Dorsoduro and Ca’ Dario.
51
An eventful interview
He had changed. Giulia Morelli sat next to Daniel Forster in the upper hall of the Scuola di San Rocco and tried to make sense of the situation. She had left a message on his answering machine that tantalised deliberately, holding out the promise of some kind of offer. She expected him to respond, but not so quickly or with such apparent determination. The doubt and misery which she had seen in him the previous day were now gone.
She followed his eyes and gazed at the paintings in the corner of the hall, feeling all the same that the game could still be hers. “I love this place,” she said. “I could sit here for hours. It’s as if someone painted the entire history of the world on these walls.”
“You really think that?” He seemed surprised.
“Sure. A policewoman can like paintings, Daniel. Music too. You’ll get me a ticket for the concert, won’t you?”
“I thought you didn’t take bribes.”
“True!” she laughed. “You’re very sharp today. Your eyes aren’t red. I think you’re no longer living in the bottom of a bottle of cheap rosso.”
“The wine has turned this past week,” he said obliquely. “I’ll have tickets left at the door. Just the one?”
She shrugged. “That’s all I need, Daniel. I’m a solitary sort. You’re kind.”
“It’s nothing.” His eyes seemed fixed on the painting, though it was one of the less conspicuous ones, a work she had never much noticed before.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“The room,” he lied. “Why do you really like this place?”
“As I said. Because it feels as if there is an entire world in here. All the emotions. Every story there’s ever been, for good and evil.”
His gaze stayed on the canvas in the corner.
“Tell me about that one,” she asked.
“It’s the Temptation of Christ. You haven’t noticed it before?”
She stared at Tintoretto’s two figures, refusing at first to believe him. But there was nothing else the work could be: there was Christ in darkness and doubt, and Lucifer with the rocks in his extended hand.
“No,” she said, surprised. “Not really. There are so many bigger works here. And…” Giulia Morelli paused, needing her words to be precise. “It’s odd. It is Christ who is in the shade and the Devil in the light. A handsome Devil too.”
“ ‘The Venetian Lucifer,’ Scacchi called him. He warned me that we would meet one day and I should face a choice.”
There was something important here. “Did you meet his devil?” “Perhaps,” he replied. “Perhaps I’m in his company now.”
“Ah,” she said, pleasantly impressed. “So that is why we meet here, not at Ca’ Scacchi?”
“No.” He wore an ingenuous smile and Giulia Morelli felt once more that Biagio was right: Daniel Forster was an honest man, if rather more slippery than she had first imagined. “To tell the truth, I was just tired of being in that big, empty house, waiting to hear another voice. And I love this place, as you do. As Scacchi did. These faces talk to you after a while.”
She said nothing, waiting.
“And you have, I think, something to tempt me?” he guessed. “Or so you hope, judging from your message.”