It was there, in black and white, and his brain had sucked it in even though he had averted his eyes, fearful of an image decades old. Yet he wasn’t happy. They could have got it wrong. They could have mixed up her picture. Theymust have got it wrong. The alternatives were too outlandish to swallow.
Everywhere he looked, there were gloves lying companionless. In the canal, sitting on windowsills, hunched on the ground near lamp-posts and benches. His panic mounted as he counted them. Nothing looked quite so dismal as a discarded glove. Did each one signify a terrible death in the city? Just because two bodies. three bodies had been found didn’t mean that more were lying in wait, stretching back to a time when the killer had set out on her spree.
Snow had begun to fall on the city. Already the narrow streets and uneven roofs were dusted with white while the canal absorbed the flakes and remained black. In some areas, where the light was poor, the canals escaped from view completely. They became plumbless moats that one could look into without hope of ever finding an end.
At Fondamente Nuove he persuaded a vaporetto pilot preparing to go home to take him to San Michele. The promise of ten thousand lire if he waited to bring him back was enough of a lure. On the short journey, Massimo watched the waters creaming at the bow while Venice fell away behind them. A series of lights came on around the Sacca della Misericordia, as though people had opened their windows to watch his journey.
The island loomed out of the dark. More and more, his father had made references to this place, with its pretty cypress trees. It would be expensive to find him a plot here, but it seemed, even through Leopoldo’s oblique language, that his heart was set upon it.
Even from here, in such unsociable weather, Massimo could smell the perfume of cut flowers on the graves. As the vaporetto drew up alongside, the white stone of the Convento di San Michele seemed lambent in the murk.
‘You know the cemetery is closed, Signor?’
‘Just wait for me,’ Massimo ordered, and then: ‘Do you have a torch?’
The pilot sat back and rummaged for cigarettes in his jacket pocket. ‘Yes. And I might allow you to hire it, if you ask me nice.’
It was not such a difficult cemetery to break into. Beyond the entry archway, the cloisters marked the beginning of the graveyard proper. But Massimo ignored it. Adelina might well have been buried here, but she was not here now. The island could not take bodies indefinitely. Having gorged on the dead for so long, it had reached bursting point. Now the bones of the resting were lifted every ten years or so for another final journey to an ossuary on the mainland, in order to make way for the next wave of cadavers. If Adelina’s name was to be found here, it would be on a plaque, not a headstone. Massimo trained the feeble torchlight on the neatly arranged plinths, readying himself for a long night’s hunt. At least they were easier to read than the weathered slabs.
The snow that had begun to fall on the heart of the city found its way out here after half an hour. Massimo blew on his hands to keep them warm and tried to ignore the impatient hoots from the vaporetto horn. The pilot was going nowhere; his pockets would remain empty if he did.
He covered the cemetery in a slow strafing movement, his hopes lifting with every plaque that did not bear her name. Perhaps, simply, he was going mad after all. When he did not find her here, he could return to the mainland and find it had returned to normal. All he needed was this restorative jaunt to pick clean the tired crevices of his mind.
But then, of course, of course: Adelina Gaggio, 1963–1973. The characters were chiselled in marble as cleanly as if they had been formed that very afternoon.
He found himself back at the water’s edge with no recollection of climbing over the monastery wall. The pilot had turned his back on him and was eyeing the wink of lights across the Venice coastline. It was a pale comfort to Massimo, but the longer he stared at his home, the more he wanted to be back there. He would turn himself in and try to help the police as best he could, even if it meant being charged for obstruction, or worse.
‘Start the engine, friend,’ he said, as he clambered on board. The pilot did not move. A white glove lay on one of the seats. Massimo struggled to piece together a sudden scattering of jigsaw pieces in his thoughts, but none of the pieces would fit: they seemed to be from different puzzles and he knew they could not match the complete picture he was striving for.
‘I don’t—’ he began, but his words were coated with too much breath, too much saliva to complete his sentence.
He touched the pilot and watched as he toppled back in his seat. Massimo recoiled as he saw the pilot grinning at him. But the grin was too low on his face, and too wide and wet.
The glove was nothing of the sort. Or rather, it could only have fitted the pilot’s hand. It had been skinned with a surgeon’s precision.
‘It doesn’t fit,’ she said. ‘None of them ever fit.’
She solidified at his side, as if structuring herself from the particles of dark that helped to make up what the night was. Almost immediately it was as if she had always been there.
‘Don’t worry, Mass,’ she whispered. ‘When you called me, why, it wasn’t you calling me at all. It was the hotel. It was the Europa, bringing me home. Our true resting place is never the final resting place, is it? It’s where we drop. That’s what takes our essence. The rug in the room you were so afraid of. That has the flavour of my final breath in its weave. It’s an always place. More real, I suppose, than our city, trapped in a yesterday none of us believe in any more. More real than I ever was.’
He was paralysed with fear and doubt.
He saw her hand come free of the glove, which she dropped over the side of the boat. What he thought at first to be tattoos of some kind, a weird graffiti that sprawled across her flesh, revealed itself to him as the veins and sinews of a severely damaged hand. The fingernails were warped with the aftershock of septicaemia. They looked as thick and twisted as ram’s horn.
‘They sliced my fingers as though they were bits of meat, Mass. They stuck splinters under my fingernails and set fire to my palm. They skinned me. For fun. For fun. And your father took money for it. Hush money. He pocketed his bundle of notes and at the centre of them was my pain, wrapped so very tightly.’
Massimo was weeping now. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘You were my friend. I didn’t know.’
She gently rubbed his neck with her grotesque claw. ‘You saw what was happening. But you forgot. I called to you. The men shouted at you to go away. And your father gave you money to forget. But you saw all right. Every cry for help since, haven’t you chosen to ignore it? Haven’t you always turned your back and thought, “Well, what can I do?” You’re like this city, Mass. You close your eyes to ugliness. And the blood that runs through you is as cold as the water in those canals.’
He had slumped against her. So exhausted was he, and so enchanted by the Venetian lights, that he failed to notice what her hand was doing until it was withdrawing.
She said, ‘Your hand, when you held mine, Mass — didn’t they fit together so perfectly?’
His flailing mind saw that her hand, with its five gnarled horns, was sheathed by a new glove. A really quite beautiful glove that waxed and waned in his eyes like the beat of water in the canals. It was a deep, glistening red. He was going to ask her what material produced such a fine colour, but he was too tired to speak. The last thing he saw before he became indivisible from the night was the flash of a cleaver as she pulled back the deep corners of her cloak. And even that was beautiful.