‘It belonged to an old boy called Delia Quercia,’ she told Jo. ‘He didn’t leave a will when he died; the children’s lawyers have been arguing over the house for years. So someone’s getting fat out of it. Why do you ask?’
‘Just curious,’ said Jo dismissively.
But when moonlight lay white on the campo that night, and sleep eluded her, she got up, padded to the window and looked out to see whether any pallid thing was waving to her. The corner house was deep in shadow, and somehow that was more unsettling than seeing something. Even when she finally drifted off to sleep, her dreams were populated with floating masks and pale shrouds on the shores of stagnant waters.
Mist, which really came on cat feet, transformed the city the next morning into a place of ghosts and shadows indeed, and smelling strongly of the sea. Jo skulked in bed, fatigued from her broken night, grumpy with lack of sleep; and then the phone rang.
‘Pronto,’ she yawned into the mouthpiece. For a long time there was nothing but the rush and clatter of the phone line, and then, as she was about to hang up, very faint and faraway, a voice said, ‘Are you coming?’
‘What?’
Another long pause, and then, ‘If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you.’
The line went dead, and left Jo staring at the receiver and thinking about M. R. James.
And then she jerked awake with the compulsive indrawn whoop of holding her breath too long, and stared round the suddenly unfamiliar room without comprehension for nearly a minute.
She got out of bed, the old linoleum cold beneath her feet, and walked through to the main room, where she trod on something sharp that made her hop and curse. Investigating, she found it was a necklace: a rather pretty antique thing of opals and jade with a vaguely oriental look. Jo picked it up and put it on the table by the telephone, catching sight of her sleep-rumpled face in the mirror above. Not a jewellery person at the best of times — her idea of dressing up was a clean pair of jeans — she was hardly tempted to slip the necklace over her head to see how it would look. Even the fact that she could entertain such a thought made her smile, and she crossed to the window.
Opening the shutter nearly dislodged the white cat, which yowled angrily and took its leave in the feline equivalent of a huff. Outside, the weather truly was misty, so much so that the corner house was invisible and the sounds of people bestirring themselves were muffled, as if they had all put on boots of felt and decided, inexplicably, to speak in whispers. But then she heard the sharp bark of a dog, cutting through the dull cloud.
Not without suspicious glances at the telephone, Jo picked through the cards in the big dish beside it, until she found the one she was looking for.
‘La Casa della Scala,’ said Maurizio Giordano, whom Jo had been told knew everything there was to know about Venice. ‘The House with the Stair.’ Expecting, for no logical reason, a kindly gnome of a professor, she had been surprised to find a lumbering great young man who, had he been a dog, would have been a St Bernard, possibly crossed with an Irish wolfhound. He was the proprietor of an establishment called The Arcane Library — though even a brief glimpse at the shelves made Jo think ‘eclectic’ would be a better word.
‘The House with the Stair?’ she repeated, giving the words the same capitalization.
‘That’s right, it’s quite famous. All the guides take the tourists to look at it. If you go through the archway on the right of the house you’ll find a spiral staircase leading up the back, with a thing like a dovecote on top. It was built by a guy called Umberto Scimone, who most people think was as mad as a hatter. Because, you see, the staircase doesn’t connect to the house at all, unless you want to jump two metres across and up or a metre down to get in through a window.’
‘So what’s the story?’
‘Well, he built the staircase for cats, apparently. He was potty about cats. You know M. C. Escher?’ Giordano asked, with apparent irrelevance.
‘Yes?’
‘Have you seen that print of all the curly-up critters going up and down one of his stair-mazes?’ Jo nodded. ‘That was the sort of thing Scimone had in mind. He even did a sketch of hundreds of cats doing much the same thing, up and down an endless stair. Though I don’t think he was quite so fascinated by impossible geometry as Escher, being an architect, you see.’
Behind the professor, the open window gave onto a properly functional balcony on which stood a wicker chair, a small table, and a bay tree with a spiral trunk in a Chinese pot. From not too far away came the sounds of vaporetti plying the canals, but their clamour was currently being contested by some enthusiastic Verdi from somewhere nearby. Early, she thought; Ernani, perhaps. The air felt damp, although the mist was mostly gone, risen into the sky to dull the late-autumn sun and mock the eyes with air.
‘And who was Signor Delia Quercia?’
‘As a matter of fact, he was my grandfather. On the wrong side of the blanket, though, as they say. But we’re not yet done with Signor Scimone. Would you like a glass of wine?’ Jo assented, and was shortly presented with a nicely chilled Vernaccia. That done, the professor continued, ‘I assume you know what ley lines are?’
‘Sort of,’ she replied. ‘Lines of. force, aren’t they? The Old Straight Track,’ she added, the title popping up unbidden, although she had never actually read the book.
‘Positive force, to be exact,’ said Giordano, and waited for Jo to nod her head. Sipping his wine, he continued, ‘So it won’t have occurred to you that they might have a negative equivalent?’
‘Not really,’ Jo said. ‘I hadn’t given it much thought.’
‘Well, Signor Scimone did. And he came to the conclusion that Venice was riddled with the things. Lines of bad luck, if you like. Interestingly enough, it seems La Fenice was built on one.’ Jo, who still grieved at the loss of the opera house, nodded. ‘Scimone had quite a lot of. shall we say, individual ideas. Apart from the negative ley lines, he used all sorts of arcane formulae to influence his work.’
‘What, sort of eighteenth-century Italian feng shui?’
Giordano laughed, a curiously high sound from such a huge frame. ‘You could say that.’ He got to his feet and hunted amongst his bookshelves, leaving Jo staring at a collection of what appeared to be grimoires. Finally he extracted a slim volume, the cover of which he showed to Jo: it featured the cat drawing he had mentioned earlier. It was called Le Gatti e L’Architettura; she missed the author’s name.
Opening it delicately, he flicked through pages until he found what he was looking for. ‘Here it is: “Scimone’s fascination with cats is well known, but perhaps the full extent of it is less common knowledge. In a letter to Fiorenza Tevere, he proposed the somewhat Brunoesque view that he saw them as merely the earthly manifestations of huge and benign beings which had their existence in another sphere entirely. As such, he believed their benevolence was a positive force for good, and planned every building to take advantage of this, especially those which had to be constructed on or near negative ley-lines:”
‘A cat-flap in every palazzo?’ suggested Jo, not without sarcasm.
‘Actually it was Galileo who invented the cat flap,’ said Giordano, straight-faced, and Jo didn’t know whether to believe him or not.
Closing the book, he refilled their glasses, and looked at her expectantly.
‘And I suppose the house is on one of these negative ley lines?’ she said.
‘Exactly. Now listen, the plot thickens. Scimone built the house, properly the Palazzo Delia Quercia, for one of my ancestors, carefully explaining to him the significance of the stairs, which were, in essence, a very grand cat flap, allowing them to come and go via an upper floor.’