And still she fell.
II
Death in Venice
Por dinheiro bailo o perro.
The dog dances for money.
A multitude of candles sputtered and smoked, so many of them that it might have been the inside of a church. The heat they gave off filled the room, and the ceiling above them was blackened; apart from the candles, the room was bare. It was a long room, stuffy and airless; heavy curtains covered its five tall windows, and the curtains, like the ceiling, were stained with soot. Despite all the candles, shadows lurked in its corners.
Leaning against the wall, Captain Da Silva watched, a frown on his face, as Delia Quercia inscribed an elaborate figure on the floor with chalk. Da Silva was an unremarkable man, not tall, his only memorable feature a pair of blue eyes — legacy of an English grandmother — but he had a competent, reliable look. Right now he was a little nervous, a little sceptical, a little annoyed; and more than a little sickened, knowing what his employer intended to do with the white cat which stared out with golden-green eyes between the bars of the cage. And he badly needed a smoke.
Most of all, though, he wished very heartily that he had never got involved in this at all, but that would have been impossible anyway. He shook his head irritably, annoyed at wasting time on pointless speculation: Delia Quercia owned him, more or less. Owned theIsabella, his ship, anyway, even if she was mortgaged to the gunwales — like everything else the Venetian had left of his forefathers’ empire. This house included.
Da Silva had spent most of his life at sea, and had thought that he had seen and endured enough to be pretty much hardened to anything life could throw at him. Until Arturo Delia Quercia had commandeered the Isabella and flung him into a world far removed from the mundane dangers of Cape Horn and the Roaring Forties; though he would have preferred a hundred-foot sea or a screaming hurricane any day, given the choice. Which, of course, he wasn’t.
Like Venice herself, the Delia Quercia fortunes and influence had declined over the centuries, and a once-proud shipping empire had dwindled to a single vessel and a decaying palazzo whose ground floor was unusable thanks to the combined effects of acqua alta and neglect. Even here, on the top floor, a damp and stagnant odour lingered.
Now Delia Quercia, like many a desperate man before him, intended to wager everything upon one last throw: to take a final gamble for all or nothing. Yet the stake the Venetian was playing with was a higher one than Da Silva would ever hazard. He was wagering his soul.
Months before, he had taken passage on the Isabella to Macau — not, in itself, a particularly unusual thing for an owner to do. But he had also had a task to demand of her captain.
It had been in this house, Da Silva remembered, that the nightmare had begun. In the room directly below this one. And he hadn’t even known it for a nightmare at the time.
‘I need your help, Da Silva,’ Delia Quercia said, twirling his glass in the lamplight so that the wine, quickened by the flame, turned a deep, translucent ruby. ‘Have you ever heard of Marco Polo’s amulet?’
The Portuguese captain shook his head, and sipped at his own wine, an unexpected and uncharacteristic courtesy from his employer. ‘No, Signore. Is it valuable?’
A deep laugh shook the older man. ‘Yes, Captain — you might call it valuable. But suffice it to say that it was once in the possession of my family, and now it is not. I am told, however—’ he looked at Da Silva as if summing him up’—that it is, at present, in Macau.’ He drained his glass, and refilled it at once from the decanter.
‘Was this thing stolen from your family, then?’ Da Silva asked.
Again, Delia Quercia laughed, but there was no mirth in it. ‘Inasmuch as the person in whose possession it is now paid no money for it, yes.’
Da Silva sighed, but soundlessly. Delia Quercia liked this sort of game, got pleasure out of needling him. But he had learned long ago that you did not show impatience, or for that matter any kind of expression or emotion, in the Venetian’s presence. Not if you wanted to keep your freedom as well as your job. And Da Silva had no wish to sample the hospitality of an Italian jail, far less the hempen embrace of a noose. ‘Then I assume you wish to acquire it back from this person? In Macau?’
‘Yes, Captain, I do. But I shall need you to do the “acquiring”. Since the person is a Portuguese person and speaks no civilized language.’
He did not mention at this stage that the Portuguese person was, in fact, a dead Portuguese person, nor that she had been dead for more than a hundred years. Not, Da Silva thought ruefully, that it would have made any difference. When Delia Quercia said ‘Jump!’ all he could say, all he could ever have said, was ‘How high?’
The place they came to eventually, after many false meanderings, was deep in the maze of buildings around the docks, hidden in the twists and turns of alleys between the godowns. Unfamiliar stinks assailed their nostrils; and the place, though it seemed — but for the ubiquitous rats — deserted, was noisy in odd ways — bursts of confused shouting, snatches of song, strange brassy instruments being struck, even a roaring that sounded like some kind of engine. Da Silva did not know, and did not really want to know, how his employer had come by the knowledge that had brought them here. His revolver was in his hand, but privately he was more glad of the long knife he wore concealed down his back.
It was also darker than it had any right to be, darker than the inside of a coal-sack, and Delia Quercia’s lantern made everything around its cold beam even blacker by contrast.
But they had arrived at last, and the captain knocked at the door in a rhythm that had been described to him. Presently a wizened, ancient Chinese woman, her face a mass of wrinkles, opened it a crack and peered out at them suspiciously.
‘We came from the White Unicorn,’ he said, in Mandarin, as he had been told, and passed her an ivory token.
Unsmiling, the woman nodded, and let them in, tottering on bound feet, although she wore the black pyjamas of a lower-class Chinese. ‘Wait here,’ she said. The door banged shut behind them, and Da Silva put his revolver back in his pocket.
They could see very little, although Da Silva identified the place as a dispensary. The scent of desiccated herbs was very faint, but Delia Quercia’s lantern showed him labels on drawers: ginseng, phoenix heart, dragon’s claw. Presently the old woman returned and beckoned to them, her own hand like a claw.
So far, so mysterious; but Da Silva had moved easily through this world thus far, since it was a milieu with which he was familiar, and one he knew how to manipulate. At some point as they descended the steep wooden stair, however, he suddenly felt as though he had crossed a barrier: moved sideways, as it were, into some place that was not so familiar. His neck prickled, and he wondered whether his employer had felt the same thing; although he doubted it, Delia Quercia being, he thought to himself, an insensitive son of a whore. But what manner of person would inhabit the cellar of a Chinese pharmacist’s shop in an alleyway that was almost impossible to find? The answer came back at once: someone with something to hide.